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A new system of fitness machines turns the watts you generate while working out into electrticity to power the gym.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A new generation of workout machines that generate electricity as you work up a sweat are poised to invade fitness centers and help you keep your New Year's resolution to trim down your waistline.
The electricity generated by the machines is fed back into the grid, helping the gym save on its utility bills.
The so-called Green System from Woodinville, Wash.,-based SportsArt Fitness, represents a novel way to harness "human power," Ken Carpenter, director of sales for the company, told me.
It joins a growing list of similar concepts, including PaveGen's pavers that generate electricity as people walk (and boogie) on them and devices such as shoes and a backpack that charge batteries as you go for a jog or hike in the woods.
Sweaty watts The Green System consists of recumbent and upright bikes as well as elliptical trainers, each with a box that captures 75 percent of the watts you generate during a workout.
Boxes in several machines are hooked together and routed through an inverter that can handle up to 2,000 watts. Assuming an average of 133 watts per person, a pod might have 15 machines on it, Carpenter said.
"Most facilities are going to be drawing so many watts and amperage, you'd have to have a lot of inverters to really reverse that meter, because of light bulbs, air conditioning, and all the other things being powered," he said.
Nevertheless, 2,000 watt hours are enough to power a clothes washer for 6 hours, a microwave oven for 2.5 hours, or a 27-inch flat screen TV for 17 hours, according to SportsArt Fitness.
This is enough electricity that the system will pay for itself in about three years, according to Carpenter. The company has an online calculator where you can figure out your potential savings.
The system includes an inverter and the exercise machines. The inverter runs about $3,000, while the the machines could cost about $3,500 to $7,000.
Generating award points The system is also hooked up with Victoria, Canada,-based EcoFit, which produces digital technology to calculate the number of watts an individual generates during a workout, put it on a graphical display and keep track of watts over time on a card.
In the future, the companies hope to turn these "eco-points" generated at the gym into currency accepted at coffee shops and other retail outlets.
Back at the gym, the display technology also allows individuals to compete. For example, if you see your buddy is generating 115 watts, you might ramp it up so you can generate 130 watts.
Right now, most people measure their performance at the gym in terms of workout time, or distance biked, or calories burned, but Carpenter said he thinks this paradigm will shift to watts "the more eco-conscious people get."
So, eat, drink, and be merry this weekend. But come the New Year, hit the gym and generate some watts.
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.
Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.
Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens released this photo saying it shows a hydraulic fracturing drill site in the Pavillion/Muddy Ridge gas field. The group said it was taken from the porch of its chairman, John Fenton.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
The hype around seemingly limitless reserves of natural gas made available through the technological innovation known as hydrologic fracturing, or fracking, may be just that — hype — according a new analysis of the data behind the claims.
The committee, an organization of petroleum engineers and geoscientists, estimated a future gas supply of 2,170 trillion cubic feet (tcf), which at the current rate of consumption of 24 tcf per year, translates to a "95-year supply of gas, which apparently has been rounded up to 100 years," Nedler writes.
He then explains that only 273 tcf of that total are "proved reserves." That fits with data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The remaining amount is broken down into categories ranging from probable to speculative. Of this reasoning, Nedler writes:
C.J. Marshall / AP
This file photo shows the outside of a natural gas drill site owned by Chesapeake Energy in Leroy Township, Pa.
By the same logic, you can claim to be a multibillionaire, including all your "probable, possible, and speculative resources."
Assuming that the United States continues to use 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or be recoverable.
Of course, consumption could rise, especially if we convert coal-fired power plants to natural gas and use it to fuel more of our cars and trucks.
At the end of the day, the future natural gas supply could end up being as large as the most optimistic projections, or fall way short. "We simply don't know, and we may not know for years to come," Nedler concludes.
Other energy analysts really do see a bright future in natural gas, especially shale gas.
In "The Quest," the author and energy analyst Daniel Yergin, calls shale gas "the biggest energy innovation since the start of the new century, [that] has turned what was an imminent shortage in the United States into what may be a hundred-year supply and may do the same elsewhere in the world."
The sentiment is echoed in Michael Graetz's "The End of Energy", where he notes that "a consensus among analysts has emerged that domestic reserves, along with those in Canada, are adequate to supply both countries for many decades, if not a century."
This controversy, in turn, could hobble the pace of natural gas drilling and put a damper on the hype machine surrounding the future of natural gas. Or not. Only the future will tell.
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.
Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.
California's investments in renewable energy help make San Diego one of the hottest markets for green jobs in the U.S.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
In 2013, the cost of solar power in San Diego will be cheaper than electricity from the local utility grid, according the predictions of an energy policy analyst who created a handy graphic to illustrate when so-called grid parity will be achieved.
Sam Mircovich / Reuters
A prototype sun tracking solar panel made by Concentrix Solar collects energy from its location at the University of California San Diego in this file photo.
Parity is a "tipping point, when democratization of the electricity system not only makes political and economic sense, but becomes more competitive than using utility-delivered electricity," writes analyst John Farrell.
His calculations assume that the cost of solar will continue to fall by 7 percent a year and grid electricity will rise at 2 percent a year.
If true, then San Diego will be the first to reach the parity milestone, followed by New York in 2015. From there, parity is progressively reached across the southern tier of the U.S. with my cloudy, rainy, northern hometown of Seattle not reaching parity until 2027.
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.
Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.
In this file photo, tourists take photos of each other in the flooded Saint Mark's square in Venice.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
To protect Venice from periodic floods that are increasingly heightened by the double whammy of rising seas levels and sinking land, a team of Italian researchers suggests lifting up the canal-laced city by pumping seawater into the aquifers below it.
Doing so could result in a uniform uplift of about 30 centimeters over a 10-year period of steady, coordinated pumping via a series of 12 wells that circle the city, according to a study reported in the journal Water Resources Research.
The idea isn't entirely new, but until now its applicability was clouded by a limited understanding of Venice's underlying soils.
The researchers overcame this obstacle by combing through seismic data — obtained in the 1980s by an Italian oil and gas company — to create a 3-D reconstruction of the soils.
"This allowed them to confirm the presence of a continuous layer of impermeable clay below which injected water could increase pore pressure," Scott K. Johnson reports for Ars Technica.
Pore pressure corresponds to water between grains of sediment that can bear some of the load. Subsidence occurs when water is pumped out — as occurred in Venice in the mid-1900s — and the grains pack together, causing the land to sink.
In theory, pumping water back into the soils could reverse this trend, but in reality a full recovery isn't possible, notes Ars Technica.
Importantly, the coordinated injection of the seawater can prevent one side of the city rising up faster than another, which could crumble the infrastructure — buildings, roads, etc. — that the project aims to protect.
What's more, if this approach works in Venice, it might also find use in other parts of the world threatened by rising seas, including Shanghai, New York, New Orleans, Miami, Cairo, Amsterdam and Tokyo.
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.
Metallic structures with a low level electric current provoke limestone formations that attract coral growth. The technology is proving effective at restoring reefs around the world, including Bali.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A low-level electric current running through domed-shaped metallic structures in the waters off Bali is giving a jolt to coral reef survival there, according to news reports.
The Biorock technology is seen by some conservationists as a means to repair coral reefs damaged by years of destructive cyanide and dynamite fishing practices, as well as steadily warming oceans.
Warming oceans are a threat to the reefs since they result in more frequent episodes of coral bleaching, a phenomenon when higher temperatures cause photosynthetic algae that provide corals with food and color to leave, turning the corals white.
Biorock technology builds from the late German marine architect Wolf Hibertz's discovery in the 1970s that electrified metallic structures cause dissolved minerals in the water to crystallize on them.
This grows "into a white limestone similar to that which naturally makes up coral reefs and tropical white sand beaches," the Global Coral Reef Alliance explains.
Marine life including corals and oysters colonize this limestone.
"Corals grow two to six times faster. We are able to grow back reefs in a few years," Thomas J. Goreau, a marine biologist who is leading the development of the technology, told AFP.
Goreau is president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, a U.S.-based non-profit dedicated to the protection, preservation, and sustainable management of coral reefs.
Bali success The alliance today works with organizations around the world to implement the Biorock technology, including a 20-year-long project in Pemuteran Bay off the north coast of Bali.
Today there are about 60 of the electrified metallic cages in the bay, creating a coral reef there that is "flourishing better than ever before," AFP reports.
What's more, researchers overseeing the project say that the Biorock technology makes the corals more resistant to global warming.
"Biorock is the only method known that protects corals from dying from high temperatures. We get from 16 to 50 times higher survival of corals from severe bleaching," Goreau told AFP.
These restored reefs in turn attract fish and tourists.
Technology limits? While the technology is useful for small areas, the scale of coral bleaching is just too large for it to be a cost-effective solution, Rod Salm, a coral reef specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told the Associated Press in a 2007 story about Biorock technology.
A more effective method of saving reefs from mass coral bleaching may be large marine protected areas that offer plenty of shade and cooler waters for the reefs, Salm noted in a 2010 blog post for Nature.
With $56,671 in settlement funds, the government agency attached corals to a special cement that hardens underwater. By 2010, the restored reef was healthier than an adjacent undamaged section.
Goreau issued a press release countering the agency's success story saying that his Biorock technology is more cost effective. Based on the settlement funds used for the restoration, the government project cost $1,622 per square foot. Biorock technology can be used to grow six foot tall reef structures for $13 to $20 per square foot, he claims.
The technology will be featured in One Day on Earth, a television program sponsored by the United Nations, in early 2012. You can check it out in the video below.
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.
A five-thousand-year-old material gets new life and super strength thanks to new technology. From the 103rd story of the Willis Tower in Chicago to Apple's future headquarters to a Corning research lab, we see how tough glass can get while maintaining its timeless beauty.
NASA astronaut Dan Burbank shared a matchless view of Comet Lovejoy from the International Space Station, showing the comet's magnificent tail from a vantage point high above the atmosphere. "I probably saw the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space, and that's saying an awful lot, because every day is filled with amazing things," he told Detroit's WDIV-TV in an interview.
Hundreds of photos, captured from an altitude of 240 miles, were assembled into the video you see here. You can see the comet rise from the horizon, shining through the green line of atmospheric airglow, and then fade away as the sunrise breaks out in brilliance. It's a view only three people can see with their own eyes — although that little list will rise to six on Friday when three more crewmates arrive on a Russian Soyuz craft.
Go full screen with the video, and after you're done feasting your eyes on Burbank's amazing view, treat yourself to these other video views:
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.
A team of Univ. of Illinois engineers has developed a self-healing system that restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in less time than it takes to blink.
Gadgets are great. We're enticed to buy new ones every few years. Sometimes that's because the new features are too awesome to resist, but other times we're simply buying replacements. As cool as gadgets are, they are prone to break and hard, if not impossible, to repair.
That frustration of throwing away perfectly good technology just because it doesn't work may be history, thanks to a "self-healing" electronics developed by engineers at the University of Illinois.
This system restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in less time than it takes to blink, the university reports. It does this with tiny microcapsules on top of a gold line functioning as a circuit in a chip.
"As a crack propagates, the microcapsules break open and release the liquid metal contained inside. The liquid metal fills the gap in the circuit, restoring electrical flow," reads a new release on the technology.
While this technology could find a home in gadgets, the reality is you'll still want to replace them every few years to take advantage of technological leaps. But for other uses, such a ship en route to Mars, self-healing electronics could be a life saver.
For more information, check out the news release on the study reported in the journal Advanced Materials as well as the video above with lead author Scott White, a professor of aerospace engineering.
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.
A five-thousand-year-old material gets new life and super strength thanks to new technology. From the 103rd story of the Willis Tower in Chicago to Apple's future headquarters to a Corning research lab, we see how tough glass can get while maintaining its timeless beauty.
Hajime Sakamoto, president of Japan's Hajime Research Institute, is soliciting sponsors to help him build a 13-foot-tall humanoid robot.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
If all goes reasonably well, the future will be full of friendly humanoid robots that that bake cookies, fold laundry, fetch beers, and clean up our messes. We'll likely think of them as unthreatening helpers. After all, most prototypes are unmistakably robots and aren't quite as tall as a full-grown adult.
That may change if Hajime Sakamoto gets his way. The president of Japan's Hajime Research Institute is soliciting sponsors to help him build a 13-foot-tall humanoid robot. A robot that big around the house might be better suited to make sure you (and your kiddos) do your own household chores.
The robot will be the largest humanoid robot in the world and capable of bipedal walking, the company notes. It will come with a cockpit, presumably so that humans can use it as alternative mode of transportation — or just to scare the daylights out of friends and neighbors.
Bipedalism, that is two-footed, upright walking, is hallmark of primate evolution that separates monkeys from early humans. Doing it is no simple task (just watch a toddler learning to walk). Designing a robot that moves around with human efficiency on two feet has been an ongoing challenge in robotics.
A breakthrough came in 2005 when a trio of robots that walk in a human-like manner was reported in the journal Science. One was about as tall as an adult woman, according to the researchers, and all three were lauded for shedding light on the biomechanics of human walking.
That is, by building robots that walk like humans, we are forced to learn more about how we actually do the task. This in turn results in more human-like robots and could also lead to more life-like robotic prosthesis.
If the video below showcasing Sakamoto's 7-foot bipedal robot playing soccer is any indication, his quest for a 13 footer, and even taller bots, appears driven by an obsession with the "Mobile Suits" seen in the anime series Gundam.
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.
The space shuttle Atlantis lands at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, ending 30 years' worth of shuttle missions. Click on the image to see msnbc.com's "Year in Space" slideshow.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
During 2011, NASA said goodbye to the Spirit Mars rover and the space shuttle program — but there's hope that during 2012, new players will strut their stuff on the space effort's huge stage, stretching from Cape Canaveral to the Red Planet.
This is my 15th annual "Year in Space" roundup, and in all those years I can't think of a starker time of transition between the year that's past and the year to come. The space shuttles are being readied for museums, and work hasn't yet started on the big rocket that NASA says it will need for the next era of human space exploration. The space agency's plans for commercializing operations in low Earth orbit could well be tied up in budgetary knots, and there are questions about how much farther its robotic Mars exploration program can go.
But it's not all gloom and doom: One of NASA's Mars rovers may have given up the ghost, but the other one — Opportunity — has begin its most ambitious adventure yet, exploring the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater on Mars. Juno, GRAIL and Mars Science Laboratory were launched toward Jupiter, the moon and Mars, respectively. Other planetary probes are purring along, all the way from Mercury to the solar system's edge.
One of the most promising frontiers for 2012 is being explored by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft: The past month has seen the unveiling of Earth-sized planets as well as a Neptune-sized planet sitting in the habitable zone around its parent star. Those alien Earths are still too hot for life, but lots of folks are speculating that we could hear about the first Earth-sized planets in an Earth-type orbit within a year or two.
Which outer-space tales has intrigued you the most over the past year, and what sounds most intriguing for the year ahead? That's what this lineup is all about. I'll list five top stories for 2011, and five top trends for 2012. You can pick your favorite using the Live Vote ballots. Who knows? Your preferences may influence my to-do list for the coming year. Take a run through our "Year in Space Pictures" slideshow to refresh your memory, then cast your vote. We'll crown the winners in an update next week.
Top stories of 2011 It's always tough to limit the list to five, so I'm including an "other" category in this bunch. Please tell me in your comments why you think I'm underplaying or missing your favorite outer-space story.
NASA ends space shuttle program: Policymakers decided years ago that the shuttle program would have to end once the International Space Station was complete, due to safety and cost concerns. The end finally came in July. Grounding the shuttles theoretically frees up money for exploration programs that go beyond Earth orbit, but in the short term, thousands of jobs are lost. For the time being, NASA has to depend on Russia and other countries for space transport.
Spirit rover gives up the ghost: After months of trying to re-establish contact with the six-wheeled little trouper, NASA declared that Spirit was really most sincerely dead — felled by stuck wheels and a winter freeze-up. It had a good run: Six years of operation on Mars as part of a mission that was expected to last only 90 days. The Opportunity rover soldiers on, reaching Endeavour Crater after three years of trekking. And it recently made a significant find: gypsum deposits that appear to confirm water once flowed on Mars.
'Hubble's successor' dodges a bullet: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope had been in danger of cancellation, but the White House and Congress worked out a deal to keep the project alive on an $8 billion budget. However, the budget negotiations dealt a heavy blow to the White House's request for commercial crew vehicle development, and there are continuing worries about other space science programs, such as the ExoMars missions that NASA is supposed to be working on with the Europeans.
Downers in Earth orbit: Sometimes the sky seemed to be falling in 2011. In August, an unmanned Soyuz rocket blew up after launch, sparking an investigation that might have led to the evacuation of the International Space Station. NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite fell to Earth in September, and the German-built ROSAT satellite followed in October. There was lots of hand-wringing over the potential risk from falling debris, but nobody got hurt. The glitch that affected Russia's Phobos-Grunt probe in November will eventually lead to another fall in the new year (see below).
Top trends of 2012 As Yogi Berra supposedly said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I'm signaling the speculative nature of the prediction business by sprinkling a few question marks here and there:
Commercial flights to space station? SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft is currently scheduled to link up with the International Space Station for the first time in February, potentially marking the beginning of a new age in NASA's orbital operations. Orbital Sciences is due to follow later in the year. Meanwhile, commercial ventures will be working on designs for spacecraft capable of putting astronauts in orbit by 2017 or so. How far will NASA's funding get them?
Monster rover reaches Mars: NASA's November launch of the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory could justifiably rank as one of 2011's top stories, but the real payoff comes in August, when a rocket-powered sky crane is due to drop the 1-ton, car-sized Curiosity rover onto Gale Crater's scientifically intriguing terrain. The big question is: Will that thing really work? But if the rover sets down safely on the surface, we could be in for years of stunning imagery and scientific discovery.
Earth's twin detected at last? As the Kepler probe takes more observations, Earth-size candidates that lie in Earth-type orbits may well be added to the list of potential planets. Further confirmation would be required to make sure the candidates are truly alien Earths, but even hints that such worlds are on the list could cause a sensation of "Avatar" proportions.
NASA works on future course: NASA wants to go to an asteroid in the mid-2020s, and send astronauts as far as Mars in the 2030s. But there are lots of blank spaces that still need to be filled in. For example, who'll help NASA build the multibillion-dollar heavy-lift rocket that Congress mandated? What will happen to space science priorities such as Mars sample return and proposed missions to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? In an era of tightening budgets, how much exploration can NASA afford? Will the presidential election lead to yet another change of vision?
SpaceShipTwo actually in space? Virgin Galactic's founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, has said powered tests of the company's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane will begin in 2012, and he may well take a ride with his family as a Christmas present next year. If he sticks to that schedule, humans will ride into outer space on a privately developed rocket ship for the first time since SpaceShipOne's trips in 2004. But the tests to date have not been glitch-free, and a question mark is definitely in order.
There you have it: Click on the links to get more background, weigh the field, and cast your vote. This could be more fun than the Iowa caucus, and I'm saying that as a former Hawkeye. For even more end-of-the-year musings, check out these links:
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.
The robotic K-Max helicopter shown here in a file photo is flying re-supply missions in Afghanistan, opening up the era of unmanned logistics.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Robotic helicopters capable of ferrying 3.5 tons of cargo in a single load are at work supplying NATO troops in Afghanistan, according to a defense technology blog.
The technology will put fewer soldiers at risk flying over enemy lines on re-supply missions. That doesn't mean, however, that the military will put the helicopters directly in harm's way.
"Most of the missions will be conducted at night and at higher altitudes," Marine Capt. Caleb Joiner, mission commander, said in a news release. "This will allow us to keep out of small arms range."
While the helicopter should save lives on the battlefield, how might robotic choppers and other supply vehicles translate to civilian life? Feel free to share your wishes in the comments section below.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
The rise of the microblogging site Twitter was fueled by media attention and traditional social networks based on geographic proximity and socioeconomic similarity, a new study says.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Developers of the next-big social networking application stand a greater chance at skyrocketing success if Hollywood stars and big media go gaga over it, according to an analysis of Twitter's meteoric rise in popularity.
Data collected on the number of users adopting the microblogging service in its early years (between 2006 and 2009) show that it first spread gradually via traditional social networks — real-world friends, work colleagues, neighbors — then took off when media stars started to gather their flocks.
"The first big run up in the number of Twitter users corresponded to the months that Ashton Kutcher was trying to be the first one to a million followers," Jameson Lawrence Toole, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and co-author of the study, told me today.
"The most number of people ever signed up for Twitter during that week," Toole said.
A visualization showing the adopting of Twitter across the United States. From late March 2006 through the early August 2009, nearly 3.5 million people signed up for twitter. 2.3 million of those users signed up in the 408 cities displayed here.
From there, Twitter's rise was unstoppable. News reporters wrote about Kutcher and Oprah and more people signed up for Twitter. More media personalities wrote their own stories about sending 140-character tweets. More people signed up. More stories, more users.
While the data isn't all that surprising, it suggests a new way for researchers to model the power of media influence in their analyses of what drives a company to success, according to Toole.
In traditional models, he said, the role of media is considered a constant across time. What the Twitter analysis illustrates is the existence of a feedback loop present in today's media. "The more people sign up, the more news articles are written, and then more people sign up," he said.
The effect has been named elsewhere as the Oprah Effect, which is particularly prevalent in book sales. Aspiring authors know that if the talk show host picks their book for her monthly book club, for example, a spot on the best seller list is almost certainly in their future.
Given the analysis of Twitter data from its early years, the power of big media stars seems to apply to Internet-based applications as well. So, if you want millions of users to use your app, make sure a big name pitches it, preferably in a quasi-viral way. That should mean success, according to the new model.
"What we can't model is if Oprah is going to pick up your Web service," Toole noted.
The studyis scheduled to appear this month in the journal PLoS One.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
Scientists and engineers picked by the National Science Foundation for a two-month boot camp on entrepreneurship pose at Stanford University on the first day of class in October.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Lab scientists are getting a $50,000 assist from the U.S. government to go to school and learn the entrepreneurial skills required to take their innovations into the marketplace and, perhaps, become millionaires.
"I am basically teaching them how to do eye contact and test their hypotheses outside of the lab," Steve Blank, a startup guru at Stanford University who designed and teaches the course, told me Tuesday.
It is modeled after Blank's Lean LaunchPad class, which replaces the traditional masters in business administration curriculum — balance sheets, business plans, etc. — with what Blank calls "the scientific method for entrepreneurship."
Entrepreneur training The course forces teams of researchers — an entrepreneur, principal investigator, and mentor — to network with colleagues and potential clients to test hypotheses about the market for their lab innovation.
As hypotheses fail, the teams adapt with what Blank calls a pivot, or change in the business plan. It acknowledges that startups usually go through multiple failures en route to success.
That's different than how a traditionally-trained MBA would operate in an established corporation, notes Blank, where failure would almost certainly result in the firing of an executive.
"This word pivot not only encapsulates the fact that you are going to be changing rapidly, it embraces the fact that we are going to do it without crisis. We are going to do it without firing executives," he said.
For example, a company called Arka Solutions, led by Satish Kandlikar, a mechanical engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, pivoted twice throughout the process.
They started with an idea they would manufacture highly efficient LED lamps, but ended up with a company that uses their technology to make heat-pipe cooling systems for LED lights as well as electronics cooling and HVAC applications.
The next Google? Before the course started, Blank thought maybe three or four of the teams would end up going forward as companies. After 8 weeks and 1,947 calls, 19 of 21 teams said they are now entrepreneurs.
None of these companies are going to be the next Google or Facebook, well-known Internet companies with eye-popping billion-dollar market valuations, Blank noted. But successful $100 million companies?
"Absolutely," he said, adding that these teams of scientists and engineers echo the original roots of Silicon Valley, which was founded by a bunch of PhDs, not MBAs.
"The National Science Foundation has started the first incubator for science and engineering from the government," he said.
Armed with his hypothesis-testing methodology to successful entrepreneurship, Blank says the teams involved in I-Corps could attract venture capital away from overly valued Internet companies.
That should come as good news to students who stuck with chemistry, biology and physics as their counterparts chased riches promised by degrees in law or business.
The National Science Foundation will be offering the I-Corps at least twice in 2012 and expanding the course to universities around the country. For more information, visit the I-Corps website.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
Thousands of fluorescent E. coli bacteria make up a biopixel.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
The bar of the future may have all-organic brews on tap and blinking neon signs in the window made with millions of bacterial cells that periodically glow in unison.
The same "living neon sign" technology could also be used to help brewers and other folks monitor environmental pollutants in water such as arsenic, according to research published online Sunday in the journal Nature.
The breakthrough involved attaching a fluorescent protein to bacteria engineered with biological clocks, and then synchronizing the clocks of thousands of bacteria within a colony to create a so-called biopixel.
Thousands of these biopixels, each an individual point of light like a pixel on a computer screen, are then synchronized so they all glow in unison to create a sign.
The largest signs made so far are about the size of a paperclip, according to the researchers working on the technology at the University of California at San Diego.
Path to success The work started with engineering a biological clock into a single bacterium, explained Jeff Hasty, a professor of biology and bioengineering at the university.
These engineered clocks are attached to a fluorescent protein that flashes on and off.
Next, Hasty's team synchronized all the clocks in a bacterial colony via what's called quorum sensing, which is a way bacteria communicate with each other using molecular signals.
This made it so that "an entire colony would flash in synchrony," Hasty explained to me Monday.
A single bacterial colony is 10s of microns in diameter — about the size of a pixel, hence biopixel.
"If you want to get out to the centimeter-length scale, this quorum sensing won't work because it is too slow; you would get something that looks like waves," he said.
To get over that hurdle, the team connected a gene that codes for hydrogen peroxide gas vapor to the biological clock. The gas vapor is used to communicate and synchronize the colonies.
"When the clock goes on, you get a pulse of vapor and that pulse of vapor then goes to a neighboring colony and that's what communicates the signal. And when the clock goes off, the vapor goes off," Hasty said.
In the final system, quorum sensing is used for signaling at the colony level, the gas vapor signal is used to synchronize across colonies.
Environmental sensors The researchers have turned the blinking bacteria into a sign that spells out UCSD and could, for example, get to the scale where it could spell your favorite brand of beer for display in a bar window, Hasty said.
More practical applications will come in the environmental sensor market. As a proof of concept, the team created a biosensor that detects levels of arsenic, a heavy metal, in water. The more arsenic detected, the slower the sensor blinks.
These sensors can be built in the lab for less than $100, Hasty said, and each sensor lasts for weeks at a time.
For now, the researchers are trying to figure out the limits of scale for the technology.
"How many cells can we get in a centimeter-length scale to increase the signal?" Hasty said. "And then, how much can we increase this length scale to get something that is even macroscopic?"
Imagine, for example, a giant flashing "living neon sign" hovering over the outfield seats advertising the marquee sponsor for the Colorado Rockies baseball team.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
Franky Zapata demonstrates the Flyboard, a jetpack-like contraption that hooks up to a personal water craft and lets you play in and above the water akin to a dolphin.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
For some of us, jetpacks represent a dreamy way to fly over traffic en route to work. For those just looking for fun, look no further than the Flyboard, a contraption that lets you zip in and out of water — and soar above it — akin to Flipper after way too much caffeine.
The device was created by French water sports racer Franky Zapata. It's essentially a board hooked up to a personal watercraft such as a Jetski via a water-sucking hose. Water shoots out through jets below the feet and hand grips to provide propulsion.
Promotional video of the Flyboard by Zapata Racing.
In the video above, Zapata shows off the Flyboard's ability to turn humans into flipping, twisting, jumping and diving dolphins. It looks like a blast, though some skill must be required not to get tangled up in the hose.
It hooks up to any personal watercraft with more than 100 horsepower and costs about $6,400 (PWC not included). While there are certainly other jetpacks on the market, this one might fit a few more budgets and spike higher on the fun-o-meter.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
Chlaenius propeagilis is a new species of beetle from China, described in the journal Zookeys.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
Scientists are tallying up scores, or even hundreds, of newfound species — but they're also musing on how many species will be lost before they're found.
This year's count from the California Academy of Sciences demonstrates that the pace of discovery is, if anything, increasing: Researchers associated with the academy added 140 species to the big biological list, and a 42-day expedition to the Philippines could eventually add hundreds more.
Among the highlights are four new species of deep-sea sharks, six completely new genera of African goblin spiders, three new genera of barnacles and 31 new sea-slug species. This year's tally of 140 compares favorably with the count of 110 species that were added during 2010.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from the Academy's gallery of the latest finds:
Terry Gosliner via California Academy of Sciences
Chelidonura mandroroa is a new species of sea slug, also known as a nudibranch, from the Indo-Pacific. Nudibranchs use their vivid colors to warn predators of their toxic or unpalatable nature. This nudibranch and five other new species were described in the journal Zootaxa.
Williams and Alderslade / Calif. Academy of Sciences
Anthoptilum gowletthomesae is a new species of sea pen from Australia. It can attach to rocky surfaces.
Luiz Rocha via Calif. Academy of Sciences
Sparisoma sp. is a new species of parrotfish from Sao Tome.
Fidanza and Almeda / Calif. Academy of Sciences
Cambessedesia uncinata is a new species of subshrub from Brazil, described in Harvard Papers in Botany.
Robert Van Syoc via Calif. Academy of Sciences
Minyaspis amylaneae is a new species of barnacle from Fiji. Minyaspis is also a new genus, one of three described in the journal Zootaxa.
The folks at the California Academy of Sciences aren't the only ones taking stock of new species. Earlier this week, the WWF conservation group noted that 208 newly described species, including a "psychedelic gecko," were recorded in Southeast Asia's Mekong River region during 2010. Australian researchers say they've found more than 1,000 new species in the country's Outback, and they estimate another 3,500 are waiting to be discovered beneath the arid topsoil. They say thousands more species of small animals are probably still undiscovered in Africa and South America.
"If you start multiplying this on a global basis, there's likely to be massive diversity that will be uncovered in coming decades," Andy Austin, a biologist at the Australian Center for Evolutionary Biology and Biodiversity at the University of Adelaide, is quoted as saying.
But if all that biodiversity is just waiting to be discovered, why do we hear all this talk about a modern extinction crisis? It's because hundreds or thousands of other species are passing into oblivion every year. That was the point behind the WWF's survey of the Mekong Delta.
"While the 2010 discoveries are new to science, many are already destined for the dinner table, struggling to survive in shrinking habitats and at risk of extinction," Stuart Chapman, conservation director of WWF Greater Mekong, said in a news release. Vietnam's Javan rhino population is among the latest to bite the dust.
Another just-released study puts the issue in terms that a 6-year-old could understand: One out of every six species related to the characters in the movie "Finding Nemo" is facing extinction, according to researchers at Simon Fraser University and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Among the most threatened are the real-life kin of Squirt and Crush the marine turtles, Anchor the hammer head shark and Sheldon the seahorse.
"It's unthinkable that the characters in 'Finding Nemo' could become extinct, but this is the reality unless we pay more attention to the diversity of marine life," SFU's Loren McClenachan, the study's lead author, said in a news release. The report is due to be published in the journal Conservation Biology.
Are all these concerns leading you to lose your appetite for shark-fin soup and rhino-horn concoctions? Feel free to weigh in below with your comments on the campaign to find species and keep them from being lost.
This satellite image provided by the the DigitalGlobe Analysis Center shows the Chinese aircraft carrier Shi Lang (Varyag) sailing in the Yellow Sea. The picture was acquired Dec. 8 by DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
A commercial satellite operator says it has captured a rare image of China's first aircraft carrier as it sailed through the Yellow Sea, after going through an exercise that's the 21st-century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.
DigitalGlobe said the aircraft carrier showed up on a cloud-filled picture snapped on Dec. 8 by its polar-orbiting QuickBird satellite from a height of 280 miles (450 kilometers). An analyst spotted the ship while checking the image on Tuesday, said Stephen Wood, the director of the company's analysis center.
"There is something that is always indispensable about having people involved," Wood told me. The ship was identified "using a combination of the satellite imagery plus open-source material on the Internet, and geography," he said, but "at the end of the day, it still comes down to a person."
Experts have been hoping for months to get a glimpse of the aircraft carrier at sea. The former Soviet Union started building the ship, originally known as the Varyag, but never finished it. After the Soviet breakup, the Varyag ended up in the hands of the Ukrainian government. The ship was auctioned off to the Chinese in 1998. Since then, the Varyag, which has reportedly been rechristened the Shi Lang, has been under refurbishment for sea service.
"This is a ship and a story that has had legs for many years," Wood said.
DigitalGlobe
Don't feel bad if you can't spot the aircraft carrier in this wide-field version of the satellite image from QuickBird. It's in the very center of the picture.
NBC's Brian Williams reports on the DigitalGlobe satellite picture.
DigitalGlobe said this picture was taken during the carrier's second sea trial, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) south-southeast of the port of Dalian. Wood said the picture indicates that the ship is "moving at a decent rate of speed, which would be expected in the middle of the ocean." The U.S. military could no doubt glean more information about the Shi Lang's status, from QuickBird's pictures as well as from classified, higher-resolution imagery.
China says the Shi Lang will be used for research and training, and the project is thought to be part of the country's strategy to expand its presence as a naval power. The Chinese military is expected to build more copies of the ship in coming years. In fact, sources told Reuters in July that a second aircraft carrier was under construction.
"China's next moves have to be watched carefully, or there eventually could be a negative impact on maritime safety in Asia," Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Japan's Tokai University, told Reuters at the time.
QuickBird's view of the Shi Lang serves as today's offering from the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which features an image of Earth from space every day from now until Christmas. Here are the past offerings in the series:
Update for 10:45 p.m. ET: The Associated Press' Dan Elliott got in touch with a Pentagon spokeswoman, Cmdr. Leslie Hull-Ryde, who said the progress made by the Chinese on the aircraft carrier was in line with the U.S. military's expectations. A Defense Department report to Congress said the carrier could become operationally available to China's navy by the end of next year, but without aircraft. "From that point, it will take several additional years before the carrier has an operationally viable air group," Hull-Ryde told Elliott in an email.
BirdBrain Technologies / Carnegie Mellon University
A triangular gadget called the Brainlink is attached to an old Roomba vacuum cleaner. Controlled via Bluetooth connection with a smartphone or computer, the device can teach old robots new tricks. Add-on sensors, for example, teach Roomba to avoid hitting walls.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
Here's how aging robots such as the Roomba vacuum cleaner and the Robosapien toybot might gain a new life: With a triangular wireless attachment called Brainlink, any old IR-controlled bot can become your best friend again.
This gadget establishes a Bluetooth connection with an Android-based smartphone or laptop computer. You can then write and run programs that communicate with Brainlink, which in turn talks to the robot via infrared signals that mimic the signals coming from the device's remote control.
So, for example, a "joystick" app on a phone can control the Robosapien with the touch of directional buttons. In "puppet mode," the phone's accelerometer is used to control the bot – tilt the phone to the left and the robot leans to the left.
The device, which was built by a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff company BirdBrain Technologies, also comes with ports for connecting additional sensors. This might come in handy, for example, to upgrade the Roomba with proximity sensors so that it can avoid hitting walls.
The technology is aimed squarely at "people who like to hack around or for educators who want to spice up a computer science or electrical engineering class," Tom Lauwers, who heads BirdBrain Technologies, said in a news release.
That is, casual users of Roombas and Robosapiens may find their faithful old dogs more interesting and fun in an age when robot technology is growing by leaps and bounds.
To learn more about the Brainlink, check out the introductory video below.
Brainlink is a new controller that allows you to create rich programs for toy robots and home automation.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
A Utah Division of Wildlife Resources employee frees some surviving grebes on Dec. 13 at Stratton Pond in Hurricane, Utah, after thousands of the birds crash landed throughout Southern Utah on Monday night.
Thousands of birds died on impact after apparently mistaking a Wal-Mart parking lot and other areas of southern Utah for bodies of water and plummeting to the ground in what one wildlife expert called the worst downing she's ever seen.
Crews went to work cleaning up the dead birds and rescuing the survivors after the creatures crash-landed in the St. George area Monday night.
By Tuesday evening, volunteers had rescued more than 2,000 birds, releasing them into nearby bodies of water.
"They're just everywhere," Teresa Griffin, wildlife program manager for the Utah Department of Wildlife Resource's southern region, told The Spectrum newspaper in St. George. "It's been nonstop. All our employees are driving around picking them up, and we've got so many people coming to our office and dropping them off."
Officials say stormy conditions probably confused the flock of grebes, a duck-like aquatic bird likely making its way to Mexico for the winter. The birds tried to land in a Cedar City Wal-Mart parking lot and elsewhere.
"The storm clouds over the top of the city lights made it look like a nice, flat body of water. All the conditions were right," Griffin said. "So the birds landed to rest, but ended up slamming into the pavement."
No human injuries or property damage have been reported.
Griffin noted most of the downings she's seen have been localized, "but this was very widespread."
"I've been here 15 years and this was the worst downing I've seen," she told the newspaper.
Officials said they were continuing a rescue effort that started Tuesday afternoon and included an enthusiastic group of volunteers. The surviving grebes were released into bodies of water in southern Utah's Washington County, including a pond near Hurricane.
"If we can put them on a body of water that's not frozen over, they'll have a better chance of survival," said Lynn Chamberlain, a wildlife department spokesman.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in the Antarctic in 1911.
The Associated Press reports:
Polar adventurers, scientists and the prime minister of Norway gathered at the bottom of the world Wednesday to mark the 100th anniversary of explorer Roald Amundsen becoming the first to reach the South Pole.
Under a crystal blue sky and temperatures of minus 40 F (minus 40 C), the group remembered the Norwegian explorer's achievement on the spot where he placed his flag on Dec. 14, 1911.
"We are here to celebrate one of the greatest feats in human history," Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said as he unveiled an ice sculpture of Amundsen.
AFP - Getty Images
From left: Roald Amundsen and his companions Oscar Wisting, Sverre Hassel and Helmer Hansen, saluting the Norwegian flag at the South Pole on December 16, 1911, two days after they reached their goal with the help of 52 dogs and four sledges.
Ole Mathismoen / AP
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg joins three polar adventurers heading to the South Pole on Dec, 14, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of Roald Amundsen's feat. Several expeditions skied across Antarctica to attend the ceremony though many were delayed and had to be flown the last stretch.
Amundsen and his team spent almost two months skiing across the frozen Ross Sea, climbing steep hills to the Antarctic plateau at about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) and crossing vast ice fields to reach the pole. Read the full story.
Hulton Archive via Getty Images
Roald Amundsen and members of his Antarctic expedition team. Date unspecified.
Tonight's the night for Scandinavian girls to don crowns of candles and lead processions through the night, in celebration of St. Lucy's Day. In some locales, sweets and gifts are passed out to children. In others, the parties go on all night.
Although it's best known as a Swedish yuletide holiday, the roots of St. Lucy's Day actually go back to Sicily, where the saint lived and died. Lucy is thought to have lived in Syracuse, a city on the island of Sicily, and suffered a martyr's death around the year 310, on Dec. 13. That date has been celebrated as her feast day since the 1300s.
St. Lucy is said to deliver gifts to good children on the night of Dec. 12-13, in the company of a donkey and an escort named Castaldo. The children are told to leave out some coffee for Lucy, some flour for the donkey, and bread for Castaldo — kind of like the milk and cookies that American kids leave for Santa Claus. Click on over to "Your Guide to Italy" for more about the traditions of St. Lucy's Day.
Candlelight processions are a big part of the St. Lucy's Day festivities, whether you're in Sweden or Sicily. This night photograph of Sicily, snapped on Aug. 18 from the International Space Station, shows the island as if it were lit up for "Santa Lucia." It's tonight's offering from the Cosmic Log Advent Calendar, which highlights views of Earth from space every day from now until Christmas. We'll serve up another visual treat on Wednesday, and in the meantime, catch up on the calendar entries you may have missed:
Media Lab postdoc Andreas Velten, left, and Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar with the experimental setup they used to produce slow-motion video of light scattering through a plastic bottle.
By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News
A new imaging system that captures visual data at a rate of one-trillion-frames per second is fast enough to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space.
For reference, light particles — photons — travel about a million times faster than a speeding bullet.
While that's fast, researchers at MIT's Media Lab have developed a system for capturing data on the movement of photons through space and time and then stitching that data together in a computer to create virtual slow-motion videos.
An imaging solution allows researchers to visualize the propagation of light at an effective rate of one trillion frames per second.
In the video above, for example, a burst of laser light is seen traveling through a soda bottle and bouncing off the cap. Other videos show a ripple of laser light move across a table, over and into a tomato, and up a wall.
"What you see in the videos is an average of many pulses," Andreas Velten, a researcher in MIT's Media Lab who is leading the effort, explained to me Tuesday. "If we capture one pulse, we don't get enough information. First of all because it is too faint and second because we only see one line at a time."
The technique to create the videos relies on what's called a streak camera. The aperture — opening — of this camera is a narrow slit that provides a reasonable field of view in the horizontal direction, but very limited view in the vertical — essentially a line, or row of pixels.
"It can only see one line, but it gives you a very high frame rate — a trillion-frames-per second," Velten said. This allows the researchers to make a movie of one scan line. Several pulses of light are used to compose each scan line movie to improve image quality, he noted.
Then, a system of mirrors in front of the camera changes the field of view slightly so that a movie of the next line can be made. The process continues for each line of a scene, such as a pulse of light moving through a bottle. Then, the computer uses all this information to create the virtual slow-motion movies.
"So what you are seeing is actually an average of many pulses, but because our camera and laser are synchronized very well, all the pulses look exactly the same," Velten said. "That's basically the trick."
According to the researchers, it takes only a nanosecond — a billionth of a second — for light to scatter through a bottle, but it takes nearly an hour to collect enough data to stitch together a video.
While watching photons move through soda bottles and across tables is visually cool and educational, the technology could be used to study the properties of materials, as well in scientific and medical imaging, even "ultrasound with light," the researchers suggest.
For more on this technology, check out the video below featuring Velten and his adviser, Ramesh Raskar.
MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That's fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.
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.
Where nations used to compete to get into space, now the competition focuses on private businesses, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into next-generation spaceships. Msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
The band is getting back together: Seven years after winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize, software billionaire Paul Allen and aerospace guru Burt Rutan are teaming up with SpaceX and other top-flight rocketeers to create an air-launched orbital delivery system. They say the venture will require the construction of the largest aircraft ever flown.
Allen unveiled his new company, Stratolaunch Systems, at a Seattle news conference today. It marks his first space venture since the partnership with Rutan to build the prize-winning SpaceShipOne rocket plane, which became the first privately developed craft to reach outer space in 2004.
The Seattle native, who made his fortune as a Microsoft co-founder, said he's long dreamed of following up on SpaceShipOne's success with another revolutionary space effort. "You have a certain number of dreams in your life that you want to fulfill, and this is a dream I'm very excited about," he told journalists and VIPs at the headquarters of Vulcan Inc., which serves as the umbrella company for many of Allen's ventures.
Rutan, who retired from Scaled Composites in April at the age of 67, will serve as a board member for Stratolaunch. He said Allen was the "perfect team member and customer" when they worked on SpaceShipOne. "I'm looking forward to doing that again," Rutan said.
The new venture is significant for the revival of the Allen-Rutan partnership, with the addition of California-based SpaceX and Alabama-based Dynetics as new suppliers. It's like putting Roy Orbison and Bruce Springsteen on the same music stage.
Other players include Gary Wentz, a former chief engineer at NASA, who will serve as Stratolaunch's CEO and president; and former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who is on the board. Griffin said the Stratolaunch air-launch system could make spaceflight more routine by removing many of the constraints associated with ground-based launches. However, getting the company off the ground will require a large investment as well as "the courage to fly through failure to get to success," Griffin said.
Allen agreed that his latest venture won't come cheap. He said he'll spend "at least an order of magnitude more than I put into SpaceShipOne." Allen's investment in SpaceShipOne was estimated at $25 to $30 million, which suggests he's prepared to put at least $250 million to $300 million into Stratolaunch.
Mothership plus rocket The Stratolaunch system would super-size the arrangement used for the SpaceShipOne launches: Scaled Composites has been tapped to build a carrier airplane that weighs more than 1.2 million pounds, with a wingspan of more than 380 feet. That tonnage rivals the weight of the Antonov An-225, which is recognized as the world's heaviest aircraft. Stratolaunch's dual-fuselage plane would be powered by six 747 engines, and would require a 12,000-foot runway for landing.
Wentz said the venture already has a contract to acquire two Boeing 747s. The engines as well as other subsystems would be used on the Stratolaunch super-carrier. However, Scaled Composites President Doug Shane told me that the 747's metal skin wouldn't go onto the plane. Instead, the new plane's wings and fuselage structure would be fabricated from advanced carbon composites.
Rutan joked that the plane was "relatively close to building, as soon as we can get a building big enough."
The plane would be capable of flying up to 1,300 nautical miles to reach its launch point. SpaceX would provide a shortened version of its Falcon 9 rocket for the next phase of Stratolaunch's route to orbit. Wentz described it as a "Falcon 4 or 5." The multistage booster would be attached to the plane using a mating and integration system developed by Dynetics, and released during the mothership's flight at 30,000 feet. After release, the 490,000-pound rocket would light up to send commercial and government payloads weighing up to 13,500 pounds into low Earth orbit.
Elaine Thompson / AP
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, right, shakes hands with former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin as aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan looks on, following a Seattle news conference to announce the creation of Stratolaunch Systems.
Griffin said the Stratolaunch system would initially serve "a thriving commercial satellite market, small to medium" — the type of market previously served by the now-retired Delta 2 rocket.
Wentz said the rocket to be developed by SpaceX would not compete with SpaceX's own Falcon 9, which can lift 23,050 pounds to low Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral. Allen said "we're in a different class of payload size," and SpaceX's vice president for government sales, Adam Harris, concurred. "There's room in that [payload] class for something new," Harris told me.
Allen said the Stratolaunch system won't take on human passengers until the system's safety and reliability are fully demonstrated. But if and when it does, "we could be very competitive" with the $60 million-a-seat fee that the Russians will be charging NASA over the next few years, he said. Rutan suggested that people could make up a significant share of the payloads in the longer term. "I don't think there's any limit to the number of payloads in that category," he said.
Stratolaunch's briefing materials said more than 100 people have already been assigned to the effort in California and Florida as well as in Alabama, where the company is headquartered. Flight tests of the plane are due to start in 2015, with the rocket added to the test phase in 2016. The plane will be tested at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, but the base for launch operations has not yet been selected.
Re-entering the space race Allen and his partners say air-launched systems can send payloads into space at lower cost, with greater safety, more flexibility and faster turnaround time than ground-launched systems. That would be because the carrier airplane effectively gives the rocket a head start on its ascent to orbit, and can launch from a variety of midflight locations. But the launch industry is becoming more competitive, thanks in part to the rise of SpaceX and smaller rocket companies such as Masten Space Systems and Armadillo Aerospace.
Someday, Allen and Rutan may find themselves in competition with Virgin Galactic, which has incorporated SpaceShipOne technology into the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and is expected to start commercial service in the next year or two. Today, however, Virgin Galactic issued a statement welcoming the new venture.
"It takes me back to the exciting conversations the three of us had in 2004 when we first started talking about commercializing SpaceShipOne technology," Virgin Galactic's founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, said in the statement. "We've come a long way since then; WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo are built and flying, and we have nearly 500 private individuals and science researchers signed up and ready to fly. The potential of the industry we are leading is immense but will depend on the continuing emergence of truly safe, affordable and transformative technologies. Burt and Paul's record in that respect is unmatched. I hope that in due course, in partnership with Stratolaunch and others, we will be able to repeat the pattern that has worked so spectacularly well in the suborbital sphere, for orbital spaceflight.”
Watch the full Stratolaunch Systems news conference in Seattle.
The commercial space race may have changed over the past seven years, but Allen clearly wants to get back on the track. At the end of his autobiography, "Idea Man," he dropped a broad hint about the plans announced today. "I'm just now considering a new initiative with that magical contraption I never wearied of sketching as a boy: the rocket ship," he wrote. "Someone, after all, is going to have to get behind SpaceShipThree."
But does Allen expect to ride the Stratolaunch into space someday? During the news conference, the 58-year-old billionaire said he'd probably wait until a good number of flights have been flown. "I'm actually a really conservative guy in some aspects," he confessed.
Correction for 4:20 p.m. ET Dec. 13: I originally wrote that two failed NASA missions (Orbiting Carbon Observatory and Glory) were launched using air-launched systems — but they were actually launched from the ground, using Orbital Taurus XL rockets. Sorry about the error. I had the Orbital Pegasus XL in mind, which has recorded a string of successful launches from the air going back to 1997. The Taurus XL was derived from the air-launched Pegasus XL.
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.
Physicists have revealed what they've found so far in their quest for the Higgs boson at Europe's Large Hadron Collider on Tuesday, after days of buildup that put the "God particle" on a par with Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Force. But the Higgs boson isn't a religious experience, and it won't help you destroy the Death Star. So what is the Higgs? And what do scientists know about it? Here's a small guide to the Large Hadron Collider's latest:
Why it's important: For decades, physicists have used a theory known as the Standard Model to explain the interactions of subatomic particles, and the theory works beautifully. It's guided our way through the world of nuclear power, television, microwave ovens and lasers. One problem: The theory needed something extra to explain why some particles have mass and some don't. Back in the 1960s, physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues proposed the existence of a mysterious energy field that interacts with some particles more than others, resulting in varying values for particle mass. That field is known as the Higgs field, and it's associated with a particle called the Higgs boson.
Today, the Higgs boson is the last fundamental piece missing from the Standard Model. Finding it is the most commonly cited reason for building the $10 billion LHC. If the characteristics of the Higgs particle (or particles) match what's predicted by the current formulation of the Standard Model, that would bring a sense of completion to particle physics. If the Higgs isn't found, that might force physicists to tweak or even discard the Standard Model. "I find it difficult to imagine how the theory works without it," Peter Higgs recently told the London monthly Prospect. If a non-Standard Higgs is detected, that could totally change the way we see the universe. In the far future, we might even find a way to take advantage of the Higgs field, just as earlier physicists took advantage of the electromagnetic field, radioactivity or quantum effects.
Where they're at: The quest for the Higgs is being conducted using two detectors at the LHC, which is housed at Europe's CERN particle physics center on the French-Swiss border. The collider has been built inside a 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground tunnel where two beams of protons are smashed together at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.
The detectors, known as ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid), are placed at key points on the collider ring. They're built somewhat differently, and they serve as a system of checks and balances to make sure one team can confirm what the other team is seeing. The LHC is the only collider on earth that can achieve the energies required to probe the Higgs boson's potential hiding places. (However, higher energies have been observed in cosmic ray collisions high above Earth's surface.)
CERN
This graphic shows a typical candidate event in the search for the Higgs boson, including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) has been measured in the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision.
What they've learned: The ATLAS and CMS teams shared their results in a series of public presentations at CERN, beginning at 8 a.m. ET Tuesday. Aidan Randle-Condle has been liveblogging the event at the Quantum Diaries blog. You'll find a less geeky liveblog at The Guardian. Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is presenting a webcast discussion after the announcement, at 12:30 p.m. ET.
Here are the key numbers: The CMS team said that if it exists, the Higgs boson would have to have a mass somewhere between 115 billion and 127 electron volts (that's 115-127 GeV for short). ATLAS reported a range of 116-130 GeV. Both teams saw "tantalizing hints" of a detection around the 124-125 GeV level, but nothing that could yet be called a discovery. That's because the confidence values are no higher than 3.6 sigma for ATLAS, and 2.6 sigma for CMS.
Wait ... what's a sigma? Those numbers measure how likely it is that the effect seen amid the billions of collisions at the LHC is real rather than a statistical fluke. Suppose you have a machine that flips coins to check whether they've been stamped correctly with heads and tails, rather than two heads. You have to decide when to stop the conveyor belt to remove a coin with two heads, based purely on the machine's report. If the machine flips five heads in a row, you have more than 2 sigma confidence that there are heads on both sides of the coin. If it flips 10 heads in a row, the confidence goes up to more than 3 sigma. If it flips 20 heads in a row, you have a 5-sigma observation. (You could just have someone look at both sides of the coin, but you get the idea.)
In scientific observations, a level of 3 sigma constitutes "evidence" that an observed effect is real, and not just a fluke. You have to go up to 5 sigma to declare a "discovery." Thus, the observations hint at where the Higgs boson might be found, but this can't yet be called a discovery. In its news release, CERN used a different analogy to describe the confidence level, using dice rather than coins: "Taken individually, none of these excesses is any more statistically significant than rolling a die and coming up with two sixes in a row."
Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains the latest results in the search for the Higgs boson.
What's next? However the results are spun, more data will be required to nail down a confirmed detection of the Higgs. The proton beams have been shut down for CERN's holiday break, but they'll be started up again next year. The results so far have raised hopes that confirmation of the Higgs' existence (or its non-existence) will come by the end of 2012. After next year's round of experiments, the LHC will be shut down until 2014 for a major upgrade. It won't ramp up to its full power of 7 trillion electron volts per beam until after the upgrade. There'll be a long wait to get to the deepest mysteries of particle physics — but based on the latest results, there's renewed hope for the Higgs.
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.
Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle reports from inside the rocket factories on the future of spaceflight.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
If you think America's space effort is in a state of flux now, you ain't seen nothing yet: Just wait until billionaires Richard Branson and Robert Bigelow are vying to offer orbital hotels, or until there are as many brands of spaceships built in the United States as commercial jets.
Or not.
That's the curious thing about Space Race 2.0: It's definitely a marathon, not a sprint, and the field of contestants have had dropouts (like the bankrupt Rocketplane Kistler) as well as drop-ins (like the Boeing Co.).
If any of the racers make it to the finish line, NASA will once again be able to send U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station on U.S.-built spacecraft, ending the post-shuttle spaceship gap. There may also be opportunities for businesses and foreign governments to purchase their own presence in space, in the form of private-sector space stations. Regular folks may be able to buy vacation packages that include a quick up-and-down on a suborbital spacecraft, or even a stay on one of those space stations.
There'll be new opportunities for space research and manufacturing as well. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institution as well as an adviser to the Blue Origin space venture, has called low-cost space research the "killer app" for the space travel industry — right up there with space tourism and space station resupply.
But what steps lie ahead for private space ventures, and what's the time frame for taking those steps?
A crucial year For the companies seeking NASA's business, the next six months to a year will be crucial: Four companies — Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX — are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA to develop spaceships capable of ferrying astronauts to the space station and back. SpaceX and yet another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., have already been receiving NASA funding to support the development of unmanned cargo spaceships.
In February, SpaceX is due to launch a test cargo shipment to the space station and bring the capsule back to Earth. Orbital Sciences, meanwhile, is gearing up for its first test flight of its Taurus 2 launch vehicle in the same time frame. By 2013, both companies should be cleared for orbital cargo deliveries as part of a $3.5 billion combined deal with NASA.
The development effort for crew vehicles is more complex, due to the higher safety requirements. Last month, Congress settled on an allocation of $406 million for the next phase of the commercial crew development program, or CCDev. That's less than half of the $850 million requested by the Obama administration, and NASA hasn't yet laid out a revised plan for the next development round.
Alan Boyle gets behind the flight controls of Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser simulator and lands the spaceship on a virtual runway (with help from Sierra Nevada's Stokes McMillan).
Based on the space agency's previously announced plans, the money for the next phase would be given out starting next July, for the development of an integrated system that includes a space-taxi capsule as well as the rocket it rides on. SpaceX can already offer the full package, which combines its Falcon 9 rocket with its Dragon capsule. The other contenders will have to buddy up with rocket builders — either United Launch Alliance, which offers the Atlas 5; or ATK and EADS Astrium, which have proposed creating a hybrid rocket called Liberty. Right now, the Atlas 5 is the favored vehicle in the rocket race, but the next phase of CCDev provides an opportunity for dark horses like ATK to get back in the race.
As long as no one crosses the finish line, NASA is stuck in the position of paying the Russians $50 million or more for each seat filled by a U.S. astronaut heading to the space station. So the space agency has a powerful interest in making sure that at least one space-taxi operator succeeds. NASA expects that it'll be using U.S.-built space taxis in the 2017 time frame, but warns that reduced funding levels will slow down the timeline.
Suborbital space race Meanwhile, additional companies are aiming for suborbital space business, either for research or tourism purposes. Among the major players in this particular race are Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace,
Virgin Galactic says it's on track to begin powered test flights of its SpaceShipTwo craft early next year, with an eye toward offering suborbital trips at $200,000 a seat in 2013. Branson, the company's founder, is aiming even higher: "We're starting by suborbital trips, we'll then go to orbital trips, we're then going to look at space hotels. We're going to look at intercontinental travel at a speed much quicker than you can currently travel," he told me during an interview in October.
At the christening of Virgin Galactic's spaceflight terminal in New Mexico, Richard Branson talks about the future of space tourism — and predicts that he will eventually open space hotels.
XCOR Aerospace plans to start testing its Lynx rocket plane in the air within a year, and wants to take on tourists starting in the 2013-2014 time frame.
Armadillo has partnered up with Space Adventures, the company that has sent seven paying passengers to the space station, to develop a suborbital launch system capable of carrying passengers or scientific experiments. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority says Armadillo ran a successful test of a reusable sounding rocket known as STIG A on Dec. 4. The rocket rose to an altitude of 137,500 feet (41.91 kilometers), and carried a scientific package from Purdue.
Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, is also working on a suborbital spaceship project that's separate from the NASA-funded orbital effort. (The company is bouncing back from the crash of a suborbital test vehicle in August.)
Next giant leap Of course, there's no guarantee that any of these companies will get off the ground on the timetable they expect. This space race is notorious for slowing down the pace: Spaceship builders have been predicting that the golden age of private spaceflight is just two years away for the past 15 years.
Bigelow Aerospace, which has already put two of its inflatable space modules into orbit on Russian rockets, could conceivably purchase launch services from SpaceX or United Launch Alliance to establish future private-sector space stations — and it's teaming up with Boeing and Space Adventures to make the arrangements for orbital trips by tourists and researchers.
Where could all this lead? Would you believe to Mars? At least that's what SpaceX founder Elon Musk expects. He's teaming up with NASA's Ames Research Center on a proposal for an unmanned Mars mission in the 2018 time frame, and he has said SpaceX's rockets could send humans to Mars in the next 10 to 15 years if that's what NASA wants to do.
"The reason to do space and to try to push the boundary of space is that it's one of the coolest things that humanity, or we as a country, can do," he told me. "We want there to be cool things. Life cannot just be about solving problems. If that's all it's about, why get up in the morning? There's got to be things that are inspiring and make life worth living — and I think pushing the boundaries of space and the outer frontier is one of those things."
SpaceX founder Elon Musk links the aims of his various companies together and explains why he'd rather be engineering than lobbying in Washington.
This report draws upon videos that are part of a Future of Technology package produced by msnbc.com's Matt Rivera. Stay tuned for a new twist in the saga of future spaceflight on Tuesday.
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.
A satellite image of Yucca Lake in Nevada, acquired on March 13, shows what appears to be a Predator or Reaper drone being towed at a restricted airstrip.
By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News
A satellite photo that appears to show a military-style drone at a secret Nevada air base is stirring up a buzz on the Web, but don't worry: The imagery you're seeing on Google Earth is tweaked to avoid compromising national security.
The picture, which became the subject of multiple news reports over the past week, demonstrates the power of 24/7 satellite surveillance. It focuses on a dry lakebed, known as Yucca Lake, which has been used for secret projects for decades. Like the better-known Area 51, this patch of the desert (sometimes referred to as Area 6) is closely watched by amateur aficionados. It's been seen as a test site for unmanned aerial vehicles like the MQ-1 Predator, the MQ-9 Reaper and the RQ-170 Sentinel for at least the past three years.
Google / Digital Earth
A close-up taken from orbital imagery shows what appears to be an unmanned aerial vehicle sitting out at the Yucca Lake airfield.
RQ-170 Sentinels are in the news because the state-of-the-art spy drone was downed in Iranian territory, representing what appears to be a serious security setback for the U.S. military. The Nevada picture on Google Earth, which was acquired in March by one of DigitalGlobe's satellites and fed into the Google Earth system, doesn't show a Sentinel. It looks like one of the less advanced, less swoopy Predators or Reapers. Of course, there's always a chance that the craft is a decoy. (We are talking about secret air bases, after all.)
Flight Global's website, which published the image last week, speculated that the airfield is being used by the CIA to test hardware and software for its classified aerial operations. Since then, other news reports havebeenasking whether Google Earth is compromising national security.
U.S. satellite operators have worked out agreements with the federal government that govern the resolution of imagery made available through public databases, and you can imagine that the public images are fuzzier than the satellites' full capability. There can also be restrictions on what areas are targeted during particular times.
Potentially embarrassing images can surface, of course — such as pictures of drones in an area of Pakistan where the Pakistani government said there were no drones. And the concerns could become more acute as other countries launch imaging satellites that don't have to follow U.S. rules. But the Yucca Lake photo doesn't tell anybody who has been paying attention — including the bad guys — anything they didn't know already. The fact that the picture is still available, almost a week after it was thrown into the spotlight, suggests that national security has not been endangered.
I've made inquiries with the public relations folks for Google and DigitalGlobe, and if I hear anything back I'll update this item.
The Google Earth image serves as today's offering from the Cosmic Log Advent Calendar, which features views of Earth from space every day from now until Christmas. Check back for another image on Tuesday, and check out these previous offerings:
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