Sirius via YouTube

A 6-inch-long (15-centimeter-long) skeleton was found in Chile's Atacama Desert. The skeleton showed several anomalies, including its alienlike skull, teensy body and the fact that it had just 10 ribs rather than the 12 that healthy humans normally have.

By Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience 

A teensy skeleton with a squashed alienlike head may have earthly origins — but the remains, found in Chile's Atacama Desert a decade ago, do make for quite a medical mystery.

Apparently when the mummified specimen was discovered, some speculated that it was an alien that had somehow landed on Earth, though the researchers involved never suggested this otherworldly origin.

Now, DNA and other tests suggest that the individual was a human and may have been 6 to 8 years of age when he or she died. Even so, the remains were just 6 inches (15 centimeters) long. [See Images of the Alien-Looking Human Remains]

"While the jury is out regarding the mutations that cause the deformity, and there is a real discrepancy in how we account for the apparent age of the bones … every nucleotide I've been able to look at is human," researcher Garry Nolan, professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, told LiveScience. "I've only scratched the surface in the analysis. But there is nothing that jumps out so far as to scream 'nonhuman.'"

Analyzing the tiny human
Nolan and his colleagues analyzed the specimen in the fall of 2012 with high-resolution photography, X-rays and computed tomography scans, as well as DNA sequencing. The researchers wanted to find out whether some rare disorder could explain the anomalous skeleton — for instance, it had just 10 ribs as opposed to 12 in a healthy human. They hoped to determine the age at which the organism died, as its size suggested a preterm fetus, a stillborn or a deformed child. They also thought the DNA would confirm whether it was human or perhaps a South American nonhuman primate.

The remains showed skull deformities and mild underdevelopment of the mid-face and jaw, the researchers found. The skull also showed signs of turricephaly, or high-head syndrome, a birth defect in which the top of the skull is cone-shaped.

The genome sequencing suggested that the creature was human, though 9 percent of the genes didn't match up with the reference human genome; the mismatches may be due to various factors, including degradation, artifacts from lab preparation of the specimen or insufficient data.

The team also looked at mitochondrial DNA, or the DNA inside the cells' energy-making structures that gets passed down from mothers to offspring. The allele frequency of the mitochondrial DNA suggested that the individual came from the Atacama, specifically from the B2 haplotype group. A haplotype is a long segment of ancestral DNA that stays the same over several generations and can pinpoint individuals who share a common ancestor way back in time. In this case,  the B2 haplotype is found on the west coast of South America.

The data from the mitochondrial DNA alleles point toward "the mother being an indigenous woman from the Chilean area of South America," Nolan wrote in an email. 

More mystery
The jury is still out on the mutations that caused the deformities, and the researchers aren't certain how old the bones are, though they estimate that the individual died at least a few decades ago. They didn't find any of the mutations commonly associated with primordial dwarfism or other forms of dwarfism. If there is a genetic basis for the deformities, it is "not apparent at this level of resolution and at this stage of the analysis," Nolan wrote in a summary of his work.

In addition, even if they found those mutations, they may not explain the anomalies seen in the skeleton. "There is no known form of dwarfism that accounts for all of the anomalies seen in this specimen," Ralph Lachman, a professor emeritus at the UCLA School of Medicine and a clinical professor at Stanford University, wrote in a report to Nolan.

This wouldn't be the first time alien-looking remains have been brought to the attention of science. The alienlike skulls of children were discovered in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in Mexico. Researchers who examined the skulls said they had been deliberately warped, in accordance with a practice of skull deformation that was common at the time in Central America.

"It's an interesting medical mystery of an unfortunate human with a series of birth defects that currently the genetics of which are not obvious," Nolan wrote of the Atacama skeleton.

The research was featured in film "Sirius," a crowd-funded documentary that premiered on April 22 in Hollywood, Calif.

Follow Jeanna Bryner on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

University of Illinois-Chicago computer scientist Jason Leigh stands in the CAVE2 virtual-reality system, where 72 stereoscopic liquid crystal display panels encircle the viewer.

CHICAGO — Take a walk through a human brain? Fly over the surface of Mars? Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago are pushing science fiction closer to reality with a wraparound virtual world where a researcher wearing 3-D glasses can do all that and more.

In the system, known as CAVE2, an 8-foot-high (2.4-meter-high) screen encircles the viewer 320 degrees. A panorama of images springs from 72 stereoscopic liquid crystal display panels, conveying a dizzying sense of being able to touch what's not really there.

As far back as 1950, sci-fi author Ray Bradbury imagined a children's nursery that could make bedtime stories disturbingly real. "Star Trek" fans might remember the holodeck as the virtual playground where the fictional Enterprise crew relaxed in fantasy worlds.

The Illinois computer scientists have more serious matters in mind when they hand visitors 3-D glasses and a controller called a "wand." Scientists in many fields today share a common challenge: How to truly understand overwhelming amounts of data. Jason Leigh, co-inventor of the CAVE2 virtual reality system, believes this technology answers that challenge.

"In the next five years, we anticipate using the CAVE to look at really large-scale data to help scientists make sense of that information. CAVEs are essentially fantastic lenses for bringing data into focus," Leigh said.

The CAVE2 virtual world could change the way doctors are trained and improve patient care, Leigh said. Pharmaceutical researchers could use it to model the way new drugs bind to proteins in the human body. Car designers could virtually "drive" their vehicle designs.

Imagine turning massive amounts of data — the forces behind a hurricane, for example — into a simulation that a weather researcher could enlarge and explore from the inside. Architects could walk through their skyscrapers before they are built. Surgeons could rehearse a procedure using data from an individual patient.

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP

Brain surgeon Ali Alaraj talks about the first time he viewed the brain using the CAVE2. "You can walk between the blood vessels," said the University of Illinois College of Medicine neurosurgeon. "You can look at the arteries from below. You can look at the arteries from the side."

CAVEs aren't cheap
But the size and expense of room-based virtual reality systems may prove insurmountable barriers to widespread use, said Henry Fuchs, a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is familiar with the CAVE technology but wasn't involved in its development.

While he calls the CAVE2 "a national treasure," Fuchs predicts a smaller technology such as Google's Internet-connected eyeglasses will do more to revolutionize medicine than the CAVE. Still, he says large displays are the best way today for people to interact and collaborate.

Believers include the people at Marshalltown, Iowa-based Mechdyne Corp., which has licensed the CAVE2 technology for three years and plans to market it to hospitals, the military and in the oil and gas industry, said Kurt Hoffmeister of Mechdyne.

In Chicago, researchers and graduate students are creating virtual scenarios for testing in the CAVE2. The Mars flyover is created from real NASA data. The brain tour is based on the layout of blood vessels in a real patient.

Brain surgeon Ali Alaraj remembered the first time he viewed the brain using the CAVE2.

"You can walk between the blood vessels," said the University of Illinois College of Medicine neurosurgeon. "You can look at the arteries from below. You can look at the arteries from the side.... That was science fiction for me."

How CAVEs compare
Would doctors process information faster with fewer errors using CAVE2? That's the question behind a proposed study that would compare CAVE2 to conventional methods of detecting brain aneurysms and determining proper treatment, said Andreas Linninger, UIC professor of bioengineering, chemical engineering and computer science.

But it's not all serious business at the lab.

In his spare time during the past two years, research assistant Arthur Nishimoto has been programming the CAVE2 computer with the specifications for the fictional Starship Enterprise. He now can walk around his life-size re-creation of the TV spacecraft.

The original technology, introduced in the early 1990s, was called CAVE, which stood for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment and also cleverly referred to Plato's cave, the philosopher's analogy about shadows and reality. It was named by former lab co-directors Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin.

The second generation of the CAVE, invented by Leigh and his collaborator Andy Johnson, has higher resolution. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

"It's fantastic to come to work. Every day is like getting to live a science fiction dream," Leigh said. "To do science in this kind of environment is absolutely amazing."

More about virtual environments:

• 3-D virtual reality comes to home computers
• Is there a virtual Mars in our future?
• Gallery: Reality check for Star Trek tech
• Project Holodeck beams up virtual-reality gaming

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 

X Prize Foundation

The medical diagnostic tool envisioned by the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize may well look much like a smartphone running an app with wireless sensing capability, as shown in this artist's concept.

Qualcomm and the X Prize Foundation have laid out a $10 million plan to spur the development of medical diagnosis devices like the ones seen on "Star Trek" science-fiction shows — not by the 23rd century, but by mid-2015.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is the latest multimillion-dollar competition designed to serve as an incentive for technological breakthroughs, following in the footsteps of X Prizes for private-sector spaceflight, ultra-efficient automobiles. low-cost genome sequencing and robotic moon missions.

"There is a generation of exponentially growing technologies ... that are coming together to empower us to make real the 'Star Trek' technology of a medical tricorder," Peter Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation's CEO, told me today.

Tricorders are the hand-held props that have been used by "Star Trek" characters dating back to the 1960s to check a crew member's vital signs — with the aim of keeping Bones from having to tell Captain Kirk, "He's dead, Jim." The old ones looked like cassette recorders with mini-TV screens, while the later models looked like flip phones gone wild.

The tricorder envisioned for the X Prize would be a hand-held wireless device like a smartphone, weighing no more than 5 pounds. It'll have to record health indicators such as blood pressure, respiratory rate, pulse and temperature, and diagnose a set of 15 diseases to be named later. Diamandis said the diseases on the list would probably include respiratory and cardiovascular conditions.

Details still to be determined
The X Prize specifications still have to be filled out, along with the scale to be used for judging the various models in the competition, but the foundation says "teams will have to consider tradeoffs amongst weight, functionality, power requirements, battery life, screen resolution, A.I. engine location, diagnosis capability, end consumer cost, and so on."

The schedule calls for the initial draft of the competition guidelines to be made public later this month, and massaged into their final form by September or so. The teams that seek the prize will show off their prototypes during a qualifying round in mid-2014, and the top 10 teams will compete in a final round in mid-2015. That final round will require teams to use their devices to diagnose 15 to 30 consumers over the course of three days. The teams will be judged based on the diagnoses as well an assessment of consumer experience and proof of adequate high-frequency data logging.

The top team will win $7 million, and there'll also be a $2 million second prize and a $1 million third prize, all put up by the Qualcomm Foundation.

"Health care today certainly falls far short of the vision portrayed in 'Star Trek,'" Paul Jacobs, who is Qualcomm's chairman and CEO as well as chair of the Qualcomm Foundation, said today in a news release. "By sponsoring the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition, the Qualcomm Foundation will stimulate the imaginations of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and doctors to create wireless health services and technologies that improve lives, increase consumer access to health care and drive efficiencies in the health care system. This competition will accelerate the development of tools that can empower consumers to take charge of their own bodies and manage their own care."

The competition's formal kickoff came today during Jacobs' keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It follows up on last May's announcement that Qualcomm, a global company focusing on wireless network technology, would sponsor the competition.

Tricorders galore
Whether or not you call it a tricorder, the hand-held medical diagnostic device definitely seems to be an idea whose time has come. Just last month, the Canadian government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $38.5 million initiative to further the development of such devices, as well as the medical tests and protocols that would run on them. Also last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to the first hand-held device to detect brain bleeding.

Meanwhile, a startup called Scanadu is working on a "tricorder" that parents can use to monitor their kids' health, and there are so many medical monitoring apps for smartphones that the FDA is working on regulatory guidelines for them.

Like other X Prizes, the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is intended to provide an extra incentive for innovators rather than a profitable venture in itself. The Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight serves as an example: Software billionaire Paul Allen spent upwards of $25 million to win the $10 milllion prize in 2004. But that venture opened the way for what could be more profitable space ventures to come, including Virgin Galactic and Stratolaunch.

Diamandis said the Tricorder X Prize competition was open to ventures that were already involved in the medical-device market, although he emphasized that the eligibility rules had not yet been put in their final form. He also emphasized that the winning device won't be the final word in the future history of the "Star Trek" tricorder.

"The target here is Tricorder 1.0," he told me. "It's about demonstrating the diversity of different diseases or conditions that can be diagnosed with a mobile, user-friendly, hand-held device."

Does it sound as if we're at a turning point for medical technology, or will this turn out to be just one more chapter in a science-fiction novel about more affordable health care? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about tricorder dreams:

• From 2000: Medicine meets the final frontier
• From 2008: Trekkie tricorder detects ailments
• From 2011: iPhones turn into medical imagers
• Gallery: Reality check for 'Star Trek' tech

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.