Thermal-imaging devices have been used to seek out pot-growing operations, map Martian geology — and now, to watch the second suspect in this week's Boston Marathon bombings as he was holed up in his last hiding place.

Authorities said a helicopter equipped with a thermal imager spotted the heat signature of a person inside a tarp-covered boat, sitting in a backyard in Watertown, Mass. Police used the sensor after an area resident reported seeing a trail of blood leading to the boat — and catching a glimpse of a blood-covered body inside. The thermal readings confirmed that there was indeed someone under the tarp, and that the person was still alive.

"Our helicopter had actually detected the subject in the boat," Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police told reporters. "We have what's called a FLIR — a forward-looking infrared device — on that helicopter. It picked up the heat signature of the individual, even though he was underneath what appeared to be the 'shrink wrap' or cover on the boat itself. There was movement from that point on. The helicopter was able to direct the tactical teams over to that area."

There was an exchange of gunfire when a SWAT team approached the boat, so police had to back off. The helicopter continued to track the body's movements inside the boat. Eventually, the tactical team moved in and took the wounded bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, into custody.

How thermal imaging works
Thermal imagers can spot the signature of a heat source inside a house, a vehicle, or in this case, a vessel. Walls may stop visible-light wavelengths, but the heat can still pass through. Variations in heat emissions can be picked up by camera chips designed to be sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum. The signature would be particularly noticeable when there's a significant difference between the background temperature and the temperature of the heat source.

Police have long used such devices to find out whether marijuana was being grown inside a house using heat lamps. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of thermal scans to monitor heat sources inside a person's home should be considered a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, and thus would require a warrant. The court said such scans could reveal private details about the homeowner, including the time of night when "the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath."

Thermal imagers have been taken to other worlds — for instance, aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, which analyzes variations in the composition of the Red Planet's surface using the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

Immigration authorities have used thermal scanners to look for the signs of fever among arriving passengers, and researchers have been experimenting with them as a lie-detector technique.

In 2009, FBI investigators used thermal imagers to search for graves in the neighborhood where Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell lived. That may well have been the most notorious case where the technology was brought to bear. Until now.

Update for 5:43 p.m. ET April 20: The comments on this story might suggest I've shed more heat than light on the role played by thermal imaging. There's no question about it: The crucial break in the case came when the boat owner, David Henneberry, saw the blood-covered body in the boat, called police and then got out of the way. Police used thermal imagery to track the suspect's movements inside the boat, and help guide the SWAT team's response.

In most cases, thermal imagers can detect only the heat signature emanating from a wall or a vehicle. For example, you could tell whether there were heat lamps (or a lady taking a bath) in a particular room by noticing the high level of heat emitted by the room's walls. But you generally wouldn't see the outline of the heat lamps themselves (or the lady, for that matter). In the Cleveland serial-killer case, thermal imaging was used to look for the signs of freshly turned soil rather than for the cold, dead bodies themselves.

The Watertown case is special: The tarp was so thin that police could indeed see Tsarnaev's outline, as graphically illustrated by these pictures.

More about thermal imaging:

• PhotoBlog: More thermal images of suspect
• Infrared holography identifies fire victims
• Like Pinocchio, your nose shows when you lie
• New tech gives soldiers Predator-style vision

Slideshow: Search for suspects in Boston Marathon bombings

Jared Wickerham / Getty Images

Cheers filled the streets after a Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured alive but wounded Friday night — following a daylong manhunt that shut down the city.

Launch slideshow

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri Apr 19, 2013 9:14 PM EDT

When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.

The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.

OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.

The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.

"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."

Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.

"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.

"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.

Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge. 

"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.

"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

More about Facebook research:

• Facebook posts are more memorable than faces
• Facebook's roots go way, way back
• Scientists map 'Facebook for birds'

The PNAS paper, titled "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable From Digital Records of Human Behavior," includes a conflict-of-interest statement: Stillwell received revenue as owner of the MyPersonality Facebook app. Kosinski received funding from the Boeing Co. and Microsoft Research.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:02 PM EDT

Warner Bros. Pictures / MGM

Simulation software that helped filmmakers create the character Gollum's skin for "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" is one of the technologies recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The goal of every movie is for the audience to suspend its collective disbelief and become immersed in the world created on screen. With special effects breakthroughs continuing to raise the bar for movie audiences, the technical folks behind the scenes are convening on Saturday to celebrate the science and engineering advances in moviemaking.

Audiences know that Daniel Day-Lewis is not really Abraham Lincoln and that Anne Hathaway is not Fantine, but when they watched "Lincoln" or "Les Miserables," they believed. Those kinds of accomplishments are traditionally honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at a ceremony held a couple of weeks before the televised Oscar extravaganza.

Saturday's Scientific and Technical Achievement awards ceremony will be at the Beverly Hills Hotel, co-hosted by Zoe Saldana and Chris Pine, who both starred in 2009's "Star Trek" reboot. Nine science and technological awards will honor a total of 25 innovators whose hardware and software have changed the process of moviemaking.

Numerous award winners spoke to Inside Science to explain the science, engineering, and mathematical tools behind the latest special-effects wonders:

Visual effects: Feathers and smoke
Even though Natalie Portman has tremendous acting ability, it was screen science that helped her sprout feathers during her final transformation from a woman to a swan in the 2010 film "Black Swan."

"The team at Look FX had been working for weeks trying to make it work," said Ross Shain, chief marketing officer at Imagineer Systems Ltd. "The end result had to show the effect starting on her back, neck and shoulders with the camera panning close up."

Imagineer Systems Ltd.

Mocha Planar Tracking Software helped Natalie Portman sprout feathers in the 2010 film "Black Swan."

With lots of camera movement and very few points to digitally attach feathers to Portman's arm, Look FX had tried all the tools it had, but nothing worked. So the team tried the Mocha planar and tracking software, which was created to solve common technical problems and save time for visual-effects artists, editors, animators and colorists.

Developed by a team including Shain and fellow award winners Philip McLauchlan, Allan Jaenicke, and John-Paul Smith, the software essentially tracks the movement of each on-screen digital picture element, or pixel, during a scene. This allows an artist to have more control over the final look and movement of a visual effect. Almost instantly, Mocha allowed artists to take the image of swan skin and feathers that they had created, attach it to Portman's arm, integrated the image into her skin.

"This allowed the reveal to happen," said Shain. "The result blew people away." 

Audiences are often blown away by large fiery explosions or billowing clouds of smoke.

Theodore Kim / UCSB

A still image shows how Wavelet Turbulence software can create wisps of virtual smoke that can take on any desired shape.

In the 2011 film "Hugo," as Hugo Cabret runs through the clock tower trying to escape the train station inspector, it was Theodore Kim — a computer scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and fellow award winners Nils Thuerey, Markus Gross and Doug James — who created the wisps of smoke that provided an extra cloak of invisibility. The Wavelet Turbulence software makes it easier for artists to control the final look of smoke clouds and fiery flames on screen.

"While this work is highly technical, its ultimate goal is an aesthetic one," said Kim. "When many people think of math and science, the perception is often that it leaves no room for creativity or intuition. However, both played a tremendous role in the design and implementation of this software and in turn it aids others in their own creative work." 

CG skin and movement
Bringing to life a computer-generated character like Gollum from the 2012 film "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" was a unique challenge, because part of what made him appear so lifelike had to do with his skin and his movements. To make this work, a team of artists and scientists from Weta Digital, including award winners Simon Clutterbuck, Richard Dorling and James Jacobs, developed an approach they call "Tissue: A Physically-Based Character Simulation Framework."

"The framework is used to construct and simulate the anatomical components of our digital creatures and characters," said Jacobs, a supervisor for creature special-effects.

With a similar goal in mind, a group at Centropolis FX, including awardees J.P. Lewis, Nickson Fong and Matt Cordner, created the pose space deformation, or "PSD," technique.

"PSD is an artist-friendly way to fix basic skinning problems with animation," said Cordner, an FX artist at Blizzard Entertainment.  "It is an integral component of Weta's tissue framework."

PSD helps an artist pose a computer-generated arm into a specific position, such as an arm flexed making a muscle. The artist can fix the skin's surface and save the settings for the skin's surface for that specific poise. After the skin is fixed on all the poses in a scene, PSD will incorporate all of that information so that as the arm moves from flexed to relaxed, to help make the skin look more realistic.

Lighting: From a scene to city
In the 2001 animated film, "Shrek," creating a rose-colored sunset was part art and part science for the team who worked at PDI/Dreamworks, including Daniel Wexler, Lawrence Kesteloot and Drew Olbrich.

DreamWorks Animation

A screenshot shows the Light system at work.

"We made a tool for artists to help them achieve new levels of creativity," said Wexler, now a chief executive officer at The11ers. "Lighters tell a story with light, and since a lighter's time is more valuable than a computer's time, we developed the Light system."

The Light system combines lighting and rendering into one tool. Lighting is when the artist adds light to the scene, such as an illuminated desk lamp. Rendering generates the entire scene by forming an image that combines the lamp's light, the wood grain on the desk and the color of the wall. This allows the lighter to see what the light looks like in the scene.

"Instead of having to wait hours between making a change to a scene and being able to view it, the artist is able to see changes in lighting in real time," said Wexler.

More from Inside Science: Oscar sci-tech trivia

Focusing on the lights in one room is one thing, but trying to light up five blocks of the New York City skyline is another. For Steve LaVietes, Brian Hall and Jeremy Selan at Sony Pictures Imageworks, creating Katana, a computer graphics scene management and lighting software, was a way to overcome the common problem of using up all of the computer's memory to generate large, complicated scenes.

"Katana is specialized for large-scale film production where there is lots of data or lots of team members involved," said LaVietes, a pipeline architect.  He develops the software process that moves data between departments for final movie frame delivery. "The way Katana works, if I make a change to a scene, I only save that change, and you would see a flowchart of all the changes to this scene."

For example, an artist can produce a set of instructions for how the light will look streaming from an apartment window at night. Then, if the artist decides to make that one window and entire apartment building the length of an entire city block, Katana can apply the same light instructions over a much larger environment.

Getting the lighting just right, making the characters appear lifelike and creating visual effects that take an audience's breath away is the goal of these Oscar award-wining screen scientists and ingenious engineers. When they do their job well, the audience doesn't even notice their work.

More about movie tech:

• Rock Center: 'Hobbit' director reveals secrets
• 'Hunger Games' fire show is Hollywood magic
• Get your fill of fun facts about the Oscars

Emilie Lorditch is an editor and writer for Inside Science TV.

This report was originally published by Inside Science News Service as "Oscar Sci-Tech Awards Honor Ingenious Screen Science and Engineering." Copyright 2013 American Institute of Physics. Republished with permission.

NASA has turned the Mona Lisa into the first digital image to be transmitted via laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in lunar orbit, nearly 240,000 miles away, thanks to a technology that may soon become routine.

The experiment took advantage of the laser-tracking system that's in operation aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon for the past three and a half years. NASA sends regular laser pulses from the Next Generation Satellite Ranging station at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to the space probe's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or LOLA, to measure its precise position in lunar orbit.

For last March's Mona Lisa maneuver, researchers encoded a black-and-white version of Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic masterpiece as a series of values in a 152-by-200-pixel grid. Each value represented a shade of black to gray to white, ranging from zero to 4,095. The signal for each pixel was then piggybacked on the ranging station's laser-tracking pulses: Each pulse was fired during one of 4,096 super-short designated time slots, at a rate of about 300 bits per second.

As the pulses were received in lunar orbit, LOLA's software used the precise timing of each pulse to figure out the grayscale value for a given pixel — and reassembled the black-and-white image. The process wasn't perfect: Atmospheric turbulence introduced laser transmission errors, even when the sky was clear. To accommodate the 15 percent error rate, the researchers used Reed-Solomon data coding, which is the same method used to smooth out the bumps in the playback of CDs and DVDs.

The picture was reprocessed and sent back to Earth using the orbiter's standard radio communication system, just to make sure that Mona survived the trip intact. Throughout the experiment, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter conducted its regular mapping tasks without interruption.

A research report on the experiment, with Goddard's Xiaoli Sun as principal author, was published online by Optics Express on Thursday.

NASA

This composite image shows how the Mona Lisa image looked after its trip to the moon. The left side shows the picture before error correction, and the right side shows how it looked after error correction.

Sun said the Mona Lisa was chosen for the transmission because the painting is so much more visual than strings of random numbers. "It's a familiar image with lots of subtlety," he said. "You can immediately feel whether the image looks right, and how much information got lost."

The feat marked the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances, LOLA's principal investigator, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA news release.

"In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use," Smith said. "In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide."

A data rate of 300 bits per second may seem achingly slow by today's standards, but NASA is planning a higher-bandwidth laser communication demonstration for its next mission to the moon, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer. When LADEE is launched in August, it will carry an experimental laser system that's designed to transmit data at a rate exceeding 600 million bits per second.

In 2017, NASA is due to send an experiment called the Laser Communications Radar Demonstration into orbit aboard a commercial satellite to test a full-fledged, beam-based communication system. Studies suggest that laser systems have the potential to transmit data at rates 10 to 100 times faster than traditional radio systems for the same mass and power, or match radio's data rate with a smaller, more efficient package.

Who knows? Mona Lisa may well mark the start of a renaissance in high-speed satellite communications.

More about next-generation communications:

• Interplanetary Internet passes test
• NASA mission to test ultimate space Wi-Fi
• Military's new radio: laser beams

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Equinox Graphics

Clusters of entangled qubits, shown in this artistic visualization, could allow remote quantum computing to be performed on a server while keeping the contents and results hidden from the remote server.

If the future is heading toward "cloud computing," where most of your data lives on someone else's server, can you trust the cloud to keep a secret? Researchers say they've found a way to guarantee that your information will be secure in the cloud, using quantum entanglement.

The technique is called blind quantum computing, and it adds one more piece to a puzzle that could eventually be assembled into an entirely new infrastructure for data processing. Theoretically, quantum computers could outdo classical computers when it comes to making weather predictions, simulating biological processes, analyzing chemical reactions and, not incidentally, deciphering secret codes. Data security could become an even bigger issue than it is today.

Whom do you trust?
Today, most of your computing power probably resides on the device you're using, whether it's a desktop or a smartphone. If you send secure data someplace else, those bits are probably encrypted using classical mathematical techniques. They're tough codes to break, but they're not unbreakable. In fact, computer scientists say quantum computers might be well-suited for cracking today's classical codes.

At the same time, there's a trend toward developing devices that shift more of the computing power onto big servers. You would still use your tablet or smartphone or netbook for input and output, but the information is stored and processed as part of a huge cloud of bits on the server. That's the idea behind the much-debated cloud computing approach.

How sure can you be that the folks who manage the cloud won't meddle with your data? And could a malicious cloud client meddle with the central server? Such questions are tricky now, and they could get trickier if quantum computing takes hold, according to an international research team led by Stefanie Barz of the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Vienna and the Austria-based Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information.

In this week's issue of the journal Science, Barz and her colleagues note that quantum computers will be so complex that there may be only a few of them in operation at specialized facilities around the world.

"A key challenge in using such central quantum computers is enabling a quantum computation on a remote server while keeping the client's data hidden from the server," they write.

Demonstrating blind computing
The researchers worked out a system to entangle photons of light that were generated by a nonlinear crystal, and then "process" those entangled photons on an experimental setup of beam splitters, filters and couplers. The photons served as quantum bits, or qubits, to be manipulated in two types of quantum calculations (Deutsch's algorithm and Grover's search).

In this scenario, the person who provided the qubits knows their initial entangled state, and can thus decipher the entangled outcome. But the company that does the data processing wouldn't know how the qubits were entangled — and thus could not even try to decode the qubits without essentially destroying them. As far as it's concerned, all those qubits look like a totally random hodgepodge. What's more, the system has a built-in verification scheme.

"By inspecting the output, you can know if the company really has a quantum computer, without disclosing your algorithm, the input, or indeed the output," the University of Oxford's Vlatko Vedral said in a Science commentary on the research. "The computation is thus 'doubly' blind."

Barz and her colleagues say there are still some technical challenges to be overcome. for example, it's theoretically possible for some of the photons emitted while preparing the qubits to reveal information about the "blind" phase of the calculation. Also, it's important to have a high-fidelity, low-signal-loss system for processing the qubits — whether they consist of photons with different polarizations, or electrons with different spins. But however the quantum computing puzzle is put together, the researchers say their experiments will have contributed a key piece.

"Our demonstration is crucial for unconditionally secure quantum cloud computing," they say, "and might become a key ingredient for real-life applications, especially when considering the challenges of making powerful quantum computers widely available."

More perspectives on the research:

• EurekAlert: Quantum physics enables secure cloud computing
• New Scientist: Quantum computer is blind to its own bits
• BBC: Quantum computing could head to 'the cloud'
• PopSci: Quantum computing will allow secure calculation

More about quantum computing:

• A quantum leap in computing
• Tales from the quantum frontier
• Spooky quantum entanglement disturbed
• Four-atom-wide wire may herald tiny computers

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The interesting thing is that the different companies are coming together in combinations that make the space race look more like a square dance: Space Adventures is teaming with Armadillo on suborbital tourism, with Boeing on orbital tourism, and with the Russians on trips to the space station and even the moon. Sierra Nevada is relying on Virgin Galactic's help for atmospheric tests of its prototype orbital vehicle, while Virgin Galactic is relying on Sierra Nevada to provide the hybrid rocket engine for SpaceShipTwo. Boeing is a partner with Lockheed Martin in United Launch Alliance, which plans to provide rockets for Boeing as well as two of its CCDev competitors.

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."

More on the future of spaceflight:

• SpaceX chief aims for Mars
• Boeing runs hard in the new space race
• Future spaceflight goes virtual at Sierra Nevada
• Blue Origin spruces up its rocket report
• Slideshow: The making of SpaceShipTwo
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

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.