Robotic Insects?

Back in 2007, antiwar protesters in Washington, DC noticed they said appeared to be insect-sized drone surveillance aircraft hovering over them. As a Washington Post article reported:

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

The Post consulted various government agencies, none of which admitted to having deployed robotic insects.  The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, however, had actually tried to develop such a device back in the 1970s--the insectothopter robotic dragonfly, which contained a tiny gasoline engine that powered four flapping wings. Reportedly, the insectothopter actually managed to fly, but reported was scrapped because it could not handle crosswinds. Perhaps as a result, Pentagon researchers veered off in a different direction, and began looking at attaching micro-electrical mechanical systems, or MEMS, to insects to create swarms of tiny, remote-controlled cyborg secret agents, capable of flying or crawling into enemy territory. (Here's a blog post that I wrote on that idea, a few years back.)

The Future As We See It

For years, 3D displays have been used as a gimmick. Millions of the old red and blue 3D glasses were distributed for the 2009 Superbowl and Tupac's hologram appearance at Coachella was promised to be the next big thing. But there's always something off about current 3D implementations. Even RealD 3D movie displays cause headaches and nausea for some movie-goers -- a big enough problem that 2D Goggles were developed to counteract the 3D illusion. Why has technology continued to develop in two dimensions in our 3D world? And why is the Hollywood version of a hologram so hard to turn into reality?

As we move toward new and improved ways to interact with our 3D world new technologies will certainly change our daily lives. What are the implications on human interaction in the future? Check out the video below as Jonathan Strickland explains one possibility for the future of holograms.

Learn more about this series and catch more future-tech videos at the FW:Thinking website.

 

"Citizen Hearings" on UFOs

These days, allegations of conspiracies and coverups are pretty popular in on Capitol Hill, as evidenced by one Senator's recent 13-hour filibuster in order to obtain an assurance that the government isn't going to use robotic aerial assassins to execute U.S. citizens without trials. But that must make it all the more frustrating for UFOologists, who in many ways are the progenitors of the government conspiracy-coverup meme, because they're getting drowned out by all the noisy newcomers screaming that the Boston Marathon bombing was a "false-flag" operation or that the Pentagon is secretly modifying the weather.

The last time UFOologists succeeded in getting any attention from Congress was in the late 1960s, when then-House minority leader Gerald Ford pushed for hearings after a spate of UFO sightings. The future President chided the U.S. Air Force for keeping its Project Blue Book findings under wraps, and proclaimed that "the American people are becoming alarmed by the UFO stories." But good luck getting anyone in office to issue a similar clarion call today.

Should school children have tracking chips?

If conspiracy theorists on the web had been on target, by now we'd all have microchips implanted in our bodies that would give the federal government the ability to identify us and track our movements, thanks to a loophole created by an obscure provision of Obamacare that was supposed to kick in on March 23, 2013. That arbiter of Internet fact vs. fiction, Snopes.com, has refuted the meme--though not to the satisfaction of action movie star-turned-political activist Chuck Norris, who hinted in this 2012 commentary that the tracking chips were "a bit too close" to the "mark of the beast" mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation.

While I've written in the past about civil libertarians' concerns about RFID chips, I was tempted to poke fun at Norris for his conspiracy-minded alarmism, and question whether he'd been conked on the head a bit too hard while fighting a bear. That is, until I saw a recent article in the International Business Times, entitled "Invasion Of Privacy? RFID Tracking Kids On School Buses." The latter describes the Gordon Counta, Ga. school district's new pilot program to keep track of students on school buses through a system called StudentConnect, IBT reports that the technology combines Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology with a "passive" RFID chip--the sort that doesn't have its own power source and will only respond to a signal from a receiver device when it is nearby, rather than broadcasting a signal. (Here's a HowStuffWorks article on how RFID tagging works.)

Doing Experiments on Yourself?

This Saturday at 10PM, Outrageous Acts of Science features people who've used themselves as guinea pigs as strange experiments -- including a man who volunteered to be tickled excessively, to the point where he appeared to pass out. As biologist Carin Bondar explains on the show, the subject appears to have suffered overstimulation of the vagus nerve, which can divert blood away from the brain and into the digestive system.

As unadvisable as this particular little stunt may seem, you might be surprised to know that bona fide scientists at times actually have performed much more dangerous experiments upon themselves. Back in 1933, for example, Dr. Allen Walker Blair an assistant professor at the University of Alabama school of medicine, became curious about the potency of the black widow spider's poisonous bite.

Having a Clear Head--Literally

You've probably heard self-help gurus talk about the importance of clearing your mind, but Stanford University researchers have figured out a way to do that, literally. In a just-published paper in the scientific journal Nature, they describe a new process that they've invented for making a cadaver mouse brain transparent, so that scientists can get a three-dimensional look inside it without a computer simulation. To greatly simplify, the CLARITY process, as they've named it, involves washing away the fat that normally blocks the view of the brain's cells and replacing it with a see-through gel that holds the brain's structures in place so that they can be studied.

As a Stanford press release explains, neuroscientists no longer will have to make do with slices of brain tissue. Instead, they can examine brain's fine wiring of nerves and molecular structures, and measure and probe them at will with both visible light and chemical tests. So far, they've only tried the process on slivers of human brain tissue, but it's only a matter of time before they render a cadaver human brain transparent as well. 

A Los Angeles Times story on the research predicts that it will have a massive, transformational effect on neuroscience, generating mountains of data what will enable researchers to understand the brain's anatomy and how it is altered by diseases such as Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. Already, researchers have used CLARITY to peruse a tissue sample from the brain of a person with autism, and discovered a deeply buried neuron that "looped back on itself," in the words of Karl Deisseroth, the Stanford bioengineer who led the team. Though it will take a lot more work to figure out whether that abnormality has genuine significance, there's at least a glimmer of hope that it might turn out to provide an explanation for the disorder.

Here's a video from Nature's YouTube channel that illustrates how it all works.  

 Pretty amazing, huh? Probably the only thing that would be cooler would be if we could peer into a living brain. I'm waiting for transhumanist body hackers to come up with a clear plastic replacement for the skull and the skin that covers it, so that some adverturous soul can transform himself into something akin to the Revell Visible Man model that I had when I was a lad.

A Real Version of Marty McFly's Hoverboard?

If you're a fan of the Back to the Future movie trilogy of the 1980s and early 1990s, you undoubtedly remember that when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels to the year 2015 in the second movie in the series, he discovers something more state-of-the-art--a hoverboard, which floats above the ground. From YouTube, here's the scene. Notice that Marty's new nemesis Griff (Thomas F. Wilson) also has one, a macho version with a pitbull emblazoned on the board. You always wanted one of those, didn't you? I did.

I was reminded of this when Griff's hoverboard recently turned up on eBay, where it's being offered for the bargain price of $9,995. (There already have been a number of presumably lower offers, all declined by the seller.)

The drawback, of course, is that the hoverboard is just a prop, rather than an actual working hoverboard. Back in 2001, when inventor Dean Kamen was on the verge of announcing what he promised would be a revolutionary new transportation device, there were rumors across the webisphere that he had developed an actual working hoverboard. Instead, to our disappointment, he gave us the Segway.

What We Could Learn From Aliens

If you've ever seen the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, you may remember the scene in which the flying saucer lands in Washington, and Klaatu the alien emerges, holding in his hand what looks to the terrified humans like a weapon. After a soldier shoots Klaatu, Gort the robot emerges from the spaceship, and employs his otherworldly powers to disarm the soldiers and reduce a tank to scrap metal. It's only then that the wounded Klaatu rises to reveal that what he had in his hand was a miniature telescope, capable of seeing father into space than existing human observatories. From the script:

KLAATU: It was a gift. For your president. (Glances at the broken object ruefully) With this, he could have studied life on other planets.

Okay, that was just from a movie. But the paradox that the scene raises might well turn out to be a real one, if we ever actually make contact with terrestrials, who most likely will come from a vastly more advanced civilization. While we're likely to fear aliens, assuming that they're out to conquer and/or destroy us, it well be that they're actually benevolent creatures who want to share with us what they know. And what they know might have the potential to help us an enormous deal. 

In a 1995 report, the U.S. Naval Observatory's Steven J. Dick wrote that discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization also would have potentially mind-blowing impact upon science and our view of reality, comparable to Europe's rediscovery (through the Arab world) of classical Greek science in the 12th and 13th centuries, orCopernicus' discovery in the early 1500s that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of our solar system.

Here are a few areas in which I think we could make enormous progress as a result of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization:

• Unlocking the secret of faster-than-light travel. Presumably, aliens who visited our planet would come from an enormous distance across interstellar space, since even the nearest potentially habitable planet is probably at least 13 light years away. That might mean that they have developed a technology similar to the warp drive envisioned by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, or something else that is at this point beyond the human imagination. They may also possess antigravity technology as well, since UFOs (assuming that at least some of them actually are alien spacecraft) have been observed to perform seemingly impossible aerobatic feats. 
• Freedom from the limitations of our biology. Humans already are beginning to dabble in transhumanism--that is, augmenting ourselves with powered exoskeletons and electronic gadgetry such as microchip implants that enhance vision. But if an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, it may well be that they've become completely post-biological creatures whose brains merge natural and artificial intelligence. They may even have discarded their meat bodies completely to live within machines of their own creation (which hopefully don't look like circa 1991 Arnold Schwarzenegger--that would be too weird). Here's a 2006 paper by NASA scientist Steven Dick on that subject. We could make a quantum leap forward toward transhumanism with their help.
• Reversing environmental damage. It's conceivable that extraterrestrials from a far more advanced civilization have mastered planetary engineering--that is, the ability to make major intentional alterations in the environment. (Here's a paper that Carl Sagan co-authored on that subject years ago.)  That might enable them to fix our atmosphere and reverse the destructive process of climate change. 
•  Conflict resolution. International conflicts are killing people at a far lower rate than in the past--about 55,000 people are dying worldwide from warfare each year in the 2010s, according to Foreign Policy magazine, about a third of the fatal casualty rate in the 1980s. But humans still possess an alarming propensity for slaughtering one another, as evidence by the estimated 468,000 homicides committed worldwide in 2011, according to United Nations research. If an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, most likely they've developed lethal technology at least as potent as ours, and possibly even more so--imagine something along the lines of the Death Star from the Star Wars fictional universe. But the aliens' continued existence would mean that they also have some advanced method for resolving differences without violence. We might be able to get them to share that method with us--or perhaps, as a last resort, to send a legion of Klaatus and Gorts to force us to stop the killing.

If We Do Discover an Extraterrestrial Civilization--What Then?

For researchers involved in SETI--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence--the ultimate dream is to discover, at last, a signal that is an unmistakeable, ambiguous signal from a distant civilization that is attempting to contact us. But imagine that someday, one of them does find such a message from space--a verifiable, repeating equivalent of the Wow signal picked up by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977.

But after the immediate excitement of knowing that we are alone wears off, another difficult question arises. What should we do then? Should the scientists try to signal back and alert the extraterrestrials that we've received their message, and want to communicate? Or should we follow Stephen Hawking's 2010 admonition to avoid contact, in order to avoid the danger of being attacked by extraterrestrials?

It's a question that scientists have been wrestling with for a long time. Back in 1960, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, prepared an advisory paper for NASA that, in part, dealt with potential risks of having contact with aliens.

Northeast Megalopolis Meteor

The east coast was abuzz last night, and it wasn't just the stunning upset in this year's NCAA basketball tournament. Around 8PM on March 22nd, skygazers noticed a large, vibrant light in the sky. While many speculated about this fireball, Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office confirmed to the Associated Press that the flash was likely a "a single meteor event."

Sightings were recorded from North Carolina to Massachusetts, with the highest concentration based in the northeast corridor. Unlike the Russian meteor one month earlier, there were no reported injuries from this event. While it was exciting for those who witnessed the meteor, just how rare are such sightings?