Is Internet Anonymity Doomed?

It's been 20 years since New Yorker ran this cartoon, which was the origin of the meme that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." But it's still pretty much true, as we recently were reminded, thanks to the unfortunate recent case of a star college football player whose online girlfriend--stricken tragically with leukemia, or so he thought--turned out to be a fake, perpetrated upon him by an online hoaxster.

But there are more and more signs that Internet anonymity--once heralded as one of the essential building blocks of the online world's freedom-loving anarchistic spirit--is destined to go the way of dialup modems. Instead, we' may be peering into a future in which everybody will be continually, instantly identifiable online, no matter what device you use, or what elaborate layers of ambiguity you seek to fashion.

One sign of this paridigm shift is the news that Google is exploring the possibility of eliminating passwords, and replacing them with identifiable hardware. One way to do this would be pocket-sized USB devices containing cryptographic cards, which users would carry around with them and plug into their PCs (for handheld devices or smart phones, they'd use a wireless NFC connection). As this Wired article explains: 

Moving Millions of People to Mars?

One thing you have to love about Elon Musk is he loves to go big. In May 2012, his company SpaceX became the first private-sector outfit to send a spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station, and in October, his Dragon spacecraft became the first private craft to complete an actual cargo resupply mission to the station.  He's now in the process of developing the Grasshopper, a reusable space rocket--essentially, a 10-story tall vertical takeoff and landing vehicle, the sort of thing that we've previously seen only in 1950s sci-fi movies. In November, the Grasshopper  managed to rise nearly 20 feet, hover, and then touch back down on the launch pad at SpaceX's rocket development facility in McGregor, TX. 

But Musk has even more colossal ambitions. In March, he told BBC News that not only envisions that SpaceX will launch a manned mission to Mars by 2027, but says he's figured out how to get the cost of a round trip to the Red Planet down to $500,000 per person. (That may sound steep, but consider this: back in 2001, when Dennis Tito became the first space tourist to fly on a Russian spacecraft, it cost him $20 million just to go to International Space Station.) But that's not all. In late November, Musk set off a frenzy across the technosphere with a series of tweets, in which he revealed his vision for resettling millions of humans in a massive Martian colony.

Top 5 Space Discoveries of 2012

The biggest space exploration discovery of 2012 is the one that existed only in the collective consciousness of the Internet rumor mill. After a NASA scientist teased National Public Radio in November by saying that the Mars robotic rover Curiosity had collected data that was going to be "one for the history books,"  some predicted that the space agency might announce the discovery of a life form on Mars. That didn't quite happen — at least not yet. Nevertheless, it was a year that featured other important discoveries. Here are five of what we think may turn out to be the most significant milestones in the exploration of space during 2012.

5. The Milky Way probably has a whole lot of planets

An international team of astronomers, who used an investigative method called gravitational microlensing to spot planets by looking for their gravitational effect upon distant stars. In a January article in Nature, they estimated that there are 160 billion stars with planets orbiting around them in our galaxy. That's about an average of 1.6 planets per star. 

Watch Video: Learn more about the Milky Way

4. A rectangular galaxy

If you're used to thinking of galaxies as flattened discs resembling the Milky Way's graceful spiral, this one may be hard to get your head around. Astronomers already knew that some galaxies actually were ellipsoids, shaped more like rugby balls, while others were completely irregular. But in March, a team of astronomers led by Alister Graham of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia announced the discovery of the dwarf galaxy LEDA 074886, which has a distinctively rectangular shape. According to Technology Review, what Graham describes as an "emerald cut galaxy" lies about 70 million light years from Earth, and may have formed when two disc-shaped galaxies merged. From our vantage point, the combination looks like a rectangle, just as a gigantic stack of pancakes would.

Watch Video: Carl Sagan explains how galaxies are born

Robot Dogs of War in Development Now

It says something about the human-canine relationship that once scientific visionaries came up with the idea of anthropomorphic robots, it didn't take them long to dream up mechanical dogs to keep them company. One of the big hits of the Westinghouse Electric pavilion at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, for example, was Sparko, the cute little metal terrier who did tricks while Elektro the robot stared at the audience and uttered his handful of recorded words. And who could forget Rags, the four-legged cyborg in Woody Allen's 1973 futuristic comedy Sleeper, who scampered around at the feet of the household automatons and inspired the wisecrack: "Is he housebroken or will he be leaving little batteries all over the floor?"

 More recently, from 1999 to 2006, electronics giant Sony produced Aibo, a $2,000 computerized mechanical dog that not only could bark, nuzzle a ball and lift its leg as if to relieve itself, but could utter 1,000 words and provide a dog's-eye perspective on the world through a video camera implanted in its head. Sony actually managed to sell 150,000 of the artificial creatures; one California engineer reportedly owned 56 of them.

But not all robot dogs are designed to be cute and cuddly. For roughly a decade, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been pushing to develop what it calls "biodynotics" — that is, multifunctional mobile robots that mimic various animals.  This technological analog of evolution has spawned bizarre devices such as a robotic lobster that may someday protect U.S. Navy craft by hunting for mines buried  in shallow water, and also cyborg insects, which I wrote about in this blog post back in 2009.

Latest Celebrity Space Cadet: Sarah Brightman

 As rumored in Russia and now confirmed by the singer herself, top-selling soprano and Sarah Brightman, 52, plans to travel to the International Space Station, orbiting Earth 16 times and singing a song or two. Perhaps this one?...

In an apparent effort to push the limits of exhaustion, the trip, through space tourism company Space Adventures, will come after a world tour in 2013 and six months of training in Russia. Authorities have tested her and declared she's physically and mentally fit for the program.

Where Is Your Mind?

Okay, I set myself up here...it's tempting to respond, "in the gutter," to that question. But seriously. Did you ever wonder where your consciousness — the awareness of your environment, and the thoughts that spring from it — actually resides? Does the essence of your personality and intellect float through your skull, lonely as a cloud that floats over vales and hills, to steal an image from William Wordsworth (and Bulwinkle J. Moose)? Or is your gestalt actually generated by a bunch of different activities going on in various specific locations in your brain?

It's a question that humans probably have pondered since  Neolithic shamans drilled holes in people's skulls, presumably to cure mental illnesses. According to Stanley Finger's fascinating history textbook Origins of Neuroscience, The ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle wondered whether thinking took place in our heads at all. He instead leaned toward the heart as the location of our minds, because in autopsies it seemed comparatively warm to the touch. The Roman physician Galen, who studied the brains of dead gladiators, had a hybrid theory in which our "vital spirits" were pumped from the heart via the carotid arteries into the base of the brain, where they were miraculously transformed into "animal spirits" that made us who we are.

Shrinking Books Down to Molecular Size

The Journal Science reports that Harvard Medical School researchers, led by synthetic biologist George Church, have devised an impressive information archiving system. This advanced method makes it possible to shrink down and store an entire genetics textbook on a pictogram — that is, a trillionth of a gram — of DNA. That's about 6-12% of the material that makes up the complete human genome!

The article didn't specify the particular book. But if it was Church's upcoming Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, we're talking about shrinking down 304 pages to a size that you could fit into one of your cells. Presumably, that means that someday soon you'll be able to store the entire 100-plus books by novelist James Patterson under a single 1980s-style fake fingernail.

Implanting False Memories

I'm eager to see the new remake of the 1990 sci-fi thriller Total Recall, even though Colin Farrell isn't as buff as a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. Plus I'm still disappointed that they didn't cast the E*Trade baby to play the role of Kuarto, the mutant growing out of a man's abdomen who leads the Martian resistance fighters in the original. (Apparently British comedian Bill Nighy, who portrays the rebel leader in the remake, is blandly cast as just a regular human.)

None of that matters though, because both versions of Total Recall are based upon "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," a short story by my favorite sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick. He dreamed up the trippy concept at the core: What if scientists could erase certain memories from your brain, and replace them with fabricated recollections of things that never actually had happened?

In the original story, protagonist Douglas Quail (changed to Quaid in the movie version) is a mousey clerk who harbors a fantasy of going to the Mars colony on a daring mission as an undercover agent for the Inter-Planet Alliance. He goes to Rekal, Inc., a brain-altering pseudo-travel agency that offers to provide him with recollections of having actually experienced the adventure he's been dreaming about. When he says he's willing to settle for a fake memory, Rekal consultant admonishes him to see it differently.

Wireless Robotic Kissing - With Video!

You may have been too busy playing Shoot the Zombirds on your iPhone to notice. But there's a big debate currently among social scientists about whether our increasing reliance upon — and immersion in — the Internet, video gaming and handheld electronic devices is turning us into a society of alienated, lonely misanthropes.

Some worry that our increasing fixation upon the virtual is causing us to lose the desire, or even the ability, to have face-to-face interaction with fellow humans. One ominous sign: A recent study found that texting has overtaken spoken conversation as the most frequent form of communication among British adults. And while social networking and online dating sites are popular among zeitgeisty Gen-Yers,some warn that people actually are using them as buffers to create the illusion of actual intimacy — which feels more comfortable to smartphone-obsessed introverts than the real thing. As Canadian social worker Cliff Nzombato lamented on the TED website:

"We seem to like, and actually fall in love with the medium more than we do of each other...what I see and hear as I travel around the world, an increase of fear to connect on a so call street level. People have become afraid of other people."

Nzombato worries that the lack of what he calls a "physical social network" is going to lead only to more alienation and depression.

Dark Matters: Reviving the Bat-Bomb?

And no, I'm not talking about getting George Clooney to don a cape and mask again to remake the exquisitely awful 1997 flick Batman and Robin. I'm referring to an this weekend's episode of Dark Matters, which deals with what has to be one of the most bizarre weapons systems ever developed by the U.S. Military — kamakaze bats armed with tiny canisters of napalm, whom planners envisioned unleashing against Japanese cities during World War II.

The episode airs Saturday, August 18 at 10PM e/p!

As Jack Couffer detailed in his 1992 nonfiction book Bat Bomb: World War II's Other Secret Weapon, the concept originally was dreamed up on December 7, 1941 by Dr. Lytle S. Adams, a 60-year-old dentist who was driving home from a vacation at Carlsbad Caverns when he heard the radio reports about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Like many other Americans, Adams felt the urge to retaliate against the Japanese. He thought back to a vision that had made a powerful impression upon him in the cavern — millions of bats suddenly taking flight — and suddenly had an inspiration.