The self-driving car was achieved–13 years ago. As part of the National Automated Highway Consortium, a team of engineers and scientists had a platoon of eight cars motor down a stretch Interstate-15 in San Diego, driver free and safe.

So what happened? Computers are faster, cars are safer–but we’re not seeing any self-driving cars, as envisioned in sci-fi from Knight Rider to Minority Report. “It was too expensive,” said Mohan Trivedi, a University of California-San Diego professor who specializes in intelligent cars. The cars required highway lined with sensors and magnets to guide the cars, massively increasing the cost of building roads. So the project died.

But not the dream of better cars. Trivedi chaired the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium last month, and he said science realized that maybe we don’t want to cede control of our cars. “We have a connection with our vehicles we don’t want to give up,” he said.

Instead, smart car research is focused on how cars can better assist their human drivers. There were some pretty cool concepts on display at the conference:

* Directional sound. One UCSD team of grad students was playing with ways they could modulate the amplitude and frequency of sound from a set of high-end speakers to create a sense of where a sound is coming from. Cameras outside the car can detect objects on the road (like a car in the blind spot), and project sound at the driver so it sounds like it’s coming from where the object is.

I got to try it out. Using just a speaker in front of me (no surround sound!) they could simulate a haircut. I could hear the scissors move around my head.

Other members of that same team were using the directional sound to project conversations between the front and back seats, and to make it so that different people in the car could listen to different entertainment without interference.

* Autodimming windshield. A pair of high school students came up with this one. They found a material that increased its opacity when an electric charge ran through it. Using a camera to sense the location and brightness of the sun, they think they can devise a windshield that automatically dims when necessary.

* Lane-changing assistance. Another team has devised a way for the car to recognize the lane on the highway and determine whether the driver intends to change lanes, or is just drifting. If the former, the system will assist with the lane change; if the latter, it will alert the driver to straighten out.

OK, there was some advance in self-driving technology on display. Behold, from the minds at Stanford University’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory, a car that can store a map of a parking garage and be sent off to park itself. It can be summoned back with just a cell phone call. Maybe KITT won’t be deferred for too much longer.

Remember in an earlier post where I asked for help for Alan Leipzig, a teacher who wanted to buy a class set of my book Death from the Skies!?

I’m pleased to say that within two days he reached his goal thanks to you guys! He actually got his goal with just five donors. As he says on his DonorsChoose page:

I am astounded. Thirty-five hours. Five donors. This is the fastest I have ever seen a project funded. I am incredibly thankful to all of you, and will remember this with every amazing class discussion I get this year. You have taken a step towards elevating science back to its place of honor in America.

The books you give me will inspire wonder in dozens if not hundreds of kids in the years to come. You’ve replaced the static 60’s style drawing of the Solar System in their textbooks with a dynamic, changing, and exploding universe. The far away pictures of galaxies are now personified as giant crazy monsters. You have helped make this class FUN.

That’s fantastic. I’m really proud of you guys; you helped an educator educate, and helped some students get excited about astronomy.

THANKS. You rock.

---

Happisburgh, Norfolk is a fairly unassuming village on the English coast. Highlights include a pretty church and Britain’s only independently operated lighthouse. The entire lot might imminently fall into the sea, which would put it on the map just as it catastrophically disappears from it. But this tiny village is about to get a boost of fame – it turns out that Happisburgh was the site of the earliest known human settlement in Britain and, indeed, in Northern Europe.

Simon Parfitt from London’s Natural History Museum, together with a team of 15 British scientists, uncovered a set of over 70 flint tools from the Happisburgh shore, including hammers and cutting implements. These artefacts suggest that humans were living in this area over 800,000 years ago, some 100,000 years earlier than previously thought. The area is a treasure trove of information – the artefacts are one thing, but the sediment and fossils around them also tell us about the environment and climate that these prehistoric Britons lived in.

At a time when most Europeans were living in warm Mediterranean climes, the Happisburgh inhabitants were coping with an England that was on its way out of a warm spell. Edible plants were few and far between. Winter temperatures were freezing and daylight hours were short. Predators like sabre-toothed cats and hyenas prowled about. And yet, these early Britons survived. Previous studies suggested that early humans tracked their favourite climates and habitats as they expanded across the world. But Parfitt’s new find suggests that they were far more adaptable than we gave them credit for. They probably grumbled about it though…

This isn’t the first time that England’s eastern coastline has changed our perception of early northern Europeans. A decade ago, the earliest evidence of prehistoric Britons came from Boxgrove, East Sussex, which was regularly exploited by human settlers around 500,000 years ago. But in 2001, two fossil collectors – Paul Durbidge and Bob Mutch – discovered a piece of much older flint on the coast of Pakefield in Suffolk. Their names appear on a Nature paper describing several such artefacts, all of which are around 700,000 years old. The new flint tools from neighbouring Norfolk are older still.

The tools were revealed by the same coastal erosion that threatens the modern village. The uncovered beach gave Parfitt’s team a chance to dig, and they soon found several artefacts at many different layers, suggesting that the Happisburgh settlers visited the site repeatedly. The tools are in good condition with no evidence of erosion, suggesting that they were carried to the site by hand rather than water.

Working out how old the Happisburgh tools were would normally be very challenging, for carbon-dating doesn’t work very well that far back. But Parfitt found other methods. His team showed that the sediments sitting alongside the flint pieces were buried at a time when the Earth’s magnetic field had flipped around. This happens from time to time, so that a compass that now points north might once have pointed south. We know when these flips occurred very accurately and the last one took place 780,000 years ago. The Happisburgh tool-makers must have been wandering around before then, when north was south and south was north.

There is a caveat to this line of logic. The Earth sometimes goes through less dramatic and short-lived flips of polarity, called “geomagnetic excursions” (what a wonderful term – the Earth has taken a morning constitutional, decided it doesn’t like the weather and gone home for some tea). The sediments might have been laid down during one of these more recent excursions. Fortunately, Parfitt has more evidence.

Not content with just finding flint tools, the team painstakingly analysed all the fossils they could find in the area. They categorised every plant, bone, pollen grain and insect shell. The species they found lived towards the end of the Early Pleistocence period, between 990,000 and 780,000 years ago. Both lines of evidence – magnetic and biological – converged upon the same set of dates.

But the fossils tell us even more, including the climate and the environment that these prehistoric settlers lived in. The beetle remains are particularly informative. Beetles respond very quickly to changing climates and many species are only found in a narrow range of temperatures. If you find lots of beetles in the same place, the climate must have suited all of them, narrowing things down to a much smaller range. By comparing the Happisburgh beetle fossils to modern species, Parfitt worked out that 800,000 years ago, the weather was fairly normal for Norfolk, even by today’s standards. At 16-18°C, summer temperatures were slightly higher than the average today, but winter temperatures (at 0 to -3°C) were at least three degrees colder.

The fossils also tell us a lot about the environment of prehistoric Happisburgh. Pollen grains tell us that the region was fringed with lush forests of pine and spruce. Fossils of plants and aquatic beetles indicate the presence of a large, slow-flowing river fringed with marshes and pools, while shellfish, barnacles, seaweed and a sturgeon tell us that freshwater gave way to salt marshes and an estuary. In fact, this river was no other than the mighty Thames, which used to flow northwards to the Norfolk coast, rather than its easterly route past modern London.

The Thames’s floodplains were dominated by grass and heaving with animals. Among the voles, deer, beavers and elk were truly exotic species including mammoth and rhinos. These in turn fed predators – Parfitt found the fossilised dung of a hyena, and sabre-toothed cats probably prowled the scene too. And in the middle of them all were the earliest Brits.

The varied habitats probably helped them to cope with the bitter winters. They could collect tubers from the forests, shellfish and seaweed from the coasts and fresh meat from the plains grazers. It remains to be seen whether they adapted in other ways. Perhaps they became physically different, as other humans have done in response to environmental challenges. Perhaps they relied on hunting, clothing, fire or shelters.

The answers to some of these questions may have to wait until Parfitt can find some actual fossils of these elusive forebears, a quest that he is undertaking with relish. For now, we can only laugh at the fact that the earliest known British settlement was in a place called ‘Happisburgh’ – a name that is surely completely out of kilter with the national pastimes of grumbling, self-deprecation and stultifying social awkwardness. At least we know the weather was rubbish…

Reference: Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09117

More human history:

• Meet Inuk – full genome of ancient human tells us about his hair, eyes, skin, teeth, ancestry and earwax
• An 60,000-year old artistic movement recorded in ostrich egg shells
• Prehistoric carving is oldest known figurative art
• Tree rings reveal two droughts that sealed the fate of Angkor
• 35,000-year-old German flutes display excellent kraftwerk

If the citation link isn’t working, read why here

Are we finally going to clean the skies of smog-causing nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide? The Environmental Protection Agency proposes new rules this week that would force power plants in 31 states, mostly in the East, to cut emissions of both to more than half of their 2005 levels by 2014.

The new rules take advantage of the “good neighbor” provision of the Clear Air Act to cut interstate transport—not cars and trucks, but the drift of air pollutants across state borders. (Air pollution, not unlike oil spills, does not respect the lines of the map) [TIME].

The Bush Administration tried to adopt a similar rule, but two years ago a U.S. Court of Appeals said the EPA had overstepped its bounds and nixed the regulations.

As a result, many power companies scaled back their investments in pollution controls. Now those companies will have to decide whether it is more cost-effective to retrofit their dirtiest power plants or shut them down [Los Angeles Times].

The EPA trumpeted its new rules, which would take effect in 2012, by boasting about the positive health effects. While the rules would cost industry nearly $3 billion to execute, the EPA says, they would save $120 billion or more by preventing illnesses like bronchitis and asthma, and seeing fewer work days lost to sickness. (We should note here that these numbers, which sound good in a press release, are very rough estimations. We’ve been hard in the past on people who try to estimate the money or hours lost in the U.S. economy when the NCAA basketball tournament or the World Cup airs. However, the health benefit of better air quality, especially on stinking hot days like today, is no joke.)

There EPA regulations might have more staying power than those Bush tried to enact. But the future of regulating coal plants lies in Congress.

Some analysts said the proposed rules could push utilities to support a plan for climate legislation that would cap greenhouse gas emissions at power utilities first. Utilities may seek to get relief from some air and water pollution controls from regulations in a climate bill in exchange for shutting down their least-efficient plants fired by coal, which emits more carbon dioxide than any other fossil fuel [Reuters].

Related Content:
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DISCOVER: The Smoking Torch explains what smog does to an athlete’s lungs

Image: Wikimedia Commons

At the end of Back to the Future, Doc Brown and Marty McFly use their time-traveling DeLorean to race off to the mysterious world of October 21, 2015. Unless things change drastically over the next five years, it doesn’t look like we’re headed for the neon-colored world portrayed in the second film (perhaps McFly messed up history) but it looks like we’ll at least have the awesome sneakers.

Blake Bevin has posted instructions on how to make a pair of McFly’s automatic-lacing Nike sneaks on the Instructables website. He used an Arduino microcontroller which looks a little less than futuristic clamped to the sneaker’s heel, but certainly gets the job done. With Gizmodo’s post, the video went viral yesterday.

As Bevin says on Instructables:

“Operation is quite simple — step into the shoe and a force sensor reads the pressure of your foot and activates two servo motors, which apply tension to the laces, tightening the shoe.”

The shoes are great, but, given the choice, a hoverboard would be that much cooler. Unless, you’re racing on water, of course.

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As I write this, a plane powered by the sun is flying somewhere over Europe, undertaking its most ambitious test flight yet.

When we last left the Solar Impulse back in April, the experimental aircraft had flown a two-hour test to prove it was flight-worthy. Today, the pilot in the plane, which weighs about as much as a car and is covered in 12,000 solar cells, will try to stay aloft for 24 hours, even cruising along during the nighttime hours.

“The goal of the project is to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” said team co-founder Bertrand Piccard, adding that this test flight – the third major step after its first ‘flea hop’ and an extended flight earlier this year – will demonstrate whether the ultimate plan is feasible: to fly the plane around the world. “This flight is crucial for the credibility of the project” [AP].

Piccard’s team wanted to fly a little closer to the summer solstice last month, but technical problems left them grounded. With the bug in the communications system now sorted out, pilot Andre Borschberg took off from Switzerland at about 7 a.m. local time. When night falls in Europe—sometime later this afternoon U.S. time—Borschberg will have to decide whether he’s managed to save enough energy to fly through the night. If so, he’ll bring the plane down from an altitude of nearly 28,000 feet to just about 5,000 and hold steady, waiting for the dawn so he can land.

“For seven years now, the whole team has been passionately working to achieve this first decisive step of the project,” said pilot Andre Borschberg as he entered the cockpit at an airfield in Payerne, in the west of Switzerland…

“The big question is whether the pilot can make efficient use of the battery energy to fly throughout the night,” the team said in a statement [BBC News].

We’ll keep you posted on how they do.

Related Content:
80beats: Flying the Sunny Skies: Solar-Powered Plane Completes Two-Hour Test Flight
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80beats: Meet the “Puffin,” NASA’s One-Man Electric Plane
DISCOVER: Who’s Flying This Thing?

Image: Solar Impulse

It sounds cool to say maybe the Internet has turned us all into one giant superorganism, as Robert Wright does today in the Opinionator blog at the New York Times. But before we bandy about cool-sounding words, it’s necessary to think hard about what they mean–particularly, what they mean to the biologists who first developed them as concepts.

The word superorganism can describe an ant colony or any other society of animals in which the individuals function like cells in a body. They come in extremely specialized types (workers and queens and other castes for ants; liver cells, neurons, and other cell types for our bodies). They coordinate their specialized functions with communication (alarm pheromones in ants; hormones, cytokines, and other signals in us). What’s more, superorganisms have been shaped by the same force that shapes organisms like us: natural selection. Organisms have evolved into sophisticated decision-generators. In response to changes in the environment, our bodies generate decisions about how to react–whether that decision is to run for our lives or just break into a sweat to help keep ourselves from overheating. Some kinds of decision-making systems favor survival and reproduction. Other kinds fail. It’s legitimate to call an ant colony a superorganism, because the ants also make collective decisions (move a colony, defend it, etc.), and those decisions determine their survival and their ability to make new colonies.

The word superorganism is a metaphor–a way of thinking of something (an insect colony) as something else (an individual animal). But it’s a great metaphor, because the more you think about it, the more parallels you encounter. It guides thought, and yields insight. (A good place to see the metaphor work its magic is in Bert Holdobler’s book, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies.) Metaphors fail when they capture a few, superficial similarities but lack the deep connections that really matter. Yes, we can communicate with each other a lot with Facebook, but what collective decision has emerged from that communication, beyond getting Betty White on Saturday Night Live? How have those decisions allowed some superorganisms to survive while others die off? Oops–there’s only one so-called superorganism in Wright’s piece–ourselves. So the metaphor fails yet again. Wright doesn’t do the hard work of proving this metaphor really works. And so when he then starts hinting that somehow becoming a superorganism is the whole point of human evolution–our destiny–it’s a prize he has not earned.

Superorganisms are cool enough when they’re just made up of ants. We don’t need Facebook to make them interesting.

[Image: Alex Wild]

Hubble is the gift that keeps on giving. Check this jaw-dropping stunner:

Holy wow! Click to embiggen, or go here to get a ginormous image.

This is an image of NGC 3603, a vast cloud of gas and dust that is cranking out stars like no one’s business. It’s one of the busiest stellar nurseries in our entire galaxy. That cluster of stars in the center has thousands of newly-born stars in it, including one named NGC 3603A. This bruiser is the most massive star ever to have its mass directly measured: it is a whopping 116 times heftier than the Sun. That’s about as massive as a star can get without tearing itself apart!

But look to the upper right; see that bright star centered in some blue-ish gas? I’ve zoomed in on it here. That star is Sher 25, a massive B1a supergiant that is a ticking time bomb. Sometime in the next 20,000 years — and that’s a guarantee — it’ll blow, creating a supernova that will rival Venus for brightness! I know this because the gas around it is a classic hourglass-shaped bipolar nebula, created as the star itself expels dense winds of its own material. We’ve seen this before: around the supernova SN 1987a.

Here’s a shot from Hubble of 87a (click to embiggen this, too). You can see the ring around the star, and the faint rings around it top and bottom. It’s still not clear exactly how they formed, but it’s clear they’re from when the star was younger. The rings around 87a can be dated to be about 20,000 years old — that means the star made the rings and blew up 20,000 years later. Sher 25 already has rings, and it’s a bit hotter and more massive than the star that blew up in 1987… so it has no more than 20,000 years, and probably less, before it detonates as a tremendous supernova. I’ll note it’s 20,000 light years away, so it’s no danger to Earth.

NGC 3603 is one of my favorite objects in the whole sky. I studied SN87a for my PhD, and a few years back I was a referee on a paper about Sher 25 — the only paper I ever professionally refereed. All for the best, I’m thinking.

Still, the nebulosity, the stars, Sher 25 — altogether, this is an amazing object, and a magnificent picture. We may even have an early entry for my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2010.

Oh — this image was taken by my old grad advisor, Bob O’Connell. So now I think this object and I have come — pardon the expression — full circle.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. O’Connell (University of Virginia), F. Paresce (National Institute for Astrophysics, Bologna, Italy), E. Young (Universities Space Research Association/Ames Research Center), the WFC3 Science Oversight Committee, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

I spent some fifteen minutes on the moon yesterday. It wasn’t pretty. A meteor strike knocked out my base’s life support; I crashed a robot into a NASA supply shed; and, while I fiddled around with a welding torch, a gas line exploded.

Moonbase Alpha, the first of two commercial-quality online games that NASA has just developed, taught me a lot: how a solar panel-powered life-support system might work, what “regolith processing” really means, and the weird gait I’d have if I tried to sprint on the lunar surface. Perhaps it also taught me that I’m not cut out to be an astronaut, but maybe I’ll try multiplayer mode before making that decision.

The game, released yesterday on Valve’s Steam video game network, imagines the year 2020 when we have the meager start of a lunar base near Shackleton crater, not far from the Moon’s south pole. A meteor strike disables the base’s life-support (it’s not just me) and one or more players must get it running again in about 25 minutes.

This requires an understanding the base’s systems as well as building and maneuvering (or racing…) your own robots into areas too dangerous for humans. The game is a project launched by NASA’s Learning Technologies program and is a proof-of-concept meant to see if a video game can inspire youth interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I’m not sure how more expert gamers will feel, but my geeky heart leap when I saw the animated NASA logo in the game’s opening credits–not to mention the lunar footprints left behind on my trail of destruction.

Follow DISCOVER on Twitter.

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I've looked a bit more closely at the Smithsonian/Pew Poll that I blogged recently, and I realized I overlooked one of the most important (and dismal) findings. Once again, this poll shows that global warming denial is on the rise:
In an exception to the pessimism about the environment, the poll found a ten-point drop in the percentage of respondents who say the earth will get warmer: from 76 percent in 1999 to 66 percent in 2010. And moreover--and consistent with my remarks in the Washington Post piece--this is happening among Republicans:
That trend “is very consistent with data we've gathered on the issue of global warming more generally,” Keeter said. “There are many possible explanations, but one thing is quite clear: there is a strong partisan and ideological pattern to the decline in belief in global warming.” The vast majority of the change since 1999, he said, has occurred among Republicans and independents who lean Republican. Yup--the issue has gotten more partisan, more polarized, and so people have made up their minds based on ideology first, and data second. Sadly, that's how we think. And how we operate. Want to know how bad it gets? Just check out this Brendan Nyhan paper:
An extensive literature addresses ...

A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM scores range from 0 to 10; 10 being a perfect and 0 being not so perfect. To get a sense of the range, here are mean WORDSUM scores by highest degree attained, constrained for the years 2004 and later:

I decided to limit the year to 2004 and later because to explore Creationism I want to use the variable EVOLVED, which was asked in 2004 and 2008. I selected EVOLVED because the sample size was not that small, nearly 1,500, and, the response is dichotomous. Here’s what EVOLVED asked:

Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals. (Is that true or false?)

Querying Americans about human descent from animals primes them to be a bit on the Creationist side. True and false come at at about 50:50 for the above question. Below is a table where the columns have mean WORDSUM scores for non-Creationists and Creationists, and the rows indicate the particular demographic. I have put in bold those variables where the horizontally adjacent cells are outside each other’s 95% confidence interval. Additionally I constrained the sample to non-Hispanic whites (so the N is closer to 1,350).

First, I have no explanation for the age differences. Second, notice that liberals and Democrats who are Creationists tend to be kind of unintelligent. It’s not surprising to me that those who believe that the Bible is the Word of God but are not Creationists are less intelligent than those who are (the two ranges were almost outside of the 95% confidence interval). I suspect these are individuals lacking in the faculties with which to make any inferences at all from their putative beliefs, or, those who regularly get confused on questions because they have minimal comprehension of complex grammatical constructions. In my opinion something similar is going on with liberals and Democrats who are Creationist, though there is a subtle difference. In this case their social-political milieu would tolerate acceptance of the scientific consensus, but they go with their common sense gut. I have minimal experience with politically liberal Creationists of late, but when I was younger I knew a few, and their opinions were generally inchoate and vague due to an indistinct comprehension of the basic abstract issues. In other words, these were just not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Of Moose and Men: 50-Year Study Into Moose Arthritis Reveals Link With Early Malnutrition:

“As the study entered its second decade there was increasing evidence of Osteoarthritis (OA) in the moose population,” said lead author Rolf Peterson from Michigan Technological University. “OA is a crippling disease and is identical to that found in humans. It is commonly believed to be caused by ‘wear and tear,’ but the complex causes have remained poorly understood.”
…
Over the course of the study the team discovered a rise in OA as the moose population increased, and a decrease when the population fell, leading to the idea that OA is linked to moose malnutrition when food is scarcer. The team found moose that were malnourished when young would develop OA in older age.

“We have shown how malnutrition early in life increased the risk of OA later in life, but this also applies to humans as much as to a herd of moose in the wild,” said Peterson.

“These findings cast new light on how early humans first developed OA,” said co-author Dr Clark Spencer Larsen, an anthropology expert from Ohio University. “The study of human remains from archaeological contexts reveals OA increased where societies changed from foraging plants and animals to an increased dependency on farming.”

Such changes were documented in a mid-continental population of Native Americans 1000 years ago. In this group arthritis increased by 65% as society turned from foraging and hunting to agriculture and the cultivation of maize.

“Initially the increase in OA was put down to increased joint stress due to the labour of agriculture. However research now shows that, like the moose in Isle Royale, nutritional deficiencies early in life may have been the main cause. Early malnutrition was certainly a part of existence for many pre-historic human societies, and remains a fact of life for millions of people across the world, so this study is also relevant for modern human society.”

The original paper is in Ecology Letters, and it should be online at this address. I do wonder if more detailed understanding of the long term impact of early life nutrition is going to drive parents crazy with alarm as every new study which comes out produces a shift in recommendations.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Rob at 12:29 CDT

Ah, I see you out there.  You’re quietly looking over the riddle to see if you know the answer, then leaving without a word.  You really should give it a guess, you know.  I promise nobody will laugh hysterically, point fingers, or ridicule your comment.

Tom and I are winding down this cycle, getting ready for another bonus riddle round.  Get your name on the list so you too can experience the aggravation and frustration of trying to solve a really tough riddle in three guesses, with no feedback, not seeing the other guesses, not knowing if you’re right or wrong — warm or cold — until the next day.  YAY!

Okay, right on to today’s brain-buster.  Well, maybe not “brain-buster”.  How about “brain-exerciser”?  Ready?  Today you will be looking for an object:

We think of this object as one thing, but it’s really two.

This object does something important.

While not the largest of its kind, this certainly makes the top 15.

It’s recently been involved in some very interesting discoveries.

It gets around a common problem of its “kind” by, in essence, wearing glasses.

Its two parts are not close together, but have this whole North/South thing going on.

If you follow the blog, you have a running start at guessing this one.

Nobody has to be near this to make it work.

We see it, but it never looks at us.

How about that?  Clear as mud.  Get those guesses in… you know I’m in the comments waiting for someone to talk to me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From NASA:

Moonbase Alpha is a game with single and multiplayer options where players step into the role of an exploration team member in a futuristic 3-D lunar settlement. Their mission is to restore critical systems and oxygen flow after a nearby meteor strike cripples a solar array and life support equipment.

NASA will release the game on Valve’s Steam network on Tuesday, July 6. The Army Game Studio produced the game with development by Virtual Heroes, a division of Applied Research Associates in Research Triangle Park, N.C.

Game Features:

* Realistic NASA exploration scenarios
* Immersive 3D graphics
* Solo or team play
* VOIP chat
* Alternate voicable text chat

…COMING JULY 6th!

I have a Beta copy of this and find it rather challenging. The graphics are good and the play on the laptop is nice and smooth. At first I thought driving the rover was a little counter intuitive until I started piloting the robots, all of a sudden the rovers weren’t so bad

I’m getting there even though I seem to be running out of oxygen on every EVA.

Enjoy a safe 4^th of July everybody!!

Progress resupply ship (NOT the errant one). Credit: NASA

The automated resupply ship, Progress 38, has lost telemetry and has flown past the International Space Station. Reports are sketchy, some reports have the Progress spinning out of control. I don’t know about that and I’ll stick to what NASA is saying as of 15:14 ET:

Friday’s docking for the ISS Progress 38 has been aborted due to a loss of telemetry. Flight controllers have reported the resupply craft flew past the International Space Station. The flight control team is in the early stages of diagnosing what may have caused the aborted docking with the space station, but have decided not to re-attempt docking Friday. As the Progress 38 continues its separation from the space station, the Russian and American teams are discussing their options for a future docking attempt and reconfiguring the station for standard operations. The six Expedition 24 crew members are continuing with normal station activities.

I’m watching NASA TV and they are apparently replaying coverage from before the problem started. I did hear the Progress lost telemetry a bit less than a half before the schedule 11:58 am ET docking and flew past the station at a safe distance. The main thing is nobody is (or was) in any danger.

If by chance NASA TV has anything new in the next hour or two, I will let you know.

A Gemini image of a star and its 8-Jupiter mass planet taken in 2008. Click for a larger version. Credit: Gemini Observatory.

I wrote about this back in 2008 and finally we have confirmation this is indeed the first directly imaged planet around another star!

Here’s the first part of the press release from the Gemini Observatory:

A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The newly confirmed planet is the least massive planet known to orbit at such a great distance from its host star. The discovery utilized high-resolution adaptive optics technology at the Gemini Observatory to take direct images and spectra of the planet.

First reported in September 2008 by a team led by David Lafrenière (then at the University of Toronto, now at the University of Montreal and Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec), the suspected planetary system required further observations over time to confirm that the planet and star were indeed moving through space together. “Back in 2008 what we knew for sure was that there was this young planetary mass object sitting right next to a young Sun-like star on the sky,” says Lafrenière. The extremely close proximity of the two objects strongly suggested that they were associated with each other but it was still possible (but unlikely) that they were unrelated and only aligned by chance in the sky. According to Lafrenière, “Our new observations rule out this chance alignment possibility, and thus confirms that the planet and the star are related to each other.”

Read the rest of this and get more visuals at the Gemini site.

Every year on this date, I take a few minutes and read The Declaration of Independence^*. For my money, it’s one of the greatest documents ever written in the English language.

I know not all of my readers are Americans. Even if you’re not, the Declaration is a fantastic work and you should read it. And if you have the time — and you should make the time — read The Bill of Rights, too. You may not be from a country with the same laws we do, the same values we do, or the same attitudes we do, but the Founders of the United States of America had some pretty good ideas about what the citizens have the right to do, and what the government does not.

Living up to those ideas, those ideals, is what America is about. These freedoms are not given, they are earned, and must always be protected. Remember:

Happy 234^th, America.

Andrew Maynard publishes a wonderful satire on this topic. An excerpt:
But I am a reasonable man Mr. Mooney. And so I thought I would at least give your naive and misguided ideas a go. So after cleaning up the Cheerios and milk spattered across my Washington Post, I grabbed myself a member of the public and tried listening to them.
As I suspected, it was a disaster.
Accosting the first person I came across, I asked them a few simple questions:
Me: What’s the second law of thermodynamics?
Member of the public: Err, um…
Me: Okay, forget that. How do airplanes fly?
Member of the public: Err, excuse me, could you just loosen your grip a little…
Me: Come on come on, I’m trying to listen to you – say something intelligent. Please! Why don’t you accept evolution? Why do you believe vaccines cause autism in children? Why don’t you understand simple statistics? Why are you so stupid?
Member of the public: Get your hands off me now, or see me in court!
You see what I mean Mr. Mooney? There’s no reasoning with these people! Listen to them? I’d rather listen to a lamp post. Read more: http://2020science.org/2010/07/04/scientist-listen-to-the-public-surely-youre-joking-mr-mooney/#ixzz0sj2YgXuE

Research news

A new set of fossils from Gabon may be the earliest evidence of multicellular creatures. Or, not. I wrote about them briefly, but Nature News has a great piece with thoughts from various scientists, and Chris at Highly Allochthonous explains why, at the very least, we can confidently say that the fossils at 2.1-billion years old.

Scientists have created a remote controlled “robofish” that sticklebacks accept as one of their own, says BBC News. Now, for Phase Two…

XMRV – the virus that has or has not been linked to cause chronic fatigue syndrome – is stirring up headlines again. Heidi Ledford at Nature reports on the CDC’s decision to delay the publication of a new study, following the emergence of conflicting results elsewhere. And Grant Jacobs at Code for Life uses this as a case study for context in science journalism.

You’ve probably heard about the new super-whale called Leviathan, which I and everyone else wrote about. What you may not have heard about is that the name may not be valid, given that Leviathan had previously been assigned to a mammoth. SV-POW has the story and some great debates in the comments. The authors are checking out the problem but if they are forced to change the name, what will they choose? Megaleviathan? Ultraleviathan? Mechaleviathan? Brian? Failocetus?

The human body makes rare antibodies effective against all flu viruses and these might be boosted to design a better universal flu treatment, says Maggie Fox at Reuters

A new technique for deciphering the calls of sperm whales allows the magnificent, mysterious creatures to be studied in unprecedented detail, says Brandon Keim in Wired. Researchers identified subtle variations caused by differences in the shape of individual whales’ heads. It’s the first time that sperm whale vocalizations have been linked to specific individuals.

A new scent is enough to spark the evolution of a new moth species — and it can start with just a single genetic mutation. More from Wired.

Other goings-on

The early buzz on Brian Switek’s first book Written in Stone is tremendous. I read three chapters when they were in a very early draft stage and they were superb. We can only guess what he’s managed to do with them since then, but the book is available for pre-order on Amazon. Go and buy it.

Simon Jenkins has launched another half-arsed attack on science in the Guardian. Scientists decided that mockery was the only good response to such tripe, and launched #SpoofJenks Monday. I particularly loved the efforts from Matt Parker, Jon Butterworth, and Stephen Curry. Meanwhile, Imran Khan spoils the fun with a substantive response to Jenkins with, you know, points and stuff.

Peter Aldhous at New Scientist reports on a zoo with plans to save endangered species by reprogramming cells from dead animals into stem cells. First step: a drill (it’s a monkey, not a tool).

You know that things are bad with the oil spill when the fact that thousands of turtles not burning to death is a cause for celebration. You know, earlier this year, thousands of turtles weren’t burning to death on a fairly regular basis.

Ben Goldacre has a somewhat depressing take on a paper about people’s reactions to scientific evidence. “When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

Is a parasite influencing people’s World Cup skills? Is a parasite influencing people’s tendency to ascribe everything to parasites? Mind Hacks has more, but Vaughan’s probably been taken over by a parasite that reproduces by searching Pubmed.

Neurodojo talks about what happens to neurons when you’re as small as a shrew or as large as an elephant.

What do astronauts want to be when they grow up? A lovely piece by Tom Whyntie in the Guardian.

Despite an election pledge to take an evidence-based approach to health, the Conservatives have appointed MPs Nadine Dorries and David Tredinnick to the health select committee. Martin Robbins laments.

Heh/Wow

The Large Hadron Collider FAQ. “What would happen if I went inside it?” “Just. Don’t.”

What, if anything, is Big Bird? The Loom brings us a talk on the evolutionary affinities of a strange bird species

A gallery of close-ups of bug eyes, from Wired

Susan Orlean can apparently write about anything. Including hashtags.

Journalism and communication

The big news this week is that the Times has finally disappeared behind a full paywall. It’s a sad day for science journalism, for the Times provides some of the best science reporting out there thanks to folks like Mark Henderson, Hannah Devlin, Sam Lister et al. Through Eureka, they’ve shown that a science supplement can work in a national newspaper. They set up one of the only science blogs from a mainstream source that actually works. And they’ve always shown a great understanding of the value that the Internet and social media can bring to science journalism. To see all of that be less accessible to people is a big shame, but to be honest, I would be happy to pay a little less than the current asking price of £2/week for access to the science sections alone… (Also, the Sunday Times has disappeared behind a paywall too, so you win some, you lose some.) In the meantime, it’s interesting that the Guardian is going to the opposite extreme, by offering a plug-in that ports their content directly onto blogs. There’s also a good discussion on the future of paywalls at the Strange Attractor blog. Hint: people pay for the platform not the content,

More kerfuffle on embargoes this week around a study on menopause and the increasingly appropriately named Jonathan Leake. Ivan Oransky, as per usual, has a great take on the whole affair and Leake’s own thoughts. Fiona Fox is discusses Leake’s priors, Natasha Loder praises him and thinks he should be offered an apology, and Gimpyblog disagrees, having read the ESHRE’s media policy.

An interesting thought-provoking thread from Jack of Kent on the image of skepticism, with some great comments building up.

A truly inspiring interview with Eric Roston on science journalism, writing, new media and more, brought to you by Bora Zivkovic.

Scott Rosenberg at Wordyard is knocking them out of the park at the moment, with two great posts on journalists and public criticism, and the recent journo/blogger war (Episode #38302) at the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Brian Cubbison has another excellent piece on journos/bloggers (Episode #38303). I loved this: “Anyone who speaks of bloggers vs. journalists should be made to show their work. Strengthen the argument with links to actual bloggers and journalists. Anyone who uses the saggy, worn-out cliche of bloggers in pajamas should name one, just one, or be made to take down that sign above the desk, “When your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

“Do arrogant, condescending, and dismissive attitudes contribute to the journalism crisis?” asks Abel Pharmboy. This isn’t one of those question headlines where the answer is no…

I’ve been hearing about structural adjustment due to technology and gains to productivity from people since the early 1990s. The sort of dynamic which motivated the original Luddites. But this chart from Calculated Risk makes me lean toward the proposition that the time is nigh. In relation to previous post-World War II recessions the big difference in unemployment seems to be in the area of the long term; these are those whose skills will degrade, and are probably least likely to reenter the labor force at an equivalent position.