As part of Women's History Month, Open Road Integrated Media has put together a video featuring several prominent female science fiction and fantasy authors talk about the genre, being a woman in the mostly male-dominated science fiction realm, and the women who inspired them. Open Road publishes and markets e-books across several genres.

The video features writers Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Datlow, Patricia C. Wrede, and N. K. Jemisin. Check it out:

Wrede writes fantasy and shared-world fiction. Datlow was the fiction editor for Omni Magazine and other publications. Hand is an author of numerous horror and fantasy works and has written for film and television. Jemisin writes speculative fiction that has been nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards. 

These authors specifically single out Octavia Butler for her influence and inspiration. Butler, the writer of such works as the Nebula award-winning novel Parable of the Talents, died in 2006. In 1995, Butler became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.

Since 1995, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama have issued a series of annual proclamations designating the month of March “Women’s History Month.”  

Lede image of author Patricia Wrede as a child screencapped from the Open Road Integrated Media video

Google's flashy visionary and Facebook's hacker boy-king are putting their heads together - but they're not cooperating to drum up more likes or clicks, thank goodness.

The pair, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have teamed up for social good, establishing a science research prize that's already awarded $33 million in its inaugural round.  

A Big Stakes Science Fair

The award, known as the Breakthrough Prize, will be doled out to five winners each year, though a robust selection of 11 recipients were announced in the first round. The founding members of the new science foundation have committed to establish five annual prizes of $3 million for outstanding research that advances cures for intractable diseases.

Other founding members of the Breakthrough Prize include the wives of both Brin and Zuckerberg, who are both more science-minded than their tech-star partners. Anne Wojcicki, married to Brin, is the founder of 23andme.com - a genetics startup. Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's wife, graduated from medical school after meeting Zuck at Harvard and was accepted to a prestigious pediatric residency at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) last year.

“Priscilla and I are honored to be part of this,” Zuckerberg wrote in the prize's announcement. “We believe the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences has the potential to provide a platform for other models of philanthropy, so people everywhere have an opportunity at a better future.”

Apple chairman Art Levinson will serve as the new foundation's chairman, rounding out the trifecta of major tech companies with a hand in the new science prize.

Zuckerberg, Forgotten Philanthropist (In A Hoodie)

From disheveled boardroom 20-something to amoral hacker, Zuckerberg's image runs the gamut - and it isn't always flattering. But in 2012, the Facebook founder ran up a tab as the second biggest philanthropist in the U.S., giving away 18 million shares of Facebook stock valued at $498.8 million to a health and education foundation in Silicon Valley.

Brin is no stranger to writing epic tax deductible checks - or to co-founding his own nonprofit. Beyond Google's own active nonprofit arm, the quirky Google co-founder has donated millions to foundations ranging from fighting poverty in the Bay Area to Parkinson's disease research.

For more on the prize, the Breakthrough Foundation's site has the full list of its first prize recipients. 

Photo by Taylor Hatmaker.

A museum under construction is an awesome scene. It's like peeking backstage before the premiere of Broadway play, seeing the outer experience taking shape.

The Exploratorium - a unique museum of science, art and human perception - is still two months away from its grand reopening. The lower floor is strewn with half-built exhibits and criss-crossed with caution tape. The upstairs is a buzzing office full of people planning for the big day and beyond. This vast new space on Pier 15 in San Francisco opens to the public on April 17.

But on Monday the museum released Sound Uncovered, its second free iPad app, which the creators showed me during a visit to the unfinished museum. As I explored the app's exhibits, the tablet disappeared in my hands. When you launch this app, you're in the museum, no matter where you are.

Everywhere Is A Laboratory

The design of physical Exploratoreum starts with the goal of creating an experience and builds up from there. An iPad is just as good as a room in the museum if it's the right place to focus the experience of an exhibit. "What makes the Exploratorium a unique place is that it's the combination of a museum, a laboratory, and a developmental studio," says Rob Semper, executive associate director of the museum.

Semper is a physicist whose tenure at the Exploratorium goes back to designing some of its original exhibits with founder Frank Oppenheimer (also a physicist, who worked on the Manhattan Project with his older brother Robert Oppenheimer). Semper took a little time off from the Exploratorium to run the collaboration between Apple and Lucasfilm. Now he's back creating museum exhibits again, both in San Francisco and at partner museums around the world.

Extending its exhibit design to the iPad is a natural move for the Exploratorium. This museum came online in 1993, making its website among the first 600 in the world. The Exploratorium is like a laboratory for turning things into laboratories. In the same way it is turning its new U-shaped port building and the walkways and docks outside into a delightful maze of science experiments, it can turn flat, pixellated spaces into exhibits as well. And on the iPad, these experiments come to life, gaining the inputs of touch, movement, light and sound.

It's All About Perception

The two Exploratorium iPad apps so far are both "buffet-style" collections of short, multi-sensory exhibits. You can select from a table of contents or swipe through like a magazine. The first was Color Uncovered, which uses properties of the tablet's display to demonstrate properties of light. The new app, Sound Uncovered, uses both the speakers and microphones, as well as text and video explanations, to show off some of the surprisingly bizarre properties of sound.

"Perception is a strong subject for us," says Sound Uncovered project director Jean Cheng. Designing a museum exhibit at the level of user experience comes right down to perception. "This app is about sound, but it's really about you." By causing you to notice weird things about your perception that you usually take for granted, the Exploratorium forces you to think more critically about your environment, and it does so purely through fun.

I'm not going to spoil the illusions for you. If you have access to an iPad, you should download Sound Uncovered for free and try it yourself. Right now.

But I will tell you about my favorites:

I love "Find the Highest Note," which presents a circular organ and demonstrates the mind-bending auditory Möbius strip known as the Shepard scale. As you move upward and downward in base pitch, the eerie Shepard tone's partials replace each other at the top and bottom range of hearing. As a result, even though you're moving up or down in pitch, it ultimately never sounds like it's getting higher or lower. It's the auditory version of the barber-pole illusion, where the corkscrewing shape seems to move upward or downward forever while remaining in the same place.

What's also cool about this exhibit in the app is that it doubles as a musical instrument.

Another great social exhibit is the "How Old Are Your Ears?" test, which lets you slide down from an inaudibly high frequency into the ranges that humans naturally lose the ability to hear over time. The younger people in the room will start to hear an ear-splitting whine, but the elders won't hear a thing until lower down.

As we ran through the illusions at the museum, the construction crews periodically tested the fire alarm in the building, which pierced through our conversation. It was uncomfortable for a second, disrupting this carefully arranged social situation, but then we realized the building itself was demonstrating the very kinds of sensory and cognitive tricks we were playing with on the iPad.

Simply Social

The Exploratorium is not afraid to take risks with its apps. One exercise in Color Uncovered asks the user — with plenty of caution — to put a drop of water on the screen, which creates a magnifying bubble in which one can clearly see how pixels work. The team laughs about some of the App Store reviews they got from people who didn't handle that part carefully.

But the apps are simple and magazine-like, going out of their way not to overwhelm people less used to figuring out how iPad apps work. "We don't want to further mystify people with this tech," director of online engagement Lowell Robinson says. "Frank [Oppenheimer]'s dream was to demystify people about how the world works." Accordingly, these apps are not about deep-down, immersive virtual experiences. "We're trying to give you physical ways to test," says Cheng. The apps ask you to try things, try them on others, and pass the tablet around.

The Exploratorium apps are social, but not in the Facebook way. "Social in the old-fashioned sense where you're sitting next to somebody," Robinson says. We had a good laugh about that.

Sound Uncovered for iPad is available for free on the iTunes App Store.

Photos by Amy Widdowson.

You can debate how much we have evolved emotionally since our early primate days in Africa, but there’s no arguing about our looks. At that point in human development. we were to beauty what the butt is to fine cuisine - distantly related, and in all the wrong ways.

How can we tell? Popular Science has a new $6 iPad app that maps your face to the digital skulls and muscles of eight of our extinct forebears. And the results aren't pretty.

Ugly Is As Ugly Was

PS Evolver is a top-rate teaching app, concisely explaining a lot about these early hominids and the worlds in which they lived. But you’ll want to buy it for the face-mapping feature.

It’s one thing to know that our various ape-like ancestors had a jutting jaw, a flat and flaring nose or a brow you could rest a pencil on. It’s another to see how you’d have looked with those features.

Seeing my skin wrapped around an ancient, weirdly constructed skull was bracing, and made me wonder again if Mick Jagger isn’t really a flash-frozen caveman rescued from a peat bog in the 1950s. I mean, check it out:

It's Easy To Travel Back In Time

Getting the images is easy. Match your eyes and mouth to guides on your iPad’s screen (sorry, iPad only) and take a photo. The app shows you thumbnail images of your ape self, there for you to choose. Click on one, and you can expand, shrink and spin the image on every axis.

There’s plenty of information about that particular failed branch of the human experiment, including a sober, PBS-esque voiceover about their lives. Learn how long they lived, how big their brains were (one line’s brains were larger than ours), even what liked to eat them.

The app crashes too often, and for some reason, the Neanderthal face-map sometimes doesn’t render, but bagging on the app because of this is like complaining about the wrapping paper on a birthday present. There’s a lot of enjoyment here.

MIT Technology Review spots a wild story on Genome Web about George Church, a molecular geneticist at Harvard, who is developing technology that can create Neandertal cells. Once he gets the cells, Church hopes to find an "adventurous female human" who will volunteer to be a surrogate mom for the first new Neandertal baby. Church says this could bring about "kind of Neandertal culture" that could even achieve "political significance."

The original (paywalled) article ran in Der Spiegel. Apparently the Germans are appalled by Church's nonchalance about doing things like mixing DNA from different species. Somewhere, eccentric futurist Ray Kurzweil is freaking out as he realizes that even if he becomes a cyborg, he'll have to share the planet with cavemen. This is not the future that Kurzweil and his fellow Singularitarians have been hoping for. Not at all! Somewhere in Hollywood someone is already writing the screenplay: Cyborgs Versus Cavemen: The Battle for Planet Earth.

God, I love science.

While major hardware makers are busy squabbling over "4K" vs "Ultra HD", the future is quietly creeping in around the edges. A future with implications in the real world - big ones. Really big ones. Think using crowd-sourced mind control to change the color of Niagara Falls and the CN Tower big. 

Crowd-funded and completely hackable - by definition the exact opposite of gadgets that today's bloated, out-of-touch companies crank out - projects like the Muse headband are about to crash into technology as we know it with meteoric force.

Meet The Muse - And Your Brain Waves

Most people laud the Muse, crafted by InteraXon, as a "mind-controlled" game. But that sells it short - and then some. The device is a stylish, sturdy headband that measures the patterns of electrical activity in the brain - electrical signals are divided into "bands" based on their frequency. 

"This Muse headband has four clinical-grade EEG sensors," says Michael Apollo, InteraXon's Director of Applied Mind Science. "What they do is measure the electrical signal and the signature of your brain. With that we know that through interpreting those signals, we can determine certain states that you're in. We can determine when you're in a focused, attentive state - or when you're not. Or when you're in an actively engaged mind, for example analyzing or maybe overanalyzing… and also looking at it at your level of relaxation too."

Traditional EEG reading next to InteraXon's data visualization

The Muse measures two of the better-understood frequency tiers: alpha waves (8–12 Hz), associated with relaxation and restfulness, and beta waves (12–30 Hz), which correlate with alert or attentive mental states. "This sensor [monitors] the pre-frontal cortex and your occipital region," says Apollo. According to InteraXon, "brains of people in relaxed states create gentle, slow-moving alpha waves, while those engaged in intense concentration generate quick, jagged beta waves."

The Muse and devices like it might seem like they've traveled here from the future, but EEG has actually been around as a scientific tool for studying brain activity in humans and animals for almost 100 years. Though simple, it remains clinically relevant for diagnosis of conditions like epilepsy and sleep disorders. But InteraXon wants to empower people to take the reins of these electrical peaks and troughs. In doing so, they can gently steer their brains through these quantifiable mental states, which for most are solely a subjective, qualitative experience - a feeling we have about ourselves.

Mind-On With Mind Control

I happened across InteraXon's booth when its inflated dome full of blissed-out looking show-goers caught my eye. A few minutes into chatting up Apollo, it was evident that the Muse is anything but pseudoscience. The Muse, available widely for consumers in mid-2013 for $175, is the marriage of electrical sensors in a wearable package with some clever data visualizations - the "game" - cooked up by InteraXon's excitable interdisciplinary team. The games and exercises will be packaged into the Muse's companion app, which was responsive and fun, in my time with the prototype. The app will track all of the data the Muse collects and beam it to the cloud, making these patterns trackable over time.

The Muse booth was never short on fascinated onlookers, and I was happy to get my chance. Once inside, I was rigged up with a Muse headband, which wrapped comfortably around my forehead and tucked behind my ears. It required a bit of fidgeting, the Muse didn't like my hair getting in the way of its conductance or my freakishly small ears, but then we were off and running. Seated in a low-slung chair, I was handed an iPhone running the headset's companion app and instructed to watch the TV screen in front of me.

Moving The Heavens And The Earth

In the first exercise, a sun and a moon appeared on opposite sides of the screen. My job was to merge them. And with no controller to speak of, that meant getting my brain to cooperate - easier said than done. The faster I could concentrate and arrive at an attentive, beta wave-rich state, the faster the sun and moon would overlap. I tried a few quick tricks to rein in my thoughts with little luck, like repeating a line from a poem I'd just read in my head over and over. The sun and moon didn't budge, so I started counting every time one of the animated wavy lines between the two orbs hit a precise spot on the screen. The heavens moved, literally - seconds later, the sun and moon had overlapped into a virtual eclipse.

In another game, my brainwaves powered an auditory feedback system. When I was chilled out, the beat slowed to a pleasant, peaceful set of sounds. If I let my attention wander - to the cameraman pointing his lens at me from just outside the dome, for instance - a thudding drumbeat galloped into my ears. This exercise encouraged breath control, a major focus in the mindfulness and meditation practices that clearly influenced the Muse's creators.

Muse prototype on display

It's Not A Game - It's Data Visualization

These tasks are games, in a way, but more so they're exercises. Rather than controlling the sun and moon or the drum beat with your thoughts, you're actually controlling your thoughts themselves, which are in turn interpreted with the Muse's sensory flourishes. The game is just a clever way to show you what your brain's alpha and beta waves are up to, but it's a fascinating representation of realtime bio-feedback - all streaming right out of your cortex over bluetooth.

The most striking thing about wearing the Muse is watching as your subjective, internal mental experience - the kind of thing you just feel in the basement of your brain - as it's interpreted and articulated visually. Having this kind of quantified feedback makes you truly feel like the master of your own mind - and that was just from my 20 minutes with the headset on.

The Future Of The Future

So what's the point? Well, it isn't just to move the sun and moon together. A device like the Muse is all about personal feedback and tracking. Attention, a traditionally hard-to-pin-down construct in the neuroscience community, is also infamously tough for most of us to wrestle into submission. Our minds stray and suddenly we've wasted 10 minutes, eyes glazed over, clicking Like on Facebook.

The vast power of our own minds is leaking out through these kind of attentional holes that we can't quite plug or quantify. And in the digital era, humans might be even worse at actually relaxing than we are at paying full attention to things - and we're already pretty bad at that. Pathological multitaskers, we can hardly sit still and direct our mind toward the kind of cognitive breaks that research shows not only boost productivity, but increase crucial skills like memory retention.

Consumer-oriented, EEG-powered monitors like the Muse aren't just about gimmicky (but cool) tricks like flying helicopters with our thoughts. Think of the applications. Therapists and mental health practitioners can affordably measure their patients' progress on quantifiable goals. Depression and anxiety, today's most pervasive mental disorders, are scientifically proven to yield to treatment that focuses on breaking bad cognitive habits, so-called negative "automatic thoughts." 

And consumer devices have some distinct advantages, even for the medical community. "One thing is portability," says Erica Dixon, member of American University's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience lab. "Something that's really cool about these things is that if you can get a laptop, a jump drive and a headband, you can take it anywhere. Think about Doctors Without Borders - if they can even do half of what a traditional medical device could do, that's still really amazing."

In the workplace, imagine working in efficient bursts when you know your brain is focused rather than spreading your attention in a thin layer over a whole eight-hour shift. And that's just the start. Later this year, when developers get their hands on the Muse's open development kit and the little wonder headband becomes commercially available, we hope to see all sorts of cool apps and hacks spring up. 

Updating Your Brain's Firmware

According to Apollo, the idea is that a device like the Muse will actually train us to make our brains more efficient when we're not wearing the device - by literally reprogramming the brain. "We're using the most scientifically validated brain training protocols. We've run in-house studies - in the last one, within eight weeks we had people's brains change in structure and function. They're seeing the world through different eyes." When the brain is the limit, the possibilities are truly endless. Welcome to the data of you - this is your quantified self.

Just put on your headband and look straight ahead.

Computers that simply do the sames things faster and faster are becoming boring. Been there, done that. But a device that can detect and interpret your emotions? Or intelligently organize a meeting, knowing that one of the participants is jogging at the time? That’s a more interesting proposition. Intel, perhaps surprisingly, is working on both.

At the Intel Developer Forum this week, the chip giant has serious business on tap, presenting the latest iteration of its Core microprocessor line and laying out its software initiatives, including updates from its McAfee security division.

On Monday, however, Intel debuted a book of science fiction stories. Dubbed Imaging the Future And Building It, the book includes a number of stories - from professional authors like Madeline Ashby and Karl Schroeder, plus more pedestrian efforts from analysts like Rob Enderle. But the most interesting bits come in the introduction - where Intel lays out its vision of the future.

Over the last few years, Intel futurist Rob Johnson explains, Intel has been running a “futurecasting lab,” where the company whiteboards what the future will look like. The effects-based models help guide Intel’s product development; Intel is working on its 2019 model right now.

Everything Changes In 2020

In 2020, however, “something remarkable happens,” Johnson writes. “As we pass 2020, the size of meaningful computational power approaches zero.” In other words, with a microprocessor that small, you can put a computer in just about anything.

“When you get intelligence that small, you can turn anything into a computer,” Johnson writes. “You could turn a table into a computer. All of a sudden, it’s possible to turn your shirt, your chair, even your own body into a computer.”

And in some sense, that’s what Intel showed off in a series of demonstrations on Monday - intelligent interactions between various devices, some containing their own electronic eyes and ears. The goal was to use technology as a bridge between man and machine to facilitate context.

If this sounds like the sort of blue-sky forecasting you might hear at an academic conference, you’re not far off. For years, Intel has employed a small team of anthropologists and other social scientists to translate what the company manufactures in its fabs into real-world technology. And this year it pushed into art.

Dishing Out A Smart Bowl

Take, for example, the showcase exhibit: what Intel called “Display without Boundaries” - essentially an smart bowl. The display intelligently connected a video projector and Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows to create a projected image that interacted with the surface of the bowl. The bowl served as both a display and a controller. And the bowl not only sensed the user’s fingers, but photos could be “swiped” from the bowl to a more traditional wall-mounted display.

“This could be my photo album, you know. I could touch those, bring them up on the wall, interact with them, enlarge them, this could be my photo wall,” said Carl Marshall, a graphics software architect and research scientist at Intel. The idea, he said, was not only to establish a display where ever it could be used, but to create an emotional connection between data and a physical object.

Navigating Mood Maps

That was the same theme evoked by Margie Morris, a clinical psychologist employed by Intel, whose “Mood Map” projected a collection of images collected by Instagram onto a similar photo wall - and attempted to sense their mood.

Traditional sentiment analysis works fairly well for text; describing a person as “awesome,” for example, is almost always a positive statement. But photos can be a much more difficult nut to crack for a computer, which may be unaware of the photo’s context. Morris’ project used some easy clues - hashtags - to try and sense the mood, while the color of the filter provided others.

“Instead of a thumbs up / thumbs down, you’re trying to establish an emotional connection,” Morris said.

The Mood Map does two things, Morris explained: it provides an emotional “map” of the photos, outlining them in a particular color, according to the assessed mood. But it also allows users to track the emotional path of a particular image depending on the mood of the user, and assign their own “mood” tag to the image itself.

Context Is King

A number of other demos also attempted to provide context, typically in a more generic way. A handful of Intel researchers are working on projects to sense context from a device’s sensors, most often the phone. For example, if the Intel research framework senses a user’s phone moving (because its owner is out jogging, for example), it won’t ring a user’s desk phone for a scheduled conference call. A related social framework would “sniff” the phone’s microphone and try to determine if the user was in a car, then send him a voice message instead of a text so as not distract the driver. All of this would require the user’s permission, of course.

The overall goal, Intel said, was to eliminate what author Madeline Ashby called our “hermit crab” relationship with technology, where our digital history is defined by the devices that we have used, used up and discarded.

This not only has implications for conservationists, but consumers and manufacturers alike: forging an emotional connection between consumer and technology means that users will likely value and hold on to an electronic device far longer than they would otherwise.

Photos by Mark Hachman.

In these enlightened times, you may think that the average Internet user is too sophisticated to be suckered in by online scams. But cyber fraud and theft are growing rapidly despite constant efforts to educate users to the danger. A new study suggests why some people, especially the elderly, seem so susceptible.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, identity theft and fraud complaints jumped up to 1.8 million in 2011, a rise of 24.2% from 2010, and 4575 since 2001. The annual report from the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network doesn't break down the (many) fraud categories by what's online or not, but its a sure bet that many of these scams are conducted via the Internet.

Why Warnings Aren't Enough

It is frustrating to see so many of these scams succeed, in some cases even after huge amounts of media coverage explicitly warning about the problem and how the fraud.

New research from the University of Iowa may suggest an explanation on why this keeps happening.

One of the models for how we believe something is true or not is the False Tagging Theory (FTT), which postulates that all ideas are initially believed to be true. Doubt rears its head only when a specific area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, "tags" an event or an idea as false. The University of Iowa team's research found that when a very specific part of that area of the brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is damaged, the doubting system is not as efficient.

"Damage to this area of the brain causes a 'doubt deficit' that results in greater credulity," the team wrote in the journal Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience. One of the ways the vmPFC can become damaged? Natural aging.

This would help to explain why so many fraud cases seem involved older citizens. A 2009 MetLife Mature Market Institute report, Broken Trust: Elders, Family and Finances, revealed that up to one million older Americans are victims of financial fraud each year, and that number is growing.

You would think that, having been around the block a time or two, the elderly might be less prone to fraud victimization. But if a victim's cognitive mechanism that would normally see through a flam-flam job is not working properly, then it makes sense that they would be easier to fool.

How To Avoid Online Fraud

If you're still worried about Internet scams, here's some simple advice:

• Have patience. This is the one you should use for every financial proposal. Very rarely does someone really want to give you money, and if they're in a hurry, something is wrong. If someone pays you too much money and says they trust you to wire the overage back, take your time, no matter what they say. Chances are, whatever check they sent you is about to bounce sky-high. If it clears, then send them the change.

• Follow up with phone calls. If someone claiming to be a relative or friend emails from a distant place saying they're in trouble and need money wired fast, practice patience again. Take five minutes and call that person. Very likely, they haven't even left home.

• Your bank already knows everything. If someone calls from your bank or credit card company asking for personal information, remind them you already told them all of that in triplicate when you first signed up for the bank or credit account. Politely hang up, and then call the bank on your own to make sure there isn't really a problem.

Tablets and mobile devices are making it easier for all segments of the population to get online, so the number of potential victims continues to grow. And as long as there are potential marks out there, fraud will never fade away.

When Mars rover Curiosity touched down Sunday, August 5th, it was more than a technological triumph for the space agency; it was another victory in a four-year-old social-media campaign that has expanded to Google+ Hangouts, Angry Birds and Xbox 360 Kinect games and, in the future, maybe mission-specific apps.

The space agency proved it's as adept at landing a rover on Mars as it is at entertaining a global audience, be it through a smoothly executed live-stream viewed by millions or an interactive web tool simulating the rover landing.

And as Jason Townsend, the Deputy Social Media Manager at NASA explained, it’s just the beginning as far as social-media outreach is concerned:  

“We're always looking for new opportunities to connect with new audiences and share information about our missions, programs, and people. We're always exploring where the public is, and figuring out where social media is headed next. We are on the most popular platforms — and when new ones emerge, we'll go there, too.”  

Besides hitting all the social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr), NASA had a variety of interactive features made just for Curiosity. “Eyes in the Sky,” an interactive computer simulation that followed Curiosity’s descent live, was a Reddit favorite, hitting the front page of the social-news site in a thread threatening NASA with a “friendly DDoSing.”

“Eyes” wasn’t the only interactive tool created for the rover. Xbox 360 Kinect owners could also download and play the “Mars Rover Landing” game for free. "Our main goal is to bring NASA back to the living room," said Matt Clausen, the lead artist at Human Interfaces at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead artist for the Xbox game. "I grew up in the 1980s, and I watched [a] space walk on TV," explained Clausen, "and this is the first game created by NASA to go into the living room."   

In fact, NASA has been experimenting with the Xbox Kinect and Nintendo Wii controllers "to control real robots," said Clausen, because "we're looking at simpler ways to do things," including bridging the gap between NASA and the public. 

The public can expect more interactive features and games in the future, explained Townsend, as they’re in line with NASA’s quest to inspire the next generation of kids.

The most recent development is Angry Birds Space update, "Red Planet," done in time with the Mars Curiosity landing.  Townsend said NASA and Rovio worked collaboratively on the game after a joking tweet between the Rovio's Twitter account and @NASA, the Twitter account managed by Townsend.

Can we expect mission-specific smartphone apps any time soon?

“Definitely,” said Townsend. "We've got several apps in the pipeline, and we have a variety of teams working on them," he added, though he wouldn't elaborate.

Clausen, who is working on a few of those apps, said "this was all a very big experiment - which we feel has been very successful."   

As for NASA's most immediate move in social-media, "we're currently expanding on Google+, and figuring out how to do Google Hangouts," said Townsend.  

Said Michelle Viotti, the Mars public engagement manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a press release: "Because Mars exploration is fundamentally a shared human endeavor, we want everyone around the globe to have the most immersive experience possible."

Curiosity's Shadow and Mount Sharp, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Monday marks the 40th anniversary of the Landsat satellite program. It’s the longest-running continuous program capturing satellite images of Earth. Google is working with the U.S. Geological Survey and Carnegie Mellon University to make parts of the archive available to the public. Using Google Earth Engine, you can now travel back and forth in time between 1999 and 2011 and see how Earth has changed.

Read more about the partnership on the Google Lat Long blog.

Scientists and academics at the Summer 2012 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs conference will put the finishing touches on the new network infrastructure, known as the Innovation Platform.

The goal of the Innovation Platform is to provide a research sandbox in which researchers in academia and big data initiatives can experiment in order to improve networking software and protocols for the Internet itself. This fits well within the mission parameters of Internet2, which was founded 16 years ago to do exactly the same thing.

Misunderestimating Internet2

Internet2’s purpose is often misunderstood by those in the IT community: Many people think of it as some sort of separate network that exists completely outside the infrastructure of the Internet for the sole use of academics who were less than thrilled about sharing their Internet with commercial interests and the public at large in the 1990s.

Like any stereotype, there is some truth to this description. As traffic on the Internet exploded when the World Wide Web was opened to commercial use, the scientists and academicians who helped build the Internet in the first place soon saw that bandwidth congestion from all this new traffic was seriously going to crimp their data style.

Thus began the integration of new infrastructure within the Internet in 1996, and the beginnings of Internet2, which was to provide big bandwidth to support the research and educational communities, as well as build new technologies to improve the Internet.

While Internet2 utilizes a very high-capacity backbone, the consortium maintains that it is not a physically separate network. The tubes, as it were, are the same as the Internet’s - only the routers and switches are different.

The work being done at this week’s conference is yet another milestone in a long list of achievements for the network, including the deployment of IPv6 in 2000, a 1TB/hour data transfer from CalTech to CERN in 2003, and planned support for 8.8Tbit/sec of capacity in 2013.

Progress for OpenFlow

Specifically, the Innovation Platform relies on OpenFlow, an open standard used by “commercial Ethernet switches, routers and wireless access points [providing] a standardized hook to allow researchers to run experiments, without requiring vendors to expose the internal workings of their network devices,” according to the OpenFlow About page.

When formally launched, the new software-defined network should be able to handle big data transfers much faster, as network scientists will be able to get into the guts of every switch and router in the network to optimize data transfers that right now can bog down big data analysis. Think of it as an elastic network, shifting to meet the demands of the traffic within.

The Innovation Platform will also serve as an important test bed for OpenFlow, which has been criticized for being “still too immature to be usable.”

100G networks in use throughout the Internet-at-large is vital to the success of big data and cloud computing, and the work of the Internet2 consortium will be a big part of making that a reality.

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Here are a few science and tech stories focused on fascinating people.

Richard Dawkins has leveled some interesting criticisms of renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, whose new book tries to rewrite the story of natural selection. (via 3quarksdaily)

Sixteen-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved a 350-year-old math and physics problem. (via 3quarksdaily)

Richard Resnick's 11-minute TED talk might convince you that his work on fast genomic sequencing is about to revolutionize health care.

Elizabeth Norton has written up the work of neuroscientist Johan Lundström, who is trying to understand the distinctive scent of older people.

FastCompany has a great interview with Steve Lee, the product lead for Google's Project Glass cyborg goggles.

Are tractor beams technologically feasible? Haifeng Wang thinks so.

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Look at these new inventions and imagine the possibilities.

Fox News (sorry) reports on a new scientific ghost town, the Center for Innovation, being built in New Mexico to test the next generation of everyday technologies.

Here's the press release from Pegasus Global Holdings, which is financing the project, to get a sense of the ambitions.

Many of our next decade's inventions will be made out of superstrong, light materials like graphene. To make things out of graphene with precision, it looks like we'll have to use microscopic robots!

We'll also need renewable power supplies for our inventions, and new kinds of solar cells are showing some promising efficiency ratings.

Our future technologies will have to be much cleaner than our present ones. Researchers are building artificially intelligent robotic fish (!!!) to help with the clean-up.

Speaking of artificial intelligence, here's a great essay about why human intelligence is overrated.

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But people are going for it, anyway.

A man named Dan with a lot of time on his hands has drawn up detailed plans to buld an actual, working Starship Enterprise.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, confirms that it plans to build a moon base.

The Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) combat exoskeleton is almost ready for field trials in Afghanistan.

Here are detailed specs and videos of what the HULC can do.

The privately built Dragon capsule has made its first fly-by of the International Space Station, thanks to SpaceX founder and real-life Iron Man Elon Musk.

It's time to let go of our nostalgia for the space program of old and make room for even wilder possibilities.

Image credit: Chris Martin of Evil Starship Factory via BuildTheEnterprise.

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Some can even outsmart us.

This rich infographic goes into depth about the amazing eyes of some of the world's hardiest species.

Here are six animals that are so smart, it's creepy.

Namit Arora contemplates the inner lives of animals in this intriguing essay.

Japanese scientists have invented a "dolphin speaker" that may enable us to communicate with our marine counterparts.

Maybe we should learn a thing or two from the animal kingdom. Rachel Armstrong has put a new spin on Arthur C. Clarke, arguing that "any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature."

But just to put us in our place, here's a two-minute supercut video of animals seriously messing with people.

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We're further along than you might think.

Researchers have lifted the lid on turtle evolution, a perfect demonstration that technology is natural.

But now we have our own genetic ideas. We're able to triple the physical endurance of mice in the lab.

This paper shows that high-resolution prosthetic human eyes are possible!

Here are slightly and greatly more accessible articles about these bionic eyes.

We've also developed low-cost artificial leaves that perform photosynthesis, a leap forward for sustainable energy.

This is as much a work of art as science, but check out this video of "FaceForward," a robotic face sculpture shown last year at Burning Man.

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Even if that means building space stations.

As U.S. government support for its space program wanes, NASA is making legal room for entrepreneurs who want to take over.

These new private space companies are teaming up to build whole space stations.

The European Space Agency is looking for asteroids and other "space hazards," and amateur astronomers have volunteered their help.

On the Web, companies want to serve us our future by monetizing our information. Maybe we'd have a better future if we became our own platforms.

What happens if we don't do it ourselves? We lose control. We get driven around by robots...

... and we have to watch out for zombie drones.

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We don't even know how to behave on our first date with a robot.

Our popular culture is obsessed with the Mayan "apocalypse" this year, but archaeologists have proven (again) that we have no idea what that ancient calendar actually says.

We're on the verge of building robot sex companions, but we don't know how to treat them.

As for the people who are alive, we don't know how our minds arise from our brains.

We don't understand where life came from, but a new mathematical approach might explain it.

Are particles particles? Are they waves? Is there a difference? We don't know yet.

And of course, there's still that mystery of the proportions of the entire universe.

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Some future materials are already here.

Thanks to new atom-by-atom construction methods, researchers have invented metafluids, a whole new class of material.

Batteries are a major chokepoint for new technologies, but low-cost, high-efficiency graphene batteries are on the way.

A team at the University of Exeter has invented a flexible graphene material that could revolutionize wearable computers.

What kind of futures can these new materials enable?

Solar-powered catamarans?

Underwater habitats?

The future is just getting started. Check out MIT Technology Review's top 10 emerging technologies.

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What will we be when we grow up?

Wildcat warns that becoming a cyborg should be taken gently.

Some people want no part of this next phase. Eric Valli has some amazing photos of people living off the grid (ᔥ BoingBoing)

Maybe our brains are just meant to stay the way they are. Are we hardwired for higher understanding?

But that doesn't stop Google from trying to usher in the cyborg age. Check out this video of Sebastian Thrun demonstrating the Google Glasses.

Augmented-reality glasses are child's play compared to the human robotics systems NASA is cooking up.

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