Giant Freakin Robot

The National Weather Service may not sound like the most exciting of government bodies, but some really interesting things fall under their umbrella. Take, for instance, the fact that it is responsible for the Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which “provides real-time monitoring and forecasting of solar and geophysical events which impact satellites, power grids, communications, navigation, and many other technological systems”.

The SWPC has been tracking the largest solar storm since 2005, which began after a large solar flare Sunday night and is accompanied by a radiation storm expected to continue at least until tomorrow morning.

Solar storms resulting from these kinds of flares come in three stages. Electromagnetic radiation comes first, followed by radiation via protons. We are still in the midst of this radiation storm, which has remained at a classification of S3 (Strong) all day but is expected to peak and start declining soon. This is the highest level from a solar storm in years, but still not enough to prompt astronauts on the International Space Station to take any additional or unusual steps to protect themselves from it. The last and most dramatic part of the solar storm – the Coronal Mass Ejection – will hit Earth at approximately 9am EST.

John D. Boswell’s Symphony of Science is kind of like Auto-Tune the News for science, if Auto-Tune the News was aimed to produce something more interesting than silly parodies of on-air gaffs. I enjoy Auto-tune the News as much as the next person, but they lack the beauty and sincerity of any given Symphony of Science video. It definitely helps that Boswell is working with stunning images of space and nature (from high-quality BBC productions, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Discovery Channel productions, and TED talks) and wonderfully eloquent scientists.

The thirteenth Symphony of Science video came out this week, and it is a “musical celebration of the wonders of biology, including evolution, natural selection, DNA, and more”. “The Greatest Show on Earth” samples David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, and Bill Nye from their talks and television appearances, remixes them with a music track, and pairs these sounds with gorgeous images from BBC nature programs.

If you follow science news regularly, you’ve probably heard of the so-called “invisibility cloak” scientists have been working on. That technology is built on the principle of bending waves of visible light so that it wraps around an object rather than bouncing off it, thus rendering it invisible to the naked eye. Though still a long way from giving us actual, portable cloaks of invisibility, it’s still pretty amazing, and now the research has uncovered an even more mind-bending application: creating a “hole in time.”

Anyone who’s grown up on a steady diet of science fiction television can take a deep breath and calm down: we aren’t on the threshold of collapsing the space-time continuum. Instead, as National Geographic reports, the “time hole” involves applying the same principles used in the invisibility experiments – bending or diverting the path of light – to create a gap. Cornell physicist Alex Gaeta, who co-authored the study explains that “any event that occurs at that instant of time won’t lead to scattering of light. It appears as if the event never occurred.”

Still confused? I’m right there with you. Thankfully Gaeta provides a more concrete example of the theory. He conjures up an image familiar to anyone who’s watched a heist film, or the Mission: Impossible movies: a museum exhibit guarded by a crisscrossing array of security lasers. Buckle up, folks, here we go:

Isn’t it about time we had tricorders? You know tricorders, those little box devices they run around with on Star Trek which, when pointed at something, will tell you everything there is to know about it right down to the smallest molecule. The X Prize Foundation agrees, and they’re offering $7 million to the first person or organization who can successfully make one.

In case you’ve never heard of them before the X Prize Foundation is a group dedicated to advancing human technology breakthroughs. Mostly they do that by offering massive prizes to anyone who can pull off a specific technical marvel. In 2004 for instance they awarded the Ansari X Prize for the first non-government agent to launch a spacecraft.

This time they want medical advances. Basically what they’re describing is Star Trek’s medical tricorder, but here’s their detailed description of the device they’re hoping to encourage someone to develop:

As envisioned for this competition, the device will be a tool capable of capturing key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases. Metrics for health could include such elements as blood pressure, respiratory rate, and temperature. Ultimately, this tool will collect large volumes of data from ongoing measurement of health states through a combination of wireless sensors, imaging technologies, and portable, non-invasive laboratory replacements.