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3D contact lenses are already being designed for the U.S. military

The Super Bowl is over and now we have to face an ugly reality.  It’s February and we’re only one week in.

With the hope of lifting your spirits, here are 10 examples of innovative thinking to remind you that better things are coming.

The movie inside my head: Here’s something you could use some grim February afternoon, although alas, not this month. But by 2014 we could have contact lenses that display computer-generated, panoramic 3D images that make the real world go away. They’re being developed for the U.S. military by the Washington State company Innovega, with the idea that soldiers could have maps or other critical data fed directly to their contacts.  But gamers probably won’t be far behind and it will only be a matter of time before the rest of us are able to have very private screenings inside our heads.

Dunkin’ iPhones: Drop your phone in the sink and you’re pretty much headed for a bad day.  But a California start-up named Liquipel says it has created a coating that will protect your phone in the event of a dreaded dip.  And the word is that both the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S3 will come with the wondrous waterproofing.

Seeing green: For those already dreaming about getting on your bike again, a new invention should make city riding a bit safer.  Called the Intersector, it uses a microwave radar gun to calculate the speed and length of approaching objects.  If it determines a car is coming into an intersection, the light stays green for four seconds; if it’s a bike, the green last for 14 seconds.  The nifty device is now being tested in a handful of California cities.

When cans chill: When spring comes, so will the first self-chilling can. Joseph Company International will start selling in California and Las Vegas an all-natural energy drink called  West Coast Chill that not only provides a jolt, but also absolves you of the weighty responsibility of putting it in the refrigerator.  Just press a button on the can and the temperature of the liquid inside drops 30 degrees F.  How did we do without this?

Chew your package: While we’re on the subject of packaging that makes our lives even easier, we may soon, thanks to Harvard researchers, have containers we can eat. The scientists call them WikiCells. They’re food membranes held together by electrostatic forces and they work like an edible, biodegradeable shell that’s gotta taste better than cardboard.

Does this make me look virtually fat? It will also become easier to buy clothes online. Make that to buy clothes online that fit. Using the same kind of 3D camera technology as Microsoft Kinect, the British firm BodyMetrics has come up with a way to let you try on clothes without actually trying them on. By creating a 3D map of your body, it will show you precisely how clothes will fit you, not Heidi Klum. Don’t be surprised to see this technology available on the Amazon website. And eventually, with 3D cameras in new models of Smart TVs, your living room could also become your fitting room.

Wearin’ of the screen: Not only will your clothes fit better, but they’ll also be able to turn into actual touch screens. Canadian scientists are testing new fibers that will keep clothing soft and flexible while it doubles as a sensor. Soon you may be able to turn up the music by simply brushing your sleeve or take your blood pressure without lifting a finger.

Thanks for sharing: Why should you have to search all over the place to see the video clips on YouTube or Vimeo that your friends have shared through social networks? Now you don’t. A new iPad app called Showyou pulls thumbnail images for all of them into one easy-to-use grid that turns your friends’ recommendations into Web video programming. What are friends for?

Coming soon: The Robot Diet: If we assume that robots will be doing a lot of our work in the future, here’s more good news. We may not have to worry about them running out of batteries. British scientists are making progress in getting robots to run on biological fuel, causing some to speculate that they’ll one day be able to live on dead insects, rotting plants and yes, human waste.

Now this would make a great halftime show: In case the above info makes you think less of our robot friends, take a look of this video of flying “nano quadrators” or little bots developed at the University of Pennsylvania. And prepare to be awed by how they fly in formation. If not for all of the Super Bowl ads put online before the game, this would have been the most popular clip on YouTube last week with more than 3 million views.

Video bonus: No matter how grim things may get this month, one surefire way to keep everything in perspective is to spend a little time gazing at photos of Earth from space. Check out this “Science Friday” clip on how NASA creates the images of our home planet.

The Coca-Cola polar bears are making another appearance at this year's telecast of the Super Bowl

Remember when no one would leave the room during Super Bowl commercials, how everyone would share that moment when, for the first time, a TV ad faced the nation.

That is so over.

Chances are you’ve already seen a handful of this year’s ads; a lot have been out on the Web for a week or longer.  One spot for Volkswagen, titled “The Bark Side,” featuring a chorus of dogs barking out the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars, has already been viewed nearly 11 million times on YouTube.  Another, for Honda, in which actor Matthew Broderick channels Ferris Bueller from early in his career, has been watched more than 6 million times and it’s been up for just a week.

What’s going on?  Isn’t the whole point for Super Bowl ads to be unveiled during the Super Bowl?  Aren’t they supposed to feel special–especially with the going rate now $3.5 million for 30 seconds?

What’s going on is that advertisers have realized that even at Super Bowl parties, they no longer control the room.  Of course, people will be watching the TV.  But they’ll also be looking at their laptops, their iPads, their smart phones. And someone could just as likely be connecting with a person in the next state as the next chair.  If advertisers no longer have the party’s undivided attention, why bank everything on the element of surprise?

The other big realization is that social media–Facebook, Twitter, YouTube–has changed the rules.  Now brands don’t pitch to consumers; they try to build relationships with them.  And that’s where familiarity trumps surprise.  So what if people have seen a commercial before the big game?  They’ll know it, probably have talked about it and best of all, may have shared it on Facebook by the time they watch it on TV.  These commercials are now mini-brands,and the more exposure they get, the better.  Yes, the Jerry Seinfeld spot for the Honda Acura won’t be as funny on Sunday.  And the partying vampires who feel the wrath of an Audi’s LED headlights won’t seem as creepy.

But hey, we’re talking about them already.

Bears just wanna have fun

So what else will be part of Sunday’s social media swirl?  Remember Coke’s soda-chugging polar bears. They’re back and thirsty as ever. And they’ll be watching the game, one a New York Giants fan, the other rooting for the New England Patriots. Whichever team is losing in the second quarter will determine which bear is featured in the spot.

But that’s only a slice of their show. They’ll be tweeting about the game–who knew they have opposable thumbs?–and they’ll appear live on streaming video throughout the day at CokePolarBowl.com, reacting to what’s happening in the game. The computer-animated bears reportedly were created by people who watched a lot of nature films to ensure that Coke’s bears look like real polar bears would if real polar bears watched football.

Even Coke doesn’t expect many of us to spend a lot of time following their bears.  But if people check in only a few times, their connection to the bears–and the soft drink they love–gets a little bit stronger. And if we do it during a Pepsi commercial, well, the folks at Coke will drink to that.

Pepsi is countering with its own version of interactive TV, and it’s going a lot more techy than tweeting bears. It’s using Shazam, the mobile app designed to tell you the name of a song if you let your phone hear a few bars. Pepsi’s  spot features Elton John and Melanie Amaro, the singer who won “The X Factor” competition on Fox in December. But here’s the spin.  The commercial has been ”Shazam-ed” so when people with the app let their phone hear the ad, they’ll be able to download a music video of Amaro singing “Respect.” Seems like a lot of effort when a perfectly good football game’s going on. But with so much focus now on connecting with consumers as often and on as many devices as possible, a lot of advertisers are willing to give it a try. Almost half of the commercials airing during the game will be ”Shazam-able,” which means users with the app will be able to get extra content–such as a chance to rank all the Super Bowl commercials–or coupons and giveaways.

Do the monster hash

One estimate has it that 60 percent of the people watching the game will also be looking at a second screen. (Based on my household, I’d say that’s about 40 percent low.) Whatever the number, if people are going to be engaging in virtual yakking, why not set up a nice little place for them to do it.  So custom Twitter hashtags are big this year.  Forlorn over the fate of those pretty young vampires in the Audi ad? Go to #SoLongVampires on Twitter and share.  Want to vent about the game?  Polar bears will be standing by at #GameDayPolarBears.

Chevy’s going down a different road. It’s created its own mobile app called simply “Chevy Game Time” and it’s designed to keep fans engaged during the day with trivia games and polls. Nothing all that fancy. Except for the prizes. Loads of prizes you can win by playing along–from pizzas to team jerseys to tires. And cars. Chevy will have an Oprah moment and give away 20 cars. Everyone who downloads the app receives a unique ”license plate” number and if that number shows up during one of the Chevy ads, you win a new set of wheels.

Shouldn’t Chevy be your Best Friend Forever?

Video Bonus:  You’ve no doubt seen Apple’s famous “1984″ Super Bowl ad that launched the MacIntosh Computer.  But have you watched the parody created 20 years later?

Who is headed to the Moon next? Image courtesy of Flickr user Arjan Almekinders

In a week where a series of solar storms created spectacular aurora borealis light shows and two Canadian teenagers launched a Lego astronaut in a homemade balloon 80,000 feet into the atmosphere, the space story that grabbed the most media attention in the U.S. turned out to be Newt Gingrich’s pledge to establish a colony on the moon by 2020.

He promised that, if he’s elected president, not only would America settle the lunar surface before China, but als0 that that community on the moon could become the first U.S. state in space.

Great stump speech stuff, particularly in a region hurt by the shutdown last year of the space shuttle program, but it isn’t very likely. It’s not so much the technology, it’s the money. As Phil Plait points out at Discover Magazine, the cost of establishing even a tiny, four-person base has been estimated at $35 billion, plus at least another $7 billion a year to keep it running. Imagine Congress, circa 2012, picking up that tab. In fairness to Gingrich, he suggested that private companies, with NASA prize money as an incentive, would cover most of the cost, but that would require them to take on enormous financial risk with no guarantee of a payoff.

So where does that leave us?  Is this NASA’s Dark Ages?  Should we just cede the moon to China now?

China’s all in

China would seem to have the inside track on that moon base.  Last November it carried out the first docking of two of its unmanned spacecraft, then, at the end of 2011, announced a five-year plan that includes dramatically expanding its satellite network, building a space lab and collecting lunar samples, with the ultimate goal of launching its own space station and a manned mission to the moon. The Chinese government, with the opportunity to show in a very public way that it’s now a world leader in science and technology, has made it clear that funding will not be an issue.

If the U.S. is to get back to the moon first, it may have to be as part of an international team. Earlier this month, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported that Russian space officials have started talking to their counterparts at NASA and the European Space Agency about building a moon base. There’s always the chance the Russians will try to go it alone, although a string of recent failures or problems doesn’t bode well–including the embarassment of an expensive probe meant to explore a Martian moon instead stalling in Earth orbit and plunging into the Pacific two weeks ago.

And what of the private companies on which Gingrich would bank so heavily to colonize the moon? That’s way out of their league. That said, this should be a pivotal year for business in space. Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, the California outfit headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, will launch the first private spaceship to dock with the International Space Station, although that unmanned mission, scheduled for early February, was just pushed back to late March because the rocket needs more work.

Then there’s Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which hopes to have its space tourism business up and running by the end of the year. Remember when it used to cost $30 million for a non-astronaut to ride aboard Russia’s Soyuz spaceship? No more. Soon you’ll  be able to take off from Spaceport America in New Mexico, rise to 50,000 feet while attached to a plane, get released into sub-orbital space and enjoy your five minutes of weightlessness.  All for the low, low price of $200,000.

So what’s up with NASA?

As for NASA, yes, its glory days as defined by astronauts soaring into space are fading for now. But let’s forget about the moon base thing for a minute. When it comes to pure science and deep space exploration, NASA still delivers. Just last Thursday, the agency announced that its Kepler Space Telescope had discovered 11 new solar systems. (That’s solar systems, not planets.) The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor which survived attempts last year to take away its funding, will, after it launches in 2018, be able to look back in time to the first galaxies ever formed.

On Mars, Opportunity, one of NASA’s two rovers there, is still functioning, eight years after it landed. That’s already 30 times longer than it was supposed to last. And come early August, another Mars rover, Curiosity, is scheduled to arrive and start looking for signs of life.

Still, space travel has lost much of its luster, and that loss has even rippled through science fiction writing. Author and physics professor Gregory Benford digs into this in an essay in the latest issue of Reason magazine, where he notes that ”Congress came to see NASA primarily as a jobs program, not an exploratory agency.” The political and economic realities of exploring our solar system, says Benford, have sobered sci-fi writers, and these days they’re more likely to set stories way in the future and on worlds far beyond any trip for which we could imagine a budget.

A little more space

Here’s other recent space news:

• Dippin’ dots again?: Researchers are looking for volunteers to live in a simulated Mars habitat on barren lava fields in Hawaii. They’re trying to figure out what kind of menu would work for astronauts on the long, long six-month trip to Mars.
• Mars attacks: Scientists have determined that a meteorite that fell in Morroco last year actually originated on Mars.
• Are we there yet?: A NASA spacecraft that left Earth in 2006 is now two-thirds of the way to its final destination of Pluto. That’s right, it will take nine years
• Gone fission: The conventional means of powering rockets–chemical combustion–isn’t an option for really long-distance space travel. Now a new study is underway to see if nuclear fission can be an alternative.
• Surely you jest: After studying photos of the surface of Venus, a Russian scientist says he may have seen signs of life in one of our solar system’s more hostile environments.

Video Bonus: Now these guys knew how to dress for moon vacation. A little space travel, old school.

Are Apple's digital textbooks going to change the industry?

Last week Steve Jobs came back to life.  Or at least his aura did.  At an “education event” in New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Apple proclaimed that the time has come to “reinvent the textbook” and who better to do it than Apple.  The mythic leader himself had put a Jobsian spin on the matter during one of his interviews with writer Walter Issacson for the best-selling biography, Steve Jobs. Textbook publishing, Jobs pronounced, was “an $8 billion industry ripe for digital destruction.”

Let the sacking begin.

In a time when your cell phone can tell you the weather forecast and your car can give you directions, textbooks can feel so, well, unresponsive. They’re not all that different from what they were like when people were riding horses to work, except they cost a whole lot more. They’re still are a pain to keep current, still get dog-earred, still can make you feel like you’re lugging around bricks.

Enter the iPad. Apple’s solution, naturally, is to replace textbooks with sleek, light, nimble iPads and its big announcement last week was that it’s rolling out a new version of its electronic bookstore called iBooks 2, and filling it with titles of its new partners, some of the biggest textbook publishers in the business. The e-books will cost $14.99 each, a pittance in this business, and be a breeze to update. Plus, they’ll be interactive, with touchscreen diagrams, audio and video. And you’ll be able to do word searches.

Apple even has research to back up its contention that the iPad blows away the conventional textbook as a teaching tool. A study done in a California middle school last year found that almost 20 percent more students (78 percent versus 59 percent) scored ”Proficient” or “Advanced” in Algebra I courses when using an iPad.

So it’s all good, right?

Well, there is the matter of how you ensure that every kid has an iPad. Even if Apple offers a discount below the $500 price tag, most public schools aren’t exactly flush with cash these days. And not everyone has been dazzled by Apple’s innovation. Sylvia Martinez, president of Generation YES, a program that helps intergrate technology into the classroom, says that for all the bells and whistles, what iBooks brings to education is more tweak than reinvention. It still treats students as consumers, whereas technology at its best, says Martinez, encourages them to be creators.

Blogger Steve McCabe, writing in “Tidbits,” which covers Apple products, goes even farther. He hopes that in future iterations, Apple’s textbook software will allow more personalized learning where the content will be able to interact with the student–Siri turns tutor–instead of just the other way around. For now, McCabe argues, Apple is offering students an experience not all that different from a CD-ROM in the 1990s.

Steve Jobs is rolling over.

The new college try

Even more dramatic changes in education are bubbling up at the college level.  Last month MIT announced the launch this spring of a new initiative called MITx, which will allow people around the world to take MIT courses. For free.

Getting an MIT education at no charge seems like one sweet deal, although it’s not quite that simple. The course selection will be fairly limited, at least initially, and a MITx student won’t be able to earn a degree, but simply a “certificate of completion.” It’s also possible that there will be an “affordable” charge for a certificate.  But unlike other online courses the university offers, the MITx platform will give students access to real online labs–not just simulations–and student-to-student discussions. It’s open source software and MIT expects other universities and high schools around the country will eventually end up using it.

That will only swell the latest wave of free online learning, pioneered by websites such as Academic Earth, which began streaming videos of lectures by professors at the country’s top universities almost four years ago and now has Bill Gates among its biggest fans, and Khan Academy, the brainchild of MIT graduate Salman Khan, who began making his conversational video tutorials in 2005 and now has more than 100,000 people around the world viewing his lessons every day. (See Khan’s recent interview with Forbes to see where he thinks all this is headed.)  There’s Codeacademy,  which teaches coding newbies how to build apps.

And now add a new player called Udacity, which has its own curious history. Last fall Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, who’s also been leading the development of Google’s driverless car, sent out an email to a professional network saying that he would offer his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course–the same one he taught at the university–online without charge. Within days 10,000 people had signed up; eventually 160,000 would, including an unusually large contingent of Lithuanians and several Afghans who skirted through war zones to get to Internet connections. When the course ended in December, 248 people had earned perfect scores; none of them was an official Stanford student.

Things apparently got a little tense when Thrun let Stanford administrators know about his plan to offer his class for free. So it’s no surprise that he decided to leave the university and go out on his own. He describes using technology to make free, high-quality education available worldwide as “like a drug.”

Next month Udacity will offer its first two courses, “Building a Search Engine” and “Programming a Robotic Car.” Not for everyone, but available to anyone.

Video Bonus: Watch Sebastian Thrun’s talk at the recent Digital Life Design conference and hear how his decision to teach free courses felt like a choice out of  The Matrix.

The BodyMedia Armband is yet another tool to help you track your health with personalized data.

Someday, probably sooner than we think, much of our lives will be recorded by sensors. Whether it’s armbands tracking our heartbeats or dashboards monitoring our driving or smart phones pinpointing where we are at all times, we, as defined by our preferences and habits, are becoming part of the staggering swirl of data already out there in cyberspace.

With so much personal information now in play, a lot of people are nervous about who owns it and what they’ll do with it. As they should be. But there’s also the question of how to make sense of it all. Can all this seemingly random data be reconfigured into patterns that not only do the obvious–allow businesses to zero in on customers–but also help deal with ridiculously complex matters, such as slashing health care costs or forecasting the stock market?

Consider the possibilities in health care. In the past, anyone analyzing who gets ill and why had to rely on data skewed heavily toward sick people–statistics from hospitals, info from doctors. But now, with more and more healthy people collecting daily stats on everything from their blood pressure to their calorie consumption to how many hours of REM sleep they get a night, there’s potentially a  trove of new health data that could reshape what experts analyze. As Shamus Husheer, CEO of the British firm Cambridge Temperature Concepts, told the Wall Street Journal, “You can compare sleep patterns from normal people with, say, pain sufferers. If you don’t know what normal sleep looks like, how do you tease out the data?”

In Austin, Texas, Seton Health Care is using Watson–that’s right, the IBM supercomputer that humiliated its human competitors on “Jeopardy!” last year–to comb through tons of patient information with the goal of helping hospitals identify behavior that drives up costs.  For instance, Watson is now focusing on patients with congestive heart failure, but it’s looking at much more than what appears on patients’ charts, such as doctors’ notes. And it’s finding that factors that wouldn’t ordinarily show up in medical analysis–like patients not having transportation to get to a doctor for checkups–can be a big reason for repeat trips to the ER, which of course, is the sort of thing that sends health care costs through the roof.

Twitter tells all

Now that we have both tools to crunch so much data and so much data to crunch, it makes finding patterns that predict the future less daunting.  “We’re finally in a position where people volunteer information about their specific activities, often their location, who they’re with, what they’re doing, how they feel about what they’re doing, what they’re talking about,” Indiana University professor Johan Bollen told the Boston Globe. ”We’ve never had data like that before, at least not at that level of granularity.”

There are outfits that analyze Twitter traffic for financial services companies and even a hedge fund in London that uses a secret Twitter-based formula to make investment decisions.

Bollen is such a believer that he says he’s found a correlation between the level of anxiety expressed on Twitter and the performance of the stock market. Seriously. Based on his analysis, when there’s a high level of anxiety of Twitter, three days later, the stock market goes down.

So remember, keep your tweets sweet.

We’ll be watching you

Here are just a few of the new ways sensors are tapping into our daily lives:

• The beat goes on: A North Carolina startup has created earbuds with sensors that monitor your heart rate and other biometric data.
• Smarty pants: Soon American soldiers could be wearing underwear that tracks their respiration, heart rate, body posture and skin temperature and relays the info back to a central system.
• Another reason to watch your weight: A Japanese engineering professor has developed an ultra-sensitive sheet that fits over the driver’s seat and, by reading the contours of your butt, can determine if you’re one of the car’s approved drivers.
• Some like it hot, some don’t: Thanks to researchers at MIT, you may one day wear a wristband that allows you to control the temperature and lighting in your part of the office.
• And now, a pill for your pills: Later this year a smart pill with sensors that track if people are using their medications correctly will go on the market in the United Kingdom.
• Your clothes just called: Apple has received a patent for a system through which your running shoes or your clothing will send suggestions to your iPhone about how you can improve your workout.

Video bonus: Check out how OmniTouch can turn your hand, or any other flat surface, into a touch screen.