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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.

What can eye-tracking teach us? Image courtesy of Flickr user Michele Catania

Tracking the eye movements of people as they peruse an item or advertisement or web page has long been a staple of marketers. The goal, of course, is to see where their eyes move and where they linger and then devise ways to get them to linger longer. It’s always felt a little creepy to me.

So it curbed my inner curmudgeon to read recently about research showing you can learn a few things about someone by watching where they’re looking. For instance, a study published in Cognition magazine this month suggests that who a person is relates to how they move their eyes. In this case, the scientists found that people they identified as more “curious”–based on their answers to survey questions–also were more likely to be the ones whose eyes moved freely around photos they were asked to view. Their eyes, it seemed, were true to their curious nature.

Not impresssed? Okay, how about this: Another study done a a few years ago  by psychologists Elizabeth Grant and Michael Spivey found that people whose eyes tended to focus on a particular part of a diagram were most likely to solve a problem–in this case how to use a laser to destroy a tumor in a patient’s stomach. Then, after the researchers highlighted that section of the diagram, twice as many people figured out how to do it. By having their eyes directed to the right place, their brains were able to gather the information they needed.

But what if you tracked the eye movements of an expert, say a surgeon, and then used that as a teaching tool? That’s exactly what researchers at the University of Exeter in Great Britain did last year. First, they recorded where and for how long the eyes of an experienced surgeon were fixed during a simulated surgery.  Then novice surgeons were trained to mimic those eye movements. Those who mastered the technique were able to learn technical surgical skills much more quickly–and were less stressed–than those who didn’t use it as part of their training.

Wonder if this would work on teenage drivers. (See below).

Power gazing

Judging from the reports from last week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), reviewers weren’t exactly dazzled by most of the thousands of gizmos and gadgets on display.  But one demo that did seem to fire off some sparks featured a system called Gaze from the Swedish company Tobii Technology.

Gaze uses a web cam to track your eyes and essentially turn them into a cursor. It works like this:  To calibrate your eyes, you first look at an application on the screen, then tap the touch pad to launch it. Infrared lights illuminate your pupils, then two cameras take rapid-fire photos and use them to make 3-D models of your eyes that can follow their movement.

Once your eyes take over, you no longer have to physically scroll  down a page. Just move your eyes down the screen and the text rolls up in response. Or you can scroll horizontally through photos, again just by shifting your eyes.  And then there are the video game possibilites. The demo at CES allowed you to blast asteroids out of the sky simply by staring at them.

I am retina, hear me roar.

The eyes have it

Here are more things scientists are learning by looking into people’s eyes:

• Read my lips: “Go to sleep”: Researchers at Florida Atlantic University say that starting at six months of age, babies learn to talk by gazing at your lips instead of your eyes.
• Puppy love: A study published in the latest issue of Current Biology concludes that dogs play close attention to our eye movements and they’re more responsive if you first make eye contact.
• Could it be because they’re teenagers?: Scientists at Montana State University received 1 $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to use eye-tracking sensors to help determine why young drivers have a hard time recognizing traffic hazards.
• Eye spy: A device called an EyeBrain tracker is being tested in France to see if it can help diagnose early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
• Don’t judge a friend by his cover: An eye-tracking study of the new Facebook Timeline found, among other things, that while people noticed the big cover photos first, they spent more time looking at the smaller profile photos.  Oh, and also more people noticed the ads in the new format.

Video Bonus: See for yourself how to play Asteroids with your eyes.

Most innovators aren’t inventors.  We were reminded of that again last year during the swirl of coverage of Steve Jobs, who achieved his godlike status largely through his unique ability to distill, refine and, above all, execute the ideas of others.  As the new year begins to pick up speed, it’s a good time to take a look at some young entrepreneurs whose innovative thinking, rather than pure invention, has them poised for big things in 2012.

(Read about great historians and food writers to follow in 2012)

Daniel EK of Spotify, photo courtesy of Flickr user leweb11

Can’t stop the music: The recording industry has been in a death spiral for awhile now, dating back to when Napster fed the notion among a generation that freedom to download music without paying is an inalienable right laid out in the Constitution, or maybe it was the Magna Carta. Whatever. Bottom line is that CDs are going the way of the 8-track. But all may not be lost, thanks to a Swedish computer geek-turned-musician-turned-Internet-innovator. That would be Daniel Ek, who launched Spotify in Europe three years ago when he was 25.

Earlier this month Forbes magazine called him “the most important man in music.” That’s probably  over the top, but Ek has devised a model that provides instant access to free music while pumping up struggling record labels through licensing fees. Spotify, which makes its money through advertising and user fees ($10 a month for mobile access to your playlists, $5 a month to avoid ads), didn’t roll out in the U.S. until last summer, but raised its profile dramatically a few months later when it hooked up with Facebook. Ek knows that building a personal brand is a subtext of the Facebook experience and a person’s taste in music is often a big part of that. So now, through Spotify, Facebook users see the songs their friends listen to and the playlists they compile, and with a single click, can give a listen. If Spotify goes mainstream in the U.S. this year, Forbes just may be right.

Return of the pin-ups: Often the shrewdest innovations are about carving out the right niche at the right time and so it appears to be with Pinterest, the hot social network of the moment. As someone who says he was a “maniacal” insect collector while growing up in Iowa, co-founder Ben Silbermann realized how passionate people can be about their hobbies or collections.  And he and his partners, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, also recognized that posting photos has become as popular a means of self-expression on social networks as clever status updates and funny video links.  So they combined passions and photos in Pinterest, where members can “pin” up pictures–their own or ones found on the Web–of their hobbies or just quirky obsessions. They could be muscle cars or Amish quilts or Halloween costumes made of duct tape. Hey, it’s your show.  Yes, a year from now Pinterest could be yet another Web sensation gone south.  But some analysts are already saying it’s worth more than $150 million.

Power play: Wind and solar energy are clearly appealing alternatives to 50-year-old coal-powered plants pumping out pollutants. But clean energy sources still face a big hurdle: If the wind’s not blowing or the sun’s not shining, how do you keep the lights on? That’s the key to wind and solar becoming core components of the power grid and it’s why a lot of researchers are trying to find ways to cheaply and efficiently store energy that comes from renewable sources. Danielle Fong, chief scientist for an California company called LightSail Energy, is focusing on a process in which wind and solar power would be converted to compressed air. Then, when needed, it could be expanded to drive turbines that support the power grid. Fong’s only 24, but based on her credentials, you have to think that she has as good a shot as anyone at solving this one. At the age of 12 she was taking college-level physics sources; at 17, she was studying nuclear fusion at Princeton.

Copy that: It’s easy to get carried away with the potential of 3-D printers.  Imagine being able to download specs for a part you need, then printing it out in your home office. Or have your kids or grandkids use it to build toys they designed themselves.  The reality, though, is that it’s likely to be years, maybe even a decade, before they’re as common as PCs in our homes. But if it does happen sooner rather than later, Bre Pettis and MakerBot, the Brooklyn-based outfit he heads as CEO, will have a lot to do with it.  They’ve brought the cost of 3-D printers down to about $1,000 and just last week unveiled the MakerBot Duplicator, which prints objects in two colors.  But for Pettis, it’s not just about building a business; he once was a teacher and one of his dreams is to bring 3-D printers into the classroom where they can really tap into kids’ creativity.

When cheese says cheese: If most of us had seen what Alexa Andrzejewski did a few years ago while visiting Japan and South Korea, we probably would have dismissed it as slightly bizarre dining behavior and gone back to our meal we couldn’t pronounce. But Andrzejewski, a one-time graphic designer, thought there was something to it. What she saw was people taking pictures of their meals with their cell phones.  She first thought about doing a picture book of exotic meals. But she ultimately concluded that she may have found a way to differentiate a business from all of the restaurant  mobile apps out there.  Why not provide diner reviews of specific meals and  build them around photos of the food so people could see what they’d be ordering.

That was the genesis of Foodspotting, a mobile app that shows you pictures of meals that are near where you are at the moment.  Or as Andrzejewki puts it, it’s like gazing at the windows of a bakery, except you’re staring at your phone.   Now the company is looking for ways to build its business by partnering with apps  that let diners know about deals and working with restaurants that want to promote their specials.  It also plans to release a new version of its app, one that suggests nearby meals based on your preferences.

Thanks for sharing: The latest estimates are that by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Already, 21 mega-cities have populations of 10 to 20 million.  I’ll go out on a limb and say we’re going to need some pretty innovative thinking about urban life over the next decade if  we’re going to keep cities liveable.  One person who’s been giving this a lot of thought is Alex Steffen. He’s the author of  Worldchanging: A User’s Guide For the 21st Century, which was updated last year. He’s also been  called a futurist and he is, but in a practical way.  Steffen’s very big, for instance, on the growth of a culture within  cities where people share instead of own, whether it’s cars,  sports equipment or power drills.  He also knows that it’s going to take a lot more than putting plants and trees on rooftops to make cities sustainable and keep them from, as he puts it, “stealing the future.”

Good reads: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention other bloggers  worth watching this year because of their insightful takes on all things innovative, starting with Dominic Basulto,  who works at Electric Artists in New York, but whose writing appears regularly at at Ideas@Innovation at WashingtonPost.com and at BigThink.com.  Another deserving a visit is David Dobbs’ “Neuron Culture“  blog for Wired.com. And to stay on top of the latest tech, stop by when you can at the “Bits”  blog on the New York Times website.

Video Bonus: Salman Khan has made a big splash with his Khan Academy, built around low-tech, conversational educational videos.  Check out his TED Talk from last year on using video to reinvent education.