Will personal rapid transit -- or "pods" -- ever come to the United States?

Fifty years ago, we sure did love the monorail.  It was sleek, shiny, seemingly safe and, not surprisingly, a centerpiece of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.  Two years later, it starred again at the New York World’s Fair, as newsreel video gushed about its being the “train of the future.” Yes, as America moved forward into the 21st century, this was going to be our ride.

But, as we know, it didn’t work out that way.  To get a sense, though, of how much the thrill is gone–and not just with the monorail, but all public transportation–consider that next week the House of Representatives could vote on a bill that would change how mass transit projects are funded, making them easy targets for budget cutters.

That’s not to say that people aren’t developing innovative ways to help us get around.  We just need to look elsewhere now for the best examples.

Beat this, Superman!

High-speed trains epitomize how much some in the U.S. have fallen out of love with cutting-edge transit.  Not that long ago, states would have fought furiously for federal funding to help provide faster trains connecting their main cities.  Last year governors in Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida turned it down. And the one state where it would seem to have the best shot–California, where a high-speed line would run from San Francisco to Los Angeles–Gov. Jerry Brown, its biggest booster, is clearly facing an uphilll battle.

But in China (Isn’t it always China lately?) it’s a very different story. The country already has the world’s fastest rail line–the train running from Wuhan, in the heart of central China, to Guangzhou, on the southeastern coast, hit a top speed of 245 miles per hour in trials and averages 194 miles per hour on its trips. By 2020, bullet trains will connect all of China’s major cities and within the next five years, more high-speed rail likely will be added in China than the rest of the world combined.

This time it’s personal

They’re technically known as Personal Rapid Transit, or PRTs. But most people call them “pod cars.” Which makes sense since they really are electric pods with wheels.  No driver, no steering wheel, no accelerator.  They show up when requested, you and as many as three others get in, you press the start button and you’re off to your pre-programmed destination. They’ve been in use at London’s Heathrow Airport since last summer  and a bit longer to transport people around Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Other PRT systems are being developed in South Korea and North India, the latter to provide easy access to the Golden Temple, the holy Sikh shrine in Amristar. Best bet for the first one in the U.S. is in San Jose, California, which has already committed $4 million for a study to see if it makes sense to have pod cars serving the city’s airport.

Cars standing by

In Paris, they’re taking the ZipCar concept up a notch. Through a system called AutoLib that launched last fall, people can rent a tiny electric “Bluecars,” much as you would a bike in one of the bike-sharing programs you see now in a lot of  U.S. cities. Once you register and get an ID badge, you can pick up a car at one of the 1,200 parking spaces–complete with charging stations–around the city.  You simply use your badge to unlock the vehicle.  The promise is that you can drive up to 150 miles on a single charge. They rent for roughly $13 a day or $20 a week. City officials say they hope to have 5,000 of the little cars buzzing around Paris’ streets by next year.

The real magic bus

The world’s first full-size, all-electric buses are also on the street and yes, they’re in China. Hunan Province has ordered 1,000 of them, but Chinese automaker BYD, which makes the silent vehicle, has big plans to export them around the world.  Hertz is already using one of the BYD buses at Los Angeles International Airport, and the Chinese company hopes to sell some to both Los Angeles and Chicago. The bus, which also has nine solar panels on its roof, can reportedly travel almost 190 miles on one charge.  If you have any doubts about this venture, note that both Warren Buffet and Bill Gates traveled to China for the launch of the new bus last fall.  Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway owns 10 percent of BYD.

This way up…and down

Sometimes what a city needs is a good escalator. That’s right, an escalator, and I’m not talking about some dinky moving stairway at the mall, but one that climbs hillsides like the old funiculars used to do. The world’s largest outdoor, covered escalator system started moving people up and down a Hong Kong hill in the mid-1990s and it has since transformed the section of the city known as Mid-Levels.   And last December, the city of Medellin in Colombia, opened a six-section, 1,200-foot-long escalator that climbs into one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. Residents used to have walk up stairs equivalent to ascending a 28-story building.  Now what used to be a 30-minute hike takes them not much more than five minutes.

An update: Nevada announced last week that it has finalized regulations for driverless cars. (No, you can’t drink and “drive.”) Google has been lobbying the state to have its highways become the proving ground for the Google robot cars I wrote about last summer.

Video bonus: Take a ride in one of Heathrow’s pod cars in this clip from Reuters.

Is there an end in sight for Alzheimer's? Image courtesy of Flickr user Susan NYC

If you made it through the Grammy Awards Sunday night, you probably saw onetime country pop star Glen Campbell. And you may know that, like almost every singer who had a few hits in the 1970s, Campbell’s in the middle of a farewell tour.

But this isn’t some Rolling Stones’ “I-can-still-dance-and-wear-tight-pants” spectacle. This is a real Farewell Tour. Because Campbell, now 75, has Alzheimer’s disease. And it won’t be long before he won’t remember lyrics or how to play the songs he’s performed thousands of times. Then things will get considerably worse.

In a perfect world every Alzheimer’s patient would get a farewell tour, a chance to make one last sweep through a life before all the names and connections and memories get locked away inside a shuttered brain. But most don’t, and instead disengage from the world as their family and friends watch, with no way to slow the cruel decline. Right now there are more than 5 million people with Alzheimer’s in the U.S. alone, with that number expected to triple by 2050.

Unless…

Researchers discover a miracle drug that stops the downward spiral before it gets started. There’s been talk of this for years now, suggestions that scientists were getting close. It hasn’t happened. But just last week hopes were raised again with the report that researchers at Case Western Reserve in Ohio had made a remarkable discovery. After treating mice with a drug called bexarotene, usually a treatment for skin cancer, they found that, within 72 hours, the animals were able to start remembering things again.

The news set off a frenzy of calls to doctors from people anxious to know if this really was some magic cure. Could it actually reverse the horrible effects of Alzheimer’s on humans?

No one knows yet. It’s entirely possibile it will have little or no effect.  The scientists at Case Western hope to start a  small trial on humans this spring, which could last four months. But after that it’s hard to say how this will play out because the patents on bexarotene as a cancer drug, held by the Japanese pharmaceutical firm Eisai, Inc., run out this year and so far it hasn’t shown interest in funding the new research at Case Western.

Meanwhile, two other big pharmaceutical firms, Pfizer, Inc. and Eli Lilly will have data from trials on their own Alzheimer’s drugs later this year. Talk about high stakes–particularly for Pfizer, which badly needs a big seller, now that the patent on Lipitor, its cholesterol medication that was a cash cow for so many years, has run out. Can you imagine what it will mean to be first on the market with a truly effective Alzheimer’s treatment?

Darkness spreads

Two other discoveries announced this month, while not quite as dramatic as the bexarotene study, could be almost as pivotal in finding an effective treatment. The first, confirmed in separate studies at Harvard and Columbia, found that Alzheimer’s spreads from neuron to neuron along paths that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. And that suggests that one way to stop the disease would be to find a way to prevent cell-to-cell transmission.

In the other key finding, UCLA scientists determined that a brain imaging tool they developed could effectively track the buildup of memory-dimming plaque deposits in the brain, which could allow treatment to begin even before symptoms appear.

Consider them two more pieces that may help solve the nastiest brain puzzle of all.

Brain drains

Here’s more recent news on memory research:

• Shocking news: Researchers at UCLA found they were able to improve memory by using electrical stimulation on the part of the brain where the first signs of damage from Alzheimer’s usually appear.
• Forget how to count calories? Older people who consume more than 2,000 calories a day could double their risk of memory loss. That’s what scientists at the Mayo Clinic concluded after a study of 1,200 men and women in their 70s and 80s.
• Another reason not to wake me up: More evidence of the value of a good night’s sleep comes from researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.  They determined that there may be a link between “disrupted sleep” and the buildup of amyloid plaque in the brain, a marker of Alzheimer’s.
• Is 40 the new 60? A recent study in London found that cognitive function could actually start declining in people as young as 45.
• There’s an app for that? Yes, there now actually is a Facebook app, created in Singapore, that allows you to experience Alzheimer’s disease. It’s called Sort Me Out and it’s designed to give you a sense of what it feels like to lose your friends and memories.

Video bonus: Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert thinks we give our brains too much credit.  In this TED talk, he argues that their real purpose is not to let us think, but rather to help us move.

Image courtey of Flickr user clarescupcakes.co.uk

Applying science to love is a fool’s game.

As much as we want there to be rules that always hold true, romance continues to confound us. And yet the quest goes on, with scientists checking hormone levels, doing brain scans, taking countless surveys with the goal of making love and attraction a little less inscrutable and knowing that our appetite for answers never wanes.

Take, for instance, the new book, “The Science of Relationships: Answers to Your Questions About Dating, Marriage and Family, and its companion website.  It’s all about the science, compiling research on the subject of love, while acknowledging, as co-author and Colorado State psychologist Jennifer Harman puts it, “the more work all of us do, the more we realize how much we don’t know.”

Among the things the scientists think they do know:

• When women are ovulating, they tend to be attracted to more manly men; when they’re not, they prefer guys with a softer side.
• Opposites may attract, but they dont’ last. People with similar body types tend to do better together in the long run.
• Women who listen to romantic lyrics are more likely to give their phone numbers to men.
• Men do not, as conventional wisdom has it, think of sex a few thousand times a day.  It’s more like 34.
• And this stunner: Everyone, including members of your own sex, looks better when you’re drinking. Who’d have thunk it?

The soulmate trap

Even companies in the business of matchmaking now say they’ve turned to science.  When outfits such as Match.com, eHarmony or Chemistry tell people they can help them find their soulmates, they usually cite their use of algorithms.  Ah algorithms, the secret sauce of personalization.  I mean, if they can help Google come up with matches for every word in the world, they should be able to zero in on the person of your dreams, right?

Don’t bet on it.  Certainly, that’s the advice of Eli Finkel, an associate professor of social psychology at Northwestern University and one of the authors of a study on online dating websites that will be published this month in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Not that the researchers were able to analyze the matchmakers’ algorithms–it is secret sauce, after all. But Finkel says singles shouldn’t get their hopes up.

The problem, he and co-author Benjamin Karney, of UCLA, wrote in the New York Times yesterday, is that scientific studies suggest that you can’t really predict if two people can sustain a relationship until after they meet. What really counts is how they resolve disagreements. Also, online services tend to base their recommendations on similarities in personality and attitudes.  That may make for some fun dates, but, based on reams of research, it apparently doesn’t make a big difference over the long haul.

Conclude Finkel and Karney: “None of this suggests that online dating is any worse a method of meeting potential romantic partners than meeting in a bar or on the subway. But it’s no better either.”

There’s another downside to online dating, according to a different study, this one by researchers at the University of Rochester.  Because singles now have so many potential choices online, it found that more of them are treating the Web dating experience like a visit to the Amazon site, shopping for potential dates like shiny objects, running through mental checklists as they scroll through profiles. All of which results in unrealistic expectations that if they just keep looking, they’ll find a soulmate. Good luck with that.

Animal attraction

When it comes to demystifying attraction, though, sometimes only studying animal sex will do. Take , for example, new research that found that boosting the estrogen level in a male garter snake attracted dozens of other male snakes eager to mate with it.

But my personal favorite among recent studies involved fruit flies. Seems that researchers at the University of Michigan introduced a male fruit fly into a special chamber containing two female fruit flies. First, however, they decapitated the two females so, according to the report, they couldn’t “influence” the male fly.  (What, bat their lashes? Purse their lips?)  What they found is that the male was attracted to the headless female that smelled younger.  And then they repeated the experiment, and  this time the male made a beeline to an older fly because it has been covered with a younger fly’s pheremones.

So much for old spice.

Love talk

Here’s more of what’s new from the love and marriage front:

• Missing link: A study at the University of Utah found that when couples were separated four to seven days, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol rose and they didn’t sleep as well.
• The L word: Contrary to what most of us think, researchers at MIT discovered that it’s men who tend to say “I love you” first in a relationship. And the men usually were happier than the women when their partner said it. Unless it was after sex. Then the women were happier to hear it.
• Maybe because it lasted longer: In her book, “The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us,” University of Texas scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum says that research shows that our first kiss leaves a stronger impression than our first sexual encounter.
• The look of love: British scientists found that women thought a man was more attractive if they saw a photo of a pleasant-looking woman looking at him.
• What? Text messages don’t count? Just under half of the women surveyed in a British study said they’ve never received a love letter.  And only 10 percent of the men surveyed said they had written one.

Video Bonus: So where did all this Valentine’s Day stuff start? Would you believe a pagan ritual with an animal sacrifice?  You should probably stick with candy.

The Samsung Smart TV

Pity your poor TV.

Just a few years ago, it owned Super Bowl Sunday.  For hour after hour, it held every eye, every ear at every party.

But last Sunday things were different.  The TV was still in center ring, but there was all this other stuff going on.  Someone was playing “Words With Friends” over there, someone else was tweeting to pretend polar bears over there.  What’s up with that?  How could a TV lose the room during the Super Bowl?

The truth is that our TVs are now badly outnumbered by the other screens in our lives, screens on devices that, whether we like it or not, know a lot more about us.  In fact, research released today by Nielsen confirms that Americans under 35 are definitely spending less time in front of TV sets. Which is why a lot of people think that if TVs are going to get back on top of the heap, they have to get more like those other devices.  They have to get a lot smarter.

What makes you so smart?

Smart TVs have actually been around since 2009 when Samsung came up with the name to describe its TVs with Internet access.  But it was only last month, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, that they started being hailed as tech whose time has come.

So what exactly can a Smart TV do? For starters, it allows you to browse the Web. You can watch YouTube videos and finally blow up your Facebook page to a size fitting your greatness. You can transfer photos from your phone to the big screen. You can make Skype video calls.

But the real transformation of the TV into something more like a very large smart phone will come, not surprisingly, through apps. Samsung, for instance, offers a Netflix app and a Hulu Plus app so you can watch movies and TV shows on your own time, like you would on your laptop or an Xbox 360. It also has something called ESPN Next Level that layers the kind of stats sports geeks love over live game action. And then there’s a Social TV app which allows you and friends’ tweets to run down the screen as catty commentary while you’re watching the Oscars.  Two screens in one–now you’re talking. 

And then along came Apple

Still, there are those who feel that Smart TVs won’t really be all that smart until they can tell you which episodes of “Breaking Bad” you missed and can recommend other shows with the snarkiness of ”30 Rock.” Or when they’re connected by WiFi to every other device in your house–your smart phone, of course, but also your dishwasher and refrigerator (“Chill the brewskis, March Madness today.”).

Then there’s the remote problem. I mean, how smart can a device be if it relies on another one that’s a) designed to make you feel stupid and b) always lost?

And this is where the Apple intrigue begins. Looming over the future of Smart TV is Apple TV. Not that an Apple TV actually exists, but its aura does, fed by cryptic comments by Steve Jobs in Walter Isaacson’s biography. ”I’ve finally cracked it,” Jobs said of Smart TV, which in the tech world, qualifies as an Issac Newton moment.

So it was a big deal last week when it was reported that Apple’s been in touch with companies that make TV components. And then again a few days ago, when Best Buy sent out a survey to customers asking them if they’d be interested in a product it described as an “Apple HDTV.”

The notion that Steve Jobs from beyond the grave will do for Smart TV what he did for smart phones has tech writers channeling Talmudic scholars as they try to interpret just what he meant. Nick Bilton, for one, writing for the “Bits” blog in the New York Times, posits that Jobs wasn’t just talking about the TV’s interface, but rather how artificial intelligence (AI) software could change the whole TV-watching experience. Jobs, he says, was talking about Siri, the digital personal assistant on the iPhone 4S that ‘s become the voice of AI.

Sure, other entertainment systems, such as Xbox 360 Kinect respond to hand gestures and voice commands.  But Siri can carry on the semblance of a conversation.  Imagine…

“Siri, how about another episode of ‘Cops’?”

“Are you sure that’s what you really want to watch?”

“Yes, Siri, that’s what I want.”

“But you know that’s not good for you.  Might I recommend ‘Downton Abbey’?”

TV or not TV

Here’s some other recent news on the TV front:

• Killer ads: One group that’s especially jazzed about the potential of Smart TV is advertisers, who are starting to imagine what’s possible when you combine the emotional power of the big screen with the targeting precision of Web advertising.
• Finally, couch potatoes get a little credit: A new iPhone and iPad app called Viggle can track what you’re watching on TV, then gives you credits at the rate of two points per minute. Rack up enough points and you can win a $5 gift card to places like Burger King and Starbucks.  May not seem like much, but you’ll know you earned that latte.
• Watch and buy: A mobile app called Zeebox is hoping to make a business out of making it easier to buy things you see on TV.
• TV goes new school: Another indication that Smart TV is percolating was the announcement this week that Flingo, a company that makes TV apps, has landed $7 million in venture capital funding.

Video bonus: Want to see for yourself? Here’s a quick tutorial on what a Samsung Smart TV can do.

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.

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.