Brent Spiner and his Star Trek character Data. Photo: Beth Madison.

No, it’s not Brent Spiner. It’s an honest-to-goodness robot.

Japan’s Seinendan Theater Company, currently touring the U.S. with its play “Sayonara,” features an incredibly lifelike android. A (human) actress sits backstage playing the android’s part in front of a video camera and microphone, while the android translates her speech and movement on stage. The play consists of a discussion between the android and another actress on the themes of life and death.

Jackie Mantey, writing for ColumbusAlive.com, said that the use of the robot in the performance is not merely a novelty—it heightens one’s experience of the play and adds to its meaning. The presence of the android, she writes,

helps highlight the humanity — for better or worse — of the other, flesh-and-blood characters and, ostensibly, the audience.

For example, part of the “Sayonara” plot involves the release of radioactivity at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after the 2011 tsunami. While considering the pain technology can bring us, audience members are simultaneously reminded of the groundbreaking things it has done as well….

Mantey also reports that the android, named Geminoid F., “looks so much like an actual human being, the company often doesn’t use photos of it in promotional materials for the stage production so as not to confuse audiences.”

Judge for yourself: the BBC did a report on Geminoid F.’s acting skills—and her effect on her fellow actresses—when the show debuted in Japan in 2010. And here she is talking to a group of people and posing for pictures:

The play isn’t Geminoid F.’s only gig, either—far from it. Like so many great actresses before her, she made an early-career appearance at a performance in a shopping mall:

More from Smithsonian.com:

Robots Get the Human Touch
Robots Inspired by Biology
Virtual Dinosaurs Come to Japan

Quantum physics professors at the University of Ulm in Germany, have created a mathematically-accurate visual approximation of the hypothetical Gödel model of the universe. That is, they show what it would look like if you could simultaneously see past, present, and future versions of physical objects.

Sandrine Ceurstemont of New Scientist, who compiled the video above, explained it this way:

In the first clip, a camera is placed at the centre of this cylindrical universe, simulating what an Earth-like object would look like. Because light behaves differently in this space, as the sphere moves away from you, you see an image of both the front and the back. If it moves above you, it appears as a collection of slices. During its orbit, you see many versions from different time periods all at once.

The video gets even more trippy as it simulates what you would see when looking up at a ball. Because the universe is rotating, light rays move in spirals, creating circular echoes around the object. If a single ball is replaced by a stack, you see all the balls at once.

In a similar attempt to answer the question of what time travel would look like, PBS’s NOVA made the “Time Traveler” computer game to illustrate Einstein’s theories on the subject. Hollywood has certainly given us a wide array of visual representations, from whooshing space-vacuums to screen-flickers and -fades to magic DeLoreans. If you’ve got a lot of um, time on your hands, you can lose a lot of it by exploring the always-lively message board threads where people with varying levels of authority to speak on the matter argue about whether time travel could ever work, and what it would feel like if it did.

But as to just how accurate any of this is? No one really knows for sure—not even Gödel’s grandfather, and not even Schrödinger’s Cat.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Well-Dressed Time Traveler
What Studying Einstein’s Brain Can and Can’t Tell Us

Photo: Kevin Dooley

When Andy Warhol famously said that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” he couldn’t have been talking about himself. Two and a half decades after his death, he shows no sign of leaving the spotlight. In the past few months, he’s been popping up everywhere, alongside the discoveries of some of his lesser-known art.

For instance, the Luckman Gallery in Los Angeles is currently exhibiting a series of Warhol’s Polaroid photographs that have never before been on display. LA Weekly describes the particularly Warholian appeal of the show:

Set in glass cases, the tiny photos showcase Warhol’s knack for capturing not only the physical features of his subjects — mostly visitors to the Factory, the studio where Warhol worked — but also their personalities. Their small size forces viewers to slow down and look more closely, and there are multiple photos of some of the people. In a digital camera, the less ideal ones would probably get deleted with the push of a button but here the many shots become little clues to each subject’s personality.

In March, California will also be home to another exciting West coast Warhol debut—his 1968 film “San Diego Surf” will be playing at The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The surf movie, shot with 16mm cameras near where it will play, was never finished in Warhol’s lifetime. It remained locked up for decades until it was unearthed for the first time for Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011. The San Diego showing will also feature never-before-seen footage of the making of “San Diego Surf,” so Warhol fans that want to catch a glimpse of the man behind the camera won’t be disappointed.

This week, Planet Money also reported that Warhol’s (very rough) sketch on paper of the U.S. unemployment rate from 1928 to 1987 was going up for auction at Christie’s soon. Estimated sale price? $20,000 to $30,000. Not bad for what looks like something scribbled on one of those big notepads in a corporate conference room.

Not only is Warhol’s art still being discussed, dissected, and sold, his influence continues to reverberate in very contemporary culture.

In the cover story of this week’s TIME, for instance, Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow reveals what (or who) inspired her to first switch from painting to film when she was a young artist. As Vulture quotes Bigelow’s profile:

“I think I had a conversation with Andy Warhol somewhere in all this, and Andy was saying that there’s something way more populist about film than art — that art’s very elitist, so you’re excluding a large audience. ” Yep, she got into making movies because of a conversation with Andy Warhol. (“In the future, everyone will have a world-famous fifteen-minute torture scene.”)

It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Warhol’s influence is apparent everywhere, considering how he changed the way we see something as banal as a can of tomato soup.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Fresh Look at Andy Warhol
Warhol’s Pop Politics

The comet Hale-Bopp, photographed from Minnesota by Kevin Dooley.

It wasn’t a comet. Really.

A widely-held (and often-discredited) theory suggests that a comet from outer space was responsible for killing off the Clovis culture, a Paleo-Indian population living in the southwestern part of North America over 13,000 years ago. The comet theory holds that either the direct impact of the comet or the air burst it caused set the surrounding land on fire, killing all sources of food and eventually starving the remaining people there.

New research at Royal Holloway University in the U.K.—performed in conjunction with 14 other universities around the world and recently published in the journal Geophysical Monograph Series—disproves that hypothesis (again).

The project did not pinpoint an alternate explanation for the disappearance of Clovis, but the researchers have determined that a comet was definitely not to blame. If North America had been hit with something large enough to alter the Earth’s climate and wipe out a civilization, there would have been significant evidence of such an impact. But, they argue,

no appropriately sized impact craters from that time period have been discovered, and no shocked material or any other features of impact have been found in sediments. They also found that samples presented in support of the impact hypothesis were contaminated with modern material and that no physics model can support the theory.

So the comet theory is dead—really. But the problem is, for some reason it just won’t stay dead, says one researcher:

“The theory has reached zombie status,” said Professor Andrew Scott from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway. “Whenever we are able to show flaws and think it is dead, it reappears with new, equally unsatisfactory, arguments.

“Hopefully new versions of the theory will be more carefully examined before they are published.”

Hmm. Maybe the problem here is that other prevailing theories of the Clovis’ decline—for instance, that gradual changes in the animal populations of the area led the Clovis population to hunt differently and take advantage of different natural resources (that is, that the original Clovis didn’t disappear at all, their descendants merely left different artifacts behind them as time went on)—are just super boring by comparison.

Comets are way more exciting. For that reason, the Clovis Comet theory may remain forever undead.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Comet’s Close Call
Discovered: A Prehistoric Pantry
Mammoths and Mastodons: All American Monsters

A mock-up of the multiple layers of Rembrandt’s “Old Man in Military Costume,” photo by Andrea Sartorius via J. Paul Getty Trust.

Rembrandt van Rijn’s “Old Man in Military Costume,” captures a rich history in one portrait. As the painting’s current home, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, describes its subject,

His military costume may symbolize Dutch strength and patriotism during the struggle for independence from Spain. Although he faces front, the man’s torso is turned in a three-quarter view; his watery eyes gazing off to the side give the image a sense of immediacy.

For several decades, though, art historians and scientists have been intrigued by another story embedded within the 380-year-old painting—the artist’s methods.

Using conventional X-ray technology, researchers investigated “a confusing area of greater density” in one area of the portrait, to try to find out whether it was an earlier portait attempt that the artist had painted over. According to the Getty website, by 1984, conservators had discovered that there was, indeed, another figure hidden beneath.

The difficulty of revealing the “underpainting” lies in the fact that Rembrandt used the same type of paint, with the same chemical compound, in both versions. So more sophisticated X-ray technology was necessary.

Now, new experimental methods at the University of Antwerp have the potential to really see what’s hidden underneath the portrait, even if the composition of each layer of paint is the same. Scientists have tested a kind of macro X-ray fluorescence analysis on a mock-up painting they created for the experiment:

When bombarded with these high-energy X-rays, light is absorbed and emitted from different pigments in different ways. The scientists targeted four elements of the paint to fluoresce, including calcium, iron, mercury and lead, and got much better impressions of the hidden painting in the mock-up than they were able to before.

The next step is to repeat the process on the real thing. It’s not the first time a Rembrandt piece has been put through the X-ray scanner—a year ago, the Brookhaven Labs used macro-scanning X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF) to verify that an unsigned portrait from the 1600s was, in fact, an authentic Rembrandt.

Below is a brief talk by a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about Rembrandt’s methods, and what makes “An Old Man in Military Costume” such a compelling masterpiece:

More from Smithsonian.com:

Rembrandt or not Rembrandt?
Rembrandt at 400
X-Ray Telescope Puts Glorious Nebulae in New Light

Photo by Wojciech Kulicki.

Cold weather, lack of wind and a dearth of environmental regulations have lately created a perfect storm of toxic smog in northern China. Air pollution has gotten so extreme in China’s capital, ABC News reports, that “it is literally off the charts: more than 20 times the maximum safety level.”

Some of Beijing’s factories are temporarily closing, flights are being cancelled and emergency rooms are filling up with people having severe respiratory reactions to the toxic air they have been breathing.

According to a report on ABC World News, the air quality index in Beijing has reached a height of 755. Higher numbers mean worse pollution, and anything over 300 is considered “an emergency.” By comparison, the worst-polluted city in the U.S., Bakersfield, California, reached a peak air quality index of 159 last year.

Perhaps most notably, the notoriously silent Chinese government has recently sent out emergency warnings about the air quality in Beijing for the first time. But many Chinese citizens clearly feel that not enough is being done, according to ABC:

The air is so bad that wealthy Chinese entrepreneur, Chen Guangbiao, is selling fresh air in soft drinks cans, similar to bottled drinking water. Each can is sold for 5RMB or about 80 cents. Chen is well known for his charitable donations and publicity stunts. He says he wants to stimulate awareness of environmental protection among government officials and citizens by selling the canned fresh air.

“If we don’t pay attention to environmental protection, in 10 years every one of us will be wearing gas masks and carrying oxygen tanks on the streets,” Cheng told ABC News. “By that time, my canned fresh air will be a necessity for household,” he predicts.

Sound familiar? In the 1987 comedy Spaceballs, a Star Wars spoof, a corrupt president uses up all the air from his world, and then schemes to steal fresh air from another planet. In this scene, he outwardly denies the crisis while sucking down cans of “Perri-air: canned in Druidia, naturally sparkling, salt-free air.”

It’s a bleak state of affairs indeed when a Mel Brooks schtickfest from the ’80s actually predicts the future.

Lord Dark Helmet. Photo by reenyman.

More on Smithsonian.com:

Before and After: Cleaning up Our Cities
China’s Per Capita Car Emissions Nearly On Par with Europe’s
The Long Fight Against Air Pollution

Photo: The U.S. Army

Dogs have been long been an important part of military operations—from bomb-sniffing to supply-delivery—even long before Rin Tin Tin. But training military working dogs is an expensive and time-consuming process. And anyone who’s spent any time trying to get a dog to even follow the “sit” command knows that some dogs are sharper than others.

Now, Wired’s Danger Room blog reports on a plan by DARPA to pre-select the smartest recruits using newly available brain-scanning methods:

…the project — adorably called FIDOS, for “Functional Imaging to Develop Outstanding Service-Dogs” — touts the idea of using magnetic image resonators (or MRIs) to “optimize the selection of ideal service dogs” by scanning their brains to find the smartest candidates. “Real-time neural feedback” will optimize canine training. That adds up to military pooches trained better, faster and — in theory — at a lower cost than current training methods of $20,000, using the old-fashioned methods of discipline-and-reward.

The theory is that, by scanning a dog’s level of neural response to various stimuli, including handler cues, the researchers will be able to identify the dogs that will be the quickest learners and therefore the easiest to train.

Scanning dogs’ brains may also help trainers identify different types of intelligence, so as to more accurately match certain dogs to tasks they’d be best at. For instance, more “brain hyper-social dogs”—those who are best at sensing and responding to the emotional cues of their handlers—would be best used as therapy dogs for soldiers in rehabilitation.

The research looks promising; although, as PopSci’s Clay Dillow points out, challenges remain:

Before you can train to be a canine psychology assistant or to rope out of helicopters with the SEALs, you have to train it to lay still in an fMRI machine.

Good point. On the other hand, though, if little Fido can’t do so much as sit still for a quick head exam, shouldn’t he be automatically disqualified from the more delicate task of detecting a bomb?

More on Smithsonian.com:

In New Zealand, Dogs Are Being Taught How To Drive Cars
How Dogs are Replacing Drugs in the Treatment of PTSD
The Dogs of War

2011′s Hurricane Irene, as seen from space. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Germophobes might not want to read this one. New research has found that there are some microbes that are so resilient that they can actually ride hurricanes.

A tropospheric survey, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found 17 individual bacterial species as high as 10 kilometers (more than six miles) in the air, according to David Biello on Scientific American’s Observations blog. By comparison, other lifeforms such as fungal spores and pollen don’t thrive nearly as well as the microbes, the survey found.

Swept up in the air by wind and water, these bacteria not only survive in the stratosphere; they actually gain nourishment from it. And unfortunately, what goes up must come down:

…judging by these samples, hurricanes and possibly other storms, help convey enormous amounts of a lot of different bacteria around the world.

Samples from Hurricane Karl and Earl (both in September 2010) showed that the big storms both rained out bacteria from the atmosphere and also swept up some species not usually found so high, including E. coli and Streptococcus, especially after passing over cities and other populated areas. In the case of Hurricane Earl, there were even soil microbes from that tropical cyclone’s origins as a dusty wind in the Sahara Desert.

As Smart News wrote last month, previous research published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology revealed that microbes were capable of traveling by “vast streams of dust,” even crossing oceans and spreading from one continent to another.

Purell addicts already suffering through this year’s unusually rough flu season are advised not to think too hard about germs so tough that they can survive ultraviolet rays, extreme cold and Category 4 hurricane winds.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Painting With Penicillin: Alexander Fleming’s Germ Art
Dirty Curiosity Rover Could Seed Mars with Earthly Bacteria
Watch All of 2012′s Hurricanes in One Video

Photo by daisukeimaizumi

Thanks to new research methods and a pile of (very old) dirty dishes, archaeologists have discovered the very ancient origins of a globally popular cuisine. Though the combination of flavors recognized as curry today is the result of centuries of cross-cultural trade between India, Southeast Asia and Europe, the dish’s origins reach back farther than was previously thought.

According to Andrew Lawler, at Slate, “the original curry predates Europeans’ presence in India by about 4,000 years.” The three basic ingredients of the spicy stew were ginger, garlic and turmeric, and, using a method called “starch grain analysis,” archaeologists Arunima Kashyap and Steve Weber at the University of Washington at Vancouver were able to identify the residue of these ancient spices in both skeletons and pottery shards from excavations in India:

Starch is the main way that plants store energy, and tiny amounts of it can remain long after the plant itself has deteriorated. If a plant was heated—cooked in one of the tandoori-style ovens often found at Indus sites, for example—then its tiny microscopic remains can be identified, since each plant species leaves its own specific molecular signature. To a layperson peering through a microscope, those remains look like random blobs. But to a careful researcher, they tell the story of what a cook dropped into the dinner pot 4,500 years ago.

Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, Kashyap spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical curry.

The two researchers dated the remains of these spices to between 2500 and 2200 B.C. That, and the discovery of a “carbonized clove of garlic,” Lawler writes, supports the theory that “curry is not only among the world’s most popular dishes; it also may be the oldest continuously prepared cuisine on the planet.”

So the next time you order a spicy vindaloo, korma or masala, know that you’re not only having a sinus-clearing, delicious experience—you’re tasting a bit of ancient history.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Indians Made It to Australia More Than 4,000 Years Before the British
How Food Shaped Humanity

From birth, Neil Harbisson lacked the ability to perceive color. Because of a rare condition called achromatopsia—total color-blindness—he always lived in a black-and-white world. But with the help of inventor Adam Montadon, Harbisson developed the “eyeborg,” a device that he wears on his head that translates colors into sound. The camera senses the color frequency in front of him, then sends different audible frequencies to a chip embedded in the back of his head.

Using the same color-sound language, he now also translates music into colors to create art—painting a multi-chromatic modernist representation of a Justin Bieber song, for instance. And as he explains in the film above, his ability to perceive color through sound has expanded into the realm of the superhuman; he can now “see” infrared rays, and soon, he hopes, ultraviolet as well.

This mini-documentary about their project won the Focus Forward Filmmaker Competition (h/t David Pogue on Twitter).

Harbisson spoke more about how the “eyeborg” has changed his life in this fascinating TED talk, below. “Before I used to dress in a way that it looked good,” he says, wearing pink, blue, and yellow. “Now I dress in a way that it sounds good. So today I am dressed in C major, it is quite a happy chord.”

The most intriguing part of Harbisson’s TED talk is the very end, when he says that “I think life will be much more exciting when stop creating applications for the mobile phones and we start creating applications for our own body…. I do encourage you all to think about which senses you would like to extend. I would encourage you to become a cyborg—you won’t be alone.” The TED blog has a list of six other “real-life cyborgs,” who go through daily life with cameras in their eyes, USB drives in their hands and extra ears in their arms. (Yikes!)

According to Harbisson’s and Montadon’s Cyborg Foundation website, the team is working on all kinds of wild, sensory-experience-expanding projects in addition to the “eyeborg.” There’s also a “speedborg,” which is like a little radar detector that you wear on your hand that translates the speed of an object into vibrations; a “fingerborg,” a prosthetic finger with a miniature camera inside; and “360-degree sensory extension”—a pair of earrings that vibrates when someone approaches from behind.

More on Smithsonian.com:

These People are Turning Themselves into Cyborgs in their Basement
Teach Yourself to Be Synesthetic: Hear Colors, See Sounds
For Some, Pain is Orange

Photo by David Monniaux via Wikimedia Commons.

Out with the old, in with the…even older. A museum in Mongolian capital Ulan Bator that was once dedicated to dictator Vladimir I. Lenin will soon be transformed into a center for prehistoric fossils, The Guardian reports.

The building that will house the new center was the home of The Lenin Museum from 1980, when Mongolia was still closely aligned with the  Soviet Union, to 1990, when a peaceful revolution transformed the country into a multi-party democracy. Since then, the building has housed politicians’ offices—though a bust of Lenin has remained.

The new fossil museum is meant to attract tourists and to raise awareness of Mongolia’s rich (pre-)history. The smuggling of Mongolian fossils has been a problem in the past:

“Mongolia has been sending dinosaur exhibits abroad for 20 years, while not having a museum at home,” said Oyungerel Tsedevdamba, the minister for culture, sports and tourism. “We have a wonderful dinosaur heritage but people are not aware of it.”

She said that fossils lent to overseas institutions, and specimens smuggled abroad illegally, would fill several facilities if they were all brought home.

In fact, the jewel of the exhibit will most likely be the nearly-complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, also known as Tarbosaurus bataar, that is 7 meters long. (This is the same Tarbosaurus that was the subject of an international dispute last year, when it suddenly appeared at auction in the U.S. after apparently being imported illegally.)

Bolortsetseg Minjin, founder of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs, was quoted in the Guardian as saying that the preservation of fossils in Mongolia is “very unique” because paleontologists have been able to “find complete skeletons in the Gobi desert, which is very rare.”

In a previous profile for National Geographic, Minjin explained further:

“In other parts of the world,” she notes, “you discover isolated bones that have been scattered—carried off by animals, damaged by exposure to harsh weather, swept away in rivers. Here in the Gobi, many dinosaurs must have died instantly, in a very unique way.”

Paleontologists believe that Mongolia’s high sand dunes may have been collapsed by one or more sudden monsoons, trapping dinosaurs in the valleys between the dunes. Buried below that land, now known as the Gobi desert, the fossils remained preserved and untouched for tens of millions of years.

Minjin now works on outreach programs to help get Mongolian students exposed to and educated about their country’s rich heritage—an effort that will perhaps be helped along by this new fossil center in Ulan Bator. As she asked National Geographic, “Shouldn’t the people who were born in this place help discover its own amazing past?”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Tarbosaurus on Trial
Where Dinosaurs Roamed
Hunting Dinosaurs on Venus

Photo: Flickr user tranchis

Researchers from the University of Chile are at work on an innovative new vaccine that they hope will fight alcoholism, a prevalent problem in their country. People who have been given the vaccine will experience an immediate hangover from even a drop of alcohol, making drinking such an unpleasant experience that they’ll be forced to abstain.

The vaccine “works by sending a biochemical message to the liver telling it not to express genes that metabolise alcohol,” explains the Daily Mail. “Normally, the liver turns alcohol into the hangover-causing compound called acetaldehyde which is then broken down by a metabolising enzyme.”

The scientists plan to start trials on mice next month, and human subjects later in the year. Dr. Juan Ansejo told The Santiago Times that he and his colleagues were first inspired by a genetic mutation that’s fairly common in Eastern populations that naturally lowers tolerance to alcohol:

“People who are Japanese, Chinese or Korean and have this mutation – let’s say 15 to 20 percent of the population – they don’t touch alcohol, and that’s because they feel bad with the vomit and the nausea,” Asenjo said.

This isn’t the first time a drug has been used to discourage alcohol use by prompting hangover symptoms; Disulfiram is a pill that works the same way. The obvious problem with having the medicine in a pill format is that one could simply stop taking the pills when temptation won out.

The key to this new vaccine in Chile is that it’s administered by a shot (not that kind of shot, the needle kind), and it remains in the body for about six months to a year, with no way to reverse its effects during that time.

Of course, what this potential miracle drug doesn’t treat—and no drug alone ever could—are the underlying causes of the disease, both genetic and psychological. What would someone do after the vaccine eventually wears off? Get another, and then another? Does the desire to avoid an instant hangover count as recovery?

More from Smithsonian.com:

Tipsy Gene Prevents Against Alcoholism
The Alcoholics of the Animal World
The Truth Behind Beer Goggles