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New analytical data supposedly backs the case for Martian life having once existed

The Allen Hills meteorite sparked a huge debate in 1996 when both NASA and the White House announced the possible discovery of life from the red planet. President Bill Clinton gave a speech at the time that could perhaps sound prescient, if the new findings put scientific doubts to rest.

"It speaks of the possibility of life. If this discovery is confirmed, it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered," Clinton said.

The NASA scientists have recently scrutinized the meteorite with advanced High Resolution Electron Microscopy, and looked specifically at carbonate discs and magnetite crystals. They found that the structures show a chemical purity much more similar to a biological rather than geological signature, and have strong resemblance to so-called magnetic bacteria on Earth.

Scientists from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston have detailed their findings in the November issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. But other astrobiologists at NASA Ames Research Center near San Francisco and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena have also been buzzing over the possible findings, according to Spaceflight Now.

Perhaps Earth may soon have a better answer to its longstanding questions about extraterrestrial life. If so, the War of the Worlds invasion tally is Mars 1, Earth 0.

[via Spaceflight Now]

Last month, President Obama promised 100 grants totaling $3.4 billion in eventual Smart Grid funding, but for now it seems the DOE is at least getting serious about launching some demo projects to test novel transmission and storage technologies. Half of the projects – and at $435 million, the bulk of the funds – will go toward Smart Grid tech that allows the grid to communicate in real time with utilities, homes and appliances, as well as to integrate renewable resources into the energy mix.

The other half of the projects (and the remaining $185 million) will fund “utility-scale energy storage projects” that will assist the grid in storing excess energy for later use, a key component for bringing inconsistent renewable sources like wind and solar into our national energy diet. Those technologies include better battery systems and compressed air energy systems, among others.

That’s where things get interesting. It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of announcements as political posturing at a time when the President’s critics are browbeating him over stimulus job numbers and the whereabouts of his ballyhooed “green jobs.” But the Smart Grid does have the potential to change the way Americans consume energy, and improved battery tech could be the key to everything from increased renewable energy use to a shift toward all-electric automobiles.

If the money makes it to the right people with the right ideas, this could mark the beginning of a long and overdue shift in American energy policy. Here’s to cautious optimism.

Get the entire list of projects here.

[DOE]

A Mumbai engineer's "violent elephant control gear" will safeguard against beasts run amok

The "Violent Elephant Control Gear" takes the form of a 16-pound box fitted to the rear leg of an elephant. A human controller can press a remote device button to trigger a power cord that shoots out and ensnares the other rear leg of the elephant.

Matthew's invention can supposedly restrain elephants weighing as much as 2 tons. A spokesman told The Daily Telegraph that the commercial launch will price it at a little more than $664 (or £400 or 30,000 rupees).

The device is also billed as a more surefire method for stopping rampaging elephants, as opposed to the current approach of shooting the elephants with anesthetic darts -- a potentially tricky proposition if several shooters overestimate the dosage.

Fast Company suggests that the device may draw inadvertent inspiration from a certain Star Wars film ... and we have to admit, those Imperial AT-AT Walkers always did look a bit elephantine.

Still, rampaging elephants aren't giant, unfeeling mechanical walkers, but instead manifest the unhappiness of beasts of burden or circus animals. Fast Company also points out that hostile human-elephant interactions only continue to rise as humans encroach on a shrinking wild elephant habitat -- a much bigger problem, beyond the control of any remote-controlled leg manacle devices, no matter how cool.

[via Fast Company and The Telegraph]

What the "future" of supersonic air travel looked like in 1975

In our first episode, we're looking at an amazing promotional film that Braniff International made in 1975 to get customers excited about supersonic air travel.

Braniff began operating Concorde flight between Dallas, TX and Washington, DC in 1979. These technically weren't supersonic flights, though -- because of noise pollution from sonic booms, Congress had outlawed supersonic service over the domestic U.S. So when the Concorde touched down in DC, the Braniff pilots would swap out for a British Airways crew, who would take care of the fun stuff at Mach 2 over the Atlantic.

But as you can see, that didn't stop Braniff from portraying supersonic air travel as an amazingly futuristic feat right out of science fiction -- complete with silver helmets for passengers, "mood controls" in every seat, and jetpack-equipped flight crews.

Braniff wasn't totally off the mark, though. Here are the things their cheesy film actually got right (or, at least in the ballpark) about the future of air travel:

Smart ID. All US passports have had RFID chips in them since 2007. And more recently, plans have surfaced to potentially upgrade e-passports to include flexible wirelessly-powered screens that show a 360-degree rotating view of your head instead of a boring little photo.

High-speed direct rail connections. We take them for granted now, but fast, convenient airport rail lines didn't become commonplace until the 1980s. And superfast maglev trains -- like Shanghai's Transrapid system, which debuted in 2003 with a top speed of 311 mph -- are still only found in Europe and Asia, not the United States. (Although not for lack of trying.)

Robots. Again, Asia has us trumped: RoboPorters (yup, that's really what they're called) were deployed in Japan's Kita Kyushu airport in 2008, each capable of schlepping up to 100 pounds of luggage. Then again, we have robot pilots. Beat that!

On-demand entertainment. In Braniff's film, passengers are delighted to have a whopping three movies to choose from. These days, we'd consider such limited choices as grounds for a refund. And before long, in-flight broadband internet service will make even VOD seem quaint.

Overall, not half bad for a 34-year-old film. Aside from the gratuitous helmets, of course.

The groundbreaking plant produces about enough power to make a pot of delicious coffee

Osmotic power works by separating saltwater and seawater in two chambers separated by a polymer membrane that will only allow freshwater to pass through. The salinity of the seawater draws the freshwater through the membrane, creating a great deal of pressure on the seawater side. That pressure can be used to turn a turbine to create power.

Of course, the Norwegians have no problem going big on their maritime energy projects either. Norwegian energy giant StatiolHydro recently erected Hywind, the world's first floating full-scale offshore wind turbine, and Statiol's Snohvit field in the Barents sea is the world's most environmentally friendly liquid natural gas plant and boasts the world's longest undersea pipeline system.

Just as technological innovations made Hywind and Snovhit possible, advancements in membrane technology have vastly increased the efficiency, as well as lowered the cost, of osmotic power. The Tofte plant cost between $7 million and $8 million, not too shabby for a power plant if, of course, it can offer more than just a pot of coffee. One quick solution: implement osmotic plants near desalination facilities, which produce a briny water twice as salty as seawater as a byproduct.

Double the osmotic pressure potential, and suddenly we're up to two coffee makers. Slowly but surely, progress is made.

[The New York Times]

The collision took place at an energy of 450 GeV, far below the maximum power of the accelerator. By Christmas, LHC scientists hope to generate collisions twice as powerful as yesterday's test. However, even at that doubled energy needs a sevenfold-increase to reach the LHC's maximum capacity, and the level where scientists might observe the Higgs boson.

The picture above shows the collision as recorded by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector. The red and blue bars represent subatomic particles flying forth from the proton collision like atomic shrapnel. When the LHC finally ramps up to full power, the 3,600 scientists at the will witness the most powerful particle collisions ever engineered by man.

Let's hope they can keep the machine working, and safe from birds, until then.

Genetic testing and brain scans for new recruits attempt to cut out PTSD-prone soldiers

Scientists and armed forces medical personnel have long been baffled by PTSD's seemingly arbitrary manifestation; a group of warfighters can experience the same battle with the same degree of intensity, yet some are able to continue their lives normally while others are not. Often PTSD can simmer below the surface, becoming symptomatic several years after the initial trauma. But while there's no cure for PTSD, prior studies have shown that strategies like having a reliable social net and a good coping strategy can be effective in warding off the symptoms of PTSD. The problem is identifying which soldiers may be quietly harboring PTSD without knowing it.

Therefore, the idea is not to cure PTSD outright but to identify predictors of the disorder -- possibly genetic biomarkers or elevated stress hormone levels -- that indicate a soldier's predisposition toward the disorder before he or she enters combat. Once understood, the presence of PTSD predictors won't allow soldiers to shirk combat duty, but it will give the armed services a chance to mitigate the effects of PTSD by getting soldiers into treatments early rather than waiting for the outward signs -- outbursts, nightmares, flashbacks, social withdrawal -- to manifest themselves.

At Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base in California, soldiers bound for combat are undergoing a battery of tests ranging from biomarker analysis to psychiatric image association tests in which soldiers are shown pictures of various stressful situations while their stress levels are measured. Another study by University of Texas researchers followed soldiers deployed from nearby Fort Bragg through their combat experiences. Soldiers also provided a DNA sample, an MRI brain scan and a CO2 inhalation test to evaluate their reactions to stress.

Unsurprisingly, preliminary findings in the UT study show that soldiers who reacted strongly to the carbon dioxide test also showed more prevalent symptoms of PTSD, which is exactly the kind of predictor researchers are looking for. It's a very military-esque way of dealing with an issue: assess the situation, locate the source of the problem, then contain its ability to render harm to our side. Given the narrow likelihood of either war coming to a close in the foreseeable future, hopefully this research will at least help more troops returning home return to normalcy as well.

[TIME]

Houben, now in a facility in Brussels and communicating via a computer controlled by his minimally functioning right hand, came around after his 1983 car accident. But while he could hear every word his doctors spoke, he could not speak to them, nor could he move his body to communicate with them in any way. For years researchers and doctors tried to coax a response from Houben, who all along was trapped within his own body, living a life of frustration with his inability to interact.

"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," he told the Guardian via his computer.

For over two decades Houben remained in what doctors thought was an unconscious state, though he was fully conscious of the world going by around him. It wasn't until three years ago when doctors wanted to try a new state-of-the-art PET scanning system on Houben that they made a startling discovery: the "comatose" man's brain was functioning almost normally.

For Houben, the discovery of his consciousness by the outside world has been like a "second birth," to put it in his own words. But for science, while the news of Houben's "discovery" is heartening, it will likely rehash the debate over when, if ever, a patient who by all indications of modern science is vegetative should be terminated.

Belgian neurologist Steven Laureys has published a paper on Houben's ordeal suggesting that his case is not isolated. According to his study, as many as 40 percent of cases diagnosed as vegetative may indeed possess enough consciousness to not only communicate, but to actually make considerable progress with the right treatment. Of 44 "vegetative" patients Laureys analyzed, 18 ended up responding to communication.

The idea of losing the ability to communicate with the outside world is terrifying enough, but to then be misdiagnosed and forgotten -- or deemed a lost cause and slotted for termination -- all while possessing fully functioning mental capacities is downright unthinkable. The question "how many times have we been wrong?" is one the medical community is likely loath to ask, but if Houben's case is any indication, it's one that needs to be addressed. If Laureys analysis is to be believed, there should be many more Houben's out there screaming in silence.

[The Guardian, Associated Press]

Through Educate to Innovate, the White House hopes to return American science and technology learning to prominence

Noting that for decades academic achievement among math and science students has been "losing ground" in the U.S., the president said that around the world "there is a hunger for knowledge, an insistence on excellence, a reverence for science and math and technology and learning. That used to be what we were about," he said. "That's what we're going to be about again."

The president also announced an annual science fair at the White House for the winners of national science and tech competitions. Since the NCAA athletics champs get to visit, so too should the nation's mathletes. "Scientists and engineers ought to stand side-by-side with athletes and entertainers as role models," Obama said. The genius inventors still in high school we featured earlier this year are surely taking note.

The initiative, dubbed Educate to Innovate, is kicking-off with five public-private partnerships that will be, according to the White House, worth more than $260 million in funding and in-kind support from a variety of companies and organizations:

• Time Warner Cable, FIRST Robotics, and the Coalition for Science After School have established the website connectamillionminds.com to help kids and parents find after-school activities in science, tech, engineering and math.

• Discovery Communications, along with partner universities and federal agencies will, among other things, be devoting a block of commercial-free kids programming on Discovery's Science Channel.

• Sesame Street is in the midst of the first of two seasons that will focus on science and math.

• A National Lab Day that musters the on-going help of groups and individuals across scientific realms to support teachers' projects in the classroom. Funded in part by the Hidary Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others, the White House said the effort aims over the next four years to impact 100,000 teachers and 10 million students.

• The MacArthur Foundation, Sony, the Entertainment Software Association and others in the industry will be holding competitions for the design of free videogames that target math and science, including one that's open only to kids.

We previously looked at a New York City public school that incorporates LittleBigPlanet and other games as part of its learning curriculum, and so seeing video games take a more prominent role in national science education sounds like an intriguing step.

After his speech, two students from a school in nearby Vienna, Va., showed the President a robot they'd built in six weeks, designed to pick up and lob moon rocks. Obama said he was interested in seeing the demo, given the ability of robotics to inspire young minds. "I also want to keep an eye on those robots," he said, "in case they try anything."