For those of us that came of age during the 1980s and after, the threat of nuclear oblivion has never seemed to be a real threat. The dangers of AIDS, economic failure, terrorism have loomed large in the lives of Generation X, Y and the Millennials, but very few of us ever had to hide under our desks during a bomb drill or watch Dad obsess over the backyard underground bunker.

In 2003, Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto created a time-lapse video map of every nuclear bomb explosion in the world between 1945 and 1998. There were 2053 explosions in that time, including the tests that the United States made during the "Manhattan Project" and the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ostensibly ended World War II. The 14-minute long video (below) is a beautiful and terrifying look at the nuclear era that defined world politics, warfare and humanity for more than half a century.

The U.S. had the most nuclear tests, by a large margin, with most occurring in the southwest. The Soviet Union performed most of its tests in and around what is now Kazakhstan and the Lake Balkhash region with many also coming in northern Siberia and Nordic border with Finland. When the British entered the nuclear race, their first tests were in the desolate regions of west Australia. The French were several years behind but made up for coming late by being very active with nuclear tests in the South Pacific, the most vast and uninhabited region on Earth. India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs mostly in the northern section of the Indian subcontinent. China tested many of its nuclear weapons at Lop Nur in the northwestern part of the country.

Hashimoto's data is based on research from the Swedish Defense Research Establishment and Stockholm International Peace Institute. It does not include two supposed nuclear tests by North Korea in 1998 that may or may not have actually happened. Pakistan was the last to test nuclear bombs in 1998.

"This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world," said Hashimoto according to the website CTBTO, a commission formed to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.

The gruesome tally: the U.S. tested 1032 nuclear weapons, U.S.S.R 715, France 210, Britain 45, China 45, India 4 and Pakistan 2.

See Hashimoto's video "1945--1998" below.

CERN physicist Dr. Albert De Roeck is hosting a Google+ Hangout tomorrow from inside the cavern where the experiment takes place, about 100 meters underneath Cessy, France. He'll explain the CMS experiment and take questions about the crazy frontiers of particle physics.

In other words, for the physics of today to work, we have to just assume that the Higgs is there. It has to be, or else we go back to the drawing board. One of the main reasons the LHC was built was to create particle collisions enormous enough to detect it with the most sensitive instruments ever constructed. The Compact Muon Solenoid is one of those instruments.

On February 10, from 17:00 to 18:00 Central European time, Dr. De Roeck will explain how this incredibly sensitive piece of equipment works and what it's looking for. Here's a chart of that start time for every time zone. For the U.S., it's 11:00 a.m. Eastern, 8:00 a.m. Pacific.

The Hangout will appear on the CMS Experiment Google+ page.

Lead image by Lucas Taylor/CERN via Wikimedia Commons

CMS diagram via Wikimedia Commons

Participants can have up to three partners. They pose a question, develop a hypothesis, test it with an experiment and submit the findings online. Last year's winners became scientific superheroes, meeting the president, speaking at TEDx Women, just generally kicking butt. There are also prizes, including a $50,000 college scholarship, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with National Geographic or an internship at Google or any of the partner organizations.

This year, the contest is open to even more participants, accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russian). 90 finalists around the world will be selected, and the top 15 will be flown to Mountain View, Calif. for the final event.

There's also a new category this year, the Scientific American Science in Action award, for a project that addresses a social, environmental or health need. The winner will get $50,000 and a year-long mentorship to help implement the project.

The Google Science Fair is now open for submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59 p.m. GMT (that's 6:59 p.m. Eastern/3:59 p.m. Pacific in the U.S.). Submit your projects at google.com/sciencefair.

Space Lab will allow students to submit a science experiment by video, and a panel of scientists and astronauts, including Professor Stephen Hawking, will pick the best submissions. The winners' experiments will be performed aboard the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the whole world.

As if getting your own science experiment performed live on the ISS for the entire world wasn't enough, there are also prizes like zero-G flights, Lenovo IdeaPad laptops, a trip to Japan to watch your experiment launched into space, or a cosmonaut training experience in Star City, Russia.

Space Lab is part of YouTube's educational channels available at YouTube.com/EDU. Teachers can visit YouTube.com/Teachers to learn how to incorporate Space Lab into their classrooms.

Read more on the official YouTube blog.

The two are completely different efforts, but the idea is to extend botanical knowledge through various Web-based materials and allow scientists and students to collaborate online. A herbarium is typically a huge collection of dried plants maintained by large universities and botanical gardens - two of the largest are found at the Bronx, NY and St. Louis, Missouri. To give you an idea of the size of these things, the St. Louis collection contains more than 5 million plants and is housed in several buildings. There are several hundred others located all over the country as you can see by the map above.

Led by Mary Barkworth, a professor at the Utah State University, the project aims to coordinate all of these heretofore independent herbaria efforts around the country. The virtual edition has just gotten started, and the researchers are figuring out common data markups and trying to catalog the individual plant species that each institution has on file, which Barkworth estimates is in the several millions. Part of the problem is that the plant collections go offline, as universities change their funding and science emphasis, and are either tossed aside or dispersed to interested collectors. So, tracking these herbaria down isn't a simple task. Another problem is that these collections aren't static: researchers are continually adding to their collections.

Eventually, the entire catalog will be imaged and placed on the public Internet so that researchers from anywhere can find a particular leaf, fern or seed. Right now there is the Index Herbarium maintained by the Bronx NY Botanical Garden here, but it is more a collection of pointers to institutions, rather than a database of the actual plant materials itself.

The Open Science network is an entirely different effort, but also presented its progress at the biology conference this week. Here more than 40 academic institutions are trying to help science educators improve their curricula with all sorts of virtual tours: you can take a recorded video walk in the woods with a noted bio prof and hear him provide commentary and descriptions of plant life, for example. It aims to make science more hands-on and interactive and engaging. There are links to lesson plans, lectures, and summer field courses that students can take.

Dr. Lisa Colledge, project manager for Strata, identified the problem that gave rise to its creation: "At the end of the day everything comes back to resources."

The tool is a dynamic, customizable modeler that allows a user to add and subtract scientists and specialists to a team and anticipate the change that would make in the team's efficiency. A set of tabs allow changes to benchmarks, personnel and influence over time (on science in general, not just a specific project). The interface is very recognizable, with drag-and-drop scientists (is this the first time that phrase has ever been written?), which outputs into various charts and graphs.

In much the same way that a football player in a fantasy league or video game would be represented by his stats, so is the scientist or specialist in question. According to Dr. Colledge, the scientists are represented by a range of data, from SciVerse Scopus, an abstract and indexing database, articles from all kind of publications and references in those publications, as well as output and citation data which can be customized, and is dynamic and current.

What are the chances of those of us at home playing along? (Who wouldn't want a chance to see how Niels Bohr and Stephen Hawking would effect the development of the steam engine? Or whether Marie Curie or Richard Feynman would be more effective in helping Danny Dunn with his homework machine?)

Slight.

The tool is sold to universities and other research institutions and users will need to belong to one. If such a tool is even roughly analogous with academic journals, the cost would prove prohibitive for the Average BA-holding Joe. Maybe an academic game company could license the engine and data and give us the Max Planck-Laura Maria Caterina Bassi smackdown for which we have so long waited.

"Google has tremendous power in the search market, and it gives Google the ability to steer users in directions that are best for Google," Expedia's counsel, Thomas Barnett, told The Wall Street Journal. "All of that would ultimately end up harming consumers."

Google has issued a response, saying that "Our reason for making this acquisition is simple: ITA will help us provide better results for our users."

Included in the company's rebuttal are promises that Google plans to honor ITA's existing contracts with clients and that it "does not plan to sell airline tickets directly." The site also refutes the idea that the deal will be bad for consumers by raising ticket prices or stifling innovation. In the end, the company defends the purchase of ITA saying that "We think we can make more significant innovations and bigger breakthroughs in online flight search for consumers by combining our engineering expertise with ITA's than we would by just licensing ITA's data service".

Google's acquisition of ad network Ad Mob caused similar anti-trust concerns, but the deal was ultimately cleared by the Federal Trade Commission. The Justice department is currently conducting "an extended antitrust review of the deal", according to The Wall Street Journal, but it has yet to come to a decision.

Although monitoring air pollution is important for public health, current air monitoring stations are sparsely deployed. Often, visibility is measured by human observers, too, which introduces subjectivity into the analysis. And in developing countries, there is typically little to no monitoring done whatsoever.

For these reasons, the scientists decided to develop a sensing system that uses off-the-shelf sensors and could be deployed to a large number of people. They chose to use an HTC G1 running Google's Android mobile operating system because it provides access to device sensors, can determine 3D orientation and is open and easily programmable.

At the moment, the app only works on days when the sun is shining, not when it's cloudy out, but that seems to be its only drawback so far.

Democratizing Science

In a larger context, this and other apps which tap into the low-cost sensors and components of today's smartphones help to democratize access to and participation in scientific discovery. Recently, for example, NASA experimented with Android phones to determine if smartphone hardware could be used in orbit without shaking apart, if phones could work in a vacuum and if they could handle the extreme temperatures of space, both hot and cold.

University of Washington students also used Android to build a slew of mobile apps for the disabled, again thanks to the operating system's open platform.

But there needs to be more of this type of experimentation, we think. Developers today have access to tools, hardware and sensors for next to nothing, but too many out there seem content with creating dumb, one-off joke applications instead of something truly innovative and unique. Apps are now capable of being eyes and ears for the disabled, satellites, networked sensors, glucose monitors, doctors and so much more. And those built on Android and other open platforms don't have to go through any sort of vetting process to reach a large audience, as they do on Apple's platform. Shouldn't there be more tools like this out there? What are some of the most amazing, innovative apps you've seen?

Using quick response (QR) codes, a camera is able to detect which page the student is on and can display supplementary 3D materials. The student controls the experience by presenting one of three business card-sized QR codes that either activate or advance a sequence of models for each page. They can get a closer look or a different angle on the models by simply moving the book closer to the camera or rotating it.

The experience is pretty compelling as it is. Animations play on some of the pages, explaining how signals travel differently through the various layers of the earth. The visuals are nothing new, but the fact they could theoretically be viewed by a student holding a smartphone would fundamentally change the way students use textbooks.

I hope, however, that the use of QR codes is reduced when a product like this goes to market. The codes, while big and easy to recognize for computer vision software, are clunky, obtrusive and rob publishers of page real estate. Sufficient image recognition technology exists that should allow smaller imaged based markers to be used to activate the experience (or the entire page could be used as a marker).

Using the handheld markers to activate and change the models shouldn't be necessary either, as previous AR experiences - as seen in this example from Total Immersion - have let users control 3D models by placing fingers on top of specific parts of a marker. Qualcomm, which announced its new AR SDK last week at Uplinq 2010, said the kit would include support for this functionality, which it calls "virtual buttons." Needless to say, it can be done, and in the case of augmented textbooks, should be done.

The possibilities for education and augmented reality go far beyond just textbooks. In fact, augmented reality could make learning safer for kids. Why place dangerous chemicals in the hands of children when virtual chemistry sets could eliminate any dangers? Kids can swap protective goggles for head-mounted displays (HMDs) and beakers and bunsen burners for virtual test tubes with 3D chemicals - all of which could be done from the comfort of the student's desk, or even at home.

Augmented reality has enormous potential in the education space. Earlier this year, the New Media Consortium reported in its 2010 Horizon Report that simple augmented reality is just two to three years away from having a significant impact on education. Augmented books and virtual chemistry sets are likely only a fraction of the way the technology will revolutionize the way students learn.

Photo by Flickr user Neys.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

An Always-On Mobile Web

With these sorts of improvements, lithium-sulfur batteries could lead the way in the next phase of the mobile revolution. They could allow us to fully enjoy the web from anywhere in the world, without having to worry about dying batteries, access to power outlets or having to carry around battery replacements when planning long-lasting mobile computing sessions.

Far more than just a convenience, better battery technology would impact how our mobile devices are designed and how they behave. For example, Apple currently imposes numerous restrictions on members of their mobile device lineup for the sake of battery performance. On Apple iPhones, iPod Touches and the forthcoming iPad, applications aren't permitted to run in the background and Adobe Flash technology has been banned altogether, supposedly for its CPU usage which rapidly drains battery juice. Other mobile smartphone makers, while not necessarily as restrictive as Apple, still have to weigh the benefits of providing these same types of features with the performance hit their gadgets will take if they do so. And as anyone who regularly fires up their smartphone web browser knows, too much Internet surfing during the day means a phone that dies out before nightfall.

Another example of the technology's potential impact: e-Readers. Today, if you want to pack your Kindle or Nook device to take with you on vacation, you still have to go through the thought process: how long will I be gone? Will my battery last? Should I pack the cord? Now imagine that you could just throw your e-Reader into your bag without a second thought, just as if you were packing the paperback novel or newspaper these sorts of gadgets aim to replace. Would that encourage more people to make the switch from the analog formats to digital?

The Impacts of Better Batteries

What if, in the future, concerns like these were no longer a worry? What if phones, netbooks, e-Readers and other mobile devices could be used for days on end without the need for a charge? That would radically impact the way we think about and use our mobile devices.

There are a million other use cases that could benefit from this technology change, too, including sensor networks, computing from remote areas, faster news dissemination from areas impacted by disasters (either natural or man-made) where power outages have occurred, gadgets for hikers, campers and other explorers who spend weeks away from civilization and, therefore, away from electricity, mobile location-based services that run in the background on smartphones and other personal mobile gadgets and - OK, we'll admit it - the ability to Twitter all day long without a recharge.

For the nitty gritty technical details about this new battery technology, MIT's Technology Review explains everything from the cathodes to the conductivity as well as the challenges still ahead for this breakthrough technology. Most notably, the scientists still need to figure out how to maintain capacity. After five discharge/recharge cycles, the batteries lost one-third of their initial storage capacity and after 40 to 50 cycles, they ceased to function altogether. However, if the researchers can overcome that final hurdle and a few others, the new technology could one day become commercially viable. It's too soon to know if that will actually occur, but as gadget lovers ourselves, we're hopeful.

Some parts of the available prototypes are interesting but opinion in the scientific community seems split. Is this ground-breaking stuff or yesterday's news repackaged by another industry threatened by the web? That depends on who you ask.

The proposed new format incorporates things as simple as bullet point summaries and playable audio interviews with a paper's author and as complex as click-navigable data visualizations and real-time citation analysis. Some of the AJAX implementations are quite smooth and useful looking. The full summary of proposed features is available on Elsevier subsidiary publisher Cell's site and the company is seeking public comment.

Blogs and websites are weighing in with different points of view. James Dacey writes at PhysicsWorld that "I reckon this is another key development in an interesting transitionary period for both the publishing and media sectors." Several commenters on this article on Canadian Law Library blog Slaw were far less generous.

Gary P. Rodrigues, a former LexisNexis publishing exec, had the following to say there:

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of the 'future' in the 'Article of the Future'. Rather, it seems to me to be a collection of everything that it is possible to do now, but for which there is no commercial demand. Reed Elsevier faces a major challenge to its dominant position in the market for scientific journals from the Open Access movement. It needs to do something major to meet that challenge. The prototypes just don't live up to the hype.

Indeed, the article prototypes are reminiscent of what in the tech world was being called the Social Media Press Release, an attempt to make press releases multi-media and filled with social media hooks that could make them more useful to journalists. That effort seems to have petered out as most people in relevant industries found the format more trouble than it was worth.

There is a possibility that The Article of the Future will suffer the same fate. Elsevier says that it hopes the new format will make consumption of scientific research more efficient and interdisciplinary. We suspect, though, that many people who are interested in reading a paper titled "A Dynamic Pathway for Calcium-Independent Activation of CaMKII by Methionine Oxidation," for example, would prefer to keep out the clutter and stick with a familiar, scannable, academic format. Some of the features proposed are undeniably useful, though, and could lead to change that's incremental, if not revolutionary.

For a more in-depth look at other attempts to disrupt the scientific publishing industry, see Michael Nielsen's article on the topic, this Nature blog post about scientists' use of social networks and this profile of a new social network for scientists called MyExperiment.

The Noesis search engine (PDF) is different than regular search engines because it employs the use of semantics to help its users better shape their search queries. The results of this lead to better, more accurate, and more complete sets of search results. Those results can then be refined even further by Noesis' end users if necessary.

The goal of the Noesis project is to provide scientists working in the field of Atmospheric Science a way to better search through the "hidden web" of scientific catalogs that traditional search engines cannot reach. Because these catalogs are built using a standard vocabulary, the most efficient searches on the catalogs involve using specific terminology.

To create Noesis, researchers simply annotated those specific vocabulary terms with ontologies - the machine-readable definitions for the words that help computers understand the concept of the term and its relationship to other terms. Of course, annotations alone do not make a semantic web search engine. The ontologies must be coupled with a tool that's capable of searching through them. To that end, Noesis employs something they call the Ontology Interface Service (OIS), a SOAP-based web service interface to an inference engine. When a user performs a search, the OIS is also immediately searched for associated concepts. The Specializations and Generalizations discovered are returned in a tree structure which the user can navigate further. Synonyms and related terms are also shown, and, using checkboxes, they can be appended to the original query to refine it further.

Although the project was designed for use in one select area of science, its framework could easily be replicated in other scientific fields of study.

The Semantic Web: Better in Niches?

The main problem with the semantic web today is that the assignment of those above-mentioned ontologies - the pieces of code that allow machines to grasp meanings that humans innately understand - is that there's no solid way to automate their assignment. At the present time, no automatic or semi-automatic processes to do so have been achieved...at least, not to the point that a true vision of a new, intelligent web can be realized.

Most of the time, annotating web resources must be done using manually inserted bits of code placed into various web pages. Obviously, that's a challenge when you consider the size of the internet - it would be impossible to manually annotate this ever-growing resource. Unfortunately, without automated methodologies, a true semantic web will remain an unrealized dream.

However, in smaller communities, the semantic web can easily become a reality. Scientific data catalogs only represent small portions of the web as whole. Because of their limited size, manually annotating the resources they contain is a manageable feat. This is the case with Noesis. It shows there is promise for the semantic web after all - if only in small niches.

Image credit: rule100

The first demonstration of the OpenKnowlege system is aimed to enhance the abilities of those seeking health-related information on the web. Instead of solely relying on a doctor to prescribe a course of treatment, people today tend to seek out medical information on their own using the web. Unfortunately, that data is often inaccurate and misleading. What OpenKnowledge intends to do is provide patients with structured information that has been checked for accuracy. To test this system, OpenKnowledge is working with Cancer Research UK on a project related to treatment methods.

2) Emergency Response

When there's an emergency situation, there is often a centralized point that disseminates critical information to people in need. But if that system itself breaks down, people are out of luck. OpenKnowledge aims to decentralize those systems so that a "backup" decentralized network of peers could be put into place. There, people could help each other out when the centralized system failed. This is currently being testing with emergency response authorities in Trentino, Italy.

3) Protemoics Research

Protemoics research (the study of the structure and function of proteins) can also benefit from the OpenKnowledge framework. In this area of science, many researchers worldwide rely on a small number of databases, creating a bottleneck of sorts which stresses the infrastructure of the databases themselves as well as those that maintain them. Researchers also find it hard to share data and results directly with other groups. In addition, the quality of the information in those databases is very mixed.

OpenKnowledge aims to solve all three problems by letting the researchers share data with each other directly, peer-to-peer style. This relieves the burden on the databases while the feedback will continually improve the quality of the data shared. This is currently being tested in an existing proteomics network in Spain called ProteoRed.

So...What Is It Exactly?

Understanding how a system like this works is difficult and the Open Knowledge web site doesn't make the process of comprehension any easier. Even despite the cute, Harry Potter-themed slideshow meant to describe the process, the actual details are hard to grasp. Obviously written by brainy researchers, they can't even call the slideshow a "slideshow," instead referring to it as a "simple pictorial introduction."

Still, if you can wade through the academic speech on the site, what you may find is a creative idea for sharing information. Basically, through open source downloadable code, OpenKnowledge sets up a peer-to-peer network where users can trade in information and data similar to how BitTorrent users trade mp3s and video files.

In the OpenKnowledge system, anyone can easily become a peer or even create their own peer by sharing existing code or writing their own. In order to become an OpenKnowledge user, you simply need to download the OpenKnowledge kernel from here together with some additional components that you might want to use. In addition to users, services, such as WSDL services, can also be made into peers on the OpenKnowledge network.

OpenKnowledge is more of a framework for decentralizing the systems on the web. It's not so much of a consumer-friendly web app than it is a model for information sharing that can help advance areas of science and research. You may not ever use OpenKnowledge yourself on your home computer, but your life may very well be impacted one day by the innovations it made possible.

In the original research study that examined offline interactions, the researchers found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. In other words, your happiness is related to that of your friends, your friends' friends, and their friends' friends. They also discovered that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and are found in large clusters of other happy people. For each additional happy friend, a person's probability of being happy increases by about 9%.

Armed with these results, the researchers decided to see if the offline research could translate to the online world as well. Of course, determining happiness in the online world is more difficult - a smiling profile picture does not necessarily equate to you being a happy person.

The Facebook Study

The study began with the researchers examining a group of 1700 college students interconnected on the social networking site Facebook. They took note of the students' profiles and who their friends were. They also noted whether the profile photos contained a smiling face. Next, the researchers looked at the other photos found in the students' Facebook albums, this time paying careful attention to who "tagged" who in the photos. This was important because the people who take the trouble to be in the same place, take a photograph together, upload the photograph, and label ("tag") it, almost always have a closer relationship with each other than they do with the rest of the "friends" found on people's profile pages. These "photo friends" tend to represent a person's real-life friends. In fact, the average student in the study had over 110 friends on Facebook, but they had an average of only six of these "photo friends" (close friends).

To determine happiness, the researchers noted who was smiling in these tagged photos. Although they admitted that smiling is, of course, very different than happiness, it was as close as they could come in the virtual world. Apparently, that may have been close enough.

Happiness Is Contagious

The data from results of the online study ended up correlating to their offline study - the results were essentially the same, they were just translated to the digital world. What the researchers found was that smiling students were surrounded by others who were also smiling in small "happiness clusters." Those who were not smiling seem to be located more peripherally in the network. After performing statistical analysis, they determined that those who smile also tend to have more friends - on average one extra friend, which is good considering that people only tend to have six close friends. Those who smiled were also more likely to be at the center of the network when compared to those who don't.

You can see the results of the study mapped out in the image below. The figure shows just a part of the Facebook network, containing 353 students. The smiling people who are surrounded by other smiling people are in yellow, those frowning or giving any other "serious" look are in blue, and those in green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

In the end, the main conclusion of the study was that, whether online or offline, "when you smile, the world smiles with you."

Image credits: smile, suchitra prints; network, edge.org; smiling girl, porcelaingirl