Shakespeare was a grain hoarder and a flagrant tax evader, according to a new study that explores the Bard of Avon's financials. It's kind of surprising, and it means, weirdly, that he may have starred in a real-life version of one of his own tragedies. But that's OK. Another piece of research, in the form of a new book, suggests he couldn't have been a singular jerk: He might not have been a singular person at all.

To be clear, the idea that Shakespeare is not Shakespeare, or at least the man named William Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him, is neither a new nor a popular theory. But it's getting new treatment from a scientist who has long been known for a very different field: Astrophysics.

When he isn't studying the sun or distant pulsars, Stanford emeritus physicist Peter Sturrock reads and writes poetry, which he said got him interested in the so-called authorship question. In short, there's a school of thought that holds the person who wrote Shakespeare's poems and plays was not a guy named William from Stratford-upon-Avon, but rather some other famous writer using a pen name. Sturrock (and a few others) think the real writer of works like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Coriolanus" (that's the grain-hoarding one) could really be Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Sturrock, 88, started thinking about this when he wrote his memoir, "A Tale of Two Sciences," in 2009, he said in an interview. "I have very wide interests," he said.

He remembered that in his early 20s, he used to compose poetry, but the only poem he could remember was a parody of a Shakespeare sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"

"That got me interested in the Shakespeare science, and I read the whole series of sonnets. It was obvious to me there was a life story in those sonnets, and furthermore, it's very hard to fit that story in the sonnets in with the gentleman from Stratford."

It's true that very little is known about Shakespeare's private life, leading to speculation about his sexuality, identity, Catholicism and other known unknowns. But the mysterious writer has been dead for almost 400 years (2013 is the 400th anniversary of his retirement, incidentally) and there's really no way to find out. In the absence of evidence, how do you know the truth?

Sturrock turned to statistics, and specifically a method called Bayesian statistical analysis. This technique can provide answers based both on relevant evidence or data, and on pure theory. In other words, probabilities change based on the information you have, and what you think you know. He developed this particular method while studying pulsars 40 years ago.

When pulsars were discovered in 1967, astrophysicists were initially unsure whether they were rotating neutron stars or pulsating white dwarfs. Sturrock essentially made lists of each star's attributes, noting certain facts he could use to distinguish them. For instance, does the spin rate of a pulsar speed up or slow down? What's the probability that a white dwarf would do that? Or a neutron star? (It was later established that pulsars are rotating neutron stars, by the way.)

"I realized it was important to separate the evaluation of evidence from the evaluation of theories," Sturrock recalled, "so what I have is a way of assigning weights, or probabilities, based on your evidence and based on your hypotheses. You come out of that with probabilities for hypotheses. And I realized it was quite general. You can reapply it to anything."

Even Shakespeare, as he does in his new book, "AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question." You can find it on Amazon.

The book is written as a conversation among four fictional characters, who each voice a perspective on 25 pieces of evidence. Each chapter has a blank section where you can write down your own thoughts, and then you can plug them into a website Sturrock created, which will churn out probabilistic graphs showing the strength of each argument.

The idea stemmed from Sturrock's reading of a book called "Shakespeare's Unauthorized Biography," which contained a chart of a dozen or so key attributes the real William Shakespeare had, contrasted with attributes you'd expect any author to have. Sturrock realized that meant he could approach the question statistically.

"You can start with some bias if you want, and some odds on so and so. You don't have to, but this is a way of having options to decide between," he said. "It's a way to organize your thinking."

He contrasts this approach with other books on this subject, which are structured more like legal briefs: Present an argument, find facts that support the case, and present them as convincingly as possible, while attacking facts other people have put forth.

As one of the characters in the book notes, whether or not William Shakespeare himself is actually responsible for his oeuvre doesn't change a word in it. And it wouldn't change the influence those words have had on English language, culture and history. Does not--as a writer once said--a rose by any other name smell as sweet? In the end, does it really matter?

"It does to me," said Sturrock, who is British. "It's been a travesty of justice, to not give credit where credit is due. It's dreadful."

You can go here to find out more about the book and come up with your own answers.

We've been expecting this announcement since February, and today it looks like it's happening: President Obama has announced an ambitious plan to map the circuitry of the human brain. Kicking off with $100 million in 2014, a coalition of scientists will research ways to improve brain-related tech and sketch the interactions of brain cells.

A senior administration scientist told the New York Times that it's similar to the Human Genome Project, but the goals might be a little more nebulous: there's no specific endpoint, but with a map of the brain, scientists could better understand diseases of the brain and, maybe, find treatments.

But first they have to develop the technology to make it happen. The NIH will be working out the details--like goals and budgets--for the project. DARPA and the National Science Foundation will be involved with the project, too, while university scientists are also working on the initiative, called Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or just Brain.

In an online chat about the project, DARPA Head Arati Prabhakar explained that the military tech wing wanted in on the project to explore potential treatments for soldiers suffering psychological damage after returning from service.

NIH Director Francis Collins, meanwhile, assuaged fears that the project might cause "brain drain" by diverting money away from other projects. Collins said the project would only be funded by a small fraction of the NIH's funding, along with donations and investments from other institutes.

Collins also drove home comparisons to the Human Genome Project. Like that initiative, the data retrieved from the project, after being thoroughly tested, will become immediately available on the internet for other scientists to use. Also similarly, an ethics panel has been appointed that will work to determine the implications of the research.

The Times reports on both the enthusiasm and skepticism behind the project. On the one hand: Great! A nationally funded science project exploring an important topic we still don't completely understand. On the other hand: Should we be trying to make this happen before we have the technology to do it?

This is a long-term project, so we'll have to wait a while still to see who was right, and what discoveries come out of it.

[New York Times]

Astronomers have spotted a black hole wake up from a decades-long nap to munch on a small passing object, maybe a brown dwarf or a super-Jupiter. For astronomers, it's a preview of a similar feeding event that will happen later this year in our own galaxy.

The black hole in this new example is in the galaxy NGC 4845, located 47 million light years away. It's about 300,000 solar masses, so a decent-sized black hole. Astronomers weren't even looking for it--they were using the European Space Agency's Integral satellite to look at a different galaxy, and noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from this one, which is normally pretty quiet. They checked it with the Swift satellite, an International Space Station X-ray monitor, and the XMM-Newton black hole hunter, and noticed the galaxy had brightened by a factor of 1,000 in January 2011.

"The observation was completely unexpected, from a galaxy that has been quiet for at least 20-30 years," said Marek Nikolajuk of the University of Bialystok, Poland, lead author of a new paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

They determined the X-ray emission came from a halo around the black hole, as it shredded an object about 14 to 30 times the size of Jupiter. It might have been a small brown dwarf, a failed star not big enough to fuse hydrogen, or it could have been a huge Jupiter-like gas planet. Whatever it was, it's not anymore, having been torn apart by the black hole.

Incidentally, this serves as a sort of preview for a similar event that will happen in our own neighborhood this year. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is about to swallow a passing gas cloud.

Astronomers hope to get a glimpse of the action with optical and radio telescopes, especially the newly inaugurated Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. ALMA, an installation of 66 radio antennae in the Chilean Andes, can detect the faintest whispers of material in our universe. It would be able to see the gas spinning around the black hole and falling in.

Scientists think the gas snack will happen later this year, explained Paul Ho, an astronomer at the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. I met him at the ALMA inauguration, and he told a group of space journalists about his proposal to watch the action with the giant radio array.

"People have been working the optical, and they can trace the motion. You can actually see stars moving around the center of the black hole system in the Milky Way, and in their measurement of the stars, they notice a blob of gas which is moving," he said. "They track it in time, and they see it heading toward the center, so they can track what the orbit looks like. We are very excited about that; we can see it."

Stay tuned--that should be pretty spectacular.

Today's industrial robots have incredible dexterity to match their brute strength, and can actually learn on the job. And then there's an entirely new breed of robots-some in humanoid form, and others that take highly practical forms all their own-that can walk, talk, save lives, and perform critical jobs in extreme environments, or simply take care of mundane tasks at home while we're out enjoying our lives.

From healthcare and homecare, to military use and emergency response, robots are fast becoming a fixture in our lives. A number of T. Rowe Price's analysts are closely following their every move, and one of them spoke recently about the latest innovations and opportunities in robotics, as well as where we might see them making an impact next.

For years now, robots have worked tirelessly in the shadows to increase or enhance the productivity of humans. Until recently, however, the futuristic, sci-fi-inspired vision of robotic technology has largely remained disconnected from the glamourless utilitarian role it's played in manufacturing. But robotic technology has now advanced to the point where we're truly starting to see it move into many new areas of the economy.

THE TWO PHASES OF ROBOTICS

The evolution of robotics can be divided roughly into two phases. In the first phase, we saw electric machines that were programmed to perform specific tasks but otherwise didn't really interact with the real world, such as those we've seen in automotive manufacturing for years. Japanese companies were early to market with the industrial robots used in many areas today, including auto manufacturing, distribution centers, foundries, pharmaceutical packaging, and many others.

There's a publicly traded Japanese company called FANUC that actually has a fairly robust portfolio of industrial automation robots. Their blade profiling systems, for instance, are used to finely sharpen and finish critical metal parts for gas turbines used by aerospace and energy manufacturers. Some of their other systems are used on a production line to hold, move, and precisely place extremely heavy objects with the same delicate care and relative ease that a person might use to put a carton of eggs into the refrigerator.

Industrial robots have progressively become more and more sophisticated. But the potential for much broader industrial and consumer acceptance is tied to the development and advances occurring in the second phase of the robotics evolution, which we're in the early days of right now. These robots aren't simply programmed to perform repetitive tasks-they can absorb data, recognize objects, and respond to information and objects in their environment with greater accuracy.

The Japanese were leaders and early adopters when it came to industrial robotics, but now we're seeing more activity and innovation coming from companies in the U.S. and Europe as well. And we expect robotics to eventually touch every industry and evolve into a truly global opportunity with a worldwide landscape of players over time.

ROBOTS ARE MODERNIZING HEALTHCARE

One great thing about robotics is that when you are aware of it, you know that it's improving your life. Cultural acceptance is really key here, and our ability to touch and interact with the robots is important. There are a number of areas in the global economy where people might actually be surprised to learn about the participation of robots.

For example, people have talked about the concept of self-driving cars for decades. If you happen to drive anywhere near San Francisco, you'll probably end up driving next to one made by Google; I have, several times. When you see one, you know what you're looking at, but I don't think that anyone expected to be commuting alongside self-driving cars in a public corridor so soon- and yet we are. And of course there is iRobot's Roomba home robot vacuum cleaner, which has now sold more than 7 million units in over 50 countries worldwide. There is even a neat start-up company called Romotive that has developed a small, mobile robotic platform that uses your iPhone as its "brain."

There are many ways that robots are increasingly being used to modernize healthcare and related services. Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci surgical robots are used by doctors in the U.S. as the standard of care to perform minimally invasive prostatectomies. They're also used here, and to a lesser extent around the world, to perform hysterectomies, lung surgery, and certain cardiac, ear, nose, and throat procedures, too.

Another great example comes from iRobot, a company whose RP-VITA clinical remote presence robot utilizes a mounted iPad to allow offsite specialists to interact with patients and administer care. This platform enables doctors and practitioners to administer more personalized services than would be available through the web or stand-alone kiosks. Eventually these robots might make their way into patients' own homes, or other locations like elderly care facilities, just as robotic home vacuum cleaners and floor washing units are today.

MILITARY AND PUBLIC SAFETY ARE BURGEONING MARKETS
One sector that has significantly increased its adoption of robotics is the military, where they've essentially gone from zero ground robots in 2002 to over 5,000 ground robots today. The expectation is that over time robots will be used more and more for reconnaissance, battlefield support, and sentry duty. This is in addition to the tasks commonly associated with them now, such as the detection and disposal of explosive devices, or radar tracking and missile defense. These robots will be fully autonomous, enable remote awareness, and be capable of going places, determining what's happening in their environment, and transmitting information about it as needed. There's every expectation that they will operate close to military personnel in the field and act as a force multiplier.

Similarly, we expect to see robots make an impact in the public safety area. The adoption of modern information technology within the first responder community has been lagging behind other segments, but with the FirstNet initiative (a single, nationwide interoperable public safety broadband network being built and operated to help police, firefighters, emergency medical service professionals and other public safety officials perform their jobs and stay safe) becoming viable, there are a number of robotics companies-established firms and startups-ready to provide robotic products that can help make a difference.

For instance, there are several companies pursuing the concept of quadrocopters to be used in emergency response situations for military and commercial applications. These are unmanned, remote-controlled flying drones that can serve as reconnaissance tools to provide real-time assessments and monitor dangerous situations. Another similar idea is iRobot's throwable surveillance robot concept. Imagine a five-pound robot with cameras and sensors that emergency personnel can literally toss into a burning building or a hostage situation and, through the use of a tablet, immediately have on-the-ground situational awareness and two-way communications capabilities with people on site, without putting lives at risk.

INNOVATION MUST BE BALANCED AGAINST SCALE AND PROFITABILITY

The development of robots is a multi-disciplinary exercise, which is why you tend to see a lot of the real cutting-edge innovation come out of academia-academic researchers aren't held captive by the need to generate profitable growth, and they aren't subject to conference calls around quarterly earnings. One such academic program that comes to mind is the University of Pennsylvania's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, where they are doing some really interesting work on autonomous quadrocopters that utilize a control system and sensors to fly indoors as well as outdoors.

People in academia can come up with incredibly innovative robots that look really neat, but the challenge is to take an innovative idea and turn it into a physical product that can be manufactured for profit. It is very difficult, however, to bring an innovative concept to market, protect the intellectual property, create a distribution model, build a brand, identify customers, and find the right price point based on the market.

As a firm, we own iRobot and have followed the company for quite some time. They're a "rule breaker" in the robotics space, having scaled into a half-billion dollar revenue business-a good amount of that is driven by sales of home robots, like their vacuum-cleaning Roomba and floor-cleaning Scooba robots, and is complimented by sales of unmanned ground robots to the defense and security sectors.

One thing we like about their approach is that they apply the necessary financial rigor to the markets in the projects they pursue while remaining innovative. One project they previously worked on (but ceased because it was difficult to make the numbers work) was a robotic sea turtle, called the Transphibian. It had fins that enabled it to swim and maneuver in both shallow and deep water, and even crawl along the bottom of the ocean. They have also worked on "robot slime" for the government, which mechanically oozes like actual slime mold as it climbs up walls and across ceilings, and also on robots that have a softer, human-like grip…much softer than, say, the robots on the manufacturing line.

I think we will see much broader acceptance of robots when concepts evolve from being neat prototype ideas to real products that make a profound impact in people's lives. These will be robots that help us do things better, faster, and with greater knowledge about the world around us. Ironically, they might even help us improve relationships we have with other people in remote locations, making us more human in the process.

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Bio: Rhett K. Hunter is a vice president of T. Rowe Price Group, Inc., and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., a research analyst in the U.S. Equity Division, a vice president and Investment Advisory Committee member of the Global Technology Fund, Science & Technology Fund, and New Horizons Fund. Hunter received a B.A. in economics and Asian studies at Bowdoin College and an M.B.A. from MIT's Sloan School of Management. He covers technology as a small-cap generalist.

Disclaimer: All funds are subject to market risk, including possible loss of principal. Funds that invest in a single sector are subject to greater volatility than those with a broader investment mandate. Investing in small companies is generally carries more risk than investing in larger companies. Funds investing overseas are subject to additional risks, including currency risk and geographic risk.

Google represented 4.88% of the T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth Fund, 1.64% of the T. Rowe Price Growth & Income Fund, 4.94% of the T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund, 4.26% of the T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund, 5.50% of the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund as of December 31, 2012; it was not held by the T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Fund or the T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund as of December 31, 2012. Intuitive Surgical represented 0.34% of the T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Fund and 0.04% of the T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth Fund as of December 31, 2012; it was not held by the T. Rowe Price Growth & Income Fund, T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund, T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund, T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund, or T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund as of December 31, 2012. Fanuc represented 0.13% of the T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund as of December 31, 2012; it was not held by the T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth Fund, T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund, T. Rowe Price Growth & Income Fund, T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund, T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund, or T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund as of December 31, 2012. iRobot was not held by the T. Rowe Price Blue Chip Growth Fund, the T. Rowe Price Global Technology Fund, the T. Rowe Price Growth & Income Fund, the T. Rowe Price Health Sciences Fund, the T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund or the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund as of December 31, 2012.
The funds' portfolio holdings are historical and subject to change. This material should not be deemed a recommendation to buy or sell any of the securities mentioned.

T. Rowe Price Investment Services, Inc., distributor

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Beyoncé owns all likenesses of herself, and there are probably way more of those than you realize-because since 2005, she's had a "visual director" shoot her waking life for up to 16 hours a day, GQ reported.

That footage, along with digital files of interviews she's given, videos of her shows, a video diary she's kept and nearly every photo of her, all live in a long, narrow temperature-controlled room in her office suite in mid-town New York. A U.S. Library of Congress blogger called out GQ for not naming the digital archivist who must keep all of those things in order. It will take several months just to label, date and cross-reference Beyoncé's digital library of herself, GQ reported.

Curious about what it takes to be this unnamed archivist? The Library Journal found the original job posting for the position in January, soon after the GQ profile came out.

Beyoncé isn't the only famous person to have a digital archive. In 2010, author Salman Rushdie bequeathed his old computers to Emory University in an update to the old practice of giving authors' paper drafts and letters to archives. Visitors to the Rushdie archive can see his emails, web search histories and, of course, .doc drafts of his novels.

At the time, the storage of digital files from laptops, CDs and floppy disks (John Updike's, at Harvard University) required charting new ground in archiving. Now the field is spreading, evidently even to pop celebrities.

[GQ via the Library of Congress]

Baidu, the kind of bizarro Chinese Google, is rumored to be working on a take on Google's latest creation, Google Glass. According to ChinaDaily, Baidu's "Eye" project will include "an LCD display, voice-controlled image recognition and bone-sensing," will respond to voice and gesture, and would sync with a smartphone to accomplish certain tasks, like making phone calls. It's Glass, in other words.

Like Google, Baidu has a huge majority of the search market in its native country, from which it derives most of its income. Baidu also has a maps service, a news frontpage, local search, a social network, an online encyclopedia, a web browser (that looks pretty much exactly like Google Chrome), a cloud documents service, and a smartphone operating system (which is based on Google's Android). All ripoffs of Google (or Facebook, or Wikipedia), but all okay. On the other hand, Baidu is also notorious for censoring anything the Chinese government wants, has been caught up in bribery scandals, and offers convenient ways to search for pirated music and videos. It's Dark Google.

Baidu is said to be talking to Qualcomm, makers of some of the best mobile internals (processors, that kind of thing) on the market, and Foxconn, known for assembling Apple's iPhones and iPads, for the creation of the Eye. Baidu has yet to comment, but we're curious to see how the alterna-Glass develops.

[via ChinaDaily]

They slip through the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's "Do Not Call" registry, and indeed through federal law. They fool you with that pause after "Hello," so that they sound, for a moment, like there's a real person on the other end of the line. They mostly sell fraudulent goods and services, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

They're automated phone blasts, they're illegal in the U.S., and now the commission has announced a few winning ideas for automatically sensing them and routing them away from your phone. The ideas come from a contest the commission hosted for individuals to send in ideas for technologically blocking robocalls. (The commission works on legally blocking robocalls via lawsuits, commission acting director of consumer protection Chuck Harwood said during a press conference today.)

The Federal Trade Commission gets 200,000 complaints about robo-calls a month, Harwood said. "More than we get on any other subject. Consumers are clearly fed up," he said.

The contest's winning ideas got some money-$25,000 each for winners Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss-and some publicity. After that, it's up to the inventors and companies to contact each other to try to bring these ideas to market, Harwood said.

Check out the solutions below:

Nomorobo
Aaron Foss came up with the Nomorobo system, which intercepts incoming calls before they reach people's phones. Nomorobo then determines whether the caller is an illegal robot before deciding whether the let the call through. The system compares incomings numbers with whitelists and blacklists the Federal Trade Commission maintains. The determination even works when a blacklisted robocaller uses caller ID spoofing to make it appear as if the call is coming from a non-blacklisted number, according to a video Foss made for the contest.

Numbers that aren't on a blacklist, but seem to have robocall-like behaviors, go through an audio CAPTCHA. Nomorobo wouldn't require people to buy any new hardware and works for cellphones as well as landlines.

More robocall filtering
Serdar Danis' solution works similarly to Foss'. It also filters calls using whitelists and blacklists, detects caller ID spoofing and sends questionable calls through an audio CAPTCHA.

Crowd-sourced blocking
Google employees Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson submitted an idea that won the Federal Trade Commission's technology achievement prize, but wasn't eligible for a monetary reward because it came from a company. In the Google solution, people who get robocalled can report the number to a database that then learns that number is fraudulent and blocks it in the future.

Playing dead
For those who don't want to wait for contest ideas to turn into real services, the Federal Trade Commission's contest also drew a lot of entries from people who didn't exactly have a technological solution, but wanted to share what they do now to reduce the number of calls they get. Some people played to robocallers that three-tone "doo-doo-doo" sound that indicates a disconnected phone numbers, fooling the callers into never calling again. The commission collected the tips in a video.

Using nuclear power for energy instead of coal has prevented almost 2 million pollution-related deaths around the world, and could save millions more lives in the future, according to a new paper. It's the latest publication from James Hansen, NASA's fiery climate change scientist, who is retiring on Wednesday after 46 years with the space agency.

The paper argues that policymakers should increase nuclear power, rather than continuing dependence on fossil fuels. The 2011 disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant should not deter governments from expanding nuclear power, according to Hansen and its lead author, Pushker A. Kharecha of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute. On the contrary, nuclear power will prevent further deaths from air pollution, they argue.

Even taking the disaster at Fukushima into account, they calculate that global nuclear power has prevented about 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths since 1971, and will prevent another 420,000 to 7 million deaths by the middle of this century. (The death range depends on which fuel nuclear power will be replacing.) Nuclear power has already prevented 64 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions, and would prevent the equivalent of another 80 to 240 gigatons, again depending on which fuel it replaces.

The paper does acknowledge the serious health and environmental concerns related to storage of nuclear waste. But the main point is that nuclear power is cleaner and greener than sources that belch carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The study has some limitations, stemming from assumptions about future coal use, but the authors think they were actually being conservative: "Our results for both avoided GHG emissions and avoided mortality could be substantial underestimates," they write.

The paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, and it comes in the same week that Hansen, 72, said he will retire. He is a widely respected climate researcher, but in the past several years has become much more than a scientist, becoming involved in climate protests and even getting himself arrested a few times. He unapologetically beats the drum for human-caused climate change and its current effects. Even climate scientists have said he can be alarmist, and he has rankled environmental groups with his support for nuclear power.

He has done so while on vacation from his NASA gig so there would be no conflicts, but he also became a flash point for the agency and for climate science in general. Memorably, during the Bush administration a political appointee tried to silence him, but he took the issue public and the White House backed down.

With his departure from NASA, the climate research community loses one of its most vocal members, and the climate-denialists lose one of their favorite punching bags. But Hansen told the New York Times he plans to continue his activism after he retires, including taking on the federal government in lawsuits. "As a government employee, you can't testify against the government," he told the Times.

Stereo photogrammetry is a process used to determine the strain on a certain structure, which is why it was used to investigate the causes of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. But NASA engineers--including one who worked on that investigation--are looking into using it to determine how and why trees fall.

If you can gather and analyze data about how trees stress and break in a hurricane or snowstorm, you might be able to determine the best ways to stop that from happening. NASA Glenn engineer Matt Melis joined forces with Cleveland arborist Mark Hoenigman, and used stereo photogrammetry to examine the trees. In a statement, Melis explained it like this:

By painting a pattern of black and white dots on the trees, the software could pick up on the minute ways a tree breaks apart as it fails when pulled by a winch. Through more tests at the Morton Arboretum near Chicago, the researchers were able to determine that knots in trunks were structural weak points in trees, and they also plotted how the ground was deformed when a tree was knocked over.

NASA says a consulting firm has approached the researchers since then, looking to see if they'll examine branch structures to find ways of fighting against extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy.

[NASA]

These are some monocytes-a type of white blood cell in the immune system-that lived on the International Space Station.

The cells were grown in an incubator with simulated gravity. They've been colored with antibodies so scientists can easily spot specific proteins in them.

Scientists from Italy and Germany have been studying how these monocytes move, and found that the space-grown monocytes have altered cytoskeletons, which reduced their motility. That change may partly explain astronauts' weakened immune systems, the European Space Agency reports.

It's amazing how frustrating it can be to drive in L.A. Superhighways are jam-packed, cars crawl along in the worst rush hour of your life even though it's only 2 p.m., and yet no one rides the scary subway. Last summer, it took me two solid hours to travel 28 miles--and that was on the highway, following a route Google said should take maybe 35 minutes.

L.A. officials are trying to do better, however, and they recently finished a decades-long project to synchronize all of its traffic lights.

It took city planners 30 years to build up the system, at a cost of more than $400 million, but L.A.'s Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system is unique in its size and scope. The New York Times reviews its highlights:

It automatically adjusts to account for issues at individual intersections, and it changes light timing to accommodate buses if they're running behind. Without the system, it takes 20 minutes on average to drive 5 miles in L.A. With the system, that drops to 17.2 minutes, according to the NYT.

It's more difficult than you might think to manage all of this. Every car, every lane and every intersection is a data point with ever-changing variables, making it a tough programming problem. L.A. developed its own software, but other cities are working with companies like IBM, which is helping Boston mine its traffic data. IBM is also developing software that can predict what drivers will do based on their driving patterns, and aggregating that information into network-wide predictions that can forecast traffic like you might forecast the weather.

Eventually, networks of connected cars will synchronize with each other as well as the lights. And they will even keep tabs on your habits to predict whether you'll contribute to gridlock: Honda, for instance, is developing technology that can warn drivers if they're likely to cause congestion, and Ford is working on in-car apps that can re-route drivers around smoggy, congested spots.

In the end, though, there's not much anyone can really do about traffic. There are only so many miles of road, and more and more cars are using it. Reducing travel times might only encourage more people to drive--they will think, "Hey, it's not so bad," and more of them will drive, and it will be bad again. Easing congestion, in L.A. or elsewhere, really needs dramatic changes to infrastructure or the way we live and work.

China's version of Google has 580 million users. It makes, according to some surveys, around 50 percent of all the junk in your home. When an American company chooses to make something actually in America? It's news. Because that stuff is usually made in China.

Yet according to a survey from HD Trade Services, a whopping 94 percent of Americans surveyed (about 1,500, surveyed online) could not name a single Chinese brand name. Online surveys aren't exactly the most accurate, but that stat rings true: how many can you actually name?

There are lots of reasons for this. One is that even though many Chinese brands rank among the most successful in the world, they tend to stay within their home country. Being fairly new to the world manufacturing scene, many of these brands either cater specifically to China (like China Telecom, Bank of China, and China Life Insurance) or are fairly new and still getting their feet under them (like ZTE and Huawei, both consumer electronics companies).

The more obvious problem is that by American standards--and we're saying "American" here rather than "non-Chinese" because the survey focused on Americans--Chinese goods are often kind of crappy. Brands like Haier, Tencent, Hisense, and Huawei have major presences at, for example, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I've been going for years, and the only thing I remember about any of those brands is that a couple years ago, Haier had a Kinect ripoff which was more broken than most of the Kinect ripoffs I saw that year. These brands are enthusiastic, but, as The Verge nicely wrote here, haven't quite figured out the American market, both in terms of products and marketing.

The one Chinese brand that anyone who reads PopSci should know, the one that makes some of the best computers out there, is Lenovo. Lenovo's made a hell of a run after purchasing IBM's consumer products wing, but I suspect many don't realize that they're Chinese now. After all, it's still a ThinkPad, right?

Solar panels make energy, but they take energy to make, too. And, until about 2010 or so, the solar panel industry used more electricity than it produced, according to a new analysis. Now, the industry is set to "pay back" the energy it used by 2020.

The study looked at what went into building and installing solar panels all over the world, including everything from home installations to solar farms, says Michael Dale, a climate and energy researcher at Stanford University, in a Stanford-produced video. He and a senior scientist, Sally Benson, thought that because the solar panel industry was growing so quickly, it might actually be using more electricity than it produced. Instead, they found an industry at a crux.

"I think that this paper shows that actually the industry is making positive strides and it's even in spite of its fantastically fast growth rates, it's still producing, or it's just about to start producing, a net energy benefit to society," Dale said.

Most solar panels manufacturers now consume lots of electricity, usually pulled from coal or other fossil fuel-burning plants. Stanford News pointed to the example of melting silica rock to obtain the silicon used in most panels. The melting requires electricity to fire ovens to a temperature of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Solar panels' energy balance is now tipping, however, because newer technologies reduce that electricity consumption. For example, some newer panels require less silicon, or waste less material in the manufacturing process. Researchers are also looking to replace silicon with more abundant elements, such as copper, zinc, tin and carbon.

Dale and Benson published their full analysis in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

[Stanford News via the Verge]

Computers grow up so fast these days. The Roadrunner supercomputer, once the fastest computer in the world and the pride of Los Alamos, had a rich and full life. Born in 2008, it broke the Petaflop barrier, paved the way for hybrid supercomputers, and this weekend retired at the ancient age of five.

It turns out Moore's Law, which roughly predicts a doubling of computer power every two years, is especially harsh on the computers at the cutting edge. Within a year, a new supercomputer named Jaguar (sadly, not Coyote) had stolen Roadrunner's title as the fastest machine on the planet. Since then, Jaguar was unseated by Tianhe-1A, a Chinese supercomputer, which in turn fell before the might of Japan's K Supercomputer. Turns out the petaflop speed record game is cutthroat.

Records are cool, but what's cooler is the work Roadrunner did after breaking them. Not a machine to rest on its laurels, Roadrunner researched nanowires, magnets, laser backscatter, HIV, and ran a "simulation of the universe at a 70-billion-particle scale." Awesome as all that research is, for Roadrunner it was more of a hobby and a side-project.

As a Los Alamos National Laboratory computer, Roadrunner's original purpose was nuclear weapons modeling and simulation to "assure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent." Los Alamos as a town really came into being for the Manhattan Project, and since then has served as one of America's top nuclear research sites for decades, benefiting from the Cold War, an incredibly well-educated populace, and for decades an awesome cross-party Senatorial tag-team that ensured constant funding and evolution of the lab's purpose.

Though Roadrunner's main work is over, Los Alamos researchers plan to spend a month with the decommissioned machine testing memory comprehension techniques in supercomputers-something they could never do while the computer was operational.

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Right in Earth's neighborhood, space is positively bubbling with high-energy antimatter particles--a lot more than can be explained. These excess positrons--mirror opposites of negatively charged electrons--just might be signals of dark matter.

They might not be, though, and right now scientists are not sure. But the news of excess positrons is still good news from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, one of the largest and most expensive physics experiments in history. From its post on the International Space Station, flying some 220 miles above Earth, the AMS could be on the verge of helping cosmologists explain what dark matter is made of.

Right now, the best news that the $2(ish) billion AMS works, and that it's settled the question of whether there really is an excess of these positrons. Its first results were announced in a seminar at CERN, near Geneva. Samuel Ting, its 77-year-old investigator and the main reason AMS exists, is publishing the data explaining these "new physical phenomena" in Physical Review Letters.

"This experiment is the first to probe in detail the nature of this excess. We have observed many new phenomenon, and soon, the origin of it will be understood," he told the seminar.

Since it was perched on the ISS in May 2011, delivered by space shuttle Endeavour, the AMS has spotted 30 billion cosmic rays. It has been weighing the ratio of positrons to regular electrons, which could be a way to detect dark matter. Lots of high-energy electrons are expected--those are the same cosmic rays bombarding Earth and the rest of the solar system from exploding stars and other sources. Positrons are more rare, though. Yet as AMS goes up the scale of cosmic ray energies, more and more positrons show up.

Previous experiments saw a similar excess, but couldn't prove it for sure, and couldn't prove what it meant. One was called Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) and the other is NASA's Fermi telescope, which measures gamma rays. Now that AMS has verified the excess, that means scientists could be on the right track.

"Theorists will have a good time to play around with this data," Ting told his colleagues at CERN.

Dark matter tracers?

Physicists think dark matter could consist of something called WIMPs, which stands for weakly interacting massive particles. When two WIMPs bump into each other, they destroy each other, and the result is an electron-positron pair. The mass of those particles is related to the size of the WIMP in question. That's also related to its energy. So seeing positrons around a certain energy range might, might be a sign of these dark matter annihilations, and a telltale sign of its presence in our local section of the universe.

The problem is, positrons can come from other sources, too. Pulsars can spew them as they whip around in super-fast rotation. So seeing extra positrons is not necessarily a eureka moment for dark matter hunters.

AMS may provide insights into other mysteries of matter, too. From a mathematical point of view, nothing should exist, because matter and antimatter should have zeroed out after the Big Bang. They didn't, and now everything in the universe exists--but why? The AMS can detect exotic particles, from neutralinos to strangelets, that could help answer these questions.

Ting has spent decades fighting to build AMS and get it into orbit. It was almost scuttled after the 2003 Columbia disaster, but he lobbied Congress to require NASA to launch it. In his PowerPoint presentation, he showed photos of lawmakers including former Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Nebraska, touring the detector's construction facilities. His paper acknowledges several members of Congress.

The instrument itself is a major achievement, with some of the most sensitive electronics and arguably the most precise instrumentation ever lofted to space. No one has ever really nailed down a price tag, but it cost somewhere between $1.2 and $2 billion. The 7-ton instrument works somewhat like the particle accelerators at CERN, with a cryogenically cooled permanent magnet that bends incoming particles. The way they bend reveals their charge and their nature. It is full of xenon and contains incredibly precisely aligned tubes--so much so that Ting verified their structure with medical equipment.

"I put them in the hospital, like a patient, and I gave them a CT scan," he said. "Remember, it took us nearly 18 years to produce these results."