Ball lightning is one of those phenomena that is more or less universally understood to be amazing when experienced anecdotally but potentially terrifying when experienced firsthand. These glowing, often grapefruit-sized orbs of blue, electric light seem to form spontaneously, sometimes inside people's homes or around airplanes generally only last for a few seconds and aren't well understood, as it's nearly impossible to empirically study them or create them because there is no broadly accepted explanation for how they originate.

But in a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres, researchers from Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Australia National University have put forth a mathematical theory that they think explains how ball lighting occurs and why it tends to occur where it does.

In it, the researchers propose that ball lightning isn't the result of microwave radiation, antimatter, or slowly burning particles of silicon leftover form lightning strikes (all of which have been theorized as the source of the phenomenon), but of leftover ions that accumulating and interacting with electric fields, often across some kind of dividing plane like a pane of glass (explaining why eyewitness accounts have sometimes described these glowing orbs as passing through glass.

Essentially, the paper theorizes that streams of ions--electrically charged particles--leftover from normal lightning strikes or some other source like aircraft radars (which also explains why the phenomenon has been associated with flying aircraft) accumulate on some thin planar surface like a glass window, creating an electric field on the other side. This field excites air molecules around it an in extreme cases cause a ball discharge--which can dissipate harmlessly or burst with some (terrifying) force.

The important thing about this paper is that it is a mathematical solution employing generally accepted equations for the movement of ions and electrons and such, so the theory should be testable. Moreover, it also jives with the empirical evidence, like ball lightning passing through glass or forming on or near the nose of airplanes.

[CSIRO]

A husband-and-wife team has taken home the first Gehry Prize from the Southern California Institute of Architecture for exceptional thesis projects (named for the architect Frank) not for a particular architectural design but for creating a unique method of 3-D printing that allows the user to alter the design in progress, creating a physical model of streaming information.

Conventional 3-D printing generally works by precisely depositing thin layers of heated, extruded plastic or resin one atop the other based on a 3-D digital model of the desired object. Another kind of additive manufacturing, known as stereolithography, builds objects using light-sensitive resins and some kind of light source (a laser, a UV projector, etc.) that precisely cures the liquid resin into a solid (generally creating objects from the top down rather than the bottom up). Liz and Kyle von Hasseln's project, known as Phantom Geometry, is of the latter mode, but its also executed on a huge scale. And where most printers stick firmly to a digital 3-D model of the desired object, Phantom Geometry allows the user to print outside the specifications of a given 3-D model. As a printed product emerges, the designer can alter the design in-progress, in turn altering the downstream architecture of the printed product.

The system is comprised of a UV light projector, a special photo-sensitive resin, and precision-controlled robotic arms borrowed from SCI-Arc's Robot House. The projector is mounted on a robotic arm just below a shallow vat of resin that hardens when exposed to UV rays, much like the stuff dentists use to create molds of patients' teeth. The projector can beam UV rays up into the bottom of the transparent vat in any shape or form the programmer desires. Layer by layer this hardens the resin, fixing each new layer to the previous one. Leftover liquid resin continues to flood into the print area to be cured with the next burst of light (this is perhaps better explained visually in the video below).

As a result, the finished product appears to be slowly extracted out of the vat, emerging as a series of eerily beautiful tendril-like structures that appear almost organic. And as with living things, the development of each object can be impacted by external influences--in this case, by a change in the stream of data inputs dictating the shape and design of each layer. In that light, you might think of Phantom Geometry as a classic case of technology and art teaming up to imitate life.

Phantom Geometry from Liz and Kyle von Hasseln on Vimeo.

[via Co.Design]

According to the news site RocketNews24, the Japanese company Chaku Perfume has "developed a new communication service in the way of an iPhone application and device called "Chat Perf," which can send smells across cyber space. Amazing!"

Yes! We think this sounds amazing, too! Wouldn't it be great to be able to share the scent of a bakery you just walked past with a friend hundreds of miles away? Or capture the smell of autumn? Or be like, "What is that smell? I'll share it with my friends; maybe they can tell me."

Except, Chat Perf is not quite going to make that possible. Based on the story's description, it seems that the new app is only capable of releasing, upon a remotely issued command, whatever odor has been stored in the smell tank attached to a person's phone. So, you could potentially purchase a bakery-scented smell tank, give it to a friend, travel hundreds of miles away, instruct your friend to plug their bakery smell tank in, and then "send" the smell to them through the Chat Perf app. Which is, frankly, probably not worth the effort.

Chaku Perfume may have anticipated that problem, because they provided RocketNews24 with a few ideas to get developers started:

Does anyone really want to smell the sweat of anyone while watching a concert? Chaku Perfume thinks someone might. Someone outside of Japan, according to the article: "Japan is a relatively odor-free culture...With this in mind, the Chat Perf might prove to be compatible with foreign markets."

Hm.

Despite our overall disappointment with the new app, it did get us thinking about what it would take to bring real, true, bona fide smellepresence to fruition:

First, researchers would have to develop a true electronic nose--one capable of analyzing odors in the same way that the human brain does. (Despite over thirty years of research, that achievement is still a long way off.) Assuming we're talking about a cell phone app, the electronic nose would have to be at least as small as our real human ones.

Next, the code for the odor would be transmitted from the user's electronic nose to the scent recipient's cell phone. This would be the easy part.

Finally, the scent recipient would need to be carrying a device containing--in an organized fashion--the 10,000 or so odor molecules that humans are capable of smelling. We're not even going to wager a guess as to the size of that contraption, but you can bet it would be clunkier than the clunkiest iphone device anyone's made yet.

In short, we're a long way off, and Chat Perf is a tiny first step.

Determining whether a brain-injured patient is conscious is fraught with moral and ethical complexity: What does it mean to be awake? What does it mean to be truly alive? Medically, it's an open question, as doctors have to determine whether a vegetative patient's responses to stimuli are reflexive or purposeful. Morally and legally, it's a minefield--remember Terri Schiavo? Despite the difficulties, neuroscientists in Europe are moving closer to an objective measure of consciousness.

We have seen several interesting tests and therapies over the years to assess locked-in and vegetative patients, and even to help them communicate. In one notable case, a man who was categorized as vegetative and unconscious responded to yes-or-no questions in the same manner as a fully alert person. Other studies show that EEG devices can be used to deduce an unconscious person's imagined actions by reading his or her brain activity. While these are promising, they're not generalizable--or at least no one has tried to make them into a generalizable consciousness test. Melanie Boly, a postdoc at the Belgian National Fund for Research in Liege, Belgium, is working on this, according to Nature News.

The team subjected a group of volunteers to a brief electromagnetic pulse via cranial electrodes, and watched the ripple of brain activity it produced. The pulse produced patterns of activity through the brains of 32 alert, healthy people. In asleep, healthy people, the pulse produced a shorter response, which stayed physically closer to the location of the pulse, Nature says. The varying brain activity was quantified according to its complexity, and Boly and her colleagues used this to up with a "response complexity" metric. Then they tried the same technique on a group of people who had been diagnosed as vegetative, minimally conscious or "locked-in." In the vegetative people, the pulses looked a lot like the sleeping-subject brain patterns. As the patients' levels of consciousness increased, so did the complexity of their brain responses.

The team says the response complexity index could help doctors trying to determine a patient's level of consciousness.

[Nature News]

The question of how and where life arose on Earth is a massively complex puzzle. The puzzle pieces themselves--the physical evidence of what really happened--have long since vanished. The best biologists can do is to try reconstructing what the pieces might have looked like, and how they might have fitted together. Every breakthrough in origin-of-life studies to date has been an important but very small step toward a convincing explanation of how it really happened. It may be that life is inevitable, given the right conditions, as Sagan thought. It may equally be that life is terribly, terribly unlikely to happen, even under the best of circumstances. The fact that life on Earth survives in so many harsh environments, moreover, doesn't prove that life arises easily. It proves only that that life can adapt like crazy after it arises.

If you're a pessimist, therefore, you might conclude that the search for extraterrestrial life might well prove to be fruitless. If you need further ammunition to bolster your pessimism, you might take a look at the book Rare Earth, published by paleontologist Peter Ward and astronomer Don Brownlee in 2000. The authors advance a series of arguments to suggest that while life might well be common in the Milky Way, the sort of advanced life we'd really love to find is very rare. Each argument by itself sounds pretty convincing; taken together, they appear at first to be devastating.

If Jupiter didn't exist, we would get 10,000 more comets smashing into Earth.

Take Jupiter, for example. If our biggest planet had spiraled in toward the Sun to become a hot Jupiter, it would probably have disrupted Earth's orbit. But if we had no Jupiter at all, that could be a problem as well. The reason, argue Ward and Brownlee, is that Jupiter shields the Earth from comet impacts. Comets originate from the outer solar system, and most of them stay there. When one does fall in toward the Sun, however, it's almost always flung away by Jupiter before it can get anywhere near Earth. The astronomer George Wetherill showed decades ago that if Jupiter didn't exist, we would get about ten thousand times more comets smashing into Earth than we do--not a good thing for the emergence and evolution of anything more advanced than bacteria.

Ward and Brownlee also point out that our Moon is much bigger in relation to Earth than any planet-moon pair in the solar system. It's so massive that its gravity helps stabilize the tilt of the Earth. Mars, whose moons are tiny, wobbles something like a spinning top that's close to falling over. Without the Moon, our planet would do the same, making the seasons highly unstable and making it hard for plants and animals to adapt.

And then there's plate tectonics, which recycles the Earth's crust back into the interior over hundreds of millions of years. That process also recycles carbon dioxide after it binds chemically to surface rocks, ensuring that the atmosphere doesn't undergo a runaway greenhouse effect, turning our planet into a hothouse like Venus. Of all the rocky bodies in the solar system, only Earth has plate tectonics, so it's probably rare in the universe. And then there's Earth's magnetic field, which protects us against energetic particles streaming in from the Sun or from deep space. And then... well, suffice it to say that Rare Earth makes a sobering read.

It does, that is, until you talk to Jim Kasting. "A lot of people read [Rare Earth] and believed it," he told me during a conversation at a Vietnamese restaurant in Seattle. "I think they sold a lot of copies because it was the anti-Carl Sagan. It appealed to people who didn't want to believe this whole line of stuff that Carl had been selling."

Discard the notion that life is confined to the surface of a planet, and you've suddenly got a lot more places to look.

One by one, Kasting addressed the arguments in Rare Earth and made it clear that he wasn't impressed. For example, he said, it's true that if you eliminated the Moon, Earth's tilt would wobble chaotically. But if Earth were spinning faster--if the day were twelve hours long rather than twenty-four--the chaos would go away. "So you have to ask," said Kasting, "How fast would the Earth be spinning if you didn't have the Moon? And that's complicated." In short, Ward and Brownlee raise a plausible argument, but hardly a definitive one.

It's also true, continued Kasting, that Jupiter protects Earth from comet impacts. But it actually raises the odds we'll be struck by asteroids. That's because the asteroid belt is just Sunward of Jupiter, so it's relatively easy for the giant planet to nudge a mountain-size chunk of rock into an Earth-crossing orbit. "It appears," Kasting writes in his 2010 book How to Find a Habitable Planet, where he devotes a full chapter to presenting counterarguments to Rare Earth, "that having a Jupiter-sized planet... is a mixed blessing."

As for plate tectonics, he said, Venus is the only other planet in our solar system besides Earth big enough to have them in the first place (a planet smaller than Venus would have cooled off by now, so it wouldn't have the semi-molten rock that allows continents to slide around). But Venus lacks the water it would need to lubricate the motion of crustal plates, which could be why, despite its adequate size, it doesn't have plate tectonics. Out of two planets that might have plate tectonics, one of them does, and Kasting sees no reason at all to assume that Venus is somehow typical of exoplanets while Earth isn't.

There's probably life all over the place.

The bottom line, he said, is that "there are a lot of things that we don't know, so we make conjectures. Ultimately, if we can do TPF and follow up with post-TPF missions, we'll figure out what happens, and where." "I'm an optimist," he admitted. "I agree with Carl Sagan. I think there's probably life all over the place, and there are probably other intelligent beings. I'm just not as good at speculating as he was."

There's another reason you might lean in the direction of optimism. The concept of the habitable zone applies if you're assuming life is confined to the surface of a planet. If you discard that assumption and consider places where conditions are favorable beneath the surface, you've suddenly got a lot more places to look. In our own solar system, Earth has the only habitable surface, but planetary scientists think the Martian subsurface might be habitable as well. In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most capable rover toward Mars, where the six-wheeled, SUV-size Curiosity will, among other things, drill into the Martian soil to look for organic chemicals (but not, on this mission, for life itself).

The right conditions for life could also exist on even more exotic worlds. Astronomers have known for years that Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus both have subsurface water. The energy to keep the former from freezing solid right down to the core comes from tidal squeezing, as it orbits through the powerful gravitational field of Jupiter; Enceladus's heat source is a mystery. More recently, theorists have suggested that even Pluto might harbor liquid water, one hundred miles or so beneath its icy surface--the heat in this case coming from the decay of radioactive potassium. As for complex carbon molecules, they're abundant in the bodies of both comets and asteroids, which have been crashing into the moons and the outer planets for billions of years.

Yet another plausible reason for optimism arises from the fact that the universe is under no obligation to follow the "life as we know it" rule. Carbon is abundant in the Milky Way and combines easily with other atoms to form the elaborate organic molecules that underlie all of terrestrial biology. Water is abundant as well, and acts as a versatile solvent. So it's not absurd to think that carbon-based life might be universal, and is exactly what astrobiologists should be looking for.

Excerpted with permission from Mirror Earth: The Search for Our Planet's Twin (Walker & Company) out today. Michael D. Lemonick is a senior writer at Climate Central, Inc. and a former staff writer for Time. Mirror Earth is his fifth book. Buy it here.

In 1994, Avner Ronen was in the Israeli Defense Forces, stationed, he says, at the first place in the IDF with an internet-connected computer. Somebody there showed him some nudie pics, doubtlessly downloaded with painful slowness, but nudie pics. "I immediately saw the potential of the internet," Ronen told me, with about as much of a grin as I ever saw throughout our interviews. Which is not much.

That was the beginning of Ronen's involvement with the internet, the start of the path that would eventually lead to a move from his native Israel to an airy, open, vaguely industrial office in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, complete with requisite friendly dog. Ronen is the founder and CEO of Boxee, a company that's poised to release the Boxee TV, a time-shifting, place-shifting streaming media box that could truly free us from the tyranny of the cable providers--though Ronen is very careful not to put it quite that way.

He needs those tyrants, after all, and they are very, very wary of him and what he's doing. That's because Boxee's history does not suggest a company that plays nice. This is a company that emerged from a hacker project that immediately made an enemy of Microsoft, a company that later infuriated NBC-Universal, Fox, and ABC-Disney by hacking Hulu. Yet today, this is a company that works with Comcast, of all companies, to protect the latter's content, and a company that has no qualms about pondering new and probably more annoying ways to serve ads. And a company that hosts the mayor of New York City for pro-startup photo ops. All while still playing back your pirated, BitTorrented episodes of Breaking Bad. In full 1080p.

The Boxee TV could replace your cable subscription. At least, it's the closest any box has come. And it probably had to come from a company like this one.

Here's how it started. Around the turn of the century, hackers began to notice something very interesting about their gaming consoles, gamers and hackers being often one and the same. No longer were they weak, cheap, single-function appliances. The Dreamcast could connect to the internet and host multiplayer games. The PlayStation 2 had USB ports. And, most intriguingly, there was a new console from, of all companies, Microsoft. The Xbox, released in 2001, was incredibly powerful for its time, and, more importantly, constructed much more like a PC than other games consoles. It was the first to have a built-in hard drive (only 8GB, but still). It had a big bulky DVD-ROM drive, and an operating system very similar to Windows 2000.

In 2000, hardly anybody had a computer hooked up to their TVs. In 2001, every single Xbox gamer had one--mostly, without even knowing it.

Microsoft had some pretty sophisticated hack-prevention tools in the Xbox, but the idea of a common, inexpensive computer hooked up to your TV was too obvious to avoid the interest of hackers. Within a year, there were several individuals, all over the world, who were all trying to turn the Xbox into a media center. By the end of 2002, they had joined forces. Their project was christened Xbox Media Player, though it would soon be renamed Xbox Media Center. XBMC, as it was then and is still known, is the open-source media project to end all open-source media projects.

Back in 2002, it could play back pictures, music, and videos from the optical drive, from the hard drive, or from computers on your network. If you've had a Roku for years, it's hard to explain how crazy this was, but ten years ago, that just didn't happen. In 2002, you didn't download video and you didn't stream media of any sort, besides maybe photos. You rented DVDs, and you played them with DVD players. You could download videos from P2P services like LimeWire and KazAa, but the selection was spotty, connections were slow, and you stood a pretty fair chance of snagging a virus by mistake. Remember, BitTorrent had only been around for a year and was not widely used. This is three years before iTunes sold videos and six years before Netflix Instant Watch debuted. This is three years before YouTube even existed. Non-physical media was still riding horses, and XBMC was an illicit steam locomotive. Dudes on XBMC messageboards going by names like "d7o3g4q" crafted something better than the biggest tech companies of the age could even dream of. Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Google, Amazon: chumps. d7o3g4q: Not a chump.

On June 29th, 2004, the first stable release of XBMC appeared. Throughout the early- to mid-2000s, the open-source project attracted dozens of incredible developers, all contributing their own ideas and their own code, on their own time, for no money. By 2006, XBMC could play any kind of video or audio, from its hard drive, from bourgeoning internet sources like YouTube and Launch.com, or from other computers on the network. It had apps, for weather and web browsing. You could rip DVDs to your hard drive. You could snag TV and movie cover art from IMDb, or album art from AllMusic. You could restyle the whole thing, make it look however you wanted. By 2007, you could download BitTorrented videos right to your Xbox.

It wasn't completely or even mostly legal, of course. It violated Microsoft's terms of service--whether that's illegal or just voids your warranty is unclear, but it is clear that Microsoft did not officially approve, since all XBMC Xboxes were banned from Xbox Live, the online multiplayer service. Then there were the more, well, obviously rule-breaking elements of the software. It could handle any of a dozen or more emulators--want to play Mario Kart 64 on your Xbox? No problem. Or any NES, SNES, Atari, Genesis, Sega Master System, or PlayStation game you wanted. It could also play illegally burned Xbox games. That's the way most modders--the people who'd build one of these XBMC Xboxes for you--would advertise. They wouldn't mention that this hack could revolutionize the home theater--they'd say, you can play Halo for free.

The content providers probably didn't take much notice of XBMC, even though it could play pirated movies and TV shows, downloaded piracy being at that time not a huge deal. But later on, they'd look back and see that the project made it extremely easy to circumvent cable.

The other thing with XBMC was that it was horrendous to set up, by today's standards. Microsoft had tried pretty hard to block this kind of thing--you'd have to either go through a complex software hack, by using a glitch exploit in certain games, or you'd have to crack open the Xbox and install a mod chip. When I had mine made, in the summer of 2006, I brought my Xbox out to an iffy part of University City, in Philadelphia, where a teenager with nerd skills far beyond mine cracked it open, hacked the software, installed a 200GB hard drive I'd brought with me, and loaded all kinds of goodies on it--emulators, ROMs, apps, skins, about fifteen full Xbox games--all for fifty bucks. All of a sudden I had a set-top box more advanced than anything on the market--hell, more advanced than anything on the market would be for another three or four years.

XBMC had all the potential in the world, but no editing at all. It was its strength and its weakness. All it needed was someone to recognize that.

Avner Ronen wasn't new to startups in 2007, when Boxee began in earnest. After he left the Israeli Defense Forces, he created Odigo, an instant-messaging service, back in 1998, when he was still in Tel Aviv. Odigo was sold to Comverse, a larger tech company, with the aim of using instant-messaging over SMS texting, in 2000, but the company shut Odigo down two years later. Ronen stayed on at Comverse until 2004 as head of acquisitions, but he says his heart wasn't really in it. In 2003, he was introduced to Windows Media Center--a half-assed but interesting interface on Windows PCs that was designed with big thumbnails and big text, what's now known as a "ten-foot interface."

The ten-foot interface is used for UIs on TVs--your Roku, Apple TV, your Nintendo Wii, even your cable service, those are all ten-foot interfaces, designed to be operated while you sit on your couch, ten feet away. But in 2003, the experience was primitive and awful. This is how you used to get digital content on your TV: you had a giant desktop computer and you plugged it directly into your TV, using a keyboard and mouse to control it. "It was a mess," Ronen says. Then Ronen's childhood friend Tom Sella--now the COO of Boxee--showed him a hack called Xbox Media Center.

Ronen, I think, saw the XBMC community in pretty much the same way Bill Gates did, when he was introduced to the project in 2005: as a largely unorganized pool of startling talent. Yuval Tal, now the the head of research and development at Boxee, was hand-picked from the elite XBMC developers. "We talked to most of them," Ronen says, "and Yuval was the only Israeli." Boxee is led pretty much exclusively by Israelis; in addition to Ronen (CEO), Sella (COO), and Tal (R&D), the company's CTO is Roee Vulkan (he was Ronen's instructor in the Israeli army), and its head of product is Idan Cohen, whom Ronen poached from Comverse when he left.

It's a little hard to tell with Ronen whether he has fond memories of XBMC or whether he just saw it as an important but unrealized idea; like a lot of Israelis (warning: generalizations ahead, but I am allowed to make generalizations about Israelis because I am Jewish), he's stoic and impassive and very, very confident, though he's a funnier guy than he seems at first. About XBMC, he said "It was a great experience, but so hard to get." Meaning, here's something cool, but not something most people could ever use. Avner began thinking very seriously about something like XBMC, but that would be usable for normal people. "XBMC was for geeks, by geeks," he says. "What we wanted was for the people, by the geeks."

XBMC, as an open-source project, has a whole bunch of other projects based on it, since anyone can use any of that code. A few guys get an idea in their heads that they can make a version a little bit better, and they can take all the code they want, for free, and do it. To remain a part of the XBMC community, you have to use a substantial part of that code, and also contribute anything you do back to the stream, so anyone else can use it. Or you can "fork," with the permission of those running the project, and head out on your own. When you fork, you no longer owe the community anything, technically, and you can work on your own product without having to collaborate with anyone else. But you probably want to keep tossing back minor help, so you don't become an enemy of the project that spawned you--bug fixes, that kind of thing.

By late 2006, Avner had gotten together with Tom Sella, who had originally introduced him to XBMC (and, not coincidentally, his next-door neighbor in the Tel Aviv suburb when the two were in 8th grade), and Yuval Tal, the newly snagged XBMC whiz. The initial idea: a box using a new, simpler version of XBMC that would plug and play, like a DVD player, that would be easy for everyone to buy, set up, and use. They pitched investors and were widely rejected. "Investors said it would be too hard to operate, too expensive, too hard to monetize," says Ronen.

So, without the money to make hardware, the brand-new Boxee team set out to make software--Mac software first, because 1) the team all used Macs, and 2) Apple's media center software, Front Row--its equivalent of the always-underrated Windows Media Center--was garbage. This was around 2007. If you look at the Boxee blog from that time, you don't see much chat about Front Row. Mostly what you see is Avner talking about technology, only some of it relating to what Boxee does. You've got his thoughts on BlackBerry v. iPhone, which, remember, was an actual debate in 2007. You've got his thoughts on Kindle and digital rights management. Also his thoughts on Kanye West v. 50 Cent, plane travel, and coffee. He is serious about coffee, as everyone who works in the startup scene is legally required to be. I don't think anyone was reading the blog at that time.

But the Boxee team was working hard on a new fork of XBMC, a new kind of software that would be easy to install, easy to use, that would give access to what the nerds wanted while being easy enough to use to pass what Avner calls "the babysitter test." His ultimate goal, which is what made Boxee so different from all the other XBMC forks, is for a stranger in your house to pick up a remote and get the wonders of the internet on the TV without ever being confused or intimidated. There's a fair chance this is an impossible task.

Boxee for Mac launched in June 2008, to immediate nerd acclaim. Lifehacker loved it. CEA, the trade organization for the consumer electronics industry, awarded the company $50,000 (half of which Boxee donated back to the XBMC non-profit--they had enough prospective investors at that point to not really need to worry about money. Over the next three years they'd raise $28.5 million over three rounds of funding.)

In mid-June of 2008, the Boxee fellows hosted the XBMC Developer's Forum in Amsterdam. Boxee, though it has made enemies over the years of some hardcore nerds who see Boxee's mainstream ambitions as a betrayal, has stayed on mostly good terms with the XBMC community, in part because of events like this. Hosting the event was shrewd; Boxee at that time, though it had bigger plans, was based on the XBMC core, and the group that gathered in an Amsterdam pub (and "partied that night," says Ronen, though he didn't elaborate on how some of the world's most accomplished nerds might celebrate in Amsterdam) were the best in the world at what they do. The Boxee team, at that event, contributed a bunch of code fixes back to the app stream, and also helped XBMC set themselves up as a non-profit organization, which gives them certain legal protections. They were the toast of XBMC. Then they forked.

Boxee wanted Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Vudu, and all the other aggregators which were starting to offer streaming video. Boxee also wanted to thoroughly control their product, which you can never really do in a truly open-source project like XBMC. It's tricky if you want to monetize, as well, since legally, anyone can freely release exactly what you released.

It was a necessary move, to separate themselves from XBMC. By that time, XBMC had gained in popularity, which was both good and bad--good because more people were aware of it, and bad because the software is only moderately legal, and in 2008 content providers (like cable companies and record labels) were much more scared and aggressive than they are now. (Which is saying something, because content providers are extremely scared and aggressive right now.) "Content companies are not very comfortable with open source," says Avner. "We paid the price for some of that older stuff, so we were still thought of as trying to disrupt [their highly lucrative setup]."

In 2008, a couple of Boxee users and former XBMC developers in, Ronen thinks, North Carolina, managed to hack Apple's kind-of-useless first-generation Apple TV to run Boxee. "At first we were surprised, because we didn't think it could be done," says Ronen. "But then it got a lot of traction with users." Boxee, which had nothing to do with the project, had to be officially neutral, not wanting to get on the bad side of either Apple or content providers, but secretly they were thrilled. It gave them both the will and the means to go back to those hardware manufacturers who had originally rejected them and say "look! People really want this!"

And, says Ronen, Boxee on Apple TV "was never a great experience." Installation was still difficult--not as difficult as the original XBMC-on-Xbox installation, but hard--and "the experience was not optimized, so it ran slowly," understandable since the software was designed for Macs, rather than the underpowered Apple TV. But that makes an even stronger argument. If people love this so much, imagine how much they'll love it when we do it right!

In 2009, D-Link, mostly known for routers and other wireless accessories, bit. It took almost two years of at times turbulent design work before the first Boxee Box would see release. Originally, Boxee worked with Nvidia in addition to D-Link, but they found that Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip, a low-power CPU/GPU, wasn't powerful enough or secure enough to do what Boxee wanted. Boxee ended up going with a beefier Intel Atom processor--a minute detail, a who-cares detail, but when you're dealing with a company that is so of the nerd community, that kind of thing gets written about and commented on.

The Boxee Box was designed by Astro Studios, which would go on to create major products like the Xbox 360 and the Nike Fuelband, and the Box's design is very peculiar indeed. "We told them, we don't want another pizza-box, router-looking device. We'd like to make a statement with the industrial design," says Ronen. It looks as though someone took a simple black cube and hurled it at the ground, rotating in midair and sticking one of its corners partway into the earth. Ronen calls it a "sunken box." It's very close to being an incredibly boring cube; instead, it's asymmetrical and completely unlike anything else that plugs into your TV. When it was announced, people complained that it wouldn't stack with their game consoles, cable boxes, and whatever else plugs into their TVs. They missed the point. "Yeah, it doesn't stack," says Ronen. This is supposed to be a conversation piece, and besides, you won't need any other gadget for watching video. So who cares if it can stack?

The remote was a major victory. It is, I think, indicative of everything that Boxee does right--it's perfect for both power users and novices. It's a slim, light, skinny little thing. On one side is a directional pad, a play/pause button, and a back button. That's it. You don't need anything else, regularly. 19 times out of 20, those few buttons are all you need, so get rid of the rest of them. The remote's stroke of genius is that on the flip side of the remote, you have a full hardware QWERTY keyboard--letters, numbers, symbols. Out of sight when you don't want it, easy to use when you need it. It makes the remotes used by Roku and Apple TV look insanely inefficient. Both Roku and Apple leave you totally stranded if you want to search--for movies on Netflix, for videos to buy in the video store, for new apps.

One app it didn't have, and has never had, is Hulu. Boxee may have broken with XBMC, but they hadn't quite broken with the flavor of hackerdom that birthed them.

Sitting down with the perpetually Boxee-t-shirt-clad Ronen in one of Boxee's glassed-in conference rooms, it's easy to get sucked into a conversation about, well, whatever Ronen wants to talk about. He's a very good speaker, despite his just-on-the-wrong-side-of-perfect English; he seems as if he's giving you the whole truth, all the time, and I found myself nodding along with pretty much whatever he said. He'll talk about money, for example--how much Boxee has and how much it makes--without hesitation. (In the announcement for the Boxee Box, he said "2012 we're supposed to start making money. That's what we told our investors." Which is not something most CEOs would say.) He's a concise and adept arguer, helped by the fact that we actually do pretty much agree on the problems and possible solutions in the industry. But he's also subtly good at moving the conversation back to subjects where he's comfortable, where he can talk about Boxee's strengths and goals. I wanted to talk about Hulu, and I think he did not. I'm not even sure he was being cagey; I think he might just be sick of talking about the time his company screwed with the biggest names in content for a few months.

In 2009, as Boxee was designing the forthcoming Boxee Box, Hulu Plus didn't exist--there were no Hulu apps for your phone, tablet, or TV, and it was completely ad-supported. Hulu started out as an experiment for the content providers, owned jointly by NBC-Universal, Fox, and Disney-ABC, to see if they could make any money off this whole "internet" thing. They were very scared of the internet, but thanks to the efforts of some talented managers and designers, they somehow created something really cool despite themselves. Of course, they also put tons of restrictions on it, and in 2009, one of the biggest of those restrictions was this: Hulu is for computers only.

Boxee, at the time, had a web browser, built on Mozilla, the platform on which the popular browser Firefox is also built. It's never been particularly easy or enjoyable to browse the web on a TV with any set-top box, but Boxee always had the option, just in case. And that meant that you could navigate to Hulu.com and watch Hulu shows in their entirety--on your TV.

Hulu found out, and its owners flipped. They weren't ready to move their internet experiment from the laptop to the living room. So they blocked Boxee from accessing Hulu. Boxee easily unblocked it. Over a period of a few months in 2009, you'd never know, in opening up your Boxee web browser, whether Hulu would work or not--Hulu was constantly blocking Boxee, and Boxee was constantly unblocking Hulu. "It wasn't great for consumers, even though they loved [Hulu]," says Ronen. It turned into a David and Goliath battle. On one side, Boxee, a scrappy startup who just wants content to be free, and people to be happy with that content. On the other side, behemoth content companies who are depriving users of great stuff for reasons the readers of gadget blogs weren't nearly satisfied with. It was old vs. new, corporation vs. startup, big vs. small. Boxee was going legit, becoming mainstream, but this was a hacker reflex. You say I can't do this? We'll see about that. Eventually, Hulu completely blocked Boxee from accessing its site.

It's unclear whether this was a good thing for Boxee as a company. It got them lots of attention, at least at the kinds of places where a squabble between tech companies might garner attention. Readers of Slashdot, Gizmodo, and Engadget took notice of this ballsy young company. But it also might have done untold damage to Boxee's burgeoning status as a media streaming startup a content provider could trust. Ronen argued that Boxee wasn't really doing anything wrong; Boxee certainly wasn't stripping out ads or allowing users to download Hulu videos or anything drastic at all, really; they were just allowing them to use Hulu in its whole form on a larger display. But Hulu didn't see it that way.

I asked Ronen if he regretted the back-and-forth. It was the only time in our discussions that he ever seemed unsure of what to say. "It did create a misconception," he finally said, that Boxee was a bunch of unfriendly hackers. But it also increased the company's visibility, and probably helped contribute to Hulu's eventual launching of Hulu Plus on a bunch of connected devices--though Boxee has never had a Hulu app. It's now a major weakness of the product, though Ronen says Hulu (which is owned by but run sort of separately from its content-provider parents) has "always been pretty friendly to us." Ronen seems pretty happy with how the whole thing turned out. "It's hard to say if that was a bad idea," he said.

The Boxee Box was released on November 10th, 2010, at a price of $199. It was significantly more expensive than its major competitors, Roku and Apple TV, and it had major software problems when it was released. I never did a review for PopSci, for example, because the thing wouldn't connect to my home network for weeks, not until a firmware update. I wasn't the only one with that problem; Ronen writes it off to incomplete beta testing. But it also launched woefully unready. No Netflix, no Hulu (well, never Hulu, but still), no Spotify. The launch was premature.

The core community, too, had its issues with the Boxee Box. A BitTorrent client that had been in an early version of the Box was removed before its release ("We wanted to work with media companies!" says Ronen), and there were significant restrictions put in by D-Link to stop users from running modified software on its hardware. That especially rankled old-school Boxee users, because Boxee at that point was still based on the XBMC core--a core that was created to run on blocked hardware. Users saw the Box's featureset as concessions to the media industry, a betrayal of the "everything should be available" ethos of open-source.

And yet, in retrospect, Ronen thinks the Boxee Box's flaw is from tilting in the opposite direction--it was too techy. It ended up "reflecting our own perceived needs, rather than designing it for mass-market," he says. Most XBMC users try to do everything XBMC can do. "We could have made the most open-source box ever," says Ronen, "but then we couldn't have had Netflix and Vudu and Pandora, apps people love." The struggle to balance the company's roots in open-source hackerdom with its hopeful future as a major, legitimate player in the media industry means balance is a real concern. "Some people said we're selling to the man," says Ronen. "Fine. We can't make everyone happy."

The Boxee Box's plan was to have it do almost everything that the hardware could handle, with very particular things left out so as to not enrage the content providers. "We made it almost too complicated, too powerful," Ronen says. Boxee at that time still catered to the extreme nerd faction, the type who would write angry messageboard posts about how the Boxee Box doesn't support three-terabyte hard drives or certain high-def audio formats. And yet the company spent lots of time making sure it could handle SMB, UPnP, DLNA, and lots of other acronyms understood by only a handful of people. "It's easy to dig yourself in too deep," says Ronen.

But the Boxee Box slowly gathered steam and became one of the best media streamers on the market. It got Netflix, and Vudu, and Spotify. It underwent several interface redesigns, each for the better. It got simpler, focused on what was important. It never became a blockbuster, but I started seeing it in the apartments of some of my nerdier friends. It did things no other player could do--namely, just about everything. Download an .MKV video from BitTorrent? Boxee will stream it from your laptop or from a hard drive plugged into it. You could watch YouTube videos or music videos on Vevo. You could watch Netflix or listen to Pandora. You could buy videos from Vudu, an on-demand service like Amazon or iTunes. It remains one of about three devices, period, that can use AirPlay, a feature created by Apple, of all companies, that's one of the most exciting ideas in tech. Soon Boxee released an excellent iPad app that both controls the Boxee Box and lets your iPad serve as a media center in its own right. By 2011, the Boxee Box no longer scared my roommates. And in 2012, the company began experimenting with some secondary products that hinted at the next-generation Boxee Box.

In February, Boxee released the Live TV dongle, a USB stick that plugs into the back of the Boxee Box and gives it live TV powers. It came with a high-def antenna, which in cities like New York can snag a few dozen channels. Seems like not that big of a deal. In September of this year, Boxee released its first (seemingly) unrelated-to-Boxee app, called Cloudee. Cloudee looks like yet another "Instagram for video" apps; shoot a video, share it with whoever you want. They can view it from pretty much any device. Combine those two, though, and you have something pretty different--the foundation of the Boxee TV, the sequel to the Boxee Box.

The Boxee TV, announced today, is a flat, un-dramatic box that looks mostly like a Roku. ("We have enough challenges selling this box," Ronen says. "We don't want the shape of the box to be part of it.") It has a high-def antenna built in, plus a new, simpler operating system, though it can still do everything the Boxee Box could. (The one detriment: the remote no longer has a QWERTY keyboard on the back. Ronen says people weren't using it very often. But it will be missed.) The Boxee TV will be available on November 1st for $99--half the price of the Boxee Box at launch, and on par with the Apple TV and the better Roku boxes.

But, for Boxee, the most important part of the Boxee TV is wholly separate from the hardware: Cloud DVR. You can record up to two hours of live broadcast TV for free, or get unlimited storage for $15 per month. (It has two tuners so you can watch one thing while recording another.) That storage isn't on a hard drive like a TiVo or any box you get from Comcast or Verizon; it's all stored in the cloud, courtesy of Amazon's hosting. Record whatever you want, as much of it as you want, and watch it anywhere, anytime. It's called No Limits DVR, and it'll be available first in the top eight TV markets in the US, with more to come.

You can record every episode of Seinfeld and have a marathon with your iPad when you get sick in a hotel room in Iowa. Watch last night's episode of Parks and Recreation on your iPhone while on the train. Sure, it doesn't support cable--the only option for that would be a CableCard, which is wildly expensive, huge, inefficient, and requires installation--but, notes Ronen, 80% of the top 100 shows and 95 of the top 100 sports events were on broadcast TV in 2011. It's something nobody has really tried before--as much as I do not condone the word "disruption" in tech, it actually does kind of disrupt the entire idea of television. Time and place no longer matter. It's all up to you.

I don't know if Boxee will sell many Boxee TV units. The concept is a little bit difficult to explain in a few words, and what it does is so different from its competitors. Roku is an app device: oh, you know Netflix and Hulu and Pandora? Those apps, on your phone and computer? Now they're on TV. Apple TV, too: hey, all that iTunes content? Now it's on your TV. But Boxee TV is doing something different: it's saying "hey, the way you watch TV? You can do it differently, and maybe better." That's a harder sell.

But what I like about Boxee, and about Ronen, is that I think they get it. They get that content is king. Roku has three hundred apps? Who cares. Can you watch the football game on it? Nope. What's important to Boxee is that people can view the content they want, in the way that serves it best. That's why they're not messing around with second-screen stuff, like Microsoft's SmartGlass, or shoving social networking into their products. They don't think that stuff makes the act of watching video on your TV better. And everything about the Boxee TV is about making TV better.

I asked Ronen where the idea for the cloud TV came from. Most ideas in the tech world are an evolution of something else--oh, that's cool, why don't we do it a little better. But the cloud TV, there isn't really anything like it. If you give him a chance, Ronen will talk about content forever. Content is everything for him. He saw a hole in the amount of content a streaming box could provide--live TV--and filled it, in the best way he could come up with. That doesn't seem to be the way other companies in this field think. The Roku Stick, for example, is not about content. It's just smaller hardware. Does that really improve your viewing experience? Not for Ronen.

Ronen said, more times than I bothered to count, that Boxee TV is not about cutting the cord. Some of his reasons make sense; if you're a dedicated baseball fan, or you love HBO's shows, the Boxee TV isn't a viable alternative to cable for you. A cool addition, maybe, but not an alternative. But I suspect most of his opposition is out of a desire not to make content providers any angrier at him than they have to be. Because for those first signing up for cable, the new blood that keeps cable subscriptions going, they now have a choice. On-demand video, plus a DVR that's more limited (it can't handle cable channels like MTV or CNN) but also kind of, well, better, plus live TV, plus music apps and YouTube and Vevo? It's a pretty persuasive argument. Ronen might deny that it's a cord-cutting device, but the packaging on the box says "Save Up to $1,000 A Year, Reduce Your Cable Bill."

The concept of a cord-cutting box as a revolutionary tool is absurd, of course. Something as entrenched and profitable as cable TV doesn't just fall apart when something more interesting comes along. But for a lot of people, especially of the younger generation, this is the first box that really can do everything we need it to, with the possible exception of sports. Movies on Netflix, sports and broadcast shows live or on the DVR, cable shows through Vudu. Everything is where you want it, when you want it. That's the future.

And it came from a company which has at various times hacked content providers, and encouraged protective legislation with content providers. That's probably the way it has to be. Bigger companies could theoretically do this, maybe even do it better--Apple is rumored to be working on pretty much the same idea--but Apple runs iTunes, and needs content providers on its side. Microsoft and Amazon and Google are in the same boat. That doesn't mean they can't or won't do it sometime in the future, but that complication does open the door for someone smaller, maybe a little less risk-averse, to try something big. And maybe become a major player themselves.

When the USS Zumwalt rolls out of dry dock at Bath Iron Works in Maine next year, the Navy's newest warship will be 100 feet longer than the destroyers currently serving around the globe-and nearly twice as massive-yet it will have a radar signature 50 times smaller and will carry half the crew. Packed bow to stern with state-of-the-art radar, stealth, weapons, and propulsion systems, the USS Zumwalt, which will be operational in mid-2016, will be the most technologically sophisticated warship ever to hit the water.

A complement to Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that currently protect the Navy's prized aircraft carriers from aerial attacks, the Zumwalt-class destroyer is for laying waste to land. It can evade enemy detection; slip into the shallows along foreign coastlines; and deliver devastatingly accurate firepower hundreds of miles inland, supporting special operations ashore, clearing the way for amphibious troop landings, or knocking out air defenses. It's a seaborne battering ram-a specialized piece of equipment for smashing in the enemy's front door.

In the 1990s, the U.S. military carried out successful amphibious assaults in Somalia and elsewhere. But as coastal defenses around the world grew more advanced-not least those of Iraq, which would have been a serious threat to U.S. troops had they invaded Kuwait by sea during Operation Desert Storm-the Navy decided to build the Zumwalt.

Traditional destroyers create huge wakes and their hulls tend to light up radar dishes. By contrast, the angle of the Zumwalt's hull reduces its radar signature 50-fold (on radar it looks like a fishing boat) and slices through the water like a 600-foot harpoon, creating little wake and making it more difficult to see from both above and below. Though it rides low, the Zumwalt can operate in just 30 feet of water, scanning for airborne and underwater threats with planar-array radar and advanced sonar.

If geopolitical events call for securing nuclear facilities in an unraveling North Korea or Iran, the Zumwalt is the Navy's surest way to arrive unannounced.From the shallows, the Zumwalt can then wipe out enemy defenses up to 72 miles away. Sailors don't cram shells into the dual 155-millimeter guns nor do they clear the casings. The guns are controlled-point, click, boom-by a computer in the command center; they fire GPS-guided shells, considered by the Navy to be more like rockets than artillery because of their ability to adjust trajectory in flight. The ship also carries a battery of SM-2 antiaircraft missiles, surface-targeting Tomahawks, missile-destroying ESSM interceptors, and vertically launched ASROC antisubmarine torpedoes, all distributed among 80 missile cells that line the Zumwalt's hull. The location of the cells ensures that the missiles can't all be disabled by a single enemy strike and serves as an extra layer of defense around the ship.

Click through the slideshow below to see how one historic Korean War battle might have played out if the U.S. military had the Zumwalt in 1950:

The Zumwalt generates far more power than it needs. Unlike other Navy vessels, its all-electric integrated power system supports shipboard operations using a single massive energy source: four gas-turbine generators that collectively produce 78 megawatts of electricity, almost 10 times more than Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. Its dual 35-megawatt advanced induction motors produce a top speed of 30 knots, but at 20 knots the Zumwalt retains three quarters of its power (58 megawatts) for other systems. Those systems-everything from fire suppression to robotic cargo handling belowdecks-are largely automated, allowing the Zumwalt to operate with a crew of just 148, compared with the Arleigh Burke's 276.

In spite of its sophistication, however, the ship will see limited service. Over the past decade, the Navy's priorities have shifted away from a shallow-water, land-attack destroyer. Missile threats from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China (which boasts of possessing a "carrier killer" missile) made it vital to protect aircraft carriers. And after a decade of land wars, the strategic emphasis is shifting to open-water conflict.

As a result, the U.S. military is currently moving 60 percent of its naval forces to the Pacific. The Zumwalt isn't particularly suited to that sort of theater, and in an age of shrinking budgets, it makes less sense to continue pouring $3 billion apiece into untested amphibious battering rams than it does to buy a variety of smaller, less expensive boats armed with proven air-defense technologies.

But the ship should still be valuable. Any conflict that spills from the open water to, say, the many contested islands in the South Pacific is one that the Zumwalt could settle. The Navy could also be called into action in the Strait of Hormuz, where tensions with Iran are coming to a boil. And, in fact, a recent report commissioned by the Pentagon did recommend that the U.S. deploy more amphibious-ready ships to the Pacific to ensure that Marines in the region have the right tools for intervention. If geopolitical events call for the securing of certain sensitive assets, such as the nuclear facilities of an unraveling North Korea or Iran, the Zumwalt is the Navy's surest way to arrive unannounced and open the way inland.

The ship's most immediate role will likely be that of an incubator for advanced technologies as the Navy updates its fleet for 21st-century conflict. The Zumwalt is an ideal platform for power-intensive future weapons systems, such as lasers and electromagnetic rail guns. And just as changing threats and shrinking budgets pushed the Zumwalt class out of favor over the past decade, future conflicts could call the destroyers into action should the Navy need to kick in anyone's door.

THE HEAVY ARTILLERY

SHELL

Weight 65 lbs.
Length 26 inches
Range 15 miles

LRLAP

Weight 230 lbs.
Length 88 inches
Range 85 miles

Long the pursuit of scientists the world over, a Princeton University researcher has devised a means of alchemy by transforming common elements into rare and valuable ones. Dr. Paul Chirik isn't actually turning boring metals into gold and platinum, but his lab has figured out how to make relatively inexpensive and abundant metals like iron behave like platinum in catalytic chemical reactions, which are a major consumer of precious metals in industry. His research could make an impact across industries, making it cheaper to produce everything from textiles to cosmetics to adhesives (and that's just naming a few). Not to mention, wrapping iron molecules in organic molecules to alter their characteristics is way, way cheaper than mining asteroids. Read the whole story over at the NYT.

[New York Times]

Microsoft's Surface--the company's first in-house Windows 8 computer, or tablet, or whatever it is, goes up for pre-order today. This is a gadget you should care about! It's designed to be a do-everything device--you can use it like a tablet, with superfast touch gestures and apps and stuff, or like a computer, with a keyboard and a full web browser and Flash and Microsoft Office and stuff. It's also startlingly beautiful; Microsoft is much better at making hardware than most people realize, but this is their crowning achievement. (Our friend Sam Biddle at Gizmodo gushed over it.) It looks awesome.

The base model is $500 for 32GB of storage--twice, Microsoft is eager to say, the amount of storage as the equivalent cheapest iPad. But, you almost certainly don't want that one, which makes it a weird item to boast about. What you want is the next one up, which throws in the Touch Cover for another $100. (There's also a 64GB + Touch Cover version, for $700.

The Touch Cover might be Microsoft's best weapon; it looks sort of like the iPad's Smart Cover (a little cloth-covered metallic flap that sticks onto the tablet with magnets) except it has a keyboard in it. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but is. Everyone who's used it is very impressed with it--Matt Buchanan at Buzzfeed FWD called it "kind of a magical little piece of technology." It senses your fingers without the need for force feedback, meaning it can tell when you're typing and when you're just resting your hands on the keyboard. Typing on an iPad is adequate at best--this might be great. It'll cost $130 extra if you opt not to buy it or want fancy colors.

The Surface goes on sale October 26th, but you can pre-order now, if you're comfortable not waiting for our review.

With one presidential debate down and the second gearing up for tonight, we've been wondering: Do debates actually matter in an election, and if so, which aspects do voters care about? We've explored some of the influences technology has on our impressions of a debate--"Is HDTV going to sway your opinion?". Here, we email with Danny Oppenheimer, associate professor of psychology and public policy at Princeton University, and Mike Edwards, founder and contributor to Leftfielder.org, on the issues, both big and small, that determine how we perceive a debate--and whether they have any impact on how we vote. The pair authored the recent book "Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work At All Works So Well" (MIT Press).

Being actually knowledgeable about the issues doesn't matter at all.

PopSci: My overarching question is: What really matters to voters in a debate? Is it the issues or the minutiae--the way their hair looks, what they're wearing.

Edwards and Oppenheimer: When it comes to who a person will vote for, there are a number of factors affecting the popular perception of the candidates' likability, competency, and empathy, which voters derive initially from a first impression (which, like any first impression, is largely based on appearance), and then get modified over time throughout the campaigns. By the time of the debates, however, most voters will have already had their first impression of the candidate; they know what the candidates look like and sound like, what party they represent, etc. Within that context, the debates serve two functions:

1.) Allow for direct comparison between the candidates--literally, this is the only time the candidates will stand next to each other during the course of the campaign, and that can be instructive. For instance, I'm not sure that most Americans appreciated how much taller Obama was than McCain until they debated each other in 2008. (Romney and Obama are only an inch apart in height, so that won't matter so much this year.)

2.) Other than that, the debates function like extremely long and well-watched campaign ads. A good debater, like a good campaign ad, can enhance the audience's positive biases of himself and the negative biases of his opponents; a bad debater will unwittingly reinforce the
audience's preexisting negative biases.

PS Is there even a point where it stops mattering, or does every controllable detail add up?:

E&O: Every controllable detail does add up, but often in subtle ways. Again, think of it like campaign ads. In an attack ad, every feature of the ad is carefully chosen to enhance the viewer's negative impression of the opponent; in a positive ad, every feature is carefully chosen to enhance the viewer's positive impression of the candidate. But the effective ones play to the pre-existing biases of the people. For example, Romney will never been seen as "one of the guys"--his repeated attempts to be seen as a likable family man have failed. But people are willing to believe that he is an effective leader and businessman. Which means that if his most effective strategy is for his appearance, gestures, tone of voice, anecdotes, and word choice all to reflect a competent and commanding presence. Obama, meanwhile, is the more "likable" candidate, and so his appearance, gestures, tone of voice, anecdotes, and word choice should all be a bit softer, a bit more casual and disarming.

PS: Is it more important for a candidate to be well-versed on issues, or to be a person who presents what they say in the right way (the right soundbites, the right "zingers")?

E&O: Being actually knowledgeable about the issues doesn't matter at all, unfortunately. What matters is that they sound like they are knowledgeable about the issues: don't say "um," don't equivocate, don't veer too far from conventional wisdom, don't give complex answers. As for zingers--they can be very effective, if they underscore an opponent's perceived weakness, although one must be careful with them too--zingers frequently backfire and make the person who said them look mean or petty, especially when they are aimed at someone who the audience is predisposed to like.

PS: What about the effect of the media? I've seen some studies (like this one) suggest that how the results are presented post-debate is the most important thing.

E&O: Certainly human beings are social creatures, and it would be wrong to assume that we make any decision in a vacuum. The media is perfectly capable of affecting the course of how voters perceive any event, including presidential debates. But keep in mind that your views of an event can also be affected by your spouse, your friends, your neighbors, your co-workers, your family, the guy talking too loudly at the next table at Starbucks, etc. And of course Brian Williams, Diane Sawyer, and Bill O'Reilly are having their own views shaped in exactly the same ways.

Moreover, people choose the media that is most likely to tell them things that they agree with--which means that it is extremely difficult to tell to what extent conservatives choose Fox News, and to what extent Fox News makes people conservative.

All of which is to say that while the media certainly matters, we don't really know how much of an impact they have on voter opinion independent of all of the other factors which are constantly affecting us.

PS: How much does it really matter? It seems like I've seen conflicting reports on how much voters can be swayed by debate results, but there's at least something there, whatever the reason for it, right?

E&O: Again, I would think of it like an extremely well-watched advertisement, and that the debates have about as much impact. Obviously that's important--there is a reason that candidates raise and spend millions of dollars. But again, that impact has to come within the larger context of the campaign. It is rare, but not unheard of, for an ad to change the course of an election--and it is rare, but not unheard of, for a debate to change the course of an election. But most of the time, especially in this era of news and advertising saturation, all it really does is reinforce what we already suspected to be true in the first place.

For four decades, a classic psychological experiment on kids has tested the strength of their wills: Will a toddler eat a marshmallow right now, or hold out for two? It's been used to measure self-control, which researchers have used to make other predictions about behavior later in life. But Celeste Kidd had a hunch that it wasn't that simple. To test it, she had to give a bunch of preschoolers a taste of disappointment.

Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, theorized that the kids are actually making a rational decision, not just gobbling the marshmallows without thinking about it. She thought this was related to their expectations about the world, so she set out to test that. "We decided we could manipulate their beliefs in the lab, so their decision-making could be influenced based on their expectations," Kidd said. "If you have a kid who expects people to lie more, you could see differences."

She and her colleagues assigned 28 three- to five-year-olds, who came in with their parents to the Rochester Baby Lab, to two different "environments," called an unreliable and a reliable environment. Both groups were given a create-your-own-cup kit, where you decorate a blank piece of paper that gets inserted into the clear plastic lining. In the unreliable setup, the kids were given a box with broken crayons, and told if they just waited a few minutes, a grownup would return with a bigger, better box. After two and a half minutes, the researcher came back and said, "I'm sorry, but I made a mistake. We don't have any other art supplies after all. But why don't you use these instead?"

Then, the researcher put a quarter-inch sticker on the table, and told the toddler that if he or she waited, the researcher would come back with a bunch of bigger, better ones. Again, the researcher came back with squat.

In the reliable experiment, the adult did come back with what she promised: A huge tray of art supplies and a handful of large, nice stickers. Then it was time for the marshmallows. Each toddler was told it was snack time, and that he or she could have one marshmallow right now--or wait, and have two instead. The adult took away the art supplies and put a single marshmallow right in front of the kids, four inches from the edge of the table. What happened next was often hilarious--kids danced, took pretend naps, sang to themselves, even nibbled on part of the marshmallows and turned them over so the evidence would be hidden. One toddler was highly skeptical, Kidd said.

"[Our researcher] did the first two experiments, saying ‘Sorry, we made a mistake,' and then explained the marshmallow choice. He said, ‘Are you sure you have other marshmallows? You better have other marshmallows.' It was like a verbal acknowledgement of, ‘You say things that are not true.'"

But the results were surprisingly serious, Kidd says. Children in the unreliable setup waited just three minutes. Kids in the reliable setup waited an average of 12 minutes.

In the original 1970 test, kids who "failed" (which was 75 percent of them) ate the gelatinous sugar blocks after an average of five minutes. Follow-up tests showed that longer-waiters generally had more success later in life, which is why this test is so famous in child psychology. But this study shows there's more to it.

"People make decisions that make sense given their experience in the world. Kids make decisions based on not what is true, but what you believe to be true in the world, because that's all you have," Kidd said. "If you have a kid who has lived in a very unstable environment, they may have come to make decisions on the basis of that assumption. If they are in a place where that assumption is no longer valid, teaching them that is no longer the case--giving them evidence that they are in a stable environment--may be effective."

Regardless of what the kids did, they each got three extra marshmallows when it was all over.

The study appears in the journal Cognition, and you can read it here.

The first commercially available amphibious vehicle capable of decent speeds--45 miles per hour on both land and water--is expected to go on sale in the U.S. by the end of this year. At $40,000 a pop, the Quadski is an expensive ATV (most go for less than $10,000), and it's even expensive next to both an all-terrain vehicle and a personal watercraft (which retail somewhat more expensively than ATVs, but not by that much). But its amphibious nature is pretty dazzling: just drive into the water, push a button, the wheels retract upward, and five seconds later you're cruising. The Quadski's maker, Michigan-based Gibbs Sports Amphibians, hopes to sell 1,000 of them next year.

[Washington Post]

Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner set a new world record Sunday when he leapt from a capsule suspended 128,100 feet--about 24 miles--above Earth's surface. Watching the livefeed as he opened the capsule door and prepared to jump, we thought he looked very much like a man perched on the edge of space.

But just how close to the edge was he?

To get a sense of Fearless Felix's actual proximity to space, we charted the altitude of his incredible jump in relation to some other objects strewn in the space between us and the International Space Station:

(Click here to see a larger version.)

Credits: Clouds, Ian Image Library; Boeing 747, Eluveitie, via Wikimedia Commons; beaker, Silliusvia Open Clip Art; International Space Station, Ciniconoclasta via ClipArtsFree.net; meteors, via Open Clip Art

Apple just sent out invites for an event on October 23rd, at which (presumably) they'll announce the iPad Mini. It's been ridiculously heavily rumored; current guesses place the screen at 7.8 inches, smaller than the 9.7-inch full-sized iPad but larger than minitablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 (both at 7 inches even). What's really curious here is price: the full-sized iPad starts at $500, but the current cheapest iPod Touch--which, at this point, is a very tiny tablet--costs $300. So the logical price for an iPad Mini might be $400, but that's twice as much as, say, the Nexus 7, which is a very capable device. What will Apple do? Tune in here next Tuesday for the thrilling answer! (Disclaimer: It is not our fault if the answer fails to thrill.)

Oh, here's a nice mockup of what the iPad Mini might look like, given the current metallic trend amongst the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Wheels are the most efficient way to get around, but they can't take you everywhere. This new robotic wheelchair designed in Japan can go almost anywhere, however--it can swivel its axles up and down to climb up stairs, onto curbs or over obstacles.

All the user has to do is move a joystick to point it in the desired direction, and the robo-chair figures out what to do. Sensors on its feet detect the distance to nearby obstacles and determine their size. The chair will stabilize itself in the best position to hoist one of its front wheels, like a rider straddling a horse.

It has four-wheel drive and five axes of motion, including the ability to deploy horizontal stabilizers and spin in a tight circle. This would make it easier to back up or change directions, even in tight spaces. The chair is still a prototype, with ongoing tests at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan.

[DigInfo]

From protozoans to people, there is a lot of life on this planet, and it's all connected to a common ancestor from which everything descends. It's hard to imagine, let alone visualize, all of the commonalities and shared heritage of all of that life. But now you can do it with fractals.

A new website launching today lets you explore all of the evolutionary tree of life, zooming in and out like you would use an online map. It's called OneZoom and it's built on a fractal pattern that repeats the same branching form, no matter how expanded or collapsed your view. James Rosindell, a professor in the department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, conceived the idea and programmed OneZoom in collaboration with Luke Harmon, a biologist at the University of Idaho.

The project was somewhat of a happy accident, Rosindell said in an interview. Fascinated by fractals, the evolutionary biologist wanted to use a fractal zooming interface to display large and complex data sets, but it took a collaboration with Harmon to decide on the tree of life as his subject.

A tree is an apt metaphor for the history of life (among many other things) because it starts with a clearly defined beginning, offering both a timeline and a vast canopy of interconnected information. In a tree of life, the trunk generally represents the first life on Earth, and then it splits into boughs and branches for different kingdoms, like plants and animals. Those split into smaller branches, say for fish, mammals, birds and so on; and those break down into smaller and smaller twigs, representing families and groups, and finally leaves representing species. But try putting all of that information on a single tree, and it's impossible, Rosindell said. It wouldn't fit on a single page, neither a plant-derived one nor a digital one.

Rosindell said this prevents scientists and the public from fully appreciating the phylogenetic connections among millions of different species. While other scientists and data-visualization experts have visualized tree-of-life connections using other forms, like concentric rings, Rosindell believes a zoomable tree is a more comfortable-feeling interface. He said he was partly inspired by Google Maps, which offers a zoomable, pannable view with as much or as little detail as a user wants to see.

"A fractal view already has this implemented," he said. "No matter how far you go, you get more and more information. What I would like to do is build the Google Earth of biology."

At its start, OneZoom looks like a tree, with a trunk, branches, twigs and colored leaves. Zoom in on the first branches, and you start seeing more detail. Around 166 million years ago, for example, you see that monotremes evolved, followed by marsupials and placental mammals. The tree spirals toward the future, with more and more branches representing more and more detail. The links between species serve somewhat like roads on a map, displaying clear connections. At the leaf level, you can tell which species are threatened with extinction--represented by red and green leaves--along with links to more information. Eventually, Rosindell will add photographs, too.

There's no limit to the metadata it can handle, and you can even view it in different fractal forms, from a Julia spiral to a feathery tree.

The data comes from the open Tree of Life Project, a collaboration among biologists and other scientists around the world. It contains decades' worth of work in phylogeny, evolutionary history of and relationships among groups of organisms. The project is about a year away from a complete tree of all life, Rosindell said. He wanted a system in place that could visualize it as soon as it's ready.

Right now, OneZoom only contains mammals, but that's still more than 5,000 species, all correlated with each other and color-coded according to their threat levels. Rosindell has big plans for the rest, and he even wants to build a searchable app for smartphones, showcasing the history and relationships between all life on Earth.

"What I'd like to do is visualize information about each species, information about each connection, with their intermediate forms, fossils, and all the wondrous information that exists about the history of life on Earth in one place," he said.

OneZoom was scheduled to go live at 5 p.m. Eastern time today--check it out
here. A paper describing Rosindell's and Harmon's methods will be published in the "Cool Tools" series of the open access journal PLOS Biology.

The Alpha Centauri system, our closest interstellar neighbor and long the stuff of science fiction lore, harbors a planet about the size of the Earth. It whips around its star, Alpha Centauri B, every 3.2 days and is too close and hot to have any water. But it's both the lightest world to orbit a sun-like star, and the closest exoplanet ever found to date--by a long shot.

Alpha Centauri is actually a binary system, with Cen A and Cen B each pretty close in size to our own star. There's a third star, Proxima Centauri, which is associated with this system. Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory set their sights on the system because it's likely to harbor planets, and because it would be very tricky to spot a planet there. They did it with a special spectrograph installed on the La Silla Observatory in Chile, and used the so-called wobble method, which measures tiny changes in a star's radial velocity that are caused by planetary perturbations.

The planet is much closer to Alpha Centauri B than Earth is to the sun, so it's not Earth-like, because it's not habitable. Foundation Alpha it is not. Writing in Nature, the astronomers say their method could lead to plenty of other habitable-planet discoveries, however: "We are confident that we are on the right path to the discovery of Earth analogues," they write. The paper will be published this week. [It was initially embargoed until Wednesday, but Nature allowed publication after a European news outlet broke the news early.]

It's an important addition to the exoplanetary pantheon, but let's be honest--this is amazing because this is Alpha Centauri. It's so close to us at just four light-years away, and it figures so prominently in science fiction--that alone makes it an incredible discovery.

Click here to enter the gallery

This year's entries in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, like past years', include abstract looks at the tiny world around us. This year we have more than a few shots of the odd-looking fruit fly and an unexpectedly colorful image of garlic. Click through the gallery to see them, and look for the winners on Tuesday, October 23.

A hulking Arleigh Burke-class destroyer might typically burn a minimum of about 24 barrels (1,000 gallons) of fuel per hour, but this figure conceals so many factors and variables that the Navy doesn't really use it the way we use "miles per gallon." Wind and current can have a major effect on a ship's efficiency. Speed affects a ship's mileage in unique ways, too, says Gabor Karafiath, with the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Bethesda, Maryland. When a ship moves quickly, he says, "it takes an inordinately greater effort to push it through the water because it makes bigger and bigger waves."

Other subtleties arise from a ship's engine setup. Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are fitted with four gas turbine propulsion engines (which are most efficient at high RPMs), so depending on the speed required, one engine going full tilt is more efficient than splitting the work across two engines. The USS Chafee burned similar amounts of propulsion fuel overall in May and July 2010, but in July its efficiency turned out to be 72 percent higher; that month the ship operated mostly with one engine cranking at maximum capacity versus using multiple engines running at lower ones.

tl;dr: With ships, there's no such thing as "highway" and "city" mileage.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.