Tiny Sphere Satellite Will Test Future Space Surveillance Network

Astronauts released a tiny satellite from the International Space Station last month that will be used as a test bed for a future "space surveillance network," according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

The spherical machine, called SpinSat, measures 22 inches (56 centimeters) across. The satellite was released using a robotic arm within the space station's Kibo module, under supervision from the outpost's Expedition 42 crew.

The spaceflyers, particularly NASA astronaut Terry Virts, snapped pictures from the orbiting laboratory of the SpinSat as it tumbled and sailed away from the space station.

One major goal of SpinSat's mission will be to test how well new electrically controlled micro-thrusters can stabilize the satellite's position, NASA said in an update.

SpinSat's main mission, however, is to act as a calibration target fo rspace surveillance. The military is interested in testing whether it can track the orbits and spin of spacecraft and then characterize them.

"It's a good calibration object for them to say, 'Okay, we know this thing's going by. Can we do a maneuver detection, can we do a change detection, how small of a rotation can we see, how small of a shift in the orbit can we see?'" Andy Nicholas, the project's primary investigator,said in a statement.

If the new thrusters work as planned, the International Laser Ranging Service will then watch SpinSat's movements using ground stations around the world. The service tracks satellites with high accuracy — to about 0.4 inches, or 1 cm — but the military is aiming to do better.

Several retroreflectors — cubes with three flat mirrors — are installed on SpinSat. When light strikes any of these surfaces, it reflects in the same direction. As a result, ground stations can fire a laser at the moving satellite and triangulate its position based on the light that gets reflected back.

"They know the laser light's moving at the speed of light," said Nicholas. "They know where they were pointing the laser, and from that get very accurate orbit positions — down to the millimeter level."

Researchers can also figure out the satellite's spin rate as the laser light moves from reflector to reflector. Since there is space between each reflector, scientists can calculate the spin based on how the distance between the reflector and the ground station changes when SpinSat passes overhead.

SpinSat will also provide information on atmospheric density, as gas particles create drag on the satellite. When the sun is at the peak of its 11-year cycle of activity (as it is right now), extreme ultraviolet radiation puffs up Earth's atmosphere. Scientists are interested in studying the effects of this "swollen" atmosphere now, compared with measurements from four satellites, collectively known as the Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment (ANDE), that were deployed during space shuttle missions in 2006 and 2009.

The new SpinSat is based on ANDE's design, but is slightly bigger. There are two ANDE satellites remaining, but researchers were unable to use them for this experiment, as NASA was concerned that, over time, atmospheric drag may cause these smaller satellites to hit the space station, according to the Naval Research Lab.

How This Supercool Hoverboard Works

If you've ever dreamed of cruising around town on a floating skateboard like Marty McFly does in the classic '80s flick "Back to the Future Part II," then you could soon be in luck.

A pair of innovators is trying to make the futuristic fantasy of riding a hoverboard into a reality. About two months ago, husband and wife design team Jill and Greg Henderson launched a Kickstarter campaignfor their Hendo Hoverboard, a levitating skateboard that could hit "hoverparks" as early as October 2015.

The Kickstarter campaign, which ends Sunday (Dec. 14), has been a resounding success, bringing in well over its initial goal of $250,000 in its first week. With only a couple of days to go in the impressive crowdfunding campaign, the project has already raised nearly $500,000. 

But with all the hype comes an important question: How in the world does this thing work? The basic premise behind the technology is something called Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA), Greg Henderson told.

MFA is Henderson's term for what others may call magnetic levitation, or maglev, which is already used to power superfast, hovering trainsin Japan, China and South Korea. These trains use magnets to create lift and thrust, and can travel at blistering paces because there is no friction between the train's wheels and axles and the rails.

But the tech behind the Hendo Hoverboard is different from current applications of maglev, for various reasons. The most obvious difference is that, unlike a train, the board doesn't follow a track. Instead, it hovers freely on top of a surface plated in copper.

Copper is what's known as an inductor, Henderson said. An inductor is a metal that isn't magnetic. When you put a magnet near such a metal, an electric current starts to flow in the metal. This current, in turn, causes a magnetic field to develop outward from the metal. If the magnetic field that develops is strong enough, it can levitate the magnet. If it's really strong, it can also levitate any object that happens to be attached to the magnet, including a hoverboard.

To lift a hoverboard and rider, a magnet needs to create a strong magnetic field — something that can be accomplished with the help of electricity. The Hendo board comes equipped with four electrically charged magnets, or electromagnets, which Henderson and his team refer to as "hover engines." These create what Henderson called the "primary magnetic field." When these powerful magnetsare positioned over an inductive copper surface, they're met with a strong repulsive magnetic field from the copper itself that pushes the magnets upward, levitating them.

Of course, the technology behind the hoverboard is a bit more complicated than that. To get the board to remain stable, the Hendo team uses four electromagnets.

"It stays steady because we're using more than one hover engine, and when we do that, it's sort of like trying to balance a unicycle versus a car — one wheel versus four wheels," Henderson said. "It's a whole lot easier with four hover engines."

The exact mechanism that gets all of these hover engines working together to keep the board afloat is at the heart of the Hendo team's Magnetic Field Architecture and, as such, is a company secret. However, Henderson did say that by combining the electric fields created by the hover engines, a more "efficient" magnetic field is created. He also mentioned that in high-performance versions of the board, only two hover engines are used — a feat made possible with the help of alternating magnetic fields.

"I suspect what they're doing is setting up a changing magnetic field in their magnets, and then that changing magnetic field is always inducing another magnetic field in the conductor below it that opposes it and keeps [the board] floating above the surface," said Eric Palm, deputy director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, who is not affiliated with the Hendo Hoverboard.

Right now, the Hendo board is designed to levitate over copper, but it could also be made to hover over aluminum, as well as a variety of nonmetal materials that are also inductors, Henderson said. The technology behind the hoverboard is also offered in a scaled-back form, as the Whitebox Developer Kit, which is simply a box equipped with the company's signature hover engines.

"We're trying to inspire co-creation across the globe, and we're getting some fantastic responses," Henderson said. The ideas that people have already come up with for the company's hovering Whitebox are "amazing" and "exciting," he said.

Many of these ideas are focused on new innovations in the transportationand health care industries, Henderson noted. But there have also been some novel applications for Hendo's technology, including a hovering turntable for a DJ, in which the turntable spins while the record stays in one place, Henderson said.

"As a scientist, it's really hard for me to know whether this will really turn into something useful or if it's just a cool toy," Palm said. "But it certainly is very cool. I'd love to have one."

Futuristic Laser Weapon Ready for Action, US Navy Says

The next generation of futuristic weapons has arrived. The U.S. Navy announced that its high-tech laser weapon is ready to disable and destroy enemy drones and small boats, should the need arise.

The 30-kilowatt laser weapon system (LaWS) is housed aboard the USS Ponce, a naval vessel stationed in the Arabian Gulf— a body of water located south of Iraq that separates the Saudi Arabian peninsula from Iran.

While sailors have not yet used the new laser to destroy any real enemy targets, the Navy is prepared to do just that, if necessary, according to Rear. Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research.

"On USS Ponce, LaWS has been in test and development mode since August 2014 in the Gulf. We are now beyond testing – it's operational and the laser weapon is not in a box waiting for a special occasion,"Klunder told reporters at a news briefing Wednesday (Dec. 10) in Washington, D.C.

Under the Geneva Convention, militaries are not allowed to use laser weapons directly against people — a condition that Klunder said the U.S. Navy with abide by, according to Optics.org. But LaWS doesn't necessarily have to blow anything up to be effective.

Sailors operate the laser using a video game-type controller, according to Navy officials. With this controller, they can perform a variety of operations. If an enemy boat or aircraft gets too close to a Navy ship, the laser can deter the threat with an effect known as optical "dazzling." This nonlethal option — which amounts to a very bright glare — is meant to serve as a warning, giving the adversary a chance to change course without getting blown to smithereens.

But, if a threat keeps coming, sailors aboard the Ponce can increase the strength of the laser's highly concentrated beam, which will knock out the sensors or control systems on an enemy drone or vessel. If the adversary still doesn't get the hint, the beam can be turned up higher, making it capable of destroying the threat altogether.

In recent tests, LaWS successfully hit targets aboard a small boat that was speeding toward the Navy ship. The laser weapon also shot a small drone out of the sky, according to Navy officials.

"We ran this particular weapon, a prototype, through some extremely tough paces, and it locked on and destroyed the targets we designated with near-instantaneous lethality," Klunder, chief of naval research, said in a statement.

The sailors who tested LaWS reported that the weapon worked well even in high winds, heat and humidity — conditions that aren't ideal for the operation of a laser. The data collected from these trial runs will be used to develop new laser weapons for the Navy under the Office of Naval Research's Solid-State Laser-Technology Maturation program. These future lasers could one day be deployed on both large destroyer ships (used to launch missiles) and smaller combat ships, Navy officials said.

Laser weapons systems like the one aboard the USS Ponce could be used in ground-based defense systems, as well as in the air, according to Navy researchers. These weapons are sought after because they don’t require highly explosive gunpowder or pressurized gas to destroy enemy targets, making them safer for military personnel to operate. And since all they require is a steady supply of electricity, laser weapons may also be more reliable than conventional weapons.

Of course, the U.S. military is also pursuing this new breed of weapons for economic reasons. Laser weapons cost less to build, install and fire, compared with multimillion-dollar missiles, Navy officials said.

"At less than a dollar per shot, there's no question about the value LaWS provides," Klunder said. "With affordability a serious concern for our defense budgets, this will more effectively manage resources to ensure our sailors and Marines are never in a fair fight."

The most recent tests of LaWS are part of several rounds of testing that have occurred over the past three years. In a 2011 test, a laser weapon disabled multiple small boats launched from a U.S. warship. And in 2012, LaWS downed several drones during a naval test of the system.

Military Seeks Flying Aircraft Carriers to Launch Drones

The U.S. military wants to develop flying aircraft carriers to transport drones in and out of surveillance zones.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking ideas from companies on how to launch drones from huge transport planes, such as the massive C-130 planes that ferry troops and cargo to and from the battlefield..

Drones are cheaper and less risky to fly than manned aircraft, but their range and speed limitations prevent them from being used for some missions. Deploying them from an aircraft midflight would address some of these problems, DARPA said, and could improve surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering missions.

"We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become 'aircraft carriers in the sky,'" Dan Patt, DARPA program manager, said in a statement.

"We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new [drone] designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies."

DARPA's proposal calls for a system that would allow military officials to reuse the launch platform multiple times, and could be used to retrieve the drones after they are deployed. To lower costs and minimize risk, DARPA envisions modifying existing transport planes to carry drones.

There are multiple payoffs, DARPA officials say, including safer missions for people, reducing the cost of deployments (since drones would be used instead of pilots) and technological advances.

"DARPA hopes to leverage significant investments in the area of precision relative navigation, which seeks to enable extremely coordinated flight activities among aircraft, as well as recent and ongoing development of small payloads (100 pounds or less)," agency officials said.

Companies submitted proposals last month, and DARPA said flight-ready prototypes could be ready in four years.

Microsoft Band: Fitness Tracker Review

The Microsoft Band is a wrist-worn fitness tracker designed for people who want to track data from their workouts while also having email, texts and other reminders available with a glance to their arm. The GPS-enabled device tracks your heart rate, steps taken, calories burned and the quality of your sleep, and also offers a guided workout feature. It pairs with the Microsoft Health app, which runs on iPhone, Android or Windows phones. At $199.99, the Band is more expensive than the Withings Pulse 02 and the Fitbit Charge HR (available in early 2015), which also track heart rate and cost about $120 and $150, respectively. But Band's cost is comparable to the Adidas miCoach Fit Smart (about $190 on Amazon), which also has a built-in heart rate monitor, but does not alert you about emails or texts.

What sets the Band apart from other fitness trackers is its smartwatch capabilities— email, texts and calendar alerts (as well as the digital personal assistant program called Cortana, which is available on Windows phones). But despite these bells and whistles, the manufacturer seemed to come up short on a basic requirement: comfort. I tested out the Band for a week, and here's what I found.

Overall Rating: 5.3/10

The advantages of the Band are the convenience of viewing emails, texts and other alerts on your wrist, combined with a slew of sensors including GPS and a built-in heart rate monitor. The disadvantages are that it's uncomfortable to wear, isn't waterproof and has a screen that makes it difficult to read longer messages.

Design/Comfort: 4.5/10

The Band comes in three sizes (small, medium and large), and has an adjustable-fit clasp. The device fit fairly snugly on my wrist, but the hard plastic strap and rigid screen made it pretty uncomfortable to wear for extended periods of time. The band is dust- and splash-resistant, but not waterproof, so you can't wear it while swimming.

The Band's display screen is a rectangular touch screen, measuring 11 x 33 millimeters (0.4 x 1.3 inches), with a resolution of 320 x 106 pixels. You basically have to wear it with the screen facing the palm side of your wrist; if you wear the device on the back of your wrist, you have to twist your arm awkwardly or crane your neck to read the display. I found this uncomfortable when I was sleeping or typing.

If you enable notification alerts,the Band can display incoming calls, emails, texts, Tweets or other updates, and has a small motor that vibrates to alert you.I did this, on my iPhone, by enabling each app to "Show in Notification Center" in the phone settings. It was easy to turn the push notifications on and off whenever I wanted to.

Alongside the touch screen are two buttons, the power and action buttons. Pressing the power button, centered beneath the display, will wake up or turn off the display, and pressing and holding it powers the device on and off. Pressing the action button, below and to the right of the screen, lets you toggle through the choices on the screen and select the one you want. For example, you use this button to start or stop a run, or turn the heart rate monitor on or off.

The battery normally lasts 48 hours, but it needs to be charged sooner than that if you turn on the GPS function, or other advanced features. The device charges via USB, and the stated charge time is less than 1.5 hours, whichis about what I found when using the device.

The Band connects via Bluetoothwith the Windows Phone 8.1; iPhone 4S, 5, 5C, 5S, 6 and 6 Plus; and Android 4.3-4.4 phones. You will need a Microsoft account to use your device, but you can sign up for one if you don't already have one.

When you first log in, you'll be prompted to give your Band a name and choose a color theme and wallpaper.

User-friendliness: 5.5/10

The heart rate monitor and GPS features were useful — I ran a 5-mile (8 kilometers) race with the device, and afterward I found it helpful to see my average pace, average heart rate and ending heart rate, among other metrics. People who are interested in losing weight or maintaining weight loss may find the calorie-counting feature helpful. I'm not sure how much I would use the other features, especially sleep tracking, since the device was uncomfortable to wear while sleeping.

Getting the notifications about emails and texts right on the screen was useful because it meant I knew about them even when I wasn't right next to my phone. But actually reading the messages, especially longer emails, on the tiny screen was difficult. Also, once a message is pushed to your Band, there's no way to delete the message from the Band, even if you delete it from your phone. And you can't reply to messages directly from the Band, unless you're using Cortana with a Windows phone.

I initially had some trouble pairing the device with my iPhone — the Bluetooth wasn't able to establish a connection right away. But I was able to get it up and running after a few tries, and after that it synced automatically.

The Microsoft Health app is fairly easy to navigate. The home screen displays basic information about your workout, sleep, notifications, etc., and you can customize how information is displayed on your Band by managing "tiles." 

Value of information: 6/10

Overall, I found the health-tracking features to be useful, and the notifications were kind of novel, but for people looking for a fitness tracker to track the basic data from workouts, the Band's higher price may not be worth it, and its uncomfortable design may mean there are better options. For those who have a Windows phone, I imagine that having access to Cortana could make the device more useful.

The tracker offers several ways to tailor your goals and workouts based on your own preferences. It was easy to navigate through the app to customize a workout: You go to the Find a Workout menu in the Health app, and then you can browse through the options. This could be a useful feature, especially for people (like me) who perform best with someone coaching them. On the Health app, you can adjust your targets for daily number of steps and calories burned to suit your own goals, and the app will tell you if you've met them.

You can see on the app which times of day you were most active, and you can download pre-designed workouts (such as "Train for a Half-Marathon in 8 weeks" or my personal favorite, "Fast-Track Your Pecs").

Enjoyment/Inspiration: 5/10

The Microsoft Band was fairly enjoyable to use, but didn't feel as comfortable to wear as some other GPS watches, such as the TomTom Runner Cardio.

The Band can share information with apps like RunKeeper and myfitnesspal. As a nifty perk, you can pay for your Starbucks purchases using your Band, though it's not marketed as a payment device like Apple Pay.

All in all, the Band seems like a promising device, but in practice, I found it didn't quite live up to its potential as either a fitness tracker or a smartwatch. Also, I couldn't get past it being uncomfortable to wear for long periods.

Laser-Zapping Experiment Simulates Beginnings of Life on Earth

The origin of life on Earth about 4 billion years ago remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of science, but a new study is shedding light on the matter.

To recreate the conditions thought to exist on Earth when life began, scientists used a giant laser to ignite chemical reactions that converted a substance found on the early Earth into the molecular building blocks of DNA, the blueprint for life.

The findings not only offer support for theories of how life first formed, but could also aid in the search for signs of life elsewhere in the universe, the researchers said.

The beginning of life coincides with a hypothetical event that occurred 4 billion to 3.85 billion years ago, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, in which asteroids pummeled Earth and the solar system's other inner planets. These impacts may have provided the energy to jumpstart the chemistry of life, scientists say.

In 1952, the chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted a famous experiment at the University of Chicago in which they simulated the conditions thought to be present on early Earth. This experiment was intended to show how the basic materials for life could be produced from nonliving matter.

Recent studies suggest that asteroid impacts may break down formamide — a molecule thought to be present in early Earth's atmosphere — into genetic building blocks of DNA and its cousin RNA, called nucleobases.

In their new study, chemist Svatopluk Civiš, of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and his colleagues used a high-powered laser to break down ionized formamide gas, or plasma, to mimic an asteroid strike on early Earth.

"We want[ed] to simulate the impact of some extraterrestrial body [during] an early stage of the atmosphere of Earth," Civiš told.

They used the Asterix iodine laser, a 490-feet-long (150 meters) machine that packs about 1,000 Joules of power at its peak, which is equivalent to the amount produced by an atomic power station, Civiš said. The laser was only switched on for half a nanosecond, however, because that is comparable to the time frame for an asteroid impact, he said.

The reaction produced scalding temperatures of up to 7,640 degrees Fahrenheit (4,230 degrees Celsius), sending out a shock wave and spewing intense ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. The chemical fireworks produced four of the nucleobases that collectively make up DNA and RNA: adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil.

Using sensitive spectroscopic instruments, the researchers observed the intermediate products of the chemical reactions. These instruments measure the chemical fingerprint of the molecules formed during the course of a reaction. Afterward, the team used a mass spectrometer, a device that measures the masses of chemicals, to detect the final products of the reactions.

The breakdown of formamide produced two highly reactive chemicals or "free radicals" of Carbon and Nitrogen (CN) and Nitrogen and Hydrogen (NH), which could have reacted with formamide itself to produce the genetic nucleobases, the researchers said.

The findings, detailed today (Dec. 8) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide a more detailed mechanism for how the basic chemistry of life got started.

The results of the study could offer clues for how to look for molecules that could give rise to life on other planets, the researchers said. The Late Heavy Bombardment could have created similar reactions on other rocky planets in the solar system, but these may not have had water and other conditions necessary for life, Civiš said. For example, Earth contained clay, which may have protected these building blocks of life from the very bombardment that created them.

"The emergence of terrestrial life is not the result of an accident but a direct consequence of the conditions on the primordial Earth and its surroundings," the scientists wrote in the study.

Wikipedia's Gender Problem Gets a Closer Look

Wikipedia has a gender problem.

The online, crowdsourced encyclopedia is open to anyone who wants to edit it, but surveys suggest that nearly 90 percent of these volunteer "Wikipedians" are male. A 2011 editor survey by the Wikimedia Foundation pegged the number of active female editors at only 9 percent. Other surveys have found slightly different percentages, but none exceed about 15 percent female representation worldwide.

Now, researchers are delving into how that gender schism affects the content of Wikipedia, even as the Wikimedia Foundation and independent groups search for ways to get more women involved.

"This is something that people have lots of opinions about, but about which there is very little serious research," said Julia Adams, a sociologist at Yale University who is currently running a study on how academia is portrayed on Wikipedia compared with the actual structure and demographics of the academic world.

Sexism on the Web

Adams' work, which is supported by the National Science Foundation, has already come under fire. A blurb on the ongoing study appeared in Sen. Tom Coburn's (R-Okla.) 2014 "Wastebook," a publication put out by the senator's office that highlights what he believes to be wasteful government spending.

Coburn's focus on Adams' research highlights the challenges inherent in even talking about Wikipedia's gender gap. The "Wastebook" questions whether gender is an issue at all, citing a 2011 op-ed by a conservative writer. But a growing number of voices suggest that sexism is a problem not just on Wikipedia, but all over the Internet.

"Men want to shape the type of discussions that we want to have about technology, and then women's concerns become drowned out by the idea that it's not important," said Zuleyka Zevallos, a sociologist and head of Social Science Insights in Australia, who has written about Wikipedia and gender in the past.

Zevallos pointed to a current online controversy called Gamergate, which began when the ex-boyfriend of a video game developer claimed that she had a romantic relationship with a video game journalist. On Twitter and other sites, the conflict quickly turned complicated and ugly, with death and rape threats leveled at female game developers and journalists.

A similar thread of misogyny appeared after the European Space Agency's Philae probe made a historic landing on a comet on Nov. 12. In an interview during the agency's live broadcast, mission scientist Matt Taylor wore a shirt festooned with scantily clad women, drawing criticism from the scientific and science journalism communities. On Twitter, women who spoke out against the shirt were harassed and received tweets such as "please kill yourself" and "Why is it ugly women gripe about this stuff?"

Wiki women

Any woman with an Internet connection can sign up for a Wikipedia handle and begin editing. But the Wikipedian community arose from the open-source software community, which was heavily male, said Katherine Maher, chief communications officer for Wikimedia. 

"If you draw from a community that is predominately male from the get-go, you do ultimately end up shaping the community," Maher told.

In 2011, Sue Gardner, then the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, gathered women's reasons for not editing Wikipedia, and found that they ranged from discomfort with the interface to dislike of Wikipedia's conflict-heavy culture.

"There is an overly aggressive editing of women's pages," Zevallos said, referring to pages that deal with issues of interest to women. Even the Wikipedia page for the word "woman" itself has a history of controversial edits and far more conflict on its "talk" page, where editors discuss changes, than the Wikipedia article on the word "man." Debates range from arguments over bias and feminism to the appropriate weight for women pictured as representative illustrations in the article.

"Women just get tired," Zevallos said.

Why Wikipedia matters

The question of who edits Wikipedia has real implications for the sixth-most-visited website on the Internet. The article on friendship bracelets, for example, runs only 374 words, plus a list of pattern names. Click over to the article on the marble, a toy more often beloved by boys than friendship bracelets, and there are more than 2,000 words on marble history, design, manufacturing and games.

The disparity extends beyond childhood games. In 2013, writer Amanda Filipacchi noted in the New York Times that Wikipedia editors had begun removing female authors from the "American Novelists" category in the encyclopedia and putting them in a subcategory called "American Women Novelists." Male novelists got to stay on the gender-neutral list. (Since the article appeared, an "American Male Novelist" category has been created.)

There are efforts from the Wikimedia Foundation and from grassroots groups to get more women involved with editing (as well as other minorities, as the English-language Wikipedia is largely put together by white editors). One group of editors has set up a gender gap task force to improve pages on famous women and to create more resources for female editors. Wikimedia, as well as individual Wikipedians, have staged "edit-a-thons" geared toward women, such as one in February 2014 that was aimed at getting people to contribute to pages on art, women and feminism.

There is anecdotal evidence that such targeted programs can help. For example, Wikimedia's Maher said, a program in Egypt dubbed the Wikipedia Education Program aims to get students to contribute to Wikipedia by translating English Wikipedia pages to Arabic Wikipedia.

"The participation there is almost 80 percent female," Maher said. Thus, some subcultures of Wikipedia reach large numbers of women.

Adams and her colleague, Hannah Brückner of New York University at Abu Dhabi, are interested in examining how Wikipedia tackles academia. The goal, Adams told Live Science, is to understand how well Wikipedia portrays scientific research and the demographics of the researchers doing the work.

"Girls and women look at Wikipedia, as do boys and men, and this influences how people see, for example, whether they belong in the sciences or not," Adams said.

Initial results should be ready soon, with further information coming in throughout next year, Adams said.

"People have a lot of stake in public knowledge, whether it's a textbook for school or a public encyclopedia," Adams said. "And they should have a stake in it. That's part of the point of our project."

Virtual Reality Affects Brain's 'GPS Cells'

Virtual reality is a growing technology used in everything from video games to rehab clinics to the battlefield. But a new study in rats shows that the virtual world affects the brain differently than real-world environments, which could offer clues for how the technology could be used to restore navigating ability and memory in humans.

Researchers recorded rats' brain activity while the rodents ran on tiny treadmills in a virtual reality setup. In the virtual world, the animals' brains did not form a mental map of their surroundings like the ones they form in real-life settings, the study showed.

"We are using virtual reality more and more every day, whether for entertainment, military purposes or diagnosis of memory and learning disorders," said Mayank Mehta, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We are using it all the time, and we need to know … how does the brain react to virtual reality?"

Brain's GPS

Scientists have found that brain cells act as a positioning system, by creating a mental map of an environment from visual input as well as sounds, smells and other information. The discovery of these "GPS cells" was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

Virtual reality creates an artificial environment, but does it activate a mental map the same way as the real world does? To find out, Mehta and his colleagues put rats on treadmills in a 2D virtual reality setup.

"We put a tiny tuxedo or harness around the rodent's chest," Mehta said — the rats are "swaddled like a baby, and a giant IMAX kind of screen goes all around them."

While the rats were exploring the virtual room, the researchers used tiny wires (50 times thinner than a human hair) to measure the response of hundreds of neurons in the animals' brains.

They recorded signals from a brain region called the hippocampus, known to be involved in learning and memory, while the animals explored the virtual room. Alzheimer's disease, stroke and schizophrenia all cause damage to the hippocampus, which interferes with people's ability to find their way in the world.

The researchers compared the brain activity in the virtual room to that measured while the animals explored a real, identical-looking room. When the rats were exploring the real room, their GPS neurons fired off in a pattern that produced a mental map of the environment. But to the researchers' surprise, when the rodents were exploring the virtual room, the same neurons fired seemingly at random — in other words, no mental map was being formed, Mehta said.

The researchers checked to see whether something was wrong with the rats or the measurements, but found nothing, Mehta said.

Mental pedometers

Yet, when the researchers took a closer look at the brain activity of the rats in virtual reality, they found that the signals weren't quite random. Instead, the brain cells were actually keeping track of how many steps the animals took — like a pedometer, Mehta said.

"We think the brain on its own behaves like a pedometer," but turns it into a map of the space by using other cues, such as smells, sounds, memory, he said.

Mehta has a hunch that the way the brain makes a map of space is the same as the way it remembers anything. For example, if someone tells you to remember a random sequence of numbers, it would be very difficult. But if it were part of a song, you may remember it more easily.

"Our brain is very good at picking something up if it comes from different [senses]," Mehta said. So when the brain makes a map of space, in addition to visual information about the scene, it takes into account smells, sounds and other aspects of the environment, he said.

The current study was only in rats, but Mehta thinks human brains probably respond similarly to virtual reality. Previous studies have shown that people with hippocampus damage in virtual reality setups don't form clear mental maps. Before, scientists didn't know if the map was poor because of the participants' brain damage or because of the virtual environment, but the current findings support the latter, Mehta said.

Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening?

The Royal Society in London - Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. The goal? To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person.

The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. The recently released film "The Imitation Game," about Turing's efforts to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, is a reference to the scientist's own name for his test.

In the London competition, one computerized conversation program, or chatbot, with the personality of a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy named Eugene Goostman, rose above and beyond the other contestants. It fooled 33 percent of the judges into thinking it was a human being. At the time, contest organizers and the media hailed the performance as an historic achievement, saying the chatbot was the first machine to "pass" the Turing test.

When people think of artificial intelligence (AI) — the study of the design of intelligent systems and machines — talking computers like Eugene Goostman often come to mind. But most AI researchers are focused less on producing clever conversationalists and more on developing intelligent systems that make people's lives easier — from software that can recognize objects and animals, to digital assistants that cater to, and even anticipate, their owners' needs and desires.

But several prominent thinkers, including the famed physicist Stephen Hawking and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, warn that the development of AI should be cause for concern.

Thinking machines

The notion of intelligent automata, as friend or foe, dates back to ancient times.

"The idea of intelligence existing in some form that's not human seems to have a deep hold in the human psyche," said Don Perlis, a computer scientist who studies artificial intelligence at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Reports of people worshipping mythological human likenesses and building humanoid automatons date back to the days of ancient Greece and Egypt, Perlis told Live Science. AI has also featured prominently in pop culture, from the sentient computer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" to Arnold Schwarzenegger's robot character in "The Terminator" films

Since the field of AI was officially founded in the mid-1950s, people have been predicting the rise of conscious machines, Perlis said. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, recently hired to be a director of engineering at Google, refers to a point in time known as "the singularity," when machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence. Based on the exponential growth of technology according to Moore's Law (which states that computing processing power doubles approximately every two years), Kurzweil has predicted the singularity will occur by 2045.

But cycles of hype and disappointment — the so-called "winters of AI" — have characterized the history of artificial intelligence, as grandiose predictions failed to come to fruition. The University of Reading Turing test is just the latest example: Many scientists dismissed the Eugene Goostman performance as a parlor trick; they said the chatbot had gamed the system by assuming the persona of a teenager who spoke English as a foreign language. (In fact, many researchers now believe it's time to develop an updated Turing test.)

Nevertheless, a number of prominent science and technology experts have expressed worry that humanity is not doing enough to prepare for the rise of artificial general intelligence, if and when it does occur. Earlier this week, Hawking issued a dire warning about the threat of AI.

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking told the BBC, in response to a question about his new voice recognition system, which uses artificial intelligence to predict intended words. (Hawking has a form of the neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, and communicates using specialized speech software.)

And Hawking isn't alone. Musk told an audience at MIT that AI is humanity's "biggest existential threat." He also once tweeted, "We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes."

In March, Musk, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and actor Ashton Kutcher jointly invested $40 million in the company Vicarious FPC, which aims to create a working artificial brain. At the time, Musk told CNBC that he'd like to "keep an eye on what's going on with artificial intelligence," adding, "I think there's potentially a dangerous outcome there."

But despite the fears of high-profile technology leaders, the rise of conscious machines — known as "strong AI" or "general artificial intelligence" — is likely a long way off, many researchers argue.

"I don't see any reason to think that as machines become more intelligent … which is not going to happen tomorrow — they would want to destroy us or do harm," said Charlie Ortiz, head of AI at the Burlington, Massachusetts-based software company Nuance Communications."Lots of work needs to be done before computers are anywhere near that level," he said.

Machines with benefits

Artificial intelligence is a broad and active area of research, but it's no longer the sole province of academics; increasingly, companies are incorporating AI into their products.

And there's one name that keeps cropping up in the field: Google. From smartphone assistants to driverless cars, the Bay Area-based tech giant is gearing up to be a major player in the future of artificial intelligence.

Google has been a pioneer in the use of machine learning — computer systems that can learn from data, as opposed to blindly following instructions. In particular, the company uses a set of machine-learning algorithms, collectively referred to as "deep learning," that allow a computer to do things such as recognize patterns from massive amounts of data.

For example, in June 2012, Google created a neural network of 16,000 computers that trained itself to recognize a cat by looking at millions of cat images from YouTube videos, The New York Times reported. (After all, what could be more uniquely human than watching cat videos?)

The project, called Google Brain, was led by Andrew Ng, an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University who is now the chief scientist for the Chinese search engine Baidu, which is sometimes referred to as "China's Google."

Today, deep learning is a part of many products at Google and at Baidu, including speech recognition, Web search and advertising, Ng told Live Science in an email.

Current computers can already complete many tasks typically performed by humans. But possessing humanlike intelligence remains a long way off, Ng said. "I think we're still very far from the singularity. This isn't a subject that most AI researchers are working toward."

Gary Marcus, a cognitive psychologist at NYU who has written extensively about AI, agreed. "I don't think we're anywhere near human intelligence [for machines]," Marcus told Live Science. In terms of simulating human thinking, "we are still in the piecemeal era."

Instead, companies like Google focus on making technology more helpful and intuitive. And nowhere is this more evident than in the smartphone market.

Artificial intelligence in your pocket

In the 2013 movie "Her," actor Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with his smartphone operating system, "Samantha," a computer-based personal assistant who becomes sentient. The film is obviously a product of Hollywood, but experts say that the movie gets at least one thing right: Technology will take on increasingly personal roles in people's daily lives, and will learn human habits and predict people's needs.

Anyone with an iPhone is probably familiar with Apple's digital assistant Siri, first introduced as a feature on the iPhone 4S in October 2011. Siri can answer simple questions, conduct Web searches and perform other basic functions. Microsoft's equivalent is Cortana, a digital assistant available on Windows phones. And Google has the Google app, available for Android phones or iPhones, which bills itself as providing "the information you want, when you need it."

For example, Google Now can show traffic information during your daily commute, or give you shopping list reminders while you're at the store. You can ask the app questions, such as "should I wear a sweater tomorrow?" and it will give you the weather forecast. And, perhaps a bit creepily, you can ask it to "show me all my photos of dogs" (or "cats," "sunsets" or a even a person's name), and the app will find photos that fit that description, even if you haven't labeled them as such.

Given how much personal data from users Google stores in the form of emails, search histories and cloud storage, the company's deep investments in artificial intelligence may seem disconcerting. For example, AI could make it easier for the company to deliver targeted advertising, which some users already find unpalatable. And AI-based image recognition software could make it harder for users to maintain anonymity online.

But the company, whose motto is "Don't be evil," claims it can address potential concerns about its work in AI by conducting research in the open and collaborating with other institutions, company spokesman Jason Freidenfelds told Live Science. In terms of privacy concerns, specifically, he said, "Google goes above and beyond to make sure your information is safe and secure," calling data security a "top priority."

While a phone that can learn your commute, answer your questions or recognize what a dog looks like may seem sophisticated, it still pales in comparison with a human being. In some areas, AI is no more advanced than a toddler. Yet, when asked, many AI researchers admit that the day when machines rival human intelligence will ultimately come. The question is, are people ready for it?

Taking AI seriously

In the 2014 film "Transcendence," actor Johnny Depp's character uploads his mind into a computer, but his hunger for power soon threatens the autonomy of his fellow humans. 

Hollywood isn't known for its scientific accuracy, but the film's themes don't fall on deaf ears. In April, when "Trancendence" was released, Hawking and fellow physicist Frank Wilczek, cosmologist Max Tegmark and computer scientist Stuart Russell published an op-ed in The Huffington Post warning of the dangers of AI.

"It's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction," Hawking and others wrote in the article."But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake ever."

Undoubtedly, AI could have many benefits, such as helping to aid the eradication of war, disease and poverty, the scientists wrote. Creating intelligent machines would be one of the biggest achievements in human history, they wrote, but it "might also be [the] last." Considering that the singularity may be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity, not enough research is being devoted to understanding its impacts, they said.

As the scientists wrote, "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all."