Making science accurate in movies without taking out the wonderment

Science has always had a hard time fitting in movies. From the Terminator franchise to What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?, filmmakers often pit creative license against scientific authenticity. A cluster of recent TV shows, however–Fringe, Numb3rs, and The Big Bang Theory—employ accurate science and mathematics to dramatic (or comedic) effect. In the realm of feature films though, some movies may cling close to scientific principles, most toss in a muddle of jargon, lab coats, flashing lights, or worst-case scenario: cast Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

The National Academy of Sciences is aiming to put an end to playing outside the rules of science with its new initiative, the Science and Entertainment Exchange. According to Jennifer Ouellette, the program’s director, its long-term goals are to “improve the portrayal of science and scientists in film and television by developing lasting relationships and collaborations between scientists and entertainment industry professionals.”

When science is adhered to like scripture, the results can be outstanding. Take 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was co-written by famed futurist and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. Sure, we don’t have computers like HAL yet, but the movie’s more accurate moments imbue it with an eerie, futuristic ambiance. For example, all the scenes in outer space are silent, since sound does not travel in a vacuum. Star Wars–for all its whooshing space ships and clattering, cosmic explosions–evidently never received that memo.

Films like 2001–or the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which adhered to scientifically known quirks of human memory so closely, it proved somewhat prophetic–can completely change the way the public understands the universe. More dubious endeavors, however, have the potential to mislead: Who wasn’t completely terrified of virtual reality after seeing The Lawnmower Man?

The NAS is hoping that bringing the two communities together will result in more 2001s and Eternal Sunshines, which it believes will be a boon for everyone: Through films, scientists get a popular conduit for their oft-misunderstood ideas; whereas filmmakers can produce more authentic work with the aid of researchers and academics.

Depending on how you look at it, the Exchange is perhaps as much a disservice as it is a service. By cracking down on fuzzy science, the NAS will flout one of the cardinal purposes of moviemaking: invention. After all, is scientific inaccuracy really so dangerous? It’s the fantastical inaccuracies Hollywood science–your flux capacitors, transmogrifiers, and warp drives—that get people hooked on science in the first place. Films and television have a capacity to compel and enchant, giving audiences their first taste of new worlds and strange ideas.

How many physicists today were likely Star Trek fans as children—probably because it was far more fantastic than so-called “hard sci-fi” films like 2001? According to theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, the answer is: a lot. Krauss wrote a book called the Physics of Star Trek, which investigates whether science would allow for wildly fictional concepts like inertial dampers and warp drive. “I never dressed up in a uniform or anything,” he writes, “but I did watch the series growing up–as did almost all physicists I know.” (Another famous Trekkie-cum-scientist, Stephen Hawking, penned the book’s preface.)

By fictionalizing high-minded concepts and ideas, entertainment can bring some of the greatest achievements and aspirations of science into the mainstream. The Terminator franchise got us all thinking about robotics, concealing a spooky prediction of a “technological singularity” among explosions and car-chase scenes. In Godzilla, War of the Worlds, The Andromeda Strain, and countless more Hollywood films, a scientific phenomenon is a kind of deus ex machina, saving the day at the last moment. Even when the facts are wrong, we come out of the movie theater feeling that science is powerful and capable of changing the world. And many of us want to learn more.

Ouellette — who herself wrote a book about Hollywood science, The Physics of the Buffyverse–is careful to point out that the Exchange isn’t just “scientists swooping in to ‘save’ Hollywood from bad science; it’s scientists offering input to enhance creativity.”

Certainly, if a middle ground could be achieved in the entertainment industry between sensational Hollywood and depictions that respect the laws of the universe, we might be in for some great movies. Regardless, I’m keeping my warp drive.

(Photos: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind by David Lee – © 2004 Focus Features; 2001: A Space Odyssey, by MPTV – © MPTV – image courtesy MPTV.net; Star Trek, © Paramount Pictures)

Three things our beleaguered NASA isn’t getting wrong

NASA gets a lot of flack these days, and it’s not without reason. Despite the $20.2 billion that it receives every year, two-thirds of the agency’s programs are either significantly over budget or behind schedule. With the planned retirement of the Shuttle in 2010–and with no new ship ready to replace it—the U.S. will have to rely on extensive assistance from the Russian Federal Space Agency to get astronauts into space. Add to this concoction a few years’ worth of P.R. disasters—from chief Administrator Michael Griffin’s controversial statements on global warming to the attempted kidnapping of U.S. Air Force Captain Colleen Shipman by Lisa Nowak, the love-crazed, diaper-wearing astronaut—and the negative connotation associated with NASA seems earned.

But all’s not bad at our much-maligned, bloated space agency. For starters, NASA employs 58,000 Americans; not all of them are tossing taxpayer money out the window by designing dubious spacecraft and scheming to commit crimes of passion. Some of its employees are innovating exciting new programs, engaging the public, and making big plans for the future of human space exploration.

Perhaps if we encourage the programs that NASA is getting right rather than criticize its plethora of blunders, we can restore some of the awe that once went hand-in-hand with space exploration. In the name of balance, here are three things that NASA is doing right.

Supporting The Arts

In 1962, NASA Administrator James E. Webb recognized that space exploration — beyond advancing science and technology — would inevitably inspire radical cultural change. So, he established the NASA Art Program, a little-known wing of the agency that commissions artists to present their perspectives on space missions. The list of participants is essentially a “who’s who” of American artists and includes Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Rockwell, James Wyeth, Nam June Paik, William Wegman, and Annie Leibovitz.

In 2001, NASA commissioned digital artist Martin Wattenberg to build Copernica (interface pictured above), a staggering database of “stellar cartography,” that houses all the works from the NASA collection in a clickable universe that you can navigate to explore its archives. Copernica is a strange, beautiful, and progressive section of NASA’s online presence, juxtaposing art and science to offer viewers newer, more sophisticated interpretations of space exploration.

Crowdsourcing The Small Stuff

In 2000, NASA conducted a little experiment in audience participation: To see if the public would help with scientific analysis, they created a site where volunteers (”clickworkers”) could conduct micro-tasks that require human perception and common sense but no scientific training–such as identifying craters in pictures of the surface of Mars. The project was a moderate success: An army of clickworkers took care of routine analysis that would normally require months of work by smaller teams of scientists or graduate students.

Now–in a far more fertile period for online collaboration—the program is having a more profound impact. Clickworkers are now helping to catalog images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera, locate craters on the asteroid Eros, and, soon, examine images of the proto-planets Vesta and Ceres brought back from the upcoming Dawn mission. The Clickworker program helps people feel invested in space exploration, while saving time and money better used on higher-level tasks.

Going Open-Source

As part of a larger, agency-wide shift towards transparency–a daunting task for such a sprawling bureaucracy–NASA jumped on the open-source software bandwagon in 2006. Since then, it’s released some 22 free software titles all originally designed for space mission tasks, including World Wind (see screenshot at left), a Google Earth-style 3D virtual globe that volunteer programmers are free to tinker with.

There’s even a group at NASA that works to connect communities inside and outside the agency to collaborate on software projects: CoLAB, as it’s called, hosts a digital salon for space enthusiasts in Second Life and helms the CosmosCode project, which, when it emerges from internal alpha testing, will offer tons of free, open-source space software to a whole community of programmers, companies, and other space agencies around the world.

This enterprising attitude towards open-source development is a win-win: by allowing eager geeks a crack at their code, NASA gets quickly-developed, higher-quality software — for free. The geeks, on the other hand, get to write code for live space missions, making space exploration an increasingly participatory activity. Nicholas Skytland, a founder of OpenNASA.com, a collaborative blog written by agency employees, sums up this forward-thinking endeavor: “We’ve talked a lot about ‘participatory exploration,’ and a hope for the future of NASA is that we truly embrace a culture around ‘participatory exploration’ in order to leverage technologies, knowledge, and information from the public, private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners to accomplish our mission.”

The technology seen in Minority Report is not as far off as you think

Before PCs and laptops, computers filled entire rooms. In the future, they may be all over your room.

There will be no mouse. In fact, there will be little familiar about it at all: The user will stand in front a series of screens, gesturing with gloved hands, moving images around, touching individual pixels, tracing shapes, and navigating complex fields of data. To the untrained observer, it will look as though they were conducting an imaginary orchestra. Instead of pointing and clicking, the user will just point.

Inconceivably, this computer already exists. It’s powered by g-speak—which isn’t an operating system, like Windows Vista or Apple’s Leopard—but rather a “spatial operating environment.”

Sure, it sounds new age, but it’s exactly what the makers of the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report were looking for when they encountered an early version of g-speak at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. They were in the market for a futuristic technology–one that looked like it could plausibly exist in, say, 2054—and g-speak fit the bill. John Underkoffler, the system’s designer, soon found himself on the Minority Report set. Acting as a science advisor, he explained the finer points of the “gestural language” used to navigate the then-nascent interface.

More than just an opportunity to show off the system to the Hollywood set, the film also proved to be an unorthodox direction in the evolution of g-speak.

Sure, the scenes where a furrow-browed Tom Cruise manipulates police forensics data on giant screens were initially shot on blank glass screens, with the software added in post-production. Still, it was really g-speak. The film’s actors were fully trained in the complex workings of the operating environment and were essentially miming real actions.

When the film came out, Underkoffler (pictured above) and his collaborators had the best demonstration video of all time, complete with a cameo by Cruise! “Audiences really responded to those scenes,” Underkoffler told me. “You could tell, talking to people about it, that they felt like they’d seen something that either was real or should be.”

The notion that the spatial operating environment should already exist was a welcomed reaction, since the design of g-speak was a step towards making computers more intuitive and logical to the human brain. Catalyzed by the positive reaction, and the thrill of seeing a fully-functional version of their idea come to life, they went straight back to the drawing board. The operating environment had been built twice already: once in the lab at MIT, and once in a high-profile piece of popular media. Both versions had their own sets of limitations: The financial constraints of the academic sphere–rendering the prototype g-speak to an intellectual parlor game saved for “grimly serious applications in the field of optics”—and the aesthetic standards of the film industry, respectively.

Its use in the film suggested that a spatial operating environment could be applied to a practical purpose—not that predicting crime is practical, but you get the point. Underkoffler and his collaborators desperately want to see that happen in real life. So they embarked in a third direction: commercial.

Under the moniker Oblong Industries, the creators of the g-speak now customize their futuristic computer platform for whoever needs it — including Fortune 50 companies, government agencies, and universities. They also sell g-speak to companies with big-time data issues, like those in telecommunications and network management, financial services, and medical imaging and bioinformatics. That is to say, people for whom the process of reaching into, pointing, poking, and spinning data around might be a much-needed respite from traditional number-crunching–and might provide valuable new insights.

After all, computers—with their processors, memory, graphics, and networked view of the world—are offering us increasingly complex possibilities for translating and interacting with 1s and 0s. Yet, the way we use computers hasn’t changed appreciably since the 1980s: we still click around a screen with a mouse or track pad.

The makers of g-speak know that this sort of control doesn’t take advantage of how the human brain works. According to Underkoffler, the brain regions that controls muscles, muscle memory, and proprioception (the sense of where your body is in space) and the visual system evolved to work together to deal with spatial situations. “That’s why we’re all such experts at getting around and manipulating the real world,” he says. “So it seems clear to us that computers should work the same way.”

Minority Report predicted this technology would be ready by 2054. In 2008, and it’s nearly ready to go. Though, don’t worry: a g-speak platform probably won’t replace our laptops anytime soon. (For one, not many of us can afford it.) In the future, however, it could allow us to blend virtual reality with computing, immersing ourselves in a Google Map or nearly walking inside a photo album.

As our interconnected world evolves, so will our interfaces, and our newest tools (think multi-touch iPhones and Microsoft’s Surface) will reflect our changing needs–one of which, perhaps, is a new desire to be able to reach out and touch information.

(All photos by Will Etling)

How a previously lost idea for superhuman strength may have found its way

It’s 1965. Bob Dylan’s gone electric. Astronaut Edward Higgins White has just made the first space walk by an American. The Soviets have shot a rocket off to Venus. And General Electric, perhaps buoyed by the scientific optimism of the age, is building Hardiman.

A 1,500-pound robotic suit with upwards of 30 joints and massive, cartoon-like limbs, Hardiman —”Hardi” is short for “Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation”— was the stuff of geek fantasy, something straight from the cover of a pulp science fiction paperback, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Thanks to funding from the Department of Defense, however, this strength-amplifying suit was almost a reality. When sported, it could ostensibly turn even the weakest poindexter into a weight-lifting machine, with the help of a complex network of hydraulic and electric linkages rigged up to a jointed framework.

Unfortunately, the Hardiman project disintegrated when G.E. engineers realized that although the exoskeleton’s robotic arms allowed the wearer to lift over 750 pounds, they themselves weighed three quarters of a ton. The suit was also dangerous to wear, prone to violent, uncontrollable movement.

These days, robotic suits are making a comeback, thanks largely to a change in focus from building superhuman strength to leveling the playing field for people who need it. This shift may be exactly what the dream of powered exoskeletons required to take that last, all-too-important step into reality.

For as long as both genres have existed, exoskeletons have been a usual suspect in sci-fi and Japanese manga—where it goes by the name “mecha.” They were also on the drawing boards of ambitious engineers, who have been tinkering with the suits since the first U.S. awarded a patent in 1890 for a funny prosthetic doohickey with long springs, intended to improve running and jumping. Since then, powered exoskeletons have seen as many tragic pitfalls as they have triumphs; G.E.’s Hardiman is just one chapter of that checkered history.

In 1963, the U.S. Army Exterior Ballistics Laboratory detailed the possibility of a pneumatically powered device, consisting of a large “saddle” attached to a pair of specially-designed shoes. The superhuman power it conferred upon its wearer: the ability to trot for miles without tiring. In the mid-80s, there was PITMAN—the pet project of an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico—a strength-enhancing suit which took its movement cues from brain-scanning helmet sensors. Designed for the Army, PITMAN preceded decades of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) research into the feasibility of such suits.

None of these machines ever made it far, but the hopes and ambitions of these pioneering designs have set the scene for a whole new generation of svelte, workable, and most importantly, real, exoskeletons.

Powered suits are enjoying a surge in popularity virtually unseen since the ’60s. The sheer variety of current, ongoing exoskeleton projects almost defies description: The alluring Japanese HAL-5 is a full-body suit that looks more iPod than Iron Man. The utilitarian BLEEX, or Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton, is a set of robotic legs built by robotics geeks at Cal-Berkeley that allow their wearer to effortlessly lug huge weights. And the glee-inducing SpringWalker is a pair of gangly legs that will eventually allow people to run at 30 MPH and effortlessly bound over walls—fulfilling the promise of the very first exoskeleton. The Army, too, is pouring money into all kinds of next-generation infantry combat projects, like a new robotic suit that enables its wearer to “easily carry a man on his back or lift 200 pounds several hundred times without tiring,” according to its manufacturer, Raytheon, Inc.—all while remaining flexible enough to sport while playing soccer.

The difference between this new crop of exoskeletons and the failed Hardimen of the past is surprising — they’re not all meant to create real-life Iron Men. Take a look at the HAL-5 suit, which is built and mass-produced by the upstart Japanese company CYBERDYNE, Inc.—an outfit that openly tips its hat to science fiction hallmarks like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terminator. CYBERDYNE isn’t looking to rent out its $1,300-a-month exoskeleton to, say, the U.S. Marines. Rather, it believes the suit has the potential to assist senior citizens and the disabled with their daily exertions or to help construction and disaster rescue workers work longer hours without tiring. Ditto a pair of robo-legs designed by Honda, which could ease muscular wear and tear for anyone who spends a lot of time crouching and standing up—people like factory and construction workers—as well as the elderly and infirm. This tender new approach has opened up an entirely new market of possibilities for robotic suits, which no longer need to be designed for battle situations in order to receive funding.

Which means: Unlike hoverboards, the dinner pill, and robotic maids named Rosie, ubiquitous powered exoskeletons are one dream of the past that might actually be fulfilled in our lifetimes.

(Lead photo courtesy of Cyberdyne, Inc.)

Who is Twittering on behalf of the Mars Phoenix Lander?

Among the exclamations of Mad Men withdrawal and the pro-Obama celebrations on my Twitter feed today, a lonely robot called MarsPhoenix is posting its last updates from the red planet.

MarsPhoenix—the screen name of NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander—is an unlikely Internet sensation: a small spacecraft designed to poke around Mars’ dirt for signs of microbial life, it isn’t as flashy (or needy) as other web celebrities. It doesn’t have a gimmicky theme song and it can’t perform impressive tricks on a treadmill. (See: Tay Zonday or the rock group OK Go, respectively.) But when the Lander recently started winding down its 15-month Twitter career—as its scientific mission came to an end—a corner of the blogosphere went into shock.

Some 37,000 people regularly follow the first-person, often-poetic MarsPhoenix Twitter feed. From 35 million miles away, they ask MarsPhoenix questions about life on the red planet. They celebrate its intrepid mission. And now, they mourn the robot’s slow demise due to the onset of an unforgiving Martian winter. (Twitter user laura47 recently lamented: “MarsPhoenix *cry* I don’t want to lose you!! so far away, and yet so close.”)

Of course, everyone knows that the Lander itself is not really Twittering from Mars—though that doesn’t seem to matter to those who happily anthropomorphize the robot through comments like, “Hi there, buddy! Try to stay warm! <3.” The notion of a real-life Wall-E, schlepping through the Martian landscape, has turned a relatively dry NASA mission into what could be the beginning of a new emotional investment in space exploration.

But, who really is writing those pithy updates on Phoenix’s behalf?

One person is responsible for not only the MarsPhoenix Twitter feed, but a handful of other NASA-related feeds, including those for the Saturn-exploring Cassini-Huygens satellite and the twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Her name is Veronica McGregor, and she works in the news office of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. She spearheaded the project of Twittering mission updates. Thus far, it’s freed up news office resources, many of which were going to long-form blog posts and video content, and connected the agency with a new generation of web users hungry for instant information and interactivity.

McGregor, who cut her teeth as a producer for CNN, calls the Twitter endeavor an experiment in public involvement. After beginning with a first-person perspective in order to save space—Twitter has a 140-character limit per post—she recalls waiting anxiously to see how people would react. “Part of me thought that somebody was going to write back and say, ‘Don’t do that, that’s silly,’” she confesses. “Instead, it just took off.” In a matter of days, the number of people following the Lander’s Twitter feed jumped from 3,000 to 9,000.

It’s a testament to the power of social media technologies that an organization as habitually detached as NASA can make significant inroads with a public it’s kept at arm’s length. Give McGregor’s astute understanding of the power of empathy and narrative a lot of the credit; it makes following MarsPhoenix compelling in a way that no standard-issue press releases and dry updates from the NASA website ever could be. Part of her secret is the sympathetic persona that she infuses into her dispatches; many comment on MarsPhoenix’s interminable cheerfulness (or as Twitter user dundie calls it, “Barbie cheerfulness”). “I try to be the eternal optimist,” says McGregor, who hopes her Twitter attitude will lessen the blow of the solar-powered MarsPhoenix’s collapse during the dark Martian winter. “People are getting so upset about the mission coming to an end. I’m trying to lessen that grief.”

Before she sits down to write something for the Lander—including a recent guest-blogging stint for popular gadget blog Gizmodo—McGregor asks herself, “How would Phoenix look at this?” She’s portrayed the robot as a martyr for scientific discovery: “I’ll be humankind’s monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me .” And as the mission draws to a close, she’s made the messages more cautionary, advising us to: “Take care of that beautiful blue marble out there in space, our home planet. I’ll be keeping an eye from here. Space exploration FTW!”

Hopefully, the success of this experiment will lead to a sea change in the way people interact with the research community (and vice versa). By reaching out to the public, scientists can keep people apprised of their groundbreaking work—and even offer some interesting lessons, as well. Take for example McGregor’s MarsPhoenix dispatch that informed her readers that the star that looked like it was directly above the moon wasn’t a star at all–it was Mars. “I got a lot of responses from people saying they actually went out and looked; they got very sentimental about it because they never knew that was Mars,” she says. “It’s great to think that people are learning.”

Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The scientific community reacts to Palin’s knock on fruit fly research

During her first address on Congressional policy in Pittsburgh last week, Republican vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin flippantly cited fruit fly research as an example of over-the-top government spending. She asserted that Congressional “earmarks” could be better used for funding more important things—such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which sets guidelines for the education of children with special needs. (It’s been widely reported that Palin’s newborn son has Down syndrome.) When deriding the defenseless flies, Palin punctuated her statement with one of her trademark chuckles and an “I kid you not.” (See a video of Palin’s full speech below.)

She probably didn’t anticipate the wrath it would incur from the scientific community.

Quoth the outspoken biologist P.Z. Meyers, on his blog Pharyngula: “This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community.”

All that vitriol? Over fruit flies?

Absolutely. By now, the entire science blogosphere has rushed to defend fruit flies (or Drosophila melanogaster) as workhorses of biological research–fundamental to the study of autism, among other things. (Autism, incidentally, is one of the disabilities covered by IDEA.) In order to get the research community’s perspective on Palin’s gaffe, I spoke to Hugo Bellen, a geneticist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Bellen uses fruit flies in his work on the peripheral nervous system—which wires the limbs and organs to the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord).

What was your lab’s reaction to Gov. Palin’s comments?
We’ve been flooded with emails. I’m not sure if Sarah Palin understands what the implications are of her statements. There are probably close to ten thousand people working on fruit flies because they’re such great models to study all kinds of biology. Numerous labs use fruit flies to study models for human disease and have made some major contributions to our understanding of the mechanisms by which these diseases occur.

What about fruit flies makes them so ideal for research?
They’re fast breeders. They’re cheap to work with. They’re extremely easy to manipulate–I think they’re currently the organisms that have the most tools available for sophisticated manipulation. You can essentially remove a gene in a single cell, or you can add a gene in a single cell. You can modify essentially at will. Because of that, and because through evolution all the genes are conserved, you can put mouse genes and human genes in flies and they’ll work just fine. You can manipulate the system to a level of sophistication where you can ask very complex questions, and you can ask them at a relatively low cost, and [get them answered] fast.

So, you would obviously say that government funding of fruit fly research projects is money well spent, right?
Yes, and this is generally recognized in the scientific community. The National Institutes of Health currently support more than 600 major fruit fly research projects that have lead to numerous discoveries related to cancer, neurological diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, hearing issues, blindness, genetic diseases, and [defects at] child birth. The Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1995 was awarded to [Christiane] Nüsslein-Volhard, [Eric] Wieschaus, and [Edward] Lewis for using fruit flies to discover most of the genes that play a role in early development.

So, are there scientific advances that would have been impossible without fruit fly research?
I would not say that. Nothing is impossible. It’s just historical. Years ago, Thomas Morgan started working with fruit flies—and I’m sure if it hadn’t been fruit flies somebody else would have come up with another organism that is as fast and as good—but it just happened historically that the fruit fly was selected, has expanded, and that so many people have started working with it. There are more tools available for this organism than any other. That’s the driving force for doing this research. Without the fruit fly, the study of genetics would have been delayed, and we would not understand a lot of issues as well as we do. But maybe another organism would have taken over. In fact, other organisms have been selected over the last few years.

What are some of those other organisms?
C. elegans, which is a little worm, has been used a lot and is also a great organism to study basic questions of biology. Zebrafish, which is a small fish that is used more [as a model organism] for vertebrate [animals with a backbone] development. Obviously, mice have been studied for many years. They are the most commonly used organisms—together with fruit flies.

(Fruit fly photo from Flickr user Maxx xx)

Introducing … the National Reconnaissance Office!

The so-called U.S. Intelligence Community consists of 16 agencies–an alphabet soup that includes the FBI, DEA and CIA. That umbrella moniker is a brilliant piece of semantics: “intelligence” feels smart; “community,” sounds, well, neighborly.

The reality, however, is that the Intelligence Community is a network of organizations bankrolled by an annual taxpayer budget of $43.5 billion. Each operates with some level of secrecy and autonomy from the others, and most people don’t even know some of the agencies exist. For example, ever heard of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)?

Probably not.

Despite being among the oldest American intelligence agencies—founded as a little brother to the Department of Defense during the peak of 1960s Sputnik paranoia—the NRO was top-secret until 1992. It’s not hard to keep the lid on, say, a paper-pushing bureaucratic wing of the government—but in this case it’s pretty unbelievable. That’s because the NRO, based in Chantilly, Va., is a space agency. Like NASA, it shoots satellites into orbit, employs thousands of people, and conducts research on far-fetched ideas, such as space-based radar systems. The big difference, however, is that the satellites the NRO distributes are destined to monitor the Earth rather than the cosmos; they’re designed to spy, not to study.

Military literature refers to the agency as “freedom’s sentinel in space” and America’s “eyes and ears in space.” Unofficial mission patches depict the NRO as a massive dragon with American flag-wings, holding the entire planet in its steely grip. Add to that the ludicrous money poured into the Intelligence Community after 9/11—not to mention Dick Cheney’s comments about engaging the “dark side” of American justice—and that dragon depiction starts to feel uncomfortably real.

The creation of the NRO in 1960 transformed an openly acknowledged U.S. space reconnaissance effort into a “black” (that’s “classified” in intelligence-speak) program. The main purpose: so the Soviets wouldn’t shoot down U.S. surveillance equipment. Incredibly, the NRO managed, over the course of its 32 “black” years, to send hundreds of covert spy satellites (and goodness knows what else) into space to survey every corner of the globe without anyone knowing—except those that did.

How could an agency stay secret while operating rocket launches and controlling “ground stations” all around the world, collecting and distributing data gathered from reconnaissance satellites with code names like “Misty” and “KH-13”—all built, incidentally, by civilian military contractors, like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing?

Whatever the reason, the NRO hasn’t shaken its near-ritualistic clandestine roots since the early-‘90s declassification.

Case in point: In 1995, it took a CIA inquiry and White House intervention for the NRO to admit it had gone excessively over budget in the construction of its new headquarters—the project’s classification effectively blocked any oversight. The Office has a track record of using its secrecy to burn through money without consequence: a “Future Imagery Architecture” spy satellite program frizzled away $10 billion without sending a single orbiter into space, something that Congress kept in mind this year when it recently nixed BASIC, another potentially money-guzzling satellite mapping program.

Certainly, some information should be kept under wraps for the sake of useful, international espionage, but government agencies with $6.5 billion budgets shouldn’t get to operate with impunity by playing the “top secret” card whenever the public wants to know how its money is being spent.

Now that the NRO is public, it has to submit to some transparency, such as announcing when it’s sending spy satellites into orbit—an awkward position for an intelligence agency—but it doesn’t need to reveal too many details aside from its stated mission: “track international terrorists, drug traffickers, and criminal organizations having the potential to threaten U.S. citizens and our way of life.” Occasionally something will slip out of the blackness and make a media splash, like the malfunctioning satellite that had to be shot down by a Navy cruiser earlier this year. But, for all intents and purposes–because it concerns defense—the dark agency stays dark.

And we stay in the dark.

The Bush administration spent its tenure burying science. Will Obama or McCain resurrect it?

Over the last seven years and change, we have born witness to one of the most anti-science presidential administrations in United States history. There’s been censorship of research, stacking of scientific advisory panels along ideological lines, stem cell-based culture wars, and the appointment of under-qualified government staffers. Bush and his cronies have jovially hacked away at the morale of the American scientist as though it were brush-clearing time at Crawford Ranch. Heck, remember when Dubya removed the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from NASA’s mission statement?

During stump speeches and political debates, science and technology are often swept under the rug. So, what are Obama’s plans for NASA? Can McCain, who chose a VP who believes dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time, redress the Bush administration’s wrongs? Behold, the fine print of our candidates’ proposed science policies:

BASIC RESEARCH 

Obama: The Obama campaign vows to restore the prominence of science advisor, a position that under Bush lost its “special assistant to the president”-status. With a respected science advisor at his side, Obama aims to reverse several Bush administration trends by appointing science-literate people to federal positions, doubling federal funding for basic research over ten years, and ensuring non-ideological science advisory committees.

McCain: The McCain campaign website has scant references to science research, education, or funding, but the Republican candidate stated his policies in response to a questionnaire from the nonpartisan group Sciencedebate 2008. He also vows to hire a qualified science advisor whom he’ll consult with to ensure “that policies will be based upon sound science, and that the scientific integrity of federal research is restored.” He also vows to eliminate “wasteful earmarks,” allowing him to allocate increased funds for basic and applied research. In addition, he wants to encourage the commercialization of science.

STEM CELLS

Obama: Obama supports stem-cell research despite alternatives—such as cord blood cells and reprogrammed adult cells—stating that, “embryonic stem cells remain unmatched in their potential.”

McCain: McCain supports stem-cell research, with some reservations. He asks that clear lines be drawn between scientific progress and ethical values, allowing for the use of discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization, which would go to waste under a general stem-cell research ban. He strongly, opposes, however, the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes (which conservatives refer to as “fetal farming”).

SPACE EXPLORATION

Obama: The Obama campaign has recently been harping on the four-year grounding of the U.S. space program that will start in 2010, as the space shuttle is retired and the Orion spacecraft is introduced. During that period, we will not be able to send astronauts to the International Space Station (without Russia’s help). Obama wants to maintain a U.S. presence in space to make use of the vantage point for conducting climate change, aeronautical, and weather research. He also wants to establish a “robust” program for both human and robotic exploration of space.

McCain: A McCain presidency would see increased investments in aeronautics research and a commitment to funding NASA’s Constellation program, which is developing Orion. Interestingly, his official space policy references the “U.S. victory over the Soviets in the race to the moon”—recalling Cold War-era fears that other countries might leave the U.S. in the (space) dust.

THE INTERNET

Obama: Obama believes in what he calls “an open Internet,” strongly supporting net-neutrality, which allows users to go where they want on the Web. He does, however, want to implement sensible safeguards that protect privacy online, by supporting restrictions on the use of private information.

McCain: McCain is against net-neutrality, which he refers to as “prescriptive regulation.” He argues that the government can keep Internet users safe from harmful content, spam, and bogus marketing. On the upside, McCain does champion high-speed Internet access for everyone.

SCIENCE EDUCATION 

Obama: Obama is a heavy supporter of boosting STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education by funding 40,000 teacher’s scholarships to increase the quantity and quality of Pre-K to 12 math and science teachers. Additionally, he would increase federal technology education investments by $500 million, bringing interactive games, tutoring systems, and, of course, social networks to the classroom.   Most importantly, however, is a long-overdue measure to triple the amount of National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships handed out each year.

McCain: In response to a ScienceDebate 2008 question on science education, McCain said restoring America’s economic prowess relied on building a 21st century workforce. Accordingly, he vows to help retrain displaced workers and reinvigorate the community college system by allocating $250 million to online education opportunities and bringing “private corporations more directly into the process, leveraging their creativity and experience.

(Microscope picture from Flickr user Juan Eduardo Donoso; McCain photo from Flickr user soggydan; Obama photo from Flickr user iceman9294)

Forget 2012. A Rapture-like alien drive-by is days away!

Fear October 14th. Yeah, today.

According to an Australian psychic called Blossom Goodchild, that’s the day when an intergalactic brotherhood of spacemen called the “Federation of Light” will finally make itself known to us Earthlings. Goodchild’s prophecy states that these blond, enlightened “We Come In Peace”-beings will land their spacecraft over Alabama in order to, “bring the downfall of those who have misintentions for the well being of your planet.” It will be, if you like, a spa day for Earth.

The October 14th message is running wild on the Internet, popping up in more than 200 YouTube videos, countless UFO discussion boards, and spawning entire websites devoted to prepping the uninformed for the inevitable renewal of mankind at the cosmic hands of these extra-terrestrials, known as the Pleiadeans.

Admittedly, I’m fascinated with the psychic predictions of people like Goodchild, but this sort of cultish and New Agey prognostication has a long history of being all talk with no deliverable.

If contact between the human race and any other form of life were ever to happen, I am betting that it won’t be as sensationalistic (and frankly predictable) as the October 14th prophecy portrays it. Communication with alien life would be complicated, mathematical, the product of some distant radio message. Think Contact.

That’s why legitimate endeavors like SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) exist. The Institute’s researchers, working on shoestring budgets and demeaned by almost all their scientific peers, are training their radio telescopes at the vast sky in a hunt for intelligent life in the cosmos that is rooted in science.

So, I have come to debunk Blossom Goodchild. This isn’t the first time that peaceful aliens are scheduled to drop by Earth—and it certainly won’t be the last. Below are some Close Encounters-style predictions from the last decade or so that failed to pan out.

Year: 1997
Prediction: Peaceful aliens riding in the wake of Comet Hale-Bopp were going to pass close enough to pick up the hitchhiking souls of “enlightened” humans. The 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult thought they were the only ticketed passengers for this cosmic trip. They committed mass suicide in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Their bodies (or, as they called them, “vehicles”), at least, did not catch the comet.

Year: 2000
Prediction: The turn of the millennium inspired countless prophecies—some as outlandish as that subscribed to by the Morningland cult, which claimed that Christ would return in a UFO “the size of Texas.” The more common version was that the world will be destroyed on January 1st, 2000, and that a UFO would spare only those faithful to the group from this destruction (prophecies tend to be exclusive, rather than inclusive.) Most groups, like the Aquarian Concepts Community in Sedona, Arizona, dissolved shortly after Y2K passed without a peep.

Year: 2001
Prediction: According to the  Unarius Academy of Science—a pseudoscience group founded in the early 1950s by Ernest and Ruth Norman, who claim to study the “interdimensional psychodynamics of the mind”—the so-called Space Brothers were to arrive in San Diego in a fleet of 33 spaceships, which would become the first of many light-filled institutions of higher learning. (The photos accompanying this piece are screenshots from a Unarius Academy movie called “The Arrival.”) By anticipating this arrival, mankind might be able to join the “Interplanetary Conclave of Light,” a cosmic United Nations.

Year: 2003
Prediction: Under the tutelage of Dr. Malachi Z. York, a black supremacist and convicted child molester who claims to be a native of the planet Rizq, the Nuwaubian Church believed that a spacecraft from the planet Illyuwn would visit Earth on May 5th, 2003, and take 144,000 people away and train them for a battle back on Earth a thousand years later against Devil worshipers, called Luciferians. All was quiet on the appointed date, which passed with Dr. York in jail on sex abuse charges.

The fabled elevator to space is a surprisingly pragmatic idea. In November, the Japanese give it a timeline.

Imagine, if you will, a new kind of space travel—one with no launch pads or booster rockets. No risky ocean landings in charred, cramped Soyuz orbital modules; no money-sucking Space Shuttles. No explosions, no “Houston, we have a problem.” Instead of strapping themselves onto the noses of massive rockets and hoping for the best, astronauts would nimbly step into an elevator and ride for a few hours, smoothly and safely, out of the Earth’s atmosphere and into a waiting space station.

Meet the space elevator, probably the most revolutionary idea in the history of aeronautics. Because it’s exactly what it sounds like: an elevator. To space. And, although it’s been a pipe dream of armchair theorists since the 1800s, it just made one giant leap into a whole new world of plausibility. Why? Because the Japanese, perhaps afraid of being eclipsed by the mighty progress of commercial space travel companies, or the showboating of the nascent Chinese space program, have decided to build one, for real.

It’s a smart pairing. Japan is a pioneer in the kind of precision engineering that a space elevator requires, and their space program, JAXA, is a small but powerful operation, excelling in X-Ray astronomy, satellite-based Earth observation, and building smart modules and components for the International Space Station. Plunging headlong into this unlikely project, Japanese scientists have founded an organization called the Japan Space Elevator Association, and they plan to host an international conference in November to draw up a timetable for the machine, discuss its impact on the world, and, according to their site, “Organize races with climbers made of Lego Blocks.”

Yes, it sounds like fun, but surely this is a folly in a moment of global economic upheaval?

Unbelievably, the space elevator is in fact a totally pragmatic idea, and ultimately a cheap one, too—or rather, it’s cheaper than the fuel-guzzling rigmarole we’re currently faced with every time we need to wrest something from the steely grip of our planet’s escape gravity.

The idea is simple, as most good ideas are: a super-strong tether made of carbon nanotubes, held taut by the inertia of the planet’s rotation, spanning from the surface of the Earth to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit, serving as a kind of  22,000 mile-long cosmic freeway (or, as the Japanese have already dubbed it, a bullet train to space) shuttling “lifters” out of the planet’s gravity and into orbit. To boot, the Japanese Space Elevator Association estimates it would only cost a paltry 1 trillion yen (about $9 billion) to build, which is pocket change if you consider the amount of money that NASA has indiscriminately poured into its programs over the years—not to mention compared to a certain Wall Street bailout.

What’s so elegant about the space elevator is that it draws a clean line between our centuries-old conception of “down here” and the newly approachable “up there.” While rockets retain a certain abstract quality—off they blast, in a florid burst of flame and noise, the mechanics of the whole thing still pretty mystical—the space elevator is concrete, as though humankind were reaching its own tentative arm into the great beyond. Besides, rocket fuel is so expensive, and launching rockets such a fuss, that it will probably always keep the democratization of space travel at bay. So what have we been waiting for? There are a handful of groups in the U.S. working on space elevator policy and components—one being the Liftport Group in Bremerton, Washington—but no one has made plans as bold as those of the Japanese.

Building the space elevator involves massive engineering challenges, but they’re not as impossible as they may seem. One of the most stunning things about the elevator, in fact, is that we have all the technology needed to implement it already. The only thing missing is a strong enough material to build the tether—the long cord connecting Earth and Space. Carbon nanotubes, which are the strongest man-made materials on Earth, seem to fit the bill, although the director of the JSEA, Yoshi Aoki, estimates they need to get a little stronger yet: about 180 times the tensile strength of steel.

Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps the most ardent and famous promoter of the space elevator, was often asked when he thought the first one might be built. A little flippantly, he noted, “my answer has always been: about 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing.” Stop laughing, everyone: it looks like it might be even sooner than that.