Yesterday, everyone got excited (PopSci included) at the idea, drawn from Kepler scientist Dimitar Sasselov's TED talk, that the Kepler planet-hunting mission had turned up 140 new "Earth-like" planets.

In a blog post today, Sasselov clarifies that that wasn't exactly what he meant. "At this time we have found only planet candidates . . . Planet candidates are just that: 'candidates.'" Meaning that while the odds of finding Earth-like planets remain strong -- and PopSci remains optimistic -- confirmation is, despite yesterday's hopes, still pending, as to whether the sightings are a) actually planets and b) actually Earth-like.

First we got wireless video game controls, then motion sensing controllers, and now even a controller-free video game interface. But the next stage of human-computer interaction could be controllers that add hot and cold sensations to users' simulated experiences.

An experimental new video game controller just revealed at this week's SIGGRAPH conference includes a pair of thermoelectric panels on each side of a controller. Those surfaces heat or cool rapidly in reflection of what's happening in the game, offering players a new sensory connection to what's happening on the screen.

The controller temperature doesn't swing wildly - less than 10 degrees in either direction in just five seconds - but apparently a small sensation is all that's needed to add a rich layer of sensory experience to a virtual reality environment. No word on whether any major console makers are eyeballing such technology, but the idea is pretty cool. After all, remember how thrilling it was when our gaming peripherals started vibrating?

[Technology Review]

From the people that brought you private spaceflight and super-fuel-efficient automobiles comes the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. X-Prize officials announced today a $1 million purse for the team that can demonstrate the most efficient method of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

Inspired, of course, by the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- which as of this writing appears to still be contained -- the new X Challenge aims to provide impetus for both venture capital and innovative talent gravitate toward next-gen oil cleanup technology.

"The devastating impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will last for years and it is inevitable that future spills will occur -- both from wells and from transport tankers," stated X-Prize Chairman Dr. Peter Diamandis at this morning's official announcement of the prize in Washington, D.C.

The challenge will be a two-stage affair. Phase one calls for those vying for the prize to put their technical approaches to the problem before a panel of judges that will evaluate them for feasibility, cost, scalability, environmental impact, and the degree to which the technology improves over current methods like skimming and booms.

Phase two, of course, is the demonstration of the technology in action. Competitors won't actually take their ideas to the Gulf for testing -- all evaluations will take place at the National Oil Spill Response Research & Renewable Energy Test Facility (OHSMETT) in New Jersey. But with any luck some of that technology will make it to the field eventually. The team with the single best technology will receive a $1 million prize purse, with second and third place taking home $300,000 and $100,000 respectively.

The prize's namesake and benefactor, Wendy Schmidt, is the wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt and the philanthropic force behind a handful of charitable foundations, including the Schmidt Marine Science Research Institute, which she co-founded with her husband.

Researchers at IBM have created the most complex neurological map ever seen, detailing the comprehensive long-distance network that makes up the macaque monkey brain in unprecedented detail. Such a roadmap through the brain's complex networking processes could have major implications for attempts at reverse-engineering neural networks and creating cognitive computer chips that "think" as powerfully and efficiently as the biological brain.

Focusing on a long-distance network connecting 383 brain regions and 6,602 long-distance connections that function like highways to connect disparate regions of the brain. Shorter, more localized connections were found to carry signals within regions.

But most importantly, they found what they describe in a paper published in PNAS as a "tightly integrated core" that might be they key to cognition in higher-thinking biological creatures. That core might be what gives us consciousness (we won't get into the philosophical implications there). Further, the core isn't located in one, or even two regions. The researchers found it stretches through the premotor cortex, prefrontal cortex, temporal lobe, thalamus, visual cortex and a handful of other regions.

Another surprising find: the prefrontal cortex, though at the front of the brain, might actually serve as its central information hub that distributes information throughout the brain.

The study included mapping of four times as many regions and three times the number of connections than the largest previous attempt. Those findings could finally help researchers mimic the brain -- which, even in this seemingly advanced era, is something of a mystery to us. That in turn could lead to network architecture and computer chips that process and move information as quickly and seamlessly as our brains do.

[Kurzweil AI]

In this modern economy, apparently nothing is sacred -- not even the space shuttle is spared the indignity of training its younger replacement. During what is planned to be the last shuttle flight ever, astronauts onboard space shuttle Endeavour next February will test a new docking system designed for the Orion spacecraft. The system provides real-time 3-D images to the crew and is more streamlined and more accurate than the shuttle's docking sensors.

Last week, the STS-134 crew got a preview of the technology from Ball Aerospace, whose engineers designed the system with workers from Lockheed Martin, NASA's primary contractor on the Orion project. The new docking system involves an eye-safe flash Lidar Vision Navigation System and a high-definition docking camera. The system's resolution is 16 times that of the shuttle's, and it provides data from as far away as three miles, triple the shuttle's ability.

It's not often that engineers can test future spaceflight systems in space, notes Jeanette Domber, the project lead for the shuttle test, called "Sensor Test for Orion Relative Navigation Risk Mitigation" (STORMM).

"There's nothing like collecting data in this environment, compared to the testing we can do on the ground," she said.

On the 11th day of the last shuttle mission, astronauts will make a penultimate departure from the International Space Station and move about 3.5 miles away. As the shuttle slowly returns to the ISS, the Orion docking system will switch on. The shuttle will approach the station the way Orion would, and engineers at Ball, Lockheed and NASA will gather streams of data to improve their system's algorithms.

Astronauts will really be using the shuttle's existing docking system, but astronaut Andrew Feustel (currently co-starring in the Hubble IMAX movie) will take the new one for a test drive.

The tests will improve spacecraft docking capability regardless of what Congress and the White House decide to do with the Constellation program. It could be used by pilots or in unmanned craft, says Lisa Hardaway, Ball's chief engineer for the Orion project. If the Obama administration decides to send a vehicle to an asteroid, for instance, a system like this could simplify the rendezvous.

"The beauty of our instruments is that they can be used on any vehicle for any application. For any incarnation that Orion ends up in, our vehicle is still applicable," Hardaway says.

Befitting the space program's legacy, the system might also be useful for Earth applications -- its capability to determine shapes, intensity, and distance could improve terrain mapping, deforestation monitoring and hazard-avoidance systems in transportation.

The space shuttle uses different sensors as it approaches the ISS. At far distances, astronauts track their target with radar. As they approach the station, they use a trajectory control system and a laser.

The new system integrates everything, Domber says. The Lidar system sends out a laser pulse, which is reflected to a sensor and translated into computer data. The astronauts will know exactly where their spacecraft is relative to its docking target, and the high-def camera shows them a real-time view.

Lidar systems can be dangerous, especially for astronauts peering out the space station's cupola to catch a view of the action. Engineers had to build a small but powerful Lidar laser that wouldn't hurt astronauts' eyes, Domber says: "We have done eye-safe lasers that require much more power, and are larger, and we have done not-eye-safe lasers in a small package. We needed to combine the two to make it safe."

The laser fits in the palm of your hand, and the whole package is about the size of a bread box. It is the latest in a suite of new technologies meant to further NASA's goal -- if not Obama's -- to see Orion fly in 2013.

And the latest to help shepherd the shuttle into the annals of history. Learn more about it in this video.

The annual Tales of the Cocktail convention happened again in New Orleans last week, I seem to recall. And somewhere between the sazeracs and the rusty nails, I attended a series of enlightening seminars (each accompanied by appropriate cocktails, of course).

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking and probably the most famous name in food science, was present at Tales for the first time, to lend his expertise to a deserving cocktail world. He sat on a panel with Audrey Saunders, celebrated owner of New York's Pegu Club, and Tony Conigliaro, who pushes the frontiers of molecular mixology at London's 69 Colebrooke Row. Over the course of 90 minutes, during which Pegu's head bartender Kenta Goto mixed illustrative drinks for the audience, the trio of experts dropped some fascinating and useful tidbits of cocktail science. Here are some highlights.

Froth Your Drinks Right

When shaking up a drink that you want frothy, egg white is your friend, since its proteins bond together permanently to give structure to a foam. Gelatin, the protein more commonly used in culinary foams, tends to melt after a while, since its protein bonds only temporarily. Shake the egg white at room temperature first, since it foams better warmer; then chill the drink. A shaker made of silver produces a softer, more delicate foam because of the metal's interaction with the egg.

Get the Best Mint Flavor

McGee revealed that mint, and other plants in the same botanical family, such as basil, store their delicious aromatic compounds in little hairs and organs on the bottom surface of their leaves. If you crush the entire leaf, you'll extract the generic grassy flavors from inside the leaf as well as the minty taste you're after. A better approach is to just gently muddle or abrade the surfaces of the leaves, without rupturing their whole structure.

Avoid Overexciting Your Champagne

To make a champagne cocktail, as we all know, you put a sugar cube at the bottom of a champagne flute, shake a few dashes of Angostura bitters onto the cube, then fill the glass with chilled champagne. Unfortunately, as Goto demonstrated, bitters is full of small molecules, such as lecithin, which cause the champagne's foam to strengthen and grow, so pouring fizz onto bitters can be a messy proposition, releasing too much CO₂ from the drink too soon. Instead, Saunders suggests, fill the flute first, then gently gently add a bitters-saturated sugar cube and serve.

Make the Most of Hidden Flavor

McGee cited some useful information for cocktail inventors about how the brain perceives flavor. For one thing, if there's sugar present in a cocktail, the brain will find the drink more aromatic than an identical drink with less sugar. That's an evolutionary adaptation, he theorizes: we are much more interested in items that provide more life-giving calories.

Also, in strong drinks (above 20 percent alcohol), the concentrated ethanol can form large clusters, or micelles, that are dispersed in the water phase. Aroma molecules can hide inside these clusters, becoming trapped, and thus make the drink seem less aromatic and flavorful to the drinker. Diluting the drink helps the alcohol clusters break up, freeing the tasty aroma molecules. (In the Times this week, McGee writes about other instances of diluting for flavor.) Chilling the drink also makes the alcohol more soluble in water, and likewise frees trapped aromatics. That's why putting a couple of ice cubes in a glass of neat whisky does so much for the drink's taste.

A Well-Aged Cocktail

Finally, Tony Conigliaro demonstrated a little trick he's been doing for a few years: mixing cocktails, putting them in bottles, and sticking them in a cool cellar for six months or more. (At this point, Kenta Goto obligingly poured out a round of Cuban rum cocktails thus aged.) The drink had a magnificent round, integrated flavor, although it would have been interesting to taste an unaged sample for comparison.

When spirits age in wooden casks, the majority of the changes that take place are due to the liquor's complex interaction with the wood, which gives it color and flavor. But when drinks are aged in glass bottles, they don't interact with the inert container. So what's happening? McGee explained that, left to its own devices, a spirit will age regardless: sulfur compounds in the drink oxidize, and alcohols, acids, and aldehydes react together, losing their harsh edges and producing aromatic esters.

A Stirring Experiment

After the McGee seminar, PopSci fave Dave Arnold took the stage for his own seminar, The Science of Stirring, which was nothing more nor less than a detailed analysis of how stirring a drink with ice compares to shaking it (last year he taught The Science of Shaking). Six skilled stirrers (including McGee, who volunteered from the audience) stood on the stage, mixing drinks in vessels Arnold had fitted with thermocouples, while the six drinks' temperatures were plotted live on a giant projection screen.

The liquid nitrogen was brought out at some point as well, to demonstrate that there is indeed such a thing as a cocktail that's too cold. And that was just one morning of the week-long conference. We're lucky we survived.

Snake-like robots are nothing new -- for instance, Virginia Tech has developed some pretty amazing pole-climbing snakebots, and the Israeli military has a weaponized recon 'bot in the works -- but the U.S. Army Research Lab is taking military snakebots to a new level. Its Robotic Tentacle Manipulator is using snakebot tech to develop a scalable system in which several robots work in unison to manipulate objects.

Like many of its counterparts, the individual RTM snake can slither into tight spaces, climb impassible obstacles, or swim where soldiers cannot, all the while beaming back images to the soldier controlling it by remote. Each snake is equipped with a sensor array, not least of which is a LIDAR scanner that lets it render 3-D depictions of objects, landscapes, or faces.

But the snakes also work in groups, acting more like fingers or the tentacles of an octopus. Arranging several of them on a circular base creates an array that can gingerly pick up, rotate, and inspect an IED or possibly even open a door -- a seemingly simple task that falls outside the capabilities of most robotic platforms. Its touch sensitivity allows it to do delicate work -- you don't want to squeeze a live munition, for instance -- yet in tandem the snakes could be reasonably strong.

The developmental hardware that the RTM program is currently working with spun out of research into snakebots conducted in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and consists of three 9.5-inch tentacles and a large screen laptop for the operator. The master program runs advanced algorithms that are able to manipulate the motors in each link of the snakes to work in concert as though they belong to single organism. But the system is completely scalable, so a small custom array could be designed to give the Army's Warrior robot system a more dexterous "hand," while larger tentacle arrays could be fitted to larger vehicles or robots.

[U.S. Army via CNET]

NASA has been tracking a piece of space junk on course for a near collision with the International Space Station this week, but while the agency continues to monitor the debris -- a leftover from China's brilliant shooting down of the Fengyun 1C weather satellite during a missile test in 2007 -- Russian Flight Control authorities have issued an all-clear, saying an avoidance maneuver will not be necessary.

This month, NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office released data naming the top ten incidents contributing to the space junk problem. The Fengyun fiasco is hands down the largest single contributor to the growing space junk crisis. NASA has identified some 19,000 objects larger than four inches that are running loose in orbit at extremely high rates of speed just waiting for a functioning satellite, a spacecraft, or the ISS to get in their paths. Of those, 2,841 are thought to have come from the destruction of Fengyun 1C.

Most of the garbage hurtling through space belongs to China and the Soviet Union, the report says, though Western commercial interests and space agencies also shoulder their shares of the blame. Some of the blame can even be divvied up; last year an operational Iridium communications satellite collided with a spent Russian Cosmos spacecraft, spawning nearly 2,000 pieces of smaller debris.

But Europe could soon take the top spot on the space junk tally. When the European Space Agency's Envisat Earth observation satellite goes defunct in three years, the ESA will be the proud owner of the largest and most dangerous piece of junk out there: a nearly 9-ton, $2.9 billion piece of orbiting detritus that won't be pulled into Earth's atmosphere for 150 years. The danger isn't that the massive satellite might slam into the ISS -- the chances of that are quite slim. But if it collides with another large piece of junk at high speed -- say, a rocket stage or another retired satellite -- the impact could release 10 times as much junk as the Iridium-Cosmos smash up.

With so much junk up there, the DoD has even warned of a scenario in which such a massive collision could trigger a cataclysmic chain reaction in which one impact begets another and then another until entire orbits are unusable. Unlikely, sure, but some insist it's possible. The good news is we're working on the problem. Northrop Grumman is working with DARPA to develop a ground-based radar system to help track space debris from the ground, and the U.S. Air Force is planning to launch a Space-Based Space Surveillance satellite in the near future that will help direct traffic in space. Assuming, of course, a piece of orbiting junk doesn't knock it clean out of the sky.

[Space, Network World, Voice of Russia]

Space is getting pretty crowded -- there are a couple thousand satellites orbiting Earth, not to mention destroyed-satellite debris and at least one zombiesat. Adding new ones is increasingly difficult, because there's only so much room for satellites to sit in specific, geostationary orbits.

A theory first proposed by a physicist/science fiction writer may provide a solution. In a new study, engineers from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland claim to have worked out a system of displaced orbits, first proposed in 1984 by American physicist Robert Forward.

Satellites follow Keplerian motion, an orbital path named for Johannes Kepler, who described it 400 years ago. Unless they are powered, they naturally glide along that path after they're launched. But Forward -- who, as the researchers point out, also spent time in Scotland -- proposed using solar sails to nudge geostationary satellites into a different path.

The theory was dismissed as impossible, but now Colin McInnes, Director of the Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory at Strathclyde, and his grad student Shahid Baig have published a paper in the Journal of Guidance, Control and Dynamics that says Forward was right.

McInnes says the team has devised closed orbits that don't obey Kepler's laws. The orbits would allow satellites to circle the Earth every 24 hours, but remain displaced north or south of the equator. The pressure from sunlight reflecting off a solar sail can offset the center of the orbit to be slightly behind the Earth, away from the sun, McInnes says. In science fiction-y terms that might make Forward happy, it's called a levitated orbit.

Though the displacement is between 5 to 30 miles, it's enough to make room for more geostationary satellites, which are necessary for weather forecasting and communications. Hybrid solar sails could incorporate traditional thrusters to push the satellites even farther apart.

McInnes says he is also working on how to arrange satellites in a polar geostationary orbit, where they could provide new vantage points to study climate change.

[ScienceDaily]

In a breakthrough so hot it's cool, Spanish researchers have figured out how to make water freeze at room temperature. By artificially manipulating the mechanisms by which water condenses in the atmosphere, the researchers found a means to trigger ice formation at far higher temperatures than water's usual freezing point, a development that could lead to better artificial snowmaking, more efficient ice skating rinks, and better freezer technology.

The prevalent school of thought regarding ice formation used to dictate that hexagonal structures similar to that of natural snow and ice were the best candidates to induce freezing or to trigger rain. The research team at Spain's Centre d'Investigació en Nanociència i Nanotecnologia decided to test this theory on a mineral named "Frankdicksonite," or barium fluoride (BaF₂).

Frankdicksonite has the desired hexagonal structure, but the Spanish team found it to be a less-than-ideal ice-nucleating material. Except for when its structure has imperfections. When BaF₂ has surface defects, its ability to spur condensation greatly improves. At the point of the surface defects, water tends to form tiny two-dimensional icy patches even under normal ambient conditions.

The finding could swing open the door for a new kind of synthetic, environmentally friendly material that spurs ice formation at higher temperatures. The team is currently working on just such a material, with hopes of later creating what they call "intelligent surfaces" that can manipulate water in specific ways.

[Eurekalert]