27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012 We covered some of these topics last year on the Future of Science tumblr. Here’s the quick list, but be sure to read the full article for further details on the awesomeness: 1. Quadriplegic Uses Her Mind to Control Her Robotic Arm 2. DARPA Robot Can Traverse an Obstacle Course 3. Genetically Modified Silk Is Stronger Than Steel 4. DNA Was Photographed for the First Time 5. Invisibility Cloak Technology Took a Huge Leap Forward 6. Spray-On Skin 7. James Cameron Reached the Deepest Known Point in the Ocean 8. Stem Cells Could Extend Human Life by Over 100 Years 9. 3-D Printer Creates Full-Size Houses in One Session 10. Self-Driving Cars Are Legal in Nevada, Florida, and California 11. Voyager I Leaves the Solar System 12. Custom Jaw Transplant Created With 3-D Printer 13. Rogue Planet Floating Through Space 14. Chimera Monkeys Created from Multiple Embryos 15. Artificial Leaves Generate Electricity 16. Google Goggles Bring the Internet Everywhere 17. The Higgs-Boson Particle Was Discovered 18. Flexible, Inexpensive Solar Panels Challenge Fossil Fuel 19. Diamond Planet Discovered 20. Eye Implants Give Sight to the Blind 21. Wales Barcodes DNA of Every Flowering Plant Species in the Country 22. First Unmanned Commercial Space Flight Docks with the ISS 23. Ultra-Flexible “Willow” Glass Will Allow for Curved Electronic Devices 24. NASA Begins Using Robotic Exoskeletons 25. Human Brain Is Hacked 26. First Planet with FOUR Suns Discovered 27. Microsoft Patented the “Holodeck”
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27 Science Fictions That Became Science Facts In 2012

We covered some of these topics last year on the Future of Science tumblr. Here’s the quick list, but be sure to read the full article for further details on the awesomeness:

1. Quadriplegic Uses Her Mind to Control Her Robotic Arm

2. DARPA Robot Can Traverse an Obstacle Course

3. Genetically Modified Silk Is Stronger Than Steel

4. DNA Was Photographed for the First Time

5. Invisibility Cloak Technology Took a Huge Leap Forward

6. Spray-On Skin

7. James Cameron Reached the Deepest Known Point in the Ocean

8. Stem Cells Could Extend Human Life by Over 100 Years

9. 3-D Printer Creates Full-Size Houses in One Session

10. Self-Driving Cars Are Legal in Nevada, Florida, and California

11. Voyager I Leaves the Solar System

12. Custom Jaw Transplant Created With 3-D Printer

13. Rogue Planet Floating Through Space

14. Chimera Monkeys Created from Multiple Embryos

15. Artificial Leaves Generate Electricity

16. Google Goggles Bring the Internet Everywhere

17. The Higgs-Boson Particle Was Discovered

18. Flexible, Inexpensive Solar Panels Challenge Fossil Fuel

19. Diamond Planet Discovered

20. Eye Implants Give Sight to the Blind

21. Wales Barcodes DNA of Every Flowering Plant Species in the Country

22. First Unmanned Commercial Space Flight Docks with the ISS

23. Ultra-Flexible “Willow” Glass Will Allow for Curved Electronic Devices

24. NASA Begins Using Robotic Exoskeletons

25. Human Brain Is Hacked

26. First Planet with FOUR Suns Discovered

27. Microsoft Patented the “Holodeck”

Source: BuzzFeed

GigaScience

“GigaScience aims to revolutionize data dissemination, organization, understanding, and use. An online open-access open-data journal, we publish ‘big-data’ studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences. To achieve our goals, the journal has a novel publication format: one that links standard manuscript publication with an extensive database that hosts all associated data and provides data analysis tools and cloud-computing resources.”

FigShare

“Scientific publishing as it stands is an inefficient way to do science on a global scale. A lot of time and money is being wasted by groups around the world duplicating research that has already been carried out. FigShare allows you to share all of your data, negative results and unpublished figures. In doing this, other researchers will not duplicate the work, but instead may publish with your previously wasted figures, or offer collaboration opportunities and feedback on preprint figures.”

Plug in the patient: A planetary monitoring network — Cleantech News and Analysis

Thank the humble, cheap sensor, the standard wireless radio and basic data bases for the future of planetary assistance. A massive sensor and data network called the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, could go under construction as soon as this summer and will pull data from the air, water and soil across the U.S. and act as the first comprehensive and free data depository for scientists, researchers and educators.

The Neuro Bureau

“The Neuro Bureau is a forum and collaborative initiative that supports “open neuroscience” — embracing the ideas that data, methods, and ideas can be freely shared. Translating the ethos of open neuroscience into action is an exciting challenge to the way we often work and publish.

The Neuro Bureau’s immediate goal is to establish a spirit and forum for open neuroscience, and to facilitate the translation of that ethos into action by conducting successful large open interdisciplinary collaborative efforts — such as releasing the preprocessed version of the ADHD-200 competition dataset.”

Internet Activist Charged in Data Theft - NYTimes.com

“Demand Progress said on its site that it appeared Mr. Swartz was “being charged with allegedly downloading too many scholarly journal articles from the Web.” It quoted the group’s executive director, David Segal, as saying, “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.””

“Swartz, the 24-year-old executive director of Demand Progress, has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls.” - Wired, Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles

From Big Data to New Insights | The White House by Tom Kalil

“The new partnership, along with NSF collaborations with other leading IT companies, will help researchers access the computing power and storage capacity they need to tackle the big questions in their field.  That’s important because researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large data sets, commonly referred to as “Big Data.” For example, the size of DNA sequencing databases is increasing by a factor of 10 every 18 months!  Researchers need better tools to help them store, index, search, visualize, and analyze these data, allowing them to discover new patterns and connections.”

Books on Science - Essays Inspired by Microsoft’s Jim Gray, Who Saw Science Paradigm Shift - NYTimes.com

“Dr. Wing has argued that ideas like recursion, parallelism and abstraction taken from computer science will redefine modern science. Implicit in the idea of a fourth paradigm is the ability, and the need, to share data. In sciences like physics and astronomy, the instruments are so expensive that data must be shared. Now the data explosion and the falling cost of computing and communications are creating pressure to share all scientific data.

“To explain the trends that you are seeing, you can’t just work on your own patch,” said Daron Green, director of external research for Microsoft Research. “I’ve got to do things I’ve never done before: I’ve got to share my data.””

Openness and the leaked climate research emails

“Science in the open” blogger Cameron Neylon, who works at the UK Govt’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, posted about the leak last year of the Climate Research Unit emails and looks at it through the open science lens. Specifically, he comments on the UK Meteorology Office’s push to make more than 160 years of climate data public: 

One of the very few credible objections to open research that I have come across is that by making material available you open your inbox to a vast community of people who will just waste your time. The people who can’t be bothered to read the background literature or learn to use the tools; the ones who just want the right answer. This is nowhere more the case than it is with climate research and it forms the basis for the most reasonable explanation of why the CRU (and every other repository of climate data as far as I am aware) have not made more data or analysis software directly available.

There are no simple answers here, and my concern is that in a kneejerk response to suddenly make things available no-one will think to put in place the social and technical infrastructure that we need to support positive engagement, and to protect active researchers, both professional and amateur from time-wasters. Interestingly I think this infrastructure might look very similar to that which we need to build to effectively share the research we do, and effectively discover the relevant work of others. Infrastructure is never sexy, particularly in the middle of a crisis. But there is one thing in the practice of research that we forget at our peril. Any given researcher needs to earn the right to be taken seriously. No-one ever earns the right to shut people up. Picking out the objection that happens to be important is something we have to at least attempt to build into our systems.

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