Linketies: Science Friday

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  Fittingly, we start off Science Friday with an item from the "One Nation Under Surveillance" Department (Hi, NSA guys!!!). Time magazine has some of the key facts you need to know about Big Brother the federal government's massive telephone surveillance program.
  


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  Yet another invasive species problem in the Great Lakes region. Wildlife officials plan on dumping poison into a creek near Lake Michigan in an attempt to get rid of blood sucking sea lampreys which are decimating local fish populations.
  


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  In spite of bold promises about a coming technological singularity, artificial intelligence research still faces its share of challenges. Livescience.com discusses four key obstacles on the road to building a digital copy of the human brain.
  


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  As if Japan's famous magnetically levitating "bullet trains" weren't cool enough as it is, a new generation of the trains that can exceed speeds of 300 miles per hour is being developed. The first of the new trains will begin service in 2027 and will cut the travel time between central Tokyo and Nagoya station from the current ninety minutes down to forty. By mid-century, Japan plans to have a nationwide mass transit maglev network, using ultra-high speed trains capable of carrying up to 1,000 passengers each.
  


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  Using new "quantum photography" techniques and a special lens, a team of researchers has taken the first photo of a hydrogen atom's electron orbital. Due to the complexities of trying to observe matter at such small scales (for instance, the act of making the observation affects what you're observing), photographing the interior of atoms is extremely difficult to say the least.
  


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  A recent study published in the journal Nature describes a new possibility for developing an "invisibility cloak" -- manipulating a continuous light beam to hide events and interactions.
  


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  Now here's an interesting question: Are the humans of today, with all our gadgets, new knowledge, and technological wonders, smarter or dumber than our ancestors? To a large extent, it depends on how you ask and what you mean by "intelligence". An article from Livescience.com discusses the difficulties in trying to measure the intelligence of the human species over time.
  


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  When experiments at the Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson, it made quite a splash in the media. What wasn't as widely reported, however, was the mystery of why a swarm of other particles that should have turned up were nowhere to be found. Now, new complications revealed by the LHC's results are leading some physicists to take a new interest in the multiverse hypothesis.
  


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  Bad news for all those groups trying to ship some humans off to Mars. New data collected by the Curiosity rover has confirmed what a lot of scientists have long suspected. Travelers to the Red Planet would find themselves subjected to huge levels of radiation that would far exceed lifetime safety limits. This would vastly increase the risk of damaging cancers and other serious health complications.
  


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  Not all of the results from the Curiosity rover are as disappointing as the radiation data. The little rover has confirmed that water once flowed on the Martian surface by studying pebbles on the floor of a crater. The pebbles showed unmistakable signs of water erosion.
  


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  NASA gave a June 5 press briefing about Curiosity's latest findings and a new little mystery that it has apparently discovered.