experiment
Latest
Chrome's 1,000th web experiment visualizes all the others
Google has offered a ton of Chrome Experiments to show what modern web technology can do, but it's doing something special for the 1,000th project -- namely, visualizing all the other projects. The effort lets you browse six years' worth of browser-based art, games and other creative works in multiple ways, including a tag-based timeline and a live code editor. To top things off, Google has redesigned the Experiments site so that it scales properly on everything from phones to desktops. You probably won't have time to explore every single web snippet, but it's worth a visit to number 1,000 if you're wondering what you've missed.
YouTube's latest experiment: multiple camera angles
Sports broadcasts were among the first to give viewers the chance to pick how they watch the action on the internet, but now YouTube is giving the feature a try. A video of artist Madilyn Bailey performing at YouTube Music Night lets users click through a choice of four camera angles as they watch, without pausing. We got the best results by letting the video load a bit before jumping around (apparently pulling down four streams at once can take up a bit of bandwidth) but it still seemed to hesitate occasionally when switching. Properly implemented this could make the next Lollapalooza stream even better, although we're already cringing internally at the thought of multicamera jump cuts as the next overused vlogger trend (interested creators can apply to try it out here).
Chrome experiment turns Wikipedia into a virtual galaxy
There's no denying Wikipedia's usefulness, but French computer science student Owen Cornec believes the website could stand to display entries "in a more engaging way." Thus, he created WikiGalaxy: a special Wikipedia browser that visualizes the website as a 3D galaxy. Each star represents an article, and related entries form clusters of stars -- clicking a star loads the entry itself on the left-hand panel and links to relevant articles on the right. If you want to make browsing Wiki even more interactive, you can activate "fly-mode," which sends you zooming through the stars with each click. It's a really fun way to discover new articles, and you have to try it out if you can.
The Big Picture: cooling molten metal in space
Ever wonder what hot metal would be like if it weren't bound by containers, liquids... or even gravity? You're looking at it. The European Space Agency has developed an electromagnetic levitator that the International Space Station is using to see how molten metal cools when it's free of the constraints you typically find on Earth. This experiment isn't intended solely as eye candy, of course. The station crew will use a high-speed camera to record the cooling process and make note of how it affects material structures. If the tests prove fruitful, they could teach people on the ground how to forge metal alloys with greater strength, exotic patterns and other traits that are very hard to produce using modern day techniques.
This man will experience someone else's life through a VR headset
You've probably had a moment or two where you wanted to live vicariously through a friend, but artist Mark Farid wants to take that concept to its logical extreme. He's planning an art installation, Seeing-I, where he'll experience another man's life through a virtual reality headset for 28 days straight. This other person won't be connected in real time (everything will be recorded six days in advance), but he'll have to share everything he records through a clandestine camera, no matter how private the situation might be. Mark's only direct contact with humans will be an hour with his psychologist each day, and his schedule is chained to that of his "input;" he'll eat, sleep and take bathroom breaks when this distant subject does. Ideally, the project will answer whether or not you lose some of your own identity by taking on someone else's for a long time.
Harvard used cameras to track attendance without telling students
You've probably had professors that got on your case for missing class, but they don't hold a candle to what Harvard University's faculty tried this past spring. The institution conducted an experiment that used surveillance cameras to track attendance, snapping photos that a computer analyzed to determine the number of empty seats in a given lecture hall. While the system couldn't identify individual students, the school didn't tell the 2,000 people involved that they were under watch -- they had no way to object to the test.
Tiny robotic scallops can swim through blood and eyeball fluid to fix you up
For years now, scientists have been trying to develop microscopic robots that can swim through bodily fluids and repair damaged cells or deliver medicine. Now, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany believe they've got the perfect design -- in the form of scallops so small, they can barely be seen by the naked eye. These micro-robo-scallops move back and forth to swim through blood, eyeball fluids and other liquids inside our body. The scientists believe mimicking the way a true scallop swims is ideal, due to a number of reasons.
Study proves that we can control each other's brains over the internet
A group of University of Washington researchers showed a year ago that brain-to-brain interfacing is possible in real life. Now, they're back after conducting a more thorough experiment, proving that their initial success wasn't a fluke. This time, the team performed tests using not just one pair, but six people divided into three pairs: one receiver and one transmitter. Just like before, the transmitters are hooked to an EEG machine (above) that can read brain waves, while sitting in front of a computer game. They need to defend a city in the game by firing cannons, but they cannot interact with it directly -- they can only transmit thoughts via the internet to their partners seated somewhere across the campus.
Researchers find a way to listen in on vehicular vibrations
The steady flow of vehicles is noisy enough as it is, but it also gives off a type of noise the human ear can't hear: seismic noise, or the vibration of the ground. Thus, vibrations given off by cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes on the runway among other modes of transportation haven't really been studied in depth -- until now. A team of researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have recently found a way to "hear" those vibrations using 5,300 geophones, screwdriver-like devices used to record ground movements. They placed a geophone every 300 feet in Long Beach for their study and soon realized that thanks to the devices, they could count airplanes and measure their acceleration on the runway and even detect larger vehicles like trucks on a highway. In the future, the same method could be used to monitor traffic, which could then lead to better roads and more road signals where they're most needed. [Image credit: Vincent_St_Thomas/Getty]
NASA challenges you to design experiments for Mars and beyond
Want to play a significant role in NASA's space exploration efforts without spending years in training? You now have a better chance of making your mark. NASA has launched Solve, a site that makes it easy to find all the agency's public competitions and crowdsourced projects. You'll mostly see previously announced efforts there right now, but the inaugural offering is definitely worth a look -- the $20,000 Mars Balance Mass Challenge asks you to design an experiment or technology payload that will double as ballast on future Martian explorers. You'll have until November 21st to submit your brainstorms, and you'll find out if your work is Mars-bound sometime in mid-January.
Former researcher says Facebook's behavioral experiments had 'few limits'
Facebook's still trying to brush off that whole psychological study with unaware users thing, but according to a former team member and outside researchers, the social network's data science department has had (changes have been promised) surprisingly free rein over how it polled and tweaked the site. Andrew Ledvina, who worked as a Facebook data scientist from February 2012 to July 2013, told the WSJ: "Anyone on that team could run a test." In 2010, the research team gauged how "political mobilization messages" delivered to 61 million users affected voting in the US congressional elections that year, while in 2012, thousands of users received a warning that they were being locked out of Facebook. While the reason given was that it believed they were bots or using a fake name, the network already knew that the majority were real users -- it was apparently all in aid of improving Facebook's anti-fraud system.
Facebook's awkward mood experiment under investigation in the UK
Facebook may have brushed off the furor over a psychological experiment that influenced what users saw in their feeds, but UK regulators definitely haven't. According to the Financial Times, Britain's Information Commissioner and the Irish Data Protection office (Facebook's EU base is in Ireland) are probing the social network's activities to determine if it did anything illegal. Back in 2012, Facebook changed the number of negative or positive comments that a select group of users saw in their feeds, ostensibly to gauge the effect on their moods. As you might expect, people who saw the negative comments were more inclined to write negative posts, and vice versa. While it apologized, Facebook also tried to justify the experiment by saying it benefited users and didn't compromise anyone's privacy. Still, when a UK politician told the Guardian that "if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be," it didn't seem the matter would quietly go away. [Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images]
Facebook used you like a lab rat and you probably don't care
Companies perform A/B testing -- minor site variants to see what users like or don't like -- all the time. Twitter does it with its experimental features, and sites like ours tweak designs for a sample of users to see which ones they prefer. In January 2012, researchers at Facebook did something like that too. When people heard about it last week, however, they were outraged. Facebook, in the course of the study, messed with users' emotions without explicitly letting them know about it. But as outraged as people are right now, it likely won't make a difference in the long run.
Unmanned Mars One mission to blast off with experiments (and ads) in tow
Mars One announced sometime ago that it plans to scope things out with an unmanned mission before it ships off humans to the red planet in 2025. Today, the non-profit org has finally revealed that mission's details, and by the looks of it, the unmanned spacecraft could very well carry advertisements to space. Mars One says the vehicle will have seven payloads in all, four of which are scientific experiments that'll help determine if a human settlement can thrive on the planet by 2025. These payloads include a liquid extractor that'll attempt to extract water from Martian soil collected by the another payload. There's also a thin-film solar panel to test if the sun can provide all the energy needs of a human settlement, and a camera system that the org will use to get a live feed of Mars 24/7.
One year in, and Google's crazy internet-by-balloon project is doing just fine
Even we laughed a little when Google X announced Project Loon -- an ambitious experiment built to give rural areas balloon-powered Internet access -- but one year later, the company may have proven its point: this could work. Since the project was announced last June, the company has made huge strides in balloon flight time and connectivity. Wired reports that Google's latest floating hotspots have been given LTE capabilities, freeing them from the range limitations the original WiFi-based designed burdened them with. These new radios offer better transfer speeds, too -- as high as 22 MB/s to an antenna or 5 MB/s to a phone. More importantly, the balloons are staying aloft for much longer: earlier this year, one test circled the globe three times before dropping to the ground, and another has been floating for over 100 days - and it's still up there.
Poet explains why he spammed Twitter with every word in the English language
zealots - everyword (@everyword) June 2, 2014 Approximately 109,150 tweets. Spread across seven years. Posted automatically by a bot which, each time, simply grabbed a single word from an already published (and inevitably outdated) canon of the English language and threw it out onto the social network. The bot was the brainchild of a poet, Adam Parrish (aka @everyword), whose original intention was simply to the "satirize the brevity of Twitter," but who gradually came to see the project as a "magical writing experiment." He learned, for example, that his 95,000 followers had a penchant for words that felt like they told a story, even when they weren't expressed as part of sentence: words like "sex," "weed" and "vagina," which each got around 2,000 retweets. If you read The Guardian's interview with @everyword, you'll see that his other big discovery was about how people imputed meanings to words that were entirely personal or based purely on coincidences in their Twitter feeds -- like how a tweet of the word "zealots" apparently became tangled up in the chatter of Apple fans in the midst of WWDC.
Anonymous Twitter user sends SF citizens on cash goose chase
If you need cash and don't mind chasing Twitter clues around San Francisco, you're in luck. A group called @HiddenCash, apparently led by a wealthy real estate developer, has decided to try a "social experiment" by sharing their good fortune with random strangers. They choose hiding paces around the city like the underside of a park bench or a parking meter, then cache money-stuffed envelopes labeled "@HiddenCash -- Tweet when you find." Though that makes our "PR stunt" antennae twitch, they told the Bold Italic that they have "no commercial interest" and just want to draw attention to the massive income inequity in San Francisco. For critics who though the money could be better used, they added that they already donate to needy charities and encourage those who find the cash to do the same. We're not sure if we're buying all that, but what the hell -- judging by their Twitter feed, a lot of people have had fun with it so far.
Google's new Chrome experiment lets you remix the Rubik's Cube
Sure, you could spend a while trying to solve the Rubik's Cube in Google's new Doodle, but that may get a little dry. Google was clearly prepared for that eventuality, though: it has just launched the Cube Lab, a Chrome experiment that lets you build your own internet-based puzzle. So long as you're good with modern web code, you can produce a unique Rubik's Cube with its own artwork, effects and even logic. The 808 Cube is all about music-making, for instance. Even if you're not a programmer, it's worth checking out the ready-made Lab examples to have some fun. We just wish we'd had this when we were kids -- it would have kept us playing with Rubik's Cubes long after the original got buried in the closet.
MIT students raise cash to give $100 in Bitcoins to every undergrad
Starting this fall, every MIT undergrad will have at least $100 worth of Bitcoins to their name, thanks to a couple of students who've raised half a million to do so. But, they're not just doing it so their schoolmates can eat something other than ramen -- this is actually an official project by the school's Bitcoin Club, so professors and researchers from the institute can study how students spend their virtual money. This initiative, started by computer science sophomore Jeremy Rubin and MIT Bitcoin Club president Dan Elitzer, was funded by MIT alumni and people with vested interest in the currency. The two masterminds believe this move is necessary for MIT to continue being at the "forefront of emerging technologies." Rubin even said: Giving students access to cryptocurrencies is analogous to providing them with internet access at the dawn of the internet era. [Image credit: George Frey/Getty Images]
Build your own space station with LittleBits' NASA-approved kit
Many kids want to become astronauts, but getting them to embrace day-to-day space science is tougher -- it's not as exciting as setting foot on Mars. NASA is all too aware of this challenge, so it has teamed up with LittleBits to create the Space Kit, a build-it-yourself bundle that should make these routine experiments a little more exciting. The pack includes parts and lessons that teach junior Neil Armstrongs and Sally Rides about atmospheric readings, light waves and other aspects of NASA's work without requiring engineering or programming skills. Young ones can even build tiny vehicles of their own, including the International Space Station, a satellite and a planetary rover. The $189 kit won't necessarily lead to a career among the stars, but it could be a good way to spark some curiosity.
