Innovative imaging technologies have always had a knack for furthering science. Without telescopes (originally devised to help military commanders spot enemies on the battlefield), we might still have an Earth-centered view of the solar system. Without microscopes, we might still believe that flies spontaneously arise from rotting meat.

A few weeks ago, a few of my NOVA colleagues and I attended The Fine International Conference on Gigapixel Imaging and glimpsed some of the ways that this clever new technology is impacting not just science but also education and the art world.

What's a "gigapixel" image? Just what it sounds like--an image comprised of billions of pixels. (By contrast, the cherished family photos you may have on your computer are likely mere "megas.") To get a sense of their power, peruse this popular example, a political junkie's version of "Where's Waldo?":


If you zoom in to the right spot, you can even see the details of Hillary Clinton's earrings. And the inauguration image is only 1.5 gigapixels. The largest to date, a stunning cityscape of Rio de Janeiro, is a whopping 152 gigapixels. Gigapixel imaging essentially combines robotics, digital cameras, and "stitching" software to create ultra-high-resolution pictures from hundreds or even thousands of smaller pictures. (The Rio record-breaker used over 12,000.)

Editor's Note: Graham Townsley, producer of Quest for Solomon's Mines, wrote the following dispatches while filming on location in Jordan and Israel earlier this year. The field notes give a taste of what's to come in the program, which premieres tonight, Tuesday, November 23, at 8 p.m., on PBS.

January 28, 2010

The Jordanian desert is freezing. It's mid-winter. The sun is bright, the desert mountains spectacular, but it's cold. We are in a place as desolate and beautiful as any in the world. It's called Wadi Faynan and, as we are discovering, it was one of the sites of the world's first industrial revolution -- copper production. Three thousand years ago, Wadi Faynan was a factory: smelters to the horizon, mine shafts everywhere, and armies of miners and slaves heading underground, many to their deaths. It may be beautiful today, but 3,000 years ago it was probably pretty close to hell.

Dr. Mohommad Najjar, codirector of the excavation of the copper-production site at Wadi Faynan, prepares to descend into a triple-shafted mine. All photos by Jeremy Zipple.

To this day, the desert is coated with copper slag. Amazingly, our scientists are discovering off-the-charts levels of lead and arsenic -- the toxic residues of ancient copper smelting -- still contaminating the sand. Chronicles written at the time say miners were often forced to spend weeks underground without once coming up for air, in cramped gallery mines and suffocating darkness. It's a horrifying thought.

Sculptor James Sanborn, creator of "Kryptos"--perhaps the world's most famous piece of cryptographic art--has found that it's not easy keeping a secret for 20 years, particularly one that thousands of fanatical puzzle-solvers are dead set on discovering. Since 1990, when his coded sculpture was first unveiled in the courtyard of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Sanborn has been deluged with letters, email, phone calls, and even an unsolicited 100+-page paper purporting to crack the code.  

 

                                                                      © WGBH Educational Foundation

The seemingly incoherent strings of letters stamped out of Kryptos's copper panels are actually meaningful passages of text. There are four separate passages (K1, K2, K3 & K4), each encoded with a different cryptographic key.

When NOVA first reported on Kryptos in a 2007 NOVA scienceNOW segment, three of the sculpture's four puzzles had been solved. But K4, a passage only 97 characters long, remained elusive. (In the game of cryptography, shorter codes are tougher to decipher because they offer fewer recognizable patterns.) Following the broadcast, Sanborn agreed to field questions from Kryptos's many fans, but he dodged their attempts to fish for answers, noting, "I have already given all of the clues that I want to give."

Apparently, that's now changed.

After Trapped In An Elevator premiered last week, we started hearing from viewers who disagreed with one of our on-screen experts about a quirk of elevator operation: the door-close button. Does it actually do anything? In the film, John Menville, an elevator technician with almost 50 years of experience maintaining elevators in New York City, said no:

John Menville: As you'll notice, there are a lot of buttons in the elevator. However, there's one button that doesn't work. The door close button will not close the doors no matter how many times you push it. "Door Close" button does serve a function: it lets people think that they have some control over the elevator, although that's not the case.

New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten said the same thing in his 2008 story on elevators, with a little caveat: "In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works."

But some of our viewers--and some of our own staff--are convinced that their favorite door-close buttons are perfectly functional. It turns out there is a lively debate on the subject online, too. So, who's right? Are the pro-close-button folks delusional? Are anti-closers dour cynics so convinced of their own powerlessness that they won't accept responsibility for something as inconsequential as an elevator door?

But then we realized that this isn't a question that can be answered on the internet. There's only one place to go to settle the issue once and for all: The elevator. Which actually means there are about 700,000 places to go, in the U.S. and Canada.

Seven hundred thousand is a lot. So, we need your help. Call it citizen science. All you need is a stopwatch and, naturally, an elevator. Hop in the lift, hit your floor button, and wait to see how long it takes for the door to start closing. Then try it again, adding a press of the door-close button. Repeat the whole thing a few more times, because that's what scientists do. Report your results in the comments section.

We'll do our own experiment on the elevators here at our One Guest Street headquarters. Stay tuned for the results!

So you watched Dogs Decoded last night and now you're in smart-dog withdrawal. Here's a hair-of-the-dog cure: Test your skills at deciphering the meaning of dog barks, hear from experts about their favorite smart animals, and discover why dogs and dogs alone come in so many shapes and sizes. Still jonesing for more incredible pups? This should do the trick:

You can learn more about goes into training a dozen dogs to dance around on Ikea furniture here. And if you missed the Dogs Decoded premiere, you can still watch the show streaming online. You lucky dog.

When NOVA viewers met Bob Massie more than a decade ago in Surviving AIDS, he was a medical mystery: Infected with HIV in 1978, Massie hadn't developed any AIDS symptoms. Now, scientists have identified the genetic variations that help Massie and other like him keep HIV in check.

Controllers have a variant form of the HLA-B protein, pictured here, which helps flag infected cells. Credit: P. de Bakker

Massie is a member of an elite minority of HIV patients called controllers. Representing only one in 300 infected individuals, controllers have HIV, but their immune systems curb the virus' replication. Controllers don't get sick, and they are less likely to transmit HIV to others. For two decades, scientists have been trying to understand how controllers stave off AIDS. Their goal: New therapies that could help all patients defend against HIV.

Now, a genome-wide association analysis of nearly 1,000 controllers has homed in on minute variations in a protein called HLA-B. HLA-B is a "reconnaissance" protein; it flags virus-infected cells so that "killer" T cells can identify and destroy them. But controllers' HLA-B proteins are just a little bit different: Five amino acids that make up part of HLA-B's flagging mechanism frequently vary between controllers and the vast majority of HIV-infected individuals.

Would you be willing to take a one-way trip to Mars? That's the question NOVA Online's Peter Tyson takes on in a new story on NOVA's Web site--and now that NASA and DARPA have teamed up on something called the 100-Year Starship study (a project whose evocative name belies the fact that its end product is a sheaf of paper, not the Enterprise), you might actually have an opportunity to volunteer--in a century or two.

What will the shakeup in Washington, DC mean for research budgets, energy and climate policy, and the future of NASA? We've collected analysis from bloggers and reporters around the Web, and hope you'll share your own predictions in the comments section.

Energy and climate

• Andrew Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog predicts "a new round of politicized skirmishes in the never-ending climate wars."


• "The politics of energy played a role in congressional contests and energy policies were decided in at least one state ballot initiative," according to FuelFix's Jennifer Dlouhy


• Siobhan Hughes of the Dow Jones Newswires asks whether a vote to cap greenhouse gas emissions was political suicide: "At least 12 Democrats who voted to remake the way the U.S. uses energy had lost their seats"


• "It was mostly bad news for House Democrats who voted for the chamber's cap-and-trade bill," echoes the Washington Independent's Andrew Restuccia


• For climate-change skeptics in the House, "One of the first targets will undoubtedly be the 'endangerment finding' issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in late 2009, which would allow the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions," predicts Kieran Mulvaney at Discovery News

Research budgets

• "Science could face budget constraints and ideological challenges in post-midterm Congress," says Nature News' Ivan Semenluk


• "Research programmes in the United States seem to be heading for a cliff, no matter who wins in Congress," writes Eugenie Samuel Reich for Nature News

NASA and space exploration

• "The Nov. 2 elections that will put Republicans in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives in January likely means that two vocal critics of U.S. President Barack Obama's new direction for NASA will assume leadership of committees that oversee the space agency," says Space News' Amy Klamper

Tech and telecom

• "After midterms, net neutrality could take a hit," predicts Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post


• "The election will spell big changes for the top House and Senate committees that handle tech and telecom issues...from online privacy to net neutrality," writes Politico's Tony Romm

Share your own opinions and prognostications in the comments!