Nicholas Negroponte is speaking about the $100 laptop, and the long path that’s led to his interest in the topic. Ultimately, Nicholas believes that in all the problems we’re considering at a conference like Pop!Tech, education is part of the equation. If you can change education, it’s a key to peace, prosperity and widespread social change.

Over twenty years ago, Steve Jobs gave Seymour Papert and Negroponte some computers – Apple IIs – and put they put them into a lab in Senegal. The lab wasn’t sustainable and didn’t survive, but a later lab in Costa Rica did, primarily because a local foundation was formed to support it. Nicholas sees a connection – if not a cause – between this success and the fact that Costa Rica’s main export is microchips.

Negroponte has been involved with a number of rural connectivity efforts in Kashmir, Cambodia and elsewhere. By giving laptop computers to Cambodian schools, Negroponte became enamored with the idea of having laptops in developing world schools… and homes, where they’re often the brightest light sources.

So Negroponte became engaged in the idea of building a $100 laptop, which he says is not so difficult to do. 50-60% of your laptop cost is marketing, distribution and profit. The remainder – a quarter of the total price – is the cost of the display. The remaining quarter is processor, disk and everything else. How do you get those costs down as low as possible?

The answer, beyond the display: don’t use a fat operating system. The processor speed is largely used by bloated operating systems. Five years ago, he says, his laptop ran faster and more reliably than it does today. Software developers are paid to create new features – if developers got paid to remove lines of code, we’d have a very different world. So the processor’s not a problem.

The display, though, is harder. The first idea was a projector – a screen would be a white sheet of cardboard, and the image would be created by a small set of LEDs. It’s too fragile for use in the field. So Negroponte went back to looking at LCDs. Much of the power consumption of a LCD display comes from running color filters. Negroponte says you can run a display in two modes, a higher power color one, and a brighter, lower power black and white display. In low power mode, the laptop should draw less than 1 watt.

Negroponte talks about the laptop as a “trojan horse” – he’s selling at an a ebook, costing $20 a year, amortized over 5 years. After all, governments buy books – the World Bank will probably provide loans to purchase these machines. Negroponte has been visiting large developing nations – Brazil, Egypt, China, Nigeria and South Africa – and trying to convince governments to buy into the idea in a big way.

There’s a scaling issue that will make the laptop idea work, Negroponte believes. Not only can you buy components cheaply, but it enables you to ask a component manufacturer go in a different direction – developing components specifically for low-cost machines.

Negroponte gives some interesting hints about what the machine might look like, and offers a promise that we’ll actually get to see one in November, when he shows it at the Vatican and then WSIS on November 16th. It sounds like the keyboard will fold over to the back, allowing users to look at the screen and type on the back, accordian style. The images he shows are significantly different from the images shown in a recent CNet article – there’s a hint that the keyboard may be customizable for different applications and might not be considered part of the $100 unit. Negroponte also suggests the keyboard could be a fabric keyboard, in some cases.

Interesting to me, the display Negroponte talks about doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the flexible eInk displays some people have talked about in conjuction with this device in the past – it sounds like we’re talking about something much more similar to an LCD screen, with two modes.

Responding to questions, Nicholas tells us that the machine will work on a form of Linux, with a GUI being built by Alan Kay. Asked about networking, Nicholas mentions that the team is looking at the possibility that the machine might be able to function as a mesh node even when not in use.

There’s an interesting question asked about the maintenance of these devices. Nicholas argues that giving students ownership of these devices will guarantee they’re well cared for.

The most interesting thing to me: Negroponte says at one point – “What would it mean for this project to fail? That we get a device six months late that costs $122.50?”

Uh, no. That would be great. Failure would be something that never ships, or never ships in volume, or never gets below $300. Or worse, never gets used in classrooms. I hope that’s not the case, but I still worry that even a $122.50 latop is very hard to accomplish, and I’ll still have some trouble believing it until I see a) a physical prototype, b) a manufacturing process and c) the first ten million ordered…

I spoke to Steven Johnson briefly before his presentation at Pop!Tech. He told me he was going to try to add some seriousness, gravitas and weight to our discussions, trying to move us beyond the trivialities of life – global warming, biodiversity, the rise of China – and onto talking about serious subjects like Grand Theft Auto.

This is a tough point in the program to give a talk on a book called “Everything Bad Is Good For You”. But hey, it’s a great book and a good talk.

Johnson starts by telling a story about giving his seven year old nephew a tour of Sim City, showing him the buildings and basically assuming the kid knew nothing about the game. He showed him a part of his city that wasn’t thriving and explained that he didn’t know what to do to make this district thrive. His nephew looked at the screen, thought for a moment and said, “I think you may need to lower your industrial taxes.”

It’s rare that most seven year olds show a gift for urban planning. But clearly games can help us be smart in ways that books sometimes don’t.

Johnson believes that part of this has to do with the complexity of narrative we see in modern games. He points out that in an old video game like PacMan, there are really only two or three objectives. But in newer video games like Legend of Zelda, the narrative involves dozens of subgoals and objectives, none of which are explicitly spelled out. Adults encounter these games and say, “What am I supposed to do?” Kids say, “You’re supposed to figure out what to do.”

He shows us a clip from the TV show “Lost”. He makes the argument the show is structured like a game – you need to explore along with the characters. And the show has details that only become clear if you pull it apart screen by screen. He argues that the scene we’re looking at is basically a televised version of Myst, one of the paradigmatic exploration games. It’s one of the first TV shows designed for multiple viewings – for exploration, just like a game.

Johnson talks briefly about virtual worlds like there.com and Second Life – he points out that people have been predicting for many years that these graphic environments would happen, and now people are actually building these things. It’s becoming somewhat routine for people to have avatars. That said, it’s not all good news – he tells us about his sister’s (presumably ex-) boyfriend, who became increasingly addicted to a massively multiplayer online game. One night, when he missed a dinner date, she confronted him… and he responded by saying, “Can’t you understand, I’m growing stronger!”

Johnson believes that there’s a strong tendency for tendency to standardize on a single platform – we may well see this happen in MMPOG spaces as well, as users decide they’re pissed about high switching costs, the impossibility of communicating between systems, and the need to reinvent structures built in one world for another world. Johnson doesn’t mention it, but I’d not be surprised if an open platform were capable of being the one game that rules them all.

Ivan Marovic is a young Serbian activist, a key figure in the Otpor (“Resistance”) movement. The movement was a decentralized student movement – there was some coordination from Belgrade, but each group had the authority to work on their own. They were united by tactics, iconography (a black fist on a white background) and a great sense of humor.

The movement demonstrated their power in opposing Milosevic in the 2000 elections – by the time the election took place, it was quite obvious that Milosevic would lose to opposition leader Zoran Dindic. The real question was whether or not Milosevic would step down. (And, of course, he didn’t.) So the movement took the next step, and organized to actually remove Milosevic from power.

(We get to see a great video of activists politely, but firmly, confronting police before pushing trucks out of the road to eliminate a roadblock and drive to Belgrade.)

And hundreds of thousands of activists eventually organized a nonviolent takeover of Parliament, forcing Milosevic out of power and eventually into trial at The Hague.

In some ways, this was just the beginning for Otpor – Kumara, a movement in Georgia that took down Shevrednadze, used the same symbolism and the same tactics as Otpor. And the Orange Revolution in Ukraine used many of the same tactics, and the movements were in close contact.

Ivan is less interested in writing another book about non-violent organizing or making another video – instead, he’s helping build a game, called “A Force More Powerful”. It’s a simulation game developed with Breakaway Games. It looks a little like Sim City or Civilization, but is focused on teaching organizers the tactics of non-violent resistance.

The game is in beta testing now and is planned for launch in January, and it looks really, really fun. As a player, you control characters, groups and movements – you build them into coalitions, send them out to carry out tactics and see the results from the government. Ivan walks us through a graffiti campaign, some street rallies and a benefit rock concert that finally brings down the game government.

More exciting, the game is highly editable – you can load a real world map into it, so if you wanted to model Iraq, as Castronova suggests, you could.

It turns out that several of the Serbian activists involved with Otpor were serious gamers – one woman was one of the first players in World of Warcraft; Ivan was a serious strategy gamer. It will be fascinating to see whether their passion for gaming and for social justice can come together and make a game that people actually will play and learn from.

Ed Castronova has a job that couldn’t have existed until very recently – he’s an economist of virtual worlds. His talk – “Gold from Thin Air” – is designed to surprise the audience that real money is being made online. (For those of us who’ve already spent way too much time in virtual worlds, this is less of a shock, though great to see someone this knowledgeable speaking about it.)

Castronova points out that there are 4 times as many videogamers in the US as there are golfers – doesn’t this mean we should have at least five hours a week of televised gaming coverage on TV? The average gamer is now 30 years old, and one of five people over fifty are gamers.

Videogames (sometimes) make enormous amounts of money – the launch of Halo2 made $125m on the first day – the largest opening of any media property in history. Folks are fond of comparing Hollywood and gaming software – in pure terms, the gaming industry makes slightly more money than Hollywood, though some of that money from from gaming hardware. In purely software terms, gaming grosses about $7.6b a year, while Hollywood grosses $9.5b… but Hollywood’s revenues have been flat for three years, while gaming revenues are expanding exponentially.

Castronova estimates that real money trade – people paying actually dollars, euros or yen for virtual items – is worth $100m – $1b a year. In terms of synthetic money, the trade is worth $2b – $20b. This means that the GDP per capita in one virtual world is, by his calculation, four times the GDP per capita in China.

He shows us some of the setups used by “gold farmers”, who kill the same monsters over and over again, making virtual gold which they can sell in the real world. They’re able to make about a dollar an hour doing this. Julian Dibble, a scholar of online gaming, did an experiment in gold farming on Ultima Online and discovered he could make about $47,000 a year, which is more than the median salary of school teachers in America.

We tour an auction in World of Warcraft and find an item selling for 1550 gold pieces – going into ebay to buy some gold, we can figure out that this item sells for $146 in realworld terms.

Castronova’s big point is that we need to take games more seriously – the total budget the National Science Foundation is spending to study gaming is less than one would need to release a good singleplayer game ($20m) and far less than the development costs of a multiplayer game ($75-150m). As this medium evolves and grows, we should be considering using simulations to figure out things like how to build Iraq, letting Iraquis work through agreeing on a constitution – try it a few dozen times online before we try it in the real world.

I wish Castronova had a bit more time – right at the end, he’s asking questions like “what’s real?” If online currency works the same way – or better – that real world currency, is it real? Sounds like I may need to buy his book (which he’s helpfully reminded us is attractively priced on Amazon…)

My Berkman colleague Rebecca MacKinnon starts her Pop!Tech talk with a story about a small village outside of Beijing – Pu Sa Lu. In 1999, she was the Beijing bureau chief for CNN and she’s travelling to this hick town to do a story on UFOs – which are just as much an obsession in China as in the US. She spends a short time interviewing peasants who’ve seen flying lights over the chicken coop… but what the party secretary really wants to show her is pusalu.com, the local website to encourage village tourism. Pu Sa Lu now has a Digital Homestead training center to help train young people to develop products and services for sale online.

But not everyone is using the Internet the way the Chinese government expected them to. Mu Zi Mei became tremendously famous by operating a blog, which detailed the intricacies of her extremely active sex life. The current hit song in China by Yang Chengang, a previously unknown 28 year old music teacher from Hubei, has been promoted solely on the web… yet millions of young Chinese are singing along with him as he sings, “I love you the way mice love rice”.

Stars used to be made by the communist party aparatus – now they’re being made online, by bloggers and bulletin board users. Li Yuchun, a tomboyish Chinese singer, won the recent “Super Girl” contest with help from bloggers – one wrote “I don’t think I will ever get to vote for president in my lifetime, but at least I get to vote for the girl I like…”

China’s become truly huge on the internet in recent years – while only 8% of Chinese citizens are online, that’s 103m people, making China the world’s second largest Internet userbase. They’re the largest mobile phone market, with 385m users. And they’re creating content – there are 50 blog hosting services in China, and 5m blogs.

The Chinese government doesn’t censor everything – they’re trying to make sure that political leaders and political movements don’t get built online the same way that pop stars do. Talk about an issue like Taishi and your site or service will get shut down. Talk about your sex life, and no one will make trouble for you.

Rebecca shows off the Great Firewall of China – the Chinese firewall makes it impossible to search for certain terms on Google. On Chinese blogging sites – from Blogbus to MSN Spaces – certain terms (like “democracy” or “freedom of speech”) will simply be blocked by the server. The server administrator protects you, the user, from getting into trouble with authorities by talking about forbidden topics. You’re free to talk about what you’re free to talk about, and protected from touching the third rail of politics.

Rebecca points out that other types of speech are permitted – anti-Japanese speech, for instance, is permitted online. But when that information brings people out into the streets, it tends to generate a crackdown – anti-Japanese street protests generated a strong government reaction, despite the popularity of games like “Resist Japan Online”, which encourages you to score points by killing Japanese soliders.

The Chinese are moving ahead of the US in a number of internet spaces – podcasting, blogging via mobile phones, video blogging. But these new technologies have censorship baked in. Censorship isn’t slowing down the growth of these companies – they’re growing in ways that assume that certain speech will be censored.

If China’s the largest internet userbase in the future, what does this mean for the Internet? Are the tools we use going to prevent us from engaging in certain types of speech? Are other countries going to want to adopt a Chinese-style internet rather than a US style one? Are there things we can do to ensure we don’t get censorship baked into the code and the business model?

Oded Shenkar is the Ford Motor Company Chair in global business management at Fisher, the business school at Ohio State University. His recent research is on the business and economic impact of the China on the global economy, including a book, “The Chinese Century”. He subtitles his talk: Are we toast?

The answer seems to be, “Yes. Specifically cold toast, like they serve in Britain.”

Shenkar urges us to consider timelines in Chinese terms. The “transition period” the country is going through could be a very, very long one. Professor Shenkar doesn’t expect to see China giving up labor-intensive manufacturing any time soon. Furthermore, for anyone who isn’t worried that China has taken t-shirt manufacturing away from the US, people should seriously consider worrying about the fact that the Chinese are now manufacturing higher and higher technology items, especially computer components.

Shenkar shows a Jeff Danzinger cartoon, where a family has decided that, for their Christmas presents, “We’re going to buy goods made in the good old USA”. Under the tree is a wheel of cheese, a bag of soybeans and some concrete blocks. So much for “Buy American!”

Shenkar points out that the US is currently running a trade deficit – 6% of GDP – which is generally at a level where economies get into major trouble. He further points out that other Asian countries aren’t running deficits with China, and that the EU only recently began running a deficit with China. This is an oddly US-specific problem, which has a great deal with the US tendency not to save money.

He posits a future automobile – an attractive truck made by Rover, available for $119 a month in payments, financed through the Bank of China. The car would be assembled in the US, out of primarily Chinese and Mexican parts, and marketed under a brand that sounds English, but is now owned my Shanghai Automotive, which has stated a desire to go from manufacturing zero autos for export to being one of the five largest auto manufacturers in the world in 5 to 10 years.

Shenkar shows us a quote, suggesting that our advantage in global trade can’t extend forever and that we need to assume our dominant position in global trade is going to be overtaken by a large set of enterprising and skillful nations.

It’s a quote from Britain in 1881, as prescient thinkers started to see the empire strain. Is it possible that we’re seeing the end of our own empire?

Shenkar gives us another parallel between China and the US, and England and the US a century earlier – like the US, currently fighting piracy in China, Charles Dickens used to complain that he wasn’t getting royalties from American pirate versions of his books. Shenkar points out that China has already published the seventh and eight books of the Harry Potter series. They weren’t written by JK Rowling, but they have been released… Oddly enough, when Shenker’s book was published in China, there was no chapter in it on copyright.

What happens next? Professor Shenker says he doesn’t know. We’re in uncharted territory – no country has ever had an economy primarily based on services.

It can’t help but be an interesting ride.

Suketu Mehta, an Indian author, gives us a tour of his hometown, Mumbai, as documented in his book, “Maximum City”. He’s returning, having left “Bombay” years before to return to “Mumbai” and comes back to talk to Mumbai residents about the 1992-3 riots, where Hindu men poured petrol on Muslims and lit them on fire.

From this harrrowing opening, Mehta takes us on a tour of a city so large that it will soon be more populous than the nation of Australia. If Mumbai was a nation, it would be the 54th largest in the world, as as it grows, it will soon be larger than Italy. There are 45,000 people per square kilometer in Mumbai, which is over four times the density of New York City. And the density is actually much higher than that – 2/3rds of the residents of Mumbai – the poor ones – live in 5% of the land area

So why are so many people moving to Mumbai every day? Why are megacities growing all over Asia? (11 of the 15 largest cities of the world are in Asia…)

It’s all about the villages. Indian villages are grindingly poor, and young people are willing to travel to Mumbai and live on the sidewalk in the hopes of making their fortunes. In 1950, villages provided 70% of India’s net domestic product – now 60% is produced in the cities. Mumbai alone provides 38% of the national tax revenue. Mehta argues, “Fix the villages and you fix the cities.” But until you do, Bollywood films fix Mumbai as the city of dreams for all rural Indians and increase the rural to urban migration.

But there’s enormous hope to be found in Mumbai as well. When massive flooding destroyed homes, stranded travellers and thoroughtly soaked the city earlier this year, the crime rate didn’t rise. Slum dwellers welcomed stranded motorists into their homes. Volunteers fed people in train stations. The government machinery was absent, but no one expected otherwise. Mehta tells us that, “this is how most human beings are going to live and cope in the 21st century.”

He also sees hope in the fact that (unlike in the US?), the poor in India vote. This means that the technocrats can get voted out if they don’t do a sufficiently good job in addressing the problems of the poor. Untouchables are becoming government ministers, parliamentary seats are being reserved for women, and there’s hope – despite lots of skepticism – that the government could be a major force for social change.

Mehta tells us that everything you can say that’s true about India is also false. In saying that India will soon have the world’s largest middle class, this hides the fact that it’s also got the world’s largest underclass. This underclass is finding itself increasingly in conflict with the wealthier classes.

We hear a story from Goa, where human waste was traditionally disposed of in “pig toilets”, open-sided outhouses where human waste became pig food. Unfortunately, this environmentally friendly model doesn’t work in five-star hotels, and there’s insufficient space in Goa to bury this human waste. So the waste is transported by trucks into rural areas, and dropped in villages. But villagers have started stoning these trucks as they arrive, and the garbagemen now need to be protected by armed guards.

Mumbai is what the future may look like, as more than 2 billion people will live in slums by 2030. But the news isn’t all bad. Mehta closes with a story about the Mumbai train system. The trains are packed tight with people hurrying to work. But if you miss a train, dozens of hands reach from every door to pull you aboard and let you put a toehold on the train and make it to work on time. As Mehta says, when those hands reach out for you, no one knows whether you’re from Bombay or the villages, whether you’re Hindu, Muslim or Christian – “they just know that you’re trying to get to work in the City of Gold, and that’s enough.”

During the question and answer session, Mehta reveals that he’s using proceeds from the book to sue the Indian government through public interest litigation to provide better educational services for children. I can think of no better reason than to go out and buy a copy right now.

Mark Lynas is a British journalist who focuses on climate change. He’s been on a world tour, documenting impacts of climate change. Armed with photos that give clues to the impacts of climate change, he introduces us to some possible climate change scenarios, depending on whether global warming causes one or two degrees of mean temperature rise or five to six.

Lynas’s argument is that we’re at a unique moment in geological time, a moment where the geological era is defined by human impact, rather than natural factors. He argues that this can’t be a moment where people are on different sides: “it’s all of us versus the biosphere.”

Lynas grew up in Peru, and returned to the glaciers outside Lima to recreate a photo his father had taken 20 years later. The photos side by side are astounding – a tongue of glacier almost a kilometer long has disappeared in those two decades. Those glaciers feed rivers that supply Lima – the second largest desert city in the world – with water. It’s not hard to imagine what too little water might mean to the 7 million people who live there.

Tuvalu’s Ministry of Environment

Too much water can be at least as devestating. Tuvalu is a nation on a coral atoll, which is rapidly dissapearing into a sea. Seawalls won’t help, as the rock Tuvalu is built on is pourous. As sea levels rise – as they are already doing – the Tuvalu government is working to move residents to New Zealand. This is, perhaps, the first geographical extinction of a nation.

Lynas gives us a tour of possible futures, organized by possible rises in temperature – he refers to them as code blue through code red, poking fun at the American terror warning system:

A one degree change in temperature – already inevitable – we’ll see most coral reefs die, and may see the American great plains return to desert

A two defree change – which we might be able to accomplish if we capped global warming very soon – we’ll see a major biodiversity crisis.

At three degrees, the Greenland ice sheet melts and we see a 6 meter seawater rise – which eliminates much of Florida, Manhattan and a good chunk of the Eastern seaboard of the US… and that’s just in one country. It’s also likely to chage how rainforests work – they’re likely to die and burn, which will release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

At four degrees, the Artic ice sheet melts, and polar ecosystems dissapear.

At five degrees – code red – most glaciers are gone, which means whole parts of the world – Pakistan, for instance, which relies on runoff from the Hindu Kush glaciers – will be uninhabitable. We’ll have less land from sea rise, and only a fraction of what remains will be habitable.

Lynas tells us he can’t offer probabilities for these five scenarios – or a more extreme one with a six degree rise. But it’s clear that any of these scenarios requires reacting to global warming as a major priority for world governments, not a subject we’re unwilling to tackle.

Dr. Peter Diamandis gave a colorful, energetic talk about the X Prize for travel. I didn’t blog it, because, as a friend of mine puts it, “it’s not my geek”. Which is to say, I acknowledge that cool, smart people (like Loretta Hidalgo) are fascinated by the challenge and potential discovery of space exploration… but it doesn’t flip my wig like many of the topics at Pop!Tech do.

One aspect of his work that I did find interesting – the use of prizes to encourage exploration. Diamandis was inspired by the prize used in the early 1920s to inspire Charles Lindberg to cross the Atlantic – a $25,000 prize inspired competitors to spend $400,000 to try to win it. Diamandis argues that the $10 million prize offered for a pair of 100km flights within 2 weeks generated a “Darwinian winnowing” of several dozen possible strategies, as well as astounding global media presence. He’s interested, post XPrize, in starting prizes for other unsolved problems, in energy, education and other critical fields.

It will be interesting to see whether the prize technique works on some of these other exploration projects. One area where it would be great to inspire exploration would be in the deep ocean. Dr. Marsha McNutt of the Monterey Bay aquarium, began her talk about deep-sea exploration comparing the challenges in exploring the ocean and exploring space.

In space, you can use solar cells to generate power. Not so in the ocean – you’re using batteries, or delivering power over tethers. In space, you can use radio waves to communicate. They don’t travel well through water, so you use low-baud acoustic communications or send signals through a tether. Because nothing lives in outer space (that we know of), there’s no exobiological life to interfere with your equipment. In the ocean, any instrument you drop into the water becomes a potential reef. The tendency of several thousand shellfish to attach themselves to your gear shortens its lifespan.

The main place where deep sea exploration is easier than space exploration? Launch costs. Drop something into sufficiently deep water and it will sink into the deep ocean. This means that scientists who study oceans have a much better chance of actually seeing their experiments take place than those that work in space.

And those experiments are giving us vital data about the world we’re actually living in. McNutt tells us about a project she’s worked on to explore the underside of the Arctic ice cap – an autonomous vehicle travelled under the cap, powered by a fuel cell, launching torpedoes packed with radar gear every few hundred miles, which melted their way through the ice and transmitted data to the rest of the world. What the probe discovered was a stream of hot Atlantic water running under the cap, rapidly melting the cap.

This leads McNutt to a discussion of what she calls “the least discussed and more troublesome aspect of global warming” – the falling ph of the world’s oceans. As the amount of carbon dioxide (from burning fossil fuels, primarily) increases in the atmosphere, the levels increase in the oceans as well (the atmosphere is supersaturated with CO2, which seeks equilibrium with the oceans, increasing the amount of dissolved CO2…) The impact of that concentration of CO2 in the ocean is an increasing acidification of the ocean, possibly a change of a full point of ph in the next thousand years.

This is scary for all sorts of reasons. Will photosynthetic organisms still be able to live in an acidic ocean? Will carbon sequestration – where atmospheric carbon gets dissolved, made into shells of organisms and buried on ocean floors – still occur?

No one ones. In fact, the basic story of the deep ocean seems to be that there’s a lot we don’t know. In the dark ocean, there’s greater biomass and biodiversity than in all the world’s rainforests combined. There are strange ecosystems, like the ecosystem that springs up around “whale falls” – carcases of whales that sink into the deep ocean. McNutt reports that a study of a whale fall at 3000m – 40% of the organisms discovered there were found only on whale corpses… which raises the interesting question of how these organisms find the corpses…

There’s a catalog of wonders McNutt puts on display – a symbiotic worm with a new form of reproduction, a bacterium that produces ATP by creating a charge across a cell wall, which might act as a bio fuel cell. Perhaps the most amazing is methane hydrate – an ice than burns – which is the largest available fossil fuel remaining on the planet… but nearly impossible to mine, drill or otherwise retrieve.

All of this leaves me wondering why there’s not as much “sex appeal” to deep ocean exploration as there is to space exploration. I put forth a cynical theory: that when we look to the ocean, we see a number of difficult to solve problems; when we look to the sky, we see no harm we’ve created and unlimited – if unrealistic – hope.

The always insightful Amy Salzhauer has another theory – the space program has always been about creating heroes. Ocean science is the province of geeks, not brave, granite-jawed former test pilots.

What would it take to get more of us to look down rather than looking up?

Imagine, for a moment, losing both your arms. If you’re very lucky, you’ll lose them below the elbow. That means you’ll be able to wear a prosthesis and use your shoulder muscles to open and close your hand.

If you’re unlucky, you’ll lose your arm at your shoulder. At that point, you may not end up using a prosthesis, because they’re awkward, difficult and very hard to control. There’s no way to wire the muscle into the arm, so you use chin switches to trigger one motor at a time to move each joint.

Jesse Sullivan was very unlucky. An electrical lineman, he received a 7400 volt burn which caused him to lose both his arms at the shoulder. And then he got very lucky, meeting Dr. Todd Kuiken, who was interested in new strategies for giving amputees control over their prosthetic limbs.

As Kuiken explains, “It’s very tempting to think that the way to control a prosthetic limb is to use the nerves” – i.e., listen to the signals the nerves are delivering and use them to trigger motors in the limb. Unfortunately, this is a lot harder than it looks. The nerve signals are very weak, the transmitters are very fragile, and it requires embedding electrodes deep in the shoulder.

So Kuiken tried something different, something he’d tried in rats, but never in a human. He rewired Jesse’s arm nerves into his pectoral muscle. When the nerves healed, Jesse could think “open hand” and his arm nerves would move his pectoral muscle. With a heavily modified prosthetic arm, this pectoral movement could trigger a motor in the arm and close the hand.

This, by itself, is pretty amazing. By rewiring four nerves, Kuiken enabled Jesse to bend his elbow, close or open his hand, and extend his wrist, all by using his existing nerves, not moving his chin. But it got more exciting – as the nerves regrew in the pectoral muscles, sensory nerves regrew as well. So Jesse can now “feel” his arm by sensing pressure or temperature on his chest. This meant that Kuiken could design a prosthesis – the first ever – that allowed Jesse to feel how much pressure he was applying in a grip.

Sullivan and Kuiken show off both the new technoogy they’ve developed… and the old tech, which Sullivan says he still uses more often and prefers, based mostly on reliability. Sullivan tells us he’s able to do laundry, paint rooms in his house, mow his lawn and trim his hedges… and Kuiken tells us that Sullivan once came back into the lab with 16 titanium bolts in his prosthetic arm broken from trying to pull-start his mower. In other words, Sullivan is the perfect tester to see whether this technology can really work in the real world.

It sounds like there’s a tremendous room to improve the technology. The arm Sullivan is wearing has a 400Mhz processor and less than 64KB of RAM – with improvements in computational technology, it’s easy to see how the prosthetics could process more information, provide more feedback and become more reliable. It would be beautiful to see the techniques doctor and patient are pioneering used by people around the world to regain their independence despite disabling injuries.