Run Silent, Run Deep.

“This is the driving idea behind DARPA’s Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program, which seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies hidden in the ocean depths for years on end and deploy them remotely at the push of a button when the need arises. Think: unmanned aircraft that travel to the surface and launch into the sky to provide reconnaissance or to disrupt or spoof enemy defenses, or perhaps submersible or surface sub-hunters that launch from the seafloor during times of heightened alert in a particular maritime theater.”

You know what the world really needs? A system of dormant underwater drones, which apparently DARPA is hard at work on. If you want to use this type of tech to explore the oceans of Europa or Titan, fine. For the Taiwan Strait? Sounds like a terrible idea. SKYNET aside, glitches happen.

Whither Happiness? (At Wal-Mart).

“The researchers coded each tweet for its happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied). While the researchers admit their technique ignores context, they say that for large datasets, simply counting the words and averaging their happiness content produces ‘reliable’ results.”

Happiness where are you? I’ve searched so long for you. A statistical analysis of states’ relative happiness, as determined by tweets. (Red states above are happy, blue states are not.) David Simon is 2-for-2: Next to the mouth of the Mississippi, the Maryland-Delaware area is apparently the saddest in the nation. Perhaps due to proximity to Washington DC? Definitely maybe.

In probably related news, a different map of the United States shows the most popular places cited in Craigslist’s Missed Connections. “The most popular place to spot potential love in Texas, New Mexico, Missouri, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Florida? Wal-Mart.”

Of course, this begs the question: Do people actually ever meet up on Missed Connections? Every time I’ve perused them, that section is overwhelmingly the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, just damaged, lovelorn people sending out messages in a bottle to lost exes who are actively ignoring them.

The Sky Will Fall.

“‘I would call this a tiny asteroid,’ Chodas said. ‘This is the largest recorded event since the Tunguska explosion in 1908.'” I’ve been meaning to write about this all week: On the same day that asteroid 2012 DA14 passed closer to Earth than many of our satellites, a meteor explodes in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, injuring close to 1500 people. “The object vaporized roughly 15 miles above the surface of the Earth…The force of the explosion measured between 300 and 500 kilotons, equivalent to a modern nuclear bomb.”

Consider this a wake-up call. This is one more reason why we need to invest in our space program — because, right now, we are playing chicken with the universe. That deadly asteroid might not hit tomorrow, or even in 2106. But the danger is real. As author Larry Niven put it, “the dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!”

Not with a Bang But a Bubble.

“Remember that Higgs-like particle that scientists finally managed to pin down last year at the Large Hadron Collider? Well, it’s proving to be a harbinger of bad news. According to Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the mass of the Higgs boson indicates that ‘the universe we live in is inherently unstable, and at some point billions of years from now it’s all going to get wiped out.'”

Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world. And if the asteroids don’t get us, there’s always the chance that an alternate universe might pop and destroy everything, a la Richard Grant in How to Get Ahead in Advertising. “The problem, says Lykken, is the potential for vacuum instability — a phenomenon that could spawn an all-consuming alternate universe within our own.”

Not as pressing as asteroids, however — this event, if current calculations hold up, is most likely to happen round the End of the Universe anyway, so be sure to get a table by the window.

Better Living through Virology.

“[Above] is a look at the past morbidity (how many people became sick) of what were once very common infectious diseases, and the current morbidity in the U.S. There’s no smallpox and no polio, almost no measles, dramatically less chickenpox (also known as varicella) and H. influenza (that’s not flu, but a bacteria that can cause deadly meningitis.” How Vaccines Have Changed Our World in One Graphic.

The Blogosphere’s Baby Pics.

They shut down the factory in 2009, but old Geocities home page find a (brief) new life at the One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Photo Op tumblr, dedicated to researching the Geocities days of the web. The Ghost’s old Geocities days are still captured here. There was also a time before then when my personal site was crufted over with embedded MIDIs and other embarrassing late-90’s artifacts. I’m sure it’s somewhere in the Wayback Machine.

Braaaaaiiiiiiiiiins.

“‘Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar,’ he said. ‘Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s. They’re developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs, devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation.'”

President Obama makes the case for federal investment in the Brain Activity Map Project. (You heard it here first, tinfoil hat people. The tyranny of the Kenyan socialist will not stop at your precious bodily fluids — He’s going to read your brainwaves too!) Seriously, though, investing in basic scientific research like this is, er, a no-brainer. It creates jobs while advancing the frontiers of human knowledge in all kinds of unanticipated ways. We’d be stupid not to support this — which means, of course, the jury’s still out on whether we will.

Update: “BAM is an acronym you’ll probably be hearing a lot in the weeks and months to come — so let’s talk about what the BAM project is, what it isn’t, and why it’s raising both interest and eyebrows throughout the scientific community.” Io9 has more.

The Worlds Next Door.

“‘We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted,’ said Harvard astronomer and lead author Courtney Dressing.”

Data from Kepler’s Space Telescope suggests that an estimated 6% of red dwarf stars have planets in the habitable zone, meaning, statistically, we are basically surrounded by inhabitable worlds. “Our Sun is surrounded by a swarm of red dwarf stars. About 75 percent of the closest stars are red dwarfs.”

Aperture Science.

“With a portal at each university, students can stand in front of a vertical 50-inch high-definition monitor and communicate with the help of a webcam, microphone, speakers and a computer running a video communication service. A backlit booth will house the portal.” Look at them still talking when there’s science to do — Now Duke and UNC are playing with portals. (I just hope the Duke side is red.)

Those Infectious Ideas.

“When we learn something new, our neurons tear down old connections and build new ones. In the process they cast off lots of molecules. To the immune system, this waste may look like an infection or some other kind of trouble, resulting in inflammation and the release of harsh compounds that normally fight viruses but can also interfere with the brain and its function.”

A novel path of brain research suggests our immune system may play a key role in determining intelligence. “The same T cells that protect the brain from inflammation also work to keep us sharp; and in what appears to be a feedback loop, the mere act of learning reinforces the effect.”