Simply put, the technology opens the door to augmented reality systems that don’t require some kind of bulky, virtual-reality-headset-from-the-‘90s peripheral visor or helmet. Instead, Innovega’s tech relies on images protected on a normal-looking set of specs and a pair of nanotechnology-infused contact lenses that provide megapixel clarity of that up-close imagery while still allowing the eye to focus on the world beyond.

At least, so goes the company’s CES pitch, which you can judge for yourself below. We haven’t tested the product, so we can’t really speak to its awesomeness. But DARPA can. The Pentagon’s blue-sky research wing announced yesterday that Innovega has developed for the agency a new breed of contact lenses that allow “a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus” and that allow users to focus on both faraway objects and images placed very close to the eye.

For DARPA’s part, Innovega is working as part of the Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program, which aims to eliminate the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability gap at the individual soldier level. Read: AR setups that plug individual soldiers right into drone feeds and other intel streams while still allowing them to maintain their peripheral vision and situational awareness. Meanwhile that could lead to more immersive 3-D television and gaming experiences for the rest of us. More tech detail via the video below.

Their dart-like rifle round is designed for small-caliber firearms like those carried by the average grunt or law enforcement officer. The duo is still sorting out some engineering issues and looking for a private sector partner to help develop the guided round into a marketable product, but for now the four-inch prototype bullet is proving that smart rounds are by no mean unfeasible, or even prohibitively expensive.

Their bullet works much like a precision guided aerial bomb might function. An optical sensor in the nose of the bullet detects a laser beam painted on a target and sends that information to a guidance and control system also packed on board. An eight-bit CPU commands electromagnetic actuators to adjust tiny fins that deploy from the round immediately after it exits the muzzle. From there, the on-board electronics aerodynamically guide the bullet home to its target, allowing the shooter to adjust a round’s trajectory in flight to correct on a long shot or to stay with a moving target.

In order for a finned design to work, of course, the engineers had to dispense with some fundamentals of modern firearm design, like the rifled barrel that puts spin on conventional bullets. That spin, like a spiraling football, stabilizes conventional rounds and helps them to fly straight. The smart rounds eschew rifling and spin for the active guidance provided by the fins, and in doing so computer simulations suggest they could narrow the average margin of error on a half-mile shot from nearly 10 yards down to just 8 inches.

Meaning a “miss” on a target of any decent size–let’s say for the sake of the argument, a target the size of a grown man’s torso–would still likely result in a “hit” of some degree. The video below doesn’t go very far by way of technical explanation, but you can see the round exit the muzzle and deploy its self-guiding fins in super slow-mo.

So that’s pretty huge. What we generally hear about when we hear about invisibility is some new trick with metamaterials that allows for cloaking in two-dimensions by bending light around some tiny object. This means that from a single side, the object is concealed. Take a walk around the object, and it reappears. Less like a cloak, more like an invisibility curtain.

The UT team used a different method, known as plasmonic cloaking, to conceal an 18-centimeter cylinder from every direction. This is true “cloaking,” as the plasmonic material is actually coated onto the object to be concealed. These plasmonic materials work by doing the opposite of what normal materials do: reflecting light. When you see an object, it’s because light is bouncing off of it and striking your eyes, which send that info on to the brain for processing. Plasmonic materials scatter light instead, producing what is essentially transparency from all angles of observation.
Ready for the attached strings? This has only been demonstrated with microwaves. In the visible range, the cylinder is still plenty visible. But the UT Austin team thinks that making this work in the visible spectrum isn’t outside the realm of possibility. And if they can pull that off, you’ll know it because it will be leading the news here. In previous studies the team has shown that its plasmonic coating can cloak any object regardless of shape or symmetry. If they can sort this out in visible light, we may someday be able render just about anything invisible.

Asteroid Fly-By

On January 31, the 20-mile-long asteroid Eros makes its closest pass by Earth in 37 years. It will miss us by 16.5 million miles, but that’s still close enough for amateur astronomers to see it with a small telescope.

A New Human Emerges

Archaeologists will get a clearer picture of human evolution this fall when they begin analyzing the complete skeleton of Little Foot, a small hominid found deep inside a cave in Sterkfontein, South Africa (entrance pictured), that may be more than three million years old.

Ocean Secrets Revealed

Autonomous underwater vehicles, also known as gliders, will deliver data on water density and plankton counts near Oregon and New England this fall—the first concrete results from the ambitious Ocean Observatories Initiative, a wide-reaching network of undersea sensors and other monitoring devices.

Super Supercomputer

By May, IBM will finish building a computer that churns through 20 petaflops, or 20 quadrillion calculations a second, double the current record. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (aerial view pictured) will use the new machine, called Sequoia, to perform simulations of nuclear explosions and weather systems.

Tesla Offers a Luxury Sedan

Tesla, better known for its high-end Roadster, will begin delivery of its $77,400 (before tax credits) Model S sedan [see “Luxe Electric,” page 14], which will use lithium-ion cells similar to its sibling and travel up to 300 miles per charge.

Turing Turns 100

Alan Turing, a founding father of artificial intelligence, was born on June 23, 1912. Computer scientists around the world are celebrating his centenary with conferences, museum exhibits and competitions, called Turing Tests, to find a computer program that can convince a human that it is human too.

Largest Offshore Wind Farm

The first 175 turbines of the London Array wind farm, which sits 12 miles off the English coast, will generate up to 630 megawatts of power by year’s end—more than twice the current record and enough to power 470,000 homes.

California Cap-and-Trade

This summer, California will kick off the country’s largest carbon-swap agreement by selling the right to emit greenhouse gases. Polluters can redeem these allowances in 2013, when a limit on emissions kicks in. Estimated price: $15 per metric ton. A typical power plant’s discharge: 150,000 tons.

Curiosity Explores Mars

On August 6, the largest rover yet—the size of a car rather than a golf cart—will land on the Red Planet. Curiosity is carrying new equipment that will drill into rocks, analyze their chemistry, and look for compounds that support life.

Fracking Under Scrutiny

The Environmental Protection Agency will release the first results of a study designed to answer a controversial question: Does hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas pollute drinking water? The researchers will study data from sites in four states and monitor drill locations before, during and after fracking.

Fusion Delivers Extra Energy

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in California will attempt to produce a net energy gain from a nuclear fusion reaction by using 192 lasers to crush a hydrogen-filled target. Past fusion experiments have always consumed more energy than they created.

Salmon Stage a Comeback

State and federal agencies will return salmon to California’s newly flowing San Joaquin River, parts of which had been dry for 50 years. Researchers will study up to 2,000 tagged fish to see if a full salmon run can thrive.

While the purpose of the former is to accumulate excess calories, the latter is used to produce heat. Irisin, named after the Greek goddess Iris, could one day help address obesity and diabetes. However, there is still a long way to go before the hormone is made into an actual drug.

Irisin occurs naturally both in humans and in mice, and its levels surge with physical exercise. Mice have to spend three weeks running on a wheel for the hormone to accumulate in their blood. For humans, the same happens after ten weeks of systematic exercising. A placebo-controlled study showed that boosting the levels of the hormone artificially in mice may induce some of the benefits that would normally be caused by a workout. The cells of the mice injected with irisin needed more oxygen and burned more calories. Obese mice lost several grams within the first ten days from the injection.

The treatment also had a positive effect on the regulation of blood sugar levels, which links the hormone to diabetes prevention. What’s more, Spiegelman’s team plans to investigate the potential of irisin to advance the treatment of diseases such as muscular dystrophy and muscle wasting. "We are hopeful, though we have no evidence, that this hormone may embody some of the other benefits of exercise, perhaps in the neuromuscular system," he says.

This sounds very promising, but there is still a lot to be done before an irisin-based drug comes to a pharmacy near you. First, whether or not irisin will have the same beneficial effects on humans still remains to be seen. Second, making it into an actual drug may turn out to be very challenging, as pointed out by MIT professor Harvay Lodish. Adiponectin, a hormone Lodish discovered back in the early 1990s, also seems to play a role in staving off obesity and diabetes. It is correlated with the body mass index (BMI) and it increases the metabolic rate in mice without raising the food intake. Still, so far all the attempts at converting the full size adiponectin protein into a viable drug have failed.

Professor Spiegelman, however, is optimistic. In fact, he’s optimistic enough to have set up a separate company, called Ember Therapeutics, to conduct brown fat-related research that includes studies on the effects of irisin. Supported by Third Rock Ventures, the company raised US$34 million in the first round of financing. We do hope that all this money and brain power will eventually lead to a treatment for obesity and diabetes. That said, we do recognize that there might be more to it than just swallowing a pill.

Gravitational Lensing: This image of galaxy cluster MACS J1206.2-0847 shows the gravitational lensing effect of dark matter on distant galaxies. In a new exoplanet population paper, astronomers used microlensing to sense the presence of planets around other stars. The lensing was not as extreme as this, but works somewhat like a magnifying glass, brightening the light of a star lined up behind the planetary system.

“Planets are like bunnies; you don’t just get one, you get a bunch,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who was not involved in this research. “So really, the number of planets in the Milky Way is probably like five or 10 times the number of stars. That’s something like a trillion planets.”

Of course there’s no way to know, at least not yet, how many of these worlds could be hospitable to forms of life as we know it. But the odds alone are tantalizing, Shostak said.

“It’s not unreasonable at this point to say there are literally billions of habitable worlds in our galaxy, probably as a lower limit,” he said. “Maybe they’re all sterile as an autoclave, but it doesn’t seem very likely, does it? That would make us very odd.”

“The numbers are huge by any human standard, but we are still looking at only a tiny bit of our galaxy,” said John Gribbin, an astronomer and science writer who just published a book called “Alone in the Universe.” “[This research] does further our understanding of how things like planets form and how stars form, but there is a long way to go before we can say there is life on any of these planets, and further to go before we get to civilization.”

The new planetary plenitude is derived from a six-year survey of millions of stars studied with an international network of southern hemisphere telescopes. Astronomers used a delicate detection method called gravitational microlensing, which is one of three trusty ways to find extrasolar planets. Kepler uses the transit method, detecting blips in star brightness as planets cross in front of them. Other observatories use the radial velocity method, measuring the wobble caused by the gravitational tug of a planet on its star. Both of these are helpful for finding planets that are either huge or hug tightly to their stars. But the gravitational microlensing method can be used to find planets over a wider mass range and a wider orbital distance.

La Silla Observatory: The Milky Way seen above the dome of the Danish 1.54-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, used to search for exoplanets using the microlensing technique. The central part of the Milky Way is visible behind the dome of the ESO 3.6-metre telescope; on the right, the Magellanic Clouds.

It works by using the host star and its putative planets as a lens. The gravitational field of the host solar system magnifies the light of a star in the background. If the host star does have a planet, the planet essentially widens the lens, and this is an effect that can be measured. Such an alignment is incredibly rare, so an international team of researchers examined 100 million stars every night and noted ones with promising light curve amplifications, examining them in higher resolution. From 2002 to 2007, the team observed 500 such stars. In 10 cases, they could directly see the lensing effect of a planet. A statistical analysis showed one in six of the stars studied hosts a planet of similar mass to Jupiter, half have Neptune-mass planets and two thirds have super-Earths. Combining the results suggests that the average number of planets around a star is greater than one, the astronomers say in a new Nature paper.

“Together, the three methods are, for the first time, able to say something about how common our own solar system is, as well as how many stars appear to have Earth-size planets in the orbital area where liquid what could in principle exist as lakes, rivers and oceans — that is to say, where life as we know it from Earth could exist,” said Uffe Gråe Jørgensen, head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen and an author of the paper.

With so many planets, it could be easy to assume the odds have just gotten much better for alien life hunters, but it’s not necessarily the case because scientists still don’t know what’s necessary for life to form, said Paul Davies, a cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University.

“How much real estate is out there doesn’t matter,” he said. “My guess is there would be some hundreds of millions of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, but that is no good to you if the probability of life forming on one of them is one in a trillion.”

The lack of knowledge hasn’t stopped scientists from making educated guesses, however — take the Drake equation, devised by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961, which seeks to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations based on an equation of assumptions.

“All of the work that has been done since 1961 when this equation was concocted has gone in the same direction, namely, that our situation here is not so weird, not so strange, not so bizarre, not so special,” Shostak said. “We’re not unique, at least astronomically.”

We’re just one in millions.

A Plethora of Planets: This artist’s impression shows how common planets are around the stars in the Milky Way. The planets, their orbits and their host stars are all vastly magnified compared to their real separations. A six-year search that surveyed millions of stars using a technique called microlensing concluded that every star has at least one planet orbiting around it.

It looks like the Star Trek item that we’re the closest to seeing become a reality, however, is the medical tricorder. This May, the X-PRIZE Foundation proposed a US$10 million Tricorder X-PRIZE, with the intention of encouraging the production of consumer devices that can assess a person’s state of health. The first potential contestant, which already has a tricorder in the works, is a tech start-up by the name of Scanadu.

Founded in January 2011, Scanadu is based out of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and is headed by CEO and futurist Walter De Brouwer.

Although its inner workings are being kept secret, the Scanadu Tricorder is a small, handheld device, that would be used in conjunction with the processing power and screen of a smartphone. In a non-contact, non-invasive fashion, it would be able to measure vital statistics such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and body temperature. An onboard hyper-spectral camera and microfluidic lab-on-a-chip would also be able to analyze rashes and infections, and process blood and saliva samples, respectively.

Based on these and other measurements, it could then offer a diagnosis, and advise its user on what course of action should be taken. If a doctor needed to be involved, the patient data on the tricorder could be instantly transferred to them. If it turned out to be something that could be treated at home, then an unnecessary trip to the emergency room or doctor’s office would be avoided.

The first generation of the tricorder will be aimed at parents, for use on their young children. Although it’s hard to know just how far along the device is in its development, Scanadu did recently announce that it had received US$2 million in funding from a group of private investors – that’s certainly going to help.

Other products have already made steps in the direction of smartphone-based tricorders. Melapp and the Handyscope utilize a phone’s camera to assess suspicious skin markings, the iHealth system helps users manage their weight and blood pressure, while iBGStar allows diabetics to measure their blood glucose levels.

Personal energy harvesting

While big ideas like solar, tidal and wind power certainly show promise, the IBM researchers believe that much of the energy used to run our homes will come from smaller, more personal sources. These could include things such as piezoelectric generators in our clothing, batteries that are charged by the spinning of our bicycles’ wheels, or turbines that are spun by the water flowing through our homes’ pipes. Essentially, anything that moves could be harnessed as a source of power.

Biological passwords

The days of having to memorize and keep track of alphanumeric passwords will come to an end, as biometrics take over. In order to authenticate our identities online and in person, we will use technologies such as retina scans, voice prints, fingerprint scans or face recognition.

Mind reading

Yep, mind reading. It won’t so much be about spying on other people’s private thoughts, however. Instead, it will involve things like controlling computers or other devices with our brain waves – if you want to call someone on your smartphone, for instance, you will just have to think about doing so in order to make it happen.

"Mind reading" will also be used to analyze the thought patterns of people with brain disorders, in order to help assist them in daily living, and to treat their condition.

No more information gap

While the world wide web has done much to disseminate information across the planet, its "world" hasn’t included people who can’t afford computers or smartphones, or who live in places lacking the infrastructure to connect such machines to the internet. With the rise of low-cost mobile devices, however, people in developing nations will gain full access to that world.

Farmers will be able to check weather reports to determine when to fertilize crops, patients will know when the visiting doctor is scheduled to be in town next, and financial transactions can be conducted without the need of a physical brick-and-mortar bank. The possibilities are endless.

Computers that know us

Presently, in the emails and other information updates we receive, we have to sift through a lot of stuff that doesn’t apply to us. Within five years, however, analytics and sensemaking technologies will allow our computers to "know" us, and filter out information that we don’t need.

It is even suggested that by combining our personal preferences and calendars, computers could proactively reserve tickets to a concert by our favorite rock band, if we were free on the date of the performance.

All the technologies on IBM’s latest list are already in development, so it’s not a huge stretch to state that they will gain prominence in years to come. Perhaps, however, there’s something that should have been on the "top five" list, but wasn’t. Do you think IBM missed anything?

It’s easy — OK, not easy, but relatively practical nowadays — to take two particles or two microscopic things and intertwine their fates. Now for the first time, scientists have accomplished quantum entanglement on the macro scale, entangling two millimeter-sized diamonds.

The findings, published in this week’s issue of Science, are a potential major leap for both quantum and classical mechanics. It’s the first time entanglement has been achieved between two fairly large objects — and at room temperature to boot.

Who interested they know, entanglement is the process of connecting two separate things, be they photons or nanoscale objects, so that they behave the same no matter their distance apart. What happens to one particle also happens to the other, even if they are separated by the entire universe.

Researchers at Oxford University took two small diamonds, about 3 millimeters square and 1 millimeter thick. They exposed them to incredibly short bursts — about 100 femtoseconds — of laser light, in a method called ultra fast pump probe spectroscopy. What happened next is complicated: The light induced some vibration in the lineup of the molecules in the diamond crystals. These inherent oscillations (present in all atoms, they’re just being taken advantage of here) are known as phonon modes. The pulse excited one phonon mode in both of the diamonds, and also produced two photons, which were scattered by the diamonds and which would be used to entangle the phonon states. Then the scattered photons were brought together, using a complicated setup involving a beam splitter and single-photon detectors.

The two diamonds were about half a foot apart, but when one of the photons was detected, the two diamonds were sharing a phonon. In other words, what happened to one diamond happened to the other. The researchers confirmed this by working backward, de-exciting the phonon and emitting another photon, which was itself detected. Entanglement lasted about 7 picoseconds, so it’s too short to be used in a quantum computer or other device — at least for now.

“The two diamond samples coherently shared one phonon, which is the hallmark of a quantum-entangled state,” explains L.-M. Duan, a physicist at the University of Michigan who wrote a perspective paper accompanying the Science paper. “These results provide a striking example that entanglement is not particular to microscopic particles but can manifest itself in the macroscopic world, where it could be used in future studies that make fundamental tests of quantum mechanics.”

Robot guards are coming to a South Korean jail next spring, according to the Yonhap news agency. The guards are 5 feet tall and equipped with four wheels, a friendly face and who knows what sorts of pain rays and other implements. They are designed to look friendly to inmates, according to the designers.

The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behavior, according to the BBC. They’ll be able to detect prisoner violence and even notice attempts at suicide, which researchers say will help reduce human guards’ workload. The robots will mostly work at night, patrolling correctional facilities and helping prisoners connect with officers, according to Yonhap. They come equipped with a “remote conversation function,” via the cameras mounted on their torsos.

Three prototype guard ‘bots will spend a month in a jail in the city of Pohang. The Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean research group, developed the robots in concert with Kyonggi University. The project will cost about $864,000.

Robots are already a mainstay in factories, surgical bays and disaster areas, so it’s reasonable to see them in prisons, too. But what happens when the prisoners take them over?