Plus: Consuming Mountains of Data, Sleeping While Standing, Coin Tosses Not So Random and the Milky Way in 800,000 Snapshots.

Nuclear-Powered Insect Surveillance
Earlier this year, the United States military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled its program to equip insects with micromechanical systems and create tissue-machine interfaces to eventually control the insects for information-gathering purposes.

While this may sound like (scary) science-fiction, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Georgia have already been able to implant miniature machines in insects, and DARPA-funded researchers have successfully controlled a live beetle through radio commands, Wired.com’s Danger Room blog says.

The latest development in the burgeoning field of cyborg insect science arrived this Thursday, when scientists from Cornell University announced a prototype transmitter for powering machine-enhanced insects using radioactive isotopes. According to the Cornell team, “[t]he primary objective of the Insect Cyborg Sentinels Project is to develop cybernetic insects for the purposes of living surveillance and reconnaissance micro-air vehicles, MAVs.”

Any electronics added to an insect soldier, including sensors or flight-control mechanisms, require an external power source to stay operational, and using a radioactive isotope as a sort of “nuclear battery” can supply this power while enabling a wider range of movement, Popular Science reports.

Average American Consumes 34GB of Data Per Day
Feeling overwhelmed by information at work or at home? You’re not alone. A study from the University of California, San Diego this week says that Americans as a group consumed 3.6 million zettabytes of data in 2008 (each zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes), with each individual consuming an average of 34 gigabytes of data and 100,500 words per day.

According to the report, hours of information consumption grew by 2.6 percent each year between 1980 and 2008, while information consumption in bytes increased at a 5.4 percent annual rate despite the capacity for processing data increasing at a much faster pace over the same period. One reason for the disparity is that television, which still dominates non-work data consumption, remained little changed over this period.

The report says that traditional media such as TV and radio account for 60 percent of daily non-work consumption hours, and more than three-quarters of American households’ information time is spent with non-computer sources.

The Vertical Bed
Dealing with mountains of information each day can make it hard to catch some much-needed rest, but a new invention may soon allow people to literally fall asleep on their feet instead of resorting to more drastic measures.

Developers at Substitute Materials recently showcased a “vertical bed” apparatus that fully supports a user’s weight by attaching to ventilation grating on the sidewalk, enabling a person to fall asleep while fully upright. In its initial test, the inventors had a subject sleep standing up for 40 minutes in midtown Manhattan.

The vertical bed features leg and back supports, a neck pillow and straps to keep a user safely ensconced, Gizmodo reports. The set also includes noise-canceling headphones, opaque sunglasses and a free-standing umbrella. The entire unit fits inside a single briefcase, making it handy for taking a quick nap on the go.

Credit: Gizmodo

Coin Tosses Not So Random
Settling choices just got a little harder, as new findings show that flipping a coin is not as random as people previously assumed and the result can, in fact, be manipulated by the flipper.

In a study published this month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers from the University of British Columbia conducted an experiment in which subjects were asked to flip a coin hundreds of times, and those who achieved the highest percentage of “heads” would win a prize. Each subject was taught to follow a specific coin-tossing method and the process was observed to avoid cheating. On average, heads came up 57 percent of the time and all the participants were able to toss heads more often tails.

According to the researchers, their study “shows that when participants are given simple instructions about how to manipulate the toss of a coin and only a few minutes to practice this technique, more than half can significantly manipulate the outcome,” CBC News reports.

The research concluded that because certain people can influence the results of a coin toss, the validity of coin-flipping to determine a chance outcome is now in doubt. Don’t be surprised if dice sales start to take off.

Largest-Ever Milky Way Panorama
Putting together a portrait of the galaxy is no easy thing, but scientists at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago have managed to do just that with their new composite photograph of the Milky Way.

The giant panorama, now on display at the planetarium, stretches 120 feet wide and 3 feet high, with a six-foot wide bulge in the middle to represent the center of the galaxy, Popular Science reports. The picture was composed using 800,000 individual images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and it contains 2.5 billion pixels.

“This is the highest-resolution, largest, most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of our Milky Way,” Sean Carey, head of the Spitzer Science Center, told Space.com.

Take a look at just one section of 16:

Click image for larger view.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Wisconsin

Have a great weekend, folks.