Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a “theory of everything” was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is 2010, and Hawking has given up. But it is not his fault, he says: there may not be a final theory to discover after all. No matter; he can explain the riddles of existence without it.

The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow, is Hawking’s first popular book in almost a decade. It duly covers the growth of modern physics (quantum mechanics, general relativity, modern cosmology) sprinkled with the wild speculation about multiple universes that seems mandatory in popular works these days. Short but engaging and packed with colourful illustrations, the book is a natural choice for someone wanting a quick introduction to mind-bending theoretical physics.

Early on, the authors claim that they will be answering the ultimate riddles of existence - and that their answer won’t be “42″. Their starting point for this bold claim is superstring theory.

In the early 1990s, string theory was struggling with a multiplicity of distinct theories. Instead of a single theory of everything, there seemed to be five. Beginning in 1994, though, physicists noticed that, at low energies, some of these theories were “dual” to others - that is, a mathematical transformation makes one theory look like another, suggesting that they may just be two descriptions of the same thing. Then a bigger surprise came: one string theory was shown to be dual to 11-dimensional supergravity, a theory describing not only strings but membranes, too. Many physicists believe that this supergravity theory is one piece of a hypothetical theory of all these theories of everything, dubbed M-theory, of which all the different string theories offer us mere glimpses.

This multiplicity of distinct theories prompts the authors to declare that the only way to understand reality is to employ a philosophy called “model-dependent realism”. Having declared that “philosophy is dead”, the authors unwittingly develop a theory familiar to philosophers since the 1980s, namely “perspectivalism”. This radical theory holds that there doesn’t exist, even in principle, a single comprehensive theory of the universe. Instead, science offers many incomplete windows onto a common reality, one no more “true” than another. In the authors’ hands this position bleeds into an alarming anti-realism: not only does science fail to provide a single description of reality, they say, there is no theory-independent reality at all. If either stance is correct, one shouldn’t expect to find a final unifying theory like M-theory - only a bunch of separate and sometimes overlapping windows.

Lasers have recently shown they can down an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) – but they can also keep the drones up in the air. LaserMotive, based in Seattle, Washington, has kept a 22-gram model helicopter hovering for hours at a time on a few watts of laser power.

LaserMotive won $900,000 from NASA last year by beaming power to a robot that climbed a 900-metre cable dangling from a full-scale helicopter. The technology could help power space elevators to lift objects thousands of kilometres into orbit. But with space elevators still at the concept stage, LaserMotive is keen to find other ways to turn a profit from its technology, says company founder Jordin Kare.

Flying times of conventional UAVs are limited by the fuel or batteries they can carry. Solar power with battery backup for night flight allows flight times lasting several days – defence firm Qinetiq, based in the UK, has flown its ultralight Zephyr for more than 82 hours. But although Swiss company Solar Impulse has demonstrated that solar power can keep even a piloted craft in the air, the uncrewed vehicles typically flown by military agencies are heavier and more rugged, and so need more power to stay in the air than they can get from the sun.

LaserMotive says that ground-based lasers can deliver the required power. At last week’s AUVSI Unmanned Systems Conference in Denver, Colorado, the firm focused light from an array of semiconductor-diode near-infrared lasers down to a 7-centimetre beam, which automatically tracked a modified radio-controlled helicopter. The aircraft carried photovoltaic cells optimised for the laser wavelength, which converted about half the laser power reaching them to generate a few watts of electricity – enough to power the rotors of the little copter.

The laser-powered helicopter can hover for 6 hours, company president Tom Nugent told New Scientist from the show. He thinks that limit is set only by the quality of the motor driving the rotors. “It’s a little consumer-grade brush motor not meant to run this long,” he says. Under laser power, the copter “flies for several hours until the motor burns out”.

Laser-powered future

“That little helicopter sounds like a nice demonstration,” says Robert Van Burdine, a former engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, who demonstrated laser-powered flight of a fixed-wing craft in 2003. His group manually aimed the laser, but the 300-gram radio-controlled plane with 1.5-metre wingspan had enough momentum to glide if the beam drifted off target; the helicopter would fall if the beam missed it. Although many people expressed interest at the time, he knows of no follow-up work.

LaserMotive has bigger plans for extending flight duration of military craft, says Kare. “We expect we can scale to anything anybody is interested in,” including helicopters and UAVs. A craft could hover for long periods over a laser base, or fly missions and return to recharge over the laser, or fly between a series of laser bases. In the longer term, he envisions lasers powering remote ground-based sensors, delivering power to forward military bases, or supplying emergency power during disasters.

The IPCC has tried hard to preserve the normal rules of scientific discourse and to explain continuing uncertainty, but it has been pushed towards simple sound-bite conclusions. Some of this pressure has come from the desire of many scientists to underline their concerns about the dangers the world faces. Sometimes, in the process, “could happen” has become “will happen”, and analysis has veered close to advocacy. Journalists have been willing colluders.

On occasions, this has led to exaggerated claims and a reluctance to subject eye-catching research findings to proper scrutiny. Most notoriously, the most recent IPCC report, published in 2007, included a claim that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. This turned out to be an old and unassessed argument cut and pasted from magazine articles, including one in New Scientist in 1999.

This error, swiftly dubbed “glaciergate” after it was exposed in New Scientist last year, became damaging primarily because IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri defended it for several weeks rather than swiftly admitting the mistake. (The year 2350 is a more likely date for an ice-free Himalayas).

But the last IPCC report contained other apparently unassessed claims from literature that is opaque and often not peer-reviewed. They included a claim that agricultural yields in some African countries could fall by 50 per cent by 2020 – a figure that turned out to reflect little more than existing differences between wet and dry years.

Every few years the end of Moore’s law (predicting the ever-shrinking, ever-more-powerful design of silicon chips) is predicted, and then a new breakthrough is achieved that enables more shrinkage of the components of CPUs and other chips. The result is always our latest and greatest clutch of CPUs, memory devices and silicon what-nots that are more powerful than the last ones, while consuming less electricity and generating less heat. Some limits are approaching though that do signify the upper-end of Moore’s applicability, since they run into hard physics limitations–and the way that chips are currently crafted have proved particularly irksome for makers of flash-based memory.

Can a student design change the world? Absolutely, and the Copenhagen Wheel — a hybrid-electric wheel you can bolt onto almost any bike — might soon prove how fast that can happen.

Developed by a student team out of MIT’s SENSEable City lab, the wheel recently won the U.S. round the James Dyson Awards. Even Sir James lauded the design’s versatility and elegance, telling us, “It’s a well thought out design in that it addresses a number of problems beyond tired legs.”

Co.Design recently talked with Christine Outram, who, as a graduate student, led the effort to bring the Copenhagen Wheel from a mere drawing to a full-blown working product. Here, she talks about the criteria the team laid out to guide the product’s development, and how the wheel is “more than a piece of transportation,” and could lead to full-blown carbon credit programs.

Let’s start at the beginning. How did the idea came about?

The project started at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, which usually collaborates with cities and telecoms and other places with extra data lying around, with the goal of creating a vision for the city in 15 years. The city of Copenhagen saw something called the Real-Time Room, which turned the iPhone into an ambient environmental monitor. They wanted to buy it, but being a university, the lab couldn’t really sell the project to them. So we agreed to take a look at Copenhagen, to see how technology could improve on the city.

And so, what issues did you look at once the student workshop began?

Initially there were five students involved, including myself. And the most striking thing you notice about Copenhagen is all of the bikes — 36% of people in Copenhagen bike to work. That trend began in the 1970s, with roads being strategically cut off, and cars being taxed 180%. The city mentioned that they wanted to reach 50% by 2015, but they weren’t coming close. That figure had actually plateaued some time ago.

So then we started thinking: Why wouldn’t someone get on a bike? It comes down to distance, topography, safety, and infrastructure. Weather is a factor, but we couldn’t change that [laughs].

Pretty early on, the idea of putting an electric wheel on a bike came about, because it could help put people on bikes that live further out or live below big hills. One of the students in the workshop created a really nice rendering, but we didn’t have any idea at that point about how it would actually work. And that’s when the lab went into the second phase, with a new batch of students — the “urban demo” phase. This was focused on choosing the batteries and the motor, and making the design real.

So how does the wheel work?

Inside of the hub, there’s a 250 watt motor. And when you pedal, there are sensors in the wheel that detect torque. So once the torque sensor detects a certain amount of exertion, it knows to supplement your pedaling. So if you’re going up a hill, you get more an assist. The idea is not that you stop pedaling and the motor takes over — you’re always pedaling, and the feeling is like having a friend pedaling with you.

You brake by pushing back on the pedals, and much like a Toyota Prius, the motor converts the friction created into electricity, which charges the battery. Also, when you’re going downhill, the gears in the hub switch so that they can recover energy there as well.

As far as engineering goes, the main thing is that you don’t want the batteries or the motor to spin with the wheel, creating momentum. So these sit near the axle, in a fixed position. The spinning part of the wheel actually rotates around them.

Finally, you choose how much assist you want through the iPhone interface. You can choose from low to high amounts of assist — so anywhere from 100% boost to a 300% boost.

It seems like the real insight was creating a wheel that can attach to any bike. How did that idea come about?

It actually links back to the City Car lab at MIT, because they designed something called the Robo Scooter, which had all the of the components in the wheel. So it seemed like a natural extension of that idea.

From there, we really treated it like a design project and we we weren’t interested in an incremental improvement on electric bikes, since they’re all pretty clunky with hard-wiring and external batteries. So we started with a design brief, that had four main criteria: 1. All of the components should fit in the hub. 2. It should be easily retrofitable and modular, so that you could plug in different components such as a bigger battery if you live near hills or environmental sensors if you’re a city looking to gather data. 3. It should be your friend, and be able to tell you how well you’re doing. 4. It should have a social component that connects with your friends and encourages you to cycle.

You student team at MIT was pretty multidisciplinary. How did that affect the product that ultimately emerged?

I should say that the guidance came from the leader of the lab, Carlo Ratti, who has a background in civil engineering and architecture, and Assaf Biderman, who was a physicist and works on tangible interfaces. Multidisciplinary backgrounds like theirs are really the key. When you including an electrical engineer and an electrical engineer and an architect, all these people have to speak the same language. It can’t be that you create something that works and put a pretty case over it. For instance, we could have easily hardwired a battery into the thing, but we wanted the battery to removable. The glue among everyone was an end-use focus. And that’s a design way of thinking.

So what did an architect like yourself contribute to the process?

The skill that architects bring is being able to think top down and bottom up at the same time. You have to have vision for an overall building design, but also be able to think about the design of a doorjam to prevent leaks when it rains. That sort of simultaneous thinking helps in these types of projects, and I think it helped that I continued with the project between both the brainstorming and the building.

Anything more you’d like to add about the product?

What I really like is that it’s not just a piece of transport. By including environmental sensors in the hub, you can use this to gather fine-grained data from a fleet of bicycles, just as a byproduct of people taking a normal route everyday. Moreover, you can also gather data about how many cycle miles are being logged over time, so you could watch whether the wheel is having an impact on a city’s carbon emissions. You can even imagine the wheel becoming the basis for carbon credits awarded to cities, or even competitions between cities across the world.

So is there VC backing? How are you guys staying in business? And what’s next?

We’re actually funded right now by the ministry of the environment in Italy, which is paying for the material cost of the 12 prototypes we’ve build. Those will soon go into a serious phase of beta testing, for example, riding up hills in San Francisco to see if they survive. Then, we’re looking to go commercial in 10-12 months. We already know that the final version is going to be far smaller and lighter that what you see now, thanks to custom motors and better battery selection.

And the cost?

It’ll be about $600 retail, which we think is pretty reasonable, once you consider that your average electric bike is $1000, and you don’t have to get rid of what you already have.

Update: The Department of Justice says it will appeal the ruling freezing federal funding for embryonic stem cell research

Following Monday’s shock court ruling freezing US government funding for research on human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has revealed the extent of the disruption that will be caused.

Applications for funding worth tens of millions of dollars have already been put on hold. But according to an interpretation of the ruling from the US Department of Justice, existing projects will be allowed to continue – for now, at least.

Speaking on a conference call with reporters, NIH director Francis Collins said a total of 50 applications for funding that were about to be reviewed by scientific experts have now been put on hold. “We have pulled these grants out of the stack,” he said.

‘Sand in the engine’

About a dozen proposals, which had already received high marks in peer review and were awaiting final approval of up to $20 million in funding next month, will similarly not go ahead. Another 22 projects, up for annual renewal of funding totalling $54 million, will be forced to shut down when their current funding ends at the end of September.

In theory, the researchers could apply for private funding to keep the projects alive – but Collins said it was unclear whether private sources could meet that need.

Momentum in ESC research had been growing, Collins said, boosting prospects for future cell-based treatments for conditions including spinal cord injury, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. “This decision has just poured sand into that engine of discovery,” he said.

Temporary reprieve

Researchers had feared that all NIH-backed work on hESCs would be shut down immediately. But according to the US Department of Justice’s interpretation of the ruling, no one will have to “step away from the petri dish”, as Collins put it. New projects launched earlier this year, plus those that have already been renewed, can continue for now.

These projects are currently funded to the tune of $131 million. But if the ruling stands, they will also be put on hold when they come up for renewal over the course of the next year.

The Department of Justice is still considering its next legal steps. White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton told reporters earlier on Tuesday that “all possible avenues” are being explored to continue President Barack Obama’s policy of widening funding for hESC research.

You’ll hardly feel a thing. If doctors play down the pain of a procedure, patients might avoid the nocebo effect – the placebo effect’s evil twin.

Arne May’s team at the University of Hamburg, Germany, applied heat to the arms of 38 volunteers over six days. Half of them were told the heat would get more intense, and they reported constant pain levels. The rest felt less pain as they got used to the sensation. The first group also had increased activity in a brain area involved in pain perception.

“I didn’t expect that giving negative information for 5 minutes would have an effect a week later,” May says.

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Ten minutes in a brain scanner could be all it takes to diagnose autism. So says Christine Ecker at the Institute of Psychiatry, UK, who has developed software that identifies the anatomical signatures of the condition.

Ecker’s team carried out MRI scans on the brains of 20 adult males with autism, 20 with attention-deficit disorder and 20 healthy controls. They used a machine-learning tool called a support vector machine (SVM) – which analyses data and identifies patterns – to identify key differences between the groups, such as in the cortical folding and curvature of the brain.

The SVM was then used to build a model to predict whether brain scans fall into the autistic or control group. When the original scans were fed into this model, it diagnosed autism with a 90 per cent success rate.

Current diagnosis tools are based on time-consuming and potentially stressful behavioural tests and interviews. Ecker now plans to test her model on children, for whom she predicts more accurate results “because the differences in anatomy between the healthy and autistic brain are more prominent in childhood”.