Well they’re not moon shoes, but a new device called the iShoe developed by an MIT graduate student may have your grandmother channeling her inner astronaut.

Lieberman demonstrates how sensors on the iShoe insole can diagnose balance problems.

That’s because Erez Lieberman and researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology are designing new sensory insoles that may soon help doctors diagnose balance problems in senior citizens before major falls occur.

It’s based on a technology astronauts now use every time they return to earth, and one that Lieberman himself helped develop while an intern at NASA.

“The problem NASA faces is that the altered-gravity environment of spaceflight messes with the astronaut’s sense of balance,” says Lieberman, “[This technology] is currently being used to evaluate astronaut balance after return from zero-G.”

Lieberman and the iShoe team are now testing a new version of the technology; one that can help the elderly by analyzing pressure distribution on their feet.

“If we flag the existence of the problem early, a doctor or physical therapist can come in and make a better determination of the causes,” says Lieberman, “We can detect all kinds of effects. If a patient closes their eyes, our insole will know.”

With more than 250,000 Americans breaking their hips each year during major falls and 1-in-4 dying within a year of their injury, the device would be a welcome help to doctors, patients, and their families. In fact, it was his grandmother’s death after a fall that first inspired Lieberman to apply the NASA technology to senior citizens.

In the future, Lieberman hopes that iShoe will be equipped with technology that would help correct a patient’s balance issue as it occurs. It could even sound an alert when a fall occurs.

“Eventually we hope to provide subtle auditory and vibrational cues which will help the person adjust their balance. These cues will help them stand up straight and walk around confidently,” Lieberman says.

The iShoe team expects their product to be on the market with in two years.

– Julia Griffin, CNN Science & Technology

Okay, class, here are a few more summer-reading books you might want to check out.
Please bear with me; I’m a middle manager in a TV network — this is my best opportunity to prove to a large number of people that I can actually read. Sorry I didn’t include any links here — it’s probably inappropriate for us to favor one bookselling site over another. But if you’re interested, you can figure it out……..

We all have a nose, and know how to use it. The study of how we go about that, however, is not too sophisticated. What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert is a great book on an overlooked topic. Want to know how smell works? Where it played a big role in pop culture or history? How industries and marketers have co-opted and synthesized smells for their own purposes? How ’bout the chemical structure of those less pleasant smells we all encounter, or emit? Well, you should get a whiff of this book, then. Gilbert combines a scientist’s sense of wonder, a scent-making professional’s sensibility, and a slightly Beavis + Butt-Head -like fascination with aroma.

Charlatan, by Pope Brock: Dr. John R. Brinkley was seen as a savior of marriages and an author of modern medical marvels. For a fee, he helped countless men roar during the 1920’s — by installing a booster set of goat testicles in them. Many thought it restored virility, despite a total lack of evidence. Many didn’t survive the operation. Brock writes with a flair, describing the mood of heartland America back then, and recounting the work of Brinkley’s nemesis, master fraudbuster Morris Fishbein. It’s a great parable for how gullible we can be, told with a sense of irony that’s probably essential when your subject matter is swindling people through the use of goat testicles.

The Dumbest Generation Mark Bauerlein is an Emory University English professor and former researcher at the National Endowment for the Arts. He makes the case that video games, text messaging, cellphones, and all the trappings of 21st Century communication have turned our children into shallow morons with tiny attention spans. But Bauerlein falls well short of making a complete sale on this. He deftly uses stats and studies to track the inability of young folks to identify, for example, the three branches of government. He also does a good job of tracking how analytical skills have fallen by the wayside, since we have so many electronic devices to do our thinking for us. What’s missing are the benefits — both real and potential — of the wealth of information we have here in the Information Age: How it’s used, and how it could be leveraged better. Bauerlein points out the popularity of games that seem to have no moral compass whatsoever, like Grand Theft Auto, without acknowledging that many other games help with everything from motor skills to organizational skills.

Peter Dykstra Executive Producer, CNN Science, Tech & Weather

Reading fantastic fiction in the summer can be fun, but sometimes even more exciting stories come from truths about nature itself. Here are some books that will make you think in new ways and inspire those essential “You’re not going to believe this” moments at cocktail parties.

New for 2008

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel
by Michio Kaku

The word on nerdy streets is that this book is highly accessible look at all kinds of things that sound impossible, like time travel and teleportation.

Bang! The Complete History of the Universe
by Brian May, Patrick Moore, and Chris Lintott

Brian May acquired his fame so far as the founding guitarist of the band Queen, but now he’s got a Ph.D. in astrophysics. In this book, he and co-authors rock with the origins of the universe.

My Stroke of Insight
by Jill Bolte Taylor

Taylor, a brain scientist, details her battle with her brain, and the insights she gleaned from recovery from a stroke.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan

Calling all omnivores: You may think you’re heating healthily, but Pollan’s dissection of the American diet may surprise you.

Old favorites

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
by Douglas Hofstadter

This is one of those rare books that makes us think, “Wow, the world is so much more beautiful and complicated than I thought.” That is because Hofstadter interweaves concepts from mathematics, art, music, computer science, biology, and philosophy in amazing new ways. Though the book was published in 1979, the essential questions and insights he brings up about the nature of consciousness and the possibilities for artificial intelligence are still extremely relevant. Hofstadter has also written a follow-up book called I Am a Strange Loop.

The Hot Zone
by Richard Preston

There’s nothing like reading about the way ebola liquefies internal organs while you’re sipping lemonade on the beach. Preston isn’t afraid to get into the gory details of how a strain of this deadly virus came to the United States.

The Elegant Universe
by Brian Greene

Also the subject of a PBS special, this is a terrific introduction to the world of superstring theory. Basically, physicists in this camp speculate that miniscule vibrating loops called strings constitute the entire universe, and that they exist in 10 or more dimensions. Greene has since written Fabric of the Cosmos to touch on similar themes. These topics do get complicated, so be prepared to add terms like branes and Calabi-Yau manifolds to your vocabulary.

Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick

The death of meteorologist Edward Lorenz in April makes this classic book on chaos theory especially timely. Lorenz constructed weather models that led him to a concept known as the butterfly effect. This relates to those pretty pictures called fractals. Soon you’ll be singing the Mandelbrot Set song.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

Known for being nutritious, sweet, cheap and readily available, bananas are definitely popular. But did you know that in five to ten years banana experts say this tasty fruit could disappear?

Source: Getty Images

Well, not all bananas of course, but the variety we eat called the Cavendish. A malady named Panama Disease, threatens to wipe this variety from fruit stands and cereal bowls around the world. One problem is that every Cavendish banana we buy at the grocery store is a clone from the first one found in Southeast Asia and brought to the Americas in the early 20th century.

It’s a seedless banana that can only grow from another of its kind, and even though it was once resistant to Panama Disease, a fungus that affects the leaves, it mutated over time leaving the Cavendish vulnerable to the new strain.

Our grandparents ate a different kind of banana called Gros Michel, one that became extinct due to Panama Disease. The Cavendish replaced it, and even though many people found the Gros Michel a superior banana in taste and texture, this new variety quickly became the most popular fruit in the United States, surpassing apples.

The fungus that is currently affecting Cavendish crops in Asia could eventually hit banana crops in Central and South America. In the meantime, researchers are busy trying to find a replacement for the Cavendish because they say it’s only a matter of time before the world’s perfect food is gone for good.

–Paulo Nogueira, Producer, CNN Science & Technology

A Meeting of Skeptics

Check out the Anderson Cooper 360 show tonight for Miles O’Brien’s report on the Heartland Institute’s 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. Judging just from the title, the meeting sounds official, maybe even boring…but it is in fact one of the largest gatherings of the year for global warming skeptics, doubters and dissenters.

Conference organizers bill it as the “first major international conference to focus on issues and questions not answered by advocates of the theory of man-made global warming.”

And they go on to say:

“The global warming debate that the public and policymakers usually see is one-sided, dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research, but often to achieve political agendas entirely unrelated to the science of climate change. There is another side, but in recent years it has been denied a platform from which to speak.”

They’ll get a platform tonight…but expect Miles to ask some tough questions…about the Heartland Institute’s ties to the oil and gas industry, about the overwhelming scientific consensus supporting the human link to climate change expressed last year by the blue ribbon Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and about just who in this debate might be trying to advance an agenda.

Heartland raised some eyebrows by offering “fellowships” to cover travel and lodging costs for legislators attending the conference. The conference literature says that no energy company funds are paying for the conference, but the list of sponsoring organizations include many groups who receive direct support from Exxon/Mobil and other oil and coal entities.

The conference agenda includes several credentialed scientists, and a few who are members of the IPCC. Those few are in the ironic, if not uncomfortable position of sharing a slice of the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore – who to many at this conference is the arch-villain of climate change. Others are political advocates from groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute. And the political opposites of those groups are keeping their powder dry. Desmogblog.com, a website which describes itself as unmasking the motives of global warming skeptics, has labeled the conference a “Denial-a-palooza.”

–Kate Tobin and Peter Dykstra, CNN Science & Technology

One of the stories in tonight’s “Broken Government: Scorched Earth” special tells the tale of Gretchen Cook-Anderson, a NASA public affairs officer who says her job publicizing the agency’s research into global warming put her on a collision course with political appointees at the top of NASA’s communications office.

Initially excited about working the global warming beat, Gretchen said she soon found herself in the hot seat as her bosses pushed her harder and harder to soft-pedal or even squelch any news suggesting climate change has a human cause.

She says she was even ordered to telephone NASA’s leading climate researcher, Dr. James Hansen, and tell him to stop talking to the media altogether except on agency vetted, approved and supervised occasions. And when she resisted, she found her career prospects swirling down the drain.

Gretchen’s story is compelling. It seems to illustrates a disturbing trend where by government bureaucrats are seemingly manipulating scientific findings to serve a political agenda, rather than the truth.

Reporter Miles O’Brien and I want to give full credit to Mark Bowen, who first told Gretchen’s story in his book “Censoring Science,” and to Andrew Revkin, the New York Times correspondent who first reported the political machinations going on at the NASA Headquarters Public Affairs Office.

Revkin told us that after his story ran, it was like a cork popping out of fizzy bottle.

“I started getting all these e-mails from Yahoo accounts and NASA people across the country, from Goddard Space Flight Center down in near Washington and from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory — with actually worse stories, in some ways. There was a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’d had a press release rewritten with a quotation inserted to divert it from being about climate to being about space exploration — that he had never approved, but it was in his words. That was pretty bad. And things like that were happening, and and as I dug in deeper this story kind of got some legs. “

Bowen has a PhD in physics from MIT, and comes at his his subject matter as a scientist and interested citizen — and he didn’t hold back in expressing his outrage to us at what he sees as a political agenda at work:

“It is very clear a destructive policy toward global warming has been pursued by this administration since the beginning…and they bent facts, or reality, or whatever you want to call it, to fit what was really and ideological goal. And it seems as though it was a financial goal. So I don’t think an administration has a right to do that, I think it was betraying democracy.”

–Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

Watch “Broken Government: Scorched Earth” on Thursday, February 21, at 11 p.m. ET, immediately following the CNN Debate live in Austin, Texas.

Some scientists need a makeover. Or maybe just better publicists.

Geeky. Nerdy. White coats. Coke bottle glasses.

Not so, says John Bohannon, Science Magazine contributing correspondent, a.k.a. “The Gonzo
Scientist.” Bohannon created the first-ever “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest.

“Interpret your Ph. D. thesis in dance form, using no words or images,” stated the rules.
“Scientists get a bad rap, mostly because of clothing issues,” said Bohannon, a molecular biologist turned journalist.

A shimmering loincloth could change attitudes in a flash. And that’s what archaeologist Brian Stewart, the winning entrant wore, wowing the judges with his emotional connection to the audience.

Stewart’s thesis: “Refitting repasts: a spatial exploration of food processing, sharing, cooking and disposal at the Dunefield Midden campsite, South Africa.”

And he managed to convey his five years of research and field study into a one -minute romp on the dance floor.

So how DO scientists dance?

“There’s some awkwardness and some magic, sort of like at a wedding,” said Bohannon.

Among the dozen contestants competing in Vienna, there was tap dancing, break dancing, and a group disco number. Bohannon says the analytical work of science can be all- consuming, and this was a chance for students, post-docs, and professors to cut loose.

Next year’s contest is likely to be a YouTube event, so quantum physicists, anthropologists, mathematicians—scientists from anywhere in the world can dance their hearts out.

“If people, especially Americans knew how much fun science was, they wouldn’t shy away,” said Bohannon.

Have a look at all 12 of the videos here.

– Marsha Walton, science and tech