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But NASA will be sending a spacecraft into the Sun’s atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch sometime before 2018.

Four million miles doesn’t sound very close, but it’s still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered. NASA plans for the project to “unlock the sun’s biggest mysteries.”

Although the spacecraft will be relatively far from our star’s surface, its carbon-composite heat shield will have to withstand intense radiation, as well as temperatures exceeding 2,550 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics — why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system?” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in Washington.

“We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers,” said Fisher.

Images courtesy of NASA

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Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly . Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.

Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.

Beyond its usefulness, Pillbox is a public health platform that was created in a unique way — by utilizing open source data. Here are four ways the NIH approached this endeavor using the open and social web.

1. Connecting Open Data to Civic Hackers

Pillbox is a “collection of projects focused on a single goal: improving the health of citizens,” said Hale. That goal could be realized through social gaming mechanics, an area that’s familiar to Foursquare users and FarmVille players. “There’s a Facebook game in development based on the Pillbox API,” he said. After Hale attended Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon last December, a developer took him to a D.C. Ruby users meeting. There, the civic hacking community got excited about using Pilllbox data in a game.

To move the game forward, the developers had to build a search interface in Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for Pillbox. “When they’re done, they’ll give the code for the pill ID interface to NLM,” said Hale. The game isn’t live yet, but Hale hopes to see an iteration online by the end of the year. As of the last build of the game, messages are scrambled between players “to protect privacy.” These messages come with a pill image. Players then have to use the Pillbox ID system to identify pills and unscramble message.

2. Sharing Code on GitHub

“When these developers were building [Pillbox], they found it didn’t have any wrappers for the API,” said Hale. “So they wrote them in Ruby, open sourced them and shared them in a Pillbox space on Github, an online open source code sharing community. Now the wrappers are there for anyone to use.”

Subsequently, a Python developer who was at the meeting working on another project at the Hackathon, took it as a challenge to do it in fewer lines of code, said Hale. He also created Python wrappers for Pillbox and posted them.

“That’s the power of open data, ‘coopetition’ and social media,” said Hale. “Consider the development of hundreds of lines of code, Ruby and Python wrappers, and that interface. How much would it have taken to do this otherwise?”

3. Connecting Washington to Innovation

Hale has used social media extensively to collaborate with clinical staff, patients, and developers, empowering and enabling communities to solve health challenges. In particular, Hale is active on Twitter as @LostOnRoute66, where he tweets about patient safety, biomedical informatics, social media strategy, user experience, music, and food. “Social media was the key channel. It was through Twitter that we maintained these relationships and built new ones.”

One of the challenges for the government research community in Washington can be its distance from the technology communities in Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas and Seattle. “Pillbox was built outside with the community,” says Hale. That’s an important shift from the way traditional projects have been approached. “Due to [conferences like] HealthCamp and to connecting in the Valley, we saw a different way of approaching the issue,” said Hale.

Initially, there were just giant institutions called Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies taking pictures of the pills, said Hale. “We realized it wasn’t just the images — it was the data behind them, and access to that data. When I talked with the community in the Valley, I realized there was more that was possible. We’re not just putting up pictures of pills, we’re putting up a platform, and thereby changing the ways that people work with government. It’s the information that’s important, not the website. It’s about understanding the power of adding an open API to your data.”

Additionally, an increasing number of government agencies and civil service workers are using SlideShare to disseminate presentations. Hale is no exception. His presentation on Pillbox from January 2010 is embedded above.

4. Call for Participation Using the Federal Register 2.0

This summer, a team of developers and designers relaunched the FederalRegister.gov, the online presence for the legal newspaper of United States. The Federal Register 2.0 is one of the better recent examples of open government, as it makes the often arcane business of government more transparent and understandable to citizens. Hale says that the NIH will be posting a “Call for Participation” where they ask pharmaceutical companies to send them samples of their tablets and capsules.

If the public-private relationship bears fruit, they’ll take high quality pictures based upon Pillbox’s process, send the images back to the pharmaceutical companies and, if approved, put them into Pillbox. Those images could then be sent to the FDA, where they coud get included on a label.

“That would enable images of drugs based upon a single body of standards, which could then enable identification through smartphones,” said Hale. “The secret sauce isn’t the images when this is done but the background processing. We’re creating tools and services which make open data available to everyone, accessible, and in the public domain.”

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Open Data Apps That Are Improving Our Cities
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
- How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
- How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change
- 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Anykeen

More About: david hale, federal register, github, hackathon, national institutes of health, national library of medicine, nih, NLM, open data, pillbox, Python, Ruby on Rails, slideshare, sunlight labs

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Infographics at their best are more than just pictures — they can provide new understandings, succinct summaries, or just plain old fun.

In that respect, reading newspaper archives isn’t the only way to get a deeper understanding of current events. Infographics can help us get a better grasp on what’s going on.

Check out these 10 visualizations to learn more about the news with a quick look.

1. Google’s Appetite for Acquisition

Last month alone, Google acquired social-search service Angstro, visual shopping search engine like.com, and social currency company Jambool. Google has been on an acquisition binge for some time, and it’s getting tricky to keep track of its appetite.

This graphic shows a timeline of Google’s activity in three categories: “Building Revenue Streams,” “Cutting Competition,” or “A Little of Both.”

2. Gay Marriage Chronology

The campaign for gay marriage has passed a multitude of milestones over the last decade. Unfortunately for those trying to keep track of them, the victories and setbacks vary drastically by state. Decisions are reversed and in some cases overturned by higher courts, which makes progress hard to track.

This map from the LA Times shows the status of gay marriage in each state by month. Click on a state for its most recent ruling or watch the country change from being legally similar in its treatment of same-sex couples in 2000 to sharply divided in 2010.

3. IED Attacks from Wikileaks’ Afghanistan War Logs

The frequency and fatality of IEDs (homemade bombs) in Afghanistan was highlighted when WikiLeaks published more than 90,000 secret documents about the Afghan war. Anti-war activists published this illustrative video that includes all of the incidents reported in these leaked documents.

4. Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

On April 20, an explosion on a BP drilling rig started what has become the largest accidental oil spill in history. Despite numerous strategies that were deployed to plug the leak, it wasn’t capped until July 15.

This video graphic by New Orleans online newspaper NOLA wraps timeline, graphic, and cumulative damage data into one easy-to-digest piece of media.

5. CIA World Factbook Dashboard

The CIA World Factbook has always been a great resource for putting news stories into the context of their geographic location. But now it’s also easy to get the information at a glance.

The World Factbook Dashboard allows you to color code the countries of the world by population, population growth, infant mortality, agricultural GDP, industry GDP, services GDP, total GDP, GDP/inhabitant, or inflation. Clicking on a country zooms in for more information.

6. Geography of a Recession

This map from The New York Times illustrates not only which areas suffered the highest unemployment rate after the recession, but also offers the option to filter data by metropolitan areas, areas with housing bubbles, rural areas, and manufacturing centers.

7. Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Violence Map

The Wall Street Journal updates this map constantly with violent conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to learn about the day-to-day details of the war or understand its scope, there’s no better visual resource.

8. What Does the Health Care Bill Mean to Me?

Even if you read through every health care bill article, it could be hard to exactly pick out what the law would change about your insurance coverage and taxes. The Washington Post made it easy by providing this nifty tool. Input whether you have insurance coverage, your family size, your income, and your marital status, and it will tell you how health care reform will impact your life.

For the broader picture on healthcare reform, see this subway-style map from GOOD Magazine.

9. Obama’s 7 Billion Economic Stimulus Plan

The government is still busy spending much of the 7 billion it allotted for the economic stimulus in February of last year. This infographic effectively illustrates how that huge chunk of change is being distributed.

10. American Casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Beyond

This chilling interactive graphic from USA Today simply illustrates the deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Information seekers can search deaths by personal factors like name, age, gender, race, or home town as well as by military service details, date, cause, or place.

CNN has a more elaborate version here.

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- 5 Fab Twitter Follower Visualization Tools
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- 12 Beginner Tutorials for Getting Started With Photoshop

More About: afghanistan, bp, current events, gay rights, graphics, healthcare reform, infographics, iraq, News, oil-spill, stimulus, visualizations, wikileaks

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The FCC’s seven-page public notice [PDF] tackles two of the key proposals from the Google-Verizon framework: “Specialized Services” and net neutrality/open Internet principles for the mobile wireless Internet. The Google-Verizon proposal has received heavy criticism for excluding wireless Internet from many net neutrality regulations.

“There are two complex issues, however, that merit further inquiry,” reads the report. “The first is the relationship between open Internet protections and services that are provided over the same last-mile facilities as broadband Internet access service. The second is the application of open Internet rules to mobile wireless Internet access services, which have unique characteristics related to technology, associated application and device markets, and consumer usage.”

The FCC has already said that it doesn’t agree with all of the points of the Google-Verizon proposal, and this public notice carries that tone. The FCC’s concern with specialized services seems to be that open Internet protections could be weakened if broadband providers use specialized services to circumvent the rules that apply to broadband Internet access.

On the wireless front, the FCC “seeks comment on ‘how, to what extent, and when’ openness principles should apply to mobile wireless platforms, with a particular emphasis on furthering innovation, private investment, competition and freedom of expression.” In other words, the FCC wants it to make the rules of wireless net neutrality very clear so companies like Google and Verizon don’t use ambiguity to their advantage.

The FCC is giving interested parties a 30-day window for filing comments and a 55-day window for reply comments. This is probably only the beginning; the important issue of net neutrality isn’t going to be resolved anytime soon.

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The cards will soon make their way to two or three additional national retailers, according to USA Today.

Facebook Credits is a virtual currency redeemable for primarily in-game Facebook purchases. In Farmville, for instance, gamers can use Facebook Credits as a currency, in lieu of credit cards, to purchase additional items for their farms. 7-11 also sells gift cards specifically for FarmVille.

Facebook Credits gift cards package the virtual currency in consumer-friendly entities, which Facebook hopes will appeal to holiday shoppers. The gift cards are visually no different than the variety sold in stores today, and were produced by GMG Entertainment, the same company that makes Apple’s iTunes cards.

Social gaming is a relatively new industry with huge potential. More than 56 million Americans are now playing social games. By 2013, annual sales from virtual goods are expected to reach billion. Facebook’s foray into brick-and-mortar retail stores is a significant move that will help the company capitalize on social gaming.

Facebook also has a deal in place with MOL, an online micropayment company, to sell Facebook Credits at retail stores in Asia and Australia.

Image courtesy of USA Today

More About: facebook, facebook credits, gift cards, MARKETING, Target

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In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines like Google. Your business can’t skip the task.

Since most would-be readers use search engines to find blog posts, you need to make sure that Google ranks your site highly when those readers search for terms related to your business and the content you’re writing.

You could spend thousands of dollars to have a search marketing firm optimize your business’s blog for search engines, but chances are that you can learn a lot of the fundamentals yourself, saving yourself a lot of money as long as you have the interest and the time. Here’s a basic primer on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your company’s blog.

1. Always Include Search Terms in Your Post’s Title

When Google reads a website to index it, it reads the code directly, not the snazzy presentation that humans see. The way most blogging platforms are built, the headline or title of your blog post is among the first things Google sees, and Google generally assumes the words that appear earliest are the most important. That’s why the title is the most important part of your blog post when it comes to SEO.

Think about who you want to reach with this blog post, and what that person might be searching for when looking for your business’s goods or services, then include critical words from that hypothetical search in the title. The most important terms should appear as quickly as you can reasonably fit them in. Just be careful not to make the title unreadable or awkward to human readers — that SEO effort will have been for naught if the reader is immediately turned off by the content once he or she finds it.

Here’s a pro tip: You’re not likely to win strong ranking for more than one or two search terms at once, so minimalism is a virtue here. Don’t get over-ambitious. Focus on one potential search term, then if you want to rank for a second term, write a separate and unique post specifically with it in mind.

2. Link Important Words to Earlier Blog Posts

Search engines generally assume that a blog post that has been linked to has more authority than one that has not. They also consider exactly what word or phrase linked to the post; a blog post about the iPhone is going to be more likely to show up in Google searches on the subject if another page links the word “iPhone” to the post.

You’ll get the most value from external links from sites that Google or other search engines already consider to be an authority of the subject (if the top blog about iPhones links the word to your post, you’ll get a huge boost), but all incoming links will still pass rank to your page, even those from elsewhere on your site.

So be sure and link important keywords to other pages or previous posts on your blog to gain some credibility and search rank. It will make a big difference. Just don’t overdo it; not only do human readers hate reading blogs so filled with links that they might accidentally click on something, Google may penalize you if you go overboard, too.

3. Hit the Tagging Sweet Spot

Most blogging platforms let you apply tags to your posts. Tags help organize your blog so both humans and search engines can find what they’re looking for. They’re terms like “consulting,” “local” or “technology” that reflect the topics and content of the post.

Google tries to recognize tags and use them to prioritize your site in its search ranking for those terms. The tags are usually links to other pages on your blog (usually a backlog of other posts with the same tag), and like we said earlier, linking search terms to other pages on your site helps too.

So by all means, add pertinent tags to your blog post, but be warned that Google and other search engines are wary of sites that try to game this system. They will penalize you in the search rankings if you use so many tags that the web indexing bots suspect you might be attempting to associate your content with unrelated topics just to score extra traffic.

The method for determining this is arcane, but a good rule of thumb from a pro blogger is that five to 10 appropriate tags are usually right in the sweet spot.

4. Use Google Insights to Find the Best Search Terms

You don’t have to play a guessing game about the best tags or search terms to link or put in your post’s title. Since Google is the most popular search engine, it makes sense to focus your efforts there. Whenever you’re not sure which terms to go with, hit up Google Insights, a web-based tool that compares the popularity of any search terms you want to know about.

For example, if your business is a coffee shop but you’re not sure whether would-be customers are more likely to search for “café” or “coffee shop,” Insights can tell you which one is more popular.

These four tips should get you on your way to having a more SEO-friendly corporate blog. Add your tips for search engine optimization in the comments below.

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Image courtesy of iStockphoto, MacXever

More About: blog, blogging, business, corporate blog, how to, List, Lists, search engine, search engine optimization, search engines, SEO, small business, smb, tips

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[youtube XMxuocCN1O0]

YouTube's "Life in a Day" project is an ambitious filmmaking exercise in which thousands of people around the world document their lives, and some film industry veterans cut, chop, and paste all that footage into a coherent documentary. It's a monumental challenge, but the names attached--most importantly Ridley Scott, serving as executive producer, and Kevin MacDonald (director of The Last King of Scotland, not the similarly named member of Kids in the Hall)--provide some reassurance that maybe, just maybe, the film won't suck.

The footage, all of which was shot on Saturday, July 24th, comes from 197 countries and is in 45 languages, and totals over 80,000 separate videos. And today, you can get a feel for the huge task in front of Scott and MacDonald, because Google just put all the videos online.

LG is also aboard as a partner, curating a separate section called "Smile" that highlights "positive and inspiring" videos. It's cheesy, as is LG's official statement (which is little more than the repetition of the company's slogan, with a few filler words for syntax), but it's not a bad idea. In fact, Google allows the filtering of videos by mood, including "thoughtful," "depressed," "excited," and "lonely," so you can exclusively watch videos of lonely people, if that's your weird thing.

The film itself is being constructed now, and will premiere simultaneously at Sundance and on YouTube in January 2011.

Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it via email, and stalked in Brooklyn (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heading for a new battleground: social media. In preparation for the long-awaited peace talks between Israel and Palestine beginning this Thursday in Washington, both sides are bringing the network effect to diplomacy.

In recent days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened up accounts on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube, reports the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF). According to a statement released by the PM's office, "Netanyahu has directed that these media be used during his upcoming trip to Washington in order to pass along updates and current information." And Netanyahu himself said, "Today, social media channels are more vital than ever for Israel's public diplomacy efforts, for administrative transparency and for providing citizens with updated information."

Palestine, too, plans to use online tools for the upcoming Mideast talks. According to Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Abed A-Nassar, chair of the Association of Palestinian Journalists, has called on Palestinian institutions to work toward adding a more pro-Palestinian voice to related Wikipedia pages. A-Nassar's comments followed the Israeli Yesha Council decision to provide workshops in the "Zionist editing" of Wikipedia entries.

The report points out that this isn't the first time Israel and Palestine have turned to social media to sway public perception. In May, Israel used Twitter and YouTube to argue its case following the raid of Gaza flotilla.

More and more nations are taking advantage of social media, which is increasingly becoming a tool to influence public opinion--or just polarize debate even further. The United States and North Korea, for example, have albeit indirect talks online, in what's becoming known as Twitter diplomacy.

Tonight, U.S. President Barack Obama is slated to address America from the Oval Office via a live stream on YouTube, a speech during which he is expected to announce the end of the U.S. combat role in Iraq.

Before you check out the live stream tonight at 8 p.m. EST, YouTube is offering you the opportunity to ask the White House follow-up questions via its Moderator function. The speech will also be stored on YouTube’s CitizenTube, should you happen to miss it tonight. Check out the above video from the YouTube Blog for more info.

This isn’t the first time a speech has been streamed live from the Oval Office. A few months ago, President Obama spoke to the American public with regard to the Gulf oil spill. YouTube also allowed viewers to submit questions to the president during the State of the Union Address, which he later answered on the video-sharing site.

As more and more of these events occur online, one can only imagine the historical archive that YouTube will amass.

More About: obama, Political, video, youtube

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Car-share clubs are nothing new, but WhipCar isn't a car club. Rather, it's a peer-to-peer carhire scheme that launched in the U.K. four months ago and now has over 600 vehicles at its disposal. Relationships are formed between lender and lessee to the point where bottles of champagne are given as thank-yous.

It's a canny idea that, as Vinay Gupta explained to me, came about when he and co-founder Tom Wright were "captivated by excess capacity." They looked at the idea of car sharing and worked out how to take it one step further. "We'd go onto the streets, a little cobbled street in London," Gupta says, "and realize there were probably ten too many cars there, and we [worked out how to] address the problem."

The hurdles--or handbrakes, as Gupta calls them--were many, with the thorny problem of insurance being the key hurdle to overcome. "If you're going to hand over your car to someone regardless of the prospect of making money out of that asset, accidents happen, and you need to be covered." Nine months' work with Lloyd's of London, the legendary insurance company, created the first insurance policy in the world that dynamically protects owner and driver when the booking is placed.

The firm's website is obviously key to their success, as the entire service is Internet-based (with a little help from SMS messages if needed). "We designed the site in such a way that we accept payments so people don't need to worry about that hassle when they collect the cars. We've created a booking platform so that owners can adjust their availability as they see fit, we've created a clever algorithm called Rental Price Guidance that tells you when you enter your registration plate and your postcode who much your car can earn in your neighborhood, based on the kind of car it is, how old it is, and supply and demand in the neighborhood. At that point you can take our guidance price and adjust it as you see fit."

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If you think that, at the end of the first week, WhipCar had just 30 vehicles, and now boasts 600, and that's via word of mouth and a basic street marketing campaign, it's not a bad total. The firm, which operates out of London's West End, is expecting to take six months to get to the number of vehicles that the U.K.'s "leading car club" (for that, I would read Streetcar, a subsidiary of Zipcar) took six years to attain.

The cars are also available in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Coventry and Edinburgh, but it's in the rural areas where WhipCar can really clean up, unlike the car clubs. "The issue with the traditional car club model is that it starts to break down in less populated areas because of the overheads--maintenance and securing the fleet, and there's a problem with access. They're free midweek, but never at weekends. They have those kinds of challenge. This is highly scaleable because, whereas it doesn't make sense for a rental firm to be in a small village in Wales, we've already got a car there."

But getting the word out in rural areas is more difficult than in cities. Gupta, however, leaves a lot of the marketing to the owners. "We look at our owners as Avon Ladies. We give them the tools to help them market their vehicles, everything from personalized business cards to posters and flyers that they can put up in their local supermarket or coffee shop. We give them personalized URLs to market themselves on the web, and we've got social tools in development as well." At the moment, it's left to the individuals to market their cars via Facebook or Twitter, although they are in the throes of launching an active campaign. They've also delivered a voucher code that allows owners the opportunity to give discount vouchers to valued customers.

So what about launching abroad? I have a theory that WhipCar is totally suited to the U.K. market--Brits are pretty laid-back about their possessions, and wouldn't be that bothered about the odd scratch on the bodywork, or latte spillage or dog hair in the interior. Would the service go down well in the U.S., which is by nature more litigious? Driving in Continental Europe--as a former resident of both France and Spain, I have first-hand knowledge--is more Lewis Hamilton than Lewis Hamilton's home country.

Gupta laughs. "It's a fair point. With a service like this, it's not a case of one size fits all. Right now, we don't want to take our eye off the ball in the U.K., but we have our eye on other places. As for the U.S., the best way to answer that is, well, the service is designed to keep owners in control. You're not forced to take any booking even if you're on the service, and you can see the person's profile and ask questions before agreeing. It's neighbor renting to neighbor." I think that any expansion in any country will require an assessment of pros and cons. We're looking at what would be the most successful place..."

Sweden, I suggest.

"Yes, the Nordics have a great tradition of car sharing." And a better quality of excuse should some mishap befall the driver. "I'm sorry, but a moose ran into me."