Last night, founders of nine nascent companies stood up in front of their peers, a handful of journalists, and dozens of venture capitalists and other potential investors in what is a tri-annual coming out party for the entrepreneurs of StartX. I’ve been meaning to check in on this startup incubator for a while, and I’ll definitely be watching it in the future, because while not all of the nine startups in this season’s class are going to rock the tech world, a few just might.

A little bit about StartX. This nonprofit company, itself started by Stanford graduates, selects startups founded by Stanford students, graduates, and faculty and provides free office space, legal services, mentoring, and even stipends for about three months. Running year round since the summer of 2010, last night’s presenters represented the company’s fifth “class.” The program gets hundreds of applications, and, of the 32 companies in its first four classes, 27 have attracted funding to date, not a bad track record.

At last night's “graduation” of the Fall 2011 StartX class, two technology-based efforts stood out.

The buzzworthiest was also the most secretive: Bell Biosystems, a company founded by Caleb B. Bell III, who received his PhD in biophysical chemistry from Stanford last year. The company set out to figure out a way to create a remotely detectable tag for animal cells used in cell therapy research and have that tag replicate when the cells divide. A board member told me that most people thought it would be simply impossible to create such a tag that could replicate, but Bell Biosystems figured it out in months, much faster than even the company founder expected. Bell Biosystems’ cell lines incorporate magnetic components within each cell that replicate with the cell. When these cells are injected into research animals—or, eventually, patients—they can be easily tracked from outside the body and potentially steered or, if the cell therapy goes awry, destroyed without harming other cells. I can’t show you the video; Bell asked that cameras be turned off during his presentation and any information beyond the printed information distributed to the press be embargoed.  (He actually said little more than was in the press materials, though he did say what he’s calling these magnetized cells. I didn’t agree to honor the embargo, but I’ll respect his request and won’t give away the secret name here. However, if you guess it in the comments below I will tell you if you’re right.)

Also hot: Vi Energy, a company working to develop a new battery technology. Twin sisters Meghali Chopra and Sonali Chopra (left) graduated last spring with chemical engineering degrees and started their company the day after graduation, using their savings from summer and school year jobs and some help from family members to set up a small laboratory. They have been focusing on developing cathode material using what they say are low-cost, high energy density technologies that have been overlooked by the broader industry. They say prototypes they’ve already developed last longer than today’s lithium ion batteries. The twins don’t lack confidence, telling the audience “We believe our cathode material will take over all lithium ion applications.” Sitting next to me during Vi Energy's presentation, David Hornik, a partner at August Capital, commented, “If they can make a battery last just a minute longer, it’s huge,” before he made his way over to talk to Vi Energy's founders. You can see the Chopras’ presentation in the video below.

Also presenting were Mindsumo, a combination of crowdsourcing problem solver and recruitment tool; Agetak, a secure data aggregator for the medical industry; Zoku, a tool for sorting social data to make networking more efficient; Breakthrough, a company with tools for remote counseling and psychiatry via video; Tiptop Med, a way for consumers to search for medical providers based on pricing of services; Smit’s Crew, an application to connect bars to customers; and Medigram, secure group messaging for hospitals. I won’t go into detail here; I’ve linked each (except Medigram, which also asked for media silence) to a video of its presentation. But watching these young entrepreneurs take the stage one after another did paint a picture of a few trends:

• The healthcare industry is ripe for innovation. Yes, this may be stating the obvious, but it’s a reminder that healthcare is where many of today’s problems are, so it’s where entrepreneurs are going. We are going to see a lot of attempts at new technology that attempt to make healthcare better, cheaper, and more efficient—and some of these may actually work. That’s pretty exciting.

• Social networking, for the most active users, is at a tipping point—or I could say breaking point. Besides Zoku on the stage, a company called Qwhisper from a previous StartX class demonstrated its technology on the side of the room; both companies have recognized that we’ve got so much information coming in from Facebook and Twitter that we’re having a really hard time extracting what we want or need to know from the constant stream, and we need tools to help. I’m not sure Zoku and Qwhisper are the perfect tools, but they are recognizing a new problem and are trying to solve it.

• Not everyone is looking to change the world. Incremental and sometimes silly innovations are worth at least a month or two of effort, because you never know, it could catch on. Smit's Crew admitted it put just about that much time into developing its technology. How to describe it? Well, in the viral video “$&*% Silicon Valley Says” these kinds of incremental concepts are described by analogy, for example, “It’s like AirBnb for Facebook games” and “It’s like Pandora for cats.” So, in that spirit, I’ll describe Smit’s Crew as “It’s like Groupon plus FourSquare plus Meetup for bars in Palo Alto.” (Of course, to quote the "Valley Says" video again, "Who has a party in Palo Alto?" Perhaps not Stanford students, they're too busy starting companies.)
 

A cancer research institute at the University of Pennsylvania has sued its former director, now the president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, claiming that he “chose to abscond” with groundbreaking research and used it to start a biotechnology company. That company, Agios Pharmaceuticals based in Cambridge, Mass., is developing a potentially new way to treat cancer and has raised about US $260 million, according to the New York Times.

Craig Thompson, the researcher in the middle of the billion-dollar suit, denies the charge. But the case highlights a couple crucial questions: who owns research ideas? And would this be an issue if those ideas didn’t lead to a product, a company in this case, that was valued at millions?

Thompson joined the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at UPenn in 1999 as its scientific director. In 2006, he became director of the Abramson Cancer Center, of which the Institute is a part. He joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 2010.

While at the Institute, he worked on cancer metabolism, studying metabolic enzymes that play a role in the formation and progression of tumors. The lawsuit claims that Thompson took this intellectual property, funded by the Institute, to Agios, which he co-founded in 2007. Further, it says that he hid his role in starting Agios.

The complication here is that there is no patent involved that the Institute can claim to own. The lawsuit might hinge on the critical question of whether Thompson gave away patented information to Agios or merely ideas. The Institute does not cite any specific patents in its lawsuit. And, as per the New York Times, Lewis Cantley, another Agios co-founder and director of the cancer center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, says that the company was not pursuing technology from Thompson’s former laboratory.

Finally, this from a WNYC news post:

Arti Rai [who teaches intellectual property at Duke University] said university research scientists – unlike their industrial counterparts – often move from place to place and take their knowledge with them with impunity. But it depends on the perceived financial value of their research.

“In cases of pre-patentable know-how, where there isn’t money involved, and it’s just the researcher’s brain going from Lab A to Lab B, there wouldn’t be a lawsuit, because there isn’t money to be gained, “ Rai said. “Here, there’s a startup company that’s signed a lucrative deal. Evidently, the cancer institute thought there was enough money to be made in the not-too-distant future [to sue].”

Illustration: Mick Wiggins

Hi, I'm Scott Aaronson. I study quantum computing at MIT. Recently, on my blog, I offered a $100 000 reward for a demonstration, convincing to me, that scalable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world. The award is entirely at my discretion; I might also choose to give smaller awards for "partial" falsifications of scalable quantum computing. Rachel Courtland of IEEE Spectrum asked me to comment on why I made such an offer; in particular, she wanted to know "why it's even an open question whether quantum computing is scalable." She adds: "I think a lot of non-experts assume that it's just a question of investment, time, and technological innovation."

Personally, I think that those non-experts are completely right: it is just a question of investment, time, and innovation! Indeed, that's the only reason I felt emboldened to make this offer. While I could scrounge together $100 000 if necessary, it certainly wouldn't be easy on a professor's salary.

The context for my offer is that, for decades, a small but vocal minority of computer scientists and physicists has held that building a scalable quantum computer is impossible: not just really, really hard (which everyone agrees about), not just "impossible for the next thousand years" (how would anyone know?), but impossible even in principle, in the same sense that perpetual-motion machines or faster-than-light travel are impossible in principle. A few of the skeptics seem rather angry, and express the view that quantum computing researchers are some sort of powerful cabal bent on suppressing dissent.

Tiny quantum computations have already been demonstrated in the lab – for example, 15 has been factored into 3×5 – so the question is whether quantum computers can be "scaled up" to bigger sizes capable of solving more interesting problems. The central problem is decoherence, meaning unwanted interactions between the computer and its external environment, which prematurely "measure" the computer and destroy its fragile quantum state. The more complicated the quantum computation, the worse a problem decoherence can become. So for the past fifteen years, the hope for building scalable quantum computers has rested with a mathematically-elegant theory called "quantum fault-tolerance," which shows how, if decoherence can be kept below a certain critical level, clever error-correction techniques can be used to render its remaining effects insignificant.

Not surprisingly, most quantum computing skeptics – among the ones who offer physical arguments at all! – focus on trying to poke holes in particular methods for quantum fault-tolerance. Some of their criticisms are interesting and might lead to good science. The problem, from my perspective, is that so far the skeptics' case has been entirely negative: none of them are able even to hint at an alternative picture of physical reality, which would explain from basic principles why no form of fault-tolerance can work, and why quantum computing isn’t possible.

Most of the skeptics say that they have no problem with quantum mechanics itself (it is, after all, the best-confirmed physical theory of all time); it's only scalable quantum computers that they object to.  To date, though, no one really knows how you can have quantum mechanics without the possibility of quantum fault-tolerance. So as I see it, the burden falls on the skeptics to give an alternative account of what's going on that would predict the impossibility of scalable QC.

An even more dramatic way to put the point is this: if quantum computing is really impossible, then we ought to be able to turn that fact on its head. Suppose you believe that nothing done by “realistic” quantum systems (the ones found in Nature) can possibly be used to outperform today’s classical computers. Then by using today’s classical computers, why can’t we easily simulate the quantum systems found in Nature? What is the fast classical algorithm for simulating those quantum systems? How does it work? Like a wily defense attorney, the skeptics don't even try to address such questions; their only interest is in casting doubt on the prosecution's case.

The reason I made my $100 000 bet was to draw attention to the case that quantum computing skeptics have yet to offer. If quantum computing really does turn out to be impossible for some fundamental reason, then once I get over the shock to my personal finances, I'll be absolutely thrilled. Indeed, I'll want to participate myself in one of the greatest revolutions in physics of all time, a revolution that finally overturns almost a century of understanding of quantum mechanics. And whoever initiates that revolution will certainly deserve my money.

But what I know for sure is that quantum computing isn't impossible for some trivial reason that’s simply been overlooked for 20 years by a very large group of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. And I hope putting my money where my mouth is will help more people realize that.

When my family gathers with friends to watch the Super Bowl, this year I’ll be bringing the chili, cornbread, and onion dip.

And when broadcasters gather to beam the Super Bowl to a hundred million viewers, this year a company called SMT, formerly SportsMedia Technologies, will be bringing the yellow line.

But I can't take credit for my chili recipe (though I have to say my additions of beer and cocoa powder are a really nice touch), and SMT can't take credit for the yellow line; that technology was first created by Sportvision Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. Sportvision introduced the yellow line to TV viewers in 1998; it got the Emmy in 2000. To viewers, it seemed like magic—many thought that somehow chalk was being applied to the field and quickly vacuumed up. Sportvision quickly had competitors, like PVI, a company that was absorbed by Sportvision in 2010, and SMT, which, after a series of lawsuits, started paying license fees to Sportvision in 2007.

I saw the system from behind the scenes at a San Francisco 49ers game in 2003, when I profiled the company and the engineers who developed the technology—many of whom came out of the defense industry. Back then it took four or more operators and banks of computers to get that yellow line onto the screen; these days the whole system can be run by one person, and the number of computers has been stripped down as well. And both the companies that now produce yellow lines have added features, like virtual team logos that appear to be painted on the field.

Sportvision, meanwhile, has expanded far beyond football, developing virtual technology for enhancing broadcasting of baseball, basketball, golf, hockey, Nascar, and other sports. And IEEE Member Stan Honey, who cofounded the company, just took on a new challenge—he’s been named director of technology for the 34th America’s Cup, and he’s promising to change the America’s Cup viewing experience with onboard cameras, lapel microphones, and yes, virtual lines.

But back to the Super Bowl. If you want to impress your friends on Sunday with your detailed knowledge about how the yellow line works, the “big failure” that preceded it, and why the occasional bit of line ends up looking like it is chalked over a player’s foot, check out Spectrum’s “All in the Game.”

Photo: IEEE Member Stan Honey was the force behind the creation of the yellow football line. He’s now working to revolutionize the way we watch sailing, as director of technology for the 34th America’s Cup.

Best Buy has turned away from traditional celebrities, like Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne (featured in last year’s Super Bowl ads) and embraced its inner geek. The company announced that this year’s Super Bowl ads will feature the “rock stars of technology.”

Who does Best Buy consider a rock star? Try Silicon Valley celebs Philippe Kahn, Kevin Systrom, and Jim McKelvey (pictured above, left to right). Kahn founded Borland, Starfish Software, and LightSurf Technologies. His latest startup, Fullpower Technologies, developed the motion sensing technology used for navigation in the iPhone and iPad. And Kahn is considered to be the first person to take a picture with a cell phone and share it, as Spectrum reported in Digital Photography: the Power of Pixels. Systrom worked at Google before starting Instagram, the creator of a popular photo sharing app for the iPhone. And McKelvey’s startup, Square, has made it possible for anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone to take credit card payments, sinking a big nail into the coffin of cash.
 

The device pictured above, the Chattanooga Intelect TranSport, was used in experiments to determine whether ultrasound would be an effective contraceptive technique for monkeys.

Researchers have long sought new methods for male contraception beyond the condom and the vasectomy—in other words, the male equivalent of the birth control pill. Now separate research teams at the University of North Carolina (UNC), the University of California, Davis, and the University of Bari in Italy have shown that irradiation with ultrasound of the type that sports medicine specialists use to bring relief to aching joints can painlessly shut down sperm production.

(What can’t ultrasound do? IEEE Spectrum has reported on breakthroughs using ultrasound for mind reading, controlling Parkinson’s and other neurological ailments, and curing migraines and depression)

According to Dr. James Tsuruta, who headed the UNC team, finding the right combination of ultrasound power, frequency, and duration to shut down sperm production in rats required a lot of experimentation. Eventually, Tsuruta’s team hit upon a setting for the device and a methodology that resulted in sterilization. They showed that two 15-minute sessions spaced two days apart were enough to cause almost complete eradication of sperm at various stages of development. Instead of placing the ultrasound transducer in direct contact with the testes as is done with, say, a knee or shoulder, the scrotum was placed in a cup of hot salt water that allowed the energy emitted by the wand to be conducted to the skin. Tsuruta and his colleagues, who applied heat to separate groups of mice—some with and some without ultrasound—found that “There is something special about heating with ultrasound; it caused 10-times lower sperm counts than just applying heat,” says Tsuruta.

Asked what accounts for this difference, Elaine Lissner, director of the Male Contraception Information Project and founder of the Parsemus Foundation, which funded the UNC study, said, “This is one of the mysteries that has yet to be solved.” The best guess, says Lissner, is the one ventured by the late Dr. Mostafa Fahim, who, back in the 1970s, was the first researcher to try therapeutic ultrasound for male contraception. Fahim thought that ion transfer involving the salt in the conducting saline had an effect.

(Fahim and colleagues at the University of Missouri in Columbia published journal articles and book chapters and were awarded patents related to their sperm-killing technique. But a more renowned researcher set ultrasound contraception on the backburner for more than two decades when he couldn’t reproduce Fahim’s results.)

The UC-Davis team wanted to see how effective ultrasound would be on larger animals such as primates, so they started right off experimenting with monkeys. And just like the UNC team, zeroing in on the right settings took time and persistence. (They irradiated the testes using a commercially available device called the Chattanooga Intelect TranSport. The UNC rat and the Bari dog studies used different devices that anyone can purchase online.)

"We were pretty discouraged at first," says Dr. Catherine VandeVoort, the UC-Davis team’s lead researcher. "The monkeys didn't seem to mind the treatment a bit, but we were having a rough time of it. Thirty minutes of treatment three times a week is a lot of monkey testicular massage.”

They eventually found that three 30-minute sessions, each spaced two days apart, was enough to temporarily depress sperm production. But sperm counts would return to normal after about six weeks, giving the UC-Davis researchers the idea that they had hit upon a reversible, noninvasive male contraceptive. The main problem with that, say observers, is that a man would find it difficult to be certain exactly when his temporary sterility has worn off.

The two U.S. teams were aware of each other’s work. But they had no idea that Raffaella Leoci, a veterinary researcher, had come up with the same killer app for ultrasound at the behest of a German company. Having stumbled upon Fahim’s papers, Leoci reasoned that “We have a big problem with stray dogs here; if it really worked, that might be a more humane and affordable way to sterilize them than surgery.” Leoci’s experiments proved that three 5-minute treatments, each spaced two days apart, were enough to permanently sterilize a dog.

“The UNC team's rat study has the numbers, and they have beautiful histology data showing what's going on inside the testes,” says Ted Tollner, a member of the UC-Davis team. “The Italian team was first to publish and showed ultrasound could be very effective in a large animal, not just rats. Together with our results showing the possibility of reversibility, along with effectiveness in the closest animal to humans, it makes a pretty compelling package.”

Tech professionals in the Silicon Valley are making a six-figure income on average. Annual salaries for software and other engineers there rose 5 percent from 2010 to hit US $104 195, according to a survey by career website operator Dice Holdings. This is the first time average Silicon Valley salaries have crossed the $100 000 mark in the ten years since Dice Holdings has conducted the salary survey.

The numbers might not come as a surprise given the success of companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Zynga, and, in their wake, the explosion of web-based startups fueling talent wars for software engineers in particular.

But engineers elsewhere in the country aren’t doing too shabby either. The average tech salary nationwide was US $81 327, an increase of 2 percent. The Dice survey indicates that tech workers have seen their biggest pay increase since 2008, after a period of two years in which pay stagnated.

Techies in cities such as Austin, Portland, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Seattle, and New York City, have seen considerable bumps in pay. Austin salaries saw the biggest jump of 13 percent to reach an average $89 419, followed by Portland, which saw $82 055 after an increase of 12 percent.

Bonuses are also regaining popularity, with the nationwide average climbing 8 percent to reach $8769. Here again Silicon Valley engineers have an edge: their average bonus was $12 450. And, as per the Wall Street Journal:

"There's a tussle for talent growing in Silicon Valley and employers have to pay up," said Mr. Silver [Tom Silver, a Dice senior vice-president]. Overall, tech-job postings in Silicon Valley on Dice rose to 5,026 earlier this month, up 26% from 3,974 a year ago, he said, even as tech-jobs postings nationwide only rose 11% over the same period.

Photo: 401K, Flickr

In a recent article (“Amazon: ‘Primed’ to disrupt Apple's textbook plans?”), my fellow tech journalist Jason Perlow called into question the economics of Apple’s new iBooks Author program.

Apple has in mind changes in the creation and distribution of textbooks that may prove to be as disruptive as the ones it wrought in the music industry. The McGraw-Hills and Barnes & Nobles stand to be disintermediated in the 2010s in the way that record studios and stores were in the 1990s.

Jason’s point, and it was an interesting one worthy of further examination, was that even $15 textbooks are uneconomical when you factor in $500 iPads. And indeed, we have to look at the price of iPads specifically, and not tablets in general, because it looks like Apple’s DRM scheme cum business model locks textbook authors and their creations into Apple’s own world of online stores and devices. As Jason’s title suggests, he thinks this strategy leaves an opening for less onerous DRM and less expensive devices, and he quite naturally thinks of Amazon as an alternative in each regard.

But is there such a gap? Are the economics of iTextbooks so unfavorable?

First, there’s the matter of the $500. Jason says,

And before you tell me that Apple is going to drop the prices on basic iPads to under $300 because the company is feeling particularly philanthropical [sic] towards our poor children so they can read these wonderful rich content textbooks, stop dreaming.

I agree—let’s not look for a gentler and more philanthropic Apple anytime soon. But it will take some time for authors to create their works and for schools to adopt them. All signs point to significantly cheaper iPads by then: Whether you look at the pricing of Apple’s other devices as your guide, or just rely on Moore’s Law plus the generally competitive tablet market, we can count on entry level iPads being at most $300, and probably as low as $200, in a few short years.

Just look at the iPhone. AAPLinvestors has the numbers in a handy table: The original 4 gigabyte iPhone 1 was $499 back in June 2007; two years later you could buy a new 16 GB iPhone 3GS for $199.

At $200 for the device, the difference between $15 textbooks and $75 textbooks gets eaten up pretty quickly. And yes, $75 paper textbooks are what iTextbooks will be competing with. For example, the Temecula Valley (Calif.) Unified School District happens to have its middle school textbooks listed by title and price. The 14 different math, social studies, English, and science books range in price from $66 to $99. In addition, each is paired with one or two workbooks or handbooks, generally in the range of $10 apiece (though one language arts handbook is $83).

Of course, to complete a economic comparison of digital and paper textbooks, we need to also know how long schools hang onto their paper textbooks.

(It’s also important to be sure that a $15 iTextbook can be transferred from one student to another. Otherwise, 5 years of $15 book-students will equal the cost of a $75 textbook and even a $200 iPad will be a fiscal boat anchor sending the iBook business model to the bottom of the Sea of Samuelson. But let’s not worry about this for now—surely, at the very least, an entire iPad, loaded up with a students’ entire school year’s digital texts, could be handed over to a new Nth-grader and its former user moves to grade N+1—just the way printed books are today.)

As far as I can tell, nowadays schools are encouraged to change textbooks every 4 or 5 years, though generally books are sturdy enough—and schools are reluctant enough to buy new books—that I’m sure they’re generally kept longer. Six to eight years might be more realistic.

If so, the financial argument would still weigh in favor of printed textbooks—$75 per subject, divided by 7 years, say, is less than $11, or $44 for four subjects. Even at a mere 5 years, that's $60. The four iTextbooks also cost $60, and to that we need to add at least $50, assuming the iPad lasts 4 years (which may be optimistic).

There is, though, the question of waste—schools don’t always buy books efficiently. A particularly horrific citywide example of such waste was documented by the Rochester, N.Y. Democrat & Chronicle a few years ago. The paper found:

Nearly 20,000 new or gently used textbooks valued at more than $445,000—equivalent to about a sixth of the $2.7 million the district spent on books last year—sat in the depository as teachers waited for them.

About 70,000 books, some unused and still relevant to classroom instruction, were deemed obsolete and discarded by the district this year.

Nearly 57,000 secondary school textbooks—valued at more than $1.4 million—were discovered over the last two years to have been lost by city schools and students.

Presumably these things are less likely in the digital realm. Book orders don’t need long lead times, and there are no physical books to store in warehouses. Not every school district is as inefficient as Rochester’s; but the waste inherent in paper shouldn’t be discounted.

These considerations only start the comparison between pages and screens. For example, many K-12 textbooks today have optional digital counterparts that give students and parents electronic access to texts from home. (Here’s how parents and students log on to their books at McKnight Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pa.) iTextbooks might obviate the need for that entirely, or make such access trivial and cheaper.

To the economic questions we have to add the several benefits of electronic books. As the father of a daughter whose back muscles weren’t the strongest, foremost among them is carrying a single iPad instead of 10 kilograms of paper—or risk sitting in class without one’s book. More importantly, iTextbooks will presumably be multimedia by design, and the addition of audio, video, and interactive graphs and tables ought to promote learning— Students could watch Romeo and Juliet as well as read it, and math equations will come alive, as can historical narratives and natural science. The search for more information on the Internet would be seamless.

To return to Perlow’s original question, there probably is a gap in the market for Amazon. Even if Apple’s textbooks become cheaper, overall, than physical textbooks, there will always be a demand on the part of school districts strapped for cash for lowering their textbook expenses—and every public school in the U.S. is strapped for cash.

Amazon will need to make 10-inch tablets with fast processors and screens rich in color, because that’s what’s required in a learning context. Can they do so at prices that still beat Apple’s? Can they do it quickly, before Apple gets a firm grip on the market? Even though its songs are more expensive, iTunes still outsells Amazon almost 6 to 1 when it comes to digital music. Are school districts likely to be more nimble than the pop-music-buying public?

UPDATE (January 25, 2012): I've posted the interview with John Kappenman below. He puts the magnitude of this storm in perspective.

On Sunday evening, the sun unleashed a bright solar flare. Along with the flare came a coronal mass ejection, a blast of charged particles that began colliding with the earth's magnetosphere today.

The current storm is expected to be rather moderate, reaching just 2 or 3 on the G-scale, a measure of solar storm intensity that ranges from 1, the least severe, to a maximum of 5. Airlines have diverted flights that were scheduled for polar routes, because the geomagnetic activity can interfere with the high frequency communications systems they use to stay connected to ground control stations.

But as John Kappenman explains in our February cover story, a severe solar storm could wreak havoc on power grids, oil and gas pipelines, and communications networks. Nuclear power plants appear to be particularly vulnerable. The last time we had a truly powerful storm was 1921, and our utter dependence on electrical infrastructure makes us much more vulnerable today. Kappenman notes that Sunday's event wasn't well positioned to cause a direct-hit on earth; had a flare erupted in the same location late last week, the impact here would have been worse.

I'll be chatting with Kappenman later today, and he'll provide an update on today's storm. We'll also discuss what lessons can be learned from the 1989 geomagnetic storm that knocked out power in all of Quebec. Check back here at 3:00 PM EST for more.

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show broke all records—153,000 attendees, 3100 exhibitors, and, for me, more than five dozen tweets. I wrote a number of blog posts trying to make sense of it all, but I also tweeted on the fly whenever something tickled my eye—or my funny bone. This twitter stream captured my CES explorations; a round up below, sorted by category rather than chronology. For the chronological view, see Twitter @TeklaPerry.

Televisions:

• My CES 2012 predictions: TV hot, 3D not.

• CES press day. Just got handed 3d glasses so guessing LG TV won’t be glasses free.

• LG kicks off CES how-thin-can -a-TV go day with an LED TV that is 28 mm thick.

• LG TVs will use company's own chipset, Google TV, voice rec, gesture rec, and a partridge in a pear tree.

• And then there is OLED thin...LG unveils 4 mm thick 55-inch OLED TV.

• From a distance LG OLED TV is pretty stunning. Waiting a chance to get closer.

• CES or fashion week? Sharp sends TVs down the runway.

• Samsung TV will be able to listen, see and DO what it wants? Did I hear that correctly?

• Samsung unveils its OLED. Guess all the cool TV mfgs will ship big OLED TVs this year--they may not sell them, but they'll ship them.

• Myspace reborn as Myspace TV

• Justin Timberlake thanks Myspace users for sticking with it. Who are these people?

• Nuance's dragon TV could be programmed to only listen to me, not other family members. End of remote fight. I win

• If you're looking for OLED at CES it's not at Sony booth. My guess is [Sony] didn't have a big one to match LG and Samsung.

• Sony says OLED isn’t being abandoned but has less potential than other techs like "Crystal." But no promises on Crystal's future.

• OLED is the must-see at CES judging from the long line @Samsung. Get up early for this one.

• In this time of interface change future isn't clear but, says Samsung's Ryan Bidan, "penbased is probably not best solution for TV"

• I just talked to a TV and it listened, but it would have been much more satisfying to say "Shut up!" instead of "Mute."

Cameras:

• As I contemplate Kodak's sad fall I'm thinking about the guy at Kodak who designed the first digital camera.

• Fujifilm debuting latest digital cameras to packed house CES while Kodak on brink of extinction.

• Fujifilm designed new CMOS sensor for X-Pro1 camera with pixel arrangement that eliminates need for low-pass filter.

• Weird but engaging: some Panasonic/Lumix cameras have "miniature effect" option that makes the world look a toy.

• Lytro's light field cameras generate 3D images as a "byproduct" of its shoot first focus later tech.

• Lytro camera named Last Gadget Standing at #CES.
 

Computers, pads, and beyond:

• OLPC tablet is rugged and waterproof. It’s not an iPad but if I were Leapster I'd be worried.