A funny thing happened after Google’s new privacy policy was announced last week. When people started checking what Google knows about them on Ad Preferences Manager—that’s the profile of you they build by watching your movements on the Web, so they can tailor ads accordingly—young women began reporting that actually, Google had aged them quite a bit. And had thought they were dudes. One young lady of our acquaintance is believed by the Ad Preferences genie to be a “65+” male. Why?

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What’s the News: To much fanfare, Google has released a preview version of Google+, their long-anticipated move into the social-networking space dominated in the U.S. by Facebook, whose meteoric growth challenges Google’s dominance over the Web itself. The new service lets users send messages and pictures to each other, like Facebook, but puts more emphasis on grouping and communicating with varying-sized audiences, as with email or in the real world of meatspace.

The two consensus early reactions (from the small group of people who have access) are that the service is mostly smooth and functional, a welcome change after Google’s social flops Buzz and Wave; and that it sure looks a heck of a lot like Facebook. Will that be enough to challenge Facebook, whose enormous base of users have uploaded much of their lives to one social network and may not want to invest time in another?

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What’s the News: Your phone can now be a credit card, thanks to Google Wallet, announced yesterday with great fanfare. With this system, when you swipe your phone over a sensor, a near-field communication (NFC) chip gives the merchant your credit card information. You punch in your PIN, and: cha-ching.

Google has partnered with 20,000 companies who will take payments this way, including Macy’s, American Eagle, and Subway.

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What’s the News: Google’s self-driving cars have been generating buzz lately, with the news that the company has been lobbying Nevada to allow the autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads. But it remains to be seen whether hordes of self-driving cars really going to work in the real world.

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What’s the News: Many evaluations of scientific excellence singling out specific universities or departments, but two European researchers have taken a different approach: They rated the top scientific cities by looking at what proportion of published science articles are highly cited. Cambridge, Massachusetts, came out as the winner in physics and chemistry (no surprise there—MIT and Harvard) for having lots of influential papers; London was tops in psychology; Moscow was the chemistry and physics loser; and Taipei, Taiwan was the low achiever in psychology.

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How the Heck:

• Researchers used a science database called Web of Science to count the number of total papers and influential papers produced in cities around the world in 2008. (In chemistry, for example, a total of 10,460 papers were published that year.)
• The expectation was that 10% of each city’s papers would appear in the top 10% of the most-cited papers. Researchers tallied up the number of actually influential papers from each city and compared that with the expected figure.
• The under-performing cities are plotted on Google Maps as red dots, while the over-performing are green. For example, on the chemistry-cities map, Moscow’s circle is the largest because it’s publishing the most chemistry papers, but it’s red because only 5 of its papers were in the top 10% of most-cited chemistry papers, far below the expected figure of 47.7 (10% of its output).

What’s the Context:

• The northernmost city with more than expected highly cited papers was Tromso, Norway, proving that science can prosper even in the icy, inhospitable stretches of the Norwegian Sea.
• While fewer in number than North America, Europe, and China, there is still some thriving science cities in countries in the Middle East, including Oman and Iran—though Iraq is noticeably blank.
• Compared to the maps of physics and chemistry, there are far more successful psychology cities.

Not So Fast: As the researchers note, the study fuzzes over any distinctions that emerge on a smaller scale than a city—for instance, the maps don’t show any difference between a city with one superstar who publishes 10 influential papers and another city with a group of 10 researchers who each publish 1. And since the scoring is based on citations, it’s subject to biases based on renown, language, and resources; the same paper published by a famous researcher at Oxford will get more notice than if it were published in Nigeria.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1103.3216: Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff, Which Cities Produce Worldwide More Excellent Papers Than Can Be Expected? A New Mapping Approach—Using Google Maps—Based On Statistical Significance Testing

• While modeling plasma flows deep inside the sun, scientists may have found an explanation for why some sunspots cycles (like the most recent one) are weaker than others. “It’s the flow speed during the cycle before that seems to dictate the number of sunspots. Having a fast flow from the poles while a cycle is ramping up, followed by a slow flow during its decline, results in a very deep minimum.”
• Risky business: In defending President Obama’s vision for space exploration that relies upon commercial space companies, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the country must “become unafraid of exploration. We need to become unafraid of risks.”
• Bad timing: Just as Apple unveils its new iPad—and Steve Jobs uses the opportunity to gloat about his company’s superiority in apps compared to Google’s Android system—Google had to take 21 apps off the Android Market because they were infected with malware.
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• Who needs a vomit comet? The Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado reached a deal with Virgin Galactic to send some of its scientists up on SpaceShipTwo’s suborbital flights, allowing them to conducts tests in weightlessness.
• Fire ants may have originated in South America, but their home base for invading the world at large is right here in the United States. So says a new study of more than 2,000 fire ant colonies spread around the globe.
• Gone in a flash: About 150,000 Gmail users woke up to find their mailboxes wiped clean—messages, folders, and all. Google is racing to recover the lost correspondences. In the meantime, this is a reminder of two things. First, you should back up your email. And second, Google is really, really big. Those 150,000 people represent just .08 percent of Gmail users.
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Last year, Google raised the ire of many when it confessed that its city-mapping Street View vehicles unintentionally gathered unencrypted Wi-Fi data as they rolled past people’s abodes. To fix its image and to fend off lawsuits, the company soon tightened its privacy policies and ensured that its Street View cars stopped collecting that information. But the controversies just won’t stop. Google is now trying to convince privacy-conscious Swiss officials to drop the country’s tight Street View restrictions, while security-conscious Israeli officials are concerned that the technology will help terrorists.

Twenty-seven countries have been partially mapped via Street View, a Google product that provides 360-degree panoramic views from ground level. The company creates these images by sending groups of camera-studded vehicles to various parts of the world to snap pictures as they drive.

Although Switzerland is home to one of Google’s largest offices outside the United States, the country has strict privacy laws that have prevented Google from loading new Street View images of Switzerland for the past year. On Thursday, Google petitioned a Swiss court to lift this ban. The search engine company told Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court that its technology automatically conceals the identity of faces and license plates, and that it is no different from rival services.

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Google extends its tendrils into new arenas so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. This week the giant tech company is creating digital art museums, challenging the hackers of the world, letting you play doctor on your tablet, and messing around with fractals.

Google Art Project

Going to an art museum: Sure, it’s a great way to improve your cultural cachet, but it also makes your feet hurt. Fortunately for couch potato art lovers (or those of us who can’t fly all over the world on a whim), Google is bringing some of the world’s greatest museums to you through Art Project, which takes Street View technology into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum, and others.

The level of detail offered up by up to 14 billion pixels is pretty jaw-dropping. Take “The Ambassadors” by Hans Holbein the Younger at the National Gallery in London. It would be easy to ignore the sheet of music that sits on a table in the painting. But with the Google Art Project’s magnification, users can see that the sheet music actually has real music painted onto it. The user can zoom-in and see the individual notes and words with pin-sharp clarity. [Wall Street Journal]

For now just one painting from each of the participating museums is captured in such detail. More could come, and the project’s founder is also seeking a way to capture three-dimensional art, like sculpture.

A Chrome Challenge

For the first time, Google is taking its Chrome browser to Pwn2Own, a competition in which hackers try to break into the major Internet browsers including Firefox and Internet Explorer. And the company is making things a little more interesting, kicking in an additional $20,000 of prize money into the pool.

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New sea creatures, humongous stars, and cockroach antibiotics: Those are just a few reader favorites from this year in science. As 2010 comes to a close, we bring you a dozen of the most popular 80beats posts of the year.

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For more great stories from the year in science, check out DISCOVER’s Top 100 Stories of the Year.

Humanity’s legacy of millions upon millions of books represents an unparalleled reservoir of data, precisely detailing the changes in language and culture over the centuries. Now, if only a search engine giant were digitizing that history…

Oh, right. Google has been doing just that, and now scientists are beginning to tap that treasure trove of data.

From Ed Yong:

Together with over 40 university libraries, the internet titan has thus far scanned over 15 million books, creating a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published. All the while, a team from Harvard University, led by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden have been analysing the flood of data.

Their first report is available today. Although it barely scratches the surface, it’s already a tantalising glimpse into the power of the Google Books corpus. It’s a record of human culture, spanning six centuries and seven languages. It shows vocabularies expanding and grammar evolving. It contains stories about our adoption of technology, our quest for fame, and our battle for equality. And it hides the traces of tragedy, including traces of political suppression, records of past plagues, and a fading connection with our own history.

Do yourself a favor and check out the rest of Ed’s extensive post—including fascinating examples like the “half-life” of any given year being mentioned in literature—over at Not Exactly Rocket Science. And try out Google’s search to see the prevalence of any phrases or phrases over the years.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: The Dawn of Urban Civilization: Writing, Urban Life, and Warfare
80beats: The Brains of Storytellers and Their Listeners Actually Sync Up
Not Exactly Rocket Science: New Languages Evolve in Rapid Bursts
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The Evolution of Past Tense: How Verbs Change Over Time

Image: Wikimedia Commons (New York Public Library)

While a certain bacterium that can thrive in arsenic has dominated the science press this week, the big story in the world at large is on the ongoing WikiLeaks saga. The release of an enormous trove of confidential documents from the U.S. State Department has provoked plenty of fall-out: there’s governmental embarrassment and anger, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now wanted in Sweden on alleged sex crimes. But we’re most interested in how the never-ending story touches several science and tech stories, some of which have unraveled here on 80beats.

Get That DNA

One embarrassing revelation of the leaked diplomatic cables was that American diplomats were supposed to be part spy; they were asked to try to gather genetic material from foreign governmental officials. Once the cables leaked, the State Department couldn’t exactly deny that this happened, but it now says that these suggestions came from intelligence agencies. And relax—the requests were voluntary.

A senior department official said the requests for DNA, iris scans and other biometric data on foreign government and U.N. diplomats came from American “intelligence community managers.” The official said American diplomats were free to ignore the requests and that virtually all do. [Washington Post]

China Source of Google Hack

Early in 2010 we reported on the large cyber-attack against Google. Though rumors swirled, the Chinese government denied its involvement; the country and the search engine giant went through months of tension before arriving at a truce in the summer. According to WikiLeaks, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party were directly connected to the hack.

China’s Politburo directed the intrusion into Google’s computer systems in that country, a Chinese contact told the American Embassy in Beijing in January, one cable reported. The Google hacking was part of a coordinated campaign of computer sabotage carried out by government operatives, private security experts and Internet outlaws recruited by the Chinese government. [The New York Times]

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“Don’t track me, bro!”

If you’ve long been a fan of the Federal Trade Commission’s “Do Not Call” registry, allowing people to opt out of telemarketing campaigns, the good news is that FTC has taken the first steps toward such a setup for the Internet. Jon Leibowitz, the FTC’s chairman, pitched in a report this week (pdf) the idea of implementing some kind of “do not track” option that would allow people to easily say no to having their online behavior tracked and used for purposes like behavior-based advertising. The bad news is, both legally and conceptually, is that it would be a more challenging idea to implement than “Do Not Call.”

Rather than submitting their names on a centrally maintained list, consumers would use a tool on their Web browsers to signal that they do not wish to be tracked or to receive targeted advertising. Leibowitz said Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have all experimented with do-not-track technology on their browsers. [Washington Post]

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Those Street View cameras aren’t just collecting pictures of streets and buildings to make Google Maps better, they’re also scooping up email addresses and passwords, Google admitted Friday.

Back in May the company announced that its Street View cars were mistakenly collecting data from unencrypted wireless networks; now they’ve acknowledged that this data included emails, url addresses, and passwords from people who were sending that data over open (non-password protected) networks when a Google car passed by.

In making the new announcement, Google declared itself deeply chagrined, and outlined the steps it has taken to improve its privacy policy.

We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users. [Official Google Blog]

The data-collecting code was a part of the software running on Google’s Street View cars, which have so far mapped over 30 countries, and have established a presence on every continent–including Antarctica. The software was meant to just collect basic data about the presence of WiFi networks as the car-mounted cameras snapped pictures.

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A huge offshore wind energy project took a leap forward today with the announcement that Google and the investment firm Good Energies are backing the mammoth underwater transmission lines that would carry clean electricity up and down the East Coast. The $5 billion dollar project would allow for wind farms to spring up all along the mid-Atlantic continental shelf.

Google and Good Energies will both be 37.5 percent equity partners in the clean energy infrastructure project; the Japanese industrial, energy, and investment firm Marubeni will take a 15 percent share. The project, proposed by a Maryland-based company called Trans-Elect, would set up a 350-mile long energy-carrying backbone from Virginia to northern New Jersey, first allowing the transfer of the south’s cheap electricity to the northern states, and later providing critical infrastructure for future offshore wind projects.

The AWC backbone is critical to more rapidly scaling up offshore wind because without it, offshore wind developers would be forced to build individual radial transmission lines from each offshore wind project to the shore, requiring additional time consuming permitting and environmental studies and making balancing the grid more difficult. [Official Google Blog].

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