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It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the spat between Google and China over censorship and hacking attacks. But that was more than enough time for the fracas to escalate into international political tensions and name-calling.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in today. In a wide-ranging speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton said the internet had been a “source of tremendous progress” in China but that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” [BBC News]. In taking a foreign policy stand on information freedom, she also singled out other countries that she says harass bloggers or promote censorship and called on other companies to follow Google’s lead in taking a stand against restrictive governments.

“A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said, calling growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall [Reuters].

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Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.

The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].

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There’s nothing like the launching a company from your college dorm room that achieves global Internet hegemony within a few years to make you think you can offer royal pronouncements about how the world has changed.

OK, so that was a bit melodramatic. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earned some howls and guffaws in the last few days over his statements saying that, in a nutshell, people aren’t terribly interested in privacy anymore. Specifically, he said:

“In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”

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After a long weekend of Las Vegas fanboy salivating, another year of the Consumer Electronics Show has come to a close. Here are DISCOVER’s choices for the most important storylines among the flood of gadget-philia emanating from the desert.

1. OMG, It’s Coming Toward Us!

Between the unstoppable worldwide phenomenon that is “Avatar” and ESPN rolling out 3D broadcasts for this summer’s FIFA World Cup, 3D is back with a force not seen since the crazes of the 1950s and 80s. The bandwagon has close to universal industry ridership‚ almost every major manufacturer is launching 3D sets at CES this week, the Blu-ray format will support 3D and many gaming consoles should soon follow suit [Popular Mechanics]. But unless you’ve got a big wad of extra cash burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to wait a while before taking the 3D dive, tech experts warn. 3D TVs will come with plenty of sticker shock at first, there won’t be very much content to watch on them… and oh yeah, you’ll still have to wear those stupid glasses.

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The world’s largest network of fully wired undersea science stations has gone live off Canada’s western coast. The NEPTUNE network has begun streaming data from undersea instruments and sensors located on the Pacific Ocean floor directly to the Internet. The network is expected to produce 50 terabytes of data annually, all of which will inform scientists about everything from earthquake dynamics to the effects of climate change on the water column, and from deep-sea ecosystems to salmon migration [Scientific American].

NEPTUNE will also feature a deep sea rover nicknamed Wally that will measure the temperature, salinity, methane content, and sediment characteristics on the ocean floor. The $100 million project will produce more than pretty pictures and a fire hose of data—it can also provide advanced tsunami warnings that could save both lives and money.

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There’s nothing like a flashy statistic to get some attention, and scientists at the University of California, San Diego did just that by calculating the total amount of data consumed in the United States in 2008. The final tally? About 3.6 zettabytes (or 3.6 billion terabytes). That number works out to about 34 gigabytes per American per day. Put on paper, [the 3.6-zettabyte total] would be equal to 7-foot stacks of thick paperback novels placed side-by-side across the entire United States, including Alaska, said Roger Bohn, the study’s author and director of the university’s Global Information Industry Center [San Diego Union-Tribune].

Since the researchers excluded things people read for their work from the study, computers are only third in the total amount of time spent per information source. Most of this time is spent in front of screens watching TV-related content, averaging nearly five hours of daily consumption. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day [The New York Times]. Even without work hours, the researchers say, Americans log 1.3 trillion hours of information-gathering in a year, be it from print, online, TV, radio, or other sources.

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How long does it take to solve a nationwide scavenger hunt? If you’re a bunch of MIT whiz kids, just less than nine hours.

As DISCOVER covered last week, DARPA, the Defense Department’s mad scientists, devised a contest to study the spread of information with $40,000 of prize money for the winning team. The task was to be the first to find all 10 red balloons scattered at secret locations around the country and report them to the DARPA Web site.

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One year ago today, a brain-damaged man died peacefully at the age of 82, and neuroscientists the world over learned the identity of the man who was referred to in the textbooks only as “H.M.” Henry Gustav Molaison lost much of a brain structure called the hippocampus during an operation in the 1950s. The procedure was meant to stop his epileptic seizures. However, the hippocampus is critical to memory formation, so the surgery left Molaison unable to form new long-term memories [New Scientist]. By studying Molaison’s behavior over decades, researchers learned an enormous amount about memory formation.

Today, researchers at The Brain Observatory in San Diego are taking the next step in studying the workings of Molaison’s brain: They’re slicing it up. During Molaison’s life, he and his guardian agreed that his brain should be donated to science upon his death. So his brain was frozen, and beginning today it will be cut into about 2,600 very thin slices (think deli meat). Each slice will be photographed, and many will be studied microscopically to determine exactly which parts of Molaison’s brain were damaged in that long-ago operation. The slicing operation, which began about an hour ago, is being streamed live on the Internet, although it’s hardly a gripping action sequence (it looks more like scientists going about their business in a lab). In addition, the photos of the brain slices will soon be posted online for all the world to marvel at.

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To celebrate the Internet’s 40th anniversary, DARPA, often referred to as the mad scientist wing of the Pentagon, will award a $40,000 prize to the first person or group to find all 10 of DARPA’s big red weather balloons.

But the contest is not all fun and games. DARPA is studying the participants to learn more about how large online groups share resources and compete using social networks. During the DARPA Network Challenge, each of the 10 red balloons will be placed in hidden but publicly accessible locations during the daylight hours of December 5. Would-be balloon hunters can start registering for the challenge on December 1, and have until December 14 to submit balloon locations to the contest website [Popular Science]. The agency has dropped a few vague clues, but they are mostly leaving it up to the balloon seekers to figure out how to conduct their search. DARPA will stand by and observe the contestants, collect data, and interview those involved about their search methods.

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Astronomers want you… to help them match pictures of cosmic collisions, which are known as “galactic mergers.” Studying these mergers could explain why the universe has the mix of galaxy types – from those with wound-up spiral arms to compact balls of stars – that it does. And it turns out that the human eye is much better than a computer at matching up images of real mergers with randomly-selected images of simulated mergers [SPACE.com]. So naturally, astronomers want to enlist the eyes of Internet users to help them.

The website, Galaxy Zoo Mergers, features a new game that bears (it must be said) only a mild resemblance a Vegas slot machine, with a real galactic merger image in the middle and eight randomly selected images of simulated mergers in the slots around it. Players pick out the best matches and can even manipulate the number of stars they see or an image’s orientation to make a better match. Says researcher Chris Lintott: “By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated possibilities and selecting only the very best matches, they are helping to build up a profile of what kinds of factors are necessary to create the galaxies we see in the universe around us – and, hopefully, having fun, too” [SPACE.com].

This is the latest project from Galaxy Zoo to rely on crowdsourcing. Over the past two years, Galaxy Zoo has enlisted 250,000 Internet users to classify hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey – an effort that so far has resulted in 15 scientific papers, either submitted or published [MSNBC]. This new project will focus on 3,000 merger images, including some new ones taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The researchers say their attempts to understand the dynamics of a galactic merger is like trying to understand a car crash– they hope to find out what caused it, and what the final outcome will be for the galaxies involved.

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Image: Galaxy Zoo

With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.

The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)

By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].

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Image: JPL / Microsoft

The self-proclaimed spam king of the Internet, Sam “Spamford” Wallace, was ordered to pay Facebook $711 million in civil damages for slinging spam on the social networking site. Wallace allegedly accessed Facebook accounts without obtaining permission, and used them to make bogus wall posts and spam the account holders’ friends. Those actions run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which sets guidelines for commercial e-mails, which are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) [PC World]. The judge also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that he be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means he could actually face jail time if convicted.

If you’ve ever received an unsolicited email (and who hasn’t), chances are good that it came from Wallace’s company, Cyber Promotions, which was once the largest source of spam. So not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time Spamford has run afoul of the law. In May, 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace for sending junk messages. Wallace was also fined $4 million by the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 for his excessive pop-up ads [CNN]. Officials at Facebook said they don’t expect to see much of the $711 million, seeing as how Wallace is bankrupt and may soon have to send out his spam as hand written letters from behind bars.

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Image: flickr / benstein

Yes, in early September we sent the Internet our birthday best wishes, noting that it had been 40 years since computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles connected two computers via a 15-foot cable, allowing for the transmission of data between them. But it wasn’t until October 29, 1969 that the first message passed between two different computer nodes, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford University. The message that researcher Leonard Kleinrock intended to send to Stanford was “login” but Kleinrock was only able to type “lo” before the system crashed. On his second attempt, the message went through successfully [ABC News]. With that, a net was born.

The system dubbed ARPANET, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, would lead directly to the Internet that we know, love, despise, and rely on utterly today. To date, over 1 billion people are online, and last year, Google announced that it had detected over 1 trillion pages [PC World].

Vinton Cerf, an Internet pioneer and the current Chief Internet Evangelist at Google says the online world will continue to evolve in ways we can barely imagine, but which serve humanity’s basic drive to communicate. “Don’t let anyone tell you that information is power…. It’s information-sharing that’s power” [LiveScience], he says.

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Image: NIH. ARPANET began with only four nodes, located at the University of California-Los Angeles, Stanford University, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Three scientists who mastered light through technology have been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for physics, for breakthroughs that the prize committee said “helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies.” Half of the $1.4 million prize goes to Charles Kao (pictured), for his work on fiber optics, while the other half will be divided between Willard Boyle and George Smith, two retired researchers from Bell Labs who invented the first imaging technology using a digital sensor instead of film, paving the way for the creation of digital cameras.

Kao’s discovery in fiber optics set the stage for the technological revolution that underpins today’s global communication systems, powering broadband internet connections and carrying data transmissions around the world. In 1966, he figured out how to transmit light for more than 100 kilometers using optical glass fibers, five times the length of the most advanced fibers then available [Bloomberg]. Fiber optics have become ubiquitous in today’s wired, networked world; the Nobel committee noted that if all the optical cables in use today were unraveled, it would equal a single thread more than a billion kilometers long, enough to circle the globe 25,000 times.

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Looking for an easy, cheap way to spy on your neighbors? Researchers are working on a device that may be just the thing, which uses a simple wireless network to “see” through a wall and detect people moving around in the room beyond. But paranoid apartment-dwellers will be glad to know that the system still has plenty of limitations. At the moment the system can only track movement within a three-foot range, and it can only sense motion–it can’t put together a picture of what or who’s moving.

The system relies on the variations of radio signals in a wireless network. The signal strength at any point in a network is the sum of all the paths the radio waves can take to get to the receiver. Any change in the volume of space through which the signals pass, for example caused by the movement of a person, makes the signal strength vary. So by “interrogating” this volume of space with many signals, picked up by multiple receivers, it is possible to build up a picture of the movement within it [Technology Review]. The paper describing the technology has been posted on the arXiv pre-print server, and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The device could be more than a boon for voyeurs or robbers. The researchers argue that the technology could be used in search and rescue operations, with emergency teams using the same radio technology used by Wi-Fi networks to build a web of sensors around a disaster site, revealing the location of victims and survivors [Telegraph].

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Image: Joey Wilson and Neal Patwari