The Social

Genetic analysis start-up 23andMe, known for its star-studded "spit parties" and a controversial investment from Google, announced Thursday the debut of a new initiative to bring together women who have been affected by breast cancer or who may be genetically at risk.

October is the 23rd annual National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Using its Web-based social network, 23andMe hopes to "reach out to, and build a community around, women who have encountered breast cancer, thereby increasing the scientific understanding of the inherited aspects of a disease that affects 200,000 newly diagnosed individuals per year." Women who purchase the $399 testing kits will have the option to participate in surveys, and the start-up's research arm, called "23andWe," will build a community for the swapping of knowledge, advice, and support.

Representatives from 23andMe said that the project does not yet have any external research organizations as partners, and remains "primarily a social-networking community" at the time. The genetics community has been reluctant to embrace consumer DNA-analysis companies, and the state of California asked 23andMe, along with other companies in the same field, to stop selling tests until they could be fully compliant with health regulations.

At the end of August, 23andMe announced that California authorities had granted it a license to continue selling its tests. In a blog post, 23andMe's founders described the agreement as "only the start of the dialogue between regulators and genomics companies that offer direct-to-consumer services."

This post was updated at 1:04 p.m. PT to clarify the state of 23andMe's negotiations with the state of California.

(Credit: Discovery)

NEW YORK--On Tuesday night, the Discovery Channel hosted a few hundred guests at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium for a preview of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, filling the audience up with cocktails called "The Liftoff" (a tequila sunrise in a rocket-like champagne glass) and then packing us all into the planetarium's theater to watch some cool retro space visuals.

The miniseries got its start when Discovery embarked upon a project to archive old NASA footage in a high-definition format as a commemoration of the agency's 50th anniversary. It evolved, following in the footsteps of last year's successful Planet Earth, into an ambitious, high-profile HD miniseries. When We Left Earth is very watchable, especially for space junkies who will dig the never-before-seen clips of astronauts. But it's less visually impressive than its terrestrial predecessor. The problem with turning grainy 1960s-era footage into high-definition is that it's still grainy 1960s-era footage.

That said, in an age when space travel only seems to make headlines when Sir Richard Branson is talking about his lofty plans to jet millionaires around among the satellites, it was pretty cool to peek into an era when NASA wasn't always brought up in the same sentence as "budget cuts." The national enthusiasm over the quest to put humans on the moon is something that we could all learn from when it comes to current scientific challenges--alternative energy, I'm looking at you.

When We Left Earth is a six-part series; Tuesday night's screening featured episode two, about the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s. It was an apt pick for the big screen, because Project Gemini was the first U.S. spaceflight initiative to feature space walks, which are always good eye candy. It was also an upbeat chapter to screen, considering Project Gemini went relatively smoothly and disaster-free, minus a (SPOILER ALERT!) moderate nail-biter when Gemini VI initially failed to launch.

It'll premiere on the evening of June 8. "Liftoff" cocktails aren't included, but you can easily make your own with some orange juice, grenadine, and Cuervo.

This post was updated at 11:51 AM PT in order to correct a misstatement that was made in the announcement. The winning artwork from the Etsy-NASA contest, not the artists, will make a trip into space. Read the correction post here.

NEW YORK--What does a marketplace for handmade crafts have to do with a NASA project in virtual world Second Life?

A lot, apparently, according to a panel at Thursday's PSFK Conference that paired Robert Kalin, founder of the Brooklyn-based handmade goods site Etsy, and Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA Co-Labs at the NASA Ames Research Center. The topic of the panel, which was moderated by futurist consultant Greg Verdino of Crayon, was the collaborative working movement known as "co-working."

"This is no longer a phenomenon that is limited to the one-man shop," Verdino said. "What we're starting to see now is this notion of co-working transcending physical space and blending physical work spaces, digital and virtual."

Hoppin and Kalin announced as part of the panel that Etsy and NASA would actually be doing some co-working on their own. "Etsy and NASA are partnering on a program that we're calling Space Craft," Kalin explained. Space Craft will be a contest in which Etsy members create products inspired by NASA's logo; finalists' work will wind up in the NASA gift shop, and two piece of winning artwork will get to go into space. The audience seemed a bit taken aback, possibly due to the incorrect assumption that Kalin meant the artists would be the ones to go into space. "This is all sort of in the planning phase," Kalin added.

Sounds like more concrete information will be forthcoming.

Aside from the plan to put crafty hipsters in space, the panel mostly touched upon the two speakers' rationales for their support of collaborative working. Hoppin explained that the Ames Research Center, located in Silicon Valley, originally opened a virtual co-working space in Second Life because there was too much governmental red tape to open a physical one. In the Co-Labs work space, there are virtual lectures, 3D replications of the planets, and in-world projects that both NASA employees and outsiders can work on. "People can dress up as penguins," he said. "This is not really where you'd expect, as a NASA bureaucrat, to find NASA."

He added that the space agency is still working on opening a physical work-space in the Valley and is in talks with Yahoo.

Kalin, who says he "doesn't get" Second Life, was asked by Verdino about Etsy's "spirit of collaboration between buyer and seller." Etsy uses chat rooms, wikis, and other various social tools so that it's a bit more interactive than, say, eBay and its feedback ratings.

"There's something magical about the item that you get," Kalin explained. "It comes from this connection that you made online, but (then) you get the physical item."

On Steven Spielberg's rumored social network, maybe you can discuss whether that ghost was really a ghost or just the creepy old caretaker from the abandoned amusement park.

(Credit: Hanna-Barbera)

Who wants to believe? TechCrunch reported Monday night that Steven Spielberg is developing a new social network where people can talk about their encounters with the paranormal and extraterrestrial.

Spielberg, creator of sci-fi classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Men in Black, and the War of the Worlds remake a few years ago, is reportedly himself a believer in paranormal phenomena. In creating a social network for fellow enthusiasts as well as people who claim to have encountered the otherworldly, Spielberg is tapping into a lifelong passion.

But its exact ties to tech and entertainment are unclear. "The project may have originally been associated with Yahoo but the project was killed off before launch," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote. "But if our sources are right, the idea has lived on and a team in Los Angeles is working to launch it in the next few months."

Here's another theory: What if this is in conjunction with some kind of upcoming Spielberg project, a sort of uber-viral meta-campaign along the lines of the HBO Voyeur Project? (Whatever happened to that, anyway?)