Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield finished out his five-month flurry of songs, snapshots and social media from outer space with a real doozy: a rendition of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that even Bowie is retweeting.

The music video was months in the making: With Bowie's approval, the song's lyrics were tweaked to reflect Hadfield's return from the International Space Station on Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz craft. "Lock your Soyuz hatch and put your helmet on," Hadfield sings in the video. After showing scenes of Hadfield strumming on his guitar and gazing soulfully out the station's windows, the video winds up with a Soyuz parachuting down to its landing.

Since "Space Oddity" went up on Sunday, it's been viewed on YouTube more than 2.7 million times.

The YouTube hit caps off an orbital tour of duty during which Hadfield sent down thousands of pictures via his Twitter account, performed the first original song recorded on the space station, mixed it up with "Star Trek" icon William Shatner and unveiled Canada's new $5 bill. For the past two months, he was doing all this while serving as the station's first Canadian commander.

"He's brought space back, not just for Canadians but for the world," fellow Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen told NBC News.

Dreams of space
Hadfield, 53, began his path to stardom during his childhood on a corn farm in southern Ontario. Watching Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon in 1969 inspired him to dream of becoming an astronaut when he was 9 years old. He started flying airplanes in his teens, and went on to become a fighter pilot in the Canadian Armed Forces. He's been an astronaut since 1992, and he flew on space shuttle missions in 1995 and 2001.

Last December, he finally got his shot at a long-term stint in space — and he definitely made the most of the experience.

Slideshow: The antics and artistry of astronaut Chris Hadfield

Canadian spaceflier Chris Hadfield has posted incredible pictures of the world from space. He has also explained how to brush your teeth, shave and clip your nails while weightless.

Launch slideshow

Hadfield's 28-year-old son, Evan, told NBC News that his father put in several hours a day snapping pictures and sending tweets, in addition to his usual 10-hour work shift aboard the station. "When he wasn't working directly for space station maintenance, or on one of his science experiments, he was doing something with his time to benefit people down here," Evan Hadfield said.

Evan worked long hours, too, without pay. Over the past five months, he has been managing his father's social-media accounts and taking the lead in getting videos like "Space Oddity" produced. "I work about 16 hours a day, seven days a week," he said. "Last week I worked 19 hours a day. ... I read about 13,000 to 17,000 messages a day, and that's just in the morning."

"Space Oddity" was a special case, in part due to a tangle of international copyright issues. The Hadfields started working with Bowie and his team, as well as NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, even before the astronaut's launch in December. "It was definitely something we wanted to do," Evan said.

Why do it? Chris Hadfield hinted at the reasons in a different farewell-to-space video: "Who'd have thought that five months away from the planet would make you feel closer to people?" he asked. "Not closer because I miss them — just closer because seeing this [experience] this way and being able to share it through all the media that we've used has allowed me to get a direct reflection back immediately from so many people. ... It makes me feel like I'm actually with people more, that we're having a conversation. That this experience is not individual, but it's shared and it's worldwide."

Hansen said all of Hadfield's pictures, videos and tweets could be boiled down to a simple message: "We do live on a spaceship, a spaceship called Earth, and we need to work together to protect it."

The next chapter
So what's next? After Hadfield and his two Soyuz crewmates touch down in Kazakhstan, they'll be whisked away in separate directions: Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko will head toward Moscow, while Hadfield and NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn will be flown directly back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for medical checks, debriefings, rest and recuperation.

"We have a lot in store for these guys over a number of weeks," Hansen said. And that's not counting a single tweet.

It's hard to believe that Hadfield will be out of the social-media spotlight for long. "We've still got a lot of stuff," Evan Hadfield said. There are still lots of photos and videos from his father's spaceflight that have yet to be shared. But not even the Hadfields know how all those visions from outer space will come out, and on what timetable.

"I don't know, and I don't even want to speculate, because what if I'm wrong?" Evan said. "I hope, I really hope that people take Dad's message to heart and continue it past his return."

Update for 12:25 p.m. ET May 14: The "Space Oddity" video viewership is up to nearly the 7 million mark, and Hadfield commented on the YouTube phenomenon shortly after his landing in Kazakhstan. "I'm very happy that ... 7 million are interested. It is very interesting and historic to be in space," Reuters quoted Hadfield as saying.

"It's part of humanity to be in space," Hadfield said in Russian. "What we were feeling, what we were doing there, the music we played, this is a big part of our lives." 

More about Chris Hadfield:

• Astronaut's artistry hits warp speed
• How Canada's top astronaut sees the world
• Cosmic Log archive on Chris Hadfield

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon May 13, 2013 7:49 PM EDT

Slideshow: Art of Science 2013

Mingzhai Sun and Joshua Shaevitz / Princeton

Click through the top images from Princeton University's Art of Science Competition, which features images of artistic merit created during the course of scientific research.

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Worms are a source of wonder in this year's crop of aesthetically pleasing scientific images, served up by Princeton University's Art of Science Competition.

"C. instagram," one of the contest's top photos, features a wriggling network of C. elegans worms on an agar plate covered with E. coli bacteria. Ewwww, right? But when Princeton molecular biology student Meredith Wright looked at the scene through a microscope, she had a different reaction: Cooool!

"I found the pattern on this plate particularly lovely, and was able to capture it with my cell phone by holding the lens of my phone's camera up to the microscope eyepiece," she wrote. "I've since shared the photo on social networking sites and have had friends who've never been interested in biology ask me more about my work because of this photo."

Researchers don't do what they do to create beautiful pictures, but beauty often arises amid the search for scientific truth. That's what the Art of Science program is going for: Images produced in the course of scientific research that have aesthetic merit as well.

This year's theme was "Connections." Andrew Zwicker, director of science education at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, said that some of history's most exciting scientific discoveries have come from making connections between different disciplines.

"For example, with physics and biology, everyday there is a new finding showing that the two are connected in the most fascinating and profound way," he said in this year's contest announcement. "In a similar vein, connecting the aesthetics of laboratory images to their scientific importance has transformed how we look at our data and results. With the 2013 Art of Science competition, we are celebrating all manner of connections."

Meredith Wright / Princeton Art of Science Competition

"C. instagram" shows masses of C. elegans worms on an agar plate. The picture was taken with a smartphone camera through a microscope, and shared via Instagram.

The connections between beauty and truth are reflected in this year's three top-rated images. First prize goes to Martin Jucker's visualization of Earth's wind patterns in shades of red and blue. Michael Kosk's photomicrograph of crushed birch wood took second place. And third prize went to a many-branching visualization of online connections for the websites set up by the plasma physics lab and by the Lewis Center for the arts.

"These two embroidery-like figures visually give us an idea of the similarities and differences of a website devoted to science and one devoted to the arts," said the prize-winning webmasters, Paul Csogi and Chris Cane.

The three prize-winners will share $500, divided into shares of $250, $154.51 and $95.49 in accordance with the aesthetically pleasing golden ratio. Another 40 images are included in Princeton's Art of Science 2013 exhibit, which opened on Friday in the atrium of Princeton's Friend Center. The works were chosen from 170 images submitted from 24 different departments across campus.

Click through our slideshow featuring some of the pictures in the exhibit, and then be sure to visit the Art of Science website and the Art of Science Facebook page for much, much more. And don't forget to share. That's precisely what Meredith Wright hopes you'll do with "C. instagram."

"This image represents the simple pleasure of finding something beautiful when you don't expect to," she wrote, "and it shows how easy it is to connect science with new audiences by simply clicking 'share.'"

More artistic science to share:

• Solid science turns into crowd-pleasing art
• Creepy critters and cool close-ups
• How beauty was found in a slimeball

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

People are getting all twitchy about the bugs that are coming out in New York and New Jersey after a 17-year buildup, but when it comes to cicadas, Billy Tesh is seeing the real deal in North Carolina.

"I was so excited," Tesh told NBC News from Greensboro, where he runs a company called Pest Management Systems. "I've never seen so many in one location in my life. They were on almost every blade of grass."

And this is just the start: Billions of the insects are due to come out over the next few weeks, across a swath of the East Coast ranging from North Carolina to Connecticut.

These particular cicadas have been biding their time underground since the Clinton administration, in 1996. For 17 years, they've been sucking up fluid from plant roots and waiting for their biological alarm clock to ring. The bugs emerge in droves when the soil temperature reaches 64 degrees.

Other species of cicadas break out from the ground every year, but scientists suspect that the 17-year cicadas (and their 13-year kin) adopted a longer life cycle as an evolutionary ploy to overwhelm their predators with sheer numbers and surprise. When the time comes, masses of insects burrow out of their underground homes, shake off the shells of their childhood, unfurl their wings and look around for mates.

This spring's group is known as Brood II — which comes between last year's Brood I in Appalachia and next year's Brood III in the Midwest.

Tesh knows all about the broods: The 53-year-old pest-control specialist has been through several invasions by the red-eyed, loud-humming bugs. Even by his standards, this year's group of cicadas is special. He realized that on Thursday morning when he stopped by a farm in Stokes County, which appears to be one of the first places to experience the full force of this spring's "Swarmageddon."

"This particular brood is extremely large," Tesh said. He's expecting the cicadas to take noisy wing in the next day or two. "They're probably singing tonight."

Billy Tesh

A cicada and its shell sit on pest-control specialist Billy Tesh's hand during a visit to a farm in Stokes County, North Carolina.

Billy Tesh

Red-eyed adult cicadas clump together in a tree in North Carolina.

Billy Tesh

Hundreds of cicadas and their shells hang from dewy spears of grass in North Carolina.

Marc Dennis

Cicada nymphs make their way along a path on Staten Island.

Judging by the reports posted on Magicicada.org and Radiolab's Cicada Tracker, lots more cicadas have been emerging over the past week or so. Sightings have been reported not only in North Carolina, but in areas as far north as New Jersey and Staten Island in New York, which are traditional stomping grounds for Brood II. Those sightings are generating lots of buzz, but University of Connecticut cicada researcher John Cooley says the bugs in the New York metro area appear to be early risers forced out of their holes by wet weather.

Cooley checked out the cicadas that were emerging at New Jersey's Cora Hartshorn Arboretum. "There are nymphs there, and there are lots of them, but I don't think they are ready to come out," he told NBC News. He doesn't expect these early arrivals to do well, and he thinks the nymphs spotted on Staten Island will be in a similar fix. The weather in the Northeast just isn't spring-like enough yet for full-scale Swarmageddon.

When Swarmageddon sets in, Easterners won't need to wonder: The bugs will cover the ground when they crawl, blot out the sky when they fly and generate a mating hum as loud as a New York subway train (90 decibels or more). After a weeks-long mating season, the adults will die off, leaving behind shovelfuls of bug bodies. Meanwhile, a new crop of nymphs will hatch out from their eggs and burrow into the dirt to begin the next 17-year cycle.

Tesh says people have nothing to fear from the cicada invasion. The insects may damage some of the plants that they crowd onto, but they also serve to aerate and fertilize the soil. He's already gotten several calls from concerned customers in the Greensboro area — but so far, no one has asked him to bring out the pesticides. Instead, everyone has been taking his advice: "Just let Mother Nature take its course."

Slideshow: Return of the cicada

Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast experiences an invasion.

Launch slideshow

More about Swarmageddon:

• Bug-watchers see cicadas on the rise
• Cicada emergence generates early buzz
• All about cicadas on NBCNews.com

Show us your cicada photos by adding #NBCNewsPics to your tweet or Instagram post, or upload your pictures directly by clicking on this box.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Satellite imagery can serve as a time machine, revealing dramatic change in just a few seconds — but can you imagine documenting almost three decades' worth of all that change, across most of our planet's land mass? A team of imaging experts, computer scientists and journalists did. Now they've unveiled the result: a global database of zoomable, animated satellite views known as Timelapse.

"We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public," Rebecca Moore, engineering manager for Google Earth Engine and Earth outreach, said Thursday in Google's blog announcement of the Timelapse project.

Moore said the project began in 2009, when Google started working with the U.S. Geological Society to make its archive of Landsat imagery available online. The team sifted through more than 2 million satellite images, adding up to 909 terabytes of data, and selected cloudless, high-quality views for every year since 1984.

Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab smoothed the views into seamless animations, and Time magazine built it all into a presentation that supplements the time-lapse animations with commentaries on climate change, urban growth and the other trends that are transforming the planet.

"I've been chiseling away at this project over the last 11 months, and am in awe of the folks who helped this come together in ways I could never have conceived on my own. Some very bright minds figured out how to make the biggest video frames ever constructed, equivalent to 900,000 HD TVs next to one another," Jonathan Woods, the Time project's executive producer (and a former colleague at msnbc.com), said in an email.

Google Earth is also hosting the Timelapse zoomable map. "Much like the iconic image of Earth from the Apollo 17 mission — which had a profound effect on many of us — this time-lapse map is not only fascinating to explore, but we also hope it can inform the global community's thinking about how we live on our planet and the policies that will guide us in the future," Moore said.

When it comes to telling the story of our changing planet, one time-lapse animation is worth a thousand words. But there's more to tell. Find out more about the trends illustrated in the seven animated images you see here:

Columbia Glacier: Alaska's retreating ice reveals how climate change is changing Earth's surface.

Dubai coastal expansion: New islands are sprouting along Dubai's coastline as part of a $14 billion land reclamation effort, arguably the largest project of its kind.

Irrigation in Saudi Arabia: Agriculture amid the deserts of Arabia? It's a growing concern, thanks to huge irrigation projects that take advantage of underground rivers and lakes. The water won't last, though: Hydrologists estimate that it'll be economical to pump water for only about 50 years. 

Lake Urmia drying up: Iran's great salt lake is not as great as it was, and the reason for that is in dispute. The Iranian government blames climate change and drought, while critics blame the dams that have been built around the lake.

Brazilian Amazon deforestation: Satellite imagery documents the loss of Amazonian forest land in Brazil due to road-building, logging and agricultural clearing.

Las Vegas urban growth: What sprawls in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas. Landsat pictures reveal how urban development has spread out around Nevada's biggest city over the decades.

Wyoming coal mining: The Black Thunder mine in Wyoming's Powder River Basin ranks as the largest single coal mining complex in the world, according to Arch Coal, its operator. Satellite imagery shows how the mine has spread out over the decades.

More time-lapse videos:

• One World Trade Center rises
• Shuttle Endeavour traverses L.A.
• Time-lapse gallery from Photoblog

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Greatest solar eclipse hits

Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis

See stunning images from past solar eclipses going back to the 1920s.

Launch slideshow

If you can't make it to the South Pacific's eclipse zone in time to watch the sun turn into a "ring of fire" on Thursday, you can still get in on the spectacle online.

The annular solar eclipse begins at 6:30 p.m. ET (22:30 GMT) in western Australia. Over the course of several hours, the moon's shadow will sweep across Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Pacific from east to west, fading into the sunset off the coast of South America.

Because of the relative position of moon, sun and Earth, the moon can't cover the sun's disk completely. For observers who are situated within a strip of Earth's surface that measures 100 to 140 miles (171 to 225 kilometers) wide and thousands of miles long, only the outer edge of the sun will remain uncovered. That's what produces the eerie ring of fire.

The sight will be much like what was visible during last May's annular solar eclipse, and the course of the eclipse will be similar to the Pacific path that was taken by the moon's shadow during last November's total solar eclipse.

If you are in the zone for the ring of fire, be careful: Even that slim ring of sunshine packs enough of a punch to burn your eyes, and you'll need to take precautions. Those precautions can take the form of eclipse-viewing glasses or filters, or pinhole-camera rigs that let you view the eclipse indirectly.

Caution should be the watchword as well for those who can observe the eclipse's partial phase from a wide swath of the Pacific, ranging from New Zealand to Indonesia and Hawaii, as shown in the animation below. NASA's Eclipse website provides further details, including precise time schedules for the eclipse in a variety of locales.

If you're entirely outside the eclipse zone, you won't be so sorely tempted to gaze at the sun. Instead, you can enjoy totally safe views of the eclipse online. Click on the links below for a few of the options:

Slooh Space Camera: Slooh's coverage begins at 5:30 p.m. ET, during the partial phase that leads up to annularity. Slooh's team will provide the commentary for live video feeds from Tennant Creek, Cape Melville National Park and Cairns in Australia. The show also will feature occasional shots of the unsullied sun from Arizona's Prescott Observatory. You can use a Web browser or Slooh's iPad app to tune in.

Coca-Cola Space Science Center: The Georgia-based center will provide a live video feed from Australia's Cape York starting at 5 p.m. ET.

Amateur webcams: Australian skywatcher Gerard Lazarus is gearing up to capture live video of the eclipse, and there may be other on-the-fly feeds. Follow the Twitter hashtag #ASE2013 for updates. 

Television Down Under: The eclipse is likely to make news Down Under, and it's worth checking Sky News Australia and 3News in New Zealand for TV coverage.

If you miss it: Check SpaceWeather.com, Space.com and Universe Today for images of the eclipse after it takes place. You'll also want to keep tabs on Geoff Sims (@beyond_beneath) and Colin Legg (@colinleggphoto) on Twitter.

If you catch it: Got pictures? Please feel free to share 'em with us via NBCNews.com's FirstPerson photo upload page, and we'll pass along a selection of eclipse pics.

More about the eclipse:

• All about the 'ring of fire' eclipse
• Australia to see second solar eclipse in six months
• Flash interactive: What causes a solar eclipse?

Tip o' the Log to Michael Zeiler and Amanda Bauer for eclipse tips.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

"Astronaut Abby" is at the controls of a social-media machine that is launching the 15-year-old from Minnesota to Kazakhstan this month for the liftoff of the International Space Station's next crew — and if Facebook and Twitter count for anything, it just might get her to Mars someday.

Abigail Harrison says she's always dreamed of being the first astronaut to set foot on the Red Planet, and she sees her campaign to get involved in space station outreach as one giant leap toward that target. 

She has enlisted one of the crew members, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano, as her mentor and orbital pen pal. Her Rockethub crowdfunding campaign has passed the $20,000 mark and is shooting for a goal of $35,000 for travel and outreach. As the May 28 date for Parmitano's launch approaches, she's juggling radio interviews, Facebook updates, Twitter thank-you notes, public appearances ... and oh, that's right: high school.

"You can run yourself ragged on a campaign like this," Harrison, a sophomore at South High School in Minneapolis, told NBC News. "Last time I checked, I have seven A's this quarter. It's been harder to keep my grades up. I don't have as much free time to relax."

Somehow, Astronaut Abby manages. It doesn't hurt that her mom is a social-media maven who runs a marketing agency as @SocialNicole. "My mom has been an amazing resource to answer my questions and help me learn things during this campaign that I wouldn't have been able to learn myself," Harrison said. She also has corporate sponsors, graphic designers and public relations types on her side to keep the mission on track. But her key space connection is with Parmitano — and for that, Harrison has her mom and social media to thank.

The teenager has been an avid space fan since she was 6 or so. Two years ago, she and her mother traveled to NASA's Kennedy Space Center to see the final launch of the shuttle Endeavour. @SocialNicole participated in the mission's Tweetup, which gave a select group of Twitter users the opportunity to meet with NASA officials and astronauts, including Parmitano. She had a chat with the Italian, talked up her daughter and said she hoped they'd meet someday.

"Coming back through the airport, my mom and I turn around at security, and Luca was standing right behind us," Abby recalled. That was the beginning of a friendship that resulted in the #SoyuzAdventure outreach project.

"I will mentor you now," Parmitano told her, "and someday I will train you for your mission to Mars."

Harrison will be attending the Soyuz launch at Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan as Parmitano's guest, and she plans to send back dispatches about her travels. During Parmitano's six-month mission on the space station, Astronaut Abby will be checking in on a daily basis as the astronaut's "Earth Liaison." She'll pass along what she finds out via email blasts, blog items, Facebook updates, Twitter tweets and maybe even the occasional Google+ Hangout.

The contributions she's received so far will pay for the trip to Baikonur, and she'll scale her education and outreach efforts to fit her funding.

This may not sound like the traditional path toward an astronaut career, but maybe it's the wave of the future. "It's definitely been a learning process to step away from the idea that being an astronaut is more than just math and science," Harrison said. She still has a passion for science — particularly for biology and geology. And she still has a passion to be among the first to walk on Mars. "I have a saying, 'Mars or Bust, 2030,'" she said. But she also has a passion for social interaction, and she has learned from Parmitano to work that into her career plans as well.

"Do what you love, not what you think NASA is looking for," she quoted her mentor as saying, "because NASA is looking for people who are passionate about what they do."

In 2030, Astronaut Abby will be 32 years old — which is how old Sally Ride was when she became America's first woman in space. That sounds just about right. 

More about students and space:

• NASA to launch student-built radiation shield
• Mars project is a whole new world for kids
• Students help NASA control robots from space

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Space Warps Collaboration

The green crosshairs pinpoint a gravitational lens lurking in an astronomical image.

Think you can find space warps? Astronomers have recruited thousands of citizen scientists to look for exoplanets, galaxies, moon craters and other cosmic curiosities — and now they need your help to go after one of the weirdest phenomena in space-time: gravitational lenses.

The Space Warps website gives Internet users the opportunity to sift through telescope images and spot galaxies so massive they bend the light rays that pass near them, like a lens. The venture could help crack some of the secrets of dark matter, the mysterious cosmic stuff that is more plentiful than the ordinary matter we see around us.

"Not only do space warps act like lenses, magnifying the distant galaxies behind them, but we can also use the light they distort to weigh them, helping us to figure out how much dark matter they contain and how it’s distributed," Oxford University physicist Phil Marshall, one of the leaders of the Space Warps research team, said in Wednesday's kickoff announcement.  "Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions about galaxies, including how many very low-mass stars such as brown dwarfs — which aren’t bright enough to detect directly in many observations — are lurking in distant galaxies."

Space Warps is the latest gem in Zooniverse's constellation of online citizen-science ventures — a constellation that also includes Planet Hunters, Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo and much, much more. The warp-hunting effort follows the model set by those other projects: Participants are given online training exercises to sharpen their lens-spotting skills, and then they're set loose to check sky survey images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.

"Computer algorithms have already scanned the images from the CFHT survey, but there are likely to be many more space warps that the algorithms have missed. Realistic simulated space warps are dropped into some images to train the volunteers how to spot them, and reassure people that they are on the right track,’ said Anupreeta More, project co-leader from Kavli IPMU in Tokyo.

Galaxy Zoo already has demonstrated that human eyes and brains are much better than automated computer software when it comes to recognizing the subtle characteristics of astronomical phenomena. Dozens of scientific papers have been spun off from Galaxy Zoo searches — including reports on the headline-grabbing blob of green gas known as "Hanny's Voorwerp."

Space Warps could well uncover similar curiosities. Warp-hunters will be able to discuss their finds with each other and with experts on the project's online forum, and even create computer models of their discoveries. A list of gravitational lenses will be published for amateurs and professionals to investigate further.  

"Even if individual visitors only spend a few minutes glancing over 40 or so images each, that's really helpful to our research — we only need a handful of people to spot something in an image for us to say that it's worth investigating," said Oxford's Aprajita Verma, another leader of the Space Warps team.

So what are you waiting for?

More about gravitational lenses:

• Cosmic lenses find farthest galaxy yet
• Crazy cosmic lens focuses on dark matter
• Dark energy illuminated by cosmic lens

The Space Warps collaboration currently includes Phil Marshall, Aprajita Verma, Matthias Tecza, Chris Lintott, Rob Simpson (University of Oxford), Anupreeta More, Surhud More (Kavli IPMU), Amit Kapadia, Kelly Borden, David Miller, Arfon Smith (Adler Planetarium), Jean-Paul Kneib (EPFL Lausanne), Rafael Kueng, Prasenjit Saha (University of Zurich), and citizen scientists Elisabeth Baeten, Claude Cornen, Cecile Faure, Thomas Jennings, Stuart Lowe, Christine Macmillan, Julianne Wilcox and Layne Wright. Organizers say it is about to get a lot bigger.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Almost a third of America's honeybee colonies bit the dust last winter, according to a bellwether survey of bee health. But the deaths didn't fit the typical pattern for colony collapse disorder, the mysterious malady that wipes out bunches of bees all at once. Instead, researchers suggest that last summer's drought and other common-sense factors were to blame.

The annual survey of beekeepers, conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership and the Apiary Inspectors of America, found that 31.1 percent of the colonies were lost over the winter of 2012-2013. That compares with a loss of 22 percent during the previous winter, which was exceptionally mild. It's also slightly higher than the six-year average of 30.5 percent in colony losses.

The past winter's bee death rate was roughly as high as it was during the winter of 2006-2007 — when colony collapse disorder, or CCD, was at its peak. But this time, most colonies "dwindled away rather than suffering from the sudden onset of CCD," Jeff Pettis, a U.S. Department of Agriculture bee expert who worked on the survey, said in a news release announcing the results.

University of Maryland entomologist Dennis vanEnglesdorp, who directs the Bee Informed Partnership, listed several likely causes for last winter's spike. One prime reason is the drought that swept over the Midwest last year. "When there's a drought, the bees are in poor shape with the food," California beekeeper Randy Oliver told NBC News in March.

Honeybees may have had to rely on irrigated crops rather than wildflowers for their nectar, which could have increased their exposure to pesticides, vanEnglesdorp said. He said last year's rising corn prices led farmers to replace prairie and shrubs with cornfields, further limiting the bees' foraging areas. And for part of the year, beekeepers lacked an effective treatment for Varroa mites, a type of bee parasite that was cited last week as the biggest factor behind the nation's bee die-off.

VanEnglesdorp said all these factors left bee colonies in a weakened state for the tough winter of 2012-2013. He said the beekeepers who took their hives to California in February to pollinate almond trees suffered especially high losses. Nearly 20 percent of those beekeepers said they lost 50 percent or more of their colonies over the winter.

Pettis noted that the survey stopped tracking losses at the end of April. As a result, "the 31 percent figure likely underrepresents the losses, as we saw many weak colonies that were not actually dead," he said.

Beekeepers rebuild their colonies in the spring, so a 31.1 percent loss rate isn't quite as catastrophic as it sounds. Nevertheless, vanEngelsdorp said high winter losses are changing the way commercial beekeeping is done. "All the money you're going to make in honey goes to replacing dead colonies and keeping your colonies alive," he said. "Any money you make [as profit] will be from pollination."

More about the bees:

• Die-off blamed on combination of causes
• EPA steps up pesticide review
• NBC News archive on the bee crisis

The winter colony loss survey was funded by USDA. The 6,287 U.S. beekeepers who responded to the survey managed nearly 600,000 bee colonies at the start of the survey period, or about 23 percent of the country's estimated 2.6 million colonies. A complete analysis of the survey data will be published later this year.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

UWA

The University of Western Australia's Monica Gagliano studies how plants communicate with each other.

Studies show that basil gives a boost to chili peppers, while fennel is a real bummer. The effect has been seen even when the plants are sealed off from each other with sheets of black plastic. So does that mean that the plants are "talking" to each other through subtle vibrations? That's the kind of talk that sparks a debate — not between the plants, but between humans.

The latest study, reported in the open-access journal BMC Ecology, looked at potential communication between basil plants and chili pepper seeds. It's one of a series of experiments conducted by Monica Gagliano and Michael Renton of the University of Western Australia.

"Our results show that plants are able to positively influence growth of seeds by some as-yet unknown mechanism," Gagliano said in a news release from BioMed Central, the journal's publisher. "Bad neighbors, such as fennel, prevent chili seed germination in the same way."

Fennel plants release chemicals into the air and soil that are detrimental to most other plants, including chili peppers. Last year, Gagliano and her colleagues set up mini-gardens to study the interaction between the plants more closely. They were surprised to find that chili seeds germinated more quickly when the fennel plant was sealed off with plastic to block the transfer of those nasty chemicals. It was almost as if the baby chilis sensed that a villainous plant was nearby, and grew up faster so they'd have a better chance of fending off the fennel.

The new study looks at the flip side of plant interaction: Unlike fennel, basil is a "good neighbor" for chili plants because basil plants release chemicals that discourage weed growth. Gagliano and her colleagues found that to be the case for chili seedlings. The seeds germinated at a higher rate, even if the basil plant was sealed off with the black plastic. That led Gagliano and Renton to conclude that the seeds could still sense the presence of a friendly plant when they couldn't get the standard chemical signals.

How could this be?

"We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell which allow rapid communication between nearby plants," Gagliano said in the news release.

That surmise seems to fit with other findings on plant communication. Corn roots, for example, give off regular clicking sounds in the range of 220Hz (which corresponds to an A below middle C). Gagliano and her colleagues found that when young corn roots are suspended in water, they tend to lean toward the source of a continuous 220Hz tone transmitted through the water. The researchers suggested that acoustic signals could knit plants into an underground network of friends and foes.

But as Gagliano points out, no one has yet identified the precise mechanism by which one plant hears what another plant is saying. That's one of the reasons why other researchers haven't wholeheartedly embraced the idea that plants are talking to each other.

"Although the idea of plants communicating by sound is intriguing, there is still a long way to go before we know whether, and if so to whom, the woods sing!" the University of Leiden's Carel ten Cate wrote last December in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Duke University's Dan Johnson, who is studying how trees respond to drought, said it's "too early to tell" whether plants truly respond to each other's sounds.

"We have been detecting these acoustic signals for almost 50 years," Johnson told NBC News. "The idea of using those signals for communication is incredibly interesting, and there is potentially some growing support for it. But we're a good ways away from strong support for acoustic signaling between plants. ... I'm glad that somebody's working on it, but I think it's too early to say."

More about plant communication:

• Hear that sound? That's a thirsty tree
• Listen up: This is your plant talking!
• Plant uses sound to attract bats
• Flowers and bees have electrifying discussions

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A mosaic of images captured by NASA's Mars Curiosity rover on Sol 262 of its mission on Mars (May 2) shows its robotic arm in the foreground and Mount Sharp in the background. Two drill holes can be seen on the surface of the bedrock visible below the robotic arm's turret.

NASA's Curiosity rover is back at work in Yellowknife Bay, a rocky area inside Mars' Gale Crater — and if it takes good care of itself, it just might still be at work when humans hit the Red Planet.

At least that's the sentiment voiced by Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, during this week's Humans to Mars Summit in Washington. "I anticipate the first astronaut we send can go and shake Curiosity's hand," he told Monday's audience at George Washington University. If that astronaut is able to come within hand-shaking distance, the gesture would serve as a thank-you for years of service by the nuclear-powered robot, Meyer said.

Last week, Curiosity resumed contact with controllers back at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after a weeks-long gap that was scheduled due to solar interference — and JPL has just finished upgrading the rover's software.

Images sent back on May 2 show the rover's robotic arm and its instrument-laden turret poised over Yellowknife Bay's bedrock. Scientist-writer Ken Kremer and his Italian colleague, Marco Di Lorenzo, assembled 13 images ("a Martian baker's dozen") into the sepia-toned panorama you see above.

"She's back and flexing!" Kremer wrote in an email. 

Within a week or so, the rover will be drilling into Martian bedrock to flesh out its scientific findings about the habitability of ancient Mars. Then it'll start heading toward Mount Sharp (a.k.a. Aeolis Mons), a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in Gale Crater. Scientists are hoping that the layers of rock on that mountainside have recorded billions of years' worth of geological changes.

Because Curiosity is powered by a plutonium-fueled radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the rover could keep going for decades — assuming that there aren't any mechanical breakdowns, of course. That's what fuels Meyer's hope that there'll be a human-machine handshake someday.

More than 70 percent of Americans are confident that humans will go to Mars by 2033, according to a survey conducted in February by Phillips & Company for the Boeing Co. and Explore Mars, the nonprofit group sponsoring this week's summit. But one of the summit's headliners, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, said that sending astronauts to Mars can't be done without technological innovation and financial support.

"I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready," The Washington Post quoted Bolden as saying. "I don’t have the capability to do it. NASA doesn’t have the capability to do that right now. But we’re on a path to be able to do it in the 2030s."

Will humans ever shake Curiosity's hand? When? Register your opinion in our unscientific survey above, and voice your views in the comment section below.

More about sending humans to Mars:

• Thousands want to take one-way trip to Mars
• Mars flyby in 2018? It's so crazy it just might work
• NBC News archive on Mars

You can follow the Humans to Mars Summit via streaming video. Check out Explore Mars' channel on Livestream for on-demand videos from Monday's sessions, plus live coverage of Tuesday's sessions.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Return of the cicada

Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast prepares for an invasion.

Launch slideshow

Backyard bug-watchers are seeing the winged bugs known as cicadas come out of their holes in New Jersey and North Carolina after 17 years of underground slumber — and scientists say a full-scale outbreak may not be far behind.

"There are some pretty convincing reports coming out," John Cooley, an expert on cicadas at the University of Connecticut, told NBC News. "It's fair to say it's starting, but it's still in the very early stages. It certainly isn't going all crazy. ... When it really happens, it's not going to be like this. It's going to be shovel loads of cicadas."

Cooley maintains one of the most closely watched websites for this spring's emergence, Magicicada.org. Little bug logos are popping up on different areas of Magicicada's interactive map, which means a smattering of Internet users are seeing cicadas coming out of the ground. In some cases, they're even seeing the bugs crawling around as adults.

Cooley, however, says that we ain't seen nothing yet. "When it really happens, we expect that website will just light up," he said.

The outlook is similar on other bug-watching sites — such as Radiolab's Cicada Tracker, which is encouraging listeners to put out their own soil-thermometer setups. Those readings are considered key leading indicators for cicada activity, because researchers have found that the bugs emerge en masse when the springtime soil temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius). A different temperature tracker set up by the Sutron information network for the Washington area suggests that the nation's capital still has a way to go before the cicadas come out.

Insects are expected to emerge by the billions on the East Coast, across an area stretching from North Carolina to Connecticut. This army of bugs, known as Brood II, spends 17 years feeding on plant roots underground. Sometime between late April and early June, depending on the weather, the insects burrow out of the ground as nymphs. The juveniles shed their outer skins, crawl up trees or buildings, and fly around to find their mates. The females lay their eggs, and then the adults die in droves. All this happens in the course of four to six weeks.

After another few weeks, a new generation of nymphs hatch from the eggs, drop to the ground, burrow into the soil and begin the next 17-year cycle.

Magicicada.org

An interactive map provided by Magicicada.org shows this spring's cicada sightings.

Ron Edmonds / AP

Red-eyed cicadas cluster on leaves in Annandale, VA., during the Brood X emergence of 2004. Like Brood II, Brood X comes out every 17 years - but the timing of the cycle is different.

Brood II is just one of several broods of 13-year and 17-year periodical cicadas: The last big bug outbreak featured Brood XIX, which created a huge buzz in Southern states in 2011. This year's emergence is expected to begin in the South as well, though that's not guaranteed.

"Our expectation has been that we would hear from folks in North Carolina first," said Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for the National Pest Management Association. However, the only cicada sighting she's actually been able to confirm was made in New Jersey. Although the insects tend to swarm in rural or suburban areas, there's a chance they could be sighted in urban enclaves such as New York's Central Park or the Bronx Zoo as well.

Cooley said he expected the pace of sightings to accelerate in the days ahead. "Within a week or so, it ought to really be going," he told NBC News. "Spring can't hold off forever."

When it comes, a cicada emergence can fill the skies with flying bugs, and fill the ears with a hum as loud as a jet engine or lawn mower. Those who have been through the full-frontal buzz say the experience can be disconcerting if you're not prepared for it. But cicadas are not considered a threat to humans. In fact, they can be quite delicious.

For true bug fans, the best response to the emergence is to lie back and enjoy it. "I'm looking forward to it," said Cornell University entomologist Cole Gilbert, who's expecting to catch the trailing edge of the Brood II outbreak in upstate New York. "I think it's pretty cool."

More about cicadas:

• Cicada invasion generates early buzz
• In death, cicadas boost plant life
• Tasty cicadas may sicken pets

Thanks to the rapid rise of crowdsourcing and social media, this year's event is sure to become the most tweeted cicada emergence in history: Cicada Mania suggests using the hashtag #BroodII for the 2013 outbreak, and #Cicadas for general cicada issues. If you want to see the Twitterverse from the cicadas' point of view, just follow @Brood_II. There's a Cicada Mania Facebook page for entomophiles. And if you're an entomophobe, you'll find kindred spirits on the "I Hate Cicadas!!!!!!" Facebook page.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" NBC News Science's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.