Twitter.com MarsPhoenix's Twitterings sound as if they're coming direct from the Red Planet.

You've been put on notice, Stephen Colbert! NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is hot on your heels in the online celebrity race. Just a few days after Sunday's touchdown in the Red Planet's north polar region, NASA's MarsPhoenix has attracted almost 10,000 Twitter fans, rivaling the Web-savvy comedian's legions on Twitterholic's leader board.

For those who are not yet tweeting, Twitter is a service that allow you to send and receive short text messages tailor-made for cell phones and other mobile devices. Many of its users think it's the greatest thing since ... well, since Facebook. Alpha-geek blogger Robert Scoble, for example, recently rhapsodized over how Twitter's legions kept tabs on this month's earthquake in China.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory latched onto Twitter long before the landing, when the public-affairs team was looking at ways to get the word out about Phoenix's progress.

"We do podcasts, we have a YouTube channel, and we recently started doing blogs," Veronica McGregor, JPL's media relations manager, told me today. "So we were discussing what we were going to do, and one of the newer members of the staff said, 'Why don't we try Twitter?'"

Perfect for the holiday
McGregor said the idea was perfect for Phoenix's landing, which was scheduled smack-dab in the middle of the Memorial Day weekend. Lots of folks would likely be away from their computers, but Twitter could help them follow the mission over their cell phones while they were at the backyard barbecue.

The first-person Twitterings gave Phoenix a personality all its own (his own? her own?). For example, during the preparations for landing, Phoenix told its fans that "my propellants have to be pressurized," and referred to the signal-relaying Mars Odyssey orbiter as "my buddy."

Any Twitter user can click on a button to start following the messages sent by any other user. On May 13, MarsPhoenix had 284 followers. On landing day, less than two weeks later, that number stood at 3,052.

McGregor thought that would be the end of the story. "We didn't really give any thought to what we were going to do after the landing," she said.

But Phoenix's rise was just beginning. On Memorial Day - the day after landing - the number of followers nearly doubled.

McGregor recalled that she had her Twitter service set up to give her an e-mail notification whenever MarsPhoenix gained a new follower. One day she went out to get a sandwich, and when she walked back to her desk, "my computer was ringing like a slot machine." By the time she disabled the notifications, more than 1,000 messages had flooded in.

Phoenix's agent
Although McGregor handles the Twitterings (as well as JPL's Facebook page), she prefers to think of herself as MarsPhoenix's earthbound agent. One of the beauties of the system is that she can forward questions from the tweeting crowd to the Phoenix mission team, and then post the answers from the experts. Prime time for message traffic is around midnight - especially now, when the main shift for Phoenix's mission operations is overnight.

That back-and-forth gave a big boost to the number of followers after the landing. "When people saw that Phoenix was answering their questions, it just got crazy," McGregor said.  

As of this writing, MarsPhoenix's followers number 9,329, putting MarsPhoenix at No. 30 on Twitterholic's Top 100 list.

Stephen Colbert, who capitalized on the social-networking trend himself when he sponsored a leatherback in the Great Turtle Race, currently ranks No. 26 with 10,524 followers. (Colbert was also behind one of the funniest pranks ever perpetrated on Wikipedia, and a hilarious Web video contest as well.)

NASA Watch's Keith Cowing says the space agency should be making more of a fuss over Phoenix's Twitter presence, but McGregor said she'll stick with the viral approach for now. "This is a Twitter audience," she told me. "I'm going to keep it pure and simple."

Phoenix's future
Phoenix may not reach the heady heights of the very top Twitter personalities (such as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has more than 34,000 followers and is third on Twitterholic's list). But JPL's Twitter experiment isn't really about the celebrity race. McGregor said she'll keep it going "as long as people keep asking those questions."

This latest Mars lander isn't designed to last as long as the twin Mars rovers - which are still at work in the planet's warmer climes, more than four years after they touched down. Phoenix could fade next week, or perhaps in three months, or perhaps next year when the north polar region goes into its deepest freeze.

Whenever the end comes, it will be up to McGregor and her colleagues to craft a farewell message to the lander's legions of followers ... in 140 characters or less.

"That'll be a tough one," she said.

How would you sum up Phoenix's mission so far in 140 characters? Feel free to chirp away below, or tune into Cosmic Log's tweets.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET May 31: On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog - or a Digg-fueled faux Colbert. One of the commenters notes below that StephenColbert's Twitter account has been outed as ... gasp ... not associated with the real Stephen Colbert or Comedy Central. Here's an explanation purportedly posted by the fake Colbert. Thus, StephenColbert's Twitterholic ranking isn't the truest measure of the Colbert Nation's potential pull. That doesn't take anything away from MarsPhoenix's impressive showing in the Twitterverse, however.

EIROforum / CERN A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector. Click on the image for a larger version.

Could an atom-smasher really create Armageddon? You can delve into the subject with some summer reading as well as a real-life court case.

The next month should see further action in the doomsday lawsuit filed in March - the one claiming that mini-black holes from Europe's Large Hadron Collider could destroy the world. The plaintiffs in the case, Luis Sancho and Walter Wagner, want the CERN particle-physics center to put the $8 billion project on hold until more questions about such a scenario (and others) are answered to their satisfaction.

The federal government (that is, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and DOE-supported Fermilab) is one of the defendants in the case, and it's been served with a summons that requires a response by June 24. Wagner relayed word that Europe's CERN particle-physics center, the other major defendant, was served as well this week.

However, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me today he wasn't aware that any papers had been served. "We haven't received anything as yet," he said.

Gillies said scientists have finished updating a safety report that concludes the particle collider poses no danger of destroying the world. That report is to be presented to the CERN Council next month, and would then be released to the public, he said.

Between now and then, you can get your fix of doomsday speculation by reading Douglas Preston's "Blasphemy," this month's selection for the Cosmic Log Used-Book Club. The CLUB Club focuses on books with cosmic themes that should be available via secondhand-book sellers or your local library - and "Blasphemy" certainly fills the bill on the cosmic front.

The plot revolves (heh, heh) around a fictional particle accelerator that's even bigger than the Large Hadron Collider, built into a huge coal mine on land leased from the Navajos in Arizona. It pits a Svengali-like physicist and his loyal researchers against a doomsaying televangelist and his loyal acolytes, with a grizzled ex-CIA ex-monk in the middle.

It's not often that you come across a book that blends a murder mystery, a love story and a scientific thriller with visions of God (really!?) and an apocalyptic climax of biblical proportions.  But "Blasphemy" manages to put all that together, while also giving you a glimpse at what a proton accelerator actually does.

If you listen to the audio version, don't miss the after-the-book interview with Preston, conducted by Scientific American's John Rennie. You can hear the interview by clicking on a link from this Web page.

Do you have your own suggestions for summertime scientific pot-boilers? Herman Wouk's "A Hole in Texas," perhaps? Feel free to add your recommendations as comments below. If your choice becomes a CLUB Club selection, I'll send you a poster featuring cartoonist Roz Chast's particle art for Symmetry magazine.

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• Visit Carnival of Space 56 ... and RLV / Space Transport News 

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope bears witness this week to two stellar hauntings - bizarre and beautiful phenomena sparked by dead giant stars.

First, Spitzer trained its infrared eye on the pulsing, undead corpse of a strongly magnetic star called SGR 1900+14 - revealing a bizarre ring of dusty material that couldn't be seen in visible wavelengths. Then, just today, Spitzer's scientists reported on the ghostly echoes of light emanating from Cassiopeia A, a supernova that blew up 300 years ago.

The report on the ring appears in today's issue of the journal Nature, but is based on a review of readings from Spitzer going back almost five years.

SGR 1900+14 has been an object of interest since 1998, when the star blew up, sending a powerful blast of gamma rays in Earth's direction. What's left behind is something known as a magnetar - a dead star that slowly pulsates with X-rays and hums with a strong magnetic field.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

This image shows a ghostly ring extending seven light-years across around the corpse of a massive star called SGR 1900+14.

"The universe is a big place, and weird things can happen," the Nature paper's lead author, Stefanie Wachter of NASA's Spitzer Space Science Center, said in a news release issued Wednesday. "I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that's when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we'd never seen before."

Wachter and her colleagues surmise that the ring was created during the blast: The magnetar's crusty surface might have cracked and sent out a flare so strong that it blasted away at a nearby cloud of dust, leaving an oblong ring behind that measures about seven light-years in its widest dimension.

"It's as if the magnetar became a huge flaming torch and obliterated the dust around it, creating a massive cavity," said Chryssa Kouveliotou, senior astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and a co-author of the paper. "Then the stars nearby lit up a ring of fire around the dead star, marking it for eternity."

The scientists believe the ring isn't being lit up by the magnetar itself, but instead by radiation from nearby massive stars.

The effect may be beautiful, but a magnetar's gamma-ray burst is no walk in the park. In fact, some researchers believe the 1998 burst from SGR 1900+14 was one of Earth's closest brushes with doom. In their book "Rare Earth," astronomer Donald Browlee and paleontologist Peter Ward note that the blast occurred more than 20,000 light-years away - and yet, the radiation penetrated to within 30 miles of Earth's surface before dissipating, requiring the pre-emptive shutdown of two orbiting satellites.

"Had the magnetar in question been only 10,000 light-years away, the energy reaching Earth would have been four times stronger - perhaps strong enough to damage the ozone layer," they wrote. "Did this particular event sterilize worlds within a light-year or less? ... Perhaps life can flourish only in neighborhoods far from magnetars."

That goes for supernovae in general, for that matter. A supernova leaves a beautiful corpse, but you wouldn't want to be next to the star when it blows up.

Echoes from a supernova
Spitzer's other study of the week pays tribute to the long-lasting effects of a supernova - specifically, Cassiopeia A, which was in the record books as the Milky Way galaxy's youngest supernova remnant until this month.

Cass A is about 11,000 light-years away, and its supernova blast reached Earth in the year 1680. Scientists didn't think they'd be seeing anything more from that blast - but starting in 2005, they picked up on some curious upticks in the heat emanating from dusty clouds surrounding the dead star.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MPIA

Click for video: Infrared imagery from NASA's  Spitzer Space Telescope reveals "echoes" from  a supernova. Msnbc.com's Keva Andersen reports.

The scientists figured out that these were "infrared echoes" - caused when the radiation from the initial blast heated up the clouds and caused them to re-radiate in infrared wavelengths. Because the clouds are not in a direct line with the supernova's central star, the path taken by the echoing radiation is longer than the direct route, and as a result we're just now observing the glow.

Spitzer's infrared camera is perfectly suited to catch such echoes. The Spitzer team took the infrared readings and matched them up with faint echoes in visible-light wavelengths, captured by Japan's Subaru Telescope in Hawaii and other ground-based telescopes. These echoes were directly reflected off the surrounding clouds, like yodels reflected off an Alpine mountainside.

In Friday's issue of the journal Science, the researchers report that they were able to get enough observations from those echoes to analyze the spectrum of light from the original explosion, seen from Earth 300 years ago.

"The echoes of light we found around Cassiopeia A provide us with a time machine to go back and see its past," the study's lead author, Oliver Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in today's Spitzer news release.

The spectrum showed that Cassiopeia A was a red supergiant star that became a Type IIb supernova. That was something researchers never knew before.

"Cassiopeia A has been studied extensively with many telescopes over a wide range of wavelengths," said Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley, a supernova expert who was not affiliated with the study. "It is gratifying that we finally know what kind of star exploded so long ago."

NASA said the Type IIb determination could explain a longstanding mystery: A supernova that close should have registered as a noticeably bright star, but very few sightings of Cassiopeia A were recorded back in 1680. Why didn't more people notice the supernova?

"Type IIb supernovas fade quickly," said George Rieke of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a co-author of the Science study. "This, plus a few cloudy nights, might explain the historical enigma around Cassiopeia A."

In addition to Wachter and Kouveliotou, co-authors of the Nature paper about the magnetar include Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz of the University of California at Santa Cruz; V. Dwarkadas of the University of Chicago; J. Granot of the University of Hertfordshire; S.K. Patel of the Optical Sciences Corp.; and D. Figer of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

In addition to Krause and Rieke, co-authors of the Science paper about Cassiopeia A include Stephan Birkmann and Miwa Goto of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy; Tomonori Usuda and Takashi Hattori of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Hawaii; and Karl Misselt of the University of Arizona.

The World Science Festival had its maiden launch today in New York, with a grand sendoff from Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The kickoff also featured the announcement of the first Kavli Prizes for nanoscience, neuroscience and astrophysics - adding an extra dash of million-dollar pizazz.

For five days, the Big Apple is serving as the prime intersection of entertainment and science - not just for New Yorkers, but also for prominent out-of-town scientists such as MIT robotics whiz Cynthia Breazeal, genetics guru Francis Collins, telegenic British physicist Brian Cox and ... heck, I've just gotten to the C's. The VIP list also includes actors and singers, directors and dancers.

Scott Gries / Getty Images

Brian Greene is co-founder of the World Science Festival, which runs through June 1 in New York City.

The festival is the brainchild of television producer Tracy Day and Columbia University theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of the best-selling book "The Elegant Universe" and one of the few guys in physics who can make string theory sexy.

Greene has had well more than his 15 minutes of fame as an adept explainer of cosmic concepts - and his hope is that the festival will become an annual celebration of science, not only in New York, but across the country and the world.

On the eve of the festival's opening, Greene took a few minutes to discuss his vision for the festival and beyond:

Q: How is the science festival coming together?

Greene: The programming has come together extremely well. Such a wide range of voices will be heard at the festival, in a broad spectrum of formats. I think it's a real arena where people will experience science differently than they do in any other place.

Q: The whole point of this is to present science in a different way. Building on this idea of the 'arena,' do you see science as something that in this setting will be like … entertainment?

A: Well, I certainly hope that the events are at least in part entertaining, but it's not about entertainment per se. It's about communicating the core ideas of the wonder of science that has been developed over the last hundred years, 20 years, five years, in a way that people can take a step back and say, 'I really got that. I really understand what that's about, and it was so exciting I want to read more about it, and learn more about it.'

Our general philosophy is that, as we head into the 21st century, there are so many challenges and opportunities, from climate change to stem cells, genomic sequencing, nanotechnology, space travel, alternative energy - it's a long list of things that fundamentally rely upon science. To have a public that can make informed decisions, you need a public that is excited to grasp the underlying science. And that's what this is about.

Q: Some have argued that the frontier of science has become such an arcane subject – we're talking about extra dimensions in physics, or stem cells – subjects that are so removed from everyday reality, and this is one reason why there's such a problem with science literacy. That's why it's such a hard nut to crack …

A: I find that a reverse way of looking at it. To me, the very ideas you just mentioned – the possibility of extra dimensions, the potential utility of stem cells – that is the richest material for getting people excited about science, so long as it's communicated in a way that is accessible. I believe that all of these ideas are ones that can be communicated in a way that makes sense, and feels inspiring and compelling and at the same time educational.

Q: Are there new ways of presenting this information, or is it a case of going back to basic forms, such as the storytelling approach?

A: Certainly the storytelling approach, to my mind, is the most powerful. But of course it depends on how it's executed, and that's why the festival has put together a stellar team of journalists who have spent their careers in broadcast, bringing difficult nonfiction ideas to general audiences. Very few of them have ever applied those methods to science. So it's really just making use of a wealth of experience that has been brought to bear on other subjects, and focusing it upon science.

Q: Can you cite a case study that will help people visualize this approach?

A: For instance, Oliver Sacks is doing an event with the Abyssinian Baptist Church Choir, called "Music and the Brain." And the point is to have a discussion of how music affects us neurologically. But rather than just having Oliver Sacks describe this in words, or perhaps in pictures, we want the audience to experience it so that they'll be engulfed in this uplifting music - and with that experience, we'll then have a discussion of what actually is going on neurologically. So it's a far more potent way of getting across the idea. You experience what it is that's being discussed, as opposed to just having it discussed in the abstract.

Q: That almost sounds like what Leonard Bernstein did with his "Young People's Concerts."

A: Yes. I'm less familiar with that than Tracy Day, the festival's executive director, but she has mentioned that a few times. ...

I can give you a couple of other examples: There's an event called "Illuminating Genius," with [choreographer/dancer] Bill T. Jones and [artist] Matthew Ritchie, in conversation with the neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and Nancy Andreasen and David Eagleman. Here is a group of neuroscientists who have expertise in neuroimaging, who have spent time thinking about how creativity manifests itself in the brain. They'll have the creative artists there, one of whom has had a brain scan, and they'll analyze the way in which the creative impulse these people are known for manifests itself physically in the architecture of their brains.

Another program is one that I'm doing on quantum physics. I'm trying to get across the key idea of quantum physics, that the world evolves according to rules that are fundamentally probabilistic. I'll use animation to get that idea across. But when I get to the key idea, the light on the stage will shift to a dance troupe that has choreographed a 90-second piece that is an embodiment of probability in human movement.

They have a big cube, a big die that they throw back and forth as they're dancing. Every so often it drops to the ground, and based on which face comes up, that determines how the dance proceeds from that point. So the audience can really see probability at work, after hearing about probability being injected into the fundamental laws of physics.

In summary, there are a lot of elements that aim to reach the person more than just through their head.

Q: Do you feel like you're just preaching to the converted? These are people who are energized to seek out science, but there's a larger problem having to do with people who are not keyed into the scientific endeavor at all, and don't wish to be, and base their views on unscientific ideas that they've grown up with?

A: I guess the way I would say it is that we aim to create new avenues of entry into science,  for the person who wouldn't normally go to a science event.  So the person who wouldn't go to a science event but loves the Abyssinian Choir will go to this event for the music, but they will leave with an understanding of some of the science.

So the hope certainly is that by having unusual pairings of scientists and artists, you bring in people who are coming in for the art and leaving with the science.

We're also bringing in the kids, through the youth and family program. They're following a similar philosophy. Disney is coming and doing the science of the imagination. The kids who love pyrotechnics and virtual reality and robotics, roller coasters, things of that sort, will come for that as the draw, but then the program takes them behind the scenes and reveals the science. The science of sports, that's a similar program. Kids come in to watch NBA stars throw hoops, but then you have scientists who can speak to the underlying ideas of mechanics, physics, and to the training regimen for these great athletes.

So in this way we are setting the groundwork for an event year by year that can reach further and further away from the "converted."

Q: It's been a rough few years for science, and there's been a lot of controversy over how much of a role science has played in public policy. Do you feel as if a corner has been turned? Is the festival one step along the way?

A: I definitely do feel the festival is one step along the way. With a new administration, there's a good chance that the role of science in the public sphere will shift dramatically. And therefore the time is ripe to have a celebration that perhaps starts in New York but has a ripple effect. I hope in future years that there will be allied festivals at the same time around the country.

We've already been contacted by people who want to run such festivals in alliance with the New York event. There's a real capacity to have a week focusing each year on science, that will itself infuse the public sphere with these ideas, so that people will be apt to think in these terms.

What bright ideas do you have for science outreach? Been to any good scientific cafes lately? Feel free to add your comments below. 

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NASA / JPL-Caltech / UA / Lockheed Martin Put on your red-blue glasses and take a look at this artist's conception of Phoenix Mars Lander to get a 3-D effect. Click on the image for a larger view.

Time to whip out those red-blue glasses: Phoenix Mars Lander, which touched down on the Red Planet, is already sending back black-and-white images in stereo. If you're set up with 3-D specs - and who isn't? - it's the next best thing to being there.

The first images stay relatively close to home, revealing what's right in front of the lander. One widely distributed picture shows one of the lander's three legs extending down to the surface, with disturbed soil and pebbles surrounding it. (Here are versions from Kevin Baird's Flickr collection, The Martian Chronicles blog and Mars Unearthed. Baird also offers a video blog post tracing the process.)

Another stereo photo, showing shadows and rocks around the lander, is available from the Phoenix Web site at the University of Arizona. The rough-cut picture looks stretched out because it's designed for cylindrical-perspective projection, suitable for viewing as a partial 360-degree panorama. (Here's a nicer detail shot from HazyHills.com.)

This is just the start of what should be a fine collection of anaglyphs - that is, two-toned images that are designed for easy viewing through cheap 3-D glasses. What's that? You don't have your red-blue glasses yet? They're ridiculously easy to find at novelty stores or on the Web. You can even make your own glasses - and if you're feeling adventurous, you can take the spacecraft stereo pairs and create your own 3-D pictures.

Phoenix isn't the first Mars probe to send back stereo pairs. HazyHills offers about 70 stereo pairs from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, while Mars Unearthed has scores of lovely anaglyphs from the rovers as well as from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Express. Michael Lyle has automated the process for creating 3-D versions of rover imagery, often with impressive (if not exactly user-friendly) results.

Looking for more 3-D thrills? Check out this NASA page, which brings together more than 200 anaglyphs from space missions ranging from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini probe to the sun-watching (and aptly named) STEREO satellite. Comet Wild 2 looks like it's coming straight for you in this 3-D picture from the Stardust probe, created by Calvin Hamilton.

Have you come across more killer 3-D views from space? Are you actually making them? Send along the links to your favorites.

Update for 8:45 p.m. ET: The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla presents a before-and-after animation showing how Phoenix Mars Lander has changed the Martian landscape. You'll also find images that point out the lander's backshell and parachute from the air and from the ground. How cool is that?

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Junying Yu / Univ. of Wisc.

Skin cells can be modified to create cells that seem as versatile as embryonic stem cells.

Someday, researchers will be able to order up living human cells afflicted with the genetic flaw they need to study. Gene-splicers will be able to correct the flawed code that causes diseases. And if you're struggling with one of those diseases yourself, your doctor just might be able to fix you, using semi-tailor-made cells ordered from a biobank. The whole process would be almost as easy as drawing blood from a blood banks today.

Such are the breakthroughs that could spring from future efforts to create stockpiles of reprogrammed human cells.

"Banking cells sounds pretty boring and trivial," said cardiologist Timothy Kamp, co-director of the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center in Madison. "But it turns out that there is a lot of hard work that goes into that, to actually guarantee that you have high-quality, reproducible lots of cells."

Birth of a super-cell
The cells are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells. Last November, research groups in Japan and the United States announced that they had converted ordinary human skin cells into super-cells that appeared to be as versatile as embryonic stem cells, with the ability to transform themselves into virtually any tissue in the body.

For years, embryonic stem cells have been held up as the gold standard in regenerative medicine. By massaging such cells in just the right way, doctors could create new cardiac cells for faulty hearts, new neurons for broken spinal cords, new pancreatic cells for diabetics - the list goes on and on. But the cells have to be harvested from human embryos, which raises ethical as well as medical questions.

If IPS cells can be made safely, and if they truly do the same things that embryonic stem cells can do, researchers could theoretically take a skin sample from someone who had a particular genetic disease and manufacture an unlimited supply of cells that manifested that disease. That would open up a promising path to future cures.

From the lab to the clinic
The first step would be to study the living tissue in the lab, to find out how it responds to various therapies and genetic tweaking.

"I think we'll get things out of cells in a dish faster than putting cells in people," Kamp said.

He envisioned a repository for IPS cells that manifest genetic conditions ranging from sickle-cell anemia to a predisposition for bad drug reactions.

For example, Kamp is interested in the factors that contribute to a type of potentially fatal heart condition known as long-QT syndrome. Studying heart cells from a wide range of individuals with an inherited disposition for the syndrome could tell researchers which people are more vulnerable than others - or which ones might suffer an attack by taking a particular drug. (A decade ago, the allergy drug Seldane and some other antihistamines were banned from the U.S. market because of such a linkage.)

An IPS cell bank could be the source of heart cells for such studies, and many others besides. The result could be new drugs (or old drugs, perhaps like Seldane) that are suited to your genetic makeup.

Farther down the line, researchers could find ways to tweak the DNA in IPS cells to fix genetic flaws and create healthy tissue tailor-made for you. For example, UW-Madison dermatologist Joyce Teng is already looking into whether cells can be tweaked to fix rare genetic skin condition known as ichthyosis, Kamp said.

Cell transplantation has been applied to a wide range of maladies - including heart disease - but some diseases will be more suited to cell therapy than others.

"There are a number of fairly rare diseases that might end up being some of the first headline successes, because they're terrible diseases wtih pretty devastating shortening of life expectancy ... and also the genetics have been well-studied," he said. "The more complex diseases might take a little more work."

The road ahead
In fact, there's a lot more work that needs to be done to clear the way for IPS cell banks.

First, scientists have to find out whether the reprogrammed cells are actually the functional equivalent of embryonic stem cells. Kamp and his colleagues are checking into that question for heart cells, by attaching tiny electrodes to the cells and measuring their electrical function.

"So far, the properties look similar, but that's not really the end of the story," Kamp said. "I think you're going to find an explosion of literature in the next year."

Other researchers have undertaken similar experiments using neurons, blood cells and other tissue types spawned by IPS cells.

Scientists also have to figure out safer methods for creating IPS cells from skin cells. Currently, genetic factors have to be introduced into the cells using retroviruses - which is not considered safe enough for transplantation into humans.

It will take a lot of samples to build an IPS cell bank. Kamp said many of the lines could be reprogrammed using cells held by other biobanks, such as the Coriell Institute for Medical Research as well as UW's own National Stem Cell Bank. Other disease-specific lines might have to come from new donors, however.

Who's in the banking business?
Then there's the issue of funding: UW's institute isn't the only organization interested in setting up an IPS cell bank. Kyoto University's Shinya Yamanaka, the stem-cell researcher who independently created IPS cells last year, has also called for the establishment of such a bank. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Japanese government backs the idea.

Although Kamp doesn't know specifically what other research groups in the United States are working on, he knows there's lots of interest in the cell-bank idea.

"Everybody's plans are not well-designed and not public knowledge at this point," he said. "I expect the NIH [National Institutes of Health] will support some of this banking in the long term, but it will take some time."

Theoretically, people could "bank" their cells for conversion into IPS cells, just as an increasing number of families bank newborns' umbilical-cord blood as a stem-cell insurance policy. But the IPS conversion process is so expensive that Kamp doesn't think such a scenario is realistic.

"We're already spending 16 percent of our gross domestic product on health care," he said. "Developing your own stem-cell line for every patient? I don't think that's going to lower the cost of health care."

The more likely scenario is that your doctor would go to the cell bank and pick out the IPS cell type that was the closest genetic match - following the medical model set for bone marrow transplants (which is one of the oldest forms of stem-cell therapy).

"I expect we're going to get smarter and smarter as far as the issue of immune rejection goes," he said.

Kamp emphasized that these are only the early days of the IPS cell revolution. After all, the first successes with human cells were reported just six months ago. Medical researchers haven't yet figured out precisely how to define high-quality cells, let alone how to make them reliably and efficiently. But Kamp is confident that things will be getting a lot more interesting in the months and years ahead.

"There are a lot of surprises around every corner," he said. "That's part of the fun."

Update for 2:10 p.m. ET May 24: I wanted to address an issue that usually comes up when discussing human embryonic stem cells: that no cures have become available using such cells, while treatments that rely on other types of stem cells (for example, adult stem cells) have been available for some time. Virtually every researcher I've spoken with over the years has said that we can't afford to overlook any avenue to stem cell therapies, including the less versatile adult cells as well as cells derived from cord blood and other sources.

However, the reason why embryonic stem cell therapies aren't as far along is not because they're less promising. They're more promising, based on animal studies. The problem is that the field is so controversial that regulators and investors are moving much more slowly.

Last week's news is a case in point: The Food and Drug Administration has put the first clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells on hold, and advisers have said that such trials will have to be held to more stringent standards than other, more conventional clinical trials.

Part of that is because of safety concerns: For example, animal-derived biological factors are used even for culturing human embryonic stem cells. Some have voiced fear that the therapies could give rise to tumors, although the company involved in last week's development, Geron, says that hasn't happened in its animal studies.

Will the situation change with the next administration in the White House? That's hard to tell, and some researchers in the field worry that tighter budgets will put an extra squeeze on research with embryonic stem cells.

To learn more about regenerative medicine, check out msnbc.com's special section on cloning and stem cells.

Memorial Day weekend is a time to remember the sacrifices of fighting men and women. For many Americans, it's also a time to remember where the barbecue grill was put last fall. But for space science fans, this is the big weekend for Phoenix Mars Lander and Red Planet exploration.

The lander is due to fire its retros and settle on the surface of Mars' north polar region at 7:36 p.m. ET Sunday.

Phoenix is bristling with gear to dig into Martian soil and ice, but it's also carrying a memorial of its own: a DVD disk carrying a digital library of Red Planet art and literature, titled "Visions of Mars." The collection was assembled more than a decade ago by the Planetary Society in cooperation with Time Warner and the Russian Space Research Institute - and was destined to fly on Russia's ill-fated Mars 96 probe. The project was revived for last year's Phoenix launch.

Today, the Planetary Society's Susan Lendroth pointed out that even before Mars 96, "Visions of Mars" made a successful sortie into space, thanks to NASA astronaut Shannon Lucid. Lucid became the first American woman to live aboard a space station when she joined the crew of the Mir space station back in 1996 - and she brought along a copy of the collection, to spark her imagination in orbit.

"I would like to see us fly to Mars," Lucid was quoted as saying back then. "That is what I would hope the space station would do for us."

The path to Mars may not be as clear as Lucid hoped it would be 12 years ago. But if Phoenix lands successfully, and if humans finally reach the Red Planet, "Visions of Mars" will be waiting with a little touch of home. That message comes through loud and clear in the words emblazoned on the top of the DVD: "Attention Astronauts: Take This With You."

Here are a few more links about Mars for the Memorial Day weekend:

• Planetary Society: Where to watch Phoenix's landing
• Pancam: Latest color imagery from Mars rovers
• Catholic Sensibility: Carnival of Space 55 
• WHEC.com: A Mapquest for Mars 

Sebastian Scheiner / AP American tourists and students with the Philadelphia Biblical University work at an archaeological dig near Beit Guvrin in central Israel. Tourists pay $25 to spend the day digging and sifting through the ruins. Their fees underwrite the more difficult parts of archaeological work: washing pottery shards, logging finds and writing up the research.

If Harrison Ford can play an archaeologist in the "Indiana Jones" movies, why can't you? You probably won't snag a starring role in a Hollywood blockbuster. But you can always find an archaeological dig looking for some help, particularly if you're willing to pay for helping.

The life of an archaeologist isn't all about fighting Soviet spies or unearthing unspeakable ancient evils, of course. Often it's about sorting through somebody else's trash - except that this trash could be thousands of years old. That's where students and tourists can help out, by pitching in on the fieldwork.

Unlike your typical tourist vacation, fieldwork opportunities will require you to get your hands dirty. But you also will learn much more about ancient cultures that vanished, as well as modern cultures that still survive. The price tag can range from free, to $25 a day, to thousands of dollars for a two-week trip.

Most of these sessions are offered only in the summer, and in those cases it may be too late for this year. But you'll have plenty of time to plan out next year's adventure - or you can use the Internet to turn yourself into an armchair archaeologist.

Here are 10 online destinations to explore:

• The Archaeological Institute of America's online fieldwork catalog is searchable by region as well as by keyword, so you can get right to the Maya excavations. (Sorry, no quests for crystal skulls.) As long as you're on the AIA Web site, you owe it to yourself to check out Archaeology magazine's special section on Indiana Jones and the "Crystal Skull" movie. Don't miss Mark Rose's Hollywood reality check (but watch out for the spoilers!).
• Speaking of reality checks, take a detour to the National Science Foundation's Web site and browse through "Archaeology from Reel to Real," a special report that delves into how archaeology is really done. It shouldn't be any surprise to hear that archaeologists get a kick out of Indy on the big screen but would probably kick him out of their dig in real life.
• If Mesoamerican cultures are your thing, take a look at the Maya Research Program. Every year, the Texas-based nonprofit group organizes excavations at the Blue Creek archaeological dig in Belize, as well as community service tours and more traditional tours of pre-Columbian sites in Mexico and Central America.
• Past Horizons lists more than 200 archaeological opportunities around the world, including 94 in the United States alone. You'll also find a Weblog and lots of links to other resources.
• ArchaeologyFieldwork.com serves as an online marketplace for researchers seeking volunteers as well as would-be volunteers seeking opportunities.
• The Biblical Archaeology Society's "Find a Dig" Web site focuses on opportunities in Europe and the Middle East, including 20 sites in Israel alone. If you send in your e-mail address, you'll get a free e-book guide to doing fieldwork titled "I Volunteered for This?!"
• Remember the part about sifting through other people's trash? That's almost literally what the Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation is about. You can sign up, and then show up to take a close look at centuries-old rubble and soil salvaged from construction work at Jerusalem's Temple Mount (known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary). There's no charge to join in the operation, as long as you can devote three days to the work. Some ancient artifacts have already been found among the leavings. But as usual with anything having to do with Jerusalem's holy sites, the project has stirred up religious controversy and archaeological questions.
• The Earthwatch Institute offers some top-drawer opportunities for archaeo-tourism, including a trip to the very camp in Kenya's Olduvai Gorge where the Leakeys made their momentous discoveries of hominid fossils. You'll find plenty of ecotourism trips as well.
• About.com lists a variety of more traditional study trips that will make you feel more like you're on vacation, and less like you're at work. These itineraries expose you to the world's great archaeological sites, in the company of academic experts who can tell you the stories behind the splendors. If Indiana Jones ever hangs up his bullwhip, he could become a guide on one of these tours.
• If you'd rather not get your hands dirty, you can still trace Indy's footsteps with this guide to "Indiana Jones" destinations around the world. Do you prefer the ancient road less traveled? Check out 10 archaeological sites that are off the beaten path.

Still looking for a sequel? This Web page on the "Find a Dig" site links to lots of opportunities that are closer to home. The National Park Service offers a portal page titled "Visit Archaeology." The Society for American Archaeology offers plenty of suggestions for keeping up with the Indiana Joneses. And if you're really adventurous, you can ask the folks at your local university or preservation office if they could use a hand - or at least grab your fedora and head out to celebrate your state's archaeology month.

Do you have any better ideas? Seen any good movies about archaeological wonders lately? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

• The New Yorker: Anatomy of a hangover
• Fortean Times: Stamp collector's guide to the galaxy
• Improbable Research: Not even wrong, the DNA edition
• Onion: Tomato genetically modified to be more expensive

Alain Herzog / EPFL

Click for video: Watch  how a micro-robot copies   a grasshopper's flight.

Swiss researchers have unveiled a grasshopper-sized robot capable of jumping more than 4 feet (1.4 meters) high - marking a new record for robo-hoppers. The 2-inch-tall (5-centimeter-tall) contraption could blaze a trail for future rescue robots or swarms of interplanetary explorers, according to its developers.

The robot was shown off today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena, Calif., by researchers from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. It's the latest breed of machines based on biomimetics - the technological strategy of building mechanical systems that mimic what animals do.

The robo-grasshopper, which weighs just a quarter of an ounce (7 grams) joins robotic versions of salamanders, birds, inchworms, water skimmers, dinosaurs, even robo-bacteria and robo-beetles.

For years, researchers have talked about developing hopping robots that could be dropped off on Mars and jump around the Red Planet's rugged terrain, serving as scouts, samplers or communication relays. The Swiss scientists say their hoppers could fill the bill.

"This biomimetic form of jumping is unique because it allows micro-robots to travel over many types of rough terrain where no other walking or wheeled robot could go," Professor Dario Floreano said in a news release. "These tiny jumping robots could be fitted with solar cells to recharge between jumps and deployed in swarms for extended exploration of remote areas on Earth or on other planets."

Closer to home, the hoppers could be sent in to survey a disaster scene and look for survivors, just as bigger robo-search parties did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Swiss institute said the researchers took their cue from small jumping creatures such as fleas, locusts, grasshoppers and frogs - which use elastic storage mechanisms for a slow buildup and a fast release of leaping energy. The robo-hopper charges two torsion springs with a 0.6-gram pager motor and a cam. The micro-machine's onboard battery provides enough juice for up to 320 jumps at intervals of 3 seconds, the researchers said.

Today's report from New Scientist notes at least one problem that still has to be resolved: getting the robot to right itself after a jump and move ahead in a desired direction. Floreano was quoted as saying some refinements would be added, such as grasshopper-style wings as well as solar panels, silicon sensors and smarts. That comes at a cost: The more you load up a hopper, the lower it will go.

Floreano's colleague at the Swiss lab, Mirko Kovak, presented the biomimetic research at sessions in Pasadena today and will also demonstrate the hopper next month in a "robot zoo" at the International Symposium on Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines in Cleveland.

• X Prize Foundation: Four more teams join private moon race
• New Scientist: A half-century of DARPA's hits and misses
• Wired Autoblog: Diesel hybrid carries students to victory
• Technology Review: Making lunar exploration safer
• BBC: Laser heats up the fusion future

Salvatore Di Nolfi / EPA A visitor snaps a picture of the Large Hadron Collider's underground beamline during an open house in April, which was the last opportunity for the public to see the facility before the scheduled start of operations.

The schedule is taking shape for the startup of the world's biggest particle-smasher — and for the lawsuit seeking to shut it down.

The plaintiffs in that lawsuit have served the federal government with a summons, and Justice Department lawyers are due to respond by June 24. One of the other parties in the case, Europe's CERN particle-physics center, is supposed to be served this week in Switzerland, according to Walter Wagner, one of the plaintiffs.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider is gearing up to slam protons together at energies that have not yet been studied on Earth. The peak energy of 14 trillion electron volts approaches levels seen in the first microseconds after the big bang - which is why the collider has been nicknamed the "Big Bang Machine."

Wagner and his co-plaintiff, Luis Sancho, are worried that when the collider reaches full power, it could create black holes or strangelets that would grow and gobble up our planet.

Physicists at CERN and the world's other top-level research facilities have been saying for years that that's mere science-fiction silliness. Nevertheless, Wagner, Sancho and other critics continue to sound the alarm. They want operations at the collider to be put on hold for at least four months, pending further safety reviews that would address the black-hole question and other potential risks.

Among other defendants, the lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and Fermilab in Illinois, the laboratory that is playing the lead U.S. role in the Large Hadron Collider. The Justice Department is handling the federal government's legal response, and Justice spokesman Andrew Ames said he would not comment on the suit until the response is filed next month.

Federal attorneys are likely to focus their defense on relatively narrow legal issues – for example, claiming that the government as well as government-funded scientists have complied with environmental guidelines, or that the LHC project is not subject to U.S. regulations, or that the lawsuit should be thrown out because of technicalities. That's how Wagner's challenges to previous particle-collider experiments have been handled.

Although anything can happen (even the sudden eruption of a rogue black hole in the courtroom), I wouldn't expect the attorneys' brief to focus on the globe-gobbling question. That element of the controversy will be addressed in a safety report currently being reviewed by CERN and outside experts. The report, which is said to underline and amplify previous conclusions that the LHC is safe, could be released by the end of this month, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me.

The technical report is currently undergoing a final review by CERN's scientific policy committee as well as outside experts, and Gillies is writing up a version in easier-to-understand language for the benefit of us non-physicists.

First beams in July?
Meanwhile, CERN's startup schedule is coming into better focus as well: The LHC team is due to start cooling down the last sectors of the collider's beamline to near absolute zero on Wednesday, with the expectation that cooldown will be complete by mid-June, Gillies said. That would clear the way for a final round of equipment testing, with the first attempt to inject proton beams into the collider "likely to be in the second half of July," he said.

The exact date would be set four to six weeks in advance – leaving enough time to plan a big media event around the first beam injection. Gillies said the first injection will provide a convenient hook for coverage, including a live BBC broadcast of the turn-on around 9:30 a.m. CET (3:30 a.m. ET) on the appointed day. However, he stressed that the beam injection was just one step in a months-long commissioning process.

"It's not like launching a space shuttle or anything like that," Gillies said.

The first low-power proton collisions would come later in the summer or fall, leading up to a VIP ceremony on Oct. 21. The collider won't reach its full power until next year, after CERN's winter break. Any legal questions should be resolved by the time the Large Hadron Collider gets anywhere close to post-big-bang energies. At least that's what the Justice Department and CERN would expect.

Weighing the risks
For his part, Wagner wants to see the safety report first. Despite all the expert claims that the LHC will be safe, the former nuclear health physicist insisted that nothing he's seen so far has absolutely ruled out the black-hole doomsday scenario.

"For all I know, they will come up with some other novel argument that proves this can't happen. We want to see an argument that absolutely proves it ... because otherwise it ends up being [a statement that] 'we have no way of calculating.' And that, to me, is a scary proposition."

I should emphasize here that most scientists, even the ones who think way outside the box, are not scared. Here's how theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the author of "Physics of the Impossible," put it to me back in February:

"I'm going to sleep well when that machine is turned on, because I know that cosmic rays have more energy than the Large Hadron Collider, and you don't see black holes from outer space. These are microscopic in size, and they don't last long."

Of course, there are always counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments. For a sampling, you can check out LHC Concerns and the BackReaction blog, among many other resources. Then you can weigh in with your own comments below.

• Universe Today: No doomsday in 2012
• Popular Mechanics: Debunking 'Lost' science
• New York Times: Who is the walrus?
• Slate: Will lab-grown meat save the planet?
• Physics ArXiv Blog: E.T. may use neutrino phone (via Slashdot)

Intel ISEF Sana Raoof, Yi-Han Su and Natalie Saranga Omattage received top honors at the 2008 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

This is the season when students really shine — and in this spring's science and engineering competitions, women are continuing to close the gender gap.

Following up on last December's first-ever female sweep of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, three 17-year-old young women won the top prizes in last week's Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The winners of the $50,000 awards include:

• Natalie Saranga Omattage of Cleveland, Miss., for developing a more efficient and less expensive way to screen for food additive contaminants, including those responsible for the recent wave of pet deaths.
• Sana Raoof of Muttontown, N.Y., for a new application of mathematical knot theory to help resolve classic biochemical classification problems.
• Yi-Han Su of Chinese Taipei for identifying a high-activity catalyst that could improve methanol processing to generate hydrogen more efficiently.

"Sana, Natalie and Yi-Han demonstrate that dedication to science inquiry can transcend boundaries and show what we can accomplish when we focus on mathematics and science," Intel Chairman Craig Barrett said in a news release announcing the winners.

The competition is billed as the world's largest pre-college science fair - offering more than $4 million in awards and scholarships, and drawing more than 1,550 contestants from 51 countries, regions and territories.

The trio received additional attagirls over the weekend from the Sciencewomen blog and from Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy Blog. Plait observes that "any society that relegates women to an underclass is, at the very least, throwing away half their brain trust."

Maybe it's a generational thing: Studies have shown that elementary-school girls like math and science better than, say, language arts and social studies. In the past, gender stereotypes may have led girls to let those interests slide as they grew older - but societal changes are closing the gap. A couple of years ago, string theorist Eva Silverstein told me this about the seeming gender gap in math and science:

"I don't know what the timescale should be for eliminating the societal influences, but I'm pretty sure it would be ludicrous to expect it to have happened within one generation. Hence, the current numbers fail to provide any meaningful evidence of innate inferiority of women in science. The error bars are huge."

The fact that young women are making more of a mark in high-school science may well show that the charts are settling into a more sensible pattern. In any case, it's heartening to see that even the traditional preserves of "Rocket Boy" geekdom are going co-ed.

AIA / Team America Rocketry Challenge Students from North Carolina's Enloe High School launch their rocket during the Team America Rocketry Challenge. The Enloe rocketeers won the competition on Saturday, beating out 99 rival teams.

One example would be the Team America Rocketry Challenge, which wrapped up over the weekend in The Plains, Va., just outside Washington. More than 100 teams from middle schools and high schools around the country vied in the world's largest rocket competition. A team from Enloe High School in Raleigh, N.C., logged the top score - and it was no big deal that the rocketeers included two women.

The Enloe team will share a prize pool of more than $60,000 with other top finishers, and in July they'll head off to the Farnborough International Airshow for a fly-off against Britain's top student rocketeers, from Horsforth Secondary School in Yorkshire.

Last month's FIRST Robotics Competition provided yet another opportunity for students to shine: The winning team in the April 19 championship was not only co-ed, but international as well: Teams from St. Catharines in Ontario joined up with students from Greenville, Texas, and Sterling Heights, Mich., to take the top honors in the FIRST world championship.

The FIRST competition in Atlanta was the final round in months of competition involving more than 1,500 teams from the United States as well as Brazil, Britain, Canada, Chile, Israel, Mexico and the Netherlands.

Last month also brought NASA's Great Moonbuggy Race, in which students build and race their own human-powered vehicles over a simulated lunar course at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

This year's college winners hailed from the University of Evansville in Indiana, with Murray State University and Carleton University taking second and third place. The high-school winners came from Erie High School in Kansas, with two teams from the Huntsville Center for Technology right behind.

Two more traditional whiz-kid competitions are still coming up: This week brings the last round of National Geographic's Geography Bee, with 55 finalists invited from the U.S. states and territories to test their geographical smarts. Take the GeoBee Quiz and find out how you rate. To give yourself a good workout, hold yourself back from using maps, globes and search engines.

Later this month, we'll be following the most tradition-laden bee of them all, the National Spelling Bee. Last year's winning word was "serrefine" (a small forceps). Check out this year's words in the Spelling Bee's Study Zone. And to get a taste of the Bee experience, click your way through this "Dateline NBC" interactive.

What do you think are the best measures for school-age science literacy? Are you feeling more hopeful about the next generation, or less optimistic? Feel free to share your whiz-kid wisdom as a comment below.

Update for 5 p.m. ET May 20: This Boston Globe article cites research indicating that women don't go into certain types of math and science jobs because they prefer not to. One study found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics in favor of work in medicine and biosciences. Another found a linkage between a preference to work with tools (where men tend to score higher) and the choice of a career in information technology. Those who preferred to work with people (where women tend to score higher) were less likely to choose an IT career.

All this doesn't necessarily contradict the idea that societal factors have pointed women away from math, science and engineering - even though they're otherwise well-suited for those fields.

Rand Simberg discusses the Globe article at Transterrestrial Musings. (Tip o' the Log to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.)

Update for 11:30 p.m. ET June 23: I've corrected the reference to the Sciencewomen blog in accordance with Alice Pawley's comment below.

• L.A. Times: Do I smell sexy? A new reason to swap spit
• Telegraph: How a magnet turned off my speech
• Anniston Star: Near-death, near God? (via Daily Grail)
• Science News: Epic genetics 

NASA / Univ. of Ariz.

Click for slide show:    See Mars and more.

The folks behind NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have put out pictures of the area where the Mars Polar Lander disappeared nine years ago - and are inviting people to see if they can find it.

Back in 2005, the pros thought they saw signs of the lander in lower-resolution imagery, but they retracted the claim months later. So far, MRO has not turned up a smoking gun, or a smoking crater. Nevertheless, it's continuing the search.

Mars Polar Lander was due to reach the Red Planet's south polar region in 1999, but it went out of contact during its descent from the surface and was never heard from again. Investigators surmised that a glitch with the spacecraft's thruster system led to a catastrophically hard landing.

Coming after the failure of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter, the lander's loss forced a makeover of NASA's Mars exploration program. Several missions had to be shifted around. In fact, Phoenix Mars Lander, which is due to set down in Mars' north polar region on May 25, is a retooled incarnation of a 2001 lander that was put on hold. The instruments on board are upgraded versions of Mars Polar Lander's hardware. 

NASA

Mars Polar Lander, shown in this artist's conception, disappeared during its descent in 1999.

The latest search for the lost lander doesn't have official status, said Ari Espinoza, a member of the Web team for MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. That means spacecraft sleuths shouldn't expect NASA or the HiRISE team to follow up on any leads they come up with.

But if there's strong evidence that the lander has actually been found, go ahead and post a link to the photos as a comment on the HiRISE team's blog - as well as at UnmannedSpaceflight.com, a discussion forum often frequented by Mars-savvy scientists.

If the unofficial search turns up something worth investigating more officially, "we'd be very happy with that," Espinoza told me. Just be sure to read NASA's guide to finding junk on Mars as well as the HiRISE blog comments. That will keep you from wasting your time on an analysis of bogus cosmic-ray hits or lower-resolution HiRISE imagery.

You'll find more pictures of Mars to pore over in the HiRISE image catalog, as well as in our latest edition of "The Month in Space Pictures." The images titled "Alien Dunes" and "Going Splat on Mars" are from the HiRISE catalog. That's where you'll find larger images suitable for use as computer wallpaper or printed photographs.

Here's a listing of other places where you can get bigger images and more information about the cosmic views seen in this month's roundup:

• Check out the Space Telescope Science Institute's Hubblesite for "Galactic Pile-up" and "Dance of the Stars."
• Kennedy Space Center's media archive points you to "This Is Only a Drill."
• The European Southern Observatory glories in "The Green Flash" and more.
• "Liftoff From India" comes from the Indian Space Research Organization.
• NASA's Earth Observatory brings you "Rocks of the Emerald Isle."
• NASA's MODIS team presents "Stream of Ash" and "Mississippi's Mouth."
• The European Space Agency offers "Martian River Delta" and "Focus on Antennae."
• The Canada-Hawaii-France Telescope features "Clouds of Glory" and "Galactic Pearls."
• You'll find Saturn's "Storm and Shadows" at NASA's Web site for the Cassini orbiter (or the Cassini imaging team's Web site).
• Bigelow Aerospace features lots of pictures to accompany "A Better Genesis."
• Finally, here are bigger versions of "The Big Crawl," "Rocket Rolling," "Endangered Species" and "After the Cyclone."  You can find huge versions of the "After the Cyclone" imagery at DigitalGlobe, but the pictures are festooned with watermarks. NASA has more before-and-after cyclone imagery.

Now that the presidential primary season is winding down, the effort to organize a national candidates' forum on issues relating to science and technology is shifting to the post-convention phase of the campaign. A survey conducted for ScienceDebate 2008 and Research!America indicates that most Americans are hungry for such a debate, with health care leading the list of topics. Despite that, the debate never came together during the primaries.

"Only the McCain campaign gave us the courtesy of a formal response: a polite decline that left the door open for the general election," Shawn Lawrence Otto, ScienceDebate 2008's chief executive officer, said in an e-mail to supporters. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, also focused on the sci-tech frontier this week in a major speech about climate policy.

The Democratic contenders - front-runner Barack Obama and one-time front-runner Hillary Clinton - passed up several chances to sign onto the debate, even though they sent surrogates to a Boston forum sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In his e-mail, Otto confirmed that "we are now making a planned shift to the second phase of our effort, focusing on the general election."

Otto also reflected on why ScienceDebate 2008 fizzled out during the primaries, despite a wave of high-level support:

"Part of the problem, from our perspective, is a perception in the media, particularly the political editors, that this is a niche debate.  We have saturated coverage in the science community, but have had a very difficult time getting the mainstream national media to cover this effort at all, despite numerous and frequent attempts; they believe that issues like religion loom far larger in this election and science simply doesn't sell papers. Science has also been somewhat nonvocal and under political attack over the last several years, and this has helped to create the inaccurate perception of an uninfluential minority.

"The media help to steer the public's attention and the national dialogue, and the candidates respond to this, and it has become an accepted assumption. But is it right? We argue that this assumption is wrong: science is not niche, and it does matter to a majority of Americans - in fact it matters a lot. But policymakers and editors need to know that, and they're not going to poll for it on their own. We argue that this wrong assumption is part of the very problem we are fighting to turn around, and that exposing it is one of the more important goals of this initiative.

"So we teamed up with Research!America to do a national poll of public attitudes about science and politics and found that what we've suspected all along is in fact true: there is overwhelming public support for this idea - and the support is equal among both Democrats and Republicans. Indeed, scientific integrity is even more important among Republicans."

Is there any chance that sci-tech issues (such as medicine, energy, climate and environment, innovation, education, economic development, space) will get a better airing during the general election campaign? Or will it be more of the same? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

• The Atlantic: The sky is falling
• Transterrestrial Musings: Don't know much about space policy
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Lord of the Ants'
• Altair VI: Carnival of Space 54

Prediction markets have been known to outdo the pollsters when it comes to handicapping political campaigns, and they can also be used to predict how bad the next flu epidemic can get, how well the next product will sell - or even how long the latest celebrity marriage will last. (Are you listening, Mariah Carey?)

But are these markets legit? That's what researchers and regulators want to find out.

Most recently, the Iowa Electronic Markets - the country's oldest political prediction market working with real money for research purposes - foresaw that Barack Obama was gaining a lock on the Democratic presidential nomination long before the pundits came around.

Iowa Electronic Markets

This chart shows the rise and fall of Democratic presidential candidates' fortunes on the Iowa Electronic Markets. Barack Obama is currently on top.

Here's how it works: Investors can put up to $500 in an online account to buy shares in a candidate's fortunes that would pay $1 per share of the candidate succeeds, but nothing at all if the candidate fails. Likelier outcomes gain value, while unlikely outcomes dwindle in value. The idea is that the marketplace distills the "wisdom of crowds" to come up with a collective assessment that is better than any single person's opinion. 

Similar markets can be created to attract investment in the weather's ups or downs, or an actor's Oscar prospects, or a football team's Super Bowl chances.

Is this starting to sound like (gasp!) gambling? Well, that's precisely the problem.

This month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a request for public comment on the future of prediction markets - or, to use the CFTC's term, "event contracts." The commission wants to know whether it should be regulating these markets, and if so, what rules should be put in place. Comments to secretary@cftc.gov must be received by July 7. (Click here to read the comments submitted so far.)

On the other side of the table, researchers also want to know where they stand. Back in 1992, the CFTC issued a "no-action letter" to the Iowa Electronic Markets, affirming that Iowa's researchers could go ahead with the market as long as they followed the specified conditions.

To refresh your memory, 1992 was the last time there was a Bush in the White House and a Clinton running to replace him. Since then, no other prediction markets have been given a similar go-ahead. That's why most other real-money markets are based abroad (for example, InTrade in Ireland).

In this week's issue of the journal Science, 22 researchers - including two of the Iowa market's co-founders - call on the CFTC and Congress to clear up the uncertainty surrounding prediction markets:

"These markets could assist private firms and public institutions in managing economic risks, such as declines in consumer demand, and social risks, such as flu outbreaks and environmental disasters, more efficiently.

"Unfortunately, however, current federal and state laws limiting gambling create significant barriers to the establishment of vibrant, liquid prediction markets in the United States. We believe that regulators should lower these barriers by creating a legal safe harbor for specified types of small-stakes markets, stimulating innovation in both their design and their use."

Such assurances could take the form of no-action letters like the one issued to the Iowa researchers, but the researchers also urge the CFTC to consider issuing formal rules or guidance on prediction markets.

The Science authors aren't looking for carte blanche: They suggest that the safe-harbor treatment be extended to not-for-profit research institutions and government agencies engaged in research - as well as to "private businesses and not-for-profits that are not primarily engaged in research, which would only be allowed to operate internal prediction markets with their employees or contractors."

That would leave the door open for industry prediction markets that are being run at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Among the researchers' other recommendations:

• The total amount of capital invested should not exceed a modest sum - say, $2,000 per year.
• Market operators could charge modest fees for administrative and regulatory costs.
• Brokers and paid advisers would be barred, to reduce the risks that contracts would be sold to "inappropriate or vulnerable customers."
• The CFTC should allow contracts for "any economically meaningful event." In the researchers' view, that would take in political developments, environmental risks and economic indicators, but presumably not sports outcomes.
• Congress should support the CFTC's efforts by providing the necessary funding for oversight, and also by specifying that the commission's decisions pre-empt overlapping state and federal gambling laws.

"Because Congress did not intend the CFTC to regulate gambling, it is important to design new regulations so that socially valuable prediction markets easily qualify for the safe harbor but gambling markets do not," the researchers write.

In its request for comment, the CFTC signaled that it's also concerned about the distinction between prediction futures and plain old gambling. The document spends a fair amount of ink discussing contracts that involve "commercial risk management" (such as the price of corn), as opposed to "environmental measures" (such as rainfall) and "general measures" (such as celebrity marriages).

The commission also raises the bugaboos of the prediction game: Should some event contracts be banned, such as investing in the winner of the next presidential election or the timing of the next terrorist attack? The latter idea actually came under consideration in 2003, but lawmakers quickly squelched it. You can just imagine how a senator would feel if legislation on prediction markets came up while her own stock was in a tailspin, or while someone was bidding up the market for terror attacks.

For another perspective on this, I turned to I. Nelson Rose, an expert on gambling laws at Whittier Law School (and co-author of the book "Internet Gaming Law" with Marty Owens):

"I am a big fan of predictive markets. In fact, I have an active account with the biggest, InTrade.com. ...

"The idea about getting a federal carve-out is a good one.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of the states declared trading in commodity futures as being illegal gambling.  So Congress passed laws expressly stating that trading stocks and commodities on a listed U.S. exchange was not gambling.  It had to do the same when stock index futures were invented.

"The real problem today for sites like Intrade today is not state or federal anti-gambling law as much as they are markets for securities, which fall under federal and state securities laws.  Of course, as long as they are overseas, no one particularly cares."

As much as researchers and regulators might wish it, the line between playing the market and playing the odds may not always be clear-cut. Here's an excerpt from Rose and Owens' book, quoting a participant in the Iowa Electronic Markets who made $1,300 by "investing" in Democrat Al Gore during the 2000 campaign.

"So I'm a Yellow Dog Democrat and I'm pretty sure Gore is going to capture the popular vote. On November 1, 2000, I bought about 1,900 futures on Gore at 34 cents, which cost a little over $600. On the 10th of November when the popular count was certified, these contracts were worth a buck apiece. I had earlier found the market in 1996 when the Republican Convention came here to San Diego. I made some phenomenal money 'betting' Buchanan on an uptick after the Arizona primary, and a good bunch more selling 'derivatives' of this market (i.e., campaign buttons with a little stamp on them indicating they could be redeemed for a multiple of their purchase price if the candidate won the nomination) backed by an equal number of contracts on the market.

"I'm a little surprised the Nevada books haven't offered action like this. It seems that when people put their money where their mouth is politically and actually win something tangible when their candidate comes through it's a good thing."

Is it a good thing? Or does it sound a little too unseemly when you're talking about the highest office in the land? Either way, place your bets ... er, your comments ... in the box below.

The researchers behind this week's Science article are Kenneth J. Arrow, Paul Milgrom and Erik Snowberg of Stanford University; Robert Forsythe of the University of South Florida; Michael Gorham of the Illinois Institute of Technology; Robert Hahn of the American Enterprise Institute; Robin Hanson of George Mason University; John O. Ledyard of the California Institute of Technology; Saul Levmore and Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School; Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation; Forrest D. Nelson and George R. Neumann of the University of Iowa; Marco Ottaviani of Northwestern University; Thomas C. Schelling of the University of Maryland at College Park; Robert J. Shiller and Paul C. Tetlock of Yale University; Vernon L. Smith, Philip E. Tetlock and Hal R. Varian of the University of California at Berkeley; Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania; and Eric Zitzewitz of Dartmouth College.

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GWAP.com / CMU

The Squigl game involves having two players outline the same object in an online picture. Points are awarded based on how close their outlines match.

Researchers are enlisting Internet users to try out a new set of games that will help them develop smarter search engines and sharper-eyed machines. It's kind of like playing "Hot or Not" … for a scientific cause.

Games With a Purpose, or GWAP, is the brainchild of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University - including Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of the CAPTCHA filter to distinguish between real humans and machines. As part of their plan to elevate machines to the next level of human-style intelligence, von Ahn and his colleagues hope to capitalize on the all-too-human desire to get to a multiplayer game's next level.

"We're trying to do two things here," von Ahn told me today. "One is to train computers to do the things that humans do. And another thing we're trying to do is just use a different approach to experiments. For the first time, we can get hundreds of thousands or millions of people working on the same problem at the same time. ... We're seeing how we can coordinate millions of people to solve tiny bits of the problem."

Von Ahn's first GWAP offering was called the ESP Game: The same image is displayed to two players who are online simultaneously. Each player tries to guess the word that the other player would use to describe the image, and the players win points when they hit upon the same word. The goal is to complete as many matches as you can before time runs out, and get your name on the list of top scorers.

Sounds fun, right? Well, the data from the guesses can be analyzed to develop better word-to-image search engines. The idea was so good that Google licensed it and turned it into a function called Google Image Labeler.

The new GWAP Web site, which made its official debut today, adds four new games:

• Matchin, a game that asks players to judge which of two images is more appealing. The game could help developers create search engines that rank images automatically based on which ones look the best.
• Tag a Tune, in which players describe songs so that computers can search for music based on tags (for example, an upbeat song about a wedding) rather than based on the title alone.
• Verbosity, which works kind of like the old TV game "Password." You have to help your partner guess a secret word without using the word itself. The results can be used to develop better artificial-intelligence strategies.
• Squigl, a game in which players trace the outlines of objects in photographs, to help teach computers how to recognize those objects more easily. The closer your outline is to your partner's, the higher your score.

"People have been trying to work on image recognition for 40 years," von Ahn explained, "and it turned out to be a much more difficult problem than we thought it would be."

Solving the problem could lead to autonomous vehicles that would more easily identify road hazards as they drove themselves - that is, the kind of vehicle that von Ahn's colleagues at Carnegie Mellon created to win a $2 million prize from the Pentagon last year.

The technology could also make cameras smarter. "If a camera could recognize that you're not smiling, it would tell you to smile," von Ahn said. (Sony has already come out with cameras equipped with a "smile shutter.")

To take part in GWAP, you register with the site, click on a game, and then wait for an anonymous online partner to show up. It doesn't take that long, especially during U.S. daytime hours. "We just released it today, and several thousand people have already played," von Ahn said.

The data from the game play will be freely shared with other researchers working on artificial-intelligence tools as well as the psychology of human word and image recognition, von Ahn said.

The gender game
Although you're not required to share any personal data, you do have the option of filling out a profile that's much like the kind of listing you'd see on MySpace or Facebook. Von Ahn's experience with the ESP Game has already yielded some insights into the finer points of game play.

"Pairs of females and pairs of males do better than when one is female and one is male," von Ahn observed. "For example, if there's a picture of an attractive female, and there are two males playing, they're more likely to both say the word 'hot.'"

Despite that same-sex advantage, von Ahn said online players would rather go through the game with a partner of the opposite sex if they're given a choice - which just goes to show that a little sex appeal goes a long way, even when you're engaged in the scientific game.

Von Ahn's colleagues in the GWAP project are software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan and graduate students Severin Hacker, Edith Law and Bryant Lee.

For more about "Hot or Not" research, check out Melissa Dahl's story about face-attractiveness studies. For more about games with a purpose, consult Kristin Kalning's "On the Level" column. And if you have any other scientific gaming suggestions, let me know in a comment below.

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