NOAO / STScI / DSS / NED The options on the "You Decide" ballot for Hubble observations include (top row, from left) NGC 6634, NGC 6072 and NGC 40, as well as (bottom row) Arp 274, NGC 4289 and NGC 5172. The Hubble team will conduct online voting through March 1.

Pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are usually the biggest crowd-pleasers in our monthly roundups of outer-space imagery, and now you can help pick out which cosmic curiosity will get the star treatment from Hubble's team.

An online vote, with six choices on the ballot, is being conducted through March 1 - and the winner's picture will be splashed all over the Internet a little more than a month later. Think of it as the cosmic version of "American Idol," without the bickering judges.

Your vote doesn't have to be a shot in the dark. At the Hubble team's "You Decide" Web page, you can click on a video in which Frank Summers, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, explains the attractions of each potential target:

• NGC 6634: A star-forming region inside the Cat's Paw Nebula, in the constellation Scorpius. The region is just one of the footpads in the "paw" shown above.

• NGC 6072: A planetary nebula in the constellation Scorpius. Such nebulae are created when dying stars puff out shells of glowing gas. The "planetary" title refers to the fact that they can look like planets when viewed through small telescopes. 

• NGC 40: Another planetary nebula, in the constellation Cepheus, which has been dubbed the Bow Tie Nebula because of its lobed appearance. Like NGC 6072, this nebula has a reddish glow.

• NGC 5172: A spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, containing more than 100 billion stars. This galaxy is angled toward us, and astronomers have spotted at least two supernovae firing off inside the disk.

• NGC 4289: Another spiral galaxy, but this one is facing us edge-on from the constellation Virgo. The disk's arms are thin, but some images reveal a thicker fog of stars just around the center.

• Arp 274: Two galaxies (or is it three?) are locked in a gravitational dance, creating wild spirals of stars as they interact. Such encounters create spectacular bursts of infant suns. Arp 274 is in the constellation Virgo.

None of these galaxies has gotten a close-up look from Hubble before, and perhaps the biggest benefit of this exercise is that space fans could get to know these objects almost as well as reality-TV fans know the "American Idol" finalists.

The rankings are being updated on the "You Decide" Web page as the balloting continues. After the end of voting on March 1, the Hubble team will point the space telescope in the winner's direction. Imagery from the observations will be released in the April 2-5 time frame, during the 100 Hours of Astronomy event organized for the International Year of Astronomy.

 In the meantime, you can peruse the winning images in our "Month in Space" slideshow for January - and if those pictures aren't big enough, click on these links to see higher-resolution versions:

• Cosmic blast zone: The planetary nebula NGC 2818 is one of this month's biggest winners - from Hubble, naturally. Read more about it.

• Star-spangled flier: Get the bigger picture of software billionaire Charles Simonyi's zero-gravity training, and learn more about the spaceflights of the super-rich.

• Moon over Maine: This picture makes the year's biggest full moon, as seen from South Portland, even bigger. And this story explains the orbital mechanics of it all.

• Full-frontal Saturn: Consult the Cassini imaging team's Web site for more pixels and more perspective on the ringed planet as well as the Cassini orbiter's mission.

• Still smokin' hot: NASA's Earth Observatory is the place to go to find out more about Chile's Chaiten volcano and its impressive plume.

• X marks the spot: We filled you in on SpaceX's progress toward the launch of its first Falcon 9 rocket, and you'll find more cool pictures at SpaceX's Web site.

• Break time on Mars: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Web site provides a bigger panorama showing the rocky, sandy Martian terrain that surrounds NASA's Opportunity rover.

• What happens in Vegas... doesn't necessarily stay in Vegas. Click here to see a bigger picture that serves as a commentary on what light pollution is doing to the night sky. You'll want to read the full story, of course.

• Hammered on Mars: You'll find a higher-resolution view of a cratered Martian scene, plus much more, at the HiRISE Web site for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

• Our galaxy's Grand Central Station: Another amazing Hubble picture reveals the blazing center of our own galaxy - with an assist from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

• Stars on the move: These Hubble images show the glowing tails of gas left behind as stars plow through space. This story explains what's going on.

• Red Sea crossing: Once again, the Earth Observatory has the full story behind the Terra satellite's view of a Middle East dust storm. 

• Alien sand and frost: Hie yourself over to the HiRISE Web site for more about the Martian sand dunes in Russell Crater.

• Winter colors: Snow, ice and fog never looked so colorful from space. NASA's MODIS Web site has more about the Terra satellite's view of the Pacific Northwest in winter.

• Beyond the rings: If you go back to the Cassini imaging team's Web site and look at the high-resolution image, you'll understand why the Saturnian moon Mimas is known as "the Death Star."

Photo credits: The montage at the top of this item includes an image of the Cat's Paw Nebula (of which NGC 6634 is a part, visible toward the lower right) from T.A. Rector / University of Alaska at Anchorage, T. Abbott and NOAO / AURA / NSF; images of NGC 6072 and NGC 40 from Steve and Paul Mandel / Adam Block / NOAO / AURA / NSF; an image of Arp 274 from the NASA / IPAC Extragalactic Database (courtesy of Halton C. Arp); and images of NGC 4289 and NGC 5172 from the STScI Digitized Sky Survey.

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ESO This composite image of Centaurus A shows lobes and jets emanating from the galaxy's central black hole. The image combines data from the APEX radio telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope.

Radio observations are filling out an impressive picture of huge jets blasting out from a galactic black hole. The latest findings support the view that Centaurus A is a giant particle accelerator, powered by the active galaxy's matter-sucking monster.

Centaurus A is a giant elliptical galaxy that's in the process of merging with a companion spiral galaxy, about 13 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Centaurus. Like our own Milky Way galaxy, Centaurus A has a supermassive black hole at its center, with a mass equal to 100 million suns. (Our galaxy's supermassive black hole is wimpy in comparison, weighing only as much as 4 million suns.)

All that crashing, smashing and swirling around Centaurus A sparks intense star formation, making it one of the most spectacular objects in the sky - particularly when it comes to radio and X-ray emissions.

The latest image from the European Southern Observatory combines a true-color background view from the Wide Field Imager on the ESO's 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla in Chile with an X-ray view (in blue) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the radio view from the Large APEX Bolometer Camera. That camera, also known as LABOCA, is mounted on the international APEX submillimeter-wave radio telescope in Chile.

LABOCA's submillimeter view plainly shows the heat glow from the galaxy's dusty main disk and the bright radio emission from the galaxy's center. It also shows the radio emissions from jets of accelerated particles shooting north and south from the center.

As detailed in an image advisory issued Wednesday, such emissions occur when fast-moving electrons spiral around the lines of a magnetic field. The electrons emanating from Centaurus A are traveling at half the speed of light, and then slamming into the surrounding gas to create a shock wave. That's what's causing the bluish X-ray emissions that are most prominent in the lobe the lower right of the galaxy.

ESA / NASA / AVO Project / Paolo Padovani

This artist's conception of a galactic black hole is similar to the ESO's picture of the real thing.

Those jets and lobes are the coolest features of the image, and they don't always show up in pictures of Centaurus A. (Here's an example). LABOCA's sensitivity to submillimeter wavelengths is well-suited for charting the radio emissions from the outflow. That's one of the subjects covered in a research paper published by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The team behind the LABOCA observations was led by Axel Weiss of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. Other members of the Max Planck team include Attila Kovacs, Rolf Güsten, Karl M. Menten, Frederic Schuller, Giorgio Siringo and Ernst Kreysa.

We've had a veritable banquet of black hole tales over the past month - so take advantage of this all-you-can-eat smorgasbord:

• Study revisits LHC black-hole controversy
• PlayStation 3 tackles black-hole vibrations
• Instrument spots potential twin of Milky Way's black hole
• Supernovas starve supermassive black holes
• Which came first, black holes or galaxies?
• Stars form within black hole's destructive reach
• Search for more black holes at msnbc.com

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• Slashdot: Doomsday debate resurfaces with bizarre twist 
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• Discover Magazine: Virtual tour of 8 strange exoplanets

San Diego Union-Tribune via Zuma Press Joe Bartolomei and Lee Sterling of Solartistry Inc. install solar panels on the roof of a home in Encinitas, Calif. The economic stimulus plan is expected to give a boost to energy efficiency as well as renewable-energy technologies.

A hefty portion of President Obama's $825 billion stimulus plan is aimed at generating a triple play for employment, energy and the environment: The House version of the bill, for example, would put more than $68 billion toward boosting America's green-tech sector, which could in turn reduce the average household's energy bill as well as our costly hunger for fossil fuels.

But will the triple play pay off? Some folks on the sidelines worry that billions of dollars could be wasted on technological dead ends, while others complain that all this spending is just a greener shade of pork.

The greening of American infrastructure
Job No. 1 for the stimulus package, also known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is generating jobs. The plan would follow through on Obama's campaign promise to do that by putting billions toward the greening of the nation's infrastructure (which is in a pretty dark place right now).

An analysis by the Center for American Progress, which is where most of Obama's ideas were fleshed out during the campaign, shows that the biggest chunk of the package's green spending - almost $31 billion - would go to increase the energy efficiency of federal facilities and low-income housing, plus rebates for energy-efficient appliances and green-job training programs. The package would more than triple the amount that the federal government is currently spending on this category, the center said.

This means that if you're considering an energy-related upgrade, you might want to wait to see what kind of aid will be available once the stimulus package is passed - particularly if you're in a lower income bracket.

When Obama laid out the plan last weekend, he said such measures would "save taxpayers $2 billion a year by making 75 percent of federal buildings more energy-efficient, and save the average working family $350 on their energy bills by weatherizing 2.5 million homes."

It would also create jobs: A report by the Center for American Progress and the University of Minnesota estimated that spending $100 billion on energy efficiency and renewable energy would produce 2 million new jobs in two years.

This part of the plan wouldn't break new ground, technologically speaking, according to Daniel J. Weiss, the center's senior fellow and director of climate strategy.

"What's been lacking is resources rather than technology, particularly in a retrofitting situation," he told me. "For federal buildings, you could be installing more energy-efficient windows, plugging leaks in the buildings, getting a more efficient heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system."

That means most of the green-tech jobs would go to contractors, electricians and other skilled laborers rather than, say, researchers and business executives. Even Joe the Plumber might find something to like.

Scientists - and particularly engineers - would be enlisted to prime the pump with greener technologies and cleaner vehicles. Among the priorities: research into advances in renewable energy (for example, solar and wind-generated electric power), carbon capture and sequestration, and support for cleaner diesel vehicles, better plug-in electric hybrids and better batteries. The House has set aside $8.6 billion for these categories, including $600 million to buy plug-ins and alternative-fuel vehicles for federal fleets.

Weiss said the legislation shifts the focus somewhat away from biofuels, which are currently not as affordable or available as experts would have expected a couple of years ago. "Given that problem, focusing on alternative fuels that already have an infrastructure built in for the delivery of that fuel - namely, electrical outlets - has more promise," he said.

Bottom line? Plug-in electric vehicles should get an extra boost toward the marketplace.

Speaking of electricity, the plan would allocate $19 billion for smart-grid technologies - innovations that range from smart meters in the home to upgraded transmission systems in the countryside. Another $10 billion would beef up the nation's mass transit systems.

Taking on the challenges
It all sounds great to Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering. A year ago, the academy announced a list of 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, and Vest feels as if the Obama administration has picked up on the suggestions.

"Thematically, there's a lot of overlap between the engineering challenges and some of the things that are being started," he told me. "It's obvious that the No. 1 theme was clean, efficient, American energy. Several of the Grand Challenges fit into that."

Of course, the challenges were selected for long-term development rather than short-term stimulus. For instance, it's not likely that engineers will figure out how to provide cheap, commercial fusion power in the next couple of years (though there's always a chance).

"A jump start is really important," Vest said. "Simply getting engineers engaged in green technology has a lot of intrinsic value for the long term as well. Working on the grid ... moving on the efficiency front, retrofits and things like that ... these can literally be done overnight. Other areas, like the development of advanced batteries, is something that can use a big push. You can't guarantee that it's going to happen in a year or so, but you can certainly employ people in an area that has critical importance moving forward."

Green pork?
So what's not to like? House Republicans are wary about supporting so much spending, particularly on items that don't seem to benefit mom-and-pop businesses. The idea of spending money on new cars for federal agencies has been drawing some of the harshest fire.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., specifically mentioned the purchase plan for alternative-fuel vehicles and plug-ins during an interview with NPR and said the American people expected Congress to stop pork-barrel spending. "Frankly, this bill doesn't rise to that standard," Cantor said.

Anne Korin, who is co-director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and chair of Set America Free, has a different kind of worry: In the rush to pass a stimulus bill that makes billion-dollar bets on future energy technologies, some of those bets may end up being misplaced.

Like Cantor, she pointed to the vehicle purchase plan as an example. "When you look at that, that may on the surface sound good, but the devil is in the details," she said. Would the vehicles have to be purchased before the next generation of plug-ins hits the market? Should the money go toward buying the whole vehicle, or should it be stretched out to cover only the extra cost of going with the greener technology? Should the tax breaks being given for new hybrid vehicles be extended to plug-in conversions as well?

"It would be desirable to slow down and make sure there's a chance to actually analyze these expenditures," Korin said.

Looking ahead
Weiss agreed that the stimulus spending had to be monitored to make sure it was going toward the most appropriate technologies. "You don't want everybody buying Beta when the rest of the world is going VHS," he said. (For the young kids out there, that's an analogy from the bygone days when most people actually watched videos on tape - think of it as Blu-ray vs. HD DVD.)

You don't want the stimulus money sitting on a shelf while the technology sorts itself out, either. The Congressional Budget Office raised precisely that concern this week, saying that a big chunk of the money in the stimulus package wouldn't be spent before fiscal 2011. As you'd expect, the White House has taken issue with that analysis.

In any case, House action on the package is just an early step along the way. The Senate has to weigh in as well, and the green-tech effect may end up looking a lot different by the time the bill gets out of Congress. The Senate Appropriations version, for example, would allocate $40 billion for "the development of clean, efficient, American energy" and $2.6 billion for alternative-fuel cars in the federal motor fleet. (Cosmic Variance's John Conway has more on the science stimulus.)

Weiss said the green stimulus spending would be merely the first step in Obama's three-step agenda for energy and the environment.

"There will be an energy bill that begins after the stimulus package," he said. "This will be done in late February or March and April. It's more likely that what you'll have is policies like renewable electricity standards and [policies aimed at making it] easier to build transmission lines."

Weiss said the third step will be the big one: a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse-gas emissions - the type of system that former Vice President Al Gore called for just today during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.

Will that cap-and-trade system look like what Obama proposed during the campaign, with the aim of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020? It's too early to tell: After all, the guy's been in the White House for only a week.

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• io9: The Alien People's Court is now in session 

Young et al. / SwRI / NASA

This view of Pluto was created by seeing how its brightness changed during partial eclipses by Charon.

To be or not to be ... a planet? That's not really the big question anymore, no matter how you feel about Pluto's so-called demotion.

The truly big question, addressed in two books that look at Pluto's present position from completely different perspectives, has to do with what kinds of planets are out there. That applies to our own solar system as well as the hundreds of other worlds being detected in the universe beyond.

Both books take Pluto as the starting point: In "The Pluto Files," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson chronicles the rise and fall of the little world's fortunes - a saga in which he played a role as director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History.

Tyson got himself in trouble with Pluto-loving third-graders when he decided to leave Pluto out of a parade of planets displayed in the museum's Hall of the Universe. This was back in 2000, well before the International Astronomical Union's decision in 2006 to define the word "planet" in such a way that Pluto didn't qualify.

Today, Tyson insists the omission wasn't meant as a snub. "That exhibit was not an exhibit about the solar system," he said. Instead, it was meant to show the relative sizes of cosmic objects ... objects that just happened to include planets. He pointed out that Pluto and its cousins in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy objects beyond Neptune, are included in another exhibit that delves into the solar system's full menagerie.

"I think Pluto's happier there, with the kings of the Kuiper Belt," Tyson told me.

So would Tyson say the solar system has eight planets, or nine? "I say the question doesn't interest me," he answered. "The question should not be how many planets there are. There was never any science in that question."

Rather, the question is how similar objects should be grouped together in the solar system: The way most astronomers see it, the four terrestrial planets belong together (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars). Then there's the asteroid belt, with Ceres in the leading role. Then there's the four gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). Finally, you have the icy bodies on the solar system's edge - which include Pluto as well as Eris, the even farther-flung object that astronomers found to be bigger than Pluto.

"When you take that approach, you end up with a family photo of the solar system," Tyson said, rather than a list that has to be memorized.

W.W. Norton

Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson addresses the planetary debate in "The Pluto Files."

The controversy over what to call Pluto (dwarf planet? distant minor planet? large Kuiper Belt object? comet in a deep freeze?) is just one part of "The Pluto Files," Tyson pointed out. "The rest of the book is a celebration of people's reactions to this scientific controversy, and it's a fun celebration at that," he said.

What is it about Pluto that makes it, as Tyson says in the book's subtitle, "America's Favorite Planet"?

"It's the dog," Tyson said. "It's entirely the dog."

In the book, Tyson delves into the connection with Pluto the Pup, the Disney cartoon character that was named after the solar system sensation in 1930-31. He also reprints editorial cartoons about Pluto's plight. You'll even find reproductions of some of the handwritten letters from kids who took Tyson to task - or took his side.

"I know how you feel," one 8-year-old told Tyson in a note. "We feel the same about Pluto not being a planet. ...  But we just have to get over it. That's science."

'Is Pluto a Planet?'
Unlike Tyson's 8-year-old correspondent, Vanderbilt University astronomer David Weintraub doesn't think the controversy is over - and he doesn't think the way the IAU handled the issue two years ago serves as a good example of how science is done.

"I don't think we have a consensus right now, and science is built on that consensus," he told me.

Princeton Univ. Press

Vanderbilt astronomer David A. Weintraub has updated "Is Pluto a Planet?" with a postscript about the planethood debate.

Weintraub's book on the subject, "Is Pluto a Planet?," takes a longer view on the big question, starting with the ancient Greeks and moving through the history of planetary discovery. At various times through the centuries, astronomers counted 16 planets, or 13, or eight or nine.

Now that scientists have detected more than 300 planets beyond our solar system, plus Pluto-sized "planet embryos" and other oddities, defining planethood per se is looking more and more like a lost cause, Weintraub said. That's the approach he takes in the classroom as well as in the book, which has just been updated in paperback to address the "flawed logic" behind the IAU's rulings on dwarf planets and plutoids. 

"The word 'planet' by itself doesn't give us enough information to think critically about what someone is telling us," he said. "Jovian ... Neptune-sized ... Earth-sized ... You almost have to have those adjectives in order to make the word 'planet' useful anymore."

So where does Pluto fit in the grand scheme of things? Weintraub said the ultimate answer will depend on several factors - including the growing body of knowledge about extrasolar planets as well as the results from the New Horizons mission to Pluto, which reaches its climax in 2015.

"Come back in 10 years and we'll have a better answer," he said. "I think we're asking better questions right now."

Tale of a telescope
This week, Pluto will be a cause for celebration at the Rancho Hidalgo housing development in Animas, N.M. The developers bought the 16-inch telescope that Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh used in his latter years, and at 3 p.m. MT Wednesday the instrument will be dedicated at its new place of honor.

Courtesy of Gene Turner

An archived photo shows the late astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, with his 16- inch telescope at his home in Las Cruces, N.M. Click on the picture for a larger version.

The developers for Rancho Hidalgo also own the Arizona Sky Village, another residential community designed to cater to skywatchers. One of the developers, Gene Turner, told me that Tombaugh's telescope will serve as the centerpiece for a new educational program at Rancho Hidalgo. Among those invited to the dedication are members of Tombaugh's family as well as David Levy, Tombaugh's biographer and the co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.

Turner expects the refurbished and upgraded telescope to get frequent use. "There's no shortage of people who can usher people up to the eyepiece," he said. Turner himself has his heart set on imaging Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, as separate objects - something that's rarely been done by amateur astronomers.

He promised that Rancho Hidalgo will be a place where a discouraging word about Pluto will seldom be heard. "If you come in here, Pluto's a planet," Turner told me, "and I will put that in my covenants and restrictions."

You can watch Tombaugh show off his telescopes in video clips that are part of this Q&A with the late astronomer.

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Paul Sakuma / AP file Click for video: Some of the monsters from the film "Monsters vs. Aliens" are seen through 3-D glasses during a demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Click on the image to watch a report from KNTV's Scott Budman about DreamWorks' 3-D ambitions.

The big game itself will still be in ho-hum 2-D, but the commercial break at the end of the Super Bowl's second quarter will show off some new technologies for 3-D moviegoing and TV watching. The biggest challenge just might be keeping all the different goggles straight.

Movies have been going 3-D, off and on, for 50 years: The standard technique was to film the scenes using a stereo camera. On the screen, both versions, for the left eye and the right eye, were displayed simultaneously in different polarized views or different colors (most typically emphasizing red and blue).

When viewers watched the movie through polarized or red-blue glasses, that induced a 3-D effect. (Here's a hilarious online demonstration of the technique from a red-blue version of the 1953 film "House of Wax 3D," one of the top-grossing 3-D films in Hollywood history).

Unfortunately, watching a whole movie in the theater, on your living-room TV or on your computer monitor could induce motion sickness if the technique wasn't done exactly right. Over the past few years, Hollywood has rolled out a succession of technologies aimed at making 3-D more foolproof. "Titanic" director James Cameron was an early adopter of 21st-century 3-D moviemaking, and now whole constellations of companies are vying to get you wearing those 3-D goggles (or eventually go 3-D without them).

You almost need a program to keep all the players behind Sunday's Super Bowl 3-D commercial extravaganza straight: DreamWorks Animation and Intel teamed up on a venture called InTru 3D, an upgraded platform for 3-D animation and rendering that was used for the upcoming film "Monsters vs. Aliens." The movie's 3-D look has been translated into a 90-second trailer for the small screen.

Animated 3-D lizards will appear right afterward, in a 60-second spot to tout Pepsi's SoBe mineral water. And NBC, which is airing the commercials, will give a plug to a 3-D episode of "Chuck" that was shot using 3ality's 3-D production system. (NBC Universal is one of the partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

You won't want to put on the traditional red-blue glasses to see these 3-D clips: Instead, the commercials are being broadcast using ColorCode 3-D's amber-violet encoding system. That means you'll have to go out to a retail outlet near you and look for the bin of free ColorCode 3-D glasses, probably stuck somewhere near the Pepsi/SoBe display. (As explained in this news release, you can have the glasses sent to you if you call 1-800-646-2904 by Thursday.)

ColorCode's system works much like the old-style, red-blue anaglyphs, in that different colors are slightly offset in a stereo pair of images to produce the 3-D effect. (Here are some red-blue examples from the Red Planet.) However, ColorCode's color scheme is selected in such a way that the pictures still look OK in 2-D when you're not wearing the glasses. ColorCode's Web site offers these samples of 3-D stills and videos, so you can see for yourself before Sunday.

ColorCode 3-D Do you have your 3-D glasses for the Super Bowl commercial yet? Try them out on this bird's-eye view  of a computer- generated skyline. Click on the image for a larger version.

"This process much improves the viewing experience if you don't have glasses to watch it," Jamie French, director of NBC Entertainment Publicity, told me today.

The 3-D "Chuck" episode is due to air on the night after the Super Bowl, with viewers getting an hourlong dose of ColorCode video (that is, if you don't include the 2-D commercials).

"The show is best viewed when lights are turned down low in the room in which the show is being watched," French advised. "Total darkness would actually be best. Due to the fact that the audience will be using the less expensive paper glasses being distributed throughout America, the lens structure is more susceptible to ambient light affecting the viewing experience. People should watch in the dark."

Yet another type of technology will come into play when "Monsters vs. Aliens" hits the theaters on March 27: Some theaters will show the movie using a RealD projection system, which allows both sides of the stereo view to run through one projector. That system is far more financially feasible for wide release than the traditional dual-projection system used for 3-D movies.

Like other movie projection schemes, RealD relies on 3-D goggles that have polarized lenses rather than different-colored lenses. That means the glasses you picked up for the Super Bowl commercial will be no good in the theater. RealD claims that its circular-polarization system makes for more comfortable viewing than the standard linear-polarization system, but you'll have to judge for yourself.

It's likely you'll have plenty of chances to judge: DreamWorks says all its animated features will be rendered in 3-D from now on. DreamWorks thus joins Fox and Disney on the 3-D bandwagon. Sports teams are testing the waters as well: Over the past couple of months, RealD and 3ality have teamed up to assess the feasibility of showing 3-D football games in movie theaters (including the BCS college football championship and an NFL game). 

After watching the Chargers trounce the Raiders in theatrical 3-D, NBC Sports' Alan Abrahamson gave the show (if not the Raiders) a big thumbs-up: "I saw the NFL's future Thursday," he wrote. "Its name is 3-D."

So if you're a real 3-D fan (or a real football fan), you might be heading to the theater for next year's Super Bowl ... and not just for the commercials.

Correction for 1:45 p.m. ET Jan. 27: In the comments section below, Phil Gray and Rich Emery correct the impression I originally left that the early 3-D movies were shown in the theaters using the red-blue view. Actually, the theaters generally showed the polarized version of the movie, as they explain in their comments. The red-blue version was more commonly aired on TV (or YouTube), where it's well nigh impossible to do the polarization trick. I've rewritten this item to fix that misimpression.

On another question, it's not necessary to have one of those newfangled 3-D HD TVs to see the Super Bowl commercial. In fact, those won't do you any good for this particular kind of 3-D effect. Based on the reviews, it sounds as if the new-generation 3-D TVs aren't quite ready for prime time.

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NASA / JPL / Corby Waste Hey, kids: Here's your last chance to name NASA's Mars Science Laboratory.

OK, kids: You have only one more weekend to come up with a name for NASA's next Mars rover. I've got some ideas, but it's up to you to write the essay and take this opportunity to make your mark on another planet. Although the contest is for kids only, even grown-ups can play a part in naming the Mars Science Laboratory - and you don't have to be a kid to enjoy the latest goodies from NASA's 5-year-old Red Planet rovers.

The naming contest is open to kids aged 5 to 18 who are registered students at U.S. schools. Your suggested name, plus an essay explaining the reason for the name, must be received by 11:59 p.m. ET Monday. Judges will sort through the entries and select nine finalists for consideration by the public in late March.

That's when the grown-ups have a say: A "Public Poll" will be posted on the contest Web site in late May, and the public input will be one of the factors used to determine the winning name. The grand prize is a three-day, two-night trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Disneyland for the winner plus up to three other family members.

JPL has the option of letting the winner sign his or her name on the rover itself. But NASA won't be obligated to use the name you come up with if it doesn't work out. Check out the contest rules for all the details.

If I were a kid again, I'd make a case for naming the darn thing Darwin. After all, the Mars Science Laboratory is built to roam around the Martian landscape and look for evidence that the planet was once potentially habitable. That blend of geology and biology would have been appealing to British naturalist Charles Darwin.

Another option would be to name the rover Beagle, after the ship that took Darwin on his famous voyage. (The name "Beagle 3" would pay tribute as well to Beagle 2, the European Mars lander that was lost in 2003.)

It's just too bad that the mission's launch had to be delayed. It would have been doubly fitting if the laboratory were sent out into space during the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species."

The names that were given to NASA's twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have worked out better than I originally thought - and that's a tribute to Sofi Collis, who came up with those names when she was just 9 years old. In a similar high-flown vein, you could suggest:

• Resolution: The vessel that took Captain James Cook on his final voyage of discovery, as well as the name of the inflatable moon-style habitat that was recently christened in Antarctica.
• Revelation: I'm hopeful that the Mars Science Laboratory's mission will bring fresh revelations about past and perhaps even present life on Mars, and I like the nickname Rev the Rover. (I'm also anxious to write the headline "Revvy revs up.") But maybe Revelation sounds a little too apocalyptic, especially considering that it's likely to land on Mars in (gasp!) 2012.

But those are enough names from me ... feel free to add your own suggestions as comments below. There's no age limit. And while you meditate on your moniker, have a look at the latest 3-D picture from NASA's Opportunity rover, released just in time to mark the fifth anniversary of its landing.

For more about the rover anniversary, check out this posting from earlier in the month, plus our "Return to the Red Planet" archive.

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Univ. of Maryland

This graphic shows the apparatus set up for the   quantum teleportation experiment.

Researchers have successfully teleported information from one trapped atom to another one sealed up in a container sitting 3.3 feet (1 meter) away. That's one small step for teleportation, and one quantum leap for code-makers and code-breakers.

But if you're waiting for the kind of teleporter that can beam Captain Kirk down from the Starship Enterprise ... well, don't hold your breath.

"The term 'teleportation' is a little weird," research team leader Christopher Monroe told me today. "When people see that word they think of Captain Kirk, and that's a big problem."

That's not to say that this kind of teleportation is ho-hum physics: Albert Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and thought it couldn't be done. But quantum teleportation, as in the transfer of information from one place to the other without passing through any physical medium, has been in the works for more than a decade.

Over the years, teleportation experiments have demonstrated that quantum states - for example, the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon - can be teleported using a variety of methods. But the researchers behind the latest experiment, reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science, claim that this is the first time information has been teleported between two separate atoms in unconnected enclosures.

That's the kind of setup that makes the most sense for super-secure communication systems, as well as for super-smart computers that could break today's cryptographic codes or sort through huge databases.

"Our system has the potential to form the basis for a large-scale 'quantum repeater' that can network quantum memories over vast distances," Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland, said in a news release issued today. "Moreover, our methods can be used in conjunction with quantum bit operations to create a key component needed for quantum computation."

The experiment was run by Monroe and other researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute, a partnership between the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. If you don't need to know the details about how the feat was done, and you don't want to risk getting your brain twisted in a knot (as mine was), skip the next section and resume reading about "the next giant leaps." 

How the job was done
The team started out by trapping ytterbium ions in electromagnetic fields, inside separate vacuum chambers. Let's call the two ions A and B. (This chart shows the setup.)

Each of the ions could be in either of two energy states that were designated as the "1" and the "0" of a binary quantum bit. Unlike classical bits of information, quantum bits (or qubits) can be put into a state of superposition - that is, they can be in a combined 1-and-0 state until a measurement is made.

Ion A was zapped with a specially tailored burst of microwaves to put it into a desired state of superposition - in effect, entering information into A's "memory." Then, both ions were excited with laser pulses lasting just a trillionth of a second. That excitation sparked each ion to give off just a single photon that corresponded to each ion's energy state. (This chart explains the process.)

The photons were directed to a beam splitter that would set off a pair of detectors only if the energy states of each ion are entangled in such a way that they're complementary: If one is in the "1" state, the other has to be in the "0" state. It might take thousands of tries to get the right combination, and scientists wouldn't know which ion is in which state. But once the two detectors were activated at the same time, scientists could be confident that the entanglement is in force. (This chart shows how it works.)

With the ions in an entangled state, the scientists measured ion A - collapsing the quantum state out of superposition and making the original information vanish. Now A's energy state is definitely either "1" or "0." That would tell the scientists what kind of microwave burst to apply to ion B in order to read out the information that was originally entered into ion A.

No information was sent directly from A to B. Instead, quantum entanglement was used to put the information into ion A and get it out again through ion B. (This chart shows the final steps of the experiment.) 

Future giant leaps
Monroe admitted that the experimental setup might seem rather clunky compared to today's classical computers. But physicists are still in the small-step phase of quantum computation.

"There's a lot of engineering that has to be done," he said, "but if you've ever seen the first solid-state transistor in 1957, it looked like this. It looked like it came out of a physics lab."

Monroe would like to boost the reliability of the system for entangling atoms, as well as the reliability of the system for reading out the results. In the experiment reported in Science, the information could be read out accurately about 90 percent of the time.

"For teleportation, that's very good," Monroe said. "We'd like to go up to 99 percent. But for quantum computing, you'd probably need three nines - 99.9 - so we have our work cut out for this in all dimensions."

Eventually, Monroe and other researchers in the field hope to establish networks of quantum communication devices that can send data across the globe. Quantum communication would be more secure than present-day communication, because if someone tried to eavesdrop on the signal, it would just collapse into random gobbledygook.

Theoretically, quantum computers would be much better than classical computers at sorting through huge databases to find the right information. One of the leading applications would be to find the prime factors of large numbers, which are the key to today's cryptographic systems.

A quantum computing system would be a godsend to spies - and that may be why the research reported in Science was supported by the federal government's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, as well as by the National Science Foundation.

Beam me up? Not so fast
But if information can be teleported without sending something between A and B, doesn't that mean something could be transmitted faster than the speed of light? And wouldn't that break the laws of physics? Well, not really. Even though the quantum entanglement operates at a distance, the information required to interpret the results has to be transmitted classically.

"Something happens faster than the speed of light," Monroe said. "It's just not information. ... But there is something weird nevertheless."

Monroe and other researchers hope to delve into some of that weirdness, including a phenomenon called nonlocal communication, in future experiments. Over at the University of Washington, physicist John Cramer is taking a different approach to the same kind of weirdness through an experiment that could investigate backward causality. (The last time I checked, Cramer was still working the bugs out of the lab apparatus.)

As for Captain Kirk ... physicists emphasize that the brand of quantum teleportation they work with isn't like the instant matter teleportation that's been so much a part of science fiction, from "Star Trek" to the 2008 movie "Jumper."

Theoretically, I suppose it's possible to entangle every single atom in Kirk's body with atoms down on the surface of the planet Vulcan. But in order to reconstruct the information at his destination, Kirk would have to be destroyed atom by atom on the Enterprise. And right now, even William Shatner wouldn't want to put that much faith in physics.

"There's always one kicker," Monroe said, speaking about the science in general rather than Kirk's fate in particular. "No matter what you do in quantum mechanics, there's always going to be a kicker somewhere."

Click through our interactive presentation, titled "Cats and Qubits," to learn more about how you get from quantum mechanics to next-generation computers.

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David A. Aguilar / CfA

This artwork shows the "super-Neptune" planet. Normally blue in color, its red hue is caused by the illumination from the nearby dwarf star.

A network of small telescopes has bagged its smallest prize yet - and that's great news for astronomers.

HATNet's discovery of an extrasolar world only slightly bigger than Neptune helps prepare the way for an even more capable planet-hunter that could find alien Earths.

To date, more than 300 planets have been found orbiting other stars. Most of them were detected by measuring the gravitational wobble that the planet induces in its parent star. That method works great for huge planets, but not as well for smaller worlds.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' HATNet uses a different method: Six automated 4.3-inch telescopes in Hawaii and Arizona work together to watch for the ever-so-slight dimming of a star's light as a planet crosses in front of it.

By analyzing how the light pattern changes during the transit, astronomers can figure out how big the planet is. The wobble method can then be used to follow up on the detection and calculate the planet's mass. This interactive presentation explains the workings of the transit method as well as the wobble method.

A couple of years ago, HATNet found the most massive planet ever detected using the transit method. Its latest discovery, designated HAT-P-11b, is the smallest planet on its list. It is not, however, the smallest extrasolar planet known to orbit a normal star: That distinction belongs to a team of researchers who used a different method, called microlensing, to detect a planet just three times as massive as Earth.

HAT-P-11b is a "super-Neptune": It's 25 times as massive as Earth, and 4.7 times Earth's size. In comparison, the Neptune we all know and love is equal to 17 times Earth's mass and 3.8 times Earth's size. The planet orbits a dwarf star 120 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, at a distance so close that it's baked to a temperature of 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit (600 degrees Celsius). One orbit takes just 4.88 days, according to a news release issued last week by the Center for Astrophysics.

The center reported that there are signs of a second planet in the same star system, but more gravitational-wobble readings are required to confirm the observation and nail down the second planet's properties.

Another "hot Neptune," known as GJ 436b, was found using the wobble method and then studied by a different team using the transit method. Now the scientists will be able to compare notes.

"Having two such objects to compare helps astronomers to test theories of planetary structure and formation," said Harvard astronomer Gaspar Bakos, who led the discovery team and has submitted a paper on the find to the Astrophysical Journal.

Hundreds of small worlds, including planets the size of Earth, might be found using the transit method once NASA's Kepler mission goes to work. The one-ton Kepler spacecraft is due for launch in March, and the HAT-P-11 star system should be in its field of view.

"We expect Kepler to measure the detailed properties of HAT-P-11 with the extraordinary precision possible only from space," said Harvard's Robert Noyes, another member of the discovery team.

Update for 7:20 p.m. ET Jan. 22: New Scientist quotes researchers as saying that the smallest known extrasolar planet orbiting a normal star may be even smaller than they originally thought. Their latest estimate suggests that the planet is only 1.4 times as massive as Earth. Even though the mass is Earthlike, the planet's environment probably isn't. "Because its host is a very dim red dwarf, the planet is likely to be frozen - even though it orbits at about the same distance as Venus from our sun," New Scientist reports.

Warner Independent Pictures "Slumdog Millionaire," a film that focuses on the young winner of an Indian "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" contest, is the priciest pick on the Hollywood Stock Exchange's best-picture nomination market.

Prediction markets have been spot-on when it comes to picking presidents, but the record is less stellar when it comes to movie stars. This year, the best-known Oscar prediction market largely follows the conventional wisdom on Oscar nominations. How close will the Hollywood Stock Exchange come to the actual picks? Tune in tomorrow.

The idea behind prediction markets is that people who back a particular proposition are able to put their money where their mouth is, and trade in options that pay off if the proposition comes to pass. The winner-take-all propositions could be about who's going to win the presidential election, or who's going to win the Super Bowl, or who's going to win an Oscar. If you're right, you get paid. If you're wrong, you get nothing. 

Yes, it sounds like gambling ... and some offshore Web sites handle the prediction markets much as they handle traditional betting. But for two decades, the Iowa Electronic Markets have been allowed to create such real-money "markets" with the sanction of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, as a research project for the University of Iowa. The research has shown that such markets have done a better job than polls at predicting election results. In fact, a new study based on IEM data was published just this week.

The Hollywood Stock Exchange, which is a subsidiary of the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald, deals in play money rather than real money. Nevertheless, it has claimed a good record for predicting the Oscars. In 2007, for example, HSX traders settled on the winners in seven of the eight top Oscar categories.

Last month, Cantor Fitzgerald announced that it would offer futures contracts for domestic movie box-office receipts - which means investors would be able to put down real money on how they think movies will do. That resulted in some raised eyebrows - and a note of caution from one of the professors involved in the IEM.

The Iowa research project, like the Hollywood Stock Exchange, has offered markets to predict box-office figures for some time now, and marketing professor Tom Gruca said neither the IEM nor the HSX has been very good at the game. The average percentage error for the IEM's forecasts is 38 percent, while the equivalent predictions from the HSX have been off by 31 percent on average.

"Forecasting movies is a very difficult problem," Gruca said. "There's an enormous amount of data out there for traders to aggregate, but how do you put it all together? Nobody's learned yet how to distill all that information into a consistently accurate forecast."

Predicting Oscar nominations may be easier. Let's see how the HSX does on Thursday morning. Here are the priciest stocks in the top four categories, as rated by investors at 5:15 p.m. ET today:

Best picture

• "Slumdog Millionaire"
• "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
• "Frost/Nixon"
• "Milk"
• "The Dark Knight"

Best director

• Danny Boyle for "Slumdog Millionaire"
• David Fincher for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
• Christopher Nolan for "The Dark Knight"
• Gus Van Sant for "Milk"
• Ron Howard for "Frost/Nixon"

Best actor

• Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler"
• Sean Penn in "Milk"
• Frank Langella in "Frost/Nixon"
• Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino"
• Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

Best actress

• Kate Winslet in "Revolutionary Road"
• Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married"
• Meryl Streep in "Doubt"
• Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky"
• Angelina Jolie in "Changeling"

For other markets, involving supporting roles and screenplays, check out the HSX Web site, and then check our Entertainment section on Thursday morning to see which stocks paid off.

Update for 11:45 a.m. ET Jan. 22: On one hand, four out of five ain't bad. On the other hand, most of the favorites for the Oscars are so locked in that it doesn't take a genius (or the wisdom of crowds) to put together a respectable list of nominees. So how well did HSX do? One way to judge is to compare its record with a real live person - namely, Newsweek's Ramin Setoodeh, a.k.a. the Gold Digger.

• Best picture: HSX gets four right, but "The Dark Knight" was vanquished by "The Reader." The Gold Digger had the same miss.
• Best director: Once again, "The Reader" (Stephen Daldry) rules over the "Knight" (Christopher Nolan). Another miss for HSX and the Digster.
• Best actor: HSX and the Gold Digger had the exact same picks once again, but the actual nomination list had Richard Jenkins of "The Visitor" instead of Clint Eastwood in "Gran Torino."
• Best actress: HSX slightly outdid the Digger by picking Angelina Jolie, who ended up on the actual list of nominees. But neither prediction had Melissa Leo ("Frozen River") on the list. Also, Kate Winslet was nominated here for "The Reader" rather than "Revolutionary Road." Two misses for HSX, three for the Gold Digger.
• Other categories: The prediction game usually gets harder as you move down the categories. The Digger missed one each in the two supporting-role categories, and so did HSX. So it's Angelina Jolie for the win: HSX edges the Gold Digger by a hair (or a pouty lip). HSX was trading stock in two extra categories: The market missed on three original-screenplay nominations, and one adapted-screenplay pick.

Correction for 11:25 a.m. ET Jan. 28: Ugh, I originally wrote that the Securities and Exchange Commission had given clearance to the Iowa Electronic Markets when it was actually the Commodities Futures Trading Commission - as I pointed out in the earlier item that I'm linking to. I should read my own stuff more closely. I've corrected the reference above.

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Chuck Burton / AP Amanda Raflo watches the inauguration of President Obama on her laptop while studying at a coffee shop in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday.

President Obama's inauguration sparked significant traffic jams - not only on Washington's streets but in cyberspace as well, according to Web performance monitors. They reported slowdowns at the Web sites run by the White House and the U.S. Senate as well as at several online news outlets.

The fact that the raw numbers of Web users didn't rise to the levels seen on Election Night suggests the problem wasn't the number of people who were online, but the amount of bandwidth each of those people was using.

"It's safe to say that streaming video was a significant contributor to these slowdowns," said Shawn White, director of external operations at Keynote Systems Inc. Another likely factor is the rapid rise of bandwidth-heavy sharing sites such as Flickr and YouTube, he said.

Keynote Systems is a California-based company that focuses on measuring and testing performance on the Internet and mobile networks. Service providers knew weeks ago that Washington's wireless networks were going to be stressed today, but it turns out that a lot of Web servers far from the scene of the action were as well.

White listed eight online news sites where the response times were significantly slower than normal: ABC News, CBS News, Fox Business, the Los Angeles Times, msnbc.com, NPR, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

"Only NPR actually experienced an outage," he told me. On another front, The Associated Press reported that CNN had to put some viewers on a "wait list" for a while before they could watch the inauguration.

The Bush-Obama transition affected the White House Web site, where pages took twice as long to load in the 10 a.m.-to-noon ET time frame, and up to 16 times longer at 11:30 a.m., White said. Response times snapped back to normal at 12:07 p.m., once the Obama administration officially took charge.

The Senate Web site was 60 percent slower than usual today - and 63 percent of the time, attempts to connect didn't go through at all, according to the Keynote figures. Even Keynote's Business Top 40 sites were affected. "What we saw was a sharp slowdown in performance from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.," White said.

"Obviously the Internet is resilient, and it can handle these events, but it might take longer to do what you want to do," he said.

Keynote can't keep track of how many visitors are clicking into particular Web sites, or what they're doing once they get there. The company's monitoring software can only determine how Web sites are coping with the traffic. But White speculated that the sharp and sudden slowdown could be traced, at least in part, to the "multiple gigabytes of video traffic running on the Internet."

That view was reinforced by figures from Akamai, a Massachusetts-based company that provides streaming-media services for a long list of Web sites, including msnbc.com. In a news release, the company said today marked its biggest day ever for live streaming video.

The peak of more than 7 million active simultaneous streams came at 12:15 p.m. ET, just as Obama was launching into his inaugural address. That figure compares with an average of 1.3 million for the previous 24 hours. Check out Akamai's real-time visualization to see what the current figures are.

"In addition to the historic nature of the inauguration, it is now clear that this event has driven unprecedented demand from an global online audience," Robert Hughes, Akamai's executive vice president of global sales, services and marketing, said in the news release.

Akamai also maintains an index showing the number of Internet users clicking into online news sites, and today's figures showed a significant spike of 5.4 million users per minute at 11:45 a.m. ET. However, that peak ranks just No. 5 on Akamai's all-time list, just below the first day of the NCAA's "March Madness" basketball tournament in 2006.

So what's No. 1? Election Night 2008, when the traffic reached nearly 8.6 million users per minute at 11 p.m. ET.

Of course, the inauguration is a different kind of event. Back in November, Internet users were most likely looking for quick updates on the voting results. Today, they were more in the mood to watch the grand event as it happened, with all the bells and whistles. And because it happened during workday hours, when more people have access to fast connections at the office, that would encourage viewers to become bandwidth hogs.

Video wasn't the only big draw of the day: Traffic also spiked at social networking sites such as Facebook (where users can keep their friends posted on what they're up to) and Twitter (where 140-character "tweets" can be traded among friends). Obama took advantage of such sites during his campaign, so it's only natural that they were in high gear today.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told me that today's tweets-per-minute peaked at a level five times higher than the week-ago average (as shown on this chart). Despite the increased traffic, there were few reports of glitches. Even TwitPic, a Web site that lets Twitter users swap photos, was able to handle the increased load.

"TwitPic made it through the inauguration great, don't think we even experienced any slowness either," the site's creator, Noah Everett, told me in an e-mail. "We upgraded some of our hardware this weekend to handle the traffic."

But before anyone gets overly impressed with today's traffic spikes, consider this claim, advanced by Silicon Alley Insider: Not even Obama's inauguration was as popular as the Puppy Cam.

Whitehouse.gov

The White House Web site gets a makeover.

Even before President Obama took the public oath of office, power quietly switched over from the Bush administration at the stroke of noon, as called for in the Constitution. And so it was on the Web: The Bush White House's Web site disappeared into the ether, replaced by an online portal jazzed up with blog posts, slideshows and front-page video.

All those bytes could contain crucial bits of information chronicling the past eight years. Fortunately, they aren't totally lost. If the only other online presidential transition is any guide, the vanished content will eventually resurface on the HTML-coded pages of Web history.

The new Whitehouse.gov was introduced in a blog posting at 12:01 p.m. today by Macon Phillips, director of new media, who noted that the Web site was "one of the first changes" introduced by the administration. Phillips came over to the White House from Blue State Digital, which designed a whole constellation of Web sites for the Obama team.

Phillips promised that more goodies would be posted online as Inauguration Day wore on, including video of Obama's inaugural address and slideshows from the festivities. (This First Read blog post shows off a bit more of the site.)

Meanwhile, search engines were still pointing to the Bush administration's pages, but efforts to see live content from the old days (as in, um, yesterday) were greeted by "Page Not Found" messages. That's the way it was during the Clinton-Bush transition as well: One day you could hear Socks the Cat meow, and the next day you had to be content with Spotty the Spaniel.

Some of the frills from the Bush Web site, such as biographies of the First Ladies, have been ported over to the Obama Web site with little change. (And speaking of change, the new Whitehouse.gov picks up some of the elements from Change.gov, the ground-breaking Web site created for the presidential transition.)

If you're hoping to drill down into the Bush administration's old Web pages, you'll have to sort through the cached versions preserved by search engines or the http://www.whitehouse.gov">Internet Archive, at least for the time being. That situation will almost certainly change, however: The Web legacy is just too valuable to let lapse.

The model for old presidential Web sites was set eight years ago, during the Clinton-Bush transition: Today, several versions of the Clinton-era White House Web site have been preserved, thanks to the Clinton Presidential Library and the National Archives. (Check out, for example, this 2000 White House talk by famed physicist Stephen Hawking.)

The same routine will no doubt be made available to now-former President George W. Bush and Web historians. Tributes to the late, lamented Spotty the Spaniel - like all the now-dead speeches, photos and press releases from the Bush administration - will live again online.

Correction for 7:43 p.m. ET: In the original version of this post, I said that Change.gov was fading away. But as a sharp-eyed reader points out below, content from the transition Web site can still be found by clicking on the small link on the lower right of the Change.gov home page. I've revised this item to correct my oversight.

AP file Click for video: Million Hundessa, lead team technician for Sprint, left, and Ken Deatrick, a radio frequency technician for Sprint, add capacity to a cell site in Washington in preparation for the inauguration. Click on the picture to watch Brian Williams' report for "NBC Nightly News."

A cell-phone-generated blizzard of voice calls, text messages and pictures swept through the nation's capital as President-elect Barack Obama's inauguration neared - sparking scattered reports of delays and blocked calls. Wireless service operators said the problems weren't any worse than they expected, and they repeated their advice for keeping the voice and data traffic running smoothly.

Cell-phone crush
By some estimates, millions of mobile-phone users have converged on the Washington area for Tuesday's inaugural ceremonies. To cope with the expected crush, service providers have been adding as much capacity as they can to the area's wireless networks, said Joe Farren, spokesman for CTIA, the wireless industry's trade association.

That includes bringing in portable cell-phone switching equipment on mobile trailers ("cell on wheels," or COWs) and trucks ("cell on light trucks," or COLTs).

Despite those measures, the wireless companies still expected some glitches to crop up. "If 3 or 4 million people show up, and they're all trying to get on the Internet to send pictures, there could be congestion," Farren said.

Based on his own experience over the weekend, NBCWashington.com's Matthew Stabley said beefing up the wireless networks may not have solved the problem entirely.

"Sunday night, my cell phone mysteriously lit up at about 11 p.m. with a voicemail message that'd been left two hours earlier. Just before midnight, several text messages sent throughout the evening appeared all at once. Then another text message took a half hour to receive. ..."

Representatives from Verizon Wireless and AT&T, the nation's two largest wireless carriers, said they had not heard of any problems other than the delays that had been anticipated.

"This is obviously an unprecedented situation, and we've been planning for it for months," said Mark Siegel, spokesman for AT&T Mobility. He said his company increased its staffing levels in the area by 60 percent and brought in backup generators as well as cell-on-wheels stations.

Even so, he said, "Think of this as an entrance ramp to a highway, and when that ramp gets really crowded, people could experience a delay. The laws of physics are at work here. It could be people have occasional difficulty placing a call or getting access to the Internet using their wireless devices."

Jeffrey Nelson of Verizon Wireless said he knew of no problems. "And I would know," he added. He said he lives a half-mile north of the White House.

Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis reported that her company's network "performed as expected," despite a dramatic rise in cell-phone traffic over the weekend.

"Specifically, on Sunday in the D.C. metro area, we successfully experienced more than double the amount of voice calls and text messages on our CDMA network in comparison to last Sunday," she said.

"There were some periods of minor call blocking, but this was expected considering the large number of people in the area and the varied nature that people use their phones for today - capturing and emailing videos and photos, using social media sites, and texting a large number of people at once."

How to beat the jam
CTIA's Farren has some standard advice to counter congestion if you're caught in a cell-phone traffic jam, on Inauguration Day or any other day: The first rule is "text, don't talk." Text messages take up only a few hundred bits of data, which means those messages can piggyback securely right on top of the more data-heavy voice traffic.

Farren said the photos and videos you capture on your cell phone should be saved for sending later, after the data jam eases. And if you have a mission-critical need for voice or data communications, think about identifying a backup plan that involves a land line, just in case the wireless networks are jammed.

Speaking of jamming, Secret Service agents do have the capability to jam wireless communications in the immediate vicinity of the president - that is, if they think there's a threat. But if you have trouble getting through from the parade route, it will probably be due to the congestion rather than national security.

Watching on the Web
Of course, you could also get in on the action from the comfort of your own home or office, thanks to the Internet. Obama's presidential campaign set a new standard for high-tech, high-touch politics, so it's no surprise that his inauguration has been cast in the same mold.

Plans are in the works for Webcasts of the ceremony as well as some of the inaugural balls around the nation's capital, but that's just one way to experience Tuesday's events from afar: The Presidential Inaugural Committee's Web site, PIC2009.org, is offering all the tools that helped put Obama in the White House, including a text-messaging channel and an online database that points you to the nearest TV-watching party.

The inaugural Web site looks a whole lot like the Obama team's other online properties, ranging from MyBarackObama to Change.gov. That's by design: The same outfit that handled those earlier political Web sites, Blue State Digital, is behind PIC2009 as well.

Working with Obama's operatives, Blue State Digital engineered a platform that collected millions of e-mail addresses, offered a map-based interface to point supporters to events, and kept the site's users up to date on the campaign's progress (and needs). The inaugural site is built the same way so that users know what to expect, and can easily navigate their way around the site's features, said Thomas Gensemer, managing partner for Blue State Digital.

The PIC2009 blog is updated daily, of course, not only with snippets of text but with YouTube videos and Flickr slideshows as well. If you need a quicker fix of PIC bits, you can check the inaugural Twitter feed or sign up to have text updates sent to your mobile phone. The Obama campaign's "house party finder" application has been adapted for the inauguration as well.

Party all night on the Net
The inaugural ceremonies will be widely Webcast - as they have been since the Clinton era. This year, you're likely to see video of Inauguration Day's parties as well. PIC2009 has promised Web video from the Neighborhood Ball, which is scheduled to be the first stop for Obama and his wife, Michelle.

Gensemer told me that the Web site would offer "roving-camera coverage" of the First Family's partygoing throughout the evening, but the current plan doesn't call for PIC2009 to provide real-time video of the action at the other inaugural balls. That will be left up to the party organizers on a case-by-case basis: For example, MTV.com is gearing up to Webcast the Youth Inaugural Ball. (If you know of other inaugural events on the Web, pass them along as a comment and I'll add them to the list.)

You can bet that someone at PIC2009 will be blogging the night away next Tuesday. The Web site just might be jammin' as hard as the bands at that MTV party, but Gensemer said he and his team were confident they could keep up with the traffic.

"We had the biggest event possible on Election Day, although this is going to be a close second," Gensemer said.

Another option is to go to the movies: Our cable brethren at MSNBC have partnered up with Screenvision to present movie-theater viewings of the inauguration in cities across the country. This New York Times item says MSNBC coverage will also air in 650 Starbucks coffee shops. For more information about the free theater tickets, check out this MSNBC Events Web site. We also have a rundown of inauguration broadcasts and balls.

Have you encountered cell-phone snags? Pass your report along as a comment below.

This is an updated version of a posting that was first published at 3:59 p.m. ET Jan. 13, with additional reporting by Suzanne Choney, a contributing writer/editor for msnbc.com.

JHU-APL / NASA An artist's conception shows NASA's New Horizons probe passing over Pluto in 2015.

Three years ago today, NASA's New Horizons probe set off on a mission for Pluto and other little worlds on the edge of the solar system. On the same day, little Hana and Nora Fennell set off on a mission of their own.

The twin daughters of Alan Fennell and Risha Raven were born on this day in 2006. Since then, New Horizons' managers at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory have enlisted Hana and Nora - along with four other kids who mark Jan. 19 as their birthday - as "Pluto Pals."

The mission's top scientist, Alan Stern, said the idea came to him when he saw a newspaper picture of two boys watching the New Horizons launch. "It made me think it would be fun to follow some children who would grow up during our 9½-year trip to Pluto," he said.

Hana and Nora's grandfather, Patrick O'Connor III, played a big role in getting the idea off the ground. He recalled watching the launch over the Internet from his office at DeVry University's Chicago campus, and hearing later in the day that his daughter was in labor. O'Connor, who was dean of electronics and computer technology, said in an e-mail message that both of the day's events made a big impression on him:

"Since I am a great fan of spaceflight in all its aspects, a year later, I sent a 'congratulations' to Alan Stern at NASA, noting the anniversary of the launch was, coincidentally, a 35th birthday for a son-in-law, the first birthday for my two twin granddaughters, the birthday of Allen Steele (one of my favorite science fiction writers) and the birthday of Robert E. Lee. Alan Stern wrote back about the 'Pluto Pals' idea, and I let Risha know her twins might be 'mascots' for the New Horizons mission.

"The twins, Hana and Nora, were born in Northern Illinois, about 80 miles from Streator, where [Pluto discoverer] Clyde Tombaugh was born. With the Pluto/Charon system being a double planet, I thought it was fitting that two sets of twins were among the Pluto Pals.

"She submitted their names and I thought their selection was one of the coolest things ever.  They will probably appreciate the 'NASA swag' they were sent when they get a little older, but they're only 3, and New Horizons is in hibernation mode now - not very exciting at the moment.

"By the time of arrival July 14, 2015, at Pluto/Charon, they'll be old enough to appreciate it, I hope."

Fennell and Raven are a husband-and-wife team on the Illinois farm (where they tend a blog as well as livestock), and Raven also serves as the family practitioner in Polo, Ill. (pop. 2,500). It's a busy life, but Fennell said they make sure to take the time to answer their kids' questions about science - whether it has to do with the workings of a tractor battery or the name of a star cluster in the night sky.

Courtesy of Patrick J. O'Connor III

Nora and Hana Fennell were born on the same day that NASA's New Horizons probe was launched toward Pluto, in 2006. They'll be 9 years old when the probe finally reaches the icy world.

"Science is important to us as a family, and teaching opportunities are important. ... There's nothing like that teaching moment. That only comes around one time," Fennell told me.

What to call Pluto serves as another teaching moment: After New Horizons was launched, the International Astronomical Union voted to classify it as a "dwarf planet" rather than a major planet. That vote sparked a controversy that is still working itself out. (More on that next week.)

Hana and Nora aren't in on the debate yet, but other members of their family have been. "I asked their 12-year-old sister what she thought," Raven told me. "She said she's been told that Pluto was not a planet, and she really doesn't understand why."

By the time Hana and Nora celebrate their 10th birthday, we should know a lot more about Pluto and its place in the solar system - thanks to another 10-year-old zooming billions of miles away.

To learn more about New Horizons on its birthday, check out the three-year update on the mission Web site. You can look back at New Horizons' eye-opening Jupiter flyby in 2007, and this handy-dandy dashboard will show you where the spacecraft is from now until at least 2015.

I'll be taking a few days off to help out with a family medical matter, but during the break, take a look at Renew America Together, a Web site set up by President-elect Barack Obama's team to match you up with service opportunities in your neighborhood.

For many people, Martin Luther King Jr. Day (which will be observed next Monday) has become not just a day off from work, but a day set aside for community service. Here's hoping you find a worthwhile opportunity to serve - whether it's through Renew America Together, also known as USAService.org, or through any other outlet you choose.

And if you're looking to consider subjects even more cosmic during my days off, here's a magazine rack of Web links:

• Popular Mechanics: How to build on the moon
• Time: Life after Earth on 'Battlestar Galactica' 
• Popular Science: Enter the PopSci Invention Awards!
• Discover: Is quantum mechanics controlling your thoughts?

Regular postings will resume next week.

Lemelson-MIT Program

MIT's Timothy Lu won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 2008 for inventing processes that could combat bacterial infections.

When it comes to the next generation of innovation, the good news is that more teens are interested in pursuing careers in science and technology. The bad news is that they don't know where to turn. The Lemelson-MIT Program has put its finger on the problem - and is pointing toward a potential solution.

First, the good news: Eighty-five percent of the teens surveyed for this year's Lemelson-MIT Invention Index expressed interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which are known as the STEM fields of study. That's a huge jump from last year's figure of 64 percent, according to the nonprofit program.

What's more, most of the teens said making money wasn't the primary reason for their interest.

"Fifty-six percent of those said protecting the environment or improving society was their interest for going into STEM," said Joshua Schuler, executive director of the Lemelson-MIT program. Another 44 percent said their interest arose from plain old curiosity about the way things work. Just 18 percent said they were primarily interested in fame or money.

Schuler told me today that the swing toward STEM could signal a change in mind-set for the next generation: "There's a huge, huge movement here in green technology. ... With the Obama administration coming in, there's this definite sense of change, and a desire to hit these environmental targets, and I think that resonates with young people."

Now for the not-so-good news: The teens were also asked what might discourage them from pursuing a STEM career. Thirty-one percent of the respondents said they didn't know anyone who worked in those fields, and another 28 percent said they didn't understand what scientists and engineers actually did.

That's where Schuler hopes he and his colleagues can make a difference. The Lemelson-MIT Program is probably best-known for the prizes it sponsors, including a $500,000 prize for midcareer inventors, a $100,000 prize for sustainable technologies, and an assortment of prizes for student inventors. But the program also runs an initiative called InvenTeams, which is aimed at putting students and teachers together with innovators from industry.

"It's a way that schools can introduce mentors and role models," Schuler explained. He emphasized that teachers are already doing a great job as role models. The InvenTeam initiative is simply aimed at giving those teachers an extra boost of tech savvy.

InvenTeams can receive grants of up to $10,000 to help them pursue solutions to technological challenges in their own communities. One team in Littleton, N.H., worked on a project to keep sidewalks clear in the wintertime. "The heat to melt the ice and snow comes from waste heat from the school's boilers," Schuler said.

The team brings in fresh blood every year, and this year they're working with engineers to develop a data-gathering system that can determine when to send the snowplows out to clear city streets, Schuler said.

The Lemelson-MIT Program also gives kids a broader view of how technology can help the planet. Last year, KickStart CEO Martin Fisher won the sustainability prize for his company's low-cost, human-powered irrigation pumps - and during the awards ceremony he met with students who were working on their own irrigation technologies.

"You can imagine how they felt," Schuler said. "Their 'god,' basically, in this field was on stage with them."

Seeing how good technologies can be used to do great things is the best way to close the innovation gap - not only in America, but around the world. For example, mobile phones are being used in regions of Asia and Africa to facilitate market transactions and financial services.

"This is really exciting for young people: 'The technology that I use for texting my friends can also be used for X, Y and Z in a developing country.' ... We're very optimistic about youth across the U.S. jumping on this trend of innovation for sustainability," Schuler said.

One field that's ripe for innovation is the energy industry, as illustrated by this week's greening of the Detroit Auto Show. In the survey conducted for the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, 37 percent of the teens said the gasoline-powered car was the technology most likely to become extinct in the next five years. Figuring out exactly how the cars of the future will be powered is one of the key jobs waiting for the innovators of this generation and the next generation.

For a list of other jobs, check out our report about the Grand Challenges for Engineering, and click on over to the National Academy of Engineering's Web site on the subject as well.

The Lemelson-MIT Program was founded in 1994 to encourage invention, entrepreneurship and sustainable technologies. Because the Invention Index is all about science, technology, engineering and math, you might be interested in the geeky details: The teen survey was conducted by the Opinion Research Corp. between Nov. 13 and 17, using a phone-based, multiple-choice format. The survey used a nationally representative sample of 501 teens, aged 12 to 17. The margin of error at a 95 percent confidence level was plus or minus 4.3 percent for the entire sample.

Janet Iwasa / Harvard Med. School and Mass. Gen. Hospital This cutaway view shows a model protocell about 100 nanometers in diameter. The protocell's fatty acid membrane allows nutrients and DNA building blocks to enter the cell and create copies of the cell's DNA. The new DNA strands remain inside. Scientists suggest this is how the first living cells began to evolve eons ago.

Where did the theory of evolution come from? And where's it going? Essayists and scientists are rallying to answer such questions during the countdown to Charles Darwin's 200th birthday.

The folks who want to build up Darwin's legacy (and the folks who want to challenge it) are gearing up for Feb. 12 by reflecting on the past, present and future of evolutionary theory. Scientific American has devoted virtually an entire issue of the magazine to the topic already, and this week the journal Science made Darwin its cover boy.

Evolution's past
Among the journal's highlights is a review article by Peter J. Bowler, a historian from the Queen's University of Belfast who focuses on the roots of Darwin's theory. Some might argue that Darwinism was so much "in the air" 150 years ago that if Darwin hadn't come up with the idea, someone else would have figured it out. But that's not the way Bowler sees it.

To be sure, other biologists had worked out the main outlines of the theory of natural selection - that is, the idea that advantageous traits become more common in succeeding generations. One of the reasons why Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" when he did was because another biologist, Alfred Russel Wallace, was working on his own theory along similar lines.

Bowler maintains, however, that Darwin's formulation of the theory "was both original and disturbing."

"It was not just that the idea of natural selection challenged the belief that the world was designed by a wise and benevolent God," Bowler writes. "There was a wider element of teleology or goal-directedness almost universally accepted at the time."

Darwin would have scoffed at the idea that the evolutionary process was designed to go in any particular direction, other than pointing toward survival in "the struggle for existence."

Some critics have complained that evolution the way Darwin saw it was a cold-hearted process, and laid the groundwork for the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism. (That theme comes through loud and clear in last year's anti-Darwin documentary, "Expelled.") In response, Bowler insists that "Darwinism was not 'responsible' for social Darwinism or eugenics in any simple way," but he acknowledges that some of the more disturbing aspects of his theory were exploited by later generations.

"We may well feel uncomfortable with those aspects of his theory today, especially in light of their subsequent applications to human affairs," Bowler writes. "But if we accept science's power to upset the traditional foundations of how we think about the world, we should also accept its potential to interact with moral values."

That's food for thought, well worth chewing over in the comment section below.

Evolution's present and future
Another essay in the journal, written by award-winning author Carl Zimmer, takes a closer look at the ultimate question that Darwin barely addressed in his writings: How did life itself arise? The full essay is available on Science's Web site as well as on CarlZimmer.com.

Zimmer touches upon several paths now being explored to address that question, including a reworking of the classic Miller-Urey experiment that changes the recipe for a "primordial soup" that could give rise to life's building blocks. The new brew is a better reflection of what scientists now think Earth's early atmosphere was like (with lots of carbon dioxide and a dash of nitrogen), and adds some extra chemicals that would allow amino acids to form when zapped by lightning.

Other lines of research look at the potential for simple molecules to bootstrap themselves into more complex, self-replicating molecules - eventually leading to life as we know it. For years, scientists have speculated that biology began with a molecular genetic system that no longer exists in nature, worked its way up to an "RNA world," and at last gave rise to the DNA-based system we see today.

Chemists are slowly closing in on what could be a plausible explanation of the process, Zimmer reports. "We've got the molecules in our sights," the University of Manchester's John Sutherland told him.

One of the most intriguing bits of research was published this week on Science's Web site: Biologists at the Scripps Research Institute report that they built a set of self-replicating RNA enzymes that could serve as "an experimental model of a genetic system." The chemical reactions gave rise to the game of life, without biology.

Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal quotes one of the paper's co-authors, Gerald Joyce, as saying the experiment showed how evolution can take hold in the RNA world. "All the original replicators went extinct and it was the new recombinants that took over," Joyce said. "There wasn't one winner. There was a whole cloud of winners, but there were three mutants that arose that pretty much dominated the population."

Still other researchers are working on the artificial cells to contain artificial life. The aim here isn't to create Frankenmicrobes: A team from Penn State explained last year that studying artificial cells could help scientists develop more effective pharmaceuticals for natural-born cells. Such experiments could also shed light on how the first protocells took shape on the early Earth.

Animation by Janet Iwasa shows how a protocell can form from fatty acids.

The latest revelations demonstrate how evolutionary theory - and practice - is still evolving today. There's also a spurt of differentiation in how the field is being covered: Just this week, Science launched its Origins blog to keep track of all the Darwin doings, and the bicentennial will be a leading theme during next month's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Here are a few more resources on evolutionary biology and the Darwin bicentennial:

• The TalkOrigins Archive
• The Loom: Carl Zimmer's blog 
• Panda's Thumb: Group blog on evolution 
• Natural History Museum: Darwin 200
• University of Cambridge: Darwin 2009 Festival 
• Fast Forward: Our archived report on the future of evolution

• The Economist: Blessed are the geeks
• BBC: More brains needed (via Slashdot)
• Discover Magazine: Beyond the nine planets
• The Guardian: Rules of engagement for evolution debate