STScI

A Hubble holiday card features a ribbon of gas in the supernova remnant SN 1006.

If you're seeking stars of wonder for the holiday season, the Hubble Space Telescope's bounty of cosmic imagery is a good place to start. You can choose from free e-cards, a Hubble Advent calendar and other outer-space goodies fit for three kings.

The HubbleSite's online card selection blends classic views of planets, nebulae and galaxies with classic holiday sentiments. You can choose from several sizes suited for standard card layouts. It's best if get your cards produced at a print shop or online photo service, but you can also print them out on your home printer.

If you're a do-it-yourselfer, HubbleSite's gallery can provide you with the raw material for a boxful of colorful holiday cards.

For the past six years, the European Space Agency's Hubble team has offered printable pages for a wall calendar featuring the space telescope's greatest hits - and although 2010 is not yet available, chances are that fresh pages will pop up before Christmas. You'll also find print-ready postcards and an updated "Hall of Fame" with images suitable for printing. 

Last year, Boston.com's Alan Taylor offered up an online Advent calendar featuring Hubble imagery, and there's no reason why you couldn't click through the calendar again starting on Tuesday. The idea behind Advent calendars is that you have a fresh goodie to enjoy every day between Dec. 1 and Christmas. So if you want to get into the spirit of the tradition, you'll have to stop yourself from scrolling down past the image of the day.

Hubble's astronomers aren't the only space fans getting into the holiday spirit: The team behind NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory also offers e-cards for winter holidays, and for other occasions as well. For general-purpose greetings, the Old Farmer's Almanac has a selection of "Sky Watch" e-cards, and you can also check out the e-card gallery at the Sky at Night Web site.

Looking for more timely pictures? Our latest "Month in Space" picture roundup fills the bill. Here are links to bigger, print-worthy versions of the images featured this month:

• Sunny day in space: Check out the space station scene at NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site.
• Milky Way: Some like it hot ... Comes from NASA's three Great Observatories. You'll find links to the big picture from my Cosmic Log item.
• ... Some like it cool: Count the stars in the picture of the Milky Way shining over the Grand Tetons, and get back to me by next Christmas.
• Polar patterns: The HiRISE site offers goodies galore from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
• A turbulent gulf: The big picture, and the story behind the picture, can be found at NASA's Earth Observatory Web site.
• Liftoff! Flames and clouds swirl around the space shuttle Atlantis during its Nov. 16 launch.
• Antarctic winds: Another winner from NASA's Earth Observatory.
• Chaos on Mars: The latest big picture from the European Space Agency's Mars Express photo album.
• Red Planet blobs: HiRISE captures a picture of Mars' weird carbon dioxide ice formations.
• Zero-G paparazzi: Check the Human Spaceflight site for pictures of camera-toting astronauts.
• Flash in the sky: Go to Victor van Wulfen's Clear Skies Web site for the big picture.
• Dark dunes: A spooky picture from Mars, courtesy of the HiRISE Web site.
• Milky Way marathon: Get the full story, and the big picture, from Axel Mellinger's Web site.
• Clouds of glory: Kennedy Space Center's media archive has plenty of Ares I-X rocket pictures.
• Power-packed pinwheel: Nice one from Hubble, and in holiday shades of red and green!
• Martian lessons in the layers: Yet another eerie picture of Martian mounds from HiRISE.
• Spacemen at work: The high-resolution picture at the Human Spaceflight Web site can't be beat.
• Gullies going down: An interesting shot of Martian gullies from HiRISE.
• A galaxy's leftovers: The ESO Web site offers up this picture of a cannibal galaxy's meal.
• Million-dollar rocket rises: Check out the X Prize Foundation's Picasa gallery from the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge.
• Crab Nebula reloaded: A dramatic picture from the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Web site.

Update for 1:26 p.m. ET Dec. 1: Boston.com has unveiled this year's Hubble Advent calendar, and the NORAD Tracks Santa Web site became fully operational today. So now it really is the holiday season online.

Update for 6:54 p.m. ET Dec. 1: The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla gets into the holiday spirit by offering an online Advent calendar of planetary proportions.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

	John Brecher / msnbc.com
	Night-vision goggles can teach kids important scientific lessons about, um, the electromagnetic spectrum?

Plenty of gift guides point you to high-tech gadgets, but how many point you to nuclear-powered toys?

How many guides rely on the geeks themselves to tell us all about the good stuff? And how many offer actual goodies for the best ideas?

For the eighth year in a row, we're presenting holiday gift suggestions for the science-minded, and we're depending on you to deliver.

Here's how it works: You submit your ideas for geeky gifts as comments below. Next Wednesday, we'll offer up a selection of the most promising ideas, and you'll get to vote for (and comment on) your favorite.

The top vote-getter as of 3 p.m. ET Dec. 10 will win ... drumroll, please ... a signed copy of my just-published book, "The Case for Pluto." Unless you have the book already, or just would prefer something else. In that case, you can choose between these coffee-table books: "Hubble: Imaging Space and Time" by David Devorkin and Robert W. Smith, "Planetology: Unlocking the Secrets of the Solar System" by Tom Jones and Ellen Stofan, or "Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts."

When you make your suggestion, emphasize the link to the science involved. For example, there are lots of oddball techie gifts out there, but what we're looking for is the Higgs boson plushie you can hide in your particle-collider pop-up book. There are lots of cool iPhone apps, but we want to hear about the app that puts a planetarium in your palm. There are lots of gifts for geek kids, but we're interested in the magic wand with a Van de Graaff generator inside.

Gizmodo gets it in these roundups of gift ideas for space geeks and science nerds - although if you have suggestions for science books, there's an app for that already. As usual, Wired.com's GeekDad already has a voluminous roundup of gift suggestions, including my personal favorite, the EyeClops night-vision binoculars. You can get them in a premium package with the "Modern Warfare 2" video game, but I'm afraid shooter games just aren't my thing.

Here are some of the best places for the things we're talking about:

• Edmund Scientific: The granddaddy of all scientific stores.
• Educational Innovations: This stuff looks too fun to be educational.
• Robot Snob: Check out their gift guide. Dinobots for dino geeks!
• Sheldon Shirts: Don't need to be a fan of "TBBT," but it helps.
• ThinkGeek science toys: The sweet spot for science thingies. 
• Xkcd store: Where you can find last year's winning geek gift.

And here's where you can find our geek gift guides from previous years:

• The gift of science (2002)
• For the scientist who has everything (2002)
• Toy traditions go back to the future (2003)
• Your toys will be assimilated (2004)
• Gifts for space geeks (2004)
• Find your star (2005)
• The top gift for science geeks (2006)
• Season's readings for kids ... and for grown-ups (2007)
• What to get a geek ... your ideas ... and the top geek gift (2008)

I hope all this is enough inspiration for you. Now it's your turn: Leave your gift suggestions for science geeks in the comment box below.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

I'm taking Thursday and Friday off for the Thanksgiving holiday (except for covering the shuttle landing, of course). Here are some Web links to see you through the long weekend, including a story that's creating quite a bit of advance buzz. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

• Spaceflight Now: Mars meteorite yields secrets of possible life 
• JPL: Cassini captures ghostly dance of Saturn's northern lights
• DVICE: Augmented reality from a Coke can (via NASA Watch)
• National Geographic: Yukon ghost ship discovered undamaged 

Featurepics.com

Books on scientific subjects offer the world ... and other planets as well.

Science books used to show dinosaurs exclusively in shades of scaly green and brown. Books about the solar system used to list just nine planets, and books about the subatomic world didn't go much farther than protons, neutrons and electrons.

As times have changed, so has the science - and so should science books. Just in time for holiday giving, here's a selection of books for kids (and grownups) that incorporate recent developments on the scientific frontiers.

Dinosaurs:
University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz's 432-page "Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Ages" was written two years ago, but it still stands up to the test of time. The encyclopedia touches on hundreds of species of dinosaurs (including the feathered kinds) and describes their world in detail. Holtz has even created a Web page to update the text and provide links to other online resources.

Holtz passed along other recommendations in an e-mail: "I would put Scott Sampson's 'Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life' as the top recent adult book, and Darren Naish's 'The Great Dinosaur Discoveries' as the best new coffee-table book. For kids, after my own (of course) the new DK Publishing 'Prehistoric Life' is really comprehensive in all types of fossil organisms (and good for adults as well). I've heard good things about National Geographic's 'The Dinosaur Museum,' too. For a short book, Bakker & Rey's 'Dinosaurs!' is very nice and modern."

Astronomy:
The solar system is usually a crowd-pleaser among the kids, and our perspective on our own cosmic neighborhood has changed quite a bit in the past few years. "The New Solar System" by Patricia Daniels, which came out in August, reflects all those changes - including the shifting views on what it means to be a planet. That shift is also reflected in two children's books that take a wide stance on the planethood question: "11 Planets" by David Aguilar and "Ten Worlds" by Ken Croswell. What's a parent to do? I address that in my own newly published book about the solar system shift, "The Case for Pluto."

For readers ages 9 and up, one of the best places to go for books about Earth science and planetary science is the Sally Ride Science Store.

Looking beyond the planets, DK's "Universe," edited by British astronomer royal Martin Rees, takes you all the way to the edges of the cosmos. If your child is looking for something more Harry Potteresque, take a look at "George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt," the latest tale from famed physicist Stephen Hawking and his daughter Lucy. And for wee ones who wonder about black holes, Brian Greene's "Icarus at the Edge of Time" might be just the thing. (I chatted with Greene about the book last year.)

One of the latest coffee-table books with an astronomical theme is "Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle" by Michael Benson - and the reviews glow as brightly as the galaxy on the book's cover: "breathtaking" ... "mind-blowing" ..." spectacular."

There's a wide selection of sky guides suitable for the stargazer on your gift list. "Stars and Planets," "The Rough Guide to the Universe" and "The Backyard Astronomer's Guide" were all updated just last year. True space geeks might also appreciate an oldie but goodie: "The Compact NASA Atlas of the Solar System," which co-author Ronald Greeley says is still the best true interplanetary atlas in print, eight years after it was published. (What else would you expect him to say?)

Space history:
CollectSpace's Robert Pearlman passes along these recommendations for up-to-date children's books having to do with the history of spaceflight: "Look to the Stars" by Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin and Wendell Minor, and "Mission Control, This Is Apollo" by Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan Bean and Andrew Chaikin. These and many more books were published this year to mark the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. I listed more than a dozen of them to celebrate the occasion.

For still more selections, click on over to Out of the Cradle and check out Ken Murphy's book reviews as well as the Lunar Library.

Nanotechnology:
One of the problems with nanotechnology is that it's sometimes hard to describe exactly what it is, particularly for the kid crowd. Believe it or not, there's a book for that: Marlene Bourne's "MEMS and Nanotechnology for Kids," a 32-page picture book designed for students aged 11 and up.

For the older set, there's "No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale" by Felice C. Frankel and George M. Whitesides, a coffee-table book that cleverly wedges in-depth descriptions of the nanoworld in between bunches of beautiful pictures. If you're a fan of photomicrographs like the Olympus BioScapes pictures we published last week, you'll like this book - as well as Seymour Simon's "Out of Sight: Pictures of Hidden Worlds."   

Physics and more:
The restart of the world's biggest particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, should spark interest in recently published books that delve into the big picture surrounding subatomic physics, such as "Why Does E=mc²?" by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, "Collider" by Paul Halpern and "The Quantum Frontier" by Don Lincoln. (I talked with Lincoln about his book earlier this year.) If you're up for delving into the nature of ultimate reality, you can explore "The Lightness of Being" by Frank Wilczek. (Here's a Q&A with the author.) And if you want a good subatomic scare, check out these totally fictional doomsdays.

I wish the LHC pop-up book, "Voyage to the Heart of Matter," were more easily available - as it is, you'll have to order it from the publisher in Britain (and wait for the pre-orders to be filled). Pop-up fans can content themselves with "The Story of Everything" by Neal Layton, which addresses subjects ranging from the big bang to human evolution.

Speaking of everything, I have a feeling nearly every science-minded young reader will get a kick out of "A Really Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. This newly published book is a kid-friendly adaptation of Bryson's classic work, "A Short History of Nearly Everything," which was a selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club five years ago. David M. Schwartz's alphabet books about science and math - "Q Is for Quark" and "G Is for Googol," respectively - are also easy on the eyes and the brain.

More about books:

• 2008: Put some space on your coffee table
• 2007: Season's readings for kids
• 2007: Season's readings for grownups
• 2005: Literary adventures
• 2004: Gifts for space geeks
• Richard Dawkins' latest, 'Lost Symbol' secrets and more

Feel free to add your own recommended reading as a comment below. Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

• Scientific American: New theory would topple space-time
• NPR: Darwin's 'Origin' still stirs debate after 150 years
• Science @ NASA: Mystery of solar tsunami solved 
• New Scientist: Orion's dark secret

	Blue Origin
	Click for video: New Shepard flies in Blue Origin video from 2006, used with permission.

Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' usually secretive Blue Origin rocket venture raised the curtain today on three research experiments that are slated to take suborbital journeys on its prototype spaceship in two years' time.

For years, Blue Origin has been working on a vertical-launched rocket that could someday take passengers on an automated trip beyond 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude. That's beyond the boundary of outer space - at a height where passengers could see the blue, curving Earth beneath the blackness of space, and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.

Blue Origin's engineers have flown their New Shepard prototype craft through several low-altitude tests at Bezos' hush-hush launch facility near Van Horn, Texas. But details about any of the tests beyond the first one have been hard to come by.

For the past year, the venture has been working with planetary scientist (and former NASA science official) Alan Stern on a plan to put experimental packages on New Shepard, even before people fly on it. Stern has touted suborbital research as a "killer app" for private-sector spacecraft, and he is organizing a seminar in February to help get the ball rolling.

Today's announcement is notable not just because it represents a rare update from Blue Origin, but also because it marks a step forward for suborbital science. "This is the first time that a next-gen suborbital company has selected payloads to fly in space," Stern told me.

The three experiments are:

• "Three-Dimensional Critical Wetting Experiment in Microgravity." Principal investigator:  Stephen Collicott of Purdue University. Collicott's research focuses on how fluids behave in zero-gravity environments. Such studies are crucial for propulsion system design.
• "Microgravity Experiment on Dust Environments in Astrophysics" (MEDEA). Principal investigator: Joshua Colwell, of the University of Central Florida. As described in this UCF news release, Colwell's experiment is aimed at shedding light on the process by which space dust builds up to form planets, or the rings around those planets.
• "Effective lnterfacial Tension lnduced Convection" (EITIC). Principal investigator: John Pojman, of Louisiana State University. Pojman concentrates on the interaction of fluids in zero-G. In August, he chatted with me about his research and how tough it can be to get experiments into space.

Blue Origin has said that the first experiments could fly during New Shepard's unmanned testing phase in 2011, and that experiments requiring human tending could be taken up starting in 2012. That schedule is still operative, but it's too early to be more specific about the launch timing, Stern told me.

No money would be exchanged for flying these experiments. Stern said the researchers would provide the apparatus in containers ranging up to the size of a small chest of drawers (technically speaking, the equivalent of one to three shuttle middeck lockers). Blue Origin would provide the ride as a demonstration of its vehicle's research capability.

Blue Origin isn't alone in the suborbital research market. For example, Collicott is working with Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace to fly a shoebox-sized fluid-mechanics experiment. Virgin Galactic, Masten Space Systems and XCOR Aerospace say they're also planning to send research packages into space.

Researchers hope that private-sector spaceships will provide more opportunities for sending experiments into zero-G. Space entrepreneurs, meanwhile, hope the research market will provide more of a market for their shiny new rocket ships. But will it work out that way? Blue Origin's announcement demonstrates once again that the two-year rule of commercial spaceflight is still in effect. When will the rule be broken? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

• CollectSpace: Hubble instruments become museum artifacts 
• Slashdot: After 35 years, Arecibo talks to E.T. again
• Science News: Climate might be right for a deal
• Chandra Blog: Carnival of Space 130

NASA / STScI

The galaxies NGC 2207 (left) and IC 2163 are entangled in a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. Such mergers are the focus of Galaxy Zoo's latest project.

Galaxy Zoo's latest online research project is a "cosmic slot machine" that asks users to match up simulations of galactic smash-ups with pictures of the real things. The payoff? That comes in the form of citizen science.

Over the past two years, Galaxy Zoo has enlisted 250,000 Internet users to classify hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - an effort that so far has resulted in 15 scientific papers, either submitted or published.

The latest venture, spearheaded by scientists from Oxford University and George Mason University, kicks it up a notch.

"This doesn't replace Galaxy Zoo," Oxford physicist Chris Lintott told me today. "This is an addition. ... It's a classic scientific question: You solve one thing, and you immediately get 600 other questions."

The data sifted through Galaxy Zoo already confirmed and expanded upon what was known about galactic mergers: that they are more common in denser environments, that a few percent of all galaxies in the universe are clashing together even as we speak, and that the rate of star formation in merging galaxies is about twice what it is in solo galaxies.

Now astronomers are hoping Galaxy Zoo can help them figure out the dynamics behind galactic mergers.

"It's like looking at a car crash," Lintott said. "We want to know the answers to two basic questions: What caused it, and what will the final outcome be?"

For example, how common is it for two spiral galaxies to merge with each other and form an elliptical galaxy? Under what conditions do they coalesce into a bigger spiral instead? How do clashing galaxies develop the monster tails occasionally spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope?

To answer such questions, the new program will enlist Internet users to size up pictures from its database of 3,000 galaxy smash-ups. Most of the images were identified as mergers by Galaxy Zoo's minions, and some Hubble imagery has been thrown in to sweeten the pot.

"Visitors to the Galaxy Zoo Mergers site use what's rather like a giant slot machine, with a real image of a galactic merger in the center and eight randomly selected simulated merger images filling the other eight 'slots' around it," Lintott explained in today's announcement of the project. "By randomly cycling through the millions of simulated possibilities and selecting only the very best matches, they are helping to build up a profile of what kinds of factors are necessary to create the galaxies we see in the universe around us - and, hopefully, having fun, too."

As users become familiar with the site, they can make their own tweaks in the simulations to produce better matches for the pictures - by adding or subtracting stars, for example, or flipping the orientation of the galaxies.

"Once you've done this for a while, you get a feeling of what you need to change," Lintott told me.

George Mason University astronomer John Wallin emphasized that you don't have to be an expert in astronomy, or even a veteran of Galaxy Zoo, to participate. "In fact, our evidence shows that not being an expert actually makes you better at this sort of task," he said.

Galaxy Zoo enlists humans because our eyes and brains are much better than even the most sophisticated machines when it comes to finding similarities between the real and the simulated mergers. Once the most accurate computer simulations are identified, that software can be run forward and backward to reconstruct the galaxies' past and forecast their future.

"These collisions take millions of years to unfold, and so all we get from the universe is a single snapshot of each one," Anthony Holincheck, a graduate student at George Mason University, said in today's announcement. "By producing simulations, we will be able to watch each cosmic car crash unfold on the computer."

The Java-based program actually runs the mini-simulations on each user's computer. Lintott said Holincheck came up with the code by adapting Wallin's original Fortran simulation program. "It's a nice merger of Galaxy Zoo's involvement of people with a SETI @ Home-style application of distributed computing," Lintott said.

Lintott acknowledged that sifting through galactic mergers can pose more of a challenge than doing Galaxy Zoo's relatively simple classification tasks. Depending on your standards, you may have to click through hundreds of galaxies to come up with a suitable match. That's part of the experiment, Lintott said.

"We want to show that there are more complicated tasks that people are happy to share doing," he said.

Eventually, the effort is expected to produce new insights into the widescale distribution of different types of galaxies, the dynamics of galactic mergers, and case studies worthy of more detailed follow-ups. Galaxy Zoo participants have been acknowledged in the papers they've sparked, and that will likely be the case for future research as well.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

Toshiba UK

Click for video: An armchair floats to the edge of space in Toshiba's "Space Chair Project" commercial. Click on the image toŠsee Toshiba's video on YouTube.

Space ballooning hits new heights in an HDTV commercial showing a simple armchair floating against the backdrop of our curving planet, almost 100,000 feet above the ground. When you watch the video, the first thought that comes to mind is, "Wow, that's cool!" And the second thought is probably, "How the heck did they do that?"

"Usually a project like this takes a year or a year and a half to pull together," John Powell, founder of California-based JP Aerospace and one of the key guys behind the Space Chair Project, told me. "But they needed this pulled together in four months."

"They" refers to Toshiba UK and Grey London, the marketing agency that pulled off the project. The idea was to do something remarkable that would tout Toshiba's HD cameras and LCD displays as "armchair viewing, redefined."

JP Aerospace was asked to build a rig that could take the chair and two miniaturized cameras to the edge of space. Powell and his fellow high-altitudeŠballoon experimentersŠhad done similar magic tricks in past years for Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel projects. This was ambitious even by JP Aerospace's standards, however.ŠThe job becameŠeven more ambitious when the videographers ended up asking for four separate rigs - essentially, "a backup for a backup for a backup," Powell said.

He declined to say how much JP Aerospace was paid for the project, but he noted that the parts alone for each rig cost tens of thousands of dollars. "This was the only big commercial project we did this year, but it paid like it was two," Powell said.

The JP Aerospace blog goes into detail about howŠeach rig was constructed: Basically, the team built frameworks that could be suspended from the high-altitude balloons. The chair was suspended on lines from the rig's framework. Powell said each chairŠweighed just three and a half pounds because it was built out of balsa wood.

"It was amazing - it looked like a real chair," Powell told me. "Our biggest worry was that someone would sit on one of them."

The cameras wereŠattached to the rig so that one looked down at the chair and one got a shot from the front. Adding it all up, each rig weighed about 22 pounds (10 kilograms).

WithŠall the regulatory approvalsŠin hand, JP Aerospace's team went out to Nevada's Black Rock Desert and sent up the four rigged-up balloons, one at a time, over the weekend of Sept. 26-27.ŠPowell joked thatŠthe filmmakers for the commercial and the "making of the commercial" video clip far outnumbered his balloon-handlers.

Toshiba UK

Click for video: JP Aerospace's team launches a high-altitude balloon from Nevada's Black Rock Desert, with chair attached. Click on the image to watchŠthe "Making of Space ChairŠvideo on YouTube.

The chairs rose to heights ranging from 82,000 to 99,200 feet, Powell said. Each flight lasted a little more than two hours: 100 minutes up, and about 30 minutes down.

Once the balloons got up to their maximum height, the material from which they were made chilled down to the point that it became as delicate and brittle as glass. Eventually,Šof course, the balloons popped due to the stress, and the rigs started falling throughŠnear-vacuum at speeds faster than Mach 1. As the atmosphere thickened, the fall slowed.ŠAt the end of all four flights, the parachutes opened - and all the cameras were recovered intact. No backup needed.

"They ended up with about 16 hours of footage for a 60-second commercial," Powell said.

The video chips were rushed out of the desert to begin the editing process, and the rest is television (and marketing) history. Toshiba even set up a promotional Web site to let users guess where the chairs would land.

Powell said the money earned from the project will be plowed back into JP Aerospace. In recent years, the near-space imaging business has been very, very good to Powell and his semi-pro team. "The imagery is what's really paying the bills. ... We're the only aerospace company to ever be 30 years in the black," he said.

Powell said there's been more interest in high-altitude imagery, due to a movement away from computer-generated imagery in commercials and movies.Š"They could have CGI'd a chair going up there," he said of theŠToshiba filmmakers, "but they wanted the real thing."Š

High-altitude imaging is also increasingly going low-cost. For example, there's the MIT student group thatŠrecentlyŠsent an Earth-imaging camera almost as high as JP Aerospace's balloons did for just $150. But Powell said his operation is on a "whole next level," where commercial clients expect to get total reliability and just the right shot for their needs.

Powell and hisŠcolleagues don't expect to limit themselves to commercials shot at 100,000 feet. Their eventual goal is to develop airships capable of going all the way to orbit. Right now JP Aerospace is working on a 35-foot-long Tandem airship that could rise well beyond the 100,000-foot level. The team is also looking into a "rockoon" launch system that would use high-altitude platforms as rocket launch pads.

"Each test that we've done is a test for Airship To Orbit," Powell said.

I first mentioned the Airship To Orbit concept more than five years ago, and since then the effort has weathered its share of ups and downs. Do you think it's an idea whose time has not yet come, but will someday? Or is the dream doomed to deflate? Feel free to weigh in with your pros and cons in the comment section below.

• CollectSpace: 'The Rock' speaks out for NASA (and 'Planet 51')
• Fedline: Nuclear agency tries to find dates for its geeks
• Tech Review: Watch a molecular machine in action
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'What Are Dreams?' 

	Jan Michels
	Click for slideshow: Feast your eyes on Olympus BioScapes winners for 2009.

Who would have thought that a water flea, diseased neurons and poisoned algae could be so beautiful? It's just a matter of having the right perspective.

The flea, the neurons and the algae are among the stars of the show in this year's Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. The contest is just one of several conducted annually to highlight scientific imagery that puts a fresh perspective on subjects that, under other circumstances, might seem commonplace or even repellent.

Take the water flea, for example.

In its natural element, it's a little critter - measuring less than an eighth of an inch (2 millimeters). But in the photomicrograph created by University of Kiel zoologist Jan Michels, the humble flea becomes a big green monster, wearing an ornate "crown of thorns" that protects it from predators. The nuclei within its cells glow like angry coals.

Terrible violence on a microscopic scale is on view in Skidmore College biologist David Domozych's picture of once-celled algae being blown apart by an herbicide known as oryzalin. The cell's innards spill out like blood-red guts.

The picture of motor neurons afflicted by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, looks like a glowing spider web, buzzing with activity. And in truth, the picture serves as a signal of hope rather than infirmity. These neurons were created from the skin cells of an 83-year-old ALS patient, using a promising procedure known as cell reprogramming.

One of the first applications for the procedure is to create living but diseased human cells - which can be subjected to experiments without endangering the patient from which the cells came, in hopes of understanding the disease better or even finding a cure. This particular image was created by a pair of researchers, Gist Croft and Mackenzie Weygandt of Columbia University and New York's Project ALS.

Such images are scientifically meaningful, and beautiful as well. They're also becoming far more available. More than 2,000 microscope images and movies were entered in this year's competition, setting a record for the six-year-old prize program.

"These images and movies reflect some of the most exciting research being done around the world and reveal the art that exists in optical microscopy," Osamu Joji, group vice president and general manager of Olympus America's scientific equipment group, said in this week's award announcement. "They shed light on the intricacy of our living universe and provide us with a visual record of the science of our era. But just as important, they reflect the awesome grace, beauty and mystery of aspects of the natural world that can't be seen with the naked eye."

Judges gave the top prize - $5,000 worth of Olympus products - to Michels for the photo of the water flea. Lesser prizes were awarded to the rest of the top 10 finishers, and another 65 images were cited as honorable mentions. Click through the top 10 in our slideshow, and check out the rest in Olympus' online gallery.

But don't stop there. Here's a roundup of other microscopic and scientific views:

• Newsweek: Photos from Nikon's Small World competition 
• ... More winners on the Nikon Small World Web site
• International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge
• ... More winners on the National Science Foundation Web site
• Incredible insect photos on msnbc.com
• Visions of Science and Technology
• Wellcome Image Awards
• The Scientist Video Awards
• Wired: Best science visualization videos of 2009
• NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

NASA / ESA

An ethereal "X" or boxlike structure marks the chaotic center of the edge-on galaxy NGC 4710. Click on the picture for a larger version.

One of the "X-Files" that astronomers keep in their filing cabinets relates to the mysterious X shape seen at the center of some galaxies — but this particular mystery may be close to being explained. At least that's what Paul Goudfrooij of the Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute and his colleagues are hoping.

If you squint your eyes, you should be able to make out the faint X-shaped pattern splaying out above and below the center of the edge-on galaxy in the picture above. The image of the galaxy NGC 4710, which is about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, was  released just today by the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope team.

The picture is part of a Hubble survey aimed at determining how such structures, which astronomers call boxy bulges, arise in galaxies that have dense bars of stars, gas and dust in their middle. "The overall idea is to test the origins of bulges in spiral galaxies," Goudfrooij told me this week.

The X-shaped bulge is actually created by streams of stars that have been knocked out of the main plane of the galaxy due to dynamical instability. All those inclined stellar orbits produce an optical effect vaguely reminiscent of the boxy look of the famous Red Rectangle nebula.

Thanks to computer simulations, astronomers have figured out two leading scenarios for building bulges. In one scenario, the process happens very early in a galaxy's evolution, even before it develops its disk and spiral arms. In the other scenario, the bulges gradually build up and dissipate later in the life cycle of a galaxy. "They just form every now and then during the evolution of a galaxy," Goudfrooij explained.

The bulges that form gradually "typically are apparent in the late-type galaxies with small bulges [and] not as prominent in early-type galaxies with large bulges," he said.

Goudfrooij and his colleagues are looking for a way to determine which galaxies are going through which scenario, and they think globular star clusters could provide a good way to tell the difference. The pressures involved in the rapid-formation scenario should squeeze lots more star clusters into existence. In the other scenario, "when you build up a bulge through the more gradual way, you wouldn't expect to form many globular clusters in that process," Goudfrooij explained.

In the case of NGC 4710, the smallest of the boxy-bulge galaxies studied by Goudfrooij's team, it turns out that relatively few globular clusters formed. That matches what the astronomers were hoping to find. The team is still in the process of writing up their findings, but Goudfrooij said the work could lead to a more complete picture of galactic evolution - not only for spiral galaxies, but also for elliptical galaxies that are basically big balls of stars.

NGC 4710 is something of a hybrid: It's known as a lenticular galaxy, which exhibits some of the characteristics of spiral galaxies as well as elliptical galaxies. And that makes it well-suited for this kind of study. As any fan of the fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder knows, there's nothing like an alien hybrid to spice up "The X-Files."

More galactic X-Files:

• A smashing view from Hubble
• Galaxies go into shock
• Hubble's 'fountain of youth'
• Galaxies in gridlock
• Season's greeting from space
• Close encounter with a galaxy cluster
• ESO shows you the Cosmic Bird
• Galactic merger could boot our solar system
• X-rated galaxies
• Stars gone wild

• Space Elevator Games set for 2010: This time, it's personal
• Wired Science: The building of a high-tech eco-stunt
• New Scientist: NASA seeks its one true glove
• WSJ: Moon-water gamble has paid off
• Tiny Mantras: Carnival of Space 129

Malcolm Park

A fireball seems to shoot right through a house in Grafton, Ontario. Malcolm Park captured the image as he was setting up to photograph meteors on Monday night.

This week's Leonid meteor shower may not rise to the level of a shooting-star storm, but it's certainly producing a flurry of fine-looking pictures.

November's Leonids are one of the year's best-known annual meteor displays, ranking right up there with August's Perseids. But the strength of the Leonid shower can vary greatly from year to year, depending on Earth's precise orbital path. In 2001, for example, our planet went through a relatively dense stream of debris left behind by Comet Tempel-Tuttle, producing peaks estimated to range as high as 3,000 meteors per hour.

This year's shower isn't nearly that spectacular: Based on initial reports, the peak rates for North American observers were in line with predictions of 20 to 40 meteors per hour. Astronomers say that Asian observers are better-placed than Americans this year, and could see as many as several hundred per hour under optimal conditions.

On the Meteorobs mailing list, some observers complained about being "clouded out" by inclement weather, while others exulted over their good luck. "I captured a Leonids picture last night!" skywatcher Mike Hankey declared in his posting.

Malcolm Park of Grafton, Ontario, had a similarly lucky strike when he was setting up for a Leonid photo shoot on the shore of Lake Ontario. He was in the midst of taking a test picture of his friend's illuminated home, just before 9 p.m. Monday, when a flash seemed to zip right through the house.

"Out of nowhere, a brilliant fireball fell straight to the north, changing colours as it fell. I was astonished to see that I had captured the entire event on my display," he wrote in a message to SpaceWeather.com. The eerie result can be seen at the top of this item.

For an amazing animated image showing the flash and disappearance of another meteor streak, check out this page on Park's Web site. 

Martin McKenna observed scores of meteors from his vantage point in Northern Ireland - including one he called "the most incredible Leonid fireball of my life." His photos show a colorful train of smoke wriggling through the night sky and disappearing.

"I was frozen with astonishment and only managed to get these images as it faded," he told SpaceWeather.com. "This was a sight I shall never forget!"

And the Leonids aren't over yet. Although astronomers say the peak has probably passed for North American observers, you can still see plenty of night-sky sights, and this guide should help.

For more views of the meteor show, check out SpaceWeather.com's roundup. We also received several pictures of sky wonders via our FirstPerson Web page, not necessarily having to do with the Leonids. Here's a selection to click through:

• A glowing patch of sky that Vicki Naugle saw in January. "I first saw this 'Ball of Light' hovering above the trees for about five to seven minutes while traveling 55 mph westward on Highway 90, just past Seminole Landing, Alabama," Naugle wrote. "I grabbed my camera and when I snapped the picture, the light had already traveled above the clouds! The moon is in the upper left-hand corner!"
• A classic "Harvest Moon" setting behind the Ten Mile Range near Breckenridge, Colo., submitted by Daniel McVey.
• A pair of brilliant, rainbow-tinged sundogs that bracketed the setting sun at White Sands, N.M., during a tour on Oct. 27, 2007. Photographer Matt Falk also sent along a zoomed-in view of the sundog on the right, with fellow tourists taking it all in.
• One of my favorite pictures is Falk's view of a sun halo surrounding a gnarled tree. "I was hiking through Bryce Canyon, Utah, on a slightly overcast morning (July 11, 2009)," Falk explained. "At some point, I put on a pair of sunglasses, and this halo around the sun leapt out at me! I needed to use my polarized filter on my camera bring out the same effect here, after standing behind the tree to block out the glare of the sun."

For still more sky oddities, check out our fall picture roundup.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

	Hulton Archive / Getty Images file
	A new line of fragrance is inspired by Marilyn Monroe's DNA.

A venture that uses the DNA from Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson and other dead celebrities to mix up personality-driven fragrances is getting more than a whiff of publicity - but if you're expecting a touch of "Marilyn" to make you smell like the real Marilyn, you have no nose for science.

MyDNAFragrance's "Antiquity" line of perfumery appears to be the latest marketing gimmick driven by genetics, along the lines of DNA art, protein-coded music and (heh, heh) celebrity DNA samples.

The venture does use the celebrities' DNA code, after a fashion, and it does translate that code into a customized scent recipe - so there's certainly no false advertising. But the DNA that's used has absolutely no bearing on what a person smells like, and the DNA itself is not featured in the recipe.

In fact, in some cases, you probably wouldn't want to smell like the celebrity anyway. "I did a little research on Elvis, and he actually had really bad body odor," Diva Verdun, MyDNAFragrance's chief development officer, was quoted as saying in the New York Daily News.

Verdun makes clear that the recipes are secret formulas based on the genetic coding for mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, which exists outside the nucleus of every cell and is passed down genetically only from the mother's side. There are a limited number of variations in mtDNA, and millions of people share the same variation. So if the fragrance called "Blue Suede" is based on Elvis Presley's genetic code, it could also be based on the code for Elvis Weisenheimer who lives down at the end of the street.

The same goes for "Marilyn" as well as "iQ" (inspired by Albert Einstein), "Entrance" (Joan Crawford), "Monarch" (Katharine Hepburn) and "M" (Michael Jackson). Scientifically speaking, the fragrance has as much in common with these celebrities as a coat of arms.

MyDNAFragrance can do the same thing with your own DNA, as NBC's TODAY Show pointed out last year.

One of the most interesting parts of the process has to do with the source of the celebrity DNA. It turns out that the analysis was done on historical hair samples held by the University Archives' John Reznikoff, who also deals in collectible documents. Reznikoff is said to have the world's largest collection of celebrity hair - including clippings from Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon and moonwalker Neil Armstrong.

Reznikoff hasn't yet sampled the "Antiquity" scents, but from what he understands, the fragrances are meant to reflect the olfactory essence of the person providing the DNA sample.

"It's very far from an astrology reading," he told me today. "It's very scientific. The point is to use the DNA profile and evoke the essence of a long-gone hero - sometimes not so long-gone, as in the case of Michael Jackson."

Reznikoff has hair samples from about 160 notable figures, but for now, MyDNAFragrance has had genetic profiles done for only a half-dozen bits of celebrity hair. 

You can't do a full-blown DNA test on shafts of hair - for that, you'd need the follicle or some other bits of skin surrounding the shaft. But you can analyze the mtDNA, as explained in this forensic primer. Sometimes a body sample is so degraded that the mtDNA test is as good as it gets - and in some cases, that's good enough. Such tests helped investigators solve the case of the Russian royal family's murder, 90 years after the deed was done.

So even though "Marilyn" may not make you smell like Marilyn Monroe, the flap over the fragrance can help you learn a little bit about how DNA analysis is done. And if you really do want to smell like Marilyn, there's an easy solution: Chanel No. 5, Monroe's favorite perfume. (When asked what she wore to bed, Monroe reportedly answered, "Five drops of Chanel No. 5.")

More on DNA and hair:

• Arthur C. Clarke's DNA odyssey
• Woolly mammoth's DNA mapped from hair
• Auction house all shook up over Elvis hair
• Hair came from bison, not Bigfoot
• Interactive: How DNA encodes our history

S. Abe and H. Yano / NASA / ISAS

Meteors flash brightly in a picture taken from an aircraft flying at an altitude of 39,000 feet during the 1999 Leonids Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign.

The Internet can help you get a great view of this week's Leonids or any other meteor shower, on your computer screen or in the honest-to-goodness night sky.

Of course, if you have the time - and dark, clear skies - there's nothing to match the experience of seeing meteoric fireworks from your own backyard. Not every backyard is well-placed for meteor-watching, however, particularly if you live in an urban area.

So where can you go? The first option is to check with your local astronomy club (which may be listed here, here, here or here). Such organizations sometimes have viewing parties planned at locations well-suited for stargazing, and in any case, they'd know where the skies are likely to be darkest and most sparkly.

Another option is to use the Clear Sky Chart to find places near you where the skies are not cloudy all night. The Web site automatically combines weather reports with day/night data and the atmospheric conditions to produce easy-to-read, color-coded, hour-by-hour sky forecasts for popular skywatching sites around the country.

Generally speaking, the farther you can get away from city lights and obstructed skies, the better. Golf courses, country roads and state parks are among my favorite haunts. As you're driving around in search of a good spot, you just might happen upon some friendly fellow travelers, as I did during a meteor-hunting expedition a couple of years ago.

Any meteor shower gets better after midnight, when Earth's night side is turning directly into the stream of cometary debris that sparks shooting stars. It takes a while for your eyes to get used to the dark, so a little patience goes a long way. To figure out when astronomers think the Leonids will peak, you can try NASA's Fluxtimator Web page (but be sure to set the program for this year and your location).

While your eyes are adjusting, you can take in other celestial sights. This week, the opportunities to see the International Space Station pass by are mostly in the evenings, according to NASA's real-time sighting guide, but Jupiter is sparkling in the sky for most of the night. And if you stay up until dawn, you can feast your eyes on Venus and Saturn. Check out Sky and Telescope's observing guide to find out just where to look. You can also consult Heavens-Above for sky charts tailored to your location.

So what if it's totally cloudy, or you just can't sit outside after midnight to take in the sights? You can still get a taste of the meteor experience online by checking in with SpaceWeather.com. The Web site provided viewing tips in advance of the Leonids, and will surely offer a gallery of meteor snapshots afterwards. You'll also find activity reports on the International Meteor Organization's Web site and on the Meteorobs mailing list.

For news of Leonids past and future, you can also check with the Leonid MAC Web site. NASA's Leonid Multi-instrument Aircraft Campaign sends out researchers to document meteor showers from airplanes flying above the clouds or from exotic locales on Earth. This year, for example, top meteor experts are converging on Nepal, where they believe the very best viewing opportunities will be available.

If you've been lucky enough to capture a meteor flash on film (or, more likely nowadays, in a digital image), feel free to submit it to msnbc.com via our FirstPerson page. We'll share it with the world later this week. And if you miss out on tonight's show, never fear: Leonid meteors will still be visible for the next few days, soon to be followed by December's Geminid display.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

CERN / CMS Collaboration

A computer-generated graphic shows particles flying through the Large Hadron Collider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector during a "splash event" on Nov. 7.

The world's biggest and most expensive particle-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, is all warmed up (and cooled down) for a fresh start after a few snags, including an unfortunate incident that involved a bird and a baguette.

Fourteen months ago, the LHC began operating in the middle of a media spotlight fit for a rock star - but broke down after only nine days. A faulty electrical interconnection between the underground collider ring's high-powered magnets, coupled with a helium leak, caused significant damage to the ring - and the LHC has been closed for repairs ever since.

Those repairs included the installation of a magnet protection system that would automatically shut down the collider if anything similar should happen again. The LHC is now undergoing its final checkouts, including a test last weekend that involved sending beams of protons halfway around the ring.

The collider's handlers at the CERN particle-physics center, on the French-Swiss border, say the test provided "valuable data" for synchronizing the equipment. (It also provided a valuable excuse for bubbly toasts.)

If all continues to go well, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me that proton beams should start going all the way around the ring again "within the next 10 days or so." That squares with a report in the CERN Bulletin that beams will be circulating in both pipes "just over one week from now."

Bigger milestones lie ahead, Gillies said. The first-ever proton collisions are expected to take place a week or two after the beam restart, at relatively low energies of 450 billion electron volts per beam. Those energies will be gradually ramped up to as much as 1.2 trillion electron volts (TeV) by Christmas, Gillies said. That would be a new record for high-energy particle collisions, exceeding the mark set by Fermilab's Tevatron.

The LHC's science program would begin in earnest after the holidays, at energies of 3.5 TeV. "The big event for us is getting the physics program going in January," Gillies told me. It might take another year to work up to the LHC's top energy of 7 TeV per beam.

Why such a gradual ramp-up? Gillies said the magnet protection system has to be commissioned at progressively higher levels to make sure there won't be any nasty surprises like last year's blow-up.

The LHC has certainly had its share of ups and downs over the past year. "We've learned a lot," Gillies said.

The bird and the baguette
The latest - and probably the silliest - setback came just last week, when a short circuit shut down a substation that supplied power to part of the LHC's cryogenic cooling system. The outage caused two sectors of the collider ring to warm up to a few degrees above its required operating temperature of 456 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (1.9 Kelvin).

"When people went to investigate the cause, they found feathers and a piece of bread," Gillies said. "It's a bit of a Sherlock Holmes-y thing."

Sleuths surmised that the short occurred when a bird dropped the bread onto the open-air substation. And thus was a legend born, about the baguette-wielding bird that brought down the world's mightiest machine.

Gillies downplayed the flap, saying that the event wasn't as serious or as strange as some have made it out to be. "I understand this kind of thing is common at power stations around the world," he told me. In the CERN bulletin, he said the outage caused no delay in LHC preparations. "Had we been running, we'd have lost a day or two's worth of beam time, which is nothing unusual when operating a frontier research machine like the LHC," he wrote.

"The moral of this story is that CERN and particle physics are in the spotlight like never before," Gillies continued. "The great adventure that is the LHC has caught the public's imagination, and there's a great thirst for information about what we're doing. Headlines about birds and baguettes may be uncomfortable to live with, but it's always worth remembering that this kind of attention is ultimately for the good. Soon, the headlines should be turning from birds to b-quarks, and from baguettes to bosons. It's a day we're all looking forward to."

From birds to black holes
Assuming that the birds leave the LHC alone, scientists will soon be using the collider to unravel mysteries ranging from the nature of dark matter to the possible existence of "the God particle" and supersymmetric particles, extra dimensions and microscopic black holes.

Oops, did I say "black holes"? Some critics still worry that the black holes created by the LHC could lead to a globe-gobbling catastrophe. Such worries have been repeatedly knocked down, however. Just this week, Discovery News' Ian O'Neill cited a fresh, yet-to-be-refereed study concluding that the LHC's micro-black holes would pose zero threat to Earth.

The researchers say that tidal black holes would evaporate virtually instantly. If they zoomed through the planet, they would be flung out into space and fizzle out. And if the black holes dropped to Earth's core and stayed there, it would take billions upon billions of years for them to grow to the size of, say, a virus.

That's how the researchers see it. The way I see it, the black-hole apocalypse rates pretty low on the plausibility scale - below the asteroid apocalypse, below the robot apocalypse, even below the cheesy kind of apocalypse laid out in the movie "2012." But how do you see it? Feel free to pick your apocalypse and discuss it in the comment section below.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've just set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Evolution' reloaded
• The Economist: The skeleton of water
• Daily Grail: Psy-spy research under the microscope
• New Scientist: Consciousness captured in brain scans

ESA

The OSIRIS camera on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft captured this view of Earth from 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers) away on Thursday.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft is making its final flyby past Earth on its way to an asteroid and a comet – a close encounter that should yield beautiful pictures of our home planet, and perhaps the answer to a cosmic mystery as well.

Rosetta was launched five years ago and has already made two gravitational flybys past Earth, plus one past Mars. Friday's flyby represents the final boost, slingshotting the probe past the asteroid Lutetia for a quick look next year, and then pushing it along to the main event at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.

When Rosetta arrives at its destination, it will send a small lander down to the comet's 2.4-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) icy nucleus and spend two years in orbit, studying Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it approaches the sun. Rosetta's 11 scientific instruments will record how the comet is transformed by the sun's warmth.

Time for more marvels
Rosetta has been snapping marvelous pictures of the sights it has encountered over the past five years, ranging from our round blue planet, the moon and a 3-D Mars to the asteroid Steins, a diamond-shaped space rock topped by a monster crater.

The current flyby has yielded yet another stunner: a view of a crescent Earth that highlights a slim slice of Antarctica and southern oceans, seen from 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers) out. You can expect more pictures to be posted to the European Space Agency's Web site and the Rosetta blog as the encounter proceeds.

The climax comes around 2:45 a.m. ET (8:45 a.m. CET), when the spacecraft zooms past Earth at an altitude of 1,541 miles (2,481 kilometers), going 28,000 mph (45,000 kilometers per hour). Those are just rough estimates, of course. Mission controllers can monitor Rosetta's speed and location to an accuracy of millimeters. And that's where the mystery enters the picture.

Time for a mystery
For almost two decades, scientists have noticed slight anomalies in the effects of gravitational flybys on spacecraft speed. For example, when NASA's Galileo spacecraft swung past Earth in December 1990, controllers found that the probe picked up an extra 3.9 millimeters per second of speed over what was predicted by their calculations.

The NEAR Shoemaker asteroid probe got an extra boost of 13 millimeters per second during its own Earth flyby in 1998. But there were no anomalies noted outside the range of uncertainty during swingbys involving Cassini probe to Saturn and the Messenger probe to Mercury.

The discrepancies have been compared to the "Pioneer anomaly," another longstanding case in which the navigational numbers (this time involving the Pioneer 11 and 12 spacecraft) just didn't add up.

Rosetta itself registered an anomalous speed-up amounting to an extra 1.8 millimeters per second during its first Earth flyby in 2005 - but performed precisely as predicted during the second flyby in 2007. No one knows what will happen this time.

"It's a mystery as to what is happening with these gravity events," Trevor Morley, the Rosetta mission's lead flight dynamics specialist at ESA's European Space Operations Center, said in an ESA report on the anomalies. "Some studies have looked for answers in new interpretations of current physics. If this proves correct, it would be absolutely groundbreaking news."

The possible causes range from near-Earth tidal effects, atmospheric drag and radiation pressure to exotic concepts such as dark matter, dark energy or unexpected twists in the theory of relativity. One study suggests that relativistic time dilation would account for the discrepancies.  

Highly precise data will be recorded during the Rosetta flyby to determine whether the spacecraft speeds up or slows down more or less than predicted by the various theories. Ground stations in Australia, California and the Canary Islands are involved in the investigation.

"We are using as many ground stations as are available to maximize the amount of swingby data we record," Morley said. "The more data we get, the better the chance that we may eventually come up with an answer."

Update for 4:19 p.m. ET Nov. 13: The flyby went well, by all accounts, but it will take a while to analyze the precise velocity readings and determine whether or not Rosetta showed any of the mysterious anomalies this time around. The probe captured several more nice pictures of Earth. Check out the Rosetta blog for shots like this one of a cloud-covered North America, and these pictures of Earth's night side.

• Wired.com: Why we love Pluto, the underdog planet
• New Scientist: Pluto to Earth: 'I'm a planet, damn it!' 
• Inside Science: Sagan's 'Glorious Dawn' hits the big time
• NASA's Ares rocket tops Time's list of year's best inventions
• SpaceX's Falcon 1 on Popular Science's 'Best of What's New'
• Greentech Media: Will hush-hush fusion technology go public?

This summer's animated movie "Up" and last month's weird tale of the balloon boy may have given you your fill of high-flying fiction - but if you're looking for factual sagas that soar, check out this year's winners of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. There's even a story about a kid with a balloon.

Every year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science convenes independent panels of science journalists to select the top stories in several categories of science writing and broadcasting. The winners in each category will receive $3,000 and a plaque in February at the AAAS' 2010 annual meeting in San Diego.

I was lucky enough to receive the award for online journalism in 2002, for a series of stories about genetic genealogy, and the recognition ranks among the highlights of my career. This year's winners raise the bar incredibly high.

Speaking of high, the winning piece in the radio category focuses on the intriguing, seemingly improbable journey of a single balloon. One English girl put a label on the balloon, reading "Please send back to Laura Buxton." Then she released the balloon, which drifted into southern England and landed near the home of ... yet another girl named Laura Buxton. A miracle, no?

"This is a tale about miracles which, on closer examination, are not quite as miraculous as they seem," one of the winners, longtime science journalist Robert Krulwich, was quoted as saying in the AAAS' award announcement. "Ordinarily, an anti-miracle story sounds like a downer, but in this case, by mixing girls, grandpas, balloons, statistics professors and probability theory, we came up with an un-miracle that feels almost miraculous. I think that's way cool."

Another thing that's way cool is that all of the winning entries are available via the Web. Here's the full list of winners, with links to their work:

• Large newspaper (100,000 or more circulation): Carl Zimmer for three articles in The New York Times: "Now, the Rest of the Genome"; "10 Genes, Furiously Evolving"; and "Blink Twice If You Like Me."
• Small newspaper (less than 100,000 circulation): Amie Thompson of the Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune for "Lethal Legacy," a series of stories about a family coping with a disease so rare that only a handful of families worldwide are known to be affected by it.
• Magazine: Gary Wolf of Wired for "Barcode of Life," an article focusing on the arcane field of biological taxonomy and the rise of DNA barcoding.
• Television (spot news/feature): Julia Cort of "Nova ScienceNOW" for "Diamond Factory," a segment that focused on a production facility that makes diamonds good enough to fool jewelers into thinking they're natural. The technology is paving the way for better electronics and stronger materials.
• Television (in-depth reporting): Doug Hamilton of WGBH/"Nova" for "The Last Extinction," a documentary exploring the potential factors behind the megafauna extinction that occurred 12,900 years ago. Hats off to "Nova" for putting the whole darn episode online.
• Radio: Jad Abumrad, Soren Wheeler and Robert Krulwich of WNYC's "Radiolab" for "A Very Lucky Wind," the balloon saga with a tart twist of probability theory.
• Online: Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire for a series of stories on Bangladesh's climate-induced crisis, including an overview of the "climate exodus" amid rising waters as well as an online video and an on-the-scene report from the ruined village of Gabura.
• Children's science news: Douglas Fox of Science News for Kids, for "Where Rivers Run Uphill," an article focusing on the scientists who study Antarctica's subsurface lakes.

NASA

A NASA graphic traces the asteroid 2009 VA's path within the moon's orbit and past Earth. Each dot on the 2009 VA line indicates an hour of time along the route.

Asteroid-watchers say a space rock about as big as a garage came within 9,000 miles (14,000 kilometers) of Earth last Friday, just 15 hours after it was detected.

Experts quickly determined that the asteroid 2009 VA would miss us - and even if it came directly at us, it wouldn't have caused a catastrophe. Nevertheless, the close encounter serves as a reminder that someday a much bigger rock may well hit us and that it's best to be prepared.

In this week's recap of the event, NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office reported that 2009 VA came well within the moon's orbit - so close, in fact, that the asteroid's orbital path was bent by Earth's gravitational pull.

NASA and other space agencies around the world have been keeping increasingly close track of near-Earth asteroids and comets, with a strong assist from amateur astronomers. In this case, the object was first detected by the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona. It was quickly identified by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., as a close-approaching asteroid. Then NASA experts worked out its orbit and gave the all-clear.

Why wasn't the rock found sooner? Well, smaller objects are more difficult to detect in advance, and this one was estimated to be only 7 meters (23 feet) wide. That's nowhere near as big as the 10-kilometer-wide (6-mile-wide) object that apparently did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago - or even the 30-meter-wide (100-foot-wide) Tunguska object that was thought to have wreaked destruction in a Siberian forest in 1908.

For what it's worth, the Defense Department's Joint Space Operations Center tracks about 19,000 orbital objects down to the size of 10 centimeters (4 inches), and NASA tracks bits of space junk that are even smaller. But incoming near-Earth objects are trickier to track until they're almost upon us.

In the close-but-no-collision category, this one was No. 3 on NASA's list for cataloged asteroids: A meter-wide (yard-wide) asteroid came within 6,150 kilometers (3,821 miles) in October 2008, while another space rock about the size of 2009 VA passed within 6,535 kilometers (4,060 miles) in March 2004.

If 2009 VA had entered the atmosphere, it almost certainly would have blown itself up before hitting the ground - just as a larger asteroid did a month ago, without warning, in the skies over Indonesia. A somewhat smaller asteroid met a similar fate in the skies over Africa about 13 months ago. (Months later, students in Sudan found 4 kilograms (8.7 pounds) of meteorites that fell to Earth after last year's blast.)

Such atmospheric blow-ups release energy equivalent to about a kiloton of TNT. In comparison, the Hiroshima atomic bomb set off a roughly 15-kiloton blast.

So, for several reasons, we shouldn't hit the alarm button over 2009 VA. But that doesn't mean we should hit the snooze button, either: The Indonesia blast and the surprise pummeling that Jupiter took back in July are just foretastes of nasty surprises that could be waiting for us. The more we know about asteroids and how to fend them off, the better. Here are some reports that lay out the asteroid threat and what NASA has been doing about it:

• How to track the 'wolves of the solar system'
• NASA downgrades asteroid threat in 2036
• Experts urge more action on asteroids
• Interactive: Close encounters of the asteroid kind
• Newsvine poll: What do you think of the asteroid threat?

Update for 3:35 p.m. ET: I've upped the estimate for the dino-killing asteroid to a whopping 10 kilometers (6 miles) across. Anything bigger than 1 kilometer wide would be considered capable of causing a global catastrophe.

NASA / ESA / SSC / CXC / STScI

Click for video: Color-coded images from NASA's three Great Observatories — the Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes — are combined to produce this spectacular view of the Milky Way galaxy's central region. Click on the image to watch a video about the image from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

NASA has blended three views of our home galaxy's turbulent core to produce a picture filled with scientifically significant snap, crackle and pop. And the deeper you go into the image, the more you learn.

The composite picture of the Milky Way's center draws upon near-infrared data from the Hubble Space Telescope (shown in yellow), infrared readings from the Spitzer Space Telescope (shown in rich red) and the X-ray vision of the Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in shades of blue and violet)

The result is an amazingly detailed, and amazingly colorful, multiwavelength view of our galaxy's core, 26,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Among the highlights are Sagittarius A*, the bright knot of material that surrounds the Milky Way's supermassive black hole, and the "light echo" left behind by black hole blasts that faded away long ago.

"That's one interesting thing to see - this time history of a supermassive black hole that's closer to us than any other," said Chandra press scientist Peter Edmonds. X-ray imagery from the past several years chart how the light echo has changed.

Another bright bluish spot, toward the left side of the picture, marks the location of a mysterious X-ray source known as 1E 1743.1-2843. The emissions might signal the presence of a black hole or a neutron star that is sucking in material from an unseen companion, but astronomers aren't sure.

The whole region is aglow with a blue haze that represents diffuse X-ray emissions from gas that has been heated to millions of degrees. The heat comes from violent storms of energy that are being whipped up by the central black hole as well as the birth and death of massive stars. Check out Chandra's multicolored X-ray view of the galactic center for even more detail.

The infrared view from Spitzer shows a reddish haze, marking the presence of hundreds of thousands of stars that can't be seen in visible light. Those stars warm up the surrounding clouds of gas and dust, producing an infrared glow. A closer look from Spitzer's perspective reveals long filaments of dust and "pillars of creation" where newborn stars are beginning to break out of their cocoons.

The near-infrared view from Hubble highlights arcs of warm gas that have been heated up by clusters of bright, massive stars. The structures outlined in the image provide a skeleton on which to hang all the other imagery of the galactic center.

To see how the whole picture fits together, click on the wavelength tabs on this image. And to identify the points of interest in the galactic center, check out this annotated picture.

Edmonds told me that this kind of collaboration involving multiple telescopes, and particularly NASA's three Great Observatories, is increasingly becoming the rule rather than the exception. More and more astronomers are coming to the conclusion that looking at things in one range of wavelengths may not be enough to crack the mysteries of the universe.

"The younger astronomers coming through now, they see a problem, and they attack it with every tool they've got," Edmonds said. That goes double for the next generation of scientists who may be inspired by images like the one released today.

The three-in-one view of the Milky Way's core is being sent out in printed form to more than 150 planetariums, museums, libraries, schools and science centers across the country to commemorate the 400 years since Galileo Galilei turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. Here's a list of the places where you can see the picture displayed in all its 6-foot-by-3-foot glory.

Today's image release is just one of the activities associated with the International Year of Astronomy. There's more to come. For example, you can send a message to the planet Venus via the Japanese Akatsuki probe, due for launch next year. Next week, 35 radio telescopes around the world will conduct an unprecedented 24-hour observation of nearly 250 remote quasars.

You can get your daily fix of cosmic commentary from 365 Days of Astronomy, all the way up to the end of the year. And I'm betting that the year will end with a bang: To keep up with the latest, follow the International Year of Astronomy's Twitter updates or join the Facebook group.

Courtesy of Nat'l Academy of Sciences / PNAS

The southeast corner of a painted pyramid excavated at a site in Mexico shows scenes from everyday Maya life in the A.D. 620-700 time frame.

Murals found on a buried Mexican pyramid reveal how the average Maya lived about 1,350 years ago - shedding light on aspects of Maya society that are "virtually unknown," researchers say.

Almost all of the artifacts associated with the ancient Maya civilization have to do with the ruling class and religious life: the secrets of the Maya's ritual blue paint, or their monumental religious panels, or the arrangement of their temples, or even their controversial calendar.

In contrast, precious little has remained from the everyday lifestyles of ordinary Maya. Some hints have emerged in recent years. For example, archaeologists analyzed the chemical residues of Classic Maya settlements to determine that the Maya had a functioning market economy. But when it comes to visualizing how that market worked, the murals found at Mexico's Calakmul site provide the best picture yet.

The murals are "quite stunning," said William Saturno, an archaeologist at Boston University who was not involved in the Calakmul project but has found a few Maya treasures of his own.

One painting shows a man wearing what appears to be a colorful, broad-brimmed sombrero as he mixes up a big pot of maize gruel (think of thin corn soup). Another man with an ornate headdress and fancier garb drinks from a bowl of the stuff as a female server looks on.

Courtesy of Nat'l Academy of Sciences / PNAS

This black-and-white rendering of a painted scene from the Calakmul pyramid shows the serving and drinking of "maize-gruel."

In a different mural, a female tamale-vendor offers her wares on a platter, to a man who is already munching on one of the tamales.

Other pictures show how the foodstuffs went to market:

• A bearer carrying a heavy pot on his back wears a patterned headband to help him distribute the load.
• A man with a basket and spoon is designated in Maya hieroglyphs as a "salt person." (Salt was a staple of the Maya diet.)
• A group of figures gather around bowls and a tied sack in a picture labeled with the hieroglyphs for "maize-grain person."
• A "tobacco person" holds a spatula and a pot that presumably contains a processed form of the leaf.
• A woman wearing a sombrero sits alongside a basket holding ceramic pots. You guessed it: She's labeled as the "clay-vessel person."

Courtesy of Nat'l Academy of Sciences / PNAS

A mural reproduced in black-and-white shows a woman with ceramic cylinder vessels in a basket. The hieroglyphs above the pots identify the woman as "clay-vessel person."

The paintings and their meanings are laid out in a research paper appearing online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper's authors include Ramon Carrasco Vargas of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History, Veronica Vazquez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and Simon Martin of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

The site where the murals were found is on the Mexican part of the Yucatan peninsula, near the Guatemalan border. Archaeologists have known about the Calakmul site since 1931, and it's been under study for more than 15 years. Over the past five years, Carrasco Vargas and his colleagues have been digging into an arrangement of 68 buried structures known as the Chiik Nahb complex.

The tallest feature in the complex, called Structure 1, looked like a collapsed mound from the surface. But it was actually a buried pyramid that measured about 36 feet (11 meters) on each side and once rose to a height of 15 feet (4.7 meters).

The researchers dug a tunnel to explore the interior, and found that the pyramid had been remodeled several times over as much as 600 years. They were amazed to find that one of the remodelings included the addition of murals on panels and sidewalls of the pyramid's three tiers. Based on the style of pottery depicted in the paintings, the researchers estimate that the paintings were done sometime between the year 620 and 700.

About 30 pictures have been documented so far. To create the murals, shades of blue, green, yellow, red and brown were applied to a gray-white stucco background, and each panel was framed with red lines. The paintings were apparently done in two phases, with the more skilled artwork created during the second phase.

"Costumes range from simple loincloths and tied-cloth headbands to more elaborate headgear and clothing decorated with painted or woven designs," the researchers reported. "Such distinctions probably reflect different social status. ... Women often wear face-paint, sometimes extending below the neckline, and both sexes wear ear ornaments, necklaces and pendants."

The pictures help flesh out our mental pictures of everyday life during the Maya's heyday, but mysteries remain: For example, several of the murals include hieroglyphs that denote the name or title of a female. Who was she? And why were such common but lively scenes painted on the pyramid? Was this the central monument for a Maya marketplace?

So far, the answers to those questions are far from clear.

"The full implications of these finds will take time to evaluate and requires the exposure of all the paintings," the researchers wrote. "Ongoing excavations will more fully situate Structure 1 within the wider archaeological context of the Chiik Nahb complex and aid its interpretation."

At least one thing is clear, however: The Calakmul murals could well open up a new archaeological frontier.

"We have very little hard information about the social processes by which foodstuffs and goods circulated within Maya polities and the varying roles of festivals, gift-giving, communal feasting and exchange, all of which are attested in ethnohistorical sources," the researchers said. "These murals evidently depict one or more of these activities and thereby portray an ancient social mechanism that has left no other evidence of its existence."

Update for 7 p.m. ET Nov. 10: Boston University's William Saturno had more to say about the Calakmul research after he read the published paper. He agreed that the murals are significant and reveal a side of Maya society that has been seen only rarely.

"In terms of the work of public art, I don't know of others that show nondescript people," he told me in a follow-up phone call. "They're not nobility. You have titles like 'He of the Corn Gruel.' In that sense, they show a part of Maya life that is not commonly seen in public art."

He also agreed that the report raises further questions that have yet to be answered.

"I have to say I'm puzzled as to why the art is not being discussed as market scenes as opposed to scenes of everyday life," he said. "Some of the things I think are really neat about this are things that are not being emphasized."

Saturno noted that the murals almost exclusively show market transactions rather than, say, the actual production of the goods being traded.

Other researchers have surmised that Structure 1 and its surroundings were the site of an ancient Maya marketplace, Saturno said. "There are all these little, low-walled, stall-like structures that are unprecedented in other Maya sites," he observed. The implication, then, is that the pyramid indeed served as a public monument with a market theme.

"Maybe we're finally looking at a Maya market," Saturno said, "and if we're looking at a Maya market, that's really cool."

More about everyday life in ancient times:

• Sex and booze figured in Egyptian rites
• High times in ancient times
• Gallery: How ancient peoples partied
• Women made the beer in ancient Peru 
• Hints of 9,000-year-old wine found in China
• Everyday life in New Testament times

While we're on the subject, I'll take this opportunity to mention a book that was written about everyday life in not-quite-ancient times: "The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium." This readable volume, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, delves into such topics as how to fasten your clothes in a world without buttons, or the recipe for a medieval form of Viagra. It's this month's selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club, a collection of books on cosmic themes that you should be able to find at your local library or secondhand-book shop.

And while we're talking about millennial matters, I'll note that Penn Museum's Simon Martin, one of the authors of the Calakmul study, also has some choice things to say about the "2012" Maya apocalypse claims. 

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've just set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

	Consortium for the Barcode of Life
	Color-coded genetic sequences serve as "DNA barcodes" for a hermit thrush (far left), an American robin, a bumblebee and a honeybee. The gray bars stand for genetic differences.

DNA fingerprinting isn't just for humans anymore: The "barcodes of life" are being read in other species as well, and they're being used to crack down on smugglers, track down disease carriers and trace the effects of climate change.

About 350 experts from 50 countries will be meeting in Mexico over the next week to discuss the rising number of applications for the technology. One of the major items on the agenda is to seal a global deal to extend the DNA barcode system to plants.

That could help genetic sleuths to get a better handle on where timber is being harvested illegally, where herbal medicines really come from, and where plant diseases are being spread.

"Biodiversity scientists are using DNA technology to unravel mysteries, much like detectives use it to solve crimes," David Schindel, executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, said in a news release previewing the weeklong Mexico City meeting. "It is having a profound impact on our understanding of organisms in nature and how they interact with the environment."

The international consortium and the Instituto Biologia at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico are co-hosts of the meeting at the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Researchers will be sharing the success stories they've accumulated over the past six years.

DNA barcoding really got its start in 2003, when scientists agreed on a standard for fingerprinting a species' genetic code.

Anyone who's watched any modern-day cop show knows that DNA can serve to match a crime-scene sample with a suspect (or rule that suspect out as the perpetrator). But is there a quick, reliable way to determine from a DNA sample whether it came from a rare parrot or a common chicken?

The consortium's scientists settled on a 645-base-pair region of mitochondrial genetic code, known as the COI or COX1 gene, to serve as the standard fingerprint for a species. That region mutates quickly enough that you can tell the difference between closely related species, but slowly enough that individuals within a species have similar barcodes.

Here are just some of the applications cited by the consortium:

• In 2003, a Brazilian man was caught trying to smuggle 58 eggs through an airport. The man said they were quail eggs, but police suspected they were rare (and regulated) parrot eggs. Although the eggs never hatched, DNA barcoding revealed that the embryos of blue-bellied or yellow-faced Amazon parrots were inside 51 of the eggs, macaws were inside three others, and yellow-crowned parrots were inside the last four. That justified an arrest.
• Researchers recently reported in the journal Conservation Genetics that they sequenced the barcode region for 25 mammals and reptiles from Africa and South America that commonly turn up in international trade. Many of the species, such as Old World monkeys and Nile crocodiles, are not supposed to be harvested. The researchers hope the barcodes will help counter the rising trade in bushmeat, a market that was estimated last year to be worth as much as $15 billion.
• Officials at the Federal Drug Administration say DNA barcoding can reliably distinguish the seedpods of star anise (Illicium verum), an herb commonly used in teas, cooking and herbal remedies, from the otherwise identical seedpods of a sister species (Illicium anisatin) that is considered a health risk due to the presence of neurotoxins.
• The International Barcode of Life Project, headquartered in Canada, is presenting a study showing that eight bat species feed on more than 300 types of insects - making up one of the largest food webs ever discovered. Such research can show "how diets may be changing due to climate change," said the Smithsonian Institution's Scott Miller, chair of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life.
• London's Natural History Museum has partnered with an educational charity to get 1,000 students involved in "Project BarkCode," aimed at collecting genetic samples from 10,000 trees in Britain starting next year.
• In Canada, students collected fish samples from stores nationwide for DNA analysis, and found a significant level of seafood mislabeling. In the United States, the FDA hopes to use DNA barcoding to cut down on mislabeling and other illegal and hazardous practices.

Eventually, scientists aim to develop a database of 5 million samples from 500,000 species. The project will almost certainly have public health benefits: Even now, researchers are collecting barcodes for disease-spreading mosquitoes in India, black flies that transmit river blindness disease in South America, and parasites that afflict frogs and livestock in Mexico and Central America.

DNA fingerprinting could contribute to an early warning system for the spread of disease, or help inspectors track down the source of food contamination. "This is an example of where new genetic technology can be transformative to society," George Amato, director of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History, said in a recent report on barcoding.

For more examples of barcoding at work, check out this clickthrough gallery that highlights how DNA analysis can help document global biodiversity.