LLNL Technicians check a positioner inside the target chamber at the National Ignition Facility in California. A tiny capsule containing fusion fuel would be placed at the very end of the pencil-shaped positioner, then blasted by 192 laser beams.

All of a sudden, nuclear fusion is becoming an energy buzzword instead of an energy joke: One route to fusion is being hailed as having the potential to become a "holy cow game-changer," another mainstream method is getting a multimillion-dollar boost, and a dark-horse candidate is stealthily moving forward as well. Heck, even cold fusion is back in the game.

So what's behind the seemingly sudden interest?

Part of the buzz is dictated by the calendar. After 12 years of construction, the world's most powerful laser is finally finished at the National Ignition Facility in California, and VIPs are getting a look at some of the best that Big Science has to offer in fusion energy research.

But part of it is dictated by the hard times we're living in, said Richard Nebel, who heads a team looking at an unconventional kind of fusion technology. "These can be the times when innovation can really take hold," he told me today.

The way Nebel sees it, tough times can spur people to look for unconventional solutions to society's challenges - for example, how to develop cleaner, cheaper, more abundant sources of energy. Biofuels (including algae), wind, wave, geothermal and solar power are all part of the mix, along with better batteries and greater fuel efficiency.

There's a place for safer nuclear power as well, involving fission as well as future fusion - or maybe even fission-fusion hybrids. Here's a quick rundown of the latest developments:

Laser fusion
The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility has been 12 years in the making, but today the Energy Department announced that the super-laser-blaster is fully operational and ready for business. The department has emphasized the facility's function as an H-bomb simulator, probably because that's its most down-to-earth application. However, a lot of researchers and onlookers are hoping that the NIF can provide a realistic route to commercial fusion power.

LLNL

Click for video:   The National Ignition   Facility explains "the   power of light."

The NIF's array of 192 pulsed lasers are designed to blast pellets of deuterium-tritium fuel so intensely that they ignite in a fusion reaction. Earlier this month, NIF's operators reported that they delivered more than a megajoule of laser energy to the target chamber's focus point - which should be enough to get nuclear fusion started.

The prospect of creating a controlled fusion reaction is what led New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to write that the research planned for NIF might be a "holy cow game-changer" in the energy quest. If the technique actually works, a $10 billion pilot power plant could be built to prove that "any local power utility could have its own miniature sun - on a commercial basis," Friedman said.

And if not? "At the pace we're going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us," he wrote.

Tokamak fusion
The other Big Science path to fusion leads through France, where the $13 billion ITER fusion research plant is under construction. ITER, due for startup in 2016, is an international effort that is based on magnetic-confinement technology. The fusion reaction would be contained within a highly shielded, doughnut-shaped chamber known as a tokamak.

A year ago, U.S. participation in ITER was essentially put on hold due to the budgetary battles between Congress and the Bush administration. There was a risk that U.S. firms would be locked out from participation in the project - but that scenario was averted when the Energy Department restored ITER's funding just in the nick of time.

The omnibus spending bill for the remainder of this fiscal year, which was signed into law three weeks ago, includes $124 million for the U.S. involvement in ITER. Thom Mason, the director of Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told the Knoxville News Sentinel's Frank Munger that the U.S. ITER effort had been "running on fumes" for the past few months.

"So, this will really help the morale and get people moving," he said.

The big priority now is to arrange for the purchase of U.S.-built hardware that the federal government has promised to contribute to the ITER reactor. That should have a "good economic impact in terms of employment," Mason said.

Fission-fusion hybrids
Some researchers say the fusion process could be paired up with the fission process to reduce the amount of waste left behind by conventional nuclear reactors.

The classic hybrid concept - known as Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, or LIFE - was developed by NIF researchers: They suggested that a laser-sparked fusion reaction could supply extra neutrons inside a fission reactor. That power boost would burn up radioactive leftovers that otherwise would have to be stored or reprocessed.

More recently, physicists at the University of Texas at Austin proposed a similar hybrid technique that would employ a fusion tokamak rather than a laser-blaster. The technique was touted by Forbes magazine's Jonathan Fahey as a "Texas Smoosh 'Em." (Fahey also looked at the LIFE concept.)

The idea's boosters say going with hybrid reactors would reduce the need for long-term waste repositories such as the one that had been planned for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. It looks as if the Obama administration is pulling the plug on the plans for Yucca Mountain, so
any strategy that cuts down on the nuclear waste problem would be warmly welcomed.

However, it's not yet clear whether the fusion-fission hybrid concept is workable. Over at the Atomic Insights blog, Rod Adams is skeptical about NIF in general and hybrid nuclear power in particular. "Fission works; fusion is a complex hallucination," Adams writes.

Polywell fusion
If fusion is a hallucination, the wildest part of the vision would have to be the project that Nebel and his colleagues are working on at EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. in New Mexico. They're following up on preliminary indications that a relatively low-budget, high-voltage gizmo known as a Polywell fusion device could produce more energy than it consumes - that is, if the gizmo is scaled up to the appropriate size.

Late last year, Nebel's team sent a report about their experiments to their funders at the U.S. Navy. The results were encouraging enough that the Navy is providing the money for follow-up work through the end of this year.

Nebel told me the interim funding was meant to "keep us alive until they figure out what they want to do." Although he was reluctant to go into the details, progress reports posted on the Talk-Polywell discussion forum and the Dean's World blog indicate that the device's design  is being tweaked to improve its performance.

"We've been trying to clean up some of the things we know we can do better," Nebel said.

Nebel has long hoped that the technology could be ramped up to create commercially viable fusion reactors - which would cost way less than $10 billion each, by the way. He is still hopeful. "We think that we should be able to go forward with this," he said.

However, Nebel is also reluctant to overpromise. That might not be a bad thing, considering that so many people involved in the fusion quest have been promising so much for so long. The most Nebel will say is that the studies - and the discussions with potential funders - are continuing.

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William A. Cotton / Colorado State University Click for video: Alpha cribs containing colonies of algae grow under artificial lights at Colorado State University's Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory. Click on the image to watch an archived video about algae-based biofuels from NBC Nightly News.

In the past, Venetians have looked upon algae as their scumbag enemy, but now they're hoping to tame the plants to satisfy the historic Italian seaport's energy needs. Will algae provide the ultimate in green power, or is the scheme merely a green pipe dream?

The Venetian port authority's deal with Enalg, announced last week, represents one of the latest and highest-profile forays into algae-fueled energy production. As detailed in the port's news release, the plan calls for construction of a $273 million, 40-megawatt power plant by 2011, using technology pioneered by Washington-based Solena Group.

Like many other plants, algae produce an oil that can be converted for industrial use. Solena's process involves growing the algae in plastic cylinders that are supplied with water, carbon dioxide and sunshine. The resulting biomass is then turned into a synthetic natural gas to fire electricity-generating turbines. The carbon dioxide released by burning the gas is fed back into the system to help grow the next generation of algae.

"The lagoon surroundings are ideal for experimenting with this new technology," said Paolo Costa, president of Venice's port authority. "The objective is to guarantee the energy self-sufficiency of the port of Venice and, in the near future, to look for the possibility of supplying energy to the ships moored at the dock."

Lots of claims have been made over the years for algae energy efficiency: Some experts say each acre given over to algae cultivation could theoretically produce the equivalent of thousands of gallons of oil per year, compared with an estimated yield of 18 to 335 gallons of ethanol per acre for traditional biofuel crops. Others claim that algae-growing systems could be tweaked to yield as much as 100,000 gallons per acre annually.

"That's almost like having an oil well in your backyard!" said David Pimentel, a researcher at Cornell University who's known for taking a hard look at alternative-energy claims.

Pimentel is known for taking a skeptical view of the energy equation for ethanol - and he doesn't believe the most optimistic claims for algae, either. But he does think algae power is worth looking into. "It's a disappointment that DOE [the Department of Energy] is not investing in this one as much as we should," he told me today.

From slime to biofuel
Pimentel's research focuses on the benefit/cost ratio for extracting oil from algae and converting it into biodiesel. That's different from Solena's syngas process, but it's more in line with the mainstream approach for using algae oil.

His calculations, based on an analysis of the literature rather than lab studies, indicate that each gallon of oil (or its equivalent) that's invested in algae power would yield the energy equivalent of 1.4 gallons of oil. Researchers in New Zealand recently came up with a slightly higher return of 1.7-to-1, he said.

"This is somewhat optimistic, but you've got to have a little bit of optimism," he said.

The current algae-producing process requires lots of water, and getting the oil out of the algae is a "fairly energy-intensive" job, Pimental said. "It takes approximately a quarter of a gallon of oil to extract [the equivalent of a gallon of] that oil out of that squishy green mass," he said. There's also the problem of keeping impurities out of the algae culture, he added. 

Pimentel figures that algae oil would cost the equivalent of $4 a gallon - which means it's not quite competitive with current gasoline prices. However, he said, "this is much, much better than producing ethanol from corn, and it's much better than producing biodiesel from soybeans."

The idea of capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from, say, a coal-fired power plant and using that CO₂ to feed the algae adds to the technology's attraction - and that's a big reason why the coal industry is so eager to see algae power take hold.

Changing the cost equation
If the production process could be made more efficient, that would improve the prospects for slimy green power. And improving the process is exactly what Ben Wen, chief scientist at New York-based United Environment & Energy, is hoping to do.

At last week's meeting of the American Chemical Society, Wen reported that his company was testing an algae-to-biodiesel conversion process that could be 40 percent cheaper than today's standard. The process involves pumping the algae oil plus methanol through a solid catalyst at high pressure. Biodiesel comes out the other end.

"It's a continuous process," Wen told me. "You just pump the feedstock through the catalyst all the time, instead of the batch process used in the industry right now."

The process promises to provide "the first economical way to produce biodiesel from algae oil," Wen said in a news release. "It costs much less than conventional processes because you would need a much smaller factory, there are no water disposal costs, and the process is considerably faster."

However, the process not yet quite ready for prime time. Wen said that United Environment & Energy was working with a venture partner (which he declined to name) to set up a pilot plant capable of producing nearly 1 million gallons of algae biodiesel annually.

"This year we get the pilot plant into operation," he told me. "Next year, we optimize all the conditions. In late 2010, we should get an idea of how to put it into commercialization."

Is the buzz over algae power for real - or is it mostly, as one commentator said last week, "wild-eyed optimism and pure hype"? Feel free to join in with your comments below.

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NASA Click for video: Backdropped by the thin line of Earth's atmosphere, the international space station shines in a view captured from the shuttle Discovery. Click on the image to watch a sped-up video of Discovery's March 25 flyaround.

Is one picture worth a hundred billion dollars? That's the mostly-in-jest price tag that was put on this week's portrait of the virtually complete international space station. Pictures may not be the most practical payoff from space exploration, but they're definitely the biggest crowd-pleasers, as demonstrated by the latest batch of "Month in Space" pictures.

The entertainment value of imagery from the final frontier is just one of the five E's that justify jumping off this planet. The space station is expected to contribute to the other E's as well - for example, through proposed energy-beaming experiments and a host of studies aimed at smoothing the way for future exploration.

When all that research is added to images such as this week's "$100 billion photographs," does that make the estimated cost of the space station project worth it? That sounds like the perfect topic to discuss in the comment section below.

In the meantime, there are lots more billion-dollar pictures to delight in, including some new 3-D views of a Martian dust devil in Spirit's sights, and Opportunity's 360-degree view of its surroundings. You've got to be wearing your red-blue glasses to get the full effect of Resolution Crater, an alien foxhole visible on the right side of Opportunity's panorama.

For those of you who are resolved to adorn your computer desktop with big pictures from space, here are the sources for the images included in the latest "Month in Space" roundup:

• Set focus to infinity: Getty Images' Matt Stroshane grabbed a shot of other shooters shooting the shuttle Discovery's launch, and you'll find more fine blasts from the past in our FirstPerson photo gallery.

• Out for a walk: NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site shows spacewalker Mike Fincke at work.

• Multitude of moons: The Hubble Space Telescope's snapshot of four moons around Saturn one of my favorites. If you like the still image, you'll love the movie - as well as the behind-the-scenes story.

• Space spider: The European Southern Observatory's image of the Tarantula Nebula is like a work of abstract art - which gets better when you get closer.

• The gamma-ray sky: Can you spot the track of the sun in the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's full-sky view? Check this labeled version of the picture for the answer.

• Ripples on Mars: The HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides a surreal, false-color view of Martian sand dunes.

• Three's a crowd: Hubblesite is the place to go for bigger views of a three-galaxy crash.

• Scorched earth: NASA's Earth Observatory has a satellite close-up of Australia's burned-out national park.

• Galaxies in gridlock: The Spitzer Space Telescope snagged a colorful infrared view of two galaxies about to collide. Check out this log posting for more.

• Ready to rumble: My, what big thrusters you have! Find out more about billionaire Charles Simonyi's return trip to the space station.

• Black hole in her hair: The Web site for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Center has bigger downloads of the Medusa Galaxy and its X-ray glow. 

• Paints of the pole: Europe's Mars Express provides groovy false-color and perspective views of Rupes Tenuis at the Martian north pole.

• Mars' junior moon: HiRISE gives the full treatment to Deimos, the Red Planet's smaller moon. Now it needn't feel inferior to Phobos.

• Mesa on a mesa: The story behind HiRISE's picture of the carved-away feature on Mars' Ganges Chasma gets more interesting when you see the bigger picture.

• Pastel planet: We've tried to make the Cassini orbiter's picture of Saturn and its shadowy rings as big as we could, but the full-size pictures make it still bigger and better.

• Danger zone: Earth Observatory provides a guide to the world's most potentially dangerous volcano, Popocatepetl in Mexico. By the way, keep an eye on Alaska's Mount Redoubt.

• A peculiar pair: ESO has the full story on Arp 261, including the story behind the bright star at the bottom of the image and the rainbow streaks toward the top.

• Darwin's islands: Think of the Aqua satellite's picture of the Galapagos Islands as a 200th-birthday present for Charles Darwin.

• Butterfly in space: In the ESO's picture, the Bug Nebula is too pretty to be called a bug.

• Beach Blanket Blastoff: This orange-tinged view of the Kepler probe's blastoff from Cape Canaveral is as delicious as a real Florida orange. Find out more about Kepler's planet-hunting mission. 

Finally, here's an update on a story we first told you about last week: I mentioned that Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope was getting an upgrade, and that more announcements were on the way. This week NASA and Microsoft announced that the sky-simulation software would incorporate 100 terabytes of the space agency's data - enough to fill 20,000 DVDs - under the terms of a Space Act Agreement. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

You can look forward to high-resolution pictures from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as well as the yet-to-be-launched Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"NASA is excited to collaborate with Microsoft to share its portfolio of planetary images with students and lifelong learners," said S. Pete Worden, director of the agency's Ames Research Center at California's Moffett Field. "This is a compelling astronomical resource and will help inspire our next generation of astronomers."

NASA already has a Space Act Agreement with Google for astronomical ventures such as Google Earth and Google Mars - so this new deal means there'll probably be a new dimension to the Microsoft-Google rivalry. And that in turn means it will be easier than ever for space enthusiasts to see NASA's multibillion-dollar imagery.

Update for 6:40 p.m. ET March 28: Here's the high-resolution source for the image of the space station at the top of the item, and here's the full caption. If you click around this photo album, you'll find many more stunning images from the space station flyaround.

Correction for 1 a.m. ET March 29: Yoinks! I typed "Jupiter" instead of "Saturn" for the comment on the "Multitude of Moons" picture. Oh, yeah, Saturn is the one that has the big rings. Thanks to everyone who pointed out the error.

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Paragon Space Development Flowering plants would be enclosed in a mini-greenhouse placed on Odyssey Moon's lunar lander, as shown in this artist's conception.

A company that has built mini-biospheres for orbiting space stations says it's ready for the next giant leap: growing flowers on the moon.

"It's all very aggressive," Taber MacCallum, chief executive officer of Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., said of his company's plan to send a miniature greenhouse to the lunar surface. "But it isn't fun if it isn't aggressive."

Paragon's "Lunar Oasis" would piggyback on a lunar lander currently being developed by Odyssey Moon to vie for a share of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. Details of the partnership are to be publicized Friday during a news conference at Paragon's headquarters in Tucson, Ariz.

To win the prize, Odyssey Moon would have to get its lander/rover craft on the moon's surface by the end of 2014. Paragon is working with Odyssey Moon on the lander design and its thermal control system as well as the mini-greenhouse.

"We are thrilled to have Paragon join the team with their expertise in thermal and biological systems," Odyssey Moon's founder and chief executive officer, Bob Richards, said in a news advisory. "I am incredibly inspired by our hope to grow the first plant on another world."

Capturing the imagination
The greenhouse idea has emotional as well as scientific appeal.

"People of all ages will get excited about the idea of growing a plant on the moon," Jane Poynter, president and founder of Paragon (as well as MacCallum's wife), said in the advisory. "Imagine a bright flower on a plant in a crystal clear growth chamber on the surface of the moon, with the full Earth rising above the moonscape behind it; these are the ideas that got me interested in space."

MacCallum has been impressed in particular by how kids react to the idea. "To them, right now it's more cool than astronauts," he told me.

But the experiment isn't just kid stuff. "The first plant to grow from seed and complete its life cycle on another world will be a significant step in the expansion of life beyond the earth," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in the advisory. "The sooner we do it, the better."

Plants already have been found to flourish in zero gravity - in fact, Paragon played a big role in plant-growth experiments on the space shuttle and Russia's Mir space station as well as on the international space station. But plants haven't yet been grown in lunar-type reduced gravity, said Volker Kern, Paragon's director of NASA human spaceflight programs.

"Scientifically, it will be very interesting to understand the effects of the moon and one-sixth gravity on plant growth," he said.

Mother Nature on another world
MacCallum knows that getting plants to grow in the Lunar Oasis will be a challenge. First of all, the greenhouse would have to survive the trip to the moon in working order - which is definitely one giant leap for the Odyssey Moon team.

Odyssey Moon

Odyssey Moon's lander makes its descent to the lunar surface in this artist's conception.

Then Mother Nature would have to do its thing on another world, with a lot of help from the onboard life support system. The current prototype for the greenhouse is a 15-inch-high (37.5-centimeter-high) reinforced glass cylinder that's about 7 inches (18 centimeters) wide on the bottom. Seeds for a rapid-cycle type of Brassica plant - basically, mustard seeds - would be planted in Earth soil within the container.

"It's one of those 'lab-rat' plants that scientists use a lot and know very well," MacCallum explained.

The petite plants have been bred on Earth to develop yellow flowers 14 days after planting - which happens to be how long a lunar day lasts. "We're hoping to at least go to flower and set seed in the course of one lunar day," MacCallum said.

Without the mediating influence of an atmosphere, lunar surface temperatures can swing widely between day and night, from 225 degrees Fahrenheit (107 degrees Celsius) during the day to colder than 240 degrees below zero F (-153 degrees C) at night. "My guess is the plant is going to get so cold that it dies during the night," MacCallum said.

But wouldn't it be cool if the plant developed mustard seeds that started a whole new cycle of growth on the moon? If that happened, "we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves," MacCallum said.

Lessons in life support
Paragon's would-be lunar gardeners will have to work their way through lots of technical challenges: How do you design the greenhouse glass to block the sun's harmful rays while letting in the sunlight needed for Earth-style photosynthesis? How do you meter in the carbon dioxide and water that the plant will require, while removing the oxygen given off by the plant? "It gets complicated very quickly," MacCallum said.

NASA / Paragon

Paragon Space Development's Autonomous Biological System provides a sealed habitat for aquatic plants or animals in space.

But as MacCallum said, that's part of the fun. These are the kinds of challenges he's been dealing with since the early 1990s, when he and Poynter served as resident scientists in the eco-laboratory known as Biosphere 2. The couple started up Paragon even before they left Biosphere 2, and the company collaborates with NASA as well as outside researchers on space-biology experiments.

Today, Paragon specializes in the testing and development of life support systems for outer space as well as for underwater diving. The company is part of the Lockheed Martin team building NASA's next spaceship, as well as the Oceaneering team designing NASA's next spacesuit. Paragon has also been awarded a U.S. Navy contract to start production of an advanced diving system designed specifically for use in contaminated water.

All those projects will be mentioned during Friday's news conference, with U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in attendance. But the Lunar Oasis is likely to be the star of the show: Paragon plans to present a model of the greenhouse to Giffords, who is chairwoman of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.

The model was still under construction as of this week, and MacCallum said he couldn't guarantee that it'll be a realistic representation of the greenhouse eventually going to the moon. "Since we really don't know what 'realistic' is, we'll have to see," he joked.

Check out this msnbc.com gallery and this X Prize Web site for basic facts about the Google Lunar X Prize teams.

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Steve Richards

Click for slideshow: See new species from Papua New Guinea.

What's behind the continuing stream of species discoveries? Conservation groups are spending millions of dollars to document and preserve the final frontiers of biodiversity, helped along by better technology and savvier scientists.

The latest additions to the list are contained in today's announcement from Conservation International, focusing on the discovery of more than 50 previously undocumented species in a remote region of Papua New Guinea. Less than a week ago, the same group took the wraps off what appear to be four new species discovered in Peru's White Mountain Range. And last month, the headlines heralded 10 new amphibian species in Colombia as well as a dozen more found in India.

There's a whole list of cases in which species are being found by the bunch:

• Seven coral species off Hawaii's coast
• Hundreds of species in Australian waters
• 100 new sharks and rays named
• Jumbo marine life found near Antarctica
• New types of salamanders in Costa Rica
• Strange creatures from Philippines' 'coral triangle'
• 11 new species discovered in Vietnam

So what's going on? The species rush doesn't signal an explosion in the world's biodiversity. In fact, it's a reaction to what appears to be the diminishment of diversity. This is a scientific race to know what we've got before it's gone, so that any remaining biological riches can be more surely safeguarded.

"If we lose these species, as [environmentalist] Paul Ehrlich would say, we're losing the rivets in the plane or the ship that we've been sailing in," said Bruce Beehler, an ornithologist who serves as Conservation International's vice president for the Indonesia-Pacific region.

Frogs and other amphibians, for example, are the equivalents of "canaries in the coal mine" for biodiversity, as pointed out in the latest issue of National Geographic. Finding out where such species thrive - and where they seem to be most endangered - could point to the key frontiers for species conservation.

Beehler compares the exercise of species conservation to setting aside money for your savings account. "Basically, that's our bank account for the future," he said. Do you want to save a cent out of every dollar, or 10 cents? "It's the same with nature," Beehler told me. "We can clear 199 hectares and save one hectare, but that's not going to work. We need to save more."

But how do you identify the biological capital most in need of saving? "We're getting to know the areas that have been overlooked better," Beehler said. Biodiversity seems to be greater where there's lots of rainfall, lots of topographical relief and not a lot of people. Those characteristics point to the tropics as the richest hunting grounds - particularly areas that have remained relatively untouched by humans because they're hard to get to.

In recent years, GPS technology and better mapping techniques have accelerated the pace of the species quest. Grand projects such as the Census of Marine Life are methodically cataloging the world's species, and DNA analysis is helping scientists sort out how all those species are related to each other.

 "The technology definitely helps identify the areas we might call the last unknowns," Beehler said. At the same time, rising populations and the drive to exploit new frontiers are exposing those areas to 21st-century pressures. Hence the rush to identify the places where a wide range of species are thriving.

Identifying those frontiers, as Conservation International has done with its list of biodiversity hot spots, is just the first step. Once the scientists get a sense of exactly what a particular area has to offer, conservationists try to work with local governments to protect the hottest hot spots. That's just what Conservation International is doing right now with regard to Papua New Guinea, Beehler said.

Protecting the species frontier is easier when the frontier's residents understand they have something important to protect. In a sense, they've learned from our own bad example. "Most of these local people are a lot smarter than we were," Beehler said.

Should more be done to preserve the species frontier, or is all this talk about biodiversity overblown?  Feel free to weigh in with your comments, pro or con.

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NASA / JPL Click for video: A short but fierce "gullywasher" of methane rain falls on the mountains surrounding Titan's Hotei Arcus in this artist's view, based on mapping data from the Cassini spacecraft. Click on the image to see a virtual flyover.

Pictures from the Cassini orbiter have been processed to provide a psychedelic flyover of Titan, Saturn's largest and most mysterious moon. But wait ... there's more: You also can watch moon shadows dance over Saturn's rings, a phenomenon that occurs during a season that comes only once every 15 years.

The virtual flight comes courtesy of Cassini's radar-mapping instrument, which can see places hidden from human eyes. Titan is shrouded by a thick layer of orangish smog, but the radio waves cut right through the atmosphere to map the mountains, valleys and dune fields below.

Randy Kirk, a member of the radar team from the Astrogeology Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Ariz., used overlapping radar data from Cassini's 19 flybys to create 3-D maps for about 20 areas of Titan, covering close to 2 percent of the moon's surface.

"These flyovers let you take in the bird's-eye sweeping views of Titan, the next best thing to being there," he said in a news release issued today by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We've mapped many kinds of features, and some of them remind me of Earth. Big seas, small lakes, rivers, dry river channels, mountains and sand dunes with hills poking out of them, lava flows."

Titan's rivers and lakes, however, are filled with liquid hydrocarbons rather than water. That's due to the moon's composition as well as its cold temperatures. The methane cycle on Titan is much like the water cycle on Earth, driving the weather on Titan (including methane rainstorms) as well as surface flows and changes in the terrain. In fact, some have compared Titan's organic-rich atmosphere to what Earth might have had in its history, only chillier.

Among the areas mapped in 3-D is Ganesa Macula, which was thought to be an ice volcano. The radar readings reveal no volcanic dome, however, which is keeping scientists guessing about Ganesa Macula's true nature. "It could be a volcanic feature, a crater, or something else that has just been heavily eroded," Kirk said.

The maps trace Titan's north polar lakes of methane and ethane, as well as the mountains that rise up to 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the shoreline. If Titan's terrain follows Earth's model, those lakes should be no deeper than about 300 feet (100 meters), NASA reported. Elsewhere, the radar imagery has measured vast fields of sand dunes measuring at least as high as the lakes are deep.

Kirk, who presented his first batch of 3-D maps today at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, expects that there will be more such maps to come. Such maps will give scientists a better sense of Titan's hidden topography - and a fuller understanding of how the moon's weather works.

Leaping and hopping on a moonshadow
Meanwhile, Cassini's cameras are tracking the long shadows of Saturn's moons as they pass over the planet's rings. This is the prime season for such sights, thanks to the approach of Saturn's equinox.

Like Earth and most of the other planets, Saturn is tilted with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun. And so are its rings. But twice during Saturn's 29.5-Earth-year orbit, the planet's rings are aligned so that the sun's rays pass straight across. Think of it as the Saturnian equivalent to the spring and fall equinoxes on Earth. Here's how the Cassini imaging team at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute explains the effect:

"During these times the shadows of the planet's rings fall in the equatorial region on the planet, and the shadows of Saturn's moons external to the rings, especially those whose rings are inclined with respect to the equator, begin to intersect the planet's rings. When this occurs, the equinox period has essentially begun, and any vertical protuberances within the rings, including small embedded moons and narrow vertical warps in the rings, will also cast shadows on the rings. At exactly the moment of equinox, the shadows of the rings on the planet will be confined to a thin line around Saturn's equator and the rings themselves will go dark, being illuminated only on their edge. The next equinox on Saturn, when the sun will pass from south to north, is Aug. 11, 2009."

Got all that? The members of Cassini's imaging team have been anxiously awaiting the show, and one of the videos released this week shows the shadow of a 70-mile-wide (113-kilometer-wide) moon called Epimetheus slicing across the rings in January. An even smaller moon, Pan, was caught casting a shadow last month - and more moons will follow. Such observations could reveal ever-so-slight warps in Saturn's icy rings, providing fresh clues about their structure.

"One of the best things about being in orbit around Saturn are those mind-expanding opportunities that arise every now and again to see some celestial phenomenon you couldn't possibly see here on Earth," Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team, said in Monday's image advisory. "It's at those times you feel a real sense of privilege to be alive ... now... to witness such remarkable sights. And from the looks of it, the next year is going to be one remarkable sight after another."

For more sights from Saturn, check out our slideshows featuring Cassini imagery and views from Titan. You can also search msnbc.com's archives for more tales of Titan.

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NASA / JPL-Caltech The Mars Science Laboratory, shown in this artist's conception, will be taking on a new name before its launch, now scheduled for 2011.

Will we be watching Adventure touch down on Mars in 2012? Or will it be Amelia instead? Or something else equally wonderful? Here's your chance to decide what NASA's next Mars rover will be named - and send your own name along for the ride. P.S.: Stephen Colbert doesn't get a write-in vote on this one.

In response to the space agency's call, more than 9,000 students from across the country sent in suggested names for the Mars Science Laboratory, and the nine top picks were posted to an online polling place today. Here are the choices, plus a little bit of information about the kids who suggested the names:

• Adventure, from a third-grader in Hudsonville, Mich.
• Amelia, from a second-grader in Ava, N.Y.
• Curiosity, from a sixth-grader in Lenexa, Kan.
• Journey, from an eighth-grader in Tell City, Ind.
• Perception, from a sixth-grader in Urbana, Ill.
• Pursuit,  from an 11th-grader in Houston.
• Sunrise, from a seventh-grader in Pittburgh.
• Vision, from a 10th-grader in Severna Park, Md.
• Wonder, from a third-grader in Lemoore, Calif.

The kids each wrote essays to explain their choices, but those essays are being held back until after the winner is announced in late April or early May, said Guy Webster, a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Although NASA hasn't announced the names of the finalists, some of them are already getting their day in the media spotlight.

For example, 8-year-old Adia Bulawa has told reporters that she came up with the name Amelia to honor famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared in 1937 during a round-the-world flight attempt. Nine-year-old Kirstin Montsma came up with "Adventure," according to the Grand Rapids Press. (If you come across further reports about the rover kids, feel free to send them along as comments below.)

Now it's the public's turn to rate the nine names. The polls will be open until next Sunday, and the top vote-getter will be decided by adding up the weighted votes, Webster said.

JPL will invite the winning student to put a signature on the Mars Science Laboratory, which is due for launch in 2011, with landing set for 2012. All nine finalists, as well as 21 semifinalists, will have an opportunity to put a custom-made digital message on a microchip that will be carried on the car-sized robot.

You can add your name to the microchip as well, by following this link to the signup Web page. You can even print out a snazzy certificate that recognizes your participation in the mission. (I already have mine up on the office bulletin board.)

These "send-your-name" opportunities are becoming a standard offering for space missions. This time around, you can click on a link and find out which parts of the country are most represented in the database - and even invite your friends to send their own names to Mars.

NASA's naming contest for a future space station module stirred up quite a bit of buzz this month, due to a write-in campaign for talk-show parodist Stephen Colbert. The winner of that particular contest will be announced next month, and I'll eat an eagle if it turns out that the module is named "Colbert" - even though the write-in received far more votes than the runner-up, "Serenity." After all, the space agency isn't bound to go with the top vote-getter, for the space station module or for the Mars rover.

When it comes to the rover, no write-in votes will be allowed. "That was part of the design for the contest from November on," Webster said. The outcome of this week's vote will be considered as one of the factors for the official name selection, and Webster said NASA fully expects to pick one of the nine listed names.

Here's what JPL said about the contest in a news release last week:

"The naming contest is part of a Space Act Agreement between NASA and Disney. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures is the prize provider for the contest. This collaboration made it possible for WALL-E, the animated robotic hero from the 2008 movie of the same name, to appear in the online content inviting students to participate.

"Scheduled to launch in 2011 and land on Mars in 2012, the rover will use a set of advanced science instruments to check whether the environment in a selected landing region ever has been favorable for supporting microbial life and preserving evidence of such life. The rover also will search for minerals that formed in the presence of water and look for chemical building blocks of life."

 May the best name win!

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How does a naked singularity work? What happens when a spacecraft gets stressed-out? Answering such questions is all in a day's work for Kevin Grazier, the scientific adviser for the critically acclaimed TV series "Battlestar Galactica."

Over the course of five years, the planetary scientist has figured out how to juggle his day job on the Cassini science team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as his duties for "Battlestar Galactica" and other sci-fi projects. But even though Galactica is gearing up for its last ride tonight, Grazier still hasn't completely figured out how the spaceship manages to travel faster than light.

"If I knew exactly how it worked, I'd be going to Stockholm for my Nobel," Grazier joked.

Actually, Grazier and his co-author, Wired contributing editor Patrick di Justo, are working out the details of Galactica's FTL drive for a book due to come out this fall, titled "The Science of Battlestar Galactica." The book will also delve into how artificial gravity just might work (using graviton generators?) and discuss how low a population can go before it's doomed.

That last point is particularly germane to "Battlestar Galactica" - which is built on the premise that humanity has become an endangered species, hunted down by the very machines created by humans. The current series is a "reimagining" of the 1978 sci-fi TV series by the same name, but with a darker, post-9/11 tone. (Here's a recap from the start of the current season.)

"'Galactica' discussed in a very frank and open way a lot of things that are relevant for today: terrorism, prisoner torture, abuse of power by the government," Grazier said. Neither side is totally good or totally evil. In fact, the humans occasionally come off as badder bad guys than the humanlike Cylon machines they're fighting - which might lead some viewers to wonder whether this species is worth saving.

The show's strains of moral ambivalence have attracted comparisons to the war in Iraq and, more recently, the stalemate in Gaza. That topicality is no doubt why the United Nations invited the stars and fans of "Galactica" to participate in a panel discussion about the show at U.N. headquarters this week.

"We don't like to confront these issues in our lives, but they are real," Robert Orr, the U.N. assistant secretary-general for policy planning, was quoted as saying in io9's account of the event. "If a show can get us thinking about it and talking about it, then amen, because it isn't easy."

By most accounts, tonight's two-hour finale on the Sci Fi Channel brings the series to a satisfying end, although you can also find a dissenting (spoiler-ish) view. For fans, there will be plenty of tears tonight. "Pretty much everybody has been choked up by it," Grazier told me. "It'll definitely be a case of 'Set Tissues to Defcon 1.'"

But it won't be the end of the 13 Colonies' grand saga. In addition to the Grazier-di Justo book, there's a stand-alone TV/DVD movie in the works titled "The Plan," which tells the Cylons' side of the story (and answers some of the questions that couldn't be resolved in the series finale). Sci Fi has also given the green light for a "Galactica" prequel series, titled "Caprica."

Grazier hasn't yet been asked to consult on "Caprica," but he has more than enough to keep him busy. He's consulting on other TV projects such as Sci Fi's "Eureka," in addition to his day job as a scientist and engineer working on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Right now he and his colleagues at JPL are planning the orbiter's trajectory going out to the year 2017.

This week, Grazier took some time out to discuss "Galactica" science, including two of the more recent plot twists: A few episodes ago, Galactica's crew discovered that the battlestar was starting to break apart, and they tried to use a biomaterial developed by the Cylons to strengthen the ship's hull. Then, in last week's installment, scouts from Galactica located the Cylons' main colony, right in the middle of an accretion disk swirling around a naked singularity. All this sets the scene for tonight's series-ending battle.

Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Now we know that the Cylon colony is orbiting a naked singularity - is there anything you had to deal with scientifically to get the details right?

Kevin Grazier: The original script I saw from Ron [Moore, the show's executive producer and the writer for the final episodes] already had the colony in the accretion disk of a black hole, a singularity. And as far as it being called a naked singularity, I think that Ron was really trying to avoid the use of the word "black hole." I don't know why, this is just an impression. But as far as the black hole being a naked singularity, the way it's written, it's not really integral to the plot. An accretion disk is an accretion disk. It's a good place to put a colony, if you don't mind getting hammered by the occasional impact. It's not a place that's easy to attack. It's easily defensible, let's put it that way.

Q: I suppose the thing about using the term "black hole" is that people have a particular image of a black hole, and the writers wanted to avoid that whole issue of worrying about falling into the black hole.

A: The fact of the matter is that people believe a black hole is this all-sucking object that gulps down anything in its path or nearby, and you can't orbit it. But you can. As long as you're far enough away, you can orbit and be fine - at least, gravitationally. Now, Starbuck did mention that if you get close enough, the tidal stress will tear Galactica apart - and given its compromised state, that's not unreasonable. But the fact that you can orbit a black hole, I think, is counterintuitive to many people.

Q: So I guess that would be a bit of an astronomy lesson for some people.

A: Indeed. And, you know, a naked singularity is a black hole without an event horizon. I included a discussion of the event horizon in my notes for the show. If the singularity does have an event horizon, and an event horizon is the distance at which the escape velocity becomes the speed of light, what are the implications for FTL-capable ships?

Q: What did you have to say on that point?

A: I said that we'd have to worry about the tidal stresses long before the event horizon becomes an issue. You can jump away. ... My point is that we sometimes discuss things in greater detail than you'll ever see on screen.

Q: Another twist that came out in the most recent shows had to do with the Cylon biomaterial that was being painted onto Galactica's hull. Were there any details you had to address there?

A: We didn't really go into great detail. I did do some research on that to see whether there way anything I could add, and there wasn't much. There is a lot of research being done into coatings on vehicles that could heal scratches, things of that nature.

My feeling is that if there's something that we're developing right now, at our level of technology, then, when the Cylons are thinking about it, they have their CPUs running 24/7. We have to sleep, we have to recreate, we have to go home and eat. So if the Cylons think about it, they may be able to move in technological directions much faster than we can. "If they think about it" - that's a key caveat. Intuition, ingenuity is something that is hard to accomplish when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Q: Are there other scientific issues that either gave you fits on "Battlestar," or that you feel proudest about?

A: There are a lot of things that I was really happy about. Sometimes they're only a blip on the screen. In my notes, I pointed out that Galactica would probably break up in "the Adama Maneuver" [which involved having the battlestar fall through the atmosphere over a planet called New Caprica]. I said I'd be remiss in my job of science adviser if I didn't point out that Galactica would break up in that situation. I didn't care what it was made of, any advanced material would still break up. It's just too big. Like the shuttle Columbia, it would shatter into a million pieces.

After that, when we find out that Galactica is in fact breaking up, I said, "Please, please include the fact that the jump into New Caprica could have done this on its own." And in fact that's implied in what Chief Tyrol says to Adama. I'm glad that got in. It says, "We didn't forget this."

Another example shows how people have been poisoned by years of bad sci-fi. In one episode, we had Tyrol and his wife Cally in an airlock. The airlock was closed inside and it was slowly leaking, and they're now looking at dying and leaving behind an orphan. The solution was to set off the explosive bolts and blow them into a waiting Raptor. Now, people who saw "Outland" or "Total Recall" said that everybody knows they'd explode. While people who saw "Sunshine" said, ah, it's too cold. They'd freeze. But neither of those things would happen.

They wouldn't burst. If you had air in your lungs, where's it going to go? Would it burst out of your chest, or would it take the path of least resistance and go out your mouth? Small things like blood vessels might burst, and your eardrums, too - and that's exactly what we see. Cally had blood vessels burst in her eyes. And you'd get the bends, which is also what we see. She's in a hyperbaric chamber, and the next day you see Tyrol moving really slowly because the bends impacted the joints. That was one case where we portrayed it correctly, and people who are used to seeing it done wrong trashed it - and quite vehemently sometimes.

Q: That episode reminded me of the movie "2001," where I think they did handle the effects of exposure to space vacuum correctly.

A: They did, and some people pointed that out. But it was drowned out by the noise on some of the boards that I read.

Another thing that we did was very subtle. At the beginning of the season, Kara shows up after supposedly dying, and she says she had a vision: The path to Earth leads through what she sees as a trinary star, a gas giant with rings, and a comet. But when you first see the vision, you don't see the rings. Later, when she's painting a picture, this time she's painting rings, and the trinary star that this planet is orbiting is occulted.

Think back to Cassini's image of the E and G rings with Saturn occulting the sun. Rings that are made of very fine particles scatter light forward, and can't be seen in what we call backscatter light. They're best seen with the sun occulted. So one of the writers came to me and said, "We need something in space that looks like one thing from one direction, and something different from another direction." And that's what it ended up being.

Q: There's an example where you must have felt as if worlds were colliding, in that your work on Cassini shed light on your work on "Battlestar."

A: "Shed light"? Pun partially intended? If I can use something from my experience, I will. I took particular delight in using that in "Galactica." And I'll tell you another fact. While it was never used in a spoken line, the word "Cassini" did appear in the script. "We see the rings of this planet, just like Cassini did..." Which was satisfying.

Interestingly enough, right after I started on the show, we had an episode where one of our pilots gets shot down on a "Titan-like moon orbiting a Saturn-like planet." And the motivation for that? Not me! It was one of the writers. It turns out that they're regular science fans in addition to being science-fiction fans.

For more about "Galactica" science, check out Grazier's blog posts on the Cinema Spy Web site. And feel free to chime in with your thoughts on sci-fi science or the "Battlestar Galactica" finale in the comment section below.

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Summit Entertainment

Click for video: In this scene from the movie "Knowing," Nicolas Cage explains how a list of numbers predicts future disasters.

"Knowing," the Nicolas Cage movie opening Friday, is the latest Hollywood tale to play off the idea that our future is already determined by the numbers, if only we knew how to interpret them. Does the universe really work that way? The answer is no ... yes ... maybe.

If you think you can predict the dates of future disasters by checking numbers on a piece of paper, as Cage's character does in the movie, you might want to consider seeing a therapist. But if you think you're seeing the same plot twist happening over and over again, it's not all in your head.

Numbers with cosmic significance have played a big role in movies such as "Pi" (which is a take-off on the Bible Code fad) and "The Number 23" (actually, my personal favorite is the number 42). Numerological voodoo is a theme in the "Lost" TV show (see? 42!). And sometimes that voodoo translates into real-life worries: For example, the bogus doomsday claims about 2012 stem from the numbers behind the ancient Maya calendar.

There's some powerful psychology behind numerology, in fiction as well as real life. And when it comes to physics, numbers are real life.

With the right theory, knowing one set of numbers can tell you what a future set of numbers could be, MIT theoretical physicist Edward Farhi says. "Physics is really the business of taking numbers, the values and attributes of things, turning a crank, which is our theory, and arriving at new numbers which predict what will happen in the future," Farhi told me this week.

Cranking out the numbers
For example, engineers can crank out numbers to predict where NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will be in 2015 (somewhere around Pluto, we hope) or where the Cassini orbiter will be in 2017 (still checking out Saturn's moons, if scientists have their way). Closer to home, if you saw two trains barreling toward each other, at a certain point you can say there'll be a collision with as much confidence as Cage could in "Knowing."

"It gets much more complicated when we try to predict complicated things," Farhi said. "Really, what we're talking about is where you draw the line."

That's where the "maybe" part comes in: A century ago, predicting the weather a week or more in advance might have seemed like than voodoo - but with better monitoring systems and sophisticated computer modeling, we take that kind of weather forecast totally for granted. Farhi predicted that future technological advances will lead to better predictions as well.

"There are two avenues to prediction: One is to have a really good idea that helps you, and the other is just to increase computer power," he said. A truer-to-life model for a particular phenomenon, backed up by higher-powered modeling software, will lead to more accurate predictions.

Predictions in the office pool
That applies to weather forecasting, but it can also apply to economic and social forecasting as well. You don't have to look any further than this month's "March Madness" college basketball tournament, which began today, to see how improved computer modeling can contribute to the prediction game.

Farhi is working on the computer-power side of the prediction equation, by working out the theoretical underpinnings for quantum computing. In 20 years or so, when quantum computers are finally ready for prime time, that could bring a ... well, you know what kind of leap in computing that could bring.

The first applications for quantum data processing would include decrypting secret codes and encrypting communications and designing more efficient networks. But some researchers say quantum computers also could be used to solve puzzles ranging from Sudoku games to molecular-scale construction, and bring computer modeling to a higher level.

Quantum computers could outdo traditional computers when it comes to simulating chemical reactions on the molecular level, but Farhi is reluctant to push his prophetic powers any farther than that. "I'd love to be able to predict what we're going to be able to predict in 200 years," he said.

Cheating on the causality exam
One thing seems to be certain: You couldn't time-travel into the future and then come back with an ironclad prediction, even though that's another common theme in science-fiction movies.

In a sense, we're all traveling into the future - and according to the theory of relativity, you could even control the pace of your "travel" into the future by accelerating to near the speed of light. "What doesn't seem to be OK is to go back in time," Farhi said.

All sorts of potential paradoxes could arise, such as the famous "killing your grandfather" paradox. "The laws of physics seem to avoid that," Farhi said. "They don't want that to happen. So traveling backward in time does not seem to be OK. ... If the knowledge in the movie about things that happen comes from a trip to the future, followed by a return trip, I would say that goes beyond conventional science."

Phew! Glad we got that settled. Feel free to chime in below with your own thoughts about numerology and science, the "Knowing" movie, the buzz over 2012 or your "March Madness" predictions.

For more from Farhi and Hollywood physics, check out this item about quantum teleportation and the movie "Jumper." And for an in-depth discussion of how real life differs from the movies, consult "Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics."

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Microsoft Research This screenshot from the Web-based version of WorldWide Telescope shows Venus' surface, mapped by the Magellan probe and enhanced with other imagery.

A year after making its debut as a downloadable software program, Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope is going public on the World Wide Web. It's the latest move aimed at widening the "market" for free online exploration of the cosmos.

There's lots of software that gives you the universe on your computer - ranging from the kind of programs you pay good money for (such as Starry Night, Redshift and TheSky), to free programs available over the Internet (Sky on Google Earth, Stellarium and Celestia, as well as the classic WorldWide Telescope, a.k.a. WWT), to Web-based planetariums (Google Sky and Heavens-Above).

Today Microsoft took the wraps off its own Web client, based on the standalone version of WWT, at the annual MIX conference in Las Vegas. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Many of the WorldWide Telescope's features have been carried over: You can see thousands of the night sky's coolest sights in multiple wavelengths, thanks to a rich database of imagery from space telescopes as well as ground-based observatories.

For example, you can bring up the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) in optical wavelengths, load in Spitzer's infrared view, and then use a slider button to morph one view into the other. The dark, dusty swirls in the optical view turn out to be exactly where the infrared emissions are the brightest.

You can also sit back and let someone show you around, thanks to tours that have been prepared by space fans ranging from professional astrophysicists to a 6-year-old kid. And you can load up panoramas created by probes on Mars, Apollo astronauts on the moon, or photographers visiting the Mauna Kea observatories in Hawaii (or the lobby of Microsoft Research's headquarters, for that matter).

The release is meant to make the WorldWide Telescope available to non-Windows computer users as well as Windows users who may be reluctant to install a big piece of software, said Jonathan Fay, one of WWT's co-creators at Microsoft Research. He said 2 million users have downloaded the standalone program, but for every Web site visitor who has done the download, there have been almost 100 visitors who have not.

You still need to have Microsoft's multimedia plug-in, known as Silverlight, but Fay said he hopes users won't find that to be a huge hurdle.

"If they've seen Web advertising, they've probably already installed Silverlight," he said. (The plug-in was used for NBC video streaming during last year's Olympics, and it's also playing a supporting role in this month's "March Madness" tournament.)

Also, there are some features that haven't been carried over - such as the ability to create those cool guided tours, or navigate the universe in 3-D. "If you can use the 3-D mode, that's what you want to install," Fay said.

Fay keeps a MacBook Air laptop sitting on the edge of his desk at Microsoft Research, connected to the Internet through a flaky wireless connection, just to get a sense of how the Web client works for real-world users. The graphics aren't as high-resolution as they are in the classic WWT, and the imagery is slower to load - mostly due to the connection speed - but at least it works.

Fay and the other main man behind the project, Curtis Wong, are focusing on making the high-quality version of WorldWide Telescope good enough for professional researchers to rely on. Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are already using WWT to help keep track of their image databases, and Fay hints that more announcements are on the way. (I'll provide updates at the end of this item if and when they are announced.)

Amateur astronomers are also taking to the WorldWide Telescope, in part thanks to efforts such as the Astrometry site on Flickr. Photographs of celestial sights can be coded up so that they drop right into the WWT Web view. Fay said the WorldWide Telescope plays well with the Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project, an effort to standardize how astronomical photos are tagged.

In the past few weeks, it seems as if the competition between Microsoft and Google has been heating up in the celestial sphere: Google Earth has added the ability to create guided tours, a la Microsoft's WWT, and rolled out an eye-pleasing array of Martian imagery. (Google's "Live From Mars" image stream, drawing upon the latest pictures from Mars orbiters, came online shortly after last week's launch.)

Now Microsoft has raised the bar for Web-based space exploration, moving into a realm where Google Sky has had the lead.

Fay said the way WWT uses Silverlight could be adapted to other applications as well, including Web-based gaming environments and experiments in geographic-based crowdsourcing. "This is a game-changer in terms of what people are going to expect from the Web," he said.

And in fact, the folks from Microsoft and the folks from Google are learning from each other. Neither Google Sky nor WorldWide Telescope are being done for the money, since both programs are free. Rather, they're helping to blaze a technological trail for other pursuits - while at the same time providing something useful and fun for scientists as well as the general public.

"The more, the better - and the science is going to benefit in the end," Fay said.

To see how far astronomical visualization has come in the past 45 years, check out this report about the first close-range images of Mars ever sent back by a space probe - Mariner 4 in the mid-1960s. The image data was printed out on strips of paper, and then hand-colored by engineers like a paint-by-numbers picture. That's a far cry from the stunning views we feature every month in our Space Gallery.

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NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI / ESA This image of a pair of colliding galaxies called NGC 6240 shows them in a rare, short-lived phase of their evolution just before they merge into a single, larger galaxy. Click on the image for a larger version.

Nothing draws a crowd like a spectacular crash - whether it's a NASCAR auto race or a galactic collision. Over the past month, Internet users voted for a cosmic smash-up as their favorite target for a future close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope, and this week you can feast your eyes on two fantastic images of galaxies in gridlock.

The first "train wreck" comes from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This is a biggie: Two huge galaxies, each anchored by a central black hole that's millions of times as massive as the sun, are moving toward an imminent pile-up. Exactly how imminent? Millions of years after the scene captured in this image - a time span that's a mere blink of the eye on the cosmic scale.

"One of the most exciting things about the image is that this object is unique," Stephanie Bush of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says in a news release about the observations. "Merging is a quick process, especially when you get to the train wreck that is happening. There just aren't many galactic mergers at this stage in the nearby universe."

Spitzer's image of NGC 6240, which is 400 million light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, highlights the bursts of infrared radiation as the dust and gas from the two galaxies slam together. All that pressure creates new generations of hot stars, blazing away in infrared wavelengths even though the radiation in visible wavelengths is obscured by dust clouds. Because of this phenomenon, these starry swirls are known as luminous infrared galaxies.

In the news release, the Spitzer science team point to the streams of stars being ripped off the galaxies - "tidal tails" that extend into space in all directions. And this is just the warmup act: Bush and her colleagues expect the galactic black holes to hit head-on. That would upgrade NGC 6240's status to that of an ultra-luminous infrared galaxy, thousands of times as bright in infrared as our own Milky Way.

The findings are detailed in The Astrophysical Journal. In addition to Bush, the paper's co-authors include Zhong Wang, Margarita Karovska and Giovanni Fazio, all of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

This week's other galactic crash was witnessed by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Two galaxies are piling into each other 70 million light-years away in the constellation Libra, and just as in the case of NGC 6240, the clashing clouds of gas and dust are sparking waves of stellar fireworks.

ESO

This color composite image from the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile shows Arp 261. Click on the picture for a larger version.

These galaxies, collectively known as Arp 261, aren't as big as the monsters in NGC 6240. They're on the scale of dwarf galaxies, similar to the Magellanic Clouds orbiting the Milky Way. In this week's image advisory, the ESO says the focus of research in this picture actually isn't the wide-screen view of smashing galaxies, but a detailed look at an unusually long-lasting, X-ray-emitting supernova. This image adds little white bars to highlight the location of the supernova.

The picture also includes other objects at a wide range of distances. If you click on a higher-resolution view, you'll be able to make out a sprinkling of background galaxies on the right side of the picture. Those galaxies may be 50 to 100 times farther away than Arp 261, the ESO says.

Toward the top left corner of the picture, you can see two red-green-blue streaks. Those are two small asteroids in our solar system's main asteroid belt. The streaks are multicolored because the ESO's picture was taken through different color filters - and the asteroids were moving through the telescope field even as the exposures were switched from one filter to the next.

If you're looking for more simply smashing pictures, don't miss today's report about Saturn's quadruple-moon transit, as well as our regular roundup of the best space views in the cosmos.

Correction for 3:30 p.m. ET March 18: I fixed a bad link to the Saturn transit story ... Sorry about that! After reading all the perceptive comments below, I've also edited the item to straighten something out about the timing of events at NGC 6240. We will likely see an even more spectacular pile-up there millions of years from now, but because the galaxies are so distant, and because the speed of light is finite, that phase of the pile-up will have happened hundreds of millions of years earlier.

• BBC: Does old age begin at 27?
• The Atlantic: One world, under God
• N.Y. Times: The fall and rise of the right whale
• Tech Review: A machine that speeds up evolution 

Inside Science News Service / Ivanhoe Click on image for video: Mathematician Mike Breen says "March Madness" basketball brackets can generate quintillions of outcomes.

As you puzzle over the "March Madness" basketball bracket for your office pool, you can go with pure luck - and hope you hit a 9,000,000,000,000,000,000-to-1 long shot. Or you can play it safe and just go with the higher-rated team for every game. But how scientific is that? A growing number of online tools promise to give you an analytical edge over your officemates.

Bracketology - the study of the NCAA tournament selections for the purposes of filling out a winning office-pool entry - has been around for more than two decades, even before the World Wide Web began. But bracketologists have really stepped up their game in the past few years, said Pete Tiernan, founder of BracketScience.com.

"You've got people who break down basketball games possession by possession, and use logarithmic analysis to do simulations on the game," Tiernan told me today. "What we're seeing now is the 'Bill Jamesing' or the 'Moneyballing' of college basketball. It just so happens that the NCAA tournament really lends itself to that."

The sheer mathematical breadth of the tournament bracket is breathtaking: There are 2⁶³ possible ways to fill out the standard office-pool form (the play-in game between the 64th and 65th teams is usually glossed over), or 9 quintillion permutations.

Just how many office-pool sheets does that translate into? "If you took every school from kindergarten through college, and covered every basketball court with brackets, you would have stacks of brackets 591 miles high on every court in the country," Tiernan said.

You could narrow the odds by sticking with the top seeds: After all, the tournament's selection committee has essentially done all the ranking for you, based on performance during the regular season.

The only problem is that everyone else can do that, too: Chances are your office-pool entry won't stand out from the crowd, and you'll probably end up in the middle of the pack. What's more, some pools are weighted to give extra points for predicting upsets and Cinderella teams. The rewards don't necessarily go to those who play it safe.

That's where high-powered analysis enters the picture.

"The way we think about it is, you just have to do a better job than the selection committee did at picking the seeds," said Tom Federico of TeamRankings.com. The Web site's analysis tool, BracketBrains, matches up historical teams with statistical profiles that are similar to teams in this year's tournament - right down to the perceived home-court advantage for each game.

The software can point to the games where upsets are more or less likely, said Mike Greenfield, one of Federico's fellow "nerds" at TeamRankings.com. "In many cases, the NCAA will mess up, and we'll see that the No. 3 team is probably in the top 25, and the No. 14 should be a No. 10 seed ... so instead of being a 90 percent [probability], it's a 60-40 split."

You do have to pay a subscription fee to get the full benefit of BracketBrains or BracketScience, but for a free analysis with fewer bells and whistles, you can check out the Poologic site - which draws upon years and years of bracketological research. Poologic's Webmaster, systems analyst Tom Adams, estimates that his site's users have won at least $250,000 in pools to date.

If you want to take a chance on winning the office pool - or winning the admiration of your co-workers - you might want to follow a contrarian strategy, based on research published last year in the journal Chance. I've discussed this line of research before, but the latest findings indicate that not picking all the favorites could lead to a better "return on investment."

One of the co-authors of the study, University of Minnesota statistician Bradley Carlin, said you don't want to overdo it: A No. 16 seed, for example, has never won the tournament - so picking your Cinderella from the bottom of the pile probably won't get you far.

His advice is to go with the lowest-rated No. 1 seed or the highest-rated No. 2 seed to take it all, and then fill out your bracket in reverse, using the Sagarin ratings as your guide.

"Then cross your fingers and have another beer," Carlin told me.

Bracketography's David Mihm favors a more mainstream approach: "If you can pick three of the Final Four teams ... those games are typically worth more points. I would really focus on the teams you think are going to be there in Detroit this year."

Over at BracketScience.com, Tiernan said the strategy you decide upon could depend on how big your office pool is.

"In smaller pools, with less than 50 [participants], I don't think you want to go with a contrarian strategy," he said. "The sample size is small enough that if you just do well you're going to be in the running. Now, when you get to 100 people, 200 people and up, you almost have to take a contrarian strategy to win. ... Of course, the risk in smaller pools is that you'll be at the bottom of your pool, and you'll look kind of foolish."

But if you go with a long shot that turns out to be a Cinderella team, even if just for a night or two, you might win a different kind of payoff.

"I ask people, what do you want to be?" Tiernan said. "Do you want to do well in your pool, or do you want to be the guy that they look at and say, 'Wow, he picked Kentucky to go two rounds! He's a genius!'"

That strategy may not be scientific, but it sure sounds like fun.

Update for 8:59 p.m. ET: Poologic's Tom Adams sends along some inside information, just in time for filling out your bracket: "This is a good source of info to find strong teams that are underbet for champ. Memphis seems to be one of them, from the early data (8:50 p.m. in the East). The pick distributions are good estimators of office pool pick distributions, except for localized favorites. For instance, Memphis probabably won't be underbet in Memphis."

Update for 2 p.m. ET March 19: LiveScience reports a couple of new twists in bracketology, including the claim that top seeds don't matter once you get past the first couple of rounds of the brackets, and the development of a new computer model that supposedly outdoes other systems for ranking basketball prowess. Just for fun, compare the Georgia Tech researchers' bracket (which has North Carolina going all the way) against your own picks and the actual results.

For another helping of slightly less scientific bracketology, check out Steve Cuddihy's tips at Officepool64.com. To get the full story about the NCAA tournament, click on over to the college-basketball coverage at NBC Sports.com. For more on the mad, mad mathematics of bracketology, check out Inside Science News Service. And for a contrarian view on the whole idea of bracketology, check out this column from Mike Celizic, who is calling upon the math geeks to "give it a rest."

Thanks to John Cherry of Ivanhoe Broadcast News for assistance on the Inside Science News Service video above, featuring mathematician Mike Breen.

USGS via Google Earth

This view from Google Earth's virtual Mars highlights the Red Planet's north polar ice cap.

Google has upgraded its Red Planet browser to reveal fresh as well as long-faded views of Mars, marking the latest advance in a visualization revolution.

Today's add-ons for Google Earth 5.0 include a "Live From Mars" layer that incorporates the latest available imagery from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, as well as historical maps of the planet's "canali" as seen by 19th-century astronomers and guided tours that are narrated by NPR's Ira Flatow and Bill Nye the Science Guy.

It seems as if there's a new dose of astronomical gee-whizzery available every couple of weeks. Google unveiled its 3-D virtual Mars just last month, as part of a package that also included deep-ocean views and historical imagery.

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft showed off a new interface for its WorldWide Telescope that lets you use your hands to zoom through the universe as if you were in a scene from "The Minority Report." (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.) And just this week, NASA unveiled a cool new Web site that brings climate data to life and even gives you a 3-D satellite tracker to play with.

All these online visualizations are designed to do more than just give you pretty pictures - although the pictures are pretty great. They also aim to convey a better understanding of the science behind the pictures, served up on an easy-to-use, easy-to-adapt platform.

"Our hope is that Mars becomes more than just a public science demonstration program," said Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google software engineer who took a lead role in developing the upgrade announced today. "We're hoping that NASA and other scientists use it as a primary distribution mechanism for communicating science to the public and to each other."

The "Live From Mars" layer is an example: As soon as NASA releases fresh imagery from the THEMIS thermal imager on its Mars Odyssey orbiter, those pictures will be incorporated into Google Earth's Red Planet image database.

This week, the computer on Mars Odyssey had to be rebooted - and as a result, Google said the first "Live From Mars" images won't be quite as live as originally planned. "As soon as images start flowing again, Mars in Google Earth will be one of the first places to see them, very soon after the images are received on the ground by NASA," the company said in a statement.

Another layer adapts historical maps of Mars from the days when astronomers actually thought they saw water canals on the Red Planet. Among the views you can peruse are Nathaniel Green's 1877 sketch and Giovanni Schiaparelli's rendering of Mars' "canali" (by which he more likely meant natural channels or rivers rather than constructed canals).

The seemingly straight channels are actually the product of the way humans piece together patterns from the information at hand - much as later observers could make out a Face on Mars (or Happy Face on Mars) in orbiter imagery. No one was better at pattern-making than Percival Lowell, who made detailed maps of the canals and theorized that they were built by an endangered extraterrestrial culture. (You can read Lowell's "Mars and Its Canals" in its entirety online).

Lowell's maps are included as a layer for Mars on Google Earth - along with the 1909 maps from Eugene Antoniadi that showed the canals weren't really there.

Google's Mars also offers tourist tips from "A Traveler's Guide to Mars" - as well as those guided tours, narrated by Flatow and Nye. The tours take advantage of a feature that was built into Google Earth 5.0, which allows users to record their moves as they navigate through the software and add an audio track.

Such tours have been part of the WorldWide Telescope since its debut last year. Developers at Microsoft as well as Google have been encouraging software users to create a wide variety of these presentations for sharing.

"Our vision for the platform is to reach a tipping point where most of the content that's visualized on it doesn't come from us," Google's Weiss-Malik told me. The virtual Mars, for example, draws upon collaborations between Google and NASA, the University of Arizona (which plays a key role in the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission) and Arizona State University (which is involved in the Mars Odyssey mission).

"We enjoy working with these groups," Weiss-Malik said. "It's this great pairing, where they have the content and we have this great platform that's just begging to be exploited."

Today's new features should be automatically available to anyone who has Google Earth 5.0. Just look under the "Mars Gallery" category.

And while we're on the subject of cosmic visualization, I should give a shout-out as well to projects such as Celestia, Stellarium, Heavens-Above, Gravity Simulator, Slooh and Universe Sandbox. Check out this previous posting for a roundup, and feel free to add your favorites in the comment section below.

You win some, you lose some: That truism goes for planets as well as presidents. Pluto may have lost an election at the International Astronomical Union's general assembly almost three years ago, but it won the backing of the Illinois Senate last month.

Lawmakers approved a resolution that re-establishes Pluto's full planetary status as it "passes overhead through Illinois' night skies." The resolution sets today aside as "Pluto Day" in Illinois. March 13 is singled out because it's the 79th anniversary of the announcement that Pluto had been discovered.

Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, was born in Streator, Ill., which explains why Illinois' state senators felt a special need to mark the occasion. In his later years, Tombaugh lived in New Mexico, where March 13 was similarly designated "Pluto Planet Day" in 2007.

The debate over the status of Pluto and the solar system's other smaller planets continues to this day. Illinois' resolution may be nonbinding - but come to think of it, so was the IAU's. So if you're looking for something to celebrate, raise a glass to Pluto today. Then, have a nice piece of pi tomorrow. (And while you're in a festive mood, sing "Happy Birthday, Dear Albert" as well.)

Update for noon ET: I've come across two more reasons to celebrate. First, the NASA probe that's bound for Pluto in 2015, known as New Horizons, has started sending back pictures of Neptune's moon, Triton. That's particularly interesting for the New Horizons team because Triton is Neptune's largest moon, spinning in a direction that's completely different from that of its adoptive parent planet. The current thinking is that Triton is a bigger cousin of Pluto's that broke out of the icy Kuiper Belt and was somehow captured in Neptunian orbit. Thus, studying Triton can yield insights into what Pluto is like as well.

This month also marks the 20th anniversary of the conception of the World Wide Web. Back in March 1989, CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee, submitted a little paper called "Information Management: A Proposal" to Mike Sendall, his manager. Sendall was intrigued enough to write a note on the document's cover - "Vague, but exciting" - and gave Berners-Lee the go-ahead to follow up on the research. As a result, the first baby Web was born in 1990.

Twenty years later, working on the Web is still vague, but exciting. To see how far the Web has come since then, check out CERNland, the European research center's new portal site for kids.