Neil Armstrong / NASA

Electronic equipment and switches surround astronaut Buzz Aldrin in Apollo 11's lunar module, nicknamed Eagle, before the moon landing in 1969. Over the past 40 years there have been big changes in computers — and in the amount of information available on computers about the Apollo moonshots.

Forty years ago, the world watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on television sets and giant screens. This year, the tale of the moonshot is being retold on computer monitors and mobile phones. Here's a Top 10 list of online destinations celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11:

Voyage of the Millennium: Our three-part audio slideshow about the Apollo 11 experience is a decade old - but it's still a beaut, in my humble opinion. Photojournalist Roger Ressmeyer went through stacks of NASA images and selected his favorites, tracing the buildup to Apollo 11, the high points of the mission itself and its aftermath. In the audio soundtrack, he tells the story behind each picture. Maximize your browser window to make sure you have all the buttons to play the audio and click through the slideshow.

Apollo video online: Don't miss this 43-minute documentary from MSNBC's "Time and Again" about America's space effort and Apollo 11 in particular (complete with Huntley and Brinkley!). Here's a 10-minute Apollo retrospective from NASA. For a different take on the TV coverage, check out the BBC's archive of Apollo coverage. Spacecraft Films' documentary, "Live From the Moon," focuses on how Apollo played out on television. (I mentioned this show and others last week in my Apollo video roundup.)

Apollo at 40 at NASA: The space agency itself has the biggest store of online material about the moon missions. NASA's Apollo 40th Anniversary Web site serves as the portal to old and new goodies. There's a separate Web page devoted to the Apollo program. The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal is the jewel in NASA's crown, offering mission logs, photos and lots of "fun stuff." But wait ... there's more: Check out the JSC Digital Image Collection as well as the Apollo archive on the Human Spaceflight Web site.

Project Apollo Archive: This Web site would have to rank right up there with the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal as a must-see archive of moonshot lore. Kipp Teague has put together an exhaustive repository of imagery from before, during and after the Apollo missions.

We Choose the Moon: The Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's Apollo Web site is offering a Twitter re-enactment of the mission, timed to tell you what happened exactly 40 years before. Actually, make that two re-enactments. One Twitter tale is told from the perspective of Mission Control, and the other Twitter feed takes on the crew's persona. You can also download a widget to track the time-warp mission, get e-mail updates and watch a video of President Kennedy's "We Choose to Go to the Moon" speech.

Apollo at the Smithsonian: The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum serves as the main repository for Apollo artifacts, so it's only fitting that the museum has opened a virtual exhibit hall commemorating the moonshots. You'll find an interactive timeline, images, videos and podcasts - and a plea for personal recollections about 100 items in the museum's collection.

ApolloPlus40 on Twitter: Like the Kennedy Library, the journal Nature's Web site is tweeting Apollo 11 events in a 40-year time warp. The Nature News staff is also blogging about Project Apollo and its legacy.

Apollo 11 on Facebook: You just knew there had to be a Facebook page for the Apollo 11 mission. You'll also find Facebook pages for moonshot memories and last weekend's "Echoes of Apollo" radio experiment. NASA's latest moon probes, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the LCROSS moon-smashing spacecraft, have their own pages.

Bad Astronomy: Are there still some people who think the moon landings didn't really happen? If so, you should point them toward astronomer Phil Plait's classic guide to debunking moon-hoax claims. Did I mention that Phil is a blogger and author, too? Consider it mentioned.

CollectSpace: Robert Pearlman's online journal provides Apollo anniversary news you won't find anywhere else - such as this week's reports about the $1,000 Apollo coffee-table book and Choclatique's moon-rock candy collection. The discussion forums let Internet users trade gossip about Buzz Aldrin's whereabouts or debate the relative merits of space memorabilia. CollectSpace's link list covers a lot of the Web territory I've missed, but feel free to pass along pointers to other online resources in your comments below.

Update for 9:30 p.m. July 1: Chris Willis of Footnote.com wrote in to let me know about the Moon Landing Memories Web site launched in cooperation with Florida Today. The site provides access to Florida Today's 1969 archives and NASA documents such as the lunar module manual. Web users also have an opportunity to add their own thoughts and pictures.

More Apollo resources:

• Apollo on rewind: Top 10 moonshot videos
• Apollo in sharper focus: The best lunar literature
• Buzz Aldrin's journey (and his rap video)
• More space history on msnbc.com

• N.Y. Times: Blink twice if you like me
• Seed Magazine: The extinction oscillator
• Fermilab: 'Doubly strange' particle detected
• SpaceWeather.com: Volcanic sunset gallery
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Musical Minds' | 'Nova ScienceNow'

Natural History Museum

This artist's conception shows a hadrosaur eating. An analysis of tooth wear suggests that hadrosaurs were more likely to graze on low-growing, silica-rich plants than on tall bushes. The tooth scratches also reveal how hadrosaurs chewed.

A novel analysis of microscopic scratches on fossilized teeth reveals how plant-eating duck-billed dinosaurs used a now-extinct type of jaw to chew their food. The study also suggests duckbills were more likely to graze on low-lying greenery than to chomp on tree leaves like giraffes (or like the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park").

The researchers behind the study, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, say the technique they used to uncover the tale of the teeth could be applied to other scientific mysteries as well.

"We did it by measuring literally hundreds and hundreds of scratches on these teeth, and then doing a statistical analysis of the directions of the scratches," University of Leicester paleontologist Mark Purnell, who led the research, told me today."The statistical analysis turned out to be quite a tricky business."

Vince Williams / Univ. of Leicester These are teeth from the lower jaw of a hadrosaur, showing its multiple rows of leaf-shaped teeth. The worn, chewing surface of the teeth is toward the top.

The mouth of a hadrosaur has been compared to a "cranial Cuisinart," with hundreds of teeth lined up in rows to chop up the tough plants of the late Cretaceous. But the dinosaurs didn't have the complex jaw joint that mammals have, leaving scientists to puzzle over exactly how hadrosaurs did all that chewing.

Purnell and his colleagues say they found the answer after going through a three-dimensional analysis of the scratches left behind on fossilized hadrosaur teeth from Wyoming. Co-author Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at Britain's Natural History Museum, said the dinosaurs chewed "in a completely different way [compared] to anything alive today."

"Rather than a flexible lower-jaw joint, they had a hinge between the upper jaws and the rest of the skully," Barrett explained in a news release describing the research. "As they bit down on their food, the upper jaws were forced outward, flexing along this hinge so that the tooth surfaces slid sideways across each other, grinding and shredding food in the process."

Vince Williams / Univ. of Leicester These are teeth from the upper jaw of a hadrosaur known as Edmontosaurus. The specimen was molded and coated with gold for examination using a scanning electron microscope to give high-power magnification of the microscopic scratches.

What was eaten?
The study also sheds new light on another plant-eating puzzle: Were duck-billed dinosaurs grazers, eating low to the ground like today's sheep and cows? Or were they browsers, rearing up to eat leaves and twigs like today's deer and giraffes?

The evidence has been mixed: Last year, a different research team reported that the material found inside the fossilized guts of a hadrosaur appeared to consist of sliced-and-diced conifer needles, leaves, bark and twigs. That would suggest that hadrosaurs were tree-browsers, as depicted in "Jurassic Park," the late Michael Crichton's best-known dinosaur novel.

Vince Williams / Univ. of Leicester

This is a highly magnified view of the surface of one of the hadrosaur teeth, showing scratches created about 67 million years ago by tooth movements and feeding. The black boxes show the areas, each less than half a millimeter wide, in which scratches were analyzed. Click on the image for a larger view.

Purnell and his colleagues, however, say that the wear patterns they saw on the dinosaur teeth are more commonly associated with modern-day grass-eaters.

"Although the first grasses had evolved by the late Cretaceous, they were not common, and it most unlikely that grasses formed a major component of hadrosaur diets," today's news release quoted the University of Leicester's Vince Williams as saying. "We can tell from the scratches that the hadrosaur's food either contained small particles of grit, normal for vegetation cropped close to the ground, or, like grass, contained microscopic granules of silica. We know that horsetails were a common plant at the time and have this characteristic; they may well have been an important food for hadrosaurs."

Purnell cautioned that the conclusions about the hadrosaur's diet are "a little less secure than the very good evidence we have for the motions of the teeth relative to each other." But he said that the dental analysis represented "a new strand of evidence ... a new way of saying something, based on real data, about what they were eating."

Whatever they ate, the hadrosaurs proved to be an "incredibly successful" species, taking their place as the dominant plant-eating species in the late Cretaceous period, Purnell said. Unfortunately, their cranial Cuisinarts couldn't save them when a giant asteroid (or was it climate change?) struck the hadrosaurs and their meat-eating cousins down 65 million years ago.

Mark Purnell / Univ. of Leicester

Microscopic scratches on the tooth of Edmontosaurus, a hadrosaur, show up in false color.

So why should we care how (or what) hadrosaurs chewed? First of all, the researchers' method for analyzing dental wear can be used to study a wide array of long-vanished species, and not just hadrosaurs. "We can start to study weird things like extinct groups of fish, or very early mammals. ... Nobody's looked at very early mammals, particularly what they ate rather than how they ate," Purnell said.

More generally, studying how dinosaurs fit into their ancient environment can help us figure out how to avoid becoming "dinosaurs" ourselves.

"These things were the dominant terrestrial herbivores, so they had a major role in structuring ecosystems in the late Cretaceous," Purnell pointed out. "If we don't know how they ate, that's a big gap in our knowledge. The more we understand the ecosystems of the past, and how they were affected by global events like climate change, the better we can understand how changes now are going to pan out in the future."

More about dinosaurs:

• Nine links in the dino-to-bird transition
• T. rex analysis supports dino-bird link
• The world's seven deadliest dinosaurs
• Dino mummy unlocks Jurassic secrets
• Earth's Timeline: An interactive guide
• Look for dinosaurs on msnbc.com

• Twisted Physics: Carnival of Space 109 
• ScienceDaily: First electronic quantum processor created
• Wired: NASA wants your help digitizing von Braun's notes
• Popular Science: Shuttle Endeavour ... seen from outer space
• Universe Today: Spirit rover makes night observations on Mars 

Kevin Frank / The Tonight Show / NASA

Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad stands near the southern rim of Surveyor Crater during a moonwalk on Nov. 19, 1969. Conrad holds a sampling scoop, and a tool carrier rests by his foot. Put on red-blue glasses for the 3-D effect, which was added by graphic artist Kevin Frank. Click on the image for a larger version.

Our latest crop of cosmic pictures puts you hundreds of miles above an erupting volcano, sends you zooming over the moon and plunks you down on Mars. But if you really want to feel as if you're in outer space, you'll have to put on your red-blue 3-D glasses. It's the next best thing to being there.

Take this spectacular image of Sarychev Volcano's eruption, for example. It's the first image in our "Month in Space" roundup for June, and it looks pretty cool in the slideshow window. But it looks even cooler in 3-D, thanks to Belgian stereo artist Patrick Vantuyne. Hats off to SpaceWeather.com for serving up the image, along with time-lapse satellite readings that show the spread of the volcano's plume and a stunning aerial photo of the volcanic clouds.

While you have your red-blue glasses on, spend some extra time clicking through Vantuyne's online 3-D galleries. I particularly like his series of stereo shots showing the Apollo moonwalkers at work.

Most of the Apollo 3-D images, or anaglyphs, were created using a simple technique called the "stereo cha-cha": The astronaut with the camera would take one photograph while putting his weight on the left leg, then shift his weight to the right leg and snap the second picture. The images could then be combined, using red and blue highlights to create the stereo effect.

Some photographers place the left-right views side by side and expect you to look at them cross-eyed, but that's a trick my poor eyes can hardly ever achieve.  

Vantuyne is by no means the only guy who goes in for space in stereo. NASA has assembled albums of 3-D imagery for Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 14. There's also a zoomable panorama of lunar terrain as seen during Apollo 15. The U.S. Geological Survey has its own anaglyph atlas for Apollo 16 and 17, and Mars Unearthed offers a wealth of stereo imagery for the Red Planet as well as for the moon and other cosmic locales.

I mentioned "Moon 3-D" a couple of weeks ago in my roundup of books with an Apollo theme - and if you're interested in a 3-D Mars, you'll want to check out this archived log item.

One important issue to resolve right away is how to get the 3-D glasses in the first place. You can usually find them at novelty or party stores, and NASA provides a handy guide to buying the glasses or making your own. I keep a cardboard set of the glasses in my pocket: You never know when a 3-D volcano or moonwalk will pop up. 

The big pictures
Here are links to more information about the other images featured in our latest "Month in Space" roundup:

• Moonshadow on Saturn's rings: You can see Mimas' shadow stretch across Saturnian rings at the Cassini imaging team's Web site. I provided an overview on the ringed planet's equinox in a Cosmic Log item earlier this week.
• Tail of flame: The NASA Human Spaceflight Web site provides the big picture showing last month's liftoff of reinforcements for the international space station.
• Channels on Mars: Real-life "canali" on the Red Planet? The European Space Agency's Mars Express Web site has the full story behind Hephaestus Fossae's dry channels.
• Marine green: NASA's Earth Observatory features the satellite image of a swirling phytoplankton bloom off Japan's Hokkaido Island.
• Stacking up: NASA's Project Constellation Web site shows hardware stacked up for a future rocket test. Will the Ares I rocket pass the test? Here are a couple of perspectives on NASA's next-generation launch systems. 
• Mars revealed: The Web site for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, has versions of this picture from Gale Crater in sizes suitable for framing (or wallpapering).
• Putting their heads together: For the first time, six astronauts from five countries are spending months of quality time aboard the international space station. NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site provided this unconventional portrait.
• Old moon...: The Moon Views Web site has oodles of reprocessed images from the Lunar Orbiter project of the 1960s, including this view of the moon's south pole.
• ... And new moon: To see the final pictures taken before Japan's Kaguya orbiter crashed on the moon, check out the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Web site. Check out this story as well.
• Evolving island: Earth Observatory provides the full story behind the space station snapshot of St. Helena island, visited by Napoleon Bonaparte as well as Charles Darwin.
• How Martian spiders evolve: This HiRISE photo is proof that Martian geology is truly alien. What the heck are those things? I talked about the "Spiders From Mars" almost three years ago, and the Martian Spiders Web site has more of the scientific story.
• To the moon! You'll find launch photos galore at NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Web site. LRO has already entered lunar orbit, and the LCROSS moon-smashing probe has sent back its first images.
• Mercury's rays: The Messenger Web site at Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory offers loads of images from Mercury.
• Valleys on Mars: The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's view of the valleys carved into Elysium Mons comes from the HiRISE Web site.
• First look: The European Space Agency sent along the first images from its Herschel infrared telescope. You can review our launch story to find out more about Herschel and its partner probe, Planck.
• Take me home: NASA's Kennedy Media Gallery shows you not only how the shuttle landed back in Florida atop a modified Boeing 747 jet, but also what happened afterward.

• N.Y. Times: Ham radio fans set up weekend of moontalking 
• Lemelson-MIT: Nanotech expert wins $500,000 prize
• Once and Future Moon: First, nail down the mission
• The Loom: I hear they're going to make evolution legal

BioMed Central

Click for video: Watch mating worms. (Credit: Paul Sternberg, Allyson Whittaker, Caltech)

How do you spice up a report about the mating habits of nematode worms? Well, how about an online video of hot nematode-on-nematode action?

The video and an accompanying news release are related to a research paper published today in the open-access journal BMC Biology.

The paper focuses on the male mating behavior of Caenorhabditis elegans, an oft-studied worm species.

The point of the research is that the male possesses two sets of muscle groups that facilitate mating by keeping his tail in contact with a hermaphrodite mate while he probes for the proper, um, opening. One of the opposing sets of muscles is sex-specific - and that set is key to the males' tail-turning trick.

To study how those muscles are controlled, the researchers (Caltech's Allyson Whittaker and Paul Sternberg) fiddled with the worms' levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. They also studied mutant males who don't mate as well as the typical nematode because of their chemical shortcomings.

The paper delves deeply into the molecular and neural pathways that underlie worm mating techniques and, more generally, the interaction of opposing muscle sets. If you read it all the way through, you're either a serious student of developmental biology - or you're the kind of person who buys Playboy just for the articles.

For some classic "worm porn," check out this archived item from P.Z. Myers' Pharyngula Weblog.

ALMS via Argonne Nat'l Lab

A GM Chevrolet Corvette (bottom) and a Porsche RS Spyder were the two winners of the first Green Challenge at the Petit Le Mans race in Atlanta last October. The winners were selected based on a formula that factored in energy efficiency, petroleum displacement and greenhouse-gas emissions as well as speed during the 1,000-mile race.

The race doesn't always go to the swiftest. Nowadays, some auto races go to the most fuel-efficient, or to the most environmentally friendly, or even to the best business plan.

That doesn't mean you should expect a NASCAR prize to go to a Prius anytime soon. But it does mean you'll see different kinds of scales for judging the cars that go onto the track - scales that you might even use when you buy your next car.

"Race cars actually move the technology of street cars in several ways," John C. Glenn, an environmental specialist with the Environmental Protection Agency, explained today in a news advisory keyed to a green-tech conference. "One, the technology of race cars develops at a much faster pace than the technology in street cars. And two, they form the basis of what kind of cars people want. They see cars racing on the track, and that's the kind of car they want to buy."

Glenn discussed the trend toward greener racing at the American Chemical Society's Green Chemistry and Engineering Conference in College Park, Md. His theme was that racers can be mean and green at the same time.

"We clearly did not want to change racing. We didn't want to make it boring and slow," he said. "We didn't feel as if that would accomplish our goal, which is to get people to use more energy-efficient vehicles and to stimulate the development of more energy-efficient technologies."

Glenn and his colleagues have been working with race organizers for years to move closer to that goal. In 2006, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy joined up with Argonne National Laboratory and SAE International to form the Green Racing Working Group. The group notched its first big success last October when the American Le Mans Series conducted its first Green Challenge, a "race within a race."

Rather than holding a separate competition for green vehicles, the Green Challenge judges scored the cars already entered in the 1,000-mile Petit Le Mans endurance race at Road Atlanta, using a formula that accounted for the cars' energy efficiency, greenhouse-gas emission and petroleum-equivalent fuel cost.

The Le Mans race was the perfect place to start, Glenn said, because the rules permit a wide range of "street-legal" fuels including E10 and E85 ethanol blends, sulfur-free diesel and gas-electric hybrids.

And the winners are ...
When all the numbers were factored together - including vehicle mass and average speed - the order of finish for October's Green Challenge turned out to be slightly different from the outcome of the overall race: A Chevrolet Corvette that finished fourth overall in the Le Mans won first place in the Green Challenge's Grand Touring class, while a Porsche RS Spyder that came in sixth overall won first prize in the Prototype class.

Tom Wallace, GM's global vehicle chief engineer for performance vehicles, called the Green Challenge results "Corvette Racing's greatest victory." Glenn was pleased as well - pleased enough to spread the green-racing gospel far and wide.

"When I talk to people involved in racing, I tell them, 'You're coming to a crossroads. You can either be the poster boys for global warming, or you can be part of the solution. It all depends on you,'" he said.

It looks as if the message is sinking in: This year, the American Le Mans Series has extended the green-racing series to run all season as the Michelin Green X Challenge. The teams with the best records at the end of the Le Mans season in October, as calculated using the formula developed for last year's race, will grab the green glory.

Michelin is also retooling its enviro-racing initiative on the international Le Mans circuit to go with the Green X Challenge branding.

X files: Fight the future
As long as we're talking about auto racing's X files, we should touch upon the highest-profile green-racing event on the agenda: the $10 million Progressive Automotive X Prize. In April, the Auto X Prize's organizers announced that 111 teams were accepted into the competition, and spokeswoman Carrie Fox told me today that 96 of those teams have gone on to the next step of the contest by turning in their business plans.

Business plans? Maybe A.J. Foyt didn't need a business plan for the Indy 500, but the financial details are an integral part of the Automotive X Prize preparations. Teams have to show not only that they can field a car capable of getting 100 miles per gallon (or its energy equivalent), but also that they can produce 10,000 or more of those cars for the automotive marketplace.

Over the next few months, the X Prize judges will analyze the business plans and decide which teams will go on to actual track tests in 2010. Fox said the detailed rules and schedules for the competition ahead - including on-the-road semifinals and finals - should be announced sometime in the next few weeks

Contest planners can't yet predict exactly how many cars will participate in the races to come. "We're still so amazed at the number that have made it through the first couple of phases," Fox said.

One thing's for sure, however: The X Prize finals won't be like most auto races. For example, the vehicles will be sent out in a staggered start. "The cars won't ever be side by side," Fox said. With so many one-of-a-kind cars in the competition, the X Prize teams can't afford risking an Indy-style pileup.

Another unusual twist is that the race may not be quite over when it's over. It will probably take some extra time to run all the numbers on energy equivalents, fuel efficiency and greenhouse-gas emissions.

But in the end, someone could come away with a NASCAR-scale payoff measured in millions of dollars. Now that's a kind of green worth waiting for.

More on auto tech:

• Eight ways for auto racing to rev up innovation
• Six turnaround technologies for the auto industry
• Scientists unveil chocolate-fueled race car
• Still more from msnbc.com's Auto Tech section

Daniel Maurer / AP

Click for video: The University of Tubingen's Nicholas Conard holds an ancient flute during a news conference. Click on the image for a video report on the find.

Scientists say they've found what they consider to be the earliest handcrafted musical instrument in a cave in southwest Germany, less than a yard away from the oldest-known carving of a human. The flute fragments as well as the ivory figurine of a "prehistoric Venus" date back more than 35,000 years, the researchers report.

The findings, published online today by the journal Nature, suggest not only that cavemen and cavewomen could rock the house, but that musical jam sessions may have helped modern humans prevail over their Neanderthal cousins.

"The bottom-line issues are demographics, but behind the demographics are other factors," said Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tubingen and the Nature paper's lead author.

Researchers know that modern humans prevailed over Neanderthals in Europe 20,000 to 35,000 years ago, and that the principal factors behind the Neanderthals' disappearance probably included culture and climate as well as diet. Conard and his colleagues - Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and Susanne Munzel of the University of Tubingen - argue that the musical tradition fostered by Homo sapiens may have contributed by bonding communities more closely together.

"Modern humans seemed to have had much larger social networks," Conard told me today. That networking may have helped facilitate "the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations," he and his colleagues wrote.

The fact that multiple musical instruments turned up in the same area, not far from other artistic artifacts, strengthens the argument that Paleolithic humans developed a relatively rich culture, the researchers say.

Four flutes found
In all, researchers report finding the fragments of four flutes at two excavations in an area of southwestern Germany known as Swabia. Three of the sets of fragments were carved from mammoth ivory, but the real prize is a nearly complete flute hollowed out from the bone of a griffon vulture. That specimen was found in the Hohle Fels cave, just 28 inches (70 centimeters) away from the spot where the prehistoric Venus (or, as some wags have put it, "prehistoric porn") was found.

The figurine's discovery was announced in May, but both finds were actually made last September. "First came the Venus, and a couple of weeks later came the flutes," Conard said.

When assembled, the vulture-bone flute is about eight and a half inches long (21.8 centimeters long) and boasts five finger holes. There are fine lines cut into the bone around the holes, suggesting that the flute's maker was calibrating the holes' placement to produce the nicest tones. One end of the flute is cut into a V shape, and the musician probably blew into that side of the flute. The researchers assume that an inch or two of the flute's far end is missing. You can hear what the flute might have sounded like in this MP3 audio clip.

Conard noted that the fragments of eight flutes have now been found in Swabian geological deposits dating back 30,000 to 40,000 years - deposits known as the Aurignacian layer. Radiocarbon dating indicated that the newly found fragments fit into that time frame, and other dating methods led the researchers to conclude that the flutes were more than 35,000 years old.

They said there were no "convincing" claims that any older musical instruments have ever been discovered.

Reviewing the evidence
Actually, Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Turk and other researchers have pointed to a bear-bone fragment that is about 50,000 years old and appears to have the finger holes for a flute. I wrote about that particular specimen nine years ago in a story on the "sounds of science." But there's still a controversy over whether the holes were made by a Neanderthal or by a bone-chomping scavenger.

"No [outside] scholar who has ever studied it has ever confirmed it's a flute," Conard told me. Turk and his supporters have stood by their story, however.

This bear bone specimen was found in Slovenia in 1995. Is it a 50,000-year-old flute? Such claims have spawned controversy.

Conard said his team's conclusions about the flute found in the Hohle Fels cave are on much more solid ground. "It's a totally different situation here," he said. "We're dealing with finds that have all kinds of indications of cutting with tools and polishing."

The research also meshes with the story told by other finds like the prehistoric Venus. Taken together, the evidence points to a flowering of culture that took place around 35,000 B.C. Could it be that prehistoric partygoers brought their flutes as well as their figurines to the same cave rave?

"It's possible," Conard said. "Let's put it this way: If that were the case, you would find the situation that we have. On the other hand, we can't be sure how much time is represented by the [geological] layer. Let's say that your grandfather played the flute, and your great-granddaughter made the Venus. But it's got to be the same general time period."

Update for 4:30 p.m. ET June 25: I heard back via e-mail from a couple of other knowledgeable fans of ancient flutes. First, here's one of Conard's co-authors, Susanne Munzel, commenting on the Slovenian bear-bone flute (or non-flute):

"I have seen this 'flute' in Ljubljana earlier this year, and in my eyes it is not convincing. As an archaeozoologist I think this is carnivore chewing, which is quite normally found on juvenile cave bear bones. Certainly the bite marks are quite regular and look artificial, but the inside of the shaft is still covered with spongiosa. This makes a sound of the 'flute' impossible. Furthermore the shaft is not very long, and the first 'finger hole' is too close to the mouthpiece. We still don't know why art and music is only proved for Homo sapiens, since very nice Middle Paleolithic stones tell us that Neanderthals were no stupid people. Actually, these flutes and art objects are dated to 35,000 to 40.000 years BP [before present], a time in which in other parts of Europe Neanderthals were still around. So there is no contradiction in dating or the like."

And here's a message from Boston University's Jelle Atema, who made replicas of the bear-bone flute as well as other ancient flutes (and played them quite well, I must say):

"I find the evidence concerning this flute solid, but the inferences weak and misleading. I sense an all-too-common 'Cro-Magnon supremacy' issue here. And once published as a full article in Nature, even inferences become scientific fact. The questions surrounding the Slovenian Neanderthal flute are, in my opinion, throwing sand in the eyes.

"Unfortunately, my main job is as a marine biologist, and my full article is not published in Nature but in the British flute magazine Pan, besides the brief mention in the Science article following the AAAS meeting in 2000. I think it would be most productive at this point to organize a conference where all flute-finders exchange evidence. A real open forum."

Atema also addressed a couple of e-mailed questions I sent him. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Q: Is there any way to judge how such flutes might have been used?

A: The article provides no evidence for the way the Hohle Fels flute (carved from a vulture radius) may be played. The authors suggest that V-notches were carved for sound production and that fine lines across the bone surface may have been for measuring the proper distances between finger holes.

I have argued that one V-notch (not 2) could indicate either a quena-type or a broken fipple-type flute. I presented evidence from the deer bone flute for a fipple flute, i.e., what we now call a 'recorder.' The [Slovenian] Divje Babe flute could be either. Line carvings (and fine dot designs) are also found on the beautifully preserved 4,000-year-old vulture bone (here an ulna) which I replicated; these have nothing to do with finger holes. Moreover, I have argued that the player can easily bend the pitch so that precise finger distances are not necessarily of great importance. (This is highly controversial, but once you hear it you can believe it: Finger holes do not fix the pitch, they only suggest a pitch region.)

Finally, the idea that the Divje Babe flute is not a flute but actually a bone with two canine-pressed holes is highly unlikely. Most people agree that the broken third hole is a finger hole. Then there is the fourth 'hole' which may be a finger hole or - in my opinion - the blow hole or notch. And most biologists immediately recognize that scavengers of bone marrow crack the bone with their molars, which have the required leverage for bone crunching. Canines are for grasping, not cracking. (Just imagine how a carnivore would place its canines on a round bone and pierce two holes with its teeth! ... and then leave it alone.)
 
Q: The paper also touches upon the possible role flute-playing might have had in Paleolithic society, and how it might have given an edge to modern humans (in more connected communities) over Neanderthals (who were said to be in more isolated communities). From your perspective, what's the current thinking on the wider implications of Paleolithic music for modern human and Neanderthal society?

A: This to me is the same speculation people use to justify their cultural superiority all over the world. The problem for some people is to accept that Neanderthals may have been playing flute. Perhaps Cro-Magnon may have adopted originally Neanderthal instument making and music. There is no evidence in either direction. The only way to save the Cro-Magnon musical superiority is to question (and reject) the fact that Ivan Turk found a flute ... therefore the holes were made by cave bears! I believe his and my evidence are clearly favoring the human Neanderthal flute model. (Some would argue that Neanderthals were not even human. No problem; that's a question of definition. But we should be careful. Racial opinions have justified enslaving and eradicating people all over the world.) There is no evidence that Neanderthals, human or not, did not have a musical culture.
 
Q: Is there any way you can assess how this latest research fits into the current thinking on ancient music-making?

A: I believe that this is a case of scientific competition. Who has the oldest flute? Slovenia? France, Germany? The hard evidence presented here is wonderful but limited. Personally, I see a broad pattern of old musical culture all around the edges of the ice-age Alps. Any solid new piece of evidence is welcome. Maybe eventually we will have a picture of the musical origins. What's clear is that the current bone-flute-based evidence is somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 years old. The sophistication of the flutes suggests that the actual musical culture is much older, particularly if I am right in my fipple flute reconstructions.

Let me know when MSNBC is sponsoring this old bone flute convention.

More science you can hear:

• Listening to the sounds of science
• Researchers re-create pre-Columbian sounds
• Trace the evolution of laughter
• Are songbirds hard-wired to carry a tune?

• Popular Mechanics: Buzz Aldrin's latest spaceflight prescription
• ScienceDaily: Brain study explains early birds vs. night owls
• New Scientist: Statistics point to Iranian election fraud
• The Register: Pentagon looking for godware 

Ron Batzdorff / Universal Pictures

"Apollo 13," starring Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, ranks among the best fictional movies about NASA's moon effort.

If you're lusting to relive the glory days of NASA's early space effort, the best time for doing that is right now: Video resources about the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs are at their peak as the 40th anniversary of humanity's first moon landing approaches. Here's a Top 10 list, plus a couple of extra-credit pointers to more space video:

• "Apollo 13": Some consider this Oscar-winning 1995 movie about NASA's most agonizing moon mission to be the best dramatic depiction of real-life spaceflight - and a wellspring of space cliches. The duct tape was real, and mission commander Jim Lovell really did say "Houston, we've had a problem" (though Jack Swigert said it first). However, flight director Gene Kranz admits that he never said "failure is not an option" during the mission, though he used the phrase as the title of his autobiography. (Watch a TODAY show video about the film and the reality.)
• "Fly Me to the Moon": If you're looking for a kid-appropriate retelling of the Apollo 11 saga - in 3-D, no less - this 2008 animated tale about three flies who hitch a ride to the moon might be right up your alley. OK, maybe the reviews weren't super, but those reviews were written by grown-ups and not the movie's target audience. How can you go wrong when it carries the endorsement of Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin (who puts in a cameo at the end)?
• "For All Mankind": This 1989 documentary uses the best technology of the time to tell the Apollo story, augmented by interviews with the astronauts (who were then 20 years younger than they are today). The film is structured to trace the arc of a single moon mission, using footage from Apollo 11 as well as other moonshots.
• "From the Earth to the Moon": Big-name actors and actresses take on the roles of the astronauts and the people surrounding them in this 1998 HBO miniseries, hosted by "Apollo 13" star Tom Hanks and based on "A Man on the Moon," Andrew Chaikin's history of the Apollo effort. Many of the 12 shows are not straight-on space operas; rather, they recount the moon missions from the perspective of the astronauts' wives, or the ground controllers, or even (gasp!) the press corps.
• "In the Shadow of the Moon": The thing I liked most about this highly regarded 2007 documentary was that you get to do the time warp between film footage from the 1960s and contemporary interviews with the Apollo astronauts. Also, audio recordings and film footage from Mission Control were laboriously synched up to flesh out the historical record. 
• "Live From the Moon: The Story of Apollo Television": This brand-new documentary, produced using Spacecraft Films' video collection (see below), keys on the way that television was used to bring the Apollo experience into America's living rooms.
• "Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3-D": I'm a sucker for any 3-D movie (well, maybe not "My Bloody Valentine"), but this 2005 release is one stereo flick I have yet to catch up with. The film blends re-creations of stereo scenes from NASA's archives with re-enactments of Apollo moments. Director Mark Cohen told me it's a "multiformat, hybrid, documentary, experiential something." Whatever it is, it's on DVD - but I'm holding out to see it someday at a big-screen Imax theater.
• "The Right Stuff": One of the funniest reality-based space movies, in my opinion, and one of the best. Like "Apollo 13," this 1983 film immortalized such space quips as "no bucks, no Buck Rogers" and "Spam in a can." Like the Tom Wolfe classic on which it was based, the movie focuses on Project Mercury rather than Project Apollo. But it's so good I just can't leave it off the list.
• "When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions": The producers behind this 2008 documentary series went back to NASA's archives and remastered more than 100 hours of footage from Mercury, Gemini and Apollo in glorious HD. Six hourlong episodes trace the full story of NASA's space effort, moving beyond Apollo into the era of space shuttles, the Hubble Space Telescope and the international space station. 
• "The Wonder of It All": This 2007 documentary is a complement to "In the Shadow of the Moon," which came out in the same year. "Wonder" focuses less on the technical side of the Apollo effort and more on the astronauts and their post-Apollo reflections. "I came away most impressed," NBC News space analyst James Oberg said in his film review.

In addition to the Top 10, no list of Apollo video would be complete without giving a big shout-out to Spacecraft Films, which offers a lineup of DVDs about space missions and aerospace topics that would easily fill a bookshelf. Most of them give you the straight stuff from each mission - for instance, the three-DVD set for Apollo 11.

For something completely different, you can head on over to YouTube and click through the Disney videos that fired the imaginations of young rocketeers in the 1950s and 1960s. And stay tuned for more to come, including an Apollo 11 docudrama titled "Moonshot" that's likely to show up on the History Channel later this year. Most notably, the Buzz Aldrin role is filled by James Marsters, who made his mark as a bleached-blond bloodsucker in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel."

Did I miss your favorite space movie? Remedy that omission by leaving a comment below. You can also review my roundup of recently published books on the Apollo missions (including Aldrin's latest memoir). Stay tuned for a listing of online resources for the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto." 

• National Geographic: Divining Angkor
• Starts With a Bang: Carnival of Space 108
• Scientific American: Fill 'er up with grassoline
• The Intersection: Change our science-anemic culture

NASA / JPL / SSI

The spiky shadow of Saturn's moon Mimas dips onto the planet's rings and straddles the Cassini Division in this natural color image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on April 8, 2009. Click on the image for a larger view.

Leapin' and hoppin' on a moonshadow? The Cassini space mission turns that line from the Cat Stevens classic completely around by revealing the leapin' and hoppin' moonshadows on Saturn's rings.

Those shadows are taking on an especially eerie look as the planet nears equinox, an event that happens only twice during Saturn's 29.5-year-long orbit. In August, Saturn's rings will be facing the sun exactly edge-on. During the buildup to that event, the Cassini orbiter has been focusing on the shadows cast by moons as well as structures on the rings themselves.

NASA / JPL / SSI

Tethys' shadow passes over Saturn's rings. Click on image for larger view.

The shadows are stretched to bizarre lengths, just as earthly shadows are elongated right before sunset. And because the moons are in motion, the mini-eclipses slide across the rings like dark ghosts. Four pictures showing the phenomenon were released today to celebrate the approaching Saturnian equinox as well as a "Visions of Saturn" exhibit at Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

"It has been a scientist's delight to watch this almost wafer-thin collection of icy debris, that we have come to know so well, change in character and spring into the third dimension," Carolyn Porco, the leader of Cassini's imaging team and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations, said in an image advisory.

NASA / JPL / SSI

Enceladus' shadow passes over Mimas. Click for larger view.

Today's bonus image is another kind of mini-eclipse, involving two of Saturn's moons. The time-lapse animation shows the shadow of one Saturnian moon, Enceladus, passing over the face of another moon, Mimas.

Both moons are intriguing, but for different reasons: Ice-covered Enceladus possesses a set of geysers that spew water into space. Those geysers hint at a subsurface ocean, and perhaps alien marine life as well. You'll be hearing more about that as Cassini's mission continues.

Icy Mimas, meanwhile, is less than 250 miles (400 kilometers) wide, but still retains a round shape. That has led astronomers to suppose that the smallest dwarf planets (as defined three years ago by the International Astronomical Union) are around Mimas' size. But I'll bet that exceedingly few dwarf planets have the cool "Death Star" profile that Mimas has.

For more Cassini coolness, check out these links:

• Slideshow: Cassini's greatest hits
• Slideshow: Cassini's 10th birthday
• Cassini's closest encounter 
• A mystery glows on Saturn
• Winners from Saturn

NASA's moon-crashing probe - known as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS - is flying past its target Tuesday morning. And if the streaming-video spirits are smiling, you can follow along.

The space agency says it is planning to webcast LCROSS' lunar encounter starting at 8:20 a.m. ET Tuesday. The swingby is aimed at changing the spacecraft's trajectory, five days after launch, in order to get it into position for its eventual crash (currently set for October).

LCROSS' cameras and other scientific instruments will be switched on for about an hour for calibration purposes. The first 30 minutes of LCROSS' data feed will provide frame-per-second video views of the lunar surface from an altitude of about 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers), NASA says. During the second half-hour, LCROSS will scan the lunar horizon to calibrate its sensors, and the video imagery will update only occasionally. Another Web stream will show an animation visualizing the spacecraft's position throughout the swingby.

The availability and quality of the streaming video will depend on a multitude of factors - so as usual, there are no guarantees (tip o' the Log to SpaceWeather.com).

Even earlier in the day, NASA TV will be carrying coverage of its other moon probe's entry into lunar orbit. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched right along with LCROSS, but in this case, the point of the maneuver is to position the spacecraft so it doesn't hit the moon. Video coverage of LRO's lunar orbit insertion begins at 5:30 a.m. ET, NASA says.

Here are a few other Web links to moon over:

• Wired Science: Tweet me to the moon
• N.Y. Times: Questions for a moonwalker
• BBC: Looking back to the Apollo lunar missions 
• The Observer: Moon mirror project axed after 40 years

Spaceport America

Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two carrier airplane flies over New Mexico's Las Cruces International Airport on Saturday, showing off its dual-fuselage design.

Five years after the private-sector space age began, rocketeers are taking circuitous routes to turn their spaceship dreams into reality. And the pioneers of the age say that's just as it should be.

The Space Age, with capital letters, dates back more than 50 years to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik 1 on Oct. 4, 1957. That marked the first time an artificial satellite was put into orbit. The 5-year-old space age I'm talking about dates back to June 21, 2004, when the SpaceShipOne rocket plane became the first privately developed craft to carry a civilian astronaut into outer space.

When SpaceShipOne flew, some observers thought regular folks would be going on day trips to outer space within just a year or two. Indian-American millionaire Chirinjeev Kathuria, who helped extend the life of Russia's Mir space station in 2000 and now serves as chairman of the PlanetSpace rocket venture, certainly thought so.

"When the industry started out, I think everyone - including ourselves - were naive in saying we could do this in 12 months or 24 months," Kathuria acknowledged. "I think everyone's becoming more realistic. That's why no one is saying, 'OK, we're going to do it this year or next year' anymore."

Other observers were far less optimistic, even back in 2004. Millionaire investment adviser Dennis Tito, who became the first paying passenger to visit the international space station in 2001, told me five years ago that "it may take many decades" for private industry to create passenger spacelines.

Virgin Galactic

SpaceShipTwo designer Burt Rutan peeks out from one of the rocket plane's windows during construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif.

The most realistic time frame for suborbital space tourism seems to have come from aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan, who famously designed SpaceShipOne on a restaurant napkin and is now leading the development effort for Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo at Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif.

"We at Scaled are very aware and proud of what we did five years ago," Rutan told me in an e-mail. "Memory fails me of what I was predicting would happen, so I did a Google search and came up with a podcast that had a prediction."

Rutan pointed to a speech he gave at the Academy of Achievement in 2004, 10 days before SpaceShipOne's first sally into space. "At the end of the pitch I predicted that the public would be able to buy tickets for a spaceflight 'about 10 to 12 years from now.'"

Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic are on track to beat that schedule, even if SpaceShipTwo's first commercial flight doesn't come until 2012 or later.

Virgin Galactic Burt Rutan takes a seat inside SpaceShipTwo's fuselage during construction.

"There is a lot of activity at Scaled right now on manned spaceflight," Rutan said. "Not a large number of folk working, but very impressive hardware being developed and tested for Virgin. We all know how important the work is, and our team has a passion for the goal of providing public access to the black sky view of our planet."

Small steps
Some small steps were taken toward the fulfillment of Rutan's prediction on Friday: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and other dignitaries gathered at Spaceport America to break ground for the multimillion-dollar space terminal that's being built for Virgin Galactic's operation. Richardson said the groundbreaking ceremony was "an important step toward our goal of being at the forefront of a vibrant new commercial space industry."

Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn provided the latest word on SpaceShipTwo's time line. After the ceremony, he told me in a phone call that the rocket plane would have its unveiling and first unpowered glide test in December. Dec. 7 has been reported as the target date, but Whitehorn said it's too early to pencil that into the appointment book.

He said he expected SpaceShipTwo's first rocket-powered test flight past the 100-kilometer-high space boundary to take place within 12 to 13 months after its unveiling. The test flights would be conducted in Mojave, but he expected the first $200,000-a-seat commercial flight to take place in New Mexico (with Virgin's billionaire founder Richard Branson on board). That milestone would most likely come in the 2011-2012 time frame.

Whitehorn emphasized that the schedule was dependent on how the test program proceeds. Unlike the superpowers who started the Space Age, the SpaceShipTwo team feels no pressure to run a space race. "We're in a 'race' with only one thing - a race with safety," Whitehorn told the crowd in New Mexico.

The safety theme was brought home when the carrier aircraft for SpaceShipTwo, known as White Knight Two, set out from its Mojave base to fly over the New Mexico ceremony. En route, an indicator light came on, forcing a diversion to the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport for a safety check.

Scaled later reported that a speedbrake actuator had failed during the descent for the flyover. To make up for the no-show, White Knight Two flew over New Mexico's Las Cruces International Airport during the return trip to Mojave on Saturday. Even though it didn't turn out exactly as planned, the excursion marked White Knight Two's first round-trip, point-to-point journey.

Spaceport America

White Knight Two makes a pass over Las Cruces International Airport on Saturday.

The rocket report
Here's a fifth-anniversary status report on five other suborbital ventures that have been active in the "New Space" age. If I'm missing anyone, please feel free to fill me in by leaving a comment below.

• Blue Origin: You don't hear much from New Space's most secretive player, but it's virtually certain that the venture - backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos - will start commercial spaceflights by 2010 as originally envisioned. In February, Bezos told talk-show host Charlie Rose that Blue Origin was working on its second test vehicle, and that there would be at least one more test vehicle after that.
• PlanetSpace: Kathuria's venture lost out on NASA funding for a space station resupply rocket, and lost an appeal of that decision as well. But Kathuria told me PlanetSpace was still "looking for opportunities" at NASA, and is also seeking Pentagon funding for the development of an unmanned aerial vehicle. That vehicle would be a quarter-scale version of PlanetSpace's Silver Dart space glider design. "After the UAV is proven and built out, we'd eventually use that vehicle for point-to-point space tourism," Kathuria said. He's grown increasingly realistic over the past five years: "Building launch vehicles and spacecraft is not an easy process," Kathuria said. "It's a difficult process, and it a very capital-intensive process."
• Rocketplane Global: The Oklahoma-based company says it has been hit hard by the current economic downturn but is still working out the plans for development of its rocket plane as well as spaceport arrangements. About $100 million is needed to turn the plans into reality, Rocketplane's Chuck Lauer has been quoted as saying.
• Rocket Racing League: The league is working with Armadillo Aerospace to turn two airplanes into rocket-powered racers for a demonstration flight, most likely in November at the Aviation Nation air show at Nevada's Nellis Air Force Base. "We're looking at Nellis, and we have other options, too. We're just not in a rush," the league's co-founder and CEO, Granger Whitelaw, told me. The planes won't appear at September's Reno Air Races, as previously hoped. Whitelaw said the league will wait out the downturn before proceeding with plans for competitions. "When the market comes back to us, we'll be there. ... Had we been out there and starting to race right now, we probably would have been in a bad position," he said.
• XCOR Aerospace: I've written quite a bit about XCOR's step-by-step approach to spaceflight. At last report, XCOR is still on target to begin flight tests of its Lynx Mark 1 high-altitude rocket plane next year. This month, The Globe and Mail quoted COO Andrew Nelson as saying about 30 people have paid part or all of the $95,000 fare for a Lynx flight. The Mark 1 is meant to blaze a trail for later flights that will go beyond the outer-space boundary.

Update for 7:20 p.m. ET June 22: I added pictures from Saturday's White Knight Two flyover and updated the text accordingly.

• ESA: Stunning sneak preview from Herschel telescope
• NSF: Did climate spark die-off 200 million years ago? 
• Symmetry Breaking: LHC restart to come later in autumn 
• The Economist: Planes, trains and automobiles  
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Ape Genius' 

Berkman Center / Harvard

This map provides a visualization of the Iranian blogosphere in early 2009. Clusters of blogs are associated with different themes, ranging from reformist vs. conservative politics to Persian poetry and "CyberShia" religious discourse. Click on the image for the Berkman Center's interactive version of the map.

An analysis of Iran's Internet reveals a deep level of diversity, with a level of surveillance (and surveillance-dodging) that goes just as deep. During this week's post-election crisis, so many reflections have been bouncing back and forth in this online hall of mirrors that it's sometimes hard to get a fix on where anyone stands - geographically or politically.

Iran is a particularly fitting battleground: A status report on the government's Internet filtering effort, just updated this week by the OpenNet Initiative, notes that Iranian Internet usage has grown nearly 50 percent every year for the past eight years - the highest growth rate in the Middle East. About 35 percent of the country's population uses the Internet, a level of penetration significantly higher than the Middle East average of 26 percent.

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society says Iran is home to one of the world's richest and most varied blogospheres, with major clusters for secular/reformist politics as well as conservative politics, for "CyberShia" religious discussion as well as Persian poetry appreciation.

At the same time, the OpenNet Initiative says Iran has one of the world's most extensive Net filtering systems, on a par with China's. The government's Net-limiting efforts have been on full display over the past week during a clampdown on Web access, text messaging and mobile phone traffic.

OpenNet's first report on Iranian filtering, released four years ago, stirred up a controversy when it found that authorities in Tehran were using SmartFilter software, made in the U.S.A., to control Internet access. This year's update says Iran is now using home-brewed software instead, joining China as the two countries in the world "that aggressively filter the Internet using their own technology."

How do the Iranian officials do it? Only a limited number of Internet service providers have been licensed to operate, and those providers have to toe the line by using software that blocks users from accessing forbidden URLs (such as the BBC's Persian service). The forbidden list can be updated centrally - and of course, the list grew longer in advance of this month's presidential elections. If Internet users try to gain access to a blocked URL, a "blockpage" comes up instead, delivering a warning to the user that access is forbidden.

Power to the proxies
So how are Iranians getting through to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other supposedly off-limits Web destinations? My colleague at msnbc.com, Bob Sullivan, addressed the Twitter case specifically in a Red Tape posting. More generally, Iranians are being pointed to detours in the information superhighway known as proxy servers.

Inside Iran, proxy servers are like passport control points: Outgoing data traffic is checked by the filtering system on the Internet service's proxy server, and if it's heading for a forbidden place, it's blocked from going farther. But if the destination is not on the forbidden list, it's allowed to go through.

Outside Iran, the proxy servers are like transit points. Activists set up proxy servers on their own computers, using Internet Protocol numbers that don't appear on the forbidden list. Traffic from Iran can go through to those addresses with no problem. The data traffic is then forwarded to wherever it's destined to go, even if that destination is supposedly forbidden.

During the post-election crisis, proxy servers have been popping up like thousands of computerized "Casablanca" cafes around the world. The Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site based in Sweden, launched an anonymous Net-surfing forum to help Iran's opposition - but most of the proxy providers are amateurs.

"There's an interesting dynamic between people outside Iran who are willing to configure their PCs to set up proxy servers, and people inside Iran who are willing to put that number in their browser," said Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain, a member of the OpenNet Initiative team. "On a day-to-day basis, you wouldn't see people going to this trouble."

The rapid growth of the proxy-server movement is one of the amazing things about the response to the Iran crisis. "You are seeing people go beyond making their avatars green and actually run new software on a computer that, a few moments ago, they were using to play 'Quake,'" Zittrain said.

On the Internet, no one knows you're Iranian
The effect of this is that anonymity cloaks much of the traffic coming out of Iran nowadays. That goes for opposition activists, but it also goes for the Iranian government and its agents. Thus, there's something of a spy-vs.-spy battle going on: There's no easy way to know who is really messaging what, especially when it's passed along by numerous Twitter outsiders.

A classic example was the back-and-forth Twittering over what opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi's supporters should be doing on Friday, which is shaping up as a crucial day in the post-election crisis. "Mousavi and Karoubi ask supporters not to attend Friday prayers in Tehran," a widely followed Twitterer known as Persiankiwi reported. But other Twitter messages read, "Mousavi Facebook and Twitter possibly hacked. Please delete tweets about not attending Friday prayers."

In the end, Twitterers - including, presumably, actual Iranians - had to make up their own minds on whose word to trust.

Another twist has to do with the impermanence of the proxy-server system. Once the Iranian authorities get wind of a popular proxy, they can shut it down by adding it to their forbidden list. "It's kind of a minute-by-minute arms race rather than a marathon," Zittrain said.

Sizing up the blogosphere
Morningside Analytics' John Kelly, one of the authors of the Berkman Center's report on the Iranian blogosphere, said it will be interesting to see what effect Internet users have on the political crisis - and what effect the outcome of the crisis will have on Internet users.

One of the more interesting findings from the study was that the blog cluster centered on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's supporters was very self-contained, with relatively few connections to other parts of the blogosphere. Mousavi's cluster, in contrast, was significantly more connected with Iran's other blog clusters - which hinted at a wider spectrum of support.

Kelly said he saw a similar pattern during the U.S. presidential election campaign, with Republican-leaning blogs forming more of a self-contained "echo chamber" than Democratic-leaning blogs. Mousavi may not be Barack Obama, but Kelly finds the parallel interesting nonetheless.

"Two data points don't prove anything, but it's consistent with the idea that one of the candidates managed to break out and get support from outside the politicized base," Kelly said. That may be why Mousavi's movement seems to be more resilient than earlier post-revolution opposition movements in Iran.

Most of Iran's Weblogs were shut down in the wake of the election, but Kelly said he's hearing that they're starting to become accessible again. "If the blogosphere is coming back online, it'll be really interesting to see how this all reconfigures," he said.

More on Iran and the Internet:

• NBC video: Web warriors poke holes in Iran's firewall
• One woman's personal window into Iran
• Iran's Internet battle hits new heights
• Red Tape: Twitter 1, Censors 0
• Social networks support election protests
• Battle for hearts - and screens - of the world
• Red Tape: Iranian outage points up Web weakness
• More sources for news on Iran's election
• Full coverage of Iran election's aftermath

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."

• Space Elevator Games: Snagged!
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• Discovery.com: Sonic black hole traps sound waves
• Space.com: Supercomputers give inside look at sunspots

NASA

Click for slideshow: NASA's step-by-step plan to return to the moon.

An independent panel was mostly in listening mode during today's first hearing on the future of America's spacefaring effort, but the fact that so many perspectives were heard suggests that the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee is really going to review a wide spectrum of options.

Those optionsŠincludeŠNASA's current Constellation Program, which calls for developing new types of rockets known as the Ares 1 and 5 to send humans back to the moon by the year 2020. But they also include adapting existing rockets such as the Delta 4 or Atlas 5, or some sort of "Frankenrocket" that marks the next stage of evolution for expendable launch vehicles. Or maybe the rockets that SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are building to send cargo up to the international space station. Or maybeŠa novel kind of shuttle-derived launch vehicle like the one envisionedŠby the mavericks behind the DIRECT spaceflight plan.

The panel's chairman, former aerospace executive Norman Augustine, told reporters after the hearing that he and his colleagues had a lot of homework to do between now and August, when they're due to file their report on what NASA should do after the shuttle fleet is retired in 2010 or so.

I was otherwise engaged today, focusing on the "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, but thankfully my friends on the space beat were paying close attention to the all-day hearingŠat the Carnegie Institution of Science in Washington. Here are some of the recaps:

• Representatives from the Constellation Program as well asŠUnited Launch Alliance,Šthe Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture for unmanned launches, presented "dueling PowerPoint presentations" forŠnext-generation spaceflight, TheŠNew York Times' Kenneth Chang reported.ŠNASA's Steve Cook said there was "a stable plan" to launch the first manned Ares 1 mission by 2015 as scheduled, at an estimated cost of $35 billion. ULA's Michael Gass said a modified Delta 4 Heavy launcher could be ready by 2014, at a lower cost.
• Irene Klotz's report for Reuters pointed out that although the ULA plan to replace the Ares 1 may be cheaper, the cost equation changes when the need for a heavier-lift Ares 5 (the rocket needed for moon missions) is factored in. She also quoted SpaceX's Elon Musk as saying that his company's Dragon capsule could be used to transport astronauts, with the addition of an escape system and other upgrades. "The whole purpose of SpaceX from the beginning has been human spaceflight. That's why I created it," Musk said.
• Sen. Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who flew on the shuttle in 1986, complained that "NASA simply can't do the job it's been given - the president's goal of being on the moon by 2020," according to AFP's report. The solution? Nelson said the program needed more money than has been budgeted.
• The Orlando Sentinel's Mark Matthews quoted Augustine as saying that his panel saw "a lot of different ideas" at today's hearing. "What we have to do is take each of them and stack them up side-by-side," Augustine said.
• Twitterers seem to be everywhere, in Washington as well as Tehran: If you're somewhat space-savvy, you can get a good sense of the flow during the full day of hearings (including the DIRECT presentation)Šby bringing up Jeff Foust's Twitter feed, clicking it open for all updates from June 17, and reading from bottom to top. The Augustine panel's staff was tweeting as well.
• I saved the best for last: Clark Lindsey's RLV and Space Transport NewsŠprovides a full rundown of the afternoon sessions (read from below to above, blog-style).

Were you tuned in to today's hearings? Are you looking forward toŠtheŠpublic meetingsŠyet to come in Huntsville, at the Cape and back in D.C.? If so, you are truly a hard-core spaceŠjunkie and have earned the right (if not the obligation) toŠpost your comments below.

• U. of Mich.: Lightning on Mars! | CU-Boulder: Shorelines too! 
• SpaceWeather.com: Night-shining clouds sweep over Europe
• New Scientist: Monkey 'IQ test' hints at our ancestors' smarts 
• Science @ NASA: Mystery of the missing sunspots solved?
• PhysOrg: Quantum mysticism revealed (via Daily Grail)

Bruce Rolff / FeaturePics.com

Our consciousness plays a key role in how we perceive space and time, biomedical researcher Robert Lanza says in "Biocentrism."

Biomedical researcher Robert Lanza has been on the frontier of cloning and stem cell studies for more than a decade, so he's well-acclimated to controversy. But his book "Biocentrism" is generating controversy on a different plane by arguing that our consciousness plays a central role in creating the cosmos.

"By treating space and time as physical things, science picks a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world," Lanza declares.

Any claim that space and time aren't cold, hard, physical things has to raise an eyebrow. Some of the reactions to Lanza's ideas, first set forth two years ago in an essay for The American Scholar, brand them as "pseudo-scientific philosophical claptrap" or "no better than any religion."

Lanza admits that the reviews haven't all been glowing, particularly among some physicists. "Their response has been much how you'd expect priests to respond to stem cell research," he told me Monday.

Other physicists, however, point out that Lanza's view is fully in line with the perspective from quantum mechanics that the observer plays a huge role in how reality is observed.

"So what Lanza says in this book is not new," Richard Conn Henry, a physics and astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University, said in a book review. "Then why does Robert have to say it at all? It is because we, the physicists, do not say it - or if we do say it, we only whisper it, and in private - furiously blushing as we mouth the words. True, yes; politically correct, hell no!"

The weird twists in our view of the cosmos are hinted at in the scientific speculation over quantum teleportation, experiments in reverse-time causation, the idea that time has no independent existence, and physicist Stephen Hawkings' suggestion that the universe as we know it is generated through quantum interference involving all possible universes.

Lanza and his co-author, astronomer/columnist Bob Berman, try to assemble all those weird little twists into a larger theory. Rather than laying out the big picture here, I'll let them do it in an exclusive online abridgment:

CLICK HERE TO SAMPLE 'BIOCENTRISM'

The authors contend that their view of the cosmos can help resolve all the head-scratching over unifying the fundamental forces, or coming up with a "theory of everything" that covers the submicroscopic world of quantum effects as well as the grand workings of gravity.

There are potential pitfalls, of course. If you merely accept that reality works the way it does because that's how our senses and neurons are structured to perceive it, you could run the risk of shrugging off the search for deeper, truer descriptions of that reality.

One route would be to write off the still-mysterious aspects of our universe (e.g., what dark energy is, or how consciousness arises) as an expression of the anthropic principle. In effect, you're saying, "It's that way just because if it weren't, we wouldn't be here to observe it." Another route would be embracing intelligent design ("God did it").

Neither of those routes can be navigated very well using the scientific method, and Lanza and Berman point that out in their book. However, they don't lay out a detailed road map showing how a "biocentric" view of the universe might affect the course of science - other than to say that neuroscience needs more attention and string theory needs less.

Theoretically, one avenue might be to study how our brain organizes the incoming electrical impulses to create the matrix beyond - and tweak that circuitry in different ways. "With a little genetic engineering, you could probably make anything that's red move, or make a noise instead, or even make you feel hungry or want to have sex," Lanza said.

Lanza acknowledges that the step-by-step, objective approach to solving scientific puzzlers is still the way to go when you're focusing on a specific research project, such as turning the medical promise of embryonic stem cells into reality. He knows he's not making all this up.

"Day to day, yes, I can put x number of ml [milliliters] in a Petri dish, and I can predict exactly what the behavior is going to be," he told me.

But Lanza said quantum effects as basic as the two-slit experiment tell us that there's more to life, the universe and everything than milliliters of solution in a dish. "We have this way that we think of space and time on the street. It's day to day, paying your bills," Lanza said. "But when you look at these experiments, that's not what they're telling us. In fact, they're telling us quite the reverse."

Does all this make a difference in daily life, or how you see the world? Take a look at the free sample of "Biocentrism," and feel free to weigh in with your comments below. And if you're looking for more mind-blowing speculation, check out these archived Cosmic Log items:

• Paul Davies: The self-made universe
• Frank Wilczek: The grid we live in 
• Lanza on the "new theory of the universe"
• Lanza on evolution's future shock
• Six mind-blowing ideas

• Scitable: Learn science at Nature
• IEEE Spectrum: Why Mars? Why now? 
• N.Y. Times: New glimpses of life's puzzling origins
• Nat. Geo.: Crop circles point to tombs older than Stonehenge 

• This month, Virginia-based Space Adventures announced that Cirque du Soleil's billionaire founder, Guy Laliberte, is planning to take a multimillion-dollar trip to the international space station in September. But if Laliberte can't go, who is his backup? Today, the company said business and aviation attorney Barbara Barrett was training alongside Laliberte as the backup crew member for the Russian Soyuz flight. Barrett is an instrument-rated pilot, a former U.S. ambassador to Finland, and the wife of former Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. "Training as a backup for the September space launch is an adventure - and education - of a lifetime," Barrett said in today's announcement. The previously quoted price for the backup cosmonaut package (including training and certification at Russia's Star City cosmonaut complex) is $3 million, compared with an estimated $35 million to $40 million for the actual space trip.
• Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two carrier airplane zoomed through test flight No. 8 last week at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, and observers continue to expect that the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane will have its rollout and begin flight tests later this year. Groundbreaking ceremonies for SpaceShipTwo's future home, Spaceport America in New Mexico, are scheduled on Friday. The festivities should include a White Knight Two flyover, assuming that the weather and the flight test schedules are cooperative. If you can't be there in person, you can watch the webcast on the Spaceport America site. In honor of the event, the spaceport has released a fresh batch of design concepts for its suborbital flight terminal, due for completion in 2010 or 2011.
• The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is celebrating its new name, its new Web site ... and its new chairman, Mark Sirangelo of Sierra Nevada Corp. The New Space industry group used to be known as the Personal Spaceflight Federation, but at a recent board meeting, members decided that their ventures were about much more than just personal tourism. "There are so many uses for commercial access to space, and we want to emphasize the broad cross-section of potential markets for our members' products and services," the federation's president, Bretton Alexander, said in today's news release. The group's new officers include representatives from companies that are targeting NASA space station resupply contracts and research opportunities as well as the tourist/explorer clientele. 
• Should NASA modify its multibillion-dollar plan to retire the shuttles, build a new fleet of spaceships and return to the moon by 2020? That question is sure to be addressed on Wednesday during the first public hearing conducted by a independent review panel under the chairmanship of aerospace executive Norman Augustine. The panel, known formally as the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee (and informally as the Augustine 2.0 Commission), is due to meet from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, and NASA will be doing an all-day webcast on its Media Channel.

Kelley Knight Heins

Click for video: John Callas, project manager for the Mars rover mission, explains how a duplicate rover is being used at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to figure out how best to free up a rover stuck in Martian sand. Click on the image to watch an msnbc.com video.

Take two parts diatomaceous earth, add one part clay ... and voila! You've got a blend of simulated Martian sand fine enough to get a rover stuck in.

"It's not a secret formula," John Callas, project manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers, said as he showed us around the place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory where a stand-in for the Spirit rover is mired in buckets of the stuff.

The semi-impromptu tour, arranged for me and a few other folks who attended last week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, Calif., provided an inside look at the clean room where NASA's future Mars rover is taking shape, as well as the not-so-clean room where rovers are put to the test.

Sometimes the tests are conducted long after the real rover has left the building, and that's why an engineering model of the Mars Exploration Rover (known as the Surface System Test Bed rover, or SSTB) is up to its robotic ankles in fake Martian sand at JPL's In-Situ Instrument Laboratory. The real Spirit rover has been stuck in a sand trap and possibly hung up on a rock for more than a month, and its handlers are planning to practice techniques for dislodging it in an indoor pit filled with crushed rock.

Once the pit is set up to duplicate the scene on the west side of the Martian plateau known as Home Plate, mission managers will see which maneuvers have the best chance of freeing Spirit. For example, should the rover try following its own tracks out of the mire, or turn its wheels down the slope to take advantage of gravity? Should it go slow, or go for broke?

"The most important thing is, we don't want to make things worse," Callas explained. The rover could just spin itself in deeper, for example, and get hung up on the pyramid-shaped rock that appears to be sitting beneath its belly. That would immobilize Spirit: After more than five years of rambling, the rover would end its days at that spot.

"If you set the belly on the ground, I think it's 'game over' at that point. We don't want to do that," Callas said.

Kelley Knight Heins A "Rover Crossing" sign is mounted near the entrance to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's In-Situ Instrument Laboratory, where rovers sometimes get grimy.

Last Tuesday, while we were looking in on the pit, workers were shoveling the crushed rock to build a mound with the same 12-degree slant that Spirit is experiencing on Mars. Then a box will be placed on the slope and filled with a sandy soil like the stuff in which Spirit is stuck.

This particular stuff is lighter and fluffier than your typical Martian soil. "It's almost flourlike," Callas said. Duplicating the texture wasn't easy, but after fiddling with the ingredients, engineers came up with the not-so-secret formula Callas described. They hollowed out a hole in the rock pit, set a blue tarp down into the hole, filled it with the simulated sand and then stuck two of the test rover's six wheels way down into the hole for a "shoebox test." The test showed that the mixture seemed to have about the right fluffiness.

The next task is to mix up enough of the faux Mars muck to fill NASA's sandbox and start making dry runs. Eventually, a sequence of maneuvers will be beamed up to Spirit, and the microscopic imager on the end of Spirit's robotic arm will be used to monitor the rover's progress.

It could take weeks for the plan to play out, but that's fully in line with NASA's expectations: When Spirit's twin, the Opportunity rover, was stuck in a sand dune on the other side of the Red Planet, back in 2005, breaking free took weeks as well. Spirit's current situation looks even stickier, Callas said.

At least he and his colleagues are on the right track with their formula for Martian sand. Who knows? Maybe you could even sell the stuff. When our NASA guide, Whitney Clavin, put her hand in the sand, the sensation made her suspect that Mars might not be all that bad a place after all.

"That felt great!" she said later. "That stuff felt like a beach in Thailand." 

NASA / JPL-Caltech Click for video: Full-scale models of three generations of Mars rovers were put on display at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in May 2008: Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner rover is front and center, with the Mars Exploration Rover (model for Spirit and Opportunity) at left and the Mars Science Laboratory (now named Curiosity) at right. Click on the image for a YouTube video of the photo opportunity.

The grimy rover pit is just a few minutes' walk from the immaculate clean room where the successor to Spirit and Opportunity is taking shape. Components for the Mars Science Laboratory, which was rechristened the "Curiosity" rover last month after a naming contest, are spread across the floor of a warehouse-sized white room at JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility.

A model of the spacecraft's "Sky Crane" descent stage sits against one side of the room like a giant spider. A couple of saucer-shaped protective shells are in different corners, covered in shiny shrouds. Racks of rover wheels are sitting in the center of the floor, as are two partly assembled models of the rover itself. One is an engineering model, which would be used like the rover in the rocky pit. The other is the flight model, which is due for launch in 2011 and a soft Martian landing in 2012.

"The engineering model will get dirty," the mission's deputy project scientist, Joy Crisp, told us. "The flight model will stay clean."

If NASA stuck with its original plan, Curiosity would have been launched this year. But money troubles and problems with the rover's actuators led mission planners to order a two-year postponement. I asked Crisp whether she was worried that engineers would lose their edge due to the delay.

"That's not our big worry," she replied. "It's still a very big, complex, challenging thing. ... Even with the two years, we're going, 'Oh, gosh, this is hard!'"

Curiosity is designed to drill into some of Mars' biggest mysteries: What types of organic compounds are hidden in the rock and soil? What happened to the liquid water and the carbon dioxide that scientists believe was more abundant on ancient Mars? Could this seemingly dead world sustain life?

For big questions, you need a big rover, and Curiosity will be the biggest rover ever to roam the Red Planet. It measures 10 feet long (3 meters long, not including its robotic arm) and weighs 1,927 pounds (900 kilograms). In comparison, Spirit and Opportunity are both 5.2 feet (1.6 meters) long and weigh in at 384 pounds (174 kilograms) each.

Kelley Knight Heins A clean-room worker vacuums the floor near models of the Curiosity rover that are being put together at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Spacecraft Assembly Facility in Pasadena, Calif. (The flight model is to the worker's left, and the engineering model is to the right. Click on the picture for an overall view of the clean room.)

 As we looked down into the clean room from a viewing gallery, white-suited workers covered up some of the racks and attached equipment to an overhead hoist system. One worker pulled around what seemed to be a rather low-tech vacuum cleaner, making sure the clean room was as clean as could be. (Crisp guessed that the vacuum was equipped with special HEPA filters.)

Launch vehicle manager Arden Acord stopped by the gallery for a look, and told us that the clean-room workers were practicing the installation procedure for Curiosity's plutonium-fueled power source.

Curiosity will be drawing electricity from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, unlike the solar-powered rovers currently operating on Mars. (Even Spirit and Opportunity use radioisotope units as heaters, however.) Through the decades, RTGs have been used on spacecraft ranging from the Apollo lunar lander to the Mars Viking lander, the Cassini orbiter and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. The units are considered more reliable than solar arrays for providing round-the-clock power, but they tend to generate controversy as well as electricity.

Acord knows full well that RTGs need to be handled carefully, and as little as possible. The units can get as hot as 350 degrees Fahrenheit (175 degrees Celsius). "We're not putting the real one on until [Curiosity is being prepared for launch at] the Cape," he said.

The practice unit has to be installed - quickly, efficiently and safely - through a hole in the side of the spacecraft's backshell, Acord said.

"The health physics people down at the Cape have to know that you know what you're doing," he explained. "That's why you have to do it with a tape measure and a stopwatch."

NASA / JPL Click for video: Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Alliance Spacesystems test the range of motion on the Curiosity rover's robotic arm joints. The instruments have not been mounted on the arm's turret yet, but weights have been placed on it for testing. Click on the image for a QuickTime video from NASA that shows the testing procedure (sped up to compress the time).

Other aspects of spacecraft assembly are practiced using similar routines. Engineers recently put an engineering model of Curiosity's robotic arm through its paces, using dummy weights at the end of the arm. The real thing will bristle with tools, including a camera, a spectrometer, a drill, a brush and a tungsten carbide drill.

"This arm is truly amazing," Crisp said. "It's got 75 pounds on the end of this huge robotic arm."

Assembling everything will take months, and if the past is any guide, Curiosity and its earthbound twin will be at least partially assembled far more than once.

"They've put things together and have done some testing - and then they took it apart," Crisp said.

For updates on the Mars missions, check in with our "Return to the Red Planet" section. For more "Inside" reports, click on the links to these archived items:

• 2006: Inside the rocket factory
• 2006: Inside the spacecraft factory
• 2007: Inside the big-bang machine
• 2007: Inside the antimatter factory
• 2007: Inside the subatomic race
• 2008: Inside the supernova machine
• 2008: Under the neutron microscope
• 2008: Inside the subatomic dragstrip

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto." 

• Innumerable Worlds: Carnival of Space 107 
• Science News: The red roots of human behavior
• New Scientist: A supervolcano under Mt. St. Helens?
• ArXiv Blog: Wormholes would generate weird quantum force