Gary Meek / Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech Professor Kostas Konstantinidis displays Shewanella microbes that have the ability to "inhale" certain metals and compounds and convert them to an altered state, which is typically much less toxic.

Using genetic analysis, scientists discover that a type of germ used for cleaning up toxic sites is actually many types of germs that gobble up different kinds of crud. This suggests that a smorgasbord of microbes could be customized for different applications – ranging from cleaning nuclear dump sites to powering future fuel cells.

"Soon we will be able to pick the right strain for cleaning specific environments," said Kostas Konstantinidis, an environmental microbiologist at Georgia Tech. "But we are in the beginning stages of this."

Konstantinidis and his colleagues focused on a bacterial genus known as Shewanella, which is found in a wide spectrum of ecosystems ranging from the Arctic to the Amazon. Their genetic analysis of 10 strains of Shewanella is being published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Shewanella typically converts metals and other nasty compounds into less toxic stuff - which makes the bacteria well-suited for environmental cleanup duty. One strain of the bacteria, Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, is particularly good at sucking metal oxides from groundwater and transforming them into insoluble forms that are ripe for removal. The Energy Department is looking into whether that strain could help clean up radioactive nuclear weapons sites.

Shewanella is also being studied as a potential power converter for microbial fuel cells. In that application, Shewanella (or other microbes such as Geobacter) would gobble up metals and expel electrons as a waste product, setting up "circuits of slime."

One of Shewanella's strengths is that it adapts easily to different environments and energy sources. "They can actually capture DNA from the environment that gives them a selective advantage," said Margaret Romine, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and one of Konstantinidis' co-authors.

In the lab, one strain of Shewanella can look just like another - which is a problem if you're trying to find just the right germ for the job.

"If you look at different strains of Shewanella under a microscope, or you look at their ribosomal genes, which are routinely used to identify newly isolated strains of bacteria, they look identical," Konstantinidis explained in a Georgia Tech news release. But when 10 seemingly similar strains were subjected to whole-genome sequencing and proteomic analysis, the researchers found far more diversity than they expected.

Some strains had 98 percent of their genes in common, while others shared only 70 percent of their genes. And the differences in expressed proteins were even larger than the differences in genetic content. In comparison, humans and chimpanzees have 96 percent of their genetic coding in common.

"In humans, there are multiple levels of organization, so it's not fair just to compare the numbers," Konstantinidis told me. "But it does give you a perspective on how much diversity exists there in the environment."

All but one of the 10 strains studied could gobble up several types of metals. The oddball was a type of bacteria that couldn't convert metals anaerobically, but relied on nitrates and oxygen instead. "There are a lot of things that this one guy has lost, so what it's done is that it's taken a different evolutionary path," Romine said.

The genetic analysis indicated that the Shewanella strains acquired the genes that were needed to adapt to a particular environment - freshwater or saltwater, sandstone or sediment - and shed the genes that became unnecessary.

Konstantinidis said the kind of genetic analysis he and his colleagues conducted could eventually serve as a guide for finding "the right strain for the right environment in the right conditions."

In the short term, scientists could mix up a smorgasbord of Shewanella and see which strains worked best in which setting, Konstantinidis said. In the longer term - say, five years from now - scientists could well be making genetic modifications to customize bacterial strains for a particular cleanup job or energy application.

That may sound like a bioengineering dream come true - and in fact, there are signs that we're already well on our way toward a biotech bounty. But in the wrong hands, genetically engineered bacteria could spark a bioterror nightmare. What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

The research reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was supported by the Energy Department through the Shewanella Federation consortium and the Proteomics Application project. In addition to Konstantinidis and Romine, the research team included Margrethe Serres of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.; Jorge Rodrigues of the University of Texas; Jennifer Auchtung and James Tiedje of Michigan State University;  Anna Obraztsova and Kenneth Nealson of the University of Southern California; Carol Giometti of Argonne National Laboratory; and Lee-Ann McCue, Mary Lipton and James Fredrickson of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."  You can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

Hector Mata / AP

Smoke sweeps over Southern California's Mount Wilson Observatory.

Wildfires in California are always a cause for alarm, but the raging Station Fire is particularly alarming for researchers and science fans because it has endangered some of Southern California's astronomical crown jewels, including historic Mount Wilson Observatory and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Even though the worst seems to be over for JPL, only mission-critical employees are at work today, due to concerns about air quality. That means Mars rover operations have been suspended for the day. "The rovers understand," project manager John Callas was quoted as saying.

The outlook is worse for Mount Wilson. Gaggles of science geeks are anxiously monitoring the firefight through Web sites, webcams and Twitter updates. Here are a few of the resources to check - and feel free to add to the list by leaving a comment:

Twitter updates:

• @NASAJPL: JPL's official Twitter account.
• @jhjones: Jane Houston Jones, astronomer involved with Cassini mission outreach at JPL.
• @elakdawalla: Emily Lakdawalla, planetary geologist who blogs for the Planetary Society.
• @plutokiller: Mike Brown, Caltech astronomer and dwarf-planet discoverer.
• #station: Umbrella search term for Station Fire updates.

Web sites and webcams:

• Towercam image from Mount Wilson Observatory
• Fire updates from Mount Wilson Observatory
• Station Fire updates from La Canada Flintridge
• YouTube time-lapse video of Station Fire
• Overnight time lapse of Mount Wilson (via @plutokiller)
• L.A. fires as seen from NASA's Terra satellite

I'm taking Friday off as part ofŠa long end-of-summer weekend, while keeping one eye on NASA's third (or is that fourth?) countdown to the shuttle Discovery's launch. In the meantime, here are a few WebŠlinks aimed atŠcalming downŠyour apocalyptic fears and/or firing up your imagination:

• Space Disco: Happy Mars Hoax Day!
• The Daily Grail: Who is Rupert Sheldrake?
• New Yorker: Experiments in environmentalism
• Associated Content: Viral campaign hypes '2012'
• Cosmic Log rewind: Mars, 2012 ... and lost socks

IBM Research - Zurich

Click for video: This graphic shows how scientists used a carbon monoxide molecule on the end of a metal tip to map a pentacene molecule. Click on the image to watch a video from NBC's "Nightly News."

Scientists have traced the structure of a complete molecule in all its glory, using the sharpest pen ever devised: an atomic force microscope tipped with a single molecule of carbon monoxide.

The experiment, detailed in Friday's issue of the journal Science, could help open up a new frontier for molecular-scale circuitry and construction.

Researchers have been imaging molecules and their constituent atoms in crystals for decades, but the trick is to get a fine-resolution fix on the structure and behavior of an entire, self-contained molecule as it sits on a surface.

If you have the wrong stuff at the very tip of your probe, the very act of mapping the molecule can spoil the picture.

Leo Gross and his colleagues at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory found that a carbon monoxide molecule (with its oxygen atom sticking straight out from the tip) produced "spectacular" images of the pentacene molecule. That's a well-studied type of hydrocarbon composed of five benzene rings interlocked in a row (C₂₂H₁₄).

Science / IBM

Several pentacene molecules are imaged using non-contact atomic force microscopy.

The benzene rings showed up brightly in the atomic-scale images, just as predicted by theory. One of the images published in Science even showed several of the five-ring molecules scattered around a surface like nano-caterpillars.

The researchers said their results were so good because the carbon monoxide molecule could get incredibly close to the pentacene molecule without picking it up or moving it around. When they tried probes that were tipped in metals, such as gold or silver or copper, the pentacene molecule would move around before the tip came close enough to map the chemical forces holding the molecule together.

The IBM team concluded that non-contact atomic force microscopy can be a great way to see how molecules are put together, but only if the microscope's probe is tipped with the right stuff.

The next step is to probe differently constructed molecules to see how they react with various types of tips - and see which kinds of surfaces work best as a molecular-scale lab bench. The goal of all this is to devise a molecular construction toolkit, as well as methods for watching how the tools in the kit work together.

"Eventually we want to investigate using molecules for molecular electronics," Gross told Chemistry World. "We want to use molecules as wires or logic switches or elements."

Experts in nanotechnology have long dreamed of creating molecular-scale circuitry that could revolutionize the computer world. But Gross told EETimes that the revolution is still far off. "It will take at least 15 years to see molecular electronic applications," he said, "and it is by no means certain that we will succeed."

That sounds like a refreshingly realistic assessment to me - but what do you think? Feel free to add your comments below.

Update for 10 p.m. ET Aug. 31: I've added a link to the video from NBC's "Nightly News" in which anchor Brian Williams discusses the magnificent molecule imagery.

ESO

The Trifid Nebula reveals three faces in this ESO view. Click on the image for a larger version.

The latest view of the Trifid Nebula serves as fresh evidence that good things definitely come in threes: This star-illuminated cloud of gas and dust gets its name from its three-lobed appearance (via the Latin word "trifidus"), and the European Southern Observatory's crowd-pleasing picture puts the "three faces" of the nebula on full display.

The Trifid Nebula, which lies thousands of light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, was first observed by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764 - who listed it as No. 20 in his famous catalog of interesting sky objects. It was English astronomer John Herschel who gave it the "Trifid" tag 60 years later.

In the centuries since then, the nebula has been imaged thousands of times, by the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes great and small. Today the ESO showed off its own view of the nebula, captured by the Wide-Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The three-lobed central region of the nebula is just one of the Trifid's three faces. As explained in today's image advisory from the ESO, that pinkish-red glow arises when young stars heat up the surrounding gas so much that it glows with the hot red signature given off by hydrogen. This is the Trifid's classic emission nebula.

The light-obscuring lanes of dust and cool gas that trisect the bright lobes represent another face, known as dark nebulae. Still more dark nebulae are scattered around the Trifid scene - and around the cosmos at large. The Horsehead Nebula, 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Orion, is the best-known example.

Blasts of stellar radiation can sculpt and squeeze the dense knots of nebular material into fresh batches of stars and planets. One potential example of this can be seen toward the lower part of the emission nebula, where a silhouetted finger (seen more clearly in this Hubble closeup) seems to point toward the nebula's bright central star. Actually, the star's radiation is carving away at the finger, leaving behind an evaporating gaseous globule, or EGG. Such EGGs are most famously on display in Hubble's iconic picture of the Eagle Nebula, known as the "Pillars of Creation."

The Trifid's third face is recognizable as a reflection nebula - that is, a cloud of gas that doesn't glow on its own but instead scatters the light filtering through from nearby stars. The effect can be seen just above and to the left of the emission nebula, where bluish clouds are lit up by sparkling stars.

"The largest of these stars shines most brightly in the hot, blue portion of the visible spectrum," ESO says in its advisory. "This, along with the fact that dust grains and molecules scatter blue light more efficiently than red light - a property that explains why we have blue skies and red sunsets - imbues this portion of the Trifid Nebula with an azure hue."

Eventually, the surrounding clouds will dissipate, leaving behind groupings of mature stars - just as a primordial nebula left behind our sun and its stellar neighbors billions of years ago. Billions of years from now, our sun - and some of the Trifid Nebula's hot young things - may well give rise to yet another type of nebula: the planetary nebulae created when dying sunlike stars blow off shells of colorful glowing gas.

You'll find all sorts of nebular faces in our Space Gallery, including our slideshow tribute to the "Pillars of Creation." But don't stop there: Check out the ESO's zoom-in video of the Trifid Nebula, look for planetary nebulae in msnbc.com's archive and learn about a brand-new breed of cosmic objects called "super-planetary nebulae."

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NASA

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams uses a "lab-on-a-chip" on the international space station in 2007. The device has been compared to the tricorder on "Star Trek."

NASA says the shuttle Discovery's mission marks the start of the international space station's transition from a construction site to a full-fledged orbital lab. But space station science is still more promise than payoff.

The folks in charge of the station's scientific program say they're just now getting a chance to make good on the scientific promise. "The STS-128 flight is going to complete the final outfitting of the station with its major research facilities," Mark Uhran, NASA's assistant associate administrator for space station, told reporters during a weekend briefing.

Among the goodies packed into Discovery's cargo bay are a brand-new space station rack designed for experiments in fluid physics, another rack devoted to materials science (with room for a zero-G furnace), a second lab freezer for storing biological samples, and scads of scientific experiments.

On the way down, Discovery will be carrying another couple of batches of experiments that have been mounted on the station's exterior for more than a year. Most of those experiments are aimed at testing how various materials stand up to the radiation and vacuum of the space environment. Some of those materials may well be used for building the Orion crew capsule that's supposed to take the shuttle's place, said Julie Robinson, NASA's space station program scientist.

Robinson and her colleagues have detailed more than 150 research projects that have been conducted aboard the space station over the past nine years or so, most notably in a technical report released earlier this year. Nevertheless, critics say the research output from the $100 billion station seems underwhelming when compared with the thousands of studies produced by the Hubble Space Telescope and other unmanned space probes.

As we discussed just last week, the space station's relatively low profile among scientists is one factor behind the rise of interest in private-sector suborbital research opportunities.

Sunday's briefing was aimed at signaling that NASA and its international partners would be making the space station more science-friendly in the years to come. Now that the station's long-duration crew has expanded from three to six, there should be more time available for doing orbital research, Uhran said. And on the flip side, researchers will be taking advantage of the fresh opportunities that are becoming available.

"We're right on the cusp of that right now," Uhran said, "and the largest reason behind that cusp has been that the perception of risk has been very high during the assembly phase. Two years ago, people weren't certain whether the space station was going to be completed on schedule."

Comeback for science?
Even three years ago, NASA acknowledged that science would have to be pushed out of the spotlight as station construction was ramped up - and the cutback in funding left some researchers out in the cold. Today, there's still some perception of risk, because NASA hasn't even committed to funding the station in 2016 and beyond. Uhran noted that "few people want to get involved" in a lab project when the lab might be shut down in just a few years.

"I think it would really cut us off short if the station ended in six years," said Jeanne Becker, chief science officer for Texas-based Astrogenetix.

Astrogenetix's research into disease virulence were held up as a success story for space station science. Starting last year, the company has flown samples into orbit aimed at studying how microbes such as the ones that cause salmonella poisoning and staph infections behave differently in space.

Earlier research found that salmonella bacteria became much more virulent in space - perhaps because the fluid conditions in zero gravity are similar to the conditions found inside our intestines. Follow-up studies supported by Astrogenetix built upon that finding by sending genetically modified roundworms into orbit.

The worms were studied after each flight to see whether blocking particular genetic factors reduced the rise in virulence, and researchers think they've hit paydirt: Astrogenetix is now trying to develop a salmonella vaccine on Earth, based on the genetic leads discovered in space. Astrogenetix is getting ready to file an application with the Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials, Becker said.

"We're very excited about these results, which really would not have been made possible had we not had continued access to space to be able to do iterative-type studies," she said.

The company is also conducting a multiflight study to find out whether a similar vaccine can be developed for MRSA, a drug-resistant strain of staph that has been linked to tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations. "In these survey flights, it demonstrated a good proof of concept to continue with results in MRSA," Becker said.

Thomas B. Pickens III, Astrogenetix's chairman of the board, told me that researchers weren't sure that the MRSA bacteria would spark the same virulence response that salmonella did in space. "We were on pins and needles when we sent MRSA up, and when it came back we were very pleased to find out that it acted in the same way," he said in an interview.

Pickens acknowledged that the project still had a long way to go. "The pharmaceutical industry doesn't really pay any attention to anybody unless you've gone through the FDA process," he said. And many biomedical researchers aren't yet convinced that spaceflights are necessary to figure out how to fight infectious diseases. In fact, some pooh-pooh reports of space-related "breakthroughs" as little more than efforts to sell the space program.

Pickens, however, is convinced that Astrogenetix is "on the forefront of something big."

He is already talking about taking on one of the other promised frontiers in space research: enhanced protein crystal growth in microgravity. If purer proteins can be grown in space, that could help researchers develop entirely new breeds of medications.

"They can do the aqueous proteins ... like Viagra was one that they did," Pickens said. "But when you get into the really tough stuff, the proteins that cause these really sinister diseases, those are the ones that are so complex that they can't find solutions. ... We see that as the next natural step for Astrogenetix to go to."

Benefits on Earth?
The space station already serves as a platform for solving the problems that will need to be addressed in order for humans to push out farther into outer space. For example, researchers recently found that long-duration spacefliers urgently needed to boost their vitamin D supplement, NASA's Robinson said.

But when it comes to doing science with applications on Earth - such as developing new medical treatments and new industrial materials - the jury is still out. In fact, Uhran would say that NASA has barely had a chance to make its case.

"If I look back cumulatively over the past 25 years, at the opportunities that we've had on prior programs - believe it or not, we've only had the equivalent cumulatively of about six months of laboratory time in space," Uhran said. "Remember, those missions were only 10- or 12-day missions at best. But now, with a continuously operating space station, we'll surpass that in the first 90 days. In fact, we've surpassed it already with the space station in the assembly phase. That's why I say this is a real critical juncture that we're at."

Once science really gets going on the space station, Uhran believes the questions about extending operations on the orbital outpost beyond 2015 will quickly get resolved.

"If we can get this R&D program ramped up, I'm not that concerned about the lifetime," he said. "I think it'll make its own argument."

But what do you think? Is the space station just about to come into its own as a place for doing research, or is it a scientific dead end? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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NASA

Physiologists and spotters put NASA's COLBERT treadmill to the test during a zero-gravity flight aboard the space agency's C-9B jet aircraft.

The Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (a.k.a. COLBERT) won't be the first piece of exercise equipment in space, but it could be the most famous orbital workout device, thanks to its celebrity acronym.

"I am 'go' to launch me," talk-show host Stephen Colbert declared today in a pre-recorded send-off for NASA's COLBERT treadmill. "Let's light this candle!"

The twists and turns in the tale of the treadmill - which is flying up to the international space station aboard the space shuttle Discovery - would be worth at least two or three gags on "The Colbert Report."

For starters, consider the origins of the acronym: Earlier this year, NASA set up a naming contest for one of the space station's last components, provisionally known as Node 3. The pressurized module, due for launch next February, will eventually house life support systems and connect other "rooms" in the orbiting laboratory. It also will provide one of the station's best views of the cosmos outside, thanks to a dome-shaped cupola.

NASA let the public vote on four choices for Node 3's final name - Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity or Venture - but the agency also allowed write-in votes. And that write-in provision created a classic opening for Colbert's alter-egotism.

NASA TV

Click for video: Watch Stephen Colbert's comic send-off to NASA's space treadmill.

The comedian, who takes on the on-screen persona of a bloviating right-winger, has lent his name to a bald eagle, a leatherback turtle and a species of diving beetle. He once egged on his viewers to register 17 million online votes in a naming contest for a bridge in Budapest. (The big reason why it's not called the Colbert Bridge today is because the rules forbade naming the thing after a living person.)

Getting the "Colbert Nation" to put his name in first place in the NASA contest was a slam-dunk. More than 230,000 write-ins were recorded, meaning that Colbert drubbed second-place "Serenity" by 40,000 votes. But just because you come in first doesn't mean you're the winner: There was no way NASA would name the node after a living person, let alone a cable-channel comedian.

To save face, the space agency looked for something else to name after Colbert. For a time, the rumor mill focused on the space station's $19 million toilet, but eventually someone came up with the idea of putting the COLBERT acronym on the exercise device known as Treadmill 2. The decision was announced by marathoning astronaut Sunita Williams on Colbert's show. 

As for Node 3, NASA ended up choosing a none-of-the-above name: Tranquility, in honor of the moon base where Apollo 11 touched down 40 years ago. Even today, the comedian couldn't resist giving NASA a comedic tweak today for passing up "Colbert" and going with Tranquility instead. "Yeah. That'll scare the aliens," he said. "They're not gonna mess with Earth now - we might get all relaxed at them."

NASA

The COLBERT treadmill patch has become a collector's item.

The COLBERT treadmill caused a sensation on a level not often seen in the world of exercise equipment. If you had the good sense to buy the treadmill's "official" patch, depicting a cartoony Colbert on the run, today you'd have a real collector's item on your hands (or on your jacket). The patch had to be discontinued soon after it came out, because the rights to use Colbert's image turned out to be murky. Today, a patch that typically would sell for $5 or less attracts bids that occasionally range past $100.

It's not as if the treadmill itself is all that remarkable. The space station already has six exercise devices on board, including a different type of treadmill known as the TVIS (Treadmill with Vibration Isolation and Stabilization) that is recessed into the floor of the Russian-built Zvezda service module.

Colbert joked that the new treadmill will help "finally slim down all those overweight astronauts."

"Let's face it, being weightless is mostly just a desperate bid to get away from that bathroom scale every morning," Colbert said. "But you guys and gals are ambassadors to the universe. Don't make us look bad. Put down the astronaut ice cream, tubby. Tubby, tubby, two-by-four, couldn't fit through the air lock door."

Jokes aside, the astronauts' daily treadmill run (plus other workouts amounting to two and a half hours a day) is a matter of self-preservation, not weight loss.

Studies have shown that spacefliers quickly lose bone mass and muscle tone unless they follow a vigorous exercise regimen. Researchers suspect that the lack of gravity basically signals the body that it's OK to let the muscles atrophy and let the bones weaken. Exercise is the best way to override that signal - and in that sense, COLBERT and the other exercise devices are lifesavers, not just a lifestyle choice.

Two treadmills will come in handy now that the space station's long-duration crew has been doubled from three to six.

Off-the-shelf equipment
COLBERT's roots go back to Wisconsin-based Woodway USA, which provided six of its treadmills under the terms of Wyle Laboratories' contract with NASA for biomedical services. "Our treadmill is as close to off-the-shelf as you can get," Eric Weber, Woodway's director of sales and marketing, told me today. 

The devices were modified to have a metal rather than a rubber running surface. The controls were moved off to the side, and a spring tensioner was added so that the treadmill's belt worked properly in zero-G. The treadmill itself was housed in a spring-equipped base to cut down on vibration, gussied up with bungee cords to push the weightless runner down onto the belt, and instrumented with sensors to record the biomedical effects produced by different types of exercise.

The final model is heavier and wider than NASA's TVIS treadmill, and the space agency expects it to be simpler, more reliable and easier to maintain. (Space station astronauts had to give the TVIS treadmill a complete overhaul a couple of months ago.)

Only one of the six Woodway treadmills is actually heading up to the station. The other five are being used for research, development and testing.

The pompous pundit you typically see on "The Colbert Report" might have expressed mock outrage to hear, by way of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that treadmills originally retailing for about $7,000 ended up costing the government about $6.8 million each. But there was none of that in Colbert's send-off, aired on NASA TV today.

"I just want to say, we are all huge fans here, and it has been a true honor to make merciless fun of you this year," Colbert told the space agency.

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NASA

NASA scientists work on an experiment flown on a zero-G airplane flight. Suborbital craft could open up a new frontier.

The killer app for private spaceflight, at least once the millionaires and celebrities have had their turn, may well be scientific research.

"You spark this industry with tourists, but I predict in the next decade the research market is going to be bigger than the tourist market," says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Colorado-based Southwest Research Institute who is heading up a committee to link up researchers with future suborbital spaceflights.

Until recently, suborbital space trips were marketed primarily as the penultimate high for well-heeled thrill-seekers. Plunking down $200,000 for an afternoon-long ride to weightless heights was seen as the next adventure for folks who have been around the world, down to Antarctica and up to Everest - but can't take a $35 million trip to the international space station.

But is the tourist market big enough to sustain private-sector spaceflight, particularly in the early years? Virtually all the major players in the still-gestating suborbital industry now realize that research flights could make the difference in their drive to profitability.

One of the clearest signs of that came last month, when an Arab investment group bought a $280 million stake in British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic venture, putting special emphasis on the capability to fly scientific experiments and deploy small satellites.

California-based XCOR Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have made research missions a big part of their business plans. Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace has a deal to fly experiments from Purdue University on its experimental "Mod" rocket. Even Blue Origin, the secretive space effort backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has worked out plans to fly suborbital experiments, starting with unmanned tests currently set for 2011.

Scientists are already organizing themselves to take advantage of the opportunities ahead. This week, Stern convened the first meeting of a committee known as the Suborbital Applications Research Group (SARG, or "Sarge"), organized in Boulder, Colo., under the aegis of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. After the meeting, Stern and others touted the effort at a meeting of a http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/meetingview.aspx?MeetingID=3547&MeetingNo=5">National Academies board in Boulder.

"I think this is going to be an enormous, enormous enterprise," Stern told me.

Why do it?
There are other options for space research, of course, ranging from zero-G airplane flights to suborbital sounding rockets to unmanned orbital and deep-space flights to space station experiments. So why would researchers, and even NASA, opt for rides on private spaceships that have yet to be built?

Cost is just one reason, Stern told me. A $200,000 ticket for a space ride may sound expensive for a tourist, but it's peanuts compared to the $2 million or more charged for the launch of a NASA sounding rocket, he said.

What's more, the coming suborbital spaceships will be "a completely different breed of cat from all the rockets that are around," Stern said. Eventually, Virgin Galactic intends to fly its SpaceShipTwo fleet several times a day - compared with perhaps a couple of dozen NASA suborbital rocket launches in the course of a year.

"If you could go at [an experiment] every day of the year and see the atmosphere changing, how powerful would that be?" Stern said. "This becomes a laboratory-like experience."

Piloted spaceships are also likely to provide a more robust environment for research. Scientists would be more likely to get their experiment back and less likely to lose it in a hard landing. "These vehicles will be designed to fly octogenarians in good health," Stern said. "Well, what does that mean to me as a scientist? If it can fly grandmas, I can pull the rack out of my lab, and it should be able to fly in space. That's a radical change."

Experimenters could also fly along with their experiments - not just once, but multiple times. "Graduate students will be doing their own Ph.D.s in these vehicles," Stern predicted.

John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said suborbital research opportunities could give students valuable experience in designing experimental packages, integrating them with launch vehicles and actually seeing the hardware fly. "That's an experience that's just difficult to get elsewhere in the space industry," Gedmark told me. 

What to do?
The researchers who attended this week's committee meeting anticipate that private-sector flights will cut out virtually all the red tape currently required for space station experiments. John Pojman, a chemistry professor at Louisiana State University, is looking forward to quick progress on his research into fluid dynamics - specifically, how fluids of different densities mix under various conditions.

Years ago, Pojman was in line to have one of his experiments flown on the space station. "We passed our scientific review, we were in design mode, and then after the Columbia [disintegrated in 2003], we were 'deflighted,'" he recalled.

NASA's managers eventually jury-rigged an experiment that involved injecting a squirt of Russian honey into water recovered from the station's urine collection system. Pojman said it took 900 e-mails and numerous teleconferences over the course of six months to work out the details. "The astronauts were great, but that was a lot of trouble for something that I think should have been easier to get approval for," he said.

More rigorous zero-gravity experiments could be done much more easily on a suborbital spaceship, Pojman said. "We don't need orbital time periods," he said. "We don't need hours, we just need minutes."

Stern said a wide range of experiments could be done in life sciences, materials science or even planetary science. "One of the things I want to do is look for the vulcanoids, close to the sun," he told me. "We'll take a bunch of deep images of the sky, and we'll find them if they're there. We can nail this problem in a few flights."

Even space tourists could be enlisted for research. "We're going to instrument the tourists, and we're going to fly hundreds of thousands of experimental subjects," Stern said.

Who's involved?
The next steps are to prepare researchers for the suborbital flights ahead. If test flights begin in 2010 and 2011, as currently anticipated, the time for developing experiments is right now. To jump-start the process, the Southwest Research Institute has scheduled a suborbital flight training course for a dozen researchers at the National AeroSpace Training and Research Center, or NASTAR, in Pennsylvania in January.

Stern is also organizing a February conference for researchers interested in suborbital opportunities - and expects hundreds to attend. He also expects a wide variety of governmental agencies to get into the act.

"This is so cheap, and the applications are so good, that I expect NIH, NSF, DOD, DOE, a whole slew of federal agencies will have space efforts, just like federal agencies have boats and airplanes that they use," he said. "Literally, Aruba could afford to have a spaceflight program. ... Every country that wants to have their own space program with astronauts can go."

That would be the fulfillment of a years-long dream for Stern, who was once in line to become an astronaut and later spent a yearlong stint as the space agency's associate administrator for science. He was among those who persuaded NASA administrator at the time, Mike Griffin, to lend his backing to private-sector suborbital research flights.

"Mike loved it," Stern recalled. "It's sort of stymied right now. There's no champion for it, but I think NASA will figure it out, and the research community will see that this is so powerful."

To hear Stern talk, the sky's the limit when it comes to science on suborbital spaceships. He likens the current situation to the state of space science just after World War II, when American researchers didn't know what to do with all the V-2 rockets brought over from Nazi Germany.

"By the time the International Geophysical Year came along in 1957, the scientific community didn't know how they could live without sounding rockets," Stern said. "I told my committee, we are in 1946. And I told them that by 2019, no one will know how to live without this."

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USGS

Gas hydrates are   deposits of ice that   contain natural gas.

Energy experts say vast undersea reserves of natural gas hydrates may be more accessible than previously thought, potentially offering an important stopgap in the coming energy transition.

But unless the transition is handled adroitly, gas hydrates could set off a vicious circle of global warming - and there are already signs that the situation is heating up.

The promise of gas hydrates is highlighted this week in the journal Science: Ray Boswell, a researcher at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, recaps a string of pilot projects aimed at assessing what it would take to harvest undersea gas hydrates.

Gas hydrate deposits are a big deal because they are so widespread, and yet so mysterious: These undersea deposits form from methane and water at low temperatures and moderate pressures. The methane molecules are trapped within lattices of water molecules, but they can be released by raising the temperature or lowering the pressure.

Boswell cites estimates suggesting that 20 quadrillion cubic meters of methane could be trapped within global deposits. If all that methane could be extracted, it would provide enough natural gas to supply the United States at current levels for more than 30,000 years.

That's an impossibly big "if," however. First of all, the vast majority of those deposits are either widely dispersed in mud or piled up in mounds on the deep-ocean floor. Getting at those deposits would be an expensive, ugly proposition with potentially catastrophic environmental consequences (more about that in just a bit).

Success in sand?
In recent years, gas hydrates have been found in more accessible settings, such as sandy deposits off the coast of Alaska and in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Sand reservoirs of gas hydrates also have been identified off the shores of southeastern Japan and Canada's Northwest Territories. Gas hydrate reserves have also been found in offshore clay sediments near India and Korea.

USGS via TAMU

On the molecular level, gas hydrates consist of methane molecules (CH4, green and gray) embedded in lattices of water molecules (H2O, red and white).

Drilling tests have suggested that extracting the methane from the sandy deposits could become commercially feasible, Boswell said. One method calls for reducing the pressure in the well bore, liberating the methane gas from the water. Another method involves injecting carbon dioxide to displace the methane from cavities in the deposits. The second method has the added benefit of locking up CO₂, which could address climate change.

"Initial studies of these two approaches have been encouraging, but extended production tests of both methods are needed," Boswell wrote. "Such testing, currently in the planning stages for sites in Alaska, will be needed to help prepare for marine production tests, which are still several years away."

In a follow-up e-mail exchange, Boswell acknowledged that gas extraction wasn't a slam-dunk: "What can be done/accomplished, by when, is a function of many things: budgets, the continued interest of our industry collaborators, research findings going forward in the U.S. and internationally." He said the stated goal was to resolve the questions about commercial production from gas hydrates by 2015 for the Arctic, and by 2025 for the Gulf of Mexico.

A whiff of environmental worry
One of the big questions has to do with how harvesting gas hydrates would affect climate change. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and for a long time, researchers have wondered whether the release of undersea methane could kick off a runaway global-warming effect.

Here's how the scenario is set out: Warming oceans cause a thaw in gas hydrate deposits, which liberates methane, which adds to the greenhouse effect, which warms the oceans, which adds to the gas hydrate thaw, which ... well, you see where this is going.

The "methane apocalypse" often comes up in discussions of past extinctions or science-fiction tales (such as "The Mother of Storms," a past pick in the Cosmic Log Used Book Club). There's even a USGS Web page addressing concerns that gas hydrates are to blame for the Bermuda Triangle.

But you don't have to turn to science fiction or the fossil record to pick up on the concerns about gas hydrates. This month, Geophysical Research Letters published a study finding that an Arctic sea-temperature rise of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) has coincided with heightened release of methane from the sea's depths.

"Our survey was designed to work out how much methane might be released by future ocean warming; we did not expect to discover such strong evidence that this process has already started," the University of Southampton's Tim Minshull said in a news release from Britain's National Oceanography Center.

And the world's oceans are continuing to warm, according to the latest statistics. 

Joseph Romm, who has been following the gas hydrate issue at the ClimateProgress blog for the Center for American Progress, told me "there's no question that it is a potentially large resource - and it also is a potentially dangerous climate feedback."

This month's study highlighted a "very serious" concern, he said.

"Before any country were to engage in large-scale attempts to harness this, some scientific body should study the matter and render some advice," Romm said. In addition to the greenhouse-gas concern, "methane in the water is dangerous to sea life," he noted. (Unless you're talking about methane-eating bacteria, of course.)

Romm said the worst thing energy prospectors could do would be to mine gas hydrates using "some sort of bulldozer approach," without regard for the consequences.

I have a feeling Boswell would agree with that.

"Our goal is to provide another option for society to have available to help us deal with future energy demands," Boswell told me in our e-mail exchange. "We will as a nation need to weigh all sorts of issues in making these choices. Our program is designed to provide the relevant information so that those decisions are as informed as possible. This includes numerous projects we have to understand gas hydrates' role in the environment, in carbon cycling, in past climates, and in potential response to changing climates going forward."

What do you think? Will gas hydrates help us get by while we make the transition to alternative energy sources such as wind power, solar power and biofuels of all sorts (plus nuclear power)? Or does all this talk about a methane apocalypse scare you off? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 9:45 p.m. ET: Tim Collett, a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey focusing on gas hydrate projects, told me that the Japanese are "by far the most motivated" to move forward with methane. They're planning to begin a test production project in the Nankai Trough in 2012, he said.

Collett stressed that the kinds of gas hydrate deposits currently under consideration are not the kinds that pose the greatest hazard for excess methane release. "The hydrates we think of for production issues are really deeply buried," he said.

Nevertheless, researchers are always mindful of methane's potential downside as well as the potential upside. "The hazard assessment with this type of hydrate occurrence is probably manageable, but the issues have to be considered in every case," Collett told me.

More on methane power:

• Harnessing methane to power the future
• Methane levels rising in Norwegian Arctic
• Microbe-powered 'fart' machine stores energy
• Search for methane on msnbc.com

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N.C. Wyeth / Christina Bisulca / Univ. of Delaware

This 1919 illustration was covered over with another painting in the 1920s by artist N.C. Wyeth, but the color scheme was reconstructed through X-ray imaging.

Eighty-five years ago, American illustrator N.C. Wyeth painted one work of art over another, hiding a dramatic fistfight beneath a placid family portrait. Now X-ray vision has brought the long-hidden colors of that fight scene back to life - without disturbing the brush strokes layered on top.

The experiment, described today at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in Washington, is just the latest example showing how science can reveal secrets concealed beneath the surface of paintings and manuscripts.

The best-known example is Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which was put through a laser-scanning exam a few years ago. The project produced a surprising twist: Scientists found evidence that the lady with the enigmatic smile was originally depicted with the type of veil worn by pregnant women, suggesting that the painting was done to celebrate a birth.

Other examples abound:

• During a hospital X-ray session, a portrait of an unknown Renaissance man was detected beneath a 16th-century religious scene.
• X-rays have brought previously hidden writings by Archimedes to light, 800 years after the text was scrubbed off the parchment in a medieval form of recycling.
• Scientists used X-ray scans to analyze ancient artwork found behind Afghanistan's ruined Bamiyan Buddha statues - shedding new light on the origins of oil painting.
• Last year, a method known as X-ray fluoroscopy revealed the previously unseen portrait of a mystery woman beneath Vincent van Gogh's "Patch of Grass."

X-ray fluoroscopy figures in the tale of N.C. Wyeth's double painting as well. Earlier studies, using less sophisticated devices, revealed that there was a different scene hidden beneath Wyeth's "Family Portrait," thought to have been painted between 1922 and 1924 and now held by the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania.

Art historians identified the mystery painting as an illustration that turned up in printed black-and-white form in a 1919 issue of Everyman's Magazine. But they couldn't make out the fine details, and they couldn't figure out which colors Wyeth used in his palette. That's where the confocal X-ray fluorescence microscope developed at New York's Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source, or CHESS, came in handy.

X-ray fluoroscopy involves shooting beams of X-rays at a target - such as a painter's canvas - and then collecting the fluorescent signals given off by the chemicals in the various pigments. Cadmium would point to yellow pigment, for example, and cobalt would point to cornflower blue.

The problem was that previous scans couldn't discriminate that well between different layers of paint built up on the canvas. "That's what made separating out the two images so difficult," said Jennifer Mass, an expert on art conservation at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate.

The CHESS X-ray microscope had an advantage, in that it could be fine-tuned to focus on different depths in the paint layers. In an earlier project, Mass and her colleagues were able to figure out that a 17th-century Flemish painting was actually built up from three separate wood planks over the course of 20 years. So, in 2007, the research team - including Mass as well as CHESS researcher Arthur Woll and the University of Arizona's Christina Bisulca - set to work on Wyeth's "Family Portrait."

N.C. Wyeth / Brandywine River Museum

N.C. Wyeth's "Family Portrait" conceals another image that was painted earlier. The painting is a study for a mural that was never completed. N.C. Wyeth is the second figure from left, and his son Andrew Wyeth is the youth pictured at far right.

The researchers mapped out exactly which pigments were used for which areas of the hidden painting - not just blacks and whites and shades of gray, but other colors as well. They found that Wyeth used a "muted palette" of colors for the fistfight scene, dominated by pastel tones, Mass said.

"We were quite surprised, actually, by the pastel colors," she told me, "but the curators weren't at all." Even though the fistfight illustration ended up in black and white, the curators knew that Wyeth also used muted shades of color when creating such works. He felt the toned-down colors on the canvas translated well onto the black-and-white page.

Mass said the museum curators were happy to hear that the researchers' findings fell in line with what was known about Wyeth's artistic technique.

The same non-destructive X-ray procedure could be used to resurrect other illustrations that have been covered over - including several of his best-known works. And that prompts an obvious question: Why did Wyeth paint over those illustrations in the first place?

Other artists, such as van Gogh and http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/matisse-wayne-2948">Henri Matisse, reused their canvases to save money. But Wyeth did it for artistic rather than financial reasons. He once advised his son, the equally famous painter Andrew Wyeth (who passed away just this year), to try painting over old canvases in order to be "inspired by the abstract shapes from the former composition."

That's just what the elder Wyeth did in his "Family Portrait": The fistfight illustration was turned upside down, and the artist picked up on some of the shapes (like a clenched fist or the curve of a fighter's pant leg) in the later painting. If you need some help to spot the hidden shapes, take a close look at the three illustrations included in this PDF edition of Cornell University's Pawprint newspaper.

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NASA / JPL-Caltech

Rover team members Matt Van Kirk, Julie Townsend and Tam Nguyen set up a test rover and sandbox at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to rehearse maneuvers aimed at extracting a Mars rover from a similar sand trap on the Red Planet.

As NASA's Spirit rover marks its 2,000th workday on Mars, team members back on Earth are conducting the final rehearsals for a long-range operation they hope will free the plucky robot from its Red Planet sand trap.

The rover team keeps track of Spirit's timeline in Martian days, or "sols," which are slightly longer than Earth days. The result is that even though the rover passed the 2,000-day milestone a few weeks ago, as measured on Earth, the Sol 2000 mark didn't come around until Tuesday.

"We had a little celebration," John Callas, project manager for the Mars rover missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me. "We had a Sol 2000 cake."

Spirit's supporters on the Unmanned Spaceflight discussion forum also celebrated the day with special logos, posters and a poetic tribute from Stuart Atkinson that begins thusly:

This morning, yawning as I woke
From another Troy-trapped night
I watched Sol rise for the 2,000th time
And wondered: "Was it all a dream?" ...

The reference to the "Troy-trapped night" recognizes that Spirit is currently mired in a sandpit nicknamed Troy, facing a trial worthy of the Divine Comedy. The poetic parallel is doubly apt - considering that Dante posted half-buried villains around Hell's central pit in his "Inferno," and that NASA's Opportunity rover escaped from being buried in a Martian sand dune called "Purgatory" more than four years ago.

It took weeks for NASA to get Opportunity unstuck back then - and if anything, Spirit's situation is even stickier. The six-wheeled rover rolled into a sloping patch of loose soil more than three months ago, and its downhill wheels have spun deeply into the stuff. But wait ... there's more: A rock appears to be sticking up toward Spirit's underbelly, and one of the rover's wheels doesn't work.

To simulate Spirit's predicament, rover team members set up a sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and tried out a variety of maneuvers, using a test rover that's a clone of Spirit and Opportunity. The maneuvers included many of the tricks you'd use to free your car from a snowdrift, ranging from plowing ahead powerfully to backing out slowly.

During a series of one-day and two-day tests, engineers determined that the best escape strategy was to cycle through all those maneuvers. But how to begin? JPL's Callas said that's the last big choice facing the rover team.

"It comes down to whether we go forward initially, or go backward initially," he told me. Eventually, mission managers want Spirit to go forward. But the rover generally does a better job rolling backward, because it can pull its locked wheel behind rather than having to push it ahead.

To gain more insight into the forward vs. backward question, the team is planning a couple of additional kinds of test drives: One experiment calls for maneuvering a reduced-weight rover (known as SSTB-Lite) through the sandbox, to see how much difference Mars' weaker gravity might make. The team also want to drive both of the test rovers through a bed of crushed aggregate, just to see how Spirit would be affected if the soil isn't as soft as the simulated Mars dirt at JPL.

"The soil we're testing it in is the worst-case scenario," Callas explained. "We think it's better on Mars than it is on Earth."

Once the rescue plan is fully in place, mission managers plan to conduct a weeklong dress rehearsal and see how things turn out. The upshot is that the actual command sequences may not be radioed up to Spirit until late September or early October, Callas said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

A picture sent back by Spirit on Sol 1984 (Aug. 2) shows the rover's shadow on Martian terrain. Click on the image for a QuickTime 360-degree view from Unmanned Spaceflight.

Fortunately, Martian winds have swept the dust off Spirit's power-generating solar arrays several times, which has helped keep the rover's energy levels high. There's no need to rush toward a winter haven, as team members had feared when Spirit got stuck.

"She could ride out the winter where she is right now," said Callas, using the feminine pronoun to refer to the rover. "There's no problem."

In the meantime, the rover has been checking out Troy's intriguing soil, surveying its surroundings and sampling rocks. So for now, at least, time is on NASA's side.

If Spirit has to stay stuck where it is, that won't necessarily end the odyssey. And when Spirit finally gives up the ghost, the rover team will be able to look back with pride on a years-long mission that was originally scheduled to last just 90 Martian days. But it's way too early to write the obituary: There's still a good chance that Spirit will rise out of the mire and move on to its next scientific paradise.

Although he's wary about "counting our rovers before they hatch," Callas has his eye on the duration record for Mars surface operations, set by the Viking 1 lander (1976-1982). "We want to beat that record," he said.

He figures that will happen on April 29, 2010 - which translates to Sol 2247.

To keep up with the countdown, check out NASA's "Free Spirit" Web page as well as the Mars rovers' Twitter updates. And don't forget our own archive on Mars missions, titled "Return to the Red Planet."

Update for 8:40 p.m. ET Aug. 19: I revised and added to this item after hearing back from JPL's John Callas.

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Pat Rawling / NASA

An artist's concept shows a space elevator stretching down from orbit.

Like almost everyone else in the space vision business, the enthusiasts who foresee a "railway to space" are adjusting their high-flying dreams to fit down-to-earth realities.

"We don't have all the questions, let alone all the answers," Michael Laine, head of the LiftPort Group, told an audience of about 50 people on Saturday during the 2009 Space Elevator Conference on Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

Laine probably knows as well as anyone how few answers are available.

LiftPort's Web site is still counting down toward his goal of putting a real live space elevator into operation by 2031. But Laine's years-long quest to turn the concept into an actual business left him hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by 2007, with a legal cloud hanging over his head.

Laine put LiftPort into mothballs and lay low for two years, spending part of that time in the International Space University's study program. It's only been in the past few months that he's been able to lift his head above the clouds again. "We went through some difficult times," he wrote last month in a newsletter, "but are beginning to get all those issues settled to the point where LiftPort will rise again (pun intended)."

Laine told me today that his legal troubles are "kind of in a strange point of limbo," and that he's still massively in debt. But he has enough hope for future ventures that he's willing to get back into the space elevator game rather than moving on to more conventional business ventures.

"I'm actually really happy to be back out there," he said.

Still a laughable idea?
The space elevator concept is one of the highest-flying ideas out there: Imagine a super-strong tether swinging out, say, 100,000 miles from Earth's surface, with laser-powered robots shuttling up and down from a ground- or sea-based station to an orbital platform. If such a thing could be built, the idea's proponents say the system could cut the cost of putting cargo into space from $10,000 to $100 per pound.

The idea is at least a century old - and was most famously popularized by science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, who once said the space elevator would succeed "50 years after everyone has stopped laughing."

At last year's Space Elevator Conference, pioneer researcher Bradley Edwards said the first elevator could be built within 15 years, at a cost of $7 billion to $10 billion. The speakers at this year's conference took a far more sober view of the financial and technical resources that would be required. "They're not the rosy numbers that you hear," said Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation, who manages two NASA-backed contests for space elevator technologies.

In a technical paper presented at the conference, Shelef concludes that the conditions required for a working space elevator are "actually very difficult to satisfy" at any price. That's the bad news. The good news is that the technologies needed for a theoretical space elevator project could well lead to payoffs - even if the elevator itself never gets built.

Those technologies fall into three categories:

Super-light, super-strong materials
The biggest piece of the space elevator system would have to be a tether strong enough to stretch for tens of thousands of miles, passing through Earth's rough weather and the radiation-pounded space environment. NASA's $2 million Strong Tether Challenge is aimed at rewarding the breakthrough development of lightweight materials that are twice as strong as the current industry standard.

Ted Semon

After being put to the test, a Japanese-made carbon nanotube tether looks like a stretched piece of videotape.

During this year's conference, a Japanese-American team tried to win the challenge with a tether made out of carbon nanotube strands. The tether looked and felt like the videotape from an old VCR cassette, as described on Ted Semon's Space Elevator Blog.

The nanotube tether didn't match the strength of its industry-standard competitor, known as the "house tether" - and that means NASA's prize has gone unwon for another year. But Shelef said the contest is still fulfilling its goal of promoting materials research that goes "beyond the leading edge."

He said the materials developed for the competition could conceivably be used in super-strong parachutes for NASA's Mars landings, or better carbon composites for spacecraft, airplanes and automobiles.

Power-beaming systems
Another NASA challenge offers $2 million in prizes for beam-powered robots that can scuttle quickly up a fabric ribbon - sort of like the robotic climbers that would make their way up the thousands of miles of a space elevator's tether.

The Power Beaming Challenge's bar has been raised every year over the past three years. To win any money in this year's contest, a team would have to send its climber up a kilometer-long (0.6-mile-long) tether stretched between the ground and a hovering helicopter, at an average rate of at least 2 meters (6.6 feet) per second.

"Think about Batman shooting his little dart arrow and going up," Shelef said. "He's going about 2 meters per second."

EADS

Europe's EADS group has tested laser-powered rover prototypes.

Three teams - the Kansas City Space Pirates, Seattle-based LaserMotive and the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team - have devised laser-powered systems to meet the challenge. They're all likely to go for the gold during a contest tentatively planned for October at NASA's Dryden Research Center in California's Mojave Desert.

"This is like military-grade stuff," Shelef said. "They're doing work on the level of military contracts."

Even if robotic climbers are never beamed up an actual space elevator, the resulting technology could be used to power rovers operating in the icy, sunless depths of craters at the moon's south pole, Shelef said. He didn't mention the potential military applications, but if you watch video of the laser-beam tests, you could easily imagine infrared laser systems capable of tracking or disrupting aerial targets.

High-flying platforms
Another piece of the space elevator puzzle involves building aerial platforms that would serve as way stations for those robotic climbers. In the past, LiftPort's Laine has focused on balloon-lofted platforms that could serve as weather monitoring stations or telecommunications relays - and he said he's hoping to revive the balloon venture, perhaps as part of a military research program.

Others are working to build different kinds of platforms for spreading the space elevator gospel: academic programs that would back research into elevator-centric engineering issues, for example, or a peer-reviewed journal that would publish such research. The talk at this year's conference was that Canada's McGill University would soon be raising its research profile.

"We need to partner with everyone we can," said Semon, who does his part as the president of the recently formed International Space Elevator Consortium as well as a leading blogger following the field.

Should NASA be offering millions of dollars to support technologies for a space elevator that may never be built, at the same time that it's apparently falling billions of dollars short in its drive to re-energize space exploration? Shelef and his colleagues are under no illusion that they'll come up with the next giant leap into space anytime soon. For now, they're content with the small steps being encouraged by NASA's prize program.

"At this budget level, it can't hurt," Shelef told me. "It can only give you a good answer."

Update for 10:15 p.m. ET: Personal Spaceflight's Jeff Foust, who attended the weekend space elevator conference, passes along word that Armadillo Aerospace plans to take aim at NASA's $1 million top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge during Labor Day weekend. The timing for the prize attempt is mentioned on The Space Fellowship's Armadillo discussion forum. Armadillo won a $350,000 prize last year for a less ambitious flight.

More about the space elevator concept:

• PC World: Space elevator - science fiction or climate cure?
• New Scientist: Inflatable tower could climb to edge of space 
• Red Orbit: Japan looks to build first space elevator
• io9: This space elevator is the terrorists' next target

• National Geographic: Plugging into the sun
• Habitation Intention: Carnival of Space 116
• Scientific American: The origins of everything
• The Space Review: Why Mars missions are so hard 

Denis Balibouse / Reuters

A meteor streaks past stars in the night sky at the Mont-Tendre near Montricher in the Jura Mountains, north of Geneva, late Tuesday during the Perseid shower. This view was captured with a fisheye lens. Click on the image for a larger version.

Long after summer vacations are over, the experience lives on in slideshows, photo albums and computerized file folders filled with exotic snapshots. My weeklong vacation in Quebec produced some personal favorites - but the real action was in the skies above, highlighted by the annual Perseid meteor shower. Stunning images also came down from Mars, Saturn and frontiers beyond the solar system. Here's a rundown of the week's visual highlights:

Perseid postmortem

Bill Cooke / NASA via SpaceWeather.com

This composite view of bright Perseid meteors was created using two cameras operated by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center.

The skies were clear outside Quebec's biggest city for my meteor vigil, from 3 to 5 a.m. Wednesday, and I saw a fair number of quick streaks of light as well as a few spectacular vapor trails. Wednesday's peak rates were recorded around 4 a.m. ET (for Western Hemisphere viewing) and 1 p.m. ET (for the Eastern Hemisphere), according to statistics from the International Meteor Organization.

The reports on the Meteorobs discussion forum spanned the spectrum from deep satisfaction to deep disappointment, as usual. Some reported that the viewing was better on Wednesday night (Aug. 12-13) than it was on the traditional peak night (Aug. 11-12). "Perseids made up for their poor Aug. 11-12 showing last night," one observer wrote. "Rates for me were triple the previous night."

Check out SpaceWeather.com's meteor gallery for stunning views of the show. The next highlight for meteor-watchers comes early next week, when the Kappa Cygnid shower is due to peak.  

Having a blast on Mars

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided this oblique view of Victoria Crater. Click on the image for a larger view, with Mars rover tracks barely visible on the crater's left edge.

Despite a temporary glitch, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is continuing to send back eye-popping pictures of the Red Planet, including the somewhat oblique view of Victoria Crater you see at right. The sidelong look was aimed at learning more about the deposits making up the crater wall, particularly the lighter layers toward the top. A larger version of the image reveals the faint tracks of NASA's Opportunity rover, which left Victoria behind almost a year ago and is now en route to an even bigger crater.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera also spotted a Martian dust devil whipping over the planet's surface, and plenty more sights besides. But some of the most intriguing insights came from Opportunity, which is still operating on the Martian surface five and a half years after touching down.

Opportunity came across an iron-nickel meteorite during its travels - and scientists have determined that the watermelon-sized hunk of rock, nicknamed Block Island, couldn't have survived its descent from space unless Mars' atmosphere was thicker than it is today.

"Either Mars has hidden reserves of carbon dioxide ice that can supply large amounts of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere during warm periods of more recent climate cycles, or Block Island fell billions of years ago," rover team member Matt Golombek said in Monday's update about the find.

Season's greetings from Saturn

NASA / JPL / SSI

A picture taken by the Cassini orbiter shortly after Wednesday's equinox on Saturn shows only a thin ring shadow on the planet. Click on the image for more.

The ringed planet rang in a new season this week, with the Saturnian equinox officially taking place just after 8 p.m. ET Monday (00:15 GMT Tuesday). That's a big deal for a world where each of the four seasons lasts more than seven years. Saturn's equinox is a particularly magical time, because it marks the climax of a disappearing act.

Because Saturn's rings are precisely edge-on with respect to the sun, the rings' shadow almost completely vanishes from the planet's disk. From Earth's perspective, Saturn looks virtually ringless. The seasonal curiosity serves as a scientific opportunity as well: The shadows of objects embedded in the ring plane became incredibly elongated in the weeks leading up to the equinox, revealing weird bumpy features in the rings as well as a previously undetected moonlet. Check out the Cassini imaging team's Web site for the latest images of this magical season.

Saturn's largest moon, Titan, was also in the news this week, thanks to the detection of a tropical storm within its smoggy atmosphere. You can see a picture of the storm, as well as a psychedelic infrared portrait of Saturn and Titan, at the Gemini Observatory's Web site.

A fresh burst of starbirth

NASA / CXC / PSU / JPL-Caltech / CfA

This composite image from the Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes shows the molecular cloud Cepheus B. Click on the image for a larger view.

When two of NASA's Great Observatories get together, the results have got to be good. This week's image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope provides a sparkling view of a "trigger-happy" star formation region 2,400 light-years from Earth.

The picture shows bursts of starbirth within a cloud of molecular hydrogen known as Cepheus B, and suggests that infant star systems can be "triggered" into existence.

"Astronomers have generally believed that it's somewhat rare for stars and planets to be triggered into formation by radiation from massive stars," Penn State University's Konstantin Getman said in a news release jointly distributed Wednesday by the Spitzer and Chandra teams. "Our new result shows this belief is likely to be wrong."

Getman is the lead author of a study detailing the results, published in the July 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

You can expect more marvels from yet another Great Observatory just after Labor Day, when astronomers are due to release a fresh crop of images from the repaired and upgraded Hubble Space Telescope. The vacation season may be drawing toward a close, but the stunning snapshots from space just keep on coming.

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Duane Hoffmann / msnbc.com

Where do missing socks go? Would you believe they drop into a mini-black hole?

Now let us consider cosmic mysteries of a completely different sort ... for instance, why do socks disappear in the laundry?

Many hypotheses have been put forward: The eminent thinker Jerry Seinfeld once proposed that socks carefully plan their escape. Another researcher invokes quantum mechanics. Some crackpots even suggest looking under your washer's agitator or in your closet. Can you believe that?

Last weekend, an eminent panel of theorists (including myself) gathered to reflect upon "cannibalistic socks" and other riddles at the SpoCon science-fiction and fantasy convention in Spokane, Wash. I think we may have made as much headway as the Solvay Conference did back in Einstein's day. Here's the rundown on our results:

Where disappearing socks go
Some people have suggested that socks go missing in the laundry because a space-time warp somehow transforms them into belly-button lint and dust bunnies that appear out of nowhere. That's only half-right. Take a look at this diagram of the modern clothes dryer, then note the similarity to this picture of the ATLAS detector at Europe's Large Hadron Collider. Is that mere coincidence?

I didn't think so.

Dryers have been spinning away since long before the LHC was ever conceived, driving socks into collisions so energetic they build up powerful jolts of static electricity. Can anyone deny there's a chance - even if it's a 1-out-of-10⁵⁰⁰ chance - that such collisions could generate miniature black holes? And can any scientists truthfully say there is absolutely zero chance that such black holes could grow large enough to gobble up one of a pair of socks, leaving the other behind as a kind of laundry-hamper Hawking radiation?

I didn't think so.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ... the Not-So-Large Ban-Lon Collider. Your laundry room contains a device perfect for doing small-scale experiments in string theory. (Or is that yarn theory?)

Interstellar travel
How can we possibly get to other stars? Some at SpoCon held out hope for the Heim Drive, a device that is supposed to convert gravitational energy into electromagnetic energy and send spacecraft zooming through shortcuts in space-time. The last time I wrote about this, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss told me the idea was "completely crackpot," but some Cosmic Log correspondents thought that judgment was way too harsh. I'm not sure which would take longer: making the centuries-long trip to Alpha Centauri using existing propulsion technology, or finding a way to build an honest-to-goodness warp drive.

However, there is another possibility that I'm surprised hasn't gotten more attention. It's a little something I call the Clerk Drive.

Have you ever noticed how hardware-store clerks seem to disappear instantly the moment you need advice on whether to buy the 5/16 or the 11/32 doohickey? I do believe many of them have mastered the knack of quantum teleportation to the break room, achieving what is effectively faster-than-light speed over short distances. All we need to do is find a few with a sense of enterprise, give them a title and put them in command of our first starships. The title? That's obvious: Captain Clerk.

Perpetual motion
Talking about breakthrough propulsion naturally led to the search for a perpetual-motion machine - and the solution to that perennial poser has been known for a long time. Because cats (like geckos) always land on their feet, and toast always lands on the floor buttered-side down, all you have to do is attach a buttered-side-up piece of toast to a cat's back (or to its feet, in an alternate design). Logic dictates that when you throw the cat up in the air, it should levitate above the ground like a frog spinning in a solenoid.

Some theories suggest that you could channel "cat-toast" power by attaching a turbine to the spinning cat, as shown here. The effect would last only as long as the cat stayed alive, but you could get around that limitation by putting the cat in a box with a radiation device. That way, there's always a 50 percent chance that the cat is alive ... as long as you don't open the box.

The only problem is that a recent study has questioned the whole antigravity cat hypothesis. This research claims that the cat would land on its feet, but the toast would eventually flip buttered-side-down anyway. The probability of that happening hits 100 percent if the cat can find an expensive carpet to curl up on.

Mars and the Maya
When I got back to the office, I came across a couple of e-mail messages on matters that were just as much on the scientific fringe - but motivated by serious concerns. One was from Mariele Bogran, telling me that the Great Mars Hoax ("Mars will be as big as the moon in August") was starting to get mixed up with tales of the coming Maya apocalypse:

"I am writing to inquire about the Mars hoax. Recently a similar e-mail to the one you have mentioned came to my attention. After looking for some facts to back it up I immediately came to find the Cosmic Log you posted last year. Now, I live in Honduras, and as you may know, the Mayas had a great empire here in Copan. The Mayas predicted the Mars sighting in their calendar thousands of years ago. So this e-mail has been creating quite a buzz in Copan. Proposals for a major festival and activities revolving around the Mars sighting are being drawn up. However, before any further steps are being taken, I would like to confirm whether the claims in this e-mail are true or false. ..."

If the e-mail to which Bogran refers is the same one that makes the round every August, it's a garbled version of outdated truth. Back in August 2003, the planet Mars was closer to Earth than it had been in tens of thousands of years. If you peered at it through a telescope under the best conditions, the Red Planet might have looked as big as the moon does when seen with the naked eye. But Mars will never come as close as the moon, and the planet poses absolutely no danger to Earth.

This month isn't a particularly good time to observe Mars. The next close encounter is due in January 2010. At that time, it will be almost twice as far away as it was in 2003 - as illustrated on this Web page. By the way, it'll be even farther away in 2012, when the ancient Maya calendar silently resets itself.

The 12th planet
My reports about Jupiter's Great Black Spot prompted this question from Danilie Howe: "Could the spot on Jupiter be the 12th planet?" That's a reference to the Nibiru legend, which claims the Sumerians knew about a faraway planet that periodically entered the inner solar system and created havoc on Earth.

I dashed off a quick note saying that the impact was likely caused by an object that measured only a few hundred meters (yards) in width - far too small to be a planet. Howe wrote back, asking if I knew where the 12th planet was.

If she meant a threatening planet like Nibiru, my answer would be that such a planet is not known to exist. As I write in Chapter 13 of "The Case for Pluto," a large planet could theoretically exist far out on the fringes of the solar system, perhaps out in the Oort Cloud. No existing telescope is powerful enough to detect such a world, although that situation may change. Even if Planet X existed, it wouldn't pose any threat to Earth in the foreseeable future.

NASA's David Morrison has written extensively about the astronomical side of the Nibiru myth, and language scholar Michael S. Heiser handles the historical side. Heiser contends that the Sumerians used "Nibiru" to refer to Jupiter, or to Mercury, or to a star - but not to a planet beyond the five known to the ancients.

The question remains, however: Where is the 12th planet? Today, we know of four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Mars, Venus and Earth), four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) and five dwarf planets (Eris, Pluto, Ceres, Makemake and Haumea). That makes 13, and there are probably many more yet to be recognized (though the International Astronomical Union currently draws the line at the biggest eight).

Based on illustrations by NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI) This graphic compares the sizes of five dwarf planets and their moons with the size of Earth and its moon. The top row shows, from left, Eris and its moon, Dysnomia; Pluto and its three moons, Charon, Nix and Hydra; and Makemake. The bottom row shows Haumea and its moons, Namaka and Hi'iaka; Ceres; and Earth's moon. A small slice of Earth's disk is visible at the bottom of the picture.

OK, so which of those is 12th on the list? Just for argument's sake, I'm going to go with the IAU's chronological order of designation as planets (dwarf or otherwise). The status of the first 11 was established by the IAU's 2006 resolution, which means Makemake went 12th a little more than a year ago, and Haumea went 13th last September.

Therefore, if you really press me to identify the 12th planet, I'd go with Makemake - which is roughly 50 times farther away from the sun than we are. Even at its closest point, it's still 35 times farther away and thus poses no threat to our planet. The only thing threatened by Makemake and the other dwarfs is our preconception of what a planet has to be.

Do you have additional thoughts on scientific myths or mirth? Feel free to pass them along below. I'm on vacation through Aug. 16, but I'll still check in every now and then to approve your comments.

More silly science:

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H. Dietz / TUM

This schematic shows some of the nanoscale shapes made from DNA. Click on the image for larger view.

Scientists are improving their technique for bending DNA into origami shapes. The latest twist uses custom-made chemicals to turn bunches of molecules into smoothly curving circlets and gears - a trick that eventually could set the stage for practical nanomachines.

DNA origami is a technique for folding the double helixes into programmed patterns. Some of the experiments have produced whimsical demonstrations such as a microscopic "happy face" or a map of the Americas. But the purpose behind all this is not mere child's play.

"Instead of just programming abstract software, we're programming matter," Harvard biochemist William Shih, one of the researchers behind the latest yoga tricks, told me today.

Shih and his colleagues - Harvard's Shawn Douglas and Hendrik Dietz of the Technische Universität München in Germany - report on their efforts in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Previous tricks have taken advantage of angular bends in chemical bonds to create structures that "staple" themselves together with strands of DNA. In May, for example, Danish researchers unveiled nanoscale boxes made in this manner, complete with locks and keys.

Science

This graphic shows how bundles of DNA molecules can be bent. Base pairs are removed from the orange strands of DNA, and added to the blue strands.

These new twists use the same type of readily available raw material: DNA from a virus that commonly infects bacteria, a critter known as M13.

The stapling technique, however, is different. Instead of twisting off at a sudden angle, the stapled-together bundles of DNA strands are chemically tweaked in such a way that base pairs are inserted in one strand, or removed in a different strand. In this way, the molecular bundles can be programmed to take on gradual curves or twists.

The biochemists behind the Science research did almost as good a job as Mother Nature: Inside the cell, DNA molecules can loop themselves into curls with a radius of about 4.5 nanometers. In comparison, the artificial structures had a minimum radius of 6 nanometers. Among the resulting shapes was a beachball-shaped latticework measuring just 50 nanometers wide.

The rounded curves and twists are the latest additions to a growing nanotech toolbox. "The DNA origami method is only three years old, so there hasn't been that much time for people to explore," Shih said. "We didn't realize how flexible, how malleable DNA is."

Now the big challenge is to reduce the defect rate for DNA self-assembly. Shih said his team's molecule-programming technique produces the desired shapes only 25 to 50 percent of the time. At the current scale, that's not such a problem, but if the technology is scaled up to create more complex structures, the defects would ruin any type of nanomachine you tried to make.

"We currently cannot build something intricate such as an ant's leg or, much smaller, a 10-nanometer-small chemical planet such as a protein enzyme," Dietz said in today's news release about the research. "We expect many benefits if only we could build super-miniaturized devices on the nanoscale using materials that work robustly in the cells of our bodies - biomolecules such as DNA."

One of the ways to reduce the defect rate might be to use biological processes rather than artificial chemistry to program the DNA molecules. "It's great chemistry, but you can't compete with enzymes," Shih explained.

"As engineers, we have to solve the same problems that nature has solved," he said. "We're optimistic that this will be possible."

Shih said he and his colleagues take their inspiration from the development of integrated-circuit technology, where small but steady advances have led to exponential increases in reliability and complexity.

He said the research has already yielded one piece of "low-lying fruit" - an artificially tweaked molecular structure that can shepherd protein molecules into a particular orientation for analysis. Once the protein molecules take on a non-random orientation, researchers can use nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to gain more information about how those molecules are folded. That could lead to better 3-D models for membrane protein structure, and better medications as well.

Looking farther down the road, Shih said nanomachines made from DNA could help build electronic (or plasmonic) circuitry, extending Moore's Law to molecular scales.

They could also deliver drugs or therapeutic genetic material directly into the cell. After all, the masters of molecular origami use DNA from a virus that does the same sort of thing for darker purposes.

"Things like viruses have evolved over millions of years to solve these problems," Shih said. "We'd like to be able to approach the efficiency with which viruses deliver their cargo to cells, but do it in a safer way."

More about nano-tricks:

• Shih Laboratory: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute,
  Harvard Medical School, Wyss Institute
• Dietz Research Group: Laboratory for Biomolecular
  Nanotechnology at Technische Universität München
• Shawn Douglas' Web site: caDNAno
• Science Podcast: Interview with William Shih
• DNA origami gallery at msnbc.com

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