Jim Seida / msnbc.com

Video clips for the iPhone feature imagery from the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, including this view of Tyrrhena Crater.

Mobile devices such as Apple's iPad, announced this week, are providing new ways to see the crown jewels of space science: glorious views from the frontiers of the universe. However, getting to the good stuff sometimes requires a little sleuthing. Check out some of the brightest gems - and feel free to pass along your own favorites.

Audio podcasts have been around for years upon years, of course, and last year we touched upon the growing wealth of science vidcasts. Much of that content can be heard or viewed on a mobile device as well as a computer screen - via YouTube channels, iTunes, special apps or Web sites optimized for mobile.

If you want to see cosmic pictures on a compact screen, here are a few places to start:

• NASA Images: The Internet Archive has partnered with NASA to offer up a huge repository of space imagery, including video. You can connect with NASA Images on the Web, or via an iPhone app. There's also an official NASA iPhone app that can show you archived imagery, tell you when the next shuttle launch is scheduled or show you where to look for the International Space Station. This NASA Web page rounds up scores of the space agency's vidcasts. (For example, here's a video retrospective on Spirit's six years of roving.)
• Hubble's Universe: The Space Telescope Science Institute offers a couple of video series, including Hubble's Universe Unfiltered, which provides scientific context for the space telescope's stunning imagery; and Tonight's Sky, a monthly stargazing guide. Hubble's Universe is also available via iTunes for Apple's mobile devices.
• Hubblecast: The European Space Agency's Hubble team has its own series of vidcasts, available for viewing online or on mobile devices. Hubblecast is also on iTunes, naturally.
• ESOcast: Hubblecast host Joe ("Dr. J.") Liske also anchors the European Southern Observatory's series of astronomy-themed shows.
• GLASTcast and Goddard Shorts: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center offers a couple of vidcast series. One series, "The Extreme Universe," focuses on the gamma-ray-watching Fermi Space Telescope, while the other presents short subjects keyed to space research at Goddard.
• Space Images from JPL: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory offers an iPhone/iPod app that pulls together hundreds of images, organized by category. If you're on the Web, you'll probably prefer working with JPL's Photojournal instead.
• HiClips from HiRISE: For some time now, the team behind the HiRISE hi-res camera for NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been putting out a series of "HiClips" - video montages suitable for viewing online or on mobile devices, complete with spacey soundtracks. It's easy to get to the latest HiClip on the Web, or find the archived HiClips on YouTube.

In fact, pretty much all of this content can be found on YouTube channels or iTunes if you do a search. You'll find lots more besides - such as "The Week in Space," a vidcast series presented by Spaceflight Now and hosted by longtime space journalist Miles O'Brien. Are there other cosmic vidcasts you're following? Feel free to add them in your comments below.

You can also click your way through the latest installment of "The Month in Space Pictures," starring way-cool images from HiRISE, Hubble, Cassini and other space probes. It's an impressive lineup, worth seeing on the biggest screen you can find. Just in case you're looking for more information or bigger pictures, here are links to the image sources:

• 'Trees' on Mars: Scientists say the forests of Mars are merely an illusion. You can get the big picture from the HiRISE Web site.
• Whirling stars: Get the big picture of star tracks in the skies above the Swiss Alps.
• Start to finish: Is one big picture worth hundreds of words when it comes to appreciating this month's annular solar eclipse?
• Celestial sparkles: Hubblesite has more about the space telescope's picture of the 30 Doradus Nebula.
• Spots on Saturn: Click on over to the Cassini imaging team's Web site for a more detailed view of stately Saturn.
• Drill, baby, drill: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has more about the Opportunity rover's study of a peculiar Martian rock.
• Cosmic flame: The Flame Nebula flares up larger on the European Southern Observatory's Web site.
• Opening the hatch: The big picture shows you a spaceflier's face through the window of a Russian Soyuz capsule just after its fall to Earth.
• After the quake: My post-earthquake roundup points you to more satellite imagery of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
• Year of the Cat: You'll find more views of the Cat's Paw Nebula on the ESO's Web site.
• Waves of Martian sand: Check the HiRISE site for more about the Red Planet's weird waves.
• Out for a spin: NASA Human Spaceflight presents a sharper image of a Soyuz capsule maneuvering near the International Space Station.
• Shining seas: NASA's Earth Observatory explains the sunglint seen in this picture of Italy's boot.
• Great Brrrr-itain: You'll also find the full story behind a wintry satellite view of Britain on the Earth Observatory Web site.
• Tale of a galaxy's tail: Intrigued by the twin-tailed galaxy ESO 137-001? You'll find the rest of the story on the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Web site.
• Cold moon: The moon looms like a beachball over a snowy Swiss scene in the big picture.
• The final frontier: When it comes to images of the universe's farthest reaches, Hubblesite delivers the GOODS.

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

• Lemelson-MIT Invention Index: Teens excited about tech
• Transterrestrial.com: Why Obama is a space conservative 
• Mail on Sunday: Subway map of the Milky Way
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Ghosts of Machu Picchu'
• Daily Grail: 'Evidence of the Afterlife' 

• NASA: Apollo 1 ... Challenger ... Columbia
• Popular Mechanics: 24 years after Challenger
• Popular Science: 25 technologies to rebuild America
• New Scientist: Burt Rutan, the maverick of Mojave

LLNL

At the National Ignition Facility, the power of 192 lasers will be focused on a gold-plated cylinder like this one, containing a pea-sized pellet of fusion fuel.

Experiments at the National Ignition Facility have given researchers confidence that they'll achieve a milestone in nuclear fusion sometime this year.

The tests involved blasting a cylinder the size of a pencil eraser, known as a "hohlraum," with 192 laser beams and seeing whether researchers could tweak the energy to create the right kind of implosion. The results suggested that they could - and that the $3.5 billion blaster in California just might produce the world's first controlled fusion reaction, with more energy coming out than going in.

For more than a half-century, scientists have been trying to harness the nuclear fusion reaction to generate what could be prodigious amounts of energy. The reaction involves crushing together light atoms (like hydrogen) so forcefully that they fuse into heavier atoms (like helium). Each reaction converts a tiny amount of mass from the atoms directly into energy.

When you multiply that demonstration of E=mc² by trillions, you start producing power on the scale of an H-bomb or the sun.

The research reported by the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, represents a step toward actual energy production in a controlled reaction. But there are still many steps to go before scientists reach that break-even point. Even if NIF is successful, it will take years to adapt the technology for commercial applications. And that's the most optimistic view.

Jeffrey Atherton, the program director for target experimental systems at NIF, is an optimist.

"The potential for NIF and fusion energy as the game-changer [for energy resources] is enormous," he told me. He acknowledged that commercial fusion was far from a sure bet, but said the technology had to be included in the nation's portfolio of energy research. "You have to invest in things that could have risk associated with them, but also have enormous benefits should they play out," Atherton said.

The initial tests at NIF, built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California, have made Atherton and his colleagues feel more comfortable about the investment. Those tests are detailed today in a research paper published online by the journal Science.

"When we extrapolate the results of the initial experiments to higher-energy shots on full-sized hohlraums, we feel we will be able to create the necessary hohlraum conditions to drive an implosion to ignition later this year," Siegfried Glenzer, plasma physics group leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me in an e-mail.

What's a hohlraum?
The term "hohlraum" comes from the German words for "hollow area." Hohlraums are hollow, gold-plated cylinders that are structured to spread the energy from the laser beams into a inward-pointing blast of X-rays, all focused on a target the size of a small pea. The target is a precisely machined, spherical pellet of beryllium, containing the stuff to be imploded.

For the real ignition shots, the targets will be filled with a cryogenically cooled dollop of deuterium-tritium fusion fuel. Deuterium and tritium are two isotopes of hydrogen that are particularly well-suited for fusion. If the researchers do it right, that tiny bit of fuel would be compressed by a factor of 1,000 or more, and reach temperatures approaching 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit). That's hotter than the sun.

For the tests described in the Science paper, the hohlraums were smaller, the targets were filled with plain old hydrogen and helium, and the temperatures reached a mere 3.3 million degrees C (6 million degrees F). The resulting reaction fell far short of break-even fusion, but Atherton said it confirmed that NIF was on the right track.

"The point is that we were doing it at a scale that's about 20 times larger than has been done, with a laser power that accordingly is about 20 times higher than has been done, with a precision and efficiency that hasn't been done before," he said.

Dealing with uncertainty
One big challenge was to aim the laser beams so precisely that the target was heated evenly. If the heating is the slightest bit uneven, the fusion fuel will splurt away before it implodes enough to create the pressure and temperature required for ignition. That's essentially what happened at NIF's predecessor, the $200 million Nova laser facility. But researchers said they were satisfied with the uniformity of heating at NIF.

"We also demonstrated a very elegant way of tuning the symmetry of the laser beams, by making very subtle changes in the color of the wavelength in the cone of these beams," Atherton said.

Glenzer told me the wavelength-tuning trick "was predicted to work, but could only be tested on full NIF experiments described in this paper." More than 90 percent of the laser energy was absorbed by the hohlraums - which is more than was predicted by the pre-test simulations.

The experiments demonstrated that researchers could "overcome the biggest physics uncertainty in laser fusion - namely, we showed that we can heat hohlraums to temperature and radiation symmetry close to what is needed for ignition," Glenzer said.

Atherton echoed those comments in more down-to-earth terms: "Given the very positive results out of last summer and fall, we do feel much more confident about the feasibility of fusion as an energy source," he told me.

The tests described in Science were conducted last year at an energy level of 0.7 megajoules. Since then, NIF has ramped up to the 1-megajoule level, and Atherton said "our ignition experiments will be operating at a laser energy of 1.2 or 1.3 megajoules this summer."

Energy source of the future?
The results impressed other experts. "They're ahead of the curve predicted," Mike Dunne, director of the Central Laser Facility of Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, told Science.

"It's definitely a very capable and interesting machine," said Charles Seife, a longtime science writer and journalism professor at New York University who wrote a book about the fusion quest titled "Sun in a Bottle."

However, it remains to be seen whether reality will follow the predicted path. In his book, Seife shows that the course of true fusion never did run smooth, despite repeated predictions that success was just a few years and a few (million? billion?) dollars away. The classic joke is that fusion is the "energy source of the future - and always will be."

Even Atherton acknowledges that NIF's nanosecond-long shots can't be harnessed for commercial purposes in the near term. The shots would have to occur "10 times per second, as opposed to once every few hours, or days, or pick your unit of time," he said.

Researchers say NIF could blaze a trail for more commercially viable concepts. For example, the Laser Inertial Fusion Engine, or LIFE, would use laser shots to generate neutrons for a hybrid fusion-fission reaction.

However, in the long run, it may turn out that one of the other approaches to fusion will be more fruitful. Maybe it'll be the $13 billion magnet-based ITER project taking shape in France. There are also a number of dark-horse candidates - such as the low-cost, high-voltage system currently being funded by the Navy, or the levitating-magnet system that came into the spotlight just this week.

Atherton said NIF would almost certainly be the first technology to reach the break-even point - but he said it made sense to investigate other paths to fusion as well. "We don't look at this as a competition, as much as that we're all in a race to develop clean energy resources," he said. He recognized that other energy technologies - including biofuels, solar, wind and safer fission reactors - also had to be funded.

"Many people who study this and try to take a considered, balanced perspective actually believe that it's important to invest in all of these technologies," Atherton said.

Beyond energy production
Atherton pointed out that fusion research isn't aimed exclusively at commercial energy production. The knowledge gained at NIF could also be applied to astrophysics and nuclear physics - that is, the science behind what happens in stars. "There's a whole wealth of basic science that could be done with this type of burning-plasma creation," he said. "That could give physicists the ability of doing experiments looking inward instead of outward."

There's yet another big reason why the U.S. Department of Energy has spent billions of dollars on NIF: "The physical conditions created with an ignition-type target can be used to study important physics questions related to the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile," Atherton said.

Seife suspects that the weapons issue is the key to NIF's existence, but he hasn't been able to put his finger on how exactly the research being conducted there benefits the U.S. nuclear weapons program. He wonders whether NIF is actually less about nuclear physics - and more about keeping nuclear physicists employed.

"NIF isn't truly about energy," Seife writes in his book. "It is not about keeping our stockpile safe, at least not directly. It is about keeping the United States' weapons community going in the absence of nuclear tests."

Is NIF on the right track for nuclear fusion? Is the promise of nearly limitless energy worth the billions of dollars being spent on fusion research? Or is fusion research really a matter of national security rather than energy production? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More on the fusion quest:

• June 27, 2007: Inside fusion's fortress
• June 28, 2007: How far away is fusion?
• Jan. 9, 2008: Strange science takes time
• Feb. 4, 2008: Comeback for big science?
• Feb. 6, 2008: Key to fusion may be in space
• April 2, 2008: America's fusion future
• May 2, 2008: The far-off fusion race
• June 12, 2008: Fusion quest goes forward
• Aug. 28, 2008: Fusion effort in flux
• Oct. 20, 2008: Fusion projects hang in limbo
• Dec. 16, 2008: Fusion we can believe in?
• March 31, 2009: Fusion catches fire
• Dec. 3, 2009: Hot, medium and cool fusion

Another paper published today on the Science Express Web site - "Charged-Particle Probing of X-ray-driven Inertial-Fusion Implosions" - sheds additional light on the reactions expected to take place at NIF.

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

Eric Steen / JBEI

E. coli bacteria were genetically engineered to produce oil, then sequester themselves from the droplets to facilitate oil recovery, as shown in this photo.

Researchers have engineered a common type of bacteria to produce biodiesel and other goodies from plain old plants. The microbial trickery, detailed today in the journal Nature, promises to add "nature's petroleum" to America's energy supply within the next few years.

"We've got a billion tons of biomass every year that goes unused," said Jay Keasling, a co-author of  research study and chief executive officer for the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute, or JBEI. "We'd like to turn that into fuel."

"Biomass" is shorthand for any plant material that's suitable for converting into energy, ranging from grain to the stuff that's left behind in the field after harvesting, from wood product waste to plants and seeds. Corn, for instance, is the primary source of biomass for making ethanol in the United States.

The problem with corn is that its use for energy production competes with its use for food. That's why scientists are devoting so much time and brainpower to developing methods for converting indigestable cellulose (like wood chips) into fuel.

Keasling and his colleagues say their bioengineered E. coli bacteria could provide an affordable path to greater energy independence. Theoretically, the fuel produced from biomass could make up for as much as 50 percent of U.S. oil imports. "We want to turn the U.S. Midwest into the new 'Mideast,'" Keasling said.

The Nature article explains how E. coli could do it: Researchers modified the bacteria's genome to insert the coding for producing an enzyme known as hemicellulase. That enzyme can break down one of the ingredients of cellulosic feedstock, hemicellulose, into smaller sugar molecules.

E. coli bacteria are naturally programmed to turn those sugars into fatty acids for building cell membranes - but normally, each bacterium produces only as much of the fatty acids as it  needs. Rsesearchers fiddled with that part of the genetic code, too. "We stole away the fats it would normally use to make the membrane and channeled them into biodiesel instead," Keasling said.

That essentially turned the bacteria into little biodiesel factories. "The more you steal away, the more it turns it up," Keasling said.

The bacteria expelled droplets of oil into the fermentation vats, which made extraction of the fuel relatively easy. "When you turn the impellers off, it's like oil and water," Keasling explained. "The oil floats to the top, you skim it off, you put it in your tank."

The process could be tweaked to produce other chemical products as well, ranging from jet fuel to solvents and lubricants.

Keasling emphasized that the study published in Nature was a "proof of concept" rather than the demonstration of a commercially viable process. He and his colleagues are looking for a process that would utilize as much of the feedstock as possible, and not just the hemicellulose. "We got about 10 percent of the theoretical maximum yield, and we will continue to work on this to try to increase the yield," he said.

One of the funders for the research is LS9, a California-based biotech company that intends to market fuels and other microbe-produced chemicals. "I'm reasonably optimistic that we're going to have high-level production of these kinds of biofuels in the next couple of years," Keasling said. Check out this Berkeley Lab news release to learn more about the research.

LS9 isn't the only venture in the bacterial biofuel business. Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles and a different company named Gevo have devised a different technique for turning E. coli into biobutanol factories. Yet another company, Amyris Biotechnologies, recently received millions of dollars in federal funding to turn sorghum into biofuels using genetically modified yeast.

All these ventures are aiming to get biofuel products on the market in the next few years. But which company will be the first? Which will be the best? Feel free to weigh in on the future of microbe-based energy production by leaving your comments below.

Update for 8:45 p.m. ET: The latest feats from E. coli come as no surprise to Carl Zimmer, who literally wrote the book on the humble bacterium. This week in his blog, The Loom, he asks a rhetorical question: "Is there nothing E. coli cannot do?"

Update for 10 p.m. ET: Here's a Tech Review article about LS9 from its start-up phase in 2007. There was a lot of talk about "clean energy" in President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address tonight, including advanced biofuels, but the true energy revolution will come about only when technology can produce fuels that are efficient, clean - and, above all, affordable. Will bioengineered bacteria help cure what ails America's energy economy? Stay tuned.

• New Scientist: Think different ... about evolution
• See the 2009 total solar eclipse in glorious detail
• Improbable Research: Better not mention the polywater  
• Cracked: Six creepy animal behaviors science can't explain
• Onion: Science Channel refuses to dumb down science any further

	NASA
	Click for slide show: See how NASA's Mars rover missions began.

Nine months after the Spirit rover sank into a Martian sand trap, NASA says the troubled traveler will have to remain stationary in order to survive the Red Planet's winter. Now the challenge is to improve Spirit's tilt so that it soaks up as much solar energy as it can.

Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, said Spirit ran up against "a golfer's worst nightmare: the sand trap that no matter how many strokes you take you can't get out of it."

The rover team has been trying to free Spirit for months, but McCuistion declared that the golf cart-sized robot's "driving days are likely over."

"Right now our plan is to worry about getting through the winter," he told journalists today during a teleconference.

After the winter, scientists plan to conduct stationary experiments to characterize the Red Planet's core - is it solid, or still somewhat molten? They'll also look into the interaction between the Martian soil and atmosphere, as well as the characteristics of the intriguing soil around the rover. Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the mission's principal scientific investigator, says the sulfate salts found in the soil suggest that Spirit is stuck in an area where steam vents were once active.

Tale of two rovers
Both Spirit and Opportunity, its twin on the opposite side of the planet, landed on Mars six years ago - and both were expected to last only 90 days. To date, NASA has spent more than $900 million on the rover missions, but the cost has leveled out to about $20 million a year. Squyres said the rovers have yielded roughly 500 scientific papers, abstracts and presentations to date. The highlight of the missions so far has been the on-the-ground discovery that Mars was once wet enough to support life.

Opportunity is still in good condition and making its way toward the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. That rover is in better shape to last through the winter because it's much closer to the Martian equator, said John Callas, project manager for the rover missions.

Callas and other mission managers have been trying to free Spirit for months, but wheel failure turned out to be a killer. One of Spirit's six wheels has been out of commission for years, and another went out last month. Even if Spirit somehow found a way to escape the sand trap, it would be seriously hobbled due to its four-wheeled status. "It certainly couldn't really make any headway," McCuistion said.

In the past week or so, the rover team changed its strategy for moving the rover and made more headway, at least in terms of improving Spirit's northerly tilt. That raised some hope that the rover might still be capable of making an escape. In the end, however, mission managers decided that time was running out, and that they had to switch their top priority from freeing Spirit to surviving the winter.

"The seasons are determined by Mars, and not determined by the mobility of the vehicle," Callas said.

The road ahead
The current plan is to reposition Spirit in its sloping sand trap over the next couple of weeks to optimize the angle of its solar arrays for power production. Right now the arrays have an "unfavorable tilt" toward the south, but each degree of improvement will make a big difference, Callas said. By the end of February, the rover isn't expected to have enough power for wheel movement. In March, the rover would probably have to cut back on communication to conserve electricity.

"Getting through the winter will all come down to temperature and how cold the rover electronics will get," Callas explained in a NASA statement. The rover was built to survive temperatures of minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 degrees Celsius) with its electronics on, and minus-67 degrees F (-55 degrees C) with electronics powered down, Callas said. During the roughly six-month Martian winter, the lows are expected to be around minus-50 degrees F (-45 degrees C).

Spirit should be able to handle the winter temperatures by "hibernating" like a bear, Callas said. That's not a guarantee: The electronics might not be as hardy as they were when the rover landed six years ago. But if the NASA team can keep Spirit alive, the rover should be able to start its stationary science experiments in September or so.

Squyres said the decision to have Spirit stay put was "kind of poignant moment for us."

"We built these vehicles with the intention of driving around on the surface, and Spirit has done that magnificently for the better part of six years," he said. "So seeing us shift our focus to a different class of activities - you know, it's a change, and it's one we're going to have to adapt to."

'Not a day to mourn'
Rover driver Ashley Stroupe said the change still hasn't fully sunk in with the engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who steer the robots by preprogrammed remote control.

"At this point we've been really focused as a team on the day to day. I don't think we've necessarily fully changed our mind-set in our heads just yet ... to more stationary ops," Stroupe said.

But rover team members emphasized that it wasn't yet time to write Spirit's obituary.

"This is not a day to mourn Spirit," McCuistion said. "This is not a day of loss."

Assuming that Spirit survives, the study of Mars' core would be a primary scientific objective. During an interview last week, Callas told me that the rover would detect tiny gravitational shifts as Mars spins on its axis - shifts that could tell scientists about the planet's internal composition. He compared it to the trick of spinning an egg to figure out whether it was raw or hard-boiled.

"If the final scientific feather in Spirit's cap is determining whether the core of Mars is liquid or solid, that would be wonderful," Squyres said. And who knows? Still more discoveries may lie within Spirit's reach.

"The bottom line is, we're not giving up on Spirit," Squyres said.

NASA is offering a series of electronic postcards that Internet users can send to Spirit (and the team of scientists and engineers behind the rover). This item from last week provides further background about Spirit's troubles and the rover team's strategy. Fresh animated images show Spirit's view in the direction of movement and in the figurative rear view mirror. For the latest word from the "Free Spirit" movement, check in with the Twitter accounts for the Mars rovers and one of their drivers, Scott Maxwell.

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

This report was last updated at 4:10 p.m. ET.

Red Bull Stratos

Click for video: Daredevil Felix Baumgartner (right) tries on a pressure suit and helmet while Red Bull Stratos technical project director Art Thompson and retired Air Force Col. Joe Kittinger look on. Kittinger holds the record for highest parachute jump, and Baumgartner wants to break that record. Click on the image to watch a video clip about the project from NBC's TODAY show.

One of aerospace's most enduring records was set 50 years ago by Air Force Col. Joe Kittinger, who made the highest-ever parachute jump from a balloon floating 102,800 feet above the ground. It was one giant leap that helped blaze a trail for the Space Age.

Ever since then, skydivers in search of glory have tried unsuccessfully to break that record. Now Felix Baumgartner, who is already renowned for skyjumping across the English Channel, is gearing up to make the attempt this year - with Kittinger's help.

"With Joe on board, I feel safe," Baumgartner said on NBC's TODAY show. "I'm really looking forward to doing this."

Details about Baumgartner's near-space mission came out on Friday during a series of announcements by its corporate sponsor, Red Bull.  The mission represents one giant leap for Red Bull, which has long sponsored a team of skyjumpers to market its energy drinks. Although the company hasn't said how much the Red Bull Stratos mission will cost, the price tag seems likely to hit hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions.

Baumgartner, 40, said the record attempt would mark "the next logical step" in his two-decade career as a parachute jumper. The highlight so far has been his English Channel crossing in 2003 - which involved jumping from a plane 33,000 feet over the white cliffs of Dover and gliding 22 miles to the French coast in a suit equipped with wings and a chute. He has also done death-defying (and security-defying) jumps from monuments in Brazil, France, Sweden and Taiwan.

The Stratos mission is something completely different, though. It would involve rising up in a pressurized balloon cabin to a height of 120,000 feet - and then taking one big step out of the cabin, wearing a prototype spacesuit.

"Within the first 30 seconds, I'm going to reach the speed of sound," Baumgartner said.

Kittinger came close to doing that during his Project Excelsior parachute jump in 1960, which was aimed at studying how military pilots could best endure high-altitude ejections. The record-setting fall was actually Kittinger's third and final outing for Excelsior. During the first jump, he blacked out and survived only because his automatic chute-opening system worked. During the third jump, one of Kittinger's gloves malfunctioned, but he again survived with all his body parts intact.

50 years of chasing the 'Right Stuff'
Today, at the age of 81, Kittinger looks back at his achievement with the proper attitude of "Right Stuff" coolness: "When it came time to go, I was ready to go," he said.

And now he believes it's time for his record to go - which is why he's serving as one of Baumgartner's advisers. "Records are meant to be broken," he said. "It's human nature."

The reason why Kittinger's record has stood so long is not for lack of trying. There's a long list of skydivers who have tried, including Australia's Rodd Millner, America's Cheryl Stearns, Britain's Steve Truglia and France's Michel Fournier. No one has succeeded so far.

It looked as if Fournier might have done it in 2008 with his "Big Jump" in Saskatchewan - but his high-altitude balloon slipped away as it was being inflated, leaving Fournier and his capsule on the ground.

Fournier has estimated that his efforts to break Kittinger's record have cost nearly $20 million so far, and he's not done yet. In fact, a near-space race may be shaping up. The Frenchman says he's aiming to make another attempt in Canada this May - that is, assuming the weather is favorable and he can come up with the rest of the $500,000 (Ĩ360,000) that's required for the project.

The people behind Baumgartner's attempt say they plan to make the attempt sometime this year, somewhere in North America. But they can't yet be more precise on those points. They say the timing will depend in part upon the development and testing of the pressure suit, the high-altitude balloon and other high-tech essentials.

Red Bull isn't the only company behind the project. For example, the pressure suit is being developed by David Clark Co., which has also helped create spacesuits for NASA and high-altitude suits for the U.S. military. The company's work on Baumgartner's giant leap could well carry over to the creation of NASA's next spacesuit.

Red Bull is already working out deals for live coverage of Baumgartner's mission on TV, the Web and mobile phones. That would include a 90-minute documentary for the BBC and the National Geographic Channel, tentatively titled "Space Dive."

The future of space diving?
Before that title is set in stone, the BBC might want to check with Rick Tumlinson, a longtime space activist and entrepreneur who has been working on his own high-altitude skydiving venture, known as Project SpaceDiver.

"'Space diver' is a trademarked term for us," Tumlinson told me today. "Anybody else just jumps from high altitudes. We are the space diving company."

Project SpaceDiver would involve an extended test program that starts with relatively low-altitude skydives from a rocket-powered vehicle, and goes all the way up to orbital heights. The ultimate goal is to produce a system that would let astronauts dive to safety from a space vehicle or space station in the event of an emergency.

Tumlinson has been working with Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace on the idea, but he wouldn't rule out partnering with other rocket companies as well. He's glad to see Baumgartner, Red Bull and other players chasing after Kittinger's record. "They're going to beat the record, and we're fine with that." Tumlinson said. But he believes Project SpaceDiver will turn out to be much more than a stunt.

"We intend to build on their experience and open the stratosphere and beyond to a wide variety of people," he said. "And keep in mind, our goal is eventually to return people alive from space itself."

It's too early to tell whether Project SpaceDiver will get off the ground anytime soon. For that matter, it's too early to tell when Baumgartner will take his own giant leap. But if both ventures follow their hoped-for trajectories, Tumlinson says he'll still end up holding the high ground.

"They're basically repeating, from a balloon, something that was done in the 1960s," he told me. "We wish them well. "We're very excited about what they're doing, but they're going old school. We are going to fly from a rocket. No matter how high they go, we're going to go higher ... because it's a freaking rocket."

For a virtual vision of future space diving, check out Clark Lindsey's posting on RLV and Space Transport News. Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following b0yle on Twitter. And pick up a copy of my new book, "The Case for Pluto." If you're partial to the planetary underdogs, you'll be pleased to know that I've set up a Facebook fan page for "The Case for Pluto."

• WSJ: White House to outsource NASA work
• Once and Future Moon: What is 'exploration'?
• Spaceflight Now via YouTube: The Week in Space
• Telegraph: Space pictures taken from a garden shed

Newmarket Films

Click for video: Naturalist Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) studies an orangutan named Jenny in a scene from "Creation." Click on the image to watch a trailer.

Charles Darwin's inner demons - and his inner angels - come to light in a film that traces the roots of his 150-year-old masterwork, "The Origin of Species." The movie version of the story, titled "Creation," dwells on the personal conflicts and travails that helped shape Darwin's thinking on the theory of evolution.

"Creation" goes into limited U.S. release today, months after the filmmakers spoke out about their own conflicts and travails. Last September, when the movie made its debut in dozens of other countries, director Jeremy Thomas complained that the film had no U.S. distributor.

"It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America," he told The Telegraph. "There's still a great belief that [God] made the world in six days."

Less than two weeks later, however, the U.S. distribution rights were picked up by Newmarket Films - which was ironic, because five years earlier the same company handled  "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's worshipful (and graphic) tale of Jesus' death and resurrection.

"Creation," which received a much better review on msnbc.com than Mel Gibson's movie did, could be subtitled "The Passion of Charles Darwin." It shows the British naturalist as deeply conflicted over the implications of his ideas about natural selection and the "struggle for existence." The idea that nature was at war with itself, bereft of divine providence, ran counter to the prevailing views in mid-19th-century England - and particularly the view of his deeply religious wife (and first cousin).

	Newmarket Films
	Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany are a couple off screen as well as on screen as Emma and Charles Darwin in "Creation."

Charles Darwin is played by Paul Bettany - who is also starring as the Archangel Michael in "Legion," another film with religious overtones that is making its debut this week. Bettany's wife, Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, portrays the evolutionist's wife, Emma.

The unease in Darwin's marriage isn't the only thing contributing to Darwin's angst. He must suffer through the cloying brand of Christianity championed by his erstwhile pastor, as well as the urgings of scientific colleagues who are only too happy to get rid of the Man Upstairs. (One scene shows Darwin wincing when fellow biologist Thomas Huxley, who came to be known as "Darwin's bulldog," gleefully tells him, "You've killed God, sir!")

The source of Darwin's deepest sorrow is the death of his 10-year-old daughter, Annie, in 1851. "Creation" depicts Darwin as literally haunted by the girl, who suffered from scarlet fever and tuberculosis (or consumption, as it was known back then) and was subjected to dousing, scrubbing, sweating and other medical treatments that seem extreme today.

Did Annie's travails sharpen Darwin's own views on the struggle for existence by the time "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859? Randal Keynes, Darwin's great-great-grandson, thinks so - and he argues the case in the biography on which the movie is based.

Keynes' book was originally released in Britain in 2001 under the title "Annie's Box," and was later published in the United States as "Darwin, His Daughter and Human Evolution." Now the book is being republished as a paperback movie tie-in, titled "Creation: The True Story of Charles Darwin."

Keynes and I discussed the true story of Darwin, as reflected in his book as well as the movie, during a wide-ranging interview earlier this month. Here's an edited transcript of our chat:

Cosmic Log: In the book, you draw out the idea that the personal tragedy Darwin went through helped sharpen what he wrote in "The Origin of Species." Can you talk about how that was reflected in the movie?

Randal Keynes: Neither the book nor the movie suggests that Darwin drew directly from his experience of Annie's childhood and loss for any of the ideas in the book. What I would say is that Annie's death must have been one of the elements, because it was his most powerful experience of death and bereavement. …   That must have been important in his thinking about pain, and loss, and struggle.

It was therefore an element in his thinking about the "struggle for existence." I mention how it was, in certain passages of his writings about the struggle for existence, that he used different language after his experience from what he had written before.

But that's not the most important point, I think. The experiences of life with Annie and her death were important to Darwin in his idea about the natural origin of the human moral sense. He came to hold the view that the human moral sense arises not from principles laid down by God or anyone else, but in a complicated way from how we care about other people who are important to us – which is a natural instinct. How we develop our thinking about people who are important to us, and how we should treat them when we have language to communicate, and set ourselves rules, and so on.

If you read what Darwin said about the natural origin of the human moral sense in "The Descent of Man," his second great book, you find again echoes of things he learned from his life with Annie.

The very important thing about "The Origin of Species" is that he avoids talking about human nature in it. He knows just how explosive any suggestion that humans are part of the pattern of evolution would be. He puts nothing explicit into "The Origin of Species," he just leaves it as an unspoken implication. When he finds that other people haven't gone on to tease out the implications for humans in the theory of evolution, he decides, "OK, I'm going to write the second book, 'The Descent of Man.'" He explains there that humans are a part of the story.

Q: Right, you mention in the book that he was hoping that Alfred Russel Wallace, an evolutionary theorist who was a contemporary and something of a rival, would write something about that.

A: But he didn't.

Q: What really struck me about the movie was how grim Darwin's life experiences sometimes became. I'm not sure that comes through so much in the book – just those dark depths of grimness.

A: The movie is doing quite a lot in combining strands and weaving them into the picture that the movie presents. It takes a number of elements in Darwin's life, in the way that movies always do, and puts together things that were actually some way from each other.

Q: It would be good for people to know that. After seeing the movie, I looked back and found that Darwin was indeed troubled by illness for a large part of his life. But I see what you're saying: that some of the parts of the story may have come from a later phase in Darwin's life, after "The Origin of Species" was written.

A: Or at other times during the writing. As a Darwinist, I would say that for every important element in the film, there is a source in Darwin's life and writing and in our knowledge about him. The source material doesn't fit together in precisely the way that it does in the film. I think that the film is not a work of historical biography.

The film works by giving an impression of basic truths, a history of a person's life and situation. The impression very often can go beyond what there is chapter and verse for in the historical record – because it depends on the imagination that we use in interpreting what we learn about the person. You make guesses about what that person is feeling and doing. It's part of human nature, part of the way we understand people.

Q: So you feel that the film captures the essence of Darwin's life and work?

A: The film does that. I think it's right to present Darwin as a man of passion as they do. A man under pressure, and sometimes buckling under the pressure. It's really valuable to show him that way after 100 years of portrayal of him as this bearded prophet with no humanity at all. Some people make it sound as if he just produced this theory out of thin air by the objective marshaling of evidence. That just doesn't get to the heart of the excitement of the theory, or the difficulties that Darwin had in working it out. It's right to show Darwin in this new way, because that is closer to the true nature of the man than this stereotype.

Q: We should probably talk about the controversy that surrounded the release of the film. At one time, there was talk that this film was too hot for the United States to handle. What's your perspective? I have a feeling that the controversy was overblown … or perhaps not?

A: It's difficult for me, because I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of the controversy in the States. The position is so different in Britain on the science vs. religion issue that I'm reluctant to make guesses about what's going on in the minds of different people in the States. I have been struck by how these issues became much more difficult, I think, within the last decade. I wouldn't want to comment on the reasons. It seems to me that it all happened during the Bush administration, but it's really not for me to comment on the administration.

It does seem to me that the issue of science vs. religion became poisonous because it developed a political dimension. I saw this with the history of the wonderful exhibition that the American Museum of Natural History put on.

The staff of the museum felt it would be wonderful to follow their exhibition on Einstein, which was a great success, with a similar exhibition on Darwin. In about 2000, they put to their board a proposal for a blockbuster exhibition on Darwin. The board said, 'Wonderful,' and commissioned them to produce this exhibition. I met the organizers when they came over to London and helped them by putting them in touch with the people who had the material they wanted. …

By the time the exhibition was ready to open, the climate of opinion on Darwin had changed. The clouds had darkened, and there was lightning in them. … When the museum sought corporate sponsorship for the exhibition, they found that, for the first time in their history, they couldn't find a corporation that was prepared to sponsor the exhibition. Each corporation felt that if we back this exhibition we may get flak, and there are other exhibitions that we could back instead. So let's just pass on this one.

The museum had seen that change from the time that they commissioned the exhibition to the time when it was ready to open. They were afraid there would be demonstrations. When it opened, they were ready for lightning and storms. But possibly partly because it opened in New York, they had a wonderful reception. The exhibition was a triumph, and it toured around the States, and Canada, and around the world.

You got that change of climate from 2000 to 2004 or 2005, showing in the lack of sponsorship. That is exactly what the film found. Very possibly it was a repeat of the failure of the exhibition to get sponsorship. It's not that the potential backers were against evolution. It's simply that there were other films that were safer bets.

What has turned out in both cases is that the fears weren't fully realized. People went to the exhibition. They enjoyed it. They'll go to the film. They'll love it. Other people will reject it. That's their choice.

Q: We've just finished up the big year for the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species." Now that there has been that spotlight on Darwin, do you have a sense of what the next year, the next decade, the next century might bring when it comes to reconsidering Darwin and his legacy?

A: During the year of Darwin, many more people came to realize what the film shows about his character and the value of what he did - in standing out against people who wanted to reject his idea just because they didn't like it. The year has also brought home to many more people the value of his legacy in education.

I very much hope that people won't now forget about Darwin again, because they've learned during the past year just how interesting a person he was, and how valuable his example is in science education, in education about the natural world and natural life.

They will hold onto that idea, I think. Over the next 10 to 20 years, we'll be able to use his legacy to help people to understand important things about the matters that are covered in his theory.

Keynes' "Creation," a.k.a. "Darwin, His Daughter and Evolution," has been around long enough to qualify as a selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club, which highlights books with cosmic themes that have been around long enough to show up at your local library or used-book shop.

As an alternate selection, you might consider "The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online." The Web site offers "The Origin of Species" as well as "The Descent of Man," of course, but I think my favorite read of the week would be Charles Darwin's Beagle Diary, which was edited by Keynes' father, Richard Darwin Keynes.

More about Darwin and the saga of evolution:

• TODAY video: Paul Bettany on playing Darwin
• An alternate view: 'Darwin's Darkest Hour'
• We're all living in Darwin's world
• Strange facts about the father of evolution
• Einstein and Darwin: A tale of two theories
• Darwin's pianist wife influenced theories
• Rare Darwin drafts go online
• The not-so-angry evolutionist
• How evolution evolved
• Adventures in evolution
• Readings in evolution

• Northwestern: Prof helps out on sci-fi show 'Caprica'
• 'Weather Proof' tests Mother Nature so you don't have to
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies'
• National Geographic: 'Fight Science' packs a scientific punch

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz.

An enhanced-color image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows streaks in the central pit of an impact crater. The streaks are created by wind erosion.

If you're a fan of NASA's Mars missions, a few things have started heading in the right direction - including a renewed flow of eye-pleasing pictures from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a new program that gives you a say in picking the orbiter's future targets, and new signs of progress in the months-long effort to free the Spirit rover from a sand trap.

Spirit: Free at last? There's new hope
For the past nine months, Spirit's wheels have been stuck in a patch of soft soil nicknamed Troy. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tried for weeks to free the rover by having it retrace its tracks - but instead, the wheels just dug themselves in deeper. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the rover team discovered that the rover's right front and right rear wheels weren't working. That left the six-wheeled Spirit with just four good wheels.

Last week, managers tried a different tack: Instead of trying to get out the way it got in, Spirit was commanded to continue on the southward path it was taking when it got stuck. (Describing the direction is a little tricky. Because of its long-running wheel problems, Spirit was rolling in reverse gear when it got into trouble. So it has to "drive forward" to retrace its steps, and "drive backward" to break new ground. Spirit is now trying to drive backward, rear wheels first.)

The rover drivers also added a new maneuver that involves turning the wheels from side to side before a drive is attempted. The maneuver, called a "frog kick" or "breaststroke," is aimed at shaking dust out of the wheels and clearing the path ahead, said John Callas, project manager for the twin rover missions. Each wide turn of the wheel pushes against the soil piled up behind it, giving the rover an extra push forward.

"Think of it like trying to do a breaststroke while you're lying in snow," he told me.

However you visualize it, the frog kick seems to be working. Callas said Spirit has moved about 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) after each kick-and-drive maneuver. He estimated that the rover has plowed about 7 centimeters (3 inches) southward through the sandy soil so far.

NASA / JPL

An animated image shows Spirit's wheels rising up after a spin on Jan. 16.

That may not sound like much, and Callas cautioned that the maneuvers might get the rover only so far before it becomes fully stuck again. But in this case, every inch helps.

"The rear wheels are climbing up. ... It's jacking up the rear of the rover," Callas said. That's a good thing, because that has the effect of tilting Spirit's solar arrays more directly toward the sun in the north. That should let Spirit soak up more sunshine during the depths of the southern Martian winter, which lasts from about mid-February to mid-August, Callas said.

"We're trying to increase the rover's tilt to enhance its winter survivability," he explained.

All this is good news for the rover team, but Callas peppered his remarks with caution. Spirit still isn't tilted toward the north as much as it should be. If the rover gets stuck again, there's a chance its solar arrays won't generate enough power to keep it alive through the winter.

During the most recent drive, Spirit's left middle wheel stalled - which is an ominous sign. "We may be observing a rapid deterioration in the mobility system," Callas said.

At one point there had been talk about using Spirit's robotic arm as a pusher or a plow, but engineers figured out that the arm would be of little or no help in such maneuvers. Even if Spirit loses its mobility, NASA is still hoping the rover can serve as a stationary science outpost. The robotic arm can serve as a valuable tool for doing science in place, but using it to move rocks or soil would put that part of the mission at risk, Callas said.

"That's not going to happen," he said.

For more about Spirit's situation, check out this status update from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, complete with a larger animated image of the wheels' movement. You can also get the latest on Spirit's twin, Opportunity, which is in the middle of a months-long trek toward Endeavour Crater.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Pick your picture
While the rover team focuses on Spirit's predicament, the scientists and engineers in charge of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-resolution camera are reveling in the fresh flow of imagery after the probe's revival last month. They're also enlisting the public to help select future targets for picture-taking.

The team behind the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, has established a Web-based suggestion box called HiWish. Once you register on the Web site, you can use a map-style interface to point to areas you'd like to have HiRISE photograph. You'll be asked to explain the rationale for your choice and show how it fits in with the mission's science themes.

The HiRISE science team will evaluate the suggestions and go after the high-priority targets first. You'll be notified if and when the orbiter sends back a picture of your suggested site. "This opportunity opens up a new path to students and others to participate in ongoing exploration of Mars," Rich Zurek, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's project scientist, said in a news release.

McEwen had a few tips for folks who want to maximize the chances that their suggestion will be chosen:

• Don't spam the system: This is not a lottery, and it's not a contest to see which locations get the most votes. People who send in multiple entries for the same target will not increase their chances of winning. "If they annoy us, they're less likely to get their picture taken," McEwen said.
• Don't choose the popular places: HiRISE has taken thousands of pictures so far, and yet less than 1 percent of the Martian surface has been imaged. Places like the Face on Mars and the rover landing sites have already had their day in the spotlight, but there are plenty of other worthy areas that haven't gotten as much attention. Try to put your cursor "on a place on Mars that isn't really popular," McEwen said.
• Go north ... or south: Because the probe traces a pole-to-pole orbit, there are more opportunities to take pictures of high-latitude targets than equatorial targets.
• Think small: HiRISE is capable of seeing objects just a few meters wide, but it's not good at seeing the big picture. "The most common mistake that people are likely to make is thinking at the wrong imaging scale," McEwen said. Don't bother to suggest taking a wide-angle shot of Olympus Mons or Valles Marineris.
• Do your homework: Checking out the pictures already taken is the best way to get a sense of what the HiRISE team is looking for. Even if you never make a suggestion, you're sure to come across images that will make your head spin. Our selection of "High-Resolution Hits" merely provides a Top 10 taste. Fresh images are added to HiRISE's database every week.

The latest crop includes a colorful view of streaked bedrock in the central pit of an impact crater - the image at the top of this posting. The colors have been "stretched," or enhanced, to reflect shades of blue, rose and purple that you'd never actually see on the Red Planet. In this case, the different shades reflect subtle variations in surface composition.

The swirls of color show where Martian bedrock "is eroding, moving downhill a bit, then getting swept by the wind," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE.

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz.

An oval-shaped mesa spreads out on Syrtis Major, a huge shield volcano on Mars, as seen in this false-color image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Another HiRISE image shows a layered mesa that looks like a blue-and-tan racetrack. This feature is part of a Martian shield volcano known as Syrtis Major, near the northwest rim of a giant impact basin called Isidis Planitia. The area is considered a potential landing site for the Curiosity rover (a.k.a. Mars Science Laboratory). McEwen told me the site is of interest because it has a "great diversity of minerals," including hydrated minerals that may signal the area was hospitable to life billions of years ago.

If HiRISE images indicate that the spot is sufficiently safe for landing, it could be visited by Curiosity in 2012 or by a U.S. or European rover in 2018-2019.

Phoenix Mars Lander: No resurrection yet
Mars' northern hemisphere is just now coming out of the winter season, and scientists are trying to find out whether NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has resurrected itself. They're not holding their breath.

Phoenix stopped communicating with Earth back in November 2008, at the end of a mission in Mars' north polar region that lasted more than two months longer than its expected three-month duration. The probe's most celebrated finding was the discovery and analysis of water ice beneath the Martian surface.

The Phoenix team knew that the probe would freeze to death during the winter, but they built a "Lazarus mode" into its software, just in case the electronics returned to working order after thawing out. This week, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter started listening for signals from Phoenix, but as of today, nothing has been heard. Off-and-on listening sessions will continue for the next couple of months - just in case Phoenix rises from the grave after all.

• Planetary Society: Send birthday wishes to Buzz Aldrin
• CollectSpace: Disney picks Buzz Lightyear space patch
• Improbable.com: GA GA equation vs. Gaga equation
• Cracked: The five creepiest unexplained broadcasts
• The Onion: Scientology losing ground to Fictionology

Erickson et al. / Cerebral Cortex

A cutaway image shows four brain structures studied in the video-game research. the caudate nucleus (blue), putamen (red), nucleus accumbens (orange spot) and hippocampus (green). Researchers found linkages between game performance and the first three structures, but no linkage involving the hippocampus.

Does playing video games improve your brain? Or do bigger brains make it easier to learn video games?

Psychologists say they can predict how well you'll do on a video game by looking at the size of just three little structures inside your brain. If those structures are bigger, you'll probably catch on more quickly and do better.

But don't start bragging about how gamers are naturally brainier just yet. The psychologists have more puzzles to solve before they level up.

"We're really at the tip of the iceberg in understanding how all this gets put together," said the University of Pittsburgh's Kirk Erickson, the study's principal author.

The study, conducted by Erickson and 10 other researchers, appears in the journal Cerebral Cortex. "This is the first time that we've been able to take a real-world task like a video game and show that the size of specific brain regions is predictive of performance and learning rates on this video game," Erickson said in a news release issued today.

The team's findings come amid an increasing reliance on game-based "brain training" as a form of mental calisthenics. "Video games are now being used frequently through educational disciplines to train children and adults, in remedial situations, in business practices to train employees, and they're even being used by the military," Erickson told me.

Past research has shown that expert gamers tend to outperform novices on basic measures of attention and perception. Some studies have suggested that video-game training can help novices bridge the gap - while others indicated that the novices couldn't catch up after more than 20 hours of training.

Inside the learning machine
Erickson and his colleagues wondered whether physical characteristics in the brain were behind the variability in learning rates. The researchers focused on a region deep within the cerebral cortex, known as the striatum.

"Our animal work has shown that the striatum is a kind of learning machine - it becomes active during habit formation and skill acquisition," one of the study's co-principal investigators, Ann Graybiel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in the news release. "So it made a lot of sense to explore whether the striatum might also be related to the ability to learn in humans."

Thirty-nine experimental subjects, ages 18 to 28, were recruited at the University of Illinois. Ten of them were male, 29 of them were female, and none of them had played video games for more than three hours a week over the preceding two years. Each subject's brain was measured using high-resolution MRI scans to map the relative size of structures in the striatum.

	RPI
	The video game Space Fortress can be manipulated to test various aspects of cognition.

Then each subject received 20 hours of training to play a video game specifically created for research purposes, called Space Fortress. It's basically an Asteroids-type arcade game, in which the object is to knock down and destroy an enemy fortress while dodging space mines. However, the game has lots of extra twists that require close attention. Some of the players were told to focus exclusively on running up a high score, while others were told to shift their priorities between several goals.

The result? The subjects who had more volume in an area called the nucleus accumbens did significantly better in the early stages of training. Meanwhile, those who were well-endowed in different areas of the striatum, known as the caudate nucleus and putamen, handled the shifting strategies better.

"These are people who had healthy brains," Erickson said. "These aren't learning-disabled people. But we were still able to distinguish essentially who would be more affected by the training in this video game."

What the brain areas do
The linkages between the areas of the brain and their effects made sense, based on what neuroscientists have previously learned. For example, the nucleus accumbens has been linked to the brain's emotional response to reward and punishment. That would explain the pleasures and frustrations that gamers feel during the early stages of learning a game.

"The putamen and the caudate have been implicated in learning procedures, learning new skills, and those nuclei predicted learning throughout the 20-hour period," said the University of Illinois' Arthur Kramer, another co-principal investigator.

Arizona State University linguist James Gee, who has studied the linkage between video games and learning but was not involved in the latest study, said in an e-mail that the researchers made "an interesting set of claims." However, he noted that the study involved "an old-style arcade-type game that is not typical of today's games in many respects."

He also noted that other research, going back to the 1980s, has shown that "a short training period made differences between men and women on spatial skills in video games disappear." That runs counter to the claim that there's an unbridgeable gap between good and bad gamers.

Exercise and the brain
Even the researchers behind the latest study stress that brain structures aren't set in stone. "We know that's not true for a lot of nuclei in the brain," Kramer said. "We know that exercise can increase the volume of the nuclei."

He could be talking about physical as well as mental exercise. An earlier study conducted by Kramer and Erickson, for example, found a linkage between physical fitness and memory function in elderly people. A more recent study found that game-playing enhanced brain function. And it could be that the folks with brains suited for gaming got that way by pursuing other activities, such as musical training or even juggling.

Erickson said the study could have an impact on how brain-training services are offered - depending on how much value people place on measuring brain volume. "In the future, we might be able to tailor the training regimens based on pre-existing differences in the brain," he told me. "Some people might be slower at reaching the same level, so that means they might need more time to learn the same process."

He said the findings also could suggest regions to focus on when treating mental disabilities - or regions to watch when looking for the effects of different training strategies.

"What we don't know yet is the extent to which these brain regions can actually change as the result of more experience or training," Erickson said. "It's possible that the more activity you engage in, the more likely you are to change the volume of these structures."

Researchers are just beginning to get a handle on how different regions of the brain interact to foster learning - which brings us back to the tip of the iceberg.

"The fact that we could explain more than 20 percent of the variance in learning rates by measuring the volume of only two or three brain regions is actually quite impressive," Erickson said. "There must be several other brain regions contributing to performance in learning. These other regions are things that other studies will have to track down."

Does all this hint at a new age of neuroscience, or a newfangled revival of phrenology? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 1:30 p.m. ET: Arizona State University's James Gee has already weighed in with additional comments via e-mail:

The paper is interesting indeed, though problematic in certain respects.  Of course, the nature of people's brains affects their learning and performances — this is just another way of talking about individual differences.  So, too, does the nature of people's prior experiences in the world.  And, of course, these two (internal structure and external experiences) interact in complex ways — one way they interact is that sometimes it is hard to tell whether a set of experiences led to a brain difference (e.g., more reading leading to changes in the brain) or a brain difference led to people wanting, getting, and being better at some experiences (e.g., seeking out reading and liking it more and being better at it).

The authors try to control for experience by taking people who have played video games for less than 3 hours a week in the prior two years.  However, this still allows the possibility that some of these people had played arcade-style video games massively when younger (it is not uncommon that college students — especially ones as old as 28, which are included in the sample — played games a good deal before they went to college, but play less in college).  So, without controlling for this factor, we cannot be sure the result is not due to some of these students having played a good deal more video games than others prior to two years and this may have affected their brains.

This would be like doing a reading study on working adults and taking those who have not read many books in the last two years.  Many adults do not read a lot, but some may have been big readers earlier in life, before the demands of work and family, and others may have been non-readers.  The sample would not be a sample of true reading "novices," and we do not know that the sample of gamers in this study are truly game "novices" for the same reason.

The game is not typical even of arcade games — it is a made-up game for research involving a lot of complexity and elements that certainly sound frustrating and un-gamelike — e.g., lots of symbols to pay attention to.  It would certainly be important to know how much different subjects like the game or were motivated to play it in any way that they were paying avid attention and caring enough to learn anything.  Otherwise, the study may just be identifying subjects that were motivated by a rather strange game.

In any case, the study tells us little about the sorts of modern games — like Civilization — that educators have argued hold out great promise for deep learning and school reform.  The game in the study stresses hand-eye and motor coordination — admittedly important for some purposes — but games that want to recruit a larger (and older than teen) player base downplay hand-eye coordination in the favor of strategy.

The most interesting result in the paper — and an important one — is the result that shows the importance and efficacy of variable-priority learning, that is, learning that trains and stresses cognitive flexibility, rather than fixed-priority learning.  But, of course, cognitive scientists already know this from other forms of research.

More on brains and games:

• The brain: An interactive roadmap to the mind 
• 10 ways to boost your brainpower
• Can brain games keep you young?
• Boomers, teens turn to 'brain fitness' games
• Exercise makes your brain brighter at any age
• More on mental health from msnbc.com

In addition to Erickson, Graybiel and Kramer, the authors of the study appearing in Cerebral Cortex include Walter Boot of Florida State University; and Chandramallika Basak, Mark Neider, Ruchika Prakash, Michelle Voss, Daniel Simons, Monica Fabiani and Gabriele Gratton of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois. The study was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

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

The Haitian Project

A volunteer washes the dust from last week's earthquake in Haiti off a solar array at Louverture Cleary School, north of Port-au-Prince, to maximize power production.

Donors are gearing up to send cell phones, streetlights, water purification systems and even audio Bibles to earthquake-hit Haiti. The bad news is that the country's power infrastructure is on the ropes, but the good news is that these particular gadgets are solar-powered. Haiti happens to be one of the countries in the world best-suited for solar power.

In the long run, that just might help the country survive. But in the short run, even solar power isn't immune to earthquakes. Over the past week, the people and the pieces of equipment that make the technology work have literally been pulled out of the rubble in Port-au-Prince and its environs.

Sometimes the news is terrible. Paul Munsen, president of Sun Ovens International, is struggling to get hundreds of stand-alone solar-powered ovens from the company's factory in northern Haiti to Port-au-Prince.

"Unfortunately, the people we were working with [in Port-au-Prince] are trapped in the rubble and presumed dead," Munsen told me. "Some of the infrastructure we had in place that would have been ideal for us to get the ovens into people's hands is severely damaged."

Sometimes the news is more hopeful.

"It's been quite an emotional roller coaster over the last few days," said Mickey Ingles, the vice president of operations for New Jersey-based Worldwater & Solar Technologies as well as the solar-power consultant for the nonprofit Haitian Project. The project operates Louverture Cleary School, a Catholic boarding school for more than 350 Haitians in a poverty-stricken suburb of Port-au-Prince known as Croix-des-Bouquets.

The quake caused structural damage on campus. Several students were injured. But today, the school's 22-kilowatt solar-power array is back in working order, and classes have resumed. Louverture Cleary can supply all its own power needs and is even serving as an aid center for the devastated neighborhood. "We have opened up our school to let neighbors in for food, shelter and water," said Tim Scordato, the Haitian Project's office manager in Rockford, Ill.

A solar-powered mobile water purification system, donated last year by the Haitian Project, was pulled from the rubble and put into service at a Red Cross aid station. Every day, the Mobile MaxPure rig is turning 30,000 gallons of contaminated city water into drinkable water, Ingles said.

"There are many water purification systems there, but they operate on diesel," Ingles told me. "Right now, diesel is in extremely short supply."

Diesel vs. sunshine
By some accounts, Port-au-Prince currently has only a two-day supply of fuel for generators. "The fuel situation is pretty dire right now," Caroline Hurford, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, told Reuters. Every gallon of fuel that is saved through solar power can be put to good use elsewhere.

Haiti's latest troubles may make it seem as if the country has been cursed, just like Pat Robertson said. It's the Western Hemisphere's poorest country, crippled by decades of deforestation and soil erosion as well as economic mismanagement and natural disasters. But the country is blessed with sunshine - so much so that it's been on Solar Cookers International's global list of solar-power prospects for years.

Sun Ovens International

Solar cookers provide a low-cost alternative to charcoal for Haitian families. The devices are basically insulated boxes equipped with reflective aluminum panels.

Sun Ovens International is gearing up for a leading role in the solar-powered relief effort. The company makes solar cookers that are basically insulated boxes, surrounded by strategically placed panels of highly polished aluminum. The ovens get hot enough to boil, steam, roast or bake dishes at temperatures of up to 360 degrees Fahrenheit (182 degrees Celsius).

A $40 donation buys a complete cooking kit for a Haitian family. One commercial-sized oven, capable of making 1,200 meals during an eight-hour workday, is already in Haiti - and two more are on the way. Munsen and his colleagues are just waiting for camps to be established for the homeless (who are known more formally as internally displaced people or IDPs). "Our goal will be to provide the ovens in IDP camps," Munsen said.

"The first two weeks are always totally relief, and then you get into the real development," he explained. "Until it gets into more of a development phase, there's not any sort of infrastructure for putting these technologies in place."

In the long run, the idea is to get Haitians using solar power instead of charcoal for cooking. "We find that people realize they have money to buy their kids shoes because they're not buying as much charcoal," Munsen said.

"Even prior to this, in Port-au-Prince, the majority of families spent 55 percent of their income just buying charcoal," he explained. "So the issue of having fuel to cook with has been a major problem for Haiti for years before this earthquake. I can't imagine what it's like now. We think that using the sun is going to make a great deal of sense."

Here comes the sun
Other solar-powered gadgetry could have a similar impact, during the crisis and in the years to come:

• Dutch companies and aid organizations have set up an effort to send 1,000 solar-powered mobile phones to Haiti, to be distributed by Fonkoze Financial Services. "Good communication is an absolute necessity in disaster relief, but Haiti currently has a tremendous power problem, which impedes charging mobile phones," Paul Naastepad, chief executive officer of the Intivation solar-power company, said in a statement. "The mobile network itself still functions in many instances due to backup generators, or it can be repaired much quicker than the electrical grid." Check out this report from msnbc.com's Bill Dedman to see how critical an issue cell-phone recharging has become.
• Florida-based Sol Inc. is contributing more than 100 solar-powered streetlights to the Haitian relief effort. These lights are designed to be installed in less than an hour, stay lit all night and stand up to hurricane-force winds. In the wake of the earthquake, such lights can be used to improve nighttime security in the streets of Port-au-Prince, or provide extra light for outdoor emergency clinics. The big issue is how to get the lights to the right people in a timely fashion. The first shipment went down today with Missionary Flights International.
• New Mexico-based Faith Comes by Hearing is sending Haitian churches 600 "Proclaimers" - portable, solar-powered audio players that have been loaded with the books of the Bible. The players "will be given to local pastors so people can hear God's word in their own language - Haitian Creole," spokesman Jon Wilke said. Each Proclaimer can be turned up loud enough to be heard by up to 300 people, in a country where more than a third of adults are illiterate. Wilke said "there is an immediate need for another 3,000 Proclaimers."

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Riddles of the Sphinx'
• SpaceWeather.com: Solar activity flares up
• GEN: Take the RNAi Cryptogram Challenge
• One Astronomer's Noise: Carnival of Space 137

	Karel Navarro / AP
	Rescue dog Duncan peers between the legs of Peruvian firefighter Gustavo Villavisencio as they prepare to leave Lima for Haiti.

Rescuers from all around the world are converging on Haiti in the wake of this week's earthquake - and not all of them are human. Finding survivors amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince is a job tailor-made for dogs and devices.

The search-and-rescue operation "appears to be unprecedented in scale," Discovery.com reports.

Many of those teams, such as Virginia Task Force 1 and California Task Force 2, have been in this kind of situation before - for example, after the catastrophic Iranian earthquake of 2003 or the collapse of a Haitian school in 2008. But the magnitude of this week's disaster is so great that rescue teams who have never before gone into an international operation are being pulled into action.

"This is an unusual situation," said Debra Tosch, executive director of the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.

Tosch has been doing search-dog training for 12 years, and was in the midst of a training session when I called her today. Despite all the technological advances in search and rescue, she says dogs are still "man's best friend" in the wake of a disaster.

"They can cover a large area much more quickly than we can," she said. Robots and listening devices may come into play during a rescue operation, "but a dog is much quicker."

The making of a sniffer dog
The best breeds for this job are working dogs: Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, border collies, German shepherds and the like. "We will test 100 dogs before one one goes into our program," Tosch said. "What we're asking them to do is not natural for a dog. How many dogs on their own would go up a fire ladder to the second story?"

The dogs that make the grade are trained to recognize a specific smell: the scent of a live, not a dead, human. "We all have a common scent that says, 'Yes, I am a live human being,'" Tosch said. "We also have an individualized scent, but these dogs are trained to look for that common scent."

Sniffer dogs are adept at matching up that scent with the people surrounding them - in effect, saying to themselves, "This is it ... oops, that's you ... then, this is it ... ah, there's nobody there," Tosch said. At that point, the dog barks until it receives its reward.

During training, the dog is given a tug toy by the supposed victim. "That's why the dog always wants to find the victim," Tosch explained. "That's where the fun is. It's a hide-and-seek game."

In the field, the dog's handler has to find a way to give the dog its toy as if it had come from the disaster victim, to reinforce the hide-and-seek behavior. And if the dog doesn't find anything, a rescue team member might have to hide amid the rubble to give the dog a chance for positive reinforcement.

"We've done that," said Lt. Gery Morrison of Fairfax County Fire and Rescue in Virginia, a veteran of Virginia Task Force 1. "We've put rescuers behind a building, just a mock rescue, so that dogs will find a live person and get rewarded. Otherwise, they get discouraged."

Once the dog finds a survivor, other methods come into play for the actual recovery. "It's not that dog's job to tell us exactly where the victim is," Tosch said. "His job is to tell us where the strongest human scent is."

Joe Raedle / Getty Images North America

Search-and-rescue workers from Mexico carry their dog as they search for survivors amid the rubble of an earthquake-hit building in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Pinpointing the victim's location
The victim might well be caught under tons of rubble, and the scent could waft up through nooks and crannies to a spot on the surface yards away. Or the dog might have caught a whiff of a false positive. Nobody's perfect, not even an expert canine.

"If the dog gets a 'hit,' then we'll go with some other device to get a secondary confirmation, either using a SearchCam or a listening device," Morrison told me. "If we don't get any information from those devices, then we'll send a second dog in."

Search-and-rescue cameras are typically mounted on wands that can be extended to 8 feet or so, with 360-degree view control. Listening devices can pick up the faint sounds of human voices or movements within the rubble. But how do you actually retrieve the victim? That's where human hands and specialized tools come into play.

Getting the victims out
This time around, Virginia Task Force 1 is using a few new twists, including a heavy-duty rebar cutter that can handle the reinforced concrete found at Haitian disaster sites. "We stole that from the construction trade," Morrison said.

The task force's upgraded toolbox also heavy-duty saw that can cut through 2-inch-thick steel. "Believe it or not, it looks like a Skilsaw but it cuts steel," Morrison said.

As horrible as the Haitian earthquake was, there are some factors that make this search-and-rescue job easier than the typical urban situation, Morrison said: "The biggest thing that we have is the height of the buildings. We don't have the six- or eight-story buildings. They're all one-, two-, three-story buildings, so that helps us."

But search-and-rescue robots aren't on the scene as much as they were in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and Hurricane Katrina. The main reason for that has to do with the characteristics of the collapsed buildings in Port-au-Prince. Morrison explained that collapses generally follow one of three models: a pancake collapse, a "V" shape or a lean-to collapse.

"In Haiti, we're dealing with a pancake collapse. ... When you have the lean-to or the V collapse, you have more voided areas. The pancake doesn't have so many of those empty spaces for operating a remote device," he said. "On the other hand, the structures are more stable when they pancake. You feel more confident about putting a rescuer or a technician in there."

Robin Murphy, a Texas A&M professor who heads the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, said she didn't know of any robots currently being used on the ground in Haiti. "Ground robots are helpful for large buildings, but in general, dogs are the biggest help in finding victims in residential areas - dogs smell faster, much faster than the most agile robot can get in the rubble," she wrote in a blog posting.

She said robots in the air, such as the U.S. military's Global Hawk drones, can contribute to post-disaster reconnaissance. "I'm not sure if the air traffic control problems have been resolved to permit larger aerial assets to fly," she told me in an e-mail. (In fact, a Global Hawk has been flying over Haiti for the past couple of days ... here's a video report.)

Considering that the quake occurred on Tuesday afternoon, is it getting too late to find survivors amid Port-au-Prince's rubble? Not on your life, Morrison said.

"We have found individuals [alive] 72 hours after the fact," he recalled. "In Turkey, we found one after seven days. The only guideline is that you go multiple days after the latest find. Also, it's the amount of devastation. Are we fruitlessly putting people in a dangerous situation?"

At some point, the live-scent dogs will have to be replaced by cadaver dogs. The search teams will head home, and Haiti's rescue effort will become a recovery effort.

But that point hasn't been reached yet. The dogs are still barking.

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET: The National Disaster Search Dog Foundation sent along some good news at the end of this bad-news week. Here's today's news release from Janet Reineck, the foundation's development director:

At 1:15 p.m. local time, an SDF Search Team in Port-au-Prince located three girls, trapped alive since Tuesday in the rubble of Haiti's devastating earthquake.

Bill Monahan and his border collie, Hunter, were searching a neighborhood near the Presidential Palace, concentrating on a large bowl-shaped area of rubble which was all that remained of a four-story building.

After criss-crossing the area, Hunter pinpointed the survivors' scent under 4 feet of broken concrete and did his "bark alert" to let Bill know where the victims were.  Bill spoke with the survivors, then passed them bottles of water tied to the end of a stick.  As they reached for the water, one of the girls said, "Thank you."  Highly trained rescue crews from California Task Force 2 are now working to extricate the girls from the wreckage and provide first aid.

Bill and Hunter continue to search, as do the six other SDF teams on the ground in Haiti:

California Task Force 2 – Los Angeles County
Gary Durian & Baxter – L.A. County Fire
Ron Horetski & Pearl – L.A. County Fire
Bill Monahan & Hunter – L.A. County Fire
Jasmine Segura & Cadillac – L.A. County Fire
Jason Vasquez & Maverick – L.A. County Fire
Ron Weckbacher & Dawson – Civilian

Florida Task Force 1
Julie Padelford-Jansen & Dakota

At Search Dog Foundation headquarters in Ojai, CA, SDF Founder Wilma Melville received the news with silent gratitude.  "This moment is what SDF Search Teams train for — week in and week out — throughout their careers together.  When one SDF team succeeds, all of our teams succeed.  Our thoughts are with our teams in Haiti, who continue to comb the rubble into the night.  Their perseverance, skill and strength in the face of extreme challenges make us all proud, and give us hope."

Captain Jayd Swendseid of CA-TF2 confirmed earlier today that the 72-member team Task Force with 70,000 pounds of rescue equipment is actively looking for victims around-the-clock.  "The teams are working in 12-hour shifts so they have time to rest and recuperate.  Yesterday the team put in a long and exhausting day.  Roads are closed and there is a lot of debris that is making transportation difficult, but the team is managing to get to buildings and make rescues.  Morale is good and supplies are sufficient so far."

The teams of CA-TF 2 are now assigned to one of two squads to enable round-the-clock searching.  The Red Squad (Dawson, Pearl, and Maverick) is in rotation with the Blue Squad (Hunter, Baxter and Cadillac). The squads connected briefly with SDF Team Julie Padelford-Jansen and Dakota — deployed as part of Florida Task Force 2 — before Julie and Dakota were assigned to search a different neighborhood.

SDF Executive Director Debra Tosch:  "All SDF handlers are experts in reading their canines, pacing them throughout their shift to ensure the dogs are kept safe, healthy, happy and motivated.  The canines are literally the Task Force's most precious tool in the hunt for survivors: Their well-being is mission-critical."

SDF is grateful to all of our supporters around the country who are truly part of the search, having made this rescue possible.

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

I'll be taking a long weekend in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day - a day that celebrates the legacy of the civil-rights leader and provides an opportunity to carry on his work through service. This weekend, thousands of Americans are contributing humanitarian services in Haiti, where millions are in need.

Take some time out to consider a contribution to the relief effort - making sure, of course, that the money really does get to those in need. To assess how well your chosen charity is performing, check out the Charity Navigator database.

On the science front, there's some bad news and good news for King's philosophical brethren. An internal study, newly released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gives the university poor marks in racial diversity - particularly in science and engineering. More hopeful news for the future is contained in the National Science Foundation's latest science and engineering indicators, suggesting that the proportions of blacks and Hispanic students in those fields will rise in years to come.

Science isn't everything, as King observed in 1964 during his Nobel Peace Prize lecture: "There is a sort of poverty of the spirit that stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance," he said. "The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually."

Despite all that, we have to hope that scientific and technological advances will give us a greater understanding of what King called the "interrelated structure of reality." Many of the scientific insights we've gained in the 46 years since King's observation support the view that no single element, gene or theory can explain why we do what we do ... or why we see what we see. The workings of the cosmos and conscious beings are indeed interrelated, and science provides the evidence.

Martin Luther King, like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, would agree with the proposition that "we are all connected." We just have to do a better job of reflecting that reality -  not only on MLK Day, but every day. Feel free to add your own thoughts as comments below.

More Web links for the long weekend: 

• New York Times: The out-of-sight mind 
• Science @ NASA: Telescope will join planet safari
• Asylum: Math geek figures out why he lacks a girlfriend
• ScienceInsider: Latest science 'indicators' capture China's rise

GeoEye Satellite Image

Click for zoomable image: Satellite imagery captured on Wednesday, the day after Haiti's earthquake, shows the ruined National Palace surrounded by people and debris. Click on the image to explore the scene with HDView (plug-in required).

In the wake of Haiti's earthquake, satellites are helping rescuers pinpoint where the need is greatest - and reconnecting the ruined nation with the outside world.

Emergency responders and military personnel - plus journalists, of course - are scrambling to get into Port-au-Prince, where hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been in need of assistance since Tuesday's magnitude-7 shock. At the same time, satellite operators are scrambling to get a better look at the devastation, and provide the support for aid organizations on the ground.

The amount of data streams beaming up from Haiti to Inmarsat's telecom satellites has already skyrocketed, said Jack Deasy, director for civil government programs at Inmarsat Government Services. "While it's not as intense as Afghanistan, it is a number of times up from anything normal in that region," he told me today.

Mark Brender, vice president of communications for GeoEye, said satellite imagery serves as "virtual truth serum, and provides governments and relief organizations with an instant snapshot of the lay of the land."

"Our imagery over Haiti, for example, showed how many people went to sports stadiums and open areas," he told me. "Well, that's knowledge. Maybe that's where you ought to provide food and water first."

Wednesday's imagery from the GeoEye-1 satellite can be compared with "before" imagery, such as an Ikonos satellite view from 2008 (7MB version), to determine which areas of the Haitian capital suffered the most damage. The post-quake picture shows a flattened presidential palace ... a ruined cathedral ... crumbled military barracks ... and tumbled-over cargo containers in Port-au-Prince's port. (This New York Times interactive cleverly blends the before-and-after views.)

GeoEye is by no means the only satellite operator on the case. A whole fleet of eyes in the sky are focusing on Haiti: DigitalGlobe's WorldView-1 and QuickBird. France's Spot-5, Japan's ALOS, the European Space Agency's ERS-2 and Envisat, and Canada's RadarSat-2.

In the early stages of a relief operation, satellite maps can show rescuers the worst-hit places in a disaster zone, or the best place to set up headquarters. Radar imagery can be used to monitor the region even when it's covered with clouds, and even detect the surface deformations that may signal aftershocks or landslides to come.

Reconnecting to the world
When the rescuers arrive, one of the most immediate needs beyond food, water and medicine is the need to communicate. The quake dealt a heavy blow to Haiti's standard communication links.

	Hughes
	A Broadband Global Area Network terminal, or BGAN, is about the size of a laptop computer and connects with a satellite network to transmit voice or data.

"Without communication, it's incredibly hard to talk about what's needed in terms of shelter, food, medical supplies and so forth," said Bill Brindley, chief executive officer of NetHope, a consortium of 28 nongovernmental relief organizations.

Here again, satellites are coming to the rescue. Telecoms Sans Frontieres, a French-based international relief organization, was among the first on the scene with BGAN terminals. (The acronym, pronounced "bee-gan", stands for broadband global area network.)

The BGAN devices are about as big as a netbook or laptop computer, and cost from $1,000 to $4,000 each. They provide a mobile hookup for phone or data communication (wireless or wired) through the Inmarsat satellite network, at rates that are structured like cell-phone plans (but more expensive).

Telecoms Sans Frontieres is hooking up terminals to facilitate communications for U.N. relief workers in Haiti, and will eventually let Haitians make free two-minute phone calls to anywhere in the world. The group's U.S. representative, Paul Margie, said the biggest challenge isn't technology but security. "The security and logistics situation on the ground is pretty bad, so finding secure locations to do these things is hard," he told me.

Inmarsat's Deasy said the data traffic is rising rapidly as teams from around the world converge on Haiti, bringing tens or scores of the BGAN terminals with them.

"We expect that demand to go up as more teams arrive, and we expect to be able to accommodate that demand," he said. "Then it becomes a question of the details of how people go into the country."

The next stage involves putting down small satellite dishes (known as VSATs, or very small aperture terminals) to beef up the communications networks.

Governmental relief operations are already getting VSATs on the scene, and relying upon satellite services donated by satellite operators such as SES World Skies. "Satellite networks play a quintessential role in disaster recovery, when speed is of the essence," Rob Bednarek, the company's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

As the Haiti crisis unfolds, Telecoms Sans Frontieres plans to transition from the BGAN terminals to high-frequency and VHF communication links, supplemented by VSATs, Margie said.

Like many relief agencies, Telecoms Sans Frontieres has been on the scene for a series of disasters, ranging from Caribbean hurricanes to Asian earthquakes. "Every emergency is very different from the last," Margie said. "The challenge of yesterday's emergency is not the challenge of the next one."

A net of connectivity
Every crisis brings new innovations as well: For example, NetHope is putting together a novel combination of VSAT dishes and WiMax wireless networks to cover Port-au-Prince with a net of connectivity.

"It will create a 10-megabit-per-second network that can be used for two purposes," NetHope's Brindley told me. "First, phone connectivity for setting up voice over Internet, so [relief workers] can begin to communicate. The second thing will be Internet connectivity. That will allow for GIS mapping, it will allow for FTP for photos, it will allow for video. ... It provides a full stack of communication technologies for allowing the teams to coordinate and for assessments to be done."

More than 20 of NetHope's members are involved in Haiti disaster relief - and coordinating all that activity can be a complicated and expensive proposition. NetHope says its VSAT/WiMax telecom system will cost $25,000, and it's currently raising the money to cover that expense.

Fortunately, millions of dollars are streaming in from mobile phone users around the world to help Haiti - and support is streaming in as well for the work being done by NetHope, Telecoms Sans Frontieres and other gearhead do-gooders. "We've really seen a tremendous response from the corporate world, primarily the high-tech companies that are partnering with us, as well as individuals," Brindley said.

When the crisis eases, Brindley expects that NetHope will hand the system over to the Haitians themselves. But at this point, no one can predict how long the crisis will last. At this point, keeping up the communication links amid Haiti's chaos is challenge enough.

"We'll be used in Haiti for a year, there's no question," Inmarsat's Deasy said. "But our unique value in this area is that first 24 to 48 hours."

Update for 9:30 p.m.: NASA has put up several images from its Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000 that show Haiti's highs and lows, including the seismic fault that gave way during this week's quake.

More about satellites:

• How satellites saved the world
• Satellites assess tsunami damage
• Internet + sat phones = emergency relief
• High tech used in disaster response

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

• Slate: What's the best way to dig through rubble? 
• Discovery.com: Sniffer dogs converge on Haiti
• Scientific American: Quake not that surprising
• The Engineer: How Haiti should be rebuilt

Damian Dovarganes / AP

Click for video: Morgan Page, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, shows a map of seismic activity in Haiti. Click on the image for a video about quake science from NBC Nightly News.

Several factors came together to make Haiti's earthquake the most devastating seismic shock to hit the country in two centuries - ranging from sheer magnitude to sheer poverty. In purely scientific terms, the best comparison was the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the Bay Area during the 1989 World Series. But the tragedy in Haiti isn't purely scientific.

The death toll seems certain to rise into the tens of thousands in the wake of Port-au-Prince's magnitude-7 quake, compared with a death toll of 63 after the magnitude-7 Loma Prieta quake. The difference clearly has to do with the woeful state of infrastructure in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

"A large part of the death toll and destruction tends to be in the infrastructure. ... In developing countries, we don't know what kind of building infrastructure they have, but it's safe to assume that it's less safe there in terms of shaking activity," said Alex Hutko, a research seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

Experts say Tuesday's earthquake was the strongest shock to hit what is now known as Haiti since 1770. However, the Dominican Republic, Haiti's eastern neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, fell victim to a magnitude-8.0 tremor in 1946. That event killed about 100 people, with most of those lost in the tsunami created by the offshore quake. About 20,000 were left homeless.

Dominicans back then were relatively lucky in that the quake occurred in the early afternoon on a holiday, when most people were outdoors. In contrast, the Haiti quake was close to a perfect seismic storm:

• The area where the shock occurred, known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone or EPGFZ, had not had a major rupture in more than a century. Haiti sits at the boundary between the North American and the Caribbean tectonic plates, which move across each other at a rate of nearly an inch (20 millimeters) per year. In the EPGFZ in particular, the average annual slippage is a third of an inch (7 to 8 mm). But all that strain has been building up for decades. The really eerie thing is that seismologists predicted almost two years ago that Port-au-Prince could be in for a 7.2 earthquake, due to the buildup of strain in the EPGFZ.
• A magnitude-7 earthquake is toward the high end of the scale, but magnitude is not the only factor that determines how damaging a quake can be. A little more than two years ago, for example, a 7.7 quake in Chile killed just two people. This time, however, the epicenter was relatively close to the surface (6 miles or 10 kilometers deep) and relatively close to Haiti's biggest population center (10 miles or 15 kilometers from Port-au-Prince, with a population of more than 2 million). Shallower seismic activity is much more dangerous than deep rumblings, and the level of shaking drops off substantially over distance. This quake was so strong that it reportedly broke water lines at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, 200 miles away.
• The geology of the area hit by the quake is also a big factor. "Soft ground tends to amplify the shaking and also can tend to break up the foundation of structures if the ground ruptures underneath them," Michael Blanpied, associate coordinator for the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program, said in a podcast about the Haiti earthquake. Hutko told me the USGS didn't have information about the soil geology in Port-au-Prince. However, the large number of collapsed structures would fit the pattern for a soft-ground quake.
• The timing of the quake, at 4:53 p.m. Haiti time (ET) on a weekday, caught many people in their offices - the worst place to be when buildings are falling. Among those who were caught in that situation was the chief of the U.N.'s Haiti mission, who was meeting with a Chinese delegation at the five-story office building and was among those unaccounted for.
• The state of infrastructure in Haiti was the real killer. After the tragic collapse of a school in 2008, Port-au-Prince's mayor estimated that about 60 percent of the city's buildings were shoddily built and dangerous under normal conditions. The country has been struggling with grinding poverty for years, due to decades of political instability as well as a series of natural disasters. Ironically, Haiti's horrible infrastructure is a disincentive for investment, creating a vicious circle of economic hardship.

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake provides several parallels for Tuesday's quake in Haiti: Both involved strike-slip faults -  the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault in Haiti, and the San Andreas fault system in California. Both caused catastrophic damage to infrastructure: Twenty-one years ago, most of the quake victims died when Oakland's Cypress Street Viaduct collapsed. A day ago, hundreds of thousands of people were trapped in collapsed structures ranging from simple shacks to the National Palace.

The timelines for the two events could diverge dramatically during the aftermath.

Lessons learned from Loma Prieta were put to use in a wave of large-scale rebuilding projects, in the Bay Area as well as in other quake-prone areas such as Seattle. It will be a miracle if Haiti can recover as quickly, even with the millions of dollars of international aid likely to come its way. It's not a scientific certainty that the country will recover at all. That part of the story is up to all of us.

More about earthquake science:

• Just how powerful was the earthquake? The estimates vary, but it's clear that a magnitude-7 quake packs many times more power than an atom bomb. This earthquake power calculator suggests that a 7.0 earthquake releases as much energy as 477,000 tons of TNT. (In comparison, some have estimated the power of the Hiroshima atom bomb at 12,000 to 18,000 tons.)  Check out this video for more about the comparison and additional perspectives on the earthquake's energy. The main quake was followed by dozens of aftershocks, with the biggest rumble reaching a magnitude of 5.9. "These aftershocks are of moderate size in and of themselves," Blanpied said. "However, given that they're occurring during the time that the area has suffered a major shock, [with] many damaged buildings, rescue efforts going on, each of these can cause further damage." Because the quake took place on land rather than on the sea floor, it didn't create a tsunami like the one that devastated Sumatra five years ago.
• What's a strike-slip fault? They're geological faults where most of the ground movement occurs laterally rather than vertically. Some of the most infamous seismic events in history, including the 1906 San Francisco quake and the 1988 Armenia quake (which killed 25,000 people), involved strike-slip faults. For more about killer earthquakes, check out this online gallery.
• Want to learn more about earthquake basics? Get more of the basics about the Haiti earthquake from this Q&A. Click through our interactive graphic on seismic science, or study this archived item about how magnitudes are measured. You can also browse through the National Earthquake Information Center online, or look at this snapshot of recent earthquakes worldwide. The USGS PAGER system estimates the alert level for recent quakes, based on population as well as seismology. USGS also links to a variety of seismic hazard maps.
• Can earthquakes be predicted? We looked into that question a couple of years ago, and even checked in with some unorthodox seismic forecasters. "Earthquake sensitive" Cal Orey, for example, contends that she made a "bull's-eye" prediction about last weekend's magnitude-6.5 quake off the California coast, thanks in part to her pets. Even orthodox scientists accept that animals can sometimes pick up the early signs of an earthquake. Hutko, for example, pointed to an online video that shows a dog fleeing an office seconds before the serious shaking started in California. He says the effect is due to the way different seismic waves spread out. A quake's "P" wave is known to precede the slower-moving but more damaging "S" wave. In Haiti, the difference amounted to four seconds, Hutko said. This online gallery provides more perspectives on earthquake prediction.

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

NASTAR Center

Suborbital spaceflight training includes sessions in the NASTAR Center's centrifuge.

Researchers are going back to school this week to learn what they need to know to do science in a spaceship - including how to deal with jaw-clenching acceleration and how to avoid getting distracted by the out-of-this-world view.

The first trainees in the Suborbital Scientist-Astronaut Training Course gathered today at the NASTAR Center in Southampton, Pa., to begin two days of classes, exercises and centrifuge spins. Their aim is to get ready for research opportunities at the edge of outer space when they become available, one or two years from now.

"I think the next two years are going to be fascinating," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

Stern and a colleague at the research institute, Dan Durda, are not only co-organizers of the training session - they're also among the trainees. Other scientists are coming in from Boston University, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Central Florida and the University Space Research Association.

"This is a group of highly motivated individuals who want to be ahead of the curve," Stern told me this week. Most of them already have experiments they want to fly in microgravity, and they're anxious to learn the ropes even though it's not yet clear exactly what kind of spaceship they'll be riding.

	NASTAR Center
	A patch for the Suborbital Scientist-Astronaut Training Program has been designed by MIT student Tatsuya Arai.

Stern has called research a potential "killer app" for the suborbital spaceflight industry. For a tourist, the $200,000 fare for flying on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane may sound steep. But for a researcher, that's not a bad price for a few minutes of weightlessness. The cost of flying a comparable payload on a suborbital rocket could amount to a couple of million dollars, and there's no chance for scientists to ride along with their experiments.

So what should a scientist know before he or she takes the ride? During this week's session, trainees will get classroom training in spaceflight physiology, the ins and outs of the space business and how to manage your time when you have only four minutes or so to do your experiment.

They'll also spend time in a hypobaric chamber that simulates the low-oxygen conditions at an altitude of 18,000 feet. At that height, the air is thin enough to bring on the symptons of hypoxia, but not thin enough to cause serious injury.

Each trainee will get a turn in the NASTAR Center's centrifuge, which whirls riders around to simulate the 3.5 G's of acceleration you would feel from head to toe during a typical suborbital launch, and the 6 G's pressing down on your chest during re-entry. These are the kinds of acceleration levels that NASTAR has built into its training sessions for Virgin Galactic's future fliers, said Brienna Henwood, the center's business development and program manager.

Stern said the researchers will also be trained to focus on completing complex tasks amid the distractions that accompany spaceflight - such as fellow passengers who are whooping with excitement, bumping into you and gawking out the window.

Spacefliers can't let themselves get caught up in the "pretty scenery" when there's so much work to be done in just a few minutes, Henwood said. The researchers will probably have to adopt the no-nonsense, stick-to-the-checklist attitude that's long been associated with NASA astronauts. "When they actually go to space, they're not looking out the window so much," Henwood said.

The standard rate for the two-day course is $6,000 - but Henwood said the trainees were paying half-price for this week's class, thanks to the recruitment efforts by Stern and Durda. "Volume discount," she joked.

There was a waiting list for the session, and Henwood said another class (with another round of discounts) could be scheduled once 10 to 12 researchers sign up. "We're getting close to that," she said.

You can follow this week's exercise by tracking the Twitter updates from @theNASTARcenter, @AlanStern, @spacepurple (Joanne Hill from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center), @ad_astra2 (MIT's Erika Wagner), @awhizin (Akbar Whizin). Among the scientist-astronaut-bloggers are Joanne Hill, APL's Charles Hibbitts and UCF's Josh Colwell. There'll be updates from OnOrbit and NASA Watch as well.

Stern sees this week's session as just another step along the way to a new age of suborbital research. Next month, a larger group of scientists and space entrepreneurs are due to gather in Boulder, Colo., for a conference on the subject, with NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver as the opening keynote speaker. Stern said the event is shaping up as a "watershed moment in the growth of research and education applications for these new commercial spacecraft."

Is this trip really necessary? Few full-time researchers have been to the final frontier so far, but Stern insists that space has to become a place where science is routinely done ... by humans, and not just by machines. "If operating unmanned was such a great thing for science, then every lab in America would have been automated long ago," he told me.

Update for 8:15 p.m. ET: The first day of training held chills and thrills for the 11 trainees, according to Twitter updates passed along via the NASTAR Center's Suborbital list page. One of the trainees reportedly passed out during the altitude chamber tests. "Only 1 of 11 scientists lost it. That's a 91 percent success rate, folks," Stern reported in one of the updates.

• BBC: Future computer will mimic neurons
• Inside Science: An antimatter supernova
• PhysOrg: A solid case of entanglement
• Simostronomy: Carnival of Space 136

David McKay / NASA

This photomicrograph focuses on a large "biomorph" from a Mars meteorite fragment known as Nakhla e4150ed. Its chemical spectrum appears to be primarily iron oxide but with a carbon content slightly greater than the underlying matrix.

Do rocks from Mars bear the tiny fossilized signs of life? Scientists who think so say they'll subject meteorites from the Red Planet to a new round of high-tech tests in hopes of adding to their evidence.

For years, only one meteorite has figured in the controversy: ALH84001, a rock that was blasted away from Mars 16 million years ago, floated through space and fell through Earth's atmosphere onto Antarctica about 13,000 years ago. Scientists reported in 1996 that the rock contained microscopic structures that looked like "nano-fossils," but skeptics said the structures could have been created by chemical rather than biological reactions.

In November, the scientists who were behind the earlier research reported fresh findings that they said answered many of the objections from the skeptics - and they said two other space rocks traced to Mars seemed to have "biomorph" structures similar to those found in ALH84001. Pictures of the biomorphs were spread across a couple of Web pages back then, but generated relatively little attention at the time.

Over the weekend, the Spaceflight Now Web site provided further details on what the scientists saw and what they think it means.

The team, headed by astrobiologist David McKay from NASA's Johnson Space Center, said that samples from ALH84001 and the two other meteorites - known as Nakhla (found in Egypt in 1911) and Yamato 596 (found in Antarctica in 2000) - would be analyzed with high-resolution electron microscopes as well as an ion microprobe system in the months ahead.

Such instruments are expected to provide much better information about the chemical composition of the samples - information that could show more definitively whether the processes giving rise to the biomorph structures were biological or strictly geological.

"We do not yet believe we have rigorously proven there is [or was] life on Mars," McKay told Spaceflight Now's Craig Covault. "But we do believe we are very, very close to proving there is or has been life there."

David McKay / NASA

A close-up view of a footprint-like pit in a Nakhla mineral. The cross lines in the pit are likely reflecting the fine-scale crystallographic structure of the underlying mineral revealed by differential dissolution by organic acid. The "toe" of this footprint still contains remains of the pit filling and is either microbial remains or precipitated clay minerals and oxides from the crack filling.

NASA could follow up on such findings with the Opportunity rover - which is due to start its seventh year on Mars this month. The search for signs of ancient life on Mars would be a job even more suited to the bigger, more capable Curiosity rover (a.k.a. Mars Science Laboratory), which is scheduled for launch in 2011. And if the evidence is really as strong as McKay hopes it will be, more Red Planet missions would likely be put on the fast track.

But there's always the chance that the evidence for life on Mars will remain inconclusive, even after the new, improved scientific tests. The Red Planet has been known to tease scientists before: You don't have to look any further than the Martian "canals" spotted in the 19th century, the Face on Mars photographed by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, the biology experiments conducted by the Viking landers, the Martian "banyan trees" touted by the late science-fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, and the recurring reports about Martian methane.

Will biomorphs turn out to be the turning point in the search for life on Mars, or just another twist in a tangled tale? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below, and stay tuned for the next chapter in the "Life on Mars" story.

David McKay / NASA

Doughnut-shaped features dot this microscopic view of Nakhla sample 1151-1. It is not clear whether these are single doughnut-shaped units or are two separate curved units with a space between them in the center. Note that these units mostly have spiky features at their margins.

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: Several commenters have asked how we know that any of these space rocks came from Mars. The answer has to do with tiny pockets of gas that were found inside the meteorites. When the chemical makeup of the gas was analyzed, scientists discovered that it matched the unique signature of Martian atmosphere, as measured by the Viking landers back in the 1970s. ALH84001 was the first meteorite to be identified in this way, but other meteorites (including Nakhla and Yamato 596) have a similar signature. Check out this Web page for more about the signature of Martian atmosphere and other technical issues relating to ALH84001.

Even without the gas analysis, scientists can tell that the Mars meteorites are of alien origin. A few years ago, University of Hawaii planetary scientist Vicky Hamilton analyzed the mineral composition of ALH84001 and suggested that the rock was blown away from a region of Mars known as Eos Chasma, which is a branch of the planet's wide-ranging Valles Marineris canyon system. Valles Marineris would be a great place to look for life on Mars, if it weren't so darn hard to get down into.

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

• NASA Spaceflight: Glitch may force change for next shuttle flight
• Science News: Ancient hominids may have been seafarers
• Wired: Bee colony collapse may have several causes
• Telegraph: Vatican reveals secret archives