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  • Saturn's moons in 3-D

    NASA / JPL / SSI
    A stereo image from the Cassini orbiter shows the Saturnian moon Prometheus in
    all its 3-D glory. Use red-blue glasses to see the stereo effect.

    As the Cassini orbiter whirls past Saturn and its moons, it's racking up a growing inventory of cool imagery - including 3-D views that are worth pulling out your red-blue glasses to see.

    The latest stereo views were captured late last year and released this month: The picture above shows Prometheus, a 90-mile-long (145-kilometer-long), potato-shaped "shepherd moon" that keeps Saturn's F ring in line. The gravitational influence of Prometheus sculpts the ring's inner edge, while another shepherd moon known as Pandora serves a similar function just beyond the ring's outer edge.

    To create the 3-D view, Cassini's imaging team selected two black-and-white images that were taken from slightly different angles, and then processed them to add perspective when the two-tone picture is seen through red-blue glasses. The images were taken from a distance of about 35,000 miles (57,000 kilometers).

    Pandora got the 3-D treatment from Cassini three and a half years ago. A full-color picture, also based on image data acquired in September 2005, shows the 50-mile-wide (81-kilometer-wide) moon in all its dull tan glory.

    Saturn's water-spouting moon, Enceladus, is featured in another 3-D image that was released this week. Cassini took lots of pictures during a fly-by of Enceladus last November, and this week's release highlighted a region called Baghdad Sulcus. The region is right in the middle of a series of fissures known as "tiger stripes," so named because they slash through the moon's south polar region like the markings on a big cat.

    Cassini has documented clear evidence that icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds are spraying out into space from geysers in the tiger stripes. That leads scientists to suspect that there's liquid water and perhaps even life lurking beneath Enceladus' icy shell. The latest 3-D imagery, acquired from a distance of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers), highlights the rugged peaks and faults of Baghdad Sulcus. 

    NASA / JPL / SSI
    Baghdad Sulcus, a feature on the Saturnian moon Enceladus, is displayed in a 3-D
    Cassini image that is best viewed with red-blue glasses. The vertical dimension
    appears deeper in this image than it would in reality.

    These images merely scratch the surface of Cassini's 3-D goodness. Check out these red-blue blasts from the past:

    • Hyperion: This moon looks like a space sponge, measuring 204 miles (328 kilometers) in its widest dimension.
    • Iapetus: Saturn's two-tone moon has had many turns in the 3-D spotlight. MarsUnearthed shows you the whole disk as well as several views of Iapetus' cratered surface, all courtesy of Cassini. The spacecraft also caught sight of Iapetus' towering peaks. 
    • Dione: This icy moon looks like a giant marble floating in space, especially when you see it with 3-D glasses.
    • Phoebe: Cassini's image of Saturn's far-out moon really pops in 3-D, and here's a closer view of its craters.
    • Rhea: Get a look at 3-D craters on Saturn's second-largest moon.

    If you're having a hard time finding the red-blue glasses required for the 3-D effect, you can turn to the vendors listed on this NASA Web page. In something of a science outreach experiment, I made my own contribution to the cause today by sending out 40 sets of cardboard glasses that were provided by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope team. (Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)

    Even if you're not into 3-D pictures, there are plenty of 2-D wonders to choose from. If it's Cassini imagery you're looking for, check out NASA's Saturn Web site as well as the Cassini imaging team's Internet home base.

    For a wide-angle view of the cosmos, click through our latest "Month in Space" slideshow. Here are links to more information and bigger pictures about the slideshow images:

    More about 3-D imagery:

    Update for 10:27 p.m. ET: When this item was first posted, I put out an offer to mail out cardboard 3-D glasses to the first 40 people who sent me e-mails. All those have now been spoken for - but if I get more from Microsoft Research, you'll be the first to know. Thanks so much to all who wrote in. The specs are in the mail.

    Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto." I'll be visiting the Eastern Iowa Observatory and Learning Center on March 6 to talk about "The Case" and the planet quest. If you're in the area, stop by and say hello.

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  • Sizing up the space races

    This week's reviews of NASA's new plan for space exploration have been mixed at best, and grim at worst. The plan calls for canceling the back-to-the-moon Constellation program, extending utilization of the International Space Station, and developing technologies step-by-step to go beyond Earth orbit. The problem is, where should NASA go? And when?

    During Wednesday's Senate subcommittee hearing, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said Mars should be the prime destination for human spaceflight but acknowledged that "we can't get there right now because we don't have the technology to do it." Lawmakers responded that without a clear destination and timetable, NASA might end up going nowhere fast. Here are a few Web links, with a tip o' the blog to Rick Sterling:

    One of the more interesting back-and-forth exchanges doesn't involve NASA and Congress, but rather The Wall Street Journal and private-space pioneer Burt Rutan, the guy behind the SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo rocket projects.

    NASA's plan calls for entrusting resupply of the space station to private launch providers - which has been a sticking point for some members of Congress. On Wednesday, the Journal quoted from a letter that Rutan sent to lawmakers, saying he was "fearful that the commercial guys will fail." Today, the Hyperbola blog quoted Rutan as saying that the Journal "chose to cherry-pick and misquote" his comments - and passed along a statement saying "it is a good idea indeed for the commercial community to compete to resupply the ISS. ..."

    However, Rutan said commercialization had its limits:

    "... I do not see the commercial companies taking American to Mars or to the moons of Saturn within my lifetime, and I doubt if they will take the true Research risks (technical and financial) to fly new concepts that have low confidence of return on investment."

    At least some of the commercial companies vying for NASA's business might agree with that view. Most observers would say NASA wants to commercialize space station resupply so that it can devote more in-house resources to the riskier job of exploration beyond Earth orbit. Today, the Journal published an op-ed piece by Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin supporting NASA's new vision:

    "The new NASA budget makes sense for many important reasons. First, the president is signaling that this agency deserves the full support of this administration and Congress, even as priorities are sorted out and other budgets are cut. Second, getting long-range spaceflight right requires getting near-Earth orbit perfect. Third, forestalling the moon mission in favor of perfecting the technologies that will allow us to reach Mars within some defined period ahead is sound. We should not rush it and experience an avoidable tragedy."

    Rutan responded with an e-mail sent to me and other folks on his mailing list. I've made slight editing changes to spell out abbreviations (such as "thru" and "$"):

    "This sounds fine through the lens of my friend Buzz Aldrin.  However, the reality is that the new plan has no schedules, no dollars and no programs to build government hardware for any future manned spaceflight activity.

    "In 1962 we contracted North American to develop the Apollo spacecraft before we had even decided that we would need to do lunar orbit rendezvous. It was another three-plus years before rendezvous was demonstrated in Earth orbit! We boldly moved forward with the assumption that the technology would be there. In contrast, NASA has, for the last two decades, shown that they can burn through hundreds of billions of dollars without flying anything new.  The new plan almost guarantees another decade or two of the same behavior.

    "Many believe that failure of a research technology initiative is defined only by its test data or by its accident record.  However, most government 'research' programs fail in another way - spending all the money and over-running the schedule before even having the courage to do the testing of the new, poorly understood ideas.

    "This new NASA plan will not have good optics for Americans over the next decade or two, as the exploration (i.e., above low Earth orbit) activity will be done by our adversaries while we look on and rerun the old films of Apollo.  Buzz will continue to be our hero, but our youth may yearn to move to where the action is."

    Rutan's last point is a particularly interesting one: If there is a new space race in our future, where will the race end? Four decades ago, the finish line was the moon. Now that China, India, Japan and Europe are now in the lunar exploration business, will the moon be the finish line again? Or should NASA give a "been there, done that" shrug and aim directly for Mars?

    The idea behind NASA's previous vision was that the moon would be a steppingstone to the Red Planet - but Robert Zubrin, a rocket scientist and the Mars Society's president, makes a forceful (and predictable) case in this week's issue of Space News that Mars has to become the focus of an Apollo-scale, all-out push:

    "... Without the guidance supplied by a driving mission, under the new Obama space policy, another 10 years and more than a hundred billion dollars will be spent by NASA's human spaceflight program without achieving anything significant. ... The American people want and deserve a human spaceflight program that really is going somewhere, and not just anywhere, but to a destination that is really worth going to.  That destination is Mars."

    NASA's proposed exploration plan allows for other destinations, however, such as near-Earth asteroids. And that could serve as the focus for yet another type of space race. On his Space Politics blog, Space-industry consultant Jeff Foust quotes Norm Augustine, the chairman of last year's influential space policy review panel, as saying he wasn't so worried about Chinese missions to the moon.

    "'My worry,' he continued, 'will be that the Chinese will land on an asteroid and scare the hell out of us, as they could do relatively soon if they decide to do it. Maybe if they're smart they won't do it, because it probably will wake us up like Sputnik did.'"

    Why would that be so scary? Augustine suggested that it would be because such a mission would be a sign of rapid Chinese progress in human spaceflight, claiming a "first" that Americans have never achieved. But I think there's a bigger fear factor involved.

    Sputnik led to fears that the Soviets could rain down spaceborne bombs, and the Soviets' manned space effort sparked worries that Communists might control a "Red moon." Can you imagine how people would react if they got the idea that a rival could put rockets down on near-Earth asteroids? Death from the skies, indeed!

    Mars may be where answers to the deepest questions lie - but if NASA planners are making a list of space races, they shouldn't forget the asteroids. Is that the way you see it? Feel free to add your comments below.

    Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto." I'll be visiting the Eastern Iowa Observatory and Learning Center on March 6 to talk about "The Case" and the planet quest. If you're in the area, stop by and say hello.

  • Inside the mind of a 'killer whale'

    Julie Fletcher / Orlando Sentinel file via AP
    SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau is shown while performing on Dec. 30, 2005.
    Brancheau was killed during an encounter with an orca at SeaWorld on Wednesday.

    Experts on marine mammals say that dolphins - including "killer whales," which are more properly called orcas - rank among the most intelligent species on the planet. So what was that orca thinking when he dragged his human trainer into the water and killed her?

    "I have no way of knowing what the whale had in mind," Richard Ellis, a marine conservationist at the American Museum of Natural History, told The Associated Press. "But I can tell you that killer whales, because they're supposed to be so intelligent, don't do things accidentally. This was not an insane, uncontrollable act. This was premeditated. And the whale, for whatever whale reasons, did this intentionally."

    Dolphins have so much brain power that they're thought to rival humans in intelligence. One measure is known as the encephalization quotient, or EQ, which quantifies the size of a species' brain compared with what would be expected based on body size alone.

    At last weekend's annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Emory University neuroscientist Lori Marino noted that our EQ is about 7, while the EQ for chimpanzees and other great apes is a little more than 2.

    And dolphins? Species in the dolphin family have EQs ranging from 4 and 5. "This means their brains are significantly larger in relative size than all other animals and second only to modern humans," Marino said.

    What's more, the cortex of the dolphin brain is more convoluted than the human cerebral cortex. Thus, on at least one scale of brain function, dolphins beat humans.

    Orca intelligence hasn't been studied as intensively as the intelligence of bottlenose dolphins, but orca EQ has been pegged at around 2.5. Toni Frohoff, research director at TerraMar Research, is confident that orcas are not dumb animals. "If anything, since orcas are the largest member of the dolphin family, their intelligence is perhaps superior to other dolphins," she told me.

    Marine mammal's motive?
    Frohoff suggested that Tilikum, the orca who was involved in the death of trainer Dawn Brancheau at the SeaWorld aquarium in Orlando, Fla., may have been suffering from the cetacean equivalent of anxiety disorder.

    "We know that post-traumatic stress syndrome has been identified in other species, by [animal specialist] Temple Grandin and others," Frohoff said. "PTSD is very possibly related to his action. The act of capture alone, let alone the sustained and chronic stress that he is subjected to, could easily be responsible for that. ... He's been trying to communicate, and nobody's been listening."

    Researchers generally say that confinement in a holding pen for long periods of a time is stressful for marine mammals, which typically swim 75 to 100 miles a day in the wild.

    Tilikum was a special case for several reasons: He's the largest orca in captivity, weighing in at more than 6 tons. In confinement, he'd feel especially pinched by his goldfish-bowl surroundings. He was separated from his Icelandic family pod at the age of 2. That would be particularly stressful for a species so tied to family life that each pod has its own dialect of calls. And because he was involved in two earlier human deaths, in 1991 and 1999, Tilikum was even more isolated than the typical captive orca.

    Some might wonder why Tilikum was still at SeaWorld after those earlier deaths. "Because of the previous incidents, he has been kept in isolation most of the time - except for breeding," Susan Berta, co-founder of the Orca Network in Washington state, told me. "That's why he was kept on. He's sired 17 calves."

    Isolation, stress, boredom, raging hormones ... all these have been cited as factors contributing to the Tilikum tragedy. But Emory's Marino said "it is important for us not to get caught up in this one whale."

    "He isn't a bad seed or a serial killer," Marino told me in an e-mail. "He is an intelligent sensitive animal taken from his family when he was 2 years old and forced to lead a highly artificial and confined life.  This tragedy is just one example of what happens when we continue to use animals in this way.  It is also critical to note that there has not been a single documented case of an orca injuring a person in the wild.  People do swim with them or get among them in very small inflatables and boats, and there has yet to be an incident.  All of these terrible events occur in captivity."

    What to do with a killer
    Marino worried that Brancheau's death may lead SeaWorld to give Tilikum what would amount to a lifelong sentence in solitary confinement. "That would be the worst thing that could happen to this whale," she said. "That really could worsen the situation."

    She and many of her colleagues in the marine science community say that captivity isn't healthy for orcas, or for studying them scientifically. "There is a good deal of information from the orcas, but most of it has come from the wild," said Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College in New York.

    During the AAAS meeting, Reiss, Marino and other scientists called for a halt to practices such as dolphin drive hunting and the capture of dolphins, including orcas. One ethicist, Thomas White of Loyola Marymount University, said the mammals' behavior and neurophysiology suggested that they had "all of the traits that philosophers traditionally require for persons." (A similar debate over personhood has been percolating over the status of chimps.)

    Ellis said this week's incident would likely have the ironic effect of raising the popularity of marine mammal shows like the ones at SeaWorld. But Marino said the Tilikum tragedy should instead spark a reassessment of the sea's most intelligent species.

    Marino suggested that Tilikum and other captive orcas could be rehabilitated to return to the wild, or at least go to marine sanctuaries (like the one that sheltered Keiko, a.k.a. the "Free Willy" whale). The Orca Network is currently campaigning for the release of Lolita, a performer at the Miami Seaquarium that is the only member of the Southern Resident orca population still held in captivity.

    "We need to have a conversation about whether these animals should be entertaining us in these tanks," Marino told me.

    So let's converse: Before you start thinking about orcas as if they were plush toys, check out this commentary from Georgetown University biologist Janet Mann. "We forget that they are called killer whales for a reason and there is nothing warm and cuddly about that," she writes.

    The idea of marine mammals striking back has had such a hold on the human psyche that it's been satirized by The Onion and "The Simpsons." As we get to know other species better, will our attitudes toward them change? Or was this tragedy brought on by a rogue killer, pure and simple? If orcas really are intelligent persons, shouldn't they be held liable for what they do? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    Here's some additional background on animal intelligence:

    Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto." I'll be talking about Pluto and planethood at 6 p.m. PT / SLT (9 p.m. ET) today on "Virtually Speaking," a show that's available via Second Life, BlogTalkRadio and iTunes.

  • Bringing back Mars life

    ESA
    In this artist's conception, an ascent module lifts off from the Martian surface,
    carrying samples of soil and rock on a key part of the journey back to Earth.

    Fifty years after NASA began grappling with the idea of life beyond our planet, it's in the midst of planning missions to bring potential traces of Martian life back to Earth ... again.

    NASA's goal of looking for extraterrestrial life is almost as old as the space agency itself: In 1960, a bioscience advisory committee recommended that NASA should get involved in exobiology as well as space medicine, and in that same year the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was authorized to start figuring out what kind of spacecraft would be needed to search for life on Mars.

    In the 1970s, NASA's Viking missions to Mars included experiments that scientists thought would reveal whether life exists there - but the results were inconclusive at best. NASA researchers also found evidence of bacteria-like "nanofossils" in meteorites that were blasted away from the Red Planet and fell to Antarctica. Those findings are still under debate as well.

    A dozen years ago, NASA's David McKay - one of the researchers behind the nanofossil find - told me that the verdict on Martian life might have to wait until fresh samples are brought back to Earth for detailed study. "I think that'll be really definitive," he said at the time.

    When I spoke with McKay back then about bringing samples back from Mars, he thought the job would be done by 2007. In fact, NASA's original exobiology plan called for 100 missions to be flown to Mars by this time. But reality has fallen far short of the plan. NASA's proposals for a Mars sample return have been stymied repeatedly, due to cost and logistical considerations.

    Over the past couple of years, scientists have been closing in on another sample return concept - and the radical shift in NASA's space vision, announced just this month, could conceivably bring the plan for bringing back Mars life into sharp focus.

    Here's the current timeline, as laid out by the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, or MEPAG:

    • In 2018, a U.S.-European mission would send a sample-gathering rover known as MAX-C to Mars, perhaps in combination with Europe's Exomars rover. MAX-C would drive around and build up a cache of rock and soil samples suitable for sending back.
    • In 2022 or so, another rover would descend to the Martian surface, link up with MAX-C and deposit the samples into a rocket-equipped return capsule.
    • In the mid- to late 2020s, an orbiter would be launched to Mars. At just the right moment, the return capsule would blast away from its roving launch pad and rendezvous with the orbiter. The orbiter would carry the capsule back toward Earth and fling it into a drop zone for recovery. That part of the operation would work much like the Stardust comet sample return mission.

    All this may sound as if it's a distant dream - but Cassie Conley, NASA's planetary protection officer, noted that the plan for dealing with the potential exo-biohazard on Earth should be in place a good 10 years before the samples come back. That suggests that there's only a few years left to settle on key elements of the plan, including a decision on where the samples will be brought.

    Sending astronauts to Mars
    There's another factor driving the Mars planning process forward, which has to do with NASA's long-range exploration goals. This month's vision switch called for the cancellation of the space agency's back-to-the-moon plan, but at a congressional hearing today, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said he was aiming instead to send astronauts to Mars ... eventually.

    "At this particular time, I can't provide a date certain for the first human mission to Mars," Bolden told the Senate's science and space subcommittee. However, Bolden recently told the Houston Chronicle's editorial board it was his "personal vision" to put NASA on a path toward a human Mars landing sometime in the 2030s.

    That's the kind of talk that could energize further robotic exploration of Mars, including two-way trips. "Non-human sample return would feed very directly into the technology for human exploration," Conley told me.

    If Bolden's vision holds true, a lot of questions will have to be answered in the next 20 years. Conley said one biggie is how safe astronauts would be on the Red Planet. A report from the National Research Council, titled "Safe on Mars," outlined a whole list of potential nasties ranging from alien microbes to toxic hexavalent chromium. Some of those risks can be assessed only by up-close analysis of Martian samples, Conley said.

    Safe on Earth?
    Another big question has to do with how safe earthlings would be if and when material is brought back from Mars. That's the reason why Conley serves as planetary protection officer - a job title that sounds as if it came from a science-fiction screenplay.

    "When we bring samples back from Mars, somebody's got to protect us from Mars - and we don't trust astrobiologists to do that," said John Rummel, who once held Conley's job and is now the director of East Carolina University's Institute for Coastal Science and Policy. Rummel also heads the planetary protection panel at the International Council for Science's Committee on Space Research, a.k.a. COSPAR.

    Rummel, Conley and other experts on astrobiology discussed the past, present and future of exobiology (or astrobiology, which is the preferred term nowadays) in San Diego over the weekend during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    When fresh Martian material is brought back - either by astronauts or by special-delivery robots - it'll have to be contained much more tightly than the Apollo moonwalkers were 40 years ago. The way Rummel sees it, our planet was lucky that the moon was most sincerely dead. "If there had been anything alive on the moon at that time, it would be alive here now," he said. (On the flip side, we may have left something alive on the moon.)

    NASA's plans call for Martian samples to be handled as if they were top-priority biohazards, in a containment facility equivalent to a Biosafety Level 4 lab. The sample capsule would have to be built to withstand a crash landing (like the unfortunate Genesis crash of 2004).

    If sample analysis indeed finds definitive signs of life on Mars, that could revolutionize our perspective on the universe. But it's also possible that no signs will be found - or that scientists will have a hard time deciding what they see is actually "life" or not.

    Back in 1960, NASA's exobiologists thought the questions about life beyond Earth would be answered by now. Today it's clear that those questions will still be debated for years to come. NASA's next rover, due for launch in 2011 after a series of troubles, won't address the life-on-Mars question directly - but it will set the stage for the missions to come by studying whether life could have existed on Mars.

    "The period of biological exploration ... in fact, is only beginning," Rummel said. "Life begins at 50."

    Feel free to chime in with your comments below, and click the links to learn more about life on Mars:

    It turns out that 1960 was a big year for discoveries: To find out why, check out our roundup of 50 years' worth of science sagas ... celebrate this year's golden anniversary for lasers ... and learn about the past and future of the search for alien signals.

    Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto." I'll be talking about Pluto and planethood at 6 p.m. PT / SLT (9 p.m. ET) Thursday on "Virtually Speaking," a show that's available via Second Life, BlogTalkRadio and iTunes.

  • Are we missing E.T.'s call?

    SETI Institute
    The Allen Telescope Array currently comprises 42 radio dishes, each 20 feet in
    diameter, which have been placed at the Hat Creek Observatory in California.
    The network could eventually knit together data from 350 dishes.

    Scientists have been keeping watch for alien signals for 50 years, but haven't heard anything. Why? Maybe we haven't been looking long enough ... maybe the aliens aren't out there ... or just maybe we're totally missing signals that are being transmitted in a way we didn't expect.

    One thing's for sure: The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, touches upon one of the deepest questions of human existence. Here's how the late Lee DuBridge, science adviser to presidents, put it in a famous quote: "Either mankind is the most advanced intelligence in the galaxy; or not. Either alternative is mind-boggling."

    The leading lights of SETI science reviewed 50 years of a mind-boggling quest over the weekend in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science - and previewed some way-out ideas that could become reality 50 (or 500) years from now.

    The wizard of Ozma
    The SETI era got its start on April 8, 1960, when astronomer Frank Drake pointed a radio telescope into the skies over West Virginia and looked for patterns in the signals received. The effort, known as Project Ozma, was put together on a shoestring budget. "All of this cost $2,000," he recalled during the AAAS seminar.

    Drake and his colleagues turned up nothing of extraterrestrial origin, although there was a short-lived thrill of excitement when they came across some intriguing signals that they later found out were military transmissions. That set the pattern for the half-century that followed. Although SETI astronomers have been teased by one-time-only events such as the "Wow" signal, there have been no confirmed messages from E.T.

    Some astronomers say that in the grand scheme of things, 50 years isn't all that long, and the effort expended so far hasn't been all that exhaustive. "I think we have not yet begun to search," said Peter Backus, an astronomer at the SETI Institute in California's Silicon Valley.

    But the technology is getting better all the time. "Fifty years ago, Frank Drake would never have imagined the directions in which SETI has moved," said Jill Tarter, director of the institute's Center for SETI Research (and the scientist who inspired the main character in the "Contact" book and movie).

    Latest and the greatest
    The latest and the greatest SETI search is in its beginning stages at the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, a $50 million, 42-dish network that is being operated 24 hours a day to look for alien signals ... and do other radio-astronomy experiments as well. Eventually, those 42 dishes could grow to 350, resulting in a sensitivity and resolution comparable to that attained by the 1,000-foot-wide Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

    The only problem is that SETI astronomers tend to use our own technological capability as a yardstick to estimate what the aliens should be capable of - and the current trend suggests that the more advanced a civilization gets, the less we'd hear from them.

    For instance, Drake pointed out that television transmissions used to be sent out with 18 megawatts of power. "That was one of the prime signs of our existence," he said. But thanks to advances in signal technology, those power levels have been reduced to 5 megawatts.

    Then you have to consider that more and more transmissions are being directed downward to Earth from telecom satellites, instead of upward from terrestrial transmitters. That could reduce the signature of Earth's radio emissions from millions of watts to mere watts of reflected power.

    "What's happening here is that the earth is growing quiet," Drake said. "If we are the model for the [intelligent] universe, that's bad news."

    Way-out ideas
    SETI searchers would have to trust that other civilizations would be sending out intentional signals - using either old-fashioned radio or perhaps ultra-short pulses of light.

    When astronomers look for light signals, in a relatively recent strategy known as optical SETI, they have to assume that E.T. is directing a powerful beacon at targets around the cosmos. Fortunately for those astronomers, doing optical SETI can be about as inexpensive as Project Ozma was 50 years ago.

    "Two thousand dollars and a smart graduate student, and you can be in the SETI business," Drake observed.

    Astronomers are working on more expensive strategies as well: One idea that's been around for quite a while calls for putting a radio observatory on the far side of the moon, virtually the only place in the solar system that is perpetually shielded from terrestrial transmissions.

    Another way-out strategy would be to set up a monitoring station far from the sun - maybe 500 to 1,000 times as far away as Earth. At that distance, the sun could focus light waves (and radio waves) from cosmic frontiers like a giant lens.

    "We could well have an Internet for the galaxy, based on gravitational lenses," Drake said. Berkeley astronomer Dan Wertheimer, one of the scientists behind the SETI @ home alien-hunting screensaver program, said observers at such a gravitational-lens observatory could "read the license plates on an extrasolar planet."

    And if things get too quiet on Earth, as Drake suspects, that might be just a temporary situation. The deployment of space solar-power satellites would involve sending gigawatts' worth of power down to Earth, and some of that energy would be reflected back into space. "If we go this route, the earth will become visible again," Drake said.

    But would that be a good thing? Would we really want the aliens to know we exist, or should we lie low? That's a completely different story.

    Feel free to chime in with your comments below, and click the links to
    read bygone tales from the SETI quest:

    It turns out that 1960 was a big year for discoveries: To find out why, check out our roundup of 50 years' worth of science sagas ... and celebrate this year's golden anniversary for lasers.

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

  • It's a golden year for lasers

    Berkeley Lab
    Wim Leemans of Berkeley Lab's Accelerator and Fusion Research Division works on
    a 40-terawatt laser that could blaze a trail for a new breed of particle accelerator.

    Fifty years after the first laser was demonstrated, engineers are celebrating the golden anniversary, marveling over how a once-feared "death ray" now touches almost every aspect of our lives, and setting the stage for future breakthroughs.

    The push to invent the laser (which is actually an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation") actually started out in the 1950s as a quest to build a better radar system. First, scientists came up with gadgets to amplify microwave beams, known as masers, and then the technology was extended to light wavelengths.

    Although there's been a historical debate over who is most properly credited as the inventor of the laser, the clearest milestone came on May 16, 1960, when Hughes Research Laboratories' Theodore Maiman demonstrated a solid-state device that used a flashlamp coiled around a ruby crystal to produce coherent pulses of red light.

    It didn't take long for the laser to take its place in pop culture as a powerful beam weapon - perhaps most famously in the classic 1964 movie "Goldfinger," where James Bond nearly gets burned in his boxers. In real life, however, laser power is used more often to mend rather than rend - for example, by repairing torn retinas, tweaking out-of-shape corneas or eliminating cancerous tumors.

    The reason the laser plays such a powerful role in technology isn't just because of its power. Most laser-based technologies play off the fact that the photons in the light beams move in lock step and keep their focus. That makes lasers ideal for sending precisely modulated messages over long distances - to the moon and back, for instance - or for reliably reading off the messages contained in DVDs, bar codes or biological cells.

    "Almost all real-time information now, more or less, is encoded using the laser," said Thomas Baer, executive director of the Stanford Photonics Research Center. Even wireless communication networks are knit together on the ground using fiber-optic networks, which rely on lasers to encode and boost data transmissions as they streak across the world.

    Baer said the devices and services that rely on lasers - ranging from optical fiber to grocery scanners to cheap laser pointers - are thought to play a role in more than $3 trillion worth of commerce yearly.

    The laser's glorious past is being marked this year with LaserFest, a yearlong array of activities organized by the Optical Society, the American Physical Society, SPIE and the IEEE Photonics Society. But we're not just talking about history here.

    "Even 50 years after the invention of the laser, new applications are being patented at a phenomenal rate," Baer said. Patent data searches show that the term "laser" ranks as the third most popular keyword, right behind "engine" and "computer."

    As part of the LaserFest celebration, Baer and other laser researchers outlined some of the innovations ahead over the weekend in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science:

    Lasers and energy:

    The biggest spotlight for laser power falls on the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Lab in California, where researchers are working toward producing the world's first controlled nuclear fusion burn. The plan calls for zapping a small pellet of hydrogen isotopes with 192 precisely focused laser beams, as I explained last month. During his AAAS talk, NIF principal associate director Edward Moses emphasized that although the campaign to produce a break-even reaction is due to begin this year, actually attaining that goal might take a year or two.

    Turning laser fusion into a commercially viable operation is an even greater challenge: Moses showed an animation in which fusion-fuel targets are shot into the ignition chamber 10 times a second, with each blast yielding 10 times as much energy as NIF is expected to produce (that is, 200 megajoules vs. 20). Although the task looks daunting, Moses expressed confidence that a demonstration power plant could be built in 10 to 15 years.

    "If there's a will, the way is 15 to 20 years to be on line with power," Moses told journalists.

    In the shorter term, there may be a laser in your car engine sometime soon: Engineers have been developing a fuel-ignition system that relies on laser light instead of spark plugs.

    Lasers and medicine:
    Baer said researchers are developing techniques that use lasers to shed light on cellular activity. One approach relies on shaped laser pulses to penetrate into moles deep enough to see the potential signs of skin cancer. Laser holography can also be applied to the search for cancer deep within tissue.

    Yet another laser technique can detect the early signs of Alzheimer's disease: Drops of a special fluorescent dye are placed into the eye, and then the eye is illuminated with a pulse of blue laser light. If the dye lights up, that indicates the presence of beta amyloid, a protein linked to Alzheimer's that shows up in the eye years before other symptoms of the disease emerge.

    Lasers and computers:
    If computer manufacturers can make the switch from electronics to laser-based photonics, that would dramatically reduce the cost and power requirements for mobile phones, computers and other gadgets.

    "A new optical USB protocol has just been demonstrated, which means that in just a year or two, we will have 10-gigabit-per-second bidirectional optical connections on our laptops, allowing much faster communications to displays, memory and the Internet," John Bowers, director of the Institute for Energy Efficiency at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said in a LaserFest roundup.

    Lasers are also blazing a trail in heat-assisted magnetic recording, a technology that could increase the storage capacity of disk drives by a factor of 20 or more.

    Lasers and materials science:
    Scientists have come up with a new type of laser apparatus to check the composition of a material by blasting off just a microscopic piece of it and analyzing the plume that's given off. Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, or LIBS, could be used to look for E. coli bacteria in spinach, to determine whether a powder contains ordinary mold or anthrax spores, to help art experts authenticate or restore a painting, or to see what substances are contained in a dinosaur fossil.

    Meanwhile, Livermore Lab is developing a laser light source that produces mono-energetic gamma rays, or MEGa-rays for short. Livermore Lab's Christopher Barty says such rays could spot the signature of nuclear material even if it's hidden behind 3 feet (1 meter) of steel - which would be ideal for detecting smuggled uranium, or analyzing the composition of nuclear fuel as well as nuclear waste.

    Lasers and the subatomic world:
    Berkeley Lab's Wim Leemans is leading a team of researchers who are trying to develop a new type of accelerator that pumps up subatomic particles with laser light rather than microwaves. He compares laser plasma wakefield acceleration to the effect that a motorboat's wake has on a lake. If the laser energy is tuned just right, electrons riding the laser waves can be accelerated to higher energies over a very short distance. Small-scale, laser-based accelerators may not rival the Large Hadron Collider anytime soon, but they may open the door to new applications in medical imaging and radiation therapy.

    Lasers and weapons:
    Although it didn't come up at the AAAS meeting, the concept of using the laser as a military weapon had its latest tryout this month, when the U.S. Air Force knocked down a test missile with an airborne laser. At the time, the military called the test a success, but since then there have been indications that the current technology is just not ready for prime time. New Scientist reports that the Air Force is going "back to the drawing board" with next-generation alkali lasers. Hmm, I wonder what that portends for Dr. Evil's plans for laser world domination....

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  • Get paid to plug in

    Alan Boyle / msnbc.com
    A Scion xB converted to all-electric power is plugged into California's electrical
    grid during a demonstration at the annual meeting of the American Association for
    the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

    Someday, someone will pay you to hook your car into the electrical grid. It's one of those almost-a-sure-thing business opportunities enabled by the expected rise of plug-in vehicles. But will the payoff be worth the cost? That's where the calculations get a little complicated.

    Experts on the future of the electrical grid and plug-in electric cars came together this week in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to discuss their common interests.

    The concept of moving power back and forth between a smarter grid and more capable electric cars, known as vehicle-to-grid or V2G, is a "perfect bridge technology" for two complementary energy frontiers, said Jasna Tomic, new-fuels project manager for Calstart, a nonprofit energy research center headquartered in California.

    It's a concept that utilities are willing to shell out money to support, said Ken Huber, senior technology and education principal at Pennsylvania-based PJM Interconnection.

    PJM coordinates power transmission for a region that takes in all or part of 13 states and the District of Columbia. One of the big challenges for companies like PJM is to keep the load on the regional grids as stable as possible. Too much of a load is bad, potentially leading to brownouts. Too little of a load can also be bad, especially as electric utilities move toward renewable sources such as wind and solar energy.

    To keep its regional grid stable, PJM needs to have battery storage capability equal to 1 percent of its peak load. Since PJM's peak is around 100,000 megawatts, "we have 1,000 megawatts moving up and down," Huber explained.

    So here's where your future electric car enters the picture: PJM is currently paying battery providers somewhere around $25 to $35 per megawatt-hour to have that electrical storage available. If you have a plugged-in car just sitting idle, PJM would love to have a system that could take a little bit of the power out of your car battery during peak times, and send it back out to your battery during off-peak hours.

    "It has a very, very high value to the grid," Huber said.

    How much is it worth?
    Exactly how much value? That's the point of a pilot project operated by a group called the MAGIC Consortium. The consortium started small, connecting just a few cars from the University of Delaware's campus fleet. The cars were Scion xB's, manufactured by Toyota and converted into all-electric "eBoxes" using AC Propulsion's kit.

    The conversion also required the addition of a power control box that could transmit and receive data about the battery's state as well as the electric company's power requirements over a secure Internet connection. After all, the last thing you want is to have somebody hack into your car.

    Three or four cars are hardly worth developing a system for, but for the University of Delaware test, the AES power company served as an aggregator for battery capacity. The payment to the customer - in this case, the University of Delaware - was based on how much capacity the cars' batteries held (19 kilowatt-hours), and how long the car was plugged in (on average, 21.5 hours a day).

    The payments typically amounted to $300 per month per car, said Willett Kempton, senior policy scientist at the University of Delaware's Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.

    Not ready for prime time
    If you consider merely the $500 cost of adding the control box and software, that's a good deal. But if you factor in the cost of converting the car into a plug-in vehicle - an expense that can range into tens of thousands of dollars - you definitely wouldn't do it just for the power company's payout.

    "Right now, because batteries are expensive, the value is less than the cost," Kempton acknowledged.

    You'd have to consider other benefits - for example, the fact that you could charge up your eBox for a 150-mile trip for just a couple of dollars, which is less than the price for a gallon of gasoline.

    AP file
    The Chevy Volt goes on display at the Washington Auto Show.

    Although converted plug-ins such as AC Propulsion's eBox are available now, most people will probably wait to make their plug-in purchase until they get a look at mass-market vehicles such as the Chevy Volt (a gas-electric hybrid) and the Nissan Leaf (which is all-electric). Both those models should be available starting late this year.

    It's too early to judge just how much impact plug-in cars will have, particularly when it comes to vehicle-to-grid technology. But if a million electric vehicles hit the streets in the next five years, as President Barack Obama has suggested, something will have to be done to accommodate that extra load on the grid, Huber said. That could take the form of demand-sensitive pricing for electricity - which would make V2G more attractive.

    "I don't believe we're going to be in the situation we're in today for very much longer," Huber said.

    Boosting the batteries
    Better battery packs will be key to the success of plug-in vehicles, said Tony Posawatz, vehicle line director for the Chevy Volt. General Motors has developed a new breed of 16-kilowatt-hour batteries based on lithium-manganese chemistry - as well as a cooling and heating system to keep those batteries at a stable temperature.

    "We call the battery the 'fifth passenger' sometimes, because we take such good care of it," Posawatz told me.

    As more plug-ins are sold, more and more batteries will be available to store and eventually use the energy that's generated by solar and wind. "We're going to make this asset available to plug in all the time to collect the energy created by this green technology," Posawatz said.

    GM is working on a number of initiatives for smart charging and automatic software upgrades, including technologies that take advantage of the automaker's OnStar service. But it will be a while before vehicle-to-grid technology is built into the Volt, Posawatz said. "Two-way energy transfer is several years out," he told me.

    It's more likely that car owners will use their own "smarts," once cars like the Volt have been around for a while. Some might sign up for a V2G upgrade from the utility, like the system pioneered by the MAGIC Consortium. Others might install solar panels at home and use their plugged-in car as a storage device for home-brewed electricity.

    In the long run, car owners might even save their old plug-in batteries to store more power at home. "We believe the battery will have a life outside the car," Posawatz said.

    But pretty much everyone agrees that the most important milestone on the road to plug-in paradise will be cheaper batteries. Right now, the batteries for plug-in cars cost $1,000 or more per kilowatt-hour - which makes the plug-ins much more expensive than their petroleum-fueled counterparts. The battery cost is so significant that the National Research Council concluded it would take decades for the benefits of plug-ins to outweigh the costs.

    "That's the biggest challenge," Posawatz acknowledged. "How can we quickly move down the cost curve and get the technological advances going? Certainly the automotive industry does not move as quickly as the telecommunications industry. ... Can we make that kind of progress on a shorter time scale?"

    What do you think? Is there a plug-in payoff in your future, or are biofuels the way to go? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    Correction for 2:15 p.m. ET Feb. 22: In response to a comment, I've corrected the reference to the converted cars, calling them Scion xB's rather than Toyota Scions. The cars are made by Toyota but marketed under the Scion brand.

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    following     @b0yle on
    Twitter    . And for something completely different, pick up a copy of
    my book,     "The Case for
    Pluto."

  • Top sights of science

     

    Science / AAAS / NSF
      Click for slideshow: See the
    winners of the 2009 International
    Science and Engineering
    Visualization Challenge.

    The winning entries in an international visualization contest prove that you can see good science at work in a variety of venues, ranging from cartoon strips to art galleries.

    For the past seven years, the journal Science and the National Science Foundation have co-sponsored contests to recognize the best visual depictions of scientific phenomena - ranging from photos of scientific subjects to videos and interactives that explain concepts in science and engineering.

    The winners of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge focus on topics in biology and biomimetics, network science and nanotechnology, mathematics and medicine, environmental science and emergency response. The judging panel received 130 entries from 14 countries, 23 states plus the District of Columbia.

    Monica Bradford, Science's executive editor, said the contest rewards scientists for "thinking outside the box" and revealing the beauty and wonder of science.

    "The contest winners communicate difficult research in a way that the general public can understand," she said in a news release.

    One of the winners, Harvard's Sung Hoon Kang, agreed that one of the main objectives of good visualization is to involve the public in the scientific process. "Public outreach has always been a weak side of science," he said. "By adding art and metaphors to our research portfolio, we, as citizens, can send a clear message to the world: Science - at its core - is focused on the problems of societal importance. This will work better than detailed (and often incomprehensible) scientific debates."

    Along with colleagues Boaz Pokroy and Joanna Aizenberg, Hoon won first place in the challenge's photography category for a photomicrograph of plastic fingers cradling a green sphere (shown at the top of this item). Each of the fingers is only one-500th the diameter of a human hair. The picture, titled "Save Our Earth, Let's Go Green," illustrates a technique for polymer self-assembly and also makes a statement about sustainability.

    "Each hair represents a person or an organization," Aizenberg told Science. "It shows our collaborative effort to hold up the planet and keep it running."

    The places where the visualizations appeared are as varied as the subject matter. "Branching Morphogenesis," for example, is an 12-foot-high, 15-foot-wide, 8-foot-deep art installation created from curtains and 75,000 cable zip ties. Visitors to the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, can walk right through the curtains to experience a large-scale simulation of human lung cells as they interact with each other.

    Another winner, "Brain Development," is a comic strip by neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin and cartoonist Jorge Cham that explains how brains are born. The same duo does the geek-friendly "Piled Higher and Deeper" online strip as well as cartoons for Scientific American Mind. (Godwin talks about his SciAm contributions in this podcast.)

    To get the full story on the winning entries, click through our slideshow, check out Science's Multimedia Center and visit NSF's Web site. For the record, here's the full list of winners in the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge:

    Photography
    First place:

    • Sung Hoon Kang, Boaz Pokroy and Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University for "Save Our Earth, Let's Go Green."

    Honorable mentions (tie):

    • Michael Zach of the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point for "Microbe vs. Mineral: A Life and Death Struggle in the Desert."
    • Russell Taylor, Briana Whitaker and Briana Carstens of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for "Flower Power."
    • Heiti Paves and Birger Ilau of Tallinn University of Technology for "Self-Fertilization."

    Illustration
    First place (tie):

    • Richard Palais and Luc Benard of the University of California at Irvine for "Kuen's Surface: A Meditation on Euclid, Lobachevsky and Quantum Fields."
    • Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia, Annette Fierro and Jenny E. Sabin of the University of Pennsylvania's Sabin + Jones Lab Studio for "Branching Morphogenesis."

    Honorable mentions (tie):

    • Dave Beck and Jennifer Jacquet of Clarkson University for "Jellyfish Burger."
    • Mario De Stefano, Antonia Auletta and Carla Langella of the 2nd University of Naples for "Back to the Future."

    Informational graphics
    First place:

    • Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham of Wake Forest University School of Medicine for "Brain Development."

    Honorable mention:

    • Erin Olson, Daphne Orlando, Gregg Hickey, Julia Tremaine, Martin Ramsden and Tim Manning of R&D Systems Inc. for "Regulation of the Cell Cycle and DNA Damage-Induced Checkpoint Activation."

    Interactive media
    First place:

    • Jeremy Friedberg and Andrea Bielecki of Spongelab Interactive for "Genomics Digital Lab: Cell Biology."

    Non-interactive media
    First place (tie):

    • Harmony Starr and Molly Malone of University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Center for "The Epigenetics of Identical Twins."
    • Daniel Grady, Christian Thiemann and Dirk Brockmann of Northwestern University for "Follow the Money: Human Mobility and Effective Communities."

    Honorable mentions (tie):

    • Nils Sparwasser, Gregor Hochleiter, Christian Gredel, Hartmut Friedl and Thorsten Andresen of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for "Decision Support System for Tsunami Early Warning."
    • Stacy Jannis, William Dempsey, Rebekah Fredenburg, Marcelle Morrison-Bogorad, Creighton Phelps and Stephen Snyder of Jannis Productions for "Inside the Brain: Unraveling the Mystery of Alzheimer's Disease."

    Correction for 11:59 p.m. ET Feb. 22: I've fixed the reference to Ars Electronica to note that the center is located in Austria, not Germany.

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  • Suborbital science gets boost

    More than 250 researchers, space industry entrepreneurs and NASA officials gathered today at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colo., to give a boost to the concept of doing research on private-sector spaceships.

    The concept got a boost, all right: Over the next five years, more than $75 million could be committed for spending on suborbital space research.

    Most of that money is expected to come from NASA itself: Lori Garver, the space agency's deputy administrator, said during today's keynote address that the Obama administration's budget proposal calls for spending $15 million a year on suborbital space research in the 2011-2015 time frame.

    NASA's Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program, also known as CRuSR, would distribute the money to research institutions to develop experiments, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation said in a statement.

    The proposal still has to gain congressional approval, but researchers and entrepreneurs hailed NASA's commitment as a vote of confidence in private-sector spaceflight. The $75 million sum is more than seven times as much money as was offered for the Ansari X Prize - which was won five and a half years ago by SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed spaceship.

    "Since this new generation of commercial vehicles are low-cost, NASA's $75 million will open the floodgates for everyone from astronomers to high-school classrooms to conduct real science in space. This will be one of the best investments NASA has ever made," planetary scientist Alan Stern, the organizer of this week's conference, was quoted as saying in the statement.

    "For everyone who has dreamed of participating in the grand adventure of spaceflight, this $75 million commitment marks the dawn of a new space age," he added. "As the commercial space industry continues to grow, I expect that we will see increasing numbers of payloads and people flying to space."

    Stern's own home base, the Southwest Research Institute, announced that it would set aside more than $1 million of its own money over the next three years to build and fly experiments on commercial suborbital vehicles. Experimenters could fly along as well.

    "We at SwRI are strong believers in the power of commercial next-generation suborbital vehicles to advance space science and sensor technology," Stern said in a separate statement from the institute. "We also believe strongly in the tremendous advance offered by the newly emerging capability to put scientists in space with their experiments."

    Stern wears several hats in the space business: He's associate vice president of SwRI's Space Science and Engineering Division in Boulder; the science team leader for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto; and an adviser to several commercial space ventures including Blue Origin. He's also a former NASA associate administrator and a one-time trainee for a space shuttle flight.

    Stern never did go into space on the shuttle, but he could get another chance on a commercial spaceship.

    SwRI's spaceflight trainee team includes Stern as well as fellow planetary scientists Dan Durda and Cathy Olkin. Stern and Durda recently went through suborbital space training at NASTAR's facilities near Philadelphia, along with other researchers aiming to fly in space.

    "We're finally arriving at the day when space scientists can conduct their research 'in the field,' in the same way that botanists, geologists and oceanographers have been doing all along," Durda was quoted as saying in today's announcement. "We hope that many of our fellow researchers and educators in the diverse disciplines that will benefit from frequent access to space will be right behind us in line to fly."

    Stern told me that SwRI's researchers could fly on Blue Origin's
    suborbital rocket or on other vehicles currently under development. Among the other companies developing those vehicles are:

    The Commercial Spaceflight Federation was established to promote the growth of these companies and other private-sector space ventures.

    "We are thrilled to see NASA recognizing the enormous potential of new commercial vehicles for science, research and education," said Mark Sirangelo, who is chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation as well as a top executive at Sierra Nevada Corp.

    This week's conference is co-sponsored by SwRI, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and the Universities Space Research Association.

    This report was last updated at 8:05 p.m. ET.

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  • 80 years of Pluto

    Lowell Observatory file, circa 1950
    Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh demonstrates how he used a device known as a blink
    comparator to discover Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona on Feb. 18, 1930.

    Astronomers had their doubts about Pluto from the very start. At first, even its discoverer wasn't sure where the little world fit in the planetary parade. But 80 years after it was found, Pluto has demonstrated that it's a survivor.

    The dwarf planet first came to Earth's attention on the afternoon of Feb. 18, 1930, when former Midwest farmboy Clyde Tombaugh saw a curious speck on a pair of photographic plates in a contraption called a blink comparator, set up at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.

    The 24-year-old Tombaugh had been painstakingly checking plates for months, looking for the telltale signature of a "Planet X" beyond the orbit of Neptune. When he saw a speck on one plate that seemed to jump to a slightly different position on another plate, made just a few days later, he suspected that he had found his quarry.

    Only problem was, the darn thing looked much smaller than what Tombaugh was expecting to see. As described in astronomer David Levy's biography of Tombaugh, the speck was so small that the discoverer wondered whether he had merely spotted the moon of a yet-unseen planet.

    That's the way it's gone for Pluto in the eight decades since. Even when the world was getting used to the idea that a "ninth planet" had been found, some astronomers suspected that there were more mini-worlds yet to be found out there - and that Pluto might not deserve its planetary title. Beginning in 1992, smaller objects were indeed discovered on the solar system's icy rim, known as the Kuiper Belt. And in 2005, Caltech astronomer Mike Brown finally found something bigger than Pluto, another world that came to be known as Eris.

    A 'fraudulent' find?
    "The moment that I saw Eris ... I was pretty convinced that this was the 10th planet, and that's what it would be forever," Brown recalled. After all, if Pluto was a planet, its bigger cousin Eris had to be a planet, too.

    But Brown also admitted that referring to Eris as a planet "felt a little fraudulent, even at the time.'" And if that's how he felt about Eris, what did that say about Pluto?

    Such thoughts set the stage for the International Astronomical Union's disputed definition of planethood in 2006, which classified Pluto, Eris and their ilk as dwarf planets ... but not planets per se. The rationale was that the word "planet" should be reserved for worlds that have cleared out everything else that orbits at the same distance from the sun.

    To some astronomers, that definition doesn't make sense - and I lay out the detailed arguments in my book, "The Case for Pluto." But to Brown, whose Twitter nickname is @plutokiller, the definition was surprisingly sensible.

    "The fact that astronomers actually got their act together and made sense of the solar system instead of just going on sentiment ... to this day, I'm still shocked. But I'm happy they did it," he said.

    Now Brown is working on his own book about Pluto and the planet-hunting life, titled "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming." Despite the pugnacious title, even Plutokiller sounds as if he's developed a soft spot for his prey.

    "It's without question one of the most interesting Kuiper Belt objects to study," Brown said. "I feel bad when I say mean things about Pluto. I still feel like I have to defend the rationalness of the decision to demote Pluto."

    Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson demoted Pluto in 2000, even before the IAU did, when he left it out of a planetary lineup at New York's Hayden Planetarium (in his capacity as the planetarium's director). Today, he's taking pains to point out that he's never been a "Pluto-hater."

    "I felt in the year 2000, as I do today, not hard-line against Pluto - as I've been stereotyped - but having what I think is a rather simple point of view: that we need a lexicon commensurate with the richness of knowledge that we now have about what orbits the sun," he said. "And what we've been trying to do is shoehorn new discoveries and new ideas into an outdated classification scheme.

    "I was never as hard as news programs tried to get me to say. I exist nowhere saying that there are eight planets in the solar system. I've never said that, ever," Tyson said. "What I said is that if you group objects by similar properties, then the solar system breaks into a whole other kind of understanding."

    Meeting the family
    Tyson goes on a coast-to-coast odyssey to lay out that understanding in "The Pluto Files," a "Nova" documentary premiering on PBS television stations on March 2. During the hour-long program, we see him sizing up planetary stand-ins with fellow astronomers on Harvard's football field, discussing Pluto the planet (and the dog) with Walt Disney's great-nephew, getting a close shave in the Illinois town where Tombaugh was born, and meeting up with Tombaugh's family in New Mexico.

    The program even shows Tyson making his peace with Clyde Tombaugh's daughter, Annette Tombaugh-Sitze, as he points out Pluto's place in the Hayden Planetarium.

    "Things are beginning to change in people's attitude toward Pluto," Tombaugh-Sitze told me this week. "People are softening."

    Clyde Tombaugh's 97-year-old widow, Patsy Tombaugh, also thinks the debate over Pluto has "calmed down" in the past couple of years, although she wouldn't be surprised if the controversy continued to simmer for the next 80 years. "It looks like we're going to have to keep on discussing this," she told me.

    Something wonderful
    One of Pluto's biggest advocates is Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who serves as the principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Stern told me today he sensed that the "pendulum is dramatically swinging back."

    "We hear more and more people referring to Pluto as a planet. ... Even Neil Tyson has become sort of ambivalent," he said.

    In Stern's view, the IAU "really, objectively screwed up" by approving a definition that, for instance, would classify Earth as a non-planet if it were orbiting at Pluto's distance from the sun. "It's pure absurdity. People see through it, once they think through it," he said.

    M. Buie / SwRI / NASA / ESA
    Click for video: Hubble Space Telescope images, taken in 2002-2003, were
    combined to produce these maps of Pluto. Click on the image to watch Pluto spin.

    Every decade brings a sharper picture of Pluto, and just last week, scientists unveiled a map based on Hubble Space Telescope imagery that revealed dramatic change on the dwarf planet. But those revelations won't hold a candle to what New Horizons could see when it passes by Pluto in 2015.

    There might be ice volcanoes, or puzzling amounts of methane, or thin streaks of clouds. The possibilities are so wide-ranging that Stern shies away from suggesting what we'll see. "Every time we've been to a new planet, we found out we were naive and wrong," he said.

    "We're going to get surprised, we're going to get shocked. That's the fun of it." Stern said. "When we get to Pluto, when you ask me what we'll find, I'll give you an answer that's guaranteed to be right. The answer is this, in two words: something wonderful."

    Update for 10 p.m. ET: How will posterity judge Pluto and Clyde Tombaugh 80 years from now? Here are the perspectives from our panel of experts:

    • Neil deGrasse Tyson: "My hope ... and I would not have said this before making this film ... My hope is that Clyde Tombaugh gets learned about and remembered as not simply the discoverer of Pluto, but as a kind of hero. ... He was a farmboy, not highly educated but self-taught, made homemade telescopes, got hired by this observatory, and had the perseverence and the discipline to make an important discovery. Whether or not you think of it as the ninth planet, Pluto is important as the first of a new class of objects in the solar system. In fact, I think that's a more important distinction to have than simply being known as the most diminutive planet."
    • Alan Stern on Clyde Tombaugh: "He not only discovered Pluto the planet, but a whole new class of planets, the ice dwarfs. It's the brightest light in the Kuiper Belt, in what we later came to realize is the most populous region of the solar system. Of course, it took a long time to see that. Columbus didn't know he was in North America, but Clyde lived long enough, into the 1990s, to realize the magnitude of what he saw in the 1930s."
    • Mike Brown on Pluto's status: "I can't imagine anything major happening that would lead to yet another reclassification of dwarf planets, with one exception. The one exception would be if somebody finds, in the very outer parts of the solar system, something that bridges that gap. Right now there's such a dramatic gap between the smallest planet, Mercury, and the biggest non-planet, Eris, that it's really, really easy to draw a line there. ... My suspicion is that this is going to stick for the next five years, and that it will stick for the next 80 years."
    • Mike Brown on Clyde Tombaugh: "The fact that he found the first Kuiper Belt object 60 years before anyone else found the next one is just a testament to what an amazing job he singlehandedly did. ... That will always be part of the legend. Eventually, I suspect, he really becomes known as the discoverer of the Kuiper Belt. ... I predict that in 100 years, if you read books about the history of astronomy, there will be a big section about Clyde Tombaugh - and there will not be a section about Mike Brown. And I think that's OK."

    Correction for 8:30 p.m. ET Feb. 18: I originally wrote that Clyde Tombaugh compared photographic plates for more than a year, but he actually did that task for a mere eight months. The Planetary Society's biographical page points out that he took pictures of the night sky starting in early 1929, but the photographic plates piled up for a few more months before he was given the job of comparing them as well. Tombaugh began doing that task in June 1929.

    I'll be discussing the 80th anniversary of Pluto's discovery at 1 p.m. ET Thursday on "Looking Up With Mal and Dave," airing on WKXL 1450 radio in Concord, N.H. Even if you're not in New Hampshire, you can listen online.

    Astronomer Ken Croswell is observing the anniversary by pleading Pluto's case in The Wall Street Journal. (You might have to click into the article from a Google News search page to read the whole thing.)

    ... And wouldn't you know it? Just weeks after I laid out "The Case for Pluto" at Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., the city of Gresham has declared that Thursday will be celebrated as Pluto Day. The party begins at 5:30 p.m. at the Plaza del Sol in Rockwood.

    Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or following @b0yle on Twitter. (Every new follower brings me closer to my goal of exceeding @NeilTyson's Twitter tally.) For the full story on Pluto and planethood, pick up a copy of my book, "The Case for Pluto."

  • Humobots in space

    NASA
    During a simulated lunar operation, NASA's Robonaut prototype welds a seam at a
    construction site while two moonwalking astronauts inspect completed work.

    Despite the cancellation of NASA's back-to-the-moon program, the next steps on the moon will likely be taken sometime in the next decade under human control. It's just that the humans will be using a robot to take them. The space agency's paradigm shift just might bring a shift to robotic telepresence as the next-best thing to walking on the moon.

    Yes, they'll be robots - but if current trends in robotics hold true, the robots could work like humans with superpowers, responding to the movements of a virtual-reality operator and sending back streams of video and data in near real time. Such "humobots" would represent one giant leap beyond the current generation of interplanetary rovers.

    The small steps can already be seen in this month's budget proposal for NASA: Among the robotic initiatives suggested to replace the canceled Constellation program is a mission to send out a lunar robot that "can be tele-operated from Earth and can transmit near-live video."

    X Prize synergy
    That mission sounds very similar to the challenge posed by the Google Lunar X Prize, a program that sets aside $30 million in prizes for teams that develop video-capable lunar landers. And that's music to the ears of Peter Diamandis, chairman and chief executive officer of the X Prize Foundation.

    "The president's budget is directly in line with what we're trying to do with Google Lunar X Prize," Diamandis told me over the weekend.

    One of the X Prize teams, Odyssey Moon, is already partnering with NASA's Ames Research Center to develop a lunar lander that could win the prize. Diamandis said the X Prize rules have been written to let teams earn revenue from NASA or other quarters, even during the prize-winning flight.

    "We're very open to working with NASA," Diamandis said.

    Months ago, NASA Watch's Keith Cowing reported on rumblings that NASA might add millions of dollars to the Google Lunar X Prize kitty. Diamandis wouldn't comment on how the space agency might participate, but he pointed out there was ample precedent for other funders to piggyback on the X Prize purse. Virgin Galactic, for example, paid to have its logo painted on the SpaceShipOne rocket plane for the flight that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004. "That is completely within the rules," Diamandis said.

    In its latest issue, Aviation Week reports that the shift in NASA's approach was providing an opening for human spaceflight to become more international and commercial in character. Diamandis picked up on that, noting that NASA isn't the only potential customer for X Prize moonshots.  European or Indian space agencies, or even commercial customers, could also get involved in the lunar robot rush, he said.

    What is Project M?
    NASA won't rely solely on X Prize teams for its space robots, of course. Just this month, the space agency announced that its Robonaut prototype was getting an upgrade with the help of General Motors. The automaker wants to use Robonaut2 as an autonomous assembly-line worker, while NASA's near-term plan is to have the robot assist spacewalkers with maintenance tasks at the International Space Station.

    When Robonaut2 is ready for prime time in space, it should be able to work either in remote-control mode, copying the movements of a virtual-reality operator; or in autonomous mode, under the watchful eyes of human monitors.

    It's not so far-fetched to imagine remote-controlled Robonauts descending to the moon's surface and serving as the eyes, arms and legs of their human operators in the harsh lunar environment. In fact, SpaceRef has posted a video about "Project M," which appears to be a Johnson Space Center concept for landing a two-legged robot on the lunar surface.

    A YouTube video posted by SpaceRef / OnOrbit shows a two-legged NASA
    robot exploring the moon as part of "Project M."

    There's been something of a buzz over the video - and particularly over the claim that the mission could be accomplished in 1,000 days. That time frame sounds extremely short as spaceflight goes. Skeptics also have questioned whether you'd really want to send a robot with two long legs when a robot with tracks or wheels might have more stability.

    But whatever the process of locomotion turns out to be, this seems to be the kind of exploratory mission most in step with NASA's new "flexible-path" strategy. The virtual-reality operators could be back on Earth, dealing with a four-second light-travel delay between making a move and seeing the results. Eventually, they could be pulling the strings from lunar orbit - or from Martian orbit, if and when Robonauts head for the Red Planet.

    Is this how the next giant leaps to the moon and beyond will be taken? Or will the humans need to stay in the picture? Feel free to let me know what you think - or what you've heard - as a comment below.

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

  • Hottest soup in the universe

    BNL
    Click for video: This artist's conception shows two gold ions blasting into each
    other in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, leaving behind a spray of particles that
    includes quark-gluon plasma. Such conditions naturally existed in the universe a
    microsecond after the big bang. Click on the image to watch a YouTube video.

    Scientists say the tiny bubbles of plasma they've created in a "big bang machine" are the hottest dollops of soup ever seen in the universe, reaching temperatures of several trillion degrees.

    What's more, the weird properties of that soup may help scientists create a new breed of electronic devices - and figure out why the universe didn't blow itself up as soon as it came into being.

    The proton-sized soup bubbles, known more formally as quark-gluon plasma, were created about a billion times in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Like the larger, more recently constructed Large Hadron Collider, RHIC is capable of creating the conditions that existed in the universe a millionth of a second after the big bang.

    RHIC (pronounced like "Rick") does that by accelerating gold ions in a 2.4-mile-round magnetic ring and smashing them together at nearly the speed of light. In 2005, RHIC's researchers said the collisions were so energetic that they liberated quarks and gluons from subatomic particles, creating a free-flowing plasma that acted like a nearly perfect liquid.

    Five years ago, the researchers weren't yet able to determine just how hot the quark-gluon soup had gotten. Today, they announced new findings that pegged the temperature at 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). That's 250,000 times hotter than the center of our sun, and roughly 40 times hotter than the core of a Type II supernova, said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate lab director for nuclear and particle physics.

    "This is the hottest matter ever created in the laboratory" and qualifies as the "highest temperature known in our present universe," he told journalists during a teleconference organized in conjunction with this week's American Physical Society meeting in Washington.

    The temperature is also about twice as high as what's required to melt protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons - which confirms that RHIC actually did create quark-gluon plasma, Vigdor said.

    How the temperature was taken
    Making the measurement wasn't easy, said Barbara Jacak, a physicist at Stony Brook University who is the scientific spokesperson for RHIC's PHENIX detector team. She compared the feat to judging the temperature of molten metal in a bronze foundry by analyzing its color and brightness.

    For molten metal, the color changes from red to orange to yellow to white-hot - but for the blast created in a particle accelerator, the color goes way beyond the visible spectrum, into the gamma-ray region.

    Physicists analyzed the light emissions from RHIC's blast of subatomic particles, and carefully separated out the emissions from the gold-on-gold collision. They came up with the 4-trillion-degree estimate by matching their data against theoretical models for the plasma's expansion, Jacak said.

    Details of the findings are to be published in Physical Review Letters.

    Now that the temperature has been characterized, researchers can be confident that the meltdown of subatomic particles really does create a liquid that flows with almost no frictional resistance. Such an ordered state does not mesh with the picture physicists previously had about the expected behavior of free-flying quarks and gluons.

    "All we want to do now is find out why," Jacak said.

    The LHC is scheduled to go back into operation later this week, and the schedule calls for the LHC's ALICE experiment to begin smashing lead ions together this fall. ALICE's collisions could be two to three times more energetic than RHIC's maximum level. Some physicists speculate that at those energies, quark-gluon plasma would stop acting like a liquid and start acting like a gas.

    Breaking the rules of symmetry
    RHIC's experiments have already shown that "this is not your father's quark-gluon plasma," Vigdor said - and not just because of its liquid properties.

    Another experiment analyzed how free quarks interacted with the ultra-strong magnetic fields produced by the gold-on-gold ion collisions. That experiment, involving RHIC's STAR detector, found that the quarks didn't behave as expected: Positively charged quarks tended to emerge from the collision parallel to the magnetic field, while negatively charged quarks went in the opposite direction.

    That runs counter to the idea that the interactions of quarks and gluons should exhibit mirror symmetry, or parity. Physicists had thought there'd be just as much chance for the quarks to emerge one way as the other way, regardless of charge. But the quark-gluon soup broke that symmetry - and that may point the way toward other examples of symmetry-breaking at high temperatures.

    As a matter of fact, physicists are counting on finding those examples.

    "Even though we all like symmetry, it is really imperfection that we owe our existence to," Dmitri Kharzeev, head of Brookhaven's nuclear theory group, said during the teleconference.

    The best-known and most intriguing example has to do with the balance of matter and antimatter in the universe. Theoretically, the emergence of the universe should have given rise to equal amounts of matter and antimatter ... which would have annihiliated themselves immediately in a burst of energy. But for some reason, our universe gave matter preferential treatment - perhaps due to symmetry-breaking at the time of the big bang. Physicists would love to find out how that happened.

    Previous experiments have found evidence of symmetry-breaking for matter and antimatter, and the question is to be addressed head-on by the Large Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment. Kharzeev said the symmetry-breaking behavior seen in quark-gluon plasma could help the the antimatter sleuths crack their more mysterious case.

    Symmetry-breaking is also thought to play a role in the mystery of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle" that would explain why some particles have mass while others are massless. Identifying the Higgs boson is a prime objective for the LHC as well as the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois.

    The path to spintronics?
    All this may sound like a purely theoretical exercise - but Kharzeev said symmetry-breaking could have some down-to-earth implications.

    For years, Kharzeev and his colleagues at Brokhaven have been trying to develop devices that take advantage of a technology known as "spintronics." Today's electronic devices are based on the properties of electric charge, but spintronic devices would be designed to take advantage of an electron's magnetic spin.

    The research team has been working on the patents for a spintronic device made from ultra-thin sheets of graphene. Under the right conditions, such gadgets could perform calculations at the speed of light, as if they were working with photons rather than electrons.

    If researchers could figure out a way to create asymmetric magnetic interactions in graphene, like the asymmetric interactions in the quark-gluon soup, that would bring them a big step closer to manipulating spin and putting spintronics to work, Kharzeev said.

    "This is a very practical thing," he told journalists. "It's real, and this connection - no matter how far it may seem from real life - is helping us and other people develop practical applications."

    Update for 3:45 p.m. ET Feb. 16: Some commenters have wondered how it is that any particle collider could endure that much heat. The answer is that the quark-gluon plasma existed for much less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second before it cooled and turned into the more commonly seen spray of subatomic particles. Also, each dollop of quark-gluon soup was only as big as a proton - so the experiment really didn't have a chance to set anything ablaze. However, the collider can give off some pretty nasty radiation, as is the case with most particle experiments - so you wouldn't want to be standing next to the collision point with a soup spoon.

    More about quark-gluon soup:

    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."

  • Jump into Olympic-size science

    NBCOlympics.com
    Click for video: The sport of curling lends itself to a discussion of physics
    in a video presented by NBC Learn in cooperation with the National Science
    Foundation. Click on the image to see the full video series.

    Science and sports aficionados are using the Winter Olympics as a teachable moment, for subjects ranging from the mechanics behind a curling freeze to the meteorology behind Vancouver's non-freeze.

    The geeks and the jocks may be on opposing sides in the battle for high-school supremacy. By the time you get to the Olympic-scale level of excellence, however, geeks and jocks definitely need each other.

    A prime example came during the 2008 Beijing Games, when swimmers wearing innovative suits almost literally blew their rivals out of the water - so much so that the suits were outlawed as a form of "technological doping." Similar technologies have revolutionized winter sports ranging from skiing and hockey to speed skating.

    If the jocks need the geeks to help them go faster, the geeks need the jocks as well - to serve as prime specimens for physiological studies, for example. Top athletes are helping scientists understand just what the human body is capable of, and those insights are fed back into efforts to make the rest of us healthier as well.

    Learning from the Olympics
    Then there's the classroom application: If you have to teach your students how angular momentum works, a high-speed video of figure skater Rachael Flatt will hold their attention better than the filmstrips their grandparents had to sit through in physics class. At least that's the theory behind the series of Olympic-themed science videos presented by NBC Learn and the National Science Foundation. (NBC Universal is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

    Anchored by NBC's Lester Holt, the 16 videos delve into the physics behind curling, snowboarding and other sports represented at the Olympics. How do Newton's laws of motion enter into short-track speed skating? How does math contribute to the strategy for winning a hockey game?

    The videos provide extra face time for U.S. Olympic hopefuls such as skater J.R. Celski and cross-country skier Liz Stephens. Flatt was a natural for the series, in part because her dad is a biochemical engineer and her mom is a molecular biologist.

    "It's definitely safe to say that science runs in my blood," she said in an NSF news release. "I jumped at the chance to participate in this project because my parents have passed along their love of science to me over the years, and I hope to one day pursue a career in the field."

    Inside Science News Service has also caught Olympic fever: This week, Inside Science's Chris Gorski looks at the science of curling - that curious sport in which players push stones across a patch of ice and sweep brooms in front of them to guide them to a target. It turns out that the speed of the stone should dictate the style of the sweeping.

    Olympic forecasts
    Another Inside Science report, by Emilie Lorditch, delves into the system set up to forecast weather for the Olympic events, hour by hour, site by site. To cope with the challenge, Canadian meteorologists beefed up the Vancouver area's network of automated weather observing stations, stepped up the training of meteorologists and improved the computerized forecasting models.

    The 2010 Olympics will put a short-term forecasting system known as "nowcasting" to its most extensive test yet. Popular Mechanics reports that sensors will be measuring snowfall on a minute-by-minute basis, and nowcasts will be issued at 15-minute intervals, with a spatial resolution of 0.6 mile (1 kilometer).

    The big concern right now is the lack of snow: It's ironic that even as America's East Coast is coming out of the worst snowstorm in decades, Canada's West Coast is having its warmest winter in decades - which is not a good thing for the Olympics. The Orange County Register quotes a historian as saying that long-term climate change could turn the Winter Games into an endangered species.

    "I think many people look out 20, 30 years from now and are concerned about whether the Winter Olympics will still be viable," said Derick L. Hulme, a political science professor at Michigan's Alma College who specializes in Olympic history.

    Is that concern overblown, or will the geeks have to come up with some kind of weather modification system to keep the jocks on the ski slopes? What other climatological or technological trends could affect the Olympics of the future? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    ... And speaking of forecasts
    Who will come out on top in the medal race? Answering that question is a popular pastime for economic forecasters during Olympic season. This time around, Colorado College economist Daniel Johnson says Canada will come out on top with 27 medals (five of them gold). The Wall Street Journal's statistical analysis also sees Canada as the big winner, but with a significantly bigger haul (37 total, 12 gold).

    The computer models tend to favor Canada due to the "home-field advantage" that has been observed during past Olympics. However, the Inkling predictive market - which depends on the wisdom of crowds rather than the wisdom of software - has consistently favored Germany over Canada and the United States. The Hubdub market also goes with Germany over Canada, but by a slim margin. Sports Illustrated has a similar projection, based on an event-by-event analysis.

    So the Vancouver Games may provide the opportunity for a little side bet on the accuracy of medal count predictions: Who will come closest, the geeks or the jocks? We'll get back to you with the answer in 16 days.

    Update for 8 p.m. ET: Lessonoply offers lesson plans keyed to the NBC Learn videos. Meanwhile, The New York Times' Learning Network blog is offering a "Winter Olympics Teaching and Learning Extravaganza," and TeacherVision has put together an online curriculum guide keyed to the Vancouver Games.

    More on the science of the Olympics:

    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."

  • See Saturn's twin light shows

    J. Nichols / Univ. of Leicester / NASA / ESA
    Click for video: Ultraviolet imagery of Saturn, captured by the Hubble Space
    Telescope a year ago, reveals the planet's northern and southern auroras at the
    same time. Click on the image to watch a video from the European Space Agency.

    Scientists are showing off a one-of-a-kind double aurora, spotted on Saturn by the Hubble Space Telescope. The northern-southern light display is notable not only because of its rarity, but also because it shows that the giant planet's magnetic field is out of balance.

    Saturn's auroral displays are created by the interaction between the planet's magnetic field and electrically charged particles zooming out from the sun. This isn't unusual, of course. Earth's auroras provide the best-known examples of the phenomenon, and scientists have seen polar lights on Jupiter as well as Mars, Uranus and Neptune.

    But the peculiarities of Saturn's poles have intrigued astronomers for years. Some puzzle over a hexagonal cloud pattern circling the north pole. Others have found that Saturn's northern lights went all over the place, with dramatic ups and downs.

    To learn more about the auroras, a team led by the University of Leicester's Jonathan Nichols pointed the world's best-known space telescope at the giant planet for several days last year between January and March, which was close to the time of Saturn's equinox. That's when Saturn's rings are edge-on with relation to the sun, and both the north and the south polar regionsŠcan be seen from Earth simultaneously.

    Nichols noted that last year was Hubble's best opportunity to see the double feature. Probably its only opportunity, as a matter of fact. By the timeŠthe Saturnian equinox rolls around again, in 2024, the space telescope will likely be over the hill. So Nichols' team captured time-sequence images using the Advanced Camera for Surveys' ultraviolet-sensitive solar blind channel - the only part of the ACS that was working at the time.

    "This sustained series of images of simultaneous north-south aurora are important scientifically, since they cannot be obtained at any other planet, including Earth," Nichols said in a university news release. "They tell us a great deal about the nature of the planet's magnetic field and the processes which generate aurorae in a way not possible at Earth. It's a great example of how planetary science can fully complement the study of the Earth."

    Nichols and his colleagues reported their results late last year in Geophysical Research Letters, and the Hubble team released the double-aurora movie just today. The glowing displaysŠfrom the two auroras were seen to rise and fall pretty much in tandem. That'sŠconsistent with the idea that charged particles flow between north and south along invisible "traffic lanes" in Saturn's magnetic field.

    The light shows are not completely symmetric, however. The auroral oval is slightly smalller and more intense in the north than in the south, and that implies that the magnetic field is not evenly distributed across the planet. It must be slightly stronger in the north - an effect that wouldŠaccelerateŠthe charged particles to higher energiesŠas they're fired toward the atmosphere.

    So what's the reason for the asymmetry? That's not yet known, but researchers have a few possibilities they want to check out. They may well get their chance: This may be the last hurrah for Hubble's observations of a Saturnian equinox, but the Cassini orbiter is expected to send backŠobservations of Saturn's magnetic field and auroras for seven more years.

    Nichols and his colleagues said the Hubble data provide a good starting point for solving Saturn's polar puzzles. "These observations will provide important context for Cassini observations as Saturn moves from southern to northern summer," they wrote.

    For more about Saturn and Cassini, check out the Web resources available from NASA and the orbiter's imaging team, as well as msnbc.com's Saturn stories and Saturn slideshows. We even put together a special slideshowŠto celebrateŠSaturn's rite of spring. And let's not forget about Hubble: We have slideshows that round up Hubble's greatest hits as well as Hubble's latest greatest hits. Aw, heck ...Šyou might as well click your way through our entire space gallery while you're at it.

    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."

  • Hairs trace human history

     

    Nuka Godfredsen
      An artist's impression shows how Inuk might have looked in life 4,000 years ago.

    For the first time, scientists have deciphered the genetic code of an ancient human from a long-gone culture, using the DNA from just a few tufts of 4,000-year-old hair preserved in Greenland's permafrost.

    Thanks to the rapid advance of gene-sequencing technology, researchers could tell the hair belonged to a brown-skinned man whose ancestors came to the New World from Siberia around 5,500 years ago, during a previously unknown migration. And that's not all.

    The genetic evidence suggests that the man, nicknamed "Inuk," had the kind of eyes, teeth and even earwax associated with modern-day Asians and Native Americans ... and that he might have been going bald.

    One of the research team's leaders said the technique used on Inuk's hair could be used on other ancient samples as well, almost literally fleshing out humanity's saga through the millennia. "I think it will be something we will see much more of in the coming five years," said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen.

    After two years of study, the team published their findings in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The latest report follows up on earlier research published in the journal Science.

    Scientists have been analyzing ancient DNA for years - and in fact, they've found out enough about the extinct Neanderthals' genetic code to conclude that at least some of them were redheads. But the study of Inuk (a name that comes from the Greenlandic word for "human") sets a new standard. The Neanderthal genome is only in rough-draft form, while Inuk's genome has been checked 20 times over (20x, in genomic parlance). That's about as good as it gets, even for modern-day genome sequencing.

    "It is amazing how well-preserved this sample is, presumably due to its rather young age and the permafrost," Svante Pääbo, a geneticist who led the Neanderthal DNA study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, told me via e-mail. "Eighty percent of the DNA is human, whereas at most 4 percent is from Neandertals in the bones we study. I am envious."

    Edward Rubin, director of the U.S. Energy Department's Joint Genome Institute, was similarly impressed: "The coverage of the genome is such ... that they begin to get clues to what the flesh and blood of this creature was."

    "It's really a time machine," said Rubin, who is based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

    'Freezing my butt off'
    Willerslev is no stranger to Arctic artifacts and ancient DNA analysis: His past projects include studies of mammoth DNA preserved in Alaskan permafrost, as well as fossilized poop from Oregon, so it was natural for him to try to see whether such genetic techniques could be extended to ancient humans in the Arctic.

    Willerslev went so far as to go on an Arctic expedition in 2006 to look for samples. "I was freezing my butt off up there," he recalled. But it turned out that the ideal specimens were already sitting in a Copenhagen museum.

    The four hair samples were retrieved from Greenland's permafrost, along with four bits of bone, during a Danish-led excavation in 1986. They were placed in a plastic bag, filed away in Denmark's National Museum, and largely forgotten about. When Willerslev heard about the hair, he could hardly believe his luck.

    Researchers handled the hairs carefully to reduce the risk of contamination, and verified that only Europeans had come in contact with the samples. That was important, because they wanted to minimize the chance that modern-day DNA would get in the way of the big question they were aiming to answer.

    Tale of an extinct culture
    Archaeological studies had determined that the hair and bone came from an individual of the Saqqaq culture, a now-extinct people who were among Greenland's earliest residents. Anthropologists have long wondered whether the Saqqaq were the descendants of "First Americans" who crossed the Bering land bridge from Siberia 10,000 to 14,000 years ago - or whether they were part of a different migration.

    Once Inuk's DNA was analyzed, researchers could compare his code to that of present-day groups ranging from the Inuit to Native Americans to Siberians.

    "The closest contemporary population he is associated with is in fact not Inuits or Greenlanders or Native Americans in the New World, but three Siberian populations," Willerslev said. And when the team looked more closely at the DNA comparison with those three groups - the Nganasans, Koryaks and Chukchis - they determined that Inuk's ethnic group probably split off a mere 5,500 years ago.

    That suggests that Inuk and his kin came to America during a previously unknown wave of migration. At that time, the Bering land bridge didn't exist, so Willerslev and his colleagues assume that the migrants must have crossed either by sea or over winter ice.

    The reasons why the Saqqaq eventually faded into oblivion remain shrouded in mystery. They might have been assimilated or pushed into extinction by later cultures, such as the Dorset or Thule peoples. Willerslev said follow-up genetic studies could shed further light on that question.

    Fleshing out Inuk's portrait
    The researchers were interested not only in the big picture, but also in a portrait of the individual behind the DNA. Because the genetic readings were so detailed, they could use bits of coding known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (better known as SNPs, or "snips") to link Inuk's genome to modern-day genetic traits.

    The results confirmed Inuk's Siberian background in surprisingly detailed ways:

    • His blood type was A+, which is found in very high frequency in east Asian populations.
    • Combinations of SNPs suggest that he had brown eyes as well as dark, thick hair and a skin color that was not as light as that commonly found in Europeans.
    • One of the SNPs is linked to shovel-graded front teeth, a characteristic trait of Asian and Native American populations.
    • Another SNP is linked to having earwax of the dry type that is typical of Asians and Native Americans, rather than the "wet" earwax found in other ethnic groups.
    • A 12-SNP combination, linked to metabolism and body mass index, suggests that Inuk was adapted to a cold climate.
    • Inuk's genetic code also indicates that he had an increased risk of baldness. The fact that Inuk's hair could be recovered thousands of years later led Willerslev to suggest half-jokingly that "he actually died quite young."

    Inuk's hair turned out to be a genetic jackpot, thanks to the fact that it was so well-preserved and free of modern-day contamination. If there were significant contamination, the researchers assumed it would show up as a European genetic signature, because the samples were handled exclusively by European researchers. By that measure, the maximum estimated contamination was 0.8 percent, "not much higher than background," Willerslev said.

    Willerslev and other geneticists conceded that few ancient samples from elsewhere in the world could come up to Inuk's standard. Rubin said the preservative qualities of the permafrost couldn't be underestimated. "It's like putting a piece of meat in your freezer rather than on your kitchen table," he told me. "This is a great sample for that reason."

    But the geneticists also said sequencing techniques were improving so much, for ancient as well as present-day DNA, that other long-dead cultures could be studied in the future. What skin color did the ancient Egyptians have? What genetic diseases afflicted the Etruscans? How did humans settle the Americas?

    Willerslev said "only time can show" if the technique used on Inuk's hair can be applied to other genetic samples from ancient human remains. "But honestly speaking, I think it is very likely that you can," he said.

    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."

  • Start your X Prize engines

    PIAXP / X Prize Foundation
    SSI Racing's 2SSIC, the ZAP Alias electric car and Aptera's three-wheeler were
    among the X Prize entrants on display at last month's Detroit Auto Show.

    The Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize program has added a few twists to its $10 million competition for energy-efficient motor vehicles. The competitions that matter the most won't be held in public view, but will be conducted instead behind closed doors.

    When the contest had its kickoff two years ago, X Prize officials said the competition would climax with a couple of rounds of "real-world" cross-country racing, incorporating city as well as highway driving. Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, even mused about rerunning the New York-to-Seattle road race that jump-started the Model T's popularity back in 1909.

    The public will still get a look at X Prize cars in Michigan, during viewing opportunities at the State Capitol in Lansing in April and at the Michigan International Speedway outside Detroit in July. No judging will take place at those events, however. Instead, the judges will put the vehicles through closed-door road tests at the speedway, starting April 26. The field will be winnowed down to 20 vehicles during further tests in June and July.

    The finals aren't the final word, however. The last contest comes in August, when the top finalists undergo dynamometer testing at the Environmental Protection Agency's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, and at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. All the numbers are plugged into a formula to select the winners, who will receive their checks at a September prize ceremony in Washington. This timeline lays out the details.

    The aim of the competition is to reward teams that come up with efficient, clean, safe and affordable automotive vehicles. The key target is to surpass the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon fuel economy, while satisfying all the standards for safety and emissions that have to be met for a marketable car. Half of the $10 million purse is set aside for the winning "mainstream" car, capable of seating four. The other half would go to "alternative" two-seaters: $2.5 million for the side-by-side winner, $2.5 million for the top tandem.

    It's been a long two years for the X Prize organizers, and they as well as the contestants are looking forward to starting their engines in the spring. "We couldn't be more thrilled to partner with Michigan as we enter the most exciting phase of the competition," Diamandis said in an announcement sent out during last month's Detroit Auto Show.

    Some commentators sounded a little less thrilled. Autoblog Green's Sebastian Blanco, for example, noted that the prize program "has lost a lot of potential and participating teams over the course of the past few years" - and bemoaned the fact that the on-track events would take place exclusively at the Michigan speedway. X Prize Cars' Eric Boyd said the organizers "removed all excitement from the prize" by going to a closed-door format.

    "That's not what I signed up for, and I imagine many of the recent big team losses are related to this - surely the teams had inside knowledge on the direction the prize is going," Boyd wrote. "The big problem with this new timeline is that the prize will likely never enter the mainstream with this schedule."

    It seems as if the green-auto industry is in the midst of a reality check right now. That's due in part to the increased scrutiny being given to the potential payoffs from plug-ins. The troubles that are being encountered with Toyota's hybrids, once the darlings of the auto industry, definitely don't help. Will the coming Automotive X Prize events give fuel-efficient cars a boost, or is the $10 million contest fated to get stuck in low gear?

    More about X Prizes:

    • Competitors in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize program gathered last week for a summit at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Entrepreneurs discussed their plans to send privately funded landers to the lunar surface just as the NASA announced the cancellation of its own back-to-the-moon program. NASA's new plan emphasizes a "flexible path" to exploration beyond Earth orbit, as well as a greater reliance on commercial spaceships. This was music to the ears of many at the GLXP summit, including Diamandis. "It's about capitalism, its about competition, it's about entrepreneurialism," Diamandis said in an X Prize postmortem.
    • The X Prize Foundation's next $10 million competition may encourage the development of more advanced brain-computer interfaces. Check out this posting at Singularity Hub for an in-depth discussion.

    Correction for 11:13 a.m. ET Feb. 10: I've fixed the reference to Michigan's State Capitol so that it's in its rightful place in Lansing. Thanks to all for setting me straight.

    Check out msnbc.com's Autos section for the latest on Toyota's troubles and other industry issues. 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."

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