Claudia Marcelloni / CERN

A worker stands beneath the ATLAS detector's calorimeter during this month's maintenance break at the Large Hadron Collider.

The world's most powerful particle collider will be kept running through 2012 rather than taking next year off for an overhaul, Europe's CERN particle physics lab announced today. The change in plans means scientists at the Large Hadron Collider will have more time to track down the Higgs boson and other mysteries of the universe before the extended break — and it also means the machine should be shut down just in time for the Maya apocalypse.

Not that there's anything to the doomsday date. There's no reason why the world should end on Dec. 21, 2012, with or without the LHC. Some folks think dramatic, world-shattering changes will occur on that day because it marks the end of the Maya "long-count" calendar, but that myth has no basis in historical or cosmological reality. (And experts say the date may have been miscalculated, anyway.) Some folks also think the LHC could bring on doomsday by creating catastrophe-causing black holes or strangelets — but there's no evidence for that, either.

The real significance of the LHC's operation in 2012 is that scientists are so pleased with the way the machine has been running that they want to keep up the scientific momentum.

"With the LHC running so well in 2010, and further improvements in performance expected, there's a real chance that exciting new physics may be within our sights by the end of the year," Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's research director, said in today's news release. "For example, if nature is kind to us and the lightest supersymmetric particle, or the Higgs boson, is within reach of the LHC's current energy, the data we expect to collect by the end of 2012 will put them within our grasp."

Right now, the LHC is closed for maintenance, but it's due to start up again in February. The new schedule, approved by the CERN's managers over the past few days, calls for operations to resume at the tried-and-true energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts per beam. CERN expects to increase the LHC's data collection rate by at least a factor of three over the next year, potentially allowing scientists to see the first hints of new phenomena by the end of the year. But one year would not provide enough time to "turn those hints into a discovery," CERN said.

So instead of shutting the LHC down for a yearlong series of upgrades, as previously planned, CERN said it would take a "short technical stop" at the end of 2011, then go back into operation for 2012. The big upgrades would be done during 2013, and in 2014 the LHC would be back in business at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam.

One of the LHC project's primary goals is to detect the Higgs boson, which is the only particle predicted by current theory that has yet to be found. The Higgs particle, along with its associated field, is thought to play a role in endowing some particles with mass while leaving others (such as photons) to go massless. Research at the LHC could shed new light on other fundamental questions as well: Are there whole classes of supersymmetric particles (or "sparticles") that have gone undetected to date? Might some of those sparticles account for dark matter, which can't be seen but can be detected by its gravitational influence? Is it possible that we live in a world of 10 or 11 dimensions? Why does it look as if matter won out over antimatter when the universe came into being? What's the nature of the primordial soup that existed just an instant after the big bang?

For more about the LHC and its role in solving the mysteries of the universe, delve into our special section about "The Big Bang Machine." And for more from the 2012 watch, check out these stories:

• Stressed by storms and supernovas?
• Solar cycle sparks doomsday buzz
• Alien invaders vs. the truth squad
• The end is not near 

If you're looking for an additional antidote to 2012 hysteria, check out 2012hoax.org. Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter. You'll even find a reference to 2012 hype in a chapter of my book, "The Case for Pluto."

Nicholas Longrich / Yale University

An illustration depicts a newly discovered dinosaur called Titanoceratops, which predates the better-known Triceratops.

Paleontologists report that a massive horned dinosaur was roaming the American Southwest 5 million years before the well-known Triceratops ... or was that a Torosaurus?

The newly named species, Titanoceratops, weighed nearly 15,000 pounds and had an 8-foot-long skull. It lived during the Cretaceous period, around 74 million years ago.

The finding, accepted for publication in the journal Cretaceous Research, suggests that the large horned dinosaurs evolved their large size earlier than previously thought, reports Yale University paleontologist Nicholas Longrich.

The paleontologist got an inkling about the existence of this dinosaur while searching through scientific papers that described a partial skeleton discovered New Mexico in 1941. The skeleton was identified as Pentaceratops, a common species to the area, and was reconstructed as one for display at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in 1995.

"When I looked at the skeleton more closely, I realized it was just too different from the other known Pentaceratops to be a member of the species," Longrich said in a news release.

Nicholas Longrich / Yale University

The skull on the left is the Titanoceratops skull, the missing parts of which were reconstructed to look like a Pentaceratops. The illustration on the right shows the missing parts of the frill (shaded).

Instead, he says the dinosaur likely weighed twice as much as an adult Pentaceratops. It was similar to Triceratops, but with a thinner frill, longer nose and slightly bigger horns.

He suspects that Titanoceratops is the ancestor of both Triceratops and Torosaurus. "This skeleton is exactly what you would expect their ancestor to look like," he said.

More work is needed, however, before the assignment to a new species is confirmed. As pointed out by Brian Switek on the Smithsonian's Dinosaur Tracking blog, members of the Dinosaur Mailing List are debating whether Pentaceratops and Titanoceratops are different growth stages of a single species.

"The animal Longrich has named Titanoceratops certainly did exist," Switek writes, "but as with any other species, the animal's name is a scientific hypothesis that will likely be discussed and debated in years to come."

The discussion parallels the debate over whether Triceratops and Torosaurus fossils actually represent the juvenile and adult forms of the same animal. Some experts suggest that the name "Triceratops" (or more likely "Torosaurus") should go extinct, alongside "Brontosaurus." Others, however, insist that Triceratops and Torosaurus were truly different breeds of horned dinosaurs.

So how do you settle the debate? The best way is to find more fossils, and especially fossilized frills. That's exactly what Longrich is hoping for in Titanoceratops' case.

More stories on horned dinosaurs:

• Puzzling three-horned dino is adult Triceratops
• Mini Triceratops first horned dino from South Korea
• Triceratops had horn-to-horn battles with kin
• Dinosaur had horns the size of baseball bats

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Earth may be a special place, but it's really not all that big compared to other planets in the solar system, as blogger Brad Goodspeed illustrates in this video. The planetary images are tweaked to show how big other planets would appear if they orbited our world at the distance of the moon, 240,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) away.

In the video, which has gone viral, Jupiter appears to fill the night sky. Goodspeed has since updated the original post with a note explaining that the video does not represent the entire night sky, and that Jupiter would actually not fill the entire sky, as was pointed out to him in a comment on his blog. You can follow along the ensuing discussion in this post.

Scientific accuracy aside, the video does accomplish its goal of making Earthlings feel small. And the discussion about the accuracy of the video, according to Goodspeed, is a good lesson in the scientific process.

"It's my hope that by pointing out my own errors the skeptical ethic might be introduced to some new people. And by using this video as a case study in the discussion between art and science, the whole mission of this blog is advanced," he writes.

Update for 4:30 p.m. ET Jan. 31: Despite the best efforts of the Egyptian army and a human shield, some of the ancient treasures inside the century-old Egyptian Museum were damaged during a brief wave of looting, authorities in Cairo say. Among the damaged artifacts are two pharaonic mummies and a priceless statuette from the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The country's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, described the damage in a series of statements, including an update that was posted to his blog on Sunday. He said looters ransacked the museum's gift shop and went on to vandalize authentic treasures as well. More than a dozen display cases were broken into, including one that contained the Tut statuette. "The criminals found a statue of the king on a panther, broke it, and threw it on the floor," Hawass wrote. "I am very thankful that all of the antiquities that were damaged in the museum can be restored, and the tourist police caught all of the criminals that broke into it."

The looters scattered pieces of the mummies across the museum floor — and judging by the photographs that were released Monday (graphic content below), restoring those relics will be challenging to say the least.

Roger Wood/CORBIS

A figurine from Tutankhamun's tomb shows the boy-king riding a panther.

Al Jazeera via EloquentPeasant.com

A video frame from Al Jazeera shows what appears to be the panther in pieces, with the figurine of Tutankhamun missing.

Based on video footage that was shot inside the museum, some observers suggest that other treasures from Tut's tomb may have been damaged as well. Margaret Maitland, an Egyptologist at Oxford University in England, suggested that at least one other gilded statuettes of the boy-king pictures may have been broken off its pedestal.

This one shows Tut standing on a boat with a harpoon at the ready:

Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

A wooden statuette shows the gilded figure of Tutankhamun standing on a boat, holding a harpoon.

APTV via msnbc.com

This video frame from the looted Egyptian Museum shows what appears to be the boat, with the Tut figure broken off.

Maitland also pointed to another video showing a wooden block with the broken-off feet still attached. At first, she assumed that this suggested yet another statuette of a standing Tut was snapped off, but later analysis made it seem more likely that these were the broken-off feet from the "Tut on a panther" statuette. Check out Maitland's blog posting at the Eloquent Peasant for those comparisons.

Hawass said two mummies in the museum were destroyed, with their heads ripped off. In one of the most upsetting pictures from the museum, shown below, the mummies' heads and bones can be seen spread across the floor.

AP

This photo was taken early Saturday in the Egyptian Museum and made available on Monday. Parts of unidentified mummies, including the heads, are seen damaged on the floor.

Over the weekend, experts wondered whether two mummies may have been the mortal remains of Tut's great-grandparents, Yuya and Tuya. That surmise was based on a comparison of a gilded mummy case seen in the video with photographs of the case that was laid over Tuya's mummy. Discovery News' Rossella Lorenzi focused on that angle.

On Monday, however, Aidan Dodson, an Egyptologist from the University of Bristol, reported that the mummies were unlikely to be those of Yuya and Tuya. As explained in an update from Maitland, the mummy case had been separated from Tuya's mummy and was being exhibited in the museum by itself.

Maitland noted that two more ruined displays matched up with well-known items from Egypt's antiquity: an array of soldier figurines and a wooden model boat from the tomb of Mesehti, a provincial governor during the 11th or 12th Dynasty (roughly 2025 to 1700 B.C.). Here are pictures showing those damaged artifacts:

MSNBC TV

A video grab shows damage done to a display case that apparently contains an array of soldier figurines from the tomb of Mesehti, a provincial governor from the 11th or 12th Dynasty.

MSNBC TV

An armed security guard stands watch next to a display case containing a damaged model boat from the tomb of Mesehti.

In his blog posting, Hawass provided specific information about the Tut-on-a-panther statuette (which is actually one of two similar statuettes from the tomb), but not about the other items that appear to be damaged in the video. Why not? It could be because Hawass is still trying to get all the facts of the story straight, or because he's reluctant to publicize the full extent of the damage at this time. It's also possible that some of the items shown in the video are display-case replicas or gift-shop knock-offs rather than the real things.

In any case, Hawass sees the damage and looting as a national tragedy.

"My heart is broken and my blood is boiling," he wrote. "I feel that everything I have done in the last nine years has been destroyed in one day, but all the inspectors, young archaeologists, and administrators, are calling me from sites and museums all over Egypt to tell me that they will give their life to protect our antiquities."

The good news
That's the good news about the saga of Egypt's endangered heritage. The current chaos in Cairo easily could have left all the priceless artifacts at the Egyptian Museum, including Tutankhamun's 3,300-year-old golden death mask, vulnerable to widespread looting. After all, that's how the situation played out for Baghdad's national museum in 2003 after the fall of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

It didn't happen that way in Cairo because of the high-mindedness of the government as well as its critics.

When fire broke out on Friday night at the ruling party's headquarters, Khaled Youssef, an Egyptian film director who has made movies critical of government policies, issued an urgent call on the Al Arabiya television channel: "I am calling on the Egyptian army to head instantly to the Egyptian Museum. There is a fire right next to it in the party headquarters," he said in a report relayed by Reuters.

As the fire raged, would-be thieves started entering the grounds surrounding the museum, The Associated Press reported. But other young men, some armed with truncheons taken from the police, formed a protective human chain outside the museum's main gates. "I'm standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure," one of the men, a 40-year-old engineer named Farid Saad, told AP.

AP quoted 26-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim as saying that it was important to guard the museum because it has "5,000 years of our history. If they steal it, we'll never find it again."

Another defender at the gates pleaded with the crowd not to let the looters in, shouting, "We are not like Baghdad!"

Finally, four of the army's armored vehicles took up posts outside the museum. Soldiers surrounded the building and moved inside.

AP said the soldiers rounded up would-be looters who made it onto the museum grounds and lined them up in a row. As the soldiers corralled one man toward the line, crowds outside the fence shouted, "Thief, thief!" A couple of the troops hit the man with the butts of their rifles and sat him down with others who were apparently caught inside the gates.

The army and the people are continuing to keep watch on the museum and its riches amid Egypt's crisis.

Treasures galore
Tut's golden mask is arguably the most precious of the museum's treasures — so precious that authorities will no longer let it travel out of the country, even though many other artifacts from Tut's time are currently on the road. (I had the chance to see the mask in Seattle in 1978 during the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibit.) The 109-year-old museum serves as the central repository for the riches from Tut's tomb, which was discovered by Egyptologist Howard Carter in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. But there's lots more to protect. The highlights range from monumental statues of Amenhotep III and his family to Roman-era gold treasures dug up from Egypt's Western Desert.

Amr Nabil / AP file

The golden mask of Tutankhamun is the best-known treasure at Cairo's Egyptian Museum.

Elizabeth Bartman, president of the Archaeological Institute of America, told me she was heartened to hear that the Egyptian people were so keen to protect their cultural heritage.

"If the reports about the human cordon around the museum are true, that's a very moving thing for me," she told me. "They regard their archaeological finds as so precious that it's worth their lives to protect them."

University of Pennsylvania archaeologist C. Brian Rose, the institute's past president, wasn't surprised by the reports.

"It's not possible to plan for the future unless one understands the past, and I think this is something that all Egyptians understand very well," Rose told me. "There's a great respect for the cultural heritage of Egypt — shared, I think, by I would say nearly all Egyptians. I hope that respect will keep the archaeological sites and museums safe from any harm during this period of conflict."

Even if the protesters and government forces share that respect for the museum's antiquities, the situation could still lead to unintended and unwelcome consequences.

"Especially with Egypt being such a dry place — they have all these organic materials, they have textiles, they have ancient food, they have lots of wooden items — fire is a very scary proposition," Bartman said. "Let's just keep our fingers crossed that the museums are not going to be caught in the crossfire."

More tales from the museums:

• Germany's Zeit Online quotes a former director of the museum, Wafaa el-Saddik, as saying that the would-be looters of the Egyptian Museum included museum guards and policemen. She also said that Egypt's Memphis Museum was "completely robbed," but that museums in Luxor and Aswan appeared to be safe. (Google translation from German.)
• Jan. 29 video: Msnbc.com's Al Stirrett narrates the video shot inside the museum.
• Jan. 30 video: NBC's Kate Snow reports on the damage for NBC's "Nightly News."
• Jan. 31 follow-up: Egypt worries about antiquities being smuggled.
• Slideshow: Tutankhamun's treasures

And other sagas of endangered antiquities:

• Mystery of Afghan gold has a happy ending
• Looted Baghdad museum restored, dedicated
• Iraq finds missing artifacts in premier's storage
• Fire at Nazi death camp destroys victims' shoes

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter consistently beams down mesmerizing high-resolution images of the Red Planet. Now, the scientists who study the images have stitched together the latest public release into this cool video set to a groovy "Sanskrit" tune they grabbed from Apple's GarageBand. Let's take a virtual tour ...

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Sinuous ridges in the Aeolis / Zephyria region

The video starts with a flyover of sinuous ridges in the Aeolis/Zephyria Region. The reason these ridges look like an inverted river bed is because that's what they probably are, HiRISE team member Ross Beyer from NASA Ames Research Center explains in his commentary on the imagery.

Sometime in the distant past, lava flowed down a meandering river a channel and hardened on the bed. Then, the river dried and the surrounding landscape eroded, leaving raised river bed of hardened lava. "We can study these ridges to try and determine how much water might have flowed through this system," he writes.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Pits on Mars' South Pole make what look like a deranged happy face.

Next up is the Martian south pole, where the pitted landscape is nicknamed "Swiss cheese terrain." Scientists are monitoring the residual carbon dioxide there to see how it changes over time. One spot they routinely check looks like a deranged happy face. Compared to 2007 images of the spot, the pits have grown larger.

The growth of the pits was originally thought to be a sign of climate change on Mars, but scientists now think the carbon dioxide that goes from solid to gas in the pits recondenses on nearby surfaces, so there's no net change in carbon dioxide, according to Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for HiRISE at the University of Arizona.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

A highly-elliptical crater chain on Mars was likely formed as an impacting space rock came down nearly parallel to the surface.

Moving along, the video takes us to an unusual elliptical impact crater, which upon closer examination appears to be the result of overlapping craters that formed simultaneously along with several smaller craters. McEwen explains in his commentary that such crater chains can form when the impacting space rock trajectory is almost parallel to the surface.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

Ravines, or gullies, on Mars were likely modified by glacial flows.

The eye candy continues with what are called giant gullies in the Hellas Montes region. The gullies are more like ravines that have been covered or modified by glacial flows, McEwen explains.

NASA / JPL / University of Arizona

These sinuous ridges on Mars might be erosional remnants of flow ejecta from ancient impact craters.

The final stop in this groovy tour of Mars is more sinuous ridges, this time in the North Syrtis Major Region. But instead of inverted stream channels, these ridges may be erosional remnants from material ejected from ancient impact craters, McEwen suggests. "In either case the landscape is differentially eroded, and more erosion-resistant materials cap high-standing topography," he writes.

More HiRISE eye candy:

• Amazing! Mars orbiter gets a fix on lander
• Mystery sand ripples on Mars explained
• New Mars orbiter sends its first pictures
• Good moves on Mars
• Mars orbiter spots rover's landing site

More than any other media, cartoons have the ability to sum up important events into one single, powerful image, and tap into the collective mood of the country.

Some perfect examples of this are a couple of cartoons drawn in light of today's anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which happened 25 years ago today.

The first is drawn by Jeff Parker, the staff cartoonist at Florida Today. His paper is based on the Space Coast, and one of their main beats is covering NASA, so when it came time to remember the astranauts that were killed during this tragedy, Jeff had to feel for the collective pulse of not only the community he works and lives in, but the country at large. His tribute cartoon is simple, powerful and captures the mood of the country when thinking back on this tragic event.

The second cartoon comes from Dave Granlund, and touches on the impact teacher turned astronaut Christa McAuliffe continues to have on students across the country. The Challenger accident dealt a harsh blow to America in large part because Christa inspired millions of teachers and students to tune into the launch to see her become NASA's first teacher in space.

Cartoons can do more than entertain us. They can give us insight into world events, hold politicians accountable and as these cartoons show, tap into the mood of the country to not only remember important events, but place them into the proper historical context. All in one image.

French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin says his years-long study of the Great Pyramid of Giza suggests that it was built inside-out, and that two unexplored chambers are hidden at the heart of the ancient structure. So far, Egyptian authorities haven't taken his ideas all that seriously, but there's a chance they'll actually be put to the test this year.

Researchers from Laval University in Quebec say they want to probe the pyramid's insides for a whole year using infrared thermography, a technology that they say would let them "see" through thick stone walls without disturbing the 4,500-year-old monument.

"It's a non-invasive technique," Xavier Maldague, an engineering professor who specializes in infrared thermography, told Postmedia News. "We won't even touch the surface of the pyramid."

Archaeologists have long puzzled over how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid, which served as a monument to the Pharaoh Khufu (2589-2566 B.C.). Houdin proposes that the builders had stones brought up external ramps at first, but then constructed a corkscrew system of internal ramps to finish the 450-foot-high structure.

During a news conference in Paris today, Houdin said 3-D simulations point to the existence of two secret chambers at the pyramid's heart. He said similar chambers have been found in the pyramid of Snefru, Khufu's father, and that the hidden rooms in Khufu's pyramid might have held furniture meant for the pharaoh's use in the afterlife.

"I am convinced that there are antechambers in this pyramid," AFP quoted Houdin as saying. "What I want is to find them."

Houdin's past proposals for a pyramid probe have been rebuffed, but he was hopeful that the Laval expedition would turn up evidence to back up his claims.

Maldague said infrared imaging could reveal the outlines of the internal ramp. Thermal imaging devices could trace how different structures and materials within the pyramid radiate heat differently, he said. If there is an internal construction ramp, the thermal patterns would indicate anomalies. "By measuring the differences in temperatures on several parts of the pyramid, it will tell us where the ramp is," Maldague told Postmedia News.

Infrared cameras could be set up in a hotel located about 1,000 feet (300 meters) from the pyramid, and the imagery could be beamed back to Laval over the Internet, Maldague said. He hopes to get authorization from Egyptian authorities by the end of this year, and start his measurements by mid-2012.

More about Egyptian mysteries:

• Archaeologists unearth Sphinx's protective walls
• Robot to expose hidden secrets of Great Pyramid
• Egypt's top archaeologist shows off newfound tomb
• Dig sheds light on the lifestyle of the pyramid-builders

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Scientific concepts take center stage in a video series that connects chemistry to spearmint gum, dill pickles, cheeseburgers and other everyday goodies.

The National Science Foundation and NBC Learn, the educational arm of NBC News, cooked up the "Chemistry Now" series to capitalize on the International Year of Chemistry. (NBC Universal and Microsoft are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The series focuses on the chemistry behind common physical objects and the changes they go through, as well as the lives and work of scientists on the frontiers of chemistry.

"The International Year of Chemistry is an excellent opportunity to reach out to the public and convey to them the ways in which chemistry is involved in their lives each and every day," Matthew Platz, director of the NSF's Division of Chemistry, said in this week's announcement about the series.

"Chemistry Now" is meant to make concepts that may sound complicated more digestible for students in the classroom, as well as your run-of-the-mill video viewer on the Web. For example, the video above explains how a chemical known as carvone can taste like spearmint if the molecule is patterned in a particular way, but can taste like dill if the molecule takes on a mirror-image pattern.

Each week's featured video comes along with additional clips, graphics and lesson plans tailor-made for the classroom. Three packages have been put out so far, on the chemistry of water, cheese and mirror molecules. Future installments will focus on the other components of a cheeseburger (from the bun to the pickles), as well as chocolate (just in time for Valentine's Day), flowers and much, much more.

The first half of the 32-package "Chemistry Now" series runs through May. The second half picks up in the fall to keep pace with the traditional academic school year. The scientific content is drawn from news reports as well as from  the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Scientific American and the National Science Teachers Association's lesson plans. NBC Learn turns all that science into the "Chemistry Now" video packages.

"Using unique and engaging storytelling, NBC News can help break down barriers to understanding complicated scientific concepts," Soraya Gage, executive producer of NBC Learn, said in this week's announcement.

You can keep up with the weekly episodes on NBC Learn's website as well as NSF's Science360 website and the NSTA blog.

More science on video:

• Are you ready for some football science?
• Top science videos around the Web
• Jump into Olympic-size science
• Must-see science videos

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Seth Wenig / AP

"Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter, right, look on as an IBM computer called "Watson" beats them to the buzzer to answer a question during a practice round of the "Jeopardy!" quiz show in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Jan. 13.

How smart is your favorite search engine? If the game show "Jeopardy" is a guide, it's just about as smart as the average human.

Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, the brains behind WolframAlpha, tested how often the correct answers to "Jeopardy" questions appear in the title or text snippets of the results page on Google, Bing, and a handful of other search engines. He didn't include WolframAlpha, his own search engine, because it uses a different type of technology.

Google displayed the right answer on its result page 69 percent of the time. Ask.com's page had the correct answer 68 percent of the time. Bing registered a 63 percent success rate, and Yandex came in at 62 percent. Blekko (58 percent) and Wikipedia search (23 percent) performed worse than the average human, who gets 60 percent of Jeopardy questions correct.

WolframAlpha

This chart shows the comparative success of several search engines at answering "Jeopardy" questions.

Of course Ken Jennings, the all-time winning champ of the game show in which players buzz in to provide questions that go with answers displayed on a screen, gets 79 percent correct, meaning that basic search engines have a way to go beat the best in the game.

That's where the IBM Watson supercomputer comes in. Next month, "Jeopardy" will air a series of shows in which the question-answering machine goes head-to-head against Jennings and Brad Rutter, another champ, for a $1 million prize. We already know that Watson bested the two Jeopardy whizzes in a test run this month, and the tournament shows have already been taped. Any bets on who's the winner?

The buzz over the human-vs.-machine match inspired Wolfram to conduct the search engine test as part of a thought exercise comparing his WolframAlpha technology, which is built on a different paradigm, to Watson.

He says IBM's machine is great for answering questions from unstructured data. This has potential real-world applications such as mining medical documents or patents, and doing discovery in litigation, he notes in a blog post about his test.

WolframAlpha technology, on the other hand, can be used to "investigate structured data in completely free-form unstructured ways," he writes. He goes on to explain:

"One asks a question in natural language, and a custom version of WolframAlpha built from particular corporate data can use its computational knowledge and algorithms to compute an answer based on the data — and in fact generate a whole report about the answer."

So where does Wolfram stand on the human-vs.-machine battle? The last line of Wolfram's blog post provides a pretty big hint about where his sympathies lie: "Good luck on 'Jeopardy'! I'll be rooting for you, Watson."

More stories on Watson and Jeopardy:

• Computer beats 'Jeopardy' champs in test round
• Supercomputer plays 'Jeopardy'
• IBM computer taking on 'Jeopardy' champs for $1M
• 'Jeopardy' streak comes to an end

Bomb-sniffing plants could make airport security a whole lot greener – at least until a bomb-packing terrorist walks by and causes the leaves to turn white, researchers report in the journal PLoS ONE.

The plants are being grown by a research team headed by June Medford, a biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, with funding from the Depart of Defense and a host of other agencies.

The trick involves using DNA to rewire the plants' protein-based signaling process, so that the leaves change color when certain chemicals or environmental pollutants are detected. Plants usually rely on the system to release toxins that ward off insects looking for a leafy meal.

"Plants can't run or hide from threats, so they've developed sophisticated systems to detect and respond to their environment. We've taught plants how to detect things we're interested in and respond in a way anyone can see to tell us there's something nasty around," Medford explained in a news release.

To get there, Medford's colleagues used a computer program to redesign receptors in plant cells to recognize a specific pollutant or explosive. Then she and colleagues at her lab modified the redesigned receptors to function in the cell walls of the plants.

So far, the researchers have grown Arabidopsis and tobacco plants in the lab that respond to an explosive by "de-greening" within a few hours. Next-generation greenery should make the change in color in a matter of minutes.

The plants will be ready for prime time in about three to four years, Medford told Wired.com's Danger Room. Potential applications include airport security as well as at public gathering places such as football stadiums. They could even find use around a home — turning white, for example, when radon is detected.

What's more, these rewired proteins can live in any kind of plant, giving green thumbs with an appreciation for biotech a new world of choices when considering what to grow next.

More stories on bomb sniffing and plant technology:

• Bomb-sniffing robots put to test in Iraq
• Bomb-sniffing dogs rushed to Baghdad
• Creator of bomb detector wins prize
• Study says bees can find explosives
• Custom-scented flowers may be on the way
• Text messages can quench plants' thirst

TIn addition to Medford, co-authors of the PLoS ONE paper, "Programmable Ligand Detection System in Plants Through a Synthetic Signal Transduction Pathway," include Mauricio Antunes, Kevin Morey, Jeff Smith, Kirk Albrecht, Tessa Bowen, Jeffrey Zdunek, Jared Troupe, Matthew Cuneo, Colleen Webb and Homme Hellinga.

Project funding is from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the Bioscience Discovery Evaluation Grant Program through the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and Gitam Technologies.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

David L. Valentine, University of California Santa Barbara

A fresh oil slick from the Deepwater Horizon spill, during June 2010. Note that one drop of detergent was added to the oil slick, forming the cleared circle. A chemical of such dispersants lingers in the deep ocean, a new study found.

When nearly 800,000 gallons of a chemical dispersant were injected into the oil gushing from the busted wellhead on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico during last year's Deepwater Horizon disaster, nobody knew for sure what would happen. Now, scientists are getting their first answers, and the results are mixed.

Tests for a key component of the chemical concoction reveal that the dispersant worked its way into the oil-laden plume in the deep ocean, and stayed in the deep ocean. But the chemical did not degrade as much as scientists thought it would.

"It is hard for me at this point to say whether or not it is bad or good that it stuck around," study lead author Elizabeth Kujawinski, a chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, told me today. She and colleagues were surprised that little or no biodegradation of the dispersant substance had occurred.

Molecule measurements
The team analyzed concentrations of a molecule called DOSS (dioctyl sodium sulfoscuccinate), which makes up about 10 percent of the dispersant solution. In May and June of last year, it was present in the oil plume in parts-per-million concentrations. More than 640,000 pounds of DOSS were injected into the deep ocean from April to July.

By September, the plume had drifted 200 miles away from the wellhead, and concentrations of DOSS were detected there in parts-per-billion concentrations. The finding suggests that the degradation of the molecule was insubstantial relative to other factors such as simple dilution, Kujawinski said.

Click for interactives:
Learn more about the physics of oil spills and dispersal
USA v. BP: Background on the Deepwater Horizon case
A day-by-day look at the Gulf oil spill's spread

While the researchers expected the molecule to degrade faster, they note that there is a dearth of data on the fate of the molecule in seawater and dispersants in the deep ocean, making any interpretation scientifically tentative. Instead, they see this study as a foundation for future studies.

"By knowing how the dispersant was distributed in the deep ocean, we can begin to assess the subsurface biological exposure, and ultimately what effects the dispersant the dispersant may have had," another study co-author, David Valentine from the University of California at Santa Barbara, said in a statement. "The results indicate that an important component of the chemical dispersant injected into the deep ocean remained there and resisted rapid biodegradation. This knowledge will ultimately help us understand the efficacy of the dispersant application as well as the biological effects."

Valentine said that the decision to use the dispersants at the sea floor "was a classic choice between bad and worse," and that scientists will need to do more studies on the chemicals' biological effects. "The deep ocean is a sensitive ecosystem unaccustomed to chemical irruptions like this, and there is a lot we don't understand about this cold, dark world," he said.

Environmental impact
The existing scientific literature indicates that toxic concentrations of DOSS are about 1,000 times more concentrated than the highest concentration Kujawinski and colleagues observed, which suggests the concentrations of the molecule they detected in the deep ocean are not toxic to the ecosystem there.

Kujawinski noted, however, that she's unclear on how long organisms were exposed to the chemical in those toxicity studies. In any case,  most if not all of those studies were conducted on coastal organisms such as blue crab.

"One of the concerns about this deepwater application is that it affects a different group of organisms, deep sea corals, deepwater fish, and so on," she told me. "And the question is whether or not they would be as sensitive, more sensitive, or less sensitive, as the organisms that were actually studied."

Findings were published online today in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology.

More on the oil spill and dispersants:

• Oil dispersants an environmental 'crapshoot'
• Is dispersant still being sprayed in the Gulf?
• Skeptical public fears oil spill health issues
• NOAA, FDA to test seafood for dispersants
• Some experts skeptical of Gulf oil findings

In addition to Kujawinski and Valentine, the co-authors of the report in Environmental Science & Technology, "Fate of Dispersants Associated With the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill," include Melissa C. Kido Soule, Angela K. Boysen, Krista Longnecker and Molly C. Redmond.

 John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

The Hubble Space Telescope has outdone itself by catching sight of what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen, lying about 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. If the observations hold up, they would one-up another galaxy that made headlines last October when researchers said it was 13.1 billion light-years away.

The newfound galaxy candidate, discussed in this week's issue of the journal Nature, is known by the unwieldy name UDFj-39546284. (Let's call it UDFj for short.) Like the earlier candidate for the farthest galaxy, UDFy-38135539, it was detected amid other faint galaxies in a snapshot of the sky known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

This particular candidate was singled out during an exhaustive search of the deep-field data in infrared wavelengths, which was gathered during 87 hours of observations by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2009 and 2010. Based on the characteristic shift in UDFj's light spectrum, astronomers determined that the galaxy dated back to a time just 480 million years after the big bang.

NASA / ESA / UCSC / Leiden U. / HUDF09

Shown here is an image of the candidate galaxy that existed 480 million years after the big bang and the position in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field where it was found. This is the deepest infrared image ever taken of the universe.

"Our previous searches had found 47 galaxies at somewhat later times, when the universe was about 650 million years old. However, we could only find one galaxy candidate just 170 million years earlier," Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, a leader of the research team, said today in a news release. "The universe was changing very quickly in a short amount of time."

Among the galaxies used for comparison were the previous "farthest galaxy" and two others dating to around the same time period. The distances for super-faraway galaxies are usually expressed in terms of their redshift factor, or "z." The higher the number, the more distant the galaxy. The three comparison galaxies were at redshift 8.2 or more. The team involved in last October's research report said that UDFy-38135539 was at redshift 8.55. UDFj had a redshift factor of 10.3, Illingworth and his colleagues reported.

The researchers said the galaxy candidate was less than 1 percent the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. They also said there was a 20 percent chance that the object is "a contaminant or is spurious." It's possible that an anomaly is making the galaxy look older than it really is. There's even a remote possibility that the galaxy doesn't exist at all.

"We're really pushing Hubble to its limits here," Illingworth told journalists today during a NASA teleconference.

To reassure themselves that UDFj truly existed, they matched their data against models for galaxy formation and determined that their candidate fit the models. They also checked the same location in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field against infrared imagery from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. If Spitzer detected the galaxy as well, that might have signaled that the galaxy was closer than the researchers thought. But UDFj didn't show up on the Spitzer imagery. ""That's actually good news," Illingworth said.

These tests took months to complete, and they led the researchers to the conclusion that what they were seeing was real. "We have every reason to believe that this might be a plausible source which existed 500 million years after the big bang," said another leader of the research team, Rychard Bouwens, who went from UC-Santa Cruz to Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Not everyone is convinced that this galaxy candidate is everything that the research team says it is. But Rachel Somerville, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Inistitute who was not involved in the study, said she thought the results were solid. "This team has done all the right tests," she told me during today's teleconference. "What they've done is very sensible. I would be very surprised, actually, if this turns out to be not high-redshift."

Three images show the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (left), a zoom-in view of the distant galaxy and its surroundings (top right), and the closest view of the galaxy candidate (bottom right).

It's significant that only one object was representative of an epoch 480 million years after the universe's origin, but that 47 galaxies were associated with the 650 million-year-old universe. That growth rate would be consistent with the idea that galaxies grew up rapidly from the seeds of stars under the gravitational influence of dark matter, Bouwens said.

Somerville focused on that aspect of the team's findings. "Perhaps the most interesting part of this research is the 'dog that didn't bark,'" she said, referring to a classic bit of Sherlock Holmes lore. Based on the number of galaxies detected at 650 million years, "they should have seen 10 times more galaxies" at 480 million years, she said. The fact that they didn't lends weight to the idea that the epoch between the 480 million-year mark and the 650 million-year mark was a key time for galaxy growth.

Illingworth said the galactic growth rate must have been much faster during that interval than it is today.

"The peak of starbirth in the universe occurred about 10 billion years ago, and it turned over gradually," he observed. "Basically, since the last half of the life of the universe, the starbirth rate has been dropping quite distinctly and dramatically. So we're in a very quiescent time in the universe, compared to what it was at the maximum.  In fact, we're almost back to where we were at this 500 million-year age. It's sort of like the universe is aging, and nothing much is happening."

This graphic shows how present and future telescopes have pushed the cosmic frontier farther back in space and time.

So what was the galactic growth rate before the 480 million-year mark? That's impossible to tell right now. When it comes to measuring galaxy distances, redshift 10 is just about the observing limit for the Hubble Space Telescope. To go back much farther in time and space, astronomers will have to wait for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently due for launch in 2014 or 2015. The Webb telescope, also known as the JWST, could also confirm precisely how far away UDFj is.

"It's going to take JWST to do more work at higher redshifts," Illingworth said. "This study at least tells us that there are objects around at redshift 10, and that the first galaxies must have formed earlier than that."

More from the edge of the universe:

• Most distant galaxy cluster discovered
• Nobel physicist focuses on Hubble's heir
• Huge telescopes would probe new frontiers
• Cosmic lenses may distort view of early universe
• Video: NBC's Brian Williams on the Hubble discovery

In addition to Bouwens and Illingworth, the co-authors of the Nature paper, "A Candidate Redshift z~10 Galaxy and Rapid Changes in The Population at an Age of 500 Myr," include Ivo Labbe, Pascal Oesch, Michele Trenti, Marcella Carollo, Pieter van Dokkum, Marijn Franx, Massimo Stiavelli, Larry Bradley, Valentino Gonzalez and Daniel Magee. The research was supported by NASA and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Illingworth's team maintains the First Galaxies website, offering information about the latest research on distant galaxies.

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

NASA

Sputnik was a small satellite with a big impact on science. Click to see a slideshow about the start of the Space Age.

President Barack Obama wasn't even born when the last "Sputnik moment" took place — and despite tonight's State of the Union declaration that another such turning point in science, technology and innovation is upon us,  America's post-Sputnik experience almost certainly won't be repeated. There's simply not enough money or political will to spend on an Apollo-scale engineering endeavor. But the past year's political changes may well bring a more pragmatic shift in science policy as well.

Among the fields likely to benefit the most: clean-energy research, not only relating to renewables such as solar and wind, but also taking in nuclear, natural gas and "clean coal" ... high-speed rail and high-speed wireless Internet ... and support for science education. 

But first, about Sputnik: Less than half of the U.S. population was alive when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, so it's hard to convey the sense of paranoia — and determination — that was sparked by the realization that your perceived mortal enemy could loft a beeping satellite or a nuclear weapon over your homeland. (Reading the comments on this "Sputnik Memories" item might help.)

The challenge of Sputnik led to the creation of NASA and the true start of America's space effort, as well as President John Kennedy's vow to send Americans to the moon and bring them back safely by the end of the 1960s. For a decade, the U.S.-Soviet space race was the farthest front of the Cold War. Finally, in 1969, America won that race at an estimated cost of $100 billion in current dollars.

"After investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets, we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs," Obama said tonight. "This is our generation's Sputnik moment."

To be sure, America needs new jobs, new industries and new innovations — but that isn't what motivated America's response to Sputnik. It was fear of annihilation, pure and simple.

A more pragmatic agenda
Now, about Obama's agenda for science, technology and innovation: "The general priorities of the Obama administration have been pretty consistent with priorities in the past," Patrick Clemins, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told me in advance of Obama's speech.

The levels of federal money budgeted for research and development took a sharp rise in the early years of the George W. Bush administration,  primarily in defense and health R&D. But over the past few years, the AAAS' analysis shows a more gradual increase. The proposed R&D outlay for fiscal 2011 is $148.1 billion, a slight decrease from 2010.

The top priorities for research and development break down into these five categories, Clemins said:

• Jobs, competitiveness and innovation
• Health
• Energy
• National security
• Environment, natural resource protection and climate change

"The one that seems to be coming to the forefront is energy," Clemins said. "The administration keeps talking about the clean-energy economy, new technologies to help jump-start economy."

Clean energy received the most specific attention in Obama's State of the Union Address. He repeated his goal to put 1 million electric vehicles on the nation's roads by 2015, and set a new ultra-long-range goal of having 80 percent of America's electricity coming from clean-energy sources by 2035. (By that time, it's worth noting, Obama also aims to have astronauts going into Martian orbit.)

"Some folks want wind and solar," he said. "Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all — and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen."

Obama said Congress could cover cost of developing clean-energy technologies by eliminating "the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies." It's likely to be far more difficult, however, to get Democrats and Republicans to agree on that part of the innovation equation.

Obama set a goal of extending high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans by 2015, and giving 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail by 2035.

He also said the country should prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math over the next 10 years. Increases in education funding can be a tough sell, particularly since Obama is insisting on a five-year freeze in domestic spending, but today's dismal news about the state of science education in America just might serve as a wakeup call.

The White House made a symbolic nod to science education by seating four outstanding science students in the House gallery tonight:

• Amy Chyao, a high-school junior from Richardson, Texas, who won first place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for developing a new cancer drug.
• Brandon Ford, a junior from Philadelphia who was part of the West Philly Hybrid X team that competed in the Automotive X Prize.
• Diego Vasquez, a community-college student from Phoenix who was part of a team that won a Lemelson-MIT Program grant for designing a motorized chair for people with disabilities.
• Mikayla Nelson, a high-school freshman from Billings, Mont., who helped develop a prize-winning solar car design for the National Science Bowl.

"We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair, that success is not a function of fame or PR, but of hard work and discipline," Obama said. Opinion analysts who were monitoring the speech for Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research said the focus-group response to that line was almost "off the charts."

Generally speaking, the minute-by-minute response from a mix of 50 Democratic and Republican swing voters suggested that the speech was "a personal triumph for the president," the company's chairman and CEO, Stan Greenberg, told reporters.

Energy over environment
Clemins said energy initiatives stood the best chance of getting a sympathetic hearing in Congress. "Republicans tend to be more on the energy security side of energy policy — to try to reduce dependence on foreign oil, to manage our resources smartly. ... There's definitely agreement that energy is a policy that needs to be put forward," he said.

More emphasis may well be placed on "really trying to get a lot of the energy discoveries that were invented here actually put into the economy here," Clemins said. The federal government has "done a poor job of keeping the manufacturing of these technologies over here," he added.

Obama made the same observation in his speech, noting that China has become home to the world's largest private solar research facility as well as the world's fastest computer.

But there are also success stories, such as the stimulus boost that was given to America's battery manufacturing industry, which is key to the success of electric cars. "The percentage increased in terms of how much battery technology was produced here," Clemins said. The Energy Department projects that the annual production of electric-car batteries will rise to 50,000 by the end of this year, and 500,000 by 2015.

So if the White House and Congress will be devoting more attention to energy policy, which of the R&D priorities on Clemins' list will get less attention? In light of the GOP takeover in the House and the erosion of the Democrats' majority in the Senate, Clemins speculates with good reason that climate change policy and environmental protection will lose out.

The numbers to back up Obama's initiatives are due to be released next month as part of the White House's budget proposal for fiscal 2012. Clemins is already venturing a guess as to the size of the proposed R&D investment. "I wouldn't say that we'd see increases," he said, "but it'd be less of a decline than average in a shrinking budget."

Back to the Sputnik moment
So what about the space effort, which was the prime beneficiary of 1957's Sputnik moment? With the imminent end of the space shuttle program, NASA is facing a challenging transition over the next year. The space agency is turning to commercial launch providers to fill the gap — and strangely enough, the rise of private-sector spaceflight has itself been compared to a "Sputnik moment."

Right now, NASA's budget for this fiscal year is still in flux, and it's not yet certain whether the space agency will get the money needed to fly three more shuttle missions as scheduled. But Clemins suspects that, at least in the GOP-led House, the space agency will find a more sympathetic ear ... just as it did in the 1960s. He noted that the House Science and Technology Committee was renamed the Science, Space and Technology Committee. Committee Chairman Ralph Hall happens to be from Texas, a state that serves as the home for Johnson Space Center. A Texan is also the committee's ranking Democratic member.

"Indications are that space will probably see a heightened profile in the science and technology realm," Clemins said.

So maybe Obama's reference to a "Sputnik moment" isn't that far off after all.

Update for 12:15 a.m. Jan. 26: Here are two relevant responses to Obama's speech. The first is an excerpt from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's blog posting:

"Tonight, President Obama delivered a powerful State of the Union message to the nation. His focus on innovation, education and building are the foundations for our future success as a nation – and the key to economic recovery and long-term fiscal stability.

"At NASA, we’re making contributions in all of these areas. Our education initiatives inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. Our groundbreaking work on innovative technologies to solve some of the greatest challenges we face is why people turn to NASA for help in times of crisis, whether it’s firefighters in California or rescue workers in Chile trying to save trapped miners. And as we continue to maintain our world leadership in human spaceflight, we are working to help build the space transportation systems of tomorrow, incentivizing commercial companies to compete in the space marketplace and reducing our costs. Fifty years ago, another young President propelled a fledgling space agency on a bold, new course that would push the frontiers of exploration to new heights. The 21st-century course that President Obama has set our agency on will foster new industries that create jobs, pioneer technology innovation, and inspire a new generation of explorers through education – all while continuing our fundamental mission of exploring our home planet and the cosmos. ..."

And now, a snippet from Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology:

"Tonight the president focused on 'America winning,' by leading the world in innovation.  But leading the world in innovation must start with a strategy that fosters private investment and economic growth.  Too many of this administration’s policies have been detrimental to business and to keeping jobs in the U.S. ...

"Absent from the President’s speech, apart from mentioning Sputnik as a metaphor, was any vision for our nation’s space agency.  NASA’s exploration program has been paramount to securing America’s lead in the global economy and spurring innovation.  So many technological advancements have stemmed from an ambitious, goal-oriented space program.  I am disappointed that the president used this moment only to reflect on NASA’s history, rather than promoting a strong vision for the future of space exploration.  This Thursday is officially designated as 'A Day of Remembrance' for the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger tragedies; a day to reflect on those national heroes who lost their lives.  We should honor them by carrying on their legacy and ensuring that America 'keeps winning' in space exploration and scientific discovery."

More on the State of the Union and innovation:

• Video: Watch the 'Sputnik Moment' clip
• Full text of the State of the Union Address
• GOP urges Obama to stop 'endless borrowing'
• Fact check: Obama ledger out of balance
• Newsvine vote: Did Obama strike the right note?
• How inventive is the next generation?

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Do you need to decorate a child's birthday cake, even though you have the drawing skills of an infant? No problem. Just get your hands on a 3-D printer, and your guests will think you're a five-star pastry chef. Heck, you could even print their (edible) pictures on individualized cupcakes.

That's one potential application for 3-D printers in the kitchen. They also work great for making squiggle-printed masa cakes — as Dave Arnold, a chef at the French Culinary Institute and co-author of the Cooking Issues blog, demonstrates in the video above.

The printer essentially spits out paste, or frosting, or any other malleable product through a moving syringe. The syringe can be programmed to build whatever you want. But instead of just one layer, such as text or a photo printed out on a piece of paper, these printers allow layers to be stacked into three-dimensional shapes.

Currently, the technology is most useful for things such as decorating cakes and making funky-shaped cookies, according to Jeffrey Lipton, who leads the Fab@Home project at Cornell University. Lipton and his colleagues created the 3-D food printer, and he says the future of culinary 3-D printing lies in creating foods with different textures.

"You could imagine having a meatloaf that is spongy and absorbs the sauces, and that is a completely different experience from just taking meat, putting it into a loaf and baking it," he told me today. "Even though the materials are all the same, how they are arranged really affects how it tastes and how it feels in your mouth."

More than food
The buzz around 3-D printers extends well beyond food. The MakerBot Thing-o-Matic 3-D printer kit, which prints three-dimensional products by building up layers of plastic to match a computerized design, was crowned by Cosmic Log readers as 2010's top Science Geek Gift.

The $1,200 gizmo could be used to print prototypes for commercial products, made-to-order artwork or replacement parts for other devices you have at home ... even custom-made action figures for gamers and collectors.

A group called Made in Space wants to put 3-D printers on the International Space Station. Then, instead of shipping up spare parts or some object left back on earth, astronauts could just download the design and press print.

Other researchers are eying the technology to print three-dimensional structures of cells. A first step would be to use the technique to build layers of cells and study how they communicate. Sometime in the future, the machines could be programmed to print out human organs for transplants.

"The real power of 3-D printing is giving you complete control over geometry, about giving you the ability to innovate, and about allowing you to customize," said Lipton, whose project envisions 3-D printers available to make just about anything.

Press print for dinner
Back in the kitchen, the 3-D printer could be used to spit out dinner for the time-starved set. Just walk in the door, and instead of hitting the freezer for yet another TV dinner, hit the print button instead.

"You'll always have ways of manipulating the food. … Even though it may not be the best quality and the most amazing food in the world, it will still be interesting and edible and rapidly produced," Lipton said.

Fab @ Home / Cornell

Mmmm ... This "chocolate structure" was created using a 3-D printer.

Arnold, the Cooking Issues blogger, finds the idea of a 3-D printer that spits out a meal with a press of a button horrifying — it removes humans even further from the way our food is made, he says. Tasked to figure out how he would use the printer loaned to him by the Fab@Home project led to the masa cake idea.

"Masa is a homogeneous paste. Masa is delicious. It is the ideal printing medium," he writes. "I had a feeling that the taste and texture of steamed and fried squiggle printed masa would be fantastic. I was right."

Fab@Home is open source technology. Anyone with access to a laser cutter can build one for about $1,600, Lipton said. A kit costs about $2,400. Lipton expects the price to fall further and the quality of the technology to improve as it moves from academics and tinkerers to the realm of professional engineers and corporations.

If you got your hands on a 3-D printer, how would you use it? Feel free to weigh in with a comment below.

More stories on 3-D printing:

• Inkjets print living cells in 3-D
• 3-D home printers could change the economy
• Make your own geeky goodness
• Print your own space station in orbit
• Can business ideas benefit billions?

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Biologists are using the kind of animation technology you might see in a multimillion-dollar "Toy Story" movie to show the general public how molecules inside a cell work.

The resulting high-tech visual aids have found their way into thousands of high-school classrooms, and they've been watched millions of times on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. That's the kind of success Robert Lue, director of life sciences education at Harvard University and the creator of the BioVisions project, has been hoping to achieve.

"It is very much about how do you put science in context, how do you take advantage of the fact that we are visual animals, that we in fact understand the world through our eyes to a significant degree, and apply that reality of who we are as animals to the way in which we perceive science," he told me.

Behind the scenes
The team's latest animation, "Powering the Cell: Mitochondria" shows how molecules inside the cell convert food into energy. You can watch it by clicking on the arrow above. Here's an earlier video, "The Inner Life of the Cell," which shows white blood cells attacking infections in the body:

To make the animations, Lue and scientific collaborators take mountains of data about the workings of the molecules inside a cell, synthesize all that information, and create visual models in their minds of what it would look like. They then communicate these visions to animators.

"We are scientists that translate data into visual models, but we also, to a significant degree, are film directors," he told me. "In the same way that a film director has to establish point of view, has to establish in a particular scene what you see, how would particular characters behave, what would be the most compelling or dramatic perspective ... we also have to create that as well."

The animators turn that vision into a digital reality, using their expertise in what kinds of motions can be created, how to render the surfaces of molecules, and what colors to use.

Impact on science education
In addition to striving for scientific accuracy, the collaboration is after an end product that is useful as a science communication tool. That means making editorial decisions about what to leave on the cutting-room floor.

"If we showed everything in real time that would be a simulation, not a representation, and a simulation of reality would be so complex that it would fail as a communication tool," Lue said.

For example, the density of proteins inside a cell is so great that if the animations included them all, nothing would be visible. "You need to thin things by more than a hundredfold, so that you can focus on the players that are the primary characters for a particular sequence," he noted.

Lue is particularly proud of a survey showing that the molecular animations are used in 78 percent of high schools, a finding that he says shows the animations enable students to think about biology in a new light and "understand the relevance of the unseen world."

And they’ve achieved this with a budget that’s in the tens of thousands of dollars, not the millions available to animators in Hollywood.

More stories on the science of movies and animations:

• Scientists visualize a virus on the attack
• Animation in a micro-Wonderland
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• The physics behind the movie magic
• 'Avatar' technology raises Oscar question
• Moving closer to a 'Matrix'-style virtual world

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

While NASA's Spirit rover is frozen in place on Mars and potentially dead to the world, the Opportunity rover is hale and hearty as it begins its eighth year of operation on the Red Planet.

"Seven years is a long time, but we're all delighting in it," John Callas, project manager for the rover missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me today.

When Spirit and Opportunity bounced to their airbag-cushioned landings on Mars, back in 2004, the $800 million twin missions were supposed to last only 90 days.

Now both probes have hit their seventh anniversary (Jan. 3 for Spirit, Jan. 24 for Opportunity, both dates according to Pacific time at JPL). Because of their longevity, the rovers look like the one of the best deals going when it comes to interplanetary exploration. Callas estimates that the current spending rate for a two-rover operation is about $17 million a year. The cumulative cost of keeping Spirit and Opportunity going for seven years has been about $900 million, or "about 1 percent of the AIG bailout," Callas joked.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

The Opportunity rover's mast shows up as a shadow in a picture taken by its navigation camera on Mars on Jan. 10.

From the beginning, success has come more easily for Oppy than it has for Spirit. Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the head of the rover science team, has referred to Opportunity as "Little Miss Perfect." Except for a nagging problem with the rover's mini-thermal emission spectrometer, Opportunity is running just fine with nary a service call.

Opportunity is currently sitting at the rim of Santa Maria Crater in Mars' Meridiani Planum region and will be out of communication for about two and a half weeks, due to Mars' position relative to the sun and Earth. Because of the solar conjunction, communication between Mars and Earth is disrupted by interference. Thus, the rovers as well as NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be put on autopilot until the communication links clear up again.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / ASU

A stereo image from the Opportunity rover shows a section of the Santa Maria Crater panorama. The 3-D effect can be seen using red-blue glasses.

That doesn't mean Oppy is getting the time off, however. Callas said Opportunity has been programmed to set its Mossbauer spectrometer down on a patch of hydrated sulfate minerals and "integrate for a good long time." Hydrated sulfate deposits are considered an indicator that water once flowed through the area — and so Opportunity's work over the break could set the stage for a fresh round of discovery.

After studying the terrain around Santa Maria Crater, Opportunity will continue its southward odyssey. "We're pretty much going to pull up stakes and head for Endeavour Crater, 6 kilometers away as the crow flies," Callas said. Getting to the crater could take another Martian year — or almost two years of Earth time. It could take even longer, depending on how many stops the science team wants to make along the way.

The 13.7-mile-wide Endeavour Crater would rank as Opportunity's most impressive vista, and the destination with the most potential scientific value. The crater would reveal Mars' geological layers to a phenomenal depth, serving as a time machine for scientists trying to reconstruct the Red Planet's history. Mission scientists are particularly interested in studying the phyllosilicate clay minerals that have been detected from orbit. Such minerals are thought to have formed under wet, warm, non-acidic conditions — just the kinds of conditions that might have been favorable for life.   

Spirit still silent
Meanwhile, Callas and his colleagues are still hoping Spirit can be brought back to life as well. Right now the rover is stuck in a sandtrap on the other side of the planet, and mission managers haven't heard from it since last March. The rover team is hoping that the solar-powered Spirit weathered the Martian winter and will build up enough power to come out of hibernation and re-establish contact. But there's always the chance that Spirit has given up the ghost.

"We're probably moving into the regime that, if there's something wrong with the rover, it's probably more than one thing," Callas said. Mission managers are trying a variety of strategies that should get through to Spirit even if there were multiple failures.

How long will NASA keep trying? "It'll be more driven by us exhausting all the reasonable things to try," Callas said. "We're still developing that list. ... Longer-term, we can continue to listen for Spirit at a reduced level of activity for an extended period of time, at minimal cost to the mission."

Even though he's keeping hope alive, Callas recognizes that time is running out. Plans and budgets are already being drawn up for a one-rover operating mode.

"Candidly, it's likely to start rolling off after the March-April time frame," Callas said.

In honor of Opportunity's anniversary and the latest stereo image of the Red Planet, we sent free 3-D glasses to some of the folks who "like" the Cosmic Log's Facebook page. Hit the "like" button on Facebook to get ready for next month's 3-D glasses giveaway. You can also join the Cosmic Log community by following b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Hamed Sanei, NRCan / University of Calgary

The coal‑ash particle on the left is from the latest Permian extinction boundary at Buchanan Lake, Nunavut. The particle on the right is from a modern power plant.

The explosive burning of coal seams in Siberia a quarter-billion years ago may have contributed to a mass extinction event that wiped out about 95 percent of marine life and 70 percent of life on land, a new study reports.

Scientists have long thought that massive volcanic eruptions in Russia's Siberian Traps were responsible for the Permian-Triassic extinction, though many have argued that such a deadly blow likely needed an extra push.

Stephen Grasby, a geochemist with the Geological Survey of Canada in Alberta, and his colleagues found charred particles in Permian-aged rocks from the Canadian Arctic that resemble modern coal fly ash, the toxic particles released when coal is in burned in coal-fired power plants.

"This could literally be the smoking gun that explains the latest Permian extinction," he said in a news release.

The finding implies that magma in the Siberian Traps ignited coal deposits in the surrounding area, creating explosions that sent plumes of coal ash billowing into the skies. These clouds would have dispersed the coal ash around the world.

"It was a really bad time on Earth," Grasby said. "In addition to these volcanoes causing fires through coal, the ash it spewed was highly toxic and was released in the land and water, potentially contributing to the worst extinction event in earth history."

Many scientists believe we are in the throes of the sixth great mass extinction in earth's history, largely due to the impact of humans on the planet, including our reliance on burning coal for energy.

Findings were published Sunday in Nature Geoscience. For more details on the study, check out this piece in Nature News.

More stories on coal fly ash and mass extinctions:

• Environmentalists challenge EPA stats on coal ash
• Arsenic, radium levels high at ash spill site
• Coal ash spill turns scenic area into muddy pit
• What triggers mass extinctions?
• Earth's Timeline: How to tell your Triassic from your Jurassic
• Did poison bacteria set up Permian-Triassic extinction?
• Did cosmic impact contribute to Permian-Triassic die-off?
• Fungus feasted on Triassic leftovers from extinction
• Mass extinction threat: Earth on verge of huge reset button?
• Devonian die-off teaches grim lesson

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe captured this stereo view of the Martian moon Phobos on Jan. 9. Some areas of the image have been adjusted to fix distortions or gaps for 3-D viewing using red-blue glasses.

The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has snapped a fresh round of high-resolution images of the Martian moon Phobos, including a 3-D picture and a look at a yet-to-be-launched probe’s once and future landing site.

Phobos, the bigger of Mars' two moons, is getting repeated once-overs by Mars Express' high-resolution camera in part because a good atlas is so important for the Russian-led Phobos-Grunt mission, now due for launch in November. The Russians plan to put a lander down on the ground ("Grunt" is Russian for "ground"), and the Mars Express imagery is helping refine their mission trajectory. Phobos-Grunt's lander is to collect rock and dust samples from the surface and send them back to Earth in a capsule.

"With every Phobos image from the stereo camera, we can improve the three-dimensional model of the Martian moon," Jürgen Oberst of the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Planetary Research said Friday in an image advisory.

G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

The ellipses on this image of Phobos show the previously planned landing area for the Phobos-Grunt mission in red, and the currently planned landing area in blue.

These pictures were taken on Jan. 9 during Mars Express' last scheduled encounter with the 12-by-14-by-17-mile moon. The flyby brought the orbiter within an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) — so close that the camera had to turn at its maximum rate as it passed over Phobos.

Phobos' characteristic grooves show up clearly in these photos — but it's not yet clear exactly what caused them. One hypothesis is that they're splat marks from debris that was kicked up by impacts on Mars. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains the concept in this posting from an earlier Phobos flyby.

More about Phobos:

• Martian moon in spotlight
• Two Martian moons in one picture
• Phobos likely forged by catastrophic blast

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter.

Mark Ben Holzberg / Fox Broadcasting via AP

John Noble, left, plays a charmingly mad scientist who assists an FBI agent (Anna Torv, wearing the electrodes) and his own son (Josh Jackson, at right) on the Fox sci-fi show "Fringe." Jasika Nicole (seen in the background) also stars.

When it comes to mad scientists, it's hard to top Dr. Walter Bishop, the eccentric genius at the heart of the Fox TV series "Fringe" —but some of the most famous figures in scientific history have come pretty close. You could even argue that their eccentricity played a role in their scientific success.

At least that's what Baltimore science teacher John Monahan argues in his book, "They Called Me Mad: Genius, Madness and the Scientists Who Pushed the Outer Limits of Knowledge." Today, some of history's most prominent scientists might well have been diagnosed with mental conditions such as Asperger's syndrome or obsessive-compulsive disorder, he said.

"The popular wisdom is that you've got to be kind of 'off,'" he told me. "My take on it is, yeah, in a way, it did help them look at things from a different perspective, to see outside the box, to see stuff that other people hadn't recognized even though they were looking at the same thing. Those sorts of brain differences may be very important to being considered a genius."

And if the differences come out as charming eccentricities, as they do in the case of the fictional Dr. Bishop, so much the better. Here's a guy who spent years in a mental hospital ... who keeps a cow in his lab so he can have fresh milk on demand ... who fantasizes about pancakes as he does brain surgery ... and who blurts out, "Let's go synthesize some LSD!"

They called Tesla mad
No doubt we'll spot more of Walter's eccentricities in a series of new "Fringe" episodes starting tonight, and marvel over the madness of it all. But if Walter Bishop could travel back in time, he might find a kindred spirit in Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), a real-life genius who was equally as eccentric. For example, Tesla would stay in a hotel room only if its room number was divisible by three, and he reportedly became so attached to a pigeon he fed that he was devastated when the bird died.

Bishop may have invented a sparking and sizzling contraption that could thrust him and his "Fringe" teammates into a parallel universe (fictional!), but Tesla invented sparking and sizzling contraptions that opened the way for modern-day AC electrical current and future-day beamed power (fact!).

Tesla's life provides a textbook case on the potential pitfalls of a mad-scientist image. He was engaged in a years-long battle with another famous inventor, Thomas Edison, over whether AC or DC would win out as the standard for electrical distribution. "Edison would use publicity to portray Tesla as a mad scientist, a crackpot, in order to diminish the standing of AC," Monahan said. For example, Edison had an elephant and other animals electrocuted in an effort to show the public that AC was too dangerous. (Which doesn't sound like all that sane of a publicity strategy to me.)

Ultimately, the supposedly mad scientist prevailed. "Tesla won that battle," Monahan said.

Another mad-scientist duel took place after the development of the atomic bomb: After World War II, the Manhattan Project's scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, didn't want the U.S. government to build a more powerful hydrogen bomb. But his rival on the research team, Edward Teller, persuaded the government to move ahead with the H-bomb project. Teller prevailed in part because he was able to tar Oppenheimer with the "mad scientist" brush, Towson University's Glen Scott Allen told the Why Files. (Allen has written his own book about scientific personalities, titled "Master Mechanics and Wicked Wizards.") 

Archimedes and Frankenstein
Monahan traces the real-life history of mad scientists back to Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), who is known for running out into the streets of Syracuse naked after figuring out the principle of buoyancy in his bathtub. The best-known fictional tale of a mad scientist came much later, of course, in the form of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's 1818 novel about Victor Frankenstein. Shelley's classic was inspired by experiments in galvanism, which involved animating frog legs (or even the corpses of criminals) by jolting them with electricity.

The tail end of the Frankenstein saga has a real-life parallel in the story of Joseph Priestley, the 18th-century English scientist and clergyman who is credited with the discovery of oxygen and the invention of carbonated water. Priestley's political and religious views got him into so much trouble that rioters burned down his house and his laboratory. Eventually, Priestley and his family fled to America, where the scientist spent the rest of his life.

"He ended up being literally driven from England by a torch-wielding mob," Monahan said. (For more on Priestley's life and times, check out "The Invention of Air" by Steven Johnson.)

The present and future of mad scientists
You probably wouldn't call Priestley "mad" in the psychological sense of the word. In fact, psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig reviewed the biographies of more than 1,000 famous people and reported that the lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders for the natural scientists on the list was 28 percent — lower than that for the general population. (The comparable number for creative writers and artists, however, was a maddening 73 to 87 percent.)

Other studies have suggested that the cluster of characteristics associated with highly creative people can sometimes look a lot like the signs of mental maladjustment — for example, unconventional beliefs, nonconformity and defocused attention.

"Psychopathology is by no means a sine qua non of creativity," Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, reported in one research paper. "Instead, it is probably more accurate to say that creativity shares certain cognitive and dispositional traits with specific systems, and that the degree of that commonality is contingent on the level and type of creativity that an individual displays." 

The specialties of fictional mad scientists tend to change with the times. For Victor Frankenstein, it was reanimating stitched-together cadavers. For Walter Bishop, it's creating interdimensional portals. And Monahan expects that genetic engineering and nanotechnology will become the hot topics for tomorrow's mad scientists. "If I were going write a mad-scientist story set 100 years in the future, that's probably what I'd go for," he told me.

But Monahan wonders if mad scientists will eventually become as obsolete as Tesla's sparking and sizzling coils. In the old days, he said, cutting-edge science was primarily the domain of experimenters working in relative isolation.

"Now science is different," Monahan said. "Now, if you're a scientist, you're probably working for a university or a large corporation or some other large group. It's much more of a cooperative kind of thing. So when you look at the science now that's pushing the envelope — genetic engineering, nanotechnology, that sort of thing — really, it's more of a faceless kind of thing. You don't have this mad-scientist face on it. But the anonymous, corporate world that's behind that is just as threatening. A lot of folks are just as afraid of it nowadays, and you see that reflected in a lot of movies and TV shows."

Like "Fringe," for example. One of the frequent foils for Dr. Bishop and the gang is a mega-conglomerate named Massive Dynamic. (Slogan: "What Don't We Do?") If it comes down to a charmingly mad scientist against a faceless mad corporation, I'll go with the scientist. How about you? Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts about the way science is done, in fiction and in real life, by leaving a comment below. 

More about mad science:

• History reveals: Tesla totally awesome!
• Mad science? Growing meat without animals
• Mad scientists use tarantulas to terrify
• The 10 greatest fictional inventors of all time
• Science Olympiad: The Science of 'Fringe'
• The Mad Scientist Network
• Workman's Mad Science Club (with experiments!)

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter.