In his new book, "The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe," Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades' worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved.

Close traces the decades-long effort to find the deep connections between the fundamental forces of nature and resolve the "infinity puzzle" — that is, the fact that the mathematics of quantum theory came up with nonsensical numbers. That puzzle was eventually solved, as Close describes in the book, but an even bigger puzzle remains: Why is the cosmos built the way it is?

Some clues could emerge from Europe's Large Hadron Collider, where physicists are looking for a mysterious particle known as the Higgs boson. Close delves into the strange role that the Higgs plays in contemporary physics, but he emphasizes that his latest book is about much more than the science.

"'The Infinity Puzzle' is not just another story about the physics of the LHC," he told me this week. "It's focusing on the people. Science is a pure ideal, but the scientists who do it are people. And we all have the same desires and pressures. ... There are heroes and villains in science, as there are everywhere."

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Close's tale illustrates that the course of true science doesn't always run smooth. It may well turn out that the long-sought Higgs boson is a will-o'-the-wisp, and physicists will have to go back to square one. But even that won't render "The Infinity Puzzle" out of date. 

"If the Higgs boson turns out not to exist, and we have to completely rewrite everything, this book will show how we got to this conundrum," Close said. "And if it does exist, hopefully it will explain why it was so important."

The book is particularly timely, considering that this year's Nobel Prize ceremonies are due to take place in Stockholm and Oslo next week. During a wide-ranging interview, Close discussed his book as well as the people and the puzzles that inspired it. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: Could you explain what the "infinity puzzle" is?

Frank Close: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is the biggest experiment that particle physics has ever set out to do. It's trying to find the answer to why there is structure in the universe. The buzzword you hear is the Higgs boson, and the question is, who is Higgs, what's the boson, what's it all about?

Well, what it's all about is what "The Infinity Puzzle" is trying to answer. In telling the story, the book focuses on the people who brought us to this remarkable point in history. And in particular it focuses on a group of scientists who discovered two separate things, half a century ago. First, how to unite the electromagnetic force, the force that holds you and me together and makes magnets work, with the weak force of radioactivity, which plays a very important part in how the sun burns. This is called the electroweak theory today.

The other part of the story is how to make a theory, which works beautifully if there is no mass in anything at all, work in a world where particles have mass. That has become known as the Higgs mechanism, and the consummate object we're looking for is the Higgs boson. The questions surrounding whether these things are named correctly, whether the people who won Nobel Prizes in the past were the right people, and whether there are going to be controversies over Nobel Prizes in the future for all of these things — those are the themes of the book. It's about the politics of science, the way that people are driven to want to get the big prizes. Scientists suffer the same emotions that everybody else does.

Q: You touch on many of those personalities — some who received Nobels, and some who didn't but deserved to. Do those personalities actually shape the science? Are there things in the universe that we see in a particular way just because a scientist first described it in that way?

A: It's a very interesting question about the role of personality in being able to tease out the secrets of nature. There are some people who are strong mathematical calculators but don't necessarily have great vision. There are other people who have got great vision, but aren't particularly strong calculators. It's when these two types get together that rapid progress is often made.

Ultimately, there's a truth out there, and we're trying to find what it is. It's different for artists. If you're a Beethoven, if you're proposing some symphony and you don't publish it, the chance that somebody else will create the very same symphony someday ... well, that just doesn't happen. But in the case of science, nature has already constructed the symphony, and we're trying to find what it is.

The challenge is, suppose that you have uncovered a bit of the symphony, but you're not sure whether you want to go public with it, so you don't publish it. Then, a short time later, somebody else does publish it, a bit braver than you, and you realize that you were right all along. You've lost the credit. There's a certain point where you have to be brave enough to jump off the diving board and take the plunge, to mix in another metaphor. There are many examples of people who didn't take that last step, for one reason or another. You know the names of the winners, but you don't know the ones who didn't quite make it.

Q: When it comes to the Higgs boson, the question has arisen as to whether it actually exists. One of my colleagues has joked that if it's found, that's worth a Nobel. And if it's ruled out, that's worth a Nobel as well. Is that the way it works?

A: The idea that has led to the Higgs boson is a piece of beautiful mathematics. Whether nature actually does it is a question that only experiments can answer. Although the theorists are the ones that get all the press ... the Einsteins and the other names that trip off the tongue ... it's ultimately the experiments that decide. That's where we are at the moment.

The idea that there should be a Higgs boson, or something else that masquerades as that particle, has been around for a long time. It's only now that are finally able to do the experiments that will tell us one way or the other if that is the case. And if it is the case, we might find out exactly how nature plays this particular trick. When Peter Higgs and a group of other people first put the idea forward, they were trying to solve a particular conundrum, and they came up with the simplest way of doing it — that is, that there was a single particle known as the Higgs boson. That was 50 years ago. Since then, people have refined those original ideas, based on the discoveries we have made.

There are several possible ideas as to how nature might actually do this conjuring trick. It might be there's a whole family of particles called Higgsinos and other weird names. It might not be a simple particle. It might be a compound — just as an atom has a nucleus that's made of protons and neutrons, which are made of smaller things called quarks, there might be new sorts of particles waiting to be found, called techniquarks, which collectively act as if they were a single boson.

It might be those, it might be something else. We simply don't know. And that's the exciting thing. Nature knows the answer at the moment, and we're trying to find out at last what it is.

Q: Is the Higgs boson the only door to new physics, or are there other routes to going beyond the Standard Model of physics?

A: We certainly know that the Standard Model cannot be the final answer. It describes everything that we currently have explored, but there are many things we have to put in by hand. The mass of the electron is put in by hand. Why it is what it is, we don't know. But if it were different, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You start by putting in all these measured numbers, and then we can describe a vast amount of stuff. But there must be some richer theory out there that will show why the Standard Model is as it is. 

An analogy is Newton's laws of mechanics, which worked perfectly for hundreds of years. They were later incorporated inside Einstein's theory of relativity, which is a much richer, more powerful theory that includes Newton in it. We suspect there is a "theory of everything" out there which will contain the Standard Model. We are hoping we'll get close to the nature of that theory at the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is exploring regions of nature we've never been able to explore before. We've seen them from afar — it's a bit like knowing there's somebody around the corner but you haven't seen them yet.

We are entering new territory. We're creating in the laboratory the conditions that the universe experienced about a trillionth of a second after the big bang. There are observations that have taken us to a billionth of a second after the big bang, so we've been pretty near. You might think, "Oh, why would we want to get nearer?" It's because the stuff that you and I are made of was created in that cauldron of the big bang's aftermath, and there are puzzles yet to be solved.

For example, why is anything left today? Antimatter is real, and matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet. So why didn't the newborn universe annihilate itself after the big bang. There must be something that tipped the balance. What that is, we don't know for sure, but some hints are beginning to emerge from the Large Hadron Collider.

The real thing is, we're exploring a new continent, and the LHC will show us what is there. That will then answer many of these questions —and if I knew the answers now, I'd be riding off to Stockholm.

Q: You mentioned the fact that some of the values in the Standard Model have to be put in by hand, and that scientists are trying to find out if there's a deeper theory that explains why those values are as they are. Some physicists have said that it might just be a lucky break that we have those values, and that our universe might be merely one of the "bubbles" sitting on the wider landscape of the multiverse. Do you subscribe to that landscape view of the multiverse?

A: Well, of course, the simple answer is, I don't know. And to be honest, nobody knows. I feel sometimes it's a bit of a cop-out. The universe I find myself in is difficult enough to describe. The idea that it is one of a huge number of universes ... that might indeed be true, but if we cannot experimentally answer whether it is true or not, I'm not sure whether the question is actually scientific. It's interesting philosophically. It's possible that someday we might be able to come up with an experiment that can answer whether there are other universes, but then you get into interesting tautological questions. The "universe" is presumably everything we can be aware of. If there are other universes that we cannot be aware of, then they're beyond the capability of science to investigate. But if they are investigatable through science, they are in a sense part of our universe.

The real question is this: Are the masses of electrons and other fundamental particles essential numbers in their own right, or are they no more fundamental than the radii of the planets around the sun? We don't know yet. I can't imagine anything that the Large Hadron Collider will discover that will give us a clear insight as to why particles have the masses that they do. But if we discover the Higgs boson, or whatever it is, we may well find out where mass comes from. And there may be some interesting quirk that comes out of that discovery that will give us a clue as to why the masses are as they are. The excitement of science is that until you've done it, you don't know.

Q: It seems to me that you were on a BBC program some years ago that touched on this whole discussion over whether a particle collider could destroy the world.

A: Yes, and the world hasn't ended yet.

Q: Some people would say the controversy was actually good for physics because it was a "teachable moment" that got people interested in physics. How do you see it?

A: Well, to be fair, it was a controversy that no scientist really subscribed to. It was something that somebody dreamt up, and it created an interesting sensation. But it does give the opportunity to explain what the Large Hadron Collider is and is not. The idea that we are doing things in the Large Hadron Collider that have never been done before is not the case. It's the first time that we have been able to do them. But the universe at large has collided particles together at energies far in excess of anything we do at the LHC or will ever be able to do. Cosmic rays in outer space are subatomic particles whipped into violent motion by magnetic fields in the cosmos — and they hit the upper atmosphere at energies far in excess of anything at the LHC.

Nature has done the experiments before, and we're still here. It's just the first time that we have been doing them under controlled conditions to tease things out. There are more things in life to worry about than that.

More about the puzzles of physics:

• Three win Nobel for discovering cosmic speedup
• Physics prize highlights puzzles
• Hidden universes revealed
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

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Close will make an appearance at Town Hall Seattle at 7:30 p.m. PT Friday to talk about his book and the Large Hadron Collider, and is due to visit Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Calif., at 7 p.m. PT Dec. 6.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

How many stockbrokers can boast about a trade that brought in more than 200 times their investment over the past six weeks? Political pundits could, if they had the foresight to "invest" in GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich's prospects back in October.

The Iowa Electronic Markets make it possible to do such a deal: The IEM operation, sponsored by the University of Iowa's Tippie School of Business as a economic research project, is the only market in the country that has the tacit blessing of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to let traders lay real money down on political predictions. In other contexts, this might be known as a "bet."

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Here's how it works: You can buy up to $500 worth of shares in a political proposition — for example, the proposition that Gingrich will finish either No. 1 or No. 2 in January's Iowa GOP presidential caucus. If the proposition pays off, you'll be paid $1 for each share. If it doesn't, the shares are worthless. Thus, the share price on a given day should reflect the traders' assessment that the prediction will come true.

Researchers have reviewed the IEM's record since the Bush-Dukakis faceoff of 1988 and report that political prediction markets are at least as accurate as traditional political polling. During the 2008 presidential campaign, traders leaned toward a Democratic win more than a year before the actual election. Not much changed in the market after that year's party conventions.

Gingrich, however, has experienced a huge shift in fortunes over the past six weeks, on the political circuit and on the IEM: His Iowa caucus shares were trading at just 0.3 cents on Oct. 13, but on Tuesday they reached 69.1 cents. (Ron Paul has just edged ahead of Mitt Romney as the runner-up.)

"Gingrich is soaring," University of Iowa spokesman Tom Snee told me today. "He's actually gone up from yesterday. Today he's at 75 cents a share."

That means every dollar invested in Gingrich in mid-October would yield $250 today.

Now, before your head starts swimming at the prospect of making tens of thousands of dollars in the political game, here's a reality check: There's a limit to how much you can invest in an IEM proposition, and it's not just the $500 account limit.

"You can only buy something if it's available for sale, and we're not going to have 166,000 shares for sale," Snee said. Right now, there's only about $5,000 total invested in the Iowa caucus market. The entire value of investments in all of the IEM's markets is about $185,000, held by about 1,200 traders. You couldn't possibly have spent the whole $500 buying up Gingrich shares at 0.3 cents per share.

Here's how Iowa professor Joyce Berg, director of the IEM, explained the issue in an email passed along by Snee:

"All IEM contracts in the RCONV [Republican Convention] market are issued by selling bundles (one of each contract in the market) for $1.  Because exactly one of the contracts will pay off, the IEM has exchanged $1 for something that will be worth $1.  In your example, for a trader to spend $500 on contracts selling at $0.003, there would need to be $500/.003 = 166,667 Gingrich contracts available.  The only way that could happen is if other traders had spent $166,667 purchasing bundles. The funds to trade the hypothetical trader’s gains come from other traders.  That is, for every gain, there is an equal loss in the market.

"In other markets where traders can sell short, there are banks that guarantee the trades.  In the IEM, we don’t have that issue due to the way we use bundles to create contacts."

So if you were hoping to use your political acumen to pay for a condo, the IEM can't help you. But there are some potential bargains out there. Heck, just a couple of weeks ago, Herman Cain's Iowa caucus shares were trading at more than 25 cents each. Now they're worth a penny. If you have a hunch that Cain can revive his fortunes, there's money to be made. How's that for an economic plan?

More about prediction markets:

• 2012 political market open for business
• Market lays its bets on Oscars
• Buying into all sorts of predictions
• Flu forecasts come true
• Pentagon kills 'terror futures market'

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To handicap the political marketplace, check out NBC Politics on msnbc.com. And to find out what's going on in the financial markets, check in with msnbc.com's Business section.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The collective wisdom of the crowd is being called upon to help scientists decipher the language of pilot and killer whales in a project that could help us operate our machines in harmony with the ocean giants.

To participate, log on to Whale.fm, a project sponsored by Zooniverse and Scientific American, and try to match up similar sounding whale calls. 

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The researchers behind the project hope that the wisdom of the crowd will more accurately match the calls than one user can alone.

That is, what I think are two similar sounding calls might not be what you think. If hundreds or thousands of people group the same sounds together, though, they're more likely a match.

Whale.fm is particularly important for basic pilot whale research, since scientists know so little about them. What they do know suggests they communicate in similar ways to killer whales, which are known to live in family groups and communicate among themselves in unique dialects.

Scientists collected the whale calls over the years with underwater microphones suctioned onto whales, dragged behind ships and attached to buoys. Each sound and a corresponding spectrogram — a visual representation of the whale sound snippet — are presented for users to find a match.

The site also plots on a world map where the call was recorded and even offers users an option to track specific whales. 

If all goes well and lots of people participate, researchers should get answers to questions such as the size of the pilot whale call repertoire, any differences between the repertoires of long and short finned pilot whales, and how, if at all, the calls change amid noise such as sonar.

The project will also let researchers know how well volunteers agree with each other and, thus, how good we are at collectively categorizing the calls of vocal species such as whales.

This type of crowdsourcing — tapping the wisdom of the crowd to form a collective intelligence — has been used for other research projects in the past, including Zooniverse's Planet Hunters, which is harnessing crowds to find new planets.

If the crowd turns out to be wise enough to help researchers decipher whale songs, what else can we do?

More on crowdsourcing projects:

• This is the first crowdsourced military vehicle
• Abort or give birth? Couple asks Internet to vote
• Software taps human brains
• Charities start to harness the power of the many
• Amazon pushes user-driven research service

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A robot that looks like a little green Martian in a snowsuit has learned to recognize itself in the mirror — and is pleased with what it sees.

Mirror-self recognition is a hallmark of intelligence in animals, something found in primates, dolphins and elephants, for example, but not dogs.

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On the robot's blog, the Thecorpora engineers said they wondered what would happen if Qbo sees itself in the mirror, noting that the robot is programmed with face and object recognition capabilities.

As seen in the video, Qbo is trained to recognize itself and, when it does, give the programmed response: "Oh, this is me. Nice." 

"This quite simple experiment touches interesting psychological aspects of self-consciousness," the blog reads. 

The researchers are working on programming the robot so it can recognize itself autonomously when found in front of the mirror, one step closer to true self awareness.

While robots don't yet rule the world, they are getting smarter.

More on robots and intelligence:

• The 10 smartest animals
• Dog vs. robot: Which is the better soldier?
• Robot learns from experience
• Can robots look all too human?

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

An electromagnetic catapult successfully launched a fighter jet in a demonstration of two futuristic technologies, the U.S. Navy announced Monday.

The electromagnetic aircraft launch system, as the electromagnetic catapult is formally known, is being developed to replace the steam catapults that have launched fighter jets off Navy carriers for more than 50 years.

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EMALS uses electric currents to generate magnetic fields that propel an aircraft down a launch track. 

 

The system, according to the Navy, is an improvement over of steam catapults, which are unable to generate the power needed to launch heavier and faster next generation fighter jets.  The catapult also causes less wear and tear on aircraft and is easier to maintain. 

In addition to the F-35C, which is a carrier variant of the Joint Strike Fighter scheduled for carrier trials in 2013, the EMALS team has launched a T-45 Goshawk, an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, a C-2A Greyhound and several F/A-18 aircraft with and without stores over the past 12 months, the Navy reported.

EMALS will be deployed on the Navy's futuristic aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, which is currently under construction and slated for completion in 2015.

The F-35C and EMALS still face funding and technological hurdles in their development, notes the website DoD Buzz, but the successful launch Nov. 18 is did demonstrate the future of aviation.

Updated 9:00 am PT on 11/30 with more details on the test launch aircraft.

More on Navy technology:

• Navy twin stealth drone takes flight
• UFO-like drone hits cruise mode
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Soft-glowing lights powered by energy harvested from human waste could soon set the mood everywhere from nightclubs to living rooms, according to an electronics company.

The lights, designed by Philips, are hand-blown glass cells filled with a culture of bioluminescent bacteria that are fed via silicon tubes connected to a source of methane gas harvested from food and body waste. 

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The system, called the Bio-Light, is part of what Philips calls the Microbial Home, a project to recycle waste and reduce environmental impact.

The company notes that the bioluminescent lighting is too low-intensity for functional illumination, but says the system could light up the edge of the road at night or power signs pointing to the bathroom at movie theaters and nightclubs.

Another potential use offered by Philips is "new genres of atmospheric interior lighting with, for example, possible therapeutic and mood-enhancing effects."

Though it might take a little getting used to mood lighting powered by poop and wilted lettuce, the concept is another example of how to live more sustainably on a planet with finite resources. 

"Energy-saving light bulbs will only take us so far," Clive van Heerden, Senior Director of Design-led Innovation at Philips Design, notes on the company website.

"We need to push ourselves to rethink domestic appliances entirely, to rethink how homes consume energy, and how entire communities can pool resources." 

[Via Discovery News and Gizmag]

More on poop to power technology:

• Poop-to-power projects pumped up
• Poop power? Sewage turned into electricity
• Can pandas help us make biofuels? Here's the poop
• Food waste + fish poop = lettuce

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Researchers say they've found two pits to the east and west of Stonehenge that may have played a role in an ancient midsummer ceremony. The discovery suggests that the 5,000-year-old circle of stones we see today may represent just a few of the pieces in a larger geographical, astronomical and cultural puzzle.

The previously undetected pits could provide clues for solving the puzzle.

"These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important ritual focus, and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date," Vince Gaffney, an archaeology professor at the University of Birmingham, said in a news release issued over the weekend.

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The pits, which measure about 16 feet (5 meters wide) and at least 3 feet (1 meter) deep, have been covered over for centuries and can't easily be spotted on the ground. But they showed up in a survey that was conducted using non-invasive mapping techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry. The survey is part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project, which was initiated last year with backing from the University of Birmingham's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Center and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna.

The placement of the pits is intriguing: They were found on the eastern and western sides of the Cursus, a racetrack-style enclosure north of Stonehenge itself that spans 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) from east to west and is up to 100 yards (meters) wide. From the perspective of an observer standing at the Heel Stone, a massive upright stone just outside Stonehenge's main circle, the sun would rise just above the eastern pit on the day of the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year. The same observer would see the sun set that evening in line with the western pit.

Archaeologists have previously noted that the Cursus was apparently created several hundred years before Stonehenge's 5,000-year-old stone circle was erected. The newly detected pits may have been part of a grand layout that guided the placement of the standing stones.

But to what end?

Gaffney, who led the survey project, speculated that the Cursus was the central stage for a midsummer ritual that was enacted long before Stonehenge's heyday. "The perimeter of the Cursus may well have defined a route guiding ceremonial processions which took place on the longest day of the year," he said.

In addition to the pits, Gaffney and his colleagues found a previously undetected gap in the middle of the northern side of the eroded earthwork that defines the sides of the Cursus. They propose that ceremonial leaders entered the Cursus through that gap, and then gathered at the eastern pit to conduct sunrise rituals. Over the course of the day, participants in the rituals might have made their way westward, ending up at the western pit at sunset.

"Observers of the ceremony would have been positioned at the Heel Stone, [with] which the two pits are aligned," Gaffney said.

Henry Chapman, another archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, said Stonehenge's position would have added to the symbolism. "If you measure the walking distance between the two pits, the procession would reach exactly halfway at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge," he said in the news release. "This is more than just coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance."

The researchers suggested that the pits may have contained tall sighting stones, or wooden posts, or even fires to symbolize the sun. Just imagine how it would feel to watch the sun rise from a fire lit before dawn, follow its movement across the sky in time with a daylong procession, and then see it fall into the flames at sunset.

"Stonehenge may have been emerging as an important area for quite a long time, and sometimes you can't necessarily see that in the standing archaeology," Gaffney said in an MP3 podcast provided by the University of Birmingham. "The stones themselves, which are generally later, don't give you that information. You have to infer it from relationships between multiple monuments."

The researchers aren't anywhere close to finishing the puzzle: Gaffney figures there's at least another two years' worth of survey work to do. Even then, the full story of Stonehenge and its environs may remain wrapped in mystery. How much can stones and earth tell? Stay tuned ...

More about Stonehenge:

• Did Stonehenge start out as a cemetery?
• ... Or was it a place of healing?
• Gallery: Secrets of Stonehenge
• Gallery: Seven mysteries of archaeology

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A fresh photo from the Cassini orbiter shows the hydrocarbon-rich seas and dunes of Titan, a Saturnian moon that might be capable of sustaining life as we don't know it.

The picture, published today on the websites of NASA's Saturn mission and Cassini's imaging team, shows the huge sea known as Kraken Mare as a dark spot on the northern edge of Titan's disk. The dark Senkyo dune field is front and center. Cassini's narrow-angle camera captured the view in near-infrared wavelengths from a distance of 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers) on Sept. 14.

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Titan is totally shrouded in smog, but Cassini's camera filters are set up to pierce through the haze and spot details on the surface below. The cold condtions on the moon are such that hydrocarbons such as ethane and methane can exist in liquid form. This rare picture from Cassini shows the glint of sunlight off the sheen of Kraken Mare, which is larger than the Caspian Sea on Earth. (And yes, Kraken is named after the mythical sea creature. "Mare" is Latin for "sea.")

Titan's seas, lakes and rivers of hydrocarbons are among the reasons why the murky Saturnian moon ranks higher than Mars on a recently published list assessing planetary habitability. That may sound strange, considering that the typical temperature on Titan is 289 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-178 degrees Celsius). But Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University who helped put together the list, told me that it makes sense to rank Titan as the top prospect for extraterrestrial habitability.

"If you think about it, Titan has a thick protective atmosphere like Earth's, similar to the early Earth atmosphere," he said. "It has a lot of nitrogen and methane in it, and Titan has hydrocarbon lakes, energy sources. There's a lot of possibility on Titan — if you objectively evaluate the possibility of life on Titan, I would agree."

He cautioned, however, that life on Titan may not take the form of life on Earth. Titanian life would have to thrive on methane rather than oxygen or carbon dioxide. Last year, some researchers were wound up by reports that hydrogen was flowing down through the moon's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface, and that acetylene was less abundant than expected. That could be consistent with the behavior of methane-based life forms. There are other possible explanations, however. It'll be another decade at least before another probe can go to Titan to sort out the truth.

Schulze-Makuch cautioned that comparing Titan with Mars and Earth "is a little like comparing apples and oranges."

"Current Titan seems to be more favorable to life than current Mars, but it's 'life as we don't know it,'" he said. "It would have to be different. For Mars, though, the thing is, early Mars and current Mars are very different. Early Mars was more favorable to life. Early Mars comes out better than Titan."

That's the main point of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, which was launched over the weekend. The mission's Curiosity rover isn't suited for detecting present-day life on the Red Planet, but it should give scientists a far better idea of what conditions on early Mars were like and whether life could have gained a foothold billions of years ago.

The real value of the Planetary Habitability Index developed by Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues would be to help scientists focus on potentially livable planets beyond our solar system. "Right now we have more than 700 exoplanets," he said. "In a few years, we'll have several thousand. You'll need to have something that you can use to prioritize. ... We have to have some way to assess what is the likelihood of life on them."

Schulze-Makuch acknowledged that the index as currently devised has lots of question marks attached to it. "One of the major points of the paper was that this classification system can always be updated, and it should be as more information becomes available," he said.

Where do you think we should focus our attention? On Titan? Mars? Ice-covered Europa? Ice-spewing Enceladus? Or on the hundreds of planets beyond the solar system? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about the search for alien life:

• Mars life? New rover may uncover clues
• Liquid water on Enceladus could support life
• Life-bearing lake possible on icy Europa
• Alien Earths: 2 billion of them are out there

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

A robot designed to look and swim like a jellyfish has gotten even more realistic, according to a researcher working on the motion component of the machine. 

The robot, known as Robojelly, was developed for the Office of Naval Research in 2009 to spy on ships and submarines, detect chemical spills, and monitor the whereabouts of migrating fish.

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They did this by putting little wires, called bio-inspired shape memory alloy composites, that, when heated, contract just as a muscle does.  

The original Robojelly, however, didn't swim as gracefully as the jellyfish it was built to mimic, according to Alex Villanueva, a graduate student at Virginia Tech.

"It was just pulsing and staying in place, it wasn't really going anywhere," he told me. 

He improved the robot's swimming prowess by studying how jellyfish swim and then re-engineered the robotic propulsion mechanism to more realistically mimic the jellies.

Natural jellyfish generate thrust by deforming and contracting the bell section of their bodies. The lower, or lagging section of the bell, deforms slightly later than the rest of the bell.

Villanueva added this so-called flexible margin to the Robojelly.

"As soon as we put it on, the robot started swimming really well, so well that the biologists were like, 'man, this looks really close to the natural fish,'" he said.

Villanueva presented the results at the 2011 meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics Nov. 22 in Boston, Mass.

He is now working on improving the hydrodynamics of the robot so that it swims as proficiently and energy efficiently as the natural fish.

In addition, he is working on a 5-foot diameter jellyfish modeled after the lion's mane jellyfish. Results on that robot are forthcoming, but he says it has passed preliminary swimming tests. 

Great. As if real giant jellyfish weren't scary enough, it now appears we have to contend with look-like giant robotic jellyfish.

More on underwater robots:

• Underwater robots at work in Japan
• Electronic fish could be model for underwater robots
• Underwater robots attack spill like Superman
• Robotic clam could detonate underwater mines

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Two is better than one, especially when it comes to flight testing a stealth drone designed to take off and land from moving aircraft carriers at sea. The U.S. Navy announced today it has reached that milestone in its X-47B program.

The second tail-less unmanned aircraft — named Air Vehicle 2 — took to the skies from Edwards Air Force Base in California on Nov. 22 and flew a few racetrack patterns over Rogers Dry Lake at an altitude of 5,000 feet, said Northup Grumman, who is building the plane, in a news release.

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The first flight of the original X-47B took place in February. That aircraft successfully retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration in September, allowing photographers to snap images that make the plane look like a UFO from a 1950s cartoon.

Having a second plane will allow for the collection of more performance data and keep the program on development schedule, the aerospace company said. 

The computer-controlled unmanned aircraft takes off and flies a pre-programmed mission and then returns to base in response to mouse clicks from a mission operator. The operator monitors the flight, but doesn't actively control it remotely, as for other drones.

One of the twin aircraft will transition to the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., by the end of 2011, to begin testing of precision carrier approaches, arresting landings and "roll-out" catapult landings, according to the release. 

The tests will also include testing of recently installed guidance, navigation and control software that will enable the aircraft to land on a moving carrier deck, considered among the harshest aviation environments.

The second craft will remain in California to continue envelop expansion flights, which are used to demonstrate the aircraft performance under a range of range, speed, and fuel-load conditions. 

The first carrier launches are planned for 2013 and autonomous refueling demonstrations are slated for 2014. 

More on Navy technology:

• UFO-like drone hits cruise mode
• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Today was "Black Friday" for some folks in southern climes, and not because it's the big shopping day after Thanksgiving: A partial solar eclipse made the sky just a little bit darker in areas of New Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa and Antarctica.

Some observers spotted only a slight grazing of the sun, while others — such as Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff and his eclipse-chasing colleagues — could see the moon take an appreciable bite out of the sun's disk in the skies over Invercargill in southern New Zealand. "After an in-and-out, off-and-on-rain day, we are very pleased," Pasachoff said in a report from Sky & Telescope's Kelly Beatty.

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Pasachoff passed along another perspective on the eclipse, taken from the seventh-floor offices of the New Zealand Department of Conservation in Invercargill. The hand in the picture belongs to Steve Butler, who works for the government agency.

"I gave him one of my solar filters to hold so I could take that photo (Nikon D200)," Pasachoff told me in an email. "He is the regional project manager and was able to grant us access to that site where we were shielded from the wind ... aside from the fierce wind that came through the opened window."

Antarctica's researchers had what were potentially the best seats in the house, with up to 90 percent of the sun's diameter blacked out. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound as if the weather was all that cooperative down at the bottom of the world.

Today's event was the last of four partial solar eclipses during 2011, but there's one more eclipse to close out the year. A total lunar eclipse will be visible from half the world on Dec. 10-11, with best viewing available from Australia, Asia and the Pacific. North Americans will see the beginning stages of the eclipse, while Europeans and Africans will catch the ending.

Next year brings a new crop of solar spectacles, including an annular "ring" eclipse visible from Asia, the Pacific and the western U.S. on May 20, and a total solar eclipse visible from Australia and the South Pacific on Nov. 13. 

More eclipse treats:

• Solar eclipse dims skies in Europe, Middle East
• Marvel at the 'Midnight Sun' eclipse
• The sun gets double-crossed
• Eclipse views turn moon into a star 

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA's $2.5 billion, car-sized rover is ready for an epic Mars mission. Are you? Here's how to get connected with Curiosity.

The one-ton Curiosity rover is the central payload for the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which is due for launch at 10:02 a.m. ET Saturday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 41 in Florida, atop an Atlas 5 rocket. At today's pre-launch news conference, Colleen Hartman, NASA's assistant associate administrator for science, said the laboratory was "locked and loaded" for liftoff.

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The space agency expects the launch to bring 13,500 spectators onto its grounds, including about 150 Twitter users who are filling the Twitterverse with tweets as they attend briefings and tours. To tune in the tweeps, do a search on the #NASAtweetup hashtag, and be sure to follow Mars Curiosity on Twitter and Facebook.

Press kits for the launch are available online from NASA and United Launch Alliance.

NASA TV is due to air a news conference on the subject of "Why Mars Excites and Inspires Us" at 1 p.m. ET Friday, and will begin live coverage of Saturday's countdown and launch at 7:30 a.m. ET Saturday. An alternative to the NASA.gov video stream is the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Ustream video. Saturday's launch window extends until 11:45 a.m. ET, and even if storms or technical glitches force a postponement, NASA can try for liftoff all the way up to Dec. 18.

After launch, the coverage will settle down quite a bit. But you can keep track of Mars Science Laboratory's progress via NASA's Web portal, and study up on Gale Crater, the scientifically intriguing area where the rover is due to be dropped to the surface on the night of Aug. 5-6, 2012. Curiosity's mission is intended to last at least a Martian year (686 Earth days). NASA says the mission's primary aim is to "investigate whether the landing region has had environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life, and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed."

This could get interesting.  

Other resources:

• Planetary Society Blog: Mars Exploration Family Portrait
• NASA: Photosynth of Curiosity rover in Mars Yard
• Graphic: All about NASA's Mars Science Laboratory
• NASA: Mars Curiosity's Discovery Guide
• JPL via YouTube: How do you get to Mars? 

More about the mission:

• Mars rover: A first step into search for life
• Mission will look deep into Mars' past
• Why is it so hard to get to Mars?
• Slideshow: The making of Curiosity
• Video: Curiosity's crazy journey to Mars

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

How about a dinosaur skull for the holidays? Or a handful of glow-in-the-dark uranium marbles? Cast your vote and help us crown the geekiest gift for the holiday season.

The gift suggestions for this year's Science Geek Guide are in line with a proud tradition here at msnbc.com. You can always find guides to Black Friday tech deals, or the top 20 toys of 2011, or the hottest holiday hostess gifts. But where else can get a line on a nuclear-powered plaything, or a six-dimensional paperweight, or brains to fit your budget?

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Even better, this is a geek gift guide created by geeks for geeks, with some geeky prizes thrown into the bargain. Last week I put out the call for suggestions, and it'll be up to you to select the coolest, most offbeat prize from the top 10. The geek who made the top-rated suggestion will be eligible to receive a pile of books, including "Science Ink," "The Cult of Lego," "The Physics Book" and "The Case for Pluto" (autographed by yours truly).

Here are this year's 10 finalists:

Uranium marbles: "Nothing says Merry Christmas like a little bit of radiation," says Richard-1971294. He'd love to get his hands on some uranium marbles. Back in the old days, pigments containing uranium oxide were used in lots of items, including ceramic glazes, green-tinted glassware and, yes, children's marbles. Black Light World, which sells a three-pack of uranium-doped marbles for $9.95, says they're "totally safe" — even though radioactive caution stickers are plastered all over the promotional images. You can also find 'em on eBay.

Dinosaur skulls: "Dino skull replicas are cool and geeky!" David Flowers tweeted in his response to the call for entries. The Dinosaur Corporation offers a wide selection of skulls, molded out of polyurethane resin to look like the real thing ... only smaller. If you're looking for a real dinosaur skull, that'll cost you. A T. rex skull sold for $215,000 in March (and some dino dung went for $1,200). Flowers also put a naked mole rat plushie on his geek-gift wish list.

The Elements Vault: "Physics is hot these days, but for lovers of chemistry, this kit from Theodore Gray will be a real treat." says KGill. "His gorgeous book about the elements, 'The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe,' showcased the elegance of the periodic table, and the beauty of the elements. This collection incudes new text and photographs, reproductions of historic documents, a pop-up model of an atom, and samples of several elements."

Magnifying glasses and other optics: "Nothing beats a brand new magnifying glass," says Jennifer Hancock, a Humanist author and speaker. "They get cruddy after a while, always nice to have a new one." Here's the set she has her eye on. Oh, and she wouldn't mind getting a hand-held microscope and illuminator, plus a snazzy pair of binoculars. In her Twitter profile, Hancock calls herself a dork, but she sounds like a bona fide geek to me. There is a difference.

Mars rover lunchbox: Lights in the Dark blogger Jason Major says anything from ThinkGeek will do the trick, but he'd sure like to get a $20 Mars Exploration Rover lunchbox from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's online store. Space geeks of the female persuasion might consider some Red Planet earrings in honor of the about-to-be-launched Mars Science Laboratory mission.

USB microscope: "A USB microscope, with the ability to capture images digitally, is a great geek gift!" says Paliniasky. There's a mind-boggling selection, ranging from less than $20 to astronomical prices.

Plush microbes: "GiantMicrobes are way awesome and super cute — stuffed animal versions of microorganisms," says biology student Kelsey Plesniak, a member of the Cosmic Log corps on Facebook. As we head into flu season, what better gift could you give a microbiology geek than ... a cuddly flu bug?

Wi-Fi detector shirt: This $14.99 ThinkGeek T-shirt has a decal that glows to indicate the signal strength of wireless networks in the area. "My son the math teacher bought one of these earlier this year," George Buddy Dow says on Facebook. "Inexpensive and practical." Just don't forget to remove the decal and the battery pack before you put it in the wash. Dow also puts in a plug for the "Ant Farm Revolution," which sounds like an entomological Occupy movement.

Star Trek pizza cutter: Joel Davis casts his vote for a $29.99 ThinkGeek kitchen accessory that promises to "boldly cut pizza where no man has cut before." It's as if you're holding a miniaturized starship Enterprise in the palm of your hand. Come to think of it, I've seen that episode.

Pi plate: "A pi plate is available. To make pies in," Jan Smith writes. "Has a large pi symbol in the center and the numbers 3.14159... etc., all around the edge of the plate. I got one for my son." Here's an alternate design for the pi plate. Any way you slice it, this will be a good kitchen item to have around for March 14 ... Pi Day.

Extra credit: You'll find all sorts of geeky (and not-so-geeky) gift ideas by following the links below, and you'll also want to check out our holiday book roundup. You might also consider supporting The Illuminated Origin of Species, an effort by artist/naturalist Kelly Houle to create an illuminated manuscript of Charles Darwin's masterwork in the spirit of the Book of Kells. To support the effort, Houle is offering sets of Darwin-themed greeting cards, beetle prints and an adopt-a-beetle program.

Don't forget to cast a vote for your favorite gift among the top 10, and may the best geek win!

Previous Science Geek Gift Guides:

• The gift of science (2002)
• For the scientist who has everything (2002)
• Toy traditions go back to the future (2003)
• Your toys will be assimilated (2004)
• Gifts for space geeks (2004)
• Find your star (2005)
• The top gift for science geeks (2006)
• Season's readings for kids ... and for grown-ups (2007)
• The top geek gift of 2008
• Gifts from the sixth dimension (2009)
• Make your own geeky goodness (2010)

More science gifts:

• Edmund Scientific: The classic science store
• Educational Innovations
• Exploratorium Science Gift Guide 2011
• GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide 2011
• Home Science Tools gift guide
• Imagination Soup math and science gifts
• MakeZine Holiday Gift Guide
• Robot Snob suggestions for robotics fans
• Sheldon Shirts: Big Bang Theory gifts
• ThinkGeek: Stuff for smart masses
• xkcd store
• Zazzle gifts for geeks ... and "Big Bang" fans

Update for 4:45 p.m. ET Nov. 23: Thanks so much for your votes. Looks like it could be a close contest. The top Science Geek Gift of 2011 will be selected based on the tally as of noon ET Sunday, and announced in a follow-up item on Monday.

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You don't need to buy me a present. All I ask is that you connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Astronomers have come up with a livability index for alien planets and moons, and the winners are ... Titan in our own solar system, and the Gliese 581 planets in the extrasolar league.

Rating systems for Earthlike and habitable planets may not make much difference now, but the developers of the Earth Similarity Index and the Planet Habitability Index say they could be crucial in the years ahead.

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"With a new generation of telescopes and missions on the way, the discovery of many more exoplanets can be expected," they write in a paper to be published in the December issue of the journal Astrobiology. "That, in turn, will drive the need for a classification scheme for assigning astrobiological potential for exoplanets based on estimates derived from quantitative data of their probability for supporting life."

If such a scheme could truly reflect whether or not a given planetary environment is habitable, that could drive the priorities for exploration in our own solar system, as well as high-resolution observations of extrasolar systems.

Habitability indexes have been in the works for at least the past couple of years. Traditionally, astrobiologists have focused on three conditions that appear essential for life on Earth: organic compounds, the presence of liquid water, and an energy source such as the sun or undersea volcanoes. But in the search for alien Earths, those conditions aren't easily determined, and they may even be irrelevant.

The newly proposed indexes take a two-track approach to the classification challenge.

"The first question is whether Earthlike conditions can be found on other worlds, since we know empirically that those conditions could harbor life," Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University who is one of the study authors, said in a news release. "The second question is whether conditions exist on exoplanets that suggest the possibility of other forms of life, whether known to us or not."

The Earth Similarity Index looks at the size, density and orbital distance of a planet or moon, as well as the size and temperature of its parent star, and compares those parameters with Earth's. Earth has the maximum global ESI of 1. Mars has a 0.70 rating, and Mercury is the next on the list with 0.60. For what it's worth, the dwarf planet Pluto and Neptune's moon Triton register a measly 0.075 and 0.074, respectively. And Enceladus, the icy Saturnian moon that is thought to harbor a subsurface ocean and perhaps life, is right down there with them at 0.094.

Looking beyond the solar system, the researchers worked up ESI values for a variety of extrasolar planets. The top finishers were Gliese 581g (whose existence is in dispute) with 0.89, and Gliese 581d with 0.74.

But that's just the first part of the job: The researchers' Planet Habitability Index looks at a different set of factors: Does the planet have a rocky or frozen surface? Is there an atmosphere, and how thick is it? How about a magnetic field? How much energy is available, either through tidal flexing or from the parent star? Could there be organics present, and is a liquid solvent available for chemical interactions?

By those measures, Earth has a relative PHI of 0.96, which is nearly as close as you can get to the maximum of 1. Based on what's known about the rest of the solar system, the runner-up is not Mars, as you might expect, but the Saturnian moon Titan (0.64 vs. 0.59 for Mars). The Jovian moon Europa is next on the list (0.47), but Enceladus (0.35) ranks lower than Venus, Jupiter and Saturn (0.37).

The authors stress that expectations based on earthly life may not apply to extraterrestrial environments.

"Habitability in a wider sense is not necessarily restricted to water as a solvent or to a planet circling a star,” they write. "For example, the hydrocarbon lakes on Titan could host a different form of life. Analog studies in hydrocarbon environments on Earth, in fact, clearly indicate that these environments are habitable in principle. Orphan planets wandering free of any central star could likewise conceivably feature conditions suitable for some form of life."

So how does the Gliese 581 system's PHI look? Gliese 581g's value was estimated at 0.45, 581d registered 0.43, and 581c came in at 0.41. By that scale, the chances of finding life in a red-dwarf system 20.5 light-years away (or sustaining life if we ever get there) are about as good as they are for Europa. OK, but not great.

It's important to keep a couple of things in mind about this research: First of all, there's a fair amount of speculation about the various factors and their relative value for habitability. Further observations may shift the values for those factors, as well as the mathematical formula into which they're fed.

Perhaps more importantly, the numbers game can't take the place of actual observation and exploration. The ESI and PHI may well turn out to be thought experiments like the Drake Equation, which takes your assumptions about a variety of cosmic factors (How many planets like Earth come into existence every year? How likely is it that intelligent civilizations arise on alien Earths? How long do they last?) and turns them into a number. At least that's the message from David Morrison, director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, headquartered at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Here's what Morrison told me in an email:

"Very interesting. Discussing such conceptual indexes is a good way to organize our thinking about worlds that may be suitable for life. But it doesn’t actually add value, in my opinion. For the Earth Similarity Index, we already have thought that liquid water, and a solid surface, and enough gravity to hold on to a substantial atmosphere, are important indications of habitability. Hence the interest in Earth-size planets within the habitable zone (meaning surface liquid water is possible). To go further, as by considering the composition of the atmosphere, we are quickly into the effort to identify life by its chemical signatures, not just habitability. The broader habitability index in also interesting, but we just don’t know how to define habitability. And if Titan is an example, we may never have the data on exoplanets that could distinguish the hydrocarbon liquid lakes that we see on Titan.

"Bottom line: This (like the Drake Equation) is a good teaching tool. It helps is to organize our thoughts. But I doubt it will be very useful as a research tool, because we know so little about what properties truly define habitability. Without a much better idea of what alien life is like, we don't know how to define habitability. And probably nature is much more creative than we can imagine."

What do you think? Where would you target the search for extraterrestrial life, and what criteria would you use to prioritize the targets? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about the search for alien life:

• A new equation for life
• Case builds for habitable alien planet
• Super-Earth on the edge of habitability
• More about astrobiology from Cosmic Log

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In addition to Schulze-Makuch, the authors of "A Two-Tiered Approach to Assessing the Habitability of Exoplanets" include Abel Mendez, Alberto G. Fairen, Philip von Paris, Carol Turse, Grayson Boyer, Alfonso F. Davila, Marina Resendes de Sousa Antonio, David Catling and Louis N. Irwin.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Ready to crack open some inky tales of scientific lore and levity? Check out our holiday science book roundup — and add your own selections to the list.

Big, arty books:

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• "Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed" by Carl Zimmer: This is not your typical coffee-table book. First, it's handy enough to sit on a shelf, thanks to its 7-by-10-inch size. But more importantly, it's not just an assemblage of 200 amazing tattoos inspired by scientific symbology. Zimmer tells the tale behind each tattoo ... and the science that inspired it. Think of it as a survey course on the cosmos, written on skin.
• "The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics," by Clifford Pickover. What other book begins 13.7 billion years in the past and ends up more than 100 trillion years in the future? In between the big bang and the coming reign of the Boltzmann brains, Pickover hits the high points in the history of physics, explains scientific concepts ranging from classical mechanics to dark energy and string theory, and offers a glossy illustration for each milestone. Oh, and don't forget "The Math Book."
• "The Space Shuttle: Celebrating 30 Years of NASA's First Space Plane," by Piers Bizony. Are you looking for this year's biggest, shiniest coffee-table book about NASA's recently departed space shuttle fleet? Bizony's book is chock-full of pictures from each of the fleet's 135 missions, although the last one is represented only by a picture of Atlantis and its team during preparations for July's final flight. The text reviews 30 years of highs and lows for the shuttle program.
• "The Big Idea: How Breakthroughs of the Past Shape the Future," foreword by Timothy Ferris. National Geographic's coffee-table book provides a visually spectacular look at 24 cutting-edge innovations, ranging from stem cells and nanomedicine to augmented reality. But that's not all: Each of the "big ideas" is traced back through the scientific discoveries of the past that have laid the foundation for the future. Just the thing for a budding scientist or engineer. Here's what Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker says about the book: "If you put it on your coffee table, it will make people believe that you are smart. But I think its real value lies in what it can do for a seventh-grader."
• "The Cult of Lego," by John Baichtal and Joe Meno. Not exactly a science book, but if we're talking about inspiring the next generation of engineers, flipping through this book would be one way to do it. You can regard this volume as an introduction to the esoteric world of "vigs" (vignettes), "minifigs" (custom-made mini-figurines), balloon-borne Lego experiments, robo-Legos and grand projects that require millions of those little bricks. 

For kids of all ages:
The AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books recognizes high-quality science writing and illustration for young readers, but the "young adult" finalists are worth reading even if you're not so young anymore. My book, "The Case for Pluto," was a finalist last year. Here are this year's top selections:

Young adult science books:

• "Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle," by Thor Hanson. Delves into the evolution of feathers in the dinosaur age, their adaptation in the animal world and in the fashion world, the history of the global feather trade and the future applications of feather science.
• "Feynman," by Jim Ottaviani with illustrations by Leland Myrick. A graphic novel about the bongo-playing, Nobel-winning pioneer of quantum physics? This is a biography of Richard Feynman you have to see to believe. It's been a good year for the late physicist: Fans will want to pick up Lawrence M. Krauss' "Quantum Man" and take a look at Freeman Dyson's essay about both biographies in The New York Review of Books. Really serious fans will be interested in the new paperback edition of "Feynman Lectures on Physics."
• "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story," by Susan Freinkel. Are we in an unhealthy relationship with plastic? Freinkel delves into the history, science and economics surrounding our love affair with synthetics, and suggests a healthier way to live with "the material we love to hate but can't seem to live without."
• "Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, a Robot Named Scorch, and What It Takes to Win," by Judy Dutton. The Intel Science and Engineering Fair is one of the premier competitions for whiz kids, offering $4 million in prizes and scholarships. But what's the real story behind the whizzery? Dutton follows a dozen brainy contestants through the thrill of discovery and the agony of defeat.

Children's science picture books:

• "After the Kill," by Darrin Lunde. Illustrator: Catherine Stock.
• "A Butterfly Is Patient," by Dianna Hutts Aston. Illustrator: Sylvia Long.
• "Seabird in the Forest," by Joan Dunning.
• "Seed, Soil, Sun," by Chris Peterson.

Middle-grades science books:

• "Biomimicry: Inventions Inspired by Nature," by Dora Lee. Illustrator: Margot Thompson.
• "The Case of the Vanishing Golden Frog: A Scientific Mystery," by Sandra Markle.
• "Elephant Talk: The Surprising Science of Elephant Communication," by Ann Downer.
• "World Without Fish," by Mark Kurlansky. Illustrator: Frank Stockton.

Award-winners:
These books take the prize. Literally. They're this year's top selections from prestigious science-writing competitions:

• "Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA," by Maryn McKenna. Winner of the National Association of Science Writers' Science in Society book award.
• "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," by Rebecca Skloot. Winner of National Academies' Communication Award for books (and a repeat recommendation from last year's holiday book roundup).
• "The Wave Watcher's Companion," by Gavin Pretor-Pinney. Winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.

Additional attention-getters:
These books have been getting a lot of ink from The New York Times, Amazon.com and other sources:

• "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World," by David Deutsch.
• "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," by Steven Pinker.
• "Cleopatra: A Life," by Stacy Schiff.
• "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer," by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
• "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created," by Charles C. Mann.
• "The Information: A History. A Theory. A Flood," by James Gleick.
• "Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything," by David Bellos.
• "Here's Looking at Euclid," by Alex Bellos.
• "Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World," by Lisa Randall.
• "Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them," by Donovan Hohn.
• "Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science," by Marjorie Caroline Malley.

More book recommendations:
I've touched upon a fair number of notable books over the past year, including "Incognito," "The Hidden Reality," "The Magic of Reality" and "Physics of the Future." Check out these other recommendations from past Cosmic Log roundups:

• 2011: 10 books for a summer field trip
• 2010: Season's readings in science
• 2010: Tales for summer science odysseys
• 2009: Science by the book
• 2009: Books for an Apollo summer
• 2007: Season's readings for grown-ups
• 2007: Season's readings for kids
• 2007: Escape into summer sci-fi
• 2005: Literary adventures (scroll down)
• Cosmic Log archive on books
• Cosmic Log Used Book Club

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Add your own book recommendations as comments below ... and don't forget to send in your Science Geek Gift suggestions for this year's contest. You could win a pile of books, including "Science Ink," "The Cult of Lego," "The Physics Book" and "The Case for Pluto."

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Russia's stranded Phobos-Grunt spacecraft reportedly has lost its main opportunity to go to Mars, land on one of its moons and return to Earth with a sample. Nevertheless, efforts to revive it continue.

Little information has come from the Russian Space Agency since the 13-ton probe was launched on Nov. 9, but reports from Russian news outlets say that controllers couldn't make contact before the planned window of opportunity closed today for the round trip to Mars and its moon Phobos.

Phobos-Grunt ("Phobos-Soil") was designed to scoop up a soil sample from Phobos and bring it back to Earth. It was also supposed to deliver a 250-pound (115-kilogram) Chinese mini-orbiter to study Mars' atmosphere. Before launch, Phobos-Grunt was hailed as Russia's comeback try for interplanetary exploration. But since the orbital glitch, it's been viewed as one more in a long string of failures for Russian Mars probes.

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The Interfax news agency quoted an unnamed source in the space industry as saying that there was still an outside chance of going ahead with the trip to Phobos. "This would be possible if Phobos-Grunt received a new flight program, which would involve acceleration with the use of complex ballistic maneuvers, for instance, through the moon and with high fuel expenditure," the source was quoted as saying. "But by mid-December, even this opportunity to fire the spacecraft toward Mars will be gone."

For days, observers have been talking about a potential "consolation prize" for the $163 million mission: perhaps a trip to the moon and back, or to an asteroid. But this assumes that Russian Mission Control will be able to establish contact, upload new instructions and have the probe fire its engines properly to get out of Earth orbit. None of those tasks has yet been achieved.

So what's the problem? Here's one of the leading hypotheses: For some reason, a fault led to the probe's failure to fire its engines for leaving Earth orbit, but Mission Control can't send the commands to reset the software because the fuel tanks are blocking an antenna that needs to be clear.

NASA and the European Space Agency have been trying to help the Russians make contact, and all those efforts are continuing. At one point, orbital debris experts said Phobos-Grunt's orbit was on a decaying track that would lead to a fiery re-entry in December. But satellite observers now say the orbit has been more stable than initially predicted, and re-entry may be held off until January or later. It's almost as if Phobos-Grunt is trying to save itself.

The probe carries about 10 tons of toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, plus a smidgen of radioactive cobalt-57. Experts are debating whether the fuel would burn up in the atmosphere, or whether some of it would survive the fall and cause an environmental problem. Chances are that the debris from Phobos-Grunt would fall into the ocean, as was the case for NASA's UARS satellite and Germany's ROSAT satellite. But you can expect to hear more about the toxic-spill angle as the time of re-entry approaches — unless, that is, the spacecraft undergoes a miraculous resurrection.

In the meantime, NASA's next Mars probe — a one-ton rover known as Curiosity or Mars Science Laboratory — is due for launch on Saturday. The plan for that $2.5 billion mission is nearly as ambitious as Phobos-Grunt's. The six-wheeled, car-sized rover will have to be lowered to the Martian surface next August from a hovering "sky crane." Let's hope the Great Galactic Ghoul sees fit to spare Curiosity, if not Phobos-Grunt.

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: David Warmflash, the lead investigator for the Phobos-LIFE experiment aboard Phobos-Grunt, says in a Twitter update that the "window for going to Mars [is] still open, not window for going and returning with Phobosian sample." I've tweaked this posting to reflect that scenario.

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

You can run, you can hide, but the masterminds in the military's high-tech research arm have their eyes on a gadget that will allow them to hear your racing heart even as you try to get lost in a crowd.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has the technology to hear your heart as you crouch and cower in a dark corner across the room. Now the agency aims to increase its ability to do this at even greater distances, through walls — and even hear and distinguish between multiple hearts at once.

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The technology could help chase down terrorists who set off a bomb and then scatter into the fleeing crowd, for example. It could also help rescue victims trapped in the rubble from the explosion.

The goal of the agency's "Biometrics-at-a-distance" program is a technology that "can record human vital signs at a distance greater than 10 meters using non-line-of-sight and non-invasive or non-contact methods" and do this for up to 10 people at once.

The technology to do this, the agency suspects, is likely to build from electrocardiograms, which measure the heart's electrical activity. This is what doctors use, for example, to diagnose heart disease in people.

[Via Gizmodo]

More on DARPA tech:

• DARPA wants smarter machines
• 'Flying Humvee' moves ahead
• DARPA offers $50,000 prize for reading shredded messages
• How MIT team won balloon search-and-rescue challenge

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

One researcher has identified 11 new species of sweat bees, including a bug named in honor of Gotham City — but in a sense, these bees aren't new at all. They've probably been right under our noses all this time.

The new identifications were made by Cornell entomologist Jason Gibbs by checking dead-bee collections and conducting DNA tests. Species names and descriptions were published last month in the journal Zootaxa as part of a reshuffling of the family tree for 97 species of sweat bees. Gibbs said there may be thousands of bee species yet to be identified.

"This highlights the need for additional studies of our major pollinators," and not just honeybees, he told me.

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One bee may look like another, but there can be subtle morphological and genetic differences that set them apart. If the bees are so dissimilar that they can't breed with each other, they're considered separate species. Mitochondrial DNA tests provide a reliable way to map out species relationships by revealing how long ago particular strains of creatures diverged. "These bees are morphologically and genetically distinct enough that you can say with confidence that they are their own species," Gibbs explained in a Cornell Chronicle interview.

Sweat bees are so named because they get some of their sustenance from licking the sweat off our skin. They nest in the ground or in tree cavities. Four of the species that Gibbs identified are "cuckoo bees," which have lost the ability to build their own nests and collect pollen. These species lay their eggs in the nests of other bees, which end up raising the invaders' progeny. That's the same sort of trick cuckoos pull in the bird world. (Gibbs named one of the cuckoo-bee species Lasioglossum izawsum, which is awesome.)

Four of the species were found in the New York City area, including a specimen that was collected at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2009. That species was named Lasioglossum gotham, which led The New York Times to declare that the Big Apple "has a bee to call its own." Sure, Gotham may be one of New York's nicknames, but if you want to think of L. gotham as the "Batman bee" instead, no one's going to stop you.

The species names for the nine other newly identified strains are arantium, ascheri, batya, curculum, furunculum, georgeickworti, katherineae, rozeni and trigeminum. Some of these labels echo the names of other bee researchers: Cornell's George Eickwort, for example, or John Ascher and Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History. It was Ascher who found L. gotham and passed it along to Gibbs for identification. The Times reported that L. katherineae was identified by analyzing a dead bee that had been sitting in a drawer at the museum since 1903.

The fact that the list of bee species is a little longer than it used to be doesn't mean that the widely publicized crisis besetting the bees is over. Honeybees have been hard-hit by a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, which experts suspect is caused by a combination of mites, parasites, viruses and pesticides. Bumblebees are having problems, too.

"This discovery doesn't counter the idea that bees are declining," Gibbs told me. "What it points out is that there are a lot of species we don't enough about to say whether they're at a stable level."

Identifying the wide variety of bee species just might be the first step toward identifying the factors that keep some populations healthy while others are put at risk. "Even though these bees were only recently described, we can go back to the collections by digitizing records, and start comparing modern abundances," Gibbs said.

More about the bees:

• Big mystery surrounds bees' tiny foe
• New bee viruses found attacking healty hives
• Bees feel the sting of huge population plunge
• Four bumblebee species declining in North America

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Gibbs' research was supported by the Canadian Barcode of Life Network through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Genome Canada, and the National Science Foundation. Gibbs was a researcher at York University in Toronto for a time while working on the study, which explains the Canadian connection.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.