The volunteers participating in the Einstein @ Home computer program have done it again: Two computer users from Russia and Britain have crunched the data for the discovery of a radio pulsar roughly 31,000 light-years away.

Like SETI @ Home, the Einstein @ Home system knits together hundreds of thousands of individual computers to create the equivalent of one big super-duper-computer for searching through astronomical data. Almost 250,000 volunteers are participating in the program.

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Instead of looking for signals from alien beacons, as SETI @ Home does, the computers working for Einstein @ Home sift through data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, for any signs of gravity waves. If Einstein @ Home were to detect such waves, that would serve to confirm Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and mark a breakthrough in physics.

No gravity waves have been found so far. But the Einstein @ Home has been expanded to take on another task: checking radio readings from the Arecibo Observatory for evidence of pulsar flashes. Last year, the program made its first confirmed detection: a pulsar known as PSR J2007+2722, which was detected with the highest level of certainty on computers in Iowa and Germany.

Now researchers have submitted a paper about the second pulsar detection to the arXiv.org document server.

Bruce Allen, who is Einstein @ Home's project leader and director of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), said this second radio pulsar is more interesting than the first.

"This pulsar is in a binary system, is rotating 48 times per second, and is orbiting a massive white-dwarf companion once every 9.4 hours," he told me in an e-mail. "The pulsar, called J1952+2630, was found in data collected at Arecibo Observatory in 2005. The pulsar is particularly interesting because the orbit is very circular, which indicates that the companion star is a white dwarf.  But the companion star is several times more massive than a normal white dwarf companion star; it has a minimum mass of 0.95 solar masses.  Most likely, this pulsar belongs to the rare class of intermediate-mass binary pulsars, of which previously five were known."

The clearest evidence for the pulsar's existence was provided by computers operated by two volunteers: Vitaly Shiryaev, a Russian researcher who has a Ph.D. in radio physics; and Stacey Eastham, who does vehicle testing for the British government in Darwen. In his profile, Eastham says he's studying astronomy and physics on the side. He got involved in the Einstein @ Home project because he's interested in "anything space-like, and being able to be part of something like this is right up my street."

Both men are mentioned in the acknowledgments at the end of the scientific paper. On the project's message board, Allen also passes along "a big 'thank you' to all Einstein @ Home volunteers, whose continuing support makes these exciting discoveries possible."

If that's the sort of fame you're lusting after, or if helping out with Einstein @ Home simply sounds like something that's right up your street, check out the project home page and sign up to participate.

More science you can take part in:

• Planet hunters sift through data
• Help scientists go to the dark side
• Play a game ... and fight disease
• Gamers solve protein puzzles

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Based on his genetic profile, William Holland considers himself a descendant of noble families going back more than a millennium. Between then and now, however, his ancestors were dispersed around the African continent — and some of them were brought to America as slaves. That's the branch of the family to which Holland and his family belong.

Now, Holland is bringing the centuries-old saga of his family full circle by inviting his long-lost relatives to come from Africa to America. If Holland's plan works out, African royalty will meet face-to-face with the descendants of slaves and slave owners in Virginia.

"It's something that's never been done before," Holland told me today, on the last day of Black History Month. "It's something that should not be missed."

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The genesis of Holland's plan goes back to the trips he's taken over the past year to fill in the gaps in his genetic heritage. Y-chromosome tests suggested that his ancestors were related not only to a royal family in the West African nation of Cameroon, but also to a noble family in Ghana, hundreds of miles away. 

"I'm overwhelmed now," said Holland, who is the great-grandson of a slave who found himself serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War. But Holland isn't too overwhelmed to make a kind of sense out of his tangled genetic tale.

This month, during a visit to his genetic relatives in Ghana, Holland pieced together a story of a grand migration. A comparison of his Y-chromosome markers with those of the families in Ghana and Cameroon suggested that their most recent common ancestor lived perhaps 50 generations ago, or roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years ago. His Ghanaian hosts, members of the Akpaglo family, told him that their ancestors migrated southward from Sudan and settled in the Oyo Empire. Holland assumes that his Cameroonian ancestors were part of that migration as well.

"From there, they split up," he told me. One ancestral line eventually took root in Ghana, another in Cameroon. Holland has now been to both nations to track down his pedigree. Armed with the genetic results, he was initiated into two African families.

In Cameroon, Holland was given a royal name ("Ndefru"). In Ghana, the Akpaglo family gave him three more African names during a seven-hour ceremony. Holland's new names include Togbe ("old wise man," even though Holland is in his 40s), Korsi ("born on Sunday," which he was) and Degboe ("brave person who went away and returned").

"I'm satisfied now — now that I have four names," Holland joked.

But he's not finished yet. Holland still wants to share the experience he had with his fellow Americans, and at the same time give African visitors a taste of America. Holland says some of his friends and relatives back home in Atlanta are irked by the idea that they were somehow sold into slavery by their African ancestors. His African friends and relatives say that's not the way it was. So Holland is trying to organize a daylong reunion and seminar on May 22 in Virginia, where his ancestors worked as slaves, to give Africans and Americans a chance to talk through their history together.

Holland has invited Fon Angwafo III, who heads the Mankon tribal group in Cameroon, as well as family representatives from Ghana. He's hoping that his African-American relatives as well as the descendants of the Virginia family who held his ancestors as slaves will be on hand as well.

"You hope to enlighten your family about Africa and what happened in the slave trade," Holland explained.

Holland has already heard that "the Fon" has accepted his invitation, and he's pretty sure someone from Ghana also will be coming. It's not a done deal yet, but if everything works out the way Holland hopes, one man's quest to find his family roots will turn into a meeting of the clans from across oceans of time and space.

Holland says his newfound African kin can hardly wait. "They're past excited right now," he told me. All in all, not a bad way to end Black History Month.

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Feel free to recount your own family quest in the comment section below. For more coverage of Black History Month and beyond, check in with msnbc.com's corporate cousins at TheGrio.com.

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."

Researchers have struck million-dollar deals for as many as 17 flights aboard two kinds of private-sector suborbital spaceships, with the prospect of many more in future years. "This is just whetting people’s taste for what is to come," said Alan Stern, a planetary scientist who helped engineer the deals and is due to be one of the first to fly.

Stern, an associate vice president at the Southwest Research Institute, is leading SwRI's suborbital research effort and is also presiding over this week's Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando, Fla. The conference is bringing together scientists and space entrepreneurs to develop what Stern calls a "killer app" for spaceflight: zero-G research in rocket-powered suborbital vehicles.

SwRI is involved in both of the deals announced over the past few days: One calls for two researchers to fly on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, with an option to purchase six more seats for a total value of $1.6 million. The other sets aside six flights on XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane, with an option for three more flights.

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Virgin Galactic has begun glide tests of its first SpaceShipOne craft, dubbed the VSS Enterprise, and expects to start rocket-powered tests by early 2012. XCOR's chief operating officer, Andrew Nelson, said the first Lynx flight tests were slated for early 2012 as well.

"I expect there's a good chance that the first flights could be late next year," Stern told me today. "The majority would be in '13, two years from now."

If all 17 spots are purchased, "this program will put more launches of human beings into space" than any single government agency over the 2012-2014 time period, Stern pointed out. When you lump together all the government-backed astronauts and cosmonauts going to the International Space Station, the total may be bigger, but "if you count just the number of NASA astronauts in those three years, you will find that it's a smaller number," he said.

The cost for the Virgin flights averages out to the standard tourist rate of $200,000 per seat. Virgin Galactic says its SpaceShipTwo flights will reach almost 70 miles in altitude and provide several minutes of zero gravity.

Neither Stern nor Nelson would say how much SwRI would pay for the XCOR Lynx flights, but the tourist rate for the Lynx is $95,000 per seat. Nelson said the first Lynx model to enter service, the Mark I, would rise to at least 38 miles in altitude and yield just under a minute of zero-G — which is enough for SwRI's purposes. The Lynx production model, the Mark II, could fly about twice as high and provide longer stretches of microgravity.

Stern said he would be one of the researchers going into space as part of the deal. Two other SwRI staffers, Dan Durda and Cathy Olkin, have also been trained for spaceflight. SwRI will be paying for all the flights out of its research and development budget.

Three experiments are ready for flight, Stern said: One involves monitoring the researchers' vital signs during zero-G as well as their high-G ascent and descent. Researchers will also make astronomical observations out the windows of the rocket planes using an ultraviolet imager. Durda , meanwhile, has prepared a sample of simulated asteroid-type material that will be studied during the different phases of flight. Such research with fake asteroid stuff could help scientists figure out what to expect if a human mission is sent to land on a real asteroid, as the Obama administration has proposed.

Stern said the SwRI space program was aimed at priming the pump for scientific studies using piloted suborbital spacecraft. Such flights offer a low-cost, quick-turnaround alternative to research on the International Space Station, which generally involves a years-long procedure for approving and executing experments.

"Someone had to break the ice," Stern said. "We're very proud to be the first."

Other companies, including Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin, are also working on suborbital spaceships, and Stern said SwRI has been in discussions with those ventures as well for future flights.

"We're building a spaceflight program, and we'll take all comers" Stern said.

Other perspectives on suborbital science:

• Space.com: Virgin signs deal to launch scientists into space
• The Space Review: Suborbital back out of the shadows
• New York Times: One giant leap for researchers

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Stern is due to discuss suborbital science initiatives on March 13 on "Virtually Speaking Science" with co-hosts Alan Boyle and Robin Snelson. 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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Air Force engineers have used their skills in keeping airplanes aloft to harness more than 99 percent of the energy in a simulated deep ocean wave. A scaled up version of the technology should be as efficient, they report.

The free-floating, fully-submerged wave energy converter effectively cancels incoming waves, capturing their energy while flattening them out. This differs from other wave energy technologies that are tethered to the seafloor and tend to be battered by storms.

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Researchers at the U.S. Air Force Academy who have expertise in feedback flow control and fluid dynamics for various military aircraft and NASA spacecraft began working on the project in 2008.

Feedback flow control research involves the use of sensors and adjustable parts to control how fluids flow around airfoils like wings. The researchers decided to apply this knowledge to wave energy after reading about the field in a magazine and realizing the similarities.

The team presented their design and computer simulation results at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in November 2009. The latest tests are experimental confirmation of the computer simulations.

"Nobody believes simulations other than the guy who did it," Stefan Siegal, who is leading the wave energy effort, said in a news release announcing the result. "So we set up a very small, about 1:300 scale version of the deep ocean wave in a lab."

When they put in a scale model of the wave energy converter, they were able to capture about 95 percent of the wave's energy. "That is in a sense confirming the results that we got out of the simulations," Siegal said.

The remaining five percent was lost to harmonic waves. The team tweaked the feedback flow control and increased the efficiency to 99 percent in subsequent tests.

Siegel expressed confidence in the press release that a scaled up version of the experiment will behave in a similar fashion.

The Department of Energy has provided another $400,000 for follow on testing with a 1:10 scale models at the Offshore Technology Research Center at Texas A&M University, taking the technology another step closer to full size tests in the open ocean.

Update for 7:40 p.m. ET: In a follow-up phone conversation today, Siegel explained his optimism for the scale-up of the technology. "Things actually get better for us as it gets bigger," he said. There's a lot of friction at the current scale, and the waves themselves are not very powerful. "In a sense, the experiment we just completed is almost, I would say, the worst-case scenario," Siegel said.

What's more, Siegel and his colleagues are about to publish numerical full-scale simulation results that demonstrate how this will work. Since the model-scale simulations and experimental results match up, they are confident the full-scale experiment will match the full-scale simulations as well.

Siegel now splits his time between the Air Force Academy and a startup dedicated to the wave energy technology. Visit the company website to learn more: Atargis Energy Inc.

More stories on wave energy:

• $28 billion in wave energy projects proposed
• Scientists tap motion in the ocean for energy
• Oregon eyes wave buoys to generate power

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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 idea of beaming down power from outer space has surfaced in science-fiction stories and government studies for decades now. Commercial deals have been struck, prototype satellites have been proposed, international initiatives have been announced. But has any real progress been made toward developing space-based solar power systems? That's what we're talking about this Sunday on "Virtually Speaking Science."

A few ventures have been working on the technological challenge of beaming power from Point A to Point B, in the form of laser beams or microwaves. In 2009, a company called LaserMotive won $900,000 in a NASA-backed competition for beam-powered robots. The same company proved last year that they could keep a quadrocopter up in the air all night, just by focusing a laser beam on its power-generating arrays. And in 2008, Managed Energy Technology demonstrated a wireless RF transmission system that could send a small-scale power beam over a distance of up to 90 miles.

But all these experiments are firmly grounded on planet Earth. Has anyone gotten to the point of building the hardware for beaming experiments in outer space?

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"None of them that I know of is at the point of turning steel," said Air Force Col. M.V. "Coyote" Smith, who'll be our guest on Sunday's show. Smith spearheaded a 2007 study for the Defense Department that laid out a scenario for the military use of space-based solar power, and made a follow-up proposal for a power-beaming satellite project called "One Lightbulb."

The idea was to beam enough power from space to make just one little LED light shine. Smith figured that $10 million would be enough to go ahead with the satellite project and learn how to overcome the technological as well as the international regulatory hurdles that bigger satellites might face. But the Pentagon didn't go for the idea.

"It's a new mission area," Smith explained, "and in this austere budget era, it's difficult to attract a sponsor organization."

For now, Smith is pinning his hopes on small-scale commercial ventures to get the ball rolling. "I think what you're going to see is that the commercial community is going to step up to the plate and do minor studies that would bait the interest," he told me.

What do you think? Will PG&E's customers be getting some of their electricity from space by 2016, as the California-based Solaren venture promised a couple of years ago? Or will space solar power stay in the realm of science fiction for decades to come? Tune in our show on your computer at 8 p.m. ET Sunday, or join the studio audience in the Second Life virtual world. (To get there, here's the SLurl.)

Heck, you can even watch the Oscars on TV while you're listening to "Virtually Speaking Science" on the computer. My Second Life avatar is probably better-looking than some of the actors you'll be seeing. Wish I could say the same thing for my First Life face.

Update for 12:35 a.m. Feb. 28: If you missed our chat about space solar power, you missed a humdinger ... including the premiere of our new cosmic theme song, written by yours truly and performed by Rocker Scientist James Emley. Fortunately, you can download the hourlong podcast at BlogTalkRadio.com. Stay tuned for our next "Virtually Speaking Science" show on March 13, when the subjects will be NASA's mission to Pluto as well as suborbital spaceflight and scientific research.

More about space solar power:

• Space solar power crowd bets on Obama
• Controversy flares over space power plan
• How do you make space power pay?
• Interactive: Harvesting energy from orbit

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My co-host on "Virtually Speaking Science" is Robin Snelson of the Space Studies Institute. Listen to the podcast from our Feb. 13 show, which featured Tim Pickens, team leader of the Rocket City Space Pioneers. And stay tuned for our program about Pluto and suborbital spaceflight on March 13, the 81st anniversary of the announcement of Pluto's discovery.

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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Ever since the Apollo era, NASA has been beaming up tunes to start off the workday for traveling astronauts. For the last mission of the space shuttle Discovery, the space agency asked the public to pick a couple of fitting wakeup songs from its Top 40 list. More than 2.4 million votes were registered in the online contest, and the winners are "Blue Sky" by Big Head Todd and the Monsters (with 722,662 votes) and the "Star Trek" theme song by Alexander Courage (with 671,134 votes). Songsters have also submitted more than 1,300 original compositions for consideration as future wakeup songs.

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Thanks to the marvels of the Internet, you too can wake up like an astronaut. Just arrange to have your Mission Control team click the "play" button and crank up the volume.

There'll be another online vote for the wakeup tunes to be played during Endeavour's STS-134 swan song in April. Stay tuned...

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Seeing a space shuttle launch from the ground is impressive enough, but the view from above is just as thrilling. Take a look at some out-of-this-world pictures of the shuttle Discovery's final launch.

First, there's this YouTube video of Thursday's liftoff, which software developer Neil Monday shot with his iPhone through the window of a commercial airplane flying out of Florida's Orlando International Airport. A member of the flight crew can be heard on the intercom, telling passengers to look out "the right side of the aircraft" ... and later on, someone jokes, "we don't want to have anybody complain because we were late."

No one's complaining here.

Still more stunning views were captured from an even higher altitude, using an unmanned helium balloon that was festooned with smart phone cameras and other gizmos. The first images were released today, and they're stunning. 

"We are tickled pink. We don't think anyone has ever taken a picture of the shuttle this high," said Keith Cowing, a spokesman for Challenger Center for Space Science Education, which led the Robonaut-1 project with Quest for Stars.

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The Robonaut-1 balloon was launched from Florida so that it was in position for Discovery's supersonic transit of the stratosphere. The team hoped that the high-tech smart phones would send back real-time views of the launch, but that didn't pan out.

"We were relying on cell phone coverage, and you don't get a lot of that over swamps," Cowing explained. He said that similar experiments carried out in California, where coverage is better, have had better real-time results.

Payload payday
Expecting that the real-time imagery might not work, the experiment was set up with redundancy. The balloon was equipped with six Android smart phones as well as other high-tech cameras — an array of equipment that's worth several thousand dollars.

The payload was recovered in a field just west of Daytona Beach, Fla., near Cody's Corner on Route 11. The built-in redundancy paid off. "These guys are a real combination of storm chasers, barnstormers, and techno-geeks," Cowing said of the team behind Robonaut-1, an effort that was geared toward advancing science education.

The team released the first of the photos retrieved from the equipment today, but Cowing said this was just the tip of the iceberg. The balloon was at an altitude somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 feet "for the better part of an hour, which means we actually have captured the entire launch sequence and can actually see it heading into space," Cowing noted.

More images will be released in the coming days, and the cream of the crop will be released March 2 at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Orlando.

More launch views
Robonaut-1 proved that regular folks can join the space community with just a few cutting-edge smart phones — devices that are lightweight, have a high-quality camera, and the computing power of desktops — plus some clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration and a little ingenuity. Meanwhile, other enthusiasts were busy capturing images of Discovery's launch from the ground.

Photographer Peter Lardizabal, for example, snapped pictures of Discovery's ascent and solid rocket booster separation from Apollo Beach in Canaveral National Seashore Park, about 18 miles north of the launch pad. More of his images are available from Spaceweather.com.

Lardizabal recommended Apollo Beach as a good venue for taking pictures. "It really gives you the best view of the separation. ... The only real problem is, it really, really fills up quick," he said. After Thursday's launch, he said, it took two hours to drive just three miles out of the park.

Shuttle-watchers started showing up a day in advance of Thurday's launch, and the park is likely to become even busier for the final two space shuttle launches, scheduled for April and June.

Lardizabal said another hot spot for shuttle-watching is Lighthouse Point Park, a Florida state park that's also north of the pad. "Viewing the launch from the north end is a special treat," due to the area's perspective on the shuttle's ascent route, he said. "You get to see the ascent of the vehicle from the side."

Are you thinking of taking in one of the last space shuttle launches in history? It's not too early to make your travel plans. The best guide to shuttle launch viewing is by photographer Ben Cooper. For additional advice, consult this NASA viewing guide, and keep an eye on this Web page for tickets from the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex. 

So ... are you nostalgic for Discovery yet? After this trip, the shuttle will be heading for a spot at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, and you'll be able to get a close-up look at the world's most traveled spaceship. In the meantime, flip through our album of "Blasts from the Past," and take a look at this shot of Discovery's launch in April 2010, as captured by Todd Swanson of His Image Studio in Charlotte, N.C. Thanks for sharing, Todd!

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET: Neil Monday, the airline passenger who shot the shuttle video on YouTube, told me the story behind the images in an e-mail:

"I am a 25-year-old working as a software developer for the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla. On Thursday, I was on my way back to my hometown of Richmond, Va., for my older brother's wedding. The flight was scheduled to take off at 2:25, and if it had been on time, I would have completely missed the launch. I think we took off at around 4:30 headed south, and slowly banked toward the north. Once we leveled out, the shuttle took off.

"I was actually seated on the opposite side of the plane, but luckily the window seat on the right side was open (which was the side the shuttle would be on). I asked the gentleman if I could sit there for a few minutes to film the launch, and he said sure. Once I was done filming, he gave me his contact info so I could show him the video. I had a digital camera with me which would have done a great job recording, but the batteries were dead, so I shot the video on my iPhone. I don't think I knew about the launch until 20 minutes before it happened. It was neat, because we could see the countdown on the TVs in the headrests and then just peek outside the window and see the real thing.

"I remember seeing another video on YouTube of a shuttle launch filmed from an airplane, and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. Then to actually have the opportunity to see it in real life was absolutely fascinating. I have a feeling that I will be telling the story to my grandkids one day."

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Science editor Alan Boyle and msnbc.com contributor John Roach joined forces on this posting. Tip o' the Log to Keith Cowing, who also presides over NASA Watch, SpaceRef, OnOrbit and other space websites.

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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Online markets do at least as well as opinion polls when it comes to predicting election results, but how good are they at predicting the Oscars?

If the trading on the Hollywood Stock Exchange is any indication, you should bet big on "The King's Speech," the movie about King George VI's struggle to overcome his stuttering problem on the brink of World War II. The exchange's AwardOptions market works like an online futures market, but uses play money rather than real cash. Shares in Oscar-nominated movies and actors can be bought and sold. When it's time to settle up on Sunday, the "investors" who picked the winners get a $25-per-share payoff in play money. The losers get nothing.

With that in mind, here are the top prospects as of 5:35 p.m. ET Friday:

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• Best picture: "The King's Speech" at $17.69 per share.
• Best director: David Fincher for "The Social Network" ($12.90), in a close contest with Tom Hooper for "The King's Speech" ($11.29).
• Best actor: Colin Firth for "The King's Speech" ($22.01).
• Best actress: Natalie Portman for "Black Swan" ($20.31).
• Supporting actor: Christian Bale for "The Fighter" ($18.92).
• Supporting actress: Melissa Leo for "The Fighter" ($15.47).
• Adapted screenplay: "The Social Network" ($17.90).
• Original screenplay: "The King's Speech" ($17.45).

The idea behind prediction markets is that they distill the wisdom of crowds — particularly knowledgeable crowds — about a complicated phenomenon. The investors who are more confident about their informed opinion should be willing to invest more, and it's also possible to back out of your opinion to cut your losses if the market isn't going your way.

That's the way it works with the Iowa Electronic Markets, which is the only U.S. prediction market authorized to work with real money. The market operation is run by the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business as a research project, and studies have shown that the IEM is at least as accurate as traditional polls for projecting presidential election results.

The IEM's researchers have used prediction markets not only to forecast elections, but also to predict the course of flu epidemics ... and box-office results as well. So how about Oscar awards?

"It's the sort of thing that's better suited to office pools than online markets," Tom Snee, a spokesman for the University of Iowa, told me today.

Unlike elections or box-office performance, the Oscar outcomes are decided by a relatively small group of 5,755 academy members — and they're not talking about how they voted. "There's really only a small number of people who know what's going on," Snee said. "There's no information to aggregate, it's just people speculating. So there isn't a whole lot we can do."

Although the IEM stays out of the Oscar prognostication business, it's getting more heavily into the box-office business. The university's M.B.A. students and faculty are already engaged in their most ambitious experiment yet, aimed at predicting the four-week box-office gross for "The Adjustment Bureau," a Matt Damon thriller that opens next Friday. The prognosticators are developing algorithms that account for the past performance of Damon's films, Damon's co-stars (Emily Blunt and Jon Stewart), the openings of other movies that weekend, the time of year (March is not the greatest season for new movies), the advance buzz and other factors.

"This is the same kind of analysis that professional marketers perform in their work, so it gives them an idea of what to expect on the job and helps them apply what they've learned in a class where there are real dollars at stake," Thomas Gruca, a marketing professor who is overseeing the contest, said in a news release.

As for the Oscars, one way to gauge the wisdom of crowds is to compare the outcome with the predictions from a living, breathing expert. Someone like, say, our very own "Scoop" columnist, Courtney Hazlett. Here are her best guesses in seven comparable Oscar categories as of Friday afternoon:

• Best picture: "The King's Speech."
• Best director: Tom Hooper for "The King's Speech."
• Best actor: Colin Firth for "The King's Speech."
• Best actress: Annette Bening for "The Kids Are All Right."
• Supporting actor: Geoffrey Rush for "The King's Speech."
• Supporting actress: Jacki Weaver for "Animal Kingdom" (with a nod to Melissa Leo).
• Adapted screenplay: Aaron Sorkin for "The Social Network."

And just to pile things on, here are the market leaders from Intrade's prediction market for six comparable Oscar categories, expressed in percentage terms as of 5:35 p.m. ET. Intrade, which is based in Ireland, works with real money rather than virtual cash:

• Best picture: "The King's Speech" (81.9 percent).
• Best director: David Fincher for "The Social Network" (60 percent).
• Best actor: Colin Firth for "The King's Speech" (94.9 percent).
• Best actress: Natalie Portman for "Black Swan" (88.4 percent).
• Supporting actor: Christian Bale for "The Fighter" (89.9 percent).
• Supporting actress: Melissa Leo for "The Fighter" (68.7 percent).

So it sounds like a classic human-vs.-market contest to me. Check back here on Sunday night to see how the real results compare with the predictions — and feel free to register your own forecasts as comments below. If you make a perfect prediction for the six top categories listed (best picture, director, actor, actress and supporting roles), I'll send you a free autographed pair of 3-D glasses as a reward. But the time stamp on the prediction must be no later than 12:01 a.m. ET Sunday, and I will accept only your first prediction (which means multiple guesses aren't allowed).

I realize that cardboard 3-D glasses aren't quite as glitzy as an Academy Award. On the other hand, what good is a golden statuette when you're watching a movie like this one?

Update for 12:30 a.m. ET Feb. 28: Seven out of eight ain't bad ... the only category that the Hollywood Stock Exchange's AwardOptions market didn't get right on Oscar night was best director: Tom Hooper ("The King's Speech") won out over David Fincher ("The Social Network"). Intrade also got that category wrong (although of course Hooper is at 99 percent now that the award has been announced). "Scoop" columnist Courtney Hazlett was correct about the director, but she missed the mark for the best-actress award (which went to Natalie Portman) as well as supporting actor and actress (Christian Bale and Melissa Leo). Bottom line? The big winner when it comes to predicting the Oscars is the wisdom of crowds.

More on prediction markets (and the Oscars):

• Political markets settle up
• Gold medal for Olympic predictions
• Flu forecasts come true
• Betting on a future market
• From 2009: Betting on the Oscars
• Rate the best-picture nominees
• Video: Oscar picks from the TODAY show

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Your old sneakers may smell like something found only in fetid corners of nature, but chances are there's plenty that's not natural about them. A pair of Dutch entrepreneurs wants to change that. They've created a fully biodegradable shoe that will sprout flowers when planted at the end of their life.

OAT Shoes says their goal is to produce "sneakers that not only look good, but leave no mark on the environment when you throw them out."

The kicks are made using hemp, cork, bio-cotton, certified biodegradable plastics, chlorine-free bleach and other nontoxic materials. The first batch will come with seeds in their tongues, so that wildflowers will sprout up in commemoration of users' planted, expired kicks, according to Gizmag.

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The shoes are the brainchild of entrepreneurs Christiaan Maats and Dirk-Jan Oudshoorn, who believe the future of fashion is "reconciliation between nature and industry," they write on their website.

"We are nature, we were born from it, live in it and we’ve been playing around with it for a while now, building cities and roads and running around, not minding too much about keeping the place clean. And now, up to our knees in waste and with mother earth losing her temper, it’s time for some spring cleaning. And that starts with making greener choices."

Making greener choices, they add, often means a compromise on fashion. They hope their sneakers cross the barrier. As a testament to the shoes' marketplace potential, the company won second prize this January in the Green Fashion Competition at Amsterdam International Fashion Week.

Vasilios Christofilakos is the chairman of the accessories design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. He told me today that the shoes are innovative and represent the future of the shoe industry.

"What they are doing right now is opening up the doors for everybody. It's an opportunity," he said. "Some people say 'Oh it is so gimmicky.' Really? Why don't we look beyond the gimmick? Let's look at what's happening."

What's happening, he says, is a revolution in the fashion industry. Simple Shoes, for example, strives for 100 percent sustainability and incorporates everything from recycled inner tubes and plastic bottles to bamboo, hemp, and organic cotton into their shoes and bags. Other companies, such as Nike, make sustainability a prominent part of their businesses.

Meaningful change, Christofilakos said, will come from the new generation of industry leaders — college age students and recent graduates — who are bringing to the industry a global awareness of the need for sustainable materials and products.

"We may still be looking at them as novelty items today. They are not the staple. But I feel that these novelty items will be the staple," he said. "When in the future I don't know, but I think that is where we are going."

OAT Shoes are expected to hit store shelves this spring, though the company reported Thursday on their Facebook page that they hit some glitches with production in Bulgaria.

More stories on geeky fashion:

• 'Smart' clothing respond to wearer's emotions
• Japanese astronaut testing 'odor-free' clothes
• Self cleaning coating for clothes developed
• 'Smart' fabric glows in response to allergens

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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).

One month after President Barack Obama urged America to rise up and respond to a "Sputnik moment" in international high-tech competition, there are rising worries that the trend line for civilian research and development spending is going down rather than up.

The most worrisome development came last Friday, when the House approved a spending plan for the rest of the current fiscal year that would make deep cuts in spending for science and tech programs. The budget for the Energy Department's Office of Science, for example, would be cut by 18 percent. Ned Sauthoff, head of the U.S. ITER fusion research program, said such a reduction really translates into a roughly 30 percent cut, because a whole year's worth of spending reductions would have to be spread over about seven months.

If the House's budget become law, that could mean the shutdown of all the particle accelerators at federal labs, as well as a premature end to dozens of experiments in next-generation biofuels, batteries and nuclear reactors.

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Biomedical research would take a hit as well — which carries a particularly deep sting for geneticist Eric Lander, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard as well as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. He believes the 21st century will be "the century of biomedical research," and worries that the United States could lose its lead in the field to other countries.

"This is a scary moment," he said this week at a Harvard seminar to mark the 10th anniversary of the decoding of the human genome. "Far more scary than some satellite going around beeping."

Vicki Sato, a veteran of the pharmaceutical industry who is now a professor at Harvard Business School, said the current revolution in biomedicine had "much more daunting" consequences than 1957's Sputnik moment. "If we fail at it, the health consequences, the economic consequences, the competitiveness consequences will be significant — in some ways, more significant than losing the race for space."

Lander said Obama's reference to Sputnik was meant to call attention to the current budgetary tug of war. Cutting the deficit without properly investing in future innovation would result in a "Pyrrhic victory," he said. "We will end up with a balanced budget and a second-rate nation."

White House science adviser John Holdren said something similar during last weekend's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. "Everybody is looking at China and saying, if we don't lift our game, China is going to eat our lunch economically," he told reporters, "because the amount they are investing in science, technology and innovation, while it has not yet reached anything like our level, is rising very quickly."

You might expect people like Lander and Holdren to say those sorts of things, considering that they're Obama's top counselors on scientific issues. But how about physicist Ray Orbach, who served as the Department of Energy's under secretary for science under President George W. Bush? In an editorial written for the journal Science, Orbach said he watched the House approve its budget bill "with a mixture of astonishment and dismay."

"Other countries, such as China and India, are increasing their funding of scientific research because they understand its critical role in spurring technological advances and other innovations," he wrote. "If the United States is to compete in the global economy, it too must continue to invest in research programs."

Orbach, who is now the director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was vitally important for the Senate to restore funding for science in the current fiscal year. "Failure to do so would relegate the United States to second-class status in the scientific community and threaten economic growth and prosperity for future generations of Americans," he wrote.

One way or the other, this phase of the budget battle will reach a climax next week, when the current legislation that governs federal spending expires. There's already talk of a costly government shutdown if the GOP-controlled House, the Democrat-controlled Senate and the White House can't reach a deal by March 4. Maybe they should just bring in a few engineers to straighten out this silly budget mess.

What do you think? Register your opinion in the mini-poll above (unscientific, of course) and expand upon your view in the comment space below.

More about politics and science:

• Science shifting in a 'Sputnik moment'
• White House issues scientific integrity memo
• How political shifts will spin science as well

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

The space shuttle Discovery is poised for its final blastoff today at 4:50 p.m. ET, on a mission to the International Space Station, and all sorts of folks are have their eyes and ears tuned in to the finale, helping those of us who aren't at Kennedy Space Center follow all the action.

A project aimed at getting school-age kids amped up about Discovery's final mission is launching a helium-filled balloon equipped with cameras and other gizmos to photograph the shuttle as it climbs into space from an altitude of 100,000 feet. The balloon will also provide live video during the mission. The video is due to be streamed on UStream, Challenger.org and OnOrbit.

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Quest for Stars and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education will time the launch of the "Robonaut-1" payload from Florida so that it is in position for Discovery's supersonic transit of the stratosphere. Bobby Russell, a spokesman for Quest for Stars, said some of the high-definition, high-altitude views should be available in real time — but the "jaw-droppers" won't be released until Robonaut-1's payload falls back to Earth and is retrieved.

"We think we might be knocked from the sky by the supersonic shock wave," Russell said.

For more information on the project, check out this news release. And for another view of a launch from space, here's a photo showing last week's launch of the European Space Agency's Kepler ATV-2 cargo craft, as seen from the space station:

Watch on the Web
NASA TV, the space agency's multiplatform feed for shuttle junkies over the years, is of course still available and now streamed over the Internet in HD. Familiarity with human-spaceflight geek-speak helps follow along the commentary. We'll be streaming NASA's video coverage here on msnbc.com.

If you want a little video-game ambience with your liftoff, you could join Sony and NASA and watch a live stream of the launch from within PlayStation Home — an online virtual world you can access from PlayStation 3 game machines. Check out Winda Benedetti's post for more information.

Tune in
Rather just listen in? Then tune in to SomaFM Mission Control, an Internet radio station that will be treating listeners to a mix of ambient and experimental music along with live audio from the space shuttle mission.

Update for 6 p.m. ET: Spotty cell phone coverage hampered real-time data collection from Robonaut-1, and the balloon apparently hit bad weather during its ascent. The balloon's altitude was estimated at 33,000 feet when cell phone coverage ended. The project's organizers are still hoping that they'll recover some launch images from the payload. "We are now turning to retrieval," Quest for Stars reported in a Twitter update.

More stories about Discovery's last mission: 

• Discovery's final crew: Experienced and friends
• Get the latest on Discovery's final mission
• Robot butler hitching ride to orbit on shuttle
• Shuttle payload includes more closet space
• By the numbers: Basic facts about the shuttle
• Got a great launch picture? Please share it 

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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).

If you're one of the many people who won't be able to watch the shuttle Discovery make her final launch into space from the front-row seats at the Kennedy Space Center — there's no need to panic. You can always watch it from your very own virtual yacht.

That is, NASA and Sony have announced that a live stream of the Thursday launch will be made available from within PlayStation Home — the online virtual world you can access from PlayStation 3 game machines. It will be the first live streaming event shown within Home.

Though, if you want to watch the shuttle launch from there, you're going to have to buy a boat. Specifically, you're going to have to buy the Sunset Yacht.

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The good news is, the Sunset Yacht is cheaper than, say, a real yacht. But it'll still cost you $4.99. You can pick up this yacht – which becomes your own personal virtual space within PlayStation Home — at the LOOT Store in the PlayStation Home Mall.

Once you have the yacht, you can invite your Home friends and fellow PS3 gamers to bring their avatars to your ship so you can all watch the shuttle launch together virtually. It'll be streamed live via the NASA TV Channel onto a giant TV screen hanging in the middle of your boat.

In fact, here's a look at the virtual yacht and the virtual TV screen that could be yours (cue the cheesy music):

The shuttle launch currently is scheduled for 4:50 p.m. ET (1:50 PT). And, even if you and your friends are located in various places around the country, you can oooh and ahhh over the sight together right there on your yacht if you all have blue-tooth headsets connected to your PS3s.

"We're excited about this new way for people to experience the exhilaration of human spaceflight as part of a larger community," said NASA spokesman David Weaver in the press release. "In addition to the other two shuttle launches planned for April and June, NASA looks forward to sharing more of our endeavors with PlayStation users."

Of course, it's worth noting that if you don't want to shell out the $4.99 for a virtual yacht or you don't happen to have a PS3, you can always watch the Discovery launch for free right here on NASA's web site.

But, if you do decide to drop cash for your virtual boat, you will get some extra space-travelly goodness.

According to the press release, the Sunset Yacht's NASA TV channel will offer hundreds of videos that give you views from past and current NASA missions. There will also be a gallery of podcasts showcasing missions including the Mars Science Laboratory and Voyager spacecraft from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

And if space travel isn't your thing, you can always watch clips of "Breaking Bad," "Charlie's Angels" and (I'm not making this up) "He Man and the Masters of the Universe" right there on your giant virtual TV screen, or perhaps simply enjoy the sights and sounds of the vast virtual ocean around you.

Ain't (virtual) life grand?

For more gaming news, check out:

• Will you feel at home in PlayStation Home?
• Blind man plays video game flawlessly
• Nancy Drew and the secret of the iPad app

Winda Benedetti writes about games  for msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.

Kleopatra, a dog-bone shaped asteroid named after the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt, is a pile of rubble that spawned twin moons about 100 million years ago, astronomers announced in a new study.

The discovery stems from detailed observations of 135-mile-long Kleopatra with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii made in 2008 that confirmed the asteroid's dog-bone shape and the presence of two moons, each about 5 miles wide.

The scientists charted the orbits of the moons to determine the asteroid's mass. This combined with other data on the asteroid's size and shape allowed them to determine its density: a low 3.6 grams per cubic centimeter.

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"That implies that somehow this asteroid has a large portion of void in its interior," Franck Marchis, an assistant research astronomer with the University of California at Berkeley, told me today. 

Rubble piles
In other words, the asteroid is a pile of rubble, not a solid chunk of rock as such large asteroids were once thought to be. Instead, Kleopatra joins a growing list of large asteroids that appear to be rubble piles, said Marchis, who is also a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

"We now know that asteroids can have a large porosity," Marchis said. "They are not primitive bodies; they are most likely bodies that are the result of a catastrophic disruption."

He and his colleagues suggest that the rubble pile coalesced from the remains of a smashup between rocky, metallic asteroids, which happened sometime after the origin of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

The moons could be leftover fragments from this collision, though Marchis and his colleagues now think they are pieces of the rubble pile asteroid that broke off during another impact that sent the asteroid spinning faster and faster.

This spinning would have elongated the asteroid and thrown off the moon. The team's calculations suggest the outermost moon was ejected about 100 million years ago; the inner moon about 10 million years ago.

Naming twins
The moons, Cleoselene and Alexhelios, are named after the twins born to their namesake, Cleopatra VII, and Mark Antony, a politician and general from the Roman republic: Cleopatra Selene II and Alexander Helios.

The names are in keeping with a tradition started when Marchis and his colleagues discovered the triple asteroid system 87 Sylvia in 2005 and named its two moons Romulus and Remus because Rhea Silvia was the mother of Romulus and Remus, the twins who founded Rome.

"And so just to keep this tradition, and because Cleopatra had twins as well, we decided to call them Alex Helios and Cleopatra Selene II, and we shortened them to Alexhelios and Cleoselen," Marchis said.

The outermost moon is Alexhelios and the innermost moon is Cleoselene. In Greek mythology, Helios and Selene represented the sun and moon, respectively.

Planet formation

The study of rubble pile asteroids may also help astronomers understand how planets could form more quickly than they would if their cores are formed by larger bodies glomming together.

"We know that planets from by collision of planetesimals. What we don't know is what was the composition of these planetesimals," Marchis explained. "We think that observing asteroids will give us direct information about the formation of the planetesimals, from which the planets formed."

If an asteroid is a rubble pile, when it collides with another asteroid, it is likely to be obliterated into small fragments that will then accrete into a larger body. This process is faster than the accretion of solid body asteroids, he said.

"So the question right now is how many of the asteroids that we have been observing, the 500,000 of them that we know, are rubble piles?" he said. "We don't know that yet. We just know the more measurements we have of the mass and density of asteroids, the more of them are in fact rubble piles."

Findings are reported in the February issue of the journal Icarus.

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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).

 

Will electric cars take over America's roads? How about natural gas, or biofuels? Or will gasoline still be the automotive fuel of choice, despite concerns about imported oil and greenhouse-gas emissions? The nation's long-term energy future is still up for grabs, but a spate of recent reports suggest that big changes are on the way.

The first mass-market, highway-ready plug-in electric vehicles are already making their way to drivers' garages, although the production pipeline for Chevrolet Volts and Nissan Leafs may not be moving as fast as would-be buyers hoped. Toyota's plug-in Prius, the Ford Focus Electric and other electric entrants are due to join the Volt and the Leaf by the end of the year. But it's not yet clear whether electric vehicles, or EVs, will win out in the marketplace.

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The big issue is batteries. As long as the cost of onboard electric power is high, compared to the cost of gasoline, buying an EV will never make sense based on fuel savings alone. A couple of years ago, the National Research Council estimated that providing enough battery power for 10 miles of electric driving would cost $3,300, and a 40-mile all-battery range (such as the Volt's) would add $14,000 to the cost of a car. Today, the battery pack for 200 miles of driving would add $20,000, says Kristin Persson, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Scientists are focusing on making batteries work "longer, safer, cheaper," Persson said at last weekend's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. But she doesn't expect the revolution to come anytime soon: Lithium-ion will be the battery technology of choice for the next 10 to 15 years, she said.

Battery evolution, not revolution
Actually, battery technology is in the midst of evolution rather than revolution. For example, during the AAAS meeting, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reported on the use of chemical-laden microspheres that give worn-out batteries the chance to "heal" themselves — extending their lifetime and cutting down on the risk of battery fires.

Another research group has developed an advanced lithium-ion battery that can store more power and operate efficiently over a wider range of temperatures. "To our knowledge, a lithium-ion battery having this unique electrode combination has so far never been reported," the researchers said this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. "On the basis of the performance demonstrated here, this battery is a top candidate for powering sustainable vehicles."

Better batteries are the biggest challenge for electric vehicles, but a retooling of America's energy distribution infrastructure is another, as was pointed out last year at an MIT symposium. If the auto industry meets the Obama administration's optimistic target of putting a million advanced-technology cars on the road by 2015, that could put more of a drain on the nation's electrical grid and accelerate the rise of smart-grid technology. (In the wake of last month's State of the Union Address, the administration rolled out a fresh set of initiatives aimed at meeting that 2015 goal.)

At the AAAS meeting, the U.S. Department of Energy's Imre Gyuk pointed out that hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on technologies that can help even out the load on the grid — ranging from frequency regulation and ramping to the use of flywheels, compressed air and pumped hydro to store the energy generated by intermittent power sources such as solar and wind.

'Fracking' for energy freedom?
But even with all this effort, will electric vehicles prevail? After all, the biggest winner in last year's $10 million Automotive X Prize competition was not an electric car, but Edison 2's ethanol-powered Very Light Car — which scored 102 mpg in large part because it was made from ultra-light materials, with an ultra-efficient aerodynamic design. And in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, John Deutch, a former CIA director who is now a professor at MIT, claims that the global energy landscape could well be transformed by the rapid rise of shale gas as a domestic energy source.

Vehicles powered by compressed natural gas could become more prevalent, as could gas-fired electric plants. Shale gas production comes with its own problems, of course — ranging from the environmental impact of "fracking," to the issues associated with continued greenhouse-gas emissions, to the infrastructure shifts that would be required to let drivers fuel up with natural gas instead of gasoline. But the "good news about gas" demonstrates that electric isn't the only energy technology generating buzz.

What do you think? Will your next car be a plug-in, or will you be waiting to see whether another technology wins the race to replace gasoline? Feel free to register your opinion as a comment below.

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."  

A 6.3 magnitude earthquake toppled buildings, buckled streets, and killed at least 100 people in the southern New Zealand city Christchurch Tuesday – a far worse toll of death and destruction than the 7.0 earthquake that hit the same region on Sept. 4, 2010, but resulted in no loss of life.

Why?

"The main reason is that this earthquake is basically under Christchurch whereas the one in September was approximately 30 miles away," Don Blakeman, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., told me.

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Although 30 miles doesn’t seem all that far, he said the distance appears to have made all the difference. Another factor could be the shaking characteristics of the quake — this one may have had higher frequency waves, which cause more damage, but that's not known at this point.  

Aftershocks
Tuesday's event was likely an aftershock from the September event and is consistent with a migration pattern of aftershocks away from the epicenter of a major quake, according to Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California.

"What we are seeing now is that the aftershock activity has moved to the eastern side of that fault zone and that's not untypical. Sequences of earthquakes will propagate along a fault structure," he told me.

Although it was an aftershock, it was a large aftershock, he noted.

"Most aftershocks are typically small and they themselves don't generate many aftershocks, but occasionally, and as far as we can tell randomly, one of those will turn out to be a big earthquake itself and then it will have an aftershock sequence," he said.

Tens of aftershocks have already been felt in Christchurch since the 6.3 earthquake on Tuesday, according to news accounts.

Reports indicating that a contributor to Tuesday's death toll was the timing of the earthquake (it happened in the middle of the day when people were out and about, whereas the September quake was in the middle of the night when people were at home in bed) are misguided, Blakeman said.

"This is a very general thing, but there tend to be more injuries when people are at home in the evenings, especially at night, just because they are all in buildings," he explained.

Earthquake infrastructure
As bad as the toll from this earthquake in New Zealand, it won't be as devastating as the shallow, 7.0 earthquake that struck essentially beneath Port au Prince, Haiti, in January last year. That's mainly because Christchurch is built to withstand temblors.

"In Haiti, a lot of the structures are very, very poor," Blakeman said. Poor construction with an earthquake centered on the city was a recipe for disaster. Of course, the Haiti earthquake was also much larger — 7.0 versus 6.3.

One of the reasons Christchurch's infrastructure is built to withstand earthquakes is because New Zealand, like Southern California, is bracing for even bigger earthquakes in the future.

One of New Zealand's major fault systems, the Alpine Fault system, is analogous to the San Andreas Fault in California, noted Jordan, in that it has primarily strike-slip motion on it and is expected to rupture sometime in the future with a large earthquake.

"New Zealand has another aspect to it: it is also being squeezed, especially to the north but even in this region one can see the effects of that kind of compression from the plate tectonic motions that are occurring in the area," Jordan added. "That gives rise to subsidiary faulting such as you are seeing here."

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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).

What would happen if we found out that we are not alone in the universe? Or, on the flip side, what would happen if we decided that we really were alone? Experts provided updated answers to those age-old questions, from a scientific as well as a religious angle, during a Sunday session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting. But one of the most intriguing questions had more of a personal spin: What would you ask E.T. if you had the chance?

First, here's some background:

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Questions surrounding the possibility of life beyond Earth might get more serious sometime in the next quarter-century or so. Wesley Traub, chief scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program, predicted that by 2030, five Earth-scale planets would be identified among the 100 closest star systems as worthy of being studied for signs of life. He based that prediction on the most recent lineup of candidates from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler probe.

"About a third of all planets are planets that could have life on them," he said — that is, Earth-size worlds or super-Earths.

Looking for alien life
What would scientists look for when it comes to life detection? Traub speculated that future spacecraft could analyze the atmospheres of alien worlds for signs of high oxygen levels and water vapor. Spectral analysis of the light reflected by those planets might even turn up the chemical signature of chlorophyll or other chemicals indicative of life. But it'd be almost impossible to tell whether the alien organisms are one-celled creatures, six-legged dinosaurs or intelligent species. If they're smart enough to communicate with us, the only way we'd know is through well-known means such as radio signals or laser bursts (or maybe orchestrated blasts from a stellar beacon).

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, has said that evidence of alien life — either through such direct contact or through long-distance chemical analysis — could become available in a time frame ranging from 2025 to 2035. And he bet his listeners at Sunday's talk that he'd buy them a cup of coffee if E.T. wasn't found in their lifetime. (Will that bet ever pay off? Think about it: You can't take your Starbucks with you.)

So what would society do if life is detected? At Sunday's talk, science historian Owen Gingerich said the first scientific claims for E.T.'s existence would likely be hotly contested, just as the Mars meteorite microfossils have been for the past 15 years. Even if the findings are confirmed, it would take years for the implications to sink in.

Most of the leaders of the world's religions say extraterrestrial life wouldn't shake their faith. But 16th-century theologian Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake after saying so, and even today some believers say E.T.'s existence would make a "mockery" of Christianity. Like it or not, religious institutions and other pillars of society would have to accept (or deny) a paradigm shift at least as big as the shifts sparked by astronomy and biology. 

Misanthropic principle
What if life is not detected? It's pretty hard to prove a negative, but suppose future probes analyze the atmospheres of scores of Earth-size planets ... and find nothing worthy of note. Suppose the search for extraterrestrial intelligence continues for a century ... and no messages are received. Howard Smith, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the evidence already suggests that intelligent life is extremely rare in the universe, and we're the only sentient beings within a 1,250-light-year radius. (Smith chose that figure because it's about as far as humans could possibly travel during a 100-generation round trip at the speed of light.)

"We are probably alone and will have to solve our own problems," he said at Sunday's talk.

Smith calls this the "misanthropic principle." That term plays off the widely cited anthropic principle — the idea that Earth appears to be so suited for life as we know it not necessarily because God made it that way, but simply because we wouldn't be around to see it if it wasn't.

The way Smith sees it, the misanthropic principle is a good thing. The view that we alone are responsible for our zone of the cosmos should make us feel "blessed," and more careful about not spoiling the good thing we've got here.

"The misanthropic principle is joyous," Smith said. "We should rejoice in our good fortune."

Is it depressing or liberating to think that we're truly the best the universe has to offer, at least in this celestial neck of the woods? Feel free to add your comments below.

Oh, and about the question we started out with: What would you ask E.T. if you had the chance? This came up during the question-and-answer session, and one of the suggestions was along the lines of "Dear E.T.: Do you have a religion?" (That led science writer David Despain to quip in a Twitter comment: "Hello, I'm a Jatravartid. Let me share with you the message of the Great Green Arkleseizure's white handkerchief.")

Personally speaking, I'd rather ask: "How did you do it? How did you survive long enough to get to this point of contact?" If E.T. responds by raising its ray gun, I'd probably have the answer I wasn't hoping to get.

But what would you ask? 

More about the search for aliens:

• How would alien life change your life? 
• What to do if we find alien life
• Calculate the odds of finding E.T.
• Hawking: Aliens may pose risks to Earth
• Still more about the search from msnbc.com

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After a winter maintenance break, Europe's Large Hadron Collider went back into operation this weekend, beginning a marathon that scientists hope will lead to theory-twisting breakthroughs.

Argonne National Laboratory's Thomas LeCompte, who is physics coordinator for the LHC's ATLAS detector, said the particle accelerator resumed shooting proton beams around its 17-mile-round (27-kilometer-round) underground ring on Saturday night. James Gillies, a spokesman for Europe's CERN nuclear research center, told me that proton-on-proton collisions could resume within a week.

During the next two years, the underground particle accelerator could produce data pointing to the nature of dark matter, or the discovery of a whole new class of unanticipated subatomic curiosities, or the existence of extra dimensions ... or the presence of the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle" that could explain why some particles have mass and others don't.

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"By the end of next year, we hope very much that we will be able to say something about the Higgs," said Felicitas Pauss, head of international relations at Europe's CERN nuclear research center.

String theory supported
Researchers are already able to say something about potentially new physics, coming out of just a few weeks' worth of lead-ion collisions in November. Those collisions created quark-gluon plasma, an exotic type of matter that existed just an instant after the big bang, said Yves Schutz, a CERN physicist who is part of the team behind the LHC's ALICE detector.

"We have produced in the laboratory the hottest matter ever, the densest matter ever," Schutz said today during a session at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Washington.

Previous experiments conducted at another particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider in New York, showed that quark-gluon plasma took on the form of a liquid. Some scientists expected the plasma to go to a gaseous state at the higher temperatures achieved by ALICE, but it didn't. Instead, it was a "perfect liquid, which flows without resistance and is completely opaque," Schutz said.

That in itself was a big surprise. But Schutz told me that the results were consistent with what had been predicted by a particular variant of string theory known as AdS/CFT correspondence, which also addresses such mysteries as quantum gravity and extra dimensions. "I'm surprised that they can make a prediction and that it matches what we measured," Schutz said.

String theory is a long-debated conception of the subatomic world that envisions matter as being composed of incredibly tiny strings or membranes that vibrate in an 11-dimensional universe. Skeptics have criticized the concept as being untestable and unfalsifiable, but if findings from the LHC can confirm some hypotheses and falsify others, that could increase string theory's acceptance.

Only the beginning
The collider is scheduled to run at its current energy of 3.5 trillion electron volts (TeV) per beam for 2011 and 2012, with a weeks-long maintenance break next winter that would be similar to the break that has just ended. At the end of 2012, the machine would be shut down for more than a year to get it ready to run at its full power of 7 TeV per beam.

Over the past year, the LHC's beams have been at 3.5 TeV, producing results that have confirmed decades' worth of findings from earlier particle accelerators. But the collisions have not yet yielded enough data to provide evidence for the exotic theories that scientists have suggested, Pauss said. LeCompte explained that the telltale signs of dark matter, microscopic black holes, supersymmetric particles or the Higgs boson are so rare that scientists have to search through huge amounts of data to find them — and then make sure that the evidence is rock-solid.

He compared the task to an oil-prospecting operation. "You might strike oil, but you haven't explored the whole field," LeCompte said.

By the end of 2012, scientists should have enough data to confirm or reject claims about the Higgs boson and the other oddities. If the Higgs is not found, that might force physicists to take a second look at the Standard Model, the theory of subatomic structure that ranks as one of physics' biggest achievements.

"We know the Standard Model is wrong at some level," LeCompte said. "We know that something lies beyond that. The Higgs is the simplest and most elegant way to push it to the next level, but nature may have something else in mind."

A good number of scientists say failing to find the Higgs boson at the LHC would actually be more intriguing than finding it — even though they admit it'd be hard to tell that to the politicians who have funded the $10 billion international project.

"If we don't see it, we will be very excited, because it means that there's something very brand-new," the University of Maryland's Nicholas Hadley, who is a member of the research team for the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid detector, told journalists at today's news briefing. "But to say we looked and we didn't find anything ... we'll probably volunteer to have other people stand up here in front of you if that day comes."

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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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."