Igor Paprotny / Thayer School of Engineering

Researchers have managed to control a swarm of microbots with a single signal. The breakthrough may eventually lead to robots that are able to build tissues inside the human body.

With the application of a single electrical signal, researchers can control swarms of tiny robots to assemble themselves into structures. 

"We are controlling these robots kind of like remote controlled cars," Igor Paprotny, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California at Berkeley who is co-leading the research effort, told me Friday. 

Instead of one controller transmitting a signal to steer one car, the signal controls several cars at once, sending each in a slightly different direction. 

This is accomplished by building each microbot so that they behave in a different way when they get the signal. Paprotny said to think of the robots as individual pieces of a puzzle. When controlled by the global the signal, they come together to build and solve the puzzle.

Control breakthrough
The breakthrough in control of the tiny robots, each a few hair widths across, overcomes a problem of stickiness at small scale due to the same type of forces that allow geckos to scurry across the ceiling.

Researchers have previously controlled tiny machines with the use of magnetic fields, MIT's Technology Review reports, but the equipment is complex and robot control is difficult at best.

The idea of controlling microbots with an electrical signal was first presented in 2005 by team co-leader Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke University. 

Now, the team is able to control several microbots at once to perform a singular task.

The assembly breakthrough could eventually lead to applications such as sending swarms of robots into the body to build tissues, such as a new wall for a damaged capillary.

More complex robots could assemble themselves into tools to perform surgery or make images, Paprotny explained. 

Keeping it simple
To date, the team has created a set of four simple silicon robots which have been tweaked to move in slightly different ways on a surface. MIT's Technology Review describes them this way:

The robots contain an actuator called a scratch drive, which bends in response to voltage supplied through the electric array. When it releases tension, it goes forward, in a movement similar to an inchworm's. But the key to the robots' varying behavior is the arms extending from the actuators. ... To control a swarm, the team designed each robot with an arm that reacts differently during portions of the voltage signal.

"We keep the robots simple, but we can achieve this very rich behavior which allows us now to assemble these shapes," Paprotny told me.

The next step is to move from this substrate to a system that can function in a liquid environment, allowing the robots to move and assemble 3-D structures. This is needed for tissue assembly.

A collaborator, Ali Khademhosseini at Harvard Medical School, envisions the robots building tissue cells as they assemble themselves.

"The cells, once they're assembled, come off from the robots letting cells rearrange further to make things that are indistinguishable from natural tissue," he told MIT Technology Review.

"But right now," he added, "the challenge is we're still not very good at making each of these individual components."

More stories on tiny robots: 

• New biological robots build themselves 
• Programmed DNA robot goes where scientists tell it 
• Inchworm like robot smallest ever 
• Solar powered robot swarm could clean oil 

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).

AMS-02 Roma Group

An artist's conception shows the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the left, installed on one of the International Space Station's truss sections. The device is to be brought up on the shuttle Endeavour.

Big particle-physics experiments have caused their share of unwarranted nightmares over the past few years, including the worries about globe-gobbling black holes and strangelets that might be created by Europe's Large Hadron Collider. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a $2 billion particle detector due to go into orbit on the shuttle Endeavour, just might actually detect strangelets, or the traces of mysterious dark matter, or bits of antimatter that couldn't possibly be created on Earth.

But Samuel Ting, the Nobel-winning MIT physicist who has guided the spectrometer through a troubled 17-year-long development effort, will actually be sleeping a lot easier once the AMS is launched.

"Our only nightmare for AMS during the 17 years was to be removed from the manifest," Ting, the experiment's principal investigator, told me today.

A few years ago, it looked as if NASA would be leaving the van-sized apparatus on the ground just because it couldn't spare a shuttle mission to fly it up to the International Space Station. Ting said he was surprised by that decision, particularly because scientists from 16 countries had contributed so much to the experiment. "I would say 'surprised' is the most polite word I can think of," he said.

Fortunately, Congress set aside the money for a flight to send up the AMS. And when NASA decided to extend operations on the space station to at least 2020, Ting and his team retrofitted the 7-ton, cryogenically cooled detector to make it last as long as the station, even if it stays in orbit until 2030.

Ting reiterated the main goals of the AMS experiment during a news briefing today:

• Look for heavy antimatter particles, such as the nuclei of antihelium or anticarbon, that would otherwise be annihilated as they passed through Earth's atmosphere. The presence of such cosmic particles could shed light on what happened to all the antimatter that should have been created along with ordinary matter in the big bang. "If you expect 20 antihelium and anticarbon [particles], and you never see one, something's wrong," Ting said.
• Watch for the traces left behind by exotic particles that may theoretically account for dark matter, which is thought to account for 90 percent of the matter in the universe but can only be detected by its gravitational effect.
• Keep an eye out for anomalous combinations of particles, such as strangelets, which incorporate an unusual type of "strange" quark.

To make such detections, the AMS will rely on the most powerful magnet launched into space and a complement of seven particle-detecting instruments. An early version of the device underwent real-world testing aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1998, so Ting is confident that AMS-2 will work like a charm after its installation and a shakedown period of eight hours. Once it's installed, the astronauts on the station don't really need to do anything:The data will be beamed down to Earth for analysis — at first to a control center at NASA's Johnson Space Center, and eventually to CERN, Europe's particle physics research center. That's right, the same center that plays host to the Large Hadron Collider.

I suppose the only nightmare Ting has to worry about now is that, for some reason, the AMS doesn't work as planned. He doesn't sound all that worried ... but other physicists have questioned whether the $2 billion project will end up being worth it. In last week's issue of the journal Science, the University of Chicago's Dietrich Muller was quoted as saying that the scientific questions being addressed by the AMS could have been done much more cheaply using high-altitude balloon experiments. And the University of Michigan's Gregory Tarle contended that nuclei from antimatter galaxies would never make it to our corner of the cosmos anyway.

"The major justification for doing AMS has evaporated," Tarle said.

When a reporter brought up Tarle's criticism at the end of today's briefing, Ting dodged the criticism and instead talked about Tarle's university.

"University of Michigan is where I went to school," he observed. "Used to have a very good football team. In the last few years, the team has gone to pot. Last year, they have changed the coach.

"I have no other answer."

Professor Tarle, I think you just got Tinged.

More about the antimatter quest:

• It's official: Heaviest antimatter found
• Space mission hunts for antimatter galaxies
• Antimatter atoms captured at last
• AMS may lead to space radiation shield

Stay tuned for further updates from Kennedy Space Center, in Cosmic Log as well as in msnbc.com's space news section. You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Roberto Gonzalez / Getty Images

Photographers and observers place their cameras at the base of the space shuttle Endeavour's launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for Friday's scheduled liftoff.

The wild weather that is sweeping through America's Southeast has had a mild impact on the outlook for the shuttle Endeavour's final flight, with forecasters raising the chances of a delay in Friday's launch from 20 to 30 percent.

Right now, the weather is the only question mark about a flight that's expected to attract upwards of 700,000 spectators, including notables ranging from President Barack Obama and wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to "Star Trek" actor LeVar Burton and gamer/astronaut Richard Garriott.

The skies over Kennedy Space Center in Florida were mostly sunny this morning, but chief weather officer Kathy Winters said that the tail end of a storm system that left a trail of destruction through Alabama was headed for the Florida coast.

"The weather is expected to get a little bit bad this evening," Winters told reporters.

If low clouds are still hanging around when it's time to launch, at 3:47 p.m. ET Friday, the launch would have to be delayed at least 24 hours. The potential cloud ceiling, added to the chance of unacceptably high crosswinds, led Winters and her fellow forecasters to downgrade the weather outlook from 80 percent positive to 70 percent positive. Which is still pretty positive, as weather forecasts go.

NASA test director Jeff Spaulding said the countdown was proceeding without any technical hitches. But if the launch has to be put on hold on Friday, whether for weather or for other reasons, Spaulding said NASA would still have at least three more opportunities for liftoff over the next week.

Notable launch
This launch is notable for several reasons: It marks Endeavour's final space outing before it heads for retirement at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. It'll be the second-to-last shuttle launch ever, setting the stage for Atlantis to close out the 30-year shuttle program this summer. Endeavour will be bringing up the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, one of the biggest physics experiments ever launched into orbit. And perhaps most poignantly, the launch is the focus of a love story involving Giffords and her husband, Endeavour commander Mark Kelly.

Giffords, an Arizona Democrat who is recovering from a grave head wound sustained in January during a shooting attack in Tucson, was flown to Florida from her rehabilitation center in Houston to see the launch and take part in family festivities.

President Obama, along with his wife and two daughters, are due to witness the launch from the space center as well, in between a visit to storm-stricken Alabama and a commencement address at Miami Dade College. The last sitting president to attend a shuttle launch was Bill Clinton, who came to the Cape to see off senator-astronaut John Glenn in 1998. It's not yet clear whether the Obamas will be with Giffords or at a different secure location for the launch.

"We will be ready to accommodate, wherever that location is," Spaulding said. 

Tweeters in attendance
Other celebrities in attendance this time around include LeVar Burton, who played Geordi LaForge on "Star Trek: Next Generation"; and Seth Green, who has appeared in the "Austin Power" movies and a host of other films and TV shows. The actors are among 150 Twitter users who were invited to the launch to participate in a NASA tweetup, and they traded tweets for their own meetup at the Cape.

"Where are you, man?" Burton tweeted to the red-haired Green. "My Ginger detector is on the fritz?"

"Less than 20 feet away from you!" Green replied. "Why won't you say hi to me?!?"

Richard Garriott, the millionaire video-game developer who became the first son of a NASA astronaut to go into space himself in 2008, also tweeted that he was heading down to Florida to see the launch.

Spaulding told reporters that he and the rest of the launch team weren't changing their routine just because a high-profile audience was hoping to see Endeavour rise on Friday. "We do the exact same level of effort" in advance of every liftoff, he said, and there'd be no pressure to put on a show.

"Our team is really focused in on what we're doing here," he said.

More about the shuttle's final days:

• Video: Watching one of the last launches
• Meet the crew of Endeavour's last flight

Stay tuned for further updates from Kennedy Space Center, in Cosmic Log as well as in msnbc.com's space news section. You can join the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Harry Cabluck / AP

Member Ken Mercer, from San Antonio, reads amendments during a meeting of the State Board of Education Thursday, March 26, 2009, in Austin, Texas.

Everything is bigger in Texas, the saying goes, which is why advocates for science education are concerned about proposed supplemental, web-based instructional materials for biology courses that appear to promote creationist arguments.

"This gets a foot in the door," Joshua Rosenau, the programs and policy director of the National Center for Science Education, told me today. "In general, Texas is a concern with textbook issues because they buy so many textbooks. A publisher who was planning on being able to sell in Texas and then can't is in real trouble." 

That means textbook publishers target the Texas market. Cash-strapped school boards across the country looking to replace their materials, in turn, are likely to be stuck buying whatever was created for the Texans. 

Texas science standards
Two years ago, the Texas State Board of Education voted 13-2 to put in place a plan that would require teachers to encourage students to scrutinize "all sides" of scientific theories, including the theory of evolution.

Critics of the plan argued that it would allow non-scientific ideas such as creationism and intelligent design to slip into Texas classrooms even though the board president at the time, Don McLeroy, had previously said, "Anything taught in science has to have consensus in the science community and intelligent design does not." 

Now, proposed science education materials — all web based — are available for review on the board's website. The National Center for Science Education and the Texas Freedom Network, organizations that criticized the new plan, reviewed the materials and found their fears confirmed.

Intelligent design teachings
The review shows that materials from an obscure New Mexico-based company called International Databases LLC promote anti-evolution arguments made by proponents of intelligent design and creationism. These are the same arguments that many scientists have shown lack scientific merit.  

Among the highlights from the review made available by NCSE and TFN include:

• A slide on the origin of life states that "since such materialistic, self organization scenarios now have a history of scientific insufficiency for explaining the Origin of Life on Earth, the Null hypothesis (default) stands. This allows for the testing of the legitimate scientific hypothesis … Life on Earth is the result of intelligent causes."
• A teacher resources slide that says that "at the end of the instructional unit on the Origin of Life, students should go home with the understanding that a new paradigm of explaining life's origins is emerging from the failed attempts of naturalistic scenarios. The new way of thinking is predicated upon the hypothesis that intelligent input is necessary for life's origins."
• A module on the scientific method that lays out two "unproven hypothesis" that scientists have used to build their theories on the origin of life. One is called "scientific materialism, naturalism, and so forth." The other is that "an intelligence is necessary to explain both the origin, and diversification of life on Earth."

The NCSE and TFN point out that a federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled in 2005 that teaching intelligent design in public schools is unconstitutional, regarding it as creationism in disguise. Should the Texas school board approve the materials reviewed here, the critics hint at "expensive legal challenges."

What's next?
Teams of reviewers appointed by the Texas Education Agency will examine all of the proposed instructional materials in June and report to the TEA and State Board of Education. A public hearing and final vote on the materials is scheduled for July. Public schools could then purchase the materials for use in classrooms beginning in the 2011-2012 school year. 

Rosenau, the NCSE programs and policy director, is optimistic the board won't approve International Databases Inc. materials on technical grounds. "Not even getting to the issue that it is creationist, it doesn't cover all the new standards as it is supposed to, it has typos, it has basic errors of fact," he told me. "It is hard to imagine it going anywhere."

Should it be approved, however, the company would go from an unknown entity to suddenly having access to the coveted Texas market, validating them as a player in the emerging e-textbook market. It would also open the door to allowing the material in a hardcopy textbook, Rosenau added.

"I'm sure the board could say, 'Look, we've already got an approved supplement that takes this perspective, so how can you say it would be irresponsible now to put that in your textbooks?' "

More stories on science education and intelligent design: 

• Textbook changed 'creation' to intelligent design' 
• 'Intelligent design' in Tenn. schools? 
• 13 percent of biology teachers back creationism 
• Evolution texts survive in Louisiana 

Funium

FamilyVillage features cute characters that can be "immigrated" into the game along with their vital records.

Family Village is a Facebook game that lets you create cartoon characters representing your forebears, associate them with vital records and documents, send them through "immigration" into a virtual world — and then put them to work. Think of it as a CityVille populated by your ancestors.

"This is not meant to be a genealogy game,” said Jeff Wells, the chief executive officer of Utah-based Funium. “It’s a game that incorporates genealogy."

Funium is rolling out Family Village on Facebook in semi-stealth mode. "We're up to around 14,000 or 15,000 installs, which is relatively small in this environment. Our objective is millions," he told me this week. Then, knowing my background, he invoked a metaphor close to my heart: "We're pushing the shuttle to the launch pad."

I've paid for genetic tests and document searches in hopes of uncovering more of my Boyle family roots. I've traveled to Ireland to check parish records, and riffled through countless rolls of microfilm looking for clues. But I've never played a Facebook game, and I'm not sure Family Village will get me started. But then again, I'm really not the target audience for the game.

"It's not supposed to do your genealogy," said Wells, who previously served as the CEO of the GeneTree DNA testing company. "It just makes genealogy more interesting. This is meant for the masses. My intent is to get people who are disinterested in family history interested."

Updating the family quest
In the pre-Facebook age, genealogy was traditionally ranked among the country's most popular hobbies (right up there with stamp collecting). But today, online social networking takes up increasing amounts of leisure time. In February, comScore reported that the average Internet user spent more than four hours a month on social-media sites. In a sense, Family Village and similar genealogy apps (such as the popular "We're Related" Facebook app) represent efforts to update the hobby for the 21st century.

"We have incorporated family history into the social gaming environment," Wells said. "That's the first time that's been done."

Funium via Business Wire

Family Village lets you build a community for the relatives that "immigrate" into the Facebook game.

Family Village is also built to incorporate information from We're Related, Family Link and other online genealogical resources. As you create game characters, you can add in data from your own genealogical records, about birth, death, marriage and all the other family-tree basics. The game platform is designed to suggest archived documents or other resources that may relate to your relatives. Some resources come free, while others can be purchased using Facebook-based micropayments.

Like CityVille, Family Village offers plenty of items to buy, including houses and landscaping, pets and vehicles, and even monuments with national-origin themes. (So your ancestors were English? Buy a Union Jack or a London Bridge for your family's virtual digs.) You can either kick in real-world money for purchases, or have your characters toil away at their virtual jobs to build up reserves of virtual cash.

Wells said the initial reviews from beta-testers have been positive. Funium's news release cites the case of Sandra Gwilliam, a grandmother who plays Family Village with her children and grandchildren. "If people can play the game with their ancestors, it makes the ancestors seem more real," Gwilliam said.

What about privacy?
Personal privacy is a big concern for online genealogy as well as for Facebook usage. For example, you wouldn't want to have your mother's maiden name freely accessible for any old friend to see. And your living relatives wouldn't appreciate having their basic stats displayed without their consent.

Wells said Family Village addresses the privacy issue by letting users control how much information they want to make public. "We follow all the Facebook privacy and security provisions," he told me. "We don't share anything more than what Facebook would allow. and their provisions have become pretty strict lately."

By default, a Facebook user visiting your Family Village community would have limited access to the data associated with the characters who populate the place. "If you elect to, for that person visiting your village, you could give them authorization to see your family tree," Wells said.

The game may also alert players to check particular databases or documents, based on the information they've provided, but Wells said "we're not accessing any information that they're not confiding on the Internet."

Family Village may not be as high-tech as Y-chromosome or mitochondrial DNA testing, but Wells said the goal of the game has much in common with genetic genealogy. "We want to make sure that, at the end of the day, people learn that we are part of one great family tree," he told me. "For those who aren't interested necessarily in DNA or genetics, we can still accomplish the same thing by having people realize that we have many, many cousins out there."

So what do you think, cousin? Feel free to share your thoughts about the family quest and/or Facebook games as a comment below.

More about genealogy:

• Black history saga comes full circle
• Pilgrims and Indians in her family tree
• DNA takes on a family's mysteries
• The wearin' o' the genes

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

SETI Institute

The Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes in northern California looking for E.T. has been put in hibernation mode due to budget woes.

Financial woes have delivered a serious blow to the search for E.T. One of its best tools, the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, has been put on hold until new funding is located.

"It is a huge irony," Jill Tarter, director of SETI research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., told me today. "Now we actually know where to point the telescopes to look at planets, but we don't have the telescopes to point right now, so a very ironic situation."

For decades, astronomers have pointed their telescopes at stars they thought were likely to have planets around them. This February, the first results from the NASA's Kepler Mission revealed 1,235 potential worlds in orbit around distant stars.

ATA financial woes

Since October 2007, the array of 42 radio telescopes located about 300 miles north of San Francisco has been searching for radio signals from stars that could indicate the presence of technologically advanced extraterrestrials.

The array is the instrument most dedicated to the E.T. search. The first phase was built with a $25 million gift from the foundation of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and another $25 million in private donations. Plans call for an eventual build out to 350 antennas, though the recession has slowed progress. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

In a letter to donors, Tom Pierson, the CEO of the SETI Institute, explained that the array was put in "hibernation" due to budget woes and is being maintained in a safe state by a skeleton staff.

The array is a partnership between the SETI Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. The institute is responsible for construction; the university for operations.

Franck Marchis, an astronomer affiliated with both institutions, broke the news about the hibernation in a blog post April 22. The ATA was put to sleep on April 15.

The Hat Creek Observatory, where the array is located, took a financial hit when the Radio Astronomy Laboratory lost funding from the National Science Foundation and the state of California that was used for its operations.

Running the ATA costs about $1.5 million a year and the SETI science campaign at ATA costs an additional $1 million annually, according to Pierson's letter.

New funding opportunities
One hope for new funding of long-term operations at the array is a potential partnership with the United States Air Force Space Command to use the array to help track space debris, a growing threat to satellites and manned spacecraft such as the International Space Station.

"This effort is ongoing and showing much promise, but near term funding has been delayed due to the same, highly publicized large scale federal budget problems we all read about in the news," Pierson writes in his letter.

NASA funding for SETI projects ceased in 1993, though the space agency continues to support tangentially-related research, including the Kepler mission to search for planets orbiting other stars. The SETI Institute hopes to raise $5 million to use the ATA to search the most promising Kepler targets.

"We hope that the public will get inspired to help us explore those Kepler worlds," said Tarter, who added the institute is also relying on citizen scientists to help develop computer code and algorithms for the setiquest and Galaxy Zoo programs.

The is all part of a push, she noted, to get people really thinking about what it means to be on the lookout for extraterrestrial intelligence and "to think about how we are so intimately related to the cosmos, to think about us in a bigger perspective so that perhaps we can do something about minimizing the differences we struggle with and make the point that we really are all Earthlings."

More stories on SETI and the ATA:

• E.T. calling? Here's what to do
• Hey, E.T.! The line is open
• SETI: 50 years of searching for E.T.
• New channels in the search for E.T.

Chevrolet

Volt owner Steve Wojtanek says he's averaging 122 miles per gallon of gasoline in Boca Raton, Fla., mostly because he's driving the bulk of his miles on battery power.

You might not think of electric cars as long-haul vehicles, but months of real-world driving reveal that they can be long-distance marathoners — under the right conditions. Chevrolet, for example, is reporting that the average Volt driver is going 1,000 miles between gasoline fill-ups. And for the most part, Nissan Leaf owners are perfectly happy to do without the gas tank altogether.

It's been six months since we first took to the highways for our first "Electric Road Trip," which is enough time for electric-car automakers to work out the bugs in the system. Nissan came across a software glitch that could keep the battery-powered Leaf from starting, but the main issue has been availability. Only 5,300 Leafs have been sold worldwide, including about 500 in the United States. But Nissan says it will be accelerating production and taking reservations again as of May 1.

Meanwhile, Chevrolet has sold about 1,500 Volts as of the end of March, and the company says sales will be going nationwide by the end of the year. The company has been keeping track of Volt driving patterns through its OnStar network, and the data suggest that Volt owners are getting savvier about maximizing battery use and minimizing use of the car's gasoline-powered "range extender." During March, the average mileage between fill-ups went from 800 to 1,000 miles, Chevrolet reported last week.

Chevy pointed to two Volt owners in particular: Gary Davis of Greenville, S.C., said he went two months between gas purchases and figures his gasoline usage at 547 miles per gallon. Steve Wojtanek of Boca Raton, Fla., said that 2,225 of the 3,417 miles he recorded were driven on battery power, which works out to 122 mpg.

Those figures don't take the electricity expense into account. The Environmental Protection Agency's rating suggests that the Volt gets the equivalent of 93 mpg on electricity alone, 37 mpg when the gasoline engine is running, and 60 mpg for combined battery-gasoline power. The Leaf gets a combined EPA rating of 99 miles per gallon equivalent.

Your mileage may vary
When it comes to electric cars, that age-old saying — "Your mileage may vary" — never rang truer.

"It's almost a game to see what you can do to get the best mileage out of it," Wojtanek said of his Volt.

Wojtanek told me he's changed his driving style to boost the Volt's efficiency. Quick starts or stops are kept to a minimum. It also helps that most of his trips are short jaunts around Boca Raton, which provides plenty of opportunities for charging up between drives. Pretty much the only time the gas engine turns on is when the 55-year-old commercial actor (and retired airline pilot) takes a trip to Fort Lauderdale or Miami. The round trip to Miami is 98 miles, and generally the gas kicks in after about 40 miles of all-electric driving. "Forty-three miles is about the best I get on the battery," he said.

Wojtanek, who counts a Rolls-Royce and even a replica Batmobile among his past purchases, said the Volt ranks high on his list. "This is the first Chevy since I had a Corvette back in 1991. ... For my driving, this is the best," he said.

He acknowledged that if you consider economics alone, it'll take a long time to make up the difference between a standard gasoline-powered car and the Volt, which retails for more than $40,000 before tax breaks. "The question is, how long does it take to recoup the cost?" he observed. "Every time gas prices go up, the time to recoup gets shorter."

Getting smart about batteries
The Nissan Leaf is cheaper ($33,000 before tax breaks), and the fact that it doesn't use a single drop of gasoline is especially appealing for electric-car purists. But gasoline-free operation also means that the Leaf has a more limited range, and some have complained that the car can quickly run out of juice and leave a driver stranded.

"Some knowledge about lithium-ion batteries helps," Patrick Van Der Hyde, a Seattle-area Leaf owner, told me today.

When the Leaf's battery gets near the end, it can deplete quickly, depending on the driving conditions. "All sorts of things affect range, just like all sorts of things affect gas mileage," said Van Der Hyde, who works for an electric-grid management company. "We average about 10 trips a day in the car, and most of those drives are five miles or less."

Van Der Hyde said he can expect to get 70 miles of "straight-out freeway driving" from a full charge, or closer to 100 miles if the car is in Eco-mode and he sticks to roads where he can travel 40 to 50 mph.

In the five months since I put the Leaf through its paces, dozens of electric-vehicle charging stations have been added to the Department of Energy's list for the Seattle area, but Van Der Hyde said the Leaf will really come into its own when fast-charging DC electric stations are installed throughout the region. That will enable the car's owners to get a full charge in a half-hour, as opposed to about seven hours for a 220-volt home charging station or 16 hours for your standard 110-volt outlet. (Right now, the Department of Energy says the closest DC fast-charger is in Portland, Ore., which is more than 170 miles from Seattle.)

'Primary car' ... except for road trips
Van Der Hyde said his family uses the Leaf as the "primary car in the way we think about it," and keeps a Honda Odyssey around for road trips.

That's the same strategy followed by Jon Hoekstra, senior scientist with The Nature Conservancy, who was the Seattle area's first Leaf owner. He uses the Leaf for commuting, for the occasional trip to the airport (which has plug-in parking stalls meant for electric vehicles) and even quick jaunts out of town.

"It does everything we need our car to do with the exception of road trips — and that's OK, because we didn't expect that," Hoekstra told me today.

Hoekstra and his wife bought the Leaf back in December to reduce their carbon footprint, and their fuel bill as well. "It really doesn't take much juice," he said. "I think I figured it's 3 cents a mile."

As much as possible, he tries to treat the Leaf like a regular car. "I deliberately have tried not to be a 'hypermiler,'" he said. In the first four months of driving, there's been only one time when the family felt the fear of running out of power. Hoekstra said that happened because the car wasn't fully charged up before the trip, and because nasty weather reduced driving efficiency — all contributing to a perfect storm for range anxiety.

Fortunately, the Leaf made it back home before the electricity ran out. "Other than that one occasion, it's been great," Hoekstra siad.

Do you have electric-vehicle experiences to share? Are you on a waiting list, or are you waiting for other EVs such as the Ford Focus Electric or the plug-in Prius to make their appearance? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about electric vehicles:

• Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt get top safety ratings
• Chevy Volt offers a taste of electric car's future
• Video: Get set for 'Revenge of the Electric Car'
• Toyota eyes magnesium batteries for EVs
• 10 electric cars you can buy in 2011

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

Lydia Mathger

Scientists are studying how squid and other cephalopods change color and pattern of their skin to blend in with their environment in hopes of creating next-generation camouflage for the military. Shown here are chromatophores (large brown, red and yellow structures) and iridophores (pink iridescent splotches) in th esquid Loligo pealeii.

The ability of octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish to instantaneously change the color and pattern of their skin to blend in with their surroundings has caught the eye of the U.S. military. Its goal is a new generation of high-tech camouflage.

The Office of Naval Research has awarded $6 million to a team of U.S. scientists to conduct the basic research required to make the squid-like camo. Precisely how the military will use the technology is classified, noted Roger Hanlon, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 

One can imagine, though, everything from tanks draped in a skin that constantly updates its look so that it blends in with its surroundings as it rolls through a patchwork of agricultural fields or a uniform that allows soldiers to disappear on crowded urban streets as easily as they do in swampy forests.  

Research approach
Hanlon and colleagues plan to extract the "operating principles" that make the skin of squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish observant, adaptive and responsive to the environment. The information they gather from looking at interactions of pigments and reflectors at the cellular and molecular levels will be used to inform the engineers and scientists building the materials that emulate these properties.

"This is the bio-inspired approach to engineering," Hanlon noted in email to me Monday from Turkey where he is on a research dive. "Let the animals guide some of our work. Animal systems are always more elegant and sophisticated than most folks give them credit for."

Another branch of the research effort builds on a 2008 discovery by Hanlon and colleagues Lydia Mathger and Steven Roberts that the skin of these marine animals contains opsins, the same type of light-sensing proteins that function in eyes.

The team aims to figure out where the opsins are located in the skin, and where and how they send the light information to change body and skin patterns.

"The most exciting possibility is that the opsins may sense light and inform the skin to change (or) refine some aspect of its pattern without sending information back to the brain," said Hanlon, who is also a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University.

Building new materials
It will be up to the team's engineers to try and emulate the skin of the cephalopods, as this class of marine animals is known, using new so-called metamaterials, materials that blur the line between material and machine.

Naomi Halas, an expert on nano-optics at Rice University in Texas and principal investigator on the grant, said the group plans to use patterns of organized nanostructures to create sheets of materials that can change colors quickly — like the pixels of a high-definition television screen — but also see light in the same way that squids do, according to a press release.

A key component of the material will be unique clusters of nanomaterials discovered by Rice chemist Stephan Link, a co-investigator on the grant. Halas said Link's materials are very sensitive to changes in their environment and can more easily change colors than other nanomaterials.

Beyond military
According to Hanlon, this work isn't just for secretive military applications. Industry and society may also benefit from the effort, which will reveal knowledge about combining pigments and reflectors.

"Some (of the applications) are as simple as heating and cooling things by absorbing or reflecting radiation," he said. "Detroit can make cars that change color; fashion designers can make dresses that change pattern — highlight of the cocktail party!"

How would you use this technology? Weigh in with a comment below.

More stories on cephalopods and disguise

• Hawaiian squid carries a built in light
• Astonishing octopus is master of disguise
• Get set for invisible war machines
• Octopuses walk on 2 arms to get by predators
• Some sharks can become invisible, study says
• The 'why' of a leopard's spots
• Lizards' camouflage reveals evolution in action
  

STAR Collaboration / RHIC / BNL

This image shows a three-dimensional rendering of the STAR time projection chamber surrounded by the time-of-flight barrel (the outermost cylinder). Particle tracks spray out from the collision, including a meter-long track from an antihelium-4 nucleus (highlighted in bold red).

The reports began circulating a few weeks ago, and today's publication in the journal Nature makes it official: Physicists have detected the heaviest bits of antimatter ever found on Earth. And that record is likely to stand for a long, long time.

Members of the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, based at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, say they've seen the traces of 18 nuclei of antihelium-4 among about half a trillion particles produced by almost a billion gold-ion collisions at RHIC. These nuclei are like regular helium nuclei, except that instead of having two protons and two neutrons, they have two negatively charged antiprotons and two antineutrons.

The particles existed for only about 10 billionths of a second before they came in contact with ordinary matter particles and were annihilated, but that was long enough to register on STAR's detectors. Physicists can routinely produce antihydrogen nuclei (basically, antiprotons), and last year a research team reported the first detection of antihydrogen atoms (a positron going around an antiproton). Scientists have even detected antihelium-3 nuclei (two antiprotons and an antineutron). But until now, antihelium-4 has eluded them.

RHIC is best-known for smashing together gold ions so forcefully that particles like protons shatter into their constituent quarks and gluons, producing the kind of primordial soup that existed just an instant after the big bang. When that soup congeals, all sorts of combinations of quarks come together — and statistically, there's an ever-so-slight chance that the quarks will arrange themselves into two antiprotons paired with two antineutrons. The odds of that happening are so vanishingly small that RHIC's researchers had to sift through mountains of data to find the 18 events they were looking for.

The bad news is that the chances of finding anything even heavier are even more vanishingly small. So small, in fact, that physicists don't expect to detect them anytime in the foreseeable future, at RHIC or even at Europe's Large Hadron Collider.

The good news is that these 18 detections confirm the statistical model that theorists expected to see for the creation of antimatter in the lab. Searching for natural-born antimatter in outer space is one of the top jobs for the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which is due to be delivered to the International Space Station a week from now. The AMS should be able to detect antihelium nuclei and other subatomic oddities during its years-long run in orbit.

If the AMS comes up with different statistical balances of antimatter vs. matter, that would suggest that a cosmic source of antimatter somehow survived the big matter-vs.-antimatter blowup that scientists believe followed the big bang.

"The new measurement from the STAR experiment would provide the quantitative background rate for comparison," said Hank Crawford, a STAR collaborator from the University of California at Berkeley, said today in a news release. "An observation of antihelium-4 by the AMS experiment could indicate the existence of large quantities of antimatter somehow segregated from the matter in our universe."

Such findings could shed further light on one of the big mysteries about the universe's origins: How is it that matter won out over antimatter, resulting in the cosmos as we see it today? Is it possible that we merely live in a localized zone of the universe where matter dominates? Could there be huge reservoirs of antimatter, on the other side of a DMZ (dematterized zone)? During the next decade, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer just might help scientists put together more pieces of the matter-antimatter puzzle.

More about the antimatter mystery:

• Exotic antimatter particle exhibits new conduct
• Antimatter atoms caught at last
• Weird antimatter particles discovered
• Could X particle solve two puzzles? 

Correction for 3:10 p.m. ET April 25: I initially had the constituents of the nucleus wrong in the second paragraph. It's two antiprotons and two antineutrons, not two antiprotons and two antiprotons. Sorry about that!

Hundreds of scientists in the STAR Collaboration equally share the credit for the research reported in the Nature paper, "Observation of the Antimatter Helium-4 Nucleus." A version of the paper was made publicly available on the arXiv.org website.  

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

With the shuttle program winding down, the future of American spaceflight may well depend on how starry-eyed tycoons spend their money — and some of NASA’s money as well.

Three of the four companies that are in line to receive $269.3 million from NASA for building future spaceships are privately held, and what's more, they're led by well-off individuals who have at least a hint of intrigue about them. The fourth company, Boeing, is partnering with Bigelow Aerospace, which was founded by hotel-chain billionaire Robert Bigelow and has its own orbital aspirations.

NASA has laid out a plan for paying out the money over the next year or so, with the aim of promoting the rise of a new set of spaceship operators in the post-shuttle era.

In a commentary, George Washington University communication researcher Linda Billings picks up on the fact that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are going to ventures that are headed up by folks who already have hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Why do these 'commercial' space companies need government handouts?" she asks. "The awardees are not hard-up start-ups (and these government handouts are not their first)."

It's true that all four companies have received money from the federal government previously, but none of those companies would characterize the payments as "handouts" or "subsidies."

They'd see them instead as payments for services rendered, goods delivered, or milestones achieved along the path that NASA wants them to take. And the $50 million that's been paid out so far under NASA's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev, is dwarfed by the $9 billion paid to commercial providers such as Lockheed Martin for the development of NASA's now-canceled Ares 1 rocket and now-downsized Orion crew capsule.

Although the financial details are hard to come by, it's virtually certain that the four companies have already spent far more than they've received for their spaceship projects. It's also virtually certain that not all four projects will make it into orbit. Because NASA is spreading out its bets, failure is definitely an option.

Here's a recap on the four spaceship development projects that NASA will be supporting for the next year under the second phase of the CCDev program. I'll be focusing on these efforts on Saturday during a Second Life chat about the post-shuttle spaceflight era, presented by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. SLT/PT):

Blue Origin

Blue Origin's orbital space vehicle is designed to take on trips to the International Space Station.

Blue Origin: The venture getting the least amount of money ($22 million) is arguably the most mysterious of the bunch. Amazon.com's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, set up Blue Origin in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of going into outer space. He has the country's only privately owned spaceport, nestled amid his 165,000-acre ranch in West Texas — and until CCDev came along, most people assumed he was targeting solely suborbital space tourism.

CCDev made clear that Bezos had higher ambitions: Blue Origin's agreement with NASA, made public in redacted form this week, shows that the company aims to build an orbital launch system capable of getting seven passengers to the International Space Station (or other destinations in low Earth orbit). Its space vehicle would initially be launched on an expendable rocket such as United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5, and eventually Blue Origin plans to field its own reusable rocket.

The suborbital effort is now seen as an interim step along the way to orbit. "The suborbital vehicle will be fully reusable and capable of flying three or more astronauts to an altitude of over 328,000 feet (above 100 kilometers) for science research and adventure," Blue Origin said. "The suborbital booster is currently undergoing integrated testing. ... The suborbital capsule will baseline key technologies for the orbital space vehicle, and is currently undergoing final assembly."

With rare exceptions, the only information publicly available about Blue's plans comes from government documents that must be made publicly available, such as the one released this week. Thus, it's hard to tell how much money Bezos has put into his rocket venture so far. But when you consider the construction costs for Blue Origin's production facility in Washington state, plus its facilities in Texas, plus all the testing it's done to date, it's unquestionably more than the $3.7 million the venture received under CCDev1 plus the $22 million it's due to get under CCDev2.

Blue Origin's partners include NASA's Ames Research Center and Stennis Space Center, United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin, Aerojet and the Air Force Holloman High Speed Test Track in New Mexico. The company's agreement with NASA says that Bezos "recognizes that successful development of an innovative space launch capability is a long-term endeavor and is committed to steady funding for development efforts to achieve a commercial orbital vehicle."

The company said NASA's support would "accelerate" the development of a reusable crew transportation system. "We are very pleased to continue working with NASA on development of our Crew Transportation System, and appreciate the confidence NASA places in Blue Origin," the company's program manager, Rob Meyerson, said in an emailed statement.

Sierra Nevada Corp.

An artist's conception shows Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser near a space station docking port.

Sierra Nevada Corp.: Sierra Nevada received $20 million during CCDev1 and is getting $80 million in CCDev2 to continue development of its Dream Chaser space plane, which is based on the HL-20 lifting-body design that NASA pioneered back in the 1980s. The concept was revived by high-tech entrepreneur Jim Benson at SpaceDev and inherited by Sierra Nevada when it acquired SpaceDev in 2008. (Benson had left SpaceDev two years earlier and came up with a different spaceship concept, but he passed away in 2008 before he could get very far with the idea.)

Sierra Nevada's top corporate officers are in the public eye far less than Jeff Bezos. After all, Bezos is still the head of a publicly traded company, but CEO Fatih Ozmen and his wife, company president and chief financial officer Eren Ozmen don't have much reason to go public. Three years ago, a story about Sierra Nevada in the Las Vegas Sun called Fatih Ozmen a "mystery man."

The Ozmens started out as employees at Sierra Nevada and acquired the Nevada-based company in 1994. Since then, Sierra Nevada has grown into a big-time defense contractor with 29 locations in 15 states. Inc. magazine listed its 2009 revenue at just under a billion dollars.

Sierra Nevada's website lists numerous awards, including recognition as "the top woman-owned company demonstrating excellence in applying innovative IT solutions to the federal government." But the company has also experienced the occasional hiccup, such as recent questions over the development of an imaging pod for the Air Force, called Gorgon Stare.

The company's agreement with NASA lists 11 partners, including Boeing, United Launch Alliance, United Space Alliance, Aerojet, Draper Lab, NASA's Langley Research Center, AdamWorks, SAS, the University of Colorado, the U.S. component of Canada's MDA robotics company and Virgin Galactic (which is working with Sierra Nevada on "global marketing, sales and commercial operation" of the orbital Dream Chaser).

SpaceX

An artist's conception shows SpaceX's Draco thruster engines firing to separate the Dragon spacecraft from the Falcon 9 second stage. Side-mounted thrusters could be used as a launch abort system and landing system.

SpaceX: This California-based company, founded by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2002, has notched a surprising number of space successes lately, including last December's launch-to-splashdown test of its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule. NASA is supporting the development of the Falcon-Dragon system with $278 million under a separate program for cargo craft development, known as Commercial Orbital Transport Services or COTS. If SpaceX hits its marks, it will be in line for $1.6 billion worth of NASA contracts to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

Musk has said it would take $1 billion and three years of work to adapt the Falcon-Dragon system to carry crew, primarily because of the expense of developing an emergency launch abort system. This week, he said the $75 million in CCDev2 money would put SpaceX on track to meet that schedule.

"The award will accelerate our efforts to develop the next generation of rockets and spacecraft for human transportation," Musk said in a statement. "With NASA's support, SpaceX will be ready to fly its first manned mission in 2014."

Musk has made no secret of his long-term goal: to open the way for colonizing Mars and turn humanity into a multiplanet species. This week's statement referred slyly to those ambitions by noting that SpaceX's thruster system would "provide the capability for Dragon to land almost anywhere on Earth or another planet with pinpoint accuracy, overcoming the limitation of a winged architecture that works only in Earth's atmosphere."

A couple of years ago, Musk said that he invested $100 million of his fortune in SpaceX — but there have been more recent indications that the spigot has been turned down on his personal cash flow. SpaceX recently reported raising $50 million in additional funds, and Musk said an initial public offering may take place next year. Last year, there were a flurry of reports about Musk's financial straits, which led him to discuss the situation candidly in the Huffington Post.

SpaceX's agreement with NASA says the $75 million would accelerate crew-transport development by 50 percent compared to an internally funded baseline. So what does that say about SpaceX's investment? That figure is blacked out in the agreement posted online, but if time is money, that might imply SpaceX is bringing $75 million of its own to the project. The section listing SpaceX's partners and institutional investors is also blacked out, but the company notes that it works in "close collaboration with four NASA centers and eight leading aerospace companies."

Boeing

Boeing's CST-100 craft approaches the International Space Station in an artist's concept.

The Boeing Co.: This aerospace giant is something of an outlier. It's publicly traded, and has been involved in the U.S. space effort for decades. Among other things, Boeing served as the prime contractor for construction of the International Space Station. Billings' knock against Boeing was that with $3.3 billion in profit for 2010, the company didn't need a government "subsidy" for its spaceship-building operation.

However, Boeing's John Elbon repeatedly said in the run-up to the CCDev2 announcement that NASA had to serve as the anchor customer for the company's proposed CST-100 crew capsule. Without NASA support, the financial underpinnings of the project just didn't stand up. The $92.3 million in CCDev2 money, added to the $18 million from CCDev1, will keep Boeing on track to have the capsule ready for flight by 2015.

"By the end of CCDev2, our design will be firmed up and we'll have it synced up with NASA requirements so we understand our vehicle will meet those requirements," Boeing's John Elbon told reporters.

Boeing's go-ahead is also good news for Robert Bigelow, whose aerospace company has already put up two inflatable test modules into orbit on Russian spacecraft. Bigelow Aerospace is hoping that the CST-100 — perhaps launched on an Atlas 5, Delta 4 or Falcon 9 — can bring paying passengers to its future private-sector space stations as well as to the government-supported International Space Station.

In addition to Bigelow, Boeing's agreement with NASA lists Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Airborne Systems, ILC Dover, Spincraft, XCOR Aerospace, United Space Alliance and ARES Corp. as teammates and investors. Boeing also notes its agreements with Bigelow, Space Adventures and an additional blacked-out entity "to increase market growth."

Orbital Sciences Corp.

Orbital Sciences' Prometheus space plane, shown in this artist's conception, was one of the proposals that NASA passed up. Orbital is now reportedly planning to mothball the concept.

What separated the winners and losers: NASA has now released the full list of companies proposing CCDev2 spaceship projects, plus short rundowns on why particular proposals were chosen or eliminated. It's fascinating reading for space geeks.

The also-rans included alphaSpaces, Andrews Space, ATK Aerospace Systems, Excalibur Almaz, ILC Dover, Innovative Space Propulsion Systems, KT Engineering, Oceaneering International, Orbital Outfitters, Orbital Sciences Corp., Orbital Space Transport, Paragon Space Development Corp., PlanetSpace, Spacedesign Corp., TGV Rockets, Transformational Space Corp. (a.k.a. t/Space), United Launch Alliance and United Space Alliance.

Philip McAlister, acting director of NASA Headquarters' Commercial Spaceflight Development program, said Boeing and SpaceX were clear standouts from the rest of the pack. "They were the only ones to receive 'very high' confidence ratings, which I consider significant," he wrote.

ATK, Excalibur Almaz and United Launch Alliance were among the finalists, but McAlister said Excalibur Almaz was eliminated due to low ratings, especially on business considerations. He opted not to go with ATK and United Launch Alliance in part because of their lack of linkage to a crew-carrying vehicle. Those two companies were proposing only to build launch vehicles, and McAlister put somewhat less weight on that side of the equation.

"Within the U.S. industrial base, there is considerable launch vehicle development expertise, as many companies have successfully developed new launch vehicles over the last few decades," he explained. "In contrast, no U.S. company has successfully developed a crew-carrying spacecraft in over 30 years."

In other words, not since the space shuttle ... unless you count the private-sector SpaceShipOne rocket plane, which made three suborbital space trips in 2004. 

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin's Space Operations Simulation Center in Colorado can simulate on-orbit docking maneuvers using mockups of the Orion spce capsule, left, and the International Space Station.

So what's next? The CCDev2 covers the development timeline through May 2012, but NASA is looking for another $850 million to cover the third phase of the program, CCDev3. Being a CCDev2 winner doesn't guarantee that you'll get CCDev3 funding, and it's possible that a company not receiving money in one phase of the program could be funded for a future phase. For example, SpaceX didn't receive any funding in CCDev1 but was awarded $75 million in CCDev2.

The agreements with NASA spell out milestones that must be met in order to receive incremental payments. It's not guaranteed that all the companies will meet all the milestones. For example, Rocketplane Kistler was awarded up to $207 million from COTS, NASA's cargo spacecraft development program, but the company couldn't reach its investment target and was cut off after receiving $32.1 million for hitting earlier milestones.

If the CCDev process is successful, NASA should be able to choose from new U.S.-built spaceships for launching astronauts to the International Space Station in the 2014-2015 time frame. In the meantime, the space agency will have to rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft for crew transport. NASA expects to begin sending cargo up to the International Space Station on remote-controlled craft provided by SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. as early as next year.

Separately, NASA is also funding Lockheed Martin's work of the Orion crew capsule, which is currently envisioned as a NASA-operated emergency crew escape vehicle. Such capsules would be launched to the space station without a crew, thus minimizing the flight risk.

The Orion may well turn into the multipurpose crew vehicle that Congress wants NASA to develop for trips beyond Earth orbit. Congress has set aside $1.2 billion in the current fiscal year for the Orion-based crew vehicle, plus $1.8 billion for a heavy-lift rocket capable of putting 130 tons of payload into orbit. Lawmakers want to see that mission accomplished by 2016, but NASA isn't sure the job can be done. 

Even if the beyond-Earth space transport system is ready by 2016, NASA is expected to use commercial transports to get astronauts to and from the space station. Using a heavy-lifter to send astronauts to low Earth orbit would be like using a semi to get from one end of town to the other. It's better to call a taxi ... which is exactly what NASA plans to do once its commercial "space taxis" are ready to fly. 

More on the space race:

• NewSpace Journal: Orbital may wind down commercial crew effort
• Aviation Week: Five vehicles vie to succeed space shuttle
• The Register: Millionaire's private spaceship 'can land on Mars'
• NewSpace Journal: Paul Allen considering new space projects
• Much, much more from RLV and Space Transport News 

If you're a Second Life user, please join me at the StellaNova Amphitheater on Saturday at 1 p.m. ET (10 a.m. PT/SLT) for "From the Shuttle to Mars," a talk about the post-shuttle era presented by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. If you miss the talk, you'll still be able to listen to the full hourlong podcast via MICA's audio archives. (You'll also find links to the archived podcasts from my three previous MICA talks.)

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

Factory workers at mid-sized electronics companies may find themselves working alongside a robotic companion named FRIDA with human-like arms that are able to grasp and manipulate small parts. 

A prototype of the robot was introduced earlier this month at an industrial trade show in Europe by ABB, the Swiss-based power and automation technology giant.

FRIDA, which has a torso and arms akin to those of an adult, is intended to join assembly lines in the fast-changing electronics sector currently populated with flesh-and-bone humans.

Due to the pace of new product introductions and uncertainties in volume, according to ABB, this sector has been reluctant to use robots, which tend to be bulky, dangerous to work around, and require reprogramming whenever the next greatest thing is introduced.

The small size and weight of FRIDA, which stands for "Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-arm Assembly," make it easily portable without mechanical support such as a forklift. In addition, it is easy to safely slot in next to humans, according to ABB.

FRIDA's arms are padded and each has a gripper for grasping small parts. It "demonstrates agility of movement and can reach human cycle times while working in narrow spaces without risk of cable entanglement," the company says.

ABB maintains that the robot is intended to complement human labor, not replace it, though the technology would allow for scale-up of automation at factories currently turned off by the high costs and relative inflexibility of industrial robots.

The company is testing several prototypes in a range of industrial settings. Among the key remaining challenges is figuring out how to engineer and efficiently reprogram the systems to perform different tasks.

Information on an actual cost for the robot is unknown at the moment, though ABB says they aim to keep costs down so that a company can quickly get a return on its investment.

FRIDA is joining a race in the robotics world to fill the niche of electronics company assembly lines, IEEE Spectrum reports. Other players include the dual-arm Motoman SDA10D from Japan's Yaskawa and the Workerbot from the German firm pi4_robotics.

The Motoman and Workerbot are both larger than FRIDA and need more sensor safeguards when working around humans such as fencing, IEEE notes. 

With all this robotic competition for space on the assembly lines, one thing seems certain: greater automation, freeing up humans for other jobs, assuming they can find one.

More on the robo-future:

• Your new co-worker may be a robot 
• Japan looks to a robot future 
• Female robot to hit Japan catwalk 
• What happens when good robots go 'bad'? 

Over the past 750 million years, our blue marble has gone through remarkable changes — continents have shifted, ice ages have come and gone, sea levels have risen and fallen, and one-time deserts have turned green, allowing creatures to crawl out of the oceans and live off the land. 

These changes are now being made visible by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. The first set of the Visible Paleo Earth visualizations are being released today, on Earth Day, and more will be available in coming weeks. 

"I think people looking at the whole period will realize how fragile our planet is, how it changes," Abel Mendez, who is leading the project, told me in advance of the public release.

Visualization contruction
Mendez constructed the visualizations by combing through color images of Earth from NASA's Next Generation Blue Marble project and blending them with the global paleoclimate reconstructions developed by Ronald Blakey from Northern Arizona University and Christopher Scotese from the University of Texas at Arlington.

University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo

The Americas 65 million years ago just before the extinction of dinosaurs after an impact in the Yucatan Peninsula (center). Our planet was warmer, had many more forests and almost no ice caps during the end of the Cretaceous Period.

As he built the visualizations, Mendez said he was struck by the fact that the distribution of land mass among the continents has changed dramatically over the past 750 million years, but the total land area has stayed consistent – between about 10 and 30 percent of total surface area. "I was expecting to see more," he said.

The color of the land area changes dramatically, especially beginning 500 million years ago, during an era known as the Cambrian Period. Life was small-sized back then, and mostly confined to the oceans. As a result, the continents were mostly deserts.

From that point forward, terrestrial life began to flourish. In the years leading up to the extinction of the dinosaurs, he noted, the planet was even greener than it is today. "That is something nice to see in the pictures," he told me. "Today we have too many deserts. The dinosaurs had more food."

Habitable exoplanets
In addition to providing Earthlings with a voyeuristic view of the changes through time on their own planet, Mendez's project is part of a larger goal to understand the habitability of Earthlike planets around other stars.

Today, very few exoplanets can be directly imaged, but that will change in coming years. Mendez hopes to learn how the light reflected by faraway terrestrial planets changes can vary, depending on how much ice or vegetation covers their landscapes.

"If we can see that light, we will be able to have an idea of the continental distribution and how much vegetation" the planets have, Mendez said.

For today, the focus is on our planet. These visualizations provide a view of Earth's ever-changing continents and climate from the past to the present. What's in store for the future? "There are people who have some ideas of how the planet will be in the future with climate and continental change," Mendez said. "Eventually, I will make images for those also."

More about Earth's past, present and future:

• Interactive: Earth's timeline
• Ancient rocks contain climate forecast
• Rock links Antarctica and North America
• Rodents could rule the future animal kingdom

Karen Dreger, CRASAR

Underwater robots, including the SARbot shown here making a test dive on Tuesday, are at work in Japan searching the murky coastal waters for debris, infrastructure damage, and survivors.

Underwater robots equipped with imaging sensors that can see through murky waters are at work inspecting bridges, docks, and pipelines in port areas of the earthquake- and tsunami-ravaged coastline of Japan.

The robots, between the size of a suitcase and football, join other robots inspecting the crippled nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant. On Monday, those robots reported that radiation levels are too high for human repair crews.

Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, in College Station, and one of the world's top experts in rescue robotics, told me in the days after the disaster that underwater robots could also be of use in Japan. All she needed was an official invitation. 

Port deployment
That invitation came and her team, in partnership with Tetsuya Kimura of the Nagaoka University of Technology, deployed the robots Tuesday at the fishing port Minami-sanriku-choy to look for debris and other threats in the cloudy waters that could block passage of fishing boats, which need at least 15 feet of clearance before they can return to work.

On Wednesday, Murphy reported that the port was clear of obstructing debris, and that the robots "performed admirably."

"We were surprised at the lack of cars and other big objects underwater. The lower portions of the town is one rumbled mass of cars, piers, metal pilings, and such all twisted about, so we expected to see at least some of the same in the water," she  wrote in a blog post from the field. 

The team primarily encountered anchor stones and ropes used in the harbor and some smaller bits of debris. The lesson learned, Murphy notes, is a need for simulation software that predicts where debris goes in the wake of a tsunami or hurricane. 

No bodies of victims were found, which Murphy said is bittersweet. Minami-sanriku-choy had a population of 20,000. An estimated 2,000 people are dead or missing following the disaster. 

Similar to BP effort
The robots in use are smaller versions of the types used during the BP oil spill. They include the suitcase-sized Seamor, which can spot objects of interest with sonar capabilities and Seabotix's SARbot, which can zero in on the objects.

Other equipment in the team's arsenal includes the football-sized AC-ROV robot and monitoring equipment for AEOS Inc. All of the robots have a tether to allow operators on the surface to control the vehicles in real-time and watch the sonar and video footage. 

The team is now moving to Rikuzen-Takada to continue the search-and-rescue efforts. Murphy will update her blog as time permits.

Red Whittaker, a robotics expert at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, told me in March to expect robot deployments that help Japan recover from the earthquake and tsunami to last for weeks, months, and years.

"These are campaigns, not skirmishes, and typically new tools are brought to bear as the challenges arise and those challenges are very different over time," he said.

More coverage on robots in Japan:

• Robots en route to Japan 
• Robots to the rescue in Japan?
• Robots gauge radiation near Japan plants
• Japan plans to send robot to the moon by 2015

NASA

NASA's "Eyes of the Earth" Web-based viewer shows you the orbital locations of the space agency's Earth-observing satellites in real time.

The planet celebrates its 42nd annual Earth Day on Friday, and a lot of the coolest gifts to mark the occasion are coming from places that are out of this world: the dozens of satellites that are keeping watch from orbit.

Here are just a few of the goodies that NASA and other satellite operators are providing to mark the occasion:

Chat with a satellite scientist: Today at 1 p.m. ET, Annmarie Elderling is the guest star for an online video chat that's being aired on UStream. Elderling is a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who specializes in the study of clouds, aerosols and trace gases in Earth's atmosphere. She's the deputy project scientist for Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, a satellite mission now in development that will measure atmospheric carbon dioxide. (OCO-1 was lost in a launch mishap two years ago.)

Chat with an Arctic explorer: On Earth Day, NASA presents an online chat with Lora Koenig, deputy project scientist for Operation IceBridge. This is an airborne science mission that is monitoring Greenland's ice sheet with a variety of instruments. She'll be logging on from Kangerslussuag, Greenland, at 3 p.m. ET on Friday. Tom Wagner, NASA's cryosphere program manager, will participate in the chat as well from NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Enter a video contest: NASA is asking video mavens to put together short YouTube videos that celebrate Earth Day and the exploration of our home planet. The deadline for submissions is May 27, and the entry that's judged the best by NASA scientists and communicators will be featured on the space agency's home page. Check out the details on the "Home Frontier" contest Web page.

Learn about Earth's endangered ice: DigitalGlobe, which operates a constellation of Earth-observing satellites, is featuring its collaboration with the Extreme Ice Survey to study what's happening to the world's glaciers. Researchers suggest that glaciers serve as something of a "canary in the coal mine" for climate trends, and the bird isn't looking all that great these days. DigitalGlobe's satellite imagery documents glacial shrinkage as seen from space, while the Extreme Ice Survey has deployed dozens of time-lapse cameras to monitor glaciers on the ground. 

Track Earth-observing satellites ... and more: NASA's "Eyes of the Earth" Web page offers a smorgasbord of interactive graphics, including a 3-D satellite viewer that lets you track the space agency's Earth-observing satellites in real time (or speed up the timeline as much as you want). Check out the "My Big Fat Planet" blog, click through dramatic then-and-now imagery from Earth's environmental frontiers, and focus in on NASA's top five Earth images, based on Facebook and Twitter popularity.

Explore the Earth Observatory: NASA's Earth Observatory is the go-to Web site for daily Earth imagery from satellites as well as from the International Space Station. "World of Change" is a feature that documents how natural and human-caused phenomena have transformed our planet over the years. 

More out-of-this-world perspectives:

• Slideshow: Earth as art
• Holiday calendar: Our planet from space
• Archived gallery: Earth as seen by space travelers
• How satellites help save the world

Check back later for additional pointers to out-of-this-world Earth Day resources. 

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

University of Kansas

Teeth show markings of a right-handed person. The markings are from accidental tooth whacking by people using stone tools, according to researchers.

Lefties were as outnumbered 600,000 years ago as they are today, according to telltale markings on teeth found on Neanderthal and Neanderthal ancestors in Europe.

The finding serves as a new technique to determine whether a person was left- or right-handed from limited skeletal remains, and it also suggests that a key piece for the origin of language was in place at least half a million years ago, David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, told me today.

But while ancient righties appeared to outnumber lefties nine to one, the findings don't reveal whether some of the ancient lefties dominated in sports, as baseball players do today; and in politics, where being left-handed seems to help open the door to the White House.  

Tooth markings
The telltale tooth markings, based on experiments, appear to result from how these Neanderthals and their relatives processed hides with stone tools, explained Frayer, a co-author of a paper on the findings published this month in the journal Laterality.

One of his colleagues in Spain had people wear a mouth guard and then strike a hide as if they were cutting or stretching it with a stone tool. Every now and then, the test subjects were asked to whack their guarded teeth, as the researchers think would have accidentally happened as the ancient humans worked away.

AFP - Getty Images file

A reconstructed Neanderthal appears to strike a pose at the Prehistoric Museum in Halle, Germany.

Imagine a person pulling on the hide with their left hand and striking it with a tool held in their right hand. When they accidentally hit a tooth, the angle of the strike would be from the upper left to the lower right, Frayer explained.

"It doesn't matter what tooth it was, it would always be in that direction," he told me. "That tells you if you see scratches that are running in that direction, it tells you that the individual was primarily using their right hand to process."

Markings primarily going the opposite way — from the upper right to the lower left — are the sign of a lefty.

Frayer and colleagues examined isolated teeth from 27 Neanderthal and Neanderthal ancestors from Europe dating back 600,000 years and found that 25 of them have the telltale markings of a righty.

"That's the pattern we see in modern populations," Frayer noted, suggesting that right-handed dominance is an ancient human trait.

Language link
Although some studies of tool-using chimpanzees suggest a preference for the left hand, the ratio isn't as sharp as 9 to 1, according to Frayer. Such a distinctive ratio of handedness is unique to humans and their immediate ancestors and relatives.

And such laterality, he adds, appears linked to the development of language, a skill that humans have and chimps don't.

"The connection is the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and language is located on the left side," Frayer said.

We know this because when people experience a stroke on the left side of the brain, their speech is impaired and they lose control of the right side of their body. A person who has a stroke on the right side of the brain retains the ability to talk, but loses control of the left side of their body.

Finding that right-handedness goes back at least 600,000 years thus suggests that this key piece for language was in place, "so the people probably spoke," Frayer said.

More stories on handedness:

• Tool using chimps mostly lefties, study finds
• Hand preference in humans, animals explained
• Brain zap may improve righties' use of left hand
• Left handed hitters have a built in advantage

Imagine repairing the scratches in your car's paint finish just by shining a special light on them. Or using the same technology to make your scratched-up mobile phone look as good as new. How about removing the unsightly flaws on a varnished tabletop with the glow of a black-light lamp?

These scenarios may sound like the start of a late-night infomercial, but they're actually among the possibilities raised by the development of a new type of "healable" polymer.

"You can think about different ways to realize this technology," Christoph Weder, a materials-science researcher at Switzerland's University of Fribourg, told reporters. "If you think about cars, yes, you can think about your own little fix-it-up tool, but you can also think about combining the instrumentation with car washes."

AMI / CWRU / USARL

Scratches on this polymer can be fixed by shining ultraviolet light on them.

You can't get this stuff at your body shop just yet, though. The material is still years away from commercialization. "Our study is really a fundamental research study. ... We really provide a toolbox to developers who hopefully will take this to the next level," Weder said.

Weder and other researchers describe their molecular "toolbox" in a paper published in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The researchers, led by Case Western Reserve University's Stuart Rowan, say they have developed a new class of materials known as "metallo-supramolecular polymers."

"These polymers have a Napoleon Complex," Rowan explained in a news release. "In reality, they're pretty small, but are designed to behave like they're big by taking advantage of specific weak molecular interactions."

Most polymers consist of long molecular chains, but these metallo-supramolecular polymers consist of short chains that are glued together with metal ions.

If the material is scratched, cut or cracked, that breaks up the polymer. But researchers can "heal" the damage by shining intense ultraviolet light on the material. The irradiation heats up the polymer, causing the molecules to come unglued and flow back together like a liquid. That fills in the cracks and smooths out the surface. When the light is switched off, the material reassembles and solidifies again within seconds.

Zina Deretsky / NSF

This schematic shows how the molecules making up the polymer can be temporarily disassembled under UV light. When the light is turned off, the molecules reassemble themselves.

The light can be focused on a particular area of the polymer surface to fix a defect, while the rest of the finish remains intact and unaffected. The research team also found that the material could be "healed" repeatedly with no ill effects.

Although the experiments were conducted exclusively with ultraviolet light, the researchers are looking into tweaking the technology so that other wavelengths can be used, such as a specific kind of blue light. During the experiments, the team came across some instances where the material was discolored in the course of being healed, but Weder said that was probably due to molecular defects in the material.

Weder said the main ingredients of the polymer are "relatively inexpensive" chemicals.

"I don't think that ultimately cost will be a showstopper," he said, "but I should say again, what we have reported is not something that I expect to be commercialized tomorrow or next year. It's really a first generation of a class of materials that need further refinement."

In a Nature commentary on the research, Nancy Sottos and Jeffrey Moore of the University of Illinois at Urbana said that healable polymers "offer an alternative to the damage-and-discard cycle" that is seen so often in today's consumer society, and represent a first step toward products "that have much greater lifespans than currently available materials."

Andrew Lovinger, polymers program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Materials Research, said the quest for healable materials was part of a wider initiative to create "matter by design."

"There are people working both on the chemistry of creating this kind of matter, on the propoerties and the processing ... and even on the theoretical [side] and cybertools to make that possible," he said. "Having scientists and engineers all working together in all of these areas with that vision may one day lead us to any kind of material or matter we will be able to design from scratch — pardon the pun — and may be able to design for any kind of property."

More on materials science:

• Metals with memory could fix dents
• Self-healing car coating repairs scratches
• Rubber-like material can mend itself
• Bendy antennas could reshape electronics
• Airplanes of the future could be self-healing
• 'Programmable matter' may shape future tools
• Water-blocking material mimics spider hair
• Graphene: Thin stuff is a big fat deal
• The latest fashion in invisibility
• Solar cells that heal themselves

In addition to Rowan and Weder, co-authors of "Optically Healable Supramolecular Polymers" include Mark Burnworth, Liming Tang and Justin R. Kumpfer of Case Western Reserve University; Andrew J. Duncan and Frederick L. Beyer of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory; and Gina L. Fiore of the Adolphe Merkle Institute and Fribourg Center for Nanomaterlais, University of Fribourg. The reearch paper was based on work supported by the U.S. Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the Adolphe Merkle Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

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

Leonardo da Vinci via Nightly News

Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" is the best-known representation of an event that, according to a Cambridge professor, may have taken place one day earlier than traditionally thought.

Biblical accounts of the Last Supper make more sense if the meal took place on Wednesday rather than on Holy Thursday, a Cambridge professor contends.

In a newly published book titled "The Mystery of the Last Supper," Sir Colin Humphreys explains why he thinks the first eucharistic meal, which most Christian churches will be commemorating on Thursday, actually occurred on the Wednesday night before Easter.

"Many people think the Gospels disagree," Humphreys told me today. "I'm saying they're in remarkable agreement. I've used science and the Bible, hand in hand, to solve this problem."

Humphreys is a materials-science professor at Cambridge University who also casts a scientific eye on the mysteries of the Bible. In 1993, he and a colleague wrote in the journal Nature that Jesus' crucifixion probably took place in the year 33. In 1995, he proposed that the "Star of Bethlehem" was actually a comet that became visible in the year 5 B.C. In his 2003 book, "The Miracles of Exodus," he proposed natural explanations for some of the phenomena described in the biblical story of the Jews' flight from Egypt.

Cambridge U. Press

Sir Colin Humphreys

His latest claims are aimed at addressing some of the nagging questions surrounding the Last Supper: First of all, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke suggest that it was a Passover meal, while the Gospel of John says that it occurred before Passover. Also, so much occurs between the Last Supper and the crucifixion that it's hard to fit everything into the time between Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Jesus' capital trial before the Sanhedrin, for example, would have had to have taken place during the night, which is contrary to Jewish jurisprudence.

Pope Benedict XVI takes note of the Last Supper's loose ends in his own newly published book, "Jesus of Nazareth, Part II," without coming to a firm conclusion on whether the meal occurred on Holy Thursday or earlier in the week.

Humphreys analyzed a variety of religious calendars — Jewish and Egyptian, solar and lunar — and reached his own conclusion that ties up the loose ends. It turns out that Passover began at sunset on Thursday, April 2, in the year 33, according to the calendar adopted during the Jews' Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C. But a different religious calendar, dating back to the Jews' time in Egypt, would have Passover beginning at sunrise on Wednesday, April 1.

That means Matthew, Mark and Luke could make a case for Wednesday's evening meal being part of Passover (by the pre-Exilic reckoning), while John would be justified in saying it happened before Passover (by the more recent reckoning).

If his timeline is true, the Last Supper would have taken place on April 1. Jesus' main trial before the Sanhedrin would have been on April 2. The confirmation of his sentence and his appearances before Pontius Pilate would have occurred on the morning of Good Friday, April 3, followed by the crucifixion. All this would lead up to the first Easter Sunday on April 5 of the year 33.

Cambridge U. Press

"The Mystery of the Last Supper" analyzes the timeline of the Passion story.

Many in the scientific community might see Humphreys' work as an empty exercise. They might even doubt whether Jesus was a historical figure at all. But Humphreys hopes that his analysis will be useful to scriptural scholars as well as rank-and-file believers.

"For biblical scholars, it resolves the discrepancy," he told me. "We now have just the right amount of space that we need for the Gospel events."

Humphreys also believes that Jesus and his followers were trying to send a theological message by celebrating the Passover on a schedule that goes back to a time before the Babylonian exile, to the era of Moses and the Exodus. "It mirrors the covenant that Moses announced," Humphreys told me. "It's cementing the message of Jesus, that he's the new Moses."

Chances are that Humphreys' claims won't lead churches to switch their Holy Thursday (a.k.a. Maundy Thursday) observances to Wednesday instead. But do they change your view of biblical lore? Feel free to share your thoughts about the Easter season and its historical underpinnings in the comment section below.

More about the Last Supper and the Bible:

• Meal in Last Supper paintings supersized
• Nails from Jesus' cross? Experts doubt it
• Claims about 'lost tomb' stir up tempest
• Alternative gospels in the spotlight
• Reconstructing the tomb of Christ
• Messianic message stirs debate
• Who was the historical Jesus?
• Science replays the crucifixion
• Bible gets a reality check
• The face in the Shroud

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