World Science Festival

Kids and kindred spirits have fun with geometric toys during the 2010 World Science Festival Youth and Family Street Fair in New York City.

The World Science Festival hits the streets of New York City on Wednesday, and this time, you don't even have to be in New York to get in on the celebration.

For example, you'll be able to watch a phalanx of physicists delve into the 96 percent of the universe we can't see, during a Thursday panel discussion on "The Dark Side of the Universe." You can listen in on a Friday night conversation about the neuroscience of sleep. You can even get a virtual sampling of Sunday's science street fair at Washington Square Park ... all from the comfort of your own desktop.

And that's just the beginning: Video clips from World Science Festival presentations are being added to the WSFtv website, from past years as well as from this year.

World Science Festival

Theoretical physicist Brian Greene is one of the organizers of the World Science Festival.

The festival was created in 2008 as a way to blend art, science and fun on the streets of New York. But this year, the event's organizers — including Brian Greene, a string theorist from Columbia University — have bigger aspirations. They want to share the experience on the Web, not just in June, but throughout the year.

Greene provided a preview for this year's festival today during a quick Q&A. Here's an edited transcript:

Cosmic Log: In past years, the festival has featured mind-blowing concepts such as the holographic nature of the universe. What sorts of mind-blowers are on tap this year? What's going to really knock our socks off?

Brian Greene: Well, we have this program called "From Dust to ...: The Radical New Science of Longevity." One of the participants, Aubrey de Grey, has some pretty far-out ideas. He believes that the first person who'll live to be 1,000 years old has already been born. That certainly rankles many other scientists who work in the field, so it should be a very lively conversation about where we stand in understanding the aging process. Can we slow it? Can we stop it? What does that mean?

I'm in a program called "The Dark Side of the Universe," where we'll talk about the 96 percent of the universe that we have not seen. We're going to run the gamut. There'll be experts on dark matter who will be suggesting that in the near future, we're likely to identify what the dark matter is. We're going to have another team, of which I am a member, who'll be talking about dark energy. We'll be discussing how this dark energy was discovered, and I'll be pushing to the limit on how some of us suspect that dark energy may be giving us a clue that there are other universes out there.

There's a wonderful program that's called "The Secret Behind the Secret of Life," which is actually a play. As you know, we like to mix art and science together in this festival. This is a play about the history behind the discovery of DNA. After the play, there'll be a discussion involving some of the scientists who were involved in the discovery. Maybe some interesting insights that have not yet been given the light of day will come out of that conversation. What really happened when DNA's structure was discovered?

Q: A lot of people have talked about the role of Rosalind Franklin, who appears to have missed out on the credit that she was due for the discovery.

A: Rosalind Franklin is the focal point of this play. The play itself is not meant to be completely historically accurate, but that will be the launching point for a conversation that will be focused on the history, among the only people alive today who know what really happened.

Physicist Steven Weinberg is coming to the festival. He's doing something special that we've never done before — which is to actually give somebody a platform to speak their mind on their view of the future of a given subject. He'll be speaking about the future of "big science," which is really what physics has largely turned into. What does it mean for the future of science that funding for these big projects is going to be harder and harder to come by? Steven Weinberg is not just a scientist. He's not just a Nobel Prize winner. He's a statesman of science.

Q: So what's his solution to the issue of more expensive "big science" projects, and the reluctance of governments to give over the billions of dollars that are required for such projects?

A: That's a great question. I'm looking forward to hearing the answer.

Q: And then there's the reading of Alan Alda's play about Marie Curie, "Radiance," with Maggie Gyllenhaal in the starring role ...

A: Yes, that's going to be a spectacular program. I was just at the dress rehearsal a few minutes ago. Alan Alda is known as an actor, but he's also a spectacular writer. This is a play that will really knock people's socks off. Bringing art and science together is a huge challenge, because you want there to be real science, but you don't want to step out of the drama to explain the science. So the real challenge is, how do you integrate the abstract ideas of science in a fictional format that will allow the audience to stay in the drama even as they're learning the science?

I think Alan's written to that challenge and taken the art form to a new level, because you're completely drawn in by the drama of Marie Curie's life. You become immersed in her science, in her thoughts, the way she looks at the universe, and you never realize that you're being brought into these wondrous ideas, because the drama just carries you off. Maggie Gyllenhaal's fantastic as Marie Curie. It's an amazing cast, and it's going to be a great show.

Q: That touches on the reason why you and others established the festival in the first place. I don't think you meant it to be a dry colloquium about scientific topics. You really wanted to engage the public.

A: That's exactly the point. We really wanted to make new avenues of entry into science, where somebody who would go to Lincoln Center but wouldn't go to a scientific event would come to our opening night and be brought into science that way. That idea permeates just about everything we do at the festival. We have this program called "Beautiful Minds: The Enigma of Genius," which will really try to get into asking whether genius is hard-wired from the get-go. Is it something that can be nurtured? What do we even mean when we use the word "genius"? It takes so many different forms, in music and art, in math and science. That program will begin with a wonderful montage  — actors playing out three great geniuses in history, Ramanujan from mathematics, Marie Curie from science, and Beethoven from music. The program will then have a conversation among mathematicians, neuroscientists, composer Philip Glass and other artists. It's emblematic of the way the festival treats these ideas.

Let me give you one more example. Pat Metheny, this legendary jazz guitarist, will be doing a program called "Music and the Spark of Spontaneity," in which he will be improvising onstage, doing what he does best, and then there will be a team of neuroscientists and psychologists who will try to explain what is actually going on inside his brain during those creative moments. Again, you have performance brought together with science in order to advance the understanding of each.

Q: It looks as if the festival is getting a little more like the TED conferences, where you're trying to have some elements recorded on video so that they endure after the conference is over.

A: Our goal is to be here 365 days a year. The way we're doing that is, we do have this WSFtv part of our website now. We have full programs from previous years, but we also have wonderful vignettes of programs. For three minutes you can click in and hear about the big bang or black holes, or click and hear about the newest understanding of aspects of neuroscience. Across the board, there's this great science programming that is drawn from each festival's offerings, but is available all year round — and it comes in bite-size chunks or in larger chunks, depending on what your taste at a given moment might be.

Q: Will some of the presentations from this year's festival be put online?

A: Yes, definitely, either in full or in excerpts. The goal is to have as much of the festival as possible available. We typically sell out all the programs, but there are only so many people you can fit in a live event. Online, you can reach 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times as many people. And that's the goal.

The World Science Festival presents events at a variety of New York City venues through Sunday. Check the WSF website for details about events and ticket availability, and check the WSFtv website for video offerings.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz.

An image captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on March 31 shows the glint of the Spirit rover's solar panels as a bright spot toward the left side of this image, alongside the rock formation known as Home Plate.

NASA is no longer sending commands to the Spirit rover on Mars, but the long-silent robot still has a few more chances to phone home. Not that anyone is expecting Spirit to call, more than a year after the six-wheeled robot went into a coma. But if Spirit does decide to make a resurrection, it better do it before June 8.

That's when NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is due to take a last listen for UHF signals from the rover, which is mired in sandy soil on an incline inside Gusev Crater, alongside a rock formation known as Home Plate. The final relay pass is due at 12:30 p.m. PT (3:30 p.m. ET) on June 8, said John Callas, project manager for the Mars rover missions at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"After that point, there is no attempt at communicating with Spirit going forward," Callas told me today.

So when do you mark the time of death? Would it be June 8? Or May 25, when NASA sent its last command seeking contact? Or March 22, 2010, the last time that NASA heard from the ailing, energy-starved rover?

Callas and his colleagues have had a long time to prepare for Spirit's end and turn their full focus to the twin rover Opportunity, which is still very much alive and rolling.

"The transition to single-rover operations has already been done," Callas said. "That was done many months ago. The project is already where it should be."

He said mission operations at JPL now occupy the time of a little more than 40 full-time-equivalent employees, compared with several hundred back in the heyday of the rover missions, seven years ago. The cost for the Opportunity-only operation is about $12 million annually, compared with $800 million for the rovers' construction, launch and primary mission.

At the risk of anthropomorphizing the machine yet again, I'll just mention that Spirit was generally considered the hard-working, nothing-comes-easy rover, while Opportunity was the "little princess" of the two. Spirit was the first to land on Mars, in early January of 2004, and it suffered glitches that the team could use to smooth the way for Opportunity later.

Many of Spirit's most memorable discoveries, having to do with geological evidence of ancient water on Mars, came after its scheduled 90-day primary mission was finished.

"It's all been said, and everyone knows this, that this is a remarkable mission that exceeded expectations, a three-month mission that lasted for six years," Callas said. "We have to remember how blessed we are to have had that. Our glass isn't half-empty, it's really nine-tenths full."

As the mission wore on, Spirit had to contend with a bum wheel and bouts of computer-memory amnesia, but its final round of troubles got started a little more than two years ago when it became stuck in loose dirt while driving around the Martian plateau known as Home Plate. For months, engineers at JPL worked on detailed plans to free up the rover, but they just couldn't move Spirit far enough to put its power-generating solar arrays into a good position to soak up sunlight during the Martian winter.

For a while, NASA used Spirit as a stationary observation post, but the rover's power eventually dwindled to the point that it shut down transmissions to Earth and went into hibernation.

It never woke up.

Ironically, it was Spirit's solar panels that most recently signaled the rover's location. This March, sunlight glinted off the panels at just the right angle to shine into the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The flash told the mission team that Spirit's panels were not yet completely covered with the red dust of Mars.

I asked Callas whether it was worth monitoring the reflections of Spirit's solar panels to track the deposition of dust over the months and years to come, but he said that would be a "very difficult analysis to do." The reflectance of the panels could be anywhere between 30 and 80 percent.

"It's unclear how you can use that information," Callas said.

Kenneth Kremer / Marco DiLorenzo / NASA / JPL / Cornell

The Spirit rover's last panorama, sent back in February 2010, shows its surroundings in Mars' Columbia Hills. The hill with the light-colored top, visible near the top center image, was dubbed Von Braun and would have been Spirit's next destination.

So Spirit's days as a scientific instrument of any kind appear to be over. But scientists will continue to pore over the data that Spirit delivered for more than six years. "That will happen for decades," Callas said. And as an inspiration for future planetary science, Spirit has entered immortality, alongside the Mars Viking landers as well as the Mars Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover.

It's fitting, then, that the rover will get the scientific community's equivalent of an Irish wake in July, when the rover science team gathers at JPL for a previously scheduled meeting. "We intend to use that opportunity as an avenue for Spirit's send-off," Callas said.

Godspeed, Spirit! And may you be in heaven half an hour before the Great Galactic Ghoul knows you're dead.

More about Mars:

• NASA weighs landing sites for next rover
• Counting down to a mission to Mars
• Gallery: Greatest hits from Mars
• Inside the rover factory

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Brian Gratwicke

A powdered glass frog, Cochranella pulverata, from Panama is shown here. A new social-networking website allows citizen scientists to upload their photos of frogs to help conservationists track frogs around the world.

Budding naturalists armed with a camera and an Internet connection can help save the world's frogs from extinction thanks to a new social-networking site that links up information on their froggy finds with scientists who are racing to conserve the amphibians.

Of the 6,814 known species of amphibians, about 2,000 are considered threatened with extinction due to habitat loss, climate change, the chyrtrid fungus, and other factors. In the last two decades, 168 are thought to have gone extinct. 

To participate in the Global Amphibian Blitz, citizen scientists take a photo of a frog they encounter in their backyard, at the park, on a hike, or anywhere else one leaps into view. They can upload it to the iNaturalist.org website along with the date and GPS location (there's an iPhone app for that).

Once posted, the species is identified by scientists who are keen to learn the whereabouts and population status of amphibians.

"By being in the right place at the right time and armed with a camera, amateurs can provide information that scientists could never dream of collecting on their own," Scott Loarie, co-director of iNaturalist and post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, said in a news release.

Since the Global Amphibian Blitz was launched May 25, reports on more than 290 of the known species of amphibians have been posted to the website.

Project scientists view the social-networking site as a wise use of limited conservation funds to locate rare species and collect data on out-of-range occurrences. The precise whereabouts of the rare frogs will be closely guarded by the scientists to thwart collection by wildlife traders.

This is the latest campaign to collect data on the world's amphibians. The Search for Lost Frogs, a global effort to account for amphibians feared threatened with extinction, wrapped up in 2010 with mixed results — several frogs thought already lost were re-discovered, but many more appear gone forever.

To learn more abouth the Global Amphibian Blitz, check out the video below.

In addition to iNaturalist, the Global Amphibian Blitz is sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley's AmphibiaWeb; Amphibian Ark; the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute; the Amphibian Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission; and the Center for Biological Diversity.

More about frog conservation:

• Scant froggy finds spark worries
• Froggy finds raise hopes for Haiti
• Three new frogs leap into spotlight
• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia

A real-life jetpack passed a key test this month by soaring to a height of 5,000 feet, deploying an emergency parachute and drifting back down to New Zealand's Canterbury Plains.

"This successful test brings the future another step closer," Glenn Martin, the jetpack's inventor and founder of the New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Co., said in a statement issued today.

Martin Aircraft says the previous altitude record for the fan-driven, wearable aircraft was 50 feet (15 meters). Sending a test pilot 100 times higher sounds like a scary proposition, and that's why the May 21 parachute test was unmanned. Instead, a dummy weighing as much as a human operator was put into the jetpack. The contraption was radio-controlled from a helicopter flying nearby.

The point of the exercise was to put the jetpack's emergency landing system to the test. The engine cut out at an altitude of 3,000 feet (900 meters), and then an off-the-shelf ballistic parachute popped out to slow the speed of descent. The jetpack hit the ground with a velocity of 15.7 mph (25.2 kilometers per hour), Martin Aircraft reported.

"The aircraft sustained some damage on impact, but we would expect that it is likely a pilot would have walked away from this emergency landing," the company said.

The jetpack pushed the envelope for climb rate (800 feet per minute or 4 meters per second, with the capability to rise even faster) and flight duration (9 minutes and 46 seconds). "This test also validated our flight model, proved thrust to weight ratio and proved our ability to fly a jetpack as an unmanned aerial vehicle, which will be key to some of the jetpack’s future emergency/search and rescue and military applications," Glenn Martin said.

The company expects the jetpack's first buyers to be military and emergency-response agencies — which might well be looking for ways to send in a remote-controlled aircraft capable of delivery, surveillance or extraction in situations that are too dangerous for more traditional conveyances.

Martin Aircraft's CEO, Richard Lauder, said the next steps in development will include improvements in the emergency parachute system, engine performance and high-speed flight stability.

The Martin jetpack project was unveiled almost three years ago at the EAA AirVenture air show in Wisconsin. The company says it's targeting an initial price tag of $100,000 for the recreational version of the vehicle. If the venture really does take off commercially, I could imagine jetpack rides becoming one of the offerings for recreational fliers, alongside hang-gliding adventures, ultralight airplane rides and balloon tours. Would you strap in? How much would you pay? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More on jetpacks and other dreams of flight:

• This jetpack can be yours for $100,000
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?
• Jetpack veterans meet new innovators
• Seven flights of fancy that fizzled

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Norman Rockwell

A Norman Rockwell oil painting shows astronauts John Young and Gus Grissom as they're suited for the first flight of the Gemini program in March 1965. NASA lent Rockwell a Gemini spacesuit in order to make this painting as accurate as possible. Click through highlights from the "NASA | ART" exhibition.

Space visions from well-known painters, photographers, sculptors and astronauts — dating back to the beginnings of NASA's spaceflights in the 1960s — go on display this weekend at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum after a three-year national tour. The exhibition of more than 70 works from the NASA Art Program, titled "NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration," comes as the latest chapter of spaceflight history, the 30-year space shuttle program, is nearing its end.

The NASA Art Program was set up in 1962 to show space exploration from a perspective that launch cameras couldn't capture. "The artists were given pretty much free rein to do anything they wanted to do," Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian, told The Washington Post. And what artists! The lineup included Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, James Wyeth, Alexander Calder, Annie Leibovitz and William Wegman.

For this exhibition, the curators added works by Norman Rockwell, the classic Americana illustrator; and Alan Bean, the Apollo 12 moonwalker who's an accomplished artist as well. DCist's Heather Goss says the exhibition is "pretty damn spectacular." She calls particular attention to Paul Calle's pen-and-ink sketches of the Apollo 11 astronauts as they were suiting up for their historic 1969 moon landing.

What masterpieces can we expect from future flights? The Post reports that no artists were commissioned to document the shuttle Endeavour's launch on May 16 due to budget cuts, but it says a "world-famous photographer, who declines to be named right now," will be on hand when Atlantis lifts off on July 8 to close out the space shuttle program.

Check out the exhibition, which is on display on the second floor of the National Air and Space Museum on Washington's National Mall through Oct. 9. And if you can't get to the exhibit, you can sample some of the highlights in our "NASA | ART" slideshow.

More about space art:

• Moonwalker's art goes on display at Smithsonian
• Spacey artists win crafty prizes from Etsy and NASA
• Hubble Space Telescope goes pop
• Artists of the final frontier

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Desertec Foundation

This is a sketch of possible infrastructure for a sustainable supply of power to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The recent uprisings in North Africa have rattled the short-term prospects for a multi-billion dollar project to generate massive amounts of solar energy in the Sahara and ship a portion of it to Europe.

Long term, though, the establishment of new democracies throughout the region may set the stage for the project's long-term success, argued some participants at a project conference this week in Berlin, Germany.

"Socioeconomic development and the development of democracy go hand-in-hand," Kirsten Westphal, an energy expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told Spiegel Online.

In her view, the solar energy project would bring the kind of economic development that could consolidate democratic structures. 

Harnessing the sun
The project, known as Desertec, would harness the abundant sun falling on the Sahara and use it to meet electricity demand across North Africa and Middle East, as well as 15 percent of Europe's.

The project calls for construction of solar thermal power plants in the Sahara and high-voltage transmission lines to ship the power to the people. Cost estimates are around $566 billion.

The concept is being promoted by the nonprofit Desertec Foundation and the Desertec Industrial Initiative, an industrial consortium consisting of such heavyweights as E.on and the re-insurer Munich Re.

At first, the solar power would be used locally, though eventually project promoters envision a portion shipped to Europe.

Such an ambitious project requires a certain level of stability in North Africa to be successful. Unrest scares off investors, for one, and providing extra security for the massive infrastructure would be too costly, noted conference participants. 

Neocolonial hurdle
The Arab Spring, as the revolts to establish democracy across the Middle East and North Africa are called, represent the latest hurdle to the project, which has been questioned as too expensive and technically challenging to ever work. 

In addition, the concept is seen by some as sort of neocolonialism — European nations coming into North Africa and the Middle East to siphon its resources for their own gain, Spiegel Online noted.

This type of fear isn't farfetched. Writing in the magazine Foreign Policy this week about the geopolitics of food, Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, details how rich nations are already tying up land in developing countries to grow grain for themselves. 

"Most of these land acquisitions are in Africa, where some governments lease cropland for less than $1 per acre per year … That the governments of [Ethiopia and Sudan] are willing to sell land to foreign interests when their own people are hungry is a sad commentary on their leadership," Brown writes.

According to the Spiegel Online article, attendees at the Desertec conference are well aware of the neocolonial fears and are encouraging an open and transparent process to show that their motives are honorable.

"Until the project takes shape, however, doubts are likely to remain," notes Spiegel Online. " 'Desert Power for the People' was the title of the Berlin event. But it's perhaps understandable if stakeholders in North Africa and the Middle East find themselves asking the question: Which people?"

More stories on green energy: 

• Solar power from North Africa for Europe 
• Europe's supergrid gets a boost 
• Green machine takes root in Jordan 
• Green energy ideas so crazy they might just work

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).

Henry Bortman / 2010

Astrobiology researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon works with samples at California's Mono Lake.

Last updated 8:30 p.m. ET

After five months of battles in the blogosphere, the debate over whether life can be based on an alternate biochemistry is playing out on the highest levels of peer-reviewed research.

Back in December, the journal Science sparked a ruckus by publishing an online report from researchers who claimed that they had coaxed bacteria from California's Mono Lake to live on arsenic rather than phosphorus. That's a big deal, because phosphorus is thought to be one of the six elements essential for life as we know it (along with carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur). Arsenic, on the other hand, is typically seen as a potent poison.

The researchers, led by astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon at the U.S. Geological Survey, suggested that such an alien biology could exist in environments beyond Earth that are traditionally thought to be inimical to life — for example, the hydrocarbon seas of Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

That sounds like a wonderful vision, but the claims from Wolfe-Simon and her team instantly came under attack from other chemists and microbiologists. In a flurry of blog postings and Twitter tweets, the critics took aim at what they saw were fatal flaws in the team's methodology. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues defended their work in a Q&A issued via Science, but said they preferred to pursue the debate through the traditional peer-review process.

Now that process has taken a great leap forward. Today Science posted eight peer-reviewed technical comments from the critics to its Web site, along with a response from the original research group. The journal said all these papers would be printed, along with the original study (which has so far been available only online), in next week's edition.

"There's a lot of stuff that's happened," Wolfe-Simon told me today. "It's been a real challenge for me and my co-authors. ... We think this is evidence that, really, science is moving forward faster."

She held to the original claim that molecules of arsenic were incorporated into the machinery of life, replacing at least some of phosphorus. "We would argue that our conclusion is still viable," she said. "We never claimed 100 percent substitution, and in a way that point was misconstrued."

Wolfe-Simon said more evidence has been amassed to back up the arsenic-life claims over the past five months. However, the fresh evidence had to be held back for future publication. Wolfe-Simon said she was constrained from reporting new data in today's online response to the critics, which was a source of frustration for her. Science insisted on that to keep the cycle of response and counter-response from spinning out of control.

It's not unheard of to publish technical comments and responses in the wake of a controversial paper. Science did exactly that this week, with regard to a study claiming that microbes consumed all the methane that leaked from last year's Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it's very unusual to publish a research paper, eight critiques of that paper and a follow-up response to those critiques in the same issue of a scientific journal.

Science's editors said they did not expect their data dump "to be the final word on the subject."

"The fact that we received so much feedback to the Wolfe-Simon paper suggests to us that science is proceeding as it should," the editors said in a statement. "The study involved multiple techniques and lines of evidence, and the authors felt their conclusion was the most plausible explanation for these results when considered as a whole. We hope that the study and the subsequent exchange being published today will stimulate further experments — whether they support or overturn this conclusion."

The criticisms — and the responses from Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues — thus set the ground rules for the debate, which will likely continue for months and years to come. Here's a quick rundown of some of the issues involved:

Criticism: The "arsenic-eating" bacteria, known as GFAJ-1, were grown under conditions that still had trace amounts of phosphorus, and it's more likely that the microbes used that trace phosphorus rather than the arsenic. The arsenic-life researchers claimed there was so little phosphorus left that the bacteria couldn't possibly have survived on it — but under extreme conditions, some individual microbes have been found to survive on that little.  

Response from the team: They point out that they checked bacteria under three conditions: high phosphorus and low arsenic; high arsenic and low phosphorus; low arsenic and low phosphorus. If the "arsenic-eating" bacteria were actually living off the low levels of phosphorus, they should have done as well in the low-arsenic / low-phosphorus environment. But they didn't. The team also says the survival rate on an ultra-low-phosphorus level should be compared based on wider populations, and not based on individual extremophile microbes.

Criticism: In the course of breeding bacteria to make them live in a high-arsenic environment, the team might have actually created bacteria that adapted to the low-phosphorus concentrations by processing the chemicals differently. That would explain why the high-arsenic / low-phosphorus bacteria did so much better than the low-arsenic / low-phosphorus bacteria.

Response from the team: They saw no evidence that the bacteria's biochemistry processed phosphorus in the way that was suggested, but acknowledged that the chemical pathways used by GFAJ-1 "are important avenues for future investigation."

Criticism: The molecular bonds involving arsenic would simply not be strong enough to hold up in alternate forms of DNA and other biochemical building blocks. What's more, phosphorus is far more abundant than arsenic in the solar system, and most of the arsenic available on rocky planets would be available in a form that is structurally quite different from phosphorus. These considerations point to the unlikelihood of life arising on Earth or elsewhere with an arsenic-based biochemistry.

Response from the team: It's conceivable that the arsenic bonds in large biomolecules are more resistant to a breakdown than the bonds in smaller molecules. "GFAJ-1 may have evolved specific strategies to cope with this issue, such as stabilizing structures," the team wrote.

Criticism: The team didn't devote enough attention to guarding against contamination of their samples and purifying the DNA that they analyzed. What's more, the uncertainties surrounding the measurements may not allow the team to make definite conclusions.

Response from the team: Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues recap the procedures they used and say they "were sufficient to remove any impurities." They also cite multiple techniques that cross-checked their results, through radiolabeling as well as high-resolution mass spectroscopy. They agree that further analysis of the DNA "would be a useful future experiment" because it could shed further light on the chemistry involved. They reworked their calculations on some of the analysis to respond to some of the criticisms about averaging, and said the data still supported their conclusions.

The bottom line is that the debate will continue, with more researchers getting into the act. Wolfe-Simon's team says samples of GFAJ-1 are being made available to other labs upon request, through the Oremland Laboratory at the U.S. Geological Survey.

"We look forward to working with our peers to replicate our observations and to test our hypotheses along the lines suggested by [one of the critics, Stefan] Oehler and others," the team writes.

One of the most vocal critics, University of British Columbia microbiologist Rosie Redfield, said today that she was still unconvinced:

"The authors don't report any new experiments. Most of their responses take the form of 'our interpretation could be correct on this point if...' In many cases there is indeed a small possibility that it could, but there are so many of these points of interpretation, each with only a very small probability of being correct, that I don't think anyone will find the arguments convincing."

Redfield said the team's responses to her comments about contamination were "in some ways the most scientifically valid, as they provide information about their media and DNA purification." She promised to have more about that on her blog later today.

So the blogosphere beat goes on. What do you think? Are you intrigued by this latest chapter in the grand scientific debate, or has the whole subject of arsenic life lost its appeal? Either way, please feel free to add your comments below.

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: I've added some comments from Wolfe-Simon above after chatting with her this afternoon. She said she and her colleagues took Redfield's concerns about potential contamination very seriously. "Her criticisms are definitely valid," she said. "One of the first things we went back and did was look at all the ways we can get [phosphorus levels] down to zero."

But she said the key observations would come when scientists look at GFAJ-1's molecular machinery, to confirm that arsenic really is being incorporated into DNA, lipids and other molecules where phosphorus is usually found. "The question that people are really asking is, 'Show me the money. Let's see those biomolecules,'" she said.

Wolfe-Simon said she and her co-authors have been getting offers of help from other researchers in fields ranging from molecular biology to astronomy. She's also been getting supportive messages from lots of folks, including a 7-year-old girl who told her she wants to do research at Mono Lake when she grows up. "If I can put my peg on the wall, if we can ask the right questions ... she's going to answer the questions," Wolfe-Simon said.

Meanwhile, Redfield has posted an additional blog item that details her concerns about contamination. She's not satisfied with the response that Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues provided. "Overall, the most striking aspect of the authors' formal response is that they never admit to having made any mistakes or having done anything badly," she writes. "This is a bit disconcerting, given how many concerns were raised."

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: An additional post from Rosie Redfield addresses how to test arsenic-life claims. Meanwhile, science writer Carl Zimmer looks at the big role that online discussion played in the arsenic-life debate, and Nature's Erika Check Hayden rounds up reactions from other researchers. One theme: Is it worth spending time and effort to try replicating the findings?

The story so far:

• December 2010: Life as we don't know it ... on Earth?
• 'Weird life' claims spark a backlash
• 'Weird life' reveals science at work
• 'Weird life' researchers answer critics
• February 2011: Arsenic debate just won't die
• April 2011: Alien life revisited

Science is making all 10 papers accessible with free online registration. You can see the whole list on Science Express, the journal's rapid-publication website, and here's an item-by-item menu:

• Comment by James Cotner and Edward Hall
• Comment by Rosemary Redfield
• Comment by B. Schoepp-Cothenet, W. Nitschke, L.M. Barge, A. Ponce, M.J. Russell and A.I. Tsapin
• Comment by Istvan Csabai and Eors Szathmary
• Comment by Stefan Oehler
• Comment by David Borhani
• Comment by Steven Benner
• Comment by Patricia Foster
• Response by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, Jodi Switzer Blum, Thomas Kulp, Gwyneth Gordon, Shelley Hoeft, Jennifer Pett-Ridge, John Stolz, Samuel Webb, Peter Weber, Paul Davies, Ariel Anbar and Ronald Oremland
• "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus" by Felisa Wolfe-Simon et al.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

John Kessler / Texas A&M

Wearing protective masks, Texas A&M's John Kessler and David Valentine of the University of California at Santa Barbara stand in front of ground zero of the Deepwater Horizon Gulf oil spill in June 2010. Their research, published in the journal Science early this year, is the subject of renewed debate this week.

What happened to all the methane that was released into the ocean during last year's Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Scientists are revisiting that question this week in dueling research papers.

The two papers appearing in this week's issue of Science follow up on a study that was published in the same journal in January. Back then, a team of scientists reported that bacteria gobbled up the methane released during the Deepwater Horizon spill at a surprising rate. Experts estimate that 200,000 tons of methane were released during the spill, in addition to the more than 200 million gallons of oil. The researchers concluded that "nearly all" of the methane was consumed in the ocean before it reached the atmosphere.

A rival group, led by University of Georgia marine ecologist Samantha Joye, takes issue with that conclusion in this week's issue. Joye and her colleagues say too many uncertainties surround the observations. "I believe there is still a lot to learn about the environmental factors that regulate methane consumption in the Gulf's waters and elsewhere," Joye said in a news release.

The researchers behind the earlier study defended their results in a response that was published alongside their critics' comments.

"The case is actually in pretty good shape right now," said David Valentine, a geochemist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who was behind the earlier research as well as today's response to Joye's group. "They're not countering the data, they're not countering any sort of technical issues. They're just really trying to argue interpretation without offering any alternative."

Why it matters
Although the methane from the Gulf spill is pretty much gone by now, one way or the other, this isn't an empty debate. Scientists say the fate of the Gulf of Mexico methane could hint at how Earth's ecosystems might respond to future methane releases — for example, a meltdown of frozen deep-sea methane reserves caused by climate change. Methane is a greenhouse gas even more potent than carbon dioxide, and some fear that a massive atmospheric release could create a climate catastrophe. If methane-munching microbes could handle a meltdown, that might put that nightmare to rest.

Valentine and his colleagues concluded that the microbes did the trick by tracking ocean methane levels as well as reductions in oxygen levels. Such oxygen anomalies might indicate that the microbes were oxidizing the methane gas in order to digest it. But Joye and her colleagues suggested that the lower oxygen levels might have been caused by other factors, such as the "dead zone" phenomenon observed in the Gulf.

Joye also pointed to studies indicating that considerable amounts of methane released from natural deep-sea vents are not consumed by microbes. "A range of data exists that shows a significant release of methane seeping out at the seafloor to the atmosphere, indicating that the microbial biofilter is not as effective," she said in the news release.

Valentine, however, said there was "absolutely no basis" for the dead-zone argument, because that kind of oxygen depletion occurs in shallow waters, not in the depths that he and his colleagues studied. They insist in their Science paper that "natural emission does not mimic" the Deepwater Horizon release of methane.

Oily, gassy debate
This scientific back-and-forth is likely to go on for a while, just like the similar back-and-forth over what happened to the oil spilled in the Gulf. Joye happens to be involved in that debate as well, which similarly centers on how efficiently microbes removed the hydrocarbons that leaked into the sea. She contends there's a lot more oil left behind than other researchers have claimed.

Valentine said one of the factors behind the disagreement is a study that Joye and her colleagues published in Nature Geoscience in February. That study included an estimate of the hydrocarbon leakage that turned out to be too high, he said. "That sets a false stage for the argument and makes it seem as if there's a much greater discrepancy than there is," he told me.

So how well can Mother Nature clean up after our oily, gassy messes? The answer to that question is still being contested, but eventually, both Joye and Valentine would like to get this debate resolved.

"For me, it's important to get this right because I'm trying to understand how nature works," Valentine told me. "Undestanding how the ocean deals with these inputs is an important thing, in order to understand what happened in the past — and what will happen in the future."

More on the oil spill aftermath:

• The physics of oil spills
• BP plans to resume Gulf drilling this year
• Obama seeks more drilling in Alaska and Gulf
• Study: Bacteria causing sick fish in Gulf

In addition to Joye, the authors of "Comment on 'A Persistent Oxygen Anomaly Reveals the Fate of Spilled Methane in the Deep Gulf of Mexico'" include Ira Leifer, Ian R. MacDonald, Jeffery P. Chanton, Christof D. Meile, Andreas P. Teske, Joel E. Kostka, Ludmila Chistoserdova, Richard Coffin, David Hollander, Miriam Kastner, Joseph P. Montoya, Gregor Rehder, Evan Solomon, Tina Treude and Tracy A. Villareal.

In addition to Valentine, the authors of "Response to Comment on 'A Persistent Oxygen Anomaly Reveals the Fate of Spilled Methane in the Deep Gulf of Mexico'" include John D. Kessler, Molly C. Redmond and Mengran Du.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The latest in a series of critical reports on the National Science Foundation takes aim at science that's seemingly silly but really isn't.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., issued today's 73-page report, "The National Science Foundation: Under the Microscope," after months of signals from GOP leaders that the agency's programs would be targeted.

Some of the report's criticisms are clearly justified and have been the subject of investigation for years. Examples include the scandal over staff members' porn-surfing, Jell-O-wrestling at an Antarctic research station and questions about mixing business travel with romance. The report also cites concerns about $1.7 billion in unspent funds that are lying in a budgetary limbo, as well as examples of mismanagement already identified by the agency's inspector general.

But the headline-grabbers are "questionable" research projects that are portrayed in an unflattering light. "Are these projects the best possible use of our tax dollars, particularly in our current fiscal crisis?" the report asks.

Here are a few examples:

• A robot that was designed to fold towels and do other chores. The project at the University of California at Berkeley received a $1.5 million NSF grant.
• Experiments at Indiana University aimed at finding out whether an analysis of Twitter updates could predict the mood on the stock market. The $25,000 grant was provided to Indiana University researchers under a program that was actually set up to respond to the Haiti earthquake. 
• A Duke University study focusing on why the same teams tend to dominate March Madness basketball brackets, which received a $79,998 NSF grant.
• A study of marine locomotion that involved putting shrimp on an underwater treadmill and comparing how sickness impaired their movement. That particular study was supported by a $559,681 award from NSF, and the research group at the College of Charleston's Grice Marine Laboratory received 12 grants totaling over $3 million during the past decade, Coburn reported. The scientists also received a lot of publicity, including a spot on NBC's TODAY show.

It's easy to stir up some outrage or squeeze out a laugh over these types of science projects ... and they're the kinds of projects that we journalists like to write about, precisely because they seem so silly. That's why Coburn's report quotes so extensively from news articles about the research, rather than the findings themselves.

But in all these cases, there's a serious point behind the silliness.

The towel-folding robot, for example, is part of a project to see what it would take for robots to handle relatively unstructured tasks ranging from cooking to surgery. The Twitter prediction study is aimed at seeing whether social media can be factored into new types of prediction models (such as the long-running Iowa Electronic Markets). The "March Madness" study looks at whether the principles of evolutionary biology can be applied to hierarchies ranging from sports dynasties to academia and business. And the shrimp-on-a-treadmill study served as a way to gauge the health of marine organisms in a laboratory setting.

Some scientists said Coburn's report contained a distorted description of their research. "Good Lord! The summary of the funded research is very inaccurate," LiveScience's Stephanie Pappas quoted Texas A&M psychologist Gerianne Alexander as saying. 

Traditional target
Coburn's report is the latest example of a tradition going back at least to the 1970s, to the late Sen. William Proxmire and his "Golden Fleece Awards." Proxmire was a Democrat, but more recently it's been Republicans who have been taking shots at science spending. Remember Sen. John McCain's campaign against the Adler Planetarium's newfangled projector? The assault on fruit-fly research by his 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's attack on volcano monitoring?

"There's a long history of these reports coming out," Patrick Clemins, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told me today. Usually, the reports prey on studies that have a "poorly picked title" or focus on a research area that seems frivolous at first blush.

The National Science Foundation's grant selection process isn't perfect, and there's a chance that some clunkers may end up getting funded. But Clemins said the process works better than any alternative.

"We have a peer-review process that incorporates the viewpoints of a panel of experts, not just a single expert but a panel," Clemins said. "Just as we rely on legislators to make legislative decisions, we should rely on scientific experts to make the scientific decisions on where the next big innovation might occur."

Cut whole categories of research?
To a degree, Coburn and his staff would agree with that: "Ultimately, the decision as to what constitutes 'transformative' or 'potentially transformative' [research] should be left to the scientific community rather than Congress," the report says.

NSF is already working on some of the steps recommended in the report, such as coming up with better ways to measure the impact of federally funded research. But Coburn's recommendations go farther, calling on whole categories of NSF funding (for social studies and science education) to be cut off or consolidated with other federal programs.

Coburn talks quite a bit about the country's budget crisis, but there's an innovation crisis going on as well. Would he really want to axe research into "cross-cultural understanding of others' emotions," knowing that such research has been used to fight terrorists and keep U.S. troops safer in Iraq and Afghanistan? For more about that study, check out this issue of Scientific Enquirer from the Association of American Universities.

The AAU, in fact, has a great Web page that pulls together lots of examples showing how basic research can fuel transformative technologies. The next time politicians take aim at fruit-fly studies and other seemingly silly science, wave this printout in their faces.

The NSF's own studies suggest that the American public is strongly supportive of research that advances the frontiers of knowledge, even if it brings no immediate benefits. Do you agree? As always, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: ScienceInsider's Jeffrey Mervis says Rep. Ralph Hall, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Science Committee, has signaled that NSF isn't the right place to start cutting the budget. In an email, he told Mervis that he has "long supported NSF and believes that their mission supports U.S. scientific discovery and fuels innovation."

Mervis also quotes NSF officials as saying that Coburn's concern about $1.7 billion in unspent funds is based on a misreading of federal statutes. "It's being used for exactly the purpose for which it was intended," an unnamed budget official is quoted as saying.

It sounds as if Coburn's report will end up being little more than a blip on the budget radar screen, and justifiably so. But stay tuned for further developments. The senator's communication director, John Hart, is quoted as saying that future reports will examine the policies and practices of other research agencies.

Update for 11:10 p.m. ET: Among the scientists who feel dissed by Coburn's report is a Twitter pal o' mine, SETI Institute astronomer Franck Marchis. "He is attacking my research on multiple asteroids, stating that I am looking for aliens since it is hosted by the SETI Institute," Marchis writes.

Update for 2:20 a.m. ET May 27: In a blog posting, medical researcher Greg Crowther, the co-leader of SingAboutScience.org, responds to the criticism leveled against his project in Coburn's report. "What's most important here ... is not the senator's misconceptions about our particular project but rather his broader implication that music has no place in the realm of science," Crowther writes. "I emphatically disagree." So do I.

More on science and politics:

• Scientists criticize idea of citizen review of funding
• How politics will spin science
• Will our 'Sputnik moment' fizzle out?

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

UPS

UPS, the package delivery company, is test driving a new, lightweight diesel-powered truck to use on its high-mileage routes.

UPS, the package-delivery company well known for its brown trucks and the brown uniforms worn by its employees, is testing next-generation delivery trucks that are a shade greener.

The prototype trucks from Utilimaster / Isuzu have composite body panels that make the trucks about 1,000 pounds lighter than the comparable P70 diesel package car on the road, which should result in fuel savings.

The trucks are powered by a four-cylinder diesel engine and should achieve a 40 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The company wants to deploy them on high-mileage routes to take advantage of the fuel savings.

UPS has put five of the trucks on the road at various locations around the country to see how they perform in a variety of road and climate conditions from the rough back roads of Nebraska to the desert heat of Arizona. The test will run until December.

The prototype truck does have less cargo space compared to the P70, but this could actually make it more suited to narrow city streets, the company notes in a video of the innaugural test drive below.

NASA / Reuters

An engineering overlay camera view from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft shows the International Space Station linked with the shuttle Endeavour as Earth looms in the background on Monday.

In these days of instant gratification through digital imagery, it may seem strange that this week's unprecedented pictures of the International Space Station and the shuttle Endeavour linked together in orbit are still being processed. But that's essentially what's going on.

The pictures are just now on their way to Moscow, contained on a batch of data-storage cards that are similar to the chips inside your digital camera. That's the word from NBC News space analyst James Oberg, who said he discussed the status of the pictures today with Rob Navias, a NASA spokesman at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Still pictures and video clips of the photogenic linkup were captured on Monday from a Soyuz vehicle that was on its way back to Earth from the space station. Black-and-white engineering video from the Soyuz provided a low-quality preview of the imagery, but space geeks around the world have been salivating to see the high-definition, full-color versions.

Today, Navias said the data cards were left inside the Soyuz after it landed, and are due to be airlifted to Moscow on Thursday.

The contents of the Soyuz craft, including the precious cards, "will be processed through normal disposition procedures" at the Energia rocket company's spacecraft fabrication facility on the northern outskirts of Moscow, Navias told Oberg. NASA expects to get access to the pictures in about a week.

"This was always the plan," Navias said. But that doesn't square with the reports that went out from Mission Control before the photo op. One report, from NASASpaceflight.com, suggested that the images would be copied from the cards almost immediately after the Soyuz landed, and then would be either transmitted electronically to the U.S. or flown back to Houston.

In an email, Oberg said he could see how the cards might be left in the Soyuz, even if the returning astronauts intended to carry them out after landing. "We do it with vacation pictures from Earth all the time," he joked.

It could be worse. Just imagine how much a fuss there would have been if the cards were lost. Or imagine what would have gone through in the old days.

Russian Space Agency / NASA

This view of the space shuttle Atlantis connected to Russia's Mir space station was photographed on July 4, 1995, by Mir cosmonauts who took a brief fly-around in a Soyuz spacecraft.

"In the past, spectacular space station photographs have taken much, much longer to be published because cameras weren't digital," Oberg wrote. "A shot of the shuttle docked to Mir in 1995, taken from a Soyuz that backed away just prior to the shuttle undocking to get the 'glamour shots,' took months to get back to Earth. A shot of three docked Russian vehicles at Mir, taken from an approaching Soyuz, also took months to get back to Earth and years to be released (since nobody in the West knew it had been taken)."

When you put it that way, waiting a week to see the latest beauty shots from orbit doesn't sound so bad. "They are worth waiting for," Oberg said.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Mike Tarbutt

Imperial College London's Dhiren Kara adjusts the laser system used to measure the shape of the electron.

The most precise measurements of the electron ever made suggest that it's perfectly spherical to an accuracy of less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 centimeter — a tiny, tiny number that physicists say can make a big difference in the nature of the cosmos.

In this case, we're actually talking about the "shape" of the electron's interactions with electric fields rather than whether it's a non-spatial point particle or a tiny vibrating string. Those concepts are fine in other contexts, but for the laser experiment conducted by researchers at Imperial College London, size (and shape) matters. The measurements, which were 10 years in the making, are reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

If the physicists had seen an irregularity in the electric dipole moment — that is, the orientation of the electron as it spins in an electric field — that would have lent support to some of the non-standard models in particle physics. One example is the idea that an extra supersymmetric particle (a.k.a. "sparticle") exists for every particle we know about in the standard model. Another example is the view that the interactions involving matter are just slightly different from interactions involving antimatter ... which would explain why we see virtually no antimatter in the universe around us.

The fact that the electron seems so perfectly round suggests that the search for "new physics" at Europe's Large Hadron Collider might be harder than some scientists had hoped. That meshes with the LHC's initial findings ... or, should I say, the non-findings of exotic phenomena such as microscopic black holes and supersymmetry. The LHC is still ramping up its data collection rate, however, and physicists say it's way too early to guess at what they'll find or not find.

In any case, the results reported in Nature are considered an observational tour de force.

"We're really pleased that we've been able to improve our knowledge of one of the basic building blocks of matter," research team member Jony Hudson said today in a news release. "It's been a very difficult measurement to make, but this knowledge will let us improve our theories of fundamental physics. People are often surprised to hear that our theories of physics aren't 'finished,' but in truth they get constantly refined and improved by making ever more accurate measurements like this one."

In a Nature commentary, University of Michigan physicist Aaron Leanhardt noted that the previous best attempt to detect the electron's electric dipole moment was reported by other researchers in 2002, by making fine-scale measurements of electrons in a beam of neutral thallium atoms. The Imperial College team pushed the envelope by measuring the motion of electrons in ytterbium monofluoride molecules, using highly precise laser pulses.

If the electrons were not perfectly round, their motion would exhibit a slight wobble, like a spinning top that's running down. As a result, the shape of the ytterbium monofluoride molecules would be distorted. But the physicists saw no sign of such a wobble. Instead, they determined that any variance from perfect roundness, stated in terms of centimeters, would have to be less than 10.5 times 10 to the -28th power times e, where e is the charge of the electron.

"This means that if the electron was magnified to the size of the solar system, it would still appear spherical to within the width of a human hair," Imperial College said in its news release.

Hudson and his colleagues aren't finished yet. They report that they're working on new techniques that could make even finer measurements of the electron, allowing them to "probe for new particle physics at tens of tera-electronvolts." In comparison, the top collision energy achievable at the LHC is a mere 14 tera-electronvolts, or 14 TeV.

It's mind-boggling to think that ultra-fine measurements of electrons can guide physicists' investigations at the highest energies achievable on earth. That perspective is what led Leanhardt to hail the Imperial College team's effort as a significant push into the frontiers of physics.

"Experiments of this genre reach far beyond the realm of atomic, molecular and optical physics: they can be viewed as low-energy windows on the high-energy soul of the cosmos," he wrote.

More about the frontiers of physics:

• What's a hadron? Take a tour of the particle zoo
• Fundamental cosmic constant now seems shifty
• Particle discovery has the physics world buzzing
• Higgs boson rumor as elusive as the particle itself

In addition to Hudson, the authors of "Improved Measurement of the Shape of the Electron" include D.M. Kara, I.J. Smallman, B.E. Sauer, M.R. Tarbutt and E.A. Hinds.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Dreamstime.com

Researchers find that males spend less time in elaborate courtship displays such this peacock's feathers when males far out number females. Instead, they get sneaky to get a mate.

When a woman walks into a male-crowded bar she's unlikely to be showered with courtly attention — that is if findings about mating in the animal kingdom translate to the human realm.

"She might just be watching them fight it out and then have one particularly possessive one making sure others aren't getting access to her," Laura Weir, a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, told me today. 

In other words, as the dudes duke it out with each other, one little weasel will sneak over and trap her in a corner and try to keep her all to himself?

"Exactly," she said, although she stressed her reluctance to take the analogy too far. The data, she noted, is compiled from the mating behaviors of the birds and bees … and alligators, fish, frogs, lizards and lobsters, too. 

Operational sex ratio
Her research focuses on the influence of the so-called operational sex ratio on competition for mates. Operational sex ratio is the ratio of males and females ready to get it on at any one time and place. 

In the animal kingdom, like at a bar, the ratio can often be heavily male biased. For example, in a lot of species, males are often first to arrive to the mating ground so they can establish territories.

The females will come afterward, and depending on the pace of female arrivals over  time, "you can have very biased sex ratios during some times of the mating season," Weir said.

When the first female arrives, the general thought is the males will get aggressive toward each other, fighting with each other to take out the competition. 

"We found that there is this increase in aggression to a point, but then they stop using aggression as a tactic to get females and they change to other tactics like sneaking in or scrambling around looking for females," Weir said.

Dying courtship
All this aggression and sneaking around comes at the expense of courtship, which is a costly, time-consuming investment. Think birds such as peacocks with their fabulous displays of feathers or sparrows constantly updating their playlists.  

Instead of investing in the displays and songs to attract the very best mate, the males put their energy into just trying to find a mate, any mate, which involves more covert sneaking around.

On the flip side, males in these situations tend to be more guarded of the mates they secure.

"If they've mated with her, they want to ensure they are the only one who's done it," Weir said. "And so, rather than go off and fight with other males or try to court another female, they'll just cling to the female that they've already mated with."

Overall, Weir and her colleagues note, the findings illustrate a considerable flexibility in the mating structure within species, which is likely related to the end goal of life: reproduction. 

At least, that's the next question they hope to tackle in their research. 

"If the goal of the biological world is to leave more offspring, are these changes in behavior beneficial to the males when they are actually competing for mates and competing to fertilize eggs?" asked Weir.

Weir is a lead author of a paper describing this research in the February issue of The American Naturalist. 

More stories on the science of animal sex:

• Same sex behavior nearly universal in animals
• Hook-ups in the wild: Do animals enjoy sex?
• Urine spray signals sex, violence to crayfish
• New tunes, not oldies, lure the feathered ladies
• Of mice and men: Tens sex lessons from the wild
• Despite flash, males are simple creatures
• Polygamous mice are better breeders

Investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen's new book, "Area 51," suggests that the Soviets stirred up the Roswell UFO incident in 1947 by sending flying disks into New Mexico with child-size aviators on board, as a warning that they could spark a UFO panic if they wanted to.

But will that explanation fly?

Jacobsen's revelation is based on an account from just one unnamed source. This source said he was an engineer with the company EG&G at Area 51,  the hush-hush military research site in Nevada. He told Jacobsen that he studied the remnants of the Roswell crash in 1951, along with four other EG&G engineers.

There are no documents to confirm the account — because, Jacobsen says, this was one of the most tightly held secrets of the Cold War. Even though that confirmation is lacking, Jacobsen says she stands by her source's amazing account. "He had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling me," she told me, "but it was a matter of conscience for him."

Michael Hiller

Annie Jacobsen is the author of "Area 51."

Jacobsen's source recounted what he says he saw, as well as what he was told and what he surmised based on that information. Here's the scenario presented in "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base," based on the source's account:

• After World War II, the Soviets capitalized on the work being done on stealthy flying-wing aircraft by a group of Nazi German engineers headed by two brothers, Walter and Reimar Horten. They developed disk-shaped flying machines that could sporadically evade radar detection. The U.S. military perfected such technology at Area 51 over the decades that followed to produce planes such as the F-117 stealth attack aircraft.
• Soviet leaders were spooked by the U.S. military's use of the atom bomb to bring the war to a quick close. They were a couple of years away from developing their own atomic weapons, based on secrets stolen from the U.S. bomb effort. The Roswell incident was aimed at warning the Truman administration that the Soviets could create a UFO hoax, stirring up fears similar to those that were sparked inadvertently by the fictional "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast in 1938.
• Jacobsen's source believes that the Soviets dispatched flying-disk drone aircraft from a mothership flying near Alaska. Intermittent radar signals were picked up by U.S. installations, but the disks were nevertheless able to enter U.S. airspace and come down near Roswell, N.M.
• "Child-size aviators" were aboard the disks: humans, seemingly about 13 years old, who may have been surgically or biologically altered to give them enlarged heads and eyes. Jacobsen quotes her source as saying he was told that the alien look-alikes were the result of experiments conducted by Nazi mad scientist Josef Mengele. The bodies were recovered from the wreckage, and two of them were alive but comatose.
• The wreckage and the bodies were transported from New Mexico to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for study, then transferred again to Area 51 in Nevada. This is where Jacobsen's source saw them in 1951. The source is quoted as saying he saw Russian writing stamped on a ring that went around the inside of the aircraft, and that he saw the child-size bodies on a life support system.
• When Jacobsen asked why President Harry Truman didn't report all this in 1947, she said the source replied, "Because we were doing the same thing." She notes in the book that the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department carried out human experiments on the effects of radiation, and suggests that the hundreds of experiments revealed in 1995 were just the tip of the iceberg. "I believe that a lot of what the Atomic Energy Commission did was reckless and dangerous," she told me.

This latest explanation runs counter to the scenarios put forward by the federal government — first, that the Roswell wreckage came from a weather balloon, and then that it was debris from a crash-test dummy drop as well as a balloon-borne experiment to monitor nuclear blasts. It also runs counter to the long-held claims by UFO activists that the crash actually represented a covered-up visitation by extraterrestrials.

Drawing fire from both sides
As such, Jacobsen's Roswell account is taking fire from UFO skeptics as well as those who give the alien scenario more credence. In a novel twist, Clifford Clift of the Mutual UFO Network told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the linkage to German aerospace technology was too tenuous to be believed.

Little, Brown & Co. / Hachette

"Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" delves into decades' worth of hush-hush programs.

"After researching the claim, I found little truth in this theory," he said. "It is a stretch. One of my concerns is if they wanted to create panic, why in New Mexico and not in New York where there are more people to panic? I would suggest it is another conspiracy theory, and heavens, MUFON knows about conspiracy theories. They do sell books."

Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center said he also was skeptical about Jacobsen's account, although he stressed that he hasn't yet read the entire book.

"People have been studying the Roswell case for decades now," he told the New Mexican. "They've got deathbed testimony. They've got testimony from military officers who were involved, eyewitnesses. I think I'll go with the latter, rather than this young lady who penned this new book."

Investigator Kal Korff — who took aim at the alien claims in his 1997 book, "Roswell UFO Crash" — said he wasn't buying the "Area 51" story either. "Of all the crazy ideas as to what is behind Roswell, this is one of the most extreme out there," he told me in an email.

Beyond the substance of the story, there's the issue of basing such a dramatic story on one person's account. "I would never report anything related to UFOs based on only one unnamed source!" journalist Leslie Kean, the author of "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record," wrote in a Facebook update.

Jacobsen told me that getting the story out of even one of the five engineers who were involved in the Area 51 follow-up to the Roswell incident was a months-long job.

"What's important to understand is that all of the top five EG&G engineers had top secret clearances and also Q clearances. ... So you're dealing with the most upper-echelon clearances you could possibly have within the federal government, in the Atomic Energy Commission. Your 'need-to-know' is so strict that you only know what you know. ... To suggest that the five engineers could stand around and discuss, 'Hey, what do you think is,' is a bit naive," she said. "It's 'take this craft apart and put it back together ... take these bodies and move them over here.' And that is about the extent of it."

It's also important to understand that there's a lot more to "Area 51" than Roswell. The Roswell tale, which takes up about 30 pages of the 544-page book, is the only one that depends on a single unnamed source, Jacobsen said. Most of the book focuses on the stories behind formerly secret programs ranging from nuclear bomb tests to the development of the U-2 and A-12 Oxcart spy planes. To this day, military officials avoid referring to Area 51 by that name.

The gorilla-mask scenario
So if the Roswell UFO wasn't an alien (or Soviet) intruder, and if you don't buy the official explanation that it was a balloon experiment, what else might it have been? One of the alternate explanations is that the "UFO" was indeed a flying disk, but that it was a U.S. rather than a Soviet experimental craft. In this scenario, the alien-looking bodies might have been dummies designed to create a preposterous cover story.

Jacobsen herself refers to a similar disinformation strategy that the Air Force used in 1942, when the first jet aircraft were being developed at California's Muroc dry lake bed. She said one of the test pilots for the Bell XP-59A jet plane, Jack Woolams, put on a gorilla mask when he went on a flight — just in case other pilots training on different planes came flying nearby to take a look.

"Instead of seeing Woolams, the pilot saw a gorilla flying an airplane — an airplane that had no propeller," Jacobsen wrote. "The stunned pilot landed and went straight to the local bar and ordered a stiff drink. He told the other pilots what he'd definitely seen with his own eyes. His colleagues told him he was drunk, that he was an embarrassment, that he should go home."

Thus was the secret of the Bell XP-59A preserved, even from the other fliers at the Muroc base (now known as Edwards Air Force Base).

Were the Roswell aliens actually dummies, the equivalent of pilots wearing gorilla masks? Or is Jacobsen's source correct? Is the truth more monstrous than people thought? Even though the eyewitnesses are dying off, Jacobsen believes the real story may be contained within the hundreds of millions of documents about "black" projects that are still said to be classified.

She notes that all of the sources she consulted while researching "Area 51" told her they knew much more than they were telling. "Everyone always ends with, 'Well, Annie, I've actually told you 5 percent of what I know,'" Jacobsen said.

Is the truth out there? Or will it remain mired in reams upon reams of conjecture and disinformation? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about UFOs:

• UFO reports come from Russia ... right on time
• Why we love to fear E.T.
• Jerusalem videos stir UFO buzz
• Year of the UFO? Let's get real
• Still more from Cosmic Log's UFO files
• Search for UFOs on msnbc.com

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to  "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Angelo Cavalli / Getty Images file

Scientists have found a microbe that lives on caffeine.

Many people say they can't live without caffeine, but few of us would actually perish in the absence of our morning coffee ritual. For the bacterium Pseudomonas putida CBB5 that isn't the case. It really does live on caffeine, according to new research presented today. 

The caffeine-munching bacterium was found in a flower bed on the University of Iowa campus.

Ryan Summers, a doctoral student there, identified four digestive proteins that it uses to break down caffeine, which allows it to live and grow, he explains in a summary of his research presented at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans.

"This work, for the first time, demonstrates the enzymes and genes utilized by bacteria to live on caffeine," he writes.

Caffeine is composed of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen. The bacteria break caffeine down into carbon dioxide and ammonia. Ammonia is a compound of nitrogen and hydrogen.

Further testing showed that the compounds formed during the breakdown of caffeine are natural building blocks for drugs used to treat asthma, improve blood flow and stabilize heart arrhythmias. Since these drugs are difficult to synthesize chemically, Summers and colleagues think their bacteria could ease production of these drugs and lower their costs.

What's more, the bacteria could be employed to clean up after us human caffeine junkies, Summers notes in the research summary.

"The caffeine digestive proteins could also be used to remove caffeine and related compounds from large quantities of waste generated from coffee and tea processing industries, which pollute the environment. The decaffeinated waste from these industries can be used as animal feed and for production of transportation fuel."

More on caffeine and microbes:

• Dipsticks could check caffeine in your cup 
• Caffeine and painkillers found in fish 
• Caffeine gives boys a bigger buzz, study says 
• Bacteria turned into biofuel factories

Build Change

Build Change is working with local communities in disaster prone regions of the world to build culturally-acceptable homes that can stand up to the violent shaking of earthquakes and hurricane-force winds. This disaster-resistant home was built in Indonesia.

Earthquakes don't kill people, poorly built buildings do. The problem is that most disaster-proof, inexpensive housing technologies don't fit the cultural preferences of the communities that need them, according to a non-profit that's promoting a fix.

"This is something that we can control and we can change if we know how to do it correctly," Elizabeth Hausler, the CEO and founder of Build Change, which has led post-disaster reconstruction efforts in China, Haiti, and Indonesia, told me last week.

Implementation of simple engineering principles using locally-available materials and labor can lead to culturally-acceptable housing that can survive the violent shaking of earthquakes and hurricane-force winds.

"Our mission is to reduce deaths and injuries from earthquakes when houses collapse, but there are so many financial and social features to that," Hausler said. "You've got to get the architecture right; it has to be appropriate for the climate and the culture."

The approach contrasts with government and relief agency programs that rebuild communities with disaster-proof homes, such as sturdy geodesic domes, that don't fit in with the aesthetic or culture of the local community. As a result, the building technology isn't replicated after the help leaves town.

"You completely miss the opportunity to train people to build something that they are familiar with … to improve on their preferred way of living," Hausler said.

The three Cs
The trick, she's found, is to teach local communities what she calls the three Cs of disaster proofing: configuration, connections, and construction quality. 

Build Change

Many homes in disaster prone regions such as this one in Bengkulu, Indonesia, don't follow the three Cs: configuration, connections, and construction quality.

Configuration relates to paying attention to a home's design plan and layout – keeping an eye out for things such as load-bearing walls in each direction of the home to improve durability and lightweight roofs.

"In an earthquake, you don’t want a heavy roof, you don't want something heavy over your head," Hausler noted, adding the caveat that a lightweight roof in a hurricane-prone region needs to be tied down so it won't blow away.

Another configuration to consider is the placement of windows and doors. These openings weaken the structural integrity of a wall that holds up the roof, but in a many regions of the world lots of open windows and doors are needed for climate control.

Instead of saying only small windows are acceptable, Build Change promotes putting reinforcements in place.

The second C, connections, focuses on the engineering principle that everything has be connected together to perform well in an earthquake or hurricane, Hausler explained. Walls connected to the foundation, roof connected to the walls, etc.

The third C, construction quality, is about finding locally available building materials and qualified labor to do the job. That means laying bricks so that there's enough mortar in the spaces in between, for example, or soaking bricks in water before building a wall to improve its strength.

Empowered stakeholders
Implementation of the three Cs is already standard practice in some parts of the world, including Japan, which was recently struck by a powerful earthquake and tsunami. As a result, Hausler's organization isn't planning to work there. 

Build Change

Build Change empowers homeowners to make decisions about the floorplan of their new homes, a process that helps keep the sound engineering principles in the community long after the organization leaves town. Here local stakeholders in China look at a blueprint.

"Japan has some of the best engineers in the world and with some excellent building codes, so we really wouldn't add a lot of value there," she explained.

"We add more value in a place like Haiti or a rural area in China where there really is a dearth of trained professionals and engineers who understand and enforce a simple building code."

By working in disaster-prone regions that currently lack the engineering expertise to build sturdy homes with limited funding, Build Change hopes to empower local homeowners and builders to continue implementing the three Cs long after the organization leaves town.

"That is the true test of sustainability," Hausler said. "That is our ultimate goal: that people continue to build earthquake resistant houses on their own without us and without any financial subsidy."

Hausler was awarded the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability on May 10 in recognition of her engineering accomplishments and creation of a model that establishes sustainable earthquake resistant housing in the developing world.