Richard Carson / Reuters

Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson takes a video of the media gathered before the beginning of today's news conference with fellow astronauts Doug Hurley, Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The four astronauts assigned to the last mission of NASA's 30-year-long space shuttle program aren't just burdened with the weight of history: They're expected to transfer four tons of supplies from the shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station in just a few days' time, the kind of job that's usually done with a six- or seven-person crew. They have to be ready to take shelter on the station for months, in the event that something goes wrong with their ride. And as if that weren't enough, they're being inundated with requests for tickets to watch the last-ever liftoff of America's winged spaceship.

If I were a member of Atlantis' foursome, I'd be feeling totally overwhelmed right now. But Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson sounds as if he's totally cool with a mission even he admits will be "very busy, very event-filled."

"This is the right crew for the right time," Ferguson told reporters today during the last-ever shuttle crew news conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Atlantis is scheduled to begin its 12-day flight with a July 8 launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle's crew of veteran NASA astronauts, including Ferguson as well as pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be leaving Houston on the Fourth of July to make final preparations for liftoff.

The main objective of the shuttle program's 135th and final mission, known as STS-135, is the transfer of supplies, spare parts and science experiments from the Italian-made Raffaello cargo carrier that's sitting in Atlantis' hold. Items have been color-coded to facilitate the moving job: Everything on the shuttle that has a yellow tag goes into the space station. Everything on the station that has a green tag goes onto the shuttle for return to Earth.

The moving operation will proceed so quickly that "if you stand still and hold a yellow label in your hand," you could find yourself swept up in it, Ferguson joked.

Magnus said she visualizes forming a bucket brigade to facilitate the move. "It's fun to fly around with these bags, back and forth," she said. But even in zero-G, all these objects have inertial mass, so the astronauts have to be careful not to get thrown into a spin during the transfer operations. "You get a little lesson in Newton's laws," Magnus said.

Skeleton crew
The big move is the top priority, but the to-do list doesn't stop there. Two spacewalkers from the space station's crew, Ron Garan and Mike Fossum, will help transfer a broken coolant pump module to Atlantis' cargo bay, and bring out a robotic refueling experiment for installation on the space station. While Garan and Fossum take on maintenance tasks on the station's exterior, Atlantis' skeleton crew will play supporting roles inside the station.

The reason why there are only four astronauts on this last mission is because NASA has to have a contingency plan to keep them on the space station, in the event that serious damage is done to Atlantis during its ascent. The plan calls for the crew members to be rescued, one by one, by taking seats on Russian Soyuz craft over the course of several months. Mission planners decided that a four-person crew was the right number: small enough to make for a realistic rescue plan, while big enough to execute Atlantis' final mission.

It doesn't make the job easy for the astronauts, though. When Ferguson was asked whether there were any advantages to having a smaller-than-usual crew, he could come up with only one: "There are less opinions to contend with," he joked.

Contending with crowds
Although NASA officials haven't yet said how many people they expect to attend Atlantis' launch, it could be one of the biggest crowds to gather around the Florida launch site. At one point, mission managers thought that up to 700,000 spectators might turn out for last month's final launch of the shuttle Endeavour, and the fact that this is the last-ever chance to see a space shuttle launch could well make for higher interest this time around.

"Anybody who has not seen a shuttle launch in person is really missing out," Hurley said. Even the astronauts are having a hard time deciding who will get precious VIP tickets. (Each crew member has about 300 tickets to distribute.)

"The tickets are starting to get more valuable as the launch gets closer," Walheim said.

There's been so much hubbub about the mission that Ferguson said he was actually glad to go into quarantine, the period just before a launch when astronauts are shut off from much of the outside world for medical reasons. "I'm looking forward to a little bit of quiet time," the commander said.

The weight of history
After months of preparations, Atlantis' crew members said it was just now sinking in that they are going to be the last astronauts to ride a space shuttle into orbit — and they had mixed emotions about that. On one hand, Walheim said "we are going to lose a little bit of the beauty of the country when we retire the space shuttle." Ferguson went even further, saying that bidding farewell to the shuttle would be like mourning a friend.

On the other hand, all four astronauts pointed out that Americans would keep on flying into space — initially on Russian transports to the space station, and then on U.S.-made commercial space taxis, and then on a new breed of NASA spaceships designed to go beyond Earth orbit.

Such reflections on the shuttle's past, and on the future of spaceflight, ended up being the weightiest matters considered at today's news briefing. Ferguson predicted that the next person who flies on a U.S. spacecraft into low Earth orbit "probably will not have a NASA badge ... it'll be a badge from Boeing, or SpaceX, or Sierra Nevada." The current scenario calls for those companies' spaceships to be flown initially by private-sector test pilots, and then cleared for the space agency's use. It will take the better part of a decade before NASA astronauts once again guide the agency's next-generation spaceships to a new frontier. 

The 49-year-old commander of the last space shuttle mission recalled that he was inspired to become an astronaut by watching the launch of the first space shuttle mission 30 years ago. "I hope there will be another space vehicle ... that will inspire children in the same way," Ferguson said.

More about the last shuttle mission:

• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Slideshow: This is your life, Atlantis

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

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," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Airport body scanning technology has been adapted to help shoppers quickly find better fitting clothes. The device is based on technology initially designed to protect air travelers.

The wide deployment of millimeter wave full-body scanners at airports around the U.S. caused a kerfuffle largely because they generate grainy photos of travelers' naked bodies. Will a makeover of the technology that promises to help put clothes on your body get a different reception?

If preliminary results from a beta test of the technology are a guide, the answer is yes.

"The feedback has been phenomenal from customers as to the helpfulness of the service to them," Elizabeth Thomas, a marketing executive with Unique Solutions Limited, told me today.

The company licensed the body-scanning technology from Batelle, a research organization that manages the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory where the technology was first developed, and deployed the first "mybestfit" kiosk at the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania.

The millimeter wave technology uses radio waves to penetrate clothing and bounce signals off the body that get transferred to a computer where the data generates useful information.

At airports, the data is used to make a somewhat naked-body image that helps security personnel identify objects such as ceramic knives and other non-metallic weapons. At the mall, "there's no image involved whatsoever," Thomas said.

Rather, a computer software program uses the signals to generate measurement data from all over your body: arm and leg length, waist and hip size, weight, etc., and then matches that data up with fitting fashions available at the mall.

The shopping potential of the technology was demonstrated to reporters at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in 2007. The deployment at the Pennsylvania mall is the beginning of what Unique Solutions Limited hopes will be a trend that allows us all to be a bit more smartly dressed for stress.

More on body scanners:

• Scanning for security – and the perfect jeans
• Are airport X-ray scanners harmful
• Leaked U.S. Marshal body scan images revealed
• Airport body scanners reveal all

NASA file

Assisted by divers, Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim practices for a spacewalk underwater at Johnson Space Center's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. The lab's training pool will continue to be used for space station training, even after the shuttle fleet is retired. However, some of the spacewalk trainers will be laid off.

NASA managers are providing a sneak preview of the final space shuttle mission during a series of briefings today at Johnson Space Center in Houston, but they're also previewing how the space agency will change once Atlantis lands. One of the obvious changes will be the rapid reduction of the shuttle program's workforce, from about 6,700 workers today to less than a sixth of that number by the end of August.

Even those numbers pale in comparison with what the workforce was at its peak, shuttle program manager John Shannon told a gaggle of reporters at the space center, including yours truly. He estimated that 30,000 contractors were employed by the program at its height, around the time when Endeavour made its debut in 1992.

But there are a couple of bright spots on the horizon: Commercial companies are ramping up operations to take over the job of resupplying the International Space Station, and many of the shuttle program's workers are in a prime position to join those ventures. Looking further ahead, the space station's program director, Mike Suffredini, noted that the orbital outpost is making the transition from its construction phase to an operational phase that could provide more opportunities for research and development.

Here are a few of the bullet points from this morning's briefing on the shuttle and station programs:

• Shannon said the current shuttle workforce included about 5,500 contractor employees, in Texas, Utah, Louisiana, Alabama and Florida, plus slightly fewer than 1,200 NASA civil servants. A couple of days after the shuttle lands, about 3,200 contractors will be laid off. By around mid-August, less than 1,000 contractors would be left to help with the "transition to retirement" for the space shuttle fleet. NASA civil servants would be gradually reassigned to other tasks, including going over to space station operations, keeping tabs on the commercial spaceships and working on NASA's programs for exploration beyond Earth orbit.

• The shuttle program, as a program, ends "30 days after wheels stop," Shannon said. However, he estimated that the transition to retirement, including the process of getting the space shuttles to museums and documenting all the lessons learned over the past 30 years, would take another two years.

• United Space Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed Martin venture that serves as the shuttle program's prime contractor, has previously floated the idea of operating two of the space shuttles as a commercial means of resupplying the space station. The idea hasn't gotten much traction to date, but Shannon said the engineers who are working on Endeavour after its final flight have been holding off from taking any actions that would make the shuttle "unrecoverable" until NASA Headquarters gives the go-ahead. "We're a little off the plan for Endeavour," Shannon told reporters. Further consideration of the United Space Alliance plan could be one of the motivations for the delay, but another possible reason would be to have a flight-capable shuttle available for engineering analysis.

• Some might ask why the shuttles have to be retired. "The bottom line is there's not enough money," Shannon said. NASA's plan for the past seven years has been to finish space station construction, then retire the fleet in order to make way for the next generation of space vehicles. Those vehicles would include spacecraft capable of going beyond Earth orbit, to a near-Earth asteroid, perhaps to the moon, and eventually to Mars. "What we're doing is we're sacrificing the shuttle to enable us to take that next step, and if we were to retire the shuttles, this is the time to do it," Shannon said.

• Suffredini said that Atlantis' mission to make the shuttle fleet's final resupply run to the space station might not sound sexy, but "it's one of the most important flights we've ever had." More than 8,000 pounds of supplies are going up to the station, including two tons' worth of critical spare parts. Those supplies will provide an additional six-month stockpile for space station operations, meaning that the astronauts will have enough supplies to see them through the end of 2012, Suffredini said. By that time, U.S. commercial transports such as SpaceX's Dragon should be part of the supply chain, along with Russian, Japanese and European supply ships.

• So far, all indications are that SpaceX will launch its next Dragon capsule on a Falcon 9 rocket by the end of this year, and have the capsule go all the way to a linkup with the space station. That demonstration would open the way for the beginning of SpaceX's resupply missions under a multibillion-dollar contract with NASA. However, Suffredini said the final decision on having the Dragon hook up with the station had not yet been made. "It's one thing to be done with hardware, it's another thing to be done with software," Suffredini said. SpaceX's work on the Dragon mission still had to go through NASA verification, and "that's going to take us till really close to the end of the year to get all that done," Suffredini said.

• Suffredini said he thought operating the U.S. segment of the space station as a national laboratory "is going to make a big difference" for commercial applications coming from space science. He mentioned the promise of creating new vaccines for salmonella and other infectious diseases, based on studies done in orbit. And he pointed out that the space station would be a cornerstone for NASA's presence in outer space. "It's not just the cornerstone, but it's the only thing from the standpoint of human spaceflight that NASA is operating," Suffredini said.

• Shannon said he was heartened to see how many veterans of the shuttle program were being taken on by other high-tech companies, in aerospace and in other fields. He said he's seen cases where former shuttle employees have been hired at one company, and then "come back and grab six of their friends."

• When one journalist noted that the parking lots and buildings at Johnson Space Center already seem emptier than they once were, Shannon acknowledged that NASA's facilities were indeed emptying out, with simulators and mockups of space hardware soon to be distributed to museums across the country. That can come as a "little bit of a shock," he admitted. But he said the space center was ready and waiting for the next chapter in NASA's history. "Let's fill it up with something else," he said. "Let's fill it up with what the next program is going to require."

Stay tuned for more from Johnson Space Center this week, and much more about the shuttle program's final mission next week.

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," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

A 25-foot-long giant squid is splayed out on a tarp after it was picked up by a fishing crew over the weekend.

Florida fishermen snared a real-life sea monster over the weekend: a giant squid measuring 25 feet in length.

"It's really, really, really rare to get giant squids because they're so huge, and live so deep," John Slapcinsky, a collection manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, told me. For museum workers and scientists who specialize in giant squids, this specimen is quite the catch.

Jeff Gage / Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

University of Florida researcher Roger Portell injects preservative into the giant squid.

The animal was bobbing in the water when the fisherman chanced upon it on Sunday. They hauled it onto their boat, put it on ice, and brought it to shore. There, they alerted the Florida Fish and Wildlife conservation commission, who called in the Florida Museum of Natural History.

"I thought we definitely need to bring it in, because no one’s going to believe us if we don't," Robert Benz, one of the original squid finders, said in a press release. "I didn’t want to leave it out there and just let the sharks eat it."

Somewhere along the way, the squid died. 

It's now been relocated to the Florida Museum of Natural History, where Slapcinsky and his colleagues are preserving the massive invertebrate. "Soft bodied squids spoil easily," Slapcinsky told me.

The squid will be put through quite the regimen over the next month, and will be injected with and bathed in a cocktail of preservatives. These will kill the bacteria in the body of the squid and firm up the soft tissue of the animal, Slapcinsky explained.

Univ. of Fla. / FMNH

A tentacle coils out from the dead squid's body. Studying the creature and sequencing its DNA should help scientists determine how various breeds of deep-sea squid are related.

Because they're so rarely observed in the wild, or found dead (they get eaten pretty quickly), there's a lot that scientists don't know about the behavior of the enormous animals, like how they reproduce or what they eat. Also, a debate continues about whether giant squids make up a single species, or several, and Slapcisnky hopes that DNA analysis of this new squid will have some answers. 

It's not yet clear if the squid will make it into a museum exhibit, Slapcinsky says — the museum may not have the right equipment or the space to show off the spineless specimen. But it will be available for squid researchers to visit, to take a closer look. 

More on giant squids: 

• Scientists capture giant squid on camera
• Military studies squid camouflage
• Hawaiian squid carries a built in light 

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and science at msnbc.com. Find her on Twitter and join our conversation on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

"The robot has moved a step closer to humanity," concludes a news release put out today by a German research institute on the development of a robotic skin.

The "skin" consists of 2-inch square hexagonal plates packed with sensors for things like touch, acceleration and temperature that are joined together in a honeycomb-like configuration.

"We try to pack many different sensory modalities into the smallest of spaces," said Philip Mettendorfer, who is developing the skin at the Technical University of Munich, in the news release. "In addition, it is easy to expand the circuit boards to later include other sensors, for example, pressure."

The technology, according to the researchers, will provide robots with tactile information to complement their camera eyes, infrared scanners and gripping hands. Tap it on the back, in the dark, and it will know you're there.

In the video above, researchers test the sensors on a robotic arm by doing things such as brushing it with a piece of tissue paper and touching it with a warm hand to show how the robot quickly jerks away. In another test, the accelerometer allows it to keep a cup on a tray steady as the arm is moved around.

For now, the skin consists of just 15 sensors, though the researchers plan to create a prototype completely draped in the skin-line sensors that can interact with its environment.

The research effort, described in June issue of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, joins other quests around the world for robotic skin.

Ali Javey's group at the University of California at Berkeley, for example, recently reported on a new material for e-skin that can detect a range of pressures. This could, for example, allow a robot to distinguish between an egg and a frying pan and adjust its grip accordingly.

NASA scientists reported development of a skin that would give robots a sense of touch as it moved about its environment. Similar to Mettendorfer's concept, this would help robots react, for example, when they bump into an object.

The goal for robotic skin experts doesn't stop at the current sensory accomplishments. "These machines will someday be able to incorporate our fundamental neurobiological capabilities and form a self-impression," according to the Technical University of Munich.

More on robot sensory abilities:

• New skin lets robots get sensitive
• New e-skin could give robots human-like touch
• Electric fish could be model for underwater robots
• Wearable robots may help those who are paralyzed

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).

Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data

The Nabro volcano has been erupting in the African nation of Eritrea since June 13. This image made with data from a NASA satellite is giving scientists one of their most detailed views of the remote, little-studied volcano.

A NASA satellite captured this spectacular false-color image of the Nabro volcano erupting in a remote region of the northeastern African country of Eritrea.

The bright red portions of the image indicate hot surfaces, NASA explains in an advisory. That's why the hot volcanic ash spewing out of the volcano's caldera glows red.

To the west of the ash cloud, portions of the lava flow are visible. The front edge is particularly hot, thus red. The speckled bits upstream in the lava flow are likely regions where the cool, hardened crust is splitting and exposing fluid lava as the flow advances.

The volcano is located in an isolated region of Eritrea near its border with Ethiopia. Scientists believe it began erupting on June 13. Ash from the volcano has disrupted flights and cut short Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent trip to Africa.

Despite these impacts, scientists say they know very little about the volcano. When it was first detected, in fact, scientists thought it was the nearby Dubbi volcano. Imagery such as this photo from NASA's Earth Observing-1 satellite acquired on June 24 is providing the most detailed look at the eruption to date.

More on African volcanoes:

• Airlines watching East Africa volcanic ash cloud
• Volcanic eruption cuts short Clinton African trip
• Giant crack in Africa may create a new ocean
• Science explodes at African lake

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).

Bok Yeop

University of Illinois engineers developed a pen with conductive silver ink that can write electric circuits and interconnects directly on paper and other surfaces.

Researchers have developed a silver-inked rollerball pen that writes electronic circuits on paper, wood, and other surfaces. The breakthrough leads a new class of flexible, low-cost and disposable electronics, according to the team.

The normal-looking pen's ink is a solution of silver. After writing, the ink dries to leave conducting pathways that maintain their integrity through multiple bends and folds in the paper, enabling devices with flexibility and conformability, according to a news release on the breakthrough.

The effort was led by Jennifer Lewis, a professor of materials science and engineering, and Jennifer Bernhard, a professor of computer and electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. The results were published in the journal Advanced Materials.

In previous work, metallic inks have been used with ink jet printers to fabricate electronic devices. The pen offers the flexibility to apply metallic ink directly on paper without the hassle and expense of buying and programming inkjet printers.

"Pen-based printing allows one to construct electronic devices on-the-fly," Lewis said in the news release.

The team so far has used the pen to put LED lighting on the roof of a house in a sketched copy of a painting by Jung Hee Kim called "Sae-Han-Do." The LED is powered by a five-volt battery connected to the edge of the painting.

The team has also demonstrated a flexible LED display on paper, conductive text, and three-dimensional radio antennas.

More on electronic printing:

• Esquire unveils cover with electronic ink
• Work underway on paper 2.0 – it's electric!
• Inkjet printers may be the future of solar cells
• World's smallest 3-D printer is a factory in the home

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).

Rachel Strohm

Lake Kivu harbors huge reservoirs of methane and carbon dioxide gas that could power Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But gas could also explode, killing everything in and around the lake.

The depths of Africa's Lake Kivu harbor untold quantities of carbon dioxide and methane gases that could provide abundant electricity to millions of Rwandans and Congolese settling along its shores. But those gases could suddenly release, killing everything in and around the lake.

"Understanding whether you can find scenarios that would lead to something like that, a catastrophic release of gas, is of course important," Anthony Vodacek, a remote sensing scientist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, told me on Monday.

He is leading a two-year survey that aims, for the first time, to provide a scientific portrait of the entire lake system. The team consists of seismologists, biologists, remote sensing specialists, and other scientists who will combine their areas of expertise to provide a baseline understanding of the system.

"If you don't know what the starting point is, you don't know what the change is. And so that is part of what we'd like to establish here," Vodacek said.

Methane extraction
The Rwandan government has already built a power plant along the lake's shores which siphons methane from the depths of the lake to generate 3.6 megawatts of electricity, about 4 percent of the country's needs. The aim, eventually, is to generate several hundred megawatts.

Lake Kivu is one three known so-called explosive lakes in the world. The other two are in Cameroon. Lake Nyos experienced an explosive eruption in 1986 that killed 1,500 people. During these so-called overturning scenarios, something triggers the gases trapped in the depths to burst towards the surface.

The gas is trapped at the bottom of the lake because the streams that feed the lake are slightly brackish. Salty water is denser than freshwater and so, it sinks to the bottom, taking all the organic detritus with it that releases carbon dioxide as it decomposes.

In addition, the lake is in a seismically active region. "It is a rift valley lake," Vodacek noted. "The Africa continent is pulling apart … and that means there are fault lines, there are earthquakes, and those can be tied in to potential triggers for what goes with the lake overturning."

It's possible that people extracting the gases to generate electricity will stave off a catastrophic overturning of the lake, though it could also upset the stability of the lake, Vodacek noted. That's one of the questions the team wants answered.

Extraction of the methane to generate electricity could be a huge benefit for development in the region, Vodacek noted. Currently, most of the cooking fuel comes from forests around the lake, the same forests that are home to endangered mountain gorillas.

"Normally, you don't think of development as having positive impacts, but in this you could because it could turn people away from cutting down the forest and subsistence farming on these steep hillsides in the region," he said.

If the lake becomes a source of fuel, then conservationists can focus reforestation efforts in the surrounding hills and help protect the gorillas, Vodacek added.

Explosive history
Team member Robert Hecky, an aquatic biologist at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, performed an analysis of a sediment core from Lake Kivu in the 1970s and found evidence for catastrophic overturns about once every 1,000 years beginning about 5,500 years ago.

This finding corresponds with genetic evidence from cichlids, freshwater fish that first evolved in the lake. Today, only about 15 species are found in the lake, though thousands more species are in other lakes.

People looking at the molecular clock of these fish put two and two together and realized the Lake Kivu fish experienced an extinction about 5,000 years ago, "which coincides with the analysis of the sediment and the overturning of the lake," Vodacek said.

Hecky and other team members will bring advances in the study of lake sediment cores to refine the timeline of the overturning events and perhaps gain insight to the triggers such as landslides or volcanic activity.

Seismologists on the team will embrace advances in GPS sensors to get a detailed read on the rifting process in the valley to understand where fractures and fault lines are located.

Vodacek, who is leading the effort, will take a view from the sky to piece all the data together.

In particular, he is embracing recently released data sets of satellite imagery from NASA that provides nearly 40 years worth of data on the region, showing how the landscape has changed as people settled on the lakeshore and cut down the forests.

"You're always hearing these horror stories of natural resource development without any regard to the environmental impacts of that," he said. "Here's a case where we would like to go in and make sure there's necessary due diligence to make sure that things aren't destroyed as a resource is developed."

More on Africa energy and conservation

• Rwanda harnesses energy from exploding lake
• Deal struck to protect Congo mountain gorillas
• Scientists say eruption in Congo imminent
• Scientists: Inbreeding helps African fish

Roy Caldwell

The abilty of peacock mantis shrimp to see circularly polarized light has inspired engineers to develop technology that may improve CDs and DVDs.

The future of CD and DVD technology may be found in the eyes of peacock mantis shrimp, an international team of engineers recently reported.

The shrimp are one of the few animals in the world that are able to see circularly polarized light, the type of light used to make 3-D movies.

Scientists believe this ability is related to sexual signaling, Roy Caldwell, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, told me on Friday.

"The strongest circularly polarized signal is certainly displayed during courtship and the assumption is it is important," he said.

The evidence for the ability to detect the circularly polarized light is based on Odontodactylus cultrifer, a relative of the peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus). The eyes of the peacock mantis shrimp are similar and easier to obtain for study.

Aklesh Lakhtakia, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Pennsylvania State University, looked at these eyes in a bid to build a better waveplate.

"Polarization (or polarization state) is a property of light that human eyes do not appreciate but the eyes of many other animals do," he added.

"Waveplates are needed to either undo significant depolarization or to separate light of different polarization states. Of course, one also needs waveplates to filter light (generated by a source) of only a specific polarization to enter an optical device."

These devices are typically made from minerals such as quartz, calcite, or birefringent polymers. In some cases, to create the range and transparency required, two different materials are stacked or joined. Sometimes, though, this type of construction delaminates – it comes apart at the seams.

The method pioneered by Lakhtakia and colleagues with the National Taipei University of Technology, mimics the lens construction of peacock mantis shrimp.

These multilayered materials are suitable for waveplates in the visible light spectrum and cannot delaminate because they are manufactured as one piece.

The waveplate consists of two layers of nanorods; each layer deposited using different methods. One method produces a layer of needle-like nanorods that are parallel to each other and all slanted in the same direction. The second method produces parallel nanorods that are upright.

"The two separate layers are needed so that we can play off one against the other to achieve the desired polarization without significantly reducing transmittance over a broad range of frequencies," Lakhtakia said in a news release.

For now "we have just found a way to make an achromatic waveplate," Lakhtakia told me. The details are provided in the June 21 issue of Nature Communications. "Over time it will become part of optical systems," he added.

More on data storage and bioinspiration:

• It's 2010 and data storage tech is still in flux 
• Data storage gets image makeover 
• Animal eyes inspire new technology 
• When optical discs go bad 
• Swarm intelligence inspired by animals 
• Airplanes of the future could be self healing 

Terry Gosliner / California Academy of Sciences

This species of Nembrotha nudibranch (also known as sea slug) was found during the California Academy of Sciences' 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition. Click through a slideshow featuring the new species.

Researchers say they identified 300 species that they think are new to science this spring during a biological prospecting expedition to the Philippines, organized by the California Academy of Sciences.

“The Philippines is one of the hottest of the hotspots for diverse and threatened life on Earth,” Terrence Gosliner, dean of science and research collections at the California Academy of Sciences and leader of the 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition, said today in a news release about the findings. “Despite this designation, however, the biodiversity here is still relatively unknown, and we found new species during nearly every dive and hike as we surveyed the country’s reefs, rainforests, and the ocean floor."

The 42-day expedition was launched in late April and focused on Luzon, the largest island in the Philippine archipelago, as well as the surrounding waters. In cooperation with more than two dozen colleagues from the Philippines, the academy's scientists surveyed a wide range of ecosystems and shared their findings with local communities and conservationists.

Among the suspected new species are dozens of types of insects and spiders, deep-sea corals, sea pens, sea urchins and more than 50 kinds of sea slugs. Scientists say they came across a new kind of cicada that makes a distinctive "laughing" call, a starfish that eats only sunken driftwood, and a deep-sea swell shark that sucks water into its stomach to bulk up and scare off predators.

When the expedition ended, the scientists combined their data and identified their top conservation priorities — expansion of marine protected areas, plus reforestation to reduce sedimentation damage to coral reefs. The academy said reduction of plastic waste was also a priority, because plastic litter was pervasive throughout the marine environment, even on the ocean floor at depths of more than 6,000 feet.

Over the coming months, the expedition's scientists will be analyzing their specimens with the aid of microscopes and DNA sequencing equipment to confirm their discoveries.

The academy's expedition is one of many efforts around the globe to document and safeguard biodiversity — in part because yet-to-be-discovered species may point the way to commercially useful drugs or technologies, in part because they may turn out to be key to an ecosystem's health, and in part because they're beautiful, exotic or just plain odd.

"The species lists and distribution maps that we created during this expedition will help to inform future conservation decisions and ensure that this remarkable biodiversity is afforded the best possible chance of survival," Gosliner said.

Be sure to check out our slideshow featuring the 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition, and then click through these other galleries of new species:

• Madagascar offers treasure trove of new species
• Scientists spot biological beauties in Bali
• RAP stars rock the animal world
• Lost frogs found in Haiti
• Three new frogs leap into spotlight
• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• New species from New Guinea
• Scientists finish first sea census
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2009
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Papua New Guinea's new species
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• The strange species of Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under .. underground
• Eight 'extinct' species found alive and kicking  

The 2011 Philippine Biodiversity Expedition was funded by a gift from Margaret and Will Hearst. The academy has planned an "Expedition NightLife" celebration at its San Francisco headquarters at 6 p.m. PT June 30, featuring a display of specimens from the expedition and Filipino music and dance. For more information about the schedule and tickets, check the academy's website. Can't make it to San Francisco? You can still click through the academy's YouTube video playlist for the expedition.

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," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

The latest movie based on Philip K. Dick's offbeat science-fiction stories features one especially offbeat character ... named Philip K. Dick.

"Radio Free Albemuth," an indie film that is getting a sneak-preview screening tonight at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, incorporates some of the wilder parts of Dick's biography — including his belief that he was getting information from a superintelligent, extraterrestrial entity called VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System).

"Dick was very skeptical of these experiences," John Alan Simon, the screenwriter, director and producer for "Radio Free Albemuth," told me this week. "Some people think he was crazy. But if he was, he was a very lucid, skeptical kind of crazy."

Radio Free Albemuth

"Radio Free Albemuth" writer/director/producer John Alan Simon (right) checks signals with first assistant director Gabe Reiter.

Simon will participate in a Q&A at the Seattle screening, which kicks off a weekend celebration for new inductees in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Dick, who passed away in 1982, is already in that Hall of Fame — in part because his works have been such a fertile ground for sci-fi film adaptations such as "Blade Runner," "Minority Report," "Total Recall," " A Scanner Darkly" and "The Adjustment Bureau."

Unlike those tales, "Radio Free Albemuth" is set in an alternate-reality past rather than the future: a past in which a Nixon-like president burns the Watergate tapes and creates a conspiracy theory aimed at keeping him in office. Meanwhile, VALIS transmits messages down to a resistance movement. Philip K. Dick (played by Shea Whigham in the movie) is among those who are drawn into the resistance, along with the story's protagonist (Nicholas Brady, played by Jonathan Scarfe) and a singer whose songs are encoded with subliminal messages.

Radio Free Albemuth

In "Radio Free Albemuth," Philip K. Dick is played by Shea Whigham.

The singer's role is filled by Alanis Morissette, the Canadian-American singer/actress who just happened to play God in the 1999 film "Dogma." Whigham is best-known for his role in the HBO series "Boardwalk Empire," while Scarfe has appeared in a number of TV series including "E.R." and "CSI: Miami." Most of the actors have had meaty roles in films and on TV, but Simon said "Radio Free Albemuth" is more about Dick's vision rather than about big-name movie stars.

"The movie asks a lot of very, very interesting questions about 'What is religion,' and 'What is God,' and 'What do you do if God begins sending messages to you?'" he told me. "What if God were an alien, and what if all the great religious movements of all time were inspired by the same over-intelligence in the universe? I found that a very intriguing notion. ... The movie is skeptical of answers, the same way Philip K. Dick was skeptical of religion."

Another theme in the film is sparked by the conflict between the government and the resistance. "It's the message of '1984,' the message of Huxley's 'Brave New World,' which is the importance of the individual over the supremacy of the state," Simon said. "That's a timeless message."

But the director also emphasized that the film wasn't just a philosophical treatise. "It is, at the end of the day, an exciting science-fiction thriller. ... not that dissimilar from 'The Da Vinci Code,'" Simon said.

"Radio Free Albemuth" has been making its way through the film-festival circuit, and so far it's gotten awards as well as accolades for staying true to the spirit of Dick's work, even if that means the movie gets a little talky at times.

Radio Free Albemuth

Canadian-American singer Alanis Morissette plays a subversive singer in "Radio Free Albemuth."

"While watching 'Radio Free Albemuth' has made me wonder whether stage or radio may be a better platform for a Dick adaptation, I came away from the film with that unique Dickian sense of unease, insignificance and wonder, and it's good to see his work reproduced so faithfully on the big screen, flawed or not," Quiet Earth's Ben Austwick wrote.

Simon said he hopes "Radio Free Albemuth" will build on the same sort of grass-roots interest that turned "What the Bleep Do We Know" into such a phenomenon seven years ago. The movie seems certain to win over the sci-fi master's hard-core fans, who call themselves "Dick-heads." But will the wider public dial in to "Radio Free Albemuth" as well? Stay tuned. ...

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.

Courtesy of N. Metzl

Scientists have found marine plankton in the Southern Ocean will increase production of a smelly gas in response to global climate change.

Parts of the global oceans may get smellier thanks to global warming, according to a recent study.

The culprit is increased production of a sulfur-containing compound by marine plankton called dimethyl sulfide, or DMS. The sea-air smell is described variably as like cabbage or fishy and tangy.

Its link to marine plankton has been known for a while, and in 2007 scientists identified the genes responsible for its production.

Climate scientists are interested in the smelly gas for more reasons than just tickling their inner child: it is a major precursor for aerosols that trigger cloud formation and reflect sunlight back to space.

The new study finds that "DMS is locally much more sensitive to climate change than in previous modeling studies," Philip Cameron-Smith, a researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a news release.  

"The shift in emissions will change the heating patterns." 

To find out how the marine plankton and production of the gas will respond as concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide rise, scientists plugged present day values (355 parts per million) and a future value (970 parts per million) into a global ocean biogeochemical model. 

In the future scenario, the team found that DMS emission to the atmosphere was 150 percent higher than current levels in the Southern Ocean. The plankton there benefit from melting sea ice and other ecosystem changes, which will open up cold water where they thrive.

The increased production of the plankton in the Southern Ocean, in particular a species called Phaeocystis, will compensate for a decline in production in warming waters that stunt growth, Cameron-Smith said.

Going forward, the researchers said that they may need to factor in how ocean acidification from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the oceans will affect the plankton community, and thus DMS production.

For a preview on this issue, check out the video below:

More on climate change and the oceans:

• Scientists figure out origins of sea smell 
• Plankton, base of ocean food chain, in big decline 
• Warming alters Antarctic food web, study finds 
• Arctic ice melt sparks plankton blooms 
• Scientists unravel recipe for ocean's biological blooms 

Findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. In addition to Cameron-Smith, co-authors include Scott Elliot and Matthew Maltrud of the Los Alamos National Laboratory; David Erickson of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Oliver Wingenter of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

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).

INAH

Blood-red paint clings to the walls of a 1,500-year-old tomb chamber hidden within a Maya pyramid in Mexico.

A tiny remote-controlled camera is providing remarkable views of an apparently intact 1,500-year-old Maya tomb that's thought to hold a ruler's remains.

The 2-inch-long camera was lowered into a vault inside a pyramid at the Palenque archaeological site, in the hills of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Archaeologists have known about the vault since 1999, but the only access to the room was through a small shaft in the pyramid — just big enough to fit the micro-camera through.

The images reveal a series of nine figures painted on the walls in black on a vivid, blood-red background. Dishes, apparently meant to hold funerary offerings, are set on the floor. The camera also spotted pieces of a funerary shroud made of jade and mother of pearl. "The characteristics of the funeral site show that the bones could belong to a sacred ruler from Palenque, probably one of the founders of a dynasty," Reuters quoted archaeologist Martha Cuevas as saying.

For more about today's revelations, check out this report from Mexico. And don't miss the National Institute of Anthropology and History's Spanish-language news release, which includes a slideshow and an infographic.

INAH

The tomb is hidden within a pyramid known as Templo XX at Mexico's Palenque archaeological site.

INAH

Workers had to climb down a ladder to get to the place where the micro-camera could be lowered through a small shaft.

INAH

A worker points to the small shaft that provides the only access to the tomb below.

INAH

This camera view shows what appears to be a stylized figure, painted on the red walls of the 1,500-year-old Maya tomb.

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.

For millennia, scientists have puzzled over the reason why rubbing two insulators together can produce static cling — and you may be shocked to hear that the standard explanation is wrong.

Static electricity, also known as contact electrification, is "one of the oldest areas of scientific study," researchers from Northwestern University observe in their paper on the subject, published online today by the journal Science. Questions about the phenomenon's cause date back to around 600 B.C., when Thales of Miletus conducted experiments with amber charging against wool.

The traditional view was that electrons were transferred from the surface of one material to another — for example, from a plastic balloon to the strands of hair on a child's head. That would cause one material to carry a slight positive charge while the other material carried a slight negative charge. Because opposites attract, the hair would be drawn toward the balloon, resulting in that cute "bad hair day" look.

To test that explanation, the Northwestern team took an ultra-close look at the static-charged surfaces of plastic material as well as silicon and aluminum, using Kelvin force microscopy. What they found was different from what they expected. The surfaces were actually "mosaics" of electrically charged nanoscale regions, alternating between positive and negative charges. When the surfaces were rubbed together, tiny patches were transferred from one surface to the other.

"It's not just transfer of electrons when two pieces of material come together," principal study author Bartosz Grzybowski, a chemistry professor at Northwestern, told Science in a video clip. "It's about transfer of material that then mediates the buildup of charge."

When those nano-bits of material are torn away from the surfaces as a result of the rubbing, that breaks chemical bonds and leads to changes in the net electric charge of each material. So when you rub a plastic balloon on a child's head, tiny flecks of that balloon are actually being rubbed onto the little one's locks of hair.

"A picture that emerges is that contact electrification is a complex process involving a combination of, at least, bond cleavage, chemical changes and material transfer occurring within distinct patches of nanoscopic dimensions," the researchers write. "The exact relationship between these effects — and possibly also those due to the presence of surface water and local electric fields — remains unclear but prompts several intriguing questions for future research."

Grzybowski and his colleagues point out that contact electrification isn't just a parlor trick: Through the ages, the phenomenon has sparked technologies ranging from photocopying and laser printing to do-it-yourself biodiesel and spray painting. Grzybowski said his research group was already trying to apply what they've learned to come up with better ways to apply coatings to surfaces. So it's nice to know that even after 2,600 years of study, our view of contact electrification isn't ... heh, heh ... static.

More about electricity:

• Power beamed through the air
• Static buildup may explain Martian mystery
• Avoid getting burned at the pump — literally!

In addition to Grzybowski, the authors of "The Mosaic of Surface Charge in Contact Electrification" include H.T. Baytekin, A.Z. Patashinski, M. Branicki, B. Baytekin and S. Soh. For more about the research, check out this report from the Nobel Intent blog.

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.

Memrise

A mnemonic device shows the transition between a picture depicting strength and the Mandarin character for strength. Such devices help us remember words, according to the founders of Memrise, a website that teaches you words of a foreign language.

For adults, learning a new language is often a long, frustrating process that inevitably ends up in failure. A memory expert and a neuroscientist hope to change that with a new online software package designed to make learning the vocabulary of a foreign language fast, fun and rewarding.

"Really good successful learning needs to be vivid, imaginative and creative. It needs to be active. And if you can make it a bit social, that's great," Greg Detre, a neuroscientist and co-founder of Memrise, the online destination to learn foreign words quickly, told me today.

The website is built on the metaphor that our minds are gardens where memories are either flourishing or wilting. When users learn a new word, they get a seed that they tend and grow into a healthy plant by correctly passing well-timed tests that force the users to recall the word.

To help users learn the word, the site offers up mnemonic devices. When learning the word man in Mandarin, for example, Memrise transforms the character for man into a cartoon of a man. Users are also encouraged to come up with their own devices. These devices, the founders say, make the words stick in your mind and enriches the recall experience. 

To help plant and tend the memory, the site uses an algorithm that tests you on the word when the memory of it is most likely fading your mind.

"It is trying to teach you how your memories work," Detre explained. "If you don't nurture them on a scientific schedule, they die just like flowers. But we are also at the same time trying to make your learning visible and social and useful."

The fun part hinges on choreography behind the scenes that props the tests at the time and a level of difficulty where you have to work a bit to get the answer, but that you will likely get it right. In other words, the tests make you feel like a genius, which feels good, so you keep on learning. If the tests were too hard or too easy, you might quit, Detre noted.

The site also lets you play along with friends and strangers. Comparing your garden with others fires up the competitive spirit, for example. Users can also share mnemonic devices and encourage each other to learn new words, fostering a sense of community.

Memrise bills itself as teacher of words in a foreign language. "That's only a small part of learning a language," Luis Von Alm, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and co-creator of another online learning website, Duolingo, told Technology Review.

Detre agrees that Memrise alone will not teach you a new language, but, in his opinion, is the "best way to learn the words of a new language." And learning vocabulary, he added, is "the right way for the brain to kick itself into learning a new language."

More on language and learning:

• A baby's babble leads to language
• English won't dominate as world language
• Robots invent their own spoken language
• What language do we use with E.T.?

Tip o' the Log to Technology Review's Kristina Bjoran

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).

Carin L. Cain / AAAS / Science

An artist's conception shows a typical sauropod with a long neck, long tail and massive body.

How warm was a dinosaur's blood? Researchers report that it was about as warm as ours, based on a chemical analysis of sauropod teeth, of all things. The novel findings, published today by the journal Science, are consistent with the view that at least some dinosaur species were warm-blooded — and suggest a way to settle the controversy conclusively.

"What we're basically doing is sticking a thermometer up a dinosaur's butt," study co-author John Eiler, a geochemist at Caltech, told me jokingly.

What the researchers actually did was to drill out samples of fossilized tooth enamel from an assortment of sauropods, the largest kind of dinosaurs. Then they analyzed how different isotopes of carbon and oxygen were bonded together in apatite, a rare form of carbonate found in the enamel.

Past experiments have shown that the heavier isotopes — carbon-13 and oxygen-18 — are more likely to clump together when the carbonates are formed at lower temperatures. At higher temperatures, the bonds are more randomly distributed, and you don't see as many of the heavy isotopes clumping together. The precise proportion of the clumped isotopes can tell you the average body temperature of a toothy organism.

"This is the basis of the 'thermometer,' but it's a thermometer where all the information that allows you to rigorously calculate temperature is preserved in a single phase," Eiler said.

He said clumped-isotope thermometry has been tested with teeth from sharks, birds, crocodiles, rhinos and elephants, "and it just works for all of them." The procedure was also tried on a woolly mammoth's 20,000-year-old teeth and the 12 million-year-old teeth of an ancient crocodile and rhino. But this is the first time results have been reported from 150 million-year-old dinosaur teeth.

The analysis was done on 11 teeth from Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus dinosaurs from Tanzania, Oklahoma and Utah. Other samples were judged unsuitable for the sensitive chemical tests. "Did we do it perfectly?" Eiler said. "We believe that we found a result that we're confident in, but it's not easy."

Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told me in an email that the findings were "quite interesting and promising."

Warm blood ... but warm-blooded?
It turns out that the temperature Eiler and his colleagues came up with — 36 to 38 degrees Celsius, or 97 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit — is consistent with previous estimates produced by other methods. But Eiler said those methods, including one that involves comparing the different oxygen isotopes in dinosaur teeth, resulted in less direct measurements.

"None of those are simple applications of a thermometer," he said. "They all require some kind of assumption about the nature of the body fluid that the structure grew from."

The key point behind the research isn't necessarily that dinosaurs had blood as warm as ours. "The deeper question is, how did they get that way?" Eiler said. "What allowed them to get to that temperature? Was it through regulation of their metabolism, like it is for us? Was it simply their size? This is the next step."

Some scientists hold to the view that dinosaurs as a group might not have been strictly warm-blooded (like today's birds and mammals) or cold-blooded (like most reptiles). They suggest that some dinosaurs were big enough to keep their blood warm due to thermal inertia — as alligators and Galapagos tortoises do.

Eiler said the newly published temperature estimates are not consistent with that hypothesis. "They're not as hot as they were supposed to be," he said, "and that tells us there's something about dinosaur physiology that we don't understand."

To get at the answer, the scientists want to take lots more temperature readings, using the tooth enamel from big and little dinosaurs: from juvenile sauropods and dwarf sauropods, as well as from another class of dinosaurs known as theropods, which include Tyrannosaurus rex and are thought to be more closely related to birds.

"If sauropods were like mammals, you would expect the small animals to have the same body temperature as the large ones," Caltech biologist Robert Eagle, the Science study's lead author, told me. But if the temperature readings vary significantly, that would tip the scales back toward the thermal-inertia hypothesis — or it might force scientists to come up with a whole new hypothesis.

Beyond dinosaurs
And that's just the start. "When you start to think about the evolutionary transition between dinosaurs and birds, maybe you can interrogate these evolutionary transitions and find out when warm-bloodedness arrived," Eagle said. "We have no idea when that happened."

If it turns out that dinosaurs were truly warm-blooded, scientists could work their way backward toward the common ancestor of dinosaurs and crocodiles, to study how body temperature regulation might have evolved during the Permian geologic period, more than 250 million years ago. "The only limitation is whether there's enough well-preserved fossil material," Eagle said. "That doesn't necessarily depend on age. ... It's definitely theoretically possible that we can go all the way back to the Permian."  

Eagle said the clumped-isotope thermometer has already been used on rocks and the shells of marine organisms to study ancient climate change, and now it's being applied to a meteorite from Mars as well. In that experiment, researchers want to find out "whether this meteorite experienced high temperatures on the journey from Mars to Earth," he said. If there's no evidence of high temperatures, that might support claims that organisms could make their way between the planets inside such meteorites — an idea that set off a storm of controversy earlier this year.

Eiler said we'll probably be hearing much more about this temperature-taking technique in the years to come: "It's still recent enough and exotic enough that you wouldn't quite want to call it mature, but it's established. ... Applying it to teeth, I think our lab remains unique in doing that, although I'm sure other labs will be doing it soon."

Update for 11:45 p.m. ET: I followed up with a phone call to Luis Chiappe, the dinosaur expert at the L.A. museum, and he said there may well be other applications for this technique. "I would imagine that the way it happens is, people realize there's a new tool on the table and they will grab it and use it in various ways." For example, Chiappe is an expert on dinosaur eggs, and it's not unthinkable that you could measure egg temperatures to investigate how dinosaur moms hatched their young. Modern-day crocodiles use temperature to determine the sex of their hatchings. Did dinos do the same?

Chiappe agrees that the next task is to test other sizes of dinosaurs.

"If we were to find comparable temperatures in hatchlings of sauropods and juveniles of sauropods, that would definitely support the idea that these animals were endotherms [warm-blooded]. So that needs to be done," he said. "The problem is that the technique is a destructive technique. Therefore, not too many museum curators will be happy to donate their specimens to be destroyed."

More about dinosaur physiology:

• How dinosaur proteins could have survived
• How to tell male from female dinosaurs
• Dinosaurs were taller due to thick cartilage
• Most dinosaurs were more like Barney than T. rex
• Teen pregnancy affected dinosaurs, too
• Tooth marks suggest T. rex was a cannibal 
• Search for dinosaurs on msnbc.com

"Dinosaur Body Temperatures Determined from Isotopic (C13-O18) Ordering in Fossil Biominerals" was published today on the journal Science's website and will appear in a future issue of the print version. In addition to Eagle and Eiler, the authors include Thomas Tütken, Taylor S. Martin, Aradhna K. Tripati, Henry C. Fricke, Melissa Connely and Richard L. Cifelli.

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.

CPOM / UCL / ESA

CryoSat's detailed data have been used to generate this map of sea-ice thickness in the Arctic with data from January and February. Thanks to CryoSat's orbit, ice thickness close to the North Pole can be seen for the first time.

Scientists have long used satellite imagery to illustrate the shrinking extent of the Arctic sea ice. Now they've got satellite data that will provide regular updates on whether the ice is getting thinner as well.

The first ice thickness map from the European Space Agency's CryoSat spacecraft was released Tuesday at an air show in Paris. It was compiled with data collected in January and February.

The map shows, for example, the ice is thickest near the North Pole and off the coasts of Greenland and northeastern Canada. It thins as it stretches out towards Alaska and Russia.

Scientists expect the imagery to complement studies that show the Arctic sea ice extent is shrinking. This winter, for example, U.S. scientists reported the sea ice extent was among the smallest ever seen.

In recent years, scientists have consistently warned that the sea ice extent will shrink dramatically in the decades to come, primarily as a result of global climate change.

These warnings are based on models and observations of the sea ice extent — that is how much of the Arctic Ocean the ice covers. For a more robust understanding, scientists also need to know how thick the ice is.

The winds could, for example, push the ice out of one area but pile it up in another. This would mean the ice extent had diminished, but the volume remained the same.

CryoSat measures the thickness of the ice, providing a 3-D view, Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, told me today.

"Looking at the extent, we are just looking down at the surface, sort of the facade of the ice cover and you don't know exactly what it looks like underneath," he said. CryoSat, he added, will provide regularly updated pictures on the volume of sea ice.

Scientists have previously obtained ice thickness measurements, but only a few times a year with instruments such as NASA's IceSat, Meier noted. The new satellite provides continuous data. "It can show us how the ice changes seasonally and from year to year," he said.

The satellite obtains thickness measurements with a technique that bounces radar waves off the ice and the water in cracks which separate the ice floes. A calculation allows them to determine the sea ice thickness above the water.

Of course, about 90 percent of sea ice is actually underwater, "but if you measure the 10 percent above and know roughly what the density (of the ice) is, which tells you how much is above versus below, then you can calculate the total thickness," Meier said.

CPOM / UCL / ESA / Planetary Visions

For the first time, data from ESA's CryoSat mission have been used to map the height of the ice sheet that blankets Antarctica. CryoSat's ability to map the edges of the ice sheet is demonstrated by the detail that can be seen of the flow from east Antarctica onto the Ronne-Filchner ice shelf in the west. The outer white circle represents the limits of earlier missions and the inner circle shows that CryoSat is collecting data up 88° latitude.

For now, the thickness data shows the ice thickness in January and February. But in coming months more maps will be released and, over time, that allow scientists to see year-to-year changes in ice thickness.

"The data are exceptionally detailed and considerably better than the mission specification," the ESA writes in a news release. "They even show lineations in the central Arctic that reflect the ice's response to wind stress."

Meier cautioned, however, that the data is "fresh off the presses," more a proof of concept that the satellite can see sea ice and measure its thickness. "There are still a lot of things to work out ... it is too early to put a lot of stock in the absolute numbers."

In addition, the researchers have created a new map of Antarctica showing the height of the ice extent there. The data here is also preliminary, but shows CryoSat's ability to map the edges of the ice sheet in detail.

Understanding how ice sheets are changing at edges of Antarctica and Greenland is key, since change is happening fastest at the edges.

More on the Arctic sea ice:

• Arctic sea ice ties for smallest area this winter 
• Arctic sea ice may be altering weather, expert says 
• Inuit dog sleds help measure Arctic sea ice 
• 2010 seeing hot temps, less Arctic sea ice 
• Dramatic Arctic sea ice shrinkage predicted 

Science via AP

These undated photos provided by the journal Science show demineralized fragments of tissues lining the marrow cavity of a Tyrannosaurus rex femur. The find included what appear to be blood vessels, and possibly even cells.

Scientists have discovered how bits of the protein collagen from dinosaurs that died millions of years ago might have survived in fossilized bones.

The new research shows the rope-like connective tissue is twisted in such a way that certain parts are shielded from biological degradation and could survive for millions of years. 

James San Antonio, a biochemist at Orthovita, a medical-implant manufacturer, and colleagues looked at bits of collagen extracted from dinosaur bones and compared them to where those bits show up in collagen fibers of rats and humans.

They found that all 11 pieces analyzed came from the innermost parts of the fibers where they would have been protected from degradation by enzymes and the elements.

What's more, several of the molecules contain amino acids that are water-hating and contain few acidic amino acids, which make them less vulnerable to degradation by enzymes and water.

"We were rather pleasantly surprised and taken aback," Orgel told ScienceNews, adding that if any molecules were to survive millions of years, it would be the sheltered kinds they observed. 

If so, the finding helps explain how researchers were able to recover and sequence soft tissue from a Tyrannosaurus rex and a duck-billed Hadrosaur.

Those studies are controversial since many scientists believe there's no way soft tissue could survive millions of years and thus what has been found and sequenced is actually contamination from more recent times.

The new finding, reported in PLoS One, has yet to convince the skeptics.

"I'm an old protein cynic," Matthew Collins of the University of York in England, told ScienceNews. "Obviously, we would like to see a lot of samples from lots of labs. I'm not convinced yet."

The study was based on data from the initial reports. And that data, geneticist Stephen Salzberg at the University of Maryland has pointed out in a comment at PLoS One "are contaminants from modern species," notes Nature News.

The new study's authors refute the criticism, saying that if the fibers were contaminants, they should be from random parts of the structure. All the bits they found were from the most protected regions.

So, the controversy remains, but the new study does show how these proteins could survive millions of years. And if they did, scientists believe they'll be able to gain insight on how dinosaurs lived.

More on dinosaur proteins:

• T. rex analysis supports dino-bird link 
• Proteins could reveal new dinosaur secrets 
• Gunk in T. rex fossil confirms dino-bird lineage 
• Scientists recover T. rex soft tissue 
• Dinosaur mummy reveals organic molecules 

The mastermind behind the first privately funded spaceship says he's disappointed by the pace of progress since SpaceShipOne took its historic trip, seven years ago today. But there's hope on the horizon, in the form of SpaceShipTwo.

Aerospace designer Burt Rutan has retired from his top post at the company he created, Scaled Composites, and is now living in North Idaho with his wife, Tonya. His new digs are hundreds of miles from California's Mojave Air and Space Port, where SpaceShipOne took flight and where SpaceShipTwo is now undergoing unpowered glide tests.

"I feel good about the decision to retire and leave Mojave, mainly due to my health uncertaintites and to the wonderful place we now live," Rutan, 68, told me in an email. When he refers to his health, he's talking about heart troubles that forced him to undergo surgery in early 2008. And when he refers to the appeal of his current locale, he's talking about Idaho's political environment as well as its mountains and lakes.

Bebeto Matthews / AP file

Burt Rutan presides over a 2008 news conference about SpaceShipTwo.

"Conservatives just take better care of each other and govern better," he said. "Oh, I also love the weather and the views."

When SpaceShipOne broke the space barrier on June 21, 2004, Rutan was hoping he'd be one of the first passengers on a commercial flight to the edge of space, more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) up. He even said he wanted to "go to the moon in my lifetime" and "see my grandchildren go to the more interesting moons of Jupiter and Saturn."

Today, folks are still talking about the possibility of sending passengers around the moon — perhaps by 2015, although today Russia's space chief voiced doubts about that prospect. It doesn't look as if anyone will be going to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn anytime in the next few decades, though, and even that first private-sector passenger flight to space has not yet taken place.

"Yes, disappointed that progress has been slow," Rutan wrote.

Rutan has always shied away from laying down firm schedules for the future. Even in his retirement, he declined to talk about how soon SpaceShipTwo would be taking on customers — or, for that matter, about any other ventures he might be taking on. "I cannot talk about future things, never did. Just stay tuned," he said.

But if Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic stick with the schedule they've laid out, rocket-powered test flights could begin within the next year, with the aim of sending test pilots once again across the outer-space boundary.

The year 2012 appears to be the very earliest target for the first commercial suborbital spaceflights. Such journeys would give Virgin Galactic's customers a taste of zero-G and a view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space, at a cost of $200,000 a seat. There are other companies in the suborbital space race, including XCOR Aerospace (aiming for flights from Curacao in 2014) and Armadillo Aerospace (which has partnered with Space Adventures). For now, however, Virgin Galactic still appears to be closest to entering the market, with New Mexico's Spaceport America taking shape as its base of commercial operations.

Zenith Press

"Burt Rutan's Race to Space" traces the aerospace designer's decades-long career.

Until the next-gen spacecraft actually fire up their rockets, space dreamers will have to content themselves with lower-flying adventures such as zero-gravity flights and astronaut training sessions. Or you could read the book: "Burt Rutan's Race to Space," a new volume from Dan Linehan, author of the "SpaceShipOne" coffee-table book, has just been published.

While "SpaceShipOne" focused on the run-up to the rocket plane's history-making flights, "Burt Rutan's Race to Space: The Magician of Mojave and His Flying Innovations" takes a wider look at the aerospace guru's career, from his days as a designer of homebuilt airplanes to his work on SpaceShipTwo. Rutan's work on record-setting long-distance aircraft such as the Voyager and the GlobalFlyer is well-known, but I was surprised to see some of the other not-so-ready-for-prime-time projects in which Scaled Composites played a role, including the DC-X rocket prototype, the Roton test vehicle and NASA's X-38 crew return vehicle.

Now the Voyager and SpaceShipOne are hanging in the Smithsonian, and a new generation of aerospace designers are following in Rutan's footsteps. Here's what Mike Melvill, the first pilot to become an astronaut in SpaceShipOne, wrote in the foreword to "Burt Rutan's Race to Space":

"It will be interesting to watch the continuing progress of Scaled Composites, where Burt has left an unbelievable legacy of truly astonishing aircraft designs and ensured that there is a cadre of exceptional designers, engineers and test pilots with an unmatched shop full of the best composite fabricators in the world."

Even though he's retired, and even though he doesn't like to talk about future things, Rutan himself couldn't resist taking a forward-looking perspective as he looked back on what happened seven years ago today.

"The thing that sticks out," he wrote, "is that hundreds of children were there to watch."

Will June 21, 2004, go down in history as the true start of the commercial space age? Or will it turn out to have been a false start? What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments, and let's see what happens by June 21, 2012.

Stay tuned for a Q&A with Dan Linehan in a future posting. Linehan's earlier book, "SpaceShipOne: An Illustrated History," has just become available in paperback.

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 past decade has brought a whole new frontier of icy worlds to explore on the edge of our solar system — and now you can get in on the exploration as well, through IceHunters.org, the latest citizen-science project from Zooniverse.

Hundreds of thousands of Internet users have signed up for past Zooniverse projects — to classify galaxies, or count lunar craters, or spot solar storms, or identify potential planets orbiting alien stars, based on data from previous astronomical observations. This project is different: For the first time, amateurs can help identify future targets for a NASA interplanetary flyby — in this case, for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

Right now, the New Horizons team's top job is getting ready for the 2015 flyby past Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. But the Southwest Research Institute's Alan Stern, principal investigator for the $700 million mission, said he and his colleagues are already looking for follow-up targets in the Kuiper Belt, the wide disk of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. Those targets will have to be selected before the Pluto encounter takes place.

"We'll have four years to find the objects, find the orbits, learn about them and choose the best one or two to fly by," Stern told me today.

Scientists are poring over telescope images to look for the candidates: Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs, that are smaller than Pluto but still substantial. These icy worlds could reveal more about the origins and the geography of the planetary frontier, but there's only so much that even the professionals can do. The Zooniverse team suggested that citizen scientists could contribute to the cause, and Stern decided that enlisting Internet users would be feasible and fun.

"Maybe a citizen will beat us to the punch," he said.

JHUAPL

An artist's impression shows NASA's New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt object on the edge of the solar system.

One of the leaders of the IceHunters effort, Pamela Gay, said the project will give a boost to public participation as well as planetary science.

"Projects like this make the public part of modern space exploration," Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, said in a news release. "The New Horizons mission was launched knowing we'd have to discover the object it would visit after Pluto. Now is the time to make that discovery, and thanks to IceHunters, anyone can be that discoverer."

This is no simple task, however: The IceHunters are being asked to check composite images from ground-based telescopes, such as the 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii or the 6.5-meter telescope in Chile, and mark the little blobs that could signal the existence of a Kuiper Belt object.

The technique is a 21st-century version of the method that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh used to discover Pluto 81 years ago. He laboriously checked photographic plates to look for a speck that moved just the right amount of distance in the interval between one exposure and another. IceHunters.org enlists computing power to overlay different images of the same square of sky, and blot out the fixed stars. The little blobs that are left over could be variable stars, or asteroids, or those precious KBOs. It's up to Internet users to check millions of pictures and mark the right blobs for further study.

"Using just about any modern Web browser, users can circle potential KBOs and mark with a star the locations of asteroids," website developer Cory Lehan said in today's SIUE news release. "The website is filled with examples to help get people started. Anyone should be able to take part — no Flash required."

John Spencer, a colleague of Stern's at the Southwest Research Institute and on the New Horizons science team, said the IceHunters' results will be factored into the mission's KBO search effort. "When you're looking for something special in masses of messy, real-world data, sometimes there's no substitute for the human eye, and Zooniverse IceHunters will put thousands of eyes to work on this important job," he said in a New Horizons news release.

New Horizons' scientists will draw up a list of candidate KBOs based on location (Can the spacecraft get to them?) as well as scientific interest (How big are they? What do they seem to be made of? Do they have moons?). The top candidates will be listed online for public review, Stern said.

"I'll make the determination about which objects we fly by, but we're going to ask the public to come in and take a vote. It won't be a binding vote, but there are a great many very talented amateur scientists with a diversity of views, and they can help us," Stern told me.

The New Horizons team will announce one or two targets in the Kuiper Belt shortly before the Pluto flyby in July 2015. The spacecraft will be set on its new course one or two months after that encounter. The KBO observations would likely occur in the 2016-2020 time frame, depending on the distance from Pluto.

There may be an extra payoff for the IceHunters: They just might have a role in the naming of celestial objects that are discovered in the course of the project. Here's what the IceHunters.org FAQ file has to say about that: "In general, astronomers are very fond of catalog numbers, and the variable stars and Kuiper Belt objects you find will all be assigned numbers that are, sadly, quite boring. It may be possible, however, for you to name the asteroids you find — provided you're the first to find them. So start looking, and be the early bird to get the worm asteroid."

More about Pluto and the Kuiper Belt:

• Pluto stays in the spotlight, dead or alive
• The outer solar system remains mysterious
• Scientists find smallest known Pluto sibling
• Interactive: The new solar system
• More about Pluto on Cosmic Log
• More about 'The Case for Pluto'

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 Kuiper Belt as well as the search for alien worlds.