Arcadis via AP

An artist's conception from the Dutch engineering firm Arcadis illustrates its proposal to build a barrier in the Verrazano Narrows between New York's Brooklyn borough and Staten Island, shielding the Upper New York Bay. This barrier would be supplemented by two smaller barriers, one between Staten Island and New Jersey and the other on the East River. Experts say the vast destruction wreaked by the storm surge in New York could have been prevented with a sea barrier of the type that protects major cities in Europe.

Marine scientist Malcolm Bowman has been warning since before Hurricane Katrina that the New York metro area was susceptible to a catastrophic storm surge, but the fact that superstorm Sandy proved him right doesn't make him feel any better.

"It was all predictable, and unfortunately it all happened,” Bowman told me today. "But then it got worse."

Bowman's nightmare scenario, laid out in a 2005 report, foresaw a 12-foot storm surge that devastated low-lying neighborhoods in the New York metro area. When Hurricane Sandy was approaching landfall on the New Jersey coastline on Monday, the National Hurricane Center predicted that the storm surge could amount to somewhere between 6 and 11 feet.

The tide that pushed into New York's Battery Park was higher than any of those figures: 13.7 feet in height.

The results were catastrophic: Subway and highway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn were flooded. Power stations were swamped, leaving millions of people without electricity. The water washed over runways, rail yards and roads, disrupting traffic for days. Whole towns were submerged in New Jersey. Rising water levels affected operations at half a dozen nuclear power plants in the region. The estimated toll: At least 46 deaths in the United States, and an estimated $20 billion or more in property damage.

"This has been a knockout punch," Bowman said. "This is a wakeup call."

Storm surges have hit the region before — most notably with the deadly nor'easter of December 1992, and to a lesser extent with Hurricane Irene last year. But Sandy was much deadlier.

"What happened on Monday night is that the maximum surge occurred at high tide, and it also happened to be a full moon," Bowman said. "All those events came to coincide, and that's what made it so bad. If the storm had hit six hours later, it would have been low tide, and there would have been less damage. Timing is everything."

But in Bowman's view, it's not just a question of bad luck. "Climate change is real," he said. "We've had these two extreme events, two years in a row. It's time to think about levees. This is what the Europeans have done."

Bowman and his colleagues at the Stony Brook Storm Surge Research Group have been calling for the construction of a network of levees and gates that could block the gargantuan push of water that accompanies superstorms like Sandy.

The project would start with two or three storm surge barriers, modeled after the systems that have been built on the Thames River in England, or on waterways in the Netherlands. Bowman said three such systems are already protecting Stamford, Conn.; New Bedford, Mass.; and Providence, R.I.

The best locations for the New York region's first barriers would be at the Outer Barrier and across the Upper East River, Bowman said. "They would cost in the range of $5 billion or $10 billion each," he said. "That sounds like a lot of money, but you wait until you hear what it will cost to bring the city back."

Up to now, New York's response to flood threats has been to build smaller-scale barriers around facilities to make them more resilient to flooding. A multibillion-dollar project to create a storm surge defense system hasn't been on the agenda. "The city has been very polite, and they agree that in the long term it will become a necessity," Bowman said. "But for now they say, not yet. They're focusing on resilience, solutions to small problems."

That strategy will almost certainly change in the post-Sandy era. During a Tuesday news conference, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo acknowledged that it's time to upgrade the city's infrastructure for the superstorms to come.

"Going forward we are going to have to anticipate these types of extreme weather patterns," CNBC quoted him as saying. "And we have to think about how we redesign the system so that this doesn't happen again." 

That won't happen overnight.

"What has to happen is, either Congress or the city of New York needs to put in a request to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and say we need to do a feasibility study," Bowman said. "We've done it on the academic level, but now we need to bring in the corps. ... We could be studying this for the next 10 years, but we better get on with it."

More about the science of Sandy:

• Subway rats may flood NYC streets
• How Sandy turned into a superstorm
• Climate experts worry about storms to come 
• NBC News' coverage of superstorm Sandy

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Nationwide polls may portray the presidential campaign as a neck-and-neck horse race, but less conventional data-crunching methods spit out a different picture, with President Barack Obama edging out GOP challenger Mitt Romney.

One big variable remains to be factored in: the effect of Hurricane Sandy. And one big state that's been relatively unaffected by the storm holds the key to the outcome: Ohio. "It's been that way for the entire election cycle," said David Rothschild, an expert on opinion modeling at Microsoft Research and Columbia University's Applied Statistics Center.

Rothschild, who lays out election forecasts at the Predictwise website and blogs about prediction science on The Signal at Yahoo, surveyed the state of the art this weekend at the New Horizons in Science symposium, presented as part of the ScienceWriters2012 conference.

In the final days of the campaign, the divergent spins on the election outlook have sparked a few fireworks. Statistician Nate Silver's analysis for The New York Times' Five Thirty Eight column, which has consistently favored Obama even as many others were reporting a tightening of the race, drew criticism from the National Review's Josh Jordan for including "a little bit too much hope of an Obama victory against what appears to be a surge of Romney momentum."

This week, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough virtually called for Silver's pundit license to be revoked. "Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes," he said on "Morning Joe."

Economist Paul Krugman went to Silver's defense in his own column for the Times, decrying the "war on objectivity" and saying that "all the election modelers have been faithful to their models, letting the numbers fall where they may."

"This is really scary," Krugman wrote. "It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn't what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign."

Silver's analysis is based on a state-by-state assessment of polling data from multiple sources, translated into an electoral vote count. Political prediction markets, such as those studied by Rothschild, use a different method to come up with a surprisingly similar snapshot of the horse race.

The markets offer a glorified kind of gambling on political fortunes: The winner-take-all markets let players "invest" in the prospects of a particular candidate. If the candidate wins, the investor gets, say, $1 a share. If the candidate loses, the investor gets nothing. Leading up to Election Day, investors can buy or sell shares in candidates to match their expectations of success.

The shifting share prices reflect the perceived probability of success. For example, Intrade's market sets the probability of Obama's re-election at 63 percent. The Iowa Electronic Markets go with a little more than 63 percent, while the trading at Betfair puts the probability at 70 percent. That's in the same ballpark as Silver's 72.9 percent estimate.

IEM / Univ. of Iowa

A chart shows share values on the Iowa Electronic Markets in the winner-take-all market for the presidential popular vote. The blue line indicates Democratic share prices, while the red line indicates GOP share prices.

Intentions vs. expectations
What the prediction markets provide is a probability figure, not a vote share figure. It reflects expectations about a given outcome, just as the Vegas odds reflected the expectation that the Giants would win the World Series, even before they swept the Tigers. There was a chance all the way up to the final out that the Tigers could roar back and take four games in a row to win the series. But in this case, at least, the Vegas marketplace predicted the outcome.

So what's the success rate of prediction markets? How do surveys that gauge expectations perform, compared with traditional surveys that gauge what voters say they intend to do? That's where Rothschild's research comes in: He and a colleague, Penn economist Justin Wolfers, looked at the predictions produced by traditional polls ("For whom do you intend to vote?"), as opposed to less traditional surveys ("Whom do you expect to win?"), in 345 political races.

Most of the time, the predictions from the two types of forecasts were in agreement. But in those cases where the predictions were different, the expectation survey was right 76 percent of the time, while the traditional intention survey was right only 24 percent of the time.

Rothschild said the strength of expectation polls may lie in the fact that investors can absorb information from other sources to come up with a consensus that reflects the wisdom of crowds. "Asking people about expectations is equivalent to as if people went out to 10 random voters and reported the binary result," he said.

Based on the prediction markets, it's as if Obama is the favored team in the seventh game of the World Series. The betting odds have been in his favor for the past year — even though there have been ups and downs, such as his slump in the first presidential debate. Now that all the debates are done, most of the uncertainty has been wrung out of the campaign.

"There's one more unexpected event: this hurricane," Rothschild said.

After the storm
Lots of prognosticators have pointed to the uncertainties raised by Hurricane Sandy. The conventional wisdom was that Romney would benefit from a long-recognized anti-incumbent effect in late pre-election polling, as well as a race-tightening effect. However, Sandy changes the calculus.

"Generally, natural disasters benefit incumbents," Rothschild said. There's a tendency to put politics aside, rally 'round the flag and let the president look presidential. (That effect can go negative if the disaster response doesn't go well, as President George W. Bush found out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.) Even before the storm hit, Scarborough said Romney's momentum could stall in Sandy's aftermath. "It changes everything with a week to go," he said.

There's already some evidence that the rally effect has kicked in: For example, today New Jersey's Republican governor, Chris Christie, said hat Obama's response to the storm crisis was "outstanding" and that he didn't "give a damn about Election Day." Christie is due to tour devastated areas with the president on Wednesday.

The catastrophic aftermath of the storm may affect early voting as well as the Election Day turnout in places like New York and New Jersey. That could cut into the Democratic vote. Research has shown that obstacles to voting tend to hit Democrats harder than Republicans. But in Sandy's case, that statistical effect may not be critical because those states are relatively safe for Obama.

Sandy's effect may be more crucial hundreds of miles from the worst of the storm, in Ohio. For the past year, Ohio has been the "flip state" in Rothschild's calculations. Neither candidate has a clear path to victory unless he wins Ohio's electoral votes, Rothschild said. That's one reason why Romney was the headliner for a storm-relief rally in Ohio today — and why Vice President Joe Biden and former President Bill Clinton are canvassing the state while Obama tours the hurricane zone.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney reacts as he accepts a food donation from a supporter during a storm-relief event in Kettering, Ohio.

How will it all turn out? There are lots of statistical models floating around, and no matter which way it turns out, some will score a home run while others will strike out. In addition to the political prediction markets we've been talking about, here are a few more forecasts to watch:

• University of Illinois' Election Analytics favors Obama in the electoral vote.
• Moody's Analytics favors Obama in the electoral vote.
• Yale economist Ray Fair's Vote-Share Equations indicate that the election is too close to call.
• University of Colorado's election model, developed by political scientists Kenneth Bickers and Michael Berry, favors Romney in popular and electoral vote.
• IHS Global Insights' Nigel Gault's model favors Romney, based on a formula that combines five economic indicators.

We'll be talking about the scientific angles to the political campaign at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show airing on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world. My guest will be Shawn Lawrence Otto, a founder of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America."

Turn to NBC Politics for the full story about the final week of the presidential campaign, and keep a watch on our coverage of Hurricane Sandy's aftermath as well.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor and vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, which presented the New Horizons in Science symposium. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hurricane Sandy is posing a monster challenge for weather forecasters and emergency agencies, due to an amazing combination of meteorological factors, but what's just as amazing is how well they've been able to predict what seemed to be an unpredictable disaster.

"It looks like we've been fairly consistent on this, even five days out," Chris Landsea, science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, told me today. "I think when all is said and done, on the track forecast, we're going to be quite accurate."

Sandy's path, which took a left turn from the Atlantic to slam head-on into the heavily populated Northeast, is just one of the unusual aspects of this storm. "The size of this system, the late-season nature, and the track — all these are fairly unique characteristics," Landsea said. To look for precedents, you have to go back to infamous hurricanes such as Agnes in 1972, Hazel in 1954, even the great storms of 1944, 1938, 1815 and 1804. But today, the region is so much more populous and developed that the impact is certain to be far greater.

Here are five factors that have turned Sandy into a superstorm:

Northerly track: Atlantic tropical storms most commonly tear through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and lose energy as they pass over the U.S mainland. This storm, however, crept along the Eastern Seaboard, where waters that were warmer than usual for this time of year kept the storm alive. As the storm moved northward, it morphed into a hybrid storm, drawing additional strength from the differential between the storm's warm air and cold northern air from the jet stream.

"There's a transformation that this system is undergoing," Landsea explained. "This is actually evolving into a winter storm, and later, a nor'easter." One result of this evolution is that the storm system has widened to more than 800 miles in diameter, stretching from the Carolinas to Maine and Canada.

NASA / NOAA

NOAA's GOES-13 weather satellite shows the storm system associated with Hurricane Sandy covering the northeastern United States even before landfall on Monday.

The left turn: Hurricanes that get so far north could drift off into the cold Atlantic to die — but they can also be pushed into the mainland, as Hurricane Irene was last year. Irene followed a path that was roughly parallel to the coastline, but Sandy took a hard left turn that put it on a course for a direct, perpendicular strike on the coast. That's because a cold front on the mainland is drawing the storm westward, while the current state of a weather pattern known as the North Atlantic Oscillation is blocking the storm from heading eastward. 

Storm surge: Sandy's top sustained winds of 85 miles per hour typically wouldn't rate as a superstorm, but its effects will be magnified, Landsea said. "Even though it's not a 'major' hurricane by any means ... there is substantial threat because of the storm surge and because of the rainfall. There's going to be flooding. Both of those factors are going to be killers," he said. The storm surge is projected to range from 6 to 11 feet. One of the big reasons for such a high surge is that the waters off the coast of New York and New Jersey are so shallow: As the surge from the deeper ocean nears the coastline, all that water piles up to create a higher wave.

Full moon: Another reason for the huge storm surge is the fact that the moon is hitting its full phase just as Sandy is making landfall. The celestial lineup of the sun, moon and Earth contributes to higher-than-normal high tides. 

Winter storm: Sandy is such a late-season storm that it's running into winter weather in the northeastern United States, which is adding an extra dimension to the misery. "I have not been around long enough to see a hurricane forecast with a snow advisory in it," Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, told NBC's TODAY. The storm could trigger up to 3 feet of snow in the Appalachians, the National Weather Service reported. The Weather Channel's Tom Niziol said that "an amazing combination of factors" have come together to make Sandy a threat due to the snow as well as the rain.

Landsea and other forecasters may marvel at the factors behind what some have called a "perfect storm" or "Frankenstorm," and there'll surely be lots of lessons learned for future weather modeling. But that's not what's uppermost on their mind right now. "What's really important are the impacts," Landsea said.

To keep on top of the storm, and to keep safe, keep an eye on NBC News' hurricane coverage:

• Sandy swamps coastal towns, cuts power to 700,000
• Live updates on Hurricane Sandy
• Your images of Hurricane Sandy

Update for 3:10 p.m. ET Oct. 30: The storm surge was clearly one of the biggest impacts of Hurricane Sandy, and for good reason: The National Hurricane Service reported that in some cases, the surge exceeded its own maximum prediction of 11 feet. At New York's Battery Park, for example, the surge measured 13.7 feet — and it was devastating. On another note, I've corrected the spelling of Landsea's apt last name since this item was originally published.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Linda Godfrey is so sure about the existence of weird walking wolves that she's written a book titled "Real Wolfmen: True Encounters in Modern America." In more than 300 pages, she lays out dozens of stories about sightings of nasty-looking beasts running around on their hairy hind legs. Scientists are unconvinced — but they do admit that humans are virtually hard-wired to watch out for wolves on the darkness.

"The werewolf idea is strictly a product of our imagination, but it comes along with a culture of thousands of years of fear of wolves," said Michigan Tech's Rolf Peterson, who has studied wolves for decades at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior. "It's just an outgrowth of that. But there's nothing out there that's anything like a werewolf. It's all in our heads."

Try telling that to Godfrey and the people whose dog-man reports are featured in her book.

"I've received hundreds of reports over the years ... and that's probably a small percentage of the actual sightings of these creatures," she told me. "So many people are in denial when they have these experiences, because it sort of rocks their world."

Quest for the beast
Godfrey had her own world rocked in 1991 when, as a rookie reporter in Elkhorn, Wis., she wrote about a sightings of a creature that came to be known as the "Beast of Bray Road." The beast was said to be a 6-foot-tall, fur-covered wolflike animal that chased after witnesses on its hind legs.

Linda Godfrey

Linda Godfrey, author of "Real Wolfmen," created this sketch of an upright canid based on reports from witnesses.

"I can't find any scientific reason why feral canines should walk on their hind legs, in the absence of, say, a missing forelimb," Godfrey said. "I can't find any experts who can tell me why they should do this. But they do."

Sure, there have been hoaxes: The most famous case is the Gable Film, a home-movie reel that appears to show a dark shape attacking the person holding the camera. The film was eventually traced to a couple of guys trying to hype a "Michigan Dog-Man" tale.

Godfrey acknowledges that some of the wolfman reports actually turn out to be misidentifications of four-legged wolves, or bears rearing up on their hind legs. Other "wolfmen" have turned out merely to be weird men lurking around the countryside. And there's actually a rare malady known as hypertrichosis that can make people look like the wolfmen in the movies.

But Godfrey insists that even after all those cases are eliminated, there are solid sightings that can't be explained away.

She emphasized that she's not making claims about magical beings that change from humans to wolves and back again, like Jacob and his fellow shape-shifters in the wildly popular "Twilight" saga. "The thing about these creatures that people report to me is that they're not describing something that has human characteristics, only odd behavior that reminds them of humans," Godfrey said.

So if there are all these reports of "upright canids," why haven't scientists identified this, um, unusual species? "It has the ability to get around whichever way is most convenient," Godfrey explained. "If you saw one of these things on four legs, you would just say there's an extremely large, creepy-looking canine that's walking by on all fours."

In her book, Godfrey voices the hope that high-tech gear such as motion-sensitive trail cameras and night-vision imaging devices will eventually produce indisputable evidence to back up all the stories Godfrey has heard over the past 20 years. But so far, scientists aren't buying it. "I haven't had any that say, 'Yes, I know there are dog-men,'" Godfrey acknowledged.

Rabies and other reasons
Michigan Tech's Peterson is one of the scientists Godfrey has contacted in the course of her wolfman quest — and although he doesn't see any reason to believe the dog-man reports are real, he notes that there are plenty of reasons for werewolf tales to take root.

"The basis for people's fear of wolves is not totally without evidence," he told me. "The wolf is the species that has posed the most difficulty for us, aside from our own species."

For one thing, there's rabies, a disease that was common in Europe during the heyday of the werewolf saga, starting in the 16th century. It would have been unnerving to see someone who was bitten by a rabid dog or wolf sicken and go mad within a matter of days — and that would have added credence to the idea that such people were being transformed into a kind of wild animal.

Another reason is that wolves truly are predators: In the old days, children who were pressed into service as shepherds made for tasty targets, Peterson noted. And we're not just talking about the old days. Peterson pointed to a grisly string of wolf attacks on children in India that took place in 1996-97, as well as more recent episodes.

There's another side of the coin, of course: Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated wolves to create man's best friend. "We've been around wolves for tens of thousands of years, and we developed dogs out of it, so we have a long association with that particular species," Peterson said. With that kind of complex love-hate relationship, it's not surprising that the world's cultures have produced such a rich store of wolf-man archetypes — ranging from the skinwalkers of Native American lore to Jacob's hunky wolf pack. Our tendency to see wolves in the shadowy shapes of the night may well be a reflex that's been fine-tuned over countless millennia.

But what about the wolves? Peterson's specialty is the study of relationships between wolves and their prey, and he's noticed that the wolves of Isle Royale periodically change their perspective on people as well.

"Seven, eight years ago, after 45 years of being totally terrified of people, the wolves suddenly lost their fear of people," he told me. "Then, after about three years, they switched back to being afraid. I have absolutely no idea what caused either switch. They have their own cultural knowledge about us, and they transmit that from generation to generation, I suspect."

Did I just feel a chill going down my spine?

More Halloween stories to chew on:

• 2002: Ghostly mysteries solved
• 2003: Why we seek out an eek
• 2004: Sharing your scares
• 2005: Ghosts on the rise
• 2006: Bring me your ghost stories!
• 2007: The science of spooks
• 2008: Chasing phantoms on film
• 2008: The science of bloodsuckers
• 2009: Seven ghoulish discoveries
• 2010: Spooky stuff from NASA
• 2010: How your brain handles terror scares
• 2011: Why the 'paranormal' is just normal
• 2012: Sleuth finds the truth behind ghost stories

Stay tuned for a Halloween reality check on vampire legends.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Twentieth Century Fox

A scene from the 2008 movie "Shutter" shows a ghostly shape in a photo.

Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell has busted a lot of ghostly myths over the past 40 years — but the spookiest part of his job comes when he actually catches a ghost red-handed.

No, we're not talking about spirits of the dead: These "ghosts" are hotel clerks who flick the lights to keep the guests talking about the place's ghost story. Or a mischievous child who plays tricks on his parents. Or maybe a camera crew catching weird-looking "orbs" floating through the frame — orbs they didn't notice until they looked at the pictures later.

"Much of what so-called ghost hunters are detecting is themselves," Nickell, the author of "The Science of Ghosts," told me this week. "If they go through a haunted house and stir up a lot of dust, they shouldn't be surprised if they get a lot of orbs in their photographs."

The orbs are actually out-of-focus reflections from a camera flash, created by dust particles floating in front of the lens. The clumping noises that ghost hunters hear often turn out to be the footsteps of crew members elsewhere in the building, or even someone on a stairway next door. And those weird readings they pick up with thermal imagers? They're typically left behind by the flesh-and-blood visitors.

A tough job
Tracking down the truth behind spooky sightings is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, Nickell said.

"It takes only a moment for someone to say that they saw something," he said, "but it can take a huge expenditure for someone to fly somewhere, and they might never re-create that one little moment."

Joe Nickell

Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell appears to be surrounded by an aura in a photograph that was created to duplicate a spooky effect.

Nickell, a former professional magician and detective, has been that someone for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry since the 1970s. "I've been in more haunted houses than Casper," he joked. And the truth is that there are worse jobs in the world.

"I wouldn't want anyone ever to know this, but it really is a great deal of fun to do what I do," Nickell said.

In "The Science of Ghosts," Nickell spins a series of tales about his worldwide travels. His first haunted-house investigation, in 1972, took place at Toronto's Mackenzie House, where residents reported seeing apparitions hovering over their bed, and hearing footsteps when no one else was in the house. Nickell ascribed the apparitions to "waking dreams," a phenomenon that leads people to see things when they're half-asleep or in an idle reverie. And as for those footsteps: Nickell found out that there was an iron staircase in the building next door. The strange sounds were traced to a late-night cleanup crew tromping up and down those stairs.

Nickell learned a lot from that first case. "You must go on site, and you must investigate just like any other piece of detective work," Nickell said. "You can treat the house as a sort of crime scene."

Other cases involved spirit photographs, such as the ones that show orbs or bright streaks. One family called Nickell in to explain a series of pictures that showed bright, hazy loops of energy in the foreground. Nickell eventually figured out that the loops were created when a flash bounced off a camera strap dangling in front of the lens. "Now we know about the camera-strap effect," Nickell said.

Taking on TV psychics
Nickell also takes on psychic mediums who claim to speak with the dead. In the book, he traces his encounters with TV-show medium John Edward, who uses so-called "cold reading" techniques to draw information out of a crowd. (For example, "I feel like someone with a J- or G-sounding name has recently passed. ...")

"The people who profess to be able to talk to the dead tend to be either fantasy-prone personalities, or charlatans, or possibly a bit of both," Nickell declared. "They would be harmless if they didn't mislead so many people."

Nickell totally understands why a belief in ghosts and the afterlife is so important to people. "If ghosts exist, then we don't really die, and that's huge. ... It appeals to our hearts," he said. "We don't want our loved ones to die. We have this whole culture that we're brought up with, that encourages this belief in ghosts."

Once a ghost story gets attached to a place or a situation, then almost anything that happens can be interpreted as supporting that story, he said. That's one reason why ghostbusting can be a thankless job. Another reason is that it's so hard to wrap your arms around the evidence — or, more appropriately, the lack thereof.

"No one is bringing you a ghost trapped in a bottle," Nickell said. "What they're offering is, 'I don't know.' Over and over, they're saying something like this: 'We don't know what the noise in the old house was, or the white shape in the photo. So it must be a ghost.' These are examples of what's called an argument from ignorance. You can't make an argument from a lack of knowledge. You can't say, 'I don't know, therefore I do know.'... If I could just teach people a little bit about the argument from ignorance, I think we could give the ghosts their long-needed rest."

Do you agree? Or do you have some truly spooky ghost stories to share for the Halloween season? Whether you're a believer or a skeptic, feel free to share your tale as a comment below.

Extra credit: Even as Nickell and I were having our conversation this week, word was getting out about the death of skeptical thinker Paul Kurtz at the age of 86. Kurtz was the founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, the Center for Inquiry, Prometheus Books and Skeptical Inquirer. He was also Nickell's mentor.

"Paul really gave me an office to work out of, and he just let me work," Nickell said. "I think of him as the father of the worldwide skeptic movement."

Nickell noted that some skeptics think there's no need to respond to claims they consider silly. But Kurtz took a different view. "He realized early on that there really needed to be a voice to respond," Nickell said. And that's what made Nickell what he is today: the world's longest-running full-time professional paranormal investigator.

More Halloween tales:

• 2002: Ghostly mysteries solved
• 2003: Why we seek out an eek
• 2004: Sharing your scares
• 2005: Ghosts on the rise
• 2006: Bring me your ghost stories!
• 2007: The science of spooks
• 2008: Chasing phantoms on film
• 2008: The science of bloodsuckers
• 2009: Seven ghoulish discoveries
• 2010: Spooky stuff from NASA
• 2010: How your brain handles terror scares
• 2011: Why the 'paranormal' is just normal
• 2012: Why werewolves give us the willies

Stay tuned for more Halloween angles in the days ahead, including reality checks on werewolves (Team Jacob!) and vampires (Team Edward!).

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The results are in, and the latest laureates in the Robot Hall of Fame range from the absolutely lovable WALL-E cartoon character to the positively scary BigDog robo-runner. This year's class, announced during a Tuesday night ceremony at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, also includes the pint-sized, soccer-playing NAO humanoid robot and the PackBot bomb-disposal robot.

The Robot Hall of Fame was created in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University to recognize excellence in robotics technology. More than two dozen machines, real and fictional, have been inducted over the past nine years, but the Class of 2012 is the first to be selected by popular vote instead of a panel of judges.

"More than any previous class of inductees, this group of robots selected by popular vote represents contemporary robotics — robots at the cutting edge of technology — rather than older robots of strictly historical importance," Shirley Saldamarco, the Robot Hall of Fame's director and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, said in a news release. "Two of our inductees, NAO and Packbot, are commercially available, and BigDog is still the focus of active research. Even our fictional honoree, WALL-E, is from a movie that's just four years old."

More than 17,000 people from around the world participated in the online vote during August and September, the Hall of fame said. The four laureates were chosen from 12 nominees in the categories of education/consumer, entertainment, industrial/service and research.

Unfortunately, for every winner there are two robots that would probably be saying "it's an honor merely to be nominated." If they could talk, that is. The also-rans include the fictional Johnny 5 from the movie "Short Circuit"; NASA's Robonaut 2 android, which is currently being tested on the International Space Station; and the deep-sea-diving Jason remotely operated vehicle.

Johnny 5, at least, can take solace in the fact that he was the runner-up robot in our People's Choice poll, which brought in more than 3,300 votes. Write-in votes were cast for other fictional fan favorites, such as B9 from "Lost in Space" (DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!); Bender, the alcohol-swigging, politically incorrect robot from the "Futurama" TV series; and the robo-crew from "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

To learn more about the new inductees, check out the videos below — and then click on the Web links for bios on the other machines honored by the Robot Hall of Fame.

2010 honor roll: NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers; Roomba floor-cleaning machine; da Vinci Surgical System; Huey, Dewey and Louie from "Silent Running"; T-800 Terminator from the "Terminator" film series.

2008 honor roll: Lt. Commander Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation"; the Raibert Hopper, a pioneer in robotic locomotion; NavLab 5, an autonomous minivan; Lego Mindstorms educational robotics kits.

2006 honor roll: Aibo robotic dog; SCARA robotic arm; Gort from "The Day the Earth Stood Still"; David from the movie "A.I."; Maria from the movie "Metropolis."

2004 honor roll: Honda's ASIMO android; the animated Japanese "Astroboy" character; C3PO from the "Star Wars" saga; Robby the Robot from "Forbidden Planet"; and Shakey the Robot, a mobile robot that could figure out how to get around a room.

2003 honor roll: Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner rover; GM's Unimate assembly-line robotic arm; R2-D2 from "Star Wars"; HAL 9000 from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Lady Gaga is already a huge name in the music world, but now she's a scientific name as well — thanks to fans at Duke University who named an entire genus of ferns after the gender-bending pop star.

Nineteen species in Central and South America, Mexico, Arizona and Texas belong to the newly designated genus Gaga, the researchers report in a paper published by Systematic Botany. The genus is a grouping of closely related species that was split off from an earlier named genus known as Cheilanthes on the basis of subtle differences (for example, the number of spores per sporangeum) as well as DNA analysis.

The new genus' 19 species include two new ones: Gaga germanotta was found in Costa Rica and has a species name that pays tribute to the family of the artist, whose birth name was Stefani Germanotta. The species name for Gaga monstraparva, a newfound type of Mexican fern, honors Gaga's fans. ("Monstra parva" is Latin for "Little Monster," Gaga's term of endearment for her followers.)

It's clear from Duke's news release that Gaga's Little Monsters include the Duke researchers who proposed the new genus name.

"We wanted to name this genus for Lady Gaga because of her fervent defense of equality and individual expression," said biologist Kathleen Pryer, director of the Duke Herbarium. "And as we started to consider it, the ferns themselves gave us more reasons why it was a good choice."

Duke pointed out that the ferns go through a stage in which they have somewhat fluid definitions of gender. During their bisexual reproductive stage, the ferns' gametophyte takes on the appearance of a blue-green Gaga costume. Even the DNA analysis turned up a Gaga angle: One of the genus' distinguishing strings of base pairs reads GAGA (guanine-alanine-guanine-alanine).

Duke University

One of the costumes Lady Gaga wears for her performances (left) reminded researchers of the color and shape of a gametophyte from the species in the genus Gaga (right).

But the main motivation for the naming is to pay tribute to a superstar who's been an inspiration.

"We often listen to her music while we do our research," Pryer said. "We think that her second album, 'Born This Way, is enormously empowering, especially for disenfranchised people and communities like LGBT, ethnic groups, women — and scientists who study odd ferns."

Lady Gaga is a "remarkable, unexpected, perfect" choice for the scientific tribute, said Duke faculty member Cathy N. Davidson, whose was involved in a MacArthur Foundation initiative that helped the pop star create a national anti-bullying project called the Born This Way Foundation.

"Encouraging her fans and kids everywhere to be brave, bold, unique, creative and smart is what Lady Gaga is about," Davidson said in Duke's news release. "It's rare that a celebrity so young gives back so much to society."

There may be future opportunities out there for performers who count botanists among their fans. Pryer, who is president of the American Fern Society as well as the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, points out that genetic analysis may well reorganize the family tree of ferns over the long term — leading to more scientific categories that will need new names.

Update for 6:20 p.m. ET: In a follow-up phone call, Pryer told me she was inspired to go for a genus named Gaga after seeing the performer's blue-green getup during the broadcast of the 2010 Grammy Awards.

"When she emerged in what I saw as a fern gametophyte, I just felt that she was speaking to us," Pryer said.

She and her colleagues had been focusing on ferns for five years or so, and detailed studies of the plants' characteristics as well as DNA readings were leading them to the conclusion that many of the ferns that had been classified as belonging to the genus Cheilanthes really belonged in a separate category. "This is going to come as a shock to some botanists that they can't be called Cheilanthes anymore," she said.

Lady Gaga's appearance, basically in a fern costume, was the key moment for Pryer. "That was the initial 'Oh, my gosh, it would be wonderful if we could name a genus after her,'" the biologist said. When the research article was submitted to Systematic Botany for review, she and her colleagues sought Gaga's permission to use her name.

"Within 24 hours, her manager sent us an email and said 'Great,' with a smiley face," Pryer said.

She noted that U.S. taxpayers, including fans of Lady Gaga, help fund her lab's research through the National Science Foundation. "A lot of 'Little Monsters' are out there supporting the work in this field," Pryer said. Maybe knowing there's a scientific classification out there with Gaga's name on it will inspire the littlest Monsters to pursue careers in science. But in any case, the name will stand as an enduring tribute to a person who's done so much to promote basic human kindness through her music and the Born This Way Foundation, Pryer said.

"It's a way for us to give a gift," she said. "A forever gift."

More celebrity species:

• Parasite named after reggae star Bob Marley
• 'Bootylicious' fly named after Beyonce
• 'Venus Rat-Trap' named after TV naturalist
• 'The Hoff' loves his celebrity crabs
• What's in a scientific name? (Scroll down)

In addition to Pryer, the authors of "Gaga: A New Fern Genus Segregated from Cheilanthes (Pteridaceae)" include Fay-Wei Li and Michael D. Windham. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

These are the first, focused high-energy X-ray views of the area surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. The three images on the right side show Sagittarius A* before, during and after an X-ray flare that was spotted in July.

For years, astronomers have known about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, but these pictures from NASA's NuSTAR telescope show a rare view of the usually sleeping giant gobbling down a cosmic snack.

"We got lucky to have captured an outburst from the black hole during our observing campaign," Caltech's Fiona Harrison, the $165 million mission's principal investigator, said today in a NASA news release. "These data will help us better understand the gentle giant at the heart of our galaxy and why it sometimes flares up for a few hours and then returns to slumber."

NuSTAR, also known as the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, is an X-ray observatory that was launched in June to study high-energy phenomena such as the tumult that takes place around black holes. Sagittarius A*, which is 4 million times as massive as our sun, is one of the prime targets for observation.

Supermassive black holes like Sagittarius A* commonly form at the center of big galaxies: In fact, they may be an essential piece of the galaxy formation puzzle, and some of them can get pretty violent. Our galaxy's black hole is uncommonly quiet, however, and that's probably a good thing. Only occasionally does matter from the surrounding area fall into its grip. As that matter is sucked into the singularity, it heats up and emits a blast of radiation.

NuSTAR happened to be in the right place at the right time to observe Sagittarius A* for two days in July, along with other observatories. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was watching for lower-energy X-rays, while the Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea was taking infrared images.

During the observations, a bright X-ray flash flared up. The emissions were given off by matter that was heated up to about 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 mllion degrees Celsius), NASA said. The high-energy readings are being compared with the images in other wavelengths to deepen astronomers' understanding of how black holes gobble up matter and grow.

"Astronomers have long speculated that the black hole's snacking should produce copious hard X-rays, but NuSTAR is the first telescope with sufficient sensitivity to actually detect them," Columbia University's Chuck Hailey, a member of the mission science team, said in today's statement.

Get ready for a gluttonous orgy
NuSTAR and other black-hole watchers are getting set to watch Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short, go into full gobble mode next year: A huge cloud of dust and gas known as G2 is approaching the black hole, and when it gets close enough, gravitational forces will start pulling material in and heating it up. If July's event was a snack, G2's close encounter will be a gluttonous orgy.

Just this week, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California released a supercomputer simulation showing how the cloud will be disrupted as it passes by Sgr A*. That simulation suggests that the close encounter will last several months, and that G2 will be totally gone in less than a decade.

Fragile et al. via College of Charleston / LLNL

This three-dimensional volume visualization spans the period 2010 to 2020, showing the cloud of dust and gas known as G2 as it approaches the Sgr A* black hole near the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

"It will just sort of break up into some sort of incoherent structure," Peter Anninos, a computational physicist at Livermore Lab, said in a news release. "Much of it will join the rest of the hot accretion disk around the black hole, or just fall and get captured by the black hole. It will lose a lot of energy, but not all of it. It will become so diffuse that it's unlikely that any remnant of the gas will continue on its orbital track."

Check out this Web page for QuickTime animations showing what scientists think will happen to the cloud, and stay tuned for updates on the dietary preferences of our galaxy's not-always-sleeping giant.

More about black holes:

• Rare star explosion reveals hidden black hole
• Speedy star swoops close to black hole
• Scientists measure a black hole's mouth
• NASA telescope discovers black hole bonanza
• Countdown to our galaxy's black hole show
• Scientists closing in on Milky Way's black hole
• Astronomers set up virtual telescope for black holes
• Video: Researchers see black hole devour star
• Cosmic Log archive on black holes

The G2 computer simulation is the subject of a paper due for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, titled "3D Moving-Mesh Simulations of Galactic Center Cloud G2." In addition to Anninos, the authors include P. Chris Fragile and Julia Wilson of the College of Charleston, as well as Stephen D. Murray of Livermore Lab.

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

Slideshow: Nikon Small World 2012

Geir Drange

Get an up-close view of an ant carrying its baby, plus other top-20 winners in the 2012 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition.

Launch slideshow

Small wonders can be icky as well as clicky, as this year's top images in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition demonstrate. First-ever picture of the blood-brain barrier forming in a live animal? Got it. Ultra-close-ups of a desert rose and a baby garlic flower? Got 'em. Creepy pictures of bat embryos and eight-eyed spiders? Got those, too.

Ninety-nine winners were chosen out of hundreds of photographers from around the world who participated in the Small World contest, which has been presented by Nikon since 1975 to recognize excellence in photomicrography. We're featuring the top 20 images in our slideshow.

Top honors go to Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., who captured what's thought to be an unprecedented picture of the blood-brain barrier in a live zebrafish embryo.

The barrier is a structure of cells that let nutrients and other necessities move between blood vessels and the central nervous system, while keeping bacteria and other baddies out of the brain's territory.

"We used fluorescent proteins to look at brain endothelial cells and watched the blood-brain barrier develop in real time," Peters and Taylor said, in a statement explaining the genesis of their winning image. "We took a three-dimensional snapshot under a confocal microscope. Then we stacked the images and compressed them into one — pseudo-coloring them in rainbow to illustrate depth."

The result is a matrix that appears to shine in the darkness like the craziest neon sculpture you've ever seen. Other winning pictures present views of a ladybug's leg, a fruit fly's gut or a bone cancer cell in similarly glowing colors.

And then there are the curiously creepy pictures: a series of three bat embryos, showing how the critters' flesh-colored wings grow longer during gestation ... an ant gripping one of its larvae in its jaws ... newborn lynx spiderlings that turn their eight eyes toward the microscope's lens.

In some cases, the photomicrographs were created in the course of a research project — but in other cases, the pictures are primarily meant to convey the wonder of small worlds. For example, photographer Charles Krebs was led to create his 17th-place image when he was stung by nettles. "After the numbness in my fingertips subsided, I carefully collected some, and took a look at the underside of a leaf," he wrote on Photomacrography.net. His 100x image shows a nettle's stinging hair, or trichome, filled with venom.

Eric Flem, communications manager for Nikon Instruments, said it was a privilege to showcase some of the world's best photomicrography. "We are proud that this competition is able to demonstrate the true power of scientific imaging and its relevance to the scientific communities as well as the general public," he said in today's news release. A total of $6,000 worth of Nikon products and equipment will go to the three top prize winnres.

Click through the top-20 slideshow, then check out the Nikon Small World website for scores of additional images of distinction. You can see the contest's top images offline as well, in the form of Nikon's full-color calendar and a touring museum exhibition. And you'll find a huge stockpile of small wonders in the slideshows listed below:

• Nikon Small World in Motion for 2012
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2011
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2010
• The world within a drop of water
• Greatest hits from Nikon Small World
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2011
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2010
• Olympus BioScapes' top 10 for 2009
• Visualizing science in 2012
• Visualizing science in 2011
• Visualizing science in 2010
• Visualizing science in 2009

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor, and was on the judging panel for the 2011 Nikon Small World Competition. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin's pusher escape system rockets the company's prototype crew capsule away from the launch pad, demonstrating a key safety system for both suborbital and orbital flights. Click on the picture to go to the Blue Origin website for a video of the test flight.

Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket venture notched a blazing success last week when it tested a NASA-backed launch pad escape system for its crew capsule.

The Oct. 19 demonstration flight at Blue Origin's West Texas spaceport marked the final milestone for NASA's $22 million agreement with Blue Origin, which was aimed at promoting the development of next-generation spaceships capable of resupplying the International Space Station. Blue Origin, which is based in Kent, Wash., decided not to compete for the next phase of NASA's orbital program — but in a news release issued today, Bezos said his company would make use of the "pusher" pad escape system in its suborbital spaceship.

"The first test of our suborbital Crew Capsule is a big step on the way to safe, affordable space travel," he said. "This wouldn’t have been possible without NASA’s help, and the Blue Origin team worked hard and smart to design this system, build it, and pull off this test. Lots of smiles around here today. Gradatim Ferociter!"

That last phrase is Blue Origin's motto, which is Latin for "Step by Step, Courageously."

The latest step
The pad-escape test was the latest step in Bezos' decade-long effort to create a launch system suitable for space tourists as well as researchers and, eventually, orbit-bound astronauts. The 48-year-old Amazon.com founder, whose net worth is estimated at more than $23 billion, created Blue Origin in 2000 to follow through on his childhood dream of space travel. 

"Blue Origin's goal is to work steadily toward developing human spaceflight capabilities," Brett Alexander, the company's director of business development and strategy, told me today. "Our goal is to lower the cost and increase the safety of human spaceflight to enable more people to fly."

Blue Origin

Blue Origin's New Shepard crew capsule rose to a height of 2,307 feet before deploying its parachutes for a safe descent.

Blue Origin

The gumdrop-shaped crew capsule set down 1,630 feet from the launch pad. This closeup view focuses on Blue Origin's logo and motto: "Gradatim Ferociter."

Alexander said last week's pad-escape test in Texas and this month's successful test firing of Blue Origin's BE-3 liquid-hydrogen rocket engine at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi ranked among the biggest steps taken to date toward the company's goal. "This is a very big deal. ... Propulsion and crew escape are two of the fundamental building blocks of our system," Alexander said. "Those are the cornerstones, if you will."

Blue Origin is working toward the development of a New Shepard suborbital launch system with a propulsion module that can launch the crew capsule to an altitude beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) boundary of outer space. From that height, passengers can get a few minutes of weightlessness amid a view of the black sky above a curving Earth, while researchers can conduct useful experiments on the effects of the space environment.

Blue Origin hasn't laid out a specific schedule for commercial operations — nor has the company said anything about its pricing plan for spaceflights. But in order to be financially viable, the venture would probably have to be competitive with other suborbital spaceship companies, such as Space Adventures, Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Those companies are offering flights in the range of $95,000 to $200,000 per seat.

Alexander said "the key to both safety and affordability is reusability of the launch vehicle and a lot of practice — a high flight rate."

End-to-end tryout
The pad-escape test served as an end-to-end tryout for Blue Origin's crew capsule: A center-mounted solid-rocket engine from Aerojet lofted the capsule to a height of 2,307 feet (703 meters) under active thrust vector control. Then the capsule descended by parachute to a soft landing 1,630 feet (496 meters) downrange, at the company's test facility on ranchland owned by Bezos, near Van Horn, Texas.

Blue Origin showed the blastoff and landing in a video lasting a minute and 45 seconds.

Ed Mango, the manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said in a space agency statement that "it was awesome to see a spacecraft NASA played a role in developing take flight."

"The progress Blue Origin has made on its suborbital and orbital capabilities really is encouraging for the overall future of human spaceflight," Mango said. 

In an actual flight scenario, the escape system would be lit up only if Blue Origin's propulsion module experienced a problem serious enough to abort the flight. The passengers inside the crew capsule would be rocketed away to safety. If the flight proceeded normally, the crew capsule would separate from the propulsion module, coast to the edge of space, re-enter the atmosphere and descend to a parachute landing. The propulsion module, meanwhile, would autonomously perform its own rocket-powered vertical landing.

In August 2011, a prototype propulsion module went supersonic and rose to an altitude of 45,000 feet during a test flight — but when the vehicle became unstable, the flight had to be aborted and the rocket ship crashed to its doom. That's the kind of scenario that would bring the pad-escape system into play.

Alexander said Blue Origin was still working on the next version of the propulsion module. The old version used five kerosene-fueled engines, but the next-generation propulsion module will use a single hydrogen-fueled engine, he said. "It'll look a little different, but it's essentially the same size," he said.

In the past, Blue Origin has been somewhat reticent to talk about its activities  but in light of the past month's successes, Alexander seemed to emphasize the sentiment behind the company's motto: step by step, courageously.

"Our overall development path certainly doesn't stop with suborbital," he said.

More about commercial spaceflight:

• Blue Origin's blue-sky ambitions
• NASA, FAA work out rules for spaceships
• Next steps in the new space race
• Cosmic Log archive on the commercial space race

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

U.S. Navy

The white whale known as NOC used its nasal passages to make humanlike sounds.

The noise sounds like the kind of "dum-diddy-dah" tune folks might sing to themselves while they're strolling along the beach — but it's actually the voice of a white beluga whale, mimicking human conversation by blurping air through its blowhole. The strange case of the whale named NOC marks the first time that scientists could study a marine mammal in the very act of "talking" like a human, using a most unhuman method.

"I think he was looking for feedback," Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, told me. "These animals make a lot of sound, and they like feedback."

For years, NOC was part of the U.S. Navy's Marine Mammal Program in San Diego, which was aimed at studying whether whales, dolphins, seals and other marine mammals could do underwater reconnaissance or perhaps even disable mines. NOC was captured in 1977 in Canada's Hudson Bay and brought down to California to work with researchers and divers. (He was the smallest of the pack, and Ridgway says that led to the nickname "no-see-um," or NO-C for short.)

Seven years later, the researchers noticed that NOC spontaneously started making unusual sounds — "as if two people were conversing in the distance just out of range for our understanding," they reported in the journal Current Biology. One time, a diver came to the surface outside NOC's enclosure and asked his colleagues, "Who told me to get out?" They soon concluded it was the whale, which must have been saying "Out, out, out."

That led Ridgway and other researchers to make a series of recordings of NOC's sounds, at the surface and underwater. They found that the pitch and the amplitude rhythm was similar to human speech. "Whale voice prints were similar to human voice and unlike the whale's usual sounds," Ridgway said in a news release. "The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

Although this was way out of the norm for whales, it's not unheard of: Back in the 1940s, biologists reported that whale calls could occasionally sound like the voices of children shouting in the distance. In the 1970s, there was a beluga whale at the Vancouver Aquarium that could reportedly make sounds like garbled Russian or Chinese, and even say his name ("Lugosi"). However, NOC afforded the first opportunity to study scientifically how a whale could make such sounds.

The San Diego researchers hooked up pressure sensors inside and just above NOC's nasal cavity. The readings suggested that the whale varied the air pressure inside the nasal tract, expelling air through vibrating phonic lips to make the kinds of sounds that come from a human's vocal cords. In short, the whale had figured out an alien way to talk like a human.

"We do not claim that our whale was a good mimic compared to such well-known mimics as parrots or mynah birds," the researchers write. "However, the sonic behavior we observed is an example of vocal learning by the white whale. It seems likely that NOC's close association with humans played a role in how often he employed his human voice, as well as in its quality."

About four years after NOC started talking like a human, he stopped. The whale continued to vocalize, but those sounds were just the typical whistles, squawks, rasps, yelps and barks. In 1999, NOC died. "We never got his best speech imitation" on tape, Ridgway said — but the existing recordings were more than enough to set the researcher thinking about the potential.

"Whether or not the whale knows what he's saying, other than mimicking what he heard, probably should be explored further," Ridgway told me. "Certainly I think there's a lot we could learn about their sound production. What we'd like, primarily, is for them to tell us how they interact with their ocean environment. How deep can you dive? How long can you stay underwater? What frequencies can you hear? Can you hear the same sounds at the surface and at depth? Describe what you observe with your sonar."

Japanese researchers are already working on a dolphin speech translator. Maybe a talking whale isn't that far behind. But what would the dolphins and the whales tell us? "Thanks for all the fish"? Or "thanks for nothing, you damn dirty humans"?

More about animal intelligence:

• Audio: Listen to the whale that talked like a human
• Dolphins appear to do nonlinear mathematics
• Studies focus on what animals are thinking
• There's more than one path to intelligence
• Gallery: The world's 10 smartest species
• Flash interactive: All about whales

In addition to Ridgway, the authors of "Spontaneous Human Speech Mimicry by a Cetacean" include Donald Carder, Michelle Jeffries and Mark Todd.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

This mosaic of imagery from Curiosity's navigation camera system shows a scoop on the end of the rover's robotic arm taking a sample of Martian soil on Sol 66 (Oct. 12).

NASA's Curiosity rover is rooting around what scientists call the Martian "Promised Land" — a place where three geological formations come together to provide a deliciously complex picture of Mars' ancient past.

Although the ultimate destination for Curiosity's $2.5 billion, two-year mission is a 3-mile-high mountain called Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, the rover is going to be spending the next few weeks nosing around its current site, which is called Glenelg. That name comes from a geological formation in Canada's Northwest Territories, but it's also a fitting name because it's spelled the same forward and backward. Similarly, Curiosity will be going backward and forward, retracing its steps for a while when it's time to head for the mountain.

Considering that Curiosity will be in the Promised Land for several weeks, we might as well get to know the place. These pictures from Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo show you the rover's surroundings. Kremer is a New Jersey-based journalist, research chemist and photographer; Di Lorenzo is a physicist who's a high school educator and photographer in Italy.

Both men are part of an active "amateur" community that makes use of the imagery provided by Curiosity and other Mars probes, such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Opportunity rover. "Amateur" is in quotes, because the work done by amateur image-processing gurus is such a great complement to the professional work from the Mars mission teams.

Many of these gurus hang out online at UnmannedSpaceflight.com. Some also maintain their own Mars-related websites, such as Martian Vistas, the Gale Gazette and the Road to Endeavour. If you haven't checked out these sites yet ... well, what are you waiting for? And if you have other recommendations for interplanetary imagery, such as the Mars Science Laboratory mission's home page or the Planetary Society's blog network, feel free to pass them along as a comment below.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

A series of images captured by Curiosity's Mastcam system shows the foreground terrain on Sol 50 (Sept. 26), with eroded hills in the background. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

This panorama shows Curiosity's view of Glenelg on Sol 64 (Oct. 10), with hills in the far distance. The mosaic was assembled from 75 images acquired by the Mastcam 100 camera. Click on the picture to see a larger image.

Where in the Cosmos
I used a section of one of the Kremer/Di Lorenzo panoramas as today's "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle picture on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and it took only a matter of seconds for Bart Salatka (and many others) to name Glenelg as the place where the picture was taken. To reward his quick wits and fast fingers, I'm sending Salatka a pair of 3-D glasses that are being provided courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. Two of the close runners-up, Josh Sandler and Manny Acevedo, are eligible to receive 3-D glasses as well. Those cardboard specs will come in handy for seeing 3-D pictures from Curiosity's mission, such as this fresh view of the Rocknest site at Glenelg.

Congratulations to the other recent winners of "Where in the Cosmos" honors: Kevin Seaford, Lee Robbins and Tom Phillips for recognizing a satellite image of the aurora borealis; and Jeff Henager and Jenn Mason for identifying dust streaks on Mars. To get in on the action, click the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page. But hang tight: Due to travel plans, the next "Where in the Cosmos" contest won't take place until December. More about that later...

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

(c) Paul Nicklen / National Geographic

Preparing to launch from the sea to Antarctic sea ice, an Emperor penguin reaches maximum speed.

You thought "The March of the Penguins" was cool? Check out the launch of the penguins — an aerodynamic phenomenon that helps these flightless birds take flight.

Emperor penguins can't fly just by flapping their wings, but they can propel themselves fast enough through Antarctic waters to turn themselves into winged rockets. They do it by releasing tiny bubbles of air from their feathers: The air acts as a lubricant, reducing drag as they swim up from the depths like tuxedoed torpedoes. In fact, engineers have used air bubbles in similar ways to speed the movement of torpedoes through the water.

Who knew that penguins have been doing the same sort of thing for eons? University College Cork's John Davenport knew: He and his colleagues studied video footage from the BBC's "Blue Planet" TV series to develop a biochemical model for the penguins' torpedo trick. They were amazed to find that the birds' speed was due to the "coat of air bubbles" streaming from their feathers.

National Geographic

The penguin images are from the November edition of National Geographic magazine. The electronic versions of the report include an exclusive video and interactive graphic that show penguins rocketing onto the ice.

Before the penguins dive into the water, they ruffle their plumage to trap air within the feathers' structure. A deep dive compresses the air into a smaller volume. When the penguins go into their launch, the decompressing air is released through pores in the feathers — creating a layer of tiny, lubricating bubbles.

The trick is described for scientists in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, and for the rest of us in November's issue of National Geographic magazine. The heart of the magazine story is Paul Nicklen's pictures, which have just won him top honors in the Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

"We wanted to change people's perception of penguins as ungainly animals," said Nicklen, who has followed penguins and other polar species for years, and admits he's always had an obsession with Antarctica. "The biologist in me was trying to learn about the science."

And he did learn more about the biological background for the bubble trick: Penguins are preyed upon by leopard seals, which lie in wait beneath the ice to ambush the birds during their ascent from the depths. "The penguins know they're there, and as they're coming up ... it's like someone turns on a tap, and there are millions of microbubbles pouring over their bodies."

The supercharged speed helps the penguins elude their predators and shoot up to safety on the ice, Nicklen said. The masses of bubbles have another defensive effect: They confuse the seals as they try to swim in for the attack. Nicklen himself found out how that feels. When he got too close to the penguins underwater, they released a bubbly barrage.

"It was like I was floating through space, in a sea of bubbles," he said.

The online version of National Geographic's penguin spread will feature a video and interactive graphic showing in detail how the penguins rocket out of the water and onto the ice. Next week, the photographer will unveil an app called "Paul Nicklen: Pole to Pole," with more images. In the meantime, feast your eyes on these images from National Geographic, plus two bonus videos:

(c) Paul Nicklen / National Geographic

An airborne penguin shows why it has a need for speed: to get out of the water, it may have to clear several feet of ice. A fast exit also helps it elude leopard seals, which often lurk at the ice edge.

(c) Paul Nicklen / National Geographic

Life is safer at the colony, where predators are few and company is close.

(c) Paul Nicklen / National Geographic

The danger of ambush by seals is greatest when entering the water, so penguins may linger near an ice hole for hours, waiting for the first bird to dive.

(c) Paul Nicklen / National Geographic

"These penguins have probably never seen a human in the water," says photographer Paul Nicklen, "but it took them only seconds to realize that I posed no danger. They relaxed and allowed me to share their hole in the sea ice." This photo earned Nicklen the Environment Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

More about penguins:

• Penguins' graphic sexual acts shocked researcher
• Not-so-happy feet: You're stressing out the penguins
• Satellite view doubles Emperor penguin count
• Chinstrap penguin colony declines as ice and food shrink

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered via email every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Ed Stockard

Atmospheric optics turn sunlight into a celestial display as seen from Summit Station in Greenland on Oct. 14. Ed Stockard, one of the workers at the federally funded research station, says the display includes a halo, sun dogs, an upper tangent arc and more. "My eyelashes froze together, and my cheeks were getting nipped pretty good," Stockard writes.

Is this heaven? No, it's Greenland — lit up by a dazzling display of refracted sunlight.

These pictures are from Ed Stockard, who's part of the team at Summit Station on the peak of the Greenland ice cap. The research facility, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, serves as an observation post for the complex interactions between the atmosphere and one of the world's biggest reservoirs of ice.

The station is also an observation post for sky phenomena ranging from the northern lights to sun halos. And judging by his Flickr photo gallery, Stockard is getting an eyeful this season.

But there's more than meets the eye: Over at the Atmospheric Optics website, Les Cowley points out 11 separate optical phenomena that are on display. The combination of halos, arcs, sun dogs and a sun pillar has earned Stockard's Arctic scene a place as the Optics Picture of the Day.

You don't have to live in the Arctic to see the sun's weird effects. In midnorthern latitudes, this time of year brings misty days, and even some days when ice crystals hang in the air. That's prime time for halos, sun bows and moon bows, fog bows and more. Cowley's website guides you through all the magic that the air can provide — and for still more examples of that magic at work, click on the links below.

Ed Stockard

Buildings at Greenland's Summit Station are silhouetted by the sun and atmospheric effects.

Ed Stockard / Les Cowley / AtOptics.co.uk

A chart from the Atmospheric Optics website catalogs 11 optical effects that can be seen in Ed Stockard's fisheye-camera view of the sun at Summit Station.

More about atmospheric optics:

• Whoa! It's a quadruple rainbow!
• Optical illusions and light shows
• 'Tis the season of sky oddities
• 'Two suns' spotted in China

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered by email every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

Three bite marks left in the Martian ground by the scoop on the Curiosity rover's robotic arm are visible in this image taken by the rover's right navigation camera during the mission's 69th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 15).

NASA's Curiosity rover is analyzing its first Martian soil sample, a load of dirt that may well include some of the "bright shiny objects" noticed by Curiosity's cameras.

Scientists have determined that the mysterious bright flecks of material are native to Mars, and may represent a different kind of mineral. That's one big reason why Curiosity's science team members are so anxious to get back the first detailed mineralogical analysis of Martian soil.

"The most important thing about our mobile laboratory is that it eats dirt," Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission, told reporters today. "That's what we live on."

The bright bits in the sandy soil measure about a millimeter wide, as big as a medium-sized grain of sand. In close-up pictures taken by Curiosity's MAHLI imager, those bits were so unlike the typical reddish grains that scientists held up on scooping dirt into the rover's CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy) analyzer until they could figure out what the schmutz was. (Grotzinger said that the science team adopted the Yiddish word for dirt when referring to anomalous bits of bright material on the Martian surface.) 

Last week, Curiosity's cameras spotted a different kind of schmutz that the scientists concluded was plastic debris from the rover itself. This time around, scientists were "super-paranoid" about the potential for putting a contaminated sample into the highly sensitive CheMin lab, Grotzinger said. That's why they took their time deciding whether the latest bright flecks were artificial or natural.

By Monday, the scientists decided they were natural — which raised a new question: What's behind the brightness?

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This image shows part of the small pit or bite created when NASA's Curiosity rover collected its second scoop of Martian soil at a sandy patch called "Rocknest." The bright particle near the center of this image, and similar ones elsewhere in the pit, prompted concern because a small, light-toned shred of debris from the spacecraft had been observed previously nearby. However, the mission's science team assessed the bright particles in this scooped pit to be native Martian material rather than spacecraft debris. This image was taken by Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI camera, during the 69th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Oct. 15).

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

The robotic arm on NASA's Curiosity rover Curiosity delivered a sample of Martian soil to the rover's observation tray for the first time during the mission's 70th Martian day, or sol (Oct. 16). This image taken later that same sol by the rover's left Mast Camera shows the sample on the tray. The tray is 3 inches (7.8 centimeters) in diameter. The sample came from the third scoopful of material collected at Rocknest.

Grotzinger said there were two hypotheses on the table. The first was that the mineral grains were cleaved during their formation to create flat, shiny surfaces that reflect sunlight better than typical Martian sand. The second was that the bright grains really are a different kind of mineral, mixed in with the garden-variety dirt.

The X-ray analysis from the CheMin lab, coupled with additional readings from Curiosity's laser-blasting ChemCam analyzer, should tell the tale, Grotzinger said. "We're kind of hoping that ChemCam can be useful to analyze these particles on a grain-by-grain basis," he said.

One scoopful of dirt, collected by an attachment on the rover's robotic arm, had been used earlier to clean out the internal surfaces of Curiosity's soil-sampling system. A second scoopful was dumped out without being used because of the contamination concerns. The third scoopful was shaken through the system this week, and some of that dirt was fed into CheMin's inlet funnel on Wednesday.

The mineralogical analysis is a big part of Curiosity's two-year mission to determine whether ancient Mars had the chemical wherewithal to be potentially habitable. Grotzinger said that Martian soil could well have served as a home for subsurface life billions of years ago, when the planet was warmer and wetter.

"Now, once and for all, we hope to address what's in the soil of Mars, mineralogically," he said.

Curiosity's other onboard lab — known as Surface Analysis on Mars, or SAM for short — was expected to get its first sample next week. Later on, the rover will use its drill for the first time on Martian rock. Grotzinger suggested that Curiosity would spend the next few weeks investigating the site where it is now: a place known as Glenelg, where three geologically distinct formations come together.

"We consider ourselves to be in the promised land," he said.

By the end of the year, Curiosity is expected to turn back from Glenelg and make its way toward a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain sitting in the middle of Gale Crater, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. The six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover landed on Mars on Aug. 5. Today is the mission's 72nd Martian day, or sol — and although Curiosity has picked up a few dings on its wheels, project manager Richard Cook said the rover "continues to be in great health."

The only recent glitch involved NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which temporarily went into safe mode. That meant the Curiosity team had to turn instead to NASA's Mars Odyssey probe as a backup communication relay for data from the surface. Fortunately, MRO's controllers resolved the safe-mode issue, and "yesterday they went back to full operations," Cook said.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

Trace the Curiosity rover's journey to Mars, and see the first pictures that the six-wheeled robot has sent back from the Red Planet.

Launch slideshow

More about the Curiosity mission:

• Rover digs up shiny particles on Mars
• Rock turns out to be a true curiosity
• Weird Martian object traced to rover
• Cosmic Log archive for Curiosity mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

L. Calcada / N. Risinger / ESO

An artist's conception shows the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, a member of the triple-star system that's closest to Earth. Alpha Centauri B is the most brilliant object in the sky, with Alpha Centauri A at lower left and our own sun visible as a bright speck at upper right.

Chances are that no one alive today will ever travel to Alpha Centauri B b, the boiling-hot, Earth-scale planet detected a mere 4.37 light-years away, but that doesn't mean we have to put off planning for the trip. Even though this particular planet isn't habitable, there might well be more than one reason to take a close look at the star system.

"If you have one planet that's stable there, there's a good chance that there are other planets, too. That would be really exciting, to have it so close, even though it's really far away," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Washington State University who's a co-author of the e-book "How to Develop the Solar System and Beyond." 

So how can it be done?

As the late science-fiction novelist Douglas Adams once said, space is vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big. That definitely applies to the distance between the sun and its closest stellar neighbors in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. The fastest spaceship ever launched, NASA's New Horizons probe, will require nine years to get to the dwarf planet Pluto — and Alpha Centauri is more than 6,500 times farther away.

The twin Voyager spacecraft are just now approaching the edge of our own solar system, 35 years after they were launched, but at their current velocity it would take them 70,000 years or so to go as far out as Alpha Centauri.

The only hope is that next-generation propulsion technologies could raise the top speed and reduce the travel time to the scale of a civilization's lifetime, if not an individual's lifetime. And that's not easy. "The amount of energy that's needed is usually the part that catches people by surprise," said Marc Millis, founder of the Tau Zero Foundation and a visiting scholar at the Ohio Aerospace Institute.

Forget about warp drive: For now, let's talk about physics we actually understand. Because of the way propulsive energy scales in relation to distance, you'd need an engine a million times more powerful than Voyager's to bring the travel time to Alpha Centauri down to a human time scale, Millis said. That's such a tall order that even Kim Stanley Robinson, who writes about routine interplanetary travel in his latest novel, "2312," has pooh-poohed the whole idea of interstellar flight.

"'Beyond the solar system' is too far away," Robinson told Space.com in May. "It's a joke and a waste of time to think about starships or inhabiting the galaxy. It's a systemic lie that science fiction tells the world that the galaxy is within our reach."

Lasers or nukes?
Schulze-Makuch, however, hasn't given up hope. He notes that interstellar propulsion was one of the big themes at the Defense Advanced Research Project's 100 Year Starship Symposium. "It was pretty clear that we can get up to 10 percent of light velocity, using solar sails. You'd have to wait quite a while, but you're constantly accelerating," he said.

Millis agreed that light-sail technology was one of the most widely suggested avenues for interstellar flight. Such a space-sailing spaceship would be propelled by the pressure of photons — perhaps from the sun, but more likely from a super-powerful laser aimed at the sail from a station on Earth. Another avenue might be to use nuclear fission or plasma drives to blast the starship outward at an accelerating pace.

Assuming that it's possible to get to 10 percent of light speed, Millis said the first traveler to Alpha Centauri would almost certainly be a camera-equipped robotic probe. "At our level of prowess, including the things we think we can do but haven't really tried, a probe is about the only thing you can send," he said. The electronics would have to be robust enough to survive somewhere between 45 and 200 years of traveling — which Millis thinks is within the bounds of believability.

When will humans go?
The first intelligent entities to travel from Earth to other stars will probably be artificial androids built to last for centuries. If it ever gets to the point that humans journey to other stars, they would almost certainly have to live for generations within a huge, self-sustaining habitat.

One of the most popular options is to hollow out an asteroid, place an artificial ecosystem inside it, give it enough of a spin to provide artificial gravity, and somehow send it speeding on its way. Such a concept has been around since the 1960s, and in the novel "2312," Robinson fills the skies with such craft to carry his characters from destinations ranging from Mercury to Pluto and beyond.

It could take 200 years or more to send out the first true starships — but along the way, there will be plenty of discoveries like this week's detection of Alpha Centauri B b to push us along.

"The roadmap that we have takes a grand perspective, with the objective to scout out our own solar system first, put a permanent human presence on Mars, look at asteroids, and really work first on our own solar system before we take the next step to an extrasolar planet," Schulze-Makuch said.

Will we humans ever get the chance to follow through on that roadmap? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about planet discoveries:

• In a statement issued today, NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, praised the researchers at the European Southern Observatory who made the Alpha Centauri discovery . "For astronomers, the search for exoplanets helps us understand our place in the universe and determine whether Earth is unique in supporting life or if it is just one member of a large community of habitable worlds," Grunsfeld said. He noted that NASA's Kepler, Hubble and Spitzer missions have contributed to the search for planets beyond our own solar system, and that the James Webb Space Telescope would study exoplanets as well. "NASA is also studying two medium-class exoplanet missions in our Explorer program, and in the spring of 2013 will select one of them to enter development for flight later in the decade," Grunsfeld said. Those missions are known as FINESSE and TESS.
• The Alpha Centauri discovery has turned the spotlight once again on the Exoplanet app for the iPhone, iPad and iTouch, developed by Danish-born astrophysicist Hanno Rein. The app keeps track of more than 800 extrasolar planets, and sends alerts when new discoveries are announced. Believe it or not, more exoplanets have been added to the list since Tuesday's announcement about Alpha Centauri B b. The new entrants include WASP-72b and two worlds detected by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE. These giant planets range from about a tenth of Jupiter's mass to nearly one and a half times Jupiter's mass.

More about interstellar travel:

• Reality check for starships
• Alpha Centauri has closest exoplanet
• Voyager 1 isn't as far out as we thought
• Biggest challenge for interstellar travel? It's us

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Planetfall: Snapshots from the solar system

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Michael Benson / Kinetikon Pictures

See some of our solar system's greatest sights, as captured in "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions," a large-format book by Michael Benson.

Launch slideshow

Spacecraft engineers may not think of themselves as artists, but in the right hands, the fruit of their labors can be as artistic and as revolutionary as Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical sketches — as evidenced by the stunning views on display in Michael Benson's "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions."

"It's an amazing thing that in the last 50 years, we have expanded the realm that's accessible to us either directly or indirectly as a species," Benson told me. "As a result, we have a new chapter in image-making and photography. In a way, this brings science and art together, as it was in the Renaissance."

"Planetfall" presents more than 120 images of solar system bodies ranging from our own home world to the sun and moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and asteroids and comets — all in a whopping 12-by-15-inch (30-by-38-centimeter) page format. Some of the photos stretch out over double-folds, triple-folds, even quadruple-folds (which translate into roughly 5-foot-wide panoramas).

To create the photos, Benson went back to the raw data from NASA and European Space Agency missions. "It's a point of pride to build most of these images from the ground up," Benson said.

Benson, a writer/filmmaker/photographer, has done this before. His earlier books, "Beyond" (2003) and "Far Out" (2009), presented imagery from planetary probes and deep-space views, respectively. At first, Benson thought he'd just update the "Beyond" book for a new edition. "But then I thought it would be fun to change the format of the pages, and simply look at 21st-century planetary photography — because we really have had a renaissance of these missions in the past decade," he said.

Making planetfall
For the book's title, Benson used a word that capitalizes on the concept of an explorer making landfall. "Planetfall" is defined as the moment when visual contact is made with a celestial body. Following through on that theme, the book is structured as a series of movie-like journeys — beginning with an establishing shot, then moving in for glorious close-ups.

The section on Mars starts out with a long-range view of the Red Planet from ESA's Rosetta probe during its flyby on the way to a comet encounter. "It's one of the very rare pictures where you see a planet with the Milky Way behind it," Benson said. The point of view zooms in to reveal the terrain as seen from orbit, including a marvelous shot of ground fog lying at the bottom of a Martian canyon, as seen by ESA's Mars Express probe (page 100). Then there's that stunning series of panoramas from NASA's Mars rovers, ending with a blue-tinged sunset as seen by the Opportunity rover.

With only a few exceptions, Benson tries to come as close as he can to the view that human eyes would see, which sometimes requires some tricky image processing. For example, a picture of Saturn's geyser-spewing moon, Enceladus, is based on image data from the Cassini orbiter in infrared, green and ultraviolet wavelengths. Benson said he tweaked the data to come up with a red-green-blue combination (page 187).

"I think I got away with it pretty well," he said. "It makes a very worthy color image. ... To my knowledge, it's the first time that a global portrait of Enceladus has been released where you see the geysers in color."

In addition to the book, which is published by Abrams, Michael Benson is working on a "Planetfall" photo exhibition that will be on view at New York's Hasted Kraeutler Gallery starting in December, and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington next year.

How scientists see art
So how does Benson's work sit with planetary scientists? "Obviously everybody's worried about the funding [for future planetary missions]. Anything that can get the word out about these missions is good by them," Benson said.

He's also heartened by an endorsement from Paul Geissler, a planetary scientist at the U.S Geological Survey who has collaborated with Benson in the past. "He has an artist's eye, so he sees things differently than a scientist would," Geissler told The Wall Street Journal last year. "I honestly think that he has done as much to support and further solar-system exploration as many scientists who are working in the field."

Benson said he has just as much respect for the scientists who make his artistry possible.

"We have a fantastic chapter in the history of photography that has been brought to us, almost as a side effect of these missions," he told me. "Their primary reason for happening is scientific research, but we also have this opportunity to see what these places look like. I believe we will inevitably end up expanding as a species. It may take longer than the visionaries of the 20th century thought, but I do believe it will end up happening. This is still the opening chapter: We're seeing the end of the beginning of that move."

Update for 5 p.m. ET Oct. 19: I originally wrote that Benson coined the term "Planetfall," but commenters have rightly pointed out that the term has been around in science fiction for quite a while, meaning the interplanetary equivalent of landfall. In fact, it was picked up as the name of a computer game in the 1980s. Benson tweaks the meaning a bit, using it to define a visual discovery rather than an actual landing. I've revised this item accordingly.

More from the art of science:

• Artists capture the spirit of space
• Hubble Space Telescope goes pop
• Artist dreams up a mock Mars mission
• Making music from weather data
• Scientific art contest taken with grain of salt
• Scientific visions that take the prize
• Slideshow: The art of science

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

(c) Roger Ressmeyer / Corbis

Lasers fire at a fuel pellet inside a nuclear fusion experiment at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Covering the effort to develop fusion as a power source was one of the experiences that led photographer Roger Ressmeyer to move ahead with his "Visions of Tomorrow" film project.

For decades, photographer Roger Ressmeyer has chronicled discoveries the frontiers of science, from nuclear fusion to the edges of the universe, and now he's working to distill all those discoveries into a hopeful film about the future, titled "Visions of Tomorrow."

"This movie will be saying, 'Here's what we can do about humankind's biggest problems. ... The world's future looks a lot brighter than we're led to believe," Ressmeyer says. But in order to get that message onto the big screen, he's going to need a little help — and several million dollars.  That's why he's bringing his project to the Social Innovation Fast Pitch conference in Seattle this week.

Ressmeyer is best-known as a visual storyteller, specializing in the wonders of space and science. It's that reputation that has earned him honors as 2012's PhotoMedia Photography Person of the Year. He has helped chronicle the space effort in magazine layouts and in coffee-table books such as "Orbit," and he has captured images from around the world that make the world's scientific landmarks look like the shrines they deserve to be.

Through the years, Ressmeyer has come to believe that scientific wonders have a spiritual dimension as well. "Visions of Tomorrow" will tell that story, with the help of some of the best minds in science and technology.

"A key spiritual truth is that 'thoughts become things,' as Mike Dooley says," Ressmeyer told me over the weekend. "What we're hoping to do on the spiritual level is to address the collective loss of hope, and create a movie that leaves people walking on air, letting go of fears, and getting behind a better future for the planet."

Visions of Tomorrow

Photographer Roger Ressmeyer is creating "Visions of Tomorrow."

The project sounds a bit like some other science-plus-soul hybrids that have shown up in theaters or on DVD in recent years, ranging from "What the (Bleep) Do We Know" to "I AM" and "The Secret." But Ressmeyer insists that this film will be different.

"There have been many 'new-agey' movies about the fact that humanity is one, and people everywhere are basically good. What makes this movie different is that it will present actual solutions under development by world-renowned scientists, engineers and futurists," he said.

Setting an agenda
So who are these scientists, engineers and futurists? For now, Ressmeyer is being cagey about that question. He's begun to use his network of contacts to recruit the folks that will be featured in the movie, and some filming has been done already. But he's holding back on the details until he assembles a core of executive producers to help shepherd the project — and assembles the financing for the next phase.

He says his vision for "Visions of Tomorrow" aims to touch upon some of the top problems facing humanity, and how science and engineering can turn them around.

"In my years of covering science, I learned how to dig really deep, and how to create images that bring ideas to life," Ressmeyer said. "We'll take the best ideas — the ones most likely to succeed, the ones covering the biggest challenges humanity faces, like resource depletion, climate change and global warming, overpopulation, the effects of war and social distress. In the movie, all of these things will come together in a beautiful, entertaining and inspirational view of what's possible for tomorrow."

Nuclear fusion power seems certain to earn some screen time: Ressmeyer noted that his photo coverage of the fusion frontier was one of the factors that led to the "Visions of Tomorrow" project in the first place.

"We don't expect that every one of these solutions will pan out," he told me, "but we do believe there are enough possibilities out there to produce virtually limitless energy, to address the population issue, climate change, and raise the planet's collective consciousness."

The road ahead
During the Seattle conference on Thursday, Ressmeyer will talk about the project and show a teaser video clip. "It's the perfect place to show that pre-production footage for the first time, and possibly the only time it will ever be shown in public," he said.

If the backing comes together the way Ressmeyer hopes, filming would resume in early 2013, with the film's release set for 2014. Ressmeyer has also established a Visions of Tomorrow Foundation to move ahead with the agenda laid out in the movie, and he and his colleagues plan to use social-media crowdsourcing (and crowdsupporting) to keep hope alive.

Ressmeyer says that reviving hope in the future is the driving force behind "Visions of Tomorrow." During our interview, the 58-year-old photographer recalled the despair that he felt when doctors told him he suffered from juvenile diabetes, back in the days when many people saw that disease as a "virtual death sentence."

"My experience of being told at age 13 that I would be lucky to live 20 years led to a very, very major internal struggle between optimism and pessimism, idealism and cynicism, that in some ways continues to this day," he said. "All my life experiences have led to a vision and realization that hope is the force that drives planetary change — and there's a real shortage of that right now. 'Visions of Tomorrow' is designed to spread hope, to create confidence we can fix things."

Ressmeyer still has to fill in a lot of the blank spots in his vision, but do you think he's on the right track? What issues would you want to see addressed in a vision of tomorrow, and what bright ideas can you contribute? Please feel free to weigh in with your questions and solutions in the comment space below. I have a feeling that Ressmeyer will be watching.

More from Roger Ressmeyer:

• Audio slideshow: Voyage of the Millennium
• Buzz Aldrin plans the next giant leap
• 'Visions of Tomorrow' website

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Florida Fish and Wildife via Flickr

The eyeball that caused a sensation was cut from a swordfish's head, apparently by a fisherman, scientists say.

The giant eyeball from Florida that captured the world's attention came from a swordfish, scientists reported today. They said straight-line slashes on the softball-sized orb suggest that it was freshly cut out of the fish's head by a fisherman and tossed overboard. The fact that it washed ashore and was found by a beachcomber so quickly contributed to a rare string of circumstances that sparked last week's collective "ewws" and "ahhs."

"It's definitely been unusual to have a situation quite like this," Kevin Baxter, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, told me today. The commission has been fielding tons of inquiries ever since pictures of the eerie eyeball turned up on Thursday. If you haven't seen them yet, be sure to check out the commission's Facebook page and Flickr gallery.

Observers had speculated that the eye might have come from a large fish, or a giant squid, or even a whale — but in retrospect, the scenario involving a swordfish caught at sea seems to make the most sense. Genetic testing is being conducted to confirm the hypothesis.

Here's the explanation from the commission's news release:

"After examining an eye found on a south Florida beach this week, researchers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission believe the specimen came from a swordfish. Genetic testing will be done to confirm the identification.

"'Experts on site and remotely have viewed and analyzed the eye, and based on its color, size and structure, along with the presence of bone around it, we believe the eye came from a swordfish,' said Joan Herrera, curator of collections at the FWC’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg. 'Based on straight-line cuts visible around the eye, we believe it was removed by a fisherman and discarded.'

"The approximately softball-size eye was recovered by a citizen in Pompano Beach on Wednesday. FWC staff received the eye later that day. Swordfish are commonly fished in the Florida Straits offshore of south Florida at this time of year.

"A highly migratory fish, swordfish can be found from the surface to as deep as 2,000 feet. Swordfish in the Atlantic can reach a maximum size of over 1,100 pounds, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Swordfish feed on a wide variety of fish and invertebrates."

More sea marvels:

• Florida fishermen pick up dying giant squid
• Hawaiian squid carries a built-in light
• Boy finds a bonanza in whale vomit
• Gallery: 10 deep-sea secrets revealed

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Carli Segelson / Fla. FWCC via AP

A photo from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission shows a giant eyeball from a mysterious sea creature that washed ashore and was found by a man walking the beach in Pompano Beach, Fla., on Wednesday. The eyeball will be sent to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

A giant eyeball that washed ashore and was found by a beachcomber in Pompano Beach, Fla., is mystifying wildlife officials — but probably not for long.

The softball-sized eyeball was reported to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on Wednesday, and wildlife officers put the specimen on ice. It will be preserved and sent to the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., for analysis.

Marine biologists couldn't immediately identify which species of sea creature would be associated with the eye, but researchers will use genetic testing if necessary to solve the mystery, said Carli Segelson, a spokeswoman for the commission. "I shouldn't say this, but they may be able to eyeball it," she told me today.

Segelson said she's been fielding tons of inquiries about the case, especially since a picture of "THE MYSTERY EYEBALL" was posted to the commission's Facebook page. "It's just gone viral," she said. There are more pictures in the commission's Flickr photo gallery.

Some have suggested that the eye came from a monster fish, a giant squid or even a whale. It does look a bit like this picture of an eye from a giant squid, but Segelson said wildlife officers are leaning toward a different scenario.

"The primary suspect right now is that it would be a large fish," she said. Among the possibilities are a swordfish, or a tuna, or some sort of deep-water fish species.

What do you think it is? Feel free to give it your best shot a comment below, and keep your eyes peeled for the answer.

More sea marvels:

• Florida fishermen pick up dying giant squid
• Hawaiian squid carries a built-in light
• Boy finds a bonanza in whale vomit
• Gallery: 10 deep-sea secrets revealed

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA TV

NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, commander of the International Space Station, holds one of the cups of Blue Bell ice cream during an interview.

The three astronauts on the International Space Station are having ice cream for dessert tonight — and we're not talking about that spongy "astronaut ice cream" stuff. This is the vanilla chocolate-swirl ice cream that was delivered in a research freezer aboard the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship that arrived on Wednesday.

"It's quite a treat," space station commander Sunita Williams told ABC News during a space-to-Earth interview today. "We don't usually have this type of stuff up here. It's usually thermostabilized or dehydrated [food] that we're dehydrating. So homemade ice cream is something special, and we're going to have a little party."

The Blue Bell ice cream was a late addition to the manifest for SpaceX's Dragon supply flight, which marks the first routine commercial cargo delivery under the terms of a $1.6 billion, 12-flight contract with NASA. Astronauts used the space station's arm to bring the Dragon in for berthing early Wednesday, and the time line went so smoothly that the hatches between the station and the visiting spacecraft were opened that same day — a day earlier than scheduled.

The ice cream was transferred from the Dragon's ultra-cold GLACIER research freezer to the space station's own freezer space in preparation for tonight's dinner. Williams is sharing the treats with Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko. NASA spokesman Rob Navias told me today that the ice cream supply amounts to a pint or two — and it's not clear how long the spacefliers will be able to stretch that out. "It depends on how much they eat," Navias quipped.

The space station's crew has until Oct. 28 to transfer 882 pounds (400 kilograms) of supplies into the station, load it back up with about twice as much mass in Earth-bound cargo, and unberth the Dragon for its re-entry and splashdown. In place of the ice cream, the GLACIER freezer will be carrying frozen biological samples, including hundreds of frozen blood and urine samples that have been waiting for a ride back down to Earth. Since last year's retirement of the shuttle fleet, the Dragon is the only spacecraft capable of returning a significant amount of cargo from the space station.

Navias made it sound as if Williams and her crewmates should have no problem meeting their deadlines.

"As of 1 p.m. Central Time, the crew had completed 77 percent of all of the cargo transfer and had already unpacked all of that cargo moved over to the station so far," Navias told me in a follow-up email. "All in one day. Way ahead of schedule."

Sounds like somebody deserves an extra helping of ice cream.

Update for 5 p.m. ET: NASA's Space Food Hall of Fame notes that the freeze-dried confection known as astronaut ice cream actually flew in space only once, aboard Apollo 7 in 1968. "It wasn't that popular," NASA food scientist Vickie Kloeris said in 2005. The desserts offered to the space station's astronauts are typically things like chocolate brownies, plum-cherry cobbler, honey cake or berry medley. Every once in a while, though, a space shuttle shipment would include real ice cream as a special treat.

More about outer-space food:

• Frozen dessert goes into orbit
• NASA serves up space food and shuttle tiles
• Simulation crew to explore the final frontier of food
• Spicy food gets five stars from space station crew

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CMS Collaboration / CERN

The Large Hadron Collider's CMS Collaboration gets its collective picture taken in front of a full-scale picture of the CMS detector at Europe's CERN particle physics lab. More than 3,000 scientists, engineers and students are involved in the CMS Collaboration, and just about that many more are involved in the collaboration for the LHC's other primary detector, ATLAS.

The Higgs boson received nary a mention at this year's Nobel Prize proceedings — and although the Higgs hunt has been the biggest news in physics over the past year, there are good reasons for the silence. Next year, however, the Nobel committee could have a huge Higgs hassle on its hands. And maybe that's a good thing.

Some observers think the conundrum surrounding a potential physics prize for the Higgs boson could lead the Nobel committee to make some long-overdue changes. And that, in turn, could change the public perception of how science is done.

First, here's the main reason why this year's discovery of a "Higgs-like particle" wasn't Nobel-worthy this year, even though it validated a 40-year quest: The key breakthrough came to light in July, when the teams behind the Large Hadron Collider's two main experiments — ATLAS and CMS — declared that they had enough data to merit an official discovery of a new subatomic particle. That's well past the traditional deadline for nominations, and although deadlines can be bent, the findings still need to be firmed up.

MIT physicist Frank Wilczek, who won a share of the 2004 Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on the strong nuclear force, said as much in an interview with LiveScience's Clara Moskowitz: "There are ways to stretch the rules, but evidently the relevant decision-makers felt that there was not sufficient reason to do so in this case."

Wilczek added that a Nobel Prize recognizing the theoretical underpinnings behind the Higgs boson was "the odds-on favorite for next year."

Too soon?
Usually, the committee in charge of awarding the physics prize waits until a breakthrough becomes so much a part of the scientific mainstream that there's no doubt about its truth and its value. That's the way it was this year, when French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland were honored for work in quantum optics that they pioneered 20 years ago.

When it comes to the Higgs, however, the clock is ticking: British physicist Peter Higgs —who lent his name to the theory, the field and the particle that would explain the origins of particle mass — is 83 years old. Other contributors to the theory are of a similar age. The theory itself was developed in the 1960s, and the real marvel is that Higgs and his colleagues were proven so right, so long after they came up with the idea.

But tradition dictates that the prize can be shared by no more than three individuals, who all have to be alive (although that rule was bent last year). Besides Peter Higgs, who should be in on the glory? Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who has just finished a book about the Higgs quest titled "The Particle at the End of the Universe," says Belgian physicist Francois Englert is the best candidate for the second spot. Several others have valid claims on the third spot, however. And then, how about recognizing the thousands of physicists who worked on the LHC collaborations?

This is the sort of quandary that has tied physicists in knots for years. Wilczek himself has said he's using the "no more than three" rule as a key plot device in a murder mystery he's writing, tentatively titled "The Attraction of Darkness." It's about a team of four physicists who discover the true nature of dark matter, and find themselves up for a Nobel Prize. "One of the four dies, supposedly a suicide, but then, maybe not," he told The New York Times.

Do the right thing
The way Carroll sees it, the Higgs hassle provides a perfect opportunity for the Nobel committee members to change their tradition — and ruin the premise of Wilczek's novel in the process.

"They can do the right thing, and stop insisting that only three people can win it," Carroll told me. "Maybe that's something they can talk about over the next 365 days."

Carroll isn't alone on this: This week, Scientific American's editors urged the Nobel Foundation to change its ways, either by merely throwing out the "no more than three" rule, or by allowing the prize to be awarded to groups as well as individuals. Etienne Klein, a physicist at France's Atomic Energy Commission, was quoted as saying the Nobel committee should "take a gamble" and award a Nobel to Higgs, Englert and Europe's CERN particle physics center, which manages the LHC. Columbia University's Peter Woit, the blogging mathematician behind "Not Even Wrong," favored going with CERN plus the ATLAS and CMS collaborations.

Some might think recognizing groups rather than individuals would represent a dilution of Nobel prestige — but it can easily be argued that the change would bring the scientific prizes in line with the practice for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is routinely awarded to organizations ranging from the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, 1963) to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007).

The change could also shift the popular perception of the scientific process — away from the image of a scientist slaving away alone in a basement lab, and toward a more complex picture of scores, hundreds or thousands of researchers working together, connected via global networks. In short, the picture that actually reflects how science is usually done nowadays.

Do you agree? If not, why not? If so, what's the best way to convince the Nobel committee to make a noble change? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Correction for 4:40 p.m. ET Oct. 11: I originally wrote that Belgian physicist Francois Englert was French. That error has been corrected. Pardonnez-moi s'il vous plaît!

More about the Nobel and the Higgs:

• Nobel physics prize highlights quantum optics
• Chemists win Nobel for study of protein receptors
• Medicine prize recognizes stem cell breakthroughs
• The art and science of guessing a Nobel Prize
• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Soprano superstar Sarah Brightman has confirmed that she's planning a flight to the International Space Station and hopes to sing a song in orbit — but not until after she finishes up the worldwide concert tour that she's just about to start.

We've basically known about Brightman's spaceflight gig since August, but today's news conference in Moscow gave the British singer a chance to talk about the multimillion-dollar orbital tour. She told reporters that she's had an "incredible desire" to go into outer space since childhood. In fact, seeing the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 "actually inspired me and gave me the courage to go into the career that I have," the 52-year-old said.

Brightman started out as a disco singer in the late '70s with spacey tunes such as "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper" and "Love in a UFO," but she really made her mark in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She was even married to the impresario for a time. Since then, she's had a successful solo career, specializing in the classical crossover genre.

Today's briefing put heavy emphasis on the "Dreamchaser" album and concert tour that's scheduled to hit early next year, as well as Brightman's role as a UNESCO Artist for Peace ambassador.

"I don't think of myself as a dreamer — rather, I am a dream chaser," Brightman said. "I hope that I can encourage others to take inspiration from my journey both to chase down their own dreams and to help fulfill the important UNESCO mandate to promote peace and sustainable development on Earth and from space. I am determined that this journey can reach out to be a force for good, a catalyst for some of the dreams and aims of others that resonate with me."

SarahBrightman.com via YouTube

Singer Sarah Brightman gives a thumbs-up sign during one of her medical tests in Russia, conducted in preparation for spaceflight.

She emphasized that although she's received medical approval from the Russians for a flight aboard a Soyuz craft to the space station, she won't be able to follow through with the six-month spaceflight training course at Russia's Star City facility until after the 2013 concert tour is over.

SpaceAdventures / SarahBrightman.com

Singer Sarah Brightman is about to embark on a "Dreamchaser" concert tour.

She's got plenty of time: Brightman probably won't be able to catch a ride to the station until 2015, when the space station's partners are planning to have astronauts begin a yearlong stay in orbit. Because of the logistics for that extended mission, there'll be an extra seat on an outbound and inbound Soyuz that a paying passenger can fill.

Like the eight other private space tours that have gone to the station over the past 11 years, Brightman's 10-day space odyssey is being arranged through Virginia-based Space Adventures. (One space traveler, software billionaire Charles Simonyi, has gone twice — which would make Brightman the eighth paying guest to visit the space station. She's the second woman to do so, after Iranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari.)

Space Adventures' chairman, Eric Anderson, said the financial arrangements for the tour were confidential. However, the going rate for trips to the space station has risen to roughly $50 million. Considering that Brightman's net worth has been estimated at less than that, it's possible that at least part of the fare is being paid by her promoters.

Brightman also has purchased a seat on Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, at a cost of $200,000, and she's supporting a science-themed Galactic Unite Brightman scholarship program as well. SpaceShipTwo is expected to begin commercial service in the 2013-2014 time frame. 

In the months ahead, Brightman said she would work with UNESCO to develop a program to promote the conservation of Earth's resources, as well as education for girls in science and engineering. She said she expected there would be a "chain of events" tying in to the program, including concerts, multimedia experiences and a "song from space."

Space Adventures said she would continue her U.N. work after the space mission, through a series of "Space to Place"concerts at UNESCO World Heritage Sites, biosphere reserves and parks. 

UNESCO's director of public information, Neil Ford, was on hand in Moscow to provide backup for the singer. "How amazing that you're about to realize your own dream and fly into space," he told Brightman. Ford said one of UNESCO's goals for the project was to put "science to use for human ingenuity."

Anderson said Brightman was an attractive candidate for a space station trip in part because of her high profile as the world's best-selling soprano. "I can think of no better ambassador for the idea of human spaceflight," he said.

Based on Brightman's comments during the question-and-answer session, it could be an entertaining ride. One journalist, for example, asked whether she was concerned about encountering aliens during the trip. "I'd love to be kidnapped by an alien," Brightman quipped. And when a reference was made to "The Fifth Element," a movie in which the French actress Maiwenn played an alien diva, Brightman answered, "I probably am similar to the diva — without all the tentacles she had."

More music from space:

• A heroic flute duet from orbit
• Listen to the first song from Mars
• Scientists use real stars for reggae
• U2 concert adds a surprise from space

For more information about singer Sarah Brightman's space adventure, check out SarahBrightman.com.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Universal Studios

E.T. charmed Elliott (Henry Thomas) and millions of moviegoers in the 1982 movie "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial."

Thirty years ago, a different kind of alien hit the screen: a vulnerable, cuddly, candy-munching creature that captured hearts as well as box-office records. Is "E.T." still relevant for the 21st century? If you're looking for the extraterrestrial that humanity is most likely to run into first, E.T. definitely doesn't fit the mold. But if you're looking for the cultural icon that's most likely to motivate the search for honest-to-goodness extraterrestrials, E.T. just might be your A-list alien.

"If you look at the number of films that involve extraterrestrials these days, it's something like five or 10 a year," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute, told me today. "And most of them are kinda nasty. What I liked about E.T. is that, after all, he was just a botanist who came to Earth and played with the kids.

"He was a good tonic against the xenophobia we have about aliens. He's no more realistic than those other aliens, but his appeal encouraged folks to think that searches such as SETI were maybe not a bad thing."

SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — is Shostak's specialty. In addition to conducting decades of research in the field, he's written books about aliens, advised moviemakers about them, and hosts a radio show that often touches upon the search for alien signals. If an unrealistically cute and cuddly alien gets more people interested in the quest, that's just fine by him.

"Look, none of these movie aliens are realistic," he said. "Certainly all of the good guys are relatively anthropomorphic. You could analyze it in terms of the science ... but to me, all of the alien films stimulate the idea that there could be something out there. I can see that only as a good."

So what would a realistic alien look like? Probably more like R2-D2 than E.T.: Intelligence that's encased in metallic hardware will travel much better than the kind of intelligence that's carried around in relatively fragile wetware. R2-D2 could be pretty cute at times, but it's more likely that the real-life robo-aliens would be indifferent to our fate. To some extent, Shostak agrees with physicist Stephen Hawking: Our relationship with alien visitors might be similar to the Native Americans' relationship to the Europeans in the 1500s. In short, not all sweetness and light.

"If any were to come, at least extrapolating from the history of visitations here on Earth, most likely they would be nasty," Shostak said. "It wasn't the nice guys who got on the ship to visit the Aztecs."

But then again, perhaps E.T. suggests a sunnier scenario. Why would the aliens visit? Probably not for resources, because any civilization capable of coming to Earth would already command prodigious reserves of power. Certainly not for mating. Even if E.T. was made of flesh and blood rather than metal, the genetic code (and reproductive system) would be different. Perhaps, like E.T., the aliens would come just to catalog the flora, the fauna, maybe even check out the rock and roll.

"That might make sense," Shostak said.

What do you think? Is anyone else out there, or are we alone? How have our perspectives on extraterrestrial life evolved over the past 30 years? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More perspectives on E.T. and "E.T.":

• Aliens won't eat us, and we won't mate with them
• Expert doubts aliens would visit Earth to terrorize us
• Stephen Hawking: Aliens may pose risks to Earth
• Steven Spielberg considered creepy 'E.T. sequel
• Henry Thomas recalls leaving Spielberg in tears
• Cosmic Log archive on aliens

Correction for 10:20 a.m. Oct. 10: Shostak said there were five or 10 alien-themed movies per year, but I mistyped the quote to make it sound as if E.T. got far less screen time. Sorry about the miscue, which has been mended. 

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.