Documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, co-author of the new book "The Jesus Discovery," discusses how a robotic arm was used to make archaeological discoveries during a New York news conference today.

Now that the word about "the Jesus Discovery" is out in the open, outside experts are weighing in — and many of them look upon the robotic exploration of a 1st-century Jerusalem tomb as a technological tour de force resulting in an archaeological faux pas.

On one level, the "Jesus Discovery" investigators saw this project as a follow-up on the sensational claim they made five years earlier in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," that Jesus and members of his family were buried in what is now a southeast residential neighborhood of Jerusalem. On another level, they set forth what they said were the earliest known evidence of Christian references in the Holy City — in the form of an inscription referring to resurrection on one casket, and a fishlike design on another casket.

Today, several experts specializing in 1st-century Christianity said the investigators failed to make their case on either level.

"In my assessment, there's zero percent chance that their theory is correct," said Andrew Vaughn, executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, or ASOR.

Christopher Rollston, an expert in Semitic epigraphy at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Tennessee, said that although the underground chamber is "a nice tomb ... it's hard to press it into service as an impressive find."

Some archaeologists were familiar with the project months before it came into the spotlight, but non-disclosure agreements kept them from commenting  until today's press announcement at Discovery Times Square in New York. The project has already spawned a book by scriptural scholar James Tabor and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, titled "The Jesus Discovery," and a documentary about the find is due to air on the Discovery Channel this spring.

When today's embargo lifted, the criticism from outside experts hit with full force on the ASOR Blog.

"Nothing in the book 'revolutionizes our understanding of Jesus or early Christianity,' as the authors and publisher claim, and we may regard this book as yet another in a long list of presentations that misuse not only the Bible but also archaeology," Duke University biblical scholar Eric Meyers declared.

Jodi Magness, a religious-studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said "it pains me to see archaeology hijacked in the service of non-scientific interests, whether they are religious, financial, or other." In her view, Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues set out to dig up evidence to support their earlier claims about a different tomb nearby, the so-called "Jesus Family Tomb" — and then rustle up a fresh round of media attention.

"Professional archaeologists do not search for objects or treasures such as Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail," she wrote. "Usually these sorts of expeditions are led by amateurs (nonspecialists) or academics who are not archaeologists. Archaeology is a scientific process."

Old and new claims
The main objection to the claims for the Jesus Family Tomb, like the claims themselves, retraces ground that's been well trod since 2007: Just because bone boxes are marked with the name "Jesus" and the names of his brothers and sisters, as mentioned in the Bible, doesn't necessarily mean these are the actual biblical figures.

Tabor and Jacobovici produced a statistical analysis looking at the frequency of names in ancient Jerusalem, and claimed that the close fit to the names on Jesus' family tree couldn't be just a coincidence. Last month, Tabor said further research has strengthened the case he and Jacobovici laid out in 2007.

The critics insisted once again that a statistical argument could never win the day. "Dramatic claims require dramatic evidence. ... The claims of Tabor and Jacobovici for this tomb are no more convincing now than they were then," Rollston wrote.

But what about the inscription in the more recently explored tomb, known as the Patio Tomb? And what about the fish? Rollston said the fish was more probably a type of ornamental design typically seen on Jewish bone boxes, known as a nephesh tower. Where Tabor and Jacobovici saw the "fins" of the fish, Rollston saw the eaves of the tower's roof.

Even if it was intended to be a fish, "it would most naturally be understood as simply a reflection of a nautical motif in a tomb," or perhaps representative of the deceased's occupation — for example, a fishmonger. Unlike Tabor, Rollston did not rule out the possibility that a Jew would have such a design engraved on the bone box.

James Tabor / UNCC

James Tabor, a religious-studies researcher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, outlined these designs found in various contexts, including "nephesh" images that have been found carved on 1st-century Jewish caskets, a fish drawing found in a Christian catacomb, and the "Patio Tomb fish" design seen in the tomb that Tabor and his colleagues explored using a camera-equipped robotic arm. Tabor's critics say the fishlike design is actually a variant of the nephesh tower design.

As for the inscription, Rollston said the resurrection connection was questionable. Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues suggested that it could be interpreted as reading, "Divine Jehovah (Yahweh), lift up, lift up," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up from [the dead]." But Rollston said the first letter in the word that was said to refer to Jehovah — IAEO — looked like a T rather than an I.

"This can't be an iota," he told me, "and that's the one letter that has to be there."

He also questioned the interpretation of the inscription's key word, "UPsOO," or "hupso," which would be a form of the verb "to lift up." Even if one assumes that's what was intended, the word wouldn't necessarily refer to raising up in the resurrection sense, he said. And even if one assumes it was indeed meant as a reference to resurrection, there were some Jewish sects back then — such as the Pharisees — that believed in a general resurrection.

"For someone to state that this is an early Christian tomb, there really has to be some clear and decisive evidence to back up that statement," Rollston told me. "And it just really isn't here."

In a follow-up email, Tabor told me that the "tower will not float" as an alternate explanation for the fishlike image. He also pointed to the comments he posted on the ASOR Blog, taking further issue with the nephesh tower interpretation. In a comment addressed to Rollston, he said, "We have much to discuss, but I look forward to doing it face to face."

On the positive side...
Not every outside expert was totally critical: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted Yuval Baruch, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, as saying that Tabor and Jacobovici may well be right about the fish. Baruch noted that the fishlike image was not photographed "in the best light," but added: "If it is indeed a fish, it is fantastic. It has no parallel."

Baruch cautioned against reading too much into a single decoration, however. "Different decorations are being discovered all the time," he told Haaretz.

Rollston and ASOR's Vaughn both said the robotic-arm exploration technique that Tabor and his colleagues used to explore the 1st-century tomb held promise for future digs. Israel's religious and civil authorities are reluctant to have ancient sites disturbed, and even if the excavations are approved, they can create huge disruptions for residential areas like the one where the tomb currently in question is located. Tabor and his colleagues circumvented many of those typical problems by using a camera-equipped robotic arm that they snaked down through a pipe going into the tomb.

"The robotic-arm technology used by James Tabor is truly amazing," Vaughn said. "To be able to explore in a relatively non-invasive way, and to respect the artifacts and bones that may be present there, is certainly of much value."

Magness, however, stressed in her blog posting that robotic-arm video couldn't take the place of a full-fledged dig.

"The archaeological endeavor involves piecing together all available information, not just one artifact taken out of context," she wrote. "Context is the reason that archaeologists go to so much trouble to document the provenance of every feature and artifact dug up on an excavation. The current claim is based on finds that have no context, as they have not been excavated. All we have are photos taken by a robotic arm of objects (or parts of objects), the dates and identification of which are unknown or unclear."

Rollston said further analysis could well shed more light on the central question raised by the current controversy: How did the first Christian communities emerge and manifest themselves? But the process of getting definitive answers doesn't necessarily match the typical time frame for a television production or book project.

"The wheels of scholarship, like the wheels of justice, grind slowly but surely," he told me.

More about biblical brouhahas:

• New find revives 'Jesus Tomb' flap
• Claims about tomb stir tempest
• Messianic message stirs debate
• Return to King Solomon's mines
• Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel
• Gallery: The archaeology of Christianity
• Experts stumped by markings in Jerusalem

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Andrei Penescu

The northern lights shimmer over Kangerlussuaq in Greenland on Feb. 27. "Out for about two hours in -36 degrees Celsius until my fingers gave up, but what a nice show!" Andrei Penescu told SpaceWeather.com. "I didn't get out too far from the town, and had a lot of light pollution, but the aurora was very bright."

A "crack" in Earth's magnetic field has opened the way for yet another thrilling display of the northern lights near the top of the world.

We're in the middle of an upswing in the sun's 11-year activity cycle, leading up to an expected peak in 2013. If solar storms get too intense, there could be a heightened risk of outages in satellite communication and electrical grids. But fortunately, the only significant effects from the solar outbursts so far have come in the form of heightened auroras, occasionally ranging as far south as Nebraska.

Auroras arise due to the interaction of Earth's magnetosphere with electrically charged particles streaming from the sun. That interaction energizes atmospheric oxygen and nitrogen in the ionosphere, causing ripples of greenish and reddish light between 60 and 200 miles up in Earth's polar regions.

SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips reports that the interplanetary magnetic field tipped south this week and opened a crack in our planet's magnetic shield to fuel a minor G1-class geomagnetic storm. The Space Weather Prediction Center said the storm was sparked by particles sent out from the sun during an eruption last Friday.

You can see the atmospheric physics at work in the picture above, captured by Andrei Penescu in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, on Feb. 27. Fittingly, Kangerlussuaq is home to the Sondrestrom Upper Atmospheric Research Facility, a project that studies the aurora and other atmospheric phenomena.

Here are a few other photos from this week's auroral displays, plus two video extras. One is "Temporal Distortion," a time-lapse tribute to the aurora and other wonders of the night sky by Dakotalapse photographer Randy Halverson. It includes some of the auroral imagery we featured back in October, and features original music by Bear McCreary, the award-winning composer for TV shows such as "Walking Dead" and "Battlestar Galactica."

The other is David Peterson's compilation of time-lapse videos captured by astronauts on the International Space Station, including some primo views of the aurora from above. Here's what NASA's Mike Fossum, a former space station resident, had to say about the clip: "This is the best video I've seen from photos we took on ISS! Stunning!!"

Can't argue with that...

Aaro Kukkohovi

Finland's Aaro Kukkohovi saw an aurora of a different color burst forth on Feb. 27 in the skies over Lumijoki. "I've never seen anything close to this," Kukkohovi told SpaceWeather.com. "What a fantastic burst of energy - like something blew a hole into Earth's magnetic field just above us." For more from Kukkohovi, check out the gallery at the LumiSoft website.

AuroraMAX / CSA

The AuroraMAX wide-angle camera snapped this picture of the northern lights over Yellowknife in Canada's Northwest Territories early Feb. 27. For more from AuroraMAX, check out the project's website and Twitpic gallery.

More auroral glories:

• Rocket flies into the northern lights
• Northern lights appear to wash over ship in Norway
• The sun sends Earth a valentine
• Aurora extravaganza glows in space
• Planet looks back at the northern lights
• Auroras spark awe across the north
• Solar weather stirs up super sights
• Northern lights go way, way south
• Speed through Lapland's lights
• Beautiful blasts from solar storms
• Get a video view of Canada's aurora
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

One of the designs etched on a bone box found within a 1st-century Jerusalem tomb suggests the biblical story of Jonah and the fish, which held significant symbolism for early Christians.

Using a remote-controlled camera on the end of a robotic arm, investigators have found what could be the earliest evidence of a Christian iconography in Jerusalem, engraved on a set of "bone boxes" inside a nearly intact 1st-century tomb.

One of the limestone boxes, known more formally as an ossuary, carries a Greek inscription calling on God to "rise up" or "raise up" someone. Another box appears to show the carved image of a fish, perhaps with the prophet Jonah in its mouth. Allusions to fish and the "sign of Jonah" came to be widely used among early Christians, but not among Jerusalem's Jews.

Update: Doubts raised about the 'Jesus Discovery'

Those discoveries alone would be enough to get biblical scholars excited. But the investigators in this case are the same people who claimed five years ago that ossuaries from a nearby tomb were engraved with the names of the biblical Jesus and his family. They're putting forth this new find as supporting evidence for their earlier claims, and resurrecting the topic in a newly published book ("The Jesus Discovery") as well as a Discovery Channel documentary that's due to air this spring.

"This does reopen the whole question about the 'Jesus Tomb,'" James Tabor, a scriptural scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me.

That almost guarantees that the link to Jesus will take center stage once again in the discussion of the discovery, with most archaeologists discounting the connection. There's even a chance that the renewed controversy would push this most recent find out of the spotlight. That would be a terrible shame, said John Dominic Crossan, an expert on 1st-century Christianity and former Catholic priest who is a professor emeritus at DePaul University.

"It's a stunning discovery," he said. "It's a stunning piece of technology. As a scholar, I really don't want to get lost in saying, 'Oh, come on, it's off the wall.' Yeah, it's off the wall. But look at the wall!"

James Tabor / UNCC

Engineer Walter Klassen and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici hold the camera-equipped robotic arm in its folded-up configuration.

Or in this case, look at the box.

How the boxes were found
Tabor and documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici located both of the 1st-century tombs — the so-called Jesus Family Tomb as well as the one with the newly revealed inscriptions — in a Jerusalem neighborhood known as Talpiot years ago. They looked into previous claims that the bone boxes in the Jesus Family Tomb were marked with names that meshed with the names of Jesus' brothers and sisters, as mentioned in the Gospels. The investigators went on to cite a statistical analysis of name frequency as evidence that the family interred in the caskets was that of Jesus.

Most provocatively, they pointed to one box that was said to contain the remains of Jesus, and another containing the remains of "Judah, son of Jesus." These claims ran counter to the mainstream Christian view that Jesus made a bodily resurrection after his crucifixion and death, and that he did not marry or have children. To explain the seeming discrepancy with the Gospels, Tabor and his colleagues suggested that early Christians did not necessarily believe in a bodily resurrection, but rather a spiritual resurrection in which Jesus left behind the "old clothes" of the flesh.

The first book ("The Jesus Family Tomb") and TV documentary ("The Lost Tomb of Jesus") set off a wave of protests, with skeptics saying that Tabor and Jacobovici were sensationalizing an unprovable assertion. Despite the criticism, the team continued their work, focusing on the other tomb. This tomb was only briefly examined in 1981 before protests by Orthodox Jews, concerned about the disturbance of a gravesite, forced an end to the archaeological study. The tomb was sealed back up, and a condominium was built over it. Tabor and his colleagues refer to this tomb as the "Patio Tomb," because a patio sits almost directly above the tomb.

Israel's civil and religious authorities were resistant to efforts to reopen the Patio Tomb, so Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues came up with an unorthodox alternative: They suggested building a robotic arm that could be extended down vent holes and drill holes into the tomb, to a maximum length of more than 15 feet. The authorities gave their permission, and the documentary team proceeded with their remote-controlled video exploration in June 2010.

James Tabor / UNCC

Investigators shot imagery of the 1st-century Jerusalem tomb and the bone boxes inside the tomb using a robotic arm, as shown in this video frame.

The filmmakers peered into niches cut into the tomb and found several inscribed bone boxes, including one that was left ajar to reveal the bones still within. In one of the niches, two boxes were jammed close together. As the robotic arm maneuvered to look at the side of one of the boxes, one of the investigators cried out, "Wait, wait, stop there!" A design had been etched into the limestone — a design that could be interpreted as a fish with a stick figure hanging out of its mouth.

The meaning of the inscriptions
After consulting with other scriptural experts, the investigators concluded that the etching showed a representation of Jonah and the fish. The biblical tale of the prophet who was swallowed by a giant fish, only to be vomited up alive three days later, had a special resonance for early Christians, who believed in Jesus' resurrection after three days in a tomb. The image of the fish, which would not typically be carved on a Jewish ossuary, suggested to Tabor and his colleagues that this might be the earliest surviving example of a Christian marking on an artifact in Jerusalem.

The team's excitement grew when they saw the inscription on the box sitting next to the one with the fish: A four-line inscription in Greek appeared to refer to a belief in the resurrection. The inscription could be read as "Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up to the Holy Place," or "Divine Jehovah, raise up [abbreviated name]."

"This inscription has something to do with resurrection of the dead, either of the deceased in the ossuary, or perhaps, given the Jonah image nearby, an expression of faith in Jesus' resurrection," Tabor said in a news release.

The Jesus connection
Tabor and his colleagues tie this latest discovery to their earlier claims by suggesting that the two tombs were part of one complex, which might have been chiseled out by a wealthy supporter of Jesus and his disciples. They even name their prime suspect: Joseph of Arimathea, a high-ranking religious official who was said in the Gospels to have arranged Jesus' burial. In the investigators' view, the fact that they found such a strong connection to early Christianity in the Patio Tomb strengthens their original claims for the Jesus Family Tomb, which is 200 feet away.

"We now have the new archaeological evidence, literally written in stone, that can guide us in properly understanding what Jesus' earliest followers meant by their faith in Jesus' resurrection from the dead — with his earthly remains, and those of his family, peacefully interred just yards away," Tabor and Jacobovici wrote.

Crossan said that was too much of a leap. "There's nothing that associates [the Patio Tomb] with Joseph of Arimathea," he said.

He said the two tombs may well have no relationship to each other: "This whole area is riddled with tombs, as far as we can tell."

Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, voiced a similar view. "The attempt to connect [the Patio Tomb] to the other tombs is sheer conjecture, unless the tombs were connected," he told me.

Witherington said the connections made in the newly published book were similar to those put forth in Tabor's earlier work. "Most of us who have evaluated his work would say, OK, all very interesting, but it's building one speculation on another speculation," he said.

However, Witherington was intrigued by the fish carving. "We have early Christian ossuaries with the fish symbol ... in the 2nd century, if not back into the 1st century," he said. "That is the early Christian symbol for I-Ch-Th-Y-S ... 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.' What we don't have any evidence for is that symbol on Jewish ossuaries."

The words of the inscription also caught Witherington's interest. "They imply a belief about the resurrection," he said.

It is thought that the use of such bone boxes in Jerusalem ceased in the year 70, due to the Roman destruction of the city. Thus, there's a chance that the residents buried in the Patio Tomb actually lived during the time of Jesus and his first disciples. However, Crossan noted that Christians weren't the only ones in 1st-century Jerusalem who held a religious belief in resurrection. The Pharisees and the Essenes also looked forward to the resurrection of the righteous, he said.

"What I would say is ... this is a rich Pharisee, a rich person in the 1st century who believes in the resurrection," Crossan told me. "We always thought that [the image of] Jonah coming out of the fish was peculiarly Christian. Maybe that's one more thing that the early Christians took from Jewish tradition, and this would be the first evidence."

More about biblical archaeology:

• Messianic message stirs debate
• Return to King Solomon's mines
• Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel
• Gallery: The archaeology of Christianity
• Experts stumped by markings in Jerusalem
• Claims about Jesus' 'lost tomb' stir up tempest

An academic paper on the Patio Tomb project is being posted to The Bible and Interpretation on Tuesday, and Tabor says the paper will be submitted for print publication as well. A press event about the project and the Discovery Channel documentary has been scheduled for 11 a.m. ET Tuesday at Discovery Times Square in New York City. Funding for the project was provided by Discovery Channel / Vision Television / Associated Producers. Tabor's colleague in obtaining the excavation license from the Israel Antiquities Authority was Rami Arav, professor of archaeology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

NASA will be dealing with some tough choices in the years ahead: The space agency has to start virtually from square one on its Mars exploration program. It has to rein in budget overruns on the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, widely seen as the heir to the Hubble Space Telescope. It's spending hundreds of millions of dollars on commercial efforts to replace the space shuttle, and billions of dollars on the development of a new launch system to send astronauts beyond Earth orbit for the first time in more than 40 years. And to top it off, it's been allotted less money for next year than it's getting this year.

How can NASA strike the proper balance in its budget? It can't, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says. In his latest book, "Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier," Tyson explains why America's space effort needs more of a boost than it's getting.

"I'd really argue for doubling NASA's budget," Tyson told me today.

For the past few years, the space agency's spending has amounted to roughly half a percent of the total federal budget. (This year NASA is due to spend $17.8 billion.) In proportional terms, that's half what it was 20 years ago under President George H.W. Bush — and roughly a ninth of what it was in 1966, at the height of the U.S.-Soviet space race.

Tyson said that NASA's budgetary situation is so untenable that if he were on the NASA Advisory Council, as he was between 2005 and 2008, he couldn't give any advice. "I would excuse myself from the meeting," he said. "I wouldn't even stop at the White House."

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, is in his element among large-scale planetary models.

Over the past couple of years, Congress has had a stronger hand in setting NASA's future course, but Tyson thinks the ultimate fix for what ails NASA won't be found on Capitol Hill.

"If I write members of Congress with the ideas that I have, in a way, that's circumventing the electorate, because they elected a person to serve their interests," he said. "If I come around the side door and say, 'Do this,' I'd feel uncomfortable in that role. I'd rather address the public. As an educator, this is a fundamental part of what I do: communicating the thrill of discovery and exploration to the public. And if the public is not enchanted by exploration and discovery, that's OK. ... Then I appeal to the economic argument: In this, the 21st century, the nations that embrace innovations in science and technology are the ones who will lead the world."

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Tyson has been thinking about these topics for years — as the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, as an adviser to NASA and a member of several space policy commissions, as the author of several books and myriad magazine articles, and as the host of the updated "Cosmos" TV series, due to debut next year.

W.W. Norton

"Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier" is adapted from commentaries written by Neil deGrasse Tyson over the past 15 years.

He freely acknowledges that the glory days of the space effort were driven not by economics, not by science, but by the Cold War's military realities and image-building imperatives. "We did it for military purposes, but we reap the economic benefits," he said.

Which benefits does Tyson have in mind? He noted that there have been plenty of technological spin-offs from spaceflight, ranging from satellite weather forecasting to electronic gadgetry to Tang and Teflon. "Spin-offs are great, but that's not even what I'm talking about," he said. "I'm talking about a culture that wants to dream about tomorrow, and make tomorrow happen today. That culture prevailed in the 1960s and early '70s."

Nowadays you don't hear so much about Tomorrowland. "We've been coasting on those investments, and it's finally caught up with us," Tyson said. "Meanwhile, other countries understand this investment, and they are making active gains in their innovations in science and technology. In particular, space is galvanizing that effort. We knew that would happen, because that's what happened to us in the 1960s. This is not some surprise emotion. It's already been tested ... with us. Right now it's in China, but I think we can resurrect it here going forward."

No delusional thinking
Unlike GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, who made such a splash with his pledge to build a moon base by 2020, Tyson shies away from pointing to a particular destination for the space effort. It could be the moon, or Mars, or an asteroid, or the solar system's Lagrangian gravitational balance points. And unlike Gingrich, Tyson believes space exploration efforts will always have to be led by governments. Routine operations in low Earth orbit could be handed over to private enterprise, just as airmail delivery was handed over to commercial carriers in the 1920s. But exploration is a different matter, Tyson said.

 Tyson said his book's original title — before his publisher talked him out of it — was going to be "Failure to Launch: The Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts."

"Where the delusional thinking reveals itself ... is the expectation that private enterprise can lead a space frontier. No ... no is the answer," Tyson said. "Not that I don't want that to be the case. There's just no precedent for that in the history of human culture. To take something that's expensive, dangerous, unknown and risky ... put all of those together and you cannot value it in the capital markets. There's no known return on investment."

"Space Chronicles" represents Tyson's effort to lay the groundwork for informed, non-delusional decisions about America's future in space — and also work in some of the catchy topics that he's written about over the years, ranging from the prospects for extraterrestrial life to the potential for killer asteroids.

"I want to put people on firm ground of how to think about the science and engineering of space exploration, so that when it comes time to make a policy decision, they have some fluency in the ambitions of those who want to explore space," Tyson said. "The book is a celebration of space, but it's also an indictment of all the delusional thinking that has interfered with efforts to resurrect another golden age of space exploration."

Is it delusional thinking in this budget-conscious era to propose doubling NASA's budget? Or would it be a policy move just crazy enough to work — and inspire a new generation of innovation? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments, pro and con.

More from Neil deGrasse Tyson on msnbc.com:

• 2010: Why the frontier matters
• 2009: Pluto's pros and cons
• 2008: Black holes for beginners
• 2007: From black holes to black history
• 2005: Einstein and Darwin — a tale of two theories

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Jeff Berkes Photography

Jupiter, the moon and Venus take starring roles in a sunset sky extravaganza, as captured by photographer Jeff Berkes in Pennsylvania's Chester County.

The glitterati of the solar system turned out this past weekend for an Oscar-worthy show: a triple play featuring Jupiter, the moon and Venus in evening skies. This photo, snapped by photographer Jeff Berkes in Pennsylvania's Chester County, is a classic portrayal.

"The crescent moon, Venus and Jupiter have formed a slim triangle in the western skies at sunset," Berkes told me in an email on Sunday. That's not all: Mars rises in the east a few hours after sunset. This sky guide from Space.com's Tariq Malik provides the details. Even if the skies are cloudy all night, you can still get in on the fun online via Slooh.com's planet-watching webcast.

The moon is shifting progressively farther to the east in evening skies, but anytime this week should be prime time for the planetary extravaganza. Got great pictures? Share them via the Cosmic Log Facebook page or msnbc.com's FirstPerson in-box. You'll also want to get a look at the beauties on Jeff Berkes' website as well as at SpaceWeather.com and Space.com.

Update for 7:30 p.m. ET Feb. 27: NBC News' Brian Williams featured a beautiful time-lapse view of Venus, Jupiter and the moon that was captured on Friday night by Roberto Porto on the road to Teide National Park in Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Check it out:

More from Jeff Berkes on PhotoBlog:

• Catch a falling star ... and fall colors
• Meteor quest turns up treasures

Mars' reddish dust covers the Opportunity rover's solar panels in this downward-looking view, assembled from images taken by the NASA probe's panoramic camera from Dec. 21 to 24, 2011. The mosaic was put together in such a way as to omit the mast on which the camera is mounted.

One of the trickiest things that NASA's Opportunity rover does on Mars is take a look at itself — but for the six-wheeled rover, it's been a vital part of its eight-year-plus mission on the Red Planet.

This picture illustrates why the occasional once-over is so important: Because Opportunity relies on solar power, mission controllers back on Earth need to know how much dust is accumulating on the rover's solar panels. It's been a while since the dust has been swept off by Martian winds, and so there's quite a bit of dust covering the power-generating cells right now.

The dust hasn't been so much of a concern during the previous southern winters that Opportunity has spent in Meridiani Planum on the Red Planet. But as winter approaches this time, NASA has decided to position the rover on a north-facing slope so that it can soak up as much of the sun's weak rays as possible. That's a strategy that the rover team employed in the past with Opportunity's twin, the Spirit rover, which now lies moribund in Gusev Crater on the other side of the planet.

Opportunity is conducting research in place as it sits on the north-facing slope of a ridge known as Greeley Haven, on the rim of the 14-mile-wide Endeavour Crater. The rover's going to be there for a while: Mars' southern winter solstice takes place on March 30, and the planet's seasons last roughly twice as long as Earth's. So we'll be seeing a lot of the rover's surroundings at Greeley Haven — including the current focus of its scientific studies, a rock called Amboy.

For comparison's sake, here's a picture of Opportunity's relatively clean solar panels from September 2007:

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell

This mosaic shows Opportunity's solar panels in September 2007 as seen by the rover's panoramic camera. The downward-looking view has been assembled to omit the mast on which the camera is mounted.

And here's a real treat from space artist Don Davis: A painstakingly assembled mosaic of imagery from Opportunity, looking east-southeast over Endeavour Crater to the far side just before sunset. You can see Opportunity's dust-covered solar panels and color-calibration sundial in the foreground. In the distance, you can see the long shadows cast on the crater floor — including the slight bump of a shadow that could well have been cast by Opportunity itself. It's a picture to marvel over, and astronomer/educator Stuart Atkinson does his fair share of marveling on the "Road to Endeavour" website. Emily Lakdawalla provides further details about Davis' rendition on the Planetary Society Blog.

Copyright Don Davis / NASA / JPL / Cornell

Don Davis created this mosaic from imagery sent back from Mars by NASA's Opportunity rover as the sun was setting on Jan. 27. The rover is looking out from a ridge toward the far rim of Endeavour Crater. The shadow of the ridge, and Opportunity itself, can be made out on the crater floor, toward the right edge of the image.

A little section of this picture served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page earlier today. It didn't take long for Josh Jones to figure out what the picture showed, and to reward his mastery of a Martian mystery, I'm sending him a pair of 3-D glasses. Join the Cosmic Log Facebook community and stay tuned for the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle.

Speaking of Mars, my space-watching colleagues and I touched upon Red Planet research and other cosmic topics during the Weekly Space Hangout on Thursday. To wind up the week, here's the webcast, courtesy of Universe Today's Fraser Cain:

More about Mars:

• Rocks hint at strong quakes on Mars
• Mars orbiter spies on past probes
• NASA aims to shift money from Mars to space tech

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Home Microbiome Study

A graph charts the relative proportions of different types of bacteria on shoes (odd-numbered columns) and cell phones (even-numbered columns). For a detailed breakdown, check the Home Microbiome Study website.

Your cell phone and your shoes have whole communities of microbes living on them, as distinctive as the germs on your fingers and in your mouth.

Among the bacteria that typically live in your pocket are the relatives of nasty bugs that can cause pneumonia, meningitis and gonorrhea. In contrast, the soles of your shoes could harbor bacteria related to E. coli, salmonella and the microscopic critters that cause pink eye.

Eww, right? Maybe a more appropriate reaction would be "Wow!" At least that's the way I see it, as a participant in what could be the world's first comparative study of smartphones and shoes.

"We've never actually done this stunt before," said Jack Gilbert, a microbial ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues had yours truly and 30 other journalists swab their phones and their shoes to collect the microbial samples last weekend in Vancouver, Canada, during a news briefing at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The results of the DNA tests, conducted under the auspices of the Earth Microbiome Project, were distributed today.

Jonathan Eisen, a microbiologist at the University of California at Davis, said today's gene-sequencing technologies makes it possible to process genetic samples for mere hundreds of dollars, as opposed to millions of dollars, in a fraction of the time it used to take. "Five years ago, this would have taken our lab six months or more," he said.

That technological quantum leap is opening up new scientific frontiers. "For the first time, we're able to do surveys of places quickly and cheaply," Eisen said. "It's like we're kids in a candy store."

Last year, researchers turned up the "eww" factor by analyzing the microbial communities in public restrooms, which include germs linked to staph and diarrhea. Some of the researchers involved in the Earth Microbiome Project charted the microbial signatures of toilet seats, restroom floors and sink surfaces, and found that the flush handles and seats were "relatively enriched" with bacteria from our bowels.

Home Microbiome Study

Genetic markers distinguish between the samples taken from shoes (in blue) and the samples taken from cell phones (in red).

Compared to those findings, the results from the phone-vs.-shoe study are positively tame. "We found nothing that was pathogenic ... which means all of you are healthy. That's a good thing," Gilbert said.

There was a clear difference between the bacterial signatures of our shoes and our phones, although a couple of the samples look as if they were switched — suggesting that journalists don't always follow directions.

The researchers couldn't take samples from our bodies, because that would have run counter to the privacy guidelines for their experiments. But the fact that the cellphone samples were so similar suggests that we nurture those microbial communities with the germs from our hands. And we're not talking just about phones.

"One of the reporters in the room didn't have a phone on him, and said, 'Could you sample my wallet instead?' The sample from his wallet looks exactly like the smartphones," Gilbert said.

As for those nasty-sounding bacterial types, Gilbert said we shouldn't worry too much. These bacteria are almost certainly benign cousins to the bad sort of bugs. "The hypothesis is that the good bacteria are out-competing the bad bacteria," Gilbert said. "If they weren't there, the pathogens may be able to take root."

Our shoes reflected a wider diversity of microbes than the cell phones did — which makes sense when you consider how much we had to walk through to get to the news briefing in Vancouver. "There was one pair of shoes which was a significant outlier to the rest of the data," Gilbert observed. "We don't know why. It could have been that the person who owned those shoes may have stepped in some mud or something. ... If the person's been walking in a different environment from everybody else, we could potentially trace where someone is walking."

Which raises the question: Could your microbes serve as diagnostic tool, or even a detective tool? Researchers have talked about being able to figure out what ails you by analyzing your personal microbiome, but they're not there yet. Eventually, it may even be possible to read your whole history by checking exactly which bacteria you've picked up from which places.

"There's enough to suggest that this might be a tool, but the robustness of that tool would have to be seriously investigated," Gilbert said.

That's what the Earth Microbiome Project is all about.

"Anybody out there who is interested in microbes in the water, microbes in the air, microbes on skin, microbes on pets ... anybody can participate in the Earth Microbiome Project," Eisen said. "I can imagine scaling up to millions and millions of samples. If a citizen science project or a high-school class has an interesting quest, they can do this now."

Is that something that makes you go eww, wow ... or uh-oh? Please feel free to make your opinion known by registering a vote above, or leaving a comment below.

More about microbes:

• Scientists map the world's microbes
• Bacteria's slimy biofilm could help humans
• Scientists study belly-button bacteria
• Soap isn't always as clean as it seems
• Bacteria prefer prime real estate

For more about the phone-vs.-shoe experiment, check out the Home Microbiome Study's website and Facebook page.

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 or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Traders have solidified their positions on the Oscar prediction markets — and if the wisdom of crowds holds true, Sunday will be a big night for "The Artist," the Hollywood throwback to the silent era.

In addition to being the favorite for best picture, "The Artist" is projected to be in the spotlight for best director (Michel Hazanavicius) and best actor (Jean Dujardin). Viola Davis, who played a leading role in "The Help," has the highest-valued shares in the best-actress market. Christopher Plummer ("Beginners") and Octavia Spencer ("The Help") are favored for best supporting actor and actress, respectively.

These are the clear verdicts from the Hollywood Stock Exchange and Intrade, two of the prediction markets catering to Oscar picks.

Such markets let traders "invest" (basically, bet) on the outcome of a future decision. Traders invest in a particular proposition  — for example, that George Clooney, the star of "The Descendants," will get the best-actor Oscar. If that proposition comes true, the investor would get $25 in play money for each share on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, or $10 in real money on Intrade. If it doesn't come true, the shares become worthless.

In the political sphere, prediction markets have been found to be at least as accurate as traditional polling, because traders get pretty savvy about adjusting their investments to reflect new data. The method has been applied not only to politics and the Oscars, but to flu epidemic forecasts and financial forecasts as well.

Beyond the top six categories, HSX is going with "The Descendants" for adapted screenplay and "Midnight in Paris" for original screenplay. Intrade, meanwhile, favors "Rango" for best animated feature. The trading generally reflects the mainstream thinking, but this year it has shown a shift in sentiment from Clooney to Dujardin.

Last year, the Oscars followed the Hollywood Stock Exchange's market trends in seven out of the eight categories covered. The wisdom of crowds was wrong only when it came to best director. Will the markets do as well this year? Would you care to bet? I'll update this item after the Oscars with the results.

By the way, Mitt Romney is favored to win the Michigan and Arizona GOP presidential primaries on the Intrade markets, despite the social-media buzz over Rick Santorum. Romney also leads the pack for the Republican nomination, on Intrade as well as the Iowa Electronic Markets. GOP Newt Gingrich is showing some surprising volatility on the IEM — but isn't volatility exactly what you'd expect from Newt?

Update for 11:45 p.m. ET Feb. 26: It's another seven-out-of-eight performance for the Hollywood Stock Exchange. The one big surprise: Meryl Streep, not Viola Davis, won the best-actress Oscar. Who would have thought Streep would be the underdog in the pre-Oscar handicapping? If you bet on Streep today, you could have more than doubled your money on Intrade. The closing price was 35.5, and if you were lucky enough to buy in at that level, each $3.55 that you put in would get you $10. All the other top-valued picks on HSX and Intrade won their Oscars. 

More about the Oscars:

• Will 'The Artist' dance away with best-picture Oscar?
• George Clooney to claim best-actor Oscar? Wanna bet?
• Oscar time! Stay near the stars in Hollywood

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 or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Astronauts may have more food options available to them by the time they go on trips to Mars, as shown in this artist's conception, and NASA wants to be ready when the time comes.

Want to get paid $5,500, plus expenses, for tasting different kinds of space food on Hawaii's Big Island for four months? Join the crowd: About 100 people have applied for the job so far, and there are still six days to go before the deadline.

There are a few catches, though: You'd have to be cooped up in a fake Mars habitat for most of that time, cut off from the rest of the world except for a time-delayed communication link. Forget about packing the bikini. Anytime you leave the habitat, you'd have to wear a bulky spacesuit. And don't expect a luau. The whole point of this exercise is to find out whether it's better to feed you freeze-dried and dehydrated foods, or let you make your own meals from "shelf-stable" ingredients such as flour, beans, rice and cheese. For 120 days, you'll have to write detailed assessments of all those meals ... as well as your own mood.

Such is the life awaiting six prime crew members and two alternates next year during a 120-day simulated Mars mission known as Hawaii Space Exploration Analogue and Simulation, or HI-SEAS.

University of Hawaii researcher Kim Binsted says the applications have been streaming in as the Feb. 29 deadline approaches. She can tell where HI-SEAS has gotten a shot of publicity by keeping track of where the emails are coming from on any particular day. "Apparently Italy heard about us yesterday," she said. By next week, she expects to have 200 or so applications to choose from.

The selection criteria are relatively stringent: a bachelor's degree in science, math or engineering ... three years of graduate school or professional experience ... ability to pass a flight physical exam ... 24 months of being tobacco-free. Plus, of course, a normal sense of taste and smell. "We're looking for people who would be as astronaut-like as possible," Binsted told me.

The simulation, conducted by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, is designed to find out which kinds of foods would make the most sense for a months-long mission beyond Earth orbit. Are meals be more satisfying if they're made from bulk ingredients, or will it turn out that the usual pre-packaged, no-muss meals are actually more suited to space missions?

Douglas C. Pizac / AP file

Gus Frederick, right, examines his camera as Greg Drayer looks on during a mission near the Mars Desert Research Station, northwest of Hanksville, Utah. The Hawaii mission simulation is likely to use a similar type of mock spacesuit.

After selection and training, the crew members will travel to Hawaii in early 2013 and get settled inside a simulated habitat that will probably be set up in the Big Island's Saddle Road area. Binsted said "it's very stark, very Marslike," with fresh lava flows from the Mauna Loa volcano. In addition to their food-tasting duties, the crew members should have some spare time to conduct other research studies, as long as they stay in character for the simulation.

Binsted said the entire three-year project is supported by a $947,000 NASA grant, and about a third of that will go toward the 120-day taste test. The project also includes a head-down, bed-rest study that's being conducted at the NASA Flight Analogs Research Center in Galveston, Texas, to simulate the effects of long-term microgravity.

Many astronauts have observed that food seems to lose its flavor in space — which is why hot sauce is such a popular condiment for crews on the International Space Station. Binsted said the bed-rest study could determine whether the hot-sauce effect arises because of a physical effect (for example, swelling of the nasal passages in zero-G) or a psychological effect.

"There's not a lot of 'spice' in their life, so maybe they have to get it from their food," she said.

More about space food and simulations:

• Wanted: Six mock Mars astronauts with the right stuffing
• Pale-faced crew emerges from 520-day mock Mars mission
• Space spice gets five stars from space station crew
• First Mars astronauts may grow their own food

To learn more about Hi-SEAS and apply to join the crew, check out the project's call for participants. Application deadline is 11:59 p.m. Hawaii time on Feb. 29. You can also follow @HI-SEAS on Twitter.

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 or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This temple in the Kingdom of Tikal is one of the most prominent of the Classic Maya Period.

Scientists have long assumed that the Classic Maya civilization was done in more than a millennium ago by a series of droughts, but now they say natural records suggest those droughts were "modest," with no more than a 40 percent reduction in rainfall. And that, in turn, suggests that similarly modest climate changes over the next century could have a not-so-modest effect.

"What seems like a minor reduction in water availability may lead to important, long-lasting problems ... Today, we have the benefit of awareness, and we should act accordingly," Martin Medina-Elizalde, a researcher at the Yucatan Center for Scientific Research in Mexico, said in a news release.

The study — conducted by Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling, a colleague from the University of Southampton — appears in this week's issue of the journal Science. It addresses one of the big mysteries of Maya history: What caused a civilization that dominated areas of present-day Guatemala and Mexico in the year 800 to collapse by the year 1000? Deforestation and drought have figured prominently as the prime suspects, but just how dire did those droughts get?

To shed additional light on the mystery, the two climate experts analyzed chemicals in lake sediments, marine shells and cave stalagmites to track variations in rainfall. For example, the ratio of oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 in a particular layer of mineral can tell you how much rainfall fell during the season when the mineral was laid down. Such variations can be read year by year, like tree rings.

Science / AAAS

The elements in different layers of stalagmites in Yucatan Peninsula caves, such as this one, were analyzed to determine how rainfall varied through the centuries.

The researchers found that there was indeed a deficit in rainfall in the period between the years 800 and 1000. But that deficit was modest, amounting to a 25 to 40 percent reduction in the drought years. Medina-Elizalde and Rohling assume that the droughts took the form of reductions in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms during the summer.

"Summer was the main season for cultivation and replenishment of Mayan freshwater storage systems, and there are no rivers in the Yucatan lowlands," Rohling said in the news release. "Societal disruptions and abandonment of cities are likely consequences of critical water shortages, especially because there seems to have been a rapid repetition of multiyear droughts."

In an email, Medina-Elizalde told me that "these droughts may not have been strong enough to cause by themselves the collapse of the civilization, but they were likely strong enough and persistent enough ... to cause major sociopolitical disruptions that ultimately led to the final outcome."

"Let's imagine that today, from one year to another, major cities can no longer supply fresh water to a third of their populations. ... With no freshwater pumping systems, how would we keep producing agricultural produce and supplying fresh water to support the entire populations of these cities?" he wrote.

Today, much of the Yucatan Peninsula's rural population still relies on summer rainfall to support their crops. Medina-Elizalde said access to fresh water isn't so much of a problem, thanks to modern pumping systems. But he noted that lower-than-average summer rains still "have fairly dire consequences" for local farmers.

The current models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that there could be annual rainfall reductions of up to 50 percent in the Yucatan Peninsula by the end of this century, Medina-Elizalde said. He and his colleagues are studying how such reductions might affect freshwater supplies in the region.

"Some climate models suggest that local vegetation does contribute to increase rainfall significantly ... which would suggest that by preserving the forests, we are mitigating the impacts of climate change," he said. "Definitely, local governments need to start making serious efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change in light of the forecast for the next decades."

What do you think? Does this research merely add an interesting twist on a centuries-old story, or does it serve as a warning about our future fate? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about climate and ancient civilizations:

• How climate change kills societies
• Ancient city survived as civilizations collapsed
• Mystery behind Khmer civilization's ruin revealed
• Will climate change change us?

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

CERN

The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away.

Months after researchers reported that they measured neutrinos traveling faster than light, they're finding that the incredible result may have been due to a bad connection rather than a violation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

The potential instrumental glitches, first reported by ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge, is addressed in a statement from the OPERA Collaboration, the group behind the controversial neutrino-beam experiments.

Last year, the OPERA team made ultra-precise measurements of how long it took for neutrinos to make the 450-mile (732-kilometer) trip between the CERN particle physics lab on the French-Swiss border and Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory. When they took the speed of light and a wide variety of other experimental factors into consideration, they determined that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds before they should have.

If the results were to stand up, they'd mark the first failed test for Einstein's century-old theory. That's one reason why researchers found them so hard to believe, even though a repetition of the experiment yielded the same results. The OPERA team has been reviewing the entire experiment, and several other research groups have been trying to replicate it. A key concern has been the Global Positioning Satellite system used to clock the neutrinos' transit time. The measurements are required to be so precise that the relativistic effects of Earth's gravitational field on the GPS system had to be taken into account.

Now sources familiar with the OPERA review say scientists have identified two potential problems with the experimental apparatus. One has to do with a fiber-optic connector that sends a GPS time stamp to the experiment's master clock. That connector may not have been functioning correctly when the neutrino-timing measurements were made, and as a result, the recorded flight time would be shorter than the actual time. That alone could explain the seemingly faster-than-light results.

Another potential problem has to do with the oscillator that was used to generate the time stamps for GPS synchronization. This problem could have made the flight time look longer than it really was.

The sources I contacted via email declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak in advance of the statement issued Thursday. One of the scientists said the glitches should not be characterized as "errors," but instead as "nasty instrumental effects."

CERN spokesman James Gillies confirmed that the GPS connector problem was being investigated, but he emphasized that the effects still had to be confirmed. "More beam will be needed before we know for sure," he told me in an email. Tests with short pulsed beams have been scheduled for May.

Update for 9 a.m. ET Feb. 23: CERN has issued the expected statement about the potential glitches:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Update for 1:53 p.m. ET Feb. 23: Here's a similar statement from Italy's nuclear research institute, INFN:

"The OPERA Collaboration, by continuing its campaign of verifications on the neutrino velocity measurement, has identified two issues that could significantly affect the reported result. The first one is linked to the oscillator used to produce the event's time-stamps in between the GPS synchronizations. The second point is related to the connection of the optical fiber bringing the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock.

 "These two issues can modify the neutrino time of flight in opposite directions. While continuing our investigations, in order to unambiguously quantify the effect on the observed result, the Collaboration is looking forward to performing a new measurement of the neutrino velocity as soon as a new bunched beam will be available in 2012. An extensive report on the above mentioned verifications and results will be shortly made available to the scientific committees and agencies."

More about those pesky neutrinos:

• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
• Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

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

The YouTube Space Lab program aims to get students thinking about outer space as their experimental sphere.

Can zero gravity open the way to better fungicides, novel types of liquid circuitry and magnets ... and previously unseen snowflake shapes? Those are the kinds of questions that six teams of teens want to answer as they move into the final phase of the YouTube Space Lab competition.

The regional winners were named today and will gather in Washington next month for a series of events and tours, including a March 22 awards ceremony. The contest is divided into two age categories, for 14- to 16-year-olds and 17- to 18-year-olds. Three teams were selected in each category to represent the Americas, the Asia-Pacific region, and the Europe/Africa/Middle East region.

While they're in Washington, the teens will be treated to a weightless airplane flight and a special tour and dinner at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center, which will be home to the retired space shuttle Discovery by that time.

The regional winners were chosen in a process that was guided by judges as well as by votes cast by more than 150,000 YouTube users. Next month, the judges will announce the top teams in the two age categories. Those teams will have their zero-G experiments run on the International Space Station and live-streamed on YouTube over a Lenovo laptop. The two top teams can travel to Japan this summer to watch their experiment launch as part of Japan's robotic HTV-3 space station supply mission — or they can choose to go through cosmonaut training in Russia once they turn 18.

One of the experiments would send a bacteria with fungus-fighting properties, known as Bacillus subtilis, into space to see whether growth in weightlessness enhances its virulence. Earlier experiments have shown that to be the case for salmonella bacteria, a common culprit in food poisoning.

The other proposed experiments would study how zero-G affects surfactants, ferrofluid magnets, ice crystallization, heat transfer and even the hunting habits of jumping spiders. Rather than going into the details here, let's have the regional winners themselves explain their research:

The Space Lab competition is sponsored by YouTube, Lenovo and Space Adventures, in cooperation with NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The man behind the idea is Zahaan Bharmal, Google's head of marketing operations for Europe, Middle East and Africa.

"This grand project demonstrates that math and science matter," Bharmal said in today's announcement of the regional winners. "These six winners represent the next generation of scientists and even space explorers. Their families, schools, local communities and countries should be very proud."

Amen to that.

More about student science projects:

• Hey, kids! Put your space experiment in orbit
• Biochemist bags top prize at Google Science Fair
• Obama takes his best shot at White House science fair
• Formerly homeless teen gets presidential shout-out

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

Roberts et al. / AGU / HiRISE / NASA

Scientists have found evidence of relatively recent quakes on the surface of Mars by studying boulders that fell off cliffs, leaving tracks behind.

Geologists see signs that seismic shocks as powerful as magnitude-7 quakes on Earth have rumbled on the Red Planet recently, and such "marsquakes" could be a good thing for the search for life on Mars.

"The fact that Mars is geologically active means that it may offer geothermal power, subsurface liquid water, and extant life," Robert Zubrin, a rocket scientist and president of the nonprofit Mars Society, told me in an email.

The study that's getting Zubrin's juices flowing appears in Thursday's issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets.

A research team led by Gerald Roberts, a geologist at the University of London's Birkbeck center, charted ruptures in the Martian crust and the trails left behind by dislodged boulders, as seen in high-resolution images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The researchers compared the images with earthly faults to gauge what kinds of disturbances could have caused the changes they saw. They also looked at how much Martian dust was covering over the evidence, to estimate how long ago the disturbances happened.

Their conclusion? Powerful earthquakes have rattled Mars in recent geologic time, and may well be rumbling on Mars today.

The researchers acknowledged there could be other ways for boulders to loosen up and go tumbling on Mars. For example, ice or frozen soil could thaw along the rim of a crater, setting off an avalanche. Other researchers have said meteor strikes can cause avalanches as well. But Roberts and his colleagues saw a pattern in which the size and the number of dislodged boulders gradually decreased over a radius of 62 miles (100 kilometers), moving out from a central point on a fault line in Mars' Cerberus Fossae region. The biggest dislodged boulders were 65 feet (20 meters) wide.

"This is consistent with the hypothesis that boulders had been mobilized by ground-shaking, and that the severity of the ground-shaking decreased away from the epicenter of marsquakes," Roberts said in a news release from the American Geophysical Union, which publishes JGR-Planets.

An image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows an avalanche in progress in Mars' north polar region. Such avalanches could be caused by thawing ice, or meteor impacts, or marsquakes.

The fact that the trails left behind by the boulders have not yet been erased by Martian winds suggested to the researchers that the rumbling happened relatively recently, perhaps sometime in the past few million years. And the pattern of the disruption suggested that the seismic activity at Cerberus Fossae hit magnitude 7, which is comparable to the strength of the quake that hit Haiti in 2010.

"The magnitude 7 is based on comparison on the size of the ruptured piece of crust," Roberts told me in an email. "On Earth, a rupture of several hundred kilometers and 15-kilometer depth would be typical for, say, a California magnitude-7 earthquake. The energy release is proportional to the size of the rupture. ... Thus, on Mars the same energy would be released, but the weaker gravity would mean the effect of shaking would be more severe in terms of vertical motions of particles on the surface — things would be thrown in the air more easily."

You might think that would be bad news for future Mars exploration. If you were an astronaut on Mars, a magnitude-7 quake is not the sort of thing you'd want to go through. If you're an astrobiologist, however, it might be very good news. Seismic activity could serve as a source of energy for microbes beneath the Martian surface. And as Zubrin suggests, seismic activity could be harnessed as an energy source for future settlements.

But is it for real? Right now, the evidence is based merely on image analysis rather than on-the-ground measurements. Roberts noted that the Mars Viking landers, which touched down on the Red Planet in 1976, had seismometers. They also had wind-speed sensors.

"The problem was that when the wind was strong ... the lander shook, setting off the seismometers," Roberts said. "The problem was the design, as it would have been better to have put the seismometers on the ground, as in the Apollo lunar instruments."

NASA has been considering a mission known as InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) as one of three options for future funding as part of the space agency's Discovery Program. If InSight is selected, a spacecraft equipped with a seismometer, a heat-flow probe and other sensors would be sent to Mars in 2016.

NASA's Mars program is currently up in the air, but if InSight or something like it gets off the ground, we might find out how frequent and how powerful those marsquakes can get.

More about Mars:

• Seismic study hints at a rumbling Mars
• Martian life might thrive in lava tubes
• Are Martian volcanoes still ready to rumble?
• Volcano vents could point to Martian life

In addition to Roberts, the authors of "Possible Evidence of Palaeomarsquakes From Fallen Boulder Populations, Cerberus Fossae, Mars" include Brian Matthews, Chris Bristow, Luca Guerrieri and Joyce Vetterlein.

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

When Occupy Wall Street and similar protests played out over the past year, the phenomenon looked familiar to Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal: He's seen similar moral outrage over economic inequity expressed by monkeys and chimps. And he thinks we could learn a lesson or two from our fellow primates.

"The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated," he told reporters today, on the final day of this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Canada. "Inequity is not good for your health, basically."

Based on primate studies, that goes for the haves as well as the have-nots. Far from being a uniquely human quality, a sense of fairness is something biologists have seen in studies of primates as well as crows and dogs. Even elephants may have an appreciation of inequity, although de Waal said he and his colleagues haven't done such a study with that species because "you don't want to piss off an elephant."

One of the classic studies involves capuchin monkeys who were given treats when they exchanged tokens with their human handlers. Two types of treats were offered: cucumber slices (meh...) and grapes (yum!). If one monkey saw that another monkey was consistently getting grapes while she was getting only cucumber slices, she'd quickly start protesting — by flinging the cucumber back at the handler and angrily jumping onto the cage walls.

"This is basically the Wall Street protest right here," de Waal said.

De Waal's replay of the scene never fails to get a human laugh, whether it's at the AAAS meeting or at a TEDx conference in Atlanta, as shown in the must-see video above. But there are serious points behind the laughter: Inequality causes tension and stress, not only for the one who gets the cucumber, but also for the one gets the grape (or a million-dollar bonus) and has to endure the resulting outrage.

Researchers set up a barter game with capuchin monkeys to see how they responded to unequal payoffs. For the full story behind this experiment, check out the NSF Science Nation video.

Some primates actually get the message. "In some combinations, the one who gets the grape refuses it unless the other one gets the grape," de Waal said. Other primates make a different choice. De Waal pointed to a chimpanzee study of selfish vs. altrustic behavior, in which the chimps are more likely to be in a sharing mood if they've attracted the attention of another chimp. However, they're not quite as likely to share if the other chimp is actively pressing them to do so.

The bottom line from de Waal's talk is that a sense of fairness, outrage over moral equality and the ability to reconcile and cooperate are not uniquely human behaviors. Rather, such sensibilities were hard-wired into brains long before the rise of the human species. This is reflected in neuroscience as well, de Waal said. "Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making," he observed.

All this meshes with the message of de Waal's latest book, "The Age of Empathy." For more from de Waal about the altruism of animals, check out my Q&A from 2009.

Here are a few more nuggets from de Waal's lecture and news briefing in Vancouver:

• Different primate species express signs of reconciliation in different ways. For example, stumptail monkeys make up by inspecting each other's rear ends, without ever looking each other in the eye. In contrast, chimps and other apes (including us hairless apes) "need eye contact" when they reconcile their differences, de Waal said.
• Men make a characteristic pursed-lip gesture when expressing regret — a gesture that's also widely seen in other male primates under similar circumstances. But de Waal says it's rarer to see women making that pursed-lip look.
• Empathy — the ability to share an emotional connection with other individuals — isn't unique to humans. But humans, like many other species, make a distinction between in-group and out-group connections. Having a sense of empathy for people beyond our "in-group," however that's defined, may be a "fragile experiment" being conducted by our species, de Waal said.
• During an earlier session at the AAAS meeting, a group of scientists and philosophers called for the promulgation of a "Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans." De Waal was asked what he thought of setting up a declaration of rights for non-human primates, and he replied that he generally took a "welfarist" view toward other species. Humans were bound by an obligation to animals rather than by a set of rights drawn up on their behalf, he said. He pointed to the recently adopted limits on chimpanzee research as an example. "If they [chimps] are not so necessary for biomedical studies, should we be using them in biomedical studies?" de Waal asked.

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Lab-grown burger to be served this fall for $330,000
• Scientists map the world's microbes
• Device turns gestures into song
• Researchers working to build a better leaf
• Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

Francois Lenoir / Reuters file

Dutch scientist Mark Post displays samples of lab-grown meat at the University of Maastricht.

The quest to grow meat in a lab rather than on an animal is due to reach its climax this fall, with the first-ever culture-dish hamburger served to a celebrity taster after a $330,000 development effort.

Mark Post, a physiologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, said the project is being funded by an anonymous investor who is interested in "life-transforming technologies" and believes lab-grown meat could revolutionize the food industry.

"It's a reputable source of money, I can tell you," Post said today in Vancouver, Canada, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Post hopes the tasting will be a media event, with experimental chef Heston Blumenthal cooking the burger. The patty will be much like a regular quarter-pounder — but with one big difference: This one will be created by growing bovine stem cells in a vat, transforming them into thousands of thin layers of beef muscle cells, mincing them into tiny pieces, then combining the bits with lab-grown animal fat to form a lump of meat the size of a golf ball.

If Post and his colleagues succeed, it would mark a technological triumph after years of working to improve upon the current, millennia-old method for making meat. Researchers in the field say the livestock industry in its current incarnation is too energy-intensive and land-intensive for a global population that's rising in numbers and affluence.

Meat production already takes up more than half of the world's estimated agricultural capacity, in one way or another. U.N. figures show that animal farming takes up 30 percent of the planet's exposed land mass. And over the next 40 years, the demand for meat products is expected to double.

If the researchers' assumptions are correct, growing meat in the lab "could reduce the energy expenditure by about 40 percent," Post said. Lab-grown meat has also won the endorsement of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, because the stem cells could be extracted without killing animals.

The money behind the meat
Post has been talking about serving up the first lab-grown burger for a long time, but it took the anonymous 250,000-euro ($330,000) contribution to turn the dream into reality. Traditional meat producers weren't interested in changing their ways, and were doubtful about success, he said. "Most people don't believe it's ever going to happen," he told reporters.

When Post started working on the project, he focused on growing stem cells from pigs to create a lab-grown sausage, but he said "my financier was not very interested in sausages."

There's still a long way to go between now and the celebrity cookout: Post said he doesn't yet know what the burger would taste like, because the samples that have been grown so far are too small. The pinkish-yellowish strips of muscle cells are only about an inch (3 centimeters) long, a half-inch (1.5 centimeter) wide, and so thin (1 millimeter) that they're semi-transparent. Post feels confident that his team can perfect the process by October, but full commercialization could take another 10 years or more.

The good news is that if there's someone out there willing to buy the second lab-grown hamburger, they can get it for "an extreme reduction in price," Post told me. He estimates that piece of meat should cost just 200,000 euros ($263,000).

Beyond meat
It's worth asking whether the quest to grow lab-grown meat is worth the effort, considering that there are already vegetarian alternatives to meat. Aren't tofurky and field roast good enough? Post and others note that such products haven't made a significant dent in the meat market, and are generally more expensive than the meat items they're meant to replace.

"If there is a vegetable-derived product that can take away the human being's craving for meat, that would be preferable," Post said.

Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown says he's working on precisely that kind of stuff, and it could be on the market in the next year or so.

"We have a class of products that just totally rocks and cannot be distinguished from the animal-based product it replaces, even by hardcore foodies," he said. He promised that his plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products would be tasty, nutritious — and profitable.

"I think it's going to be one of the easier things I've done," he said.

Brown joked that he couldn't talk about the details, "because if I did, I'd have to kill you." He'd say only that he "had no trouble getting investment" from a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. To commercialize the concept, two ventures have been set up with placeholder names: Sand Hill Foods and Jasper Ridge Creamery.

The way Brown sees it, the meat industry is a "sitting duck for disruptive technology," offering a rich target for alternatives. He said the wholesale market for unprocessed meat has been estimated at $150 billion a year, which is 250 times the current market for meat alternatives.

Even though Post said the meat industry has been generally standoffish about lab alternatives, some companies are going against the grain: Nicholas Genovese, a visiting scholar at the University of Missouri at Columbia, told journalists that JBS, one of the world's biggest meat-packing companies, was interested in his parallel effort to grow meat in the lab.

More about the future of food:

• Scientists turn stem cells into pork
  
• Beef producers see America losing its appetite
• The skinny on milk nutrition: Cow, goat, rice or soy?
• Future of food: Drinkable bagels and beyond

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Scientists map the world's microbes
• Device turns gestures into song
• Researchers working to build a better leaf
• Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

Last updated 7 p.m. ET.

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

Researchers have created a system that converts hand gestures into speech, and yes, into song as well. Although the system isn't yet ready for a shot at "American Idol," its name — Digital Ventriloquized Actor, or DiVA — gives you an idea where the technology is going.

"It is a singing synthesizer," said Sidney Fels, director of the University of British Columbia's Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Center, or MAGIC. Fels explained how DiVA does its thing today in Vancouver at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With the gestures of the right hand, DiVA's operator controls the pitch and the character of the sounds. Closed-hand gestures produce consonants. Open-hand gestures produce vowels. Meanwhile, the left hand is hooked up with finger contacts to create stop sounds like and buh. "We designed a gestural space that mimics the vocal tract," Fels explained.

The result is eerie: In the video above, you'll see a singer accompanying herself with the DiVA's voice. (I'm not ready to put it on my playlist just yet.) And in a series of videos, DiVA operator Sageev Oore synthetically sings the alphabet song and recites Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham" verse as if he were playing two characters. (Which is kind of like Gollum talking to himself in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.)

If DiVA goes commercial, it could provide a new way for people with speech disabilities to make themselves heard. But why go to all that trouble when there are other speech synthesizers out there, including the electronic voice made famous by physicist Stephen Hawking?

"The problem with that is, you won't be able to sing. You won't be able to be expressive," Fels said.

One of the intended applications for the technology is to create new types of singing musical instruments that can be played in real time. Fels said there have been five compositions written for DiVA so far, played by musicians trained to use the device. "It takes about 100 hours for a performer to learn how to speak and use the system," Fels said in a news release.

The gloves, the volume-control foot pedals, the magnetic-sensor system and other components that bring DiVA to life can get rather unwieldy. "It's a backpack full of equipment," Fels told journalists. "I wouldn't walk around the restaurant and order sushi with it." But Fels and his MAGIC team are developing a version that can be operated with a computer tablet.

That hints at what may be more important applications in the longer run. The DiVA project got started as a way to teach people how to control a complex system with gestures and give them auditory feedback to let them know when they're doing the gestures right.

"Other possible applications for this discovery are interfaces to make certain tasks easier, such as controlling cranes or other heavy machinery," Fels said. It's also conceivable that gesture-based training might offer an alternative way to learn and practice foreign languages, particularly Asian dialects that depend on precise tonal control.

Gesture-controlled input devices ranging from Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Kinect have already revolutionized the gaming industry. Will DiVA, or other devices like it, open up a whole new frontier for the field? Does the future belong to gestures? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about gesture-controlled devices:

• Game device adapted for a robot's touch
• Control the cosmos with your fingers
• Hack lets game device read sign language
• Will your next smartphone recognize gestures?

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Researchers working to build a better leaf
• Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

Since I mentioned Kinect, I should note that msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft as well as NBC Universal.

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

Researchers are analyzing the molecular pathways that plants use for photosynthesis.

Researchers have been trying for decades to improve upon Mother Nature's favorite solar-power trick — photosynthesis — but now they finally think they see the sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

"We now understand photosynthesis much better than we did 20 years ago," said Richard Cogdell, a botanist at the University of Glasgow who has been doing research on bacterial photosynthesis for more than 30 years. He and three colleagues discussed their efforts to tweak the process that powers the world's plant life today in Vancouver, Canada, during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The researchers are taking different approaches to the challenge, but what they have in common is their search for ways to get something extra out of the biochemical process that uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. "You can really view photosynthesis as an assembly line with about 168 steps," said Steve Long, head of the University of Illinois' Photosynthesis and Atmospheric Change Laboratory.

Revving up Rubisco
Howard Griffiths, a plant physiologist at the University of Cambridge, just wants to make improvements in one section of that assembly line. His research focuses on ways to get more power out of the part of the process driven by an enzyme called Rubisco. He said he's trying to do what many auto mechanics have done to make their engines run more efficiently: "You turbocharge it."

Some plants, such as sugar cane and corn, already have a turbocharged Rubisco engine, thanks to a molecular pathway known as C4. Geneticists believe the C4 pathway started playing a significant role in plant physiology in just the past 10 million years or so. Now Griffiths is looking into strategies to add the C4 turbocharger to rice, which ranks among the world's most widely planted staple crops.

The new cellular machinery might be packaged in a micro-compartment that operates within the plant cell. That's the way biochemical turbochargers work in algae and cyanobacteria. Griffiths and his colleagues are looking at ways to create similar micro-compartments for higher plants. The payoff would come in the form of more efficient carbon dioxide conversion, with higher crop productivity as a result. "For a given amount of carbon gain, the plant uses less water," Griffiths said.

Making the grid more efficient
Anne K. Jones, a biochemist at Arizona State University, wants to make use of the power that goes to waste during photosynthesis. On a sunny day, a plant's molecular machinery generates more electrons than the Rubisco carbohydrate-producing engine can handle. "A lot of those electrons get thrown away," she said.

In this sense, photosynthesis is like "a badly connected electrical grid," Jones said. She's studying ways to use biological nanowires to transfer the extra energy from the light-harvesting cell into another cell that's genetically engineered to produce fuel or food. The nanowires would be analogous to electrical transmission lines, distributing power from one part of the grid to another.

Jones said filaments found on the surface of many bacterial species, known as pili, could be adapted for this purpose. Other researchers have already been looking into using those filaments as the basis for bioelectronic circuits.

"Components in future systems need not even be biological, so long as they interface with the wires developed in this project, paving the way for hybrid biological/inorganic photosynthetic systems," Jones explained in an abstract for her presentation.

Creating an artificial leaf
Jones' research meshes with Cogdell's efforts to adapt the chemistry of photosynthesis ujsing synthetic biology. Cogdell's project, backed by Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is aimed at developing an artificial leaf that produces a dense, portable fuel you could put in your car.

"We would aim to produce hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide," he said. His favorite candidate is terpene, the main ingredient in the plant resins that are today distilled into turpentine. Under the right conditions, terpene behaves "rather like octane," Cogdell said.

He envisions a process in which carbon dioxide and water are chemically processed to produce a scummy sheen of terpene, which could be skimmed off and turned into fuel. Even though the end product is a hydrocarbon, the process would be carbon-neutral because of the CO2 capture, Cogdell said.

"We can't do it yet, but we have a dream," he told me.

Whether the future belongs to artificial leaves, or nanowired bacteria, or turbocharged rice, all these researchers believe that coming up with a better way to turn sunlight into energy is a crucial challenge for the next generation. They estimated that there was only a 30- to 50-year window for completing the transition from the fossil-fuel era to the age of total renewable energy.

Griffiths said the next generation will need more food as well as more fuel. He referred to the "green revolution" that has transformed global agriculture over the past half-century, and added that "what we now need is a new green revolution for the next 50 years."

Cogdell echoed that view: "This is one of the grand challenges that mankind faces," he said.

Do you agree? Which path will lead us out of the energy crunch, the climate-change conundrum and the fuel-vs.-food debate we're dealing with today? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More on the future of plants:

• 'Artificial leaf' makes real fuel
• Mimicking plant evolution proves fruitful
• Chinese automaker suggests photosynthesizing car
• Six green-energy ideas so crazy they just might work

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

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

The CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso experiment sends muon neutrinos through a tunnel at the French-Swiss border in the direction of a detector in Italy, more than 450 miles away. One of the group's experiments, known as OPERA, turned up evidence that neutrinos may travel faster than light.

This year, particle physicists are aiming to get definitive answers to the questions that consumed them last year: Does the Higgs boson, potentially the final fundamental piece of the Standard Model puzzle, actually exist? Could there be new physics beyond the Standard Model, which is arguably the most successful scientific theory of the 20th century?

And just as importantly, can neutrinos really fly faster than light, as findings from Italian lab suggested last year?

"I have difficulty to believe it, because nothing in Italy arrives ahead of time." Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Europe's CERN particle physics center, joked today during a scientific meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Physicists recapped the past year's results and looked ahead to the next year during sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science — and if their expectations come to pass, 2012 could be a big year for textbook editors.

First, about those neutrinos: Experiments conducted by the OPERA collaboration at CERN on the French-Swiss border and at Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory clocked particles traveling the 450 miles (732 kilometers) between the labs at speeds slightly higher than the speed of light. That would run counter to a century's worth of special-relativity experiments, which has led most scientists to suspect some subtle factor went unaccounted for in the experiment. However, the skeptics haven't yet shown definitively where where the OPERA scientists went wrong, which "means that essentially they've done their job," Bertolucci said.

He said there were five efforts under way to re-examine or replicate the OPERA team's experimental results. One such effort would involve the MINOS neutrino experiment headquartered at Fermilab in Illinois. Rob Roser, a staff scientist at Fermilab, said the neutrino test required the installation of more sensitive detection equipment, and now that the equipment is ready, data would be collected in April. The results of the replication efforts should be in hand by the end of the year. 

The faster-than-light effect is so subtle that physicists would find it hard to accept even if a similar effect is detected by other experiments. But Bertolucci recalled that similarly unexpected results from the Michelson-Morley experiment, more than a century ago, eventually led to Albert Einstein's revolutionary work on relativity.

"We have to just keep an open mind," Bertolucci said.

Quest for the Higgs
The discovery of the Higgs boson, the particle that could explain the phenomenon of mass and masslessness, is the year's other coming attraction in particle physics. For the past few years, Fermilab's Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider have been in friendly competition to pick up the first hints of the particle's existence. And even though the Tevatron was shut down last September, the teams analyzing the last of their results could still "steal Sergio's thunder," Roser said.

Roser, who is the leader of the Tevatron's CDF collaboration, said scientists were in the "final throes" of data analysis and would announce their results relating to the Higgs boson at a March conference in Italy.

"We will be able to say something interesting, though whether it's that we don’t see it or we do see it remains to be seen," he said.

Late last year, the LHC teams said they saw hints that the Higgs boson might exist at a mass-energy level of 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. Those hints were too tentative to count as a discovery, however, and it sounds as if the same might hold true for the Tevatron results. Roser said he and his colleagues think the Tevatron's detectors could spot a 125 GeV Higgs boson at a 3-sigma confidence level — which is short of the standard for a discovery.

Bertolucci repeated his view that the LHC will determine "by the end of 2012" whether or not the type of Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model exists. Workers are due to clear out of the LHC's underground tunnels next week, and after a cooldown period, the collider will once again start shooting proton beams into detectors at 99.999999 percent of the speed of light.

Bertolucci said the LHC has grown "from an infant to a very, very healthy teenager" over the past year, and CERN's plans call for the beam energies to be ramped up from 3.5 trillion to 4 trillion electron volts this year.

The Higgs boson ranks as one of physics' most famous "known unknowns," Bertolucci said. "But we hope for unknown unknowns," he added. 2012 could be the year that the LHC points to new physics beyond the Standard Model, perhaps having to do with supersymmetry, mini-black holes or extra dimensions.

If the Higgs is found, that would confirm once again that the Standard Model provides the correct description of the subatomic world, and physicists would rejoice. But Bertolucci said "I would be more excited if we don't find it."

"If the Higgs mechanism is not there, another mechanism must be there," he explained. It turns out that particle physicists, like fans of detective novels, love a mystery.

Closing in on the W boson
While we're waiting for the next chapter in the Higgs quest, Fermilab's scientists are getting ready to unveil yet another piece of the subatomic particle puzzle. They'll announce the latest estimate of the mass of the W boson on Feb. 23, Roser said. That's significant, not only because it helps nail down another key value in the Standard Model, but also because an accurate measurement of the W boson can tell physicists more precisely where to look for evidence of the Higgs boson. Symmetry magazine illustrates the point with plush toys in a vise.

More on the frontiers of physics:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• Faster-than-light neutrinos pass test
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• What's a boson? Tour the particle zoo
• Special report on the Big Bang Machine
• Search msnbc.com for the Higgs boson
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

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

Stanford University

A researcher sounds a note on a conch-shell trumpet as part of an experiment to re-create the ceremonial calls heard by ancient Andeans in the Chavin de Huantar ceremonial center in Peru.

Ancient peoples around the world seem to have designed their sacred spaces not only for ceremonial sights, but for ceremonial sounds as well, archaeologists say.

In Peru, for example, a 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center's design was optimized for the blare of a priest's conch-shell trumpet. In Mexico, the Chichen Itza temple site features a staircase that can make hand claps sound like the chirp of a quetzal bird. And one of the best-known ancient monuments of all, England's Stonehenge, has a layout that's acoustically pleasing as well as astronomically significant.

The big question is, did ancient societies really have acoustics in mind when they built their monuments?

"That is a challenge," said David Lubman, a California-based acoustical scientist and consultant. Much of the evidence is circumstantial, or based on interpretations of ancient myths. But when the acoustical resonances fit so well with the purpose of a ceremonial space, it's hard to resist making a connection.

"Whether or not you have historical evidence, you have another form of evidence," said Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

Theater for the ears
Researchers discussed their efforts to unravel the mysteries of ancient acoustics today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.

For the past few years, Kolar and her colleagues have been focusing on Chavin de Huantar, a pre-Inca site in Peru that served as a regional religious center. People apparently came to a circular plaza to worship, and to hear an oracle's pronouncements issuing from a stone gallery.

The Stanford team conducted a detailed acoustical study of the gallery's cross-shaped passageways. They found that the central duct between the gallery and the plaza would serve as an acoustic filter system, accentuating the tones produced by the priests' ceremonial conch trumpets, known as "pututus."

"There was theater going on," Kolar said. The thrilling effect of the trumpet calls and the oracle's words may well have been heightened by the psychoactive effects of the San Pedro cactus that the Chavin people consumed during their rituals.

The chirping staircase
There are theatrical touches as well at Chichen Itza, a Maya temple complex going back more than 1,000 years, Lubman said. One of the most prominent monuments is the Temple of Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo: Some researchers have argued that the temple's staircase was constructed so as to create a "feathered serpent" shadow during the spring and autumn equinoxes. Lubman says the staircase can produce an aural as well as a visual effect: When you clap your hands at just the right spot, the echo comes back sounding much like the chirp of the quetzal bird, which was sacred to the Maya.

The acoustician played an audio clip demonstrating that the bird's chirp and the clap's echo sounded remarkably similar. He speculated that a priest might have clapped his hands loudly to seek counsel from a quetzal. Worshipers would have been impressed to hear the chirp of a spectral bird, apparently coming from inside the temple. "Only priests were trained to interpret what the quetzal said," Lubman said, half-jokingly.

Lubman has been studying Chichen Itza's acoustics for more than a decade. That's such a long time that the quetzal research "should be old news," he said. "But the darn bird keeps chirping." He noted that Chichen Itza has another interesting acoustic feature: Its ball court is designed like a "whispering gallery," so that a low utterance in one corner of the court could be heard clearly in another corner.

The bottom line? Maybe the ancient Maya were more in tune with sacred sounds than we are today. "Now, many things go through our eyes before they get to our minds, but that wasn't true in the ancient world," he said.

The Stone Age and Stonehenge
Steven Waller, a researcher at California-based Rock Art Acoustics, theorized that acoustics may even have had something to do with the placement of the stones at Stonehenge, a monument that's at least 5,000 years old. "What struck me was that the layout of Stonehenge reminded me of an interference pattern," he told his AAAS audience.

Waller said he was even more intrigued when he considered the legends of ancient Britain. One legend suggests that Stonehenge was created when two pipers lured maidens into a circle with their magic tunes, and then turned them into standing stones. He noted that some of Stonehenge's monoliths are sometimes called "piper stones."

Could ancient acoustics have been behind some of these legends? To find out, Waller conducted an experiment in which he put blindfolds on experimental subjects and had them walk around an open field in a circle while two flutes played an identical tone (1100 Hz, or C-sharp). The sound waves from the two flutes interfered with each other in such a way that the sound alternated between loud and soft in different locations. When the walkers were asked to map out the area, they came up with a pattern of obstacles and archways much like an ancient stone circle.

"It's as if there was something blocking the sound ... a ring of invisible objects, massive objects, blocking the sound," he said.

Waller also analyzed the placements of stones at Stonehenge and other neolithic stone circles, and found the acoustic parallel he was looking for. "The pillars actually cast acoustic patterns that mirror an interference pattern," he said.

The leading hypothesis about Stonehenge is that it served as a religious center that was laid out to mark the astronomical alignments for Earth's seasons, and Waller doesn't take issue with that. "My theory doesn't necessarily conflict with the solar alignment theory," he said. But is there any evidence to show that Stonehenge's designers really did have acoustics in mind? Waller can only point to the circumstantial connections — for example, the fact that cave paintings were often put in the locations that had the best acoustics for ceremonies, or the fact that some ancient peoples thought echoes emanated from spirits inside stones.

"They didn't know about sound waves reflecting," he said.

Waller said the important thing is to be mindful of the contributions that acoustics can make to the study of sacred spaces. Some of those spaces are already in danger of disappearing. For example, Waller worried that some of the modern-day renovations aimed at making cave paintings in France more accessible to tourists may actually destroy the acoustic qualities that led the painters to those spots in the first place.

"Nobody has been paying attention to the sounds," he said. "We've been destroying the sounds."

More about the sounds of science:

• It turns out that cavemen loved to sing
• Was Stonehenge inspired by a sound illusion?
• Stonehenge: Totally awesome place for raves
• Researchers re-create scary pre-Columbian sounds
• Acoustic archaeology yields mind-tripping tricks
• Listen to the sounds of science

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Men with Cabot Oil and Gas work on a natural gas valve at a hydraulic fracturing site in South Montrose, Penn. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, stimulates gas production by injecting wells with high volumes of chemical-laced water in order to free up pockets of natural gas below.

A university study asserts that the problems caused by the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," arise because drilling operations aren't doing it right. The process itself isn't to blame, according to the study, released today by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

The report is likely to add new fuel to a blazing controversy over fracking. Researchers reviewed the evidence contained in the reports of groundwater contamination from three prominent shale-rock formations where the process is employed: the Barnett Shale in North Texas, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, New York and other areas of Appalachia; and the Haynesville Shale in western Louisiana and northeast Texas.

The groundwater contamination is graphically portrayed in the documentary "Gasland," which showed residents near shale-gas operations setting their drinking water on fire as it came out of the tap. Worries about such contamination have sparked political resistance to fracking, leading some states and countries to hold up new drilling operations.

At the same time, shale gas is seen as an increasingly important domestic energy source. About a quarter of U.S.-produced natural gas currently comes from shale, and that proportion is projected to rise to nearly half by 2035. Last month, President Barack Obama suggested that the natural gas industry could support 600,000 jobs in America by the end of the decade, in large part due to the rise of hydraulic fracturing. In its latest budget request, the White House proposed new studies by the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that fracking is done safely.

Mike Groll / AP

People take part in a rally against hydraulic fracturing at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, N.Y., on Jan. 23. New York state legislators are considering a number of bills to limit fracking.

"It's a game-changer in terms of the energy balance," study leader Chip Groat, associate director of the Energy Institute, told journalists today. He and other scientists discussed the report in Vancouver, Canada, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Where does fracking go wrong?
Hydraulic fracturing involves drilling deep into shale beds, then injecting water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to shatter layers of rock — liberating trapped pockets of natural gas. The gas is captured for energy use, but the water and other byproducts have to be cleaned up. The procedure has been used since the 1950s, but it's become far more widely applied in recent years due to advances in horizontal-drilling technologies.

The researchers concluded that many of the reports of contamination can be traced to above-ground spills or other mishandling of the wastewater, Groat said. Other causes of the contamination include underground casing failures or poor cement jobs. "These problems are not unique to hydraulic fracturing," Groat said in a news release.

In the reports reviewed by the researchers, "we found no direct evidence that hydraulic fracturing itself ... was a cause for concern," he told journalists at the AAAS meeting. He acknowledged, however, that shale gas development "can be bungled" due to problems with drilling and extraction techniques used closer to the surface.

Such problems are most likely behind the water-on-fire phenomena documented in "Gasland." But it's difficult to identify precisely what the problem was or what the long-term effect will be without before-and-after data, Groat said.

"We really feel hobbled in a lot of these [cases] by the lack of baseline information," he observed.

Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Ray Kemble delivers fresh water on Jan. 18 to family members whose water was contaminated due to a shale-gas drilling operation hydraulic fracturing in Dimock, Pa.

Today's release of the final report follows up on a preliminary version that was issued last fall. In addition to discussing the causes of contamination, the report evaluated the ability of states to enforce existing regulations, and analyzed the public perceptions surrounding fracking.

Among the other findings:

• Natural gas found in water wells within some shale gas areas, such as the Marcellus Shale, can be traced to natural sources. The report said the gas was probably present before the onset of shale gas operations.
• Some states have actively addressed the regulatory issues surrounding shale gas, but most regulations were written before the process became widespread. In those cases, regulations may need to updated to reflect new situations. However, "there isn't the need for new regulatory frameworks," Groat said.
• News coverage of the controversy has been "decidedly negative," and few media reports mention the scientific research related to the process.
• Surface spills of the fluids used in the fracking process were judged to pose a greater risk to groundwater sources than the fracking itself.

The Energy Institute said its report was conducted using general university funds, but received assistance from the Environmental Defense Fund in developing the scope of work and the methodology for the study. The EDF said it reviewed drafts of the report during the course of the project but did not contribute to its conclusions.

Not the final word
Scott Anderson, senior policy adviser for the Environmental Defense Fund's energy program, discussed the report in a blog posting published after the report's release. "If the problem isn't hydraulic fracturing, then what is?" the headline asks. Here's some of what Anderson said:

"As has been the case in other inquiries, the University of Texas study did not find any confirmed cases of drinking water contamination due to pathways created by hydraulic fracturing. But this does not mean such contamination is impossible or that hydraulic fracturing chemicals can’t get loose in the environment in other ways (such as through spills of produced water). In fact, the study shines a light on the fact that there are a number of aspects of natural gas development that can pose significant environmental risk. And it highlights the fact that there are a number of ways in which current regulatory oversight is inadequate."

Anderson said the report deserved widespread attention, but was "by no means the final word on these topics."

Groat said the report was based on a review of previously published data rather than fresh field observations. "We did not go out and measure things," he acknowledged.

He said further studies will be conducted into the atmospheric and seismic impact of hydraulic fracturing — two much-debated environmental issues that were not addressed in detail in the newly issued report. The Energy Institute also plans to conduct a detailed case study on groundwater contamination in Texas' Barnett Shale, as well as a field investigation into the effects of shale gas drilling on the water above and below fracturing sites in the Barnett Shale.

"Certainly more work needs to be done," Groat said.

Update for 11:15 p.m. ET Feb. 16: One of my correspondents on Twitter, Pamela Oldham, notes that ConocoPhillips committed itself in 2010 to contribute $1.5 million to the University of Texas at Austin for energy research. The petroleum company said at the time that the Energy Institute would administer the grants, with the money going to UT-Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering and the McCombs School of Business. I'll check on how that squares with the institute's claim that the study was funded from general university accounts.

Oldham also notes that ConocoPhillips was recently named in a civil lawsuit alleging fracking-related water contamination in Texas' Panola County.

Update for 10:20 a.m. ET Feb. 17: Chip Groat, associate director of the Energy Institute and the leader of the study released this week, responded to my inquiry about the ConocoPhillips grant last night with this email:

"Three or four of the large energy companies give money to UT  for student support (a recruitment investment) and for research that is spread among various departments. ConocoPhillips has done this, and part of the funding they provided was to the Energy Institute to support the Barnett Shale Case Study which will be a follow-on to the study we reported on today. None of the ConocoPhillips money went into this study [the one released this week]. For the [follow-up] case study, we will use Energy Institute money plus funds from energy companies and governments in the Barnett Shale development area. This is a matter of financial necessity, but we want to spread the funding among organizations with different interests in Barnett Shale development."

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.