John Brecher / msnbc.com

A crowd in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle watches NASA's Super Guppy aircraft approach Boeing Field, carrying a key piece of a space shuttle mockup that will go on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

SEATTLE — It may not be a real space shuttle, but it's ours.

Today NASA delivered a key piece of the mockup that astronauts used for space shuttle practice to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, my hometown. And it arrived aboard one of the most ungainly-looking airplanes ever built. The wingless mockup is known as the Full Fuselage Trainer, or FFT. The plane has a nickname that's more colorful: the Super Guppy.

The Super Guppy looks more like a Super Whale. The wide-body turboprop airplane has a cargo hold that's been built up into a bulbous shape, specifically to carry big stuff for outer space. Only five of the Guppies were ever produced, and they were used to cart spacecraft components around for the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and shuttle programs. This Super Guppy is the only one of its kind still flying, and this week's odyssey with the most important piece of the Full Fuselage Trainer is one of the highest-profile flights the plane has ever taken.

For decades, the plywood-built FFT sat in a building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew compartment — the part of the structure that was flown to Seattle today — was outfitted with all the buttons, switches, cockpit displays and middeck lockers that the real shuttles had. None of those gadgets worked, but they helped the astronauts get familiar with the layout before they started handling the real controls. Astronauts could also practice how they'd get out of the shuttle in the event of a landing-strip emergency.

With the end of the space shuttle era, NASA's Johnson Space Center no longer needed the FFT, so the space agency decided to donate it for display. The Seattle museum made a play for one of the flown shuttles, and even built a shuttle-sized, 15,500-square-foot Space Gallery to display it in. But Seattle lost out to Florida, California, New York and the "other Washington" in the competition for Atlantis, Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery. The Full Fuselage Trainer served as the consolation prize.

Most of the FFT's plywood parts could be shipped up by traditional means for later assembly, but the shuttle crew compartment had to be transported all in one piece. That's why NASA's Super Guppy was called into service.

The airplane has a 25-foot-high, 25-foot-wide, 111-foot-long cargo compartment — big enough to hold the mockup's most awkward piece, even when it's bound up in shrink wrap and a protective steel frame. Over the past couple of days, the Super Guppy has been making a journey from its home at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, over to California, and then up to Seattle at a top speed of around 200 knots. It wasn't exactly a record-setting pace — but what the Super Guppy lacks in speed, it more than makes up for in the "What the Heck Is That?" department.

The Guppy flew over my hometown and its surroundings with a Seattle-born astronaut, Greg Johnson, at the controls. Then it floated down to a landing right in front of the museum, which is adjacent to Boeing Field. One of the commentators at the museum called it a "beautifully ugly airplane."

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire pointed to the craft with pride as the sky spit down rain. "When we get together in Washington state, we can land the big whale right behind me," she said.

Museum of Flight

NASA's Super Guppy and a chase plane fly above the mostly cloudy skies of Seattle.

Museum of Flight

After its touchdown at Seattle's Boeing Field, the turboprop-powered Super Guppy taxis over to the Museum of Flight next door.

Museum of Flight

The entire front of the Super Guppy swings open to reveal the cargo inside.

Museum of Flight

The 65,000-pound Tunner 60K aircraft cargo loader and transporter rolls toward the Super Guppy.

Museum of Flight

The cargo compartment for the Full Fuselage Trainer, wrapped in protective plastic, has been taken out of the Super Guppy for a short ride on the Tunner transporter to its new home in the Museum of Flight's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery.

Several thousand onlookers watched as the Super Guppy's entire front opened up to the side like a four-story-high door. 

"It's really cool that it's actually able to fly," Allison Kirkman, a 10-year-old student at Spirit Ridge Elementary School in Bellevue, Wash., told me as she watched from the tarmac. "It's an amazing plane, and how they built it is cool, too."

The shrink-wrapped shuttle crew compartment was moved out of the wide-yawning Super Guppy onto a 65,000-pound mobile transporter, then rolled over to the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery. Over the next couple of months, the shuttle mockup will be assembled in a place of honor, alongside a Russian Soyuz capsule and a prototype lander that was used in Blue Origin's spacecraft development program. Museumgoers like Kirkman will be able to walk through the shuttle mockup's cargo bay — and they might even be able to crawl through the crew compartment, just like the astronauts did.

Kids, prepare to be amazed ... again.

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

ATLAS Collaboration / CERN

This diagram shows the results of a proton-on-proton collision in the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector last September, with four muons indicated by red tracks. Such a result could be consistent with the Standard Model with or without the Higgs boson, depending on the analysis of multiple events.

Has the Higgs boson finally been detected? It's almost gotten to the point that if a discovery of some sort doesn't come out of next week's update on the multibillion-dollar subatomic search, it'll be a big surprise. But how far will the announcement go, and what will it mean for the future of physics?

To refresh your memory, the Higgs boson is the only fundamental subatomic particle predicted by theory but not yet detected. It's thought to play a role in endowing some particles, such as the W and Z boson, with mass ... while leaving other particles, such as the photon, massless. The Higgs mechanism, proposed by British physicist Peter Higgs and others in the 1960s, could have played a role in electroweak symmetry breaking, which was a key event in the rise of the universe as we know it.

The Higgs boson is so key to the current understanding of fundamental physics that Nobel-winning scientist Leon Lederman nicknamed it the "God Particle" — a term that has been making other physicists wince ever since. Another religion-tinged cliche would be to call it the "holy grail of particle physics," as CERN physicist John Ellis has. He says finding the Higgs is a key goal for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

"That's one thing that we're really looking forward to with the LHC," Ellis told me five years ago. "In fact, back when we persuaded the politicians to stump up the money to build the thing, that's probably what we told them."

Last December, the teams reported that they saw "tantalizing hints" of the Higgs' existence at a mass of around 125 billion electron volts, or 125 GeV. But the confidence in those results was not yet high enough to claim a discovery. Now the teams behind the collider's CMS and ATLAS experiments have collected higher piles of data, at higher energy levels, sparking higher expectations.

The 5-sigma fetish
When physicists talk about their confidence, they talk in terms of statistical "sigma" levels. The higher the sigma, the less likely that the results are just a fluke. In particle physics, 3 sigma constitutes strong evidence, but it takes 5 sigma to accept the results as a discovery. At the 5-sigma level, statisticians say there's roughly one chance out of 3 million that you're leaping to the wrong conclusion, as opposed to a 1-in-1,000 chance at the 3-sigma level. That distinction makes a big difference when you're sifting through billions upon billions of proton-on-proton collision reports.

Last year, the best that the LHC teams could do was 3.6 sigma for ATLAS, and 2.6 for CMS. Now physicists are looking for a 5.

For three weeks, the teams have been running the numbers on their experimental results in secret, so as to avoid any chance that one analysis will influence the other. Their results are to be announced during a presentation at the CERN nuclear research center in Geneva, which will be webcast starting at 9 a.m. CEST (3 a.m. ET) on July 4. Although no official word has leaked out, the unofficial word is that someone looking for a discovery could get to the magic number.

"Reports from the experiments indicate that at least one of them, if not both, will reach the 5 sigma level of significance for the Higgs signal, when they combine 2011 and 2012 data and the most sensitive channel. So, this will definitely be the long-awaited Higgs discovery announcement, and party time for HEP [high-energy physics] physicists," Columbia mathematician Peter Woit wrote on his Not Even Wrong blog a week ago.

Since then, other physicist-bloggers have been fine-tuning the expectations. Here's a selection:

• On the Resonaances blog, physicist Adam Falkowski (a.k.a. Jester) has a countdown clock ticking toward the Higgs discovery. "It is not clear, at least to me, if either of the two experiments will pass the 5-sigma fetish. But it does not really matter. ... What's going to change next Wednesday is that the status of the Higgs will be upgraded from 'almost certain' to 'beyond reasonable doubt.'"
• On Quantum Diaries, Southern Methodist University physicist Aidan Randle-Conde advises against trying to combine the data from the two teams to get to 5 sigma. "With all this pressure to get as much out of the data as possible, it's tempting to move too quickly and do what we can to get a discovery, but now is not the time to rush things," he writes.
• On the ViXra Log, Philip Gibbs says that when CERN's researchers report their progress, "it is likely that the main question they are investigating will switch from 'Is there a Higgs Boson?' to 'Is it the Standard Model Higgs boson?'"
• On a blog titled "Of Particular Significance," Rutgers physicist Matt Strassler advises caution, but also suggests getting "the cases of champagne ready, in case the time has finally come to pop the corks." He points out that a discovery announcement would by no means be the end of the story. "Even if we see strong evidence of a Higgs-like particle ... the correct understanding of that particle — in particular, determining whether it is or isn't a 'simplest Higgs' — may take years."
• As we approach H-Hour, you can expect to hear more via all these outlets as well as other blogs such as Cosmic Variance and "A Quantum Diaries Survivor."

Hedging on the Higgs
What Strassler and Gibbs are saying is important: Technically speaking, CERN is unlikely to announce that the Higgs boson has been definitively discovered. It's more likely that physicists will talk about a new particle that has a signature consistent with the Higgs but has to be investigated further.

CERN hinted at that approach last week in the news release announcing Wednesday's webcast. "It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar," said the center's director general, Rolf Heuer. "Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it's really your best friend, or actually your best friend's twin."

Gigi Rolandi, a senior research physicist at CERN, used a similar analogy in a video released this week, referring to crops of corn (which he calls maize, as most Europeans do), wheat (which he calls corn) and poppy flowers. Some particles are as easy to spot as a red poppy in a wheat field, he said. But not the Higgs. "The search for the Higgs is more similar to looking for a single plant of maize among many, many corn plants, than looking for a poppy among the corn," he said.

We'll get a foretaste of Wednesday's proceedings on Monday, when Fermilab is due to provide its final update on the Higgs boson search, based on the full set of data from the now-closed Tevatron. Will Fermilab try to steal some of CERN's thunder, at least for a couple of days? Stay tuned....

Update for 12:05 p.m. ET June 30: Some commenters are asking whether there are practical applications for the discoveries that could be made at the Large Hadron Collider. I addressed that question in a story I wrote four years ago, headlined "Discovery or Doom? Collider Stirs Debate." Please check out the article, as well as the Flash interactive on "Nightmares and Dreams" at the LHC.

Update for 6 p.m. ET July 1: To watch streaming video of the Fermilab Higgs update at 9 a.m. CT (10 a.m. ET) Monday, click through to this Web link.

The buzz leading uo to H-Hour is getting even louder, as expected. The Daily Mail reports that some of the theorists behind the Higgs boson concept have been invited to the CERN briefing on Wednesday, which some observers see as another sign that something definitive will be announced. Also, Reuters' Robert Evans keeps the buzz humming in a dispatch published today.

Previous episodes in the Higgs hunt:

• Ups and downs for Higgs boson buzz
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• Can physicists crack the big puzzle?
• Flash graphic: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Flash graphic: Michio Kaku on LHC nightmares and dreams
• Msnbc.com's special report on the Large Hadron Collider

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

There's a new contender for the title of fastest star in the universe: an apparent pulsar that's blazing away from the scene of a supernova at a velocity in the range of 6 million mph (10 million kilometers per hour). But as is the case with every superlative in nature, this title is not exactly undisputed.

From now on, when folks talk about stellar speediness, they'll have to talk about an X-ray source called IGR J11014-6103 — which the INTEGRAL gamma-ray probe discovered about 30,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina.

IGR J11014 shows up as a light green, comet-shaped blob in color-coded images released this week by the science team behind NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. The green blob marks X-ray emissions detected by Chandra. Elsewhere in the imagery, you can see purple-tinged patches, indicating the super-hot, X-ray-emitting remnants of a supernova known as SNR MSH 11-61A. Those observations were made by another X-ray telescope, the European Space Agency's XMM Newton probe.

The X-ray views were combined with earlier optical and radio readings to produce a full picture of the scene, which is discussed in a paper recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Berkeley astronomer John Tomsick, the research paper's lead author, told me that the X-ray emissions from IGR J11014 suggest that it's a pulsar — a rapidly spinning, super-dense star that was ejected by the supernova explosion. The star's greenish X-ray tail is probably a pulsar wind nebula, a blast of high-energy particles that's produced by IGR J11014 and swept back as the star plows through the interstellar medium.

In the image, you can see a fainter X-ray tail extending from the star toward the top right. Chandra's team says the cause of that feature is unknown, but similar tails have been seen sticking out from other pulsars. 

Previous observations have led astronomers to conclude that the supernova remnant as it's seen today is 15,000 years old. If you combine that age figure with the estimated distance between the center of the blast and IGR J11014's current position, that would imply that the pulsar has been moving at a speed of 5.4 million to 6.5 million mph.

That would be incredibly fast for a star like IGRJ11014. Only one other star associated with a supernova has been clocked at a comparable speed. That neutron star appears to be zooming away from the supernova remnant G350.1-0.3 at a velocity estimated at 3 million to 6 million mph. If these speeds are confirmed, "this would challenge theorists to create models that explain such super speeds out of supernova explosions," Chandra's science team said.

There are still some open questions, however. For example, readings from Australia's Parkes radio telescope have not yet confirmed that IGR J11014 is actually a pulsar. The signature of the object's emissions — including the fact that no counterpart to the X-ray source has been found in optical or infrared imagery — strongly suggests that it's a pulsar. But eventually, astronomers will want to see the star's pattern of pulsations. They'll also want to confirm that their view of the star's trajectory is correct.

That's why Tomsick wants to get some more observing time for IGR J11014. "We're quite hopeful," he said.

Even if IGR J11014 turns out to be speedier than the neutron star associated with G350.1-0.3, the stellar speed record depends on how you define your terms. Tomsick points out that black holes eject jets of material at velocities approaching the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, or 671 million mph). And if you consider the expansion of the universe, whole galaxies appear to be zooming away from us at speeds of hundreds of millions of miles per hour.

But if the facts about IGR J11014 check out, it deserves some sort of spot in the cosmic record books, and not just in the pulsar category. "It's speedier than any of the regular stars out there," Tomsick said.

Where in the Cosmos
IGR J11014 was the focus of today's "Where in the Cosmos" photo quiz on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and I swear it took less than a minute for Turkish astronomer Arif Solmaz to figure out that the green blob in the picture was a pulsar. In recognition of his quick wits (and quick typing fingers), I'm sending him a pair of 3-D glasses, provided courtesy of the WorldWide Telescope team, as well as a signed 3-D picture of yours truly. Kathi Wagner wasn't far behind, thanks to the fact that she had read about IGR J11014 on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog — and because any friend of Phil's is a friend of mine, she'll be getting some 3-D glasses as well.

Be sure to hit the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page so you're ready to play "Where in the Cosmos" next Friday.

More about celestial speed:

• 'Warp speed' planets get flung out of galaxy
• Hypervelocity stars flung into intergalactic space
• Astronomers find the fastest-spinning star ever

In addition to Tomsick, authors of "Is IGR J11014-6103 a Pulsar with the Highest Known Kick Velocity?" include Arash Bodaghee, Jerome Rodriguez, Sylvain Chaty, Fernando Camilo, Francesca Fornasini and Farid Rahoui.

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

A four-minute video from the International Space Station, released today by NASA, captures a beautiful and horrible sight: Ribbons of smoke drifting across Colorado and other Western states, due to a rash of wildfires.

You can also see sunlight glinting off lakes, as well as the snow-covered Rocky Mountains. But the haze covering the plains makes the biggest impression as you watch the landscape pass by, 230 miles (370 kilometers) beneath the station and a docked Russian spacecraft.

More than 30,000 residents in the Colorado Springs area had to evacuate their homes Tuesday night, due to what officials said was the most destructive fire in the state's history. Today, Colorado Springs Mayor Steve Bach passed along a preliminary report that the Waldo Canyon Fire destroyed 346 houses. President Barack Obama is due to visit the city on Friday to meet with firefighters and tour the fire-ravaged zones. (Our slideshow documents the devastation.)

Slideshow: Homes gutted in Colorado fire

The worst fire season in recent history is taking its toll with large fires burning thousands of acres in Colorado while others consume areas in Montana, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Launch slideshow

Other wildfires burned in Colorado as well as Utah and Montana, The Associated Press reported.

The space station can capture high-resolution video and stills of the scene from its Cupola observation deck, but that's not the only vantage point at NASA's disposal. Earth-watching satellites such as Terra and Aqua are also monitoring the wildfires, as are weather satellites such as GOES-15. Here's a picture of the western U.S. taken by GOES-15 at 8:45 a.m. ET today and processed by the NASA GOES Project at Goddard Space Flight Center:

NASA / NOAA GOES Project

The GOES-15 satellite keeps a stationary eye over the western United States. Smoke from the fires raging in several states has created a brownish-colored blanket over the entire region.

"The dawn's early light revealed smoke and haze throughout the Midwest, arising from forest fires throughout the Rockies," NASA said in its image advisory. "While the most publicized fires occur along the populous eastern range in Colorado, the great smoke plumes in this image came from Wyoming."

To get a fix on the Western wildfires, check out these resources:

• MODIS fire imagery: Clickable state-by-state satellite views from Terra and Aqua.
• NASA: Fire and Smoke: A selection of wildfire imagery, organized by subject.
• GeoMAC Wildland Fire Support: Online, zoomable satellite maps of fire locations.
• Incident Information System: Text-based database for national wildfire status.
• Weather coverage on msnbc.com: Your source for news about the Western wildfires.

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

Jack Matthews / Oxford Univ.

This juvenile example of the rangeomorph fossil Charnia measures just two-thirds of an inch (17 millimeters) in length. Note the fine detail of the branches.

Researchers have found the weird shapes of the world's earliest-known baby animals preserved in rock on Newfoundland's coast, apparently thanks to a Pompeii-like volcanic blast that covered the little critters with ash about 579 million years ago.

Like Pompeii's famous ash-encased forms, the ash layer solidified over soft bodies that otherwise might have been lost in the process of fossilization. In this case, the preserved animals are bizarre, fern-shaped animals from a little-known geological age known as the Ediacaran Period, which ran from 635 million to 542 million years ago. This is the age that marked the appearance of the first complex multicelled organisms — strange-looking creatures that disappeared when the Ediacaran Period gave way to the Cambrian Period.

These particular creatures were rangeomorphs, fern-shaped organisms that lived deep below the sea surface. They bear a superficial resemblance to sea-pen corals, but their detailed body plan is like nothing that exists in the world today. Because they lived so far underwater, they didn't make use of photosynthesis, as most plants do — but they may not have had all the charactistics of animals, either.

Scientists from Oxford and Cambridge University, in collaboration with the Memorial University of Newfoundland, found more than 100 of the fossil shapes in rocks at Newfoundland's Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve. Oxford's Martin Brasier said a volcanic eruption on a nearby island apparently overwhelmed "an underwater 'nursery' of baby Ediacaran fronds." Brasier is one of the authors of a report on the research due to appear in the July issue of the Journal of the Geological Society.

"The fossilized 'babies' we found are all less than three centimeters long and are often as small as six millimeters — many times smaller than the 'parent' forms, seen in neighboring areas, which can reach up to 2 meters in length," Brasier said in an Oxford news release. "This new discovery comes from the very bottom of the fossil-bearing rocks, making it one of the oldest bedding planes to preserve 'animal' fossils in the whole of the geological record."

Another co-author, Cambridge's Alexander Liu, said "these juveniles are exceptionally well-preserved, and include species never before found in rocks of this age. ... The discovery confirms a remarkable variety of rangeomorph fossil forms so early in their evolutionary history."

Alex Liu / Oxford

This fossil shows the fine detail of a juvenile Trepassia wardae's branching pattern. The specimen is just 3 millimeters wide - about a tenth of an inch.

Alex Liu / Oxford

This photo shows what may be a previously unknown type of fossilized organism. The organism has a long, curved stem with fine "branches" at its tip. The branches represent some of the smallest organic features found within the rocks at the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve in Newfoundland.

Alex Liu / Oxford

Oxford University's Jack Matthews photographs rangeomorph fossils at Newfoundland's Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve.

Martin Brasier / Oxford

Waves crash against Newfoundland's rocky shore at Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve.

The Ediacaran Period was an crucial era in evolution because it's thought to mark life's transition from mostly microbial forms to a profusion of complex, multicellular organisms.

"We are now exploring even further back in time to try and discover exactly when these mysterious organisms first appeared, and learn more about the processes that led to their diversification in an 'Edicarian Explosion' that may have mirrored the profusion of new life forms we see in the Cambrian," Brasier said.

More about the earliest creatures:

• Tiny tracks of first complex animal life discovered
• Meet Earth's earliest animal with a skeleton
• Plant or animal? Odd fossils defy classification
• Earth's earliest creatures had muscles
• Flash interactive: Earth's timeline

In addition to Brasier and Liu, the authors of "A New Assemblage of Juvenile Ediacaran Fronds From the Drook Formation, Newfoundland" include Jack Matthews and Duncan McIlroy.

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

Leaders of the nonprofit B612 Foundation today took the wraps off a campaign to fund and launch a space telescope to hunt for potential killer asteroids — a campaign they portrayed as a cosmic civic improvement project.

Former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, the foundation's chairman and CEO, estimated that hundreds of millions of dollars would have to be raised to fund the project, but said he was "confident we can do this."

"We've been at this particular project for a year now," Lu told me in advance of today's campaign kickoff at the California Academy of Sciences' Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. "We have people who are internationally well-connected, and we have a message that we think resonates with people ranging from large donors to perhaps half a million kids worldwide."

The foundation's aim is to identify and map the orbits of half a million asteroids that are on trajectories approaching Earth over the course of five and a half years, using a spacecraft that's launched into a Venus-type orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the 2017-2018 time frame.

Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, B612's chairman emeritus, said the task could be key to humanity's long-term survival. "We feel a certain urgency to get on with it so that we can be confident that we're not going to have a cosmic disaster here for no good, justifiable reason, just because we didn't get with it," he said in a statement. "So let's get with it. That's the name of the game."

What's the risk?
The potential risk posed by near-Earth asteroids was highlighted earlier this month when a kilometer-wide (0.6-mile-wide) asteroid called 2012 LZ1 sailed within 3.3 million miles (5.3 million kilometers) of our planet, just a few days after its discovery. If a rock that big were to hit Earth, it could end civilization as we know it. Smaller asteroids, around 40 meters (130 feet) in diameter, could set off atom-bomb-scale explosions like the 1908 Tunguska impact, which flattened 500,000 acres (2,000 square kilometers) of forest in Siberia.

Ground-based telescopes and space probes such as the NASA's now-defunct Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer have found thousands of near-Earth asteroids, including an estimated 90 percent of the planet-killers measuring a kilometer or more wide. But there are hundreds of thousands more yet to be found in the Tunguska-or-bigger range.

The B612 Foundation, which takes its name from the asteroid that was home to the main character in a children's book titled "The Little Prince," was formed in 2002 to advocate strategies for deflecting potentially hazardous asteroids. A little more than a year ago, the foundation decided to shift its focus to mapping the inner solar system.

"Over the years it became clear that deflecting asteroids is a solvable technical problem as long as there is adequate early warning (decades of notice)," the foundation said in a briefing paper. "It also became clear that the job of tracking asteroids to provide early warning was not going to be accomplished by others in a timely fashion."

What's the mission?
To track more asteroids, the foundation proposes launching the Sentinel Space Telescope, a 1.5-ton, 25-foot-tall (7.7-meter-tall) observatory that draws upon design features from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Kepler planet-hunting probe. Ball Aerospace was involved in both those earlier space projects, and would be the prime contractor for the Sentinel. The craft would carry a 20-inch (50-centimeter) telescope with an infrared imager.

Lu said the telescope's design has been nearly completed under the leadership of mission director Harold Reitsema, an astronomer who recently retired from Ball Aerospace. Negotiations are currently under way with Ball Aerospace on a fixed-price contract to build the Sentinel, Lu said. He declined to be specific on the mission cost because of those negotiations.

The mission plan calls for the craft to be launched on a Falcon 9 into a slightly elliptical orbit between Earth and Venus. From that vantage point, the Sentinel could look out toward the vicinity of Earth's orbit with the sun behind it — which would be ideal for spotting space rocks like 2012 LZ1. Image data would be beamed down to NASA's Deep Space Network and passed along to the mission's data operations center at the Laboratory for Space Physics in Boulder, Colo. Newly identified asteroids would be reported to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, in accordance with existing procedures, and the orbital data would be analyzed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to assess potential hazards.

The B612 Foundation said it signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA on June 19 in support of the mission. The foundation has also been in contact with SpaceX's engineers to discuss technical details for the anticipated launch, Lu said.

B612 Foundation / Ball Aerospace

Schematics show how the Sentinel Space Telescope would be put together.

B612 Foundation / Ball Aerospace

The Sentinel Space Telescope would take up a Venus-type orbit and look outward toward Earth's orbit.

What are the chances?
The fund-raising challenge could be as daunting as the challenges associated with spacecraft development. But Lu said the success of SpaceX's commercial resupply mission last month boosted his confidence that a non-governmental space effort could be successful. After his 2007 retirement from NASA's astronaut corps, Lu worked for three years as a Google executive, and he was inspired to go forward with the Sentinel project when he returned to Google's Silicon Valley headquarters to give a talk.

"I told them the essential problem was that nobody is mapping the asteroids," he recalled. "One of the guys there said, 'Why don't you just go and do it?' ... And then we said, 'Hey, maybe we can.' It was eye-opening to me to see how commonplace these types of fund-raising projects are."

Lu pointed out that the estimated cost of the mission, amounting to a few hundred million dollars, was comparable to the cost of building a performing arts center, a museum, or a planetarium like the one where today's briefing was being held. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for example, has raised more than $437 million in its current capital campaign. "There are 50 to 100 projects larger than ours going on at any time in the United States, and nobody bats an eye," he said.

He also recalled that many of the world's best-known observatories, including the Palomar Observatory, the Lick Observatory and the Keck Observatory, were built with private financing. "I think of this as following in the precedent of large ground-based telescopes, from a funding standpoint," Lu said. 

It would be nearly unprecedented, however, to mount a space mission exclusively with private donations. The nonprofit Planetary Society and Cosmos Studios tried to do so in 2005 when they financed the launch of the Cosmos 1 solar sail on a Russian submarine missile — but that $4 million mission failed, and the follow-up LightSail 1 mission has not yet been launched.

NASA looked into launching an asteroid-hunting probe years ago, but never went forward with the mission because it was deemed too expensive. The cost was estimated at $500 million nine years ago, Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center, told The Associated Press.

Spahr questioned whether enough could be raised for the Sentinel project, given the state of the economy. "This is a hard time," he told AP.

The B612 Foundation's list of directors and advisers include some well-known names in the fields of fund-raising and venture capital, such as Dick Bingham, Geoff Baehr, Esther Dyson, Alexander Galitsky and Steve Jurvetson. Other members of the "B612 Founders Circle" include Google senior vice president Alan Eustace, Broadcom President/CEO Scott McGregor and Reddit CEO Yishan Wong. In the end, fund-raising power may be as essential for the Sentinel's successful liftoff as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Update for 9:50 p.m. ET: During a follow-up news briefing, a few more nuggets about the Sentinel project came to light:

• B612's aim is to find 90 percent of the Earth-orbit-crossing asteroids that are at least 460 feet (140 meters) wide, and 50 percent of the Tunguska-type asteroids that are 130 feet (40 meters) wide. Reitsema said an internal analysis indicates that such a feat would be doable during a 5.5-year mission. Lu said an independent technical review panel headed by former JPL flight manager Tom Gavin would monitor the Sentinel Space Telescope's development to make sure it does what it's intended to.
• No money is changing hands under the terms of the agreement that B612 has with NASA, and the foundation will make the orbital data on asteroids freely available via the channels provided by the Minor Planet Center and JPL's Near Earth Object Program Office. However, B612 and NASA will have a six-month exclusive proprietary interest in scientific publications based on the data. Lu said that NASA is looking into funding a science team to make use of the Sentinel data. "We expect to make some more announcements in the near future on that," he said.
• Schweickart said that B612's effort was complementary to Planetary Resources' previously announced plan to identify and mine near-Earth asteroids, but that the two groups were not working together. B612's main objective is to map asteroids astrometrically and comprehensively, but not determine their composition or value for exploitation. Planetary Resources is mainly interested in identifying asteroids that have the right stuff for mining, such as water ice or precious metals.  
• If an asteroid is found to pose a collision threat, Lu expects that his "gravity tractor" concept would be considered for diverting the asteroid. However, that strategy takes time. "A few decades makes these things reasonable ... but when you are getting down under a decade or so, it can become very difficult in any case."
• Now that we know what we know about potentially hazardous asteroids, Lu said that there's an imperative to do something about them. "I think it would be embarrassing if we were to be struck by a major asteroid in the next few decades, simply because we didn't choose to do the mapping that's needed to find these asteroids," he said. If that were to happen, "shame on us," he said.
• Lu noted that most projects of this scale end up with the resulting facility being named after the project's principal benefactor — for example, the W.M. Keck Observatory. "Hint, hint," Schweickart interjected. Want to have a space telescope named after you? Hundreds of millions of dollars should do the trick. 

More about asteroids:

• Asteroid experts plan space telescope
• How to handle asteroid threats
• Asteroid debate rises to next level
• Asteroid likely to spare Earth in 2040
• Reality check for asteroid miners
• Interactive: Close encounters of the asteroid kind
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

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

Gail Shumway / Getty Images

In a recently conducted poll, 19 percent of the respondents said they thought Washington, D.C., would be the most likely landing zone for a UFO. But if that ever happened, who's the best person to lead the welcoming party? About 65 percent said they'd rather have Barack Obama than Mitt Romney handle the situation.

A new poll suggests that 77 percent of Americans think there's evidence that aliens have already visited Earth. The same poll suggests most Americans think President Barack Obama would do a better job than presumptive GOP challenger Mitt Romney if we had to fight off an alien invasion. And if we have to rely on a superhero to save us, they'd rather go with the Hulk than Batman.

That somewhat silly survey was conducted to tout a "Chasing UFOs" TV series on the National Geographic Channel, but the results raise a serious question: If an alien civilization does get in touch with us, who's in charge of figuring out what to do?

"Nobody's in charge," says Seth Shostak, who is senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute as well as the chairman of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Study Group. Shostak and I talked about SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — as well as its serious and silly implications tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science." The hourlong talk show is archived as a podcast on the Web and on iTunes.

As the poll done for National Geographic suggests, a good number of people suspect the aliens have already arrived, presumably on UFOs or through interdimensional travel. Most scientists scoff at that idea. "Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?" British physicist Stephen Hawking asked earlier this month. But Shostak thinks it's only a matter of time before extraterrestrial civilizations actually do make themselves known, by sending signals across the light-years. Almost a decade ago, he predicted that we'd detect those signals by the year 2025, and today he told me he's sticking by that prediction.

During our pre-show interview, Shostak laid out his rationale for the 2025 date and discussed how an alien-contact scenario is likely to go down. Check out this edited transcript of the Q&A.

Cosmic Log: Do you still feel that 2025 is a good time frame for alien contact? And maybe more importantly, how do we know we're getting closer to the date?

SETI Institute

Seth Shostak is senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

Shostak: People ask, 'Are you getting close?' And we no more know whether we're getting close than Chris Columbus knew he was getting close to the Americas — we might some palm fronds a day or two out, but other than that, we don't know. In some sense, it'll come as a complete surprise if we get a signal. We know that from false alarms. They never occur when you expect them, because you never expect them.

But in terms of the prediction, that's based on the following: We're looking for needles in a haystack. If you ask, when are you going to find a needle, you need to know three things: How big is the haystack? How fast are you going through the hay? And how many needles are in there? We know two out of three. The haystack's the galaxy, and we know how fast we're going through it. We don't know the number of needles. So I took estimates of the number from the Drake Equation, and figured that it's two dozen years out. What's happened in the meantime is that the funding crisis has slowed things down a bit.

Q: Do you think you need to revise the 2025 date?

A: I think 2025, 2030 is about right, given that we can continue to do the experiment.

Q: Is it a steady process, or is there an increasing rate of hay examination?

A: This is all predicated on an increasing rate. That's the march of technology, which is mostly digital electronics. Computers keep getting faster and faster at any given price point, and that's good news for us. We can look at a larger chunk of the radio dial at once. We can go through the stars faster. Or we can look at bigger hunks of sky at once. It's mostly computing power that is responsible for the increasing speed of SETI. We're not sitting around with earphones the way Jodie Foster was.

Q: Could it be that the patterns of communication by extraterrestrial civilizations take a form completely different from what we assume?

A: We kind of know what areas SETI is weak in. It's been slow, in the sense that you've got a couple of hundred billion star systems in the galaxy, and if you can look at only a couple a day, that's really slow going. That might take forever. Can we look at more stars in a given time, with adequate sensitivity?

The second thing is, it may be that you really have to look for a long time at any given star system. Of course, we don't do that. We look at any given star system, at any given frequency, for at most a few minutes. Some other search programs look for one and a half seconds at any given star system. If the aliens are broadcasting in our direction once a week, or once a day, or once an hour, we're not going to see it. We know that's a problem.

Another issue is that the aliens may not know we're here because they haven't picked up 'I Love Lucy' yet. They don't know Homo sapiens is here, they just know that Earth is a planet with biology. They may not be motivated to target us relentlessly with reality television. They may broadcast now and then, with a little ping just to see if anybody's here. You really need an experiment that can pick up an intermittent, maybe one-off signal that's designed to ping the planet. Everybody knows that. That's a technology issue, but it's an issue that's getting better.

Q: Has anybody come up with a concept for an all-sky, all-the-time receiver?

A: Yeah, well, all-sky, all the time, all frequencies — that's what you'd looove to have. On paper, you can design an instrument that can look at the entire sky. All frequencies, that's another problem, but you can certainly cover more frequencies than we do. It's all a question of whether you can afford to build such an instrument. The answer is, no, not now. It takes an enormous amount of computing power to do that. However, one thing you can say about the future is that there will be more computing power. This is not impossible. This is not like building rockets to go at 99 percent of the speed of light. That might work on paper, too, but in practice, that's a long way off. But this is something where you can say, with the computing power of a few decades hence, it becomes a practical thing.

Q: Assuming that alien signals are detected by 2025, is humanity ready for that?

A: Well, I don't know how much planning has been done. We've revised some protocols, but those are just the immediate steps you take if you pick up a signal. They deal with practical matters, like checking the signals out and alerting everybody. But I don't know that there's any large-scale effort to prepare humanity, any more than there was any preparation by the Indians in the Caribbean in case a Spanish ship showed up. I don't think that's a problem, to be honest. In poll after poll, the public has said they believe the aliens are out there. They see them on television every night, and at the movies every third weekend. A third of 'em think the aliens are already here, but they don't see a problem with that, either. Nobody's staying home. Everybody's still going to work.

I think that psychologically, everybody could handle it. It's just going to be a big news item. Whatever it would be, people would find it interesting. But they'd be savvy enough to realize there's no immediate threat. The aliens would be 500 light-years away, and we pick up their signal.  There's no reason to think that people would go just completely non-linear.

The long-term consequences are less predictable. People would ask, should we broadcast back? Should we send a rocket in that direction? What should we do?

Q: Who would be in charge if there was an alien signal? Assuming that scientists confirm that there's an anomalous signal pattern, hinting at extraterrestrial intelligence, what's the procedure?

A: I don't think that there's anybody designated to be in charge. There was a flap a few years ago, involving an official at the U.N., but that was all a red herring. She quickly admitted that she's not in charge. Nobody's in charge.

Look, the real people who will be in charge will be the media, because they'll be reporting it. In some sense, whoever finds the signal is probably in charge. If it's us, then somebody at the SETI Institute will be called. Or suppose it's the Berkeley group. Well, they're in charge. Or maybe it's a group that comes across the signal by accident. There's no hierarchy. Anyway, you know how the media work — they're not going to follow the rules.

There's no danger in any of this, except for one thing: That's the idea that you're sitting around, and suddenly there's a signal, and you call a press conference. That's not the way it will happen. We get signals all the time, and someday one of those signals will pass all the tests, and it slowly emerges as a real signal. But it takes something on the order of five days before you're convinced. During all that time, the media knows about this, because there is no secrecy. But there's no press conference yet, because the scientists aren't yet sure themselves. This time lag means there will be all sorts of stories before the official word is out. It isn't because of leakage, it's because anytime anybody finds something interesting, they may mention it. They'll put it on their blog. Who knows what they'll do?

It'll be very, very messy. And the corollary to this is that you can probably expect a lot of false alarms. There'll be something interesting, and a lot of people will write about it, and three days later it turns out to be nothing.

Q: Some people worry that our own radio signals are advertising our presence in what could be a rough neighborhood, but I take it that's not a concern of yours.

A: There are people who get their knickers in a knot about this deliberate broadcast stuff. National Geographic is supposed to be collecting tweets to broadcast as an answer to the "Wow Signal." I personally don't get heartburn about broadcasting. The fact is that NBC is broadcasting all the time, right? You can say, well, that's a weak signal. Sure it is. But if you're really worried about broadcasting into space, don't just shut down the publicity stunts. You better shut down the radars at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, too. They're broadcasting into space all the time.

Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life — and bring lots of questions. Seth Shostak and I were at the StellaNova Small Auditorium, courtesy of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) tonight. If you missed the live event, don't worry: It's archived by "Virtually Speaking" on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

More nuggets from the National Geographic UFO poll: 

• The "Aliens Among Us" survey polled a random nationwide sample of 1,114 Americans between May 21 and May 29. The poll was conducted by Kelton Research, which used email invitations and online surveys. Quotas were set to ensure reliable and accurate representation of the total U.S. population ages 18 and older. Margin of error is +/- 2.9 percent.
• More than one-third of those surveyed (36 percent) believe UFOs exist. Eleven percent are confident they've spotted a UFO, and 20 percent know someone who claims to have seen one.
• Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) said Obama would be better-suited than Romney to handle an alien invasion. Seventy-nine percent believe the government has kept information about UFOs a secret from the public. Nineteen percent think Washington, D.C., is the most likely landing zone for a UFO, while 28 percent think a UFO would touch down in Roswell, N.M.
• Seventy-seven percent think there are signs that suggest aliens have visited Earth. Most of these people said that the evidence came in the form of photographs (60 percent) and videos (57 percent) of UFOs.
• If aliens landed, 22 percent said they would try to befriend the visitors. Fifteen percent said they would run away, 13 percent said they would lock their doors, and 2 percent said they would try to inflict bodily harm.
• Seventy-one percent think that aliens are more likely to exist than are superheroes, vampires and zombies. But if aliens attacked Earth, 21 percent said they would most likely call on the Hulk to deal with the havoc, compared with Batman (12 percent) or Spider-Man (8 percent). Fifty-five percent believe there really are officials like the "Men in Black" who claim to be agents and threaten those who come forward with UFO sightings. 

Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

• Paul Doherty on solar eclipses and the transit of Venus
• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

Seth Shostak has a talk show, too! Hear it at "Big Picture 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 and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Marko Djurica / Reuters

People look at the skeleton of a mammoth at an open-pit coal mine in Kostolac 62 miles southeast of Belgrade on June 27.

What started out as a coal mine near the Serbian town of Kostolac, southeast of Belgrade, has turned into a gold mine for mammoth bones. Archaeologists say they've found the remains of at least five of the ancient beasts, scattered across 20 acres of sandy terrain.

"There are millions of mammoth fragments in the world, but they are rarely so accessible for exploration," Miomir Korac of Serbia's Archaeological Institute told The Associated Press. "A mammoth field can offer incredible information and shed light on what life looked like in these areas during the ice age."

Experts have been finding mammoth remains at the open-pit mining site for years. In 2009, a well-preserved, 16-foot-long mammoth skeleton was discovered about 89 feet (27 meters) beneath the surface. That specimen, nicknamed Vika, was a furless southern mammoth that lived about a million years ago. Another mammoth skeleton, thought to be 500,000 years old and nicknamed Kika, was found at a factory site in northern Serbia in 1996 and is now on display at a museum in Kikinda.  

The more recently discovered bones, excavated last month at a depth of about 66 feet (20 meters), appear to be from woolly mammoths that lived tens of thousands of years ago.

"This discovery is interesting because, unusually, there are many bones in one place," Sanja Alaburic, an expert from Serbia's Museum of Natural History, told AP. He speculated that the bones were carried to the site by flooding.

Korac said that colleagues in France and Germany have been contacted for consultation. Unearthing all the bones will require at least six months of work, he said.

Marko Djurica / Reuters

Archaeologists work to find mammoth bones at an open-pit coal mine in Kostolac, 62 miles southeast of Belgrade on June 27.

• TV special focuses on mammoth-cloning plan
• Mammoth probably butchered by humans
• Mammoths were killed off by lots of culprits
• Follow @msnbc_pictures on Twitter

Researchers used a clever trio of tricks to figure out what 2 million-year-old human ancestors ate by analyzing the stuff on their teeth, and they found something unexpected: They ate more like chimpanzees than like humans. Their analysis could point to a reason why our species triumphed while some of our long-lost cousins failed.

"Our results suggest that there was more variation among hominins around 2 million years ago, in terms of what they ate and where they lived," Amanda Henry of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explained in an email, using the technical term for humans and their close fossil relatives.

The various species spread out into different environments, ranging from forests to grasslands, but each species had a preferred environment, in part due to diet specialization. "Then, with the evolution of Homo erectus around 1.8 million years ago, we see a big shift," Henry said. "Homo erectus thrived in a whole variety of environments, and was even able to migrate out of Africa."

Homo erectus eventually gave rise to Homo sapiens — that is, us. Meanwhile, the hominins that were tied down to Africa's forests — perhaps including Australopithecus sediba, the South African species that Henry and her colleagues studied — faded away in the competition with other apes. The latest research, published online today by the journal Nature, doesn't address that big evolutionary issue directly. But it does provide plenty of food for thought.

Decoding the diet
Australopithecus sediba was discovered in 2008, and has come to be seen as a transitional species between the relatively small, ape-like pre-humans known as australopiths and our closer ancient relatives in the genus Homo. Only a few specimens of the species have been recovered, but they appear to reflect chimp-like as well as human-like characteristics.

So which way did Au. sediba swing when it came to its diet? The researchers focused on the teeth of two specimens, a juvenile male and an adult female.

First, the researchers zapped the tooth enamel with a laser and analyzed the vapor that was given off. The composition of the enamel preserves a record of what the individual ate while it was growing up. In this case, Johns Hopkins University geochemist Benjamin Passey used a mass spectrometer to look at the balance of carbon-12 and carbon-13 isotopes in the vapor.

Lee Berger

The teeth of a juvenile male Australopithecus sediba had a dark layer of calculus, which is clearly visible in this close-up picture.

If the level of carbon-12 is relatively high, that suggests a diet heavy in forest products such as leaves, fruits and the critters that eat those things. Those are known as C3 foods. But if carbon-13 is high, that points to foods from the African savanna, such as seeds, roots and grasses. These are C4 foods.

"It seems like a hallmark of human evolution to be able to use savanna resources," Passey told me. "Today, most of our energy comes from grass in one way or another, either from grain or from animals that eat grain and grass."

Tests on sediments and various animal bones suggested that the area where the specimens were found was a savanna 2 million years ago. However, when Passey analyzed the samples from Au. sediba, he found that the carbon was almost pure C3, suggesting a diet heavy in forest products.

Two other lines of evidence confirmed that preference: Deposits of plaque on the teeth contained bits of silica, known as phytoliths, that were linked to forest vegetation. Also, the pits on the teeth were characteristic of creatures that favored a forest diet. All the evidence pointed to the conclusion that these particular pre-humans went to the forests for virtually all of their food, even though their remains were left behind in the savanna.

"This astonished us," Passey said.

The meaning of diet
Upon reflection, it shouldn't be that surprising that Australopithecus sediba passed up what the African savanna had to offer, said the University of Colorado's Matt Sponheimer, another co-author of the Nature paper. "We know living apes don't seem to like such foods much — or at least they are never a large portion of their diets," he told me in an email. "It is likely that this is at least partly due to their masticatory (and probably digestive) anatomy being suboptimal for such diets."

Modern-day savanna chimpanzees engage in similar behavior, the researchers noted.

The findings are consistent with the view that "early hominins were quite flexible with respect to diet, with different populations preferring different parts of the available plant resource base, depending on when they lived, and where," said Bill Kimbel, who serves as director of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins but was not involved in the Nature study. "The plant phytoliths are a nice addition to the repertoire of perspectives on the issue."

In an email exchange, Kimbel cautioned against reading too much into Au. sediba's preference, as reflected by the results from two individuals. He took issue with my suggestion that the results put the species in the "chimp camp" rather than the "human camp," and noted that other hominin species had different preferences for C3 vs. C4 foods.

"I don't think sediba should be seen as 'remarkable' in this context," he told me. "And sediba no more belongs in the 'chimp camp' than it does in the 'giraffe camp' (with which it also shares dominant C3 values). This is not a useful analogy."

Sponheimer declined to say whether he thought Australopithecus sediba died out because it didn't shift its diet to the foods of the savanna, "but one could make such an argument if indeed this was an organism tied to very specific microhabitats by a limited dietary repertoire." A different argument could be made as well: Perhaps the descendants of Au. sediba eventually adapted to a diet that took in C4 as well as C3 foods, and thus contributed to the rise of early Homo.

Passey, for one, would love to study more specimens. "It would be nice to analyze those and see if all members of that species have that same forest behavior," he told me. However those future experiments turn out, the findings reported today show how novel techniques — ranging from precision laser blasting to tooth-crud analysis — can shed light on the origin of our species.   

More about human origins:

• Was there a fork in our family tree?
• Humans had sex with now-extinct relatives
• Fossils shake up humanity's family tree
• Savannas may have nurtured human ancestors

In addition to Henry, Sponheimer and Passey, the authors of "The Diet of Australopithecus Sediba" include Peter S. Ungar, Lloyd Rossouw, Marion Bamford, Paul Sandberg, Darryl J. de Ruiter and Lee Berger. The paper, published online today, will appear in a future print edition of Nature.

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

Researchers are watching the first scenes of a cosmic show that's expected to heat up over the next year as a giant gas cloud approaches the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

The impending collision was the subject of a research paper published in Nature last December, and now Youris.com, the European Research Media Center, is providing an update: By mid-2013, the cloud is expected to pass in the vicinity of the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*, at a distance of 36 light-hours, or less than 25 billion miles (40 billion kilometers).

Black holes are gravitational singularities so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip. They can only be detected by their gravitational influence on their surroundings, or by the blazing swirl of material being sucked down into their maw.

Some black holes are thought to be created when massive stars collapse. Others, like Sagittarius A*, are thought to be crushed into existence as part of the galaxy formation process. Sagittarius A* is 4.3 million times as massive as our sun, and is located 27,000 light-years from our solar system. There's no danger that this black hole will gobble up the galaxy — in fact, it's unusually well-behaved, which is one reason why humanity has been able to hang around long enough to detect it.

Stefan Gillessen, an astrophysicist at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has been observing Sagittarius A* for the past 20 years. He says next year's encounter could provide an unprecedented view of our supermassive black hole at its best ... or at its worst.

Youris.com

A computer simulation shows the elongation and breakup of a cloud of gas as it encounters the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Click on the image for an update and video on the encounter, which is expected to begin in 2013.

"So far, there were only two stars that came that close to Sagittarius A*," Youris.com quotes him as saying. "They passed unharmed, but this time will be different: The gas cloud will be completely ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole."

Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory say the speed of the cloud's progress has nearly doubled over the past seven years, to more than 5 million mph (8 million kilometers per hour). They report that the cloud's edges are already beginning to shred. During the months to come, it should break up into elongated filaments. "It will look like spaghetti," Gillessen said.

The cloud is also expected to get much hotter, and will probably start emitting X-rays.

Reinhard Genzel, who heads the ESO's team of astronomers, said the show won't end with next year's expected encounter.

"The next few years will be really fantastic and exciting, because we're probing the territory," he said in the Youris.com video report. "Here this cloud comes in, gets disrupted, but now it will begin to interact with the hot gas right around the black hole. We have never seen this before."

Update for 11:20 a.m. ET June 29: I've added the preferred title for the European media center, Youris.com.

More about black holes:

• Scientists closing in on Milky Way's black hole
• Astronomers set up virtual telescope for black holes
• X-ray observatory launched to hunt for black holes
• Video: Researchers see black hole devour star
• Cosmic Log archive on black holes

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

What's hotter than Justin Bieber and Emma Stone put together? Guinness World Records says the hottest stuff made by humans is the multitrillion-degree quark-gluon plasma that was produced two years ago at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC. The plasma, also known as big-bang soup, reached a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit), which is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.

Why so hot? RHIC's physicists were seeking to duplicate the conditions that existed just an instant after the big bang that kicked off the universe's expansion 13.7 billion years ago. At that temperature, the quarks and gluons that are almost always bound together in protons, neutrons and the like are jumping around in a free, soupy state. Studying that soup could reveal how the universe is put together at its most fundamental level.

The RHIC team created the soup by accelerating gold ions in a 2.4-mile-round magnetic ring in New York, and smashing them together at nearly the speed of light. They found that the proton-sized dollops of plasma had the characteristics of a nearly perfect liquid rather than a gas.

"There are many cool things about this ultra-hot matter,” Steven Vigdor, who leads Brookhaven’s nuclear and particle physics program, said in today's news release about the Guinness recognition. "We expected to reach these temperatures  that is, after all, why RHIC was built — but we did not at all anticipate the nearly perfect liquid behavior."

Vigdor noted that trapped atom samples also behave much like a liquid on the other end of the temperature spectrum, near absolute zero. "The unity of physics is a beautiful thing!" he said.

Like an aging celebrity, the 12-year-old RHIC is slowly being eclipsed by the new kid on the block — CERN's Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border, which is in its fourth year of operation. One of the detectors at the LHC, known as ALICE ("A Large Ion Collider Experiment"), is doing similar big-bang experiments with lead ions, and has achieved temperatures higher than RHIC's. Some researchers have estimated that ALICE's soup gets as hot as 10 trillion degrees. 

"The energy density at the LHC is a factor of three higher than at RHIC," Brookhaven quotes CERN physicist Despina Hatzifotiadou as saying. "This translates to a 30 percent increase in absolute temperature compared to the value achieved by RHIC. So I would say that ALICE has the record!"

The only holdup is that ALICE's team has not yet published an official temperature measurement for its quark-gluon plasma, and as Brookhaven notes, "the Guinness team is nothing if not official." That means there's still plenty of time to raise a pint of Guinness (or your favorite alternate beverage) and drink a toast to RHIC's hotness.

More about big bangs:

• Matter melts — if it's 125,000 times hotter than the sun
• LHC opens up a fresh frontier in big-bang science
• Atom-smashing scientists want even Bigger Bangs
• Interactive: Inside the Big Bang Machine
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider

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

SpaceX is basking in the glow of last month's successful cargo mission to the International Space Station, but it's also celebrating the glow of its next-generation Merlin 1D rocket engine, which has now gone through a full mission duration firing of 185 seconds.

The California-based company said today that the engine firing took place at its rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, on a test stand near the building where the recently returned Dragon cargo capsule is being kept. The test reached 147,000 pounds of thrust, satisfying the duration and power requirements for a Falcon 9 launch. SpaceX also tested the Merlin 1D's capability for multiple restarts.

"This is another important milestone in our efforts to push the boundaries of space technology," SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk said in today's announcement. "With the Merlin 1D powering the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, SpaceX will be capable of carrying a full range of payloads to orbit."

The Merlin 1D represents an enhancement of the Merlin 1C engines that are being used on the Falcon 9's first flights. SpaceX said the 1D should open the way for "improved manufacturability by using higher-efficiency processes, increased robotic construction and reduced parts count." The new engine's structural and thermal safety margins play a key part in SpaceX's plans to start launching astronauts into space as early as 2015.

SpaceX says the Merlin 1D's should see their first flight on Falcon 9 Flight 6, due for liftoff next year.

Also today, Aerojet's AJ26 rocket engine was test-fired at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, according to a Twitter update from the space agency's rocket test complex. The AJ26 is to be used on Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Antares rocket. Like SpaceX, Orbital has been receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from NASA to support the development of a launch system capable of resupplying the space station. Orbital says the first Antares test flight will be launched later this summer.

NASA

A picture from NASA's Stennis Space Center shows the test firing of Aerojet's AJ26 rocket engine.

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

Ted S. Warren / AP

To produce the words for text or speech, British physicist Stephen Hawking currently uses an infrared sensor mounted on his eyeglasses, visible here during an appearance this month in Seattle. The sensor picks up twitches from his cheek, which are translated into the desired letters or words. Hawking and neuroscientist Philip Low are experimenting with a system that can translate brain waves directly into text and speech.

After months of tweaking, researchers are finally ready to show off a high-tech headband that can translate Stephen Hawking's brain waves into speech — providing what could eventually become an easier avenue for the paralyzed British physicist and many others to share their deep thoughts.

The system, developed by San Diego-based NeuroVigil and known as iBrain, uses a head-mounted receiver the size of a matchbox to pick up different types of brain waves. iBrain employs a computer algorithm called SPEARS to analyze the brain emanations and encode them for a text-based speech reader. Philip Low, NeuroVigil's founder, chairman and CEO, is to present the latest results from his work with Hawking on July 7 at a Cambridge conference on consciousness.

"I haven't discussed doing a demonstration with Stephen, but we could do that, of course," Low told me today. During the conference, Low will be showing video clips of Hawking using the iBrain to communicate.

For decades, Hawking has been coping with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disease that has left the theoretical physicist confined to a wheelchair and unable to move even his fingers. To write or speak, he currently uses an infrared sensor system mounted on his eyeglasses: His cheek twitches are read by the sensor to control a wheelchair-mounted computer system that slowly encodes the patterns of those twitches. It can take a half-hour for Hawking to twitch out a couple of sentences in response to a question.

In an abstract prepared for next month's presentation, Low and Hawking describe how they worked out their technique for the iBrain system. Hawking (who is described as a "high-functioning 70-year-old ALS patient" in the abstract) was told to try moving one of his hands or feet — for example, flexing his foot or scrunching his hand into a ball. The limbs didn't move, of course, but just thinking about trying to move them generated readable brain-wave patterns.

"The subject's brain activity demonstrated distinct broad-spectrum pulses extending to the gamma and ultra-high gamma ranges," the researchers wrote. "Such pulses were present in the absence of actual movement, and absent when the subject was not attempting motion."

The abstract said Hawking's brain also buzzed with alpha brain waves when he closed his eyes, as expected. Alpha waves are associated with wakeful relaxation, and are probably familiar to anyone who's undergone biofeedback training. Gamma waves, in contrast, are associated with increased attention — and in the past have been linked to activities ranging from running to learning.

Lots of possibilities
The fact that Hawking's brain signals could be read reliably is a good sign, not only for one of the world's best-known scientists but for hundreds of thousands of others around the world. Low and Hawking say their work "opens the possibility to link intended movements to a library of words and convert them into speech, thus providing ALS sufferers with communication tools more dependent on the brain than on the body."

Low told me that the brainwave-reading device could be used to control prosthetic devices "to give ALS sufferers mobility" — sort of like a real-life version of the Stephen Hawking robotic exoskeleton proposed in an Onion parody 15 years ago.

The iBrain device could have other applications, such as diagnosing sleep apnea, studying autism and monitoring other brain conditions. It's already been used in a clinical trial to monitor the effects of experimental drugs on brain activity. The U.S. military is also looking into how the device can help treat traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, which are big issues for combat veterans. Direct brain-to-speech communication, however, represents the highest-profile application, particularly when Stephen Hawking is involved.

"We'd like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain," The Telegraph quoted Low as saying.

The key question for Hawking is whether iBrain represents an improvement over the system he currently has. Back in April, the professor told The New York Times that the project hadn't quite reached that point. "At the moment I think my cheek switch is faster ... but should the position change I will try Philip Low's system," he wrote in an email sent by an assistant.

In that quote, Low said Hawking was talking about brain-computer interfaces in general, rather than specifically about iBrain. "What we are seeing is in fact an immediate response, so the question is going to be to productize this, so that he can communicate reliably should he lose control of his cheek muscles," he said.

TEDMED via YouTube

Neuroscientist Philip Low (at right) demonstrates how the iBrain device can send brain-wave readings to a cellphone with an subject who's wearing the headband (at left) during a TEDMED 2009 presentation. Click on the image to watch the YouTube clip.

Personal quest
Low said the iBrain project was already moving on to Version 2.0, and the iBrain 3 device is due to be built next year. "That will be about the size of a U.S. quarter," he told me. "People will be able to check their brain activity much like you or I can check our blood pressure."

The 32-year-old, Vienna-born researcher's company has come a long way since its founding, which Low says he initially financed by putting $240,000 on his credit card. Someday, he hopes brain-monitoring systems will be used to pick up the signs of neurological problems early enough to do something about them. For Low, this is not just business. It's personal.

"I would have loved to see this 20 years ago, when my father suffered from a side effect of a commonly used sleep drug," he told me. "He threatened someone with a weapon ... a gun, actually. And it destroyed our family."

His father was eventually pardoned, but it took a long time to put everything back together. That experience led Low to look into the neurological basis of sleep, including experiments with bird brains. That was what led him to come up with the SPEARS algorithm in the first place.

"It's very ironic that an algorithm I initially developed to analyze the brain patterns of birds has found its way to dealing with Stephen Hawking's brain patterns, the U.S. military and autistic children," he told me. 

More about Stephen Hawking:

• Stephen Hawking keeps his eyes on the prize
• What's on Dr. Hawking's desk? A guided tour
• Stephen Hawking's biggest mystery? Women
• Hawking says God's not needed. So?

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

"The Dark Knight Rises"? Bah! If you measure the heft of a movie trailer by dramatic impact, "Seven Minutes of Terror" is the one to watch. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released the five-minute trailer today to tout the upcoming entry, descent and landing of its $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, starring the Curiosity rover. That price tag amounts to 10 times the estimated production budget for "The Dark Knight Rises."

The Batman movie is likely to meet with wild success when it opens July 20. The Mars mission could bomb utterly when it lands Aug. 5. The wildest part of the probe's seven-minute ride through the atmosphere will come when a hovering "sky crane" is due to lower the car-sized rover to the ground within Gale Crater, then blast itself away before it falls on top of the darned thing.

Even JPL's engineers admit they sometimes think the concept is crazy. But to get a true sense of exactly how crazy, you have to watch the video. "If any one thing doesn't work just right, it's game over," engineer Tom Rivellini says.

Another engineer, Adam Steltzner, observes that it will take about 15 minutes for signals to make their way back from Mars to Earth during the landing. "So when we first get word that we've touched the top of the atmosphere, the vehicle has been alive, or dead, on the surface for at least seven minutes," he says.

I'm getting chills already.

For more about entry, descent and landing, or EDL, check out Emily Lakdawalla's preview on the Planetary Society's blog.

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

NASA via Twitpic

NASA astronaut Ron Garan looks into the camera from outside the International Space Station in July 2011. "Knocking on the door to come back in #FromSpace after yesterday's spacewalk," Garan wrote on Twitpic.

You might think it's cool enough that NASA astronaut Ron Garan has spent months aboard the International Space Station, but he’s become even better-known as a social-media maven. This month he passed the 2 million mark for Google+ circles, putting him at No. 21 on the Google+ Top 100. His Fragile Oasis postings are a highlight on the Web, Facebook and Twitter. His "Ask Me Anything" exchange with Reddit users went so well he's thinking of doing it again.

So what's the secret to his success? It's really not a secret at all: He’s got a good story to share, about the beauty and fragility of planet Earth.

The 50-year-old New York native is a former Air Force fighter pilot who has degrees in business economics and aerospace engineering. He joined the astronaut corps in 2000, and his training for spaceflight included a turn as an "aquanaut" for NASA's NEEMO underwater research mission in 2006. Garan has been up in space twice — in 2008, on the shuttle Discovery to help deliver Japan's Kibo lab to the International Space Station; and just last year for a nearly six-month tour of duty on the station.

Garan says another stint on the space station is "always a possibility, down the road." But right now, he's focusing on NASA's Open Government Initiative, which aims to build stronger collaborative ties between government, industry and the general public. That means social engagement isn't just something he does in his spare time. It's part of his job.

During a recent interview, Garan talked about how he became a super-social spaceman, and what he's learned from the adventure. Here are some edited excerpts of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: When you come into contact with the public, what do you find they’re most curious about?

Garan: "Well, what they’re most curious about is the basic question of what life is like, living in space. It really is a marvelous experience. It’s very interesting in a lot of respects — and probably the greatest part about it is that it gave me an incredible sense of appreciation for what we have here on our planet. Everything from just simple things that define the beauty of life on our planet — the breeze in your face, and the smell of flowers, watching a flock of birds and a million other things. After you’re up there for a while, those are things that you really start to miss.

"I had the opportunity to have a short-duration flight on the space shuttle Discovery back in 2008, during which I was up there for two weeks, and then a long-term one where I was up for five and a half months. And it’s a very different experience. You have the same views, you have the same environment that you live in. But being able to see the earth, day in and day out, and watch the earth change ... and to really start to miss some of the things that I took for granted, that really gives you that appreciation."

NASA file

A fish-eye view of the International Space Station, captured by Ron Garan last July, features the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in the foreground. A Russian Progress cargo ship and a Soyuz crew capsule are docked on the left end of the station. The structure extending to the left of the AMS is a thermal radiator. One of the station's gold-colored solar arrays is visible in the background. And off to the right, the shuttle Atlantis is docked to the station's Tranquility module.

Q: So how did the Fragile Oasis website enter into the mix?

A: "That came out of my shuttle mission in 2008. I had a little bit of frustration. I imagine it’s like when you go to the Grand Canyon, and you’re there by yourself, and you sit there at the rim of the Grand Canyon and you’re looking out over this amazing thing. And imagine that very, very few people have been able to have that experience. For me, at least, that would be frustrating, and the experience would not be as rich as it would be if I had the opportunity to share that with people. So I was frustrated during my shuttle mission that I couldn’t share the experience.

"When I got assigned to my long-duration mission, there’s two and a half years of training, and during that two and a half years, I really brainstormed how I could do that. We came up with Fragile Oasis, not just to have it as a website where we could tell stories about space, but the goal was always to provide a platform for people to follow along on the mission, not as spectators but as fellow crew members. To have an interactive way to do it.

"We had some significant technical challenges in getting that thing off the ground, and it’s still a work in progress. It doesn’t have a lot of the interactive features that we wanted it to have, but we’re working on it. When I launched to the International Space Station, and I had the five and a half months up there, I really was very thankful that I had this tool, this platform, to be able to communicate. And in the meantime, we had the exponential increase in the popularity of social media tools.

"First I did Facebook, but I didn't see that as a public outreach tool. I saw that as a way to connect with old friends, and I was just using it on a personal basis. On the other hand, I started Twitter for one reason: I saw it as a way to do education outreach. I could say, I’m learning about this experiment we’re going to be doing in space, and I’d put a link on there to the experiment's website and the science behind it. I saw that as a very powerful way to do outreach. I now see the benefits of outreach in other platforms as well, including Facebook and obviously Google+. In the case of Google+, I see a very robust mechanism to share the space program and the experience of living in space with a lot of interactive features on that platform."

Q: With all your experience in social media, do you find that you favor one tool over the other? From your comments, it sounds as if you’re seeing some differentiation in how those different tools can be used. Particularly with Google+, you just recently passed the 2-million-follower mark. That must be one of the big successes for your efforts.

A: "Well, I think all the platforms offer slightly different tools to tell the story. I think they all fit together really well, actually. So it’s not a 'one-platform' type of message. We want to reach the broadest audience we can, because the excitement of spaceflight is global. It’s for all humanity. So the more tools we can use to tell that story, and the more people we can get involved with the story, the better off the whole message will be."

Q: Did you have to do a selling job with NASA to do the sorts of things you’re doing?

A: "It took a while to catch on, but it’s catching on now across the board. We realize the benefit of social media. I’m on some social-media committees now, on some working groups to help not only crew members and astronauts, but also thousands of other people who work in the space program. They have a very compelling story as well. We’re trying to find the best way to get that story out. And what we’re finding is that just letting people tell their story in the way they want to tell it is the best way to do it.

"Obviously, there have to be guidelines. But the more leeway we can give people in the space program to tell their story, the richer the experience will be, both for the people who are reading it and for the people who are doing it. That’s one of the cardinal rules here, to give people as much leeway as we possibly can."

Q: Are there any guidelines or favorites that you want to pass along to people who want to be closer in touch with the space adventure?

A: "Oh, yeah. There are tons and tons of people. Most of the astronauts who fly in space right now have Twitter accounts. They’re all on there. There’s also @NASA_Astronauts, where we try to retweet, as best we can, everything from all the astronauts. There’s @NASA, the official Twitter account. There’s the Facebook version, and soon the Google+ version of all these as well. There’s commercial spaceflight: @SpaceX has a social media presence. There are people outside the space agency who are involved in telling the story as well, such as @YurisNight and #spacetweeps.

"What we’re finding through this is that it’s not just the official word from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese space agency. There are citizen scientists and all these other groups that have formed around the idea of space exploration, and they really do a great job of telling the story as well. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of passion and heart and soul that’s put into this."

Q: Is there something about the space story that particularly resonates with social media?

A: "I think it’s because it’s a human endeavor, and throughout the 50 years of human spaceflight, it’s always been a select few people who have gotten to fly in space, and we’ve relied on them to come back and tell us what it was like. Now, through technology and through these new platforms, we can bring people along with us on the missions and have them experience this is real time. You can see example after example of this.

"An easy example is, if one of us sends out a tweet with a picture, let’s say, and we misidentify the geographic location, we’re going to find out about that pretty fast. That happened to me on my mission, and I thanked the person who brought that to my attention. I started sending pictures to that person first, to make sure I got it right. We don’t have a lot of time up there, and all the pictures and all the social media that we do is in our free time. So to have people on the ground, crowdsourcing or open-sourcing or however you want to put it, that really empowers us to do more. It makes communication much more effective."

Q: Have you ever thought if it would be possible to boil down the glory of space down into one tweet? Is there any elevator talk you’ve thought about giving in 140 characters, about what it’s like to fly in space?

A: "You’d need at least 147 characters to do that ... no. I know I couldn’t do it. That would be a pretty remarkable feat."

Q: What’s the one thing that you’d like people to know about spaceflight.

A: "In 140 characters?"

Q: Not 140 characters, but what’s the one biggest message that you think the space experience provides for people on Earth?

A: "Well,  to go back to the reason we started Fragile Oasis: The really compelling reason is that we wanted to use this perspective we have on the planet to inspire people to go out and make a difference, and make the world a better planet. The one gift that I think we get when we fly in space is this perspective.

"You don't necessarily have to be in space to get this perspective, but being in space really reinforces it: You see how fragile the planet is. You see how beautiful it is, how peaceful it looks. Then you realize that life is not as beautiful for everybody on the planet as it looks from space. That's a very compelling thing to experience, and hopefully it serves as a call to action, to not accept the status quo and make life on the planet as beautiful as it looks. That's the No. 1 thing that I want to get across."

NASA

The International Space Station looks like little more than a speck with solar panels in this picture, which was taken from the shuttle Atlantis during its approach on July 10. A first-quarter moon shines on the right side of the frame.

Where in the Cosmos
Garan and his colleagues at Fragile Oasis offer a cornucopia of outer-space imagery and blog postings, including this picture of the International Space Station and the moon, as seen from the shuttle Atlantis during its approach for docking last July. The photo served as today's quiz picture in the "Where in the Cosmos" contest, presented weekly on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

Len Whitney's comment was my favorite: "I believe it's a TIE fighter ... but those are short-range fighters, we're too far out in space ... Must have taken off from that moon ... Wait a second ... that's no moon!!!! It's a space station!"

For figuring out so quickly that the picture showed a moon and a space station, I'm sending 3-D glasses to Facebook followers Matt Jaworski and Lawrence Johnson. I'm also reserving a pair for Whitney. To make sure you're in on next week's contest, click the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page and join the alliance. It's not a trap!

More about NASA and social media:

• NASA launches Facebook trivia game
• NASA looks to social networking to lure Gen Y
• NASA leads governmental social-media list 
• NASA launches space station ... on Internet radio

Although Ron Garan is the highest-rated astronaut on the Google+ list, props also deserve to go out to Mike Massimino, the first NASA astronaut to tweet from space and NASA's top astronaut when it comes to Twitter rankings.

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

Doing smackdowns on stupid online videos could be a full-time job, so it's a good thing that so many other people are willing to take on the task. What's not a good thing is the video done up for the European Commission's Women in Research and Innovation initiative, which has high-heeled models glamming it up to tout science as a "girl thing."

Not that I'm against high-heeled models, but as a teaser to highlight women in science or get girls interested in science careers, it earns a strong thumbs-down. After weathering the bad reviews on the Web and Twitter for hours and hours, the European Commission shut down access to the video and tweeted, "OK, scientists, we heard you."

The campaign in general isn't a bad thing. This quote from the Science-Girl-Thing.eu website hits the right tone:

"Want to save lives? Keen to find out what’s lurking in the nether regions of space, or in the deepest ocean trench? Passionate about the environment? Do something about it! The next great discovery could be yours, so come and take up the challenge.

"Did you know that girls do as well as boys in science and maths at school but many more boys go on to further study science, technology and engineering? So girls, remember: you’ve got what it takes.

"Science needs your ideas, your inspiration and your passion — science needs YOU!"

It's just too bad that one video spoils the mood. Now I'm waiting for the parody video, "Science: It's a Guy Thing," which will have Chippendale male dancers strut their stuff while a bespectacled woman looks up from the microscope.

For a selection of the smackdowns, just sort through the Twitter tweets that include the #sciencegirlthing tag — or, as a balancer, the #realwomenofscience tag. Both of those tags have risen to Twitter's list of top trenders.  This Skepchick posting by my blogging colleague, Noisy Astronomer Nicole Gugliucci, provides a great survey of the pluses and the minuses. She includes this video that covers the positive side of the ledger. Like the awful teaser video, it's part of the "Science: It's a Girl Thing" video gallery.

Update for 2:15 p.m. ET: The tweets from European Commission spokesman Michael Jennings suggest that he thinks the campaign's evil plan is working: "Hope was to get young people onto site. That seems to be happening! ... Lots of comments on #sciencegirlthing vid. 45 seconds of fun for launch to grab attention. Not central to main campaign."

Update for 5:45 p.m. ET: The original teaser video has been taken down, but of course you can still find an archived version on YouTube. The Science-Girl-Thing.eu website features a different teaser trailer, and the European Commission's communication department says this in a Twitter update: "OK, scientists, we've heard you and we want to keep hearing you. Help us build a list of #realwomeninscience: https://t.co/A2LX24ym." That shortened Web address points to a list of Twitter accounts for female scientists. More than 100 women are on the list so far, and it's growing by the minute. Now, that's a good thing.

Update for 7:05 p.m. ET: Twitterers are tittering over tweets with the #scienceboything hashtag, but I'm still waiting for the "Science: It's a Guy Thing" video.

More about women in science:

• Women explore the frontiers of physics
• Wanted: More high-tech options for women
• Video: Female scientist blazes her own path
• Geek stereotype drives girls out of computer 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 and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

CERN / CMS Collaboration

A computer graphic shows a typical Higgs boson candidate event, including two high-energy photons whose energy (depicted by red towers) is measured in the Compact Muon Solenoid's electromagnetic calorimeter. The yellow lines are the measured tracks of other particles produced in the collision. The pale blue volume represents the CMS' crystal calorimeter barrel.

A week ago, sources started passing the word that physicists were "fired up" about further evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model and the main quarry for the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider.

That blaze of buzz reached a high point this week, when Columbia mathematician Peter Woit reported "reliable rumors" that the confidence level for a detection of the Higgs' signature in the mass range of around 125 billion electron-volts, or 125 GeV, was increasing.

"CERN will soon have to decide how to spin this: will they announce discovery of the Higgs, or will they wait for some overwhelmingly convincing standard to be met, such as 5 sigma in at least one channel of one experiment?" Woit wrote.

"Sigma" refers to the statistical confidence that a given result is more than a fluke, with 5 sigma serving as the gold standard for a discovery. If you're a Higgs-watcher, you'll be hearing a lot about sigma in the next couple of weeks, leading up to the International Conference on High-Energy Physics, or ICHEP, in Australia from July 4 to 11. That's when the LHC's teams are due to provide a status report on the search for the Higgs. 

The Higgs hunt is hot because physicists have hypothesized about the boson for 40 years as part of the mechanism by which some particles acquire mass while others don't. The Higgs is so fundamental to the frontier of physics that Fermilab's Leon Lederman once called it the "God Particle" — a term that most other physicists positively hate. Finding it in the mass range where it's expected to be would serve as solid confirmation for the Standard Model, one of the most successful theories in the history of science. Not finding it would be more interesting: Physicists would have to consider some other mechanism, outside the Standard Model, to explain particle mass. And there's nothing theorists love more than a challenge like that.

In December, the teams behind the ATLAS and CMS detectors reported "tantalizing hints" of a Higgs detection at 125 GeV, with confidence levels of 3.6 sigma for ATLAS and 2.6 sigma for CMS. If the additional observations made since then show the same sorts of hints, those sigma levels should go up — and that's been the gist of the buzz over the last week or so. For science geeks, that's a big deal, or at least a big meme: so big that the hashtag #HiggsRumors was for a time on top of Twitter's trending list, Discovery News' Jennifer Ouelette noted.

A lot of that trending took place because of the in-jokes spawned by the original buzz — which has now fallen to a steady hum, thanks to a string of reality checks.

"Please do not believe the blogs," ATLAS spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti told The New York Times. "I am very surprised that rumors appear on a subject that is really evolving daily," CMS spokesman Guido Tonelli told Science News. "The experimenters can't possibly have their data in presentable form yet, so the rumors can't be correct in every detail," Rutgers theoretical physicist Matt Strassler observed on his blog.

Union College physicist Chad Orzel, the author of "How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog," said the celebrity-level hype was "the price of success":

"I mean, it’s not an accident that there’s a lot of excitement about the maybe-sorta-kinda discovery of the Higgs. This is the product of years of relentless hype from the particle physics community. They've been talking about this goddamn particle for longer than I've been running this blog, and it's finally percolated out into the general public consciousness enough that buzz about it can trend on Twitter. Complaining that your persistent effort to get people to care about particle physics esoterica has led to people being excited about particle physics esoterica seems more than a little churlish.

"So, lighten up. Revel in the success of your hype machine. God knows, if there were a Twitter trending topic about Bose-Einstein Condensation or anything else in atomic physics, I’d do the Happy Dance all the way down the hall. You’ve worked hard to make your elusive particle a celebrity, now reap the rewards."

The true reaping will come in a couple of weeks. As Reuters' Robert Evans reported, the most recent readings from ATLAS and CMS are being analyzed in isolation, so that one team's conclusions don't influence the other team. Until the ICHEP actually takes place, hype is just about all we'll hear about. But in the meantime, get ready for the real news by reviewing these resources:

• Higgs vs. hype: A mini-guide
• Cartoons visualize the Higgs boson
• What's a boson? Tour the particle zoo
• Special report on the Large Hadron Collider
• Search msnbc.com for the Higgs boson

Update for 1 p.m. ET June 22: Europe's CERN particle-physics center just announced that the big update on the Higgs search will come on July 4, during a seminar at 3 a.m. ET that's tied to the start of the ICHEP conference. 

"We now have more than double the data we had last year," CERN's director for research and computing, Sergio Bertolucci, was quoted as saying. "That should be enough to see whether the trends we were seeing in the 2011 data are still there, or whether they’ve gone away. It’s a very exciting time."

CERN said that if a new particle is discovered, the ATLAS and CMS teams will need more time to ascertain whether it's the Higgs.

"It's a bit like spotting a familiar face from afar," CERN Director General Rolf Heuer explained. "Sometimes you need closer inspection to find out whether it’s really your best friend, or actually your best friend's twin."

CERN said physicists at the conference in Melbourne will be able to join the seminar via a live two-way link. The seminar will be followed by a news conference at CERN. There'll be a webcast available via http://webcast.cern.ch. Stay tuned...

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

Planetary Resources

The Arkyd-101 space telescope, shown in this artist's conception, represents the first spacecraft to be developed by Planetary Resources as part of an asteroid scouting and mining venture.

Planetary Resources, the billionaire-backed private venture that's aiming to hunt down and mine near-Earth asteroids, is looking for suggestions about projects that could attract extra funding through Kickstarter-style campaigns.

In a Web posting, co-founder Peter Diamandis says that in the month and a half since the asteroid-mining project was unveiled, he and his colleagues "have been overwhelmed at the response from people begging to know how they can get involved." In an associated email blast, Diamandis and the company's other co-founder, Eric Anderson, say they've gotten hundreds of emails asking about the project.

The company — which counts Google billionaires Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, space billionaire Charles Simonyi and Texas billionaire Ross Perot Jr. among its investors — has said it plans to launch its first asteroid-hunting space telescope, the Arkyd-100, within two years. But what Diamandis and Anderson really want to do is launch 10 to 15 of the 44-pound (20-kilogram) telescopes in the next three years. 

"To offer you a chance to actually get involved, we’ve been tossing around the idea of adding additional capacity in our production run, and either offering you access to a portion of our orbiting spacecraft — or — if there’s enough demand, actually build you an additional Space Telescope for your own use," Diamandis wrote. "We'd probably do this through a Kickstarter campaign, but ONLY if there's enough interest."

Among the ideas that Diamandis is floating:

• $100 for a chance to direct the Arkyd-100 and take a high-resolution photograph of anyplace on Earth, or a celestial body.
• A desktop-scale model of the Arkyd-100.
• A half-day at the controls of a satellite, allowing you to take up to 50 photos from space.
• Invitations to the Planetary Resources launch party.

The suggestion box (which also serves as a ballot box for the suggestions) takes the form of a Facebook-style comment section on Diamandis' Web posting. Thirty comments, plus comments on the comments, piled up in the first hour since Diamandis issued his invitation.

Planetary Resources isn't the only venture trying to take advantage of the crowdfunding model. Last week I wrote about the ArduSat project, which involves another guy named Peter (high-energy physicist and former Wall Street investment manager Peter Platzer). ArduSat's organizers are seeking $35,000 in Kickstarter pledges for the development of a sensor-laden nanosatellite that could be run as an orbital time-share. As of this writing, the pledge amount is at $31,631 with 24 days to go — which means it's virtually certain ArduSat will hit its funding target.

I also mentioned the DreamUp project, which is offering space on the International Space Station's experimental racks for student-built experiments at rates as low as $15,500. DreamUp is a partnership involving NanoRacks and the Conrad Foundation, and has the added twist that American Express Membership Rewards points can be redeemed to cover the cost of flying an experiment.

Meanwhile, the nonprofit B612 Foundation says it's getting ready to unveil a privately funded, multimillion-dollar space telescope project to monitor the inner solar system for potentially threatening asteroids.

Am I crazy, or is there some sort of snowball effect kicking in? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

More about unconventional space projects:

• Reality check for asteroid miners
• Donations revive the search for aliens
• Crowdfunding sought for $10,000 spacesuit
• Kickstarter project sends Trek dolls to stratosphere
• Kinect-controlled satellites heading to space

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

E2BN / NEN

A sculpture that shows computer pioneer Alan Turing looking down at the Enigma Machine was created from stacked slate by British artist Stephen Kettle.

The June 23 centennial of Alan Turing's birth is providing an opportunity to look back at the brilliant life and tragic end of a pioneer in computer science — a Briton who was instrumental in cracking Germany's Enigma code and turning the tide of World War II, but who killed himself after his humiliation by a society that saw homosexuality as a crime.

Turing came up with the concept of a "universal machine" back in 1936, setting the stage for the quest to create artificial intelligence. It's a quest that's as old as Ovid's Metamorphoses and as new as IBM's Watson. His vision of a computer so knowledgeable and adept in the ways of society that humans would think it was human, too, led to the establishment of the "Turing Test" as a classic gauge of machine intelligence. (Some argue that a program called Cleverbot passed the Turing Test last year.)

His greatest contribution came during the war, when he designed an electromechanical device known as the "bombe." With additional refinements, the cabinet-sized machine at Britain's Bletchley Park could decode thousands of intercepted German messages, tipping off the allies about the Nazis' next moves.

The intelligence gleaned by the Bletchley Park team, code-named Ultra, was crucial to the Allied war effort. "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told King George VI.

Gay hero? Or just plain hero?
The postwar era, however, was a disaster for Turing, who was gay. He got into a messy relationship with a man who helped an accomplice break into Turing's house — and after Turing reported the burglary, the investigation of the break-in eventually turned into an investigation of the researcher's sexual behavior.

At that time, in 1952, homosexual behavior fell under a criminal category known as gross indecency, and Turing's conviction could have put him in prison. As an alternative, Turing chose chemical castration through hormone injections. His security clearance was revoked, and he was barred from working for the British government. Turing pressed for a change in Britain's laws, but homosexuality remained a criminal offense in Britain until 1967.

That was way too late for Turing. Two years after his conviction, he died in his laboratory after eating a poisoned apple.

In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology to Turing, saying that the computer pioneer "truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war."

"The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely," Brown said. "We're sorry. You deserved so much better."

Today, Turing is hailed in some quarters as a tragic gay hero. But during this centennial year, the spotlight is squarely on science rather than sex. Google executive Vinton Cerf, who's considered one of the creators of the Internet, said in a BBC retrospective that he hoped this year's exhibits and observances would "help make Turing a hero and household name beyond the technical community that reveres his memory."

Texts on Turing
Cerf's tribute is one of seven essays on Turing's life and legacy being posted to the BBC's website this week. Wired's British website is also presenting a rich variety of perspectives to celebrate Turing Week. This weekend, luminaries from around the world will gather at the University of Manchester for a Turing centenary conference. Video from the conference is due to be streamed live. It's all part of Alan Turing Year.

To read up on Turing and his times, you can start with Andrew Hodges' 1983 biography, "Alan Turing: The Enigma," which has been reissued in a centenary edition. (In addition to the book, Hodges maintains a biographical website at Turing.org.uk.) There's also a centenary edition of "Alan M. Turing," the biography written in 1959 by Sara Turing, Alan's mother. "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is a more recent biography of the great man, written by David Leavitt in 2006.

Charles Petzold's "The Annotated Turing" delves into Alan Turing's groundbreaking 1936 paper, while Princeton University Press is putting out "Alan Turing's Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis," a facsimile edition of Turing's Ph.D. thesis. There's also "The Essential Turing," a compilation of the researcher's best-known writings. And if you're looking for something fresh that puts Turing's achievements in a wider context, check out George Dyson's book, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe."

Any birthday wishes you'd like to pass along for the centennial? Feel free to post them as comments below.

More about the history of computing:

• A brief history of computers
• British code crackers reunite, pride unbroken
• Museum celebrates 2,000 years of computing
• For tech pioneer IBM, 100 years of 'Think'

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

(C) Photo by Sheela Sharma

Three teams, one on each side and one in the back, maneuver an Easter Island statue replica down a road in Hawaii, hinting that prehistoric farmers who didn't have the wheel may have transported these statues in this manner. The experiment was led by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo and is reported in the July issue of National Geographic magazine.

Did Easter Island's famous statues rock, or roll? After doing a little rocking out themselves, researchers say they're sure the natives raised the monumental figures upright, and then rocked them back and forth to "walk" them to their positions.

Their findings mesh with a scenario that casts the Polynesian island's natives in the roles of resourceful engineers working with the little that they had on hand, rather than the victims of a self-inflicted environmental catastrophe.

"A lot of what people think they know about the island turns out to be not true," Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University at Long Beach, told me today.

Lipo and University of Hawaii anthropologist Terry Hunt lay out their case in a book titled "The Statues That Walked" as well as July's issue of National Geographic magazine. Their story serves as a counterpoint to a darker Easter Island saga, detailed in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," a better-known book by UCLA scientist-author Jared Diamond. 

Two scenarios
In Diamond's scenario, Easter Island's society is portrayed as one that chose to fail through overpopulation, conflict and deforestation. Polynesians colonized the island as far back as 1,600 years ago, and cut down forests of palm trees as part of a slash-and-burn strategy that led to intensive farming, soil degradation, conflict, cannibalism and massive depopulation. By the time the Europeans arrived in the 18th century, Easter Island's society was on the ropes.

The island's statues, known as moai, play a significant part in this scenario. Diamond relies on the findings of other researchers who say the monoliths, weighing as much as 90 tons, were dragged into place by hundreds of islanders, using downed trees as sleds, rollers and levers. Rival chieftains recruited whole tribes to erect monuments to their glory. The broken statues found along the island's path were a testament to the stone-carving society's final failure.

Hunt and Lipo take a different view: The way they see it, Easter Island was never that great a place to live. "It was never verdant, and there were never very many people on the island," Lipo said.

In this scenario, the Polynesians settled on the island about 800 years ago — and brought rats along with them. The settlers ate the rats, but because the rodents were an invasive species with no other natural predators, they took over the island and feasted on palm nuts, hastening the pace of deforestation. The population remained relatively stable for centuries, but when the Europeans arrived, the islanders who were there fell victim to diseases that their immune systems couldn't fight.

(c) Photo by Sheela Sharma

Archaeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt stand in front of a full-scale replica of a stone statue from Easter Island. Their research into Easter Island's past is featured in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Hunt acknowledged that, "from a biodiversity standpoint, it was a catastrophe." But he said the farming methods used by the ancient islanders were designed to make the best of a bad situation. Rocks were piled up to create circular garden plots known as "manavai," and crops were planted within the circles. Nutrients would quickly leach out of the soil, but fresh rock was pulverized and added to the soil as a mulch.

"They were able to engineer their lives in a way that was really stable and sustainable," Lipo said.

The statues play a different role in the two scientists' alternate scenario. They said it wouldn't take all that many people to move the statues if they were raised up vertically and then rocked down the road. Taking on the task would have helped blow off steam, and might have served as a kind of social glue, Hunt said.

"You're actually putting a lot of your effort into the process of moving a statue rather than fighting," he told me. "Moving the moai was a little bit like playing a football game."

Trial by transport
After "The Statues That Walked" came out, Diamond sharply disputed the conclusions reached by Hunt and Lipo, declaring on climate expert Mark Lynas' blog that they were "considered transparently wrong by essentially all other archaeologists with active programs on Easter Island." Diamond addressed the debate in detail, including the idea that the statues could have been moved vertically.

"This seems an implausible recipe for disaster," Diamond wrote. "Imagine it yourself: If you were told to transport a 90-ton statue 33 feet high over a dirt road, why would you risk tipping and breaking it by transporting it vertically with all its weight concentrated on its small base, rather than avoiding the risk of tipping by laying it flat and distributing its weight over its entire length?"

Lipo and Hunt had their own counter-rebuttal published on Lynas' blog as well, and the debate over the historical record depends on sophisticated interpretation of radiocarbon dating tests, pollen analysis and tooth marks on palm nut shells. But the part about the horizontal vs. vertical transport? That could easily be tested.

UCLA's Jo Anne Van Tilburg had previously shown that the horizontal method was workable, as long as you had lots of laborers and logs. Lipo and Hunt set up their own experiment: They built a 5-ton moai replica, with the weight distributed as it was in a real statue. Then they tied ropes around it, raised it up using a crane, and got ready to let it stand free.

They could immediately see that the statue would fall forward if the crane relaxed the tension on the line. Hunt said he and Lipo were just about to walk away in disgust when the crane operator slipped a 2-by-4 under the front edge of the statue and had it standing. "As soon as we saw this, Carl and I said, 'Of course! This makes perfect sense!"

National Geographic

National Geographic's iPad presentation on the Easter Island statues, part of the July 2012 issue, shows how the vertical-walking method might have been employed centuries ago.

The researchers found that the statue's fat belly produced a forward-falling center of gravity that facilitated vertical transport. A crew of as few as 18 people could use ropes to rock the statue back and forth, and forward. (In comparison, Van Tilburg's team used 60 pullers.) The vertical-transport trick worked with four rope-pullers on each side, plus 10 people to pull on the statue from behind, as if they were holding back a dog that was straining forward on a walk.

"It's really unnerving and beautiful, all at the same time," Hunt said.

Of course, a 90-ton statue is bigger than a 5-ton statue, but Hunt found that the technique was scalable. "With the physics of the taller statue, you have greater leverage," he told me. "It almost gets to the point where you would have to do it that way."

'We're not failures'
The statue-walking experiment alone doesn't prove that the entire scenario put forward by Hunt and Lipo is true, but it's consistent with the claims in the islanders' oral tradition that the statues "walked" down the road in ancient times. It also provides an alternate explanation for the ruined statues that littered the roads: When you lose control of the ropes, that's what happens, and you don't have any good way to move the broken pieces.

So did the statues rock, or roll? The debate over the two scenarios surrounding Easter Island's past could well continue for generations. But it's clear which scenario is preferred by the islanders themselves.

"The young people ... they're celebrating. I don't think there's any other word for it," Hunt said. "One came up to me and said, 'It's so important for my generation to know we're not failures.' That brought tears to my eyes."

More about Polynesia:

• Yes, the Easter Island heads really do have bodies
• Rat DNA helps trace Pacific migrations
• Ancient fashion explains snail mystery

Hunt and Lipo are scheduled to discuss "The Statues That Walked" at the National Geographic Society's headquarters complex in Washington on Thursday. The presentation is sold out.

"The Mystery of Easter Island," a Nova-National Geographic special focusing on the research conducted by Hunt and Lipo, is scheduled to air on PBS on Nov. 7.

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

P. Carril / ESA

Asteroids zip past Earth in this artist's conception.

The nonprofit B612 Foundation says it's planning the first privately funded deep-space mission, with the goal of launching an instrument known as the Sentinel Space Telescope to look for potentially hazardous asteroids from a vantage point inside Earth's orbit around the sun.

The foundation, headed by former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, tipped its hand today in an advisory alerting journalists about a press conference to be conducted at 8:30 a.m. PT June 28 at the California Academy of Science' Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco.

"We will create the first comprehensive dynamic map of our inner solar system showing the current and future locations and trajectories of Earth-crossing asteroids, paving the way to protect the Earth from future impacts and opening up the solar system to future exploration," the advisory read.

Scheduled speakers include Lu as well as the foundation's chairman emeritus, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart; project architect Scott Hubbard, a Stanford professor who once served as NASA's Mars czar; and mission director Harold Reitsema, former director of space science missions at Ball Aerospace.

A spokeswoman for the B612 Foundation, Diane Murphy, told me that the advisory was the only information being made public in advance of the press conference. That means it could be more than a week before we get formal word about the projected cost of the mission, its financial backers, projected launch date or other key details. However, the concept for the Sentinel Space Telescope has been percolating among asteroid-watchers and activists for years — providing an advance glimpse at what the project would entail.

Facing the threat
The B612 Foundation was established almost a decade ago to call attention to the potentially catastrophic threats posed by near-Earth objects. For example, an asteroid strike is thought to have led to the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago, and as recently as 1908, a much smaller cosmic impact wiped out half a million acres of Siberian forest.

A comprehensive catalog of potentially threatening asteroids could provide more advance warning of potential threats, giving humanity more time to do something about them. 

NASA has made good progress in cataloging most of the large asteroids that could pose a world-ending threat, thanks to ground-based observations as well as space missions such as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Last year, the WISE mission's science team estimated that more than 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids wider than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) had been found. However, scientists figure that so far they've been able to track less than a third of the near-Earth asteroids between 100 meters and a kilometer in width. Such asteroids could destroy a city or cause a "cosmic Katrina" if they hit just the wrong place.

Two Earth-crossing asteroids, 2005 YU55 and 2012 LZ1, sparked headlines in the past year when they made close encounters, and an other asteroids are due to come even closer in the years ahead. The most worrisome space rocks are those that spend much of their time interior to Earth's orbit, where they can get lost in the sun's glare. For that reason, the Sentinel mission's planners want to put their telescope in a place where it can look out toward Earth, with the sun behind it.

B612's action plan
A letter posted to Google+ in January, and attributed to Lu, lays out what appears to be a game plan for turning the Sentinel mission into a reality:

"We now have a detailed plan to build an infrared telescope spacecraft that will within 5.5 years of operation catalog and track the vast majority of threatening asteroids.  We have a fixed price bid from a spacecraft contractor, and are finalizing an agreement with NASA to provide communications and tracking services. The planned launch date is in 2016, with a flyby of Venus to enter the final observing orbit around the sun from where it can continuously monitor Earth’s orbit."

The letter said such a mission would cost several hundred million dollars, a cost that is "comparable to a multistory building or other municipal civic project."

It said the foundation's goals for 2012 were to add to B612's fundraising team, fill some technical positions, continue with analysis of the mission design "leading to a signed contract with our spacecraft manufacturer," and secure an anchor donor. Funding the work planned for the year would require raising $4 million, the letter said.

"By this time next year we should be able to begin actual construction of the Sentinel spacecraft," the letter said.

Since that letter was written, a different venture known as Planetary Resources announced that it had gained financial backing from a bevy of billionaires for efforts to build and deploy asteroid-watching telescopes in Earth orbit — with the ultimate goal of going out to the most promising asteroids and mining them for water and precious metals. Is there some synergy at work here? What exactly will be announced next week? For now, your guess is as good as mine, so feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about asteroids:

• How to handle asteroid threats
• Asteroid debate rises to next level
• Asteroid likely to spare Earth in 2040
• Reality check for asteroid miners
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

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

Brad Goldpaint

Photographer Brad Goldpaint captured this view of the northern lights over Crater Lake, Ore., early Sunday.

A double-burst of solar particles sparked auroral lights over the weekend, as expected — but at least in some parts of the world, the colors were not what you'd expect. Instead of the typical greenish glow, observers reported seeing reds, pinks, violets and even blues.

"It's been many years since I saw the blue in our auroras, but Saturday night they came back," John Welling reported in a note accompanying the photo he posted to SpaceWeather.com.

Pinks, reds and blues also dominated the scene captured on camera early Sunday by Brad Goldpaint, from a vantage point above Oregon's Crater Lake. In an email, Goldpaint told me the opportunity came about "by pure coincidence."

"Capturing this famous light show had been a dream of mine for several years, but I could not have imagined the lights showing up in my own backyard!" Goldpaint wrote. "After setting up near the Rim Village Visitor Center lookout area, I began to notice a faint band of moving light slowly making its way from behind the Watchman Tower, around 1:30 a.m. My camera began picking up bright pink bursts of light towards the north, with what also looked like unfamiliar vertical bands of light stretching upwards from the horizon. I quickly changed my camera’s white balance to confirm I was not picking up some random light pollution, or hallucinating in my drowsy state. Following additional exposures, I came up with the same amazing results. The magical shifting scene continued until sunrise, and like most days in the wilderness, I was awed and humbled by true nature personified."

The photo now graces Brad's portfolio at GoldpaintPhotography.com.

The colors of the aurora depend on the wavelength of the light emitted when fast-moving, electrically charged particles from the sun interact with different types of atoms and ions in Earth's upper atmosphere. If the particles hit mostly oxygen atoms, the light will be in the greenish-yellowish-reddish range. Collisions with nitrogen atoms produce the blue, purple and deep red hues.

The altitude of the auroral glow also affects the color: At altitudes between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers), the oxygen emissions tend toward the green side of the spectrum. At higher altitudes, you'll see more red. Blend all those colors, and you get a beautiful, wide-ranging palette.

The "Causes of Color" website provides a fuller spectrum of information. And speaking of a fuller spectrum, here are more of the weekend's colors, plus a bonus video:

Randy Halverson

Pink and purple rays highlight this picture of the aurora as seen from South Dakota's Black Hills by Randy Halverson. Technical details: Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 24-70, f/2.8 ISO 3200, 20-second exposure. For more of Halverson's images, click on over to Dakotalapse.com.

Stephen Voss

Stephen Voss snapped pictures of the southern lights from a spot near Invercargill in the south of New Zealand. "A dull arc hung around for a couple of hours before suddenly exploding with a mixture of rays and curtains," Voss told SpaceWeather.com. Check out Voss' gallery at Deep South Astrophotography.

Scott Lowther

Scott Lowther snapped this panoramic picture of Saturday night's auroral display as seen from Tremonton, Utah. The shot was taken with a Nikon D5000 and a 55mm lens at f/1.4 with 6-second exposures. For more of Lowther's photos, check out the Art by Earthlings website.

Shawn Malone / LakeSuperiorPhoto.com

Shawn Malone snapped this picture before dawn on Sunday morning from Marquette, Mich. "Got to witness the tail end of aurora activity as the skies cleared about 15-20 minutes before the sunrise light moved in," Malone told SpaceWeather.com. "Photos taken between 3:50 a.m. and 4:15 a.m. Bright aurora, with rays of light overhead, almost forming a corona. Beautiful purples came through on the exposures, but only light visible to the eye, as is typical with auroras right before sunrise." Check out LakeSuperiorPhoto.com for more of Malone's work.

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights blaze again on video
• Farewell to the northern lights
• Northern lights make for must-see TV
• Southern exposure for auroral lights
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

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