This past winter has been exceptionally rough for honeybees — and although it's too early to say exactly why, the usual suspects range from pesticides that appear to cause memory loss to pests that got an exceptionally early start last spring.

Friday marked the start of an annual survey that asks beekeepers to report how many bees they lost over the winter, conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership, the Apiary Inspectors of America and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The advance word is that the results will be brutal.  The New York Times, for example, quoted beekeepers as saying the losses reached levels of 40 to 50 percent — which would be double the average reported last year.

One beekeeper in Montana was quoted as saying that his bees seemed health last spring, but in September, "they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy."

Dennis vanEngelsdorp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland who is one of the leaders of the survey team, said he can't predict what the past winter's average loss figure will be. The beekeepers' reports are being solicited online for the next two weeks, and the figures are due for release on May 7.

"What I can say is, when we were in California this year, the strength of the colonies that were there was significantly lower than it was in previous years," vanEngelsdorp told NBC News. 

Pesticides at issue
That's consistent with a mysterious ailment known as colony collapse disorder, which has stirred scientists' concern for the past decade. The malady almost certainly due to combination of factors — including the Varroa mite, a single-celled parasite known as Nosema, several varieties of viruses, and pesticides. Researchers point to one particular class of pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, as a prime suspect.

Neonicotinoid-based pesticides are commonly applied as a coating on corn seeds, but the chemicals can persist in the environment. Although they have low toxicity for mammals, they've been found to have a significant neurotoxic effect on insects, including bees. Several European countries have banned neonicotinoids, the European Union has been looking at a wider ban, and the Environmental Protection Agency is considering new limitations as well. Just last week, a lawsuit called on the EPA to suspend the use of two types of neonicotinoids immediately.

Two recently published studies add to the concern: This week, researchers report in Nature Communications that neonicotinoids block the part of a bee's brain that associates scents with foods. They suggest that without that functionality, the bees effectively forget that floral scents mean food is nearby, and thus die off before they can pollinate. A study published in January in the Journal of Experimental Biology found a similar link to problems with scent-related learning and memory.

Mild winter, dry summer
Although neonicotinoids are currently front and center in the debate over colony collapse disorder, they're not necessarily the primary reason for this winter's dramatic dip in bee colonies.

VanEngelsdorp noted that the winter of 2011-2012 was easy on the bees: Losses amounted to just 21.9 percent, compared with a 2006-2011 average of 33 percent. However, the mild winter was kind to the bees' pests as well. VanEngelsdorp speculated that Varroa mites may have gained an early foothold in the hives last spring. By the time beekeepers started their treatments on the usual schedule, it was too late to keep the mites from weakening the colonies. That would help explain why the past winter's losses were worse than usual.

Scott Bauer / USDA via AP

A worker bee carries a Varroa mite, visible in this close-up view.

California beekeeper Randy Oliver, who discusses industry trends on the Scientific Beekeeping blog, said the past summer's drought was also a factor: "When there's a drought, the bees are in poor shape with the food," he told NBC News. He said he and other beekeepers predicted that there'd be heavy winter losses last July, when the scale of the drought became clear.

Heavy losses are bad news, and if bee colonies are becoming progressively weaker, that's worse news. It's not just because of the honey: The Department of Agriculture says that bee pollination is responsible for more than $15 billion in increased crop value each year. A bee scarcity increases costs for the farmers who need them for pollination, and that could lead to higher food prices. But Oliver said it's important to keep a sense of perspective about the bad news.

"The situation with the bees is not dire," he said. "The bees are doing OK. There's no danger that the bees will go extinct. ... That's just not true."

More about bees:

• Neonicotinoids tied to crashing bee populations
• Zombie bees spread to Washington state
• Mites and virus team up to wipe out beehives

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

The age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin is being resurrected this Easter — thanks to the attention of a new pope, the creation of a "Shroud 2.0" app, and a new book that claims the cloth dates back to Jesus' time.

The claim immediately faced a wave of criticism, including a harsh statement from Turin's archbishop that some say has driven a stake into the book's heart.

Believers say the centuries-old shroud bears the imprint of Jesus, chemically captured in the cloth at the time of his resurrection. Skeptics say it's a cleverly done medieval fake, wrapped up in highly debatable scientific claims that just won't die.

The newly published Italian-language book — "Il Mistero Della Sindone," or "The Mystery of the Shroud" — recycles some of those claims, adds in some fresh results from single-fiber tests, and makes the argument that the shroud shows the difficult-to-reproduce image of a man who lived sometime between 280 B.C. and the year 220.

If that's not enough to bring the shroud back into the spotlight, there's also the news that Pope Francis, who was named to lead the Roman Catholic Church just last month, will appear on Italian TV on Holy Saturday to introduce a RAI Uno TV appearance of the shroud. "It will be a message of intense spiritual scope, charged with positivity, which will help (people) never to lose hope," the Italian ANSA news agency quoted Turin Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia as saying.

And then there's Shroud 2.0, a free app for Apple's iPad/iPhone (and soon for Android) that lets users zoom in on high-definition images of the shroud and get factoids about its history. The app is being offered by Haltadefinizione, which took photos of the relic in 2008 and collaborated with church officials on the project. Shroud 2.0 is being offered as an "evangelization tool," according to the Vatican's News.va website.

Antonio Calanni / AP file

A photo from 2000 shows the Shroud of Turin displayed at Turin's cathedral.

Scientific links
The Catholic Church has taken no official stand on the authenticity of the shroud, which is kept under lock and key in Turin and is only rarely brought out for public display. But over the years, some researchers have tried to show that the shroud goes back to biblical times rather than to the 14th century.

"The Mystery of the Shroud" is the latest book of this genre. It was written by journalist Saverio Gaeta and Giulio Fanti, an engineering professor at the University of Padua. Fanti is part of a controversial research group that has claimed the image on the cloth couldn't possibly have been created by natural means. The new book refers to those past claims, plus a new angle.

That angle has to do with single fibers that were purportedly vacuumed up from the shroud during scientific testing. Fanti and his colleagues put the fibers through a series of mechanical and chemical tests. "Combining the two chemical methods with the mechanical one, it results [in] a mean date of 33 B.C., with an uncertainty of plus or minus 250 years at 95 percent confidence level, that is compatible with the period in which Jesus Christ lived in Palestine," the publishers say in a news release.

Skeptical views
Fanti's claims drew a quick reaction from Joe Nickell, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who regularly counters claims from Fanti and other shroud researchers.

"As is typical of a religious rather than scientific agenda, their news was shrewdly released just in time for Easter," Nickell said in a blog posting. "That alone casts doubt on the claims, but there is more."

Nickell pointed out that Fanti's tests "involve three different procedures — each with its own problems — which are then averaged together to produce the result." He said that stands in contrast with 1988's mass spectrometry tests, which yielded a date range between 1260 and 1390. Fanti says those earlier tests were not "statistically reliable," but Nickell and most scientists are sticking with the verdict rendered in 1988.

As a professional skeptic, Nickell can be expected to voice doubt about the book. But criticism also came from Archbishop Nosiglia.

Because there's "no degree of security" as to the authenticity of the fiber samples, the shroud's custodians "cannot recognize any serious value to the results of these alleged experiments," Nosiglia said in a statement quoted by La Stampa's Vatican Insider. The archbishop's comments "put stakes into Fanti's work," Vatican Insider reported.

Somehow I suspect that shroud science is not truly dead, but what do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your own verdict in the comment section below.

More about science and the shroud:

• Was resurrection story inspired by cloth?
• Experts re-create the face in the shroud
• Cosmic Log archive on Shroud of Turin

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

AP file

Elvis Presley performs in Providence, R.I., on May 23, 1977, three months before his death. Presley's doctor says that an enlarged and impacted colon played a role in the death of "the King."

In her latest book exploring the science that surrounds life's unmentionables, Mary Roach goes for the gut. Literally.

Roach has already taken on sex ("Bonk"), death ("Stiff"), the afterlife ("Spook") and the final frontier ("Packing for Mars"). In "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," she surveys centuries' worth of weird and wonderful discoveries about our digestive system, from the lips all the way down to the anus (which Roach says has some of the most densely innervated tissue on the human body).

In the course of exploring the alimentary canal, Roach addresses questions about our body's oddities (What keeps our stomach from digesting itself out of existence?) as well as the chemistry of digestion (How does Beano fight flatulence? How does Devrom stop the stink?).

One of the most fascinating tales has to do with the curse of Elvis Presley's colon: He died in 1977, while straining on the stool — and through the years, experts have pointed to drug abuse as well as a bad heart as contributing causes. But Roach concentrates instead on constipation, a problem that apparently plagued Presley for much of his life. The autopsy showed Presley had an enlarged "megacolon," horribly impacted with claylike material from a barium X-ray procedure that the King went through four months earlier.

It turns out that other folks have suffered fatal cases of constipation, but there's so much ickyness surrounding the subject that you don't hear much about it.  "I doubt you'll be seeing bus posters about defecation-associated sudden death any time soon," Roach writes.

There's a similar ick factor about many of the topics touched upon in "Gulp" — but fortunately, Roach has a knack for turning the "ick" into "ooh!" "wow!" and "really!?" In an interview last week, Roach discussed the ick factor and listed some of her favorite "Gulp" moments. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

W.W. Norton

"Gulp" answers questions ranging from Elvis Presley's cause of death to the frontier of fecal transplantation.

David Paul Morris

Mary Roach is the author of "Stiff," "Spook," "Bonk," "Packing for Mars" and now "Gulp."

Cosmic Log: Tell me how the book got started. How did you get into "Gulp"?

Mary Roach: Well, a couple of things: One of them was something I stumbled onto when I was writing "Packing for Mars." I came upon a rather bizarre space nutrition study at the University of California at Berkeley back in the '60s, where they were testing bacteria as an entree. Dead bacteria. They actually had subjects go into a metabolic chamber and they sat them down, and they served them a slurry of bacteria of different varieties. And it was a terrible fiasco, of course.

That got me thinking about eating, and how it's a sensual thing and something that involves the mind, something we look forward to. But underneath all that, it's a basic biological need, and a process. We have a food processor, but we don't like to think about that. So I thought, maybe I'll think about that. Maybe I'll go down the alimentary canal and have a look.

Q: You talk a lot about the taboos that are associated with eating and digestion. Could you put your finger on the silliest taboo you came across? Is there some attitude toward eating that really makes no sense?

A: The first one that comes to mind is saliva. Saliva is something that's a highly taboo substance. Once it's outside your body, your own saliva is a source of disgust. Which is quite bizarre, because you're swallowing it all the time. You generate two to three pints of it, right there in your mouth. And yet, once it leaves the body, it's an object of revulsion. It's fascinating — something that has to do with the boundaries of the self.

Q: You debunk a lot of myths in the book, too. Is there particular bit of accepted wisdom that you're proudest to show is not really true?

A: The myth that I had the most fun with was the Jonah myth. Some people take the Bible literally, and try to make the case that a human being could survive in a whale's stomach. So I looked into this and tried to figure out which whale. A sperm whale would be the most likely candidate, because it's got a big enough gullet, and it doesn't have gastric acid. What it does have, though, is a very powerful stomach that crushes whatever is in its gut. You would be tumbled around and probably have some broken bones if you were inside a sperm whale.

Q: Is there something in the book that people really should know, that they probably don't know? For example, if I ever feel like my stomach is full to bursting, I'm definitely not going to load up on bicarbonate of soda.

A: Yes, the human stomach is surprisingly resistant to bursting. It has a couple of emergency ditching maneuvers. You burp, or you regurgitate. This is your stomach's way of saying, "OK, we don't want to burst, that would be fatal. So let's get rid of some stuff." The only time a human being suffers a case of a burst stomach tends to be somebody who ate a huge meal, and then felt uncomfortable and took a whole bunch of bicarbonate of soda. A little bit of gas makes you burp, and then you feel better. But a lot of gas, generated quickly, can outpace the body's safety mechanisms and burst your stomach. So after eating a huge meal, I don't recommend a large dose of bicarbonate of soda. Proceed with caution.

Q: "Gulp" includes lots of historical tales about those who have studied the alimentary canal. Is there one story you'd point to as deserving of more attention than it usually gets?

A: One of the people that impressed me was the very first experimenter to study and document human intestinal gas. This was in 1816. A Parisian doctor, Francois Magendie, had the opportunity to dissect a couple of guillotined prisoners. Because the prisoners had a last meal, and he knew what the last meal was, he could run a controlled experiment, if you will. He knew how long they'd been digesting. So he looked at what types of gas were in what part of the alimentary canal. He even figured out the hydrogen sulfide component, which is usually only 0.2 to 0.3 parts per million. It's a trace gas, but the human nose is quite sensitive to it, so it's possible he just used, uh, his nose. That was a novel approach to studying human intestinal gas. For originality, I give Magendie a lot of points.

Q: And when it comes to the scientific frontiers for studying the alimentary canal, a lot of people talk about fecal transplants. That's something that you address in the book.

A: Yes, if you have a certain type of bacteria called C. difficile, C. diff for short, it tends to set up camp in little pockets along the intestine, and it can be difficult to get rid of. It can be a kind of lingering infection that leads to inflammation and diarrhea. It's a quite serious condition, sometimes fatal.

If you take someone else's waste, and you use a colonoscope, you can put that material in and basically "seed" the patient's bacteria with a whole different set of bacteria that takes over. You take it from a healthy person, obviously, not from someone else who has C. diff. You take it from the waste material, which is one-third bacteria by dry weight. There's a lot of bacteria in human waste. Tons! That was a surprise to me. You don't really know what that stuff is, but a lot of it is bacteria.

This has about a 90 percent cure rate for chronic C. diff infection, and there's no real down side. It's rare that medicine comes up with something that simple, that effective, and with no side effects. The problem with it is just the ick factor. It's been slow to catch on, probably because there's no device maker or drug company to push a drug through. It has to be the hard work of M.D.'s who are just trying to get it into the system. They don't even know how to bill for it, so they bill for a colonoscopy.

Now people are starting to look at bacterial transplants of different kinds, as possible treatments for everything from weight loss to chronic ear infections. There's someone looking into it as a treatment for gum disease, by taking someone else's oral bacteria and giving them a dose of that. There's not a lot of down side, other than the ick factor.

Q: It strikes me that the ick factor, and how to deal with that, is a theme that runs through the book. Have you drawn any lessons about how to get over the ick factor when it hurts us rather than helps us?

A: This is one of those rare and wonderful cases where the media's fascination has been helpful. There have been a lot of articles written about fecal transplants, and that's partly because it's headline-grabbing. "Yeah, they put someone's crap in somebody else!" It gets people's attention, and they read it. But it's gotten so much coverage that now people are used to the notion of doing it, and they know that it's effective, and they know that it's useful. It's not such an intuitively horrific thing. The more people talk about it, the more they'll get used to it, and the more the ick factor dissolves. Then people with a problem feel free to go to their doctor and say, "Hey, I heard about this fecal transplant, and I wonder if maybe we can try that."

The fact that it's getting a lot of coverage, and a lot of people are talking about it, is making it OK to speak about it. And that's always a good thing.

Q: Do you feel as if "Gulp" actually serves that purpose? I realize every author feels as if his or her book is a boon to humanity, but is this a special case?

A: [Laughter] With my books, it's a little hard to make the case. But if I were to make the case, it would simply be that: I am encouraging people to talk about what's going on in the whole human food processor, from mouth to anus. It's a miraculous machine, and we owe it a little respect, instead of shame and embarrassment. I would love to see people having dialogues about it without feeling funny.

More cool facts about our food processor:

• Passing time by passing gas
• Can eating too much make your stomach burst?
• Diet and nutrition on the Body Odd blog

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

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 29, 2013 3:33 AM EDT

A NASA astronaut and his two Russian crewmates made the fastest-ever trip to the International Space Station on Thursday, arriving less than six hours after launch.

In the past, it's taken two days for Soyuz spaceships to make the trip from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. But mission planners worked out a more efficient procedure that made it possible for the Soyuz to catch up with the station in just four orbits, compared with more than 30 orbits under the previous flight plan.

Russian cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin, along with NASA's Chris Cassidy, rocketed into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:43 p.m. ET Thursday (2:43 a.m. Friday local time). "The spacecraft is nominal, we feel great," Vinogradov, the spacecraft's commander, reported as the rocket ascended to orbit.

NASA launch commentator Josh Byerly hailed Thursday's flight, saying that the crew was "on the fast track" to the station.

The six-hour trip lasted roughly as long as an airplane flight from Seattle to Miami. NASA officials say the fast-rendezvous procedure minimizes the time that crew members spend in the Soyuz's close quarters and gets them to the much roomier space station in better shape. The down side is that the three spacefliers had to spend most of the trip sitting elbow to elbow in bulky spacesuits — which might strike a familiar chord for Seattle-to-Miami fliers.

The fast-track technique relies on a complicated round of orbital choreography that was tested three times over the past eight months, using unmanned Russian Progress cargo ships.

Last week, the space station raised its orbit by about a mile and a half (2.5 kilometers) to put it in the correct position for intercepting the Soyuz. The Soyuz had to be launched at just the right moment, to get into just the right orbit at just the right distance behind the station. To catch up with the station at the right time, the Soyuz had to execute a precisely timed series of thruster firings — a task that was made easier by an upgrade to the spacecraft's automated navigation system.

"From a technical point of view, we feel pretty comfortable with this," Cassidy said at a pre-launch news briefing. "All of the procedures are very similar to what we do in a two-day process, and we've trained it a number of times."

Despite all the training, there were some nail-biting moments. At one point during the Soyuz's approach, a Russian mission controller told Vinogradov, "You really need to stay calm and cool." Vinogradov followed through on the advice, guiding the Soyuz to its targeted position at 10:28 p.m. ET.

Two hours after docking, the hatches between the two spacecraft were opened, and the Soyuz trio floated through to greet three other spacefliers who have been living aboard the station since December: Canadian commander Chris Hadfield, NASA's Tom Marshburn and Russia's Roman Romanenko.

"Hey, is anyone home?" Vinogradov joked. The new arrivals received a round of hugs and congratulations, exchanged warm words with loved ones back on Earth via the station's communication link, and finally settled down for rest at the end of a long, long day.

Vinogradov has been on two previous long-duration space missions — to Russia's Mir space station in 1997-1998, and to the International Space Station in 2006. Cassidy, a Navy SEAL, has been to the station once before, during a mission on the shuttle Endeavour in 2009. This is the first spaceflight for Misurkin.

The new crew members will spend five and a half months aboard the orbital outpost. They'll take part in station upkeep as well as scores of scientific experiments. Up to seven spacewalks are planned during their stay, with the first one coming up next month. The next changing of the guard comes in mid-May, when Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko are due to return to Earth.

More about the Soyuz trip:

• Space station shifts orbit for fast trip
• Space trip offers speed, but not comfort
• Fast trip to station is like riding a train

This report includes information from The Associated Press.

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

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 28, 2013 4:47 PM EDT

FBI

The FBI says a 1950 flying-saucer memo rates as the most popular file in its online document repository.

The FBI says it never followed up on the most popular file in its online reading room — a one-page UFO memo that passes along a second- or third-hand report about flying saucers and alien passengers that were supposedly recovered in New Mexico.

The memo, dated March 22, 1950, has been viewed almost a million times over the past two years, the FBI said this week in a blog posting. It was written by Guy Hottel, who was the head of the FBI's field office in Washington at the time, and addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In the memo, Hottel discusses an account provided to an FBI agent ... that was attributed to an informant ... who purportedly heard from an Air Force investigator ... that "three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico."

"They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter," the memo read. "Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots."

Hottel said he was told that the saucers' control systems might have been disrupted by interference from "a very high-powered radar set-up" that the government had in the area. But he admitted in the memo that "no further evaluation was attempted" by the informant, whose name is blacked out in the online document.

The Hottel memo has been in the public record since the 1970s, but it created a huge splash in 2011 when it was added to the FBI Vault, an online repository of public records. Here's how The Sun, a British tabloid, characterized the memo in a headline from those days: "Aliens Exist, Say Real-Life X-Files."

Monday's posting was written to counter such characterizations. The FBI denied that the memo constituted evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft — and said Hottel's report was never taken all that seriously. Instead, it was considered "an unconfirmed report that the FBI never even followed up on."

The FBI said there was no reason to believe that the memo referred to another famous UFO saga, the purported discovery of a crashed alien spaceship in Roswell, N.M., in 1947. "The Hottel memo is dated nearly three years after the infamous events in Roswell," it said. 

The bureau acknowledged that for a few years after the Roswell incident, Hoover followed up on an Air Force request by ordering his agents to verify any UFO sightings. "That practice ended in July 1950, four months after the Hottel memo, suggesting that our Washington Field Office didn't think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it," the posting said.

There's an alternate explanation for the Hottel memo that makes a lot more sense. Two years ago, when the memo was added to the Vault, paranormal investigator Ben Radford noted that the informant's story matched the description of a UFO hoax that was concocted by a man named Silas Newton. In 1950, Newton was telling tales about flying saucers that had crashed at a radar station near the Arizona-New Mexico border. Newton was later convicted of fraud, and died in 1972.

Ironically, there's a whole different section of the FBI Vault that's devoted to Newton, whom the bureau described as "a wealthy oil producer and con man." To get the story about the connections between Newton's tales and the Hottel memos, check out this thorough debunking on the Above Top Secret forum.

Even though the FBI says the memo "does not prove the existence of UFOs," it's not confirming the Silas Newton story, either. "Some people believe the memo repeats a hoax that was circulating at that time, but the Bureau's files have no information to verify that story," it said.

What do you think FBI Agent Fox Mulder would say? "The truth is out there"? Or "Trust no one"? Feel free to weigh in with your own verdict in the comment section below.  

Update for 6:35 p.m.: Mark Allin, chief operating officer for The Above Network, says the truth is out there, in the form of the Above Top Secret analysis that I mentioned earlier. "The short story is, without a doubt, 'Case Closed,'" Allin said today in an email. "The memo is based on a hoax that was carried out by a convicted con man named Silas Newton, and it was debunked years ago. It's a pretty good and interesting hoax story, to be certain, but there is no value in it beyond that."

More about UFOs:

• US Army missile test sparks UFO reports
• Gallery: UFO cases that still stir up a buzz
• Cosmic Log archive on UFOs

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

Distant relatives of England's King Richard III have escalated their fight to have the much-maligned monarch's mortal remains buried in York rather than Leicester, claiming that the matter was a human rights issue.

The late king's skeleton was discovered beneath a parking lot near the present-day Leicester Cathedral last year, and identified "beyond reasonable doubt" through DNA analysis and other forensic tests. Historians say Richard III was buried at the cathedral because it was near where he fell in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 — but it was only recently that archaeologists had enough information to know where to dig.

A century after his death, Richard was immortalized as the child-killing monster of William Shakespeare's play, "Richard III." Contemporary experts say that the king's reputation as an evildoer was undeserved, and that he was an enlightened ruler. Villain or victim, King Richard III has enjoyed a surge of popularity in recent times, so much so that his fans in two English cities are arguing over his final resting place.

Even before the bones were exhumed, the University of Leicester was granted a license from the British Ministry of Justice that gave university officials the power to decide the disposition of any remains that were found. The university and other officials in Leicester are now in the midst of preparations for a reburial at Leicester Cathedral next year.

Descendants of Richard III's siblings, however, are arguing that the remains of England's last Plantagenet king should be buried instead in York, where the monarch had family connections. A lawyer representing the pro-York group, known as the Plantagenet Alliance, said Tuesday that he was preparing a legal challenge to Leicester's plans.

"We have now written officially to the Ministry of Justice and University of Leicester, notifying them that we plan to issue these claims," Reuters quoted the lawyer, Matthew Howarth, as saying. "We will follow up by issuing the judicial review and other proceedings as soon as possible, but certainly within the next few weeks."

The group intends to argue that the Ministry of Justice failed to consult the relatives about the arrangements for the exhumation and reburial, and that this failure breached the European Convention on Human Rights.

"We have every hope that Matthew and his colleagues will succeed in these cases and help us significantly in our quest to have Richard's remains buried at the most appropriate site, York Minster," Stephen Nicolay, a 16th great-nephew of the king, was quoted as saying.

In response, the University of Leicester issued a statement rejecting the Plantagenet Alliance's claims.

"Richard III is believed to have no living descendants. Any distant relations are therefore descended from his siblings. Statistically speaking, many tens of thousands of individuals alive today are descended in this way," the university said. "There is no obligation to consult living relatives where remains are older than 100 years."

The university said that the group's reference to the European Convention on Human Rights, which recognizes the right to respect for private and family life, "seems particularly odd given the distance of any relations, the years that have passed and thus the lack of any personal relationship with the deceased."

More about Richard III:

• Adulation for Richard III is fit for a king
• Police investigating hate mail sent to York
• Richard III's face revealed after 500 years

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

The ASSET Program / Cornell

An image produced by a scanning electron microscope shows two Tetrahymena cells in the act of mating.

Biologists have known for decades that there are up to seven sexes of the single-celled organism known as Tetrahymena thermophila — but they didn't know exactly how those different sexes "did it." Until now.

When it's time for Tetrahymena to mate, two organisms of different mating types recognize each other and get together to swap DNA. The results of the hookup are totally random. One critter may be mating type No. 1, the other may be mating type No. 3, and the two resulting progeny may turn out to be, um, mating type No. 6. How do they do that?

In the journal PLOS Biology, researchers report that the hooked-up organisms almost literally roll the genetic dice to determine what the sex of the progeny will be.

The researchers say the key to Tetrahymena's sexual proclivities lies in its double genome: Every cell has a "somatic" genome that manages its everyday life, plus a "germline" genome that serves a function similar to that of the ovaries or testes in humans. The germline genome contains incomplete gene pairs for each of six or seven sexes, depending on the cell line. (In this case, the cells came in six sexual flavors.)

Random sex
When two microbes hook up, the progeny's newly created somatic genome latches onto one of those incomplete gene pairs, producing one complete sex-specific gene pair. The other sexy bits from the germline genome are wiped out. The random rearrangement leaves the resulting cells with exactly one complete sex-specific gene pair — and one mating type.

"It's completely random, as if they had a roulette wheel with six numbers, and wherever the marble ends up is what they get," senior researcher Eduardo Orias, a research professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, explained in a news release. "By chance they may have the same mating type as the parents — but it's only by chance. It's a fascinating system."

Most of the time, Tetrahymena reproduces asexually, simply by having a parent cell divide into two progeny cells. But the organisms tend to pair up sexually when food is scarce, apparently as part of an evolutionary mechanism that takes advantage of genetic diversity. Sex-specific proteins on the surface of the cells serve as a signal that mating is likely to result in more diverse progeny. That's how two cells of the same mating type avoid pairing up with each other.

This type of mating process doesn't by itself increase the Tetrahymena population: Two cells hook up, and after recombining DNA, two cells separate again. "This is sex without reproduction," Orias said during a telephone interview. After mating, the recombined genetic information is passed down from parents to progeny through asexual reproduction — until it's time for the next hookup.

What it means for humans
Although the process sounds totally alien to us two-sex types, the lessons from Tetrahymena could have implications for human health.

"Tetrahymena has about as many genes as the human genome," Orias said in the news release. "For thousands of those genes, you can recognize the sequence similarity to corresponding genes in the human genome with the same biological function. That's what makes it a valuable organism to investigate important biological questions."

For example, Tetrahymena may reveal new tricks relating to the methods that cells use to recognize friend vs. foe. That could have implications for studying human immune response. Also, the way that the organisms rearrange their DNA may point to new strategies for fighting cancer, which often results from the faulty rearrangement of genetic material.

"The hope is that at some point, there may be useful applications for medicine," Orias told NBC News.

More about microbial marvels:

• No sex for 40 million years? No problem!
• Single-celled giant upends early evolution
• Strange organism has unique roots in tree of life

In addition to Orias, the authors of "Selecting One of Several Mating Types Through Gene Segment Joining and Deletion in Tetrahymena Thermophila" include Marcella D. Cervantes, Eileen P. Hamilton, Jie Xiong, Michael J. Lawson, Dongxia Yuan, Michalis Hadjitomas and Wei Miao.

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

SpaceX said its robotic Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, bringing back more than a ton of cargo from the International Space Station.

"Welcome home!" the California-based company said in a Twitter update, heralding the Dragon's return to Earth after more than three weeks in space. SpaceX said its recovery crew watched the spacecraft descend to the sea at the end of its parachutes, and a ship headed to the site to haul the capsule aboard and bring it back to port.

"Time to go fishing!" the Canadian Space Agency said in a congratulatory tweet.

The on-time splashdown came at 12:34 p.m. ET, five and a half hours after the Dragon was released from the grip of the space station's robotic arm. "It looks both beautiful and nominal from here," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, the station's commander, reported as the orbital outpost flew 256 miles (411 kilometers) above the Pacific.

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn said he was "sad to see the Dragon go. ... Performed her job beautifully, heading back to her lair."

This marks the third time that SpaceX's commercial cargo craft has made a round trip to the space station. The first visit, in May 2012, showed NASA that the California-based company could deliver payloads safely. Last October, another Dragon took on the first of 12 cargo runs under the terms of a $1.6 billion contract with the space agency. This latest mission launched on March 1, carrying 1,200 pounds (544 kilograms) of supplies and equipment.

SpaceX had to cope with a post-launch glitch involving the Dragon's thruster system, but the mission went swimmingly after that. Astronauts unloaded the cargo soon after its was brought in for its berthing at the station, and then refilled it with 2,600 pounds (1,180 kilograms) of payload items due to be returned to Earth — including scientific experiments, station hardware and trash. Packaging brought the total weight past the 3,000-pound (1,360-kilogram) mark, SpaceX said.

NASA said the plant samples that were brought back from the station could help scientists enhance crop production on Earth and develop food production systems for future space missions. Other experiments carried by the Dragon could help in the development of more efficient solar cells, detergents and electronics. 

The returned cargo also included 13 sets of Lego toy blocks that went up to the station two years ago aboard the shuttle Endeavour. The blocks were used by the astronauts in educational videos to demonstrate how machines work in weightlessness. One of the kits, a 3-foot-long (meter-long) scale model of the space station, was so bulky that it would have collapsed under its own weight in Earth's gravity.

NASA via SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule separates from the International Space Station's robotic arm on Tuesday.

NASA TV via Spaceflight Now

A thermal imager on SpaceX's Dragon capsule captures a view of the International Space Station during Tuesday's departure.

SpaceX

SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule floats down to the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday.

Dragon's return was originally scheduled for Monday, but "fairly aggressive" seas at the intended splashdown zone forced a one-day postponement, NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said. The weather was better on Tuesday, and the splashdown target was a couple of hundred miles nearer to shore, at a point in the Pacific 214 miles (344 kilometers) west of Baja California.

SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said the capsule was secured aboard its recovery ship without incident. "Cargo looks A ok," he reported in a Twitter update.

The ship is due to make a 30-hour voyage back to the port of Los Angeles, where time-sensitive biological samples will be offloaded. Then the Dragon and its remaining cargo will be trucked to SpaceX's facility in McGregor, Texas.

The next SpaceX cargo run is scheduled at the end of September. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is working on a second commercial delivery system that's due for its first test launch next month. But only the Dragon is capable of bringing significant amounts of cargo back to Earth.

NASA selected SpaceX and Orbital to help fill the gap left by the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011. Russian, European and Japanese cargo craft also service the space station. For now, Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only spacecraft that transport people to and from the station, but NASA intends to have U.S.-built commercial spaceships — perhaps including an upgraded version of the Dragon — carrying astronauts within five years.

More about SpaceX:

• SpaceX's next-gen engine cleared for liftoff
• Grasshopper rocket takes its biggest hop yet
• NBC News archive on SpaceX

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

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 26, 2013 7:29 AM EDT

These microwave images show how an object looks in normal view (top row) and oblique view (bottom row) when it's uncloaked, and when it's cloaked by a metascreen. A free-space view of the scene is included as well.

If you liked last year's bulky invisibility cloaks, you'll love this year's fashionable ultra-thin invisibility wrap — which is just a tenth of a millimeter thick but can still make the objects inside undetectable to microwave scans.

"This is the first time an ultra-thin cloak has been realized, much thinner than the wavelength," Andrea Alu, a materials-science researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, told NBC News in an email. "The approach is unique."

Invisibility cloaks have been the stuff of science-fiction stories ranging from the "Star Trek" TV series to the Harry Potter sorcery saga, but they're also becoming the stuff of science fact. The first real-life invisibility cloak was created in 2006, and they've gotten a lot better since then.

Alu and his colleagues describe what they call a "3-D stand-alone mantle cloak" this week in the New Journal of Physics. The research builds on past work with bulkier kinds of cloaking devices. The first invisibility cloaks guided light waves around hidden objects. Last year, Alu's group showed how a shell of plasmonic materials could cancel out the scattering of light waves by an object, rendering it invisible. This week's research paper features a new kind of wave-canceling cloak that's much thinner than the shell.

The University of Texas researchers took a 18-centimeter-long cylindrical ceramic rod and wrapped it in what they call a "metascreen," a layer of flexible plastic film overlaid with a fishnet pattern of copper tape. In the visible spectrum, the wrapped-up object looked like a tube of kitchen plastic wrap. But when the researchers beamed microwaves at the object, their microwave imagers couldn't pick up the object's signature.

"The wave can pass through the object, if it is penetrable," Alu explained.

Alu et al. via New Journal of Physics

This image shows the experimental set-up for far-field microwave observations. The cylinder at the center of the scene is a ceramic rod wrapped in an invisibility cloak that's just a tenth of a millimeter thick.

Alu et al. via New Journal of Physics

A near-field experiment demonstrated that the rod wrapped in a copper-and-plastic metascreen was invisible to microwaves, even when the rod was inclined at an angle.

The researchers reported that invisibility effect was present over a moderately broad bandwidth, with optimal performance at a wavelength of 3.6 gigahertz. The same technique could be used to produce invisibility in different wavelengths.

"In terms of applications, radar camouflaging is one," Alu said. He said the technique could defeat advanced countermeasures for stealth radar detection, such as looking for the radar "shadow" of a stealth-concealed object. Alu and a colleague also have proposed a method for terahertz-wave invisibility, which could theoretically make objects invisible to airport security scanners.

Alu said the potential applications aren't limited to stealth and spycraft. "The main civil applications we have suggested for this technology are in the area of non-invasive sensing, biomedical and optical nanodevices for computing, and energy harvesting," he said.

Harry Potter might not want to give his old cloak of invisibility cloak to Goodwill just yet, though. The metascreen constructed by Alu and his colleagues will work only for microwaves, and not for the visible-light wavelengths that our eyes can see.

"In principle, this technique could also be used to cloak light," Alu said in a news release. "In fact, metascreens are easier to realize at visible frequencies than bulk metamaterials, and this concept could put us closer to a practical realization. However, the size of the objects that can be efficiently cloaked with this method scales with the wavelength of operation, so when applied to optical frequencies, we may be able to efficiently stop the scattering of micrometer-sized objects."

That means Harry will still have to keep the bulky old cloak in his closet — unless he can use the "Decresplitudo" spell to shrink himself to a millionth of a meter in size. And if he can do that, who needs a cloak?

More about invisibility:

• Invisibility gets a reality check
• Invisibility cloak for quakes? It's possible
• Invisibility could lead to super-Internet

In addition to Alu, the authors of "Demonstration of an Ultralow Profile Cloak for Scattering Suppression of a Finite-Length Rod in Free Space" include J.C. Soric, P.Y. Chen, A. Kerkhoff, D. Rainwater and K. Melin.

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

L. Calcada / N. Risinger / ESO

An artist's conception shows the planet Alpha Centauri Bb, orbiting one of the stars in a nearby triple-star system. A commercial venture known as Uwingu says it will use proceeds from a contest to give Alpha Centauri Bb a new name to support endangered educational and public outreach efforts.

NASA's plan to suspend educational and public outreach activities due to budget sequestration has sparked protests from some of the space agency's biggest fans, and a commercial venture known as Uwingu wants to help fill the gap. Uwingu says it will direct proceeds from its contest to name the closest exoplanet toward projects that are facing budget cuts.

The venture was set up last year to offer space-themed entertainment that would raise money for education and space science. Just last week, Uwingu kicked off an effort to come up with a "people's choice" name for Alpha Centauri Bb, an Earth-sized planet that was detected last year just 4.3 light-years away.

It takes $4.99 to nominate a name, and 99 cents to cast a vote. The contest closes on April 15, and the winner will be announced the next day. Some of the proceeds will go toward paying the company's expenses, but the target is to put at least half of the money into a fund to support research and education. 

Rough patch for NASA
When the company made its public debut, the founders said the Uwingu Fund could serve as a lifeline for scientists and educators if NASA's budget ran into a rough patch. Sequestration certainly qualifies as a rough patch: The automatic spending cuts will force NASA to scale back its budget by roughly $900 million for the fiscal year.

As part of its plan to comply with sequestration, NASA officials on Friday ordered the suspension of educational and public outreach activities, also known as EPO. Planetary scientist Alan Stern, Uwingu's CEO and a former NASA associate administrator, said the suspension has put educational and public outreach programs "under severe and sudden stress."

"At Uwingu, we believe that private and commercial funding of space-based initiatives — including research and EPO — is more important now than ever," Stern said in a statement Monday. "That's the purpose of The Uwingu Fund, which is fueled from people participating in the naming contest for Alpha Centauri's planet. Today we're announcing that Uwingu is taking action to combat the severe, adverse impact of sequestration on NASA EPO by directing all Uwingu Funds proceeds raised through this contest to grants to EPO professionals and projects."

In the grand scheme of things, education and public outreach aren't the most expensive things that NASA does. The continuing resolution that governed spending for the current fiscal year set aside $137 million for the agency's education account, and sequestration would trim that figure by $7 million. NASA budgets additional funds for public outreach on a mission-by-mission basis, but the expense is still a small proportion of NASA's $17.8 billion budget.

Outcry over outreach
Friday's move nevertheless sparked an outcry from many who rank education and public outreach among NASA's strongest suits. Over the weekend, more than 4,500 people signed onto an online petition urging the White House to "repeal" the EPO spending cuts.

"This is something that hits extremely close to home, and not just because I may not have a position this summer as a result of this," Scott Lewis, media director for Astrosphere New Media Association, said in a Google+ posting. "NASA's education and public outreach is something that opens the eyes of thousands, if not millions of people, to the magnificence of science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

One of the ventures that could be affected by the budget cuts is CosmoQuest, an online educational project that sponsors virtual star parties, citizen-science projects and similar activities with NASA support. Pamela Gay, a professor at Southern Illinois University who is CosmoQuest's project director, said the effect on funding is not yet clear — but she's already preparing for cutbacks.

"I'm looking at multiple fundraisers," Gay, who is on Uwingu's board of advisers, said in a Google+ posting on Sunday. "While I'm less worried about CosmoQuest than I was yesterday, it is clear that many good people in the NASA EPO community are deeply in jeopardy. I continue to encourage you to help us seek donations so that I can recover as needed from any cuts we incur, and, as additional funding allows, work to contract people who do lose their jobs to help us build new and amazing things for CQX. I'm hoping you will help me build a safety net for our community."

Correction for 3:55 p.m. ET March 25: I referred to Scott Lewis as an astronomer at Citrus College — which prompted this email from Lewis, a.k.a. "The Bald Astronomer": "I'm not an astronomer at Citrus College, but a student there. I am, however, media director for Astrosphere New Media Association, on the education/public outreach team for CosmoQuest, owner of KnowTheCosmos.com, and an all-around attractive man. haha."

More about sequestration's effects: 

• Sequester keeps NASA officials from conference
• FAA to close 149 air traffic control towers
• Budget battles: What you need to know

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

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

The Curiosity rover's instrument-laden robotic arm is front and center in this mosaic view captured by the Mars rover's NavCam system and assembled by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer. The colorized black-and-white imagery was captured on March 23. Click on the image to see the full panorama.

After a week of down time due to a computer glitch, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is once again sending back pictures of its rocky Red Planet locale at Yellowknife Bay. In this fresh panorama, the rover looks as if it's sticking its drill-equipped robotic arm right in your face.

"That drill is hungry, looking for something tasty to eat, and 'you' (loaded with water and organics) are it," jokes scientist-writer Ken Kremer, who collaborated with Italian colleague Marco Di Lorenzo to assemble the panorama.

Curiosity's percussive drill played a key role in the science team's most recently reported breakthrough: the finding that powder drilled out of a Martian rock contained the chemical traces of a life-friendly environment that existed on Mars billions of years ago. The team's chemical analysis of the powder indicated that the minerals were probably formed in the presence of drinkable water.

That kind of water no longer exists in liquid form on the Martian surface. The place where Curiosity is currently working may have once been in the vicinity of a riverbed, but it's now a cold and dry wasteland of sand and rock. In the weeks to come, Curiosity's scientists plan to drill into the rock again, looking for confirmatory clues about the potentially habitable environment in the Red Planet's past.

The plan has been held up due to a series of minor setbacks — including a memory failure that may have been due to a cosmic-ray strike, a precautionary stand-down to weather a solar storm, and most recently a computer file glitch that put the rover into safe mode. The Curiosity team has been carefully bringing the rover back to full operation, and this picture is presumably part of the checkout process.

It won't be long before the rover will once more have to reduce its contact with its handlers back on Earth, due to an Earth-Mars-sun conjunction that will interfere with radio signaling. Curiosity's communication gap is expected to last from April 4 to May 1, as detailed in a mission update from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During the break, Curiosity is expected to carry on with its experiments, but the transmission of science data and images will have to wait until May. So let's enjoy these fresh images while we can.

For more of Curiosity's raw imagery, check out the galleries on JPL's Mars Science Laboratory website. You'll also find great pictures on UnmannedSpaceflight.com, where Kremer, Di Lorenzo and other image-processing gurus post their work. If you have 3-D glasses, whip 'em out and take a look at Ed Truthan's red-blue view of Curiosity's first drilling site.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

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

Launch slideshow

More about Mars:

• How a Martian mountain would look on Earth
• What's next for the Curiosity rover
• NBC News archive on Mars

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

A Friday night flash of light in the skies over the East Coast sparked a rash of meteor sighting reports, followed by a mad dash to track down photos and videos of the event.

The American Meteor Society logged more than 800 reports from a region ranging from  North Carolina to Washington to New York to New England to Canada. Hundreds more registered their observations on Twitter.  One Twitter user, known as @Married2TheNite, reported from New Jersey that he saw — and heard — the object pass by. "It was making almost a hissing noise as it flew brightly overhead," he wrote. "I saw it around 7:55 p.m. EDT."

That time frame meshed with the many other reports. Some witnesses said they saw flashes of green, red and blue as the object streaked past.

The reports were consistent with a fireball — similar to the one that flashed over Russia on Feb. 15, but much, much smaller.

"It's not an incredibly rare event, but it is very unusual to have that many people observe it, and also it was unusually bright," Ron Dantowitz, director of the Clay Center Observatory, told NBC station WHDH-TV in Boston. "These types of meteors happen once or twice a year. The unusual thing is that it was so well observed not so long after sunset."

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office told The Associated Press that the flash appeared to be "a fireball that moved roughly toward the southeast, going on visual reports."

"Judging from the brightness, we're dealing with something as bright as the full moon," Cooke said. "The thing is probably a yard across. We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the Northeast."

For a while, Twitter buzzed with tweets and retweets highlighting pictures that falsely purported to show the Friday night light — but eventually, bona fide views surfaced. The paucity of honest-to-goodness meteor shots contrasted with the wealth of dashboard videos that came to light after last month's Russian meteor blast.

"The meteor has taught us one thing tonight," Cara Lynch tweeted, "the East Coast needs more dash cameras." 

One of the most widely distributed videos of Friday night's flash came from someone who didn't actually see it when it happened. "I wish I would have seen it for real," said Kim Fox, a first-grade teacher from Thurmont, Md.

Fox told NBC News that she checked her security-camera system after hearing about the meteor. At around the time that news reports said the meteor was widely sighted, she saw a bright flash on one of the camera views. She took out her mobile phone, recorded a video of the video, and posted it to her Facebook page. From there, the video went viral on the Web and on TV newscasts.

"The phones have been ringing all night," Fox said.

Did you see the flash? Add your sighting report to the American Meteor Society's log, and tell me about it in the comment space below. Got pictures? Feel free to post them to the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

Update for 3:44 p.m. ET March 23: In one reference, I mistakenly placed Thurmont in New Jersey rather than Maryland. And it's WHDH, not WDHD. Sorry about that! Also, more video views of the flash have come in. Hopkins Automotive Group posted this flashy security camera video on its Facebook page. There's also this dashcam view from WUSA9 photojournalist Kurt Brooks.

More about meteors:

• Russian meteor lurked for thousands of years
• Geminid meteors sparkle like gems
• Next big meteor shower? Lyrids in April

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

This story was originally published on Sat Mar 23, 2013 12:09 AM EDT

NASA via Twitter

NASA says the tweets will continue despite a "pause" in educational and public outreach initiatives.

NASA is putting the brakes on its educational and public outreach efforts, due to the continuing standoff over the federal budget and the resulting sequestration of the agency's funds.

The cutbacks in NASA's activities, including social-media initiatives, were outlined on Friday in a pair of memos from NASA Headquarters in Washington. The independent SpaceRef website published both memos, including one that ordered a suspension and another that provided additional instructions for NASA's Communication Coordinating Council.

Automatic spending cuts are taking effect, at NASA and many other federal agencies, as the result of the failure by the White House and Congress to agree on a budget deal. Last month, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told lawmakers that sequestration would reduce NASA's overall budget from the $17.8 billion that Congress approved last year to $16.9 billion.

The space agency already has cut back on travel and training expenses. As a result, some of the space agency's scientists and executives had to pass up this week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas. The new directives extend the cutbacks to online, multimedia and social-media initiatives as well as publications.

Operational websites and social-media accounts were excluded from the suspension, however — which means existing Twitter accounts, including @NASA and @MarsCuriosity, can stay in business. NASA has rapidly expanded its online presence in the past couple of years, winning recognition from the Emmys, the Shorty Awards and the Webby Awards. Just this month, the Mars Curiosity mission's social-media team won the South by Southwest Interactive Award for best social-media campaign. 

Waivers were also granted for mission announcements, media events and products, breaking-news activities and responses to media inquiries. In an emailed response to NBC News' inquiry, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs said additional guidance would be issued next week, addressing areas that would be exempt from the suspension.

"It's important to point out that it's a suspension, not a cancellation," Jacobs wrote. "The agency's budget for the fiscal year is more that $1 billion below the original request. We are taking prudent steps to ensure the resources expended on outreach activities are done so wisely.

"Mission activities and much of the existing news and information dissemination is not likely to be impacted, including our successful social media efforts," he said. "However, it is important in this constrained fiscal environment to pause and assess how the money is being spent on a wide variety of outreach activities, many of which are funded by independent projects and programs. We are not canceling anything yet. We are being financially responsible by pausing long enough to review activities before they go forward."

Update for 9 p.m. ET March 23: Folks have started a petition on the White House's "We the People" website, calling for a repeal of the sequestration cuts for education and public outreach. Although the sentiment is admirable, NASA's hands (and the White House's hands) may be tied by the rules that govern sequestration. It's important to note that all of the space agency's activities have to be cut back by the same percentage. It's just that in the case of education and public outreach, the memos that address the process for starting the cuts have now been made public. 

That being said, signing a White House petition is a great way to make your opinion known, and so is writing or calling your representatives in Congress.

More about sequestration's effects:

• FAA to close 149 air traffic control towers
• How science funding will be affected
• Budget battles: What you need to know

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

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 22, 2013 10:00 PM EDT

Talk about dancing with the stars: The glow of the northern lights danced through the night sky this week, thanks to a solar storm that swept past Earth over the past few days. Comet PanSTARRS, which is appearing a little bit farther north in western skies every evening, adds some extra sparkle.

The time around the equinox is considered the peak of the aurora season, because this time of year strikes a balance between the dark skies of winter and the more clement temperatures of summer. And although PanSTARRS may not have panned out the way some of the more optimistic skywatchers might have expected, it's still observable in the Northern Hemisphere — particularly if you're watching with binoculars from a vantage point far from city lights, with a clear view to the western horizon.

Sky & Telescope's PanSTARRS page helps you track the comet day by day, and you can always rely on SpaceWeather.com to have the latest, greatest pictures of PanSTARRS as well as the auroral glow.

For example, French photographer Sylvain Dussans managed to capture both phenomena in one glorious picture, taken from Norway's Senja Island.

Here are a couple more videos of the solar storm and the comet, as seen from Earth and space:

Chad Blakley / Lights Over Lapland

This closeup from Chad Blakley's video uses a black circle to highlight the comet's location. For more, check out Blakley's Lights Over Lapland page on Facebook.

More about the comet and the aurora:

• Double delight in the skies above
• How to get the most out of PanSTARRS
• Cosmic Log archive for auroras and comets

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

Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech researchers used a gene disruption technique to change the eye color of a mosquito, a critical step toward new strategies for disrupting the transmission of diseases such as dengue fever. The eye colors of these mosquitoes are varied because of cell-to-cell variability in the degree of gene editing.

Scientists at Virginia Tech have disrupted the genes that control eye color in mosquitoes, using a genetic-engineering technique that could also disrupt the transmission of diseases such as dengue fever.

The technique relies on two specially designed proteins that belong to a class known as transcription activator-like effector nucleases, or TALENs. The technique can target DNA at a specific site in an organism's genetic code, so precisely and efficiently that the journal Science has called the molecules "genomic cruise missiles."

Virginia Tech entomologist Zach Adelman prefers a different analogy. "They're basically a very, very fine-tuned pair of scissors," he told NBC News.

TALENs have been used to edit the genomes of animal and human cell cultures, but Adelman said the approach he and his colleagues used on the mosquito genome was different. Rather than trying to modify the function of a gene, the researchers aimed to disable a gene by snipping away at it. In the journal PLOS ONE, they describe how they targeted a gene whose protein product is essential for the production of eye pigment in Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species linked to the transmission of dengue fever.

Genetically engineered TALEN proteins were injected into the germ cells of mosquito embryos early in their development, with the intention of disrupting the coding for eye pigmentation that would be passed down to the next generation. When the targeted mosquitoes gave birth to baby bugs, a large percentage of them had light-colored eyes instead of the typical black eyes. The lack of pigment served as confirmation that the genetic code was wiped out.

The next step is to identify the genetic mechanisms in mosquitoes that play a role in virus transmission. When the right targets are found, the researchers will try to design a different set of molecular scissors to disrupt that genetic code.

Adelman said he's been working on molecular strategies to fight mosquito-borne diseases for a dozen years, and began the TALEN-based project just last May.

"To date, efforts to control dengue transmission through genetics have focused entirely on adding material to the mosquito genome. Ensuring that this added material is expressed properly and consistently has been a challenge," Adelman said in a Virginia Tech news release. "This technology allows us to pursue the same goals, namely, the generation of pathogen-resistant mosquitoes, through subtraction — for example, removing or altering a gene that is critical for pathogen replication."

More about mosquitoes:

• Gene-modified skeeters could stop dengue fever
• Key West waits on dengue mosquito experiment
• WHO: Dengue is fastest-spreading tropical disease

In addition to Adelman, the authors of the PLOS ONE paper, "TALEN-Based Gene Disruption in the Dengue Vector Aedes aegypti," include Azadeh Aryan, Michelle A.E. Anderson and Kevin M. Myles. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Fralin Life Science Institute at Virginia Tech.

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

ESA

The Planck mission has produced the most detailed all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The European-led team behind the Planck cosmology probe on Thursday released the mission's first all-sky map of the cosmic microwave background — a post-big-bang "baby picture" that suggests our universe is about 100 million years older than scientists thought.

The map traces subtle fluctuations in temperature that were imprinted on the deep sky when the cosmos was just 370,000 years old. Scientists say the imprint reflects ripples that arose as early as the first nonillionth of a second of the universe's existence. These ripples are thought to have given rise to today's vast cosmic web of galaxy clusters and dark matter.

"To a cosmologist, this map is a gold mine of information," University of Cambridge astrophysicist George Efstathiou, a member of the Planck science team, said during a European Space Agency news conference in Paris. He joked that not long ago, cosmologists might have "given up their children" to have such a map in their hands.

The $900 million (€700 million) Planck probe was launched on a European Ariane 5 rocket in 2009, along with the infrared-sensitive Herschel space telescope. Planck produced its first all-sky radiation map in 2010. Since then, scientists have fine-tuned the image to remove the bright emissions from the Milky Way and other foreground sources, leaving only the background radiation.

Two NASA satellites — the Cosmic Background Explorer and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, also known as COBE and WMAP — produced earlier versions of the baby picture. Those findings determined that the universe is made up of 4.5 percent ordinary matter, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 72.8 percent dark energy. The results also showed that the universe is geometrically "flat" to a margin of error of 0.4 percent, and helped scientists estimate the universe's age at 13.7 billion years.

NASA

Planck's map of the cosmic microwave background has significantly higher resolution than the readings that were made during previous missions such as COBE and WMAP, as shown in this graphic.

Planck can produce cosmological maps with three times the resolution of WMAP, and at least 10 times the temperature sensitivity. As a result, the estimates of the universe's age and composition have undergone some additional fine tuning. Planck's readings indicate that the universe's expansion rate is slower than previously thought — which means the universe is older.

Planck's estimate for the age of the universe is 13.82 billion years.

Martin White, a member of the Planck team from the University of California at Berkeley, told NBC News that Planck's estimate narrowed down the error bars on previous estimates. "In that sense, it's very consistent, but much more precise," he said.

The Planck team's breakdown of the universe's constituents is 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent dark matter and 68.3 percent dark energy, he said. "There's less stuff that we don't understand, by a tiny amount," Efstathiou said. As a result of the shift toward more matter and less dark energy, "an awful lot of people are going to be revising their calculations," White said.

Efstathiou said the Planck data also pointed to some "strange features" in the cosmic microwave background that may point to new frontiers in physics, including an unexplained dip at one point of the power spectrum, and an unusual distribution of large-scale fluctuations that roughly followed the plane of the solar system.

"Why characteristics of the CMB should relate to our solar system is not understood. ... I was explicitly told not to say anything about God in this talk — which I've just violated," Efstathiou said half-jokingly.

ESA

This graphic highlights anomalies seen in the Planck data. One anomaly is an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky (indicated by the curved line), with slightly higher average temperatures in the southern ecliptic hemisphere and slightly lower average temperatures in the northern ecliptic hemisphere. This runs counter to the mainstream view that the universe should be broadly similar in any direction we look. There is also a cold spot that extends over a patch of sky that is much larger than expected (circled). The anomalous regions have been enhanced here to make them more clearly visible.

Planck's data set should help scientists do a reality check on many of the hypotheses proposed by cosmologists, including the view that the universe underwent rapid and far-reaching inflation in the first moments of its existence, as well as the claim that there are six or seven spatial dimensions in addition to the three we perceive.

An initial reading of the data appears to favor the simple models for the inflationary big bang, and rule out a lot of the complex models. "We think that they will be facing a dead end," said Krzysztof Gorski, a member of the Planck team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

ESA Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain noted that so far, the mission has delivered just half of the data it's expected to produce. The rest of the data is scheduled to come out in 2014 and 2015. "Today is not the end of the story," he told reporters. Efstathiou put it another way, paraphrasing one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's best-known catchphrases: "We'll be back."

More about cosmology:

• WMAP scientists unveil their best 'baby picture'
• Japanese string theorists simulate big bang
• Scrunched-up dimensions untangled

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

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 21, 2013 5:49 AM EDT

Pablo J. Venegas

This image shows a male specimen representing the newly discovered species of woodlizard known as Enyalioides binzayedi. License: CC-BY 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

Scientists say they're intrigued by two new species of woodlizards found in the Peruvian jungle, and not just because of their scary-cool looks.

The lizards, described in the open-access journal Zookeys, were found in Cordillera Azul National Park, which was created to protect Peru's largest mountain rainforest. The area includes some of the country's least-explored forests.

The males of both species sport distinctive patterns of green spots on a brown and black background. One species, Enyalioides azulae, is known only from a single locality in the mountain rainforest of northeastern Peru's Rio Huallaga basin. The other, E. binzayedi, lives in the same river basin. "Azulae" refers to Cordillera Azul National Park, while "binzayedi" pays tribute to the sponsor of the discoverers' field survey, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the creator of a conservation fund bearing his name.

These two species take their place alongside 10 others in the genus Enyalioides. Three of those 10 were discovered just in the past five years, and the researchers say that suggests that "more species might be awaiting discovery in other unexplored areas close to the Andes."

"Thanks to these discoveries, Peru becomes the country holding the greatest diversity of woodlizards," lead author Pablo Venegas of Peru's Center for Ornithology and Biodiversity, or CORBIDI, said in a news release from Pensoft Publishers. "Cordillera Azul National Park is a genuine treasure for Peru, and it must be treated as a precious future source of biodiversity exploration and preservation!"

The two species apparently share the same territory, with only a slight difference in altitude ranges. That's what's intriguing: The researchers say the lizards' differences, as reflected in their mitochondrial DNA as well as body characteristics, may reflect the subtle effects of evolutionary divergence.

Pablo J. Venegas

A male and a female of the newly discovered species known as Enyalioides azulae show off their colors. License: CC-BY 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/

More species worth marveling at: 

• Borneo bio-hunt turns up treasures
• Strange species found in Suriname
• Taking stock of 2011's new species 
• New bee or not new bee? That is the question
• 'Lost' rainbow toad rediscovered
• Froggy finds raise hopes for Haiti
• Three new frogs leap into spotlight
• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• The Amazon's amazing species
• Biological gems found in Philippines
• Madagascar offers hundreds of new species
• Scientists spot biological beauties in Bali
• RAP stars rock the animal world
• Scientists finish first sea census
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2010
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Papua New Guinea's new species
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• More strange species from Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under ... underground

For more about the Peruvian woodlizards, check out Nadia Drake's report for Wired.

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

Slideshow: Moon rocket engines recovered

Click through scenes from Bezos Expeditions' recovery of historic Saturn 5 rocket engines from the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Launch slideshow

Salvagers backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos have recovered components from the Saturn 5 rocket engines that powered NASA's Apollo moon missions off the launch pad, more than four decades after they hurtled down to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Amazon.com's founder reported on the successful three-week sea salvage operation on his Bezos Expeditions website. "What an incredible adventure," he wrote.

"We've seen an underwater wonderland — an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program," Bezos said Wednesday.

Almost a year ago, Bezos announced that deep-sea sonar scans had located the first-stage engines that were used for the historic Apollo 11 launch in 1969 — the launch that sent astronauts on their way to the moon's surface for the first time. The first stage of the three-stage Saturn 5 was jettisoned once its fuel was spent, and fell into the Atlantic.

It took months to plan the recovery expedition — and three weeks ago, Bezos and the salvage team headed out into the Atlantic on the Seabed Worker, a ship that has previously played a role in recovering sunken treasures.

"While I spent a reasonable chunk of time in my cabin emailing and working, it didn't keep me from getting to know the team," Bezos wrote. Much of his posting was given over to thank-yous for the team members. 

The chilly ocean waters preserved the hardware in "gorgeous" condition at a depth of more than 14,000 feet, Bezos said. He noted that it was difficult to make out the serial numbers on the hardware. Confirmation of the Apollo 11 connection will have to wait until the parts are more closely examined.

Remotely operated vehicles recovered enough components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. Bezos said the ship was now on its way back to Cape Canaveral, Fla., to offload the artifacts. Bezos Expeditions said the restoration would take place at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center.

"The upcoming restoration will stabilize the hardware and prevent further corrosion," Bezos said. "We want the hardware to tell its true story, including its 5,000 mile per hour re-entry and subsequent impact with the ocean surface. We’re excited to get this hardware on display where just maybe it will inspire something amazing."

Even before the expedition, Bezos and NASA worked out where the artifacts would be going. The first option would go to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs told NBC News in an email. The second engine would be offered to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, the hometown for Bezos and Amazon.com.

"While we have no role in the restoration, we are providing assistance to help identify the hardware through our various history offices and field centers," Jacobs said.

Although Bezos made his billions in the dot-com world, he's had a longstanding interest in spaceflight as well: His rocket venture, Blue Origin, has been working on a launch system for suborbital as well as orbital passenger flights with NASA's backing. Last year, Bezos donated a 5-ton Blue Origin lander prototype to the Museum of Flight.

In a statement, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden praised the recovery of the engines as a "historic find."

"We look forward to the restoration of these engines by the Bezos team and applaud Jeff’s desire to make these historic artifacts available for public display," Bolden said. "Jeff and his colleagues at Blue Origin are helping to usher in a new commercial era of space exploration, and we are confident that our continued collaboration will soon result in private human access to space, creating jobs and driving America’s leadership in innovation and exploration."

More space history:

• Timeline: NASA's Glory Days
• NASA tests engine from Apollo 11 rocket
• Moon looms again as future destination

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

Congress got the word from NASA on Tuesday about its options for dealing with the threats posed by asteroids and comets: Lawmakers can either provide adequate funding for detecting and characterizing near-Earth objects, and diverting them if necessary — or they can pray.

Threats from space are generally the stuff of science-fiction movies such as "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," but members of the House Science Committee took a hard look at the realities during Tuesday's hearing, which came in response to the Feb. 15 meteor explosion over Russia as well as a close encounter that same day with a much bigger asteroid known as 2012 DA14.

The lawmakers didn't always like what they heard. The committee's chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told the panelists more than once that the progress report they delivered was "not reassuring." But representatives from both parties were receptive to the idea of putting more resources into the effort to counter cosmic threats.

White House science adviser John Holdren noted that the funding devoted annually to cataloging potentially threatening asteroids has risen from $5 million to more than $20 million over the past couple of years. But even at that level, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden estimated that it would take until 2030 to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth objects between 140 meters and 1 kilometer in width, as mandated by Congress.  

"Maybe we can help you out with the budget. Don't know," Smith replied. He said "we need to find ways to prioritize NASA's projects."

Holdren said the single most useful project would be to put an infrared-sensing telescope in a Venus-like orbit, like the Sentinel Space Telescope being developed by the nonprofit B612 Foundation. The telescope could look for asteroids that currently can't be spotted from the ground because they spend much of their time within Earth's orbit, where they're lost in the sun's glare. The 55-foot-wide (17-meter-wide) rock that blew up without warning over Chelyabinsk in Russia last month was just such an asteroid.

"It came from a direction where our [existing] telescopes could not look," Holdren said. "We cannot look in the sun." 

Don Davis

Artwork by Don Davis shows a meteor streaking across the skies over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. More of Davis' work is available at his website, DonaldEDavis.com.

Holdren estimated the cost of an asteroid-hunting space telescope at $500 million to $750 million, and said it could reduce the congressionally mandated survey time to six to eight years. Following through on the Obama administration's plan to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 would cost about $2 billion a year, Holdren said.

The automatic spending cuts known as sequestration will affect NASA's asteroid-hunting effort as well as the plans for human exploration, Bolden warned.

"The president has a plan. But that plan is incremental," Bolden said, referring to the Obama administration's budget proposal. "And if we want to save the planet, because I think that’s what we’re talking about, then we have to get together ... and decide how we’re going to execute that plan."

The idea of enlisting other countries as well as amateur astronomers to "crowdsource" the hunt for threatening asteroids struck a responsive chord with lawmakers. But Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., reminded Bolden that China couldn't be on the list of partners due to a congressional ban.

Congressional teach-in
The hearing served as a teach-in for some of the panel members. At one point, Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, asked whether the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope could be retrofitted to look for asteroids. "No, sir," Bolden replied. At another point, Gen. William Shelton, head of the Air Force Space Command, had to explain to lawmakers that the space-based surveillance system used for monitoring missile launches on Earth could not watch out for rocks coming in from deep space.

Holdren and Bolden provided a status report on the asteroid search, reporting that about 95 percent of the near-Earth objects larger than a kilometer are being tracked. However, only about 10 percent of the 13,000 to 20,000 asteroids bigger than 140 meters have been detected. If an asteroid of that size were to strike land, it "could devastate the better part of a continent," Holdren said.

Looking on the bright side, Holdren added that such asteroids are thought to hit Earth only every 20,000 years or so.

Bolden said less than 1 percent of the space rocks in the 30- to 100-meter range have been found. Such asteroids may not be continent-killers, but they are bigger and more potentially destructive than last month's Chelyabinsk meteor.

Lawmakers repeatedly asked how much advance warning would be required to deflect a threatening asteroid, and were repeatedly told that it would take years. Shelton said that if time was limited, "probably nuclear energy is what we're talking about." But even a nuclear-armed mission to blast an asteroid, Bruce Willis-style, would require lots of lead time. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., asked Bolden about the strategy for dealing with an Earth-threatening asteroid that was discovered with three weeks' warning.

"If it's coming in three weeks ... pray," Bolden said. "The reason I can't do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off."

More about threats from space:

• 'Marsageddon' comet adds to concerns
• The global plan to deal with asteroids
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

Ali Weinberg is an associate producer with NBC News in Washington.

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

L. Calcada / N. Risinger / ESO

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

The closest known exoplanet is currently called Alpha Centauri Bb, but the folks behind Uwingu want you to come up with a cooler name.

"It might be Pandora. Who knows?" said planetary scientist Alan Stern, Uwingu's co-founder and chief executive officer.

As fans of the James Cameron sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" know, Pandora is the name of the moon in the Alpha Centauri system where the movie's action takes place. In science fiction, planets beyond our solar system have colorful names. But in reality, exoplanets merely have designations that are based either on the name of the star they orbit (like Alpha Centauri Bb) or on the name of the probe that discovered the world (like Kepler-37b)

The International Astronomical Union, which usually takes the lead role in naming celestial objects and features, has held back on creating an exoplanet-naming process. So Stern and his partners set up Uwingu to fill the vacuum — and raise some funds for research and education in the process.

Starting today, Uwingu is taking nominations for Alpha Centauri Bb's new name, at a price of $4.99 per suggestion. For 99 cents per vote, Uwingu's registered users can pick their favorite name. The name that has the most votes when the contest ends on April 15 will be crowned the people's choice. It won't carry any weight with the IAU, but Stern is hoping that the name will stick.

"There are people in the world who think astronomers own the sky, and what we're effectively saying is, it's the people who own the sky," Stern said.

The user who suggests the winning name will receive recognition and prizes from Uwingu. There'll be additional yet-to-be-specified prizes for runner-ups, and for those whose name suggestions reach the 100-, 1,000- and 10,000-vote level. Uwingu already has a list to start with, since it's been in the exoplanet-naming business for several months.

"Older names will be grandfathered in, but I think the new ones will soar past these," Stern told NBC News. (The current top vote-getter is Heinlein, a name that pays tribute to the science-fiction master Robert Heinlein.)

Proceeds from the contest will be distributed according to Uwingu's formula, which puts half of the money into a fund to be given out as grants. Uwingu is structured as a commercial venture, so the rest of the money helps pay the venture's bills. Stern realizes that having people pay to suggest planetary names with no official standing may be controversial, and he's willing to take the heat.

"Just spell our name right," he said.

His supporters include one of the world's foremost planet-hunters, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy, who is one of Uwingu's advisers. In an email, Marcy told NBC News he thought the idea of naming Alpha Centauri Bb sounded "marvelous."

"It should be fun and creative," Marcy said. "It hurts no one, and generates funding for research. What a perfect antidote to the modern crunch on funding in pure research!"

Uwingu's critics include Caltech astronomer Wladimir Lyra, who came up with his own proposal for naming extrasolar planets a few years ago. He's not crazy about the pay-for-play naming system. "What I would advocate is a classical way of naming the planets from our own myths, the way we name features on planets in our own solar system," Lyra told NBC News. "We can draw upon the expertise that the IAU has for naming things."

As long as people understand what they're buying — and what's not for sale — Uwingu's contest looks like an interesting and harmless experiment. Heck, it might even push the world's astronomers to reach consensus on names for the most prominent exoplanets. But what do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 9:35 p.m. ET: I originally wrote that Uwingu is structured as a for-profit venture, and that the company's partners will receive some of the proceeds — but in a follow-up exchange, Stern said that Uwingu is a long way from making a profit. Half of the revenue goes to a fund for research and education grants, and the other half helps pay the bills.

"Uwingu was to find a new way to fund space research and education in tough times. Some of us wrote checks and put some pretty serious money into getting the company started, and each of the members of this company has contributed hundreds and in some cases thousands of hours to developing this since 2010," Stern said in an email. "None of us has received even a dime from the Indiegogo campaign or any funds we've earned on sales since we debuted. This is a labor of love."

More about exoplanets and their names:

• Mission to Alpha Centauri by 2011?
• How to take a trip to Alpha Centauri
• Newfound planets need better names

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

Pasi Hakala

Comet PanSTARRS twinkles amid the glow of the northern lights over Lempaala in central Finland on March 17.

The skies were lit up with glowing auroral displays as well as the twinkle of Comet PanSTARRS over the weekend, and a few skywatchers could see both celestial phenomena at once. One of those lucky few happened to be Pasi Hakala, an astronomer at the University of Turku's Tuorla Observatory in Finland.

"I was preparing to take some pictures of Comet PanSTARRS (just as a hobby, even if I'm a professional astronomer) with my camera ... as the aurora appeared right next to it," Hakala said in an email. He said this picture was taken with "an old Olympus E-330 plus a legacy, fast Konica 57mm f/1.2 lens" — which just goes to show that you don't need the latest, greatest camera to take a great picture of the night sky.

It's also true that you don't need to be in Finland to get a great view of the aurora. This weekend's geomagnetic storm was so strong and sweeping that the northern lights were seen as far south as Colorado. "We generally only get to see auroras this far south of the Arctic Circle a few times a decade, when the sun is near the peak of its 11-year sunspot cycle," Jimmy Westlake, an astronomy professor at Colorado Mountain College, wrote in a column for the Steamboat Pilot & Today.

Check out Westlake's photo and more views of the northern lights and Comet PanSTARRS below.

Jimmy Westlake

Colorado Mountain College's Jimmy Westlake captured this view of the aurora behind the twin stone monoliths of Rabbit Ears Peak near Steamboat Springs, Colo. The picture was taken early March 17, "during the wee hours of St. Patrick's Day morning," using a Nikon D700 camera with 50mm lens at f/3.8, 30-second exposure at ISO 6400. As for Comet PanSTARRS: "Colorado has had one storm after another" over the past week, Westlake said, but he has seen the comet through holes in the clouds on three different nights. Check out Westlake's comet shot on SpaceWeather.com.

Chris Cook

Photographer Chris Cook and his son watch Comet PanSTARRS from First Encounter Beach in Eastham, Mass., on the evening of March 13. The photograph was taken via remote shutter release, using a Canon 5D and a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L lens. The image served as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for Monday. Even though PanSTARRS has passed its peak brightness, the comet can still be seen by Northern Hemisphere observers after sunset in the western sky.

Submitted by Christoph Malin / FirstPerson

Christoph Malin sent in this picture of Comet PanSTARRS via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page. The comet was seen during the Imaging Expedition of the Institute of Astro- and Particle Physics at the University of Innsbruck, which went to the 10,000-foot-high (3,050-meter-high) Gaislachkogel Mountain in Ötztal, Austria. Check out this Vimeo clip, and look down below for links to more night-sky views submitted via FirstPerson and Twitter,

More photos of the aurora and the comet:

• Dori Sig (a.k.a. Halldor Sigurdsson) captures the aurora over Reyjavik, Iceland
• Irma Eriksson posts a Facebook picture of the aurora over Stockholm, Sweden
• LeRoy Zimmerman shares a view of the aurora over Alaska. More from LeRoy.

More about auroras and comets:

• Solar eruption supercharges auroral displays
• Video: Airplane provides clear look at comet
• Cosmic Log archive for auroras and comets

Tip o' the Log to @dorisig and @imycomic.

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

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

This mosaic of images from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows Mount Sharp, also known as Aeolis Mons, in a white-balanced color adjustment that makes the sky look overly blue but shows the terrain as if under Earthlike lighting. This is just a small segment of a wider panorama assembled from image data collected on Sept. 20, 2012. The sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain. A raw-color version of the mosaic shows the scene's colors as they would look in a typical smartphone camera photo taken on Mars. Click on the image to see a larger version from NASA.

If you could pull up a 3-mile-high mountain from Mars and plop it down in California's Mojave Desert, it'd probably look much like this latest color panorama from the Curiosity rover's science team. This little piece from the panorama doesn't do justice to the whole picture: You really should see the whole thing at high resolution to get a sense of just how much Mount Sharp, a.k.a. Aeolis Mons, looms over the scene where NASA's six-wheeled robotic lab has been working.

The most jarring thing about the picture is the blue sky. No, the Martian sky doesn't really look like that. The Red Planet's atmosphere is filled with iron-rich dust that turns everything into shades of butterscotch, burnt orange and brick. To see Mount Sharp as you or your smartphone camera might see it if you were actually there, check out this true-color version of the panorama.

The blue-sky version has been processed to reflect a white-balanced view, as if the picture were taken in an earthly rather than a Martian setting. Why would scientists bother with a phony view of Mars? "White-balancing helps scientists recognize rock materials based on their experience looking at rocks on Earth," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in Friday's photo advisory. It's as if Curiosity was able to get rid of all that red dust in the air and take a clear picture of the mountainside from miles away.

The pictures for this panorama was taken in September, while the rover was en route to its first destination. For the past couple of months, Curiosity has been studying the rocks at a site known as Yellowknife Bay, and it's already turned up some amazing discoveries about Mars' past — including evidence that the area was capable of supporting microbial life billions of years ago.

Within the next couple of months, Curiosity is due to turn around and begin its 6-mile (10-kilometer) trek to the foothills of that big mountain. Pictures like this panorama will help scientists figure out exactly where their nuclear-powered robotic geologist should be going.

Slideshow: Curiosity's space odyssey to Mars

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

Launch slideshow

More about Mars:

• Martian rock reveals life-friendly conditions
• What's next for Mars Curiosity rover
• NBC News archive on Mars

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

Johnathan Blair / National Geographic

A museum worker inspects a replica of a woolly mammoth, a species that went extinct 3,000 to 10,000 years ago. In March 2012, scientists in Russia and South Korea announced a partnership to try to clone the mammoth and generate a living specimen.

If scientists can use genetic engineering to bring back the woolly mammoth, should they do it? How about the passenger pigeon? Or the western black rhino? Do we humans have a responsibility to restore at least some of the species that our ancestors wiped out? And if we bring them back, will they really be the same?

Such questions are the focus of TEDxDeExtinction, a public forum that's being presented on Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET at National Geographic's Washington headquarters. You can watch the whole thing online via LivestreamTEDx and National Geographic's De-Extinction website, which also has loads of articles and resources on the issue. The event has been organized by Revive & Restore, a nonprofit clearinghouse for worldwide de-extinction work that's under the aegis of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco.

"De-extinction"? What's that?

"It's using new technologies like cloning and genome sequencing to reconstruct a species that went extinct," science writer Carl Zimmer explained. Zimmer's talk at Friday's TEDx event will help set the scene for the de-extinction debate, and he's also written a cover story on the topic for National Geographic's April issue.

National Geographic

National Geographic's cover story for the April issue focuses on the prospects of reviving ancient species.

De-extinction has been in the works for more than a decade, basically ever since Dolly the Sheep demonstrated in 1996 that mammals could be cloned from cells in a lab dish. Spanish and French scientists worked for years on an effort to bring the Pyrenean ibex back from extinction, by cloning cells that had been preserved from the last known animal of the species. They succeeded only in producing a deformed kid that died 10 minutes after birth.

That brief de-extinction (and re-extinction) took place in 2003 and was reported in 2009. Since then, significant advances have been made in cloning and in other technologies for DNA sequencing and gene splicing. That's allowed scientists to think about what previously was unthinkable. Russian and Korean researchers, for example, are looking through the tissue of a woolly mammoth that was preserved in the deep freeze of Siberia's permafrost, in hopes of finding cells that are suitable for cloning.

Harvard geneticist George Church, meanwhile, is working on a technique for inserting snippets of reconstructed DNA code from an extinct species into stem cells for a closely related living species. The coding for the traits of a passenger pigeon could be reintroduced, bit by bit, into a breed of common rock pigeon. Over the course of many generations, the rock pigeons would become more and more like passenger pigeons.

"George Church's method will open up a whole new range of possibilities," Zimmer said. "You're not actually grabbing an intact molecule that was inside an animal that was alive 1,000 years ago."

This type of reverse engineering could also open up a whole new range of questions. "Is a regular rock pigeon that's been given the traits that passenger pigeons had really a passenger pigeon, or is it a hybrid, or whatever?" Zimmer asked.

In a similar vein, plant researchers are sorting through the genome of Asian chestnut trees, with the intention of picking out the specific strings of DNA coding that can make American chestnuts more resistant to a species-killing fungus. The trick could save American chestnut trees from extinction, even though it's debatable whether they'd still be American chestnuts. "It's not the original thing, it's better," Zimmer said. "But should be we be doing that?"

It's not such a giant leap to think about looking through the Neanderthal genome as well, to find out whether it contains the coding for traits that could make humans "better." Church's reflections on that subject sparked all sorts of exaggerated reports a couple of months ago, replete with references to Neanderthal babies being spawned by human surrogate mothers-for-hire.

Zimmer said the last thing that Church and his colleagues want is a genetic free-for-all over de-extinction. "They want this to be something where there's a strong consensus," he said. "This is not an off-the-reservation project."

Friday's event could represent a significant step toward building that consensus. Watch the webcast and see for yourself. National Geographic's webcast portal includes the day's schedule.

Photographer Joel Sartore, one of the scheduled speakers at TEDxDeExtinction, has been documenting species on the brink of extinction for his Photo Ark project. Here are three of the species he has included in his portfolio. For more about Sartore, check out this Daily Nightly blog posting:

Joel Sartore / National Geographic

The golden pheasant (Chrysolophus pictus) is a species native to mountainous forests of western China.

Joel Sartore / National Geographic

The striking panther chameleon (Furcifer pardalis) is native to tropical forests of Madagascar. The reptile is highly prized by collectors for its bold colors and relatively large body size (up to 9 inches or 23 centimeters long).

Joel Sartore / National Geographic

The Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) is the most rare subspecies of gray wolf in North America. It is listed as critically endangered by the IUCN.

More about the genetic frontier:

• How synthetic biology will change us
• Potentially endless line of mice cloned
• Extinct tiger gene resurrected in a mouse

The de-extinction issue is due to be addressed in a one-hour National Geographic Channel special, "Mammoth: Back From the Dead," premiering April 12. Also, the Wildlife Conservation Society is planning a conference April 9-11 in Cambridge, England, on the implications of synthetic biology for conservation.

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