Ana Carolina Carnaval / UC-Berkeley The frog Hypsiboas semilineatus is found in Brazil's Atlantic rainforest.

This has been a fantastic week for frogs, and the scientists who love them.

First, there was a report that as many as 10 new species of amphibians have been discovered in the jungles of Colombia. Then, a frog-finding duo said they found a dozen new species in the forests of India. Finally, researchers published promising results from an experiment that used DNA from nearly 200 Brazilian tree frogs to help identify the hottest biodiversity hot spots.

Marco Rada / CI-Colombia

Click for slideshow: See the new amphibian species discovered in Colombia's Darien region.

The week's findings demonstrated that there's still lots to learn about the world's amphibian species - and that even tiny frogs can make a big contribution to global environmental awareness.

Frogs and other amphibians could use a bit of good news: They're facing challenges ranging from climate change to fungal infections to a mysterious wave of deformities. Habitat loss is the biggest factor working against them, and it doesn't help that they're so darn delicious.

Robin Moore, amphibian conservation officer for Conservation International, told me that he takes heart from the discovery of new species like the ones found in Colombia's Darien region. "The fact that these areas still exist shows that we still have time, and we still have a chance," he said.

Which hot spots are hottest?
Conservation International has identified 34 hot spots around the world that take in only 2.3 percent of Earth's land surface, and yet serve as native territory for more than 50 percent of the world's plant species as well as 42 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate species. All these areas deserve to be preserved from environmental degradation - but how do you prioritize one area (or even one part of one area) over another?

Ana Carolina Carnaval / UC-Berkeley

Hypsiboas albomarginatus was one of the three frog species that figured in the Science study.

The research from Brazil, published in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests one method: First, researchers developed a computer model to determine which areas have had the most stable climate over time. Then they looked for a way to measure the amount of biodiversity in those areas.

Their hypothesis was that in the more stable areas, native species have had more time to spread out and reflect genetic diversity - while the species currently living in the less stable areas haven't been around as long and thus would be less diverse.

Brazil's Atlantic forest region, one of Conservation International's hot spots, served as a test case. The model indicated that the region's central rainforests were more stable climatically than the southern forests, going back as far as 21,000 years. That suggested that the biodiversity would be greater in the north than in the south.

To check the hypothesis, the researchers took DNA samples from 184 tree frogs representing three different species. Sure enough, an analysis of mitochondrial DNA showed less genetic diversity in the south than in the central area. The researchers confirmed that assessment by reviewing previously published genetic data for mammals and reptiles. Bird studies showed a similar pattern.

Ana Carolina Carnaval / UC-Berkeley

Hypsiboas faber was another one of the Brazilian frog species sampled for the Science study.

"The study has shown us that the central Atlantic forest, which hasn't had the investment of resources and effort as the southern, has been stable from a climatic standpoint and therefore is likely more diverse than currently believed," study co-author Craig Moritz, a biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in a news release. "But because this area is under great human impact, it deserves conservation and research priority."

That doesn't mean the southern forests aren't important, said Berkeley's Ana Carolina Carnaval, another one of the study's co-authors. But it does mean there can be a hidden dimension to biodiversity - at least in the hot spot she and her colleagues analyzed.

"The broader story is that we think this technique could be applied in other countries and other hotspot areas to identify regions that haven't been well-sampled yet - regions that could possibly harbor as yet undiscovered unique diversity," she said.

New frogs by the dozen
Based on this week's findings, the forests of India's Western Ghats might qualify as one of those regions. It's already listed, along with Sri Lanka, as a Conservation International hot spot. But the fact that researchers reported 12 new frog species in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society indicates that lots of secret lives are playing out in that region.

It wasn't easy to find all those frogs, one of the researchers told me by e-mail. "You can study the animals only during the night," said Sathyabhama D. Biju, an expert on amphibians at the Delhi University Systematics Lab. What's more, the best time to find them is during the monsoon season, which is their breeding time.

S.D. Biju / Frogindia.org

Click for slideshow: See the 12 frog species discovered in India.

"It is difficult and at the same time enjoyable too," Biju wrote. "Seeing new frogs croaking in the dark nights with torrential rain is really good!"

Seven of the 12 new species were discovered in unprotected areas that were once heavily forested, according to Biju and his co-author, Franky Bossuyt of the Amphibian Evolution Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The duo also rediscovered the Travancore bushfrog, a species that was last officially sighted more than 100 years ago and was thought to have gone extinct. They said the frog was found in "a highly degraded environment in its original locality."

Biju said that frogs in India, like frogs in South America, are considered an important indicator species for the health of an ecosystem. And he's deeply concerned about forest-clearing in the Western Ghats, where some of India's best-known tea, coffee and rubber plantations are located.

"It is a shame that human interference like plantation (legal and illegal) near the forest, and urbanization (for the sake of so-called development) contribute to rapidly vanishing habitat," he wrote. "Really, I am worried about my frogs."

Co-authors of the study in Science include Carnaval and Moritz as well as Michael Hickerson of Queens College, New York; Celio Haddad of Universidade Estadual Paulista; and Miguel Rodrigues of Universidade de Sao Paulo. To keep track of biodiversity and other big environmental issues, check out msnbc.com's Environment section.

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K. Cook / LLNL / NASA / ESA

Haunted by NGC 4921? Click on the image for a zoomable version.

The Hubble Space Telescope's latest stunner is a pale ghost of a galaxy, floating amid its kindred spirits in the Coma Cluster. But wait ... there's more: If you take a closer look at the picture, you'll find thousands of other galaxies going far back into the depths of the universe.

This galaxy, known as NGC 4921, is part of a well-known cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices, 320 million light-years from Earth. More than a thousand galaxies huddle together, and most of them have been crunched together into elliptical shapes. NGC 4921 is one of the rare spirals still surviving - and in today's image advisory, the European Space Agency's Hubble team says it's a "rather unusual one."

NGC 4921 looks so ghostly because it's an "anemic spiral" - a galaxy where the process of star formation is much less intense than usual. Instead of the classic spiral arms, the galaxy contains pale swirls of dust, punctuated by bright young stars.

The space telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys made a series of long, deep exposures documenting the galaxy as well as the surrounding area of sky - 80 exposures in all, which took up 27 hours of precious telescope time. All those exposures, in visible light and the near infrared, were combined to produce this picture, which reveals thousands of more remote galaxies.

You should be able to spot a variety of galactic shapes and colors in our HD View zoomable version of the image - including some lumpy raisins of light that are characteristic of galaxies on the far edge of the observable universe. You might have to click on the adaptive tone adjustment at upper right to get the contrast just right. If you don't want to download the HD View plug-in, you can look at the Hubble team's zoomable version, or this large-format JPEG.

Here's an annotated image that shows you what's what, and you'll definitely enjoy this "Hubblecast" video that tells the story behind NGC 4921.

There's another, sadder story behind this picture: The European Hubble team said the Coma Cluster imagery was originally collected by a team led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Kem Cook, as part of an effort to identify Cepheid variable stars in NGC 4921. Such stars can be used as "standard candles" to calibrate the distance to the galaxy, and indirectly yield information about the universe's expansion rate.

The team wasn't able to complete that project, however, because the Advanced Camera for Surveys gave out in 2007.

The good news is that Cook and his colleagues hope to return to the project once the camera is repaired. That's one of the items on the to-do list for NASA's final Hubble servicing mission, which is now scheduled for launch in May. If that repair job goes as expected, there might be some life left in this old galactic ghost after all.

For more stunners from Hubble, check out the European Space Agency's Hubble portal, the Space Telescope Science Institute's Hubblesite, and our own Space Gallery. And don't forget to cast your vote for your favorite future Hubble target.

CERN A worker prepares a replacement magnet for the Large Hadron Collider's ring.

The federal lawsuit against the world's largest particle-smasher may have been thrown out of court last year, but the plaintiffs have since filed an appeal, arguing that the judge was wrong when she said the U.S. legal system had no jurisdiction over the European science experiment.

The two plaintiffs, retired nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner and Spanish science writer Luis Sancho, had argued that full-scale operations at the Large Hadron Collider carried a risk of creating globe-gobbling black holes or other cosmic catastrophes. Those fears have been knocked down in a series of safety studies and research papers - including one that was put out just a couple of weeks ago.

Nevertheless, Sancho and Wagner are soldiering on.

Less than a month after U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor dismissed the case in Honolulu back in September, the plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Their first brief in the case was due this week, and in that document, Sancho and Wagner take issue with Gillmor's ruling that the federal government did not play a major role in the European-led project. A copy of the brief was forwarded to me by James Tankersley, whose LHC Facts Web site is sympathetic to the plaintiffs' cause.

The brief rehashes the plaintiffs' worries about the collider. For a review of the scientific issues, you can check out this "Discovery or Doom" story, part of our special report on "The Big Bang Machine." But because the case was thrown out on legal rather than scientific grounds, the bulk of this week's brief dwells on the legal issues.

In a nutshell, the plaintiffs say the federal government's contribution of $531 million to LHC construction over more than 11 years, plus the U.S. consultative role on the project, are factors that add up to a "major federal action."

The judge ruled that the involvement was not a major federal action because the United States was not a voting member of Europe's CERN research council, and because the $531 million paled in comparison with CERN's $5 billion-plus contribution. (Most estimates currently run even higher, to a total construction cost of $10 billion.)

Judge Gillmor said that if the U.S. participation did not rise to the level of a major federal action, the federal court system did not have jurisdiction. At the end of her ruling, she strongly hinted that if the LHC's detractors wanted to stop U.S. involvement in the project, their main recourse should be to sway Congress. The plaintiffs, however, want the case to proceed in federal court.

The brief may be posted at some point to Wagner's LHCDefense Web site. Federal attorneys are due to file their own brief next month. Meanwhile, repairs are continuing on the LHC's magnet ring, which broke down shortly after its official startup in September. CERN says the repairs should be finished sometime this summer, leading to the collider's restart.

If this case follows the pattern set by Wagner's earlier challenges of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, the latest appeal is likely to be turned down on narrow legal grounds, perhaps even before the restart. There are likely to be multiple motions ahead, however.

In their brief, the plaintiffs say they want more hearings on the LHC's risks, and they won't be satisfied unless the LHC's experiments "can be proven to be impossible to destroy the Earth." The theoretical and experimental assurances that have been provided so far aren't good enough for them - and they may never be, when you consider how loath physicists are to say anything is absolutely impossible.

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NASA / JPL-Caltech

Spirit surveys its tracks, with a rock stuck near its right wheel. Click on the image for a larger version.

The Spirit is moving again on the Red Planet, now that mission managers think they know what ailed the mixed-up Mars rover last month. Spirit has had to cope with more mundane snags as well, such as a rock that got in its way this week.

Meanwhile, Spirit's twin, Opportunity, is continuing its march on the other side of the planet - and both rovers are sending back 3-D snapshots.

Back on Earth, engineers are working on a next-generation rover that works more like a yo-yo. Read on for the latest rover update ...

Spirit back in business
A week ago, rover mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were scratching their heads over some puzzling problems that Spirit was having. First, there was a glitch that gave the rover a temporary case of amnesia. Then, the rover seemed to be having problems orienting itself. When it tried to get a read on the sun's position in the Martian sky, it didn't find it in the expected position.

These sorts of problems could be written off as signs of aging - which would be perfectly understandable. Spirit and Opportunity were designed with a 90-day "factory warranty" in mind, but last month they both passed the five-year mark. One of these days, Spirit is going to give up the ghost - but not this time. After its senior moments, the rover appeared to return to normal operation.

Since then, engineers have settled on the view that Spirit suffered an unfortunate cosmic-ray hit that turned off its flash memory temporarily. Spirit's team programmed the rover's computer with an optional no-flash mode - also known as "cripple mode" - to fix a memory problem that cropped up shortly after it landed on Mars. A cosmic-ray strike in just the right place (or actually, the wrong place) could have temporarily put the rover in cripple mode.

"It would require the confluence of a number of likely events, but it's still possible," John Callas, rover project manager at JPL, told me today.

Rover engineers also determined that Spirit's accelerometers - gadgets that the rover uses to measure its tilt - could be off by 3 degrees or so, which would have thrown off the sun-orientation exercise. All this is detailed in an update issued on Monday.

NASA / JPL-Caltech This stereo view is part of a panorama captured by NASA's Spirit rover on Jan. 26. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect. Click on the image for a larger version.

Because the accelerometers aren't used while Spirit travels, engineers gave the go-ahead for renewed roving on Saturday. Spirit's right front wheel has been gimpy for almost two years, but the rover still gets around by rolling backward and dragging the stuck wheel behind it. It was that very wheel that got hung up on a partially buried rock, just about a foot into Spirit's renewed trek.

Callas said the rover team's drivers, who steer the robots by remote control from millions of miles away, were able to get Spirit moving yet again. "On the most recent drive, they were able to move around it," he said.

Over the past few weeks, Spirit has been analyzing the soil around a formation known as "Home Plate," as part of a long-term effort to learn more about the area's geological history. Data from Spirit's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer recently indicated the presence of silica in a patch of soil called Stapledon.

An earlier analysis of silica-rich soil led scientists to conclude that the area once had hot springs or steam vents - and NASA said the findings from Stapledon indicate that "the environment that deposited the silica was not limited to the location found earlier."

Opportunities for Opportunity
Callas said Spirit's twin, the Opportunity rover, is continuing its trek through the sand-swept plains of Meridiani Planum, heading toward the 13.7-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater.

Opportunity has traveled about 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) in the past three months, Callas said, but there are still miles to go before the rover reaches its destination. "That's a couple of years away," he said.

Callas said the mission plan calls for Opportunity to stop every one or two kilometers along the way to take a close look at patches of exposed bedrock. Such observations will help scientists characterize how the geology changes across the 4-mile-plus (7-kilometer) stretch between Opportunity's old hangout, Victoria Crater, and its new digs.

NASA / JPL-Caltech This is part of the full-circle stereo view captured by NASA's Opportunity rover. Use red-blue glasses for the 3-D view, and click on the image for a larger version.

Opportunity may make other scientific stopovers. "There are some waypoints along the way - craters and other features that we will use as lighthouses or buoys, if you will, along the path," Callas said. "They may be scientifically interesting as well. ... It will be opportunistic."

Just in the past few days, JPL has posted 3-D stereo panoramas of Opportunity's vantage point as well as Spirit's surroundings, and the raw images just keep on coming. How long will the rovers keep marching? Callas has no idea. "We're going to keep working these rovers until we wear them out," he said.

The yo-yo rover
NASA is already working on the next generation of rovers: Some, like the pressurized rover that was part of last month's inaugural parade, will be suited for big jobs on the moon and Mars. Others will be built for small, tricky jobs - for example, shimmying down a steep cliff on another world.

Today, JPL touted a project known as Axel, which is being developed in cooperation with Caltech students for the shimmying sort of job. Axel is a robot that works like a yo-yo, reeling out a tether and pulling it back in as it rolls down and up steep terrain. The low-mass contraption is equipped with big wheels, a scoop and two 360-degree-tiltable cameras for observation.

Someday, such rovers could be anchored to the bigger, smarter descendants of Spirit and Opportunity, and lower themselves down to a crater floor on Mars.

JPL Robotics The Axel rover system being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion System could be used as a "marsupial" rover. Axel would be lowered down on a tether from a larger, anchored rover to explore steep terrain, as shown in this illustration.

"Axel extends our ability to explore terrains that we haven't been able to explore in the past, such as deep craters with vertically sloped promontories," Axel principal investigator Issa A.D. Nesnas, who works in JPL's robotics and mobility section, said in today's news release. "Also, because Axel is relatively low-mass, a mission may carry a number of Axel rovers. That would give us the opportunity to be more aggressive with the terrain we would explore, while keeping the overall risk manageable."

Check out this video to see Axel in action. For more information, consult this JPL Web page as well as this one at Caltech. And to keep up with all the Mars missions - past, present and future - check in with our "Return to the Red Planet" section.

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CNES Astronomers can detect an extrasolar planet by watching for the characteristic dimming of a star as the planet's disk passes over, as shown in this graphic.

European astronomers say they have found a "super-Earth" that's less than twice as wide as our planet, but up to 11 times more massive and hellishly hot. It might turn out to be the smallest Earthlike planet yet discovered beyond our solar system - depending on how you define "smallest" and "Earthlike."

Discovery of the planet, known as COROT-Exo-7b, was announced today at a Paris symposium focusing on findings from Europe's Corot planet-hunting satellite, which was launched a little more than two years ago. The researchers are still working on a scientific paper that will lay out the details - but the planet's vital statistics already have set off an extrasolar buzz.

More than 300 planets have been detected beyond our solar system - but the most commonly used method for detecting them (known as the radial-velocity method) works best with big planets like Jupiter rather than small planets like Earth. Corot uses a different method, which looks for the telltale dimming of light as a planet's disk crosses its parent star. This transit method is how researchers detected COROT-Exo-7b, circling a sunlike star about 457 light-years from Earth. (Let's just call the planet Exo-7b from now on, OK?)

Even for transiting planets, Exo-7b is unusual: Just a couple of weeks ago, we were gushing over a transiting Super-Neptune that was 4.7 times as wide as Earth. Exo-7b is somewhere around 1.75 times as wide as Earth. It orbits its parent star once every 20 hours, at a distance that is about a sixtieth of our distance from the sun. That would put the temperature on Exo-7b around 1,800 to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 to 1,500 degrees Celsius).

The smallest?
Although the European Space Agency's news release says Exo-7b is the "smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the solar system," it's not yet clear how it really ranks among the full range of extrasolar worlds. The transit method used by Corot is great for measuring how wide a planet is, but other methods have to be used to figure out how massive it is.

We know for sure it's not the absolute smallest: That distinction belongs to the weird pulsar planets first found more than 15 years ago. And even if you're talking about Earth-scale worlds that circle normal stars, there are a few other contenders for the "smallest planet" title.

"It is the smallest-mass exoplanet found to date that transits, but other hot super-Earths have been found that do not transit but have lower masses (given the ambiguity in the orbital inclination)," the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Alan Boss, one of the world's foremost experts on planetary formation, told me in an e-mail.

For example, there's Gliese 876 d (minimum mass, 5.9 Earth masses; best guess, 7.5 Earths), another small world around HD 181433 (7.5 Earths), and still another around HD 69830 (11 Earths), Boss said. These planets were detected using the radial-velocity method, so their diameters haven't yet been nailed down precisely.

Responding to the questions raised about Exo-7b's mass, the researchers told me that today's estimate of 11 Earth masses, based on radial-velocity measurements, was merely an upper limit. "It may be as small as half that," Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's Corot project scientist, said in an e-mail. "We hope to know within a few weeks."

Daniel Rouan, a researcher at the Observatoire de Paris Lesia, said a smaller mass would be in line with the model for a planet with Exo-7b's dimensions.

Fire or ice?
Looking beyond the numbers, Exo-7b would be an exotic - if not exactly comfortable - place to visit. The researchers speculate that the planet might be rocky like Earth, and covered in liquid lava. Or it could be made up of water and rock in equal amounts, and possess a water-vapor atmosphere.

Wait a minute ... water? Wouldn't any water on Exo-7b boil off into space?

"It's even beyond the point of boiling: It's in the state called super-critical water, which is neither a gas nor a liquid," Rouan wrote. "However, vapor is its best approximation. Note that this possibility of having water on this planet is just a viable hypothesis, not the most probably at present. A more precise response in a few weeks or months probably."

Fridlund said the water might even exist as ice, if the conditions were just right. "If the rotation of the planet is bound (like our moon is), and it turns the same side toward its star at all times, the other hemisphere may be very cold, and water could exist as ice on the surface."

Boss said Exo-7b could have been an ice giant that migrated inward from the cold part of its solar system and melted into a water world, but he thought it was more likely to be a rocky planet. "Most likely these hot super-Earths formed inside their gas giants, in much the same way that Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury did," he said.

Best is yet to come
No matter where you think Exo-7b fits in the planetary scale, everyone agrees that smaller finds are on the way. Planet hunters are particularly looking forward the launch of NASA's Kepler spacecraft, now set for March 5. Kepler and Corot use similar strategies for detecting planetary transits, but they look at different areas of the sky.

"Obviously, Kepler will have a better overall performance because of its larger surface (more flux), its larger field (more stars) and its longer survey of a given field," Rouan wrote. "True Earthlike candidates should be found. On the other hand, it will not be easy for Kepler to confirm its Earthlike planet candidates, because the ground-based instruments to do that do not really exist yet in the Northern Hemisphere, at least at the beginning of the mission. Confirmation by ground-based observations is absolutely mandatory with the transit technique."

Boss, who is part of Kepler's science team, said today's announcement was "hopefully a harbinger of more to come."

"There is a lot more for Kepler to do," he told me. "This by no means skims the cream away from Kepler's upcoming feast!"

Update for 5:40 p.m. ET: The last time we talked about extrasolar planets, I added a note calling attention to a New Scientist report claiming that scientists had downsized their estimate for the mass of the smallest known exoplanet orbiting a normal star. Since then, folks in the know have reported that New Scientist got it wrong, and that the planet known as MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb still has a mass estimated at 3.3 times that of Earth (with a large uncertainty factor). In any case, the planet has to be included as a contender for the title of smallest super-Earth.

The Corot team's findings are to appear in a paper titled "Transiting Exoplanets From the CoRoT Space Mission VII. COROT-Exo-7b: The First Super-Earth With Radius Characterized," by A. Leger, D. Rouan, J. Schneider, R. Alonso, B. Samuel, E. Guenther, M. Deleuil, H.J. Deeg, M. Fridlund et al., to be submitted to the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

To learn more about the search for extrasolar planets, just go ahead and search for "extrasolar" planets. You can also check out our interactive graphic on "Other Worlds," as well as this list of the 10 most intriguing extrasolar planets (which might have to be updated one of these days).

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Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP - Getty Images Click for video: This Samsung 56-inch 3-D HD plasma panel is designed to be used with LCD glasses. Tonight's episode of "Chuck," in contrast, is encoded for 3-D viewing with the ColorCode glasses distributed before the Super Bowl. If you have those glasses, click on this image to watch a scene from "Chuck" in 3-D.

This week's experiments in 21st-century 3-D television viewing are just the start for a technology that some filmmakers hope will soon be right up there with HD and Blu-Ray on the coolness scale.

Sunday's Super Bowl commercials provided a little taste of the current state of 3-D for the small screen - and the reviews were mixed: Based on rewind ratings, Tivo said the ads for the DreamWorks animated film "Monsters vs. Aliens" and for Sobe bottled water "fell well short of the pace, barely cracking the top 50."

MTV's Larry Carroll said the 3-D movie preview  "looked fun," while The New York Times' Stuart Elliott said "it's not going surpass my memories of the one time I watched Hitchcock's 'Dial M for Murder' in 3-D."

The acid test could come tonight, when NBC airs an hour-long 3-D episode of its geek-spy show, "Chuck." (NBC Universal is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.) The video is encoded to produce a 3-D effect when you see it through the same amber-blue ColorCode glasses that were distributed at retail outlets in advance of the Super Bowl. Will viewers wear those paper glasses for an hour? If not, will the show still look OK without the glasses? Stay tuned ...

In any case, when 3-D TV is actually ready for prime time, you won't be using the funny paper glasses with colored lenses, said Jim Mainard, the head of production development for DreamWorks Animation. Instead, you'll be using the funny plastic glasses with polarized lenses.

Mainard is one of the main guys responsible for moving DreamWorks' animation studio to an all-3-D operation. Eventually, all that 3-D content - like "Monsters vs. Aliens" - will be moving from the big screen to the small screen. As we saw at last month's Consumer Electronics Show, some HD television sets are already built to display 3-D shows the way they should be seen, and Mainard says many more "3-D Ready" sets will be hitting the market.

"I think it'll be a standard thing on television sets in the next few years," he told me.

The Super Bowl commercials and the "Chuck" episode are still in the gimmick category, but some of the systems being tested and sold come much closer to the 3-D theater experience. Rather than transmitting a single color-coded signal, these TV sets display two sets of signals, one for the left eye and one for the right eye. The difference lies in the way your eyes are fooled into seeing the two views separately:

• Lenticular viewing: These 3-D sets are meant to be watched without any funny glasses. Instead, the monitor incorporates a special lens that sends different signals to each eye, as long as you're sitting in a "sweet spot." The 3-D effect is similar to that produced by those novelty postcards with a grooved plastic layer on top. The technology, pioneered by Philips, is available today - but Mainard thinks the sweet-spot requirement might be too limiting for home viewing.

• Active glass systems: Samsung and Mitsubishi are offering "3-D Ready" sets that rely on LCD glasses that alternate their polarization between the left and the right eye, in time with the refresh rate on the TV monitor. In effect, you see one frame with the left eye, the next with the right - repeated, say, 60 times a second. (Mitsubishi is also working on a specialized kind of no-glasses 3-D display using lenticular technology.)

• Passive glass systems: Hyundai, JVC and other companies are working on TV sets that can switch between the usual 2-D display and a 3-D display meant to be seen with plain old polarized glasses - the kind of glasses that come by the binful at theme-park 3-D theaters. In 3-D mode, every other line carries a clockwise or a counterclockwise polarization. Thus, each eye gets half of the visual information on the screen, but your brain puts it together to create one picture with the 3-D effect. This Web page explains the active vs. passive distinction.

Mainard said the passive-polarized systems are "quite amazing" and add only $100 to $200 to the cost of a TV set. However, he said, DreamWorks' 3-D content can be converted to any display standard, for the theater or for home viewing. The important thing is to arrive at a standard.

"Our final frames are ready to go, independent of whether they go to RealD or Dolby ... or ColorCode," he said. After all, transforming a computer animation from 2-D to 3-D is just a question of software (and processing power), as we discussed more than four years ago.

The important thing is to settle on a standard for television sets and DVDs. If the standards, the hardware and the content come together, 3-D could become as much of an attraction as HD is today - and boost the sales of next-generation players in the process.

"In many ways, it could be the savior of Blu-Ray," Mainard said.

What do you think? Will 3-D TV always remain a gimmick, or could it become the new frontier of home entertainment? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below - and don't throw away those funny glasses!

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• Slashdot: Where's E.T.? New ideas about Fermi's Paradox  
• New Scientist: Extinct Pyrenean ibex (briefly) cloned to life