William Pomerantz / X Prize Foundation

Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius rocket fires its engine above a mock lunar landing pad on Saturday while a ground crew member looks on from a distance.

Armadillo Aerospace qualified to win a million dollars of NASA's money today by accomplishing a rocket-powered round trip modeled after a moon landing. The team's remote-controlled Scorpius rocket (formerly known as the Super Mod) blasted off from its Texas launch pad, rose into the sky and floated over to set down on a mock moon landing pad. After refueling, Scorpius blasted off again for what one observer called a "perfect flight" back to the original launch pad.

The judges confirmed that Armadillo satisfied all the contest requirements. Scorpius made pinpoint landings within a meter of each landing pad's center target, according to William Pomerantz, the director of space prizes for the X Prize Foundation.

That means the million-dollar top prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge will definitely be given away this year. But Armadillo's rocketeers will still have to wait another month and a half to find out if they won, while other entrants in the competition try to do the same feat better.

Rainy conditions posed a challenge for the flight, and for a while it looked as if the prospects for flying today were slim. A fortunate break in the weather gave Armadillo a chance to go for the gold.

William Pomerantz / X Prize Foundation

Members of the Armadillo Aerospace team celebrate after Saturday's flight.

Update for 10:20 p.m. ET Sept. 14: Armadillo team leader John Carmack and others celebrated the weekend's success in a statement that hinted at the road ahead:

John Carmack said: "Since the Lunar Lander Challenge is quite demanding in terms of performance, with a few tweaks our Scorpius vehicle actually has the capability to travel all the way to space. We'll be moving quickly to do higher-altitude tests, and we can go up to about 6,000 feet here at our home base in Texas before we'll have to head to New Mexico where we can really push the envelope. We already have scientific payloads from universities lined up to fly as well, so this will be an exciting next few months for commercial spaceflight."

Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, which manages the prize on behalf of NASA's Centennial Challenges program, said: "Carmack and the entire Armadillo team made it look easy … an overnight success after four years of hard work. Congratulations on two perfect flights. Now we'll need to see if any other teams attempt the Level-2, Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. If no one does, then Armadillo will win $1 million in purse cash. I'm hopeful that this success will allow policymakers to see the power and success of NASA's Centennial Challenges program."

Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, said: "Congratulations to Armadillo Aerospace, NASA and the X Prize Foundation for their excellent teamwork in making this week's Lunar Lander Challenge milestone possible. This competition shows exactly how much NASA can benefit from close engagement with the commercial spaceflight sector."

You can get the latest tweets about the Lunar Lander Challenge via this Twitter news feed. Read on for the full story behind the challenge and its payoff:

First posted 8:40 p.m. ET Sept. 11: Video-game millionaire John Carmack is aiming to win a million dollars of NASA's money when he and his Armadillo Aerospace teammates take the field this weekend for the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. And the way he sees it, the biggest thing standing in his way is an obstacle that's become quite familiar to NASA's space jockeys of late: the weather.

"It looks bad all weekend," Carmack told me via telephone from Caddo, Texas. "We need two hours without precipitation, basically, to get this done."

NASA faced its own weather problems this week at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the weather was so unstable that mission planners diverted the shuttle Discovery to a California landing site instead. Carmack doesn't have that kind of option available to him: For better or worse, he and his Armadillo team have to launch and land their Super Mod lander prototype at their Texas test site at least twice sometime in the next couple of days, or pass up this year's chance to win a million-dollar prize.

"I'm really most worried about the weather, all things considered," said Carmack, who has steered Armadillo's remote-controlled rocket through prize-worthy practice runs more than a dozen times. "It's just business as usual now. As long as my nerves stay together for another 30 hours or so, I think we're going to be OK."

How the challenge works
NASA set up the Lunar Lander Challenge three years ago, ostensibly to promote the development of rocket technologies that could come into play during future moon landings. What the competition has actually done is give a new generation of rocketeers something to shoot for - just as the $10 million Ansari X Prize encouraged the rise of private-sector spaceflight.

The contest, backed by $2 million in prizes provided by NASA, is set up with two levels. Last year in New Mexico, Armadillo took the top prize for the easier level, netting $350,000. Controlled via Carmack's laptop, the Mod rocket blasted off and rose to a height of more than 160 feet (50 meters), hung in the air for a minute and a half, then landed on another launch pad. After a pause for refueling, the Mod retraced its course back to the original pad for the win.

This time, Armadillo's Super Mod faces a tougher task in the Level 2 competition: The alcohol-fueled, pressure-tank-equipped rocket has to hang in the air for a minimum of 3 minutes during each leg of the round trip, and it has to land on a pad that is strewn with mock lunar boulders.

The judges will give Carmack and the rest of the ground crew just 135 minutes to fuel up, fly, refuel, fly again and secure the Super Mod after the flight. There will be built-in holds along the way, however, so the whole exercise could take longer than 135 minutes - in fact, Carmack is wondering whether the clock can be stopped if it starts raining.

"Will the judges stop time and let us pick up later?" he asked. (The answer, we found out later, is yes.)

The funny thing about this contest is that the Armadillo team may not know for sure until October whether it's won a prize. That's because, unlike past years, the 2009 Lunar Lander Challenge is a traveling road show.

Masten Space Systems is due to try for the Level 1 second prize ($150,000) next week at its home base in Mojave, Calif. It will also shoot for Level 2 on Oct. 7-8 and Oct. 28-29. Another competitor, Unreasonable Rocket, will shoot for Level 1 as well as Level 2 at its launch site in Cantil, Calif., on Oct. 30-31.

If multiple teams guide their rocket through the required course successfully, the prize goes to the rocketeers with the best average accuracy. Thus, Armadillo could conceivably accomplish the Level 2 flight and still miss out on the $1 million first prize as well as the $500,000 second prize.

"To wait another month and a half to find out what place you got - that's a little bit odd, but it's understandable," Carmack said.

The challenge's prime payoff
A million dollars would go a long way toward accelerating Armadillo's progress - or progress at Masten, or Unreasonable Rocket, for that matter. Carmack's team may be a little better off, in light of the fact that the company where he works, Id Software, was recently acquired by ZeniMax Media. "I have a bit more personal resources at my disposal," he said. In any case, he's planning to expand Armadillo's team of three full-time employees and four hourly workers sometime soon.

It's safe to say that the folks at Armadillo, Masten and Unreasonable Rocket aren't thinking about building an actual lunar lander right now - so the current wave of second thoughts over NASA's moon plans won't affect their business plans at all. The Lunar Lander Challenge is just one small step in the long march of private-sector commercial spaceflight. Armadillo, for example, is continuing to work on a rocket engine program for the Rocket Racing League - and on some other projects that Carmack can't talk about quite yet.

"Eventually we're hoping to go all the way to orbit," Carmack said. But that milestone is still many small steps ahead. For now, he's just worried about getting a couple of hours without rain this weekend - and getting a chance to deliver on the true promise of the Lunar Lander Challenge.

The X Prize Foundation, which is managing the challenge with sponsorship from Northrop Grumman, estimates that the contest has generated more than 70,000 hours of skilled work on advanced rocket technologies, with just $350,000 paid out to date. In the long run, that payoff may dwarf the million dollars as well as the rocket ships built to win that cash.

"I think the government is getting a tremendous return on what they've put into this," Carmack said. "When it gets to the point where we have to go and find more great people, we know exactly which people have demonstrated the right type of thinking, the right skill sets and the right determination."

For further updates: You can get the latest on Twitter by doing a search for #ngllc or following @NGLLC09 or @jeff_foust. Jeff Foust has posted YouTube videos of Scorpius' first flight of the day as well as the second flight.

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Arctic Dinosaurs'
• ACS: Chemical registry hits the 50-million mark 
• The New Yorker: Still searching for Amelia Earhart 
• The Economist: Private-sector rocketeers are flying high
• Wired: Rescuers shave seconds to save lives in Afghanistan 

Gustave Dore via Art Passions

In this illustration for Dante's "Paradiso," the poet beholds heaven's highest realm.

What if God is a microbe, and we're just the hosts for the creatures made in Its image? A neuroscientist and self-described "possibilian" offers 40 thought-provoking possibilities for the afterlife in a slim book called "Sum."

The questions that David Eagleman deals with at his day job at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are already pretty far-out: How do our brains construct reality? Why does our perception of time's flow change? Why do some people "see" music or associate numbers with colors?

But even at work, some of Eagleman's ideas are so far-out they have to be put aside ... until he goes home and writes about them.

"In some sense, I use my literary fiction as a channel to explore ideas that I come up with during the day," he told me.

For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. "For a long time, there's been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else - or to be something else," he said. "Once you're John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it's like not to be John Malkovich."

That spawned Eagleman's little story about cross-species reincarnation, titled "Descent of Species": Suppose you admired the strength and beauty of horses, and you got the chance to become a horse in your next life. Once you become a horse, would you have enough wits to appreciate that life, or even enough wits to choose the life after that? And if that's the case, what unwitting demigods might we humans have been in our past lives?

Other stories play off the fact that existential meaning doesn't scale well. "What would happen if we showed Shakespeare to a dog or a bacterium?" Eagleman asked. "It's pointless, because what's meaningful to you changes by spatial scale."

For example, a microbial God might reserve the afterlife strictly for microbes, with humans merely serving as part of the scenery. Or the universe might be ruled by a cosmic Giantess who is as indifferent to our fate as we are to the fate of an amoeba.

None of Eagleman's 40 tales is longer than five pages, and they all have a clever twist of karmic justice (or injustice) worthy of "The Twilight Zone."

Eagleman also notes that each story contradicts all the others - which he says is "the metamessage of the book." It's not a strictly scientific point of view, but it's a point of view that allows for multiple possibilities when it comes to life's deepest question.

"The idea that people will tell their stories with certainty, and fight and die over those stories, is just so ludicrous - because it's so much bigger than that," Eagleman said.

When it comes to his personal views on the afterlife, Eagleman shies away from calling himself an atheist, or a deist or theist. Instead, he prefers the term "possibilian." So do a lot of other people, it turns out. Eagleman's reference to "possibilianism" in an NPR interview spawned Facebook groups and a Web site for like-minded fans, and now he's planning to write a book titled "Why I Am a Possibilian."

But first, he's planning to finish a book on "the secret life of the unconscious brain," titled "Dethronement." In a sense, it's a book about your inner zombie - that is, all the processes that go on behind the scenes beneath your consciousness. He's also co-written a book about synesthesia, delving into the ways that your different senses cross wires with each other. (For instance, why do some people associate the number 4 with orange? Personally, I think 4 is blue.)

"What I'm hoping to do is write fiction and nonfiction alternately so that they synergize," Eagleman said.

Neuroscience certainly provides enough factual fodder for fiction. At his day job, Eagleman studies vision perception and time perception.

"In both those issues, reality ain't what you think it is," he said. "We can make you think something lasted longer or shorter than it really does, something happened before when it really happened afterward. The brain is not just passively recording some river flowing past. Our brains are constructing time."

With all that material to work with, Eagleman isn't likely to run out of stories anytime soon.

"All it takes to grow a neat scientific idea into fiction," he observed, "is to extrapolate it to where it matters in everyday life."

Now it's your turn. Do you have stories to share, either about the possibilities for the afterlife or about the weird workings of the brain? Feel free to share them as comments below.

More encounters with the afterlife:

• Near-death experiences: What really happens?
• Discuss near-death experiences on Newsvine
• Your views on out-of-body experiences
• Your views on the meaning of heaven

Amanda Gevens / UW-Madison

These two potatoes are infected with late blight disease.

Scientists have unraveled the genome of the parasite that sparked the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, revealing why it was such a killer back then and why it's still a scourge today.

The critter is known as "late blight," and although it's often called a fungus, it's more correctly classified as a type of water mold. More than 150 years ago, Irish farmers didn't know what it was; they only knew that something was killing off their potatoes just when they were getting close to harvest.

The repeated failure of potato crops led to the great Irish migration of the late 1840s and early 1850s. And one of those emigrants, my great-grandfather, ended up in Iowa. He was much luckier than the estimated 1 million Irish who died as a result of "the Great Hunger."

The blight is not merely a historical tragedy, however. Experts estimate that the late blight organism, which carries the scientific name Phytophtora infestans, costs farmers around the world $6.7 billion every year.

In countries such as Peru, where potatoes are a staple crop, late blight always looms as a potential peril and may be exacerbated by global warming. The parasite can hit tomatoes as well as potatoes. This summer, reports of late blight's spread stirred concerns here in the United States, in regions ranging from New York and Ohio to Minnesota and North Dakota.

Fungicides can fight the blight, and plant breeders have been working to develop blight-resistant strains of potatoes and tomatoes. The pest seems to bounce back every time it's hit, however. Now that the pest's genome has been decoded, scientists are finding out why.

"This pathogen has an exquisite ability to adapt and change, and that's what makes it so dangerous," Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said in a news release issued by the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Nusbaum headed up the international sequencing project for the blight genome. UW-Madison's David Schwartz, the principal inventor of an optical mapping system for deciphering genetic code, participated in the project as well. The research team's findings were published online today by the journal Nature.

The researchers found that the late blight's DNA coding comprised about 240 million bases - making the organism's genome more than twice as large as those of its relatives. About 75 percent of that inflated genome consists of repetitive sequences of DNA. Those sequences are specialized for attacking plants, and they appear to be the key to the blight's virulence, Nusbaum said.

"The repeat-rich regions change rapidly over time, acting as a kind of incubator to enable the rapid birth and death of genes that are key to plant infection," said the Broad Institute's Brian Haas, another leading member of the team behind the research.

It looks as if Phytophtora infestans mixes and matches the DNA from its huge genetic toolkit to overcome the genetic defenses thrown up by blight-resistant plant strains - all part of an evolutionary arms race between the parasite and its host. "These critical genes may be gained and lost so rapidly that the hosts simply can't keep up," Haas said.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the geneticists are on to the parasite's game. "We now have a comprehensive view of its genome, revealing the unusual properties that drive its remarkable adaptability," Nusbaum said. "Hopefully, this knowledge can foster novel approaches to diagnose and respond to outbreaks."

Geneticists have already found a promising target for their fight against the blight, known as RLXR, and more targets are likely to emerge as they take a closer look at the now-published genome.

Update for 9 p.m. ET Sept. 10: Here are a couple bonus links about the blight:

• Cosmic Log rewind from 2003: Engineering a superspud
• Hear or watch "Dig and Dine," Jon Hogan's song of a spud

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."  You can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

• Slashdot: A solar panel that uses human hair?
• Geeks Are Sexy: Geek origami (via GeekPress)
• Independent: A skull that rewrites human history?
• Cracked: Five superpowers you didn't know you had
• Slate Recycled: How do space pictures get so pretty?
• Onion Radio: Homeless scientists unveil world's first hobotron

D. Lovley, K. Nevin, B. Barnhart / UMass

A toy truck draws electrical power from a set of soil-microbe batteries developed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Did you hear the one about the microbes that send out electricity through their hair? Or the one about the germs that actually clean up toxic algae-ridden water? How about the bacteria that build up artificial bones or manufacture medicine?

They may sound as outlandish as the stupid pet tricks you see on late-night talk shows, but the tricks that microbes do could end up improving lives and saving energy.

Researchers from around the world swapped their tales of not-so-stupid microbe tricks over the weekend at the Society for General Microbiology's meeting at Herot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Here's a sampling of the stories:

Hairy bacteria for fuel cells
Tiny filaments appear to enhance the flow of electricity generated by a strain of sulfur-eating bacteria known as Geobacter sulfurreducens KN400, according to Derek Lovley, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"The filaments form microscopic projections called pili that act as microbial nanowires," Lovley said in a news release. "Using this bacterial strain in a fuel cell to generate electricity would greatly increase the cell's power output."

Geobacter, which can convert marine waste products into electricity, has long been considered a potential source of power for fuel cells. Lovley and his colleagues are developing such fuel cells to power monitoring devices in environments where it's difficult to replace batteries. KN400, for example, could provide the energy for deep-sea sensors that monitor turtle migration, Lovley said.

Mini-factories for medicine
Canadian researchers have turned a harmless strain of bacteria into a protein production factory by adapting a single protein on its surface. Such "factories" could eventually produce vaccines, anti-infection agents and anti-diarrhea drugs, said John Smit of the University of British Columbia.

The microbe, Caulobacter crescentus, secretes a protein that assembles itself into a surface structure Smit calls the "S-layer." Researchers found that the bacteria's self-assembly system could be modified to bring therapeutic proteins up to the surface, making it easier to purify bioengineered medicines.

"We can make the bacterium into a protein pump, secreting over half of all the protein it makes as engineered S-layer protein," Smit said in a news release. "Applications of S-layer display that we are currently developing include anti-cancer vaccines, an HIV infection blocker and agents to treat Crohn's [disease] and colitis, and diarrhea in malnourished populations."

Bacteria vs. toxic algae
Blue-green algae are becoming a scourge in areas of the globe's oceans as well as inland bodies of water. Algal blooms can produce toxins called microcystins that can be ingested by  animals and humans when they drink, swim or bathe in contaminated water.

Researchers at Robert Gordon University in Scotland have identified more than 10 strains of bacteria that can break microcystins down into harmless byproducts. Six of the strains were tested with contaminated river water under conditions that simulated real-world conditions, and all six were able to break down the toxins, the researchers reported.

"The costs of advanced water purification strategies are beyond most of the world's population," microbiologist Aakash Welgama said in a news release. "Using bacteria to remove microcystines from water provides a reliable, cost-effective purification system, which does not involve any use of harmful chemicals."

Bone-building bacteria
A strain of bacteria known as Serratia can be enlisted to manufacture the "glue" for stronger, more durable bone implants, researchers from the University of Birmingham in England reported.

The research team found that the bacteria can stick tightly to surfaces such as titanium alloy, polypropylene plastic, porous glass and polyurethane foam by forming a biofilm layer that contains a polymer known as hydroxyapatite, or HA. After a thick coating of HA builds up on the surface, the material is dried and heated.

"The bacteria are destroyed by heating, leaving just the HA stuck to the surface with their own glue — rather akin to a burnt-milk saucepan," the University of Birmingham's Lynne Macaskie said in a news release.

Most artificial bones today are made from materials that are coated with a spray-on layer of HA polymer, but the artificially coated material isn't as strong as the biofilm-based material. Moreover, the spray-on material doesn't cover the nooks and crannies of bone material as well as the bacteria do, the researchers said.

The bone-building bacteria aren't quite ready for prime time, Macaskie cautioned. "We need to do more work actually to turn the materials into materials we can use in biomedicine and the environment," she said. "Then they need to be tested in real-life situations with clinical and environmental trials."

More about microbes:

• Green ideas so crazy they just might work
• Mutant bacteria + polyester = more biofuel
• Microbe-powered 'fart' machine stores energy
• Germ genes come clean
• Look for "microbes" on msnbc.com

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."  You can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.

• NASW: Science in Society winners tackle challenging topics
• Universe Today: 365 Days of Astronomy podcast wins a Parsec 
• Balzan Prizes shine spotlight on solar cells and neuroscience
• Planetary Society Blog: Carnival of Space 119 

I'll be out of the office on Monday for Labor Day, but here's a double dose of Web links to see you through the weekend. A couple of this week's research findings ... on magnetic monopoles and the "Bose Nova" ... sparked flashbacks to the federal lawsuit that sought to shut down the Large Hadron Collider last year. To refresh your memory, that legal challenge was brushed aside and is now hanging around in appellate-court limbo:

• PhysOrg: Atoms don't dance the 'Bose Nova' 
• ScienceNOW: Magnetic monopoles created ... sort of
• CERN on the Bose Nova, magnetic monopoles and more 
• New Scientist: The coolest experiments in microgravity
• AL.com: NASA Mars exploration study drafted
• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Mystery of the Megavolcano'
• AMC: Five lessons from this sci-fi summer
• The Daily Dish: The benefits of vacation 

NASA / ASU

This image from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the Apollo 12 landing site (with the Intrepid descent stage) as well as the Surveyor 3 lander, the ALSEP experiment package and tracks leading to other surrounding points of interest.

Broader views of the universe are among the richest payoffs to result from space exploration, as demonstrated by the latest installment of "Month in Space Pictures." But those views becomes even richer when you see them from a completely different perspective. Some of the latest gems from space do just that, energizing scientific sleuths and confounding conspiracy theorists in the process.

Here's a quick sampling of completely different perspectives to peruse during the long Labor Day weekend:

NASA

A picture from the Apollo 12 mission in 1969 shows commander Pete Conrad alongside the Surveyor 3 probe, with the Intrepid lunar module on the horizon. New imagery from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the scene as it looks today.

Revisiting past space shots

• Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3 spotted: One of the interesting things about the Apollo 12 mission, which will be the focus of 40th-anniversary remembrances in November, is that the Intrepid lunar module touched down within walking distance of the unmanned Surveyor 3 probe. The touchdown demonstrated that NASA could make something close to a precision landing on another celestial body. Now yet another unmanned NASA probe, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, has taken a picture of the whole scene from above - including Surveyor 3 in its crater as well as the Apollo 12 leftovers and the astronauts' tracks going back and forth. The amazing picture, released on Thursday, follows up on LRO imagery of other Apollo landing sites.
• Apollo 15, too: You'd think that all that orbital imagery of Apollo landing sites would have finished off any claims that the moon missions were faked - but some conspiracy theorists reasoned that if NASA could fake the original missions, they could fake the LRO pictures as well. To take this view, you'd have to assume that the LRO imaging team at Arizona State University and all the other scientists working on the mission were in on the conspiracy. But now researchers from India have announced that their own moon orbiter, Chandrayaan 1, took pictures of the Apollo 15 site before contact was lost. They say the pictures reveal the tracks of the lunar rover. "Happy now, you conspiracy retards?" Gizmodo asks in its item on the imagery (with labeled and unlabeled photos).
• Spirit rover ... and Mars Polar Lander? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is still working on its plan to free the Spirit rover from its Martian sand trap. In the meantime, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken pictures of the probe and its surroundings near the Home Plate plateau from high above. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla drills deep into the imagery to point out the rover and its tracks. Emily and others are also working mightily to look for traces of the long-lost Mars Polar Lander in MRO imagery.
• Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: NASA's eye in the Martian sky is currently in precautionary safe mode due to some technical glitches, but this week the team behind MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, released more than 1,500 pictures recorded between April and August. There's a special section for the September data dump, or you can graze through the full HiRISE catalog.
• Neptunian moon spotted by Voyager: Philosophy professor (and amateur imaging whiz) Ted Stryk found a golden oldie in 20-year-old imagery from the Voyager 2 mission: a sequence of pictures showing the tiny moon Despina and its shadow passing over Neptune's disk. Another amateur astronomer, Tony Farkas, turned up the coolness dial by converting that sequence into an animated image.

Moving sights from the cosmos

• Asteroid with two moons: While we're on the subject of animated images, check out this view of the asteroid 1994 CC, which has not just one but two tiny moons. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports that 1994 CC is only the second triple-asteroid system to be discovered in the near-Earth population.
• Eclipses on other worlds: I love to watch eclipses on other worlds, such as this view of a partial solar eclipse as seen by NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars (involving Deimos). Here's a short video clip showing several solar eclipses, starring Phobos as well as Deimos, and here's a "lunar eclipse" in which Mars' shadow blots out Phobos. All this is a buildup to last month's unusual eclipse clip, showing the shadow of one Jovian moon (Io) passing over the surface of a sister moon (Ganymede). Astroengine's Ian O'Neill also links to a subtler video that shows Ganymede blotting out Io.
• Saturn's moons on the move: Emily Lakdawalla's roundup of imagery featuring Saturnian moons includes some must-see animations, including shadows of Saturn's rings passing over Janus and Epimetheus, plus some interplay between Saturn's F-ring and the shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora. Here's the larger version of Mike Malaska's animation, created from images sent back last month by the Cassini orbiter.
• Virtual telescopes: This week I got a look at the latest release of WorldWide Telescope, the free astronomy program produced by Microsoft Research. (Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.) This "Aphelion" release draws upon data from the Galaxy Zoo project to add realism to its 3-D renderings of galaxies and provides a wide-scale look at the universe that meshes quite well with the "cosmic web" we've come to know and love. "You now have this crispness to the way the unverse shapes itself," WWT co-creator Jonathan Fay told me. Other features make the software more valuable for professional astronomers. "It's not just a curiosity," Fay said. "You could actually use it to follow up on scientific research." Stay tuned for more about WWT and other astronomy programs such as Sky in Google Earth, Celestia and Stellarium in the months ahead.

Big pictures from space
When we publish our "Month in Space Pictures" roundup, folks usually ask where they can get bigger versions of the images for printing out or using as computer-monitor wallpaper. Click on the links to learn more about the latest, greatest images in our Space Gallery:

• Midnight ride: NASA's Human Spaceflight Web site has a great gallery of pictures showing Discovery's liftoff and other highlights from the shuttle mission.
• Rover's stomping grounds: Check out the HiRISE Web site or for the big picture of Victoria Crater on Mars.
• Eye of a galactic storm: The Spitzer Space Telescope's Web site has great views of the spiral galaxy NGC 1097.
• Psychedelic Saturn: The Gemini Observatory tells you all about this ringed planet of a different color.
• Where there's smoke... NASA has a Web page that features satellite imagery of the fires in the Los Angeles area. More recent imagery shows how pollution from the fires has spread around the globe.
• Star foundry: Click over to the European Southern Observatory's Web site for bigger views of the RCW 38 star-forming region.
• Disappearing act: NASA's Saturn Web portal shows you in greater detail how the planet's rings faded away during last month's equinox.
• Open for business: Go back to the Human Spaceflight Web site for pictures of Discovery's rendezvous with the international space station.
• Moon over Earth: This view of the moon hovering above Earth's atmosphere is another gem from NASA.
• Pingos on Mars: Cover your computer monitor with what could be Martian pingos, courtesy of the HiRISE imaging team. What's a pingo? Glad you asked.
• Three-ring circus: The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's Web site explains how three separate perspectives were put together to create a picture of the sun you couldn't possibly see in real life.
• Storms get in line: Check out NASA's Earth Observatory for more about the GOES-14 satellite image that shows tropical storms lined up across the Atlantic.
• Full of stars: The European Southern Observatory has more about this view of the HD 87643 reflection nebula.
• Great White North: The satellite view of Russia's Novaya Zemlya frontier comes from NASA's Earth Observatory.
• Seeking shooting stars: Here's a bigger version of the Perseid meteor picture we published, and you'll find many more in SpaceWeather.com's gallery.
• Meteorite on Mars: The Mars rovers' home on the Web has this view of the "Block Island" meteorite on Martian sand as well as this closeup of the rock.
• Farewell to a rocket: This big-picture view of last month's Delta 2 GPS launch is so detailed you can see the crescent moon in the sky.
• The sun in 3-D: Get out your 3-D glasses for a full appreciation of this STEREO view of the sun, taken from the SOHO Web site.
• Clouds of creation: You can learn much more about the "trigger-happy" Cepheus B star-forming region from the Spitzer Web site.
• High above Mount Hood: Go to NASA's Earth Observatory for the full-resolution view of Mount Hood as seen from the international space station.
• Hell in paradise: The European Space Agency has the full story behind the satellite view of the Canary Island fires.
• South Korean liftoff: The satellite launch may have failed, but the blastoff made for a fantastic picture.

Stay tuned for still more fantastic space shots on Wednesday, when the first big batch of pictures from the upgraded Hubble Space Telescope is due to be released. (We were given a preview in July when the Hubble team shared this picture of Jupiter's Great Black Spot.) In the meantime, check out our Space Gallery for more of the universe's greatest hits.

European Parliament

Researchers have identified three genes that appear to have been activated in humans alone, adapted from DNA that serves no function in other species.

But are these the genes that make us human?

That's not likely. At best, they're just part of our genetic story.

The best guess is that the human genetic code takes in somewhere around 24,000 genes - bits of chemical code that provide the instructions for building the proteins used in our bodies. Many of these genes are shared with other species. In fact, geneticists have found that humans and their closest living relatives in the animal kingdom, chimpanzees, hold about 96 percent of their DNA in common.

Most of the differences arise from old genes that have been copied and tweaked over time to create a larger store of genes - feeding a merry-go-round of mutations that keep the evolutionary process spinning. Biologists have long surmised that such mutations add up over time to produce different species.

In addition to our genes, there are other long stretches of DNA in the genome that don't figure in the production of proteins. Those stretches are known as "non-coding DNA" or "junk DNA," and every species has some. It's only been in the last few years that scientists realized that junk DNA may not be junk at all but instead can play an essential role in our genetic workings.

Three years ago, scientists discovered that bits of non-coding DNA in fruit flies actually turned into protein-coding genes. In this week's issue of the journal Genome Research, David Knowles and Aoife McLysaght of Trinity College Dublin say they found at least three human genes that appear to have gone through a similar conversion process.

Knowles and McLysaght found the genes by running a computerized comparison of the human and chimp genomes and checking the sections that didn't have anywhere near a close match. They identified 644 protein-producing genes in humans that didn't produce a corresponding hit in the chimp genome. Then they took a closer look at those sections.

In 425 cases, there were gaps in the chimp genome sequence big enough to account for the missing human gene. In 150 other cases, the researchers found a match that was missed the first time around. They looked at other species as well - eventually winnowing down their list of "uniquely human" genes to just three, known as CLLU1, C22orf45 and DNAH10OS.

That wasn't the end of the exercise. "We needed to demonstrate that the DNA in human is really active in the gene," McLysaght said in a news release. She and Knowles verified that the genes really did play a role in producing proteins for humans, and that the protein-producing capacity was disabled for other primates.

Then they were left with a mystery: What specific function do these three genes have in humans that would be missing in every other species? Right now, no one knows - although one of the genes, CLLU1, appears to be linked to leukemia.

It's virtually certain that these three aren't the only uniquely human genes, because of all the limitations in the analysis method. Knowles and McLysaght figure that they could survey only about one-sixth of the total human genome - meaning that, statistically speaking, there might be 18 human genes that arose from junk DNA since our family tree diverged from that of other primates.

The researchers suspect these genes are important in determining traits that are specific to humans. "They are unlike any other human genes and have the potential to have a profound impact," McLysaght said in the news release. In ScienceNOW's report on the findings, she's quoted as saying that "the distinction between humans and other apes must lie somewhere in the small genetic differences between the species."

But is McLysaght saying that these three, or 18, genes out of 24,000 account for all the differences between humans and other species? That's highly doubtful.

You can't exclude the roles played by the many more genes that have been tweaked and twisted over millions of years - genes such as PDYN, which has been associated with brain evolution; or FOXP2, which has been linked to speech and language. Moreover, the idea that each gene does its own thing in isolation has given way to the view that ensembles of genes work together, producing effects that are bigger than the sum of their parts.

My bet is that the quest for the genes that make us human won't end with the discovery of a holy grail, but with the discovery that myriads of genes work together holistically.

It could be that the rise of uniquely human genes, cooked up from the seeming leftovers of other species' DNA, gave a slight push to our humanness. But the fact is that every generation gets another little genetic push - as evidenced by other findings published last week in Current Biology.

Yali Xue of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and her colleagues analyzed Y chromosomes from two men separated by 13 generations, finding four mutations in the 10 million or so nucleotides within that one chromosome. Based on statistics, they estimated that each one of us carries 100 to 200 new mutations in our DNA.

In other words, according to the institute's news release as well as the BBC's report on the research, we are all mutants. X-Men (and X-Women), unite!

More on genetics and human evolution:

• Human evolution at the crossroads
• Seven signs of evolution in action
• Human evolution kicks into high gear
• How DNA encodes our history
• Mice given 'human' version of speech gene

• Symmetry: Bam! Sproing! Gyaaa! Manga artist delivers physics
• Cracked: The six most frequently quoted myths about animals
• Flickr: Venn diagram of mythical creatures (via GeekPress)
• New Scientist: Sex from the inside out | Improbable TV 
• N.Y. Times: One-way ticket to Mars | CosLog rewind
• Cumbrian Sky: Carnival of Space 118 

Scientists are planning a "Woodstock moment" for suborbital research in February ... millions of dollars are going toward a deep-ocean observatory project ... and the race to find the Higgs boson is heating up. Those are just some of the developments on the radar screen this week. Read on for the details:

• Following up on last month's talks about research on suborbital spaceships, planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute says a conference for next-generation suborbital researchers has been scheduled for Feb. 18-20, 2010. The organizers say a couple of hundred researchers from fields such as life sciences, microgravity applications, astronomy and atmospheric science are expected to gather in Boulder, Colo. "The goal is to have a Woodstock moment (OK, minus the sex and drugs) about research applications of suborbital, the fantastic education and public outreach opportunities, and the promise of making spaceflight a routine place for researchers and educators to do their work," Stern told me in an e-mail.
• Speaking of future spaceflight, two California-based upstarts in the space business reported progress this week: SpaceX said that it has delivered a UHF communication unit to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in preparation for launch to the international space station in November. The unit will be used during future on-orbit docking tests of SpaceX's Dragon cargo ship. Meanwhile, XCOR Aerospace said it has reached "several significant milestones" in its engine test program, aimed at developing the propulsion system for its high-flying Lynx rocket plane.
• The University of Washington says it will be getting $126 million from the federal government over the next five and a half years, as its share of a $385 million award for the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The money will go toward building a cabled seafloor observatory on the Pacific Ocean's Juan de Fuca Plate off Pacific Northwest shores, as part of the Regional Scale Nodes program (formerly known as NEPTUNE). The idea is to create a network of underwater monitoring stations that will provide unprecedented 24/7 broadband views of the deep ocean.
• We've been talking for years about the friendly competition to detect the first traces of the last subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model, known as the Higgs boson or "the God Particle." The detection could be made at the Tevatron in Illinois, which is in the latter days of its operating life, or at the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border, which is currently under repair. A report from New Scientist quotes researchers as saying that the LHC's problems have kept the Tevatron in the subatomic race, and that Tevatron physicists could have enough data by early 2011 to produce an answer to the ultimate Higgs question. In the meantime, true particle-physics fans will likely want to put "Voyage to the Heart of Matter," a pop-up book about the big bang and the LHC's ATLAS experiment, on their holiday gift list. 
• And now for something completely different ... actually, a couple of completely different items from The Onion: an article headlined "Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked," and a radio spot reporting that "New Species of Lobster May Have Come From Outer Space."

One Drop Foundation

Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte practices for his space mission at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training complex.

Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte's multimillion-dollar trip to the international space station will feature a two-hour global extravaganza highlighting water conservation on Oct. 9, with personalities ranging from Al Gore to U2 putting in guest appearances from 14 cities on Earth.

During today's webcast previewing the gala, the Canadian billionaire slated to become "the first clown in space" joked that he won't be allowed to do fire-eating tricks in orbit. He does plan to wear his trademark red clown nose, however.

The October event, announced at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training complex on Laliberte's 50th birthday, will be the highlight of the Cirque founder's $30-million-plus, 12-day-long round trip to the space station, due to lift off on Sept. 30. Its theme, "Moving Stars and Earth for Water," meshes with the mission of the One Drop Foundation, which Laliberte founded two years ago with $100 million of his own money.

Laliberte told reporters that the event will feature music, dance, visual arts and photography - woven together by a poetic tale on water and the environmental threats facing water resources, written by Canadian author Yann Martel ("Life of Pi"). Although Laliberte didn't lay out the whole story, he said the tale would focus on "the moon, the sun and a drop of water."

Celebrities will read parts of the tale from the various venues on Earth, and Laliberte will act as the event's emcee in orbit. The headliners include environmental leaders such as Canada's David Suzuki and former Vice President (and Nobel laureate) Al Gore, plus musicians and music groups including Peter Gabriel and Shakira in addition to U2. Space station astronauts (Belgium's Frank De Winne and Canada's Julie Payette) and Laliberte's own Cirque du Soleil are also on the guest list.

The planned venues include Montreal, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, New York, Mexico City, Sydney, Marrakesh, London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Santa Monica, Tampa and Moscow. In some cases, the audience may become part of the act, Laliberte said. The event is to be webcast via One Drop's Web site in partnership with AOL.

Laliberte will help record the event for a documentary that's being made about his training and spaceflight. "I will be the extended arm of my cameraman, my director and my sound guy in space," he said.

Laliberte said he asked some of the well-known people he has met in the course of Cirque du Soleil's 25 years of existence to take part. "To our great surprise, it was an amazing response - and there will be more surprises to come," he said.

The Quebec native, who started out in the entertainment industry as a street performer and now has a personal fortune valued at $2.5 billion, said the mission was already serving multiple goals, ranging from raising awareness about water issues to promoting space travel, publicizing One Drop and Cirque du Soleil - and getting a healthy dose of adventure in the process.

"I'm throwing a stone, and I hit three or four bounces on the water," he joked.

He said he's wanted to go into space ever since he witnessed the Apollo 11 moon landing on television 40 years ago, when Laliberte was on the verge of turning 10. "I then realized and I started to believe that fairy tales were possible," he told reporters.

He said he probably wouldn't engage in any acrobatics outside the usual zero-gravity maneuvers during his trip to space, and noted that "I can't breathe fire up there." But he said that he would probably wear his clown nose and would try to persuade fellow spacefliers to wear clown noses as well.

That won't be a first, however: Way back in 1999, Canadian astronaut Julie Payette brought a Cirque du Soleil clown nose into space - and chances are she'll be wearing one during Laliberte's visit as well.

Here's the current list of guest stars for Laliberte's gala, set to start at 8 p.m. ET Oct. 9:

• Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and Nobel laureate.
• Indian musician-composer A.R. Rahman ("Slumdog Millionaire").
• Cirque du Soleil.
• Avant-garde artist-musician Claude Challe.
• Canadian environmentalist-broadcaster David Suzuki.
• Fnaire, a Moroccan rap group.
• Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne.
• Quebec singer Garou.
• Brazilian fusion musician Gilberto Gil.
• Filmmaker-photographer Gregory Colbert.
• Biologist-filmmaker Jeane Lemire.
• Canadian astronaut Julie Payette.
• French mariner-environmentalist Maud Fontenoi.
• French artist-actor Patrick Bruel.
• Musician Peter Gabriel.
• Australian nature photographer Peter Lik.
• Shakira, Colombian-born singer-songwriter-dancer.
• Quebec composer Simon Carpentier.
• Japanese artist-singer-filmmaker Tatuya Ishii.
• Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Japanese actress and TV host.
• Australian soprano Tiffany Speight.
• Rock band U2.
• Indian eco-feminist Vandava Shiva.
• French photographer-environmentalist Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

Bryce Richter / UW-Madison

Cotton-top tamarin monkeys grew calmer after they heard music based on their own calm, friendly calls. But the monkeys became more agitated when researchers played music that contained elements of their own threatening or fearful calls. Listen to arousing monkey music and calming music (Copyright David Teie).

Music may have charms to "soothe the savage breast," but that doesn't mean the same music that soothes humans will charm other species. Monkeys, for example, aren't much affected by human music.

To find out whether any kind of music could affect a monkey's mood, a musician and a primatologist created tunes tailor-made for cotton-top tamarins. They report that the experiment worked - but the melodies are unlike anything you've ever heard.

The music that mellows out a monkey consists of long, high-pitched tones that sound squeaky to human ears. "To me, that sounds like fingers scratching on a blackboard," said Charles Snowdon, a primate researcher from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

At the other extreme, the monkeys' equivalent of a thriller-movie soundtrack sounds like a fast-stuttering engine, overlaid with string-quartet screeches. "I can't even imagine dancing to it," Snowdon said.

But based on the reviews reported in this week's issue of the journal Biology Letters, the tamarin tunes were a certifiable hit.

Researchers played an assortment of music for seven pairs of adult tamarin monkeys housed at the University of Wisconsin. Most of the run-of-the-mill human music, ranging from Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" to Metallica's "Of Wolf and Man," had little effect (although strangely enough, the monkeys were calmed somewhat by the heavy-metal music).

In contrast, the music custom-made for the cotton-top tamarins produced significant effects within five minutes: After hearing the mellowing-out music, the monkeys moved around less, interacted less and foraged more. After hearing the thrilling, threatening tune, they moved around more, huddled together and seemed more anxious.

All this was music to the ears of David Teie, the University of Maryland musician (and National Symphony Orchestra cellist) who composed the monkey music. "I was pleased, in a strange kind of aesthetic way," he told me.

For years, Teie has been working on a theory looking at the relationship between music and emotional vocalizations. In his view, music distills the meanings of sounds we make when we soothe a baby ("awwww," starting with a high pitch that slides slowly downward) or warn our mates about danger ahead ("Look out!" in sharp, staccato tones and a rising pitch).

"If I was right about the aspects of music that was built for humans by humans, then I should be able to write for another species, based on its perceptions and development," he said.

So Teie got in touch with Snowdon and began the process of analyzing recorded monkey vocalizations. He enlisted other musicians to categorize the sounds in terms of pitch, tempo and tonal progression, while Snowdon helped interpret which behaviors were associated with which sounds.

Teie said "there was a general consensus" about the linkages between different sound patterns and their effects: Long tones, in a rising or falling pattern, were associated with soothing behaviors. Quick, noisy staccato notes with broad sweeps in pitch should have an agitating effect.

One big twist is that the monkeys' "sweet spot" is much higher in pitch and much faster in rhythm. "Their communication is so fast and so high that it all sounds like chirps to us," Teie said. To make sense out of the monkeys' recorded calls, he slowed the tempo down to an eighth of normal, and brought the pitch down three octaves.

The result is that even the calming music that Teie composed sounds high-pitched and up-tempo to humans. And that's part of the point: Music can soothe the savage beast, but it works best if it's written for the beast rather than for the humans.

"If I'm irritated by that finger-scratching monkey song that calms them, then playing soft rock or country may not have the appropriate effects on the monkeys," Snowdon said. "So what do the animals like or dislike?"

To follow up on the research, Teie has created a Web site known as "Music for Cats," which offers tunes written for tabbies. He's also been talking with zoo curators about the possibility of providing captive animals with species-specific background music.

"We now know that it's possible to bring the enjoyment of music to other mammals," he said over the telephone from the Czech Republic, where he's touring. "I just visited the Prague Zoo yesterday, and let's face it, they're just desperately in need of enrichment. It would be possible to bring enrichment with no cost and absolutely no risk."

For now, he's hoping that folks will play the tunes on Music for Cats for their kitties and let him know which music gets the best feline response.

"I am very interested to get an overview of the responses, and I would want to keep writing the music that gets the best response," he told me. "I want genuine and honest feedback. If someone finds that their cats jump, scream and run out of the room, I'd want to know that."

Feel free to pass along your reviews of Teie's music for cats, or his music for monkeys, in your comments below.

Update for 9 p.m. ET: One natural question to ask is, why make the effort? If you listen to the sounds that an animal makes, and then create a type of music based on those sounds, isn't it natural that the animal would respond to the music as it responded to the original sounds? I got several answers on that point. First, from the paper itself:

"A simple playback of spontaneous vocalizations from tamarins may have produced similar behavioral effects, but responses to spontaneous call playbacks may result from affective conditioning. By composing music containing some structural features of tamarin calls but not directly imitating the calls, the structural principles (rather than conditioned responses) are likely to be the bases of behavioral responses. The results suggest that animal signals may have direct effects on listeners by inducing the same affective state as the caller. Calls may not simply provide information about the caller, but may effectively manage or manipulate the behavior of listeners."

Snowdon explained it another way in today's press release, saying that even among cotton-top tamarins, communication is about much more than just information:

"I am not calling just to let you know how I am feeling, but my call can also stimulate a similar state in you. That would be valuable if a group was threatened; in that situation, you don't want everybody being calm, you want them alert. We do the same thing when we try to calm a baby. I am not just communicating about how I am feeling. I am using the way I communicate to induce a similar state in the baby."

The findings about "monkey music" may shed light on the roots of human music as well, Snowdon said:

"The emotional components of music and animal calls might be very similar, and from an evolutionary perspective, we are finding that the note patterns, dissonance and timing are important for communicating affective states in both animals and people."

Teie, meanwhile, framed his answer in artistic terms:

"One question I am often asked is, 'Isn't this just you mimicking these calls on the cello?' Part of the idea is that it's not exactly the thing. ... As long as you don't know what it is, it will tend not to be subject to habituation, and it will always get to you."

Update for 9:15 p.m. PT: OK, one more thing. I asked Teie if there were examples of vocalizations or musical styles that had different meanings for humans and for monkeys. He pointed to the example of the "Ohhhhh" sound that expresses sympathy or consolation - you know, the kind that starts out at a high pitch and slowly slides to a quieter, lower pitch.

"We don't have the opposite," he said. "We don't have an emotionally generated vocalization that slides from lower to higher. Well, it means something specific to tamarins. It has a kind of enlivening factor to it. When they go up a major third, fourth or fifth, these are the affectionate calls from mother to young."

All I can say to that is, Ohhhhhh?

Update for 3:35 p.m. ET Sept. 5: In an e-mail, Teie adds a little bit to the human-vs.-tamarin vocalization discussion:

"At the risk of being petty - the upward-sliding 'oh?' is an extract from non-tonal Indo-European language and not an amygdala-generated vocalization. And the specific contour of upwardly sliding vocalization that tamarins have and we don't is one that gets louder as it gets higher: 'ooOOH!' Try that one in conversation and I think you'll get some funny looks!"

Mind Research Institute

This graphic shows areas of the brain that functioned more efficiently after three months of video-game practice (blue) as well as areas where the cortex became thicker (red). The left and right views show the left and right brain hemispheres.

The effects of video-game playing on your brain have been studied for a quarter-century, but the latest research reveals that there are deep puzzles yet to be solved.

One of the earliest and most noted studies in the field was conducted back in 1992 by neuroscientist Richard Haier at the University of California at Irvine, who looked at how frequent sessions with the Tetris video game changed the players' brains. The game requires players to fit colorful puzzle pieces together at a quickening pace as they fall from the top of the screen.

Back then, Haier used brain scans to discover that some parts of the brain actually used less glucose as the players became more skilled at the game. The "Tetris effect" illustrated how video-game training could make brains work more efficiently - an idea that eventually led to a whole host of brain-training games.

Now Haier serves as a consultant to Blue Planet Software, the company that markets Tetris, and he was asked to follow up on his 17-year-old research using the new tools available to neuroscientists.

Haier recruited three colleagues - Sherif Karama from the Montreal Neurological Institute, Leonard Leyba from the New Mexico-based Mind Research Network and Rex Jung, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico. They came up with an experiment that budgeted out at "under $100,000," with the expense picked by Blue Planet, Haier said.

The company had no say in how the experiment was conducted - and it didn't get an advance look at the resulting research, which was published online today in BMC Research Notes, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. "This was kind of a labor of love," Haier told me.

The researchers recruited 26 girls, aged 12 to 15. Adolescents were selected because their developing brains were more likely to reflect changes, and girls were selected because they tend to have less experience with video games than boys. Fifteen of the girls were given the task of playing the video game for an average of 90 minutes a week over the course of three months. The others were told to avoid playing video games.

Both groups were monitored for changes in brain function as well as brain structure. Earlier research conducted in Germany had shown that juggling practice led to a thickening in areas of the cerebral cortex, so Haier and his colleagues were pretty sure they'd find a link between what they saw in the functional MRI (about more efficient brain function) and in the structural MRI (about cortex thickening).

And that's where the brain puzzle threw them for a new loop.

"In science, everyone makes a very big deal about having a hypothesis before you go on a fishing expedition," Haier said. "Never once in 20 years has my hypothesis worked out the way I thought it would. The brain is always a surprise."

The researchers analyzed the brain changes in the game-playing group compared with the control group, and they found that the Tetris players' brain function became more efficient in areas linked to critical thinking, reasoning, language and information processing - just as Haier found in 1992. They also discovered that the cortex became thicker - just as the German researchers had discovered. The only problem was ... they weren't the same areas.

"We all were surprised when we put the images together and saw that there was no overlap," Haier said. The cortex became thicker in areas of the brain linked to the planning of complex movements as well as the coordination of sensory information.

Haier had hoped that he and his colleagues would come up with a mechanism to explain in physiological terms how the brain became more efficient through game-playing. "The obvious thing would be if you get more brain tissue, you have more neurons to work on a problem, so therefore that area of the brain doesn't have to work as hard," he said.

Now he realizes the problem isn't as simple as he thought. "What this study does, really, is lay the groundwork for a whole series of studies to untangle all this," he said.

In a news release, the University of New Mexico's Jung said he'd like to see what happens to game-playing brains over time.

"We hope to continue this work with larger, more diverse samples to investigate whether the brain changes we measured revert back when the subjects stop playing Tetris," Jung said. "Similarly, we are interested if the skills learned in Tetris, and the associated brain changes, transfer to other cognitive areas such as working memory, processing speed, or spatial reasoning."

Haier would love to figure out how the different areas of the brain interact during mental training, on a time scale of milliseconds. But that job may be beyond the capability of functional MRI scans, which can monitor changes only on the scale of seconds. "If we're interested in information flow in the millisecond range, by the time fMRI can see it, it's too late," Haier said.

So Haier is setting his sights on yet another new technology, and it's a real mouthful. Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, monitors the faint magnetic fields produced by the brain's electrical activity. Haier thinks MEG scans could reveal how the parts of the brain that become more efficient interact with the parts that develop thicker tissue.

"The time resolution of this technology is a millisecond, so you can see changes in the brain millisecond by millisecond," he said.

As Haier talked about how he'd design those future experiments in game-playing, which would have to be conducted within a magnetically shielded environment, I could tell he was already trying to fit the puzzle pieces together in his mind.

"I want to know what the heck is going on in those brains," he said.

To learn more about what the heck is going on in your own brain, check out our interactive "road map to the mind." You can also search for "brain scans" on msnbc.com. This report on gender brain differences draws upon earlier research by Haier and Jung. 

Join the Cosmic Log team by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And reserve your copy of my upcoming book, "The Case for Pluto."  You can pre-order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders.