It turns out that Robonaut 2 -- along with the human members of the shuttle Discovery's crew -- will have to wait a few more weeks before going into orbit, due to today's postponement of Discovery's launch. But you can still go on a virtual adventure with Robonaut and NASA, thanks to the efforts of some enterprising 3-D photographers.

This adventure doesn't require high-tech 3-D TV monitors like the ones being talked about for the coming holiday season. All you need are the cheap red-blue glasses commonly associated with 1950s-era 3-D flicks. These glasses are widely available from novelty shops -- and I've been known to send out free some spectacles myself. (More about that later.)

The YouTube video above is one example of 3-D at the edge. Filipino director/cinematographer Paolo Dy captured the Robonaut demonstration during this week's NASA tweetup -- a gathering that brought together 150 Twitter-using space fans at Kennedy Space Center for a behind-the-scenes look at the space program.

The Robonaut may look fairly flat in this particular video, but it's amusing to see phone-wielding twitterers click away in 3-D as NASA shows off its humanoid robot.

Another clip from Dy shows tweeps dashing away from NASA's countdown clock in 3-D: 

Check out Dy's website for 3-D photography of tourist sites in Europe, plus the lobby of the Manila Peninsula Hotel.

Color/3-D hybrid imagery is tricky because you have to include just enough red and blue to fool the brain into seeing the 3-D effect, and enough of the other colors to make the scene come alive. But photographers have been able to do it, even with space scenes. One of the masters at this is Belgium's Patrick Vantuyne, who offers 3-D scenes of interplanetary landscapes and space hardware on his Tridi website. Here's an unusual sidelong perspective of an Atlantis launch (be sure to check out Vantuyne's full-size version):  

Patrick Vantuyne / Tridi.be

Liftoff of the shuttle Atlantis is captured in a stereo view created by Belgian 3-D whiz Patrick Vantuyne.

But the launch is just the beginning of a 3-D space journey. Vantuyne also provides views of the space shuttle as seen from the space station, the space station as seen from the shuttle, a 3-D view of the Hubble Space Telescope flying away from Discovery, an up-close-and-personal portrait of astronaut Joe Tanner during a 2006 spacewalk, and Discovery coming in for a landing.

"What you are seeing is real stereo/3-D and not some kind of software gimmick to produce a simple stereo effect," Vantuyne says of his space hardware gallery.

You don't have to end your 3-D mission with the shuttle. Here's a selection of other 3-D space sites, plus some of the earlier roundups I've written about:

On the Web:

• Anaglyph albums from Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
• Anaglyph gallery at Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• 3-D showcase for NASA's STEREO mission

From Cosmic Log:

• The depths of Mars ... in 3-D
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D
• Saturn's moons in 3-D
• More from outer space in 3-D
• The Red Planet in 3-D
• More 3-D delights from Mars
• Fly through a nebula in 3-D

As I mentioned, you'll need red-blue glasses to see these anaglyphs the way they're meant to be seen. If you can't find them at novelty or party stores, you can contact one of the mail-order vendors listed on this NASA webpage. I'm trying to do my part as well.

So far I've sent out more than 100 cardboard 3-D specs that have been provided free of charge by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope team. (Why WorldWide Telescope? In part, it's because the astronomy software offers Mars imagery in 3-D. Also, Microsoft Research's headquarters is in my neighborhood. After all, Microsoft is a partner along with NBC Universal in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

I'll be sending out 25 more red-blue glasses to the first 25 people who left a comment on the "3-D ALERT" posting on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. Today's 3-D giveaway has ended, but keep a watch on the Facebook page for future 3-D ALERTS. And while you're on the page, please click on the "Like" button to join the Cosmic Log community. You can also follow me on Twitter (@b0yle). And if you really like me, please consider picking up a copy of my book about the planet search, "The Case for Pluto."

NASA

The Cassini orbiter, shown here in an artist's conception, has gone into safe mode of operation in advance of a flyby of Titan.

Updated 6:25 p.m. ET Nov. 5

The Cassini orbiter has gone into a precautionary standby mode, a week in advance of a planned flyby of the Saturnian moon Titan, NASA reported Thursday.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said they don't expect Cassini to be back to normal in time for the Nov. 11 flyby, which was to focus on infrared mapping of the mysterious world's smoggy atmosphere. Scientists expected the bus-sized probe's camera to capture images of two prominent regions on Titan's surface, known as Shangri-La and Adiri.

NASA said Cassini entered safe mode at around 7 p.m. ET on Tuesday, curtailing the flow of science data and sending back only data about engineering and spacecraft health. Cassini is programmed to put itself in safe mode anytime it encounters a condition on the spacecraft that requires action from the folks at JPL's Mission Control in Pasadena, Calif.

"The spacecraft responded exactly as it should have, and I fully expect that we will get Cassini back up and running with no problems," Cassini program manager Bob Mitchell said in Thursday's mission status report. "Over the more than six years we have been at Saturn, this is only the second safing event. So considering the complexity of demands we have made on Cassini, the spacecraft has performed exceptionally well for us."

Since its launch in 1997, Cassini has put itself into safe mode a total of six times, NASA said.

The glitch was a downer for folks celebrating Deep Impact/EPOXI probe's successful flyby past Comet Hartley 2 earlier Thursday. "How I dread the words 'status report' from JPL," the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla tweeted. But the status report added a bit of positive spin as well: "Cassini has 53 more Titan flybys planned in its extended mission, which lasts until 2017."

Update for 6:25 p.m. ET Nov. 5: During a follow-up phone call, Mitchell told me that engineers are "still looking at the data" to figure out exactly what was scrambled up in Cassini's electronic brain. But he has a pretty good idea what happened.

"We believe the cause is due to some data that got corrupted on its way from Earth to Saturn via the radio link," he said. "It was not a human error."

When Cassini came across the corrupted data, it went into safe mode, just as it's supposed to do. "The spacecraft is very tolerant of error," Mitchell said. "It'd be hard to break it."

But it takes a while to return the spacecraft to full operation after safing. Valves have been closed, science data traffic has been stopped, software flags have been set ... and Cassini's mission controllers have to make sure that the data corruption is completely fixed before they start up everything again. Otherwise the probe would merely return to safe mode.

In this case, mission team members concluded that the job could not be done in time for the Titan flyby, so instead they've decided to take advantage of the most opportune moment. The way it looks as of now, that moment will come on Nov. 24, when Cassini is due to start executing its next sequence of commands, Mitchell said.

More about Cassini:

• This is how Saturn's rings roll
• Slideshow: Cassini's greatest hits
• Titan may foreshadow Earth's desert future
• Visit Cassini at JPL | Cassini imaging team

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

CEA

A worker wearing a hardhat is dwarfed by the ALICE detector's red magnet assembly in the Large Hadron Collider.

The world's biggest particle collider has switched over from shooting beams of protons to shooting heavy ions -- leading to experiments that could cook up the kind of "soup" produced by the big bang. And even before those experiments have begun, critics have cooked up a fresh batch of doomsday talk as well.

For the past year, the Large Hadron Collider has been smashing protons together at progressively higher energies, 300 feet (100 meters) below ground at the French-Swiss border, in a ring-shaped tunnel that measures 17 miles (27 kilometers) around. A milestone was reached last month when the beams' luminosity hit its target for the year.

"This shows that the objective we set ourselves for this year was realistic, but tough, and it's very gratifying to see it achieved in such fine style," Rolf Heuer, director general for Europe's CERN particle physics center, said in a news release issued today. "It's a testimony to the excellent design of the machine as well as the hard work that has gone into making it succeed."

High-energy proton collisions could unlock the secrets of higher dimensions, or reveal the nature of dark matter and antimatter, or point to an as-yet-undetected field that is thought to give some particles mass while leaving other particles massless. The particle associated with this field is called the Higgs boson, sometimes known as the "God particle."

But when it comes to creating the conditions that existed just after the big bang, the LHC needs heavier ammo. That's why CERN has switched from protons to lead ions -- that is, lead atoms that have been stripped of their electrons. The ions are more than 200 times heavier than protons, and when they're smashed into each other at nearly the speed of light, the blast is expected to shatter particles into a hot soup of free-flying quarks and gluons.

Current theory suggests that the whole universe existed as a dollop of super-hot quark-gluon plasma in the first few millionths of a second after the big bang. Since then, quarks have been virtually impossible to pull apart -- but an ion-smasher in New York, known as the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider or RHIC, is thought to have done it five years ago. Such experiments help physicists understand exactly how the universe was, and is, put together.

CERN says the LHC should be able to collide heavy ions with energy levels 28 times higher than those achieved at RHIC. Some theorists have suggested that at those energies, the big bang soup would no longer exist as a liquid, but as a gas. And so, for the next few weeks, the LHC's spotlight will turn to a huge detector called ALICE (which stands for "A Large Ion Collider Experiment").

More than 1,000 physicists, engineers and technicians are on the ALICE team, but they're able to take data only during the four weeks of the year that precede the LHC's winter break. So they didn't waste any time getting started. The proton-on-proton action finished up this morning, and the first test beam of lead ions made 75 laps around the LHC tunnel tonight, CERN spokesman James Gillies told me.

"It's going well," Gillies said. "We're looking at the first collisions in the next few days."

Two other detectors at the LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid and ATLAS, will also be taking data during the heavy-ion run. Then the beams will be turned off for maintenance during the winter break. The schedule calls for proton beams to start up again in February, Gillies said.

CERN physicist Detlef Kuchler holds a piece of the lead source material used to create heavy ions for the LHC.

Return of the strangelets
This week's heavy-ion switch is good news for physicists at the LHC ... but it has also sparked a renewed campaign by folks who worry that the collisions will destroy the world. Remember them? Before the LHC's startup in 2008, some critics voiced concerns that high-energy collisions could give rise to catastrophic phenomena ranging from globe-gobbling black holes to atom-wrecking particles. Similar objections were raised about RHIC, and in response, CERN conducted a series of safety reviews that concluded LHC operations would be safe. The critics were unsatisfied, however. With the switch to heavy ions, they're shifting their focus from the black-hole scenario to the atom-wrecking scenario.

A group called Heavy Ion Alert claims that the LHC could create a dangerous breed of strangelet -- that is, a never-before-seen combination of quarks that includes some with a strange flavor. In this case, "strange" is a technical term, representing one of the six flavors of quarks. (The others are up, down, charm, bottom and top.) The claim is that just the wrong kind of strangelet could turn nearby atoms into strangelets as well, setting off a catastrophic chain reaction.

The case for killer strangelets is similar to the case for globe-gobbling microscopic black holes. If there's any chance at all that the LHC could produce an Earth-killer, the experiment should not be done. "For Earth, one [chance] in 1,000, or one in 100,000 is still something you don't want to do," James Blodgett, a member of the group, told me this week.

The reassurances from particle physicists follow a similar format as well. The most recent LHC safety report says theory as well as observations would rule out such a catastrophe. If such strangelets could arise, they would have been observed beyond Earth, where there are cosmic-ray collisions far more powerful than anything the LHC can dish out. The report's authors say it's theoretically harder to create the dangerous kind of strangelets at higher energies -- which means that if anything bad could happen, it would have happened at RHIC.

"For this reason, the likelihood of strangelet production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions can be compared to the likelihood of producing an ice cube in a furnace," the authors write.

'A teachable moment'
The LHC's critics point to earlier reports from researchers, speculating on the prospects for producing stable, negatively charged strangelets -- the supposedly scary kind. They cite this as evidence that "CERN has misled the public." But some of those reports date back 15 years or so and don't reflect the latest thinking about the production of exotic matter.

Other reports are more recent, but refer to what might be found using a subdetector known as CASTOR. The CASTOR researchers themselves voice no concern about a catastrophe. Instead, they see their experiment as a straightforward effort to find evidence of exotic phenomena previously associated with cosmic-ray collisions, including centauros and strangelets. The doomsday connection is being made by the doomsayers themselves ... plus maybe a few physicists exercising their imagination.

A newly published book about the quest for the Higgs boson, titled "Massive," devotes an entire chapter to the strangelet controversy, recounting how it grew out of a speculative comment that Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek made in an 1999 magazine article. "I thought I'd use the opportunity as a teachable moment," the book's author, Guardian science correspondent Ian Sample, quotes Wilczek as saying.

At the time, Wilczek didn't realize his strange speculation would set off a years-long debate. And even if the hubbub over strangelets settles down over the next few weeks, that's unlikely to end worries about the end of the world. Here's how Sample puts it in "Massive":

"History suggests there will always be some world-ending entity lurking among scientists' theories, and the chances of unleashing it by accident will almost certainly be shrouded in uncertainty. If dangerous strangelets and magnetic monopoles are ever ruled out, another possibility will emerge from physicists' theories. How then should society decide whether an experiment that has a minute risk of causing total disaster be carried out? In the distant past, the consequences of an experiment gone wrong affected only those involved or nearby. One argument says that, since particle colliders are primarily of direct benefit only to pure science, we have already come too far. But that is short-sighted. High-energy physics experiments have brought us revolutionary technologies as disparate as the World Wide Web and ion beams for cancer treatment. When we make progress in pure science, technological benefits often follow. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a truly open and public debate in which real risks are laid out. Without that, society as a whole has no chance of making an informed decision. How we achieve this will only become a more pressing issue as science advances."

What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 4:20 p.m. ET Nov. 5: More than two years ago, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit that sought a halt in operations at the LHC due to concerns about strangelets, black holes and other doomsday scenarios -- but the plaintiffs (Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho) have nevertheless been keeping the case alive on appeal. Richard Penner, who has been following the appeal process closely, reports that judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the plaintiffs' request for a rehearing today.

I've also heard back from a couple of the physicists involved in developing the CASTOR detector -- Edwin Norbeck and Yasar Onel -- and they say they don't expect any dangerous strangelets to be created by the LHC. In fact, they don't expect to see any strangelets at all, even though that's one of the phenomena that the detector was designed to spot. Since the original papers about CASTOR came out, experiments at RHIC have led physicists in a different direction. "The theoreticians are changing their minds," Onel told me.

CASTOR's goal, however, is the same: What is behind these anomalous cosmic-ray events known as centauros? Maybe they're caused by hypernuclei ... or maybe it's some other phenomenon at work. "Nobody knows what they really are," Norbeck told me. "They're not strangelets. [CASTOR] is prepared to look at these unusual cosmic-ray events, whatever their cause is."

More from MSNBC:

• Special report on "The Big Bang Machine"
• Nightmares and dreams at the LHC
• What's a hadron? Tour the particle zoo

More from the Web:

• CERN: The safety of the LHC
• CMS Times: Looking forward with CASTOR
• APS: Looking for strangelets ... and not finding them

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

Jeff Miller / UW-Madison file

An instructur holds up a culture dish containing human embryonic stem cells during a lab course at the University of Wisconsin.

Political shifts will produce a fresh set of skirmishes over science issues ranging from stem cells to spaceflight. And when it comes to climate change, the skirmishes could well escalate into a war over science.

"I'm not looking forward to seeing that," said Chris Mooney, who wrote "The Republican War on Science" in 2005. But based on some of the comments made during the campaign, House Republicans might well go on the offensive on climate policy.

Here's a quick rundown on the top issues:

Climate change and energy policy
In the wake of his Election Day "shellacking," even President Barack Obama acknowledged that his controversial plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through a carbon trading system would have to be put on hold. "Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat," Obama told reporters. "It's not the only way. I'm going to be looking for other means to address this problem." 

Another way to skin the climate-change cat would be for the Environmental Protection Agency to take a more active role in regulating carbon emissions -- and back in June, the Senate turned back an effort to clamp down on the EPA's efforts in that area. A new, more conservative Congress could revive the anti-regulation campaign and raise fresh questions about the science behind climate claims. That's exactly what Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said he would do during the campaign. (It's not yet clear, however, whether the new House leadership will let him do it.) 

Mooney thinks this is how a new war in science will start: "The way in which it will be most manifest is through House members grandstanding and holding hearings and investigations over climate scientists and their e-mails. But in fact, this has already been looked at, and the scientists have been exonerated. There's no 'there' there."

Roger Pielke Jr., a science policy analyst who criticizes the international response to climate change in a new book titled "The Climate Fix," said it's "perfectly fine to ask questions about the integrity of the science."

"But if that is a tactic in a larger battle over energy policy, it politicizes science, and it also detracts attention from developing energy policy," he told me. "After all this talk about 'the Republican war on science,' I would fully expect that turnabout is fair play, and we're going to see the House playing the same sorts of political strategies with the Obama administration. Whatever side is doing it, the leadership has to try to rise above that and not get sucked into some kind of left-vs.-right battle."

Mooney said lawmakers should forgo the finger-pointing over Climategate and instead work out new policies for breaking America's addiction to fossil fuels. "While they dawdle and refuse to do anything on climate, they're also dawdling and refusing to do anything about clean energy, and when they do that, they're setting the U.S. up for a big fall," Mooney said.

Pielke agreed: "With China spending hundreds of billions of dollars on energy innovation, and with Germany, India and others making investments as well, it'd be a real shame to see Congress lose itself in a petty battle over politicized science," he told me.

In an ideal world, the power shift could provide an opening for fresh policy approaches. "Perhaps this is an opportunity to think about how to design an energy and climate policy that can survive over many, many Congresses," Pielke said. "We ought to be talking about science policy, not science politics." 

Stem cells
When Obama took office, he hoped to ease federal limits on funding for embryonic stem cell research, but that policy change has been tied up for months due to a restraining order issued by a federal judge. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, expects the stem-cell standoff to continue, in part because of Congress' new composition.

Caplan said "the key challenge was whether Congress would finally not enact the Dickey-Wicker Amendment," which provides the legislative basis for the funding limits. House GOP leaders have been strongly supportive of the amendment, first passed in 1995.

"The Dickey Amendment keeps coming back, so I think this is very bad news for embryonic stem cell researchers," Caplan told me. "If the Dickey Amendment comes back, [opponents of the research] can tie it up some more. To me, this is really a sign that stem cell funding from the federal government for the next two years is not reliable. Given state deficits, people are going to move on to other areas of stem cell research not involving embryonic cells or cloning."

The issue received extra attention in Wisconsin, where human embryonic stem cells were first isolated and cultured in 1998. Republican gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker said he supported a ban on human embryonic stem cell research, and his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, ran a TV ad claiming that Walker's stand would stymie cures for juvenile diabetes and other illnesses. Walker won, and with the GOP in charge of the governor's mansion as well as the legislature, a ban on stem cell research or cloning could conceivably come up for legislative action, as it did in 2005.

The big difference this time around is that stem cells are seen as an important part of the biotech industry, with states vying for private investment. Proponents of stem cell research say cracking down in one state would merely send companies to another state -- for instance, California, which elected Democrat Jerry Brown as governor. "I like stem cells," Brown said during the campaign.

Caplan said the Republican tsunami could bode well for another biotech frontier: synthetic biology, which involves re-engineering existing genomes to create new strains of organisms. The controversial technology is currently being studied by a presidential commission. "A technology that can create not only medicine and fuel, but also jobs, is likely to get a better reception in the newly constituted Congress," he said.

Human spaceflight
Congress already rewrote Obama's space policy before the election. The NASA authorization bill -- signed into law by the president just as lawmakers went into their pre-election recess -- calls for an extra shuttle flight to be flown next summer, makes a modest commitment to develop commercial space transports for the International Space Station and fast-tracks development efforts for a new heavy-lift rocket.

The only problem is that NASA still lacks the official congressional go-ahead to spend funds for the shuttle flight and other programs covered by NASA's $19 billion budget. That go-ahead has to come in a separate appropriations bill that Congress is expected to take up before the end of the year during a lame-duck session.

Space policy analyst John Logsdon said there would likely be pressure over the next few weeks to trim back NASA's budget, but he suspected that the extra shuttle flight would still get funded. "The argument for doing it, given the intention to keep the International Space Station going, is stronger than the fiscal constraints," he told me.

But something else might have to give. One of the possible targets is the $1.3 billion authorized over the next three years for a commercial crew initiative. But two of the Republicans likely to be part of the new House leadership -- Virginia's Eric Cantor and California's Kevin McCarthy -- come from districts that play a big role in the commercial space industry. Another potential target is the "21st Century Space Launch Complex" program, aimed at modernizing NASA's Kennedy Space Center at a cost of about $400 million a year.

One cause for celebration among commercial space advocates was the defeat of Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., who raised objections to legislation setting safety standards for private-sector spaceships. Oberstar said the provisions were too lax and would encourage a "tombstone mentality" for commercial spaceflight. With Oberstar no longer in the House, prospects have brightened for extending the current regulatory regime.

Research funding
Basic research has occasionally been used as a punching bag by Republicans seeking to call attention to scientific excesses. For example, the controversial GOP candidate for Delaware's Senate seat, Christine O'Donnell, got into trouble over a 2007 quote decrying the development of "mice with fully functioning human brains." (She appeared to be referring to experiments involving human brain cells that were grown in mice for stem cell research.) During the 2008 campaign, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin went after fruit-fly research.

With the GOP in charge of the House, will funny-sounding research projects become an endangered species? David Goldston, who was chief of staff for the House Science Committee from 2001 to 2006 when it was under Republican control, doesn't think so. But he does expect science spending to come under closer scrutiny, just as other spending programs will.

"Most Republicans have beeen supportive of basic research, but I think there's going to be an internal battle over how the budget is shaped," he told me. "You could see some of these new Tea Party advocates coming in with a new attitude. ... A lot of these science issues are going to split the Republican Party, and it's going to take some time to see how those splits play out."

Even in a budget-cutting era, Pielke believes that basic research will survive largely intact. He recalled that the late Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., often ridiculed federally funded research by giving out Golden Fleece Awards.

"While there is bipartisan willingness to make fun of silly government expenditures, history also shows that there's tremendous bipartisan support for research and development," he said. "In the U.K. they just went through this enormous round of budget cuts, and one of the only areas that was protected was R&D."

What do you think? Will science survive the next two years relatively unscathed, or are we in for an escalating war on science? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 2 p.m. ET Nov. 4: Space News notes that two of the House Republicans likely to take key roles in NASA's future budgets have been strong critics of Obama's space policy. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., who is likely to head the House Appropriations Committee, has said Obama's plan would cede space supremacy to other countries such as China -- and he's also had some reservations about the move toward spaceflight commercialization (although one of the companies involved in that move, Orbital Sciences, is headquartered in his district). Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas, who is in line to head the House Science and Technology Committee, has said that NASA was "floundering" due to the White House's change in direction. Both lawmakers, however, voted for the NASA authorization bill that was pushed through Congress last month.

It's also important to note that federal research funding is coming off a $31 billion boost that was provided by Obama's economic stimulus package, and with House Republicans in a budget-cutting mood, that kind of largesse won't be seen again. Last month, Nature reported that researchers are concerned about a "cliff effect," in which projects funded by stimulus money fall off a cliff when the money runs out. Among the potential targets are the long-suffering America COMPETES Act and research projects that may now seem politically incorrect, such as the FutureGen carbon capture and storage initiative. 

Goldston now serves as director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, but for this report, he was speaking only as a former Republican aide and not as an NRDC representative.

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

AAAS / Science file

Researchers measured the length of fossilized fingers from Ardipithecus and other ancestors on humanity's family tree, then compared them with modern-day species in hopes of figuring out how aggressive and promiscuous long-gone species might have been.

The oldest-known species on humanity's family tree was built to be pushy and promiscuous, while another long-ago ancestor known as Lucy was lovey-dovey. Early humans and Neanderthals were more competitive than we are. At least those are the conclusions that researchers reached after sizing up the fingers of extinct and present-day primates.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, draws upon a famous and controversial indicator of social behavior: the comparative length of the index finger and the ring finger, also known as the 2D:4D ratio.

If the ring finger is longer than the index finger, that's supposed to be correlated with higher prenatal exposure to androgens -- resulting in a higher proclivity for aggressiveness and promiscuity. The finger-length ratio also has been linked to sexual orientation as well as sporting prowess and musical ability.

(Did you just look at your fingers?)

Emma Nelson, an archaeologist from the University of Liverpool, extended the finger-length ratio study to a wide range of species. She and her colleagues measured bones from modern-day species such as gorillas, chimps, orangutans and the white-handed gibbon. They also looked at fossil bones or previously recorded measurements from extinct hominids ranging from Neanderthals (which co-existed with humans until about 30,000 years ago) to Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy's species, going back 3.1 million years) and Ardipithecus ramidus (the oldest human-linked fossil species, going back 4.4 million years).

Nelson argues that comparing the finger-length ratios of extinct and present-day species is a valid technique for making an indirect assessment of our long-gone ancestors' social behavior.

"It is believed that prenatal androgens affect the genes responsible for the development of fingers, toes and the reproductive system," she explained in a news release. "We have recently shown that promiscuous primate species have low index-to-ring finger ratios, while monogamous species have high ratios. We used this information to estimate the social behavior of extinct apes and hominins."

Nelson previewed her findings a year ago at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting, where she talked about naughty Neanderthals and monogamous australopiths. The newly published paper draws upon additional samples, including the finger lengths for Ardipithecus, or "Ardi." So here are the numbers:

• Modern humans averaged a 0.957 index-to-ring finger ratio, and were considered to be on the line between a "pair-bonded," or monogamous, species and a middle-of-the-road species.
• Chimps, gorillas and orangutans had index-to-ring ratios in the 0.90 to 0.92 range, and were classified as "non-pair-bonded," or promiscuous.
• An early modern human from Israel's Qafzeh Cave, thought to be about 95,000 years old, had an index-to-ring ratio of 0.935. Based on that statistic, the researchers surmised this individual would be more promiscuous than modern humans.
• The finger bones from five Neanderthals yielded a 0.928 ratio, associated with even greater competitiveness and promiscuity. Ardipithecus' bones took it up another notch, to 0.899. Two even older primate ancestors, Hispanopithecus and Pierolapithecus, had ratios of 0.848 and 0.908, which means they would have been tough to live with as well.
• On the other end of the spectrum, the monogamous gibbons had a 1.009 ratio ... and the australopith sample came in with a ratio higher than that of modern-day humans (0.979). The implication, then, is that australopiths were monogamous.

The big question is whether there's anything substantial to this analysis. Nelson acknowledged that the fossil record was sparse, and that more fossils were needed for study, but she insisted that "this method could prove to be an exciting new way of understanding how our social behavior has evolved."

Other researchers have tried to make guesses about the social behavior of extinct hominid species by looking at sexual dimorphism -- that is, the differences between the male and the female of a species. If the males were significantly larger, the assumption is that they were built to have their way with many females in a promiscuous social setting. This has generated a fair amount of debate, particularly when it comes to assumptions about australopiths.

Nelson and her colleagues suggest that the finger-length ratio could serve as an additional tool for making more educated guesses about ancient social behavior.

"Social behaviors are notoriously difficult to identify in the fossil record," one of Nelson's fellow authors, the University of Oxford's Susanne Shultz, said in the news release. "Developing novel approaches, such as finger ratios, can help inform the current debate surrounding the social systems of the earliest human ancestors."

When this research first came to light last year, University of Wisconsin anthropologist John Hawks cautioned against reading too much into fossilized fingers. He said the index-to-ring ratio "may be correlated with mating system in primates, but that doesn't mean it's a good predictor of mating system. ... As fossil hominins go, I wouldn't expect the story to go any further -- there just aren't many hands, so there's never going to be a significantly predictive result."

Be sure to read Hawks' posting from last year, and feel free to weigh in with your comments below ... that is, after you've finished checking out your fingers.

Update for 2 a.m. ET Nov. 3: John Hawks provided some additional thoughts in response to my e-mail inquiry:

"The 2D:4D ratio really is a subject of a lot of research in psychology and developmental biology, and it really does reflect prenatal hormone exposure. However, it is not a good predictor of any social behaviors.

"In addition to the problem of using a poor predictor, this study has another problem that we often face with fossils -- there are very few of them, and it's not obvious which sample of living primates we should be comparing with them.

"The living apes do vary in mating structure, but they also have huge differences in hand anatomy because of locomotion. Those anatomical differences between species do not necessarily have any relationship to the neurological correlates of prenatal hormones -- even though the variation in hormone exposure is an important cause of variation within species.

"For example, Ardipithecus has fingers and hand proportions that are right within the range of other apes. So when we see that they have a 2D:4D ratio right in the range of other apes, the natural hypothesis is that this reflects their overall hand proportions. Australopithecus, Neandertals and modern humans obviously had humanlike hand proportions, and their 2D:4D ratio may simply reflect this.

"If you were going to do this study right, you would look far beyond the apes to take in many kinds of primates with different social systems. Then you could see whether closely related species have 2D:4D ratios that track their mating systems. Without this, we are really looking at a single evolutionary event -- the rise of the hominins -- which may be unique for many reasons besides mating system."

In addition to Nelson and Shultz, the authors of "Digit Ratios Predict Polygyny in Early Apes, Ardipithecus, Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans but Not in Australopithecus"  include Campbell Rolian and Lisa Cashmore.

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

IEM

A chart shows share prices on the Iowa Electronic Markets for the projected outcome of the 2010 congressional elections. The blue line is the trend for Democratic control of House and Senate. Green stands for GOP control of House, and Democratic control of Senate. Red represents a Republican sweep, and the black line shows the prospects for a Democratic-led House and a GOP-led Senate.

The conventional wisdom about today's midterm election has been consistent for weeks, based on trading patterns in political prediction markets as well as more traditional polling data. Barring surprises, the Republicans will gain control of the House, and the Democrats will hold onto a slim majority in the Senate.

But for economists, figuring out the factors behind those voting trends will be as interesting as the final results.

In the past, prediction markets have done as well if not better than traditional political polls when it comes to forecasting the outcome of campaigns. But they go about it using a completely different method that has more in common with Las Vegas gambling than election-place canvassing.

Traders can make "investments" in shares whose value varies with the fortunes of a political candidate. Suppose that on Monday, you bought into the proposition that the GOP would win the House but not the Senate. You would have paid 85 cents a share at the Iowa Electronic Markets, with the expectation that you'd win $1 a share if you were right, but lose your investment if you were wrong.

Share prices have been floating up and down for months, but the general trend has favored the split decision for congressional control. "This year, the markets are not predicting anything different from what most of the pundits are saying," said Thomas Rietz, a finance professor at the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business who is on the IEM's steering committee.

The University of Iowa has special dispensation from the Securities and Exchange Commission to run the IEM as an experiment in market behavior. And although the market's verdict isn't much of a shocker, Rietz said this year's election provides a prime opportunity to look at one of the key questions in politico-economic science: Are elections primarily decided by economic factors such as unemployment statistics and gross domestic product?

"If you talk to a structural political economist, they would say that the election is largely determined by those factors well in advance," Rietz told me. "On the other hand, if you talk to the news media, they would say the situation changes every time somebody coughs."

After experiencing a coughing fit and getting a drink of water, Rietz continued: "We think the truth is in between."

A prime practitioner of the economic-modeling method is Douglas Hibbs, a U.S.-born economist affiliated with Goteborg University in Sweden. Back in September, he issued an analysis predicting that the Democrats would lose 45 seats in the House, thus giving up their majority.

Another modeler, Yale economist Ray Fair, agrees that House Democrats will be in the minority -- but he's looking at a closer margin. His algorithm, based on economic growth rates and inflation indexes, suggests that the Democrats would get 49.2 percent of the aggregated national vote in this year's congressional races.

Tonight you'll see which model comes closest to the mark.

Rietz said Iowa researchers "aren't very far into the process" of figuring out what factors influenced the IEM's ups and downs this time around, "but we can say things are definitely tied to the economy."

IEM director Joyce Berg, another professor at the University of Iowa, said researchers would look at economic statistics as well as what was going on in the news during particular turning points in the campaign.

"For this election, it seems as if something certainly was happening there in August," she told me. "We think it's economic reports -- the continuous [stream of] not-that-promising economic reports that went against what people were looking for."

Even as the professors do their postmortem, they'll be ramping up the Iowa Electronic Markets for the 2012 presidential campaign. "We're going to try to get them open pretty fast here," Berg said.

The Intrade Prediction Markets, which can take real-money bets because they're based in Ireland, is already handicapping the 2012 race as well as the 2010 elections. Intrade's figures suggest that the Republicans have a 95 percent probability of taking over the House for the next session, while Democratic control of the Senate is nearly a 50-50 proposition. As for 2012, Intrade's clients favor the Democrats to hold onto the White House -- but it's still early in the game.

How would you bet? Do you think the prediction markets have gotten this election right? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below, keep track of tonight's results by checking in with our "Decision 2010" coverage, and check back here on Wednesday for a recap on the political prediction markets.

Update for 10 p.m. ET: NBC News projects that the Democrats will hold 199 seats in the new House, compared with 236 seats for the GOP. That would be a significantly poorer showing for the Democrats than the 211 seats that Hibbs projected in September -- but the margin of error for NBC's current projection is plus or minus 13 seats. 

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

B. Rosemary Grant / Science via AP file

A species of ground finch (Geospiza fortis) on Daphne Major in the Galapagos Islands appears to have sped up the trill of its tune to differentiate itself from a similar species that colonized the island in 1983, researchers say.

More than a dozen species of birds in the Galapagos Islands served as prime experimental subjects for Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution -- and today, "Darwin's finches" still provide examples of evolution at work. The latest example, revealed today, suggests that the songbirds modify their tunes to distinguish themselves from similar species.

The finches in question are Geospiza fortis (medium ground finch) and G. scandens (cactus ground finch), longtime residents of Daphne Major Island in the Galapagos chain. The males of each species have a song that's characteristic enough to ensure that the females of the species respond to the right mating call. There might be individual variations that crop up as each father teaches his sons to sing -- but the features of the song, such as the trill and the tempo, has generally stayed close to the norm.

Until 1983, that is.

That's when another species, the large ground finch (G. magnirostris), moved onto Daphne Major and began growing in numbers. This third species had songs that were somewhat similar to that of the other two species. But as time went on, G. fortis and G. scandens changed their typical songs: The trills became faster, while the duration of notes and the inverval between them became shorter.

All these changes were "in the direction away from G. magnirostris in acoustical space," Princeton's B. Rosemary Grant and Peter Grant, husband-and-wife ornithologists who have been studying Darwin's finches for decades, report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These observations fit the Grants' hypothesis that songbirds tend to change their tune if there's a "fitness penalty" for interbreeding with a species that sings a similar song. Researchers call this learning phenomenon a "peak shift."

"Songs of the residents and colonists may gradually change over the next few generations under pressures for unambiguous transmission to other members of the same breeding population, both from the habitat and from other species," the Grants wrote.

During the same period, finch species in the Galapagos have undergone other changes as well. For example, the beaks of G. fortis gradually became smaller, because that enabled the birds to shift to a diet of smaller seeds and avoid competition with the bigger birds that moved in. But the researchers determined that the songbird shift was a separate phenomenon.

The Grants emphasize that their study "is purely observational, without experimental control of potentially confounding variables, and hence our identification of causes should be considered as an hypothesis rather than a demonstration." But if the hypothesis holds up, the changes in tune could demonstrate how two populations that have been separated and are starting to differentiate use behavioral signals to build a wall between themselves -- thus fostering the origin of new species. What's more, they suggest that speciation can occur very quickly when driven by learned behavior.

More on modern evolution:

• Six hot spots for modern-day Darwins
• Human evolution kicks into high gear
• Feeding the birds may alter their futures
• Lizards' camouflage reveals evolution in action

The Grants' research paper, "Songs of Darwin's Finches Diverge When a New Species Enters the Community: Implications for Speciation," is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as part of a series of Inaugural Articles by academy members elected in 2008. To learn more about the Grants and Darwin's finches, check out "The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time" by Jonathan Weiner, or the Grants' own book, "How and Why Species Multiply." Weiner's Pulitzer-winning book serves as the latest selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club, which highlights books with cosmic themes that have been around enough to be available at your local library or through secondhand-book shops.

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