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Among those who left us during 2010: Charlie the smoking chimpanzee.

Caterpillars who whistle? Crickets with giant cojones? Help us decide which scientific tales from the past year are worthy of the Weird Science Awards.

This year's nominees have to meet a high standard for scientific weirdness. Weirdies from past years include glow-in-the-dark cats, glow-in-the-dark puppies, reattached rabbit penises and a 2,700-year-old pot stash.

Fortunately, we have some good precedents to follow: The Ig Nobel Prizes, announced in September, included some choice slices of scientific weirdness — and we've included one of the Ig-winners on our 30-choice menu (the one about the slime mold). The aim of the Ig Nobels, administered by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research, is to recognize "research that makes people laugh and then think." That's a fine criterion for our Weirdies as well. But you could also consider scientific tales that make you laugh, and then make you ask, "What were they thinking?"

Other criteria include things that make you go "Ewww," such as the story about crickets with huge testicles ... or make you go "Auugh," such as the chicken-or-egg study ... or make you go "Hmmm" and reflect upon the foibles of human or animal nature, such as the tale of the chimp who was forced to stop smoking. (That's a double-header selection, as you'll see below.)

In any case, it's up to you to decide which of these 30 stories win the Weirdie laurels in 2011. Choose your favorite candidate on the long ballot at right, and the 10 top vote-getters will be honored in a roundup published after the first of the year. Here's the list, arranged in chronological order from January to December:

• Better transit systems ... with slime mold?
• Steak dinners go back 2.5 million years
• World's strongest insect revealed
• Bat's song hits nature's highest note
• To scientists, laughter is no joke
• Ancient building came with DIY instructions
• Scientists work on artificial cat brain
• Fish are scared of their own reflections
• Scientists get frog to shake his booty
• Secrets of surfing crocodiles revealed
• Mammoths ate their own poo, scientists say
• Neanderthal men had arms like Popeye
• Which came first, chicken or egg?
• Stone Age carving may be ancient sex toy
• Scientists find biggest rat that ever lived
• Why it's OK for birds to be gay
• Ants vanquish elephants to save a tree
• Political victories make guys turn to porn
• One smoking chimp dies ... another is rescued
• Why whale poop is good for the ocean
• Oops! Maya doomsday date corrected
• Fruit flies stuffed to study human obesity
• Did beer lead to rise of civilization?
• Cricket's testicles set world record
• Chinese noodle dinner buried for 2,500 years
• Glow-in-the-dark plants invented
• Prehistoric storks dined on real-life hobbits
• Caterpillars can whistle, scientists find
• Did Leonardo paint initials in Mona Lisa's eye?
• What makes female squirrels so sex-crazed?

Feel free to leave a comment below if you want to cast a write-in vote for some other slice of scientific weirdness from the last year — or if you just want to reflect on the weirdness (or non-weirdness) in the world around us.

More of the year in review:

• Year in science
• Year in space
• Year in archaeology
• The worst tech of 2010
• The 2010 Weird Science Awards
• Complete coverage of the year in review

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle). 

Arturo Godoy / Brown University

This tamale bowl depicting a peccary was among the treasures discovered in an Early Classic Maya tomb containing the remains of a king dressed as a ritual dancer.

The year's top developments in archaeology and anthropology range from unearthed tombs in the Americas to unraveled genetic codes for the long-lost cousins of modern humans. Which discovery should rank as No. 1? That's for you to decide.

Every year, Archaeology magazine lists its top 10 discoveries of the past 12 months. It's a great list, and we've added a few extras to ponder as well. Take a look at this lineup, read up on the details on msnbc.com and Archaeology's website, and cast a vote for your favorite discovery using the online ballot at right.

Here's Archaeology's top 10:

Tomb of Hecatomnus robbed:  Turkish authorities arrest looters who are suspected of tunneling their way into one of antiquity's most intriguing tombs — an underground chamber thought to represent the final resting place of Hecatomnus, who ruled Caria in the fourth century B.C. and was the father of Mausolus. The burial place of Mausolus, known as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. (And now you know how the word "mausoleum" got its start.)

Paleolithic tools on Crete: Scientists announce the discovery of stone tools at two sites on the island of Crete that are between 130,000 and 700,000 years old. The find implies that the ancient ancestors of modern humans made their way to Crete across 40 miles of open sea — and that would represent the earliest indirect evidence of seafaring.

Royal tombs in Guatemala (and Mexico): A trench made by looters led archaeologists to a series of bizarre finds beneath the El Diablo pyramid at the Maya city of El Zotz in Guatemala. The items found in the 1,600-year-old tomb included infant skeletons and severed fingers, textiles and carvings, all accompanying the remains of a king dressed as a ritual dancer. Yet another royal tomb was found in Mexico. The 2,700-year-old tomb, found within a pyramid in southern Chiapas state, containing jade collars, pyrite and obsidian artifacts — and the remains of a high priest or ruler linked to the region's ancient Olmec culture.

Early pyramids in Peru: The discovery of two ancient pyramid complexes on the western edge of Peru's Amazon lowlands demonstrates that monumental architecture had spread across the Andes and well into the jungle thousands of years before the Spaniards arrive. Archaeologists saw signs of successive building phases stretching back at least 2,800 years.

HMS Investigator found: Marine archaeologists expected to spend weeks looking for the wreck of the HMS Investigator, a British ship that was the first to sail the westernmost leg of the Northwest Passage. Instead, they found it after less than 15 minutes of searching. Side-scan sonar located the ship under 30 feet of water, right at the spot where the crew left it in 1853.

Neanderthal genome decoded: Geneticists completed their first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, based on analysis of DNA extracted from ancient bone samples dug up in a Croatian cave. The analysis suggests that a tiny part of the Neanderthals' genetic heritage lives on in some of us — specifically, non-Africans. This discovery ranked as one of Science's top 10 breakthroughs of the year. And just today, some of the researchers who were behind the genome project came out with another jaw-dropping discovery: Another breed of hominid ancestors, known as the "Denisovans," appeared to be genetically distinct from modern Homo sapiens as well as the Neanderthals.

Child burials in Carthage: Anthropologists spent decades examining the cremated remains of hundreds of children who were buried in a Carthaginian cemetery between the eighth and the second centuries B.C. Their mission was to determine whether these were the victims of large-scale child sacrifices. The conclusion? Although it's possible that the Carthaginians may have occasionally sacrificed humans, a credible claim can be made that most of the children died of natural causes.

Lucy's 'great-grandfather' in Ethiopia: The 3.3 million-year-old skeleton of a short-legged female nicknamed Lucy is arguably the most famous fossil of a human ancestor. In June, anthropologists announced that they unearthed a 3.6 million-year-old partial skeleton, apparently representing a much larger male from the same species. The fossil was dubbed Kadanuumuu, or "big man" in the language of Ethiopia's Afar region, where both skeletons were found.

Jamestown's church uncovered: Archaeologists excavating the remains of Virginia's 400-year-old Jamestown settlement say they've found the remains of the earliest Protestant church in North America. Five postholes probably held the wooden columns that supported the Jamestown fort's first church, which was built in 1608 and probably served as the site of Pocahontas' wedding in 1614.

Kinder, gentler carbon dating: Scientists say they've developed a new method for radiocarbon dating of ancient samples ... which doesn't require destruction of the sample. Texas A&M's Marvin Rowe says the nondestructive method for carbon dioxide extraction has worked with samples of wood, charcoal and animal skin, as well as bone from a mummy and an ostrich eggshell. The process isn't perfect, but archaeologists say the technique could allow for the testing of Native American remains that modern tribes don't want harmed. The method could be used as well if scientists decide they want to run more tests on the Shroud of Turin.

Also in the news: In addition to the 10 discoveries listed by Archaeology's editors, my favorite stories of the year include the seeming solution of the King Tut "murder mystery" ... the recipe for Cleopatra's pearl cocktail ... the discovery of the "Hazor Code" tablets ... the exploration of Syria's 6,000-year-old lost city ... the 18th-century ship found at New York's Ground Zero ... the world's oldest leather shoe ... the brouhaha over Noah's Ark ... the 3,550-year-old boy tourist at Stonehenge ... and of course the return to the Titanic. If your fancy is struck by any of these tales, or others that cropped up during the past year, vote for "None of the Above" and feel free to make a comment below.  

Archaeology's editors announced their "Undiscovery of the Year": a study knocking down the idea that an Earth-smashing comet or asteroid sparked a catastrophe for Stone Age settlers and animals in North America nearly 13,000 years ago.

The magazine's website also offers a rundown on five threatened archaeological sites around the world, including the Native American sites that could be threatened by huge solar-array farms in southeastern California. Check out the full year-end coverage as well as the other gems offered by Archaeology magazine.

More of the year in review:

• Year in science
• Year in space
• The worst tech of 2010
• Complete coverage of the year in review

NASA

The space shuttle Discovery is rolled back into NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday, in preparation for safety tests.

After sitting on its launch pad for three months and weathering repeated delays due to weather and fuel-tank problems, the space shuttle Discovery was rolled back to NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building overnight for an intensive round of structural tests.

Mission managers want to make absolutely certain that all the flaws in Discovery's external fuel tank have been fixed. Cracks in the tank were detected while it was being loaded with liquid hydrogen and oxygen for a Nov. 5 launch attempt. Since then, engineers have beefed up two of the tank's support beams, known as stringers, and made other repairs as well.

The engineers found no other problems while Discovery was sitting on Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and a tanking test went smoothly last Friday. But NASA wants to run X-ray scans and additional tests that required bringing the shuttle back inside its 52-story assembly building. Discovery began the slow, 3.4-mile trip atop its crawler-transporter on Tuesday night, and was locked down inside the building eight hours later.

If Discovery is given the all-clear, the shuttle would be brought back out to the pad for a scheduled Feb. 3 launch to the International Space Station. The resupply mission would mark the first of three final shuttle flights scheduled during 2011. After its flight, Discovery is due to be retired and will likely be sent to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

How is the post-shuttle era shaping up? Here's an update from NBC News' Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree:

"Florida's senior senator, Bill Nelson, tells NBC News that both houses of Congress have continued NASA's budget at current levels, $18.75 billion.  Nelson says 'by law' NASA is to spend its budget developing a new heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft to replace the shuttles while developing commercial rockets and spacecraft to service the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. The new heavy-lift rocket and spacecraft will keep much of America's veteran launch team in place and will fly astronauts to asteroids and such, and then, when the know-how is developed, to deep space — Mars and other distant places in our solar system."

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle). 

NASA

Silt washes into the Atlantic Ocean from rivers in Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa, in this false-color composite image from the Landsat 7 satellite.

You're excused if this picture triggers a flashback to a trippy "Space" jam at a Grateful Dead show, but chill out: It's just an image of Guinea-Bissau, a small country in West Africa, made by the Landsat 7 satellite as it peered down at Earth from its 438-mile-high orbit.

The patterns in the country's shallow coastal waters are created by silt that's been carried by the Geba River and other streams into the Atlantic Ocean. However, this isn't what the country looks like to the naked eye in outer space. Instead, the color-coded image was produced using infrared, red, and blue filters to bring out details in the silt. This online tutorial explains more about the trippy color scheme.

Click through this year's "Earth as Art" slideshow for more out-of-this-world Earth imagery.

This picture of Guinea-Bissau serves as one of the final visual treats in our Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar. For additional views of Earth from space, check out these past offerings. We've also included links to other online Advent calendars that have been serving up space images daily since the beginning of the month:

• The Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar so far
• Door 1 for Dec. 1: Shuttle in spotlight
• Door 2 for Dec. 2: 'Alien' lake seen from space
• Door 3 for Dec. 3: Egypt's river of light
• Door 4 for Dec. 4: Tallest building reaches for the sky
• Door 5 for Dec. 5: Russia's dazzling delta
• Door 6 for Dec. 6: Space skipper vs. the world
• Door 7 for Dec. 7: Pearl Harbor from the heavens
• Door 8 for Dec. 8: Listening for E.T.
• Door 9 for Dec. 9: Blast from the past
• Door 10 for Dec. 10: Volcano caught in the act
• Door 11 for Dec. 11: Chronicling climate change
• Door 12 for Dec. 12: Happy St. Lucy's Day
• Door 13 for Dec. 13: Viva Las Vegas
• Door 14 for Dec. 14: Don't wake the volcanoes
• Door 15 for Dec. 15: Stairways to heaven
• Door 16 for Dec. 16: White Christmas in the Midwest
• Door 17 for Dec. 17: Tracks in the sky
• Door 18 for Dec. 18: Amelia Earhart's final resting place?
• Door 19 for Dec. 19: Lunar eclipse as seen from space
• Door 20 for Dec. 20: Our pale blue dot
• Door 21 for Dec. 21: Celebrate the longest night
• The Big Picture at Boston.com: Hubble Advent calendar
• Planetary Society: Solar system Advent calendar
• Zooniverse Advent calendar

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

NASA / JPL / SSI

This false-color view of the Saturnian moon Rhea shows the side that always faces the ringed planet. The colors accentuate subtle differences in Rhea's icy surface, likely related to systematic regional changes in surface composition or the sizes and structures of the grains making up Rhea's icy soil.

Pictures from Rhea reveal the composition and structure of the icy Saturnian moon in festive colors of green, blue and 3-D red. They're a holiday gift from the scientists who work with the imagery beamed back to Earth by the Cassini orbiter.

"In celebration of the holidays, and to mark the end of another fabulous year in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini imaging team is releasing today some very high-resolution views of Saturn's moon Rhea, including a 3-D look at a tectonically fractured region showing cracks as deep as 2.5 miles," the imaging team's leader, Carolyn Porco of the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, said in an e-mail sent out today.

The team also put out a fresh batch of raw imagery acquired during Monday's flyby of Enceladus, another one of Saturn's icy moons. Enceladus has geysers of water ice spewing from fissures in its surface, and the latest pictures take advantage of backlighting from the sun to highlight the fountains rising into space.

NASA / JPL / SSI

An image of Enceladus taken by the Cassini orbiter during a Monday flyby shows backlit geysers of ice rising up from fissures on the moon's surface.

This week's flyby brought Cassini within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Enceladus' surface. One particularly intriguing picture shows a dark view of the moon's rippled terrain, with those enigmatic fountains just over the horizon. The raw picture is covered with bright speckles, presumably due to radiation effects.

Cassini has produced plenty of pictures showing those rising columns of ice particles. Last month, Porco and her colleagues reported that a "phenomenal amount of heat" was emanating from the fissures as well. Such findings support the view that water or slush is being pushed up from below, most likely due to the moon's tidal flexing. If there's water and warmth beneath the surface, could there be life as well? That's a huge question that will have to be left for future space missions.

Saturn's moons in context
Meanwhile, astronomers are trying to put Saturn's various moons in their proper context. That's where the pictures of Rhea, taken during flybys in November of last year and March of this year, are coming in handy.

"Since NASA's Voyager mission visited Saturn, scientists have thought of Rhea and Dione as close cousins, with some differences in size and density," Cornell's Paul Helfenstein, an imaging team associate, said in today's image advisory. "The new images show us they're more like fraternal twins, where the resemblance is more than skin-deep. This probably comes from their nearness to each other in orbit."

A false-color image traces subtle variations in Rhea's reflectiveness, using shades of green and blue. One side of the moon always faces Saturn, and that's the side shown in the image released today (and displayed at the top of this item). The left half of the visible disk is the part that faces in the direction of Rhea's orbital motion around the planet, and the right half trails behind. Scientists believe the differences in surface appearance, seen so graphically in the false-color view, could be caused by meteoric debris slamming into one side of the moon as it moves in its orbit. Or it could be due to "magnetic sweeping," a process that occurs when ions trapped in Saturn's magnetic field strike Rhea's surface.

Scientists were hoping to find evidence of a wispy ring surrounding Rhea during the flybys, which came as close as 62 miles (100 kilometers). They had no such luck, but they did see a web of bright, wispy fractures that are similar to those spotted on a different area of the moon by the Voyager probes in 1980 and 1981.

Those wisps turn out to be exposures of bright ice along steep cliff walls, most likely formed by tectonic activity. Some of the imagery collected last year was processed to produce a high-resolution 3-D image, showing fractures and troughs cutting through two of the largest craters in the scene. Those craters have few smaller craters superimposed on top of them, suggesting that they're relatively young. That would imply that Rhea's tectonic stresses have been active relatively recently, at least in some areas.

NASA / JPL / SSI

A stereo image of Rhea's icy surface shows a trough and a fracture cutting through the crater on the left. Use red-blue glasses to see the stereo effect. Click to select a wider, higher-resolution view.

Cassini's science team members have used the imagery to improve their maps of Rhea — and still better maps are on the way.

"The 11th of January 2011 will be especially exciting, when Cassini flies just 76 kilometers (47 miles) above the surface of Rhea," Thomas Roatsch, an imaging team scientist based at the German Aerospace Center Institute of Planetary Research, said in the advisory. "These will be by far the best images we've ever had of Rhea's surface — details down to just a few meters will become recognizable."

More about Saturn's moons and the Cassini mission:

• Oxygen. CO2 found in Rhea's wispy atmosphere
• Space walnut created by moons crashing
• Possible ice volcano spied on Titan
• Slideshow: Cassini's greatest hits

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Scientists have long debated whether climate change or human hunters doomed woolly mammoths to extinction about 10,000 years ago. A new study suggests that delayed weaning due to the prolonged winter darkness north of the Arctic Circle may also be to blame.

The finding, based on an analysis of woolly mammoth teeth from Old Crow in the Yukon, shows that woolly mammoths didn't begin eating plants and other solid foods before the age of 2 and, in some cases, 3. This is much later than customary for modern-day elephants in Africa, according to Jessica Metcalfe, a doctoral student in earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario.

"In modern Africa, lions can hunt baby elephants but not adults. They can’t kill adults. But they can kill babies, and by and large, they tend to be successful when they hunt at night because they have adapted night vision,” Metcalfe explained in a media statement. "In Old Crow, where you have long, long hours of darkness, the infants are going to be more vulnerable, so the mothers nursed longer to keep them close."

She believes this prolonged weaning may have added to the pressures that doomed the woolly mammoths to extinction.

"Today, a leading cause of infant elephant deaths in Myanmar is insufficient maternal milk production," she said. "Woolly mammoths may have been more vulnerable to the effects of climate change and human hunting than modern elephants not only because of their harsher environment, but also because of the metabolic demands of lactation and prolonged nursing, especially during the longer winter months."

Metcalfe, who explains her tooth analysis research in the video above, published the findings in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. Check out the stories below for more information on the woolly mammoth.

• Mammoth DNA could spark resurrection
• Woolly mammoth hair yields fantastic DNA
• Humans drove mammoths to their doom
• Climate change wiped out mammoths

 John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

NASA

The shuttle Endeavour is silhouetted against the light of an orbital sunset in this picture, taken from the International Space Station before a Feb. 9 docking. Click to see a slideshow of 2010's best space images.

Earthlike worlds, otherworldly life on Earth, the fading of the shuttle fleet and the rise of the shuttle's successors made headlines in 2010. So what will 2011 bring?

The past year has been marked by uncertainty over the direction of America's space effort, and the questions will continue into the next year. When 2010 began, NASA expected to be retiring the space shuttle fleet by now. When 2010 ends, the space agency will still have as many as three shuttle flights to go.

The longer term is even fuzzier: Will NASA target a mission to a near-Earth asteroid? To the moons of Mars? Heck, the space agency doesn't yet know with certainty what its spending plan will be for the rest of the current fiscal year — and it's not clear how the political change-over in the House will affect the revised vision for the space effort.

The space effort is more than NASA, however. Some of the year's highlights came from other quarters. For example, there was the extended test of the Pentagon's secret X-37B space plane. There was the first free flight of SpaceShipTwo, which could usher in a long-awaited era of commercial space tourism. There were the maiden flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch vehicle and its Dragon capsule, which could resupply the International Space Station once the shuttles truly retire. There were space successes by other countries, such as China (with its Chang'e 2 moon mission) and Japan (with the return of its Hayabusa asteroid probe and the deployment of its Ikaros solar sail.)

There were also setbacks and strange twists: Japan's Venus probe missed its mark just this month. NASA's Spirit rover fell mute on Mars. And what kind of year would it be without a few rounds of UFO reports, such as the spate of sightings in China, the release of decades-old "X-Files" in Britain and the testimony of military men about strange missile-base incidents?

Every year since 1997, we've reviewed the top space stories of the previous 12 months and looked ahead to the trends to watch in the 12 months to come. It's up to you to choose which story from 2010 and which trend for 2011 should lead the list. To refresh your memory, last year's top story was the LCROSS moon-crashing mission — which, by the way, continued to make news this year. You projected that the top trend would be the impact of newly developed rockets such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 on future spaceflight.

Here's this year's roundup. Please vote for your top story and top trend using the polls included on this page, or cast a write-in vote with your comments below. For a visual recap of the year, including some jaw-dropping imagery from Hubble's 20th year, check out our "Year in Space" slideshow — and please vote for your favorite space picture of 2010 at the end of the slideshow. On Dec. 30, we'll recap the winning choices for top story of 2010, top picture of 2010 and top trend of 2011.

NASA's shifting course: President Barack Obama announces his plan to cancel the Constellation "back-to-the-moon" program and retool the space agency for a longer-term vision that would send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025 and perhaps to the moons of Mars by the 2030s. Members of Congress bristle at some elements of Obama's plan, and prominent critics complain that America would be turning back from the final frontier. By the end of the year, policymakers jury-rig a compromise.

Sunrise for private rockets: SpaceX notches two successful flights of its Falcon 9 rocket, and NASA doles out millions of dollars for the development of other private-sector spaceships that could take the shuttle's place. Scaled Composites and Virgin Galactic make headway on their suborbital space venture: SpaceShipTwo flies free at last during unpowered test glides.

Earth-sized worlds on the horizon: Scientists sift through data about distant planets, including a "super-Earth" that could conceivably sustain life as we know it, just 20 light-years away. The readings are so delicate that it's difficult to confirm whether that particular super-Earth actually exists. Nevertheless, preliminary findings from NASA's Kepler planet-hunting probe suggest that there could be millions of planets roughly the size of Earth in the Milky Way galaxy. Such reports buoy hopes that Earthlike environments and even alien life may someday be found.

Alien life, or false dawn? Speaking of alien life, a controversial study suggests that the chemistry of life could be different from what we assume has to be the case. Could atoms of arsenic take the place of phosphorus in the DNA and proteins of exotic bacteria harvested from a salty lake in California? The controversy is still raging as the year draws to a close, but the debate demonstrates that astrobiology is finally coming down to Earth.

UFOs take the spotlight: Investigative journalist Leslie Kean makes a splash with her book "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record." Skeptics question the book's assumptions, but Kean holds her ground. The media spotlight follows UFO reports from China as well as from New York and Texas. Meanwhile, a U.N. space official stirs up a discussion over the procedure for dealing with potential revelations about extraterrestrial life.

Cast a write-in vote: You have lots of alternatives to choose from, including the aforementioned X-37B mission, China's space effort and Japan's successes and failures in space. You could also go with the buzz over this year's total solar eclipse, the latest news about Saturn and its moons, or the stunning flyby of Comet Hartley 2. Feel free to let me know what I'm missing in your comments below.

Now for the top trends of 2011:

Farewell to the shuttle fleet: The likeliest schedule calls for Atlantis to take on the final space shuttle flight in late June, bringing the 30-year program to an end. But will NASA be able to stick to that schedule? Will SpaceX and other private-sector providers stick to their schedule as well for developing the spacecraft for resupplying the space station? By the end of the year, will museums really be making plans to exhibit the most complicated flying machines ever built?

All aboard for suborbital rides: Virgin Galactic's billionaire founder, Richard Branson, said last month that commercial space tours would be flown on SpaceShipTwo (a.k.a. the VSS Enterprise) in "about 12 months." I'm doubtful about that timetable, but I'd love to be proven wrong. In any case, the schedule calls for the professional pilots to put new suborbital rocket planes to the test next year — not only SpaceShipTwo, but XCOR's Lynx Mark I as well.

Sunset, sunrise for Mars missions: Will the Spirit rover's seven-year-long mission on Mars officially draw to a close in 2011? Will its twin rover Opportunity make it to the giant Endurance Crater? Will NASA's Curiosity rover be ready for launch as scheduled in the fall? What giant leaps will NASA consider for future missions to the Red Planet?

Rendezvous with an asteroid: The Dawn spacecraft is due to go into orbit around the asteroid Vesta in July and spend a year studying the second-largest body in the asteroid belt. Some astronomers wonder whether Vesta should be considered a dwarf planet, like Ceres (which is Dawn's eventual destination) or Pluto. It really doesn't matter which planetary pigeonhole Vesta is put into — either way, the Dawn mission should be a real eye-opener. 

Exoplanet quest pays off: The next big release of data from the Kepler planet-hunting mission is due in February, and astronomers are already gearing up for big revelations. The findings could confirm earlier suggestions that super-Earths account for a significant proportion of the planets detected in Kepler's survey. Some scientists suggest that super-Earths could be even more hospitable to life than our own planet. What new light will next year's exoplanetary studies shed on the big questions we have about life, the universe and everything? Stay tuned. ...

Cast a write-in vote: I'd love to hear about other out-of-this-world developments that could be on the horizon in 2011. Feel free to speculate — or tell me what I've missed — in your comments below.

More of the year in review:

• The year in science
• The worst tech of 2010
• Top 10 YouTube videos of 2010
• Complete coverage of the year in review

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Lawrence David / MIT

The figure shows the evolution of gene families in ancient genomes across the Tree of Life. The sizes of the little pie charts scale with the number of evolutionary events in lineages, slices indicate event types: gene birth (red), duplication (blue), horizontal gene transfer (green), and loss (yellow). The Archean Expansion period (3.33 to 2.85 billion years ago) is highlighted in green. Click here to see a larger version of the image.

The collective genome of all life on Earth today went through a rapid growth spurt between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, according to scientists who used computer algorithms to reconstruct the evolutionary history of thousands of genes.

The growth spurt coincides with the advent of a biochemical pathway known as electron transport that is "integral for photosynthesis as well as for respiration," Lawrence David, a computational biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me.

He and colleague Eric Alm named this growth spurt the Archean Expansion. The expansion precedes an era known as the Great Oxidation, when oxygen began to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and likely killed off large numbers of non-oxygen breathing life forms.

The computer model developed by David and Alm doesn't have the resolution required to show a causal link between the genetic expansion, the die-off of anaerobic life, and the emergence of bigger aerobic life forms. Nevertheless, "the timing is interesting," David noted.

"We see these genes coming online which have a lot to do with photosynthesis and metabolism, and concurrently there's a big diversification in the genetic repertoire," he said.

The research is based on the premise that DNA is a sort of living fossil, allowing scientists to peer back through time and reconstruct evolutionary histories.

"We inherit DNA from our ancestors, and so you can work backwards by looking at the genomic record in all the living organisms today to piece together what was going on in the past," David said. "That's the idea behind DNA in you an me almost being like a fossil."

To peer back in time, the researchers created family trees of closely related genes. It is similar to a family tree — with aunts, uncles and cousins — but instead of family members, the "branches" are DNA sequences from different organisms.

"What we found when we constructed these gene trees for all these different gene families is that 27 percent of the roots of these trees all seem to be dated to this period in Earth's history," David said.

Alm added in a news release that the findings prove "the histories of very ancient events are recorded in the shared DNA of living organisms. And now that we are beginning to decode that history, I have hope that we can reconstruct some of the earliest events in the evolution of life in great detail."

The findings were reported Sunday by the journal Nature. For more stories on related issues, check out the links below.

• 'Great Oxidation Event' occurred much earlier
• Earliest traces of complex life?
• Ancient animal explosion gets bigger with new finds
• Mysterious DNA survives eons of evolution

 John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

After weeks of buildup, it's finally time to go outside and see the full moon go dark — or, if it's cloudy, watch the total lunar eclipse over the Internet.

Such eclipses occur when Earth gets precisely between the sun and the moon, casting a shadow that covers every bit of the moon's disk. North Americans should have the best seats in the house for tonight's event, which reaches its climax at 2:41 a.m. ET Tuesday when the total phase begins. For more than an hour, the moon should glow sunset-red, thanks to the light refracted by the edge of Earth's atmosphere.

This eclipse is notable because it takes place just hours before the December solstice, which marks the beginning of northern winter and southern summer. The last Dec. 21 total lunar eclipse occurred in the year 1638. (Number-crunchers quibbled for a while over whether that one counted as a solstice eclipse, due to shifts between the Julian and Gregorian calendar, but the current consensus is that it does indeed count. The next winter solstice eclipse is due in 2094.)

The timing of the solstice is a coincidence, but it does mean the moon will be riding high in the sky — which should enhance the viewing experience.

The last lunar eclipse, back in June, was merely a partial blackout. Total eclipses of the moon are actually less common than total solar eclipses — that is, if you don't count faint penumbral lunar eclipses. But while the sun's totality is visible only from a narrow track of territory, usually in a remote area, total lunar eclipses are theoretically visible from an entire half of the world at once. Weather permitting, more than a billion people could see tonight's phenomenon.

Now how cool is that?

"Actually it's a little less cool than people are making it out to be," Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, told MSNBC. Tyson pointed out that the eclipse proceeds slowly, starting with the first contact of Earth's shadow at 12:29 a.m. ET. From start to finish, the 12 stages of the eclipse go on for about five and a half hours. "I don't know how many people are going to stay awake in the cold, winter night to watch the thing," Tyson said.

Joe Rao / Space.com

This table indicates which stages of the eclipse will be visible when: 1. Moon enters penumbral shadow; 2. Penumbral shadow begins to appear; 3. Moon enters umbral shadow; 4. 75 percent coverage of moon; 5. Near-totality; 6. Totality begins; 7. Middle of totality; 8. Totality ends; 9. 75 percent coverage of moon; 10. Moon leaves umbra; 11. Penumbral shadow fades away; 12. Moon leaves penumbral shadow. For full details, consult this guide to the 12 stages.

The best strategy is to get a glimpse at the full moon every once in a while, then find a nice dark place to keep watch starting at about 2:35 a.m. ET (which would be a reasonable 11:35 p.m. PT for us West Coasters). You can see the moon go dark, catch sight of the smoldering reddish glow, and then go back to bed when you've seen enough. At 3:53 a.m. ET, the moon comes out of Earth's shadow, which is another highlight of the event.

There's no need to drag out a telescope: Lunar eclipses are best appreciated with the naked eye, or a good pair of binoculars.

But what if it's cloudy? The weather outlook is not that great for much of the country tonight, including my neck of the woods in Washington state. (Consult our weather page to check the conditions in your neck of the woods.) Well, there's always the Internet. NASA is planning to stream live Web video of the moon as seen from Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. The embedded video coverage will be accompanied by a Web chat with NASA astronomer Mitzi Adams from midnight to 5 a.m. ET Tuesday. Another lunar expert at Marshall, Rob Suggs, will be taking your questions in the same chat forum from 3 to 4 p.m. ET today.

NASA has set up a Flickr group for lunar eclipse photography, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will feature one of the Flickr photos as official JPL computer wallpaper. You can bet that SpaceWeather.com will also offer some great eclipse pictures after the event.

Akira Fujii captured this record of the moon's progress dead-center through Earth's shadow in July 2000 by aligning his camera on the same star for successive exposures.

JPL is also offering what it's calling an "I'm There: Lunar Eclipse" social-media campaign for eclipse-watchers. Check out the campaign's Web page for details on what to do and what you'll get. If you're sending out updates via Twitter, include #eclipse and @NASAJPL in your tweets and they just might show up in the live comment stream.

In addition to the eclipse, the night sky offers plenty to look at, including the Ursid meteor shower, a bright Jupiter in evening skies and a bright Venus in morning skies.

The moon's next brush with totality comes next June 15, but North Americans will miss out. West Coasters should be able to spot part of the total lunar eclipse after that one, on the morning of Dec. 10, 2011, until it's interrupted by moonset and sunrise. The next good opportunity for North America comes on April 14-15, 2014. Check out Sky & Telescope's Web site for further details.

To learn much, much more about eclipse lore, click on the links below:

• Interactive: What causes a lunar eclipse?
• Nine cool facts about lunar eclipses
• Why an eclipse paints the moon red
• The 12 stages of the total lunar eclipse
• How to watch tonight's lunar eclipse
• It's the best lunar eclipse until 2014
• How a lunar eclipse saved Columbus
• A lunar eclipse ... as seen from space

Update for 3:35 a.m. ET Dec. 21: Sounds like the NASA feed from Alabama is not as satisfying as it could have been, but if you poke around, you'll find other webcasts ... such as this one from Chile.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

I'm officially taking a day off today to get ready for the holidays ... but it's hard to stay out of the blogosphere entirely, especially when my science-minded son is playing so many cool YouTube videos on the home computer. So I've collected a few geeky clips to add some science content to your pre-Christmas weekend. The one above is from "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart, and was featured on NPR's "Krulwich Wonders" blog. Hart has lots more where that came from.

Last week I linked to a video that illustrates the workings of the once-mysterious ancient Greek Antikythera computing device, using Lego blocks. In case you didn't see it the first time around, here it is again:

Today I noticed that there's a behind-the-scenes video as well:

My son countered with this TV-commercial-like video for a Turing machine made of Lego blocks. Well played, sir:

Have you detected a theme here? All these videos illustrate the workings of math and science using stop-action animation. To close out this video roundup, here's a just-for-fun stop-action project titled "Insert Coin" that looks as if it took a lot of work. Thanks to Paul Hsieh at GeekPress for pointing it out:

Seen any good and geeky videos lately? Feel free to pass along your favorites in a comment below.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Billed as a nursery for biotech entrepreneursm, Genspace was founded to allow would-be scientists to conduct whatever biotech experiments they like. Pictured from left to right: Sung Won Lim, Russell Durrett and Ellen Jorgensen.

Artists, would-be scientists, and lab researchers with interests outside the bounds of their institution funding have a space to gather in New York City to pursue whatever biotech experiments they can dream up.

The lab, called Genspace, is billed as a nursery for biotech entrepreneurs. It's compliant with the Center for Disease Control's biosafety level 1 regulations, meaning its a safe place to conduct professional-level science.

The FBI was at first concerned a public biotech lab in the city could be breeding grounds for bioterrorism and drug manufacturing, but the founders hashed out the worries with the agencies and received approval, according to a profile of the lab in Wired.com.

"The FBI now uses pictures of our space to show people what a [methamphetamine] drug lab doesn't look like," Genspace president and co-founder Ellen Jorgensen, who's also a biomedical researcher at New York Medical College, told Wired.

Much of the gear in the cobbled-together lab, two years in the making, was donated. But that's not stopping bona fide research. Jorgensen is working on a compact, cost-effective lab-in-a-box based on collapsible furniture that can be built by students and used in schools.

"The project complements the trend towards simplification and miniaturization of key lab components such as PCR machines and gel electrophoresis," notes the lab's website.

Another member, co-founder and freelance journalist Daniel Gushkin, is working on an experiment to get bacteria to play a game of tag with each other.

"He hopes that through time-lapse video he will be able to see bacterial clones chase one another in a petri dish as an artistic exercise in the power of genetic engineering," the lab explains.

Membership in the community is $100 a month and members can use the space for whatever experiments they choose. What would you work on? Feel free to weigh in with a comment below.

More on do-it-yourself science

• Make your own geeky gift goodness
• Do-it-yourself DNA testing: Helpful or harmful?
• Solar power coming to a store near you
• Hobbyist try genetic engineering at home

To learn more about Genspace, read David Mosher's profile on Wired.com

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Henry Bortman / 2010

Astrobiology researcher Felisa Wolfe-Simon works with samples at California's Mono Lake.

The controversy over findings that suggest life can grow using arsenic entered a new phase today: The researchers behind the radical claim issued a statement responding to their critics — and said the comments and responses generated by their experiments would be reviewed and published in a future issue of the journal Science.

In their original study, published online by the journal Science on Dec. 2, the researchers suggested that salt-loving bacteria gathered from California's Mono Lake could be coaxed to substitute atoms of arsenic, which is toxic to life on Earth, in place of the usual phosphorus atoms in DNA and other parts of their cellular machinery.

Since that study was published, a number of microbiologists and chemists have questioned whether the experiments actually proved the researchers' point. The critics said inadequate care was taken in purifying DNA samples from the bacteria in the arsenic-rich medium, and that the arsenic found in the DNA was merely contamination. They said that the bacteria might have been using trace amounts of phosphorus left as impurities in the growth medium, and that arsenic bonds in the DNA could not have stood up to exposure to water.

For the past couple of weeks, members of the Mono Lake research team have declined to respond in detail to the criticisms, saying that they preferred to address questions through a peer-reviewed process. But today, team leaders Felisa Wolfe-Simon and Ron Oremland of the U.S. Geological Survey said they were providing additional information about the experiments "as a public service ... while more formal review of their responses to comments sent to Science continues."

In a preliminary Q&A, Wolfe-Simon and Oremland recapped the procedures they went through to purify arsenic-laden DNA and said they felt the critics' concerns about the procedures were not valid. They also said "it is conceivable" that DNA containing arsenic is more resilient to water exposure than previously thought, although they acknowledged that "more research is warranted" on this question.

They pointed out that the Mono Lake bacteria could not grow unless either arsenic or phosphorus was added to the medium. Such data "clearly demonstrate" that the trace amounts of phosphorus left in the medium were insufficient to support further growth, they said.

In their conclusion, the research team reflected on what they've gone through and what lies ahead:

"For all of us, our entire team, what this was like was unimaginable. We are a group of scientists that came together to tackle a really interesting problem. We each used our talents, from technical prowess to intellectual discussion, to objectively determine what exactly was happening in our experiments. We freely admitted in the paper and in the press that there was much, much more work to do by us and a whole host of other scientists. The press conference even included a technical expert, Dr. Steven Benner, who voiced some of the concerns we responded to above. Part of our reason for bringing this work to the community was to make the intellectual and technical connections for more collaborations to answer many of the lingering questions. We were transparent with our data and showed every datum and interesting result. Our paper’s conclusions are based on what we felt was the most parsimonious way to interpret a series of experiments where no single experiment would be able to answer the big question. 'Could a microbe use arsenic in place of phosphorus to sustain its growth?' The best science opens up new questions for us as a community and sparks the interest and imagination of the general public. As communicators and representative of science, we feel that support of new ideas with data is critical but also to generate new ideas for others to think about and bring their talents to bear on.

"We look forward to working with other scientists, either directly or by making the cells freely available and providing DNA samples to appropriate experts for their analyses, in an effort to provide more insight into this intriguing finding."

Science is making the original study as well as its news article about the research available for free online with registration. If you're interested in this issue, be sure to read today's full statement — and feel free to comment below.

Update for 11:55 p.m. ET: Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia who was a prominent critic of the original "arsenic life" research, has posted her critique of the today's statement.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Wordle.org via Science / AAAS

This graphic is a visual representation of the frequency of words that appear in contemporary English-language books. The size of each word is proportional to its frequency. The most common words, such as "the" and "a," are omitted.

Want to be famous? Don't pursue a career in the sciences. That's one of the key findings from a new study that tasked computers to pick out cultural trends from about 4 percent of all the words ever printed in books.

The researchers created a software program to analyze words and phrases in a database compiled from Google's controversial project to digitize every book ever written.

The result is a scientific "tool that can be useful in the humanities," study lead author Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology and Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, told me.

He and his colleagues have dubbed the approach "culturomics," making an analogy to genomics, the study of genomes. The tool provides insight to topics as diverse as humanity's cultural memory, the adoption of technology, fame, and the effects of censorship and propaganda.

Censorship analysis
For example, to highlight the effect of censorship, the researchers searched for references to Jewish artist Marc Chagall in English and German books. In both languages, his name rises rapidly in the 1910s and continues to rise in English for several decades. However, it all but disappears from 1936 to 1944 in Nazi Germany.

Science / AAAS

This chart shows the usage frequency of "Marc Chagall" in German (red) as compared with English texts (blue). Chagall, a Jewish artist censored by the Nazi regime, virtually disappears from German writings during the Third Reich (the time frame shaded red), even as his fame continued to rise in the English-speaking world.

"The results we have on censorship are kind of remarkable — just the unbelievable extent to which government censorship can utterly obliterate someone from the public discourse," Erez Lieberman Aiden, a study co-author in Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, told me.

Michel added that the censorship analysis "is a beautiful example for how this tool can really help advance big questions in the humanities in a way that doesn't negate other techniques that exist in this field."

Pizza history
Google today launched Culturomics, a website that accompanies the study published today in Science. There, users can type in a word or phrase and see how its usage frequency has changed over the past few centuries.

For example, a person who types in the word "pizza" will learn that pizza became popular in the U.S. in 1950. This might prompt a user to look into the history of pizza, whereupon they'd discover that its popularity is linked to the occupation of Italy by American troops during World War II who wanted the food at home.

"It is really an amazing way to browse history and to discover interesting facts about the past," Michel said.

Science / AAAS

This chart tracks the frequency of references to various foods between 1800 and 2000. "Steak" and "sausage" (blue and green) are perennial favorites, overtaken first by "ice cream" (red), and later by two Italian imports, "pizza" and "pasta" (purple and yellow). "Hamburger" (cyan) became widespread in the 1930s, and "sushi" (black) is just now making its move.

Famous scientists?
In their paper, Michel and colleagues tracked trends such as the frequency of use of dates, words, and phrases between 1800 and 2000. Among their findings: We are forgetting the past faster with each passing year, but knowledge about innovations is spreading faster than ever.

When it comes to celebrity, people reach fame younger in life and become more famous than their 19th-century predecessors, but the fame is shorter-lived. However, people who reach fame later in life, such as U.S. presidents, have longer-lasting fame than actors, who peak in their 20s.

Being a fame-seeking scientist, however, "doesn't make sense by any stretch of the imagination," said Aiden. "You end up less famous than everyone else and you have to wait longer than anybody else [to get it], so in that sense, science is probably not the thing to do if your goal is to become famous."

More about language and science:

• A baby's babble leads to language
• English won't dominate as world language
• 'Woe is us' — bad grammar permeates language
• Computer program helps decode ancient texts 

 John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

ESA

NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman (left), Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev (middle), and European astronaut Paolo Nespoli (right), peer out from their Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft before their launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Problems reportedly bedeviled a communication link leading to Russia's Mission Control for a few hours today — leading to false alarms suggesting that there was trouble on the International Space Station, or on a Soyuz spacecraft that's on its way to the station. The glitch has been resolved and the crews are in no danger, but the snag caused a stir in press circles.

NBC News analyst James Oberg pieced together the story from Russian media reports as well as NASA sources who were keeping tabs on the station and the Soyuz. The alarm was sparked by a Novosti report claiming that Russian controllers were "without communication about the status of the International Space Station" and "haven't received any information about the status of the Soyuz."

That report was quickly picked up by Russia's Interfax news service, and that report was passed along in turn by Reuters. In the meantime, Novosti posted a revised report saying that the communication problem had been resolved. Later, Novosti and Interfax said the problem involved a fiber-optic network and lasted for several hours. Other reports suggested that a line between Mission Control and a military satellite control center had been cut.

It's not clear whether the disruption affected all of the primary and backup links to Russia's Mission Control Center, also known as the TsUP. There was "no indication of alarm" in the space communication traffic monitored by NASA, agency spokesman Josh Byerly told Oberg from Johnson Space Center.

Three astronauts are aboard the Soyuz: NASA's Catherine Coleman, Italy's Paolo Nespoli and Russia's Dmitry Kondratyev. They were launched on Wednesday from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and are on track to dock with the station on Friday.

The fact that Russia's Mission Control was having problems hearing from the space station as well as the Soyuz was a tip-off that the communication problem had an earthly cause. Here's what else Oberg had to say about today's incident:

"Had the problem only been in the Soyuz, it would have had much more serious implications. First, this particular spacecraft was involved in a railway collision while being transported to the launch site two months ago, and the entire crew cabin had to be replaced by the next-in-line module originally planned for a March 2011 launch. Hurrying its checkout schedule to launch 100 days sooner was a major stress on the workforce requiring three-shift operations. Under such conditions, one can assume the chances of human error go up.

"Also, without communications, the Soyuz always has the recourse of emergency landing back on Earth. For every circuit of the planet (16 per day) there is a pre-scripted landing point somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Problem is — most of those in Russia and Canada are currently enduring severe winter cold that would have made an emergency landing and rescue problematic.

"But no problem, it seems. This is just the kind of 'failure' that training directors make the crews in space and in Mission Control go through in practice, before launch. It's in keeping with an old maxim from General Suvorov, who beat Napoleon at Borodino in 1812 (beat him by not losing): 'Battle is easy, it's training that's hard.' Or as a Chinese general preached 2,000 years ago: 'The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war." As a veteran of both spaceflight training and real spaceflight operations at Mission Control in Houston, I can vouch for that attitude."

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

A tiny vibrating device, measuring as long as a human hair is wide, won recognition from the journal Science as the first quantum machine and the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2010.

Synthetic genomes and Neanderthals are cool, but the journal Science went with something different as the year's top scientific breakthrough: the world's first quantum machine.

It's not much to look at. In fact, you can barely see it with the naked eye, and it doesn't work unless it's cooled down to just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. But when researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara created their tiny vibrating "springboard," that represented "the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object," said Adrian Cho, a news writer for Science.

"On a conceptual level, that's cool because it extends quantum mechanics into a whole new realm," he said. "On a practical level, it opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality."

One of the more bizarre principles of quantum mechanics is that something can be in two states simultaneously: both on and off, both 1 and 0. Under just the right conditions, UCSB's aluminum nitride oscillator took on a single quantum of motion, so that it vibrated both a little and a lot at the same time.

UCSB's Aaron O'Connell, John Martinis and Andrew Cleland reported their results in March in the journal Nature. At the time, Cleland told me that "we were just trying to demonstrate quantum effects in a big thing."

"But a possible application would be if you try to detect these acoustic vibrations at the quantum level," he said. "You could do it with this. You could use it as a quantum microphone, or a quantum loudspeaker." Such devices might also be used to read out the results of a quantum computer's calculations.

But don't expect Schrodinger's dead-and-alive quantum cat-in-a-box to be available for holiday giving anytime soon: The bigger and more complex the object, the more it has to be chilled to cut down on the "noise" of vibrating atoms. To see quantum effects in a typical tuning fork, for example, you'd have to cool it down to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. That's way colder than the lowest temperatures seen in outer space.

Here are the other nine breakthroughs on Science's top-ten list for 2010:

• Synthetic biology: For the first time, researchers created a synthetic genome and used it to transform the identity of a bacterium. The genome replaced the microbe's DNA so that it produced a new set of proteins. It would be wrong to call this "artificial life," but the achievement was a wakeup call for scientists and ethicists. A congressional hearing on the topic was conducted earlier this year, and just today, the White House's bioethics panel called for more federal oversight of such research. (Here's the full report and a FAQ file.)
• Neanderthal genome: Researchers sequenced the Neanderthal genome from the bones of three females who lived in Croatia sometime between 38,000 and 44,000 years ago. The preliminary findings suggested that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred to a small extent, and that non-Africans carry "a little bit" of genetic code from our now-extinct hominid cousins.
• HIV prevention: Two HIV prevention trials using different strategies reported unequivocal success, Science said. One trial involved a vaginal gel that contains the anti-HIV drug tenofovir, and the other trial involved a pill containing a combination of antiretroviral drugs.
• Exome sequencing: By sequencing the tiny portion of the human genome that actually codes for proteins — known as the exome — researchers who study rare diseases caused by a single flawed gene could identify specific mutations underlying at least a dozen diseases, including Kabuki syndrome. Exome studies were listed as one of the trends to watch in Science's year-end roundup for 2009.
• Molecular dynamics simulations: Researchers harnessed the power of one of the world's most powerful computers, code-named Anton, to track the motions of atoms in a small, folding protein for a length of time 100 times longer than any previous efforts.
• Quantum simulator: While the folks at UCSB built a quantum-mechanical gizmo, other researchers used artificial crystals to simulate quantum-scale effects. Spots of laser light play the role of ions, and atoms trapped in the light stand in for electrons. Science says the devices can provide quick answers to theoretical problems in condensed-matter physics, and may eventually solve some of the mysteries surrounding superconductivity.
• Next-gen genomics: Large-scale genome analysis efforts such as the 1,000 Genomes Project are providing new insights into the genetic variations behind disease and evolutionary change. 
• RNA reprogramming: Scientists are fine-tuning methods to reprogram ordinary cells so that they take on the magical transformative properties of embryonic stem cells, and this year they found a way to do that using synthetic RNA. The new technique is twice as fast, 100 times as efficient and potentially safer for therapeutic use than previous methods.
• Return of the rat: Mice rule the world of lab animals, in part because researchers can tweak their genes to create "knockout mice" for study. But in some cases, lab rats would work better. This year there were a number of advances clearing the way for the creation of "knockout rats."

Science's editors said the "areas to watch" in 2011 include:

• Large Hadron Collider: "The first really interesting results" from Europe's supercollider are likely to focus not on the Higgs boson or supersymmetric particles, but on the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, as seen by the LHCb detector.
• Adaptation genes: New techniques such as RAD tag sequencing could help scientists learn which genes help a wide variety of organisms, ranging from bacteria to butterflies, thrive in the natural world.
• Laser fusion: The National Ignition Facility could well achieve a milestone in energy research: an ignited fusion burn.
• Hammering viruses: Broadly neutralizing antibodies, or bNAbs, could target a wide range of viral variants. Researchers have made headway in identifying bNAbs to take aim at HIV and flu viruses in animals.
• Electric cars: Plug-in electric vehicles — including Nissan's Leaf, Chevy's Volt and Toyota's new-model Prius — are set to go mainstream.
• Malaria shots: Results from a large-scale Phase III trial of a malaria vaccine in Africa are due to be announced late next year.

Science is also presenting a series of reports looking back at "Insights of the Decade." For more about the breakthroughs (and breakdowns) of the year and the decade, check out the journal's year-end package.

Next week, we'll be asking you to participate in our own "Weird Science Awards" contest, so if you'd like to pass along your nominations for the Weirdies of 2011, please submit them in your comments below.

This posting was last updated at 3:30 p.m. ET ... in part to correct a reference to a temperature "below absolute zero." Sorry about that. At least the error provided an opportunity for a political joke (see below).

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).