You just can't keep a good slime mold down. That's one of the lessons from tonight's Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

Here are a few more lessons: Fruit bats like oral sex. Swearing relieves pain. Roller-coaster rides can relieve asthma. Oil and water do mix sometimes. And the best way to figure out who gets a promotion just might be to pull names out of a hat.

This was the 20th "first annual" ceremony to honor scientific achievements that make you laugh, and then make you think. This year's festivities at Harvard University - presented by the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine - were organized around a bacterial theme. Among the highlights: the world premiere of a mini-opera about the bacteria living on a woman's front tooth, an appearance by the "Google Viral and Bacterial Advertising Team," and a warning to the audience that the person in the next seat might be harboring bacteria (doesn't everyone?).

There was the usual Ig Nobel silliness: An 8-year-old girl was on hand to cut off over-long speeches by yelling "Please stop! I'm bored!" Paper airplanes were available for throwing (but only on cue, of course). Actual Nobel laureates handed out the petri-dish awards (and made themselves available for a "Win-a-Date-With-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest").

Charles Krupa / AP

Nobel laureates Roy Glauber (Physics, 2005), Sheldon Glashow (Physics, 1979) and James Muller (Peace, 1985) demonstrate how bra cups that can be converted to emergency gas masks during the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard. The bra-mask invention won one of the not-completely-serious scientific prizes in 2009.

But there was also a serious side to go along with the silliness. The Ig Nobel economics prize went to AIG, Goldman Sachs and other fallen financial firms for "creating and promoting new ways to invest money" - ways that led to trillions of dollars in losses worldwide. Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the event's master of ceremonies, told The Associated Press that he tried to invite the company's executives to the ceremony.

"We made a few attempts, but soon realized it probably would not be possible," Abrahams said. "They never responded, not even with a 'no thank you.'"

Most of the other Ig Nobel laureates came gladly - so gladly that they paid their own way. Several scientists flew in from Japan to pick up their "Transportation Planning Prize" for figuring out how to use slime mold to design mass-transit routes. The team placed tiny bits of food in a pattern that mirrored Tokyo's rail system, with the slime-mold amoeba in the center. The single-celled creature sent out a web of veins to connect with the food bits - and after 26 hours, the surviving veins linked all the bits in an amazingly efficient way.

The same research team won an Ig Nobel two years earlier for using slime mold in a similar way to solve puzzles. "The slime mold is back!" team members sang during their acceptance speech.

Charles Krupa / AP

The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize plaque features a petri dish - perhaps in tribute to the prize-winners who used remote-controlled helicopters to collect whale snot in petri dishes.

The research into fruit-bat oral sex, which won the Ig Nobel for biology, is another example of science that makes you smirk. The research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, led scientists in China to wonder whether the behavior provided an evolutionary advantage. But maybe bats do it just because it feels good.

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the scientists who studied why swearing feels good. Richard Stephens, a lecturer in psychology at Britain's Keele University, was inspired to look into the subject when he hit his hand with a hammer and blurted out an expletive ... which seemed to ease the pain. He noticed that his wife went through a similar experience while giving birth to their daughter.

In Stephens' experiment, subjects were asked to keep their hands in ice water for as long as they could stand it. The subjects who swore could take the pain for longer periods. "What we think is, when you swear you produce an emotional reaction in yourself, you arouse your nervous system and you set off the fight-or-flight response," Stephens told AP. "It gets the heart rate up, gets the adrenaline flowing."

Is that just B.S.? Feel free to chime in with your comments below ... but please, keep it clean. This shouldn't be a painful experience.

Here's the full list of this year's Ig Nobel laureates, with links to the award-winning research. And stay tuned for the real Nobel Prize announcements, which are due to roll out starting Monday.

2010 Ig Nobel Prizes:

Engineering Prize: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot using a remote-control helicopter.

Reference: "A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs," Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron, Animal Conservation, vol. 13, no. 2, April 2010, pp. 217-25.

Medicine Prize: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

Reference: "Rollercoaster Asthma: When Positive Emotional Stress Interferes with Dyspnea Perception," Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 45, 2006, pp. 977-87.

Transportation Planning Prize: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

Reference: "Rules for Biologically Inspired Adaptive Network Design," Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Dan P. Bebber, Mark D. Fricker, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Science, Vol. 327. no. 5964, January 22, 2010, pp. 439-42.

Physics Prize: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

Reference: "Preventing Winter Falls: A Randomised Controlled Trial of a Novel Intervention," Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest, New Zealand Medical Journal. vol. 122, no, 1298, July 3, 2009, pp. 31-8.

Peace Prize: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

Reference: "Swearing as a Response to Pain," Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston, Neuroreport, vol. 20 , no. 12, 2009, pp. 1056-60.

Public Health Prize: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

Reference: "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men," Manuel S. Barbeito, Charles T. Mathews, and Larry A. Taylor, Applied Microbiology, vol. 15, no. 4, July 1967, pp. 899–906.

Economics Prize: The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money - ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

Chemistry Prize: Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP, for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

Reference: "Review of Deep Oil Spill Modeling Activity Supported by the Deep Spill JIP and Offshore Operator's Committee. Final Report," Eric Adams and Scott Socolofsky, 2005.

Management Prize: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Reference: "The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study," Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

Biology Prize: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

Reference: "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time," Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e759

More about the Ig Nobels and other silly science:

• 2009: Milkologists and bra inventor win awards
• 2008: Formula for Ig Nobel fame? Strippers and Coke
• 2007: Viagra-using hamsters and the 'gay bomb'
• 2006: The science of a blackboard screech
• 2005: Fake dog testicles win Ig Nobel acclaim
• 2004: Inventors of the comb-over honored
• Book excerpt: The world's wackiest research
• Where do socks go? Silly mysteries solved
• Msnbc.com's 2010 Weird Science Awards

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up via Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Every year, the Ig Nobels honor the truly weird wonders of science ... like the emergency bra that converts into a pair of gas masks. Tonight you can watch the Ig Nobel ceremony live as it unfolds (or crumples up in laughter).

The Ig Nobels are presented by the folks behind the Annals of Improbable Research, a scientific humor magazine. Marc Abrahams, the annals' editor and tonight's master of ceremonies, likes to say that the awards recognize "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Among my own favorite winners: the inventor of the flame-throwing car alarm ... the researchers who determined that empty beer bottles make better weapons in a bar brawl than full bottles ... and the scientist who wrote a research paper about homosexual necrophiliac duck rape.

The 2010 Ig Nobels are being announced at 7:30 p.m. ET at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, and will be webcast live via Improbable Research's YouTube channel. Check it out, and come back to Cosmic Log for a full list of the winners.

In the meantime, here are some more Web links worth of a prize, either serious or silly:

• Popular Mechanics: Breakthrough Awards 2010
• Stem cells and dark energy could get Nobel spotlight
• The Guardian: Why a healthy brain is no good for gambling
• The Lay Scientist: A website article about a scientific finding

A 36 million-year-old fossil found in Peru suggests that the feathers of ancient giant penguins followed a different color scheme — and may not have been as hardy as they are today.

Instead of sporting the classic tuxedo look of modern penguins, the fossil species known as Inkayacu paracasensis ("Water King of Paracas" in the Quechua language) had reddish brown and gray feathers, paleontologists report in a research paper published online today by the journal Science. The creature was nearly 5 feet tall, which outdoes the height of today's largest living penguin, the Emperor.

"Before this fossil, we had no idea about the feathers, colors and flipper shapes of ancient penguins," lead author Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a news release. "We had questions, and this was our first chance to start answering them."

The fossil was discovered by a Peruvian student, Ali Altamirano, in the Paracas National Reserve on the Peruvian coast south of Lima. When the researchers noticed that there was scaly soft tissue preserved on an exposed foot, they nicknamed the specimen "Pedro," after a sleazy, scaly character from a Colombian soap opera.

The fossil preserved not only the shapes of Pedro's flippers and the feathers, but also the fine patterns of color-producing nanostructures known as melanosomes. Those patterns could be compared with a vast database of melanosome structures for living birds. The comparisons are what led Clarke and her colleagues to conclude that Pedro's color scheme was gray and red, because melanosomes with those colors matched the fossilized structures best.

The shapes of the feathers and the flippers were very similar to what is seen in penguins today. But the patterns of the fossilized melanosomes had less in common with today's penguins and more in common with other types of aquatic birds. Modern-day penguins have giant melanosomes that are broader than the ones that were found in the giant penguin fossil. In fact, today's penguins have bigger melanosomes than the ones found in all the other living bird species that were surveyed. What's more, a modern penguin's melanosomes are grouped into clusters like bunches of grapes.

This information led the researchers to put together the evolutionary story of how the penguin changed its feathers.

They theorize that penguins initially adapted to their aquatic environment by developing strong, streamlined feathers that were stacked on top of each other to create stiff, narrow flippers. Then, long after Pedro bit the dust, the melanosomes took on larger sizes and a clustered arrangement. But why would the melanosomes change?

It turns out that the coloring agent contained in the melanosomes, melanin, makes the feathers more resistant to wear and fracturing. Birds with bigger melanosomes would find it easier to keep their feathers in shape during those long, hard days of swimming.

The color change itself might have been a side effect of the shift in melanosome structure, or it might have had more to do with a protective response to relatively recent predators as leopard seals. Maybe gray and red made the penguin stand out too much, compared with the more austere black-and-white scheme.

"Insights into the color of extinct organisms can reveal clues to their ecology and behavior," said Yale University's Jakob Vinther, one of the research paper's co-authors. "But most of all, I think it is simply just cool to get a look at the color of a remarkable extinct organism, such as a giant fossil penguin."

Update for 4 p.m. ET: As you can imagine, a lot of people are talking (and writing) about this story. Over at LiveScience, Stephanie Pappas quotes Gerald Mayr, a paleornithologist at the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History, as saying that the action of hydrodynamic forces on feathers may not totally explain why penguins evolved to have bigger melanosomes. He pointed out that a penguin's white feathers containe no melanosomes and yet would be subject to the same forces as the black ones. "The main question certainly is, if not due to hydrodynamic forces, why do penguins have such strange melanosomes?" he said.

Ker Than's piece for National Geographic explains the modern penguin's camouflage: A swimming predator looking up from below would see the bird's white belly blending in with the sky, while the bird's black back would blend in with the dark watery depths when viewed from above. At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong puts the Water King in context alongside other ancient penguins discovered in Paracas Park. Yong also links in turn to March of the Fossil Penguins, a blog which would have to be the definitive source on this subject. The blog's author? None other than Daniel Ksepka, one of the co-authors of the Science paper.

More about penguins:

• Earth's penguins are skating on thin ice
• Penguin die-off worries scientists
• King penguin knighted by Norway
• Gay penguin pair raises chick

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The cost of whole-genome sequencing is dropping like a rock, and that’s fueling a “renaissance of activity” for scientific sleuths tracking down the genetic causes of disease, a pioneer in the field says.

Harvard geneticist George Church provided a status report on the genome market, and its implications for medical research, during this week's "Open Questions in Neuroscience" symposium in Seattle, sponsored by the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Church is not only a Harvard professor and research, but also the founder of the Knome commercial venture for genome-sequencing.

Thanks to competition in the sequencing field, the price of decoding a complete human genome has been following an affordability curve that looks like Moore's Law on steroids. The cost of the federal Human Genome Project, which issued its first draft in 2000 and a complete genome sequence in 2003, was estimated at $2.7 billion in 1991 dollars. But that price tag has been falling by as much as an order of magnitude per year, and today the going rate for whole-genome sequencing is edging below $10,000 (counseling costs extra). The cost of materials — that is, the chemical reagents required to do the tests — is merely $1,000, Church said in June.

That might suggest that the goal of the $1,000 genome could be achieved in the next year, but Church told me there might be a price plateau instead. In any case, the rapid price decline is reviving hopes that DNA tests can reveal which combinations of genes are linked to extreme or distinctive traits.

Church pointed to the example of Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, a disease that affects nerve function in the body's extremities. In March, researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine announced that they unraveled the genetic cause of the disease by sequencing the entire genome of a sufferer (who happened to be a Baylor geneticist) and comparing genetic mutations with those found in his parents and siblings. Another study at the Institute for Systems Biology concluded that no more than four genes were responsible for another rare disease known as Miller syndrome, thanks to whole-genome sequencing for a family of four.

To accelerate the genomic renaissance, Church established the Personal Genome Project, which is aimed at producing a publicly available database of genome sequences linked to medical data. So far, 16,000 volunteers have signed up, and the project has the go-ahead to sign up as many as 100,000. But less than two dozen people have made their complete genome public. One reason for that is the concern over privacy. But Church told me the biggest reason why more people aren't already "Personal Genome Pioneers" is because of the cost. Sounds like that situation could change pretty darn quickly.

"Open Questions in Neuroscience" also included presentations by:

• Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel-winning neurobiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who focuses on the genetic and chemical mechanisms that underlie learning and memory.
• Stephen Smith, a physiologist at Stanford University whose lab explores the brain's microcircuitry and molecular architecture.
• Olaf Sporns, a neuroscientist at Indiana University whose research centers on designing computational models of neural circuits.
• Karel Svoboda, a biophysicist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus who observes neurons at work within mouse brains.
• Doris Tsao, a biologist at Caltech who concentrates on the brain mechanisms behind image recognition and 3-D perception.
• Catherine Dulac, a Harvard biologist who studies the olfactory system as well as the processing of pheromone cues.

Even software billionaire Paul Allen, who founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science with $100 million of his fortune, can take only so much neuroscience in one day.

"You do suffer from a little mental overload at the end," he acknowledged after today's sessions at the "Open Questions in Neuroscience" symposium at Seattle's Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. Allen compared the experience to drinking from the proverbial firehose.

The gusher of information from 11 leading neuroscientists — including Allan Jones, the researcher who heads the Allen Institute — was bracing as well as brain-bending. Allen said he came away from the first day with a better appreciation of the brain's marvels. "It's incredibly complex and amazing and fascinating, and you could spend lifetime after lifetime trying to understand it," he told the journalists who gathered backstage.

Among the afternoon's highlights:

• Virtual reality is helping neuroscientists understand how fruit flies use their brains. No, we're not talking about building bug-sized VR helmets. Instead, Caltech's Michael Dickinson and his colleagues fix the flies to a stationary position inside an enclosed space, and then pipe in imagery as well as puffs of air to make them think they're flying. This technique allows researchers to wire up the flies and see how their little brains respond to stimuli."You allow the animal to play a little video game," Dickinson explained. His lab found that a fruit-fly brain cell involved in the visual detection of motion was active, even during a simulated turn. "The sensitivity of this neuron is like a switch while the animal is actually engaged in behavior," Dickinson said.

Another researcher in Dickinson's lab, Andrew Straw, has set up a 11-camera tracking system known as "Flydra" to track the flight of fruit flies in an enclosed space. ("Flydra" is a clever reference to Hydra, the many-headed monster from Greek mythology.) Here's a YouTube video that shows Flydra in action:

When you combine camera tracking with virtual reality, you can immerse wired-up flies in a VR world and watch how visual stimuli are translated into flying behavior. You can even study the social interaction between real flies and fruit-fly avatars —or "flyatars." Here's a video from Caltech's Peter Polidoro that shows fruit flies interacting with a fly-shaped speck of metal:

Air-suspended balls have also been used to study how wired-up mice make their way through a VR environment. Dickinson said virtual reality and robotics could open up new frontiers for the study of brain function as well as social interaction, focusing on a whole host of freely walking, flying or swimming animals. "The technologies are beginning to emerge that allow us to do this in a rigorous way," he said.

• The complexity of neural synapses parallels the complexity of brain structure, said Seth Grant of Britain's Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. His Genes to Cognition initiative focuses on the molecular architecture behind the connections that bind one neuron to another. Based on comparisons of species at different points along the tree of life, Grant theorizes that there was a big bang in synapse complexity around 500 million to 600 million years ago. That implies that synapse complexity was "derived prior to the complex organization of the brain," and suggests that better biochemistry led to better brains. But Dickinson wondered whether it was really fair to claim that vertebrate brains were inherently better than the tiny but amazingly capable brain of a butterfly that can figure out how to make its way from Canada to Mexico without a map. If you evaluated brains on a pound-for-pound basis, who'd come out on top?

• It takes just one neuron to recognize a celebrity, Caltech's Christoph Koch observed. At least that's the upshot of research that he and his colleagues conducted into the neuroscience of image recognition. The research made headlines five years ago, in part because there's a bit of sex appeal to the idea that our brains contain a "Halle Berry neuron" or a "Jennifer Aniston brain cell." Since then, the experiments have continued: It turns out that people can be trained to think about a particular celebrity — say, Marilyn Monroe or Josh Brolin — in such a way that the right neuron fires when the celeb's image flashes up on the screen, but not when a different celebrity is seen. For example, pictures of Halle Berry sparked the same neuron even when she was shown in her tight leather Catwoman costume and mask. The Halle Berry neuron didn't fire, however, when the researchers projected images of other women wearing tight leather suits. Koch said he and his colleagues had no trouble finding such images on the Internet. "There were actually quite a few," he quipped.

• Monkeys can calculate statistics, said the University of Washington's Michael Shadlen. He and his colleagues have done extensive research with rhesus macaques, studying how the firing patterns for neurons in the lateral interparietal cortex correlate with the monkeys' ability to solve left-vs.-right puzzles. The researchers also posed more complex puzzles that required the monkeys to keep track of the comparative values of four shapes that flashed on the computer screen they were watching. Shadlen played videos that crackled with the sound of neuron firings as each shape was added to the screen. "What you're hearing is a single neuron that is effectively doing sums and differences," he said. Our brains probably digest information in the same way, weighing the pluses and minuses to arrive at a decision. "When we think about the associative cortex, we probably need to think about computations that would be natural to statisticians," Shadlen said.

I don't know about you, but my neurons can barely do sums and differences after today's workout. I'll pass along additional reports from the "Open Questions in Neurobiology" symposium on Wednesday.

Check out the full list of postings from the brain symposium. Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up via Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Let's see, who's sponsoring this conference? It's the guy who started out at Washington State University, then hooked up with this other guy from Harvard, and they started a software company ... oh yeah, billionaire Paul Allen. For a while there, it sounded as if Rutgers neuroscientist Gyorgy Buzsaki was having a senior moment. But he was actually making a point about the workings of the brain.

During his talk at the "Open Questions in Neuroscience" symposium, presented in Seattle by the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Buzsaki discussed the role of the hippocampus, which he said serves as the brain's "search engine" for data stored in the neocortex.

"You can do this 'search' in just 100 milliseconds," he told his audience at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, which is also funded by Allen.

Buzsaki's research focuses on how the brain does its search queries, over and over again, through electrical impulses known as theta oscillations. Though he didn't say it, I can imagine that those incessant waves of neural activity are what we build up into a stream of consciousness.

"If you have a mechanism to present the past and the future, then you can determine the 'now,'" Buzsaki said.

He and others theorize that the hippocampus' search algorithm originally developed to keep track of distances in the real world. As the brain became more complex, the same algorithm could be used to keep track of all the information that was building up in the gray matter. Could the hippocampus account for a lot of the mind's workings?b Right now, it's a mystery.

"I think it's fair to say we know close to nothing [about] how these neurons are wired to each other," Buzsaki said.

New tools, including the Allen Institute's brain atlases, could change that situation. Buzsaki doesn't think there are any conceptual obstacles to unraveling the hippocampus' secrets. "This is an issue of money only," one of his presentation slides read.

Is it?

Nobel-winning biologist Sydney Brenner says "there are three important questions we have to answer if we want to understand biological complexity."

How do genes work? How is that genetic information translated into cell types that work together? And how did the process get that way?

During his talk at the "Open Questions in Neuroscience" symposium in Seattle today, Brenner outlined an example of how those questions might be addressed, with regard to eye function. "Cell types must be encoded in the genome in some way," he observed. He suggested that there are binary options on every step of that coding process to produce a cell that deviates from the default path.

The difficult trick is to map that "decision space" into a time frame for development as well as a 3-D structure for the different cell types. Right now, scientists are just in the beginning stages of that cross-mapping challenge. But the process by which rods and cones are made for the retina hint that binary coding is the way it's done, Brenner said. He pointed out that some people suffer from a genetic malady that leaves their retinas without rods. It turns out that they lack a transcription factor known as NRL.

"NRL is required to throw the switch," explained Brenner, a senior distinguished fellow at the Salk Institute for Biologicfal Studies. That coding switch could be one of the important factors in the machinery for making sure the right number of cells turn into rods. And its existence may suggest that the production of rods represents a departure from the "default path" for producing cones.

"Once upon a time, I will declare, the eye started out as a row of photoreceptor cells that were sensitive to blue light," Brenner said. As time and evolution went on, more switches were added to the genetic gadgetry. And based on how jellyfish "see," that appears to be a plausible route for evolutionary development, Brenner noted.

Those switches probably developed from snippets of DNA coding that were duplicated within the genome, and changed through eons of mutation and natural selection. Brenner suggested that the underpinnings of brain cell development could be traced by a close examination of those linked duplications, which he calls "krikologs."

Is a book of genesis written in our genome? What do you think? Feel free to add your comments below.

New types of brain probes could literally shed a different light on the internal workings of the brain. That was the message delivered by Ed Boyden, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, during today's "Open Questions in Neuroscience" symposium.

Neuroscientists already have used photosensitive chemicals known as rhodopsins to monitor how neural circuitry works — just as geneticists use "glow-in-the-dark" genes as a way to monitor how traits are passed along from an organism to its progeny. Flash a light on a particular brain cell, and you can trace how that affects the chemical pathways leading from that cell.

Boyden's idea would be to build probes based on optical fibers and waveguides that could be implanted into the brain, to light up an area of interest and map the circuitry. You could even light up multiple neural pathways by building tiny mirrors into the probes. The next step is to create arrays of those probes that could be wired onto the skull, like a small-scale pincushion.

Or how about a wireless connection? Boyden said his lab has already developed software and wireless hardware to monitor multiple sets of brain implants. "One laptop can control 83 animals at once," Boyden said.

Boyden told me that he and his colleagues will be providing further details about the prospects for next-generation brain implants in research that's currently under review. So stay tuned for more about these not-so-alien probes.

How does the brain work? What's the connection between genes and neurons? How do you translate the electrical bits of brain activity into complex thoughts and emotion? How does consciousness arise? These are some of the big questions being touched upon today in Seattle at the Allen Institute for Brain Science's symposium on "Open Questions in Neuroscience."

The institute was founded in 2001 by software billionaire Paul Allen to help generate the data required to fuel discoveries about the brain. Since then, more than 100 staff researchers have generated more than 1 quadrillion bytes of brain image data (OK, a petabyte). The images show sections of mouse brains (adult and developing) as well as primate brains and yes, human cadaver brains.

"They have to be fresh," Allan Jones, the institute's chief executive officer, told the symposium during its opening session. "There's a lot of timing issues for the normal human brain."

Atlases of the brain
All that brain imagery has fed into a series of brain atlases, documenting how genetic data match up with functional areas of the brain. Thousands of researchers can use that publicly available database for their own work in neuroscience — and some of the leading researchers in the field are in Seattle this week for the symposium.

I'll be filing quick updates from the symposium today, along with the occasional Twitter tweet, from my seat in an auditorium at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum — another institution that Allen established in Seattle. David Anderson, a neurobiologist at the California Institute of Technology, said that the setting was apt, considering how much was known about the correlations between basic brain chemistry and complex mental phenomena such, as the way we respond to music.

"Our level of understanding of this process is such that any attempt to explain to explain it in mechanistic terms is really an exercise in science fiction," he joked.

The circuitry of fear
Nevertheless, Anderson and his colleagues are building up stores of science facts, in part by drawing upon the brain atlas database. For example, Anderson explained how his lab is unraveling the chemistry and biology behind fear, and its suppression. Scientists have known for a long time that an area deep within the brain, known as the amygdala, is somehow central in the fear response. But it's been difficult to tease out exactly how the amygdala's chemical circuitry works.

"The results have become fuzzier rather than clearer," Anderson said.

The Allen Institute's mouse brain atlas helped identify the different cells that composed the central area of the amygdala. Armed with such data, Anderson's team was able to trace the "microcircuits" that suppressed the expression of conditioned fear. Cells known as PKC-delta neurons play a key role, by sending out chemical signals to other cells and blocking the response.

Figuring out how those cells interact with other types of neurons in the amygdala could eventually lead to the development of more targeted anti-anxiety drugs, Anderson said. Neuroscientists don't have the full story yet, but what they've learned so far is giving them confidence that the circuitry of fear will someday be untangled.

House Democrats have signaled that they're willing to go along with the Senate's outline for NASA's future, at least for the time being — and that can be seen as a victory for commercialized space travel.

Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., chairman of the House Committee on Science and Technology, said today in a statement that he expected the Senate version of a NASA reauthorization bill to come up for a vote in the full House on Wednesday. But that's not necessarily the end of a congressional tussle over NASA's spending plan:

"It has become clear that there is not time remaining to pass a Compromise bill through the House and the Senate. For the sake of providing certainty, stability, and clarity to the NASA workforce and larger space community, I felt it was better to consider a flawed bill than no bill at all as the new fiscal year begins. I will continue to advocate to the Appropriators for the provisions in the Compromise language."

It's still unlikely that the companion appropriations bill for NASA spending will be approved before Congress adjourns for its pre-election break at the end of this week, and Gordon suggests that some tweaks might still be made in that bill. But it sounds as if the Senate's vision for NASA — including more money for commercial crew transport services — could become law. That's what the advocates of space commercialization have been hoping for. Over the past few weeks, those advocates made a strong pitch for the House to ditch its reauthorization bill and take up the Senate's instead.

Gordon said he still had a "number of concerns" about the Senate bill, including the provisions about commercialization:

• "The Senate bill includes an unfunded mandate to keep the Shuttle program going through the remainder of FY 2011, even after the Shuttle is retired, at a cost of $500 million or more without clarifying where the funds will come from, all but ensuring that other important NASA programs will be cannibalized.

• "I am concerned that the Senate bill is overly prescriptive for the design of the follow-on rocket. The end result is the Senate trying to design a rocket for NASA, while being silent on the safety of the vehicle. The compromise language lets NASA determine the best approach in the design of the follow-on human spaceflight and exploration program.

• "The compromise language ensures access to the ISS and minimizes the human spaceflight transportation ‘gap’ that will exist after the Shuttle is retired. The Senate bill does not provide a timetable for a government backup capability, which could make NASA’s access to space completely dependent on commercial providers. I am hopeful the commercial providers will be successful, but, whereas they have missed contractual cargo milestones thus far, I am wary of being completely dependent on them, because if they fail, we will be dependent on the Russians for longer than absolutely necessary."

It's true that commercial launch providers, including SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, are behind schedule. But the proponents of commercialization argue that the development of a new NASA rocket would take longer — a view supported by the conclusions of an independent panel that reviewed the space agency's development plans last year.

In a statement issued today, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation urged the House to pass the Senate bill immediately. The federation's president, Bretton Alexander, said quick action would reduce the uncertainty over NASA's future direction:

"With the new fiscal year about to begin, space industry businesses and individual space workers can't afford more months of ongoing uncertainty — they need to know what future to plan for. A protracted stalemate over the NASA authorization bill would likely cause continued layoffs and would make it more difficult for commercial companies to ramp up hiring. We cannot afford to delay the creation of new jobs, and the Senate bill, which we support, could be on the president’s desk before the end of the week. The only way to avoid months of limbo for NASA is for a prompt resolution by Congress before the new fiscal year begins, and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation urges a speedy resolution to this process."

The Space Access Society said House passage of the Senate version "is no sure thing," especially because the rules will probably require passage by a two-thirds vote. There's still time to let your lawmaker know what you think, via phone (202-224-3121) or e-mail.

NASA’s moon orbiter is sending back shots of lunar curiosities that look even curiouser when you see them through 3-D glasses.

One of the most curious sights is the natural bridge you're looking at right here, near King Crater on the moon's far side. The two-dimensional view may look like nothing more than two black spots at the left edge of the frame — but through red-blue specs, it's clear that a wedge of sunlight is shining down to the bottom of the chasm below.

The bridge is about 20 meters (65 feet) across and roughly 8 meters (25 feet) wide. Based on interpretations of the slanting shadows, the depth of the chasm ranges from 6 to 12 meters (20 to 40 feet).

This is just one of several natural bridges spotted by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter during its survey of the moon. The team in charge of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera says in its image advisory that such features are formed when material from  the surface falls into an empty lava tube beneath. The case of King Crater is even more unusual in that the bridge is not formed out of volcanic basalt, but rather out of rock that was melted by an ancient impact.

Paul Spudis, a senior staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, discusses the bridge's origins on his "Once and Future Moon" blog and notes that the formation is transitory, just as natural bridges on Earth are.

"Eventually, both surface grinding and shaking during impacts will cause the collapse of this feature," Spudis writes. "However, this won't happen anytime soon, so you have several tens of millions of years to see it."

We can see it on our computers in 3-D thanks to Nathanial Burton-Bradford, a British astronomy enthusiast who has created red-blue pictures of several lunar bridges as well as other sights, including a space shuttle launch. If you don't yet possess 3-D glasses, consult this NASA guide to purchasing spectacles or making your own. Party stores typically sell the specs as well, and I'll occasionally send out a batch myself. (Right now I'm fresh out ... but watch this space in case I get a new supply.)

David Imbaratto / Stellar Exploration for Planetary Society

Boulders on an otherwise smooth floor are seen on the Mare Tranquillitatis pit crater on the moon's surface in an image from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The pit opening is about 100 meters wide, leading to a cavity more than 100 meters deep.

The bridges of the moon merely highlight the fact that extraterrestrial geology can get pretty bizarre: We've already talked about the moon's deep, hollow pits — which could provide a haven for future settlers. Last week, the LROC team released stunningly sharp images of several pits, which were formed through a process similar to the one that created the natural bridges. In each case, surface material has collapsed to reveal a preserved lava tube below. The depths of these pits range from 34 meters (110 feet) to more than 100 meters (330 feet).

Red-Blue Planet ... and more
When you turn to Mars, the 3-D views can get even more bizarre. The website for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's high-resolution camera offers more than 1,600 3-D images, including creepy craters, snaky valleys and fields of cratered cones. The European Space Agency's Mars Express, meanwhile, has sent back 3-D views of the "Face on Mars" and other Cydonian sights.

For a 2-D version of that crazy Martian cone field, check out the latest installment of Month in Space Pictures, a slideshow that features the past month's coolest imagery relating to outer space. Follow the links below for bigger versions of each picture featured in our September roundup, suitable for printing out or putting on your computer desktop:

• Martian sea of sand, as seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
• Dance of the galaxies, presented by the European Southern Observatory
• Crazy cones on Mars, from MRO (and mentioned above)
• Creating Curiosity, documented by JPL as well as the big picture from AP
• Igor the Terrible, seen from the International Space Station
• Dodging a bullet, from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and from EPA
• Bull's-eye on the moon, from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
• Two flashes from Jupiter, passed along by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Spiral in space, spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope
• Bootprint on Mars, from Mars Express (and highlighted here last month)
• NASA's six-legged robot, from the Desert RATS team and Getty Images
• Practicing for Mars, also from the Desert RATS
• Ice sculptures in space, from the Hubble Space Telescope
• New York at night, sent down via Twitpic by NASA's Doug Wheelock
• Shooting a laser at the sky, from the European Southern Observatory
• Thar she blows, a view of a rocket motor test from NASA and ATK
• The road ahead, from JPL's Mars rover team
• Saturn and its children, from the Cassini imaging team
• Moon and Earthglow, from the International Space Station
• Twilight of the shuttle, captured by Reuters at Kennedy Space Center

... And hot off the press:

• Conjoined moons: Two of Saturn's moons, Dione and Rhea, appear to get it on in a Cassini image.
• Dark cocoons of starbirth: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captures a beautiful view of "coreshine."

Those last two pictures are sure to get some consideration for October's "Month in Space" roundup, so stay tuned. 

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Repeated tests have shown that the theory of relativity affects satellites orbiting Earth as well as galaxy clusters billions of light-years away ... but does it affect you when you're going up the stairs? Experiments reported in this week's issue of the journal Science say yes.

According to general relativity, someone who lives on the second floor of an apartment building should age ever so slightly faster than the neighbor downstairs — because Earth's gravitational force is ever so slightly weaker. Wristwatches should run faster as well. The experiments conducted by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., show that it really, really works that way.

But don't move to the basement just to extend your life: Over the course of 80 years, that slight difference would add up to far less than a millionth of a second. The NIST researchers found that a height difference of about one foot (33 centimeters) resulted in a time variance of roughly a billionth of a second per year. That time difference is too small for humans or even most clocks to measure directly — however, even trillionths of a second could make a difference in future scientific applications.

After all, readings from the Global Positioning System's satellites have to be adjusted to compensate for relativity's effects. Twice. Because of general relativity, the satellites' nanosecond-accurate clocks would speed up relative to the ground by 45 microseconds per day. But because of special relativity, which applies to objects moving in different frames of reference, there would be a slowdown effect for the clocks in motion aboard the satellites, to the effect of 7 microseconds per day.

The bottom line, as explained by Ohio State University astronomer Richard Pogge on this Web page, is that there would be a net speedup of 38 microseconds a day. Because the GPS satellites determine location by making highly precise measurements of radio transmission times, they'd quickly become totally useless if they couldn't compensate for the speedup. That's why the atomic clocks and the onboard computers have been tweaked to take relativity into account.

You can learn more about relativity and its applications to the real world by clicking through our interactive graphic, "Putting Einstein to the Test," which also explains Albert Einstein's famous "twin paradox." That's the story about one brother who gets on a rocket ship and travels through space for decades at a velocity close to the speed of light. When he returns to Earth, he has aged markedly less than his doddering twin brother. The time difference is due to special relativity — that is, the fact that the jetsetting brother was in relativistic motion as seen from Earth's reference frame.

This old-school calculator from PBS' "Nova" program lets you turn the dials and see how relativity would affect the twins' ages (Shockwave plug-in required).

The NIST researchers used their aluminum-ion clocks to check on the truth of the twin paradox as well. Here's how they did it: Usually, the ions in the atomic clocks are motionless during measurements. But the researchers fiddled with the ion in one clock so that it gyrated back and forth at speeds equivalent to going several meters (yards) per second. The clock with the moving ion ticked more slowly than the clock with the stationary ion, just like the heart of the traveling twin.

It's nice to know that Einstein was right again, but the clock research could have practical as well as theoretical applications: NIST is planning to improve the precision of its aluminum-ion clocks so that they can detect how time flows differently on the scale of a centimeter (half an inch) in height difference. That could open the way for the use of atomic-clock networks as "inland tidal gauges." NIST says such networks could record the ups and downs in Earth's gravity field created by geological shifts. And that information, in turn, could provide a better understanding of how seismic events arise.

"If you have plate movement that's a redistribution of mass contributing to Earth's gravity field, we should be able to see that with a network of clocks connected by optical fibers," NIST's James Chin-Wen Chou, the principal author of the Science paper, told me today.

Beyond relativity, more precise clocks could lead to more accurate GPS systems — for example, systems that could tell a robot-driven automobile not to veer so close to the highway lane divider. "With higher accuracy, we might be able to get higher resolution in our receiver," Chou said.

More about relativity and clocks:

• Einstein's revolution enters second century
• Black hole puts a dent in space-time continuum
• Stephen Hawking says time travel may be possible
• Clarifying Einstein's rules of the road for relativity
• Satellite maps our planet's gravity field
• Ultra-precise atomic clocks will redefine time
• NIST: Aluminum-ion device is world's most precise clock
• Inside Science: Time moves faster upstairs

The authors of the Science paper, "Optical Clocks and Relativity," include Chou as well as D.B. Hume, T. Rosenband and D.J. Wineland of NIST's Time and Frequency Division. The research was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research. This report was last updated at 6:30 p.m. ET, give or take a few nanoseconds.

Check out my other postings on Cosmic Log, and connect with me via Twitter (@b0yle) or Facebook.

A survey of 21,000 people around the world, presented today by the journal Nature and Scientific American, suggests that Americans overwhelmingly trust what scientists have to say about the origins of the universe. The results also suggest that survey respondents from Japan and China are significantly less trusting of scientists, and far more doubtful about the idea that evolution explains the forms and variety of life.

So does that mean America is more in step with science than Japan and China are? Mmm, not really. The reason for that has largely to do with scientific vs. unscientific sampling.

This particular survey is based on responses to an online questionnaire by the readers of Scientific American and its translated editions in 18 countries. That's a tip-off that the sampling is not truly representative of the countries' populations, but merely of folks who are predisposed enough toward science to buy the magazine and answer the questions. (Scientific American and Nature are both owned by Macmillan Publishers.)

It may sound impressive to say that 21,000 people participated in the survey, but the participation varied dramatically from country to country. As noted in this Nature News article, thousands upon thousands from the United States and Europe, while just 269 people from China did so.

These same factors — self-selection and unevenly distributed sampling — are why we don't put too much stock in the surveys offered on our own website. Sure, it's entertaining to find out what more than 11,000 people think about the new judges on "American Idol," but when it comes to scientific sampling, the results are about as shaky as Sanjaya's singing.

The question about evolution shows how far off self-selected surveys can get: The Nature/Scientific American survey indicates that only 12.9 percent of the 4,779 American respondents had any doubt about the power of evolutionary theory, including natural selection, to explain the forms and variety of life. In contrast, 34.9 percent of the 1,195 respondents in Japan and 48.7 percent of the 269 respondents in China indicated that they had doubts.

More rigorous surveys tell a dramatically different story: Last year, for example, the Gallup Poll conducted telephone interviews with 1,018 American adults nationwide and found that 39 percent believed in the theory of evolution, 25 percent did not, and 36 percent voiced no opinion either way.

An analysis of surveys from 34 countries, published in 2006 by the journal Science (Nature's competition), shows even more starkly where America stands: The U.S. numbers revealed that 40 percent of respondents thought evolutionary theory was probably or definitely false, compared with 36 percent who thought it was probably or definitely true. Japan's acceptance of evolution, in contrast, was put at 78 percent. The only country that fared worse than the United States in the Science paper's 34-country comparison was Turkey. (China was not on the list.)

Perhaps the most that could be concluded from the Scientific American survey is that the folks buying the magazine (or a foreign-language edition) have a mind-set that's different from the population at large. That's of interest to the editors and advertisers, but maybe not so much to policymakers or policy analysts. As for the differences between countries, cultural and political factors may play a role in how particular questions were answered. (For example, Chinese readers might be more inclined to say that scientists should stay out of politics, whether they truly think so or not.)

The reports published online today by Nature as well as Scientific American go into more depth about attitudes toward science-related issues including stem cell research and climate change as well as evolution education. To my mind, last year's survey conducted by the Pew Research for the People and the Press added much more to the debate over America's science gap than this latest one will. But what do I know? The Scientific American survey, like last year's Pew report, shows conclusively that journalists are far less trusted than scientists.

More on public attitudes toward science:

• NSF: Why 'scientific consensus' fails to persuade
• One-third of Americans back ban on synthetic biology
• Scientists say stem cell uncertainty is delaying research
• Previously in Nature: Science scorned 

You can trust me to let you have your say in the comment box below — as long as you keep it classy. Check out my other postings on Cosmic Log, and connect with me via Twitter (@b0yle) or Facebook.

• Inside Science: 'Fringe' plays with parallel universes
• io9: Six scientists point to where sci-fi got it right
• The Star: Student says he flew an ornithopter
• Bad Astronomy: Pluto at the top of the key

Comets aren't the only solar system objects that can grow a tail: NASA's STEREO mission has spotted a tail of faintly glowing gas stretching out from the planet Mercury. Now scientists are trying to figure out exactly what's in that thing.

Astronomers have known for some time that Mercury has some characteristics in common with comets, even though the composition of the closest-in planet is dramatically different from that of the dirty snowballs that ramble through our solar system's icy outer reaches. Mercury is surrounded by an exceedingly thin "coma" of gas, and radiation from the sun pushes a tail of atoms from that coma outward for more than a million miles.

The two satellites involved in the STEREO mission are designed to observe the sun's escaping atmosphere from positions in Earth's orbit that track ahead and behind our planet. Ian Musgrave, an Australian medical researcher who's also interested in astronomy, happened to be sifting through the online database of STEREO's imagery — and noticed that those images also recorded emissions from the Mercurial tail.

When Musgrave pointed that out to scientists at Boston University's Center for Space Physics, the professionals were intrigued. "Now we have found several cases, with detections by both STEREO satellites," Jeffrey Baumgardner, senior research associate at the center, said today in a news release that was timed to coincide with a presentation at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome.

The tale isn't exactly new: A couple of years ago, Boston University astronomers used ground observations to map the tail's extent to a distance of 1.5 million miles. For that project, they were guided by the bright light emitted from sodium atoms. But even then, they knew that sodium was not the major component of the tail material. STEREO's readings confirm that other elements are involved.

"What makes the STEREO detections so interesting is that the brightness levels seem to be too strong to be from sodium," said BU graduate student Carl Schmidt, lead author of the paper presented at the meeting in Rome.

Now astronomers are trying to sort out all the possibilities for the chemical composition of the tail — a job that will require further refinement of the STEREO observations. And something tells me that Schmidt right in there with the best of them.

"The combination of our ground-based data with the new STEREO data is an exciting way to learn as much as possible about the sources and fates of gases escaping from Mercury," said Michael Mendillo, director of Boston University's Imaging Science Lab. "This is precisely the type of research that makes for a terrific Ph.D. dissertation."

More tales about tails:

• Watch a video of the STEREO tail observations
• See an animated image of Mercury's tail
• Pluto probe surfs Jupiter's magnetic tail
• Scorched alien planet has a tail, too
• Tail stretches out from speeding star
• Galaxy sports a vast tail

Check out other postings on Cosmic Log ... and connect with Alan via Twitter (@b0yle) or Facebook. To learn more about planetary puzzles, and particularly about the dwarf planet Pluto, pick up Alan's book, "The Case for Pluto."

In response to a call to seek out possibly extinct amphibian species, conservationists have rediscovered two frog species and one type of salamander that had been on the list of the missing.

Conservation International and the IUCN Amphibian Specialist Group kicked off the search last month, and since then scientists have fanned out to look for scores of missing amphibians on the list. In a statement released today, Conservation International said the rediscovery of three species — decades after they went missing and were presumed extinct — serves as a "cause for celebration" as well as a reminder of the "shocking decline in the world's amphibian species in recent decades, with more than a third of all amphibians threatened with extinction."

The endangered status of frogs, toads and salamanders is thought to be due to a variety of causes, including fungal infections, pollution, loss of habitat and climate change.

Many of the species being sought make their homes in hard-to-get-to places, which adds to the difficulty of the quest. That's certainly the case for the three species that have been rediscovered:

N’Goran Kouame / Conservation International

Hyperolius nimbae was rediscovered in Ivory Coast.

• Mount Nimba Reed Frog (Hyperolius nimbae), from Ivory Coast, was last seen in 1967. "Small and well-camouflaged brown frog rediscovered by local scientist N’Goran Kouame from the University of Abobo-Adjame." The find was made "in a swampy field in Danipleu, an Ivorian village near the Liberia border."

• Omaniundu Reed Frog (Hyperolius sankuruensis), from Democratic Republic of Congo, was last seen in 1979. "Beautiful frog with bright green — almost fluorescent-looking — spots on a dark brown background. Rediscovered by Jos Kielgast from The Natural History Museum of Denmark." Here's more about Kielgast's hunt for the frog: "He discovered it while night searching areas of inundated primary forest along a tributary of the Congo River. He heard its call, and searched for the frog for over an hour. They are only active late in the night, and their call is short and infrequent. In the daytime they rest in an extremely cryptic color phase, making them nearly impossible to find. Initially Kielgast was led to believe that it was a new species by established experts but then later figured out that it was in fact H. sankuruensis."

Sean Rovito / Conservation International

Chiropterotriton mosaueri was found in a Mexican cave.

• Cave Splayfoot Salamander (Chiropterotriton mousaueri) was found in Mexico's Hidalgo province. "Not seen since the discovery of a single individual in 1941. Pink-footed, brown salamander that is believed to live underground in cave systems. Several were found by scientist Sean Rovito from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, in a cave system which is only accessible by abseiling down a large pothole." Rovito's quest was arduous: "The locals took him to a cave, used as a source of water for the community. Just before sundown Rovito lowered himself into the cave with very low expectations of finding the species. Shortly after he spotted a large adult salamander with a long tail atop a rock on the cave floor. He knew it looked different from any other species he had seen."

"These are fantastic finds and could have important implications for people as well as for amphibians." Conservation International's Robin Moore said in today's statement. "We don’t know whether study of these animals could provide new medicinal compounds — as other amphibians have, and at least one of these animals lives in an area that is important to protect as it provides drinking water to urban areas. But these rediscovered animals are the lucky ones — many other species we have been looking for have probably gone for good."

Despite the odds, the search goes on, focusing on the world's top 10 "lost" amphibians. More rediscoveries are expected to be announced at the Convention on Biological Diversity, scheduled to take place next month in Nagoya, Japan. Check out the "Search for Lost Frogs" website for more about the quest — and while you're clicking around, browse through these archived reports about species lost and found:

• Amphibians wanted ... alive
• Deep-sea creatures of the Coral Sea
• The top 10 new species from 2009
• Beautiful biodiversity in Brazil
• New Guinea's 'Lost World' revisited
• Indonesia's 'Garden of Eden'
• Papua New Guinea's new species
• Marine marvels from Papua New Guinea
• Biological treasures from Borneo
• Celebrities of the Celebes Sea
• 12 froggy finds from India
• Fantastic frogs from Colombia
• Aliens lurk in Antarctic depths
• The strange species of Suriname
• Vulnerable new species in Brazil
• Discoveries from Vietnam's 'Green Corridor'
• Endangered species of the Mekong Delta
• New species from Australia's coral reefs
• Thousands of new species in ocean's depths
• Hundreds of new species amid the Himalayas
• New species found Down Under .. underground
• Eight 'extinct' species found alive and kicking  

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

• Cracked: The animal kingdom's 9 most mind-blowing disguises
• New Scientist: Large Hadron Collider spies hints of infant universe
• Atlas Obscura: The Crystal Maiden in a Belize cave (via Daily Grail)
• ONN: NASA honeyfuggling America with nonsense space dreams

Experts are still analyzing their newly made 3-D maps of the Titanic shipwreck site, but they can already see that the great ship’s breakup was messier than most folks, including "Titanic" film director James Cameron, may have thought. “It wasn’t quite the way Cameron showed it in his movie,” expedition co-leader Dave Gallo observed.

In a post-expedition interview, Gallo said the fates of the 1,517 people who died in the 1912 tragedy were never far from his mind — especially when a doll’s arm turned up on the HD video from the seafloor.

Gallo and his colleagues spent weeks sailing back and forth between the research vessel Jean Charcot's port in St. John's, Newfoundland, and the North Atlantic spot where the Titanic went down. The expedition was interrupted by two hurricanes, Danielle and Igor, leading to last week's earlier-than-expected end.

Gallo, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, said he considered this the first purely scientific mission to the Titanic since the original survey of the site in the mid-1980s. Numerous voyages have been conducted in the intervening quarter-century, but "all of those have had science as a sidebar," Gallo told me.

"The primary mission of most of those was either recovery of artifacts, by RMS Titanic, or adventure tourism, with Deep Ocean Adventures," he observed. "Sure, they all came back with exciting images, but was that science? No."

Chris Davino, president of RMS Titanic Inc., said the past month's expedition was aimed at bringing together experts in deep-sea diving and salvaging with the scientific experts from Woods Hole, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and elsewhere. "It resonated more with me when I was out there that what we did will have real implications for deep-sea exploration and wreck-site archaeology," Davino told me. "The tools that these experts brought to bear are game-changing."

The expedition's primary aim was to use robotic vehicles equipped with cameras and sonar devices to create unprecedented maps of the Titanic. The survey covereed a 3-by-5-mile area — with high-resolution, 3-D mapping of the central 1-by-1.5-mile box. "We achieved our primary objective," Davino said.

So far, the biggest surprise has to do with how spread out the debris was. Gallo said he expected to see one or two well-defined debris trails, but "the breakup was a little more complicated than that." Unlike the largely intact (and iconic) bow section, the back section of the ship was "absolutely mangled by its trip to the bottom," he said.

"It's almost like you cracked it open and spilled everything out," Gallo said. "You see pieces of the engine, boilers ... where we thought there might be one or two big things, we found five. ... When we start to piece together how Titanic actually made its way to the bottom, those pieces will be key."

The maps now being created will precisely pinpoint all those big pieces, so that future researchers (including Gallo, if he has his way) will be able to gauge how the site has changed over time. Gallo noted that the wreck was constantly pounded by deep-ocean currents that were stronger than the experts expected. "I don't know if 'sandblasted' is the word, but it's certainly being buffeted," he said.

The 3-D survey mapped huge dunes of sediment as well as giant boulders that were "more than likely carried by icebergs," Gallo said. Could one of those boulders have come from the iceberg that Titanic ran into? There's no way of knowing.

Gallo thought the survey would turn up many more personal effects than it did — but there were still ample reminders of the tragedy that occurred 98 years ago on that "night to remember." Like that porcelain arm from a child's doll, or a bowler hat sitting by itself on the seafloor.

"Just when you feel like you're lulled into this quiet world, you get this jolt from Neptune that this is also the resting place of this wonderful ship. ... At bottom, it is a gravesite," Gallo said.

RMS Titanic Inc. has exclusive rights to salvage the Titanic, and it has incorporated thousands of recovered artifacts into traveling exhibitions to turn a profit — but not without controversy along the way. During this expedition, not a single artifact was brought up, although the more than 50 hours' worth of high-definition 3-D video will no doubt be used in commercial as well as scientific applications. "Just seeing the bow in 3-D provided new perspective," Davino told me. "You literally felt as if you were walking on the deck of the ship."

Davino said he and his colleagues haven't yet decided whether or not to retrieve artifacts during future expeditions.

"I'm open-minded to the possibilities on both sides," he told me. "It has to really start with an understanding of what the wreck site holds today — what its condition is likely to be over the course of time, how best to preserve Titanic's legacy. Should it remain in its current form, a sanctuary? Certain people — other than me, people from the government and other sectors that have been opposed to salvage operations generally — suggest that it might be appropriate to target the mailroom, or some personal effects, to bring up more about the passengers, to tell more about their stories if those items are going to be otherwise lost."

What do you think? Should the Titanic be left alone, to rust away into nothingness during the years and decades to come? Or should more of its remains be gathered up, in cooperation with scientists and historians? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about the Titanic:

• Postings about the Titanic expedition on Cosmic Log
• Reports from NBC News' Kerry Sanders on World Blog
• Expedition Titanic website 
• RMS Titanic's Facebook page, Twitter feed, Flickr site, YouTube channel
• Blog postings from the Waitt Institute

Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."