• Breaking Orbit: Carnival of Space 170
• Daily Grail: 'Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife'
• Nat'l Geographic: Is another Deepwater disaster inevitable?
• The Guardian: Pope's astronomer ready to baptize an alien

The moon is getting its figurative "day in the sun" this weekend during a global celebration of lunar looks, and the great thing is that you don't need to be a hotshot astronomer to join in.

More than 275 events in 40 countries are planned on Saturday during International Observe the Moon Night, with most of those events aimed at casual observers who usually wouldn't give the moon a second look.

Our only natural satellite tends to get noticed only during unusual astronomical events — for example, when it blots out the sun during a solar eclipse (such as the one that occurred July 11), or when Earth's shadow creates a total lunar eclipse (as it will on Dec. 22). In contrast, this Moon Night may seem as if it's occurring when the moon is in a ho-hum phase — not a brilliant full moon, nor a slender, svelte crescent, but a couple of days after its first-quarter phase. Well, it turns out that right now is the best observing opportunity in the moon's 29-day cycle.

Space.com's skywatching columnist, Joe Rao, points out that the full moon is so bright that details on the surface tend to look flat and washed-out. Just after first quarter is a much better time for seeing the moon in post-sunset skies, and for picking out the shadowed mountains and craters in sharp relief. What's more, nearly all of the moon's best features are illuminated.

So what's there to see? The highlights include:

• Copernicus Crater: This prominent crater toward the upper left of the lunar disk spans 60 miles and is a mere 800 million years old. Huge rays of lighter material emanate from the impact site, which is surrounded by the ancient Carpathian Mountains.
• Tycho Crater: 50-mile-wide Tycho is thought to be even younger than Copernicus — perhaps 100 million years old — and is surrounded by a similar burst of rays. The impact that created Tycho caused material to splash up and create a characteristic central peak.
• Seas on the moon: The lunar "maria," or seas, are smooth stretches of the lunar surface filled with volcanic lava from a long-ago phase of lunar geology. The Sea of Tranquility is one of the best-known maria because it was the site of the historic Apollo 11 landing in 1969. Just last year, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sent back pictures showing traces of the landing site.
• The terminator: The line between light and dark is the best place to look for dramatically lit craters and mountain ranges, particularly if you're looking through binoculars or a telescope. Among Saturday night's must-see craters along the terminator are Schiller, Gassendi and Kepler.

All these sights are described on a 10-megabyte moon map available from the Observe the Moon website.

This weekend's event coincide with a milestone for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. On Thursday, the $500 million mission officially wrapped up a survey aimed at scouting out landing sites for future probes and turned its full attention to scientific investigation. This all-science phase should last another two to four years, NASA said.

Moon Night has also served as an opportunity to boost a citizen-science project called Moon Zoo. The moon-cataloging project's organizers asked participants to classify geological features on 20,000 images by Sunday — adding an area twice the size of Chicago to the Moon Zoo database. It turned out that the target was reached a couple of days early. At last check, more than 32,000 images had been classified since Wednesday.

"When we launched this challenge we had no idea how overwhelming and enthusiastic the response would be," the organizers reported on their Moonometer page. Which goes to show that the moon may not be ho-hum after all.

More about the moon:

• Slideshow: 50 years of moon shots
• Space.com: Global swoon over the moon
• Sky & Telescope: Go ahead and observe the moon
• Universe Today: Saturday is Observe the Moon Night 
• Red Orbit: NASA serves as host for Moon Night events

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Space-watchers say China is still doing whatever it started doing last month with two close-flying satellites in orbit. And that's keeping outside observers worried about the fact that Chinese officials have not yet actually said what it is they're doing.

The maneuvers, which appear to involve rendezvous operations between the SJ-06F satellite and the more recently launched SJ-12 craft, could amount to practice for space station dockings or coordinated satellite observations from orbit. Few folks would have a problem with that. But they also could be aimed at developing the expertise for lurking near someone else's satellte and eavesdropping, or even knocking that satellite out of commission in the event of a crisis. That's the worrisome part.

The formation-flying exercise began in mid-August, and stirred up a significant fuss a couple of weeks ago when some observers speculated that the SJ-12 might have given a nudge to the SJ-06F. China says the satellites in the SJ series (SJ stands for "Shijian," or "Practice" in Chinese) are designed for scientific purposes, but space experts suspect that they actually are being used for military surveillance.

Amateur satellite observers around the world say the two spacecraft are still flying close together, a month after the maneuvers began. The U.S. military's tracking data have shown that they're separated by about half a mile (1 kilometer), NBC News analyst James Oberg noted in an e-mail. "This close-in relative position requires positive control — thruster firings — and onboard navigation to determine how to direct the steering jets," Oberg said.

Back in August, the U.S. Strategic Command confirmed that there were "two satellites in close proximity with each other" but said it could not confirm "if they have made physical contact."

Now Oberg passes along a new Defense Department statement, which says both less and more at the same time:

"Orbital analysts at the Joint Space Operations Center are still tracking both objects and continue to monitor them for conjunctions as part of their routine conjunction screenings for all active satellites. Providing specific details on position/proximity would move into classified and/or sensitive information."

The statement signals that the Pentagon will no longer be discussing the satellites or whether there's a chance that they could collide with each other (in a conjunction). Such details are now considered "classified and/or sensitive information."

If there are any future conflicts between technologically advanced nations, one of the battlefronts could well be in outer space. China sparked a debate over the potential for "space war" in 2007 when it sent up a missile to knock down one of its own satellites in 2007. Beijing didn't confirm the existence of that space maneuver until nearly two weeks after it occurred. A year later, it was China's turn to express concern when the Pentagon conducted its own satellite-downing operation.

The United States and Russia have been conducting orbital rendezvous for decades. Without that capability, you can't build a space station or walk on the moon. Few people would begrudge the Chinese the opportunity to develop a similar capability for their own space program. The only problem is that there's been no official information about the satellite maneuvers from Beijing (although the maneuvers have been the subject of unofficial debate inside as well as outside China).

"So far, still no official or even off-the-record disclosure from Beijing that this new experiment is in progress for a month," Oberg said. "That lack of official information can legitimately be considered 'information' about the mission goals and their probable military purposes."

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The Boeing Co. and Virginia-based Space Adventures today unveiled the outlines of their deal to market passenger seats on orbital spaceships. The deal, which was telegraphed in advance last week, would broaden Space Adventures' clientele from millionaire "citizen explorers" to non-governmental agencies and corporations, and even federal agencies other than NASA.

Boeing's vice president and general manager for space exploration, Brewster Shaw, said the deal was in line with his company's heritage. "One of our stated goals in our division is to become the Boeing commercial aircraft of human space commerce," he told journalists during a teleconference conducted from Boeing's offices in Arlington, Va.

The deal calls for flying paying passengers alongside NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and eventually other, as-yet-unspecified destinations as well. But neither Boeing nor Space Adventures were ready to answer the bottom-line question: How much will a ticket cost? The best they could say was that the price would be competitive with the cost of a ride on a station-bound Russian Soyuz craft, which is currently pegged at $40 million a seat.

Boeing's commercial space capsule, known as the CST-100, is expected to be operational by 2015. The craft's main purpose will be to service the space station after the space shuttle fleet is retired. Boeing expects there to be open seats on the CST-100 space taxis — which should be able to seat seven, albeit under tighter conditions than those that exist on the shuttle. Space Adventures will be given the task of marketing those extra seats to non-NASA customers once the capsule comes online.

In the past, Space Adventures has arranged with the Russians to fly seven millionaires to the space station — most recently, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, almost a year ago. The price tag for such flights has been escalating, from an initial ballpark figure of $20 million to Laliberte's $40 million fare. But with the expansion of the station's capacity and the phase-out of the shuttles, NASA needs more seats for its own astronauts. The result is that the supply of seats available for paying passengers on Russia's Soyuz craft has dried up, at least for the next couple of years.

The deal with Boeing provides Space Adventures with another potential supplier, which will provide more competition in the orbital transport market. If the Russians have seats available to sell in the years ahead, there'll be competitive pressure to keep the price low. And if you have any hope of going into outer space yourself, competition is a good thing: That's the only way to bring the cost of a trip to orbit not only within the budget of a millionaire, but within the budget of less welll-heeled travelers as well.

Competition in the spaceflight market
During today's teleconference, executives from Boeing as well as Space Adventures said it was too early to talk about pricing.

"Certainly a lot of that comes from the launch vehicle choice," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures' chairman. "There are a lot of other factors that play into it, including what the destination is, what the experience is. We'll see. I think it's definitely fair to say that it will be competitive with what's out there, and I just think we'll have to leave it at that for now."

Another source of competition could be Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace, which has already partnered with Boeing and aims to launch commercial space stations starting in 2014 or 2015. That would provide an alternate destination for space travelers and researchers. Anderson said his company had no arrangement with Bigelow but added that he would "love to work" with the company. He also hinted that Space Adventures might market passenger seats for other space destinations but declined to be more specific.

"The price, when it's in the right range, should be less emphasized than things like the safety and the reliability of the team providing the experience," Anderson said. "Other factors turn out to be a lot more important at this stage of the game."

NASA paying out $18 million ... and more to come?
Boeing is one of several companies that is receiving money from NASA for the development of orbital space systems. So far, NASA has committed $18 million to the project, and about two-thirds of that money has been paid out, Elbon said. Boeing has built a structural test article for the CST-100 and has begun a variety of tests.

The current plan calls for the space taxis to be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida — perhaps atop the United Launch Alliance's Atlas 5 or Delta 4, or SpaceX's Falcon 9. When they head back to Earth from the space station, the airbag-cushioned taxis would land at White Sands in New Mexico, Edwards Air Force Base in California or some other similarly out-of-the-way location. Boeing's specifications call for each taxi to be used at least 10 times, with a turnaround time of 6 months between flights, Elbon said.

Elbon said NASA's continued financial support is an essential piece of Boeing's business plan. "We wouldn't be able to close the business case" if NASA discontinued its funding, he said. The 2015 start of operations is based on the assumption that funding would continue at a tempo that matched the projected development schedule.

He said Boeing has the equivalent of 80 to 100 full-time employees working on the project.

"We are hopeful that Congress puts a budget in place that will allow a follow-on Space Act Agreement to pick up as early as Nov. 1, so that we can maintain the team that we have and keep progress on schedule," Elbon told me. "The dates that I gave you are a function of that happening. If that doesn't happen — if there's a continuing resolution, for example, that doesn't enable commercial crew [development] to continue — that will create a gap in our development program."

The deal is also based on the assumption that Boeing will actually end up providing crew transport services to NASA in the post-shuttle era, which is not a foregone conclusion.

Despite that uncertainty, Anderson doesn't intend to wait until 2015 to start selling seats.

"Regarding when Space Adventures is able to begin marketing seats under the agreement, the answer is now," he told me, "with the caveat that marketing initially really involves discussions with serious parties and entities. We need to flesh out things like pricing and schedule. And obviously we are awaiting clarity with regard to the level of commercial crew funding."

As it happens, a fight is brewing on Capitol Hill over NASA funding: The House version of an authorization bill would allocate less money than the Senate version for space commercialization — and if an agreement isn't reached within the next few weeks, Boeing and other spaceship developers may be left hanging in legislative limbo.

Elbon was asked whether today's deal was timed to influence Congress. "It wasn't a conscious effort to announce this week," he replied, "although maybe it'll turn out to be a fortuitious situation."

I'd love to hear what you have to say about the situation for future spaceflight, as it's shaping up for next month as well as for 2015 and beyond. Feel free to leave your comments below. For the record, here's the full news release, which you can also find on Boeing's website:

"The Boeing Company [NYSE: BA] and Space Adventures, Ltd. have established a memorandum of agreement regarding the marketing of anticipated transportation services to destinations in low Earth orbit (LEO) on Boeing commercial crew spacecraft.

"Under this agreement, Space Adventures will market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft to LEO. Potential customers for excess seating capacity include private individuals, companies, non-governmental organizations, and U.S. federal agencies other than NASA. Boeing plans to use the CST-100 to provide crew transportation to the International Space Station (ISS) and future commercial LEO platforms.

"'By combining our talents, we can better offer safe, affordable transportation to commercial spaceflight customers,' said Brewster Shaw, vice president and general manager of Boeing's Space Exploration division. 'To date, all commercial flights for private spaceflight participants to the ISS have been contracted by Space Adventures. If NASA and the international partners continue to accommodate commercial spaceflight participants on ISS, this agreement will be in concert with the NASA administrator's stated intent to promote space commerce in low Earth orbit.'

"Boeing and Space Adventures have not yet set a price per seat for spaceflight participants, but will do so when full-scale development is under way. Boeing continues to advance its design for the CST-100 spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Crew Development Space Act Agreement. The spacecraft, which can carry seven people, will be able to fly on multiple launch vehicles and is expected to be operational by 2015.

"'We are excited about the potential to offer flights on Boeing's spacecraft,' said Eric Anderson, co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures. 'With our customer experience and Boeing's heritage in human spaceflight, our goal is not only to benefit the individuals who fly to space, but also to help make the resources of space available to the commercial sector by bringing the value from space back to Earth.'

"Space Adventures has successfully contracted and flown seven spaceflight participants on eight missions to the International Space Station.

"Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna, Va., is the only company that provides orbital spaceflight opportunities to the world marketplace. The company offers a spectrum of programming that ranges from terrestrial weightless flights to orbital missions, flights to the edge of space, and a historic return to the Moon. Space Adventures' clients have spent over 2,000 hours in space, traveling over 35 million miles.

"A unit of The Boeing Company, Boeing Defense, Space & Security is one of the world's largest defense, space and security businesses specializing in innovative and capabilities-driven customer solutions, and the world's largest and most versatile manufacturer of military aircraft. Headquartered in St. Louis, Boeing Defense, Space & Security is a $34 billion business with 68,000 employees worldwide."

This report was last updated at 11:27 p.m. ET. 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."

Comet Hartley 2 is looming larger in a space probe's field of view, and in the cameras of earthbound stargazers as well. But there are even better views to come, on Earth and in the heavens. Soon you can even see it for yourself.

The comet's close approach ranks as one of the stargazing highlights of the year, as well as a highlight for NASA's EPOXI mission. The probe's acronym actually super-glues two abbreviations together: EPOCh (Extrasolar Planet Obervation and Characterization) plus DIXI (Deep Impact eXtended Investigation). Comet 103P/Hartley 2 is the star of the DIXI part of the show. On Nov. 4, the recommissioned Deep Impact spacecraft will come within 450 miles (700 kilometers)of the half-mile-wide (kilometer-wide) comet.

NASA / JPL / UM

Red lines point to Comet Hartley 2 in the EPOXI mission's first picture of its target.

EPOXI's first picture of the gassy, dirty snowball came in last week, and another one was posted just today. You can follow the flow of mission data day by day via @cometexplorer's Twitter updates. But right now, Hartley 2 looks like little more than a fuzzy smudge amid the background stars.

Earthly observers are getting nicer pictures and posting them to EPOXI's Facebook page. The color pictures show the comet surrounded by an eerie greenish glow. British astrophotographer Nick Howes assembled his black-and-white images into a video that tracks Hartley 2 through the night sky:

Just as EPOXI is coming closer to Hartley 2, Hartley 2 is coming closer to Earth with every passing day. Sky & Telescope's Greg Bryant says the comet should reach magnitude 5 or 6 in the constellation Cassiopeia by early October. Usually that would be bright enough for naked-eye observing under optimal conditions. "But it's important to note that ... its light is no longer concentrated into a small dot but instead is more spread out. So even if you can sight a 6th-magnitude star with the unaided eye, Hartley 2 will be tougher," Bryant writes.

Oct. 7 should be about the peak time for comet-watching, in part because there won't be any competing glare from the moon. In the Northern Hemisphere, binoculars and small telescopes should bring Hartley 2 into view — if you know where to look. Sky & Telescope's diagram pinpoints the comet's location as it moves across the sky.

You can also feast your eyes on the cometary imagery popping up on Facebook and the University of Maryland's Amateur Observers' Gallery, as well as on Gary W. Kronk's Cometography website and at the Lowell Observatory.

Photo by Gary W. Kronk

Comet Hartley 2 shines in a picture taken by Gary Kronk from his observatory in Illinois on Sept. 12.

The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla notes that EPOXI's camera doesn't have the resolving power that Earth-based cameras do, and that's one reason why the telescopic images are better now. (Another reason is that Earth is currently closer to Hartley 2 than EPOXI is, due to the spacecraft's looping trajectory.)

All that will change as EPOXI closes in for its encounter and sends back not just dozens of images, but tens of thousands of images. "Space cameras eventually take better pictures of targets because they get much closer to them," Lakdawalla says.

I can hardly wait.

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Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are aiming to find out whether vertical-farm markets, 3-D printers and other innovations can do some good for more than a billion people over the next decade … and do well enough to earn profits in the process. The ventures were born during a summer session at Singularity University in California's Silicon Valley, and announced by the university's founders just today.

Singularity U. started out three years ago as an idea that bounced around between inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of "The Singularity Is Near") and X Prize Foundation co-founder Peter Diamandis. The academic institution's graduate students pay $25,000 (minus scholarships) for a 10-week summer program aimed at filling them in on the promise of exponentially growing information technologies — a concept that Kurzweil is so keen on that I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting abbreviated to EGITs ("egg-its").

The way Kurzweil sees it, many walks of life are amenable to exponential acceleration — not just computer hardware, where the concept manifests itself as Moore's Law, but medical advances and energy possibilities as well. Kurzweil believes information technology will eventually help us crack the codes of life and take advantage of the terawatts of solar power hitting our planet. "Ultimately it transforms all these other areas," Kurzweil said today during a video briefing.

Dickson Despommier / Verticalfarm

An artist's conception shows the "Living Tower" vertical farm concept. Learn more about vertical farming..

So how do EGITS apply to entrepreneurship? Diamandis observed that most business ideas are based on technology as it is, not technologies as they will be. "It takes three or four years to bring a business to market, and by that time, it's obsolete," he said. During the graduate program, students are encouraged to think outside the box, or at least think inside an exponentially growing box.

Last year, as part of Singularity U.'s "10 to the Ninth Plus" project, the students came up with four ideas for spin-off ventures that they thought could improve the lives of at least a billion people over the next 10 years — including Getaround and CiviGuard. Getaround is an online rental service aimed at maximizing the usage of private automotive vehicles. "Their goal is to do for automobiles what cloud computing does for computers," Kurzweil explained. CiviGuard is working to set up a system for two-way emergency communication, linking victims with emergency responders.

This year's graduate students produced about a dozen ideas, aimed at providing more abundant food, cleaner energy, cleaner water, improved access to space and more sustainable use of technology (a concept dubbed "upcycling"). Here's the full lineup:

Food: A venture called Agropolis aims to put hydroponics and vertical farming to work on a local scale. "This particular project ... deals with producing little modules that can be decentralized," Kurzweil said. One potential application would be to grow produce as well as farm-bred tilapia fish and bioengineered meat inside a multistory building, and sell the foodstuffs at a market located in the same building. "They're off at this point to start up a company," Diamandis said.

"We have a schedule for research, and we're talking with partners to build a prototype," team member Maggie Jack told me. She said the first prototype facilities would be set up in California and India — but there's lots that has to be done before taking that step. "We're working on this kind of in our part time, spare time, until the winter," said Jack, who is a program manager for San Francisco-based Social Venture Technology Group.  

Energy: Another potential startup is Amunda, which would seek to set up small-scale markets in energy for the developing world. "A group can basically say, 'We have 500 households that need this many kilowatts per day,'" Diamandis said. Potential energy providers could then bid to provide the energy for that market. Online tools, such as a "Google Earth with a marketing overlay," could facilitate such markets, Diamandis said.

Water: One team project, dubbed Naishio, would enlist converging technologies (bio plus nano plus solar) to desalinate seawater more efficiently. Former NASA astronaut Dan Barry, Singularity U.'s faculty head, thinks technological convergence was a key to success. "That's where it really starts to get exciting and explodes for me," he said today. Other ventures include Sensoria, which focuses on biology-based sensor technologies to test water purity; and H2020, which would set up an online destination about water resources.

Space: Made in Space would enlist 3-D printers to make spare parts for spacecraft such as the International Space Station, rather than having to ship up tons of parts just in case something breaks. "You just launch the goo, the plastic, the material that you're going to print parts out of," Barry said. That could dramatically reduce the amount of mass that has to be launched to support a particular mission. "It can be the difference between a Mars mission that gets funded and goes, versus one that's too expensive and too difficult to do," Barry said.

Another venture is working with NASA's Ames Research Center and the California Institute of Technology to develop a beamed-energy system that would send up laser light or microwaves to power spacecraft. "That system has the potential to be on the order of 50 to 100 times more efficient than traditional launch vehicles," Diamandis said. Still other teams came up with ideas to bioengineer organisms for extraterrestrial environments, or to do low-cost biological research in space.

Upcycling: The Fre3dom team is working on a 3-D printing process that would allow local communities in the developing world to make their own spare parts for broken-down equipment. "They've identified a new bioplastic that would work well with the existing cutting-edge generation of 3-D printers," Kurzweil said. Other teams are trying to come up with better methods to extract valuable metals from electronic waste (BioMine) and create more efficient markets for products that one company might see as industrial waste (i2cycle).

All these ideas will require financing to be turned into realities, of course, and part of Singularity U.'s appeal is that venture capital types (from companies such as ePlanet Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)  have been involved in the summer session alongside the entrepreneurs. That's part of the reason why the students are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for 10 weeks of summer school.

If you were an investor, which ideas would you bet on? If you were a philanthropist, which causes would you support? What challenges would you want to see next year's Singularity U. graduate students address? Or do you think there are better ways to do good while doing well? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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NASA's Desert RATS exercise is in full swing, and that means astronauts in mocked-up spacesuits and monster rovers are roaming the Arizona desert to practice for a journey to Mars.

Desert RATS is the space agency's high-profile field trip to test the prototypes for contraptions that could go along with the astronauts on honest-to-goodness trips to the Red Planet, or an asteroid, or the moon, or wherever NASA wants to go in the future. The acronym stands for "research and technology studies." This month's exercise has been going on at Black Point Lava Flow in northern Arizona for nearly two weeks. It's due to wind up on Wednesday.

Among the hardware being tested are pressurized rovers as big as RVs, designed to house future astronauts as they travel the surface of another world for up to seven days at a time ... Tri-ATHLETE robots that could carry entire habitats on their backs ... a four-wheeled prototype rover base for Robonauts ... and lots of other gadgets. NASA's exploration website has an overview of the exercise, and there's a weblog as well as a Flickr photo gallery and a Twitter account.

Inside Science News Service's Eric Betz explains the rationale behind the RATS. NASA Watch's Keith Cowing has been providing regular updates. Check out this nighttime "Image of the Day" featuring the RATS' home base. And for some real-time interaction, tune in the live Desert RATS webcasts from noon to 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday and Thursday, hosted by NASA Edge and the Challenger Center on UStream.

More about our future in space:

• Space Review: Debating the future of human spaceflight
• Cross-Check: Hawking's 'new' idea is the same old crap
• NASA: Will scramjets make space station deliveries?
• Next Big Future: Carnival of Space 169

"Becoming Human" was an eye-opener of a website a decade ago, and it inspired an eye-opener of a public-TV documentary series that made its debut on PBS' "Nova" last year. The TV shows, like the website, traced the scientific tale of how ancient primates gave rise to the human species — not through a sudden spark, but through a transition that took millions of years. Now "Nova" is rebroadcasting the series, with the final part airing on PBS next week. But you don't even have to wait that long to skip ahead: All three hourlong shows are freely available for watching online.

For more perspectives on human evolution, check out "The Human Edge," a series of online and audio reports from NPR. Or this Q&A in The Guardian about "The Artificial Ape." Or this review of "Almost Chimpanzee," a new book that sizes our species up against our closest kin in the animal kingdom.

You can even check out our "Before and After Humans" interactive, which was created in 2005 to accompany my story about the possible paths for future human evolution. How the Web has evolved in the five years since then!

Here are some more weekend explorations on the Web:

Every week I try to link to something howlarious from the Cracked website, and this week's offering is "The Five Strangest Things Evolution Left in Your Body."

What happens when a gizmo loses out in the survival of the fittest? Here's a list of the "Top 10 Lost Technologies," via GeekPress.

Ooh! Ooh! Special-effects guru Douglas Trumbull offers teaser videos for some pretty interesting projects, including a "Making of '2001'" documentary that allows him to walk right into scenes from the classic science-fiction movie.

Looks like Trumbull is also planning to get serious about the UFO phenomenon ... which fits right in with the "he said, she said" set of UFO commentaries that stirred up such a fuss this week. What? You haven't read them? Check it out, and read some fresh UFO stories as well. The truth is out there. ...

Saturn's 62 moons range from overgrown rocks that are less than a half-mile wide to giant Titan, which is bigger than the planet Mercury. These pictures from the Cassini orbiter show off two "quartets" of moons against the backdrop of Saturn's rings. But you have to look really, really close to see the smallest members of each group.

The first picture, taken on July 17 and released today, features Titan in the lower left corner and the icy moon Tethys toward the upper right. So where are the other moons in the foursome? Pandora, a 50-mile-wide "shepherd" moon that helps keep Saturn's F-ring in line, is on the very left edge of the image. Epimetheus, which is 70 miles across, is above the rings, near the middle left of the image. But they're mere specks in this picture, which was taken from a distance of 1.6 million miles. You'll have a better chance of seeing them in this enlarged view.

Epimetheus is easier to spot in the second Cassini image, which was taken on July 27 from a distance of 746,000 miles. It's on the far left. The other moons, moving from left to right, are Janus (111 miles across), Prometheus (53 miles across) and Atlas (19 miles across). Epimetheus and Janus make a matched set, because they share an orbit around Saturn but manage to stay out of each other's way. The odd couple's relationship is explained in this NASA video.

Check out this slideshow for more of Cassini's greatest hits. For more great images from Earth and beyond, explore our Photoblog. You can join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter with @b0yle. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Space Adventures, the Virginia-based company that has worked with the Russians to send seven millionaires to the International Space Station, says it has reached "a unique agreement" with the Boeing Co. on space transportation services — and executives from both companies will be talking about the deal next week.

Today's announcement, sent to me via e-mail, merely notes that a noontime news briefing will be conducted next Wednesday at Boeing's offices in Arlington, Va. Speakers will include Brewster Shaw, vice president and general manager of Boeing's space exploration division (and a former astronaut); as well as Eric Anderson, co-founder and chairman of Space Adventures.

Space Adventures isn't saying anything further about the substance of the deal — but you could easily make the case that each company has something the other one wants:

• Under the terms of an $18 million agreement with NASA, Boeing is designing a spaceship known as the CST-100 that can carry up to seven people to the space station and other destinations in low Earth orbit. But the aerospace giant has said that ferrying astronauts for NASA isn't a lucrative enough business by itself. It also needs commitments for private-sector clients. That's one reason why Boeing already has partnered with Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace, which is planning to put a commercial space station into orbit as early as 2014 or 2015. I'm guessing that Boeing would love to have an even bigger market for its commercial space transport services.

• For years, Space Adventures has been building up a list of clients willing to take multimillion-dollar trips into orbit — including, for example, Sergey Brin, one of Google's billionaire co-founders. In the past, the company has purchased open seats aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that have brought astronauts to the space station and back. However, now that the station's long-duration capacity has been expanded from three to six, those open seats have dried up. Particularly with the imminent retirement of NASA's shuttle fleet, Soyuz seats are needed to ferry the professional astronauts back and forth. The outlook for tourist seats could improve a couple of years from now, but I'm guessing that Space Adventures would love to have a deal with Boeing like the one they've had with the Russians.

But these are just my guesses. Feel free to speculate about what all this could mean for the two companies, and for space commercialization in general, by leaving your comments below. And tune in on Wednesday to get the full story.

Ethanol just might help America break its addiction to fossil fuels — but not if it has to be made from corn, as is typically the case today. That's why researchers and entrepreneurs are rushing to find ways to turn non-food biomass into biofuel. The key trick will be to come up with a cheaper way to produce fuel from cellulosic material, ranging from corncobs to wood waste to switchgrass.

It'd be great if brewer's yeast, the humble one-celled organism that biofuel producers use to make ethanol, could handle cellulose as well as it handles simpler sugars. That would cut down on all the enzymatic processing that's currently required to get the party started.

Well, it turns out that researchers at the University of California at Berkeley are trying to teach that old brewer's yeast new tricks, by inserting genes from a type of fungus that can digest cellulose. The fungus, Neurospora crassa, can't produce alcohol. But the researchers conducted a genome-wide analysis of the critter and found a family of genes that appeared to facilitate the transport of more complex sugars into the cell. When the right genes were spliced into brewer's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), two of the resulting strains could grow on cellodextrin as well as the usual glucose. One strain produced 60 percent more alcohol than normal yeast when grown on a type of cellodextrin known as cellobiose.

"This improvement over the wild organism is a proof-of-principle that allows us to take the technology to the next level, with the goal of engineering yeast that can digest and ferment plant material in one pot," Jamie Cate, a member of the Berkeley team, said in a news release. Enzymes would still be required to break cellulose down into cellodextrins, but further genetic engineering could conceivably streamline the process further. And Cate pointed out that a wide variety of biofuels could be produced.

"The use of these cellodextrin transporters is not limited to yeast that makes ethanol," Cate said. "They could be used in any yeast that's been engineered to make, for example, other alcohols or jet fuel substitutes."

The Berkeley researchers' report was published today on the journal Science's website and will appear in a future issue. But they're not the only ones working to improve biofuel production through genetic engineering. Heck, that's one of the big reasons why genetic pioneer J. Craig Venter and others are putting so much effort into developing synthetic cells.

Here are links to other reports about yeast re-engineering:

• Chemist blends math and synthetic biology in biofuel research
• Engineer identifies genes for making biofuel more efficiently
• New yeast can ferment more sugar, make more ethanol
• Winemaking yeast could be key to alternative fuel

Some folks are already worried about the potential risks associated with "frankenfuels." The issue is definitely something to think about. If you believe re-engineering yeast to make better biofuel is scary, what would you say to combining genetically engineered yeast with human DNA to create artificial corneas? And it's not just yeast: E. coli bacteria are being tweaked as well, to produce biodiesel.

I'd love to get your honest opinion on bioengineering — so please be frank in your comments below.

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."

Scientists and sports stars are taking to the field with a 10-part video series that explains the physics and biology behind football, just in time for today's start of the NFL regular season.

The "Science of NFL Football" series is presented by NBC Learn, in partnership with the National Science Foundation and the National Football League. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) The project follows up on "Science of the Olympic Winter Games," a similar educational venture that made a splash earlier this year.

"To paraphrase what President Kennedy once said — when we watch or play a football game, we feel like we've taken part in it," Ed Seidel, assistant director of NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate, said in a news release. "But in this series we hope to achieve more than that. We want students to feel they've taken part in understanding the physical principles underlying the action on the field."

NBC News President Steve Capus said his network was "extremely excited" to participate in a project "that combines science education and a sport that so many kids know and love."

The NFL is excited as well: Several sports stars play starring roles in the videos, including Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward, Dolphins place kicker Dan Carpenter and former Saints running back Deuce McAllister. "When we can energize our students to learn through physical fitness and sports, it's win-win for everyone," McAllister said.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The series' scientific stars aren't too shabby, either. The scientists explaining the principles behind the game include physicists and engineers, a mathematician and a nutritionist. A high-speed Phantom camera captures the athletes' movements at up to 2,000 frames per second to show Newton's Laws of Motion at work. Lesson plans to accompany the videos are available via Lessonopoly. Three videos are already available, and one more will be added to the set every Friday through Oct. 29.

The videos released so far spend a lot of time talking about vectors, as they apply to punting a football or throwing the ball to a receiver in motion. I guess that's a teachable moment for classical mechanics. There's also a spot about nutrition for football players, which includes the fact that they burn 5,000 to 10,000 food calories per day (as opposed to the norm of 2,200 to 3,000 calories per day). So it's pretty basic stuff, well-suited for getting kids who are football fans fired up about physics and physiology as well.

You'll find plenty more about the science of football on the Web. Here's a nice six-pack to sample while you're watching tonight's game:

• Cosmic Log: Super Bowl science snacks
• Going deep: Future technology in the NFL
• Football video games getting a makeover
• Scientific American: The Science of Football
• HowStuffWorks: How the physics of football works
• University of Nebraska: Football physics with Dr. Tim Gay

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."

Get your daily dose of science, including advice for surviving a terrorist nuke attack, in just a few minutes:

What should Washingtonians do if a 10-kiloton nuclear device goes off in the nation's capital? Stay put in your basement. That's what Stanford researchers conclude in a report in the journal Risk Analysis. They say about 80,000 people would die in the event of an emergency evacuation — but that number would be reduced by about a third if folks just took shelter in their basement or near the middle of a large building. "The logistical challenge of an evacuation appears to be beyond current response capabilities," study author Lawrence Wein says in a Stanford news release. Which also happens to be the conclusion reached by the researchers who wrote the script for "Independence Day."

More findings on the Web:

Meteorite contains shrapnel from a supernova that occurred as our solar system was being born.

Discover magazine provides a handy how-to guide for discovering subatomic particles. Go to it, geeks!

The New Yorker profiles the woman behind 'The Secret' and 'The Power.'

William Holland, a genealogical researcher living in Atlanta, has seen some pretty strange twists in his family tree. Several years ago, he found out that his great-grandfather was a black slave ... who wound up serving as a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. But this year Holland's research resulted in something even stranger.

Thanks to DNA testing, Holland is being welcomed as a long-lost relative by a ruling family of the West African nation of Cameroon. He's visited the country once already, back in March, and he'll be getting the royal treatment in November when he goes back with additional members of his family, including his 79-year-old mother.

"Imagine receiving that news, after all these years when you grew up as the son of a sharecropper. ... Everybody tells you that you came from slaves, you came from slaves. And now you find out that you came from royalty," Holland told me.

Holland's case shows how genetic genealogy can untangle mysteries in a family tree — even for African-Americans, who typically face tougher challenges because the vital records for slaves are so scant.

Holland attributes his success to GeneTree, a Utah-based DNA testing service that came up with the Cameroon connection. But GeneTree's chief scientific officer, geneticist Scott Woodward, said Williams' case was far from unusual.

"This isn't our home run," Woodward told me. "It takes a lot of regular work. But what [the DNA analysis] did do was give us some nice clues and hints about where he should concentrate his efforts. Should he be looking in Cameroon, or should he be looking in Nigeria? That makes a big difference."

In fact, previous genetic tests had indeed suggested that Holland's African roots went back to Nigeria — so much so that Holland arranged for some of his supposed Nigerian relatives to get tested as well. "When the results came back, it wasn't a match," Holland said. (I can sympathize with that situation: Nine years ago, I went down a similar blind alley in search of my Irish roots.)

So Holland went back to the drawing board. This time, Holland plugged his genetic markers into a database provided by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, which draws upon GeneTree results as well as global genetic surveys.

Unlike whole-genome sequencing or paternity tests, genealogical testing generally looks at only a limited number of DNA markers — either on the Y-chromosome, which is passed down from fathers to their sons; or in mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mothers to their children. Such markers can't be used to figure out your susceptibility to disease or even trace all your relatives. It can only give you an idea who you're related to along your all-paternal or all-maternal line of ancestry.

The freely available Sorenson database takes the family search to an extra level, by linking the genetic data with traditional pedigrees contributed by those who have been tested. What's more, Sorenson's researchers — including Woodward, who serves as the foundation's executive director — have added test results from places around the world that would otherwise be poorly represented in genetic databases. For example, about 12,000 of the 110,000 DNA samples in the Sorenson files have come from Africa.

"Most are centered in western Africa, because we believe that's the most interesting, particularly for African-Americans," Woodward said. "We've sampled literally hundreds of different villages throughout these countries."

In Holland's case, the best matches all landed in Cameroon. "That's what got William excited about pursuing and checking some of those places," Woodward said.

Armed with detailed pedigrees that linked up with the genetic matches, Holland headed out to Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon's North West Province and the place where the chief of the region's Mankon people has his palace. Holland discussed his family tree with tribal leaders in Bamenda, and eventually was received by the Mankon chief, His Royal Highness Fo Angwafo III.

"He was so surprised," Holland recalled. "He gave me about an hour of his time. He looked at me, and he just couldn't believe it. He told me, 'William, you could be my son.'"

During the month that followed, local elders pored over all the records that Holland had prepared. Then they called him in to hear the verdict. "With all the pedigrees you show, you belong to the royal family," Holland said he was told.

Other research has helped fill in the historical gaps: Historians say that only a few ships were involved in the slave trade between Cameroon and Virginia in the early 1770s, the time frame during which Holland's ancestors came to the colonies. "I think I may have the actual ship that brought us to America. The Cambridge sailed in 1771. The Fox sailed in April 1772. I think that was the one," he said.

Today, the 41-year-old Holland is working to renovate the family homestead in Virginia, where slaves once lived. He's also working to get his complete family history in order — and encouraging others to go on their own family quest.

"We all come from different parts of the world, but this is how we come together," Holland told me.

Meanwhile, Woodward and other researchers are working to develop new genetic tools for tracing family connections. One method would check markers on additional chromosomes to "fill in close relatives, we're thinking within four to six generations, and reconstruct a relationship between two individuals who share a common ancestor," Woodward said.

"That's not even in beta. It's in alpha," Woodward told me. "It essentially covers all of your ancestors."

That could mark a significant leap forward for genetic genealogy. The tests conducted on Y chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA aren't powerful enough to detemine the precise relationship between two individuals. But when they're accompanied by hard work and personal contacts, even those tests are clearly powerful enough to forge an ocean-crossing link between an African chief and the son of a sharecropper.

"They're planning a huge welcome-home party for us in November," Holland said of his newfound family in Cameroon. "They consider us the lost children. There will be a lot of cooking, a lot of celebrating. ... You better get ready. This is something not to miss."

More about Africa and genealogy:

• She traces genetic 'Roots' to Africa
• An Irish tale: The wearin o' the genes
• Genealogy news from msnbc.com
• African American news from theGrio

GeneTree is just one of many companies offering genetic testing for genealogical purposes. For further information about services and pricing, check out this guide on Cyndi's List, or this entry on Wikipedia. If you happen to be a Boyle looking for genealogical information, take a look at my Boyle family website. (Yes, I know it's in need of an update.) You can also connect with me via Facebook or Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."