Is China on course to surpass the United States as the world's space superpower and stake a claim on the moon in the next 15 years? Billionaire space executive Robert Bigelow is deeply worried about that scenario — and he says Americans need a "kick in the ass" to respond to the challenge.

Bigelow delivered that kick today at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M. — but the general consensus among experts on China policy is that it's a bit too early to start rattling the sabers.

The founder of the Budget Suites hotel chain and Bigelow Aerospace promised to "cause a stimulation" with his remarks at the ISPCS conference, and delivered on that promise by laying out an argument for China's growing space dominance. He said the trend could conceivably lead to a lunar takeover in the 2022-2026 time frame.

---

Bigelow characterized China as "the new gunslinger in Dodge" when it came to space exploration.

The way he sees it, China is progressing along a slow, steady path toward space proficiency. The steps in that path include follow-ups to the Shenzhou 8 spacewalk mission in 2008, the unmanned Chang'e lunar missions and last month's Tiangong 1 space lab launch. In the coming years, China will have plenty of cash for great leaps forward in space, while the United States will be hamstrung by higher debt and tighter budgets.

Why the moon?
Why would China want to lay claim to the moon? Bigelow referred to some of the long-discussed potential benefits, including the moon's abundance of helium-3, which could someday be used as fuel for nuclear fusion (although that idea has been oversold in the past). The moon's raw material could also be turned into the water, oxygen, building materials and rocket fuel needed for human exploration. But Bigelow said the biggest payoff would come in the form of international prestige, just as it did for the United States after the moon landings.

"This would endure for a very long time," he said. "It’s priceless. ... Nothing else that China could possibly do in the next 15 years could produce as great a benefit."

Bigelow speculated that China could conduct detailed surface-based surveys of the lunar surface in the mid-2020s, setting the stage for the country to withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and formally claim possession of the moon. China could then conceivably insist on being paid for lunar concessions, Bigelow said.

He said the Chinese challenge could serve as a "fear factor" to energize the efforts of NASA and its space partners. "It's the best kick in the ass that you can have," he told reporters after his talk. He also doubted that the Chinese would be content with taking on the status of a partner in the U.S.-led space "family," even if they were invited to join. "They want to have their own family," he said.

Bigelow proposed diverting 10 percent of the U.S. defense budget to the space effort, which he said would provide an annual boost of $60 billion. It may turn out to be "too late" for a space race to the moon, he said; Bigelow suggested that a U.S.-led consortium should target Mars instead.

What do the experts say?
Bigelow said his analysis was based on two years of observing the space policy landscape, rather than personal discussions with the Chinese. Generally speaking, experts on Chinese space policy say that it's too early to judge the nation's long-term intentions.

"I think it is a little bit of a stretch to think about whether the Chinese will be laying claim to the moon," Dean Cheng, a research fellow at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, told me today. "I would be very surprised if they had any plans one way or the other."

Cheng said the Chinese were clearly interested in lunar exploration. "They will have all the pieces in place in the 2021-2025 time period to think about putting a man on the moon," he said. But he doubted that China would try to do anything inflammatory — for example, rolling up the American flag at Tranquility Base and putting a Chinese flag in its place. "Incendiary stuff, not likely," Cheng said.

It's more likely that China would want to see an international body such as the United Nations in charge of lunar exploration and exploitation, Cheng said. He pointed to the example of the Law of the Sea Convention, which governs the use of marine resources but has not yet been ratified by the U.S. Senate.

Cheng said the Chinese would prefer to see lunar resources controlled by an intergovernmental body rather than private-sector entities. He said they'd definitely oppose an arrangement in which non-governmental entities are in charge, such as the system set up by ICANN, the Internet's governing body.

"The prospect of the Chinese having to deal with the space equivalent of ICANN is their worst nightmare," he told me.

Other observations from Robert Bigelow:

• For years, Bigelow has been working on inflatable space modules based on technology developed by NASA, and two of the modules have been lofted into orbit by Russian rockets. Bigelow said the Genesis 1 and 2 modules were no longer providing useful data, but that they were designed to stay in orbit for 12 years. That suggests that the modules would make their re-entry no earlier than the 2018-2019 time frame. 
• Bigelow had planned to make habitable orbital modules available to international clients starting in late 2014. But today, he told reporters that the schedule has been put on hold, due to the economic downturn as well as questions about the availability of private spaceships capable of servicing the habitats. Once the decision is made to resume the project, it would probably take no more than three years to launch the modules, Bigelow said.
• Bigelow said the workforce at Nevada-based Bigelow Aerospace has been reduced from 115 workers to 51, due to the slowdown in work on the inflatable modules.
• Bigelow Aerospace has its own plan to put a colony on the moon. In the ISPCS exhibit hall, the company displayed a scale model of a base made up of inflatable modules that Bigelow said could be assembled in deep space and then transported to the lunar surface. "What was once a station lands as a base," he explained. For now, however, there are no plans to turn the concept into an actual base.

---

Stay tuned for more reports about the space frontier from the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight on Thursday. We'll also be featuring some of the leaders of the private-sector space effort, including Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Mark Sirangelo, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, in an upcoming installment of our "Future of Technology" series.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Quantum physics is the mind-bending study of matter and energy at its smallest scales. It can be difficult to grasp, no doubt. But this video of a smoking cold disk that appears to float in midair just might make you try.

The trick works due to something called quantum levitation, explain the scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel. And they hope you'll ask: what's that?

---

The apparently floating disk is a sapphire crystal that has been coated with a very thin layer of ceramic material called yttrium barium copper oxide. At room temperature, it has no interesting magnetic or electrical properties, the group explains.

However, when cooled below minus 301 degrees F, it becomes a superconductor, which means it conducts electricity without resistance. No energy is lost. 

Now, it turns out that superconductors and magnetic fields don't play nice with each other. Usually, the superconductor will expel the magnetic field, something called the Meissner effect. But when the superconductor is really thin, such as the one in this video, the magnetic field penetrates.

Of course, since we are talking about quantum physics here, it does so in a strange way. It creates flux tubes. These tubes, in turn, trap the superconductor in midair. The result is called quantum locking, that is the superconductor is locked in space.

For more information, watch this video and the check out the explanation over at the researcher's website. Afterwards, you might feel that quantum physics isn't all that difficult to grasp.

More information on quantum physics:

• Tales from the quantum frontier
• Quantum physics is the focus of Nobel buzz
• How to spot quantum quackery
• Your quantum superpowers

---

The video is courtesy of the Association of Science — Technology Centers.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

Even though Sierra Nevada Corp.'s downsized space shuttle hasn't been built yet, future fliers can practice taking it in for a simulated landing. And among those future fliers is the boss.

Mark Sirangelo isn't just the head of Colorado-based Sierra Nevada Space Systems. He's also a licensed pilot, and he intends to take a ride on his company's Dream Chaser spaceship as early as next year during its atmospheric tests. Those tests are slated to begin next summer, with the stub-winged Dream Chaser being dropped from high altitude by Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane.

---

If the test flights go as planned, Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser could be carrying astronauts and cargo between Earth and the International Space Station in 2015 or 2016 — becoming the first winged vehicle to fly in Earth orbit since NASA's retirement of the space shuttle. By that time, there could well be other U.S. spaceships flying as well, courtesy of companies ranging from the Boeing Co. and Orbital Sciences Corp. to SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Those companies' pioneering efforts in commercial spaceflight will be among the subjects taken up this week during the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, presented in Las Cruces, N.M. This year's symposium is being held just a couple of days after the splashy dedication of Virgin Galactic's terminal building at Spaceport America, 45 miles to the north.

Sirangelo told me that this week's dedication served as another sign that the commercial space frontier was advancing. "This brings a certain reality to the idea," he said as he watched WhiteKnightTwo and its attached SpaceShipTwo rocket plane go through their maneuvers.

Sierra Nevada is Virgin Galactic's partner in more ways than one: In addition to using WhiteKnightTwo as a platform for its early tests, Sirangelo's company is manufacturing the hybrid rocket engines that are to be used in SpaceShipTwo. Those engines are now undergoing ground tests. The first in-flight tests are expected to begin within a year.

Meanwhile, the work on Dream Chaser is accelerating: This spring, NASA awarded Sierra Nevada $80 million to support the spaceship's development, and last month the space agency sweetened the deal with an extra $25.6 million for additional milestones. NASA's Kennedy Space Center struck yet another deal to make its facilities and its expertise available to Sierra Nevada.

During a recent visit to Sierra Nevada Space System's headquarters near Denver, I saw a few former NASA employees bustling through the halls, including five-time space shuttle fliers Steve Lindsey and Jim Voss (who are now executives at the company).

Another one of the ex-NASA types at Sierra Nevada is the company's simulation manager, Stokes McMillan, whoused to work on NASA's X-38 program at Johnson Space Center. "After that program was canceled, I always have looked for something like that — and here it is," McMillan told me.

McMillan's pride and joy is Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser cockpit simulator, a gizmo modeled after NASA's space shuttle simulator. It may not rock and roll like the space agency's motion-base machine, but it has big projection screens, computerized control dials and a joystick-based flight system that give you the feeling that you're actually flying. Even I was able to land the darn thing on a virtual Kennedy Space Center airstrip, with lots of coaching from McMillan.

Development of the simulator was one of the extra milestones that NASA added to Sierra Nevada's list. In the long term, the make-believe cockpit can be used to train astronauts to fly the real Dream Chaser. But in the shorter term, it will help the company's engineers fine-tune the way the spaceship handles itself and the way the instruments are arranged, with advice from the experts who'll be making all those virtual flights.

Sirangelo has flown the simulator many times, and he's looking forward to taking a seat on the real Dream Chaser in the not-too-distant future. He discussed his expectations as well as the company's aspirations during a wide-ranging interview this summer. Here's an edited excerpt:   

Cosmic Log: There are several vehicles that are being supported by NASA as part of the commercial crew development program. And I've seen one report about an Irish bookmaker who said the Dream Chaser had the best odds of flying first. How do you assess the field for this sort of market of providing NASA with these services?

Mark Sirangelo: Well, it’s not for me to comment on other people's work, but we look at the field this way: We think that NASA will have more than one provider. They have more than one provider to do cargo right now. There are two U.S. companies vying to do that, in addition to the Japanese cargo system and the Russian cargo system. There are multiple cargo systems out there. We think that, ultimately, there will be at least two, perhaps more U.S. systems brought for orbital transfer.

Very often we get asked, well, why us?  Well, if you look at space, why should space be any different from how we look at our navy or our air force or our army? There are different vehicles for different tasks. Having a lifting body capable of making a runway landing has certain attributes to it that are not present in capsules right now.

Those attributes include things such as being able to return to Earth at less than 2 G's and being able to land on a runway that's less than 10,000 feet long, being able to go right up to the vehicle after it lands to take off critical experiments, and take people off immediately.

The vehicle also has the ability to do other things in space. One of the reasons NASA got into this program to begin with was to enable commercial space, not just to provide a point-to-point solution for the space station. A lifting-body design like ours has the ability to do servicing, much as the shuttle serviced the Hubble Space Telescope. Our vehicle can stay in low-Earth orbit for many months unmanned if it needs to.  We can provide transportation to other destinations in a manner that’s very consistent with what non-professional astronauts might need.

Q: Of all the vehicles that are being funded in this phase, this is the only lifting-body, winged vehicle that looks anything like the shuttle. I've noticed that you've had former astronauts come through here - do you feel as if a lot of the people who have been involved in the NASA program have a soft spot for a winged vehicle like this?

A: We think that we’re getting an increasing amount of interest in our program for a variety of reasons.  I think the top reasons are that people with the retirement of the shuttle realized that there was a purpose for the shuttle, for its design, for what it did. I wouldn’t call it sentimental, but they realized that the people who designed that were pretty smart people.  They felt that there would be multiple missions this shuttle can do.

I think there’s also real interest in that we can make a very positive statement that many of the people who worked on the shuttle program can see those skill sets being accomplished on our program. We have to turn this around from one flight to the next, we have to do many of the same kind of things that the shuttle did, albeit in a smaller version. So some of those skill sets will transfer over.

We also think that when members of the astronaut corps look at this, they'll realize that they can still be piloting, they can still be flying a vehicle.  In the current scenario, where there are passengers on a Russian Soyuz, that skill set goes away. In our vision, we will have a commercial astronaut pilot sitting next to a NASA astronaut pilot on NASA missions.  So those people still have a place to fly, that skill set remains current within the U.S. space effort. And all that money spent to train those people continue to be relevant.

Q: There’s been some discussion about who would fly the vehicle in its operational phase. Of course, there will be test pilots who are employed by Sierra Nevada to make sure the vehicle fills the specifications. But once it enters service, who's in control of the vehicle?

A: It isn’t clear to any of us right now who’s going to fly and how it’s going to fly.  But I think there are three basic approaches to the problem.

One is that we build the vehicle, and NASA essentially leases it.  So they put NASA personnel on and NASA flies it. That certainly would be fine with us.

The second approach would be that we essentially pilot the vehicle.  We own it and we’re much like the Soyuz right now, where the Russians are in charge of the vehicle and they’re providing a seat. We provide a seat in a similar fashion to NASA. Instead of flying on a Russian vehicle, putting money into the Russian space program, we’re putting that money into the U.S. space program,  and we’re providing transportation underneath our own management.

We also have come up with a third approach, and it’s one that we particularly like. It’s taking the page out of the maritime industry, where large ships are often piloted across the waters by a captain who is employed by the company who owns the tanker or the cargo ship. When the ship gets to a major port, there’s a harbor pilot who comes out to take that ship in, who knows the harbor very well. Similarly speaking, we think the NASA astronaut pilots know the space station. NASA might feel more comfortable having a NASA astronaut pilot do the proximity operations around the space station, including docking. We might in fact have our pilot do the launch and take off and put it into orbit, and I believe NASA pilot take over when that ship needs to dock to the space station.  That would balance the skill sets on both sides and provide another level of safety, and another level of interaction with NASA.

Q: Interesting ... when you look at the stimulator that you have set up, it’s very similar to how a shuttle simulator looks. Is that intentional, in that you want to preserve the handling of the shuttle, or is it just an outgrowth of the design, because it’s a vehicle that’s designed similarly to the shuttle.

A: When you walk into the simulator, you’ll see that there are very similar aspects to what is going on with the space shuttle, and that’s not by chance. Many, many years of work has gone into how to lay out vehicles, and we are learning from that, we are absorbing that. We are adding significantly new technologies to the vehicle, so it has the blending of what’s going on currently in the field of aviation technology as well as some of the tried-and-true design methods that have been used before. Anyone who comes into that who has experience flying high-performance aircraft or flying the shuttle or flying modern commercial aviation aircraft will feel very comfortable behind the stick. And that is by intent.

We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here.  We are trying to take the best of the past and marry it with the best of the future, and put it together into one vehicle. ...

Q: I'm guessing that when you got started in business, you did not anticipate that you’d be working on a spaceship. Did you think that you would be working on this sort of vehicle?

A: It’s interesting. I think many of the people on the program, myself included, have always believed that we would do something in space. I have been a pilot for a long time, and I continue to fly. One of the jokes around my family was that the next thing we were going to be doing would be Mark going to space at some point in time. This is as much a passion for me as it is for anyone else. I hope to be in one of the first vehicles. We are going to be flying the vehicles before we ever put any NASA people onboard. And if there are something wrong, we’ll be the first ones to know about it.

This is not done merely as some business activity. This is done as a personal passion. Throughout the organization, the hundreds of people who are now working on this are doing it because they believe in this program, and they believe in the partnership with NASA that we have. Someday I’ll be flying the vehicle alongside, I hope, a number of people from NASA.

Q: When do you anticipate that day will come?

A: We will start doing our drop test of the Dream Chaser in 2012. First schedule is to start doing what we call an atmospheric drop test, taking it up to a high altitude and letting it go and then piloting it down to make sure that the vehicle has all the necessary characteristics to allow to act as a piloted vehicle. In the following year, we’ll begin doing our suborbital tests, and then starting in 2014, going into 2015, we’ll be doing orbital tests, first as an unmanned vehicle and then as a manned vehicle. I hope and I think many of us will be participating in that test schedule between now and then.

Q: So in the 2015 timeframe, once the manned orbital tests begin, is that when you would get your ticket?

A: I would expect that I would be part of the drop test program and the suborbital program. We have a small group of people who have experience in flying who are going to be part of that.

Q: So that could be next year?

A: It could be next year, or early 2013.

Q: So how do you feel about that? it sounds as if you’re looking forward to it.

A: Oh, yeah. I can’t say how excited we all are to be able to go back and see hardware, to touch the vehicle now that’s been on paper for so long. Seeing that the first vehicle is well into production really gets your heart going. It makes you realize why you are doing this.

---

Stay tuned for more reports about the space frontier from the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight on Wednesday and Thursday. We'll also be featuring some of the leaders of the private-sector space effort, including Sirangelo as well as SpaceX's Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, in an upcoming installment of our "Future of Technology" series.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Willow Garage's PR2 personal robots are cool, but it's easy to understand — in this economy — why everyone hasn't plunked down $400,000 for one to make sausages, bake cookies, fold laundry and fetch beer, as the robots have been programmed to do.

After all, those chores are fairly simple for most of us to perform and sometimes even enjoyable.

---

But here's a use for a PR2 that could reel in buyers: robotics researchers at the University of Pennsylvania programmed their PR2 named Graspy to scoop poop. Really. It identifies items that look like feces (based on color), scoots over to them and picks them up with a scooper. There's video proof! (See above.)

And just to make sure there's no confusion on what the robot was programmed to do, the researchers named their project "Perception Of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control Of Object Pickup" so they could use the acronym POOP SCOOP.

"The purpose of this research is for the PR2 to clear poop out of an open field," GRASP lab member Ben Cohen, explains in the video.

Graspy achieved a 95 percent success rate, scooping more than one poop per minute. More work needs to be done to get the robot scooping like a pro, notes IEEE Spectrum. For example, it is currently able to handle only high-fiber poop.

If you'd like to turn your PR2 into a scooper of poop — and perhaps improve on its performance — you can check out instructions on the lab's wiki page.

More stories on PR2 robots:

• Mmm! Robot makes cookies
• Funny science sparks serious spat
• Robot makes sausages for breakfast

---

The research on POOP SCOOP was presented at IROS 2011. Hap tip to IEEE Spectrum and Pop Sci.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

British billionaire Richard Branson christened the world's first facility designed for private-sector space travel in grand style today, rappelling down the glass-sheathed side of Spaceport America's spaceship complex with a champagne bottle in hand.

Branson's acrobatics served as the climax of a spaceport dedication ceremony that also featured some aerobatics from the SpaceShipTwo rocket plane and its massive WhiteKnightTwo mothership. The double-plane flight system is designed to carry passengers to the edge of outer space from Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert. Branson's company, Virgin Galactic, could conceivably start passenger service on SpaceShipTwo in late 2012 or 2013, depending on how the flight tests go.

Branson and his children, Sam and Holly, popped up as surprise guest performers during a wall-walking dance staged by the California-based Project Bandaloop. The champagne bottle was lowered down to Branson on a rope. He uncorked the bottle and gave Spaceport America's alien-looking, 110,000-square-foot terminal/hangar facility a celebratory splash of bubbly. Then he declared that the building would be called the "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space," and finished off the rites with a deep swig of champagne.

---

When Branson was lowered to the ground, he told New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez that he hoped the performance would be "the first of many safe landings at Spaceport America."

Virgin Galactic's chief executive officer, George Whitesides, said it was Branson's idea to get in on the act, and Branson told me that no one rejected the idea. "I think they've given up trying to convince me not to do things," he said.

Today's ceremony drew hundreds of onlookers — including Martinez and other New Mexico politicians as well as Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin — to a site 30 miles east of Truth or Consequences, N.M., in an area so isolated that cellphone coverage was hard to come by. Spaceport director Christine Anderson joked that the $209 million facility might be out in the middle of nowhere, but it's a "beautiful middle of nowhere," set amid the San Andres Mountains.

Among those in the audience were more than 150 spaceflight fans who have already put down deposits for SpaceShipTwo's $200,000 fare. Virgin Galactic says that, in all, it has taken more than 450 reservations for suborbital spaceflights. One of the would-be fliers, Namira Salim of Dubai, said that today's dedication marked "an exciting moment."

"It's not just about going into space — the dream of the common man," she told me. "It's so much more historic and significant. The development of the private space industry and the contribution that Virgin Galactic is making to private spaceflight will actually enable payloads, researchers, scientists, all kinds of people to go up to space."

Alan Stern, a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who has reserved his seat to conduct scientific experiments on SpaceShipTwo, said the rise of suborbital spaceships would be a "game-changer" for his field. Just last week, in fact, Virgin Galactic said it had worked out contract arrangements with NASA for up to three research flights on SpaceShipTwo, with a value of up to $4.5 million. 

Virgin Galactic's flight plan calls for the WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane (also known as VMS Eve) to take SpaceShipTwo (also known as VSS Enterprise) up to a height of 50,000 feet, and then let it go to fire its rocket engine. The smaller plane would blast up to more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude, past the internationally accepted boundary of outer space. After a few minutes of experiencing weightlessness and gazing at the curving Earth, the riders would glide back to a landing at Spaceport America. The up-and-down trip would take about three hours in all.

Eventually, Branson plans to extend Virgin Galactic's reach to point-to-point suborbital flight as well as orbital outings. "This is a Virgin birth," he joked.

During today's half-hour demonstration flight, SpaceShipTwo remained firmly attached to its carrier airplane, and the altitude was capped at about 10,000 feet. But the plane has already gone through 16 free-flying, unpowered glide tests at its Southern California test site — including one last month that was characterized as a "nail-biter." Sometime in the next year, SpaceShipTwo's developers at Scaled Composites are expected to begin powered tests with a hybrid rocket engine made by Sierra Nevada Corp.

Meanwhile, construction work will continue at Spaceport America. The facility is said to be more than 90 percent complete, and the exterior of the "Gateway to Space" bseems to be essentially finished. But lots of work remains to be done on the interior — particularly in the facility's terminal area, where the floors and the walls are little more than bare concrete and unadorned drywall. The hangar, which is designed to hold as many as two WhiteKnightTwo motherships and five SpaceShipTwos, seems cavernous today.

Another year should make a big difference, both for the Gateway to Space's interior and for Branson's space aspirations. He's hoping to take a suborbital space trip on SpaceShipTwo with his family for Christmas in 2012. Does that sound too ambitious, coming from a guy who has just rappelled down a 60-foot-high building? You tell me, by registering your comments below.

More about commercial spaceflight:

• Private spaceship factory open for business
• PhotoBlog: Another look at Richard Branson's antics
• Slideshow: The making of SpaceShipTwo
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle.

Robots are already taking away jobs at factories. Now, it appears, they're ready to rule the table tennis court, too. 

Two pingpong-playing humanoid robots named Wu and Kong debuted earlier this month at Zhejiang University in China where they showed off their skills in front of engineers and journalists.

---

The twin 5 foot, 3 inch, 121 pound robots have 30 individually-powered joints, giving them an impressive range of motion. Each arm, for example, can move seven directions, according to the university's description.

Key to their ability to serve and return balls with forehands, backhands, and stoic focus are eye-mounted cameras that predict the path of the ball so the robot get can ready for the next shot.

Each camera captures 120 images per second, which are transferred to the robots' processors that calculate the balls' position, speed, angle, landing position and path, the Xinhuanet news agency reports.

It takes 50 to 100 milliseconds for the robots to respond and their ability to predict the balls' landing position has a margin of error of just less than an inch.

As shown in this video, the robots can play with each other as well as humans. However, the robots lack the ability to curve, shank, or slice the ball, noted Zhang Yfeng, one of the designers.

The team hopes to improve the table tennis ability of the robots, though the game isn't the ultimate goal. Instead, they hope to transfer the technology next-gen helper robots, such as those envisioned for elder care.

But plop one of these pingpong-playing robots in the basement of a fraternity house along with the beer tossing fridge created a few years ago at Duke and some stressed out college students would likely find reason to smile.

More on robot technology:

• Robot shopping carts follow you around
• Duke grad builds beer tossing fridge
• Honda hopes robot will help the needy
• Sneaky robots taught the art of deception
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker
• Your new co-worker may be a robot
• Non-human DJ gets radio gig
• Robot plays catch, brews coffee
• More work for robots in China

---

John Roachis a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

Londoners who walk or bike around town with a smartphone that records their whereabouts will soon earn points redeemable at shops and restaurants.

The program aims to harness ubiquitous phone tracking technology to ease congestion and pollution as well as boost physical fitness by appealing to the human desire to get stuff at a discount.

---

The concept was announced Monday by Recyclebank, a group that promotes green actions with rewards, and Transport for London, the organization that operates London's transport system including the Underground.

The smartphone app will log the distance members travel and reward them accordingly. At the end of each journey, Recyclebank will reveal the number of points earned, as well as the benefits of the journey such as the number of trees saved and carbon emissions prevented.

The app will also show users nearby locations where they can redeem their points, notes Fast Company. 

Rewards currently available range from discounts at McDonald's, where you can replenish those calories you burned walking around town, to Macy's, where you can buy a new outfit to looking smashing in the bike saddle. 

A panel of recruited users will test the application later this year. The program is scheduled for launch in spring 2012. It will be free to join.

"Our hope is that this program becomes something that other cities can emulate to reduce their environmental footprint, realizing the collective impact of individual green actions," Recyclebank CEO Jonathan Hsu, said in a statement.

If so, we can all look forward to a day when our streets are less crowded by smog-belching vehicles, we're all a bit trimmer from all the walking and biking, and our appetite for the latest deals — even at the cost of a little privacy — is more gargantuan than ever.

More on smartphones, shopping and tracking:

• Mall deal gives boost to smartphone coupons
• Government officials want answers to secret iPhone tracking
• So, your phone is tracking you? You asked for it
• Worried about your teen driver? There's an app for that
• Bobbie's buzz: Stylish ways to go green

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

Olympians and spectators that cross from a stadium to a shopping center during the 2012 summer games in London will step on pavers that convert footsteps into electricity.

The installation of the high-tech pavers is the first commercial deal inked by PaveGen, a UK-based company that makes the electricity-generating slabs. 

---

In the video above, the technology is demonstrated at the Bestival on the Isle of Wight where it was part of a dance floor that generated electricity as 50,000 people get their groove on over a four-day run. 

The slabs are made of 100 percent recycled rubber on top and 80 percent recycled material at its base. The weight of person is used to generate electricity. How, exactly, is a company secret.

To prove it works, though, the pavers have LED that illuminate when the paver is stepped on. This glow is intended to engage walkers with the fact they are making renewable energy, the company says.

The Westfield Stratford City Mall will install 20 of the pavers, which will be tromped across by an estimated 30 million people in its first year.

"That should be enough feet to power about half its outdoor lighting needs," Laurence Kemball-Cook, the 25-year-old director of PaveGen, told CNN.

The idea of harnessing the power in the human stride to generate electricity is hardly new: 

• In 2005, we were introduced to a backpack that harvests electricity
• In 2007, MIT grad students hit on the notion that the collective energy created by hundreds or thousands of people could power a train with their Crowd Farm concept
• And in August, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher unveiled energy harvesting shoes that he hopes to commercialize.

Like all of these concepts, scale up and commercialization of the pavers will depend on factors such as utility, maintenance and cost. 

But as visitors to the Olympic games in London will see, there's potential for renewable energy in every step we take.

More on people power tech:

• Shoes redefine 'power walking'
• 'Crowd Farms' could offer alternative energy
• Backpack generates its own electricity
• Device generated electricity from swinging knee

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

A high-tech crop insurance company aims to make farming profitable — and itself — by writing policies that offer protection against floods, frosts, droughts and other bouts of crop-damaging weather that are on the rise.

Whether the increase in these weather events are due to human-caused climate change, the company said, is not their business, but the events are trending upwards and they have the technology to analyze the risk they pose to individual farmers and price polices accordingly.

---

"We are not trying to predict exactly what will happen, we are trying to create a distribution of outcomes of what might happen," David Friedberg, the CEO of The Climate Corporation, which is issuing the insurance, told me Thursday.

"It is the probabilistic distribution of things that might happen that allows us to figure out what price to charge for the insurance that we are selling."

High-tech risk analysis
This ability hinges on a system that crunches a deluge of data from state-of-the-art climate models, millions of weather measurements, and billions of soil observations. At any given time, more than 50 terabytes of live data are in its systems.

Farmers purchase policies for specific plantings (such as a field of corn or wheat) and are paid automatically when an identified type of weather hits that is known to cause production shortfalls, such as crop-wilting heat or drought. 

The Climate Corporation was founded by ex-Googlers who believe that these types of weather events are becoming increasingly common. Whether this increase in weather volatility is due to human cause climate change, however, the company doesn't have an opinion, Friedberg said.

"All that we can do is identify trends in climate data and use them to help us predict what is going to happen in the future," he said. 

For example, he said they can look at any city in the United States and see that temperatures have increased slightly over the last 30 years and seem to be continuing to increase, but that's not what they're interested in.

Rather, the impacts they are looking for are droughts, such as the one currently crippling Texas and the floods that hit Midwest farms in the spring.

"Those are the sorts of events that farmers and other businesses care about … and those are the sorts of events that we also see big trends in," Friedberg said.

Changing industry
While climate scientists caution people not to confuse the weather with climate change, the types of extreme weather events experienced this year are consistent with the predictions of climate change models.

Polls show a growing percentage of Americans now believe the planet is warming, but the issue remains a political hot potato. Most Republican presidential candidates — John Huntsman aside — eschew the idea that fossil fuel burning is causing the climate to change, for example.

Meanwhile, legislation to combat climate change has failed to make its way through Congress and climate scientists are routinely accused of manipulating data, though those claims have been proven mostly false.

But for the insurance industry, where money does most of the talking, whether anyone says it directly or not, climate change is decidedly real and will wreak havoc on life, property, and crops. As a result, the industry is becoming proactive in incorporating changing climate into its risk analyses.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners now, on a state-by-state opt-in basis, surveys companies about the risk climate changes poses to insurers and the actions insurers are taking in response to their understanding of those risks, for example.

Munich Re, a multinational company that insures insurance companies, issued a report in July showing 2011 was already the costliest year on record in terms of property damage.

While natural disasters unrelated to climate change such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan make up for a big chunk of the losses, flooding in Australia has the fingerprint of climate change, Peter Hoppe, who runs the company's Geo Risk/Corporate Climate Center, told reporters as the report was released.

Natural events such as La Nina and El Nino, ocean cycles that alter weather systems, are certainly factors as well, but warming temperatures appear to be adding a layer "on top" of that natural variability, Hoppe said.

He also cited a climate connection between Australia's severe floods and rising ocean temperatures off the coast there. That means "more evaporation and higher potential for these extreme downpours," he said.

"It can only be explained by global warming," he added. 

Now that this acknowledgement exists, insurers such as The Climate Corporation are creating innovative tools to offer protection from the risk posed by the increased chance that bad weather can wipe out a year's income.

"If you are a farmer, you really can't afford to have another heat wave or another early freeze event or delayed plant period," said Friedberg. "We can really reach in and help."

More on climate change, insurance and farming:

• Warming: A $900 billion insurance risk?
• Insurers paying to rebuild greener homes
• Irene wallops floundering flood insurance program
• Scientists race to avoid climate change harvest

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

It's been almost a year since astronomers suggested that Eris, the icy world whose discovery prompted Pluto's controversial reclassification in 2006, wasn't as big as they originally thought. Now the official word has leaked out unofficially: Pluto just might be the largest dwarf planet after all — although Eris is still seen as more massive.

The latest measurements were reported last week in Nantes, France, at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress. But as the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains, it took a while for the report to become public, due to worries about the journal Nature's rules on embargoes and confidentiality.

Here are the statistics: Based on measurements made last November during the dwarf planet's occultation of a faraway star, Eris' diameter is estimated at 2,326 kilometers (1,445 miles). A similar set of measurements, published in 2009. estimated that Pluto was at least 2,338 kilometers (1,453 miles). When you include the margin of error, Pluto is essentially Eris' equal in size.

---

"It could be smaller, it could be larger; basically, it is a twin," Lakdawalla quoted Paris Observatory astronomer Bruno Sicardy, the lead researcher for the Eris measurements, as saying at the conference.

Lakdawalla held back from reporting what Sicardy said because she was asked to. The research paper about the measurements is under consideration for publication in Nature, and Sicardy said the journal's editors told him he could discuss the results only if he instructed his audience not to report them publicly. The implication was that Sicardy's paper would be tossed out if his team's findings appeared in the press.

The audience was all abuzz about the findings, of course, but Lakdawalla said she wouldn't "break anything until somebody else breaks it."

She did, however, refer to the zipped-lip situation in a Twitter message to Embargo Watch's Ivan Oransky. Long story short, Oransky checked with Nature and was told that "researchers with papers in submission at a Nature journal can certainly present at a scientific meeting but shouldn't court the press." Oransky blogs about the back-and-forth today on Embargo Watch, but the bottom line is that Sicardy needn't have feared having his paper rejected, as long as he confined his public remarks to the presentation.

If Nature sticks to the reported publication plan, the paper will be published on Oct. 26. Today, a lot of the details came out not only on Lakdawalla's blog, but also on Scientific American's Observations blog — which is interesting, because Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group. (SciAm's John Matson helpfully included a link to Sicardy's conference report.)

So what else do Sicardy and his colleagues say? Although Pluto and Eris are roughly the same size, Eris is more massive, which implies it's "mainly composed of rocky material, with a relatively thin ice mantle," the astronomers say. They suggest that Eris once had a thicker layer of ice, most of which was "blasted away" as the result of a catastrophic cosmic collision.

Sicardy and his colleagues also note that when you factor in Eris' distance, its observed brightness and its relatively small size, the dwarf planet stands out as one of the brightest bodies in the solar system, after the Saturnian moons Tethys and Enceladus. They suggest that the dwarf planet is so bright because it has a surface layer of nitrogen or methane frost, due to the freezing-out of its atmosphere.

A similar freeze-out might well happen on Pluto as it heads out to the farthest point of its orbit around the sun. Eris, meanwhile, is coming closer to the sun — and at some point the nitrogen or methane might thaw back into the atmosphere.

The two worlds seem destined to stand in the planetary pantheon as separated twins — in possession of moons, seasons, their own distinctive geologies and potentially some kind of cryovolcanic activity. Should they really be regarded as non-planets, or is it better to see them as a different class of planets? I argue for the latter in my book, "The Case for Pluto," but I'd love to hear what you think. Please feel free to add your comments below.

More about dwarfs and other planets:

• Pluto debate is about more than one little world
• Interactive: The new solar system
• Eris looks a lot like Pluto
• Eight decades of Pluto
• The Pluto files on msnbc.com

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle.

Two studies shed additional light on a murky question: How did the cosmic fog that enveloped the universe in its early days dissipate?

In one study, researchers suggest that whatever happened, happened quickly ... and they say it probably had to do with the hot blast of the first generation of stars. Another suggests how the fog-blasting mechanism worked ... and why it might be tricky to see the effect.

First, about that cosmic fog: Cosmologists have worked out a model for the development of the early cosmos that's a good match for their observations, and the model indicates that for the first few hundred thousand years of its existence, the universe consisted of a hot, murky stew of subatomic particles.

---

About 400,000 years after the big bang, things had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to come together and form a fog of neutral hydrogen gas. This marked a period that astronomers call the "Dark Ages." Eventually, gravity did its magic, and clouds of hydrogen coalesced to create the first stars and galaxies. The remaining hydrogen became electrically charged — "reionized," in geek-speak — and was cleared away.

Today, astronomers can see only as far back as the period of reionization, even if they're using the most powerful telescopes in the world. The best they can do is observe what was happening to galaxies while the reionization was taking place. And that's exactly what astronomers did during a three-year survey that's described in a research paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Timeline of the early universe
"Archaeologists can reconstruct a timeline of the past from the artifacts they find in different layers of soil. Astronomers can go one better: We can look directly into the remote past and observe the faint light from different galaxies in cosmic evolution," the project's leader, Adriano Fontana of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory, said today in a news release from the European Southern Observatory. "The differences between the galaxies tell us about the changing conditions in the universe over this important period, and how quickly these changes were occurring."

The team conducted their survey using the ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Astronomers identified five extremely faraway galaxies, based on their redshift, and placed them in a timeline that started at 780 million years after the big bang (which is thought to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago) and ended about a billion years after the big bang. They also measured how much of the galaxies' ultraviolet light was absorbed by the hydrogen fog surrounding the galaxies.

The paper's lead author, Laura Pentericci of INAF Rome Astronomical Observatory, said there was a "dramatic difference" in the amount of light blocked by the oldest vs. the youngest galaxies in the sample.

"When the universe was only 780 million years old, this neutral hydrogen was quite abundant, filling from 10 to 50 percent of the universe's volume," she said in the news release. "But only 200 million years later, the amount of neutral hydrogen had dropped to a very low level, similar to what we see today. It seems that reionization must have happened quicker than astronomers previously thought."

The findings also favor a particular hypothesis for the mechanism behind the reionization. Some theorists say the fog was cleared by radiation blazing forth from the first generation of stars, while others point to the intense radiation given off as matter falls toward black holes.

"The detailed analysis of the faint light from two of the most distant galaxies we found suggsts that the very first generation of stars may have contributed to the energy output observed," said another member of the research team, Eros Vanzella of the INAF Trieste Observatory. "These would have been very young and massive stars, about 5,000 times younger and 100 times more massive than the sun, and they may have been able to dissolve the primordial fog and make it transparent."

Confirming or disproving that hypothesis would require further observations, either from space telescopes or from better ground-based instruments such as the ESO's planned European Extremely Large Telescope.

Building the case for blazing stars
Another study, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, provides further support for the blazing-star hypothesis. Astronomers observed a dwarf starburst galaxy known as NGC 5253, about 11 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, using the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

NGC 5253 is nowhere near as old as the galaxies that the Italian researchers surveyed, but it does provide a clearer, closer-up view of the phenomenon that might have been at work during the reionization period. "This galaxy is nearby, but we're trying to use it to better understand what was going on in the early universe," the study's lead author, Jordan Zastrow of the University of Michigan, told me.

When Zastrow and her colleagues used special filters to analyze the light from the galaxy, they determined that extreme ultraviolet radiation was blasting out of the galaxy's center and causing hydrogen gas in the interstellar medium to dissipate. "We are not directly seeing the ultraviolet light," Zastrow emphasized in a news release. "We are seeing its signature in the gas around the galaxy."

The signature of the blast shows up in the team's color-coded picture of NGC 5253 as a reddish-yellow tail snaking out toward the lower left corner of the frame. "It appears to be happening over a very narrow region, a very narrow cone," Zastrow said.

The gas within such a galaxy would normally absorb the ultraviolet radiation, but the researchers suggest that superwinds from the galaxy's massive stars helped clear a passageway through the galactic gas, letting more of the light break through.

Starburst galaxies are rarely found in the nearby universe, but they're thought to have been very common in the early universe. NGC 5253 just might be showing astronomers a rerun of the gas-clearing process that marked the age of ionization. But the galaxy is also showing astronomers why it's been hard to see similar processes at work in other galaxies.

"The opening that is letting the UV light out is very small, which makes this light challenging to detect," Zastrow said. "We can think of it as a lighthouse. If the lamp is pointed toward you, you can see the light. If it's pointed away from you, you can't see it. We believe the orientation of the galaxy is important as to whether we can detect escaping UV radiation."

Astronomers might want to take this narrow-beam effect into account as they build their scenarios for how the cosmic fog cleared, Zastrow told me. "Particularly because this issue is so interesting, and so important for our cosmic history, the important thing is to better understand what is actually possible in terms of learning how it could have happened," she said.

More about cosmic frontiers:

• Scientists pinpoint the farthest galaxy
• Hubble spots farthest galaxy ... again
• Galactic births came early
• Scientists learn how galaxies grew up

---

In addition to Pentericci, Fontana and Vanzella, authors of "Spectroscopic Confirmation of Z~7 LBGs: Probing the Earliest Galaxies and the Epoch of Reionization" include M. Castellaon, A. Grazian, M. Dijkstra, K. Boutsia, S. Cristiani, M. Dickinson, E. Giallongo, M. Giavalisco, R. Maiolino, A. Moorwood and P. Santini.

In addition to Zastrow, authors of "An Ionization Cone in the Dwarf Starburst Galaxy NGC 5253" include M.S. Oey, Sylvain Veilleux, Michael McDonald and Crystal L. Martin.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The high peaks of the Himalayas may soon be a beacon for adventurous solar power entrepreneurs, suggests a new study that identified the lofty region as having some of the world's greatest potential to capture energy from the sun.

Other regions not traditionally considered hotbeds of solar power potential include the Andes of South America and Antarctica, note Takashi Oozeki and Yutaka Genchi with the National Institute of Industrial Science and Technology in Japan. 

---

In addition to copious amounts of sunlight, these regions are chillier than the usual suspects such as the southwestern United States and the deserts of North Africa. Colder temps increase the operational efficiency of certain photovoltaic solar cells, which turn sunlight into electricity.

"The Himalayan region is especially attractive because it is near regions with large future energy demands such as China and India," the pair writes in Environmental Science and Technology. 

The finding is based on a global analysis of photovoltaic potential that takes into account the effect of ambient temperature, something the team says has not been done before. 

Plopping solar cells high up in the rugged mountains will require addressing additional challenges such as building and maintaining the transmission infrastructure to bring the electricity to the cities where it is most needed, the pair notes.

But overcoming those challenges may be worth the hassle especially when factors such as global climate change are added to the equation. China, for example, adds the equivalent of two 500 MW coal fired power plants per week, according to a 2007 MIT report. 

"Because CO2 emissions per unit electricity in China and India are larger than those in the developed countries, using PV energy in these regions could have a large mitigation effect on climate change," write Oozeki and Genchi.

Big solar in Antarctica, the team adds, doesn't make much sense — at least with current technology — given the low population there and the fact that it's dark for half the year.

"If some way can be developed to store the generated energy, e.g. in the form of hydrogen or refined metals, then it may be possible to utilize the large potential in this region in the future," the team notes.

More stories on solar power potential:

• Algeria sees its desert as solar industry
• Chicago getting a tower of power – solar power
• Space solar power crowd bets on Obama
• 'Arab Spring' to juice power project?
• Green machine takes root in Jordan

Also in msnbc.com's Future of Technology section:

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Just a few weeks after a falling U.S. satellite put the world on alert, German space officials say the defunct ROSAT X-ray telescope is on course to make a fiery re-entry in the Oct. 20-25 time frame — which is earlier than previously predicted.

When NASA's six-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite plunged harmlessly into the Pacific on Sept. 24, the German Aerospace Center said the 2.4-ton ROSAT probe would be the next big satellite to take a fall. But the initial projection called for atmospheric re-entry to occur in early November. The shift to a sooner date is due to updated data, and additional shifts are to be expected over the coming days.

As was the case with NASA and the UARS spacecraft, the Germans won't be able to pinpoint precisely when or where their satellite will hit — but the most likely scenario is that the debris will fall harmlessly into the sea.

---

ROSAT, which is a contraction for "Roentgen Satellite," was launched in 1990 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The German-U.S.-British mission conducted an all-sky survey in X-ray wavelengths, cataloging more than 150,000 objects. Mission managers turned the probe off in 1999, and its orbit has been slowly decaying ever since. Because there's no propulsion system on board, the managers can't guide the bus-sized spacecraft to a controlled re-entry.

Theoretically, ROSAT could come down at any latitude between 53 degrees north and 53 degrees south, or roughly between Edmonton, Canada, and Punta Arenas, Chile. ROSAT isn't as massive as UARS was, but because of the way it was built, more of its mass is expected to survive re-entry. Experts estimate that 30 pieces totaling 1.6 metric tons could make impact, compared with 26 pieces totaling a half-ton (1,100 pounds) for UARS.

"The largest single fragment will probably be the telescope's mirror, which is very heat-resistant," the German Aerospace Center, also known by the German-language acronym DLR, said in its latest re-entry update.

The Canadian Press recently noted that ROSAT's mirror system weighs 1,700 pounds (785 kilograms), or about as much as a standard-sized polar bear. CP also quoted the University of Calgary's Phil Langill as saying that the chance of any piece hitting any person was about 1 out of 2,000, compared with 1 out of 3,200 for UARS. That statistic isn't as scary as it sounds: When you do the math, that works out to somewhere around a 1 in 13 trillion chance that a particular individual in the potential impact zone (me, for example) would be hit.

ROSAT is being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network as well as a radar facility near Bonn, Germany, and the re-entry predictions will be updated over the next week. This isn't an exact science, however. The satellite could descend more or less quickly, depending on the ups and downs in solar activity.

"Currently, the re-entry date can only be calculated to within plus/minus three days," DLR said. "This time slot of uncertainty will be reduced as the date of re-entry approaches. However, even one day before re-entry, the estimate will only be accurate to within plus/minus five hours."

Coincidentally, another kind of doomsday deadline falls around the same time — the Oct. 21 date specified by California preacher Harold Camping for the end of the world. Camping's earlier deadline for the Rapture, which was thrust into the public consciousness thanks to a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, came and went uneventfully on May 21. I have no doubt this new date will be just as uneventful ... unless it turns out to be the day that ROSAT makes a splash.

More about space debris:

• Why should I worry about space junk?
• How will the space station fall to Earth?
• Scientists downsize estimate for risky asteroids
• Huge satellite poses 150-year space debris threat

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

It's been a long, lonely three years for NASA's Opportunity rover, which has just finished a 13-mile (21-kilometer) trek from Victoria Crater across the Martian wasteland of Meridiani Planum to Endeavour Crater. A newly released time-lapse video from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory condenses the odyssey down to just three minutes.

The video draws upon a series of 309 images, each taken when the rover stopped driving at the end of a Martian day. The pictures give you a sense of the loneliness that an astronaut might feel while following in Opportunity's wheel tracks. Drifts of sand go on for miles and miles, interrupted only by craters or patches of bedrock.

---

The soundtrack for the video was created by taking low-frequency recordings from Opportunity's accelerometers and speeding them up by a factor of 1,000. "The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars," Paolo Bellutta, a roer planner at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., said in NASA's video advisory. "When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand."

Opportunity's trek to Endeavour is the longest and most ambitious journey ever taken by a probe on another planet. While Oppy was making the trip, its twin on the other side of the planet, the Spirit rover, gave up the ghost after more than six years of operation. Now Opportunity is opening a new chapter in Mars exploration, seven and a half years after its landing.

That ain't bad for a mission that was originally scheduled to last 90 days on the Red Planet. Nevertheless, a little perspective is in order: The crater that Opportunity is exploring happens to be wider than the entire distance that the rover traveled over the past three years.

NBC News' Brian Williams was certainly impressed by the video, declaring on the Nightly News that it was "one of the most incredible motion pictures ever produced."

"Is it just us, or do those Martian sand dunes remind you a lot of the Jersey Shore?" he asked.

Watch Williams go ga-ga in the "Nightly News" video clip below:

 More about Mars:

• Where NASA's next rover is going
• Opportunity transmits a 9/11 tribute
• Slideshow: The greatest hits from Mars
• Latest info and pictures of Mars on msnbc.com

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The push to wean the biofuel industry off its heavy diet of corn may, ironically, involve transferring a corn gene to non-corn plants such as switch grass, suggests a new study.

The gene, called Corngrass 1, essentially locks the switch grass into a state of perpetual pre-adolescence, explained George Chuck, a plant molecular geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley.

---

"One of the consequences of staying juvenile forever is they don't flower, they don't become sexually mature," he said. 

Instead of burning energy to reproduce, the plants build up starches that are easily degraded into sugars that are fermented to biofuel.

The plants with the gene, Chuck and his colleagues report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, stored as much as 250 percent more starch in their stems than plants without it.

The breakthrough, the researchers note, could make the production of cellulosic ethanol easier and cheaper than current methods.

In addition, since flowering is prevented with this gene, the risk is reduced that the transgenic plants will contaminate wild plants, one of the concerns about genetically modified crops.

Cellulosic breakthrough?
Researchers are struggling to overcome the expensive pre-treatment process used in the production of cellulosic ethanol, which requires a lot of heat and caustic chemicals, noted Chuck.

"All the treatment just raises the cost of processing the biomass," he said. "Whereas we showed that you can skip the pretreatment if you use our biomass with a lot of starch in it."

In their process, researchers add an enzyme called alpha amylase to degrade the starch to sugars as well as enzymes that break down cell walls, but skip the expensive pre-treatment process entirely.

In theory, this could make cellulosic ethanol more affordable.

Earlier this month, an independent panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the government was unlikely to meet a target of producing 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel a year largely because the technology to produce the fuel cheaply doesn't exist.

Chuck called his team's approach "a first step" in the direction of reaching that goal, though he doesn't know if it can be improved upon and scaled up in time to reach the target.

Nevertheless, he said, the research does show a somewhat ironic way to move away from using corn in producing biofuels, which competes with food for livestock and people.

"From the whole food-vs.-fuel debate, I think the answer may be putting aspects of the food into your biofuel," Chuck said. "Things like starch, building up starch in your biofuel cropland."

More on biofuels:

• Biofuel push a bust, report hints
• Race for better biofuels heats up
• Is algae biofuel too thirsty?
• Venture capitalist eyes cellulosic ethanol

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

A homemade rocket that blasted off from Nevada's Black Rock Desert captured images of the inky blackness of space from 121,000 feet above Earth, putting an approximately $10,000 prize within its reach.

All that's missing is a GPS log of the flight with a reading above 100,000 feet, one of the requisites to claim the prize offered by John Carmack, who created the popular video games Doom and Quake, and founded Armadillo Aerospace. 

---

Derek Deville, an amateur rocket builder, launched his homemade rocket Qu8k (pronounced quake) on Sept. 30. It reached its apogee of 121,000 feet at 92 seconds after launch, then deployed a parachute and floated back down to Earth where it was recovered just three miles from the launch site.

Cameras onboard the rocket captured the views, including the curvature of the Earth and the parachute cord slowly going taut.

While the lack of a GPS reading above 100,00 feet will keep the prize — $5,000 from Carmack and another $5,000 to $5,500 from additional benefactors — unclaimed for now, it appears it won't last for much longer. 

Deville had a GPS on board Qu8k, just didn't get the reading he needed. Several other teams are vying for the prize, which is open until the first person or group reaches the goal.

A highlight reel of the Qu8k launch is at the top of this post. You can watch the full length version here.

[Via Popular Science]

More on amateur rockets and Armadillo Aerospace:

• Amateur rocket breaks space barrier
• Thrills and spills abound at rocket fest
• Lunar lander prototype passes test
• Tourism firm to offer space rides for $102,000

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

A year and a half after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sparked a months-long environmental crisis, experts from a cleanup company in Illinois have earned a $1 million prize for coming up with a better way to deal with future spills.

Another team from Norway took the $300,000 second prize in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, which was organized even as the Gulf oil spill was going on. And wouldn't you know it? Yet another oil-spill crisis is unfolding off the coast of New Zealand, even as the awards are being announced today in New York.

The risks posed by offshore drilling and tanker accidents are what prompted Silicon Valley philanthropist Wendy Schmidt to fund the prize program almost as soon as she was asked. Until fossil fuels can be phased out entirely, there's a crying need for better oil-cleanup technologies.

"We're really playing with fire, and I hope we move beyond this," she told me in an interview before today's ceremony, "But in the meantime, it's very encouraging to see so many people who care about the problem."

---

The $1.4 million Oil Cleanup X Challenge was organized by the X Prize Foundation, which has also managed two $10 million competitions for private spaceflight and more efficient cars, as well as a $2 million contest for lunar lander prototypes. Several other X Prizes are in the works, including the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for private-sector moon missions.

The X Prize Foundation's chairman and CEO, Peter Diamandis, said the oil-cleanup challenge sprang out of a suggestion made by film director James Cameron, a member of the foundation's board of trustees.

"It really was a rapid-response X Challenge," Diamandis told me. "The idea that a $1.4 million purse could attract roughly 350 teams to pre-register was really incredible." 

The competition was designed to encourage the development of cleanup methods that could outdo the current industry standard for speed and efficiency. Ten finalists were selected to go through a series of tests this summer at the OHMSETT oil-spill research facility in New Jersey. To have a chance at winning a prize, the teams had to recover at least 2,500 gallons of oil a minute, with a recovery efficiency of 70 percent or better.

Three times as fast as the previous best
Two teams hit that mark and then some. Illinois-based Team Elastec's grooved-disc skimming system sucked out 4,670 gallons per minute at 89.5 percent efficiency — a recovery rate that was three times as good as the industry's previous best oil recovery rate, tested under controlled conditions. That earned Elastec/American Marine, a well-known manufacturer of oil-cleanup equipment, the million-dollar prize.

Norway's Team NOFI, representing a midsize player in the oil-cleanup game, came in second with a recovery rate of 2,712 gallons per minute at 83 percent efficiency. The competition's $100,000 third prize went unclaimed because no other team hit the minimum requirements.

It might sound strange that the ones to beat the industry standard are industry leaders — but Peter Velez, one of the judges for the competition and global emergency response manager for Shell International Exploration, said the winners found innovative ways to improve on their own records. "None of them brought equipment that they already had built and were selling," Velez told me.

Like mowing a field with a tractor
The keys to success for oil-spill recovery include being able to take in more surface area at once, and moving faster through a given area. "It's like you're mowing a field with a big tractor: The bigger you can make your pass, the more you can do at one time," Velez explained.

For Elastec, that meant building a huge oil-skimming system with four rows of rapidly spinning grooved discs. "It's essentially a box that moves around in the water and captures the oil very well. The more oil you can gather, the more effective you can be," Velez said.

The NOFI team, meanwhile, built a large boom system called the "Current Buster."

"This was a different setup, in that it also had a way to travel in the water at higher speeds than a typical boom can," Velez said. The contraption, which has been compared to a giant "Slip 'N' Slide" sheet, was built to concentrate the oil and slurp it into a recovery device.

Velez said the competition provided an opportunity to see how a wide variety of oil-cleanup systems worked in a standardized setting. Some of the systems are built to work better in calm seas, while others would put in a better performance in choppy waters. "It helps us make the selection when we go to purchase equipment," Velez said.

A $1.3 million 'jump start'
This competition attracted brand-new entrants in the oil-equipment market as well as established players. One of the finalists was Team Vor-Tek, whose members came from a background in metal recycling and adapted a system they originally developed for recovering plastic from the ocean. The X Challenge gave Vor-Tek's entrepreneurs an opportunity to test the waters (so to speak) with a whole new product.

"For a relatively modest investment on my part, we've really jump-started some technological advances that I don't think would have happened otherwise," Schmidt said. 

Although the X Challenge competition is finished, this is by no means the end of Schmidt's environmental efforts. The Schmidt Family Foundation — which Wendy Schmidt and her husband, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, established in 2006 — is backing other environmental initiatives such as the 11th Hour Project and ReMain Nantucket. Wendy Schmidt is looking for still more opportunities to make a difference on the energy/environment front. "We're not done yet," she told me.

The X Prize Foundation, meanwhile, is moving ahead with still more competitions. Last week, the foundation announced that Shell would be the exclusive sponsor for a $9 million, three-year prize program aimed at encouraging the exploration of Earth's frontiers, the world's oceans and outer space.

All about X Prizes and other awards:

• Spaceship team gets its $10 million X Prize
• Super-cars split $10 million in X Prize race
• Rocketeers win $1.65 million in lunar lander challenge
• $10 million offered for gene-mapping feat
• 'Star Trek' tricorder could win $10 million
• 29 teams enter $30 million race to the moon 
• Brain X Prize may spark some big solutions
• Electric plane wins $1.35 million from NASA
• NASA offers $5 million for new technological feats

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

NASA is working with a little-known Oregon company on a variety of trial balloons, ranging from suborbital near-spacecraft to a probe that would float through the smoggy atmosphere of a Saturnian moon.

The launching point for these trial balloons couldn't be more bucolic. Near Space Corp. is based in a World War II-era blimp hangar, out in the countryside south of Tillamook, Ore., a locale that is better-known for cheese and ice cream than for space exploration.

"Out of the 4,000 people in Tillamook, not more than one in 10 knows we're here," Tim Lachenmeier, Near Space Corp.'s president, told me during my late-summer visit to the cavernous hangar.

---

The company's location and its small workforce (about 15 employees) aren't the only reasons why you hear so little about them: Many of the high-altitude balloon projects that Near Space takes on are hush-hush experiments for military or commercial clients. During my visit, Lachenmeier and other workers took care to cover up the areas they didn't want a visiting journalist to see.

But the NASA projects are different: For example, Near Space won funding from the space agency to test the material that could be used on a balloon-borne probe to be sent to Titan, Saturn's biggest moon and the only moon in the solar system to have a dense atmosphere. An aerobot for Titan would have to stand up to temperatures around 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-180 degrees Celsius). Yards of Titan-worthy material are hung up in a workroom at the hangar.

The most impressive room is the hangar's 1,072-foot-long, 192-foot-high giant blimp bay, which was designed for the balloons that kept watch for enemy submarines in World War II. By the time the blimp patrols started, the Pacific threat had largely passed, and Naval Air Station Tillamook was decommissioned in 1948. Since then, it has been used as a lumber mill and a research facility for blimps and balloons. Today, Near Space shares what's billed as "the largest wooden structure in the world" with the Tillamook Air Museum, which displays an array of historic airplanes on the hangar's floor.

The huge, contained space comes in handy for testing the prototype balloons that Near Space builds. "We've had a 60-foot sphere in here," Lachenmeier said. But most of the real testing happens outside rather than inside. Because it's hard to predict exactly where a balloon payload will come down, Near Space prefers test sites with lots of wide-open space — such as rural Oregon, or a test range in Hawaii. "The locals there always call us the 'Martians,'" Lachenmeier said.

One of the company's most ambitious projects for NASA involved testing the components for an airplane that would be flown to Mars inside a spacecraft, then unfold itself and fly through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere.

Near Space did the tests by flying prototypes up to high altitudes aboard a balloon, then setting them loose. "We can simulate the Mars atmosphere that they would have to pass through," Lachenmeier explained. It turns out that the air at an altitude of 115,000 feet or so (35 kilometers) is a good analog for the Martian atmosphere.

In the end, NASA decided against going ahead with the Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Survey mission, also known as ARES. But this summer, Near Space got in on another one of the space agency's frontiers: the commercialization of suborbital research payloads.

Suborbital mission
Near Space Corp. was one of seven companies selected to receive NASA contracts totaling $10 million for suborbital flights. Over the next two years, Near Space and the six other companies will help NASA try out various technologies for getting experiments to the edge of space and back.

Lachenmeier said the program is aimed at giving NASA a range of options for future space research. "We'll help them do early-stage risk reduction for technology," he said.

High-altitude balloons alone can't carry experiments all the way up to the 62-mile (100-kilometer) boundary of outer space, but they can rise high enough to provide a good test for equipment that would eventually go farther out — like that Mars airplane or that Titan balloon. At the end of a typical balloon-borne experiment, the payload would float down on a parachute. But Near Space is also working on a new type of aircraft that could fly itself back to the landing strip once it's cut loose from its balloon.

The company's 8-foot-wide High Altitude Shuttle System, or HASS, has already shown that it's capable of autonomous flight back to its base. The HASS craft can carry a 22-pound (10-kilogram) payload at altitudes of 100,000 feet (30 kilometers) for an extended period of time.

Over the years, the U.S. military has funded HASS' development as an aerial battle-coverage platform in Afghanistan and Iraq.  NASA's flight contract, in contrast, would focus on the use of HASS and other balloon platforms for research and for testing high-altitude technologies. "They could range from sensors, to communication, to guidance — you name it," Lachenmeier said.

NASA has awarded the company its first task order to integrate and fly space technology payloads. "Up to 15 flight campaigns may be provided under this award," Eric Byers, who is in charge of project management and business development for Near Space, told me today in an email. (Last week, UP Aerospace said it received a launch contract from NASA for up to eight rocket launches over the next two years as part of the same suborbital program.)

How low can they go?
Near Space Corp.'s goal is to provide lower-cost solutions for near-space applications. But how low can it go? In the past couple of years, there have been scads of reports about college students, and even a 7-year-old and his dad, who have sent picture-taking smartphones to the 100,000-foot level for $150 or so. Lachenmeier admitted that Near Space can't beat that price.

"It's not hundreds of dollars for us," he told me. "It's tens of thousands of dollars."

But he went on to point out that there's a big difference between sending up a smartphone and lofting hundreds of pounds of payload to the edge of space. "It's not like, 'I hope we get it back.' We've got to get it back," he said.

What's more, Near Space's capabilities for testing high-altitude platforms, and communicating with them once they're launched, are at a much higher level. "Most of the $92 guys don't have a chamber where they can simulate an altitude of 130,000 feet," Lachenmeier said.

That being said, Lachenmeier welcomes the growing interest in do-it-yourself high-altitude ballooning. Who knows? Today's 7-year-olds with a high-flying iPhone could well be tomorrow's aerospace engineers. Some of them might even be working in a blimp hangar in rural Oregon.

"Almost anybody can get something up there," Lachenmeier said. "And that's pretty cool."

Correction for 9:55 a.m. ET Oct. 13: I've revised the reference to HASS' flight capability to emphasize what it can do now, rather than what it might eventually do. I've also amended the caption for the picture of HASS to indicate that it's an actual photograph rather than an artist's conception. Sorry for thinking the image was so cool it had to be computer-generated.

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

A stealth U.S. Navy drone — one designed to take off from and land on moving aircraft carriers at sea — successfully retracted its landing gear and flew in cruise configuration for the first time, engineers announced today. 

The test flight at Edwards Air Force Base on Sept. 30 also helped validate the hardware and software that will allow the X-47B to land with precision at sea, among the harshest aviation environments known, said the drone's maker, Northrop Grumman.

---

The tail-less plane is 38 feet long and has a 62-foot wingspan. In the images released today it looks like a UFO straight out of a 1950s cartoon. 

The military is hoping unmanned aircraft will allow aircraft carriers to remain out of reach of land-based missile systems while they launch airstrikes and reconnaissance missions. 

First flight of the X-47B took place in February. The latest test flight is part of on-going "envelope expansion" flights used to demonstrate the aircraft performance under a variety altitude, speed and fuel-load conditions. 

"Reaching this critical test point demonstrates the growing maturity of the air system and its readiness to move to the next phase of flight testing," Janis Pamiljans, vice president and Navy UCAS program manager for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector, said in statement.

The aircraft will transition to Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Md., later this year for further land-based testing, and will move to at-sea demonstrations in 2013. By 2014, Northrop Grumman intends to demonstrate autonomous in-air refueling.

More on Navy technology:

• New, stealthy Navy drone makes its maiden flight
• Navy gets fix for speed need
• Navy raygun disables boat with new high energy laser
• Navy sees spying, not flying, future with drones
• New robotic stealth fighter jet set to soar

---

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Commentators have been surprisingly fast to point to faster-than-light neutrinos as evidence that scientists could be wrong about lots of things, including the causes of climate change. But the most likely scenario is that special relativity — a theory that contends nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light in a vacuum — will turn out to be right. Or at least relatively right.

Two weeks after the neutrino experiments first came to light, the prevailing view among physicists is that the observations will somehow be shown to be wrong. The time measurements had to be made to an accuracy of billionths of a second. Synchronizing the time signatures over a distance of more than 450 miles of neutrino flight, from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory, is extremely challenging.

---

Nature News cites one paper questioning whether the clock synchronizations accounted for the varying gravitational force as the neutrinos sped through the planet. General relativity's gravitational time-dilation effect might have reduced the precision of the measurements, Imperial College London's Carlo Contaldi suggested. This wouldn't be the first time that special relativity and general relativity got tangled up with each other: The satellite-based GPS navigation system has to account not only for special relativity (which would make the satellite's clocks look as if they're moving slower from the perspective of earthly clocks) but also for general relativity (which would make them seem to move faster).

Other researchers have wondered whether fluctuations in the composition of the neutrino beam are just making it seem as if some of the particles are flying faster than light, when the effect is actually being caused by those unaccounted-for fluctuations. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and a colleague at Boston University, Andrew Cohen, take another tack: They say the OPERA neutrino beam doesn't bear the energy signature that it should have if the particles were exceeding the speed of light.

The leaders of the OPERA collaboration, the team that made the neutrino observations, say they've accounted for the factors that have come to light so far, including the clock-synchronization issue. But Physics World reports that up to half of the collaboration's members think it's premature to submit their findings to a scientific journal for formal publication. (So far, the results have been posted only to the ArXiv.org preprint server.)

While the OPERA physicists continue to double-check and debate their results, researchers from the U.S.-based MINOS collaboration are gearing up to do an independent neutrino-timing check. Re-analyzing the existing MINOS data is expected to take up to six months, and if new experiments are required, that could take more than a year. In the meantime, physicists will continue trying to poke holes in the OPERA observations.

Neutrinos on the air
During this week's "Virtually Speaking Science" chat, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll told me that OPERA's results are "almost certainly not true."

"Even the people who did the experiment will tell you that the chances are very, very small that it's right," Carroll said. "They just want people to understand that it's on the table, it's possible. They don't know what's wrong with their experiment. They would like someone else to check it, to duplicate it, to see what might be wrong."

If the observations turn out to be right, the implications would be "incredibly groundbreaking and earth-shattering," he said. But they wouldn't be beyond the power of theorists to explain, even within the framework of relativity.

"This is what we do," Carroll said. "We come up with new theories that fit crazy, unexpected pieces of data like this."

The OPERA experiment has already given rise to scores of papers on the ArXiv server, many aimed at explaining why the results aren't as crazy as they look. If the results hold up, theorists would have to adapt Albert Einstein's special relativity theory to accommodate faster-than-light observations. But Carroll says they wouldn't start from square one.

"We can say with confidence that there is some sense in which Einstein was right. He might not be the final word, but he wasn't absolutely wrong," he said. "Einstein's theories are not wrong, they've been tested right and left, and there's something right about them. They might need to be improved, they might need to be added to. ... But we're not throwing everything out and starting from scratch."

Some folks have suggested that faster-than-light neutrinos could open the way for backward time travel, reverse causality and other post-Einsteinian weirdness. In fact, folks are already collecting faster-than-light neutrino jokes. Two examples:

• "Neutrino. Knock-knock."
• "I wrote a speed-of-light joke ... but a neutrino beat me to it."

Carroll says that faster-than-light neutrinos would not necessarily disrupt causality and the arrow of time, and he explains why in a posting to his blog titled "Can Neutrinos Kill Their Own Grandfathers?"

"It could be true, but it doesn't have to be true. ... Theorists would have a lot of fun figuring out how the world actually works in that case," he said.

For an hourlong discussion of faster-than-light research as well as other weird frontiers of physics, including the Nobel-winning studies of our accelerating universe, listen to the full "Virtually Speaking Science" podcasts, either online or as an MP3 download. If you're a resident of the Second Life virtual world, you'll also enjoy Saturday's talk on dark energy, presented at 10 a.m. PT / SLT by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics.

The climate connection
Particle physics and climate science rarely mix, but they did get mixed up this week in an opinion piece written for The Wall Street Journal by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The essay listed "five obvious truths about the climate-change issue," including this one as No. 5:

"The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might — repeat, might — travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere."

That argument earned almost instant derision from the science-minded Twitterverse, spawning #WSJscience as a new hashtag. The idea that one weird experimental claim proves that other, completely unrelated scientific claims are shaky came off as laughable. The classic construction for #WSJscience tweets goes like this: "If serious scientists can question relativity, there must be room to debate [whether Earth goes around sun]." (Hat tip to @cqchoi)

Rather than engaging in an extended rant myself, let me just link to a few of the rants elsewhere on the Web, plus a few totally serious articles about the frontiers of physics.

Selected commentaries on #WSJscience:

• LiveScience: What do neutrinos have to do with climate?
• Bad Astronomy: 'Head-asplodey' climate change denial
• Sci-ence: Comic strip about neutrino nuttiness
• Dot Earth: 'Settled science' and CO2
• Real Climate: Unsettled science

More faster-than-light speculation:

• Faster-than-light discovery raises prospect of time travel
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• Why the speed of light matters
• Nobel physics prize highlights puzzles

---

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Archaeologists say the shapes of finger marks suggest that children as young as 2 years old made drawings on the walls of a Paleolithic cave dwelling, with an occasional boost from the grown-ups.

The tale of the "prehistoric preschool" was laid out by Cambridge University archaeologist Jessica Cooney last weekend at a conference on the archaeology of childhood. Cooney has been studying hundreds of markings made on the walls of France's Rouffignac cave complex. Many of the markings are thought to date back 13,000 years, to a hunter-gatherer culture known as the Magdalenian. The same culture is thought to have created the better-known cave drawings at Lascaux.

Like Lascaux, the 5-mile (8-kilometer) Rouffignac cave network has plenty of drawings, depicting mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and even a cave bear. But Cooney focuses on a different kind of art: impressions left behind in clay or "moonmilk" — a soft, white, crystalline precipitate that forms inside limestone caves. The ancient artists created the impressions by pressing or dragging their fingers through the soft material on the cave walls. Those markings are what Cooney and her research colleague, Walden University's Leslie Van Gelder, used to estimate how old the artists were. 

---

The analysis built upon years of research that Van Gelder conducted along with her late husband, archaeologist-theologian Kevin Sharpe. They measured the hands of thousands of modern-day people and came up with a correlation between the span of a person's three middle fingers and the person's age. For example, if the tips of the three fingers cover less than 1.3 inches (34 millimeters) in width, the fingers definitely belong to a child less than 7 years old, Cooney explained.

That modern-day analysis was then applied to the cave impressions, known as finger flutings.

"By 2006, Sharpe and Van Gelder had developed a way of determining the age and gender of children’s hand impressions, through the flutings," Cooney explained in Cambridge's news release. "As a methodology, it’s amazingly accurate.  By measuring the flutings at Rouffignac with callipers and matching them up against the modern data set, we can tell the age of the child who made them to up to 7 years old — and that is being conservative.  Similarly, if we have a clear finger profile, the shape of the top edges of the fingers, we can tell to 80 percent accuracy whether the individual was female or male. This works with both children and adults. Using methodology we can also identify marks made by the same child."

Cooney and Van Gelder spent a week making detailed measurements in the Rouffignac caves.

The researchers suspect that eight to 10 people, including four kids aged 7 or younger, were behind the ancient finger flutings. Children left marks in every chamber. One of them was apparently just 2 or 3 years old and may have been helped by a grown-up. "The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around 5 — and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl," Cooney said. 

Cooney said that child's markings appear on cave ceilings more than 6 feet (2 meters) high, which would suggest that she was held up or put on someone's shoulders to make the marks. One chamber was so marked up by children that it may have served as a "playpen of sorts," she said.

Finger flutings have been found not only in France and Spain, but in Australia and New Zealand as well. Were they mere doodles, or was there a deeper significance to the markings?

"We don’t know why people made them," Cooney said in the news release. "We can make guesses, like they were for initiation rituals, for training of some kind, or simply something to do on a rainy day.  In addition to the simple meandering lines, there are flutings of animals and shapes that appear to be very crude outlines of faces, almost cartoonlike in appearance. There are also hutlike shapes called tectiforms, markings thought to have a symbolic meaning which are only found in a very specific area of France. When in 2006 Sharpe and Van Gelder showed that that some of the tectiforms were the work of children, it was the first known instance of prehistoric children engaging in symbolic figure-making."

Personally, I lean toward the idea that the markings were the Paleolithic equivalent of kindergarten fingerpainting, but what do you think? Feel free to speculate in the comment section below.

More about prehistoric cave art:

• Altamira cave art in peril again, scientists say
• 'Cave' documentary is awesome and immediate
• Fungus threatens famed Lascaux cave drawings
• Gallery: Ancient rock art from around the world

---

For a guided tour of the Rouffignac cave complex's kiddie art, check out Rossella Lorenzi's report for Discovery News.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

New techniques for analyzing decade-old images from the Hubble Space Telescope are helping astronomers track planets that went undiscovered at the time. So far, the techniques have confirmed the existence of planets that were found in the meantime using other methods — but astronomers will be checking hundreds of stars in hopes of making brand-new discoveries.

---

Remi Soummer, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who led the new study, compared the technique to a "time machine" for seeking out planets beyond our solar system.

The key to the time machine is a huge database of observations made in the '90s by the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Oblect Spectrometer, or NICMOS. The instrument was used back then to look for dusty planetary disks and brown dwarfs. NICMOS focused on the regions around hundreds of stars, using a coronagraphic disc to block out the glare of the stars themselves.

The images were then processed to remove any remaining glare and bring out dim details. But back then, astronomers "did not have the cleanup techniques that we have now," Soummer told me today. Now Soummer and other astronomers are taking a second look at the NICMOS targets with improved image-processing software, and they're finding objects that were missed the first time around.

The star HR 8799, which is 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, serves a classic example. NICMOS took a look at the star in 1998, but the imaging software available at the time didn't pick up any planets. In 2008 and 2009, a team led by Christian Marois of Canada's National Research Council analyzed ground-based imagery of the star and spotted three planets. The same team detected a fourth planet in 2010.

Spurred by the planet discoveries, the University of Montreal's David Lafrenière and his colleagues used upgraded software to find one of those four planets in the old NICMOS picture. Soummer, Marois and others followed up by locating two more of the planets. The fourth, innermost planet can't be seen in the NICMOS image because it's on the edge of the coronagraphic disc.

"From the Hubble images, we can determine the shape of their orbits, which brings insight into the system stability, planet masses and eccentricities, and also the inclination of the system," Soummer said in a Hubblesite news release. The results from his team are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The three outermost planets make one orbit around HR 8799 roughly every 100, 200 and 400 years — so being able to see where the planets were a decade ago will give astronomers an extra data point for calculating the orbits more precisely. That's why the technique works like a time machine: It's as if you could go back to 1998 and see where the planets were back then. "It's 10 years of science for free," Soummer said.

But that's just the beginning. "What's really exciting now is that we're going to apply the same method to a bunch of other stars, and hopefully we'll make some discoveries of our own," said Brendan Hagan, a member of the research team who recently graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore.

Soummer said his team plans to analyze about 400 other stars in the NICMOS archive with upgraded image-processing software, which should improve image quality by a factor of 10.

"Once the code is ready, it's going to be a very intensive computing process," he told me. "It's going to take a few weeks to go through everything." Soummer plans to make several passes through the data, then compare the NICMOS results with other imagery to confirm the existence of new extrasolar planets.

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia currently lists 690 worlds that orbit other stars, and Soummer can hardly wait to add to the tally. "We have this huge wealth of data," he said, "and it's ready to be analyzed."

More about exoplanets:

• Real-life 'Star Wars' planet seen
• Fifty new alien worlds revealed
• 'Super-Earth' just might support life
• Interactive: How scientists search for other worlds
• Looking for alien Earths? Here they come

---

In addition to Soummer, Marois and Hagan, the authors of "Orbital Motion of HR 8799 b, c, d Using Hubble Space Telescope Data From 1998: Constraints on Inclination, Eccentricity and Stability" include Laurent Pueyo, Adrien Thormann and Abhijith Rajan.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.