A web app that will ease the decision-making process and a hand-held device that sniffs out bombs are among the first crop of potential products from a program that aims to turn basic science research into marketplace successes.

A total of 21 awards were handed out today to the inaugural class of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, or I—Corps, a public-private program that was announced this July to help researchers make the leap to entrepreneurship. 

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"They are going to go from the not-for-profit sector to the for-profit sector, for those that prove successful," Errol Arkilic, the I-Corps program officer at the NSF, told me today.

"And when they get into the for-profit sector, they are fledging capitalist companies. They add value, they take in investment, they build economic power, they create jobs, they change industries."

Going to California
The awarded projects receive a $50,000 grant and a hook-up with mentors and entrepreneurs to help turn their ideas into marketable ventures.

The inaugural 21 awardees are headed to Stanford University in California where their specially designed training curriculum begins on Oct. 10.

The curriculum is modeled after startup guru Steve Blank's Learn LaunchPad class and will help them turn their high-tech ideas into workable business ventures. 

Blank called the launch of I-Corps "a new era for scientists and engineers" in a blog post this July when the program was announced.

"If this program works, it will change how we connect basic research to the business world. And it will lead to more startups and job creation," he wrote.

Curriculum concept
The concept of the curriculum, Arkilic explained to me, essentially trains the I-Corps awardees — all of them scientists and engineers whose research has been funded by the NSF — in a scientific method to test the commercial viability of their research.

They'll learn a framework for testing hypothesis on what people will pay for their projects, what it will cost to take to market, and how to navigate the patent landscape, for example.

"Some of them will fail on paper and that's OK," Arkilic said. "Better to do it there than get out and spend years of research and millions of dollars to figure out (the market) doesn't exist."

For those that do look promising, in turn, the project teams will have the training and mentors to guide them to success.

That could mean, for example, brighter LED screens for laptops and the ability to manufacture large amounts of the super-material graphene on the cheap.

You can check out the full list of awardees on the NSF website.

More on government driving innovation:

• Corps will turn science into startups
• The United States is still number one in R&D spending, but
• Billions go to green tech
• Funny science sparks serious spat

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

Look out, Double Rainbow Guy: You just might have a double-double freakout over this first-ever picture documenting a quadruple rainbow, which is the subject of a scientific paper in the journal Applied Optics.

Seeing two rainbows in the sky is a visual treat, leading a YouTube user named Paul Vasquez to rhapsodize to the point of tears. But three or four rainbows at the same time? That's the stuff of legend. Triple-rainbow reports have been bubbling up since the days of Aristotle, but only five reports from scientifically knowledgeable observers have been recorded during the past 250 years.

Not until this year has a triple rainbow or a quadruple rainbow been photographed and published in the scientific literature.

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Such rainbows are more technically referred to as tertiary or quaternary rainbows. Like the better-known primary or secondary rainbows that Vasquez gushed over, these rare rainbows appear when sunlight bounces around the inside of a raindrop, is refracted and spread through a range of visible-light wavelengths and shines out to the observer as a multicolored arc in the sky.

The light beams that creates single or double rainbows take one or two bounces inside the raindrop, as shown in this diagram, and they're always visible in the part of the sky opposite the sun. In contrast, third-order and fourth-order rainbows require a triple or quadruple bounce, and appear on the sunward side of the sky, at angles of 40 and 45 degrees with respect to the sun.

That makes it well nigh impossible to capture all four rainbows in the same picture — and because some light is lost with each bounce, the third and fourth rainbows are incredibly faint. Even if there are raindrops in the right place, the effect is easily overwhelmed by the sun's glare.

Last year, U.S. Naval Academy meteorologist Raymond Lee and a colleague, Philip Laven, laid out a prediction for the conditions that would produce third-order rainbows, and they challenged rainbow-chasers to go out and find one. Among the requirements: dark thunderclouds, and either a heavy downpour or a rainstorm with nearly uniform rain droplets. If the sun broke through the clouds under these conditions, it could project a dim tertiary rainbow against the dark clouds nearby, they said.

Some experts thought it'd be impossible to make out the rainbow, but amateur rainbow-chasers rose to the challenge. On the evening of May 15, the required conditions came together for Michael Grossman, an observer in Kampfelbach in southwestern Germany. He turned toward the sun and started snapping pictures where the tertiary rainbow should have shown up.

"It is really exaggerated to say that I saw it, but there seemed to be something," he said in an Optical Society news release.

When the pictures were put through contrast expansion and unsharp masking, the faint arc of the tertiary rainbow came through.

Grossmann's feat made an impression on another German rainbow-chaser, Michael Theusner, and he had his camera at the ready on the evening of June 11 when a rainstorm came toward his home in Schiffdorf in northern Germany. Here's how he described the event to me in an email:

"Actually, the chasing started as a normal storm-chasing effort. I was on my way home when the storm front approached from the southwest. A nice shelf cloud had formed at the base of the storm, and I hurried home to fetch my camera (Canon 40D + Canon EF-S 17-55 mm lens) to take some photos. Then I went to a nearby field road, where you have an unobstructed view of the sky. However, when I finally reached that location, the shelf cloud had largely disappeared. So I was disappointed at first, but hoped for the rear of the storm to show some interesting cloud features. So I waited while heavy rain was falling.

"When the sun started to come out, I realized that the situation was just like the one Michael Grossmann had had when he took the first photo of the third-order rainbow. I had read about his observation on June 3 in a German Internet discussion forum for atmospheric phenomena — only about a week earlier. Thus, I tried to catch that rare rainbow, too.

"I had asked Michael Grossmann in the forum whether or not he had taken several images so as to stack them to increase the signal-to-noise ratio — a technique well known to amateur astronomers like me. Using that technique, it is possible to increase the visibility of faint signals in images. Unfortunately, he had not. I decided to use that technique to increase the chances to record the third-order rainbow. I took several image series until the rain stopped at my location. I did not see that rainbow visually.

"Back home I started processing, and already the first image series that I took when the sun brightly lit the raindrops showed the third-order rainbow! I was excited and started converting and stacking the order image series. One of them looked strange, however. Another rainbow was visible just to the third-order bow's right. Fainter, but still visible. I checked the Internet for higher order bows and quickly realized that that image series likely showed the fourth-order rainbow. I roughly calculated the radius of that bow and it matched the predicted location of the quaternary bow.

"I was stunned, as I discovered that this was very likely the very first image in the world to show this rainbow."

Theoretically, it's possible to have a quintuple or a sextuple rainbow, but the optical geometry of the bounces within the raindrop is such that the fifth- and sixth-order rainbows would be overwhelmed by the light from the first- and the second-order rainbows. "So it may never be possible to image those," Theusner said.

The research papers describing the observations, and providing guidance for future rainbow-chasers, appear in a special issue of Applied Optics. The bottom line is that the phenomenon is too dim to see with the naked eye, "with the possible exception of very rarely combined circumstances of favorable illumination, background and the strength of rain," Grossmann said. You'd have to point your camera in the right direction without actually seeing the bow, and then do some heavy-duty image processing. But Grossmann and Theusner have proven that it can be done. And for Lee, the meteorologist who issued the original challenge, that's like a ray of sunshine.

"It was as exciting as finding a new species," he said.

More about atmospheric phenomena:

• Strange optical illusions and light shows
• 'Tis the season for sky oddities
• Somewhere under the moonbow
• Two 'suns' spotted in China defy explanation

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Here are the three papers published this week in the Applied Optics, the journal of the Optical Society:

• "Visibility of Natural Tertiary Rainbows" by Raymond L. Lee Jr. and Philip Laven
• "Photographic Evidence for the Third-Order Rainbow" by Michael Grossmann, Elmar Schmidt and Alexander Haussmann
• "Photographic Observation of a Natural Fourth-Order Rainbow" by Michael Theusner

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

Unless a major technological breakthrough occurs in the next few years, a U.S. government push to put 16 billions of gallons of cellulosic biofuel into gas tanks annually by 2022 will be a bust, hints a new report. 

The push comes from the congressionally mandated Renewable Fuel Standard. Of the mandated total of 36 billion gallons from a mix of biofuels, the corn-derived ethanol target of 15 billion gallons is doable, the report says. 

But a big part of the standard — 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels from non-edible plant material such as cornstalks and switchgrass — is unlikely to be met, Wallace Tyner, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, told me Tuesday.

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"The technologies are just not advanced enough to be commercial, they are not cheap enough yet to be commercial, and we are going to have to invest more in R&D if we want to accelerate the pace," he said.

Tyner co-chaired the National Academy of Sciences report requested by Congress on the potential economic and environmental effects of U.S. biofuel policy.

"We're not saying don't do biofuels, we're not saying that it is a bad thing to do, we're just saying it is not going to happen in today's environment unless big things change," he said.

Breakthroughs needed
Currently, no commercially viable biorefineries exist for converting cellulosic biomass to fuel. That's daunting given that it took 30 years to go from zero to 200 plus plants producing more than 15 billion gallons of corn-ethanol, Tyner noted.

"Here we are in 2011 and we have 11 years to get to 2022 and build 16 billion gallons with a technology that's costlier and riskier, a feedstock that's costlier, and it is just not likely to happen," he said.

Breakthroughs are needed in every pathway to produce cellulosic biofuel.

For example, Tyner explained that one technique with a lot backing called fast pyrolysis, which breaks down biomass with heat, produces unstable oils that can't be further refined to gas, diesel, and jet fuel.

Other techniques such as gasification have been done for decades, but it remains too expensive to be commercially viable due to capital costs and catalysts used in the process.

Questionable environmental impacts
And even if technological breakthroughs drive down costs and make cellulosic biofuel commercially viable, a question remains whether or not its use will impact land use or help curb greenhouse gas emissions implicated in global climate change.

Using leftover corn stalks or wood chips from sawmills have no impact on land use and are a net positive for greenhouse gas emissions, Tyner noted, since those materials are already being generated. 

But the impacts other feedstock such as switchgrass and miscanthus is uncertain. Tyner said that preliminary research suggests these crops sequester carbon as they grow, some of which gets locked up in the soil via the root system.

"Those, I think, are going to come out OK," he said, "be we don’t know for sure."

Other biofuel crops, notably corn-derived ethanol, has been lambasted over the years for competing with food for people and livestock as well as having questionable impact on greenhouse gases. 

"For every bushel of corn that you feed to an ethanol plant instead of a hog that hog still has to be fed," Tyner noted, "so more corn or corn substitute has to be grown somewhere else in the world."

This process, the report notes, could involve clearing perennial vegetation such as forests that lock up carbon in trees and soils. Even though biofuels are considered carbon neutral, the loss of forest may offset this gain.

The Environmental Working Group, which has long opposed government mandates for corn-based ethanol, applauded the findings of the new report for showing the negative impact of ethanol subsidies on the environment.

"The new report provides more evidence that corn ethanol production continues to raise food prices around the world and harms the planet by releasing more greenhouse gases than regular gasoline," the group said in statement. 

Promoters of biofuels have long seen corn-derived ethanol as a bridge to more environmentally-friendly cellulosic ethanol, but the new report suggests that bridge is unlikely to be crossed by 2022. 

Further complicating progress on cellulosic ethanol is regulatory uncertainty, which hobbles investment in R&D, noted Tyner. After all, there's not even a guarantee the fuel standard will be around in the future or enforced. 

"You put all those uncertainties into the basket and overlay that with today's financial condition where venture capital is nothing like it was a few years ago and it is going to be hard" to find investors," he said.

More on biofuels:

• Race for better biofuels heats up
• Is algae biofuel too thirsty?
• Venture capitalist eyes cellulosic ethanol
• Energy bill a boon for ethanol, and a challenge

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

Most of the research recognized by a Nobel Prize has to do with solutions, but this year's physics prize highlights a problem that's been bugging scientists for more than a decade. And there may be more such problems to chew on in the years ahead.

"The way science makes progress is through an interplay between theory and observation," Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, told me today. But when it comes down to theory vs. observation, "observations always win," he said.

As an example, take the research that won today's Nobel Prize for physics: When the three physicists who won the award started charting the brightness of distant supernovae, they expected to find out how much the expansion of the universe was slowing down, in accord with the accepted theories for cosmic evolution. Instead, they were surprised to find that the expansion rate was speeding up.

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"We thought this would be an interesting experiment to do, but we didn't know it would be this interesting," one of today's Nobel laureates, Johns Hopkins University astrophysicist Adam Riess, told journalists during a teleconference.

Physicists didn't have a good explanation in 1998 for why the cosmos should go against gravity's pull and fly apart at a faster and faster rate. And they still don't. Their best guess is that our universe has a built-in, outward-pushing feature known as dark energy, which appears in Albert Einstein's equations for relativity as a cosmological constant.

"Dark energy still looks like the right answer — the best guess, I should say," Riess said. Einstein's cosmological constant appears to account for the effect to within 10 percent accuracy, he said. But physicists are in the dark about the mechanism. It's as if you're watching a car speeding down the road, faster and faster. Riess said you might hypothesize that there's such a thing as a gas pedal, and that pressing on it was causing the speedup. But there's not yet any way to say for sure. And there's no guarantee that the speedup will continue. There might still be a let-up on the cosmic accelerator, "in which case all bets are off," Riess said.

So is this Nobel premature? Riess said it was important to note that the prize was "awarded for seeing or discovering that the universe is accelerating," rather than for explaining why.

How to crack the mystery
There are lots of experiments in the works to expand upon the discovery made by Riess and his fellow Nobel laureates, Saul Perlmutter of the University of California at Berkeley and Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University in Canberra. Just today, the European Space Agency gave its go-ahead for the 2019 launch of the $650 million Euclid space telescope, which is designed to study dark energy's effects on the large-scale structure of the universe. NASA's $1.6 billion Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, would also target the mystery surrounding dark energy.

But Riess suspects that the mystery can't be solved by observations alone. "We won't really resolve it until some brilliant person, the next Einstein-like person, is able to get the idea of what's going on," he said.

So he issued a plea to the theorists: "Keep working," he said. "We need your help. ... It's a very juicy problem, it's hard, and you'll win a Nobel Prize if you figure it out. In fact, I'll give you mine."

Carroll, the theorist, was sympathetic to Riess' plea. But he wasn't overly encouraging.

"You don't need to tell us that this is a big one," Carroll said. "Many of us have tried. I've tried. I've written many papers about it. But it's hard."

There are plenty of possibilities, to be sure. The acceleration could be caused by vacuum energy that doesn't vary over time, but is just a feature of empty space. It could be a slowly varying quality of the cosmos known among physicists as "quintessence." It could be some unanticipated twist in the nature of gravity, or a byproduct of multidimensional spheres of existence.

"I've spent my time on this, and I'm increasingly willing to predict that the answer is a boring one," Carroll said. Maybe the best that scientists can ever say is that this is just the way our universe works.

More deep, dark questions
For now, dark energy is just one item on a growing list of puzzling questions for big-thinking physicists — questions that also include:

• What's dark matter made out of? Observations from the past decade suggest that dark energy accounts for 74 percent of the universe's mass-energy content, and that another 22 percent consists of similarly mysterious stuff known as dark matter. So far, dark matter has been detected only through its gravitational effect, but physicists have come to assume that it takes the form of exotic subatomic particles that interact only weakly with the 4 percent of the universe we can see. Researchers had been hoping they'd see the signature of those exotic particles at the Large Hadron Collider, but so far there's been no sign.
• Where's the Higgs boson? Researchers are also looking for the Higgs boson, the last fundamental particle whose existence is predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. Fermilab's Tevatron collider had been in the hunt until its shutdown last week, and if there's no confirmed detection hiding within the Tevatron data yet to be analyzed, it'll be up to the LHC to spot the Higgs, which is thought to be responsible for creating the mass of some subatomic particles and has been nicknamed the "God Particle." Again, there's been no sign so far, but physicists say they should know within the next year or so whether the Higgs exists. If there's no such thing, theorists might have to rewrite one of the scientific world's most successful theories.
• Why does the universe seem fine-tuned? A good number of physicists have noted that if the fundamental constants of physics had been tweaked slightly differently, life as we know it — perhaps even the universe as we know it — could not have endured for long, if at all. If you ascribe the workings of the cosmos to God, this doesn't present a problem. But this apparent "fine-tuning" poses a challenge if you're trying to explain why the universe is just so. One possibility would be to say there's a plenitude of universes out there, and we just happen to be in a universe that works pretty well. Or maybe the universe is governed by a "feedback loop" that operates forward and backward in time. Or maybe it's some sort of weird quantum phenomenon, as Stephen Hawking has proposed. As Keanu Reeves might say: "Whoa..."
• Why does time run only one way? Speaking of time's direction, Carroll's favorite conundrum has to do with why we experience time in only one direction, moving from the past into the future. In his book "From Eternity to Here," Carroll makes the case that the arrow of time moves in the same direction as entropy, from low entropy at the time of the big bang to higher entropy today, and even higher entropy tomorrow. "The question is, why was entropy low near the big bang?" Carroll said. "I'm still very much up in the air as to the answer to that question." As he studies that question, Carroll is delving into other puzzles ranging from the origin of life to the debate about free will vs. determinism. "You don't have to get into those age-old questions," Carroll admitted. "My own impulse is to enjoy those questions and get into this."
• Was Einstein wrong about the speed of light? This is one of the most recent unsettled questions for modern physics. For more than a century, the overwhelming evidence has been that Einstein's special relativity theory was correct in claiming that nothing could move faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. That's now been called into question by observations suggesting that some neutrinos achieved faster-than-light speeds during a 450-mile trip between two underground labs in Europe. Carroll said the observations are "very, very unlikely to be right," but if they are verified, that would force a radical reinterpretation of Einstein's theories.

Faster-than-light neutrinos would be far more troublesome for scientists than the speeding-up universe. As strange as the Nobel-winning supernova observations appear to be, Carroll said they actually "explain a whole bunch of things that people had been worrying about for a long while," including apparent discrepancies in measurements of the universe's age.

"Unlike the 'accelerating universe,' ... the faster-than-light neutrinos would create a whole bunch of problems to worry about," Carroll said. For example, would the phenomenon allow for backward time travel and reverse causality? Could a neutrino go back in time and "kill its grandfather"?

In a posting to the Cosmic Variance blog, Carroll floats some ideas that could get theorists out of a time-traveling jam, but it wouldn't be pretty. "If neutrinos are moving faster than light, the question is, how can we adapt special relativity to a framework which allows for this?" he said.

Riess, the experimenter, offered some advice for Carroll and his fellow theorists, based on his experience with the surprising supernova observations.

"As a lot of my colleagues say when they hear about a strange result, they go, 'Oh, that's wrong,' and usually 'How do you know?' then, 'Well, most things that are weird turn out to be wrong.' And that's true," Riess said. "But you don't want to completely close your ears and eyes to seeing weird things, because a lot of the most interesting things we see at some point were the weird things."

Tune in to 'Virtually Speaking Science'
Carroll and I will be talking about the accelerating universe, faster-than-light neutrinos and other weird and interesting things on Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) on "Virtually Speaking Science," an online talk show that I host on the first Wednesday of the month. You can listen to the hourlong show via BlogTalkRadio, or be a part of the audience at the Stella Nova auditorium in the virtual world known as Second Life. (Here's the SLURL for your teleporting pleasure.) You can ask questions during the show via Second Life chat or BlogTalkRadio's call-in number.

If you can't make it in real time, don't worry: The show will be archived at BlogTalkRadio as an audio podcast for on-demand listening. Many thanks to the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics for providing the Second Life venue.

More podcasts from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

More about the Nobel-winning research:

• Cosmic Variance: Dark energy FAQ
• Inside Science: The story behind the accelerating universe
• Life's Little Mysteries: What's dark energy? | How find was made
• Search for dark energy on msnbc.com

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Carroll will also be a featured speaker for the New Horizons in Science symposium, presented Oct. 16-18 at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing as part of ScienceWriters2011. I'm a member of the CASW board.

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

The idea of using urine to whiz rockets to the moon and beyond is once again leaking into the realm of possibility. 

That's because scientists have begun to crack the code of how bacteria that live without the aid of oxygen convert ammonium — a key chemical in urine — into hydrazine, which is a type of rocket fuel.

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"It is a complex of three proteins" that do the trick, Mike Jetten, a microbiologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, explained to me in an email today.

The urine-to-fuel concept first gained traction in the 1990s when scientists discovered the microbe, called anammox for anaerobic ammonium oxidation, that does this, but the idea stalled out when scientists realized only small quantities of the fuel are produced.

"Now that we understand how hydrazine is made we can try to improve the catalyst," Jetten said. "And we produce millions of tons of ammonium in wastewater every year," he added, suggesting that therein is enough of the material to manufacture rocket fuel. 

For now, the microbe is used in wastewater treatment facilities, and the findings reported Sunday in the journal Nature have more realistic and earthly applications there, said Jetten. "The better we know the process, the better we can optimize and design new wastewater treatment systems," he said.

The team is also investigating "a new concept in which waste is converted into methane," Jetten added.

More stories on urine and energy:

• Forget gas, batteries – pee is new power source
• Scientists develop pee powered battery
• Astronauts test pee purifying tech in space

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

It's a good thing that Igor Siwanowicz didn't smash the bug that bit him. A photomicrograph of that pesky lacewing larva has won first place in this year's edition of the prestigious Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition.

Siwanowicz, a biochemist and photographer who lives in Madison, Wis., said the story of his prize-winning picture began when the bug started "fiercely digging its mandibles" into his skin. Instead of swatting the bug away, he pulled out the test tube that he always carries in his pocket for occasions like this, slipped the insect inside and fired up the microscope.

As described in a Nikon news release, Siwanowicz had only one chance to capture the image he had in mind, due to the specific requirements for the bug's dissection. He carefully fixed and dyed the sample, then set up his confocal microscope for 20x magnification. The resulting picture reveals the lacewing's 1.3-millimeter-long head, and those fierce mandibles, in startling detail.

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Siwanowicz, who completed his doctoral studies in protein crystallography but now works in invertebrate photography for research, sees his work not just as a technical aspect of a science project, but as a true artform.

"My art causes a dissonance for its viewer — a conflict between the culturally imprinted perception of an insect as something repulsive and ugly, with a newly acquired admiration of the beauty of its form," he told Nikon. "My hope is that in some way, my photomicrographs prompt people to realize the presence of culturaly programming, question it, and eventually throw it off as an illusion. I am so pleased to be recognized by Nikon Small World for this philosophy, but also for the technical expertise it required to capture this photo."

Dissonance between the macro and micro worlds is a theme in this year's crop of top Small World photos, which I had a hand in selecting as a member of the judging panel. A blade of grass turns into a forest of color. The surface of a microchip glows like a gaudy neon sign. A tiny sprig of liverwort becomes a chain of scaly alien hands. Cracked solar-cell film takes on the beauty of a black-and-white abstract painting.

To get the bigger picture, check out our slideshow of the contest's top 20 images, then go on to the Small World website to see the honorable mentions, this year's "Images of Distinction" and still more distinctive images from past competitions. You'll also enjoy Siwanowicz's voluminous gallery on DeviantART.

This year's 37th annual Small World contest drew hundreds of entries from almost 70 countries around the world. Siwanowicz receives $3,000 worth of Nikon gear for his first-place photograph — with gift certificates of lesser amounts, ranging from $2,000 to $100, going to the others on the top-20 list. Eric Flem, communications manager for Nikon Instruments, said it was "our privilege to honor the talented researchers and photomicrographers who submit their amazing work."

"As evidenced by Dr. Siwanowicz ... marrying technique and aesthetics is no easy feat," he said. "We are proud that this competition is able to showcase this beautiful imagery and demonstrate some of the many facets of science."

More glimpses of microscopic worlds:

• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2011
• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2010
• Olympus Bioscapes' top 10 for 2010
• Olympus Bioscapes' top 10 for 2009
• The world within a drop of water
• Greatest hits from Nikon Small World
• Visualizing science in 2010
• Visualizing science in 2009

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Top images from the 2011 Nikon Small World competition will be exhibited in a full-color calendar and through a national museum tour. For additional information, visit the Small World website or follow the conversation on Facebook and Twitter @NikonSmallWorld. 

My colleagues on the judging panel for this year's contest included USA Today science columnist Dan Vergano; Simon Watkins, founder and director of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biological Imaging, as well as a professor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School; and Richard Day, physiology professor at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

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

NASA says it has awarded the largest prize in aviation history, $1.35 million, to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for pushing the envelope on electric-powered flying.

To win the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, the Pennsylvania-based team's Taurus G4 electric airplane flew a 200-mile course from Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, Calif., in less than two hours. That's one of the requirements for the prize. Another is that the plane had to use less than the equivalent of a gallon of gas per person. The Pipistrel Taurus G4 exceeded that efficiency standard, flying the course on just a little more than a half-gallon of fuel equivalent per passenger.

What's even more amazing is that the runner-up did nearly as well. That earned a $120,000 second-place purse for California-based Team e-Genius and its electric-powered plane.

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"Two years ago, the thought of flying 200 miles at 100 mph in an electric aircraft was pure science fiction," Jack W. Langelaan, team leader of Team Pipistrel-USA.com, said in today's award announcement. "Now we are all looking forward to the future of electric aviation."

Eric Raymond, e-Genius' team leader, was diplomatic in his remarks. "I'm proud that Pipistrel won," he said. "They've been a leader in getting these things into production, and the team really deserves it and worked hard to win this prize."

NASA's acting chief technologist, Joe Parrish, said the winner proved that "ultra-efficient aviation is within our grasp."

The challenge was one of several that NASA has backed over the past six years to encourage the development of technologies that could improve the way spaceflight and aeronautics is done. (Remember that the first "A" in NASA stands for aeronautics.) In a way, this particular prize goes full circle: NASA's Centennial Challenges were inspired by the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, which in turn was inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize for nonstop trans-Atlantic aviation.

Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize in 1927, and his grandson, Erik Lindbergh, was on hand at the Green Flight Challenge to pass along a prize of his own: the Lindbergh Prize for Quietest Aircraft. Team eGenius won that $10,000 award, which was donated by Jean Schulz, the widow of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.

NASA provides the purse for the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, with sponsorship support from Google and management by the CAFE Foundation (CAFE stands for Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency). Fourteen teams registered for the competition and collectively spent more than $4 million over the past two-plus years in pursuit of the purse. Most of the teams relied on electric engines, but the entries also included some planes powered by gasoline or biofuels.

Three planes made it to last week's finals: the Pipistrel and eGenius planes as well as a gasoline-powered plane fielded by the Florida-based Phoenix Air team. Among the factors that gave the Pipistrel Taurus G4 a boost were its dual-fuselage design, which allowed for a 75-foot wingspan with ultra-light construction, a super-efficient powertrain for its 6.5-foot-wide propeller and 450 pounds of lithium-polymer batteries. (EAA News delves into the details, and NASA has a Flickr photo gallery chronicling the competition.)

NASA hopes that the Green Flight Challenge will lead to even more ambitious aerial feats of fuel efficiency. Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier quotes Pipistrel's Langelaan as saying that his company is willing to contribute $100,000 toward a new prize for the first electric aircraft to break the speed of sound. How long would that take? Langelaan estimates five years.

Do you agree, or is that too much of a blue-sky prediction? Are electric aircraft blazing a trail for the future of aviation, or is this just a million-dollar sideshow? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More bright ideas on the tech frontier:

• NASA offers $5 milllion for new technological feats
• DARPA looks for ideas to clean up space debris
• Out-of-this-world ideas win NASA funding
• SpaceX sells its first ticket for a moon launch

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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. 

More than 600 years after he was beheaded, Simon of Sudbury has his face back,  thanks to a 21st-century virtual forensics project.

Sudbury was the archbishop of Canterbury when he lost his face, along with the rest of his head, in 1381. It was a mighty fall from grace for the man who made his way up to the top of England's ecclesiastical ladder and crowned King Richard II. But when Sudbury introduced the third Poll Tax as Lord Chancellor in 1380, the country's peasants had had enough. Sudbury was said to be so unpopular that the guards at the Tower of London just let rebels rush in during the Great Rising of 1381 and drag the bishop to his execution on Tower Hill.

Sudbury's head was put on a spike on London Bridge. Under cover of darkness, a man from the bishop's native Suffolk supposedly had it taken down and brought to St. Gregory's Church at Sudbury. (The bishop's body, meanwhile, ended up in a grave in Canterbury Cathedral, and the legend was that his ghost haunted the cathedral's tower.)

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Now fast-forward six centuries: A Suffolk school worker named Ian Copeman worked with church officials to have Sudbury's partly mummified skull (with bits of facial tissue still attached) put through a CT scan at a local hospital. The readings from the skull were sent along to the University of Dundee's Center for Anatomy and Human Identification. In the past, the center has helped reconstruct the faces of other personages such as Johann Sebastian Bach. the sister of Cleopatra and the son of Ramses II. 

Under the guidance of center director Caroline Wilkinson, forensic artist Adrienne Barker took on the project. She digitally removed the extra facial tissue and had the CT data turned into a cast of the skull, using rapid prototyping. Using that cast as her foundation, Barker built up layers of clay to simulate muscle, fat and skin. The teeth were missing from the skull, perhaps because they were sold off as relics, so Barker had to use a bit of artistry to fill out the face. But she told me she followed "the current most accurate standards" to complete the project.

Barker acknowledged that the result, unveiled last month at St. Gregory's Church, shows that Sudbury was "strange-looking fellow." She told Discovery News that some onlookers at the church gasped when they saw his visage. "He was compared to characters such as Spock and Shrek," she said.

For better or worse, this is probably how Simon of Sudbury will be known from now on. Barker noted that the only other depictions to come to light are found in two stained-glass windows in Canterbury Cathedral.

"Both of them were done in Victorian times, a good 400 years after Simon was killed, so they're not really accurate," Barker said. "This is the most accurate reconstruction."

Now she's filling out an educational website about the Simon of Sudbury project that she hopes will get kids interested in forensics.

Barker acknowledged that "a lot of people think that it's morbid" to put make-believe flesh on the shape of a 600-year-old skull. But she thinks it's "really fascinating," and I'm betting a lot of kids will as well.

Other faces from history:

• Was this the face of Jack the Ripper?
• Scans reveal the face of King Tut
• Archaeologists identify Copernicus' skull
• Experts try to reconstruct 'the real face of Jesus'

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Tip o' the Log to Discovery News' Rossella Lorenzi.

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 says it's opening the application process for astronaut candidates in early November, for the first time since the shuttle fleet's retirement this summer.

Even though the shuttles will never fly again, and even though astronauts will be traveling to the International Space Station exclusively on Russian spacecraft for at least the next three years, it takes years to train a new crop of spacefliers and get them into the rotation. The class of candidates to be selected over the next year and a half could conceivably be among the first visitors to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s.

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"For scientists, engineers and other professionals who have always dreamed of experiencing spaceflight, this is an exciting time to join the astronaut corps," Janet Kavandi, director of flight crew operations at NASA's Johnson Space Center. said in today's announcement on the selection process. "This next class will support missions to the station and will arrive via transportation systems now in development. They also will have the opportunity to participate in NASA's continuing exploration programs that will include missions beyond low Earth orbit."

Duane Ross, the manager for NASA's astronaut candidate programs, told me that NASA was still working on the detailed timeline for the application and selection process — but when it's time to put in your application, you'll click on a link posted on the space agency's Astronaut Selection website. A tentative timeline suggests that the application deadline will be sometime early next year, that the candidates would be chosen in the first half of 2013, and that they'd report for duty that summer.

How many will be chosen? Ross can't say at this point, but he's guessing that the process will go much as it did in 2009, the last time NASA selected a new class of astronauts. About 3,500 people applied, somewhere around 110 were selected to undergo an initial interview, and in the end, nine Americans were selected to join NASA's astronaut corps. They were joined by 10 others from Japan, Canada and Europe.

Ross estimated that NASA's next class might have eight to 12 astronaut candidates. "It's not going to be a big number," he said.

Today's announcement comes less than a month after a report from the National Research Council warned that NASA may not have enough astronauts to meet the demands of future missions, to the space station as well as beyond Earth orbit. That report noted that NASA had 150 spacefliers in 1999, but only 61 active-duty astronauts in 2011. The end of the 30-year space shuttle program accelerated the exodus.

When the Class of 2009 was being selected, NASA already knew that crop of candidates would never fly on the shuttle, so the selection criteria were tweaked to focus on the requirements for long-duration space station missions. "The mission hasn't changed since last time," Ross said.

"The key things we'll be looking for is evidence that folks can come in and work in an operational environment," he said. That means you don't have to be a fighter jock to apply. "There's lots of ways you can get that experience," Ross said.

However, you do have to have a certain kind of the Right Stuff. "A bachelor's degree in engineering science or math and three years of relevant professional experience are required in order to be considered," NASA said. "Typically, successful applicants have significant qualifications in engineering or science, or extensive experience flying high-performance jet aircraft."

If you're selected, you'll have to relocate to Houston. You'll have to give up your old job. The annual salaries for civilians range from $64,724 to $155,500 — that is, GS-11 to GS-14 on the federal civil-service pay scale. Some travel will be required. But if you're really thinking of applying, my guess is that none of these practical considerations will matter much to you.

Update for 5:45 p.m. ET Oct. 7: NASA spokesman Michael Curie says that the space agency "still is evaluating the number of astronauts it will select in the new class, but we expect the number to be between nine and 15."

More about the astronaut's life:

• How not to be a space slob
• What's up for the astronauts?
• Don't worry, kids, you can still be an astronaut
• Dozens apply for Virgin Galactic's space pilot jobs
• Boeing selects a rocket, looks for astronauts to fly on it

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Additional information about the Astronaut Candidate Program is available by calling the Astronaut Selection Office at 281-483-5907.

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. 

Coffee fuels millions of human brains every day. Now, spent coffee grounds have set a land-speed record as a fuel for cars.

That's right; a coffee-fueled car built by an enterprising team of British engineers recently zipped into the Guinness World Records with a top speed of 77.5 miles per hour and an average of 66.5 miles per hour. 

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The Coffee Car effort is led by Martin Bacon and a team of Teasedale Conservation Volunteers who were inspired after realizing that coffee shops produce tons of grounds that could be used to get something else going. 

The Coffee Car set the new record for a car powered by organic waste. The coveted honor was previously held by the Beaver XR7, a wood pellet burning car built by Beaver Energy, which averaged 47 miles per hour. 

To fuel the car on coffee, Bacon's team collects spent coffee grounds from shops around town, dries them out and turns them into pellets that are cooked up in a gasifier designed to fit within the body of a heavily modified Rover SD1. (More than 550 pounds of excess weight have been removed to make room for the heavy gasifier.)

The gasifer burns wood and the coffee pellets at super high temperatures, which creates a synthetic gas of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane capable of powering an internal combustion engine, CNET explains. 

The record-setting car was developed in cooperation with the BBC One show Bang Goes the Theory and will be at Bang Live during the Manchester Science Festival Oct. 22-23. 

[Via Discovery News]

More on organic waste to fuel technology:

• Got milk? Convert it into biofuel
• Wood chips help fuel 'Green Grand Prix'
• Turkey waste will power electric plant
• Poop power? Sewage turned into electricity

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.