Researchers have set up an online "periodic table" for extrasolar planets ranging from Hot Mercurians to Cold Jovians, with Earthlike worlds right in the middle. 

The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog, drawn up by the University of Puerto Rico's Planetary Habitability Laboratory, is aimed at pigeonholing the hundreds of worlds that are being identified by NASA's Kepler space telescope and other planet-hunting projects. Eventually, the tally of exoplanets is expected to mount into the thousands, and that's where researchers hope the proposed catalog will come in handy.

"One important outcome of these rankings is the ability to compare exoplanets from best to worst candidates for life," Abel Mendez, the laboratory's director and principal investigator for the project, said today in a news release.

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Also today, Kepler's scientists said they've confirmed the existence of their first exoplanet solidly within the habitable zone of its solar system, where water could exist in liquid form at a pleasant 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius). That certainly sounds livable, but Mendez told me that the planet, known as Kepler-22b, doesn't quite fit into the sweet spot for habitability because it's closer in size to Neptune than to Earth.

"I confirmed its radius, and Kepler-22b is a low-end Warm Neptunian, very close to a Superterran," Mendez said in a Twitter back-and-forth from NASA's Ames Research Center in California, where he was presenting his research at the Kepler Science Conference.

Neptunians are likely to have a gaseous rather than a rocky composition, which might make it tough for life as we know it on Kepler-22b. However, the situation might be more hospitable on a moon orbiting the planet, just as it is in the movie "Avatar" for the inhabitants of Pandora, a fictional moon orbiting the gas giant Prometheus.

How the catalog was created
The Habitable Exoplanets Catalog sets up a matrix of 18 pigeonholes based on temperature and mass: Planets in the Hot Zone would be too close to their parent suns for water to exist in liquid form. Water would exist only as ice in the Cold Zone, but could take liquid form in the Warm Zone. The catalog sets up six categories of planetary mass: Mercurians (think Mercury), Subterrans (Mars-size), Terrans (Earth-size), Superterrans (up to 10 times as massive as Earth), Neptunians (Neptune-size) and Jovians (Jupiter-size).

To figure out which planets fit which categories, the catalog draws upon a variety of resources, including the Kepler database of candidates, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, the Exoplanet Data Explorer, the Earth Similarity Index, the Habitable Zones Distance metric and the Global Primary Habitability index.

The initial classification of more than 1,600 confirmed planets and yet-to-be-confirmed candidates puts only 16 potential worlds in the habitable categories — that is, Warm Subterrans, Warm Terrans and Warm Superterrans. But that list will grow: The Kepler team announced today that its tally of candidates has risen to 2,326, based on the first 16 months of the space telescope's mission. Forty-eight of those candidates are said to lie in their stars' habitable zones.

"The tremendous growth in the number of Earth-size candidates tells us that we're honing in on the planets Kepler was designed to detect: those that are not only Earth-size, but also are potentially habitable," Natalie Batalha, Kepler's deputy science team lead at San Jose State University, said in a NASA news release. "The more data we collect, the keener our eye for finding the smallest planets out at longer orbital periods."

Mendez and his colleagues are working on software to keep the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog updated. "The computers are doing the job," he told me. "I am trying to automate everything, but it takes time."

Right now, the world in the database that's judged most similar to Earth is a candidate known as KOI 736.01, which is 1,750 light-years away and is estimated to have a surface temperature of 55 degrees F (286 Kelvin). But the top prospect for surface habitability is KOI 255.01, a Warm Superterran that's 1,169 light-years away with a surface temperature of 86 degrees F (303 K). Some researchers believe super-Earths can be even more conducive to life than Earth.

Gliese 581d, a world that orbits a red dwarf just 20 light-years from Earth, shows up among the Sweet 16 on both lists.

The search revs up
So what's next? "I hope this database will help increase interest in building a big space-based telescope to observe exoplanets directly and look for possible signatures of life," Jim Kasting, a planetary scientist from Penn State, said in the Planetary Habitability Laboratory's news release.

A habitability index could help scientists set the priorities for future observations, but they don't necessarily need to wait until a new super-space telescope is launched. During the Kepler conference, the California-based SETI Institute announced that it was once again searching planetary systems for radio signals that could serve as evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. Some of Kepler's planetary candidates are among its first targets.

"For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars and know that those stars actually host planetary systems — including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star," Jill Tarter, director of the institute's Center for SETI Research, said in a news release. "That's the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters."

Tarter and her colleagues makes use of the Allen Telescope Array, a network of radio antennas in northern California that had to be put into hibernation due to money troubles. The SETI Institute was able to restart work at the array thanks to contributions made by the public through the SETIStars.org website, as well as funding from the U.S. Air Force to assess the array's utility for space situational awareness (that is, monitoring the skies for hazardous asteroids and space debris).

Tarter said the highest priority would be given to Kepler planets that are located within their stars' habitable zones. But the search for extraterrestrial intelligence won't stop there.

"In SETI, as with all research, preconceived notions such as habitable zones could be barriers to discovery," she said. "So, with sufficient future funding from our donores, it's our intention to examile all of the planetary systems found by Kepler."

More about the planet quest:

• Which alien worlds are most livable?
• City lights could point to E.T.'s home
• Super-Earth on the 'edge of habitability'
• Interactive: How scientists search for planets
• Astronomers find 18 alien planets, and they're huge

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

A British survey suggests what the Antarctic continent would look like if it were stripped bare of all its ice.

This BEDMAP elevation image of the polar region is based on satellite imagery as well as observations made from planes, ships and even dog-drawn sleds, the British Antarctic Survey reported today. Hamish Pritchard, a researcher from the BAS, presented the digital maps at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco.

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Less than 1 percent of Antarctica's bedrock projects above the continent's layer of ice, the BBC reported. If all that ice were suddenly taken away, the sea would pour into the dark blue troughs shown on the BEDMAP picture. The light blue area on the graphic indicates the Antarctic continental shelf.

"In many areas, you can now see the troughs, valleys and mountains as if you were looking at a part of the earth we're much more used to seeing, exposed to the air," Pritchard told the BBC. Such imagery has helped scientists trace the roots of the Gamburtsev Mountains, a range of peaks buried two miles (3 kilometers) below the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

In the picture above, the Gamburtsev range is the deep-red area just to the right of the continent's center. "It's fascinating to see the Gamburtsevs in the context of the other big mountains in Antarctica," Pritchard said.

This survey of the naked continent, which follows up in far greater detail on an earlier BEDMAP scan, wasn't done merely to fascinate scientists (and the rest of us). Understanding Antarctica's rocky foundation could help climate researchers get a better sense of how the polar ice cap may respond to future climate change.

The key observations included radar soundings that penetrated the ice and bounced off the underlying rock, which told researchers how far down the ice went. Still more airborne surveys need to be made to flesh out BEDMAP's view in detail.

These pictures serve as today's offerings from the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which features views of Earth from space every day from now until Christmas. Check back on Tuesday for the next "treat," and check out these links for previous entries as well as other space-themed Advent calendars:

• Dec. 4: The monster of Madagascar
• Dec. 3: Santa's shrinking domain
• Dec. 2: The masses in Mecca
• Dec. 1: An ornament in outer space
• The full Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, going back to 2010
• Hubble Advent calendar, presented by The Atlantic's In Focus
• 2011 Zooniverse Advent calendar

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

Robotic quadrocopters — that is flying machines with four rotors — have built a 20-foot-tall tower of polystyrene blocks at a museum in France.

This may come as bad news for unemployed construction workers hoping for a bright future building next-generation skyscrapers, but it's yet another way robots are aiming to re-shape the global workforce.

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In this case, an architect still draws up a blueprint for the building, but computers and robots do the rest — interpreting the blueprint and controlling the crew of robotic copters, for example. 

The first public job for this system was the "Flight Assembled Architecture" exhibit at the FRAC Center Orleans, billed as the "first installation to be built by flying machines."

The exhibit is the work of ETH Zurich roboticist Rafaello D'Andrea and architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler.

Like any construction site, a safe operating environment is essential. To avoid collisions, the robots reserve air space on one of two "freeways" before they fly. 

"The system ensures that while a space is reserved, only the reserved flying vehicle has access — all other vehicles must wait before flying through the space," the team explains in a media release.

This system also prevents collisions with the tower, since the tower itself is considered reserved airspace.

Each robot has a specially designed gripper to hold and place the bricks. The researchers also figured that quick flights are essential to prevent factors such as air turbulence resulting in a misplaced brick.

Perhaps the speed will also cut down on construction delays, giving the robotic workforce another edge over their human counterparts.

The tower on exhibit is 20 feet tall and made of 1,500 blocks. It's a model of a futuristic 2,000-foot tall "vertical village" that could house 30,000 people — assuming 30,000 people want to live in a building assembled by robots.

[Via CNET]

More on the robotic workforce of the future:

• More work for robots in China
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• In the near future, robots will work on farms
• Your new co-worker may be a robot
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

 

'Tis the season for religious holidays, including Hanukkah for Jews and Christmas for Christians. But the Muslim world has already marked its biggest religious observance of the year, with an orbiting satellite as a witness.

Today's offering for the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar adds an Islamic twist to the holiday countdown: Here's a picture from DigitalGlobe showing thousands of people gathering around the Kaaba shrine in Mecca on Nov. 2, just before the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Participating in the Hajj is a duty able-bodied Muslims are required to perform at least once in their lives. The capstone of the experience is the Eid al-Adha, a festival that commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael to God.

The scriptural story serves to illustrate the linkages between different religious traditions. Whether you observe Eid al-Adha or Hanukkah, Advent or none of the above, here's wishing you wider perspectives on the world and its inhabitants during this holiday season.

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Some of those wider perspectives are on view in our Month in Space Pictures slideshow, which we've just published for November. Here's a lineup of links for the pictures included in the slideshow, plus pointers to some other space-themed Advent calendars:

• On the beam: Laser at ESO observatory in Chile
• Moon over air: Our planet and the moon, seen from orbit.
• On to Mars! Launch of the Mars Science Laboratory.
• After the landing: Recovery team converges on Soyuz craft. 
• Chilly homecoming: Japanese astronaut back on Earth.
• Does Pacman have teeth? WISE view of a colorful nebula.
• Southern exposure: Partial solar eclipse seen from New Zealand.
• Trail of trouble: Stranded Russian probe streaks across sky.
• Back from a mock Mars: Volunteers end 520-day simulation.
• Quartet of moons: Cassini spots four satellites amid Saturn's rings.
• A little lunar base: Exhibit takes shape at New York museum.
• Flooding in Bangkok: DigitalGlobe's view of high waters in Thailand.
• The Tarantula roars: Space telescopes focus on a spidery nebula. 
• Blastoff in a blizzard: Soyuz rocket takes off for space station. 
• Freakishly flat: ESO looks at a remarkably flat galaxy.
• The first and the last: Shuttle crews from STS-1 and STS-135.
• Crazy storm on Saturn: Cassini documents long-lasting cloud system.
• Welcome to the aliens: Greetings from New Zealand seen by satellite.
• Go with the flow: NASA satellite tracks lava from Hawaii volcano.
• After the launch: NPP satellite liftoff leaves behind a trail in the sky.
• More space slideshows from msnbc.com.
• Hubble Advent calendar from The Atlantic's In Focus.
• Space Advent calendar from Zooniverse.

Check back on Saturday for the next installment of our Advent calendar, which will be featuring new views of Earth from space every day until Christmas.

• The Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar so far
• Dec. 1: Ornament in space

Correction for 2:10 a.m. ET Dec. 3: Space consultant Charles Lurio pointed out that in Islamic tradition, it's Ishmael who is offered to God by Abraham. I originally went with Isaac, in accordance with Genesis 22, but in this context I guess I should go with the Koran's version of the story. Many thanks to Charles for setting me straight.

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

A team of San Francisco-based sleuths claimed a $50,000 prize from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today for correctly reconstructing a series of five shredded documents.

The accomplishment comes just 33 days after the DARPA Shredder Challenge was announced in a bid to improve the ability of warfighters to glean information quickly from confiscated, shredded documents.

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The challenge also provides insight to the potential vulnerabilities in the current practice of shredding sensitive national security documents, not to mention your own financial statements and personal notes.

The winning team, All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S., used custom-coded, computer vision algorithms to come up with suggested fragment pairings, which were then sent along to human assemblers for verification, the DARPA announcement explains.

They spent a total of 600 worker-hours developing algorithms and piecing together the documents, which were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.

"Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all, let alone within the short time frame," Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office, said in the statement. 

In all, nearly 9,000 teams registered to participate in the challenge. The most effective approaches used a blend of computational and old-fashioned detective work, the agency said.

The fact that the challenge has been completed should come as good news to soldiers attempting to read shredded documents — like the papers found, for example, in a Bin Laden hideout.

However, it also might make you pause next time you shred your latest bank statement. The practice may no longer be enough to keep your secrets safe. 

More on DARPA challenges:

• 2005: Stanford team wins robot race
• 2007: Driverless SUV wins $2 million Pentagon prize
• 2009: Balloon hunt nets $40,000 for MIT-led team
• 2011: DARPA wants to recycle space junk into new satellites

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

It's been one year since researchers shook up the scientific world by claiming they bred bacteria that used arsenic in place of phosphorus, and the controversy is still simmering: The lead researcher and her critics say they're taking a closer look at the microbe at the center of the "weird life" claims.

After hitting the highs and the lows of academic acclaim, Felisa Wolfe-Simon has left her original research group and joined up with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to continue her research into the bacterium known as GFAJ-1, which gets its name from the acronym for "Give Felisa a Job." (No joke!)

"There is so much work to do we're focusing on that and look forward to communicating our efforts in the coming months," Wolfe-Simon told me in an email this week.

Meanwhile, Wolfe-Simon's highest-profile critic, University of British Columbia microbiologist Rosie Redfield, took on the task of replicating the GFAJ-1 experiment. "I'm doing this even though I agree with all the other researchers who said this result is almost certainly wrong," Redfield told me. "Scientifically, it's really kind of a waste of time to try to replicate this yourself. But there's always the possibility that you could be wrong. And more than that, there was just a general sense that, you know, somebody should try."

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Redfield has sent purified DNA samples to collaborators at Princeton University for mass spectrometry analysis — to see whether any arsenic was really taken up into the molecular structure. "We just got the DNA from Rosie Redfield," one of those collaborators, Leonid Kruglyak, told me this week. A graduate student in Kruglyak's lab, Marshall Louis Reaves, is currently working out the protocols for analyzing the DNA.

"We want to be able to fragment the DNA and run the fragments on the mass spectrometer," Krugylak said. "Those fragments should look quite different in the mass spectrometer if there is arsenate."

Just today, another team of researchers, led by Simon Silver of the University of Illinois at Chicago, announced that they have sequenced GFAJ-1's genome and will be analyzing it for new clues in the case.

Argonne National Laboratory's Jack Gilbert, a member of the team, characterized himself as a "100 percent skeptic" about the findings announced a year ago, but said that the gene sequence was still worth having. He and his colleagues have already found some interesting genetic twists, even if there's no evidence of arsenic in the DNA. "It's interesting to have this information to determine what the mechanism might be if other evidence shows this to be true," he explained.

Gilbert said it was mere coincidence that the genome sequence was published online exactly one year after Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues kicked off the controversy. "I hadn't even considered that today was the anniversary," he told me.

Why all the fuss?
The case of GFAJ-1 is significant on more than one level.

If the central claim of the original paper holds true, that means the machinery of life can be tinkered with to replace one seemingly essential chemical — phosphorus — with a different chemical that's seemingly inimical to life. One of Wolfe-Simon's original collaborators, Arizona State University astrobiologist Paul Davies, has long maintained that "weird life," built on a different biochemical platform, could exist right under our noses and we wouldn't know it.

The prospect of weird life on Earth would also argue in favor of widening the search for weird life on other worlds, perhaps as close as Mars or the Saturnian moon Titan. That's what led NASA to tout the research a year ago as having extraterrestrial implications. "The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, an associate administrator at the space agency. The news reports went even farther. Here's a typical headline: "NASA Discovers Alien Life in California."

Actually, what Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues did was to take an existing strain of salt-loving bacterla from California's Mono Lake, and try to breed it in the presence of high concentrations of arsenic. GFAJ-1 emerged as the best prospect: The research team said it seemed to take hold in the high-arsenic environment, and they said their molecular analysis suggested that arsenic-based compounds known as arsenates were incorporated in the place of phosphates.

The bacteria in the arsenic-rich culture weren't aliens at all. But for many chemists and microbiologists, the research team's claims, published online by the journal Science on Dec. 2, 2010, were as hard to believe as reports of a UFO landing.

One chemist, Steven Benner of the Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, said he bet Wolfe-Simon $100 that the arsenic wasn't taken up in the DNA. Benner said in an email this week that the proposition was "still in limbo ... so the bet is not yet collected." (Wolfe-Simon told me she doesn't remember the bet.)

The skepticism over the reported results erupted almost immediately in a wave of blog postings and Twitter updates from commentators and scientists, including Redfield. As a result, the #arseniclife case quickly became a case study for instant peer review, mediated by the Internet. It also turned into a case study for open science, in which researchers share their results as they become available rather than holding them back until they're published in a journal.

Redfield emerged as a strong voice, for the skeptics as well as for the open-science movement. Her technical criticisms focused on the way that the bacteria samples were handled. "The way they isolated their DNA was almost 'I can't believe they did this' badly done," she told me this week. Such criticism led Science's editors to hold back the on-paper publication of the research for months, until eight sets of technical comments could be collected from Redfield and other observers and vetted through peer review. Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues were also given space to respond to the technical comments.

"That was pretty unprecedented," said Ginger Pinholster, director of the Office of Public Programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.

The next steps
Since then, the focus has shifted from the headlines to the labs. A Popular Science profile of Wolfe-Simon created a bit of a stir a couple of months ago: She was quoted as saying that she was "basically evicted" from her research group and worried that "it's quite possible that my career is over."

But during this week's email exchange, Wolfe-Simon told me that the "Popular Science article quotes were not what I said," and that "what matters now is what these organisms are telling us about biology, and that is my focus." Here are some reflections on the one-year anniversary from one of her emails to me:

"What a busy year it has been!

"With the generous support of NASA, we are able now to dive deep and explore this scientific discovery. After such a discovery comes the time-intensive process of rigorous testing. We aim to unravel the mechanisms behind how this microbe accomplishes the ability to flourish and grow despite uptake and utilization of arsenic. This systematic rigorous testing is critical and needed to build upon an initial discovery of this type.

"To this end, I have joined the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with Dr. John Tainer and his group there. LBNL provides the diverse intellectual and material resources of a major national laboratory, affording us the opportunity to pursue our efforts to test multiple aspects and implications of the work efficiently and stringently. LBNL synergistically complements the generous financial support from NASA.

"Currently, we have made significant headway in optimizing the growth conditions of GFAJ-1 and preparing samples for a wide range of analyses, including biomolecule crystallization and metabolite characterization. There is so much work to do we're focusing on that and look forward to communicating our efforts in the coming months. ...

"I maintain my serious commitment to science and the process of data-driven research. I look forward to speaking with you some time in the not too distant future after we make additional scientific progress."

Other researchers are delving into the mysteries of GFAJ-1 as well, even though they don't think the claims about arseno-DNA and other "weird life" wonders will hold up. "I don't have any money for this," Redfield told me. "This is just a side project in what would be my spare time, if professors have any spare time."

Redfield says the projects she gets paid for are more likely to be scientifically productive, but they're not as interesting to the general public. "This struck me as an opportunity to do science openly in a circumstance where people would be actually interested in what I'm doing, and what the results were," she said.

Now the fruits of her GFAJ-1 labors are in the hands of Kruglyak and his colleagues. If the arsenic in the samples has really been incorporated in the DNA, rather than merely representing sample contamination, traditional genetic sequencing techniques would not work. "They could give all sorts of unpredictable results," Kruglyak said. That's why mass spectrometry has to come into play.

Kruglyak can't predict how long it will take to get the answers. "It always takes longer than whatever I would say," he told me. "I would hope it's weeks, not months."

Meanwhile, Gilbert and his colleagues will continue studying GFAJ-1's genetic makeup. He told me "there's nothing spectacularly amazing" about the bacteria, which was not subjected to the high-arsenic treatment applied by Wolfe-Simon's team and by Redfield. But Gilbert said the raw bacteria's genome has some intriguing twists nevertheless.

"What is quite interesting is that this has very few arsenic resistance genes, i.e., it does not have the typical suite of genes that would make the cell resistant to arsenic in the environment," he told me in an email. Further study of the genome may at last point to an explanation for GFAJ-1's affinity for arsenic — but as of today, one year after the bacteria came onto the world scene, Gilbert can't predict what that explanation might be.

"We will prod and poke at this thing for another year, and see if there's anything more interesting," he said.

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

3-D printers are moving from the whimsical fringe of printing out chocolates, cheeseburgers and bikinis to serious life-saving stuff such as rescue robots and, now, a bone-like material scaffold that can help heal real broken bones.

This latest use comes from researchers at Washington State University. They used a commercially available 3-D printer designed to make metal objects and optimized it so it can spray a bone-like ceramic powder into whatever 3-D shape designers draw on a computer. 

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New findings on the technology are reported in the journal Dental Materials where the team describes how the addition of zinc and silicon to the mixture more than doubled the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate.

"It can make bone scaffold using the material that you want very similar to human bone and it can fix the defect that the physician wants," Susmita Bose, a professor of mechanical and materials engineering at the university, explains in the video above.

In lab tests, after just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold supported a network of new bone cells.

And, the researchers are seeing promising results with in vitro tests on rats and rabbits, they report.

Susmita and colleagues aim to insert these scaffolds into human bodies to repair broken bones. As the bone-like material dissolves, real bone tissue in the body will grow over it.

Within 10 to 20 years, Susmita notes in the video, physicians and surgeons could be able to use these bone scaffolds, together with chemicals that help bones grow, to fix jawbones and fuse spines.

More on 3-D printing technology:

• The bikini of the future is made by lasers
• The wild possibilities of printing food
• Jumping robot spider jumps out of 3-D printer
• Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa
• Analysis: 3-D printing making inroads in heavy manufacturing

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Years after their discovery, the super-heavy elements 114 and 116 have finally been christened by their Russian and American discoverers. Say hello to flerovium and livermorium, also known as Fl and Lv.

The two names received recommendations for addition to the periodic table from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, or IUPAC. But don't add Fl and Lv to your periodic-table tattoo quite yet. The names still have to go through after a five-month public comment period, and then there'll have to be a couple of official sign-offs. Three other super-heavy elements — darmstadtium, roentgenium and copernicium — just completed the full process this month.

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It's taken a long time for 114 and 116 to get this far: They were first synthesized more than a decade ago at Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, by a team that included Russian researchers as well as chemists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. For years the elements were known merely by their placeholder names, ununquadium and ununhexium. This June, the IUPAC accepted 114 and 116 as the heaviest confirmed elements on the periodic table, opening the way for the researchers to settle on official names in October.

Flerovium has long been the favored name for 114. The name pays tribute to the Russian institute's Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, where the element was synthesized, as well as the lab's founder, Georgiy Flerov (1913-1990). But the rumored name for 116 had been muscovium or moscovium. That would have given a nod to the Moscow region, where Dubna is located. The choice of "livermorium" suggests that a compromise was struck.

"The team decided it'd only be fair to have one American and one Russian," Anne Stark, a spokeswoman for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told me today. Livermorium honors the lab as well as Livermore, Calif., the city where the lab is located. (In 1997, Element 103 was designated lawrencium in honor of the lab's founder, Ernest O. Lawrence.)

Bill Goldstein, associate director of the Livermore Lab's Physical and Life Sciences Directorate, hailed the name choices in a news release. "Proposing these names for the elements honors not only the individual contributions of scientists from these laboratories to the fields of nuclear science, heavy element research, and super-heavy element research, but also the phenomenal cooperation and collaboration that has occurred between scientists at these two locations," he said.

The super-heavy elements that have been synthesized so far last for only an instant before they decay into lighter elements, but the Livermore Lab says that chemists are hoping they'll eventually find an "island of stability" in the periodic table where newfound heavy elements would last long enough for applications to be found.

There are still more elements with links to the Livermore and Flerov labs waiting to be recognized and named: 113, 115, 117 and 118. One might assume that researchers are already thinking about lists of potential names, including moscovium, but Stark said it would be "bad juju" to discuss those names until the elements' existence was confirmed. Fortunately, I don't think the juju jinx applies to us. What would you name an element if you had the chance? Feel free to leave your suggestions as comments below.

More about chemistry:

• Israel sets world record for chemistry lesson
• Vindicated: Ridiculed chemist wins Nobel
• 2011 is chemistry's big year
• Chemistry gets its own show

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

Is this the world's biggest bug? As with all superlatives, it depends on your definition. But the sight of a New Zealand giant weta chomping down on a carrot surely has to give you the creeps, even if it's rivaled by other giant creepy crawlies.

This particular species of the cricketlike creature — known as a giant weta or wetapunga to the Maori, and as Deinacrida heteracantha to scientists — is found only in protected areas such as New Zealand's Little Barrier Island. That's where Mark ("Doctor Bugs") Moffett, an entomologist and explorer at the Smithsonian Institution, found the specimen after two nights of searching.

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"The giant weta is the largest insect in the world, and this is the biggest one ever found," Britain's Daily Mail quoted Moffett as saying. "She weighs the equivalent to three mice. ... She enjoyed the carrot so much she seemed to ignore the fact she was resting on our hands and carried on munching away. She would have finished the carrot very quickly, but this is an extremely endangered species, and we didn't want to risk indigestion."

The carrot-crunching cricket went viral today, and now questions are starting to emerge about the "biggest bug" label. The information accompanying the picture lists the insect's weight at 2.5 ounces (71 grams) and its length at 7 inches (17.8 centimeters, supposedly for wingspan, but keep reading).

The New Zealand-based news site Stuff.co.nz checked that with Landcare Research entomologist Thomas Buckley. "From the picture, it's a female, but it just looks like an average-sized one of that species," Buckley said.

Even the biggest giant weta has its rivals in the insect world. By some accounts, goliath beetles can reach a weight of 100 grams (3.5 ounces) during their larval stage and achieve a wingspan of nearly 10 inches (25 centimeters). The White Witch moth, meanwhile, has a wingspan of up to 12 inches (31 centimeters), which is wider than the wings of a sparrow.

But if you confine yourself strictly to adult insects, and define "big" in terms of weight, Moffett appears to have a good case. He told me in an email that the giant weta he found counts as the "largest one weighed, as far as I have seen recorded anywhere."

Now, if your definition of a "bug" takes in more than insects — say, the giant crustaceans known as isopods, which are super-sized versions of rolypoly bugs — then you're talking about bugs of truly horrific proportions. Do you have tales of monster bugs to share? Add them as comments below.

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET Dec. 2: Some of the reports about this giant weta make it sound as if the darn thing might bite somebody's finger off, but that's bogus. This CafeTerra posting describes the bug as a vegetarian and "the gentle giant of the insect world." They survive only in protected environments because they've been driven to near-extinction by rats and other invasive predators on New Zealand's main islands. The Kiwi Conservation Club says the bug is a "docile creature and does not kick or bite." Some reports have referred to the giant weta as having a 7-inch wingspan, but Moffett told me that the insect is "wingless, or virtually so." It's so heavy that it can't jump. It's so big that it can't easily hide from predators. And yes, it's edible.

Update for 11:30 p.m. ET Dec. 2: Moffett shed more light on the "biggest bug" question in a follow-up email: "I did not measure anything but the weight (one should correctly call it the 'world's heaviest adult insect'), but a rough estimate from the picture suggests an outstretched leg might be 7 inches. The weta is essentially wingless: no wings to see at all, let alone a seven-inch wing. [As to size:] I've seen a walking stick nearly 19 inches long in Sarawak, Malaysia, but it weighs next to nothing!"

Update for 3 p.m. ET Dec. 4: Uh-oh ... The New Zealand Herald quotes entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste as saying that the heaviest giant weta on record weighed 72 grams, which would be a gram heavier than Moffett's carrot-eating friend. Kleinpaste also said it's not unusual for the bugs to munch on carrots. But even if Moffett's weta is an unremarkable "wee 'un," Kleinpaste is glad for the publicity: "I think it's wonderful as long as weta get the attention and not that idiot American."

More weird tales of the insect world:

• Eight insects with the 'ick' factor
• For monster crickets, size does matter
• How 'bugs of death' can solve murder cases
• How about a yummy scoop of grasshopper?
• Slideshow: Portrait of a bug, and other small wonders

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

To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, that's no Christmas ornament ... it's a moon. Our moon, of course, hanging above Earth's limb in a picture taken from the International Space Station. It's the first holiday goodie in our Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which will unveil a new picture of Earth as seen from space every day from now until Christmas.

Our second annual photo calendar takes its cue from a traditional Advent calendar, which is built to hide one sweet treat beneath each of 25 doors that are opened sequentially on the appropriate day. The idea is give kids something to sink their teeth into during each day of the holiday season, and build up the anticipation for the big treat on the 25th.

Alan Taylor, who has worked at msnbc.com and The Boston Globe and now runs The Atlantic's In Focus photo feature, extended the concept to Hubble imagery a few years ago. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla did a similar thing for planetary imagery, and Zooniverse offers a space-themed Advent calendar as well (with Javascript-enabled doors that really work). We jumped on the bandwagon last year, and the calendar proved so popular we decided to do it again this year.

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You'll see a fair number of pictures over the next 25 days from NASA astronaut Ron Garan, who spent five and a half months on the space station and now passes out visual goodies on his Fragile Oasis website, his Twitter, Twitpic, Flickr and Facebook accounts and his Google+ page. The picture of Earth below and the moon above is just one of his offerings from October, and it's well worth mooning over.

Come back on Friday for the next picture in the 2011 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar.

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

Beer snobs wishing to know the provenance of their favorite European pilsners and lagers are in luck: Scientists have developed a new chemical test that can tell you where the brew originated.

Though such tests have long existed for products such as wine, spirits, coffee and tea, one hasn't been developed yet for beer, noted Jose Marcos Jurado, a chemist at the University of Seville in Spain.

"That surprised me because beer is one of the most consumed beverages in the world," he told me in an email today. 

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Jurado and his colleagues developed a test that identifies chemicals in the beer that relate to various raw materials such as water and hops. A set of algorithms recognize data patterns in those chemicals that point to the beer's country of origin.

In experiments, the researchers tested their model on pilsners and lagers — blonde-colored beers — from Germany, Spain, and Portugal and found it to be accurate 99.3 percent of the time.

Some brewers manipulate the chemicals in their water to produce the style of beer they want. For example, brewers of pale ales around the world often try to match the salt content of the water in England's Burton-upon-Trent where the style was perfected.

Jurado noted that additions of salts could trick the part of the test designed to detect iron, potassium and phosphate, but the test also measures chemicals such as polyphenols from hops, a plant that gives beer its characteristic bitterness and aromas.

"It is always possible to fake a beverage," he noted, "and this model can fail." Though, he added, the addition of more chemical parameters to the test could make it even more tamper-proof.

And there might even be reason for doing so. There is a growing movement in Europe to put beers on a list of products with Protected Geographical Indication. This test could be used to certify the authenticity of listed beers.

"This practice [of chemical fingerprinting] is much extended in products like wine and its influence in marketing is well known," Jurado said. "We have given a first step in that direction, trying to point out the importance of these kinds of studies in products like beer."

Findings are published in the journal Food Control.

More on beer science and technology:

• Brewer to turn spent grains into energy
• Beer mystery solved! Yeast ID'd
• At ancient 'takeout' window, bullets and beer to go
• Ancient beer from shipwreck too salty to drink

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.