NASA

In 1977 NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched into space carrying phonographs called the Golden Records containing pictures and sounds meant to show extraterrestrials a glimpse of life on Earth. The records were engraved with pictures explaining how to play them. Click on the picture for an explanation of the code.

When E.T. sends us Earthlings a message, what should we say in response? Three alien hunters suggest in the journal Space Policy that we should develop an international protocol for sending effective, intelligible communications. A website could be set up for people around the world to leave messages, following the protocol, so that we can then figure out what messages are best-suited for cross-cultural communication.

"An effective message to extraterrestrials should at least be understandable by humans," Dimitra Atri of the University of Kansas, Julia DeMarines of the International Space University, and Jacob Haqq-Misra of Penn State University write in their paper.

The concept of creating and testing such a protocol fits with the thinking of other space experts, according to Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at the California-based SETI Institute.

Cornell

This graphic was transmitted in coded form in 1974, using the Arecibo radio telescope. Click on the picture for an explanation of the code.

The proposal from the three researchers "is on target in really wanting to encourage an open, transparent process for engaging the world community in thinking about how we would want to represent ourselves, and how we would create a message that stands a chance of being understood," Vakoch told me today.

Talking to E.T.
Unless E.T. comes to Earth in a spaceship and gets out for a meet-and-greet, the chances of a face-to-face encounter anytime soon are close to nil. Instead, cross-civilization communication will have to span vast distances, using technology such as radio waves and pulses of light.

Astronomers on the lookout for these types of communications have already established protocols for making sure a communication received isn't just a natural noise or interference from a satellite. They've also established first-order steps to decipher the message, such as determining the basic units of the information sent.

This same community of researchers has also spent the past 50 years chewing on the question of what to say to E.T. The trick, noted Vakoch, is finding something that is universal.

"Some have focused on pictures, with the idea that vision has been very helpful here on Earth and so too might be helpful on another world," Vakoch said. "You might expect intelligent creatures on another world to be visual creatures as well."

But what may be a meaningful picture to a person from a Western culture may be gibberish to the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand, for example.

"Similarly, a Westerner may look at some ceremonial carving from the Maori and say, 'You know, that's a beautiful geometrical shape,' but a Westerner may miss the fact that there's a human body being depicted in that message," Vakoch said.

Another idea is to use basic math and science. After all, if alien beings are able to communicate with us, they must have the engineering and technical know-how required to send messages across interstellar distances.

"I think the key to creating a message that has a reasonable chance of being understood is to send as many distinct messages as you can, with the hope that at least one of them might be understood," Vakoch said. "Anyone who claims they have one message that will undoubtedly be understood is overly optimistic."

Sharing ideas
The Space Policy paper calls for setting up a website where users around the world can submit messages that fit the protocol. This will allow the discovery of "the types of messages better suited for cross-cultural communication," the authors write.

The SETI Institute's Earth Speaks project is built along these lines, notes Vakoch. The website solicits suggestions for the most important things that people want E.T. to know about life on Earth at the beginning of the 21st century.

Vakoch said the idea proposed in the Space Policy paper is complementary and attracts another audience to mull the questions surrounding what to say to E.T. "We need more people involved in space policy to be thinking about these issues," he said.

More on the alien quest:

• E.T. calling? Here's what to do
• How should we 'talk' to aliens?
• What to do if we find alien life 
• Are we missing E.T.'s call?
• Calculate the odds of finding E.T.
• Stephen Hawking worries about the aliens
• Too risky to phone E.T.? Too late — NASA's tried
• Six frontiers for extraterrestrial life

Tip o' the Log to Lisa Grossman at Wired.com.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Courtesy of Mike Wong, Franck Marchis, Christopher Go & W.M. Keck Observatory

Jupiter seen in three bands of infrared (left), with an overly of 5-micron thermal infrared (center) and on the same night in visible light (small inset at right).

Scientists are getting a detailed look inside the turmoil behind the disappearance — and slow re-emergence — of a prominent stripe of clouds on Jupiter, thanks to some crafty astronomy and help from the planet's icy moon Europa.

Astronomers noticed that the stripe, known as the South Equatorial Belt, disappeared from view last May. Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot is typically found along the edges of this belt. The belt's disappearance was attributed to a deck of white clouds made of ammonia ice that formed when the dry, downwelling winds that normally keep the region clear of high clouds died down. In November, scientists noticed that the belt was re-emerging due to a shift in the cloud cover.

To gain a better understanding of the dynamics behind the disappearance and re-emergence of the belt, scientists created the image above, which shows how the gas giant looks in thermal infrared light, at a wavelength of nearly 5 microns. The thermal IR imagery is shown in bright red and yellow, overlaid on a composite of three shorter near-infrared bands.

The thermal readings reveal how heat from Jupiter's interior is being radiated into space. The three other IR bands, in contrast, capture reflected sunlight. Put them all together and compare them to visible-light images, and scientists get a picture of the thinning, breaking layer of high, bright icy clouds that obscured the belt.

"We see wispy cloud-free regions at 5 microns in the SEB [South Equatorial Belt], but they are much less extensive than the near-infrared dark regions surrounding them," Mike Wong, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an image advisory. "The data show that the change from zonelike to beltlike appearance is a complex process that takes place at different speeds in each layer of Jupiter’s atmosphere."

To make the image, astronomers used the adaptive optics system on the Keck II telescope in Hawaii in a particularly clever way. The system effectively cancels out much of the interference of Earth's atmosphere.

Normally, astronomers flash a powerful laser to create an artificial guide star, which they use to compensate for atmospheric distortions at a rate of 2,000 times per second. Jupiter, however, is so bright that its glare overwhelms the laser guide star. So astronomers went looking for something bright and close to Jupiter. On Nov. 30, Europa was positioned just right to serve that purpose, the image advisory explains.

More stories about Jupiter:

• Jupiter lost a cloud stripe, new photos reveal
• Jupiter's missing cloud stripe bounces back big time
• Scientists to probe for life on Jupiter's moons?
• Jupiter took a double wallop as amateurs watched
• Another news flash from Jupiter

Electro Optic Systems / AFP - Getty Images

An image created by Australia's Electro Optic Systems (EOS) aerospace company shows a view of the Earth from geostationary height depicting swarms of space debris -- approximately 50,000 of the half-million or more debris objects greater than 1cm -- in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

Japan's space agency is reportedly teaming up with a fishing net manufacturer to catch and remove debris from Earth orbit, where it poses a threat to spacecraft, astronauts and satellites.

The space fishing net would span several kilometers and be made of thin metal wires. As it scoops up space debris, it will be charged with electricity, allowing Earth's magnetic field to reel in the haul and eventually burn it up in Earth's atmosphere, The Telegraph reports.

"You've got a charged object moving in a magnetic field. By the laws of physics, you are going to have a force, which is going to change its orbit," Brian Weeden, a former U.S. Air Force orbital analyst who is now a technical advisor for the Secure World Foundation, explained to me today.

Though Weeden is not familiar with the specifics of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's fishing net plan, the space debris expert said the concept fits in with a class of ideas under consideration to remove junk from space.

A key innovation of the JAXA concept, he noted, is that it "solves the fuel problem. You don't have to carry fuel onboard; you just have to have a way of generating electricity, which you can do at those altitudes with solar panels."

Space junk threat
The threat space debris poses to human operations in space is steadily increasing. Both the International Space Station and space shuttle have been forced to dodge space debris in the past. A collision between a Russian and U.S. satellite in 2009 underscored the need for effective ways to clean up space.

The Secure World Foundation's Space Security 2010 report made space debris a top concern. Currently, the U.S. military is tracking 21,000 known objects bigger than 10 centimeters in Earth orbit. Of those, only about 1,000 are working satellites. The rest are dead satellites, rocket parts and other pieces of junk.

This space junk is large enough to destroy whatever it hits, according to Weeden. Another 300,000 or so pieces between one and ten centimeters wide are known to exist, but aren't routinely tracked. Most of this stuff, big and small, is in orbit with functioning satellites and other spacecraft.

"It's where the activity is because it’s a result of all the activity. That's really the problem," Weeden said. The fishing net concept and other ideas are the first concerted efforts at removing this hazardous junk.

Removing space debris
To get the stuff, scientists and engineers need to figure out how to actually catch it. These pieces could be spinning out of control, and may be vulnerable to disintegration with a mere touch, due to years of radiation exposure. Some potentially could be filled with unused rocket fuel that could cause an explosion.

This makes grabbing it with a mechanical arm, for example, difficult if not impossible. "Let's say the piece of debris is spinning. Well then you've got to first de-spin it, otherwise it is just going to rip the arm right off," Weeden said.

The space fishing net that JAXA is developing with Nitto Seimo Co is one way to solve the problem of catching the debris, he added. Other concepts include spacecraft that attach themselves to debris and then de-orbit it into Earth's atmosphere with the aid, for example, of a solar sail.

Funding and legal questions
Most of the concepts, at this point, are early in the planning stage, noted Weeden. Nothing has yet been flown and flight tested. "The other big question is who pays for it," he said. "The economic question is a big issue and it is tied into some of the legal and policy questions."

For one, whoever launched the satellite owns it. It's essentially sovereign territory. So if, for example, a French cleanup mission scoops up a Russian-made piece of debris, there's a legal question concerning breach of national sovereignty.

Legal issues aside, policy experts are floating some ideas on paying the clean-up bill. One under consideration is an account along the lines of the Superfund, which is used to clean-up hazardous waste sites in the U.S. Another is a deposit program similar to that used in some states when consumers pick up a six-pack of soda or beer.

"You put your ten-cent deposit down — though it will likely be a lot bigger than that — when you launch the satellite, and you get it back when it is no longer in orbit," Weeden said.

Whatever technology is eventually used — and whoever ends up paying for it — clean-up needs to start by 2020 to "have a fairly significant impact in terms of making things safer in orbit," he added.

More stories on space debris:

• Space junk buzzes station as astronauts sleep
• Space shuttle moves to avoid space junk
• Solar sails could clean up space junk
• A close one for the space station
• Satellite collision could pose space threat

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

ESA / NASA / Michael Carrol

The joint NASA-ESA Europa Jupiter System Mission would send to orbiters to explore the Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede. It is one of three missions vying to be the next big mission put on by the European Space Agency.

Scientists may finally get a chance to probe Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede for signs of microbial life, by looking in what are thought to be liquid oceans beneath their frozen crusts.

The Europa Jupiter Systems Mission is one of three finalists vying to carry out the European Space Agency's next big mission. All three presented mission plans Feb. 3 at a conference in Paris. A final decision is expected this June.

The other two missions vying for funding are the International X-ray Observatory, which could reveal what happens in the vicinity of black holes, and Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which will "listen" to gravitational waves, giving space-time a sort of soundtrack.

Jupiter moons
All three missions are international collaborations, so Europe's decision is tied to and will have consequences for the priorities of NASA, a partner on all three, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, a partner on IXO.

Under the joint NASA-ESA Europa Jupiter Systems Mission, NASA will target Europa, an ice-covered moon thought to harbor a liquid ocean beneath its crust; ESA will head to Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.

Since the two orbiters are built by different agencies, one could fly without the other, though "you get better results in tandem," noted Michele Dougherty of University College London, who made the case for the joint mission at the Paris meeting, according to Space News.

Having two spacecraft, for example, would give scientists an opportunity to study Jupiter's atmosphere and magnetosphere in three dimensions.

International collaboration
IXO and LISA are considered too big and complicated to fly without international collaboration. Currently, IXO's lack of technical readiness has prompted the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to rank it a lower than LISA for U.S. space-science priorities.

Boosters of both missions say technical hurdles can be cleared and will be well worth the effort. IXO promises to provide the sharpest and most sensitive X-ray views of the Universe, according to team member Kirpal Nandra.

Bernard Schutz, a director at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, likened LISA's ability to "hear" gravitational waves, which are ripples of space-time, would be like adding sound to a silent film of a walk through a jungle. "There are bound to be many things we didn't even expect," he told Nature News.

Which mission is set as a priority in Europe will become clearer this June. NASA has thrown preliminary support behind all three, though guidelines to be laid out March 7 in the final version of the National Academy of Sciences ranking will set the space agency's agenda.

Keep in mind, all the missions are still way out on the horizon: The one ultimately selected wouldn't launch until around 2020.

For more about these missions, check out these stories:

• Bigger, better telescopes to follow Hubble
• NASA, Europe explore mission to outer planets
• Jupiter's moon ocean is rich in oxygen
• Orbiting stars circle each other in minutes

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

NASA

Instabilities build up on one flank of clouds of material exploding from the sun. The instabilities may explain why coronal mass ejections bend and twist instead of following a straight path.

When clouds of material explode from the sun, instabilities appear to form and build up on one flank of the ejected material, new observations from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory show. Because these instabilities are similar to those observed in Earth's clouds and oceans, researchers have a new tool for predicting space weather. 

The observations of the outbursts, called coronal mass ejections or CMEs, were made in the extreme ultraviolet at a temperature range previously unavailable — 11 million Kelvin, according to astrophysicists at the University of Warwick in Britain, who are studying the images made with the observatory's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly.

According to the team, the so-called Kelvin-Helmholtz (or KH) instabilities appear to roll up into growing whirls at boundaries between materials moving at different speeds. The difference in speed produces boundary instabilities.

The instabilities in the CMEs closely parallel instabilities seen in Earth's atmosphere, and in waves on the surface of the seas. Scientists had predicted they occur within the solar system's weather, but this is the first time the ripples have been directly observed in the sun's corona.

The researchers studying the images are particularly intrigued by how the instabilities build up on one side of the CME — this may explain why CMEs appear to bend and twist instead of following a straight path from the surface of the sun. Further understanding the results could assist physicists trying to understand and predict space weather.

"If the instabilities form on just one flank, they may increase drag on one side of the CME causing it to move slower than the rest of the CME," Claire Foullon, a researcher at the University of Warick, said in an image advisory.

A paper outlining the observations and detailed modeling on how they the phenomenon occurs appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

More stories on coronal mass ejections:

• Here comes the sun storm
• Solar shocker: Sun storms change directions
• Photoblog: Double whammy on the sun
• See a twister on the sun

The shuttle Discovery is lit up just after this week's arrival at the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Discovery is slated for retirement after its next launch, but there's talk that the other two shuttles in NASA's fleet could be kept for commercial purposes.

Is there really a chance that at least a couple of space shuttles will stay on as commercial spaceships rather than going to museums this year? That's what United Space Alliance, the venture that currently takes care of the shuttle fleet for NASA, is suggesting in its proposal for resupplying the International Space Station in the, ahem, "post-shuttle era."

The reactions to our story about the proposal run the gamut from "it's a dream come true" to "it's a pipe dream." It's not a totally loony idea — in fact, retired senator-astronaut John Glenn threw his support behind the idea months ago, and made his pitch for keeping the shuttles flying to President Barack Obama during a White House meeting.

"Why terminate a perfectly good system that has been made more safe and reliable through its many years of development?" Glenn asked.

But when you consider all the concerns that have been raised about the risks and costs associated with the space shuttle, along with the fact that the shuttle infrastructure is already being literally dismantled, does the plan really make sense?

The forum at NASASpaceflight.com, which is frequented by a fair number of space agency insiders, is generally bullish about the idea: One commenter observed, "Technically, the orbiters are in great shape.  There are no concerns there.  Politics will likely dictate and outweigh the logic process on if this is required or not. Two flights a year is very doable. ..."

On the other hand, NASA Watch's Keith Cowing, who is plugged into the talk within the space agency as well, is bearish: " NASA is not 'considering' or 'weighing' anything other than whether or not they want to pay someone to do a study that challenges a decision the agency has already committed to."

When the idea of keeping the shuttles flying was raised to Wayne Hale, who retired from NASA last year after managing the space shuttle program, it was quickly shot down.

"What if United Space Alliance were to buy the three shuttles?" a commenter asked Hale.

"This is nonsense," Hale replied. "United Space Alliance would need about $3 billion to operate the shuttle fleet for six flights a year. You do the math. It's not feasible."

Now USA is proposing doing two flights a year, using Endeavour and Atlantis, for $1.5 billion starting in 2013. That may be more feasible, and it may be an attractive proposition for job-conscious members of Congress. But the plan still may turn out to be too costly, risky or wrong-headed. Here's how the pros and cons line up:

Pros:

• The system has already been flying for 30 years, so we know it works.
• The shuttle has more cargo capacity than anything on the drawing boards. So at the same time that NASA is flying crew, it could deliver 25 tons of supplies as well.
• The plan bridges the gap until next-gen spaceships are built and fully tested.
• It keeps the shuttle workforce employed, eases transition to post-shuttle age.
• It reduces dependence on the Russians for human spaceflight in the near term.
• It gives NASA a chance to consider future shuttle-derived heavy-lift space vehicles.

Cons:

• How would transfer of shuttles to private sector work? Should USA pay?
• Shuttles are seen as having a 1-in-100 risk of loss of crew, which would be unacceptable under NASA's proposed safety standards for future flights.
• Some of the replacement parts for the shuttles are already becoming difficult to procure (via eBay?). More external fuel tank
• Next-gen spaceships for carrying astronauts are likely to be cheaper to build and operate, and may be ready as soon as 2014. Between now and then, it may make more sense to rely on the Russians.
• Shuttle workforce is already starting to disperse due to the expected end of program.
• Wouldn't it be preferable to fund new technologies rather than keeping 30-year-old technology going?

Maybe you have more pros and cons to offer. Or maybe you just have some thoughts about the approach of the post-shuttle age, or the prospect for the commercial-shuttle age. However you see it, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

I'll be out of the office for a few days, but my colleague John Roach will keep the Cosmic Log fires burning while I'm gone.

IBMP / Oleg Voloshin

Mars500 crewmembers test Russian Orlan suits before their mission started in early June 2010.

A six-man crew on a virtual 500-day trip to Mars reached "orbit" around the Red Planet yesterday after 244 days of fake interplanetary travel. The crew is scheduled to "land" on Feb. 12, and will make three trips out onto simulated Martian terrain.

The all-male crew — three from Russia, one from France, one from China and an Italian-Colombian — are really in a mock spaceship parked at the Moscow-based Institute for Medical and Biological Problems. They're part of an experiment to find out how a crew would handle the stress, claustrophobia and fatigue real astronauts would face in long-term interplanetary travel.

Yesterday, the craft "entered a circular orbit around Mars" — according to the mission scenario, which the virtual astronauts follow like a movie script.

Three of the crew members — Alexandr Smoleevskiy, Diego Urbina and Wang Yue — will enter the "lander" scheduled to reach the mock Mars on Feb. 12. The three trips onto the simulated terrain take place between Feb. 14 and 22. The crew will then head back to the mother ship on Feb. 23. The long journey home begins on Feb. 28, and the crew escapes their mock world in early November.

More stories on the Mars 500 expedition:

• Christmas on a virtual Mars trip
• Scientists begin Mars mission simulation
• 520-day flight simulation nears 'landing' on Mars
• Give the Wii credit if Russians make it to Mars

PLoS ONE

These three graves from the Middle Epipalaeolithic cemetery of 'Uyun al-Hammam in Jordan are from the earliest known cemetery in the Middle East, if not the world.

A 16,500-year-old cemetery with human remains — buried alongside those of a red fox — suggests humans may have had a soft spot for the animals well before dogs became man's best friend.

The site at 'Uyun al-Hammam in northern Jordan is the earliest known formal burial ground in the Middle East, pre-dating other cemeteries in the region by a few millennia, scientists from Canada and the UK report in a new study published in PLoS ONE.

"This may be the earliest known cemetery period," Edward Banning, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who is leading the excavations, told me today. "It probably depends on what you mean by cemetery."

The site is certainly the earliest known in the Middle East where people were repeatedly buried with grave goods such as mortars and pestles, a bone spoon, animal parts and red ochre, an iron mineral commonly sprinkled on bodies in prehistoric times, Banning noted.

Fox finds
Beyond the site's age, the researchers were intrigued by the presence of a red fox that was used in two burials. "This whole thing was buried with one person and then later on part of that fox is removed from that burial and put in another burial," Banning said.

The graves also have bones of other animals, but only the fox bones were treated in the same way as the humans. Both, for example, were sprinkled with red ochre. And in the original burial, the fox was completely interred, not just parts as is often the case with food offerings.

Banning cautioned that the significance of the fox can't be known for sure, but given strong similarities to the way dogs were treated in Natufian burials a few thousand years later, a pet-like analogy rises to the surface.

"It is tempting to think they thought of the fox as more or less equivalent to the dog in some way, because we tend to think of dogs at least eventually becoming man's best friend and pets," Banning said.

The connection isn't too great of a stretch, he added. Both dogs and foxes are canines, for one, and researchers know that foxes, while skittish and timid, can be tamed. What's more, early domesticated dogs in the Middle East were about the same size as the red fox.

"It would not be terribly surprising that they tamed foxes at least occasionally, it's just there is no way for us to prove it was tamed," he said.

Social complexity
The cemetery finding also indicates that elaborate mortuary rituals took place much earlier than previously believed and in cultures that were clearly nomadic hunter-gatherers. "It suggests that farming wasn't necessary to have that kind of level of social complexity," Banning said.

Though the people at 'Uyun al-Hammam were nomadic, the cemetery indicates ties to particular places in the landscape. The living space around the cemetery was a well-used campsite.

"Maybe because they associated it with their ancestors, it became their burial place. As they moved around this landscape, they kept coming back there to bury their dead. That's kind of interesting too, because it suggests a territoriality that is difficult to document earlier than this," he said.

More stories on early Middle East culture:

• Beer may have lubricated the rise of civilization
• Scientists pinpoint origins of little dogs
• Ancient Nubians drank beer laced with antibiotics
• Headless skeletons found in ancient grave 

Thomas White (DESY)

A three-dimensional rendering of X-ray data obtained from over 15,000 single nanocrystal diffraction snapshots recorded at the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first hard X-ray free-electron laser, located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The 3-D structure of proteins -- in this case Photosystem I -- can be determined from these diffraction patterns. Each nanocrystal was destroyed by the intense X-ray pulse, but not before information about its structure was revealed.

Scientists are using intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser to collect data on the 3-D structure of proteins and single-shot images of an intact virus.

The feat demonstrates a way to use X-rays "to look at very, very small objects with really high resolution," Michael Bogan, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, told me today.

The proof-of-concept studies using the world's first hard X-ray free-electron laser — the Linac Coherent Light Source, located at the lab — were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The research was led by Henry Chapman of the Center for Free Electron Laser Science at the German national laboratory DESY and Janos Hajdu of Sweden's Uppsala University, together with a team of more than 80 researchers, including Bogan, from 21 institutions.

"The LCLS beam is a billion times brighter than previous X-ray sources, and so intense it can cut through steel," Chapman said in a news release. "Yet these incredible X-ray bursts are used with surgical, microscopic precision and exquisite control, and this is opening whole new realms of scientific possibilities."

The technique opens up pathways that could lead to new drugs designed to target specific proteins,  to new views of the internal structure of viruses, or to new insights into why plants are so efficient at converting sunlight into energy.

Diffraction before destruction
Until now, making X-ray images of such tiny objects was difficult because conventional X-rays destroyed the object being imaged before any useful structural data was recorded.

The hard X-ray free-electron laser gets around this problem by shooting femtosecond-long pulses at the object. A femtosecond is one-quadrillionth of a second. Think a few millionths of a billionth of a second long. "And they are coming in so quickly that the X-rays scatter off that object and we capture them on a camera — and then the object explodes," Bogan explained.

This concept is known as "diffraction before destruction," he said.

Since the objects are destroyed soon after they are hit by the laser, to create the images, researchers send streams of the objects into the path of the X-ray beam.

Protein structure
In the protein structure experiment, the team targeted Photosystem I, a protein found in the membrane of plant cells that plays a key role in converting sunlight into energy.

To make the image of the protein's structure, they squirted millions of nanocrystals containing copies of Photosystem I in a liquid jet 10 times thinner than a hair across the X-ray beam. The laser pulses hit the crystals at various angles and scattered into the detector, forming the patterns needed to reconstitute the images.

The team then combined 10,000 of the 3 million snapshots into the known molecular structure of Photosystem I. In a few weeks, a second round of the experiment will use even shorter pulses, potentially allowing the team to get "single-atom resolution of these membrane structures. This will be really, really, really incredible," Bogan said.

Some researchers will use the technology to understand the structure of proteins that they want to target with new drugs, he noted. The Department of Energy has, well, energy on its mind.

"We're trying to understand how these Photosystem membrane proteins can actually convert the sun's light into energy, and so the next targets are to start looking at other proteins involved in this process such as Photosystem II, which is another unsolved membrane protein," Bogan said.

If researchers can understand how plants convert sunlight into energy so efficiently, they may be able to reverse-engineer the process, he added. "Just having the basic understanding of how this is working would be tremendously useful."

Amoeba virus
For the virus experiment, the researchers sprayed an aerosol stream of virus particles into the beam, allowing them to make single-shot portraits of the Mimivirus, the world's largest known virus, which infects amoebas.

The images show the 20-sided structure of the virus' outer coat and an area of denser material inside, which may represent genetic material. The team speculates that shorter, brighter pulses focused to a smaller area should improve the resolution of the images to reveal details as small as a nanometer.

"This is a brand new way to look at a biological object," team member Jean-Michel Claverie, director of the Structural & Genomic Information Lab in Marseille, said in a news release. "This will allow us address not only questions related to the internal structure of the virus, but its intrinsic variability from one individual virus particle to the next — a microscopic variability that might play a fundamental role in evolution."

Bogan noted that the realm of research opened up by this new imaging technique is just now becoming apparent. He likened it to being handed a computer that is more than a billion times faster than what's currently available.

"You couldn't even imagine what you would be able to do with this thing because it would be so powerful," he told me. "And that's really where we are right now. We are at the very beginning of this capability, and these are the first demonstrations of the type of biological experiments we'll be doing with them."

More stories on X-rays and lasers:

• The leading light for lasers
• The subatomic dragstrip
• X-rays solve artistic mystery
• Alternative to X-rays makes its first step 

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

Nature / NASA / Ames / JPL-Caltech / T. Pyle

This illustration, appearing on the cover of the journal Nature, shows the six planets of the Kepler-11 system as they might have looked up close during a triple transit observed on Aug. 26, 2010. The Kepler probe couldn't produce direct imagery of the planets, but it could detect the dip in starlight caused by the transit.

Astronomers behind NASA's $600 million Kepler mission say they’ve detected a star system that packs six planets inside a space that would fit within the orbit of Venus in our own solar system. It’s the marquee event for this week’s “big reveal” from the most sensitive planet-hunting probe ever launched.

It's also a huge puzzle for planetary scientists.

The worlds around a star now known as Kepler-11 rank as the "most densely packed planetary system known," said Jack Lissauer, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center. Lissauer is one of the principal authors of a study about the Kepler-11 system, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

The six planets range in size from two to four times as wide as Earth, with orbital periods that go from 10 to 118 Earth days. The lightest of the planets is only about twice as massive than Earth. But unlike the close-in "super-Earth" that was reported by the Kepler team last month, none of these worlds is anywhere near as dense as our own planet. If the Kepler team's figures are right, ice or gas must make up a significant proportion of their mass.

"It is clear that such planets need not resemble the earth in any way, which adds to our incredible planetary diversity," astronomer Jonathan Fortney, a member of the research team from the University of California at Santa Cruz, told journalists. "If connections to our solar system can be drawn at all, the low-mass planets in the Kepler-11 system appear to be more like small Neptunes than massive Earths."

Such low-mass, low-density planets are "truly astounding," Alan Boss, a planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told me in an e-mail.

"No theorist would have been nutty (or brave) enough to have claimed that a planetary system like this one might exist," he said. "Yet it does."

Lissauer said he rated the findingas the "biggest thing in exoplanets" since the 1995 discovery of 51 Pegasi, the first extrasolar planet detected around a sunlike star. Yale astronomer Debra Fischer, a planet-hunting pioneer who was not involved in the Kepler-11 study, agreed. "With five low-mass planets in the system, this discovery is as momentous as 51 Peg was in 1995," she said today during a NASA news briefing.

"Kepler is actually reaching the milestone discoveries faster than certainly I anticipated," Fischer said. "Kepler has blown the lid off of everything that we know about extrasolar planets, and this week to me feels very different than last week did."

15 confirmed planets, 1,200 candidates
Today's announcement boosts the Kepler mission's count of confirmed planets to 15, less than two years after the van-sized spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral. From its Earth-trailing orbit, Kepler has been focusing on an area of the sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, staring at more than 150,000 stars simultaneously. The probe's telescope documents the tiny dips in starlight that could signal the passage of a planet across a star's disk.

NASA / Nature

This graphic compares the sizes of Jupiter and Earth with the nine Kepler planets that were previously confirmed (above the line) as well as the six planets reported today (below the line). The term "RE" indicates the radius of the planet in terms of the radius of Earth.

Eventually Kepler should find thousands of new planets beyond our solar system, adding to a list that now amounts to more than 500. Just this week, the science team listed a fresh batch of 1,200 planetary candidates, including more than 50 planets that appear to be in the "habitable zones" of their respective star systems.

Not all of those candidates will be confirmed as planets. Some will turn out to be eclipsing binary stars or other phenomena that can mimic the dimming caused by a planet. But in time, astronomers expect to find hundreds of Earthlike planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars. Kepler's census should shed new light on an age-old question: How prevalent are the conditions that could give rise to life in the universe?

If you were looking for life as we know it, you wouldn't look in the Kepler-11 system, which is about 2,000 light-years from Earth. Five of the planets orbit closer to their parent star than Mercury does around our own sun — much closer than the "habitable zone" where life as we know it could exist.

Finding so many worlds in one faraway planetary system is notable, but not unprecedented. Last year, astronomers using a different detection method found a star system that has at least five and perhaps as many as seven planets. Lissauer said the key distinction here is that the planets are so close to each other, circling in a disk that is proportionally flatter than a vinyl record.

"It's just totally unexpected to have this much material, to be able to get a planetary system where planets can be this close to another, that there can be so many of them, that they can be so flat," he said. "It's really a sense of extremes there."

The other curious thing about Kepler-11 is that the planets are close to the mass of Earth, but must be structured like ice giants or gas giants to account for their low density. "How in the world they formed is going to be a headache for theorists for some time to come," Boss told me.

NASA / Nature

This chart graphically shows the estimates of the new planets' radius and mass, as well as how they would fit in among the solar system's planets and other worlds that have been discovered (Kepler-10b and CoRoT-7b). The newly discovered planets (shown in blue) are more similar in composition to Uranus and Neptune than to Earth and Venus.

UC-Santa Cruz's Fortney said the findings suggest that the composition of planets up to 10 times as massive as our own can be "extremely variable."

Lissauer said it's "more likely than not" that astronomers will be detecting more of these mini-Neptunes than super-Earths. But that doesn't mean the search for alien Earths will be fruitless, as demonstrated by the Kepler mission's latest batch of planet candidates.

"There could very well be as many true Earth analogs as people have previously suspected," Lissauer told me. "Over the next two, three, four years, Kepler will be weighing in on that. It just takes a long time for us to collect enough data to address that question directly."

To untangle the complicated orbital dynamics of the Kepler-11 system, scientists tracked the apparent planets' movements for months. Usually, astronomers can confirm the existence of distant planets by checking for slight gravitational wobbles in the star that they orbit. But in Kepler-11's case, the planets were too small and the star was too far away to use that method. Instead, the Kepler team worked out the timing of the planets' movements so precisely that they could figure out their masses using those calculations alone.

"The timing of the transits is not perfectly periodic, and that is the signature of the planets gravitationally interacting," Daniel Fabrycky, a postdoctoral researcher at UC-Santa Cruz, explained in a news release. "By developing a model of the orbital dynamics, we worked out the masses of the planets and verified that the system can be stable on long time scales of millions of years."

The same method should come in handy as Kepler gathers more data on potential alien Earths. "We expect to be doing a lot of those analyses," Fabrycky said. 

In addition to Lissauer, Fabrycky and Fortney, the authors of the Nature paper, "A Closely Packed System of Low-Mass, Low-Density Planets Transiting Kepler-11," include Eric B. Ford, William J. Borucki, Francois Fressin, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Jerome A. Orosz, Jason F. Rowe, Guillermo Torres, William F. Welsh, Natalie M. Batalha, Stephen T. Bryson, Lars A. Buchhave, Douglas A. Caldwell, Joshua A. Carter, David Charbonneau, Jessie L. Christiansen, William D. Cochran, Jean-Michel Desert, Edward W. Dunham, Michael N. Fanelli, Thomas N. Gautier III, John C. Geary, Ronald L. Gilliland, Michael R. Haas, Jennifer R. Hall, Matthew J. Holman, David G. Koch, David W. Latham, Eric Lopez, Sean McCauliff, Neil Miller, Robert C. Morehead, Elisa V. Quintana, Darin Ragozzine, Dimitar Sasselov, Donald R. Short and Jason H. Steffen.

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Courtesy of William Holland

William Holland, a genealogical researcher from Atlanta, dances to the left of Fon Angwafo III, the king of the Mankon tribal group in Cameroon, during a ceremony.

When William Holland traveled from Atlanta to Cameroon to dig into his family roots, the quest succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: A blend of genetic testing and genealogical sleuthing connected him with one of the West African nation's royal families. The king of Mankon, a region in Cameroon, embraced Holland so completely that the American was ceremonially given the name of the king's father. 

But now Holland is facing an embarrassment of genealogical riches: Since he first came upon his royal connection, he has determined that he's genetically linked not only with nobility in Cameroon, but also with a different clan in Ghana, hundreds of miles to the west.

"I think I'm getting toward the end of it ... but with this group, you have thousands of thousands of people," Holland told me as he headed for another extended-family reunion in Ghana.

Holland's experience demonstrates how the search for family roots in Africa doesn't always result in the neat succession of generations that was portrayed in the 1977 miniseries "Roots." It also suggests that Black History Month, which Americans observe every February, might more aptly be called Black Histories Month.

"Who was the ancestor that all of us are from?" Holland asked. "Who was he? That's the question I want to answer, but I don't know how to ask. This one man created thousands of people, but who was he? This one man ... he was something!"

Tracing African roots
African-American roots are notoriously tough to trace back from America to Africa, for an obvious reason: When traders brought shipments of slaves across the Atlantic, families were sundered and the old names were forgotten. Owners typically gave slaves their own family names — which is what happened to William Holland's ancestors.

Holland has gone through more than his share of twists and turns as a genealogical researcher: Years ago, he found out that his great-grandfather, Creed Holland, was a slave wagon driver who was forced to serve in the Confederate infantry during the Civil War. That led Holland to sign up for membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans — a move that didn't exactly sit well with some whites and some blacks.

Nine years ago, Holland thought his ancestors came from Nigeria. But since then, there's been a revolution in the use of genetic testing to firm up genealogical ties. Holland took a DNA test offered by GeneTree and pored over records compiled by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation, GeneTree's nonprofit sister organization. SMGF's database was suited to Holland's search because it combines genetic matching with genealogical pedigrees. If your DNA markers match up with someone else in the database, the pedigree of the person you match just might provide new clues for family sleuthing.

The database was particularly attractive for Holland because the foundation's testing teams went out to gather DNA samples from people in countries around the world, including African nations. This offered a way for Holland to "leap across the ocean" and find genetic connections to families in the old country, even if he couldn't trace the precise line of ancestry.

Royal cousins
The genetic links led Holland to turn his search from Nigeria to Cameroon, where he came upon a doozy of a connection. The DNA matches suggested that he was related to the Mankon king, Fon Angwafo III, as well as other noble families in that country. Thanks to the SMGF database, Holland could show his assumed African kin detailed genealogical information when he visited Cameroon in March.

Courtesy of William Holland

William Holland says he sees a resemblance between his father Sam Holland Sr. (left) and Fon Angwafo III (right).

"The Fon" and his aides examined the records ... and welcomed Holland as a long-lost relative. He was so welcome, in fact, that his whole family was invited to come to Cameroon in November as guests of the king.

The Holland entourage — William, his 80-year-old mother Willie Mae Holland, his brother Marvin and his sister Wanda — received the royal treatment. "I get treated better there than I do in the U.S.," William Holland told me. One of the most thrilling moments came when the king gave each of the Hollands a Cameroonian name. William was named Ndefru, after Fon Angwafo III's father, Ndefru III. "The name goes back to the 1500s," Holland said.

One of the most sobering moments came when the visitors were shown three or four huts where captured Africans were kept prior to their departure for America.

"You try to hold back, but tears flow out of your eyes," Holland told me. "You couldn't control it. You just knew, in 1772 or thereabouts, you knew what was going on. You could only imagine those people who were going down to the coast, what they were thinking. When they got down there, they'd think, 'Uh-oh. This is not good.'"

Holland said his African hosts stressed that the tribe's long-ago chiefs did not hand over their ancestors for payment, and they hoped that the Americans would not hold their African kin responsible for the horrors of slavery. They also had a question for their American cousins: "How was it not possible to keep your family name?"

Holland had to explain that traders and slave owners worked mightily to separate families and clans, to erase the ties that united the slaves brought to America's shores. "Your name was taken away from you as soon as you got off the boat," Holland said.

Courtesy of William Holland

American visitors are surrounded by their hosts in Cameroon. The Americans are, from left, William Holland (dressed in blue-and-white-patterned traditional garb), Willie Mae Holland, Wanda Lee Chewning and Marvin Leon Holland.

 When it came time for Holland and his family to return to America, the family researcher's head was bursting with the lore of Cameroon and the Mankon people — and yet he realized that he had just scratched the surface. "I saw just a tenth of what really goes on in terms of tradition," he told me. "You have to be there for a year or more to learn all the culture."

New connections
The funny thing about DNA is that it can link a whole tree's worth of genealogical branches. After his trip to Cameroon, Holland delved once more into the genetic database, and found potential connections to families in Ghana as well. Does that mean the Cameroon connection was incorrect? Not really. Because of different migrations through the generations, it's possible to have genetic cousins spread over a wide geographic range.

"Most of the migration periods in Africa began in the 1300s or 1400s. That goes back 28 generations, give or take," Holland said. "You keep the same DNA because you have the same ancestor, from Sudan or Cameroon or present-day Ghana. The same Y-chromosome is there."

One Ghanaian family in particular was a "very high match," Holland said, and so he struck up a correspondence. "I have spoken with the family, and they said, 'How'd you get this information?' So I sent them the pedigree, and they were shocked," he said.

Holland felt such a strong connection that he flew from Atlanta to Accra last week to meet yet another set of prospective cousins. He wasn't disappointed.

"So far, so good," he told me last week during a phone call from Ghana. "Everything is matching up. They look like me."

The news was still good today when Holland checked in again. "It's kind of strange how much everything is matching up," he said. Holland is due to get back to Atlanta just in time for the Super Bowl this weekend.

Before he left for Ghana, Holland told me that he felt ready to move on to the next phase of his family odyssey. "The next step now is, you want to go and educate people on both sides of the water," he said. "Americans need to know what it's like in Africa. And the people in Africa, they still don't know what happened to those people who went down to the coast, hundreds of years ago. It was a one-way ticket."

Well, it's not a one-way ticket anymore — at least not for Holland.

More about genealogy:

• Pilgrims and Indians in her family tree
• Genealogists discover royal roots for all
• Prince William's fiancee has Yankee lineage
• DNA takes on a family's mysteries
• Database catalogs slaves' treks
• Tracing genetic 'Roots' to Africa
• Cyndi's List: African-American genealogy
• Special report on genetic genealogy

Correction for 3 p.m. ET Feb. 4: Creed Holland was William's great-grandfather, not great-great-grandfather, and Willie Mae's age went from 79 to 80 years in November. Best wishes to Willie Mae, and thanks to William for pointing out the errors. Sorry about that!

Stay tuned for an update after his return from Ghana, and feel free to recount your own family quest in the comment section below. For more coverage of Black History Month, check in with msnbc.com's corporate cousins at TheGrio.com.

 Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book about Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Reuters file

A Viking warship replica, Havhingsten af Glendalough (the Sea Stallion of Glendalough), makes its way into Dublin's port in 2007. New research suggests the Vikings used sunstones to navigate in cloudy and foggy conditions.

Vikings could have navigated the oceans in inclement weather with the aid of a crystal that pinpointed the sun's location behind banks of clouds and fog, a new study suggests.

Such a tool, known as a sunstone, is known from legend, but until now experimental evidence that it could actually work as hypothesized was lacking.

Researchers led by Gábor Horváth of Hungary's Eötvös University decided to see if the legend has real world legs. Their results were published online on Monday in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The theory
The Vikings were Scandinavian seafarers who traveled widely in the North Atlantic, roughly between the year 900 and 1200. Under clear and partly cloudy skies, archaeological evidence indicates that they used sundials to find their way around.

But a sundial is only useful when the sun is shining, raising the question of how the Vikings navigated in cloudy and foggy conditions, which can last for days along their known sailing routes.

In the 1960s, Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou suggested that the Vikings used a sunstone to filter the sunlight so that it all had the same polarization, or direction. By rotating the crystal to and fro, the light would appear brighter or darker, depending on how the crystal was oriented. The brightest point would be toward the direction of the sun.

Two sunstone readings from different points in the sky would allow navigators to pinpoint the sun's location. They could then hold up a torch in that direction to mimic the sun's location, allowing its light to cast a shadow on the sundial.

A widely cited reference to this method of navigation appears in the Sigurd legend, a Viking saga. Horvath and his colleagues refer to the passage in their paper:

"The weather was very cloudy. It was snowing. Holy Olaf the king sent out somebody to look around, but there was no clear point in the sky. Then he asked Sigurd to tell him where the sun was. After Sigurd complied, he grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible sun. It turned out that Sigurd was right."

The tests
Critics have questioned whether this technique was actually needed, since experienced navigators could likely estimate the position of the sun even in cloudy weather. They also questioned whether the method would actually work under cloudy and foggy skies.

To answer the critics, the researchers made photographs of cloudy skies with a fisheye lens and asked subjects in the lab to find the sun. The experimental subjects had errors as great as 99 percent, leading the researchers to report that "Viking navigators might have needed some aid to navigate on open seas during cloudy or foggy weather conditions."

So they tested out the sunstone idea under a range of weather conditions on expeditions to Tunisia, a sail across the Arctic Ocean, and at home in Hungary. For a "sunstone" they used a polarimeter, a device that measures polarization.

Their results showed that the method worked in cloudy and foggy weather, though the method wasn't as reliable under completely overcast skies. Further research will test whether the actual crystals from Scandinavia and Iceland work as well as the sensitive polarimeter.

Christian Keller, a specialist in North Atlantic archaeology at the University of Oslo, told Nature News that he is open to the idea that the Vikings used sunstones to help navigate. However, he said the available evidence suggests that they used the sun's position on clear days as a guide, combined with knowledge about the flight patterns of birds and the migration paths of whales, among other cues.

"You don't need to be a wizard," he said. "But you do need to combine a lot of different sorts of observations."

Navigation in nature
Using polarized light for navigation is common in nature, as highlighted in the other papers published this week in Philosophical Transactions B. In one study, for example, Australian researchers conclusively demonstrate that honeybees steer with the aid of a built-in polarization compass.

Another study shows that when dung beetles navigate using the polarization patterns of the moon, they're as accurate in celestial navigation under a crescent moon as they are under a full moon, and that their skill equals that measured for species that orient themselves using the sun, which is up to 100 million times brighter.

But researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia found that other navigating species such as loggerhead sea turtles, which are known to orient via a magnetic compass, appear unable to use polarized light for navigation, at least when they're juveniles.

All of these studies, and several more, are available for free from the journal. To navigate there, simply click here.

More about navigation:

• Butterfly's navigation secret revealed
• Migrating songbirds can be led astray
• The real reason chickens cross the road
• Magnets help ants lead the way

More about the Vikings:

• Viking era triggered by shortage of wives?
• 1,000-year-old Viking shield found in Denmark
• Viking burial site unearthed in England
• Viking ship replica re-enacts age-old journey

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).