Excalibur Almaz

An artist's conception shows Excalibur Almaz's orbital vehicle in flight.

At least eight companies have been invited to chat with NASA about their plans to build spaceships for sending astronauts to the International Space Station after the space shuttles are retired. Among the big questions yet to be answered: How much money will actually be set aside for supporting the development of those spaceships, and how many companies will get that money?

The list of eight was reported last week by the weekly Space News. Here's the rundown, with links to more information about each venture's proposal:

• Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, which is partnering with Astrium on a launch vehicle that's based on Ares and Ariane technology.
• Blue Origin, the relatively secretive rocket venture that's backed by Amazon.com billionaire founder Jeff Bezos.
• The Boeing Co., which is offering its CST-100 space capsule as a crew transport craft for NASA and private operators.
• Excalibur Almaz, which plans to update Soviet-era hardware to create a low-cost next-generation launch system.
• Orbital Sciences Corp., which is partnering with Virgin Galactic and other companies on its Prometheus space plane.
• Sierra Nevada Corp., which is working on a lifting-body concept based on the decades-old HL-20 design.
• SpaceX, which has already successfully tested its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule and would adapt that system for crew transport.
• United Launch Alliance, which is working to get its Atlas and Delta rockets ready to launch humans into space.

All these companies are looking for money from NASA for the second phase of the agency's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev 2. Four of these companies — Blue Origin, Boeing, Sierra Nevada and ULA — have already received shares of the $50 million awarded during CCDev's first phase. (A fifth company, Paragon Space Development, received CCDev 1 funding as well.)

The current plan calls for NASA to award another $200 million for CCDev 2. There's some uncertainty over that figure, however, because Congress is still deliberating over the budget for the current fiscal year. It's not clear how much money NASA will get overall, but it could well come in below the $18.7 billion that the agency received during the previous fiscal year.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has estimated that it would cost $1 billion over three years for his company to develop a crew-capable version of the Dragon spacecraft — which suggests that even $200 million won't go very far, particularly if it's split several ways. Not all of the eight companies will receive NASA funding. And there are other companies in the CCDev 2 competition that don't appear on Space News' list, including United Space Alliance, which has suggested retooling two of the space shuttles; and t/Space, a venture that's proposing the development of a new crew transfer vehicle.

NASA aims to announce its lineup for CCDev 2 funding this month, which means it's getting down to crunch time for many of these concepts. Theoretically, the companies' spaceship-building plans aren't supposed to depend on NASA backing. But realistically, it will be much more difficult for a company to attract investments or private business if the space agency doesn't smile upon them.

More rumblings about the companies' prospects may filter out next week, after the discussions with NASA. The CCDev 2 discussion board at NASASpaceflight.com is a good place to look for inside information. How would you handicap this space race? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

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." 

ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / G. Neukum

A stereo image shows an unnamed crater near Huygens Basin in Mars' southern hemisphere. Look at the image through red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.

Mars has some of the highest mountains and deepest valleys of the solar system — but you might not realize that unless you're looking at 3-D imagery of the Red Planet. So put on your red-blue glasses and check out some of the latest stereo imagery from interplanetary orbiters.

First up is today's picture of an elongated crater in the Martian southern hemisphere, as seen by the stereo camera aboard the  Mars Express orbiter. The picture was taken last August but has just been released by the European Space Agency. The crater has all the hallmarks of a cosmic impact, but instead of taking on the usual round shape, it's drawn out as if something struck a glancing blow on the surface.

That's pretty much what scientists think happened: A wider-angle view of the scene shows yet another stretched-out crater off to the north-northwest, directionally aligned with the main crater. That suggests that a train of orbital debris circled inward and hit the surface at a shallow angle. There's other evidence to support that hypothesis, including a butterfly-like splash pattern that spreads out on either side of the crater.

In today's image advisory, the European Space Agency says more of these elongated features will be formed in the future: "The Martian moon Phobos will plow into the planet in a few tens of millions of years, breaking up in the process, and likely creating new chains across the surface." That'll be something for future Mars colonists to watch for ... or watch out for.

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona

A stereo image shows a volcanic vent and the vestiges of lava flows on Mars. Look at the image with red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.

Our second 3-D highlight comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO. This geological feature looks similar to the impact crater spotted by Mars Express, but it's the result of a completely different phenomenon. The University of Arizona's Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, says this is actually a volcanic vent, sitting on top of a Martian shield volcano.

Lava likely flowed out of this vent repeatedly, with "spatters" of molten rock creating an elevated rim around the vent. "Could these vents be the source of atmospheric methane that has recently been detected on Mars? No, they are old and dusty, like every volcanic vent imaged so far on Mars," McEwen writes in his image advisory.

Such vestiges of Mars' volcanic past could become the focus of future exploration. Astrobiologists speculate that collapsed lava tubes might have provided a haven for microbial communities on Mars, and pit caves on Mars (or on the moon, for that matter) may offer the safest locations for settlements.

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Ariz.

An image captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows light-toned layers in a crater south of Crommelin Crater. Red-blue glasses provide a 3-D effect.

The 3-D image above shows something completely different — the crazy, cratered terrain south of Crommelin Crater, around the Martian equator. The picture, showing the region's light-toned layers, was acquired by MRO last October.

There's lots more to see in 3-D — but if you're looking at these red-blue anaglyphs, you really need 3-D glasses to get the full effect. I believe every household should have a set of the stereo specs lying around. If you're missing out, here's how to remedy the situation: Inexpensive red-blue glasses are generally available at novelty stores, and you may also find them included with 3-D books or DVDs. NASA's website for the STEREO mission provides a list of mail-order outlets, as well as instructions for building your own 3-D glasses.

Here at Cosmic Log, we've distributed hundreds of 3-D glasses that are provided free of charge by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. (Microsoft and NBC Universal are partners in the msnbc.com joint venture. WorldWide Telescope's developers have the glasses made up as a promotional item for their astronomy software, which includes 3-D imagery.)

Just today we've given out more than 30 pairs of glasses to folks who "like" the Cosmic Log page on Facebook. If you'd like to keep posted on future giveaways, please visit the page, hit the "like" button and become a full member of the Cosmic Log community.

For still more cool cosmic imagery, in 2-D, check out the latest installment of our Month in Space Pictures slideshow. This week we're featuring the shuttle Discovery's last mission as well as stunners from space telescopes and interplanetary probes. Click on the links below for larger versions of the pictures and additional background:

• Closing in: A perfect lineup for the shuttle and the space station.
• Swirls of ice: Shikotan Island as seen by EO-1 satellite.
• Cosmic reflections: Messier 78 nebula served up by MPG/ESO telescope.
• Pool practice: Bigger version of the AP picture from Star City.
• Continent in the sky: Spitzer's infrared view of the North America Nebula.
• Monster blast from the sun: You'll love this video from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
• Saturn's northern storm: Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains Cassini imagery.
• Getting ready for a walk: See more images from Discovery's Flight Day 5.
• Welcomed with open arms: Station's robotic arm grabs Japanese cargo craft.
• Light show: A dazzlingly big picture of Norway's northern lights.
• Ready for landing: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter sees crater in color.
• Walking on a mock Mars: Simulation crew practices for Red Planet mission.
• A ring of black holes: Chandra and Hubble team up on a galactic pair.
• A grand galaxy: Hubble's majestic view of the galaxy NGC 2841.
• Time to move out: Get a wider perspective on Discovery's preparations for flight. 
• Jumpin' Jupiter: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains what smacked Jupiter.
• Remembering Challenger: Learn more about the 1986 Challenger tragedy and its legacy.
• A stunning sight: Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli rocks the house with his Flickr pics.
• Eyes on the sky: Beautiful vista from the European Southern Observatory.

Still more cosmic views in 3-D:

• Get a fresh 3-D look at Phobos
• See a Martian crater in 3-D
• See a Martian milestone in 3-D
• See the Martian arctic in 3-D
• See more depths of Mars in 3-D
• 3-D delights from Mars
• Still more from Mars in 3-D
• Go on a space mission in 3-D
• See the moon's marvels in 3-D
• Saturn's moons in 3-D
• More from outer space in 3-D
• Fly through a nebula in 3-D
• Cosmic Log's 3-D-O-Rama

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." 

Nasser Nasser / AP

This file photo shows Seif al-Islam Gadhafi at a ceremony of the declaration of a sustainable environmental region at the ancient city of Cyrene near the city of al-Bayda, northeastern Libya Sept. 10, 2007.The site is one of five World Heritage Sites in the country.

Though reportedly safe for now, as the tension escalates in Libya, the fate of the country's archaeological heritage is increasingly uncertain, experts say. Meanwhile, in Egypt, threats to national treasures may resurface, after a pause.

The last of the foreign archaeologists working in Libya were evacuated Feb. 26, according to Nature News. The 11 archaeologists with the Italian-Libyan Archaeological Mission in the Acacus and Messak are studying ancient archaeology and rock art in the country.

Savino di Lernia, head of the team, relayed a message from Salah Agab, chairman of the Libyan Department of Antiquities, that currently the situation was under control and all museums and archaeological sites are safe.

But archaeologists fear the chaos and risk of looting poses a threat to the country's ancient archaeological sites, as they have in the recent uprisings in nearby countries such as Egypt.

Security is described as "good" at the Libya's five World Heritage sites, including the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna, a prominent coastal city of the Roman Empire about 80 miles east of Tripoli that is renowned for its public monuments, harbour, market-place, storehouses, shops and residential districts.

Other World Heritage sites include the ancient Greek archaeological sites of Cyrene; the Phoenician port of Sabratha; the rock-art sites of the Acacus Mountains in the Sahara Desert; and the old town of Ghadamès, an oasis city that has been home to Romans, Berbers and the Byzantine civilization.

The situation could be "problematic" elsewhere, di Lernia told Nature News.

The capital city, Tripoli, remains tightly controlled by Gadhafi's heavily armed forces, who this week launched counterattacks against nearby cities controlled by protesters. Despite the security presence, important sites in this northwestern region, such as Sabratha, are "really endangered."

A report from Reuters paints a similar picture of concern about the country's cultural heritage: 

"So far there are no records whatsoever of any areas from the cultural heritage of Libya being affected by the troubles," said Hafed Walda, a Libyan who advises the country's department of antiquities and once led an excavation at Leptis Magna.

"We're always worried about this in terms of chaos. It's going in the right direction so far but I'm not sure it will carry on like this. I don't know," he said from his London base.

Meanwhile, Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief who became a cabinet member this January, posted on his blog a list of some two dozen sites that were looted or vandalized since the uprising that led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

"Our antiquities are in grave danger from criminals trying to take advantage of the current situation," he writes.

Among the looted and vandalized sites were the storerooms for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's excavation site in Dahshur, south of Cairo, as well as the looting of the tomb of Impy near the Great Sphinx at Giza.

Hawass told the New York Times on Thursday that, for political reasons, he would not accept a post in the new Egyptian government to be formed by Essam Sharaf following the resignation of prime minister Ahmed Shafiq.

The depature of Hawass could lead to even more looting, Karl von Habsburg, president of Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield, a body that tries to protect cultural heritage in conflict zones, told the paper.

"I am terrified by the idea that [Zawass's departure] might be a sign to potential looters that now that last element of control is gone, and now we have a free hand to continue looting," he said.

Based on the world's demographics, the typical human is a 28-year-old Chinese man — but humanity's most common face could be radically different in just 20 years' time.

The "typical face" of our species was unveiled this week in the National Geographic video below, and it's featured as well in a poster supplement in the March issue of National Geographic magazine. The typicality project is part of a special report on global human population, which is expected to hit 7 billion by the end of this year.

So how do you judge typical, and why does the "typical human" look the way he does? For National Geographic, the yardsticks have to do with averages and pluralities.

For example, the world population's average age is 28, which is factored into the face's look. There are slightly more men than women on Earth, which is why the "typical" human is male. And the world's largest ethnic group is Han Chinese, making up an estimated 1.1 billion of the global population, which is why the magazine's editors went with an Asian look.

As for the specific look of that face, that's based on an visual averaging process conducted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which can draw upon tens of thousands of face photographs collected for a variety of databases over the past decade. One of these databases is part of a long-range study on face-recognition software for Asian ethnic groups. (Which sounds slightly scary.)

The fuzzy, averaged-out image was passed along to digital artist Joe Lertola of Bryan Christie Design, who re-created the face photo for National Geographic's poster using 7,000 computer-generated human figures. An interactive graphic on National Geographic's website provides more detail about the creation of the face and lets you zoom in on the composite image.

Here are a few more factoids about the typical human:

• He's right-handed, because more people are righties than lefties.
• He makes less than $12,000 a year, in line with the world's average income.
• He doesn't have a bank account, but he does have a cell phone. 

Because National Geographic defines its typical ethnic group as the biggest plurality in the world population, that ethnicity could change over time — and in fact, the population of India is projected to surpass the Chinese population by 2030. At that time, India is expected to have more than 1.53 billion people, while China is expected to reach its peak population of 1.46 billion and begin a slow decline. By 2030, the total tally of the world's population will be well on its way to a projected peak of 9 billion or more.

If current trends hold true, the generic face of humanity will eventually be Indian, not Chinese. And there may be more changes in store as global population shifts. Isn't that just typical?

Update for 12:30 a.m. ET March 5: A lot of the commenters are wondering whether it's really fair to use an all-Chinese face as a symbol for the world's entire population — and John Tomanio, senior graphics editor for National Geographic magazine, agreed that the concept is open to debate.

"There are many ways to define 'typical,' that's true," he told me in a follow-up phone call. The decision to go with an average Chinese face was based on the idea that the world's "largest ethnic group was Han Chinese."

"We didn't mean it to be provocative," Tomanio said. "But afterward we realized, 'OK, people might want to talk about this.'" Which is fine with him. So feel free to talk about this in the comment section below, but please take the high road rather than the low road in your discussion. The Cosmic Log community has a reputation to uphold.  ;-)

More on population:

• Worries about the world population in 2050
• Census: U.S. population growth slowest since 1940
• Falling birth rate to slow Muslim population growth
• Technology helps China brace for population growth

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." 

Hey, kids! Check out some newly released videos that make you feel as if you're blasting off with a space shuttle — and then plan your own high-flying mission.

Your journey begins with a half-hour-long series of videos that NASA released today, showing last Thursday's launch of the shuttle Discovery as recorded by cameras mounted on the craft's two solid-rocket boosters. The boosters are jettisoned along with the shuttle's external fuel tank during the ascent to orbit, and while the fuel tank burns up in the atmosphere, the boosters fall back down through the atmosphere, splash down into the Atlantic and are recovered for reuse.

The cameras are installed on the boosters to give the mission team a look at any potential damage that the orbiter might sustain during ascent. It takes a few days to recover the imagery, but the wait is worth it. Give a click to the video above and check it out for yourself.

The opening seconds show the view looking at the pad as Discovery blasts off, and at around the 2:25 mark, the boosters make a fiery separation from the space plane.

This half-hour show strings together several views from different perspectives. At the 15-minute mark, there's a really interesting video from the intertank camera: A contact microphone is hooked up to the booster, so you hear the rush of the engines, the whoosh of the tank pulling away, and the plunks of debris hitting the metal. After separation, you can see Earth spinning around through the frame and even catch sight of the shuttle's vapor trail. It takes several minutes for the booster to finish its free-fall. The chutes open at the 19:21 mark, and then there's the splashdown at 19:51. Glub!

Seeing the launch from on high
Meanwhile, another video gives you a sense of the view from high up — as high as 110,000 feet. We've already talked quite a bit about the Robonaut-1 high-altitude balloon launch, organized by the Quest for Stars educational program and the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. During the Discovery countdown, the student-led project released a balloon that was festooned with all sorts of video and photo gear.

Smart phones captured pictures of Discovery as it was ascending, and on Wednesday, project organizers released a snazzy music video that takes in a 360-degree view of the scene. Look closely and you'll see Discovery's plume as it fades away (at 0:35, 0:54, 1:16 and so on):

We've also mentioned the two YouTube video views of Discovery's ascent as seen from commercial airplanes. A colleague of mine here at msnbc.com, Martin McClellan, has used a mashup website called YouTube Doubler to pair the two clips so you can watch them simultaneously.

Time for another liftoff
So are you ready to put your own payload up into the air? Over the past nine years, California-based JP Aerospace has flown more than 3,400 "PongSats" to high altitudes on balloons or suborbital sounding rockets. PongSats are experimental packages that are built small enough to fit inside a ping pong ball. They could be as simple as a plant seed, or as complicated as an electronic sensor. John Powell, the founder of JP Aerospace, told me that his venture flies PongSats for free, as add-ons for missions that are aimed at developing cheaper ways to get to space.

"JP Aerospace carries the PongSats to 100,000 feet on floating platforms, where they experience 90-below-zero temperatures, vacuum, cosmic rays and zero gravity during the 20-mile fall at the end. After the mission, the PongSats are sent back to the students for research, experimenting and science fairs," Powell wrote in an e-mail.

Here's a picture that was taken from one of the balloons, showing three PongSats nestled in their rack:

JP Aerospace

Three PongSats are secured to a high-altitude balloon sent skyward by JP Aerospace.

Powell said not everyone is pro-PongSat: "I've had NASA officials tell me PongSats are of no importance because they are round and too small. Big universities tell me PongSats aren't meaningful because they are free."

But the opportunities are very meaningful to the kids — and to Powell. "I know when we have a flight coming up, because hundreds of ping pong balls show up on my desk," he said.

Powell told me that it's not too late to get a pong-sized payload ready for the next mission in April:

"All anyone needs to do to sign up is to send an e-mail [to jpowell@jpaerospace.com] with their contact information. If it's a teacher or group, they need to say how many they want to do.  I send them back ID numbers to write on their PongSat. At least a week before the flight they need to mail their PongSats to us. After the flight we send them back their PongSat along with a certificate, a DVD with launch and onboard video, a picture sheet and a mission sheet describing how high, how cold and other mission details.

"You should do one!

"On our website there is a users guide with info about how to cut a ping pong ball in half. and suggestions on experiments. My favorite is to put a mini-marshmallow inside. If we climb fast, it puffs up, filling the ball and becoming freeze-dried. If we climb slow, it gets cold before it hits vacuum and shrinks, then freeze-dries. It make a great analog climb rate indicator.

"Some of the PongSats have been getting pretty complex. About one-third are electronic, and two-thirds are the simple plant seed type of experiments."

Flying for free? That's not a bad deal for kids who have an interest in out-of-this-world science. Powell told me he's gratified to hear that more scientists are becoming interested in suborbital space research. "I just hope the scientists can catch up to the 8-year-olds," he joked.

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." 

L.A. Cicero

The foundation for the artificial skin is a flexible organic transistor, made with flexible polymers and carbon-based materials.

Stretchable and flexible solar cells have been created to power a type of artificial skin sensitive enough to feel a fly land on it and, potentially, detect diseases and toxic chemicals, scientists at Stanford University are reporting.

The team, led by chemical engineer Zhenan Bao, published one of two papers on the artificial skin fashioned out of semiconductors in September 2010. The skin could, for example, allow robots to sense pressure.

One day, it may restore the sense of touch in people with prosthetic limbs. Other potential applications under development include the ability of robots equipped with the skin to detect proteins in human saliva, sweat, or urine that serve as biomarkers of specific diseases.

Regardless of what the artificial skin is detecting, it needs to transmit electronic signals to get its data to the processing center, be it a computer or human brain. That's where the stretchable, flexible solar cells come into play.

The cells have a wavy microstructure that extends like an accordion when stretched. The electrode is made of a liquid metal that conforms to the wavy surface of the device when stretched and relaxed. This allows it to be put on clothing, or even body parts such as the elbow, where movement stretches the fabric and artificial skin.

In addition to skin for robots and prosthetics, the stretchable component of the cells would allow them to bond to curved surfaces without crackling or wrinkling, such as the exteriors of cars, lenses and architectural elements.

A paper describing the solar cells has been accepted for publication in Advanced Materials.

The sight of a fireball streaking across the night sky often leads to the question: Where'd that come from? NASA is deploying a network of smart cameras to provide the answer effortlessly.

Scientists don't often know whether the meteor you saw blazing through the sky came from the asteroid belt, a disintegrating comet, or, perhaps, was a piece of space junk meeting its fiery demise.

The network of smart cameras triangulates the fireball's paths and uses ASGARD (All Sky and Guided Automatic Realtime Detection) software, developed at the University of Western Ontario, to calculate their orbits. It then sends an e-mail to William Cooke, the head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

In other U.S. meteor networks, someone has to manually look at all the cameras' data and calculate orbits, which is a painstaking task.

"When I get to work each morning and power up my computer, there's an e-mail waiting with answers," Cooke said in press release. "And I don't have to lift a finger, except to click my mouse."

Knowing the orbit helps scientists figure out the fireball's origin. The network also tracks speed and height, allowing them to determine whether the meteor hit the ground. If so, they'll have a good idea of where meteorite hunters should look.

"And when we collect meteorite chunks, we'll know their source," Cooke said.

To date, the smart camera network consists of three cameras, each about the size of gumball machine, in north Alabama, northwest Georgia and southern Tennessee. The team will soon have 15 cameras up and running east of the Mississippi, with plans for a nationwide rollout.

Cooke is actively seeking schools, science centers and planetaria willing to host the cameras. The criteria to be host:

1. Location east of the Mississippi
2. Clear horizon (few trees)
3. Few bright lights (and none close to the camera)
4. Fast Internet connection

In addition to sending information on fireballs to Cooke, the network data is posted to a public website. Teachers are invited to e-mail Cooke (william.j.cooke@nasa.gov) to request workshop slides containing suggestions for classroom use of the data.

For example, students can learn to plot fireball orbits and speeds, how high up in the atmosphere they burn, and where they hit the ground.

Wanna see a fireball live? Cooke offers this advice:

"Go out on a clear night, lie flat on your back, and look straight up. It will take 30 to 40 minutes for your eyes to become light adapted, so be patient. By looking straight up, you may catch meteor streaks with your peripheral vision too. You don't need any special equipment — just your eyes."

Then, check the website to learn what you saw.

More on fireballs:

• Rare daytime fireball lights up East Coast skies
• Green fireball UFOs identified
• Spectacular meteor lights up the Midwest
• Twin fireballs spotted: Is comet sparking meteors?

Tip o' the Log to Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today.

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).

Streeter Lecka / Getty Images file

Is there a scientific reason why the Duke Blue Devils are perennial basketball favorites? A professor from Duke says yes.

A professor from Duke University says it's only natural that the NCAA's March Madness basketball tournament highlights the same teams year after year ... like Duke, for instance.

This sounds like either an attempt to get in good with the higher-ups at the university in North Carolina, or one of those "duh, right" studies that merely confirm common sense. If your sports team builds up a reputation, of course it'll continue to attract good athletes and coaches to keep up that reputation — and that goes for the Duke Blue Devils as well as other sports dynasties.

But the point behind the newly published research from Adrian Bejan, an engineering professor at Duke (and a former basketball star from Romania), is that sports dynasties serve to illustrate evolution at work.

"The science of sports evolution is a significant step in evolutionary biology, where the accepted view is that evolution is impossible to observe because of its long timeframe," Bejan said in a news release. "With sports, we can focus on a particular population of athletes and witness 'live' the evolution of the design and performance of this selected group."

Bejan's analysis of hierarchies in basketball and academics was published online this week in the International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics."

Constructal law
Bejan says only a few sports teams can rise to the top of a hierarchy, and that hierarchy can be predicted in line with a theory that he calls "constructal law." The theory, which Bejan developed 15 years ago, is based on the principle that flow systems evolve their design to minimize imperfections, reduce friction or other forms of resistance, and increase their efficiency with time.

As a college basketball program becomes successful, the "friction" involved in recruiting those prospects is reduced. Less effort has to be expended to bring in the best athletes, and that solidifies the university's standing in the athletic hierarchy. The way Bejan explains it, this process is as natural as the fact that a river cuts a deeper channel as time goes on.

"In this case it has to do with the players," Perry Haynsworth, a former student of Bejan's who contributed to the study, told the Duke Chronicle. "The easiest path for these high-school basketball players to the NBA is to the top 10 schools, and because of that these top 10 schools have more success."

For the record, the top 11 schools listed in the paper are, in descending order, UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, Louisville, Indiana, Michigan State, Michigan, Cincinnati and Ohio State (rankings based on NCAA Final Four appearances). This year's anticipated top seeds, as projected by Dave Ommen for NBC Sports' "Beyond the Arc" blog, don't exactly track that list. Duke, Kansas and Ohio State are the only teams from Bejan's list of 11 that are projected to be No. 1 or No. 2 seeds when the NCAA announces its brackets on March 13. But Bejan emphasizes that his study is about long-term trends rather than any one year in particular.

To be sure, Cinderella teams can break into the Final Four, and the top-rated teams can be upset as well. But Bejan and his colleagues say a college that wants to establish itself in basketball's top tier would have to spend more on its program and recruiting efforts than the existing top-tier teams. By the same token, the top teams tend to keep their reputation even if they have a bad year once in a while ... like Duke, for instance.

"The principle is that winning will return to a campus such as Duke because Duke is one of those channels of processing the best talent in the country," Bejan told the Duke Chronicle.

Academics and athletics
Bejan's analysis applies to academics as well as athletics, and he maintains that there's an evolutionary lesson in the way that colleges develop specialties. Universities, like species, have to balance the expenditure of resources for a variety of purposes. Some species have super-sharp hearing. Others rely more on their sense of smell or their sharp vision to survive. Similarly, some universities are better-known for academics than for athletics (Hooray for the Caltech Beavers!) while it's vice versa at some other universities I could name (but won't).

Some universities may show up on top-10 lists for athletics as well as athletics ... like Duke, for instance. But Bejan said "most of the universities appear only in one of the rankings — they seem to separate themselves into two different worlds." He maintains that academic powerhouses follow the same evolutionary rules that athletic powerhouses do.

This isn't the first time Bejan has blended athletics and evolution: In previously published research, he found that Olympic swimmers and sprinters have grown bigger, taller and faster over the past 100 years — recording an average growth rate that's almost three times as high as the wider population's average growth rate over the same time frame. More controversially, he has sought to explain why the top-rated sprinters tend to be black while the top-rated swimmers tend to be white. (He and his co-authors contend that it has to do with torso length, as measured by the position of the belly button.)

Do you think Bejan has hit the mark with his evolutionary analysis of March Madness, or has he thrown up an airball? Feel free to add your color commentary in the comment space below.

More about basketball and science:

• Bracketologists raise their game
• Inside the science of the NCAA bracket
• Why superathletes are a step ahead
• "Beyond the Arc" on NBCSports.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 on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Researchers have genetically engineered the bacteria E. coli to produce a gasoline-like biofuel called n-butanol at a rate that is about 10 times better than competing systems.

N-butanol (normal butanol) is naturally made by various species of the bacteria Clostridium. Since the 1920s, researchers and industry have genetically tweaked these bacteria to boost their butanol-producing abilities, said Michelle Chang, a chemist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"We were asking a different question: Can you take a microbe that is easy to work with in the lab and also easy to grow on an industrial scale and reprogram it to do new chemistry and can you compete … with the native organisms they've optimized," she told me Wednesday.

E. coli tweaks
To find out, as in earlier efforts, Chang and her colleagues inserted Clostridium genes into E. coli. But to get better yields than previous efforts, they replaced two of the enzymes in the Clostridium material with look-alike enzymes from other organisms.

The tweak helped the team overcome one of the main obstacles with Clostridium: It makes butanol, but also unmakes it. "They can turn it back to whatever it started with," Chang explained. "So it is really important if you want to build up high levels (of fuel) to put in a block where it can't go back."

The two enzyme substitutes serve as that block, leading to nearly five grams of butanol per liter of cells — that's 10 times more butanol than produced by other strains of genetically engineered E. coli and yeast.

The genetically engineered E. coli is only about one third the production as the best genetically engineered Clostridium, but Chang believes researchers have hit a ceiling in terms of what they can do with the native organism.

"If you think about the native organism, it makes butanol for its own purposes, not to make the most possible," she said. "But if we take a genetically tractable organism, we can better optimize it for something it doesn't already do."

The team has already improved on previous efforts with E. coli and thinks that with further tweaks they can get up to a four-fold increase in efficiency from where they are today.

Green future
Chang said the use of genetically engineered bacteria to produce butanol is "green" for two reasons. First, eventually, the feedstock for the bacteria would be plant material, a renewable resource for biofuels, which, in theory, leads towards a carbon neutral balance.

In addition, this is also green from a synthetic chemistry point of view, she noted.

"There's a huge amount of chemical waste that is related to the way we make molecules, so what we are interested in is asking can you do chemistry inside a living organism?" she said. "Then it is all in water and it is all based on naturally occurring systems."

More stories on butanol:

• W2 begins to construct biobutanol reactor
• Bacteria rebuilt to make oil
• Mutant bacteria + polyester = more biofuel
• The race to replace gasoline

A paper describing the research appeared online this week in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. In addition to Chang, co-authors include graduate student Brooks B. Bond-Watts and recent UC Berkeley graduate Robert J. Bellerose.

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).

Charlie Riedel / AP

Burning fossil fuels such as coal has helped push up atmospheric CO2 to levels not seen for nearly 30 million years.

What will the planet's climate be like by the end of this century? The answer may lie in really, really old rocks, according to a new report that urges a coordinated research effort to study them.

Scientists have already pieced together a comprehensive record of Earth's changing climate from studies of rocks and ice that stretches back about 2 million years. The problem is that the amount of carbon dioxide already pumped into the atmosphere is 25 to 30 percent higher than at any point in that record.

"If we continue to emit CO2 into the atmosphere and don't do something about abating those emissions, by the end of this century we are looking to be where we were 35 million years ago," Isabel Montañez, a geologist at the University of California at Davis, told me.

To understand what that amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will do to the global climate in the future, scientists are keen to study what it did to it in the deep past. Existing studies already paint a worrisome picture, noted Montañez, who chaired the team behind the National Research Council's new report.

"Those past times of higher CO2 were much warmer … and there were processes operating that don't operate in our current climate. And they lead to amplified change, accelerated warming, changes in ice sheets, things like that," she said.

For example, a massive burst of volcanic eruptions about 55 million years ago filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and pushed global temperatures higher. This, in turn, warmed the oceans, which released massive amounts of methane, another greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. The methane release, in turn, accelerated the warming. The event triggered an extinction event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Scientists view this period as a good analog to what could happen today.

Montañez and colleagues want to study this and other transitions between "icehouse" and "greenhouse" states at various sites around the world to gain a deeper understanding of these transitions in the climate. They can do this by studying cores of rock and dirt.

These sediment cores are full of shells, minerals and plants that scientists can correlate to levels of carbon dioxide and temperature.

"These are all proxies [and] the technology that allows us to define these proxies has been revolutionized in the last decade in terms of its ability to do that and to actually read time in old sediments and rocks," Montañez said.

In the distant future, scientists may look at rocks and sediment from today to better understand the transition to what geologists are starting to call the Anthropocene, or the age of man. They'll be looking for similar things.

"If you go to the end of the Anthropocene, maybe 80,000 years from now, it would look just like many of those intervals in the past," she said. "The difference is, it is just a snippet in geologic time. But for those of us living in it now, is is much more than just a snippet."

More about climate and extinction:

• Study says sixth mass extinction looms, but is preventable
• Climate change wiped out woolly mammoths, scientists say
• Lizards can't take the heat ... some are going extinct
• Glaciers played a role in ancient mass extinction
• Interactive: Trace Earth's geological turning points

Watching a space shuttle launch from an airplane is a rare thrill, and having a video camera at the ready for the event is rarer still. So I was amazed to see last week's iPhone view of the shuttle Discovery's launch, captured by software developer Neil Monday from a commercial jet leaving Orlando. Turns out I shouldn't have been all that amazed: Canadian photographer JD Howell caught another view of last Thursday's launch with his own iPhone, from a different plane that happened to be passing through nearby airspace.

"I was returning to Toronto from a shoot in Cuba on an Air Canada flight, and awoke just as it was happening," Howell told me in an e-mail. "I started rolling my iPhone and caught two minutes of it before it exited the atmosphere. Talk about timing!"

The fact that this was Discovery's final launch made the experience all the more special for Howell. And as the mission continues, more photographers are turning their cameras skyward and praying for perfect timing.

Thierry Legault

The International Space Station looms above the shuttle Discovery in a series of images captured by French astrophotographer Thierry Legault. Click on the thumbnail to watch the video.

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault, who's become renowned for his pictures of the International Space Station and space shuttles silhouetted by the sun, snapped a sequence of images showing Discovery's approach to the station on Saturday. Click on the thumbnail at right to watch the whole thing.

"I had to travel as far as Weimar, Germany, to find a clear-enough sky to catch the ISS and Discovery 30 minutes before docking," Legault told SpaceWeather.com. "The station faces near the end of the video as the sun sets on the ISS."

If you want to double your pleasure, check out British photographer Rob Bullen's similarly framed picture of Discovery's approach, which is featured on NASA's website as well as on SpaceWeather.com. Bad Astronomy blogmeister Phil Plait says "it is seriously insane that we can do this." Or is that seriously awesome?

The insanity isn't over quite yet. On Thursday, NASA is due to release launch video captured by cameras mounted on the shuttle's solid-rocket boosters, and photographers will be clicking away again when Discovery undocks from the space station on March 6. Prepare to be wowed ... again.

More pictures with 'wow':

• Sun gets double-crossed
• Space missions in 3-D
• Shuttle in the spotlight
• Stare at the sun

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."

Six volunteers have hunkered down inside a glorified trailer, stowed inside a Moscow research institute, for the final leg of their simulated 520-day space mission after bidding farewell to the room they pretended was Mars.

"See you later, Mars!" the Mars500 experiment's team wrote today in a Twitter update. In reality, the make-believe astronauts merely closed the door to their 20-by-20-foot (6.3-by-6.17-meter) "lander" and confined themselves to a habitat complex roughly equivalent to three trailer homes linked together by play-gym tunnels.

It's easy for MSNBC's Rachel Maddow to poke a little fun at the fake Mars mission, as you'll see in the video above. But this isn't merely make-believe: The $15 million experiment at Russia's Institute of Biomedical Problems is aimed at figuring out how to deal with the stresses and scenarios that might crop up during a real-life mission to Mars. For example, an earlier Mars-type simulation went sour in 1999-2000, due in part to sexual tensions. That's one big reason why the Mars500 crew is all-male.

So far, the European-Russian-Chinese crew seems to be getting along pretty well. They coped handily with simulated medical issues as well as communication delays lasting up to 20 minutes (to reproduce the effects of light-travel time between Earth and Mars). Last month, three of the crew members "landed" on a pretend Mars and walked around a big room at the institute that was gussied up with red rocks and fake stars. 

ESA

During his "Marswalk," Diego Urbina used tools that were originally designed for Russian lunar missions in the 1960s.

During a series of three "Marswalks," the crew members wore mock spacesuits that weighed 77 pounds, to simulate how the real-life spacesuits weighing up to 220 pounds (on Earth) might feel. In his latest diary entry, Mars500 crew member Diego Urbina said that when he stepped out into the made-up Mars room for the first time, the effect was ... eerily real.

"Whether you lived it or saw this scene from the outside, you couldn't avoid thinking of the first steps on the moon, and this time there was in the environment some sort of cosmic projection of the moment, into the future," he wrote. "It felt very inspiring. I could say, beyond a simple simulation."

The Mars landing team also used a video-game-style program called "Virtu" to drive computer-generated rovers through a simulated sandstorm. And at one point they had to take shelter from a hail of simulated meteors.

"For this task we wore a virtual reality helmet, to make it more realistic," Urbina wrote.

Now that the door has been closed on Mars, the six men have another 249 days in isolation ahead of them. There may be more simulated emergencies ahead, but I have a feeling that when the crew emerges from their trailer in November, they'll have smiles on their faces.

The Mars500 mission is the most ambitious of a host of space mission simulations, ranging from the Aquarius underwater simulations in the Florida Keys to the Haughton-Mars Project's experiments in the Canadian Arctic, to the Mars Society's practice runs in Utah and Canada. Are all these trips necessary? Let me know what you think about the idea of simulating far-off space missions — as well as the idea of sending humans on far-off space missions rather than letting robots do all the work.

More about future space missions:

• Obama plans to see landing on Mars
• Radiation could rule out mission to Mars
• Many refuse to give up on moon missions
• Part of space station could be sent to asteroid

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."

Paul Sakuma / AP

Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the Apple iPhone 4 at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Friday, July 16, 2010. A new study, not using the iPhone, shows that thumb placement over a smart phone antenna can lead to dropped calls.

How users of some smart phones grip their gadgets can indeed lead to dropped calls — and, at least in a lab setting, placing an Apple-style plastic bumper between the antenna and thumb failed to fix the problem, according to new research on the so-called "grip of death" and potential fixes.

The antenna problem was widely reported among users of Apple's iPhone 4 last June, which prompted Mark Beach and colleagues at the University of Bristol's Center for Communications Research to revisit and update data collected in 2005 using a personal digital assistant with a new round of tests on a smart phone prototype.

In the new tests, the researchers investigated what happens when the thumb of a smart phone user directly obstructs a particular type of antenna. They compared their findings to results with the same phone and same antenna, but placed so that the antenna was not obstructed by the thumb.

"This is an emulation of the principal problem which was of interest in the summer of 2010, yes, and that was our motivation to re-open our log books and data," Beach told me in an email. But, he emphasized that "we did not use an iPhone 4 and we did not use the patented (and commercially secret) antennas we believe to be on the iPhone 4."

Test results
The team found that a thumb placed over the antenna "comprehensively disrupts the electrical characteristics of the antenna," Beach said.

"This means that its ability to transmit/receive signals is severely impaired — especially that the received signal strength tends to fall significantly and then tends to fluctuate more widely and so to be less reliable."

Overall, the thumb disruption led to a 100-fold reduction in sensitivity of the smart phone. This de-tuning of the antenna was found not to significantly alter the shape of the radiation pattern, but worsened the electrical match between the antenna and the electronic circuitry, according to the research.

In short, "signal strength is in general worse and more likely to drop below the threshold at which a connection to the network can be maintained," Beach said.

Potential fixes
The grip of death appears to only be a problem, however, when the antenna is placed so that a user is likely to place their thumb over it. When the antenna is not directly obstructed, even when the thumb was nearby, call quality was "considerably better," he added.

"Thus, although some distance of thumb from antenna is needed, it does not have to be physically very large," Beach said.

The team tried to fix the problem by placing a thin layer of plastic between the antenna and the thumb – this is akin to the bumper Apple gave out to iPhone 4 users to address their antenna problems.

"There was no recovery in the electrical behavior of the antenna … its transmitting/receiving characteristics were not returned to their hands free state," Beach said, though he emphasized that this was under test scenarios.

Another potential fix the team is investigating is a technique called Virtual MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output)  in which the number of antennas per phone is reduced, but are shared between users. The team is presenting results at a conference in Paris this week, and the research has been published in IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

More stories on the grip of death:

• Apple gives free bumpers to all iPhone 4 owners
• Consumer reports won't 'recommend' Verizon iPhone because of antenna
• iPhone 4 comparison: Verizon vs. AT&T
• Apple 'stunned' to find flaw in iPhone 4