Geoffrey Supran

Richard Lunt, one of the researchers who developed the new transparent solar cell, demonstrates its transparency using a prototype cell.

A breakthrough in the chemical formula used to make organic solar cells could turn ordinary windows on the sides of homes and buildings into mini-power plants capable of producing enough electricity to run lights, gadgets, and appliances.

The photovoltaic cells contain organic molecules that harvest infrared light while allowing visible light to pass through. Previous attempts to create transparent solar cells have either had low efficiency — converting less than 1 percent of incoming solar radiation to electricity — or blocked too much visible light, according to the team developing the new cells.

The new prototype organic photovoltaics created at the Center for Excitronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have an efficiency of 1.7 percent while allowing more than 55 percent of the visible light through, according to a paper accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters. 

Efficiency gains?
Further development of the technology — optimizing the composition and configuration of the photovoltaic materials — may lead to efficiency of 12 percent, making it comparable to existing solar cells, the researchers note. 

Richard Lunt, a postdoctoral researcher in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and lab director Vladimir Bulovic, say the transparent solar cells could eliminate many of the costs associated with the manufacturing and installation of thin-film solar power systems.

For example, in new construction the solar cell material can be added to the window glass before they leave the factory. Existing double-pane windows can be coated with the material. Only wiring connections to the window and a voltage controller would be needed to complete a home system.

Part of the family
The transparent cell technology is "attractive, because it can be added to things already being deployed,"  Bulovic said in a press release. Using them could help combat greenhouse gas emissions, but would be just one of  the wedges that  scientists say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change.

The researchers don't yet have a final cost for the material, though think it could become a commercial product within a decade. Hurdles to its development include achieving the efficiency gains that seem plausible in the lab and extending the lifetime of organic PV cells. 

If all goes according to plan, though, any building with sun-facing windows could be fair game, significantly boosting available surface area for generating solar power. Think skyscrapers, for example, glistening in the morning or evening sun.

The windows could even help power vertical farms that some experts are pitching to feed a growing population on a planet with finite arable land.

More stories on solar cell research: 

• Solar power future for glass pyramids?
• Solar panels too pricey? Try printing them out
• Stretchy solar cells to power e-skin 
• Scientists develop self-healing solar cells 
• New solar panel design traps more light 

Department of Energy

An anvil cloud looms over the Southern Great Plains where DOE and NASA climate scientists are headed to study the physics of convective clouds in a bid to improve models of the global climate.

As spring storms rumble across the Great Plains in the coming weeks, government scientists will have their heads in the clouds hoping to gain a better understanding of the dynamics at play so they can improve models of the global climate.

"One of the real areas of hot debate in our field these days is what happens to the strength of storms as the climate warms," Michael Jensen, a meteorologist with the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, told me today.

Jensen is leading a six week field campaign beginning Friday in Oklahoma to study why these storms form where they do, how they grow over time and what causes them dissipate. The data, to be collected with state-of-the-art radars, wind profilers, NASA aircraft and weather balloons, will allow scientists to improve models they use to predict how these storms will change as the climate warms. 

Convective clouds
Current models are unable to accurately to reproduce these convective clouds. For example, the models tend to start forming them earlier in the day and produce really big storm clouds at the expense of the more common intermediate storms.

Convective clouds, or systems, are the towering masses formed by rising heat that can produce thunderstorms and other severe weather, including tornadoes such as those that swept across the southeast last weekend, killing several dozen people.

These so-called convective processes play a critical role in Earth's energy balance by redistributing heat and moisture in the atmosphere and triggering precipitation.

Although these are the processes that build up the storms that lead to severe weather, such as tornadoes, Jensen's team is most interested in "the much more typical afternoon spring and summer type thunderstorms that you experience in the plains," he said.

Field campaign
The experiment will employ a range of atmospheric measuring equipment on the DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma, such as a suite of radars to study the properties and evolution of clouds in three dimensions. Other instruments at the facility will measure winds and precipitation.

NASA participants will fly aircraft within and above the cloud systems to collect complementary data on the amount of moisture and structure of the clouds. "Now we need the weather to cooperate a little bit. We need it to rain some while we are out there," Jensen noted.

The suite of instruments all running at the same time should give the scientists a holistic view of convective processes including:

• the atmospheric conditions in which a convective cloud forms,
• how air motions within the cloud impact the subsequent growth and formation of precipitation,
• what types and sizes of cloud and precipitation occur within the different stages of the cloud life cycle
• and how the cloud system impacts the background atmosphere

The end goal is to provide the most complete characterization of convective cloud systems and their environment that has ever been obtained, providing information that has never before been available for representing these processes in global climate models.

"We know that one of the biggest uncertainties in the climate models is the representation of clouds and the feedbacks they have within the climate system," Jensen told me. "This is just one of the cloud types that we need to continue to understand better to improve the climate models even further."

More on climate and clouds:

• How do clouds affect Earth's climate?
• Warming experts stick their heads in the clouds
• Are mystery clouds of Venus a warning sign for Earth's climate?
• Photoblog: Tracks in the sky

P.A.S. Cruickshank

This artist's impression highlights Pluto's huge atmosphere of carbon monoxide. The source of the gas is erratic evaporation from the dwarf planet's mottled icy surface. The sun appears at the top, as seen in the ultraviolet radiation that is thought to force some of the dramatic atmospheric changes. Pluto's largest moon, Charon, is at lower right.

After nearly two decades of searching, astronomers have detected carbon monoxide in Pluto’s thin atmosphere, as they expected. But they didn’t expect to find so much of it. Pluto's dramatic seasonal changes serve as further evidence that the dwarf planet is one surprising little bugger.

"Everything about Pluto is surprising," Jane Greaves, an astronomer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told me. Greaves presented the new results today at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Wales.

Five years ago, Pluto was at the center of a controversy over the definition of planethood — which resulted in the creation of the dwarf-planet category, a new class of celestial objects. More recent observations have pointed up still more peculiarities about Pluto. For example, scientists have found that the faraway world's surface features are changing, that its atmosphere contains clouds, and that it might even harbor a pool of liquid beneath its icy shell.

Pluto's thin atmosphere, which was previously known to contain nitrogen and methane, is thought to freeze out and rise up as the world traces its eccentric orbit around the sun. Traces of frozen carbon monoxide have been detected on Pluto's surface, which led astronomers to assume that carbon monoxide gas should be found in the atmosphere as well.

Greaves and her colleagues detected the presence of carbon monoxide in a big way. Previous observations suggested that Pluto's atmosphere extended out to a distance of more than 60 miles (100 kilometers). The new results, obtained by the 15-meter James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, indicate that the atmosphere goes out much farther: more than 1,875 miles (3,000 kilometers), or a quarter of the way out to Charon, the largest of Pluto's three moons.

"Carbon monoxide has been searched for but never before detected," Alan Stern, principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, told me in an email. "If confirmed, this is a significant technical achievement, and there will be some interesting scientific implications as well."

Why has the atmosphere grown that much? Greaves speculated that sunlight has been hitting bright patches of frozen material on Pluto's surface, warming up the ice and causing liberal amounts of carbon monoxide and other gases to boil off. "This is now for some reason boiling off more than it was 10 years ago," when scientists in Spain made an extensive study of Pluto's atmosphere, Greaves said.

That may seem counterintuitive, considering that Pluto was at its closest point to the sun back in 1989 and is now moving farther away. But Greaves suggested that Pluto was experiencing thermal inertia — the same phenomenon that explains why the hottest time of year comes in late summer rather than midsummer. Pluto is currently in the late summertime of its full orbital cycle, which lasts for 248 Earth years.

Mark Sykes, director of the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute, said Pluto's larger atmosphere "is not necessarily a surprise."

"My thought is that we have the sun pushing for higher latitudes on Pluto, and that the net increase in gas production as those polar ices increasingly sublimate is dominating over the freeze-out on the dark pole," he told me in an email.

Carbon monoxide tends to act as a coolant — unlike carbon dioxide or methane. which are greenhouse gases linked to global warming on Earth. The balance between the trace amounts of carbon monoxide and methane is probably a critical factor controlling the ups and downs of Pluto's nitrogen-dominated atmosphere.

"Seeing such an example of extraterrestrial climate change is fascinating," Greaves said in a news release. "This cold simple atmosphere that is strongly driven by the heat from the sun could give us important clues to how some of the basic physics works, and act as a contrasting test bed to help us better understand the earth's atmosphere."

Greaves and other scientists will be tracking what happens to the carbon monoxide and other constituents of Pluto's atmosphere for years to come, but the biggest revelations are expected to come when the New Horizons probe flies past Pluto in 2015.

In the years since New Horizons was launched in 2006, Pluto has been removed from its niche as the "ninth planet" of the solar system — and is now seen instead as one of potentially scores or hundreds of dwarf planets. But Greaves said the icy world has retained its peculiar appeal, no matter what you call it.

"I don't think the name you classify it by is that big a deal," she told me.

More about Pluto:

• Pluto in the spotlight ... dead or alive
• Pluto's rival gets downsized
• Pluto in fact and fiction
• Eight decades of Pluto
• All about "The Case for Pluto"

In addition to Greaves, co-authors of the research paper titled "Discovery of Carbon Monoxide in the Upper Atmosphere of Pluto" include Christiane Helling and Per Friberg. The paper has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Univ. of St. Andrews photoillustration

On a world that spins around two dim suns, the vegetation may well look black to human eyes.

Researchers suggest that vegetation on an alien planet like Tatooine in "Star Wars" might well look black or gray to human eyes. But they probably wouldn’t seem devoid of color to the eyes of the aliens — assuming they have eyes, that is.

The conjecture comes from a paper presented by the University of St. Andrews' Jack O'Malley-James at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Wales. O'Malley-James is working on a Ph.D. project to assess the potential for photosynthetic life in multiple-star systems with different combinations of sunlike stars and red dwarfs.

On Earth, the leaves of plants generally look green because two types of chlorophyll absorb the reddish and bluish wavelengths in the visible-light spectrum. Those red and blue wavelengths drive the photosynthetic process by which plants convert the sun's energy into chemical energy. In contrast, the green wavelengths are reflected into the RGB optical sensors known as our eyes.

Scientists surmise that the birds and bugs may see plants quite differently, with greater sensitivity to different shades of green and the ability to sense ultraviolet wavelengths as well.

O'Malley-James suggests that in different corners of our galaxy, plants could evolve to take advantage of different combinations of wavelengths, depending on the light coming from their parent sun ... or suns. The possibilities become particularly intriguing for a planet in a multiple-star system — like Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's fictional home planet in the "Star Wars" movie saga.

J. O'Malley-James / Univ. of St. Andrews

On planets orbiting red-dwarf stars, the vegetation may have more photosynthetic pigments in order to make use of a fuller range of wavelengths, giving them a "black" appearance. Here are some earthly examples of dark plants and flowers.

"If a planet were found in a system with two or more stars, there would potentially be multiple sources of energy available to drive photosynthesis. The temperature of a star determines its color and, hence, the color of light used for photosynthesis. Depending on the colors of their starlight, plants would evolve very differently,"  he said in a news release.

Statistics show that more than 25 percent of sunlike stars and 50 percent of the red dwarfs in our galaxy are found in multiple-star systems. Armed with such statistics, O'Malley-James and his colleagues ran computer simulations to determine the optimal strategy for photosynthesis over a wide spectrum (heh, heh) of planetary alignments.

“Our simulations suggest that planets in multi-star systems may host exotic forms of the more familiar plants we see on Earth," O'Malley-James reported. "Plants with dim red dwarf suns for example, may appear black to our eyes, absorbing across the entire visible wavelength range in order to use as much of the available light as possible. They may also be able to use infrared or ultraviolet radiation to drive photosynthesis. For planets orbiting two stars like our own, harmful radiation from intense stellar flares could lead to plants that develop their own UV-blocking sunscreens, or photosynthesizing microorganisms that can move in response to a sudden flare."

But even if the plants reflected none of the visible-light wavelengths, extraterrestrial gardeners might well have their own special appreciation for an ultraviolet bloom, or leaves that are variegated in the thermal infrared.

I know it sounds like a flight of fancy, but this is just the kind of flight I enjoy the most. The subject reminds me of the scene from "Battlestar Galactica" where Brother Cavil complains about the "ridiculous gelatinous orbs" in his head. "I want to see gamma rays!" he shouts. "I want to hear X-rays!" Which new senses do you think the aliens might have ... and which do you wish you could have? Feel free to weigh in with your own conjectures in the comment section below.

More about alien perspectives:

• Want to call E.T.? Keep it simple, stupid Earthling
• Rare exoplanet has 'Star Wars' twin sunset
• How to find aliens: Follow the photosynthesis
• Alien plants get new twist in world of 'Avatar'
• Plants on other planets might not be green

O'Malley-James' supervisors on the Ph.D. project include Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews, John Raven of the University of Dundee and Charles Cockell of The Open University.

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

Last updated 10:15 p.m. ET:

NASA is awarding $269.3 million to four companies that plan to work on new spaceships capable of ferrying astronauts into orbit. The money is going to Blue Origin, the Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX.

The awards, ranging from $22 million to $92.3 million, are aimed at supporting the development of private-sector space transportation systems that will help fill the gap left by this year's expected retirement of the space shuttle fleet. This is the second phase of the Commercial Crew Development program, also known as CCDev2. Last year, $50 million was awarded for the first phase of the program, and NASA is asking for another $850 million to cover a third phase.

Philip McAlister, acting director of NASA Headquarters' Commercial Spaceflight Development program, told journalists today during a teleconference that the $269.3 million in CCDev2 funding would be doled out as companies achieved milestones laid out between now and May 2012. It will take more time and money, however, to get the private-sector spaceships into service.

"We are targeting the middle part of this decade to hopefully have services available for purchase," McAlister said.

Boeing

An artist's conception shows Boeing's CST-100 capsule, which is getting development funding from NASA.

Twenty-two proposals for CCDev2 funding were received, and after months of study, NASA picked these four as the winners:

• The Boeing Co. is getting $92.3 million for its CST-100 project, which would create a seven-passenger space capsule for travel to and from the International Space Station — or other orbital destinations such as Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable space stations.

The CST-100 effort already received $18 million during the first CCDev phase.

Sierra Nevada Corp.

Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser craft approaches a space station port in this artist's concept.

• Sierra Nevada Corp. was allocated $80 million for its Dream Chaser space plane, a seven-passenger craft designed to be launched vertically on a rocket and land horizontally like an airplane.

NASA paid Sierra Nevada $20 million for Dream Chaser development during CCDev1. Among Sierra Nevada's many partners in the project is Virgin Galactic, which is involved in suborbital space tourism and could eventually extend that business to low Earth orbit.

SpaceX

An artist's view shows the SpaceX Dragon coming in for a docking with the International Space Station.

• SpaceX was selected to receive $75 million, to work on what the company said were "the final upgrades needed for the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft to carry astronauts." NASA said those upgrades would include development of a side-mounted launch abort system and the hardware for accommodating crew in the Dragon capsule.

SpaceX is already receiving millions of dollars from NASA to build out the Dragon as an unmanned cargo-carrying spaceship. In December, the company conducted a fully successful test launch of the Falcon 9, putting a Dragon into orbit and bringing it back down for a Pacific splashdown. The California-based company did not receive any money from the CCDev1 program.

Blue Origin

Blue Origin says it intends to build the orbital space capsule shown in this artist's conception.

• Blue Origin, the somewhat secretive space venture backed by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has been alloted $22 million to continue work on its crew spacecraft and its "pusher" launch abort system. The company received $3.7 million from NASA during CCDev1.

Winners and losers
"This was a very competitive selection," McAlister said. One of the companies losing out was United Launch Alliance, which wants to offer the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets as launch vehicles for trips to the space station (and was awarded $6.7 million during CCDev1).

Another loser was ATK, which supplies the solid-fuel rocket boosters for the space shuttle — and proposed building a Liberty launch vehicle using elements of those boosters as well as an upper-stage core from Europe's Ariane 5 rocket. NASA also passed up a proposal from United Space Alliance, the prime contractor for the space shuttle program, to keep two of the shuttles running as a commercial operation.

Today, McAlister declined to specify exactly why the four winning proposals were chosen over the others. "It was never one thing," he said. He said NASA officials considered how far along each company had come in its development program, how the federal money would accelerate development, how much internal funding each company was committing to its project, and how viable each company's business plan was.

He promised that NASA would release further details about the selection process once the winners and the losers had been briefed and given an opportunity to provide feedback.

Independent space consultant Charles Lurio told me that launch vehicle providers such as United Launch Alliance shouldn't lose heart just yet. "I think ULA wins in any case," he said. "Three out of four [Boeing, Sierra Nevada and Blue Origin] are looking for boosters, so ULA will definitely keep their work warm."

Ed Mango, program manager for the Commercial Crew Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, told reporters that the work covered under the CCDev2 agreements would begin as soon as possible. "We're at the starting gate, ready to go," he said. NASA officials emphasized that the slate would be wiped clean for future rounds of funding: Winning this time around would not guarantee additional support later, and today's losers could be the winners next time. 

NASA's other options
NASA won't be left totally in the lurch when the shuttles retire: It has already worked out more than a billion dollars' worth of agreements to transport U.S. astronauts to the space station on Russian Soyuz craft. Unmanned European, Russian and Japanese transports are capable of sending cargo to the station, and commercial U.S. spaceships such as SpaceX's Dragon could start ferrying cargo in the next year or two.

For the longer haul, NASA is just starting to look into the development of a heavy-lift rocket and multipurpose crew vehicle capable of going beyond Earth orbit. But those next, next-gen vehicles aren't expected to enter service until 2016 or later, and they're likely to be significantly more expensive than the "space taxis" that are being supported through the CCDev program. 

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden recently said that commercial spaceships would play an essential role in the agency's long-range plans — and he reiterated that view in a statement released today.

"We're committed to safely transporting U.S. astronauts on American-made spacecraft and ending the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments," Bolden said. "These agreements are significant milestones in NASA's plans to take advantage of American ingenuity to get to low-Earth orbit, so we can concentrate our resources on deep space exploration."

In today's news release, Mango said that "the next American-flagged vehicle to carry our astronauts into space is going to be a U.S. commercial provider."

"The partnerships NASA is forming with industry will support the development of multiple American systems capable of providing future access to low-Earth orbit," he said.

Do you agree or disagree with NASA's push for commercialization? Do you think the traditional way of doing things, with NASA astronauts flying on spacecraft built and maintained exclusively for NASA, is still the way to go? ... Or is "the traditional way of doing things" even sustainable anymore? Whatever your view, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

To learn more about the spaceship projects, check out NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate webpage and Kennedy Space Center's procurement portal on the Web.

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.

This extraordinarily deep Chandra image shows Cassiopeia A (Cas A, for short), the youngest supernova remnant in the Milky Way. A new theory suggests the light from the supernova was the noon-day star seen when Charles II, the Merry Monarch, was born in 1630.

On the day King Charles II was born – May 29, 1630 – legend holds that a noon-day star appeared. Is the legend propaganda, or was the star actually light from a well-known supernova that reached Earth a few decades earlier than previously thought?

A new theory presented today at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Wales suggests the noon-day star was light from the Cassiopeia A supernova, shown in the image above, heralding in the birth of the Merry Monarch.

If correct, astronomers will have to re-think how they date supernovas, or at least the age of Cassiopeia A. Current thinking holds this stellar explosion occurred about 11,000 years ago and its light was first visible to Earthlings in the late 17^th century, though historical records of a sighting are thin.

An account that a dim star seen in the direction of Cas A, as the supernova is known, in 1680 by John Flamsteed, Britain's first Astronomer Royal, is held up by some experts as the most credible record.

Martin Lunn, former curator of astronomy at the Yorkshire Museum and U.S. historian Lila Rakoczy, combed through the historical records and suggest Cas A could have been seen decades earlier – indeed, at the time Charles II was born.

"The number and variety of sources that refer to the new star strongly suggest that an astronomical event really did take place," Lunn said in a press release. "Our work raises questions about the current method for dating supernovae, but leads to the exciting possibility of solving a decades-old astronomical puzzle."

The account of a noon-day star is written off by historians as propaganda for the restoration of the monarchy following the death of Oliver Cromwell. Most of those accounts of the star's sighting, for one, appear once the monarchy was restored – 30 years after it allegedly occurred.

Lunn and Rakoczy rest their case on an account of Charles II's birth in a book written by more than 100 Oxford University academics in 1630, called Britanniae Natalis, according to Discovery News, which the pair says adds credibility to their theory. 

The team says other natural phenomena can be ruled out, leaving Cas A as the most likely explanation for the observation. If so, calibration for the distance of Cas A from Earth will need to be revisited.

Whether this is necessary "will hinge on how well people in the 17^th century kept records of what they saw in the sky," Marcia Rieke, an astronomer at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, who has worked on dating Cas A, told me in an email today.

More stories on supernova:

• Study reveals identity of a puzzling star
• Star explosion is surprisingly neat
• New X-ray view shows supernova in detail
• Ancient rock art chronicles supernova
• Stars and stripes in space
• Supernova birth observed for first time 

Sean Gardner / Reuters

A worker takes soil samples on an island in Barataria Bay to determine if the island needs to be cleaned again near Myrtle Grove, La., on March 31. Oil fouled Louisiana's coast in the wake of the wake of the Deepwater Horizon drilling-rig explosion on April 20 last year.

One year ago this week, an oil-rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico touched off a deep-sea leak amounting to 2.5 million gallons of Louisiana light crude every day for months. In all, nearly 207 million gallons (4.9 million barrels) of oil are thought to have gushed from the leak, along with huge volumes of methane. So what's happened to all those petrochemicals over the past year? The answer is surprisingly complex and contentious.

Or maybe it shouldn't be so surprising. After all, the task requires figuring out what effect Mother Nature and millions of gallons of dispersants had on the plumes of oil and gas, as much as a mile beneath the sea's surface. What's more, the question carries policy implications: BP and the other companies that operated the well would have an interest in downplaying the spill's long-term legacy, while that's exactly the issue that BP's critics want to highlight.

The legal implications could also be huge. Scientists already are finding that their studies are being impeded by civil and criminal investigations into the spill and its effect. For instance, researchers looking into a spate of dolphin deaths that may be linked to oil-fouled seas were told by the National Marine Fisheries Service to keep mum about their findings. "Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME [unusual mortality event] investigative team without prior approval," the agency told scientists in a letter.

Even the federal government's assessment of what happened to the oil, released last August and updated in November, has been widely criticized by experts who think it downplays the seriousness of the spill's impact. Georgia Tech biologist Joseph Montoya complained last year that the federal government's estimates "always seemed to be biased to the best case."

But here are a few statements that everyone can agree with: Some of the oil evaporated, some was gobbled up by microbes, some was burned, some washed up onto shore, some is still washing up as tar balls, some was dispersed in the sea, and some settled to the bottom of the ocean.

Most researchers also agree that the spill was a catastrophe, no matter how the percentages for those various categories add up. "This was an ecological disaster, no doubt about it," Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told me.

Can Mother Nature clean it up?
A study led by Hazen and published in the journal Science last August lines up on one side of the oil-spill controversy: He and his colleagues reported that a newly identified bacterial strain was digesting the oil at a faster-than-expected rate. "We took 170 samples from where the plume was and couldn't detect any oil in the water column," Hazen said. The researchers also saw no sign of oxygen depletion, which often arises as the result of microbial blooms.

Hazen said only 6 percent of his team's deep-sea core samples contained oil contamination that could be associated with the spill. Additional oil washed up on shorelines and sank into the soil, Hazen said, but he said it may be riskier to do "aggressive treatment" of that soil than to leave it alone.

"Nature does a pretty good job of cleaning herself up, and we shouldn't be mucking things up unless we know what we're doing," Hazen said.

He said that 400,000 barrels' worth of oil (1.7 million gallons) leaks into the Gulf of Mexico from natural seeps every year, and that the Gulf's ecosystem has evolved to handle such natural contamination. "This has been going on for millions of years, literally," he said. "The bacteria that degrade oil are naturally adapted to degrade this oil. They do it quite well."

Mucked up at the bottom of the sea
Studies conducted by the University of Georgia's Samantha Joye and her colleagues tell a different tale: During diving expeditions on the Alvin submersible vessel, they found that areas of the seafloor around the spill site were covered with an oily muck and littered with dead organisms.

So how does Joye answer the "where's the oil" question? "A lot of it's on the bottom, and it's on the bottom all over the place," she told me. "The question is, how long does it stay on the bottom?"

Joye said her findings don't really contradict Hazen's. She stressed that the results from his team on microbial digestion were based on the degradation of a particular component of the oil known as alkane, in a particular zone of the Gulf waters. "His results were based on the deep-water plume, and some people have extrapolated that to the entire oil spill," she said. "And I think that's inappropriate."

She said the Deepwater Horizon blowout of 60,000 barrels a day dwarfed the natural seepage of 500 to 1,000 barrels a day, and doubted that "magic microbes" could have made much of a dent in last year's spillage.

Hazen acknowledged that the area around the spill site is all mucked up, but says his analysis of core samples led him to a different conclusion. He pointed out that during one phase of the response to the spill, millions of gallons of heavy drilling mud were pumped down into the well in an unsuccessful attempt to perform a "top kill" and stop the leak.

"We can see the oil there, but we can also see aluminates and silicates and clay," he told me. "What we're seeing in that layer close to the wellhead is oil that was trapped in the drilling mud."

The bottom line
For now, the best that Hazen, Joye and other researchers can do is agree with the federal government's estimate that roughly a quarter of the oil that leaked from the Deepwater Horizon well was captured or burned at the surface, and then keep trying to track down what happened to the other three-quarters. The federal estimate suggests that a little more than half of the oil has dispersed, evaporated or dissolved. That would leave a little less than a quarter as "residual" oil — that is, oil that looks like oil.

Joye thinks the federal estimate is too optimistic. "The majority of that stuff is still in the system and on the seabed," she said. But gathering the evidence to back up that view will take months or years — which is generally the way it works in science, especially when what you're studying is a mile deep.

"We have to evaluate and very carefully monitor the system to see how long it takes to recover," Joye told me, "because I don't think we can even begin to predict the recovery trajectory at this point."

How quickly will the Gulf recover? What do you think? Feel free to weigh in below with your comments as well as your pointers to other perspectives.

Extra credit: Last August's report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that nearly 207 million gallons of oil leaked from the broken well, with nearly 35 million gallons' worth collected by a temporary containment cap. That implies that a little more than 172 million gallons actually leaked into the Gulf. Caveat: The federal report says there's a 10 percent uncertainty factor to its numbers, and as I've tried to make clear above, some researchers don't trust the federal figures.

More about the Gulf spill anniversary:

• A year on, Gulf still grapples with oil spill
• Survey suggests Gulf is nearly back to normal
• Interactive: Sizing up the spill's impact
• Along the Gulf, the spill defines a state of mind
• Interactive: The physics of oil spills
• The latest news and videos about the oil spill

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto." 

The Biodesign Institute Arizona State University

Figure 1 a and b display schematics for 2-D nanoforms with accompanying AFM images of the resulting structures. 1 c-e represent 3D structures of hemisphere, sphere and ellipsoid, respectively, while figure 1f shows a nanoflask, (each of the structures visualized with TEM imaging).

Earlier this week, we learned about wedding rings made out of DNA. Now, the ability to fold stringy bits of DNA into patterns and shapes has gone 3-D thanks to a new technique pioneered at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute.

The breakthrough, reported in the April 15 issue of Science, is a step on the road to eventually using the procedure to create diminutive drug delivery devices, nano-computers, and chemical factories.

So-called DNA origami was introduced in 2006 by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology. It hinges on the self-assembling properties of DNA's four complimentary base pairs, which form the famous double helix.

These nucleotides, labeled A, T, C and G, follow a formula of how they interact. A always pairs with T and C with G. DNA origami practitioners exploit this base pairing to create complex shapes, but until now most shapes were two dimensional.

To do this, they frame the desired shape with a length of single-stranded DNA and then use DNA "staple strands" to cross over and integrate the structure and hold the desired shape.

"Our goal is to develop design principles that will allow researchers to model arbitrary 3-D shapes with control over the degree of surface curvature," Yan Liu of the Biodesign Institute, said in a news release explaining the research.

"In an escape from a rigid lattice model, our versatile strategy begins by defining the desired surface features of a target object with the scaffold, followed by manipulation of DNA conformation and shaping of crossover networks to achieve the design."

To achieve this, the team starts with simple, 2-D concentric ring structures formed from a DNA double helix and bound together at strategically placed crossover points. Varying the number of nucleotides between crossover points allows the designer to combine sharp and rounded elements into 2-D and 3-D forms.

More on tricks with DNA:

• 'Wedding Rings' made out of DNA
• Slideshow: Making smiley faces from DNA
• DNA robots pave way for microscopic factories 
• DNA twisted into pretzels
• Play a game and engineer real RNA 

Kyodo / Reuters

Buildings tossed together by the tsunami is seen in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan March 12, 2011. Scientists are asking if another megaquake will strike in the next six years.

First there was the earthquake and tsunami in Sumatra in 2004. Chile was shaken and lashed violently a year ago. Japan is still reeling from the twin disasters on March 11. It seems as if the Earth has woken from a long slumber and is violently re-jiggering its plates. Is there any truth to the notion?

The question of megaquake clustering, which I explored in the days following the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, was a hot topic of conversation Thursday at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn., according to various media reports.

There, Charles Bufe, a seismologist retired from the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, said the spate of recent megaquakes is very similar to a string of seven magnitude 8.5 or greater quakes that struck between 1950 and 1965. The intervening decades, he noted, were quiet.

Bufe and USGS colleague David Perkins analyzed the clustering and concluded that it's unlikely just random. "It's very statistically significant," Bufe said, according to the Seattle Times. "We think we're in an increased hazard situation for these very large earthquakes."

According to their calculation, there's a 63 percent chance that another magnitude 9 or greater quake will strike somewhere in the world within the next six years. If these megaquakes are random, the chance is about 24 percent.

Other experts at the meeting, however, supported the notion that what seems like a clustering of megaquakes is really just random, except for clusters of aftershocks in the vicinity of the major rupture, such as those continuing in Japan.

For example, seismologist Andrew Michael, who's with the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif., announced at the meeting that he's examined databases for evidence of clustering and, as he told me in an email in March, found "there is no evidence of global large-earthquake clustering."

That said, scientists are far from being able to predict earthquakes and acknowledge there is much to learn about them. It's possible that entrenched ideas will be proven wrong, said Rick Aster (outgoing president of the seismological society), encouraging scientists to keep asking questions.

More stories on earthquake science:

• 8.7 ideas in earthquake prediction
• What causes earthquakes?
• Pacific Northwest at risk for mega earthquake 
• Is Japan's quake part of a cluster? 
• Japan's aftershocks are not shocking 

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

A new PNNL study shows that 17 percent of the United States' imported oil for transportation could be replaced by biofuel made from algae grown in outdoor raceway ponds located in the Gulf Coast, the Southeastern Seaboard, and the Great Lakes. This June 2010 satellite photo shows raceway ponds in southern California.

Biofuel produced from algae, essentially pond scum, has long titillated green energy boosters as a potential big time player in the U.S. renewable fuels portfolio. Now, a-first-of-its-kind look at industrial-scale freshwater farming of algae suggests it could indeed make a sizeable dent in U.S. oil imports, but drain water resources.

Specifically, the U.S. could produce enough of the algae-derived fuel to eliminate 48 percent of the fuel it currently imports for transportation needs, according to researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. But doing so would require 5.5 percent of the land area in the lower 48 states and consume about three times the water currently used to irrigate crops.

"The water use is significant," Mark Wigmosta, a hydrologist at the lab who led the study, told me today.

Flat lands
To arrive at the figure, he and colleagues used a geographic information system database to identify land areas that don't compete with agriculture or parks, wetlands, and wildlife habitat. The land had to be relatively flat over about 1,200 acres to support freshwater ponds to grow the algae, a well-tested method to grow algae that the team selected for this baseline study.

The team also factored in 30 years of local climate data to determine how that would impact growth, including factors such as pond temperature and water loss to evaporation. Think of an algae pond like a backyard swimming pool. Water is constantly lost to evaporation — more in a hot, sunny and windy climate; less when it is humid and calm.

A calculation based on all this data led to the 48 percent of transportation imports figure. But the water cost seems like a non-starter for serious consideration of the biofuel. So, the team went looking for ways to reduce water use and found that if the ponds are placed in sunny and humid climates such as the Gulf Coast, the southeastern seaboard, and the Great Lakes, enough fuel can be grown to replace 17 percent of imports and use 25 percent of the water currently used for irrigation.

"So, you've got a significant drop in water use and still have production that is consistent with the renewable fuel targets for 2022," Wigmosta said. The fuel target is set forth in the Energy Independence and Security Act.

"It is still a lot of water," Wigmosta noted, adding the study just takes into account the water lost through evaporation. Additional water is likely to be lost such as during the algae harvest.

While the water loss is significant, the researchers found that algae's water use is comparable to most other biofuel sources.

Considering the gas efficiency of a standard light-utility vehicle, for example, they estimated growing algae uses anywhere between 8.6 and 50.2 gallons of water per mile driven on algal biofuel. In comparison, data from previously published research indicated that corn ethanol can be made with less water, but showed a larger usage range: between 0.6 and 61.9 gallons of water per mile driven.

Several factors — including the differing water needs of specific growing regions and the different assumptions and methods used by various researchers — cause the estimates to range greatly, they found, notes a DOE press release on the study.

Another limiting factor not included in this study is the availability of nutrients for the algae to grow — they eat phosphates and nitrogen-containing compounds, producing the lipids that are converted to biofuel. Future studies will factor this in, Wigmosta told me.

"As we continue to refine this analysis, the number is going to change, but we did want to get a good look at how much land is available and how much water is it going to take," he said.

Non-freshwater algae
Other areas the team will examine include growing algae in non-freshwater, such as saline water that is produced during oil and gas extraction or co-locating a pond next to a water treatment plant. One such pilot project is underway at a waste treatment plant in Rochester, N.Y., led by Eric Lannan, who is getting his masters degree in mechanical engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The project is billed as "doubly green" because the algae clean up the wastewater as they produce biofuel.

"Algae — as a renewable feedstock — grow a lot quicker than crops of corn or soybeans," Lannan said in a news release about the project. "We can start a new batch of algae about every seven days. It’s a more continuous source that could offset 50 percent of our total gas use for equipment that uses diesel."

According to Wigmosta, algae biofuel is still a long ways off from meeting its potential promise as a green fuel of the future, "but it is these kinds of studies that we need to do to really properly evaluate to what extent it can be a player in the renewable fuels portfolio."

A paper describing the research was published online April 13 in the journal Water Resources Research.

More stories on algae biofuel:

• It's pond scum, but algae could be green fuel
• Algae attracts investors, but obstacles remain
• NASA grows algae for biofuel, treats waste
• Green power from algae?
• Plastic made from algae is crazy green 

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).

Virgin Galactic

SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, fly together above California's Mojave Desert.

Virgin Galactic is looking for three good space pilots to fly its suborbital SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which is already in the midst of flight tests. Although astronaut experience is preferred, it’s not necessary. But if you’re not an experienced test pilot, don’t bother.

More than 150 would-be spacefliers have sent in their applications since the job posting went up on Monday, Virgin Galactic spokeswoman Christine Choi told me via email today. And the in-box is due to remain open until April 30.

The company, backed by British billionaire Richard Branson, has been working on the development of the first SpaceShipTwo craft (dubbed the VSS Enterprise) with California-based Scaled Composites. The suborbital space plane's design is based on SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight back in 2004. SpaceShipTwo will be significantly bigger, capable of accommodating six passengers and two pilots.

The flight plan calls for SpaceShipTwo to be dropped from its carrier airplane, the giant WhiteKnightTwo, and then fire its hybrid rocket engine to rise to an altitude of more than 65 miles, past the international boundary of outer space. From that height, the riders will be able to see the curving Earth below the black sky of space, and experience several minutes of weightlessness. After a re-entry plunge hat provides as much as 6 G's of acceleration, the plane will glide back to a runway landing.

Virgin Galactic is charging $200,000 for a tourist package that includes pre-flight briefings and the suborbital space ride. Around 400 customers have already put down deposits. The expectation is that passenger flights would begin in 2012, but that schedule depends on how the current test program goes. 

Unpowered glide tests began last October, and Scaled expects to begin rocket-powered tests later this year. So far, Scaled's test pilots have been taking turns behind the controls of SpaceShipTwo as well as WhiteKnightTwo. The pilots to be hired by Virgin Galactic will be in on the test program at California's Mojave Air and Space Port as well as the commercial flights expected to originate from New Mexico's Spaceport America. Virgin Galactic says the first new hire would "ideally start with us in June 2011."

Here are a few of Virgin Galactic's "essentials" for applicants:

• U.S. citizenship (to satisfy export regulations).
• A current FAA commercial (or equivalent) pilot license and FAA medical clearance.
• Degree-level qualification in a relevant technical field.
• Graduate of a recognized test pilot school, with at least two and a half years of postgraduate flight test experience.
• Diverse flying background with a minimum of 3,000 hours flying, to include considerable experience of large multi-engine aircraft and high-performance fast jet aircraft and low lift-to-drag experience in complex aircraft.
• Operational experience in an aerospace aviation project or business.
• Preference given to those with experience in spaceflight, commercial flight operations or flight instruction.

The new hires would report to Virgin Galactic's chief test pilot, David MacKay, a Virgin Atlantic jet pilot who has been in training to take SpaceShipTwo's controls himself. Choi said two other pilots who had been designated to participate in the test program were no longer in the running "due to citizenship."

Virgin Galactic isn't the only game in town when it comes to spaceflight. Just down the street in Mojave, XCOR Aerospace has employed former NASA astronaut Rick Searfoss as the chief test pilot for the development of its Lynx rocket plane. Several former space station commanders are serving as executives for spaceship companies such as SpaceX (with Expedition 6's Ken Bowersox), Orbital Sciences Corp. (with Expedition 3's Frank Culbertson) and Excalibur Almaz (with Expedition 10's Leroy Chiao).

Now the space shuttle program is nearing its end, and NASA is facing a years-long spaceflight gap — which means more former astronauts may be thinking about making the jump to the private sector. It'd be interesting to find out how many of Virgin Galactic's scores of applicants are current or former astronauts. But no matter what their experience level is, Virgin Galactic plans to take a lot of care in making its choice.

"We're going to look for the best of the best," the company's president, George Whitesides, told Aviation Week & Space Technology. "We're not in a huge rush. We're going to put this out and we're going to see who applies. Obviously we want to hire these folks as soon as we get good qualified folks, but we don't want to rush it, because these are going to be among the most important hires that we make."

Other developments on the new space frontier:

• The Commercial Spaceflight Federation announced that retired Navy Rear Adm. Craig Steidle, a former NASA executive, would become its president on May 15. In 2004 and 2005, Steidle served as NASA's first associate adinistrator for exploration systems and helped draw up the now-canceled Constellation Program to return to the moon.

"The commercial space industry truly represents the future of America in space, and I’m excited to be a part of it," Steidle said in today's announcement. "This industry is inspiring kids, keeping America economically competitive, creating thousands of jobs and ensuring our leadership in space. It is a privilege to lead the federation as we embark on the grandest adventure of the 21st century: opening up space to everyone."

Steidle succeeds Bretton Alexander, a former White House policy analyst who is leaving his post at the federation to pursue other projects.

• SpaceX founder Elon Musk said there's a "decent chance" that he would make shares in his company available in an initial public offering toward the end of next year. "It's something that we are considering," he told journalists during a Tuesday briefing at the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Musk made hundreds of millions of dollars after Paypal, a company he helped found, was sold to eBay in 2002. Since then, he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on SpaceX as well as other ventures such as Tesla Motors and SolarCity. Last year's Tesla IPO generated an estimated $24 million gain for Musk.

SpaceX is holding contracts potentially worth billions of dollars for future resupply of the International Space Station, plus a healthy portfolio of commercial launch contracts. Musk has said the company is in the black already. Last week, he unveiled an effort to develop a Falcon Heavy rocket that would compete with the Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin for Air Force heavy-lift launch contracts.

• Boeing says it's close to deciding which launch vehicle would be used for unmanned flight tests of its CST-100 orbital space taxi, and probably for early flights with crew members, Space News reports. The CST-100 development timetable depends to some extent on whether NASA chooses Boeing to receive funding under the second phase of the agency's Commercial Crew Development program, or CCDev 2. The CCDev 2 announcement is still pending, but Boeing's John Elbon said he was "hopeful that it happens relatively soon."

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."

What do you get when you cross a WorldWide Telescope with a Kinect motion-sensing game controller? You get the “universe at your fingertips,” according to Microsoft Research’s Curtis Wong, who demonstrated the gesture-controlled cosmos today at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas.

Actually, having the universe at your fingertips is how Wong has thought of the freely available WorldWide Telescope project since it was first unveiled in 2008. The software, which is freely available through a Web-based interface and as a standalone program, displays the night sky and lets users zoom in on cosmic imagery from a wide variety of sources. You can even go on 3-D fly-throughs of distant galaxies, or create your own tours of celestial hot spots.

But back then, Wong was talking in terms of fingertips tapping on a keyboard or guiding a computer mouse. Now, thanks to the Microsoft's Kinect controller, he can control the cosmos on a trio of high-definition video projectors, just by waving his hands in the air. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

"If I just move my fingers out about a half-inch, the earth suddenly begins zooming in, more and more. ... Then I bring my fingers together, and the earth retreats," Wong told me.

The effect is similar to the hand-waving tricks that Tom Cruise's character used to manipulate virtual displays in the movie "Minority Report" — only better, at least in Wong's estimation. "First of all, Tom Cruise had to wear these funny gloves with lights on them," Wong said. "We don't have to do that. ... We have a lot more control than he did. He had to move things on a 2-D surface and rotate them."

Subtle gestures can be coupled with voice commands to navigate through a 3-D computer model of the universe. You can set a planet spinning or change the perspective on our Local Group of galaxies just by moving your fingers, hands or arms. "The motions that we're doing with the universe are fairly subtle," Wong said.

The sky's not the limit
The system capitalizes on Kinect's multiple-sensor, hands-free gaming system, which processes depth data as well as audio and 2-D video as a way of letting users interact with 3-D virtual worlds through gestures, jumps and other body movements. The system has already been hacked to create virtual-reality superheroes, sign-language translators, seeing-eye guides for the blind and even touch-sensitive robo-surgeons.

In recognition of Kinect's hackability, Microsoft is planning to release a non-commercial software development kit for Kinect sometime this spring. Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, told me that the kit is "on track" to ship within weeks. Wong declined to lay out a timetable for making the Kinect connection available to WorldWide Telescope users, but it would make sense if it rolled out at about the same time as the software development kit.

The most obvious setting for a Kinect-enabled planetarium program would be in a classroom — or, come to think of it, in an actual planetarium, where a teacher or guide could control a sky show from center stage rather than from behind a computer monitor. Home users could conceivably get a kick out of flying through the virtual solar system via a Kinect controller and a big-screen TV. And there might be an eventual payoff for PC users as well. Gupta told me that Kinect's developers were thinking about "not just the 10-foot experience, but the 2-foot experience."

Of course, the new possibilities would apply to PC gamers as well: In addition to the WorldWide Telescope demo, today's MIX11 session featured a Kinect-powered "Wall Panic" PC game, in which players contort their bodies to match a series of Tetris-style shapes that flash on a large screen.

Looking farther down the software development road, Gupta gushed about potential applications ranging from yoga instruction to remote-controlled robotics. "I think the possibilities are endless," he told me. "We are looking to the community to see how they put this to use."

More about sky software:

• Sharing the Google Sky
• Science thrives in virtual worlds
• Planet hunters sift through data
• Biggest picture of the sky unveiled

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."

IBM

IBM's new Smarter Traveler initiative enlists your smartphone to collect data that could ease your commute by predicting traffic snarls and suggesting alternative routes.

All commuters have a personal bag of tricks to skirt traffic. Now, a new smartphone app under development promises to learn your tricks and let you know when to use them.

The opt-in system combines information on your typical driving patterns collected by your smartphone with mountains of historical traffic data collected by sensors at toll booths, in roads, bridges, and intersections to predict traffic snarls and ways to avoid them before you leave home.

This is a step up from the traffic report on local news radio or a real-time traffic map on the Internet. It's a prediction of what a driver's personal commute is likely to look like in 30 to 45 minutes, John Day, program manager for the IBM Smarter Traveler initiative, explained to me today.

"The idea is to get that information delivered to you before you leave," he said. "And you don't have to take an overt action to get that info, especially given how busy we all are."

California collaboration
IBM is developing the smartphone application in collaboration with the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) and the California Center for Innovative Transportation at the University of California at Berkeley for deployment in the San Francisco Bay Area. A global rollout is on the horizon.

"The traffic problems can be very different in other parts of the world and we built it with that in mind," Day said. "It is a matter of partnering with the various agencies who are responsible" for managing transportation.

Key to the collaboration is IBM's Traffic Prediction Tool, which continuously analyzes congestion data, commuter locations and expected travel start times throughout a metropolitan region.

"It has a very high rate of accuracy in terms of predicting these issues once you have a good historical database," Day said. "As it happens, UC and CalTrans have done a real nice job of not only building this sensor network, but keeping the data for a long period of time."

The prediction tool is automatically updated every five minutes and produces a new model of what traffic will look like in 30 to 45 minutes. The new initiative blends in your own travel habits for a level of personalization.

People who opt-in to the program will be able to logon to a website where they can review traffic data, as well as specify things such as favorite alternatives and when they want alerts sent.

Future versions
Plans for the future include incorporation of real-time data on public transportation networks such as whether buses and trains are running on time and availability of parking at stations.

"When there is a major traffic issue, we can offer an alternative, maybe drive halfway, jump off (the freeway) and get BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)," Day said.

This could help persuade people to get out of their cars and onto public transportation, a step that may be necessary as cities continue to grow and roadways become more clogged.

Currently, commuters across the U.S. spend an average of nearly a week's worth of time, 28 gallons of gas, and $808 a year stuck in traffic congestion, according to a 2009 study from Texas A&M University. 

More about traffic tech:

• Where do commuters hurt the most?
• Most dangerous season for driving? Right now
• Red Tape: Bad news about drivers who text
• Auto to climb Pikes Peak without a driver
• Apps for the auto are on the way
• How's my driving? Ask my car

Nikolay Korchekov / Reuters

Spectators watch a fireworks display presented to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic spaceflight, in Moscow's Victory Park on April 12.

More than 500 parties are going on to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight and the 30th anniversary of the shuttle program. Among the highlights: the debut of the trippy space documentary “First Orbit,” greetings from the International Space Station and the Mars500 simulation of a Red Planet mission, contests, giveaways — and the Google doodle of the day.

All these events tie into Yuri's Night, a global celebration of spaceflight that originated in Los Angeles 10 years ago. The annual event commemorates Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's blastoff on April 12, 1961, plus Columbia's first-ever space shuttle flight on April 12, 1981. Today's anniversary is bittersweet because this may be the last year of the shuttle fleet's service.

Tonight's L.A. party is a star-studded affair at the Griffith Observatory, during which Yuri's Night co-founders Loretta Hidalgo-Whitesides and George Whitesides (who is now Virgin Galactic's president) will reflect on the past and look forward to the future. They're not the only ones. This year the parties are proceeding on all seven continents.

Google

The logo on the Google homepage was set up to launch Yuri Gagarin's rocket when moused over.

"Everyone from Google to the Los Angeles Times is making note of this historical landmark, and I'm thrilled to see how excited people around the world are to celebrate the spirit of exploration and discovery that Yuri Gagarin embodied," Yuri's Night assistant director Brice Russ said in today's overview. "Whether your nearest Yuri's Night event is down the street or 100 miles away, there's something you can do to participate."

To find out about that something, check the event list at the Yuri's Night website. Some events take place after April 12, so if you have to stay in tonight, there's still a chance that you can party down.

Also, there's still a couple of days before the deadline for the Yuri's Night video and print ad contests, as well as a space-tour sweepstakes. You could win an expenses-paid trip to Russia for a zero-G flight, or even to Baikonur to watch a Soyuz liftoff.

A whole constellation's worth of websites are celebrating spaceflight today, including Scientific American, Wired, Smithsonian Air & Space and of course our partners at Space.com.

Over at Spacevidcast, meanwhile, you could watch a global Yuri's Night webcast and snag one of a million e-book copies of Andrew Kessler's "Martian Summer." Yuri's Night has also teamed up with Posterous to set up a "Yuri's Night Live" sharing site for photos and videos. Don't forget to check in with Yuri's Night via Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.

And speaking of YouTube, here's a selection of videos to get you in the holiday mood:

More about Yuri Gagarin and space history:

• Why the world remembers its first spaceman
• Fifty years later, relive the first space odyssey
• The sky's the limit for outer-space records
• Look for Yuri Gagarin on msnbc.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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."  

Science / AAAS

Reconstruction of a red apple with a green leaf in three dimensions using surface plasmon holograms

A new technique to produce full-color holograms that stay the same when viewed from any angle could usher in a day when we plop down on the couch and watch 3-D TV without optical illusions.

Current methods for creating 3-D images are based on producing a separate image for the left and right eyes. "Inside the brain we reconstruct the 3-D, so it is sort of an illusion," optical physicist Satoshi Kawata of Osaka University of Japan explains in a video made available to reporters.

He and colleagues instead made 3-D color holograms that can be viewed with the naked eye and don't change color no matter what angle they are viewed from. They did this by harnessing so-called surface plasmons, which Kawata describes as "the collective electron oscillations traveling on a very thin metal film."

The researchers coat the metal film onto a light sensitive material called photoresist that contains a hologram made with red, green, and blue lasers. The photoresist hologram rests on a thin glass plate. A corrugated layer of silver is laid on top of the photoresist to help guide the holograph's light waves.

The surface plasmons in the metal film are excited using white light. The angle of the incoming light determines which plasmons are excited and diffracted by the hologram, reconstructing the light waves reaching the viewers eyes so that the 3-D image appears.

"No one has thought to use plasmons for display applications, so it was fun for me," Kawata told Wired Science. "I just wanted to demonstrate that this could be done. But I hope people would be interested in thinking seriously to use this technology for larger-scale 3-D display."

Before it goes big time, however, the technology needs to be scaled up — the current images are a few centimeters across. In addition, the images are static, not moving picture such as film or TV.

A paper describing the research appears in the April 8 issue of Science.

Update for 6:20 p.m. ET: Check out videos of a hologram demonstration and an interview with Kawata, available via EurekAlert.

Tip o' the Log to Lisa Grossman at Wired Science

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, ESA, J. Richard (CRAL) and J.-P. Kneib (LAM). Acknowledgement: Marc Postman (STScI)

The giant cluster of elliptical galaxies in the centre of this image, called Abell 383, was used as a gravitational lens to study a galaxy that formed less than a billion years after the big bang. The galaxy's stars formed when the universe was just 200 million years old. The finding has implications for our understanding of how and when the first galaxies formed, and how the diffuse fog of neutral hydrogen that filled the early Universe was cleared.

A distant galaxy with stars that began forming just 200 million years after the big bang has been discovered. The finding addresses questions about when the first galaxies arose and how early the universe evolved, scientists report.

The galaxy was spotted with the Hubble Space Telescope. It is visible through a cluster of galaxies called Abell 383, whose powerful gravity bends the rays of light like a magnifying glass. The so-called gravitational lens amplifies light from the distant galaxy, making it appear 11 times brighter and allowing detailed observations.

Infrared data from Hubble and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show the galaxy's stars formed when the universe was 200 million years old. Observations with the W.M. Keck Observatory on Muna Kea in Hawaii revealed the observed light from the galaxy dates to when the universe was 950 million years old. The universe formed about 13.7 billion years ago.

"This challenges theories of how soon galaxies formed in the first years of the universe," Johan Richard of the Centre de Recherche Astronomique de Lyon, Universita Lyon 1 in France, said in an image advisory. "It could even help solve the mystery of how the hydrogen fog that filled the early universe was cleared."

At some point in our universe’s early history, it transitioned from the so-called dark ages to a period of light, as the first stars and galaxies began to ignite. This starlight ionized neutral hydrogen atoms floating around in space, giving them a charge, NASA explained. Ultraviolet light could then travel unimpeded through what had been an obscuring fog.

The discovery of a galaxy possessing stars that formed only 200 million years after the big bang helps astronomers probe this cosmic reionization epoch. When this galaxy was developing, its hot, young stars would have ionized vast amounts of the neutral hydrogen gas in intergalactic space.

A population of similar galaxies probably also contributed to this reionization, but they are too faint to see without the magnifying effects of gravitational lensing. NASA's James Webb Telescope, scheduled to launch later this decade, will be able to see these faint galaxies without magnification.

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).

Alexander Heckel

The world's smallest wedding rings are built up from two interlocked strands of DNA.

Thorsten Schmidt can now say he had a hand in creating the world's smallest wedding rings, measuring less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

The interlocked rings, known as catenans (after the Latin word for "chain"), were made from looped strands of DNA and measure just 18 nanometers wide. The wedding angle comes about not only because of the rings' perfectly circular shape, but also because Schmidt got married while he was working on the experiment.

These rings aren't just a romantic gesture: Because they're freely pivotable, they could be useful components in nano-machines or molecular motors.

"We still have a long way to go before DNA structures such as the catenan can be used in everyday items," Professor Alexander Heckel, Schmidt's co-author and adviser at Germany's Goethe University Frankfurt, said in a news release, "but structures of DNA can, in the near future, be used to arranage and study proteins or other molecules that are too small for a direct manipulation, by means of auto-organization."

Heckel and Schmidt / ACS Nano Letters

An atomic force miroscope image shows the interlocked DNA rings, along with an illustration showing how they're chained together.

The experiment, reported in the journal Nano Letters, involved creating two C-shaped DNA fragments that were positioned with their open ends pointing away from each other. Polyamide bonds were attached to the DNA to anchor the fragments to each other, and then the researchers added an oligonucleotide to close each of the C-sections and form the rings. The operation was done with mere chemistry. No nanometer-sized tweezers were required.

The paper notes that the assemblages resemble "stylized wedding rings," and here's the icing on the cake: Schmidt, who is now at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, dedicated the paper "to his wife and colleague Dr. Diana P. Goncalves Schmidt on the occasion of their wedding." Let's see Prince William top that one!

More tricks with twisty molecules:

• DNA folded into a world of patterns
• Slideshow: Making smiley faces from DNA
• DNA robots pave way for micro-factories
• The latest twist: Pretzels made of DNA
• Play a game and engineer real RNA

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."  

University of Utah

This image, based on variations in electrical conductivity of underground rock, shows the volcanic plume of partly molten rock that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano. Yellow and red indicate higher conductivity,green and blue indicate lower conductivity.

The volcanic plume beneath Yellowstone is larger than previously thought, according to a new study that measured the electrical conductivity of the hot and partly molten rock.

The findings say nothing about the chances of another cataclysmic eruption at Yellowstone, but they give scientists another view of the vast and deep reservoir that feeds such eruptions.

"It's a totally new and different way of imaging and looking at the volcanic roots of Yellowstone," study co-author Robert Smith, an emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Utah, said in a press release. 

Supervolcano history
The supervolcano has erupted three times over the past 2 million years – 2 million, 1.3 million, and 642,000 years ago. While researchers don't expect another eruption any time soon, it could eventually explode, destroying life for hundreds of miles around it and blanketing North America in ash.

In recent years, scientists have detected an unprecedented rate of rising for the caldera and increases in seismic activity, including a peculiar swarm of earthquakes.

The U.S. Geological Survey has ranked the Yellowstone caldera as a high threat for volcanic eruption, calling it the 21^st most dangerous of 169 volcano centers in the U.S.

While the new measurements don't raise the threat level, scientists are keen to gain a deeper understanding of the plume beneath the national park renowned today for geysers and hot springs.

"We are just getting more and more understanding of what is going on," Michael Zhdanov, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah and lead author of the study, told me today.

New measurements
In previous work, published in 2009, researchers used seismic waves from earthquakes to image the hotspot plumbing that feeds the supervolcano. Seismic waves move more quickly through cold rock than hot rock. By clocking seismic waves, researchers made 3D images of the plume.

Those images showed the plume of hot and molten rock dips downward from Yellowstone at an angle of 60 degrees and extends 150 miles west-northwest to a point at least 410 miles under the Montana-Idaho border, which as far as the imaging could "see."

In the new study, scientists used images of the plume's electrical conductivity that is generated by molten silicate rocks and hot briny water that is naturally present and mixed in partly molten rock. This shows the conductive part of the plume dipping more gently — an angle of about 40 degrees to the west and extending about 400 miles from east to west. The geoelectric image can only see 200 miles deep.

"It looks a little bigger," Zhdanov said. "It looks like our image put an envelope around this seismic image."

Geoelectrical data
The geoelectrical data was collected by Earthscope, a National Science Foundation-funded effort to collect seismic, magnetotelluric, and ground deformation data to study the structure and evolution of North America.

Magnetotelluric measurements record very low frequencies of electromagnetic radiation — about 0.0001 to 0.0664 Hertz, which is far below the frequencies of radio and TV signals and electric power lines. The low frequency, long wavelength field penetrates about 200 miles into the Earth.

Data for the study was collected by 115 stations in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho — the three states straddled by Yellowstone National Park. It was crunched by a supercomputer, which produced the geoelectric plume picture.

The study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

More stories on the Yellowstone supervolcano:

• Yellowstone eruption threat high
• Huge volcano under Yellowstone park rising
• Activity discovered at Yellowstone supervolcano
• Quakes feed fears of Yellowstone eruption

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).

AP Photo/Daniel Shanken

Tammy Kitzmiller, left, and Christy Rhem express their happiness during a news conference Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2005, in Harrisburg Pa., after hearing the verdicit from U.S. District Judge John E. Jones that prevents the Dover School District from teaching "intelligent design" in biology class. The debate lives on in Tennessee, where a bill passed the House of Representative on Thursday to protect teachers who challenge the theory of evolution.

Tennessee legislators took a step closer Thursday to allowing controversial subjects such as intelligent design to be taught in the science classroom.

The House or Representatives voted 70-28 to pass a bill that would protect teachers from discipline if they challenge the scientific theory of subjects such as "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."

Defenders of science education ranging from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Tennessee Science Teachers Association have come out against the bill, characterizing it as "unnecessary, anti-scientific and very likely unconstitutional."

Support for the bill comes from backers of the intelligent design movement at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash.

"There has been a widespread pattern of discrimination against educators who would challenge evolution in the classroom," Casey Luskin, a policy analyst with the institute, told Science Insider. "Schools censor from students the evidence against evolution. This [bill] protects the rights of teachers to teach in an objective way."

An identical bill is up for vote by the Senate Education Committee at the end of the month. If it follows the party line vote of the House, policy experts expect it to pass and to be signed into law.

Science Insider noted that if the bill passes, Tennessee would join Louisiana as the second state with specific protections for teaching "antievolution rhetoric."

More stories on intelligent design:

• Judge rules against 'intelligent design'
• Why scientists dismiss 'intelligent design'
• 13 percent of biology teachers back creationism
• Evolution texts survive in Louisiana

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).

BW Quist and R Faruqi / Northwestern University

This is a view of the model whisker array built to explore how sensory and motor data are combined in the brain to create a perception.

A virtual model of rat whiskers may help scientists unlock the mystery of how our brains turn the mechanics of touch into perceptions.

"Our sense of touch is very mysterious. You can reach into your pocket or your purse and without even looking, you can identify your keys, a coin, or a paperclip," Mirta Hartmann, who studies sensory and neural systems engineering at Northwestern University, explained to me today.

Her lab is using rat whiskers to understand how the brain goes from the mechanics of touch to a perception. "In the same way that we use our hands to go out and actively explore different objects, rats use their whiskers," Hartmann said.

Whiskers are less complicated to study than the human hand, which has sensors all over. The response of the sensors depend on the viscoelasticity of the skin.

Rat whiskers, by contrast, have senors only at the base. In addition, "rats cannot grasp with their whiskers, they can only explore. Our hand movements are complicated because we can grasp and manipulate objects, as well as tactually explore," Hartmann  noted.

Whisker model
She can colleagues studied the structure of the rat head and whisker array — 30 on each side of the face arranged in a regular pattern — to create their virtual model.

Rats use these whiskers to whisk objects 5 to 25 times per second. This is different than cats or dogs, which also have whiskers but aren't able to "move them back and forth that much," Hartmann noted.

The model allows the researchers to simulate the rat whisking against different objects and predict the full pattern of inputs into the whisker system as a rat encounters an object. These simulations can then be compared against real rat behavior.

"It allows us to start to simulate what's going to happen as the rat comes up to an object and explores it with its whiskers," she said.

Human touch
This information, in turn, should lead to insights to what's going on in the human brain as the hand fishes around a pocket or purse.

"There's just electricity in your brain and there's just mechanical signals on your hand. And somehow your brain is able to turn that contact pattern into electricity that generates a perception," Hartmann said. "That whole process is very mysterious. We need basic research to try and figure out how that happens."

In addition, the research is being used to create robots with whiskers, which can use the motion of the whiskers to generate three-dimensional spatial representations of the environment. The technology could be used, for example, on robots designed to explore dark places.

A paper describing the research was published Thursday online in Public Library of Science Computational Biology.

More stories on whiskers and sense of touch:

• Tomorrow's robots could have whiskers
• How whiskers help rats find their way
• Stretchy solar cells to power e-skin

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

An artist's conception dating back to the 1990s shows a space vehicle powered by an electric propulsion drive approaching Mars. Electric propulsion is still the preferred technology for getting to the Red Planet.

Now that the International Space Station is complete, NASA is touting it as a test bed for future voyages to Mars. But when will those voyages start? Would you believe Oct. 9, 2033?

That's one of the best dates available for launching a Mars mission, according to Ben Donahue, space exploration engineer at Boeing Advanced Systems. At this week's International Space Station and Mars Conference, presented in Washington by Explore Mars, Donahue explained that the alignments of Earth and Mars make 2033 an "easy year" for interplanetary navigation. And after all, President Barack Obama did call for a mission to the environs of the Red Planet by the mid-2030s.

But in reality, the prospects for a Mars mission depend less on the celestial almanac and more on national priorities. If getting humans to Mars somehow became a national imperative, as getting humans to the moon did a half-century ago, the job could be done "before the end of the decade," said Larry Williams, vice president of strategic relations for SpaceX.

SpaceX is one of the fastest-rising stars in the aerospace industry, but even Williams acknowledges that any effort to send astronauts beyond Earth orbit would probably have to be government-led, not industry-led.

Williams compared beyond-orbit exploration to the creation of ARPANET, the federal government's forerunner to the Internet. "I would say there's probably a good return on investment" for government-led projects, in the form of economic competitiveness and prestige, he said. He wouldn't go so far as to predict that spaceflight would be the next big thing, "but I can't think of anything that's going to be more of that 'next thing,'" he said.

What's to be gained? The space race of the 1960s led to a revolution in satellite technology, opening the way to benefits ranging from global telecom and data networks to GPS navigation. The Internet's rise in the 1990s transformed the world economy again. Travel beyond Earth orbit may well lead the way to new resources, markets and frontiers in the 2020s and 2030s. And some folks, such as SpaceX founder Elon Musk, believe it's imperative for us Earthlings to spread out through the solar system in order to guard against a planet-killing catastrophe like the one that killed off the dinosaurs.

But the "why" question is a huge tale unto itself. For now, let's concentrate on the "how." Here's how the experts at the ISS-Mars Conference sized up the road between the space station and the Red Planet:

Simulating scenarios: Six volunteers are more than halfway through their simulation of a 500-day mission to Mars and back, conducted inside an isolation chamber at a Russian institute. NASA is considering a different kind of simulation next year, which would involve transmitting voice communications to and from the station with a 10-minute delay. Several experts at the conference, including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, suggested that a prototype Mars transit module should be attached to the station for a series of on-orbit simulations leading up to a full-length mock Mars trip. One of the potential prototypes is an inflatable module built by Bigelow Aerospace.

However things work out, NASA and the space station's other international partners should have a lot more time to draw up their tests. The current plan is to extend operations on the space station to at least 2020, and NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the partners are already talking about a further extension to 2028.

Testing technologies: One of the big problems for interplanetary travelers is the heightened exposure to space radiation. To address that issue, NASA is looking at active-shielding systems that could set up a protective magnetic field around a spacecraft. Another strategy calls for packing the food, water and supplies stored up for the astronauts (as well as the waste material they produce) in such a way as to shield them during the trip to Mars.

Other potential technologies include measures to counter the health effects of spending long periods in zero-G, as well as next-generation propulsion systems. The International Space Station could serve as a test bed for all these technologies. NASA already has agreed to test an experimental VASIMR plasma engine at the space station. The consensus at the conference was that solar electric or nuclear electric propulsion systems were the way to get to Mars, perhaps boosted initially by chemical rockets.

Doing dry runs: The current vision for space exploration doesn't call for going straight from the space station to Mars. Rather, NASA plans to take a series of incremental steps along the "flexible path" through deep space. Obama has called for a trip to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, for example. That would serve as a "dry run" for deep-space transportation systems, said Bret Drake, exploration architect at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Even though the White House nixed the Constellation Project's back-to-the-moon goal, a limited number of lunar trips could serve as dry runs for surface operations on Mars. A trip to Mars orbit and back, without touching down on the Red Planet, would represent another step along the way. The early missions may actually send astronauts to a deep crater on one of the Red Planet's moons, Phobos, from which they can manage a remote-controlled army of robots on the Martian surface itself.

Relying on robots: If and when humans go to Mars, robots will have already blazed the trail. One such robot, the Curiosity rover, is being prepared for launch this November. NASA and its international partners are deep into negotiations over a series of robotic missions leading up to the transport of fresh soil and rock samples from Mars to Earth for study.

Eventually, robotic production facilities will be sent to Mars to manufacture the fuel and oxygen that will be required for the astronauts who follow. When the complete scenario for a human mission is worked out, Donahue says robots should be sent out first to conduct a full dress rehearsal.

The long road vs. the short road: How long would a human mission last? It depends. One type of trip, known as an "opposition-class" mission, would get the astronauts to Mars in 217 days, give them a 30-day stay, and bring them back in 403 days. In contrast to that 650-day trip, the "conjunction-class" mission would last 916 days: 210 days to get there, 496 days at Mars, and 210 days on the return trip.

The 210-day transit time is "nearly identical" to the length of a typical tour of duty on the International Space Station, said former astronaut John Grunsfeld, who is now deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. So taking a trip to Mars, or coming back, may not be all that much different from what space station astronauts are experiencing now. The big difference is that when their stint in space is done, returnees from the space station get to rest or recuperate. That won't be the case when astronauts finish a 210-day trip to Mars.

NASA

This graphic compares the trajectories for an opposition-class mission to Mars (left) with a conjunction-class mission (right). Both missions are launched in 2037, but the shorter mission returns to Earth in 2039 while the longer mission doesn't end until 2040.

"I think it's still an open question in terms of what it will take ... when crews do land on Mars so they can get to work," Grunsfeld said.

That's not the only open question. I've intentionally glossed over the biggest one: Is this trip really necessary? In the past, we've talked about the prospects of finding evidence of past or present Martian life, or creating a second home for Earth's species ... but I'd love to hear what you think. Tell me why we should go to Mars, or why not, in your comments below.

More about NASA's future course:

• Scientific shortfalls limit NASA's spaceflight ambitions
• Gallery: Seven out-of-this-world destinations
• Which way for NASA? A step-by-step path
• NASA lines up jobs for Robonaut

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 my book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."