"Sunrise Number 1" and "The Dreams You Give" have earned spots on the highest-flying music program in existence: NASA's wakeup music for the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour.

These tunes aren't Billboard mega-sellers ... yet. They're original songs that were entered over the past few months in the space agency's "Space Rock" contest. More than 1.5 million votes were registered. "Sunrise Number 1" by the group Stormy Mondays garnered almost half of those votes. "The Dreams You Give," performed by Brian Plunkett and his family, came in second.

Their reward? "Dreams You Give" will be played for Endeavour's crew at 6:56 p.m. ET on May 30, and "Sunrise Number 1" will air at 5:56 p.m. ET on May 31 to kick off the astronauts' last scheduled workday in space. Those may sound like ungodly hours for wakeup music, but that's just because of the mission's topsy-turvy, graveyard-shift schedule.

The latest contest follows up on an earlier poll for previously recorded hits. This time around, the entries had to be original works, composed around a spaceflight theme and submitted by the authors. Both of the top songs are bouncy, good-time tunes well-suited to get the astronauts out of their zero-G sleeping bags.

Stormy Mondays' lyrics declare that "we don't care 'bout rain or shine, when you're in space the weather's fine." The Plunkett kids tell the astronauts, "Thank you for showing us the journey from the pillow fort to the shuttle bay." Not a bad way to wake up ...

More on space music:

• Shuttle Discovery gets a 'Star Trek' send-off
• Wake up like an astronaut
• A heroic space flute duet
• Space flutist hits high note

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Once upon a time, some people thought cities might be relatively immune from a tornado's terrors due to the obstructions thrown up by tall buildings, or the microclimates created by urban heat islands — but no more.

The widespread devastation suffered in Joplin, Mo., over the weekend served as ample evidence that those urban legends are mere legends. Meteorologists say that human-made structures — whether they're skyscrapers or mobile homes in a trailer park — are not a determining factor in dictating the path of a violent storm. If it seemed as if tornadoes rarely hit the downtown areas of cities in the Southern, Midwest and Plains states, that was merely because those urbanized areas were so small compared with the open spaces in those regions.

However, that situation is changing. As the population grows and cities spread out wider, that provides bigger targets for tornadoes to hit. "We have people where there used to be farmland," AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette told Reuters.

Paquette said the huge toll from the Joplin tornado was due to bad luck — or, to put it another way, an unfortunate spike in the statistical distribution of storms. "Sometimes you have tornadoes that hit in the cornfields of Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa, and the only person affected is that farmer and it doesn't even hit his house. But here we have a tornado that hit a hospital," he said.

Adam Wisneski / Tulsa World / AP

Rescue workers in lime-green jackets search for bodies and survivors today inside St. John's Hospital in Joplin, Mo.

Howard Bluestein, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma, told MSNBC that "it's very unusual for these storms to go through a heavily populated area like Joplin."

"It's a real tragedy that the tornado just didn't go right outside and skirt the city," he said.

Bluestein said population growth, with its accompanying suburban sprawl, has created more areas where tornadoes could cause serious damage. "Cities and suburbs have expanded," he noted, "and there's a higher probability that people will actually get struck."

Joshua Wurman, president of the Colorado-based Center for Severe Weather Research, told Reuters that the tornado could have been worse if it hit an even more populated urban area, such as the Chicago suburbs.

"A tornado doesn't really care what's underneath it," Wurman said.

Meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center keep up a list of selected urban tornadoes going back more than a century. Based on the current fatality figures, the Joplin tornado ranks No. 3 — behind the 1953 tornado that tore through downtown Waco, Texas (114 deaths) and an 1896 St. Louis twister (255 deaths).

One of the center's meteorologists, Roger Edwards, says in an online Q&A about tornadoes that a storm outbreak in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area during rush hour could result in "staggering death tolls in the hundreds or thousands, and overwhelmed emergency services."

The good news is that tornado prediction methods are improving, even as the potential targets are getting bigger. Thirty years ago, forecasters could provide an average of only three minutes of warning before a tornado hit, Wurman told Reuters. Now the average is 13 minutes.

"We'd like to get that up to 30 or 40 minutes," Wurman said. He said he'd also like to reduce the false-alarm rate for tornado warnings from its current 70 to 75 percent.

And what about climate change? Could global warming affect the frequency or severity of tornadoes? Meteorologists are reluctant to make a connection between tornadoes and long-term, worldwide climate trends, but they do note that this year's La Nina weather pattern in the eastern Pacific could be contributing to the woes in the tornado zone. For more about that, check out this report from Miguel Llanos, my colleague at msnbc.com.

More on tornadoes:

• Interactive: Birth of a tornado
• Interactive: 2011 tornado season 
• Joplin tornado came with terrifying speed
• Survivors tell of dread and loss
• Weather coverage from msnbc.com

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alex Chepstow-Lusty

Llama excrement was used as a fertilizer for the maize that helped build the Inca Empire, including Machu Picchu shown here.

The seeds of the Inca Empire were planted about 2,700 years ago when a warm spell combined with piles of llama excrement allowed maize agriculture to take root high up in the South American Andes, according to a new study.

"They were constructing fields and weeding them. And probably trading took off, made possible by llama caravans transporting goods, such as maize, coca leaves, salt and a ceremonial product called cinnabar," Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima told me Sunday in an email.

The finding is inferred by a record of pollen and mites in a core of mud taken from a small lake located at about 11,000 feet up in the Andes surrounded by agricultural terraces and next to an ancient trading route that connected tropical forest and mountain communities.

The Laguna Marcacocha core extends back over 4,200 years. The pollen tells Chepstow-Lusty about what plants were growing around the lake when. Mites eat plant detritus such as that found in excrement. "The more excrement, the more mites living in the soils close to the lake," he explained. 

Record extended
In previous research based on the core, Chepstow-Lusty showed how a period of global warming starting around A.D. 1100 allowed the expansion of the Inca Empire by allowing the growth of maize,  known in the U.S. as corn, to feed armies of people constructing roads and monuments such as Machu Picchu.

The new research, published in the June issue of the journal Antiquity, extends the record back several more thousand years and pinpoints when agricultural and trade first took off in Andes around Cuzco, which became the seat of the Inca Empire.

Prior to cultivating corn, humans were eating wild quinoa, part of the spinach family. "Quinoa favors colder and drier conditions than maize, and does not provide the calories that maize does," Chepstow-Lusty said.

Alex Chepstow-Lusty

A core of mud taken from a small lake high in the Andes shows when and how maize agriculture helped build the Inca Empire.

In addition to quinoa, potatoes were also likely a major source of calories, but potato pollen is difficult to discern in the lake core. However, other researchers suggest that the weight and perishable nature of potatoes made them useful only to local communities.

Maize is easily transported and stored, which makes a surplus possible that can be extracted as payment to a political system. Hence maize, like barley and wheat in the Near East, is considered essential for the development of civilization in the Americas. 

However, in order to grow the grain at large enough scale to feed the armies needed to build the Inca Empire, a source of organic fertilizer was needed, Chepstow-Lusty argues. That, he said, was found in llama excrement, which was in abundance at the same time maize appeared in the record.

"Camelids defecate communally, so their dung can be accumulated in a small area and constitutes a regular supply that is easily exploitable by the local population," he writes in Antiquity.

"Hence it is no coincidence that the shift to agriculture corresponds with a distinct peak in oribatid mites, suggesting increased pastoralism, greater availability of excrement and potentially a major trading network."

Periodic warming
From about 700 B.C., the lake core record paints a picture of warm, dry spells in the high Andes about every 500 years that correspond with major societal changes. When the climate cooled, societies would retreat down slope, returning once it warmed again.

According to Chepstow-Lusty, the sustained warming beginning around A.D. 1100 allowed populations to move even higher up in the Andes "and grow a lot more maize and support even bigger populations."

Maize, in addition to being a source of food, is the basis of chicha, a corn-based beer that was central to the ceremonial life of Native American cultures.

"I am sure ritual ceremonies began on a large scale at the same time from 2,700 years ago and helped bind the members of different groups together, even libations for the dead and the gods," Chepstow-Lusty added.

More stories on the Inca:

• Inca children 'fattened up' before sacrifice
• Global warming may have aided Inca Empire 
• 'Lost city of the Incas' was not a true city
• Possible pattern found in Incan strings 

As the talk of a world-ending Rapture turns to ridicule, a new set of worries is coming to the fore: How will the followers of Family Radio preacher Harold Camping react to their failure to ascend to heaven? What about all those millions of dollars that were contributed to Camping's cause, including the life savings that were exhausted in the effort? And what does this portend for next year, when an even more highly publicized date with doomsday is due?

First, about the failed prophecy: With just a few hours before Rapture Saturday goes into the history books, this day turned out to be pretty normal, all in all. No cataclysmic earthquakes (although there was an Icelandic eruption and a couple of significant shakers in Japan and a New Zealand island chain). No global strife (except for the usual mayhem in the usual places). And no snatching up of millions of believers into heaven (although a good number of pranksters made it look as if clothes and shoes were "left behind").

Also, no sign of Camping himself. The minister's California-based broadcasting concern has collected and spent millions of dollars over the past few years to promote his prophecy that Judgment Day would come on May 21, 2011, based on his own idiosyncratic interpretation of Bible numerology. He and other church leaders are likely to avoid making a public appearance until Sunday at the earliest. (The Family Radio website has been offline for most of the day today.)

Some of Camping's are already returning to their daily lives. The Associated Press highlighted the case of Keith Bauer, a tractor-trailer driver who hung around Family Radio's Oakland headquarters today waiting for the end. "I had some skepticism, but I was trying to push the skepticism away because I believe in God," Bauer told AP. "I was hoping for it because I think heaven would be a lot better than this earth."

Then he added, "It's God who leads you, not Harold Camping."

Bauer and his family took a week off to make the cross-country drive from their home in Maryland, and they'll start the drive back home on Sunday.

Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, told NBC News that the ordeal is far from over for Camping's followers. For some of them, who have spent their life savings to spread the word of the Rapture, the worst days could well lie ahead.

"I think it's important to watch out for people who were in the midst of this group, to make sure that they don't harm themselves, or that they don't harm others," she said.

When prophecy fails
The Oakland connection brought to mind the case of Rev. Jim Jones, who got his start as a charismatic religious leader in that city, brought his followers to a People's Temple religious community set up in the jungles of Guyana ... and touched off a mass suicide there in 1978. The 1997 mass suicide of Heaven's Gate UFO cultists in the San Diego area serves as yet another cautionary tale from California.

But unlike People's Temple and Heaven's Gate, Family Radio did not isolate its supporters under cultlike conditions. Rather, these are regular Christians who sent in millions of dollars in contributions but continued to be engaged in their communities. A better analogy might be found in the case of the "Planet Clarion" UFO cult, which was the subject of the 1956 book "When Prophecy Fails." 

In the early 1950s, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin attracted followers who believed her claim that a great flood would destroy the earth on Dec. 21, 1954. Only Martin's followers would be saved, supposedly by the alien beings that had alerted her to the threat via automatic writing. The authors of the book infiltrated the group and saw firsthand how the group reacted when the promised rescue (and flood) did not come. 

The group waited until past the bitter end for the aliens' arrival, experiencing deep disappointment at the prophecy's failure. But a few hours after the deadline, Martin transmitted the message that the cataclysm had actually been called off due to divine intervention. This re-energized the group to reach out and spread the word once more. The episode helped lay the foundation for the concept of cognitive dissonance, pioneered by social psychologist Leon Festinger, one of the co-authors of "When Prophecy Fails."

A great disappointment
In the case of Family Radio, there are additional factors in play: One has to do with the huge amounts of money collected and spent by the non-profit organization. Although verifiable figures on Family Radio's current finances are not available, the organization had $72 million in net assets at the end of 2009. How much of that remains, especially considering that Camping apparently expected to have shuffled off this mortal coil by now? Could contributors make legal claims on those funds?

The highly publicized failure of the prophecy could generate a backlash among the wider public as well. It's strange to think that the non-end of the world would spark an angry response, but there is a precedent: When Baptist preacher William Miller's prediction of a Second Advent on Oct. 22, 1844, failed to pay off, the "Great Disappointment" led to violence against Miller's followers in some quarters.

I can guarantee that there won't be any tarring-and-feathering of Camping or his supporters, as there was in the case of the Millerites. Nevertheless, there is some understandable resentment over this episode, as expressed in some of the postings to the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

At least one good thing may come out of today's non-Rapture: More folks are likely to realize that there's nothing to numerological mumbo-jumbo, whether it comes from the Bible or the Maya calendar. If fewer people are freaked out about the supposed predictions that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, that's a very good thing. The end will come, whether it's tomorrow or several billion years from now. But as a famous man once said, we do not know the day or the hour. Until then, make the most of every day, have your disaster kit ready ... and for heaven's sake, DON'T PANIC!  

Update for 9:15 a.m. ET May 22: Rapture Saturday is now history all over the world, and Camping's prophecy is now a total fail. Journalists caught up with Staten Island retiree Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent $140,000 of his own money to put up advertising about the end of the world and wrote a book about "The Doomsday Code." The Associated Press quoted him as saying, "I can't tell you what I feel right now. ... Obviously, I haven't understood it correctly because we're still here."

After spending five years preparing for a Rapture that didn't come, Fitzpatrick said he didn't know what his next move would be. "I'm tired," the Staten Island Advance quoted him as saying. "I was working hard trying to get the word out. I'm very surprised. I fully expected that something would happen."

There's still no word from Camping himself, but things are getting ugly on his Facebook page.

More about the Rapture rumblings:

• All quiet on the Rapture front
• 'Left behind' by humorgeddon
• Why we're enraptured by the Rapture hype
• Rapture prophet says he'll be watching the action on TV
• Digital Life: Post-rapture video reveals stunning lack of zombies
• The Last Word: Only hours to go until the (fake) Rapture
• End of Days? Believers enter the final stretch
• End of the world? How about a party instead?
• Slate: 144 scenarios for America's apocalypse
• Pet sitting offered during Rapture
• Doomsday facts (or fictions)

Review all the Rapture weekend updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Delos Johnson via Flickr

Delos Johnson posted this photo from Alabama: "We just went for a short walk and then ... poof ... gone ... um ... what's that smell? ... yikes! ... brimstone."

The end times are no laughing matter, but when someone declares a particular day to be the start of the end, that can open the door for levity as well as lamentation. The most popular way to have a little fun with the Rapture — also known as Rapture bombing — has been to set out clothes to make it look as if the wearers were transported up to heaven.

There are literally scores of such pictures streaming onto Flickr, Yfrog, Instagram, Twitpic and other picture-sharing sites. Many of them have been flagged on Twitter with the hashtags #rapturebomb or #raptureprank. Here are a few of the favorites:

David Kinsey via Facebook

David Kinsey made this his new Facebook profile picture, with this caption:‎'"Interesting article in Ti....' It's Rapture Day! Hahahaha Pose your clothes, without you in 'em, and at the end of the day, give 'em away! A new, annual, halloween-ish holiday, 3rd Saturday in May, to benefit charity."

Delos Johnson via Flickr

Another one from Delos Johnson: "Close call! Almost had to cut the grass today. Feeling pretty rapturous about getting out of it!"

Rob Sheridan via Instagram

Here's a his-and-hers picture posted by Rob Sheridan: "Happy Rapture Day!"

Thanks to Delos Johnson, Rob Sheridan and David Kinsey for sharing. And special thanks to California photographer Brian Helm, a Cosmic Log correspondent who went the extra mile by shooting a five-minute video about the day of the fake Rapture:

One of the other popular concepts for Rapture bombing was to set loose a load of helium-filled blow-up dolls, to make it look as if souls were rising up into the sky. The interesting thing is, that idea was already caught on tape five years ago, as a lead-in for an episode of the "Six Feet Under" series about a quirky funeral-home family. Here it is:

Again, religious beliefs are nothing to laugh at, and there will be very serious repercussions in the days ahead, particularly for folks who spent their assets with the expectation that they'd enter immortality on Saturday. I hope Rapture bombing isn't seen as a criticism of Christianity. Think of it as a stress-reliever for the people who have been inundated by all the hype over the past week.

More about the Rapture rumblings:

• All quiet on the Rapture front
• Why we're enraptured by the Rapture hype
• Rapture prophet says he'll be watching the action on TV
• Digital Life: Post-rapture video reveals stunning lack of zombies
• The Last Word: Only hours to go until the (fake) Rapture
• End of Days? Believers enter the final stretch
• End of the world? How about a party instead?
• Slate: 144 scenarios for America's apocalypse
• Pet sitting offered during Rapture
• Doomsday facts (or fictions)

Even though Saturday is already finished with in some parts of the world, I'll still be blogging about the Rapture hype until the day is totally finished. You can follow the updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

In some parts of the world, it's already Sunday — and there hasn't been any sign that the end of the world was starting as predicted. But you already knew that'd be the way it went down, didn't you?

For years, Family Radio preacher Harold Camping has been telling his flock that the Rapture would gather up 200 million Christian believers to heaven and kick off five months of tribulation for the rest of us, heralded by a massive earthquake. Can you imagine the panic that might ensue if a significant quake actually did strike today? There's always a chance of that, of course. But as it turns out, the day has been relatively quiet in seismic terms.

Readings from the U.S. Geological Survey have turned up only a few quakes worthy of any note around the world, and nothing anywhere near major. If you check the USGS' chart of seismic activity, the blue squares denote quakes that have occurred over the past 24 hours, and the red squares stand for tremors in the past hour. The size of the square represents how big the quake was ... and there are no big squares.

USGS

This chart from the U.S. Geological Survey traces earthquakes stronger than magnitude 4.5 throughout the world over the past week, as of 11 a.m. ET Saturday. Yellow squares denote quakes up to a week ago, blue squares denote quakes up to a day ago, and red squares are quakes in the previous hour. The strongest quakes have been slightly higher than 5 in magnitude, which is in the normal range for those regions.

There's no word yet from Camping, and his followers are likely still hunkered down wondering if the end will come. But other folks are starting to go about their business, which is a good thing.

On the Cosmic Log Facebook page, correspondents around the world are voicing a sense of relief. One woman writes, "Jesus Himself said that no one would know the day or hour, but only His Father in Heaven. Besides, I'm getting married today at 3:00."

Best wishes to the bride ... and to all of you.

Noel Celis / AFP - Getty Images

A passenger jeep on a street in Manila, the Philippine capital, drives past a banner that reads "Judgment Day 21 May 2011." The day passed without incident in the Pacific.

Update for 7:30 p.m. ET: A couple of fairly significant seismic events were recorded later in the day, including a 5.8 quake in Japan and a 5.8 quake in New Zealand's Kermadec Islands. These happened to occur on Sunday as reckoned by local time, and on Saturday according to GMT. None of the events could be called Rapture-worthy unless Camping and his followers end up grasping at straws.

More about the Rapture rumblings:

• Why we're enraptured by the Rapture hype
• Rapture prophet says he'll be watching the action on TV
• Digital Life: Post-rapture video reveals stunning lack of zombies
• The Last Word: Only hours to go until the (fake) Rapture
• End of Days? Believers enter the final stretch
• End of the world? How about a party instead?
• Slate: 144 scenarios for America's apocalypse
• Pet sitting offered during Rapture
• Doomsday facts (or fictions)

Even though Saturday is already finished with in some parts of the world, I'll still be blogging about the Rapture hype until the day is totally finished, and probably even longer. You can follow the updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

If you're reading this, the Rapture still hasn't happened yet.

The preacher behind the Saturday Rapture prediction, Family Radio's Harold Camping, has said that a great earthquake would herald the beginning of the end-time tribulation around suppertime — that is, around 6 p.m. That tick of the clock has come and gone in parts of the Pacific, including Kiribati and New Zealand.

The precise timing of doomsday can be a squishy concept: Some accounts claim that the big quake has been predicted for 6 p.m. Pacific time, which is still more than 18 hours away. But I think most of us already suspect it won't make much of a difference whether we're talking about Kiribati time or California time, don't we? In any case, if you want to keep track of seismic activity around the world, you can check in with Earthquake.USGS.gov.

This whole exercise serves as a good reminder to keep your disaster preparedness kit up to date. Rapture aside, you never know when the next big earthquake, power outage or zombie apocalypse will come along.

Happy Saturday to you! I'll be blogging about the Rapture hype over the weekend, and you can follow the updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A network of radio telescopes scattered around the Southern Hemisphere has produced the best-ever view of cosmic jets erupting from a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy.

The new image shows a region of space less than 4.2 light-years across at the heart of Centaurus A, 12 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus (of course). The galaxy, also known as NGC 5128 is anchored by a black hole as massive as 55 million suns. It's a huge radio source. In fact, if our eyes could see radio waves, Centaurus A would look nearly 20 times as big as the full moon, due to the giant lobes of radio-emitting matter spreading out from the galaxy itself.

The matter is streaming into the lobes via the particle jets that emanate from the black hole.

"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," Cornelia Müller, a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said in a NASA image advisory released today.

Müller is the lead author of a study about the jets, appearing in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She and her colleagues targeted Centaurus A with a network of nine radio telescopes in Africa, South America and Australia, known collectively as the Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry project, or TANAMI. The telescopes joined forces to zoom in on the heart of the galaxy.

NASA

Left: The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 5128 is the radio source known as Centaurus A. Vast radio-emitting lobes (shown as orange in this optical/radio composite) extend nearly a million light-years from the galaxy. Right: The radio image from the TANAMI project provides the sharpest-ever view of a supermassive black hole's jets. This view reveals the inner 4.16 light-years of the jet and counterjet, a span less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Undetected between the jets is the galaxy's 55-million-solar-mass black hole.

"Advanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself," Roopesh Ojha of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center explained.

The radio image shows features as small as 15 light-days across, which makes it the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. Studying the jets in such detail should help astronomers figure out how they form — which would make Müller very happy.

More about Centaurus A and black hole jets:

• See a black hole's blast
• Giant cannibal galaxy caught in mid-gobble
• Black hole spews jets in telescope's first image
• Inside a celestial super-volcano

In addition to Müller and Ojha, the authors of "Dual Frequency VLBI Study of Centaurus A on Sub-parsec Scales" include M. Kadler, J. Wilms, M. Böck, P.G. Edwards, C.M. Fromm, H. Hase, S. Horiuchi, U. Katz, J.E.J. Lovell, C. Plötz, T. Pursimo, S. Richers, E. Ros, R.E. Rothschild, G.B. Taylor, S.J. Tingay and J.A. Zensus.

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

For a lot of people, the end of the world is serious business, even if they may not think that Saturday is the day. I'd like to apologize in advance to those people for the following links to levity:

• XKCD on the Rapture
• Rapture Gopher says ...
• Rapture excuse bingo card
• Rapture delivery failure notice
• Flowchart: Will you be raptured?
• Some grey bloke on the Rapture
• Rapture for gamers and twitterers
• The Onion: World to end on Saturday
• The Oatmeal: How God is managing the Rapture

I'll be blogging about the Rapture hype over the weekend, and you can follow the updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Current Anthropology

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest mine in the Americas along the coast of northern Chile. The iron-oxide mine dates to about 12,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have discovered a 12,000 year old iron-oxide mine along the coast of northern Chile that they say is the oldest evidence of organized mining found in the Americas.

The mine — essentially a 130-foot long and 20-foot wide trench — was found near Taltal by a team of researchers led by Diego Salazar from Universidad de Chile.

It was dug by the Huentelauquen people, a hunter-gatherer fisher group who were the first settlers of the region.

The iron oxide was used as a pigment primarily for symbolic purposes, the team reports in the June issue of Current Anthropology.

Remains indicate the pigment was used to paint stone and bone instruments. It was likely used in clothing and body paint as well, the researchers note.

While these uses of the pigment are widely known, the history of how indigenous groups exploited and processed the minerals is poorly understood.

The new find sheds light on the techniques and technologies to mine it, including the recovery of nearly 500 hammerstones that date back to the earliest use of the mine.

An estimated 25,000 cubic feet and 2,000 tons of rock were excavated from the mine from around 12,000 years ago to 10,500 years ago and again around 4,300 years ago, according to radio carbon dates from charcoal and shells found in the mine.

The earliest stages of production of the mine are contemporary with the oldest human occupations in northern Chile, the researchers note, and extends by several thousand years the record of mining in the Americas.

The duration and extent of the operation, the researchers add, indicates "the techniques required to exploit and process these minerals were transmitted over generations."

Before this find, a North American copper mine dated to between 4,500 and 2,600 years ago was the oldest known in the Americas.

via Eurekalert

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).

If you're reading this, the Rapture hasn't happened yet.

If it had happened, you might have been taken up to heaven with 200 million other members of the elect. (Or is that 144,000?) The alternative is even spookier: being left behind to face five months of tribulation leading up to the end of the world and Jesus' judgment. (Or is that seven years?)

The prediction that the end times would begin in earnest on May 21, 2011, was made years ago by Harold Camping — the preacher who heads Family Radio, a worldwide religious broadcasting concern. His prophecy is based on calculations so kooky that other end-time prophets say he's giving them a bad name. 

The real question is: Why has there been so much buzz over Saturday's scheduled Rapture?

"Obviously, what could be a bigger news story than the end of the world?" University of York historian Nicholas Guyatt, author of the book "Have a Nice Doomsday," told me. "It's absurd to think the world is going to end on Saturday, but even if there's an infinitesimally small chance that it's true, we should be interested."

One thing that sets Camping apart from most end-timers is that he sets actual dates. That runs counter to the usual Christian interpretation of the end times, which focuses on a passage in Matthew in which Jesus says "you do not know the day or the hour." It also runs counter to the lessons learned from centuries of failed doomsday predictions.

"Even among evangelists who believe in the Rapture,  most of them know we're not supposed to be trying to set dates," said Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the popular "Left Behind" apocalyptic book series.  "For one thing, it's going to make us look foolish on Sunday."

Jenkins jokingly acknowledges he's "one of those kooks who really believes it's going to happen one of these days." The 16-novel series he wrote with minister Tim LaHaye provides a fictional account of the end times, going all the way to the Second Coming. The tale is based on an interpretation of the end times known as pre-tribulation dispensationalism — which starts with some believers instantly disappearing in the Rapture while leaving others to fight it out with the Antichrist and his minions.

"It'd be a horrifying and chaotic event," Jenkins said. "I'm still a little confused whether Camping thinks that's going to happen, or whether there'll be an earthquake."

Nonsense from numbers
Jenkins and many others are also confused over how Camping came up with his prediction. This year-old posting from Church of God News runs the numbers: Saturday supposedly marks 7,000 years since the Noah's Ark flood, and 722,500 days since Jesus' crucifixion. By Camping's numerology, 722,500 represents (5 x 10 x 17) x (5 x 10 x 17), or the square of atonement times completeness times heaven. 

"Now the above is utter nonsense," the Church of God News' Bob Thiel wrote. That sounds about right.

Jenkins says such number-based predictions "happen fairly frequently" in the end-time game. "It's sort of seasonal," he said.

In fact, Camping himself predicted years ago that the world would end in 1994. When the prediction failed, Camping said he got his initial calculations wrong and corrected the figures to come up with Saturday's doomsday date.

Guyatt noted that prophets have been predicting the end times, and getting the dates wrong, for hundreds of years. One of the best-known examples in America is the "Great Disappointment" of 1844. Baptist preacher William Miller predicted that the "Second Advent" would come on Oct. 22 of that year (after a couple of abortive predictions for earlier dates). He attracted as many as 50,000 adherents by the time the big day came. Nothing happened, of course. The result? Derision, church burnings, vandalism, even tar-and-feathering. Miller continued to await the Second Advent until his death five years later.

Miller's theology contributed to the later rise of denominations such as the Seventh-Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, but those churches did away with the date-setting.

Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of the newly published book "Forged," notes that the scriptural foundations for modern-day end-time scenarios are shaky. "In the Apocalypse, there's no reference to the Rapture at all," he told me. "The idea of the Rapture comes from the writings of Paul." And many of the details have been "completely made up by theologians, they're not found in the Bible," he said.

Ehrman said he could come up with his own scenario for the end times that would make more sense than Camping's. "What I'm looking for is some very wealthy believer," he joked.

Ah, the money angle. "The thing that's confusing about [Camping's prediction] is that he doesn't seem to be making money off this," Jenkins said.

Funding the Apocalypse
Lots of money is being spent on promoting the Rapture, however. Family Radio's financial records indicate that the nonprofit organization had $122 million in net assets in 2007. The figures for the following year, 2008, show $41 million in expenses, resulting in net assets of $86 million. The 2009 report shows expenses of $37 million and net assets of $72 million. And judging by the billboard ads, bus ads and direct-mail campaigns promoting the Rapture, the spending rate must have risen substantially since those reports were filed. After all, if you're going to heaven on Saturday, why wouldn't you spend it all?

Ehrman noted that this sort of pre-doomsday spending spree has happened before, when he was teaching Bible classes in the 1980s. One of the books that came out back then was "88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988."

"I had students in my classes whose parents literally sold the farm because they didn't need it, and then it didn't happen," he recalled.

Some Family Radio listeners, such as Staten Island retiree Robert Fitzpatrick, have spent tens of thousands of dollars of their own money to promote the Rapture. That worries Jenkins. "There are very well-meaning people who are telling me they're getting rid of their life savings," he said. "I wonder who's going to take care of them when it's all over?"

Gerry Broome / AP file

Allison Warden shows off her car, emblazoned with messages about Saturday's scheduled Rapture. Warden, of Raleigh, N.C., has been helping organize a pre-Rapture campaign using billboards, postcards and other media in cities across the U.S.

The big spending spree is one big reason why this particular date has gotten so much traction. But end-time tales do not live by billboard ads alone. Guyatt says this time in history is particularly well-suited for doomsayers.

"Whenever anything really bad happens, it kind of gives their case a little support," Guyatt said. "So if you think of the turbulent times we've had over the past decade — 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan — it kind of feeds on that. Maybe it's not formal, but we have an affinity with the view that the world is becoming a more dangerous place, or maybe our days are numbered."

And every Twitter tweet, Facebook update, Rapture party invitation — for that matter, every blog post — turns up the wattage ever so slightly on the doomsday spotlight. "What's given this traction is the billboards and the media," Guyatt said. "At some point the ball is rolling, and we help tip it a bit further, because of you, because of us."

How imminent is 'imminent'?
Leave it to the veteran end-timers, who have been through all this before, to provide perspective. "I applaud the discussion," Jenkins said. "I think people should be thinking about this."

Jenkins' writing partner, Tim LaHaye, has said on many occasions that events such as the Japan earthquake and tsunami are signaling that the end is near. The way Jenkins sees it, the end of the world could well be imminent, but "our definition of 'imminent' is clearly not the same as God's."

"If he waits one more day in his mercy, it could be a thousand years in our time," he said.

So what will Jenkins be doing on Saturday?

"We're just going to carry on with the usual activities," he told me. "One of our granddaughters is going to have a ballgame."

More about the Rapture rumblings:

• Rapture prophet says he'll be watching the action on TV
• Digital Life: Post-rapture video reveals stunning lack of zombies
• The Last Word: Only hours to go until the (fake) Rapture
• End of Days? Believers enter the final stretch
• End of the world? How about a party instead?
• Slate: 144 scenarios for America's apocalypse
• Pet sitting offered during Rapture
• Doomsday facts (or fictions)

In some parts of the world, it's already Saturday. I'll be blogging about the Rapture hype over the weekend, and you can follow the updates by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Steven Cummer / Duke University

Duke University researchers have explained the dynamics of gigantic, spaceward propagating jets of lightning, such as the one seen here near the university. The jets can reach 50 miles high.

On rare occasions, jets of lightning escape from the tops of thunderclouds and shoot up into the atmosphere where they pose a threat to weather balloons and other scientific instruments. New research explains how it happens.

"In some instances there is enough energy and electric charge available for that lightning to just keep propagating up and up and up and it keeps going to about 50 miles high," Steven Cummer, a lightning expert at Duke University, told me today. 

The jets come to a halt at 50 miles high because they run into the ionosphere, the electrically conducting part of the atmosphere, which "sort of shorts it out and prevents it from getting any farther," he added.

Cummer is a co-author of a paper accepted May 5 for publication in Geophysical Research Letters that, for the first time, explains the dynamics that lead to the gigantic jets of lightning shooting from the tops of clouds into the upper atmosphere. 

Bolt from the blue
The jets, according to the research, appear to be related to a phenomenon called a bolt from the blue. This occurs when a lightning channel develops inside a cloud but is unable to find enough electric charge of the opposite sign to make it stop, so it shoots out the side of the thundercloud.

Sometimes when this happens, the channel will propagate a few handfuls of miles horizontally before it turns down and becomes a cloud-to-ground lightning stroke.

"That is called a bolt from the blue because if you were on the ground, you would be at best dimly aware that there was a thunderstorm 10 miles away and yet a lightning stroke came down and struck the ground whereas the sky above looks clear and blue," Cummer explained.

What appears to happen to allow the spaceward propagating jets is that a bolt from the blue starts to develop but doesn’t quite make it out of the side of the cloud. Then, a fraction of a second later another channel develops upward and escapes from the top of the cloud.

The first, failed bolt from the blue, Cummer explained, appears to deplete the upper cloud layer of any opposite charge that would normally stop the lightning stroke, opening a channel for the second part of the flash. It escapes from the cloud and turns into a gigantic jet that "just keeps going and keeps going." 

Cool, rare phenomenon
These giant, spaceward propagating jets of lightning were first observed about 10 years ago. Scientists think they are rather rare, though they are more difficult to observe than cloud-to-ground lightning because it's hard to see above thunderstorms. 

Researchers have viewed them a couple hundred miles away from the storms, with clear skies above and a view of the storm on the horizon. They have also been seen with cameras on satellites. From these counts, they are certainly less common than cloud-to-ground lightning, Cummer noted. 

However, they are common enough to pose a slight risk to weather balloons and other scientific instruments that spend time above the clouds but below the ionosphere. "You do have to be aware that there is a non-zero chance that a lightning bolt can shoot out of a thundercloud," he said. 

But studying the jets, Cummer admits, is mostly just scientifically interesting. Besides that, they have an undeniable "cool factor," he said.

More stories on lightning:

• Video shows how jets survive lightning strikes
• Lightning striking twice? Maybe not even once
• Scientists capture X-ray images from lightning 
• One mystery of sandstorm lightning explained 

Tip o' the Log to 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).

DigitalGlobe

The space shuttle Atlantis is visible near the center of this DigitalGlobe satellite image, focusing on the heart of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The large structure toward the left is the 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building, where the shuttle was being taken in preparation for flight. The building just to the left of the VAB is the Launch Control Center. The buildings at top center are orbiter processing facilities, the "garages" where the space shuttles are kept.

This picture turns the tables on the space shuttle Atlantis: Usually, the orbiter gets great views of Earth from space. Here, a satellite in space gets a great view of the orbiter on Earth. It's even more amazing when you realize that DigitalGlobe's satellte happened to be passing over Kennedy Space Center at midday on Tuesday, at just the time when NASA was moving Atlantis over from its orbiter processing facility to the 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building.

Atlantis is now being mated with its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters inside the VAB, in preparation for NASA's final space shuttle mission. Right now the launch is scheduled to take place in mid-July. Check out this preview story to learn more about Atlantis' "rollover" and the STS-135 mission ahead. And for a ground-level view of the rollover, check out this picture and the others available from Kennedy Space Center's media archive:

NASA

The shuttle Atlantis is parked in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building on Tuesday before being moved inside.

More about the shuttle fleet's last days:

• Shuttle Endeavour lifts off for the last time
• Video: Watching Atlantis' latest launch
• Awesome photo of Endeavour snapped from airplane
• Up, up and away ... to see the shuttle Endeavour

Tip o' the Log to Ian O'Neill at Discovery News.

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

J&R Lamb Studios via LOC.gov

These window designs show the apostles Peter and Paul, who are credited with writing 15 epistles in the canonical New Testament. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman says more than half of those epistles were forged.

A biblical scholar has raised a holy fuss by declaring that more than a third of the books of the New Testament were "forged" — that is, written by scribes other than the apostles to which they've been ascribed.

By itself, the suggestion that nearly half of Paul's epistles and both of Peter's were not written by Peter or Paul is not all that surprising. Most scriptural scholars, even those who are true believers, acknowledge that's the likeliest explanation for the New Testament's disagreements in narrative and anomalies in writing style.

But Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, goes further by asserting that such ghost-writing — or, as Greekophiles put it, "pseudepigraphy" — would be unacceptable if it were brought to light in ancient times. In fact, the writers of such works would be "roundly condemned for lying and trying to deceive their leaders," Ehrman says.

"In antiquity, people called this lying," Ehrman told me today. "That was the most common term used to discuss it."

Ehrman lays out his case for Biblical-era fraud and forgery in a recently published book, titled "Forged." The book has sparked a counter-wave of critiques from other scholars who take Ehrman to task not so much for what he's saying, but for the way he's saying it.

"Those who are looking for an excuse to call the early Christians liars and deceivers are delighted with this book," Ben Witherington, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, wrote in the first of a series of blog posts about "Forged."

Even Witherington, an evangelical, doesn't contest the claim that anonymous writers were behind many of the words attributed to the big-name New Testament authors. But he says that's the way scripture evolved back in the early Christian era — and even in pre-Christian times. For example, most scholars don't assume that the Song of Solomon was actually written by King Solomon.

The Catholic News Service's Agostino Bono makes a similar point: "Even if a specific letter was not done by Peter or Paul, it could well have been written by someone drawing from the oral tradition passed down by one or the other," he writes.

In response, Ehrman points to the scores of books that were thrown out of the New Testament by early church fathers precisely because they were judged to be forged. He also argues against the idea that later scribes were merely writing down the words that were passed along by the apostles. The writing style for the suspect scriptures is too much like Greek rhetoric and not enough like the sayings of first-century Jews, he said.

To bolster his case, Ehrman also refers to other books from antiquity, written by authors claiming to be the second-century Roman physician Galen, or the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Such books were roundly criticized in ancient times as "illegitimate children."

So which books of the New Testament are suspect? Ehrman calls out three of the gospels (Matthew, Mark and John), six of Paul's 13 epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, 2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, Colossians) and both of Peter's epistles.

The debate isn't purely academic: Ehrman says one of the motives for producing pseudepigraphic scriptures was to control the dialogue over early church practices. For example, if you thought women were getting too uppity, you could cite 1 Timothy 12, where Paul is quoted as saying, "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." Or 1 Corinthians 14:34, where women are told to "remain silent in the churches."

"It turns out that these warnings about women having to be silent are in books that are forged in Paul's name," Ehrman said. (The passage in 1 Corinthians is thought to have been added to the original, which most scholars believe was actually written by Paul.)

Ehrman isn't surprised by the strong response his book has received, particularly from the Christian rank-and-file. "For somebody who has faith in the Bible, I can see why it might be threatening," he said. "But just because it's threatening doesn't mean it's not true."

As for Ehrman's own religious faith, that was gone a long time ago.

"I'm not a Christian anymore, but it's not because of this kind of thing," he told me. "I got to a point where I could no longer believe that there's a good and powerful God in charge of the world, given all the pain and misery that's in it. ... I don't think that the God of the Bible exists. I don't know whether there's a greater force in the universe, so I call myself an agnostic, because I don't know. And I don't think anybody else knows it, either."

Longtime readers of this blog (which entered its 10th year last week) know that we deal with all sorts of cosmic themes rather than just scientific topics. They also know that they're always welcome to join the conversation, as long as it's civil. So feel free to register your thoughts in the comment section below.

More on religion and science:

• Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven'
• What's the draw of doomsday?
• Did Jesus eat an early Last Supper?
• The face in the Shroud
• The not-so-angry evolutionist
• Messianic message stirs debate
• Toilet tied to tale of Dead Sea Scrolls
• Maya myth revealed

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

Matt Slocum / AP

This file photo shows a field of solar panels at Pocono Raceway, in Long Pond, Pa. Solar energy is a fast-improving technology, according to researchers.

A team of U.S. researchers has developed a model to identify technologies that are on the fast track to constant improvement. When applied to energy, it could help investors and policymakers sort out which ones will help us avoid catastrophic climate change.

"That is certainly an inspiration for this kind of work," Jessika Trancik, an assistant professor of engineering systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me on Wednesday. 

International climate negotiators have set a goal of limiting climate warming to 2 degrees Celsius, which will require keeping a lid on concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to between 450 and 550 parts per million.

"If you look at the international goals that have been set limiting greenhouse gas emissions, you can see that we really need to move quickly," Trancik said.

Design complexity
In theory, the model she and colleagues developed can be used to pinpoint which technology designs will have the sort of fast improvement over time (think Moore's law and the evolution of computer chips) to make a realistic dent in emissions.

Essentially, they found the greater a technology's complexity, the more slowly it changes and improves over time, MIT explains in a news release. Complexity here relates to design complexity.

The model mathematically breaks a system down into its individual components and then maps all the interconnections between these components. The team found that certain patterns of interconnection can create bottlenecks that cause a technology's improvement to go in fits and starts.

Previously, researchers have compared things such as which energy technologies are moving faster by looking at their experience curve — the cost of an item against its cumulative production, James McNerney, a graduate student at Boston University, explained to me.

Technologies with the steepest slope are seen as the best investment because they are the ones that respond most to increases in production. Make more widgets more quickly and you bring down the cost of the widget.

A better basis for prediction is needed, according to McNerney, who is the lead author of the paper published May 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"I think our paper marks the first progress on that problem in a long while by offering one possible better basis for prediction — the engineering design of the technology as expressed by its design structure matrix," he told me in an email.

Energy technologies
According to McNerney, the model isn't ready to make any prognostications on which energy technology design is primed to help humans curb climate change, partly because the full data set to make the comparisons hasn't been collected.

("The team has collected large data sets on experience curves for energy technologies. They also have data on design structure matrices, but this harder to come by," Trancik noted).

"That data is probably out there, but stuck in textbooks, papers, diagrams, or engineers' heads, and needs a grad student willing to dive into all that," he said in his email. "Unfortunately, I haven't had time to do that yet!"

General trends in experience curves, though, are already notable, said Trancik. For example, the cost of electricity from solar power has come down "dramatically" over the lifetime of the industry whereas the cost of coal-fired electricity has been stagnant in recent decades.

"Those two I would say are at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of rate of improvement," she said.

Of course, she added, the cost of coal-fired electricity is already low, which makes it an economically attractive technology for today.

"It is not just about making the best decisions for today, right now," she said. "You can think about balancing today against tomorrow in terms of rate of the improvement of these technologies, which I think is something that is very important for both designing technologies and investing in technologies."

Note: Post updated on Oct. 11, 2011 to more accurately reflect the scope of the data review.

More on energy and climate change:

• Ten hot green-energy trends to watch
• Green-energy ideas so crazy they might just work
• Climate change panel drafts renewable energy paper
• Obama's climate card: nuclear power
• Report: China, India seen as key to energy, climate

Rachel Simon

An artist's conception shows the sail-backed creature known as Xilousuchus sapingensis, which existed 247 million to 252 million years ago. A new analysis of fossilized Xilousuchus bones suggests that crocodiles diverged from birds and dinosaurs earlier than some experts previously thought

A fresh analysis of a fossil found in the 1970s suggests that the family trees for crocodiles, birds and dinosaurs diverged earlier than some may have thought.

The study represents the latest chapter in a long-running debate over the relationships between dinosaurs and the ancestors of two dissimilar types of modern-day creatures — crocs and birds.

Paleontologists have traced the ancestry of all three groups to a category of common ancestors called archosaurs. The archosaurs and their cousins lived around the time of Earth's deadliest die-off, the Permian-Triassic extinction, around 252 million years ago. Teasing out the details of the archosaurs' family tree is key to understanding how birds, dinosaurs and crocodiles are linked.

"This is one of the most interesting evolutionary questions in paleontology: the origin of birds in the broadest sense," Spencer G. Lucas, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History, told me today. "If you take crocodiles, birds and dinosaurs, how do you think that evolutionary tree came together?"

Most experts say birds could actually be considered the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, while a relative few insist that dinosaurs were more closely related to crocodiles.

Second look at fossils from China
The new analysis, published on Tuesday in Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, focuses on the fossilized remains of a creature unearthed in China, known as Xilousuchus sapingensis. The specimen, consisting of a partial skull and 10 neck vertebrae, has been dated to the Early Triassic (252 million to 247 million years ago).

Xilousuchus was originally classified as a distant offshoot of the archosaur tree, known as Proterosuchia, and was thus thought to shed little light on the bird-croc-dino relationship. But the revised analysis puts it closer to the center of the archosaur family tree, and tending toward the crocodile side of an evolutionary split. Birds and dinosaurs would be on the other side of that split, said Sterling Nesbitt, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington who led the research team.

The technique that was used for the analysis involved making detailed measurements of features in the fossilized bones. For example, if a fossilized specimen shows the hallmarks of a wing, that could lead scientists to classify the fossil as belonging to a bird.

"We used the same kind of reasoning for all the little features on the bones where the muscles attach, and we score it into this computer program and it tells us how these creatures are related," Nesbitt explained. "Once you put it into this context, it all falls together. ... Xilousuchus is our oldest evidence of an archosaur in the fossil record."

What it all means ... or maybe not
The fact that the main group of archosaurs showed signs of divergence so soon after the Permian-Triassic extinction suggested to Nesbitt and his colleagues that there might be a linkage. "It could have been that the Permian extinction triggered the rise of archosaurs because they filled a niche that was emptied by the extinction," he told me. "This is one possibility that we're looking into now."

Just as the demise of the dinosaurs led to the rise of mammals 65 million years ago, the earlier mass extinction may have contributed to the rise of the dinosaurs 250 million years ago, Nesbitt said.

At the New Mexico museum, Lucas said he wasn't sure the case was that clear-cut. There are so few specimens from the Permian-Triassic transition that the criteria for classification are still subject to debate, and it would be easy to make too much out of the fine distinctions between one fossil and another. "Some of this is merely semantics," he said.

"This is an interesting idea," he told me, "but I await the next analysis of the evolutionary relationship. All of this is really in flux."

Update for 10 p.m. ET: I heard back via email from Thomas Holtz, a paleontologist at the University of Maryland and author of "Dinosaurs," a dino-encyclopedia. Here's what he had to say:

"Although I haven't read the paper yet, the conclusions seem sound. That is, Nesbitt and his colleagues have closely re-examined a lot of the Triassic archosaurs and other archosauriforms (what we used to call 'thecodonts' in the old days, until it was recognized that 'thecodonts' just meant 'any poor archosauriform unlucky enough not to be a crocodilian, pterosaur, or dinosaur'), and have the biggest phylogenetic analyses of these guys out there.

"Xilosuchus falls out as a member of the poposauroids in their studies, an odd assemblage of croc-relatives (some look a lot like finned proto-mammals like Dimetrodon; others look superficially like dinosaurs).

"Because it is a poposauroid, that means that the common ancestor of all poposauroids, and of all pseudosuchians (all archosaurs closer to crocodilians than to birds) must have already been present. And if Pseudosuchia is present, its sister group Avemetatarsalia (birds and everything closer to birds) has to be present in at least its most primitive state.

"Now the avemetatarsalians at this time wouldn't be birds, or theropods, or even dinosaurs. In fact, Avemetatarsalia probably had not yet split into Pterosauromorpha and Dinosauromorpha. But it does mean that the lineages which would ultimate lead to alligators on one side and eagles on the other had already diverged in the earliest days of the Triassic." 

Correction for 11:40 a.m. ET May 19: I scrambled up the comparison of crocodiles to dinosaurs in the original text, but have fixed that. Sorry about the mix-up.

More on the bird-dino-croc debate:

• Interactive: Are dinosaurs alive?
• Gallery: Nine links in the dino-to-bird transition
• Dinosaurs had wrists like birds
• How dinosaurs handed down their fingers
• Hunchbacked dinosaur strengthens bird-dino link

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

Earl Zubkoff, Essential Eye Photographics

University of Maryland biology student sits in the cockpit of a human-powered helicopter called Gamera.

Judy Wexler pedaled furiously and, for a few fleeting seconds, achieved what no other human has officially done before — she lifted a human-powered helicopter off the ground.

The flight is still awaiting confirmation from the National Aeronautics Association, but from the perspective of University of Maryland students working on the project, and a video of the attempt, the aircraft appears to have achieved liftoff of 3 to 5 inches, with a hover time of 4 seconds.

An announcement from the aeronautics association is pending.

The X-shaped helicopter, called Gamera, has 42-foot diameter rotors at each end of 60-foot long crossbars. A pilot's module is suspended from the middle, where Wexler, a biology student, sat and pedaled with feet and hands. Pilot included, the contraption weighs just over 200 pounds.

The liftoff flight is a milestone on a path winning the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize, an X-prize like contest for human-powered helicopters. Winning the prize requires keeping the helicopter aloft for at least 60 seconds and reaching a height of 10 feet.

To see the feat for yourself, check out the video above. The flight comes at about 3 minutes.

An ecstatic Brandon Bush, a graduate student in the university's school of engineering and project team member, says they'll review the tape but, "it is definitely a world record for us, first woman in a human-powered helicopter, maybe even a time record."

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).

Quest for Stars / Challenger Center / CSE

The shuttle Endeavour leaves behind an arcing plume of exhaust in this picture, captured on Monday by the Senatobia-1 balloon from an altitude of 64,000 feet.

The hundreds of thousands of spectators who turned out to watch the shuttle Endeavour's final launch on Monday could see it for only a matter of seconds before the spaceship plowed through a cloud bank, but a camera-equipped balloon built by students captured plenty of pictures of Endeavour's ascent from 64,000 feet.

The Senatobia-1 balloon experiment — organized by Quest for Stars, the Challenger Center for Space Science Education and the Coalition for Space Exploration — followed up on a similar operation that tracked Discovery's last launch in February. In the picture above, you can see Endeavour's plume of exhaust as the shuttle arcs spaceward.

The balloon was sent up from Beverly Hills, Fla., hours in advance of Endeavour's launch, and took video with an array of high-definition digital cameras as it ascended. Even after the launch pictures were taken, Senatobia-1 continued to rise until it reached an altitude of 95,000 feet. Then the balloon popped and the payload parachuted back to Earth, its location tracked via GPS signals. Searchers found the payload stuck up in a tree in a nursery in Pierson, Fla., 130 miles from the launch site.

"This time we were sitting there waiting for it," Quest for Stars spokesman Bobby Russell told me today.

Senatobia-1 is named after the community in Mississippi that suggested "Endeavour" as the name for NASA's youngest shuttle, which was built as a shuttle fleet replacement after the 1986 Challenger tragedy. Yet another connection to Endeavour was included as part of the balloon payload: a list of signatures from students in Senatobia, wishing a speedy recovery to wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the wife of Endeavour commander Mark Kelly.

A shuttle launch costs hundreds of millions of dollars, but Senatobia-1's launch cost much less. "For under five grand you could do basically what we did," Russell said.

He said additional videos and still imagery would be made available via the Quest for Stars website, Twitpic gallery, Facebook page and YouTube page this week. Here's a sample from today, showing the payload's freefall:

Next up is a balloon launch from the San Diego area, scheduled for next week, and then comes the big summer project: construction of the "Strato-Shuttle," a balloon-borne unmanned aerial vehicle with a 5- to 6-foot wingspan. The idea is that the balloon rises up to an altitude of more than 120,000 feet, and then releases the UAV to fly back to earth under remote control. Russell is recruiting student interns and plans to test the system in Mojave, Calif. — the same locale where the pros are working on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo and XCOR Aerospace's Lynx.

"That's the next generation," Russell said.

More amazing views from on high:

• Awesome photo of shuttle from airplane

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

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Black-billed magpies are among the few wild animals that have been shown to recognize humans.

Add the black-billed magpie to the list of birds that can recognize individual humans who pose a threat, scolding them when they approach, according to a new study.

The birds are part of the crow family, among the most intelligent animals. Previous studies have shown, for example, that crows can wield tools to find food and American crows have been shown to recognize humans who threaten their nest or captured them.

Until now, however, experimental evidence was lacking that magpies would do the same.

This changed in 2009 when Won Young Lee, a doctoral student at Seoul National University in Korea, was constantly taking eggs out of magpie nests for a long-term survey project and started to be followed and scolded by the nest owners.

He tried to fool the magpie by giving his cap to another person. "This did not work. When I moved away, the bird followed me rather than the fellow observer wearing my cap," he said in a news release. 

The researchers followed up on this finding with a controlled experiment. A pair of humans, a climber who went up to nests and a non-climber, wearing the same clothes, were presented to the magpies. All the magpies showed aggression to the climbers, but not the non-climbers.

The researchers suggest the birds learn to recognize the threatening humans by vision, learning over time to distinguish individual faces. If so, magpies would be most likely to recognize humans in urban settings, a theory the team plans to test.

The findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Animal Cognition.

Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

The orbits of planets in the Gliese 581 system are compared to those of our own solar system. The Gliese 581 star has about 30 percent the mass of our sun, and the outermost planet is closer to its star than we are to the sun. Gliese 581d might be able to sustain liquid water on its surface.

The case is building about the habitability of a planet orbiting a red dwarf star about 20-light years away from Earth, according to a new climate modeling study.

The planet, Gliese 581d, is one of a handful of planets orbiting the star Gliese 581. When it was discovered in 2007, astronomers thought it was likely too cold for liquid water, and thus life.

The new study, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggests high concentrations of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere could keep things warm enough for liquid water to be sustained at the surface.

The finding falls on the heels of a similar atmospheric modeling studies published that have reached a similar conclusion.

Atmospheric collapse
However, those studies were based on simple simulations that couldn't determine whether or not the atmosphere would collapse due to the fact the planet likely has a permanent day and night side.

In such a situation, the night side could be cold enough to freeze out the atmosphere, ruining any prospects for a habitable climate.

The new study uses a model that simulates the atmosphere and surface in three-dimensions, much like models used to study climate change on Earth.

To their surprise, the researchers found that with a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere — a likely scenario on such a large planet — the climate of Gliese 581d is stable against collapse and warm enough to have oceans, clouds and rainfall.

The planet "will have a stable atmosphere and surface liquid water for a wide range of plausible cases, making it the first confirmed super-Earth … in the habitable zone," the team, led by Robin Wordsworth at the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, concludes in the journal.

Rayleigh scattering 
A key factor of the result is a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, which makes the sky blue on Earth. In our solar system, the effect limits the amount of sunlight a thick atmosphere can absorb because a large amount of blue light is scattered back to space.

Since starlight from Gliese 581 is red, however, it is almost unaffected and can penetrate deep into the atmosphere and heat up the planet thanks to the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide.

The simulations also show that daylight heating is efficiently redistributed across the planet by the atmosphere, preventing atmospheric collapse on the night side or the poles.

If the planet is indeed habitable, the researchers note that it would be a strange place: the dense air and thick clouds would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight.

The Gliese 581 solar system also holds another candidate for habitability, 581g, which was announced last year. However, whether or not that planet actually exists remains up for debate.

The new study on 581d " is important because it's the first time climate modelers have proved that the planet is potentially habitable, and all observers agree that the exoplanet exists," Wordsworth told the British news agency Press Association. 

"The Gliese system is particularly exciting to us as it's very close to Earth, relatively speaking. So with future generations of telescopes, we'll be able to search for alien life on Gliese 581d directly."

Wordswoth added in an email to me that finding a potentially habitable planet that is so unlike Earth bodes well for the search for life in general.

"I think it's becoming clearer with every discovery we make in exoplanet science that the variety of worlds out there in the universe is going to be far greater than the few examples we are used to from our solar system," he said.

More on the Gliese 581 system: 

• Alien planet looks just right for life
• Scientists find most earthlike planet yet
• Scientists find lightest alien planet yet 
• R.I.P possibly habitable planet 581g? Not so fast, co-discoverer says 
• How to find life on an alien planet? 
• Alien planet may be in the habitable zone after all 
• Hopes dashed for life on distant planet 

Rodger Bosch / AFP - Getty Images file

Physicist Stephen Hawking delivers a lecture in South Africa in 2008. In an interview with The Guardian newspaper, he called the notion of heaven a "fairy story."

Stephen Hawking, the famous British physicist, called the notion of heaven a "fairy story" in an interview with The Guardian newspaper published today.

The physicist, 69, who was diagnosed with A.L.S. at age 21, made the heaven comment in response to a question about his fears of death.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he told the newspaper.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven of afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark."

The comments are seen as going beyond those in his 2010 book, "The Grand Design," which stirred up passions with the observation that science can explain the universe's origin without invoking God.

Hawking has far outlived most people who have A.L.S., also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, producing important cosmological research and writing books. His "A Brief History of Time," published in 1988, has sold more than 9 million copies.

The Guardian interview is the latest the scientist has given to news media in recent weeks. It is published the day before he is scheduled to address the question "Why are we here?" at the Google Zeitgeist meeting in London.

In the talk, according to The Guardian, he will argue that the tiny fluctuations in the very early universe became the seeds from which galaxies, stars, and ultimately human life emerged.

"Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in," he said.

More on Stephen Hawking:

• Hawking says God's not needed. So?
• Do we need to get off Earth by 2110?
• Hawking goes zero-G: 'Space, here I come'
• Aliens may pose risk to Earth, Hawking says
• Up close with Dr. Hawking

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).