NASA's Cassini orbiter has captured another close-up view of the Saturnian moon Helene, clearing the way for a global map of the 20-mile-wide "ice queen."

The spacecraft got its latest look at the icy moon on Saturday from a distance of 4,330 miles (6,968 kilometers), more than a year after its closest-ever Helene flyby in March 2010. This time, the pictures provided sunlit views of the moon's Saturn-facing side, improving on last year's imagery. Taken together, these pictures will enable astronomers to finish a global map that could shed additional light on the grooved, pockmarked moon's impact history, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in today's image advisory.

Helene sticks out among Saturn's more than 60 moons for a couple of reasons: First of all, it is gravitationally bound in the same orbit as another, much larger icy moon called Dione. This makes it one of four "Trojan moons" in the Saturnian system, along with Polydeuces (which is also bound to Dione) and Telesto and Calypso (both bound to Tethys).

Helene's surface also reveals a network of gully-like features that may have been created by landslides (or, in this case, dustslides or iceslides). Working up a detailed map of the moon should help astronomers get a better grip on the gullies' genesis.

For more about the latest flyby, check out this posting from the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla. And for more about Saturn's moons, check out these recent reports:

• Scientists bid to float their boat on Titan's seas
• Enceladus sparks auroral show on Saturn
• Can you spot the Saturnian moons?
• A double scoop of Saturn's moons
• Slideshow: Cassini's greatest hits

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

USDA

When humans first started to farm, we became shorter and less healthy. The effect didn't last forever, especially in the developed world following the industrialization of food systems, the researchers say. Shown here are wheat fields in eastern Washington.

People got shorter and sicker everywhere in the world when they started to farm, according to a recent study that suggests the transition to an agricultural lifestyle came at a biological cost.

The transition occurred at different times in different places around the world beginning about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, an arc of land spanning modern day Egypt to the border between Iraq and Iran.

As people gave up the diverse diet of foraged foods and settled on eating a few staple food crops they "experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress," Amanda Mummert, an anthropology graduate student at Emory University, said in a news release.

Compounding the problem, growth in population density spurred by agricultural settlements led to an increase in unsanitary conditions ripe for spreading infectious diseases and the transmission of novel viruses from livestock to humans, she added.

Eventually, this trend reversed itself and average heights for most populations began to increase. This is most evident in the 75 years or so since the industrialization of agriculture in the developed world.

The finding is based on a review of skeletal data on populations from various corners of the world, including China, Southeast Asia, and North and South America. Mummert and colleagues looked at skeletal height as well as dental cavities, bone density, and other indicators of health.

"Culturally, we’re agricultural chauvinists. We tend to think that producing food is always beneficial, but the picture is much more complex than that," Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, co-author of the review, said in the statement.

The findings support a theory he proposed in the 1984 book, "Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture," which showed a decline in health and rising nutritional diseases as humans shifted from foraging to agriculture. 

So, if the transition to agriculture was bad for our health, why did we do it? 

The geneticist Spencer Wells argues in his 2010 book, "Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization,"  that the transition was driven by a cold snap between 12,700 and 11,500 years ago called the Younger Dryas. 

In the Near East, the cold spell was also a dry spell, which was bad news for hunter-gatherers there who had settled some of the world's first villages and subsisted on easily foraged fields of wheat and barley. 

The arid climate meant the grains clung to moist niches in the hills, not the valleys where the hunter-gatherers settled. The commute to the hills to forage grains was unsustainable. So someone — most likely a woman since they did most of the gathering — Wells argues, had the brilliant idea to plant grains closer to home. 

"Her first efforts must have been rewarded with admiration from the entire village," he writes. "Virtually overnight, humans had gone from being controlled by their food supply to controlling it." 

More on agriculture, health, and evolution:

• Humans still evolving as our brains shrink 
• Cow milk closely mimics that of human breast 
• Prehistoric feasting hall found 
• How climate change kills society 

University of California, San Diego

For smell-o-vision technology to work, an electrical current is sent through the lead wires to heat an aqueous solution. The heat builds pressure, causing a tiny hole in an elastomer to open, releasing the odor, which is measured by the detector.

Imagine sitting around the house watching the tube with a case of the munchies as images of a steamy, cheesy, pepperoni pizza appear on the screen and its scent fills the air. When a phone number flashes for home delivery, would you call?

It's a question marketing departments may want to seriously consider if a technology that incorporates an odor-generating device into televisions ever moves from the lab to the living room.

For now, the concept of smell-o-vision remains firmly rooted in the lab, but researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are reporting that they've successfully demonstrated the feasibility of generating thousands of odors, at will, in a device compact enough to fit on the back of a TV or phone.

The device, arranged on an X-Y axis, consists of thousands of controllers — scents in aqueous solution such as ammonia which emit an odorous gas when heated through a thin metal wire. As heat and odor pressure build, a tiny compressed hole in the elastomer is opened, releasing the odor.

Using the X-Y matrix system, the researchers say, enables them the produce 10,000 different odors with 100 controllers on each axis.

"Instantaneously generated fragrances or odors would match the scene shown on a TV or cell phone, and that's the idea," Sungho Jin, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, said in a news release.

The researchers built the proof-of-concept device in collaboration with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in Korea. A paper on the technology was published online June 14 in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

The system was tested with two commercially available perfumes, "Live by Jennifer Lopez," and "Passion by Elizabeth Taylor." In both cases, a human tester was able to smell and distinguish the scents within 12 inches of the test chamber.

Whether or not audiences and consumers will respond to the technology are questions for another phase of the study, according to the UCSD news release. For now the question is whether it's doable. The research says yes, it is.

So, you, the consumer who likes to sit around the house and watch the tube, do you really want to smell it too? Feel free to weigh in with your vote or comment below.

More on the science and tech of smell:

• Smell that? Automated scents hit the cineplex
• This cookie's taste is all in your head
• What does an Egyptian pharaoh smell like?
• Scientists figure out origins of sea smell 
• Why does your smartphone smell like Jelly Belly?

Nikola Solic / Reuters file

An exhibit at the Neanderthal Museum in Croatia shows a male working near other family members in a cave.

Research into the roots of our species suggests that stronger bonds between fathers and their children played a role in shaping society as we know it — which is a worthwhile subject for reflection on this Father's Day weekend. Some anthropologists even suggest that current social trends could bring us closer to the good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering.

Although most moms wish the man in the house would take more of a role in childraising, things could be worse. Males take on the job of parental care in only 5 percent of mammalian species, according to research cited in "Fatherhood: Evolution and Parental Behavior." In that book, anthropologists Peter Gray of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and Kermyt Anderson of the University of Oklahoma tick off several facts about the evolution of fatherhood:

• Men tend to spend more time with young children in hunter-gatherer societies than they do in most other societies, particularly ones in which men make a living herding livestock. "Fathers might have sex-specific reasons for spending time with children, for instance, teaching boys to hunt," Gray and Anderson wrote in The Chronicle Review.
• Men tend to invest more in children if they are the biological parents rather than the stepparents. "Spending time on offspring who do not carry any of your genes seems counterintuitive," the anthropologists said.
• Some studies have shown fathers tend to have lower testosterone levels than men without children in the same society. "This could be picking up the behavioral transition men undergo as fathers as they move away from some degree of investment in courting women, seeking new mates, competing with other males, and begin to settle into a more family-oriented outlook, including spending time directly with a young child," Gray told the Boston Globe.
• Paternal care is largely absent among our primate cousins, and the fossil record suggests that the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees were similarly fatherhood-deficient.

So what changed? Anthropologists say the rise of male-female pair bonding was a key factor. "We see that process getting under way around 2 million years ago but becoming more pronounced around a half a million years ago," Gray and Anderson write. With pair bonding, males had a bigger stake in defending their mates as well as their genetic progeny.

When fathers invested more time in nurturing the family group, the mothers didn't have to expend as much energy — and that opened the way to more frequent births and bigger families. At least that's the hypothesis advanced by Northwestern University's Lee T. Gettler in the journal American Anthropologist. That, in turn, led to a population explosion among the early members of the Homo genus.

How males gathered together
Other research suggests that early humans diverged from chimps in the organization of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups of chimpanzees are generally organized along kinship lines, and there's a high level of aggression between those kin groups. But Arizona State University anthropologist Kim Hill and his colleagues reported in the journal Science that today's human hunter-gatherer groups are more mixed up, genetically speaking.

Such intermixing, coupled with pair bonding, might well explain why intergroup relations go more smoothly among humans than they do among chimps (even though we still have a long way to go). A father who recognized his son in a neighboring group would be less likely to strike out against him, which would open the way for larger tribal networks. (Thanks to Blogging the Bust's James Lavin for making the connection to fatherhood.)

Last month, University of Colorado anthropologist Sandi Copeland and her colleagues published a paper in the journal Nature suggesting that hominid males tended to be stay-at-home types who stuck together as far back as 2 million years ago. The researchers' conclusions, based on an analysis of fossil teeth found in South African caves, lend weight to the idea that cooperative behavior among males was one of the hallmarks of hominid society.

The takeaway message is that fatherhood and male bonding took on a higher profile in the formation of hominid hunter-gatherer societies, even before the rise of Homo sapiens — and that those aspects contributed to the organization of early human society, on a scale that could be larger than that found among other primates to this day.

Modern-day message
So what does that mean for modern-day fathers? You could argue that we're taking on more of the aspects of a hunter-gatherer social setting thanks to some of the trends we're seeing today — more women in the workplace, more stay-at-home dads, blurred roles in childrearing, a departure from industrial work patterns, even increased connectedness through mobile devices.

Gray told the Globe that today's society may be friendlier to fatherhood than the family setting in the 1960s, portrayed so vividly (and unflatteringly) in shows such as "Mad Men." In short, this is not your father's fatherhood.

"One thing presented in a show like 'Mad Men' that was also a common family pattern in the baby-boom era in the U.S. is this sexual division of labor," Gray said. "Women were at home and didn't work. That does not apply well to an evolutionary backdrop. Among hunter-gatherers, women and men are both working, but in ways compatible with having young kids."

Has fatherhood evolved, or are we still cavemen when it comes to parenting? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below ... and have a great Father's Day!

More about the science of fatherhood:

• Meet the mice with two dads
• New dads get baby blues, too
• Role of American dads is changing
• Dads get a hormone boost from child care

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

ESA / DLR / FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Three frames from the series of 104 taken by Mars Express during the Phobos–Jupiter conjunction on 1 June 2011.

Alignments of planets, moons and stars as seen from Earth always get us excited. This close-up view of the Martian moon Phobos lined up with Jupiter ups the ante – it was seen by a spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Phobos is only 23 kilometers wide, whereas Jupiter is 142,000 kilometers across, but at the moment of the alignment on June 1, the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter was only 11,389 kilometers away from the lumpy moon. Jupiter was a further 529 million kilometers away.

The High Resolution Stereo Camera on Mars Express was kept fixed on Jupiter for the conjunction, ensuring that the planet remained static in the frame. The operation returned a total of 104 images over a period of 68 seconds, all of them taken using the camera’s super-resolution channel.

These images have been stitched together as a movie, seen below.

Beyond the cool factor of the chance alignment, the observations are helping astronomers refine their knowledge about the orbit of Phobos, which varies with time because of its small mass and extreme proximity to Mars, the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains.

Mars Express is studying Phobos to help out the planned Russian Phobos-Grunt mission to land a spacecraft on the moon and snag a sample for return to Earth, which is due for launch in November.

More on Phobos:

• Orbiter gets a fresh 3-D look at Phobos 
• Martian moon in spotlight 
• Martian moons pictured together for first time 
• Phobos likely forged by catastrophic blast 

Swapping information between your computer and smart phone may get a whole lot easier with an app that lets you do just that with your phone's camera. 

The app, called Deep Shot, was designed by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, a graduate student in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, while he working as a summer intern at Google with research scientist Yang Li. 

The app eliminates the redundancy of looking up an address of a restaurant using Google Maps on your computer, for example, and then retyping it on your smart phone as you drive to your lunch date. Instead, just take a picture of the map on your computer screen with your phone's camera and the phone automatically opens up its mapping application tuned to the corresponding data and off you go.

Now, let's say the lunch was great and you want to write a review on Yelp. You open up the website on your phone but realize that typing the review on the tiny keyboard is tedious. So, point the phone camera at your computer. The phone recognizes the target computer screen and opens the Yelp webpage there so you can type the review with your computer keyboard.

The technology exploits the fact that many computer applications use a standard format called uniform resource identifier, or URI. For example, on Google Maps, the URI is the string of code that contains information on your starting and end points and the size of the map on the window.

Deep Shot, which must be installed all the devices you want talking to each other, uses vision algorithms to identify what's on the screen. The software then extracts and transmits the corresponding URI to the phone. What's more, since URI is standard, it can transfer data from one mapping application on a computer to a different mapping application on a phone.

Since Chang developed the application while at Google, the company owns the rights to it. Google has yet to make the system publicly available. When it does, Chang will be the first to install it, according to an MIT news release. "It just makes everything so much easier," he said.

To see the app in action, check out the video above.

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).

A hundred years from now, will we be assimilated by the machines? Or will we assimilate them? These are the kinds of issues facing International Business Machines as the company begins its second 100 years.

Right now, most folks are thinking about the past 100 years at IBM, which is celebrating the centennial of its founding on Thursday. But for Bernard Meyerson, the company's vice president of innovation, it's all about the next century.

"That's pretty much what we think about," Meyerson told me today.

Meyerson has plenty to look back on, including his own not-so-small part in IBM's past innovations. When his cell phone dropped the connection during our telephone conversation, he called back and casually mentioned that he had a hand in creating the transistors built into that cell phone. And when I asked him to explain, he said, "I actually invented the technology known as silicon-germanium."

It turns out that IBM has played a behind-the-scenes role in all sorts of technologies, ranging from semiconductor development to barcodes to Wi-Fi. "IBM is a funny company," Meyerson said. "We don't force you to put a little sticker on anything that says, 'We're the smart guys.'"

But enough about the past: What about the future? "Going forward, you have tremendous opportunities," particularly when it comes to making sense of the huge databases that are being built up in all sorts of fields, Meyerson said. For example, imagine a system that can take medical records from the 285 million people around the world with diabetes, anonymize those records and analyze them, looking for potential new treatments or preventive measures.

"The fact is, there is no mechanism today that could do that, and the reason is that medical data is unstructured," he said. There's little consistency in how the records are kept, and medical conditions might be described in different ways by different doctors.

When you put together the volumes of data and the numbers of people that have to be covered in these massive, unstructured data sets, the figures mount up to quintillions of bytes. That's the challenge facing new types of computing tools — for example, the Watson supercomputer, which won a highly publicized "Jeopardy" quiz-show match earlier this year. Now Watson is being put to work on a tougher task: making sense of medical records, which is just the kind of job Meyerson has in mind.

Still other challenges await. Watson-style computers could digest the millions of data points involved in tracking the flow of highway traffic, then develop models to predict where the tie-ups could arise before they actually happen. The computers of the next century will have to handle a wide range of "big data" challenges, ranging from climate modeling to natural-language search engines for multimedia.

Meyerson doesn't expect Watson to answer that challenge completely. A hundred years from now, Watson will almost certainly be considered a quaint antique, much like the tabulating machines that were made back in 1911.

"Watson specifically is not the issue, as much as the combination of Watson's ability to interpret natural language, the capacity to store 'big data' and apply data analytics to come up with solutions for society," he said. "In the absence of natural language, you're going to have a short, unhappy life attempting this work. Without that key ingredient, how are you going to take the interaction of humans and machines to the next level and make it easy?"

Paramount Pictures

"Star Trek" captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is fitted with gizmos for a fictional Borg transformation. The blending of humans and hardware will probably be more artful in real life by 2111.

What will the next level be in the year 2111? "Honestly, at 100 years I'm genuinely unsure," Meyerson said. The past century has shown that the pace of technological advancement can be highly variable, depending on what kinds of breakthroughs come to the fore. But if Meyerson had to bet on one particular game-changing technology, it would be coming up with a direct interface between computing circuits and the human brain.

"If it turns out that there is a very natural way to communicate data back and forth without being obtrusive, then the whole world changes," he told me. This wouldn't be a Borg-like assimilation, in which humans look increasingly like machines. Rather, the machines would blend into the human body.

Does that sound like a grand dream for the next century? Or a nightmare? Feel free to chime in with your comments below.

More about the future:

• Hits and misses in the five-tech forecast
• Physics turns from fission to the future
• Take a test drive through the next 100 years
• Deep thinkers speculate about the next 50 years
• Futurist Ray Kurzweil reaches for immortality

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alessandro Bianchi / Reuters

The moon looms in partial eclipse, framed by an arch at Rome's ancient Colosseum on Wednesday.

If you're in North America, you may have had no idea that an exceptional lunar eclipse took place this afternoon. But most of the rest of the world got in on the spectacle, and you can, too, after the fact.

This eclipse was notable for several reasons: The moon went right through the center of Earth's shadow, which means the total phase went on for 100 minutes — the longest duration since the year 2000. Also, last week's volcanic eruption in Chile was thought to have put enough sulfur in the air to lend a dusky, coppery color to the moon during totality. The reddish shade certainly didn't disappoint, as you can see in these pictures.

Phases of the eclipse were visible from wide swaths of Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia as well as the Indian Ocean and South America. Pretty much every major land mass in the world, in fact, except for North America and Greenland. If you're hankering to see a total lunar eclipse with your own eyes, the next opportunity comes on Dec. 10, when the show will be visible from the U.S. West Coast as well as Australia, the Pacific and most of Asia.

Jack Guez / AFP - Getty Images

The moon rises over the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv before a total lunar eclipse.

Marko Drobnjakovic / AP

A partially eclipsed moon rises into the skies over Belgrade, Serbia, on Wednesday.

Darrin Zammit Lupi / Reuters

A partial lunar eclipse is seen over the village of Zejtun, lit up for its parish church feast of Saint Catherine, in the south of Malta on Wednesday.

Jack Guez / AFP - Getty Images

This sequence of images shows the progress of the lunar eclipse as seen from Tel Aviv.

Geert Vanden Wijngaert / AP

A lunar eclipse is seen through the Atomium monument in Brussels, which was built for a world's fair in 1958.

Bullit Marquez / AP

Earth casts its shadow over the moon during a total lunar eclipse as seen from Manila in the Philippines before dawn Thursday.

Ciro Fusco / EPA

The lunar eclipse looms over the Castel dell Ovo (Egg Castle) in Naples, Italy.

Ahmad Yusni / EPA

Malaysian government officials peer at the eclipsed moon through telescopes in Putrajaya early Thursday,

Tim Winborne / Reuters

A lunar eclipse is visible early Thursday amid cables on the Anzac Bridge in Sydney, Australia.

More about eclipses:

• Interactive: What causes a lunar eclipse?
• Nine cool facts about lunar eclipses
• Greatest hits from a partial lunar eclipse
• Marvel at the 'Midnight Sun' eclipse

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Univ. of Illinois / Lemelson-MIT

University of Illinois materials scientist John Rogers is the 2011 winner of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize.

The man behind a stretchy heart monitor, an electronic eye camera, and a solar energy technology that is potentially price-competitive with coal has bagged a $500,000 prize for his creative, inventive mind.

John Rogers credits a fortunate upbringing by a physicist dad and poet mom, as well as a team of talented colleagues, for making him one of the most successful midcareer scientists in the country and recipient of this year's Lemelson-MIT Prize.

The blend, he says, has allowed him to think imaginatively — and then leverage his creative ideas within the constraints of practical utility. The result is a string of inventions with applications from life-saving heart surgeries to producing clean, green energy at an industrial scale.

The common thread is his focus on materials. "That is core to everything we do — new materials or new geometries for materials that open up new engineering opportunities," the professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois told me today.

Electrified nature
Much of what Rogers does is come up with ways to allow electronics to mimic nature, and use nature as the inspiration for new product designs. The first category is realized in his so-called biointegrated electronics, which are flexible bits of circuitry that mold to body tissue.

John Rogers

This balloon catheter, with collections of sensors and ablation electrodes on its surface, is designed for minimally invasive treatment of certain types of arrhythmias.

Most of the electronic devices available today are built on rigid, flat surfaces of brittle semiconductor wafers — a platform that's not well-suited for integration with the human body.

"The human body doesn't look like a silicon wafer. It is curvilinear. It is soft. It is elastic. It is moist," he said.

His team bridges the gaps between mechanics and form, between conventional electronics and the human body, by redesigning the electronics to look like the body.

This has led to soft, flexible devices that can be integrated into tools used for medical diagnosis. For example, human trials will soon start on a device that integrated electronics with an inflatable balloon that is threaded into a heart, pumped up and then used to measure the electrical properties of cardiac tissue.

Another concept is to mount the electronics onto the surface of the brain in such a way that the circuitry gets inside the folds and crevices to locate specific regions associated with epileptic seizures, for example.

"You can also imagine all kinds of physiological status monitors, monitoring brain waves, or EKG, muscle activity, and so on, and in that realm I think that there are real opportunities in health and fitness," he added.

In fact, Rogers' company, mc10, has partnered with Reebok to produce a line of wearable monitoring equipment, though he wouldn't spare any more details on the specifics.

Electric eye
Nature — specifically, the mammalian eye — is the inspiration for his electric-eye camera. Our eyes, he said, are "spectacularly sophisticated" imaging devices, but are relatively simple compared to the camera equipment used to make professional-quality photographs.

For the camera, he put photoreceptors on a hemispherical surface similar in size and shape to the human eye. The result is a wide-angle view in a compact package that gives the same sharpness and resolution as studio-quality photographs.

Lemelson-MIT Program

An electronic "eyeball camera" consists of a hemispherical photodetector array integrated with a simple imaging lens.

For now, the technology is being used primarily for night-vision cameras, a niche market where his lenses should trim weight and bulk from the devices currently on the market. The future, though, is likely in your pocket: "Imagine a cell phone camera that takes studio-quality pictures," he said. "That's the vision."

Cheap, green electricity
The work on stretchable electronics has also led Rogers in the direction of producing clean, green electricity with a photovoltaic module based on teeny, tiny solar cells that, when wired up together, have the potential to compete with coal on price.

Lemelson-MIT Program

Spherical glass lenses focus sunlight onto a collection of tiny solar cells.

Each cell is the size of grain of sand that is wired with others into an array. On top of each cell is a tiny glass lens that focuses the sunlight on the cell.

"In this way you can build a very lo- cost and highly efficient module that can efficiently convert sunlight into electrical power," said Rogers, who co-founded another company, Semprius, to market the technology.

Tucson Electric Power Company is trying out an array in the Arizona desert. According to Rogers, an independent consultant has concluded that within five years the technology can be scaled up and compete with coal on price.

All this creative work earned Rogers the $500,000 prize today. He will accept it and speak about his accomplishments at EurekaFest at MIT from June 15 to 18.

More stories on the Rogers' work and the prize:

• An eyeball camera for cell phone --with zoom
• Stretchable LEDs could mean better medical implants
• Breakthrough makes LED lights more versatile
• Biotech pioneer wins invention prize 
• 7 award-winning innovations 

Museum of Mathematics

An artist's conception shows the Museum of Mathematics, which is slated to open in Manhattan in 2012.

The man behind an innovative interactive museum devoted exclusively to mathematics promises that it will be a "place where it's safe to be a geek" — but also something more: a place where non-geeks can experience the true joy of math.

"There's this whole force of fun and beauty that most people don't get a chance to experience," said Glen Whitney, a 42-year-old mathematician who left his job at a hedge fund three years ago to start up the Museum of Mathematics.

Whitney's dream is taking shape even now in a 19,000-square-foot space at 11 E. 26th St. in Manhattan: He and the rest of the MoMath team have already raised $22 million toward their capital goal of $30 million, and the museum is on track to open in late 2012. But they're not waiting until then to spread the good word: The museum organizers have been sending a traveling exhibit called the "Math Midway" around the country for the past couple of years. (The exhibit was featured at this month's World Science Festival in New York and opens at the Discovery Center for Science and Technology in Southern California on Saturday.)

They're also open-sourcing the exhibit plans so that any museum around the world can put up their own version of a MoMath display. "The mission of the museum is to create the greatest amount of exciting, hands-on, informal mathematical opportunities that are out there in the world," Whitney told me.

The Math Midway is serving as a sort of beta test for the opportunities that will be offered when the actual museum opens. One of the biggest crowd-pleasers so far is a square-wheeled tricycle that's built to ride smoothly on a scalloped track. "There's a mathematical principle that says there's a road for every wheel," Whitney explained. The trike illustrates how that principle, which involves geometric shapes known as catenary curves, can work in the real world.

"We already know that people will line up for this," Whitney said. "It's become a bit of an icon for the Math Museum."

Another exhibit features puzzle pieces that are designed to fit together on cylinders, spheres and a shape that's curved like the mouth of a trumpet. "It basically lets you see how the curvature of the space you're in affects the kinds of patterns you can make," Whitney said. On a flat surface, you can fit six equilateral triangles around a single point ... but on the horn-shaped surface, you can fit seven.

"In every exhibit, we try to pack a surprise punch," Whitney said.

Although the museum is designed to appeal to all ages, the team is paying special attention to how well the exhibits go over with students in the fourth through the eighth grade.

"That's our sweet spot, for a very simple reason," Whitney said. "If you look at the trajectory of students going through the curriculum, things seem more or less fine up to the fourth grade. That period from the fourth to the eight grade is where we see a decline in the engagement of the students. Why are we opening a math museum in the first place? It's because we see cultural issues in this country."

International studies have shown that 15-year-old students in the U.S. perform well below the global average when it comes to math — specifically, 25th place out of 34 countries in 2009, when the Program for International Student Assessment's most recent test was conducted. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results were "an absolute wakeup call for America."

Whitney has been awake and aware of this problem for a long time. He believes the standard sequence of math classes is way too limiting, and fails to engage students as much as they could be engaged. "Mathematics is actually much broader and richer than the list of topics that one reaches through the normal curriculum," he said.

He hopes the Museum of Mathematics can play an integral role in turning the tide. Will the exhibits make math geeks out of non-geeks? Whitney doesn't obsess too much over those labels.

"We just want to create a place where it's OK to really love math and be enthusiastic and be engaged with it," he told me. "If you want to call that being a geek, then that's a geek. What we don't want is for students to end up three or four years later disavowing any interest in those beautiful surprises because they see signals telling them, 'Oh, that's not something we should be talking about.'"

Is it going to be a hard sell to get kids to go to a math museum? Or is this just what the doctor ordered? (Yes, Whitney has his Ph.D. in mathematical logic from UCLA.) Feel free to weigh in with your comments below. 

Extra credit: While you're waiting for the museum to open, here are some recently published books that put an unorthodox spin on math:

• "The Mathematics of Life": Ian Stewart explains how mathematicians and biologists are working together on some of the most difficult problems the human race has ever tackled — including the unraveling of the genome, the structure of viruses, the spread of disease, the interaction of environmental factors and the origin of life itself.
• "One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics": David Berlinski goes back to basics and explains the foundation of arithmetic, right down to the origins of the plus and minus signs. But don't get the idea that Berlinski is dumbing down the subject: This book touches upon the contributions by David Hilbert, Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell and other brainy people through the ages.
• "Loving + Hating Mathematics: Challenging the Myths of Mathematical Life": Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner delve into the lifestyles of the not-necessarily-rich but famous mathematicians, in an effort to explain "why the most rational of human endeavors is at the same time one of the most emotional."

Looking for geeky places to go? Check out this report from the author of "The Geek Atlas," this roundup of top tech destinations and this list of shrines to innovation. 

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The team behind NASA’s Dawn probe has released a video showing the asteroid Vesta spinning in space with a mysterious shadowy spot on its surface. It's really just the beginning of a weeks-long stream of images climaxing with Dawn's rendezvous with Vesta next month.

Dawn has been en route to Vesta for almost four years, but the $357 million mission is just now starting to get good. When the 5.4-foot-long (1.6-meter-long) spacecraft enters orbit on July 16, it will mark the first time any spacecraft has come so close to an asteroid so big. Earlier probes have landed on smaller asteroids, during NASA's NEAR-Shoemaker mission to Eros in 2001 and Japan's Hayabusa sample-return mission to Itokawa, which ended last year. But with a mean diameter of 329 miles (529 kilometers), Vesta is so big that some astronomers have wondered whether it ought to be classified as a dwarf planet.)

In terms of mass, Vesta is second only to the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt. Dawn is due to spend a year studying Vesta, and then will move on to a rendezvous with Ceres in 2015.

Right now, Dawn is about 170,500 miles (274,400 kilometers) from Vesta and closing in at a speed of 370 mph (170 meters per second). The images released today roughly match the best pictures previously taken of the asteroid by the Hubble Space Telescope. Twenty pictures, taken for navigation purposes over the course of a half-hour on June 1, were assembled in sequence to create the video you see above. One of the most notable features is a dark spot that rolls across the field of view from left to right.

"Like strangers in a strange land, we're looking for familiar landmarks," the University of Maryland's Jian-Yang Li, a member of the Dawn science team, said in a news release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The shadowy spot is one of those — it appears to match a feature, known as 'Feature B,' from images of Vesta taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope."

The images also give you a sense of Vesta's irregular shape, which is due to a huge crater at the asteroid's south pole.

All these features will come into sharper focus in the weeks leading up to the rendezvous. NASA says it will be releasing images from Dawn's approach on a weekly basis, which should come as a relief to planetary scientists and space fans. For weeks they've been urging the Dawn team to release more such imagery, and now Vesta is finally ready for its close-up.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET: I had Dawn's position with respect to Ceres and Vesta scrambled up for a little while, but now I have the correct current figures. 

More about asteroids and other worlds:

• Could life on Earth have come from Ceres?
• Vesta: Scientists find a protoplanet's guts
• Pallas: Protoplanet frozen in time
• Smorgasbord includes Vesta fiesta
• Interactive: The new solar system

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Stan Badz / Getty Images Contributor

Tiger Woods studies his putt at the 12th green during the second round of the AT&T National at Aronimink Golf Club on July 2, 2010, in Newtown Square, Pa.

Leave it to a golfing physicist armed with geometry to give all us duffers some simple advice that should make more of our putts fall.

The advice is this: instead of just lining up the putt at hand, take a little extra time and determine the target line for several equidistant putts a few steps to the left and right of the ball. 

"What you'll notice is that those target lines all sort of converge at the same place," Robert Grober, a physicist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., told me today. "It is as simple as that."

To sink the putt, aim for this area.

"The advantage of this methodology is that it requires no quantitative calculation, and thus no exact knowledge of the speed and slope of the green and the length of the putt," he writes in a paper posted on the Physics arXiv website.

All that calculation was done by Grober, a world expert on the science of golf, and detailed for those who want to get into the nitty gritty in the paper, "The Geometry of Putting on a Planar Surface."

He found that if all the equidistant putts in a circle around the ball are taken into consideration, the target maps out to a little diamond-shaped area on the fall line. And this diamond gets bigger the longer the putt and the steeper the slope.

"But all that's really important to know is that all the putts nearby are related to each other," he told me. "A few steps to the left, a few steps to the right, they all have a target point which you can align yourself."

While the advice is simple, Grober noted that even professional golfers don't seem to do it. Instead, they tend to only line up the putt at hand.

So, the world's best golfers might want to consider this advice as they get ready to tee off Thursday at the US Open.

Likewise, President Barack Obama could use the pointer when he takes on low handicapper House Speaker John Boehner in a widely anticipated round on Saturday.

More stories on the science of golf:

• Spacewalker takes orbital golf shot 
• Nanotech used to make … a better golf ball
• Study: Golf courses make good homes for birds
• Why a red shirt helped Tiger Woods 

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).

Fred Ullrich / Fermilab

Two experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider have come to different conclusions about a scientific mystery.

Two months ago, physicists on the CDF detector team at Fermilab's Tevatron collider, just outside Chicago, reported a mysterious "bump" in the distribution of data from their proton-antiproton collisions, hinting at a non-standard twist in the Standard Model that has governed particle physics for decades.

The anomaly could have been caused by a glitch in the analysis of results from the CDF detector, or it could have been caused by a previously undetected breed of subatomic particle. If the latter turned out to be the case, that would send theorists back to the drawing board — lending weight to exotic concepts such as the existence of a "fifth force" known as technicolor. Such a finding might also suggest that the Higgs boson, the so-called "God Particle," needn't exist.

Since then, additional data from the CDF detector added to the team's confidence. They thought it was increasingly likely that something strange was really happening. But the CDF isn't the only detector at the Tevatron. There's a second detector, known as DZero, which should have seen the bump as well. In fact, the main reason why there are two detectors is so that one detector's data can be confirmed by the other. So researchers around the world anxiously awaited word from the DZero team.

Now the DZero tribe has spoken: They don't see the bump. "Nope, nothing here — sorry," New Scientist quoted DZero co-spokesperson Dmitri Denisov as saying.

The discrepancy may be due to the different computer models that the teams used to interpret what they were seeing in the masses of data from the collider. It's also possible that as more readings are added to the analysis, the margins of uncertainty will narrow down and result in more consistent conclusions. But in any case, it's way too early to write off the Standard Model, or to declare that the God (Particle) is dead.

"This is exactly how science works," DZero co-spokesperson Stefan Söldner-Rembold said in a Fermilab news release. "Independent verification of any new observation is the key principle of scientific research. At the Tevatron, we have two experiments that, by design, can check each other."

The relationship between the CDF and DZero collaborations has been compared to the rivalry between two sports teams — like the Cubs and the White Sox. But the discrepancy between the two findings "must be understood and resolved," Fermilab said. Toward that end, the lab is setting up a task force with representatives from the two teams as well as two Fermilab theorists.

Although this matchup is going into extra innings, the game won't always be tied up. Eventually, Europe's more powerful Large Hadron Collider is likely to come into play and clear up the mystery for good.

More weekend field trips on the Web:

• MIT chemical engineer wins Priestley Medal
• Not Exactly Rocket Science: The Renaissance Man
• Daily Mail: Did Giotto re-create the Shroud of Turin?
• Aviation Week: Chinese probe leaving moon orbit for deep space

The DZero collaboration's paper, "Study of the Dijet Invariant Mass Distribution in ppbar-->W(-->lv)+jj Final States at √(s)=1.96 TeV," has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

The CDF team's paper, "Invariant Mass Distribution of Jet Pairs Produced in Association with a W boson in ppbar Collisions at √(s)=1.96 TeV," has been published in Physical Review Letters.

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

Public information officer Theresa Mendoza walks on a ridge top as the Wallow Fire burns behind her outside of Eagar, Ariz., Wednesday, June 8, 2011.

At a glance, images of the forest fire raging in Arizona and the volcano erupting in Chile seem to suggest they are filling the atmosphere with gases and debris that will mess with the global climate, but experts say this week's events, in isolation, aren't much to worry about. 

The Willow fire in Arizona has charred at least 336,000 acres so far, filling the atmosphere with smoke, soot, and the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. It joins a string of fires that have raged elsewhere in the U.S., including Texas and Florida.

The amount of greenhouse gases from these types of fires "can be quite substantial," Matt Hurteau, a forest ecologist at Northern Arizona University told me today. 

To illustrate how substantial, he pointed to work led by Christine Wiedinmyer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, that shows forest fires in the U.S. between 2001 and 2008 accounted for six to eight percent of total annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

One fire alone, however, is a blip compared to the emissions from burning fossil fuels such as oil and coal to power the global economy.

"A common misconception is that fire emissions are huge compared to fossil fuel emissions," Beverly Law, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University told me today. "They are not, really. Fossil fuel emissions trump everything."

Fire projections
But the fires burning in Arizona and elsewhere along the southern tier of U.S. do fit projections from models of global climate change that suggest the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will cause the southwest, over the long term, to become drier, Law added.

"We just can't say there is a direct cause and effect right there," she said.

In fact, historical forest management decisions in Arizona play a major role in the severity of fires there, Hurteau said. In the ancient past, the ponderosa pine forests burned frequently and, as a result, were open and had a grassy understory. The grass, in turn, served as fuel for forest fires.

Beginning in the 1800s, pioneer settlers moved west and grazed the forests with their livestock, which reduced the fuels. Then, in the 1900s, a policy of fire suppression led to increased forest density. "Now we've got these really dense forests that are prone to this type of wildfire event," he said.

The effect of this management on forest fire ecology is independent of the climate signal. What's more, it is the weather on any given day that drives the severity of fire.

"To say that climate change is causing that weather on that day, we can't do that because climate is the longer term trend," Hurteau said.

Nevertheless, long term climate trends suggest the southwest will become drier, thus more prone to wildfire. More wildfire, in turn will put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which should lead to more changes in the global climate, he noted.

Ho / Reuters

A plume of light-coloured ash stretches along the edge of the Andes in this natural-colour satellite image acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard Terra on the morning of June 6, 2011, as the eruption at the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano chain continues.

Volcanoes and cooling
Volcanoes, on the other hand, can potentially cool the climate by spewing the gas sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere where it blocks sunlight from reaching Earth, thus causing cooling. The eruption of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile, however, doesn’t appear to have done that.

"It wasn't a massive injection of SO2," Alan Robock, an environmental scientist who studies the connection between volcanoes and climate, told me today. "While it shut down air traffic over Argentina and Chile because of the ash, we won't be able to see the climate effect."

The last time a volcanic eruption cooled the climate was the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused global temperatures to cool by about half a degree Celsius for a couple of years.

The dramatic images of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle show a giant ash cloud. The particles will fall out quickly, creating havoc locally, but they don't have a long-term climate effect.

A cooling effect will eventually comes from an explosive eruption that puts sulfur into the stratosphere, Charles Stern, a geologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder told me today.

"And that's good, we could use a little cooling right now," he said.

In fact, scientists have begun to discuss the idea of intentionally filling the stratosphere with sulfur to mimic the cooling effect of a Pinatubo-style eruption. Stern and Robock, though, said this geoengineering approach isn't a good idea due to the costs and other side effects.

"I think we are just going to have to wait for a volcano to do it," Stern said.

More stories on fires, volcanoes and climate change

• Photos: Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcano eruption seen from space
• Photos: Raging Arizona fire continues to blaze
• Volcano could mean cooling, acid rain 
• Could warming trigger volcanoes, quakes
• U.N.: Warming makes for bigger forest fires
• Forests in flames: Scientists see warming ties 

Odyssey Space Research

An artist's conception shows one of Odyssey Space Research's iPhones floating in the International Space Station's Tranquility module, with a view of Earth from the Cupola observation deck.

The last space shuttle mission will be the first mission to send iPhones into orbit — but if this experiment works out the way its developers hope, you could be seeing a lot more such devices on the final frontier in the years to come.

The two Apple iPhone 4's certified for launch to the International Space Station on the shuttle Atlantis next month won't being used for phone calls. Astronauts on the space station already have a pretty reliable Internet phone link for that, so they don't have to worry whether AT&T or Verizon provides better reception from space. In fact, the phone function on these iPhones has been disabled.

"My joke is that the roaming charges would be astronomical," Brian Rishikof, the chief executive officer for Houston-based Odyssey Space Research, told me today.

Odyssey has loaded the phones with an app designed to help spacefliers get oriented in case they ever get lost in space. SpaceLab for iOS will be used for four experiments on the station:

• Limb Tracker lets astronauts snap pictures of Earth's horizon and analyzes the shape of the planet's arc, or limb, to estimate altitude as well as flight angle.
• Sensor Cal uses a series of reference photos to calibrate the phone's gyro and accelerometer for subsequent measurements.
• State Acq enable astronauts to estimate their spacecraft's latitude and longitude by matching up iPhone photos with a wireframe of Earth's coastlines.
• LFI checks the effects of space radiation on the iPhone by monitoring certain areas of the phone's memory for single-bit upsets —flipped bits that can scramble a spacecraft's brains. Bit flips have been blamed for space glitches affecting NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Voyager 2 probe, as well as the Toyota accelerator glitches on Earth.

The $100 billion space station is bristling with communication equipment, so it's unlikely that astronauts would ever lose their bearings there. But in the years ahead, NASA will have to rely on commercial space transports, and it's conceivable that mobile devices could serve as backup systems for spacecraft navigation in the event of a catastrophic computer glitch or communication failure. If you've seen the movie "Apollo 13," you might recall that those astronauts had to eyeball Earth through their window to set a course for their return from the moon.

Beyond the experiments, putting the iPhones on the station will help NASA figure out how best to adapt commercial off-the-shelf devices for use in space, said Jeffrey Manber, managing director of NanoRacks. Manber's company developed the rack-storage system in which the phones and other payloads will be flown.

Manber told me it was "extremely difficult" to get the phones certified for spaceflight.

"It was probably one of the hardest payloads we had," he said. "It's not exactly the same iPhone that you or I would buy."

Rishikof said Odyssey disabled the phone function as well as GPS location capabilities, to streamline the certification process and to avoid running afoul of other space communication channels (including military channels). Even if GPS was enabled, "you're not going to get reception" on the space station, Rishikov said. The iPhones also run off pre-certified external batteries rather than the internal batteries, although that situation may change for future experiments, he said.

Manber estimated that it took four to five months to get the phones certified — which is significantly quicker than NanoRacks' average of nine months. "NASA's not getting enough credit for making the process more commercial-friendly," Manber said.

He also said this was only the beginning of a new age for spaceworthy devices, and for NanoRacks. "We've got 60 payloads in the queue," Manber told me. "We have 15 customers already. We're going gangbusters."

Rishikof, meanwhile, said his company is eyeing potential space applications for other mobile devices. "The iPod and the iPad are natural opportunities, but we haven't done anything explicitly yet," he said.

The space iPhones are due to be returned to Earth this fall aboard a returning Russian Soyuz craft. "Actual flight data from the experiments are expected to be collected, analyzed and shared so that educators, students, scientists and space enthusiasts can re-create the experiments as if onboard the ISS itself," Odyssey said in a news release.

But you don't have to wait until then to give SpaceLab a spin. It's already available at the App Store, and you can play around with simulated data that's adjusted for Earth's gravity. Just two days after its release, the app is already heading toward the top of the charts for iPhone educational software.

Update for 6 p.m. ET: Inquiring minds wanted to know exactly what was done to the phones, and so I followed up with Rishikof on that point. He told me iOS operating system was not modified. "We did not 'jailbreak' the phone," he told me. But it wasn't merely a matter of flipping the phones to "airplane mode," either. Rishikof said minor modifications were made in the interest of getting the phones certified for spaceflight in time for launch — modifications that were analogous to, say, yanking a wire. In the future, Odyssey intends to have the iPhone certified for spaceflight as it is, "out of the box," Rishikof said.

Rishikof said he's gratified by the interest in the project, particularly because it shows how gadgets that are increasingly familiar to folks on Earth can become part of the technological landscape in space as well. "That sense of connection is really important," he said.

Meanwhile, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told me that if the iPhones work as hoped, that would be of interest to the space agency. He mentioned the Apollo 13 example that I cited above and said, "NASA is always interested in additional layers of redundancy for spacecraft navigation."

Although several sources have said these are the first iPhones to go into space, Humphries pointed out that the line gets fuzzier when you're talking more broadly about mobile devices. "There are lots of iPods and MP3 players" on the space station, Humphries said. But the astronauts don't use them as navigational aids. They use them pretty much as folks on Earth do: for instance, listening to tunes while they do their workouts.

More about space gadgetry:

• iPhone goes to the edge of space
• Put outer-space imagery on your mobile device
• Real space station done, now on to LEGO version

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. Also, give a look to "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.