NASA

Images of Saturn's moons made with the Cassini orbiter, shown here in an artist's conception, have been used to make a Flash-based golf game.

Now that the space shuttle has safely launched for its last time, it's time for space enthusiasts to have a little geeky fun: A virtual round of golf on Saturn's moons.

The Flash game, Golf Sector 6, was developed by Diamond Sky Productions, which is headed up by Carolyn Porco, the imaging science team lead for the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.

The game is based on the images captured by the spacecraft and allows players to get a feel for what it would be like to tee it up on a truly out-of-this world course.

To play, hold down the clicker on your mouse and point the green arrow in the trajectory you want your tiny human golfer to hit the ball. The longer the arrow, the harder the swing.

"Each of Saturn's moons has its own weak gravity, which should keep things interesting, so be sure to take that into account when you make your swing!" the team explains on the Ciclops website, where the game is housed.

"Just like golfing on Earth, the goal is to hit the ball into the hole — or in this case, the crater! — using the smallest number of swings."

Playing a round on the Saturn's moons also presents a simple lesson in physics: Each moon has a different gravity because they are different masses and sizes. The ball's trajectory follows Newton's gravity formula.

Playing golf in outer space is nothing new. Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard famously hit a few golf balls on the moon in 1971.

Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin hit a foam ball with a six iron during spacewalk at the International Space Station in 2006.

Maybe now that NASA is putting its focus on human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit, an astronaut may someday get to hit a few balls on Saturn. For now, a virtual fore! will have to do.

Tip o' the Log to Lisa Grossman at Wired.

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).

University of Sheffield

A flexible bag that stiffens under impact is being developed for use in luggage compartments of planes.

A soft, flexible bag that hardens when confronted with a sudden force could make air travel safer on all types of aircraft, according to researchers working on the novel bag for bags in the cargo bin.

The bag is being pitched as a less expensive, more flexible and lighter-weight alternative to hardened luggage containers deployed on some wide-body jets that protect passengers from explosives snuck onto planes.

Fundamental to the bag, named the Fly Bag, are a techy-sounding internal elastomeric coating and a fabric impregnated with a shear-thickening fluid, notes University of Sheffield in the UK, where the bag was developed in partnership with Blastech Ltd., a spinoff company owned by the university's lab.

Elastomers are low-stiffness, high-strain materials used in products such as adhesives and sealants. The bag has an elastomer developed to provide a heat- and flame-resistant gas seal in the bag at high strain rates and deformation.

Shear-thickening fluids increase in viscosity in response to impact. Simple STFs can be made by mixing together the right amount of corn flour and water. If rolled into a ball, this would bounce on hard surfaces but return to a fluid once left alone.

"Under normal circumstances, the particles in STFs repel each other slightly, however following sudden impact, the extra energy in the system proves stronger than the repulsive forces, causing the particles to clump together in structures called hydroclusters, which bump into each other, consequently thickening the fluid," a news release from the University of Sheffield explains.

For the Fly Bag, the research team coated the yarn of the fabric with STF. As the fabric comes under strain, shearing forces between the yarns cause the STF to thicken, temporarily increasing the stiffness of the fabric.

The same idea could be applied to body armor designed to protect people from knives and bullets, the team said, though their focus at the moment is air travel. The team hopes to have the first bags on the market within two years.

More on armor tech and travel safety:

• From hard to soft in seconds
• Toughest body armor developed by scientists
• Army tests new body armor for women
• Parcel bombs four times larger than Christmas plot
• Suspicious bag delays Germany-bound flight

Mark Kirkman / Interspace News

Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle takes the controls in the commander's seat inside the shuttle motion-base simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

After a decade of trying, I finally landed a space shuttle.

Not the real thing, of course. I'm talking about a simulated landing, basically flown on a computer. Every once in a while, I've tried my hand on the arcade-game-style shuttle simulators you might find at science centers and museums, and it hasn't been pretty. I'd come down to hard, or confuse my "up" and "down" on the joystick, or veer off the landing strip. I've gotten pretty used to flashing red lights and low scores over the years.

So when it came time to go up the stairs and climb into the motion-base shuttle simulator at NASA's Johnson Space Center, the first thing that came to mind was the Astronaut's Prayer: "Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up" (or something like that). The pressure got just a bit worse when our trainer for the session, NASA flight controller Corbett Hoenninger, told our crew of journalists that the folks who rode in the simulator just before us were the Atlantis astronauts themselves.

I climbed into the commander's seat for the initial takeoff. The motion-base simulator is a little bit like the ones you might find at high-class amusement rides — a mockup cockpit that's crammed with real-looking hardware, including a heads-up electronic display on the forward window and a 1980s-vintage seatbelt with five clip belts for the shoulders, waist and crotch.

As I gripped the joystick with my right hand, Hoenninger was reassuring.

"I have faith in you," he said.

"I don't," I answered.

First, we experienced launch. There was really nothing I needed to do, except to roll with the rocking simulator, listen to the recorded rumble and watch the solid-rocket boosters fall away on the computer-generated display out the side window. Then we went right to the landing sequence.

There are lots of gauges and rolling balls that the real astronauts can probably make sense out of, but for me, the key thing was to peer into the heads-up display and use the joystick to keep a small glowing diamond inside a bright circle on the heads-up display. The circle shifts around the screen, to reflect how you should be moving the joystick to make a banking turn and level up the gliding shuttle for final approach to the simulated runway.

I went through a little bit of that up-down problem, but Hoenninger was there to remind me of the difference — and alert me about two little triangles that would start rising up from the bottom of the video display. As the start of the runway grew larger on my display, the triangles served as a guide for moving the joystick so that you landed level instead of falling onto the runway like a brick. The latter alternative is something I'm all too familiar with.

Believe it or not, I actually set our virtual runway on the ground without crashing, although there was an inelegant thump and a screech that sounded off-nominal. Then Hoenninger reminded me about the pedals. The shuttle has two hydraulic pedals that control your wheel braking to keep you on the centerline as you slow the craft to a stop. The system couldn't be simpler, but it still took me a few seconds to get the coasting under control — in part because I let my feet slip off the pedals while I was flying.

After my landing, each of the other three journalists took their turn. All of us set the shuttle down successfully. In fact, Hoenninger told me later that not one of the visiting media types had crashed. That made me feel a little less special. But I did get a "Certificate of Accomplishment" for successfully landing the motion-base shuttle mission simulator, which I'll put in a place of honor in my office cubicle.

So now I can finally put my shuttle jinx to rest — and just in time, too. With the end of the shuttle program, the shuttle simulator is due to be disassembled and shipped off to Texas A&M, to be used by a new generation of aerospace engineers and virtual space jockeys. To those Aggies, I say: Godspeed ... and keep your feet on the pedals.

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. 

Terrafugia

Terrafugia's Transition roadable aircraft, shown here in an artists' rendering, has cleared regulatory hurdles that make it street legal.

A flying car is being exempted from regulatory hurdles, meaning future owners of the vehicle will be able to drive it on public streets, the company behind it recently announced.

What this means is that you'll be able to legally sit in traffic with the rest of the street-legal cars, but have a slight grin as you head home from the general aviation airport where you landed after flying over traffic for the first 20 miles of your commute.

"Think of it as an airplane that drives, not a car that flies," Anna Mracek Dietrich, the chief operating officer of Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass.,-based company that is making the Transition roadable aircraft, told me in an email Thursday.

"Once on the ground, the pilot can fold the wings on his Transition with the push of a button, drive home, and park in their garage."

The exemptions granted from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration allow the company to use windshields made of lightweight polycarbonate materials rather than heavier traditional laminated automotive safety glass and tires that are not normally allowed on multi-purpose vehicles.

The Transition's tires are rated for highway speeds and the vehicle's weight and fit in the same classification as SUVs and light trucks, Dietrich explained, but they weigh only a fraction of other tires in its class. The exemption makes this OK.

Last year, the vehicle was granted a weight exemption that allows it to be classified as a Light Sport Aircraft by the FAA even though it is 110 pounds too heavy for that rating.

The clearing of these regulatory hurdles will allow Terrafugia to begin delivery of the Transition when it is ready for commercial production next year.

More on flying cars:

• 'Flying car' goes to market
• Flying car lifts off in maiden flight
• 'Flying car' concept gets a design tweak
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

Sierra Nevada Corp.

In this artist's conception, Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser space plane is shown alongside a docking port at the International Space Station.

NASA's Kennedy Space Center signed a deal today to let Sierra Nevada Corp. use its facilities to develop and launch a mini-shuttle for servicing the International Space Station, beginning as early as 2015.

"This is a really great step toward a bright future for us," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said at the signing, which took place in the Florida space center's briefing room.

Previous deals have awarded Sierra Nevada $100 million in NASA funds to aid in the development of the company's Dream Chaser, a winged space plane that's based on a design considered but rejected by the space agency in the 1980s. The Dream Chaser would launch on an Atlas 5 rocket and carry as many as seven passengers and cargo to the space station.

Sierra Nevada is one of several companies funded by NASA's effort to promote the development of commercial spacecraft that could fill in for many of the functions of the shuttle fleet, which is headed for retirement after Atlantis' upcoming station resupply mission. The Dream Chaser is the only proposed spaceship that has wings. The others — such as SpaceX's Falcon, Boeing's CST-100 and Blue Origin's OSV — are conical capsules like the Apollo command module.

Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems, noted that the Dream Chaser's look was similar to that of the shuttle, though without the shuttle's commodious cargo bay. When one journalist made a remark about the craft's sleek design, Sirangelo joked, "We like the word 'sleek.'"

He said the design similarities suggest that the reusable Dream Chaser, which would land on a runway like a glider, might well be serviced like the shuttle. But when Sirangelo was asked exactly which facilities would be used at Kennedy Space Center, he said "we're still working out the details" on that issue. NASA said the space center would help Sierra Nevada "define and execute" activities for launch and for post-landing processing.

Last week, NASA reported that all of its partners for crew vehicle development, including Sierra Nevada, were meeting their specified timelines. Sirangelo said Sierra Nevada's schedule called for suborbital test flights in 2013, orbital test flights in 2014 and the start of space station operations in 2015.

Kennedy Space Center's director, Bob Cabana, joined Sierra Nevada in signing today's Space Act agreement. He said the venture was in line with NASA's efforts to give private companies a greater role in low-Earth-orbit operations, thus freeing the space agency to concentrate on beyond-Earth-orbit exploration.

"We are going to transform human space flight for future generations," Cabana said.

Today's Space Act agreement isn't the first of its kind: Sierra Nevada previously reached agreements with Johnson Space Center in Texas, Langley Research Center in Virginia and Dryden Flight Research Center and Ames Research Center in California. Among the other companies that have made Space Act agreements under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program are Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp.

"There are others in the works," Cabana told me after the signing.

Do you think such agreements point the way to the future of spaceflight? Or are you worried that private enterprise isn't up to taking a leading role on the final frontier, as some of the space effort's veterans fear? Either way, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 6 p.m. ET: Sierra Nevada's Sirangelo discussed the deal in more depth with me during an interview this afternoon. Among other things, he told me that the Dream Chaser could be launched atop an Atlas 5 from California as well as from Florida, and it could land on any runway. If it happened to land in California, or anyplace else, that's no big deal. "It returns home in a cargo plane," Sirangelo told me. The mini-shuttle is compact enough to fit within a C-5 transport plane, he noted.

He suggested that  the Dream Chaser could touch down in, say, Madison to deliver fresh experimental samples to a lab at the University of Wisconsin — or make a landing at the EAA AirVenture air show to give the crowds a thrill. A spaceship coming to your hometown ... how's that sound as a way to build interest in the space program?

Stay tuned for more from Sirangelo and other players in the commercial space race next week, once I transcribe my notes.

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. 

NASA / Monica Soler

A researcher demonstrates a pee-recycling technology based on forward osmosis that will be tested on the space shuttle Atlantis.

During the final days of shuttle Atlantis' final flight, an astronaut will inject a urine-like fluid into a special bag designed to convert the fluid into a drinkable, sugary solution. If it works, future astronauts may use it to make their own pee a safe and satisfying liquid refreshment.

Astronauts on the International Space Station already drink recycled urine but the glitch-y system takes energy from the orbital lab's limited supply. The new system doesn't require electricity; rather it relies on a process called "forward osmosis."

NASA describes forward osmosis as "the natural diffusion of water through a semi-permeable membrane from a solution of a lower concentration to a solution with a higher concentration. The semi-permeable membrane acts as a barrier that allows small molecules such as water to pass through while blocking larger molecules like salts, sugars, starches, proteins, viruses, bacteria and parasites."

The semi-permeable membrane (a bag) is filled with a sugary solution that is nested within an outer bag. The dirty fluid — including pee, sweat and dishwater — is injected into the outer bag. As it makes it way to the inner bag, the contaminants are left behind. The result, if all goes well, is a quaffable liquid.

One of the four astronauts will test the textbook-size recycler toward the end of Atlantis' 12-day mission, scheduled for liftoff on Friday. Fortunately, the test will be with a pee-like solution, not the actual bodily fluid.

The system was demonstrated to reporters at the Kennedy Space Center this week. Wired's Dave Mosher, who was on scene, has the details.

More on peeing and drinking in space:

• Space urine recycler to get fix-it part
• Cheers! Crew drinks up recycled urine in space
• Broken urine recycler may affect space mission
• We won't water it down: That is potable pee
• Space beer headed for zero gravity bar

Scott Andrews / for msnbc.com

In one of 120,000 images shot during the time-lapse, NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is hoisted before being mounted with "the stack" before rollout at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

As the sun sets on NASA's spaceflight program, three talented people set out to document the preparations for shuttle Atlantis' final launch.

Armed with 15 cameras, Scott Andrews, his son Philip Andrews and Stan Jirman teamed up to shoot and seamlessly combine a whopping 120,000 still images. The finished product is condensed into a 3-minute time-lapse video that makes the four-day process of preparing the shuttle for its trek to the launch pad look like a cakewalk.

The time-lapse is the culmination of 40 years of collaboration. Photographer Scott Andrews, a technical consultant for Canon, has been photographing launches and landings professionally since Apollo 15 in July 1971.

Scott Andrews / for msnbc.com

The morning after rollout, NASA's space shuttle Atlantis rests on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Throughout the years he has helped hundreds of photographers from around the world and worked closely with the NASA spaceflight program. Scott said his main mission in creating the time-lapse is to pay tribute to all of the shuttle workers.

Referring to the origins of the time-lapse video, Scott said "Anybody could have done this time lapse — but nobody did."

So Scott sat down and drafted a 47-page proposal and made six trips to the Kennedy Space Center to finally get the "yes" he needed. This all hinged on the trust he had built during his tenure, split between Kennedy and Johnson space centers.

In the end, they produced a tribute to not only the shuttle workers, but also NASA and the spaceflight program as a whole.

Veteran NBC space correspondent Jay Barbree summed it up best: "When historians look back, they will write that the shuttle was a reusable ship that carried astronauts into orbit.  It was an essential brick on the road to distant places beyond our planet."

Related content:

• Slideshow: The life of shuttle Atlantis
• Video: Space shuttle crew: 'We want to make sure we go out in style'
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures
• More space news from msnbc.com

State University of New York

Michael Amadori looks into a fish tank growing tilapia in a lab at the State University of New York. The fish waste is used to grow lettuce.

If, in a few years, you are suddenly overcome with a sense that there's something fishy about the lettuce in your salad, you might be on to something. There's a chance it was grown with fish poop.

"There's no fish taste whatsoever," Michael Amadori, a master's student in ecological engineering at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, assured me Wednesday.

For now, Amadori is growing the futuristic lettuce in question as part of a science experiment aimed at closing the loop between the food we throw away and the food we eat.

Americans throw out about 25 percent of their food, he noted, a fact that led him to ask: "Can I take this waste product in our society and turn it into a value-added product?"

To find out, he's set up an experiment where he feeds dried food waste from a student cafeteria to fish in freshwater tanks and uses the fish poop to grow Boston Bibb lettuce.

The concept is called "aquaponics," a combination of fish farming and hydroponics (growing vegetables without soil). Though not new, this is the first time it has been tried with post-consumer food waste to feed fish.

Most aquaponic systems, Amadori said, spend about 50 percent of their operating budget on commercial fish feed, which is typically pellets made from ground up fish, corn, and vitamins.

So, while systems such as the Massachusetts Avenue Project in Buffalo, N.Y., and Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wis., are great socially and environmentally, "they are having trouble making a profit," Amadori said.

His experiment is set up in a greenhouse where tilapia, a hardy freshwater fish that will eat just about anything, is raised in half a dozen 55-gallon barrels holding 20 fish each.

The cafeteria food waste is ground up, dried, and broken up into pellets that are fed to the fish in three of the tanks. The other fish are fed commercial pellets as a control factor.

Temperature-controlled water from the fish tanks is cycled into graveled-filled containers where the lettuce grows.

"The gravel bed has bacteria that convert the fish waste into plant food and then the plants remove that and the water returns (to the fish tank) clean," Amadori explained.

The experiment has been running for about four months. The fish won't be harvested until they weigh around a pound, at about one year of age. The lettuce, however, is abundant.

"I'm making 18 heads a week and it is delicious," Amadori said. "It tastes just like the lettuce you buy at the grocery store."

More on sustainable food:

• Fishing for food solutions, aquaponics offers clues
• Could vertical farming be the future?
• Rooftops take urban farming to the skies
• U.S. OKs large fish farms in Gulf of Mexico

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Susan Crippen is to be laid off next month from her job as a shuttle crew trainer at Johnson Space Center.

Thirty years ago, Bob Crippen was on the first space shuttle crew. Twenty-four years ago, his daughter Susan became part of the space effort as well, taking a job as a shuttle crew trainer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Now the shuttle program is ending, and so is Susan Crippen's job.

I asked her whether her famous father had any advice for her. "No," she replied. "He just worries about me getting laid off."

Crippen, 46, is just one of an estimated 4,500 NASA contract employees due to lose their jobs between now and mid-August, including about 1,000 in the Houston area. She works for United Space Alliance, the shuttle program's prime contractor, as a training instructor for simulated shuttle launches and landings.

NASA file

NASA astronaut Bob Crippen floats in weightlessness during the first shuttle mission, STS-1, in 1981.

The shuttle Atlantis' astronauts went through their final simulations last Friday. After the sim, the crew of four gave Crippen and her colleagues a round of goodbye hugs. Now the shuttle crew is in Florida, getting ready for this Friday's scheduled launch. The motion-base simulator on which they trained will go to Texas A&M's aerospace engineering department.  Other training equipment will be divvied up among museums across the country. And in just a few weeks, the shuttle training team will be disbanded.

For the next few years at least, NASA's astronauts will be trained in Russia to ride in Soyuz spacecraft to and from the International Space Station, under the command of Russian cosmonauts. They'll still get training in Houston for operations aboard the space station, and for the spacewalks that will need to be conducted from the station. Eventually, the astronauts might have to learn their way around the commercial space taxis that are just now in the design and development phase. But from now on, no one will ever need to be trained to fly the space shuttle. 

When I visited the team's control room on Friday, just hours after the final sim, a half-dozen trainers were reflecting on their storied past and their uncertain future. Susan Crippen studied physics at the Unversity of Texas at Austin, and went to work at Johnson Space Center right after graduation. She's not yet sure what she's going to do after she's laid off, but it sounds as if aerospace is in her blood — in part because of the family connection.

Bob Crippen was a naval aviator who was assigned to the Air Force's military astronaut program in 1966. He became a NASA astronaut in 1969, just after the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 1981, Crippen and Apollo 16 commander John Young flew Columbia on the shuttle program's first space mission — a mission that historians now say was riskier than NASA thought at the time. After STS-1, Bob Crippen flew on the shuttle three more times. He took on a variety of management posts at NASA, left the space agency in 1995, then worked as an aerospace executive until his retirement in 2001.

Susan Crippen, the second of three daughters, still remembers that first shuttle flight.

"I did go to the first launch, but I'm not going to the last launch," she told me.

Instead, she'll be standing by at Mission Control, along with other trainers from the team.

"If anything occurs that's unexpected, our teams will get called for real-time support, and we'll go over here to the simulators, and we'll run through those procedures, kind of like in Apollo 13," shuttle training team lead Juan Garriga told the Houston Chronicle.

During Friday's final simulation run, the trainers were wearing matching green polo shirts, emblazoned with the logo for Atlantis' final mission, which is known as STS-135. Garriga made it sound as if there was a little magic in the number: He told me that when he tallied up his team's requests for the STS-135 shirts, the number of entries came to ... 135.

Maybe it's a good omen for the future. The shuttle team could sure use one.

More from Johnson Space Center:

• Inside NASA's 'Skunk Works' lab
• Last shuttle crew faces a heavy load
• After shuttle lands, layoffs loom
• How Atlantis' top tweeter got that way

The shuttle story in depth:

• Interactive: Final shuttle mission in focus
• Cast of characters: Space crews in the spotlight
• Interactive: Space shuttle timeline
• Slideshow: Atlantis, this is your life

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. 

In case you need another reason to dream about a vacation down under, check out this stunning time lapse video of the Milky Way seen over the Southern Ocean made by amateur astronomer Alex Cherney of Melbourne, Australia.

The video compresses 31 hours of viewing time into 2.5 minutes that show our galaxy rising and setting over the ocean as clouds sweep across the skies and distant ships blink on the horizon. Beyond the Milky Way, the Magellanic clouds rise and moonrise illuminates Australia's south coast.

Cherney's effort won the grand prize in the STARMUS astrophotography competition. "The scenes are chosen with the eye of an artist, but the subtle panning and excellent control of color and contrast reveal technical skills of a high order," the organizers of the astronomy festival said in a news release announcing the winner.

More stunning time lapse imagery:

• See a meteor shower in a minute
• Time flies … in one-year videos
• Video: Photographer captures stunning time lapse of stars
• The Milky Way from South Dakota

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).

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A 3-D view created from NASA imagery shows the space shuttle Endeavour docked to the International Space Station during that shuttle's last mission in May.

How can you possibly improve upon the ultimate pictures of the space shuttle and the International Space Station together in orbit? By turning them into 3-D photos, of course.

That's what Italian amateur astronomer Roberto Beltramini did with the imagery captured in May by his countryman, astronaut Paolo Nespoli. The "ultimate" opportunity presented itself when Nespoli and two other spacefliers were leaving the space station to come back home during the shuttle Endeavour's final orbital tour. Nespoli shot high-definition stills and video from the departing Soyuz spacecraft, and the fruits of his labors were made public last month.

Beltramini took pairs of slightly offset images and tweaked them to produce these stereo views, displayed on his Space 3D gallery and republished with permission.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

In this view, you can make out Endeavour's robotic arm curling around the shuttle. Red-blue glasses are required for the 3-D effect.

Roberto Beltramini / Space 3D

A different perspective shows Endeavour's rear end, head-on.

These are perspectives we'll never see again — not even during Atlantis' program-ending visit to the space station this month. It was a scheduling fluke that a Soyuz craft happened to be leaving the station while Endeavour was docked, and the circumstance is virtually certain not to be repeated.

We just might see Atlantis and the station linked together from a different perspective, however. Photographers such as France's Thierry Legault are getting better and better at snapping amazing pictures of the station-shuttle complex from Earth, and during Atlantis' mission, you'll want to check Legault's website as well as Patrick Vantuyne's 3-D photo gallery.

Update for 9:40 p.m. ET: You'll need red-blue glasses to get the full 3-D effect from the pictures offered by Beltramini and Vantuyne. I'm in the process of sending out 3-D specs to at least a dozen (and probably more) members of the Cosmic Log Facebook community as part of our occasional "3-D Giveaway" program. To join the community, all you have to do is click the "Like" button on the Facebook page. The glasses are being provided courtesy of Microsoft Research. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.) If you're one of today's winners, congrats: I'll start sending out the glasses after Atlantis lifts off.

More 3-D views from space:

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

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," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Joel Graham, University of Maryland

A 94°C geothermal pool, with a level-maintaining siphon, near Gerlach, Nevada. Sediment from the floor of this pool was enriched on pulverized miscanthus at 90°C and subsequently transferred to filter paper in order to isolate microbes able to subsist on cellulose alone.

A record-breaking microbe that thrives while munching plant material at near boiling temperatures has been discovered in a Nevada hot spring, researchers announced in a study published today.

Scientists are eyeing the microbe's enzyme responsible for breaking down cellulose — called a cellulase — as a potential workhouse in the production of biofuels and other industrial processes.

Cellulose is a chain of linked sugar molecules that makes up the woody fiber of plants. To produce biofuels, enzymes are required to breakdown cellulose into its constituent sugars so that yeasts can then ferment them into the type of alcohol that makes cars (not people) go vroom.

At the industrial scale, this process is done most efficiently at high temperatures that kill other microbes that could otherwise contaminate the reaction, Douglas Clark, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, told me today.

"So finding cellulases that can operate at those temperatures are of interest," he said.

Hot spring
That's what led Clark, microbiologist Frank Robb from the University of Maryland, and colleagues to collect sediment and water samples from the Great Boiling Springs near Gerlach, Nevada. The spring is 203 degrees F, just short of boiling.

"It's on private land and has been surrounded by a low wall to keep cattle from going into it and that maintains the temperature," Robb explained to me today, noting that most hot springs have varying temperatures depending on the weather and water levels in the spring.

In addition, a siphon has been added to Gerlach hot spring to keep it from overflowing. The combination gives whatever microbes that are in there no choice but to grow at high temperatures, Robb noted. Bits of grass and woody material blown into the spring serve as a food source.

The team grew microbes found in the samples on pulverized miscanthus, a type of grass that is a common biofuel feedstock, to isolate the microbes that grow with plant fiber as their only source of carbon.

They then sequenced the community of surviving microbes, which indicated three species of Archaea, a type of single celled microorganism, were able to utilize cellulose as food. Genetic techniques identified the specific cellulase involved in the breakdown of cellulose.

This cellulase, dubbed EBI-244, was found in the most abundant of the three Archaea.

"We didn't really expect to find an organism that could grow at such a high temperature and degrade cellulose in this particular environment. But you never know," Clark told me. "It really underscores the diversity of life. And, obviously, if you don't look, you won't find it."

Too hot
The enzyme EBI-244 works optimally at 228 degrees F (109 degrees C), which is actually too hot for the efficient breakdown of cellulose into fermentable sugars due to side reactions that can occur, Clark noted.

"But it is interesting to know that such cellulases are out there," Clark said. "And then this cellulase might also serve as a good starting point to be engineered to work at a lower temperature but maintain the high stability that it has naturally evolved to work at such high temperatures."

Robb likened this engineering process to building a street car from parts used on cars found at the racetrack. "The enzyme itself could be the parts bin," he said.

So, the enzyme itself probably won't be hard at work anytime soon producing fuel to put in your gas tank, but it does lead researchers down the road to engineering the biofuels of the future. What's more, EBI-244 is a record holder for heat tolerance in cellulase.

"It is always nice to have a record breaker," Clark noted. "It adds to that wow factor a little bit."

A paper on the findings appears in the July 5 issue of the journal Nature Communications. Other authors are Dana C. Nadler, Sarah Huffer, Harshal A. Chokhawala and Harvey W. Blanch of UC Berkeley; and Sara E. Rowland of the University of Maryland Marine, Estuarine and Environmental Sciences graduate program.

More on heat-loving microbes:

• Yellowstone microbe converts light to energy
• Got milk? Convert it into biofuel
• How bacteria could help power the future
• How biology will help fill your fuel tank
• Hole-y Cow! Guts could lead to holy grail for cheap biofuels
• Not-so-stupid microbe tricks

Dr. Stephen Hicks/Oxford University

While some scientists have been busy using Kinect for the forces of eeevil (read: to turn helicopters into our future robot overlords), it seems others have been busy using the motion-sensing game controller for good (read: to help the blind see).

Oxford University researcher Dr. Stephen Hicks (our hero) is working on a pair of glasses that will help people with a very small amount of vision see again. And he was inspired — at least in part — by the Kinect game controller.

Hicks' prototype for the spectacles just went on display at the Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition in London.

The glasses have tiny cameras built into the frames and small LED lights built into the lenses and are attached to a small but sophisticated computer that detects what's in front of the user. The computer behaves like a small robot, seeking out things of interest and presenting them to the person wearing the glasses in a simplified way.

Hicks has said that Kinect — the camera-based motion-sensing controller for the Xbox 360 — as well as the iPad have helped inspire some of his team's work.

"These days computers are small enough and powerful enough to do a lot of real time visual processing such as person recognition or depth recognition and in certain cases to be able to read words," Hicks explains. "The simple idea is that the computer will recognize objects of interest and display them in a way that is simplified and bright enough for a person who has only a small amount of sight."

Hicks says his aim is to make the glasses as discreet as possible and also as cheap as possible so the average person will be able to afford them. The lightweight glasses will look essentially like normal glasses (see picture above) and the small computer they're attached to will use basically the same components that are used in smartphones, he says.

You can see Dr. Hicks discuss the project in more detail here:

Now, here's hoping these glasses also will be able to detect an incoming Kinect-controlled quadrocopter attack. For the sake of all humanity.

Thanks to Kotaku for the heads up.

For more gaming news, check out:

• Kinect quadrocopter flight, perfected by Swiss researchers
• Kinect-controlled helicopter scores win for robot overlords
• The Force is strong with "Star Wars: Kinect"
• Martial artist shows off real life motion control gaming
• Dance Central 2' delivers more dancers, music, laughs

Winda Benedetti writes about gamesfor msnbc.com. You can follow her tweets about games and other things right here on Twitter.

Courtesy of William Holland

Marvin and William Holland, from left, sit beside Ntomnifor Richard Fru during an African-American reunion in June. Genetic analysis suggests that the Holland brothers are distantly related to Fru's Cameroonian family.

Thanks to 21st-century genetic testing, William Holland is finally able to show some of his African cousins what happened to his slave ancestors back in the 18th century. The climax of Holland's quest came last weekend, when about 60 African-Americans and Africans gathered at Franklin County Recreational Park in Virginia for a teach-in about his family's ocean-spanning, three-century saga.

The 42-year-old Holland, who lives in Atlanta, left his job at Coca-Cola and turned his focus to the family quest nine years ago. The quest is particularly difficult for African-Americans like Holland because their ancestors came over in chains with their African identity erased. Holland eventually figured out that his great-great-great-great-grandfather was brought over from Africa around 1772 and sold to a Virginia plantation owner. He even discovered that his great-grandfather, Creed Holland, was forced to serve in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

But traditional genealogical research couldn't give Holland any further clues as to his African origins. Exactly where did his ancestors come from? Did he have any present-day cousins back in the old country? That's where genetic tests could point the way.

Holland had his DNA analyzed for markers that just might match up with African kin who had taken similar tests. Records held by the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation suggested that he might be related to the king of a region in Cameroon's Northwest Province, named Fon Angwafo III. When Holland visited Cameroon and laid out his records for the king and his counselors to inspect, he was welcomed as a long-lost relative. In fact, during a follow-up visit with other family members, Holland was ceremonially named Ndefru, after Fon Angwafo's father.

The Africans told how they lost their kin during the days of the slave trade — but when the African-Americans told how their ancestors lost their identity through slavery, Holland's Cameroonian cousins just couldn't believe it. So Holland invited "the Fon" and his family to come over to America and learn more about the other side of the slavery story.

It took months to make all the arrangements, and Fon Angwafo III himself couldn't make the trip because of political obligations at home — but late last month, the Fon's wife, Queen Kiko Anna Angwafo, finally arrived in America along with the king's son and nephew to see the region in Virginia where Holland's ancestor ended up. Holland and his family were the Africans' hosts for a family reunion on June 25. Cameroonians from the Mankon region ruled by the Fon and from the nation's West Region attended the event as well.

Courtesy of William Holland

African-Americans and African visitors wear traditional garb at the Frontier Culture Museum's West Africa farm exhibit near Staunton, Va. From left are William (Ndefru) Holland, Regina and Kamari Holland, Marvin (Tsi) Holland, Prince Peter Tseghama Angwafo, Willie Mae (Mankah) Holland, Queen Kiko Anna Angwafo, Ntomnifor Richard Fru and Eric Bryan, the museum's deputy director.

Courtesy of William Holland

Queen Kiko Anna Angwafo picks up a pestle at the Frontier Culture Museum's West Africa village exhibit.

One of the highlights was a visit to the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton, Va., where a replica West African village has been built to give visitors a taste of life before slavery.

But the climax came when the Africans were taken to the old Holland plantation, where William Holland's ancestors lived as slaves (and took on the last name of their owners).

"The whole purpose was to tie in the missing links," Holland told me. And by that measure, he judged the reunion to be a great success. The Cameroonians saw a blacksmith shop from the Civil War era. They soaked in the history as they toured the plantation's old chicken house and slave kitchen. They walked around the graves where slaves and their owners were buried.

"They totally understood," Holland said. He quoted them as saying, "Now we know you weren't joking around when you told us about this. ... It's very clear now, the pain and suffering you went through when you came to America."

And there was a bonus: A descendant of the slave owners, John Sherrard Holland, served as the Africans' tour guide.

Courtesy of William Holland

William Holland's family and his African visitors meet with John Sherrard Holland, a descendant of the plantation owners who held William Holland's ancestors in slavery.

"It was a great honor and a pleasure to do that," the 55-year-old operator of a hunting preserve told me later. He went to school with members of William's family, and "we've always had the best of relationships," he said.

As for the dark past of slavery, John Sherrard Holland said that has been left far behind. "It's history," he said.

But William Holland said that history is worth reflecting upon once more, particularly at a time when America is celebrating Independence Day. He noted that when Americans heralded their freedom in 1776, his African ancestor had been unfree for four years. "Just imagine what he was thinking," Holland said.

"Is it time for celebration?" he asked. "I don't know. But now we're trying to do justice to that heritage — and that's something to celebrate."

Previous chapters in the tale of William Holland's roots:

• Sept. 8, 2010: DNA points to royal roots in Africa
• Feb. 1, 2011: Family roots get tangled up in Africa
• Feb. 28, 2011: Black history saga comes full circle 
• African American news from theGrio

 For further information about genetic testing for genealogical purposes, check out this guide on Cyndi's List, or this entry on Wikipedia. If you happen to be a Boyle looking for genealogical information, take a look at my Boyle family website. You can also connect with me via Facebook or Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

Ricoh European

Ricoh unveiled a billboard Tuesday that is 100 percent powered by solar and wind energy.

Marketers will try just about anything to put their brands in front of us and, they hope, in our hands. This can come at large expense of natural resources. For example, think airplanes guzzling fuel as they tow banners for burger joints and insurance companies over your favorite beach this holiday weekend.

Office equipment company Ricoh hopes its new billboard powered by 100 percent solar and wind energy will make us all think about living more sustainably as the company puts its name in front of everyone who's driving a stretch of the M4 motorway between London's Heathrow airport and the city.

The billboard, which was unveiled Tuesday, has 96 solar panels and five individual wind turbines that will produce an average of 12,612 watts per hour per day. However, if there is not enough sun or wind, the sign may not light up, Ricoh notes.

The company also has a solar-powered billboard in New York's Times Square.

Efforts such as this can be seen as a bit gimmicky, but, as Heather Clancy writes on ZD Net, Ricoh "is an imaging company, so one might imagine that maybe Ricoh could help other companies interested in similar messaging approaches."

More on green advertising:

• Times Square getting its first 'green' billboard
• Here comes the sun: White House to go solar
• Eco-fatigue: Going green no longer red hot
• Truth in green ads? Not as much as you think

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

Confidence is growing in results from a particle physics experiment at the Tevatron collider that may help explain why the universe is full of matter.

Why are we here? It remains one of the largest unexplained mysteries of the universe, but particle physicists are gaining more confidence in a result from an atom smashing experiment that could be a step toward providing an answer.

We exist because the universe is full of matter and not the opposite, so-called antimatter. When the Big Bang occurred, equal parts of both should have been created and immediately annihilated each other, leaving nothing leftover to build the stars, planets and us.

Thankfully, it didn't happen that way. There's an asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Why this is remains inadequately explained, Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a co-spokesman for the particle physics experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  outside of Chicago, told me on Thursday.

"We are looking for a larger asymmetry than we currently know in the best theories in physics, which is called the standard model," said Soldner-Rembold, who is based at the University of Manchester in England.

Using the Fermilab's Tevatron collider, members of the DZero experiment are smashing together protons and their antiparticle, called antiprotons, which are perfectly symmetric in terms of matter and antimatter, he explained.

"So you expect what comes out will also be symmetric in terms of matter and antimatter," he said. "But what we observe is that there is a slight, on the order of 1 percent, asymmetry where more matter particles are produced than antiparticles."

This 1 percent asymmetry is larger than predicted by the standard model and thus helps explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

The DZero team announced this finding of asymmetry in 2010, but their confidence in the result wasn't sufficient to call it a discovery. At that point, there was a 0.07 chance the result was due to a random fluctuation in the data.

The team has now analyzed 1.5 times more data with a refined technique, increasing their confidence in the result. The probability that the asymmetry is due to a random fluctuation is now just 0.005 percent. They'd like to get to an uncertainty of less than 0.00005 percent before popping open the champagne.

The new results were presented Thursday at Fermilab.

"There are very high thresholds in physics so that people can really call something a discovery and be absolutely sure," Soldner-Rembold said. "We are going in the right direction."

Even more work at Fermilab and further, complementary experiments with the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva will be required to shore up confidence that what they are seeing really is real, and thus a step toward explaining why the universe has much more matter than antimatter.

"To really understand how the universe evolved is the next step," he said. "We do a particular process in the lab. In order to say is this enough to explain the amount of matter around us is not as easy as saying 1 percent sounds good."

And for those hoping that science has all the answers, Soldner-Rembold cautions that science will never answer the question of "why we are here, it only tries to understand the underlying laws of nature."

More on particle physics:

• That wily Higgs boson is running out of places to hide
• New subatomic particle: real or anomaly?
• Aging U.S. particle accelerator gets more time
• Seven smashing atom smashers