Texas Gov. Rick Perry stirred up a fresh scientific spat today with his claim that scientists were manipulating their data about climate change "so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects" — a view that serves to highlight the differences among the GOP presidential candidates on science-related issues.

During a town hall meeting in Bedford, N.H., here's what Perry, one of the front-runners for the Republican nomination, had to say about the state of climate science:

"I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number or scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we're seeing, almost weekly or daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. They've been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have in some cases [been] found to be manipulating this information. ..."

The comments are pretty much in line with what Perry has said in the past. He's playing off the suspicions raised by the "Climategate" e-mail controversy that broke in 2009. That flap revealed that the most outspoken climate researchers are all too human when it comes to talking about their intellectual adversaries in private — but in the end, they were mostly cleared of scientific malfeasance (although one published graph was judged to be "misleading").

The criticisms of Perry's view follow well-worn tracks as well: On the left-leaning Think Progress blog, Texas A&M climate researcher Andrew Dessler is quoted as saying that none of the credible atmospheric scientists in Texas agree with the governor. "This is a particularly unfortunate situation, given the hellish drought that Texas is now experiencing, and which climate change is almost certainly making worse," he said.

Think Progress goes so far as to list more than three dozen scientists who disagree with Perry.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Texas Gov. Rick Perry extends his arm toward a lab worker during a tour of Resonetics Laser Micromaching in Nashua, N.H., on Wednesday. Resonetics CEO Chris Banas is to the left of Perry, and Cliff Gabay, the company's president, looks on from the right.

The Texas governor's views come in contrast with those of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, an early front-runner in the GOP presidential field. Romney has said "I believe, based on what I read, that the world is getting warmer" and added that "I believe that humans contribute to that."

As a result, he said at a New Hampshire town hall meeting in June, "it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors." However, he said any measures to stem greenhouse gases should be applied on an international basis. He opposed putting a carbon cap-and-trade system into place because it would put America at a competitive disadvantage.

The Perry vs. Romney climate split may be the latest and buzziest difference to emerge in the race for the GOP nomination, but when you look closely at the candidates, you'll see other differences as well. Here's a rundown on four of the leading candidates, related to four hot-button scientific topics: climate policy, evolution education, stem-cell research and science funding:

Climate policy:

We've already summarized Perry's and Romney's views.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota opposes climate change legislation, saying that carbon dioxide is a "harmless gas." During a town hall meeting in South Carolina this week, she said that all the issues surrounding climate change would have to be "settled on the basis of real science, not manufactured science."

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas has called the concern about Earth's changing climate "the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years, if not hundreds of years," based on the Climategate reports (see above). He's opposed to energy subsidies as well as government efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions. "Pollution can be better taken care of under a private market system, under private property," he said.

(President Barack Obama, by the way, favors policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but the current "climate" in Congress has severely limited any progress on environmental initiatives.)

Evolution education:

Perry says he is a "firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution." Intelligent design is the view that the complexity seen in nature is best explained as resulting from the efforts of an intelligent designer — for example, God, or an alien civilization. But in Perry's case, certainly God.

Romney said during his presidential campaign that he believes "God designed the universe" and that he believes God "used the process of evolution to create the human body." As Massachusetts governor, he opposed the teaching of intelligent design in public-school science classes. "The science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are any other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed," he told The New York Times. "If we're going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that's for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class."

Bachmann says "evolution has never been proven" and believes that intelligent design should be taught alongside the evolutionary view of biological change. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide," Bachmann told reporters at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans in June.

Paul says "nobody has concrete proof" for evolutionary theory, although he acknowledges that "it's a pretty logical theory." In his view, the intelligent-design concept has more to do with personal beliefs rather than science. "In a libertarian society these beliefs aren't nearly as critical. When you have government schools, it becomes important," he said. "'Are you fair in teaching that the earth could have been created by a creator or it came out of a pop, out of nowhere?' In a personal world, we don't have government dictating and ruling all these things; it's not very important."

(Obama favors the current legal view that teaching the intelligent-design concept in public-school science classes would be unconstitutional.)

Stem-cell research:

Perry is opposed to human embryonic stem-cell research, which involves destroying human embryos to harvest the therapeutic cells. But he's a strong supporter of less controversial adult stem-cell research. In fact, he was a beneficiary of such research when he received an infusion of his own lab-grown stem cells to speed recovery from a back injury.

Romney has voiced support for embryonic stem-cell research in the past, but he says his position has changed over the years, and he now opposes such research.

Bachmann is opposed to federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but favors less controversial initiatives that use adult stem cells or reprogrammed cells (also known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells).

Paul says the federal government should have no jurisdiction over the conduct of embryonic stem-cell research. He has, however, sponsored legislation that would use tax credits to encourage less controversial stem-cell studies, as well as the establishment of stem-cell and cord-blood banks.

(Obama has favored expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research — an issue that has been tied up in lengthy legal proceedings. Most researchers hope that reprogrammed cells will eventually provide a way out of the moral and ethical controversy.)

Science funding:

Federal funding for the National Science Foundation has become something of a hot potato in some GOP quarters, in light of recent criticism of the agency from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

Neither Perry nor Romney has made his views on NSF funding widely known, but in the past the Texas governor as well as the Massachusetts governor have touted NSF grants that came to institutions in their states.

Bachmann has faced criticism from the right-leaning Club for Growth for her "questionable" vote to reauthorize spending by the NSF. However, Bachmann did recently seek to reduce NSF funding to 2008 levels for a budget reduction of $1.7 billion.

Paul voiced strong opposition to federal funding for science education in 2000, saying that "Congress has no constitutional authority to single out any one academic discipline as deserving special emphasis." More recently, Paul was one of two members of Congress voting against a resolution to mark NSF's 60th anniversary.

(After he took office, Obama vowed to double NSF's $6.5 billion budget, but this year's $6.8 billion figure falls well short of that goal.)

What to add?

I realize I'm missing many other worthy GOP candidates, and many other worthy issues relating to science and technology. Feel free to add your comments about the candidates and the issues, but please keep the conversation civil. This isn't the place to talk about the debt crisis, or chew over the immigration issue, or handicap the horse race. That's what the First Read blog is for. Check in with First Read and msnbc.com's Politics section for daily coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign.

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET Aug. 18: Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, another GOP presidential hopeful, stirred the pot by sending along this Twitter tweet: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." This follows up on The Washington Post's quote from Huntsman's chief strategist, John Weaver: "We're not going to win a national election if we become the anti-science party."

Although Huntsman accepts the view that greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to climate change, he told Time's Swampland blog in May that cap-and-trade systems haven't worked and that "putting additional burdens on the pillars of growth right now is counterproductive."

On the stem-cell issue, a spokesman for Huntsman told LifeNews.com that the Republican supports research that involves "adult stem cells, non-embryonic stem cells and certain types of embryonic stem cell[s]" but does not support federal funding for research on new lines of embryonic stem cells. Such a stand appears to be consistent with the policy that was in place during George W. Bush's tenure at the White House.

Huntsman has generally been supportive of science funding: Among the efforts he supported as governor was the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative at the University of Utah.

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

Guile 3D Studio / YouTube

Denise, a virtual assistant designed by Guile 3D Studio, has been programmed to serve as a non-human DJ. "She" will take to the air on Aug. 24 from 1 to 4 pm CST on KROV in San Antonio, Texas.

A non-human DJ will take to the airwaves next week in San Antonio, Texas, in what may mark another step on the path that puts flesh-and-blood radio personalities out of a job.

The DJ is an artificial intelligence program called Denise, who was built by Guile 3D Studio to serve as a virtual assistant to answer phone calls, check email, conduct Web searches and make appointments, among other tasks.

Dominique Garcia, a radio personality in San Antonio, purchased Denise for $200 and programmed the AI to serve as a DJ. Denise will hit the airwaves on Aug. 24 from 1 to 4 p.m. CST on KROV.

"A lot of radio DJs are pretty upset with me because it does work," Garcia told me.

For now, Denise requires human assistance to write the script for Denise's talk breaks and slot the voice track into the playlist.

For the most part, the script writer tells Denise exactly what to say, though "she" has the capability to tell jokes when asked, provide the weather forecast and look up things on the Internet. She can't, however, fill airspace by herself.

"That technology does not yet exist in the AI world," Garcia said. "It is not as sophisticated as that; that's the ideal situation."

In other words, Denise needs an operator who's talented enough to write a compelling script, teach her new jokes, prompt Web searches and, at least for now, type up a traffic report for her to give.

This operator work, according to Garcia, should be much cheaper labor than hiring a full-time human DJ and thus ultimately save radio stations millions of dollars.

"If you have a staff of five that is paid $100,000 a year each, that's half-a-million dollars," he said. "The entire (AI) program is $200, a one-time fee. You never have to pay an annual fee. It never has to go to the bathroom. It never goes on an egomaniac spree. It is always there."

A part-time laborer could be hired as Denise's human assistant, Garcia reckons, for about $10 an hour.

The program, Garcia notes, sounds "a tad robotic" and is far from possessing the quick-wit and ability to drone on unscripted for hours that allows some human DJs to command high salaries in today's market.

Nevertheless, for an off-the-shelf piece of software not even designed to be a DJ, the technology could be disruptive to the industry already facing threats from companies such as Pandora, the Internet radio station that hit 100 million users this July.

"This is something that can be done today if stations decide to run with it," Garcia said.

Station managers and other listeners might want to tune in to KROV on Aug. 24.

More on AI and robots taking human jobs:

• More work for robots in China
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker
• Beyond 'Jeopardy': Watson wins
• Scientists work on artificial cat brain

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

M. Hayes / ESO

This image shows one of the largest known single objects in the Universe, the Lyman-alpha blob LAB-1. The intense Lyman-alpha ultraviolet radiation from the blob appears green after it has been stretched by the expansion of the Universe during its long journey to Earth.

A mysterious giant "blob" of glowing hydrogen gas on the edge of the observable universe has to be powered by the galaxies hidden within it, astronomers have concluded.

The detective story surrounding the power source for the Lyman-alpha blob, one of the biggest objects in the known universe, is discussed in this week's issue of the journal Nature. An international team of astronomers used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to track down the answer to a decade-old question.

"We have shown for the first time that the glow of this enigmatic object is scattered light from brilliant galaxies hidden within, rather than the gas throughout the cloud itself shining," the University of Toulouse's Matthew Hayes, lead author of the paper, said in an ESO news release.

The 300,000-light-year-wide blob of gas was spotted in the year 2000, shining at a distance of 11.5 billion light-years in the constellation Aquarius. It's called a "Lyman-alpha blob," or LAB-1, because it shines brightly in a characteristic wavelength of ultraviolet light known as the Lyman-alpha radiation.

Astronomers knew that there were several galaxies within the huge cloud of gas, including an active galaxy with a matter-gobbling black hole, but they didn't know whether those galaxies could account for the tremendous amounts of radiation pouring from the blob. Some scientists thought the gas cloud could have been lit up by the energy of its own gravitational collapse.

The VLT team used a telescope-mounted spectrograph known as FORS to observe the blob's Lyman-alpha emissions and see whether the light was polarized. If they detected polarization, that would imply that the light was coming from an inner source, and then was being reflected or scattered by the gas cloud. If there was no polarization, that would support the view that it was coming from the glowing gas itself.

Previous efforts to answer the question were unsuccessful, but in this week's Nature, the team reports that the light is polarized in a ring around the central region, but unpolarized in the center. That's exactly what would be expected if the light was being emitted by the galaxies embedded in the center of the blob, and then was scattered by the surrounding gas.

"These observations couldn't have been done without the VLT and the FORS instrument," the Univerisity of Minnesota's Claudia Scarlata, a co-author of the paper, said in the news release. "We clearly needed two things: a telescope with at least an eight-meter mirror to collect enough light, and a camera capable of measuring the polarization of light. Not many observatories in the world offer this combination."

More Lyman-alpha blobs have been discovered since LAB-1 first came to light. Now the VLT astronomers are planning to study those other objects ... to see if their findings hold true throughout the blobosphere.

Update for 2:15 p.m. ET: In a Nature commentary, University of Durham cosmologist Richard Bower says the VLT research is "technically impressive" and could shed light on deep questions about the nature of the universe. Determining what powers these cosmic blobs "could provide crucial insight into the formation of galaxies" in the early days of the cosmos, he writes.

Newly developed observational methods, including the technique used for the VLT observations, could be extended to study the previously invisible stuff between galaxies. "This possibility is exciting, because stars and cold gas account for only a small fraction of the ordinary matter in the universe: Theoretical models predict that most ordinary matter will reside in an extended and hitherto undetectable reservoir," Bower says.

More about space blobs:

• Astronomers unravel secrets of space blobs
• Giant mystery blob found near the dawn of time
• This blob is the biggest thing in the universe
• Cosmic blue blobs discovered

The authors of "Central Powering of the Largest Lyman-Alpha Nebula Is Revealed by Polarized Radiation" include Hayes, Scarlata and Caltech's Brian Siana. 

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

TEAM Network via AFP / Getty Images

A jaguar prowls through the Central Suriname Nature Reserve at night.

The individual scenes tell wonderful wildlife stories: A jaguar goes on the prowl during the night. An elephant takes a stroll through the jungle. A mountain gorilla strikes a pose with a baby on her back. But when you put together 52,000 of those hidden-camera scenes, you can see the bigger picture: The more territory you set aside for wild mammals, the more diversity you'll find. And soon you may be able to contribute to that bigger picture as well.

The tens of thousands of "Candid Camera" moments come from the first worldwide camera-trap mammal study, conducted by a consortium known as the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network, or TEAM Network. In a study published by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, scientists documented 105 species that showed up in nearly 52,000 images from seven protected areas in the Americas, Africa and Asia.

The camouflaged cameras were designed to snap pictures when they detect the heat signature of an animal nearby — whether it's a mouse opossum weighing just an ounce, or an African elephant weighing more than four tons. Wild creatures weren't the only things that were caught on camera: The traps also picked up pictures of tourists or poachers who happened to walk by.

WCS / TEAM Network via AFP - Getty Images

A mountain gorilla (Gorilla berengei berengei) lies in front of a hidden camera with a baby on its back in Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable Forest.

At each of the sites, 60 camera traps were set up for a month, with each camera covering a 2-square-kilometer area. Images for the TEAM project were collected between 2008 and 2010. The pictures showed plenty of cute animals, including giant anteaters, a curious chimpanzee, tapirs, jaguars and cougars. But the study's lead author, Jorge Ahumada of Conservation International, said the cuteness of the pictures was not the focus of the project.

"We're really concerned not about a particular species, but about the health of an ecosystem," he told me today.

Camera traps have been used before for a wide range of species-specific projects, including studies of shimmying bears, seldom-seen leopards and extremely rare rhinos. But the TEAM scientists are more interested in conducting a wider census of species in protected areas around the world. The results could suggest particular locales where conservationists and policymakers should concentrate their efforts.

"Sometimes we operate in the dark, because we don't have a systematic global effort," Ahumada said.

Trento Museum of Science / TEAM Network via AP

This image provided by the Trento Museum of Science shows an African elephant in Tanzania's Udzungwa Mountains on Oct. 11, 2009. It's one of almost 52,000 photos of 105 mammal species taken as part of the first global camera trap mammal study by the TEAM Network.

The scientists have already found that mammalian species diversity is related to how much land is set aside for a protected area, as well as how fragmented the area is. The Central Suriname Nature Reserve in South America had the most species show up on camera (28), while Laos' Nam Kading National Protected Area in Southeast Asia had the least (13). In the Laotian reserve, not a single insect-eating mammal was seen.

"The results of the study are important in that they confirm what we suspected: Habitat destruction is slowly but surely killing our planet’s mammal diversity," Ahumada said in a news release. "We take away two key findings from this research. First, protected areas matter: The bigger the forest they live in, the higher the number and diversity of species, body sizes and diet types. Second, some mammals seem more vulnerable to habitat loss than others: Insect-eating mammals — like anteaters, armadillos and some primates, are the first to disappear — while other groups, like herbivores, seem to be less sensitive."

TEAM Network via AFP - Getty Images

An ocelot walks by a camouflaged camera in Brazil's Manaus nature reserve. The picture is one of nearly 52,000 images collected by the TEAM Network.

Ahumada told me that reduced biodiversity could have a big impact on other environmental issues as well, including climate change and Earth's carbon balance.

"Some scientists suggested not too long ago that if you remove mammals from forests ... you will shift the forest community toward trees that will have much less wood, much less density of carbon per unit weight. That's an unintended consequence of not paying attention to these animals and the whole ecosystem," he said.

He said the findings reported today were just "an initial snapshot" of species diversity in protected areas. "Now, for some of these sites, we have four or five years of data," he added. The TEAM Network has already expanded from seven to 17 sites, and it's aiming to have camera traps in 40 protected areas around the world by 2013. That will provide a regularly updated census of mammalian species in the world's hot spots for biodiversity.

And who knows? Maybe someday there'll be a hot spot near you. Ahumada said he and his colleagues are planning to make their image-analysis software available to the public, so that anyone with a camera trap can gather data about the creatures that pass by.

"Involving citizens in science is great," he said. "The more information we have, the more we know is happening."

TEAM Network via AFP - Getty Images

A South American tapir (Tapirus terrestris) makes an appearance in a camera-trap photo taken in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.

More about biodiversity:

• More pictures from the camera-trap mammal study
• Tiger poachers caught on camera ... their own
• Biological gems found in the Philippines
• Search for 'biodiversity' on msnbc.com

The TEAM Network is a partnership involving Conservation International, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wildlife Conservation Society. The effort is partially funded by those institutions and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

In addition to Ahumada, the authors of "Community Structure and Diversity of Tropical Forest Mammals: Data from a Global Camera Trap Network" include Carlos E.F. Silva, Krisna Gajapersad, Chris Hallam, Johanna Hurtado, Emanuel Martin, Alex McWilliam, Badru Mugerwa, Tim O'Brien, Francesco Rovero, Douglas Sheil, Wilson R. Spironello, Nurul Winarni and Sandy J. Andelman.

TEAM's local partners in the study are Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA), Conservation International Suriname, Organization for Tropical Studies, Museo Tridentino di Scienze Naturali, and Institute of Tropical Forest Conservation. The seven protected areas monitored for the study were Bwindi Impenetrable Forest (Uganda), Udzungwa Mountains National Park (Tanzania), Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (Indonesia), Nam Kading National Protected Area (Laos), Central Suriname Nature Reserve (Suriname), Manaus (Brazil) and Volcan Barva Transect (Costa Rica). 

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

Harry Asada / d'Arbeloff Laboratory

A spherical robot equipped with a camera may navigate underground pipes of a nuclear reactor by propelling itself with an internal network of valves and pumps

A cannonball-shaped robot with no outwardly visible means to move around could soon work its way into the piping systems of aging nuclear power plants to look for signs of rust, corrosion, and unwanted gunk that could cause a leak and contaminate groundwater.

The need for some type of inspector for these power plants was highlighted in June in a special report by the Associated Press, which found tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, has leaked from at least 48 of 65 commercial nuclear sites.

These leaks are raising doubts among independent engineers about the reliability of emergency safety systems at these sites because some of the pipes carry water meant to cool a reactor in an emergency shutdown to prevent a meltdown, the AP reported.

"You got pipes that have been buried underground for 30 or 40 years, and they've never been inspected, and the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission)  is looking the other way," engineer Paul Blanch, who has worked for the industry and later became a whistleblower, told the news service. "They could have corrosion all over the place."

The spherical robots could be sent in to do these inspections, according to Harry Asada, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is heading up the robot's design.

Instead of propellers, fins, or rudders, the robot moves with a specially designed system of Y-shaped valves embedded inside the sphere that harnesses the force of water moving through the reactor pipes, Asada and his team explain.

Depending on what direction operators want the robot to swim, they can close off various channels to shoot water through a specific valve. The high-pressure water pushes open a window at the end of the valve, rushing out of the robot and creating a jet stream that propels the robot in the opposite direction.

The design eliminates the need for external appendages that could snag on something as the robot maneuvers through the network or pipes, joints, and sensors, forcing a plant shut down and rescue mission, Asada said in a news release.

As the robot navigates the pipes, an onboard camera takes images. The plan is to beam the imagery to operators in real time with wireless underwater communications using laser optics. A hamster-ball like mechanism will allow the camera to pan and tilt in place by shifting its center of mass.

Asada envisions the robots as short-term, disposable patrollers with a lifetime of perhaps a few missions into a labyrinthine network before breaking down due to radiation exposure. A prototype was presented earlier this year at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

In addition to the AP report, ensuring the safety of nuclear power plants was demonstrated at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, which was damaged by an earthquake and tsunami last March; three of the six reactors suffered meltdowns.

To help deal with the crisis in Japan, iRobot deployed its Packbot to the damaged plant. Wilson Rothman reports on this robot deployment in the video below.

 More on nuclear power plants and robots:

• Robots en route to Japan
• A robot cut out for mine rescue work
• Snake robot could disable explosives
• Safety rules loosened for aging nuclear reactors
• Radioactive tritium leads found at 48 US nuke sites

ABB Group

FRIDA, a robot from ABB Group, is the type of industrial robot that could soon find work assembling consumer gadgets. Foxconn Technology Group plans to put 1 million such robots to work at its factories in China.

Assembling and welding together gadgets like Apple's iPhones and iPads is tedious, dull, low-paying work that even a robot can do. That's why 1 million more robots will soon be on the job at Foxconn Technology Group's factories in China.

"This is the kind of stuff that drives people crazy when they have to do it themselves, which leads to suicide, which is what the Foxconn people had a problem with," Frank Tobe, owner and publisher of The Robot Report, which focuses on news and analysis of the robotics industry, told me today.

A highly-publicized string of suicides last year at the manufacturer of electronics for Apple, Dell, Sony and other technology companies was partly blamed on the long hours and tedious work employees endured.

The move to robots will free employees from the mind-numbing assembly-line tasks, which could help trim the suicide rate. The workers, in turn, could be trained for higher-skilled jobs, such as operating robots, Tobe said.

"The whole concept is to move people up, to give them a better job," he said. "[But] it is true it is going to reduce some [of the workforce]."

According to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency that reported the plan earlier this month, the transition is part of a bid to trim rising labor costs and improve efficiency. Taiwan-based Foxconn employs 1.2 million people. About 1 million work on mainland China. It currently has 10,000 robots.

The announcement implies that industrial robots now function well enough and are priced cheaply enough to replace-low cost assembly line labor. And if this is happening at Foxconn, there's little doubt it is happening elsewhere too.

According to Engadget, robots such as ABB's FRIDA, which has human-like arms and can manipulate small parts, are the likely replacement workers. Other industrial robotics companies to watch include Panasonic, Rockwell Animation, Canada's ATS Automation Tooling Systems, Germany's Kuka, and Japan's Nachi-Fujikoshi, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Noticeably absent from the industrial robot sector, Tobe noted in a blog post about Foxconn's plans, is the United States, which long ago lost this market to foreign competitors. In the U.S., the robotics industry starts and ends with the military, as msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman reports this week in the video below.

More on Foxconn and robot workers:

• Foxconn to end suicide payments to families
• Why Apple is Nervous about Foxconn
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker
• Your new co-worker may be a robot
• Life at China's infamous iPhone factory

Michael Shribak and Irina Arkhipova / Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole

This colorful Nikon Small World photomicrograph shows a bdelloid rotifer, a creature commonly found in freshwater. Click through a slideshow of aquatic curiosities from the Nikon competition.

Shark Week may be winding down, but just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes a host of fearsome-looking creatures from the black lagoon ... or from your drinking water.

Our summer slideshow from the international Nikon Small World competition features aquatic organisms ranging from the bdelloid rotifer, which has gone without sex for more than 80 million years, to an embryonic bamboo shark.

Each year, the Nikon contest highlights pictures made with a microscope, and this year hundreds of entries were received from around the world. I was one of the judges who was given the job of whittling that field down to the top 20 and rating them in order. I'd love to tell you which image came out on top — but that will have to wait until the fall, when Nikon is due to announce the winners.

Between now and then, you and other Internet users will get a chance to choose your own favorite. The "People's Choice" part of the competition is due to begin at the Nikon Small World website next week.

The pictures may be pretty, but they also serve a scientific purpose: to explore the world within a drop of water. Take the bdelloid rotifer, for example: These critters are about a half a millimeter (0.02 inch) long, and yet they play a crucial role in keeping freshwater clean. They've even been employed to clean up municipal wastewater. If you drink unfiltered tap water, there's a good chance that you've been drinking in rotifers as well. Eeuuwww? Check out this report on AmateurMicroscopy.net and this article from the Hartford Courant for more about the rotifer and how it figures in the history of microscopy.

I'd take rotifers any day over some of the other critters seen through a microscope, such as water fleas and lice. Several pictures in our slideshow shine a spotlight on water fleas — such as Leptodora kindtii, which is widely found in lakes and can grow up to nearly an inch (21 millimeters) in length. The giant water fleas are mostly transparent, which comes in handy for avoiding the fish that prey upon them. We've included a picture that focuses on the flea's surprisingly complex compound eye. If you're heading to the lake this weekend, don't be surprised if you get the feeling that you're being watched.

Another type of aquatic bug, the Argulus fish louse, is a nasty fish parasite. Not the kind of thing you want in your aquarium — or in your drinking water.

Our slideshow is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the worlds within a drop of water. Check out the exhibits at the Micropolitan Museum, including the "Water Flea Circus," for an in-depth exploration. Wim van Egmond, the museum's curator, produced a couple of the images featured in our slideshow (including the Argulus' ugly mug). Don't miss the 3-D images featured on van Egmond's home page!

For still more glimpses of microscopic worlds, click through these galleries:

• Nikon Small World's top 20 for 2010
• Olympus Bioscapes' top 10 for 2010
• Olympus Bioscapes' top 10 for 2009
• Greatest hits from Nikon Small World
• Visualizing science in 2010
• Visualizing science in 2009

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

Brian Emfinger / RealClearWx.com

Brian Emfinger photographed this Perseid fireball in 2009. (More photos at RealClearWx.com.)

August's Perseid meteor shower ranks among the year's most popular sky shows, and provides a great opportunity to drink in a big gulp of night-sky goodness. So what if this year's meteor shower won't be as spectacular as it could be? There are still plenty of ways to maximize your enjoyment of this year's Perseid performance.

First, a reality check: In a normal year, observers could spot more than a meteor a minute under optimal viewing conditions during the peak of the Perseids, which usually comes on the night of Aug. 12-13. The conditions aren't optimal this year, however, because the moon is big and full during what are traditionally the best hours for meteor-watching, between midnight and dawn. All that glare makes it harder to see the fast, faint streaks of light in the night.

The best strategy is to find an observation point that's free of clouds and city lights, and also has an obstruction to the south that stands a chance of blocking the moon's disk — whether that's a barn, a tree or a mountain. Anything that reduces the glare will increase your chances of spotting meteors.

What to watch for
The Perseids' peak comes at the same time each year because that's when Earth travels through the path of gritty space debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle, which crosses our planet's orbital path every 133 years. When those bits of grit pass through the upper reaches of our atmosphere at speeds of more than 125,000 mph, they light up trails of ionized air. Every once in a while, the more substantial bits flare up as fireballs.

The Perseids are so named because they appear to emanate from a spot in the constellation Perseus, known as the radiant. It's good to keep an eye on the radiant if you can, but in fact, meteors can flash anywhere in the night sky. For that reason, meteor-watching is best done with the naked eye rather than binoculars or telescopes.

NASA

Perseid meteors appear to emanate from a point in the constellation Perseus, as shown in this graphic depicting the northeastern sky at around midnight. Although the meteors can appear in any part of the sky, their tails can be traced back to that point.

However, you might want to bring along those things nevertheless, to look at other celestial sights such as Saturn (in western skies late Friday), Jupiter (in eastern skies early Saturday) and Mars (rising in the east just before dawn). Don't believe those hoax emails that claim Mars will be as big as the moon this month — but do take the opportunity to go planet-hunting if you can. The Heavens-Above website can show you where to look.

Another celestial object to watch for is the International Space Station, the brightest human-made object in the night sky. Many localities will have multiple opportunities to watch the space station on Friday and Saturday night. To check the schedule for your location, consult NASA's station tracking database.

Party all night ... online
Meteor-watching is best enjoyed as a group activity, and this year NASA will be presenting an all-night online party to keep track of the Perseids. Astronomer Bill Cooke and his colleagues from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will be chatting away from 11 p.m. ET Friday to 5 a.m. Saturday. Click on over to this webpage to join the chat when it starts. There'll also be live video from all-sky cameras maintained by NASA.

Finally, here's a recap of last year's top-ten tips for maximizing even a mediocre meteor shower:

1. Pick a viewing spot far away from city lights, where the skies are likely to be clear and wide-open. Higher elevations are usually better than lower elevations.
2. For help in site selection, you can check out the Clear Sky Chart website, which provides weather conditions for skywatching ... and links to popular viewing locations on a state-by-state basis. Your local astronomy club can also point you in the right direction. Some events for amateur astronomers are timed to take advantage of the Perseids — for example, this year's star party in California's Mojave Desert.
3. Bring a blanket or a chaise lounge to lie back on. Have layers of clothing available in case the air turns chilly at night. Bring snacks or drinks. Bring a flashlight so you can find your way through the dark.
4. Bring a music player or radio if you need a diversion. But don't forget the earphones if you're going to be alongside other groups who may not appreciate your musical taste. Frankly, the best diversion is a deep philosophical conversation with your meteor-watching friends.
5. Don't give up too quickly. Give your eyes plenty of time to get accustomed to the dark. Although the meteors appear to emanate from the radiant in Perseus, don't focus exclusively on that point. "The closer the meteor is to the radiant, the shorter the trail is," Cooke says. "I always tell people to look straight up, because that way, they'll catch plenty of meteors far enough from the radiant to see a trail."
6. The later you can stay up, the better. Generally speaking, meteor shows don't get good until after midnight, when Earth is turning into the stream of meteor debris.
7. To get a better sense of what to expect at which time, use NASA's Fluxtimator. When you click in the right coordinates for meteor shower, date, location and viewing conditions, the Java-based calculator charts what the estimated meteor flux will be at different times.
8. If you're totally clouded out, you can try listening to the meteors. The video stream on NASA's Perseid Web page will be accompanied by a soundtrack of radio blips created by the meteor streaks. Cooke says it's also possible to hear the radio blips by tuning your FM radio to a station so distant that all you can hear is the hiss of a carrier wave. "When a meteor passes, you'll hear a blip kind of like a sonar blip," Cooke said. Here's a spooky audio file that gives you an idea what the radio echoes sound like. SpaceWeather Radio also lets you hear the meteors.
9. If you want to share your meteor sightings with the world via Twitter — and find out where the sightings are sizzling — the MeteorWatch website is the place for you.
10. Even if you miss the meteor shower completely, you can click through the gallery of greatest hits at SpaceWeather.com. And you can start making plans for the Leonid meteor shower (peaking Nov. 17-18), the Geminids (peaking Dec. 13-14) and next year's Perseids, when the moon conditions will be much, much better.

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

Steve Zylius / University of California-Irvine

National Fuel Cell Research Center associate director Jack Brouwer at the new "sewage-to-hydrogen" fuel pump.

An experimental fuel cell at a wastewater treatment plant in California is turning poop flushed down the drain into hydrogen fuel for cars.

The novel fuel cell converts biogas — methane — produced in digesters at the plant into heat, electricity and hydrogen. The heat is fed back to the digesters, the electricity powers the plant, and the hydrogen is fuel for cars.

"It is a technology to generate hydrogen with a very low environmental impact," Scott Samuelson, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, told me today.

The use of stationary fuel cells at wastewater treatment plants and landfills to generate heat and electricity from biogas is nothing new, Samuelson noted, but this is the first demonstration of the technology to generate hydrogen for cars in parallel with the heat and electricity.

Traditionally, stationary fuel cells at wastewater treatment plants take biogas emitted by the digesters (bacteria that feast on sewage) and mix it with hot steam. This breaks down the methane to hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

Next, the CO2 is emitted while the hydrogen is fed into a fuel cell stack that generates electricity and a byproduct of water, Samuelson explained.

More gas
The new system at the Orange County Sanitation District'sFountain Valley sewage treatment plant is fed more biogas than it needs for electricity generation. The excess hydrogen produced when mixed with the hot steam is siphoned off for refueling cars.

"We discovered that by doing that we actually substantially increased the efficiency of the fuel cell so that it produces more energy per unit of fuel going in and it allows that hydrogen to be generated for refueling at almost no energy cost," Samuelson said.

The current system uses a 300-kilowatt fuel cell, though the same type of fuel cell is deployed elsewhere at 1.2, 2.4 and 5.6 megawatts, he noted. So, the process is scalable.

In fact, the so-called tri-generation technology (heat, electricity and hydrogen) should work just as well at landfills as wastewater treatment plants. If so, the collective piles of human waste could "power more than 30 percent of the automobile population" in Southern California, Samuelson noted.

Hydrogen clusters
The novel technology at the Orange County Sanitation District seems fitting for the once-lauded hydrogen highway of the future that has evolved into a series of clusters.

Already, several hundred hydrogen cars are on the road and by 2015 big name automakers such as Mercedes, Honda and Chevrolet plan to have some 50,000 hydrogen-powered deployed in southern California.

Instead of putting hydrogen fueling stations up and down and between the coasts, the government-subsidized industry is putting filling stations where people will buy and drive the cars, explained Chris White, a spokeswoman for the California Fuel Cell Partnership.

"You probably go to the same two or three stations most of the time. We look at the same thing for these fuel cell vehicles," she told me today. "Where do people live, work and play?"

That's where they put what are now called the clusters and one of these clusters is in Orange County, where the new station will officially open on August 16.

"The fact that it's also making hydrogen from sewage is an awesome, awesome, bonus," White added. "We talk about running out of fuel one day, I can tell you we are never going to run out of fuel that's made from [sewage]."

More on hydrogen cars:

• Hydrogen tries to catch up in green car race
• Hydrogen cars ready to roll – for  a price
• Honda Clarity's future still looks murky
• LA gas station gets hydrogen fuel pump

Funding for this $8 million to $9 million project was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the California Air Resources Boardand the South Coast Air Quality Management District. The station was designed by the University of California, Irvine, FuelCell Energy Inc., and Air Products and Chemicals Inc.

John Roachis a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

USGS

One of the more vigorous vents in Kilauea's Pu'u 'O'o Crater, seen at lower left, is topped by a 20-foot-tall spatter cone. The flow from this vent cascades down several steps, joining the flow from two other nearby vents, before going under a small bridge and into the broad area of ponded lava to the west.

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano is doing a slow burn while the world watches.

Kilauea isn't the kind of volcano that blows its top — as Washington state's Mount St. Helens did in 1980, or as Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano did last year, or as Alaska's Cleveland Volcano is starting to do. Instead, lava rises from fissures on Kilauea, which is part of a national park on Hawaii's Big Island.

The volcano's Pu'u 'O'o cone has been erupting since 1983 with few interruptions. Last week, the U.S. Geological Survey reported a fresh breakout of lava. This video shows what happens as the bright orange lava erupts from spatter cones, then cools and moves down slope:

According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, this current phase of the Kilauea activity, known as the Kamoamoa fissure eruption, began on March 5 when lava began fountaining between the Pu'u 'O'o and Napau craters. When the fountaining stopped, lava began building in Pu'u 'O'o, forming the molten lake that drained in a dramatic collapse on Aug. 3.

Here are a few more pictures from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, released on Monday. It's important to note that the active flows remain entirely within the Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park and pose no threat to the public.

USGS

After the collapse of the crater floor on Aug. 3, Pu'u 'O'o has been filled with thick fume. A very tiny flow, visible only with a thermal camera, was active on the crater floor.

USGS

This thermal image, looking southwest, shows the very small flow active in the bottom of Pu'u 'O'o crater. In the upper right, the active flows on the lower west flank of Pu'u 'O'o can be seen.

USGS

This view, looking east, shows the broad area of ponded lava fed by two main channels originating from several individual vents. The fume-filled Pu'u 'O'o Crater is in the background. The darker lava in the foreground is from the Kamoamoa eruption in March.

More about volcanoes:

• Previously on PhotoBlog: Volcano spews lava
• From March: Scientists monitor eruptions at Kilauea
• Volcanoes: The difference between a blurper and a boomer
• Interactive: How and where volcanoes arise

Tip o' the Log to OurAmazingPlanet.

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

University of California San Diego

An image made with a lens-less X-ray microscope that sees at the nanoscale reveals magnetic domains that appear like the repeating swirls of fingerprint ridges. As the spaces between the domains get smaller, computer engineers can store more data.

A new lens-less microscope that harnesses X-rays is able to see details at the scale of a single nanometer and could help usher in an era of smaller computer hard disks that hold more memory, researchers report in a new study.

The technique is also scalable, and as X-ray sources are improved, the technique should allow researchers to resolve down to the subatomic scale, Oleg Shpyrko, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, told me today.

The X-ray microscope uses a computer algorithm to generate the images. It does this by converting the diffraction patterns produced by the X-rays bouncing off the nanoscale structures into resolvable images.

While various other microscopes, such as atomic force microscopes, can see at the nanoscale, they are only able to see through thin samples. "The advantage of X-rays is they can see through materials," Shpyrko said.

The technique, for the first time, also allows scientists to see magnetic structure at the nanoscale level without the aid of a lens. This is important because it enables researchers to more easily manipulate the sample being studied, he noted. 

The computer algorithm that serves as the lens is similar to the technology that sharpened the Hubble Space Telescope's initially blurred images before its mirrors were repaired in space. A similar concept is employed by astronomers who use adaptive optics to remove distortion from their images.

To test the microscope, Shpryko and colleagues made a layered film composed of the magnetic elements gadolinium and iron that are being considered for the development of higher capacity, smaller, and faster computer memory and disk drives.

When combined, these materials self assemble into a series of magnetic stripes that look akin to the repeating swirls of the ridges in fingerprints. Being able to see these patterns will enable researchers to make and see smaller and smaller fingerprint patterns, known as magnetic domains, which will allow more data to be stored in a smaller space within a material, according to the researchers.

"We want to be able to make materials in a controlled fashion to build magnetic devices for data storage or, in biology or chemistry, to be able to manipulate matter at nanoscale," Shpryko said in a news release. "And in order to do that, we have to be able to see at the nanoscale. This technique allows you to do that."

Currently, the technology is "still somewhat a conceptual proof of principle," Shpryko told me, but given advances in technology, he can envision a future when the microscope technique finds uses in chemistry and biology, for example imaging cells and viruses with a spatial resolution higher than that available with visible light.

More on microscope technology:

• You'll need a microscope to see 'nanobama'
• Researchers say microscope can see atoms
• New nanoscope sees objects smaller than ever
• Japanese scientists create microscopic bowl

A paper on the telescope was published online August 8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors include: Ashish Tripathi, Jyoti Mohanty, Sebastian H. Dietze, Erik Shipton, Eric E. Fullerton, Sang Soo Kim, Ian McNulty.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Laura Burns

The U.S. Capitol looms in the background as a full-scale mockup of the James Webb Space Telescope goes on display in Washington in 2007.

Federally funded researchers are facing months of uncertainty due to the budget-cutting battle that's unfolding in Washington. But policy experts say one outcome seems virtually certain: The long-term prospects for research and development are looking dimmer.

"I don't think that people are very optimistic," said Patrick Clemins, director of the R&D Budget and Policy Program at the Washington-based American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One might be tempted to say, "Join the club." When it comes to projecting the federal government's budgetary future, optimism is in short supply right now. But the outlook for research and development is particularly murky because it takes years for the most ambitious and costliest projects to bear fruit — and that's exactly the time frame that's most challenging for budget planning.

The short-term deal that was put in place last week to avert a debt crisis actually wasn't as bad as Clemins and other budget-watchers had feared. A week ago, ScienceInsider's Jeffrey Mervis wrote that "there may yet be a silver lining for U.S. scientists," in that the deal was kinder to discretionary spending than the House version of the fiscal 2012 budget. About $24 billion kinder.

Mervis speculated that the extra give in the budget might provide an opportunity to reconsider a House proposal to kill the James Webb Space Telescope, which is considered the heir to the Hubble Space Telescope. But reports of the space telescope's resurrection, and any other silver linings on the budgetary cloud, may be greatly exaggerated.

Short term vs. long term
Clemins said the likeliest outcome for the 2012 budget would be just enough of an increase to keep pace with inflation.

"It could be better, it could be worse, but inflationary increase are something we can deal with," he told me. "I think the real challenge is going to come when more discretionary-spending cuts come through the sequestration process or the committee budgetary process."

Looking beyond 2012, things get tougher. Many of the $914 billion in cuts already agreed upon won't take effect until 2014 or later. In the meantime, lawmakers have set up a process by which a 12-member "supercommittee," evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, would be charged with finding at least $1.2 trillion in additional cuts over the next decade. If the cuts can't be implemented by 2013, across-the-board cuts would take effect automatically.

Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society, figures that there'd be an 11 percent reduction in the flow of federal money going to science programs.

"It is hard to see how American science could avoid serious long-term contraction under the legislation approved — unless the economy grows very substantially and federal revenues increase accordingly," Lubell said in his analysis.

Top targets on the hit list
Although the supercommittee's members haven't yet been named, Clemins can already guess which targets will be the first to come up for consideration. "Anything that's been in the news before for cost overruns or potential management issues is going to be at the top of the list, and that's why the Webb Space Telescope came up," he said.

NASA has already spent $3.5 billion on the telescope, and it's expected to require $3 billion more over the course of its construction and operation. At one point, NASA thought the telescope could be launched as early as this year — but the latest estimate points to 2018 as the earliest launch date.

On the defense side of the R&D budget, the troubled F-35 stealth fighter project could be in similar trouble, Clemins said. The F-35, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, is looked upon as a key component in the Pentagon's post-Cold War air strategy — but the project has been plagued by cost overruns and schedule delays, making it a prime target for cutbacks.

If history is any guide, national laboratories and high-energy physics research could also be in for significant cutbacks. In the past, the Energy Department's Office of Science has faced the prospect of double-digit reductions, with the potential for drastic staff reductions or shutdowns at high-profile facilities such as Fermilab in Illinois. The U.S. contribution to the ITER nuclear-fusion program could once again be in peril, just as construction is due to ramp up for the $21 billion international project. (ITER is now slated to begin operation no earlier than 2019.)

Nature's Eric Hand reports that granting agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation might have to reduce their grant-acceptance rates to single digits, and he quotes the Association of American Universities' Barry Toiv as saying there's "not a chance" that academic institutions could make up the gap. For months, the NSF has been high on the budgetary hit list, and it's hard to imagine there won't be more scrutiny.

Is now the time to bemoan the state of American scientific prowess and technological competitiveness? It's a bit too early for that. "Anything now is just speculation," Clemins said. "We're going to have this whole discussion again in December," when Congress is supposed to consider the supercommittee's budget-cutting plan.

But it's not too early to contact your congressional representatives and tell them about your priorities for future spending, including investments in research and development. And while you're at it, feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More on politics and science:

• Will our 'Sputnik moment' fizzle out?
• Funny science sparks serious spat
• NASA chief to Congress: Save our telescope
• How politics will spin science

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

Michael Ericsson Visuals

An auroral display dominates the sky over Tibbitt Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories on the night of Aug. 6.

Last week's solar storms sparked auroral displays as far south as Colorado and Nebraska over the weekend, but the best viewing was available way up north — for example, Canada's Northwest Territories, where photographer Michael Ericsson captured this amazing picture.

"It's one of the better spots in the world to see the aurora," Ericsson told me over the phone today from Yellowknife. He says you can see the northern lights on pretty much any clear night, "if you're out for enough hours."

Ericsson knew that the weekend would be prime time for aurora-viewing, thanks to a series of solar eruptions that started on Aug. 2. The outbursts didn't cause significant disruptions in satellite operations, communications or power grids, as some had feared, but they put on a heck of a show over Tibbitt Lake, where Ericsson set up his camera equipment. He put together a time-lapse series of the auroral display — shot at three-second intervals with a Nikon D3s at ISO 6400 — to produce this must-see video. (Make sure you're seeing this in PhotoBlog's wide-screen format.)

Ericsson says he's seen brighter auroral displays, particularly during the long northern winter, but this one was special nevertheless. "It's really neat getting a summer aurora, because in Yellowknife we're still not getting complete darkness," he told me, "and that's part of the reason why I didn't see it as the most intense aurora."

He and a couple of friends traveled to Canada's Nunavut territory in April to document the northern lights there and also gather some oral history from the local elders. Here's yet another must-see video that features the sights of the lights and the sounds of Alice Ayalik, telling tales of the aurora in her native tongue:

Check out Ericsson's Vimeo website as well as his blog and MichaelEricsson.com for much, much more from the Great White North.

Ericsson wasn't the only one to catch last weekend's show. Yuichi Takasaka's time-lapse video offers a subtler look at the aurora, punctuated by passing clouds and airplanes. Takasaka specializes in views of the night sky, focusing on the northern lights as well as noctilucent clouds and the International Space Station. This view of the Aug. 5 aurora was captured from Burton Campground in British Columbia:    

Check out Takasaka's Blue Moon Promotions website for more.

SpaceWeather.com offers a whole gallery of photos and videos featuring this month's auroral displays, and the show may not be over just yet: Just today, the most powerful flare in years blasted out from the sun. The flare was not directed toward Earth (which is a good thing), but it still might spark a fresh wave of auroras later this week. To learn more about how auroras arise, and how best to see them, check out this FAQ page from the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute.

More about auroras:

• Southern lights look sweeter from space
• Weird glow from Earth's auroras explained
• A mystery glows on Saturn
• All about auroras on msnbc.com

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

Daniel Maurer / AP

This 35,000-year-old bird-bone flute, held by the University of Tübingen's Nicholas Conard, is considered one of the world's oldest handcrafted musical instruments. But researchers say human musicmaking has much more ancient roots.

If you think about, there's no escape, really. Music holds humanity in a vise grip. Every culture you can think of has it, hears it and taps their feet to it. So how did music first take hold? A new analysis proposes that music hijacked our ancestors' ability to hear and interpret the movements of fellow human beings.

That claim is at the heart of “Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man,” a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi analyzed the rises and falls in the rhythm and intonation of more than 10,000 samples of folk music from Finland and found that they bear a stamp — an auditory fossil of sorts — that can be traced back to the rises and falls and rhythms associated with the movement of people. 

It’s the latest in a series of theories that have drawn upon evolutionary biology, developmental biology, psychology and neuroscience to explain how human beings came to cultivate music as a complex, expressive craft. Music has persisted in society, but it doesn't seem to come with any obvious survival benefit. If it wasn't essential to survival, why did it stick around? 

BenBella Books

"Harnessed," a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi, focuses on the origins of music - and how music helped shape humanity.

“Music really is the story about a person moving or doing something around you,” Changizi told me. “It’s just like listening to a story. We’re having an auditory story about people moving our midst.” 

The appreciation for music grew and developed from this primal urge, monopolizing a natural faculty meant for human survival. Music essentially “harnessed” this urge, Changizi says, which also explains the title of the book.

“A lot of thinking is remote from the physical act of making music,” William Benson, a jazz musician and author of the book "Beethoven’s Anvil," told me. “And [Changizi] gets right to the physical aspect of making music.”

For one thing, it explains music's emotional appeal. In his book, Changizi described a study that looked at the foot patterns of people in different emotional states. When they were happy, sad or angry, their gaits betrayed their feelings.

“Music may not be marching orders from our commander, but it can sometimes cue our emotional system so precisely that we feel almost compelled to march in lockstep with music’s fictional mover,” Changizi writes. “And this is true whether we are adults or toddlers. When music is effective at getting us to mimic the movement it mimics, we call it dance music, be it a Strauss waltz or a Grateful Dead flail.”

The relationship between movement and music may come as a surprise for some, but not so much for others. In some African cultures, the word for "music" and "dance" are one and the same. In contrast, concert pianists or cellists sit still when they perform. 

Why this difference? Blame the Gregorian chant, says Benson. Monasteries were the intellectual centers of Europe in the Middle Ages. Monks chanted tonal, arrhythmic verses daily, developed the Western musical notation, and set the pattern for the understanding and performance of Western music during the centuries that followed. “And if you think of that as the basis for music, then you’re not going to get the kind of music you get in Africa and India,” Benson told me.

Essentially, the Gregorian chant decoupled the ideas of movement and rhythm from music in the Western world. But Changizi's theory brings the ideas together once again, backed by a statistical approach that looks more deeply into the correlation between dance and movement and music. 

Take a deeper look into the brain, and you may have an even more convincing case for music being an intrinsic characteristic of the human experience, says Edward Large, who studies how the brain processes sound and rhythm. While Changizi's musical analysis sounds reasonable, there may be an even deeper universality. "The paydirt is where you find the same patters in the brain that you find in the music," he told me.

So, the human brain was harnessed. A faculty that came into being for survival — recognizing the behavioral patterns in the movements of others — was tweaked, and music hitched a ride into the lives of modern humans.

We see such behavior all the time, Changizi explains. Just look at cats: “Although tuna is not what cat ancestors ate, tuna is sufficiently meat-ish in odor and taste that it fits right into a cat’s finicky diet disposition.” And music, it seems, is tuna for our finicky brains.

More about the science of music: 

• Making music from weather data
• Music of spheres and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys
• Music for cavemen
• The sounds of science

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology for everyone. Find her on Twitter and Google+ and join our conversation on Facebook. 

U.S. government researchers have created half-millimeter wide robots that assemble themselves from free-floating particles and transport objects four times their size.

The technology bridges a gap in the manipulation of objects that exists between laser-powered tweezers and mechanical micromanipulators, according to the Department of Energy.

The salt grain-sized robots are built from particles that move in response to magnetic fields. To create them, scientists put these particles between layers of non-mixing fluids. When a magnetic field is applied, the particles arrange themselves into spiky, circular shapes the scientists call asters.

When a second magnetic field is applied, the robots begin to move. By changing this magnetic field, the researchers can control the robots.

"We can make them open their jaws and close them," Alexey Snezhko, a researcher with the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and one of the robots' creators, said in a news release. "This gives us the opportunity to use these creatures as mini-robots performing useful tasks."

In the video above, the robot picks up a glass bead that is four times as heavy as the robot. In the video below, the robots swim in formation and corral free-floating particles like a miniature vacuum cleaner.

The robots were particularly adept at picking up and moving objects without smashing them, a problem encountered with mechanical micromanipulators, according to the researchers. They could find work in the fabrication of precisely designed functional materials.

What's more, the robots can repair themselves. If a particle is lost, for example, the robot reshuffles itself and keeps going.

More on robots:

• New biological robots build themselves
• Robot makes cookies from (almost) scratch
• A new DNA robot gets with the program
• Obama visits institute to 'keey an eye on robots

The research was supported by the Department of Energy's Office of Science. A paper on the robots was published online Aug. 7 in Nature Materials. Igor Aronson, also of Argonne National Laboratory, is a co-author on the paper.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Yale University

Freshwater is becoming an increasingly scarce resource on a planet with a surging population, emerging economies, and a changing climate. Improved desalination technologies are required to provide water for people and crops, experts say.

New membrane technologies could more efficiently turn billions of gallons of seawater full of salt, decomposed fish, and other bits of unappetizing organic matter into thirst-quenching liquid for people and crops, according to experts in desalination technology.

The problem is that these membrane technologies don't yet exist in the right form to efficiently turn seawater into freshwater, they said in a review article aimed at spurring lab-level research with molecular models.

Desalination plants use membranes in a process called reverse osmosis. Seawater is forced through the membrane to filter out the salt in seawater to help make it drinkable and available for irrigation. The process requires a minimum amount of energy to do.

"If you have a clean room, it gets messier and messier over time and in order to sort that you, you've got to expend energy to clean your room up. Separating salt water from seawater is kind of the same thing," William Phillip, a chemical engineer at the University of Notre Dame, told me on Monday.

Membrane tech
Advances in membrane technology, such as using novel materials such as carbon nanotubes to reduce the amount of energy required to push the water through it, are allowing researchers to approach this theoretical limit in energy expenditure.

This means that desalination remains an energy-intensive process that is much less efficient than the technologies used to make freshwater available for drinking as well as the cost savings gained through water conservation, reuse and recycling, the researchers note.

But separating salt water from seawater is only part of the equation in the desalination process. While membranes are close to the minimum limit of energy required, desalination plants spend up to twice as much energy in pre- and post-treatment processes.

For example, plants need to filter out decomposing fish and seaweed as well as other forms of particulate and organic matter before it is passed through the membrane. Chemicals such as boron and chloride are filtered out after the membrane pass to make the water suitable for agriculture.

"Finding ways to not use as much energy to pre-treat the water is somewhere we think that science and technology can help," said Phillip, who wrote the paper with Menachem Elimelech, while he was a post-doctoral student at Yale University.

Their idea is to develop membranes that filter out all the other stuff as well as salt from the seawater, but do so in a way that the membranes don’t get gunked up with fish scales and seaweed and thus require constant cleaning.

"If you can make a membrane that stuff didn't stick to, or didn’t adhere to the membrane surface as easily, then you could relax pretreatment demands and use less energy," Phillip explained.

While this so-called anti-fouling technology doesn't yet exist for desalination, these surfaces have been created for other uses such as medical implants, noted Phillip. A membrane, however, has to let freshwater pass through while blocking all the other stuff, but not allowing it to stick.

That's a tall order, but one that the researchers, writing in the Aug. 5 issue of Science, said they can begin to tackle with "detailed molecular models that establish structure-property relationships between membrane surface structure and chemistry."

Appropriate use
A breakthrough with an anti-fouling membrane fitted into commercial-scale desalination plants is at a minimum on the order of five to 10 years out, Phillip said, but developing the technology within that time frame could make improved desalination technology available for when and where it is needed.

Freshwater is an increasingly scarce resource on a planet with a surging population, emerging industrial economies and a changing climate, the researchers note. In some parts of the world such as Israel, Singapore and Spain, desalination is the "only viable means to provide the water supply necessary," they write.

This is true even though desalination requires three times more energy than conventional methods to treat river water, lakes, and groundwater for potable use, Elimelech noted in an email exchange with me.

In addition, environmental concerns such as trapping juvenile fish during intake and discharging highly concentrated saltwater mixed with chemicals into the marine environment must also be considered, the authors note in their review paper.

Elimelech added: "If you still want to have desalination as part of the water supply portfolio, we need to continue to improve the energy efficiency to make it a sustainable technology. At the present time, the bottom line — if you have other less energy/cost consuming options, use them first."

More on desalination:

• Green machine takes root in Jordan
• Dry California OKs huge desalination plant
• Desalination has promise, experts say
• Israel to build 5th desalination plant

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

CMU / DRP

At left, a subject wears an array of 20 strategically placed cameras, facing outward to monitor apparent motion in the environment. At right, the data from all those cameras can be interpreted to produce an animated figure in virtual space.

Motion-capture animation is all the rage in moviemaking: Without it, there's no Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings," no aliens in "Avatar," no intelligent chimps in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." But it's an expensive proposition: You need to place special dots all over the actors whose motion you want to capture, then have them do their thing in front of precisely calibrated cameras hooked up to a sophisticated computer system, inside a closed stage with controlled lighting.

Now all that could change, thanks to a new system that relies on cameras looking out from the actor's body, rather than cameras looking in at the actor.

"This could be the future of motion capture," Takaaki Shiratori, a postdoctoral associate at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, says in a news release about the technique. "I think anyone will be able to do motion capture in the not-so-distant future."

Shiratori presented a paper about the inside-out approach to motion capture, known as "structure from motion" or SfM, today at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The method has been the subject of research for 20 years at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney's research facility in Pittsburgh.

In traditional motion capture, cameras focus on dots that are placed at strategic locations on a body suit worn by the actors. Computer software renders an animated image — the chimpanzee or the alien, for example — so that its movements conform to the positions of the dots. That animation can be substituted for the actor's image in a computer-rendered composite.

"In 'Avatar,' motion capture was used to animate characters riding on direhorses and flying on the back of mountain banshees," Shiratori and his colleagues write in the paper. "To capture realistic motions for such scenes, the actors rode horses and robotic mock-ups in an expansive motion capture studio requiring a large number of cameras."

In the SfM version of motion capture, 20 lightweight cameras are mounted on the limbs and the trunk of each actor, looking out into the environment. As the actor moves, the video from each camera is compared with reference images, and translated into the movements of the animated figure in a virtual 3-D environment. No studio needed.

The good news is that the technique can be used to capture a sequence of movements in an outdoor setting, with no boundaries on the range of movement. This video shows how the software builds a virtual space, sort of like the data-point cloud created by the Kinect motion-detection game controller, and tracks an actor as he moves through the space.

"Our approach will continue to benefit from consumer trends that are driving cameras to become cheaper, smaller, faster and more pervasive," the researchers write.

The bad news is that rendering the imagery currently calls for a huge amount of computational firepower. The researchers say it takes an entire day to process just one minute of motion-capture data, and the final results aren't quite as good as what's achievable through traditional methods. But as Gollum said in "The Lord of the Rings" movie, "Patience! Patience, my love." The researchers hope that precioussss innovations will soon be within their grasp.

"Future work will include efforts to find computational shortcuts, such as performing many of the steps simultaneously through parallel processing," the team reports.

More on movie tech: 

• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• The physics behind the movie magic
• The future of 3-D moviemaking
• From 2002: Brave new world for virtual actors

In addition to Shiratori, collaborators on "Motion Capture From Body-Mounted Cameras" include Hyun Soo Park, Yaser Sheikh and Jessica K. Hodgins of Carnegie Mellon University and Leonid Sigal of Disney Research, Pittsburgh. Hodgins is a DRP director as well as a CMU professor.

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

SETI Institute

Radio antennas stand sentinel at the Allen Telescope Array, north of San Francisco.

The SETI Institute's search for extraterrestrial intelligence is back on track, thanks to more than $200,000 in donations from thousands of fans.

"We're not completely out of the woods yet, but everybody's smiling here," the institute's chief executive officer, Tom Pierson, told me today.

In April, the institute had to put its big ear for hearing E.T.'s radio call, the 42-antenna Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, into "hibernation" due to budget woes. The biggest hit was the loss of funding by the University of California at Berkeley, the institute's partner for operating the antenna array.

The SETI Institute has been around for decades: It stepped in to help keep the search for alien radio signals active after NASA cut off funding for the quest in 1993. It's not the only organization doing SETI, but it's the leader in the field. The Allen Telescope Array, or ATA, was launched with $50 million in contributions from software billionaire Paul Allen and others — and if the array ever takes in 350 linked antennas, as it's designed to do, it would rank among the world's premier radio-telescope facilities.

But in light of the financial challenges, that's a huge "if" right now. In fact, until last week it wasn't certain if or when the ATA would come back online.

After the antenna array was mothballed, the institute and its fans in Silicon Valley set up a Web-based campaign for donations, known as SETIstars. The campaign kicked off in June, and about 45 days later, on Aug. 3, contributions hit the $200,000 mark. That was how much money the SETI Institute said would be needed to bring the antenna array back into operation. (Since then more than $4,000 in additional contributions have come in.)

Among the contributors are Jodie Foster, the actress who played a SETI researcher in the movie "Contact"; science-fiction writer Larry Niven, creator of the "Ringworld" series of novels; and Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who flew around the moon in 1968. "It is absolutely irresponsible of the human race not to be searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence," Anders wrote in a note accompanying his contribution.

Pierson said the institute's managers and scientists were drawing up a plan that would restart science operations in September.

"We think we're going to come out of hibernation and be solid for the next five months or so, and during those five months we're going to take care of calendar year 2013 and put that under our belt," he said.

Pierson acknowledged that the ATA's long-term success would "require a mix of funding," including continued contributions as well as renewed cash flow from other applications for the radio array. The institute is hoping that the U.S. Air Force will use the array to  track orbital objects that otherwise might pose a threat to the International Space Station and other satellites. During the daytime, the ATA could be used for the Air Force's "debris deconfliction," and during the night it could search for alien signals, Pierson said.

The institute is also looking for ways to reduce the array's operating costs from the current level of $1.5 million per year, plus another $1 million for science operations, Pierson said. "We need to transition to a new modality without UC-Berkeley," he said.

Eventually, astronomers at the SETI Institute hope to use the ATA to listen for signals from the most promising planetary systems identified by NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission. Jill Tarter, the institute's director of SETI research, said in April that the fund-raising target for the Kepler follow-up project would be $5 million.

The institute has already set up a website called setiQuest, where citizen scientists can help sift through the data expected from the ATA, and SETIstars will remain open to receive donations, Pierson said. He had two messages for the SETI supporters: "No. 1 is how grateful we are," he told me. "More than 2,000 people jumped in and help. Also, stand by for future campaigns from SETIstars. We hope to build opportunities that will really excite the public."

More about the search for alien signals:

• New E.T. hunt tunes in on Earthlike planets
• Calculate the odds of finding E.T.
• Are we alone in the universe? Well, maybe
• Gallery: 50 years of searching for E.T.
• Search for extraterrestrials on msnbc.com

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

David Zalubowski / AP

In this file photo Gary Kawano installs a new meter outside a home in Boulder, Colo., as part of the smart electrical grid system being put into place in the university city.

As smart meter technology does what it is supposed to do — persuade us to do our laundry, wash our dishes and recharge our cars in the middle of the night when electricity rates are lowest — it's possible the smart grid will outsmart itself, according to a new study.

That's because electricity rates are cheapest in the middle of night now precisely because everyone is asleep while electricity is generated that needs to be used. But if we all become night owls (or program our devices to turn on when energy rates drop), demand for electricity – and prices – will suddenly soar and, in a worst-case scenario, actually bring down the power grid.

Realistically, this isn't going to happen, Mardavij Roozbehani a member of MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and a lead author of a paper presented at a recent meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers that examines how price controls can prevent huge swings in demand, told me Monday.

"We, as scientists and systems operators, are going to come up with a solution that prevents that kind of response," he said, but added it is the type of scenario planners need to be thinking about now as smart grid technologies roll out across the country.

One idea is to give consumers not-exact real time pricing, he said, in effect shielding them from the wild swings that take place in the marketplace. Such solutions, though, inevitably come at some cost to the efficiencies real-time pricing is meant to provide.

For example, "when you need an aggressive response from the consumers — say the wind drops — you're not going to get it," Roozbehani noted in a news release.

More on the smart grid:

• Is the smart grid too smart for us?
• Smart meters have security holes
• 'Smart grid' – buzz of the power industry
• Smart power meters track electricity use

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Mafic Studios

An artist's conception shows a large phased array in orbit, soaking up solar power.

NASA is awarding $100,000 one-year grants to 30 teams for out-of-this-world ideas ranging from new kinds of spacesuits to quantum communication and space solar power.

The awards were announced today under the auspices of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, or NIAC. The space agency said the concepts were chosen on the basis of their potential for enhancing future space missions. The grants will go toward further study, to determine whether the ideas could help NASA meet future mission requirements.

"These innovative concepts have the potential to mature into the transformative capabilities NASA needs to improve our current space mission operations, seeding the technology breakthroughs needed for the challenging space missions in NASA's future," NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun said in today's announcement.

The 30 recipients were chosen from hundreds of proposals, Joe Parrish, director for early-stage innovation in NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, told journalists during a teleconference. The grants will be disbursed starting in September, and the projects will be highlighted at a conference in the spring of 2012, said Jay Falker, NIAC's program executive.

Falker said project teams will present papers on their work by the end of the year, and some will even develop hardware. The most promising concepts will be chosen for two-year Phase 2 grants amounting to $500,000 each. "We recognize that in order to achieve big gains, we are going to have to accept some risks," Parrish said.

NIAC follows up on an earlier program with the same acronym, known as the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. Between 1998 and 2007, that program pioneered such concepts as space solar power and the space elevator, but it was retooled in response to recommendations from the National Research Council. Unlike the previous NIAC, the new NIAC is open to NASA centers as well as outside academic and industry teams.

"I'm just so thrilled that NIAC is back," Parrish said.

NIAC is just one part of NASA's technology development program, which also offers larger grants for more mature technologies as well as Centennial Challenge prizes that are open to all comers.

The concepts selected for NIAC support are considered to be at least 10 years away from being incorporated into actual missions, although Falker said NASA's mission directorates have already expressed interest in incorporating some of the supported concepts. Here's a rundown of the Phase 1 selections, listed along with organization and principal investigator:

• Variable Vector Countermeasure Suit (V2Suit) for Space Habitation and Exploration, Draper Laboratory, Kevin Duda. NASA says this spacesuit would use flywheels to stabilize and assist astronauts as they work in microgravity.
• Enabling All-Access Mobility for Planetary Exploration Vehicles via Transformative Reconfiguration, North Carolina State University, Scott Ferguson.
• The Potential for Ambient Plasma Wave Propulsion, Ohio Aerospace Institute, James Gilland.
• Space Debris Elimination (SpaDE), Raytheon BBN Technologies, Daniel Gregory. NASA's Falker said this project would look into the possibility of using a balloon-lofted, high-altitude air gun to change the course of potentially hazardous orbital debris.
• Regolith-Derived Heat Shield for a Planetary Body Entry and Descent System with In-Situ Fabrication, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Michael Hogue.
• Atmospheric Breathing Electric Thruster for Planetary Exploration, Busek Co. Inc., Kurt Hohman.
• Economical Radioisotope Power, Universities Space Research Association, Steven Howe.
• Contour Crafting Simulation Plan for Lunar Settlement Infrastructure Build-Up, University of Southern California, Behrokh Khoshnevis.
• Entanglement-assisted Communication System for NASA's Deep-Space Missions: Feasibility Test and Conceptual Design, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Paul Kwiat. This project proposes using quantum entanglement to create more capable communication systems in space.
• SPS-ALPHA: The First Practical Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large PHased Array, Artemis Innovation Management Solutions, John Mankins. This study could lead to a demonstration project for space-based solar power satellites.
• High-temperature superconductors as electromagnetic deployment and support structures in spacecraft, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Miller.
• Non-Radioisotope Power Systems For Sunless Solar System Exploration Missions, Pennsylvania State University, Michael Paul.
• Spacecraft/Rover Hybrids for the Exploration of Small Solar System Bodies, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marco Pavone.
• Ultra-Light “Photonic Muscle” Space Structures, University of Hawaii, Joe Ritter. This project could lead to the development of telescopes and other space-based structures whose shapes can be altered by light beams.
• Low-Power Microrobotics Utilizing Biologically Inspired Energy Generation, Naval Research Laboratory, Gregory Scott. This study would focus on adapting biological models for space robots.
• Printable Spacecraft, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kendra Short. This project would look into using 3-D printing technology to create small spacecraft or components for a planetary outpost.
• In-Space Propulsion Engine Architecture based on Sublimation of Planetary Resources: from exploration robots to NEO mitigation, NASA Kennedy Space Center, Laurent Sibille.
• Metallic Hydrogen: A Game-Changing Rocket Propellant, Harvard University, Isaac Silvera.
• Nuclear Propulsion through Direct Conversion of Fusion Energy, MSNW LLC, John Slough.
• Interplanetary CubeSats: Opening the Solar System to a Broad Community at Lower Cost, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Robert Staehle.
• Ghost Imaging of Space Objects, NASA Jet Propulsion, Dmitry Strekalov. NASA says this technology culd eventually be applied to observations of extrasolar planets or black holes.
• Laser-Based Optical Trap for Remote Sampling of Interplanetary and Atmospheric Particulate Matter, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Paul Stysley.
• Steering of Solar Sails Using Optical Lift Force, Rochester Institute of Technology, Grover Swartzlander.
• Aneutronic Fusion Spacecraft Architecture, University of Houston at Clear Lake, Alfonso Tarditi.
• Radiation Shielding Materials Containing Hydrogen, Boron, and Nitrogen: Systematic Computational and Experimental Study, NASA Langley Research Center, Sheila Thibeault.
• Meeting the Grand Challenge of Protecting Astronaut's Health: Electrostatic Active Space Radiation Shielding for Deep Space Missions, NASA Langley Research Center, Ram Tripathi.
• Proposal for a Concept Assessment of a Fission Fragment Rocket Engine (FFRE) Propelled Spacecraft, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, Robert Werka.
• Radiation Protection and Architecture Utilizing High Temperature Superconducting Magnets, NASA Johnson Space Center, Shayne Westover.
• Technologies Enabling Exploration of Skylights, Lava Tubes and Caves, Astrobotic Technology Inc., William Whittaker. The Google Lunar X Prize entrant has long talked about using caves on the moon as low-cost shelters for rovers and astronauts.
• Optimal Dispersion of Near-Earth Objects, Iowa State University, Bong Wie. In the past, Bong Wie has suggested that subsurface nuclear explosions could provide a feasible option for dispersing a threatening near-Earth object. Maybe "Armageddon" wasn't that far off....

More about innovation at NASA:

• NASA offers $5 million for new feats
• NASA will need new ways to do everything
• The next giant leaps for NASA technology
• From 2004: NASA investigates way-out ideas

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

Experts say the premise behind "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," the latest movie about intelligent chimps gone wild, is almost laughable. But they're not laughing about the wider issues raised by the cross-species romp — ranging from the genetic humanization of other animals, to the way we treat our fellow apes, to the long-running debate over the definition of "humanness."

Let's start by acknowledging that there's no way just administering a drug or fiddling with a few genes can confer human-type intelligence or language ability on chimpanzees or other non-human primates. "The scientific notion is preposterous," Jon Cohen, author of the book "Almost Chimpanzee," told me today.

Cohen said the oft-cited claim that there's a 1 percent difference between the human and chimp genetic code has led people to believe mistakenly that the two species are separated only by a few molecular tweaks here and there. When the differences in non-coding DNA are taken into account, that difference rises to 4 or 5 percent. Chimps and humans don't even have the same number of chromosomes (48 for chimps vs. 46 for humans).

"We have to get away from this vastly oversold notion that we're the same," Cohen said. "Let's grow up, and let's stop that."

The differences range from physiological factors (chimps don't suffer from the kinds of heart disease and cancer that afflict humans), to behaviors (humans can swim, chimps generally can't), to cognitive abilities. For years, primatologists have debated whether chimps can use language, or teach concepts to each other, or do math, or identify with the plight of someone else — but there's no debate that humans put chimps to shame in those departments.

Cohen thinks there are several factors behind our desire to think that chimps are like us:

• Save the chimps: Conservationists may emphasize the similarities as a strategy to build up support for preserving wild chimpanzees in Africa, where they are an endangered species. "It works, because the public cares about chimps more than any other species," Cohen said. "But come on — we care about whales and elephants, and they don't look like us."
• Support for evolution: A long time ago, some Darwinists pointed to the similarities as evidence of evolution at work. But that argument may be counterproductive now, since it's clear that humans and chimps had common ancestors that didn't look or act like either species. Current evolutionary theory rests on a wide array of evidence, and not just on the human-chimp connection. "We don't need that argument any longer," Cohen said.
• We are not alone: "We're fascinated by the notion that we can communicate with species on other planets, that the universe isn't as lonely as it appears to be," Cohen observed. "If we could somehow have a chimp that was more like us, it would satisfy this deep science-fiction desire for communication with others, and make us feel less lonely. But it's a fantasy."

So unless you have 5 million years to spare, don't expect to take over the world by breeding an army of intelligent chimps. An army of intelligent robots is a more likely option. However, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" does provide an opportunity for some serious reflection of the wholly human variety. Among the issues to reflect upon are these:

• Humanized species: It's becoming more common to transplant our genes into other species — for instance, the mice who were given a "humanized" version of the gene linked to language and speech. Humanized mice are even being created in college science projects. The trend has rung alarm bells at the British Academy of Medical Sciences, which is calling for a ban on experiments that might give human characteristics to other primates. (Note the "Planet of the Apes" angle in this video.) Last year, U.S. bioethicists made a similar call for regulation, saying that it would be "ethically unacceptable" to conduct humanization research with apes. (Here's a scary sentence: "Imagine the life of the transgenic chimpanzee that, while no more self-aware than other chimps, is hairless, walks erect, lacks long canine teeth, or vocalizes like a human.")
• 'Species-ism' at work: Even if chimpanzees are not as humanlike as some people may think, should they and other great apes be given special treatment? European regulators think so: They have ruled out most biomedical research on apes, while allowing experimentation on monkeys, our more distant relatives on the primate family tree. A similar debate over invasive chimpanzee research is simmering in the United States. Cohen says "species-ism" is a natural human tendency. We value mice over mosquitoes, monkeys over mice, and men over monkeys. "We do feel closer to some species than others, and we feel closest to the great apes because we're in the same family," he said. "But that doesn't mean tha we're them and they're us."
• Defining humanness: Some may question whether chimps should qualify as "persons" under the law, but no one would confuse a chimp with a human. In fact, Cohen argues that one of the main reasons to study chimpanzees is to track down the roots of the differences between our species and our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. "It clarifies what a human is, and what it means," he said.

One of the closing lines of Cohen's book resonates particularly strongly as "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" goes into its big opening weekend: "Humans will determine the fate of chimpanzees. Chimpanzees of course will have no say in the fate of humans. And that may be the single most conspicuous difference between the two species."

Do you agree? Feel free to weigh in with your comment below. And, oh, by the way: Let me know how you liked the movie.

Extra credit: If you're looking for a blockbuster movie that's on firmer (but equally scary) scientific ground, Cohen suggests keeping an eye out for "Contagion," a meticulously researched action-thriller that's due to debut next month. Looks like it has a dynamite cast — Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, to name a few — but the trailer is making me feel a little skittish about putting my fingers on the computer keyboard.

More about chimpanzees and humans:

• Did chimp and human ancestors interbreed?
• Dogs (not chimps) are most like humans now
• How humans got big brains and barbless penises
• Give a chimpanzee a video game and ...
• Search for chimpanzees on msnbc.com

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

Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson will be the host for the new "Cosmos" series.

Three decades after Carl Sagan's original "Cosmos," a new version is heading for the Fox TV network in 2013 ... with some fresh surprises in the mix.

One of the biggest surprises apparently has to do with the guy who helped get the series green-lighted by Fox: Seth MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy," a Fox cartoon sitcom that The New York Times calls, ahem, "bawdy and irreverent." But it shouldn't be all that surprising. "Family Guy" has been known to poke fun at scientists as well as the scientifically challenged, and because he was born in 1973, MacFarlane was at the perfect age to start drinking in Sagan's wisdom when the original "Cosmos" appeared in 1980.

The astrophysicist following in Sagan's footsteps for the new 13-episode series will be Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is director of New York's Hayden Planetarium as well as a seasoned author and TV host. Tyson said he and MacFarlane discussed the idea of re-energizing "Cosmos" as a follow-up to a Science and Entertainment Exchange session they both attended.

"It was his vision that any 'Cosmos' that's done today needs to reach the kinds of people who wouldn't otherwise think about science," Tyson told me. "Fox is not exactly known for its science shows. You put a science program on Fox, people will sit up and take notice."

Tyson put MacFarlane in touch with Ann Druyan, Sagan's widow and co-founder of Cosmos Studios, who will serve as an executive producer and writer for the new series.

Strong pitch
Druyan recounted how MacFarlane made a strong pitch for the concept with Fox executives. "He said that if he personally had to pay half of the cost of the pilot out of his own pocket, he would do it," Druyan told me. But it didn't have to come to that. Once Fox Broadcasting chairman Peter Rice started watching Sagan's recorded "Cosmos" shows with his family, he was hooked.

Now Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter are hard at work, writing the scripts for the new series. Both of them also worked with Sagan on the original "Cosmos."

"Steve and I have been thinking about this and working on this for many years," Druyan said. "This will be completely original, but it will be 'Cosmos.' ... We know 'Cosmos' when we see it, and this is 'Cosmos.'"

The original series delved into the nature of life (earthly and extraterrestrial), the universe and everything, all from the perspective of Sagan's "personal voyage" of scientific discovery. If you haven't seen it, you simply have to check out "Cosmos" on Hulu.

Thirty-three years after "Cosmos" came out, the book based on the series is still No. 1 on Amazon's astronomy best-seller list. Dryuan said she's "so proud and so happy" to hear that the original "Cosmos" is so revered, and that the new "Cosmos" is so anxiously anticipated.

"I think there's been a real hunger in our society of late for getting back to a time when the revelations of science can command attention on prime-time television," she said.

'Cosmos'-ness meets Neilness
Druyan was reluctant to reveal any of the new twists that she and Soder might work into the new scripts. "We want to save a lot of surprises," she said. But she assured me that Tyson would be much more than a Sagan clone.

"We picked Neil for his 'Neilness,' and we wouldn't dream of making him impersonate Carl," she said. "We picked him because he has that same kind of charismatic passion to communicate the wonders revealed by science. But we are writing this for him, in his voice. You'll be feeling the 'Cosmos'-ness of it, but I know Neil will be bringing what is so special about him to this presentation."

Cornell

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was the host of the first "Cosmos" series, which premiered in 1980.

The 52-year-old Tyson, who is seven years older than Sagan was when the first "Cosmos" premiered, voiced a similar sentiment.

"I cannot be Carl Sagan. I can only be myself," he told me. "But we both, from a very early age, were looking up and wondering about the universe. ... To the extent that we overlap, it's not that I'm cueing off Carl Sagan, it's that we're both cueing off a common experience that every astrophysicist has."

Tyson said one of the secrets of Sagan's success was his ability to play the role of a "tour guide" to the cosmos, rather than a teacher at the front of a classroom.

"What people remember the most about 'Cosmos,' and what it did best, and what I don't think has been duplicated, is the effort to convey the meaning of science to a citizen of planet Earth," Tyson said. "'Cosmos' brought science to the public in a way that meant something to their relationship to each other, to the world and to the universe."

Tyson said some of the tools that Sagan brought to the task will return in updated form for the new "Cosmos." For example, Sagan illustrated the long sweep of the universe's 13.7 billion-year existence by condensing it into a 12-month "Cosmic Calendar." If the universe began on Jan. 1, our solar system was formed on Sept. 1, life arose on Earth on Sept. 21 — and the human species made its appearance after 10 p.m. on the last day of the year.

"We have other stories to tell, to place on that calendar," Tyson said. And he can hardly wait to tell them.

"This new 'Cosmos' is overdue, and I'm honored to be a part of that," Tyson said.

More about 'Cosmos' and Carl Sagan:

• Gospels of science
• Carl Sagan's spiritual quest
• From 2005: 'Cosmos' reborn

"Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey" is due to premiere in 2013 on Fox, with same-night encores of each episode airing on the National Geographic Channel. The series will be produced by Druyan's Cosmos Studios. Executive producers include Druyan, MacFarlane, Cosmos Studios President Mitchell Cannold and Allan Butler of the National Geographic Channel.

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