None of us living today will ever get beyond our celestial backyard in real life, but there's a fleet of apps out there that can blast you through hyperspace to explore — and understand — the far frontiers of the cosmos on your tablet computer. The latest app is "The Wonders of the Universe," a multimedia spin-off of physicist Brian Cox's coffee-table book and TV documentary series of the same name.

The app, sold by Harper Collins for the iPad 2 and the new iPad, organizes more than 200 interactive articles, two and a half hours of video and hundreds of graphics to do a show-and-tell that ranges from subatomic quarks to the largest scales of the cosmic web.

To navigate through this virtual universe, you use your fingers to swipe, spread and pinch the pictures and icons on the screen.  First you select one of the cosmic scales, then you tap on a topic, and then you can watch a video or read all about what you're interested in. Extrasolar planets? Colliding galaxies? Black holes? The big bang and the big chill? It's all at your fingertips. And thankfully, there's also a tutorial that shows you how to do all that swiping, spreading and pinching.

The video clips from the show are streamed on the fly, so you'll want to make sure you have a fast wireless connection. But at an introductory price of $6.99, all that content is hard to beat, even if it a lot of it lives in the cloud rather than in your tablet.

There's lots more to the iPad universe than "Wonders." Here are four other iPad / iPhone apps I touch upon (literally!) in the video above:

Star Walk: This $4.99 app takes advantage of your tablet's GPS and compass capabilities to provide an augmented-reality view of the night sky. Want to know where to look for Venus and the Pleiades star cluster? You can either hold up your iPad and scan around for the right sight, or do a search for "Venus" and follow the pointers on your screen. If you focus in on a star or planet and tap on the "information" button, you can get quick facts about the object in question. You can also look around for the International Space Station or other satellites passing overhead.

The Night Sky: This 99-cent app doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Star Walk, but it works on the same principle: Hold up your iPad, and the app will tell you what you're looking at — whether it's a constellation or star, planet or satellite. It's also available for Android devices.

Solar System for iPad: Astronomer/writer Marcus Chown has created a beautiful $13.99 app for the iPad that presents the solar system in full, with loads of text, video, pictures and graphics. You can pick and choose your planets, and give them a spin while you're at it, or make your way progressively from the sun all the way out to the icy frontier of our solar system. As the author of "The Case for Pluto," I particularly appreciate the fact that Chown gives dwarf planets, asteroids and comets their due.

Solar Walk: The folks who brought you Star Walk have also come out with Solar Walk, a $2.99 app that gives you a 3-D virtual model of the solar system. You can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way, but it's more fun to zoom in on one of the planets and find out what's going on in real time. When you focus in on Earth, you can find out the position of major satellites in their orbits. Tap on the International Space Station and you can watch it passing over our planet's landscape. You can even click a 3-D button, put on your red-blue glasses and geek out to the third dimension.

There are lots more space-themed apps for tablets and mobile phones, including the free GoSkyWatch planetarium app, Exoplanet and GalaxyCollider. I've mentioned some of these apps previously, but what are your favorites? Feel free to share your recommendations in the comment space below.

More about science apps:

• Find new worlds on your iPad
• Scientific 'Magic' on a tablet
• App tracks the space station
• Explore outer space on your phone
• Earth Now lets you take the planet's pulse
• 'Angry Birds Space' launches gamers into orbit
• iPads would be great in space, astronaut says

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

For decades, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has worked to separate myth and religion from hard-headed facts, through science books such as "The Greatest Show on Earth" as well as philosophical tracts such as "The God Delusion." But until now, he's mostly been talking to the grown-ups. In a new work titled "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True," Dawkins goes after the younger set as well.

"Magic" is notable for three reasons:

• It casts the search for the explanations behind natural phenomena as a progression from supernatural stories to natural reasoning, throwing biblical stories in the same bin with outdated tales of Egyptian sky gods and Norse deities. (Would you expect anything less from Dawkins?)
• Dawkins argues that the scientific explanations for the origins of our planet or the reasons for a rainbow can hold as much wonder as any poetic passage from Genesis. "The truth is more magical — in the best and most exciting sense of the word — than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle," he writes. "Science has its own magic: the magic of reality."
• Perhaps most intriguingly, "The Magic of Reality" takes advantage of the magic of technology in a tablet version created for Apple's iPad. The 678-megabyte iPad edition costs less than the 272-page book ($13.99 vs. a list price of $29.99, which is being widely discounted). But in addition to providing the full text, the e-book literally puts Dave McKean's scores of illustrations into motion. It also offers more than a dozen games, interactive graphics, videos and audio clips to click on.

My favorite clickables include a chamber that lets you turn up the heat and the pressure on a solid/liquid/gas to see Boyle's law at work (you can even slosh the liquid around by shaking the iPad) ... a graphic that lets you use virtual prisms, lenses and slits to play with on-screen rainbows (and illustrate how a spectrograph works) ... a game that lets you breed frogs for optimal leg length (too bad you have to kill off six frogs in every generation) ... and a series of virtual photographs that trace evolution backwards into the mists of time (which plays off a concept Dawkins used in an earlier book about evolution, "The Ancestor's Tale").

Each chapter of the book focuses on an age-old question, ranging from "What is the sun?" and "What is an earthquake?" to "Why do bad things happen?" and "What is a miracle?" Sometimes, Dawkins ends up shrugging his shoulders. For example, after noting that time and space itself are thought to have begun with the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, he adds: "Don't ask me to explain that, because, not being a cosmologist, I don't understand it myself."

And don't ask Dawkins to accept any supernatural explanation for natural phenomena, unless you want a tongue-lashing: "If you claim that anything odd must be 'supernatural' you are not just saying you don't currently understand it; you are giving up and saying that it can be never understood," he writes.

Is "The Magic of Reality" the consummate children's book about science? I'm hesitant to go that far, partly because Dawkins is so militant about going after Judeo-Christian beliefs. "As it happens, we know that lots of fiction has been made up about this particular preacher called Jesus," he writes. Religious families might feel threatened by Dawkins' preachiness, while non-religious families might wonder what all the fuss is about. I wonder whether "The Magic of Reality" would pass muster as a public-school science textbook, in light of Supreme Court rulings that say the government should not be actively involved in opposing religion.

Beyond those qualms, there are lots of intriguing scientific topics that Dawkins just had to pass up, ranging from the workings of the brain to the nature of dark energy and dark matter. Think of "Magic" as a jumping-off point for a young adult's scientific inquiry, rather than an all-encompassing reference work.

To Dawkins' credit, he acknowledges that there are still wide gaps in our understanding of the cosmos:

"There is much that remains deeply mysterious, and it is not likely that we will ever uncover all the secrets of a universe as vast as ours; but, armed with science, we can at least ask sensible, meaningful questions about it and recognize credible answers when we find them. We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories; we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy."

I might quibble with Dawkins' perspective on the roles that imagination and spirituality play in making sense out of reality, but his central point is that we shouldn't let our beliefs hold back the search for truth. And to that, I say amen.

More readings in science and religion:

• Stephen Hawking says God's not needed. So what?
• How to teach science to the pope
• Science with the stars
• Gospels of science

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

Odyssey Space Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More about space gadgetry:

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

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

Do you want to explore the heavens? Learn about chemistry or biology? Delve into dinosaur fossils? There's an app for that ... and for that ... and for that as well. Chances are you wouldn't buy an electronic tablet just to study the solar system or the human body, but if you already have an iPad or are considering the new iPad 2, science-based apps can make in-depth learning as fun as playing a video game. Check out these apps for the iPad, and tell us about your own favorite educational apps for tablets or mobile devices (iPad, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, WebOS ... you name it).

Solar System (Touch Press, $14): So much has been learned about the solar system in the past couple of decades that it's no longer enough to memorize the names of eight (or nine) worlds. Thankfully, this app doesn't stop with the biggies, but goes on to include Pluto and Eris, Ceres and other dwarf planets, asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects ... all the objects we cover in our own "New Solar System" interactive, but with much greater depth. There's also an "orrery" that lets you zoom in on planets and give 'em a spin. Links to the Wolfram Alpha database give you basic stats on solar system objects, including where they are right now. It's not perfect — I'd love it if the software could work with the Web to plot the location of smaller objects. (For example, what's up with Apophis, and where will it be in 2029?) But all in all, it's a beautiful app that's well worth the price.

Exoplanet (Hanno Rein, free): What about new worlds beyond the solar system? The Exoplanet app for iPad, iPhone and iTouch shows you where the more than 500 detected exoplanets lie, and how their sizes and orbits compare. The software's tutorials explain how astronomers find distant planets, and you can set up notifications for every new discovery that's made. And you can't beat the price.

Star Walk (Vito Technology, $5 for iPad): Trace stars, planets and constellations in the night sky, and find out when and where to look for celestial objects as well as fast-moving satellites (including the International Space Station). The iPhone version costs $3 and includes an augmented-reality feature. Point the phone up into the sky to figure out what you're looking at.

The Elements (Touch Press, $14): This encyclopedia of the periodic table was produced by the same folks behind Solar System for iPad, and the touch-screen interface is similar. Beautiful photos show you the chemical elements in all their spinnable 3-D glory, plus the basic facts about each one — plus links to Wolfram Alpha for even more information.

Human Atlas HD (Blausen, $30): It's the priciest app on this list, but chock-full of videos and graphics that explain the workings of the human body. This app is designed to be used principally by physicians to help their patients understand what's ailing them, but it's also a boon to armchair anatomists (and, I suppose, hypochondriacs as well). Android, BlackBerry and iPhone versions of the atlas are somewhat less expensive ($20). 

3D Brain (CSHL, free): If it's neurons you're interested in, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has a free app for the iPad and iPhone that guides you through the human brain. It's a spinnable 3-D version of our own "Road Map to the Mind" interactive, but without the scary spider. There's also a Web version of 3D Brain. 

World Atlas HD (National Geographic, $2): The iPad already has maps, but every household should have a world atlas as well. It's hard to beat this price for an iPad atlas from the world's most respected geographers. And when you're connected to the Internet, you can zoom right down to street level.

Ultimate Dinopedia (National Geographic, $6): This kid-friendly app provides basic facts as well as videos, interactives and artwork covering more than 700 dinosaur species.

That's eight science-themed apps to start with, but there are plenty more in the online stores for all sorts of mobile devices. What are your favorites? Feel free to add your recommendations in the comment space below.

More iPad goodness:

• What you need to know about buying an iPad 2
• iPad 2 review: It's the tablet to beat
• 10 great games for your new (or old) iPad 

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."