Paramount Pictures / 20th Century Fox

Film director James Cameron talks with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet during the shooting of a crucial post-sinking scene in "Titanic." The newly released 3-D version of the film will show the sky as it actually appeared that night, thanks to astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson's goading.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson doesn't mind that "Titanic" film director James Cameron called him a "son of a bitch" for shaming him into correcting the movie's constellations.

"I take it as a frustrated expression of affection," Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium, told me today. "As in, 'you son of a bitch, you got me there.'"

Thanks to Tyson's persistence, moviegoers who go to "Titanic" in 3-D will see a truer representation of the night sky when Rose (played by Kate Winslet) looks up into the heavens after the ship sinks. "That sky, I would say, was the most important sky in the movie," Tyson said. And in the original 1997 version of the film, it was wrong.

In a widely quoted interview with the British magazine Culture, Cameron said the sky scene was the only shot he fixed for this year's 3-D re-release:

"It's because Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is one of the U.S.' leading astronomers, sent me quite a snarky email saying that, at that time of year, in that position in the Atlantic in 1912, when Rose is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen, and with my reputation as a perfectionist, I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in.

"So I said, 'All right, you son of a b**ch, send me the right stars for the exact time, 4:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, and I'll put it in the movie.' So that's the one shot that has been changed."

The basic problem was that a space-savvy observer would see that the sky in the original version of the movie was unrecognizable, and in fact was produced by mirroring made-up stars on the left and right halves of the screen. Tyson saw that as a needlessly sloppy move, and he made that opinion known to Cameron and his team in a succession of letters, emails and personal encounters. He wrote about the "Titanic" trip-up and other Hollywood missteps in his 2007 book, "Death by Black Hole." You can watch him tell the tale about "Titanic" and other sci-fi movies in this video clip:

When Cameron's people finally asked Tyson to provide a better sky, the astrophysicist used a standard planetarium program to generate the star field for the proper latitude and time of night, captured a high-resolution image and sent it off to the filmmakers.

"The Big Dipper came out nicely," Tyson said.

The sky was initially fixed in the bonus materials for a special DVD version of "Titanic" a few years ago. "I took that as a triumph and let it be," Tyson told me. Now the corrected sky appears in the big-screen version of the film itself, thanks to post-production wizardry.

Tyson said he can understand why it took a big re-release for Cameron to change the sky. "As a director, you don't want to have to rethink all that, and I respect that," he said. Tyson said his respect for Cameron has grown even more now that the right stars will be on display in theaters around the world.

Will Cameron put the space-savvy S.O.B.'s name in the credits for the 3-D movie? Tyson says he doesn't know, and really doesn't care.

"If he does, that's fine," Tyson told me. "I'm a servant of the public interest and the public's appetite for information about the universe. I get these calls all the time. ... The mere fact that an artist cares about getting the science right, and thereby transmitting that science literacy to the consumers of that art — that's enough reward for me."

More about 'Titanic' and Neil deGrasse Tyson

• 10 reasons for the Titanic tragedy
• James Cameron refloats 'Titanic' in 3-D
• Tyson on NASA's need for a budget boost
• From black holes to black history

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.

Murray Close / Lionsgate / Everett Collection

Peacekeepers escort Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in a scene from "The Hunger Games."

The technological divide between the rulers and the ruled is at the heart of "The Hunger Games": While the good guys struggle to survive, the bad guys employ fictional gee-whiz technologies inspired by real-life frontiers. And just as in real life, technology gets tripped up by unintended consequences.

That's not to say the post-apocalyptic North America of the book series and the much-anticipated movie, opening Friday, is anything close to real life. On one level, the technologies used by the villainous government of the nation known as Panem, ranging from force fields to extreme genetic engineering, serve as science-fiction plot devices and special effects. But on another level, the contrast between bows and arrows on one side, and death-dealing hovercraft on the other, accentuates the saga's David vs. Goliath angle — or, in this case, Katniss vs. the Capitol.

Here are a few of the technological trends that provide the twists in "The Hunger Games," along with real-world analogs:

What? No cellphones?
Much has been made of the fact that the starving, downtrodden residents of Panem's districts don't seem to have access to cellphones or the Internet. Instead, they have to huddle around giant television sets to find out what their overlords in the Capitol want them to see. But if you think of Panem as a fictional tweak of modern-day North Korea, "The Hunger Games" might not be that far off the mark: You've got a leadership capable of long-range missile launches, exercising virtually total control over what its impoverished populace sees and hears. Cellphones were outlawed until 2008, and even today they're confiscated from international visitors upon arrival. Internet access and international calling are limited to the elite.

The outlook for change is mixed: Today, a million North Koreans are said to be using mobile phones, but the State Department's Alec Ross told the Korea Times during a recent visit to Seoul that "it will be very difficult for technology to drive change in North Korea, given the extreme measures that North Korea has taken to create a media blackout." That's life in Panem ... er, Pyongyang.

Genetic engineering
The most vivid special effects are connected to genetic engineering of various organisms, including humanized animals. To minimize the plot-spoiler effect, the only "muttation" I'll mention in detail is the mockingjay, which figures so prominently in the advance publicity and provides the title for the third book in Suzanne Collins' "Hunger Games" trilogy. The geniuses at the Panem high command created genetically modified birds known as jabberjays that were able to listen in on rebel conversations and report them back to the authorities. When the rebels caught onto this, they started feeding the jays false information. And when the Capitol figured this out, they left the jabberjays to fend for themselves. Male jabberjays mated with female mockingbirds, resulting in birds that could learn and repeat musical notes but not human speech.

The twist illustrates a time-honored movie maxim about genetic engineering, enunciated in the first "Jurassic Park" film: "Life will not be contained." That may be putting it too simply, but the field has certainly raised a lot of questions about how to keep genetic genies in the bottle. This month, more than 100 groups issued a call to hold back on synthetic biology until new guidelines are drawn up.

Cross-species splicing is becoming more common: Jellyfish genes have been used to give a glow to mice and pigs. Other types of transgenic cloning have made cats and dogs glow in the dark. Experimental mice have been given a "humanized" version of a gene linked to speech, and there have been humanized sheep and cows as well. These real-life muttations aren't as scary as the tracker jackers, but the movie's genetic-engineering nightmares definitely strike closer to home than, say, vampire nightmares.

Force fields
When competitors fight each other in the Hunger Games, the arena is surrounded by some kind of force field to keep Katniss and the other kids from escaping. The invisible fence pushes back anyone or anything that's thrown against it. In real life, researchers have looked into building up short-lasting but powerful electromagnetic fields to repel projectiles directed against military vehicles, but they haven't yet reached the stage where a commander could truly issue the order to raise shields.

It's more realistic to expect that future spaceship captains will use electromagnetic fields to protect their crews from interplanetary radiation blasts. One such study is being funded at Johnson Space Center as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

For years, the U.S. military has been looking into another type of force field, known as the Active Denial System or "pain ray." This non-lethal system can direct a beam of millimeter-wave radiation at a crowd, producing an extreme burning sensation on the skin. The heat ray's victims instinctively back away from wherever they're standing to get out of the beam. Wired.com's Spencer Ackerman was among a group of guinea pigs ... er, guests ... who got a taste of the pain ray during a recent demonstration at the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

Ackerman's conclusion was that the system isn't anywhere near ready for prime time yet, due to lingering concerns about health effects, plus the hours-long buildup time for the beam generator, plus the fact that the system doesn't really work that well under dusty, rainy or snowy conditions. Bottom line: It might be a while before the odds are ever in the pain ray's favor.

Hovercraft
The "Hunger Games" aerial hovercraft are like helicopters, only spookier. They transport cargo as well as people, and can be used for combat and covert operations as well. A real-life hovercraft might be something like the fan-driven vehicles that Moller International has been working on for decades, or a scaled-up version of the Martin Jetpack. Or who knows? Maybe the Capitol has perfected the superconducting anti-gravity effect that NASA looked into more than a decade ago. (Interest waned when it turned out that the Podkletnov Effect couldn't be reliably reproduced.) 

Surveillance society
The biggest shadow looming over Katniss and the other denizens of the Districts is constant surveillance. That's what the Hunger Games are all about: a reality-TV fight to the death, on the air 24/7, complete with sponsors and wagering. It's a popular concept in fiction, popping up in films such as "The Running Man," "Battle Royale" and "Series 7."

The Capitol's surveillance isn't limited to the games, however. Just as the contestants are being monitored inside the arena, Panem's citizens have to assume they're being monitored on the outside. In real life, meanwhile, tens of millions of surveillance cameras are being installed across the United States, and there's talk about giving domestic duties to camera-carrying robo-planes.

Hmmmm ... maybe this part of the science-fiction saga is getting a little less fictional. What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts about the book and the movie, or about real-life parallels, in the comment section below.

More about 'The Hunger Games'

• 'Hunger Games' fire show is Hollywood magic
• Navy opens 'Hunger Games' arenas for robots
• 'Hunger Games' is also a social media game
• Stars say 'Hunger Games' movie violence justified

More movie reality checks:

• Invisibility and other 'Harry Potter' technologies
• 'John Carter' and the real-life Martian quest
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron: Legacy'
• Apollo 18 in fiction and fact
• 'Avatar' and the future of 3-D moviemaking
• Reality check for 'Star Trek' tech

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.

Director Andrew Stanton watches over the filming of a scene for "John Carter," the Disney blockbuster based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' century-old Mars fantasy novel.

Hollywood film director Andrew Stanton says no one should go to the $250 million 3-D blockbuster "John Carter" expecting to see a documentary about Mars — but he also says the movie, based on a century-old fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, reflects some 21st-century insights about the Red Planet.

He's not talking about the 9-foot-tall green aliens or the impossibly agile feather fliers that folks on Mars get around on. He's not even talking about the scenes where the title character, a Civil War veteran who finds himself mysteriously transported to the next world over, jumps hundreds of feet in the air and lands effortlessly with nary a thud. (Sure, Mars has just one-third of Earth's gravity, but you'd still land pretty hard.)

What Stanton has in mind is the wide-angle view: the fact that at least in some places, the real Mars looks much like the terrain in Utah where many of the exterior scenes were filmed. Some scenes were filmed just one hill over from the site of the Mars Desert Research Station, where researchers operating under the aegis of the Mars Society are testing the tools and techniques that someday might be used for real-life missions to the Red Planet.

Stanton notes that Burroughs had it right when he imagined a dry world where water once flowed in profusion. Findings from NASA's Mars rovers and orbiters have reinforced the view that Mars was warmer and wetter billions of years ago, but lost its oceans and much of its atmosphere due to its weak magnetic field and weak gravity. If life ever flourished on the Martian surface, it lost its footing a long time ago.

The vision of Mars provided in Burroughs' 11 "Barsoom" novels, and in Stanton's movie, is more like the Red Planet as it was understood in the late 19th and early 20th century. This was an era when tycoon astronomer Percival Lowell thought he could make out well-built canals and the hints of civilization through the telescope he had built in Arizona for Mars-watching. The Martian maps created by Lowell and his contemporaries set the scene at the start of the movie.

Burroughs' novels have been a staple of youngsters' imaginings for generations — and today they're freely available online, thanks to Project Gutenberg. Just go to Gutenberg.org's search page, type in "Burroughs," and start with "A Princess of Mars," the novel that provides the plot for "John Carter." You can even download an audiobook version for free.

The movie will hit your pocketbook a bit harder — and that raises the big question about "John Carter": Will the film earn back the estimated quarter-billion dollars in costs and go on to make a profit? Stanton has had a pretty good track record so far, artistically and financially: The 46-year-old Oscar-winner was one of the first animators to join the Pixar studio, became one of the key writers for "Toy Story," made a splash as the director of "Finding Nemo" and had an out-of-this world success as director, writer and voice character for "WALL-E."

"John Carter" marks Stanton's live-action directing debut — and the stakes could hardly be higher, not just because of the huge financial gamble, but also because of the tricky source material. Can Stanton breathe new life into a tale first told in 1912, and still do right by Burroughs' fans? Stanton thinks he can, in part because he's a super-fan himself.

"I’ve wanted to see this story on the screen since I was 11," he told me. "As a fan, I’ve spent my whole life just waiting for somebody to please put it on the screen. When it finally got put into my lap, I suddenly found myself in the driver’s seat."

Stanton and I talked about his vision of Mars, and his expectations for the movie, during a telephone interview last month. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A: 

Cosmic Log: A lot of directors say when they're doing a science-fiction movie, the first thing they think about is telling a good story, and then they have to think about being faithful to the source material, and then they try to slide in a little science just so the film doesn’t look too outlandish. Did you find that you had to keep a lot of those factors in mind as you were working on "John Carter"?

Andrew Stanton: Well, part of the charm and the romance of the book is attached to the time it was written, when we didn’t know enough. It was inspired by the slight improvement in telescopes, and you could see a little bit more of vague detail on the surface of Mars. And that inspired a lot of imagination and wonder in a lot of people’s minds, including Edgar Rice Burroughs. The fantasy he came up with was intriguing, and I didn’t want to debunk it. There’s no fun in that. I mean, there’s a reason why I do stories with fish that talk underwater. If you’re not up for taking that license with your imagination, then you might as well not read the story.

Frank Connor / Disney

During filming in Utah, "John Carter" director Andrew Stanton looks over some papers in the foreground while Taylor Kitsch, who plays the title role in the movie, stands in the background.

Q: Is there anything in particular you did to try to have the audience accept that?

A: Yeah, there was. As a kid, the 11-year-old part of me that read the book, you want to believe that it might be something that could happen. You want to put yourself in the position of the main character and say, "Wow, what would it really be like?" That was certainly part of the attraction. You want to believe that these kinds of flora and fauna and this civilization might exist out there.

We have the one advantage now that we know exactly what the surface of Mars looks like, thanks to all the Mars rovers rolling around and sending back all the images, and all the satellite images. You can Google-map Mars from your iPhone. What that told us is exactly what the geography looks like, and it looks a lot like the Southwest. It’s very much an empty 'Dead Sea' desert, where it’s very evident that billions of years ago there used to be water. That was something I could immediately take advantage of and incorporate. That allowed me to shoot in real locations, and make it much more believable and authentic. If you can take a little bit of license and ask, "What if Burroughs was right?" — this might be what it would be like.

Q: Are there things that you want to let Edgar Rice Burroughs fans know? To say, "This is going to be just a little bit different, because of the way we had to do this movie for the 21st century"?

A: No, the funny thing is, I took the exact opposite approach. If I was the kid in 1976 who could fall in love with a 1912 book, for example, the way it was written, I took it as no different from somebody suddenly coming across "Moby Dick" or "Romeo and Juliet." I fell in love with the time period that it evoked. I wanted to embrace, wholeheartedly, the timelessness of the story and the mythic aspects, but also embrace the historical aspect of it. So I delved right into the late 1800s in the U.S., and I tried to treat the surface of Mars as the people of that time period saw it. They’re all things of the past, and there’s nobody alive today to prove it was any different. It really kind of works that way. I think that's what I want, and I know that's what a lot of people want when they go to see movies. They don’t hope everything's been contemporized to now. I want to be transported somewhere else, and be brought to another place, and meet other people, and believe it.

Q: Are there any things that you drew from planetology, or anything you thought was helpful for filling the gaps when you go from the book to the movie? Often people have scientific advisers to tell them what it should be like in the movie…

A: I found that I had way more scientific advisers on "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E" than I did on this one, because of the fantasy nature. I had more research done on what it was like to live and work in the United States in the late 1800s. But once it came to Mars, it was all whatever you wanted to make up and whatever Burroughs described. But my big mandate was, I wanted to treat it like a "period film" of a period we just didn’t know about. I wanted it to have as much authenticity as if I had done the historical research — as if we had gone back to somewhere in time in our own world, whether that would be the Middle East or feudal Japan or South America. I wanted it to have that kind of gravitas, even though we had to make it up.

Disney

Director Andrew Stanton (right) consults with actor Willem Dafoe, who is perched on stilts for a motion-capture scene. Another crew member wears a green body suit to blend in with the special effects.

It’s the same thing with the environment. Instead of making up these evil-looking creatures, we looked at anything we could think of in nature that would root itself with any the creatures that people rode, or some of the species. One of the most prominent things is this race of green men called the Tharks, which are 9 feet tall with tusks and four arms. I didn’t want them to look like characters that some little kid drew in his notebook and then put on the screen. I wanted them to look like beings that truly evolved in the desert. We have all this history to go back to — so many cultures that have had to survive and push for many generations in the desert, whether it’s Australia’s Aborigines, or the Masai warriors, or the Bedouin. You see all these common denominators that connect them: They’re very thin, they’re very ropy, they just need the essentials to survive. You can pull those common denominators and then make up your own derivative race from that. We did that with everything, so that it would really feel as if nature had evolved all of this.

Q: When it came to designing the landscapes for the movie, it sounds as if you were inspired by that blending of American Southwest and what’s currently known about Mars. Did you go with what our current knowledge of the Martian landscape, or did you go with the Burroughsesque fantasy?

A: I went with what’s really out there, because I wanted it to be believable. I didn’t have the money or the desire to make stuff up. If an ocean goes away, and the ground is left there … like I said, the Mars rover footage proved that it looks like it does in Utah. There’s really very little difference. As a matter of fact, there were areas where we shot where NASA has had people researching what it might be like to colonize Mars if we ever do put a man there. And you can see why: You feel like you’re on another planet. It’s very alienesque. It’s not flat and boring. It’s not like Sahara sand deserts. It’s very unique, and that was part of the attraction of Utah as well, that you could drive two or three hours in any direction and see entirely different, foreign, alien terrain. It’s like having a state-sized movie lot.

Q: Do you draw any inspiration from other science-fiction films? For example, a lot of people have been wondering whether this film is going to be another "Avatar" … What did you take from other imaginative presentations of otherworldly settings?

A: I didn’t need to. Again, Burroughs is the source. Burroughs is the Rosetta Stone of science fiction. It’s what everything else has been inspired by. It inspired "Superman," "Flash Gordon," "Star Wars," "Avatar" — so I had no interest in making a Xerox of a Xerox. I wanted to go to the original source to try to capitalize on what was specific to Burroughs’ DNA and thumbprint. That was the thing nobody had ever copied.

Nobody’s ever really done his book. People have only been inspired by it. It’s like saying people have been inspired to create very nice harmonious, catchy tunes, but nobody’s literally tried to riff off the Beatles, and nobody’s heard the actual Beatles music. That’s what I felt like I was doing by embracing the book itself. A lot of people don’t know that Burroughs wrote 11 books about this character and this world. So it was like having my own field guide. It was like having an encyclopedia describing how the history of this world went, the people’s names, the names of places, dates, flora, fauna. It was almost an overload of information. If anything, we had to cut down how much we described the place. The books are so dense with description. It doesn’t read like a sci-fi space novel, it reads like a traveler or a tourist who has gone to an unexplored area of our world and found a lost continent. That’s what was romantic and interesting to me. It really wasn’t space.

Q: Did you base it on "A Princess of Mars," or did you incorporate material from the other books as well?

A: It’s 100 percent based on "A Princess of Mars." But because we know that these relationships and stories continue, to improve the narrative, to give it a much stronger three-act structure and make it more of a character-growth piece — which is not what the first book was like — I took license to either edit things out or took characters from places that we needed to know about in the later books and brought them in earlier. We treated it like a good television season that you’re planning for, but now you’re putting out the pilot.

Q: So there may be a sequel in the works?

A: We were really smart, because I fell in love with this as a series. The series was finished in 1959 or 1960, so it was all written by the time I was born and started to read these things. I never saw it as a single novel, I saw it as my "Harry Potter" series. I always hoped it would start a whole legacy of films, so what we did is, we optioned the rights to the first three books and outlined all three together like a trilogy, and just set our sights on seriously making the first one. We’re just crossing our fingers that people will like it enough that we can continue.

Q: But you didn’t pull a “Lord of the Rings” maneuver and shoot scenes for future films, I take it.

A: We talked about it. Fortunately, Disney had been through shooting "Pirates" 2 and 3 at the same time, and they had come to the conclusion that there really was no upside to doing that. As clever as it sounds, it causes an equal amount of problems as if you  didn’t shoot the movies together. So they said it wasn’t worth it, especially for me, doing this for my first time. It’s hard enough for me to try to do this one time around, let alone shooting two movies at the same time.

Q: I wanted to ask about that idea of going from animated to live action. Was there anything about the subject matter that made it easier or harder for you to make the switch?

A: Every film that I've ever worked on has taken a minimum of four years. I learned a long time ago that I have to love the idea so much that I’ll be willing to get out of bed and face it when it’s not working, which is most of the time. Most of the time, these movies aren’t working. It’s like raising children. Most of the time, it’s a struggle, and then you get these wonderful little pockets of bliss. That’s the fuel. That’s what gets me into making a movie and working on a movie.

I don’t have a love for a medium. I don’t think, "Oh, I want to make this just because it’s animated, or just because it’s live action." There’s no carrot there for me. It’s all about the story and the idea that I want to see done. That’s what gave me the guts to tackle working in animation on "Toy Story" in the first place. It gave me the guts to suddenly jump into being a screenwriter and try my hand at directing when I did "Nemo." Everything I’ve worked on has had some huge challenge, some huge first that I’ve never done before, but it’s always been fueled by the feeling that I really wanted to see that story on the screen.

This had the deepest seed planted, because I’ve wanted to see this story on the screen since I was 11. As a fan, I’ve spent my whole life just waiting for somebody to please put it on the screen. When it finally got put into my lap, I suddenly found myself in the driver’s seat. That’s what gave me the guts to tackle the live-action part.

But what a lot of people don’t realize is that it’s half an animated movie and half a live-action movie, blended perfectly together. There are more animated shots in this movie than in "Finding Nemo." So I really wasn’t giving up anything that I’ve learned. This is capitalizing on everything that I’ve learned and then adding on top of it the live-action aspect. Which wasn’t as huge of a change as I expected it to be. It’s really still talking to 200 artists about what’s going to be on the screen, what’s the story about, what we’re designing. The conversations were identical. There was really no translation. It’s just that suddenly you’re doing it under duress, outside all the time, in extreme conditions. It’s almost like boot camp, because you don’t have a life. You’re working from sunrise to sunset for 100 days straight. That was very different. I was so used to working banker’s hours in offices for years. But the physical endurance was the only big, big difference.

Q: With the premiere coming up, I’m curious about how you’re feeling – because there are mixed reports. Some people say it’s going to be a huge bomb. Other people say they can hardly wait to see it. Do you get butterflies in your stomach, or have you been through all this before?

A: Yeah, you can look back, and that’s been said about every big film, and about everything I’ve ever worked on. You just have to ignore it all. All you can do is control how good it'll be when you sit in the theater. I can't control people's predictions. I can’t control people's responses afterward, as far as box office and all that kind of stuff. But what I've always been able to control is to make it the best experience I can for you when you sit down in the theater. And that, I feel I've done.

More about our changing view of Mars:

• You saw it on Mars? You must be seeing things
• Google lets you tour Mars, old and new
• Where did Mars' water go? Maybe underground
• NASA rover will look deep into Mars' past

Later this week: Planetary scientists reflect on how our conception of Mars has changed in the past century, and how it will change again in the next year.

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 and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Traders have solidified their positions on the Oscar prediction markets — and if the wisdom of crowds holds true, Sunday will be a big night for "The Artist," the Hollywood throwback to the silent era.

In addition to being the favorite for best picture, "The Artist" is projected to be in the spotlight for best director (Michel Hazanavicius) and best actor (Jean Dujardin). Viola Davis, who played a leading role in "The Help," has the highest-valued shares in the best-actress market. Christopher Plummer ("Beginners") and Octavia Spencer ("The Help") are favored for best supporting actor and actress, respectively.

These are the clear verdicts from the Hollywood Stock Exchange and Intrade, two of the prediction markets catering to Oscar picks.

Such markets let traders "invest" (basically, bet) on the outcome of a future decision. Traders invest in a particular proposition  — for example, that George Clooney, the star of "The Descendants," will get the best-actor Oscar. If that proposition comes true, the investor would get $25 in play money for each share on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, or $10 in real money on Intrade. If it doesn't come true, the shares become worthless.

In the political sphere, prediction markets have been found to be at least as accurate as traditional polling, because traders get pretty savvy about adjusting their investments to reflect new data. The method has been applied not only to politics and the Oscars, but to flu epidemic forecasts and financial forecasts as well.

Beyond the top six categories, HSX is going with "The Descendants" for adapted screenplay and "Midnight in Paris" for original screenplay. Intrade, meanwhile, favors "Rango" for best animated feature. The trading generally reflects the mainstream thinking, but this year it has shown a shift in sentiment from Clooney to Dujardin.

Last year, the Oscars followed the Hollywood Stock Exchange's market trends in seven out of the eight categories covered. The wisdom of crowds was wrong only when it came to best director. Will the markets do as well this year? Would you care to bet? I'll update this item after the Oscars with the results.

By the way, Mitt Romney is favored to win the Michigan and Arizona GOP presidential primaries on the Intrade markets, despite the social-media buzz over Rick Santorum. Romney also leads the pack for the Republican nomination, on Intrade as well as the Iowa Electronic Markets. GOP Newt Gingrich is showing some surprising volatility on the IEM — but isn't volatility exactly what you'd expect from Newt?

Update for 11:45 p.m. ET Feb. 26: It's another seven-out-of-eight performance for the Hollywood Stock Exchange. The one big surprise: Meryl Streep, not Viola Davis, won the best-actress Oscar. Who would have thought Streep would be the underdog in the pre-Oscar handicapping? If you bet on Streep today, you could have more than doubled your money on Intrade. The closing price was 35.5, and if you were lucky enough to buy in at that level, each $3.55 that you put in would get you $10. All the other top-valued picks on HSX and Intrade won their Oscars. 

More about the Oscars:

• Will 'The Artist' dance away with best-picture Oscar?
• George Clooney to claim best-actor Oscar? Wanna bet?
• Oscar time! Stay near the stars in Hollywood

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 following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Dave Hogan / Getty Images file

Talulah Riley and Elon Musk strike a celebrity pose after their arrival at the Orange British Academy Film Awards ceremony held at London's Royal Opera House last February.

Elon Musk, the founder of the SpaceX rocket venture and head of Tesla Motors, heralded the end of his high-profile marriage to British actress Talulah Riley last night with a tragic tweet.

"It was an amazing four years," Musk said in a Twitter update addressed to Riley. "I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day."

Musk, 40, and Riley, 26, capped their relationship in 2010 with a storybook wedding in the same Scottish castle where the singer Madonna was married to actor Guy Ritchie. (That marriage also ended in divorce, which could impact Skibo Castle's reputation as a wedding chapel.) Musk was just coming out of a messy divorce from sci-fi novelist Justine Musk, his first wife and the mother of his five children. Riley, meanwhile, was riding high after taking on notable roles in "Pride and Prejudice" and "St. Trinian's."

Just a few months ago, Britain's Tatler magazine published an interview with the couple that gave little hint of the breakup. Today, Musk told Forbes magazine's Hannah Elliott that he would "always be friends" with Riley but that it was "far too difficult to stay married."

"We took some time apart for several months to see if absence makes the heart grow fonder, and unfortunately it did not," Elliott quoted Musk as saying. "I still love her, but I’m not in love with her. And I can’t really give her what she wants."

There's been no public reaction from Riley, either in the press or on Twitter.

Beyond the tabloids
Now that we're done with the tabloid angle, I'll just note that Musk has more on his mind than his marital troubles: First, the timing for the demonstration flight of SpaceX's Dragon capsule to the International Space Station is currently in limbo. It had been scheduled for Feb. 7, but this week SpaceX said the launch would be delayed to address "a few areas that will benefit from additional work."

For now, SpaceX isn't specifying exactly which areas of the project could use some additional work, but the launch isn't expected to be delayed more than a couple of months. "We will launch when the vehicle is ready," company spokeswoman Kirstin Brost Grantham said in an emailed statement. 

The Dragon's launch on a Falcon 9 rocket would herald a major milestone in the commercialization of orbital spaceflight. The current plan, which has to be cleared not only by NASA but also by the Russians and other space station partners, calls for the unmanned capsule to approach within 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) of the orbital outpost, and then go into a holding pattern. If everything checks out, the Dragon would make another approach, stopping just a few yards (meters) from a docking port. Then the station crew would use the robotic arm to pull the capsule in for a docking. After running through tests, the Dragon would undock and head back to an ocean splashdown.

A fully successful test would open the way for commercial cargo flights to the space station, and give a boost to NASA's plans for commercial crew operations sometime in the latter part of this decade.

Even as SpaceX continues with preparations for the launch, Musk has another "launch" coming up: the unveiling of Tesla Motors' all-electric Model X crossover vehicle, scheduled for Feb. 9. The Model X, a minivan-SUV-type automobile, is due to join the Roadster and the Model S sedan as a Tesla offering in late 2013.

More about Musk and his ventures:

• Next steps in a new space race
• SpaceX gets go-ahead for space station trip
• Elon Musk sets his sights on Mars
• Battery cars face an uphill climb

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.

The way David Attenborough sees it, pterosaurs and 3-D documentaries were made for each other, even though they're separated by 65 million years.

"You want to have something that moves not just in 2-D across the ground, but goes up as well," he said. That makes the flying reptiles an "obvious subject" for a 3-D movie, Attenborough added.

He should know: The 85-year-old British broadcaster and naturalist has been doing nature documentaries for the BBC for more than 50 years — and what's more, he's the brother of Richard Attenborough, the actor who welcomed scientists to "Jurassic Park" in that classic 1993 dino-flick.

So it's hard to think of anyone better-suited to be the writer and narrator of "Flying Monsters 3D," a big-screen documentary due for its North American opening on Oct. 7.

The movie, which had its British theatrical release earlier this year, blends computer-generated graphics with field trips to fossil beds and laboratories. In the process, a wide variety of pterosaur breeds are virtually resurrected.

Paleontologists say the creatures came to dominate the skies of the Cretaceous era, just as dinosaurs dominated the land below. "The story of how that came about, and why eventually they died out, is what the film is about," David Attenborough told journalists during a Monday teleconference.

The 3-D special effects in "Flying Monsters" take their cue from "Avatar," but there's much more mixing of the Cretaceous and the modern world. At one point, pterosaur bones laid out on a table assemble themselves and take off. And during one of the movie's concluding scenes, a Quetzalcoatlus with a 40-foot wingspan pulls alongside Attenborough as he's sitting in the cockpit of a glider.

Atlantic Productions / ZOO

A long-extinct pterosaur known as Quetzalcoatlus seems to fly alongside host David Attenborough in a digitally created scene from "Flying Monsters 3D."

"I originally thought I might do that in a hang glider. ... Unfortunately, the insurers wouldn't let me do that, so I had to do it in the glider," he quipped.

Attenborough said one of the challenges of the project was to make sure the movie stuck to the scientific story instead of turning into a 3-D monster chiller horrorfest. "It's no good just doing a film to say, 'Oh, yes, it's wonderful in 3-D,' but have no story behind it," he said.

The scientific story
Pterosaurs have been the subject of scientific debate for decades: Paleontologists have argued over whether they were cold-blooded or warm-blooded, whether they bore feathers or fur, whether they could take off from a runway or had to jump off a cliff in order to take flight. (One of the places Attenborough visited during the making of the movie was the famed "pterosaur landing strip" in southern France, which he compared to "a prehistoric Heathrow" airport.)

The creatures shown in "Flying Dinosaurs 3D" aren't your father's pterosaurs: They use their folded wings as forelimbs when they walk around on all fours — or when they launch into the air. Some have a coat of fine hairs known as pycnofibers, which serve as evidence that they were warm-blooded. And most of them sport colorful crests, which Attenborough considers a "reasonable" hypothesis.

"They were almost certainly colored, and they had structures on their heads which can best be explained as being like the crest of a bird, and were used in courtship," he said.

Atlantic Productions / ZOO

A crested pterosaur known as a Tapejara uses its folded forelimbs as it prepares for take-off in a scene from "Flying Monsters 3D."

Were pterosaurs actually birds? Pterosaurs had wings. (Check, although their wings could spread wider than bird wings.) They laid eggs. (Check, although their eggs were more like those of reptiles than modern-day birds.) They tended to group in colonies, as many species of birds do today. Pterosaurs and early birds co-existed during the Cretaceous ... but the mainstream view is that they came from different lines of the evolutionary tree.

Why did birds survive while pterosaurs die out? That's the 65 million-year question.

"Birds had feathers, stiff quills, but pterosaurs didn't have feathers," Attenborough said. "They didn't evolve feathers."

Instead, pterosaurs got their lift from membranes that were attached to their limbs and spread out during flight. Those membranes made it "very difficult to move around on the ground in a nimble sort of way," while birds "were able to run on the ground very well," Attenborough said. The way he sees it, that was a "crucial element" in the fight for survival when the era of the dinosaurs ended.

The rest of the story
Is that the way paleontologists see it? Mark Witton, a pterosaur expert at the University of Portsmouth, was one of the scientists who served as consultants for the film — and he was invited to a screening when the British version was ready for its release. "My hopes were high that everyone's favourite leathery-winged beasties were about to get their moment in the media sun," he wrote on the Pterosaur.net blog.

Atlantic Productions / ZOO

Dimorphodon flies through a jungle setting in a scene from "Flying Monsters 3D."

He came away impressed by the film's technical fireworks, but not so much impressed by the scientific claims. "Take, for instance, the way that we're explicitly told that pterosaurs were out-competed by birds and their ability to adapt to new ecologies, thus sealing the extinction of the more evolutionary-stagnant pterosaurs," he wrote. "Detailed analyses of bird and pterosaur diversity have either proved inconclusive on this issue ... or categorically stated that there's no evidence for bird-driven pterosaur extinction. ..."

Witton catalogs the movie's other scientific sins with the rigor that only a dedicated specialist could muster. "It really seems that, with a bit more care, this could've been as much of an achievement for effective scientific communication as it has been for 3-D technology, but it's really an enormous missed opportunity," he wrote.

Other pterosaur experts have provided more positive reviews. The University of Leicester's David Unwin, who was also a consultant for the film, praised the results in a video clip. "Films like this do a tremendous job of actually communicating in a really exciting way, and one that grabs your attention, the kinds of things that we've found out about pterosaurs," he said. "And what I really love is being able to see the animation and being involved in the process of trying to produce the best possible and most accurate animations."

What's a pterosaur fan to do? If you go see "Flying Monsters 3D," you'll want to sit back and enjoy the 3-D effects ... and then get the rest of the story from online resources such Pterosaur.net, or Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings, or John Conway's Palaeontography, or Pterosauria at the University of California Museum of Paleontology.

More about pterosaurs:

• Pterosaurs were 10 times heavier than biggest birds
• Flying reptile's big bill drags down feeding myth
• Pterodactyls in Japan hung out with birds
• How did flying reptiles rise?
• Search for pterosaurs on msnbc.com 

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.    

Planet-hunters say they've detected the first world that's absolutely known to circle two stars, like Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in the fictional "Star Wars" saga.

"Once again, what used to be science fiction has turned into reality," said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss, a member of the team for NASA's Kepler mission and a co-author of a paper on the discovery in the journal Science.

To mark the occasion, NASA invited John Knoll of Industrial Light and Magic, the special-effects company behind the "Star Wars" movies, to sit in on today's announcement. "When I was a kid, I didn't think it was going to be possible to make discoveries like this," Knoll told journalists.

Tatooine serves as the setting for the first movie in the series, released in 1977 and now subtitled "A New Hope." The saga's main character, Luke Skywalker, could watch a double-sunset as he toiled in the desert on his uncle's moisture farm, aided by his trusty robots C-3PO and R2-D2.

Luke probably couldn't stand on the surface of Kepler-16b, which orbits a red and an orange star in the constellation Cygnus, 200 light-years from Earth. It certainly wouldn't be a desert. The planet is most like Saturn in our own solar system — too cold for life as we know it, most likely with a thick, gassy atmosphere. "This one's just outside the habitable zone," the paper's lead author, SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle, told me.

But if Han Solo were to park the Millennium Falcon on one of Kepler-16b's hypothetical moons, there'd be plenty of double-sunsets. In fact, because the two suns orbit each other, each sunset would bring a different configuration, with the small red sun occasionally crossing over the larger orange one. "You might get two eclipses every 41 days," Doyle said.

© Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All Rights Reserved

Luke Skywalker surveys a double sunset on the planet Tatooine in "Star Wars: A New Hope."

How the Tatooine planet was found
It's the complex crossings of the suns and the planet that tipped off Doyle and his colleagues to Kepler-16b's existence. NASA's Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, stares at a 105-square-degree patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the telltale signs of something dark moving across a star. Kepler watches for periodic dips in the light coming from 155,000 stars. When those dips are detected, scientists use sophisticated software to figure out if the pattern could be caused by a planet.

One of the big challenges is that such dips can also be caused by one of the companions in a double-star system crossing over the other one. This is what's known as an eclipsing binary. The Kepler team has found hundreds of eclipsing binaries, including Kepler 16 — but scientists saw something extra in Kepler 16's pattern of dimming and brightening. "We saw extra dips in the light curve," Doyle recalled.

In the Science paper and 12 pages of supporting material, the Kepler scientists describe the painstaking process used to figure out what was behind those extra dips. They analyzed the pattern of the dips, as well as the varying lengths of time it took for objects to cross over each other (a method known as transit timing variation, or TTV). That resulted in a gravitational model demonstrating that the pattern could only be caused by a planet and two suns passing across each other repeatedly, as seen from Earth's point of view.

R. Hurt (SSC) / JPL-Caltech / NASA

It's theoretically possible for the Kepler-16 system's two suns to line up directly behind the planet Kepler-16b, as shown here.

The team found that Kepler-16b is almost exactly a third as massive as Jupiter, and three-quarters as wide — which makes it comparable to Saturn. It's somewhat denser than Saturn, but not quite as dense as water — which suggests it's half-gassy (with a helium-hydrogen atmosphere) and half-heavy (with an icy-rocky core).

Both of the two suns are smaller and dimmer than our own sun, and they orbit each other once every 41 days. The Kepler-16b planet is in a nearly circular orbit around both stars. It takes 229 days to make one circuit at a distance of 65 million miles — which is similar to the parameters for Venus' 225-day orbit. Because the twin suns are dimmer, Kepler-16b is colder than Venus, with an estimated surface (or cloud-top) temperature of -100 to -150 degrees Fahrenheit (170 to 200 Kelvin).

"You better have your long underwear," Boss joked.

Doyle said it was lucky that Kepler happened to be watching now. The orbital characteristics are such that the planet-sun transits won't be visible from Earth starting in the 2014 time frame. "In 2018, the primary transits will stop for 24 years. And in 2014, the secondary transits will stop for 45 years. Delay Kepler, and a lot wouldn't have happened," he said. 

Looking back and looking ahead
The Kepler team says Kepler-16b is the first confirmed, unambiguous example of a planet orbiting two stars. Several years ago, astronomers wondered whether binary-star systems, which make up more than half of our Milky Way's stellar population, would be too unstable to harbor planets for long. Since then, theoretical models have shown that double-sunset planets could be far more common than previously thought.

There have been a number ofl tentative reports of double-star planets. Last year, astronomers reported detecting a "Tatooine planet" that orbited one of the stars in a binary-star system. That research team used a different analysis method known as astrometry.

Boss said the case for Kepler-16b was more solid, not only because it orbited two stars in a close-in binary system, but also because Kepler's transit observations were "rock-hard solid."

"With astrometric observations, you're always a bit uncertain if it's real," Boss said.

Beyond the "Star Wars" angle, Kepler-16b is significant because it shows once again that a wide variety of star systems can foster planets, and perhaps habitable planets at that. "This is an example of another planetary system, a completely different type that no one's ever seen before," Doyle said. "That's why people are making a big deal out of this."

William Borucki, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center who serves as the Kepler mission's principal investigator, said the research "confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life."

"Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars," Borucki said in a NASA news release. "This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

Doyle said Kepler-16b almost certainly will not be the last double-sunset planet discovered by the $600 million Kepler mission. When the numbers all added up, "I didn't feel like it's the end of 20 years of searching ... it felt like the beginning of something" he said. "I predict that in the next couple of months, we're going to have some more."

But time's running out for Kepler. Boss noted that the current mission plan calls for the telescope to be "out of business one year from now." That would be a shame, Boss said, because it looks as if it will take longer than expected for Kepler to get the data to identify Earthlike planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars — which is the mission's prime objective. The reason for that is that the readings from alien suns are unusually noisy. "It turns out that most stars are not as quiet as the sun," Boss said.

Kepler's scientists are already talking about seeking an extension of the mission. That could be a challenge in this era of tightening budgets, but Boss argues that it could be a long time before NASA gets another opportunity to launch a planet-hunting mission.

"Kepler has become, in essence, our only Terrestrial Planet Finder," Boss said. "This is it, for the foreseeable future."

Extra credit: Doyle says that anyone with a good telescope (8-inch mirror or larger) and a CCD camera could record a Kepler 16 planetary transit next June 28 from China and other parts of northeastern Asia. The light from the star system would be seen to dip by about 1.7 percent, if observers train their telescopes on the stars at just the right time. "They'll be able to measure the next transit since the discovery of the planet," Doyle said.

More about weird planets:

• Q&A with planet hunter Laurance Doyle
• 'Super-Earth' just might support life
• Planetary six-pack poses a puzzle
• Probe finds planetary 'missing link'
• Planets spotted in changing orbits
• 'Invisible' planet spotted with new technique
• Looking for alien Earths? Here they come
• Cosmic Log archive on the Kepler mission
• Search for Kepler planets on msnbc.com

This report was last updated at 5:20 p.m. ET.

In addition to Doyle and Boss, the authors of "Kepler-16: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet" include Joshua A. Carter, Daniel C. Fabrycky, Robert W. Slawson, Steve B. Howell, Joshua N. Winn, Jerome A. Orosz, Andrej Prsa, William F. Welsh, Samuel N. Quinn, David Latham, Guillermo Torres, Lars A. Buchhave, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Jonathan J. Fortney, Avi Shporer, Eric B. Ford, Jack J. Lissauer, Darin Ragozzine, Michael Rucker, Natalie Batalha, Jon M. Jenkins, William J. Borucki, David Koch, Christopher K. Middour, Jennifer R. Hall, Sean McCauliff, Michael N. Fanelli, Elisa V. Quintana, Matthew J. Holman, Douglas A. Caldwell, Martin Still, Robert P. Stefanik, Warren R. Brown, Gilbert A. Esquerdo, Sumin Tang, Gabor Furesz, John C. Geary, Perry Berlind, Michael L. Calkins, Donald R. Short, Jason H. Steffen, Dimitar Sasselov, Edward W. Dunham, William D. Cochran, Michael R. Haas, Derek Buzasi and Debra Fischer.

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. 

Marvin Moriarty / USFWS

The white fungus growing on the snout of this little brown bat in Vermont's Greely Mine is the telltale sign of the bat-killing white-nose syndrome.

The hit movie "Contagion" focuses on a fictional killer outbreak that spreads from bats to humans, but a real-life killer is taking the reverse route.

The Hollywood outbreak is based on a real pathogen, the Nipah virus, which originates in bats and can be passed through pigs to humans. The so-called paramyxovirus has been implicated in more than a dozen outbreaks in South Asia. The filmmakers behind "Contagion" merely turned up the dials on the bug's virulence to produce the plot's pandemic.

The real pandemic is afflicting bats, not humans. Biologists are seeing evidence that humans are behind the spread of Geomyces destructans, a fungus that's linked to the bat-killing disease known as white-nose syndrome. In some areas of the northeastern United States, white-nose syndrome is wiping out 90 to 100 percent of the brown-bat population.

Scientific sleuths have traced the disease to the batty equivalent of "Patient Zero": a cave in upstate New York where bats with white noses were first noticed in 2006. When bats started dying, the connection to the white nose led to a determination that Geomyces destructans was playing a role.

"Scientists in Europe said, 'We have bats that are exhibiting similar symptoms, but we're not having the same problem with mortality,'" said Ann Froschauer, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who focuses on white-nose syndrome. "One of the leading hypotheses is that recreational cavers potentially brought the fungus from Europe and carried it here."

The suspicion is that fungal spores survived the trip and took root in the New York cave, where the cold and damp conditions were well-suited for the fungus. The effect on bats in the Northeast was eerily similar to the "Contagion" virus' effect on Hollywood actors.

"Once this fungus made its way into our caves in the U.S., it was the 'perfect storm,'" Froschauer explained. "The environmental conditions were right for the fungus to start growing, and bats here don't have any immunity."

The bats were more vulnerable because they were hit by G. destructans while they were hibernating, when their immune reactions were suppressed. And even if one batch of bats is wiped out, the fungus can remain in the caves, waiting for the next wave of bats to move in and spread the disease.

USFWS

This map tracks outbreaks of white-nose syndrome since 2006.

So far, biologists have found signs of white-nose syndrome in 17 states and four Canadian provinces. An international task force, led by the Fish and Wildlife Service and including representatives from more than 100 agencies and organizations, is trying to figure out what to do about the problem, Froschauer said. Among the potential options: holding bats in captivity over the winter to keep them away from the fungus, closing caves to human visitors, developing antifungal treatments, and even cryopreservation of bat sperm and eggs to allow for in vitro reproduction.

Wouldn't the world be better off without bats? Although you might not know it from their Hollywood image, bats do way more good than harm. No joke: A study published in the April 1 issue of the journal Science pointed out that bats are "voracious predators" of insects that include many crop and forest pests. Without bats, North America's economy would suffer agricultural losses amounting to more than $3.7 billion a year, the researchers said. Some have called them the "unsung heroes of organic farming."

Froschauer sees "Contagion" as an opportunity to do some consciousness-raising about the fate of a species that doesn't usually get much sympathy.

"Historically, they've always gotten a bad rap, and especially at this time of year, when we're often dealing with rabies reports," she told me. "In popular culture, they've always had this negative image."

Ali Khan, an assistant surgeon general who leads the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agrees that bats are classic bad guys.

"They make the best bogeymen, no doubt about it," he joked. "Better than Freddy Krueger."

Nipah virus and rabies aren't the only pathogens linked to bats, Khan pointed out. Researchers believe that fruit bats are the natural reservoir for the Ebola and Marburg viruses, which cause deadly hemorrhagic fevers in humans. Bats are also thought to be a natural host for viruses similar to the one that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

But bats aren't the only suspect when it comes to species-jumping diseases. The list also include pigs and birds (implicated in 2009's global outbreak of H1N1 swine flu) as well as monkeys (implicated in the long-running HIV epidemic), mice (linked to hantavirus) and rats (linked to the Black Death in the Middle Ages).

Khan told me that "Contagion" has stirred up a lot of interest among the press and the public in the question, "Could this really happen?"

"Not only 'could this really happen,' but it routinely happens," he answered, "not just to the magnitude seen in the movie — except perhaps during the 1918 flu pandemic or the Black Death."

Like Froschauer, Khan sees "Contagion" as a teachable moment for epidemiologists — and now that he's seen the movie, he gives it a big thumbs-up. "They did as good a job as you could expect for Hollywood," he said.

That shouldn't be surprising when you consider that the film's actors visited the CDC headquarters in Atlanta to chat with Khan and other experts. "When Kate Winslet said, 'This is what an R-naught is,' I thought, 'I taught her that!'" Khan said.

Khan realizes that Hollywood requires villains as well as heroes to tell a good story, but he nevertheless wanted to clear up a couple of things about the way the movie portrayed epidemiologists doing their jobs:

• "In the movie, the Department of Homeland Security comes off as the bogeyman, at least in the early part of the movie. In our operation, there's excellent collaboration with Homeland Security and particularly with FEMA."
• "It seems like there's just a handful of people who solve this whole mystery, and that definitely isn't true to form. There are hundreds of people involved in this operation. We don't send Kate Winslet all by herself to deal with a global pandemic."

Then Khan had a darker thought. "Maybe that's the future situation, if there are continued CDC [budget] cuts," he said. "There will be no one available to go out and deal with pandemics."

Now that would be a scary movie.

More about 'Contagion,' bats and public health:

• 'Contagion' leaves CDC's real scientists eager for details
• 'Contagion' billboards painted with creepy microbes 
• Keep on top of infectious diseases with msnbc.com
• More on white-nose syndrome from msnbc.com

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. 

Ian A. Duncan

A lunar module on display at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island, N.Y., could have been used for an Apollo 18 mission if it hadn't been canceled. (Learn more from the museum website and Flyian.net.)

The secret moon mission depicted in the movie "Apollo 18" is a totally bogus Hollywood invention — but if NASA ever wanted to redo the Apollo program, the Cradle of Aviation Museum has just the thing: the lunar lander that would have flown during Apollo 18.

"We like to say that it's fully loaded to go to the moon if they want to use it," quipped Andrew Parton, executive director of the Long Island museum.

The lunar module, designated LM-13, is just a small part of the hardware that was left behind when the Apollo moon program was canceled earlier than originally scheduled due to budgetary constraints. The last manned moon mission, Apollo 17, went to the Taurus-Littrow valley in December 1972. The Hollywood version of Apollo 18 was supposedly flown to investigate a spooky, "Blair Witchy" mystery on the moon — but the actual Apollo 18, 19 and 20 moonshots were aimed at widening lunar exploration and  scoping out sites for future moon bases. (This report goes into what would have happened if the Apollo program were extended.) 

After the first moon landing in 1969, Washington began pulling back on NASA's Apollo ambitions, having concluded that the space race was won. By the end of 1970, Apollo 18 was scrapped — and so was millions of dollars worth of Apollo hardware, including the Cradle of Aviation Museum's lunar lander.

Some of the leftover Apollo spaceships and Saturn V rocket stages were converted for use on the Skylab space station project in 1973 and the historic Apollo-Soyuz linkup in 1975. Other pieces were parceled out to museums, including NASA's Johnson Space Center and Kennedy Space Center, as well as the Smithsonian in Washington, the Franklin Institute in Philadelpha and the Cradle of Aviation Museum. For an exhaustive list of what happened to NASA's hardware, check out "A Field Guide to American Spacecraft."

The LM-13 lander was an unfinished shell when it came to the Long Island museum, Parton said. "We had our volunteer restoration crew, many of whom worked on the program at Grumman, work on it," he told me.

The lunar module has already had a turn in the Hollywood spotlight, as a prop for the 1998 HBO miniseries "From the Earth to the Moon." Today it's set up as an exhibit with a mannequin in a spacesuit, making as if it's about to step on the lunar surface for Apollo 18. Parton says "a fair amount of folks from NASA" come up to see the display, and he's expecting traffic to increase after the movie makes its debut.

"They'll see the movie, and then probably come out to see the exhibit," he said.

From scrap yard to backyard
In addition to the big pieces, lots of little pieces from the tail end of the Apollo program were sold off as surplus in the 1970s. Some of them weren't so little: Dale W. Cox Jr., a retired naval officer and a semifinalist for NASA's Mercury space program, happened to be driving by a scrap yard in California in 1970 when he noticed an array of titanium tanks and pipes sitting out for display.

"I learned that Apollo 18 had been canceled, and that all the titanium work in progress was being scrapped," Cox, now 90, told me today. "And there it was, so I just bought the whole thing for 10 cents a pound."

Cox's wife, Patricia, is an artist — and it wasn't long before she and another artist, Jae Carmichael, embellished the shimmery hardware with artistic touches and put the assemblages on display. "It would have been pretty dull if she hadn't put all the pieces together," Dale Cox said. "She transformed them into space junk as an art form."

Cox tried putting one of the tanks, measuring 15 feet high and weighing about 95 pounds, up for sale on eBay with an asking price of $104,000. "I got one bid at $7,500, which I rejected," he said. That offer still would have made Cox a healthy profit, assuming he paid $9.50 for the metal in 1970. But instead, he shipped the tank and other space hardware up to his son in the Seattle area, Dale Cox III.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

Half of a titanium tank that was once destined to go inside a lunar module now sits beside a 600-year-old yew tree in the front yard of Dale Cox III's house in the Seattle area. See more titanium artwork.

The younger Cox showed me around the displays in his backyard this week. Two lunar module fuel tanks look as if they're ready to load up, while another tank is still in pieces. When Cox banged on the 15-footer, which may have been built for the Saturn V rocket, it bonged like a Tibetan bell.

"Titanium never changes color, and it doesn't corrode," Dale Cox III told me. "It's been outside since my dad bought it, and it's basically never changed."

Murky mysteries in history
Were all those tanks destined for Apollo 18? The Coxes like to think so, but there's really no way to say definitively where particular components might have gone if the moon program were extended. "The most reliable way to say it would be to say that the hardware was for a canceled mission, but that final assignments weren't made," said Robert Pearlman, editor of the CollectSpace website for space history and collectibles.

He noted that lots of space hardware was being shifted around during the 1970s, for a variety of missions that may or may not have happened. The first stage of a Saturn V rocket that was at one time destined for Apollo 18 serves as a typical case: Testing on the rocket stage was completed in 1971. Then it was put in storage. Then it was pulled out of storage as a backup for the Skylab first stage. Then it was put back in storage. Then, in 1977, it was moved to Johnson Space Center to become an inert part of its rocket display.

"Its assignment was for Apollo 18, but its testing was completed after 18 was already canceled," Pearlman observed. "So by the time it was ready for a mission, there was no moon mission to fly."

Even before it was canceled, the plans for Apollo 18 were similarly murky. Most accounts say it was destined to explore the moon's Copernicus Crater, but Tycho Crater and the lunar farside were also mentioned as potential (and potentially riskier) destinations. Pearlman owns a 1970 globe of the moon that shows Apollo 18 going to Tycho, near the landing site of the Surveyor 7 probe.

By most accounts, Apollo 12 command module pilot Dick Gordon would have been the commander of Apollo 18, with Vance Brand and Harrison Schmitt serving as crewmates. But in the waning days of the moon program, Schmitt's assignment was switched to Apollo 17, which made him the only professional scientist to set foot on the moon. Joe Engle, who was bumped from Apollo 17, might have flown on Apollo 18 — but who knows?

"The Apollo 18 crew, whoever they were supposed to be, never got far enough to name a spacecraft or design a mission patch," Pearlman said. Sure, you might see some Apollo 18 patches floating around, but Pearlman said "those patches are complete fabrications, they're alternate histories that have no relation to actual fact."

Gordon retired from NASA in 1972, even before Apollo was finished. Brand, meanwhile, became the command module pilot for the Apollo-Soyuz mission (which is sometimes referred to as Apollo 18) and went on to fly three space shuttle missions. Engle helped test the space shuttle and flew on two orbital missions.

Future fiction and fact
Aside from the fact that there are scary monsters in the "Apollo 18" movie, how close does Hollywood come to the Apollo reality? That's hard to judge at this point, because the studio hasn't made the film available for advance screenings. But based on the trailer, Pearlman is intrigued.

"The look of the lunar module and the spacesuits and the other equipment seems to be surprisingly accurate for this type of film, more accurate than for bigger-budget films like 'Transformers,'" he told me.

That verisimilitude may be due to NASA's collaboration on the production. Now that the space shuttle program is over, the space agency is trying harder to stay engaged with the public and the media world. Its recently announced partnerships with Tor-Forge Books on sci-fi novels and with the National Institute of Aerospace on the "Innovation Now" radio program serve as prime examples. When it comes to "Apollo 18," however, NASA may be having second thoughts. The Los Angeles Times reported today that NASA has begun to back away from its association with the movie.

Strangely enough, we're heading into a month when real-life moon missions are taking on more prominence: A week from today, NASA is due to launch its twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory spacecraft toward the moon to study its gravity field. The $496 million GRAIL mission is due to last several months.

Also next week, the science team for NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is scheduled to unveil new high-resolution images of Apollo landing sites. The pictures won't reveal that there are Hollywood monsters on the moon, but they will be useful to wave in the faces of those who still question whether the Apollo moon landings really happened.

The moon has even come back into the discussions of potential destinations for international deep-space voyages, after a period during which NASA turned its back on going back to the moon. We may be hearing more about the debate over future space exploration in the weeks to come. Maybe someday, we'll be able to follow in Apollo's footsteps for real.

Are you planning to see "Apollo 18"? I'd love to hear what you thought of the movie, or other fictional moon flicks such as "Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon," "Fly Me to the Moon" or plain old "Moon." Share your mini-reviews in the comment space below.

More on Apollo 18 in fiction and fact:

• PhotoBlog: Apollo hardware transformed into art
• Could NASA launch a secret moon mission?
• What if NASA hadn't canceled the Apollo program?
• Astronotes: The truth about the lost moon missions

Thanks to Ian A. Duncan for sharing his picture of the lunar module at the Cradle of Aviation Museum.

For a fictionalized treatment of the U.S. space program, check out the 1982 novel "Space" by James Michener, which includes its own version of an Apollo 18 mission. I'm officially designating "Space" as the latest selection for the Cosmic Log Used Book Club, which highlights books with cosmic themes that you can find at your favorite library or used-book outlet. Check out this archive for nine years' worth of CLUB Club selections.

If you're looking for a brand-new book to read, look into "Selecting the Mercury Seven: The Search for America's First Astronauts" by Colin Burgess. The book tells the story behind the selection process for the Mercury 7, and it turns out that Dale Cox Jr. is the book's principal character. "Dale Cox has led a truly amazing life, and it is fully covered in 'Selecting the Mercury Seven,'" Burgess says.

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.

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.

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.

"The Champ" may not show up on the critics' all-time top-ten lists, but for many scientists, the 1979 flick about a beat-up boxer and his boy is considered the classic tear-jerker — so classic that a clip from the movie serves as the scientific standard for inducing sadness. But how did "The Champ" win its crown? And is it still a contender?

The "saddest movie in the world" has been the focus of Internet buzz ever since last month's Smithsonian.com report, which noted that the film has popped up in a wide variety of studies of depression and grief. For example, "The Champ" played a role in determining that depressed people aren't really more likely to cry than non-depressed people, and that people are more likely to spend money when they're sad.

That's not to say that the experimental subjects were forced to watch the whole 121-minute movie. Psychologists just used just used a 171-second clip in which the boxer (Jon Voight) goes down for the count, turning on the tears from his son (played by 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, in a performance that won him a Golden Globe). The scene was one of more than 250 film clips selected by psychologists James Gross and Robert Levenson on the basis of recommendations from movie critics, video-store employees and film buffs.

During the late '80s and early '90s, the researchers refined their list and ended up showing 78 clips to 494 undergraduates. Gross and Levenson hoped that various movies would get strong thumbs-up for eliciting amusement, or fear, or sadness, or contentment — but they didn't always hit the mark. For example, their top fear-inducing movies, "The Shining" and "Silence of the Lambs," ended up sparking too many other emotions as well.

In contrast, "The Champ" performed like ... well, you know. The movie "produced levels of sadness that were much greater than those for any other emotion," they wrote in their seminal 1995 paper, "Emotion Elicitation Using Films."

Even though that research is now 16 years old, it's been cited more than 300 times in other scientific articles, and Schroder's cry-fest is still being used as a downer in the lab. (For what it's worth, the best film on Gross and Levenson's list for eliciting amusement is the fake-orgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally.")

Knowing which movies are reliably amusing or depressing is important for psychology experiments, because movies provide a relatively painless way to elicit a variety of emotions — especially the negative ones. Showing someone a sad film clip won't leave lasting mental scars. When you compare it with some of the other methods that can spark feelings of fear, anxiety or anger, such as drugs or electric shocks, the choice is a no-brainer.

But isn't it time to rerun the experiment with a new set of movies? What seemed sad or funny in the '80s may seem sadly dated or unintentionally funny in 2011. And indeed, clips from other flicks such as "Steel Magnolias" and "John Q." have stood in for "The Champ" in some recent studies of sadness. If you have any suggestions for the saddest movie scene ever (or film clips that are the best for inducing fear, amusement or contentment), feel free to list them in your comments below.

Someday, some scientist just might decide to do a sequel to the sad-movie saga. Will a new top tear-jerker rise up for a new generation?

"I know that others have been working on this (as have we)," Levenson, director of the Institute of Personality and Social Research at the University of California at Berkeley, told me in an email, "but I believe the champ still is 'The Champ.'"

Update for 5:15 p.m. ET Aug. 7: Stanford psychologist Sylvia Kreibig, who has done extensive research on emotion-inducing films, got back to me with this email:

"We have worked with two film clips for inducing sadness in our own research (Kreibig, Wilhelm, Roth, & Gross, 2007, 2011; Kolodyazhniy, Kreibig, Roth, Gross, & Wilhelm, 2011), 'Steel Magnolias' and 'John Q.' On a scale from zero (not at all) to 10 (extremely), these films received an average rating of 6.14, with a standard deviation of 2.13. However, we did not compare these films to 'The Champ.' 'Steel Magnolias' has been used in a number of other experiments for studying sadness and has been found to be effective. A study by Goldin, Hutcherson, Ochsner, Glover, Gabrieli, & Gross (2005) tested the neural bases of sadness using 'The Champ' for inducing sadness, which might be of interest to you.

"Besides the Gross & Levenson 1995 paper, there have been at least three other large-scale research studies on validating film clips for emotion induction, including a target category of sadness:

• In 1999, Hagemann, Naumann, Maier, Becker, Lürken, & Bartussek found the clip from 'The Champ' to elicit the strongest ratings for sadness among a selection of three sadness-inducing film clips (M=6.64; SD=2.35, on a scale from 0 to 9) and to be highly specific for eliciting the target emotion (90 percent hit rate). These results are based on a German sample, demonstrating that this film clip is effective across national and cultural borders.
• Hewig, Hagemann, Seifert, Gollwitzer, Naumann, Bartussek (2005) again tested a set of three sadness-inducing film clips (among other emotion-inducing films) and again found 'The Champ' to be very effective in inducing sadness (M = 7.21, SD = 2.07 on a scale from 0 to 9), while not strongly eliciting other emotions (again in a German sample).
• In a more recent study by a Belgium research team using film clips in French, Schaefer, Nils, Sanchez, Philippot (2009) reported a clip from 'City of Angels' (mean of 2.32 on a scale from 1 to 7) to be the most effective, considering discreteness of elicited feelings and mean feeling self-report, but their selection did not include 'The Champ.'

"You see that different film sets and different scales for rating have been used in these studies. There are ways for mapping different scales onto one common scale in order to compare these values, but then the question still remains whether people would nowadays still rate 'The Champ' clip as the strongest sadness-inducing film clip. 'The Champ' seems to be fairly robust against changes in preferences of cinematographic style, as much has changed in the movie world since the film's shooting in 1979. And psychological distance/immersion might influence a film's effectiveness in inducing the targeted emotion, rather than amusement at watching the film clip or nostalgia for times past ... So emotion induction in the psychology laboratory remains to be a challenging issue!"

More about emotions and movies:

• Botox paralyzes your emotions, too, study shows
• Stop the waterworks, ladies: Crying chicks aren't sexy
• Tears don't make you feel any better
• Brain-damaged woman feels no fear
• Scientists study the thrill behind a chill
• Gallery: Five boxing films that pack a punch

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