Revelations about the solar system's icy frontier, carbon-based nanostructures and the neurological basis of perception and decision have brought global recognition to seven researchers who are sharing in this year's three $1 million Kavli Prizes.

The prizes have been awarded every other year since 2008 for pioneering work in three areas of research: astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. The program is a partnership involving the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Kavli Foundation and the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.

The Norwegian academy receives nominations from their colleagues in other countries and forwards them on to prize committees who recommend the winners. Much of the money for the awards is put up by the foundation, created by Norwegian-born industrialist/philanthropist Fred Kavli.

Here are the winners of this year's prizes, announced on Thursday:

Astrophysics
Planetary scientists David Jewitt, Jane Luu and Mike Brown share the $1 million astrophysics prize "for discovering and characterizing the Kuiper Belt and its largest members, work that led to a major advance in the understanding of the history of our planetary system." The Kuiper Belt is an icy ring of material on the outskirts of the solar system, between 30 and 50 AU. (One AU, or astronomical unit, equals the distance from Earth to the sun.) UCLA's Jewitt and MIT's Luu found the first Kuiper Belt object beyond Pluto in 1992. Caltech's Brown led a team that found numerous large Kuiper Belt objects, including one that's more massive than Pluto. Brown's discovery of the world now known as Eris led to Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet in 2006, but I don't hold that against him.

Kavli Prize

Winners of the Kavli Prize for Astrophysics: UCLA's David Jewitt, MIT's Jane Luu, Caltech's Mike Brown.

Earlier in the week, Jewitt and Luu were awarded the $1 million Shaw Prize in Astronomy for their study of trans-Neptunian bodies. Jewitt told Physics World it was "very flattering" to receive such rich honors from two independent prize committees almost simultaneously.

Kavli Prize

MIT's Mildred Dresselhaus

Nanoscience
MIT physicist Mildred Dresselhaus will receive the nanoscience prize "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures." Over the course of five decades, Dresselhaus has come up with a steady stream of insights revealing how the properties of materials at the nanometer scale can be radically different from their properties at larger scales. Her early work on carbon fibers and materials known as graphite intercalation compounds laid the foundation for later discoveries relating to buckyballs, carbon nanotubes and graphene. (Graphene was the focus of a Nobel Prize awarded in 2010.)

Kavli Prize

The 2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience goes to Rockefeller University's Cornelia Bargmann, Winfried Denk of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and MIT's Ann Graybiel.

Neuroscience
Cornelia Bargmann, Winfried Denk and Ann Graybiel share the neuroscience prize "for elucidating basic neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and decision." Rockefeller University's Bargmann used nematode worms to study the molecular controls for animal behavior, including the role of odorant receptors, sensory neurons and the neurotransmitters involved in behavioral adaptation following experience. Denk, a resercher at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, developed two techniques for studing how information is transmitted from the eye to the brain. MIT's Graybiel traced neural loops connecting the outer brain with an inner region known as the striatum. Such loops form the basis for linking sensory cues to actions involved in habitual behaviors.

Norway's King Harald V will present the prizes to the laureates during a Sept. 4 ceremony in Oslo.

Update for 10 p.m. ET June 2: The prize announcement was made during a webcast from the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science in Oslo that was beamed to the World Science Festival in New York. One of the laureates, Cornelia Bargmann, was in attendance for the announcement. Check out the archived video of the event, and if you're in New York this weekend, check out the festivities at the science festival. It's also worth noting that on the other side of the country, a month-long science fest is just starting up in Seattle.

More about scientific prizes:

• Nobel laureates say we must fund dark energy research
• Three scientists win Nobel for discovering cosmic speedup
• Vindicated! Ridiculed Israeli chemist wins Nobel Prize

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.

A year and a half after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill sparked a months-long environmental crisis, experts from a cleanup company in Illinois have earned a $1 million prize for coming up with a better way to deal with future spills.

Another team from Norway took the $300,000 second prize in the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, which was organized even as the Gulf oil spill was going on. And wouldn't you know it? Yet another oil-spill crisis is unfolding off the coast of New Zealand, even as the awards are being announced today in New York.

The risks posed by offshore drilling and tanker accidents are what prompted Silicon Valley philanthropist Wendy Schmidt to fund the prize program almost as soon as she was asked. Until fossil fuels can be phased out entirely, there's a crying need for better oil-cleanup technologies.

"We're really playing with fire, and I hope we move beyond this," she told me in an interview before today's ceremony, "But in the meantime, it's very encouraging to see so many people who care about the problem."

The $1.4 million Oil Cleanup X Challenge was organized by the X Prize Foundation, which has also managed two $10 million competitions for private spaceflight and more efficient cars, as well as a $2 million contest for lunar lander prototypes. Several other X Prizes are in the works, including the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize for private-sector moon missions.

The X Prize Foundation's chairman and CEO, Peter Diamandis, said the oil-cleanup challenge sprang out of a suggestion made by film director James Cameron, a member of the foundation's board of trustees.

"It really was a rapid-response X Challenge," Diamandis told me. "The idea that a $1.4 million purse could attract roughly 350 teams to pre-register was really incredible." 

The competition was designed to encourage the development of cleanup methods that could outdo the current industry standard for speed and efficiency. Ten finalists were selected to go through a series of tests this summer at the OHMSETT oil-spill research facility in New Jersey. To have a chance at winning a prize, the teams had to recover at least 2,500 gallons of oil a minute, with a recovery efficiency of 70 percent or better.

Three times as fast as the previous best
Two teams hit that mark and then some. Illinois-based Team Elastec's grooved-disc skimming system sucked out 4,670 gallons per minute at 89.5 percent efficiency — a recovery rate that was three times as good as the industry's previous best oil recovery rate, tested under controlled conditions. That earned Elastec/American Marine, a well-known manufacturer of oil-cleanup equipment, the million-dollar prize.

Norway's Team NOFI, representing a midsize player in the oil-cleanup game, came in second with a recovery rate of 2,712 gallons per minute at 83 percent efficiency. The competition's $100,000 third prize went unclaimed because no other team hit the minimum requirements.

It might sound strange that the ones to beat the industry standard are industry leaders — but Peter Velez, one of the judges for the competition and global emergency response manager for Shell International Exploration, said the winners found innovative ways to improve on their own records. "None of them brought equipment that they already had built and were selling," Velez told me.

Like mowing a field with a tractor
The keys to success for oil-spill recovery include being able to take in more surface area at once, and moving faster through a given area. "It's like you're mowing a field with a big tractor: The bigger you can make your pass, the more you can do at one time," Velez explained.

For Elastec, that meant building a huge oil-skimming system with four rows of rapidly spinning grooved discs. "It's essentially a box that moves around in the water and captures the oil very well. The more oil you can gather, the more effective you can be," Velez said.

The NOFI team, meanwhile, built a large boom system called the "Current Buster."

"This was a different setup, in that it also had a way to travel in the water at higher speeds than a typical boom can," Velez said. The contraption, which has been compared to a giant "Slip 'N' Slide" sheet, was built to concentrate the oil and slurp it into a recovery device.

Velez said the competition provided an opportunity to see how a wide variety of oil-cleanup systems worked in a standardized setting. Some of the systems are built to work better in calm seas, while others would put in a better performance in choppy waters. "It helps us make the selection when we go to purchase equipment," Velez said.

A $1.3 million 'jump start'
This competition attracted brand-new entrants in the oil-equipment market as well as established players. One of the finalists was Team Vor-Tek, whose members came from a background in metal recycling and adapted a system they originally developed for recovering plastic from the ocean. The X Challenge gave Vor-Tek's entrepreneurs an opportunity to test the waters (so to speak) with a whole new product.

"For a relatively modest investment on my part, we've really jump-started some technological advances that I don't think would have happened otherwise," Schmidt said. 

Although the X Challenge competition is finished, this is by no means the end of Schmidt's environmental efforts. The Schmidt Family Foundation — which Wendy Schmidt and her husband, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, established in 2006 — is backing other environmental initiatives such as the 11th Hour Project and ReMain Nantucket. Wendy Schmidt is looking for still more opportunities to make a difference on the energy/environment front. "We're not done yet," she told me.

The X Prize Foundation, meanwhile, is moving ahead with still more competitions. Last week, the foundation announced that Shell would be the exclusive sponsor for a $9 million, three-year prize program aimed at encouraging the exploration of Earth's frontiers, the world's oceans and outer space.

All about X Prizes and other awards:

• Spaceship team gets its $10 million X Prize
• Super-cars split $10 million in X Prize race
• Rocketeers win $1.65 million in lunar lander challenge
• $10 million offered for gene-mapping feat
• 'Star Trek' tricorder could win $10 million
• 29 teams enter $30 million race to the moon 
• Brain X Prize may spark some big solutions
• Electric plane wins $1.35 million from NASA
• NASA offers $5 million for new technological feats

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.

NASA

Pipistrel-USA's Taurus G4 electric airplane flies high during the NASA-backed CAFE Green Flight Challenge. The team behind the plane won $1.35 million in the competition.

NASA says it has awarded the largest prize in aviation history, $1.35 million, to Team Pipistrel-USA.com for pushing the envelope on electric-powered flying.

To win the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, the Pennsylvania-based team's Taurus G4 electric airplane flew a 200-mile course from Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, Calif., in less than two hours. That's one of the requirements for the prize. Another is that the plane had to use less than the equivalent of a gallon of gas per person. The Pipistrel Taurus G4 exceeded that efficiency standard, flying the course on just a little more than a half-gallon of fuel equivalent per passenger.

What's even more amazing is that the runner-up did nearly as well. That earned a $120,000 second-place purse for California-based Team e-Genius and its electric-powered plane.

"Two years ago, the thought of flying 200 miles at 100 mph in an electric aircraft was pure science fiction," Jack W. Langelaan, team leader of Team Pipistrel-USA.com, said in today's award announcement. "Now we are all looking forward to the future of electric aviation."

Eric Raymond, e-Genius' team leader, was diplomatic in his remarks. "I'm proud that Pipistrel won," he said. "They've been a leader in getting these things into production, and the team really deserves it and worked hard to win this prize."

NASA

The e-Genius electric plane takes flight during the CAFE Green Flight Challenge.

NASA's acting chief technologist, Joe Parrish, said the winner proved that "ultra-efficient aviation is within our grasp."

The challenge was one of several that NASA has backed over the past six years to encourage the development of technologies that could improve the way spaceflight and aeronautics is done. (Remember that the first "A" in NASA stands for aeronautics.) In a way, this particular prize goes full circle: NASA's Centennial Challenges were inspired by the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, which in turn was inspired by the $25,000 Orteig Prize for nonstop trans-Atlantic aviation.

Charles Lindbergh won the Orteig Prize in 1927, and his grandson, Erik Lindbergh, was on hand at the Green Flight Challenge to pass along a prize of his own: the Lindbergh Prize for Quietest Aircraft. Team eGenius won that $10,000 award, which was donated by Jean Schulz, the widow of "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz.

NASA provides the purse for the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, with sponsorship support from Google and management by the CAFE Foundation (CAFE stands for Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency). Fourteen teams registered for the competition and collectively spent more than $4 million over the past two-plus years in pursuit of the purse. Most of the teams relied on electric engines, but the entries also included some planes powered by gasoline or biofuels.

Three planes made it to last week's finals: the Pipistrel and eGenius planes as well as a gasoline-powered plane fielded by the Florida-based Phoenix Air team. Among the factors that gave the Pipistrel Taurus G4 a boost were its dual-fuselage design, which allowed for a 75-foot wingspan with ultra-light construction, a super-efficient powertrain for its 6.5-foot-wide propeller and 450 pounds of lithium-polymer batteries. (EAA News delves into the details, and NASA has a Flickr photo gallery chronicling the competition.)

NASA hopes that the Green Flight Challenge will lead to even more ambitious aerial feats of fuel efficiency. Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier quotes Pipistrel's Langelaan as saying that his company is willing to contribute $100,000 toward a new prize for the first electric aircraft to break the speed of sound. How long would that take? Langelaan estimates five years.

Do you agree, or is that too much of a blue-sky prediction? Are electric aircraft blazing a trail for the future of aviation, or is this just a million-dollar sideshow? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More bright ideas on the tech frontier:

• NASA offers $5 milllion for new technological feats
• DARPA looks for ideas to clean up space debris
• Out-of-this-world ideas win NASA funding
• SpaceX sells its first ticket for a moon launch

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.