The tale surrounding the discovery of King Richard III's skeleton beneath an English parking lot is about much more than a pile of 528-year-old bones — all you have to do is look at the face of Philippa Langley as she breaks down during an archaeological autopsy.

"I don't see bones on that table," she says, during an emotional scene in a new documentary about the king's remains. "I see the man."

Langley, a 50-year-old Scottish screenwriter, plays almost as big a role as the much-maligned monarch in "The King's Skeleton: Richard III Revealed." The show airs Sunday night on the Smithsonian Channel in the U.S., after racking up royal ratings on British TV. It was Langley who enlisted the Richard III Society to help jump-start the excavation, and she serves as the on-screen witness for many of the key twists in the excavation.

Medieval CSI
Based on an analysis of the historical records, archaeologists from the University of Leicester obtained a license from the British government to dig into that parking lot next to Leicester Cathedral last year. "The King's Skeleton" traces each step in the CSI-style investigation, leading to February's conclusion that the bones were indeed the mortal remains of the last Plantagenet king.

Richard III reigned for only two years, but his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 was a key moment. In fact, many historians consider his fall to mark the end of the Middle Ages in England. A century later, William Shakespeare's play immortalized him as one of literature's greatest villains.

One of the themes of "The King's Skeleton" centers on how Richard III may have gained a blacker reputation than he deserved. The way Richard III's fans see it, the successors to the throne from the House of Tudor had an interest in making their Plantagenet forebears look bad — to the point of portraying Richard III as a misshapen hunchback. "This is propaganda," historian Pamela Tudor-Craig says during the documentary.

So the truth comes as a shock to Langley.

"What we're actually seeing here is that this skeleton in fact has a hunchback," Jo Appleby, a bone expert at the University of Leicester, tells her in one scene.

"No!" Langley answers.

The identification of Richard III's remains drew upon carbon dating and detailed studies of the skeleton, including evidence of wounds that matched up with historical accounts of the king's demise. But the weightiest evidence comes from analysis of DNA extracted from the skeleton: The chemical signature of the mitochondrial DNA matched up with two maternal-line descendants of Richard III's eldest sister, Anne of York.

Stay tuned
Does this mean the case of Richard III is closed? Not yet. Mitochondrial DNA is not as precise an indicator as, say, a paternity test. "The DNA evidence is simply a single strand within the entire analysis procedure," Turi King, the University of Leicester geneticist who conducted the analysis, told NBC News on Friday. "You certainly wouldn't convict somebody on [the basis of this] DNA evidence."

However, King noted that the mitochondrial DNA signature for this particular skeleton is shared by only a few percent of Europeans. "It's quite a rare type, so that adds to the weight of the evidence," she said.

The next step will be to analyze the skeleton's Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed down from father to son. The Y-chromosome signature is far more precise than mitochondrial DNA, which all children get from their mother. Four paternal-line descendants of Richard III's family have already been identified and tested, and King is now waiting to do the much more complicated reconstruction of the skeleton's Y-chromosome DNA signature.

Working on the royal remains has been a "dream project," King said, but not without its drawbacks: "It's been very stressful. You're trying to work quite quietly and calmly. The pressure to make sure everything has been done properly has been intense. ... I feel like I'm still in the middle of it."

The license to work with the skeleton runs out next year, and King will have to finish up her DNA studies by then.

Meanwhile, a potential legal battle is looming over whether the remains will be reburied in Leicester Cathedral, as planned, or in York instead. Thankfully, that's one drama King and the other scientists involved in the Richard III mystery won't have to deal with.

"I just try to tune it out," she said.

More about the Richard III saga:

• Parking-lot skeleton identified as Richard III
• Could Richard III have gotten his spine fixed?
• For some, resting place is human rights issue

To tune in "The King's Skeleton: Richard III Revealed," check your cable provider's TV listings or consult the Smithsonian Channel's website. Britain's Channel 4 aired the show as "Richard III: The King in the Car Park."

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Vulcan and Cerberus (or Kerberos) emerged as the people's choices for naming Pluto's tiniest moons in the SETI Institute's "Pluto Rocks" contest, which ended on Monday. But in the course of running the contest, the organizers fielded 30,000 write-in suggestions — and you may well see some of those suggestions surface in the future.

"I've been delighted by the response," said Mark Showalter, a planetary scientist at the SETI Institute who played a leading role in the discovery of Pluto's fourth and fifth moons. Showalter was the point person for the moon-naming contest, which drew more than 450,000 online votes over the past two weeks.

More than 20 names were on the ballot, including Vulcan (the Roman god of fire) and Cerberus (the watchdog of the underworld). Vulcan was added to the list after the contest started, at the urging of "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, and grabbed the lion's share of the votes. But there were scads of other suggestions that weren't used, mostly because they weren't in line with the International Astronomical Union's tradition that the moons of Pluto should be named after figures from Greek or Roman mythology with some sort of connection to the underworld. Pluto was himself the mythological god of the underworld.

It's the IAU that has the final say over the names for the moons, which were discovered over the past couple of years and are now known merely as P4 and P5. Now that the crowdsourcing contest is over, Showalter willl be meeting with his colleagues on the discovery team and discussing whether to go with Vulcan and Cerberus or some other names. The names selected by the discoverers will then be considered by IAU committee members for adoption or reconsideration.

"It could take one to two months for the final names of P4 and P5 to be selected and approved," Showalter said on the "Pluto Rocks" website. "Stay tuned."

M. Buie / SwRI / NASA / ESA

These two pictures of Pluto represent the Hubble Space Telescope's most detailed view of the dwarf planet, but pictures from NASA's New Horizons probe should provide better resolution.

During a Google+ Hangout, Showalter mentioned the two most frequently suggested names that were left off the ballot. No surprise there: Considering that Pluto is a Disney cartoon character as well as a dwarf planet, you'd expect that Mickey and Minnie (as in Walt Disney's talking mice) would be the favorites.

"Yes, I am a big fan of Disney myself, but no, they are not compliant names," Showalter said. Although Mickey and Minnie make a cuter couple than Orpheus and Eurydice, they're not Greek or Roman mythological characters connected with the underworld.

Some of the other names, however, may come up again. When NASA's New Horizons probe sails past Pluto in 2015, still more mini-moons might be spotted. P6, P7 and so on would provide additional opportunities for the "compliant names" on Showalter's newly expanded list. And that's not all: New Horizons' camera could to snap pictures of previously unseen features on Pluto and its moons, That opens up a new frontier for names.

The names of planetary features don't have to follow the rules about Greek or Roman mythology: On Mercury, for example, craters are named after famous writers and artists. The hydrocarbon lakes detected on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, are named after the earthly lakes they resemble. Titan's mountains are named after the fictional mountains from "The Lord of the Rings" and other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, while the Saturnian moon's dark plains are named after planets from the "Dune" science-fiction series.

For Pluto and its moons, "we have all kinds of options," Showalter said. He noted that the naming suggestions followed some potentially appealing trends — specifically, Norse mythological figures as well as characters and locations from the "Star Wars" movie series and H.P. Lovecraft's fantasy and horror tales. Might we hear about Mount Loki, the Hoth ice sheet or Cthulhu Crater in the years to come? Will some scientist pick up on the Vulcan connection and start naming the hills of a Plutonian moon after Worf, Quark, Chakotay and T'Pol? To paraphrase another character from the "Star Trek" saga: "Make it so!"

More about planetary names:

• Uwingo aims to create Baby Planet Name Book
• How about better names for alien planets?
• Solar system's not changing — just the lingo

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Paramount TV via AP file

The original "Star Trek" TV cast included Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, the Starship Enterprise's pointy-eared science officer, and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk.

Just one day after astronomers asked Internet users to pick from a list of 12 names for Pluto's tiniest moons, they added a 13th name — Vulcan — at the urging of Star Trek icon William Shatner.

"Vulcan is the Roman god of lava and smoke, and the nephew of Pluto. (Any connection to the Star Trek TV series is purely coincidental, although we can be sure that Gene Roddenberry read the classics.) Thanks to William Shatner for the suggestion!" discovery team leader Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute wrote Tuesday in an update to the "Pluto Rocks" blog.

You don't have to be a hard-core Trek fan to know that Vulcan was the fictional home planet of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared science officer on the original TV series' Starship Enterprise. Roddenberry was the series' creator. And long before he became a Priceline pitchman, Shatner played the Enterprise's skipper, Captain James T. Kirk.

The point of the "Pluto Rocks" balloting, which runs through Feb. 25, is to weigh public sentiment for the naming of Pluto's two most recently discovered moons, now known as P4 and P5. As the moons' discoverers, Showalter and his colleagues have the right to recommend formal names for adoption by the International Astronomical Union. They thought it would be fun to give the general public a non-binding advisory role.

The contest caught Shatner's eye, and he made a couple of suggestions in a Twitter update: "So what do you think of the idea of naming the two moons of Pluto Vulcan and Romulus? You have mythology, pos[itive] and neg[ative]."

Any voter can suggest write-in names, as Shatner did, but the names should refer to people, places or things in Greek or Roman mythology that have a connection to the underworld. Right now, the two favored names are Styx (which refers to a major river of the underworld as well as the rock band) and Cerberus or Kerberos (which refers to the underworld's guard dog as well as the modern-day network protocol).

More than 120,000 votes have been cast already, with less than 5,000 of them going to Vulcan — so Shatner would have to get those Vulcan votes multiplying like Tribbles to catch up to Styx and Cerberus. But that's not impossible, especially if he puts the word out to his 1.3 million Twitter followers.

As for Shatner's other suggestion, Romulus certainly has a connection to Roman mythology and Trek lore. In mythology, Romulus was one of the founders of Rome, while in the Star Trek universe, the name refers to the homeworld of a race that rivaled the Vulcans. However, one of the IAU's guidelines is that a proposed name should not be confused with pre-existing names for other celestial bodies. That poses "a bit of a problem," Showalter said.

"Romulus, along with his brother Remus, are the names of the moons of the asteroid 87 Silvia," he wrote. "They were discovered by a team led by my good colleague Franck Marchis, now a senior scientist at the SETI Institute."

Sorry, Captain. Because there's already a Romulus in this sector of the galaxy, scientists can't reuse the name. They just cannae do it.

Can you think of other mythological names with science-fiction connections? If they're not already taken, share your ideas in the comment section below — and send them along to the "Pluto Rocks" folks as well.

Update for 8:45 p.m. ET Feb. 14: Vulcan is now the top pick in the "Pluto Rocks" poll, with more than 60,000 votes out of the 234,720 responses registered. Styx and Cerberus are second and third on the list. Showalter has added eight more names to the ballot, bringing the total list to 21. The eight additions are Elysium, Hecate, Melinoe, Orthrus, Sisyphus, Tantalus, Tartarus and Thanatos. "Pluto needs more moons!" Showalter writes in a Cosmic Diary entry.

More about Pluto and its moons:

• Pluto's moons offer clues to alien worlds
• Pluto's atmosphere larger than previously thought
• All about Pluto from NBCNews.com
• Cosmic Log archive on Pluto

Check out Monday's Google+ Hangout about Pluto and the moon-naming project on the SETI Institute's website.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 12, 2013 11:30 PM EST

"Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" puts a fresh spin on the 10-year-old story, turning the tragic loss of Columbia and its crew into an uplifting tale of the human spirit. How does the hourlong TV documentary, premiering Thursday night on PBS stations, pull that off? By focusing on one of the Columbia tragedy's casualties, Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon — and his connections to an even bigger tragedy, the Nazi Holocaust.

The tale's crucial pivot point is a miniature Jewish Torah scroll that was treasured by a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany: Ramon brought the scroll with him on the ill-fated mission, as a symbol of endurance. Even though the scroll was lost in the Columbia's catastrophic breakup in the skies over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003, its symbolism endures, thanks to "Mission of Hope."

"The film is not about the Columbia accident," director Daniel Cohen told NBC News. "The film is about a journey of hope. When I first started making the film, I thought I was making a documentary about the Holocaust. Then I peeled back the top layers and started to look inside, and I said, 'Wait a minute — there's a lot going on inside the story.'"

Let's start with the sacred scroll: During a death-camp bar mitzvah, the scroll was given to a teenager named Joachim "Yoya" Joseph at Bergen-Belsen by the chief rabbi of Amsterdam, a fellow prisoner at the camp. The rabbi didn't survive, but Joseph did, and the Torah held a place of honor in Joseph's office when he grew up to become an Israeli space scientist.

Ramon, a decorated Israeli combat pilot, also had a Holocaust connection. His mother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. But his connection with Joseph came in a different context: After Ramon's selection to be Israel's first astronaut, he worked with Joseph on an experiment to analyze the distribution of airborne dust over the Mediterranean and Middle East regions. Ramon noticed the scroll in Joseph's office, and asked if he could take it with him on his spaceflight. 

Joseph's experiment flew on Columbia — and so did his scroll. During one of the mission's downlinks, Ramon showed off the palm-sized treasure and told Joseph's story. "This Torah scroll was given by a rabbi to a young, scared, thin, 13-year-old boy in Bergen-Belsen," Ramon said. "It represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive. It represents their ability to go from black days, from periods of darkness, to reach periods of hope and faith in the future."

West Street Productions / Herzog

A scene from "Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" shows Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon walking to Columbia's launch-pad entryway.

NASA via West Street / Herzog

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon holds up a miniature Torah scroll during Columbia's final mission in 2003, as fellow astronaut Laurel Clark and mission commander Rick Husband look on.

Unfortunately, Feb. 1, 2003, was a black day. The shuttle broke up into pieces during its descent, killing Ramon and the rest of Columbia's crew: Rick Husband, William McCool, Mike Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and David Brown. Investigators determined that a piece of foam insulation that flew off Columbia's fuel tank did undetected damage to the leading edge of Columbia's left wing during launch. Sixteen days after liftoff, as the mission was ending, the hot gases of atmospheric re-entry blasted through the breach and destroyed the shuttle from the inside.

Ramon's remains were recovered and returned to Israel. Searchers even recovered the diary that he kept during the flight. But Joseph's little Torah scroll was never found. Cohen, a self-avowed space nut, said he followed the Columbia coverage closely — and took notice of a news item "buried in the back of the newspaper about this little Torah scroll that Ilan carried with him."

"I thought, wow, what a powerful new way to tell a Holocaust story to a new generation," Cohen said. He got in touch with Joseph, and over the course of several years, the filmmaker pieced together the story.

Joseph appears in the movie, although he passed away during post-production and never saw the finished product. "Mission of Hope" also draws upon interviews with Ramon's widow, Rona, as well as with Israeli investigators and former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Candid footage of the Columbia crew's training, shot by Brown, adds a personal touch to the work.

"The overriding message of the Columbia crew ... is what they brought to each other because of their diverse background," Cohen said. "They brought the magic of diversity to each other, yet woven through that is this story of the Holocaust and this terrible tragedy."

As he gathered the footage and the interviews, Cohen struggled with a problem: He wanted to focus on the message of hope, but it seemed as if the final chapter of the story was filled with loss and despair. "The dilemma was, how do you end this film?" he said.

Then he heard that another miniature Torah scroll had surfaced, in the possession of Henry Fenichel, another survivor of the Bergen-Belsen death camp who became a physics professor in Cincinnati. Fenichel was willing to have the scroll flown aboard another space shuttle flight, at the request of Rona Ramon and under the care of Canadian astronaut Steve MacLean.

"I thought, you just ended my film for me," Cohen said.

The "Atlantis Torah" flew aboard the shuttle Atlantis in 2006, on the first space station assembly mission planned in the wake of the Columbia tragedy. "It goes from the depths of despair to the heights of hope," MacLean told reporters.

More than six decades earlier, when Joseph received his "Columbia Torah," the rabbi who gave it to him asked the boy to promise he'd tell the story of the scroll if he survived.

"Now our documentary continues the promise," Cohen said. "Woven into that is our mission to tell the story of Columbia's crew and their missions. On the 10th anniversary, we will all pause and remember the horror of the moment, a searing moment in history. But at the same time, we'll remember who these people were, and what they brought to us."

More about the Columbia tragedy:

• Columbia remembered, 10 years after launch
• Special report on the shuttle Columbia's loss
• Flash interactive: NASA's Day of Remembrance

The brother of first moonwalker Neil Armstrong says in a new BBC documentary that the phrase accompanying humanity's first footprint on the moon — "that's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" — was not a spur-of-the-moment improvisation but a speech that was written out and practiced in advance.

In a rare interview, Dean Armstrong recalled that his brother slipped him the words — including the long-disputed reference to "a man" — on a piece of paper as they played a game of Risk, weeks before the Apollo 11 launch in July 1969.

"He says, 'What do you think about that?' I said 'fabulous.' He said 'I thought you might like that, but I wanted you to read it,'" Dean Armstrong is quoted as saying in a Telegraph report on the documentary, titled "Neil Armstrong: First Man on the Moon." The show premiered tonight on BBC Two.

The genesis of one of history's most famous phrases has long been shrouded in mystery: In his definitive history of the Apollo moon effort, "A Man on the Moon," Andrew Chaikin noted that as the mission neared, Neil Armstrong was inundated with suggestions for his speech, including passages from the Bible and from Shakespeare.

Chaikin implied that Armstrong was undecided about what he'd say until after Apollo 11's Eagle lunar lander had set down on Tranquility Base: "Now, on the moon, Armstrong knew he could delay no longer. As he thought about the first step he would take from Eagle's footpad he pondered the inherent paradox — a small step, yet a significant one — and he knew what he would say."

Slideshow: Neil Armstrong: 1930-2012

NASA / EPA

See images from the career of astronaut and American hero Neil Armstrong.

Launch slideshow

Dean Armstrong's recollection suggests that his astronaut brother, who died in August at the age of 82, scripted the words early on but held them close to the vest. The BBC documentary's director, Christopher Riley, speculated that Armstrong let people think the words came to him spontaneously to head off any outside tinkering in advance, or any second-guessing in retrospect.

The interview also confirms that Neil Armstrong meant to say "one small step for a man" — even though the "a" wasn't audible in the transmission from the moon. That's an important stylistic point, because the "a" draws a contrast between the physical length of a human's footstep and Apollo 11's "giant leap" for human exploration.

After the flight, Armstrong insisted that he intended to say "a man." Some experts say that the "a" was dropped because of a glitch in the radio signal, but most assume that Armstrong just left out the word. As the years went on, Armstrong's comments on the mystery took on an air of ambiguity. "We'll never know," Neil Armstrong told an interviewer in 1971.

If he did leave out the word, it's a natural slip to make: Dean Armstrong omitted the "a" himself the first time he quoted the phrase, and had to correct himself a moment later. "It was 'that is one small step for A man,'" he said.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET Dec. 30: A commenter points out that Dean's recollection runs counter to what his brother Neil told James Hansen about the speech for his authorized biography, "First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong," published in 2005:

"Once on the surface and realizing that the moment was at hand, fortunately I had some hours to think about it after getting there. My own view was that it was a very simplistic statement: what can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. It just sort of evolved during the period that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff and the EVA prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at the time. I didn't think it was particularly important, but other people obviously did. Even so, I have never thought that I picked a particularly enlightening statement. It was a very simple statement."

So maybe the controversy over those first words from the lunar surface will continue after all. ...

Update for 4:50 p.m. ET Jan. 4: Over the past few days, there's been a lot of back and forth over Neil and Dean Armstrong's intentions. Was Neil lying when he said that the words "just sort of evolved" after the moon landing? Was Dean lying when he said Neil had the words in mind before liftoff? In a Space.com commentary, Andrew Chaikin suggests that both men could be right. He says Neil Armstrong wasn't the kind of guy to let the matter of his moon speech go unconsidered until the last minute:

"... Nothing in Neil’s post-flight statements rules out the possibility that he thought up the 'one small step' line before leaving Earth. He didn’t say 'I thought up the quote after we landed'; he said, 'I decided what I would say after we landed.'

"Dean Armstrong's story just adds a little ambiguity. Maybe Neil had more than one quote in mind at that point, and only shared one of them with his brother. Or maybe the quote he showed his brother was an early draft, but after all these years, Dean remembers seeing the final version.

"We'll probably never know the answer.

"What it does not mean is that somehow Armstrong 'fibbed' or 'lied' to the public for 40 years. Everyone who knew Neil well has described him as extraordinarily principled. That was certainly the man I saw when I interviewed him, and in the years that followed, as we became friends. ..."

More about the first moonwalker:

• The Year in Space: Hello, Mars ... Farewell, Neil
• The lighter side of Neil Armstrong
• Why Neil Armstrong was camera-shy
• Cosmic Log archive on Neil Armstrong

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A brand-new reality-TV show premiered today, but this one isn't about aspiring singers or models — it's about chemistry students vying for plum research assignments.

"ChemLab Boot Camp" is produced by MIT OpenCourseWare to encourage students to go for careers in math, science and engineering. The 11-part YouTube video series follows 14 freshmen through a four-week lab course called 5.301 Chemistry Lab Techniques. The geeky grunts have to learn the ropes in the lab under the watchful eye of MIT lab instructor John Dolhun.

The kids in 5.301 have to cope with broken test tubes, spoiled experiments and the challenges of recrystallization. They also revel in the high jinks occasionally orchestrated by Dolhun, including a trick that turns potassium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and dish soap into an erupting volcano of pink foam. The students who pass the course are guaranteed a job in an MIT research lab. The students who fail ... well, is there anything worse for a geek than having the world find out about that on YouTube?

In the first episode, we get to know some of the freshmen, including a serious rap-music fan and kids who like to cover the walls with equations. MIT promises that future installments will show the rise of "Survivor"-style alliances and rivalries, and even the hint of romance. Just like "Survivor," the outcome of the finale is being kept under wraps, even though the show was filmed in January. You'll have to follow every weekly installment to find out how it all turns out.

"We shot at least 100 hours of footage to get what is the finished hour or so of material," Steve Carson, the external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, told me today.

The series was produced and directed by former MIT student George Zaidan, who used animations and video diaries to bring the lab culture to life. "I wanted to show that scientists are people — they have relationships like normal people, they make mistakes like normal people," Zaidan said in a behind-the-scenes preview. "A big part of the show is just showing who they are."

The show is part of a broader effort at MIT, funded by the Dow Chemical Co. to encourage interest in science and engineering careers. That means the videos may have to tread a careful line between boring the viewer and sensationalizing the science (which is an issue "Survivor" doesn't have to worry about).

Carson said "ChemLab Boot Camp" makes the grade. 

"What the show does as a whole is to make the idea of working in a lab accessible," he said. "For most high-school students, what goes on in a lab is a mystery. You see all this strange equipment, and people doing strange things. The show incorporates really great animations that explain the chemical reaction going on. ... There's the possibility of failure at every turn, and there's a natural drama associated with that."

More science videos worth watching:

• Mars Curiosity fans make viral video
• Comics go beyond the Higgs boson
• Ph.D. dance-off makes science sexy
• Must-see science videos of 2011

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Looking for something scientific to sink your teeth into? Take a look at these award-winning tales, which touch on topics ranging from the inner workings of the world's smartest computer brain to ... the inner workings of your own brain:

The National Academies Communication Awards, announced today, recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the general public. Each winner receives a $20,000 prize, and they'll be honored during an Oct. 12 ceremony at the National Academy of Science building in Washington. I won the online award in 2008 and have served as a judge for the past two years. Check out this year's winners and finalists:

• Book: Daniel Kahneman for "Thinking Fast and Slow." A Nobel-winning psychologist looks at the two tracks that our mind can take to make decision — and why those tracks can sometimes tie us in knots.
• Film/Radio/TV: Paula Apsell, Michael Bicks and Julia Cort for "Smartest Machine on Earth," the "Nova" public-TV documentary about IBM's Watson computer and its quest to beat human champions on the "Jeopardy" TV quiz show.
• Magazine/Newspaper: Crocker Stephenson, Guy Boulton, Mark Johnson, John Schmid and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's staff for "Empty Cradles," a series that looks at why infant mortality is so high in the Milwaukee area.
• Online: Daniel Engber for "The Mouse Trap: How One Rodent Rules the Lab," a series written for Slate that focuses on the problem with relying exclusively on lab mice for medical research.
• Finalists: James Gleick for "The Information," Charles Mann for "1493," The New York Times' Dennis Overbye for the series "Life Out There" and the Los Angeles Times' Alan Zarembo for "Discovering Autism: Unraveling an Epidemic."

The Science in Society Journalism Awards are given by the National Association of Science Writers to recognize investigative or interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society. I won the online award in 2002 for a series on genetic genealogy. This year's prizes, including a $2,500 check for each winner, will be handed out on Oct. 27 at the ScienceWriters2012 meeting in Raleigh, N.C. Here are the winners:

• Book: Seth Mnookin for "The Panic Virus," which delves into the controversy over a research paper alleging that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine might cause autism. The paper, published in 1998, was subsequently discredited — but its claims have survived and proliferated as a "panic virus."
• Science Reporting: "Poisoned Places," by reporters from the Center for Public Integrity (Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas, Emma Schwartz) and NPR (Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett, John Poole, Robert Benincasa). The series covers how air pollution continues to harm communities 21 years after Congress called for curbing that pollution.
• Science Reporting for a Local or Regional Audience: "Perilous Passages," written by Emilene Ostlind, Mary Ellen Hannibal and Cally Carswell for High Country News. The series covers scientists' struggles to understand and protect the long-distance migrations of Western wildlife.
• Commentary or Opinion: "Ban Chimp Testing," by Scientific American's board of editors. The commentary argues that it is no longer scientifically productive or moral to continue invasive experiments on chimpanzees.

More tales that take the prize:

• Seven summer books for smarties
• Scientific tales come alive in ink

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

HBO

A freshly hatched dragon perches on the shoulder of Daenerys in "Game of Thrones."

This the Year of the Dragon, and not just because of the Chinese calendar: Dragons play big roles in HBO's "Game of Thrones" TV series as well as the upcoming film version of "The Hobbit." Those fire-breathing, leathery-winged reptiles have been gripping the human imagination with their sharp talons for millennia, and it's worth wondering why.

Some folklorists trace the dragon myth back to a variety of sources in ancient China, Rome, Greece and India, and speculate that it had its genesis in the discovery of fossil bones from the strange creatures we now know as dinosaurs:

• Scythian lore described griffins with lionlike bodies and birdlike beaks. In the year 77, Pliny the Elder passed down the Scythian stories of gold-guarding griffins with peculiar ears and wings.
• During his travels in northern India, the first-century Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana reported that "no mountain ridge was without" a dragon to its name. The locals said they used magic to lure the dragons out of the earth and pry out the gems embedded in their skulls.
• Chinese accounts of "dragon bones" go back thousands of years — and as recently as 2006, ground-up dinosaur bones were being used in traditional medicine by villagers who believed they came from dragons. (The hard-to-crack dragon eggs depicted in "Game of Thrones" may well trace their lineage back to fossilized dinosaur eggs.)

Classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor, who relates all these tales in her book "The First Fossil Hunters," ascribes the reports to discoveries in fossil-rich regions such as the Altai Mountains in Central Asia, the Gobi Desert in China and Mongolia, or the Siwalik Hills in the Himalayas. Not knowing any better, adventurers interpreted the dinosaur bones as representing the remains of dragons, griffins and other mythical monsters.

The gold hoarding? That may have arisen because gold deposits were found close to the fossil beds along ancient Issedonian trade routes.

And the gems? "I think the Indian lore about special gems prised out of dragon skulls alludes to the crystals that can form on mineralized bones," Mayor wrote. "The detailed observations of the first modern investigator of the Siwalik fossils confirm my theory: large, glittering calcite crystals and tubular selenite crystals are common in the Siwalik fossils."

Hard-wired for dragons?
Anthropologist David Jones went even further in his book "An Instinct for Dragons," published in 2000: He proposed that the fables about winged, poison-spewing, fanged and clawed creatures combined three of the top threats to ancient pre-human primates: raptors like the one that may have preyed on a now-fossilized ape-boy known as the Taung child nearly 2 million years ago; poisonous snakes like the ones that may have driven the evolution of big brains and improved vision in primates millions of years ago; and big cats like the ones our pre-human ancestors had to watch out for in Africa.

"The world-dragon was formed by the nature of our own shadowy progenitors' encounters with the creatures who hunted them over millions of years," Jones wrote. The way he sees it, our brain came to be hard-wired with an instinctive fear of dragons.

Paul Jordan-Smith, a folklorist and storyteller who wrote a fiery critique of Jones' book for the journal Western Folklore, thinks the idea that our ancestors somehow evolved a dragon instinct just doesn't hold up. For one thing, Jones' claim that multiple cultures had the same conception of dragons as dangerous beasts is "demonstrably untrue," he said.

"My take on the mythic image of the dragon is that there is no one 'authentic' image, and no one 'true' meaning," Jordan-Smith told me in an email. "The dragon has been a guardian, a thief, a hoarder (like Smaug, in 'The Hobbit') and a dispenser of wisdom (especially in Chinese tales)."

For another thing, the dragon doesn't show up fully formed in ancient tales.

"It's interesting that dragons do not appear in cave paintings," Jordan-Smith wrote. "What does appear are the beasts that they hunted or that were dangerous. ... Where you do see constructs that aren't literal depictions, they're of humans merged with animals. And when you get civilization, you don't see dragons until much later. ... You don't get dragons until you get stories that have dragons in them."

Who's gripping whom?
But once dragons become part of a culture's mythic milieu, they don't fade away. Perhaps that explains why dragons hang around, in Chinese New Year festivals, in European fairy tales, and in American movies and TV shows. Here's what Jordan-Smith had to say about that:

"A dragon, like most mythic imagery, is 'plastic,' in the sense of being adaptable. It can look like whatever the singer of tales wants it to, can serve whatever purpose needed, and can mean just about anything. And some of the traditional qualities may not be incompatible with one another. A dragon that guards a treasure (or an abducted maiden) may be waiting for the right hero that will liberate it from its responsibility. A dragon that threatens to destroy a village may be a wake-up call to rectify misdeeds. Some dragons are enchanted and must be slain to regain their true form. But not all dragons are meant to be slain.

"And what of the hero? He must be changed somehow by the encounter, or else the game is not worth the candle. But what kind of change? In some cultures, to slay a fearsome beast was tantamount to assimilating its powers. ... In Tolkien's books, the Ring exerts its power so thoroughly that its wearer little by little becomes like Gollum. Perhaps there's a particular kind of danger, much more deadly than merely being killed. And perhaps when the hero slays the dragon, he himself is slain, to be reborn as the human incarnation of the dragon. For good or ill? Ask the storyteller."

Maybe it's not the dragon that has a grip on us. Maybe we're the ones who are hanging onto the dragon — and we don't want to let go.

More about dragons and 'Game of Thrones':

• Origin of Komodo dragons revealed
• Chinese villagers ate dinosaur 'dragon bones'
• Sword science plays a role in 'Game of Thrones'
• All about 'Game of Thrones' on The Clicker

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.

All swords are not created equal, particularly when it comes to "Game of Thrones," the HBO series based on George R.R. Martin's character-rich sword-and-sorcery saga. When the series opens its second season on Sunday, some of the swords you'll see are made of cheap resin, others are metal blades just meant to look good — and a few of them have been custom-crafted using a technique reminiscent of the story's fictional, magic-laden Valyrian steel.

For Martin, swords are serious business.

"The one thing I can say is that he is very, very knowledgeable about history, including weaponry," said Chris Beasley, the proprietor of Valyrian Steel, the Michigan-based company that produces licensed replicas of "Game of Thrones" swords. "When designing the swords, and he is highly involved in the design process of our book replicas, he doesn't want something to look cool. He is more concerned with realism — who made it, why, and how?"

For example, let's talk about Valyrian steel. In the "Game of Thrones" TV series and Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" book series, the Valyrian blades were created ages earlier by a vanished civilization, using a blend of alloys forged with magic spells. There's actually a real-life analog, minus the magic, known as Damascus steel. Damascus swords are famous for their resilience and the intricate, flowing patterns that are imprinted on the blades, but the secret of their forging has been lost for centuries.

A few years ago, researchers found that at the microscopic level, Damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes — structures that seem like 21st-century technological magic dropped into the 17th century. The super-strong nanostructures are mixed in with softer metal in the sword. That solves the classic dilemma of sword-making: how to make a blade that is hard enough to do damage, yet supple enough not to break.

HBO

Young King Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) sits on an Iron Throne made from the swords of enemies.

Modern-day Valyrian steel
Today, swordsmiths use a process known as "pattern welding" that produces results similar to the lost art of Damascus steel. Multiple layers of steel, with different amounts of carbon and other elements, are forge-welded together to create a blade that combines strength and suppleness. When all the layers of metal are flattened and folded together, over and over, it's like having two blades — or, more accurately, 200 blades — in one.

Some of the best-known Valyrian blades seen in the "Game of Thrones" TV series, such as the swords nicknamed Ice and Longclaw, were made using the pattern-welding technique.

"Ice was the main weapon to get right," Tommy Dunne, the weaponmaster for the series, said in a Westeros.org interview. "From the concept to the construction, it was about three weeks to make, as the blade was hand-forged by pattern welding, and the blade was drawn using machine hammers. But as with any good weapons, there's some other secrets that will remain secret!"

Beasley's business also sells some swords made with pattern-welded steel. "Those could technically be used, but we never recommend it," he told me. "Our swords are limited-edition collectibles, and no sword is impervious to damage. If used, they will get nicks, and chips, and scratches."

Beasley recalls that Valyrian Steel's Longclaw replica originally sold for $600, but after the swords were sold out, one customer reported receiving an offer of $3,000 to $4,000 for his sword. "I wouldn't recommend that anyone risk damage to something so valuable," Beasley told me.

Needle at work
If real fake Valyrian steel is too expensive for your taste, you can shell out $170 for Needle, the kid-sized sword that pre-teen Arya Stark learns to uses with deadly effect in "Game of Thrones." Beasley said Martin had a hand in designing the replica.

"Reading the books, I and many others thought, 'OK, this is a small rapier,'" Beasley recalled. "George very quickly put that notion to rest. He said that Mikken, the Winterfell smith who made it, would never have seen a rapier in his life, so how could he make one? That is why the book version of needle is more or less a small, slim longsword, and not a rapier."

Martin was so pleased with the result that he had one of Valyrian Steel's Needles sent to the actress who plays Arya so she could practice with it. And she's not the only one.

"One customer did tell us that they use Needle in their offhand to increase strength and coordination," Beasley told me. "They keep it in their office, and when on the phone or otherwise occupied they just jab and thrust with their left hand." (Remind me not to burst into that office unexpectedly.)

New twists in an old trade
Some of the secrets from the golden age of swordsmithing may have been lost over the past few centuries, but technology is adding new twists to the trade. There's been a lot of research into the use of alloying elements such as carbon, manganese, chromium, nickel, titanium and molybdenum. Materials scientists also are developing metallic materials infused with carbon nanotubes, just like in the good old days of Damascus steel.

"In more modern times, steel can be precisely made, and the overall material creation process can be more scientific so that you can get precisely the steel with the hardness and flexibility you desire," Beasley said. "So materials science has probably made modern swords stronger than older ones, but construction methods have not changed — though, obviously, power tools and other equipment have replaced arm power."

Ah, power tools — I'll bet the swordsmiths of King's Landing would have shelled out hundreds of silver stags for a good belt grinder. Are you in a mood to geek out over the science and technology of "Game of Thrones"? Feel free to indulge yourself in the comment section.

Update for 6 p.m. ET March 30: Veteran sword designer Kit Rae, who has created replicas for a variety of swords made famous by Hollywood, agrees with the parallel between the Valyrian steel of George R.R. Martin and the Damascus steel of real-life swordsmithing. "George Martin's universe is a parallel to what I would guess is the 12th to 14th century in our history," Rae told me. "Around the 10th century, that's when we were really starting to get into properly quenched and hardened steel."

There is a difference between the fictional and the factual universe, however. In "Game of Thrones," it's no longer possible to make brand-new swords with Valyrian steel. In the real world, there's a wide spectrum of swords and knives being made with the "Damascus steel" label — ranging in price from less than $200 to much more than $1,000.

"There are people who will argue that we don't have the technology to make something that compares with what the master swordmakers in Japan or Europe did. That's a bunch of bull," Rae said. "We're actually much farther along than that. But in that regard, you get what you pay for." 

More angles on 'Game of Thrones':

• Teens rule in bloody 'Game of Thrones'
• 'Game of Thrones' headed to PS3, Xbox 360
• George R.R. Martin previews his next book
• All about 'Game of Thrones' on The Clicker
• Medieval knights may have had PTSD

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.

Scott Garner

Artist Scott Garner's Still Life project uses technology similar to that found in today's smartphones to bring a traditional painting to life.

Life isn't still. Paintings don't have to be either. And now, thanks to Seattle-based artist Scott Garner, still life art is catching up with the times.

He's created an interactive gallery piece called Still Life that comes to life when tilted: the vase tips over, fruit rolls off plates and across the table, the fruit stand tumbles.

"It is about the role of technology in our lives and finding ways to switch our perspective on it a little bit," Garner told me Tuesday.

The installation consists of a traditional still life scene — a set table with fruit, plates, and an ornamental vase — presented on a flat screen TV that Garner wrapped in a traditional wooden frame.

"In any digital project, I try to find some source for more traditional craft," he noted.

This framed TV is hung on a rotating mount so that it swivels from side to side. A motion sensor is hooked to the back of the TV. As the screen moves, the tilt data is fed into a computer.

The computer, in turn, runs a video game engine from Unity 3D that Garner programmed so that it moves all the objects in the digital scene as they would in real life.

He created Still Life while an intern at superfad, a brand driven design and production company. Garner is now packing his bags to travel around before starting graduate school in digital art next year.

Where he's going is undecided, but wherever he ends up, he'll likely cast technology in new ways.

"We have amazing technology like smartphones with touch screens and accelerometers and voice recognition and all of these things, but basically you are still using it like a bunch of analog buttons," he said.

"One of the things I'm really interested in is finding ways around that, in addition to just general creative exploration."

— Via Discovery News

More on high-tech art:

• Art museums pin hopes on high tech
• Molecular movies go Hollywood
• The physics behind the movie magic
• Bio-artists bridge gap between arts, sciences

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.