"How We Do It" may sound like a sex manual, but it isn't: In fact, that's about the only topic you won't find addressed in anthropologist Robert Martin's book-length survey of human reproduction and what we can learn from the animal world.

There's still news you can use, however. For example, how long should mothers breastfeed their babies? The standard advice from the World Health Organization is six months to two years. But Martin, who is the curator of biological anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum, cites evidence suggesting that three years is a more natural length of time.

"Exclusive breastfeeding is probably six months to a year, then for the last two years or so, breast milk is combined with supplementary food," Martin told NBC News.

That estimate is based on comparative studies of other primates, adjusted for the human body size. It so happens that anthropological studies of tooth enamel, going back to 5,000-year-old remains, arrive at a similar estimate. "The earlier you go back, the closer you come to something like three years," Martin said.

Studies suggest that brain development is better in babies who are breast-fed, probably because of nutritional factors contained in human milk. Martin's point isn't so much that you're a bad mother if you can't breastfeed for three years. "My point is that we should find out what's in human milk that is essential," he said. "If we're going to use artificial milk, we've got to get the formula right."

Basic Books

Robert Martin's book, "How We Do It: The Evolution and Future of Human Reproduction," looks at the myths and realities surrounding reproductive research.

Other chapters delve into the facts and fictions surrounding sex. True or false?

Humans do it faster: True, to an extent. A large-scale study found that human copulation lasts five minutes on average, although it may rarely last as long as 45 minutes. That's much shorter than the 12-hour mating roundsseen in marsupial mice, or the 15-minute couplings for orangutans, but longer than the chimpanzees' eight-second trysts. The males of some species have a bone in their penis, presumably to aid with prolonged mating. (Martin advises doing a Web search for "mountain man toothpick" to find examples.)

Humans are naturally promiscuous:False, at least in comparison with chimps and bonobos, our closest modern-day evolutionary relatives. The evidence for that is in our reproductive system: Chimps' sperm is much stickier than humans', so much so that it forms a "plug" inside the female tract. Scientists believe the plug is part of a strategy known as sperm competition, aimed at preventing other males' sperm from wriggling their way to fertilization. Another tip-off is the relative size of a male chimp's testes: They're bigger than humans, and that's linked to sperm competition. Humans (as well as gorillas, which also lean toward monogamy) lack the genetic machinery for sperm competition. And as for the bonobos ... we all know they sleep around, right?

The rhythm method works: False ... or at least not as true as some people might think. When it comes to contraception, you can't always trust the "egg timer." Researchers found that sperm cells can be stored for days in the womb, probably hidden in crypts in the womb's neck. This means that intercourse leading to conception can occur 10 days or more before ovulation occurs.

Sperm counts are declining: Signs point to "true" ... and that's a worrisome development. Studies from Israel and France, published last year, suggest that average sperm counts have dropped 30 to 40 percent over the past couple of decades. "It's quite obvious that this is going to lead to more cases of infertility," Martin said. The prime suspects include BPA, a chemical found in food packaging and other plastics. Studies have also implicated dairy products, soy products, sauna visits, TV viewing and even trends in male underwear (or the lack thereof).

There's nothing unique about the way we 'do it': Mostly but not completely true. Martin says one of the goals of his book is to "demolish myths of human uniqueness that don't stand up to observation." But when it comes to childbirth and child development, our big brains require special handling. A baby's head has to go through a complex rotation just to fit through the mother's pelvis — and at birth, a human baby's brain is only a quarter of its adult size. In comparison, a newborn chimp's brain is half the adult size. "Our extended period of childhood is really unique," Martin said. "The primary reason for this is that our brains are so poorly developed at birth."

More about the science of sex:

• 10 surprising sex statistics
• Real-life love potion identified
• Love and lust: Lessons from the animal kingdom

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log pageto your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's 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.

Dan Brown's "Inferno," the latest thriller from the author of "The Da Vinci Code," is another globe-trotting, world-saving adventure — and a chance for readers to ponder a new set of mathematical and scientific puzzles.

In "The Da Vinci Code," Robert Langdon, the world's best-known fictional symbolologist, follows a trail that highlights a controversial reading of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In "Angels and Demons," an antimatter bomb from Europe's CERN research center plays a key part in the plot. In "The Lost Symbol," Langdon teams up with a researcher in noetic science, which tackles woo-woo subjects like ESP and vibrational energies. All three thrillers are seasoned with a healthy dose of secret codes.

"Inferno," released Tuesday, sticks with the classic recipe: The novel's opening scenes are set in Florence, an Italian city with a history as convoluted as its street map. Dante's Divine Comedy provides literary and artistic allusions — and lots of numerological clues for Langdon.

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri was, if anything, more of a numbers freak than Dan Brown: Who else would write a three-book masterwork consisting entirely of three-line stanzas? Each book is divided into 33 cantos — plus an extra one in Dante's Inferno, to make 100 cantos in all. The verses are riddled with references to threes, sevens, nines and other numbers with mystical meanings.

Doubleday

A portrait of Italian poet Dante Alighieri on Dan Brown's latest thriller, "Inferno," contains a coded message in a series of concentric circles: CATROACCR. What does it mean? Read on.

Numerological puzzles
Numbers and codes have played a part as well in the buildup to Tuesday's release of "Inferno." Even the publication date is a puzzle: Greg Taylor, author of "Inside Dan Brown's Inferno," noticed that if you reverse the American date notation, 5-14-13, you come up with the first five digits of pi (3.1415). Brown's publishers later confirmed that the date was chosen for just that reason.

Other clues are hidden in the book cover. (Minor spoilers ahead, so code junkies may want to skip to the next paragraph.) The letters CATROACCR are printed within nine concentric circles overlaid on a portrait of Dante, for example. Cipher fans figured out that the letters could be decoded to spell "Tesoretto," which may (or may not) refer to a small secret room in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. The cover of the Italian edition displays a different string of letters, CATROVACER, which readers have interpreted as an anagram for CERCATROVA. "Cerca Trova" is Italian for "Seek [and] find" — a phrase that pops up in the first chapter of "Inferno." The phrase also shows up in a mysterious Florentine painting by Giorgio Vasari, a writer and artist who created a famous portrait of Dante. Circles within circles!

Michael Haag, author of a forthcoming guide titled "Inferno Decoded," says it's not surprising that Brown was so taken with numbers, codes and arcane connections. "Dan Brown was brought up in a highly academic background," he told NBC News. "His father's a mathematician whose books are standard works if you're studying math in the United States."

Scientific puzzlers
Dan Brown's fans will be puzzling over a few new scientific allusions as well. One theme has to do with the possibility of unleashing a devastating plague. Haag said that hearkens back to the "Black Death" that swept over Florence in 1348, a quarter-century after Dante's death. "This brought about total desolation, although some people have argued that the plague was actually a boost to the Renaissance," Haag said. Such people say all that death cleared the way for the prosperity and enlightenment that followed.

That sounds like just the sort of argument you'll hear the bad guys using in "Inferno."

Another theme focuses on transhumanism, a movement that aims to enhance humans through genetics, smart drugs, implants and other technologies. Some see transhumanism as the best hope for our species' survival. Others, like historian Francis Fukuyama, regard the concept as one of the world's most dangerous ideas. And that makes it one of the world's most fitting ideas for a Dan Brown thriller, particularly one that's set in Florence.

"During the Renaissance, what happened in Florence was the birth of humanism, so transhumanism is several stages up from that," Haag noted. "It's a potentially fascist activity, because it could lead to the creation of supermen. Who's going to do it? Are we all going to do it, or just some of us?"

Will Dan Brown's latest page-turner actually get people thinking about the real and serious issues surrounding emerging diseases and the potential for bioterrorism, genetic manipulation, human enhancement and bioethics? That sounds like a cliffhanger to me. Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about Dan Brown:

• Decipher the clue, name a location
• 'Da Vinci Code' turns 10 years old
• Lost symbols found?

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the NBC News Science Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with NBCNews.com's 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.

AP file

Elvis Presley performs in Providence, R.I., on May 23, 1977, three months before his death. Presley's doctor says that an enlarged and impacted colon played a role in the death of "the King."

In her latest book exploring the science that surrounds life's unmentionables, Mary Roach goes for the gut. Literally.

Roach has already taken on sex ("Bonk"), death ("Stiff"), the afterlife ("Spook") and the final frontier ("Packing for Mars"). In "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," she surveys centuries' worth of weird and wonderful discoveries about our digestive system, from the lips all the way down to the anus (which Roach says has some of the most densely innervated tissue on the human body).

In the course of exploring the alimentary canal, Roach addresses questions about our body's oddities (What keeps our stomach from digesting itself out of existence?) as well as the chemistry of digestion (How does Beano fight flatulence? How does Devrom stop the stink?).

One of the most fascinating tales has to do with the curse of Elvis Presley's colon: He died in 1977, while straining on the stool — and through the years, experts have pointed to drug abuse as well as a bad heart as contributing causes. But Roach concentrates instead on constipation, a problem that apparently plagued Presley for much of his life. The autopsy showed Presley had an enlarged "megacolon," horribly impacted with claylike material from a barium X-ray procedure that the King went through four months earlier.

It turns out that other folks have suffered fatal cases of constipation, but there's so much ickyness surrounding the subject that you don't hear much about it.  "I doubt you'll be seeing bus posters about defecation-associated sudden death any time soon," Roach writes.

There's a similar ick factor about many of the topics touched upon in "Gulp" — but fortunately, Roach has a knack for turning the "ick" into "ooh!" "wow!" and "really!?" In an interview last week, Roach discussed the ick factor and listed some of her favorite "Gulp" moments. Here's an edited transcript of the Q&A:

W.W. Norton

"Gulp" answers questions ranging from Elvis Presley's cause of death to the frontier of fecal transplantation.

David Paul Morris

Mary Roach is the author of "Stiff," "Spook," "Bonk," "Packing for Mars" and now "Gulp."

Cosmic Log: Tell me how the book got started. How did you get into "Gulp"?

Mary Roach: Well, a couple of things: One of them was something I stumbled onto when I was writing "Packing for Mars." I came upon a rather bizarre space nutrition study at the University of California at Berkeley back in the '60s, where they were testing bacteria as an entree. Dead bacteria. They actually had subjects go into a metabolic chamber and they sat them down, and they served them a slurry of bacteria of different varieties. And it was a terrible fiasco, of course.

That got me thinking about eating, and how it's a sensual thing and something that involves the mind, something we look forward to. But underneath all that, it's a basic biological need, and a process. We have a food processor, but we don't like to think about that. So I thought, maybe I'll think about that. Maybe I'll go down the alimentary canal and have a look.

Q: You talk a lot about the taboos that are associated with eating and digestion. Could you put your finger on the silliest taboo you came across? Is there some attitude toward eating that really makes no sense?

A: The first one that comes to mind is saliva. Saliva is something that's a highly taboo substance. Once it's outside your body, your own saliva is a source of disgust. Which is quite bizarre, because you're swallowing it all the time. You generate two to three pints of it, right there in your mouth. And yet, once it leaves the body, it's an object of revulsion. It's fascinating — something that has to do with the boundaries of the self.

Q: You debunk a lot of myths in the book, too. Is there particular bit of accepted wisdom that you're proudest to show is not really true?

A: The myth that I had the most fun with was the Jonah myth. Some people take the Bible literally, and try to make the case that a human being could survive in a whale's stomach. So I looked into this and tried to figure out which whale. A sperm whale would be the most likely candidate, because it's got a big enough gullet, and it doesn't have gastric acid. What it does have, though, is a very powerful stomach that crushes whatever is in its gut. You would be tumbled around and probably have some broken bones if you were inside a sperm whale.

Q: Is there something in the book that people really should know, that they probably don't know? For example, if I ever feel like my stomach is full to bursting, I'm definitely not going to load up on bicarbonate of soda.

A: Yes, the human stomach is surprisingly resistant to bursting. It has a couple of emergency ditching maneuvers. You burp, or you regurgitate. This is your stomach's way of saying, "OK, we don't want to burst, that would be fatal. So let's get rid of some stuff." The only time a human being suffers a case of a burst stomach tends to be somebody who ate a huge meal, and then felt uncomfortable and took a whole bunch of bicarbonate of soda. A little bit of gas makes you burp, and then you feel better. But a lot of gas, generated quickly, can outpace the body's safety mechanisms and burst your stomach. So after eating a huge meal, I don't recommend a large dose of bicarbonate of soda. Proceed with caution.

Q: "Gulp" includes lots of historical tales about those who have studied the alimentary canal. Is there one story you'd point to as deserving of more attention than it usually gets?

A: One of the people that impressed me was the very first experimenter to study and document human intestinal gas. This was in 1816. A Parisian doctor, Francois Magendie, had the opportunity to dissect a couple of guillotined prisoners. Because the prisoners had a last meal, and he knew what the last meal was, he could run a controlled experiment, if you will. He knew how long they'd been digesting. So he looked at what types of gas were in what part of the alimentary canal. He even figured out the hydrogen sulfide component, which is usually only 0.2 to 0.3 parts per million. It's a trace gas, but the human nose is quite sensitive to it, so it's possible he just used, uh, his nose. That was a novel approach to studying human intestinal gas. For originality, I give Magendie a lot of points.

Q: And when it comes to the scientific frontiers for studying the alimentary canal, a lot of people talk about fecal transplants. That's something that you address in the book.

A: Yes, if you have a certain type of bacteria called C. difficile, C. diff for short, it tends to set up camp in little pockets along the intestine, and it can be difficult to get rid of. It can be a kind of lingering infection that leads to inflammation and diarrhea. It's a quite serious condition, sometimes fatal.

If you take someone else's waste, and you use a colonoscope, you can put that material in and basically "seed" the patient's bacteria with a whole different set of bacteria that takes over. You take it from a healthy person, obviously, not from someone else who has C. diff. You take it from the waste material, which is one-third bacteria by dry weight. There's a lot of bacteria in human waste. Tons! That was a surprise to me. You don't really know what that stuff is, but a lot of it is bacteria.

This has about a 90 percent cure rate for chronic C. diff infection, and there's no real down side. It's rare that medicine comes up with something that simple, that effective, and with no side effects. The problem with it is just the ick factor. It's been slow to catch on, probably because there's no device maker or drug company to push a drug through. It has to be the hard work of M.D.'s who are just trying to get it into the system. They don't even know how to bill for it, so they bill for a colonoscopy.

Now people are starting to look at bacterial transplants of different kinds, as possible treatments for everything from weight loss to chronic ear infections. There's someone looking into it as a treatment for gum disease, by taking someone else's oral bacteria and giving them a dose of that. There's not a lot of down side, other than the ick factor.

Q: It strikes me that the ick factor, and how to deal with that, is a theme that runs through the book. Have you drawn any lessons about how to get over the ick factor when it hurts us rather than helps us?

A: This is one of those rare and wonderful cases where the media's fascination has been helpful. There have been a lot of articles written about fecal transplants, and that's partly because it's headline-grabbing. "Yeah, they put someone's crap in somebody else!" It gets people's attention, and they read it. But it's gotten so much coverage that now people are used to the notion of doing it, and they know that it's effective, and they know that it's useful. It's not such an intuitively horrific thing. The more people talk about it, the more they'll get used to it, and the more the ick factor dissolves. Then people with a problem feel free to go to their doctor and say, "Hey, I heard about this fecal transplant, and I wonder if maybe we can try that."

The fact that it's getting a lot of coverage, and a lot of people are talking about it, is making it OK to speak about it. And that's always a good thing.

Q: Do you feel as if "Gulp" actually serves that purpose? I realize every author feels as if his or her book is a boon to humanity, but is this a special case?

A: [Laughter] With my books, it's a little hard to make the case. But if I were to make the case, it would simply be that: I am encouraging people to talk about what's going on in the whole human food processor, from mouth to anus. It's a miraculous machine, and we owe it a little respect, instead of shame and embarrassment. I would love to see people having dialogues about it without feeling funny.

More cool facts about our food processor:

• Passing time by passing gas
• Can eating too much make your stomach burst?
• Diet and nutrition on the Body Odd blog

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 Fri Mar 29, 2013 3:33 AM EDT

The age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin is being resurrected this Easter — thanks to the attention of a new pope, the creation of a "Shroud 2.0" app, and a new book that claims the cloth dates back to Jesus' time.

The claim immediately faced a wave of criticism, including a harsh statement from Turin's archbishop that some say has driven a stake into the book's heart.

Believers say the centuries-old shroud bears the imprint of Jesus, chemically captured in the cloth at the time of his resurrection. Skeptics say it's a cleverly done medieval fake, wrapped up in highly debatable scientific claims that just won't die.

The newly published Italian-language book — "Il Mistero Della Sindone," or "The Mystery of the Shroud" — recycles some of those claims, adds in some fresh results from single-fiber tests, and makes the argument that the shroud shows the difficult-to-reproduce image of a man who lived sometime between 280 B.C. and the year 220.

If that's not enough to bring the shroud back into the spotlight, there's also the news that Pope Francis, who was named to lead the Roman Catholic Church just last month, will appear on Italian TV on Holy Saturday to introduce a RAI Uno TV appearance of the shroud. "It will be a message of intense spiritual scope, charged with positivity, which will help (people) never to lose hope," the Italian ANSA news agency quoted Turin Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia as saying.

And then there's Shroud 2.0, a free app for Apple's iPad/iPhone (and soon for Android) that lets users zoom in on high-definition images of the shroud and get factoids about its history. The app is being offered by Haltadefinizione, which took photos of the relic in 2008 and collaborated with church officials on the project. Shroud 2.0 is being offered as an "evangelization tool," according to the Vatican's News.va website.

Antonio Calanni / AP file

A photo from 2000 shows the Shroud of Turin displayed at Turin's cathedral.

Scientific links
The Catholic Church has taken no official stand on the authenticity of the shroud, which is kept under lock and key in Turin and is only rarely brought out for public display. But over the years, some researchers have tried to show that the shroud goes back to biblical times rather than to the 14th century.

"The Mystery of the Shroud" is the latest book of this genre. It was written by journalist Saverio Gaeta and Giulio Fanti, an engineering professor at the University of Padua. Fanti is part of a controversial research group that has claimed the image on the cloth couldn't possibly have been created by natural means. The new book refers to those past claims, plus a new angle.

That angle has to do with single fibers that were purportedly vacuumed up from the shroud during scientific testing. Fanti and his colleagues put the fibers through a series of mechanical and chemical tests. "Combining the two chemical methods with the mechanical one, it results [in] a mean date of 33 B.C., with an uncertainty of plus or minus 250 years at 95 percent confidence level, that is compatible with the period in which Jesus Christ lived in Palestine," the publishers say in a news release.

Skeptical views
Fanti's claims drew a quick reaction from Joe Nickell, a research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry who regularly counters claims from Fanti and other shroud researchers.

"As is typical of a religious rather than scientific agenda, their news was shrewdly released just in time for Easter," Nickell said in a blog posting. "That alone casts doubt on the claims, but there is more."

Nickell pointed out that Fanti's tests "involve three different procedures — each with its own problems — which are then averaged together to produce the result." He said that stands in contrast with 1988's mass spectrometry tests, which yielded a date range between 1260 and 1390. Fanti says those earlier tests were not "statistically reliable," but Nickell and most scientists are sticking with the verdict rendered in 1988.

As a professional skeptic, Nickell can be expected to voice doubt about the book. But criticism also came from Archbishop Nosiglia.

Because there's "no degree of security" as to the authenticity of the fiber samples, the shroud's custodians "cannot recognize any serious value to the results of these alleged experiments," Nosiglia said in a statement quoted by La Stampa's Vatican Insider. The archbishop's comments "put stakes into Fanti's work," Vatican Insider reported.

Somehow I suspect that shroud science is not truly dead, but what do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your own verdict in the comment section below.

More about science and the shroud:

• Was resurrection story inspired by cloth?
• Experts re-create the face in the shroud
• Cosmic Log archive on Shroud of Turin

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.

NGTV / Lion TV via PBS

UCLA Professor Jared Diamond has studied traditional cultures for decades, laying out his findings in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Guns, Germs and Steel" as well as "Collapse" and his just-published volume, "The World Until Yesterday."

In the wake of a high-wire "fiscal cliff" performance that wasn't exactly their finest hour, members of Congress would do well to learn a lesson from the tribes of New Guinea and the Amazon: Listen to your elders. At least that's the lesson passed along by UCLA Professor Jared Diamond, the author of "The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?"

Diamond documented the reasons why European invaders overwhelmed less technologically advanced cultures in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." He laid out cautionary tales of social breakdown in the follow-up book, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." In his newly published book, Diamond draws upon his decades of research in far-flung locales to lay out lessons for us less traditional types.

"Tribes constitute thousands of natural experiments in how to run a human society," he told a capacity crowd Thursday night during the kickoff of his international book tour at Town Hall Seattle.

Diamond says the useful findings from those experiments run a wide gamut, from the benefits of multilingualism to the right way to carry a baby ("vertically upright, facing forward"). But one of his biggest themes has to do with the way older people are treated, or mistreated. He noted that a Fijian friend was shocked to see how often America's senior citizens are shunted aside by the younger generation. And although some traditional societies have their own quirks about dealing with the aged — for example, strangling them when they become a liability — Diamond agrees that American attitudes need an adjustment.

Penguin

"The World Until Yesterday" is the latest book from Jared Diamond, a geography professor at UCLA.

"The lives of the elderly constitute a disaster area of modern American society," the 75-year-old Diamond said in Seattle. "We can do better."

He'd like to see senior citizens restored to the roles they have always held in traditional societies, but in a modern-day context: for example, as baby-sitters in a world where both parents work, or as fonts for the kind of wisdom you can't get through a Web search. He'd even like to see age given more respect on Capitol Hill, where the median age is 57 in the House and 62 in the Senate. That was the theme of my interview with Diamond on Thursday. Here's an edited version of the Q&A:

Cosmic Log: How would traditional societies deal with something like the fiscal cliff? What advice can you give to Congress for dealing with the kind of gridlock that we've seen?

Diamond: "The unrealistic answer is to say that the only senators and House members who are permitted to vote on fiscal-cliff issues are those who are over the age of 70. That's not realistic. But the realistic idea is to say that we should give disproportionate weight to the opinions of older politicians who have experienced a much wider range of financial conditions than have the young members of Congress. That is to say, we should listen to people who have gone through the Great Depression, the bubbles of the '80s, the soaring interest rates of the '70s. They've seen a variety of conditions, whereas younger people have seen only recent conditions, and they don't realize that things can be different. That's what comes out of traditional societies. 

"Most traditional peoples talk about 'tribal elders.' The reality is that the leaders of traditional peoples are always the older people. And the reason is, it's good. They have lots of lifetime experience under very different conditions.

"The same also applies to modern societies: Sometimes I'm asked to talk to hedge-fund groups. I'm struck by the fact that most of the people are in their 20s or 30s. There may be a few people in their 40s, and maybe a couple in their 50s. When you look at the statistics, about half of all hedge funds fail within the first five years, although many of them do spectacularly well for a couple of years. The reason is, the whiz kids are very good at algorithms that make money under good conditions. But they don't realize that conditions can be very different, that there are tough conditions — soaring interest rates, financial setbacks. So they don't have the long perspective. That's an example of how a long perspective is necessary for financial policy, just as it is for governing, for deciding about war and peace."

Q: Is there any institutional reform that can do that, or is it beyond modern society to get back to those ways?

A: "It's not beyond modern society, because if you look around at different modern societies — and I'm talking about rich industrial societies — some of them give a lot more deference and weight to older people than do others. The United States is an extreme in this respect. We are perhaps the modern rich society that has the biggest cult of youth. For example, when was the last time you saw a commercial with an 83-year-old raising a bottle of Coca-Cola? The Coke ads are all about 25-year-olds. That's our cult of youth. But in Europe, there is much more deference given to older people. In China, even more. In Japan, too, and in Mexico and Italy. So there's an area where the United States, in its own self-interest, can learn from the experience of its older people."

Q: I'm struck by one of the comments that a House Republican made during the fiscal-cliff deliberations, complaining about the "sleep-deprived octogenarians" in the Senate. ...

A: "Sure, but the octogenarians have had 80 years to see the advantages of taxes. Taxes are an investment, they're not money taken away from you. They're your own money that's being used for long-term purposes. Our taxes are paying for roads, they're paying for schools, they're paying for armed forces, they're paying for inspectors, they're paying for regulators. The more we put in, the more we get out. Now, this is not to deny that every government wastes some tax money. Nobody has figured out how to spend taxes in a way that there's no waste. But the basic mindset is that taxes bring benefits. The longer you live, the more you see those benefits."

Q: Is there an analog to taxation that has worked for traditional societies?

A: "There is, but it's not until you get to medium-to-large societies. Small traditional societies of a few dozen to a few hundred people really don't have anything like taxation. Once you get to a society of a few thousand people, where there's a chief — big enough that you can't have a face-to-face discussion, but you've got to have a chief — chiefs practice an early form of taxation. They require that the commoners turn over a fraction of their agricultural products to the chief. Part of that is used to support their own lifestyle, and part of that is also held in reserve to redistribute to the commoners in a time of famine. One could say that that's a precursor to state government taxation."

Q: Are there other things on your short list of lessons that could help break the societal gridlock we see today?

A: "Another whole area that's open for discussion is the area of conflict resolution. The American system of conflict resolution in the courts is a system of determining right and wrong, with winners and losers. But in traditional societies, conflict resolution has a different goal. The goal is to achieve and maintain peace between people who are going to have to deal with each other for the rest of their lives. The society is small, so you know everybody. In the United States, a big society, if you have a traffic accident, the other person is likely to be someone you never saw before and will never see again. So who cares whether they're unhappy with the result? But the reality is that anybody who's been involved with the American civil or criminal justice system knows that its goal is not to achieve reconciliation. And the result is emotional agony, often for the rest of one's life.

"It's particularly sad when that agony involves divorcing spouses, or so often it involves brothers and sisters, or parents and children who end up suing each other in inheritance disputes. That's because when you use courts and lawyers, the goal is not to achieve emotional clearance, but the goal is to decide right and wrong. That is another big subject area we could happily talk about for a few hours."

Q: Another big subject area would be how to deal with the emotional scars left by the string of mass shootings we've seen lately. Are there any lessons that can be drawn from traditional societies addressing that issue?

A: "My one-liner there would be the balance between individual interests and communal interests. The United States' laws provide that if an individual wants a gun, that individual is going to have a gun, even if that is bad for society as a whole. Today I'm talking from Seattle, which is 100 miles from the Canadian border. Here we have a neighbor that is as affluent as the United States, but has a different balance — with much more emphasis on communal interests and much less interest on individual rights. Among other things, Canadians do not feel that everybody should exercise their God-given right to carry a gun."

Think there's enough in what Diamond says to get a discussion going? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More from Jared Diamond:

• Bilingualism is good for the brain
• Why the Navajo have thrived
• How to prevent a pandemic
• Video: Corporations vs. collapse

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.

Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss has taken on plenty of edgy topics, ranging from evolution to the state of science policy, to quantum quackery, to the science of "Star Trek." But in his latest book, he takes on what might be the edgiest topic of all: how all the somethingness of our universe could have arisen from nothingness without divine intervention.

The argument that God had to be the "unmoved mover," sparking the cosmos into existence, goes back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. In his debates with theologians, "the question 'why is there something rather than nothing' always comes up as the one 'indefensible' issue that implies there must be a creator," Krauss told me over the weekend.

"We've come so far, that addressing that question — or at least addressing similar questions — has become a part of science," said Krauss, who heads the Origins Project at Arizona State University.

He addressed the question in a lecture that was videotaped at an Athiest Alliance International conference in 2009, and the video has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube since then. The video prompted Krauss to write his newly published book on the subject, "A Universe From Nothing."

Why is there something rather than nothing? Krauss said that question implies a search for purpose that really doesn't mesh with scientific inquiry. "The 'why' question is never really a 'why' question ... really, when we say 'why,' we mean 'how,'" he told me.

OK, so how can you get a cosmos from nothing? Krauss traces a series of discoveries building up from Einstein's general theory of relativity to the latest studies of dark energy, explaining how scientists have determined that empty space is seething with energy in the form of virtual particles. From the perspective of quantum physics, particles are popping into and out of existence all the time. The way Krauss and many other theorists see it, nothingness is so unstable that it has to give rise to something ... in our case, the universe as we know it.

What's more, Krauss and his colleagues are coming around to the view that there could be a countless succession of big bangs, creating many universes with different parameters and laws of physics. Some of the universes in this multiverse fizzle back into nothingness immediately, while others — such as ours — hang around long enough to spawn galaxies and stars, planets and life. Scientists haven't yet figured out a way to test this hypothesis, but it would explain how we're lucky enough to live in a long-lasting universe: We just happened to win the prize of existence in a cosmic lottery.

"Some people say, 'Well, that's just a cop-out,'" Krauss acknowledged. "But it's actually less of a cop-out than God."

Positives and negatives
Krauss' book isn't the only one to claim that God's not needed for the creation of the universe. British physicist Stephen Hawking, a good friend of Krauss', made a similar point in his own most recent book, "The Grand Design." A key point in the argument is that the positive energy bound up in matter is balanced by negative gravitational-field energy. From the quantum perspective, the total energy of the universe is pretty much zero. Thus, the energy of "nothingness" is conserved, even when somethingness enters the picture.

This idea of positive and negative energy balancing out at zero has sparked criticism from the creationist side of the fence, but Krauss said the concept fits with current cosmological theories.

NASA / WMAP Science Team

This graphic traces the evolution of the universe from the big bang (at left) to the present, based on data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (far right). So what gave rise to the big bang? Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss says addressing such questions "has become a part of science."

"It sounds like a scam," he told me. "It isn't a scam. Once you allow gravity, the amazing thing is that you can start out with zero energy and end up with lots of stuff, and that stuff can have positive energy, as long as you counteract it with negative energy. Gravity allows energy to be negative. I liken it to the difference between a very savvy stockbroker and an embezzler. The savvy stockbroker will buy on margin, and buy more stuff than they actually have money to account for. But as long as the stock goes up and they sell it in the end, no one knows the difference and everyone's happy — whereas the embezzler takes the money and of course is discovered. The universe is more like the savvy stockbroker."

In the ultra-long term, when all the galaxies have spread out in our expanding universe, and all the stars have died out, the positives and negatives cancel each other out, turning our universe back into the uniformity of empty space. "The 'somethingness' may be here for just a short time," Krauss said.

Accentuate the positive
For a lot of people, all this might sound positively soul-killing. Evolutionary biologist (and crusading atheist) Richard Dawkins says as much in his afterword to Krauss' book: "If you think that's bleak and cheerless, too bad. Reality doesn't owe us comfort."

But Krauss said he doesn't intend the book to be a downer.

"My goal is not to destroy religion, though in fact that would be an interesting side effect," he said. "It's not any more my goal than it was Charles Darwin's goal with his book ["On the Origin of Species"]. My goal is to use the hook of this fascinating question, whiich everyone asks, to motivate people to learn about the real universe." 

Krauss said a scientific perspective on the origins and the fate of the universe offers a valid alternative to the solace traditionally provided by religion.

Free Press

"A Universe From Nothing" aims to explain how something can come from nothingness in accord with the laws of physics.

"Here are these remarkable laws of nature that have arisen and produced what you never would have expected, something much more interesting than any fairy tale," Krauss said. "We are the lucky beneficiaries of that, and we should enjoy the remarkable fact that we have a consciousness that can appreciate this remarkable universe. If it's a remarkable accident, how lucky are we to be a part of it! I do think you can create a 'theology' around this if you want."

Krauss doesn't mean "theology" in the literal sense of the study of God's ways, of course, but rather in the sense of an attitude toward life and its meaning (or meaninglessness). What's your attitude? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 1 a.m. ET Jan. 11: I should make clear that neither Krauss nor any scientist claims to have "the answer" as to the origin of the cosmos. Theorists are just trying to figure out the possible answers to the deepest questions about the universe. Perhaps the most "remarkable" thing about all this — to borrow one of Krauss' favorite words — is that it's actually plausible for scientists to address these questions at all. (And in case you're wondering, the answer to the ultimate question is still 42.)

More about cosmic perspectives:

• Stephen Hawking says God's not needed. So?
• Richard Dawkins puts 'Magic' on a tablet
• Celebrating the spirit of Carl Sagan
• Flash interactive: Beyond the Big Bang
• Hidden universes revealed
• Cosmic Log archive on science and religion

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.