• Fighting to save an endangered bird -- with vomit

    U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

    An adult marbled murrelet, a rare and endangered type of bird, floats atop the water.

    By Becky Oskin
    LiveScience

    A psychological warfare program centered on vomit could help save the marbled murrelet, an endangered seabird that nests in California's old-growth redwood forests.

    The robin-sized murrelet lives at sea but lays one pointy, blue-green egg each year on the flat, mossy branch of a redwood. While breeding, its back feathers morph from black to mottled brown to better match the forest. For two months, both parents race back and forth to the coast as far as 50 miles (80 kilometers) each day at speeds of up to 98 mph (158 km/h) while evading peregrine falcon and hawk attacks. After the chick hatches, it pecks off its redwood-colored down and, flying solo, launches straight for the ocean. Penguins have nothing on the murrelet.

    "They're a seabird like a puffin, and they have this crazy lifestyle that's like a living link between the old-growth redwood forests and the Pacific Ocean," said Keith Bensen, a biologist at Redwood National Park. "It's strange to have an animal with webbed feet in the forest," he said.

     Despite its amazing skills, the marbled-murrelet population is down by more than 90 percent from its 19th-century numbers in California, thanks to logging, fishing and pollution. Murrelets live as far north as Alaska, but the central California population is most at risk. Yet even though the state's remaining old-growth redwood trees are now protected, the murrelets continue to disappear.

    The culprit: the egg-sucking, chick-eating Steller's jay.

    USGS

    A young marbled murrelet chick.

    About 4,000 murrelets remain in California, with about 300 to 600 in central California's Santa Cruz Mountains. Squirrels, ravens and owls also swipe murrelet eggs, but jays are the biggest thieves in California, gobbling up 80 percent of each year's brood. Unless more eggs survive, the central California population will go extinct within a century, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Biological Conservation.

    To boost California's murrelet numbers, biologists in California's Redwood National and State Parks are fighting back against Steller's jays and their human enablers.

    The art of avian war
    With cash earmarked for murrelets from offshore-oil-spill restoration funds, the parks have the rare ability to fund research studies and restore habitat. The two-pronged approach will teach the black-crested jays to avoid murrelet eggs on pain of puking. More importantly, it will shrink the jay population by thwarting access to their primary food source — human trash and food. [Image Gallery: Saving the Rare Marbled Murrelet]

    "Every time folks throw out crumbs to bring out jays and squirrels, it's having a real impact on a very rare bird nesting overhead in an old-growth redwood tree," Bensen told OurAmazingPlanet.

    A Western bird, the blue and black Steller's jays like to frequent cleared forest edges — which are filled with bugs and berry bushes — and campgrounds littered with tasty trash and crumbs. As humans spend more time in the forest, the jay's numbers are booming. Their density in campgrounds is nine times higher than in other forest areas, said Portia Halbert, an environmental scientist with the California State Parks.

    "We see this crazy overlap of jays in campgrounds because of the density of food," Halbert told OurAmazingPlanet. The overpopulation also menaces federally protected species, such as snowy plovers, desert tortoises and California least terns — the jays eat their eggs too.

    Richard Golightly

    A Steller's jay inspects a fake egg meant to mimic the egg of a murrelet, another type of bird. The egg contains a vomit-inducing ingredient meant to discourage the jays from eating real murrelet eggs.

    Steller's jays don't seek out murrelet eggs. But when the birds circle picnic areas near murrelet nests, some discover the chicken-size eggs make a fine treat. The smart, savvy birds will return to the same spot over and over, searching for food. Murrelets, to their misfortune, nest in the same tree every year.

    Masters of disguise, the first marbled murrelet nest wasn't discovered by scientists until 1974, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The seabird doesn't actually build a nest, instead choosing a flat branch covered in cozy moss and needles, with cover to hide from airborne predators. At dawn and dusk, parents switch roles, flying offshore to dive for fish and invertebrates. [Watch the mysterious marbled murrelet]

    "For an animal that lives for some 20 years, losing an egg is a terrible, terrible loss," Bensen said. "They're investing an enormous amount of energy into that one baby."

    Killing Steller's jays won't help the murrelets; even more of the marauding birds will invade campgrounds to compete for vacant territory, biologists have concluded. Plus, jays are part of the natural ecosystem, said Richard Golightly, a biologist at Humboldt State University in California. Instead, researchers think aversion training is the cheapest, most effective way to stop Steller's jays from snacking on murrelets.

    "It freaks everybody out to train wild animals to do what you want, but it surprised the heck out of all of us how much more feasible it was than we thought," Bensen said.

    World's worst Easter egg hunt
    The plan, the brainchild of Humboldt State graduate student Pia Gabriel, centers on carbachol, an odorless, tasteless chemicalthat provokes vomiting with just a small swallow. Researchers fine-tuned the correct dose with lab tests at Humboldt State in 2009. Small chicken eggs, dyed blue-green and speckled with brown paint, were offered as meals to jays, with carbachol hidden inside. Wild Steller's jays in this first treatment group usually tried just one taste of the carbachol-filled fake eggs.

    Portia Halbert

    A graphic developed by the Redwood National and State Parks to encourage campers to clean up their food crumbs.

    "All of a sudden, their wings will droop, and they throw up. That's exactly what you want — a rapid response — so within five minutes, they barf up whatever they ate," Bensen said. The quick action helps the jays link the eggs with the illness.

    Some jays wouldn't even touch the eggs — evidence that murrelet egg-nabbing is a learned behavior, Golightly said.

    In spring 2010 and spring 2011, a team zip-tied hundreds of the copycat eggs to redwood-tree branches in several parks. Each chicken egg was painstakingly colored (Benjamin Moore Oceanfront 660) and speckled to resemble murrelet eggs. A control batch of red speckled eggs also decorated the forest.

    "We've been accused of being the Easter bunny in the woods," Golightly told OurAmazingPlanet.

    A second wave of eggs set out a few weeks later measured whether wild jays learned to avoid tossing their lunch. The mimic eggs reduced egg-snatching by anywhere from 37 percent to more than 70 percent, depending on where the eggs were deployed. For instance, one spot lost eggs to bears, so not as many jays got to sample the carbachol. (The bogus eggs were set low on branches, to avoid drawing jays toward real murrelet eggs.)

    A retched success
    The tests were so successful that Halbert applied for oil-spill restoration funds to start training Steller's jays in the state parks. In spring 2012, during murrelet nesting season, researchers spread hundreds of vomit-inducing eggs throughout Butano State Park and Portola Redwoods Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This year, the project included Memorial Park, a county park with old-growth redwoods. [Nature's Giants: Tallest Trees on Earth]

    "It's worked amazingly well," Halbert said."We've found a significant decrease in predations by jays, the number of times eggs get broken," she said. The effects were monitored with camera traps and a second wave of mimic eggs.

    Reducing predation on murrelet nests by 40 percent to 70 percent would stabilize the Santa Cruz Mountains murrelet population, according to the 2010 study published in the journal Biological Conservation. That 40 percent minimum would drop the extinction risk from about 96 percent to about 5 percent over 100 years, and result in stable population growth, reported lead study author Zach Peery of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    In 2012, the smallest cutback in egg attacks by Steller's jays and other predators was 44 percent, and the biggest was as much as 80 percent in the two state parks, researchers reported. The project cost $80 per treated hectare (2.4 acres).

    When the enemy is full, starve them
    Here's why taste aversion works so well for Steller's jays. Their fiercely territorial social structure keeps out untrained birds. Long-lived, with excellent memories, the jays will recognize and avoid those rare blue-green eggs that made them retch. Nothing else in the forest looks like a murrelet egg. If taste-aversion training were to spread through the murrelet's range, it would not be the first time a bird would require human babysitters to survive — think of condors, who need devoted monitoring and care..

    But Halbert said all the efforts to stop egg-stealing won't matter if the parks can't shrink the jay population by getting rid of their campground crumb food source. That's where the human psychology comes in. The parks hired an expert in public education and natural resources, Carolyn Ward, to help craft a message as finely tuned as any advertising company's.

    "We're coming up with creative ways to change people's behavior," Halbert said.

    Ward's research revealed most park visitors only read the first sentence on signs, so starting with the marbled murrelet's history was wasted effort. Now, with everything from stickers on the back of bathroom stalls to new signs at campsites, Redwood Parks visitors are warned to "Keep it crumb clean." This summer marks the new program's first big push, with campfire talks, tchotchkes for kids, brochures and YouTube videos that highlight the murrelet's plight.

    At Big Basin Redwood State Park, Halbert has also installed animal-proof food lockers and trash cans. At Redwood National Park, the staff reconfigured the outdoor sinks so jays and squirrels can't steal leftovers from dishes.

    While Redwood National Park is going “crumb clean,” the park will wait on the vomit eggs, Bensen said. "We're basically trying to prevent any food access to even the smallest crumb," he said. "With Steller's jays, just a couple Cheetos is enough. They'll keep coming and coming, and then eat the marbled murrelets. We want to cut that process off at the knees."

    Future development
    The "crumb clean" push comes as Big Basin gears up for a struggle over its first general plan, which will guide the park's future. The proposed plan, published in 2012, will expand areas of the park to new public use. But some groups, including the California Audubon Society and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, think the park should either close or restrict certain areas during murrelet breeding season, to help the endangered species recover.

    A public hearing on the draft plan was held Friday in Santa Cruz, Calif., and a copy of the plan is available online.

    "If people are looking for someone to blame for the problem the murrelet is having, I think everybody has some of that blame," Golightly said. "Cutting of the old-growth forests in the past is the primary thing that put us to this point, but presently, if you visit the parks and feed the animals, you're contributing, too. It is coming at the expense of the murrelet."

    Email Becky Oskin or follow her @beckyoskin. Follow us @OAPlanet, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience's OurAmazingPlanet.

     

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  • How space tourism could open our eyes, help save Earth

    NASA / NOAA / GSFC / Suomi NPP / VIIRS / Norman Kuring

    A "Blue Marble" image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's Earth-observing satellite — Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on Jan. 4, 2012.

    By Mike Wall \
    Space.com

    SAN MATEO, Calif. — Opening spaceflight up to the masses could help spark a global conservation ethic that stems the tide of environmental destruction on Earth, NASA's science chief says.

    Seeing our fragile Earth hanging alone in the blackness of space tends to be a life-altering, or at least perspective-changing, experience. If more people around the world are treated to that unforgettable sight, humanity might handle the planet with a bit more care, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

    "Ultimately, my vision is that lots of people get to go to space," Grunsfeld said here Saturday at Maker Faire Bay Area, a two-day celebration of DIY science, technology and engineering. "If we get more people, we'll have folks who can articulate a view of the Earth that leads to more people who want to keep the Earth a nice place to live." [Classic Views of Earth from Space (Photos)]

    Our changing planet
    Grunsfeld is a former NASA astronaut who flew on five space shuttle missions from 1995 to 2009, including three that serviced the space agency's iconic Hubble Space Telescope. He said the view looking down changed dramatically from his first flight to his last.

    Space.com / Mike Wall

    NASA science chief John Grunsfeld talks to an aspiring young space scientist after talking at Maker Faire Bay Area on Saturday.

    "The Earth looks totally different now," Grunsfeld said. "We are very visibly and significantly modifying the surface of the Earth, modifying the atmosphere. You can see that easily from space."

    Back in the 1960s, Apollo astronauts noted that national borders aren't visible from space. But this inspiring observation, which lent some much-appreciated perspective at the height of the Cold War, is no longer true, Grunsfeld said.

    "It looks like a Rand McNally map. You can see where there's rich countries and poor countries," he said. "You can see where people have agriculture and irrigation and where people don't. It's very clear."

    The planet's shrinking pockets of wilderness are also clearly visible, Grunsfeld said.

    "You can see the boundaries of national parks," he said. "They look like somebody's drawn a dark line around them, with trees inside and nothing outside. It's really very striking."

    Spaceflight opening up soon?
    To date, about 530 people have flown in space, most of them NASA astronauts or Soviet/Russian cosmonauts. But the list could soon start getting much longer.

    Virgin Galactic's suborbital SpaceShipTwo made its first rocket-powered test flight last month, and the six-passenger vehicle may start flying paying customers later this year or in 2014, company officials have said. About 580 people have put deposits down for a seat, signing on to pay a total of $200,000.

    And SpaceShipTwo isn't the only game in town. Another suborbital craft, XCOR Aerospace's Lynx rocket plane, could be operational by about the same time as Virgin's vehicle. XCOR is charging $95,000 per seat for a ride on the two-seat Lynx.

    The suborbital flights envisioned by SpaceShipTwo and Lynx will be much different, and much briefer, than an orbital mission aboard the International Space Station or NASA's now-retired space shuttle. But suborbital space travelers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see a black sky and the curvature of the Earth, officials with Virgin Galactic and XCOR say.

    Orbital space tourism is already a reality, but the list of spaceflyers is very short. Since 2001, seven different paying customers have flown to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz capsules, plunking down tens of millions of dollars for the privilege.

    Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Billionaire Paul Allen gets V-2 rocket for aviation museum near Seattle

    NASA

    After World War II, the United States acquired some of Germany's V-2 missiles for rocket tests. This modified V-2 was fired from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on July 24, 1950. Only six Mittelwerk GmbH V-2 rockets remain in the United States, and software billionaire Paul Allen procured one of them for his Flying Heritage Collection.

    By John Cook, GeekWire

    Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is selling some of his abstract art, and buying a historic rocket.

    The eclectic Seattle billionaire has procured a rare Wernher von Braun-designed V-2 rocket, the first human-made object to fly into outer space.

    Allen’s Flying Heritage Collection — located at Paine Field in Everett, Wash. — is taking possession of the rocket on Monday. The Mittelwerk GmbH V-2 rocket, one of only 16 in the world, will be assembled at the aircraft museum and then displayed as part of the permanent exhibit. The rocket — assembled from an an underground production facility near Nordhausen, Germany — is one of only six in the U.S. The purchase price was not disclosed.

    Germany developed the V-2, and used the aerial weapon in the latter part of World War II against targets in London and Antwerp. According to a BBC report cited by Wikipedia, the V-2 was responsible for the deaths of 9,000 civilians and military personnel.

    Here’s more on the rocket — which is nearly 46 feet tall and at one time had a range of 180 to 200 miles — from the Flying Heritage Collection’s fact sheet:

    “V-2s were inaccurate, cumbersome to launch in combat conditions, and could not be built in sufficient numbers to turn the tide of war. Only around 4 percent of V-2 rockets fell within their 3-mile by 4-mile aim point. However, the approximately 3,000 weapons launched caused terrible casualties in Allied cities. The missiles flew too high and too fast to be intercepted or destroyed. There was no warning before a V-2 strike; the rocket, carrying more than 2,000 pounds of TNT and ammonium nitrate, impacted the ground travelling faster than the speed of sound.

    "After Germany’s surrender, captured missiles were brought to the United States. Technologies pioneered in the German V-2 program formed the basis for America’s ballistic missile and space programs through the Apollo moon landings and beyond.”

    John Cook of GeekWire can be followed on Twitter and Facebook. Don't forget to follow @GeekWire as well.

    More from GeekWire:

    Copyright 2013 GeekWire. Reprinted with permission.

  • Get an online sneak peek at Comet ISON, potential 'comet of the century'

    Watch Slooh Space Camera's live show about Comet ISON and other comets.

    By Tariq Malik, Space.com

    The much-anticipated incoming Comet ISON, which some scientists hope will become the "comet of the century" later this year, may not be visible to the naked eye yet, but you don't have to wait months to see this icy wanderer. The comet takes center stage in an online telescope webcast on Sunday.

    Comet ISON was first discovered last year and is currently expected to swing extremely close by the sun in late November, when it will be at its best and brightest of the year. In anticipation of the comet's arrival, the online Slooh Space Camera will offer live telescope views of the object beginning at 4:45 p.m. ET.

    You can watch the Comet ISON webcast live on Space.com, courtesy of Slooh Space Camera. [See more amazing photos of Comet ISON]

    The webcast marks Slooh's fourth monthly webcast dedicated to tracking Comet ISON's progress through the solar system. During Sunday's 30-minute live show, Slooh officials will provide views of Comet ISON from the firm's remotely operated telescopes in the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa.

    Senior space scientist Padma Yanamandra-Fisher of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., will join Slooh producer Paul Cox in the comet webcast. Yanamandra-Fisher is helping coordinate NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign to track the comet. The international campaign is bringing together scientists around the world to plan out observations of ISON.

    NASA has already used several spacecraft, including sun-watching Stereo probes and the Hubble Space Telescope, to observe ISON. An unmanned balloon mission is also among the expeditions planned to observe ISON.

    J.-Y. Li (PSI) / NASA / ESA

    Comet ISON glows in a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, captured in April.

    Comet ISON has drawn worldwide attention from stargazers and scientists, including NASA, because of its close approach to the sun on Nov. 28, when it will be just 730,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) from the sun. During that close encounter with the sun, Comet ISON could become one of the brightest comets in decades. However, the comet could also fizzle out.

    Comet ISON was discovered last September by Russian amateur astronomers Artyom Novichonok and Vitali Nevski using the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) of remotely operated telescopes. The comet is officially known by the identification C/2012 S1 (ISON).

    On April 10, scientists used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Comet ISON. At the time it was about 386 million miles (621 million kilometers) from the sun and 394 million miles (634 million kilometers) from Earth.

    When observed by Hubble, the comet's nucleus was about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across with a dusty tail that stretched more than 57,000 miles (92,000 kilometers) long.

    If you have an amazing picture of Comet ISON or any other night sky view that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

    To follow the Slooh webcast directly using Slooh's iPad app or the Slooh website, visit: http://www.slooh.com.

    Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Half the mice on 'space ark' survive a month in orbit – all the lizards do

    Russia24 on Vesti.ru

    Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and the lead researcher for the Bion-M project, talks to reporters Sunday while others examine the "space ark" capsule in the background. Visit Vesti.ru to watch a Russian-language video, or click on the embedded video below.

    MOSCOW — A Russian capsule carrying mice, lizards and other small animals returned to Earth on Sunday after spending a month in space for what scientists said was the longest experiment of its kind.

    Fewer than half of the 53 mice and other rodents who blasted off on April 19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome survived the flight, Russian news agencies reported, quoting Vladimir Sychov, deputy director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems and the lead researcher.

    Sychov said this was to be expected. The surviving mice were sufficient to complete the study, which was designed to show the effects of weightlessness and other factors of spaceflight on cell structure, he said. All 15 of the lizards reportedly survived. The capsule also carried small crayfish and fish.

    The capsule's orbit reached 575 kilometers (345 miles) above Earth, according to the news agencies. That's higher than the orbit of the International Space Station, which is currently at a maximum altitude of about 421 kilometers (262 miles).

    Russian state television showed the round Bion-M capsule and some of the surviving mice after it landed slightly off course but safely in a planted field near Orenburg, about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) southeast of Moscow.

    "This is the first time that animals have flown in space for so long on their own," Sychov said in the television broadcast from the landing site. The last research craft to carry animals into space spent 12 days in orbit in 2007.

    The mice and other animals were to be flown back to Moscow to undergo a series of tests at Sychov's institute, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

    The Associated Press

    Watch Vesti Russia24's Russian-language coverage of the "space ark" that returned to Earth.

    More about animals in space:

  • Why sign up for a one-way Mars trip? Three applicants explain the appeal

    NASA / STScI

    Mars looms large in a Hubble Space Telescope photo - and in the imaginations of those who have signed up for a one-way trip to the Red Planet. "It's not that I'm trying to get away," says 18-year-old Kayli McArthur, one of tens of thousands of applicants. "It's like I'm trying to strive for something more."

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    A one-way trip to Mars sounds like something you'd wish on your worst enemy — so why would more than 78,000 people from around the world pay up to $75 for a chance to die on another planet?

    "I can say I have an ulterior motive," said David Brin, who has written more than a dozen science-fiction novels — including "The Postman," which was turned into a Kevin Costner movie in 1997. "I'd get a lot of writing done, and it might be memorable."

    As a master of hard science fiction, the 62-year-old Brin knows better than most applicants what the first Red Planet settlers would face if they're sent off in 2022, as the Dutch-based Mars One venture has proposed.

    The settlers would have to be sealed up in habitats, protected from harsh radiation, supplied with machine-made air and water, and nourished by whatever food can be grown on a cold, barren planet. They'd have to keep their sanity, millions of miles away from their families and Mission Control. Worst of all, they'd have to face the fact that there's no guarantee of ever going back.

    Will this scheme actually work? "I give it a low probability of happening," Brin said, "and I don't consider it to be the most responsible thing I've ever seen."

    Nevertheless, the venture has an attraction for Brin and tens of thousands of others, The ages of those listed in Mars One's database range from 18 to 71. All those applicants are facing a long road even before the first four-person crew gets off the planet. Mars One is accepting applicants through Aug. 31. The field of applicants would first be whittled down by panels of experts. Then they'd undergo trial by reality TV, followed by years of training.

    "This may sound crazy, but it kind of reminds me of 'The Hunger Games,'" said Kayli McArthur, an 18-year-old student who's one of the youngest Mars One applicants. "It's cool that it would be televised, but that's not my whole thing."

    On the other end of the age spectrum, 71-year-old psychiatrist Sanford Pomerantz is a little surprised that it's taking this long to get something like Mars One off the ground. "I thought by now we would have colonized Mars," said Pomerantz, who's currently the oldest applicant on Mars One's list.

    So what's the appeal of Mars One? It's too early for Brin, McArthur and Pomerantz to give a lot of thought to their adventure on Mars, let alone their death on Mars. Instead, they're focusing on the adventure here on Earth. Here's what's behind their thinking:

    Mars One

    Click on the image to go to David Brin's Mars One application video.

    David Brin: 'My main purpose is the conversation'
    Brin sees Mars One as just one of a number of ventures aimed at expanding humanity's frontier, ranging from Virgin Galactic's suborbital space tours to Golden Spike's moon missions. "It's emblematic of the new era that we're about to enter at long last — what I call the barnstorming era," he said.

    Like the daring airplane fliers of the 1920s, these 21st-century space barnstormers are willing to take bigger risks in hopes of providing bigger thrills — and eventually, earning bigger payoffs. The Mars One project is "a great way to get the discussion going," Brin said.

    "You have to assume that it may not work, and that there will be a statue of you on Mars someday," he said. "I'm aware of the tradeoffs, and I'm willing to explore it further, but largely my main purpose is the conversation. We've got to be talking about how we can be a more exploratory people — a more interesting people, if you like."

    Brin doesn't doubt that Mars One will find plenty of qualified (and interesting) people willing to take the risk.

    "People who cannot imagine any sane person making that choice simply aren't envisioning the wide range of human diversity," said Brin, who has three children in school. "Consider what I told my family. By the very earliest date that Mars One might launch, I expect to be a spry 75-year-old whose kids are already successfully launched, and who might spend a few years doing something truly remarkable."

    Even if it means dying on alien soil? Brin isn't completely sure he'd go that far, but he's willing to bet that others would.

    "I think you'll find tens of thousands of people who, under those circumstances, will at least ponder it seriously," Brin said.

    Mars One

    Click on the image to go to Kayli McArthur's Mars One application video.

    Kayli McArthur: 'I'm trying to strive for something more'
    McArthur, a freshman at the University of Arizona, is one of more than three dozen 18-year-olds on Mars One's list of applicants. Ever since she applied, she's been hearing that she has her whole life ahead of her, so why would she want to leave it all behind for Mars?

    "Being young doesn't make me want to do it any less because I have my whole life ahead of me," she said. "It makes it more exciting. ... I love all my friends, my guy friends, my family. It's not that I'm trying to get away. It's like I'm trying to strive for something more."

    She has long dreamed of going into outer space, and she figures that her future degree in materials science would come in handy for creating the first interplanetary settlement. "Going to Mars, there are so many opportunities for that," she said. 

    So far, her family hasn't stood in her way. "My family jokes, like, 'Oh, Kayli, have your fun with it,'" she said. If the selection process gets more serious, she suspects she might face more resistance from her parents. But not from her grandfather.

    "My grandpa is a retired three-star [general] in the Air Force," she said. "We were talking about it. I get really worked up and excited, and he was talking about it, too, and being realistic about it. He said, 'That would be so cool if you were able to do it.' ... I know my grandpa would totally support me."

    Mars One

    Click on the image to go to Sanford Pomerantz's Mars One application video.

    Sanford Pomerantz: 'Grandpa is going to Mars!'
    Pomerantz is old enough to remember when the idea of sending people into outer space seemed as far out as the idea of sending people on a one-way trip to Mars seems now. One of the books that made an impression on him in grade school was Robert Heinlein's "Red Planet: A Colonial Boy on Mars," which was published in 1949.

    "I started as a physics major in the university, but then I got accepted into med school and changed directions," he said. At the age of 71, he's still a practicing psychiatrist in Topeka, Kan. But he's also still holding onto that boyhood dream of spaceflight.

    "The Mars thing is exciting, because I hope it'll stimulate people to get interested in space. ... And I hope it has the secondary effect of stimulating science education, especially in the U.S.," he said.

    Just as McArthur believes that Mars will need a materials scientist, Pomerantz believes the crew will need a psychiatrist. "Psychologically, it's going to be an interesting challenge, but human beings are very adaptable," he said. "It'll be exciting to go to a whole new world. It'll be a major step in human evolution."

    If Pomerantz ends up being selected for the first Mars crew, he's likely to become not only the oldest human to head for the Red Planet, but the oldest human to go on any space mission. (The current record-holder is John Glenn, who flew on the shuttle Discovery when he was 77 years old.) For now at least, that prospect doesn't faze Pomerantz's three children and two grandchildren. "The grandchildren are excited," he said. "It's like, 'Grandpa is going to Mars!'"

    Pomerantz became a certified scuba diver just two years ago, and he still expects to be in good physical and mental shape for liftoff in 2022. "Remember, age is a state of mind," he said. "Chronologlcally, I may be 71. ... But psychologically and physically, I'm definitely in my 20s. I look in the mirror and say, 'Who's that old guy?'"

    Mars One's founders and would-be astronauts discuss plans to go a one-way trip to the Red Planet in 2023.

    More about missions to Mars:

    David Brin's latest science-fiction novel is "Existence," which is set in the latter part of the 21st century and involves matters way beyond Mars.

    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.

  • Storming sun sets the skies aglow

    Laurent Silvani

    The northern lights shine over La Baie in Quebec at 2 a.m. Saturday, in a picture taken by Laurent Silvani. To see more of Silvani's work, check out his Silvani.ca website and his Facebook page.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    A slight solar storm ejected from a powerful sunspot sparked northern lights as far south as Colorado on Friday night — and there should be more to come.

    The heightened aurora was sparked by a burst of electrically charged particles thrown off from an active spot on the sun known as Region 1748. That region is the one responsible for four powerful X-class flares that blasted out from the sun this week. Region 1748 is just now turning in our direction, and forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center say it has the potential to throw some hefty storms our way.

    Storms from the sun have the potential to disrupt satellite communications and power grids, and in extreme cases, the radiation risk could force airlines to reroute their intercontinental flights to lower latitudes. But Joe Kunches, a spokesman for the prediction center, said experts now have much better capabilities at their command to reduce the risks. And so far, he said, the active sun has been throwing "softballs" at us — at least compared with bigger flare-ups like the Halloween storms of 2003 or the Bastille Day storm of 2000.

    The most noticeable effects of recent solar disruptions have come in the form of enhanced auroral displays. SpaceWeather.com reports that faint glows were recorded Friday night in Colorado as well as Vermont, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Washington state.

    Farther north, the fireworks show was significantly brighter. Astrophotographer Laurent Silvani captured some great images from Quebec's Saguenay region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of Quebec City.

    "Following a magnetic storm, the aurora borealis was particularly visible in the sky with its waves and colors. A particularly beautiful sight!" he wrote in an email. "Many people from the Saguenay do not know that there are auroras occasionally here. They are surprised to see my pictures every time."

    Check out Silvani's website and Facebook page for more.

    For additional views of auroral glories — including, yes, some photos of the southern lights as seen from Antarctica —take a spin through SpaceWeather.com's photo gallery. And who knows? You might be able to catch the show yourself over the next couple of nights. Another geomagnetic storm is expected to sweep over Earth's magnetic field on Sunday, according to the Space Weather Prediction Center.

    To find out what can be seen from where, keep an eye on the center's Facebook page as well as its Ovation aurora forecast maps. If you're in the aurora zone, the best time to look is after midnight. The best places are far away from city lights, with clear, crisp skies. Got pictures? Share them with us via NBC News' FirstPerson photo upload page.

    While you're waiting for those dark skies, feast your eyes on these beautiful time-lapse aurora videos, plus our slideshow: 

    Shawn Malone presents North Country Dreamland from LakeSuperiorPhoto on Vimeo. "All scenes are within approximately 200 miles of my home in Marquette, Michigan," he writes. "This video is my first time-lapse compilation of a resultant 10,000 photo frames equaling 33 scenes of various night sky events from Northern Michigan 2012. It took a year to shoot and a bit of tenacity and persistence to get this into a form of coherent electrified cosmic goodness." You'll see northern lights as well as meteors and other wonders. For the best effect, watch it at full screen in HD. And for more from Malone, check out his website and Facebook page.

    Thomas Kast presents Aurora - Queen of the Night on Vimeo. "After a long winter here in Finland with many beautiful northern lights, I'm very happy and proud to share my timelapse video of the aurora borealis with you," Kast writes. "This is the result of almost 60 nights outdoors between September 2012 and March 2013. Some of the scenes are shot on the frozen Baltic Sea, some in Lapland and most around Oulu, where I live."

    Slideshow: Lights in the sky

    Click through stunning images of the auroral displays created by geomagnetic storms.

    Launch slideshow

    More auroral glories:

    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 and the rest of NBCNews.com's science and space coverage, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Scientists create world's tiniest drops of liquid in biggest atom smasher

    CMS Collaboration

    This three-dimensional view shows the proton-lead collision that produced collective flow behavior. The green lines are the trajectories of the subatomic particles produced by the collision, reconstructed by the CMS tracking system. The red and blue bars represent the energy measured by the instrument's two sets of calorimeters.

    By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience

    Scientists think they've created the smallest drops of liquid ever — the size of only three to five protons.

    The droplets were made inside the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where particles are sped up to near light speed and then smashed together. When researchers collided protons with lead nuclei, they were surprised to find that the result was teeny, tiny droplets of liquid.

    These liquid drops are minuscule, measuring about one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a typical virus. [Dazzling Droplets: Photos Reveal Mini Worlds]

    The researchers consider the droplets liquid because they flow more like a liquid than like any other state of matter.

    "With this discovery, we seem to be seeing the very origin of collective behavior," Vanderbilt University physicist Julia Velkovska said in a statement. "Regardless of the material that we are using, collisions have to be violent enough to produce about 50 subatomic particles before we begin to see collective, flowlike behavior," added Velkovska, who is a co-convener of the heavy-ion program of the Compact Muon Solenoid, the LHC detector where the droplets were made.

    In fact, the droplets appear to be tiny bits of one of the hottest liquids known, called quark-gluon plasma. This plasma, essentially a soup of quarks and gluons (the subatomic ingredients of the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei), has been made at LHC and other particle accelerators before.

    When quark-gluon plasma was first discovered in the early 2000s inside the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, physicists initially thought it would behave as a gas does. Instead, they found it had liquid properties. Scientists think this plasma represents the state of the whole universe just moments after it was born in the Big Bang, when the universe was extremely hot and dense.

    The first artificial quark-gluon plasma was produced by smashing two gold nuclei together, and was later re-created with collisions of two lead nuclei. The CMS researchers wanted to test whether quark-gluon plasma could also be made by colliding a lead nucleus with a proton, which is 208 times less massive than lead; they expected these impacts would not be energetic enough to produce the plasma.

    "The proton-lead collisions are something like shooting a bullet through an apple, while lead-lead collisions are more like smashing two apples together: A lot more energy is released in the latter," Velkovska said.

    The results of the experiment were unexpected. In about 5 percent of collisions — those that were most violent — enough energy was released around the "bullet hole" where the proton smashed through the lead that some of the protons and neutrons there melted. This material seemed to form droplets of liquid about one-tenth the size of the quark-gluon plasma batches created by lead-lead and gold-gold impacts.

    Quark-gluon plasma is still a mysterious form of matter, and the scientists can't be absolutely sure yet that what they saw were liquid droplets. Further tests should help differentiate between that interpretation and other possible explanations of the results, the researchers said.

    Velkovska and her colleagues detailed their findings in a paper submitted to the journal Physics Letters B.

    Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Scientists respond to planet hunter's plight with pointers – and poetry

    NASA

    An artist's conception shows NASA's Kepler space telescope observing a planetary transit.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    NASA is getting plenty of advice — and sympathy — as it assesses whether its Kepler planet-hunting telescope can be revived after the failure of its reaction-control system. The reactions from scientists and engineers range from repair tips to an Audenesque elegy. Here's a sampling:

    How to fix Kepler
    The reason why the $600 million Kepler spacecraft can no longer search for planetary transits is that two of its four gyroscopic reaction wheels can no longer spin. Mission managers say Kepler needs at least three of those wheels in working order to hold its position still enough to stare at alien stars.

    The most recent part to fail is known as reaction wheel 4. The mission's deputy project manager, Charlie Sobeck, told reporters that the Kepler team could try putting some reverse torque on that wheel in hopes of freeing it up.

    Two other possibilities were raised by Scott Hubbard, who headed NASA's Ames Research Center during the development of the Kepler mission and is now a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University.

    One option would be to try turning on reaction wheel 2, which failed last July. "It was putting metal on metal, and the friction was interfering with its operation, so you could see if the lubricant that is in there, having sat quietly, has redistributed itself, and maybe it will work," Hubbard said in a Stanford Q&A.

    "The other scheme, and this has never been tried, involves using thrusters and the solar pressure exerted on the solar panels to try and act as a third reaction wheel and provide additional pointing stability," he said. The mission's principal investigator, Ames' Bill Borucki, said on Wednesday the thrusters couldn't hold the spacecraft stable enough for planet-hunting. Nevertheless, it might be one of the options under consideration.

    For the time being, Kepler has been put into a holding pattern that should minimize its thruster fuel consumption and give the Kepler team several months to weigh all the options, the costs and the potential scientific benefits.

    The problems facing the Kepler planet-hunting probe are reviewed in NASA's weekly video roundup.

    Going beyond Kepler
    Even if the Kepler spacecraft can't be revived, Borucki says that only half of the data collected so far have been fully analyzed. He estimates it'll take another two years or so to complete the analysis.

    Meanwhile, NASA has just given the go-ahead its next planet-hunting satellite: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. That $200 million project would put a telescope array in space in 2017 to perform an all-sky survey, looking for exoplanets in orbit around the nearest and brightest stars. That strategy is markedly different from the one used by Kepler, which stared at a relatively small patch of sky straddling the constellations Cygnus and Vega.

    This October, the European Space Agency plans to launch a space probe called Gaia to conduct a census of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way. Gaia could detect thousands of distant planetary systems, and measure their orbits and masses using a technique known as astrometry.

    ESA is working on another planet hunter called the Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite, or CHEOPS, which is due for launch in 2017. CHEOPS would conduct high-resolution transit observations of stars that have already been found to host planets. 

    The $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA bills as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, could conceivably analyze the atmospheres of alien planets. It's currently due for launch in 2018.

    Paying tribute to Kepler
    NASA's associate administrator for science, John Grunsfeld, said it's too early to consider Kepler "down and out." But many astronomers fear that Kepler's planet-hunting days are finished.

    "I think 'The mission is not over' means 'the mission is over,'" Caltech's Mike Brown said in a Twitter update on Wednesday. "Might be other things it can do. But, kids, I think the mission is over."

    Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science who's part of the Kepler team, was similarly downbeat. In an email sent to AAAS MemberCentral, he called this week's setback a "disaster":

    "I am afraid that the loss of this second reaction wheel effectively means the partial loss of Kepler's main science goal: determining the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting their stars at distances such that liquid water could occur on the planets' surfaces. Kepler has taken an outstandingly impressive four years of data, but we still need another three or so years of outstandingly impressive data to be certain of the frequency of Earth-size planets. Right now we have enough data to make an intelligent extrapolation about what that number is, but that is not the same as actually determining that number. Kepler was planned to do that for us. There is no other mission in sight that can reproduce for us what Kepler was in the process of doing. The upcoming (2017) NASA TESS Mission will help to push the exoplanet field forward, but it is not designed to find Earthlike planets around sunlike stars, like Kepler was."

    "This is one of the saddest days in my life. A crippled Kepler may be able to do other things, but it cannot do the one thing it was designed to do."

    Another Kepler team member, Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, told KQED that he felt dizzy and teary-eyed over the spacecraft's situation. "It’s a loss for our species," he said. "That sounds dramatic, but we pride ourselves as a species of exploration, seeking answers beyond the horizon, answers about our place in the universe. And Kepler was answering those questions."

    Marcy went so far as to tweak W.H. Auden's poem "Funeral Blues" to pay tribute to Kepler. Here's the astronomer's elegy to a spacecraft:

    Stop all the clocks, cut off the Internet,
    Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
    Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
    Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

    Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead
    Sky-writing over Cygnus: Kepler is dead.
    Put crepe bows round the white necks of doves,
    Let the traffic officers wear black cotton gloves.

    Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West,
    My working week, no weekend rest,
    My noon, my midnight, my talks, my song;
    I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong.

    The stars are still wanted now; let's honor every one,
    Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
    Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
    For nothing will ever be this good.

    With thanks to W.H.Auden.

    For a video rendition of "Funeral Blues," check out this clip from "Four Weddings and a Funeral."

    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.

  • Microscopic crystal 'flowers' build themselves in a Harvard lab

    Wim Noorduin

    Researchers formed hierarchically complex structures by controlling the growth of crystals in a solution. Here, a coral shape was nucleated on top of a spiral. (The scanning electron microscope view is false-colored, but represents the actual color of the structure.)

    By Jillian Scharr, TechNewsDaily

    Imagine peering into a microscope and finding yourself in a garden.

    That's the case at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where researchers have found a way to shape microscopic crystals into complex and often beautiful structures.

    Inspired by coral reefs, seashells and other naturally occurring complex mineral structures, postdoctoral fellow Wim L. Noorduin and Harvard colleagues have been researching ways to create similar designs.

    These "flowers" were created by mixing barium chloride and sodium silicate, also known as waterglass, in a beaker of water. The resulting reaction combines with carbon dioxide in the air to create crystals made of barium carbonate in the water.

    Noorduin found that as the crystals self-assembled, he could control their shape, size and direction of growth by altering the temperature, the amount of carbon dioxide allowed into the reaction and the acidity of the water.

    Increasing the carbon dioxide levels creates the broad, flat leaves of those mineral flowers, for example. Fluctuating the acidity level creates the ruffled wave in the petals.

    Wim Noorduin

    This false-colored photomicrograph shows a red coral structure with green "stems" grown inside the cavities of the coral. While the stems are growing, researchers opened them with a pulse of carbon dioxide to produce the purple structure.

    Wim Noorduin

    A field of microscopic tulips takes shape in this false-colored scanning electron microscope image.

    Laura Hendriks / Wim Noorduin

    This complex microscopic bouquet was formed by first nucleating green stems inside purple vases, after which the stems were opened during growth to form the blue part.

    The curved petals, slender stems and jagged thorns, formed by the carbonate-silica crystals as they grew, demonstrate the effectiveness of Noorduin's technique. The team was able to create the structures on glass slides and metal plates as well, and even grew a "garden" of flowers in front of the Lincoln Memorial that's imprinted on the back of a penny.

    The images were taken with a scanning electron microscope, which uses electrons to create images of microscopic images. The color was added digitally.

    "When you look through the electron microscope, it really feels a bit like you’re diving in the ocean, seeing huge fields of coral and sponges … Sometimes I forget to take images because it's so nice to explore," Noorduin said in Harvard's press release.

    Crystal manipulation has more applications than just the aesthetic. Aside from the valuable insight into the way silicon-based structures are formed in nature, this technique can be used in nanotechnology fields such as optics and electronics.

    Noorduin's findings follow a similar discovery from Harvard biologist Howard Berg, who found that certain bacterial colonies take intricate geometric shapes in response to concentrations of chemicals around them.

    Noorduin's paper, "Rationally Designed Complex, Hierarchical Microarchitectures," was published in the journal Science on May 17.

    Email jscharr@technewsdaily.com or follow her @JillScharr. Follow us @TechNewsDaily, on Facebook or on Google+.

    Copyright 2012 TechNewsDaily

  • Buggy hordes of cicadas sighted in Virginia ... but New York? Not yet

    The first of the Brood II cicadas, which only mature every 17 years, are being spotted in some southern states including Virginia. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    There's been a groundswell of 17-year cicadas in Virginia and other southern states, as revealed by a fresh wave of photos and eyewitness reports. In some areas, the outbreak has been accompanied by the insects' loud chorus call. And that's music to the ears of University of Connecticut entomologist John Cooley.

    "That's where I'm heading," Cooley told NBC News. The weather is still too cool in New England and the New York City area for a full-blown Brood II emergence, so Cooley is planning a field trip to watch the insects rise up in Virginia.

    This is the big year for Brood II cicadas, which are expected to emerge from the ground in the billions over an area of the East Coast ranging from North Carolina up to Connecticut. The bugs are hard-wired to spend 17 years underground, feeding on the fluid from plant roots, and then pop up during the appointed spring when the soil temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees Celsius).

    For weeks, bug-watchers have been posting their sightings (and soil temperature readings) to websites such as Cooley's Magicicada.org and RadioLab's Cicada Tracker. Another website maintained by the Sutron weather information network tracks the soil temperature in Washington, D.C. 

    When the winged cicadas throng, they can cover trees and buildings — and raise a din as loud as a lawnmower or jet engine (90 decibels). Over the course of four to six weeks in May and June, the bugs mate, lay their eggs and die, setting the 17-year life cycle in motion once again. (Scientists theorize that there are evolutionary advantages to the long, odd-numbered cycle.)

    Although the cicadas have been patiently waiting for 17 years, some cicada-watchers up north are getting impatient with the pace of the emergence. Cooley said the relatively slow pace may be due to this spring's cool temperatures. In order to bring the soil up to 64 degrees F, air temperatures have to get significantly higher than that on a consistent basis.

    "I want 80s and 90s," he said, "and so do the cicadas."

    Dave Ellis / The Free Lance-Star via AP

    Brood II cicadas emerge in the Leavells Crossing neighborhood in Spotsylvania, Va., on May 16.

    Carol via Twitter.com/oikwtm_

    Cicadas throng near a house in Fredericksburg, Va.

    Carol via Twitter.com/oikwtm_

    A cat looks through a screen door as cicadas swarm outside a house in Fredericksburg, Va.

    Slideshow: Return of the cicada

    Take a closer look at the curious 17-year life of the flying bug as the East Coast prepares for an invasion.

    Launch slideshow

    More about the cicada outbreak:

    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.

  • 'Star Trek' reaches warp speed at real fusion lab

    Paramount Pictures

    This scene from "Star Trek Into Darkness" was shot at California's National Ignition Facility, which is pursuing nuclear fusion in a lab.

    By Clara Moskowitz
    LiveScience

    If the Starship Enterprise's warp drive looks especially realistic in the new "Star Trek" film, that's because it was shot in a real-life laboratory for nuclear fusion research: The National Ignition Facility in California.

    The J.J. Abrams-led crew of the new film "Star Trek Into Darkness," got special permission from the U.S. Department of Energy to film scenes from the movie at the facility, which is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

    There, real-life scientists are using the world's most energetic laser system to attempt to create nuclear fusion — the merging of two atoms into one — in a laboratory. If successful, the technology could provide a truly clean, renewable energy source for the future. While the National Ignition Facility (NIF) hasn't succeeded in igniting fusion just yet, scientists say they're getting closer and closer to their goal. [Photos: The Evolution of the Starship Enterprise]

    There are genuine links between the research going on at NIF and the futuristic science portrayed in "Star Trek," the film's producers point out: After all, the Enterprise is fueled with deuterium, the heavy variant of hydrogen, which the NIF uses in its fusion experiments.

    "For many years, we've been waiting for 'Star Trek' to realize they should be here!" principal associate director of NIF Edward Moses said in a statement. "This is a very futuristic facility… and I think we've all been influenced by Star Trek's vision of the future."

    The film uses NIF to portray the innards of the 23rd-century starship, which uses a warp drive to bend space-time, allowing the Enterprise to travel faster than the speed of light.

    Moses said he and his science team were thrilled to see their lab transformed into a sci-fi vision. "It was super exciting to see J.J. Abrams' vision of what we do," Moses said.

    For their part, the film crew was just as excited to see real-life science in action.

    "We were there just trying to shoot a movie, but all around us, these innovative scientists are working on technologies that will likely help the whole world," Abrams said. "The idea that one day the research at NIF could create clean, limitless energy is so exciting. On the one hand, it was simply a great location for the story. But more importantly, we were really honored to be welcomed there. These people are doing research that could alter the destiny of the planet the way the wheel or the light bulb did."

    The collaboration is especially fitting, because so many scientists have been inspired to pursue their careers, in part, by science fiction such as "Star Trek."

    "We couldn't even believe they let us in to shoot — and then, they were so excited about having us," Abrams said. "So many people told us 'Star Trek' inspired them to get involved in science."

    Follow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

    Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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