Joachim Ploetz, Alfred Wegener Institute

A male elephant seal opens wide at sea. Scientists have found the H1N1 virus strain in northern elephant seals off the coast of California, the first such detection in marine mammals.

The H1N1 virus strain that caused a 2009 swine flu outbreak in humans was detected in northern elephant seals off the coast of central California.

Scientists say this is the first time marine mammals have been found to carry the H1N1 flu strain, which originated in pigs. The seals seem to have picked up the virus while at sea, but it's unclear how this happened.

"We thought we might find influenza viruses, which have been found before in marine mammals, but we did not expect to find pandemic H1N1," Tracey Goldstein, an associate professor with the UC Davis One Health Institute and Wildlife Health Center, said in a statement. [10 Deadly Diseases That Hopped Across Species]

"H1N1 was circulating in humans in 2009," Goldstein added. "The seals on land in early 2010 tested negative before they went to sea, but when they returned from sea in spring 2010, they tested positive. So the question is, where did it come from?"

Contact with humans carrying the virus is unlikely when the elephant seals are at sea, because the creatures spend most of their time looking for food in a remote part of the northeast Pacific Ocean off the continental shelf.

Exposure could have occurred through feces dumped out of shipping vessels passing through this area. The researchers noted in their report in the journal PLOS ONE this week that H1N1 has been detected in stool samples of hospital patients. Another possible avenue of transmission might have been contact with aquatic birds, thought to be reservoirs for other flu viruses, the researchers say.

Goldstein and colleagues tested nasal swabs from more than 900 Pacific marine mammals from 10 different species from Alaska to California between 2009 and 2011. The elephant seals that were studied had been satellite-tagged and tracked so that researchers could tell where they had been before and after they were tested for disease.

H1N1 was detected in two northern elephant seals within days of their return to land after they went out to sea to forage for a few months. Antibodies to the virus were found in another 28 elephant seals. None of the seals had any signs of illness, which means marine mammals can be infected with zoonotic pathogens but be asymptomatic, the researchers said.

The report recommends that people working with and around marine mammals need to take proper biosafety precautions to prevent exposure to diseases that could be quite harmful in humans, even if they don't cause illness in seals.

The new research on marine mammals is part of an effort to understand emerging viruses in animals and people by the Centers of Excellence in Influenza Research and Surveillance program, funded by the National Institutes of Health.

"The study of influenza virus infections in unusual hosts, such as elephant seals, is likely to provide us with clues to understand the ability of influenza virus to jump from one host to another and initiate pandemics," Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, a professor of microbiology, said in a statement. Garcia-Sastre directs of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine, which collaborated with the team from UC Davis on the study.

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

• Image Gallery: Elephant Seals of the Antarctic
• 7 Devastating Infectious Diseases
• Germs on the Big Screen: 11 Infectious Movies

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

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:

• Cicadas crawling out of the ground in droves
• 'Swarmageddon' comes to North Carolina
• Bug-watchers see cicadas on the rise
• Cicada emergence sparks early buzz

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.

LEOzoo.org

Archie the anteater nestles on his mom at the LEO Zoological Conservation Center in Greenwich, Conn.

Is it a case of anteater virgin birth, a hormonal quirk or just some desperate hanky-panky? Whatever it is, Armani the anteater's surprising pregnancy has sparked a debate over what animals are capable of when it comes to sex.

The story unfolded at the LEO Zoological Conservation Center in Greenwich, Conn.: Last month, Armani gave birth to a cute baby pup named Archie. The only problem was, Archie wasn't supposed to exist.

Armani already had given birth last August to a female pup named Alice, fathered by a male anteater at the center named Alf. Anteater dads have been known to kill off their progeny, so Alf was put in a separate pen for several months. Marcella Leone, the nonprofit center's founder and director, said Armani and Alf shouldn't have had the opportunity to conceive little Archie.

"It is our protocol that that should not happen, so it's a mystery," Leone told NBC News.

NBC Connecticut: Birth of anteater has zoo staff puzzled

Leone speculated that the "virgin birth" may have been a bizarre case of delayed implantation, also known as embryonic diapause. Some species are able to hold up hormonally on having their fertilized eggs attach to the uterine wall and start developing, apparently as a stress response. That's known to happen to armadillos, which are in the same scientific superorder (Xenarthra) as anteaters. "It's been presumed that giant anteaters can do this as well," Leone said.

Could that be what happened to Armani?

"Given the paucity of literature, it wouldn't surprise me," said Bruce Murphy, director of the University of Montreal's Reseau Quebecois en Reproduction (Quebec Reproduction Network).

Diapause or desire?
Murphy is no expert on anteaters, but he is an expert on diapause. A paper on the subject that he and his colleagues published in the journal Open Biology is featured this week as an "editor's choice" in the journal Science.

A cross-species study published by a different set of researchers in PLOS ONE suggests that Armani may well have been capable of adjusting the dials on the standard six-month gestation period. "Their conclusion, and I think it's a good one, is that maybe every species has a capacity for diapause, if uterine conditions are appropriate," Murphy told NBC News.

Bob Luckey / Connecticut Post

Marcella Leone, founder and director of the LEO Zoological Conservation Center, watches over Armani and her baby, Archie, clinging to her back, on May 10. For more pictures, check out the Connecticut Post's report.

However, it may not be necessary to turn to diapause, or to a different kind of "virgin birth" known as parthenogenesis, for an explanation. Despite the best efforts of the conservation center's staff, it's conceivable that Armani and Alf found a way to couple through the enclosure's high-tensile fence. They may have even indulged in a brief encounter while they were being moved around.

Just minutes to do the deed
"I have seen anteaters breed many times, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly what is going on in amongst all that hair," Marie Magnuson, a biologist at Washington's Smithsonian National Zoo, told NBC News in an email. "There is some thought that there is no actual penetration, just a lot of rubbing up together. If that is the case, then his sperm are doing all the heavy lifting on the job, and a fence would not be an insurmountable barrier — as long as it is chain-link and not solid."

It wouldn't take long for anteaters to do the deed, Magnuson said.

"If they were together, it was long enough," she said. "When doing a re-introduction between our breeding pair, we had planned on taking it slow and safe. We were going to put them together for five minutes and then separate them. At three minutes they were copulating."

Leone doesn't totally exclude the possibility that Armani and Alf had a furtive fling. "You can imagine what any man will do to get to his woman," she joked. "This is not our plan, but nature is a very strong force."

The way she sees it, the story is about much more than a couple of amorous anteaters.

"The thing to really focus on is that a plant or animal becomes extinct every 20 minutes," Leone said. "So the point is to learn as much as we can about giant anteaters out of the wild, so that we can apply that knowledge in the wild as well. Ultimately, the most important thing is to save those wild places for wildlife."

More about animal sex:

• Love and lust: Lessons from the animal kingdom
• Gallery: 10 peeks at sex in the wild
• Biologists say animal sex is sensationalized

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.

You'd think that traveling at warp speed to the planet Nibiru would be the coolest thing in outer space, but for the Hollywood types who made "Star Trek Into Darkness," talking with a real astronaut on the International Space Station was way more awesome.

"I'll just act like this is a perfectly normal thing to be happening," Damon Lindelof, a writer and producer for the just-released movie, told NASA's Chris Cassidy during a Google+ Hangout presented on Thursday by the space agency and Warner Bros. "We are literally tickled pink to be talking to you right now."

The other "Star Trek" actors in on the Hangout — Chris Pine (who plays Captain James Kirk), John Cho (Sulu) and Alice Eve (who gets a healthy dose of screen time as Dr. Carol Marcus) — were just as taken. They laughed and hooted like fanboys when Cassidy let go of his microphone and took an upside-down spin in zero-G.

Pine said he loved the idea of mashing up fictional and real-life spaceflight: "It's great that our worlds can meet at some point in the middle and hopefully inspire people to do good things, and to explore."

The feeling was clearly mutual: Astronaut Mike Fincke, who served as space station commander in 2008-2009, said the "Star Trek" TV shows and movies have long inspired scientists, engineers and spacefliers. "We fall for it every time here at NASA," he said.

Fincke appeared in the final episode of the "Star Trek: Enterprise" TV series, and on Thursday he joked that he'd rather be in Hollywood: "Ever since I was 3 years old, I wanted to be a director and writer, but I failed director-writer school. Then I tried acting, and that didn't work out. So now I go on spacewalks." 

If Lindelof has anything to do with it, Fincke won't be the last astronaut to make the crossover to Hollywood. He promised Cassidy that he'd be welcome to a cameo role in a future "Star Trek" movie. "Maybe you could class up the joint a bit," Lindelof said.

Cassidy said the "Star Trek" crew would be welcome aboard the space station as well. He noted that there were currently a couple of vacancies in the U.S. segment of the station — due to the fact that one batch of crew members has just returned to Earth, and their replacements aren't due for launch until May 28. "We got two open beds," Cassidy joked. "The first two here get 'em."

You can watch the whole 56-minute Hangout while you're waiting for the next showing of "Star Trek Into Darkness," but here are a few of the highlights:

• When asked about last week's ammonia coolant leak at the station, Cassidy said he was surprised to see how quickly mission managers were able to plan a spacewalk to fix it. "It's not like you can rescue Spock from a volcano and push a button. It doesn't happen that way up here," he said. Cassidy said the episode illustrated how useful it is to have "garage-tinkerer" types aboard the station.
• Cassidy said ammonia contamination was one of the three emergency threats that the space station crew had to be prepared to deal with, along with an onboard fire or rapid decompression. That led Lindelof to warn the astronaut about the latest "Star Trek" super-villain. "You should watch out for Benedict Cumberbatch," he said. "He's very threatening, I understand."
• Cassidy said the thing that gets him the most about "Star Trek" and other space movies was the ease with which everyone walked around on spaceships, as if artificial gravity was nothing special. Even though weightlessness has its drawbacks, floating around in zero-G would make the movies much more interesting. "Trust me, it's a pretty cool thing to do this anytime you want," Cassidy said.
• The astronauts talked around a question that asked them to name their favorite "Star Trek" captain, but Fincke said his favorite name for a starship would be Enterprise (natch!). Fellow NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren went with the Starship Endurance, which pays tribute to the ship for Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic ordeal in 1914.
• Life aboard the space station tends to give astronauts the same optimistic view of the future that runs through the "Star Trek" saga, Cassidy said. From space, Earth seems so tranquil and peaceful. "There are no borders down there," Cassidy said. "You can't see a little yellow line painted on the green part."
• One of the questions sent in during the Hangout focused on a more mundane aspect of spaceflight: How do spacewalkers handle a sneeze? Cassidy admitted that could be a problem. "Once the helmet goes on, any schmutz that goes on there is just an impediment to seeing clearly," he said. The solution is to incline your head downward before the sneeze, so that the schmutz is directed below the face plate.

More about 'Star Trek' and spaceflight:

• Astronauts get a sneak peek at film
• Warp speed! It may actually be possible
• Gallery: Reality check for 'Trek' tech

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.

Susan Brantley

A horizontal drill rig capable of drilling one to two miles vertically or horizontally.

The current boom in U.S. natural gas production from glassy shale rock formations is poised to usher in an era of energy independence and could bridge the gap between today's fossil-fuel age and a clean-energy future. But that future may be swamped in a legacy of wastewater, a new study suggests.

Natural gas production is soaring thanks to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a technique that shoots several million gallons of water laced with chemicals and sand deep underground to break apart chunks of the glassy rock, freeing trapped gas to escape through cracks and fissures into wells.

An average of 10 percent of this water flows back to the surface within a few weeks of the frack job. The rest is absorbed by the surrounding rock and mixes with briny groundwater, explained Radisav Vidic, a civil and environmental engineer at the University of Pittsburgh.

"What happens to that water is a very good question," he told NBC News. "We would like to know how much of it stays in the shale, and for how long, and is there a potential for migration away from the well."

Vidic led a review study of the scientific literature looking into these questions, which is published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science. 

He said there is a small risk that some of this water could find its way into a crack that leads up to drinking-water aquifers. Most, though, follows the path of least resistance back to the well and flows out at the rate of around 30 to 50 gallons per day. "And what comes back out is much, much worse than anything you put in there, so the real concern is, what do you do with the water that comes back out? Because that's where the potential for major environmental impact occurs," he said.

Salty wastewater
This wastewater, he noted, is 10 times saltier than seawater and contains naturally occurring radioactive material released from the shale.

For now, this wastewater is either injected into wells where, in theory, it will stay indefinitely; or it is cleaned up and reused for subsequent frack jobs. 

Recycling has become particularly common in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region, where the geology limits disposal in injection wells. "I applaud the industry in Pennsylvania for coming up with that [recycling process], but it only works as long as you have more wells to inject into," Vidic said.

Eventually — and no one knows for sure when — more wastewater will be produced than there are new wells being drilled. The technology exists to treat the wastewater, but it is expensive and will leave behind mountains of salt and other solids that will need a proper home.

"The thing is, the industry is simply not addressing it right now," Vidic said. This oversight, he added, has potential be the source of panic and environmental woe when drilling slows.

The natural-gas industry downplays the issue. The concern is "a hypothetical situation that doesn't actually reflect what is really going on," Steve Everley, a spokesman for Energy-in-Depth, an industry trade group, told NBC News. 

A sudden deluge of wastewater, he noted, is "highly unlikely." But if it were to happen, he said, "companies would still be treating and finding a way to do something with the wastewater in a responsible fashion."

That wait-and-see approach worries Kate Sinding, who directs the community fracking defense project for the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. She pointed out that wastewater cannot be reused indefinitely.

"I think they are all counting on shipping it off somewhere else to be dealt with," she told NBC News. "In the Marcellus that would be Ohio, but not surprisingly, Ohio doesn't want all of the stuff from these other states, so we think it is a big problem and one that has to be taken much more seriously."

Frack fluid discolosures
According to Vidic, the wastewater problem is more serious than the nondisclosure of what exactly is in the fluid injected into the well, which has generated concerns about drinking water contamination. 

"There have been more than 1 million hydraulically fractured treatments done, and there is one case where we have seen the contamination of groundwater by the hydraulic fracturing fluids," he said. That one case occurred, he added, because the drilling took place in a region where there were abandoned wells, which served as conduits to the groundwater. 

He and his colleagues note that understanding the exact composition of the injection fluid is important for water quality. It's also important to find out exactly where Pennsylvania's estimated 100,000 abandoned wells are located.

The dearth of this and other data, Vidic noted, means more research is needed to fully understand the impact of natural gas development on water quality, but added that to date the scientific literature provides "no evidence of severe environmental pollution."

"This is an industry," he noted. "And any industry has a footprint … We all want cheap energy and we want more of it. So, OK, you can dig out more coal and burn coal, but I would take natural gas any day of the week over coal."

More about fracking:

• Disputes over fracking's effect cloud its future
• Agreement reached on fracking standards
• Fracking provides energy, jobs ... and quakes?

In addition to Vidic, the authors of "Impact of Shale Gas Development on Regional Water Quality" include S.L. Brantley, J.M Vandenbossche, D. Yoxtheimer, J.D. Abad.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website. 

UTL Scientific

Readings from a laser-mapping system were combined to produce a 3-D map of the Honduran rain forest, and then the vegetation was virtually lifted up from the scene to reveal the ruins of a circular structure.

A high-tech team of scientists and filmmakers shared pictures of what appears to have been a centuries-old civilization in Honduras, one year after they used laser-mapping technology to identify traces of structures in the thick jungle.

The square-shaped and rounded structures, seen in computerized elevation maps of a rugged rain forest, may have been the last vestiges of pyramids, palaces and houses in a fabled settlement known as "la Ciudad Blanca," or the White City.

Tales of Ciudad Blanca have circulated since at least 1526, when the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortez told King Charles V about a mysterious province called Xucutaco that "must exceed Mexico in riches and equal it in the great size of the towns, the multitude of people and the government thereof." Many explorers have gone in search of the vanished city, driving deep into some of Honduras' roughest and most inaccessible rain forests. Neither riches nor ruins were found.

Nevertheless, the sagas inspired documentary filmmaker Steve Elkins to mount yet another search, this time using an aerial mapping technology known as light detection and ranging, or lidar.

How lidar works
An airplane equipped with the lidar mapping apparatus can bounce laser light off the terrain below, and then gather millions of the reflected readings. Those readings can be interpreted by high-powered software that can produce 3-D maps with an elevation resolution of less than 4 inches (10 centimeters). Such maps can even be "filtered" to peel back the dense vegetation and see the contours of the land below. Using lidar, archaeologists can conduct land surveys that might have required months or years to do on the ground.

"We use lidar to pinpoint where human structures are by looking for linear shapes and rectangles. Nature doesn't work in straight lines," Colorado State University's Stephen Leisz, a member of UTL Scientific's archaeological team, said in a statement from the American Geophysical Union.

UTL / Colorado State University

The left image shows a map derived from lidar readings of rainforest terrain. The readings associated with vegetation have been removed to create the right image, which shows the outlines of a square structure.

UTL Scientific

This lidar focuses on a formation in Honduras' Mosquitia rain forest known as "Structure B."

Archaeologists once thought the rain forests of Central and South America were too rugged to allow for large, highly organized communities like the one described by Cortez. But over the past decade or so, researchers have found evidence to argue that the forests were once much more highly managed by native populations. The idea that the ancient peoples of the Americas created complex cities and roadways in what are now wild forests no longer seems as radical as it once did. That's what inspired Elkins and his colleagues to go ahead with their search.

An 'easy' discovery
A year ago, the team mapped about 60 square miles (160 square kilometers) of Honduras' Mosquitia rain forest, and sent the data back to University of Houston engineer Bill Carter. Carter, who works with the National Science Foundation's National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, identified the regular outlines of artificial structures after just a few minutes of analysis.

"It was kind of surprising how easy it was to find them," Carter told The New Yorker.

It took months more to map hundreds of ruins at several sites in the target area. On Wednesday, Elkins and his team shared some their images to fellow researchers during a session at a geophysical science conference in Cancun, Mexico, organized by the AGU. The laser images unveiled this week illustrate how structures could be identified beneath the vegetation, but do not show the settlements in a wider context.

"We can't show the overall place because we'd like to protect the site" from treasure hunters and looters, Elkins explained in the AGU's news release.

He said that the UTL Scientific team plans to explore the structures on the ground later this year. (UTL stands for "Under the Lidar".) Eventually, Elkins and fellow filmmaker Bill Benenson, who is underwriting the expedition, plan to produce a documentary about the latest search for Ciudad Blanca.

More about lost cities:

• How lasers helped spot lost city in Honduras
• Lost city of Atlantis may lie off Spain's coast
• Gallery: Seven tales of cities lost and 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.

NASA

NASA astronaut (and quilter) Karen Nyberg looks out the window of the Japanese Kibo laboratory on the International Space Station in 2008.

When astronaut Karen Nyberg is launched to the International Space Station, she’ll bring something entirely new to the space frontier: the art of quilting.

"I enjoy sewing and quilting," she explained during a televised interview from Moscow. "I am bringing some fabric with me, and thread. I'm hoping to create something. I don't know what yet it will be — that's part of creativity. It comes with the feeling of the day. So I have the supplies at my hands to create, if I get the opportunity and the creative notion to do so."

When she's launched into space on May 28, she'll be taking four "fat quarters" with her (pieces of fabric that are 18 by 22 inches), along with some needles and thread. But up-cargo limitations and safety issues mean she can't take a sewing machine, an iron, paints, a rotary cutter or other common tools of quilters.

Stitching in zero-G
To do quilting in zero gravity, she'll have to brace herself somewhere so she and her fabrics don't float around, find some good light, and keep her thread and thread clippings under strict control so they don't float into someone's face and eyes.

Precision stitching will surely be a challenge for her too, since she, the fabric, and the thread will want to float free, not sit steady and still. As she explained in a recent tweet, "It will be great experiment controlling everything!"

K. Nyberg / NASA

Karen Nyberg created this quilt for her niece.

Though she's limited in the material and equipment she can bring into space, Nyberg can use fabric or patches from the discarded astronaut clothing already on board the space station — some of it quite colorful. As a rule, the space station crew members wear a flight suit for a week and then discard it. There are no laundry facilities aboard the space station, so the uniforms are generally added to the trash heap that builds up inside a Russian Progress resupply ship after it is emptied. Eventually, the Progress is jettisoned, and everything in it burns up in Earth's atmosphere.

The issue of obtaining sewing scraps from a readily available "rag bag" in orbit first came up in a face-to-face interview in Houston last month. She broke into a broad, excited smile: "Discarded clothing — fantastic idea!"

And although paints and dyes are forbidden on the space station, Nyberg pointed out that there are condiments aboard that can take their place, which might be used as decoration — ketchup, mustard and chili sauce can make for some interesting painting materials.

Down to Earth
The first quilt in space would be an exciting, unique and valuable item. Bringing a quilt back to Earth might be a problem, since Nyberg has a limited space allotment in the Soyuz capsule she'll be traveling in next November. But she hopes to bring at least some of her handiwork back with her.

Fortunately, there may be additional opportunities to bring her space handiwork down to Earth. Unmanned SpaceX Dragon cargo capsules are carrying supplies up to the space station, with the next flight scheduled in November. The Dragon has a large volume for returning cargo to Earth, and NASA and SpaceX should be able to find room for a quilt or two.

If Nyberg has access to a cosmic rag bag of discarded uniforms from many countries — the United States, Russia, Canada, Italy, Japan and others — think of what her fellow quilters back on Earth could do with such star-struck materials.  NASA could decide to recycle space-flown uniforms back to Earth someday, and distribute them to quilters as part of a citizen outreach project.

The International Space Station itself is already a patchwork quilt of hardware: equipment, life support systems and structural elements that have been fabricated in various nations and pieced together over more than a decade. As with quilting, the station's life support systems emphasize recycling and re-use.

Nyberg has not mentioned any designs for her quilts. She said that she's "counting on creativity when I get there.”  She has a sketch pad, a pencil and a pencil sharpener to draw out the ideas that come to her. Whether it follows a traditional design, or a new look dictated by cosmic imagination, whether it's simple or fancy, the first quilt in space will undoubtedly become one of those precious images we’ll have sewn into our culture.

More about space crafts:

• Spacey artists win crafty prizes
• New frontiers for shuttle souvenirs

NBC News space analyst James Oberg spent 22 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center as a Mission Control operator and an orbital designer. Alcestis Oberg is a science writer and quilt collector. The Obergs are co-authors of "Pioneering Space: Living on the Next Frontier."