(C) Photo by Sheela Sharma

Three teams, one on each side and one in the back, maneuver an Easter Island statue replica down a road in Hawaii, hinting that prehistoric farmers who didn't have the wheel may have transported these statues in this manner. The experiment was led by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo and is reported in the July issue of National Geographic magazine.

Did Easter Island's famous statues rock, or roll? After doing a little rocking out themselves, researchers say they're sure the natives raised the monumental figures upright, and then rocked them back and forth to "walk" them to their positions.

Their findings mesh with a scenario that casts the Polynesian island's natives in the roles of resourceful engineers working with the little that they had on hand, rather than the victims of a self-inflicted environmental catastrophe.

"A lot of what people think they know about the island turns out to be not true," Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at California State University at Long Beach, told me today.

Lipo and University of Hawaii anthropologist Terry Hunt lay out their case in a book titled "The Statues That Walked" as well as July's issue of National Geographic magazine. Their story serves as a counterpoint to a darker Easter Island saga, detailed in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," a better-known book by UCLA scientist-author Jared Diamond. 

Two scenarios
In Diamond's scenario, Easter Island's society is portrayed as one that chose to fail through overpopulation, conflict and deforestation. Polynesians colonized the island as far back as 1,600 years ago, and cut down forests of palm trees as part of a slash-and-burn strategy that led to intensive farming, soil degradation, conflict, cannibalism and massive depopulation. By the time the Europeans arrived in the 18th century, Easter Island's society was on the ropes.

The island's statues, known as moai, play a significant part in this scenario. Diamond relies on the findings of other researchers who say the monoliths, weighing as much as 90 tons, were dragged into place by hundreds of islanders, using downed trees as sleds, rollers and levers. Rival chieftains recruited whole tribes to erect monuments to their glory. The broken statues found along the island's path were a testament to the stone-carving society's final failure.

Hunt and Lipo take a different view: The way they see it, Easter Island was never that great a place to live. "It was never verdant, and there were never very many people on the island," Lipo said.

In this scenario, the Polynesians settled on the island about 800 years ago — and brought rats along with them. The settlers ate the rats, but because the rodents were an invasive species with no other natural predators, they took over the island and feasted on palm nuts, hastening the pace of deforestation. The population remained relatively stable for centuries, but when the Europeans arrived, the islanders who were there fell victim to diseases that their immune systems couldn't fight.

(c) Photo by Sheela Sharma

Archaeologists Carl Lipo and Terry Hunt stand in front of a full-scale replica of a stone statue from Easter Island. Their research into Easter Island's past is featured in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Hunt acknowledged that, "from a biodiversity standpoint, it was a catastrophe." But he said the farming methods used by the ancient islanders were designed to make the best of a bad situation. Rocks were piled up to create circular garden plots known as "manavai," and crops were planted within the circles. Nutrients would quickly leach out of the soil, but fresh rock was pulverized and added to the soil as a mulch.

"They were able to engineer their lives in a way that was really stable and sustainable," Lipo said.

The statues play a different role in the two scientists' alternate scenario. They said it wouldn't take all that many people to move the statues if they were raised up vertically and then rocked down the road. Taking on the task would have helped blow off steam, and might have served as a kind of social glue, Hunt said.

"You're actually putting a lot of your effort into the process of moving a statue rather than fighting," he told me. "Moving the moai was a little bit like playing a football game."

Trial by transport
After "The Statues That Walked" came out, Diamond sharply disputed the conclusions reached by Hunt and Lipo, declaring on climate expert Mark Lynas' blog that they were "considered transparently wrong by essentially all other archaeologists with active programs on Easter Island." Diamond addressed the debate in detail, including the idea that the statues could have been moved vertically.

"This seems an implausible recipe for disaster," Diamond wrote. "Imagine it yourself: If you were told to transport a 90-ton statue 33 feet high over a dirt road, why would you risk tipping and breaking it by transporting it vertically with all its weight concentrated on its small base, rather than avoiding the risk of tipping by laying it flat and distributing its weight over its entire length?"

Lipo and Hunt had their own counter-rebuttal published on Lynas' blog as well, and the debate over the historical record depends on sophisticated interpretation of radiocarbon dating tests, pollen analysis and tooth marks on palm nut shells. But the part about the horizontal vs. vertical transport? That could easily be tested.

UCLA's Jo Anne Van Tilburg had previously shown that the horizontal method was workable, as long as you had lots of laborers and logs. Lipo and Hunt set up their own experiment: They built a 5-ton moai replica, with the weight distributed as it was in a real statue. Then they tied ropes around it, raised it up using a crane, and got ready to let it stand free.

They could immediately see that the statue would fall forward if the crane relaxed the tension on the line. Hunt said he and Lipo were just about to walk away in disgust when the crane operator slipped a 2-by-4 under the front edge of the statue and had it standing. "As soon as we saw this, Carl and I said, 'Of course! This makes perfect sense!"

National Geographic

National Geographic's iPad presentation on the Easter Island statues, part of the July 2012 issue, shows how the vertical-walking method might have been employed centuries ago.

The researchers found that the statue's fat belly produced a forward-falling center of gravity that facilitated vertical transport. A crew of as few as 18 people could use ropes to rock the statue back and forth, and forward. (In comparison, Van Tilburg's team used 60 pullers.) The vertical-transport trick worked with four rope-pullers on each side, plus 10 people to pull on the statue from behind, as if they were holding back a dog that was straining forward on a walk.

"It's really unnerving and beautiful, all at the same time," Hunt said.

Of course, a 90-ton statue is bigger than a 5-ton statue, but Hunt found that the technique was scalable. "With the physics of the taller statue, you have greater leverage," he told me. "It almost gets to the point where you would have to do it that way."

'We're not failures'
The statue-walking experiment alone doesn't prove that the entire scenario put forward by Hunt and Lipo is true, but it's consistent with the claims in the islanders' oral tradition that the statues "walked" down the road in ancient times. It also provides an alternate explanation for the ruined statues that littered the roads: When you lose control of the ropes, that's what happens, and you don't have any good way to move the broken pieces.

So did the statues rock, or roll? The debate over the two scenarios surrounding Easter Island's past could well continue for generations. But it's clear which scenario is preferred by the islanders themselves.

"The young people ... they're celebrating. I don't think there's any other word for it," Hunt said. "One came up to me and said, 'It's so important for my generation to know we're not failures.' That brought tears to my eyes."

More about Polynesia:

• Yes, the Easter Island heads really do have bodies
• Rat DNA helps trace Pacific migrations
• Ancient fashion explains snail mystery

Hunt and Lipo are scheduled to discuss "The Statues That Walked" at the National Geographic Society's headquarters complex in Washington on Thursday. The presentation is sold out.

"The Mystery of Easter Island," a Nova-National Geographic special focusing on the research conducted by Hunt and Lipo, is scheduled to air on PBS on Nov. 7.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

P. Carril / ESA

Asteroids zip past Earth in this artist's conception.

The nonprofit B612 Foundation says it's planning the first privately funded deep-space mission, with the goal of launching an instrument known as the Sentinel Space Telescope to look for potentially hazardous asteroids from a vantage point inside Earth's orbit around the sun.

The foundation, headed by former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, tipped its hand today in an advisory alerting journalists about a press conference to be conducted at 8:30 a.m. PT June 28 at the California Academy of Science' Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco.

"We will create the first comprehensive dynamic map of our inner solar system showing the current and future locations and trajectories of Earth-crossing asteroids, paving the way to protect the Earth from future impacts and opening up the solar system to future exploration," the advisory read.

Scheduled speakers include Lu as well as the foundation's chairman emeritus, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart; project architect Scott Hubbard, a Stanford professor who once served as NASA's Mars czar; and mission director Harold Reitsema, former director of space science missions at Ball Aerospace.

A spokeswoman for the B612 Foundation, Diane Murphy, told me that the advisory was the only information being made public in advance of the press conference. That means it could be more than a week before we get formal word about the projected cost of the mission, its financial backers, projected launch date or other key details. However, the concept for the Sentinel Space Telescope has been percolating among asteroid-watchers and activists for years — providing an advance glimpse at what the project would entail.

Facing the threat
The B612 Foundation was established almost a decade ago to call attention to the potentially catastrophic threats posed by near-Earth objects. For example, an asteroid strike is thought to have led to the dinosaurs' demise 65 million years ago, and as recently as 1908, a much smaller cosmic impact wiped out half a million acres of Siberian forest.

A comprehensive catalog of potentially threatening asteroids could provide more advance warning of potential threats, giving humanity more time to do something about them. 

NASA has made good progress in cataloging most of the large asteroids that could pose a world-ending threat, thanks to ground-based observations as well as space missions such as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Last year, the WISE mission's science team estimated that more than 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids wider than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) had been found. However, scientists figure that so far they've been able to track less than a third of the near-Earth asteroids between 100 meters and a kilometer in width. Such asteroids could destroy a city or cause a "cosmic Katrina" if they hit just the wrong place.

Two Earth-crossing asteroids, 2005 YU55 and 2012 LZ1, sparked headlines in the past year when they made close encounters, and an other asteroids are due to come even closer in the years ahead. The most worrisome space rocks are those that spend much of their time interior to Earth's orbit, where they can get lost in the sun's glare. For that reason, the Sentinel mission's planners want to put their telescope in a place where it can look out toward Earth, with the sun behind it.

B612's action plan
A letter posted to Google+ in January, and attributed to Lu, lays out what appears to be a game plan for turning the Sentinel mission into a reality:

"We now have a detailed plan to build an infrared telescope spacecraft that will within 5.5 years of operation catalog and track the vast majority of threatening asteroids.  We have a fixed price bid from a spacecraft contractor, and are finalizing an agreement with NASA to provide communications and tracking services. The planned launch date is in 2016, with a flyby of Venus to enter the final observing orbit around the sun from where it can continuously monitor Earth’s orbit."

The letter said such a mission would cost several hundred million dollars, a cost that is "comparable to a multistory building or other municipal civic project."

It said the foundation's goals for 2012 were to add to B612's fundraising team, fill some technical positions, continue with analysis of the mission design "leading to a signed contract with our spacecraft manufacturer," and secure an anchor donor. Funding the work planned for the year would require raising $4 million, the letter said.

"By this time next year we should be able to begin actual construction of the Sentinel spacecraft," the letter said.

Since that letter was written, a different venture known as Planetary Resources announced that it had gained financial backing from a bevy of billionaires for efforts to build and deploy asteroid-watching telescopes in Earth orbit — with the ultimate goal of going out to the most promising asteroids and mining them for water and precious metals. Is there some synergy at work here? What exactly will be announced next week? For now, your guess is as good as mine, so feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about asteroids:

• How to handle asteroid threats
• Asteroid debate rises to next level
• Asteroid likely to spare Earth in 2040
• Reality check for asteroid miners
• Cosmic Log archive on asteroids

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Brad Goldpaint

Photographer Brad Goldpaint captured this view of the northern lights over Crater Lake, Ore., early Sunday.

A double-burst of solar particles sparked auroral lights over the weekend, as expected — but at least in some parts of the world, the colors were not what you'd expect. Instead of the typical greenish glow, observers reported seeing reds, pinks, violets and even blues.

"It's been many years since I saw the blue in our auroras, but Saturday night they came back," John Welling reported in a note accompanying the photo he posted to SpaceWeather.com.

Pinks, reds and blues also dominated the scene captured on camera early Sunday by Brad Goldpaint, from a vantage point above Oregon's Crater Lake. In an email, Goldpaint told me the opportunity came about "by pure coincidence."

"Capturing this famous light show had been a dream of mine for several years, but I could not have imagined the lights showing up in my own backyard!" Goldpaint wrote. "After setting up near the Rim Village Visitor Center lookout area, I began to notice a faint band of moving light slowly making its way from behind the Watchman Tower, around 1:30 a.m. My camera began picking up bright pink bursts of light towards the north, with what also looked like unfamiliar vertical bands of light stretching upwards from the horizon. I quickly changed my camera’s white balance to confirm I was not picking up some random light pollution, or hallucinating in my drowsy state. Following additional exposures, I came up with the same amazing results. The magical shifting scene continued until sunrise, and like most days in the wilderness, I was awed and humbled by true nature personified."

The photo now graces Brad's portfolio at GoldpaintPhotography.com.

The colors of the aurora depend on the wavelength of the light emitted when fast-moving, electrically charged particles from the sun interact with different types of atoms and ions in Earth's upper atmosphere. If the particles hit mostly oxygen atoms, the light will be in the greenish-yellowish-reddish range. Collisions with nitrogen atoms produce the blue, purple and deep red hues.

The altitude of the auroral glow also affects the color: At altitudes between 60 and 120 miles (100 and 200 kilometers), the oxygen emissions tend toward the green side of the spectrum. At higher altitudes, you'll see more red. Blend all those colors, and you get a beautiful, wide-ranging palette.

The "Causes of Color" website provides a fuller spectrum of information. And speaking of a fuller spectrum, here are more of the weekend's colors, plus a bonus video:

Randy Halverson

Pink and purple rays highlight this picture of the aurora as seen from South Dakota's Black Hills by Randy Halverson. Technical details: Canon 5D Mark III, Canon 24-70, f/2.8 ISO 3200, 20-second exposure. For more of Halverson's images, click on over to Dakotalapse.com.

Stephen Voss

Stephen Voss snapped pictures of the southern lights from a spot near Invercargill in the south of New Zealand. "A dull arc hung around for a couple of hours before suddenly exploding with a mixture of rays and curtains," Voss told SpaceWeather.com. Check out Voss' gallery at Deep South Astrophotography.

Scott Lowther

Scott Lowther snapped this panoramic picture of Saturday night's auroral display as seen from Tremonton, Utah. The shot was taken with a Nikon D5000 and a 55mm lens at f/1.4 with 6-second exposures. For more of Lowther's photos, check out the Art by Earthlings website.

Shawn Malone / LakeSuperiorPhoto.com

Shawn Malone snapped this picture before dawn on Sunday morning from Marquette, Mich. "Got to witness the tail end of aurora activity as the skies cleared about 15-20 minutes before the sunrise light moved in," Malone told SpaceWeather.com. "Photos taken between 3:50 a.m. and 4:15 a.m. Bright aurora, with rays of light overhead, almost forming a corona. Beautiful purples came through on the exposures, but only light visible to the eye, as is typical with auroras right before sunrise." Check out LakeSuperiorPhoto.com for more of Malone's work.

More auroral glories:

• Northern lights blaze again on video
• Farewell to the northern lights
• Northern lights make for must-see TV
• Southern exposure for auroral lights
• Slideshow: The best of the northern lights
• Cosmic Log's auroral archive

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

U.S. Attorney's Office

This photo, attached as an exhibit to the complaint filed by federal attorneys, shows the tyrannosaur skeleton that has stirred up an international legal dispute.

Federal attorneys today filed a civil lawsuit that seeks to wrest a tyrannosaur skeleton valued at more than $1 million away from its sellers and return it to the Mongolian government.

The skeleton was sold at a New York auction last month for $1.05 million to an unidentified buyer, even though a federal district judge in Texas issued a restraining order to hold up the sale. The auction house behind the offering, Texas-based Heritage Auctions, made the sale contingent on the outcome of Mongolia's court challenge — and since then, the skeleton has been held in legal limbo.

Earlier this month, a panel of paleontologists declared that the skeleton represented a Tyrannosaurus bataar, also known as a Tarbosaurus bataar, which was probably smuggled out of Mongolia sometime in the past 15 years or so. Today's complaint, filed by the U.S. attorney for Manhattan in New York federal district court, follows up on that determination and lays out the authorities' version of a tangled tyrannosaur tale.

"The skeletal remains of this dinosaur are of tremendous cultural and historical significance to the people of Mongolia, and provide a connection to the country's prehistoric past," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement. "When the skeleton was allegedly looted, a piece of the country's natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place."

Mongolia has had laws on the books forbidding the export of dinosaur fossils since 1924. The complaint says the nearly complete skeleton was brought into the United States illegally, and thus should be forfeited by the sellers and returned to Mongolia.

James Hayes, a special agent-in-charge for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations, said the complaint alleges that "criminal smugglers misrepresented this fossil to customs officials."

When the skeleton was imported into the United States from Britain in 2010, the country of origin was listed as Britain — even though, according to the paleontologists, nearly complete tyrannosaur skeletons of this type have been found only in Mongolia. The experts cited a dozen features of the bones, as well as their light color and even the dirt stuck in the cracks in the fossils, as characteristic of Tyrannosaurus bataar rather than the larger T. rex or other members of the tyrannosaur tribe.

Federal attorneys said that the importers set the skeleton's value at $15,000, but that a value of $950,000 to $1.5 million was listed in this year's auction catalog. They also said the 8-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall), 24-foot-long (7.3-meter-long) skeleton was incorrectly listed on customs forms as consisting of assorted fossilized reptiles and skulls.

The complaint names Florida Fossils as the ultimate consignee for the imported goods, and notes that the company was owned at the time of importation by Eric Prokopi. The skeleton was shipped from Florida to Texas, and then on to New York in preparation for the May 20 sale. Soon after word spread that a million-dollar tyrannosaur was coming up for auction, representatives of the Mongolian government became interested and sought unsuccessfully to stop the sale.

The dinosaur skeleton is currently in the custody of Cadogan Tate Fine Art in Sunnyside, N.Y. In the weeks since the controversial sale took place, the auction house has let paleontologists and representatives of the Mongolian government examine the fossil.

"I thank and applaud the United States Attorney's office in this action to recover the Tyrannosaurus bataar, an important piece of the cultural heritage of the Mongolian people," Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj was quoted as saying in the U.S. government's news release about the case. "Cultural looting and profiteering cannot be tolerated anywhere, and this cooperation between our governments is a large step forward to stopping it."

My efforts to contact Prokopi today were unsuccessful, but representatives of Heritage Auctions issued this statement from the company's co-chairman, Jim Halperin:

"We auctioned the Tyrannosaurus bataar conditionally, subject to future court rulings, so this matter is now in the hands of lawyers and politicians. We believe our consignor purchased fossils in good faith, then spent a year of his life and considerable expense identifying, restoring, mounting and preparing what had previously been a much less valuable matrix of unassembled, underlying bones. We sincerely hope there will be a just and fair outcome for all parties."

More about the tyrannosaur:

• May 18: Auction stirs up a tussle over tyrannosaur
• May 21: Despite challenge, fossil sells for $1 million
• May 24: Auctioned dino skeleton believed to be smuggled
• June 8: Experts say tyrannosaur is definitely from Mongolia

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

SNC via NASA

Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser space plane prototype is lifted into the air by a helicopter for a captive-carry flight test in May. The Dream Chaser is one of several proposed spacecraft that could be cleared for liftoff by the FAA and NASA in the coming years.

NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration have worked out their division of labor for clearing a new generation of private-sector spaceships for liftoff — putting the aviation agency in charge of any crew-carrying spacecraft that launches and lands, but requiring the space agency's additional signoff on any missions it's paying for.

The arrangement was set out under the terms of a memo signed this month. It's in line with Congress' mandate that the FAA regulate spacecraft to protect public safety, while letting spaceship companies fly private passengers at their own risk.

"As it stands today, our regulatory authority is associated with the launch and re-entry itself," acting FAA Administrator Michael Huerta explained today during a media teleconference. "We don't have any charter or authority to do anything beyond that, at least until 2015."

That's when the "fly at your own risk" mandate runs out, and it's also just about the earliest time that any of the companies developing crew-carrying spaceships will be ready to fly passengers.

NASA has been paying four companies — Blue Origin, the Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX — more than $400 million to develop spaceships for flying U.S. astronauts. Today, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said NASA expected to announce which companies will be involved in the next phase of the commercial crew program by mid-July. Under the terms of a compromise worked out with congressional leaders, the program will give its full support to two spaceship teams, and roughly half that level of support to a third team.

The companies involved in the program have generally said they'd be ready to fly their craft as early as 2015, assuming that they receive adequate support from NASA. Bolden, however, is focusing on 2017 for the resumption of U.S.-based crew launches to the International Space Station.

The White House requested $830 million to support the program in the next fiscal year, but during its budget deliberations, Congress has been setting aside no more than $525 million. "We will ask for a significant increase in 2014 and the other years if we are to hold to the 2017 first-flight date for commercial crew to the International Space Station," Bolden told reporters.

The FAA-NASA arrangement for crew-carrying vehicles builds upon the existing arrangement for cargo vehicles, exemplified by last month's successful test of SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule. In that case, SpaceX received a license from the FAA for launch and re-entry, and clearance from NASA and its space station partners for operations at the orbital outpost.

Going forward, the FAA will have to license all U.S. spacecraft that carry passengers, orbital as well as suborbital. As part of the regulatory process, the FAA would focus on such issues as the placement of the launch site, airspace clearance, the availability of the appropriate safety equipment, emergency plans and indemnification, Huerta said. For non-NASA flights, would-be passengers would merely have to sign an informed-consent form acknowledging that they knew the risks of spaceflight. But if NASA is involved, the space agency would be responsible for crew safety and mission assurance.

"Anytime we're paying for the service from a provider, NASA standards will apply," Bolden explained. "You have to understand, if this works out the way that we envision, humans will be going to space strictly for commercial purposes, whether it's tourism, or going to an orbiting laboratory. ... Every flight from here on out, because it involves humans, may not be a NASA flight."

Theoretically, NASA would not have any formal say over the flight of a Boeing CST-100 space capsule that's launched on an Atlas 5, heading for a Bigelow Aerospace orbital module. But because NASA is expected to be the biggest customer by far for orbital spaceflight services, the space agency would probably play a key role in the development of any private-sector orbital spacecraft developed in the U.S., even if that craft ended up occasionally going someplace other than the International Space Station. Pragmatically speaking, it's likely that NASA would be to spaceflight standards what California is to auto emission standards, or Texas is to school textbook standards.

In any case, the formal lines of regulatory authority are now set for the coming age of commercial spaceflight. 

"This important agreement between the FAA and NASA will advance our shared goals in commercial space travel," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in an FAA-NASA news release. "Working together, we will assure clear, consistent standards for the industry." 

Update for 9:40 p.m. ET: I asked NASA spokesman Joshua Buck how NASA and the FAA would work together if NASA-funded researchers wanted to take suborbital rather than orbital flights with their experiments. Here's the emailed response:

"NASA follows all due diligence through its own, established safety processes to assure that payloads are safe to fly before manifesting them on a commercial vehicle. We review all safety and licensing data (where appropriate) of the commercial provider before we agree they are a safe ride provider. It is the responsibility of the commercial provider to obtain the requisite license and permits from the FAA."

More about commercial space:

• FAA grants experimental permit to Virgin Galactic
• Dream Chaser space plane passes key design test
• SpaceX's Dragon splashes down, ending historic mission
• Boeing aims for private space taxi flight by 2016
• Blue-sky ambitions at Blue Origin
• Next steps in a new space race
• Cosmic Log archive on commercial space

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

British physicist Stephen Hawking jokes about the future discoveries that could earn him a Nobel Prize.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has lived longer and achieved more than most quadriplegics have, but he's not done yet: The 70-year-old theoretician is still waiting for experimental evidence to launch him toward a Nobel Prize.

Hawking used his Nobel aspirations as a punch line more than once during his Saturday-night talk at Seattle's Paramount Theater, during a Seattle Science Festival symposium that also featured systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and paleontologist Jack Horner. The "Luminaries Series" presentation also featured evolutionary rap and modern dance, but Hawking was clearly the headliner.

Part of Hawking's appeal is that he just keeps going, and going, and going, despite his disability. He's lived for decades with a progressively paralyzing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. His entourage includes a nurse practitioner and an aide who looks after the high-tech system that translates his cheek twitches into speech. (He and his team have been testing a more advanced system that can turn brain-wave patterns into words.)

All this work to overcome adversity wouldn't have taken Hawking so far, however, if it weren't for his crazy smarts and his sharp wit. Both were in evidence during Saturday's talk, titled "Brane New World." Hawking laid out his perspective on what he thinks could be the ultimate theory of the universe, known as M-theory.

"We have been searching for the Theory of Everything for the past 30 years, and now we think that we have found a candidate," he said.

M-theory is a "mother" theory that fuses together several strains of string theory, and allows for dimensions of space beyond the three we're familiar with. For a long time, Hawking was reluctant to accept the idea of unseen extra dimensions, but on Saturday he said everything else about M-theory made so much sense that he couldn't resist.

Ted S. Warren / AP

Stephen Hawking composes his conversations with face movements, aided by a sophisticated sensor and computer system hooked up to his wheelchair.

"I feel to ignore it would be like claiming that God put fossils in the rocks to trick Darwin into believing in evolution," Hawking said.

The big question is, why haven't we detected those darn dimensions? M-theory's proponents suggest that some forms of energy, such as light, are confined to our three-dimensional space (known as a "brane," as in membrane). Gravity, however, just might leak out of our brane — and that effect could be theoretically be detected.

The key word is "theoretically." Picking up evidence of the extradimensional effect would require high-resolution measurements of high-energy phenomena, such as the clash of binary pulsars in outer space or the smash of subatomic particles at velocities near the speed of light. No such evidence has yet come to light, despite the best efforts of gravitational-wave observatories in the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border.

If astronomers were ever able to observe the behavior of black holes, that could point to the effect of extra dimensions, Hawking said. One of the biggest achievements of his career was to lay out the theory for how black holes can eventually fizzle out, due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation. If black holes emitted part of their energy into extra dimensions, in a form Hawking called "dark radiation," that could explain why astronomers have not yet seen the expected gamma-ray burst from a dying black hole. The alternative would be that low-mass black holes are so rare that virtually none of them have gotten small enough to die out.

"That would be a pity," he said, "because if a low-mass black hole were discovered, I would get a Nobel Prize." At that point, a giant image of the Nobel Prize medallion flashed above the stage.

It might also be possible to detect the leakage of energy into extra dimensions by creating microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, Hawking said. That phenomenon hasn't yet been observed at the LHC. Before the collider started up, there was a huge flap (and a federal court case) over fears that such micro-black holes, if created, might gobble up the planet. But Hawking said that would never happen.

"Instead, the black hole would disappear in a puff of Hawking radiation — and I would get a Nobel Prize," he said.

Before his talk, Hawking answered a few questions that were submitted by journalists (including yours truly) in advance. The topics covered some of the physicist's favorite topics, including time travel and the potential threat of an alien invasion. He also referred to his family life, which was a big part of his agenda in Seattle. One of his three children lives in the area, and over the past few days, Hawking and his family took in the King Tut exhibit at the Pacific Science Center, a boat cruise on Elliott Bay and a circus-dinner performance at Teatro Zinzanni. It all made for a great Father's Day visit to the Emerald City.

Here's the Q&A from the pre-talk press conference:

Q: What would it take to make time travel a reality, and how would that affect our present reality?

A: "We are all traveling forward in time anyway. We can fast-forward by going off in a rocket at high speed, and returning to find everyone on Earth much older or dead. Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that we could travel back in time. However, it is likely that the warping would trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship, and maybe the space-time itself.

"I have experimental evidence that [backward] time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time travelers, but I didn't send out the invitation until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came."

Ted S. Warren / AP

Physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking, right, answers questions from reporters as people waiting for his public appearance look on at left at Seattle's Paramount Theater on Saturday. Hawking was taking part in a Seattle Science Festival symposium focusing on the topic of evolution. Science editor Alan Boyle ... or at least the back of his balding pate ... can be seen in the foreground.

Q: If M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe, what’s the best evidence that you think will be found to support the theory? Lacking that evidence, isn’t M-theory merely another kind of religion?

A: "M-theory is the only theory that seems to have all the properties that we would expect of a complete and consistent theory of everything, but that may just reflect our lack of imagination. If M-theory is correct, it predicts that every particle should have a superpartner. So far we have not observed any superpartners, but the hope is that they will be found at the LHC. If they are discovered, that will be strong evidence for M-theory. On the other hand, if they are shown not to exist, that will be exciting, because then we'll learn something new."

Q: How would you describe your quality of life? What do you miss most from before the onset of ALS?

A: "Although I'm severely disabled and on a ventilator, my quality of life is pretty good. I have been very successful in my scientific work, and have become one of the best-known scientists in the world. I have three children, and three grandchildren so far. I travel widely, have been to Antarctica and have met the presidents of Korea, China, India, Ireland, Chile and the United States. I have been down in a submarine, and up in a zero-gravity flight in preparation for the flight into space that I'm hoping to make on Virgin Galactic. 

"Despite my disability, I have managed to do most things I want. My main regret is that it has prevented me from playing with my children and grandchildren as fully as I want." 

Q: John Gribbin recently argued that we are almost certainly the only intelligent life in the Milky Way –  do you think he’s right or wrong, and why? Also, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak argues that even if there are other intelligent civilizations out there, it’s too late for us to keep quiet about our existence, because it’s possible to pick up the signals we’ve sent out over the past 70 years. So isn’t it too late for us to keep quiet, and shouldn’t we be thinking about upgrading our defenses against the alien hordes?

A: "We think that life developed spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere such as the Earth. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life. If it is very low, we may well be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. Another frightening possibility is, intelligent life is fairly common, but that it destroys itself when it reaches the stage of advanced technology.

"Evidence that intelligent life is rare or short-lived is that we don't seem to have been visited by extraterrestrials.I am discounting claims that UFOs contain aliens. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? Nor do I believe that there is some government conspiracy to conceal the evidence, and keep for themselves the advanced technologies the aliens have. If that were the case, they aren't making much use of it. Further evidence that there isn't any intelligent life within a few hundred light-years comes from the fact that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, hasn't picked up their television quiz shows. 

"It is true that we advertise our presence by our broadcasts. But given that we haven't been visited for 4 billion years, it is unlikely that aliens will come anytime soon." 

Updates on the 'Chicken-saurus'
Hawking may have been the headliner, but he wasn't the only luminary at Saturday's "Luminaries Series" symposium on the theme of evolution. Jack Horner, who's based in Bozeman at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and has served as an adviser for the "Jurassic Park" movies and the "Terra Nova" TV series, brought the sellout crowd at the Paramount up to date on his quest to create a "Chicken-saurus."

"We're basically going to turn a chicken into a dinosaur," Horner said.

The idea is that the genetic code in chicken cells may still carry the instructions for producing traits that are associated with the dinosaurs from which they descended. "Birds are dinosaurs, so we don't have to 'make' a dinosaur — we already have them," Horner said. He and his colleagues are looking for ways to express those long-buried traits, known as atavisms. Even humans can express atavisms. For example, there have been cases of children born with tails.

"You don't have to do any magic," Horner told me. "You just have to find the atavisms in the genes."

Some researchers have already found the genes to produce chicken teeth, and Horner and his colleagues are methodically checking chicken embryos for avenues that could be used to create birds with long, dino-like tails or three-fingered claws like the ones sported by the velociraptors in "Jurassic Park." Horner told me that one of his students compared the effort to the Apollo moonshots.

"It's more than possible," Horner said. "It's just going to take a lot of money."

The future of medicine
In his talk, biologist Leroy Hood outlined his vision of the medical frontier. As the founder of Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, Hood champions an approach to health care he calls P4 — predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine. He said P4 medicine will arise from the convergence of revolutions in genetic analysis and data processing.

"Ten years in the future, each and every one of you will have your complete genome sequenced," Hood said. If quintillions of bytes' worth of genomic data can be used to nail down the linkages to disease factors as well as the factors that lead to wellness, it should be possible to get health care that's better as well as cheaper.

But getting the payoff from that promise depends on making the genomic data available to researchers, most likely on an anonymized basis, as well as developing the computational firepower to make sense out of a massive cloud of that data. "None of the IT companies have looked at this seriously," Hood said.

To get the ball rolling, Hood said he and his colleagues are talking with four small countries to implement P4 health-care programs in the next two or three years. Although Hood didn't name the countries, his institute already has a partnership with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to work on P4 initiatives.

"I have thought about going to small countries because I think the health-care system in the U.S. is too fragmented and disjointed to have any coordinated kind of change, but if you see that another country has done it very well, then that will be quite convincing," he said.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Montana State Univ. / NASA

CubeSats like the one shown in this artist's conception, measuring 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side, are coming within reach of student experimenters and DIY enthusiasts.

Wanna do some space science? You no longer have to be a professional researcher, or even a grown-up, to get your experiment into orbit. A new program called DreamUp is offering slots on the International Space Station's experimental racks to school groups for as little as $15,500 a pop, and you can use credit-card reward points to help cover the cost.

"We are committed to lowering the barriers for entry to space research," Jeffrey Manber, managing director of NanoRacks, said in a news release announcing the program. "This is a double win. This first-of-its-kind student experiment donation platform will help create a world-class experience for students."

NanoRacks, which has already helped put iPhones and the makings for Scotch whisky into space, is partnering up with the Conrad Foundation on the DreamUp program.

"Some experiments can't be done on Earth because we can't 'turn off' gravity," said Nancy Conrad, the foundation's chairman and the widow of Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad. "DreamUp, powered by our partner NanoRacks, is the ultimate 'plug and play,' helping our next great innovators participate in a scientific research opportunity like no other."

Organizers say American Express Membership Rewards points can be put toward the cost of an experiment, at the rate of $10 for every 1,000 points redeemed. The DreamUp program is open to junior-high students, high-schoolers and college undergraduates from accredited U.S. schools.

Teacher, I shrunk the experiment
The concept follows up on a series of student experiments that have already flown up to the station on NanoRacks' platforms. One of the key players in the project will be Werner Vavken, director of Valley Christian Schools' Applied Math, Science and Engineering Institute in San Jose, Calif. Vavken and his students have built experiments for the space station and taught several other schools to do likewise.

The first lesson that Vavken shares with other schools is that doing space science isn't as hard as it sounds. "I explain this to them, and they think I'm from outer space," he told me. "But they really can do it. The sky is no longer the limit."

Werner Vavken / Valley Christian Schools

Valley Christian High School's principal, Mark Lodewyk (back row with tie), Vice Principal Jennifer Griffin and projector mentor George Sousa (in the blue shirt) witness the packing of one of two NanoLabs being readied for shipping to the International Space Station. The students are Brian Hu and Evan Borras.

NanoRacks / Kentucky Space / Valley Christian Schools

A NanoLab container holds a plant growth experiment as well as electronic gear.

The key trick is to shrink the experiment: Vavken said the experiments that he and his students build have to fit within a 2-by-2-by-4-inch space (5 by 5 by 10 centimeters). That sounds incredibly challenging, but it can be done. One of the schools he worked with wanted to design an experiment to mix concrete in microgravity — a task that some thought would cost millions of dollars. Suffice it to say that the eight-student team from Faith Christian Academy in Coalinga, Calif., found a cheaper way.

"They conjured up a way to mix concrete in space, in 16 cubic inches, and they didn't have a $4 million budget," Vavken said. The experiment is due to return to Earth next month aboard a Russian Soyuz craft, and the students will then analyze how zero-gravity concrete differs from the Earth-made equivalent on the molecular level.

Other high-school experiments have been aimed at monitoring plant growth, bacterial growth and food spoilage in microgravity.

"The opportunity for students to do small experiments on the ISS is a powerful motivator in science, technology, engineering and math," Julie Robinson, NASA's chief scientist for the International Space Station, said in this week's news release. "DreamUp will provide the opportunity for top students of all socio-economic levels to fly their experiments to the space station, and the NanoRacks system allows them to be completed without any impact to other research activities."

The revolution continues
NanoRacks' standardized research platforms, known as NanoLabs, are shipped up to the space station on cargo flights. NASA astronauts plug them into the station's power and communication system, and then just let them run for 30 days. The students get the opportunity to interact with the astronauts and check in with their experiment.

"It's really pretty revolutionary for teenagers to conjure this up, get it built and tested, and approved by NanoRacks," Vavken said.

Next year could be even more revolutionary. "We are teaching the kids how to design and launch a satellite from the International Space Station," Vavken said. The CubeSat device, measuring 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side, could be sent into orbit as early as next February from Japan's Kibo laboratory, he said.

Vavken acknowledged that the $15,500 cost was "a little pricey," but he said the project could be a game-changer for teens who are interested in math, science and engineering. He recalled the case of one high-schooler who was on the team for a space experiment he helped organize. "She graduated this past year ... and got a four-year, full-ride scholarship to MIT," he said. "Now, I think that's a good payback for a kid in an after-school program."

For more information about the DreamUp program, including a registration form, click on over to the Conrad Foundation website.

But wait ... there's more
Meanwhile, aerospace experts and their corporate partners have just set up a Kickstarter campaign for a citizen-space-science project called ArduSat. They're soliciting donations to cover the anticipated $35,000 cost of building a CubeSat that will contain more than two dozen sensors for orbital observations. "As soon as the funding goal is met, we can move ahead with applications for free launches through various NASA or ESA ride-along programs," the project leaders say.

Organizers of the campaign say that ArduSat will be the "first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on demand, and even broadcast personalized messages back to Earth." If the project gets off the ground, Kickstarter supporters will get the first turns at taking the controls, at a discounted price.

Discover Magazine has partnered with ArduSat to run the Discover Space Challenge, which is soliciting ideas for innovative experiments, games or applications to run on the nanosatellite. The winning team members will be awarded a Team Development Kit that could turn their idea into a reality.

Interested? For more information, check out Phil Plait's spiel on the Bad Astronomy blog, plus Evan Ackerman's report on the DVICE blog.

More about nanosatellites:

• Kinect-controlled satellites heading to space
• Beware, terrorists: Mini satellites can find you
• NASA backs a contest for nanosatellites
• CubeSats: Tiny spacecraft, huge payoffs

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JHUAPL / CIW

A June 3 image from NASA's Messenger probe shows a scene in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of Magritte Crater. Three overlapping craters form the head and ears of a "Mickey Mouse" shape.

We've had the Face on Mars, the Smiley Face on Mars, even the Elephant Face on Mars — and now we've got the Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury, courtesy of NASA's Messenger probe.

The mousy shape comes from three overlapping craters in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of a larger crater known as Magritte. The biggest crater in this scene, which serves as Mickey's head, measures about 65 miles (105 kilometers) across.

This picture was taken during Messenger's extended mission, with the aim of collecting imagery when the sun is near the horizon. Such conditions produce long shadows that highlight small-scale surface features. The result is that the Mercury mission's mapmakers get a better sense of the lay of the land.

Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury back in March 2011, and the end of its one-year primary mapping mission marked the beginning of a one-year extension. Which means we may be hearing more about Mickey, Magritte and their Mercurial friends for months or years to come.

Where in the Cosmos
The Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury was today's featured image for our "Where in the Cosmos" Facebook contest. It took just a couple of minutes for Leslie Kebschull and Brad Perdew to come up with the locale for the cartoonish craters. Their entries came in just three seconds apart. To reward their quick minds and fingers, I'm sending them a pair of 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

To get in on next week's contest, click the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page. And while you're at it, sign up for the Tech/Science email newsletter, which is sent out Monday through Friday. That's a great way to get your daily dose of Cosmic Log as well as other goodies from msnbc.com's Space and Science sections.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Rhett A. Butler / mongabay.com

New evidence challenges the idea that the Amazon Basin was densely inhabited before the arrival of Europeans.

The historical portrayal of the Amazon Basin's residents before 1492 has swung from the stereotype of backward savages to a vision of sophisticated stewards of the land — but a newly reported survey suggests that wide swaths of the Amazon's forests, particularly in the western and central regions, were relatively untouched by humans.

The findings could play into the debate over the Amazon's future as well as its past.

""You can't use an idea of past transformed landscapes to justify modern deforestation," Crystal McMichael, a paleoecologist who analyzed Amazonian soil as part of her research at the Florida Institute of Technology, told me. McMichael is the lead author of a study published in today's issue of the journal Science.

She and her colleagues collected 247 core samples of soil from 55 sites throughout the central and western Amazon, in Brazil and Peru, to check for signs of human disturbance. Their objective was to provide a reality check for what some researchers have called the "1491 hypothesis": the idea that areas of the Amazon Basin were intensely managed centuries ago, but reverted to a more natural state after the arrival of explorer Christopher Columbus and his European brethren, due to the decline of indigenous culture.

One of the foremost critics of that view is Dolores Piperno, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Piperno is a co-author of the Science paper.

"Drawing on questionable assumptions, some scholars argue that modern Amazonian biodiversity is more a result of widespread, intensive prehistoric human occupation of the forests than of natural evolutionary and ecological processes," she said in a Smithsonian news release. "Climatologists who accept the manufactured-landscapes idea may incorporate wholesale prehistoric Amazonian deforestation, widespread fires and carbon emissions into their models of what caused past shifts in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels. But we need much more evidence from Amazonia before anything like that can be assumed."

The evidence from the soil samples, including samples taken from sites with previously known human impacts, runs counter to those assumptions. Most of the samples showed little sign of charcoal, which would have been left behind by land-clearing fires. There were few signs of silica deposits known as phytoliths, which are indicators of ancient agriculture. The researchers did pick up the signature of "terra preta" — that is, earth enriched by human waste — but mostly around riverbanks rather than far into the forest.

Crystal McMichael

Researchers Crystal McMichael and Monica Zimmerman collect soil samples in the tropical rainforests of Peru.

"Together, the data suggest that human population densities in the sampled regions were low and highly localized, and were not consistent with major population centers with associated areas of widespread, extensive agriculture," the researchers wrote.

The findings came as no surprise to Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida. Heckenberger is perhaps best-known for his study of ancient urban communities in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon, east of the areas surveyed by McMichael and her colleagues. His work was discussed in "The Lost City of Z," a best-selling book by David Grann.

"I was delighted to see the paper, because it does act as a cautionary note," Heckenberger told me. 

Heckenberger said the research fits in with the view that the pre-Columbian Amazon Basin had wide areas of forest land that showed relatively little human alteration, as well as areas that supported substantial concentrations of human population.

"This clearly has moved the debate forward," he said. "I hope we don't digress back to [a debate over whether] the Amazon was the setting par excellence for primordial forests and primitive tribes vs. an area that was dominated by large, complex societies. It's neither one nor the other. ... There were patches of dense, complex societies, and then there were other areas that were, if not completely untouched, then something very like untouched forest."

Heckenberger said he was "still of the opinion that as time progresses, we're going to find more and more of the Amazon that did support large populations." But he praised the work published in Science and said he hoped to see more sampling of sites from broader stretches of the Amazon Basin.

"I'd love to grab that team and bring them to my research site, to use that to some degree as a control against what you might expect," he told me. "The flip side of that is to jump into the pickup truck with that team and look for archaeological signatures in the area that they've been studying."

McMichael thought that was a fine idea. "He's done some excellent work," she said of Heckenberger.

She speculated that pre-Columbian tribes preferred to live near rivers rather than in the forest interior "so they could connect with other communities" more easily. She also suspected that the eastern side of the Amazon Basin was settled more intensely than the western side because it was drier and more amenable to forest-clearing. However, even if large settlements existed in some parts of the Amazon before Columbus, that shouldn't be used as a defense for 21st-century deforestation, McMichael said.

"The amazing biodiversity of the Amazon is not a byproduct of past human disturbance," she said in a news release. "We also can't assume that these forests will be resilient to disturbance, because many have never been disturbed, or have only been lightly disturbed in the past. Certainly there is no parallel in western Amazonia for the scale of modern disturbance that accompanies industrial agriculture, road construction, and the synergies of those disturbances with climate change."

More about Amazonian culture:

• Pre-1492 Amazon farmers didn't use controlled burns
• How the Amazon's lost cities worked
• Another 'Stonehenge' discovered in Amazon
• Gallery: A tale of seven cities, lost and found

In addition to McMichael and Piperno, authors of "Sparse Pre-Columbian Human Habitation in Western Amazonia" include M.B. Bush, M.R. Silman, A.R. Zimmerman, M.F. Raczka and L.C. Lobato.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

AIA / LMSAL / NASA

A color-coded image from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory highlights the solar flare thrown off from the sun's disk today in shades of gold and yellow.

For the second day in a row, the sun has sent a blast of electrically charged particles toward Earth — and according to SpaceWeather.com, that means we're in for a double shot of geomagnetic activity early Saturday. But not to worry: The most noticeable effect of the twin M-class blasts should be heightened auroral displays.

Both of the coronal mass eruptions, or CMEs, originated in a sunspot region known as AR1504, which is currently pointing in Earth's direction. AR1504 has been shooting off a series of flares in recent days, including an M1.2-class flare on Wednesday and an M1.5 today. None of the flares have approached the X-class level, which would have the potential for significant disruptions in power grids or satellite-based communication.

SpaceWeather.com projects that the CMEs thrown off by those two flares will merge into one wave of particles that's due to hit Earth's magnetic field around 6:16 a.m. ET Saturday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center, meanwhile, predicts that the CME will arrive "late on 16 June." The prediction center noted that today's flare sparked a minor radio blackout and "has the potential" to produce more such storms.

Bottom line? Polar regions will have a better chance of seeing auroral lights over the weekend, although the midnight sun will put a damper on viewing in the north. If you catch a great auroral view, please consider sharing it with us via our FirstPerson upload page. In the meantime, keep a watch on SpaceWeather.com and the prediction center's Facebook page for updates — and feast your eyes on the imagery below:

NASA

NASA's STEREO-Ahead spacecraft records the massive coronal mass ejection thrown off by today's solar eruption. The glare of the sun's disk is blocked at the center of the image.

More sun imagery:

• Your views and videos of the Venus transit
• Thrill to a sunspot's parting shot
• Graphic: Anatomy of a solar storm
• Cosmic Log archive on the sun

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Rodrigo De Balbin Behrmann

A researcher from the University of Bristol removes samples from Tito Bustillo Cave in Spain. The stalactite is painted with a red figure that dates back 29,000 to 36,000 years.

When archaeologists tried out a new technique to determine the age of Spain's most famous Paleolithic cave paintings, they were surprised to discover that the paintings were thousands of years older than previously thought — so old that it's conceivable they were painted by Neanderthals.

The technique just might change the way we think about the paintings, and the way we think about our long-extinct, long-maligned Neanderthal cousins as well. 

"Neanderthals, of course, have had this bad press for a long time," the University of Barcelona's Joao Zilhao, a member of the research team, told reporters. "But the research developments over the last decade have shown that this is probably not deserved."

The findings being reported today represent just an initial step in an "ongoing program" to date hundreds of European cave paintings more accurately, said the University of Bristol's Alistair Pike, lead author of a paper published in the journal Science. It's still too early to say conclusively whether Neanderthals were behind at least some of the artistry. However, Pike and his colleagues are confident that the earliest paintings go back at least 40,800 years. That time frame matches up with the earliest evidence of the presence of anatomically modern humans in Europe. It's also thousands of years earlier than the previously accepted maximum age, based on carbon dating.

"We were not expecting these results," Zilhao said. "When we put this project together, the idea was to improve the chronology of rock art, and particularly in the case of Spain."

Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who wasn't part of the research team but has worked on some of the same cave paintings that were recently put to the test, was impressed by the results. "The basic findings are the sorts of things you could take to the bank," he told me. But he also acknowledged that the latest findings produce "three or four new problems that we didn't have before."

"Now, with these older dates, we have to entertain the possibility that there might have been some Neanderthal involvement in some of these paintings," Snow said. "We've never really seriously considered that before."

Pedro Saura

Hand stencils and the outlines of animals dominate "The Panel of Hands" in Spain's El Castillo cave. One of the stencils has been dated to earlier than 37,300 years ago, and a red disk goes back at least 40,800 years, making them the oldest cave paintings in Europe.

Rodrigo De Balbin Behrmann

Six-foot (2-meter) paintings of horses in Spain's Tito Bustillo Cave overlay earlier red paintings that, from dating elsewhere in the cave, might be older than 29,000 years.

How the tests were done
The tests were conducted on 50 Paleolithic paintings in 11 Spanish caves, including the famous pictures of horses and human hands at the Altamira and El Castillo caves. In the past, the paintings have been dated using radiocarbon tests, but Pike's team used a different technique that analyzed the proportions of uranium, thorium and related elements in the calcite deposits that formed above and below the paintings. Those proportions vary over time, due to radioactive decay, and can tell you how long it's been since the calcite was formed.

That's an interesting approach for several reasons: First, the scientists don't have to depend on getting a reading from the paint itself, which may be contaminated or may not even be amenable to carbon dating. Also, the calcite deposits are scraped away, using a knife or a drill, until the pigment just begins to appear beneath it. "That does two things," Pike explained. "It means we stop before we damage the painting, and secondly it proves to us and our audience that these things are directly above the art itself."

The scientists can thus be confident that the age they get will be the minimum age for the artwork. In some cases, the scientists could sample flowstone deposits beneath the layer of paint to get a maximum age as well.

The tests took advantage of the state of the art in mass spectrometry, which means the scientists didn't require much of a sample. The scrapings amounted to as little as 10 milligrams, which is about the weight of a grain of rice. "Perhaps 20 years ago, we would have needed a whole gram of material, and now we need one-hundredth of that size," Pike said.

That minimizes the impact on the caves, which is a sensitive topic for the officials in charge of the caves. "Getting permission to work in a cave is really difficult," Snow explained. "The bureaucratic and political difficulties of getting this work done are substantial."

Pike and his colleagues pioneered this process years ago, in a project aimed at verifying the dates for 12,800-year-old cave engravings in England's Creswell Crags, but the tests reported today represent the highest-profile application of what's known as uranium-series disequilibrium dating.

What the tests found
The uranium tests, like previous radiocarbon tests, showed that there was wide variation in the age of the paintings. The El Castillo paintings yielded a time frame stretching from 22,600 years ago all the way back to at least 40,800 years ago. That farthest-back age is particularly telling. Previously, archaeologists had thought the paintings went back to about 38,000 years. The new tests push the age back to near the time when modern humans were first thought to have inhabited the area, around 42,000 years ago.

Pike said that raises three scenarios: El Castillo's modern humans might have developed their cave-painting skills during their migration out of Africa, and put it to use when they arrived in Europe. After all, communities of Homo sapiens who lived in Africa and the Near East showed evidence of artistic behavior going back as far as 75,000 to 100,000 years. Another possibility is that humans started painting cave walls soon after their arrival in Europe — perhaps as the result of cultural competition with the native Neanderthals, who are known to have inhabited the region as far back as 250,000 years ago. Or the Neanderthals themselves could have created the first paintings, and Homo sapiens picked up the artistic habit while Homo neanderthalensis faded away.

Pedro Saura

The "Corredor de los Puntos" lies within Spain's El Castillo cave. Red disks here have been dated to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago, and elsewhere in the cave to 40,800 years ago, making them examples of Europe's earliest cave art.

Zilhao said the Neanderthal vs. Homo sapiens debate could shed light on the roots of our own culture. "Cave painting is of course one of the most exquisite examples of human symbolic behavior," he said. "And that's what makes us human."

Although cave art has not previously been linked to the Neanderthals, Zilhao pointed out that the past few years have provided ample evidence that the species had an artistic bent. In 2010, he led a research team and fellow researchers suggested that Neanderthal cave-dwellers wore ornaments and painted their bodies with mineral-based pigments. Other researchers have found a perforated bear bone that may or may not have been shaped as a flute for Neanderthals, as well as bird feathers that may have been used as Neanderthal ritual objects or fashion statements.

Pike et al. via Science

This hand stencil in Spain's El Castillo cave dates back at least 37,300 years, based on uranium-series testing, and could conceivably show a Neanderthal hand outline.

The researchers noted that the earliest paintings were not figurative works, but instead reflected simpler motifs such as dots, disks and lines. For example, the 40,800-year-old painting in the El Castillo cave was a large red disk, probably created by blowing pigment onto the rock surface. Nearby, there was the red outline of a hand, most likely made by placing the hand on the rock and blowing pigment over it. That stencil was found to be at least 37,300 years old.

"What's really exciting about the possibility that this is Neanderthal art is that anyone, because it's open to the public, can walk into El Castillo cave and they can see a Neanderthal hand on the wall," Pike said.

Just how possible is that?

"In probabilistic terms, I would say there is a strong chance that these results imply Neanderthal authorship," Zilhao said. "But I will not say we have proven it, because we haven't, and it cannot be proven at this time. It's just, you know, my gut feeling."

What lies ahead
Pike said further tests would show whether Zilhao's gut feeling was correct.

"I think it's a fairly straightforward thing to prove if they were painted by Neanderthals. ... All we have to do is go back and date more of these samples, and find a date that predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe," he told me.

The research team is currently concentrating on hand stencils and red disks, which appear to be the oldest types of cave paintings in Spain. If the minimum dates turn out to be significantly older than 42,000 years, that would be strong evidence that Neanderthals were involved, Pike said.

Snow said the big issue with uranium-series dating has to do with the accuracy of the process. "You've got to have measurement capabilities that are really, really precise," he said. "They can't tolerate anything like the kind of sloppiness and standard error that we had to tolerate in the past, using carbon dates."

He said it was a good sign that the research team ran multiple tests on succeeding layers of calcite and got back results that showed a consistent progression of dates. This suggests that uranium-series dating can go back to time frames where carbon dating becomes less reliable. "For the profession, part of the excitement is going to be that we've got some technologies that are going to be viable for sites in the 30,000- to 50,000-year range," Snow told me.

Zilhao said the research could eventually smash our stereotypical view of the Neanderthal tribe — which died out more than 20,000 years ago. Scientists suspect that the Neanderthals fell victim to competition with us Homo sapiens types, but they also have found that the species contributed to our genetic heritage through interbreeding.

"This evidence is, at least to my mind, sufficient for us to think about Neanderthals as fundamentally human beings that were simply, if you want, racially distinct. This is quite visible in aspects of their skeletons," Zilhao said. "What will change with the demonstration, if it comes, that Neanderthals were also the first cave artists? I guess [it would be] corroboration of the already-existing evidence, and perhaps if you want a catchphrase, the last nail in the coffin of the notion of Neanderthals as the archetypal 'dumb.'"

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET: University of Arizona geochemist Warren Beck got back to me with his outside perspective on the uranium-series test, and in a word, he thinks it's an "improvement" on previous methods when it comes to figuring out the age of rock art. It doesn't render radiocarbon dating totally obsolete: If you're trying to nail down the chronology of a charcoal drawing on a cave wall, carbon dating is what you want. But if you're trying to determine the age of a painting left behind in red ochre, or if you're working with paintings that go back further than, say, 40,000 to 45,000 years, "this is the way to do it," Beck told me.

Beck thought Pike and his team took "a very conservative approach here." Because the samples were taken from calcite deposits that formed over the paint in the Spanish caves, the team could be significantly underestimating the actual ages of the paintings themselves. "They could be substantially older," Beck said. That's one of the reasons behind Zilhao's gut feeling about Neanderthal involvement.

A few of today's reports about the research have included skeptical comments from Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "There is no clear evidence of paintings associated with Neanderthal tools or fossils, so any such evidence would be surprising," Delson told The Associated Press' Seth Borenstein. He said his view was that Neanderthals were moving away from these caves around 41,000 years ago.

Delson told Reuters' Sharon Begley that the oldest Homo sapiens in Europe "may date from 45,000 to 42,000 years ago. ... There is no need to hypothesize that Neanderthals created these paintings." Could further tests by Pike and his team change Delson's mind? "The evidence will become very straightforward if we have these dates of 45,000 years or so," Pike said. Which is another way of saying, "Stay tuned." 

More about ancient cave art:

• Prehistoric kids left marks in caves
• Ancient cave paintings in peril again
• Cave paintings of horses based on reality
• Oldest cave art focuses on female sex organs
• Gallery: Ancient rock art from around the world

In addition to Pike and Zilhao, the authors of "U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain" include D.L. Hoffmann, M. Garcia-Diez, P.B. Pettitt, J. Alcolea, R. De Balbin, C. Gonzalez-Sainz, C. de las Heras, J.A. Lasheras and R. Montes. The 11 caves that were sampled are Pedroses, Tito Bustillo, Las Aguas, Altamira, Santian, El Pendo, El Castillo, La Pasiega, Las Chimeneas, Covalanas and La Haza.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, makes remarks at the microphone while NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sizes up the company's Dragon capsule on Wednesday at the SpaceX rocket test facility in McGregor, Texas. Wednesday's gathering marked the handover of the Dragon's cargo to NASA after last month's historic commercial mission to the International Space Station.

In the wake of a history-making commercial space mission, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and SpaceX's billionaire founder, Elon Musk, met up in Texas today for a close-up look at the company's recently returned Dragon space capsule and the official handover of more than a half-ton of cargo that came back to Earth on the craft. Musk also got in a little Texas-style politicking on the side.

The SpaceX Dragon's trip to the International Space Station last month marked the first time a privately built craft made an orbital stopover. The Dragon is currently the only type of spaceship on the planet capable of bringing significant amounts of cargo back from the station — up to 3 tons' worth. This time around, it returned 1,367 pounds (621 kilograms) of non-critical cargo, including scientific experiments as well as equipment and spacewalk gear that was no longer needed.

The handover at SpaceX's rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, meant that the space agency and the 10-year-old company could check off the last major milestone on their list for the demonstration mission. And that, in turn, opens the way for SpaceX to start ferrying cargo to the station on a regular basis under the terms of a $1.6 billion contract with NASA. The first of 12 missions is tentatively planned for September.

Today's meeting gave Bolden and Musk an opportunity to thank the more than 150 SpaceX employees working at the McGregor facility — and get a good look at the Dragon. The Associated Press quoted Musk as saying the craft looked "almost untouched," while Bolden said the capsule was "beaten up" during re-entry.

"The Dragon capsule is a tangible example of the new era of exploration unfolding right now," Bolden was quoted as saying in a NASA report about the Texas meet-up. "Commercial space is becoming a reality as SpaceX looks ahead to future missions to the space station and other destinations. All of NASA's partners in the commercial crew and cargo programs continue to meet milestones designing the next generation of innovative U.S. spacecraft destined for low Earth orbit. In addition, NASA centers across the country are making exciting progress on the vehicles that will take astronauts to farther destinations like an asteroid and Mars. I congratulate Elon Musk and the SpaceX team again for this historic milestone."

Bill Ingalls / NASA

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, congratulates SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer Elon Musk in front of the Dragon capsule during Wednesday's meeting at the SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

Packages representing part of the 1,367 pounds of cargo that was carried from the International Space Station to Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft returned to Earth from the space station are seen in a clean room at the SpaceX rocket development facility in McGregor, Texas, on Wednesday. The cargo was transferred to NASA on Wednesday and will be brought to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for further processing.

Musk similarly expressed his thanks to the space agency and to SpaceX's employees — and also referred to the company's plans to build a new launch site in South Texas. SpaceX is using its current pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida primarily for NASA resupply missions. Another pad that's under construction at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California may eventually take on military launches. The third launch site, in contrast, would be devoted exclusively to commercial launches.

In the past, Musk has said that he was considering several locales around the country, but this morning he told the crowd in McGregor that "the south coast of Texas is the lead candidate for that third launch site."

"I'm actually flying to meet with the governor later today and a number of people on the Texas Legislature side to talk about that, as well as any potential questions in the future about flying astronauts, if we’re successful in winning future NASA business in that regard," Musk said.

SpaceX and three other companies — Blue Origin, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp. — are currently receiving millions of dollars from NASA to support the development of spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to the station. In SpaceX's case, that would involve building and testing a launch escape system for the Dragon craft. Musk has said that the first tests of such a thruster system could begin this year, and that astronauts could conceivably fly on the Dragon as early as 2015. NASA's projections, however, lean more toward the 2017 time frame.

During the next phase of the commercial crew development program, NASA has indicated that it will provide significant support for two spaceship teams, plus a smaller backup grant. This compromise plan, which I like to think of as a "Two and a Half Spacemen," was worked out with Rep. Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations subcommittee. In light of SpaceX's success so far, the company is virtually a shoo-in to win continued support.

This afternoon, Musk and Texas Gov. Rick Perry reviewed the status of the South Texas spaceport project, which is now in the midst of a federal environmental review. Texas state officials have said they'd consider all of their options for supporting the project, including economic incentives. The one-on-one went well, judging by Perry's Twitter update: "Great meeting with SpaceX's Elon Musk — a true space pioneer!"

In a statement, Perry spokeswoman Lucy Nashed said Texas would be "a natural fit" for SpaceX's future launch facility.

After the talks with the politicians, Musk is due to meet up again with Bolden on Thursday at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. They'll take a look at another scorched Dragon — the one that flew the first NASA demonstration mission in December 2010 — as well as the prototype Dragon being designed for crew flights. And they'll probably also face a cheering crowd of hundreds of SpaceX employees, similar to this one.

More about commercial space:

• SpaceX success opens door to US military flights
• Gallery: Ten players in commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on commercial space

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.