Jason Gibbs / Magnolia Press

Lasioglossum gotham, also known as the gotham bee, is one of 11 newly identified bee species.

One researcher has identified 11 new species of sweat bees, including a bug named in honor of Gotham City — but in a sense, these bees aren't new at all. They've probably been right under our noses all this time.

The new identifications were made by Cornell entomologist Jason Gibbs by checking dead-bee collections and conducting DNA tests. Species names and descriptions were published last month in the journal Zootaxa as part of a reshuffling of the family tree for 97 species of sweat bees. Gibbs said there may be thousands of bee species yet to be identified.

"This highlights the need for additional studies of our major pollinators," and not just honeybees, he told me.

One bee may look like another, but there can be subtle morphological and genetic differences that set them apart. If the bees are so dissimilar that they can't breed with each other, they're considered separate species. Mitochondrial DNA tests provide a reliable way to map out species relationships by revealing how long ago particular strains of creatures diverged. "These bees are morphologically and genetically distinct enough that you can say with confidence that they are their own species," Gibbs explained in a Cornell Chronicle interview.

Sweat bees are so named because they get some of their sustenance from licking the sweat off our skin. They nest in the ground or in tree cavities. Four of the species that Gibbs identified are "cuckoo bees," which have lost the ability to build their own nests and collect pollen. These species lay their eggs in the nests of other bees, which end up raising the invaders' progeny. That's the same sort of trick cuckoos pull in the bird world. (Gibbs named one of the cuckoo-bee species Lasioglossum izawsum, which is awesome.)

Four of the species were found in the New York City area, including a specimen that was collected at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2009. That species was named Lasioglossum gotham, which led The New York Times to declare that the Big Apple "has a bee to call its own." Sure, Gotham may be one of New York's nicknames, but if you want to think of L. gotham as the "Batman bee" instead, no one's going to stop you.

The species names for the nine other newly identified strains are arantium, ascheri, batya, curculum, furunculum, georgeickworti, katherineae, rozeni and trigeminum. Some of these labels echo the names of other bee researchers: Cornell's George Eickwort, for example, or John Ascher and Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History. It was Ascher who found L. gotham and passed it along to Gibbs for identification. The Times reported that L. katherineae was identified by analyzing a dead bee that had been sitting in a drawer at the museum since 1903.

The fact that the list of bee species is a little longer than it used to be doesn't mean that the widely publicized crisis besetting the bees is over. Honeybees have been hard-hit by a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, which experts suspect is caused by a combination of mites, parasites, viruses and pesticides. Bumblebees are having problems, too.

"This discovery doesn't counter the idea that bees are declining," Gibbs told me. "What it points out is that there are a lot of species we don't enough about to say whether they're at a stable level."

Identifying the wide variety of bee species just might be the first step toward identifying the factors that keep some populations healthy while others are put at risk. "Even though these bees were only recently described, we can go back to the collections by digitizing records, and start comparing modern abundances," Gibbs said.

More about the bees:

• Big mystery surrounds bees' tiny foe
• New bee viruses found attacking healty hives
• Bees feel the sting of huge population plunge
• Four bumblebee species declining in North America

Gibbs' research was supported by the Canadian Barcode of Life Network through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Genome Canada, and the National Science Foundation. Gibbs was a researcher at York University in Toronto for a time while working on the study, which explains the Canadian connection.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Alaskan Brewing Co.

Alaskan Brewing Co. received a nearly half-million dollar grant to install a steam boiler fired entirely by spent grain.

The U.S. government is giving a nearly half-million dollar grant to a beer maker in Alaska that aims to install a first-of-its-kind boiler that is fueled entirely by spent grain.

All brewers are confronted with mountains of spent grains — mostly barley. Many get rid of the waste by routing it to farmers for animal feed, a noble service that can help grow a steak to accompany your fine ale.

For the Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, this has involved an added step, since the closest market for its grains is a long-distance, boat-ride away in Seattle.

To keep the grains from decomposing during transport, the brewery first dries them in a machine that is heated by a biomass burner that uses about 50 percent of the spent grain as a fuel source.

Now, with the help of the $458,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy for America program, the brewery is installing a machine that will use the dried grain to power a biomass steam boiler.

"The new boiler will eliminate the brewery's use of oil in the grain drying process and displace more than half of the fuel needed to create process steam," the company said in an emailed statement.

Brewers use process team, for example, to boil the sugary water called wort, created when sugars are extracted from the grains, a key step in brewing beer.

The boiler will cut the brewery's overall energy use from oil, and corresponding carbon emissions, by more than 70 percent, according to Alaskan Brewing Co.

The system also eliminates the need to ship the grain south to cattle around Seattle, Ashley Johnston, a company spokeswoman, told me.

The grant is one of eight announced Thursday by the agriculture department, all of which are aimed at helping rural businesses to lower energy costs so that they can stay competitive and, potentially, hire more workers.

In total, 52 projects received over $31 million in grants and loan note guarantees through the program this year. The grants can finance up to 25 percent of a project's cost.

More on beer, energy and the environment:

• Beer brews up higher German beer prices
• The why of yeast's buzz-giving ways
• Yeast is a rising biofuel booster
• A cleaner environment … through beer
• Inventor turns brewery waste into natural gas
• Beer lovers told to beware of global warming
• Beer maker sees green from start to finish

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering

Kilobot is a low-cost, easy-to-use robotic system for advancing development of "swarms" of robots.

Swarms of robots modeled on the behavior of social insects such as ants are set to invade the research and education marketplace, the university engineers who designed the technology announced Thursday.

The deal between Harvard University and K-Team Corporation, a Swiss manufacturer of mobile robots, will allow educators and researchers to develop and test sophisticated algorithms that control thousands of robots in a physically-grounded setting.

The relatively simple algorithms currently developed in research labs are mostly validated by computer simulations and a few dozen robots at a time due to the limitations of time and cost, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard noted in a news release.

The quarter-wide robots, called Kilobots, stand on three toothpick–like legs and are powered by a lithium-ion battery. Vibration motors on either side allow left, right, and forward mobility. Transceivers on their undersides allow them to communicate and coordinate movements.

The video above, for example, shows small groups of robots programmed to leave their "nest," find "food" and return to the nest, mimicking the behavior of ants. Other experiments in the video show how the robots can follow a leader, disperse, and synchronize their movements.

The hope is that such robots will eventually be able dig through piles of rubble to look for earthquake survivors, remove contaminants from the environment, and even self-assemble to form support structures in a collapsed building.

More on biologically-inspired robots:

• One signal herds microbot swarms
• New biological robots build themselves
• Inchworm-like robot smallest ever
• Robotic insects take flight on wings made using printers
• Future robots will run like cockroaches

Blue Origin's prototype rocket ship rises from its pad for a "short hop" flight test in May. Click on the image for the videos from Blue Origin's website.

Blue Origin, the secretive rocket venture founded by Amazon.com billionaire Jeff Bezos, has unveiled a spruced-up website that includes videos of its successful "short hop" flight test back in May.

However, there's no new information about the crash of its PM-2 prototype in August, which came at the end of an ambitious supersonic tryout. Bezos acknowledged the crash a week after it happened in an online update, and said his team was already working on a new prototype. In Thursday's update, he made no mention of August's setback or the state of the development effort.

"We’ve received requests for video of the short hop test flight that took place earlier this year. Here are two videos of the flight," Bezos wrote. "Enjoy!"

Blue Origin

A diagram shows the configuration for a prototype New Shepard suborbital space vehicle.

The two videos show the PM-2 rising from the launch pad at Bezos' spaceport in West Texas, then easing back down to earth with engines blazing and dust flying. One video provides a fisheye view from near the launch pad, and the other video was taken with a handheld camera from a remote location.

Thursday's update is part of a redesigned website that lays out Blue Origin's spaceflight plans and highlights the venture's employment opportunities (including 14 "immediate openings" and a summer internship program).

Blue Origin

This diagram shows the design for Blue Origin's booster system, with an orbital space capsule sitting on top of the stack at left.

Blue Origin intends to field a suborbital space vehicle known as New Shepard, which could take on tourists as well as researchers and their experiments. It's also working on an orbital space capsule capable of taking astronauts to the International Space Station. For orbital missions, Blue Origin has said it intends to use expendable Atlas 5 rockets at first but will eventually switch to its own reusable first-stage booster and upper stage.

The upgraded website provides more details about the suborbital as well as the orbital effort, including diagrams of the space vehicles and the "Cabin Payload Bays" that will hold experiments.

"The technical challenges of escaping Earth’s gravity well and reaching orbit have never been trivial, and are compounded when higher reliability and lower cost are required," Blue Origin says. "We are working patiently, step by step, to reach these long-term goals."

Over the past couple of years, NASA has set aside $25.7 million to support work on Blue Origin's orbital vehicle. Three other companies — the Boeing Co., Sierra Nevada Corp. and SpaceX — are currently receiving higher levels of support for similar spaceship development efforts. All four companies say they can have their orbital spaceships ready for NASA's use by around the middle of the decade, assuming that they continue to receive development funding from the space agency.

More about private spaceflight:

• How tycoons will fuel spaceflight
• Private efforts will get astronauts aloft before NASA
• Boeing, NASA sign deal for use of shuttle hangar
• Gallery: 10 players in the commercial space race

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

Saturn's northern storm marches through the planet's atmosphere in the top right of this false-color mosaic from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"Over the past year, a great disquiet has swept across the face of Saturn..." It sounds like the beginning of a science-fiction movie, but it's actually the latest missive from Carolyn Porco, head of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn. Today, Porco and her colleagues presented a visual chronicle of the largest Saturnian storm in more than a decade.

The storm was first noticed almost a year ago, as a spot near the line between day and night on the northern hemisphere. Since then, it's grown into a wide, bright band stretching around the entire planet.

"With a 200-day interval of intense, hissing convection, it holds the record as the longest-lasting Saturn-encircling storm ever," Porco writes. "And it has become the largest by far ever observed on the planet by an interplanetary spacecraft, giving us an unparalleled opportunity to study in great depth the subtle changes on the planet that preceded the storm's formatin and the mechanisms involved in its development."

The imaging team has bumped up the colors on a few of the images, like the one shown above, but the true-color images taken over the course of the past year tell a story that's just as dramatic.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

Images from Cassini show the evolution of a giant Saturnian storm over the course of months.

It's been 14 years and a month since Cassini was launched, and for seven and a half years it's been observing Saturn and many of its 60-plus moons. That puts Cassini right up there with the Mars rovers among NASA's most successful interplanetary missions. "And with any luck, there'll be a great deal more to come," Porco writes.

More from Cassini:

• Rounding up Saturn's moons
• Saturnian moons merge into a quintet
• A double scoop of Saturn's moons
• It's a Saturnian moonapalooza!
• Happy holidays from Saturn's moons
• Slideshow: Cassini's greatest hits

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

AFP - Getty Images

The detectors of the OPERA experiment to measure neutrinos rise from the floor of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory. Two human figures on the left and right edges of the picture provide a sense of scale.

Researchers say new tests have confirmed earlier indications that neutrinos can travel faster than light, but not everyone is convinced.

The claim runs so counter to a century's worth of physics that most observers won't be content until the findings from the OPERA experiment are repeated under a variety of conditions, by different teams of researchers. If the results hold up, that would require a reinterpretation of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which effectively sets the velocity of light in a vacuum as a cosmic speed limit.

The latest round of tests was conducted to address some of the criticisms that cropped up in the wake of the OPERA team's initial announcement about faster-than-light neutrinos in September.

"A measurement so delicate and carrying a profound implication [for] physics requires an extraordinary level of scrutiny," Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, or INFN, said in a news release. "The experiment OPERA, thanks to a specially adapted CERN beam, has made an important test of consistency of its result. The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although the final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world."

"OPERA" is a tortured acronym that stands for "Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus." The team's researchers shoot beams of neutrinos from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to INFN's Gran Sasso Laboratory, more than 450 miles (730 kilometers) away. The travel time for each pulse of neutrinos is measured to an accuracy of billionths of a second. In the faster-than-light experiment, the researchers reported that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds earlier than a light beam would have.

The revised experiment sent out 3-nanosecond-long bursts of neutrinos, spaced by as much as 524 nanoseconds, INFN said. "This permits to make a more accurate measure of their velocity, at the price of a much lower beam intensity; only 20 clean events have been collected by OPERA in this phase. Additional events could be eventually collected in the next year run," the institute said.

Jacques Martino, director of France's National Institute of Nuclear and Particle Physics at CNRS, was quoted as saying that the search for potential experimental errors "is not over."

"There are more checks of systematics currently under discussion," he said. "One of them could be a synchronization of the time reference at CERN and Gran Sasso independently from GPS, using possibly a fiber [cable]."

Some physicists criticized the initial experiment because they thought it did not fully account for the relativistic effects of the Global Positioning System, which was used to track the elapsed time as well as the distance traveled between CERN and Gran Sasso.

INFN said the updated results have been submitted for review and publication in the Journal of High Energy Physics. But ScienceInsider's Edwin Cartlidge reported that about 15 of the experiment's nearly 200 collaborators have declined to lend their names to the journal submission, on the grounds that further confirmation is required.

An unnamed source on the OPERA team told ScienceInsider that the controversy over the faster-than-light findings was exhausting. "Everyone should be convinced that the result is real, and they are not," the source was quoted as saying.

Other researchers, including physicists with the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, are working up independent analyses of neutrino runs to assess the OPERA team's findings. The initial outside assessments are expected to become available within six months or so, but end-to-end replications of the experiment could take significantly longer.

Update for 2 p.m. ET Nov. 18: In response to some of the comments below, I've changed the headline on this item, which originally read "Faster-than-light neutrinos confirmed." I realize the new headline still implies that superluminal neutrinos actually exist even though the evidence for that is in dispute, but I hope you'll understand that this is shorthand for "New experiment continues to support hypothesis about faster-than-light neutrino travel."

More on the faster-than-light controversy:

• Neutrinos spark wild scientific leaps
• Faster-than-light neutrinos? Not so fast, some say
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• 'Virtually Speaking Science': Podcast on weird physics

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Charlie Riedel / AP

In this file photo, a group of 260-foot-high wind towers are silhouetted against a bright orange sky at the Elk River Wind farm near Beaumont, Kan. Massive integration of wind power to the electric grid will take breakthroughs in energy storage technologies.

Breakthroughs in energy storage technologies are on the horizon that could turn vast swathes of the world's sun-soaked deserts and windy plains into sources of clean, renewable energy, according to experts focused on our energy future.

No one technology — ranging from storing a portion of the sun's energy collected during the day in molten salt to run solar thermal generators at night to banks of lithium-ion batteries scattered around neighborhoods — will be the solution.

Rather, "there is going to be a portfolio of energy storage" options, Bruce Dunn, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, told me Thursday. 

Dunn is the lead author of a review paper in this week's issue of the journal Science that explores the prospects for three battery technologies to become cheap, reliable and efficient enough for wide-scale deployment on the electric power grid.

Battery breakthroughs
Lithium-ion battery technology, for example, is enjoying a boost in research and development for the electrical vehicle market that is driving down manufacturing costs. Utilities will piggyback on those improvements and may even be able to use EVs to store excess wind and solar energy, he noted.

Other technologies such as redox-flow batteries are relatively new and unproven. "On paper it looks to be very inexpensive," he said, but there's very little experience using them at the scale utilities need.

The batteries are based on the use of liquid electrolytes stored in tanks and pumped through a reactor to produce energy. 

As it stands now, there's plenty known about how the batteries work on the small scale, but not much about how they work on large scale. Will they maintain the right power levels? Will there be corrosion problems?

Answers to such questions should start to come within three or four years with preliminary results from demonstration projects supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and the Department of Energy.

"It's an experiential thing, there's no way around it. You've got to build big stuff," Dunn said. "And those things are built and they are being tested. That's the good news."

Sodium-sulfur batteries, the third technology in the Science review, are already in limited use by utilities around the world, including Japan where they are sold commercially, but the technology is costly, Dunn said. Manufacturing prices have to fall before they can be embraced.

In time, he said, prices will fall, just as they have for technologies such as personal computers. And as prices for big, utility-scale batteries fall, they'll be incorporated onto the electric grid, allowing the integration of renewable sources of power such as wind and solar.

The use of batteries on the grid will also reduce the need to construct generation capacity that sits idle most of the time but puts off excess emissions of greenhouse gases as they are cycled up and down to meet peak demands, the researchers note.

Hydrogen storage
Another way to store energy is in the form of hydrogen, which has long been eyed for the fuel cells that some believe will power most cars in the future. A hurdle is how to cheaply and efficiently get hydrogen, which is abundant but almost always bound to something else.

One solution may come from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are working on so-called artificial leaf technology that splits water into bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can be stored and used to power fuel cells.

Questions remain about how efficient the system is and how inexpensively they can generate hydrogen, notes Robert Service in a news story about the technology in Science. 

One study, he noted, found that hydrogen can be produced from natural gas about half as cheaply using a mature technology called steam reforming than the best-case scenarios envisioned for the artificial leaf technologies.

"That's not saying artificial photosynthesis isn't worth pursuing – only that fossil fuels are the leading energy source for a reason and they won't be easy to dethrone," he writes.

More bang for the fossil fuel buck
Eric Wachsman, a sustainable energy researcher at the University of Maryland, argues that technological improvements are making fuel cells that run on all types of fuels, including conventional fuels such as gasoline, in addition to hydrogen, a viable option everywhere from power grids to transportation.

In separate Science review article, he explains that the breakthrough comes from new electrolyte materials that allow solid oxide fuel cells to be operated at lower temperatures.

Solid oxide fuel cells such as Bloom Energy's device that was rolled out last year, he told me, have a power density of about 0.2 watts per square centimeter while operating at about 950 degrees Celsius. His team has developed a solid oxide fuel cell that gets 2 watts per square centimeter at 650 degrees Celsius.

"It is an order of magnitude higher power density at a much lower temperature," he said, adding that his team has also developed electrolytes that make operation at 350 degrees Celsius viable.

And if solid oxide fuel cells can operate at lower temperatures, they become attractive for use in transportation where using a fuel cell to power a car is two and a half to three times more efficient than using fuel to run an internal combustion engine, he noted.

Wachsman is hoping the government will continue to support research in solid oxide fuel cell technology to help bring down the costs and scale up the technology, though noted the prospects are grim.

"There is no funding for solid oxide fuel cells in the current DOE budget," he said.

The dearth of government funding for energy innovation is taken up by Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in a Science editorial that plugs his call to increase R&D spending from $5 billion to $16 billion a year.

"History has repeatedly proven that federal investments in research return huge payoffs with incredible associated benefits for U.S. industries and the economy," he writes. "Yet over the past three decades, U.S. government investment in energy innovation has dropped by more than 75 percent."

Without further government investment, will the needed breakthroughs in energy storage remain on the horizon?

More stories about energy technology:

• Battery tech improving as demand soars
• Artificial leaf makes real fuel
• Sever for cleaner energy unveiled
• Can fuel cells power the future?
• Eight hurdles on a track to a green energy future

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

Dan Little / HRL Laboratories

A new type of nickel-phosphorus lattice is so light it can sit atop a ball of dandelion fluff without disturbing it.

Researchers have created a new kind of metal that rates as the world's lightest material — and just might show up in future batteries and shock absorbers.

The nickel-phosphorus "microlattice," which is described in this week's issue of the journal Science, is the stuff that gee-whiz is made of: It actually consists of 99.99 percent air. The other 0.01 percent is made up of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness of 100 nanometers. That's 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.

To get technical about it, the density of the material is 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimeter. In comparison, the lightest sample of aerogel, the stuff that's been called "solid smoke," has a density of 1.1 mg/cc.

The microlattice is made through a process that's completely different from the "cooking" technique that gives rise to aerogel. The researchers start by setting up a matrix of polymer lattices, and then deposit thin films of nickel-phosphorus. When the polymer is etched away, tiny metal tubes are left behind in the shape of the lattice.

Aerogel is foamy stuff that makes a great insulator but chips off easily. In contrast, the highly ordered structure of the microlattice makes it strong and resilient.

"Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture," William Carter, manager of the architected materials group at California-based HRL Laboratories, explained today in a news release. "We are revolutionizing lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales."

Lorenzo Valdevit, a materials scientist at the University of California at Irvine, said materials actually get stronger when the scale is reduced to the nanometer level. "Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the microlattice, and you have a unique cellular material," he said in a UC-Irvine news release.

The material is strong enough to bounce back after being compressed by 50 percent, yet light enough to sit on top of a fluffy dandelion without disturbing it, as shown in the photo above. The stuff's properties make it ideal for applications that involve soundproofing or shock absorption, and it could also lead to lighter battery electrodes. It's no wonder that the material was developed for the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (And yes, the developers have applied for a patent on the microlattice structure and formation process.)

Update for 10:15 p.m. ET: Valdevit provided a little more perspective on the "lightest material" claim in a follow-up phone call. "You might argue that it's a 'structure' rather than a 'material,'" he acknowledged. But the key factor has to do with how strong and resilient the microlattice is for its weight. That's what will determine how widely it's used.   

More material about materials science:

• Aerogel used in artificial muscles
• 'Frozen diamond smoke' is rich in possibilities
• Aerogel could be used in batteries and robo-surgery
• Lightweight metallic glass is as strong as steel

In addition to Carter and Valdevit, authors of "Ultralight Metallic Microlattices" include Tobias Schaedler, A.J. Jacobsen, A.E. Sorensen, J. Lian and J.R. Greer.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

As of now, there's no comet or asteroid that's definitely due to smash into our planet, but experts say it's high time to figure out how to deal with the uncertainties, misunderstandings and political wrangling that will inevitably arise during the asteroid alerts to come.

Last week's hubbub over the asteroid 2005 YU55, which passed within 200,000 miles of Earth, set the scene for a seminar on near-Earth objects sponsored in Boulder, Colo., by the Secure World Foundation. The public's interest in the harmless flyby was just a foretaste of what could happen when astronomers spot a rock that has a significant chance of hitting Earth.

And it is a question of "when," rather than "if."

Several potential impacts have been flagged over the past decade. In most of those cases, further observations — including observations gained from "pre-discovery" images of the objects in question — have ruled out a collision. But some of the cases are still on NASA's list — including 1999 RQ36, the 560-meter-wide (600-yard-wide) asteroid that's judged to have a 1-in-1,750 chance of hitting Earth sometime in the next 200 years. That rock will be targeted by NASA's Osiris-Rex probe, due for launch in 2016.

Then there's Apophis, the asteroid that sparked a scare in 2004 when its chances of impact were briefly set as high as 1-in-37. Since then, further analysis has reduced the odds to 1-in-250,000 for 2036. A new round of radar observations in 2013 could reduce the chances even further, to essentially zero, or conceivably raise them again.

That's one of the problems for asteroid-trackers: The stated odds of impact are calculated on the basis of how much or how little is known about a near-Earth object's orbit. If the possible track at a particular given time stretches for hundreds of thousands of miles, and Earth happens to lie anywhere on that track, astronomers have to acknowledge there's a chance that Earth will end up getting hit. As the orbital predictions are refined, the stated odds may go up or down. In almost all of the cases to date, an Earth impact is eventually excluded, and the odds go down to zero.

More alerts ahead
As more powerful telescopes come online, there'll be more asteroids that may be added to NASA's impact risk list — and potentially more up-and-down asteroid alerts.

"Those are going to happen every year, or at least every decade," David Morrison, director of the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, said at this week's seminar.

And sometimes the asteroid actually hits: That was the case in 2008, when a boulder-sized asteroid known as 2008 TC3 slammed into Sudan just hours after its discovery. Astronomers knew almost immediately that there'd be an impact, and that there'd be no significant damage in the desert. However, the event demonstrated that near-Earth objects could come at us from right out of the blue.

Astronomers are getting a good handle on tracking the asteroids that are big enough to spark mass extinctions. But they also say thousands of bad-news asteroids that are wider than 100 meters (330 feet) are yet to be detected. Roughly a million yet-to-be-detected asteroids are smaller than that, but still capable of causing damage. 

The bottom line is that the most immediate threats from the sky are not likely to be the huge objects portrayed in movies like "Deep Impact" or "Armageddon," but the smaller ones that are nevertheless capable of destroying a city or sparking a tsunami.

"Chances are we wouldn't see it," said Mark Boslough, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who recently drew up a computer simulation of the 1908 Tunguska blast. Boslough said the object that caused the Tunguska explosion might have been just 40 meters (130 feet) in diameter, but still flattened 500,000 acres of Siberian forest.

Emergency preparedness
So how can you prepare for something like that? That's what the experts have been trying to figure out: This week's seminar focused on a U.N.-sponsored process to draw up an international emergency preparedness plan for asteroid and comet impacts.

As it stands now, the plan calls for formalizing a network of sky-watchers, most likely including folks from NASA's Near Earth Object Program and the groups that will be part of the European Space Agency's SSA-NEO effort. If something needs to be done about studying or diverting a potentially threatening asteroid, a separate team of planners (known as a Mission Planning and Operations Group) would set up the space mission; a diplomatic group would be charged with signing off on that mission; and the U.N. Security Council would give the final go-ahead.

Why such an involved process? In the movies, NASA just goes ahead and blows up the planet-killer. But in real life, trying to move or break up a truly large asteroid could take years of effort, and temporarily raise the risk for one region of the world while lowering it for a different region. For example, if an asteroid's track is projected to end in a Pacific Ocean impact, do you move the asteroid off track to the east, putting the Americas at greater risk for a while ... or to the west, temporarily putting Asia in the crosshairs. And if something goes wrong with the operation, who would be held at fault? The U.N.-backed effort, which is expected to result in concrete recommendations by 2013, is aimed at anticipating these tricky political issues.

For relatively small asteroids, the advance warning might be on the scale of mere hours, days or weeks, and the response might look a lot like a Katrina-level hurricane evacuation. On the other end of the scale, it could take decades to resolve an Apophis-style situation.

Education effort needed
The long-term scenario would require a lot of education about the observational uncertainty, about the campaign to divert the asteroid, and about the potential effects of impact. For example, based on the Tunguska example, a 50-meter-wide (165-foot-wide) object could wipe out an area the size of a major city. (The Earth Impact Effects Program lets you tinker with the parameters of a cosmic impact and find out how far you'd have to run.)

If it takes until the year 2036 to resolve the Apophis situation, the right time for addressing the issue of near-Earth objects is ... right now. In fact, some folks have already organized school projects on the subject.

"Let it grow up with the kids as they grow older," said retired Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart, who helped organize efforts by the Association of Space Explorers and the B612 Foundation to address the asteroid issue.

What do you think? Are near-Earth objects on your list of things to worry about? Or are they on your list of things to look forward to, thanks to the Obama administration's plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by the mid-2020s? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Update for 3:25 p.m. ET Nov. 17: Rusty Schweickart added a little perspective about Apophis in a follow-up email:

"I’d like to remind people that Apophis is No. 7 on the list of objects with non-zero impact probability (ranked by Palermo level), and if you include those seen in the last 60 days, it's No. 8.  Some of the others are pretty interesting and, while still having a low probability of impact, are more threatening than Apophis.

"Unfortunately more people have heard of Apophis, given its history, and don't seem to get that its impact probability is now ridiculously low ... and very likely to go to no threat at all when we track it again in 2013.  Not so with some of the others ... but they’re not 'known' by the public.  Yet."

Also, Harvard instructor David Ropeik, an expert on risk communication (and former msnbc.com contributor), has published his own report on the Boulder seminar as a Big Think blog item, titled "The Sky IS Falling. Should We Worry?" 

Update for 8 p.m. ET Nov. 18: Another participant in the Boulder seminar, Carolyn Collins Petersen, explores "The Undiscovered Country of Small Bodies" on her blog, The Spacewriter's Ramblings.

Update for 3 p.m. ET Nov. 19: My colleague from Sky & Telescope, Kelly Beatty, reports on the Boulder seminar in a posting titled "If an Impact Looms, Then What?"

More about asteroids:

• To fight off asteroids, humans must cooperate
• Largest digital camera hunts killer asteroids
• Here's how to counter a killer asteroid
• Mystery returns to the case of the dino-killing rock
• Interactive: Close encounters of the asteroid kind

I attended the Secure World Foundation's seminar as a participant, and the foundation paid some of my expenses for the trip. The seminar sessions were conducted under the Chatham House Rule for information sharing. The direct quotes used here were cleared by individual speakers after the sessions.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.