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Last night Google released Presentations, the latest in its suite of online applications, and a potential competitor to Microsoft’s massively popular PowerPoint. All you need is a Google Docs account to access the free tool, an easy-to-use, scaled-down version of Microsoft’s mainstay. Not all the reviews have been glowing. At this point there’s really no competition. Powerpoint has far more features, and it’s already more than a simple business presentation tool—it’s a medium for artistic expression, and nearly a cultural force. But every champion needs a good challenger now and then.

Granted, it’s not even in beta yet, so this isn’t entirely fair, but if SciVee, a new website being billed as the YouTube of science, is really going to reach the people, the presentations will really need to evolve. Right now the site consists of a few video presentations from biologists. The material is interesting, and there’s a cool feature that lets you follow along in the actual published paper as the speaker presents his or her work. But the overall effect is really no different than what you’d get if you trained cameras on presenters at a biology conference, then posted the clips on the Web. And that might be part of the point of this site—it gives scientists a new, slightly less formalized way to communicate the ideas in a new paper to their peers. But part of the stated mission is also to reach a wider audience, and to do that these scientists are going to need a different approach. Step One: Getting rid of the powerpoints. It’s not too, too hard to get most scientists to sum up their research in layman’s terms, but once they get a few of those slides in front of them, they revert to speaking the very technical language of their peers, not the masses. Again, though, it’s only in the alpha phase, and it’s a great idea. So let’s hope it works.

This year, the X Prize Foundation is pointing its magic wand squarely at the Moon. The Peter Diamandis-led group announced the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize today, a competition for privately funded robotic lunar exploration. The foundation hopes that this largest-ever X Prize purse will see the development of multiple new, low-cost methods of robotic space exploration, as well as begin capitalizing on the moon’s potential as “a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth—energy independence and climate change.”

Competitors will need to land a robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of, among other things, roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

The purse has multiple tiers, including a $20 million grand prize, a $5 million second prize and $5 million in bonus prizes. To win the grand prize, a team must rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters and transmit a specific set of video, images and data back to the Earth. Second prize involves simply landing, roving, and transmitting data, without the specific parameters of the grand prize. The bonus prizes will award roving longer distances (more than 5,000 meters), imaging manmade artifacts (e.g. Apollo hardware), discovering water ice, and/or surviving through a frigid lunar night (approximately 14.5 Earth days). Deadlines: December 31, 2012 for the grand prize and December 31, 2014 for the Second Prize.

Of course, since the competition is sponsored by Google, the participating lunar spacecraft will be equipped with high-definition video and still cameras that will transmit live to the Google Lunar X Prize Web site.