Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

Space Launch System: Will it Fly?

2012-01-30T15:08:00.002-07:00

Experts divided on super-booster

The SLS is the only major space transportation project NASA has going (industry has others of course, but people pay more attention to a NASA program, especially if it supports human space flight.) NASA management is bullish on it, but other experts wonder if it's the best approach. A lot of people, myself included, are afraid the very expensive project may be starved of funds and end up getting canceled. Five-flight Shuttle astronaut Scott Parazynski, says, "I worry about this one, in particular, because there's really not a destination with milestones. When you have a rocket, but you don't really know where it's going to take you yet, that becomes discretionary funding that's easily canceled. And that's what I think is going to happen."
Does the President have us on a workable course for human exploration, or would one of the GOP candidates be better? By workable, I don't just mean they would fund good ideas, but would they let the engineers do the work without political interference and constant budget changes? NASA has staked a lot on this big bird.

Fighting over space

2012-01-27T19:33:00.000-07:00

Gingrich wants to revive the Bush concept of a lunar base. Romney thinks it's a boondoggle. Newt asks what people are even doing at NASA HQ anymore, and Ron Paul wants to colonize the moon, but only with politicians. There's some pandering here, of course, but when is the last time space was even discussed at the national level? That's one part of the political slugfest I'll actually be paying attention to.

Looking back at species found in 2011

2012-01-27T19:30:00.001-07:00

Quite a collection

This article celebrated the new species of 2011. And what a collection they make. New titi monkey, new tube-nosed bat, that curious ferret-badger. A singing frog. Four new shrews (of the untamed type). The world's most fearsome wasp, a long-tounged bee, and - a new elephant? Okay, we always knew the forest elephant was there, it's just that we've finally nailed it down as a separate species. Same with the new dolphin. But the "Spongebob mushroom" and the bee with an extradinarily long tongue, and the orange spider? Brand new.

Humans all over the place?

2012-01-27T19:22:00.001-07:00

More than one species - maybe

It used to be thought that only one species of human existed on the planet at any time, if you accept the recent view that we weren't that separate from Neanderthals. But the Denisovans and the "hobbits" have rather scrambled things up. Oh, and Neanderthals lived alongside the rest of us longer than we thought. The director of the Gibraltar Museum, on the island where Neanderthals may have made their last stand, looks at what it all means.

Are we forgetting our biology?

2012-01-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

Fewer scientists are out there among the critters

Some scientists complain that too much effort is going into splitting DNA hairs and not enough into finding and classifying stuff in the field - or teaching about it. I'll explain this one by giving the money quotes:

We are producing "a generation of armchair biologists who can write scholarly essays about species that they would not be able to recognize if they encountered them in the wild."

"...people get very, very specialized. It's not the kind of old-fashioned taxonomy where people had a very broad knowledge."

"There is a huge need for people who can recognize what things are."

New species: 19,232 of 'em

2012-01-27T18:46:00.002-07:00

2011 count (actually 2009) is eye-opening

It takes a while to compile all the new species descriptions from all the journals worldwide, so the 2011 report covers the ones described in 2009. It's pretty amazing. 41 living mammals (mainly rodents and bats, but some bigger ones, too). Seven new living birds. (I have a journal article from a decade or so back that says new bird discoveries are unlikely.) 626 crustaceans. And, of course, thousands and thousands of beetles.

The fossils of La Brea

2012-01-24T15:58:00.001-07:00

We're learning more all the time

From LA's La Brea tar pits have come a huge trove of fossils, with over 200 vertebrates represented. Mammoths, sabertooths, short-faced bears (one of my favorites) - they're all here. The point in this article is that this is not just a source for exhibits, but for ongoing investigations using DNA and other modern techniques. Where did the ancestors of these creatures, especially the massive mammals, come from? More importantly for our own time, where did they go? Why did so many species vanish in such a short time? Paleontologists are making new findings... and yes, it's still OK for us to look in awe at the exhibits.

A Most Curious Cabinet of Curiosities

2012-01-23T08:36:00.001-07:00

Mounted Wolfman? Check.

This is a most enjoyable bit of silliness. A person using the name Alex C.F. has prepared or obtained a marvelous collection of taxidermy mounts and models of fabulous creatures. Some of these look really good, and the "history" accompanying them is likewise a lot of fun. Who knew Rasputin and Dante were cryptozoologists?

'Extinct' monkey rediscovered

2012-01-20T11:00:00.001-07:00

Miller's Grizzled Langur

From Wehea Forest in East Kalimantan, Borneo, comes a bit of good news for conservation. Aside from having an interesting name, Miller's Grizzled Langur was known for being possibly extinct. This large gray monkey, we now know, is hanging on to existence. It's still on the list of 25 most endangered primates, but 'rare' is an improvement on 'extinct.'

How tall can trees grow?

2012-01-20T10:54:00.003-07:00

Redwoods are pushing it

Here's a fun little bit of nature trivia: how tall can a tree get. Trees are driven (or pulled) upward as they attempt to outgrow competitors in the search for sunlight, but there is our old nemesis, gravity, holding them back. Researchers who have worked out the engineering here suggest there's a maximum between 122 and 130 meters. That's taller than the current champ, a coast redwoodreaching to 115m. (there are people who still search the forests for an overlooked record-breaker).

There are claims that coast redwoods exceeding 130m were felled in the early 20th century, and there are several claims for felled Australian mountain ash up to 150m! None of those records are documented photographically, although some include the claim that they were actually measured by a government or logging company surveyor after they fell.

Giant tortoise may not be extinct

2012-01-10T09:29:00.001-07:00

Missing reptile's recent offspring found
It's hard to misplace a Galapagos tortoise, an animal that looks like a Volkwswagon beetle, only slightly smaller. Charles Darwin described one such, Chelonoidis elephantopus, from Floreana Island.

It was thought extinct for some 150 years now, but hybrid tortoises on a nearby island were sired by the Floreana type only 15 years ago, an eyeblink in a tortoise's lifetime. So the search is on for the species once again.

First photo of new monkey

2012-01-10T09:22:00.001-07:00

Hi, I'm a snub-nosed monkey from Myanmar

It was the most recent primate discovery (well, the most recent that's bigger than a mouse lemur, of which incidentally we just found a brand-new one.)
Loren Coleman writes:
"Jeremy Holden of Flora & Fauna International has shared with me, for release on Cryptomundo, the first photographs of the new primate now known as the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey." Very cool.

Creating a supersoldier ant

2012-01-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

Tinkering Produces Exceptional Ants

Remember those giant ants in 1950s movies? Well, we're not there yet. But scientists have shown they CAN bring out some genes that make for a super-soldier ant. Let them explain it: 'We uncovered an ancestral development potential to produce a novel supersoldier subcaste that has been retained throughout a hyperdiverse ant genus that evolved 35 to 60 million years ago.' In other words, compared to other ants, this is a monster.

Australian Sharks Are Hybridizing

2012-01-03T11:57:00.003-07:00

57 Hybrid Sharks Found
Australian scientists report something they have never found in the wild - hybrid sharks. Two species of blacktip shark have not only produced hybrids, but are producing a lot of them - 57 caught and identified so far. The fraternization may be due to a depleted habitat with fewer blacktips of each species, or to a change in one species' range, but either way it's a surprise to icthyologists. The classic definition of a species is a population that breeds only with its own kind. While that's pretty elastic, the rule is that different species mate only under unusual conditions. In a picture of evolution in action - possibly giving rise eventually to a new species - the unusual is becoming common.

GRAIL explores the Moon

2012-01-02T08:45:00.001-07:00

NASA spacecraft get in position

From NASA "The second of NASA's two Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit. Working together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before...During GRAIL's science mission, the two spacecraft will transmit radio signals precisely defining the distance between them. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features such as mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the two spacecraft will change slightly...Scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field. The data will allow scientists to understand what goes on below the lunar surface."

Almost as exciting: The probes each carry a camera, which will be trained on areas selected for study by middle-school students across America. (Sally Ride conceived this project.) A student contest is also underway to pick new names for the spacecraft.

Go GRAIL!

Add four new sharks to 2011 discoveries

2012-01-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

More sharks than we thought
A new sawshark - often called a "sawfish" - was discovered in 2011, along with two smaller lantern sharks from Taiwan and an angel shark from the Philippines. But here's the money quote from this article: "Over the last ten years there’s been some 200 new shark and ray species described, whereas less than 200 in the previous 30 years." The more we explore, the more we learn, and the more we learn the more we realize how little we knew.

Not a good year for yeti

2011-12-29T09:40:00.002-07:00

Yeti evidence? Not yeti.

The yeti, wherever it is, must feel a bit put upon. First a finger long supposed to be a yeti artifact was finally tested and found to be human. Then officials of a region of Russia called Ingushtetia announced the capture of a female Yeti, providing plenty of details on the capture, what the beast was eating, and so forth. That one seemed too good to be true, and it was. Depending on which subsequent statement one believes, it was either a mistranslation (unlikely, given all the details) or a publicity stunt.
COMMENT: There may yet be an unknown primate hiding in high forested valleys of the Himalayan region, but it's no closer to being proven than it was 60 years ago when Westerners started taking the subject seriously. I still think about the late primatologist John Napier's comment that he would dismiss the whole topic except that footprints found by Shipton and Ward in 1951 still bothered him. Those prints are still unexplained, but we have nothing better since than less-distinct prints and some very brief sightings. I hope the yeti is out there, but it may be no more real than the jackalope... Another possibility, of course, is that it's the preserved memory of a real species that was walways rare and is now extinct. But we have no proof for that either.

Bad year for elephants

2011-12-29T09:30:00.001-07:00

In the 1990s, elephant poaching was cut to a manageable level by a 1989 ban on ivory sales and strong national and international efforts, and rhinos got a break as well. In 2011, though, elephants had their worst year since that ban was enacted. The tusks of some 2,500 elephants were seized by customs and wildlife officers, and no one known how much smuggled ivory got through. One African park is losing 50 elephants a month, and South Africa reported a record 443 rhinos were killed in that country. Even when ivory is seized, the poachers and the ringleaders are almost never caught. Middlemen, like corrupt customs officers who sign false papers, are caught more often, but are easily replaced in poor nations - both in Africa where the shipments originate, and in Asia where almost all the illegal stuff is being shipped.
COMMENT: Too sad for words. To everyone: please DO NOT buy anything ivory unless it has a valid paper trail showing it's from mammoths or another legal source.

"Yeti" hand is human

2011-12-27T07:36:00.004-07:00

Well, darn. The most famous known-but-untested relic in cryptozoology, revered as a yeti's hand in the monastaery at Pangboche, was the hand of a human being after all.

Yeti finger DNA tested

2011-12-26T22:43:00.004-07:00

The famed Pangboche hand - or a finger of it - has been subjected to new DNA testing. Results due out today!

Trail of the Javan tiger

2011-12-26T22:14:00.001-07:00

Missing 35 years, does it still live?

It was 1976 when the last Javan tiger was seen. It was 1994 when the subspecies was declared extinct. After years without a clue, droppings and pawprints have prompted one more look with trail cameras. Could the cat still be out there?

Top new species of 2011

2011-12-26T16:54:00.004-07:00

The discoveries continued on land, sea, and air

What new animals turned up in 2011? As always, it's been quite a haul. A ferret-badger from Vietnam, two new seabirds, a new rail, a dolphin, a hundreds of others. The Holy Grail of species discovery, a really large new land animal, remained elusive, although a claim was put in to split the African elephant to make the forest variety its own species, and we had plenty of everything else.

December 23 was Coelacanth Discovery Day

2011-12-26T10:39:00.002-07:00

"Living fossil" found in 1938

Loren Coleman pointed out an anniversary I'd overlooked - that of the 1938 discover of the coelacanth. This fish, supposedly extinct for 60 million years, taught us a lot about evolution and survival. It also taught us that a long gap in the fossil record is not proof of extinction, something cryptozoologists have been pointing out ever since.

"Lake Monsters" surface again

2011-12-26T10:24:00.001-07:00

New video purported to be "Champ"

The idea of monsters in lakes goes back, probably, to the beginnings of humankind, when there really were scary animals everywhere, at least on land and sea. Reports of odd lakedwelling creatures come from all over the world, in lakes large and small. Zoologists have been increasingly skeptical, not only because of the lack of hard evidence but because some monster lakes are too small to support colonies of large animals. This new video fro mLake Champlain, while suggested by one video analyst to show animate objects, is being mainly dismissed on Cryptomundo as a boat wake. I tend to think "wake," too - long narrow lakes produce a lot of odd phenomena when wakes "echo" off the shorelines.

Memo to Russia: Space Launch is Still Hard

2011-12-26T10:08:00.002-07:00

Soyuz Failure

Space launch is not routine yet - at least, not as routine as it needs to be. While the U.S. has gone through boom and bust cycles of launch success, we generally think of Russian launch based on Soyuz rockets dating back to Sergei Korolev as a bus line, almost always succeeding on schedule. But last week's failure of a Soyuz 2-1b, a variant with six successful launches on its record, was the third complete failure in the last 13 months (there were also two partial failures, where the upper stages failed to put the payload in the right orbit). NASA must be pretty nervous about the whole "depend on Russia to launch our astronauts" plan. It's a reminder that truly routine access to space needs a major investment to become a long-term reality.

The search for other Earths

2011-12-22T11:46:00.002-07:00

NASA discovers two Earthlike planets

This may - just may - go down in future textbooks as a turning point in human history. From NASA:

"NASA's Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface, but they are the smallest exoplanets ever confirmed around a star like our sun. The discovery marks the next important milestone in the ultimate search for planets like Earth. The new planets are thought to be rocky. Kepler-20e is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring 0.87 times the radius of Earth. Kepler-20f is a bit larger than Earth, measuring 1.03 times its radius. Both planets reside in a five-planet system called Kepler-20, approximately 1,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra."

Rockey planets of roughly Earth-Mars-Venus size. Now we know they exist. Discovering similar planets in habitable zones is a foregone conclusion. Discovering life? In my opinion, it's just a matter of time.

Afraid of science?

2011-12-22T11:10:00.001-07:00

Decrying the modern trends

Attend a party, and you'll find someone detoxifying or decrying chemicals or railing against technology. Funny, the author says, how all kinds of stuff trendy people hate are increasing health and lifespan. His main point is that people no longer understand science, or want to.

Mysteries of the year - and next year

2011-12-20T10:55:00.001-07:00

Discover's picks for best solved and unsolved mysteries

Ben Radford offers his selection of mysteries. Among those he considers solved are a widely circulated UFO video from Jerusalem (hoax), and a boy with magnetic powers (same). Reaching back to the 1700s, he endorses an idea the famed Beast of Gevaudan never existed - that it was just "normal" wolf attacks. Not buying that one. I mean, we HAVE the mount of a hyena shot in the French countryside. Mysteries he considers worth investigating in 2012 include the faster-than-light neutrino claims from Europe and the further study of possible Earthlike planets. He's right that both are intriguing, but, Ben, use a little imagination... the orang pendek should merit a mention, at least.

Phobos-Grunt meets conspiracy theorists

2011-12-18T16:06:00.003-07:00

US accused of zapping probe

The Russian record on Mars probes is pretty embarassing for a nation that otherwise has so many space accomplishments. With the loss of the Phobos-Grunt probe, a Russian official has reached for an explanation sure to delight conspiracy theorists in the US. The HAARP research device has been blamed for everything else, so why not accuse it of zapping a Mars probe? (The energy levels are far, far, too low, but never mind... :) )

Branson Bullish on Space

2011-12-17T18:41:00.002-07:00

Foresees robust tourist market and smallsat launch

Richard Branson is nothing if not bold. He insists the space tourism industry will be big and profitable, even as he notes that acocuntants would have found his initial questions about its viability insane. He also says his system will be a cheap smallsat launcher, something microspace advocates have been pursuing or dreaming of... well, forever. His plan for submersibles taking scientists to the greatest depths of the ocean are equally brach and equally fascinating. (OK, ALMOST equally fascinating.)
Go Branson!

New access to space on a big scale

2011-12-16T13:58:00.001-07:00

Can billionaires solve the launch problem?
You can't say Paul Allen and Elon Musk think small. A six-engined launch airplane derived from two 747s, plus a modified Falcon 9 medium-lift booster, is what the new Stratolaunch venture is planning on with help from legendary high-tech aircrat designer Burt Rutan. The partners think the advantages of airlaunch plus the ability to capture a broad spectrum of military, NASA, and commercial business will result in a high-volume, low-cost business.
COMMENT. I admire their willingness to take the big risk and hope this comes off. I am concenred about the sheer complexity of the thing. Will it work reliably, and, if it does, will it really capture enough market to keep the costs down? Will it be able to underprice ground launches of the Falcon series boosters? I wish Stratolaunch every success.

Harpooning a comet

2011-12-16T13:35:00.002-07:00

NASA building gadget to fire into comets

This actually came up in a mission a couple of decades ago, the Comet Rendezvous - Asteroid Flyby (CRAF), which was canceled for budgetary reasons. Now Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC) engineers envision a probe with several harpoons with varying propulsive charges for sampling molecules inside these still-puzzling roving bodies. Very cool - hope it works!

Dinosaurs - more amazing than ever

2011-12-10T07:36:00.001-07:00

BBC Wildlife and the Decade of the Dinosaur

You like dinosaurs? Well, palentologists have 'em. In fact, they have a dizzying arrary of new dinosaurs and other reptilian relatives found over the last 10 years.
Start in 2000 with hte first definite feathered dino specimen, from China. Progress through the 2002 find of the pterosaur Hatzegopteryx, with its stunning 12-meter wingspan. Follow with Gigantoraptor, 8 meters tall. Then in 2007 we have the discovery that the predator Sinosaurus, of movie fame, weighed 20 tons, 2-3 times what T-rex did. From the first fish-eating dinosaur in Australia to the first possible venomous dino to the mind-boggling pliosaur originally nicknamed Predator X, the past ten years taught us one thing: We don't know all about dinos. Not yet. Indeed, we may hardly know them at all.

Private space missions are go

2011-12-10T07:23:00.001-07:00

NASA approves ISS trip

The first private mission to the International Space Station, postponed in the wake of NASA's budget problems and the uncertainty of keeping the ISS running using Russian vehicles, is back on.
The Dragon capsule from SpaceX will make an unmanned mission to the station - a big step forward for private space in general, and a big step for SpaceX toward getting its capsule "human-rated." As SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell put it: “SpaceX is excited to be the first commercial company in history to berth with the International Space Station. This mission will mark a historic milestone in the future of spaceflight. We appreciate NASA’s continued support and their partnership in this process.”
Bon voyage!

Missing a few moon rocks

2011-12-08T19:12:00.001-07:00

NASA hunts for samples
NASA's Inspector General reports the agency, which has thousands of lunar, meteorite, and (a VERY few) cometary specimens. When it loans them out, though, they don't always come back on time - or at all. NASA promises that, after hundreds of small but irreplaceable samples vanished since 1970, it will tighten its procedures.

Best cryptozoology books of 2011

2011-12-08T08:48:00.001-07:00

What's worth reading in cvryptozoology?
Loren Coleman has provided his always-fascinating annual list. He did not try to narrow it to a top 10, but the #1 is Richard Coniff's fascinating The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth. (I'll post my own review of this one soon. Coniff chronicles the adventures and the philosophy behind the historical and continuing search for new species, along with a discussion on how taxonomy is way, way more complicated than we realized.
The other books listed span a variety of topics, from regional collections of "monster" tales to books based on personal experience (including Tracking Bigfoot, by my friend Lori Simmons), two new tomes on Loch Ness, and two books by skeptics, Nickell and Radford. It's going to take me some time to get through all these, as my reading of late has all been on missile technology for my "real job." If you want to get me something for Christmas, you know where to look!

My apologies

2011-12-08T08:45:00.001-07:00

I've had to say this way too many times in the past, but, if you will bear with me, I know the blog has been very hit-and miss the last couple of weeks. Three solid days of jury duty plus business travel plus illness in the family just kind of swamped me, while a lot of important stuff has been happening in zoology, space exploration, and more. I'll try to catch you up, and I hope this is the last time I'll have to make this post!

Nest of the Yeti?

2011-11-28T19:01:00.001-07:00

Structures found in Russia
If there are unidentified giant primates (called sasquatch, yeti, or countless other names in different regions), where do they sleep? One idea is that they build nests by twisting branches and small trees together as nests (some of which might be called crude mattresses) in gorilla fashion, and even shelters, which known nonhuman primates don't make. An expedition in search of Russian "Yeti" evidence led, as Ben Radford of the Skeptical Inquirer reports here, to a split between the two most prominent North American scientific investigators, with Drs. Jeff Meldrum and John Bindernagel divided on whether structures found in Russia added to the evidence in favor of such creatures.
COMMENT: Such structures have been reported in North America. In areas where humans are at least occasional visitors, I thought they were likely made by kids making wigwams, forts, camp beds, etc. I did the same thing myself growing up in Florida. That's not the explanation for all such sites, but maybe it applies more often than is usually realized. Kids can push pretty deep into the woods seeking their own worlds.

Deep-sea fishing goes back a long way

2011-11-28T18:45:00.001-07:00

East Timor find pushes back timeline
Humans, ever since their ancestors waded into streams hunting for food, have relied on the bounty of the world's waters. Fishing in the open sea, though, was only thought to go back about 12,000 years. Not so. Bone fishooks and fish bones from a site in East Timor show people were catching tuna, an open-sea species, 42,000 years ago. The hooks have the basic modern shape, although without barbs. There is no evidence to say the people involved told stories of the big one that got away... but no doubt they did.
COMMENT: This is one more bit of evidence of how capable ancient people were in marine environments. We know they crossed the sea to Australia some 50,000 years ago, and now we know they ventured away from the coasts to fish. It adds plausibility to the idea (still not proven, though) that people might have come to the Americas by sea instead of by land bridge.

The return from space

2011-11-28T18:39:00.001-07:00

Three astronauts visit a small planet
The return to Earth from space has never been more beautifully documented than in this time-lapse video, set to the music of Peter Gabriel, following three astronauts as they descend toward Earth from the International Space Station.

Anti-Darwin site takes Onion article as reality

2011-11-25T13:26:00.001-07:00

Referred to nonexistent news conference

The site darwinthenandnow.com is dedicated to refuting Darwin. Well, as Darwin explicitly said he expected would happen, some parts of his 1859 work HAVE been refuted or replaced by better theories, and other aspects are still mysteries. I have sympathy with Lynn Margulis' point that "natural selection" has become a deified term that explains everything, instead of a basic idea that is still in the process of refinement. (Finally, while I fully believe in evolution/natural selection of physical forms over billions of years, as a Christian, I think there was something more at work in producing beings - us - that are spiritually self-aware. Yes, I know purely deterministic ideas have been put forth to explain our theological leanings. I just don't find them convincing.)
OK, that was a very long digression, so back to what inspired this post. The author of this site seems to have, to put it politely, gone off the rails. In this article, he challenges the standard view of history, saying the Greek civilization never existed. His source: The satirical site The Onion, which published a humor piece saying National Geographic held a news conference to announce Greek civilization's record was faked. Seriously, he believes this is real.
(I could have made a Comment on the darwinthenandnow site pointing out the absurdity, but I'm more interested in just watching it and seeing how long it takes before the whole page disappears.)
The point: if you want to challenge science, fine: challenging existing wisdom is how science advances. But you have to use science, not fiction.

Onion article

Lynn Margulis, R.I.P.

2011-11-25T10:52:00.001-07:00

One of the giants of biology, and one of the most prominent women in science, has died. Biologist Lynn Margulis was 73. She developed the initially-ridiculed theory of symbiogenesis - describing how variations could develop out of the sharing of genes with microorganisms inside a host body - which is now accepted as a major contributor to evolution. I've read some of Margulis' work for general audiences, and she comes through as a brilliant intellect who could also explain things in a way a non-biologist could understand. ( I shoiuld mention Margulis later doubted the HIV-AIDS link and rejected some key tenets of what Darwin said about how evolution worked, but her reputation was assured by her work on how evolution DID work).

. http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=4364

New mammal from Vietnam

2011-11-24T12:05:00.001-07:00

Thanksgiving greetings!
The new species of ferret-badger from Vietnam was first spotted in 2006 in the form of an injured specimen that was rescued, but died, and apparently was not properly considered for new-species status. It was five years before another one was spotted, and now the official word is out. There is nothing a zoologist likes better to celebrate a holiday than a new mammal! Welcome to Melogale cucphuongensis sp.nov, the fifth species in its genus.

The Invasion of Mars Continues

2011-11-23T15:36:00.001-07:00

Earth probes - plans and travails

Earth probes have far from a perfect record in reaching the Red Planet. Part of this is simply that flying to Mars is hard (not to mention costing $1M a kilogram). A cartoon made at NASA a long time ago showed a probe-eating monster, called the Great Galactic Ghoul.
The Ghoul is still at work, but Earth scientists never give up on exploring their #1 planetary destination. After Russia's innovative Phobos-Grunt mission to a Martian moon failed to leave Earth orbit (controllers have not entirely given up hope of salvaging it), Russia may join in planned US-European Space Agency (ESA) missions planned for 2016 onwards. ESA is worried the US may pull out - and it might, given NASA's budget woes.
First, though, comes the next effort - the largest, most complex Mars rover ever, Curiosity, will he carried on the Mars Science Laboratory mission, to launch at 10AM EST this Saturday. Go for Mars!

Kepler in the corn field

2011-11-21T13:41:00.001-07:00

Farmers honor space program There are, it seems, seven "space farms" around the country where the corn mazes popular at Halloween have been designed to honor spacecraft. I'd never heard of this story before. Here is the Kepler telescope in a field in California. Kudos to America's farmers for this one!

Whale Fossils in the Desert = Mystery

2011-11-21T07:24:00.001-07:00

Cetacean cemetary in Chile's Atacama Desert"I came here for the waters. For my health.""We're in a desert!""I was misinformed."(OK, I used that reference last year for a fossil penguin found in a desert and no one laughed. So somebody laugh, please.)Dozens of whale skeletons have turned up in one tiny spot in Chile's Atacama Desert. Most are baleen whales, with a sperm whale mixed in along with a specimen of the bizarre "walrus dolphin," previously knwn only from Peru. Two to seven million years old, the remains (still being excavated) provoke an obvious question - what happened? The presence of other species would seem to rule out a mass stranding. Paleontologists never lack for mysteries.

Two rhinos declared extinct

2011-11-20T08:04:00.001-07:00

Bad news for rhinos

The IUCN has declared that two subspecies of rhino are leaving the planet - and not from natural causes. Tthe the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) of Central Africa is "possibly extinct in the wild" while a subspecies of the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipes) in Western Africa is extinct, period.
COMMENT: This is not only sad for the rhinos, but scary for conservation in general. If we can't protect small populations of conspicuous, easily tracked animals, will we even know if more elusive animals become extinct? And the Javan rhino, a full species, has lost its Asian mainland population and is hanging on by its toenails. We need to work harder!

Finding the sasquatch film site

2011-11-19T14:06:00.001-07:00

Where was the famous film made?There is no moment more famous in the history of sasquatch-hunting, probably none in cryptozoology, than the day in 1967 when Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin claimed to have encountered a large female sasquatch and displayed as proof a 16mm film. The film has become the most analyzed amateur movie in history, except possibly for the Zapruder film. If there has ever been a genuine film of a North American primate, this is it. If it's a hoax, it was expertly done.So exactly where did the filming take place? I had always assumed it had been gone over a thousand times, but apparently some doubt crept in. The Bluff Creek Film Site Project took four years, trying to narrow it down beyond doubt. Now they think they've got it.So now what? Well, having the spot narrowed down, even after 44 years, should allow for more accurate evaluation of the film. There are already whole books on this incident: I'm sure we can now expect more.

Metal 100x lighter than styrofoam

2011-11-19T12:36:00.001-07:00

World's lightest metallic substanceWe know about aerogels, substances so light they are called "frozen smoke." But the boffins (I like that old british word) at the University of California have something more: a metallic substance composed of minitubes and so light the photo here shows it sitting on top of a dandelion puff. Where will this kind of research lead? Well, a kilogram of payload bound for Mars costs $1M to ship. Aerospace engineers might be the first users, but contruction engineers and carmakers also come to mind. We'll just have to see.

Faster than light? Weird, but not dead

2011-11-19T12:30:00.001-07:00

CERN eliminates on source of errorThe report than neutrinos beamed from Switzerland to Italy had traveled faster than light (perhaps they had a craving for cannoli?) set physics abuzz. Several possible error modes were postulated. The folks at CERN say now they have eliminated one source of error. It was suggested the experimenters may have mistimed the moment of transmission. Now that's been ruled out. The original result may still be a mistake - most physicists still think it much be - but no one has proven it yet.

Europa: To a Watery Moon

2011-11-16T11:53:00.001-07:00

Europa in the NewsJupter's moon Europa has interested astronomers since Galileo found it 401 years ago. It has a surface of water ice, with a liquid water ocean, but that ocean was thought to lie at least 10km under the crust, too deep for a future mission to sample. But more sophisticated modeling, informed by studying ice sheets on Earth, indicates at least some bodies of liquid only 3km down: shallow enough to drill to. Among the possible discoveries: life, at least on a one-celled scale. Now, will the Europa missions proposed in the US and elsewhere for the 2020s get funded? That's as big a mystery as... well, whether there is life on Europa.

NASA: News is not good

2011-11-16T11:21:00.001-07:00

Whatever you think of the Adminstration's NASA policy, when you combine it with the general fiscal crisis and Congressional priorities, the results are alarming planetary scientists. Participation in a joint Mars mission with ESA is up in the air, as are almost all planetary missions not already well into the pipleine. While Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's published claim that all future science missions were dead is an exaggeration, the recent House-Senate conference report on NASA offers an immediate budget cut with no prospects of restoration. Given all that, funding the Webb space telescope and the Space Launch System is not going to leave much money for any new initiatives.
COMMENT: It would be nice to see the aerospace giants offer to fund some small science missions as a public service. NASA, Lockheed Martin, Norhtrop Grumman, etc. all prosper when NASA prospers.

Thanks, Beyond the Edge radio

2011-11-16T10:09:00.001-07:00

We had a great interview Sunday. I was a little apprehensive because Beyond the Edge radio includes all kinds of paranormal topics I don't get into. But it was a superb interview, with a lot of time spent on why cryptozoology is (and sometimes is not) scientific and the role of the amateur in modern sceince (a lot more important than most people realize, whether it's asteroid-hunting or finding new insects.) We also delved into my other passion, space exploration, at some length and made a brief venture into the crossover between developmental aircraft projects and UFO reports. Thanks to Eric and company for a good time.

Interview on Cryptozoology

2011-11-11T14:08:00.001-07:00

Catch me 8PM EST Sunday - thanks to Eric at Byond the Edge Radio for an invitation to discuss cryptozoology. I consider myself an open-minded skeptic: a believer in the validity of cryptozoology, but a skeptica about claims that don't make sense from an ecological or zoological point of view.

"Join us as we return live Sunday Nights at 8:00 pm ET to 10:00 pm as Eric Altman, Lon Strickler, and the crew bring you the best in Alternative Talk Radio that promises to take you... Beyond The Edge. With the FRESH topics, great guests and an all around bizarre time, you never know what to expect! Tune in to find out what all the talk is about.

Listen live by clicking on the listen live and chat tab and click listen live or visit www.jackaloperadio.com"

Encounter Africa in Colorado Springs

2011-11-09T22:12:00.002-07:00

Elephants need a new pad

The half-century old elephant barn at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo is being demolished. The elephants, in the next phase of the zoo's Encounter Africa project, will reappear in spacious modern quarters. Good going, Zoo! The zoo has always been exemplary - more so in that it receives no public funds, yet manages to raise enough to provide quality habitats and programs such as black-footed ferret breeding.

Now That's a Croc!

2011-11-09T21:56:00.000-07:00

Now that's a croc!

A Phillipine village now claims it has the biggest live crocodile in the world. Pronounced to be over 6 meters (20 feet, 4 inches if you prefer) by an Australian expert, the crocodile is drawing tourists at 500 a day, and Guiness is looking into the new world record.
COMMENT: It looks like it belongs in a Jurassic Park movie, not a pen in a remote village.

Human v Chimp - How different?

2011-11-06T18:31:00.002-07:00

From House, M.D. -
Dr. Foreman: "Her oxygen saturation is normal."
Dr. House: "It's off by one percentage point."
Foreman: "It's within range. It's normal."
House: "If her DNA was off by one percentage point, she'd be a dolphin."

We're not that close to dolphins, but we've heard interminably that humans and chimps share 98% (give or take 1%) of our DNA with chimps. Well, then why are we different in many obvious ways? According to researchers at Georgia Tech, that nearly-identical genome is significantly affected by gaps (not physical gaps, but areas filled by "junk" sequences called retrotransposons) surrounding the genes and determining which genes are expressed (turned on) and which are not. That raises some interesting mad-scientist experimentation ideas for the writers of Crichton-type fiction.

Keeping students in a tough field

2011-11-04T11:22:00.002-06:00

Everyone, including the President, thinks we need to graduate more engineers. But the dropout rate is double that for most majors. The causes include some obvious ones - STEM fields are tough and students often under-prepared - and some I would not have thought of, such as that grade inflation has made humanities degrees an easier route to a high GPA. This article recommends more innovative approaches to the "death march" first and second years, including more project-based learning.
COMMENT: I went to USC totally unprepared, and left Aerospace Engineering after getting a 2 on a 100-point calculus test. There were freshman projects, but I didn't get that far. I have always thought there was more one-on-one guidance and interaction needed: accept fewer students, give them more help, and you'll end up graduating more. But no one asks me.

Monkey business in China

2011-11-02T21:18:00.001-06:00

I'm not sure what this is. Not a monkey, certainly. A loris, perhaps? Awfully cute.

Update: And the winner is... spotted cuscus! Not a native of China, so apparently a local zoo wasn't sure what to make of it.

Loss of diversity makes everything verse

2011-11-02T21:10:00.002-06:00

OK, the pun was terrible. But the point is important. Why does life survive mass extinctions, and why does it take longer in some cases to recover species diversity than in other cases? Scientists looking at the Permian-Triassic extinction, 250 MYA, say they can trace cause and effect. Loss of diversity begets more loss of diversity, and recovery is slower when there are fewer species (in other words, fewer respoitories of unique genomes) to work with. It may be worse when it's the big (apex) predators and herbivores are the ones to go. As Prof Jessica Whitesides, concerned about modern extinctions, puts it, “We’re showing that low-diversity systems take a long time to recover. When you destroy links in the food web, effects exist that are difficult to see. Normally when people think of extinctions, it’s of single species. This is a systems approach.”

A new look at new species

2011-11-02T21:06:00.001-06:00

This almost gets monotonous. Ho hum, another group of experts find hundreds of beautiful and exotic new species.
OK, it's not monotonous. It's wonderful. Explore!

Three new bat species for Halloween

2011-10-30T16:43:00.001-06:00

What's Halloween without bats? Here are three new species from Southeast Asia - all looking suitable weird from a human point of view. Scientists note they have such refined sonar systems they detect and avoid the mist nets usually used to snare birds and bats for study. Also noted (sigh) is that all three are endangered by deforestation.

NASA IG annoys every sane citizen

2011-10-29T17:31:00.003-06:00

OK, I accept NASA's position that all moon rocks, even tiny slivers, are Federal property unless paperwork has been done giving someone else ownership. So an elderly Florida woman's sample, which she says Neil Armstrong gave to her husband and he says he did not, may technically remain government property. So NASA has a right to ask for it back. Instead, the NASA inspector general arranged a massive raiding party of its own personnel and local law enforcement to terrorize the poor woman in a ridiculous, heavy-handed response totally unmerited by the circumstances. Keith Cowing of NASAWatch is on something of a crusade here. Good for him.

Reminder: All posts are solely the personal opinion of the author as a private citizen.

Dolphin Day - sensing electric fields

2011-10-25T15:26:00.002-06:00

Sharks can sense the electrical fields generated by the nervous systems of fish. That looks like a vacuum cleaner attachment on the front of a hammerhead shark kind of is a vacuum cleaner attachment, or maybe a mine detector - use whatever human analogy you will. But the platypus is the only mammal that can sense electrical fields. Or so we thought, until one species of dolphin proved to have it, too.
COMMENT: Dolphins have big brains, smart hunting strategies, sonar, AND electrical sensing? Fish are screwed.

Dolphin Day- "Here's how to hunt, you idiots."

2011-10-25T15:20:00.002-06:00

If you're a fish trying to hide from a hungry dolphin and you see a large conch shell, you may want to duck inside it. That would be a bad idea. Indopacific bottlenose dolphins have figured out that, if you get the fish in there and use the tip of your beak to keep it there, you can grab the whole shell, take it to the surface, and dump the contents into your mouth. Surprisingly (or perhaps not?), more dolphins seem to be catching on to the trick. These critters learn fast.

Dolphin Day - Social networking and cetaceans

2011-10-25T15:19:00.004-06:00

Sex-seeking male dolphins (in one species, at least) have wingmen to help "look for chicks." Really. Dolphins are turning out to be so human that, if we could just teach them how to lie, they could run for Congress.
COMMENT: Actually, they probably can lie. But would they want to be in politics? After a day hanging out with sea slugs, hagfish, sharks, and slime eels, why make it worse and be surrounded by lawyers?

NASA moves to protect Apollo sites on the Moon

2011-10-22T10:06:00.003-06:00

The Apollo landing sites should be preserved forever as milestones in human history, but there's technically nothing to prevent someone from going up and mucking around with them (the only thing forbidden is actually taking the hardware, which remains U.S. government property).
NASA is working on it. In this article, Leonard David describes how the space agency has drafted guidelines to protect sites of manned and robotic lunar exploration. NASA would prohibit any unofficial visits to the two most significant sites - Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 - and limitations on human or robotic visits (like those of Google Lunar X-Prize landers) - to the other locations.
COMMENT: We don't think nearly often enough about how to maintain what we're doing here and now as a record of future generations to understand what we were like and why we valued the things we did. This is an important first step.

Skeptic takes on sasquatch

2011-10-20T21:20:00.003-06:00

Skeptical investigator Ben Raford once offered 10 reasons sasquatch didn't exist, such as lack of fossils, lack of bodies, etc. Most of his points (read them in the title link on Cryptomundo) strike me as valid, but I have to throw the flag on this one:
"“The last large animal to be found was probably the giant panda, and that was 100 years ago,” said Radford. “There has not been a single new creature that doesn’t fit the recognized taxonomy discovered in the last century, there just simply hasn’t.” He lated confined his comment to human-sized or larger land animals.

Ben, I respect you, but on this point you're still wrong.

Start with the 500-kg kouprey in 1937.
Then to what I wrote in the post:
"First, how did the the Vu Quang ox (new genus) get overlooked? You can argue whether the 100-lb giant muntjac qualifies as human-sized, but I think it does. Then you have creatures like the Bili apes, the mainland population of the Javan rhino, and the Bardia elephants did not end up meriting new taxonomic classifications, but they are examples of how populations of very large and distinctive animals went unnoticed by scientific. Add the huge populations – I mean really huge – of recently discovered gorillas and elephants, and the suggestion that there are no big mammals left is as unpersuasive as when Simpson made it in 1984."

The eminent George Gaylord Simpson wrote in 1984 that only a "few small and unimportant mammals" were likely to turn up. He was wrong. Big-time. Discovery of new mammals is going up, not down.

The Patterson-Gimlin film: Sasquatch at 44

2011-10-20T21:13:00.002-06:00

Sasquatch really hit the bigtime in 1967, with a film that looked, at first viewing, very impressive. It's still impressive - IF there has ever been a genuine film of Sasquatch, this is it. Cryptomundo offers new analysis and comments on the film's 44th "birthday." I won;t rehash the endlessly-fought-over technical points, but here's what I added on this site:

"I too am very reluctant to overinterpret the blobs of light and shadow on an image 1.8mm high blown up countless times. But the biggest problem I have with declaring it authentic is the lack of anything as impressive for the last 44 years. Sure, there are still long odds against a close-range encounter with a camera-armed non-panicking human, but those odds are a heck of a lot better in the camcorder/cell phone age than they were in the days of the P-G encounter. I think I’ve looked at everything posted on Cryptomundo without once being as impressed as I am by P-G, which hints to me that P-G is a fluke in the sense of being an exceptionally convincing fake."

Mastodon hunting in early Americas

2011-10-20T21:06:00.003-06:00

When did people first get to North America? The long-held theory that pre-Clovis people came no earlier than 12,000 years ago has hung on way too long (I never liked it, but no one cared what I thought.) Anyway, a mastodon tusk found near Seattle and penetrated by a spear point has been dated to 13,800 years old. If people ad reached that far south, they came over earlier than thought. Frankly, I think we'll keep pushing this date back. I would not be surprised if, in another 20 years, the textbooks will start the peopling of the Americas over 30,000 years back.

Big ideas from Small Satellite conferences

2011-10-18T07:51:00.002-06:00

Thanks to Leonard David for a good article on the August Conference on Small Satellites. The quotes were accurate, and Leonard even humored me to adding a note that my views were not officially those of my company (even good companies look askance if you seem to be speaking for them when you're not. I mastered the art of the disclaimer a long time ago.)
I think the most important point I made here is that smallsat knowledge has reached a tipping point, where a space agency can now exist anywhere in the world and can be anything from a huge government effort to a kid with a soldering iron an an Internet-ordered CubeSat kit. Who knows the ramifications of that? None of us do - yet.

The Galapagos: Unique meeting of man and nature

2011-10-18T07:42:00.002-06:00

The place that inspired The Origin of Species is still pretty unusual. This is a trip I have to take some day. The unique inhabitants, including turtles, marine iguanas, sea lions, cormorants, penguins (what are penguins doing on a tropical island?) and so on, still show no fear of humans. Snorkelers report the delightful experience of sea lions coming up to look at their own reflections in scuba masks. The difficult balance between allowing tourism for needed revenue and keeping tourist numbers and activities restricted enough to avoid spooking the wildlife seems, so far, to be holding. The Earth is still full of magic...

No faster-than-light neutrinos? Darn.

2011-10-16T11:36:00.002-06:00

Well, the experiment that appeared to show a beam of neutrinos traveling faster than light appears to be a goof. The CERN researchers who made the claim may not have properly taken into account the motion of the GPS satellites providing the timing signal that seemed to show neutrinos being detected .64 nanoseconds too fast for normal travel between the transmitted in Switzerland and the receiver in Italy.
COMMENT #1 - most people don't realize that GPS satellites don't just provide location. The GPS constellation also provides the world's most accurate timing information, used by scientists, militaries, etc. worldwide.
COMMENT #2 - This article headlines that she shouldn't fire up our faster-than-light (FTL) spaceship drives just yet. True, but it's another opportunity to point out that a vigorous community of talented scientists and engineers are looking at how we can realistically achieve interstellar travel with spacecraft moving at up to half lightspeed. See http://www.100yss.org/

Purple sponges cover reef off English coast

2011-10-15T16:49:00.002-06:00

The world's largest chalk reef - a reef carved out by the action of water in a chalk formation rather than built up by tiny tropical organisms - lies only 100m in some places off the coast of Norfolk. On in, amateur divers found large numbers of a purple sponge that might seem more at home in the oceans of Europa than Europe. It is indeed a new species, just offshore from a teeming coast in a heavily fished area, and somehow either no one found it or everyone ignored it.
COMMENT: Have I said enough times that discoveries are often right under our noses, if only we are alert to them?

The world under the ice

2011-10-15T16:40:00.003-06:00

Scientists are planning an new expedition to Antarctica to set up a drilling rig that will use hot water to melt its way through ice. A lot of ice.
Starting next November, the team will meal a borehole 36cm wide through 3,000m of ice to an ancient lake that apparently stays liquid thanks to geothermal heat. They expect to find single-celled life forms that will tell us a great deal about the time, a half mission years in the past, when the lake was "trapped" under ice. A huge uncertainly is how to handle the enormous pressure the water has built up - as much as 2,700 atmospheres. The drilling equipment and hose had to be custom-built for the task. and the researchers will endure brutal conditions to carry out the task.
COMMENT: Yes, there is still adventure in science. More than most people could handle.

The Kraken sleepeth?

2011-10-13T08:58:00.004-06:00

Truly gigantic squids, long known in myth as the Kraken, were thought to be only myth, even though modern evidence suggests living giant squids up to 20m long are possible.
The later Peter Benchley once wrote that a prominent teuthologist who asked not to be named would not be surprised if a 40m squid turned up. Now from the world of paleontology comes the suggestion that such giants lived a very long time ago. It's circumstantial evidence - a collection of bones of huge, apparently violently killed 14-m icthyosaurs from over 200 million years ago - but paleontologist Mark McMenamin thinks it's the logical explanation.
COMMENT: Expect a lot of pushback - he's making a very dramatic claim without hard evidence for it. But if he's willing to advance and defend his work, then who knows what others may find pursuing this lead and looking for better evidence?

Dust-up over Snowman

2011-10-13T08:47:00.002-06:00

There's a lot of commentary flying around about an international effort to locate the purported large primate of south-central Siberia. This is near the location where a new ancestor, recently described Homo denisiova, was recently described, and it's natural to wonder if "snowman" reports in modern times might relate to the same primate or its descendant. Skeptical writer Benjamin Radford thought that, essentially, the whole field of "hominology" is so riddled with exaggeration and slipshod science that there's nothing solid to grab on to. Here Dr. Jeff Meldrum argues that, whatever the value of particular bits of evidence and particular claims, there is something very much worth investigating.
COMMENT: Sure, there is a very slipshod component in cryptozoology. The Siberian snowman does not seem to me one of the better cases. But if serious people like Meldrum want to investigate, I cheer them on. It's still a big world out there.

North America was not always primate-free

2011-10-13T08:36:00.004-06:00

OK, we're primates, but you know what I mean. Long before humans trod the land bridge (or sailed south of it - the evidence is mixed and intriguing). A new species of fossil primate, Mescalerolemur horneri, has been dug out of West Texas in an area called the Devil's Graveyard. Anthropologist Chris Kirk says Mescalerolemur seems more closely related to fossil primates from Africa and Eurasia than to others known from North America. Going back 14 million years, it's an intriguing piece of a puzzle we still know very little about.

A giant, for a limpet

2011-10-13T08:19:00.002-06:00

We humans are naturally fascinated by huge creatures, so it's hard to get us excited about anything 14mm long. However, when 14mm is huge for a specific type of animal, that's very interesting to science. A limpet-like mollusk from Antarctica (Zeidora Antarctica, of course), which is three times as long as the 5mm normal for its genus.
COMMENT: As I say so often - the discoveries are everywhere. Keep up the search!

Explaining a UFO artifact

2011-10-13T08:08:00.002-06:00

UFO researchers have long been on a search for physical evidence of postulated alien technology. A fellow named Bob White has spent years writing and talking about a very odd-looking bit of metal he ways was deposited by an alien spaceship. There's no question it's odd, looking like an elongated pine cone and containing an amalgam of metals that didn't make any sense. In this case, though, it eventually did make sense when the right person saw it. The result:
"The object in question is made of accreted grinding residue. It forms in a manner similar to a common stalagmite when metal castings are “cleaned” on large stationary grinders."
COMMENT: I think there are unexplained aerial phenomena, but most likely they are natural. There's no question the concept of alien visitors is compelling: No one would be more fascinated than I to learn "they" were actually here. But I haven't seen anything that convinces me yet.

Students can be scientists, wherever they are

2011-10-08T08:56:00.002-06:00

On Staten Island, these students are doing real science. Salamanders, their teacher explains, are easily ignored, yet can be a bellwether for ecological changes. So these New York middle-schoolers are collecting data for the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation. They and their teachers are turning over rocks, nosing through leaf litter, and learning how to find, identify, and evaluate the population of salamanders in their parks and other green spots of the city.

COMMENT: Real kids, real science. Is there a better way to motivate the scientists of the future? Every city and town in the country should be doing projects like this.

A frog that meows?

2011-10-07T07:03:00.003-06:00

Yep. The meowing night frog and 11 other new species, plus three presumed-extinct (or at least long-missing) types, turned up in a study of the frogs of western India, conducted in several trips from 1994 through last year. . A bit like the just described Australian boulder frogs (see entry below), the 3.5 cm Nyctibatrachus poocha lurks in crevices in the rock most of the time. The name "poocha" means "domestic cat" in the local language.

These and more new and surprising Indian amphibians are collected at http://www.frogindia.org

Hop to it!

New Aussie frog species climb (not hop) into view

2011-10-07T06:55:00.002-06:00

The golden-capped boulder frog is a handsome looking creature by amphibian standards, a golden-brown animal with long limbs and fingers. It and its fellow new species, the kutini boulder frog, also have large triangular finger pads, another adaptation for rock-climbing in a habitat where hopping is really not a good way to get around. Indeed, these frogs simply don't hop. The new frogs are abut 5 cm long, eat mainly ants, and lay eggs in which the tadpoles develop all the way to the mini-frog level. Their discoverer, Dr. Conrad Hoskin, says they stay deep in the cracks of boulders until night or rain brings them out.
COMMENT: Nature is like the Steve Jobs of the universe: it never runs out of new ideas.
I hope someone names a new species after Steve, by the way. Something unique and unexpected.

Mind-boggling photo from orbit

2011-10-06T15:44:00.001-06:00

This shows two Soyuz spacecraft backlit by the aurora. Breathtaking.

Nobel for Chemistry: A Dramatic story in science

2011-10-06T07:18:00.003-06:00

Prof Daniel Shechtman of Israel won the Nobel in chemistry for his discovery of a new from of condensed matter, quasicrystals - a find that got him ridiculed for years. Crystals are big on symmetry. You cut one in half, it looks the same on both sides - your turn one a quarter or a half turn, it looks the same. Shechtman found crystals in patterns that could not be repeated so easily - they had pentagonal symmetry. Turn a quasicrystal a half-turn and it no longer looks the same, but if you go back to the starting position and turn it a fifth of a turn, it DOES look the same. He saw this in 1982, but it was decades before anyone could stop throwing rocks long enough to provide the ultimate proof - growing quasicrystals in a lab. Congratulations to a pioneer!

International team chases yeti

2011-10-04T09:59:00.002-06:00

08 is the catalyst for an international gathering In the Kemerova region of Siberia to hunt of scientists and researchers from the U.S., Russia and other nations to exchange information on the long-sought Yeti/almas/snowman/whatever it is. After conferring, they will put on their parkas and start out after the creature. (There's a good image here of the 35-cm footprint found by a Japanese expedition in 2008, although it was in Nepal, a LONG way from Siberia and therefore not really pertinent.)
COMMENT: The odds are long, but the idea that some kind of large primate has adapted to life in mountain passes and alpine forests isn't crazy. I will them success.

And the Nobel goes to....

2011-10-04T08:18:00.002-06:00

For physics, it goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss, who, in work beginning in 1998, proved the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Think about that. It's a mind-blowing concept. If all matter is following the path set by an explosion, the Big Bang, 14B years ago, it should be slowing down thanks to entropy and all those gravitational tugs. It's not. This was a seriously W-T-F moment of human understanding. Dark matter? Dark energy? Evil spirits? Almost anything is possible in a universe as strange as this one.

Starship Symposium - Propulsion

2011-10-02T05:37:00.004-06:00

Get your geek on:

Notes from sessions yesterday on interstellar propulsion. Basically, as hard and costly as this trick will be to solve, there ARE promising approaches to it. Make it so!

Propulsion Panel Notes

George Miley -
It’s popular to speculate on Helium-3 fusion, but H3 collection (from moon soil or gas giant planetary atmospheres) is a huge task by itself. Start with elements, even if less optimal, available on Earth.
Louis Freedman, President, The Planetary Society – Promoted lightsails as a near-term technology with great potential. Near-term missions could warn of solar weather, thanks to their ability to “hover” in a spot in interstellar space, and perform near Earth object (NEO) missions, leading to capability to steer NEOs with huge sails
Geoffrey Landis – Lightsails are a good technology, to be followed by nuclear engines. They may or may not lead to interstellar capabilities
Friedman – Simplify missions by taking =humans out of the loop. With advances in robotics and media technology, “being there” virtually is an improving option
Mr. Kammash, Project Icarus – No, we need humans in the loop to make it worthwhile for people to fund huge endeavors.
“Columbus would not have gotten funding for sending a frog on precursor mission.”
Suggested a new Icarus motto: “On to the stars: Cowards shoot for Mars.”
Landis – all propulsion research has value because a starship might have two or three systems, for instance, for accelerating, braking, and precise maneuvers
Miley: It’s all depended on cheaper access to orbit. We need more work to explore SSTOs, light gas guns, and directed energy-powered launches.

There's a lot more where this came from. They are taping the sessions, so we should see some on DARPA's website.

At the Starship Symposium

2011-09-30T18:44:00.002-06:00

Wow. Long discussions on the physics of interstellar propulsion, by fission, fusion, and countless other methods. More to the point of this meeting, we also have the other sciences, the arts, politics, etc. NASA Ames Director Pete Worden spoke on how this is a nexus of history - space-related research has revolutionized physics, and epochal discoveries in the biosciences are close. Aerial Waldman introduced her website spacehack.org, a directory of ways for citizens to get directly involved in planet hunting, galaxy-hunting, and other space ventures. I went to two sessions on propulsion physics, and Dr. Mae Jemison's panel on the educational and cultural aspects of a spacefaring civilization. More details to come!

The IgNobel Prizes are out!

2011-09-30T18:36:00.002-06:00

The IgNobel Peace Prize went to the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturas Zuokas, got the peace prize for "demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armored truck."

Well, was he wrong?

Other prizes went to a Japanese inventor whose fire alarm uses scent (wasabi) instead of smell, a study of why beetles mate, and a paper on how to procrastinate (even if the author never finished it. Rim Shot.) Do we need to understand the science of why tortoises yawn?

Oh well, it's all progress.

The Starship Symposium

2011-09-30T07:18:00.000-06:00

Well, here I am at the DARPA/NASA 100-Year Starship Symposium. I'm in a nice hotel and I'm surrounded by hundreds of the best minds on the planet Earth. Sometimes in life you really do get a good day. I don't give a talk until Sunday, so I can just soak up the information.
Will be posting some of the good stuff.

China's next great leap in space

2011-09-29T13:33:00.003-06:00

China, the third nation in the world to launch its own astronauts on its own rockets, is ready for the next step. Within the week, China will launch a test module for rendezvous and docking experiments designed to lead, by 2020, for a permanent orbiting laboratory. (There have been off-and-on discussions about China as a partner on the International Space Station, but current limits on NASA-Chinese ventures, imposed by Congress, effectively rule it out.) The 8.5 ton module is named Tiangong 1 ("Heavenly Palace 1).” WIRED magazine here speculates it could be part of a much larger program including military objectives.
COMMENT: The author quotes the Union of Concerned Scientists as saying this is just a jobs program with no military implications, which is pretty funny considering the UCS thinks practically every U.S. mission has a dark military purpose behind it, and any time WE do rendezvous and docking experiments it's to improve our capability to attack other satellites. There is an inevitable overlap between almost any civilian and military space projects, and it remains to be seen just how much of the Chinese program is scientific and how much effort is devoted to "other purposes." But wearing my space geek hat, I would say this is an important milestone in said exploration, and I wish the Chinese all success.
Also, can we borrow some Chinese inspiration in the area of naming space vehicles. These are symbols of our world's greatness, or at least our potential greatness. China has the Heavenly Palace. We have the space station, space shuttle, and space launch system. Surely we can do better.

NOTE: All posts are, as usual, except sometimes even more emphatically, so, the personal opinion of the author as a private citizen,

Hail the black-footed ferret

2011-09-28T15:00:00.003-06:00

A creature declared extinct twice deserves its won Web page, and Nat Geo has given it one. The little "outlaw" of the prairies was rediscovered for the second time 30 years ago and is increasingly repopulating the wild thanks to captive breeding and "ferret basic training" activities designed to fit young ferrets for a life in the wild. (Or they could just watch Animal Planet.) Anyway, major conservation success stories demand to be celebrated, and this is definitely one of them!

The Fried Egg Nebula

2011-09-28T14:48:00.002-06:00

That's what astronomers have tagged this example, which shows a gigantic star at the center of two expanding shells of debris as it goes through the stages of stellar death. The star, 13,000 light years away, is a rare "yellow hypergiant" 20,000 times the mass of our sun.

Watch in wonder....

COMMENT: Surely they could have come up with a cooler nickname, like the "Target Nebula" or the "Robin Hood Nebula." Of course, the image came from an instrument called the Very Large Telescope. Seriously. We need to ship an emergency supply of cool names to Europe.

SpaceX is up to something even cooler

2011-09-27T06:18:00.002-06:00

I love those folks at SpaceX - always something cooking. Now they've applied for a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permit to fly the Grasshopper, an experimental reusable launch vehicle (RLV). The application says this gadget "consists of a Falcon 9 first stage tank, a single Merlin-1D engine, four steel landing legs and a support structure, plus other pressurization tanks attached to the support structure." Thunderbirds are GO!

Throwing the baby sea serpent out with the seawater

2011-09-26T07:16:00.003-06:00

A story often repeated by those delving into sea serpents that that Captain William Hagelund in 1968 briefly caught, then release, a "baby Cadborosaurus" the sea serpent reported to haunt the coastal waters of Canada and the US Paficic Northwest). Hagelund sketched and released the creature. Now Dr. Darren Naish has published a paper with a likely identity: the seaman was not a hoaxer, nor a sea serpent pioneer. He was followed by an odd-looking creature, the Bay pipefish. Naish writes: "Pipefishes are not all that familiar and are rarely encountered. They also do weird stuff that most people would find unexpected: they can produce a neck-like region by bending and raising the anterior part of the body ....and can even raise the head above the water surface, for example."
COMMENT: I think he's likely nailed it. I never knew what to make of the "baby" stories (there is one other a bit like Hagelund's) and wrote them off as, if not false, then unprovable without a definite creature to compare them to.
BTW, there are lots of good links in Naish's blog post to other examinations of marine carcasses and other evidence. Cryptozoologists whould all give it a read.

Who's got the UARS?

2011-09-26T06:32:00.003-06:00

OK, I was straining for a witty headline this time. But it appears an item I reposted the other day was false - we do not, in fact, have good reports of UARS debris landing in Canada, only a hoax by a guy with a Twitter account. He calls it a "social experiment." All kinds of news organizations picked it up without question. So it proves again the fragility of information in the Information Age. (There may still be debris in Canada, as it was within the possible impact zone, but there's little doubt most of it lies under the trackless Pacific. So a sigh of relief is heard from NASA HQ).

Book Review: Fishing fun with Jeremy Wade

2011-09-25T14:48:00.003-06:00

River Monsters
by Jeremy Wade
Da Capo Press, 2011
The host of River Monsters here unspools his adventures with rod and reel. Wade is clearly a master at the craft of fishing, but he makes it clear here that sometimes he's benefited from dumb luck. He has caught (and, when practical, released) the largest freshwater fishes on every inhabited continent. Along the way, he has plenty of harrowing adventures, in the water and out. Wade explains some points of fish biology (for example, adapting to fresh v. salt water) and conservation concisely and clearly. He also has some tidbits for the cryptozoologist. Remember, Wade is the guy who filed an "impossible animal:" a river dolphin with a weird sawtooth back, which turned out to be a wildly unlikely survivor of being hacked with a machete by a fisherman. He investigates Lake Iliamna (finding some data I did not, although the reverse is also true) and comes to the same conclusion I did, that it's an undocumented population of white sturgeon. This book is gripping fun from beginning to end.

UARS satellite vs. Earth: Earth 1, Satellite 0

2011-09-24T12:19:00.002-06:00

Falling satellites may be big objects, but eventually they slam into an object missions of times larger, and a graceful orbital path becomes a tumble, then a fiery splat. Or splash. NASA's UARS, including an estimated 26 parts/pieces capable of surviving its disintegration on reentry, hit last night, mainly in the Pacific Ocean, but producing some reports of debris on the ground in Canada. No injuries or property damage have been reported.
NASA was originally uncertain of the impact points. NASA spokesman Stephen Cole said, “It could have fallen into the Pacific. It could have continued a little further into Canada. But we don’t have confirmation of that.” The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base, plus some phone calls from Canada, eventually shed more light on the satellite's fate.

Step forward for space cooperation

2011-09-24T11:53:00.001-06:00

This is a step forward on a subkject I have long been urging needs more attention. No one nation can afford to do everything it wants to in space.

From NASA:
Global Exploration Roadmap was developed by the ISECG and is the culmination of work by 12 space agencies, including NASA, over the past year to advance coordinated space exploration.

The roadmap begins with the International Space Station and expands human presence throughout the solar system, leading ultimately to human missions to explore the surface of Mars. The first iteration of the roadmap flows from this strategy and identifies two potential pathways: "Asteroid Next" and "Moon Next." Each pathway represents a mission scenario over a 25-year period, describing a logical sequence of robotic and human missions. Both pathways were deemed practical approaches addressing common high-level exploration goals developed by the participating agencies — serving to inform individual agency decisions related to exploration preparatory activities.

The following space agencies participated in developing the GER (in alphabetical order): ASI (Italy), CNES (France), CSA (Canada), DLR (Germany), ESA (European Space Agency), ISRO (India), JAXA (Japan), (KARI (Republic of Korea), NASA (United States of America), NSAU (Ukraine), Roscosmos (Russia), UKSA (United Kingdom).

Hear, hear!