Shuttle Problems: ET and Schedule

nasaspaceflight.com has a report on how external tank (ET) issues threaten the schedule for the launch of the next shuttle and how new or revised procedures are being developed to keep the launch of STS-121 on track.

COMMENT: OK, I'm not an engineer. I never worked on the Shuttle. But this story, if accurate, reeks of the "schedule pressure" factor that was cited as a contributor to Shuttle safety problems, and it makes me nervous as hell.

A Universe Stranger Than We Can Imagine

Two recent articles from New Scientist highlight the fact that our universe remains, despite all our advances, a complex place with many mysteries yet to be unraveled.

First (see title link above) Japan's Hayabusa probe to the asteroid Itokawa shows it's a "loosely packed pile of rubble" resulting from a collision between larger asteroids. The problem is that it's too small (only 535 meters long) and too loose - it has a porosity of 40% (meaning that much of its volume is empty space) and appears racked by internal stresses and quakes as well as further collisions. That leaves scientists stumped as to just why this thing, with its fragmented structure and miniscule gravity, is still holding together.

Meanwhile, Slava Turyshev of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is trying to solve another mystery - the Pioneer Anomaly. The space probe Pioneer 10, at last contact in 2003, was about 400,000 km off course, and Pioneer 11 (still in contact) shows a smaller deviation, even after factors like the gravitation of the Sun and planets, pressure of sunlight, the outgassing of onboard materials, and all the other factors in the amazingly complex world of deep-space trajectories were apparently accounted for. Turyshev will "refly" the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions virtually, using computer models, in an attempt to see where the course deviation began and look for hitherto-unsuspected causes.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025541.800.html

A Slew of Life Sciences Discoveries

It's been a very busy month in the world of biology - testament to the complexity of our living planet and to the limits of our current knowledge.

First (see the title link above), Israeli researchers have found an ancient, sealed-off ecosystem in a cave beneath a quarry. Ayalon Cave is over two kilometers long. New species of strange arthropods are all over the place. Scientists estimate the cave has been isolated for "millions of years."

Second, the Indonesian species of the coelacanth, discovered only in 1998, has been documented in new underwater footage. The actual video has not been released, but the ever-alert folks at cryptomundo.com have an advance report and a still image:
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/indocoelfilm/

Third, from the same part of the world, there is more news about the Flores humans (a.k.a. "hobbits"). A team led by Adam Brumm of the Australian National University reports these creatures have overturned previous thinking about the relationship between large brains and tool-making. He said, "Homo floresiensis was capable of making stone tools and therefore the standard story of the relationship between brain size and behavioral complexity in human evolution may be less straightforward than currently assumed."

Two books on the Flores discovery are coming out. For younger readers, there is Linda Goldenberg Atkinson's Little People and A Lost World (Lerner Publishing Group). Co-discoverer Mike Moorwood of the University of New England in Australia has written a book with Penny van Oosterzee with the long title, The Hobbit's Tale: Discovery, Significance and History of a New Human Species on the Island of Flores, Indonesia. (Thanks to Loren Coleman for passing on the advance news of this book, which he received via email from Morwoord.) Both books should be out later this year.

COMMENT: In 1884, naturalist Charles Gould wrote,
"Can we suppose we have at all exhausted the great museum of nature? Have we, in fact, penetrated beyond its antechambers?"
What would no doubt astonish Gould is that his words are still accurate over 120 years later.

A catfish that hunts on land

The eel catfish can live in tiny bodies of water that shouldn't be able to sustain a fish its size. How? It expands its feeding territory by wriggling out onto the shore and grabbing insects. It even has two different feeding mechanisms. In the water, it's a suction-feeder: on land, it can arch its "neck region" in a way few fish can to plant its mouth over an insect from above.
The linked story includes a video clip of the eel catfish on the hunt.

Inconvenient, but how true?

National Geographic News has a good article on Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." The earth scientist who reviews it, Eric Steig, is a believer in human-caused global warming. He thinks the science is mostly correct but finds the film guilty of some exaggerations and questionable cause-and-effect claims. It does harp on worst-case scenarios, although most of those, according to Steig, are at least possible.

Book of the Month: The Physics of Superheroes

James Kakalios' The Physics of Superheroes (2005, from (really) Gotham Books) might be the most enjoyable learning experience you'll ever have. Kakalios, a physics professor and comic book nut, introduces readers to the basic ideas and principles of physics, from F=ma to cosmic string theory, via examples of the actions of comic-book heroes and the discussion of what they might and might not be able to do. (For instance, Superman could leap a 660-foot building easily - IF we assume Krypton had a gravitational pull 15 times that of Earth, although constructing a world like that in plausibility is... well, you can't, but explaining why you can't is highly informative.) Who knew that one trip at super-speed would require the Flash to consume 150 million cheeseburgers as fuel?

Invisibility: Not Just Fantasy?

Two separate teams of researchers, one British and one American, have reported advances in what used to be pure fantasy - a shield, or perhaps even a cloak (albeit a very cumbersome one), that could make a person very difficult to see. Strange, man-made substances called "metamaterials" might be able to "guide" visible light around the periphery of an object instead of reflecting the light to an observer.

COMMENT: Some things, as Laurence Krauss has discused in his books on Star Trek, may be forever out of reach due to the laws of physics. This story is a good reminder, though, of how the human mind can conceive ways to work with and around those laws to create what used to be strictly science fiction - without offending Einstein or Newton.

A Spectacular Undersea Eruption

A Japanese remotely operated vehicle nudged within three meters of an erupting volcano deep beneath the Pacific. See the link for spectacular footage.

A "Yes" on the Hobbits

A coup for cryptozoologist Loren Coleman and friends at cryptomundo.com: paleontologist Peter Brown, co-discoverer of the Flores hominid remains known as the "hobbits," has responded to the recent spate of articles claiming the find represents one or more microcephalic humans. Brown argues, convincingly I think, that the chief scientific objector, biologist Robert D. Martin, has been too narrow in his reading of the evidence. Martin focuses on the one skull of Homo floresiensis (from the individual called LB1) and discounts the evidence of several other individuals as inconsequential. Brown challenged critics to "point you at a human mandible with the same features as those from Liang Bua. Claiming that they have the same features as small local people is simply untrue."

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."

A note in tomorrow's issue of Science magazine challenges the identification of the "hobbit" fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores, arguing they represent microcephalic modern humans.

How Do You Make an Elephant Exercise?

You can't. Not if she doesn't want to. Keepers at the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage installed the world's largest treadmill for their African elephant, Maggie. Unfortunately, they have yet to find a treat that will entice her to use it. The zoo has spent $1M to improve Maggie's living conditions, including having the $100,000 treadmill built.

COMMENT: OK, I can't resist this... maybe elephants and people are not so different after all. Most days, I can't induce myself to get on the treadmill. Good luck with the elephant.

Hollywood and Science: Big Waves

Films like Poseidon and The Perfect Storm include memorable images of gigantic waves. As Tariq Malik of LiveScience.com notes, such events, while perhaps not quite the size they attain in Hollywood, are nonetheless real. Indeed, we have found recently that both storm-driven waves and the "rogue waves" that can appear in relatively calm seas are larger and more common than once thought. Ten waves over 75 feet high were detected on satellite data in one three-week study. Hurricane Ivan in 2004 produced waves over 90 feet high. The largest wave ever measured (at least by someone who survived to tell about it) came during a strong gale in the Pacific and was triangulated from the bridge of the USS Ramapo at approximately 112 feet. It seems logical that some of the unexplained disappearances of ocean vessels sometimes ascribed to bizarre or even supernatural causes can be laid to this phenomenon. Malik's article includes several links to further information.

Strange doings in Malaysia

There have been a series of strange stories, some in the mainstream press, about an alleged "bigfoot" type of creature in Malaysia. There are always such stories from somewhere, it seems, but the difference this time is that detailed photographs are alleged to exist, and sketches based on them have been released. This has been enough to get one Malaysian government agency to publicly state it is involved in checking out the collection of reports, footprints, and other evidence. The indefatigable Loren Coleman has collected most of this material and put it on the Cryptomundo website. There's also a good discussion on the site about what should happen (and what probably will happen, which is not at all the same thing) if something as remarkable as a new species of ape is confirmed.

COMMENT: There's nothing inherently silly about a fairly large (1.2m or so) upright primate in the SE Asian region. This area of the world is extremely ape-friendly, with gibbons, siamangs, and orangutans sharing the habitat. There have been very serious searches on both the mainland and islands like Sumatra for such animals, known as orang-pendek and many other names. Dr. John MacKinnon of the WWF, an expert by anyone's standards, once reported primate footprints he couldn't identify. If I had to bet, I would say that the odds of the Malaysian reports being the real thing are, at least, better than those of sasquatch and the yeti. Here's hoping the alleged photographs turn up in the proper scientific hands.

New Monkey Goes up a Branch on Family Tree

A new monkey discovered last year in Tanzania is not just a new species, but a new genus. Rungwecebus kipunji is a large, light-colored monkey, up to 90 cm tall, and sports what one writer called a " distinctive Mohawk stripe of hair."
The animal was originally classified in an existing genus when photographs taken in the wild showed it clearly could not be referred to any known species. This was, incidentally, a very interesting affair, as cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has pointed out, because the scientific world very rarely accepts a photograph as a holotype for naming a new species. The usual rule is that you have to have a specimen. The rule was apparently bent in this case because qualified scientists observed and photographed it. (There's no one arbiter of what is accepted as a species - acceptance is more a case of "most scientists go along with it.") The DNA analysis that resulted in the new-genus claim was based on a specimen killed by a farmer well after the species' description had been published.
To illustrate this (ahem) fuzzy state of affairs, the news releases on this species have called it the first new genus of monkey in 83 years. That distinction requires discounting the new genera of monkeys Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has named in the Amazon. Van Roosmalen's work has not been universally accepted, as some zoologists think he's too quick to create new species based on surface differences.
In the case of the Tanzanian monkey (locally called the kipunji), one prominent taxonomist, Dr. Colin Groves, has urged caution, questioning whether enough DNA analysis has been done to prove the animal's distinctive status as a new genus. Even that pronouncement can be questioned, though, because there's no agreement on what degree of difference in DNA establishes a separate species, let alone a genus.
We will settle for this: a large, distinctive new primate has been discovered. It's one more reminder that we are a long way from knowing all the creatures of the Earth.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for the pointer to the article referenced above and to Loren Coleman for his analysis on www.cryptomundo.com.

Followup: The Bear was a Hybrid

The strange bear shot in the Northwest Territory of Canada (see entry below) was, indeed, a cross between a polar bear and a grizzly, or brown bear. This is the first time ever a mix of these two species has been positively identified in the wild. Canadian authorities have agreed the bear was taken legally and will return the skin to American hunter Jim Martell, who will have the only trophy of its kind in the world.

The Ivory-Bill: Next Round of Debate

The New York Times has a long article today on the controversy surrounding the claimed rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker. Jack Hitt examines the controversy as well as the issue for conservation. This is a very interesting case, with highly qualified experts strongly disagreeing over the evidence. As for the search itself, it goes on - and, as Hitt describes, it goes on in the midst of argument, rivalry, and what can only be called political intrigue. The bird remains elusive, as if determined not to answer the question of its existence. As birder Bill Tippit explains, "You can't find the bird. The bird has to find you." Hitt compares the species to Schrodinger's cat: "both extinct from the planet and nesting in the swamps of Arkansas."

Thanks to Elise LeQuire on the National Association of Science Writers mailing list for bringing this to my attention.

Science and UFOs - a British View

The UK's Ministry of Defense concluded, in a report written in 2000 but classified until now, that unidentified flying objects present no threat and there is no evidence any are extraterrestrial. The 400-page report blames many UFOs on meteors and other atmospheric phenomena.

COMMENT: I once spent some time looking into this subject. The claims of UFO contact seem more a psychological phenomenon than a physical one, and there's no credible evidence for any of the "crashed saucer" claims. I do think that, in dismissing the subject, we may be overlooking some unknown natural phenomena of great scientific interest. The late Philip Klass and others have postulated the existence of atmospheric plasmas - much larger and more stable cousins of ball lightning. When we have only recently discovered such spectacular phenomena as "sprites" and "elves," it seems unscientific to discount the possibility of other electromagnetic entities, even if we do not understand just how they might work. After all, we don't really understand ball lighting yet.

NASA and Science Missions

The National Research Council issued a new report saying bluntly that NASA does not have the budget to carry out both its human spaceflight programs and its space science mission. The chair of the committee which produced the report said, "There is a mismatch between what NASA has been assigned to do and the resources with which it has been provided." The crisis in space science has moved a well-respected private group, The Planetary Society, to begin a "Save Our Science" petition drive. Director Louis Friedman emphasized they were not pitting science against the Vision for Space Exploration. "We think that the Vision is being undermined," he said. "You cannot have a "vision" for space exploration without science." The program's website is http://planetary.org/programs/projects/sos/.

COMMENT: This is where the age-old fallacy that the NASA budget is too high comes in. NASA takes 0.7% of the Federal budget, but surveys show many Americans think it's 20% or more. That sets up a false choice between "space explorations and our needs on Earth." Human needs we are not meeting with 99.3% of the budget are not going to be solved by raiding the 0.7%. Some NASA advocates in Congress have proposed the right figure for NASA is about 1% of the budget, which is entirely reasonable for an agency that explores our universe while bringing us invaluable knowledge of our home planet.

New species - and species under threat

Two items in the same day on new species demonstrate how much we still have to learn about the diversity of this planet: and a report from the IUCN demonstrates how many species are at risk.

New species from the deep Atlantic (link in the title of this entry) include a new species of black dragonfish, 40 cm long with fearsome-looking fangs, and 10-20 even stranger invertebrates.

Meanwhile, eight new frog species have hopped out of Laos:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060504/ap_on_sc/new_frogs_2

And, according to the IUCN's 2006 Red List, the number of known species under threat keeps growing.
http://www.iucnredlist.org/
The list includes list includes a third of the known amphibians, a quarter of the mammals, and one out of every eight bird species.
Links from the IUCN site show the entire list of threatened taxa maintained in a searchable database by the SSC Red List Programme as part of the SSC's Species Information Service (SIS).

Colonel. Eileen Collins retires

Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a space shuttle flight, has retired from NASA at age 49. The former Air Force colonel's four-flight career will be remembered for two missions in particular. She became the first woman to command a Shuttle flight, which made her the first to command any crew in space. That flight was made in 1999 on the orbiter Columbia. In 2005, she commanded the orbiter Discovery on STS-114, the first mission after the 2003 Columbia disaster. That mission involved several firsts, including the first spacewalk to repair a shuttle. Her future endeavors are yet to be determined, but she's earned her place in history.

Space Shuttle: Fingers Crossed

An article on nasaspaceflight.com reports that engineers from Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) were strongly in favor of postponing the Space Shuttle's July flight (designated STS-121) in order to allow further modifications to the external tank (ET) to preclude damage to the orbiter from foam shedding. At the recent Program Requirements Control Board meeting, it was decided to go ahead with the modifications made so far, as the mission was sufficiently safe and would provide real-flight data on the current version of the ET. Future tanks will have more safety-related modifications in place.

COMMENT: I'm neither an engineer nor a Shuttle program veteran. Moreover, I've always said that the risk of spaceflight can never be zero, and we have to accept that if we are to explore the Solar System. All that said, IF this article is accurate and not taking things out of context, it bothers me a lot that NASA would opt to override the objections of the engineers most familiar with the ET. It also makes me wonder if "schedule pressure" is once again, even if unconsciously, edging back into NASA decision-making.

New Searches for Two Missing Woodpeckers

Our friends at the cryptomundo.com cryptozoology site have noted that, in addition to the continuing search for confirming evidence of the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States, there are expeditions underway to search for two close relatives. One is looking for the Cuban subspecies of the ivory-bill, missing since about 1983: the other is looking for a related species, Mexico's imperial woodpecker, the largest woodpecker in the world and also feared extinct.

Science Everyone Should Know

Columbia News Service reports that leading scientists were asked to suggest a question that everyone should know the answer to. Ten questions were proposed, ranging from "Why is the sky blue?" to "Did humans and dinosaurs live at the same time?"

COMMENT: The part of this article that was hard to believe - I've wondered if it was a joke - was a quote from a professor of science education at Columbia. O. Roger Anderson said, "People are so deeply involved in their family lives and professions. How are they supposed to remember this stuff?" If this is really the attitude of someone who is supposed to be teaching the future science educators of America, we might as well give up on having a future.

A "Grolar" Bear?

CBC News is reporting that a hunter in northwest Territories shot and killed a very odd-looking bear, assuming it was a grizzly, or brown bear (Ursus arctos). On closer inspection, though, the animal, described as "dirty blonde" in color, is considered a possible hybrid that might be half grizzly and half polar bear (U. maritimus.) Canada's Department of Environment is investigating. If confirmed, this would apparently be the first recorded case of such a hybrid in the wild.

COMMENT: Strange bears do turn up from time to time, but the only unquestioned polar-grizzly crosses came from instances where the two species mated in a zoo. MacFarlane's bear, a pre-World War II specimen from Northwest Territories, was yellow and weighed about 600 lbs. It was so strange that mammologist C. Hart Merriam described it as Vetularctos inopinatus "new species and genus." Since there were never any more specimens, though, Merriam's identification was gradually rejected or forgotten. One suggestion is that this was a grizzly-polar hybrid. The skin and skull are apparently still in the Smithsonian, and no one has ever dug them out for modern analysis. See my own Rumors of Existence (1995) and Terry Domico's Bears of the World (1988.)

Sculpting Lost Species

Rachel Berwick is a wildlife sculptor with a unique choice of subjects - cryptozoological species. Her works include the thylacine (the world's largest marsupial carnivore, believed extinct before WWII) and the coelacanth, the original "living fossil."

Thanks to Loren Coleman, whose post at www.cryptomundo.com drew my attention to this subject.

Search for a New Trout

A new species from Mexico, the “Conchos Trout,” has been identified by a team that followed long-lost evidence. A professor at Vanderbilt University gathered information on the trout in the 1880s, but he never formally published a description, and his specimens disappeared. It took eight years of searching for scientists to find the species again in the upper tributaries of the Ri­o Conchos of Chihuahua, Mexico.

Pioneering Test Pilot Scott Crossfield Dies

Scott Crossfield, the first man to fly more than twice the speed of sound, died when the plane he was piloting crashed in Georgia, some 50 miles north of Atlanta. Scott played important roles in early high-speed jet and rocketplane flight. He may be best remembered for his part in helping develop the X-15 rocketplane and his many flights in that craft to the edge of space.
Godspeed, Scott.

Comment:
There will no doubt be debate over what an 84-year-old man was doing flying - even if he was far from an average man. Whatever the merits of that question, Scott went out doing what he loved.

"Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring? And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure? Is there a better way to die?"
- Charles Lindbergh

The Market for Science News

This is the first study I've seen that attempts to gauge how many Americans are interested in science news and information. Researcher Mike Hess said, "We found that consumer interest in science and science-related consumer products is both larger and more complex than many people previously thought."

A real monster: Mapusaurus roseae

I can never resist posting dinosaur stories. Once a geek, always a geek.

M. roseae, a predator from Argentina that measured more than 40 feet long in life, is the subject of an interesting study by paleontologists. The species offers "the first substantial evidence of group living by large meat-eaters other than tyrannosaurs like T. rex."

Earliest Known Evidence of Dentistry

Skeletons in Pakistan eight thousand years old show evidence of having their teeth penetrated, sometimes deeply, by flint-tipped drills. The scientists who described the find noted it was most common on molars which already showed decay and thus was likely intended to relieve pain.

COMMENT: Having one's molars drilled deeply is, I can attest, an uncomfortable thing with the most modern of tools and anesthetics. The pain imparted by the Neolithic procedure must have been indescribable. Given that, it's interesting to wonder why people underwent horrifically painful procedures that did not help them. After this trick had been tried on one patient, why would any others submit to it?

A Giant Step Toward Land Animal Evolution

From the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadephia comes this press release:

"The recent discovery above the Arctic Circle of remarkably well preserved fossils from a new species of ancient fish provides a key marker in the evolutionary transition of fish to limbed animals...Dr. Ted Daeschler of The Academy of Natural Sciences and his colleagues announced the discovery of 375-million-year-old fossils with numerous features that place them squarely at the evolutionary transition from fish to limbed animals. The new species has a skull, neck, ribs and part of a fin like the earliest limbed animals, but also has fins and scales like a fish. The new species, named Tiktaalik roseae, shows that the evolution from life in water to life on land happened gradually in fish living in shallow water..."

Comment: wow.

New "standardized" satellite contract

From a Ball Aerospace news release: The USAF has chosen Ball as the prime contractor for the Space Test Program's Standard Interface Vehicle (STP-SIV).

"The goal of the STP-SIV program is to increase the flexibility and reduce the cost of small satellites, complementing similar efforts underway with small launch vehicles. Ball Aerospace, with teammates AeroAstro, Inc., and Broad Reach Engineering, will build a small spacecraft with a non-proprietary standardized payload-to-experiment interface. "

COMMENT: I wish them luck. Past efforts to reduce cost by standardization have failed because small satellite developers see no advantage in using the standard design unless it gets them affordable launch opportunities. If there is no promise of more frequent and/or affordable launch opportunities attached firmly to this program -and so far, there is not - it's not clear why anyone would follow a standard design instead of customizing to best suit the needs of their own payload.

China's Plans in Space

Luo Ge, vice administrator at the Chinese National Space Administration, has laid out his nation's current plans for space. They include robotic Moon missions, including the return of soil samples in 2017. Closer to home, a constellation of eight Earth-sensing satellites is planned, along with a heavy-lift launch vehicle able to place 25,000 kg in orbit. He said the budget for China's space program is about $500M U.S. per year, although it's not clear to American observers what is included and what might be paid through other budgets, such as the military's.

NASA: Dawn revived, CEV contract delayed

NASA has made two major decisions this week. The Dawn mission to study two of the largest asteroids has been revived after an earlier cancellation. After the scientific world complained loudly following NASA's cancellation of the mission for technical and fiscal reasons, NASA rexamined it and found the technical issues were close enough to solution that the mission should be completed. Dawn will launch in summer 2007.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19372


Also, NASA delayed awarding the next stage contracts for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV), extending the Phase 1 study contracts to Lockheed Martin and the Boeing/Northrop team from March 31 to August 31. One of the Phase 1 contractors will be selected as the Phase 2 prime contractor to design, develop, test, evaluate and produce the CEV.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19373

A Unique Quirk of Nature

A puzzling animal which looks like a very slender canine with short grayish-brown hair has been hanging around a Tyco Electronics plant in North Carolina. The big-eared creature, according to biologists who looked at photographs, is probably a red fox with a rare genetic condition known as Sampson. Such an animal lacks the outer coat of guard hairs and has only the dense, soft, underfur. Authorities say the animal appears to be healthy, so they intend to just let it be.

Obituary: Addwaita the tortoise

What may be the oldest known vertebrate in history has died in a zoo in India. Addwaita, an Aldabra giant tortoise, was brought to India before the American Revolution and is estimated to have been 250 years old at the time of his death. The tortoise's name in Bengali means "the one and only." He certainly was.

Success for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has returned the first test images from the most powerful cameras yet sent to the Red Planet. It marks another milestone in the search for new knowledge, and possibly life, on our distant companion world.

Falcon 1 Rocket Suffers Setback

The partly reusable Falcon 1, the first vehicle in a stable of low-cost rockets funded by Internet billionaire Elon Musk, failed on its first flight today.
It's hardly unusual for the first flight of a new booster to fail, and Musk's company, SpaceX, has the resources and will to continue. SpaceX vice president Gwynn Shotwell told reporters the causes were not clear yet. The vehicle failed about one minute into powered flight. She said, "Clearly this is a setback but we're in this for the long haul."

Comment: I know Gwynn Shotwell and have met the very enthusiastic Musk. I have no doubt they and their team will press on. The Falcon series could drastically lower the cost of access to orbit, and it's a worthy endeavor. Three more launches are already scheduled. Best of luck, my friends.

NASA launches science microsats

The STS5 mission, using a constellation of three 25-kg microsatellites, is NASA's latest successful science launch. The satellites will provide new knowledge of the Earth's magentic field. For some science missions, multiple small satellites are better than a single large one, since they can take measurements from (in this case) three orbits simultaneously. As NASA's science budget gets squeezed (see previous posts), there will no doubt be more interest in the use of small, relatively inexpensive satellites or groups of satellites for science missions.

NOTE: By a happy coincidence, the author just received word that a paper on this topic has been accepted for the AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites (www.smallsat.org). "Microspacecraft and the Vision for Space Exploration," by Matt Bille and Kris Winkler, will be presented at the August 2006 conference in Utah.

Book Review: Riding Rockets

Three-time Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane has produced a unique memoir of his time with NASA. The book offers more than any previous memoir (and frankly, more than most of us want to know) about the nasty problems associated with weightlessness and human waste disposal. Beyond that quirk, the book has a lot to offer. Mullane explains, in you-are-there prose, the experience of space flight and the physical and emotional strains of launch scrubs. He also does a nice job of introducing us to the personalities of his class of astronauts (the "Thirty-Five New Guys") and describing the interactions between people who were both loyal comrades and intense competitors. Indeed, some of the writing is so good that it makes me wonder what went wrong in Mullane's first book, the novel Red Sky, which was frankly a painful experience to read.
An interesting sidelight is Mullane's relationship to physicist Judith Resnik, who died on the Challenger. The married Mullane frankly admits to feeling an attraction to her and is glad he never acted on it, but the way he describes their interaction gives the impression that it was all up to him: there's a hint of the old fighter-pilot ego in his description of events. Speaking of fighter pilots, Mullane's description of what astronauts did with their supersonic T-38 trainers will curl the hair of readers who like to think of astronauts as sensible people. You may not always like Riding Rockets, but you won't be able to put it down.


Matt Bille

Commemoration of a Space Milestone

80 years ago, on March 16, 1926, American physicist Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket from a farm in Massachusetts. It weighed 4.7 kg and reached an altitude of approximately 12 meters. That might not seem like a very auspicious beginning, but it was the rocketry equivalent of the 12-second flight the Wright Brothers had made in 1903. Goddard lived long enough to develop more advanced rockets and examine the German V-2, which he always thought he could have bettered if the U.S. had given him adequate funding.

Oddly, I can't find a darn thing on any NASA sites about this important anniversary.

We salute you, Dr. Goddard.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter makes it into orbit

NASA's $450M Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made a "right on the money" entry into Martian orbit on Friday. The craft's two-year mission is to examine Mars for possbile environments that might house life and to explore find landing spots for future astronauts.

Water on Saturn's Moon

NASA reported its Cassini spacecraft found evidence of what appear to be geysers of liquid water erupting from subterranean Saturn's moon Enceladus. Carolyn Porco of the Cassini team said, "We realize that this is a radical conclusion -- that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold. However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."

Rediscovered - After 11 Million Years

A rat-like animal described as a new species from Laos last year isn't new at all. It's been hiding - for 11 million years. That's how old the latest known fossil from its family is. George Schaller of the WCS notes, ""It shows you it's well worth looking around in this world, still, to see what's out there."

World's Weirdest Crustacean?

This newly described species from the Pacific may merit that title. After all, what looks like a lobster covered with blond hair? Well, this critter does. It's not hair, of course, but a kind of hairlike filament. Still, the animal looks like it came either from a mad scientist's DNA lab or from another planet entirely.

There are more things in heaven and earth....

Not a Good Day for Earth

Two items from the BBC today don't provide a very cheery note for scientists. The first article (click on title link above) concerns a warning that climate change, the effect of aircraft exhaust, and other factors could seriously degrade astronomers' ability to study the heavens with Earth-based optical telescopes in just a few decades.
The second item:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4767296.stm
reports on a study indicating Antarctica is losing about 150 square km of ice to the ocean every year. There are uncertainties in the data, as with any complex phenomenon (for example, some parts of the ice sheet, based on other studies, are actually getting thicker) but the University of Colorado scientists involved are certain the net effect on the continent is a significant loss of ice.

COMMENT: There is a lot we don't know about climate change, including how much is due to human activity vs. normal swings in the Earth's temperatures. However, these reports point out the need to minimize the activity we can control, since it amounts, in essence, to an uncontrolled experiment on the planet we inhabit.

(Thanks to my colleague Kris Winkler for pointing out these articles.)

A Busy Week for Science

In the last week or so, scientists have:

Found the lost civilization of Tambora, buried in the world's largest known volcanic eruption in 1815:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060228/ap_on_sc/lost_civilization

Discovered a new temple in Egypt with statues of Ramses II:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060227/ap_on_sc/egypt_sun_temple_4

Uncovered a fossil that puts a specialized, swimming mammal back in the Jurassic era, 100 million years before any such thing was thought to exist:
http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/060223_aquatic_mammal.html

Discovered "Cueva del Fantasma" ("Cave of the Ghost") near the Aprada tepui in southern Venezuela - a cave so huge two helicopters can fly into it. At least one new frog species has been located there so far.

The frontiers of science still beckon us.

Europe: The Rise of Modern Man

In an article in NATURE, Paul Mellars from Cambridge University said a review of radiocarbon dating evidence from across Europe shows modern humans spread across the continent and out-competed the Neanderthals in the period between 46,000 and 41,000 years BP. The event had been placed between 43,000 and 36,000 years BP. In other words, the Neanderthals did not last as long as we thought. There is much we still don't know about Neanderthals and the intersection of their destinies with our own.

Reading the DNA of a comet

Scientists have confirmed that dust samples collected by the Stardust spacecraft, whcih returned to Earth in Janaury, are indeed from the comet Wild 2. The samples were collected in January 2004. Comet dust may not be interesting to most people, but it is fascinating to scientists who have their first-ever look at what may be the primordial material of the solar system. It's like finding the fossil of the first living things on Earth. Not to mention that what the Stardust team did - reaching across hundreds of millions of miles to sample a comet and bring its matter back to Earth - is simply astonishing. It's a great step forward in our exploration of the universe we all inhabit.
No matter how pressing our problems on Earth, sometimes people need to be reminded:
"Look up! For wonder awaits."

- Matt Bille

Obituary: Eastern Cougar Researcher

On February 18, 2006, Roger Cowburn, 77, of Potter County, Pennsylvania, passed away. Cowburn spent decades collecting evidence of the continued presence of the cougar (Felis concolor or Puma concolor) in Pennsylvania and surrounding Eastern states and trying to convince the relevant authorities to recognize and protect the animal.
Mr. Cowburn deserves mention because he's an example of the kind of dedicated amateur that science still needs. That does not mean his theory of Eastern cougar survival was correct (although I rather think that it is), but that science owes a continuing debt to all those people, past and present, who devote their own time to exploring the mysteries, great and small, that still surround us.

I salute you, Roger. I hope you have your answers now.
- Matt Bille

Peter Benchley has died

Author Peter Benchley, who started a phenomenon with Jaws and has more recently done extensive work to conserve sharks and other marine life, has died at 65.

Benchley's recent works, like Shark Tales, de-mythologize sharks and explore just how amazing these predators really are. He also discusses discuss topics including the giant squid (he quotes an unnamed teuthologist as saying they may grow to 150 feet), and large, extinct, and/or unknown sharks and other species.

The Church and the Laboratory

Pope Benedict has made a very clear statement that the Church welcomes the advances made through science, and that the spheres of science and faith have nothing to fear from one another. He said, "The Church joyfully accepts the real conquests of human knowledge and recognizes that spreading the Gospel also means really taking charge of the prospects and the challenges that modern knowledge unlocks."

The Scientists and the Sea Serpent

THE SEA SERPENT’S CENTENNIAL

By Matt Bille
To cryptozoologists, those interested in the unknown and unclassified beasts that may lurk in the forests and seas of the world, an anniversary has just passed. December 2005 was the centennial of the best-documented, most authoritative “sea serpent” sighting in history – a sighting that has still not been explained.
The sea serpent is one of the great puzzles of cryptozoology. Researchers’ files bulge with hundreds of reports going back over a thousand years. Most can be explained as misidentifications or hoaxes, but a minority stand out as true mysteries of the sea. The event that occurred on December 7, 1905, is the most puzzling of all these.

Two British naturalists, Michael J. Nicoll and E.G.B. Meade-Waldo, were the witnesses. They were experienced scientists, best known for their work in ornithology but with the wide interests and expertise common for naturalists in those days. Both were Fellows of the Zoological Society of London.
The encounter came during a research cruise aboard the yacht Valhalla. At 10:15 AM, the yacht was off the coast of Brazil, fifteen miles east of the mouth of the Parahiba River. As the two naturalists looked out over the ocean, Nicoll saw something unusual. He asked Meade-Waldo, "Is that the fin of a great fish?"
Meade-Waldo looked and saw a fin he described as "dark seaweed-brown, somewhat crinkled at the edge." The visible part was rectangular, perhaps two feet high and six feet long. The distance between the fin and the observers was approximately a hundred yards.
Meade-Waldo trained “a powerful pair” binoculars on the strange object. As the two naturalists watched, there rose just ahead of the fin a small head on a long neck. Meade-Waldo described the neck as "about the thickness of a slight man's body, and from seven to eight feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness ... The head had a very turtle-like appearance, as also the eye. It moved its head and neck from side to side in a peculiar manner: the color of the head and neck was dark brown above, and whitish below - almost white, I think."
Nicoll wrote, "Below the water we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature." Meade-Waldo recorded seeing a large body under water “behind the frill.”
The encounter lasted several minutes before the animal dropped astern of the Valhalla. Being under sail, the yacht could not come about. Meade-Waldo wrote later, "I shall never forget poor Nicoll's face of amazement when we looked at each other after we had passed out of sight of it ... "
Nicoll marveled, “This creature was an example, I consider, of what has been so often reported, for want of a better name, as the ‘great sea-serpent.’”
That was the only time the two men saw the creature. At 2:00 AM the next morning, though, three crewmembers reported spotting the same or a similar animal, almost entirely submerged.
The two men wrote up their encounter, and the Zoological Society's Proceedings carried their account of "a creature of most extraordinary form and proportions." Another version appears in Nicoll's 1908 book Three Voyages of A Naturalist.
There seems no reason to doubt the veracity or the powers of observation of these two men. A century after their encounter, the question remains: what was it that they saw?
Both were convinced it was an animal, but could not say what kind. The witnesses did not notice any diagnostic features such as hair, pectoral fins, gills, or nostrils.
While Nicoll admitted it was "impossible to be certain," he theorized the creature was a mammal. He wrote, "the general appearance of the creature, especially the soft, almost rubber-like fin, gave one this impression."
Any cryptozoologist interested in looking up a report on sea creatures automatically turns first to the landmark work on the subject, In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by the late Bernard Heuvelmans. Heuvelmans noted that, for reasons unknown, conger eels have been observed to swim at the surface with head and forebody held above the water. (Congers, which reach at least nine feet in length, have also been known to undulate on their sides at the water’s surface, which makes the animal look like a small serpentine monster.) Accordingly, Heuvelmans suggested this sighting involved a huge eel or eel-shaped fish.
In the aforementioned sea monster files are several reports describing what the witnesses thought were giant eels. Four Irish fisherman claimed to have caught a nineteen-foot eel in 1915. Three years earlier, Captain Ruser of the German steamship Kaiserin Augusta Victoria had reported a giant eel off England. He described it as eighteen inches thick and twenty feet long. In 1971, English fisherman Stephen Smith was in the area of Ruser’s 1912 sighting when he claimed to have seen an eel more than twenty feet long. He described the head as resembling a conger eel’s but four times as large. Smith told an interviewer, “I have fished all over the world, but never have I seen something like this.”
There are also many reports where the animal involved was not specifically called an eel but was described as eel-shaped. One such case occurred in 1947, when the Grace liner Santa Clara collided with a sea serpent. The ship’s officers described the animal as brown in color and perhaps sixty feet long.
What about Nicoll’s theory of a mammal? To begin with, there is no known mammal, living or extinct, which looks like the creature described in this incident. If we venture into the realm of possible unknown mammals, one option is a huge elongated seal. However, we have no fossil records indicating that a seal with a genuinely long neck ever existed, much less one with a dorsal fin.
Some cryptozoologists suggest sea serpents are surviving prehistoric snakelike whales, or archaeocetes, like those in the genus Basilosaurus. These, while elongated in form, did not have long necks. It’s possible a long-necked form evolved, but the available fossil record points the other way. Whale necks got progressively shorter, not longer, after the archaeocetes.
One group of animals that always come up in sea serpent discussions are the plesiosaurs. These Mesozoic reptiles (reptiles, not dinosaurs) make good sea serpent candidates in one respect: they had necks ranging from long to absurdly long. Will Cuppy, an American humorist, once wrote that plesiosaurs “might have a had a useful career as sea serpents, but they were before their time. There was nobody to scare except fish, and that was hardly worth while.” We know from fossils that plesiosaurs could not rear their necks high above the water, but the fairly low angle shown in a sketch in Nicoll’s book seems plausible.
Unfortunately, the fossil record for plesiosaurs and the other marine reptiles with similar body plans does not continue past the time of the K-T impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs. The famous case of the coelacanth has demonstrated that it’s possible for an animal to survive for a long time without leaving a fossil record, or, more precisely, without leaving one in places where humans have looked. A lot of land area remains unexplored by paleontologists, as does the entire sea floor. (Sasquatch proponents like to point out that, according to the fossil record, gorillas do not exist.)
Even if one assumes, though, that very large and widely distributed animals vanished from the fossil record while surviving in the flesh, the dorsal fin poses another problem. We have no fossils of plesiosaur-type beasts – and some of these are amazingly well preserved – which show any sort of dorsal fin. With their broad, turtle-like bodies, plesiosaurs did not need such fins for stability. It’s not impossible that a few species might have developed a fin for sexual display or some other purpose, but there is no evidence this took place.
Meade-Waldo, while he did not compare his animal to any known species, did refer back to the sea monster sighting made from the frigate HMS Daedalus in 1848. Witnesses in that incident described an animal sixty feet long or more, resembling "a large snake or eel."
Richard Ellis, whose 1994 book Monsters of the Sea is an excellent survey of the whole matter of marine cryptids, has offered a relatively conventional explanation for the Valhalla incident. Ellis, an expert on giant squid, theorized that a very large specimen swimming tentacles-first (which squid can do), could present a suitably strange appearance if it was holding one arm above the water. The description of the eye and mouth could result from misinterpretations of details on the arm or merely from imagination, since even expert observers can make errors when excited.
This explanation, as ingenious as it seems, is hard to picture in reality. First, Meade-Waldo must have made a much bigger mistake than just the details on the head, since he specifically described a large body aft of the fin. To offer the appearance Ellis suggests, the squid would have to swim on its side, keeping one fin partly exposed and one limb constantly above the surface. It must have held that unnatural and pointless position for several minutes. It might be possible for a squid to do this (or it might not – we know very little about them), but it seems impossible to explain why it would do so.
Can there be large seagoing animals still unknown to us? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is a well-founded and scientific “yes.” Until recently, the Indopacific beaked whale (a.k.a. Longman’s beaked whale), Mesoplodon pacificus, was known from two weathered skulls found on beaches 73 years and thousands of miles apart. No one knew what the living animal looked like, or even if the species still existed, until one beached intact in Japan in 2002. The Peruvian, or Lesser, beaked whale (Mesoplodon peruvianus), was completely unknown to science until a skull was found in Peru in 1976. The species was described, based on specimens netted or stranded after that first discovery, in 1991. Perrin’s beaked whale, Mesoplodon perrini, was described from stranded specimens in 2002.
The megamouth shark (Megachasma pelagios), up to sixteen feet long, was unknown until 1976, when one was snagged accidentally in a sea anchor. In this case, “unknown” means “completely unknown.’ Despite its size, its slow speed, and its distinctive appearance (the megamouth looks like a living blimp and resembles no other shark) there were no sighting reports, no strandings, nothing before that chance encounter.
Other sizable marine animals are apparently still at large. The two men on the submersible Deepstar 4000 in the San Diego Trough in 1966 reported a bony fish thirty feet or more in length, with a rounded tail like a grouper’s and “plate-sized” eyes. The distinctively marked beaked whale called Mesoplodon “Species A” has been seen many times and even photographed, but no one has captured a specimen, and no confirmed dead examples have drifted ashore. (Marine ecologist Robert Pitman has suggested Species A sightings are due to mature individuals of M. peruvianus, with the diagnostic light-colored “chevron” marking fading when the animal dies, but this has yet to be confirmed.) Pitman has twice spotted a mystery of his own, a beaked whale he calls “Species B.” This is a dark gray animal with a strikingly long snout and a pale spot behind the eye. A bizarre deep-sea squid, over 20 feet long with very thin, spindly tentacles, has recently been captured on videotape but has never been caught or classified.
In 1998, employing a statistical technique used in biology to estimate the diversity of animal populations, Oxford University’s Dr. Charles Paxton calculated the likely number of marine animals measuring two meters (six and a half feet) or longer still awaiting classification. While Paxton admitted this technique is inexact, based as it is on the discovery rate and total number of such species found so far, his estimate of 47 species was an eye-opener.
Paxton thought the oceanic types still to be found included mainly whales and sharks, although he allowed for the possibility that some might be totally new types of animals. Meade-Waldo and Nicoll, were they here to speak to us, would no doubt agree on that point.
It all comes down to this. One hundred years ago this past December, two well-qualified men of science encountered a strange creature which remains unidentified. The animal could be a fish, a mammal, or a reptile (in what appears to be a descending order of probability.) It might still be awaiting discovery, or it might be extinct. We must wait and see what answers the next hundred years will bring.

REFERENCES
Anonymous. 2003. “Whale species is new to science,” BBC News World Edition, http://news.bbc.co.uk, November 19.
Australian Museum. 2003. “Longman’s Beaked Whale,” Fact sheet.
Baker, Mary L. 1987. Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises of the World. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co.
Carwardine, Mark. 1995. Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises. New York: Doring Kindersley.
Dalebout, Merel. 2003. Personal communication, October 28.
Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2003. “Appearance, distribution, and genetic distinctiveness of Longman’s beaked whale, Indopacetus pacificus,” Marine Mammal Science 19:3, p.421.
Dalebout, Merel, et. al. 2002. “A new species of beaked whale Mesoplodon perrini sp. n. (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) discovered through phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial DNA sequences,” Marine Mammal Science 18:3, p.577.
Ellis, Richard. 2003. Personal communication, November 22. Also 2000, March 10.
Ellis, Richard. 2003. Sea Dragons. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.
Ellis, Richard. 1998. The Search for the Giant Squid. New York: Lyons Press.
Ellis, Richard. 1994. Monsters of the Sea. New York: Knopf.
Gould, Rupert T. 1930. The Case for the Sea Serpent. London: Philip Allan.
Harrison, Paul. 2001. Sea Serpents and Lake Monsters of the British Isles. London: Robert Hale.
Heuvelmans, Bernard. 1968. In the Wake of the Sea Serpents. NY: Hill and Wang.
Meade-Waldo, E.G.B., and Nicoll, Michael J., 1906. "Description of an Unknown Animal Seen at Sea off the Coast of Brazil," Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, p.719.
Nicoll, Michael J. 1908. Three Voyages of a Naturalist. London: Witherby and Co.
Molloy, R. 1915. “A Queer Tale of Flanagan and the Eel off Dalkey Sound,” publication title unknown, August 28. Available at http://www.clubi.ie/dalkeyhomepage/ee.html.
Pitman, Robert. 2003. Personal communication, October 27. Also 1997, April 3.
Pitman, Robert, 1999. “Sightings and Possible Identity of a Bottlenose Whale in the Tropical Indo-Pacific: Indopacetus pacificus?” Marine Mammal Science 15(2), p.531.
Pitman, Robert. 1987. “Observations of an Unidentified Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon Sp.) in the Eastern Tropical Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science 3(4), October, p.345.
Ralls, Katherine, and Robert L. Brownell, Jr. 1991. "A whale of a new species," Nature, April 18.
Taylor, L.R., Compagno, L.J.V., and Struhsaker, P.J. (1983). “Megamouth - a new species, genus, and family of lamnoid shark (Megachasma pelagios, family Megachasmidae) from the Hawaiian Islands,” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, vol. 43, p.87.
Urban-Ramirez, Jose. 1992. “First Record of the Pygmy Beaked Whale Mesoplodon Peruvianus in the North Pacific,” Marine Mammal Science, October, p.420.
Yamada, Tadasu. 2002. “On an unidentified beaked whale found stranded in Kagoshima,” paper from the National Science Museum, Tokyo, December 25.

New Discoveries from New Guinea

A Conservation International (CI) expedition team of U.S., Indonesian, and Australian scientists exploring the little-known Foja Mountains of western New Guinea has discovered a stunning variety of new and rare species. These include frogs, butterflies, plants, and a new bird - the orange-faced honeyeater, the first new species discovered on the island in over six decades.

"There are more things in heaven and earth..."

Orcas bait traps for gulls

Orcas, or killer whales, have been seen spitting fish onto the surface of the sea, then submerging and waiting for a gull to come down for lunch. The gull then becomes a snack. Once one whale being studied had used the trick for a while, his relatives copied it - another example of learning by these highly intelligent predators.

Comment: Given how insubstantial a mouthful a gull makes for an orca, I wonder if this is not a meal-getting device at all. Orcas are well-known for having fun, including downright silly stunts like carrying a dead salmon on their heads. The gull-trapping game might be exactly that - a game.

Second-Guessing the Ivory-Bill

A leading ornithologist, Jerome A. Jackson, has published an article in the journal The Auk casting doubt on the evidence for the biggest wildlife story of last year - the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). Whether one agrees or disagrees with Jackson (this amateur disagrees, in case anyone cares), this is an interesting example of how top specialists can differ on the interpretation of evidence. It's also a case of a scientific controversy being played out the way it should be, in well-written articles in professional media. The Auk has made the entire article available online.

Hail Columbia

It was three years ago the Shuttle Columbia failed during re-entry, taking with it seven of the finest examples of humanity our species had to offer. Death cannot be romanticized, but it can be remembered, and learned from. Daryl Cagle's poignant collection of editorial cartoon about the disaster is a unique way to recall what the nation felt on that day.

Godspeed,
Matt

New Solar System Object Larger than Pluto

German scientists have determined the odd object well past Pluto, 2003 UB313 (discovered, as one would think, in 2003) has a diameter of 3,000 kilometers. That's 700 km larger than Pluto, the smallest planet. 2003 UB313's orbit averages nearly nearly 9 billion miles from Earth.
So, is this thing the Solar Systems' 10th planet, or is Pluto not a planet? The IAU will have to sort that out.
And what's it called, anyway? Co-discoverer Mike Brown of Cal Tech hates the clumsy designation 2003 UB313. He said, "It can't get an official name until it has an official status and right now it doesn't have an official status, so it can't get a name." Stay tuned.

Octopus v. ROV

A unique and most interesting bit of videotape shows a Pacific giant octopus, which may weigh 40 kg, attacking a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). The ROV operator was afraid the critter would damage the camera and reversed the thrusters to blast sand from the sea bottom at the octopus, driving it away.

Book Review: The First Space Race

Bille, Matt, and Erika Lishock, with a foreword by James A. Van Allen. The First Space Race: Launching the World’s First Satellites. (Illus.) College Station, TX: Texas A&M, 2004. 214pp. $24.95. ISBM 1-58544-374-3. Index.
This is a well-documented treatise of the people, events, and scientific discoveries that led to human beings’ initial excursion into near earth space. The intertwined competitive web of the three major engineering teams that existed in the first half of the 20th century and ultimately proved the practicality of the theoretical orbital mechanics espoused by Kepler and Newton is chronicled in this thoroughly researched and informative book. The extension of human knowledge resulted from the Soviet Sputnik and the American Vanguard, Explorer, and classified NOTSNIK projects is succinctly described. This book is a “must read” for anyone interested in an authoritative account of this critical period of space-flight development.
- Science Books and Films, American Association for the Advancement of Science, November/December 2005

Podcasts of Antarctic Exploration

Cindy Van Dover, biologist, undersea explorer, and hydrothermal vent expert, is an associate professor of biology at the College of William and Mary. Via Antarctica is a program of video and audio podcasts she is providing from a current expedition to Antarctica's Anvers Island. Follow science in the making!

Britain's Wayward Whale Dies

The five-meter northern bottlenose whale which swan up into the Thames last week died as rescuers were barging it back out to sea. On closer inspection, the animal had visible wounds on its body and may have been ill. A post-mortem is under way. UK Marine Mammals Strandings Programme head Paul Jepson said he hoped the worldwide interest in the whale would at least have some positive impact by sparkign the interest of children in marine mammals and their conservation.

NASA's Mission to Pluto

Congratulations to NASA for the successful launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto. This marks the first time humanity has reached out to the solar system's most distant planet. (Well, maybe it's the most distant planet. There's a lot of discussion about that right now.) In any event, the probe is off on its nine-year journey.

Comment: The launch brought out the usual complaints about its use of plutonium to power the on-board RTGs. While any use of nuclear materials must be subject to the most stringent safety precautions, those who call for an end to its employment are ignoring the realities of space flight. The utility of solar panels drops off drastically once you get past Mars. Outer-planet exploration is dependent on nuclear power generation, and long-term exploration with complex spacecraft and humans is dependent on nuclear propulsion. There is no real alternative.

Saving the Wayward Whale

The northern bottlenose whale which swam into the Thames was captured and loaded onto a barge to be taken back downstream. The animal got as far as Greenwich before marine mammal experts concluded it was so hopelessly confused it was never going to get back to the ocean in time to survive. Dolphins and seals wander into the Thames fairly often, but this is the first known case of a whale traveling up the river.
Here's wishing the wayward cetacean the best of luck.

Britain's Wandering Whale

A northern bottlenose whale, weighing an estimated seven tons, wandered into the River Thames and swam to central London. The apparently confused animal twice breached itself, but wriggled free. British wildlife experts are monitoring the animal closely and keeping the many thousands of spectators at a distance.
A reminder, once again, that humans are still fascinated with the chance to see rare creatures in person.

New Species from California caves

A three-year study of caves in two California national parks has yielded 27 new animal species, including spiders, centipedes and scorpion-like arthropods.
OK, they are small, but they still matter. In addition to their importance in their own ecosystem, these critters remind us that discoveries in the animal kingdom are still being made - not just in the forests of Borneo or Brazil, but right under our feet.

Keeping Up With Cats

One of my favorite science sources... the portal of the IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group, which is dedicated to the understanding and conservation of the world’s 36 wild living cat species. This is one of the 100+ specialist groups forming the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). News, study reports, and fact sheets provide the latest information on the 36 known species of wild felines.

Ants Teaching Ants

A startling report by British researchers says that ants do not just operate by instinct, or by mimicking the behavior of older ants. Ants engage in active (albeit limited) teaching and learning. An ant that finds a food source will lead another ant to it, even though the "teacher" ant has to slow down, wait, or redirect the "learner" and thus delay its own meal. Not bad for a creature with a microscopic brain.

NASA's Budget Heading for Trouble

According to Bloomberg.com, the NASA budget, after two years of modest increases, is going to be slashed in FY07. If they want to keep the Vision for Space Exploration on track, the only thing left to cut is the Shuttle program. The Shuttle is currently planned to fly 19 missions before retirement: 18 to the International Space Station and one to service the Hubble Space Telescope. A major cut will, unavoidably, mean reneging on committments to international partners. No matter what one things of the value of the Shuttle, this is very disruptive and will create severe problems with future international projects in space and non-space areas.

A flourescent green pig

Taiwanese scientists have bred a transgenic pig that is - inside and out - a flourescent green color. This actually does have applications in medical research, but it's still very strange.

What's next? Making one that flies?

NASA and Advanced Propulsion

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin essentially told an audience that, even though advanced propulsion system research was needed for exploration beyond Mars, it would not be funded. While it's refreshing to have an Administrator who faces the reality of limited funds and the need to prioritize, the complete dismantling of research in this area is short-sighted in the extreme. An affordable level of studies and small-scale demonstration projects is needed to keep the intellectual capital in place to allow this research to be ramped up again in the future. After all, there's no commercial demand for nuclear thermal or solar sail propulsion systems: without NASA support, the people and facilities capable of working on this problem will dissipate, and a future administrator will have to face the enormous difficulty and expense of reconstituting propulsion work from scratch. Mr. Griffin has made many good decisions, but this most definitely is not one of them.

Whales Speak in Dialects

A very interesting discovery by scientists including David Mellinger of Oregon State University is that blue whales living in different ocean regions make diffect sounds or combinations of sounds when they vocalize. As Mellinger put it, "The whales in the eastern Pacific have a very low-pitched pulsed sound, followed by a tone. Other populations use different combinations of pulses, tones and pitches." Mellinger notes that we do not know if some of the difference is genetic, or if it's all a matter of "dialects" a whale learns from its parents and others as it's growing up.

"Monster Mice" - evolution in action

Let loose in an environment with abundant food and minimal competition, mice on Gough Island in the South Atlantic have evolved into largely carnivorous bird-eating "monsters" three times normal size. One wonders if these will eventually diverge enough to be considered as a new species - if they don't wreck the island's entire ecosystem first.

A "Must See" look into deep space

This photograph, described by many colorful names like the "Skull and Crossbones" or "Cosmic Mandrill," shows the stellar cluster NGC 2467. This is a very young feature, no more than a few million years old, which is described as a stellar nursery where new stars are cosntantly being born.

Comment: There is not only scientific majesty in the universe. There is beauty which appeals to us on a higher, more spiritual level. That's one of the things about human beings that no science can as yet explain - why we find beauty and wonder in images like these.

Mars Rovers - Going Strong

The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are still going, having extended their 90-day mission through a full Martian year (667 Earth days). They have taken innumerable surface samples, sent back over 130,000 pictures, and covered over five kilometers of the Martian surface. This program is one of NASA's genuine triumphs. Kudos to all involved.

Jeff Bezos' private spaceship

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is moving ahead with his plans for a private space travel company. His new firm, the very secretive Blue Origins, is leasing more space near Seattle for headquarters and workshops. The company already bought a ranch in west Texas for rocket tests. Blue Origin's initial vehicle will be a three-person suborbital carrier, with orbital vehicles and, in the far term, space colonies to follow. He has at least one serious competitor, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic enterprise, which has leased land for a spaceport in New Mexico.

Comment: There are other companies exploring this field, too, and several others have started but already collapsed. The difference here is that these are people who have very large bankrolls and don't need to hunt for - and then please - outside investors. That makes a big difference in how quickly one can develop technology and get a complex effort underway. Good luck to both.

The Ecology of Skull Island

The new film King Kong does a more realistic job of portraying a giant gorilla than its Hollywood predecessors. In this enjoyable article, Stefan Lovgren uses the film to explore island ecology. Kong's home of Skull Island, alas, would be a bad place to look for anything like Kong himself. The island is too small and too full of large predators to work as an ecosystem. The same point was made about the island in Jurassic Park, which didn't have nearly the land area required to support multiple species of giants. Islands in general do not house large predators at all.

Comment: The Komodo dragon seems an interesting exception to this rule. Alas, there have been too many bad movies about oversize lizards to leave room for a good movie on the subject.

SCIENCE magazine's Breakthroughs of the Year

Science magazine has named its top 10 breakthroughs of 2005. First place went to a series of projects which increased our knowledge of evolution, including the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome and the ways in which a species can split into two or more species. Other breakthroughs included planetary probe successes, most notably the Huyghens lander's mission to Titan, along with genetic research, a new understanding of neutron stars, etc. The magazine also named the "breakdown of the year," the budget-driven collapse of the leading U.S. programs in particle physics.

The "Bone Eating Snot Flower"

You can't make this stuff up....
Off the coast of Sweden, scientists have discovered a seafloor-dwelling worm they have christened the bone-eating snot-flower. That's the actual translation of its specific name, Osedax mucofloris. The critters "burrow into whale bones, leaving mucus-covered plumes poking out." The plumes look a bit like flower, albeit a disgusting one. The new animal belongs to a group also called zombie worms. Most of its relations live in the Pacific, and the discovery in the North Sea was a surprise.

Thanks to my colleague at Booz Allen Hamilton, Heather Gruver, for pointing this one out to me.

One Big Cat

What may be the world's largest feral cat was recently shot in Australia. The solid black animal was so large that one zoologist who saw the single photograph published suggested it was a leopard. DNA analysis showed it was a feral domestic cat, but the tail alone was 65 cm long, and the weight has been estimated at 25kg or more. It may have been a freak, or it may be proof that, given a situation with plenty of prey and limited competition, the domestic cat can evolve into a giant variant, perhaps a new subspecies. There are other sightings of large black cats in Australia, with a few photographs and videos to back them up.

A Giant New Aquarium

The new $200M Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta holds more than 8 million gallons of water in uniquely designed "walk-through" tanks, housing over 100,000 fish (including two whale sharks, the first kept in North America) and five beluga whales.

Comment: There is always controversy about keeping large creatures in aquaria. My thought is that, while keeping creatures like belugas and whale sharks should be restricted to the largest, best-equipped facilities, there's no real substitute for exposing people to the diversity and majesty of the marine life we need to protect. Videos just don't have the same impact.

World's Coolest Robot

It's not C-3PO, but it's getting close. The latest version of Honda's humanoid robot, ASIMO, which can not only walk but jog, will get its first test in a workplace next year. ASIMO will staff the front desk at a Honda office, greeting visitors, showing them to a conference room, and brining coffee, among other tasks.

News on species at rish

A study sponsored by the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE), the study identifies 794 species approaching extinction. The AZE recommended safeguarding 595 sensitive habitat sites, of which only about a third are protected today.

One of those species is the ivory-billed woodpecker, recently rediscovered in the U.S. An article from Reuters (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051213/sc_nm/environment_bird_dc) documents how a seemingly unlikely ally, the hunting community, has helped to save the ivory-bill through habitat conservation.

Comment: Note the common thread; conservation of habitat. Restoring habitat, once it's been developed for other uses, is almost impossible. Habitat protection should be the number one priority in allocating resources for conservation.

Looking ahead: NASA's 2007 budget

NASA administrator Griffin has released his guidance on NASA's budget planning. Essentially, the science and education programs will be held flat while the agency tries to safely phase out the Shuttle, finish a workable International Space Station configuration, and fund the transition to the planned Crew Exploration Vehicle and the rest of the Vision for Space Exploration.

Comment: Those who would like to see robust science and education programs while still keeping the VSE development on track really have only one option: fight for more funding. NASA is shedding employees (contract and civil service), asking for proposals for contracting out delivery of cargo to the space station to private industry, and otherwise pushing for all the economies Congress will let them get away with (I say that because there's no chance Congress will let he agency get away with closing any of its field centers, even though they were established when NASA was much larger.) A higher "topline" is the only real option, and that means NASA and its supporters (myself included) must do a better job of making the case for more NASA funding within a constrained Federal budget.

A Mention of My Papers

The Arms Control Wonk site, in an article on a defense satellite programs called ANGELS, saw fit to mention two of my past papers on what might be done with small spaceraft in the escort and inspection role. I have not worked for ANSER since 2001, but the citation is otherwise accurate. It's nice to be thought significant.

The cite:


Matt Bille and Deborah A. Bille, Enforcing the OST—The Inspection Question AIAA-2000-5155, AIAA Space 2000 Conference and Exposition, Long Beach, CA, Sept. 19-21, 2000.
Matt Bille, Robyn Kane, Martin Oetting (ANSER) and Donna Dickey (AFRL), A Microsatellite Space Guard Force, 13th Annual AIAA/USU Small Satellite Conference, 1999.

Borneo Discovery - or rediscovery?

The photographing of an unknown carnivore on Borneo gave rise to speculation an entirely new species had been discovered. That's still possible, but it's also possible the find concerns the rediscovery of an animal presumed extinct. Cameron Leuthy, a colleague of mine at Booz Allen Hamilton, gets credit for pointing me to a site on Hose's palm civet (Diplogale hosei), a carnivore native to Borneo but not seen for 40 years and feared extinct. It looks like a promising match.

Asteroid Probe Fails to Gather Samples

Well, darn. Japan's daring robotic mission to gather surface material samples from an asteroid and return with them to Earth apparently did not work after all. After initially saying the Hayabusa probe "most probably" succeeded in gathering samples from the asteroid Itokawa , the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency now believes the sample collector "bullet" did not fire when the probe was in position. A mission like this is a terribly difficult endeavor, and failures must be expected. Fortunately, other scientific data gathering, plus the experience and the lessons learned, makes this a worthwhile endeavor even with the disappointment of the missed sampling effort.

New Carnivore from Borneo

New mammals discovered in the field are rare, sizable mammals rarer, and new carnivores rarer still. WWF scientists in Borneo have hit the trifecta with photos of a carnivore whose type is still undetermined. The dark red animal with a long, bushy tail may be a vivverid, but it's snout is obscured by a leaf in the key photograph, making certain identification difficult. THe animal is slightly larger than a domestic cat. Yet another reminder of how much we still have to learn about the species of our own class.

Hydrothermal Vents are Global Phenomenon

Scientists have announced the finding of new hydrothermal vents, gushing superheated water and minerals into the sea. What's significant is that, until now, only the Pacific "Ring of Fire" zone and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge were thought to posess such vents. Now we know they are global - a discovery which will shed more light on Earth's past and, most certainly, lead to the finding of yet more unknown species of animals to add to the hundreds of species described from the vents we already know of.

The Trojan Shark

A $115,000 imitation shark has been developed in the hopes a researcher concealed inside will be able to study great white sharks up close. The 14-foot "Trojan Shark" emits no bubbles and has skin roughed up and scarred to not only look but feel like a real shark.

Comment: It's a worthy effort, and I wish the researcher (the grandson of Jacques Cousteau) luck. But it's hard to imagine that sharks, with their incredible sensor suites, will not notice some differences. It will be interesting to see how close they let the robotic shark get.

Coverage of Earth's Exploration of Mars

Here's a good site on Mars for a broad audience, archiving all the recent NBC/MSNBC stories on the Martian rovers and the results and reports that have flowed from the resulting data. The more we learn about Mars, the more mysterious and intriguing it becomes. Here's hoping we have the vision to fund a long-term exploration program - robotic and, eventually, human - to gain full knowledge of Earth's most famous celestial neighbor. Could some life have survived there? Yes. Could life have arisen there? We don't know. Could there still be life there? It's a slim chance, but it's not impossible.....

When Sir Arthur C. Clarke was asked what event in the 20th century he
would never have predicted, he said, "That we would have gone to the
Moon and then stopped."

A Fitting Tribute

The ashes of Mercury and Gemini astronaut Gordon Cooper will be sent into space in the next commercial "burial" mission, along with those of Star Trek actor James Doohan. The space community will get to say a final farewell to two men of great influence: one real space pioneer and one science fiction pioneer who inspired some of today's engineers in their student days. The Space Services Inc. payload will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 1 booster should occur in early 2006 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Godspeed.

Readying the Space Shuttle

In a news conference held Tuesday, Nov. 22, Shuttle External Tank (ET) program manager John Chapman, manager of the external tank program, described finding nine tiny cracks, seven of them invisible at the surface, in the foam of an ET undergoing inspection. The hairline cracks occurred close to the area where foam separated on ascent during the shuttle Discovery's STS-114 Return to Flight mission last July.

It is, frankly, difficult to imagine a foam-covered structure the size of the ET going through construction, processing, mating, and filling without ever developing such micro-cracks. As Chapman cautioned, "We're still trying to figure out what this means." Right now, though, everyone at NASA is concerned with trying to get the tanks mated to their Shuttles in the most pristine condition possible. STS-121, the next mission, is planned right now for May 2006.

Shuttle program manager Wayne Hale took pains to point out the next mission will be driven by the ET work and not by a schedule.

In this writer's personal opinion, though, NASA's leaders have to prove they really mean that. Looking at the postings on www.nasawatch.com, rumblings about inordinate schedule pressure have never entirely ceased. At this point, my unsolicited advice is, "To hell with the schedule." Another fatal accident means the end of the U.S. human spaceflight program, maybe for decades. If the Shuttle is going to fly again, everything else must take second priority to flying safely.

Truimph in Space

The Japanese Hayabusa probe became the first craft ever to take samples from a celestial body other than the Moon. The probe touched down on the asteroid Itokawa and and lifted off successfully.
The probe is not in the clear yet for its return to Earth. Controllers of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) put the craft into "safe" mode maintaining a distance of about 5 km from the asteroid while they studied an anomaly that may be propellant gas leaking from one of its thrusters. The probe is 288 million km from Earth and hopefully will return in 2007.
Congratulations are due to the Hayabusa team, along with everyone's best wishes for a safe return for humanity's latest effort to reach beyond this world.

2,000+ New Species from One Survey

A team from the University of San Carlos in the Philippines reports that study of a single area - the seafloor around the island of Panglao in the Philippine province of Bohol - has turned up an estimated 150–250 new species of Crustacea and 1,500–2,500 new species of molluscs. The University reports that,
"The survey has inventoried around 1,200 species of decapod Crustacea and up to 6,000 species of molluscs in the study area of about 15,000 hectares. While the mollusc result was anticipated, the crustacean result came as a total surprise to the researchers. In comparison, the Mediterranean Sea has an area of 300 million hectares and only 340 species of decapods and 2,024 species of molluscs."
Again and again, we are being reminded that we have only begun the task of inventorying the animal species of planet Earth.
As a Psalmist wrote long ago: "So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts."

In addition to the summary at the link above, more details can be found at http://www.panglao-hotspot.org/Templates/new.html

Electronic Warfare - By Fish!

According to a new item in Science News, the modern combat tactic of jamming a rival's sensors is not so modern. Fish do it! The 15-cm brown ghost knifefish (Apteronotus leptorhynchus), which uses an electric field for detection and communication, can change the frequency of its field to jam that of a nearly rival. Simply amazing.

Amateur Makes Pivotal Find

The day of the amateurs - whether they are naturalists, fossil-hunters, or astronomers - is far from over. We think of science as a big-ticket, professional enterprise these days, but it's a big planet and a bigger universe... there will never be enough professionals to cover everything that's out there for us to learn. Witness the story of Texas fossil-hunter Van Turner, who found a peice of backbone that was eventually classified as Dallasaurus turneri, the earliest known mosasaur and an important clue to the evolution of marine reptiles.

Congratulations, Mr. Turner!

A really big ape

A new study indicates the largest known ape of all time, Gigantopithecus blackii, lived well into the time when humans inhabited its Asian home. Indeed, this 550-kg King Kong may have died out only 100,000 years ago.
Aside from the implications for primatology and paleontology, this also created a buzz in cryptozoology. Gigantopithecus (there are at least two species in the genus, with G. blackii being the largest) is the only primate of which we have fossil evidence that could account, based on size alone, for those yeti and sasquatch reports which describe apes up to 8 feet tall or more.
G. blackii is normally depicted as a gorilla-like animal which was normally a quadruped. Its sheer size is the main reason for assuming this. We have only teeth and jawbones, so there's a lot of room for speculation.
The connection with sasquatch seems a reach. Why would an animal of subtropical Asia (it's best known from China and Vietnam) make the journey across the Bering Strait land bridge in sufficient numbers to establish a North American population? This area was not always snow and ice, but it was hardly enticing foraging territory for a plant-eating ape. If sasquatch exists (I doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong) I suspect the ancestor is a somewhat smaller, more adaptable , omnivorous ape whose fossils we have not found yet.

Controversy on Flores Man

Anthropologists are sharply divided over the validity of Homo floresiensis, despite recent finds that extend the presence of these meter-tall humans of Indonesia, indicating a population that persisted from 95,000 years BP to as recent as 12,000 years. Some, like Robert Eckhardt of the Penn State University, consider the remains found so far indicate nothing more than a group of people prone to genetic defects including subnormal stature and microcephaly. In my admittedly amateur opinion, this is not a logical position. It's one thing to find a single skeleton and dismiss it as a "freak." In this case, we have material (admittedly incomplete) indicating this race survived for more than 80,000 years. A population subject to universal or very frequent microcephaly and other defects is simply not going to survive and reproduce for very long. While skeptics legitimately wonder if a being with such a small brain could produce the stone tools and other artifacts found in association with Flores, the evidence so far is that they could - because they did.

Important Report on National S&T

The National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy has produced a very clear and urgent report,
Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future .
It identifies two key challenges coupled to science and engineering: creating high-quality jobs and providing clean, reliable energy.
Recommendations: improve math and science education: expand basic research: make US more attractive to high tech students, engineers, etc.: and provide incentives for innovation.

Comment: Like most clear and urgent reports, this one will probably be ignored. Reports only matter when the President and Congress turn them into legislatiopn and budget inputs. This reprot is bold and forward-looking. Therefore, I'm not expecting much action.