In Orbit, Things are Looking Up

The balky computers operated by the Russian cosmonauts on the International Space Station (ISS) are all back on line this morning (Sunday). The docked space shuttle Atlantis is likely to leave on Tuesday, although it could have stayed longer if the ISS needed assistance. This mini-drama in orbit pointed out to us all that space travel is still complex and dangerous, but also that human ingenuity can help us adapt to and overcome the most hostile of environments.

Pluto demoted again

It's been a bad year for Pluto. First it was demoted from "planet" to "dwarf planet." Now it's not even the biggest dwarf. The dwarf planet Eris, based on observations of the size and orbit of its tiny moon Dysnomia, appears to have about 1.27 times the mass of Pluto.

Ups and Downs in Orbit

The bad news from space today is than an $83M Atlas V booster carrying two National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellites on a classified mission has placed its payload in the wrong orbit. The booster, launched yesterday from Cape Canaveral, shut down its upper-stage motor prematurely. Pentagon officials told Aviation Week the satellites can use their on-board maneuvering fuel to get into an acceptable orbit, although this will reduce their mission life. One unnamed official was quoted as saying, "The Atlas V people have a lot of explaining to do." (The Atlas is provided by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin United Launch Alliance and uses a Lockheed-Martin upper stage.)

Meanwhile, the Russian and American crews camped on the International Space Station had a good day. The balky Russian computers, after a few days of nerve-racking unreliability, seem to have settled down, with four of the six computer "channels" restored. At the same time, the astronauts of the docked shuttle Atlantis have stapled down the 10-cm flap of loose insulation on the thermal shielding blanket covering on of the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) pods.

A Heavyweight Enters the Space Tourism Race

The European aerospace giant EADS has entered the race to build a practical space tourism craft. Designing and building such craft (none of which has flown yet) has so far been the province of small and medium-size enterprises, most of them startups. EADS's Astrium division, prime contractor for the Ariane booster family, plans a craft with both jet and rocket engines, capable of landing and taking off conventionally and taking a pilot and four passengers to 100km. Astrium Chief Technical Officer Robert Laine took a swipe at his company's American rivals, suggesting most are lacking in the engineering department or in their business models. He said, "There are those who think you can design a rocket plane in a garage. Suffice it to say that that is not our niche." Bert Rutan, developing American rival SpaceShip Two, thinks it's EADS' business model that is lacking, and the European craft will be so expensive to develop that it won't be economically viable. Start your engines....

A Raptor to Run From (not that it would help you)

New from the Gobi Desert is a fossil of a predatory dinosaur that dwarfed its known relatives.
Chinese discoverer Xu Xing wrote that, after he found a leg bone he could not identify, "When I went back to my geologist colleague Lin Tan's lab to check the skeleton, I was shocked. I said to Tan, 'It is not a sauropod, it is not a tyrannosaurus, it is a tyrannosaurus-sized oviraptor. We have a gigantic chicken!' "
Gigantoraptor erlianensis stood almost five meters tall, weighed about 1.4 metric tons, and was well armed with claws. It had no teeth in its beaklike mouth, though, and paleontologists are not sure what kind of diet the creature had. It's believed to have had feathers, mainly for display, on the arms and tail. It is several times the size of any other dinosaurs in its family.
University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno commented, "But what kind of environment on Earth was this animal adapted to? It's off the charts, and with no teeth what did it eat? Did it use those long legs to escape from predators? It's clearly a pre-flight bird, but no one would have predicted its evolution, so the door seems open to a new way of living for a new kind of dinosaur."

Tool Time on orbit

Russian computers on the International Space Station have developed a series of glitches, perhaps due to the feed from the new American-built power systems installed by the Space Shuttle Atlantis crew. The two cosmonauts on board and their mission controllers hope to successfully reboot the system tomorrow (Friday). In a worst-case scenario, the station might need to be abandoned temporarily, but that is considered very unlikely at this point. (A report just in at 2300 EST says the computers have been partially reset.)
Meanwhile, American astronauts James Reilly and John "Danny" Olivas will perform a spacewalk tomorrow, with one objective being to make a minor repair on the Shuttle's thermal insulation blanket.

Goodbye, Mr. Wizard

Don Herbert, who as "Mr. Wizard" introduced two generations of students to science through TV shows, films, and books, has died at 89. Herbert's original NBC show, "Watch Mr. Wizard," began in 1951 and stayed on for 14 years, covering almost every branch of science with experiments viewers could often replicate at home. The show was revived in new versions several times, most recently on Nickelodeon in the 1980s.
I was too late to catch the original show, but I saw Herbert's work on 16mm film in my school days. Herbert did great service for science and education. There have been worthy followers, like Bill Nye, but there was only one Mr. Wizard.
Thanks to Loren Coleman for circulating this item.

VIsiting Ancient Rome

Tourists can now find their way to the landmarks of ancient Rome - or tour the city from their armchairs - thanks to “Rome Reborn 1.0.” Created by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, this exercise in virtual reality took 10 years and $2 million to create. It displays the city in amazing detail as it appeared in A.D. 320 (This is over 350 years after the mos-dramatized period, the era of Julius Caesar, but represents the height of the city's size and wealth under the emperor Constantine.) So before you reach for your passport, reach for your mouse.

Shuttle repairs slated

The mission of the space shuttle Atlantis has been extended two days to allow astronauts to repair the 10-cm rip in a thermal insulation blanket. At least two shuttle flights landed safely with similar damage, but mission managers in the post-Columbia era are taking no chances.

Nessie or not?

The footage taken by Mr. Gordon Holmes, apparently showing a swimming animal in Loch Ness, got a lot of media play in the past week. At this site on the cryptozoology news site Cryptomundo, enlarged and clarified bits of the video have been posted. They appear to show it is an animal and not just the effect of two wakes crossing. However, there is really no sense of scale, something the videographer really couldn't help since he was zooming in on something he saw on open water. The object could be an otter or one of the seals occasionally known to wander into the loch.
Long-range, unclear photos and videos of cryptozoological creatures have turned up online so often lately that cryptozoologist Loren Coleman coined the terms "blobsquatch" (an image in which an indistinct blob is supposed to be a sasquatch) and "tubesquatch" (suspicious or inconclusive video posted on YouTube or elsewhere on the Net). Meanwhile, the BBC distributed 50,000 cameras to people attending a music festival called "Rock Ness" and encouraged them to try capturing the "Loch Ness Monster."
I doubt (though I do not dismiss the possibility) that either sasquatch or Nessie will turn up in the flesh, but, if they do, they should have something to say about all the people who have exploited them. They might even be due some royalties.

"Jim, this man's blood is green."

In another reminder of just how complex the human body is and how many strange things can happen, doctors in Canada cut into a patient to install an arterial line and were startled when dark green blood emerged. Green blood shows up in some invertebrates and, of course, the most famous of TV science fiction characters, the half-Vulcan Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
Spock's blood is supposed to be green because his hemoglobin is based on copper, not iron (which actually would be highly inefficient). In the Canadian case, the 42-year old Earthman on the operating table was suffering from a very rare condition, possibly caused by using too much of the migraine drug sumatriptan, called Sulfhaemoglobinaemia. When this occurs, the red cells stop bonding with oxygen and bond with sulfur compounds instead. It's not fatal, as it resolves itself in the normal turnover of red cells, but it certainly is startling. Look for it to turn up on American television (probably Grey's Anatomy or House) next season.

Atlantis on schedule, with one concern

The Space Shuttle Atlantis is looking good in terms of making its scheduled rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). The two craft will dock this afternoon (Sunday) to exchange a crew member and deliver and install a new power module with two solar panel "wings" on the station. Three spacewalks are planned as part of the week-long construction task.
There is some concern over a 10-cm "flap" where the corner of one of the heat-shielding fabric blankets near the Shuttle's tail has come loose. At least two shuttles have safely re-entered with similar damage, but NASA is evaluating the problem. If mission managers decide a repair is needed, the astronauts have procedures and tools to either tack down the fabric or put a cover of heat-shielding material over the spot.

An honor for a cryptozoologist

Cryptozoologists, those who pursue the uncaught, unclassified, or presumably extinct animals of the world, run the gamut from amateur enthusiasts to Ph.D scientists. One of the latter is England's Dr. Karl Shuker. He has posted a letter announcing the receipt of an unusual sort of recognition: seeing his name attached to a tiny creature that looks a bit like a pineapple with a snout. Congratulations, Karl!

Hi everyone,

As readers of my books The Lost Ark (1993) and its successor The New Zoo (2002) may recall, loriciferan discoverer Prof. Reinhardt Kristensen (the loriciferans were the first of two entirely new phyla of animals revealed by him!) very kindly promised to name a new species of loriciferan after me - there were several new species that were still awaiting formal names and descriptions.

I was recently asked by a correspondent whether 'my' loriciferan had ever been named and described, and I was happy to confirm that it had. It is Pliciloricus shukeri, and in case anyone wishes to read about it the bibliographical reference to the paper in which its description appears is as follows:

Heiner, Iben, and Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen. 2005. Two new species of the genus Pliciloricus (Loricifera, Pliciloricidae) from the Faroe Bank, North Atlantic. Zoologischer Anzeiger, vol. 243, no. 3. 121-138.

Power without wires

Ever wish you could just set your cell phone down in your office and have it charge up without plugging it into anything? Well, it's feasible, according to MIT scientists who have demonstrated using wireless power to run a light bulb. "WiTricity" uses a clever manipulation of magnetic resonance to do the job efficiently instead of directly sending power via radio-frequency signals. For now, it's just a very neat trick, but the potential applications are very broad indeed.

Atlantis in orbit

My misgivings about the repaired external tank on the shuttle Atlantis were, fortunately, all wrong. The STS-117 mission had a perfect on-time liftoff from Kennedy Space Center and was in orbit nine minutes later. On board for this service mission to the International Space Station (ISS) are commander Frederick Sturckow, pilot Lee Archambault, and five other astronauts - one of whom, Clayton Anderson, will be staying on the ISS while Atlantis returns with astronaut Sunita Williams. The 11-day mission, which will add a new segment to the ISS, carries one unusual item - a metal cargo tag reading "Yames Towne." This came from the historic settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, established 400 years ago.

Closing the ultimate "Cold Case"

"Otzi," world-famous "Iceman" who died on an Italian glacier some 5,000 years ago, was originally thought to have died of exposure. Then, in the best TV-series fashion, someone found an arrowhead lodged in his neck. Now the cause of death has been pinned down more precisely. A Swiss team using a CT scanner on the well-preserved mummy found a lesion on an artery at the arrowhead site. Otzi, a generally healthy man of about 45, never had a chance after receiving the wound. He simply had bled to death.
Whodunit? That we shall never know.

Seeing the "Lord God bird"

A new documentary is coming out concerning the presumed extinction, search for, and rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker Campephilus principalis. It's titled Lord God Bird, which is a bit confusing because it's not based on Philip Hoose's excellent book The Race to Save the Lord God Bird. The ivory-bill got the nickname "Lord God" or "Good God" from the exclamations people supposedly made when they got a look at the nation's largest woodpecker.

For now, the Voice of America has posted the story along with links to the 1935 film of two ivory-bills - a clip which was long believed to be the last film of an ivory-bill anyone would ever record - and the video taken in 2004 that many (though not all) experts accepted as proof the bird still lived.

Out of Place Animals

This interesting article by Denis Cuff of the Contra Costa (CA) Times collects some examples of animals that show up where they shouldn't be. They range from a heron that hopped onto a commuter train to a manatee swimming off New York to a greater sand plover which apparently flew the Pacific Ocean to end up on the wrong continent. These cases include many examples of odd or unexplained behavior which leaves experts as befuddled as the Laysan albatross which, in 2003, was found walking down a street in San Mateo, California.

Space Shuttle Launch - Systems Go, Fingers Crossed

The space shuttle Atlantis has been given a go for launch on June 8, after a three-month delay due to hail damage to the external tank's foam insulation. This will be the first launch of 2007, which means, among other things, that the tightly scheduled slate of missions intended to finish the International Space Station and retire the Shuttle in 2010 is probably impossible to meet. Given that debris from the ET doomed the shuttle Columbia, there was some controversy over the decision to repair Atlantis' external tank (ET) at Kennedy Space Center instead of dismantling the shuttle stack and waiting for the next tank to arrive. Workers had to re-cover some sections of the ET and fix thousands of holes, dents, divots, and gouges.
NASA's Associate Administrator, Bill Gerstenmaier, put it this way: “Even though there are a lot of dimples on the tank, they’re very low mass. It has a slightly higher risk due to the number of repairs. It’s as good — almost — as a regular tank that we would go fly."

COMMENT: I'm not an engineer, and the people working on the Shuttle are among the best engineers you can find on this planet. That said, this decision makes me nervous. I'll be watching June 8 with fingers crossed that all goes well.

Dozens of new mammals - really!

Dr. Darren Naish has published in his terrific blog, Tetrapod Zoology, a four-part article on the astounding series of mammal discoveries made by Dr. Marc van Roosmalen in the Amazon region.
While van Roosmalen is well known as a conservationist and for describing new species of monkeys, his work goes far beyond that. He has, for example, described the largest new mammal to be found since the early 1990s, the Giant peccary Pecari maximus. Awaiting description are a dwarf manatee, a possible new dolphin, another peccary, a tapir, and new species of deer and monkeys (many more monkeys). Most intriguing of all is the black and white jaguar (not a melanistic example of the common jaguar, but a distinct species which Bill Rebsamen so stunningly illustrated for my recent book Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology (on which I corresponded with van Roosmalen during the research phase.)
It's possible, even likely, that some of the many specimens von Roosmalen has or is tracking down will prove to be something less than full species. He has, however, made a gigantic and underappreciated contribution to zoology. He has demonstrated that, as Bernard Heuvelmans, the founder of cryptozoology, once wrote, "The great days of zoology are not done."
Van Roosmalen's new website is a "must see"
http://marcvanroosmalen.org/pages/indexpag.html

R.I.P. - Homer Joe Stewart

One of the leading "rocket men" from the era of Sputnik and Explorer has passed on.
Dr. Homer Joe Stewart taught at Caltech and contributed to rocket propulsion and other disciplines at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which he co-founded, for many decades. He had retired from the school in 1980. After WWII, he worked on rocket and missile propulsion systems for the WAC Corporal, Corporal, and Sergeant missiles, among other projects. In 1955, he chaired the Stewart Committee, which, in a controversial decision second-guessed ever since, selected the Navy's Vanguard satellite proposal (based on its potentially greater scientific return) over competing Army and Air Force ideas to become the nation's first satellite program. Stewart encouraged the Army team, headed by Wernher von Braun, to keep working on its idea in case Vanguard faltered. While Vanguard eventually became a significant success, it had a critical failure in a launch attempt shortly after Sputnik 1, and the Army team, in cooperation with JPL, was given the go-ahead to get something up as fast as possible. That project, on which Stewart assisted, became Explorer 1. Homer Joe Stewart was 91.
COMMENT: Erika Lishock and I would have liked to interview Stewart for our book on the first satellites, The First Space Race, but he was already in poor health and was not available. He made major contributions to defense, aerospace engineering, and the exploration of space. We salute a truly great man.

Two new species of wolf?

Wolves are the world's most widespread wild mammal, or they were before Homo sapiens decided that they had to go. All wolves are usually considered a single species, Canis lupus, with numerous subspecies. There is a debate about some types, like the tiny, supposedly extinct Japanese wolf (either Canis lupus hodophilax or C. hodophilax). Now a paper published in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolution argues that two populations in India are, based on their mitochondrial DNA, distinct both from each other and from other wolf populations. They are therefore proposed as new species, C. himalayensis and C. indica. This finding, if verified, tells us canine evolution and relationships may be much more complex than we thought.

The Megafauna Murder Mystery

I've always been fascinated by how early North America was peopled and by what happened to all those really cool mammals - mammoths, mastodons, lions, and many far stranger species - that roamed the continent in prehistory. A new theory indicates that people may be innocent, or at least partly innocent, of the megafuna murder.
Numerous experts have supported the idea that all those megafauna were essentially hunted to extinction. I've always had a problem with the idea that this is the whole answer. Where, in historical times, is one example where we can say with certainty that indigenous people have hunted a an entire ecosystem of large, wide-ranging species to extinction? If all the largest animals in N. America were wiped out, along with their predators, why did Africa (until modern poaching) teem with elephants, rhinos, hippos, and the predators that fed on them? Humans had perhaps 2 million years to spread out and hunt in Africa, but only 13,000 years or so in N. America.

OK, enough editorial comment. Read for yourself why, according to a team led by James Kennett of the University of California, Santa Barbara, it looks likely a celestial body, most probably a comet, had a hand in the mass extinctions. I'm not sure from reading that that I would call it established fact, but it's certainly an intriguing possibility.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

New home for Tetrapod Zoology Blog

Dr. Darren Naish's superb blog, Tetrapod Zoology, has moved to a new address. Click on the title link above to keep up on the most interesting stuff from zoology and paleontology.

Meanwhile, on Mars....

Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log has a great roundup of new from and about the Red Planet. This includes the work of rovers Spirit and Opportunity, various plans for new missions and eventual human settlement, and an update on what appear to be giant sinkholes in the Martian surface. Steven Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Mars rover programs, was just honored by the National Space Society with its annual Von Braun Award.

All Creatures Great....

Experts with a U.S.-funded wildlife conservation program in war-ravaged Sudan have found a treeless island in the nation’s southern swamps that is home to “hundreds” of elephants. One participant, Tom Catterson, said, "We flew out of a cloud, and there they were. It was like something out of Jurassic Park.” The poachers who have ravaged Sudan’s elephants and other wildlife apparently never knew of this remote spot, whose location is being kept secret.

COMMENT: OK, this episode concerns a chaotic, poor, war-torn nation where travel was difficult and wildlife officers were few. But still… hundreds of elephants living unknown until now? The example will bring smiles, not only to wildlife conservationists, but to cryptozoologists who speculate on what else we might have missed.

...and Small

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways and be wise.”

The words of King Solomon come to mind amid new research on how army ants move efficiently over terrain which, from an ant’s point of view, is full of holes and other obstacles. The answer: living pothole-fillers. Scott Powell and Nigel Franks of the University of Bristol reported that ants of the species Eciton burchellii fill holes by climbing into them, adjusting their bodies to fit, and letting their sisters march over them. If the hole is too big, several ants will climb in. The behavior observed in Central and South America was duplicated in the laboratory, where ants marching over boards with holes drilled into them essentially took individual action to make the march of the colony more efficient. When the horde has passed, the “filler” ants clamber up and rejoin the march.

Dinosaur find - a swimming predator

Dinosaur trackways leading into water have been found before, but these have always belonged to herbivores. Was the water a refuge from predatory species? A 125-million-year-old fossil from northern Spain indicates otherwise. A trackway on what used to be a lake bed indicates at least one (still not identified) species of theropod (a member of the group including everyone's favorite. T. rex), could indeed swim after prey. Loic Costeur of France's Universite de Nantes led a team which just published its studies of tracks made in water about 3.5 meters deep, leaving marks of the dinosaur's clawed feet on the bottom. Costeur told CNN in an email that, "The animal used a pelvic paddle motion, much like living aquatic birds."

The Coastlines of Titan

NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its 31st radar mapping pass of Titan, Saturn's giant moon, and produced the startling image of a coastline with bays, channels, islands, and so forth that could well have been taken of Earth. The "water" is an inhospitable mix of methane and ethane, but the similarity of processes at work on two totally different worlds is amazing. See the title link above for the image.

Deep-sea surprise

It's not surprising to discover a new species on marine invertebrate, but scientists sending their ROV to explore the Pacific floor reported a new sea anemone from a very odd habitat. The new species has been found only in one place: living on a "whale fall," the carcass of a dead whale. Found 3,000 meters down, the small, dead-white species Anthosactis pearseae was compared in size to a human tooth. It's hardly a big or spectacular find, but it filled in a pixel, so to speak, in our very incomplete image of life in the depths. No anenome has ever been found on a whale fall, which creates a colony that may last 60 to 100 years as the bones slowly decompose.

The Sound of Little Dinosaur Feet

Paleontologists working just a couple hours' drive from my house, in Morrison, Colorado (west of Denver) report an exciting and unusual find: tracks of baby dinosaurs, in this case some species of Stegosaurus. The tracks are about the size of a U.S. half dollar and indicate the critters were somewhere around the size of human babies at that point. Morrison Natural History Museum director Matthew Mossbrucker says,"The tracks are so crisply preserved that I can imagine the sound of tiny feet splashing up water when the baby dinosaurs came to this ancient river to drink and cool down."

Note to readers

I hope you're still out there. You take a few days off for travel followed by illness, and you realize and awful lot of science has passed you by.

I promise to be more faithful about keeping you up to date on the wide world of science and technology.

By the way, we are coming up quickly on the 50th anniversary of Sputnik (October 4). That is two days before my birthday, and I always wish Mom has been able to rush it just a bit so I could share in the occasion. Anyway, the July issue of Air&Space includes a list of 50 ways to celebrate the occasion. I wrote them a letter reminding them they had missed the obvious: Read a book! Naturally, I recommend the most complete, yet concise explanation of those years:
The First Space Race
by Matt Bille and Erika Lishock
Foreword by Dr. James A. Van Allen
Texas A&M University Press
2004
Happy reading!

www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2004/bille.htm

Life in the Wedell Sea

Hundreds of new species of invertebrates have been discovered in the Wedell Sea of Antarctica. Three German expeditions from 2002 to 2005, trawling at depths between 1,000 and 6,000 meters, found the marine life to be far richer than anyone expected. There are nearly 600 new species from just one group, the isopods (which resemble marine woodlice).

Accompanying the article above in The Economist is an editorial discussing just how complex this whole business of describing species really is. Whether a scientists uses morphology, reproductive isolation (aka the Biological Species Concept or BSC) or DNA, classifying and bounding a species remains a fuzzy business.
See:http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9191545

New Evidence: Past Water on Mars

The NASA rover Spirit, currently prowling Mars' Gusev Crater, has found a patch of sand that strongly indicates water was present at the site. The soil is 90 percent pure silica. Project scientist Steve Ruff of ASU explained that, on Earth, "the only way you can achieve that level of enrichment is by pumping water through rocks." Steve Squyres of Cornell University added, "It was astonishing."

The Eagle Soars

Amid all the bad news about extinction and conservation, we should not forget the successes. The American bald eagle has done so well it may be removed from the "Endangered" species list and downlisted to "Threatened."

Ready, AIM, NFIRE

Jonathan McDowell produces an informative and insightful chronicle of what's happening in space. In this entry, he reports on the status of two interesting smaller spacecraft, NASA's AIM science satellite and the MDA's NFIRE mission, along with the launch of two large new communications satellites.
(Okay, I put this in just so I could write that headline...)

New hummingbird from Latin America

Ornithologists with The Hummingbird Conservancy have a described a new species from Columbia, the very colorful Gorgeted Puffleg Eriocnemis isabellae. Actually, they were conducting a general biological survey and not specifically looking for new birds. As one co-discoverer remarked: “Though we expected to find new species of amphibians and new ranges for birds, the discovery of a new hummingbird was completely unexpected.” The species is threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture and the expansion of coca fields.

Bear kills moose - in driveway

Folks in Alaska are used to wildlife. (A story is that the air traffic controller at the Anchorage airport once told a taxiing pilot, "Bear left at the taxiway," and the pilot replied, "I see him.") But waking up to find a 500-lb grizzly (more properly, brown) bear killing an adult moose in the driveway. The Lyons of Homer, Alaska, found just that. This entry on Cryptomundo links to the videos the witnesses posted on the Internet.

The Birds and the Bats

Two groups of modern vertebrates, the birds and the bats, have mastered flight. They do it very differently, though. Geoffrey Spedding, a University of Southern California professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering (in other words, a professor at my alma mater), reported on wind tunnel studies by writing, "Bats seem to be mostly specialized for agile and maneuverable flight in complex environments." Bats have a complex twisting motion that provides some lift on the upstroke, while birds rely almost entirely on the downstroke.

Discoveries on distant planets

Scientists have succeeded in a new level of analysis of extrasolar planets, measuring the temperature on one gas giant at over 2,000 degrees C and mapping the swirling winds of another.

Spectacular death of a star

Some 240 million light-years from Earth, and thus about 240 million light years ago, a supermassive star (perhaps 150 times the mass of the Sun) exploded in a burst of energy whose brightness is startling to astronomers. The supernova in the constellation Perseus was not only huge but extraordinarily bright in the visible spectrum, leaving scientists scrambling to adjust their models for a new type of stellar death.

Beaming Scotty Down

A suborbital rocket carried ashes from over 200 people, including astronaut Gordon Cooper and actor James Doohan, famous as engineer Scott on the original Star Trek series, into space almost two weeks ago. The Space Services, Inc. rocket came down in the mountains of New Mexico. Searchers haven't been able to find it.
They eventually will, of course, but I think Doohan would appreciate the irony of the situation. Cooper, whose metaphysical pursuits made him a bit of an oddball among the technically-minded astronaut corps, would definitely love it.

The Encyclopedia of Life

The latest and most ambitious effort to catalog all life on Earth is headed for the Web. The $100M Encyclopedia of Life project aims to include a Web page for every species on the planet. The project is concentrating first on animals, plants, and fungi, with the microbes to follow when resources permit.

NASA's NEEMO

A little-known but long-running and important experiment involves a truck-sized habitat called Aquarius, 60 feet beneath the ocean surface off the Florida Keys. The habitat, owned by NOAA and operated in partnership with NASA under a program called NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) puts "aquanauts" including NASA astronauts in the habitat to study people and technology in an environment with some similarities to a space mission. The mission beginning tomorrow focuses on medical experiments, including remote operation of surgical robots. This story by SpaceRef includes links to live webcams showing the NEEMO mission.

Restructuring the Atmosphere

Current models about global warming, weather, etc. assume we understood the structure of the atmosphere. Well, not exactly. NASA reports that perhaps 60% of the atmospheric volume considered "cloud-free" actually has a kind of extremely thin haze - a transition zone where aerosol particles absorb water and where incipient clouds are starting to form or existing clouds have dissolved. Our models of the atmosphere will need to be adjusted as more data is gathered about a widespread phenomenon we did not know existed.

Orbital Express delivers

The Denver Post highlights the involvement of Colorado companies, including Ball Aerospace, in the Orbital Express robotic docking/servicing mission for DARPA. The online version of this story includes an animation of the delicate "dance" between automated spacecraft traveling 18,000 mph.

Strange sea creature filmed off Florida

OK, it's not a sea serpent. It's only two or three meters long. But that's very big for an invertebrate, and this grayish wormlike creature remains unidentified. Veteran videographer Jay Garbose, who has worked for Discovery Channel and National Geographic, shot the puzzling tape off the town of Juno Beach, Florida. He sent it to the Smithsonian, whose experts have not been able to pin a label on the beast.
Just one more reminder the sea holds more for us to discover...

R.I.P. - Astronaut Wally Schirra

Astronaut Walter M. ``Wally'' Schirra, age 84, has passed away. Schirra was the only man to fly in space in all three of the first US space programs, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
Schirra was a naval officer, a combat pilot in Korea, and later a test pilot before being picked for Project Mercury. He said of his Mercury comrades: "We shared a common dream to test the limits of man's imagination and daring."

Godspeed, Wally.

Spidey vs. Spiders

The staff at LiveScience.com offers an entertaining look at how the powers of "Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman" compare to those of real arachnids. Answer: the web stuff - well, it really could support a guy swinging through Manhattan. "Spider sense" is, alas, fiction.

Mystery cat from India

Black leopards are known from India, but wildlife officials are not sure that's what they captured on film recently. The animal is being referred to as a "black panther," with one expert making it clear that was meant as a generic term for a large black feline, species unknown. The animal is in the Pakke Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh, and forestry personnel there, along with experts from the Wildlife Institute of India, will be going back to get a closer look at the enigmatic cat.

NASA's new science mission

A small satellite called AIM (Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere) went into space today on a Pegasus booster. The spacecraft will look at the highest and strangest clouds known to science - the mysterious noctilucent clouds, glowing nighttime phenomena which drift at altitudes of 50 miles. The booster carried Virginia Tech logos in memory of the people killed in the mass shooting at the university last week.

Hawking finds freedom in zero-G

Dr. Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist disabled physically by ALS, experienced weightlessness today on Zero Gravity Corporation's modified Boeing 727. The aircraft was scheduled to make six zero-g-simulation parabolas, but Hawking didn't want to stop, and eight were performed. Hawking pronounced the experience "amazing" and is looking forward to a trip on a private suborbital rocketplane in the near future. An anxious medical staff on board found the ride gave Hawking no problems at all.

A Tree-Sized Fungus

A 20-foot tall mystery organism more than 350 million years old has been identified - as a "humongous fungus." Really.

An Earthlike world (or close, at least)

European astronomers report finding the most Earth-like "exoplanet" so far. The planet has a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and is in the habitable zone of its star, the red dwarf Gliese 581, with temperatures allowing liquid water. It may, in Star Trek terms, be the first Class M planet known to lie outside our solar system.

New flock of microsatellites in orbit

A Dnepr rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan has put the latest flock of small spacecraft in orbit. They include the three-body MAST tether experiment and Boeing's CubeSat TestBed 1 (CSTB1) spacecraft. The aerospace giant is operating one of the world's smallest satellites, a bit of a departure for a firm specializing in gigantic GEO communications satellites. The 1-kg satellite is a product of Boeing's new Engineering Development Center in Huntington Beach, CA. Scott MacGillivray, manager of Boeing Nano-Satellite Programs, says, "These satellites can quickly and inexpensively test miniature, low-power components and subsystems to help reduce the power requirements and weight of larger satellites."

Simonyi Completes Space Flight

Space tourist Charles Simonyi, the latest astronaut from the world's largest technological power (Microsoft) has returned safe and happy to Earth. He told reporters, "Seeing the Earth from space, so beautiful, majestic and calm, has filled me with great optimism. I think it is written into our DNA to explore. Space exploration is so important to humanity, that to have been able to participate in it, even in a very small way, was such a privilege."

New contender for "ugliest fish"

This anglerfish collected off Australia appears to be a new species and perhaps a new genus. Its appearance has even scientists put off: "It's a striking-looking fish,: said Rob Harcourt, of the Sydney Harbour Institute of Marine Studies. "Hideously ugly would be a fair description." A few inches long, the new critter is grayish brown and well disguised as a bit of the ocean floor.

Yuri's Night celebrates space exploration

Every April 13, astronauts, space enthusiasts, and space agencies celebrate Yuri's Night, commemorating Yuri Gagarin's flight into space on that date in 1961. This site gathers a load of information on the flight and the celebrations.

High Tech v. Human Error

The report is in on the loss of NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which died in November 2006. To summarize: "Oops."
An oversight in writing procedures for the spacecraft led to its misalignment relative to the Sun and the loss of power to the solar panels. The craft expired when its backup batteries were gone.
On the plus side, the orbiter, launched in 1996, lasted four times as long as expected. NASA managers class the mission as a resounding success no matter how it ended.

The Stuff of Life - Re-created

Did early Earth have all the chemical elements and molecules needed to "build" life under the right conditions? Or were some vital ingredients added by comets and/or meteors? Scientists have long been split on this one.
A new experiment gives a strong, though not conclusive, indication that Earth could indeed have been the crucible of life without cosmic help. A simulated lighting storm in a re-created primordial atmosphere - an experiment first performed in 1953, but now informed by a much better idea of what the planet was like in those days - produced a "soup" of amino acids necessary for life. Chemist Jeffrey Bada, whose team at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography performed the experiment, says, "Maybe we're over-optimistic, but I think this is a paradigm shift."

Dinosaur soft tissue recovered, analyzed

It seems incredible. Unfossilized soft tissue has no business surviving in any form in a fossilized dinosaur. But there it is: not blood cells with intact DNA (sorry, Michael Crichton fans) but collagen from deep within a T. rex femur. Two studies of the proteins making up the collagen report the material is definitely from the dinosaur, not modern contamination as some initially suspected. Moreover, its composition has important similarities to collagen in modern birds, lending the strongest support yet to the birds-to-dinos school of thought.

Rarest of owls seen in the wild

Peru's long-whiskered owlet, unknown to science until 1976, has been spotted alive in the wild for the first time. The tiny owl, which sports bright orange eyes surrounded by wild-looking feathers, may have a population in the low hundreds and, thanks to habitat destruction, may be highly endangered despite its elusiveness.

Thanks to Bobbie Short for circulating this item

First report of "cave chimps"

It's common to call our ancestors "cave men," although it was true only in the limited areas where suitable caves were available. Now cave-living behavior has been documented for the first time in another ape species. Savannah chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) have been recorded in Senegal using natural caves to escape the sun during the hottest part of the day. Credit for the find goes to a team led by primatologist Jill Pruetz from Iowa State University. According to LiveScience.com, paleoanthropologist Adrienne Zihlman explained the significance this way: "These chimpanzees are dealing with conditions most chimpanzees don't have to deal with. They are giving a little window to some of the problems that have to be solved if you want to survive in the savannah, and are confronting the kinds of problems that our early human ancestors had to face."

The latest ISS tourist arrives

American software billionaire Charles Simonyi has arrived safely on the International Space Station (ISS). He arrived via Soyuz with the two cosmonauts who make up the crew designated Expedition 15. Simonyi will stay on board during an 11-day series of activities while the crews change over. His blog at www.charlesinspace.com will be sharing his impressions with the world.

A fish to remember

An Alaskan fishing boat has hauled in a rare and striking catch. The shortraker rockfish (Sebastes borealis) caught in the Bering Sea is a giant of its species, nearly 110 cm long and weighing over 27kg. Most interesting, though, is what NOAA scientists found when they counted the layers of bone in its otolith (ear bone). The chunky, deep-dwelling orange fish was, they announced, between 90 and 115 years old.
Thanks to Heather Kellas for pointing me to this item.

Faith, Reason, and Science

Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D., is the director of the Human Genome Project. That makes him a prominent and respected scientist by anyone's definition. In this op-ed, he explains why all science has taught him does nothing to diminish his belief in God, setting himself against scientists like Richard Dawson who argue that faith and science/reason cannot be reconciled. Collins argues that a case for God can be made on purely rational grounds, and writes, "Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true... But why couldn't this be God's plan for creation?"
COMMENT: I posted this because I basically hold the same views, but Collins states them much better than I could. Science cannot be squared with a literal reading of Genesis, and conflicts with many non-Christian faiths as well. If you set aside aside literalism, though, and allow for the use of allegory and metaphor in religious texts, then it's possible to find, as Collins did, "harmony in the complementary truths of science and faith."

NASA Administrator: The Next 50 Years

In this well-written opinion piece, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin sets forth the rationale for expanding the human presence in space. He outlines what he argues is a "logical, incremental, stable, sustainable plan that can be executed with realistically attainable budgets" and adds, "We really can celebrate the 100th anniversary of Sputnik with the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on Mars." With perhaps a tip of the hat to Star Trek, he concludes, " It is up to us to make it so."

It's not over: Elephant poaching rises again

Despite the international ban on traffic in ivory, elephant poaching has not ended. After several years of a relative lull, it's on the rise, aided by the increasing development of Africa and the building of roads into what used to be hard-to-access areas. Wildlife Conservation Society biologist Jeff Blake and colleagues have just published a study showing "Unmanaged roads are highways of death for elephants." Blake's team surveyed thousands of miles of African roads and found at least 27 carcasses attributable to poachers, none more than 28 miles from a road. The forest elephant (Loxodonta africana cyclotis) is particularly hard hit.

Antisatellite weapons - real, rumored, and false

This item on MSNBC is stirring up a lot of comment. My comment: it doesn't deserve the attention.
First, this post needs an extra disclaimer: I have never worked with any intelligence program and have no information other than what's publicly available and my own insights from 15 years of research and writing, as a private citizen, on the capabilities of small spacecraft.
Now, the article. It has two parts. The first concerns questions raised by Democratic Senators about some kind of orbital intelligence-related spacecraft program that reportedly is far over budget. There's no actual information about what the system is, just the inevitable (and if you follow U.S. military space programs, speculation in the press really is inevitable) about whether it's a weapon system, which the U.S. has explicitly said it is not developing.
The second part concerns an alleged satellite called Prowler, launched in 1990, capable of flying from LEO up to GEO and "stealing" signals from other spacecraft close-up. The "expert" who describes this program is unnamed, but there's no reason to think there's truth here. The Air Force has only recently flown its XSS-10 and XSS-11 microspacecraft, which have far less capability than what someone claims we flew 17 years ago. The supposed Prowler also would have needed to fire a large orbit transfer stage, which is a difficult event to hide. You don't just pop up from 300 miles to 22,300.
So all we really know is that some kind of intel program is being attacked for being overbudget. That may be newsworthy in itself, but the rest doesn't merit the hype.

Pyramid wars

Coming on the heels of a French engineer's claim that he's solved the problem of how the Great Pyramid was constructed (a problem most archaeologists already considered solved), there's an interesting article from the Jerusalem Post on how what should be a question of science has become a point of contention with religious and political implications.

Cold Fusion: not quite dead?

The 1989 "discovery" of cold fusion provided one of the major scientific controversies of the 20th century, ending with an almost universal rejection of the claimed phenomenon when other scientists could not replicate the results of authors Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons and suggested the excess heat they measured did not have a nuclear origin. According to a release from the American Chemical Society, a just-completed symposium hosted several papers on different approaches to "low-energy nuclear reactions." Fleischmann presented a paper offering new results. The topic remains, oddly, of more interest to chemists than to physicists, judging by the featured papers.

Debating what ancestors looked like

This article from LiveScience.com gives a good example of the techniques, theories, and controversies surrounding the reconstruction of the faces of human ancestors (or at least early relations) from fossils. The question at hand concerns a Kenyan skull, 1.9 million years old, which startled anthropologists when it was found in 1972. The skull, KNM-ER 1470, received the name Homo rudolfensis. Its owner was originally was thought to have a modern-looking flat face (it would be the earliest appearance of such a face, by far, in the fossil record), but some scientists now argue it appeared more apelike.

What NASA sees ahead

This graphic shows what NASA calls an "integrated snapshot of Space Shuttle, Soyuz, Progress, ATV, HTV, COTS (RpK and SpaceX), Ares 1, and Orion flights between 2007 and 2015." NASA is, of course, keeping its fingers crossed that this revised and stretched-out program is going to be funded, or if more cuts will push the Ares and Orion additional years "to the right," as they say in the Federal government. NASA Adminsitrator Mike Griffin recently lamented that NASA does not have the presumption of continuance we accord to other Federal agencies. "We don't debate if we will have a Navy," he said. "But every year we always seem to debate if we will have a space program."

Space tether experiment now April 17

New Scientist reports the M.A.S.T. tether experiment should now be launched April 17. When the one-kilometer tether is deployed, ground observers should be able to spot the three-spacecraft system with binoculars or possibly the naked eye.

The Lull after the Dinosaurs

It was generally believed in paleontology that, once the dinosaurs vanished, the mammals blossomed quickly into new niches and new species, some of which gave rise to the mammals of today. A new study, though, shows that didn't happen. Instead, the new mammals were generally evolutionary dead ends. The little critters that were the original mammalian ancestors soldiered on for 10-15 million years before branching into the mammalian family trees that survive to the present day.

Space News: Tether and Orbital Express

The launch of a new tether experiment via a Russian Dnepr launch vehicle has been delayed, and it's not clear what the new date is. Presumably the Russians want to be certain the booster is 100 percent, as the last Dnepr launch failed.

Meanwhile, Boeing has a page tracking the Orbital Express robotic rendezvous-and-docking mission (see title link). One half of the mission, the Ball Aerospace-built NextSat spacecraft, is performing nominally, while the other half, the Boeing-made ASTRO spacecraft, has encountered a series of anomalies since its launch on March 8 and is not yet ready to separate from the "stack" and get into the operational phase of the mission.

Space tether experiment coming

An experiment to be launched tomorrow (March 27) on a Denpr rocket will carry out a new test of tethers in space. Three microsatellites will deploy - two at the ends of a 1 km tether, with the third in the middle using a traction mechanism to "crawl" along the tether. Past tether experiments have had mixed results. The concept may be important for future space structures, for maneuvering without propellant, and for the generation of electrical power from the interaction between a tether and the Earth's magnetic field.

Catching up with private space ventures

This excellent entry from Alan Boyle's always-worthwhile Cosmic Log catches up with news from the rocketplane entrepreneurs and Bigelow Aerospace, which apparently has a new deal with Rocketplane Kistler for support of its orbital hotel concept. There is also new information on the SpaceX Falcon 1 test earlier this month. It's now clear the first stage bumped into the back of the second after separation, although it's less certain whether that had an effect on the second stage guidance problem that halted the flight well short of orbit.

Good news for the American crocodile

The American crocodile has become a conservation success story. The continent's largest reptile (well, maybe the largest - there's an old record of an alligator allegedly reaching 19 feet, 2 inches) has been reclassified from "endangered" to "threatened."
COMMENT: An impressive 12-foot specimen was once captured near a construction area I was working on next to the Indian River at Vero Beach, FL. The reptile was kept alive in a covered pool pending a proper return to the wild. The animal got away and was never found again, earning it the name "Houdini." At that point, in 1976, there were as few as 300 of these animals in Florida. There are now an estimated 2,000.

France Opens UFO Files

The French space agency, CNES, has opened up its files on what may be the world's longest-running official government investigation of UFOs. The agency is in the process of releasing and posting on the Web some 100,000 documents used by the Group for Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena.
COMMENT: I've always believed that the small percentage of UFO reports which resist easy explanation might well conceal some important natural electrical, atmospheric, and/or plasma phenomena that were being overlooked due to the ridicule factor. The numbers the French researchers posted, though, are startling: only 9 percent of reports are considered definitely explained, with another 33 percent likely explained. Even the most ardent American UFOlogists assume 90-percent-plus of reports can be traced to to mundane causes. I've not yet read what kind of sorting system the French researchers used, and it may well be the just-quoted numbers apply only to a puzzling minority of reports and not to the entire body of initial data. Still, there will no doubt be a lot in here for students of the bizarre - and just maybe for serious scientific minds as well.

News From SpaceX!

The first rocket produced by SpaceX, Elon Musk's privately funded company intended to cut the cost of access to orbit in half, has had a partially successful launch. The Falcon booster lifted off from its Kwajalein Atoll pad and soared into the sky about 9 PM EDT. Unfortunately, a problem with the second stage meant the rocket fell short of achieving orbit, but Musk and his intrepid crew of believers felt they'd taken a major step forward nonetheless. "We successfully reached space and really retired almost all the risk associated with the rocket, so I feel very good about where things are," he said.

NASA News: from bad to incredibly bad

NASA, burdened with far more missions and demands than its $17B budget can support, has proposed cutting out its leading-edge technology development center - the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). To save a mere $4M a year, the agency will end research into topics as diverse (and, in the long term, vital) as improved spacesuits and exotic propulsion technologies. Meanwhile, future missions in the Lunar Robotic Precursor Program will go over the side, along with the innovative "Red Planet" venture capital fund program.

COMMENT: Yes, the NASA Administrator reports to the President and must do his best with the budget he's given. I know this is easy for me to say, since my job isn't on the line, but Administrator Mike Griffin must be forthright and public about the fact NASA flat-out cannot accomplish its missions with anything like the budget it has today. The train wreck has arrived.

Danger for the "Dancing Deer"

In 1951, scientists gave up the Manipur brow-antlered deer or sangai (Cervus eldi eldi) as extinct. Fortunately, they were wrong. A small herd of the animals hung on in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur in one of the world's most unusual habitats. Some 100 deer live on a huge floating island of silt and vegetation in Loktak lake. They have developed an unusual, bobbing gait due to the spongy and insubstantial nature of the surface they walk on. The "dancing deer," as they are often called, are in trouble again, though. Changes in the lake's water level due to a hydropower station have led to the slow disintegration of the world's most unusual game preserve. The sangai can survive on dry land, and probably will. But an amazing story of survival will nonetheless come to an end.
Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

Harvest of new genes from the ocean

An expedition devoted to uncovering the genetic matter contained in tiny marine organisms is reporting quite a haul. A two-year global voyage effort in search of bacteria and viruses has proven marine microbial life is much richer than anyone suspected. The results will be studied for many more years, and will lead to a much greater understanding of the oceanic food web.

Thanks to Dr. Cherie McCollough for this item.

Another take on the Martian cave report....

A unique observation by the always-spot-on Klye Morris comic strip.

A Deadly New Species

Late in 2005, an Australian herpetologist, Dr Mark Hutchinson, caught an odd-looking snake snake crossing a dirt road in the central desert of Western Australia. The meter-long animal turned out to be a new species of the highly venomous taipan. Biologist Richard Shine commented, "My initial reaction is that this is really exciting. Taipans are such an icon of Australia. To discover that there's an entirely new taipan, more than a hundred years after the last one, really gives us an idea of what might be out there. It does seem remarkable that such large animals of general interest are quite poorly known." He added, "Maybe that reflects how few people are interested in going out to catch large snakes on hot days."

Caves on Mars?

Scientists at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas reported that images from NASA's Odyssey spacecraft show what may appear to be seven cave openings on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano. The entrances range in width from 100 to 250 meters. and the caves are somewhere over 70m in depth (in only one case can the floor actually be seen.) The caves offer possible shelter for any Martian life forms and could conceivably be of use to human colonists.

This is a big week on the Red Planet, including as it does the reported discovery of a massive underground "sea" of frozen water ice:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6310173.stm

Some doubts about the Gore version of global warming

The New York Times, which may safely be called a pro-environmentalist and generally pro-Democratic paper, has published a good article by the excellent science writer William J. Broad on the scientific reaction to Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth. Broad writes that, despite agreement by a majority of relevantly-degreed scientists that Gore's central point is correct, criticisms about the film's use of oversimplification and overstatement are creating a mini-backlash. The fear is that easily challenged missteps (like depicting a 20-foot rise in sea levels when US experts predict 23 inches) make it easy for opponents to dismiss the film and thus its topic.

Now Maine gets a big cat search

Officials in Maine are joining their counterparts in Pennsylvania (see earlier post) in a new examination of evidence for local presence of the Eastern cougar. The textbooks say Felis concolor cougar went extinct many decades ago, but very few big cats can read, and a major discovery may be in the offing.

New Big Cat Species!

GENEVA (Reuters) - Scientists have identified a leopard found on the South-East Asian islands of Borneo and Sumatra as a new species of great cat, the global nature protection body WWF reported on Thursday.
....Genetic and skin tests on the creature, now dubbed the Bornean clouded leopard, or Neofelis diardi, have shown that it is almost as different from clouded leopards found on the Asian mainland as lions are from tigers, the Swiss-based WWF said.... SEE LINK FOR REST OF STORY

The hunting of the squid

Two scientific teams have joined forces to find out just how the biggest predator in the sea, the sperm whale, finds it fast-moving squid prey. One team, led by William Gilly at Stanford University, was tagging the two-meter jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas, not to be confused with the much larger giant squid Architeuthis dux), squid, while Randall Davis's team from Texas A&M University was tagging sperm whales. Now the joint team can "watch" as the animals, which normally congregate at different depths, cross paths and become steps in the same food chain.

Does the Japanese wolf survive?

Loren Coleman and company at Cryptomundo have collected some new data on an intriguing mystery: when did the Japanese wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) go extinct - if at all?
The subcompact canid is usually listed as extinct as of 1905. However, a photograph has been published showing a specimen killed in 1910. This specimen, though, was later destroyed in a fire, leaving the mounted 1905 specimen (now in the British Museum) as the species' last representative.
COMMENT: As I described in Shadows of Existence (Hancock House, 2006), it's not at all certain the species was extinct before World War One or even World War Two. There's a slim chance it survives even today.

Orbital Express in Orbit

The U.S. Air Force’s Space Technology Program 1 (STP-1) mission has launched on an Atlas 5 booster from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The main payload is the $300M Orbital Express, a two-satellite system designed to test automated rendezvous and docking techniques. Also on board are four military microsatellites, including the US Air Force Academy's FalconSat-3.

NASA cuts loose troubled astronaut

Shuttle astronaut Lisa Nowak, the first astronaut ever charged with a felony (attempted kidnapping, among other crimes), has been terminated by NASA. Technically, Nowak, as a naval officer, has not been fired, but simply has been returned to the Navy for any further action. NASA hopes to move quickly beyond the Nowak distraction to let administrators refocus on other problems at the critically underfunded space program, but media fascination and the involvement of another astronaut (Bill Oefelein, the alleged object of an obsession on Nowak's part) unfortunately guarantees this black eye for the agency will take a long time to heal.

Animal regenerates from one cell

Experiments in Israel with the sea squirt Botrylloides leachi have shown the animal can regenerate its entire body even if all that's left of it is a single blood cell. This ability was known in some less complex invertebrates, such as worms, but scientists were surprised the relatively complex sea squirt could do the same. This ability is still beyond the reach of even the simplest vertebrates, but further studies may reveal how regeneration abilities diminished as vertebrates evolved.

Bird rediscovered after 129 years

A slightly built, long-beaked little bird not seen since 1867 has been rediscovered in Thailand. Birdlife International announced that the large-billed reed-warbler was rediscovered at a wastewater treatment plant in Thailand. The species Acrocephalus orinus had previously been known only from a single specimen found in India. It has short wings and was not thought to migrate.

What's New out of Africa

"ex Africa semper aliquid novi"
(there is always something new out of Africa)
- Pliny the Elder (23AD - 79AD)

This very old saying is still true in Tanzania's Eastern Arc Mountains, where a patchy collection of forested land equaling roughly a thousand square miles is keeping scientists very busy. In addition to a very distinctive new monkey, the kipunji (Rungwecebus kipunji, described in 2005), new species of frogs and reptiles have been identified, part of a conservation hot spot with one of the world's highest densities of endangered and endemic species. Neil Burgess of the WWF says, “This is a really important place. Biologists who go there just keep finding more and more species.”

Invented before its time

A blast from the techno-past - this very cool blog page offers examples of inventions that were ahead of their time. Some made it into everyday use, but most didn't. Still, did you know someone patented a radio carried inside a cane, connected to a pair of headphones, in 1933? OK, it was not quite a Walkman, because the user had to stop and plant the end of the cane in the ground, but it's fascinating anyway. Also in 1933 came the ancestor of the modern "shared application" conferencing business: a "cathode-ray pen" with which you could write in one city and have the letters instantly displayed on a screen in another location far away. In 1934 emerged the rubber boot with air-filled soles for comfort. Many more such examples are offered in the blog Modern Mechanix.

Revisiting the Eastern Cougar

Pennsylvania Game Commission Executive Director Carl G. Roe announced the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has begun a new review, the first since 1982, on the status of the endangered and possibly extinct eastern cougar. The animal was placed on the endangered species list in 1974, 99 years after the last verified killing in Pennsylvania and a year when many game experts believed Puma concolor cougar was already extinct everywhere.
The news that FWS will re-examine the situation gladdens the hearts of researchers whose private networks have shared information on hundreds of Eastern cougar (or puma, panther, etc.) sightings for decades and unsuccessfully attempted to convince state game managers the cat was not extinct. A handful of verified events have led officials in Vermont and Rhode Island to conclude the occasional cougar is living in the wild, but there's continued debate about whether these animals represent escaped or released exotic pets as opposed to a true surviving population.
COMMENT: I've always thought it likely there probably are a couple of pockets, one in Tennessee and one further north, where a few animals just barely hung on out of sight of man. There may have been mixing between wild and domestically-raised cougars, which will ensure things stay confused for a long time. The population of deer, the Eastern cougar's favorite prey, has exploded throughout the East and especially in Pennsylvania, which is likely to lead to increased cougar numbers.

Hawking ready for zero-G flight

Quadriplegic physicist Stephen Hawking will take the first step toward his dream of traveling to space on April 26, when he rides a modified Boeing 727 used to simulate weightlessness for astronauts and adventurers. The plane is operated in cooperation with NASA by Zero Gravity Corp. Jay Buckey, M.D., a former astronaut, told an MSNBC interviewer the experience would have a"good side and a bad side" for Hawking. "Being weightless like that doesn't require you to have that much strength in your limbs, so in that sense it would be freeing," he said. Hawking will need to be closely monitored, though, to watch the stress on his cardiovascular system and avoid injuries when transitioning from weightlessness back to normal gravity.