Old Life from melting ice?

As glaciers around the world are melting back, what are they releasing? Old microbes and even older DNA fragments, as it turns out.
Ice 100,000 to 8,000,000 years old was cut from Antarctic glaciers and carefully melted under sterile conditions. The result: healthy, fast-multiplying microbes, expecially from the younger samples. Scientists found there was a "half-life" of about 1.1 million years for DNA of frozen microbes: about half of it disappears in that time. So some samples showed, not viable animals, but fragments, which themselves could have unknown impacts if released into the aquasphere.

Your own Flying Saucer

In the "really cool stuff" department, a California company called Moller International is selling flaying saucers for $90,000. What your money actually buys you is a one-person craft able to fly at an altitude of 10 feet (3m), lifted by eight rotary engines that create enough downforce to make the craft fly with a 250-pound (114 kg) payload. The M200G can actually fly higher than that, but an onboard computer keeps it low enough so the driver does not, under U.S. Federal Aviation Administration regulations, require a pilot's license. Moller believes the craft will be popular with landowners who want to inspect property where ground vehicles or hovercraft are impractical.

Science v. Poaching in Malaysia

This very interesting article from the New Straits Times (Malaysia) describes how work is afoot to set up the country's first laboratory able to identify animals by DNA in an accredited system whose results will be accepted by courts. Malaysian conservation officials explain that, while their country's rich wildlife is under threat from both local and commercial poaching, they've lost cases because prosecutors could not definitively establish the identity of a confiscated animal part. The lab will also give the nation's scientists a new tool for differentiating animal populations, including identifying new species, and for studying wildlife diseases.

Ads in Space

Bigelow Aerospace, the firm which has raised a surprising amount of capital to pursue its goal of orbital hotels, has come up with a new idea: images, including advertisements, projected on the outside of its inflatable test modules while in orbit. The company's site shows some examples.

COMMENT: I applaud this company, as always, for its willingness to embark on a risky venture that, if successful, will help open up human space travel. I can't help but feel a little bemused by this new tweak, though. Who, exactly, is going to see the ads? UFO pilots?

The conversation on the bridge of a flying saucer might go like this:
"Look, Bleemborg. The earthlings have come up with another idea for the rest of the galaxy to laugh at."
"It is funny, Zorgfrog, but right now I do feel a craving for a vacuum-cold Pepsi."
"I hope these people don't exterminate themselves by nuclear war or global warming. They are much too entertaining to lose."
"Well, let's go ahead and dorfeltape this scene. The network executives back home are always happy to get a new segment for their hit show, 'Funniest Earth Videos.'"
"I still like the time we punk'd their Mars Rover with those ice cubes. Their news reports were hilarious."

Off for Mars

The largest, most sophisticated lander ever sent toward the Red Planet is off to a good start. The Mars Phoenix mission had a perfect liftoff this morning, courtesy of a Delta II booster rocket and the crews at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Landing in the Martian Arctic is set for late May 2008.

New Species from the Philippines

Conservation International scientists report a trove of species including a shrew (new mammals are always of interest) and a strikingly beautiful white and gold orchid.

Space: The Quest Goes On

In this article for WIRED, Michael Belfiore explains why, as bad as it was, the accident that claimed the lives of three men working on a private spaceship for Virgin Galactic is unlikely to derail the serious efforts being made to develop suborbital and orbital space travel on a paying basis.

How Much to Name a Monkey?

The answer is $650,000. That's what online casino GoldenPalace.com spent to attach its name to Callicebus aureipalatii ("golden palace" in Latin). As Stephen Strauss explains in this column, though, the business of selling naming rights to fund research has not been as simple and straightforward as scientists hoped. How, after all, do you decide what it's worth to name a genus of ants? ($25,000 is the current price tag). As Susan Swan of Canada's Museum of Nature puts it, "Everybody loves the idea, it is just the logistics of making it happen just hasn't panned out."

Back to the Red Planet

This Friday is the opening day of a three-week launch window which hopefully will send NASA's newest and most sophisticated Martian probe, the Mars Phoenix Lander, on its way. Ten months later, the 350-kg lander will settle on a spot in the Martian arctic and spend three months digging into and analyzing the soil. Soil will be sampled to a depth of half a meter and tested in a sophisticated miniature lab for the two Holy Grails of planetary exploration, water and organic material. During and after the primary mission, a weather stations supplied by the Canadian Space Agency will make the most detailed, long-term measurements yet on the Martian environment.

The Newest X-Plane

The X-48B Blended Wing Body research craft has taken flight at Edwards Air Force Base. The Boeing/NASA project, a three-jet-engine, remotely controlled "flying wing" craft, weighing 225 kilograms and with a wingspan over 6 meters, is pioneering new technologies which could produce quieter, more fuel-efficient airplanes.

COMMENT: It's good to see an X-plane flying after the string of cancellations (X-33, 34, 38, etc.) over the last decade.

Following up the week in space

The independent panel that made headlines with reports of astronauts drinking before flying also cautioned that its aim was to determine how well the process of clearing astronauts for flight was working - not whether specific incidents, as reported to the panel, had actually occurred. NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale said the panel did not provide specifics and NASA had to investigate further. She added, "Alcohol use in regard to spacecraft or aircraft -- and anybody's that's impaired -- is not going to be tolerated by this agency." So we have a while to go before NASA investigates the claim that one impaired astronaut went up on a Soyuz capsule, while another was cleared to board a Shuttle flight but was sent home when the flight was delayed for unrelated reasons.

The transcript from the NASA press conference shows the distance between the actual findings so far and the dramatic headlines (like "Three-Martini Launch"):
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=24873


Meanwhile, Burt Rutan's cutting-edge space technology firm, Scaled Compsites, LLC (whose server appears to be down this morning) has released this statement on its first-ever fatal accident, which occurred on Thursday the 26th:

Scaled Composites, LLC is deeply saddened to report the loss of three of our colleagues. Eric Blackwell, 38, Glen May, 45, and Todd Ivens, 33, were killed by an explosion that occurred during a routine cold-flow test of the oxidizer system we’re developing for SpaceShipTwo. Three other Scaled employees were seriously injured and are hospitalized.
We are doing our best to take care of the families of the deceased as well as the injured and their families, and we hope you will join us in keeping them in your thoughts and prayers.
As you may imagine, the Scaled family is devastated by this event. As we grieve together, we are also beginning to gather up all of the information to determine what caused this accident. We are committed to learn all we can from this tragedy and move ahead.

A Sad, Stunning Week for NASA

Short of the International Space Station making a sudden unplanned reentry and landing on Washington, this week couldn't possibly get worse for NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. That might be the only thought that's keeping him sane right now.

Some of this is just bad timing, with a computer sabotage report coming on the heels of the post-Lisa-Nowack astronaut medical policy evaluation and a GAO report on NASA's problems keeping track of inventory, but none of it is excusable.

Taking the GAO report first, it is fair to ask how NASA's competence at keeping track of office equipment compares to other agencies. I suspect some would love to have NASA's loss rate, which someone writing to NASAWatch estimated at about 1/4 of 1 percent of inventory. I suppose I have to give bonus points for imagination to the guy who reported his NASA-owned laptop had been shipped to the ISS and dumped overboard to burn up in the atmosphere.

The report that a subcontractor deliberately cut wires on three computers destined for the ISS is bizarre. We'll have to wait and see what kind of explanation investigators come up with. (The computers in question are Boeing-built External Wireless Instrumentation System Network Control Units (EWIS NCU)). The subcontractor has not been named (individually or by company).

The real bombshell, NASA's reporting that alcohol-impaired astronauts were allowed to fly on two occasions, is just stunning. OK, people in any tight-knit group tend to cover for each other a little. But if - IF - NASA actually let impaired people board a spacecraft, heads should roll from top to bottom of the agency. (I should add that the report said they were allowed to "fly" but it did not specify what the astronauts were flying on - the incidents could have involved Shuttle flights, but also might have been Soyuz capsules or T-38 training aircraft. "Scuttlebutt" is that these two incidents did not concern the Shuttle, but we'll have to wait for official elaboration - if it comes - on that point.)

In addition to the two "flying impaired" incidents, though, NASA is reporting there were other cases when astronauts violated the 12-hour rule (no alcohol within 12 hours before a flight of any kind) but were not described as being impaired. Regardless of impairment, any violation of the 12-hour "bottle to throttle" rule will get a military or commercial pilot grounded and otherwise seriously punished.

No astronauts, dates, or flights have yet been officially named in any of these cases, and it's not certain they will be. Whatever the details, the headlines have already done the damage. This kind of blot on NASA's record will take years to overcome.

Other items on the front page of Keith Cowing's invaluable NASAWatch site as of 7/26/07 include an employee embezzling $150K from NASA, more squabbles about the agency's budget, and, from outside NASA, a report of three people killed in a rocket test explosion at Scaled Composites in Mojave, CA.

Memo to Keith: Maybe it's a day to drape the site in black. It's a bad day for all of us who believe in space exploration and think of NASA as one of the key actors in carrying out the best aspirations of the human race.


In sadness,
Matt Bille

The Squid Invasion

The Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas, is an aggressive, voracious, and downright nasty predator which can grow up to two meters long and weigh 50 kg. While many marine species are declining, the the Humboldt squid is growing in numbers and pushing north into the coastal waters of California, consuming commercially valuable fish such as hake and anchovies. An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents how these squid were known only from equatorial waters until 1997, when they started appearing off California. Now they are showing up in increasing numbers, with still-unclear consequences for prey species, human fishermen, and competitors like sharks and sea lions.

Aerospace Projects Review - a unique resource

Despite my being a 40-year air and space buff, Scott Lowther's unique electronic publication, Aerospace Projects Review, has exposed me to countless projects I never knew existed. Scott's specialty is finding blueprints, illustrations, and descriptions of air and space vehicles that never made it to operational status. Whether it's manned V-2s, competing designs for vertical-takeoff fighter planes, atomic-powered bombers, or whatever, hundreds of projects from the fertile minds of aerospace engineers over the past 70 years or so are documented in Scott's invaluable resource.

Northrop Grumman buys Scaled Composites

The innovative company that built SpaceShipOne has agreed to be taken over by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. N-G will increase its stake in Burt Rutan's firm Scaled Composites LLC from 40 percent to 100 percent.

Comment: Everyone involved says nothing will change at Scaled Composites, and it will remain under Rutan's leadership and stay a responsive, innovative firm despite being part of a huge conglomerate. The track record of maintaining the small company's unique advantages after changes like this, however, is not good. You could even argue it is nonexistent. Let's hope Scaled beats the odds.

Harry Potter: What Fantasy Teaches About Science

I've finished the last Harry Potter novel and found it good. While I can nitpick the writing and a couple of plot holes (how did the Sword of Griffindor get from the grasping hands of a goblin back into the Sorting Hat?), it's a well-done close to a masterful work of imagination.
One of the things that makes J.K. Rowling's novels work is that they describe a universe with its own rules - its own physics, if you will. People can develop new spells and invent new magical gadgets, such as Dumbledore's deluminator, but they can't break some essential rules such as magic's inability to bring back the dead. The capabilities and limitations of magic in Book 7 are the same as in Book 1. The same can be said of J.R.R. Tolkein's magnificent Rings saga.
Compare that to George Lucas' Star Wars saga. Originally, Lucas set a rip-roaring adventure tale in a space world that looked lived in and was basically consistent under its own rules (allowance of hyper-light travel, etc.) By the second trilogy, though, the rules kept shifting. The Force, an innate capability that "binds the universe together" and could be developed by practice, suddenly became a function of genetics (a person's midichlorian count). The laws of space physics, which had been the physics of our universe with a few settled exceptions, suddenly went out the window - literally - as spaceships pulled up alongside each other and blasted with advanced versions of 20th century cannon - though with recoil having no effect on the motion of the spaceships.
The point? Our universe, and the science that describes it, operates by a set of physical laws that can't be broken (they can be suspended if you believe that God sometimes takes a direct hand in human affairs, but that's beside the point of this discussion). We don't know all the nuances of these laws, and, as we understand them better, we may create radical new technologies (e.g., sending information via the "spooky" entanglement phenomenon, or, more distantly, making use of wormholes for travel in some form). But the laws are consistent in the real world. We can accept variations or even entirely new physics in fantasy books and films, but those variations work when they are part of a consistent author-created universe. Establishing rules and then abandoning them is highly unsatisfying for the reader/viewer (and, George Lucas, beneath your considerable talent to rely on).

Regards,
Matt

Apollo 11

Apollo 11 touched down on July 20, 1969. I was a 9-year-old kid, living an hour's drive south of the Cape, fascinated by all things space-related. My father worked for Piper Aircraft then and had his private license. He'd rented a plane so we could go up and watch the launch from the air. Despite the need to keep the required distance (10 miles, I think), it was impressive. The night of the first moonwalk, I mainly remember struggling to stay awake. I think I missed the actual "One small step for man..." moment.

My wife was a young girl vacationing with her parents in West Germany. What she most remembered was how ecstatic the Germans were that the Americans were first on the Moon. Americans' money was no good: if people found out you were from the USA, they lined up to buy you dinners and drinks.

Apollo was much more than one country's triumph, though. John Stewart wrote a song about how, no matter where we were, no matter what our circumstances, "Still we stopped to watch it, yeah / on a July afternoon / watched a man named Armstrong / walk upon the Moon."

There were a lot of reasons behind that voyage, from science to the Cold War. It's often believed Apollo had an unlimited budget and sailed through Congress every year. Not true. There was a lot of debate over whether to spend what we were spending to put a handful of men on the moon.

Almost no one, though, would have guessed back then that we were going to let a half-century pass (as seems likely) before the first post-Apollo human voyage. The moonwalkers are old men now. They may all have passed on by the time we plant new footprints in the lunar dust.
Arthur C. Clarke was once asked what event of the 20th Century he would never have predicted. He said, "That we would have gone to the moon and stopped."

If we are to go again - and I think we should - we need to do it right, with a long-term plan and a long-term commitment to explore and utilize Earth's nearest neighbor as part of a grander vision.

To the countless thousands of men and women who made Apollo possible: we salute you all.

Ad astra,
Matt Bille

A Leap in Space Suit design

Space suits are devilishly difficult things to design and engineer. They must protect the user from a multitude of hazards while still allowing movement. They are, in fact, miniature spaceships. Hence the bulky EVA suits of today that, in Earth gravity, weigh more than the astronauts and exhaust the wearer after a few hours.
A radical redesign from professor Dava Newman and her colleagues at MIT uses recent advances in fabrics to create a suit nicknamed the "Spiderman suit." She calls it the BioSuit. Instead of creating a pressurized container the shape of a human, her suit uses fabrics that mold tightly but flexibly to the shape and movement of the user. An operational suit that will be much more comfortable and lighter than current models is in sight (assuming funding) in about ten years.
COMMENT: As Keith Cowing at NASAWatch points out, this promising breakthrough was made using funding from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts - an organization which was just killed for budgetary reasons.

Overnight Evolution

A year ago, the proportion of Blue Moon butterflies (Hypolimnas bolina) on the Samoan islands of Upolu and Savaii which are male dropped to approximately one percent, thanks to a parasitic bacteria which infected females and selectively killed male embryos. This put the species on the edge of extinction. A mere ten generations of butterflies, over less than a year's time, developed an immunity in male embryos, based on a "suppressor gene," that let them develop even when the parasite was present. This resulted in males reaching almost normal proportions (40 percent of the population).
NOTE: This is a more complex process that it may seem, and it's not clear from the media accounts I've read whether the suppressor gene was already present (but rare or unexpressed) in some butterflies or whether there was an actual change at the genetic level. Either way, it's a striking example of natural selection in action.

Attenborough's echinda rediscovered

Researchers exploring the Cyclops Mountains of Papua (the western half of the island of New Guinea) have reported finding burrows, tracks, and other signs indicating the continued existence of an egg-laying mammal not seen since 1961. In fact, the animal had been collected exactly once, and is represented by a single specimen in a Netherlands museum. Scientists from the Zoological Society of London will return to Papua next year in hopes of photographing Zaglossus attenboroughi in the wild.

Materials science leaping ahead

This collection of advances from LiveScience.com focuses on the development of the first "self-healing" materials by scientists at the University of Illinois. Stick a knife in the new polymer-based material, withdraw it, and microchannels carry new molecules of the epoxy-resin substrate to fill in the space. Linked articles explore shape-shifting polymers and the advances being made by studying how tiny creatures like spiders make their way over difficult surfaces.

Endangered Endangered Species Program

According to today's Boston Globe, the success of seeing the bald eagle soar off the U.S. government's endangered species list has obscured a bigger problem in the agency charged with protection and recovery of such species. Listing of new species, except those forced onto the list by litigation, has all but stopped in the last six years amid a 15% budget cut, and the acting assistant director of endangered species for the Fish and Wildlife Service, Bruce Arroyo, agreed with the paper's estimate that 30 percent of the jobs in the program, including the director's post, are vacant.
COMMENT: Comparing Administrations by the number of species they list (58 in Bush II, 231 in Bush 1), is oversimplifying the subject, since each species' case is different, but there's no question that lack of personnel and funding is hampering efforts to protect species already on the list. One organization I belong to, Republicans for Environmental Protection, has pressured GOP lawmakers, with some success, to reclaim for the party the conservation heritage of Teddy Roosevelt.
Visit www.repamerica.org is you are interested.

Water on a Distant World

NASA's Spitzer space telescope, examining a distant planet belonging to a strange class called "Hot Jupiters," has found the spectral signature of water vapor.
Water, in this case, does not mean life. HD 189733b, 63 light years from Earth, has a surface temperature estimated at 1,000 degrees Kelvin. It completes an orbit around its star every two days. Still, this is the best evidence yet for H2O on an exoplanet.

Genocide in pre-Columbian America?

Scientists are examining seven skeletons—five adults, one child, and an infant—discovered two years ago in a canyon in New Mexico. Ascribed to the small and little-known Gallina culture, the skeletons have something besides heritage in common. All show the marks of violent deaths - axe blows, broken bones, shattered skulls. The skeletons presumably were left there before the complete disappearance of the Gallina sometime around AD 1275. American archaeologist Tony Largaespada told an interviewer that almost all the Gallina people ever found were murdered. "[Someone] was just killing them, case after case, every single time." It's one more mystery from ancient America.

New mammoth called "best preserved"

Ten thousand years ago, a six-month old female mammoth died on what is now the Yamal peninsula of Siberia. The mammoth calf was found by a reindeer herder as the ice and dirt covering it eroded away. Scientists were thrilled to see the animal was so well preserved its trunk and even its eyes are intact. It's being sent to Japan for expert examination. In the photograph accompanying this BBC article, the little pachyderm looks so "normal" one would not be surprised to see it get up and walk. (If it could, it would stand about 1.3 meters tall.) There is a possibility, however slight, that the new discovery might have DNA so well preserved it could contribute to a far-out idea some specialists think could actually happen: a cloning experiment that would lead to a living mammoth, or at least a half-mammoth.

Educator-Astronaut Ready for Space

Barbara Morgan may have waited longer to fly than any other astronaut. Chosen to be the backup to teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe in 1985, she watched as McAuliffe and the "teachernaut" program died in the Challenger disaster. Morgan returned to teaching elementary school, only to come back to NASA in 1998 and qualify as a mission specialist for the Shuttle program. On 7 August 2007, she and six other crewmembers will launch on the shuttle Endeavor to service and expand the International Space Station. Morgan will operate the shuttle's robotic arm to support astronauts on EVA working on the station. She will also work in several educational projects.
COMMENT: "Dedication" and "determination" are overused words... but they are very well justified in reference to Barbara Morgan. Godspeed to Barbara and her crew.

The Death of NIAC

I mentioned in the last post that NASA takes a lot of criticism. It certainly deserves some for shutting down the highly productive NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC), which funded cutting-edge technology projects of the sort we will need to make possible such endeavors as a human voyage to Mars. It's certainly true the agency's tasks exceed its budget, and some things have to be sacrificed, but the most forward-looking institution in a forward-looking agency is quite possibly the worst candidate one could choose to axe to save a few million dollars.

New lives for old spacecraft

NASA has approved new missions for two space probes which are still functioning well after completing their primary tasks in the harshest of environments. Deep Impact, which launched an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, will not head for another comet and then turn its instruments on stars known to have planets. Stardust, which sent a canister containing interstellar and cometary dust samples back to Earth, will now go on for another look at the post-impact Tempel 1.
COMMENT: NASA, as an agency, takes a lot of criticism, some of it deserved (and some of it from me, not that they probably notice), but this is a good example of the human ingenuity which still exists there, unabated since the glory days of Apollo.

Welcome the "Octosquid"

From the deep waters off Hawaii comes this unique specimen - a 30-cm cephalopod nicknamed the "octosquid," as it has a generally squid-like shape overall but an octopus-like head and eight tentacles. It is apparently a new species although it may fall within a known genus, Mastigoteuthis.

A Dodo Named "Fred"

Continuing what seems to be Extinct Animal News Week, we have new word on the the most famous of extinct creature, the dodo. This chubby, flightless pigeon is no doubt truly extinct, but scientists have their hands on what no one had ever seen or seriously expected to see - a well-preserved skeleton that will let them analyze the bird's DNA. Since its discoverer (a local man named Fred, immortalized in the nickname given to the specimen) found the skeleton in a cave on the island of Mauritius, scientists have been, in the words of paleontologist Julian Hume of Britain's Natural History Museum, "skipping down the street."

The Thylacine's Extinction - When or If?

The modern world's only known large marsupial predator, the thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger), was declared extinct in 1986. That was 50 years after the last officially confirmed specimen died in a zoo.
Some searchers kept looking for the animal, notably Dr. Eric Guiler, who found some scat in the late 1950s and early 1960s that he thought belonged to a tiger. Those samples, which could not be positively identified with the techniques then in use, will now get a proper DNA analysis by zoologist Jeremy Austin and his colleagues at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA. (The late Dr. Guiler, for the record, thought Thylacinus cynocephalus had lived 50-60 years past its official demise, but today is truly extinct.) Finding thylacine DNA in the scats won't prove the animal is still alive, but will prove it lasted later than we thought and may vindicate at least some of the post-1936 witnesses who insisted they had seen the species in the wild.

Argentina's winged wonder

Some six million years ago, the mountains and pampas of what is now Argentina were shaded by the wings of the largest flying bird ever discovered, the condor-like Argentavis magnificens. Now researchers led by Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University have analyzed its capabilities, feeding measurements into a computer program to simulate the great bird's flight, and concluded this 70-kg bird with a wingspan over six meters was probably as large as any flying bird could get. It was so large that, while an excellent glider, it could not take off from level ground. If it came down to the flatlands for prey, it probably needed to find a slight downslope into a headwind just to get airborne. While some researchers believe the bird was a scavenger, Chatterjee and his colleagues believe its skull and beak (over half a meter long!) were better suited for a hunter-killer lifestyle.
(Comment: This is one of those species we humans should be truly sad that we never got to observe in person. We don't know when it became extinct, but it was presumably long before the first humans appeared in that region. As to its lifestyle, almost all predators will scavenge when the opportunity presents itself. We recently discovered that even the ocean's apex predator, the orca, will scavenge. It seems reasonable that A. magnificens would take whatever it could find, living or dead. )

From Vietnam, Good News on Rare Monkey

Vietnam's gray-shanked duoc (Pygathrix cinerea), was classified only in 1977 and thought to be exceedingly rare. Now a team from WWF and Conservation International has reported that, while still rare, this member of the monkey tribe is in better shape than we thought. Only one population of over a hundred individuals had ever been seen, but the newly-discovered population in central Vietnam numbers about 180.

COMMENT: While some cryptozoologists go overboard in claiming the world literally teems with large unknown species, discoveries like this and the massive herds of elephants and other wildlife recently reported from the Sudan remind us we most assuredly do NOT know every corner of the natural world.

A Step Toward Space Hotels

The Genesis II inflatable test module, second in a series designed to lead to privately-owned, orbiting hotels, is in space and doing well following a June 29 launch on a Russian Dnepr rocket. Bigelow Aerospace reported the 4.5-m module had successfully deployed, with its solar cells providing power and its internal atmosphere withing breathable limits. Bigelow is thinking big, planning to have a space station/hotel in operation by 2015 at a total program cost of $500M.

The Bald Eagle Flies High

American conservation authorities have gone ahead with their plans (see earlier post) to take the bald eagle off the Endangered Species List. This is not just a conservation success, but an emotional lift to everyone concerned with the environment. A nation that could not save its national symbol might as well give up on saving anything else.

In the "interesting footnote" department, John James Audubon consistently held that the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) was distinct from a larger, solid brown bird found along the shores of the eastern U.S., which he formally named Falco washintonii. He credited his type specimen (now lost, alas) with a wingspan of 3.1 meters. The "Bird of Washington" or "Washington's Eagle" was most likely an abnormally large bald eagle in the juvenile stage (before the white head feathers appear), but we will probably never be sure.

New claim for oldest human relation in Europe

How far back does the human lineage stretch on the continent of Europe? Scientists at an institute in Spain claim the answer is "a great deal further than we thought." A single pre-molar, discovered this past week at the Atapuerca site in the Burgos Province in northern Spain, reportedly came from strata over a million years old. Anthroplogist Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro believes it could date back as much as 1.2 million years.
Comment: This would certainly be an important find, if de Castro has it right. Some scientists will not doubt raise eyebrows at the rush to announce the discovery immediately - long before further analysis to corroborate the find is complete, and even longer before the find can be described in a scientific journal.

Who's My Mummy (sorry, couldn't resist that title)

A single tooth has led to the identification of ancient Egypt's most powerful woman. Egyptologists were sure the pharaoh Hatshepsut was one of two female mummies found a century ago in the same tomb in the Valley of the Kings, but which one? The answer emerged when a broken tooth in a box holding the pharaoh's internal organs was matched to a gap in the mummy's teeth. Hatshepsut ruled as pharaoh for 21 years during the 18th Dynasty (1550 to 1292 B.C.) Hers was a prosperous time, and Egyptologist Dennis Forbes wrote in 2005 that she was perhaps "history's first great woman" and "without a doubt... the first great female ruler." Examination of her mummy revealed she was about 50 years old, overweight, and diabetic when she died of bone cancer.

Solving the Tunguska Mystery

One of the great natural mysteries of the world is the origin - and resting place - of whatever celestial object hit Siberia in 1908. The Tunguska explosion flattened trees over a 2,000 square kilometer area. While most scientists currently accept the idea of a stony asteroid exploding 5-10km above the surface, it's hard to visualize the celestial visitor being completely vaporized. Yet no one has found either a definite impact crater or a definite fragment of the intruder. A team led Luca Gasperini, of the Institute of Marine Science in Bologna, Italy, reports they may have found both.

Lake Cheko, 300 meters wide and 50m deep, shows an unusual, steep-sided configuration unlike other lakes in the area. This lake, about 8km from the epicenter of the blast, has been tentatively identified as a crater. The expedition reports detecting a large solid mass about 10 meters beneath the sediment on the lake floor. Is this our first piece of the Tunguska object? Hopefully, we will find out. Gasperini's team will return next summer with equipment to drill deep beneath the lake and bring up samples of the mystery mass.

Recreating the Neanderthal Genome

First the disclaimer: this advance is not going to lead to live Neanderthals walking around, although you wonder when you look at some U.S. professional football teams or European soccer fans.
Now the news: Svante Pääbo and his team at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology believe they can sequence the entire Neanderthal genome. They may be able to reconstruct that of other species, like the mammoths and "cave bears" that once roamed Europe, but the Neanderthal project is definitely the "headliner" here. The German scientists report they have new techniques from getting "clean" fragments of DNA from specimens many thousands of years old and preventing them from being contaminated by modern microbes or human researchers. This should allow them to stitch together a complete genome using fragments from multiple individuals. This could answer the most intriguing question about Neanderthals - whether they were simply pushed aside by modern humans, eventually withering to extinction, or whether the two subspecies of Homo sapiens interbred.

The Case of the Headless Parrot

What may be the world's most mysterious bird has turned up - but the mystery has so far defied solution. Last year, ranger Robert Cupitt found the headless corpse of a small, drably-colored bird in Diamantina National Park, Queensland. It was a juvenile night parrot, a member of a species only very rarely reported and thought extinct by some authorities as long ago as 1915. Oddly (and inexcusably), it has taken months of delays and arguments between agencies and private groups to get a proper team set up to investigate the bird's survival. Birders blame the delay on a decision by the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency to keep the find quiet to avoid a flood of unqualified searchers coming in. That worked in the case of America's ivory-billed woodpecker, but in that case a search still began quickly.
Now the National Night Parrot Network will take up the cold trail and begin the arduous work of following up other sighting reports and searching for a "lost" avian species.

Voyaging north in search of life

Almost five kilometers beneath the Arctic ice cap winds a largely unexplored feature of the seafloor: the Gakkel Ridge, over 1,700 km long. We know little about the ridge itself and virtually nothing about the living species that exist on and around it.
A new expedition organized by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is setting out to change that. Equipped with NASA-funded remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) named Puma and Jaguar, the expedition will spend 40 days in July and August scouring scour the ridge for hydrothermal vent communities. NASA is interested because the technology used to plumb the depths of oceans on Earth might someday be used on Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon. A trove of new species is expected, and for good reason - everywhere new vents have been discovered, so have new life forms.

Houston, We're Home

The space shuttle Atlantis came down safely Friday after a day's delay caused by weather at the preferred landing site. When rain and clouds continued at Cape Canaveral, the shuttle was diverted to Edwards AFB, ending a long and successful mission. As the shuttle's commander, Colonel Frederick W. Sturckow, put it, “There were a lot of challenges on this mission and they were all surmounted."

Mars on 120 Euros a Day

The European Space Agency, in a cooperative program with Russia, is looking for six volunteers to spend up to 17 months away from the world. The "crew" will live in a closed-off habitat simulating a spacecraft traveling to Mars. Their only contact with Earth will be by radio - and, as on Mars, it will take 40 minutes to get an answer back from Earth. The goal is to get a better understanding of the group dynamics likely to develop in the cramped conditions of a long, stressful mission. The crew will have tasks to perform which will simulate, as closely as possible, with the exception of Earth gravity, the work involved in sending humans to Mars. Simulated emergencies will be thrown in. The crew, in short, will definitely have earned their daily stipend of 120 Euros by the time the mission is over.
So if you are a healthy European man or woman with a working knowledge of Russian and nothing to do for this next couple of years, this might be your opportunity to contribute to space exploration.

Landmark in Panda Evolution Discovered

American and Chinese researchers have found a skull, estimated at 2M years old, of the smaller ancestor of today's beloved giant panda. University of Iowa anthropologist Russell Ciochon, best known for his work on the mammoth prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus, said the "pygmy giant panda" was probably about three feet long, vs. the average of five feet for the modern panda.
(A poster on the cryptozoology blog Cryptomundo asked a whimsical, yet seemingly reasonable question: whether a "pygmy giant panda" would sort of even out to be just a "regular panda.")

Atlantis heading home

After the balky Russian computers on the ISS passed a final round of tests, the space shuttle Atlantis has been cleared to return home on schedule. Despite the computer glitch and the need to fix a small tear on the shuttle's thermal insulation blanket, the three-spacewalk trip was a great success. Touchdown is set for Thursday at 1752 GMT.

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.