NASA opening astronaut applications

NASA has opened up its application system to select the next class of astronauts. The basic requirements? A bachelor's degree in math, engineering, or science and three years' experience. In practice, this is the most competitive job hunt on Earth and those selected will have much more extensive resumes. The chosen class will have to have patience, too: they likely will not get to fly any Shuttle missions and will be doing nonflight duties until well into the Orion CEV program.

Look, up in the sky! A new bat!

A large, very distinctive new species of bat has been described from the Philippine island of Mindoro. Flying foxes are the world's largest bats, with wingspans on some types in the range of 180 cm. The new bat has orange fur and three white stripes on its face. An American-Filipino scientific expedition caught the type specimen after hearing of its from island residents. As zoologist Jake Esselstyn put it, "A local resident of [the town of] Sablayan first described the flying fox in great detail to us, but we were unconvinced until the species showed up in our nets." Now it's in the Journal of Mammology as well.

The Shuttle heads for launch

Although it's not certain just when. NASA's decision to replace leaking seals on the shuttle Discovery's starboard main landing gear will take time and may imperil the launch date of October 23. It might slip considerably further. The shuttle is slated for a 13-day mission, with the main goal being to deliver and attach a new Italian-built node to the ISS.

Happy 150th birthday, Tsiolkovsky!

OK, I'm a day late - the Russian space theorist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17, 150 years ago. It merits repeating that the founder of modern space-travel theory was a poor, almost totally deaf rural mathematics teacher who was fired by an imagination that kept him awake nights working out equations and concepts ranging from large hydrogen/oxygen-powered rockets to staging, space stations, and space suits. The world will owe him a debt for all time.

"Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." - Tsiolkovsky

Item I add just to show that I know it: English-speaking readers may look at his surname and assume the "T" is silent, but it's not. The Cyrillic character beginning his name is pronounced "ts."

Google Launches a New Moon Race

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google Inc. have announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon with up to $30M in prize money at stake. The winner must land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon and meet several requirements including sending video, images and data back to the Earth while traveling at least 500 meters on the lunar surface.The $30M is broken up into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize, and $5 million in bonus prizes for additional mission objectives.
COMMENT: This is wonderful stuff. I don't know if you can do this mission for $20M, but there are companies in the small "Newspace" field that will certainly try, just as the did for the original Ansari X Prize. My early favorite, if they choose to compete, would be a team of SpaceX Technologies (launcher) and a small-vehicle specialist like SpaceDev.

Japanese probe off to Moon

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), supported by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., has launched the nation's heaviest, most ambitious lunar probe. The Lunar Orbit Explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE) went up from the Tanegashima Space Center on an H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 13 at 10:31:01 a.m. on September 14, 2007 (Japan Standard Time).

Bad news for the Florida panther

Florida wildlife officials confirmed that the 15th Florida panther this year was killed on by a vehicle, eclipsing last year’s record of 11 panthers killed by vehicles. The panther was a two-year-old male discovered on I-75 just west of SR-29. After hitting a bottleneck of 20-30 surviving animals, the Florida panther has climbed precariously back to 90-100 cats in total. However, no species can handle having 10-15% of its population killed every year. The panther's case is a reminder that even an intense, well-funded conservation program may not succeed unless accompanied by the provision of adequate habitat with minimal road hazards.

A kilogram isn't what it used to be

The agreed-on international physical standard for the kilogram, a cylinder kept in airtight conditions in a locked vault in France, has lost weight. Losing 50 micrograms isn't much - about the weight of a fingerprint, as one writer put it - but it's baffling. As physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures put it, the master kilogram and its many copies used around the world "were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart. We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."

Species on the Edge

The IUCN has released its annual Red List of threatened species worldwide. It's not fun reading. The number of animals and plants threatened with extinction is 16,306, up 200 from last year. The number of documented recent extinctions of species is now 785 this year. Another 65 species are hanging on only in captivity or in cultivation. The Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared extinct only to have one sighting report come in afterwards, is "Critically Endangered and Possibly Extinct."

Disturbing news for the gray whale

This is not a good time to be a gray whale, individually or as a species. As if the recent news that some idiots killed one off the Northwest coast of the U.S. with a machine gun wasn't depressing enough, there's no reason to worry about them all.
In 1994, the gray whales of the eastern north Pacific were removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in a step considered a major success for conservation. The population was up to 20,000 individuals, considered equal to its historic (pre-modern whaling) level. But a new analysis of the whale's DNA indicates the original population was much larger, perhaps five or even six times as large. That it's apparently leveled off at around 22,000, combined with the small but increasing numbers of underfed animals observed, indicates things aren't as healthy and stable as we'd hoped. Some researchers suspect that warming has damaged the Arctic ecosystem and cut the crustacean population the grays depend on. It's too early to be sure, but there's definitely reason for concern.

The Viking Past

Archaeologists are opening a Viking burial mound in Norway to analyze the bodies of two women placed there over 1,100 years ago. The bodies were found in 1904 along with a longship, now in a museum, that told us much about the Vikings. The longship was apparently the grave for a queen, buried with another woman who might have been her daughter or a servant. The bodies were re-interred in 1948.
COMMENT: This kind of story, and others like the current display of an Incan princess, always bring up the question of how ancient human remains ought to be treated, and whether there's a chronological dividing line between burials that are and are not OK to disturb. It's a given that there is much cultural, medical, and scientific information to be gained by studying human remains, but there are ethical gray areas.
My view is somewhat stricter than that of most archaeologists (and, granted, I'm not an archaeologist at all). For what it's worth, though, I believe graves belonging to cultures still extant should be opened only in cooperation with representatives of those cultures. Graves of cultures unknown or no longer extant could be opened if there's reasonable expectation of important knowledge, but bodies should not be kept forever on display. After a period of study, they should be re-interred in or near the original site, or at least in a museum or other facility near the original site. This view is unrelated to any views about spirituality or an afterlife. It's just my thought about how to treat all cultures and all humans with a universal level of respect while still preserving the interests of science.

Trouble for a private space venture

It might be said that most private space ventures have trouble - hurdles from legalities to finances have laid low many a sincere effort to build new launch vehicles or innovative payloads. It's especially sad, though, to read that NASA declared Rocketplane Kistler in default for lack of progress and private financing for its effort to develop an alternative cargo services to the International Space Station. Bankruptcy appears quite possible. People at the two companies that eventually merged to form Rocketplane Kistler included well-known and respected names in the space engineering community. It now appears they couldn't quite get it done. If RpK does fail, it nevertheless deserves a salute as a valiant try, and its alumni will no doubt go on to contribute elsewhere. This leaves SpaceX as the only contractor under NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program.

Seeing Sputnik

A thread on sci.space.policy brought to mind the question of what people were actually looking at when they "saw Sputnik."
In developing our book The First Space Race: Launching the World's
First Satellites, (Texas A&M, 2004) I and/or co-author Erika Lishock discussed this with a lot of people, including James Van Allen. The consensus was that Sputnik 1 itself
was never observed with the naked eye, except possibly for brief
flashes near dawn and dusk. (Jim Oberg has an authoritative article on this in the new issue of Astronomy magazine.) What the newspapers and everyone else
announced about where to look for Sputnik related to the core stage of
the R-7. Even this usually appeared as a small, although sometimes
very bright, point of reflected light.
This in no way diminishes the importance or impact of the experience
people all over the world had in watching a Soviet satellite (whatever
piece of hardware it was) track across the night sky. Among other
things, it was the experience of watching with the naked eye that
inspired the physicists and engineers at China Lake to start one of
my all-time favorite programs, the audacious shoestring satellite
effort called Project Pilot or NOTSNIK.
Alas, work schedules will force us to miss the big commemorations.
I'll make it to the AAS National Conference in November, which might
be called one of the "close out" American commemorative meetings, to be
on panel about what NASA's first 50 years offers in the way of
projections about the next 50.

An Ocean in Space

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times inside the collapsing nest of a forming star system. Astronomers say the water vapor is pouring down from the system's natal cloud and smacking into a dusty disk where planets are thought to form. The observations provide the first direct look at how water, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, begins to make its way into planets, possibly even rocky ones like our own. Dan Watson of the University of Rochester said, “For the first time, we are seeing water being delivered to the region where planets will most likely form.” The star system, called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B, is still growing inside a cool cocoon of gas and dust. Ice from the stellar embryo's outer cocoon is falling toward the forming star and vaporizing as it hits the disk.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for pointing me to this item

An Impressive Ape

A team from the departments of Anthropology at two Turkish universities has recovered a new species of Ouranopithecus, a fossil ape from the late Miocene period. This might be the second-largest prehistoric ape (after the famous Gigantopithecus) known to science.
"A new great ape from the late Miocene of Turkey:" by Erksin Savas Gulec, Ayla Sevim, Cesur Pehlevan, and Ferhat Kaya: Anthropological Science 115: 153-158, 2007.
Abstract: An adult maxilla and partial mandibles of a hominoid primate recovered from the late Miocene locality of Çorakyerler (central Anatolia) are recognized as a new species of Ouranopithecus, one of the rare western Eurasian hominoids to have survived well into the late Miocene."
Thanks to Loren Coleman for putting this on the Cryptomundo page.

Yeti photos auctioned off

The most famous item of evidence in the controversial case of the yeti can be yours. The original prints of four footprint photographs taken in a high snowfield over 50 years ago by Eric Shipton will be sold by Christie's later this month.

COMMENT: While the evidence for the yeti is unsatisfying at best, no one has ever explained these footprints. Options:
1. An unknown animal.
2. Prints of known animals (or humans) expanded by melting and refreezing. This is easy enough to disprove experimentally. Tracks melt into a blob - they don't expand in a way that gives you clear edges and well-defined toes.
3. A hoax. No evidence Shipton and his companion Ward hoaxed the prints has ever been offered.
4. Simply, a mystery.

Ares 1 - How Boeing won

Boeing won NASA's ~$1B competition to build the Ares I upper stage, which will boost the Orion capsule into orbit, based on price. The ATK/LockMart bid scored higher in both the technical and managerial categories.
COMMENT: "Technically acceptable, lowest cost" - it's hard to picture this being a good idea for something this complex and this critical. I'm trying in vain to think of a case in history where a complex system contractor chosen on this basis turned out to be the right choice in the long run. Either the price will go up and negate the savings (remember the Advanced EHF National Team approach? The Space Shuttle?) and/or the contractor will be temped to cut corners and say "that's good enough." I'm not impugning anyone at Boeing, but the record on selecting a contractor based on price over one with superior technical and managerial scores is not reassuring. NASA may well have made the wrong call. Sure, they are in a tight budget situation, but for lofting a manned spacecraft, you either buy the solution you think is technically best and push Congress for enough money or you find you can't afford that solution and you give it up.

Steve Fosset is missing

Aviation daredevil Steve Fossett, the first man to make a solo, non-stop, unrefueled aircraft trip around the world, is missing. A massive aerial search is concentrated in western Nevada. Fossett had taken off Monday from a private airstrip near Yerington, NV and has not been seen since. Fossett holds over a hundred world records or world firsts, including his solo circumnavigation of the Earth by balloon.

The Croc Hunter: a sad anniversary

On September 4, 2006, conservationist Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray while diving off Australia.

The link above connects to a CNN site where people all over the world can express their comments.

My thoughts: Irwin was, as his critics said, a showman, but science and conservation need showmen. While Irwin’s enthusiasm perhaps clouded his judgment at times, there is no denying his impact for good. He took a global audience through countless lessons about wildlife and the environment, and he made it all fun. He demonstrated a love for creatures from snakes to spiders to (of course) crocodiles that helped him get across to everyone how important these “vermin” or “killers” are in their ecosystems.

Of special note to cryptozoological researchers is that Irwin also made a brief search for the presumed-extinct Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine: he found no evidence, but didn’t dismiss the possibility the world’s largest known marsupial carnivore was still out there somewhere.

We miss you, Steve.

Dr. McCoy, you dropped your gadget

One of the staple items on Star Trek was the array of devices Dr. McCoy had to repair internal injuries without the need to open up the patient. (In the original series, some of those devices were (this is true) fancy salt shakers.)
It can take a while for science to catch up to science fiction, but University of Washington engineers and doctors from Harborview Medical Center are trying to perfect a small device which could seal punctured lungs using high-intensity ultrasound. The first successful proof-of-concept experiment has already been done. Human trials have not begun, but the device offers promise for a host of uses if the technique of focusing ultrasonic beams to create a "hot spot" and cauterize leaks is proven to work on lung injuries.

The Ultimate Question

Here's a great article and discussion on the ultimate question facing science (and religion, and philosophy): Why is there something rather than nothing? Doesn't the principle of entropy make nothing (or at least a dead, inactive universe) more "natural" and likely than this complex cosmos we live in?
One response to "Why?" is "Why not?" Another is that we have only one universe to examine, and that doesn't tell us anything about the possible alternatives. It's an endlessly fascinating (sometimes maddening) question.

Lucy - a Controversial Tour

Leading paleontologist Richard Leakey's voice is one of many raised against the decision to send "Lucy" - the 3.2 million-year-old partial skeleton considered the keystone of the current theory of human evolution - on an international tour. The fossil was flown out of Ethiopia in secret and is now in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Ethiopian officials say the tour will bring an important financial boost to the museums of the impoverished nation, but Leakey and others fear the fragile remains will inevitably be damaged, no matter how carefully they are handled.

COMMENT: I agree with Leakey that this was a bad idea. Yet, hypocritical though it may be, I'll try my best to get to Denver when the tour reaches my home state. The opportunity to see Lucy in person is one I can't pass up.

Russia Thinks Big in Space

The Russian news agency RIA Novosti has reported on the nation's new blueprint for space exploration - and it's an ambitious one. The plan envisions a cosmonaut on the moon by 2025, a lunar base seven years later, and a human expedition to Mars sometime after 2035.

COMMENT: The ghost of Sergey Korolev must be smiling. It's an audacious plan, every bit as ambitious as the U.S. Vision for Space Exploration. Whether Russia can pull it off, given the nation's economic and political challenges as well as the technical advancements required, remains to be seen, but nothing happens without a goal. It makes sense that something ambitious will eventually pull all the world's space powers into a joint program, but that, too, faces a lot of difficulties. The only thing we know for sure is that the next couple of decades should be very interesting.

A striking black cat

The "black panther" is a cougar variant often reported but never caught. When a woman in Florida reported one in her back yard, though, wildlife officials found something almost as unusual - a black bobcat. The 20-pound animal was safely captured alive. Researchers at the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary told that media less than a dozen such cats are on record, and all from the same South Florida region. The cat is not just black, but a striking, perfect obsidian. The Busch staff will take samples for DNA studies and then return the cat to the wild.
COMMENT: Researchers are to be commended for their desire to return to the wild an animal that would be a very big draw if put on exhibit.

A Wrinkle in TIme Travel?

Time travel of any sort is a long way off, if it can be done at all. Still, it's intriguing to read that theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology thinks he's found a way to do it that just might, eventually, be practical. To vastly oversimplify: If space-time could be curved into a donut-shaped hole by extremely strong gravity fields, one could create a situation where time becomes a closed loop, and you can travel back in it. It will be generations before humanity masters such ability to manipulate gravity, and there's no way to be sure we ever will. This concept does explain why, if time travel is possible, we have yet to meet a tourist from the future. The theorized machine will not let you travel back into the time before the machine was created.

"Spiderman was here"

OK, not really. But this communal spider web found in Texas, stretching for 200 yards, is pretty amazing nonetheless.

The Golden Frog

In the "cool new species" department, scientists in Columbia have identified a striking new species of frog, mostly golden-yellow in color. The "golden frog of Supata,"only about 2 cm long, is a member of the group called "poison dart frogs" - easily the most colorful amphibians on Earth.

NASA Notes

In a report which will not get nearly as much media play as the "drunk astronauts" business, NASA has been unable to substantiate any reports of astronauts being alcohol-impaired at flight time. As the new review points out, a lot of people would have to look the other way, given the extensive time spent with crew and support personnel before every launch.

Meanwhile, Boeing defeated ATK for the right to build the Ares 1 upper stage, the last of the major structural elements of the new lunar booster/spacecraft combination to be put on contract.

AAS Conference upcoming

The National Conference of the American Astronautical Society, slated for November 13-14 in Houston, might be called the exclamation point closing out a busy year of meetings and other activities surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Space Age.

I'll be on the panel for the opening session as we look at what NASA can learn from its history so far and what might lie ahead.

Did we miss Martian life?

It's the latest round in a long controversy. A hotly debated theory has been published suggesting the 1976 Viking landers might have found microbes on Mars - but we missed them because they were just too different from Earth varieties.

Startling New Ape Fossil

As the proponents of sasquatch and other alleged living unknown primates often point out, the fossil record of the known apes, such as chimps and gorillas, is a very incomplete one. Nine teeth (one canine, eight molars) from Ethiopia's Afar region may fill an important gap - while upsetting the whole view of ape evolution considerably. The teeth indicate a gorilla-like ape lived in Africa some ten million years ago, before (according to current theories) the common ancestor of all African apes inhabited the continent. The implications are considerable and are sure to set off a more intense search for other ancestral ape remains.
COMMENT: There have always been some people in the cryptozoological world who argue discoveries which upset widely held theories are suppressed to protect people's academic reputations. The publication of this paradigm-shattering find should help to disprove that.

A Void in the Cosmos

University of Minnesota astronomers have discovered a bizarre new structure in the universe - a "hole," a huge region devoid of stars, planets, and, apparently, even dark matter. From an Earth perspective, the hole, nearly a billion light-years across, lies in the constellation Eridanus. One astronomer summed up this complete puzzle by saying, "What we've found is not normal."

Some tweaks to the Shuttle

NASA has ordered replacement of cracked adhesive beneath the insulation foam on the space shuttle external tanks (ETs) being readied for use, trying to eliminate the foam loss which resulted in damaged tiles on the shuttle Endeavour. The work is not expected to delay the launch of the next shuttle due to launch, Atlantis, currently slated to head for the ISS on October 23.

New Haul of New Species

National Geographic News offers a look at new and little-known species, many of them quite strange, brought up from a recent exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. An international team of 31 scientists, assembled by the Norway-based MAR-ECO project and the Census of Marine Life program, spent five weeks combing the ridge with the latest in technological assistance.

Endeavour's triumph in pictures

The shuttle Endeavour put worries about tiles to rest with a perfect touchdown in Florida yesterday, coming home a day early to beat a threat from Hurricane Dean (which now looks unlikely).
NASA has put together a collection of striking photographs from the STS-118 mission. It remains to be seen whether the damage to Endeavour's tiles will force any postponement of the next mission.

Footprints on the sands of time

The oldest oldest human footprint ever found has been reported from Siwa, Egypt. Made in mud which then hardened into rock, the print was announced as a major discovery by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. He said: "This could go back about two million years. It could be the most important discovery in Egypt."

Endeavour coming home

The space shuttle Endeavour has undocked from the ISS and is headed home a day early to avoid the possible effects an evacuation of the Johnson Space Center could have if Hurricane Dean comes ashore in Texas. Mission Control can operate from other facilities if need be, but NASA opted to keep things simple. Endeavour will come back Tuesday, with all eyes on that damaged tile section.

Some good prehistoric fun

OK, the blog Prehistoric Pulp is hardly a paleontology lesson. But it is a lot of fun. Go here to read and talk about depictions of the prehistoric in every medium from films to comic books. Revisit the Lost World!
Thanks to Loren Coleman for pointing out this site.

Crows rival monkeys in learning tool use

A fascinating experiment has found that one species of crow can not only use tools to get food out of a hole too deep for their beaks, but can figure out a more complex problem: using a short stick, the only tool within reach, to get another stick which is long enough to get the food. Russell Gray of the University of Auckland in New Zealand reports, "It was surprising to find that these 'bird-brained' creatures performed at the same levels as the best performances by great apes on such a difficult problem." Three of seven crows grasped the solution immediately, without any trial-and-error: all seven learned it within 25 tries, a better record than posted by capuchin monkeys in a 2003 experiment.
Calling someone a "Bird brain" just may become a compliment....

The Future of Space Science

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Thursday, August 16, 2007
Source: National Academy of Sciences
WASHINGTON - Next month, the Space Studies Board (SSB) of the National Research Council will kick off a yearlong series of public lectures and colloquia in cities across the country and abroad. "FORGING THE FUTURE OF SPACE SCIENCE - THE NEXT 50 YEARS" will celebrate the spectacular achievements of space and earth science, examine new discoveries in both fields, and look ahead at what the next 50 years may bring. The series includes several "regional events" in locations across the country...

Comment: this is timed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the International Geophysical Year (IGY), which led to countless accomplishments by scientists around the world in addition to sparking the development of the first satellites. See the link for the locations and content of each event.

No repairs to Shuttle

NASA engineers have decided the shuttle Endeavour need no repairs to its heat-absorbing tiles. The three-inch gouge, while causing a great deal of concern, has been deemed not to be a threat to the shuttle's safe return. Contributing to the analysis was the fact the repair itself, while it's been practiced on Earth, carries some risk - an astronaut could bump into the tiles and cause more damage during the close work required.
COMMENT: A great deal of thought went into this, and some of the media coverage was horrible, either sensationalizing the risk or bashing NASA with no effort at balanced coverage. All that said, there is no way to know with 100% certainty if this call was right until the end of the mission. All fingers will be crossed until then.

Updates from Orbit

NASA is nearing a decision on whether to send astronauts underneath the shuttle Endeavour to patch the spacecraft's heat-shielding tiles before attempting reentry. Meanwhile, in an unusual incident, a spacewalk on Wednesday was cut short after one astronaut noticed a small puncture in his glove. The damage only affected the top two layers of the five-layer glove, but Rick Mastracchio was told to cut his six-hour EVA short. He and colleague Clay Anderson were able by that point to finish their major tasks on the ISS, so there was no significant effect on the mission.

WIldlife Mystery: Walruses found headless

Alaska Natives are the only people allowed to kill walruses under the law, and they are required to make full use of the carcasses, not just take the ivory tusks. This summer, though, someone appears to be killing on an unusual scale and taking only the heads, presumably for the value of the ivory. One one 40-mile stretch of shoreline, officials have found 79 walruses, all minus their heads. All had been shot. Alaskan agencies and the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service are searching for the poachers, who can be punished severely under Federal law.

Shuttle damage update

NASA is still considering its options for repairing the gouge in the tiles of the shuttle Endeavour. The gouge, it's been confirmed, goes all the way through the tile, and the underlying felt covering the aluminum skin is exposed. NASA engineers are testing similar tiles in an arcject facility to simulate reentry and debating whether to use one of two remaining spacewalks to conduct an unprecedented repair job.

Inside the Mars Phoenix Lander

Are you wondering just what is packed into the just-launched Mars Phoenix lander? This very cool site has a fully illustrated breakdown of what instruments are on board and what each is meant to accomplish.

A zoological mystery - what is this pelt?

Dr, Darren Naish asks readers to identify a densely spotted carnivore pelt that does not seem to fit any member of the feline tribe, nor the spotted hyena. It's currently in Britain, but its age and provenance are uncertain.
Just for fun, Naish throws in a photo of a set of horns whose original owner also has yet to be identified.
Yes, there ARE many mysteries left in the natural world.

Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal skull?

Most anthropologists agree Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons never interacted except at spear point. This 33,000-year-old skull from Romania indicates that just might be wrong.

Tiny cooperative spacecraft project

DARPA is taking a serious look at mitigating the threat from ASAT weapons by putting some functions on 4.5-kg satellites called Tiny Independent Coordinated Spacecraft or TICS (TICS). These would be launched on need from a fighter plane by boosters not much larger than current air-launched missiles.

COMMENT: While modern advances in miniature computers and communications
technology make this practical, the basic rocket-from-a-fighter-jet can trace its origin to Project Pilot, or "NOTSNIK," the semi-official satellite program created by Navy
physicists and engineers in 1958. Their five-stage, 1,000-lb launch vehicle tried to orbit a 1-kg satellite and may actually have succeeded once, though the orbit was short-lived. This was not the model for Pegasus, whose designer was unaware of the project until I mentioned it to him once at the Conference on Small Satellites, but AFRL did try a couple of years ago to revive the idea, on two tracks, one working with DARPA on an impractically complex and expensive
launch aircraft (that's been killed), and then one using an F-15 or F-22 launch vehicle carrier. AFRL officers were likewise surprised that someone had actually done this and that some documentation survived (though not much), and I sent them what I had compiled. So I like to think I (and the oft-overlooked value of knowing history) made some contributions here.
The program is discussed in my book The First Space Race (Texas A&M
University Press, 2004)

NASA concerned about gouge in Shuttle tiles

The space shuttle Endeavor's mission has gone well so far, but NASA engineers are concerned about a divot three inches square in the silica tiles providing the spacecraft's main defense against the heat of re-entry. Likely caused by ice (although possibly by foam insulation) on liftoff, the damage will be carefully examined and measured by a camera and a laser tool on the Shuttle's robot arm extension. (The robot arm operator, by the way, is Barbara Morgan, originally the backup "Teacher in Space," who went through the rigors of becoming a fully qualified astronaut while she waited for her chance to fly.) If the gouge is determined to pose a threat, the crew will be directed to perform an EVA and use one of three types of on-board repair kits to fix it before reentry.

COMMENT: The tile system has never caused an accident, but it is unacceptably fragile and enormously labor-intensive to maintain. It's an outgrowth of the desire to keep development costs for the Shuttle down (which was successful) by trading off maintainability and reusability during the spacecraft's operational life. Of several options for the heat shield, the tiles were the cheapest to develop but the most expensive to maintain. All indications are the same short-sighted approach is afflicting the Crew Exploration Vehicle program.

UPDATE 8/12/2007: NASA has confirmed the damage is from a piece of foam, estimated as grapefruit-sized, that came off a strut on the External Tank (ET). Further study is still underway to determine whether the gash is deep enough to require repair. See:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20227491/

Mesolithic settlement in the English Channel

From roughly 10,000 to 8,000 years B.P. the English Channel was a river valley, not an arm of the Atlantic. Off the Isle of Wight, archaeologists are excavating the first settlement discovered in that valley. Hearths, flints, and other Mesolithic objects are being mapped and/or recovered from the bottom under 11 meters of water, where silt has preserved perishable materials like wood. The Channel was inundated when glaciers melted from the last Ice Age, and the occupants of this and other settlements were forced to higher ground.

What the heck is gravity?

LiveScience.com has posted a good article on one of the great mysteries of physics. What is gravity? It's considered one of the four forces in the Standard Model of physics, but it's the one that refuses to "play nice" and fit into models. The Einsteinian universe accounts for gravity on large scales (like the gravity of planets, asteroids, or human beings), but breaks down on the subatomic scale. Some physicists look for particles called gravitons. Others search for gravity waves. None really understand the force that binds the universe together (as Yoda would say).

End of a Species: The Yangtze River dolphin

The Yangtze river dolphin, or baji (Lipotes vexillifer), until now listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species, has been declared extinct. Early in 2006, the population was listed at 17. By the end of that year, researchers from the Zoological Society of London cruising the heavily trafficked, polluted river that was its only habitat were unable to find any evidence that even a single individual survived. In September, the IUCN will change its status with the next update of the Red List to to “critically endangered (possibly extinct)”. The last confirmed sighting was in 2002, the same year the only captive specimen died.
It is barely possible that a few individuals linger in tributaries of the Yangtze, but there is no chance they constitute a viable population.
It appears that humanity has driven a documented cetacean species to extinction for the first time.

Endeavour is Go!

The shuttle Endeavour had a perfect liftoff at 1836 EST, heading for the International Space Station on a vital construction mission. Mission commander Scott Kelly told controllers, ""We'll see you in a couple of weeks and thanks for loaning us your space shuttle."

Four mammals out of Africa

Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society discovered six new species, including four mammals, in a three-month trip to the forests west of Lake Tanganyika in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. One of the intrepid scientists, Andrew Plumptre, commented on the haul of a bat, a rodent, two shrews and two frogs by saying, "If we can find six new species in such a short period it makes you wonder what else is out there," ."

Watch a Launch as never before

Wednesday evening, the space shuttle Endeavor will launch at 1836 EST. Thanks to a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, Windows users will be able to view it in a 3D environment that lets people examine the launch from all angles. It should be spectacular.

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.