More on the "Undiscovered Pinnipeds" paper

Having read the paper, I should clarify that Dr. Naish and his coauthors Michael A. Woodley and Hugh P. Shanahan were not trying to explain all or even most "sea serpent" (SS) reports as pinnipeds, or even to prove that SS exist. SS identity was not the problem they were trying to solve.

They started with the question of whether there might still be pinnipeds left to discover and then looked at SS reports for sightings that might support the idea of unknown pinnipeds. They came away with the conclusion, based on statistical analysis, sighting reports, and other inputs, that there might be as many as three pinnipeds, all of them unusual and one truly spectacular, left to be discovered. One interesting inference is that we may have found all the “normal” pinnipeds (that is, the ones whose habits and appearance are what we expect for the order Pinnipedia).
You might say that what they did was take Dr. Charles Paxton’s statistical analysis of the "discovery curve" of marine animals over 2m long, which found there may be as many as 47 such animals yet undescribed (a figure he later revised downward) and apply it more narrowly, then add sighting data, to examine how many species in a certain group might be unclassified.
So to recap, this does not mean the authors are arguing all SS reports concern pinnipeds, only that a selection of what seem to be high-quality reports might refer to new pinnipeds.
The authors are to be commended for a new approach to the whole “mystery animal” question, creating a repeatable methodology others might apply to sharks, eels, whales, or other groups. It's not confined to marine animals. It could, for example, be used on birds, crocodilians, or primates, where it might shed an interesting light on the quest for unknown large primates that occupies so much of cryptozoology. (I found out I missed a publication from Michel Raynal that did apply a variant of this technique to whales, resulting in a predicted finding of 5 to 15 new species, the lower figure being not at all unreasonable given that we've had more than that described in the last two decades alone.)
Since I linked to Darren Naish's site in the first post, I link here to Cryptomundo for a sampling of the lively debate this paper has produced.

Asteroid sighted, then pieces recovered

For the first time, astronomers have recovered on Earth fragments of an asteroid that had been tracked in space. Asteroid 2008 TC3, the size of a telephone booth, was tracked until it vanished into Earth's atmosphere. Astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute's Carl Sagan Center correlated the object with eyewitness reports from the Sudan of a fireball exploding high in the atmosphere. 47 pieces were recovered from the Nubian Desert. The asteroid appears to belong to a rare and fragile type called F-class asteroids. Scientists are ecstatic about having pieces in hand to analyze the origin of these spacegoing mysteries.

New Species from Papua New Guinea

Researchers from Conservation International have completed their latest assessment of a biological hotspot, in this case the Kaijende highlands and Hewa wilderness of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The CI investigators, with PNG colleagues plus helpers from American and Canadian universities, cataloged over 600 species, "a large number" of which are new to science. The new animals include jumping spiders, three frogs and a handsome gecko, with more awaiting classification.

Sea serpents = new pinnipeds?

Dr. Darren Naish and two co-authors are publishing a peer-reviewed sceintific paper asking whether unclassified species of pinnipeds (seals, sea lions) are indicated by "sea serpent" reports. THeir conclusion is that there may be as many as three species of pinnipeds, one of them upwards of 10m long, behind the serpent tales.
The authors analyze the rate of discovery of pinnipeds and other large marine vertebrates and report that new pinnipeds (the last truly new species was classified in 1905), statistically speaking, can still be expected. THey try to emphasize that the article is not about sea serpents, but about new pinnipeds, although they admit the sea serpent aspect is what's going to be featured in the media.
This paper may be a major breakthrough for cryptozoology, assuming at least one new pinniped turns up to bolster it with "ground truth" ("water truth"?) It's an impressive piece of work by any standard.

US survey shows changing attitudes toward space

Here's an interesting new survey on Americans' attitudes toward the space program (no military/civilian distinction is made, though some questions and responses apply only to civil space).
On the bad side, 19% of the small sample (360 people) say they have NO interest in the space program. Men tend to be interested more than women. When asked of the benefits the space program has brought, the most common answer is applications satellites.
When asked what mission NASA should undertake next, the largest group of respondents picked the hardest, most expensive option: Human missions to Mars.
Food for thought, indeed.

THANKS TO NASA historian Mike Ciancone for circulating this.

Space station: not an easy walk

Murphy's law applies in space, too. (An aviation version of the law is, "If it is physically possible to install a part incorrectly, someone will install it that way.") Saturday, two astronauts doing an EVA for an other wise very successful ISS construction mission accidentally installed a pin upside down, jamming an equipment platform in place. Another EVA Monday loosened the pin but couldn't get the platform to extend properly. Eventually, the astronauts had to come in and pack up for Earth. They will leave behind a station with its truss and solar wing installations complete, nearly ready for a six-person crew.

Ancient sea creature one of the weirdest animals ever

Half a meter long, 500 million years old, Hurdia victoria looks like a cross between a lobster and a baleen whale. A big three-part shell projecting from the front of the animal's head gives it a bizarre appearance and puzzles scientists - the carapace looks like it should only get in the way. The carapace does not, as it does in every other arthropod so equipped, protect soft parts of the body. It looked like a hat with earflaps, worn in front of the head instead of on it.
COMMENT: As you can gather from my stabs at description, you really can't visualize this thing until you see the reconstruction. Follow the link and let me know what you think.

DId big dinos have trunks?

There are a lot of theories filling in the gaps between our knowledge of dinosaurs. One (not the most scientifically important, but interesting nonetheless) is that the big sauropods might have had trunks, like an elephant's but shorter. In today's edition of the superb blog Tetrapod Zoology, Dr. Darren Naish takes aim at this idea. The concept arose because sauropods had dorsally located nostrils, placed close to where a modern elephant has them. As Naish points out, though, trunked mammals, current and extinct, have other adaptations needed for a trunk, such as a skull that narrows distinctly from the tip to just before the eyes. Sauropods do not. Nor do they have attachment points for the specialized large facial muscles needed to operate a trunk. Finally, they don't need a trunk: their extremely long necks put the mouth wherever it needs to be without a trunk for grasping limbs, etc. (Yes, elephants' trunks have many other uses, but foraging is where the whole trunk thing began.)

COMMENT: Well, it was fun to think about while it lasted, but really, dinosaurs are fascinating enough as they are. And we do have so much yet to learn.

Where's my flying car?

Well, it's right here. The developer calls its Transition vehicle, which just had its initial test flight, a "roadable aircraft." The prototype is licensed as an aircraft. What it can't do, legally, is pull a Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and take off from a public road to escape a traffic jam. However, if these get popular (they should go on sale in 2011 for under $200K), you know someone will try it.

A busy week for the Space Shuttle

After many delays, Discovery was launched and is now at the ISS, working construction tasks to move the station toward a six-person crew capability. The biggest task is adding a 16-ton girder to the station's main truss. The mission had a bizarre start when a bat, apparently injured, clung tight to the insulation of the external tank and would not be shooed away. NASA safety officials ruled it was safe to launch with the bat in place, and off the shuttle went. As it cleared the tower, the bat, despite all the buffeting and noise, was still there. Presumably, the uninvited passenger was shaken off (or roasted) and "ditched" involuntarily in the ocean at some point. It still probably set some kind of record for highest speed attained by a bat.

DARPA's exotic sensor programs

Remember how the "sensors" on scifi craft like the starship Enterprise could detect almost anything on a planet, even underground or inside buildings? DARPA is investigating two approaches to provide something close to those abilities. One would use airborne gravitometers to measure microchanges in gravity created by subsurface voids (bunkers or tunnels). The other would use radar signals bounced off buildings to "see" into the concrete canyons of cities, where normal radar can't detect anything but the buildings themselves, to track vehicles.
COMMENT: Tough challenges, but DARPA would say that's what the agency is for. Both would have immediate impact in war zones, and the tunnel detection has other uses, from nuclear inspection to drug smuggling. Good luck, chaps.

Rare fossils indeed: Cretaceous octopi

Fossils octopi are almost nonexistent: only a single species is known. German scientists, however, have found three new species, based on five specimens from Lebanon. Invertebrates fossilize very poorly, and shell-less soft bodies like that of the octopus require perfect conditions - no oxygen in the waters where they fall to the bottom, no scavengers near to hand, and a fast covering of sediments. We now know an octopus of 95 MYA looked very much like its modern counterpart.

Happy Birthday, Vanguard 1

It was 51 years ago that Project Vanguard got its first satellite into orbit. As Erika Lishock and I documented in our book The First Space Race, the popular image of the program as a failure is undeserved. Yes, it went over budget - WAY over budget. But it made major scientific discoveries plus lasting contributions to launch vehicle technology.

Twinkle, twinkle, little sphere
Beyond the reach of eye or ear
Still above the world you fly
Oldest diamond in the sky...

OK, it's not Robert Frost, but it's heartfelt. Congratulations to Project Vanguard.

New species found on high

A stratospheric balloon experiment, launched and recovered by the Indian Space Research Organization, has yielded three new species of bacteria. The bacteria, one species of which was named Janibacter hoylei for astrophysicist and extraterrestial-life enthusiast Fred Hoyle, survive at altitudes where ultraviolet radiation would kill most Earth life forms.

Today's zoological oddity: the Whitefin Dogfish

What's odd about this small (40cm) deepwater shark? Well, in addition to light-emitting photopheres on its skin, a common adaptation of deep-sea predators out to lure prey, Centroscyllium ritteri has them on the undersides of its upper eyelids. Why would a fish "want" (evolutionarily speaking) to cast light into its own eyes? Would it want to light up its eyes when the lid rolls back to startle a predator? That doesn't seem to work. Neither, really, does any other theory I've read.

New Species: Latest bird

The latest bird species to be added to the scientific lists is sort of a 200th birthday present for Charles Darwin. Not only is the date right, but the Vanikoro White-eye (Zosterops gibbsi) of the Solomon Islands is a member of a group Darwin himself compared to his famous finches for their ability to radiate into new species filling particular niches.

Daring whale rescue

"Bridle," a North Atlantic right whale, desperately needed to be free of the fishing gear entangling him, which included a rope through his mouth that inspired his name. But he wouldn't cooperate, fleeing from rescuers. So scientists tranquilized him - in the wild, in the ocean, using guns firing darts with 30-cm needles to get a half-liter of drugs into him. This highly risky maneuver(for the scientists and the animal) achieved its goal: a whale compliant enough to allow rescue, yet conscious enough not to stop breathing and drown. This blog post by John D. Sutter links to gotta-see-it video of the rescue.

Great whites used to be bigger

Great white sharks can exceed 6 meters (19 feet) in length and weigh over a metric ton. That's big enough to scare anyone, but now we know the species used to get bigger a well-preserved juvenile specimen over 5m long indicates the adult length used to be in the range of 9m. As Dana Ehret, lead author of the article describing the new specimen, puts it, "We now think that broad-toothed makos and fossil white sharks probably reached lengths upwards of 30 feet in the past, while the largest substantiated [living] white sharks are approximately 21 feet." The fossil also indicates the great white shark did not, as once thought, descend from the extinct giant Megalodon.

Peking Man: News and Mystery

A new study of the evidence surrounding so-called "Peking Man" (now considered a population of Homo erectus) found in China in the 1920s indicates the remains may have been 200,000 years older than thought, which changes the model for human radiation and also indicates our ancestor could withstand cold better than we knew. Where, though, are the actual bones of Peking Man, which vanished in 1941? As Loren Coleman recounts, there are plenty of theories, but we are no closer to solving the mystery than we were six decades ago.

NASA: A little less optimism

COMMENT:
I said a few days ago that President Obama's FY10 NASA budget gave me a little hope for the agency. Now, I'm not so sure.
First, the President to an audience in Orlando the agency was "adrift" without goals. Not true at all: the goals have been set since the Vision for Space Exploration was unveiled in 2004, and Obama has apparently supported (at least, he has never repudiated) them. Second, a commentator on this NASAWatch thread points out that recent long-range budget plans indicate continued bad news for NASA. A 2004 projection indicated the agency's 2020 budget would be about $22B. The 2009 guidelines show it static compared to today at $19B.
I think "NASA" really stands for "Never Adequately Supported by Anyone."

Liquid water on Mars today?

Some scientists on the Mars Phoenix Lander think the craft may have found more than ice. Droplets that appeared on the legs while the craft was digging for Martian ice may be brine or clear water condensed from vapor released by the ice. It's controversial and unproven, and this article chronicles a lively scientific debate.

Igor, get me a used brain....

A very used brain, or at least its fossil, is now available. A fish that died in what is now Kansas 300 MYA left scientists a gift. Soft tissue fossils in general are rare, brain fossils even rarer, and this one is the oldest brain fossil known. One of the discoverers, John Maisey, explained its significance this way: "Now that we know that brains might be preserved in such ancient fossils, we can start looking for others. We are limited in information about early vertebrate brains, and the evolution of the brain lies at the core of vertebrate history."

Evidence chimps can plan ahead

The evidence comes from a chimp in a Swedish zoo who has decided he doesn't like visitors. Every morning, he calmly and methodically gathers a stash of rocks and concrete from his environment, breaking pieces off concrete boulders and, if the pieces are too big, breaking them into smaller chunks more suitable for throwing. When visitors show up, "Santino" gets agitated, dips into his weapons cache, and throws things at them. Researchers note Santino does not attack other chimps in range, only humans. Despite his strong arm, his accuracy is fortunately poor.
COMMENT: A chimp who throws rocks at people... will he get his own Internet news site?

Climate change - not quite a consensus

This article on a conference sponsored by the free-market Heartland Institute points out that, while there is a large scientific majority on the side of anthropocentric global warming (AGW), it's not a complete agreement. Despite accusations by people like Al Gore that the only objectors to AGW are tools of corporate interests, there is in fact still some scientific pushback against several AGW lines of argument.
COMMENT: I'm not saying the contrarians are right. But I'm glad they are still getting some coverage. Any scientific theory on which we're talking about basing a gigantic shift in the global economy must be continually forced to buttress its position and address any negative evidence.

Kepler roars into orbit

NASA press release:
"The Delta II rocket carrying the Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft lifted off on time at 10:49 p.m. EST from Launch Complex 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The spectacular nighttime launch followed a smooth countdown free of technical issues or weather concerns. The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for a slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the stars and Kepler.
COMMENT: This should be a great step forward for science. If we want to probe other worlds someday, Kepler is likely to give us much more information on the location and types of planets worth visiting. Until then, it will tell us a a great deal about how planets and solar systems form and under what conditions planets can survive.

A cold fish (but a new one)

A Spanish scientist probing the depths of the Bellingshausen Sea, a zone off Western Antarctica where no one has sampled for fish life since 1904, has given us the latest new species. Retrieved from over 600m down was the pinkish Gosztonyia antarctica, a 30-cm animal which has shown the fauna in this area is surprisingly similar to that of the distant Eastern Antarctic.

It's Dino-Chicken!

Nope, not a third-rate superhero, but a chicken genetically "reverse engineered" to display more dinosaurian characteristics, like teeth and a longer tail. Paleontologist Jack Horner is behind the 5-10 year project.
COMMENT: Scientifically, I assume the point is that, if you can bring out latent dinosaur characteristics, you can establish more about the bird-dinosaur link. It's still weird...

Missed Earth by that much

An asteroid 50m across was spotted less that three days before it grazed Earth at a distance of only 71,000 km - just over twice the distance our geosynchronous satellites orbit. 2009 DD45 could have inflicted a blow similar to the Tunguska event of 1908, greater than the largest fusion device ever detonated.
COMMENT. This is a scary reminder of how chancy life in our cosmic neighborhood is. Our asteroid detection capability is grossly underfunded and our ability to alter the course of a large cosmic rock is close to nonexistent. Neither economic conditions nor the fears of "weaponization of space" should be allowed to block a major international program to ensure our survival.

Sir David says it's not over yeti

Naturalist Sir David Attenborough, world-famous for his nature documentaries and books, told an interviewer there is one subject that's still a mystery to him - the yeti. He said, "I'm baffled by the Abominable Snowman - very convincing footprints have been found at 19,000 feet. No one does that for a joke."
COMMENT: He is referring to the clear tracks photographed in 1951 by mountaineers Eric Shipton and Michael Ward. A number of explanations have been put forward for the prints, none very convincing. While it's very troubling that no better (or even equal) prints have been documented in the last 58 years, these tracks remain, very simply, unexplaind.

Big cats in Colorado sanctuary

The Barbary lion, an extinct subspecies with a luxuriant dark mane, is the subject of an effort to breed back the strain from part-Barbary cousins around the world. Today I paid my first visit to the Serenity Springs Big Cat Sanctuary, a private rescue and retirement home east of Colorado Springs, which turns out to have a role to play in this matter.
(The sanctuary was checked during the Colorado Springs Lion episode last year, but had no escapes.)
The sanctuary is home to several "celeb-cats." One is a lioness from the film Secondhand Lions. Another is a small-maned male who was supposed to be in The Ghost and the Darkness but essentially staged a sitdown strike and was sent home.
For an oddball, there was a tiger who carried the gene that produces "white tigers" but had turned out with a normal coat. As a result of the inbreeding, though. the animal was a hermaphrodite who behaved like a male in the winter and a female in the summer. Dating must be problematical.
There was also a very large all-white tiger retired from the Tropicana hotel show troupe. His name was Snow Magic, but he was referred to as Snowman because Snow Magic seemed a little "foo-fooey" for a big male tiger. There are some 14 of these artificially bred "snow tigers" in the world.
Finally, there were a couple of real interest to me.
KK is an older male lion, a big, beautiful animal with a classic Barbary-type mane. The volunteer on duty today said KK was estimated to be 86 percent Barbary, and there were plans afoot to breed him with an almost-pure Barbary female in Morocco. The only uncertainty was whether KK was still interested in lionesses.
The guide mentioned in passing that one tiger at the center was Sumatran, and I reacted like Sam Neill when the host in Jurassic Park told him they had a T. rex. Daisy, a lovely animal with a short cinnamon coat, is believed to be pure Sumatran. I hadn't realized there was a Sumatran on the North American continent. (Actually, I realized when I looked it up that not only are there several dozen in American zoos, but I had seen three at the National Zoo a few years ago and forgotten about it. Still, it was startling to find one in Colorado.)
Visit the link above, and, if you're in Colorado, visit the Sanctuary. They love their critters and are doing great work.

Walk like a man (1.5MY ago)

Footprints of Homo ergaster - the oldest human-ancestor footprints known at 1.5 million years old - look remarkably modern. The prints, left in northern Kenya in sedimentary rock, indicate an individual about 175 cm tall. Archaeologist David Braun said, "It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden something that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier."

NASA's next budget is an improvement

Not quite what's needed, considering all the missions heaped on the space agency. But so far, there's some promise. The agency is doing better than I would have expected in the new Administration. There's $1B extra in the stimulus bill, a budget hike to $18.7B for next year, and, so far, the Obama administration has made no changes to the Bush-era Vision for Space Exploration. The new budget will not close the gap (now at least four years) in US human spaceflight capabilities, but, like I said - better than exptected.

Weird new life beneath a Great Lake

Far beneath Lake Huron, one of North America's largest freshwater lakes, mineral-laden water gushing from ancient rock layers is supporting floating purple mats of cyanobacteria. This is the kind of ecosystem seen around hydrothermal vents and other geological anomalies on the seafloor. Finding it here was a stunner, and the implications will take a long time to fully investigate and understand.

Exaggerations in the climate debate help no one

This article in the NY Times highlights a problem with the climate change debate: the tendency on both sides to engage in broader statements than the evidence warrants. Al Gore had to pull a slide blaming everything except meteor showers on global warming after the experts he based it on said he had misrepresented them considerably. Conservative pundit George Will is under fire for a dismissive column that some experts say misstated his evidence. The article notes that President Obama has also overreached the evidence.
COMMENT: It's nice to see a balanced article on this from the NYT, which appeared at times (no pun intended) in the last election campaign to treat anything from the Obama organization as akin to the Sermon on the Mount, only more authoritative. It points up something I've been trying to say along - that climate change is a complicated subject. Reducing it to viewgraphs, while sometimes necessary, is not an excuse to oversimplify, mislead, present footage from The Day After as the real thing (as Gore did), or exaggerate even the worst-case scenarios in the service of getting the message across. This is the climate of the planet Earth we are talking about, not a home thermostat. Sweeping declarations from anyone are suspect.

MIT's plasma thruster gives new meaning to "Bottle Rocket"

MIT's Dr Oleg Batishchev and his colleagues have been working on a simplified version of one promising advanced space propulsion idea, the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). While the full-size concept requires a fission reactor for power, the MIT group has been toying with a miniature knockoff for satellite propulsion tasks like station-keeping. To prove just how simple they can make it, they fashioned a working plasma thruster whose components are - really - a glass bottle and a Coke can.
COMMENTS:
1. The video of this thing being tested is really cool.
2. Why do I keep thinking of Tony Stark in Iron Man building a working "arc reactor" in a cave from scrap materials?

Orbiting Carbon Observatory doesn't orbit

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to reach orbit. The fairing on the Taurus XL launch vehicle that lifted from Vandenberg AFB early Tuesday morning apparently failed to separate.

COMMENT: This is a surprise, considering this is a well-proven launch vehicle, and it reminds us again that space launch is a complex business. It also reminds us of the shortsighted underfunding of space programs which guarantees no research spacecraft - none - has a backup unit.

Atmopsheric phenomenon tied to UFOs

Sprites are huge flashes of electricity in the upper atmosphere many kilometers above thunderstorm activity. They constitute a phenomenon defined only recently and still not well understood. Tens of kilometers across, they can look like titanic, glowing jellyfish or take on a more ball-like appearance. Geophysicist Colin Price suggests they may be behind some otherwise puzzling UFO reports.

COMMENT: Having read a lot of the UFO literature, I can think of some cases this applies to. Some witnesses could have been too far away to see the storm activity below, but able to see the gigantic sprites. With no frame of reference in the upper atmosphere, a sprite could certainly look like a smaller glowing object closer to the observer. Still, Sprites don't last long and don't move, so they certainly don't fit many other reports that are still in the "unexplained" file.
This does remind me yet again of a theorized phenomenon, suggested by the late Philip Klass and others, that I strongly suspect is real and is behind many UFOs: a larger, longer-lived cousin of ball lighting that can appear without the need for nearby storm activity. It's uncertain just what the mechanism would be, but there's no agreement on the mechanism behind regular ball lighting either.

A monster catch in Thailand

It's not a new species, but it's a heck of a fish story, and this image has to be seen to be appreciated.
British biologist Ian Welch was working with a catch-and-tag fish survey program when he pulled in, on rod and reel, a stingray with a body over two meters long and a tail over three meters. Welch says he would have been pulled out of the boat is a colleague hadn't snagged his belt and hung on. The animal weighed 350 kg. It was successfully tagged and released.

Fish's eyes peer out through transparent head

If it were not for the hard evidence of an ROV's video images and the capture of a live specimen, no one would believe this one.
The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has a transparent shield over the upper half of its head, like one of those science fiction monsters with a see-through domed skull. The fish was first caught in 1939, but the original specimens were in bad shape after being hauled from their Pacific habitat 600-800 meters down. Only now do we understand how truly weird this thing is. Tubular, light-sensitive eyes with bright green tips can turn in any direction, including upward to look through the fluid-filled "dome."
COMMENT: Can you imagine how an eyewitness report alone would be taken? The diver having the sighting would be rushed to a decompression chamber, if not to a psychiatric hospital.

MicroSpace News: India's new microsat

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and an affiliated university (IIT Kanpur) are finishing up the newest remote sensing microsatellite. The Jungu satellite, which will gather imagery to support agriculture and disaster predition/relief, relies on indigenous technology and weighs a mere 3kg.

Becoming a cryptozoologist

I get the question a few times a year from students who have read my books: "How do I become a cryptozoologist?" As Loren Coleman explains more thoroughly in this Cryptomundo post, cryptozoology is a sideline to almost all its practitioners. There are no degree courses in this controversial subspecialty. I always respond that a zoology degree is the best preparation - and you can find a paying job with it to keep up an income while you study sasquatch footprint casts or whatever fascinates you.

We found Atlantis? No? Darn.

Some 960 km off the coast of Africa, a huge grid appeared to mark the seafloor on Google Earth images. There was some immediate buzz about the fabled (almost certainly mythical, but still fascinating) lost city of Atlantis.
Alas, Google explained it was not so. The apparent grid was an artifact of the way we've been studying the seafloor. Contour data taken directly from sonar mapping systems is shown in relatively straight lines - the tracks of the ships that carried the sonar and did the mapping. The spaces between are unmapped areas.
COMMENT: Too bad about Atlantis (which probably arose from a mangled account of the Minoan civilization), but think about it the other way. Think about how much unknown seafloor territory is indicated by these images and how much exploration we have left to do. As Sylvia Earle once put it, we know more about Mars than the deep oceans.

American space weapons? Not anytime soon

In this article, DoD official Pete Hays not only insists the US is not developing space weapons, but points out a hard truth: if the Air Force wanted them, it couldn't pay for them.
COMMENT: Technically, any satellite which might be maneuvered into another can be used as a weapon, as can some ground-based missiles we have now. But Hays' point is an important one. Space-to-space weapons are a complex technology - achievable, certainly, but complex and expensive. The tacair generals would make short work of a proposal to divert money for something we don't have an overwhelming need for.

An awesome sight in the sky

Verical pillars of light in the night sky are a rare and strikingly beautiful phenomenon. This article, with a photo and diagram, explains how it's caused by light sources refracting or reflecting through low-altitude ice crystals.

Bird thought extinct photographed - then eaten

Wilson's buttonquail, a rounded featherball with black and brown plumage edged in white, is such a rare denizen of the Philippine island of Luzon that it was thgouht to be possibly extinct. It had never been photographed alive - until last month, when a TV crew captured the bird's image just before it was sold for food.

COMMENT: Let's hope that's not the last of its kind. If it is, the moment of a species' extinction will be known with rare and saddening precision.

R.I.P. Konrad Dannenberg

One of the last of the von Braun rocket scientists has passed on. Konrad Dannenberg was an engineer who played key roles in every U.S. missile and rocket project undertaken by the transplanted German team, then acted as docent, instructor, and chief encourager at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center (home of Space Camp) for many years after his retirement. He was 96 years old. One longtime NASA friend said, "The great thing about Konrad is that he never quit thinking and he never quit dreaming. He was truly an ambassador for space."

Ad astra, Konrad.

Extinct species by the bucket

I kind of ripped off LiveScience's headline, but couldn't resist. Paleontologist Steve Sweetman looks for, and finds, new species that other visits to the fossil-heavy Isle of Wight have missed. His methord? Digging out, drying, and sifting through tons of sand for small teeth and bones. That seems mind-numbing to most of us, but Sweetman is encouraged every time he hits a new species of reptile or amphibian - and he has 48 so far.

Thousands of species inhabit polar waters

A survey performed as part of the massive Census of Marine Life effort reports thousands of species of fish and (mainly) invertebrates in the waters around the poles. This area was once thought to be a biological desert. It's anything but. Hundreds of new species, yet to be formally described, are included in this haul. Strangely, an estimated 235 species appear at both poles - but nowhere in between. Their presence is spawning (no pun intended) new theories and studies in an effort to understand how such animals migrate over time to colonize new regions.

How do you vacuum a vacuum?

The recent US-Russian satellite collision (which occurred weirdly close to a scary incident in which British and French nuclear subs managed to get into the same tiny patch of ocean) reminded everyone of the space debris problem. NORAD and the USAF are tracking about 19,000 objects of 10cm or larger in orbit now. How do you reduce the hazards, given that natural reentry can taken, depending on the orbit and other factors, months to centuries for each stray satellite, bolt, holding clamp, and piece of shrapnel?
As this NY Times editorial points out, absent an easy answer to that question, the first thing we need to do is stop making more debris. We need more sensors and more computing power to avoid future collisions and better steps to mitigate the release of junk during normal operations.

Oddly, cost analyst Robyn Kane and I published a 1999 paper through the Conference on Small Satellites about the need for a "Space Guard" of small, maneuverable spacecraft which could, among other things, latch on to a dead satellite and deorbit it. The example we used was exactly what just happened: a defunct Russian satellite on a collision course with an American comsat. Alas, no one came up to us at that 1999 meeting with a check and said "Look into this." Maybe someone will look into it now.

THANKS TO Kris Winkler for this item.

What's behind "miraculous" cancer recoveries?

This article from Forbes probes the mysteries of seemingly inexplicable recoveries in cancer patients and how doctors focusing on the immune system are trying to understand and duplicate such recoveries.

COMMENT: We've all heard about cases like this. Often we know someone, at least distantly, who's had this happen. My wife, Deb, described a patient when she was an Air Force nurse who went from a healthy young man to a terminal cancer patient and suddenly, shockingly, back to a healthy young man. His oncologist couldn't explain it, and Deb vividly remembered the fellow dancing around the clinic, crying and hugging the nurses. It's a topic we all wonder about sometimes. Do such cures arise from repeatable medical factors? Faith? Plain luck? We all want to know.

THANKS TO Dr. Jennifer Stapleton for this item.

News of the Mountain Lion

This is a terrific news site for keeping up with all things related to Puma concolor. The mountain lion is always of interest because of subjects like the nearly-extinct Florida panther, the maybe-not-extinct Eastern cougar, and the arguments over whether the cat has a black or dark phase.
Thanks to Terry Colvin for pointing out this resource.

Happy 200th birthday, Darwin

There is no lack of media coverage of Charles Darwin's 200th. I thought the CNN article I linked to here, suggesting ways to celebrate with travel, was an interesting sidelight.
COMMENT: An inevitable component of this celebration is the evolution-creation debate. I've never held the view that Darwin's thoughts and religion are incompatible, merely that the work done on natural selection and evolution indicates the Old Testament account of Creation cannot be read literally. (I speak here only of the Judeo-Christian tradition.) There are many religious thinkers aligned to this view, which is also endorsed by the Vatican. There are aspects of human behavior, including altruism, the tendency toward an innate moral (as opposed to merely practical) code of ethical behavior, the ability and the need to engage in theology, and the ability to appreciate beauty, that seem to me to defy a strictly biological explanation. I'm aware, of course, that strictly biological explanations for all these things have been advanced - I've simply not found them convincing. All that said, Darwin, while he was not the first to ponder natural selection, was the indispensable thinker who turned it from speculation into a well-reasoned scientific approach. Without him, it would have advanced over time, in bits and pieces, but it would not have become the paradigm shift that it was. So Happy 200th.

Remember: Also the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. (It would have been interesting if the two men had met - Lincoln would have been very interested.) Lincoln was not a scientist, but he had an appreciation for engineering and technology. He backed the radical design of the Monitor when his admirals thought it unworkable, and he held a patent on a device to refloat stranded barges.

"The Horrendous Space Kablooie"

That's from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip - it was Calvin's preferred term for the Big Bang. It came to mind last night with the violent collision between an Iridium communications satellite and a nonfunctional Russian comsat. With over 1,500 kg of mass involved, the collision created a massive debris field in the orbit 780 km up. The debris may contaminate orbits hundreds of kilometers above and below this point as well.
COMMENT: This kind of thing was inevitable, sooner or later. It should give new urgency to space debris cleanup concepts and the ability to locate and deborbit nonfuntional satellites.

408 new mammals in the last 15 years

Yes, you read that right. The authors of a new paper reviewing all the findings since 1993 report that 40% are "large and distinctive." (The others are referred to as "cryptic," meaning, in this case, they looked similar to other species and needed genetic or other tests to differentiate them.) The new species include 23 which are endangered, which is actually surprisingly low. They bring the worldwide mammal count to 5,487.
Coauthor Paul Ehrlich comments, "What this paper really talks about is how little we actually know about our natural capital and how little we know about the services that flow from it."

COMMENT: OK, the really big animals some cryptozoologists look for so ardently still elude us, if indeed they exist. But to suggest that the search for new mammals is unscientific or a waste of time - as George Gaylord Simpson flatly declared in a 1984 paper - is an absurdity in the face of this data.

Relaunch of website www.mattwriter.com

My completely revised and updated website is up. There are sample papers, excerpts from all three of my books, etc., up there. My thanks to the talented web designer Maleesha Speer, who can be contacted from my site.

Shuttle to upgrade ISS delayed

A space shuttle flight which will carry the fourth and final set of solar panels to the ISS, preparing it for an expansion from three crewmembers to six, has been slipped to February 22 to inspect valves controlling gaseous hydrogen flow. The shuttle Discovery will take seven astronauts, including one from Japan, up to install the new equipment.
COMMENT: NASA is doing the right thing, making shuttle safety the appropriate priority. For all the problems with the shuttle, there is no other vehicle in the world that can carry huge structures into orbit in relatively benign conditions. Still, this and other delays point up that the retirement by 2010 is likely to be feasible only if missions are cut, rather than added, to the manifest. NASA and the Administration - if it ever gets around to picking a nASA Administrator - should plan the rest of the manifest by number of missions needed, not schedule, even though this will require either more money or the umpteenth slip in Constellation.

See-through circuitry

In this week's "This is just really cool" item, scientists at UCLA have developed electronic circuits made of transparent carbon nanotubes. It's possible to imagine a host of things eventually coming out of this. Invisible electronics could make transparent surfaces, like your car windshield, into signboards calling for help. It could make window-mounted solar cells more practical. Or it could make your Coke can able to read your drinking speed (maybe). It's one of those things that's just fun to bat around in your mind.

A snowball fight with a killer whale (seriously)

Marine ecologist Robert L. Pitman has spent years studying the killer whales of the Antarctic. As I recounted in Shadows of Existence, he believes there may be three species, not one. Here he discusses a particular population that has learned to follow an icebreaker for the food it gives access to. He also recounts an incident where he playfully threw a snowball at a whale - and the whale began flipping a chunk of ice into the air with its nose. Fascinating stuff.
Note; The term "killer whale" was popular for a long time, was largely replaced by the less prejudicial "orca," and seems to be slipping back into proper use. (Who decides these things?)

MicroSpace News: Japan boosts microsats to orbit

When Japan's Ibuki climate satellite orbited January 22, it had hitchhikers: no fewer than seven microspacecraft with scientific and demonstration missions:
SpriteSAT
STARS-1
SDS-1 (Small Demonstration Satellite 1)
SOHLA-1 (Space Oriented Higashiosaka Leading Association)
PRISM (Pico-satellite for Remote-sensing and Innovative Space Missions)
KKS-1 (Kouku-Kosen-Satellite 1)
Kagayaki (SorunSAT)

SpriteSAT is one of my favorite examples of what you can do with smallsats, thanks to its fascinating mission. This a sub-50kg spacecraft was built by university students and faculty to observe a powerful phenomenon we didn't know existed until a few years ago (electrical discharges called "sprites" in the upper atmosphere).
STARS-1 is a tether experiment, with a "mother daughter" pair of spacecraft. Tethers are potentially useful for control, orbit-raising, and power-generating purposes, but tether experiments seem jinxed, with several encountering glitches or (in one case) launch failure. Here's hoping for better luck.

The earliest animals on Earth

Life on Earth is believed to have begun about 1.2 billion years ago, but it took a long time to advance beyond the single-celled stage. The age of the earliest multicelled creatures has hovered somewhere around 530MY, perhaps 575. Rocks in Oman, however, have yielded chemical traces left by animals called demosponges. Demosponges of 635 MYA may have been only a millimeter or two across (their modern descendants can be over a meter high), but they were definitely multicellular creatures. This discovery has a host of implications for the early development of more complex life and the now-questioned picture of what the Earth's oceans were like in the days when mammals were a half-billion years in the future.

The mother of all snakes?

The largest modern snakes top out at around 10 meters, probably closer to 9 (not that there's anything small about that). But a reptile whose remains were dug out of a Columbian coal mine could have swallowed the largest of its modern rivals for breakfast. Titanoboa cerrejonensis was about 13m long and weighted better than 1,100 kg. Some 60 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, this was the top predator in its aquatic environment, constricting crocodilians and anything else that was handy.
Paleontologist Jason Head explained, "It's the biggest snake the world has ever known. The snake's body was so wide that if it were moving down the hall and decided to come into my office to eat me, it would literally have to squeeze through the door."
COMMENT: Wow. This does make one think about the modern reports of giant anacondas and boa constrictors (this snake was related to both) measuring 15m or more. However, the team Head was on estimated the tropics must have been considerably warmer than they are today to make a cold-blooded snake of this size practical from an energy standpoint. I can never resist quoting David Quammen's summary of monster snake lore: "It might all be true but it probably isn't."

Reactions to Iranian launch vary

The reactions are coming in to Iran's becoming the 10th nation in history to launch its own satellite with its own launcher. They, are, predictably, mixed, and focused less on the satellite than on the implications of the successful launch for Iranian missile capabilities. Israel is extremely concerned, most Western nations perturbed, and Iran is trying to reassure everyone this is a research satellite for a program with only domestic civil aims.

COMMENT: Iran actually has done something significant in space history, and there is room to applaud its scientists and engineers while being very concerned about the bigger picture. It escapes no one that this is additional leverage for Iran in the talks over the nuclear program: that is, demonstration of a related capability heightens the need to freeze the nuclear program, maybe inducing other nations to pay a higher price in aid, diplomatic recognition, etc. - if Iran is willing to make such a compromise at all. Stay tuned.

New species don't stop for anything....

...not even for a historic moment like a new nation joining the space powers of the world.

A dozen new frogs from India
http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0202-frogs_india.html

A passel of amphibians from Columbia
http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-86126.html

Oh, and see the title link... Spanish scientists cloned the Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) a variant of the Spanish ibex (Capra pyrenaica) from a frozen tissue specimen taken from the last living animal (which was found crushed by a tree). The DNA was used in embryos from a domestic goat. The kid thus produced died shortly after birth, but it still marks the first time an extinct animal has been given life via genetic engineering.

MicroSpace News: Iran does it

That was quick.
The Iranian satellite is in an orbit of 545 x 378 km, orbital inclination 55.5 degrees. Iran says the satellite serves the cause of "peace and brotherhood." Iran's neighbors are a little nervous about that part.
Video of the launch:
http://satcom.website.orange.co.uk/
The Safir launcher is a close cousin (there is much shared technology) to North Korea's Taepodong 2, which failed in its only launch attempt.

Still looking for reliable details on mass and payload.

MicroSpace News: British smallsat launcher plan

SSTL and Virgin Galactic - two firms with expertise and money (especially since SSTL became a subsidiary of EADS Astrium) - have proposed the U.K. get back into the satellite-launching business. England has long lacked its own satellite launcher, having canceled the Black Arrow program in 1971. The new idea would be a microsatellite launcher from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two, the spaceplane carrier aircraft which, as things stand now, will have a lot of useless downtime between space passenger flights. Numbers being kicked around as objectives include a payload of up to 200kg and a dirt-cheap cost of $1M per flight.
COMMENT: I'll be shocked if they can do it for $1M, but there's nothing irrational about the idea. SSTL having access to its own launcher, flying its payloads on its (and its clients') preferred schedules, is a logical notion. Good luck, lads!

In Sweden, monster hunters run afoul of the law

Sweden's Lake Storsjön is the longtime home of one of Europe's most famous and endearing "monster" tales. Often depicted with huge, comical-looking fins or ears behind its head, the purported sea serpent has been hunted seriously by cryptozoologists and not-too-seriously by those wishing to attract tourists. However, a project funded by local businesses to keep the lake under continual camera surveillance has run afoul of the Jämtland county council, which has banned cameras on the shores of the lake for reasons not exactly clear. The officials say that video surveillance is allowed only if the cameras are under water. The council in 1996 prohibited any form of harm to whatever may or may not be lurking in the lake, which has a tradition of sightings dating to 1635.

MicroSpace News: First Iranian Satellite soon?

Reza Taqipour, head of Iran's space agency, has announced the Omid (Hope) satellite may be launched as early as March. The satellite is described as a "communications satellite." Presumably, what he's referring to, given the limited payload of Iran's Safir launch vehicles, is a LEO UHF or VHF comsat, likely a microsatellite.

COMMENT: The Iranian program makes some other nations uneasy, given that a small satellite launcher and an IRBM are very close cousins. Still, every nation has the right to develop space vehicles (Iran is not a signatory to the leaky MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime)). Given Iran's resources and determination to be an influential regional power, it would not be surprising if this launch is the first step toward small imaging satellites as well as communications and maybe ELINT birds. Unfortunately, it would also not be surprising if, ten years from now, Iraq has several IRBMs with nuclear warheads, unless the rest of the world devises a much more effective approach to halting Iran's nuclear program.

The newest bird debuts in China

The bird is the potato-sized Nonggang babbler, from China's southern region of Nonggang. Birdlife International announced the dark brown bird, first spotted in 2005 and now formally described, has a known wild population of only about 100, making it an immediate candidate for "endangered" status.

Space law documents free on line

A tip of the astronaut helmet to Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz and company for putting these online:

The National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law is pleased to make available, without charge, Selected Space Law Documents: 2008. It is a compilation of space law documents from the year 2008 that were gathered primarily from postings placed on Res Communis from 1 January through 31 December 2008. The postings are supplemented with materials from other sources that were published in 2008 but which were published too late to be posted as a blog entry in a timely manner. The compilation is a special supplement to the Journal of Space Law, the world's oldest law review dedicated to space law. The Journal of Space Law, beginning with the first volume, is available on line through HeinOnLine.

Space law is sure to get discussed more in the coming years, with the Obama administration's emphasis on international cooperation. The President's proposal to "ban space weapons" needs a lot of fleshing out. How do you decide what is a space weapon? Any satellite with maneuvering or station-keeping ability can be maneuvered to collide with another satellite nearby. Even if you ban only dedicated space weapons, how do you enforce it? The honor system? No nation is going to allow foreign nationals to pre-inspect all its space payloads, and the use of on-orbit inspection is difficult, not just financially, but because the inspection satellites might be classified as - you guessed it - space weapons.

As usual, opinions are strictly those of the author as a private citizen. Said author wishes the President good luck in finding a system that actually works.

Book Review: Wild Blue (5 stars)

Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal
by Dan Bortolotti
Thomas Dunne Books, 2008

Wild Blue is simply a great book in every way. It introduces us to a mammal we know surprisingly little about, despite said mammal's status as the largest creature ever to live on Earth. The author is outstanding at explaining cetacean biology, scientific principles, technology, and so on without ever losing his sense of wonder. He also introduces us to the key figures in blue whale research and lets us know what motivates them.
Bortolotti tackles the always-present question: how big do they get? While 33m and up has been claimed, he reports that about 30m is the longest validated measurement, with the largest whales approaching 182 metric tons. He also looks into taxonomy (the once-controversial pygmy blue whale has largely been accepted as a subspecies, but there's plenty of debate about how many subspecies there are, what populations live where (and whether they intermix), etc.
Wild Blue is scientifically exacting yet always accessible to the nonspecialist reader like myself. That's a very difficult tightrope for any author to walk, and Bortolotti never loses his balance. This will stand for a long time as the definitive work on its subject.

In Memorium

This is a week for remembering.
We lost a great author, John Updike.
We lost a great man: my father-in-law, George Kanter, age 83. George was a big supporter of my space and other writing endeavors. He was a Marine, wounded in the invasion of Saipan, a polymer chemist with Rohm & Haas, a husband, a father. He led a full life, always looking forward, traveling for his company around the world, earning publication for his photographs of the Great Wall of China and the Sydney Opera House. Sometimes, though, even a full life is much too short.

And this is NASA's week to remember.

"Don't waste too much time mourning the men who died. Rather thank God that such men lived." - General George S. Patton

I repost here a well-phrased press release from the Director, Johnson Space Center:

A MESSAGE FROM THE CENTER DIRECTOR

At 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29, we will pause to remember the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia. I would like to invite all employees to the Astronaut Memorial Grove to observe this moment of silence in honor of their commitment to NASA's space exploration programs and their bravery. These astronauts and their families will always be a part of NASA's family and our Day of Remembrance will commemorate their collective contributions.

-Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967): Astronauts Roger B. Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Edward H. White, Jr.

-Challenger (January 28, 1986): Astronauts Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and S. Christa McAuliffe.

-Columbia (February 1, 2003): Astronauts Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Throughout the day, please feel free to visit the Memorial Grove to celebrate the lives of these great explorers who served their country well.

And since we're still at it...

China's Xinhua news agency reports that expeditions since 2005 have netted 14 new species of plant and animal from Yinggeling Nature Reserve in Hainan Province.
COMMENT: I'll stop with the blizzard of new species posts until a really good one comes along, but I think it important to make this point every once in a while. We don't know all the other creatures on this planet (never mind the plants). We may not know 10 percent of them.

New species: how do you name them?

Peter Etnoyer's article in Deep-Sea News goes into the question of how scientists go about naming something new. I can't improve on his words (although I've edited here for brevity):

"The first option is to name the species after a characteristic. Grandis for big, elongata for long, etc. But this can get boring. There are way too many grandis in the world already. The second approach is to name the animal after a geographic region, hence pacifica, or boat or an expedition, hence Alvinocaris and Sibogagorgia. The third approach is partimonial, to name the species after a colleague, a donor, a girlfriend, or even an enemy (if its particuarly small or ugly)."

Dr. Jon McCosker (a famed shark expert) once wrote of a kind of tongue-in-cheek feud on this last point, where he he named an eel after an old professor and some other scientists named ugly critters mccoskeri.

New species just keep coming

A sea squirt that looks like a transparent funnel when grabbing prey is just one of the oddities from a US-Australian study of the sea off the island of Tasmania. No fewer than 274 new species came out of the expedition into a steep dropoff known as the Tasmanian Fracture Zone.

Miles O'Brien on space exploration

O'Brien, a trusted aerospace reporter lost when CNN stupidly and irresponsibly cut entire units of newsgathering expertise, here weighs in on our failure to follow up Apollo. The worst thing, he notes, was not just that we failed to keep exploring and building on the Apollo achievements, but that we never tried.

Lovely new fish swims into science's view

From Sri Lanka's Onlanka News comes this photo of one of the world's newest vertebrates - Puntius kelumi, a freshwater fish with golden scales and delicate fins. The genus, Puntius, is known from several species in the Southeast Asian/Indian region.

COMMENT: One small fish may not be a huge matter to science, but I thought this was worth blogging on as a reminder that not all the significant work done in animal discovery comes out of world-famous labs or universities and equally famous journals. Vertebrates not charismatic enough to make it onto CNN are being described all the time, and in surprising numbers.

Of course, the Web is a huge help to spreading news of such discoveries. Here's one lesser-known site collecting and exchanging information on new fish:
http://www.petfrd.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22067

Here's another good example: a collection of all the new species described in just one order (the catfishes, or Siluriformes) in one year (2004). It's part of the global All Catfish Species Inventory project.
http://silurus.acnatsci.org

An armored, rock-climbing catfish

That's what has turned up in Venezuela, The new species, dubbed Lithogenes wahari, is taxonomically important as well as just plain weird. It uses its sucker-like mouth and a highly mobile pelvic fin to climb. It combines features found in two known families, the Loricariidae (armored catfishes) and Astroblepidae (climbing catfishes) and may come from a lineage ancestral to both.

NASA Administrator back to "TBD"

Space News apparently got this one wrong. Johnathan Scott Gration was not the choice for NASA Administrator - just a trial balloon that has been shot down. There doesn't seem to be any sort of consensus on who will be nominated.
NOTE to President Obama: if you can't find anyone else, I could be persuaded....

Dedicated amateur discovers new mammal

I love stories like this. The world's newest mammal - a civet from Sri Lanka - was discovered by a banker named Channa Rajapaksa, who was fascinated by civets and spent years pursuing them in the field. The first specimen of Paradoxurus stenocephalus walked into a live-trap Channa was using to study the habits and distribution of known species. Channa's research was reviewed and put into context by Colin Groves of the Australian National University and Kelum Manemandra-arachchi of the Wildlife Heritage Trust. The Linnean Society of London's Zoological Journal published their joint paper.

Japan's giant cephalopod story

It's useful to remember that cryptozoology is not just an interest (or passion) in the United States. Brent Swancer, an American living in Japan, files occasional reports with Cryptomundo on Japanese cryptids. This example concerns Akkorokamui, a creature one might think was invented for a Godzilla movie, except it's actually an old tradition among Japan's indigenous Ainu. A bright red cephalopod alleged to reach up to 110 meters in size, the legendary creature makes its home in Funka Bay on the island of Hokkaido. Is this story an exaggerated version of the North Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), or something more?
COMMENT: We're not going to find a cephalopod 110m across. It would have trouble gathering enough food as well as controlling its tentacles (given the limited speed of nerve impulses). Still, given that giant squid reach at least 18m, an octopus larger than known species is hardly impossible.

Book: Chasing Science in the Sea

Author Ellen Prager is Chief Scientist for the only operating underwater scientific habitat in the world. That for me was the most surprising fact in the whole book, considering there were dozens of such habitats in the 1960s.
Prager recounts her own adventures and explains the importance of various branches of marine science. She is not a transcendent nature writer like Sy Montgomery, but her enthusiasm comes across well. Page 85 mentions the observation of a yet-unidentified 2m-long squid. A small but surprising error is her claim that we have no submersible vehicle today, manned or unmanned, that can reach the depths Piccard and Walsh pioneered in 1960, but on the very next page she mentions Japan's Kaiko, which does exactly that. Prager repeatedly returns to the need for scientists to gather data in the field and the importance of the scientific method. This slender volume (151 pages of text) is a useful addition to its genre that hopefully will inspire some of the marine scientists of the future.

UPDATE: Dr. Prager wrote in to correct me on the supposed error, reminding me the original Kaiko was lost and the replacement ROV is limited to depths of 7,000m. In 1995, the original Kaiko dove to 10,911m in the Mariana Trench. This is approximately equal to the record established by Piccard and Walsh in their bathyscaph Trieste, with some uncertainty due to improper calibration of the Trieste's instrumentation. Richard Ellis' Deep Atlantic (Knopf, 1996) is one good source for an account of the two vehicles' dives.

Methane on Mars - what does it mean?

The short answer: Mars is either geologically active or biologically active. The latter would be more startling, of course, but the planetary scientists, the first would matter a lot, too.
Scientists inside and outside NASA have spent five years examining the sometimes-fragmentary evidence from spacecraft and telescopes and building the case for methane emissions from the surface of Mars.
As this article in Science puts it, "...Methane-generating bacteria might be living off hydrogen produced by rock...Or, purely inorganic reactions between water and rock rich in the mineral olivine could do it."

Wildlife tracking goes high-tech

How do you follow animals, as individuals or groups, in the wild? How can we get the precise data we need for conservation, such as knowing how many African penguins are meandering around a critical piece of habitat?
This article by a magazine for project managers shows how teams charged with finding out this sort of thing are bringing the newest technology to bear. Penguins are enumerated by computerized cameras that automatically distinguish individuals by the patterns of black spots on their breasts. Rare Arabian leopards are fitted with tiny "black boxes" that monitor their movements. And a network of underwater bioacoustic sensors - developed by students at Cornell University - is tracking the numbers and types of whales swimming off New York.
All very cool, and, potentially, very important.

THANKS TO Kris Winkler for this item.

New NASA Administrator a surprise pick

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration is, according to Space News, President-elect Obama's choice as NASA Administrator.
Gration is a former fighter pilot who held a variety of command positions, but never had a space assignment in the military or NASA. (He did spend one year, when he was a White House Fellow, working for NASA official Hans Mark.) He has been an advisor to the Obama campaign. He flew combat missions over Iraq and among other jobs was once Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs, Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Headquarters U.S. Air Force.

COMMENT: Hmmm. No real space experience, but a lot of leadership experience and accomplishments. It's difficult to predict how he'll do. Here's hoping he does well.

Not-quite-life created in lab

Life as we know it, even simple life, requires RNA and DNA to "run" an organism. Scientists have never succeeded in getting any form of these molecules to replicate or evolve.
They have now.
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., created RNA molecules that replicate, mutate, and compete, with the "fittest" molecules crowding out those less well equipped. Gerald Joyce and Tracey Lincoln are insistent that they have not created life, but they have created matter that "has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting." Self-replicating RNA molecules are thought to have been predecessors to DNA.

COMMENT: This does not mean we are on the verge of creating living matter from nonliving matter - DNA is a huge step from RNA. It does move us closer to that possibility, as well as giving us a look back in time billions of years to the "primordial soup" (whatever and wherever that really was.) It does make sense that, as with human cloning, we should get some regulations in place (an international agreement, preferably) on what limits we as a species place on our ever-expanding power to create.

Happy Birthday, Sergei Korolev

Today is the Chief Designer's 102d birthday. Korolev was a talented engineer, an extremely talented manager, and a man of indomitable will. An American space program analogy might be that he was that he was Wernher von Braun and Bruce Medaris (or von Braun and James Fletcher) in one man. The Space Age would have unfolded very differently without him.

MicrospaceNews: CubeSats are go

Cubesats, those handy 1-kg buses invented by by Bob Higgs at Stanford, are not just revolutionizing space opportunities for American educational institutions. This article reports on the Second European CubeSat Workshop, planned for his Second European CubeSat Workshop will take place in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, beginning January 20, 2009. The ESA Education Office is the sponsor. Nine CubeSats have already been manifested on the first flight of ESA's small Vega orbital launcher, scheduled for November 2009.

Exploring cryptozoology

This great article in the Boston Phoenix looks at cryptozoology, where it fits in the human desire to believe in the strange, where it fits in science, and how it's displayed in Loren Coleman's Cryptozoology Museum. Just a great read. It also links to a slideshow with dozens of images.

Keeping up with the roundup

Tanzania counts 17 new species of reptiles and amphibians since 2004 from the ‘virtually unexplored’ forests of the South Nguru Mountains. Asa bonus, this article links to reports on two significant mammal discoveries: the world's largest shrew and a new primate, the Highland Mangabey (Lophocebus kipunji).

Topa, savior of his species

Topa, a California condor, was found injured and taken into captivity in 1967. He didn't see a female of his species until 1982, and when he did, it took him a long time to get the hang of this mating business. Once he figured it out, though, he became one of the linchpins in the salvation of this rare species. Topa, who has lived over 40 years in the Los Angeles Zoo, has sired 21 chicks and is still going strong. Given that his species once hit a low point of 22 birds, all in captivity, the current population of 300+ owes a lot to Topa. Keepers report he has never liked humans and remains a difficult bird to handle, but he is nevertheless a star who may live another three decades.

The Sabre-tooth stalks again? Resurrecting ancient beasts

This article in New Scientist reviews the status of ten ancient creatures that, in theory, might be resurrected if we regain more of their genetic material and make some other plausible advances. The include one of my favorites, the terrifying short-faced bear Arctodus simus, along with the sabre-toothed cats, Neanderthal man (though scientists doubt anyone will breach the ethical barrier of asking a modern woman to be the surrogate mother), the Tasmanian thylacine, the dodo bird, the woolly rhinocerous, the armored glyptodont, the giant ground sloth, the Irish elk, the giant beaver, and the moa. (The author also throws in the gorilla as an example of how are rare species might be retrieved of we "lose" it.)
COMMENT: We may never realize most of these possibilities, in part because only a few have ideally suited surrogate mothers to "convert" a recovered genome into an animal. The 800-kg short-faced bear was the giant of the Tremarctine bears, for example, and the last living relative, the spectacled bear of South America. has a body mass 90% smaller. Still, if there is one thing science has taught us, it is to remember this line from Wernher von Braun: "I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution."

What's a Species, and Why?

A good article by Scott LaFee for the San Diego Union-Tribune tackles these questions in some depth, probing the different mechanisms of speciation and offering examples from fruit flies to copepods. A species, biologist Dan Bolnick notes, remains hard to define by the classic criterion of an interbreeding population. “Even if you use the criterion of reproductive compatibility, how compatible is too much to consider groups separate? What if the interbreeding species hybridize 10 percent of the time? One percent? One hundred percent? The cutoff is arbitrary.”

New species roundup - Vietnam

The end-of-the-year announcements tolling up new discoveries include article from the VietNamNet Bridge, which announces the new species roll for Vietnam as 26 vertebrate species. The latest of these, a handsomely banded cave lizard, is named Cyrtodactylus hontreensis and was announced by a joint team of Vietnamese and American experts.

Three new American fish

New vertebrates from North America are fairly rare. Indeed, it surprises some people to learn there are any such discoveries at all, even those concerning small fish. Here, however, is the tale of three new American darters from the drainage areas of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers.
We have the The Citico darter, Etheostoma sitikuense, the Marbled darter, E. marmorpinnum, and the most distinctive member of the trio, the Tuxedo darter, E. lemniscatum, distinguished in part by distinct black bands on its fins. The latter's specific name means "adorned with ribbons," which makes one wonder if it is a distant relation to Abudefduf saxatilis, the Sergeant Major. (OK, I admit military icthyological humor is a stretch.)

Another "Sci/Tech" site for your enjoyment

I didn't invent the term "Sci/Tech" or "SciTech" for a blog, although I do like to remind CNN I used it before they did (not that they care). Here is another interesting and informative site, the SciTech Journal blog published from India by Darshan Chande. Darshan answers a lot of popular science questions, from how microwave ovens work to how sloths survive in the wild surrounded by creatures that would seemingly love a tasty, near-immobile mammalian snack. (Answers: a tough hide, the ability to heal quickly, and, most important, really superb camouflage.)

WIRED's Top 10 New Organisms

WIRED names the Top 10 new organisms discovered (or, in one case, rediscovered) in 2008. You've seen most of them in this blog, but it's an interesting collection, ranging from the olive-backed forest robin (Stiphrornis pyrrholaeumus, from Gabon) to a new species of bacteria found alive in a Greenland glacier after being frozen for an estimated 120,000 years. Another weird one is a parasitic nematode worm of Central and South America, Myrmeconema neotropicum, that makes ants' abdomens swell up and turn red to look like berries to attract hungry birds, which then spread the parasite in their droppings.

Terrible reporting in a weird week for NASA

The headlines have been crazy: "Report: Obama May Merge NASA, Pentagon Space Programs" in this version on Fox News. There are even more sensational examples... none of them with a basis in reality.
It all started with a Bloomberg News item saying the Obama administration might turn the mission of launching NASA's Orion capsule from the planned Ares I over to "military rockets" - the Atlas or Delta EELVs - " because military rockets may be cheaper and ready sooner than the space agency's planned launch vehicle." Other outlets picked up on Bloomberg and took it to the point of alleging a "merger" without ever noticing the premise was wrong and that no merger is even being contemplated.

The Bloomberg story as spectacularly uninformed. The Atlas and Delta EELVs are not purely military rockets: NASA can purchase them commercially from United Launch Alliance (ULA) any time they want. EELVs carry commercial satellites and NASA payloads like the GOES series. What NASA would have to pay ULA to do is build a man-rated version, which the Pentagon has no interest in. It's also not clear where NASA and DoD ties need to be closer: they cooperate every day on everything from range operations to the significant military support to shuttle launches to missions like Orbital Express and vehicles like the X-43.

All this came during one of the more bizarre NASA news stories - that Administrator Mike Griffin's wife, among others, was openly lobbying the new Democratic administration to retain the Republican appointee. There is even an "internet petition campaign" by another former NASA official, Scott Horowitx, who seems clueless about the fact that Internet petition carry zero weight anywhere in the government (since anyone can just make them up and harvest names from the Internet.)

Now, SHOULD the new Administration look at replacing the Ares I?
Ares I, based on Shuttle SRB segments, seemed very sensible when proposed. However, it reminds me more and more of the Vanguard booster, which was sold as a simple and affordable solution using existing stages and turned into an entirely new rocket that remained a marginal design even while driving program costs from $20M to $110M (in 1950s dollars). We did eventually make Vanguard work, and the program paid for itself in technical advances, but will Ares I be as fruitful?
It may be Ares I is still the right solution, but a lot has changed since NASA made the original trade studies. Given that plus the way launcher selection affects all other decisions for Constellation, it makes sense to do one more review at this point. A well-funded team including NASA and independent experts should look at Ares compared to man-rated Atlas, Delta, and Falcon solutions. Future contributions to a heavy-lift vehicle for Constellation would be part of the value considerations, but top priority would be to find the optimal Orion launcher based on criteria supporting safety, performance, schedule, and cost objectives.

Bees really buzz on cocaine

Australian scientists have mimicked addictive behavior in humans by dripping freebase cocaine on to the backs of honeybees, where enough is absorbed to get the bees high. The bees continue their job of searching for food, but do the "waggle dance" indicating a food source to the hive much more enthusiastically. Cut them off from the drug, though, and the foragers lose interest in discovering food, let alone announcing it. Both responses have close human analogies, despite the differences in neurobiology.
Study co-leader Andrew Barron said,“What we have in the bee is a wonderfully simple system to see how brains react to a drug of abuse. It may be that when we know that, we’ll be able to stop a brain reacting to a drug of abuse, and then we may be able to discover new ways to prevent abuse in humans.”

Rise of the pink iguanas

"Pink iguanas" may sound like the name of a girl-group rock band, but scientists discovered only in 1986 that the Galapagos Isalnds were home to a population of iguanas with a distinct pinkish hue offset by black stripes. Now a new scientific study the lizards have been formally described as a separate species. Study leader Gabriele Gentile of the University Tor Vergata in Rome thinks the lizards also mark an important adaptive radiation, similar to Charles Darwin's famous finches from the same islands. (Darwin's visit did not include the islands of these fashionably attired reptiles). Gentile wrote, "So far, this species is the only evidence of ancient diversification along the Galapagos land iguana lineage and documents one of the oldest events of divergence ever recorded in the Galapagos."

Any good "creature" films in 2009?

Welcome to 2009!

Keeping an eye out for creature films in the new year is a fun sidelight of cryptozoology. I like creature films, dramatic or light-hearted, when they are done well, and zoological plausibility is not always required for a good film.
There have been enjoyable almost-kinda-plausible examples, like Creature from the Black Lagoon and Harry and the Hendersons, as well as fun-although-impossible ones like The Fly (Goldblum version) and Cloverfield. (Think about how long it would have taken nerve impulses to travel from the Cloverfield behemoth's brain down the limbs and back, or what its blood pressure would have to be.)

It's odd there have been few really good dramatic/thriller films about cryptozoological themes, given that remote locales, personal quests and conflicts, scientific (and commercial) issues, exotic creatures, and the wonder of discovery can all be elements of great drama.

Loren Coleman started a thread on Cryptomundo about 2009, noting there is a remake of Creature and a new Wolf Man due out this year.

As always, we'll have to see what actually shows up on the screen. The people behind Wolf Man make it sound promising, but when was the last time a remake of a creature film was good? Aside from Peter Jackson's King Kong (a thoroughly enjoyable exercise in excess), the most recent example I can think of is The Fly, and that was made 23 years ago. Still, Wolf Man might break the drought. The Creature remake, though, sounds like it will be heavy on the eco-preaching (the animal is not a "missing link," but a mutant creatured by dumping of pharmaceutical waste).

Others due in 2009, from Wikipedia and a quick trawl of other movie sites: There’s another chapter of Underworld due out for werewolf fans, plus a new animated Ice Age film and a movie about an albino sign-language-capable gorilla, also for a young audience (the title, Vanilla Gorilla, is a giveaway there).
Cool creatures will no doubt be on display in the next Harry Potter and in James Cameron’s Avatar.
Then there is Piranha 3-D, set in Arizona. Really.
Cloverfield seems likely to have a sequel, but it's unlikely to make a 2009 release date.