Second Air Force X-37B launched

USAF news release:
"In the latest step to improve space capability and further develop an affordable, reusable space vehicle, Air Force technicians launched the second X-37B here March 5, officials said. The Orbital Test Vehicle-2 launch comes on the heels of the successful flight of OTV-1, which made an autonomous landing at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., Dec. 3 after 224 days in space. According to officials, post-flight analysis of OTV-1 revealed OTV-2 needed no significant changes, but detailed assessments of the first mission are ongoing. "Launch is a very demanding business and having what appears to be a successful launch is always welcome news," said Deputy Under Secretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Richard McKinney, adding he is pleased with the vehicle's initial status reports. "It is important to remember that this is an experimental vehicle; that this is just the second launch; and that we have just started what is a very systematic checkout of the system." Mr. McKinney explained the second X-37B flight will help Air Force scientists better evaluate and understand the vehicle's performance characteristics and expand upon the tests from OTV-1."

COMMENT: The Air Force, of course, is not saying exactly what experiments the OTV-2 is carrying. However, the mini-space shuttle has a lot of potential uses, civil, scientific, or military. I'm curious to see how fast they can turn around these vehicles and relaunch one that's just flown.

DARPA's robot folds itself into a boat or a plane

OK, it's a tiny prototype that still needs wires conencting it to the computer. But DARPA's shape-shifting "flat robot" is just COOL.

More Eastern Cougar thoughts

In writing about this on Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman expressed his thought that the ruling was politically motivated - the FWS didn't want to expend the resources on the Eastern cougar.
Loren wrote, “All future sightings of large, tan, deer-colored felids in the Eastern USA now will again exist in that shadowy zoological limbo occupied by the Ivory-billed woodpecker and Bigfoot.”
My thoughts in response:
Well, not exactly. This case is different because the FWS is not declaring all sightings invalid. They are saying that validated sightings are of cougars from sources other than the original Eastern subspecies stock.
Of course, a fair question is, “If a sighting is valid but the cat is not caught, how can anyone be sure where said cat came from?”
The FWS answer is essentially that breeding populations would have left more evidence than we now have. That brings up a couple of complications. One is that the cat is notoriously elusive, and I wonder just how sure the FWS can be. The other, as someone pointed out on Facebook, is that it may not matter: if escaped, released, or wandering cougars establish a population, then you still have a population of a protected animal and must regulate it (although you don’t have a population of an ENDANGERED animal, which is where politics come in since the latter must be protected and regulated much more extensively.)
The politics do exist. I’ve reported before how a friend of mine, an excellent witness who knew his bears, reported literally bumping into an unmistakable grizzly bear in Colorado and was told very frankly by a state wildlife person that it would be a huge headache – for the agency, for hunters, and for landowners – if he insisted on his story. (He gave up.)
And just to complete the maze of complexity here, if you do find a breeding population, how sure can you be they are NOT original Eastern cougars? The genetic differences between the three Continental US cougar populations are minimal – some argue nonexistant.
Given that it’s established there have been SOME releases/escapes, and some Western cougars pushing east of the Mississippi, I don’t think we’ll ever know if genuine Eastern cougars have survived. I think they have, but how could it ever be proven?
Finally, I wonder if the FWS experts, while no one expressed the thought, had an unconscious bias based on the fact this was not the ivory-billed woodpecker: this was a local population, really, of an animal doing very well elsewhere on this continent. If it wasn't clear whether the subspecies identification of cougars is valid in the first place, did it matter to the survival of the species whether they found any genuine Eastern cougars?

Is the Eastern Cougar extinct?

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has decided the answer is "yes." While agreeing there are some confirmed sightings, they have put all these down to escaped/released pets or, in states like Illinois, cougars sneaking back in from the west.
The obvious question is, "If there's a confirmed sighting and the cat is not caught, how do you know where it came from?"
The FWS experts rely on the theory that a breeding population should have left more evidence than we have, but I don't know. This is a pretty darned elusive animal. I suspect the extinction label is premature.

Who first broke the sound barrier?

Well, officially, Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1 in 1947. Did someone beat him to it?
In this enjoyable Skeptoid article, Brian Dunning breaks down the possibilities, all concerning claims made for planes in power dives (Yeager did it in level flight, and there has been no argument that he was the first to do that).
One idea is that a German Me-163 rocket fighter did it during WWII, but Dunning rejects this common Internet-posted claim. He argues the Komet, one of the earliest delta-wing planes, could not have done it: the design and the control surfaces were such that the plane could have hit the sound barrier only in an uncontrolled dive ending in death, not in a recoverable maneuver as claimed only in a 1990 book, not verified in any captured German test records.
An intriguing report says Hans Guido Mutke, a German Me-262 jet fighter pilot, believed he'd passed the sound barrier only in retrospect, after he'd read of Yeager's experiences and the phenomena he'd encountered passing through the barrier. This falls into the "highly unlikely but not impossible" bin. The Me-262 was not designed for supersonic flight and would likely have torn apart or been destroyed by the phenomenon known as "Mach tuck," in which the nose is forced downward until the pilot loses control.
American pilot George Welch believes he broke the barrier twice before Yeager's flight by diving steeply in the XP-86 prototype fighter plane. Since Welch did the same thing again, properly instrumented and verified, in the same aircraft AFTER Yeager's record was set, it seems likely he did it before Chuck as well. Likely - but not proven or provable in the official sense.
None of this detracts from the quantum leap in capability pioneered by the X-1 and Chuck Yeager. He still holds the official record and likely always will.

What's the highest wind speed ever?

I get fascinated sometimes with the records of the natural world - highest wave, biggest elephant, what have you. This article looks at the claims for the highest wind speed ever recorded.
The official highest ground-level speed measured directly for a wind anywhere in the world is from Mount Weather in New Hampshire in 1943 - 231 mph.
The highest verified wind in a tornado (NOT measured at ground level, but at some hundreds of feet from the ground) is 318mph, taken by Doppler radar in Oklahoma City in 1999.
There are two claimants for the Mount Weather record, one from Australia, one from Guam. The highest measurement, from Australia in the 1996 cyclone Olivia, was 113 m/s or 253 mph. In both cases, the records were not accepted officially, in part because the represented speeds more than double the sustained wind at the time, a freakishly unlikely (though not completely impossible) circumstance.
One is tempted to say that there have been higher wind gusts, only no instrument or observer survived to report them. That's probably a true statement, and the continual improvement in weather instruments makes it likely there will someday be a new official record, but for now - Mount Weather rules!

Who was Yuri Gagarin?

This Russian blog provides a wealth of detail about a man who is world-famous but not well known as a person - Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. In this portrait, Gagarin emerges as a man who had plenty of technical skills but excelled in the intangibles - qualities Chief Designer Sergei Korolev sought in his cosmonauts. He could handle such tortures as spending 10 or 15 days in an isolation chamber where he could speak to no one. Moreover, among Gagarin's specialties were coolness, a sense of humor, and the equanimity to handle becoming a national icon. And everyone agreed he LOOKED properly like an ethnic Russian and had a classically Russian name: in the politics of the time, that mattered too.

Thanks to JSC historian Mike Ciancone for passing this along.

How did life begin? Still debating

This short article by John Horgan for Scientific American is the lead-in to some lively responses. While some are complaining Horgan short-changed all the work done on DNA and RNA in the last two decades, he's right in saying there is still (and probably always will be) debate on exactly what happened billions of years ago. The recent trend is to suggest the simpler RNA gave rise to DNA, but it turns out RNA is unlikely to arise by itself either. We come back to this: life is wonderful.

Chinese doctor dedicates himself to saving new snake

In 1984, doctor Chen Yuanhui treated an old man for snakebite and was curious when the man described the snake. It wasn't one he or anyone else with a scientific background had ever heard of. It was five years before he found someone who had captured a group of what are now called the Mangshan pit viper. Chen devoted his life to studying and protecting the endangered species. He kept seven in his home at one point. The local people, some of whom have a totem apparently based on the large green viper, appreciate him so much they commissioned a statue of the doctor and his "patient."

Thailand group reports 10 new lizards

The environmental preservation group Thailand Nature Explorer presented a varied and colorful group of 10 new lizard species to the public, emphasizing how these finds demonstrated the nation's diversity along with the need for quick protection of new species. The lizards were given what to the Western ear are exotic names in addition to their scientific ones. For example, a well-camouflaged rough-skinned brown species was christened Jing Jok Niew Yao Khlong Nakha (Cnemaspis vandeventeri). This article includes photos of all 10 species.

Annoucning the newest bird species

The bird is Mentocrex beankaensis, a colorful rail from the Beanka Forest of Madagascar. Researchers from the Field Museum collected it during an expedition led by Steve Goodman. Neil Block said the bird wasn't entirely new to locals or researchers, but it was hard to collect a specimen for a formal description. “This bird they’ve known about for decades, but no one has been able to go find it and get a specimen of it. It’s not a common thing at all, and it’s really hard to find.”

Prof reports 15 new fish species in US

They are not all confirmed yet, but I thought this university press release was interesting. One ichthyology professor, Austin Peay State University's Dr. Rebecca Johansen, is reporting that she and her students have gathered evidence of up to 15 new species from the southeastern U.S. Wouldn't you think that was an area where all the vertebrates are known? It's a good reminder that we rarely know the natural world as completely as we think we do.

Happy Birthday, British Interplanetary Society

OK, not quite birthday time yet. This article notes that the venerable British Interplanetary Society (BIS) "the oldest space organisation in the world still in its original form," will be 80 years old in 2013. The BIS, whose most famous member was the late Arthur C. Clarke, did many pioneering studies of rocketry, beginning with a 1938 study of what it would take to send three astronauts to the Moon. The 1970's study Project Daedalus laid out, in detailed engineering terms, the requirements to send a mission to Barnard's Star. The BIS continues to link space enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers around the world. Many groundbreaking papers have appeared in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS), published since 1934. Visit them at http://www.bis-spaceflight.com/

Ships from 4 agencies docked at ISS

There is something cool about the shuttle Discovery's current mission to the ISS that I didn't realize: there are now craft from four space agencies docked together. Robotic supply vessels from Japan,Russia, and the European Space Agency (ESA) are docked along with NASA's shuttle. Europe's ATV-2, Johannes Kepler, is there, along with the Kounotori ("White Stork") from Japan and Russia's Progress 41. That's about as International as a Space Station can get.

DARPA's Robotic Cheetah

If you're a soldier pursuing an enemy, wouldn't you like to be able to tell a fast-running robot to "fetch?" The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) thinks so, too. The Cheetah will have four legs, an articulated head, and a flexible spine. This will be a proof of concept model, not an operational weapon, but think of the advances in robotics we've seen in recent years.

Critters caught up in the naming rights business

THis is always interesting to me, and I'm not even sure why. It's become commonplace to sell naming rights for new species as a way of funding research. The most famous example is the South American monkey Callicebus aureipalatti, whose specific name translates to "golden palace” — a gambling website that bought naming rights for $650,000. I didn't realize the fad included individual critters, though. Ford bought the right to name a zoo gorilla Henry. DreamWorks has deals with Zoo Atlanta and with a zoo in Spain, with the movie studio donating an unknown amount of money in exchange for naming a baby panda at each site Po, after the hero of the animated film Kung Fu Panda.
COMMENT: I don't see the harm in this, if the money is used well. The zoos had better be careful, though. What if Zoo Atlanta advertises itself as the place kids can see the "real Po" and the animal catches some bug and dies? Then you're the zoo that killed Po, and there will be economic repercussions for years. "He killed Po" might be carved on the zookeeper's tombstone.

Department of cool gadgets: PERISCOP

For a long time, marine biologists have used "slurp guns" of various types to suck in marine creatures and bring them back for examination. Keeping a deep-sea critter alive, though, is a tricky process. Changes in pressure are often fatal.
French scientists have created a solution, the Projet d’Enceinte de Remontée Isobare Servant la Capture d’Organismes Profonds ("Enclosure project for isobaric ascent serving to capture deep organisms"). PERISCOP is a suction device with three chambers: one to capture an organism, one to maintain it while the submersible or ROV continues to cruise at depth, and one to maintain water pressure while you bring the organism to the surface and transfer it into a shipboard pressure tank. It's a little more complex than most such devices but it increases the depth from which pressure-sensitive fish and other animals can be safely retrieved (or kidnapped, I suppose, from the fish's point of view.) The prize so far is an eelpout brought up alive and healthy from 2,300m.

People of the ancient Subarctic

In a trench dug into an ancient settlement site in central Alaska, archaeologists found something startling: the remains of a child, 11,000 years old, which had been cremated after death. The dwelling the child lived in was then abandoned. Was this reverence for the dead? Fear of a spirit? Fear of disease? The dwelling was not a simple nomadic camp, but a pole-supported structure dug about 30cm into the ground. Remains of animals, among other finds, show the site was used for a long time before the child's death.
It's not known what modern Alaska Natives the child is related to, although a tribe living near the lake has christened the child Xaasaa Cheege Ts'eniin: Upward Sun River Mouth Child
What happened here? There is much we may never know.

Hail Discovery!

STS-133, the last mission of the shuttle Discovery, is in orbit. Discovery has logged 39 space flights, more than any other orbiter.
NASA reported,
"Good to be here," Commander Steve Lindsey radioed soon after the three main engines shut off and the external fuel tank was jettisoned. The official launch time was 4:53:24 p.m. EST."

COMMENT: The Shuttle was hampered by cost restrictions that kept it from being fully reusable, and plagued by two fatal accidents that were the fault of (avoidable) human error. But it was, for all that, a magnificent achievement, a spacecraft with countless uses, and it opened up space (at least, LEO space) to humans on a scale never seen before. It made possible the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station. We're going to miss it.

Microspace: Music of the SPHERES

Remember SPHERES, those little free-floating nanosats sent up to the ISS in 2006? The trio of "helper" satellites is still up there, and DARPA has all kinds of cool experimental uses for them. The SPHERES power themselves around in the atmospheres inside the ISS.

The 100-Year Starship study

What would it take to fly a piloted starship at near-light speeds a hundred years from now? NASA and DARPA are engaged in a study to see what technologies might be needed and how far they have to go to be mature enough. NASA Ames' Pete Worden, a guy always ready to think out on the edge, is one of the movers in this effort.
COMMENT: Sure, it's still going to be speculative. And sure, there are countless nearer-term concerns. But someone needs to think about the long term and the interstellar situation we could someday become.

Kepler module climbs toward ISS

These amazing photos show ESA's Johannes Kepler ATV resupply module climbing through the atmosphere toward the station. From the Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, an Ariane 5 launcher boosts the Kepler into orbit.

Navy scores a laser breakthrough

One of the US Navy's priorities for future weapons is the free electron laser (FEL) - your basic "death ray." This article from WIRED report on a breakthrough, running a test model on land at 500,000 volts, which the writer tells us can burn through 20 feet of steel per second. Yes, per second. A lot remains to be done before this is a practical weapon: it's too big, too fragile, too power-hungry to be put on current ships. But the Navy sees this as the future solution for defending ships from cruise missiles, aircraft, even ballistic missiles.

Top 10 Astronomical Discoveries

This isn't a deep-thinking astronomical site, but it's a very nice, brief, well-illustrated list of the ten most amazing discoveries of modern astronomy. They include General relativity, exoplanets, gamma ray bursts, black holes, the age of the universe, the Big Bang theory, redshifting, cosmic microwave background radiation, and those crazy twins, dark energy and dark matter, both of which still have plenty of "what the hell?" aspects to them.

Book Review: The Wave by Susan Casey

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey (2010)
Casey, who wrote a great book on white sharks, hee tells two stories. One is of the sailors and scientists probing the mysteries of giant waves. The second is of surfers, mainly the legendary Laird Hamilton and his rivals, as they try to ride larger and larger giants.
The two stories are only fitfully tied together as Casey switches back and forth between them. It would have been very interesting if she could have gotten some of the scientists and the surfers to chat directly, or at least comment on the other group's thoughts more than they do here.
In pursuit of rouge waves, she gathers evidence that the legendary 100-footers do happen, and they happen more often than sailors like to think about. Wave science turns out to be extremely complex and still developing, and Casey presents it well. Some of the instances were new to me, and some were scary just to read about while sitting on dry land. (Digression: Swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw has been asked what's the biggest wave she ever saw, and she writes that sailors don't have time or inclination to measure: they just divide bad weather into "this sucks" and "this REALLY sucks.")
As to the surfers, there are a handful capable of riding 60-foot-plus giants (I usually write in international units, but the 100-foot figure is iconic, so I will stick with English units here.) There is a quest among surfers to ride a hundred-footer, but these usually appear in such severe conditions, or with so little warning, that even surfers who carefully follow weather reports and wave forecasts have only a tiny chance of catching one. However, she believes Hamilton did in fact once ride a wave in excess of a hundred feet. Alas, he did it at a remote Pacific spot where no photos were recorded, and that's what you need to claim a record.
The Wave is an engrossing book whether you like sea stories, surfers, or science: it's a read that will sweep you away.

In search of the 30-foot anaconda

Slides from Slate magazine's article on the quest for a 40-foot anaconda, although the researchers would have accepted a 30-footer. Unfortunately, they found neither, and the claimed photograph of a 120-footer shown here looks like a sandbar to me.
COMMENT: The late Smithsonian herpetologist George Zug accepted a 38-foot claim, although some newer authorities reject this report (the snake was not preserved). (I use English measurements here because of the iconic nature of the 30-foot monster.) It's been argued the prehistoric 43-foot Titanoboa represented an upper bound for snakes, because at some point the nerve impulses travel too slowly to control the complex body movements.
Article: http://www.slate.com/id/2285539/

Thanks to Dana Stabenow for first posting this link on Facebook.

"Monster" photograph from English lake?

England's Lake Windermere is no Loch Ness, but two people kayaking on an office outing, think they saw a multi-humped monster. The story would end there except for the camera-phone picture you can see on the title link. A group of otters? A phenomenon caused by two wakes crossing? Could be either, but I'll grant them this appears more impressive than most "monster" photographs.

UPDATE: Well, yuck. A car tire turned up near the lake, slashed and stretched out so it could look like rubbery black humps.

Explorer 1 mission re-created with CubeSat

NASA's GLORY mission, to be launched February 23, will carry three CubeSats as hitchhikers. One is Montana State University's Explorer-1[Prime], a mission replicating the experiment carried out by the original Explorer 1 in 1958. The gamma ray detector on board will not be from 1958, but a development item from the Pioneer 10 mission, provided by the late Dr. James Van Allen, who directed the original experiment that found the Van Allen radiation belts. MSU hoped to launch the mission on the 50th anniversary of the original, but even tiny space projects are never as simple to build (and especially to launch) as originally projected.
COMMENT: When I talked to MSU's director for this mission a few years ago, he recounted telling Van Allen that they were going to replicate his 1958 experiment. Van Allen's deadpan response: "Well, I hope you don't prove me wrong."

Stardust sees NASA-created crater on comet

Stardust/NEXT flew close by Comet Tempel 1 yesterday (within 200 km) and grabbed some great images and other science data. The big prize, though, was an image of the crater made in the nucleus when NASA's Deep Impact mission blasted into the comet in 2005. The results of that mission indicate the nucleus is more fragile than expected. The crater is still very clear, and squadrons of particles, compared to flak, are still streaming off and gave Stardust/NEXT some chancy moment,s even though the spacecraft was shielded.

The spacecraft is on its second life: it performed its original mission of collecting cometary particles and sending them in a capsule down to Earth, and then it was reprogrammed and sent to Image Tempel 1.

Amazing stuff!

Science education has problems in Russia, too

People (like me) who are concerned about the state of American science education can at least take heart that other nations' educators share their concerns. In Russia, 29 percent of the population believe in human-dinosaur coexistence, 55 percent that radiation is entirely created by humans, and 32 percent (rather mind-blowingly) believe the Sun revolves around the Earth. A spokeswoman for the government polling institute said, said, "I wonder whether our colleagues in other countries would find any different."

Weird new deep-sea lobster found

Dinochelus ausubeli, an inhabitant of the Pacific Ocean off the Philippines, looks bizarre even by lobster standards. It can't be mistaken for any known species, thanks to one claw that has been ridiculously extended into long, snapping "fingers." It looks like a James Bond villain with a weaponized artificial limb. The name of the new genus means "terrible claw."

New photo of rarest rhino

Conservationists are getting very excited by a photograph of a rhino's butt.
They have reason to, There are no more than 200 Sumatran rhinos left, scattered in pockets around Southeast Asia. On Borneo, there are perhaps 30. So the camera-trap photo of a pregnant female has everyone a bit more hopeful. The smallest, hairest, and most primitive-looking of rhinos, the Sumatrans are the world's most endangered large mammal.

Dating a mystery manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is a beautifully illustrated book created by an unknown author at an unknown place and time. Its language is, so far, indecipherable (even many of the letters don't match any known language), and for 99 years since its discovery has defied hobbyists, linguists, and cryptanalysts.
Now we know one thing: its age. University of Arizona scientists usieng radio-carbon dating have placed the parchmnet used in the manuscript in the early 15th century. This was about a century older than previous estimates. Greg Hodgins of the university admits eveything else remains a puzzle. "Who knows what's being written about in this manuscript, but it appears to be dealing with a range of topics that might relate to alchemy. ...Just look at those drawings: Are they botanical? Are they marine organisms? Are they astrological? Nobody knows...It's a great puzzle that no one has cracked, and who doesn't love a puzzle?"

It's a jackal.. nope, a wolf!

Remember the jackal-headed Egyptian god, Anubis? (You should if you took any class on Egypt of watched the original Jonny Quest.) Well, the Egyptian jackal, scientists have discovered, is actually a wolf. The "African wolf," as it has been rechristened, may be a separate species or it may be another of the thirtysomething subspecies of the gray wolf Canis lupus. This was a stunner to zoologists who had never questioned the canid's identity until a DNA study.

Is this insect weird enough for you?

Five centimeters long, it's a nonflying cricket, heavily built, with feet that look like snowshoes. This species of the genus Schizodactylus is interesting entomologists, not just because it's strange, but because it shows only small changes from fossil remains newly discovered in Brazil. It's like the animal looked at the whole "evolution" thing and said, "Nah, not for me."

Student finds new species

Ryan Shofner was taking an undergraduate entomology course at Fort Hays State University in Kansas when he collected a bug he hadn't seen before. He and his professor looked into it, and kept looking into it. And now we have the jumping bristletail, a new species.
COMMENT: Students and other amateurs: the scientific world still needs you!

Will the reusable launch vehicle make it this time?

Reusable, or partly reusable, launch vehicles have been a goal of engineers for 50 years. Except for the partly reusable Space Shuttle, dozens of projects in many nations have been started, only to be canceled because the development cost was too high, the technology was too difficult, etc. Sometimes the economics have not looked promising, as market projections failed to materialize.
The US Air Force is going to try again. From a posting on Federal Business Opportunities:
"Brief Program Summary: The Air Force has identified the Reusable Booster System (RBS) concept as a promising approach to meet its future spacelift needs. The RBS consists of an autonomous, reusable, rocket-powered first stage with an expendable upper stage stack."
Will the program make it this time? Let's hope so. The Air Force is reacting to the rising cost of expendable launchers. I've been saying for decades that we have to move past the idea of throwing the whole rocket away.

The biggest bear that ever lived

Modern bears, the largest of the brown bears and polars, may in exceptional individuals reach 500kg. The extinct giant short-faced bear have have reached 1,000kg, although experts have lately been debating how robustly it was built and whether this figure is too high. (A freak polar bear killed over 100 years ago was claimed to push 1,000kg as well.) But what do you do with a bear that weighed 1,600kg and standing 3.4 meters high? It's hard even visualize the thing. It seems like fantasy.
However, the giant short-faced bear's South American relative, which was discovered in 1935 but only now given a proper examination, really was that big. Paleontologist Blaine Schubert said "there's nothing else that even comes close...It just blew my mind how big it was."

How big is the biggest fish?

The world's biggest fish is the whale shark. This harmless filter-feeder has long been known to reach 15 meters and more. Now scientists using laser-aided cameras report some are bigger - nearly 20m.
Note: Michael Bright, in his book There are Giants in the Seas, cited reports of whale sharks up to 75 feet (over 22m!). That would be surprising - and awesome - but it's not impossible.

Really cool (as in subzero) new octopus species

Four new species found in Antarctic waters as fascinating to scientists because their venom works even at subzero temperatures. The octopi drill through mollusk shells with their beaks and then let the poison go to work. Teuthologis Bryan Fry adds, ""We want to see what cool and wonderful new venom components we can find out of these venoms that would be useful in drug development. They have such incredibly accurate activity that there has to be a way to harness that. To tweak it or modify it or just use one little chunk."

Microspace News: New CubeSat missions

I love the CubeSat, the 1kg, 10-cm cube invented at Stanford by Prof. Robert Twiggs that has allowed colleges and high schools as well as labs and government agencies to develop quick, affordable space missions. Now NASA has selected 20 CubeSat missions to get rides as secondary payloads on larger rockets in 2011 and 2012. The diversity is fascinating.
To the Cube!

-- Air Force Research Lab, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

-- Drexel University, Philadelphia

-- NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (two CubeSats)

-- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. (two CubeSats)

-- Naval Research Lab, Washington (two CubeSats)

-- Massachusetts Institute of Technology

-- Morehead State University, Morehead, Ky.

-- The Planetary Society, Pasadena, in partnership with NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

-- Space and Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala.

-- St. Louis University, St. Louis, Miss.

-- Thomas Jefferson High School, Alexandria, Va.

-- University of Colorado

-- University of Hawaii

-- University of Louisiana, Lafayette

-- University of New Mexico

-- U.S. Military Academy

-- U.S. Naval Academy

http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/home/CubeSats_initiative.html

Interesting new rocket venture

EADS and Alliant Techsystems will take Alliant's Ares-1, add an EADS - Ariane upper stage, and build a new rocket called "Liberty" to try to capture NASA and international business ferry astronauts and cargo to orbit.
COMMENT: I wish them well, but I don't get the business plan. They are behind Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and especially SpaceX in this venture, not to mention Russia. They will need some kind of real cost breakthrough to capture business, and I don't see it in the materials released so far. They set a cost target as $180M and admit they need NASA money up front to finish R&D.

Nitpicking Star Trek planet names

Star Trek planet names are unrealistic. All Trek fans are nitpickers, but I don't think this has been discussed. The planets all have names easily rendered in English, like Toros or Ligan. Human languages unrelated to English (Yup'ik, Vietnamese, Salish, whatever) have sounds difficult to reproduce in English and spellings that are often impossible to render accurately in English. (Vietnam's westernized alphabet can have a half-dozen different accent marks around a single letter.) Galactic Standard seems to have no problem expressing planet names - which always sound the same when spoken by the planet's natives. Earth cultures often do not even use the same word for their homeland as foreigners use. There should be some difficult and varied pronunciations when you get to alien names.

Jules Verne's birthday!

Happy Birthday to the father of science fiction (and the technothriller). Google has a nice tribute in its logo today.
I keep waiting for someone to do a decent movie of ANY of Verne's books. Except for the enjoyable and well-acted Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from the 1950s (heck, even the squid still holds up pretty well), there seems to be some bizarre cosmic law dictating it will never happen. The television adaptations of 20,000 leagues have been abominable, and nothing worth watching has ever been done with Verne's other novels. (Caveat: I have not seen the early film version of "Mysterious Island.")

See "In the Shadow of the Moon"

Best space documentary ever: In the Shadow of the Moon. It perfectly re-creates the wonder, the danger, the tension, and the celebration surrounding the first steps on another world. In an interesting bit at the end, astronauts tell how voyaging to the moon affected them spiritually. Watch it, especially if you are too young to remember just why this was such a big deal.

China's mummy goes missing

Mummies discovered in western China some years back were dated to 4,000 years B.P. They were remarkably preserved, but the stunning thing was that some had Caucasian features. To this day archaeologists debate where these people came from. The most famous of all was a woman, auburn hair still intact, who toured with an exhibit that went to major American museums. Now the "Beauty of Xiaohe" has been pulled back mid-tour by Chinese officials and sent home. The Chinese are not explaining, leaving Americans to speculate that someone decided the politics of Caucasian settlers in ancient China was politically touchy. The exhibition, minus its star, goes on.
COMMENT: There seems no reason for China to be so sensitive about a mysterious but not major detail of its rich history. It's not like anyone was claiming Western influence for ancient Chinese accomplishments in science, technology, and exploration.

Gustave the giant croc still on the loose

Hunters haven't killed him. Soldiers with automatic rifles haven't killed him. Even a bad movie, Primeval, only enhanced his legend. Gustave, the world's biggest and most dangerous Nile crocodile, is still snatching people in Burundi. This article (and an Update article linked on the same site) describe him as a monster, probably 20 feet long and weighing around a ton, and distinguished by bullet scars as well as by size. Half again as long as a normal mature croc, Gustave has been blamed for 300 deaths. Scientists reject this figure, but no one doubts he has a fondness for easily-caught humans. As important as it is to halt his depredations, scientists also hope that he can be taken alive and continue passing on his genes. Herpetologists were stunned that a croc this size still lived in the wild, surviving both legal and illegal hunting, and even people out to kill him speak of him with a kind of respect.

Kepler finds a solar system like ours

Scientists using the Kepler space telescope have found over 1200 likely exoplanets, but the big news concerns a solar system 2,000 miles away: "six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11." Out of the hundreds of exoplanet discoveries made so far, the Kepler-11 find most closely resembles our own solar system: relatively compact, with rocky planets orbiting a small yellow star in a single plane.
Pat Flannery, a contributor to the group sci.space.history, made my favorite remark on this: "Kepler makes it look like a Star Trek universe out there, with planets all over the place."

Klyde Morris on the "Sputnik moment"

I shy away from politics on this blog, but, as a space historian, I was rather annoyed the term "Sputnik moment" was being tossed around with almost no evidence anyone really understood the context of the term. (Note to President and Congresspersons: I'll send you my book if you ask. ) This Klyde Morris comic strip rather neatly (and bitingly) makes the point.

Coolest Shuttle graphic ever

Just in time for the end of the program, Space.com has put together the clearest one-web-page graphic I have ever seen explaining the Shuttle program and its technology. I wish it had come out ten years ago and been made into a poster. I would have bought one. But still, here it is, and even veteran Shuttle-watchers will enjoy it.

Cool Fossil Department: Dino named after twin scientists

From the University of Kansas (KU) news service: "Count KU grads and identical twins Celina and Marina Suarez among the coolest people ever after the two had a new species of dinosaur named for them. Geminiraptor suarezarum, "one of the oldest dinosaurs of its type ever identified in North America," will be named for the 29-year-old identical twins and geochemists, who discovered the birdlike raptor's bones in Utah..." Details and photo of the excavation at the title link.

Cool Experiment Department: Paper planes from space

OK, near space. Hundreds of paper planes made by students were released from a balloon 36.5 kilometers up. Sponsor Samsung put an SD card in each plane. Planes have been reported in widely scattered locations, but it will take a while to figure out all the reported landing sights and claim a record for the longest paper plane flight ever. The planes, of waterproof paper, have been reported as far afield as South Africa, the United States, and Russia. Project Space Planes, led by Joel Veitch, built the aircraft and hope some may be found centuries from now - they may function as time capsules as well as messengers.

Correcting my initial post, I swtiched the title link to a batter and more recent article. I oritingally wrote the planes were constructed by German students, but I skimmed the article too quickly. It's still a unique and fascinating experiment.

What is a "cryptid," anyway?

"Cryptid" is a word coined by cryptozoologists (no surprise). It refers to any animal which is reported but not confirmed, including never-caught species and presumed-extinct ones. Michael Woodley here examines the use and misuse of the term. He rejects Dr. Charles Paxton's advice, which is that theorizing about cryptids is pointless, and we should use reports, not hypothesized creatures, as the basics for theorizing.
COMMENT: I see Charles' point. For example, cryptozoologists are not really studying a "cryptid" called sasquatch, they are studying reports of large unclassified primate. Sometimes, there is something to be said for focusing the discussion with at least a general outline of a "cryptid," but it's unscientific to name a solution, to the exclusion of other solutions, when there is no animal in hand.
This reminded me of how the late Grover Krantz aimed to spark scientific discussion when he published a paper naming a specific presumed-extinct species, Gigantopithecus blacki, as the source of sasquatch reports. The problem is that he named it based on footprints when we have only teeth and jawbones of Gigantopithecus and no one can say what the feet looked like. Almost no one in the anthropological community accepted such a reach, and it did not do anything to burnish the reputations of cryptozoology in the "mainstream" scientific world, nor the reputation of Krantz (who was a genuine expert with well-respected work in human evolution.) Still, Krantz was never sorry he did it: he thought he achieved his primary objective.

Origin of the Chupacabra

I never thought the chupacabra (that is, the spiny-backed, blood-sucking animal, as opposed to the oddball canids tarred with the same name) was a real animal. It turned up in the 1990s, on an island of all places (Puerto Rico), and real creatures just don't pop out of the ground. There wasn't even any folklore about them before that. Ben Radford here traces the idea of the "goatsucker" to the creature in the movie Species. I'm not sure this is original with Ben, as I seem to recall some cryptozoologists floating it a year or two back, but I do think he's right here.
It was cryptozoologist Loren Coleman who mused that the chupacabra was "cross-cultural, sort of like Jennifer Lopez." This raises the interesting idea of a spiny-backed monster judging American Idol. I'd watch.

A Skeptic Visits the Cryptozoology Museum

An enjoyable visit to Loren Coleman's museum by self-proclaimed skeptics who nevertheless think it was a great experience, recommend it to everyone, and even pitch for donations. Um... an important note. That is NOT a life-size replica of a yeti, it's a sasquatch. VERY few even among the cryptozoology community think sasquatch and yeti reports concern the same animal. Skeptics should be more careful about terminology.

Meet the Science Cheerleaders

Is "science cheerleader" a contradiction in terms? Nope. On this site, NBA and NFL cheerleaders are cheering for science policy, science education, and greater involvement in science by students and adult citizens alike. And yes, there are videos of attractive women cheering for science, for those who like that sort of thing. GO TEAM!

The gorilla that walks like a man

All gorillas can walk bipedally a little if they need to. But in England's Kent Zoo, a male named Ambam apparently decided this bipedal thing was really cool. He has become a very popular exhibit because a human-like walk has become normal for him. With their short legs, gorillas are not going to do any long-distance running, but it's speculated that Ambam liked having the vantage point to see things before his fellow gorillas - a keeper approaching with food for example.

A one-fingered dinosaur?

Yep. A very small dino from China has stubby little arms (stubbier and littler, in proportion, than T. rex arms) with a single finger on each hand. It may have dug up terminite mounds with its long digits. Linhenykus monodactylus died out with the rest of the dinos at the end of the Cretaceous period - unless it died of embarassment amid the laughter of other dinosaurs first.
COMMENT: Seriously, the thing looks ridiculous. The platypus has more dignity.

New jelly species: the "Pink Meanie?"

The jellies, or sea jellies (or jellyfish, a term marine biologists have tried to banish without success) include an astonishing variety of forms, from animals that can hardly be seen at all to species three meters across. The new species found off Florida, Drymonema larsoni, is so different from its nearest kin that a new family had to be created. (Different due to "allometric growth of the bell margin distal of the rhopalia, an annular zone of tentacles on the subumbrella, and ontogenetic loss of gastric filaments," if you want to know.) It was nicknamed the "Pink Meanie" for its unusual diet: other jellyfish. And this species is huge, up to a meter across. Not a creature to mess with.

Puzzle: Hybrid minke whale

Sometimes closely related species (and even some non-closely related ones) hybridize successfully. But here's a puzzle: hybridization of species from opposite ends of the Earth. How does a northern minke whale even meet an Antarctic type? The two both venture to equatorial waters, but six months apart (their respective winter seasons). So someone's migration time was drastically off. We don;t know why. This article also asks whether the hybrid found in 2007 was a fluke (get it?) or part of a trend. Again: we don't know.

NASA Remembers

Tomorrow is NASA's Day of Remembrance, when the astronauts of Columbia, Challenger, And Apollo 1 are honored.

I wrote this one year after Columbia:


Columbia: Per Ardua ad Astra

One year ago….

Waking on a clear weekend morning here in Colorado, casually logging on to check my Email, seeing the AOL banner, "NASA Loses Contact With Columbia." Turning on CNN. Watching more CNN. Explaining it to my daughter, then 11. Wondering how it had happened, what it would mean.
A year later, the technical answers are out. The human answers, as always, are not simple. They drift out in fragments over the course of history, debated, challenged, finally settling but never quite settled.
Worth it? Of course it was not, in any logical sense, worth losing seven people for a science mission whose returns would not have been of great importance. Death, as Ulysses S. Grant once said of war, "is cruelty and you cannot refine it." Nor can you romanticize it. Nor, when there gross errors in judgment made, can you excuse it.
I submit, however, that any calculation about the worthiness or foolishness of the voyage is incomplete, nay, unfair, unless it takes into account the desires and motivations of the voyagers. The seven people on Columbia did not just accept the risk of venturing, in a craft built by fallible humans, into the most hostile realm we know. They sought the risk. They spent years training, competing, and sometimes demanding the right to take the risk. Whatever judgments we might make on the costs vs. the returns of their efforts as explorers, the explorers themselves had no doubts. Every one of them was a bright, accomplished, highly educated human being. Not one was foolish enough to think there was no risk, or low risk. Not one hesitated. Indeed, they did everything they possibly could to qualify themselves to stand out among their peers and earn the chance to risk their lives in a cause they deemed worthy.
By that standard alone, they were the best our species had to offer. They were sent forth into the last unknown ocean, explorers in an age when most people in their society place high value on safety, comfort, and surety.

Godspeed, Columbia.

Matt Bille
OPINIONS IN ALL POSTS ARE SOLELY THOSE OF THE AUTHOR

Follow the Whale

At this link from Oregon State University, you can follow the path of Flex, a radio-tagged Pacific gray whale. What is interesting about Flex is that he's following a migration route never before documented for his species. What is he up to in the northernmost reaches of the Pacific?

Newest wild cat is actually TWO wild cats

Until 2007, the beautiful clouded leopard was believed to consist of one species (Neofelis nebulosa). In that year, scientists showed the species living on Borneo and Sumatra was distinct, and it received a new scientific name (Neofelis diardi). It is so little known the first video was released only in 2010. Now the species needs to be split again, as further study has shown the cat known as the "Sunda clouded leopard," is two cats. The Sumatran and Bornean populations, it turns out, are also distinct. The more we learn, the more we learn there is to know...

Alien hand syndrome (for real)

Alien hand syndrome sounds like bad fiction, but it's difficult reality for a New Jersey woman whose left and right hands often act in opposition to each other, without her conscious intent. Her left hand has even punched her. It seems her brain hemispheres are not operating together. They are competing for dominance.

Cold fusion returns?

Italian researchers claim they have gone beyond the original (and much criticized) experiments in cold fusion (often called low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR). They not only have produced cold fusion, but have a marketable product that produces 31 times the energy fed into it.
They made the claim at a press conference after their paper was rejected by a journal and their patent was rejected by the Italian government. The chief complaint is that they can't explain the mechanism by which the LENR are produced. Do they really have something, or is this another dead end?
COMMENT: I hope they have something real, but I'm waiting for an independent verdict.

Giant new crayfish from Tennessee

Important new species are everywhere. That's something I've harped on in this blog since the beginning. Now a really surprising one has literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee. (Someone else has already used that line, but I don't care.) Hiding in freshwater stream beds is a crayfish twice the size of known species. That's still only 12.5 cm long, but it's pretty amazing no one has ever noticed a crayfish that should stand out from its fellow appetizers. Never stop looking!

Lake of Mystery

A note on Antarctica's huge, deeply buried Lake Vostok. Russian researchers are drilling (it's summer down there) the first borehole to sample the lake's waters. They expect to find new species -not, unfortunately, the dinosaurs of popular imagination, but a new ecosystem on the one-celled level. It's potentially exciting and important stuff.

Microspace News: Nanosail-D deploys!

The little solar sail that could has not only come back from its presumed demise, but has deployed its 100-square-foot sail. It's the first solar sail deployed in LEO (there have been failures, and Japan's IKAROS is testing one out on its trip to Venus.) It's a step forward for a promising technology and for the use of tiny satellites to carry out important testing.

The animals we've lost

A photo essay on ten animals believed lost in the last decade: two amphibians, three mammals, and five birds. Farewell to the Pyrenean ibex (subject of an attempted cloning procedure), the colorful Spix's macaw, Holdridge's toad, and too many more.

New Zealand's butterfly man

Collecting butterflies is a hobby for some - an obsession for others. This charming article tells the story of a man who has made over 3,000 collecting trips, 20 of them to other nations, and netted over 200 new species.

Microsat News: NanoSail-D suddenly turns up

NanoSail-D, a Cubesat-based nanosatellite carrying a solar sail experiment, was written off after it failed to eject from NASA's FASTSAT after launch last month. Yesterday, it suddenly ejected. Engineers are unsure of what happened here, but are now hoping the experiment will "wake" and start sending data. Help is being sought from the global amateur radio community in the search for signals.
The NASA release says:
"The NanoSail-D science team is hopeful the nanosatellite is healthy and can complete its solar sail mission. After ejection, a timer within NanoSail-D begins a three-day countdown as the satellite orbits the Earth. Once the timer reaches zero, four booms will quickly deploy and the NanoSail-D sail will start to unfold to a 100-square-foot polymer sail. Within five seconds the sail fully unfurls."

COMMENT: Solar sail experiments are on a very unlucky streak. Fingers crossed.

Microspace News: Kedr microsat celebrates Gagarin

This year is the 50th anniversary of the first human spaceflight. One of the first events in the celebration of this half-century of achievement is the launch of the 30-kg microsat Kedr. Named for Yuri Gagarin's call sign, the microsat will go up on the next Progress craft to the International Space Station. A cosmonaut will hand-launch it from there. It will broadcast greetings in 15 languages, using the ham frequency of 145.95 MHz.

Revisiting the yeti

Teisha Rowland's Biology Bytes column (I'm no longer sure of the difference between a column and a blog) gives a brief survey of the history of the yeti. Rowland is clearly skeptical that there's anything stomping around in the mountains, and sasquatch partisans will object to her quick dismissal of that animal. Rowland thinks many yeti sightings and reports can be laid to other Himalayan wildlife, and her point is that we should not overlook conserving the known in our speculations about the unknown.

Drilling for hobbit DNA

Anthropologists would love to have the DNA of the "hobbit," Homo floresiensis, but the 18,000-year old bones have not yielded up their secrets. Two earlier attempts to recover the hobbit's genome have failed, but new sampling techniques and a premolar tooth that's been kept in cold storage may mean the third time is the charm.

James Hansen: not the best spokesman for science

OK, NASA's James Hansen is the most famous of climatologists. Whether you think he's right or wrong on climate change, though, his government position is giving him the platform to spew rants that democracy is the problem and the Chinese style of dictatorship is the answer (never mind millions of people murdered, eh? And you didn't visit Tibet, I'll bet) for the world's future.
Nobody cares what I think, but, Hey, Doc? You're an ass. Climate change needs to find a spokesman who is at least rational.

Vatican reconciles God and the Big Bang

Dan Brown's novelistic version of Catholicism vs science is falsehood piled on fabrication, but it's true enough that the two don't exactly agree on everything. Pope Benedict is the latest to try to bridge the gap. Echoing something his predecessor once said to Stephen Hawking, Benedict said there was no problem with the Big Bang (which was proposed by a Catholic priest in 1927, BTW) but that before a universe described by physical laws burst into being, the Creator had shaped the moment. Some physicists argue that there simply could not be a "before" the big bang: the concept is meaningless. That's not much easier to get your head around than a supernatural Creator, is it?

One of rarest cats rediscovered

The Bornean Bay Cat (Catopuma badia) is one of the world's beautiful "small cats." It's also, after a photograph in 2003, unseen, endangered, and possibly extinct.
It's back.
As Loren Coleman reports here, only twelve specimens have ever been collected, and the first live specimen was not caught until 1992. There are none in captivity now. But just-released photographs have confirmed the cat is, at least, alive. Hopefully they will give a boost to conservation efforts.

US shuts down its most powerful collider

The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news as physicists search for the Higgs boson, a.k.a. the "God particle," a theorized building block of the universe. The Tevatron in the U.S., wile less powerful, is America's pre-eminent physics instrument and also has a chance to discover the Higgs (a sure Nobel Prize event). Now we're shutting it down. Budget cuts.
COMMENT: We can, it seems, no longer afford our leadership in science and technology. Just one citizen's depressed opinion.

Evocative video of what space exploration is about

Not made by NASA: made by someone who wants the agency to recapture the wonder. You have to see it.

Preserving Antarctic exploration history

Antarctic exploration captivated the world a century ago the way space endeavors do today.Robert Falcon Scott left for the South Pole in 1910 and never returned. I did not know this bit from the BBC, republished by Keith Cowing on NASAWatch:

"In 1910 Scott relied heavily on school children to fund his expedition, with schools sponsoring a sledge dog or set of skis, in return for the honour of having their name transported to the very bottom of the world."

Now school children are among the donors for an effort to preserve Scott's historic hut. The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust (UKAHT) raised £3.5m to ensure the preservation of the hut and associated artifacts.

Thunderstorms shoot out antimatter (believe it or not)

A lighting associated phenomenon in thunderstorms, called a terrestrial gamma ray flash, results in beams of antimatter shooting into space. The phenomenon was discovered by NASA's Fermi satellite.
Tell me if NASA's release sounds like science fiction: "On Dec. 14, 2009, while NASA's Fermi flew over Egypt, the spacecraft intercepted a particle beam from a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) that occurred over its horizon. Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor detected the signal of positrons annihilating on the spacecraft -- not once, but twice. After passing Fermi, some of the particles reflected off of a magnetic "mirror" point and returned."
COMMENT: You know, sometimes even I'm at a loss for words.

Hubble studies giant green blob

Get a load of the strange glob of gas now under scrutiny by the Hubble Space Telescope. (picture at title link.)
This was another amateur discovery: Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch teacher, found it while participating in an online galaxy-classification program called Galaxy Zoo. The bizarre stellar gas cloud is so weird it's simply known as Hanny's Voorwerp (Dutch for Hanny's Object). It looks rather like one of those unclassified interstellar phenomena that the crew of Star Trek:TNG seemed to run into about every other week.
"Look at the heavens, and never cease to wonder..." (me)

The Shuttle tank struggle

NASA has announced it will install a new set of stringers in the affected area of the shuttle Discovery External Tank (ET) to take the load off suspect ones. I really didn't like this when I read it: I would have said take the stack apart, install the next available tank, and send this one back to the manufacturer to be overhauled. However, NASAWatch's Keith Cowing publishes a comment from former Shuttle manager Wayne Hale that explains the rationale:
"...until root cause is understood, all the remaining tanks are suspect; going to the next tank in line would likely have the same condition. Understanding the cause and fixing all the remaining tanks is required. Second, this is hardly a hurry up launch fever situation. The shuttle team is methodically working through the problem. They have delayed the launch from early November repeatedly because the solution is not in hand. They are exercising very good judgment and not rushing. Working through difficult engineering problems can be painful to watch, but my observation is that they are doing what is prudent and proper."

Good luck, guys.

The vampire tree frog (fun new species from Vietnam)

The vampire tree frog, like some others of its type, can glide a bit between branches using its splayed-open feet and the membranes between its toes. What gives it the name, though, is the large black fangs that adorn the tadpoles. Does Vietnam make horror movies?

Russian architect's interesting "Ark"

Russian architect Alexander Remizov has a unique new idea for "green" buildings. It doesn't look like a building at all. Instead, what he call the Ark looks like a partly unfolded, plastic-covered Slinky, or maybe a section of vacuum hose. It uses the latest tech, including wind power and transparent solar panels, to be efficient, but he says it doesn't need any unusual structural materials. They could be built large enough to house 10,000 people.
COMMENT: Unknown is whether anyone will finance a test of the idea. I hope someone does, at least for a small-scale trial. The idea that anyone could come up with a really new idea for a building is a little startling if you think about the millennia humans have been building stuff. Green construction is usually based on modifying longstanding ideas: this guy might have come up with the most radical notion since the geodesic dome.

Journal publishes high school papers

The Concord Review is a unique journal: it publishes outstanding history research papers by high school students. Publisher William Fitzhugh created the Review and keeps it going on subscriptions, donations, and his own money. He publishes the top research papers sent to him from all over the world. One problem: fewer teachers in the U.S. are assigning research papers. Fitzhugh says, “Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace. Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.”
COMMENT: I salute you, sir!

Are we part Neanderthal after all?

The last study I blogged about on this topic said humans and Neanderthals didn't interbreed. Well, anthropological paradigms never seem to last very long. Comparing the human and Neanderthal genomes, the researchers quoted here reported we moderns have a minimum of one to four perceent Neanderthal DNA, and it could be higher. It brings up countless questions: why did these two types mate? When? Where? Was it consensual? (Distasteful, but you have to ask - humans in conflict tend to do very nasty things to each other.) And how did Neanderthal DNA end up all over the ancient world, including places like China where Neanderthals, as far as we know, never existed? And is there still an argument for separate species, or does having 99.7% identical DNA mean there's no doubt any longer? There's a lot more research coming on this one, I'm sure.

Thanks to Dale Drinnon for calling my attention to this article.

New life exposed in Antarctica?

A huge large chunk of ice has broken off the Antarctic mass, and Australian biologists see opportunity. (In this case, it has nothing to do with climate change, by the way.) An expedition is going after new species that may have been exposed for the first time after a major change in the ice cover. A collision between ice masses broke off a chunk 40x80 km. Now, as one scientist puts it, The calving of the iceberg has exposed parts of the seabed that haven't been available to us for study in our lifetimes. So we just don't know what we'll see under there - they've been buried under 400 metres of ice for the last 80 years or so."

Turkish scientists find 21 new aquatic species

As a reminder that discoveries are made all over the world, this account covers a fish a cave shrimp, and 19 other animals described by the Water Products Faculty at Ege University in Turkey. According to Dr. Özdemir Egemen, "I believe there are many other species waiting to be discovered. Our country is among an elite few countries in terms of richness in underwater life.”

COMMENT: I do wonder about the translation at one point in this story. It says they found "seven aquatic reptiles." Turtles, perhaps, or maybe it meant "amphibians?"

Lessons from the Black-Footed Ferret

The Futures Channel offers science and math lessons for gradeschool kids based on compelling real-world examples. In this case, it's the recovery of the black-footed ferret. Not only does it have lots of pictures of an incredibly cute animal, but it explains how the species came back from the brink of extinction (indeed, it was presumed to BE extinct twice), but leads into math and science problems as students consider the population growth, variables involved in recovery, etc. Great stuff!

A couple more examples:
http://www.thefutureschannel.com/dockets/space/spaceports/index.php
http://www.thefutureschannel.com/dockets/realworld/wildlife_refuge/index.php

Stories I love: Amateur finds planets

Peter Jalowiczor isn't an astronomer - just a British utility worker with dedication and ingenuity. Using two personal computers to chunk through four years of information collected and released by the University of California's Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team in faraway California.
The result: Four new exoplanets have been discovered. As he explains the technique:
"I look for faint changes in stars' behaviors that can only be caused by a planet or planets orbiting about them. Once I identify likely candidates, I send the details back to Santa Cruz."
COMMENT: Even in the high-tech world, the amateur explorer still matters.

Solving the spacecraft blackout

If you've studied space flight, or just watched Apollo 13, you know the scary moment when the plasma sheath around a reentering space craft cuts off all radio communications for three or four minutes.Aleksandr Korotkevich of the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Moscow, though, thinks he can solve it. The trick is to turn the plasma sheath, which reflects away from of the RF energy but also absorbs some of it, into a giant antenna. No one knows if it will work until it's tried with an actual spacecraft, laboratory simulations notwithstanding, but it's very clever and just might solve a big problem.

Sumptuous early book on marine creatures (mermaid included)

Louis Renard's 1718 book on the sea creatures of the East Indies, according to this book-lover's blog, is remarkable in several ways. It's beautiful: it's extremely rare: and there's a lot of license taken in the illustration of creatures the author never saw. Renard advertised the book as showing creatures drawn from life, including the mermaid. His mermaid is actually kind of interesting, as it shows a much longer fishlike body and tail than normal (there's a little of the oarfish about it, albeit not an accurate oarfish.) Anyway, enjoy the illustrations.

Plenty of new dinosaurs, too

It's not just living species that keep turning up. We're still learning about dinosaurs, too. Scientists in Utah named eight species in an amazing year for paleontology. My favorite name: Seitaad ruessi. Apparently "Seit'aad" is a desert-dwelling monster in Navajo folklore. It's an early sauropod, ancestor to famous beasts like Brachiosuarus, and was found in a sandy area where no one would normally look for dinos.

Two species of African elephant

This debate has been going on for a long time, but maybe this will settle it. A new paper in PLoS Biology argues the savanna and forest elephants of Africa are different species. Indeed, they diverged millions of years ago. They do still interbreed, though. And although researcher David Reich said, "We'll need to rewrite some basic biology textbooks," I don't think the more controversial pygmy elephant has ever really gotten a fair hearing despite pretty good evidence.

Astrobiology at Yellowstone Park

Here's a really cool little online guidebook from the University of Montana on the study of "extremophiles" in the hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone and the insights they give us into possible life on other worlds. Extremophiles in general are fascinating, and they've done a good job here of explaining their significance.

What Cable TV really needs

There seems to be no end of TV shows on ghosts, cryptozoology, and other "phenomena" that say, "Let's see what's out there." (I argue cryptozoology does not belong with the other topics, since it deals with falsifiable hypotheses and is therefore a real science when done right, but the point of this post is the same whether it's ESP or Bigfoot.)
What we need is a show that examines these topics in depth, not just breadth. How could certain things happen? Is the science plausible? If the science isn't plausible, are people reporting things that aren't there? What's the science behind that? Psychology? If we're looking at a creature, what's a plausible food web like? What species might be its ancestors, and how has the whole line remained hidden? Some shows do a good job with particular bits of evidence, like the way MonsterQuest got an expert to look at the MacFarlane's Bear remains, but there's no show that goes deeply into the science, psychology, and sociology of the paranormal. If you have to postulate a supernatural explanation (I don't claim there can't be such a thing), is the evidence so overwhelming that no other option will do?
I don't know how you fund a show like that, but there are hard science series on astronomy and nature that get done. We need one that really looks deeply, with objectivity and open debate among experts, at the "fringe" topics.

Not out of Africa?

It's been pretty close to an article of faith among scientist that the anthropoids (monkeys, apes, and humans) first emergent in Africa. But fossils showing three primate families inhabited Libya 39MYA are being interpreted as indicating the primates may have been busily evolving elsewhere before this point and then moved into Africa - where they eventually produced humans. Christopher Beard, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History , points to a paucity of earlier African primate fossils and thinks these primates came from Eurasia and thrived on the new continent.
Beard has previously made this proposal on different evidence, the discovery in 2005 of a primate called Ganlea megacanina in Myanmar:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090630202125.htm

COMMENT: I'm not about to weigh in on whether Dr. Beard is right, but this does remind us how much is still to be learned about primate ancestry.

Listing all those plants

American and British botanists have compiled a global list of land plants - all 300,000 known species. It's the most complete survey ever undertaken. Clearing out a mass of taxonomic underbrush built up over centuries, they determined which names were valid and threw out 480,000 duplicate names. Knowing what plant is what and which ones are where is a very big deal, not just for botany, but for plant-based pharmacology and for conservation. Now they are at work naming those plants which have been documented but never properly named. As one researcher noted, this is complicated because people in the field are always bringing in new plants - even trees!

Four more cracks on Discovery's tank

The NASA and contractor engineers who have been crawling over the External Tank (ET) for the shuttle Discovery have good and bad news. Good: The cracks that postponed the shuttle's launch have been fixed and the area strengthened. Bad news: there are four new cracks (or previously undiscovered ones) on the other side of the tank. The latest (February 3) launch date may or may not be practical. What is unnerving is that they're not sure of the root cause of the cracks. Fingers crossed guys, and MAKE SURE it's good to go.