President Bush on Creation and Evolution

It might be said that an outgoing President's views don't matter much, but this is an exception, since George W. Bush has been for a long time one of the most prominently Christian figures in public office. In an interview with ABC's "Nightline" program, Bush pronounced himself a believer in the importance of the Bible, but "not a literalist." He explained concerning creation and evolution, " "I think you can have both. I think evolution can — you're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world; I think the creation of the world is so mysterious it requires something as large as an almighty and I don't think it's incompatible with the scientific proof that there is evolution."

A poll on this livescience.com story indicates the readers of the site are generally in strong disagreement with the President (whom I am, in general, in agreement with, though I would not have used his phrasing). Of 5,800 self-selected respondents, 89 percent felt creation was "just a primitive story."

A thousand new species from SE Asia

This blog has covered some new species from Southeast Asia, including a 30-cm spider and a startling pink millipede, but just how many species have been discovered in the valley of the Mekong river, which flows through much of that region? The WWF added them all up and found there have been over a thousand in the last decade. Think about that. This astonishing number tells us that, despite all the environmental harm we've caused, a great deal of the natural world is still out there waiting to be explored and classified. The link above includes photos of some examples, like the brilliant green viper Trimeresurus gumprechti (one of 22 new snakes), the Laotian rock rat, and a tree frog, Chiromantis samkosensis, which is colorful not just on the outside, but on the inside, thanks to its turquoise bones and green blood (!)
Oh, and the viper was spotted crawling through the rafters of a restaurant. Seriously. That ought to count some points off a Michelin Guide rating.

Cryptozoologist of the Year named

Loren Coleman gives the honor to Dr. Andrea Marshall, who discovered a huge and striking new species that had been (sometimes, anyway) in plain sight. No one before her had made much of a study of the manta populations off the coast of Africa. When Marshall looked at them thoroughly, she discovered they included two species, one coastal (this was the known species) and a larger, deeper-water denizen which could be distinguished by its more triangular fins, its lifestyle (migratory), and its sheer size (up to eight meters across and weighing up to two metric tons). Marshall did something important to all of science: looking at something no one else had examined and finding what no one else had noticed.
I nominated Debbie Martyr as runner-up for her rediscovery of the Sumatran muntjac and her continuing progress in solving the mystery of the orang-pendek - the likeliest, in my view, of all the cryptid primates to prove a new species.

MicroSpace News: Bring on SwampSAT

I covered earlier in this column the welcome release of NSF grants for microsatellite technology projects. The University of Florida has used NSF funding to create the Advanced Space Technologies Research and Engineering Center at the UF College of Engineering. Their first flight hardware is a $100K, 1-kg microsat designed to tackle the problem of precision attitude control of a vehicle with very little room for a conventional attitude control system. The university is not spilling all the details of their idea in the press (even in the College of Engineering's own press), but SwampSAT will be ready for launch in 2009 to test a possible solution.

Also:
http://www.test.eng.ufl.edu/newsroom/articles/detail_articles.php?id=985

Dwarf crocodile is three species

In the latest example of applying DNA to taxonomy, a team from the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History was looking into the distinctiveness of populations of the African dwarf crocodile, which had been split off on morphological grounds into separate subspecies. Looking at dwarf croc DNA samples from all over the African continent, researchers discovered that, not only were the two subspecies more properly described as full species in the genus Osteolaemus, but there was a third species no one had distinguished. The scientists sequenced over 4,000 more base pairs of DNA (both mitochondrial and nuclear) from more than 80 individuals to work it all out.

Under Lake Ontario, an archaeological mystery

A hundred and fifty meters beneath the surface of Lake Ontario rests a newly discovered mystery. A 19th-century schooner, 17 meters long, rests upright on the bottom in surprisingly good condition. No one consulted so far, though, has been able to shed any light on the vessel's name or its origin. Video from an ROV indicates many of the ship's fittings were removed before it sank, perhaps indicating it was in the middle of a conversion for some other role when disaster struck. The vessel is distinctive because of its use of a daggerboard, a wooden extension to the keel which could be raised or lowered. There's no record of any daggerboard ship on the lake, from any time period.
COMMENT: As we explore the Earth's wild places and the universe around us, this find reminds us that we always have more to learn from exploring our own history as well.

The Day Science Stood Still?

Alan Boyle's ever-entertaining Cosmic Log looks at the new movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still. I haven't been anticipating this film. The 1950s original, a beautiful little two-character drama, is classic: this one looks like another CGI spectacular with lots of explosions and tiresome eco-preaching. However, Boyle notes, the creators did endeavor to get some of the science right, and actress Jennifer Connelly in particular tried to make her astrobiologist character believable. So maybe I'll see it after all. At least on DVD.

UPDATE: The first reviews are in. DVD is looking like the good option.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/12
/review.day.earth.still/index.html

One small step toward fusion

Creating electricity by fusion reactors, while devilishly difficult, is viewed by some experts as the only long-term answer to providing sustainable "green" power to the Earth in sufficient quantity to run cities and industries. No one has yet built a fusion reactor producing more energy than it consumes. Within the most common design being pursued, a superheated plasma must be kept away from all contact with the sides of donut-shaped chamber - without creating energy-sapping turbulence within the plasma, and without using an enormous amount of power. Now two MIT scientists have demonstrated a potential solution using radio waves. The problem? It works, but they don't know how. Without understanding the theory involved, they can't prove that the method will scale up for use in commercial reactors.
COMMENT: Commercial fusion remains probably a couple of decades off, but every advance like this brings it a little closer. If President-elect Obama is serious about long-term energy independence, fusion research needs a boost. The initial costs are high and the rewards are years away, but the logical case for investing here is very strong.

How mammoth can a mammoth get?

This entertaining article by Loren Coleman introduces us to the Songua River Mammoth(Mammuthus sungari), a NE Asian species that appears to have been the largest proboscidean ever to walk the Earth. At 5.2m high and 9.1m long (tail tip to trunk tip), it weighed some 10 tons or more and must have been awe-inspiring to a hunter armed only with a spear. It still loses out for the title of "Largest Land Mammal Ever" to Paraceratherium (a.k.a. Baluchitherium or Indricotherium), which roamed some of the same territory, but it doesn't lose out by by much.

Space: The Commercial Frontier

Several companies are preparing to tap what they see as a promising market in suborbital rides to space. Blue Origin is the quietest of these, building a vehicle with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' investment money and spending almost nothing on tooting its own horn before it has an actual working spaceship. (Good for them). The company is, though, reaching out to offer suborbital microgravity rides for scientific projects. Blue Origin has invited contact from scientific and student organizations seeking space on projected Research and Education Missions (REM), which will be flown in addition to the passenger missions. Leonard David, whose excellent article collects what we know about this very private firm's plans, reports that REMs might be available as early as 2011.

Name your own bat

Many name-the-species sales have involved creatures 99% of the population doesn't care about, but Purdue University has jumped on board by offering the right to name seven new species of bats. The university hopes this will raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for research and conservation. For those with chiroptophobia, there are also two South American turtles up for grabs.

MicroSpace News: More on ORS satellite

Goodrich will be building the next (and first officially operational) satellite using the Operationally Responsive Space moniker for DoD. ORS Sat-1 will, in the not-very-helpful terminology offered by Goodrich's Tom Bergeron, "...provide valuable operational capability to commanders in the field and will utilize capabilities proven on Goodrich's portfolio of ISR solutions."

COMMENT: It will be interesting to see if this satellite earns the name ORS, or whether, in transitioning from R&D pathfinders to "operational" satellites, this becomes a more typical stretched-out, cost challenged, budget threatened program.

Big slip for Mars Polar Lander

NASA's flagship mission to Mars, the Mars Polar Lander, won't be fully tested and ready by the planned October 2009 launch date. That pushes it to the next window of opportunity, when Earth and Mars are in the optimal alignment for a mission. That comes in 2011. The slip will add further costs to a mission beset by a series of overruns and descopings.

Dinosaurs at the poles

How did dinosaurs, traditionally thought of as tropical or subtropical creatures, survive near the poles? After all, it was chilly up there (and down there) even in the Mesozoic. The annual mean temperature at the poles was about 41 F or 5 C - balmy compared to modern climates, but too cold for for what we used to think were basically cold-blooded animals.
One idea was that dinos living near the poles made long seasonal migrations, as many modern birds do. Fossil evidence, though, as well as a comparison to modern polar land animals, indicates that many species did not migrate, or at least did not migrate as far as we thought. As Phil Bell of the University of Alberta explains, "Many types of dinosaurs were surviving in polar latitudes at the time, and getting along quite fine. They were not physically able to remove themselves from the environment for a variety of reasons and had to adapt to the cold, dark winters just as the rest of us mammals do today." Bell and co-author Eric Snively have shown us all, once again, that we have a lot to learn about our favorite fossil creatures.

British Columbia's sasquatch hunters

This very skeptical but not unaffectionate portrait of sasquatch hunters in Canada's western province includes some good give-and-take between the believers and skeptics.

What if birds or reptiles had produced the human-level brains?

This is about the most interesting thread on any blog I've seen lately (Darren Naish's blog Tetrapod Zoology is always interesting, but this entry is really really interesting). What if mammals had not produced the top intelligent species on the planet (us)? What if mammalian evolution had gone wrong, or dinosaur evolution had more time to work with? Naish tracks this idea through its original concept (a bipedal dinosaur evolved from a brainy species called Troodon) through his own "avisapiens" and some concepts by other researchers on brainy descendants of known dinos or birds. Someone ought to collect all these and do a book on them.

Giant pterosaur discovered - in museum

A pterosaur with one of the coolest scientific names ever - Lacusovagus magnificens, "magnificent lake wanderer," has been described from a fossil found in Brazil but overlooked for years in a German museum. The species had a wingspan of five meters and is the largest known member of a clan of tootless flying reptiles called chaoyangopterids. It doesn't match up to the greatest of the flying reptiles - the mind-boggling Quetzalcoatlus northropi, with a span up to 12 meters by some estimates, and the similar-sized or perhaps even larger Hatzegopteryx thambema - but it's a major find nontheless. And, like I said, it's just plain cool.

Oldest-ever insect imprint found

A very clear imprint of a dragonfly-like insect, found on a rocky outcrop by a Tufts University geology student in Massachusetts, has been dated to approxmately 312 million years. It may be the oldest such imprint knwon to science.
Discoverer Richard Knecht explains, "It's not a dragonfly but picture a dragonfly-like body. We're looking at something related, maybe a mayfly. They have the same body plan." Tufts paleontologist Jake Brenner adds, "It's unusual to see a flying insect make such a deep impression in this muddy sediment. We don't have many good body fossils from this time period with these early flying insects. The level of detail is really unseen in continental deposits."

Cougar killed in Louisiana

Again, officially, there are no cougar populations east of the Mississippi, except for the Florida variety. At this rate, though, officials sure are keeping busy doing necropsies on bodies of cats that don't exist.

Journal of Air and Space Law now online

A release from my old friend Joanne Gabrynowicz at the U. of Mississippi School of Law indicates the Journal of Air and Space Law will be available online via university and law libraries with the proper account.


32 years of the world's most important writings on space law have just become more easily accessible. Today, volumes 1 through 31 of the Journal of Space Law, spanning from 1973-2005, was added to the HeinOnline Library.
The Journal had a number of on-line companies from which to choose. It chose HeinOnline, first and foremost, because its contents are more widely available to libraries around the world. Its subscription rates make Hein Online contents more accessible to libraries with modest budgets. Over the years, we have received comments from lawyers and students alike saying they could often access a HeinOnline account when they could not access some of Hein's larger, more expensive, competitors. Now, like the University of Mississippi School of Law Library, any library with a Hein subscription can make the Journal accessible.
After speaking to a number of law librarians, the Journal also learned that many of them prefer the Hein format that provides an image of each original page, in its original full-page format. This preserves the original page as an historical and legal record and also facilitates more accurate citations.
The National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law is now engaged in a project that will create a searchable, cumulative index for all of the volumes, back to 1973. When completed, the index will be available on the Center's website. In the meantime, searching on HeinOnline can be done by title or author name, as well as full-text searching of the collection or select periodicals.