Revisiting Air Force's flying saucer idea

Way back in the 1950s, the USAF looked at jet-powered saucers and initially thought they might work. Project 1794, though, was a complete fizzle: it produced nothing but a prototype called the AvroCar that was just an inefficient hovercraft.  This story is being trumpeted as news, as here, but in fact it's been known since the early 60s at least. All that is new is declassification of a specific document. The Air Force's idea never went anywhere for the same reasons no one (Nazis included) ever made a flying saucer work: it's a terrible shape to control in the atmosphere, offering no advantage over conventional aircraft.  While a saucer would work fine in space, where shape doesn't matter, that's no reason to build one.  An interesting sidelight, though, is that a round, nearly flat shape works nicely for aerobraking in the transition to planetary atmospheres. That's why Apollo capsules were such broad cones and the Mars orbiter Curiosity looked very much like a flying saucer to an observer on Mars.

SpaceX Dragon makes orbit despite losing engine

The video is pretty dramatic.

One reason behind SpaceX's Falcon 9 launcher's being designed with 9 engines was to allow "engine-out capability." (Another was to allows mass production of small engines for the cost advantages.)  This one is not just a shutdown, though - you can see substantial pieces of an engine bell (nozzle) flying off.  NASA will no doubt want some more analysis and assurance despite the success.  The other medium-lift rocket builders, Boeing and LockMart, have proven they can build superbly reliable rockets, although at very high prices. SpaceX is trying to prove it can build equally reliable rockets at much lower prices. 

SpaceX heads for ISS again

SpaceX, the upstart company that presents the first serious challenge in many years to the US medium/heavy launch giants (Boeing and Lockheed Martin), has launched its second Dragon capsule bound for the space station. The first Dragon mission to the ISS was almost perfect. If NASA's experiment in private contracting pans out, private firms will take over "routine" launch of people and cargo to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and NASA can concentrate on its planetary probes and (hopefully) astronaut missions beyond LEO.

And EIGHT new mammals from Peru

A monkey, a porcupine, and a collection of other fuzzies. 

The Yoda worm - new species

"Found someone you have" 

Also new: straight from Borneo

Want to see a spider that looks like it was invented to be englarged for a horror movie? That's just one of the striking creatures in this photographic collection of new discoveries.

Common ancestor of birds and mammals??!!?

There is no doubt birds descended from reptiles: we have good transitional fossils, a host of skeletal characteristics, and so on. Yet a few scientists have wondered: could we have it all wrong? Could some characteristics birds share with mammals (most notably the fully divided four-chambered heart) indicate the birds and mammals had a common ancestor?
As Dr. Darren Naish argues here in his marvelous Tetrapod Zoology blog, we certainly do not have it all wrong, but the idea of a bird-mammal clade (originally called Haematothermia by 19th-century naturalist Richard Owen, who seems to have originated the idea) isn't quite 100% dead.  There have been some modern papers published on it. As Naish notes, you have to pretty much ignore all the fossils to support this conclusion.  As I note, it does demonstrate that radical papers do get published in the peer-reviewed literature.
There's even a cool drawing here of what a bird-mammal ancestor might have looked like.

Meanwhile, in Sulawesi....

If you don't know where Sulawesi is, that's understandable, but zoologists have the island high on their "hot spot" list for discovery of new species. A recent expedition funded by the funded by the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, one of the few to visit the Mekongga mountains reserve since 1932, has turned up a new mammal - Margaretamys christinae, a rather cute rat with a white-tipped tail. The genus name makes it the fourth species in its group, and the species name - well, that's for the discoverer's girlfriend.  Other recent finds from this area include Megalara garuda, a really big, mean-looking wasp.  I'd pick the rat as a pet.

Book review: Pink Boots and a Machete

Pink Boots and a Machete
Mireya Mayor
National Geographic (2011)


This is a terrific book, whether you want to read about a great scientist or about great adventures. A top primatologist and discoverer of a new species of lemur, Mayor tells gritty stories of her aventures around the world, leavened with humor and self-reflection. (I wrote about her in my 2006 book Shadows of Existence, although I accidentally called her a Rhodes scholar instead of a Fulbright scholar. Oops.) Most of this book is taken up with field expeditions, and the strongest message is that finding and conserving wildlife in remote regions of the world is still hard. As in "very hard," as in, "you can die," which she almost did on more than one occasion. Radios and modern gear and even rescue helicopters can't get you out of everything. Mayor includes in her gear a little black dress (social skills can be very handy in remote villages) and on one occasion resorts to blatant sex appeal when there's no other way to get something done. I don't think that demeans or diminishes her at all: it's just something extra in her toolkit, so to speak, for accomplishing work that's very important. Mayor is someone I'd very much like to meet, and the kind of role model I hope my daughters will look up to. Her book is superb.

Deep Sea News

Great blog/news page.  Ever knew how mantas give birth, why seemingly simple current flows are complex and full of eddies, why bivalves are such tough survivors, that there are lots of ocean-themed songs on a Spotify playlist or that one of the contributors, Dr. Kim Martini (really) says in her bio,  “Quite simply, her goal in life is to throw expensive s**t into the ocean."  Come see the sea as never before.

New fish "hooks up" with mates

A newly discovered freshwater fish seemingly doesn't know how to take "no" for an answer.  It's equipped with - really - four barbed hooks on its genitals.  Gambusia quadruncus, the llanos mosquitofish, diverged from its closest relative about a million years ago, and it's been off by itself evolving its mating equipment. 

Hoax and Double-Hoax

Loren Coleman has a good column on Cryptomundo potining out an important consideration concerning claims a cryptozoological sighting, photo, or film is hoaxed. There are hoaxes, of course - I'm sick of blobby Sasquatch pictures and videos - but it's not automatic that the "whistleblower" is telling the truth.  Coleman's cases are the deathbed confessions of hoaxing the "Surgeon's Photograph" of the Loch Ness Monster and the Patterson-Gimlin film. There are others...

What's a kangaroo doing in New Hampshire?

In 2008, a kangaroo was captured in Wisconsin. Some years earlier, two cops were slightly injured trying to capture a kangaroo in Chicago. (A version of that sighting made it onto an episode of ER.) Now two skeptics - and I mean Skeptic with a capital S, as they were members of the Granite State Skeptics Society -  describe seeing what they jokingly called a chupacabra but what certainly looked like a kangaroo that hopped across the road in front of their car at night.  The ears were oddly short for a kangaroo, but otherwise it fits and nothing else I - or they - can think of does.  Unless it's a prop left over from a SyFy movie,  someone has lost a big marsupial in a place no big marsupial should be. 

An Air Force pilot trainer - for space!

The T-38 Talon is soldiering on in its fifth or sixth decade as the USAF's only supersonic trainer.  There was a time, though, when Northrop Grumman suggested it could be much more - a suborbital Mach 3.2 trainer capable of hitting 250,000 feet, where its control surfaces would be useless and student pilots would control it with hydrogen peroxide thrusters.  As often happened in the anything-is-possible 1960s, there were ideas for even more way-out versions.  Amazing. 

UPDATE: This one was so interesting I sent it to friends who were T-38 instructor pilots. Their responses:
Chas Ruth: "Would I want to fly it? Hell, yes! Do I think it would work? Probably not."
Elizabeth Knemeyer Ruth: "I'm not an engineer, so I don't know if they could make it work. But it would certainly be a blast to give it a try."

Awesome ISS and Earth reflected in astronaut's visor

Thanks, NASA

Four new bats join the mammals

Yes, we are still finding new manmals - a lot of them. Latest evidence - four odd-looking bats  All are members of the group called horseshoe bats, marked by weird-looking "leafy" noses. A single African species has turned out to be four. One clue: they echolocate on different frequencies.

A new kind of cloud?

Clouds have been around for billions of years. The modern classification system was completed in 1951.  Or was it? It seems absurd we haven't properly classified all the cloud types, but maybe.... A very strange type called the agitated wave cloud - or undulatus asperatus - has been proposed as a new "species" deserving addition to the cloud "zoo." This dramatic swirly/wavy formation wasn't even photographed officially until 2006.  See here for dramatic pictures

When my daughter was in third grade, she pointed out cumulus clouds to me and said, "I'm just telling you this because they probably didn't know it when you were in school." She may not have been entirely wrong.

Next big step in private space

SpaceX is about to make its first regular resupply run to the ISS, following the success of their trial run. This time, their Dragon capsule will carry a full load of supplies up and carry used equipment back down.  The date: October 7 (ONE DAY after my birthday - Elon, couldn't you speed it up a bit?)

SpaceX's press release:

OCTOBER 7 ANNOUNCED AS TARGET LAUNCH DATE FOR SPACE STATION MISSION


NASA and SpaceX have announced October 7, 2012 as the target launch date for SpaceX’s first resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is scheduled for 8:34 p.m. EDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida. October 8 is the backup date.

The launch represents the first of 12 SpaceX flights to the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract, and follows a successful demonstration mission in May when SpaceX became the first private company ever to attach to the ISS and return safely to Earth.

The SpaceX CRS-1 mission also represents restoration of American capability to deliver and return cargo to the ISS—a feat not achievable since the retirement of the space shuttle. SpaceX is also contracted to develop Dragon to send crew to the space station. SpaceX’s first manned flight is expected to take place in 2015.

The Ig Nobel prizes are out!

Ever wonder about the dynamics of coffee sloshing in a cup? About whether residual brain activity goes on in a dead fish? (Surprisingly, the answer is Yes.)  About how to shut up an annoying speaker who drones on forever? Well, the Ig Nobel prizes, given for scientific work that cannot or should not be repeated, have been handed out (by real Nobel winners, incidentally).  It's hard to top the dead-fish one, although for sheer uselessness the question of why the Eiffel Tower looks shorter if you lean to your left offered stiff competition.   Who says science has no sense of humor?

Zoological oddity: Thomas Helm's sea creature

In spring 1943, radio broadcaster, naturalist, and nature writer Thomas Helm was cruising with his wife in a small sailboat off Florida's Gulf Coast.  (Helm had been invalided out from the Navy after being severely wounded at Pearl Harbor).  What he says he saw very clearly was a beast so odd he couldn't even suggest an identity. Helm was thoroughly familiar with seals, sea lions, and mustelids like otters: indeed, short of a degreed biological scientist, you couldn't have had a much better witness.  A round head - like that of a tiger without visible ears - covered in chocolate brown fur and sitting atop a four-foot neck appeared in the water in front of him.. He had plenty of time for a good look, and altered course at one point to keep from coming too close (he originally saw it at 30-40 yeards, but does not say what his closest approach was.)  Helm was insistent this was no known pinniped (seal or sea lion) - among other things, it had a relatively flat face with eyes looking forward, not on the sides, and this is what reminded him of a cat. Cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans classified this as an example of his “Merhorse” type of sea serpent, although the head shape doesn't fit, while modern cryptozoologist Dale Drinnon writes it off as a normal pinniped.  A pinniped, though, seems wrong to me.  A seal or sea lion's head might give this appearance if the witnesses had had only a brief view straight on, but not when they had several minutes to watch it as they sailed by - they didn't see it from just one angle.  
Helm's description and drawing of the face remind me a bit more of a manatee more than a pinniped, but it seems an impossible error to describe a nearly-neckless manatee as showing four feet of neck of smaller diameter than the head.  There is no question this was a mammal - not only did it have fur, but definite whiskers.  Helm thought the head was about the size of a basketball.
Helm insisted in his book Monsters of the Sea that, prior to the incident, he gave no thought to "sea serpents" of any kind.  He asked local commercial fishermen if they'd seen anything like his animal, and they had not (though he noted almost all had their own tales to tell of odd sea creatures.)  Neither they nor scientists he approached could tell him anything useful.

Well, there it is - and there it rests. We have a solid witness (accompanied by another adult) and a description not only impossible to reconcile with a known animal but with any of the "sea monster" sightings I can think of in which the head was described.  Dr. Roy Mackal has suggested for some sea and lake monsters a kind of long-necked sirenian (a member of the group made up of the manatees and dugongs.)  IF such an animal exists - and the evidence is scant - then Helm's animal could reasonably be placed in that category.  As with so many cryptozoological sightings, this tale resides in a most unsatisfying limbo. It may be there forever.