Video of an "alien" squid

The squid family Magnapinna (housing one genus with four known species, counting one that has been observed but not yet named) is little-known and is often compared to creatures from some other planet. With huge fins and ten identical spindly tentacles dangling from "elbows," these squid certainly look like nothing else on Earth. Here we have a video, provided by Shell Oil, of one of the animals in the Gulf of Mexico. That this family, with individuals known to range up to 7m in overall length, went undiscovered until just ten years ago is a testament to how much we still have to learn about the inhabitants of the oceans.

Success at the ISS

The most recent space shuttle mission is forever going to be known for the lost tool bag. The bag can be spotted from Earth and has its own websites. Really. See http://www.n2yo.com/?s=33442 as just one example.
That's a shame, because the crew of the Endeavour accomplished a huge amount of work, along with the ISS astronauts, to make the station fit to expand from three crewmembers to six. The ISS now has a repaired solar-wing joint, an advanced water recycling system, its first refrigerator, and a second toilet to go with two new habitation areas. Congratulations to all involved.

Water spouting from a Saturnian moon?

Water is the Holy Grail of space exploration: wherever we find, it, there is at least some possibility of life. As we chase underground deposits on Mars, though, another body is appearntly spouting huge geysers of the precious compund into space. Saturn's strange Enceladus is jetting masses of dust and gas - and, some researchers now argue, liquid water.
COMMENT: Out seemingly familiar solar system is turning out to be like the universe at large - not just stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

Rare giant turtle saved from being on menu

In Dong Mo Lake (also known as Ho Hoan Kiem) near Hanoi, Vietnam, dwells a huge freshwater turtle. It was once thought to be a legend. When its exstence was confirmed, some scientists suggested it represented a new species. That turned out not to be so, but close enough: it was a Swinhoe's soft-shelled turtle (rafetus swinhoei), a member of the most endangered reptile clan on Earth. There may be only four such turtles in the world, and their future is bleak.
It almost got bleaker when recent floods washed the Hanoi turtle out of its lake. Conservationists searched frantically for two weeks until a fisherman announced he had the 70-kg reptile and was effectively holding it for ransom. Nguyen Van Toan claimed he already had a big offer from a restaurant. He was, however, mollified by a reward of about $200 and some new fishing nets. The lonely ruler of the lake is back where he belongs.

The end of the cave bears

Often, when a carnivorous species dies out, one contributor is its specialized diet. That seems to have happened in reverse with Europe's huge cave bear, which was largely vegetarian. Martina Pacher of the University of Vienna and her colleague Anthony J. Stuart of the Natural History Museum, theorize that climate change about 27,800 years B.P. reduced the available vegetation and caused the 1,000-kg bears (Ursus spelaeus) to slide toward extinction, followed by the mammoth and other species. Europe's race of brown bears (Ursus arctos), true omnivores, made it through all right.

NASA, money, and Mars

Keith Cowing has a somewhat dispiriting but important collection of notes and sources here on NASA's chronic inability to project costs adequately and the way the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) seems to be the source to pay for other directorates' sins as well as its own (of which it has many). A possible two-year slip in the Mars Polar Lander mission seems the next likely domino to fall. Cowing puts it more bluntly, calling the cuts and postponements to science missions "the slaughter of the innocents" and noting that "Eventually, you run out of innocents to slaughter." He links to an op-ed by former NASA SMD Associate Administrator Alan Stern arguing that the agency has gotten used to preparing unrealistically low cost estimates to get missions approved with the assumption they'll be bailed out later (which does not always happen). Stern admits to being a culprit at times. It's not a problem unique to NASA - see virtually every report on DoD procurement.

Pygmy tarsier rediscovered

A tiny, adorable primate, missing for decades and often considered extinct, has been found by an American expedition to its historic range in Indonesia. Texas A&M University anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen notched a kind of scientific first by becoming the only person ever known to be bitten by the mouse-sized species.

Eastern cougars on the prowl

Officially, no population of cougars, pumas, etc. exists in the Eastern U.S., except for the handful of cats hanging on in Florida. That position, though, is getting harder to defend, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is taking another look. Two new examples, as posted at the handy news site Cryptomundo:

A cougar in New York, with an unmistakable photo (although it's not clear the photo comes out of the same event as the sightings in the news article quoted):
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/panther-pic-ny/

A cougar killed near the state line between Georgia and Alabama:
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/ga-cat-killed/

It's often hard to be definitive about whether a given cat has spent time in captivity, even when you have the body. It's impossible when all you have is a photo. Either way, I think the evidence keeps mounting that a few cats hung on in the East, probably supplemented by released/escaped captive animals of Western origin, and the explosion of the deer population is helping this scattered part-hybrid, part-native population to slowly rebuild its numbers. That means the reports will keep getting more numerous and more solid until the government scientists start agreeing with the cryptozoologists.

New dolphin from Australia

In another example of how what scientists find is often quite different from what they look for, Dr. Luciana Möller of Australia's Macquarie was trying to unravel the relationships of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) from Australian coastal waters. The DNA, though, diverged more than she expected: so much that dolphins from southern Australia should should be considered a new species, even if they look very much like their cousins around Australia and around the world (the bottlenose dolphin gets around).
COMMENT: This is important stuff, but it raises anew the question of what degree of difference, and/or what specific differences, are adequate to prove that populations are separate (non-breeding) species. I asked two scientists of my acquaintance that question, and both Ph.D.'s threw up their hands.

Decoding mammoth DNA

The always-readable Nichols Wade had a good article in the NYT earlier this week on how we've taken one small step toward possible mammoth cloning - and how the debate about whether cloning will ever be practical continues unabated. "A large fraction" of the extinct pachyderm's DNA has been recovered from fragmented specimens using new machines and techniques. One of the men announcing this advance, Penn State University's Stephan C. Schuster, estimates he could recover the entire genome for another $2M and clone a mammoth for $10M.

A new (albeit extinct) penguin species

What Sanne Boessenkool of the University of Otago in New Zealand wanted to do was understand the history of the rare yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes). What she found when analyzing old bones was that some of them didn't come from New Zealand's only known penguin. Instead, they belonged to a species that went extinct in historical times. It seemed the species, now named Megadyptes waitaha, was the dominant form of New Zealand penguin until the Polynesians showed up around the 13th century. The larger M. waitaha was eaten out of existence, and the yellow-eyed penguins settled into their niche.

LIFE photo archives on line / space trampolining

LIFE magazine has teamed up with Google to put into a free online archive thousands of photographs, dated from the 1860s to the present. Not surprisingly, there are some great space photographs in the collection. Here's one from a 1960s experiment I never heard of: an athlete bouncing from a trampoline while wearing a space suit to help understand the way astronauts move in microgravity.

Exploration via rubber duckie

Scientists studying glaciers in Greenland had a problem. Meltwater often ran into channels within or under the glacier, and they didn't know where it came out, an important data point in understanding the effects of increased melting on the Greenland ice cap as a whole. There was no budget for anything like miniature robotic vehicles, which likely would not have survived anyway. The solution? Dump 90 $2 toy rubber ducks into the water. The ducks have vanished into/under the glacier, and Dr. Alberto Behar and his colleagues are waiting for someone to find them. The ducks may travel 30 miles to open water, or they may be stuck or diverted along the way. It's data either way, and this episode is a great example of human ingenuity at work.

UPDATE: As of December 24, no ducks have been recovered. This is disappointing, but they may yet surface, and even if they don't. showing there is no passage under the ice to the bay is still important information.

Spectacular meteor (story w/video)

This celestial visitor lit up hte skies over Western Canada in an awesome display that was fortunately captured on video. The space rock, estimated at up to 10 tons and the size of a desk (iron meteorites are really dense), did not hit the ground intact but shattered into hundreds of pieces at low altitude.

Glaciers on the Red Planet

Planetary scientists report Mars may have more water ice than anyone thought, locked in glaciers buried beneath the surface. The glaciers may have been frozen for 200 million years and may have as much water as the Great Lakes of North America. The find, made using ground-penetrating radar from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, may be a major boost for future human exploration. We've known Mars has ice beneath its soil, but the glaciers offer the possibility of tapping a huge store in one location rather than having to process large amounts of the Martian terrain for thinly spread ice.

Found: The grave of Copernicus

The great astronomer Copernicus accurately located the Sun and Earth in the solar system, but locating his grave has been a challenge. It's known he was buried in a Roman Catholic cathedral in Frombork, Poland, but the grave wasn't marked. Now a Polish archaeologist reports that remains disinterred in 2005 have been matched to Copernicus' portraits and other information, including a DNA from a hair sample that likely belonged to him. The skull has been used to build up a computer-generated portrait (see title link) of what the eminent scientist looked like at the time of his death.
COMMENT: OK, we found him. The article does not say what the plan is, but I hope he will be reburied soon with appropriate honor. I've never liked the idea of relics of the dead being displayed or stored. It's not about the deceased so much as it is about human dignity in general. It's legitimate to do tests, such as X-raying mummies or taking DNA from Kennewick Man, for valid scientific purposes, but the remains should then be re-interred, if at all possible, with respect for the culture the person belonged to.

Shuttle success at the ISS

The STS-126 mission to the ISS is off to a very promising start. It's an ambitious mission: 15 days, four EVAs, and several major hardware additions to the space station. After a Friday launch that included a little concern about debris (the Shuttle, fortunately, shows no sign of meaningful damage), the Endeavour is docked at the ISS and has begun transferring everything from a cargo modules to a $250M water recycling system to a better exercise machine. It's all part of getting the ISS ready for a six-person crew rather than the current complement of three.

Why Nessie matters

This article by Brian Morton is unnecessarily harsh on Nessie and her believers, but it it makes an interesting point: what does the famous and elusive inhabitant of the loch mean to Scotland and to all of us? To Morton, "The curious thing about Loch Ness studies is that all the debunking in the world doesn't seem to make a dent on the phenomenon." Nessie represents an ancient past and a modern mystery. He wonders if Scots cling to the legend of the loch because they no longer have any other common identity. It's a question that Americans have asked about sasquatch and Japanese about the Honshu wolf.

First Extrasolar planets imaged from Earth

One distant star has three planets, another at least one. Not news perhaps, we've detected extrasolar planets before. But now we humans have out first-ever direct visual images of worlds far beyond out own. Two teams - one using the Hubble Space Telescope, the other a pair of telescopes in Hawaii - have given us these historic images.
The Hubble image shows the star Fomalhaut and a planet three times larger than Jupiter. The ground-based image showsthree much larger planets circling a star called HR 8799. (Don't despair if what you seek are "Class M" planets like ours: it's only logical that the first exoplanets we see will be the biggest ones. There may be a host of smaller ones around these same stars, waiting for our tools to grow sharper.)

MicroSpace News: Cubesat Launch Opportunity

Passing on this release for all you CubeSat builders out there:

>The Space Flight Laboratory (SFL) at the University of Toronto Institute
>for Aerospace Studies would like to formally announce a launch opportunity
>in July 2009. This opportunity will be part of the Nanosatellite Launch
>Service 6 (NLS-6). NLS-6 will include one 7 kg spacecraft from SFL.
>
>Currently there is sufficient mass margin available to accommodate
>additional spacecraft, as follows:
>- Two Single Cubesats
> -- OR --
>- One Triple Cubesat
>We would like to open this launch opportunity and invite all interested
>parties to consider joining us as Launch Partner.
>
>We expect to finalize the Launch Services Agreement before the end of
>November 2008. We are currently looking at July 1, 2009 as the spacecraft
>delivery date to the launch site.

Contact:

> Mr. Freddy Pranajaya
> Manager, Advanced Systems Group
> 416-667-7700 or 416-667-7890
>