X-37B spaceplane finishing up mission?

The Air Force isn't saying exactly what the X-37B unmanned spaceplane has been up to, but it's losing altitude and being guided back toward Earth for a landing between December 3 and December 6. The Air Force has pronounced itself very pleased with the project, which has kept the spaceplane in orbit since April 22 and made significant changes of orbit. A second X-37B is under construction for a launch in 2011.
COMMENT: It will be interesting to see if the AF and Boeing have mastered the art of unmanned Shuttle-type reentry and runway landing.

Arsenic and Old Life?

NASA plans a press conference to highlight a new paper on "weird life" and the possibilities arsenic-based life exists on other worlds. And maybe, just maybe, on Earth, although we wouldn't know since nobody's ever looked for it.

Well, I'll be - a two-trunked elephant

Seriously. Show in Africa in 2004, this critter would up, where else, in a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum. Reportedly the trunks are both functional, so it's like you or I having two noses. As Karl Shuker said, it can not only make a trunk call, but can reverse the charges.....

Quantum physics: even stranger than you think

Physicists are still trying to figure out "spooky action at a distance," in which particles seem to "know" what other particles are doing, whether an electromagnetic field exists even if it's totally shielded off from the particle, or whether the second slit in a double-slit experiment is open. A new theory is that there is not an inexplicable connection between the particles, but that time is running backwards as well as forwards. Confused? If you're not confused, you don't understand the situation. But there are practical as well as purely scientific applications of figuring it out.

If we find the right planet, how do we get there?

Scientists think they have found at least one exoplanet in what's called the "Goldilocks zone" - not too hot, not too cold, in other words at least plausibly tolerant to Earthlike life. This brief but interesting article brings up the problem of how we get there. Conventional rocket? 380,000 years. One possible solution, discussed here by Dana Andrews, might cut it to 40 years.
COMMENT: I worked on a NASA study once that looked at this. There are several ideas for near-lightspeed travel, but they require massive investments of time and money. Still, we should keep looking at them to lay the foundation future generations will build on.

What is the orang-pendek?

Danish zoologist Lars Thomas has been studying hairs collected last year when Sumatra's enigmatic primate, which looks a bit like a short, slight man covered in reddish hair, was last seen. According to Karl Shuker, his report is that the DNA collected was very close to human, but the hair structure was apelike. This is not quite as contradictory as it seems. Shuker points to the strikingly marked "king" cheetah, which is a normal cheetah by DNA but has hairs structured like those of an unrelated species, the leopard. Possible identities for the orang-pendek include an unknown population of orangutans well out of their known range (this would require considerable observer error in the sighting reports, but such human error is hardly unknown), an ape related to the siamang/gibbon line, or some early offshoot from the human line, perhaps related to the Flores "hobbits."
COMMENT: My question was whether the mixed result could indicate it was ape hair accidentally contaminated by humans, but Shuker reports Thomas doesn't think that could have happened. The orang-pendek is very respectable as cryptozoological animals go, with experts keeping an open mind and good witnesses like British conservationist Debbie Martyr describing it in the field. What this result means is that we have not solved the mystery yet.
UPDATE: Lars Thomas has responded that the DNA came from the inside of the sample hairs, where contamination was not possible.

Christmas in orbit for Discovery?

The next launch window for sending the shuttle Discovery to the ISS opens December 17, but it's not clear whether the spacecraft would be ready that date. A mission over Christmas is one possibility, but it's turning out to be harder than expected to find the cause of cracks in the intertank structure on the shuttle's External Tank. Fixing the cracks (not difficult) is no good if they might recur and you don't know why. According to NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier,"We would have liked to have found a most probable cause by now. This is turning out to be a little more complicated from an analysis standpoint....We'll let the data drive where we're heading."

Save the Tiger

At a meeting in St. Peterburg, Russia, actor Leonardo DiCaprio met with President Putin and donated $1 million to the World Wildlife Fund to protect tiger habit and support anti-poaching activities. Earlier this year, he spearheaded a $20M fund drive. Putin has taken on a personal (if showy) commitment to the tiger, going out himself to tranquilize one for a research program. The Siberian (or Amur) tiger is the only tiger subspecies whose wild population is increasing, although it is far from out of danger.
COMMENT: I sometimes get annoyed when celebrities are ostentatious about their giving, although the publicity they can bring to a cause is also a good thing. So I'll applaud Leonard on this one. The cause needs all the help it can get. Despite heroic actions of wildlife officials and rangers, the wild tiger population is in free-fall, down to about three thousand animals in all the subspecies put together. (Maybe species: some mammologist maintain the Sumatran is a distinct species, although it can mate with other types.) Tiger habitat has to be conserved and patrolled, and people living on its edges need economic support so they are not forced into poaching. That takes money.

ISS passing in front of the Moon

The photographs coming out of the space program still inspire wonder. Or they should.

Scientists amazed at cometary "snowstorm"

The EPOXI spacecraft's close pass by comet Hartley 2 made jaws drop at NASA. Jets of carbon dioxide spewing from the ends of the comet's nucleus envelop it in a continuous envelope of frozen particles, some up to basketball sized. One investigator compared it to seeing a comet in a snowglobe. Indeed, there are two phenomena going on, as EPOXI deputy principal Jessica Sunshine (am I sexist to say that's a wonderful name for a scientist exploring the universe?) explained: "The carbon dioxide jets blast out water ice from specific locations in the rough areas resulting in a cloud of ice and snow. Underneath the smooth middle area, water ice turns into water vapor that flows through the porous material, with the result that close to the comet in this area we see a lot of water vapor."
COMMENT: The more we explore, the more there is to wonder at. I understand other needs, but I cannot understand the argument that spending one half of one percent of our national budget on probing the universe isn't worth it.

The Great Monkey Escape

Some 80 monkeys inhabit an enclosed patch of forest on the grounds of Kyoto University's primate research Center. Faced with an electric fence more than 5 meters high, one group of monkeys pulled off an escape by using springy tree beanches to catapult themselves over it! However, the monkeys didn't know where to go once outside: they hung around, and researchers armed with peanuts were able to lure them back in.

Tasmanian tiger video? Hmmm, probably not

This 2009 video form Australia is making the rounds, attached to the interesting question of whether it might be a surviving thylacine (or Tasmanian tiger). When I saw it, I wrote: "Interesting, clearly not a dog from the tail, possibly a big fox," although the color seemed a little light for a fox (it was taken from too great a distance to see if there were any stripes). Expert opinion is tending toward a fox, but it's raised the question of whether the world's largest modern marsupial predator might still be alive. My read: thylacines absolutely persisted after the official extinction date of 1936, but how long? I think, based on sightings, a few hung on in Tasmania into the 1980s, maybe the 1990s. It is not impossible some survive today, either on Tasmania or from an unrecorded introduction to the Australian mainland, but I can't work up any real hope.

A tiny bat may not be there anymore

Discovery of a new mammal species is always a big deal. That's true even for this tiny bat from Ecuador, which weighs a mere 3.5 grams. The problem: it was found as a tagged specimen in the collection of the Río Palenque Scientific Center (RPSC), and no one knows if live ones still exist anywhere.

Wild photos: croc grabs elephant

This wildlife encounter was one never before recorded on film. A crocodile (who you might say had eyes bigger than his stomach) grabbed an adult elephant by the trunk. The elephant reared back, pulling the croc into the air and then onto the bank. The elephant shook off the reptile, and everyone split the scene.

A glowing deep-sea squid

A new species of squid, 70 cm long and studded with light-producing organs, has turned up in the southern Indian Ocean. A six-week IUCN-sponsored expedition to the region trapped or observed some 70 species of squid, or one-fifth of the known species, which is really something. It's also thought there are more new species among the expedition's haul.

Three new amphibians hop into view

From western Columbia come the newest amphibians known to science. An effort to find possible extinct frogs and toads, launched by Conservation International, instead turned up the new species. Currently awaiting formal description are a new type of "rocket frog" (I don't know the origin of the term, member of a group where the parents carry newly hatched tadpoles to water on their backs: a beaked toad only 2cm long, which lays eggs on the forest floor which develop directly into mini-toads; and toad with striking red eyes. Herpetologists haven't figured out the last one's genus yet: it may require erection of a new one.

Will NASA make Commercial Crew impossible?

NASA supports (or has been told to support) the idea of letting commercial vehicles carry crew members to the ISS. Not surprisingly, there are different levels of support for this radical idea within the agency.
NASA, very properly, wants to impose standards for "man-rated" launch vehicles, much as the FAA certifies airliners. This is not new for NASA: it did the same thing for the Redstone, Atlas, and Titan II boosters in the 60s when rockets developed outside NASA were adapted to carry astronauts. Former Shuttle program head Wayne Hale, though, thinks NASA's new proposed standards are so burdensome no one may be able to meet them. Hale writes:
"The document runs a mind-numbing 260 pages of densely spaced requirements. Most disappointing, on pages 7 to 11 is a table of 74 additional requirements documents which must be followed, in whole or in part. Taken all together, there are thousands of requirement statements referenced in this document." The questions raised by Hale and the commenters on his blog is whether NASA is setting the bar so high that its standard cannot be met.
COMMENT: It's hard to decide whether this apparent overregulation hides malicious intent or just reflects an abundance of caution in an agency where all the people who have done this job before have retired. Either way, NASA needs to, and presumably will, take comments from industry and may do some modifying to get the job done without making the job impossible

T. rex: Does my tail look fat?

It's been some years now that paleontologists have been volleying back and forth the idea that Tyrannosaurus rex, the biggest (ok, there are a couple other dino-predators in the same size range), meanest-looking carnivore ever to stomp the earth, was primarily a scavenger. Among the points cited are the small forelimbs and analyses indicating it wasn't fast enough to chase prey.
One researcher at the University of Alberta says this latter point isn't correct. He looked at the tail structure of T. rex vs. modern analogues like the komodo dragon and concluded the dino's tail was much more muscular than people had been assuming. The muscles at the base of the tail is a clue to how much muscle there was in the thighs, and together they can give us an idea how fast the animal moved. The answer: fast enough to run prey down, and faster than needed for a scavenger.
COMMENT: All predators will scavenge whenever the opportunity arises, but I never liked the arguments that T. rex did so almost exclusively. The animal is just over-equipped, ridiculously big and well-armed, for the job.

New lizard species: available for lunch and dinner

Discoveries of new species are made in many ways: in the field, among hunters' trophies, in museums. Charles Darwin once shot a bird and ate most of it before it dawned on him he didn't recognize its species. A weasel once dropped a new South American rodent at Dr. Louise Emmons' feet. Kathryn Fuller of the World Wildlife Fund once discovered a new species of any when it walked out of a potted plant on her desk and asked visiting entomologist E.O. Wilson to take a look. The latest fluke discovery comes from a Vietnamese restaurant, where a lizard that was well known locally but unknown to science was being served up as a blue plate special.

The science of Godzilla

I've mentioned this before, but it's too much fun not to return to. Dr. Darren Naish has updated his exploration, abetted by two other paleontologists, of the scientific problems with the greatest of the giant monsters. One of the fun points is that, while the American film Godzilla looks much more reasonable as a real animal, the titanic (impossible, really) demands of gravity on any such beast make the Japanese type, with his tree-trunk legs, at least a little more practical. The American version does win a point for eschewing the atomic bad breath.
COMMENT: This stuff is endlessly fascinating to me, even if we know none of the giant creatures would work. If Godzilla is impractical, we can certainly forget about the spindly yet even bigger Cloverfield monster. Peter Jackson's King Kong looked marvelous, as Jackson took a gorilla and meticulously scaled him up by a factor of 4 (some sources say 4.4) but Kong, too, would suffer from impossible weight-bearing demands on his skeleton, among other things.
But in the end, who cares? Just enjoy.