The newest bird debuts in China

The bird is the potato-sized Nonggang babbler, from China's southern region of Nonggang. Birdlife International announced the dark brown bird, first spotted in 2005 and now formally described, has a known wild population of only about 100, making it an immediate candidate for "endangered" status.

Space law documents free on line

A tip of the astronaut helmet to Prof. Joanne Gabrynowicz and company for putting these online:

The National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law is pleased to make available, without charge, Selected Space Law Documents: 2008. It is a compilation of space law documents from the year 2008 that were gathered primarily from postings placed on Res Communis from 1 January through 31 December 2008. The postings are supplemented with materials from other sources that were published in 2008 but which were published too late to be posted as a blog entry in a timely manner. The compilation is a special supplement to the Journal of Space Law, the world's oldest law review dedicated to space law. The Journal of Space Law, beginning with the first volume, is available on line through HeinOnLine.

Space law is sure to get discussed more in the coming years, with the Obama administration's emphasis on international cooperation. The President's proposal to "ban space weapons" needs a lot of fleshing out. How do you decide what is a space weapon? Any satellite with maneuvering or station-keeping ability can be maneuvered to collide with another satellite nearby. Even if you ban only dedicated space weapons, how do you enforce it? The honor system? No nation is going to allow foreign nationals to pre-inspect all its space payloads, and the use of on-orbit inspection is difficult, not just financially, but because the inspection satellites might be classified as - you guessed it - space weapons.

As usual, opinions are strictly those of the author as a private citizen. Said author wishes the President good luck in finding a system that actually works.

Book Review: Wild Blue (5 stars)

Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal
by Dan Bortolotti
Thomas Dunne Books, 2008

Wild Blue is simply a great book in every way. It introduces us to a mammal we know surprisingly little about, despite said mammal's status as the largest creature ever to live on Earth. The author is outstanding at explaining cetacean biology, scientific principles, technology, and so on without ever losing his sense of wonder. He also introduces us to the key figures in blue whale research and lets us know what motivates them.
Bortolotti tackles the always-present question: how big do they get? While 33m and up has been claimed, he reports that about 30m is the longest validated measurement, with the largest whales approaching 182 metric tons. He also looks into taxonomy (the once-controversial pygmy blue whale has largely been accepted as a subspecies, but there's plenty of debate about how many subspecies there are, what populations live where (and whether they intermix), etc.
Wild Blue is scientifically exacting yet always accessible to the nonspecialist reader like myself. That's a very difficult tightrope for any author to walk, and Bortolotti never loses his balance. This will stand for a long time as the definitive work on its subject.

In Memorium

This is a week for remembering.
We lost a great author, John Updike.
We lost a great man: my father-in-law, George Kanter, age 83. George was a big supporter of my space and other writing endeavors. He was a Marine, wounded in the invasion of Saipan, a polymer chemist with Rohm & Haas, a husband, a father. He led a full life, always looking forward, traveling for his company around the world, earning publication for his photographs of the Great Wall of China and the Sydney Opera House. Sometimes, though, even a full life is much too short.

And this is NASA's week to remember.

"Don't waste too much time mourning the men who died. Rather thank God that such men lived." - General George S. Patton

I repost here a well-phrased press release from the Director, Johnson Space Center:

A MESSAGE FROM THE CENTER DIRECTOR

At 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 29, we will pause to remember the crews of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia. I would like to invite all employees to the Astronaut Memorial Grove to observe this moment of silence in honor of their commitment to NASA's space exploration programs and their bravery. These astronauts and their families will always be a part of NASA's family and our Day of Remembrance will commemorate their collective contributions.

-Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967): Astronauts Roger B. Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Edward H. White, Jr.

-Challenger (January 28, 1986): Astronauts Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and S. Christa McAuliffe.

-Columbia (February 1, 2003): Astronauts Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Throughout the day, please feel free to visit the Memorial Grove to celebrate the lives of these great explorers who served their country well.

And since we're still at it...

China's Xinhua news agency reports that expeditions since 2005 have netted 14 new species of plant and animal from Yinggeling Nature Reserve in Hainan Province.
COMMENT: I'll stop with the blizzard of new species posts until a really good one comes along, but I think it important to make this point every once in a while. We don't know all the other creatures on this planet (never mind the plants). We may not know 10 percent of them.

New species: how do you name them?

Peter Etnoyer's article in Deep-Sea News goes into the question of how scientists go about naming something new. I can't improve on his words (although I've edited here for brevity):

"The first option is to name the species after a characteristic. Grandis for big, elongata for long, etc. But this can get boring. There are way too many grandis in the world already. The second approach is to name the animal after a geographic region, hence pacifica, or boat or an expedition, hence Alvinocaris and Sibogagorgia. The third approach is partimonial, to name the species after a colleague, a donor, a girlfriend, or even an enemy (if its particuarly small or ugly)."

Dr. Jon McCosker (a famed shark expert) once wrote of a kind of tongue-in-cheek feud on this last point, where he he named an eel after an old professor and some other scientists named ugly critters mccoskeri.

New species just keep coming

A sea squirt that looks like a transparent funnel when grabbing prey is just one of the oddities from a US-Australian study of the sea off the island of Tasmania. No fewer than 274 new species came out of the expedition into a steep dropoff known as the Tasmanian Fracture Zone.

Miles O'Brien on space exploration

O'Brien, a trusted aerospace reporter lost when CNN stupidly and irresponsibly cut entire units of newsgathering expertise, here weighs in on our failure to follow up Apollo. The worst thing, he notes, was not just that we failed to keep exploring and building on the Apollo achievements, but that we never tried.

Lovely new fish swims into science's view

From Sri Lanka's Onlanka News comes this photo of one of the world's newest vertebrates - Puntius kelumi, a freshwater fish with golden scales and delicate fins. The genus, Puntius, is known from several species in the Southeast Asian/Indian region.

COMMENT: One small fish may not be a huge matter to science, but I thought this was worth blogging on as a reminder that not all the significant work done in animal discovery comes out of world-famous labs or universities and equally famous journals. Vertebrates not charismatic enough to make it onto CNN are being described all the time, and in surprising numbers.

Of course, the Web is a huge help to spreading news of such discoveries. Here's one lesser-known site collecting and exchanging information on new fish:
http://www.petfrd.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22067

Here's another good example: a collection of all the new species described in just one order (the catfishes, or Siluriformes) in one year (2004). It's part of the global All Catfish Species Inventory project.
http://silurus.acnatsci.org

An armored, rock-climbing catfish

That's what has turned up in Venezuela, The new species, dubbed Lithogenes wahari, is taxonomically important as well as just plain weird. It uses its sucker-like mouth and a highly mobile pelvic fin to climb. It combines features found in two known families, the Loricariidae (armored catfishes) and Astroblepidae (climbing catfishes) and may come from a lineage ancestral to both.

NASA Administrator back to "TBD"

Space News apparently got this one wrong. Johnathan Scott Gration was not the choice for NASA Administrator - just a trial balloon that has been shot down. There doesn't seem to be any sort of consensus on who will be nominated.
NOTE to President Obama: if you can't find anyone else, I could be persuaded....

Dedicated amateur discovers new mammal

I love stories like this. The world's newest mammal - a civet from Sri Lanka - was discovered by a banker named Channa Rajapaksa, who was fascinated by civets and spent years pursuing them in the field. The first specimen of Paradoxurus stenocephalus walked into a live-trap Channa was using to study the habits and distribution of known species. Channa's research was reviewed and put into context by Colin Groves of the Australian National University and Kelum Manemandra-arachchi of the Wildlife Heritage Trust. The Linnean Society of London's Zoological Journal published their joint paper.

Japan's giant cephalopod story

It's useful to remember that cryptozoology is not just an interest (or passion) in the United States. Brent Swancer, an American living in Japan, files occasional reports with Cryptomundo on Japanese cryptids. This example concerns Akkorokamui, a creature one might think was invented for a Godzilla movie, except it's actually an old tradition among Japan's indigenous Ainu. A bright red cephalopod alleged to reach up to 110 meters in size, the legendary creature makes its home in Funka Bay on the island of Hokkaido. Is this story an exaggerated version of the North Pacific Giant Octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini), or something more?
COMMENT: We're not going to find a cephalopod 110m across. It would have trouble gathering enough food as well as controlling its tentacles (given the limited speed of nerve impulses). Still, given that giant squid reach at least 18m, an octopus larger than known species is hardly impossible.

Book: Chasing Science in the Sea

Author Ellen Prager is Chief Scientist for the only operating underwater scientific habitat in the world. That for me was the most surprising fact in the whole book, considering there were dozens of such habitats in the 1960s.
Prager recounts her own adventures and explains the importance of various branches of marine science. She is not a transcendent nature writer like Sy Montgomery, but her enthusiasm comes across well. Page 85 mentions the observation of a yet-unidentified 2m-long squid. A small but surprising error is her claim that we have no submersible vehicle today, manned or unmanned, that can reach the depths Piccard and Walsh pioneered in 1960, but on the very next page she mentions Japan's Kaiko, which does exactly that. Prager repeatedly returns to the need for scientists to gather data in the field and the importance of the scientific method. This slender volume (151 pages of text) is a useful addition to its genre that hopefully will inspire some of the marine scientists of the future.

UPDATE: Dr. Prager wrote in to correct me on the supposed error, reminding me the original Kaiko was lost and the replacement ROV is limited to depths of 7,000m. In 1995, the original Kaiko dove to 10,911m in the Mariana Trench. This is approximately equal to the record established by Piccard and Walsh in their bathyscaph Trieste, with some uncertainty due to improper calibration of the Trieste's instrumentation. Richard Ellis' Deep Atlantic (Knopf, 1996) is one good source for an account of the two vehicles' dives.

Methane on Mars - what does it mean?

The short answer: Mars is either geologically active or biologically active. The latter would be more startling, of course, but the planetary scientists, the first would matter a lot, too.
Scientists inside and outside NASA have spent five years examining the sometimes-fragmentary evidence from spacecraft and telescopes and building the case for methane emissions from the surface of Mars.
As this article in Science puts it, "...Methane-generating bacteria might be living off hydrogen produced by rock...Or, purely inorganic reactions between water and rock rich in the mineral olivine could do it."

Wildlife tracking goes high-tech

How do you follow animals, as individuals or groups, in the wild? How can we get the precise data we need for conservation, such as knowing how many African penguins are meandering around a critical piece of habitat?
This article by a magazine for project managers shows how teams charged with finding out this sort of thing are bringing the newest technology to bear. Penguins are enumerated by computerized cameras that automatically distinguish individuals by the patterns of black spots on their breasts. Rare Arabian leopards are fitted with tiny "black boxes" that monitor their movements. And a network of underwater bioacoustic sensors - developed by students at Cornell University - is tracking the numbers and types of whales swimming off New York.
All very cool, and, potentially, very important.

THANKS TO Kris Winkler for this item.

New NASA Administrator a surprise pick

Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration is, according to Space News, President-elect Obama's choice as NASA Administrator.
Gration is a former fighter pilot who held a variety of command positions, but never had a space assignment in the military or NASA. (He did spend one year, when he was a White House Fellow, working for NASA official Hans Mark.) He has been an advisor to the Obama campaign. He flew combat missions over Iraq and among other jobs was once Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs, Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Headquarters U.S. Air Force.

COMMENT: Hmmm. No real space experience, but a lot of leadership experience and accomplishments. It's difficult to predict how he'll do. Here's hoping he does well.

Not-quite-life created in lab

Life as we know it, even simple life, requires RNA and DNA to "run" an organism. Scientists have never succeeded in getting any form of these molecules to replicate or evolve.
They have now.
Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., created RNA molecules that replicate, mutate, and compete, with the "fittest" molecules crowding out those less well equipped. Gerald Joyce and Tracey Lincoln are insistent that they have not created life, but they have created matter that "has some life-like properties, and that was extremely interesting." Self-replicating RNA molecules are thought to have been predecessors to DNA.

COMMENT: This does not mean we are on the verge of creating living matter from nonliving matter - DNA is a huge step from RNA. It does move us closer to that possibility, as well as giving us a look back in time billions of years to the "primordial soup" (whatever and wherever that really was.) It does make sense that, as with human cloning, we should get some regulations in place (an international agreement, preferably) on what limits we as a species place on our ever-expanding power to create.

Happy Birthday, Sergei Korolev

Today is the Chief Designer's 102d birthday. Korolev was a talented engineer, an extremely talented manager, and a man of indomitable will. An American space program analogy might be that he was that he was Wernher von Braun and Bruce Medaris (or von Braun and James Fletcher) in one man. The Space Age would have unfolded very differently without him.

MicrospaceNews: CubeSats are go

Cubesats, those handy 1-kg buses invented by by Bob Higgs at Stanford, are not just revolutionizing space opportunities for American educational institutions. This article reports on the Second European CubeSat Workshop, planned for his Second European CubeSat Workshop will take place in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, beginning January 20, 2009. The ESA Education Office is the sponsor. Nine CubeSats have already been manifested on the first flight of ESA's small Vega orbital launcher, scheduled for November 2009.