Monkeys vs Flying Squirrel!

Japanese macaques were filmed hanging out, doing whatever monkeys do - until a flying squirrel glided overhead. Then they went, well, bananas, screeching in alarm and pursuing the squirrel like it was a deadly enemy. Researchers speculate the monkeys mistook the squirrel for a predatory bird, but another theory is that the males used the occasion to show off to females how alert and brave they were. In other words, they acted more or less like human males when a female is spooked by a harmless rodent or snake. Guys to the rescue!

An inspiring NASA video

In 30 seconds, this video reminds us of why we explore. Too bad that's all forgotten in fights over jobs and politics. But watch it anyway,

Discovery of old ship means much to Canada

Canadian searchers have discovered the wreck of HMS Investigator, a three-masted 400-ton vessel which sank 155 years ago. It was the first ship to survive a transit of the Northwest Passage, even though that's not what it set out to do. The three-masted, 400-ton, 36-meter vessel is described as in very good condition, thanks to the cold Arctic waters. The ship's discovery, according to the government, reinforces Canada's territorial claims in the Arctic (This seems a bit odd, since there's no real dispute about where the vessel traveled (the crew was rescued), only where it sank.) In any event, archaeologists can't wait to explore the discovery further.

Finding new species a walk in the park

Mercantour National Park in southern France is hardly terra incognita. But a recent study reminds us we almost never know all the species in any given spot. A new species of beetle and ten other new small invertebrates turned up, and more are expected.

From the Moon to McDonalds

The Lunar Orbiter mission results, a scientific treasure trove of images, were little studied and barely saved from trashing. Space entrepeneurs Keith Cowing and Dennis Wingo found the data tapes stored in a defunct McDonald's restaurant and set about retrieving the images. Kudos to these two scientific detectives!

What's the worst dinosaur film ever made?

Gosh, there are so many possibilities. Here Smithsonian dino-blogger Brian Switek nominates the 1970s TV movie "The Last Dinosaur" in which idiocy is piled on impossibility. Who knew that a geologist was capable of referring to a mammal as a "ceratopsian," (it's a horned dinosaur - where did you get your degree, anyway?) or that T. rex had a foam-rubber skull that could make a giant rock bounce harmlessly away?

New octopuses equipped for the cold

In 2009 came the news that all octopuses (not just specialized varieties like the deadly blue-ringed octopus) have venom. Now Bryan Fry, the University of Melbourne (Australia) specialist who made that discovery, reports that four new species of octopus from Antarctic waters sport a previously unknown adaptation. The enzymes in cephalopod venom lose their effectiveness at cold temperatures, but the new species employ poorly-understood "biochemical tricks" to keep their venom potent at subzero temperatures. There are "new small proteins in the venom with very intriguing activities, which may be potentially useful in drug design," Fry says.

Surprising things about the male brain

LiveScience reports that male brains are more complex than you females think: we can be empathetic, we're not all natually promiscuous (even though we are hard-wired to look at pretty women), and a lot of men are (gasp) predisposed to committment and marriage... "Believe it... or Not"

Mapping Mars

NASA and Arizona State University researchers have stitched 21,000 images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on the Mars Odyssey probe into the highest-resolution map of another planet ever made. All features of 100m or greater appear on the map, which visitors on the Internet can navigate using pan and zoom features. So go to Mars!

Dramatic encounter: sailboat vs. whale

A southern right whale, 10m long and weighing 40 tons, chose a bad time to hurl itself out of the water. There was a sailboat of about its own length in the way, and the photos were dramatic. Both sailboat and whale survived. South African authorities are investigating whether the sailboat was steered deliberately to very close quarters with the whale.

COMMENT: One cetologist wrote something interesting about whales' habit of breaching. If a blue whale leaps almost clear of the water and falls back, its head is falling 30 meters or more and hitting incompressible water. Why isn't the whale's brain mashed? We don't know.

Moss reproduces with air gun

A common species of moss uses a unique method of reproduction. As the sun shrinks its spore-containing pods, they shrink into am airtight tube shape. When the pressure inside gets too high, the lid blows off, and air comes out in a vortex ring (like a smoke ring) blasting spores upward into the wind at 144 km/h.
Thant's not a misprint. The moss blows its spores into the air at Autobahn speed. It's hard to say moss is cool...but this is cool.

Big African mammals: should there be more?

In this article, Dr. Colin Groves suggests the disputed pygmy elephant can be dismissed. He reviews other mysteries of African wildlife, including why the species known as Reck's elephant disappeared about 700,000 years ago, just before the modern African elephant came on the scene.

Launch vehicles that weren't

This site, invaluable to space historians, collects launch vehicles, especially reusable launch vehicles (RLVs), proposed from 1963 to 2001. RLVs seem much more logical than throwaway boosters, but it turns out actually building one is very, very hard. Planners who hope to build them in the future need to apply all the lessons learned (often expensively) in the past.

Launch vehicle makers think they'll win either way

The President's proposed NASA overhaul, and the alternatives argued in Congress, tend to have one thing in common: they will lead to more types of Earth-to-orbit spacecraft that need rides. In the debate over what types of spacecraft to send where, the launch vehicle side can be overlooked. The only American players are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX. As this article outlines, they all think the future looks bright.

Hard to keep up with NASA changes

First President Obama called for a radical restructuring of NASA, especially the human spaceflight segment, and killed the Constellation vision of a return to the Moon and a lunar base in favor of a decades-off mission to Mars (which had actually been part of Constellation from the beginning, though everyone seemed to have forgotten this). Then a near-violent storm of support vs. opposition, which of course had nothign to do with whose jobs were at risk in which state or Congressional district) broke out. Then Obama backed off a little on points like completing a form of the Orion capsule. Then both sides trotted out the astronauts, scientists, Congresspersons, Hollywood personalities, and random citizens who favored their positions. (Surprisingly, no one has claimed to have held a seance with Wernher von Braun.) Then NASA Administrator Charles Bolden made the statement on live TV that the "foremost" mission he had been charged with by the President was to make Muslim nations "feel good about" their contributions to science and technology. Then the White House said no one had ever told Bolden any such thing and the ex-Marine, straight-arrow Administrator was somehow making up a new mission on his own. Then the White House version was endorsed as believable by an all-star panel including space luminaries Luke Skywalker, James Kirk, and Marvin the Martian. Then a Senate committee laboring on the FY11 NASA budget produced a draft bill closer to the old Constellation program than to the President's vision. Now former astronaut and Senator John Glenn, who favor extension of the Shuttle, is meeting with the President. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that a new heavy-lift rocket - to be paid for in the future, of course, - is important. (Oh, and now someone claims they did try to explain it all to von Braun via a seance, but they say all the great rocketeer's spirit did was utter a string of oaths in German and then break the connection.)

The real version of events - to the extent anyone can figure it out - is not much saner than this one. It may, arguably, be even stranger. The bottom line: no one knows yet what is going to happen with American spaceflight. All I can say is, whatever your position, make it heard, because the times they are a-changing.

AS ALWAYS, only more so than always, this blog is purely the author's personal expression as a citizen.

Mayan tomb holds startling discoveries

Some 1,600 years ago, a Mayan king died in the Guatemalan city of (really) El Zotz. Professor Stephen Houston, the researcher from Brown University who led in the discovery and exploration of his tomb, found it filled with offering of the best of Mayan textiles, carvings, and pottery - and the bones of six children who appear to have been sacrificed. The tomb had been sealed so so well that even the smells of the bodies and other contents remained. Houston said, “These items are artistic riches, extraordinarily preserved from a key time in Maya history. From the tomb’s position, time, richness and repeated constructions atop the tomb, we believe this is very likely the founder of a dynasty.”

Rediscovery of a shy primate

The Horton Plains slender loris, a 20-cm primate with huge eyes, was thought to have vanished from its habitat in the trees of Sri Lanka some time during WWII. A claimed sighting in 2002 sparked a serious effort to find it again, and the animal's first-ever photograph has just been released. The rediscovery was a joint effort by scientists from the Zoological Society of London, the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka.

Update on the great Atlantic plastic hunt

To follow up on science writer David Lawrence's cruise with the "Plastics at SEA" expedition, David now reports, "I survived the SEA expedition without getting voted off the boat -- though there were discussions of heaving me overboard at times." Samples collected by the ship in 128 net tows included almost 48,000 pieces of plastic. Not very heartening, but, of course, correcting a problem starts with understanding its magnitude.

REP names Greenest Republicans in Congress

Republicans for Environmental Protection, a group I belong to which seeks to reclaim for the GOP the conservation heritage of Teddy Roosevelt (yeah, I know, he shot large numbers of everything in Africa except meerkats, but he was still instrumental in protection of land here in the US) has issued its annual scorecard of "greenest" GOP members of Congress. Three Congressmen from NJ scored top honors: Leonard Lance (7th District), Frank LoBiondo (2nd District), and Christopher Smith (4th District).

More Wonders from the Deep

Robotic cameras lowered into the depths off Australia's Great Barrier Reef have revealed spectacular views of the inhabitants, including many believed to be new species. New high-tech imaging devices gave the first clear views of marine life over two kilometers down.
Some of those pictured in the title link include a brilliant red jellyfish of the genus Atolla, hatchetfish and angler fish, and the nightmarish viperfish. Other animals spotted include countless invertebrates, many of them unknown to science, and large six-gilled sharks, ancient predators whose kind saw the great marine reptiles and the the monster Megalodon come and go. One researcher said, "We simply do not know what life is down there...One of the things that we're trying to do by looking at the life in the deep sea is discover what's there in the first place, before we wipe it out."