Him Tarzan. Him Chameleon!

A new species of chameleon has been described from a tiny patch of forest in Madagascar. That in itself is not big news, as the island's herpetofauna is a long way from complete (one authority reports he has an estimated 100 new species of frogs awaiting formal description.) But its German discoverers hope the name Calumma tarzan will help make this lizard a "poster species" drawing attention to the island's diversity and the need for better habitat conservation. Lead author of the formal descriptive paper, Philip-Sebastian Gehring, said, "The Tarzan chameleon is going to use his celebrity name to promote protection for this last patch of forest."


THANKS TO Beth Buczinsky, author of a cool nature blog I had not known about until now (see title link), for posting this on the Web.

Bizarre new catfish from Peru

Loren Coleman and company at Cryptomundo have scooped me twice today on new species. Good for you, Loren.
This one, from a remote section of the Amazon in Peru, is really something. It's a big (looks 60cm or more?) armored catfish with outsized fins and a specialized vegetarian diet: it eats mainly wood that has fallen into the river. It has unusually-shaped teeth for scraping wood. Its other dietary item? The droppings of other catfish. Paulo Petry of the Nature Conservancy gets the credit for this find, which joins nine previously known species in the genus Panaque.

New species of turtle from southeastern U.S.

The Pearl River, which flows through Mississippi and Alabama, is famous as a possible habitat for surviving ivory-billed woodpeckers. It is also, though, home to the pearl map turtle, a new species. Northern Arizona University scientists have identified the animal as new based on geographic range, appearance, and DNA, and tagged it as Graptemys pearlensis. A good reminder that not all new species come from remote undeveloped places: some are right underfoot from an American perspective.

Farewell, astronaut Bill Lenoir

William Lenoir has passed away at 71. He was a backup crew member for Skylab, an engineer who worked on the Shuttle and on solar power satellites, and the flight engineer on the first operational Space Shuttle mission. Bill served two stints at the company I work with in my day job, Booz Allen Hamilton, with a timeout to be an Associate Administrator of NASA under Richard Truly. I can't recall that I ever met Bill, but I humbly suggest a rule I think all civilizations should take to heart: Explorers should be honored.
Ad Astra, Bill.

Zoo hires gymnast to teach apes to climb

Seriously. Orangutans kept for years in an enclosure without anything to climb on became so terrestrial that, when an improved space with trres was provided, the apes didn't try to climb or swing. The zoo hired a Dutch gymnast to climb around in the trees in the hopes the orangs would follow suit. Umm... "monkey see, monkey do?"

MIT offers robotic swarm for oil spills

It looks like a picnic cooler trialing a set of venetian blinds, but MIT's newest robot has an important job. Engineers at the school think their solar-powered robot, equipped with a sort of floating treadmill of a nanomaterial that absorbs oil, can be deployed in swarms to clean up an oil spill faster and cheaper than traditional skimmers. The robot, prototypes of which have been sea-tested, can either burn off the collected oil or leave it floating bags for collection.

Review: String Theory for Dummies

String Theory for Dummies
Andrew Zimmerman Jones with Dr. Daniel Robbins
Wiley Publishing, Indianapolis, IN (2010)
364pp
Andrew Jones has taken on a monumental task: explaining string theory, with all the underlying science and universe-wide implications, without much math and without any more technical terms than necessary. It’s impressive how well he’s succeeded. If that success is short of perfection, that only reflects, as he notes himself, how vast and complex the task is.
Jones opens by noting that some of the ideas presented here will be proven false. I like that: it prepares the reader for the convoluted story which begins with the first attempts at a science of physics and ends with a theory so esoteric that the mind really can’t grasp it the way we do most scientific notions (try visualizing “rolled up” dimensions some time).
Jones opens with the why of string theory: the way relativity and quantum physics have been stopped short by the unsolved mystery of quantum gravity. He then steps back to the origins of physics and leads readers through the fits, starts, progress, blind alleys, and reversals that led to string theory being discovered, abandoned, revived as superstring theory, and modified into its current form, M-Theory.
Any theory will eventually die off if it can’t be proven, and Jones explains the possibilities and problems of testing string theory, including either by observing the universe or in particle accelerators on Earth. He spends a chapter on the arguments that string theory is unprovable, simply wrong, or both. String theorists are split on how (or whether) whether the traditional scientific requirement that a theory be falsifiable applies to a theory of things we may never be able to observe directly. Another chapter looks at the main competitor, loop quantum gravity. There are string theorists and LQG theorists who think there is an underlying connection and they might both be true, while others are convinced the opposing camp is more of a groupthink cult than a scientific approach. Other chapters cover the implications if strong theory is correct: what it means for parallel universes, the Big Bang, time travel, and other concepts of scientific and popular interest.
Jones closes by outlining the ten questions he suggests any “theory of everything” must answer and introducing the most influential people in string theory.
There really isn’t a conclusion that sums up where Jones and his Ph.D. physicist co-author think the whole argument stands today. I was looking forward to that: the information is in the Introduction and Chapter 1, but there’s no law against recapping it. There also isn’t a glossary, an omission which I don’t understand.
The basic question in evaluating a book like this, though, is whether it leaves a nonspecialist with a better understanding of the topic. I do understand it better, much better. If you’re curious about this whole business of string theory but are not interested in getting a graduate degree, String Theory for Dummies is well worth your time.

NASA's big news: first confirmed multiplanet system

Well, NASA promised a big announcement for Thursday. It was scientifically important, but I'm not sure it rated the hype. The Kepler space telescope had identified what NASA researchers called the first confirmed multiplanet system (two planets so far, both gas giants) outside our own. The impact was blunted a little bit by European scientists announcing earlier in the week that ground-based telescopes had identified a multiplanet system. Also, once astronomers began discovering exoplanets (400+ at last count), the public naturally assumed these were not all one-planet systems and discovery of a multiplanet system was inevitable. None of this is meant to put down the important work being done by the Kepler team, just to note I'd hoped for more. There may be more: Kepler scientists report they have a third signature from that system that may prove to be another planet, this one a rocky world only about 1.5 Earth diameters.

New deep-sea wonders

Three weeks' use of an advanced ROV with a color camera off Indonesia has revealed a colorful seafloor ecosystem populated by rare and unusual creatures. One scientist estimated the expedition had found "...at least 40 new species of deep-water coral and at least 50 new species that include benthic shrimp, crabs, sponges, clams, barnacles, anemones and sea cucumbers." Sea spiders 20cm across crawled near stalked sea lilies, a group once abundant in many ocean areas but increasingly hard to find. Add a lavender fish "walking" on the bottom and a pink-spined carnivorous sponge, and there's something interesting for any marine life aficionado.

Even outer space can't kill them...

No, that's not a line from a 1950s movie. It's a description of how hard it is to kill some bacteria. Sure, Lysol will probably do it, but experimenters took bacteria from English cliffs (still clinging to rock shards) and put them in experiment boxes on the outside of the International Space Station. Eighteen months later, heat, cold, radiation, and vacuum had done...nothing to them. Wherever we go in the universe, it seems, we will take out bugs with us.

How do rocks move?

Well, they don't of course, not without help. But in Death Valley, rocks slide across the dried out lake bed (playa), leaving distinctive trails. But no one has ever seem them move, and it's not confirmed yet exactly how they do it. Theories include UFO aliens (what are they doing, playing tic-tac-toe?) and prankish college students. Science is now reporting that, in the winter, it can get cold enough for a thin coating of ice to form on the rocks, creating a slippery surface in contact with the ground and allowing wind to gradually nudge them around. Well, it's good to have a puzzle solved with a prosaic, rather boring explanation. Or is that always true?

Candidate for "World's smallest frog" discovered

OK, maybe it's the smallest. It's hard to have a contest in these types of things, and there's one from Cuba which may be smaller. But herpetologists are jazzed nonetheless for Microhyla nepenthicola, a frog which had actually been collected before - but the tiny specimens were assumed to be juveniles of some other species. The species hangs out (or hops about) in the Kubah National Park on the island of Borneo. Their tadpoles grow in liquid inside pitcher plants. A big member of the species may be 12 mm long. Yep, millimeters. There are some startling photographs in the title link that show just how small it is.

Africa: Discoveries Await, But They Don't Come Easy

Melanie Strissany is posting on the NYT's "Scientists at Work" site - sort of a cross between a blog and a field journal. She has undertaken a venture in the Congo region looking for new species of fish and trying to figure out why local fish, most notably cichlids, have branched out into such a huge number of species. The lower Congo, she says, is "hyperdiverse." She adds, "...every trip I have made to Congo has resulted in new findings and the discovery of more fish species new to science — and I have a strong hunch that this time is going to be no different."
COMMENT: Science is far from becoming merely a computer-desk pursuit. If you go to this site, look down the right side at the many previous scientists who have cataloged their expeditions here. There's plenty of fascinating stuff!

Ray Bradbury turns 90

Happy birthday to one of the unique storytellers and intellects of our time, a man who has never stopped urging us on toward the stars.

Help NASA pick crew wakeup songs

A long-time NASA tradition is the playing of music from the ground to start astronauts on their day. ("Free Falling" and "Rocketman" are popular. I'm quite sure Donovan's "The Intergalactic Laxative" is not going to get picked.) Anyway, the public can submit original songs or the names of published songs as wakeup music on the last two Shuttle missions. My vote: "Orbiting Jupiter" by Cheryl Wheeler. Lyrics:
http://www.cherylwheeler.com/songs/oj.html

Can humans be - superhuman?

This collection of examples, from a firefighter who lifted an SUV off the ground to a man who runs marathins at -20 degrees F, makes us wonder what the limits of out bodies really are. Are we settling for too little in developig our physical abilities?

NASA has planet-hunting news

NASA has scheduled a press conference for Thursday to announce "big news" about an "intriguing planetary system" located by its Kepler observatory. Kepler, launched in 2009, has identified more that 700 candidate star systems but scientists have been working to distinguish stars with planets from binary stars.

"The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life — much less intelligence — beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime." - Arthur C. Clarke

Strange new bugs are out there, too

Dr. Karl Shuker reports on two strange creatures of what is sometimes termed "micro-cryptozoology": finding insects and other small arthropods. He punctures on myth - that of a shrieking foot-long centipede that sounds like it might come from Skull Island, and describes an unsolved mystery of a creature reported at close range (as in, it ran over the explorer's fingers) but not caught: a tiger beetle, bright red and the size of "a baby's finger" which has evolved to mimic the shape of an ant. Lotta weird stuff out there...

Evidence for new ape species?

The Center for Fortean Zoology (CFZ, with the "Fortean" being a reference to an indefatigable 20th-century collector of oddities) is a British-based cryptozoology society which goes about everything with typical British tongue-in-cheek humor. One of the CFZ's pet (ha-ha) interests is the unclassified ape, the orang-pendek, reported from Sumatra and thereabouts. The CFZ's Adam Davies has led several field expeditions in pursuit of evidence, and now reports results.
readers of this blog may recall I posted on the announcement hairs had been recovered in 2009 from an orang-pendek sighting. As with hairs found in 2001, they have been analyzed by interested scientists and reported out as having DNA similar - but not identical - to orang-utan DNA.
One of those scientists, Lars Thomas, says, "The significance is quite enormous no matter what the result is basically, because if it turns out to be orang-utan this proves that there is orang-utan in a part of Sumatra several hundred kilometres from the nearest population of orang-utan. If it turns out to be a primate that looks like an orang-utan but isn’t, it’s an even greater discovery because that proves that there is another great ape living in Indonesia."
The orang-pendek is very respectable as mystery animals go. Internationally known tiger conservationist Debbie Martyr has reported seeing the reddish, habitually upright primate several times, and the renowned Dr. John MacKinnon once came upon tracks of a small, unidentified primate walking bipedally. Anthropologist Dale Drinnon, in a comment to the CFZ side, suggested that a small type of orang-utan with a normally upright posture could solve several unexplained animal reports, not just on Sumatra but in surrounding land masses. Martyr and others suggest it's a new type of gibbon, although the DNA results cast doubt on that (assuming the hairs are indeed from our quarry).
I wrote to the CFZ's Adam Davies after he sent me this announcement and asked the obvious question. If analysis indicates a new species here, when are we going to see the results in a peer-reviewed journal like Nature? Surely the topic is important enough for a journal to accept it if the science is well done, and the peer review process (though not perfect) will mean scientists with no connection to CFZ will be validating the DNA results.
Adam replied, "As ever, you ask good questions,I don't know the answer yet,but I will ask. I have met Henry Gee from Nature magazine before, and we got on very well. Lars is still carrying on the testing, and hopes to get better info. I promise you that I will let you know, when I know." (He added that information on the expeditions he has led, and future ones, is also available at another site, www.extreme-expeditions.com.)
So there you have it. Promising, but not yet definitive. Adam has promised to keep me in the loop and I shall do the same for you.

Footage of alleged Aussie mystery cat

Australia, it sometimes seems, is simply riddled with unexplained catlike predators. Panthers, lions, and unknown striped beasts - you name it, it's been reported. This account in the Australian press shows a still of what certainly looks like a mountain lion (Puma concolor), a North American species that seems to have somehow gained a toehold in Australia. (Abandoned mascots brought by American units in WWII are one theory.) No one has caught or killed such a cat, but tracks and dead livestock, combined with eyewitness accounts, make a strong case that something is going on.