Meet Mireya Mayor

I wrote about Dr. Mayor in Shadows of Existence because of her lemur discoveries on Madagascar. Since then the "female Steve Irwin" (she doesn't mind the nickname) has pursued animals all over the world, including Africa, South America, and even the fringes of American cities. Mayor will do whatever it takes to study rare species in the remotest regions of the world. And she likes some very unloved animals, like tarantulas. Girls looking for a science role model could hardly do better.

Great painting of the biggest flyer of all time

Calling it "Big Bird Goes Postal," the fellow who styles himself "The Optimisitc Painter" has produced a great concept of the biggest flying creature ever. He writes, "Quetzalcoatlus is a Pterosaur, and so far as we know, the largest animal known to have flown. Once you start imagining something as tall as a giraffe with the wing span of a Cessna flying about it begins to boggle the mind." He based it on Dr. Darren Naish's paper with Mark Witton that argued pterosaurs did not swoop down and snatch up prey but walked most of the time like colossal land-based storks.

HOW much to catalog species?

Two researchers at the Universidad de Sao Paulo in Brazil have produced an estimate of how much it will cost to find and classify every one of the estimated 5.4 million species still uncatalogued. The number: $263B, including the cost to train more taxonomists. (Despite my interest in living things, I can't help thinking people who spend their time trying to differentiate all those near-identical tropical beetles have the most mind-numbing job on the planet. I salute their perseverance).

New beetle named for T.R.

From an Arizona State University press release: "A new species of a rugged darkling beetle – Stenomorpha roosevelti – was named in honor of Theodore Roosevelt on the 100th anniversary of a speech he gave at Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University."

How do new species arise?

Biologists have been working on this question forever. (Darwin, despite the title of his book, really didn't nail it down). Now the computer geeks are having a go at it. Network theory indicates geographically localized mating increases diversity, but this works against assortative mating (mating with genetically similar individuals). This clash of forces fragments species into new ones. It's a lot more complicated than that, but this is an interesting insight.

Iran claims it built flying saucer

Seriously. Iran says it has a flying saucer. The government claims the unmanned Zohal (Saturn) was made for 'aerial imaging.' Why a flying saucer? Why illustrate it with what looks like a pasteup photo from the 1950s? Who knows? It's just nice to have some news from that part of the world that's not totally depressing.

First photo of Mercury from orbit

NASA's MESSENGER probe has sent back the first photograph of the planet from a spacecraft in its orbit. It's not the most interesting landscape, from the layman's point of view. (The large crater dominating the photo is named Debussy.) From the planetary geologist's point of view, though, this is a treasure trove, just the beginning of the data they expect on our most enigmatic planet.

History Files: Was the Civil War Inevitable?

There are Americans who think the Civil War was avoidable, or even imposed by the North. This new book is the latest to make the claim. I dabble as a historian when I'm not dabbling as a science writer, and I can't visualize how events could realistically have unfolded other than they did.
In 1861, the Southern states would not yield on the right to bring slaves into Federal territories, as per the Dred Scott decision, and the nation had just elected a President and a Congressional majority that, while not posed to outlaw slavery where it existed, had promised not to permit slavery in the territories. Well-meaning suggestions like the Crittenden Compromise were built on air: while issues of federalism, states' rights, etc. stoked the flames of the war, the extension of slavery was a central point on which neither side would compromise. (Don't read what Confederate leaders wrote after the war insisting slavery was a side issue: read what they said and wrote in 1861, when they were adamant it was THE issue.) Most Yankee soldiers joined the army to preserve the Union, and most Confederates to fight for for states' rights and independence, but everything except the extension of slavery could have been compromised on.) My point is that we need to be very careful in revising history: such action is sometimes justified, but not here.

This book looks fascinating

Definitely at the top of my list; The Species Seekers. Will write a review when I have gotten my hands on it.

Future tech - what's real?

Physicist Michio Kaku has a cool job. When he's not working on string theory, he's on the Discovery Channel predicting the future of technology. Internet in your contact lenses? Yes. Longer lifespans? Cloning of extinct animals? Yes and yes. Warp drive. Too bad about that one....His new book looks good, though.

Book review: The Great White Bear

The Great White Bear: A Natural and Unnatural History of the Polar Bear
by Kieran Mulvaney
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011

If Richard Ellis (author of On Thin Ice) is the polar bear's biographer, Kieran Mulvaney is its Eyewitness News reporter, making us feel as though we're watching the bear's life cycle closeup. Mulvaney threads the life story of a particular bear (initially a pair of siblings) through an adventure combining his own first-person experiences with interesting bits of polar bear lore through the centuries. Everything from Arctic exploration to the science of ice formation comes into play to fill out the picture.
I thought I was well-read on this animal, but Mulvaney shoots down some things I thought were true, such as the idea the bears hide their black noses with paws or an ice block when stalking a seal. He provides some striking incidents from recent bear studies: I had no idea a hungry bear would smash the roof of a den to commit cannibalism, or that there was an incident where a bear used an ice block as a tool to either bash open a seal's refuge or actually brain the seal (no one is sure which). Mulvaney thinks the bear is in major trouble from climate change: it's too much of a specialist to adapt to changing conditions the way a generalist species like the brown bear could.

If you want to know this unique predator better, pick up this book.

NASA, in hard times, forced to waste money

Remember the Constellation program for new rockets? It was canceled last year. But NASA is still spending $1.4M a day on it because Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) has successfully inserted language in the Continuing Resolutions being used to fund the government in the absense of a FY11 budget saying the agency has to keep spending oin the program at 2010 levels. The irony here is that most of the money doesn't even end up in Shelby's state (home of the Marshall Space Flight Center) but in Utah, where solid fuel booster maker ATK has its headquarters.
A check of Senator Shelby's website shows no references to Constellation dated later than November 2010.

Texas find pushes back dates of first Americans

For a very long time, archaeologists were certain the first settlers arrived in North America 10-12,000 years ago. Recent finds have made that untenable, pushing the date back to some 14,000 years BP (before present). New finds from Texas include stone tools from a soil layer 1.5m below that left by Clovis people 13,000 BP. The archaeologists reported the tools could be 13.5 to 15 thousand years old. They claim to have been very careful in watching for any indications sediments became mixed or overturned with time. If they are right, it pushes the migration further back, since the people who first came across the Bering Sea "land bridge" presumably needed hundreds or thousands of years to spread as far as Texas.
COMMENT: Remember the scene from the first X-Files movie allegedly set in Texas 37,000 years ago? Still fanciful, but not AS fanciful as we thought.

Attack of the giant rabbit

Yep. On the island of Minorca (off Spain) there was once a giant bunny. Now 12kg is not enormous for a mammal in general, but it is for a rabbit (they average 2 kg). One of the downers in this fluffy bit of news is that you might not recognize the animal as a rabbit. It didn't hop and apparently had small ears. (That reminds me a bit of the largest of the rodents, the capybara, with small ears relative to its size when compared to rats and mice). But this is a reminder that animals are not bound to appear the way we think they should! The wonderfully named Nuralagus rex, (roughly, "Minorcan king rabbit"), died out about three million years ago.

El Chupacabra - not much mystery left

I never paid much attention to the chupacabra business. My main objection was that no one ever heard of the darn thing until the 1990s, and animals don't just appear out of nowhere on a populated (and long-inhabited) island like Puerto Rico.
Benjamin Radford doubts pretty much all the animals of cryptozoology, and sometimes I think he's too quick to close a file. But I'm with him on this one. Critters labeled chupacabra involve what you might call Type 1 (odd-looking canids) and Type 2 weird-looking predators with spines down their backs. Radford attributes Type 1 to oddball, often diseased canids, and Type 2 to the movie Species. He may be two for two here.

Sensational claims about fatal Soviet mission

If NPR thinks this is journalism, they DESERVE to be defunded.

There are still mysteries about the old Soviet space program, which was wrapped in secrecy and presented to the world as a monolithic, smoothly functioning machine rather than the pioneering but messy effort it really was. Sill, the claims in this article, reported apparently without caution or fact-checking, are extreme. Komarov's fatal Soyuz 1 mission was risky and ended in tragedy, but here it's presented as murder, or suicide depending how you read it.
"Everyone knew the mission would fail?" Come on. There's no real evidence for this or the other claims. (Another historian has pointed out that the sound clip offered on this site seems like a splice of three different transmissions. The article says only Komarov's heelbone was found: and then shows a shot of a charred body in a coffin. It gets worse from there.
My own opinion as a space historian: this is nonsense.
(Reminder as usual- All opinions represent only the personal opinion of the author as a private citizen)

An orgy of trilobites (really)

Four hundred million years ago, trilobites were a spectacularly successful group whose hard shells have fossilized in the billions. We now know that they molted, changing shells as they grew, and that the molting period was the perfect time to get together with the opposite sex. Fossil aggregations show that gigantic numbers of trilobites gathered and simultaneously molted and then, well, went at at each other. One paleontologist explained, "We find trilobite beds that we can trace across distances of 80 miles (130 kilometers), all the effect of a single event. The numbers of individuals caught in those must easily be in the billions." So essentially they tossed off their "clothes" and engaged in the largest crustacean orgy in all of history.

Can LHC send matter back in time?

Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University says, "Our theory is a long shot, but it doesn't violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints." What theory is this? That when the LHC produces the long-sought Higgs boson, it will also produce a companion particle, the Higgs singlet. Weiler will watch for evidence that Higgs singlets and their decay products appear at the same time, which would mean the decay products are produced by singlets which "travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them." M theory, the current version of string theory, says that Higgs singlets should be affected by gravity but not by any other force - meaning they could move in time.
COMMENT: OK, it's not Admiral Kirk going back to the 20th century to save the whales. But the point is this may show time is not a relentless one-way arrow. It may have exceptions. And who knows where that insight may lead in the future?

How big can a bat get?

Dr. Darren Naish posted a Tetrapod Zoology blog on the vesper bats (Vespertilionidae), which make up some 410 of the 1,110 known species of bats. (New species are still cropping up.) Anyway, that led to an interesting series of expert comments on the question of why bats are not bigger than they are. Some of the "flying fox" fruit-eaters may have wingspans of 1.8m, and there have always been claims, though without supporting evidence, of larger ones. Naturalists Ivan Sanderson and Gerald Russell, along with two African helpers, saw a specimen twice in one day that they estimated was 4m. Is that practical?
These comments postulate a number of reasons, including thermoregulation, nutrition, and the physics of echolocation, why bigger bats than 1.8m might not work, although it seems to me there is room for argument. I don't expect we'll ever see a plane-sized bat, though. As I commented on Naish's thread, "There has to be a structural limit to each type of animal wing just like there is to each type of airplane wing (over a certain size, you have to add more spars, different construction methods, stronger and lighter materials, etc., and this is easier to solve with fixed wings than with flapping wings). If pterosaurs could get to 10m+ with a wing that seemed less well supported and braced than that of bats, though, I always wondered why bats didn't get bigger."

NASA Planetary Science: the outlook is gloomy

NASA planetary scientists are not very cheerful. The James Webb Space Telescope and Mars Science Lander are far over budget, sucking money from other programs. There is unlikely to even be a Fiscal Year 2011 NASA budget, just a Continuing Resolution that allows spending at the FY10 level. What's worse, though, is that the budget for FY12 and beyond - even if fully funded to the President's current proposal - reduces science mission funding over the next five years. Cornell University's Steve Squyres puts is bluntly: "If that budget were actually implemented, it would mean the end of flagship class science at NASA in the planetary program." The Administration's proposal gives almost $1.5B to NASA's planetary science division in FY12 but less than $1.2B for FY16.
COMMENT: The debate between human and robotic spaceflight in terms of major NASA missions, may be over: we will have neither. Maybe that's an exaggeration, and there's more to space than NASA, but let's hope Congress decides this budget is not what the American people want.
(Opinions, as always, are strictly those of the author as a private citizen.)