History Files: Lost City of the Maya

Nothing is as romantic as the idea of the lost city. Sometimes this staple of film and authors like Burroughs and Haggard actually comes true, though without the native kings and princesses. A hundred buildings and a pyramid have been found so far in the jungle covering Holtun ("Head of Stone"), a Mayan citadel that has adventurous archeologists reaching for their fedoras.

Posts might get erratic

For the next three days, I'm at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference: A truly great experience!

When the world's coolest job goes away

Several articles out this week on the NASA astronauts wondering what's ahead, as they potentially face several years of ISS-only missions, where they will be carried up by Russian rockets. As astronaut Stan Love puts it: "For me, the sense of disappointment is that launching people into space becomes something we used to do."
COMMENT: NASA had this problem before the Shuttle, as some astros left the program or worked their way into unrelated jobs, and the corps lost a lot of experience that way. NASA needs to do everything it can to keep its astronauts together and sharp. THat includes not only ISS missions, but maybe some cooperative ventures with the private-spaceship companies as well.

The Census of Marine Life - and Beyond!

I've written about the Census before, but this article by the always-excellent Nicholas Wade in the NYT introduces us to the little-known founder of this monumentally successful effort to catalog marine species around the world (finding some 6,000 new ones). Jesse H. Ausubel of Rockefeller University and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation created the Census of Marine Life program in 2000. The program grew to an effort involving 540 ships and costing $650M. And one of the most interesting things we learned is that this mammoth feat of global cooperation didn't complete the job: as Census scientists found new species everywhere they looked, the vast sections of the deep they haven't sampled yet undoubtedly hold many more. Hats off to Mr. Ausubel, a true hero of science and conservation.
Census:
http://www.coml.org/
Another of his projects is bringing together descriptions of every known species from every environment around the world. Visit the Encyclopedia of Life:
http://www.eol.org/
Explore!

Conservation: Condor Success Story

Amid all the bad news from the animal world, let's remember what humans CAN do when they put the effort into it. The California condor may be the ugliest bird in the world, but it's beautiful to conservationists. From a low of 27 birds, its numbers have climbed to nearly 400 - a population higher than at any time in at least the last 70 years.

Update on NASA funding for spaceships

The key statement on CCDev 2 funding, from NASA's Phil McAlister: "Within the U.S. industrial base, there is considerable launch vehicle development expertise and experience, as many companies have successfully developed new launch vehicles over the last few decades. In contrast, no U.S. company has successfully developed a crew-carrying spacecraft in over 30 years."
COMMENT: Makes sense to me. We have rockets: Delta, Atlas, and Falcon (which hopefully will force the others down in price). We don't have a proven human-carrying spacecraft once we retire the Shuttle. If the private sector can do it faster and cheaper than the Orion-derived capsule NASA is still working on, then fine. (If the Lockheed Martin/NASA capsule program goes well, then we're "more fine" - we have options.)

Turning a deaf ear to the universe

The Kepler telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets in the habitable zone around other stars. So the logical next step is to turn our radiotelescopes on those solar systems and listen for electronic signs of civilization. Too bad we just turned off our most powerful tool, the Allen Telescope Array, for lack of a few million dollars per year. Operating funds came from the National Science Foundation and the state of California, both of which have cut back this year so severely that the array, half funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, has been shut down.
COMMENT: A day of scientific infamy. It's understood that there is never enough money for every worthy use, and we pay our leaders to choose between competing priorities. But surely we could pull a few million from somewhere (tobacco farmer subsidies, perhaps?) to keep our ear open to the universe.

New species keep dropping in

I like to chronicle, from time to time, the fact that zoological discoveries come in all sizes, and they never stop. For example, one man, Norman Platnick, a curator emeritus of the American Museum of Natural History, discovered 10 new American species from a tiny group called goblin spiders in 2010. Goblin spiders can make silk, but they eschew webs in favor of actively hunting small insects and eating them on the spot. For all you know, you may have stepped on a new species unawares on your way to work this morning.

Taking shots at commercial space

Item 1: Jay Barbree, who's been reporting on the space program since it was created, is not happy about how NASA carved up its awards for commercial flights to the ISS. He complains that Boeing was the only experienced company getting an award: SpaceX and especially two startups, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, are unproven. NASA ignored real experience, he said (as in, ATK and Orbital Sciences).
Item 2: Russia, an ISS partner, is not happy with the whole commercial thing. Its officials say private ships can't dock at the ISS until they meet yet-to-be-defined standards. This is, of course, the same Russia getting $60M per seat to launch astronauts to ISS on the world's only functional post-Space Shuttle human-rated vehicle.
COMMENT: Barbree is right in the narrow sense that NASA didn't direct all its funding to traditional aerospace partners. But aren't those the same companies that went through so much trouble, so many cost overruns, so many problems with Ares-I and several junked X-vehicles and EELV (a reliable launcher with stupendous price increases)? Shouldn't NASA be in the business of backing some promising newcomers rather than preserving an ossified oligopoly? As to Russia...follow the money.
Every new industry and new company has hurdles to overcome. Here's hoping the new guys can do it.
REMINDER: As always, only more so: All comments represent solely the personal opinion of the author as a private citizen.

History Files: What's in YOUR attic?

The Nuremberg Chronicle is a history of the world printed 500 years ago. While several hundred copies are known to exist, the book is treasured as one of the milestones in the printing of illuminated manuscripts. Known copies are housed in museums and private collections. A complete copy in near-perfect condition has gone for a million dollars at auction.
So when a Utah man who's had an old German-language book in his attic for generations handed a local book dealer a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, jaws dropped. The man thought the book might be worth something and was donating it for a local auction. The copy is falling apart and has only about a third of its pages, so the estimated monetary worth is "only" $50,000. But it's the classic story that's appealing here. What else is in the nation's attics?

Review: the ultimate Space Shuttle book

Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions
Dennis R. Jenkins - published by the author, 2001

What Jenkins has done here is phenomenal. Certainly no other book on the Shuttle compares to it, and I don't think any other space vehicle, not even Apollo, is the subject of a one-volume reference so complete and authoritative.

In addition to exhaustive descriptions and diagrams of the Shuttle's technology, Jenkins puts the subject in context. Reusable spaceplane ideas go back to before World War II. The most brilliant minds in aerospace engineering have tried to make them practical, but either technology or cost defeated all the pre-Shuttle efforts. The author goes through the history of suborbital X-planes, the never-built efforts like Dyna-Soar, and the 1960s beginnings of the modern Shuttle program. The dozens of designs explored before the somewhat compromised final configuration was picked are all here. Everything from tile design to orbiter names is explained as we approach Flight 1, on page 268 of the 513-page text. The actual mission coverage is fairly compressed to allow for comprehensive coverage of the Shuttle's technology. Possible Shuttle upgrades and follow-ons - still relevant, as NASA's current concept for a Space Launch System is a Shuttle-based design - are covered, along with the Challenger accident and the most nnotable achievements of Shuttle astronauts. (The book's publication predates the Columbia tragedy: I bought my copy the day after the accident to help me follow the investigation.)
As someone with experience researching space technology and operations, I am, as I told Dennis once, simply in awe of the work that went into this. If you want gossipy astronaut bios or minute-by-minute descriptions of missions, this is not your book: but if you want to know how one of the great achievements in space technology was developed, this is THE book.

Easter miracle - the God Particle?

For physicists, the perfect Easter gift would be a new look at the underpinnings of the cosmos - meaning the confirmation that the Higgs boson, or "God particle," whose theoretical existence underlies much of modern cosmological theory, actually exists. There is a rumor going around the world at Internet-warp speed that physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have actually detected the Higgs, but are keeping it quiet while they ensure the observation can be replicated.
The note's title is:
"Observation of a γγ resonance at a mass in the vicinity of 115 GeV/c2 at ATLAS and its Higgs interpretation"
Here is where the original note (or alleged note) about the apparent find was posted:
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3643
For people who think physicists are boring, there's a heck of a lively exchange here.

COMMENT: I'm not about to try to explain what I don't even understand, as this all gets very technical. But I wanted to post it here because of the interesting implications for the way science works. Should an internal note posted anonymously to a blog be passed on? Are scientists who work with public funding entitled to sit on potentially important data while they do further research?

My all-time favorite quote for Earth Day

"On Spaceship Earth there are no passengers; everybody is a member of the crew. We have moved into an age in which everybody's activities affect everybody else."
--Marshall McLuhan

COMMENT: There are geniuses, radicals, wise folks, and misguided folks on both sides of most big policy debates about how best to maintain the planet. But everybody does matter. Think for a minute about a billion people recycling vs. that same billion people not receycling, and you'll see what I mean.

For whales, Boston's the right place

The bad news is that the Atlantic right whale is highly endangered. The good news is that it's congregating off Boston in record numbers (a record for the post-whaling age, anyway), attracting scientists and spectators. Off the shore near Provincetown and Truro are as many as 200 whales - half the species population. It must be a magnificent sight in person. When I whale-watched off California, the grays and humpbacks were playing camera-shy - they never got close enough to show up as more than a small hump.

A night of space history

I had a very interesting night last night, when the Rocky Mountain chapter of AIAA hosted Larry Korb, a metallurgist who had worked for the late, great North American Aviation on the X-15, Apollo, and Space Shuttle programs. Larry made a presentation on his Top 25 people, from Greek mathematicians to Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun, who he thought had been instrumental in a series of breakthroughs that led eventually to lunar flight.
He also talked about his own experiences investigating the Apollo 1 (originally "Apollo 204") fire. Larry reported that a piece of instrumentation had been removed for calibration and the plug not capped, leaving an "open" live plug in the capsule that contributed to starting the fire. According to him, North American engineers had been so opposed to NASA's demand for a high-pressure pure oxygen atmosphere that they made NASA put it in a written specification if they insisted on it.
In one of the few things I've ever heard in the negative about legendary space designer Max Faget, he remembered Faget being the one who required an inward-opening hatch on Apollo so it could not be accidentally "blown" in space. That design also made it impossible to open the hatch quickly even without a fire.
Food for thought.
Much appreciation, Mr. Korb.

Article on orang-pendek as new species

Adam Davies has published an article making the case for the orang-pendek of Sumatra and neighboring regions as a new species of primate. It's well-written and compelling, though he stops short of offering a scientific binomial (explaining that, if he did so, too much discussion would be on the name vs. the evidence.) So the species has not been formally described. The footprint, eyewitness, and hair evidence is good, though the hair is confusing: the DNA says "human" but the structure says "orang-utan." Davies and the scientist who examined the hair insist there is no evidence of contamination.
(While the following case does not involve a primate, there is a precedent for the hair of one mammalian species looking like it belongs to another. For some reason, the occasional mutant known as the king cheetah has hair structured like that of a leopard instead of normal cheetah hair.)
COMMENT: I think this is one of the cases where cryptozoologists are right and a "cryptid" wil turn out to be an important new species. Well-known tiger conservationist Debbie Martyr has seen the animal, and no less an authority than Dr. John MacKinnon of the WWF saw bipedal primate tracks he could not identify.
But we're not there yet on scientific recognition, and the impact of this article will be limited because most anthropologists and primatologists are going to automatically dismiss an article that appears in a magazine with articles of mediums and homeopathy. EdgeScience, published by the Society for Scientific Exploration, is a notch above most "paranormal" magazines in the credibility department, but the orang-pendek needs to be treated in a mainstream science magazine to have the impact Davies wants - protection of the species and its habitat.

Real life X-Files? FBI didn't care

In TV lore, J. Edgar Hoover opened the first X-Files case. In real life, according to newly released documents, a memo to Hoover reported that the FBI had done numerous UFO investigations, but UFO files were being trashed because, whatever might be happening, it was simply not an FBI matter. Hooever apparently made no objection, and the practice continued. One document that did survive follows up on the famous Roswell crash of 1947 with a notation the crashed "flying disk" turned out to be a weather-type balloon with a radar reflector attached.
COMMENT: Oh well, it IS rather hard to believe aliens sophisticated enough to visit the Earth have been poking around like idiots, doing senseless medical exams and crashing all over the place. That doesn't mean we have explained every strange thing seen in the skies. One of these days, I still think we're going to confirm a very strange natural phenomenon.

Meet your ancestor (?)

It's long been believed that members of the genus Australopithecus evolved into the genus Homo. Everyone in anthropology, it seems, has a different opinion on how and when. A unique australopithecine with some human traits but extra-long arms, a South African species named Australopithecus sediba, may have split off about two million years ago and set out on a path that led to us.
Or not. The creature's uniqueness as a species seems well agreed on, but was it on the "critical" path to humans, or just an interesting side branch? The search to find - and properly classify - the countless links in the evolutionary chain goes on.

A death spiral for science writing?

On the National Association of Science Writers list, there's a lot of concern about whether things will ever improve for writers who take pride in their craft but are being drowned in a wave of people willing to write for nothing or next to nothing, and editors (mostly online) who will accept out-and-out crud as "content." I tied to find a reason for optimism. I couldn't.

I wrote:


I have limited experience compared to many on this list, but my impression is, there is no fix. Doctors and engineers can specify or negotiate rates because there are barriers to entry in those professions. There's no barrier to claiming you're a writer and sending crud for free to the internet. There is a barrier (experience and effort) to being a top-notch writer with a high reputation, and there is a market for that: Scientific American is not going to start trolling the internet for free content. But the vast majority of "content providers" won't pay for quality and we have no way to make them. That's ugly, unfair, and it sucks (not just for writers, but for the readers who get used to reading crud and thinking that's normal.) But writers, even thousands of writers, boycotting the content farms will have almost no economic impact. Quality writers who want meaningful fees are going to be competing for a smaller market, and I can't picture any combination of realistic circumstances that will change that. It means, bottom line, that more good writers will fail to make a living at it. All any of us can do is do our best in a changing world.

Russia Claims it Named Patty the Sasquatch

An interesting article on the blog Cryptomundo reports that "Patty," the subject of the Patterson-Gimlin film and thus the most famous of sasquatches (real or fake) was allegedly named by Russian researchers. Russian cryptozoologist Igor Burtsev has claimed a Russian coined the term based on Patterson's last name. This led to a discussion on the sometimes humorous topic of nations claiming credit for everything. Loren Coleman asked me to weigh in from a space history perspective, and I wrote:


As a space historian, I run into this a lot. I always appreciated Gene Roddenberry’s joke in making Ensign Chekov an over-the-top partisan – the Russians had done everything first, better, or both.
Every nation likes to boast of its accomplishments, and some nations are more determined than others. Space is a field where many “firsts” really did belong to Russians, so of course it was heavily played up in the Cold War days.
There was a moon race, but the Soviet effort was crippled by the death of brilliant organizer/engineer Sergei Korolev. When Apollo succeeded, the Soviets gave it up and claimed they had never been focused on the moon, which most Americans accepted until hardware like the Soviet lunar lander began turning up in the post-USSR period.

The Soviets since early days trumpeted examples of science and technology achievements. The father of space flight, Tsiolkovsky, was a little-known mathematics teacher until the new government realized he was a true pioneer, promoted his reputation and his books, and gave him a comfortable pension. When they could not find a true Soviet first in some area, they tended to exaggerate or fabricate one. I own an English-language version of a Russian aeronautics textbook that credits the first manned aircraft to a Soviet naval officer – the Wright brothers do not even get a mention.
Sometimes this mindset led to disastrous embraces of Russian ideas that actually were no good, with Lysenko being the standout example.
I have no idea about the Patty claim – certainly I never heard it before now. But it’s a reminder that history is a fragile thing, even when events are still within living memory. Universally agreed-on narratives are rare. We fallible humans must do our best.