Plesiosaurs didn't lay eggs

The plesiosaurs - giant marine reptiles which were contemporaries of the dinosaurs but were not technically dinos themselves - didn't lay eggs like most reptiles. A fossil of a plesiosaur carrying a single, large youngster showed they'd evolved for live births, like whales. (Just Showing Off Department: evolving toward fewer, larger young is known as "K selection.") Paleontologists had debated this a long time, because there was no evidence that plesiosaurs were really built to haul out on land like crocodiles to lay eggs, but there was no evidence they didn't behave this way, either. The decisive fossil of Polycotylus latippinus sat in a museum for 20 years before someone looked closely at it. This is not unusual: most large museums have huge back catalogs they just don't have the personnel to examine thoroughly.

The Perseids are coming!

OK, there is that pesky full moon. But Space.com says you still get a good view if you look away from Luna.
Comment: We don't have enough poetry about shooting stars. They vie with the aurora as the most beautiful sight in the heavens.

Smallsat conference complete

Well, complete for me, anyway, some die-hards are still in meetings there. But it was a great conference, as always. More attendees than ever, but it all ran smoothly. Thanks to Pat and everyone at Space Dynamics Lab!

Smallsat Conference Day 1 and 2

No one can say small satellites are not getting their due attention. The conference's attendance set a record of over 1,000 people. 210 abstracts were received, and only 1/3 of those could be accepted. The NRO director spoke yesterday, and the head of the Operationally Responsive Space office, Dr. Wegner, headed a panel today. Dr. Gold, director of the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, also spoke today.
I an my colleagues from Booz Allen Hamilton presented our paper on the mid- to far-term microsatellite picture today, to very nice applause from the audience and some compliments afterward.
On to Day 3!

Time for the Conference on Small Satellites!

Heading out Monday to the Conference on Small Satellites in Logan, UT. (It's more fun than it sounds) My team will deliver a paper Tuesday morning on the mid- to far-term prospects for microsatellites (defined as under 100kg). The technology is advancing dramatically (satellites run by smartphones, for instance, and satellites built on individual computer chips!)

The Endangered Species Act: Flawed, but vital

Yes, there are horror stories, like the couple who was enjoined from building their dream house because it might spoil the natural view of a pair of nesting bald eagles (not affect them in any other way, just spoil the naturalness of their vistas.) And, on a more troublesome note, the ESA is often a political tool, with listings based more on lobbying and court decisions than on the science. One environmental group files petitions to list over a thousand species last year, which blocks the swamped agency from focusing on the most critical cases. (I don't think the claims of activists relocating endangered species to stop otherwise-approved developments, have ever been proven, but I would not be surprised if it happened, any more than I would be surprised if the claims landowners fearful of government intrusion occasionally shot an endangered specimen and buried it instead of reporting it were to prove true.) But the recent attempts by some Congressional Republicans to block all new species listings went WAY too far in trying to correct government and judicial excesses. Fortunately, 37 House Republicans didn't like the smell of it and joined Democrats in removing the provision.
COMMENT: Conservation, as some of us like to say, IS conservative. We need to improve the way things are done under the ESA, but we need the Act itself. To meet some other Republicans who think as I do. go to www.repamerica,org.

Knocking Archaeopteryx off its perch

We all know the story. Archaeopteryx was the first bird. Back in the Jurassic, this little creature, stunningly preserved in German sandstone as one of the most famous fossils of all time, was flitting through the treetops, dodging those clumsy pterosaurs and chuckling at its ground-bound dinosaur cousins. That picture has changed a bit: pterosaurs, for example, were covered with filaments like hair and were not clumsy at all - but the story was the same..
Xu Xing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, though, has a new take on the matter. He thinks a small dinosaur found in China is the closest relation to Archaeopteryx and proves both were true dinosaurs.
"The most exciting result from our research is that both Xiaotingia and Archaeopteryx are primitive deinonychosaurs rather than birds. In other words, Archaeopteryx is a kind of Velociraptor ancestor rather than a bird ancestor."
COMMENT: It's going to take a long time (and many more fossils) to sort out who's right here. DInosaurs and their kin have repeatedly confounded paleontologists since the original picture of giant belly-dragging lizards was imagined from the remains of beasts like iguanodon. What's important is that we keep looking and keep learning. Remember the old saying, "Will wonders never cease?" Maybe not when it comes to the Mesozoic Era.

Water flows on Mars?

Surface water on Mars, even brief, seasonally appearing surface water, would seem unlikely. The planet is basically a desert, and the low atmospheric pressure means water would vaporize quickly. Yet, water flows may happen. This belief is based on observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Dark features that look like the signature of water flows appear every summer and fade every winter. It's not 100% certain this is from water, but no one has an alternative yet. Likewise, this does not mean there's life on Mars, but every discovery that increases the estimates of Martian water makes astrobiologists more hopeful.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden: "NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form, and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration."
COMMENT: I can't help asking if Mr. Bolden forgot, or wants us to forget, that there is no record of him protesting when his boss killed our program to put humans on Mars.

PRIMEVAL: latest take on sasquatch in fiction

I love David Golemon's Event Group thrillers, in part because I wish I'd invented the concept of a secret government "historical recovery" team myself. Primeval, the latest, gives an unusual take on sasquatch. In Goleman's fiction, the squatches are neither the shy giants of most novels (like Murphy's Where Legends Roam) or the vengeance-wreakers of Hanson's Shadowkiller. His descendants of Gigantopitchecus (misspelled throughout, which is really weird because Goleman's research is usually good), are huge and generally keep to themselves, but they also keep an eye on the human world. They are very intelligent, able to camouflage themselves well, and will band together to wreak havoc on any intruders of their remote Alaskan fastness. The "sky burials" of their dead, a concept borrowed from Native American tribes, is interesting but makes me wonder why no one on Google Earth ever noticed thousands of huge corpses rotting in treetops. (Another nitpick: I won't spoil the details, but the secret bombing mission he describes to set the action in motion would never have gotten off the ground with its payload.)
Don't let the nitpicks turn you off, though. The Event Group novels are fast-moving fun with a lot of suspense and good ideas. Enjoy.

Why sasquatches don't photograph well

If there is an unclassified American ape, then we ought to have better footage than we do. Even if the Patterson-Gimlin film of 1967, considered the gold standard by those pursuing sasquatch, is genuine, the millions of camcorders and smartphones in the USA should have yielded something better than an endless array of "blobsquatch" images. (Someone suggested that the cameras are fine, but the sasquatches are blurry.)
This author makes the case that images of a smart, shy animal that normally avoids humans are very hard to get. There are only a few sasquatch hunters in the field at any time, and people who meet a huge animal by accident are likely to be too startled to reach for a camera.
You can draw an analogy with pumas: we know there are thousands, but good photos or videos from surprise encounters are very rare. (I think that's better than the anology about drive-by shootings the author emphasizes, given that there's an active intimidation element behind the rarity of drive-by footage.)
I'm not entirely convinced (think of the millions of birders who wander out with cameras, for example), but this is a well-reasoned argument.

Lizards - smarter than you think

You don't normally think of lizards as smart. OK, Godzilla figured out long ago that the Japanese military was impotent and he could attack Tokyo any time he felt like it, but your ordinary garden lizard didn't have much going on between its scaly ears.
Turns out lizards can do some basic problem-solving for food, and they remember the problem presented with it again the next day. Puerto Rican anoles, once they worked out by trial and error a problem where food was hidden under one of two caps, each a different color, would remember what color worked for them, and would pick out the right one on the first try a day later.

Calling All Bats

We've long known some plants are pollinated by bats. If you're a plant, though, how do you attract the bats? Send up the Bat-Signal?
Well, sort of. In a marvelous example of how intricate the links between dissimilar organisms can be, the Caribbean plant Marcgravia evenia has evolved dish-shaped leaves that make it appear more prominent to a bat's sonar than other plants without such sound-reflecting technology.
Evolutionary biology tells us that this is natural selection in action: plants whose leaves were more dish-shaped were more likely to be pollinated, and thus plants with that adaptation gradually displaced all other members of its species. It's not any less fascinating for being explainable, though.

Houston, we have oxygen

Oxygen molecules have to exist in space. Don't they? After all, oxygen is the tird-most abundant element in the universe, and it likes to form the O2 molecule. Astronomers always thought molecular oxygen was out there, but never found any.
Well, it was hiding, so it seems, in the constellation Orion, where the Herschel space telescope finally found it. Researchers presume free-floating molecular oxygen hasn't been spotted in quantity until now, because it's locked in solid particles of dust or in ice, but the whole thing is still very puzzling: there should be a lot more such oxygen than what we can put our fingers on. At least now we know it's not a pointless search.

Of Monsters and Monstrous Misquotations

In case I forgotten to mention it, Dr. Darren Naish's peerless blog Tetrapod Zoology has moved to the Scientific American family (see title link). This naturally means a higher profile, which naturally means a higher risk of being misquoted. Here Darren protest a newspaper's misrepresentation which quoted him as supporting the existence of the Loch Ness Monster when he had no t even been talking about that subject. He'd been talking about accounts of sea serpents, a very different subject. Darren thinks the good evidence for Nessie is as elusive as the monster, but can't bring himself to dismiss some of the accounts from the high seas.

Wow, so much cosmic news

First, astronomers report (see title link) that Earth has a little advance scout. The WISE space telescope saw an asteroid, boringly named 2010 TK7, actually orbiting ahead of us in a Lagrange point, where gravitational forces keep it from coming withing 25 million kilometers of us. More such finds are expected. One expert said, "We think that there are others which will be very close to the Earth and have motions that make them relatively easy to reach. So, they could be potential targets to go to with spacecraft."

Next, this sounds like science fiction: a planet getting constantly showered with water from a nearby moon. But the planet is Saturn, the moon is the large ice-covered blob known as Enceladus, and this is actually happening. One researcher, Paul Hartogh, says, "There is no analogy to this behavior on Earth. No significant quantities of water enter our atmosphere from space. This is unique to Saturn."
http://earthsky.org/space/saturns-moon-rains-water-onto-saturn

Finally, what do you do with a $100B space station when it reaches the end of its planned life in 2020? Proposals abound, but for now the mulitnational coordinating board for the ISS is planning to take the safest course and deorbit it into the Pacific. Still, a lot can happen between now and then. It might yet be put to further use. We don't even know exactly what shape the most complex space habitat ever built will be in by then. It could hold up very well, or it could be uninhabitable. We'll find out.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43932956/ns/technology_and_science-space/

City species evolve at warp speed

We've all heard that bedbugs have, as a result of natural selection, been producing pesticide-resistant strains. What may be surprising is that all kinds of other species affected by human activity have responded with new variants, producing, among other things, genetically distinct populations of mice in New York city parks separated by urbanity. This island evolution has been acting with a speed and effectiveness which surprises biologists, who are increasingly studying the results. One of the most striking examples: tomcod in the Hudson River have evolved immunity to the deadly pollutants known as PCBs. None of this means it's OK now to go ahead and further trash the environment. It does mean the process of natural selection is even more effective than we thought, and the island effect has implications for all kinds of cut-off habitat situations. Mother Nature still has a surprise or two for us....

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A nebula of surpassing beauty

Sometimes, all you can do is wonder.

A great farewell Shuttle video

The entire history of the program in eight minutes. Breathtaking.

New Guinea yields flood of new species.

Between 1998 and 2008, a survey reports, over 1,000 new species were described from New Guinea.
A thousand. From one location. In one decade. Think we know all the creatures on this planet? Not by a long shot.
From the snubfin dolphin to the turquoise monitor to a new river shark to nearly 100 new orchids, There are two birds, 12 mammals, and 43 reptiles.
It's a world of wonders out there beyond the air conditioning....