Intriguing report from Indonesia

I blogged earlier about an expedition from the Centre for Fortean Zoology headed for the Indoensian island of Sumatra. They were looking for the orang-pendek, a primate which, as cryptozoological topics go, is highly respectable, even if the evidence still falls short of what's needed to publish a description.

An expedition member named Dave Archer and a local guide named Sahar are certain they spotted the animal from behind as it sat in a tree. It was broad-shouldered, about 110 cm from the waist to the top of the head (they measured the tree it had been sitting in after it jumped down and escaped), dark brown and had a "heavy coat like a mountain gorilla's" This sounds a bit off from the average orang-pendek description (it's often called reddish), but doesn't fit any of Sumatra's known primates either. What elevates this report over just another sighting is that the expedition gathered both hairs and a piece of rattan the ape was chewing on, which would be expected to yeild DNA. Clear footprints were also photographed. Stay tuned.

COMMENT: Something that will raise a red flag with some scientists is that, as seems peculiarly common in cryptid sightings, no photograph was taken. In this case, Dave Archer had a camera but was trying to get to a better viewpoint before using it, and the animal didn't cooperate. If DNA is recovered and properly analyzed, though, there won't be any doubt.

MicroSpace News: India launches 6 nanosats

Six nanosatellite payloads went into orbit along with India's 960-kg Oceansat-2 yesterday. Four are free-flyers, while two remain attached to the PSLV-C14 booster's upper stage, also in orbit. In a nice example of the international cooperation that has always been strong in the small-spacecraft community, Cubesat 1, 2, 3 and 4 and Rubin 9.1 and 9.2 were technology test payloads from European universities. They weigh from two to eight kg.

Water on the Moon!

NASA scientists studying results from a NASA instrument on an Indian lunar probe, combined with overlapping data sets from different instruments on two earlier NASA probes, have declared the evidence is very solid for water on the Moon. Water is concentrated near the poles and scattered in molecules throughout the surface material (regolith). A ton of lunar soil would yield about a liter of water, so there's no sense tyring to live off it. Still, while this is not enough water to support a human outpost, it is evidence of processes taking place to maintain water on one of the least likely habitats imaginable.

Oh, and while we're at it: new evidence of more ice on Mars! (Where there might actually be enough to provide some support to a long-term stay by H. sapiens). We knew there was water there, but water ice exposed by meteor impacts at mid-latitudes expands the known resources of the Red Planet.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/news/mro-20090924r.html

Can life evolve backwards?

Science fiction writers have often played with the idea that life, under the right conditions, can evolve backward into an ancestral form. Biologists have been fascinated by this, too, but it's hard to test. Now an American scientific team has found a way to examine it on the molecular level, looking at the proteins and receptors needed to build a life form, and the answer is a qualified "no." Over time, "genetic blockades" develop that appear to forbid any backwards steps.
COMMENT: It's not clear, at least to me, whether this is a hard rule at the organism level - could an organism evolve ways around these blocks? It would no longer be precisely the ancestral organism, of course. Speculation is always fascinating...

Science: Breakthroughs on the Basics

This is an interesting article about how things we thought we understood can throw us a scientific curve when we examine them closely.
One team at MIT looked at the molecular structure of concrete, which everyone assumed was crystalline. It's not: it's part crystal and part an "amorphous frozen liquid." You'd think we had studied the basics of concrete at some point since the Romans invented it, but it turns out no one has. We knew how it worked, we used it, and no one, apparently, saw the value in breaking it down further. Now that we have, it'll be much easier to develop variations on the forumula to produce better concrete for particular applications.
Likewise, what can be magnetized? Well, a lot of solids can. But could a gas be made to act like a magnet? The thought seems silly - but the answer is yes.
Science will never reach its end. There will always be new discoveries - if someone puts the effort into looking in odd or presumably-solved problems like these.

Radical proposal: Let Pandas Go Extinct

British wildlife expert Chris Packham says we've devoted too much money to captive breeding of pandas and not enough to habitat conservation - to the point where there's not enough wild habitat left to sustain the species, and we should just let the animal go.

The point has been made before about how charismatic species suck up most of the resources available for conservation, and the degree of effort which should be devoted to captive breeding is the subject of never-ending debate. However, it is because of the charismatic species that habitat often gets conserved. And the symbolism of letting the panda go extinct is unthinkable - if we can't save the world's most beloved mammal, is there any hope for the bugs?

A couple of data points: The California condor was saved from certain extinction by captive breeding and is now re-established in the wild. The ivory-bill sighting a few years ago led to a big tract in Arkansas being conserved. Even though I fear we have lost the fight for the ivory-bill (if I had to bet, I'd say a few are still alive, but not a viable population), the mere possibility of its survival led to the saving of important habitat for countless species.

So, my response to Chris is: NO WAY. We need the panda. We need it to be a success story like the condor and the bald eagle and the whooping crane. We may not be able to save every species, but we're committed on this one. May the panda live forever!

Review: Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob Dunn (Smithsonian, 2008)

This is a book that does what great science writing is supposed to do - explain the universe while enthralling the reader. In exploring how the definitions and scope of the living world have been expanded over and over again by dedicated researchers, Rob Dunn gives us compelling portraits of biological scientists who have proposed "crazy" theories, made inconvenient observations, and otherwise risked their reputations and sometimes their lives in the pursuit of knowledge. Dunn shows that, while being laughed at by a majority of one's scientific colleagues is no guarantee of being right, it's far from a surefire indicator of being wrong.
One of the themes I push hard in my blog and my books on zoological discoveries and mysteries is that we don't know all the animals in the world, not by a long shot, and it's not just the little arthropods that are still being discovered. Dunn explores this theme and many related ones here. He anchors the book in his own experiences in the Amazon, where no one has any idea of the number of animal and plant species present, let alone what to name them. (He also passes along the intriguing story of what may be an unknown and very large type of spider monkey, which is intriguing because cryptozoologists have collected numerous reports of something with the same description.)
Dunn closes with the fascinating discoveries being made in the "deep biosphere" - the microbes that live miles beneath the Earth. Life on the surface, he notes, may in some ways be the exception.
This is a profound work, not just concerning the biological sciences, but concerning science as an enterprise.

US space budgets show slight increase

The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) has a snapshot of the President's Budget (PB) requests for the three major U.S. space budgets: NASA, DoD, and NOAA. For FY10, it's not bad - NASA up 5%, NOAA 2.5%, Defense 3%. The AIA applauds this but warns about the flat NASA budgets after 2010. Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) would get $112 million - up $2M over the FY09 request, but down $74M from what Congress appropriated last year.

Japan's new transfer vehicle makes it to ISS

In another step forward for space cooperation, Japan's H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), an unmanned resupply craft, is docked with the International Space Station. The HTV, a one-time-use craft which brings material up to the station and then incinerates in the atmosphere after being loaded with ISS trash, was captured by an American astronaut using a Canadian-built robot arm. See the title link for some very cool video.

Speaking of Star Trek

Here, up for auction, is the seemingly ancient Macintosh Plus Apple Computer gave to Trek creator Gene Rodenberry. This is upgraded from the basic 128K model, so who knows what wonders it could perform? Assuming you can still find any software for it, of course.

"640K of RAM is enough for anybody." - Bill Gates

Another step toward the holodeck

Japanese engineers have developed holograms that respond - or appear to respond - to human touch. Using ultrasound to track the movement of the human hand involved, their system makes the hologram respond as though it were a physical object being handled directly. The creators say they can visualize numerous practical applications in letting humans operate cotnrols without actually having to be in contact with their machines. Star Trek fans, of course, will see it as one small step toward the series' holodeck. The holodeck is an extremely difficult, maybe impossible, technolgy, but you never know what those clever Earthers will come up with.

I'll be a little more erratic than usual this week

This is "move our daughter to college in another state while parents cry a lot" week. So I may be less than perfect at keeping up on science and technology.

Reading this new book. Great, great book on the origins and classification of life, and the people who have devoted their lives to understanding it.

Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob Dunn

Another step in space cooperation

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency signed a new accord to cooperate on civil space exploration. Since it's easy to find news about NASA and the U.S. space leadership, I'll use this space to quote our international partner, CSA President Steve MacLean: "The United States has been a critical partner for Canada ever since the launch of the Alouette-1 satellite in 1962. From these early beginnings, we have worked together to forge a space alliance that has become a catalyst, driving generations of space expertise, innovation, science, and technological excellence through our participation in space projects that continue to serve the interests of both our nations."

Cryptozoology Museum opening

Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum, for a long time housed in his home, is moving to a dedicated location in downtown Portland, Maine and will open November 1. This is great news. Coleman has gathered thousands of artifacts, books, and other materials in this one-of-a-kind collection. (Examples: the 3.5-meter pterodactyl from the TV series Freakylinks and a life-size Sasquatch, along with a life-sized model of a coelacanth, the Museum's totemic animal.) I hope everyone will consider giving the Museum financial support. It doesn't matter whether you think cryptozoology is an exciting new science, an idiotic waste of time, or something in between. This is a collection about an enduring mystery of science and a topic of interest to millions of people. It the Museum ever fails, this collection will be scattered, and I don't see how it could ever be brought together again. Kudos to Loren for the many years of dedicated work it took to make this happen.

UPDATE: Loren asked me to add the musuem link for donations. Happy to. And, yes, I'm putting my own money where my blog is.
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/icm/

Ever seen a pink grasshopper?

Eleven-year-old English schoolboy Daniel Tate found exactly that in Devon. And it's not pinkish. It's bright, flaring, Pepto-Bismol pink. It's amazing this extremely rare mutation of a common species ever made it to near-adulthood.

COMMENT: Genes are like a deck of millions of cards - sometimes they just fall funny. Still, I can't help forming this mental picture of God in a whimsical mood, pulling a paintbrush out of thin air and saying, "Let's see if anybody notices."

THANKS to Andrew Gable for posting this link on Facebook.

Speaking of ocean mysteries...

There's a promising new tool on the way to explore them: a two-person submersible able to reach even the very bottom of the deepest ocean trenches. Since Deep Flight II is expected to be much lighter than older deep-diving submersibles, it won't need a heavily modified launch ship like the famous Alvin does. Here's hoping it works as well as advertised.

Some thought about "sea serpents"

There was an interesting exchange on one of the cryptozoology lists about whether there are surviving prehistoric whales (Basilosuarus sp.) and/or other large, spectacular marine animals still undiscovered. A summary of my inputs on this:

I do believe there is at least one, and maybe two, species of large marine animal behind the hard-to-explain "sea serpent" reports. The one I am quite certain of is a huge eel or eel-shaped fish. The less certain one is a long-necked type that is most likely a large unknown seal or sea lion. I think the usual factors of mistake, exaggeration, etc., combined with sexual and perhaps geographic differences, in these two species would account for enough of the more convincing "sea serpent" reports so as to explain the whole business.

I don't agree with those scientists, eminent though they are, who consign said "whole business" to legend. There are just too many impressive reports by ship's officers and other witnesses who, if they were not marine biologists (and remember that Messrs. Nicoll and Meade-Waldo, famous for a clear sighting in 1905, were in fact well-qualified biologists), could still be relied on to know a whale from a giant elongated "something." We know from well-qualified observers there are at least two species of beaked whales for which we have no specimen and no scientific name. The ocean is still a big place.

There are cryptozoologists, some more qualified scientifically than I am, who argue that several animals are evidenced by the sighting reports. I have difficulty, though, with the idea that a plesiosaur, a long-necked pinniped, a basilosaur, a giant crocodile and a mosasaur are still out there. The body of sea-serpent reports convinces me at least one animal must be undiscovered, but does not convince me that several types of such animals remain unknown to science. Not with no unquestionable bodies found, no post-Mesozoic fossil records verifiable, no specimens having swum into fishing nets, none ever being harpooned (and only a couple even spotted) by whalers, etc. (Allegedly lost, misidentified, or "suppressed" evidence is not worth anything as evidence, because it doesn't matter why we don't have it. All that matters is that we do or do not have it. And a report of a carcass found and lost is no stronger or weaker evidence than an individual sighting report. It is a sighting report, it's just of a dead animal.)

(As an aside, it's actually a bit odd how the vertebrate world seems to have almost given up on long necks. A few mammals, a few turtles, no other reptiles, no amphibians. Only the dinosaurian-derived birds seem to put much stock in long necks anymore.)

Science follows (or should follow) where the evidence leads, without preconceptions. The question is how strong the evidence is, and, unless you've got a carcass in your office, there's no avoiding some degree of subjective judgment on that. The probability of discovery does factor into that judgment. If we had, for example, several seemingly good accounts of 21st century mammoths in North America, I'd still discount them, because the chance of the animals remaining hidden until now is so close to zero. The chance that science has missed every one of several breeding populations of large bipedal primates on four continents (N America, S America, Europe, and Australia) (and on most of Asia), a position held seriously by some experienced cryptozoologists, likewise seems to me very close to zero. I think we will find at least one (Sumatra's orang-pendek), and one or two others are at least possible. But not a whole zoo of them.

Since this is my blog, let me toss in my opinon about the recurring belief of some cryptozoologists that evidence once reported and now unavailable may have been "suppressed by science." I'm not saying that all evidence is viewed dispassionately and treated properly. Let's say a paleontologist finds a plesiosaur vertebra that appears only 20M years old, when the established wisdom is that all such animals died out 60M years ago. I could imagine her talking herself out of publishing about it because there's such a strongly established body of thinking behind the 60M year date. She may think "It must be my mistake" or "I'm not putting this out there unless I have a dozen more like it and three other paleontologists who have duplicated my dating results and will say so in print."

A scientist with a dead plesiosaur (or whatever form of "sea monster") in his museum is another thing. A recent carcass will hold up to any storm of criticism or ridicule while making the discoverer famous for all time. I'm quite firmly convinced that no dead sea monsters (or sasquatches or Homo erectus specimens or whatever) are stuffed in vaults because someone found them inconvenient.

All that said, there are still compelling zoological mysteries still to be solved. I hope we will solve them. I won't be disappointed, though, if there are some we never do. I think that's good for us.

Hubble's deeper view of our universe

After this year's repairs by adventurous (and dexterous) astronauts, the Hubble Space Telescope has brought in a stunning array of new views of the universe. My first reaction to some of these was to add the caption, "God's Christmas ornaments decorating the cosmos."

Augustine Commission: to Mars, eventually

The summary of the Augustine Commission report is in, and the panelists thought NASA's plan for a near-term return to the Moon was (depressingly, but not surprisingly) unaffordable on politically realistic budgets. The Commission suggested NASA let private industry increasingly take over the Earth-to-orbit portion of the space business while the agency develops cutting-edge technology and pursues a "flexible" strategy for human spaceflight. The eventual goal for humans would be Mars, but the steps and timelines would develop gradually, as technology allowed. The Commission felt NASA's Ares I booster program was unlikely to provide enough value in this private/public mix to be worth continuing.
COMMENT: It will be very interesting to see how the Obama administration and new NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden will factor this report into the real world - directives and budgets. Personal opinion: I'd expect the Administration to interpret "flexible" as "keep the budgets flat." That doesn't mean no good will come of this. The cancellation of Ares and the increased contracting out may - may - mean more money for science missions (an Administration priority), a broader space technology base, and the kind of technological advances needed for missions to Near Earth Asteroids, Mars, and other destinations. Like I said, it'll be interesting.

Giant rat discovered

An expedition filming a BBC documentary series, Lost Land of the Volcano, discovered a new species of enormous rat in Papua New Guinea. The 1.5 kg animal is 82cm long, making it one of the largest true rats - if not the largest - in the world. The species, known informally as the Bosavi woolly rat, awaits its formal description.

The quest for the Orang-pendek

Press release from Britain's Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ):

"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2009-09-07
BRITISH SCIENTISTS IN SEARCH FOR THE INDONESIAN 'YETI'
A group of British explorers and scientists from the Devon based Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ), the world's largest mystery animal research organisation, are about to embark on an expedition in search of a yeti-like creature in Indonesia. The four-man team will search the jungles of Sumatra for what locals call the 'orang-pendek'. The powerfully built, upright-walking beast may be related to both the orang-utan and the much larger yeti of mainland Asia. In the same island chain remains of the tiny hominid known as Homo floresiensis were unearthed in 2003.
The Kubu people - an ancient race who were the first inhabitants of Sumatra - will aid the team. The tribe and their chief have seen the creature in their poorly explored jungle homelands.
Westerners have sighted the orang-pendek too, including Englishwoman Debbie Martyr, now head of the Indonesian tiger conservation group, and wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden.
You can follow the group's adventures on line at the CFZ website on www.cfz.org.uk."


COMMENT: The orang-pendek is very respectable as cryptozoological quests go, and has been remarked upon by "mainstream" experts as intriguing. I've corresponded with conservationist Debbie Martyr, internationally known for her tiger work, and she is certain of her sightings of an animal larger than the local gibbons and habitually bipedal. The only photograph is too blurry to be widely accepted, but there is good reason to believe the animal will be found - if not by this expedition, then sooner or later. Martyr fears for the species in the face of widespread illegal logging, though. So good luck to Freeman and company!

Mars still beckons us

What Ray Bradbury calls "homestead Mars" is still the right long-term goal for humanity, according to a new NASA report. (This is not to be confused with the Augustine Commission report on human spaceflight programs, which is leaking out all over the place but not yet final.) The report's conclusion is that, even though we will not go to Mars (or anywhere else) on the optimistic schedule proposed a few years back in the Vision for Space Exploration, it should remain our eventual goal to set human footprints on the Red Planet.
"NASA must remain the world leader in human spaceflight and lead humankind to prepare for missions to Mars. We are going to Mars because it is civilization's next major challenge."
COMMENT: There is something, even if romantic, which calls us to the only other world in the solar system that might host and sustain a human population. We should not overlook other goals and other needs, and we should continue the wildly successful robotic exploration of Mars and other worlds. Still, there is something that standing on another planet will teach us about the universe and ourselves. Getting there has to be a gradual process, constrained by the real world of technology development and budgets, but the report is right: we need a goal for the long term, and Mars will wait for us.
Someone once proposed this:
"Would you sign up for a mission to explore Mars if you knew it would take two years and you'd have a twenty percent chance of not returning?"
My response:
"Where do I sign up?"

"I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go." - Captain James Cook

This one looks worth reading

I've not gotten ahold of it yet, but here's a review of what looks like a fascinating new book on how we perceive and name the creatures around us. The book is called Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, and the author is the always-worth-reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009)

More wonders from down under

WWF Australia is releasing a new report on discoveries of fauna and flora in a continent still not completely known. A large bat, the snubfin dolphin, a carnivorous pitcher plant that grows a meter high, a new possum - all kinds of interesting new species are popping up.
There are still mysteries about the larger ground fauna of Australia, too. There are, without question, confirmed sightings of some sort of large feline-looking predator which may be a population of cougars bred from abandoned animals imported from the U.S. There is the continuing mystery of the yarri, a large marsupial predator, and persistent reports of surviving thylacines, which were supposedly out-competed on the Australian mainland by the human-introduced dingo thousands of years ago.

Apollo 12 landing site - great image

This image taken from lunar orbit shows everything on the Apollo 12 landing site - the descent stage of the Lunar Module Intrepid, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, the old Surveyor probe the astronauts visited, and preserved on the airless Moon, the unmistakable trails made by the walking astronauts.
It won't kill the "moon hoax" claims, but, in a rational world, it would.

Evolution tells us how, but why remains fuzzy

An interested exchange of dueling thought on science and religion.
First came Robert Wright with his book The Evolution of God, applying psychology and game theory to examine our evolving idea of the divine.
Then came biologist Jerry Coyne with a sharply negative review in The New Republic, saying essentially that Wright's book was pointless because the very idea that a divinity was at work in the universe had been disproved by science.
Here Jim Manzi argues back: "The theory of evolution, then, has not eliminated the problems of ultimate origins and ultimate purpose with respect to the development of organisms; it has ignored them."
In other words, we are learning more every day about the HOW, but science can't tell us the WHY, and can't prove or disprove the existence of a WHY.
COMMENT: I'm with Manzi here. I didn't find Coyne's argument or Richard Dawkins' famous bestseller "disproving" God convincing. Dawkins argued convincingly that God as Dawkins defined Him did not appear to exist, but that's not the same thing.

New species: the view from Sikkim

One of the things I like most about the internet is the way it lets me scan news sources from around the world and get the local angle on stories that I'd otherwise see only through the prism of major global news outlets - or miss out on altogether.
I mentioned the WWF report a little while ago that showed 353 new species of plants and animals from the eastern Himalayan region. Here, the Press Trust of India reports that Sikkim is "the country's richest state in terms of biodiversity." Nineteen of the new species are found in Sikkim, including five orchids and three fish.

P.S. Also today, I see we have three new frogs from Peru:
http://www.livinginperu.com/news/9985

New Species from a dark world

Beneath Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands, is the world's longest known underwater lava tube, stretching more than 1.5km. It's no surprise that an environment as strange as the Tunnel de la Atlantida should harbor new species. A recent dive netted three, all of them eyeless: two tiny worms and a 2.5cm-long crustacean from the primitive group known as remipedes. The crustacean is almost transparent and is equipped with poison fangs.
COMMENT: These animals may seem insignificant, but the point is that we find new species everywhere we look: on land, in the seas, underground, in caves, etc. The explosion of life that began so long ago reached all over the globe, into every place life could exist (and some, like seafloor vents gushing superhot, mineral-laden water, where we would have thought it could not exist.)

Why do some things evolve, and some don't?

This question popped into my head when a cryptozoology group host, anthropologist Dale Drinnon, relayed a report about Mongolia's "death worm," reportedly some kind of burrowing animal with a lethal electrical charge. I suggested there might be an undescribed species of burrowing snake, presumably venomous, with a lot of exaggeration and myth added to it. Dale speculated that it would only take one case of a startled person being bitten by a snake and dropping of a heart attack to create folklore about the snake having something more potent than venom.

Cryptozoology in general invites a lot of fun speculation about what has evolved, what has not, and why.

In this example, we don't know of any wholly terrestrial animals of any kind which can use electricity as a defense system or weapon. This may be due entirely to the inefficiency of earth and air as transmission mediums, or also to the fact that electrical sensing apparatus is likewise most useful in water, and this is what electrical weapons or defense systems evolved from.

I like to think about these things in quasi-engineering terms. Evolution is a clumsy engineer that goes off in a lot of unproductive directions and takes seemingly forever to get on the right track (also true of some human engineers), but eventually comes up with ingenious solutions. Sharks in particular have always struck me as beautifully integrated weapon systems, with powerful armament, a striking array of sensors, and various other adaptations all packaged in a streamlined, damage-resistant skin. (As a Christian, I think the eventual rise of an intelligent, self-aware being with a sense of spirituality may be somehow inherent in all evolutionary systems which run for a long enough time, but that's irrelevant here.)

To think about electricity again, an electric eel's weapon system is a terrific dual-purpose (offense and defense) gadget, although there's a cost in giving over much of the body mass to "storage batteries" and keeping them charged. I wonder that no animal ever evolved an extendable electric weapon - an octopus could use a specialized tentacle (or equip the tips of all its tentacles, with the batteries mostly in the body) for offense or defense. It may be that powerful electric cells are something so specialized and complex that, even with the hundreds of millions of years multicelled animals have had to multiply, mutate, and adapt, such cells evolved only once, in the bony fishes.

I've read several attempts at explaining why mammals haven't evolved green fur, seeing as how it would be useful in many environments, and it sort of comes down to "Well, it just hasn't happened yet." The genetic cards have just not fallen, so far, into a set that would yield green fur. Or maybe such a mutation did happen, but the animal lived in rocky terrain and the color was a disadvantage. If we found a green mammal, there would be a lot of buzz about it, but no serious damage to current thinking on mammalian biology or evolution.

I once sparked an interesting discussion on the National Association of Science Writers group by pondering why there are no six-legged vertebrates (including no cases of three paired limbs in fishes). Six legs could come in handy in endeavours like climbing trees, and would increase survivability if a limb was lost. The consensus of the considerable brainpower in that group was that, for a vertebrate, unlike a small arthropod, growing and maintaining a limb is a major investment, and the advantages just weren't worth it. You might say that spider monkeys hit on a compromise by developing a prehensile tail functionally equivalent to a fifth limb.

(And while we're at it, why no color-changing mammals?)

Another cartoon: Science news cycle

Brilliant and sad.

Science reporting in two cartoon panels

As a two-panel summary of how science news gets reported, this is masterful.

(Yes, there is a further link to a full six-panel version, but I think the two-panel exerpt is actually better. There's something to be said for conciseness.)

Our first look at a molecule

IBM researchers using an atomic force microscope have given us our first close-up image of an individual molecule. This is a molecule of pentacene, a compound used in making solar cells whose molecules include 14 atoms of hydrogen and 22 of carbon.
COMMENT: One of the interesting things is how close common physical models are to the actual image. We humans are impressively good at figuring things out when we want to.

Finding the missing birds

The conservation organization BirdLife International has taken up a new cause - searching for 47 species of birds that dwell in the twilight of uncertainly. These are birds which have not seen seen in years and may or may not be extinct. BirdLife wants to nail down their status so scientists can either help the species recover or sadly write it off. The list includes famous avians like the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and its even more spectacular cousin, Mexico's Imperial Woodpecker, Bachman's Warbler, the Eskimo Curlew, and the Pink-headed Duck, along with other birds whose fate puzzles ornithologists, such as the Jamaican Petrel, Hooded Seedeater, and Himalayan Quail.

Naturalist Charles William Beebe once said, "The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed. A vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer. But when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."
That's why the search goes on.

Salute to the Shuttle

The space shuttle Discovery, after two delays which remind us that this technology, while marvelous, is getting old and cranky, blasted off Friday for the ISS. NASA reports no foam was seen coming off the External Tank, so that's a good start to the mission. Aboard is a treadmill named for comic Stephen Colbert, one of NASA's more clever bits of PR after Colbert-lovers flooded a poll about what to name the newest module on the ISS. The module became Tranquility, while the treadmill (vital for zero-G exercise) became the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).

Blogging the Universe

Dr. Jeff's Blog on the Universe is meant to inspire students, teachers and parents to explore science and the universe. There are news items, quizzes, commentaries, and much more. My favorite feature in this rich site is "Teachable Moments in the News." Go check it out.

Extinct birds rediscovered

Beck's petrel, a species not confirmed in the wild since the 1920s has been found alive. The announcement was made based on the study of photographs taken of some 30 birds in the summer of 2008 by an Israeli ornithologist, who also collected one dead specimen. The bird was spotted in the Bismarck Archipelago, a group of islands famous in World War II as a battle site in the southwestern Pacific.


Meanwhile, the Tasman booby was also thought extinct. British scientists investigating its case didn't find live birds, but they did nail down the fact that it's not technically an extinct species because it was really a subspecies of something else all along. As Dr. Tammy Steeves put it, ""What was once considered to be an extinct species, the Tasman booby (Sula tasmani), turns out be a subspecies of a living species, the masked booby (Sula dactylatra fullagari). And now these charismatic seabirds have a new name - Sula dactylatra tasmani."
COMMENT: This is not nearly as much fun as announcing news of a new or rediscovered species, but it is important. Proper identification and taxonomy helps us decide where to concentrate our conservation efforts as well as telling us more about the evolution of all the bird populations involved in a case like this. The Tasman booby had some obvious physical differences from its shorter-winged relation, so the similarity of the DNA brings up interesting questions.
http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/extinct-seabird-rediscovered-laboratory/5/20789

THANKS TO Chad Arment for passing these links on to Dale Drinnon, who reported them in a crypto email list.

Another monster (fake but fun)

The head of the Sugar Flat Road monster is there for everyone to see in an antique shop window in Lebanon, TN. There's a brochure and a local mythology about it, although the apelike head itself fails to impress (most taxidermists can get teeth in straight, a d the skin looks like a bit like paper-mache, or at least not much like primate skin, in the available photo.)
COMMENT: There used to be more of these sorts of good-natured hoaxes scattered across the USA. I was delighted to learn this example is still around.


Blogger Brent K. Moore posted this item on his site, and anthropologist Dale Drinnon posted it to a cryptozoological mailing list, so thanks to both.

The Loch Ness Google Monster?

Has Google Earth captured the "Loch Ness Monster?" Well, the image shows an obvious boat, which some people have inexplicably called the monster. There is, though, to port and behind the boat, something odd-looking at or just under the surface of Scotland's most famous lake. Without either video or eyewitnesses, though, no one can tell whether it's part of an actively moving animal or is just drifting debris, the latter, sadly being the more likely.
COMMENT: I've about given up on Nessie, as the last three decades have failed to uncover any new type of evidence. Still, I don't think Tim Dinsdale's 1960 film has ever been satisfactorily explained (it's either a big creature or a boat, but various enhancements and enlargements have failed to bring out any telltale boat features), and some of the sonar recordings are puzzling. So the file is almost closed... but not quite.

South Korea's space launch - still a partial success

South Korea's first attempt at orbiting a satellite was mixed bag. The Naro-1 launcher, a joint project with the Russian firm Khrunichev, worked well, but the satellite was released late and missed orbit. Disappointing, but it's still a step toward the indigenous space capability the nation is building.

NASA knows how the Koreans feel, as today's Shuttle launch was scrubbed due to a bad hydrogen fill/drain valve.

Who's tops at evolution?

If you measure evolutionary success by what group produces the most new species at the fastest rate, the mammals and the birds win. One group of fishes stands (so to speak) on the podium as well.
Scientists who studied animal divergence report that crocodiles have had 250M years to diverge and produced only 23 species, while mammals have produced over 5,000 species in less than half that time. The study leader commented that it's a mystery "Why these evolutionary losers are still around."
COMMENT: WHat I take away from this is that evolution is tricky, messy, and complicated. For all we know, some of the "losers" may be around long after we furry creatures have passed from the scene.

Depicting the extinct

This is an interesting example of the question of how ancient beasts are reconstructed and how they are depicted, both in science and in popular culture. In this column from Cryptomundo, the specific example is whether the giant marine reptile Tylosaurus had any form of crest running down its back. Early paleontologists thought they saw evidence of a low crest, and depicted the animal that way. Later artists sometimes increased the size of the crest, mainly because it made the beast look more like that powerful creature of myth, the dragon. Modern paleontologists think any evidence for crests was misinterpreted, and they now depict Tylosaurus with a featureless back. Without an actual Tylosaurus, though, we don't know if that's precisely correct either.

Who killed the giant grizzly?

A reward is being offered by the US Fish and Wildlife service for the poacher who killed the grizzly bear believed to be the largest in Montana. Maximus, as he was commonly known, weighed over 800 pounds, vs. the average for Montana grizzlies of 600 pounds. While an 800-pounder wouldn't win the Ursus arctos heavyweight title in Alaska, Max was a monster by Lower 48 standards. He was only 11-12 years old and had plenty of time left to add more of his obviously robust genes to the pool supporting his endangered species.
COMMENT: FWS says they found the body - meaning someone just shot Maximus and left him there. Sometimes being a member of Homo sapiens is nothing to crow about.

New Air & Space is really cool

Every issue of Air & Space is good, but the new one is especially cool for aviation buffs. X-planes, the best and worst ideas in aviation, the quest for the 250-knot helicopter - heck, the cover alone is worth the price.

Weird "green bomber" sea worm

A new marine worm discovered off California has been given a really cool scientific name: Swima bombiviridis , the "swimming green bomber." The animal (the first species in a new genus - others have been spotted) can distract predators by casing off small blobs of tissue that glow green - starting to glow only after being separated from the main creature. Ranging from two to nine centimeters long, the worms are found at depths of 1,800 to 3,700 meters.
COMMENT: There are more species, especially invertebrates, in the oceans that we do not know than that we do. The age of deep-sea exploration is still just beginning.

Florida's "Muck Monster"

This video from the lagoon near Lake Worth, FL, shows an unidentified creature being referred to locally as "the Muck Monster." It's a sizable animal that remains almost entirely under the surface. A Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission marine biologist hesitated to venture a guess.
COMMENT: A commenter on this website suggested a large ray, and that might be right. Anything that gets people looking at the seas and wondering, though, has a good side. And we don't KNOW it's a ray....

Happy anniversary - to a fossil find

It's the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Burgess Shale - a formation so filled with fossils that its study led to our understanding of the evolutionary flowering known as the "Cambrian Explosion." Our understanding has evolved over the years, and is still evolving. Some earlier conclusions (including some cataloged in Gould's book Wonderful Life) have changed, but not the importance of the find itself.

MicroSpace News: Conference on Small Satellites

Well, another Smallsat has come and gone. I was only able to spend one day this year, but that was enough to get the feeling of camaraderie that always makes it such a pleasant experience. Our keynote speaker from the Army challenged small-satellite enthusiasts to prove their preferred solution for military tactical intelligence and communications needs (small satellites, of course) was sompetitive or superior to the options of UAVs and airships.My presentation on DARPA's fractionated architecture (F6) project went very well. Thanks to Pat, Jaimie, Yvonne, and all the rest of the USU/Space Dynamics Lab crew who did their usual super job in arranging this meeting!

NASA works on space reactor

NASA, in cooperation with the DOE, is moving ahead with technology testing under NASA's Surface Nuclear Power program. This is intended to produce a relatively small, low-maintenance, durable, and safe fission reactor to power a lunar base. NASA Glenn Research Center engineers are using a Stirling engine generating electricity from the heat provided by a liquid metal working fluid, which will be heated by the fission reactor.
COMMENT: Long-term space exploration, especially human exploration, doesn't work without nuclear energy. Some form of fission or (eventually) fusion reactors must provide stable power where solar energy is insufficient (that is, for any sizable base or spacecraft on Mars or beyond) or unreliable (lunar darkness lasts two weeks, and Martian dust storms are nasty). I understand concerns about nuclear power, but this isn't the 1960s. Our ability to build, launch, and operate nuclear systems safely has advanced enormously, and we have to deal with the fact that there just isn't an equivalent source of power for these kinds of missions.

THANKS TO Larry Klaes for sending this link via the fpspace email group.

A new theory of everything?

Ever since we humans came up with the idea of quantum mechanics, we've had trouble conceptualizing it in a way that made any sense. An especially difficult aspect of quantum theory is superposition: the idea that a particle can be in more than one state at a time. The Invariant Set Postulate, suggested by Tim Palmer, says the problem isn't that the particle can actually be in two states at once, any more than Schrodinger's cat can be both dead and alive: the problem is that we don't have the right framework to perceive what state it's in. However, everything does fall into reality and nonreality, according to his postulate, with the former (the "Invariant Set," since everything in it has, and always has been, real) a subset of all possible realities.
COMMENT: It's not clear yet whether this is a law or even a testable theory, since Palmer doesn't suggest any experimental way to verify whether there are or are not states of reality outside the invariant one we can perceive. (I think I got that right.) But, according to this article, the idea may still nudge us closer to the Holy Grail of science, a unified theory of physics. To me, it's just fascinating that human brains can come up with this stuff.

THANKS TO Dr. Jennifer Stapleton-Kotloski for sending this item.

Ares and the future of Marshall Space Flight Center

This article is one of many right now reporting that the Augustine Commission recommendations, which are leaking out all over the place, will doom the Ares-I booster intended to loft the new Orion capsule. As readers know, I never liked the damn thing, and its shortcomings have already caused the Orion's capabilities and capacity to be slashed, so I won't be sorry if it dies. (I will be sorry, of course, about the money poured into it already, but I'm not a believer in the "sunk cost" fallacy that says it always makes more sense to finish the program you began.) As the article points out, though, the rationale for the storied Marshall Space Flight Center, which got its start as the Army's home for Wernher von Braun and company, won't go away. There's plenty of work to do in advacing space propulsion.

Discovery and extinction

Writer Geoffrey Lean takes a rather extreme position regarding human-caused extinction - I've never read anything to suggest we'll lose half the species on the planet in the next century - but he has some interesting nuggets about discovery. In particular, he introduces the Smithsonian's Dr Kristofer Helgen, who has published full descriptions of 23 new mammals and has an astonishing 77 more in the pipeline. Helgen says, "Most people don't realise this, but we are smack-dab in the middle of the age of discovery for mammals."

Elephant teaches herself the harmonica

Seriously. What's amazing about this story is that the elephant in question, an English zoo inhabitant named Five, was not taught to play an instrument by humans in order to amuse the visitors. Someone left a harmonica within trunk range, and Five was toying with it and realized it made interesting noises. She kept experimenting on it and now does what the keepers, at least, call playing a tune.
COMMENT: This story, if it's accurate and not overhyped, raises some fascinating questions about what an elephant finds interesting and how "lower" mammals react to musical tones.

Houston, we have a shortfall.

The Augustine Commission created to examine options for human spaceflight is saying what everyone knew but most would not admit. With the current NASA budget, we're not going anywhere. Not the Moon. Not Mars. Nowhere beyond Earth orbit. Panelist Sally Ride, looking at the cost projections, said, "There was not enough money to even start the lunar systems."
A $3B/year plus-up for NASA, which has the same chance of happening under the current Administration and Congress as the stapler on my desk has of becoming a sentient life form, would put us on the Moon in 2025, five years later than the current schedule (which originally said 2018).

"Put out the stars.
Slam shut the teeming skies.
Abandon in place.
Burn out your eyes."
- from a poem by Ray Bradbudy on visiting the abandoned Apollo sites at KSC

Giant carnivorous plant discovered (seriously!)

From the Philippines comes news of a new species of pitcher plant: Nepenthes attenboroughii (after naturalist David Attenborough). According to its co-discoverer, "The plant is among the largest of all carnivorous plant species and produces spectacular traps as large as other species which catch not only insects, but also rodents as large as rats."
COMMENT: Almost big enough to catch the smallest deer! (previous post). OK, not really, but darn impressive. The inventiveness of nature is endless....

Smallest deer among new species

World Wildlife Fund scientists report that over 350 species have been discovered in the Himalayan region over the past ten years. While they include a gliding frog and two catfish which have evolved "sticky" bellies to cling to the bottoms of streams, the star is the miniature muntjac, a deer weighing just 11 kg and originally mistaken for a juvenile of a known species. Nepal's forest and soil conservation minister said a more thorough, systematic search of the region might find ten times as many species.

MIcroSpace News: Great videos from AMSAT-UK

Amateur satellite organizations (AMSAT) around the world have been active throughout the Space Age, up to and including building their own satellites and finding launches for them. Among new videos showing what the busy bees of AMSAT-UK have been up to:

"- FUNcube, the new AMSAT-UK linear transponder satellite project By Graham Shirville G3VZV
- AMSAT-NA Update By Drew Glasbrenner KO4MA
- AMSAT-DL Update By Peter Guelzow DB2OS
- Electronics and Teddy Bears: A Near-Space Adventure" By Ed Moore M0TEK and Fergus Noble M0NBL, Cambridge University Spaceflight
- Engineers Wanted! Tempting Teenagers to Explore Technology By Garry Bulmer, Software Architect
- Medium Earth Orbits By David Bowman G0MRF"

These chronicle presentations at the AMSAT-UK Colloquium in Guildford.

Jolly good show, chaps!

TWO DAYS TO THE CONFERENCE ON SMALL SATELLITES

T. rex stuck to small prey?

As I've said, all Tyrannosaur news is automatically considered cool. Even this article, which suggests the biggest theropods were not actually good at bringing down large prey. Two scientists argue that the paucity of fossils of young herbivores, compared to the large number of eggs that we know were laid, indicates predators were mowing down the youngsters. This and other evidence implies that even the biggest predators avoided the stupendous battles with adult Triceratops, Ankylosaurus, etc. in favor of small stuff they could gobble whole.

COMMENT: It all makes sense - to a point. Predators will chomp anything they can find - the more defenseless, the better, although with an appetite like that of an adult T. rex, there is some minimum size beyond which prey wouldn't be worth the effort.
Here are my (admittedly amateur) thoughts, though. My reaction to this theory is the same one I had to the arguments T. rex was primarily a scavenger. Either way, the damn thing is just over-equipped. Nature may make mistakes in the evolutionary process, but she doesn't turn out animals with greater size and more armament than needed - that would be wasteful. A predator six or seven meters tall, with a head the size of a Smartcar and serrated teeth as big as bananas, just doesn't seem logical unless the demands of getting a meal - the results of the constant "arms race" between predator and prey - required it to become that big and that well-equipped. The carnage among younger herbivores might well have been due to the smaller predators, like Velociraptor, as well as juveniles among Tyrannosaurus, Gigantosaurus, etc. What makes the most sense to me is still the idea that T. rex specialized in big prey.

Pterosaurs: good fliers after all?

The debate in paleontology over how good the "flying reptiles" (pterosaurs) were at actual flying has been long-running and sometimes fierce. New analysis of a well-preserved specimen from China indicates that networks of unique fibers in the animals' wings gave them the kind of precise control birds have today.
COMMENT: I doubt this one find will settle things. Even if the early species in this study was a good flier, were later and larger (including some MUCH larger) pterosaurs equally capable, or were some mainly gliders? Either way, pterosaurs will maintain their hold on the human imagination. Flying vertebrates the size of aircraft have a way of doing that.

More evidence "hobbits" were a separate species

A new study, the first to use a comparison technique called cladistic analysis, reports on the results of examining the bones of the Flores "hobbits." The result: Not only were the hobbits a separate species, but they diverged from our own far earlier than thought - perhaps 2 million years ago.
COMMENT: I understand why some anthropologists have been leery of accepting a new species when we have a key bone, the cranium, from only one individual. However, I think the debate is tipping toward the position this amateur has always held: that we have a fascinating new species of human on our hands.

Augustine Commission public meetings

The latest of the Augustine Commission's public meetings is being held in DC today. A lot of material, some of it from alleged insiders and some openly published, as been trickling out of the Commission's work - although what is popping up in the press has sometimes been contradictory. My problem with the several public meetings the Commission has held in various locations (overall, a good thing) is that, if you review the agenda for each meeting, 15 to 30 minutes is allocated for public comment. Fifteen minutes? What kind of meaningful comment are you going to get in a window like that? Remaining meetings of the Commission (scheduled to report out by 8/31) should be extended so there is at least an hour for members of the public (remember who is funding all this) to make comments.

Follow the Whale

How do you track bowhead whales that spend much of their time in remote, unobserved, icy waters? Answer: with a coalition of agencies deploying all the tools of modern technology, including sonar and satellite transmitters fired by air gun into the whale's wall of blubber. This is an interesting look at how scientists find out what an enigmatic animal (bowheads may be the longest-lived vertebrates on Earth) is up to.

2009: A Space Dud

The premiere of the new space adventure show Defying Gravity had a decent premise and some cool space scenery. Also, it had.... um, well, not much. One problem most space shows and films have is that it's too expensive to simulate everything being in zero gravity, and this show is not set far enough in the future to postulate any form of antigrav breakthrough. The idea of the space suit with some kind of magnetic nanofibers is probably as good a workaround as anyone could come up with, but why doesn't the astronauts' hair float? And the rest is soap opera. The good ship Antares and her mission are interesting, but her crew would never have been cleared for a space mission by the flight surgeons and head-shrinkers of any real agency. Junk it up with a birth-controlling government (which is relevant to what?) and a sinister space agency official (a knockoff of the James Cromwell character from Space Cowboys) and you have....some cool space scenery. Somebody deorbit this turkey soon.

While I'm on the August issue of WIRED...

There were a couple of other articles in this unusually compelling issue.

One is by Noah Shachtman on the auroral research facility called HAARP: it may have a lot of uses, and it's doing some very interesting things for science and the military. It is not anywhere near powerful enough to be the superweapon some conspiracy-watchers allege - but proponents contributed to the public-relations problem by making unrealistic weapons-related promises to military funding sources.

The other is Erin Biba's story on the revival of microbes tens of millions of years old. So far, they have not yielded medical breakthroughs, but prehistoric yeast still work for the important human endeavor of making beer.

WIRED weighs in on evolution's missteps

David Wolman in the August issue of WIRED has ten criticisms for Mother Nature. He thinks evolution misfired on, among other things, cetacean blowholes (a clumsy workaround for not evolving gills), giraffe births (that first step into the world is a doozy), and the inability of humans to digest cellulose. A fun little thought experiment. I always thought the inability of mammals to develop green fur was a strange oversight, given how useful it would be in forested environments.

Economist hosts debate on returning to the Moon

This should be interesting: a debate, hosted by the prestigious news magazine, on August 4, on whether to send humans back to the Moon. Click on the title link for details and to sign up for updates.

Soviet-era glider designed for Venus

Really. Space geeks (like me, only with engineering degrees) come up with all sorts of stuff.

New bald (yes, bald) songbird from Asia

Laos' bare-faced bulbul is the first bald songbird to be discovered in mainland Asia. Pycnonotus hualon is also the first Asian bulbul to be found in a century.

COMMENT: Peter Clyne of the Wildlife Conservation Society made an odd comment. He said, "To find a new bird species is very rare these days. It's not like we're finding new species of birds every year." Actually, Peter, we are adding new species every year: granted, it's just a few, but we are.

Biochemicals from dinosaur bone

What are actual chemical traces of protein fragments, or peptides, doing in a fossilized T. rex bone? That question led some paleontologists to reject a 2007 study claiming to have found surviving molecules of biochemicals. A reexamination, though, showed that the first report was correct. We do have traces of hemoglobin and collagen from an animal 68 million years old.
COMMENT: Any T. rex news is automatically cool.

Animals mix up ocean waters

Could all those animals in our planet's gigantic seas - from tiny plankton and krill to mighty (but relatively rare) whales - play a major role in how the waters themselves mix and move? It used to be no one thought so, but researchers studying jellies (a.k.a. jellyfish) report that we've apparently missed something important here. One said, "There are enough of these animals in the ocean that, on the whole, the global power input from this process is as much as a trillion watts of energy — comparable to that of wind forcing and tidal forcing."
COMMENT: Nature and its processes consistently prove to be more subtle and complex than we think - and that's important to keep in mind when we are making decisions on everything from pollution control to climate change.

New state of matter?

Scientific breakthroughs don't get much more intriguing than a claim of a whole new state of matter. Consider these statements from professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics: "What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before. Transparent aluminum is just the start." His "transparent aluminum" is transparent to extreme UV, not visible light the way it is in Star Trek, but it gives a clue as to just how odd the stuff Wark and his colleagues obtained by knocking electrons out of normal metal atoms with a high-power laser appears to be.

WhiteKnightTwo wows the crowds

Burt Rutan's latest creation made a dazzling public debut. One more step on the road to private space flight.

NY Times article on discovery of new species

The paper reports: "Since the last summary of the world’s mammals was published in 2005, tallying the roughly 5,400 mammalian species then known... an astounding 400 or so new species have been added to the list."

COMMENT: Not a surprise to those of us who follow this topic, but it will be to most people. As I have said so many times, there is much yet to be known about the zoological world.

First record of a Spotted deer with no spots

From the Parambikulam Wildlife Sanctuary in India's Sungam hills comes this item from an Indian newspaper. The spotted deer or cheetal is a common species, but it has always been, as the name describes, reddish with shite spots. Wildlife officials have confirmed the existence of a solid black cheetal. As far as those officials know, this is the first known instance of melanism in this species. (It's not, as the journalist described it, a "new species," although there is speculation it is a hybrid: still, it is interesting to see this phenomenon in a species where it has heretofore not been reported.)

Who "discovered" a species?

Loren Coleman posted on Cryptomundo a comment from Jerome F. Hamlin, creator of http://www.dinofish.com/, asking whether it is correct to say that museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer "discovered" the coelacanth in 1938, given that it was known to Comoros islanders for centuries. My thought:

“Discovered” as meaning “specimen obtained and made known to organized science” makes sense. It is simply, in biology/zoology, the meaning of the word. That the animal was locally known is true but didn’t have any scientific impact until Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered the species by finding the type specimen. After that, this local knowledge became valuable, giving scientists information on the animal’s habitat and helping in the search for further specimens.

There is undoubtedly, back in the history of the Comoros or Indonesia, some fisherman who pulled in the very first coelacanth ever noticed by humans. His society would have rightly called him the discoverer. Modern science just as rightly calls Courtenay-Latimer the discoverer. If we adopted a new word for “obtained or reported the first example brought to scientific attention,” and perhaps we should, then the term “discoverer” would indeed apply only that ancient fisherman. (”Described” is too narrow for what we are talking about, since the discoverer and describer are very often different people.)

From the new NASA Administrator

Administrator Charles. F. Bolden:

"Today, we have to choose. Either we can invest in building on our hard-earned world technological leadership or we can abandon this commitment, ceding it to other nations who are working diligently to push the frontiers of space... If we choose to lead, we must build on our investment in the International Space Station, accelerate development of our next generation launch systems to enable expansion of human exploration, enhance NASA's capability to study Earth's environment, lead space science to new achievements, continue cutting-edge aeronautics research, support the innovation of American entrepreneurs, and inspire a rising generation of boys and girls to seek careers in science, technology, engineering and math."

COMMENT. Good words, but the President who appointed Bolden has already chosen to slowly strangle this vision to death. Unless we come up with new approaches to space, the NASA budget - projected as flat from here on out after a one-year bump in FY10 - will doom us to a limited robotic program and LEO-only human spaceflight. Here's hoping Bolden can persuade the President and Congress otherwise.

Enter the dragon

OK, it's not a big dragon, certainly not in comparison to its near relative the Komodo. But Varanus lirungensis, the new species from the Talaud Islands of Indonesia, was a surprise to herpetologists. Its discoverer, André Koch (who was on the islands to study another species), said the find “illustrates the high diversity of monitor lizards in Indonesia."

Amateur makes Jupiter-sized discovery

I love stories about how amateurs still make vital contributions to science, despite the perception that science is all about big organizations and big projects now. When a large object - a comet or asteroid - hit Jupiter last week, it was Australian computer programmer Anthony Wesley, 44, who found the "scar" or impact zone in the Jovian atmosphere using the 14.5-inch reflecting telescope in his backyard. NASA has since confirmed the discovery - a timely one, since such impact zones last only a few days. Glenn Orton of NASA JPL said, "We are extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event. We couldn't have planned it better." So here's a cheer for Tony Wesley.

A salute to Apollo 11

"The earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." -- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -- John F. Kennedy


Apollo 11 plaque:
HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.
(Signatures: Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin, Nixon)


"To think that twelve guys went there and we've figured it out-that's crazy." -Apollo 16 Commander John Young

"We leave as we came and God willing as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind" - Apollo 17's Gene Cernan


"So if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?" - Robert Zubrin, 2004

"There can be no thought of finishing, for 'aiming at the stars,' both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning." - Robert Goddard, 1932 letter to H.G. Wells


And from the three astronauts:


Many say exploration is part of our destiny, but it’s actually our duty to future generations and their quest to ensure the survival of the human species.
— Buzz Aldrin

The regret on our side is, they used to say years ago, we are reading about you in science class. Now they say, we are reading about you in history class.
— Neil Armstrong

It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice, really; it’s an imperative.
— Michael Collins

Is NASA too expensive?

This bears repeating. The government will spend $4 trillion this year. Less than one half of one percent will go to an agency that expands our knowledge, improves our lives, monitors our environment, and helps us look beyond our current troubles and see our future as a species. Oh, and provides high-tech jobs and countless other benefits.

Paradoxically, the visibility of NASA's Mars rovers, space shuttles, etc., leads the American people to think a large portion of the national budget goes to the agency. NASA also has to deal with idiot remarks by people like Katie Couric, who said in 2006, "I can’t help but wonder what all the money could do for people right here on planet Earth." Katie, where exactly do you think it's being spent? Are the rovers carrying away cash to pay off Martian contractors?
Think about your idol, Walter Cronkite. Walter understood what we were doing and why it was worth it.

Space exploration is much more than just NASA, and I'm certainly not holding NASA up as a perfect agency. But think about it. One half of one percent. It's not enough. Given all the missions the agency is tasked with, it's not even close.

Honoring Walter Cronkite

Kudos to NASA Ames Administrator Pete Worden for looking seriously into how to arrange for the new lunar crater to be formed by the impact of the LCROSS probe to be named after space enthusiast Walter Cronkite.

Images of Apollo sites from lunar orbit

Here are the first LRO photographs of Apollo landing sites. The one of Apollo 14 is especially clear, showing the descent stage of the Antares lunar module, the instruments and work sites, and even the footpaths left by the astronauts. Upcoming images are expected to show even more detail. Think about what you are seeing: the ghosts of human presence on another world.
This comes as one DC rumor says we may slip the Project Constellation lunar return to 2028 - eight years, making for a budget-driven slip as long as the time between JFK's speech and the landing of Apollo 11. What is is about the simple phrase "NASA gets one-half of one percent of the national budget" that people cannot understand?
Finally, farewell to Walter Cronkite, who reported with accuracy and passion on the voyages to the moon. It's been suggested we name a crater near an Apollo site for Walter. We should.

Hunting the giant earthworm

It's not nearly as popular (or as good-looking) as the ivory-billed woodpecker, but another rare species is the object of a serious hunt. The giant Palouse earthworm of the northwestern U.S. has not been caught since a specimen was nabbed in 2005. It's the only specimen in any collection anywhere. The animal can reportedly grow to three feet long and smells like - lilies? That's what they say. (Who would want to get close enough to smell it?) The government has been asked to list the species as endangered, but says not enough is known about it. The worm has it's allies, and they are using chemical, shock devices, and old-fashioned shovels to try to determine just where the critter exists, and in what numbers.

Thanks to my dad, Don Bille, for pointing me to this story.

One small step... restored

NASA has posted on its website retored and digitized images from the original TV-camera recordings of key parts of the first moonwalk... including, of course, Neil Armstrong's momentous step onto the lunar surface. Watch... and feel the wonder again.

The still-elusive ivory-bill

The Cornell University ornithologists who have spent years hunting the ivory-billed woodpecker seem about to throw in the towel. Since the bird's rediscovery in Arkansas, they can't find it there or anywhere else. The latest search is finishing up in a sighting hotspot in south Florida.
Ron Rohrbaugh, director of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker Research Project, said, "The lab will continue to be a hub for information, reports and scholarship about the ivory-billed woodpecker, including through an online database where members of the public can report sightings. But unless new evidence surfaces, it's probably safe to say that we're not going to put forward any more comprehensive, systematic searches like we've been doing for the last five years in Arkansas and with the mobile team."

COMMENT. It's discouraging. I think the original rediscovery was valid. And I don't think the bird is extinct. But it's very, very close. The bird videotaped in Arkansas might be the last one ever confirmed.

Three cheers for SpaceX

"Hawthorne, CA – July 15, 2009 – Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announces the successful launch of Falcon 1 Flight 5 launch vehicle and the precision placement of Malaysia's RazakSAT into Earth orbit.

“This marks another successful launch by the SpaceX team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “We are pleased to announce that Malaysia's RazakSAT, aboard Falcon 1, has achieved the intended orbit.”

Falcon 1, a two-stage, liquid oxygen/rocket-grade kerosene vehicle designed and manufactured by SpaceX, lifted off Monday, July 13, at 8:35 pm (PDT). Lift off occurred from the Reagan Test Site (RTS) on Omelek Island at the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii."

COMMENT: A major step forward for privately developed space systems. Good job, y'all.

NASA, we have liftoff

After five postponements due to weather, the space shuttle Endeavour had a successful launch on its mission to the ISS. The launch came one day before the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch from the same pad.
COMMENT: The Shuttle and the ISS are good achievements, but I want the feeling I had watching Apollo 11 soar up and past us (my dad had borrowed a small plane from his employer, Piper Aircraft, to take my bothers and I up from Vero Beach to the Cape.). It was the feeling of witnessing, and somehow being part of, a great adventure.

Gaggle of squid ashore in California

Dozens of Humboldt squid, a meter or more long, washed up together on a beach in La Jolla, CA. As happens in some cases of beached whales, the animals seemed disoriented and were washed back up after kindly bystanders had hauled them off the sand into the ocean. It's been speculated a 4.0 earthquake just offshore disoriented the squid, although scientists said the two phenomena were not necessarily linked.
COMMENT: I suppose some owners of beach-side restaurants saw this as the ultimate convenience. You have to love it when the calamari delivers itself.

Happy Birthday, Loren Coleman

My best wishes to Loren Coleman, one of the preeminent North American cryptozoologists and a guy who has done invaluable service for science whether you think that any of the major "cryptids" are likely to be real or not. Loren has tens of thousands of artifacts (ranging from animal skeletons to a life-size pterodactyl from the defunct TV show FreakyLinks), books, articles, and other items in his International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME. This is an irreplaceable trove of information on animals known, unknown, and alleged, and Loren barely keeps it going with his own income plus donations. Without the Museum, this collection would be hopelessly dispersed, if not lost altogether.
Loren and I have differences on some subjects, such as whether the evidence for unknown North American primates is compelling (he thinks so, I'm not convinced), but the Museum is the ONLY cause for which I regularly ask readers of this blog to make contributions. I hope you'll celebrate Loren's birthday by looking into it.

VASIMR: Space propulsion advances

Several years ago, at JSC on a consulting assignment to help NASA prioritize funding for future systems, I watched a test-firing of the plasma ignition system for an interesting, if far from mature, superhigh-efficiency propulsion technology called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). Now being tested in Houston by the Ad Astra Rocket Company, founded by former astronaut and VASIMR inventor Franklin Chang-Diaz, the system has advanced to the point of test-firing an engine "to spaceflight levels." This version used 30kw of power: a flight test engine to be tried at the ISS in 2012 or later will use 200kw. Power levels in the hundreds of megawatts, for which the only practical near-term option is a nuclear fission reactor, would be needed for the ultimate goal: an engine that could send a spaceship to Mars in 39 days.

NASA abort system test (cool video)

NASA successfully flight-tested the Max Launch Abort System (MLAS) from its Wallops Island facility. This is a step toward an abort system for operational Orion/Ares launches. As NASA puts it, "While the Orion launch abort system has a single solid launch abort motor in a tower positioned above the Orion Crew Module, the MLAS concept for an operational vehicle would have four or more solid rocket motors attached inside a bullet-shaped composite fairing." The launch system pieced together for this test is an interesting gadget in itself, with "drag plates" and eight fins used to bring the stresses on the abort system closer to those of an operational launcher.

Urban wildlife report: bear in my downtown

A bear wandered - somehow - into downtown Colorado Springs yesterday. As wildlife officers played hide and seek, the 200-lb bruin sought refuge in the parking garage under my company's office building. I was picturing our boss looking through the employee manual. "Bad invoices... bomb threats...nope, nothing about bears." The animal was safely tranquilized and hauled away to some less peopled part of Colorado.

Dramatic photo - lighting and the Shuttle

A bolt strikes the lighting arrestor mast at Pad 39A as the shuttle is readied for this evening's launch. NASA still hopes to go around 7PM EST.

UPDATE: NASA slipped the launch until Sunday to check everything out and make certain there was no damage to electrical systems on the space vehicle or in its ground support systems.

UPDATE TO UPDATE: Monday now.

New genus of salamander from the U.S.

A tiny, colorful, lungless salamander described from the Appalachian highlands of the southeastern United States is so unusual its discoverers had to create a new genus to put it in. Urspelerpes brucei is only 25mm long, brightly colord in an off-yellow, with dark stripes adorning the males only. The last new genus of salamander from the U.S. was discovered in 1961, nearly a half-century ago. Professor Carlos Camp said, "The salamander fauna of the US, particularly of the southern Appalachians, has been intensively studied for well over a century, so the discovery of such a distinct form was completely unsuspected."

Latest new monkey from Brazil

The Brazilian rainforest has produced a barrel of new monkeys over the last decade (yeah, it's an overworked line). The latest is a colorful little creature called Mura's saddlebacked tamarin. It's about a half-meter long, most of which is tail. Fabio Rohe of the WCS said, "This newly described monkey shows that even today there are major wildlife discoveries to be made."
Amen to that.

Crocodile resembling armadillo found

Cool fossil species: Armadillosuchus arrudai.
This 2-meter, 120-kg reptile roamed Brazil 90 million years ago. It lived in a dry, hot area (a surprise for any crocodile) and it had bony plates on the back and neck. These made it look a bit like a somewhat flattened giant armadillo (albeit with a fearsome skull full of teeth), or maybe a predatory version of the armored ankylosaurs it shared the Cretaceous period with. It's a major addition to what we know about those ancient survivors, the crocodilians.

A cheaper way to do heavy lift?

This story from the Orlando Sentinel reports on (and includes a link to) a new NASA study of a heavy-lift launch idea that has been around for a while. The concept is to use Space Shuttle solid boosters with the Shuttle external tank, with a cargo pod mounted on the side where the Shuttle orbiter goes now. While the rocket would lift less than the proposed Constellation program heavy-lift Ares V, it is feasible and appears affordable.
COMMENT: While the Ares V likewise appears feasible, it only makes sense if we continue with the Ares I human spaceflight booster, which would validate most of the hardware. And Ares I is in trouble.

See this NASAWatch/SpaceRef recap for the conflicting information about Ares and Constellation costs. Have aspirin handy.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/ares_costs_unde.html

Fiction Review - Meg: Hell's Aquarium

Meg: Hell's Aquarium, by Steve Alten. 2009.
This is long for a review by me, but Alten is the most successful writer of cryptozoological-themed fiction, and I like analyzing his novels and thinking about what works and what doesn't.
I have to start by saying that, as a science writer, I find Alten's submerged (as in under the known seafloor) ancient sea habitat is not easy to believe in. I do give the author credit for offering a foreword that goes into the geology and palentology of his scenario. I have other problems with the science, and I was harsh about this in reviewing of the first two Meg novels. I won't rehash the details, though: It's the author's setting, it's now a given, and what the reader wants is to see is how well he uses it.
As prose, this book seemed a step back from Alten's The Loch, which I thought a very good novel. Hell's Aquarium uses a breathless style with lots of dashes and exclamation points in the narrative. You get used to it, but Alten's work in his Loch Ness novel showed he didn't need that sort of gimmick, and I'm not sure why he uses it here. There are a few editing mistakes: a sunken WWII cruiser used quite cleverly in the plot is referred to once as a "destroyer," and a character who competes in triathlons quotes a finishing time appropriate to the marathon portion only.
Most of the characters in Hell's Aquarium are three-dimensional: Alten has improved on this from book to book. The basic plot involving humans works well enough, and the villians' motives are believable.
Alten's strength, as always, is fast-moving action, and there are some real page-turner moments. Alten has a knack for incorporating popular culture, and I loved the Internet contest that resulted in naming two captive Megalodons Mary-Kate and Ashley. A final thing I liked was the ending, not necessarily for its plausibility, but for springing genuine surprises about who lives, who is traumatized, and who dies.
Alten likes to pile on the creatures and maximize their sizes in his work. This is ok: it's fiction, and if Peter Benchley can use a 100-foot squid, Alten can use a 122-foot Liopleurodon. (I liked his 25-foot evolved form of the vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis - that would be scary as hell in real life.) It's not clear how creatures from eras over 200 million years apart could have ended up in this habitat, although I'll buy anything that brings my favorite predator Dunkleosteus on stage. Alten takes pains to emphasize there's a complete food web in the "aquarium," although, like Peter Jackson's take on Skull Island, it still seems too slanted toward megapredators. All the big Mesozoic reptiles are here (evolved gills and all), along with a squadron of sharks and even a monster turtle. This makes for an exciting series of beast-on-beast conflicts as the humans mainly try to avoid becoming snacks. Alten has some good moments of description concerning the creatures and their dark, cold, deep habitat. I'll wager Alten read Richard Ellis' nonfiction Aquagenesis as part of his research: a very similar list of large predators shows up in both books.
As a cryptozoological researcher, I kept thinking of Bernard Heuvelmans' dissection of sea-serpent reports into as many as nine species. (I allow for one and possibly two.) Alten's beasts could cover all those categories and then some. It would have been fun to see Alten throw in a prominent cryptozoologist to react to the fact that, while cryptozoology has been chasing a new shark here and a giant eel there, there's been a horde of spectacular creatures unguessed-at. Maybe in the next book.
The level of cooperation and intelligence shown by some of Alten's sharks goes beyond what we know of real sharks, although the Megs, at least, have had 60 million years to evolve this way, so mark that as a permissible liberty taken by a writer of fiction. At the end, two escaped Megs are setting themselves up as new apex predators of their own patch of the coastal Pacific, violently displacing the orcas which have been used to ruling unchallenged. I'll be curious to see whether Alten follows that up in another sequel. There's some interesting science he could go into, if he so chooses, about what would happen in an event like that.
I thought the third Meg novel was a little better written than this fourth one. I thought The Loch was better still, and it puzzles me that Alten has slipped back from the quality (in this reader's opinion, of course) of his best novel.
Overall, Hell's Aquarium is what it's supposed to be, which is fun. It's like going to a Transformers film. You may wonder about some of the the science and the implausible escapes, but you came to see the robots in action. You pick up an Alten novel to see the creatures in action. Hell's Aquarium gives you what you pay for.

A very blonde black bear

A good shot of a very blonde black bear, by wildlife photographer Steve Kozlowski - who was startled by the animal coming right up to his tent.

Dinos down under

Australian paleontologists have announced the finding of three large new dinosaur species, a significant addition to the prehistoric fauna of a continent whose past is still an evolving story. Paleontologist John Long, said, "It not only presents us with two new amazing long-necked giants of the ancient Australian continent, but also announces our first really big predator." All came from a dig at Winton, in Queensland. In addition to the two large sauropods (one relatively stocky, the other taller and longer-necked) we have Australovenator, nicknamed Banjo, a predator built for speed and equipped with strong arms and three fearsome claws on each hand. They are dated at 98 million years old, which puts them in the Cretaceous.
COMMENT: New dinosaurs, especially sauropods and nasty predators, are always just plain cool to read about. I thought so when I was 8, and I still do.

Endangered species: not good news

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that over 800 species of animals and plants have gone extinct in the past 500 years. The number now threatened? We don't know exactly, as we don't know all the species on the planet (not by a long shot), but the IUCN estimate based on known species is just shy of 17,000.