Rare brown and white panda cub

Sound the AAAWWW alert. This impossibly cute cub is the fifth brown and white panda ever reported. The newspaper article referenced here raises concern about some kind of genetic bottleneck. That's always a concern with a species as rare as the panda, but I don't see the connection to this off-color oddity.
It sure is cute, though.

One honking big spider discovered

From Israel comes a startling new species: Cerbalus aravensis. This spider, which lives in holes under "trapdoors" of its own making in the sand dunes, has a leg span up to 14 cm. As Dr. Uri Shanas put it, "The new discovery shows how much we still have to investigate, and that there are likely to be many more species that are unknown to us."

A scientist looks at Pandora

I can't resist one more trip to James Cameron's Pandora: not with biologist and award-winning science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon as our guide.
She writes of the film Avatar: "It has recreated what is the heart of biology: the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world."
Among the features she finds compelling are the well-thought-out web of Pandoran life, which gives humans too jaded to get excited over a new field mouse their best virtual chance yet to step into a world unknown. She praises the depiction of scientists - dedicated, analytical, yet still taken with the wonder of it all.
COMMENT: This is the best of the Pandora articles, even if it does ignore the derivative plot and the talking trees. Great work, Carol.

Increasing cooperation in space exploration

Several milestones in 2009:

The multi-nation International Space Station can now maintain a crew of six astronauts, rather than three. Russian assistance in expanding the station, slowed because of budget troubles, will resume in 2010 as the U.S. Space Shuttle carries up the next Russian module.

Two of the largest space exploring nations announced a new partnership. The US and China agreed to expand cooperation in space science and begin discussions on cooperation in human space flight. Chinese space leaders and the NASA Administrator will make reciprocal visits in 2010.

NASA and ESA signed a letter of intent to closely coordinate their Mars exploration programs. Under the Mars Joint Exploration Initiative (MJEI), ESA will direct a joint orbiter mission in 2016, with the US leading a mission including American and European landers in 2018. Two initiatives to be organized further in the next few years are a possible network of landers in 2020, with the ultimate goal, the return of Martian soil and rocks to Earth, coming after that.

International cooperation is not always easy, but it is imperative. Budgetary pressures alone will ensure we see more of it. And if there is any endeavour in which humanity should be cooperating as a species, it is reaching out from our home planet.

New species: "snail-sucking snake"

The authors of this article seem to have coined the term "snail-sucking snake" for this new species from Ecuador. Naturally, I couldn't resist quoting it. (I also can't help thinking, in Dave Barry mode, that "Snail-Sucking Snakes" would be a great name for a rock band.) It's one of a horde of new reptiles and amphibians from western Ecuador.

Charlie's Used Shuttle Sale

OK, the header isn't quite accurate - NASA's Administrator Charles Bolden is not personally manning a used-Shuttle lot - but the shuttles are for sale after they make their final flights. Each originally cost a billion-plus (specifically, building Endeavour to replace the lost Challenger cost $1.7B). Now they are a mere $28.8M. Several large museums are expected to put in bids for orbiters Atlantis and Endeavour, while Discovery is already ticketed for the NASM. And here's a real bargain. The massive Space Shuttle Main Engines, the costliest, highest-performing rocket engines ever built, are available for free if you can transport and reassemble them. Each one weighs a mere 3.2 metric tons.

Suborbital Astronauts prepare -on their own $$

This is a neat story. Several companies are preparing to launch suborbital passenger-carrying rockets. Some scientists are making sure they are ready. Eleven men and women, paying for their own training, completed a new program to prepare them as suborbital astronauts. They underwent centrifuge and altitude chamber testing in addition to classroom work. Course organizer S. Alan Stern said, "For this diverse group of scientists to invest their own time and money for astronaut training is a true testament to the growing excitement behind the science potential of new commercial spacecraft. Interest was so high that we've already filled up a second class of a dozen scientists for spring 2010."

From Borneo: Newest Bird Species

Leeds University biologist Richard Webster has found the world's newest species of bird. The bird has, unusually, been given a common name before a scientific name: the description is still being prepared, but the small gray and white bird from Borneo is already known as the spectacled flowerpecker.

Earth has close encounter

A house-sized object will zoom past Earth Wednesday at only one third the distance to the Moon. Astronomers are not quite sure what it is. A tiny asteroid is one guess. Passing 130,000 km away is a very close shave by astronomical standards, although the object is too small to be seen by amateurs.

Animal performs photosynthesis

A sea slug named Elysia chlorotica doesn't have to work for a living - after a point, at least. It absorbs genes and cell components called chloroplasts from plants it eats - and puts them to work to produce chlorophyll itself and live by photosynthesis. Biologist Sidney Pierce comments, "This is the first time that multicellular animals have been able to produce chlorophyll."

Finding another Earth

The first exoplanets discovered by astronomers have, not surprisingly, been gas giants like our own neighbor Jupiter. As techniques and instruments have been refined (most notably with the addition of NASA's orbiting Kepler observatory), a class of smaller exoplanets, nicknamed "Super-Earths," has been discovered. These are still several times larger than our own planet, but astronomers are confident we'll soon be identifying Earth-sized worlds. A new generation of instruments (which NASA planned but abandoned in its Terrestrial Planet Finder program) will be needed to nail down the possibilities of life. My prediction: eventually, we'll find it.

"It is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun." - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The science of seeing sea monsters

Dr. Charles Paxton has published (in the eminent Journal of Zoology, no less!) an analysis which provides important insight on how seriously we should take reports of large unidentified marine animals. Paxton's paper focuses on one key parameter: how well witnesses are estimating distances to the object of their attentions at sea. The distance, which can be tricky to estimate over open ocean, affects the perceived size of the animal and how well a witness can tell a "sea monster" from a whale, shark, or other known denizen of the oceans.

Paxton's Abstract:
Analysis of the nearest reported distance in accounts of seemingly unknown, large, marine animals (sea monsters) by boat- or water-based eyewitnesses, revealed that, contrary to expectation, the majority of sightings were at close distance (<200 m). This suggests that misidentification of inanimate objects or known animal species due to great distance was unlikely. Assuming a uniform distribution of objects around the boat, the reported sightings were far closer than expected, implying a bias in the sighting or reporting process. The distribution of reported distances from boat- or water-based eyewitnesses was almost identical to that of shore-based witnesses. Unidentified large marine animals were more likely to be reported to be closer if the report was anonymous or secondhand. The gap of time between recollection/reporting and the actual sighting did not influence reported distance. There was no relation between reported distance and reported length. There was some equivocal evidence that the absence of a stated distance in a report might be an indicator of a hoax.
THANKS TO: Charles for sharing this.

Takeoff for Pterosaur.net

A group of paleontological researchers including Dr. Darren Naish have launched a site devoted to the largest and strangest creatures ever to fly in the Earth's atmosphere: the pterosaurs. Whether you seek information on particular species, general anatomy, fossil discoveries, or whatever, this is the place to meet the true-life dragons, which were stranger than any fictional counterpart. The site is wonderfully illustrated and just darn cool.

School poised to cut science labs for bizarre reason

I never get political in this blog. Hardly ever. But the story of Berkeley High School's plan to cut science labs should not go unremarked on. It's weird because it's not based on budget cuts. It's based on the bizarre notion that the way to improve achievement for minority students is to cut science labs, since minority students are using them less than white students. Seriously.
The President has made a big deal out of science education, and rightly so. It's a high-tech, science-driven world out there. Shouldn't the school be encouraging more minority students to get INTO those labs? That's not to say the money won't do any good if used to boost programs serving struggling students, which is the plan. But a racially-driven concept that no student needs hands-on work in the sciences in high school is...unearthly.

A fond look back at OMNI magazine

Paul Collins of Slate offers a fond obituary for OMNI magazine, a groundbreaking mixture of science, fiction, and speculation that (for younger readers of this blog) was a really big deal back in the 80s. It was in OMNI that the word "cyberspace" first appeared. Works from the titans of science fiction appeared in it, as did interviews with scientific luminaries like Richard Fenyman.
OMNI did spent some space on UFOs and similar speculative (some would say unscientific) topics. In general, its coverage wasn't as "out there" as some publications have offered, although I recall an article surveying readers on whether they might be alien abductees in which the symptoms it listed for determining your status were so general they applied to practically everybody.
Anyway, I miss OMNI, which was competed out of its niche in the press edition and vanished from its pioneering Internet version when its publisher died. It was nothing if not optimistic about the future, and there was good stuff in every issue.

Return to Pandora: Creating believable plants

Plant biologist Lori Kozlowski explains in this interview how she helped create the plants and the plant science we see in Avatar. She went as far as creating scientific names for all the species involved. She worked with creator James Cameron and others to develop a believable plant communication system (based in a new field of plant science on Earth, called "signal transduction").
She explains the environment this way: "...the atmosphere is thicker than on Earth, with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, as well as xenon and hydrogen sulfide. Gravity is weaker. And there is a strong magnetic field. Given the role of the environment in plant evolution, one would therefore expect to see gigantism, less of a gravity response (which makes stems grow up and roots grow down), and possibly a response to magnetic fields, which I named "magnetotropism.""

MicroSpace News: Colorado students will build space weather satellite

After 50+ years of operating in space, we don't know everything about the space environment and the "space weather" created by solar flares and charged particles.
The University of Colorado at Boulder has put out this press release:
"The University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded $840,000 from the National Science Foundation for students to build a tiny spacecraft to observe energetic particles in space that should give scientists a better understanding of solar flares and their interaction with Earth's atmosphere."
UC-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) has built several spacecraft and many instruments with student participation. (I've visited up there and was very impressed.) The Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment will be housed in a spacecraft weighing only 2.5kg. The mission will launch around 2012.

Pygmy Sea Cow and Manatee news

Loren Coleman has collected two interesting related items. One is the discovery of a fossil dwarf sea cow, related to the immense Steller's Sea Cow but in the wrong hemisphere - near Madagascar, to be exact. Coleman wonders if occasional claims of primate-like sea creatures from this region, usually dismissed as mermaid-type legends, might have an origin in surviving or very recent examples of this species. Coleman also revisits Marc van Roosmalen's recent description of a living species, the Amazonian dwarf manatee. One expert looking at its DNA has rejected the 1.3-m species as merely immature examples of the known Amazonian manatee Trichechus inunguis. Van Roosmalen acknowledged a very close genetic relationship, but to him it showed only that the split between his T. bernhardi and the ancestor species had come recently (less than 485,000 years ago).

The critters of Avatar

Based on my first viewing of James Cameron's epic, I couldn't resist offering some thoughts on the ecosystem of Pandora.
Cameron's Avatar is not a perfect film. The plot is too derivative, not just of Dances with Wolves but of Disney's subpar Pocahontas. It was hard to keep a straight face in some of the talking tree segments.
Cameron, though, has created a visual feast with some terrifically interesting inhabitants, plant and animal. His Pandora has a lower gravity than Earth, enabling trees to grow to stupendous heights and three-meter-tall humanoids to leap and dart about the forest with the grace of spider monkeys. Cameron gives us four-winged semi-reptilian flying creatures, which is not too much of a stretch given that we know one reptile from Earth's fossil record that actually did adopt the four-wing design. It's interesting that some of his animals, such as the flying banshees, have respiration holes seemingly unconnected to the mouth or the organs of smell, wherever exactly those are. This breathing system may be a little less efficient than the multipurpose systems of Earth vertebrates, but the atmosphere of Pandora (not described except as poisonous to humans) might be rich enough in oxygen and other key gases to make it viable.
Most of the animals are hexopods (six-legged). Earth vertebrates don't have six legs because it seems the cost of maintaining extra limbs exceeds their utility, while far smaller creatures such as insects go with at least six legs (which are much simpler in construction and don't add as much to the total nutritional requirements as vertebrate legs do). It may be a combination of plentiful food and plentiful oxygen on Pandora reduces the burden. (Remember, insects got much larger in the days when Earth's atmosphere had a much higher oxygen level.)
Cameron's humanoids, the Na'vi, are an exception to the hexopod design (so are some of his flying creatures). To a degree, Cameron was hemmed in by the need to make the sentient race something human movie-goers can relate to. Really, what are the odds they would laugh and cry exactly like humans to express emotions? Cameron bent to the same necessity in giving the females some features humans would recognize as female, both facially and in having seemingly nonfunctional breasts. I kept wondering what Na'vi elbow joints are like, given that they draw their bows with the drawing hand facing palm out, which is awkward as heck for humans. I also wondered what the Na'vi evolved from: the only smaller primate-type things, the prolemuris, have six legs and not much of a resemblance. (Note to Cameron - the direhorses are too obviously horselike for all their strange features. I hate to say you didn't show enough imagination, but on this point...)
The really interesting part is that everything evolved on Pandora as part of a system: not magical but electrochemical, with trees sending messages over their root systems, the Na'vi being able to "plug" directly into the nervous systems of other creatures, and so on. The entire moon is essentially wired into one living network. There have to be some limits to this (trees wouldn't want herbivores tapping in to find the best trees to nibble on), and it's hard to figure out what evolutionary pressures might have driven this development. I'm going to have to read the Avatar book for more insights. The Na'vi can connect to both the four-legged and six-legged beasts.
Actually, I do have a thought on Pandoran evolution. I wonder if Pandoran life went from free-living microbes through a bottleneck where there was only one common ancestor to higher organisms. This might have been like a slime mold, which is made up of seemingly unrelated single cells but can somehow connect enough to organize into larger structures. Everything that came after somehow found it advantageous to keep and improve on the networking ability.
Oh, heck. Don't worry too much. Just enjoy the movie. It's a hell of a show.

Would Kirk's cannon have worked?

In a classic Star Trek episode, "Arena," Captain Kirk defeated an alien captain in a very bad lizard suit by pounding charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur into gunpowder and turning a bamboo tube into a makeshift cannon. Would it have worked? The Mythbusters guys will try it out on a new episode December 28. The preview here looks pretty cool.
PREDICTION: If they have the right proportions in the gunpowder components and a lot more time than Kirk seemed to have to grind and mix them, they'll get an explosion. But I think an explosion strong enough to propel big diamonds (Kirk's ammunition) with crippling force would likely have blown up the cannon in Kirk's face. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: The cannon was, unfortunately, "busted." The Mythbusters couldn't get the handmade gunpowder to explode, and, when they substituted commercially-made gunpowder, they blew up the cannon. It was a funny touch to put their Captain Kirk stand-in, their dummy Buster, in a red shirt: Kirk never wore a red shirt, but crewmembers who did were quickly offed (as was Buster when the cannon blew up). I always thought Starfleet must have the worst-trained security forces in history, since all they knew how to do was die. Maybe they had the same trainers who failed to teach Imperial Stormtroopers how to hit anything smaller than a spaceship no matter how close the range.

Loren Coleman's Top 10 Cryptozoology stories

Loren Coleman, the most prominent American cryptozoologist, names a Top 10 list of cryptozoological news items every year. The list for 2009 includes discoveries of several new animals, including a civet and the strikingly marked Galapagos iguana, the opening of Loren's own Cryptozoology Museum (it deserves its place: there has, until now, been nothing like a central repository for cryptozoological material), the obtaining of the first images of a juvenile coelacanth, and several cryptozoological expeditions.
COMMENT: Every year, what cryptozoologists want to see on this list is the discovery of a large (say man-sized or bigger) new species. And sometimes we get it (e.g., the Australian snubfin dolphin, van Roosmalen's peccary). Whether anyone has found sasquatch (or ever will) is not nearly as important as the fact that new discoveries, large and small, are still being made around the world.

First evidence for venomous dinosaurs

A turkey-sized raptor from China, otherwise an unspectacular find, appears to have been venomous. The fang-like upper teeth are grooved, as some snakes' are, and there are pockets in the upper jaw that could be for venom glands. The coral snake is an example of a modern reptile that uses such grooved teeth to deliver venom (as opposed to rattlesnakes, where the fangs are actually hollow and can inject venom.) Given that the modern reptiles developed poison armament twice (in the snakes and in the lizards), it's not surprising that dinosaurs, with a variety of forms evolving over 100+ million years, came up with it at least once.

Is Avatar's moon realistic?

The new film Avatar sets its lush world, not on a planet, but of a moon. Astronomers say that's not impossible, despite the barren example our own solar system offers. It worked for George Lucas and those annoying Ewoks on the moon Endor, and it could work in real life.

X-51 hypersonic Waverider passes a test

An umanned test vehicle designed to demonstrate hypersonic flight with ordinary jet fuel (previous demos have used hydrogen) passed its captive-carry test flight. THe Waverider (so named because of the way it "surfs" its bow shock wave) could be a prototype for a reusable first stage for Earth-to-orbit vehicles or for long-range conventionally-armed missiles.

The Octopus and the coconut

The video linked to here has to be seen to be believed (and I dare anyone to watch it without laughing). An Australian octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus, to be specific) was seen gathering coconut half-shells discarded by humans and pulling them together to make a full sphere it can hide in.
This article is incorrect in saying this is the first known tool use by an invertebrate: wasps have been seen using a pebble to tamp down dirt. But it's amazing anyway. As one discoverer put it, what's so surprising is how the octopus seems to plan ahead: it will pick up a shell to use later, so "when it's transporting it, it's not getting any protection from it. It's that collecting it to use it later that is unusual."

Reviewing the climate email mess

This work by the AP, based on a review of the entire 1-million-word archive of the emails swiped by a hacker from climate scientists, gives the best summary I've seen so far of this much-hyped series of events.
What they do not show is an active conspiracy to mislead people on climate change.
What they do show is unacceptable behavior, including attempts to suppress rather than debate skeptics, hide or destroy data, and sometimes fudge what's presented in the name of making the science look more certain and consistent than it is.
The underlying thread is that some researchers believed the message about the need to address anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is so critically important that it was all right to make science they already believed was solid into science that was completely consistent and beyond any doubt (indeed, so much so as to make skepticism an act of irrationality.)
This, of course, had the opposite effect once the emails were revealed. Skeptics can now say, "If these people were willing to violate ethical scientific behavior in these instances, how do we trust them at all?"

COMMENTS: My own reading of published evidence is that the general trend of the world is toward warming, with many local variations and occasional short-term reversals. It's a big planet with a very complex climate system, or rather a system of systems with all kinds of influences and feedback loops, not all of which we understand. I do think AGW is contributing to this trend, although I don't think we have as good a handle as people like the IPCC insist we do on how much AGW contributes and what immediate measures are needed. That's not an excuse for doing nothing, but it is important when we are weighing what resources to devote to stopping AGW vs. all the other human needs the world faces. (The blithe claims by some on the leftward end of the environmental spectrum that we need to address everything, and there's an endless supply of resources from wealthy countries and businesses we can tap, ignore economics as well as political reality. I also have no patience for the idea it's simple to have a win-win with green technologies solving everyone's problems. There are costs and tradeoffs to every potential part of the overall solution. Don't insult my intelligence by saying all we need are more solar panels and bicycles.)

These scientists, trying to put their work beyond doubt to convince people of the need for action, have done their cause no favors.The same is true for exaggerated estimates of warming and sea rise levels (thank you, Al Gore, who exaggerated predictions and put footage from a terrible disaster film into An Inconvenient Truth and passed all of it off as science), which draw climatologists into sometimes-public conflict. We do need action, and we do need to address this issue now, but this is a complex situation. Trying to misprepresent it as a simple situation is a very bad approach.

Norwegian sky spectacle was Russian rocket

A startling blue spiral that appeared in the skies over Norway has a prosaic explanation - a Russian missile test that went awary. It's amazing the result was so symmetrical, as if some alien intelligence was behind it - which is, of course, a theory still alive on the Web.

Nat Geo names top new species

The Top 10 news species of 2009 (actually, some of the entries concern multiple species), as selected by National Geographic. From the giant rat to the ghost slug, they remind us discovery is happening all the time.

80th anniversary of Science Fiction fandom

Couldn't let this pass without a mention. Eighty years ago today, an American club calling itself the Scienceers met for the first time. They were science fiction fans. Now SF fandom is a global industry. Interestingly, thr group met in Harlem and the president was African-American.

Another visit to the cryptozoology museum

A writer for the Web site BoingBoing visits the International Cryptozoology Museum. An interesting excerpt comes when he asks founder Loren Coleman if he "believes" in creatures like the sea serpent or Bigfoot:

"No, because belief, he has said, "belongs in the providence of religion." He just tries to keep an open mind in order to accept or deny evidence based on examination and investigation."

Virgin Galactic unveils spaceship

For space geeks like myself, Christmas has come early. Burt Rutan and Sir Richard Branson have unveiled SpaceShipTwo (the first example being christened VSS Enterprise), a six-passenger suborbital spacecraft which, assuming testing goes well, will start carrying passengers in 18 months. Three hundred people have already plunked down cash to buy or reserve a $200,000 ticket for a 2 and 1/2 hour ride that will take passengers up some 100km and include five minutes of microgravity.

COMMENT #1: Would I plunk down $200K for this? If I had the money, I would have already done it.

COMMENT #2: I'm not one of the "private enterprise is always better" ideologues, but in this case... space geeks know of the countless efforts governments have made to do something similar to what Rutan and Branson have done. In less time and with less money than it took NASA and Lockheed Martin to half-develop and then scrap their unmanned X-33, Rutan and company have delivered flight hardware. Test results will be all-important, of course, but it looks like a great leap forward has been made by people of vision. Will governments learn something from this? History doesn't give us much cause for optimism.

Four new species of king crab

From a pile of untagged museum specimens, some over a century old, British Ph.D. candidate Sally Hall has pulled the evidence for four new species of king crabs, members of a family housing some of Earth's largest crustaceans. The four species represent four widely scattered areas of ocean.
COMMENT: This sort of find is important to zoology, more than most people realize. Going through old museum collections has yielded countless new species, including in recent years the world's largest gecko and the world's largest spider, and we don;t know what has been overlooked in museums and private collections around the world.

In case you are wondering, the new guys are:
Paralomis alcockiana, from the Atlantic Ocean,
Paralomis nivosa, from the Philippines,
Paralomis makarovi, from the Bering Sea, and
Lithodes galapagensis , the first king crab species recorded off the Galapagos Islands.

World's smallest orchid - marvelous

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
- William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Even botanists must be thinking poetic thoughts about the newest species of orchid. It is 2.1 millimeters Less than 1/10 inch) across. The transparent petals are one cell thick. It comes from Cerro Candelaria reserve in the Ecuadorian Andes, in a country where over 1,000 - you read that right, 1,000 - species of orchid have been discovered in the last century.

New Star Trek film; no science, lots of fun

I was re-watching Star Trek on DVD this morning. Anyone with the barest knowledge of science can't help but wince. (You can drive a ship intact through a black hole? What does that giant predator on the ice planet eat when it can't get humans?) Trek fans have to wonder at the violence done to a Spock character, who, while an officer and an instructor at Starfleet Academy, would permit himself an affair with a cadet. And the sheer ridiculousness of the series of events that make Kirk a starship captain is breathtaking.
Despite all that, it's a heck of a fun movie. Like Independence Day, it makes you overlook its flaws because the cast is obviously having so much fun that you are happy to turn your brain off and take the ride with them. Chris Pine as Kirk is enjoying himself so much you expect him to spontaneously combust. (And his character is a believable incarnation of William Shatner's Kirk in younger form.) The whole cast, for that matter, is perfect. So I give a three-phaser salute to J.J. Abrams and look forward to the sequel.

Mars Meteorite: Life After All?

In a 1996 study of the Allan Hills 84001 Meteorite, strongly believed to be of Martian origin, NASA scientists announced the finding of "microfossils" indicating the presence of Martian bacteria. This was controversial, and scientists generally rejected it on the grounds the structures could have been formed naturally. (Not surprisingly, when you claim you have discovered Martian life, the bar for evidence is set pretty high.) A new analysis using high resolution electron microscopy has concluded the microfossils could not have been formed naturally. One of the team members said, "We feel vindicated. We’ve shown the alternate explanation is absolutely incorrect, leading us back to our original position that these structures are formed by bacteria on Mars."
COMMENT: As one cautious scientist observed, results from a single meteorite, however impressive, won't put a question as complex and monumental as Martian life to rest. The next step is to replicate the findings - either from other meteorites or on Mars.

High-tech semi-submerged vessel proposed

I don't know whether this marine exploration vessel will ever be real, although the French inventor says he's raised half the 35 million Euros needed to build it, and the president of France has endorsed it. The idea is that this vessel, which looks a bit like a giant sail, ship will operate mostly submerged, with divers able to simply walk out of a hatch tens of meters below sea level.
COMMENT: I'm not sure this complex gizmo will be worth the premium it will cost to build and operate compared to a conventional exploration vessel with submersibles, but I can't help hoping it gets its chance to demonstrate its promised utility. It's original and darn cool.

Mysteries of the naked mole rat

Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are not just odd-looking little mammals. They are every bit as bizarre as they look.
Where mice and other rodents their size may die of old age at 2, mole rats can live to 30. They don't get cancer. They don't have bone loss until well into old age. Their brains can stand being deprived of oxygen for 30 minutes. (Homo sapiens? Five minutes tops.) They don't even feel pain. That would seem a mixed blessing, given that humans who don't feel pain are always hurting themselves, but it seems to work out OK for the rat.
Naturally, scientists are curious about all these adaptations, most of which have obvious human benefits if (it's always a huge if) they can be replicated in our own species.
COMMENT: So remember, naked mole rats are not just the heroic little pet in my daughter's once-favorite cartoon, Kim Possible. They may actually become heroes of science and medicine in real life.

Astronaut one of NG's "Adventurers of the Year"

John Grunsfeld, the leader on the spacewalk that restored the Hubble Space Telescope to better than new, was honored by National Geographic as an "Adventurer of the Year."
COMMENT: There is a lot of debate about the future of human spaceflight, but there are things that humans, no matter how troublesome and fragile they are as space travelers, can still do better than any robot. One is on-orbit repair: the other is inspiring other people.

Keeping up with new species

James Platt highlights just a few of the new species discovered in 2009, including a chameleon that was discovered when a researcher interrupted the snake that was eating it.

Review: On Thin Ice, by Richard Ellis

On Thin Ice: The Changing World of the Polar Bear.
Richard Ellis
2009, Knopf (New York).
Ellis, a writer, artist, and conservationist mainly known for his work on matters maritime, here turns his attention to Ursus maritimus. The polar bear is the largest modern land predator, albeit one that spends significant time in the water and depends on the marine food web.
The book is, not surprisingly, a very good one. It has Ellis' trademarks of thorough research (there is a typical Ellis bibliography, running 26 pages) and good writing. My favorite turn of phrase comes when, after reviewing how all sorts of polar bear parts are used for decoration and so on following legal hunts in Greenland, the author remarks, "In other words, nothing is wasted except the bear."
This book is a superb introduction to the polar bear, its world, and its interaction with humans. I had a pretty good idea from other reading how remarkable this animal and its adaptations are, but a lot of the bear-human history surprised me. For example, I had no idea anyone had, or could, train a polar bear team to pull a sled.
The most surprising thing for me, though, was how numerous the animals must have been centuries ago. Early European explorers didn't just see the occasional bear: they saw dozens, or, over a season, sometimes hundreds. I asked Richard if anyone knew the species' population before Europeans entered its realm. It may have approached twice today's estimate of around 22,000, but he cautioned there was no reliable number. All that's certain is that hunting and indiscriminate killing removed many thousands.
Ellis seems to have read every account by explorers, whalers, and everyone else who ever saw a polar bear. The bear's behavior is explored in depth, and some myths rejected. An excellent chapter explores why humans are so darn fascinated with the polar bear, along with the contradiction between our love for the adorable cubs vs. our willingness to kill adults even when they are not presenting a threat.
Then we get to the threatened status of the bear today. The species still numbers many thousands, and is not actually going to disappear anytime soon. However, there is no question that, as Ellis documents, climate change will affect polar bears more quickly and more severely than it will most species.
A side note is that, in an unaired portion of a 2008 interview I did for the series MonsterQuest, I hypothesized that declining ice to the north and more human development to the south would push brown bear and polar populations together, resulting in more "pizzly" hybrids. I tossed that off the top of my head at the time: I didn't realize that, as Ellis shows, more qualified people have advanced the same idea. A hybrid shot in 2006 is the first proven example of a cross occurring in the wild, but it likely won't be the last.
When Ellis discusses climate change, the reader gets the impression that it's a simple case of sometimes-hyperbolic but pure-hearted environmentalists vs. totally evil corporations and Republicans. I'm not about to defend the Bush environmental record, but there are debates about everything from the conflicting estimates of warming to the tradeoffs (never mentioned here) in outlawing oil and gas development in northern regions, and Ellis could have acknowledged that these subjects are complex even as he makes a persuasive case for action.
Essentially, then, the book has a zoology/history section and a policy section. The zoology/history section is wonderful. The policy section displays Ellis' passion for the bear in a manner that could have been given more context but is nevertheless gripping.
Summary: If the polar bear has an official biographer, it is Ellis. It's the same role Ellis played in his outstanding books about the great white shark and the giant squid. The result is a tome everyone with an interest in nature, bears, or the environment should read.

Sea serpents and coelacanths

While I'm citing Darren Naish, let me put in a link to another of his posts, with an excellent discussion in the Comments following: the possibility of large unclassified marine animals, sometimes reported as "sea serpents," still being out there. Dr. Naish is keeping an open mind. It's a coincidence that I am linking to a post where he recommended bmy books on the topic. (Really, it is.)

Here's my comment from this discussion, which had veered into sasquatch and other cryptozoological topics as well as sea critters:

First, thanks to Darren for mentioning my books. I'm not perfect at this, but I try. I intend to write followup books about every ten years until I depart the planet. The idea is to leave a record of some of the major discoveries in zoology and developments in cryptozoology covering a half-century or so.
The giant crocodile seen from a U-boat is discounted by some cryptozoologists as a hoax. It always bothered me that the account claims the whole animal was thrown clear of the water by an explosion on the target ship after the ship sank. The physics don't work.
Despite the time that's passed since the Nicoll / Meade Waldo case, I think it still stands as important evidence. Maurice Burton wrote that he'd seen a conger eel swim (for some reason) with head and forebody out of water: if you have a giant species (10-15 meters?) that occasionally does the same, it comes close enough to this and and some other SS sightings to have an explanation without postulating the survival of an ancient group. (Such an animal does not explain all the good sightings, and we may yet have a long-necked pinniped out there, although we should have better evidence for it than we do.)
If I had to bet money on sasquatch, I would bet it does not exist. I would not close the file on the grounds of the fossil record, though - the fossil record of the modern chimp and gorilla is so sparse that a couple of missed finds would place it at zero. But hair, dung, and even DNA samples only identify sasquatch if you have known sasquatch specimens to compare them to. Nothing except a whole animal or a significant piece of one is going to suffice for a scientific description.
Posted by: Matt Bille | November 25, 2009 2:18 PM

Startling photos: hippos kill crocodile

Darren Naish posts a couple of really gripping photographs. Apparently a crocodile tried to get at a hippo calf - scrambling over the backs of the hippo herd at one point, it looks like - and it turned out to be a really, really bad idea.

Giant "Dumbo" octopus one of Census of Marine Life finds

"Dumbo" octopuses, a rare gelatinous type with earlike fins used for swimming, were thought to be small as well as primitive. A species discovered this year in a survey of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, though, is two meters long. They appear to live between 1,000 and 3,000 meters deep, a zone where they are one of the larger animals around. This is just one of the continuing trove of weird and wonderful animals emerging from this ongoing survey.
In an unusual sidelight, the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon just ran a timely strip featuring the Dumbo, in which the Census of Marine Life is being carried out by fish swimming around with clipboards. (Oddly, I can't find the Dumbo cartoon on the website at www.slagoon.com.)

"Hobbits" were a new species: the latest round

A statistical analysis of skull shapes and body dimensions demonstrates the Flores Island "hobbits" were a separate species, according to the latest study offered up as evidence in a controversy ongoing since 2003. Modern humans, microcephalic humans, and the Flores specimen LB1 are all distinct, say William Jungers, Ph.D., and Karen Baab, Ph.D. Babb argues, "Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis."
COMMENT: As readers know, I have always been on the "separate species" side of this argument. This has been a fascinating example of a scientific controversy, and I doubt the final word has been said.

THANKS to Dale Drinnon for circulating this link.

Image: Martian ice lake

This is a startling image of water ice pooled in a crater at the Martian North Pole. ESA's Mars Express spacecraft has given us this glimpse of a world that, while very cold and a little short on atmosphere, is not quite as hostile as we used to think.

New finch species seen emerging?

One of the problems in explaining and proving evolution has always been that its timescale is too slow for real-time observations by humans, at least where vertebrates were concerned. However, two researches studying the famous finches of the Galapagos report seeing the creation of an apparent new species in action. On an island with only one finch species, the arrival of an oddball migrant in 1981 set off a chain of events which, seven generations later, has produced a finch with a distinct appearance and song. It's not clear whether this reproductively isolated type can breed with other finches (part of the classic definition of a species), but it seems to be well along the path to complete separation.

Scientific blogging of all sorts

I suppose you could argue it makes this blog superfluous, but I would be amiss not to point on occasion to the almost limitless resource offered by the site Scientific Blogging. A glance at today's collection of blogs offers stuff from scientists and science writers on topics as diverse as the Higgs boson (nope, still haven't found it), engineering education (it would use some engineering work), mummies, and (of course) science writing. They even sell cool T-shirts.

Siamese crocodiles hid in plain sight

Cambodia's Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center houses dozens of crocodiles, most hybrids of the rare Siamese species (Crocodylus siamensis). What no one knew until DNA work was done was that half were not hybrids. They were the world's largest captive population of pure Siamese crocodiles, a highly endangered species. Conservationists are thrilled... and a little embarrassed.

Strange ancient crocodile bore tusklike teeth

A croc that hunted on land, with land-adapted legs rather than the stout, bowed legs we normally expect on a croc, is strange enough. When it had three sets of huge fangs, projecting top and bottom like the tusks of a warthog, that's positively weird. Kaprosuchus saharicusa , a newly described fossil from Niger (only one of three new crocodile species), even added "an armored snout for ramming" to all of this. The discoverer said, "This has never been seen before on any crocodile."

Why would a land animal lose its lungs?

That's the question raised by this bizarre little amphibian. Its ancestors and its near relatives have lungs, but this newly discovered, wormlike cacaelian borrows around breathing through its skin, a method of respiration normally used only in aquatic environments. One scientist suggests the species "lost" its lungs through evolving a narrower body diameter that facilitated burrowing, but admitted that was only a guess.

Isn't this baby cute?

OK, maybe not so much. But it is a very young coelacanth, 31.5cm long, photographed by Japanese researchers in its home environment. The ancient fish, of which Ogden Nash remarked "It doesn't know it's obsolete," is still a mystery to us in some ways, and the finding of juveniles is a step forward in our understanding.

Crikey! New species honors Steve Irwin

A colorfully striped new species of land snail with an unusual habitat - it's found only on mountaintops over 1000m above sea level - has been named to honor another unique Australian, Steve Irwin. Scientists of the Queensland Museum decided the animal needed a new genus as well as a new specific name, so, here it is: Crikey steveirwini.

Water ice on the Moon

"I'll take that on the (Moon) rocks."
The LCROSS probe collision in the lunar south pole region got NASA what they hoped for - evidence of water ice in the resulting debris plume. We don't know if there's enough to significantly help in supporting a human base on the Moon, but we know where to look now.
COMMENT: Someone commenting on this story said that they'd pay a lot for a beer brewed with genuine Moon water. Maybe someday that won't sound so crazy.

European students build lunar orbiter

When college students go to look at the moon, they don't always have engineering on their minds. However, the European Space Agency is sponsoring the European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) for a launch around 2014. Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL) will be the prime contractor to integrate all the systems built by groups of students into a lunar mapping spacecrraft.
COMMENT: Wonderful plan. NASA, are you listening? (NASA is already quite good about projects to inspire students, but this takes the idea to a new level - or new orbit, if you will - and mertis a look.)

The beauty of the Earth

This fellow has collected the strangest and most beautiful landscapes in the world, from geometric formations that don't look natural at all to ice pillars and enormous crytals.

Lonnie Zamora, UFO Witness

I don't spend much time on UFOs anymore, but the passing of one of history's most famous UFO witnesses deserves a mention. Lonnie Zamora, the New Mexico cop whose report of a landed UFO from April 24, 1964, near Socorro, was one of the best-known cases for a long time, died November 2.
The Air Force investigation of this report, which was mainly based on Zamora's retelling plus some rectangular impressions in the ground and burn traces on the ground and surrounding brush, ruled out an extraterrestrial craft or a secret military device but did not go so far as to declare the case a hoax. UFO skeptic Philip Klass thought Zamora might have been fooled by one of his hypothesized unconfirmed-natural-phenomena class of plasma UFOs, with stray wisps of plasma accounting for Zamora's report of two small figures in white coveralls next to the UFO. Klass later changed his opinion to a probable hoax, with Zamora, well known as an upstanding citizen, pressured by tourist-seeking local officials to provide the focal point. There's no proof of this, either, though. There were other witnesses who reported something flying low and making the jet-like roar Zamora reported, but the police officer was the only person who claimed to have seen the craft while it was on the ground and to have gotten a close look.
COMMENT: One item in Zamora's report, a red half-circle-and-arrow insignia seen on the side of the craft has always bothered me: it has never been reported again on a UFO or anything else, and it seems like something a hoaxer would make up. Still, neither Zamora nor anyone else has ever admitted a hoax, and the case went into the Project Blue Book files as "unexplained."

The Mystery of the Falklands Wolf

When is the only mammal on an island group a large canid, with no mice, rats, or bats to accompany it? There's only one case, that of the now-extinct Falklands wolf. These red-furred, coyote-size animals have always been a puzzle. Now scientists using DNA from preserved specimens have confirmed it was neither a true wolf nor a domestic dog nor a coyote: it was s a relative of the long-legged maned wolf, a unique canid of South America. How did it get to the Falklands, 480km from the mainland, thousands of years before humans made it to the New World? We still don't know.



THANKS to Dale Drinnon for passing on this linke

Ares-I: now what?

The Orlando Sentinel, a paper which naturally does a lot of space coverage, calls for the demise of Ares-I. With one mostly successful test of a partial vehicle done, NASA believes it's making appropriate progress. The Augustine Commission didn't make a definitive finding on the rocket, instead laying out alternative scenarios, and new NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden hasn't weighed in yet. I know a lot of people smarter than me believe in the Ares, but I still lean to the "kill" side. It won't be ready until 2017 or so, at a far later date and higher cost than promised. I'm aware that man-rating a commercial booster is not easy or cheap, but I think it could give us a more powerful, more flexible rocket at least a couple of years sooner.

First-ever photos: sperm whale eating giant squid

These underwater photographs from the Pacific near the Bonin Islands are the first actual record of a sperm whale chomping on a giant squid. The squid in these pictures is about 9m long.

THANKS to Gavin Joth for finding this link.

Farewell to Robert Rines

Robert Rines, a prominent inventor and patent attorney best known for his decades-long effort to prove the existence of large unknown animals in Loch Ness, has died. Rines was 87. Rines and his wife were convinced they saw a "monster" in the Loch in 1971, and he poured considerable money and time into developing sonar and camera systems that would obtain proof. It was his expeditions that obtained controversial underwater photographs in 1972 and 1975, along with some sonar readings that are still unexplained. Rines was still making expeditions to the Loch in his 80s.
COMMENT: Rines never got the unambiguous proof of Nessie (a species he lately feared could be extinct) he was seeking, but his is the story of a determined man who put his money where his heart was and tried to bring a legend into the light of science. The world needs people like Robert Rines, and he will be missed.

UPDATE: The distinguished international news magazine The Economist published an affectionate obituary to the man and the dream.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14902633
THANKS to Kris Winkler for that link.

Nothing like it in the world: Crypto Museum Opens

Photos from the opening of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME. Pride of place goes to a startlingly lifelike, life-size sasquatch sculpture, but the msueum houses thousands of books and artifacts documenting the influence of cryptozoology on science and culture. There's nothing like it, and there can't be anything like it, given the many one-of-a-kind items stored here.

Support the Museum - buy a really cool T-shirt!
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/cz-shirt/

Future engineers too good in pumpkin contest

My day job employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, sponsors a contest for student engineers called the Pumpkin Launch. This year, one team did too well. Their cannon shot a pumpkin the length of a football field and through the stadium scoreboard.
COMMENT: You have to be careful turning smart young people loose on anything.

Bears love honey, right? Umm, no.

Wildlife biologist Lynn Rogers has spent years socializing with a family of black bears. Among his findings: they have no special affinity for honey. And they'd pass up a pile of roots and berries to break open an ant hill.

Chasing sasquatch

The intrepid souls of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia are out hunting for their target beast in the Allegheny Mountain within the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. Good luck, chaps.
COMMENT: If sasquatch exists at all, it's hard to believe it has a wide distribution. I suppose it's not impossible that, IF there's a large primate hanging out in the Pacific Northwest, there are isolated pockets of animals elsewhere as relics from a past when the species was more numerous. I do not think these fellows are going to find what they're seeking, but I applaud amateurs with the conviction to go out and actually look, rather than just theorize.

Ares I-X is a go

With 725 assorted sensors attached, NASA's Area I-X text vehicle flew very well today. It's a long road to an operational vehicle - only the first stage of the rocket was live on this suborbital test. However long it takes to get to an operational Ares (assuming the booster is not scrapped, and I still lean toward thinking it should be), this is a valuable learning experience. Congratulations to NASA, ATK, and the rest of the team involved.

"Unicorn fly" was a mini-monster

Back in the Jurassic, there were plenty of "monsters" roaming the Earth. One of the weirdest, though, was no dinosaur. It was a tiny fly - a fly with a horn on its head and three eyes at the tip of the horn. Zoologist George Poinar, Jr. said of the newly discovered insect Cascoplecia insolitis, "No other insect ever discovered has a horn like that, and there's no animal at all with a horn that has eyes on top."
COMMENT: Would make a great science fiction monster...

Tiger conservation is cause for worry

When I wrote my first book, Rumors of Existence, in 1995, I quoted a tiger conservationist as saying, "The end of the tiger is in sight, possibly within ten years." It hasn't been quite that bad, but the latest meeting of the world's tiger conservationists reports from Nepal that things are not much better. There are only an estimated 6,000 tigers in the wild. None of the extant subspecies is in sustainable shape, and the Sumatran subspecies is on the brink of following its Javan relative to extinction.

Ares booster test slips due to winds

NASA's Ares I-X, the first launch to use significant hardware from the Ares I booster intended to lift the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, slipped from its 0800 EST launch time due to high winds at the Cape, but is still expected to go today.
Some of those who think the Ares is a costly step in the wrong direction see no point in the test. The Augustine Commission report out last week didn't really clarify the road ahead for human spaceflight boosters. I'm not a fan of the Ares I myself. But my view is that we built the hardware, and you always learn a lot, good and bad, by flying new rocket technology. So let 'er rip.

How abominable is the snowman?

Where did a silly-sounding term like "abominable snowman" come from, and how did it stick to our friend the yeti? As Loren Coleman explains in Cryptomundo, it appears to be a mistranslation of a Sherpa term for the presumed beast, metch kangmi, made by explorer Henry Newman way back in 1921. (The first word of that term is also rendered, more accurately, as meh-teh or meh-to. The whole term can be translated as "filthy snowman," which is actually not too far off.)
Confused yet? Not surprisingly, cryptozoologists who think there's a serious possibility the yeti exists find the colorfullly mistranlated term (one of a host of local names for the beast, such as by the way) to be, well, abominable in itself.

Musings on Gould's Wonderful Life

Stephen J. Gould argued in his book Wonderful Life that if you "replayed the tape" of evolution a million times, you would likely never hit on the combination of events which produced humans. Now Gould was a smart guy, no doubt smarter than me (and much more educated and focused), but I think there are a couple of important points to make.
One is that, the more unlikely we are, the more likely it appears that Someone had a hand in our emergence. After all, this is the only planet we know of suitable for higher life forms, and here we are - that's a 100% success rate, albeit one based on our still-limited data set. (Science has confirmed only a few hundred exoplanets, none in the habitable zone. When we know about 10,000 planets, things may look different.)
The other point is that I think Gould took too lightly the fact that that intelligence is always an advantage in evolutionary competition. (Not an unmitigated advantage - intelligence requires support for a large brain, with all the requirements that imposes - but an advantage nonetheless.) In a harsh enviornment like Mars, things may well stop at the microbe level (I won't be surprised if we eventually confirm such life on Mars), but Earth is a big, diverse place, and intelligence has a chance to come into play.
I suspect that, even if no one was influencing evolution, if it ran long enough on a planet of diverse environments like ours, you would eventually produce - every time - a species with an intellectual level sufficient to make the breakthrough to consciousness and an awareness of the spiritual dimension of life. I think the evolutionary game is intended to produce such species - and, even if it's not intended, it will anyway.
So, Gould's admitted brilliance notwithstanding, I think there is something else going on.

Rediscovered: The case of the missing crow

The bird of the day is Indonesia's Banggai Crow, also known as Corvus unicolor - the name denoting its solid blackness. The bird was known by two specimens described in 1900, and that was it until 2007. It's rare and considered critically endangered, but endangered beats extinct any day.

Ida not a "missing link"

Scientists hate the inaccuracy of calling anything a "missing link," but they don't mind the publicity involved. Remember Ida, the cat-sized primate ancestor christened with that title, with so much fanfare, last year? Well, Ida's not our ancestor. Not unless the reader happens to be a lemur.

Oops.

Biggest web-spinning spider discovered

And we mean big. Newly described from from dead specimens found in Africa, some fro the field and some from a museum, the new species of golden orb-weaver named Nephila komaci is almost 4cm in body length and 10-12cm in leg span. The big specimens are females: the males are about five times smaller. Good luck, guys.

Lemurs, Range, and Reporting

It was recently discovered that the greater bamboo lemur, missing and feared extinct for over 100 years before a sighting in 1972, has a much greater range than we thought. The authors of the blog Cryptomundo post that bit of good news here and take a jab at the venerable Agence France-Presse (AFP) for running the story with a picture of the wrong species.

DARPA unveils blob robot

The idea gang at DARPA, with help from the Roomba creators at iRobot, have unveiled a proof of concept robot that appears to have no structure. The blob-like ChemBot can inflate or deflate parts of its body to change shape, passing through cracks or climbing over or squeezing through bad terrain, building rubble, etc, in ways a more conventional robot could not. It's likely years away from an operational descendant, but this is the kind of stuff DARPA is supposed to do - advance the state of the art and see what happens.

A shot LCROSS the Moon's bow

OK, that's a heck of a contrived headline, but the point is that we have more information coming in from the LCROSS lunar probe collision. There was indeed a plume, just not one bright enough to match the PR NASA had created and encouraged about the project. Scientists are very excited about the results, which should enable them to confirm the presence or absence of water with a few more weeks of analysis.

Cryptic Cougars in Pennsylvania

The last official cougar kill in Pennsylvania? 1874. The last reported sighting? Well, they're coming in all the time. Are they real? I tend to think they are.

Coleman's museum makes its move

This NECN.com site offers a print version and a video news report on the movement of Loren Coleman's crypto collection to the new home of the International Cryptozoology Museum. As Coleman points out in the report, whether one values cryptozoology or not, it can be a "gateway science" that gets kids interested in the natural world.

Predatory pterosaur grabbed in-flight meals

Darwinopterus modularis, a flying reptile from China, appears to have been adapted to grab smaller pterosaurs, the earliest gliding mammals, and feathered reptiles (the ones on their way to being birds) while in flight. The creature had a long tail for balance and quick maneuvering, a flexible neck, sharp teeth, and a skeleton that indicates it would have been a hapless hunter on the ground. The species is dated to the Jurassic, 160MYA.

Earth and Moon as seen from Mars

This hauntingly beautiful image was captured from a spacecraft 142 million kilometrs from the Earth-Moon system.

NASA lends a hand for reusable launchers

The toughest problem in all of the space launch field is developing a practical, affordable, reliable Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) capable of putting payloads into orbit. It seems obvious that a reusable ship would be better than expendable ones (we don't junk airliners after each flight), but making that notion work in practice has been terribly difficult. NASA, the Air Force, other nations' space agencies, and commercial firms have all tried different approaches since the partly-reusable Shuttle was built. The result so far: billions of dollars spent, with no RLV. Now NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory have joined to develop a "technology road map" to build on the emerging (slowly emerging) suborbital RLV industry toward an orbital craft.
COMMENT: Something like this has been done before, but technology continues to advance since the first spate of RLV proposals in the 1980s, and the suborbital ships now nearing test flight are pushing it further. Let's hope this new partnership really takes the idea somewhere.

No HSK, but lots of data from lunar collision

The HSK (Horrendous Space Kablooie) is a term I borrowed from Calvin and Hobbes for a major celestial collision. (Calvin suggested it as a much better name for the Big Bang, and he was right.) In this case, the double collision event involving NASA's LCROSS probe and the Centaur upper stage didn't produce the huge visible debris plume NASA expected (and, from a PR point of view, hoped for). But it did produce a mass of data, which will take a couple of weeks to reduce, on the composition of the soil at the bottom of the target crater in the south polar region of the Moon, hopefully including the signature of water ice.

Not UFO, but weather effect wows Moscow

I thought it would be fun to post the tabloid-story version of this sighting over Moscow. It looks like something orchestrated to advertise a science fiction film, but neither networks nor alien visitors are at fault. It's a rare and striking cloud pattern, apparently involving colliding weather fronts and just the right solar angle to create the image of a giant ring over the Russian capitol.

Fly me to the moon... WHAM!

From NASA:

"The LCROSS Centaur and Spacecraft impacted the moon at approximately 4:30 a.m. PDT. Scientists are reviewing the initial data and will report what they know at a Post Impact News Conference at 7:00 a.m. PDT / 10:00 a.m. EDT on NASA TV."

This is an interesting experiment. Under lunar conditions, the plume of debris from the impacts could soar 10km high, offering an unparallelled opportunity to analyze its composition.

COMMENT: I don't expect they will find water ice in sufficient quantities to support a lunar base for humans, but any water will be a major discovery.

Then for comic relief, we have conspiracy theorists who claim we are testing a new kind of bomb. Guys... wouldn't it be a lot cheaper to test a bomb on Earth rather than spend thousands of dollars per kg to haul it to the Moon?

Meet Ardi - a common ancestor?

The tired and inaccurate phrase "missing link between humans and apes" has been discarded by scientists, mainly because evolution is much messier than that - it's more of a branching bush than a nice straight-climbing family tree. Still, Ardipithecus ramidus, a 1.2-meter, 50-kg primate estimated to have roamed Ethiopia 4.4 million years ago, appears to have been important to both modern groups. Mindful of the need to tell a story in presenting complex science, researchers have assembled the most complete skeleton, a female, and put her front and center of this important discovery. They call her "Ardi."

Nobel for mastery of light

The 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics went to three men who developed breakthrough technology we now take as routine: American Drs. Willard Boyle and George Smith for inventing the charge-coupled device (a.k.a. "camera on a chip)," used in everything from digital cameras to space telescopes, and Dr. Charles Kao, who worked in the UK and Hong Kong, for critical contributions to the development of fiber optics.

THANKS TO Linda Dodson for flagging me when this article came out.

MicroSpace News: Academy's next satellite ready

US Air Force Academy cadets are finishing up the integration of their latest student satellite, a space weather microsat dubbed Falcoln 5. Several instruments on the satellite will characterize the flow of charged particles around the bird, providing important information for all satellite designers as a result of the $11M mission. Launch is scheduled as a secondary payload on a Minotaur IV booster in mid-2010.
GO FALCONS.

Cosmic wonders never cease

The Spitzer space telescope has found a new and very different ring around Saturn: a diffuse halo tilted 27 degrees from the planet's known ring system. The particles in the new ring orbit in the opposite direction from those in all other Saturnian rings. Planetary scientists will be working on this one for a long time.

Biggest dino footprints ever

Sauropod dinosaur footprints found recently in France are two meters across. Let me say that again: TWO METERS. Is this a sauropod or the animal from Cloverfield? One meter is big for a sauropod track. Half a meter is respectable for an elephant. The article does not say whether the species of dinosaur has been identified, but the old derivation of the word "dinosaur" from "thunder lizard" (as in making the ground thunder when they walked) seems appropriate in this case.

Our MESSENGER to Mercury

Dr. Jeff Goldstein passes along his latest updates on a mission of special interest to him, the MESSENGER probe of Mercury. MESSENGER snapped some great images on its third flyby of the Toasted Planet. The gravitational assist from that flyby will enable the probe to go into orbit on March 11, 2008.

American, Russian space administrators meet

A very interesting image, almost more so for the background than for the men in the foreground.

"NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, Left, and Head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, Anatoly Perminov turn to pose for a photograph at Mission Control Center Moscow in Korolev, Russia shortly after the successful docking of the Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft with the International Space Station (ISS) marking the start of Expedition 21 with Flight Engineer Jeffrey N. Williams, Expedition 21 Flight Engineer Maxim Suraev, and Spaceflight Participant Guy Laliberté, Friday, Oct. 2, 2009. Lalibreté will return to Earth with the Expedition 20 crew on Oct. 11, 2009."

Tequila to Diamonds? Ig Nobel Awards are out

Why don't pregnant women topple over? Will a full or empty beer bottle do more damage to your skull in a bar fight? Can you make diamonds out of, yes, tequila? Those questions were answered by the researchers who garnered the 2009 Ig Nobel Awards, given for work "that can not or should not be repeated."

New shark has sex on its brain

Women always say men have sex (or a specific organ) "on the brain." The newly described Eastern Pacific black ghostshark (Hydrolagus melanophasma) does, to a degree. While the genitals (claspers) are in the usual position underneath the shark, an organ that looks like a spiked club on the forehead appears to stimulate and help hold on to the female of the species. I suppose there's nothing to add (beyond pondering the taste of female ghostsharks) but that we have one more example of the infinite possibilities that pop up over the huge timescales of evolution.

Reply from Orang-pendek expedition leader

Adam Davies, leader of the orang-pendek expedition, posted a response on Cryptomundo to the various questions he received in that forum. Read the whole text by following the title link. Here I'll just quote his response to my question about identity:

" Matt Billie asked a very good question as to whether it could have been a Lars Gibbon. I am used to seeing Gibbons in the jungle, and Sahar is a really experienced guide. I am certain he would not mistake an Orang-Pendek for a Gibbon, and his astonished reaction compounds that view. The physical descriptions by both eyewitnesses do not match Gibbon. "

Weather on planet is... rocky?

COROT-7b is the first rocky (as opposed to gaseous) exoplanet discovered. Five times the mass of Earth, it is locked with the same face always toward its (very close) star. That side maintains a constant temperature over 2,000 degrees Centigrade. The result? The atmosphere is full of what might be called "vaporized stone" and a weather front might cause it to "rain" aggregations of that stone - in other worlds, rocks developing the way hailstones do on Earth and falling from the sky.

The physics of zombie movies

Clever scientists often use pop culture to illustrate serious principles. This article reports on a paper analyzing how long a mobile target (for example, you) could survive in a structure with zombies bumbling around at random hoping to bump into you. The answer: get into the most complex, irregular structure you can find. The movie convention of hiding in shopping malls is a good strategy: the chance of being grabbed by a zombie drop off sharply compared to standing your ground in an isolated farmhouse. The author says the paper uses zombies as a model for many "random walking" type behaviors in fields like fluid dynamics.

More on that orang pendek sighting

Ther'es a good discussion, with some new information, going on at Cryptomundo about the report of an unclassified ape from Sumatra. My comment on that list:

The lack of a clear close-up view of the whole animal in the sighting report is disappointing. Just from the description, I wonder if an exceptionally large lar gibbon (Hylobates lar) can be ruled out.
I tossed out on the National Association of Science Writers list the question of whether you’d get a refereed journal to publish a formal species description on the basis of a DNA sample. [Researchers gathered hair samples and a piece of rattan the observed animal had been chewing on.] In the case of other species (two monkeys, one shrike) that were accepted on DNA samples, the samples were taken, along with clear closeup pictures and measurements, while the animal was in hand. The type specimen was then released back into the wild. This has become acceptable, but my colleague John Gever suggested DNA from hairs and rattan could always be challenged as contaminated unless the samples were gathered under laboratory conditions - meaning you had the whole animal to start with.
There doesn’t seem to be a precedent for a formal species description, and certainly not one of a vertebrate, based on a wild-gathered DNA sample alone. If anyone knows of exceptions, please let me know.
(And while I agree 100% with the suggestion that any name eventually established should honor Debbie Martyr, it might be premature to put it in the genus Pongo - while I agree that’s the likely identity, right now we can’t be sure it doesn’t belong in Hylobates or even rate its own genus.)

New species down under Down Under

The most extensive study yet of organisms living in caves and subterranean water flows under the continent of Australia has yielded 850 new species. Blind fish and eels, crustaceans, arachnids - the list includes some very weird things. And researchers estimate they've only found 20 percent of the creatures living down there.

I missed this one: great piece on Neil Armstrong

This Washington Post profile, I think, does a great job of understanding the enigmatic Neil Armstrong. For those who lack the time to read the only authorized biography, The First Man, (or those who have read it), it's must reading about the triumph of achievement, the human cost, and the different ways men act when they achieve greatness or have it thrust upon them.

New species from the Mekong

The WWF's Asian Species Conservation program has announced a flood of new species from the Mekong River basin of SE Asia. Included are one bird, two mammals, 14 amphibians, 18 reptiles, and over 100 plants. My favorite: the Cat Ba leopard gecko. With its colorful skin and huge, orange-ish eyes, this reptile would have looked great if optically "blown up" for one of those 1950s giant-creature movies.