"Something with poison..."

The Wicked Witch of the West had a point. Poison is very handy when it comes to survival, and two recent discoveries have told us more about venomous animals. 
First, an obvious question for paleontologists is when poison first evolved.  The apparent answer popped up in 2009.  (OK, you can argue whether that6's "recent," but I'm working on a theme here.) Half a billion years ago, tiny jawless proto-vertebrates called conodonts evolved strange-looking teeth. (Teeth without jaws were pretty fashionable back then).  Polish scientist Hubert Szaniawski reported, "Many of them are characterized by possession of a deep, longitudinal groove, usually associated with sharp edges or ridges. A comparative study of the grooved elements and venomous teeth and spines of living and extinct vertebrates strongly suggests that the groove in conodonts was also used for delivery of venom." So this poisoning has been going on a long time. (Weird fact: baboon,s which are not venomous, have such grooves for no apparent reason.)
The crustaceans, however, never saw the need for poison, opting to develop better claws and other weaponry.  Or we thought they did. Among seventy thousand species, maybe there had to be an oddball.  London scientists Bjorn von Reumont has found that primitive crustaceans called remipedes, which look a little like swimming centipedes, have, in one species  (Speleonectes tulumensis), developed toxic fangs. The venom is, as might be expected, odd: it mixes a neurotoxin to make its prey helpless and a heavy does of digestive enzymes to get into the prey's body and start breaking it down.
Nature, once again, proves stranger than ...well, anything else. 
 

Meanwhile, in Suriname...

Another batch of new species.  Sixty of them, to be exact.  In this case, researchers had a rare untrammeled habitat to examine. Dr. Leeanne Alonso, an entomologist who led a recent expedition for Conservation International, said, "I have conducted expeditions all over the world, but never have I seen such beautiful, pristine forests so untouched by humans. Southern Suriname is one of the last places on earth where there is a large expanse of pristine tropical forest. The high number of new species discovered is evidence of the amazing biodiversity of these forests that we have only just begun to uncover."
Does modern technology make these expeditions easy? Easier, yes. Easy" Hell, no.  Dr. Trond Larsen's blog about a flooding river drowning the expedition's camps and nearly drowning him makes compelling reading.
He adds his own thoughts on the findings: "...we were surprised and uplifted to discover so many frogs potentially new to science, including a stunningly sleek “cocoa” tree frog. Among the new fishes, we found a gorgeous, miniature tetra with a golden body and red eyes, similar to the head-and-tail-light tetra so popular among aquarists."

Flood of new species from the Amazon

I can't say it often enough: We have not found all the new species on Earth, not even the "major" ones like primates.  The Amazon has amazed us with many new discoveries, and a new report from the WWF collects 441 of these from 2010 through the present.    The adorable caqueta titi monkey (Callicebus caquetensis), purrs like a kitten when young. The monkey was the only mammal mentioned in this particular report, which is a bit odd since Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has found several more recent mammals.  There are, to go with however many mammals, 18 birds (authorities once thought the birds had almost all been discovered), 84 fish, 58 amphibians, and 22 reptiles, with the rest being plants.  The title of "weirdest new discovery" might go to the vegetarian piranha, which  can weigh up to 4 kilograms.
It's easy to sit here in middle-class North American comfort and say, "They need to protect the habitat." "They" do need to protect it, but "we need to help them, with money, with know-how, and with monitoring the activities of corporations based up here.  It is said the forests are "lungs" of planet Earth.  We're down to about half a lung.  However you take action, whether it's sending money or writing Congress or being part of a conservation, organization, discoveries like these remind us of the urgent need to do what we can.

Start planning: 2014 Pikes Peak Writers Conference

The highlight of the writing year out here in Colorado is in the planning stages.  The dates are set 25-27 April 2014.  The keynote speakers are on board, and a revamped writer's context (the Zebulon) is under way.  Start making plans!

46th anniversary of most famous "crypto" footage ever taken

It was 46 years today
That Patty taught the band to play
Squatch is going in and out of style
But it's guaranteed to raise a smile
So let me introduce to you
Still puzzling after these years
Patty Bigfoot's lonely creature band!

OK, that's guaranteed to be the worst Beatles parody ever written.  Be glad I don't sing. 

Today in 1967, at Bluff Creek, California, Roger Patterson, a rodeo rider and general odd-job man, and his pal Bob Gimlin went looking for Bigfoot.  Against seemingly stupefying odds, they found her. and Patterson shot what is probably the second most analyzed amateur film ever taken (after the Zapruder film of JFK). 

Despite a flood of books, there is still some mystery here.
If it was a hoax, it was a well done hoax.  None of the countless enhancements and enlargements done since then has shown any obviously artificial detail like a zipper.  Neither the simplistic theatrical costume alleged by Greg Long in The Making of Bigfoot nor the homemade costume others skeptics have attributed to Patterson would have measured up.  There are lots of rumors attributing the costume to John Chambers of the Planet of the Apes films, and he probably could have done it, but has said he didn't, and how would he have hooked up with P-G anyway?
If it's an animal, it has just as many problems.  Dr. John Napier, the most eminent primatologist ever to endorse sasquatch's reality, thought it was an unacceptable hybrid - top half like an ape, bottom half (despite the fur) quite distinctively human.  No one has been able to get any footage nearly as good in 46 years despite the explosion of people and money poured into the phenomenon by TV.  No one has found the animal itself, for that matter, or even a piece of it, even a DNA sample that hasn't been shredded by scientific critics.

My thought? The nays have it.  Probably.  The only thing that keeps me from closing the sasquatch file entirely is some of the seemingly clear and puzzling witness reports, but I've closed the file on the film.  I'd bet my house, here and now, that it was a hoax.  (You would, too, if you had my mortgage.) But there are mysteries about who made it and how.  I'd like someone to solve those.

On being named an Associate Fellow of the AIAA

My friends: on the occasion of my having been named an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, I'd like to thank everyone who'd collaborated with me, critiqued me, encouraged me, or simply put up with me.   This reflects some 30 years of membership, publications, and participation.  I can honestly say I earned it, but I can't say I earned it alone.

https://www.aiaa.org/

God bless you all. 

And the Sykes DNA reveals... no new species

Professor Bryan Sykes' tests on putative sasquatch and yeti DNA samples sent from around the world has yielded... not a lot.  Even the specimens he thought most unusual are, it appears,  brown bears. 
You might say it's a little more interesting than that, given that the specimens most precisely matched a polar bear, which harkens back to when the two species were one.  That's odd, given there haven't been any polars in the Himalayas forever (as in, never), and Sykes suggests there might be a subspecies that branched off just at the brown/polar split and has remained basically unchanged.  So maybe there's something of real zoological interest. I hope so.  But no yetis, no sasquatches, no new primates at all.  That's kind of depressing, really. 

Update: Here's a good recap of the latest by Loren Coleman.  More information has come out about how and where these specimens were obtained.

New Species (OK, almost new): Laos' giant flying squirrel

What's Lao for "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat"?

I missed this one when it first came out. Laos, it seems, has a very impressive flying squirrel, the second in its enigmatic genus, discovered at a market in 2012.  With a total length of over a meter (very impressive, even if it's mostly tail), the squirrel is one of the world's largest. Biswamoyopterus laoensis a close relative to Biswamoyopterus buswasi, itself known from only one specimen, found in 1981 in India. 
As I wrote in Shadows of Existence, the trendline of new mammal species discoveries is sloping up, not down.  Part of that is differentiating similar species via DNA and other techniques, but we're a long way from exhausting possible discoveries in the wild.  A new species and genus of rat, Halmaheramys bokimekot, just turned up in Indonesia, five new bats were found in Senegal, and the list just goes on. 
Are we done with finding distinct new species of large land mammals (say, 25kg or larger)? I think not.  Marc van Roosmalen's spectacular black and white jaguar may be a new species (given that van Roosmalen is the greatest living discoverer of Amazonian mammals, his certainty about this is nothing to dismiss).  The evidence for a new primate in Sumatra, the Orang Pendek, is pretty good if not yet definitive. Either would bring major headlines if confirmed. 
There may be many more headlines before we're done cataloging the mammals of the world.

Shutdown and Science

OK, the government is shut down. For the first few days, we were all joking, "How can we tell?"  Not funny any more.  Regardless of one's position on the issues, it takes the House, Senate, and President together to negotiate seriously, and our leaders are pretty darn slow in coming around to that.  So next time I vote, my slogan is, "A plague on all your Houses.  And White Houses. And Senate Chambers."
I think leaders of agencies deserve some brickbats, too, for assuming until the end that this wouldn't happen and not having more arrangements in place to keep critical research going through standby agreements with universities, agreements to share essential personnel across agencies, etc. It would still be terrible, but maybe a little less so.  Now we have NASA unable to do much of anything except keep the ISS astronauts supported, researchers in the Antarctic with no money to continue science but somehow enough money to bring them home, and nuclear labs closing (aren't those sort of essential by definition?) (The NASA article, BTW, came to my attention via a post by Shannon Bohle, who has a great blog here.) And the NIH unable to enroll new patients in trials that might, you know, save their lives. 
And pandacams shut down.  Seriously? How many cents a day did it cost to run the pandacams? I'll pay for it. 
Reminder to DC: Despite all the turmoil in America, we voters still have one power: we can still send every one of your butts home.  And maybe we should.

Ad Astra, Scott Carpenter

Scott Carpenter was one of the Mercury Seven, the knights America sent into the skies to contest the Soviet Union.  If that romantic picture has faded over the years with the discovery that the astronauts were (surprise) human beings with feeling and failings, the fact remains that these young men undertook an incredibly dangerous adventure. Their motivations included patriotism, love of adventure, and the determination among test pilots to fly faster and farther than any of their brethren.  As Tom Wolfe wrote, "Scott was the only one with a touch of the poet about him," the only one of the seven who talked much about the philosophical implications of pushing humanity into a new frontier. He was also the only one to join John Glenn in urging his fellows to watch their public images and behavior.  He wrote an exciting and moving autobiography, For Spacious Skies. As a final touch of uniqueness, Carpenter turned to another frontier, becoming a pioneering aquanaut in the Navy's SeaLab program. 
I've never met any of the Seven: I would still like to meet Glenn, the last living example, but the other one I'd have loved to meet was always Carpenter.  Farewell.

DNA of whales and... unknown primates?

The species known as Bryde's whale may be 16m long, but it is very little studied. The IUCN says there's not even enough data to know whether it's endangered. Actually, we don't even know if it's one global population or has distinct units.
Or we didn't.  Now we know there are two distinct subpopulations, or subspecies.  The smaller, coastal form has only one matriarchal DNA line: in other word,s there's very little variation.  In addition, the larger, ocean-going type is split into three sub-sub populations.  This may seen academic, but the conservation implications are big. Now we can study how each group is doing and tailor efforts to protect them..

Meanwhile, recall I rejected Dr. Melba Ketchum's claims about sasquatch DNA.  I said it was my final word, and it was.  But something potentially more interesting is going on. Prof Brian Sykes  offered to test "unknown primate" DNA samples, and he got them from all over the world.  He went through a lot of trash but apparently had significant results.
Sykes is a credentialed authority - what he has to say will be interesting.
But I'm troubled.  Apparently, while the findings are still going through peer review, there will be a documentary and a book.  The only comparable recent discovery (if this is a discovery) would be of the Flores "hobbit" people, and that one was done right: the peer review came first, and the discovery was announced in NATURE, the world's most prestigious and trusted journal.  That's the way to do it.

Wandering by Loch Ness

No, I haven't wandered by the lake in person,  I've always wanted to: I still do.  And I want the Loch to have a monster in it, even though I no longer think it does.
In the 1970s, Nessie was looking really good.  Photos and sonar readings were drawing serious interest from "mainstream" marine biologists and zoologists.  New Scientist and Limnology and Oceanography carried articles.  (There is, believe it or not, a paper by Carl Sagan on the sighting probabilities in Loch Ness, albeit a bit tongue in cheek.)  It seemed like the 1960 film by aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale might have been a real record of a real animal.
In 2013, as when I wrote about this in my book Shadows of Existence in 2006, I'm struck by the lack of new evidence.  Not sightings: there are still sightings, some hoaxed, some sincere.  But when this photo hoax (I admit, I didn't know what it was when I first saw it) is the biggest news in years, what's key is that are no new kinds of evidence.  People have spent over 80 years watching the loch and the same types of evidence: distant photos and eyewitness reports - keep piling up.  But is there anything  else?
Alas, no.  No good video, no recent sonar traces, no physical remains.  Some cryptozoologists think the creature (ok, everyone agrees there is not "a" monster, there has to be a breeding colony) occasionally emerges on land.  But it never leaves a trace.  Ness is the most-studied lake, I would wager, in all the British Isles.  And yet not only do we have no proof of a monster, but we have no proof there are enough fish in the lake to feed a colony of monsters: indeed, Dr. Roy Mackal's earlier work arguing there was enough has been pretty broadly dismissed as unwarranted extrapolations based on minimal evidence, and any predator is unlikely to be an unknown species: sightings of live animals, Adrian Shine and others argue, concern sturgeon or the occasional wandering seal (the seals are well documented: the sturgeon are speculative). 
I hate saying goodbye to Nessie.  She got me interested in cryptozoology in the first place.  I still think cryptozoology has something to contribute - even if there are no Nessies (or sasquatches, for that matter) lurking in just out of our sight. 

Space: The Historic Frontier

Space history is one of my specialties, so I apologize for being overly distracted this past week: October 4, of course, is Sputnik Day: It marks 56 years after the Space Age began.  NBC News has some new stuff on what it was like to watch the first orbital launch.  While Sputnik 1 did NOT start the nationwide panic some writers have assumed, it caused some serious concern, as it should have.  After all, the Russians were backward barbarians, right?
Wrong.  Americans should have looked back to the war years, when Russia produced superb weapons like the T-34/85 tanks and the Yak-9 fighter.  The difference between the nations was that manufacturing know-how, the latest alloys, and then-advanced machine tools  were present throughout US industry, while in Russia they were in more limited supply and a program had to get top-level attention to compete for the resources it needed.   Sergei Korolev, the Soviet Chief Designer, was a master of politics as well as engineering.  He got what he needed.  And, fueled in equal parts by patriotism and the desire for exploration, he put the world into space. (The R-7 booster he and his colleagues produced is still in service in modified form.)
Just short of a year later, on 1  October 1958, NASA was born after President Eisenhower chose a civilian, rather than a military body to lead space exploration.  (The Sputnik program was always military, with the Academy of Sciences as a figurehead: Russian spokesmen, asked whether Sputnik 1 was military or civilian, insisted it was simply "a Soviet satellite." )

The definitive English-language biography of Korolev this one by James Harford.. 

As a look back at the history of history, here's how the always-excellent Alan Boyle covered the 40th anniversary in 1997. 

The best book on the early Space Age? Well, you could nominate Asif Siddiqi's momentous Challenge to Apollo.  But we have a soft spot for a more modest effort called The First Space Race.

History Note: The Civil War in color

Some painstaking work has resulted in colorized versions - as accurate as surviving Civil War gear, contemporary paintings, and old accounts could make them - of what the Civil War would have looked like if color photography had existed.  This set includes two of the people I most admire from this era, the oft-overlooked George H. Thomas (the masterful Union general no one could stop) and my fellow Mainer, Renaissance man Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.  Here too are the flamboyant George Armstrong Custer, the reflective President Abraham Lincoln, and a striking camp-tent portrait of Union Brigadier General David M. Gregg and his staff, showing the differing shades of blue in the Union uniforms.   (There actually were color photos in those days, but the art of capturing color was at an embryonic state of experimentation: no color photos of the battlefields exist.)

The last gasp of the Ketchum-Erickson "sasquatch" claims

I tried to be very, very fair to Dr. Melba Ketchum in the slim hope she really had discovered an unknown North American primate.  But the DNA, despite positive interpretations by her and some of the labs she used, has been shredded by people with far more expertise.  And she tied it, repeatedly and explicitly, to "high-definition" video of a sasquatch nicknamed Matilda taken by a group called the Erickson Project.

My personal opinion, in precise scientific terms: it's all crap.  The article from Doubtful News sums it up pretty well.  The much-hyped footage looks like cheap theatrical costumes, the face looks like Chewbacca, and footage of sasquatches on the move looks, in ever ycase, like a like a human, with human body proportions, in a suit.  Even other cryptozoological enthusiasts are dismissing this all as a hoax, and not even a good one.  Ask Jay Michael Cooney, who deconstructed it some time ago in the just-linked blog, or John Kirk, who shreds it here.  And it's all become tangled up with a bizarre, obvious hoax called the "Sierra Kills" where a guy claims to have shot sasquatches and collected no body parts whatsoever, and for a reason beyond comprehension, some people believed him. 

Could there still be a Sasquatch? Despite the odds, I can't quite say "impossible." There are still reports by sincere people who claim they saw one closeup, and the Oxford-Sykes DNA project results are still out. 

But the Ketchum-Erickson-Sierra-Olympia mess will get no more attention from me.  It's time to waltz Matilda off the stage of cryptozoology forever.



. 

Space - The Busy Frontier

First, what's going on in space. The Cygnus module from Orbital Sciences Corp docked at the International Space Station with 600kg of supplies.  This makes it the second vehicle, after SpaceX's Dragon, to dock there.  One more step for free enterprise.

Then, what's going into space.  SpaceX's new medium-lift booster, the Falcon 1.1, made a successful first flight.  Congratulations to Elon, Gwynne, and the gang! SpaceX hopes to provide serious competition to Atlas and Delta for US government payloads, as well as expanding into the commercial market.  This is a huge step forward.  SpaceX's Grasshopper test vehicle, meanwhile, has made big strides showing it might really be possible to bring a rocket stage back and land it vertically.  I wasn't sure even this crew could solve that problem, but maybe they can.  Elon Musk think's it's a key to cutting costs for future launches. 

Finally..
Carl Sagan once observed that the dinosaurs went extinct because they didn't have a space program (okay, though I'm trying to picture T. rex with those little arms in a space capsule....)  but we can MAKE dinosaurs in space. Astronaut Karen Nyberg has sewn the first toy ever made on the ISS: a stuffed dinosaur. Now, can she make the space suit?

It's a great day for our exploration of the universe.  Yes, we need to save the Earth.  It's our launching pad.  And from here, the stars...

Turtles, real fictional, and... ?

A turtle the size of an M-1 Abrams tank is in the news.  It's not real, but it's downright scary that a lot of people on the internet think it is.
Hoax-Slayer.com has this take on the story. It's making the rounds that a giant turtle from the Amazon has been captured and was seen being hauled on a flatbed. The weight is being given as 800 lbs, which is ridiculous: if this living igloo were real, it might weigh ten times that.  It's a prop from a Japanese monster movie.
Was there, or is there, any real turtle remotely close to tank-sized? No, but they come from an impressive line that's produced some mighty creatures,

Turtles have poked along in the oceans for a long time. The body plan emerged in the Permian with species like Eunotosaurus africanus, continued into the Mesozoic, culminated in the spectacular Archelon, a leathery-shelled Cretaceous denizen that could be 13 feet long overall and 16 feet across the flippers and weigh 5,000 pounds. The only rival for the biggest turtle was Stupendemys geographicus, a freshwater type that came along tens of millions of years later. 

The reign of turtles continues today in seven species of large ocean-going turtles.  The king of marine reptiles is the leatherback, which can be ten feet long and weigh up to a ton. It has an insulating fat layer that allows it to forage far north of other sea turtles, to the seas off Norway, British Columbia, and Kamchatka. It is desperately endangered thanks to a perfect storm of poaching, egg theft, the loss of nesting beaches, accidental catches in fishing nets and shrimp trawls, and the proliferation of plastic bags – a fatally inviting snack for an animal that lives off jellyfish. It can dive to 1,200m. There are still 20,000 to 40,000 nesting females, but these numbers compare to 115,000 as recently as 1982. The fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea calls them trunk turtles, a good name for an animal that looks rather like a giant's luggage.

 

 

 

The leatherback has been implicated in some “humped back” sea serpent reports, including some of the alleged denizen of Pacific Northwest waters, Cadborosaurus.  It is presumably also the source of some exaggerated stories of truly gigantic turtles collected by Bernard Heuvelmans. Heuvelmans thought there might be another species, which he  named after an indigenous Sumatran term translated as “father-of-all-the-turtles.” Island-sized turtles (or even planet-sized ones) appear in folklore and mythology, not to mention the flying jet-powered Gamera in the Godzilla movies - source of the internet legend I just mentioned. A titanic turtle gave good advice to Ang in Avatar: The Last Airbender (the great cartoon, not the lousy movie).
So here's to the turtles.  Long may they plod.

 

Popular Science mag: Wimping out on debate?

Popular Science has announced it will no longer accept online comments to its articles. The editors say,

"A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. "  And, they complain, many commentators are nasty and mislead the public.

OK, that happens.  In the era of spambots and political polarization, it happens a lot.  But the ability to challenge science - a necessary component of finding the truth - includes the ability to challenge well-established, near-consensus science.  I have an uneasy feeling that every generation convinces itself of something like this: "Well, the consensus against continental drift or in favor of stress-induced ulcers may have been wrong, but science TODAY is immune to that kind of error." Only it isn't, because despite all our advances in tools and techniques, science is still done by fallible human beings. 

Popular Science is a private entity and can do what it likes, but it is an influential entity, and I think the editors accepted a certain responsibility when they created an online presence and invited comments.  So is the publication bowing to reality or shirking its duty? My gut says the latter.

Life from space: Not yet (on Earth or Mars)

The controversial Journal of Cosmology has published a paper claiming a fragment of a diatom sampled via balloon from the upper stratosphere (22-27km)  indicates the now-deceased organism was deposited here by a comet.
Really.
A piece of a cell wall from a microscopic algae is not exactly solid, repeatable (so far) evidence for anything this dramatic. While the authors of the paper say all the right things about excluding contamination, the general scientific response is going to be that this must be contamination unless it's repeated - more than once.  Here's the paper. 
Meanwhile, NASA's Curiosity rover is not finding methane on Mars. Any type of life we're familiar with should excrete some methane, but we're still talking about sampling a tiny piece of the planet at surface level.  This is disappointing but not damning. Previous reports of methane on Mars indicated it was trapped in rocks or ice, and releases were occasional events, although whether the methane is of geological or biological in origin is unknown.  The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will arrive in 2016 to hunt for methane from orbit.  (ExoMars is a European Space Agency craft: it was supposed to be a joint project with NASA, but NASA, as is so often the case lately, pulled out as the planetary mission budget shrank.  We're going to reach the point where other spacefaring nations won't even think of doing a major mission jointly with NASA.  Inexcusable.)
The bottom line is that the Red Planet is not - yet - ruled out as a hiding place for past or even current life.  We'd know if we were there, of course...

Doubtful News reviews Shadows of Existence

Thanks to Sharon Hill of Doubtful News for a great review of Shadows of Existence - as Sharon so kindly says, a book written in 2006 can't be entirely valid in 2013, but most of it holds up very well.  Thanks, Sharon!

History: General Chamberlain's medal

One of the most stirring stories to come out of the Civil War was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain's defense of Little Round Top, pivotal in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. A Confederate conquest of Chamberlain's outnumbered 20th Maine might have enabled the rebels to roll up the Union line. As a Mainer, I take a special interest in Chamberlain, who went on to be Governor among many other accomplishments.
Chamberlain was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1893 (really, folks? It took 30 years?) and was given a new one when the Medal was redesigned in 1904.  What happened to the original? It was, somehow, found in a book at a church sale.  A little thread of history, restored.



A medal well-deserved

Book Review: Corey's Sea Monster

I like novels about cryptozoological subjects, and my friend Loren Coleman sent me this one a few years ago.  I'd overlooked it until now.

Corey's Sea Monster
by Rutherford G. Montgomery, World Publishing Company. 
This 1969 novel for young readers is the only time I've ever seen the dunkleosteus used in a novel, except for a brief appearance in one of Steve Alten's books.  While the marine biology is here is pretty sketchy even for 1969 (who knew it was easy to photograph a giant squid underwater? And what IS an electric eel doing in the Pacific?) it's fun.  Interestingly, the author uses the name of the related species Dinichthys, but the illustrations are clearly meant to be Dunkleosteus terrelli. Mr. Montgomery makes the modern version a pelagic (open ocean) fish that in one casem for reasons unknown, decides to hang out in a sea cave off California.  He also makes it glow all over with bioluminescence.  (Did Mr. Alten perhaps read this befpre he came up with his glowing Megamouth shark?) 
Modern teenagers will consider the book too tame, and divers will blanch at the way the young hero's father routinely sends him on deep dives alone to photograph dangerous animals, but it's a harmless diversion, and it was certainly an original storyline for its day.

Dr. Ketchum and "Sasquatch DNA," Round 21

I said I was done on this subject, mainly because I am not a DNA expert.  However, an extraordinary letter has been published, with Dr. Melba Ketchum writing to the journal Nature to request her paper be reconsidered after an original rejction. The money line is here:

"We even have high definition video of the donor of sample 37 sleeping in the forest and breathing at 6 breaths per minute (Supplementary Video 1). This sample was part of a field research study overseen by a PhD in wildlife biology so we are certain of the source of this sample and the video attached to it. We have a full facial video of her also that will be released after the paper publishes."

Now you might say someone from Nature should have looked at the video. I would have, even though I would have gone in very cautiously. (I would still look at it.)  But now that the paper has been published, albeit in a rather sketchy series of events in which Ketchum bought an online journal which has published only one paper, hers, there is no excuse for not publishing the video. If she doesn't post it, it'll be taken by almost everyone, including me, to mean that she doesn't believe in its authenticity herself.

She says repeatedly her evidence has passed peer review, but she recruited the reviewers. That's not done in science.  But DNA is something most people don't understand in great depth.  An alleged face-on full-motion high-def video would let everyone form an opinion and could instantly let qualified scientists pronounce a verdict on the case.  Note that Dr. Ketchum shows no doubt of the connection between the video and her samples: she said the animal in the video DID provide one of her samples, period. 

To Dr. Ketchum: if you seriously believe we have evidence of a rare new species which immediately needs government protection - which it would - then publish the video so it can get that protection.  Otherwise, the whole case is going to slide into limbo and eventually be forgotten.  I know there's no reason for Dr. K to listen to me: I am one of many writers/researchers on cryptrozoology, albeit one who takes pride in being thorough and scientific, and I think my books bear that out.  I don't know how I can be any fairer than I've been with this.  If there is an animal, and you want it protected, publish the proof.  Please.

Book Review: Kraken

Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid    

by Wendy Williams

Abrams Image; 2011

 

 

Williams, a veteran science and environmental writer, has turned in a fun, engaging, and generally fascinating look at the cephalopods (squid get most of the ink (hah), but she spends some time with the octopuses, especially the giant Pacific octopus, and the cuttlefishes as well).  Much of the material in this book that was new to me concerned the medical utility of the squid. I knew we studied its huge nerve-cell axons, but I didn't know how fundamental squid have been to our understanding of the human nervous system and its diseases. Williams personalizes the book with stories and interviews with veteran teuthologists like Clyde Roper as well as field biologists studying the famous (and perhaps dangerous) Humboldt squid and running Squids4Kids, a program to ship squid to high school classrooms for dissection.  

We encounter are many fascinating facts along the way: I never knew that scientists had ground up and liquefied the ink found in a beautifully preserved 150-million-year-old fossil squid and used it to draw a picture of the animal.  Cephalopods, it seems, have been with us for up to half a billion years, thumbing their noses at extinction events (or so they would have done if they had thumbs, or noses) while evolving some unearthly features. These include skins capable of amazing changes of hue the animal never sees (squid don't see colors) and a brain that is, in essence, distributed through the animal's arms as well as the central gray matter. 
Concerning the latter, one topic that thoroughly fascinates William is the question of intelligence. Cephalopods are the smartest invertebrates on Earth, but how do they compare with the mammals, and how can we even figure that out with a creature whose intelligence is so different from ours?  There are even passing mentions of some tidbits for the cryptozoologists: there's a reference to a reported Pacific octopus weighing 600 pounds, and a theory that there may have been an octopus with a 150-foot arm spread - shades of the disputed Octopus giganteus from Florida and the Caribbean.

This is a terrific book. It doesn't cover all the topics I wish she'd included, but what is here will hold your attention like a tentacle holds a fish.

News on New Launch Vehicles - and Beyond

Congratulations to Japan on the launch of their new Epsilon rocket. The Epsilon is a "smart rocket" with most of the intelligence needed to control the launch on board: the launch can be directed from a laptop. 

Meanwhile, the first launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 v1.1 - with first stage reusable technology to test for the upcoming Falcon 9R - has been slipped after an anomaly was discovered in a test. Elon Musk and company are taking no chances. This is the rocket they are bidding for USAF Medium launches: SpaceX is the first New Entrant to challenge for launches under the EELV program - a program only the government-sponsored Delta and Atlas rockets have participated in for the last decade. The Delta IV and Atlas V have an amazing record of success, but the cost increases have been enormous.  SpaceX can, it is hoped, introduce real competition: and Musk sees that as only the first step toward developing his Falcon 9 Heavy variant and someday using it to send humans to Mars.  If you're going to dream, dream big.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson doesn't think it'll work: he things space exploration is essentially too big and complex a task for the private sector alone.  Tyson is a scientist and visionary I admire greatly (and a great guy) but for once I'm not sure he's right.  Musk may be a dreamer, but he's gotten some pretty amazing things done.

Space is big enough for all visions to play a part.  Maybe someday on Mars there will be the Tyson-Musk Spaceport.

9/11 - The Science and the Emotions

Here's an excellent recap of the science and engineering questions about 9/11 - and how, yes, this wrenching event happened pretty much the way the nation's top engineering and architectural experts said it did.

A few things to remember:
1. When an incredibly complex event that has never happened, and in many ways shouldn't have happened, DOES happen, there will be countless oddities and mysteries - some of which will never be definitively solved. (Look how the details of Pearl Harbor and JFK assassination are still being fought over.) Yes, that means that any official report will have some problems, too.
2. Remember that anyone can call themselves anything. When you see a name like Architects and Engineers for Truth, think about how large those professions are, what a tiny fraction of a percent are "truthers," and what a gigantic near-consensus of those professions believes.
3. In the last decade, not a single one of the masterminds - or the ordinary workers - who must have been in on this giant conspiracy has revealed anything.
4. Final bullet in the "truther" case: While I have not looked at any of those stolen/leaked US intelligence documents, the people who have pored over them and posted their analysis in the media and online have not said a word about finding even a hint of what would have been the biggest, most important, most evil and most unprecedented intelligence operation in US history.  Did we hide it from ourselves? Not likely.


No, I'm not interested in the usual 9/11 game of swapping lists of links.  You can call me closed-minded, but I've determined that, to my own satisfaction, I've read enough links, reports, and accounts to know what happened.  Unless there is new evidence - and there is not - the case is closed.

I'll remember the day as I watched it happen.  I'll remember the tributes: Judy Collins' song will stay in your mind forever, as will Tom Paxton's "The Bravest" and Alan Jackson's universal question, "Where Were You?"

And more than anything else, I remember my 10-year old daughter, Corey, asking my why I was crying. When I told her it was because a lot of children like her lost their moms and dads that day, she said.  "One of those kids can come live here. They can have my room."

"And a little child shall lead them..."

Random notes on the fishes

Fish are interesting because they are such a wonderful example of adaptive radiation (32,000 species and counting).  The African ciclids are famous as being sort of Darwin's finches with scales, but I'm thinking of marine fishes at the moment. There are three living classes and two extinct ones, by the most parsimonious methods of evaluation.  They gave rise to some of the mightiest life forms on Earth. My favorite fish is one that is, unfortunately, no longer with us, the orca-sized predator Dunkleosteus, he of the imposing armor plating and teeth (ok, biting plates) the size of small traffic cones.  It also includes two creatures once thought to be30m long, though we now know they were smaller. One is the queen of sharks, megalodon, which lives on now only in bad movies and TV species.  The other is the filter-feeding Leedsichthys problematicus, a Jurassic species with huge pectoral fins among other interesting features. This animal may or may not have been bigger than the modern filter-feeding whale shark, but it seems secure in its place as the largest bony fish ever to live. (Indeed, paleontologists still debate why and how a harmless fish in a sea of huge marine reptilian carnivores got that big at all.)
Fishes I wrote about in my first book as new included the eelike Lamprogrammus shcherbachevi, which was identified in 1993 from four specimens caught between 1972 and 1991 in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.  It is a rare mid-water and deep-water species: it deserves a re-mention because despite being reasonably large (two meters), it remains so obscure that some online descriptions of it include no species-specific illustrations.   (As a sometime cryptozoological researcher, it strikes me it would make a serviceable sea serpent if it was 15m instead of 2.  Hmmm, how do we know it isn't?  I'll get back to that in a minute.)
New species keep piling up.  We have the hopbeard plunderfish, which deserves to be mentioned on its common name alone, a chubby brown-splotched denizen of near freezing Antarctic waters, with catfish-like barbels. Another new species is the psychedelic frogfish, which has a great name and deserves it. Histiophryne psychedelica "bounces" off the seafloor with thrust of leglike fins and boosts its hop with water expelled from the gills.  All that and it looks like something from the movie Yellow Submarine, only stranger.  Another recent find, the striated frogfish, boasts changing coloration, a natural "fishing pole," and fins and other projections seemingly stuck on it at random. The whole frogfish family gets weirder from there.
Anyway, I said these were random notes, but here's the point I was going to get to.  The fishes are an ancient group containing most of the vertebrate species on Earth, but we still don't know many things, including how many types there are. Ask the scientists in the Census of Marine Life, who are still examining hundreds of potential new species. We also know that the larger species have been reduced, in some areas more than 90%, by overfishing and pollution, and we don't know how the chain of life will shake out even if we tightly regulate fishing and rely more on farmed fish (A strategy with problems of its own, but that's beside the point for the moment.)
I think it possible, and indeed likely, that the fishes hide something else from us still: an eel or eel-like fish, at least 10 long, responsible for countless reports of giant eels and "sea serpents."  Keep looking, scientists....

Godspeed, Ann Crispin

My talented, wonderful writing friend and mentor, creator (as A.C. Crispin) of great science fiction and fantasy, has lost her battle with cancer and crossed the last frontier.  I still remember when she was in town some years ago, sitting with her and my teenage daughter Corinne as Ann tried out dialogue written for Jack Sparrow for the prequel novel, The Price of Freedom, asking whether Corey thought she'd gotten the speech pattern right.  She encouraged my writing and made it so much better.  May God bless her, her husband Michael, and all her family and friends.

Ad Astra

Titan II (part 4 of 3?)

I thought I'd finished my reminiscences about the Titan II ICBM and space launch vehicle, but I realized I left out Rocky Raccoon.  No, not the Beatles song, but the long-suffering mascot of Titan II ICBM Complex 373-5, Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas.
When I came on crew in 1982, Strategic Air Command regulations somehow were read as allowing stashes of adult magazines while forbidding mascots, posters, or anything that detracted from the utilitatian green and gray.  This was a nuclear missile complex, not a dorm... but rules were bent a bit.  The magazine stashes disappeared as more women appeared on crew and the higher-ups came around to the viewpoint that they were inappropriate, but Rocky stayed.
Rockey was a stuffed raccoon who looked like he'd been run over by a missile transporter. His begraggled appearance was the result of being constantly stuffed behind panels and consoles, only to be allowed out and restored to his perch on the missile monitoring consoles after visitors had left.  Rocky was of course occasionally noticed by visitors, but crews got away with it for a long time. My crew received a Standboard (Standards and Evulation) crew writeup once that included the directive, "Remove Raccoon." This, of course, was ignored.
No one was sure how many years Rocky had been out there. We credited him unofficially with 3,000 24-hour alerts, but that was just a guess. 
Finally, it had to end.  A man I considered a friend (until then) came out pulling duty with an instructor crew, and Rocky went into the trash. My wife made up a little cardboard headstone.  That didn't last long either.  Farewell, Rocky. For a raccon, you were a great crewdog.

Swimming "monsters" are all over the place

The pioneering cryptozoological writer Bernard Heuvelmans was once told that sea serpent sightings appeared in the paper because summer was "the silly season" when reported needed to fill the paper up and were happy to put in some fanciful topics.  No one can actually find such a pattern, and having more sighting reports of lake, river, and seacoast animals is pretty easily explained by the fact there are more people on and around the water in summer to either 1) see mysterious creatures, or 2) see things they mistake for mysterious creatures.
As Loren Coleman writes here, August 2013 got really busy.  Chronologically, in early August, David Elder, an amateur photographer, saw something in Loch Ness.  He got both still photographs and video.  Loren reports that Henry Bauer and Gary Campbell, veteran Loch investigators, think Elder photographed a wave or wake effect, which is probably right but, of course, disappointing. At Loch Morar, two people reported a 20-foot creature.  It was seen three times in two days and  photographed (alas, inconclusively).
Two men kayaking off Acadia National Park in Maine reported a "sea serpent" swimming by with a three-foot-long head covered with scales.  A swimming creature off that coast might well be a moose (despite their ungainly appearance, these big lummoxes are actually nimble on land and swim well enough that they are often seen crossing water to favorite grazing spots or whatever else turns a moose on.) The three-foot length could be the product of excited exaggeration. The scales are odd:  wet, ruffled-up fur can look like anything besides what it is, but I'm not sure about scales.   On the other hand, as cryptozoological researcher Jay Cooney points out here, elephant seal hide can look like scales, too. 
So do we have an outbreak of unclassified aquatic creatures, or just a coincidental conflux of mistakes?  The conservative choice is the latter, and I personally don't hold out hope for any of the "lake monsters." But I would like to have been in that kayak....

Walking With Sharks

Yes, there are walking sharks.  No, not like the Asian walking catfish, the foot-long "monster" that invaded Florida some decades back and could emerge briefly on land. (I lived in Florida then and was disappointed I never found one:I had to content myself with Zaat: The Walking Catfish, possibly the worst monster movie of the decade. In one unforgettable scene, the guy in the walking-catfish suit is wearing sneakers.)
The walking sharks (a.k.a. bamboo sharks or longtail  carpet sharks) are, from a movie monster point of view, even more disappointing.  They never top 65cm long and never emerge from the warm Southern Pacific waters. However, from a scientific point of view, they are very interesting indeed, and we've just found a new species.  (Took me a while to get there, I know.)
The shark Hemiscyllium halmahera isn't a flashy critter, being brown with darker camouflage banding, but you notice when it uses its oversized paired fins to crawl like a salamander along the bottom in search of sea cucumbers, small cephalopods, and whatever else it can grab.  We may be seeing a flashback to the ancient days when the first amphibious fishes, the rhipidistian crossopterygians (try saying that three times fast), presumably driven by evolutionary competition, increasingly adapted to shallow water... and some poked their snouts out of the water into the weird new environment we call "land."
And any time we find a new shark, it's cool anyway. Ask Paul Clerkin, graduate student, who found eight new species while accompanying a fishing vessel and sifting through the bycatch under the aegis of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories Pacific Shark Research Center. Says Clerkin,  “Sharks haven’t really been explored as much as we think."
Apparently.

RIP, Bruce Murray, space explorer

I never met the great planetary exploration leader Bruce Murray, at least not that I recall, but I couldn't let his death pass without a note.  Murray steered the Jet Propulsion Lab, formerly an Army contract research center, into its glory days of solar system exploration.  Murray was an early and successful advocate for allotting some of the precious mass on interplanetary spacecraft to cameras: not just for the scientific return, but to involve the public.  And did it ever work.  Those of us old enough to remember Viking will recall those first pictures from Mars forever. He was instrumental in keeping JPL and the robotic missions alive when human spaceflight, especially the Shuttle, threatened to eat the entire NASA budget.  Murray cofounded the Planetary Society, wrote six books, and had an asteroid named after him.  He was nicknamed Admiral of the Solar System, and he deserved it.

Sail on, Admiral.

Book Review: Below, a solid new "creature" novel

Below
Ryan Lockwood
Pinnacle, 2013

Most "creature" novel authors make a lot of mistakes. They rush to get to the creature, they ignore, handwave, or invent the science, and/or they present us with cardboard human characters who readers wish would just get eaten and be done with it.
Lockwood doesn't make any of those mistakes. His technical details of the sea and diving are very interesting, the science behind the animals involved is stretched only a little, and he takes his time introducing a believable story about believable people.
Lockwood's creatures, the Humboldt squid, are a real species, and they do most of what Lockwood has them doing. They are smart, pack-hunting animals 2-3 meters long, that communicate with flashes of color. Lockwood makes them a little too smart and much too emotional, but otherwise they are believably scary. This is a species that could do a lot of damage if it ever collectively decided to check out a new food source like, say, humans. (There have been some scary encounters, and possibly a few unrecorded human deaths, as people study and fish for this numerous and well-armed (the pun is unavoidable) species.)
The book drags in spots, with a little too much lecturing thrown in.  And there are nitpicks: destroyers don't and can't carry guns you could fit a soccer ball into. But overall, kudos to Lockwood. He's given us a first-rate thriller and a little ecological lesson into the bargain. I'll look forward to the sequel.

Book Review: Rocket Girl

Rocket Girl: The Story of Mary Sherman Morgan, America's First Female Rocket Scientist

George D. Morgan

Prometheus, 2013 

 

George Morgan's book about his mother is fascinating, and especially so to me since I coauthored a history of the era in question that Morgan used a source.  I just couldn't get comfortable with his way of telling the story.
To say the most important thing first, Mary Sherman Morgan's invention of hydyne was a critical contribution at a critical time in the Space Race.  The new fuel enabled the Jupiter C, a booster based on Wernher von Braun's Redstone missile, to put Explorer I into orbit.  And none of us knew anything about it. My coauthor Erika and I spent years researching this era and never heard of her.  In part it was because the government documents of the time never mentioned who at her company produced the idea, and in part it was because she was so stone-silent about it for the rest of her life.  Still, I feel bad that we didn't include her in our book The First Space Race. 
To say she was a woman in a man's world is putting it mildly: there were 900 men and Mary.  Her determined climb from a dirt-poor North Dakota farm to her work in complex chemistry makes for a story that should have been told long ago.  I never knew the fuel problem was as difficult as it was: Mary and her colleagues were not allowed to vary the flow rates, change any machinery, or tinker with anything except the chemistry itself. Yet they had to produce a significant performance increase, and thanks to her encyclopedic knowledge of chemicals and ability to intuit and then calculate how they would behave, they did. The chapter on engine tests was fascinating, and the one on Explorer I's launch is an oft-mistold tale that's presented accurately here: I'm glad The First Space Race helped Morgan do a great job with it.
Morgan's story of his own generation of the family, including the discovery of who his mother really was for a major part of her life and meeting a sister Mary once gave up for adoption, is very touching.
There are some unfortunate factual errors. Specific impulse is a measure of efficiency, not power. The Jupiter C had four stages, not three.  The short-range Redstone was far from being an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and no knowledgeable person would have referred to it as one.  No Redstone was never loaded with sand, although the top stage of one Jupiter-C variant was, and that tiny "scaled Sergeant" fourth stage certainly could not have held a ton of it.
Morgan's technique of novelizing the story, with made-up characters and dialogue, severely damages the book's value as history because it's not clear what is fiction and what is fact.  I realize the approach arose out of the dearth of first-person information (again, Mary never said a word even to her children about her work) and the book's origin as a stage play: in a play, there is no choice but to invent at least some dialogue. It can lead readers to believe, though, that Russia's Sergei Korolev was determined to beat ex-enemy von Braun into space, whereas the authoritative sources on Korolev, James Harford and Asif Siddiqi, give no hint of that. The melodramatic reaction of a fictitious Army colonel to having a woman on the project needlessly amps up the sexism when the factual situation was dramatic enough.
I'm glad Morgan wrote this book.  He's a good writer, and this story cried out to be told.  I just wish he'd done it a little differently.

The slippery, surprising world of squid

Cephalopods are a diverse group, which is like saying Godzilla must leave a lot of dino dung on the Japanese landscape: the description is wholly inadequate.
Squid in particular fascinate a lot of humans.  The giant squid and colossal squid are of course the main subjects of popular culture and bad movies.  (There are a couple of squid-related novels out: Ryan Lockwood's Below is pretty good even if, like Peter Benchley's giant squid in Beast, his Humboldt squid are a little too smart and way too  emotional. Below works very well because the Humboldt squid, 2-3 meters long and a voracious, pack-hunting, communicating animal, really could be scary as hell if it ever collectively decided to find a new food source. Scarier than Benchley's 100-foot giant squid, in fact, because giant squid may be dangerous but they are rare compared to the Humboldt. And Lockwood, unlike many "creature" novelists, spends plenty of time developing realistic human characters. So kudos to him. Greig Beck's 2010 novel   Beneath the Dark Ice is well-reviewed, but I haven't read it yet.)
We catch squid, eat them, dissect them, and put them (the smaller ones, anyway) in tanks, but their world isn't our world.
While it's estimated there are 300-ish species in the order Teuthida, new ones are described every year, and we learn many new things about species we have classified.
Take, for example, Grimalditeuthis bonplandi, a translucent species about 15 cm long that lives in the Pacific. It was described from trawled (dead) specimens, but it's been captured on video for the first time, and it has a surprising habit. 
While we think of all squid as having eight shorter arms and two long food-grasping tentacles, there are a number of variations on this plan.  The vampire squid (okay, maybe not technically a squid, depending on who you ask), has two "luring" tentacles, very long, thin spaghetti-like appendages with luminescent tips, used to entice prey close enough to be grabbed.  G. bonpladi has only one such tentacle, with no luminescence, and lets it wave around in the current to either stimulate tiny light-bearing invertebrates to just look like a food object far tinier than the squid itself. When something the right size move in to grab the lure, the squid jets in and uses the stronger arms to attack.  Or so we might presume. It hasn't been caught in the act of feeding yet.
Squid are a critical part of the ocean ecosystem, and who knows what the ocean would look like if we wiped out their primary nemesis, the sperm whale? (Sharks and other fish also eat squid, but we're wiping them out as I write this.)  We have a lot to learn....

Titan II - Part 3 of 3

I've talked about the Titan II ICBM and the preparation we underwent to operate it.  When we were certified - a process the Strategic Air Command (SAC) took damned seriously - I and a few others of my class went to stand the Cold War watch in the 373d Strategic Missile Squadron. The 373rd’s motto was “Custodes Pacis,” “Guardians of Peace.”  We felt it was a good choice. 

Titan ICBMs had their share of fame, although it usually involved disasters or other bad news.  There were two movies made about Titan missiles.  The made-for-TV Disaster at Silo Seven (1988) was lame but could have been worse.  The 1977 feature film Twilight’s Last Gleaming proved that.  If there was anything remotely accurate in this story of an ex-general commandeering a missile site that appeared vaguely based on Titan I, I missed it.  Titan crews hated the film as passionately as B-52 crews hated 1990’s By Dawn’s Early Light.  (Note the unimaginative use of the same source for the titles.)   Almost as much as everyone in SAC hated the ridiculous War Games.

For a system that should have been retired when I was in grade school, the Titan II still had many years left.  There were often tiny pinhole leaks of fuel or oxidizer, and we had to keep an eye on the warning “sniffers” and other indicators.  We always felt sorry for the Minuteman crews because they almost never saw their missiles.  We went out in person to check over our birds and their support equipment every day.

The Titan II’s age, not surprisingly, meant it developed a few quirks.  I once called Job Control (the maintenance dispatch center) to report I was showing two warning lights indicating bad circuits on the missile or the umbilicals connecting it to the diagnostic equipment.  The appropriate specialist informed me it was impossible to have those two lights on at the same time.  I asked, “Well, would you like me to unscrew one of the bulbs?”  On another occasion, the old van-sized diesel generator in the silo refused to shut down after a test.  It kept going even when the maintenance team shut down all possible fuel sources.  When Job Control asked what additional help I wanted, I wearily said, “An exorcist.”  It eventually turned out a gasket had failed and the machine was consuming its own lubricating oil.

 

 I was lucky, though.  We never had a serious accident.  Actually, the whole Titan business never had one after 1979.  Things were just too stringent.  Accidentally putting a hand through a maintenance access door into the silo before lowering and securing the work platforms on that level could and did end a career.

It was with some regret we watched the Titans start going off alert.  (Drastic regulations were put in place tro mkae sure none of the important items left the complex as souveniers, even though the sites were going to be blown up under START requirements.  All I have a is an old copy of a laminated locator board used to track visitors and maintenance teams.)

Most of our missiles were still up in 1986, when I headed for a new assignment at Grand Forks in North Dakota.  I left the 308th in 1986, the year before the last missile was taken off alert.  The wing produced a book entitled “End of an Era.”  On the cover, with a Titan II, was a Tyrannosaurus rex.

The Titan II, unlike the tyrannosaur, was destined to roar again.  No one had launched a Titan II since 1976, when the supply of test missiles ran out.  While 140 Titan IIs had been built, the 53 in the silos and three spares were all that remained.  Even before  the birds had been pulled off alert and shipped out to California for storage, ways to use this resource for space launch began to surface. 

 Obviously, the Titan II made a very good space launch vehicle.  At least, it did back in the decade it was manufactured.  It took some work to turn it back into one.  In 1986, Martin Marietta Astronautics Group was given a contract to modify and launch up to 14 missiles. 

To turn a Titan II into a space launcher, the second stage needed to be modified for a new payload interface.  A payload fairing was needed, along with adapters for different satellites.  The guidance system was upgraded, and the engines were inspected and reconditioned.  Appropriate command, telemetry, and destruct systems were adapted from hardware designed for other vehicles.

The destination of the reborn Titan IIs was Space Launch Complex-4 West at Vandenberg.   On 5 September 1988, the first new Titan II launch vehicle was fired into space.   The Titan IIs were used mainly for launches to polar orbit.  Their capacity to such an orbit was over 4,000 pounds.  

Lee Brandon-Cremer with Titan II at Norton AFB

And, somewhat surprisingly to those of us who had nervously cared for the Beast, they worked. Perfectly.  Every time. The Titan 23G, as the launch vehicle was called, launched 14 times from 1988 to 1994, always from Vandenberg AFB, where we had received advanced crew training years before.  It orbited weather and scientific satellites and, most significantly, the Clementine lunar probe in January 1994, a brilliantly successful mission that started NASA on the bumpy road of its "better faster cheaper" philosophy.

The Titan II launch complex at Vandenberg, which we always called "Charlie site," is still there and can be visited by escorted public tours. There is no missile, though.  One site at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, is maintained as museum, complete with inert missile.  If you get a chance, don’t miss it.  It's the best way to appreciate the engineering marvel called the Titan II. 

(Or you can tour it on YouTube)

For more information, see David Stumpf’s excellent book, Titan II: A History of a Cold War Missile Program.

Titan II - part 2 of 3

The Titan II was an outstanding space launcher and ballistic missile.  How does one run such a complex device and its silo full of support equipment? Very carefully. 

Training for the Titan II ICBM Combat Crew force was a long task.  We headed first to Sheppard AFB in Texas for technical training.  We learned missile systems, electronics, propulsion, and such mundane things as the care and feeding of air conditioners and diesel generators.   

At Vandenberg AFB, for the second half of training,, the enlisted troops were split into two tracks depending on specialty, while the officers trained for our initial role of Deputy Commander.  We had a lot to learn, from Emergency War Orders (EWO) training, to thick books full of checklists (ANY deviation from the checklist was, in the SAC world, a career-limiting move), to sessions in a trainer simulating almost any emergency one could dream up. 

We also had a very somber lesson about what it was we were going to do.  Every crewmember had to sign a statement saying that he or she (Titan II crews were fully sex-integrated by then) could employ nuclear weapons if the President so ordered.  Before signing it, we watched films on the effects of nuclear weapons, from the destruction of houses built near American nuclear test sites to graphic footage of the casualties of nuclear warfare in Japan.  I watched, thought, said a prayer for guidance, and signed the form.

The Titan II ICBMs were deployed the Strategic Air Command in wings of 18 missiles each, with each wing divided into two squadrons.  The 308th SMW was based at Little Rock AFB, Arkansas .and was activated 29 November 1961.  When I joined the 308th, it was under 8th Air Force, an affiliation I wore with pride given what the Mighty 8th had done in World War II.

I had the honor of serving in the 373rd Strategic Missile Squadron.  The 373rd was famous among missile squadrons mainly for the “haunted missile site.” That site was 373 SMS Complex 4, or “three-four” for short.  Three-four was near Searcy, Arkansas, a town I don’t recall ever actually seeing.  On 9 August 1965, when 373-4 was undergoing maintenance work (no missile was present), a welder cut a high-pressure hydraulic line with his torch.  The resulting flash fire killed 53 civilian workers.  After an investigation was completed and new safety rules imposed, the missile site was repaired and returned to duty.

A few odd occurrences, naturally magnified in the telling over the years, seemed to cement the site’s reputation.  “A guy found all his tools put back in his toolbox when he was the only person on that level of the silo.”  “You can hear footsteps on Level 3.”  “A security policeman once shot at a glowing figure in the crow’s nest.”  (The crow’s nest was a little platform, mounted on a high pole, for weather instruments.)  “Stanford Research Institute once investigated and found there were nine different entities out here.”

All these stories turned out to be imaginary or highly exaggerated.  The author must report, with regret, that his year spent as one of the crews assigned to this site produced no sightings, or sounds, or anything else out of the ordinary.  An enlisted crewmember with artistic talent, though, rose to the occasion when it was decided that blast doors leading from the entry stairwell/elevator shaft into the Launch Control Center could be painted, analogous to the way nose art is painted on aircraft.  A very good rendering of a haunted house with a missile protruding from its roof was painted on the blast door.  Presumably, it is there still.

Titan II - Defender and Explorer

The Titan II ICBM came to mind the other day when David Darling posted on FaceBook a photo from the Gemini program.  The old Titan did two jobs - three, really.  I admired it as a booster and an exploration vehicle, but I knew "the Beast" intimately as a ballistic missile.
I pulled somewhere over 200 24-hour "alerts" underground near Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1980s.  I commanded a four person crew, two officers, two enlisted.  Unlike the Minuteman missiles still on alert today, the Titan's crew was responsible for just one missile, and the command center was connected to the silo by a long cableway.  We walked out every day to inspect the aging warrior, which was supposed to have been retired by 1970 but was still on alert because there was no agreement in DC on its successor, which eventually became the Peacekeeper ICBM. 
If you were a space buff, you already knew something about the Titan II.  When NASA decided to follow its one-man Mercury capsule with the two-man Gemini, the Air Force's Titan II was the only American vehicle with the power to lift it.  The Titan II (first launched as a missile in a test in 1962)  went through hundreds of changes to become "man-rated," the biggest of which was getting rid of a longitudinal shaking or "pogo" effect.  The resulting booster had a perfect record for placing the Geminis in space: two unmanned and ten manned launches between 1964 and 1966.  (Spaceflight was, of course, all-"manned" in those days.). It went on to develop into the Titan III and Titan IV that carried the heaviest NASA and Defense payloads outside of the Apollo stack. 



Yes, it really was this awesome.  (USAF) 

Maybe I shouldn't speak reverently of a missile that could, as we well knew, kill millions of people. But however shaky the moral calculus of Mutual Assured Destruction was, it worked.  From WWII to the demise of the Soviet Union, no one on either side turned a launch key, and a large part of the reason was because they knew the other guy had time to turn his, too.  We did the job.

The LGM-25C Titan II was a two-stage bird over 100 feet tall and 10 feet wide.  The reentry vehicle containing what was euphemistically called the physics package was covered in fiberglass-like ablative material, and the whole thing was much taller than I was and had an unmistakable menace to it.  The big Aerojet LR87, an engine with twin combustion chambers and nozzles, burned nitrogen tetroxide and an equally noxious hydrazine blend called Aerozine-50.  These were hypergolics, meaning they ignited on contact, meaning you didn't want to let them come in contact or you got something like the 1979 accident at site 374-7, where a silo door weighing 700 tons was flipped aside like a poker chip in an explosion that killed one man and produced a cloud of nitrogen tetroxide (a BFRC, or "big 'friendly' red cloud") that scared the hell out of central Arkansas.

NEXT: Training and life with the Titan II underground.

And another new mammal pokes its head out...

From a museum this time.

It's not unusual to find new species in museum collections - the world's largest gecko and longest-legged spider were described that way. (How did the spider get overlooked? I am trying to picture a curator saying, "Ho hum, foot-long spider - file it over there.")

Now we have this little fellow.  The New World's newest mammal is the olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina), which has actually been in zoos but has been overlooked because it looks fairly close to another species. Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, found the specimens in Chicago's Field Museum that sent him on a quest for the living animal: and here it is, from Ecuador's cloud forests.

Welcome, little guy. 

A bit of a detour...

I usually keep this blog to science and writing, but here's a bit of wisdom that struck me as so profound it deserved repetition. 

A story told by my favorite singer, the late Harry Chapin:

"My grandfather was a painter. He died at age eighty-eight, he illustrated Robert Frost's first two books of poetry and he was looking at me and he said, 'Harry, there are two kinds of tired: there's good-tired, and there's bad-tired.' He said, 'Ironically enough, bad-tired can be a day that you won. But you won other people's battles, you lived other people's days, other people's agendas, other people's dreams and when it was all over there was very little "you" in there, and when you hit the hay at night, somehow you toss and turn--you don't settle easy.' He said, 'Good-tired, ironically enough, can be a day that you lost. But you don't have to tell yourself, 'cause you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days, and when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy--you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say "take me away."' He said, 'Harry, all my life I've painted. God, I would've loved to be more successful, but I painted and I painted, and I am good-tired and they can take me away.'
Now, if there is a process in your and my lives in the insecurity that we have about a prior life or an afterlife and God--I hope there is a God. If He is-- if He does exist He's got a rather weird sense of humor, however. But let's just-- But if there's a process that will allow us to live our days and will allow us that degree of equanimity towards the end, looking at that black, implaccable wall of death, to allow us that degree of peace, that degree of non-fear, I want in."

From the Conference on Small Satellites

Sorry I've been hard to find lately on this blog, but there is so much going on here at Smallsat.  Yesterday's breifings covered a half-dozen ways to solve the launch problem, from new ridesharing agreements to a Japanese air-dropped-and-ignited rocket to Virgin Galactic's plan to fire s small expendable rocket from beneath the WhiteNightTwo carrier aircraft they will be using for tourist flights (the plane will fly with the SpoaceShipTwo passenger plane in human testts later this year,)   We heard a full session of microsatellite contellation plans, from NASA's five-microsat"fractionated (distributed) architecture" solar weather warning mission to science done with "femtosats" weighing less than your iphone.  Exciting times!
www.smallsat.org

Newest shark - the Carolina hammerhead

The scalloped hammerhead shark is a well-known denizen of the U.S. East Coast. When a paper published in 1967 noted a specimen with an unusually small number of vertebrae, no one thought much about it.  As often happens in science, though, subsequent specimens eventually drew ichthyologists to reexamine whether there might be more than one species. By jingo (does anyone say that anymore?), there is.  The newly designated Carolina hammerhead has 83 to 91 vertebrae, while the scalloped hammerhead has 92 to 99. It's a case of cryptic species: species which look very similar on the outside but turn out to be distinct.  This matters, not only to the sharks, but to conservationists who are trying to determine whether each species is healthy and how to manage their habitats. 
The are over 350 species of sharks, and new ones are described every year. These are usually tiny deep-water sharks, but scientists don't doubt some big ones are out there, too.  (Okay, not Megalodon - that's too much to hope for.)
A 2007-8 study in Australia confirmed - seriously - 100 new species of sharks and rays in the local waters, including a 2-meter shark with a preference for fresh water. 
So, a little late for Shark Week but always timely, welcome the newest shark - 3.5 meters long, 180 kilograms or so, and living an inoffensive life (to humans) all its own.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/09/4226010/new-species-of-shark-found-off.html#storylink=cpy