Mixed news for Microsatellites

A number of interesting things have been happening the world of microsatellite.

First, Skybox Imaging, which built its first two 100-kg imaging satellites (which offer stills and video) , will contract the next 13 to Space Systems/Loral.  It's interesting because SS/L has never built microsats. Will they bring in fresh ideas? Or will they try to build them the way they do large satellites (which will not end well)? Stay tuned!

Then Northrop Grumman delivered its modular MSV microsat bus to the government.  What they don't say in their press release is that the mission has no approved payload, budget, or launch date... nothing against the smart folks t NG, I am sure they delivered quality, but with existing budgets and plans, what they delivered is a high-tech coffee table.

Antechinus envy

Would you like to be an antechinus?  They are cute little creatures.

OK, you're not cool with being a mouselike Australian marsupial.  We now know there are 13 species, with two more descriptions on the way. Some of those species are threatened.

The discoverer of the newest species says, that Australia has 360 known mammal species and adds, "A further two dozen species have become extinct since European settlement but there are likely many other species waiting to be discovered - while the majority may be out in the bush, some could be within close reach.''

And while antechinus males don't live long, they go out in a blaze of - well, something. The males of most species go into a frenzy where they do nothing except mate and battle other males over mating.  And I mean, they do NOTHING else.  They don't sleep, they don't eat, they don't groom.  They essentially have sex and get into fights until a rival kills them or they simply drop dead, exhausted. 

There's a lesson in that.  I think.

Whale sharks in wholesale (and retail) trouble

The most magnificent fish in the oceans is, bar none, the whale shark.  Only the sperm whale and the largest of the rorquals are bigger.  They can exceed 15m in length, and claims over 20m have been made.  They are global in distribution, and we're still learning about their migration and reproductive habits.  They are protected on CITES Appendix II, and many nations have taken action to establish protected areas, ban trade in their fins, and otherwise try to keep the whale shark off Appendix I. 

China, however,  has not gotten the memo, and doesn't seem to want to.  While Chinese authorities state that illegal fishing of whale sharks can bring a jail sentence, this factory seems to operate with impunity.  I don't know what the answer is, but there has to be one, and publicizing this crime is Step 1.
Whale sharks are harmless filter-feeders (image NMFS)

 

Step Forward in Fusion

Fusion energy is the ultimate solution for the Earth's energy problems - if we can make it work. We still can't, but a major step forward was announced. Scientists at the National Ignition Facility have gotten more energy out of the fuel in their experiment than they put in.  We're still a long way from a commercial machine, but this event caused some jubilation among physicists, not normally thought of as party animals.
I'm hardly a physicist, and I don't know how close we are to fusion. But as long as we are making progress, it's worth the investment.
Unproven claims from certain people selling something called the e-Cat (never tested without its inventor present) notwithstanding, this is the path to the future.

Where have all the Nessies gone?

The Loch Ness monster, whatever you think he/she/they/it may be, has been a pretty consistent sight in its home lake for the past 80 years.  Gary Campbell, a local enthusiast who keeps a register, says no one has seen Nessie in 18 months. William Hill, the bookmaking firm that offers a cash prize for best Nessie sighting of the year, records three claims, but all were dismissed as easily explained. 
Nessie sightings before the 1930s were separated by many years, and some items put into this category were irrelevant (e.g., St. Columba's supposed dismissal of a monster in the River Ness), while others were poorly supported or fraudulent.  Still, there have been over a thousand sightings by Campbell's records, most recently in 2012. Campbell hopes 2014 will be a better year.  In other news, American television loon Charlie Sheen says he's going to look for himself. 
Good luck, Charlie. I've given up believing there's a large unknown creature in the Loch, but given Sheen's well-publicized  pharmaceutical habits, he might see one anyway.

ADDED: Dick Raynor, a highly competent investigator,  sent along a reminder that he regularly posts Nessie news here. 

Not impressed by pseudoarcheology

Sharon Hill's Doubtful News here dismantles the absurd claims that cranial deformation in South American skulls indicates some are nonhuman, or only partly human.  All we have are claims to the press and YouTube videos that the DNA is unusual - without the kind of details a real scientist would provide so others can check the work.  Dr. Melba Ketchum is one of the "geneticists" involved, which makes me automatically consign the thing to the trash heap, but one of the commenters on Hall's blog, a person with the screen name Spookyparadigm, actually gives the most important information by pointing out that real science has already given us our answers. He or she provided the following links:

Diseases of the Skull in Pre-Columbian South American Mummies
http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Abstract/1998/05000/Diseases_of_the_Skull_in_Pre_Columbian_South.114.aspx

Intentional Cranial Deformation: A Disappearing Form of Self‐mutilation
http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Abstract/1995/09000/Intentional_Cranial_Deformation__A_Disappearing.2.aspx

Effects of different kinds of cranial deformation on the incidence of wormian bones
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.10304/abstract;jsessionid=48B1AFB06CE805CDA5C244F5354C2961.f03t03?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

Exploring artificial cranial deformation using elliptic Fourier analysis of procrustes aligned outlines
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.10286/abstract?deniedAccessCustomisedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false

Cranial Vault Modification and Ethnicity in Middle Horizon San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/338290?uid=3739840&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103475568243

New World Cranial Deformation Practices: Historical Implications for Pathophysiology of Cognitive Impairment in Deformational Plagiocephaly
http://journals.lww.com/neurosurgery/Abstract/2007/06000/New_World_Cranial_Deformation_Practices_.21.aspx

Others point out that the specimens in question are apparently only shared with Ketchum and other believers, not with independent scientists -and that the specimens may have been exported from Peru illegally after being uncovered by tomb robbers, not scientists.

A whale of a new species

When I was researching my book Shadows of Existence, Dr. Merel Dalebout told me she thought there were still new species of beaked whales to be discovered.

According to the paper she just co-wrote for Marine Mammal Science, she was right.

OK, the first specimen of this new whale was found in 1963 and misidentified as a known type. OK, it's a cryptic species: we didn't miss it because no one saw it: we missed it because it looked like another species (several other species, in fact).
BUT STILL: It's a new freaking WHALE.

Welcome to the genus, Mesoplodon hotaula!

The first American step into the Space Age

Eighty-four days. That's all it took from the time General Bruce Medaris and Dr. Wernher von Braun got the go-ahead to launch a satellite in the wake of Sputnik 1 and the failure of our own Vanguard TV-3 to the launch of Explorer 1.  That launch took place 56 years ago yesterday.

For the insider story, read a book that, while not flawless (we tried hard for flawless, but didn't quite get there), was the first ever to trace the three-legged Vanguard-Sputnik-Explorer race - and the first to discuss the fourth competitor, NOTSNIK, aka Project Pilot.

Erika Lishock and I talked to all the leaders of the U.S. programs we could locate. Most helpful were James Van Allen, JPL head Bill Pickering, Ernst Stuhlinger of the von Braun team, and Milt Rosen, Technical Director of Project Vanguard.  (All are gone now except Rosen: I talked last week to Pete Wilhelm of the Naval Research Laboratory, who told me Milt is still alive but no longer seeing people.)

So check out The First Space Race!

New species of river dolphin

There are four living - and one recently extinct - species of river dolphins. Well, maybe there are five.
A new paper in PLOS names Inia araguaiaensis from Brazil.  While some specialists are not yet convinced it's a separate species, it is a big step forward in understanding the diversity and conservation status of South America's river dolphins. It's also a reminder that we don't know all the animals - even all the big animals - on this wide and varied planet.

amed Inia araguaiaensis, or the Araguarian Boto. Hrbek and his team made the discovery in Brazil’s Araguaia River basin. T - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/first-new-river-dolphin-species-found-world-war-i#sthash.mWrW20B6.dpuf

med Inia araguaiaensis, or the Araguarian Boto. Hrbek and his team made the discovery in Brazil’s Araguaia River basin. T - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/first-new-river-dolphin-species-found-world-war-i#sthash.mWrW20B6.dpuf

med Inia araguaiaensis, or the Araguarian Boto. Hrbek and his team made the discovery in Brazil’s Araguaia River basin. T - See more at: http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/first-new-river-dolphin-species-found-world-war-i#sthash.mWrW20B6.dpuf

Shark species reappears after a century

The saga of Carcharhinus leiodon, the smoothtooth blacktip shark, is a very interesting one. The lone specimen was collected in 1902 from the coast of Yemen and not named until 1985.  Since there were no newer specimens, some experts doubted the species' validity. Others assumed it was extinct.
Both schools of thought were wrong.
Shark specialist Alec Moore spotted something odd in a fish market in Kuwait in 2008: “amongst the many species of whaler shark was one which looked very similar, but different, to a couple of other species.” The smoothtooth blacktip had been rediscovered and validated.
Fish markets have always been good hunting grounds for ichthyologists, teuthologists, and the like in their search for new species. As the linked article points out, fishermen around the world deploy far grater resources than all scientific vessels put together.  They sometime find species that were unknown in a particular location - or unknown altogether. Ask graduate student Paul Clerkin, who found eight potentially new shark species by tagging along with a fishing fleet in the Indian Ocean.


THANKS TO Kris Winkler for pointing me to this item.

The Thylacine: Still Alive?

I've pretty much given up hope for the world's largest marsupial carnivore, the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger.  I consider it true - indeed, unarguable - that a few tigers survived the species' official demise in 1936. However, despite a trickle of modern sightings, my best guess is that the survivors didn't make up a viable population and died out around the 1990s. 

Maybe I'm wrong.

British cryptozoologist Richard Freeman is now in northwestern Tasmania looking for it with help from his colleagues of the Centre for Fortean Zoology.  He says, "The area is so damn remote, there are so many prey species and we have so many reliable witnesses who know the bush that I’d say there is a reasonable population of them left."

 Still, experts like the late Dr. Eric Guiler spent decades looking for the thylacine. The odds are not good.
But perhaps they are not hopeless.  I wish Freeman and company all the luck in the world.

Two Gems: Doubtful News and Tet Zoo

A salute to two outstanding sources of information on the creature world. This link to Sharon Hill's Doubtful News includes her nod to Darren Naish's Tet Zoo blog on its 8th birthday.

Now, I don't always agree with these authors, but they do their homework. Sharon might be called a generally skeptical science writer, while Dr. Naish is one of the UK's foremost authorities on extinct reptiles their kin (particularly pterosaurs and sauropods) and countless other animal-related topics. (Sharon also distances herself from the insistence that any skepticism must be coupled with atheism, an annoying strain of thought that crops up a lot in the writings of the many skeptics who love Richard Dawkins. (I never found Dawkins' approach to atheism convincing anyway: he outlines his own idea of what God must be like, then argues that God doesn't exist.)  Daniel Loxton, coauthor of a major recent book on cryptozoology, has an interesting column on this.)

To get back on topic, if you are going to understand cryptozoology, you have to understand these sources. For example, Sharon Hill pretty much destroyed the Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA silliness, while Naish's work on "sea serpents" has landed some hard shots against the too-credulous approach while leaving room for the possibility that there just might be (or until recently has been) an undiscovered pinniped at the root of this business. 

So, Sharon and Darren - soldier on!

 

Happy Birthday, Buzz Aldrin

All the Apollo 11 astronauts were born in 1930.  Two are still with us. Buzz Aldrin turns 84 January 20. Happy Birthday, Doctor Rendezvous!
Those who know the Buzz mainly from an appearance on Dancing With The Stars may not know his contribution to Gemini and Apollo. He had the first Ph.D. in orbital rendezvous techniques and played a key role in making this crucial maneuver work. (His thesis was titled, "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.")

I've met Buzz a few times and always found him approachable, gregarious, and helpful. When I was giving a paper at a space conference in 1996, I noticed him about halfway through.  He'd slipped into the front row, where he was unmistakable in a red blazer and an oversized Buzz Lightyear pin. After the session, I asked him what he thought of my paper, which was on the reuse of surplus ICBMs as space boosters. (This was before today's Minotaur program.) He replied it was a good idea, but the company he was part of had a better one.  (For the record, my idea eventually became a program, though I can't claim credit for that: Buzz's, unfortunately, didn't attract financing and slipped away.)  When I saw him a few years later at the Responsive Space conference, he graciously wrote a note to my daughter's gradeschool class on a calendar and signed it for me.  We still have it.

Photo NASA

Buzz has been pushing space exploration ever since, including numerous publications and concepts for putting people on Mars. He won't make it. Likely, neither will I.  But our kids, or their kids - they will. 

So I'm wishing you a great day, Doc.

Pinnacle Island: the mystery rock from Mars

It's about the size of a jelly donut. It's whitish and irregular, with distinct peaks. It's a Martian rock.
Oh, and it wasn't there one day, but it was the next.

Investigate Pinnacle rock

The easy explanation is that it was kicked up by one of the NASA rover's wheels.  The more fun one is that's it's a crumpled piece of paper, a memo dropped by the director of John Carter, and it says, "This movie is really going to suck."

No rock (left): Pinnacle Island (right)

Photos NASA

 

My backup idea - that Martian teenagers are pelting the rover with rocks - probably isn't true either.
But the episode is a reminder that space missions, even in area we thought we new, and going to be filled with surprises.

Petition: Open Lab notebooks?

I rarely mention petitions: I don't know whether they have impact. But my friend Shannon Bohle has brought up an interesting issue here. She argues that, if the taxpayers fund research leading to a patent, then all the records, including lab notebooks, should be public. Seems logical to me.

See the Petition Here

Miniature imaging constellations - everyone's eyes in the sky

Planet Labs' breakthrough invention - a global constellation of imaging satellites the size of bread loaves - is almost in operation.  The 28 "Flock 1" Dove satellites are on board the International Space Station (ISS) and ready to be kicked overboard. With a revisit time of a few hours, the satellites will deliver on-demand imagery with a resolution of 3 to 5 meters: the kind of capability once restricted to billion-dollar intelligence satellites, now available to everyone worldwide.  That's a little dizzying.  SkyBox Imaging will soon follow with a constellation of larger microsatellites that will bring the imagery commercially available on a similar basis down under 1 meter. (In other words, you can't read the license plate, but you could target the car.)  It also offers video on demand: in fact, its site has posted the first such privately-taken video. 
Skybox "First HD Video from Space": awesome.

Animal Hoaxes - we'll always have them

Hoax animals go back, probably, to near the beginnings of civilization.  Find a little dye from the right seashell, find a carcass, and pow, you probably get a campfire story something like, "That nothing.  Ooog kill PURPLE monkey last week. Show you for two shiny rocks." 

Flying reptiles? Got 'em. Some from Photoshop, some from the brief paranormal TV show Freakylinks, some from...well, somewhere.  Sharon Hill mentioned it here along with other "paranormal" hoaxes. The life-sized pterodactyl made for Freakylinks has ended up, as it should, in the International Cryptozoology Museum. (Scroll down on this ICM page for some other hoax creatures, the most famous being Barnum's Feejee Mermaid. )
Most recently, we have the "giant giant giant" squid from California, blamed on mutating radiation.  (I've sometimes wondered if all of California could be blamed on mutating radiation.) There is, however, no endless supply of calamari to draw from. See Snopes for an explanation of how a dead whale photograph and a dead squid photograph were morphed into a Ray Harryhausen-level monster.

Photo copyright unknown, but when you publish a hoax, I'm not likely to ask you for permission.

And, finally, we have not one but two "dead bigfoot" stories making the rounds. The odds that Rick Dyer has a dead sasquatch (you remember Dyer, right? He showed off a fake at a press conference years ago), or that Justin Smeja killed two sasquatches and collected absolutely no evidence are approximately equal to the odds my dog has a live squatch cornered in my living room. 
Hoax animals can be a lot of fun to create and fun to talk about.   Sometimes there are other agendas involved, derived from religious literalism or from "ancient alien" beliefs.
These come into play in some of the endless "ancient human giant" hoaxes, which use real skeletons shown in forced perspective or blown up through Photoshop, or in one case a giant finger that could be a tree root for all I can tell.  My response to those is always "Try this homework assignment: Design a workable knee joint for a 20-foot-tall biped in Earth's gravity.  HINT: This is not possible."

King Kong, or King PhotoShop?

Giving history the finger

These are related to the endless repeats of old U.S. newspaper clippings about human giants discovered but of course covered up by the scientific establishment.  Boy, do those get tiring.  Try to imagine a scientist with a gigantic cranium on his desk says, "Despite this being irrefutable evidence anyone can come and see for themselves, I'll forego the Nobel Prize so as to not rock the boat."

Karl Shuker collects some eye-popping hoaxes here, including terrific "rogue taxidermy" animals that would be genuinely startling/puzzling if you didn't know the context.

The Internet, of course, has made hoaxing a million times more fun for the hoaxers and a million times (I'm presuming there is some scientific formula for calculating this, but math is not my thing) more exasperating for real scientists who have to waster time pointing out what's going on.  But we'll always have hoaxes. If we find animals on other planets, the hoaxers will be right behind the scientists. It seems to be human nature.

How much of the sea has been explored?

It's common to read figures like "95 percent of the ocean is unexplored." Is that right? What does it even mean?
Well, "the ocean" is millions of cubic kilometers that is always in motion.  It doesn't stand still to be explored, but we're mapping currents and zones and thermoclines and stuff, so we're doing our best. But the only place you could make any kind of percentage assessment is on the seafloor.
Dr. Craig McClain in  this source tries to figure it out for the deep seabed.  He takes the deep sea as meaning the areas past the relatively well-known continental shelves, so we're talking about the bottom under water 200m or more deep, and that works out to 106 million square kilometers. His rough estimate of how much we've sampled using ROVs, submersibles, cores, and trawls (as opposed to just mapping contours with sonar, an important effort but one that misses a lot of detail), is about 1650 square km.  That works out to an explored area of 0.0016 percent.
So you could say the seafloor is well over 99.9 percent unexplored.

We've got a lot of work to do.

Next big new species is.. a crocodile?

Yes. The slender-snouted crocodile, to be exact.  It had been presumed to be one somewhat variable species  Mecistops cataphractus all over Africa.  It's not. The Western and Central African populations are very disctinct species that have not interbred, according to DNA, in seven million years.  This is an example of cryptic species, those with a close enough resemblance to each other to be confused (for 150 years), in this case. (There ARE physical differences, they were just considered minor enough to overlook until the DNA reinforced the distinctions.) It's very important for conservation: one way to put it is that, in any tinkering, you have to know what the pieces are.  The existing species name, by the way, fits a type specimen from Central Africa: the new western species, which is critically endangered (a scientific survey found only 50), still needs it own name. In a hurry.

More musings on cryptozoology

This article brings up some of the concerns with cryptozoology (although someone failed to tell the author that practically no one takes Australia's Rex Gilroy seriously). 

I wrote in response on the Science Writers LinkedIn board:

I don't think we'll find anything as far out as an ape in North America, or a plesiosaur in a lake, but a few of the "major" species of cryptozoology are ecologically possible and still might prove valid.
The article mentions the yarri or Queensland marsupial tiger: there are some impressive sightings, but they've tailed off: it may be one of the species in the genus thylacoleo lingered until very recenty.
The orang pendek, an ape of Sumatra and neighboring regions, usually reddish and habitually bipedal when on the ground, has a good sighting record and some unidentified hairs: No less an authority than Dr. John MacKinnon reported its tracks. While mostly bipedal, it's unknown whether it's more closely related to the gibbons (some of which are habitually bipedal on the ground) or the orangutans, which would require a more drastic evolutionary modification. (Speculation on a connection with the Flores hobbits is at the outer bound of possibility but would be really cool.)
None of the famous "lake monsters" seems plausible or even possible. There is, though, an interesting case in Alaska's Lake Iliamna: sturgeon have never been caught closer than the Gulf of Alaska, but good sightings, including aerial observations, indicate there may be an overlooked population with some very large individuals.
I still suspect there could be an extremely large eel or eel-like fish as the bottom of some of the "sea serpent" stories. A conger the size of an oarfish could explain some of the more puzzling sightings, most notably that by two British naturalists from the yacht Valhalla in 1905. Congers have been seen rushing about at the surface with head and forebody out of the water and lying sideways at the surface, appearing to undulate vertically: A very prominent zoologist, the late Dr. Maurice Burton, observed these activities but had no explanation for them.
Many people who call themselves cryptozoologists are terrible scientists, erecting whole species on the basis of a few reports (sometimes one) regardless of whether the proposed animal has any fossil record or makes any sense ecologically. Still, the hypothesis "there is an unclassified ape in Sumatra" is a perfectly good falsifiable (Karl Popper style) hypothesis, even though the resources to falsify it may not be available.
So no Nessie, no sasqtach... but as the discovery of a new tapir, new peccary, new beaked whale, and two new dolphins in the last few years remind us, it's still worth looking. 

The strangest recent animal discoveries

LiveScience updates its compilation of the weirdest recent discoveries from the animal kingdom. These include new species and discoveries about species we knew - or thought we knew.
There are the extinct animals: a tulip-shaped creature that filtered water through its head and a tiny beast what was wholly preserved even though it had no bones: in other words, a very rare discovery of a soft-tissue fossil. There was also "Predator X," Pliosaurus funkei,T a mosasaur 12-13m loing with teeth that dwarfed T. rex's.
There are the new discoveries concerning known animals: no one knew the cute little gray mouse lemur was a cannibal.
There's a 3-cm-long millipede with 750 legs. There are snakes with sensing tentacles on their heads, a Vietnamese fish with its penis on its face, a carnivorous sponge that looks like a beautiful living harp, a mouthless zombie worm, a two-headed shark (ok, that one was a fluke), and a charming video of a boa constrictor eating a howler monkey - whole, of course. 
If you greatly speeded up evolution into some kind of time-lapse movie, you'd see Nature seemingly throwing around DNA at random - sometimes hitting a dead end, but sometimes doing rather crazy things.

Eyewitness accounts and finding new animals

This is not a new topic for me (or anyone who dabbles in cryptozoology) but it came to my attention when a thread began in the FaceBook group Cryptozoology, where one writer suggested that, not only are eyewitness reports insufficient to prove an animal exists, but that, by themselves, they are meaningless.

I think that's taking it one step too far  Eyewitness descriptions are, and have always been, one of the three major ways zoologists are led to new animals. There are really ONLY three ways (countless variations, but three main categories of events) in which a new animal CAN be discovered by science. They are 1) discovery of body parts (bones, trophies, things made from the animal's skin, etc); 2) scientific surveys where scientists are in the field looking for every animal in a targeted area; and 3) eyewitness accounts (either fresh or traditional) that alert scientists or explorers to the possibility of an animal and inspire expeditions to find it. Most of Dr. Alan Rabinowitz's mammal discoveries, for example, came from asking local hunters about their animals. Sometimes they could show him a trophy: other times, they described an animal they had seen and told him, or guided him, to where it could be found. As I said, there are many variations on these categories, but the idea that eyewitness encounters have not been crucial to important animal discoveries is certainly not valid.

(By the way, if you are curious what Dr. Rabinowitz has been up to, he's in the fight of his life: battling cancer while trying to save the tigers of Myanmar.  I'm in awe of the man.)

Such sightings serve as a starting point for investigators: they are not "proof" of a creature, but they can prompt us to ask interesting questions which we can then approach with the modern tools of science. The sightings of the chevron-marked beaked whale called  Mesoplodon Species A are a good example, leading eventually to an identification (which frankly still seems a little weak to me, but I have to yield to experts like Robert Pitman and company here) of this animal as the adult form of the pygmy beaked whale. Cryptozoology, properly understood, is the application of zoology, scientifically and objectively, to the discovery of new animals: the distinction is that cryptozoology opens the aperture a bit to open files on cases which are not quite as well attested as those leading to, say, the finding of the Vu Quang ox and company

What is the eyewitness report is not followed by anything more substantial? At what point do we toss it out?

Let's say it's 1908 or so, and you open a sea serpent file based on the report made by two naturalists on the yacht Valhalla. Interesting sighting, just published in the Royal Society's Proceedings - perfectly logical thing for a scientist to do. Then you wait. Do you close the file if twenty years pass without the animal being found? Probably not - the sea is a big place. Fifty years? Maybe - 50 years without a sighting was the old IUCN standard for extinction. 100 years? Well, depressingly, it's entirely logical to close the file. (I haven't quite, but I recognize I'm on shaky ground). In other words, how long does it take for absence of evidence to become evidence of absence? Maybe there should be a 50-year standard, but the cahow or Bermuda petrel was rediscovered 300 years after extinction. Some of it depends on whether the habitat can be searched: small lakes have been thoroughly searched (and dynamited) and the hypothesis (in Karl Popper’s sense of the falsifiable hypothesis being the basis of science) that there were creatures in those lakes have been properly falsified. It would take enormous and unavailable resources to falsify the hypothesis "There is an unclassified North American ape," but you can do it in theory. For the hypothesis, "There is an unclassified elongate marine species sometimes called a sea serpent" you could still falsify it in theory by active searching, but the task is too vast to even consider. Can the lack of followup evidence be considered falsification, and after what period of time? You inevitably end up in the world of opinion.

It’s not true that “my opinion is as good as yours” (see the Pitman example above).  But it’s also true that every researcher needs to use their own judgment – hopefully skeptically (in the proper sense of that word) – when evaluating witness reports. Witnesses can be right, they can be wrong, or somewhere in the middle. But I do hold they very often give science the starting point in discovery of a new animal.   

Tennyson: Ringing out 2013

Wherever you are, whatever you believe, this is the greatest poem ever written about looking to the New Year with hope.

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light: The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind For those that here we see no more; Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring in the nobler modes of life, With sweeter manners, purer laws. Ring out the want, the care, the sin, The faithless coldness of the times; Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes But ring the fuller minstrel in. Ring out false pride in place and blood, The civic slander and the spite; Ring in the love of truth and right, Ring in the common love of good. Ring out old shapes of foul disease; Ring out the narrowing lust of gold; Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace. Ring in the valiant man and free, The larger heart, the kindlier hand; Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Reviewing a top scientific thriller: Invasive Species

Invasive Species
Joseph Wallace
Berkley, 2013


Joseph Wallace has done everything right in this thriller: good characters, a killer premise, well-researched locations, and gruesomely scary details.  But what really separates this from the pack is that Wallace, unlike many authors, has the science down cold.  His "thieves" are several evolutionary steps beyond any known insect, but you can work out why they would have evolved this way, and the result is terrifyingly plausible.  The hive-mind intelligence gets a little far out when the hive mind is connecting individuals separated by entire continents, but even here Joseph isn't just hand-waving it: he grounds the thieves' capabilities in what we know about hive minds and mentions the genuine scientific questions we still have about how they might work.  His concepts of how parasitic hosts exploit and control their prey have real analogues in nature, including those hellishly alien fungi that control the minds of ants.
As a writer, Wallace has a lot working for him: his pacing is perfect, his descriptions are thorough without being overly detailed, and he creates characters we care about and yet is never afraid to kill anyone in the service of the story.  It's clear no one is safe in this chillingly realistic novel.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman wraps up 2013

Loren Coleman, indefatiguable chronicler of cryptozoology, has published his accounts of significant deaths in the field in 2013, his nomination of cryptozoologist of the year (Dr. Bryan Sykes, who disproved most yeti'sasquatch hair evidence but apparently has discovered there was a brown/polar bear relative in the Himalayan region within historical times and maybe still extant), and the Top Ten Events in cryptozoology in 2013. 

Coleman's Top Ten are:

1. Discovery of the Kobomani Tapir (Tapirus kabomani) and other new creatures (a huge discovery, both in size and in scientific importance.)
2. Sykes' "snow bear" (which may still be a living species: there are mysteries about the bear populations of Asia.)
3. Sightings of "Little people" (may be related to the "hobbits" of Flores and/or the orang-pendek, the almost-proven ape of Sumatra, though these new reports seem to concern creatures SO little (20 inches tall) as to be hard to accept as any real animal.)
4. Mystery hominids found through DNA to have interbred with ancient humans
5. A spate of lake monster sightings, plus a "sea serpent" off Maine (I didn't find anything new or compelling in the lake monster cases, some of which were hoaxes: The Maine sea creature is kind of interesting, though it MIGHT have been a swimming moose "blown up" by excitement and the difficulties of estimating sizes across water.)
6. An out of place animal of unknown origin, a leopard, killed in Indiana (a good reminder that people reporting animals that "can't be there" can be right.)
7. Person shot while running around looking for Bigfoot (I'm amazed this didn't happen long ago.)
8. Discovery Channel's fake Megalodon shark documentary, which a lot of people still think was real
9. Interesting "snowman" footprints from Russia (In this entry Coleman mentions a related topic, the ridiculous Ketchum sasquatch DNA claims.)
10. Another sign of crypotozoology in popular culture: Safari Ltd's "Cryptozoology Toob" of small animal models.

Loren does a lot of things with his Top Ten that I like. He doesn't restrict it to events which marked progress: he picks out the most newsworthy even when they involve casting doubt or disrepute on crypytozoology.  He doesn't focus narrowly on reports and evidence: he understands that, however many of us like to think about this in scientific terms, the fact is that science, culture, and media are inextricably intertwined in the modern world.  While Loren tends to be more accepting of sighting reports than I sometimes think warranted (he classes about 80% as mistakes and hoaxes: I think the figure works out to be higher), and we disagree on the possibility of some creatures (we will not, ever, find a giant long-necked mystery animal in a lake), he is more cautious than some cryptozoologists and is willing to call out a hoax as a hoax (e.g., Ketchum). 

So congratulations, Loren, and Merry Christmas!

ADDED: Loren pointed out a a couple of mistakes I'd made in this post (my fault: I didn't quality-check it) and asked if I really thought I could be so certain about long-necked lake monsters. I am, and the rejection of that possibility is now, according to Loren, known as Bille's Dictum.  I''ll "own that," as my daughters would say.  Thanks, Loren.

New mammals - and one is a BIG one

First, we have four small mammals from Africa - the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to be exact. From one forest we have two new shrews and two new bats - small, yes, but important.

Then, we have a big one. This new tapir from Brazil, at over 100kg, is the largest new species of land mammal described since - well, a long time. Vietnam's saola is reportedly about 100kg.  Depending how one counts reclassifications (and which reclassifications and taxonomic "splitting" events one counts), it might even be the biggest since the huge wild cattle species called the kouprey came out of Cambodia in 1937.
So, yeah, it's certainly the biggest mammal discovery of the 21st century. And it should serve as a wake-up call reminding us that there is still a lot  to find in the remote places of the world. Espcially the Amazon, where Dr. Marc van Roosmalen has described several new species, including the 50-kg giant peccary, and reports several more large mammals seen but unclassified.
Here's the formal description. This animal is the fifth living species of tapir (there are some disagreements over tapir classification, but this animal is distinct: there's no doubting it).
So, wow.

The Moon and Mars

OK, maybe the most exciting era of space exploration - when humans stepped on the Moon -is long past.  But what's going on right now is pretty darn amazing. 

First NASA reported that there's more and more evidence for fresh water - even drinkably clear water - in the Martian past.  There's even a hint - just a hint, so far, but tantalizing - that it sometimes still does.

Then, of course, we have the third nation ever to land a probe on the Moon.  Not just a lander, but a rover.  China's feat, using largely indigenous technology (there's some traceability to Russian tech, but that's receding into history), captured the biggest worldwide space headlines since the Mars rovers.  It is, without doubt, a major step toward the goal of sending a human - a feat that would, in popular opinion at least, make China the predominant nation in space exploration.  A rover with the wonderful name of Jade Rabbit is making the first tracks (aside from outright collisions) in the lunar surface since Apollo 17 lifted off.  Amazing. Congratulations to China's engineers - and frankly, shame on the space leadership of the US - it's not that we're not capable of this, we clearly are, but we've chosen to let the headlines go to a rival power.  I don't think we have any idea yet of the implications.

The mission, including the 120-kg rover, was launched on a Chinese Long March 3B on 1 December.



(Photo released by China, so I don't think the AP mark in the lower right is a copyright problem)

Florida Panther: cat on the edge

Some moron killed a Florida panther, which is not only illegal but a very big deal when there may only be a hundred of them (and there were many fewer than that before conservationists, in a last-ditch measure, brought in a few healthy cats from Texas to strengthen the gene pool). 
The Florida panther has always lived on the edge, hemmed in by development, threatened by hunting (which used to be legal), and increasingly desperate to find mates and food.  The invasion of large constricting snakes competes with them for food in the southern half of the state.  The cat's legendary elusiveness hasn't helped it in the modern age: there are still roadkills every year. (Something I have pointed out in debates over why we don't have a dead sasquatch: if they exist. We SHOULD have one by now.) Anyway, the penalties for killing a Florida panther are severe, and one knucklehead was convicted of killing one in 2009 with a bow and arrow.
Jeff Corwin described an almost surreal sighting in his book 100 Heartbeats: "seemingly in slow motion, it floated to the ground...it was darker than panther's I'd seen in photos, more charcoal than sage... (afterwards) I couldn't stop thinking about the way the panther had seamlessly, effortlessly disappeared without turning a leaf."
Let's keep those few hearts beating.

New species: all discoveries count

We haven't found any new large land mammals for several years. We have found birds, sharks, dolphins, and other "major" animals, though. 
So does something as seemingly tiny as finding a new limpet feeding on the beak of a dead octopus matter?
It does.  Here's the story. 
Off Antarctica's Pine Island Bay (no, I don't know how it got the name: there are certainly no pine trees.  Maybe an early explorer lost an air freshener there) is the Amundsen Sea, a little-known corner of the great Southern Ocean. A team of biologists from the British Antarctic Survey made an expedition here in 2008 and just now published their findings. (That's not that unusual: it can often take years to determine whether a specimen is a new species: this team found more than 30.)
Why does it matter? First, we need as complete a catalog as possible for conservation.  Second, small animals can be very important in the ecosystem: ask the mighty blue whale, which harvests the dense herds of krill in this ocean, how important tiny shrimplike crustaceans are.  (You could say the blues have a license to krill.) Third, the animals found in an area are major clues to how the ecosystem functions there: scientists found that, unlike neighboring seas, the mobile echinoderms like starfish, rather than sponges, dominated the sea floor.
So let's keep looking.

Katrin Linse, said:
"Unlike many other seas around Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea shelf was not dominated by large sedentary sponges but instead by mobile echinoderms (starfish, urchins, brittlestars and sea cucumbers) and a community of similar animals which inhabit the on-shelf basins.
The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid change due to ice shelf breakup. Until now we knew nothing about the benthic fauna living here. Our recent study gives us a first insight into the biodiversity of this region and can serve as a baseline to observe future changes.
At least 10% of all the species collected are new to science, and this figure is likely to rise with further genetic identification. "


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-limpit-species-amundsen-sea.html#jCp

Katrin Linse, said:
"Unlike many other seas around Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea shelf was not dominated by large sedentary sponges but instead by mobile echinoderms (starfish, urchins, brittlestars and sea cucumbers) and a community of similar animals which inhabit the on-shelf basins.
The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid change due to ice shelf breakup. Until now we knew nothing about the benthic fauna living here. Our recent study gives us a first insight into the biodiversity of this region and can serve as a baseline to observe future changes.
At least 10% of all the species collected are new to science, and this figure is likely to rise with further genetic identification. "


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-limpit-species-amundsen-sea.html#jCp

Katrin Linse, said:
"Unlike many other seas around Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea shelf was not dominated by large sedentary sponges but instead by mobile echinoderms (starfish, urchins, brittlestars and sea cucumbers) and a community of similar animals which inhabit the on-shelf basins.
The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid change due to ice shelf breakup. Until now we knew nothing about the benthic fauna living here. Our recent study gives us a first insight into the biodiversity of this region and can serve as a baseline to observe future changes.
At least 10% of all the species collected are new to science, and this figure is likely to rise with further genetic identification. "


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-limpit-species-amundsen-sea.html#jCp

Katrin Linse, said:
"Unlike many other seas around Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea shelf was not dominated by large sedentary sponges but instead by mobile echinoderms (starfish, urchins, brittlestars and sea cucumbers) and a community of similar animals which inhabit the on-shelf basins.
The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid change due to ice shelf breakup. Until now we knew nothing about the benthic fauna living here. Our recent study gives us a first insight into the biodiversity of this region and can serve as a baseline to observe future changes.
At least 10% of all the species collected are new to science, and this figure is likely to rise with further genetic identification. "


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-limpit-species-amundsen-sea.html#jCp

Katrin Linse, said:
"Unlike many other seas around Antarctica, the Amundsen Sea shelf was not dominated by large sedentary sponges but instead by mobile echinoderms (starfish, urchins, brittlestars and sea cucumbers) and a community of similar animals which inhabit the on-shelf basins.
The Amundsen Sea is an area of rapid change due to ice shelf breakup. Until now we knew nothing about the benthic fauna living here. Our recent study gives us a first insight into the biodiversity of this region and can serve as a baseline to observe future changes.
At least 10% of all the species collected are new to science, and this figure is likely to rise with further genetic identification. "


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-12-limpit-species-amundsen-sea.html#jCp

THANKS TO Robert Twomley for the post on this that drew my attention

Turtles are doing better: Maui's dolphin is in deep trouble

There are a couple of marine conservation success stories to tout - proof that humans CAN get it right when they come together.
Thirty years ago, there were 62 green turtle nests on the beaches of Florida.  Today there are 35,000.
The leatherback turtle was critically endangered, according to the IUCN.  In this year's Red List, it's been upgraded several steps to Vulnerable.  (The Pacific populations are still in trouble, but Atlantic leatherbacks are rebounding solidly.) The leatherback is the largest and most wide-ranging of the sea turtles: it can weigh a ton, and Hemingway's fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea calls it the "trunk turtle," which is fitting for an animal that does look a bit like luggage.  It is so large it's been implicated in some "sea monster" sightings.
On the other hand, there are 55 adult Maui's dolphins in the waters off New Zealand.  The government is taking conservations measures, but critics call them half-measures, and say the animal is swiftly departing the planet.
Dr Barbara Maas says, "New Zealand's failure to protect the world's smallest and rarest dolphin is a bitter blow to marine conservation." But she insists that, if better protection from fishing nets and other threats is enacted, "They are not doomed to extinction. Genetic variability is still high, they can bounce back but saving them is a race against time."

From Brazil, a new breed of cat

Cryptic species (not to be confused with cryptids) are animals that look very similar but are different species.  This was often impossible to sort out with the pre-DNA morphological method of identifying species.  DNA analysis has, for example, raised important questions about how many types killer whales (Orcinus orca) there are. It has also showed us there's another species of wild cat in Brazil. The handsomely spotted, housecat-sized ocilla is not, as long presumed, one species: it has two populations that overlap ranges but never interbreed.  (This gets into the question of exactly what constitutes a species, and we're not going to wade into that swamp here).  The cats were confused not only because they look similar, but because they are rare and elusive: every photograph is news.
So we bid the world's newest cat a hearty welcome and hope its nine lives can carry it through the environmental challenges of life in a shrinking rain forest.

SpaceX is - well, almost Go!

SpaceX was ready for a milestone, its first launch from Florida and its first commercial launch to geosynchronous orbit (GEO) on its once-flown Falcon 9 v.1.1.  (NOTE to Elon Musk: you can do better for a designation than that.  Advanced Falcon, perhaps)? Anyway, two launch dates have come and gone. Now I'm not blaming the SpaceX folks for caution. This is a "must have" success for a rocket with no GEO deliveries so far and a long fight ahead for US government certification for Defense payloads. Everything has to be right.  We don't have a new launch date yet - "a few days" is the best available.
Do I think they'll get it right? Yes, I do.  They've made huge strides as the first competitor to United Launch Alliance to actually make it to orbit with a medium-lift vehicle. (The Falcon Heavy may flay late next year).  Here's a toast to success!

UPDATE: After postponement, a brilliant success!

SpaceX publicity photo of Falcon 9 launch

Thanksgiving Day: The kokako and the saola

The world's most famous "missing" bird is the ivory-billed woodpecker, but there are many species in the same boat (nest?)  The ivory-bill might be the most poignant story, because we got a last glimpse of it in a breif flurry of great excitement over the spotting of at least one bird before the species finally, sadly (I am afraid) slipped out of existence for good. 
That was a long prelude to a short post, but there is, on this Thanksgiving Day, better news on another bird, the South Island kokako.  Of 11 sightings of the "extinct" bird studied by the New Zealand Ornithological Society's Record Appraisal Committee, has validated one, made by Len Turner and Peter Rudolf near the town of Reefton in 2007.  That's not exactly yesterday, but it's a very big deal for a bird that many authorities thought didn't make it out of the 1960s.  When I wrote my newsletter Exotic Zoology (1994-99),  Dr. Karl Shuker gave me a friendly hard time because in two issues in a row I crossed the name up with another rare type, the flightless parrot called the kakapo.  (There are 62 kakapos in the world at last count.)

When big land animals go missing, it's often for good.  But the Vietnamese population of the Javan rhinoceros was rediscovered after a 40-year absence (and hunted back into extinction) and recently we have the first sighting of the Vu Quang ox, or saola, to be confirmed in many years. The species was only discovered in 1992.  Van Ngoc Thinh, Vietnamese director of the World Wide Fund for Animals (WWF), said, “When our team first looked at the photos we couldn’t believe our eyes. Saola are the holy grail for South East Asian conservationists so there was a lot of excitement.” It's not clear whether there are any confirmed sightings since a capture (and death) in 2010, and before that since this episode in 1999. The animal, which may weigh 100kg, is the largest full species discovered in the wild (discounting reclassifications) since the kouprey in 1937: the latter bovid, alas, may be extinct. 

So we have many losses, but also some reasons for hope.  So Happy Thanksgiving to conservation and all the heroes working all over the world to keep rare species from disappearing. 

Book Review: A thorough guide to marine mammals

Whales, Dolphins, and Other Marine Mammals of the World (Princeton Field Guides)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

A lovely book, packed with details and excellent illustrations. I haven't yet had the chance to actually use it as a field guide, but it's equally valuable as a desktop reference. I'm always fascinated by the gaps remaining in our knowledge of marine mammals (e.g., who is related to who, what varieties (possibly species) are not yet clarified, where ranges might extend), and this book provides food for thought in almost every entry. I'ts not the kind of book you'd sit down and read for pleasure or knowledge all through, but it's the kind you definitely want close at hand when doing any kind of research or writing on cetaceans, pinnipeds, and the rest.

A very special dinosaur book - All Yesterdays

All Yesterdays - Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals
Lulu.com, 2012

This slender book will show you dinosaurs in a way you never thought of before.  C.M. Kosemen, John Conway, and Darren Naish (two paleoartists and a paleontologist)  have explored the ways in which current reconstructions of dinosaurs may vary from the real thing.  Along the way, they post some unique questions, like "How did stegosaurs have sex?" (Think about it.  Your first notion may be that it wasn't possible, only it obviously was.)  Uniquely colored and shaped dinos are presented to make the point that many reconstructions, with muscles "shrink-wrapped" about the skeleton, don't reflect the way most animals really appear.  A dinosaur we think of as sleek could have been pudgy or one we think of as dull could have been garish.  For added fun, the authors wonder how future paleontologists might reconstruct a baboon (all legs and teeth) or a cow (a svelte, fast-moving animal).   This is the kind of book that not only shows you something new, but makes you think about things you considered settled and familiar. 
So buy this one for the dinosaur lover in your family. They might be startled, but they won't be disappointed. 

Record for multiple satellite launches lasts one day

Last night, an American Minotaur 1 carried 29 satellites, almost of them the tiny type called CubeSats, into orbit.  Today, a Russian Dneper launcher carried up 32.  Interestingly, both launchers are based on retired ballistic missiles. 
This isn't just a numbers game.  Earth has put up more satellites in two days than in the first four years of the Space Age.  We are in a second Space Age - one where college and high school students routinely work on satellite hardware, and a kid with a soldering iron and a credit card can order a satellite kit and become his own space agency.  The launch demand is still not being satisfied nearly as cheaply as we'd like: the CubeSats can cost $100,000 to get a single kilogram into orbit.  There's major room for improvement. 

Microsat fleet launches into space

Readers will know I take a major interest in the potential of miniaturized satellites, called microsats, nanosats, or picosats depending on side. (There is even a proposal for "femtosats" smaller than your fingernail: the ChipSat project is testing prototypes in space now.)
The most common "form factor," as the engineers say, is the CubeSat.  CubeSats are 10 cm (4 inches) on a side, the size of a square Kleenex box, and are being built in increasing numbers by everyone from the National Reconnaissance Office to high schools.  The successful Minotaur I launch, arranged by the Defense Department's Operationally Responsive Space Office and Space Test Program with coordination from NASA and Orbital Sciences Corporation, used a booster based on retired ICBM stages to put no less than 29 microsats, hte vast majority CubeSats, in orbit along with the larger STPSat-3. (When I say high schools I'm not kidding: TJCubeSat is from Thomas Jefferson High School.)  The launch set a record for most satellites launched on one mission. CubeSats do real science and even military testing along with being a boon for STEM education. A new generation will grow up having worked on actual satellite hardware in high school and college, and we don't even know the implications of that yet.  Go Micro! (Photo credit NASA)

MAVEN: Launching to Mars

The lastest (and, given cuts to Planetary Exploration, one of the last firmly scheduled) of America's Mars missions is due to launch in about 40 minutes.MAVEN will study the planet's atmosphere to determine its composition, history, and evolution in much greater detail than previous probes.  That information will make MAVEN dresults one more piece in the puzzle of possible Martian life, part or present.  On to Mars!

Quote for the Day is from Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX: "I would like to be born on Earth and die on Mars - although not at the point of impact."

Follow the Launch Live


And MAVEN is off.  Congrats to NASA, United Launch Alliance, and all others involved.

Dunkleosteus and company

The Devonian period, sometimes known as the "Age of Fishes," might be defined as the "Age of Sorting Out," as the countless creature types from the Cambrian explosion either evolved into something adapted for the long term or, in many cases, died out.  The trilobites might have dominated the biomass, as they crawled over the sea floor in billions, and they were not all small - this species was over two feet long.  but the highlights are still the fish, which evolved into some spectacular types.  Dunkleosteus is still king, though there was one species nearly as large - this guy.

So it would have been an interesting time to get in a little fishing....

The Curse of losing cursive writing

My friend Shannon Bohle has pointed out something in her blog I hadn't thought about. While I deplored the loss of penmanship in school because it taught discipline and precision, she notes that this is leading to an inability to read cursive well, and thus to loss of access of countless documents from Presidential letters to patents and scientific papers. Until the mid-1800s, everything was written in cursive, and we're sliding down a slope toward a world where much of humanity's treasure trove of thought and action will be accessible only to specialists.

Gravity: A movie you won't forget

I finally saw Gravity. It gets a middling grade at best on physics and orbital mechanics, but A's for Sandra's performance, for the indelible visuals, and for getting the feel of being in space right. An amazing film.
I suppose you could give it a D- or an F for the orbital mechanics, if you were minded to be picky: the Shuttle, Hubble, and two space stations are shown in near-identical orbits, with each spacecraft visible from the other, and what orbit was that debris in so it came around every 90 minutes (a low orbit) yet somehow included taking out communications satellites, which operate in far higher orbits?
(Someone pointed out another oddity, which is not really about this film but about our spacefaring culture: there is a lot of irony in making a science fiction film about machines we have already sent to museums.)
All that said, the director did his best to reflect the reality of space travel within the needs of the story.  Anchored by Sandra Bullock and, in a brief but memorable role, George Clooney, with Ed Harris (who else?) as the voice of Mission Control, the human drama of voyaging though the most inhospitable realm imaginable - on where you are denied even the normal feeling of falling because there's nothing to fall TO - is brought to life as never before.  The technical wizardry is amazing: even when you know how a shot was done, you can't see it.  Some of it really could have been filmed on orbit. 
It is, in the end, not a space film but a film about survival.
It's about being human.
It's a film about US.

A Digression: Veterans' Day

This poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow needs no introduction.

A Nameless Grave

"A soldier of the Union mustered out,"
Is the inscription on an unknown grave
At Newport News, beside the salt-sea wave,
Nameless and dateless; sentinel or scout
Shot down in skirmish, or disastrous rout
Of battle, when the loud artillery drave
Its iron wedges through the ranks of brave
And doomed battalions, storming the redoubt.
Thou unknown hero sleeping by the sea
In thy forgotten grave! with secret shame
I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn,
When I remember thou hast given for me
All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very name,
And I can give thee nothing in return.

Book Review: Dan Simmons' The Abominable

This is epic novel writing. 
Like most Simmons books, the detail is astonishing: you'll feel like an expert in 1920s mountain climbing, among other things, and Simmons knows how to pace things so the details never stop the story.
Climbing Mount Everest, we learn, was grueling beyond the imagination of most of us armchair adventurers.  Even after supplemental oxygen was introduced, there's a reason all pre-WWII expeditions failed to summit, the reason being that the mountaintop is a frozen, wind-lashed hell.  Simmons pits four climbers against a larger, far better armed party determined to stop them from finding a lost climber's body and the secret the dead man was carrying.  The history of mountaineering is told in the buildup to a deadly cat and mouse game in a realm where humans need every bit of stamina and grit just to stay alive, and yet must also fight for their lives.
Those wanting to learn about the yeti will not find a lot of detail, but the subject is pivotal at two points. To keep from spoiling it, I won't say whether Simmons' novel presents the metohkangmi as real animals.
My only moment of disappointment was in the end result of the larger geopolitical story that frames the deadly chase on Everest.  Again, trying to avoid spoiling the experience, I'll just say that the good guys would have used their secret information long before they did, an odd mistake by an author who works so much history into his novels.
That was one bad moment in a superb book, though.  If you are interested in tackling a long and unique novel with some cryptozoological bits, The Abominable (which is, itself, heavy enough to anchor a climbing rope or clobber a yeti with), you won't be disappointed. 

The Plastic Ocean

You've heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and probably the Texas-sized concentration of Japanese flotsam headed for the US Pacific Northwest.  (That one is to some degree exaggeration - it's not a solid floating mass - but there's a lot of debris on US beaches and a lot more heading out way. According to NOAA, about 1.5 million tons of such debris floated out to sea in the wake of the tsunami.) A messenger from the oceans (albeit a tragic one) was a gray whale that beached and died near Seattle.  In the stomach of this bottom-scraping filter feeder were "more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, sweat pants, plastic pieces, duct tape, and a golf ball." The gray was a male 12 meters long. A biologist commented: "While debris has been found in the stomachs of some previous gray whales found dead in Puget Sound, this appeared to be a larger quantity than had ever been found previously."
It's not just Puget Sound. It's not just the Pacific.  It's everywhere, and we have to stop it now.

Can a leopard change its spots - to stripes?

A striped leopard is a contradiction in terms, but Nature is full of contradictions.  One is the striped/blotched King Cheetah, originally thought to have been a distinct species, now known as a recurring genetic abnormality. There is a similar abnormality, which, in handful of even rarer cases (one writer says about a dozen are known), produces this amazing striped leopard.   

A lovely creature, isn't it?

 

NOTE: I  searched, but I can't find a copyright notice for this image: if I'm violation, I'll take it down.

 

 

Second new Australian dolphin

Hot on the flippers of the Australian snubfin dolphin  (Orcaella heinsohni) discovery comes the second new Australian dolphin in a decade: the newest member of a group called the humpback dolphins. The species, still not named, is the fourth known in the genus Sousa and lives off northern Australia.  (Humpback dolphins have a hump below the dorsal fin which is sometimes prominent enough to make the animal look like it's toting a small aqualung.) The new species doesn't look much different from its genus-mates, but study of 180 skulls and 235 tissue samples were involved in determining its distinctness. We don't know about its population or conservation status.  Dolphins in general are having a hard time of it even after the mass slaughter involved in tuna fishing has been drastically reduced. The baji (Lipotes vexillifer) is likely extinct, and four other species are in extreme danger.  Here's a good overview of the 5 most endangered cetaceans.

No Australian Nessie and no mermaids, either

There have been "sea serpent" reports off Australia before, as well as this bizarre seagoing chimera called the moha-moha (a pretty obvious hoax report if you ask me. Or ask any biologist who ever lived.)  This is, of course, not to be confused with the blimp of the fish world, the mola mola, which if you just hear a description probably sounds like a hoax - but isn't.
The latest report is this one, accompanied by a photograph.  While it looks monstrous, Australian cryptozoologist Rex Gilroy suggests it was the bow of a sunken dragon boat.  Gilroy has a habit of erring on the credulous side of cryptozoology, so when he believes in a prosaic explanation for a report, I suspect he's right. Especially since, in this case, the plesiosaur shape just "bobbed" in the water.  Darn.
Then from Deepsea News we have this analysis of why mermaids don't exist.  Sheanna Steingass explains that mermaids of the classic variety would freeze, be unable to reproduce, and would have a variety of other anatomically-based problems.  Now, I have never met anyone who thinks such a thing actually exists, but it is one of the sea's most charming legends.

My dad, a folk singer, still performs this one.

The Eddystone Light (traditional)

Me father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light,
And he slept with a mermaid one fine night
Out of this union there came three,
A porpoise and a porgy, and the other was me!
Chorus:
With a yo-ho-ho, let the wind blow free,
It’s all for the life on the rolling sea!

One night, as I was a-trimmin’ the glim
And singing a verse from the evening hymn
I see by the light of me binnacle lamp,
Me kind old father lookin’ jolly and damp.
Chorus:
With a yo-ho-ho, let the wind blow free,
It’s all for the life on the rolling sea!

A voice from starboard shouted, “Ahoy!”
And there was me mother sittin’ on a buoy
Meanin’ a bouy for ships what sail,
And not a boy what’s a juvenile male.
Chorus:
With a yo-ho-ho, let the wind blow free,
It’s all for the life on the rolling sea!

“Well, what became of me children three?”
Me mother then she asked of me.
Well, one was exhibited as a talking fish,
The other was served as a savory dish.
Chorus:
With a yo-ho-ho, let the wind blow free,
It’s all for the life on the rolling sea!

The phosphorous flashed in her seaweed hair
I looked again and me mother wasn’t there,
But her voice came echoing out of the night,
“To hell with the keeper of the Eddystone Light!”
Chorus:
With a yo-ho-ho, let the wind blow free,
It’s all for the life on the rolling sea!

The Kraken of Doom

Squid don't fossilize well (only the calcified "pen" and maybe the beak turn up), so we don't know as much as we'd like about their evolution, including just when they got to be really big.  The modern giant squid can approach (maybe even, in long-tentacled examples, exceed) 18m.  But was there a giant squid in the days of the dinosaurs? This paper says there was - and not only was it monstrous, it decorated its den with the skeletons of its victims.  Not surprisingly, most paleontologists think this idea a bit preposterous.  A piece of a squid's pen from 218 million years ago belonged, one paleontologist says, to a species at least as big as modern giants. 
It's a very unlikely possibility, but it's fun to think about. Maybe the giant seagoing reptiles had equally giant rivals?  We don't know when this "kraken" species, if it's being correctly identified at all, appeared, or how and when it went extinct.  We just know there's a bit of a controversy here.

"Lost World" is an overused term, but...

"Lost World" owes its popularity as a term to the 1912 novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, THAT A. Conan Doyle),  with a modern boost from the Jurassic Park films and some really bad films of Doyle's novel.  Biologists are careful about using it for every newly investigated patch of forest or mountain yielding new species, but the press loves it, and the scientists sometimes go along. 
The latest use concerns a plateau in Australia's Cape Melville Range never properly surveyed by biological scientists. While no dinosaurs turned up, the herps of this region offered plenty of surprises.  One scientist called the Cape Melville Leaf-tailed Gecko the "strangest new species to come across my desk in 26 years working as a professional herpetologist." The 20-cm lizard has long legs, big eyes, and a camouflage pattern that's astonishing effective: it just disappears against many backdrops. A golden skink and a rather pretty frog completed the initial haul. Dr Conrad Hoskin of  James Cook University commented, "...to be able to walk into a new mountain range and find several new animals immediately shows that there must be very many more out there."