A snapshot of U.S. networks' online science news

CNN was the first all-news network, the first 24-hour news source, and has a founder (Ted Turner) who's been prominent in environmentalist activities.  So it's a real disappointment to look at their online science coverage.  Space geeks know they fired the great Miles O'Brien and the rest of the science office in a stupid cost-cutting move.  Looking at their online offerings right now (24 June 2014), CNN's abandonment of science news is a shameful abdication of the responsibility to keep people abreast of what's happening on their planet and in their universe.  A scan of today's CNN.com pages reveals there is ONE science story not related to heath/medicine or computers, and that one is a way-down-the-page link to a misleading headline of a NY Times article about the discovery of water deep beneath the Earth (like most headlines on this topic, it talks about an "underground ocean" when we're in fact talking about zillions of scattered molecules.)

 

A snapshot of the others as of 24June:
CBS (www.cbsnews.com) = Front-page tab for SciTech (heavy on tech, but science is there)
Fox news = Front-page Science tab, with separate Health and Technology and a lot of content in specialty areas like paleontology
NBC news = separate Science, Tech, and Health tabs, plus they have the marvelous Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log
MSNBC = can't find anything at all besides consumer tech and health.
ABC news = natural science stories are hidden under the Tech tab.

So using ease of access to science stories as the only criterion, Fox, and NBC get As, CBS a B, ABC gets a C, and CNN and MSNBC get Fs.

Sharing the planet with sharks

Sharks are scary.  And, frankly, they should be.  We humans are scared of sharks, not just because some species have killed people, but because, by definition, if you encounter a shark, you're already in a realm evolutionary biology didn't prepare you for.  You are at a disadvantage from the start.
We are well north of 400 species of sharks and counting.  New ones are proposed in scientific literature every year, although the last really huge and distinctive shark, requiring a new genus, was the bizarre megamouth (Megachasma pelagios) caught accidentally by a U.S. ship in 1976.  The really odd thing about this case was that there were no sightings, strandings, reports, or even folklore hinting at the shark's existence before that date, although the numerous specimens gathered since then indicate there must have been strandings where the shark wasn't identified.
Here in 2014, one shark getting a lot of ink is one that will not be discovered, at least not alive.  Megalodon (no relation to megamouth) died out millions of years ago  but was brought back, in a sense, by a fake documentary on the Discovery Channel, which used to show only factual science programming and so misled a lot of people despite some rather fuzzy disclaimers.  There are some intriguing sighting reports of huge sharks, though most can be blamed on the harmless whale shark, which reaches 15m, and the basking shark, which is almost the same size. One that I still wonder about was that recorded by  Dr. D.G. Stead, who questioned witnesses of a sighting in 1918. Lobstermen spoke in awed tones of a ghostly white monstrosity that gobbled meter-wide lobster traps whole like popcorn.  Stead noted that some of the estimates of length were "absurd" (one man said 300 feet!) but still felt the men had met "a vast shark." The coloration is almost as much of a mystery as the size in this case.
How many of these species are dangerous to humans? I've seen counts as high as 33 species, but it's hard to sort out: humans are often bitten in circumstances where no one has a good look at the shark or can identify it. Even very small sharks may bite (like most other fish) in the right circumstances. The great white, oceanic whitetip, bull, shortfin mako, and tiger sharks are most often accounted dangerous to humanity. Of these, the whitetip may be the one people hear least about, but it was probably the chief predator in two really horrendous episodes, the predations of sharks after the sinkings of the Nova Scotia and the Indianapolis in World War II.
The blue shark (one of my personal favorites, a beautiful animal and one of the most streamlined creatures in nature) is often feared but rarely fingered as a culprit. Other species like gray reef, nurse, and lemon sharks, while not as large or deadly as their already-mentioned counterparts, figure in many of the "shark bites man" cases. 
You are, statistically speaking, unlikely to die of shark bite even if you spend a great deal of time in the oceans. Sharks kill about ten people a year. Crocodiles kill a hundred times as many people. Snakes may kill 5,000 times as many.  Even if you leave off the far greater numbers of people killed by disease carrying insects, snails, etc., it's pretty clear sharks rank as amateurs in the human-killing business. 
Again, this is about evolutionary biology.  Sharks are adapted to search for particular prey.  Most of the time a fatal human encounter is precipitated because the shark mistakes a person for a seal or something else on the normal menu. Nonfatal encounters are often the result of a shark biting at something in murky water.
That's not to say there are no shark attacks - incidents where a shark has a good view with its eyes and the rest of its marvelous sensor suite, targets a human, and seriously wounds or kills him or her.  Those certainly happen, and it's crazy to approach large sharks casually. The point is that such attacks are freakishly rare in most of the world. The Nova Scotia and Indianapolis episodes were the result of dumping large numbers of humans into the sea where sharks could hardly overlook the buffet thus presented.  (The death tolls in each case are known - 852 on the former and 879 on the latter - but the percentage of deaths caused by sharks will always be guesswork. Likewise for the 1943 case of the Cape San Juan, where many of the 825 people who died in the water were shark meals.)
It's common for many sharks to be killed by local authorities when there's a death on the world's beaches.  Countless sharks paid for the famous 1916 episode that inspired Jaws (although the perpetrator was most likely a bull shark, assuming it was only one shark.)
Most recently, seven human death in three and a half years caused the government of Western Australia to spent over a million dollars (U.S.) on a program of catching sharks via baited hooks in 2013-4.  The catch was reported in June 2014 as 175 sharks. Those over three meters - 50 of them - were deemed dangerous and killed.  The cull, however, caught no great whites, the species actually blamed for the recent human deaths. Tiger sharks made up most of the catch.  It's not at all clear this controversial effort made any difference to human safety, although it's being extended anyway.
Any human v. shark accounting is a very one-sided affair.  It's been authoritatively estimated that humans kill 71 million sharks a year, mostly for the sharkfin soup trade. The number may be higher.  The population of sharks obviously can't withstand this onslaught forever. Many nations have moved to protect particular species and block off habitat.  There is occasional good news, like the June 2014 report that great whites off the U.S. east coast are much more numerous than previously believed. And not all sharks are in trouble: small deep-water species have no economic importance.  However, as long as facilities like this fin-processing factory in China operate, sharks overall are in dire need of increased human assistance.
There remains a great deal of public fascination and fear about sharks. Witness the coverage of a single shark, "Katherine," a 1,000-kilogram-plus great white tagged off Massachusetts and most recently headed for the Gulf Coast of Texas, an event which seemingly has people stirred up as though she was Godzilla.
It's very safe to say we don't know all the shark species of the world yet.  It's also, though, clear that many of the best-known species need help.  The insanity of the soup trade (especially given that the actual shark fin in a bowl of such soup can almost be measured in individual molecules) and a myriad of other dangers threaten to effectively remove two of the ocean's biggest filter-feeders and several of its apex predators from the food chain. We don't know exactly what the results will be, but they will be serious.  They could be catastrophic. 
"Sharks are for study, not soup" should be our motto.

Latest new bird flies in

Indonesia has yielded the newest bird species known to science.   The Wakatobi Flowerpecker (Dicaeum kuehni) comes from a smaller island off Sulawesi.  It is not a "just sighted" type of discovery, as it was confused with another flowerpecker from Sulawesi proper, but it's an interesting example of biodiversity. The Wakatobi bird shows no sign of interbreeding with its smaller relative: they are separated by a strait 27km wide that the birds could cross (and presumably did at some ancient point) but do not. 

Music of the celestial night

Sarah Brightman will pay a whopping $52M to become the eighth space tourist to ride a Russian rocket to the ISS.  She's not talking much about what she'll do there, but I assume she'll try to work out arrangements to provide some kind of live performance and recording. It'll all have to be done with the onsite equipment, though: professional-quality mikes, recording equipment, and so forth are not the kind of thing space tourists can bring. They are limited to personal essentials.  Also, they can't disrupt the operations of the science station. Finally, the acoustics in a metal can crammed with equipment are nothing to sing home about. Still, I hope she can arrange something to encourage support for space exploration and interest in the ISS mission. She's a marvelous singer (Andrew Lloyd Webber described her as having a pop voice with an operatic range) and has been working to arrange this since 2012, so it's not a flirtation she's likely to abandon. 

A cryptozoological thriller - Under the Dark Ice (review)

Beneath the Dark Ice
Greig Beck
St. Martin's, 2010
320pp.

This is the first novel I've read by Beck, and I enjoyed it.  His subterranean ocean food chain is questionable, at least in its capability to support so many big predators (Warren Fahey did a better job with Pandemonium) , but this is a fast, well-written adventure thriller with a mix of survived and evolved prehistoric animals that keep the pages turning as the human characters try to escape before they are eaten. A couple of the creatures, especially the Big Bad, aren't quite believable, but others are, and Beck sure as heck makes them all scary.  Beck gets an extra point for creating a believable romance between characters who have just met, a tricky feat to pull off for any author: lesser writers would use the idea as a clumsy excuse for adding sex.  There is lots of cool military technology, some of it real today, the rest plausible in 5-10 years, and military/tech adventure readers will eat this one up.  I couldn't quite believe Beck's main military character, Alex Hunter, has the abilities he does, but he's well-written enough that I didn't care too much.  Bottom line: this book is  a lot of fun. I gave it 3.5 stars on Amazon.

New spaceships on the horizon

At the recent Space Symposium (formerly National Space Symposium), Boeing had a full-scale mockup of its cool CST-100 human transport on display (right next to the even cooler Lynx spaceplane).  It looks essentially like a bigger Apollo capsule with a greatly improved interior. Then SpaceX grabbed the spotlight by unveiling what CEO Elon Musk called a flight article - in other words, real and complete - Dragon 2.  He may have been exaggerating a little about this being flight hardware, but there's no question SpaceX is well along toward being the first of the Commercial Crew units to fly humans. 
Senator Richard Shelby, in a blatant example of promoting business in his state at the expense of the taxpayers, has proposed language that will require SpaceX and the other commercial firms to provide cost and pricing data on every component of their vehicles. The Commercial Crew program was created to buy services to orbit as a commodity, creating a much faster, cheaper pipeline to orbit than sending people up on government (U.S. or Russian) spacecraft.  Shelby, who thinks everything related to the U.S. belongs on government vehicles like the Space Launch System and the EELVs being built in his home state, would wreck this premise and cost taxpayers billions.  Boeing, with its military experience, has the infrastructure in place to figure out and provide all this data: SpaceX and Sierra Nevada do not.  Shelby saw an opportunity to crush SpaceX as a competitor on price.  What's scary is that he might get his way.

Below: Boeing capsule at Space Symposium

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Book Review: Daedalus and the Deep

Another entry in the recent wave of sea-creature novels is Matthew Willis' Daedalus and the Deep.
(Cotero Publishing, 2012: 248pp.) It's a unique and rather delightful book.
Willis takes as his starting point a true event, the report of a "sea serpent" by the HMS Daedalus in 1848.  He fictionalizes Captain Peter McQuahe as Robert MacQuarrie, and the other names used are all fictitious. Our protagonist here is Ensign Colyer, a teenage girl passing herself as her dead brother Tom.  Such things did happen in the Royal Navy on occasion, and Colyer is an engaging hero among a crew of well-drawn male characters.
Willis asks what might have happened if the corvette had not merely reported the serpent but chased it hell-bent, determined to secure it for the honor of England, its Navy, and the ship's captain.  Along the way we get all kinds of detail on how such a ship was equipped and sailed in those days. Indeed, there's sometimes a little too much detail, and I found myself skipping occasional paragraphs even though the subject interested me.
While trying not to spoil the plot too much, it's important to say there is a science fiction (one may say fantasy) element throughout this book. It's not by accident that the Daedalus and the creature came together, and their running fight over many days and thousands of miles is driven by the creature as much, or more than, by Captain MacQuarrie. 
The result is a very enjoyable read. Willis writes well: there are only a couple of clunky sentences here and there.  You will put this book down having enjoyed a rousing adventure story, an original slant on the sea serpent motif, and an engaging introduction to the days of sail.  Well done, Mr. Willis.

A month beneath the sea

Two decades ago, there were several long-dwell scientific habitats scattered on the continental shelves of the world. Now there is just one, Aquarius Reef Base off the Florida Keys.  Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques, will dive today to join a five-man crew for a 31-day stay.  Cousteau will help with experiments while filming the underwater odyssey.  It's a worthwhile mission, though it highlights the restricted funding for underwater exploration worldwide.  The last great frontier on Earth has only one outpost of Homo sapiens, and even it was almost shut down for budgetary reasons in 2012.  It only survives because of frantic fundraising efforts and some support from NASA, which sends astronauts there to train. Space explorers get used to the confined space, hostile environment, and weightlessness-like underwater conditions to prepare them for space station flights.
Cousteau calls his effort "Mission 31." Here's hoping it won't be "Mission Final" for Aquarius. 

UPDATE: Mission 31 was a complete success.  Here's hoping it brings a reappraisal of how atrophied the human presence on the seafloor has become. 

The cryptozoology "absence of evidence" thing again

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." - Bernard Heuvelmans, the father of cryptozoology, wrote that, and it's been quoted ever since. Is it valid?
I've dealt with this before, but I didn't resolve it. It's still pretty complicated.
Scientific answer: the validity of what I'll abbreviate as AEINEA depends on the circumstances.
Let's take the ivory-billed woodpecker. We know it existed. We know it hasn't been conclusively proven to exist in the U.S. since the Singer Tract in Louisiana was logged out in the 1950s.  Some ornithologists came to accept its absence: others pointed out Southern woodlands were still relatively big and a few woodpeckers in a remote spot could be overlooked for a long time.  So there was a split on whether AEINEA was valid.
Maybe this wasn't the best example, because there's still a split between the ornithologists who are sure they saw and videotaped it and those who have gone over the testimony and the tape and written them off as representing pileated woodpeckers. Still, the search was active for a very long time, and highly qualified experts took the AEINEA position. Some still do.
Anyone could have been forgiven for rejecting AEINEA in some cases, like the cahow or Bermuda petrel.  It vanished for thee hundred years. No one was looking for it in 1906 when one was caught, killed, and stuffed - but misidentified. It wasn't until 1935 when one flew into a lighthouse window and the species' rediscovery began. If you'd been arguing the AEINEA position in 1934, you'd have been ridiculed. 
Then we get to cryptozoology.  To take the most topical subject, consider sasquatch. We have no hard evidence it existed or did exist.  It's argued about whether it could exist in the purported habitat, but for the moment we'll accept Robert Pyle's well-argued book Where Bigfoot Walks and assume it could. (Pyle did not argue it did exist, only that it was possible).
You can still fly for hours over the Pacific Northwest and western Canada and not see a sign of human habitation.  When sasquatch first made headlines in the 1950s (there are older stories, but let's start with the 1958 media explosion), it seemed logical to argue AEINEA, in part because no one had been looking for evidence.
In 2014, is it still valid?
A lot of people, include a very few scientists, do argue it. A small population of smart, wary animals, they say, can still avoid leaving good evidence.  If we accept this as possible, the next question is, how long is AEINEA valid?  If it was valid in 1958, it seems reasonable to accept it in 1968 and even 1978.  1988? 2000? 2014?  (I am here setting aside the most intriguing evidence, the Patterson-Gimlin film, because it's still not definitive. We don't have a scrap of valid DNA, much less a definite piece of a specimen.)
If it's still good in 2014, how much longer? 2024? 2034? At some point, it will become indefensible. Skeptics have argued it's been indefensible for a long time.  But even if it's valid now, it can't be valid forever.
Philip Klass once said UFO researchers lived under this curse: "You will never know more about UFOs than you do now." We don't know any more about sasquatch than we did 50 years ago.  I personally leave the AEINEA door open just a crack because I know sincere people who are sure they've seen it.  But I can't leave it open much longer.
Some cryptids are a bit different. The elongated marine animal known as the "sea serpent" has left no hard evidence anyone has collected for science, but it has the whole global ocean. It had better odds than sasquatch of not leaving hard evidence but still existing just because of that habitat. It does, however, become increasingly untenable that there is no evidence if the creature comes ashore to give birth. It's retreated, in essence: if there's a real animal, it's almost certainly pelagic.  But I think AEINEA still has some validity here. 
The "I think" part is tough. There is simply no way around some degree of subjectivity unless the habitat is entirely converted to asphalt or is so thoroughly known by humans that nothing could hide. This is where we are with Loch Ness, to my thinking. 
The one thing we can say with certainty is that AEINEA cannot be valid forever for any large animal that lives on Earth.  How long is it valid? 
Assume for a moment sasquatch does NOT exist. If this is the case, there are sasquatch hunters who will come, in the coming decades, to decide AEINEA no longer applies. There are others who may die thinking it is still valid.
You'll notice that I really haven't come to a definite conclusion.
That's the thing.
YOU have to do that for each cryptid based on your own research and your own reason.  I hope, in all cases, that AEINEA will turn out to be right. It won't, but  I hope.

Private Group Revives NASA Probe

In 1997, the International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3), its extended mission completed, was left to its own devices in space. No one even tried to talk to the venerable probe (launched in 1978), which had studied cosmic rays, comets, and solar phenomena.  A private group, the ISEE-3 Reboot Project, came to its rescue. A crowdfunded effort, the Project reached a Space Act agreement with NASA allowing them to try to contact the probe and set it to yet another mission.  Using the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, project engineers on 29 May made contact and got a response from the "dead" spacecraft.   With $160,000 raised from Kickstarter, the group has plans to fire the ancient engine and send ISEE-3 to ES-1, the Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1, nearly a million miles from Earth, and get the instruments going again.

This effort is groundbreaking in so many ways. Reviving a spacecraft launched when Jimmy Carter was President. A citizen group taking over and running a NASA probe.  This really is a voyage into new frontiers. (I contributed, by the way).

Onwards!

Birthday: Dr. Sally K. Ride

Dr. Sally Ride would have been 63 today.  America's first woman in space - and the first woman to really EARN a spaceflight rather than being rushed up as a stunt - was born in California in 1951. She earned three degrees in physics and one in English. She flew into space on STS-7 in 1983. She flew again on STS-41G and was in training for a third mission when we lost the shuttle Challenger - the spaceship that had carried her into history three years before the accident.  Dr. Ride served on the Challenger investigation commission and left NASA in 1989 for a professorship, and was active from then until her death from cancer in 2012 in programs to encourage girls to pursue STEM careers. She served on a half-dozen other prestigious boards and institutes, including the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. She wrote five books on space for young readers. Intensely private, she never talked of her personal life, refused endorsements, and turned down most opportunities for appearances.   She crammed enough achievements and causes into her 61 years for three people - maybe four.

Godspeed, Doc.

Sally Ride: an American hero.

Top 10 new species announced

I'm not sure how one picks the Top 10 out of 18,000 species discovered in the past year, but the International Institute for Species Exploration has taken a shot.  In no particular order, they include one impossibly cute mammal (the Olinguito), one tree, one bizarre-looking lizard, and a microbe found - believe it or not - in two spacecraft-assembly clean rooms on different continents. Fish and birds lost out this year (they were discovered, but didn't rate placement on the list.  It is appropriate that the international committee involved made sure the invertebrates were dominant, since, in terms of total species and new species discovered, they always are.)

The list is released every year on the birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the creator of modern taxonomy.

Olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina)

Kaweesak's Dragon Tree (Dracaena kaweesakii)

ANDRILL Anemone (Edwardsiella andrillae)

Skeleton Shrimp (Liropus minusculus)

Orange Penicillium (Penicillium vanoranjei)

Leaf-tailed Gecko (Saltuarius eximius)

Amoeboid Protist (Spiculosiphon oceana)

Clean Room Microbes (Tersicoccus phoenicis)

Tinkerbell Fairyfly (Tinkerbella nana)

Domed Land Snail (Zospeum tholussum)

 

More kudos for the International Cryptozoology Museum

What more can a museum of the strange and unusual ask for? Loren Coleman's ICM in Portland, Maine, has been named one of the Top 10 Weirdest Museums by no less an authority than TIME magazine. TIME commented, "It includes everything from hair samples, fecal matter and native art — and it just might turn you into a Bigfoot believer.”  It might not, of course, but there are only so many life-size, fully furred sasquatch replicas in the world - indeed, I think the ICM's is the only one. Even if you think cryptozoology is silly, this museum houses thousands of items about animal fact and folklore from all over the planet. There's nothing like that collection.
The ICM, as always, needs funds, but I'm not asking for donations to the museum right now. There's something more important: my friend Loren has huge uncovered medical expenses. If you feel like helping, do what I did and PayPal your donation to: lcoleman@maine.rr.com

At the National Space Symposium

The Space Foundation is calling it just the "Space Symposium" this year to reflect the growing international focus. 
I managed only a brief visit today, and I thought the crowd was a little thin, but far better than last year, when the sequester crippled NASA's participation.  The Boeing Exhibit Center, though, is FULL of companies and organizations. Everyone's here, and there are some spectacular exhibits, like a Dream Chaser mockup you can sit in and a full-size Orion capsule cutaway.  More to follow!

The race to find new species

Actually, this article is more about one lab's discoveries, but I though the figures were interesting: researcher at the University of Florida's Museum of Natural History described 103 species, living and extinct,  in 2013. In second place: the California Academy of the Sciences, with 91 species. 
Go Gators!

Crypto-fiction review: Kronos Rising

Kronos Rising
Max Hawthorne
Far From the Tree Press
542pp.
2013 (updated edition)

"Creature" novels usually have two faults: the hand-waving of the science and the inability of the author to keep our attention when the creature is off stage.  Hawthorne's novel succeeds on the second count and certainly tries on the first.
So to give the good news first, Hawthorne can write. Some of his characters (the two-fisted lawman, the woman scientist) are tropes of this genre, but Hawthorne writes them colorfully and sure-footedly. Everyone has an interesting backstory, which helps us cheer on the heroes and slightly humanizes the villains.  (One odd note here: the novel's repeated reference to champion fencers being national figures and having a professional tour is so weird I assume Hawthorne means it as a kind of running gag.) 
Hawthorne knows the sea, and the ocean scenes are authentic and suspenseful.  We spend time on several ships, and all of them are described in interesting detail.  We feel the rocking of the waves and smell the salt air. 
Finally, Hawthorne is good at plotting and pacing. The book races along, and only the drawn-out climax seems too long. 
So it's eminently readable. The science needs some work.
SPOILERS
Hawthorne's villain is an evolved species of kronosaur, close to a hundred feet long . It's common for authors using extinct creatures to postulate that evolution over millions of years has left them bigger, smarter, and in this case, with the ability of echolocation, and that all falls under the heading of speculative fiction as long as the critter is at least possible.
It bothered me to see a baleen whale echolocate. This and some other liberties with the science are things that could have been revised (e.g., if it's the wrong habitat for a colossal squid, good old Architeuthis would do)  or written around. 
The knonosaurs' survival to the present is incomplete: Hawthorne presents a story that puts two kronosaurs in a volcanic cone after the K-T asteroid impact, but the next 65 million years is a bit fuzzy. However, he gets credit for trying, because a lot of "survival" novelists really don't.
None of the nitpicks will bother anyone looking for a fun read, because Kronos Rising delivers on the fun: it has plenty of plot twists, roller-coaster suspense, colorful characters, and action.  On that score, I got my money's worth.

Monk seals: the good, the bad, and the extinct

There were three species of monk seals, so widely separated that their kinship seemed bizarre - the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Hawaiian. Scientists have now figured out, using DNA from museum specimens of the Caribbean species (believed extinct sine 1952, though it likely lingered past that), that the Mediterranean, the original stock, should have the genus Monachus to itself, while the other two should be in a new genus, Neomonachus. The two surviving species are endangered - the Mediterranean critically so.

In the case of the Caribbean seal, in 1494,Columbus took note of this animal's abundance.  By 1911, humans had found and slaughtered the last known herd near the Yucatan peninsula.  The last definite record was from 1952, although sightings of one or two individuals were reported in 1964 and 1969.  A report of two seals off the southeastern Bahamas in 1974 might have marked the last time this species was encountered.  A 1980 expedition to this area produced no sightings, though fishermen surveyed in the 1990s indicated there was at least a possibility survivors had been sighted in recent years.     It is likely, however, that the species is now extinct.

Review: Predator X by C.J. Waller

I try to keep up with novels with a cryptozoological influence. That's very hard now with so many self-published and Web-published novels, most of them awful.  Predator X looked interesting, though, and mainly it was. It kept my attention, though the cryptozoology isn't the focus of the novel.   Author Waller writes well and has avoided the bloat afflicting novels these days and kept it short (149 pages). Actually, the novel is a little too short: none of the characters has any backstory, and the explanation of how the caving team this novel focuses on ended up in its situation needs more development.  There are a couple of good plot twists, especially at the very end.  Predator X (a giant pliosaur) isn't the focus here: it exists and is important to the plot, but isn't the focus of the novel, which deals more with extraterrestrial activities and a creature which reminded me of Dean Koontz' antagonist in the novel Phantoms crossed with the one in the movie The Thing (John Carpenter version). There are a few factual errors (e.g., you wouldn't find trilobite fossils in Jurassic sediments) and the ecosystem in a deep underground sea doesn't really work, or at least isn't adequately explained.  (Read Warren Fahy's Pandemonium for a much better attempt at this.) I should be fair, though, and note the ecosystem isn't entirely natural: someone's been customizing it, so to speak.
In sum, Predator X isn't a great novel, but it's a fun way to pass a couple of hours.

Turning anemones into new friends

The 1,200 species of sea anemone cover the reefs of the world with flower-like beauty and nasty stings.  Scientists surveying the world's anemones (which for their own order) discovered that one of the biggest kinds - with tentacles 2m long - is a completely different animal. Relicanthus daphneae is the new same for Pacific species found in 2005.  It used to be Boloceroides daphneae, and it likes the neighborhoods around hydrothermal vents.  Turns out it's more closely related to coral than to anemones.   There are only some three dozen orders (some are disputed) in the entire animal kingdom, so this is a very big deal.

I am still trying to come up with a truly funny joke that ends, "With friends like these, who needs anemones?" Marvin in Finding Nemo only had the punchline. If you know a good one, let me know.

One mean new dinosaur

From the United States, we have a new entry in the "top prehistoric predator" competition.  While I still give that title to T. rex for land predators and Dunkleosteus terrelli for marine predators, Siats meekerorum (the genus name is from a legendary Native American monster) was over 9m long, with three-clawed hands and a generally fierce demeanor, especially in the artist's concept attached to the linked story.  To  an amateur, the head and claws give this 100-million-year-old beast a more allosaurid look than a tyrannosaurid one, but that's just on looks: the article doesn't offer much on the actual relationships.
It's not only an awesome critter but a good reminder that the dinosaur record is far from being filled in.  Who knows what's next?

Siats meekerorum as tribute to a Native American legendary creature, the Siats (pronounced as See-otts). According to this legend, the Siats was a terrible man-eating creature. While Siats the dinosaur obviously did not eat man due to a nearly 100 million year gap in existence
Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-huge-mega-predator-dinosaur#ZJpVVLTiLTIgmI14.99

saur Siats meekerorum as tribute to a Native American legendary creature, the Siats (pronounced as See-otts). Accord
Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-huge-mega-predator-dinosaur#ZJpVVLTiLTIgmI14.99

saur Siats meekerorum as tribute to a Native American legendary creature, the Siats (pronounced as See-otts). Accord
Read more at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/researchers-discover-huge-mega-predator-dinosaur#ZJpVVLTiLTIgmI14.99

New species swim in familiar waters

There's a fish in the Columbia River Basin in Montana and Idaho called the cedar sculpin, or Cottus schitsuumsh. It lives in waters that are well known and fished, but it's newly discovered.
It's a rare event, but it does happen.
Back in 2000, a new species of bass, Micropterus cataractae, was even described from well-known and commonly fished rivers of the southeastern United States.  Fishermen had known of the “shoal bass” for at least fifty years, but no scientific examination had been made to see if this fish differed from other bass.  A large shoal bass can be two feet long and weigh over eight pounds.  
That was the case for a long time with the sculpin, too. The new find was a "cryptic species" - an animal that looks so much like related species that it needs expert examination to distinguish it. The cedar sculpin, it turned out, had a single tiny visual difference from the shorthead sculpin, Cottus confuses.  DNA is increasingly the tool of choice for distinguishing species, but it's not a perfect science yet. What degree of difference splits a species off from the others? While this is still being worked out, this article describes an effort to determine the true diversity of fish and amphibians in the rivers of the Rocky Mountains. What's known so far is that we've considerably underestimated it.

Thanks to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference

I normally stick to science in this blog, but there's one event every year for which I have to interrupt that theme, because the Pikes Peak Writers Conference deserves all the accolades it can get. The PPWC is a gathering in late April of each year (it began in 1993) to celebrate, teach, and inspire writing. I've been a dozen times or more, and it's always worth the effort and cost (the latter is significantly less than for most conferences, by the way).

(Don't take my word for it: here, from another attendee, is a great testimonial)
The PPWC is known as the friendliest writer's conference around, a reputation kept up every year with lots of mix-and-mingle opportunities (there's no separate lounge for faculty and speakers: they are part of the general population here), a great setting in a nearly flawlessly-run hotel with lovely views of the Rockies, and an army of volunteers who make sure everything is taken care of.  Mary Kay Meredith was an awesome Director.

If you're interested, here's a blog you should most definitely follow.

The largest group of attendees is always the novel-writers, but there is programming for screenwriters, memoirists, and anyone else you can name.  The speakers are great: I was limited in my attendance by business trips this year but did hear a hilarious keynote from Jim Hines.

No event involving human beings is perfect, and I have voiced two concerns.
One is to the hotel: we're on top of a steep hill, there are 300+ people, and there are four handicapped parking spaces.  I talked to an assistant manager who said, "Maybe we'll improve when we resurface the parking lots." As I said, the hotel is ALMOST perfectly run in support of the Conference.
The other concern is for the conference organizers (and I admit I should be thinking about how to be more active and useful myself: I pledge every year that I'll be a more active volunteer, and somehow I always let that ambition get crowded out.)   There aren't enough minority attendees: somehow, we're just not attracting them. I looked for non-Caucasian attendees in the crowd and spotted a small handful of Hispanic and Asian faces and not a single African-American.

Those aside, I learned a lot,  made friends, and made memories.  (Did I mention the Pikes Peak Writers offer programming all year round, and membership is FREE?)

Here's to 2015!

Can Science Solve Everything?

No.
As Robert Oppenheimer said, "Science is not everything, but science is very beautiful."  But having been through the usual phases of reading classic scientists, current scientists, old philosophers, new philosophers (none of the latter very interesting), and religious/theological sources, I keep coming back to the idea there are things we'll never solve.

But don't take my word for it. Here's a very good article.

Not even the most brilliant theoretical physicists can do a damn thing with the "Why" question - why is there something rather than nothing? One of the commentators on this article attempts to reason his way out of this by saying there may not be a "why" - "Why can't things just BE?" but I don't think he wins a point: if there's no Why, then we have to ask Why there's no Why. 

Of the other points, take life after death. Setting aside the much argued-over NDEs (near-death experiences), some scientists argue there's no evidence to think there's anything: certain processes in the brain stop happening, and that's the end of it.  But what evidence would there be, exactly? Sure, it would be nice if people were always coming back to tell their children where they stashed some extra cash, but there's no reason an afterlife has to be workable that way.  It's easy to postulate an afterlife state where contact with or even awareness of the physical world doesn't exist.  As a Christian, I think something does exist, but what really annoys me is that, if I'm wrong, I'll never KNOW I'm wrong.

But I digress.  The point was there are still places where science stops working.  Is there anything past those boundaries? We can debate that, but we're no longer debating science.  Science and the scientific method are the best tools ever developed to explore and understand the magnificent physical universe we are in. If God exists, I take it as a commandment that we are meant to use all the tools at our disposal to further develop our understanding and further explore (and protect) the realm we exist in. 

So let's saddle up our microscopes, our telescopes, our particle accelerators. Let us build out models of Earth's environment while we also build our starships.  This is the universe we're in. Science lets us make the most of it.

Keeping Up with New Species

There are so many species being added continually to the nearly 2 million we know about that it's hard to keep up.  One of the sources helpful in this endeavor is at LiveScience.com, where a page is devoted fulltime to the new creatures of the world.  The Newfound Species page does not just include the charismatic vertebrates. The beetles, anemones (did you know an anemone lives in the Antarctic ice? No one did, until recently. Meet it here.), corals, spiders, and others are here along with the reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds. (Sorry, amphibians" you're here too.  I don't know why I always leave you out.) Other recent entire here include an orchid, a scorpion, and the recognition of the second species of oncilla, a handsomely spotted Brazilian feline.  
Another site is the species discovery page of Mongabay.com. Mongabay articles tend to lean more towards the vertebrates, though not entirely - meet the newest mantises here. There is some overlap, but there are plenty of new species to go around.   The same is true for the New Species News page of ScienceDaily, which today features new sponges and bats.  It also includes some related articles about topics like how to name and track endangered species.
Those sites, plus a Google Alert, keep me reasonably up to date.  (Oh, don't forget to follow National Geographic news, including the Wild & Weird blog.) 
There's a lot to catch up on....

Across the last frontier: John C. Houbolt

John C. Houbolt, Unsung Hero of the Apollo Program, Dies at Age 95

 Houbolt, a critical factor in the race to the Moon, has died at 95. I never met him, but as an "Apollo kid" I certainly watched his work. He was instrumental in selecting the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) plan that got us on the Moon in JFK's public timeline.  As Astra, doc.

 

 

From NASA press release:

"In the space race of the 1950s and '60s, the leading voices were rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and ... another guy. Household names included Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard and ... oh, you know, the fellow who pushed the idea of a separate crew capsule and lunar lander. America wouldn't have won the race, the Eagle wouldn't have landed in 1969 and the Apollo 13 crew would never have survived if it weren't for an engineer from [the] NASA Langley Research Center. John C. Houbolt."

So reads a feature on HamptonRoads.com written in 2009 about one of the unsung heroes of the Apollo Program. Houbolt may have never become a household name, but his ideas and contributions to Apollo made it possible to achieve the goal of landing a crew on the Moon and safely returning them by the end of the decade. As a member of of Lunar Mission Steering Group, Houbolt had been studying various technical aspects of space rendezvous since 1959 and was convinced, like several others at Langley, that lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR) was not only the most feasible way to make it to the moon before the decade was out, it was the only way. At the time many scientists thought the only way to achieve a lunar landing was to either build a giant rocket twice the size of the Saturn V (the concept was called Nova) or to launch multiple Saturn Vs to assemble the lunar ship in Earth orbit (an approach known as Earth orbit rendezvous).

In November 1961, Houbolt took the bold step of skipping proper channels and writing a 9-page private letter directly to incoming Associate Administrator Dr. Robert C. Seamans. Describing himself somewhat melodramatically "as a voice in the wilderness," Houbolt protested LOR's exclusion from the NASA debate on the Apollo mission profile. "Do we want to go to the moon or not?" the Langley engineer asked. "Why is Nova, with its ponderous size simply just accepted, and why is a much less grandiose scheme involving rendezvous ostracized or put on the defensive? I fully realize that contacting you in this manner is somewhat unorthodox," Houbolt admitted, "but the issues at stake are crucial enough to us all that an unusual course is warranted." Houbolt clearly saw that the giant Nova rocket and the expensive and complex Earth orbit rendezvous plan were clearly not a realistic option--especially if the mission was to be accomplished anywhere close to President Kennedy's timetable. While conducting a rendezvous in orbit around the Moon was going to be a challenge, the weight, cost and savings of using LOR were obvious once one realized that LOR was not fundamentally much more difficult than Earth orbit rendezvous. This insights, and Houbolt's brave and energetic advocacy of it, made all the difference.

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Book of Animal Records

You may think all "record" books have "Guinness" in the titles, as kind of a natural law, but this edition of Mark Carwardine's Book of Animal Records is sponsored by the Natural History Museum in London.  It's a lot of fun and is often eye-opening, but its utility is limited by the complete lack of references.

The Natural History Museum Book of Animal Records
Firefly, 2013
256pp.

The book is colorful, readable, and has an intriguing collection of odd records (the fastest-digging monotreme is the echidna, just in case someone asks)   along with the usual biggest, heaviest, smallest, and all that. It adds up to some 900 records from all over the animal kingdom.  Carwardine is a veteran of wildlife books (I have his Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises and the touching Last Chance to See, with Douglas Adams) and is qualified to undertake this endeavor.  Most of the time, his details are accurate, and they are certainly interesting.
Since my current area of interest is marine animals, it was cool to spend some time with the largest pinniped (a southern elephant seal caught in 1913 weighed an estimated 4,000 kg) and the fastest of the seals (the leopard seal's ability to leap onto a flow 2m above the water indicates a launch speed of 22km/hr). On the sirenian side, did you know the Florida manatee has been known to migrate 850km? 
When it gets to records, of course, the whales grab most of the superlatives. The biggest sperm whale brain weighed was 9.2kg.  A blue whale caught in 1931 was weighed in pieces: with an estimate added for lost blood (6.5 metric tons) the whole whale weighed a stupendous 199 mt.  Orcas have been known to prey on 25 species of their fellow cetaceans using their speed (timed at 55.5km/h), smarts, and nasty jaws: one of those prey species is the blue whale, which while not swimming for its life communicates with low-frequency calls at 188 decibels, audible 3,000km away.
The dominant ocean vertebrates, in numbers, are are the fishes, and we learn plenty of nuggets about them:  puffer fish kills 30 people a year in Japan, while the top location for shark attacks in the years 2000-2011 is Florida (281). There are 410 species of sharks (a number probably already obsolete) and 42 are "known or suspected" of taking at least the occasional bite out of a human. (I wish there was a list provided: I've never seen an estimate that high.)
There is the occasional moment of clunky writing: e.g., coelacanths "have been dubbed as 'living fossils.'" There is also the occasional mistake. The claim on page 195 that marine biologists in 1963 saw an oarfish 15m long is flat wrong: the animal was a nearly-transparent invertebrate. Speaking of invertebrates, a deep-water crustacean in the genus Gigantocypris has, according this the text, better night vision than any living animal, though you have to read a bit further to learn Carwardine means the most sensitive, in terms of f-number (0.25).  The author gives a maximum weight of 272kg for the Pacific giant octopus, a number disputed in other references, though he adds a cautious note on the cephalopods by  saying there's no evidence for the monster Octopus giganteus once believed to have been stranded in 1896.  Also speaking of the invertebrates, they get short-changed a bit here: there are only 41 pages on them, despite their vastly outnumbering the vertebrates.
The question of dueling sources brings me to the huge problem with this book. There are no sources. No footnotes, no endnotes, no bibliography.  While it's understood Carwardine was going for the interest of popular audiences and wasn't trying to write a textbook, having NO references just flummoxes me.  With them, this book could have been terrific: instead, it's always interesting but rarely authoritative. 

Farewell, Peter Matthiessen

A great writer and conservationist has passed on.  Peter Mattheissen lived 86 years and made full use of every one. He traveled all over the world, writing about the people and the planet with a style that was unmatched for bringing readers into the scene: not just with technical descriptions, but with a spiritual understanding.  I remember him best for the moody, unforgettable Himalayan journey in The Snow Leopard (in which, among other things, he pondered the Yeti mystery), and Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, in which he followed the filming of the groundbreaking documentary Blue Water, White Death. Seeing a white shark up close, he wrote memorably that its black eye was " as "impenetrable and empty as the eye of God." Others know him for his award-winning novels, which I must admit I haven't read. He also took considerable interest in the sasquatch question, attending the first scientific conference on the subject and linking it to Native American folklore about the "Big Man." 
Goodbye to a man who did so much for the world.

Amazing specimen: an albino marlin

A New York woman caught (and released, which this article doesn't make clear) a fish no one had ever seen: an albino marlin. Caught off Costa Rica, the fish was so remarkable a taxidermy company promised her a replica mount for free. 
.
This was an Atlantic Blue Marlin Makaira nigricans, a fish that can reach 5m in length and over 600kg.  So the albino specimen wasn't any sort of size or weight record, but it was still an impressive fish. Some authorities think this species may swim as fast as 80km/hr (43 knots for us American sailors). Albinos generally don't do well in the wild: not only are they sun-sensitive, which may affect feeding opportunities even for an ocean-going fish, but they stand out to both predators and prey. It was an Atlantic Blue that figured in the most famous fishing novel ever, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, a novel I never got around to reading until 2013 but liked a lot. Here's a lovely animated adaptation. (Caution, not sure who has rights to this)

Crab-walking the ocean floor

The number and types of tools we have for probing the oceans grows every year.  Robot tuna, sharkfin cameras, and free-swimming and tethered ROVs are extending our vision and reach into the depths.
One thing we can't do yet is crawl - that is, crawl along the seafloor like a spider would, investigating caves, wrecks, and sea life up close.  This Korean invention is out to change that. Looking like a portable generator that grew legs, the 650-kg Crabster 2000 will give us a view we've never had before. It carries sonar and visual imaging systems, though more sensors and tools will be added later, and specialized versions may be developed. Making future versions able to swim "like turtles" is another objective.  Much depends on how it does in initial sea trials now underway. 
The Crabster 2000 isn't capable of everything. The initial model only goes to 200m and crawls at 10cm.minute.  But it's an interesting concept that may pay off big for oceanography. 

The Monster Shrimp From Hell

Actually, this thing couldn't hurt you. If couldn't even if it still existed. But it LOOKS like something from a James Cameron movie out to filet swimming humans alive.  Some 520 million years ago, Tamisiocaris borealis was one of the biggest animals on the planet at 70cm in length, and it cut a deadly swath - through plankton, at least. One of the odder results (and that's saying something) of the Cambrian explosion, the new predator was found in Greenland in a formation that, half a billion years ago, was located in the tropics. There was a bloom in the population of shrimplike creatures at the time, so these hard-shelled, appendage-waving creatures grew bigger. The group T. borealis belonged to, the anomalocarids, include species up to a possible 2m long and are most commonly classed as "stem arthropods" - that is, they were on the line leading to the arthropods, which today number over a million species at the very least and include everything from insects to lobsters.  (That's right: the roach you're stepping on is related to the lobster you're about to eat.  Yum.)
Evolution on Earth made so many experiments that we will never catalog them all.  Some fossils will always be too rare, too small, or too fragile, and of course many tiny invertebrates and microbes left no records at all.  But what we can know, and what we do know, is endlessly expanding and endlessly fascinating. 

The Universe Keeps Unfolding

In the spirit of the new COSMOS series (which is great, by the way), we are seeing discovery unfold every day as our telescopes and probes extend our senses into the vastness.

In the last month, this is what's happened:

As we all know, Pluto was demoted to a "minor planet" in a decision that, as we all know, was wrong.  Be that as it may, it's now clear Pluto isn't the minor planet furthest from Earth. 2012 VP113 has that designation.  It's so far out it's not clear how it was ever captured by the gravity of the Sun in the first place: its orbit averages 83 astronomical units (83 times the 93 million mile distance from the Earth to the sun) and, as astronomer Chad Trujillo put it, "Nothing that we currently know in the solar system can make objects that are so distant all the time, that never come close to any of the planets."

Nearer to home, finger-shaped objects that appear and disappear on Mars could - could - be evidence that water flows seasonally on the surface of the planet.   This phenomena was spotted, not by NASA or by a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer, but by undergraduate Lujendra Ojha.  (Keep going, kid: that Nobel Prize could be yours someday.)

Further from home, on the other hand, we have new extrasolar planets - 715 of 'em.  Talk about seeking out new worlds.
Gene Roddenberry, somewhere, is smiling.

Again, this is ONE MONTH of exploration.  Think about that.

Relaunching The First Space Race

This is cool.  My 2004 book The First Space Race: Launching the first Satellites (co-authored by Erika Lishock, with Foreword  by Dr. James Van Allen, is being relaunched as part of the publisher's expanded line of space books. 

www.upinspace.org

#upspacebooks

Anniversary - Robert Goddard's first launch

88 years ago today, Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket.  For space exploration, this was a moment akin to what the Wright brothers did at Kitty Hawk 23 years earlier.  Goddard's rocket used gasoline and liquid oxygen and solved the problem of stability by the unique device of putting the engine at the top of the rocket instead of the bottom. Goddard would go on to make enormous strides in all areas of rocket technology.  It's tragic that he didn't live to see the first satellites, but NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is only one of many tributes maintained today to the father of liquid-fueled rocketry.  Hats off, Dr. Goddard!

A cold-blooded lizard that likes the cold?

This striking new lizard from Peru prefers an unusual habitat - cold mountain streams.  The article doesn't say how much time the animal spends in the water vs. sunning itself (which it must do), but it's one more reminder that life is endlessly adaptable.  When we have, for example, crabs that live almost entirely on land and get as big as trashcan lids (dustbin lids for you British readers), fish that prefer to be on land (a tiny Brazilian catfish will instantly get out of the water if placed in it), and animals that flourish in superheated, poisoned water around hydrothermal vents, we should always keep in mind that "Life finds a way" isn't just a line from a movie. 

FIRST legislation not a good prescription for science

I rarely mention anything about politics or legislation in this space, but this rates an exception: not just because my good friend. Dr. Cherie McCollough, whose thinking I greatly respect, sent me an alert on this, but because it'll shape U.S. government science-related polities for years to come.
The House is debating a new act to fund the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, but the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act (H.R. 4186) includes some questionable provisions that have a whole lot of scientists upset. 
A lot of the hubbub concerns a major cut to the social and behavioral sciences.  As valuable as these can be (although everyone has a "silliest grant" story), I'll let other people fight that one: the right balance between social science and hard science funding is beyond my expertise.
There are some logical things in the bill: the need for a "no fraud" statement from each researcher might be seen as duplicative, but I like having it clearly in law.   There are also head-scratchers: what's the relevance of saying "A maximum of five citations in any grant proposal?" But my major problems are twofold:
1.  The bill doesn't give the NSF and NIST the needed growth ("topline" in Washington parlance) to keep pace with research and educational needs in a fast-changing, technology-driven world.  Even granting there are competing needs and yawning deficits, NSF/NIST funding has to be protected and at least modestly boosted if we're going to be a leading nation in science, technology, and commerce.   
2. The biggest puzzler is the access provisions. If the taxpayers fund work, the taxpayers should get access to it, free or at cost.  There's an existing understanding that publishers of papers can withhold free access for 12 months, but this bill would extend that to two to three years instead of reducing it. That's crazy.

Here's an interview with the author, Rep. Lamar Smith, where he explains his thinking. He seems to focus entirely on some questionable grants to the exclusion of the bigger picture, although the interviewer could have done a better job of probing for specifics.  
If you agree he's gotten it wrong, here's his contact information.  Tell him what you think. Don't be shy. Last I checked, Congress still works for us.

Peruvian Mystery Cats: strange-looking jaguars after all

Are there undiscovered big cat species in the world?
 
It's possible, but one very promising lead has been run to ground.

This is a case I worked on myself: I took Peter Hocking, the discoverer of one and possibly two possible new cats in Peru, to Denver to meet with a mammologist several years ago, but all we had were photographs of a skull, and Dr. Cheri Jones, the expert at the Denver museum, thought that inconclusive.  Hocking thought his “speckled tiger” might actually a be a jaguar, but a previously unknown color morph, while the “striped tiger” (reportedly rufous in color with white vertical stripes) was more likely to be a new species.  If this proved true, Hocking would have had the first new big cat species described in nearly a century and a half.  

 

If only.

 

Now another friend of mine, Darren Naish, has taken up the case. He and his collaborators, including Hocking, have been disappointed.  It appears the Peruvian finds must have been unusual jaguars - VERY unusual, in terms of reported coat color, but otherwise that trail has petered out.   When reading this paper, also note the excellent recap of recent mammal discoveries and discovery trends. We have by no means catalogued all the mammals of Earth.

Here's the paper!  
 

Sailing another 20,000 Leagues?

Disney's film of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a masterpiece 60 years ago and has held up pretty well.  Two TV remakes in 1997 tried to outdo each other for sheer awesome stupidity and general suckiness (they had some decent actors, but what they did with them...ugghh.)  

There was almost another remake, and it looked darn good.  The concept artist whose work is reproduced here designed a terrific submarine using 19th-century ideas, forgoing the iconic nature of Disney's sub for something more Vernian. The Disney sub is terrific to look at, both menacing and artistic, but it must have had, based on the sets in the film, an interior far bigger than its exterior, making it sort of an unintentional pre-Doctor Who seagoing TARDIS.  The squid-faced sub in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels was very cool, while the ocean-liner-size craft in the film version of League was as ridiculous as the rest of the movie.  Here's a great page collecting all the Nautilus designs from Verne's day onwards.

Verne used a lot of sea creatures, most of them depicted inaccurately even for the knowledge of his day and some of them terribly wrong (I still want to see a shark streaming phosphorescence).   But the novel was a work of genius, and it still is.  If there's a another remake - and it's rather inevitable there will be one - I hope it not only reflects the rousing storytelling of Verne's original, but all we've learned about the ocean and its creatures - some of them beyond knowledge or even imagination for an author writing in 1870. 

Awesome video - wolves and ecology in Yellowstone

How wolves change the state of rivers.

OK, wolves are awesome all by themselves.  But this short video illustrates what happens when you remove a key piece from an ecosystem.

It really is all connected.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for this item.

Wrapping up my thoughts on Ketchum-Sasquatch affair

I'd actually written this topic off, but I posed a question to Dr. Ketchum on FaceBook, and she was polite enough to engage in an exchange. I appreciate that.  But I came away  dismissing the entire topic.

I'm not an expert on the genetics, but exactly one person who is (Dr. Swenson) has endorsed the work, while every other qualified person has either ignored it, dismissed it, or is (if supportive, as Melba Ketchum claims some are)  has remained anonymous.  She sees this as irrational fear and rejection of good evidence. I can't see it that way: it's too overwhelming. 

Dr. Ketchum also insists that some samples were taken directly from a living sasquatch under close observation.  Here's where I had, to, with great reluctance, reach the personal opinion that she and others involved are not just reaching incorrect conclusions or using flawed evidence, but that at least some people involved here are not telling the truth.    

If you have a sasquatch under close observation, there are only three possibilities:
1. You're motivated by money. In this case, you'd have taken clear video to a major media outlet a long time ago.
2. You're motivated by science. In this case, you'd take clear video and more samples to an academic or government office. (If you're not believed, you'd bring in reporters.)
3. You're motivated by the sincere belief that the best thing you can do for the species is to keep it secret. I could understand this, but, if this were your logic, you'd never release ANY samples or video.

Concerning the people observing the alleged specimen, Dr. Ketchum's last comment was, "It is not my place to comment on somebody else's business."  When I posted the analysis above, she made a post saying that, if I was calling these people liars, then I was calling her a liar.  That post was quickly deleted.  She insisted that the video released was poor quality due to technical difficulties. (No one outside the community of existing sasquatch believers thinks it's in any way genuine.) She added, "I repeat, I do not have any control over the footage so it is a moot point to discuss it. Yes, the samples were controlled and the DNA testing matched the physical attributes of the one in the film."

Very well.  She has made her position clear: and, again, I appreciate her time. However, my thought as a science writer who has tried to keep an open mind on this and on sasquatch in general is that there is no fact behind all this kerfluffle, and nothing that advances science or conservation will ever come of it.

Putting the kibosh on prehistoric survivors?

Sharon Hill, geologist, skeptic, and Sounds Sciencey columnist, has given the boot (boot? Hill? Get it?)  to the claims that prehistoric survivors are still roaming around causing cryptozoologists to get all excited.  She has a number of major points, one being that the coelacanth is  not enough to make a logical link with any claims of living  plesiosaurs. (Actually, I'm almost getting tired of Old Fourlegs, a marvelous discovery, but one that apparently be trotted out forever in arguments over cryptozoology.) Hill notes that neither Central Africa nor any other spot on Earth is unchanged since the Mesozoic era, a point hammered home in the African case by Louis Jacobs in his book Quest for the African Dinosaurs.

She dismisses two of the most famous corpses in sea serpent history, noting they were in advanced stages of decay.  I had to push back a little there:  the 1937 Naden Harbor "Cadborosaurus," while clearly beat up, was not described in the contemporary accounts as being in "an advanced state of decomposition." There's still something odd about that damned thing: while it does resemble a decayed basking shark, it puzzles me that the vertebral column would have stayed intact for so long while the whale was digesting it, given the combination of chemical and muscular processes going on.. (While I wrote in 2006 that there are no accounts of sperm whales swallowing basking sharks, Richard Ellis mentions one in his book on the sperm whale, a 14-foot shark to be precise, so we can agree such a swallowing can happen.) It probably was a known creature of some sort, and Bousfield and LeBlond overreached in making it the type specimen of a new reptile. It's just not resolved quite as definitely as I'd like. 
The article raises and interesting question: if there is a decent body of sightings of a large animal, is it more likely to be a survivor which has left no fossil remains for a very long time, or a more recent development which has somehow left no remains at all?

Hauling in a giant squid

It was possible, only 20 years ago, for Richard Ellis to write that confusion of "sea serpents" and giant squids was made all the more possible by the fact that no one alive had ever seen a live giant squid for certain, so how they would look and act near the surface was open to question.  Sightings of giant squid are still extremely rare - I count one confirmed underwater sighting by humans and two videos, plus a few instances of catches on the surface - so they are still newsworthy.
Here's a new one, a catch made by a Japanese fisherman who got a rope on the squid and hauled it in still alive (it died shortly thereafter). It was about 4m long and would have been twice that if the long tentacles had been intact.  Mr. Okamoto is a shell diver who had the weirdly unsettling experience of a having a giant squid swim above him - as in, between an unarmed human and the nice normal world of the surface. Fortunately, it apparently was in no shape to cause trouble.
Fatal interactions between humans and giant squid (fatal to the human, that is), are stuff of legend, but may have happened, especially in a World War II incident in the Atlantic, where survivors reported that people had been pulled from makeshift rafts: one fellow turned up on the old Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World TV show to display dime-sized scars on his leg.
So giant squid are  still mysterious.  Good for them :)