Celebrating amateur scientists

While I'm on the subject of Popular Mechanics articles, I have to tout this one on amateur scientists and the contributions they are making on everything from space launch to hummingbird migration.

High-tech carrier construction

This fascinating Popular Mechanics article looks into the new technology applied to the Navy's newest carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, slated to launch in 2015. In addition to the technology on the ship, such as electromagnetic catapults, the article shows how the 100,000-ton carrier is being designed and constructed with the newest technology. This includes virtual reality rooms allowing engineers in different cities to collaborate and to try different configurations. A simulation program nicknamed "SimCity" for carriers" explores how well the ship will function, from refueling planes to feeding sailors, as various designs and parameters are tweaked. Finally, author Noah Shachtman takes a look at how all this is being transformed into metal with the help of the world's largest crane (it lifts 1,050 tons.) Really, really cool.

The Japanese Wolf

In this excellent three-part series for Cryptomundo, Brent Swancer updates the saga of the Japanese wolf (Canis lupus hodophilax) a.k.a. the Honshu wolf, the Hondo wolf, or the yamainu. He shows the animal almost certainly survived its official 1905 demise, but by how long? Could it survive today?

Fiction review: "Terminal Freeze" by Lincoln Child

Terminal Freeze (Doubleday, 2009)
by Lincoln Child

I've always liked the joint Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child novels a bit better than any of the solo efforts by either writer. I still do, but this cryptozoologically-themed thriller is a very good entry on Child's part.
When I read the blurb, I thought, "Monster thaws out from ice? How overused and hokey is that?" It's still overused and hokey, but Child puts an original spin on it, adds some good writing, and the result is highly enjoyable. Child works in interesting technical details about things like filmmaking and ice-road trucking, along with some cutting-edge science and some that's a bit too speculative. For example, "ice-fifteen" is legitimate: it's a hypothesized (though not yet observed) form of ice with weird properties. On the other hand, the idea of a large animal being flash-frozen so quickly that it survives because no ice crystals form in the cells seems too much of a reach: even the best-conditioned Ice Age mammals we've found frozen have been obviously and unquestionably dead. A final discussion between characters, though, leaves us with a delicious new possibility that could explain why this animal doesn't react like everything else we know. Some of the characters seem stock, but Child redeems them with the right touch of human unpredictability. (With most authors, for example, the tough old Army sergeant would have stood his ground and died in his boots.)
Overall, this novel is just what I think Child wanted it to be: an absorbingly fun read that's also a bit of a homage to Arctic thrillers like Howard Hawks' 1951 film "The Thing."

Teenage girl discovers supernova

I love stories like this about amateurs contributing scientific discoveries. Maybe someday I'll have to write a book on it.
This case is more unusual than most: a 14-year-old amateur astronomer with a small telescope pointed "real" astronomers to a rare type of supernova. Alex Filippenko of the University of California said of the find by Caroline Moore, "Coincidentally, the youngest person to ever discover a supernova found one of the most peculiar and interesting supernovae ever. This shows that no matter what your age, anyone can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the universe."

A new kind of cloud?

How can you have a new kind of cloud? People have been watching the skies for centuries. The current classification of clouds has been unchanged since 1951. Still, this cloudscape photographed by an Iowa woman in 2006 is being advanced as a new "subspecies" of cumulous cloud.
COMMENT: I don't know much about clouds, but to give a precise scientific opinon, this certainly looks kind of weird.

Boy hit by space rock

In one of the few instances in human history of a person being hit by a celestial object, a German teenager has been struck by a fragment of rock. The red-hot missile was about the size of a pea. The encounter left Gerrit Blank with a 7.5-cm scar on his hand. While there are many old stories of human-meteor interactions, the only authenticated case before Blank's is apparently an American woman struck and bruised in Alabama in 1954.

MicroSpace News: Boeing's CubeSat

CubeSats, those handy little 1kg gadgets, keep getting more sophisticated and capable. This Boeing press release notes the company's CubeSat TestBed 1 has been sending back data for more than two years now.

From the press release:

"The breakthroughs we've made with CSTB1 are enabling us to advance the development of NanoSat capabilities," said Scott MacGillivray, program manager for Boeing Nano-Satellite Programs and CSTB1. "We've downloaded more than 1 million data points to date, including dozens of photographs by CSTB1's small camera with a lens the size of a pencil's eraser head, and we continue to receive data on the extended-life characteristics of key components."

"Our success in demonstrating this new capability shows how NanoSats can perform valuable tasks to support Operationally Responsive Space needs," said Alex Lopez, vice president, Boeing Advanced Network and Space Systems. "As interest in NanoSats continues to grow, our accomplishments position us well to offer customers an affordable, viable option for specific satellite missions."
...
Boeing's next CubeSat demonstration mission, CSTB3, will be the first of a family of spacecraft designs representative of Boeing's new Tensor small-spacecraft avionics architecture, which will be the core of a wide array of missions.

CSTB3 is larger (approximately 4 kg and 10x10x30 cm) than CSTB1 and will demonstrate larger spacecraft capabilities such as higher communications bandwidth, three-axis control, onboard autonomy, and advanced dynamic power management. CSTB3 is expected to be flight-ready this summer.

Meet the Swimming Orangutans

In general, apes hate the water. Orangutans were generally thought to be like the gorilla, the chimp, and the rest. But one population, in Borneo, has become very fond of water. They don't just go in after food (we've recently learned that some gorillas will wade into water after a favorite snack). These orangs play. They roll in mud, dip into the water from tree branches, and sometimes wade in and then actually swim. These amazing photos make it clear orangs will do nearly everything humans will do in a swimming hole.

Celebrity names for new species

Entomologist Quentin Wheeler thinks it's good publicity for science to name new species after leaders and celebrities. There is, after all, no shortage of insects needing names.
Wheeler has named bugs after Darth Vader, President George W. Bush, and others. The latest? A Venezuelan beetle named Agaporomorphus colberti for comic-pundit Stephen Colbert.

New species: Keeping up with the fishes

It's important to pause every once in a while and sample the world of new species great and small.

The title link gives us a new wrasse from Brazil, a very attractive species named Halichoeres sazimai after Brazilian ichthyologist Ivan Sazima.

A new electric knifefish from Brazil and neighboring countries:
http://www.practicalfishkeeping.co.uk/pfk/pages/item.php?news=2137
(COMMENT: "Electric Knifefish" would be a great name for a rock band.)

And a continuing stream of discoveries of fish and inveretebrates from Antarctic waters, which one scientist described by saying, "There are some quite weird things down there. One sea cucumber species has this big protuberance sticking out of it. No one really knows what it's for." Another species "looks just like a sea anemone on a stick."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/science/2483219/Creatures-from-the-deep

NASA Administrator's background

This NYT editorial complains that incoming NASA Administrator Bolden has less of a deep technical background than outgoing Mike Griffin. This is true, but exactly which technical decisions of Mr. Griffin look like smart choices right now?
The Administrator needs enough background to understand engineering matters, and Bolden has that. He doesn't need to be able to design spaceships himself.

Battlestar Galactica: Science Ahead!

Well, not so much science, really. Space travel expert Kevin Fong explained to New Scientist that there's not much about the space opera one can connect with scientific or engineering reality. Among other things, the Cylon ships could easily outmaneuver the Colonial Vipers because the latter are limited by the G forces their human pilots can handle. Fong notes that any real-life long-distance space voyage in the near future, such as a trip to Mars, is likely to involve people crowded for a long time in a small volume. It does not sound nearly as much fun as crusing through solar systems on a ship with a big crew and lots of room (Although, if NASA is reading this, I, for one, would still volunteer).
According to Fong, the psychology of the show, such as the way humans fray at the edges under relentless Cylon attacks, is where its scientific truth likes.
SEXIST COMMENT: Of course, it also helps that Starbuck is really hot.

What's next after talking mice?

German researchers have developed a strain of mice endowed with a gene called FOXP2, which is necessary for human speech. All it's done with the mice is throw their voices off a bit, but Mark Leyner, writing for the NYT, wonders what this will lead to. Talking mice? (Maybe Disney has a hand in this research.) Other talking animals? He suggests that one cow talking about slaughterhouses on Oprah is likely to wreck the beef industry. (As to other animals, I do NOT want to know what my cat thinks of me in words, although she expresses herself fairly well with a superior look of disdain.)

THANKS TO Kris Winkler for this item.

What's up in Lake Champlain?

A lot of analysis is going into a puzzling cell phone video.

I think that the evidence is very poor for a large unknown beast living in a viable population in this lake, although this does not totally rule out an occasional visitor of some kind wandering upriver to the lake. This video? It looks funny - not as in faked, but as in puzzling. It’s not an easy ID to make. It seems too big for an otter or beaver. I’m not sure we can rule out “swimming deer plus wake effects,” but it’s not an obvious deer/moose either.

Sea serpent for sale

An 80-foot green sea serpent, made of of some $3,000 worth of PVC pipe, wood, fiberglass, etc. It's spectacular.

Oldest art in the Americas found in my old home town

Vero Beach, on Florida's east coast, is where I grew up and went to high school. We knew there was an archaeological dig site from an old Native American find called Vero Man: I even did a little hunting around the area in hopes of coming across something the experts might have missed (no luck).
However, an amateur fossil hunter has put Vero on the scientific map. His find: a 10-12,000 year old bone engraved with a mammoth or mastodon. One anthropologist, Dr. Barbara Purdy, called the discovery by James Kennedy “the oldest, most spectacular, and rare work of art in the Americas.”
COMMENT: In addition to a chance to nod to my home town, this story points up a common theme of mine: that the amateur still has an important role in science. Congratulations, Mr. Kennedy!

Species hunting in Papua New Guinea

Professor John Lane is spending his summer vacation on the isalnd of New Britain in Papua New Guinea. He was there two years ago and discovered the small island had a population of tree kangaroos, something never documented before. Now he wants more evidence, inluding a live-trapped specimen, because it's starting to look like the New Britain tree kangaroo may be a new species. He also expects to net new species of insects, particularly butterflies, on the little-explored island.
Lane is intrigued by local reports of some kind of large, odd-looking flying creature. The late cryptozoologist Scott Norman thought he saw one of these in PNG a few years ago. It was called the ropen and was occasionally conjectured to be a surviving pterosaur. Lane isn't about to endorse Mesozoic suvivors, but he'll keep his mind and his eyes open.

More on validation of cryptozoology

I'm having a refreshingly scientific and calm dispute with this skeptical author. My latest:

The fields you lump together as pseudoscience are not all comparable:
UFOs: no testable hypotheses
Ghosts: no testable hypotheses
Parapsychology: some testable hypotheses, some disproven, some still unresolved – disputes over what constitutes signficant test results
Astrology: Some testable hypotheses, which have been disproven

Cryptozoology: All hypotheses are testable. Some proven, some disproven, most still unresolved due to inadequate resources to test them.
As to what I’m calling “proven” examples, keep in mind cryptozoology is not simply the monsters, but any theorized new animal whose existence is hypothesized by cryptozoologists – who may nor may not have the same opinion as most “mainstream” scientists on a given possibility.
– Cryptozoologists, like many ornithologists, long theorized the ivory bill was still alive, for example.
– Cryptozoologists have long argued the Eastern cougar survived when very few non-cryptozoologists agreed, and evidence is swinging strongly in the cryptozoologists’ direction.
– Van Roosmalen’s giant peccary (sorry, I typed in “tapir” in an earlier comment when mentioning this species) is a good example of a new species cryptozoologists hypothesized about before it was confirmed.

Thus, the common example of whether there is such a beast as sasquatch – a hypothesis some cryptozoologists argue for and others argue against – does not invalidate cryptozoology no matter which way it is finally determined.

MicroSpace News: Next SpaceX launch date set

A SpaceX press release announces a new data for a Falcon 1 launch containing a microsat with an advanced imaging capability.

"Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) and Astronautic Technology (M) Sdn Bhd (ATSB) of Malaysia announce a new launch window has been set for Falcon 1 Flight 5, carrying the RazakSAT satellite to orbit. The launch window opens Monday, July 13th and extends through Tuesday, July 14th, with a daily window to open at 4:00 p.m. (PDT) / 7:00 p.m. (EDT).
Falcon 1...will place the RazakSAT satellite, equipped with a high resolution Medium-Sized Aperture Camera (MAC), into a near equatorial orbit.
RazakSAT was designed and built by ATSB, a pioneer and leader in the design and manufacture of satellites in Malaysia. The satellite is expected to provide high resolution images of Malaysia that can be applied to land management, resource development and conservation, forestry and fish migration."