Retrieving Mammoth DNA

Attempts to retrieve DNA from the bones and dried flesh of frozen mammoth remains have always been hampered by the post-death bacterial contamination, which meant up to 90 percent of what was recovered was not from the mammoth at all. A new study shows that retrieving DNA from an oft-overlooked source, hair shafts (previously thought to have almost no readable DNA), yields 90 percent mammoth DNA. This breakthrough will make it much easier to understand what ancient mammals - including ancient humans - were like through DNA analysis. It may also move us a step closer to the once-crazy idea of cloning mammoths or other creatures so they can walk the Earth again. One scientist on the project said of such cloning: "It's just a matter of time and money now."

A new Dawn for Space Probes

Boldly going where no machine has gone before, NASA's Dawn probe lifted off from KSC on an eight-year mission to study two unexplored celestial objects: the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Principal Investigator Christopher Russell of UCLA said, "Dawn will travel back in time by probing deep into the asteroid belt. This is a moment the space science community has been waiting for since interplanetary spaceflight became possible."

Astronauts: The Next Generation

From Press release: "Space Adventures, Ltd., the world's leading space experiences company, announced today that famed game developer Richard Garriott, son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, has begun preparations for a "commercially active" mission to the International Space Station (ISS)."
COMMENT: OK, it has a whiff of a stunt about it. But it's still cool to have the first child of an astronaut make a space voyage. One more little step in the opening up of space.

Satellites and Cryptozoology

Benjamin Radford has an interesting suggestion for cryptozoologists: that the image-scanning software being used to search the ever-increasing supply of high-resolution commercial satellite imagery for pilot Steve Fossett be used to comb lakes and forests for signs of "cryptids." While a sasquatch might not show up, a family group might, and a large animal on or near the surface of a lake should eventually get captured in a lucky shot.
COMMENT: I must voice one quibble here. Benjamin is a well-informed and scientific writer who's skeptical on cryptozoology and many other topics, but that's no excuse for setting up a subject for ridicule by referring to a "12-foot Bigfoot," when no serious cryptozoologist thinks we have small King Kongs roaming the Northwest.

Turmoil for the Mars Science Laboratory

The most complex spacecraft ever developed for a trip to Mars has been "descoped" because of cost overruns. The $1.7-billions Mars Science Laboratory has lost its Descent Imager and had other experiments "defunded," meaning that no more money will be forthcoming and the development team will have to make do with the budget it has. Planetary scientists are naturally furious, but NASA Headquarters has made it clear there's no money to cover a $75M overrun. The probe is scheduled to be launched in 2009.

New Species from Vietnam

Since the early 1990s, a flood of discoveries has poured out of Vietnam, often from remote regions bypassed by the decades of warfare in that region. The latest round is not as spectacular as the finding of the 100-kg Vu Quang ox, but it reminds us of the bioversity yet to be cataloged. The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) has announced 11 new species of plants and animals including a reptile dubbed the white-lipped keelback snake, two butterflies, and five orchids. All came from Thua Thien Hue province in central Vietnam.

Upcoming Space Show appearance

I and Erika Lishock, my co-author on The First Space Race, will be on the radio/internet program The Space Show on Wednesday October 3 (the night before the Sputnik 50th anniversary). The show is from 7-8:30 PM Pacific time. It's live on AM 11550 in Seattle and is available on the Web live at www.thespaceshow.com.
Thanks as always to Dr. David Livingston for having us on the program.

Obituary: Alex, the talking parrot

Alex, an exceptional African gray parrot, has died in his cage at Brandeis University at the age of 31.
Alex was the subject of a decades-long experiment to see if a parrot could go beyond mimicking words and apply them to objects and events the way humans do. The answer was a limited, but still impressive, "yes." Alex learned over 100 words and could use them in simple sentences and even conversations, such as asking for the red box out of a collection of differently-colored shapes. He could count up to six and apparently understood the concept of zero. "He was so extraordinary in breaking the perceptions of birds as not being intelligent," said his lifelong trainer and lab partner, Irene Pepperberg, who compared his intellect to a five-year-old child's.

Thanks to Kris Winkler for pointing me to this story.

Velociraptor - feathers and all

It appears the stars of Jurassic Park should have been decked out in feathers.
Alan Turner, of the American Museum of Natural History led a new study of a velociraptor forelimb found in 1998 which discovered quill knobs - which anchor feathers on modern birds - on the fossilized bone. “Finding quill knobs on velociraptor, though, means that it definitely had feathers." Turner said. "This is something we’d long suspected but no one had been able to prove.” The link above includes a really cool - and scary - illustration.

The "hobbit" as separate species

Well, it's time for Round 457 in the debate over whether the remains of a 90-cm primate called Flores man, Homo floresiensis, or "hobbit" represent a few microcephalic humans or a new species. This one sounds pretty convincing. (Granted, I've always been in the separate-species camp, so perhaps I'm too easily impressed, but some experts are saying the same thing). A team led by Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has concluded the wrist bones of the Flores specimens are very similar to those of apes like the chimpanzee and early human relations like the autralopithecines, not like those of modern humans. Not all dissenters have been convinced by this study: some, most notably Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum, insist the cranial capacity of the most complete Flores specimen, LB1, indicates insufficient brain power for any sort of "normal" (non-pathological) examples of a human species.

When is an animal "discovered"?

One of my fascinations is with cryptozoology. When researchers pursue "cryptids," as the uncaught or unclassified are called, an interesting question arises: when you declare victory? When is an animal "discovered?"
I had an interesting exchange on this with anthroplogist/cryptozoologist Dale Drinnon, who thinks me something of an idealist about the way science works. Admitting that that is true, here are my thoughts.

It's easy to say that a certain cryptid has been discovered - to our satisfaction - and thus is no longer a cryptid. But saying it has no impact on science or conservation, and thus does not accomplish anything concrete.
While some zoological scientists may be too restrictive in what they accept, there is at least a standard for formal discovery and acceptance - a holotype available for physical examination and a paper published in a refereed journal. Granted, the zillions of tropical insects, etc. don't all get papers on them specifically, but the significantly-sized animals usually put on crytpid lists would all rate publications. And the insects and spiders and so forth at least turn up on the databases kept by the IUCN, the USFWS, etc., providing "evidence of acceptance."
Photographs or seafloor trackways have on occasion gained some acceptance as type specimens, but not in any of the controversial cases cryptozoologists spend most of their efforts on.
Without that standard, anyone can declare, say, the yeti discovered to their satisfaction, based on reports and sometimes hard evidence that, for whatever reason, is difficult to access. The trouble is that everyone's opinion is essentially equal, and there's no meaningful impact on science, conservation, etc. made by declaring a species discovered. (There would be if, say, George Schaller said it, but cases where a widely recognized authority endorses a cryptid as discovered (not just deserving of investigation, ut discovered) are rare indeed.)
Even having a scientific credential does not mean one's opinion has any measurable impact - Jeff Meldrum's endorsement of sasquatch, for example, has not led to funding for sasquatch investigation and conservation, has not gotten the animal in textbooks, etc.
My own inclination is to declare an animal "discovered" only when the two-pronged standard of an available holotype (at least in the form of a DNA sample) and peer-reviewed publication is met. Those standards are not magically correct, and may overlook some valid species, but they are the closest thing there is to a formal standard accepted worldwide.
And that, of course, is just one person's opinion.

NASA opening astronaut applications

NASA has opened up its application system to select the next class of astronauts. The basic requirements? A bachelor's degree in math, engineering, or science and three years' experience. In practice, this is the most competitive job hunt on Earth and those selected will have much more extensive resumes. The chosen class will have to have patience, too: they likely will not get to fly any Shuttle missions and will be doing nonflight duties until well into the Orion CEV program.

Look, up in the sky! A new bat!

A large, very distinctive new species of bat has been described from the Philippine island of Mindoro. Flying foxes are the world's largest bats, with wingspans on some types in the range of 180 cm. The new bat has orange fur and three white stripes on its face. An American-Filipino scientific expedition caught the type specimen after hearing of its from island residents. As zoologist Jake Esselstyn put it, "A local resident of [the town of] Sablayan first described the flying fox in great detail to us, but we were unconvinced until the species showed up in our nets." Now it's in the Journal of Mammology as well.

The Shuttle heads for launch

Although it's not certain just when. NASA's decision to replace leaking seals on the shuttle Discovery's starboard main landing gear will take time and may imperil the launch date of October 23. It might slip considerably further. The shuttle is slated for a 13-day mission, with the main goal being to deliver and attach a new Italian-built node to the ISS.

Happy 150th birthday, Tsiolkovsky!

OK, I'm a day late - the Russian space theorist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was born on September 17, 150 years ago. It merits repeating that the founder of modern space-travel theory was a poor, almost totally deaf rural mathematics teacher who was fired by an imagination that kept him awake nights working out equations and concepts ranging from large hydrogen/oxygen-powered rockets to staging, space stations, and space suits. The world will owe him a debt for all time.

"Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever." - Tsiolkovsky

Item I add just to show that I know it: English-speaking readers may look at his surname and assume the "T" is silent, but it's not. The Cyrillic character beginning his name is pronounced "ts."

Google Launches a New Moon Race

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google Inc. have announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon with up to $30M in prize money at stake. The winner must land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon and meet several requirements including sending video, images and data back to the Earth while traveling at least 500 meters on the lunar surface.The $30M is broken up into a $20 million Grand Prize, a $5 million Second Prize, and $5 million in bonus prizes for additional mission objectives.
COMMENT: This is wonderful stuff. I don't know if you can do this mission for $20M, but there are companies in the small "Newspace" field that will certainly try, just as the did for the original Ansari X Prize. My early favorite, if they choose to compete, would be a team of SpaceX Technologies (launcher) and a small-vehicle specialist like SpaceDev.

Japanese probe off to Moon

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), supported by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd., has launched the nation's heaviest, most ambitious lunar probe. The Lunar Orbit Explorer "KAGUYA" (SELENE) went up from the Tanegashima Space Center on an H-IIA Launch Vehicle No. 13 at 10:31:01 a.m. on September 14, 2007 (Japan Standard Time).

Bad news for the Florida panther

Florida wildlife officials confirmed that the 15th Florida panther this year was killed on by a vehicle, eclipsing last year’s record of 11 panthers killed by vehicles. The panther was a two-year-old male discovered on I-75 just west of SR-29. After hitting a bottleneck of 20-30 surviving animals, the Florida panther has climbed precariously back to 90-100 cats in total. However, no species can handle having 10-15% of its population killed every year. The panther's case is a reminder that even an intense, well-funded conservation program may not succeed unless accompanied by the provision of adequate habitat with minimal road hazards.

A kilogram isn't what it used to be

The agreed-on international physical standard for the kilogram, a cylinder kept in airtight conditions in a locked vault in France, has lost weight. Losing 50 micrograms isn't much - about the weight of a fingerprint, as one writer put it - but it's baffling. As physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures put it, the master kilogram and its many copies used around the world "were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart. We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."

Species on the Edge

The IUCN has released its annual Red List of threatened species worldwide. It's not fun reading. The number of animals and plants threatened with extinction is 16,306, up 200 from last year. The number of documented recent extinctions of species is now 785 this year. Another 65 species are hanging on only in captivity or in cultivation. The Yangtze River dolphin, which was declared extinct only to have one sighting report come in afterwards, is "Critically Endangered and Possibly Extinct."