Defending cryptozoology

This skeptical page, like so many others, dismisses cryptozoology by lumping it with the claims for ghosts, UFOs, and other "pseudosciences." That's not valid, folks. My comment on the page follows:

The lumping of cryptozoology with other "pseudosciences" is incorrect for a very simple reason: cryptozoology, unlike the study of ghosts, UFOs, etc., deals in testable hypotheses. For example, either there is a large unknown animal in Loch Ness, or there is not. The means to test the hypothesis may not be available (e.g., a definitive sweep using the most modern naval sonar gear and hydrophones may be something no one can afford) but the hypothesis is, nonetheless, logically testable and thus scientific.
There is no arguing with the statement that many people involved in cryptozoological research, mainly amateur enthusiasts, are too quick to conclude an unknown animal is real based on inadequate data. The implication in your article that searching for unknown animals is fruitless, however, is absurd.
New mammal species alone described in scientific literature in the last 15 years number 408, including cetaceans, deer, van Roosmalen's tapir and dwarf manatee, and other creatures of substantial size. This doesn't mean there is a huge ape stalking the Northwest forests, and indeed (in my opinion, at any rate) ecological and other factors indicate it is unlikely that one will be discovered. Yet this does not invalidate cryptozoology as a field of inquiry any more than disproven claims of cold fusion invalidate nuclear physics.
It's proper to demand that, to be accepted, creatures propounded by cryptozoologists must meet the universal scientific standard of a type specimen. In many cases, though, species which have been thus established did not fall into the lap of science. They were found when researchers (both academically qualified and amateur) followed the kind of evidence cryptozoologists collect - historical accounts, footprints, local stories, etc. - until a type specimen was obtained.
You can argue convincingly that many overly enthusiastic cryptozoologists overreach the data in their claims for particular species. You cannot, however, argue that the search for unknown animals - a search being validated by the description or collection of new type specimens every single day - is scientifically void.

Matt Bille
Author, Shadows of Existence: Discoveries and Speculations in Zoology (Hancock House, 2006)

Tunguska: Did the aliens do it?

As Ethan Siegel describes in his blog, the weird story of the year award who claims the famous Tunguska impact, 101 years ago, was caused by self-sacrificing aliens putting thier spaceship in the path of a comet to save the Earth. Really. This was reported as news in some quarters. A good comment on the blog asks if maybe the aliens were the ones about to vaporize us, and they were wiped out by a fortuitous comet....

Primates in space - 50-year anniversary

On 28 May 1959, two monkeys named Able and Baker were strapped into a compatment of a modified Jupiter missile nose cone and launched into space on a suborbital mission lasting 16 minutes. Both survived the flight, although Able died a few days later of an unrelated cause.
The Air Force, years earlier, had tried giving monkeys rides in modified V-2 nosecones, but it didn't work out well. A NASA history says one monkey flight featured a malfunction of the mecahnism for separating the primate's parachute-euipped capsule and resulted in "No ill effects on money until impact of V-2."

Laser fusion is coming

Update on the National Ignition Facility, opening today.

MonsterQuest - Killer Jellyfish (really)

Note to the MQ producers - I love you guys, but who makes up the titles over there? Jellies (biologists are downplaying the misleading term "jellyfish") are more of a manace as various factors lead to population explosions. But to credit them with intelligence because soem species do look for prey instead of random drifing is a bit over the top... especially since they have no brain to work with. The show repeated a story of a ship being incapacitated when a multi-ton jellyfish washed onto the bow. It's a fascinaitng tale that's become a cryptozoological staple, but a few Australian press clippings are the only evidence it ever happened. SOmeone should dig into it more thoroughly.

Space Station crew doubles

Cool space exploration news, as reported here by NASA:

"The International Space Station crew is awaiting the arrival of three new members that will usher in an era of six-person crews aboard the orbiting laboratory. Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, European Space Agency astronaut Frank De Winne and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Bob Thirsk launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz is scheduled to dock with the station at 8:36 a.m. Friday, May 29. The trio will join station Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight Engineers Mike Barratt of NASA and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to form the Expedition 20 crew. It will mark the first time all five partner agencies are represented by astronauts on the station at the same time."

COMMENT: Increased international cooperation is the way of the future in human spaceflight for the simple economic reason that such exploration is expensive as hell.

Pink dolphin charms humans

The shipping channel south of Lake Charles, Louisiana, is home to an unusual cetacean, an albino dolphin. The very rare specimen is about 2 1/2 years old, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is keeping tabs on it.

Support for NASA leaders pours in

Everyone, it seems, is joining a chrous of approval for the nominations of Charles Bolden as NASA Administrator and Lori Garver as his deputy - the Coalition for Space Exploration, the Space Foundation, Congress, Marvin the Martian, everybody. Ex-administrator Griffin also applauded the choices, but in a speech where he also made the point that NASA, which gets well under 1% of the federal budget, is woefully underfunded considering its many missions despite doing well in the first year of the Obama administration.

Anyone remember the old Mission Impossible assignments agent Phelps used to get?

>whirr, click<
"Good evening, Mr. Bolden. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to take over NASA. You must perform too many missions with too little money, calm the fears of a jittery workforce, and prevent Constellation from turning into nothing but a bigger Gemini. Should you fail in the assignment, the Administration will disavow all knowledge of your existence in 2012.
This tape recorder will be defunded in five seconds. Good luck, Mr. Bolden."
>click<

MicroSpace News: Canada's microsats go to work

Canadian maritime, police, and military authorities must patrol huge areas of land and sea. In April 2008, the nation orbited the 8-kg Nanosatellite Tracking of Ships demonstration satellite, built by Com Dev and carrying a miniature Automated Identification System (AIS) terminal. The AIS technology will likely be added to Canad'a future RadarSats, and Com Dev is working on a follow on. In 2010, Com Dev's more sophisticated Maritime Monitoring and Messaging Microsatellite (M3MSat) will be orbited.
COMMENT: One more example of the utility of a still-overlooked technology, the microsatellite. Micro-birds can't do everything the big satellites can do, not yet, but the technology keeps advancing. They can do missions on their own as well as serving as affordable testbeds for new ideas.

Long-forgotten flight experiment: P-80 with ramjets

I always liked the first American jet fighter, the P-80 / F-80 Shooting Star. It's just a beautiful airplane with clean, simple lines, a product of Kelly Johnson's legendary genius. A link circulated on the Google group rec.aviation.military is a reminder that all kinds of one-off experimental aircraft were created in the 1940s-1960s, and many were poorly documented. This is an F-80 with small ramjets mounted on the wingtips.
See also:
http://www.enginehistory.org/f-80tj.htm

What is the Shunka Warak’in?

Cryptomundo is running the best photographs to date of a really odd canid-like animal mounted and residing in a glass case in Montana. The animal purportedly dates from 1896 (there are conflicting stories about who shot it and who owns it now). Cryptozoologists hunted for this mount for years, based on an old photograph of it, and in 2007 they found it.
So what is it? Reports of intended DNA testing have not led to any published results. It doesn't look like a coyote, nor exactly like a wolf. The hind legs, as mounted, are shorter than the forelegs, giving it a hyena-like appearance. It has a long narrow snout that doesn't look quite right for any canid people have proposed. The length (without tail) is about 48 inches and the shoulder height 26 inches, within range for a gray wolf or various other canidates.
There are a number of stories, from early American settlers as well as from Native Americans, about strange wolflike animals from this region.
There is some room for error. The mount is so old it's undoubtedly changed a little in appearance, and it's not clear how true to life the original mount was. It's even been speculated that the animal is a hoax mount using parts of two animals. Some people have noted the mount, strange as it is, does not look quite as strange as the one in the old photograph, and it might have been remounted or not even be the same animal.
Speculation about a truly exotic origin, such as the long-thought-extinct dire wolf or a brown hyena, seems extreme, but the bottom line is that it's just not clear what this critter is.

See also:
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/shunka-wars/

Finally Official: Charles Bolden leads NASA

OK, it's all over. Five months into the Obama administration, NASA has a boss.

Wishing the very best of luck to Charles Bolden, former Marine Corps general, space shuttle commander (he's the second astronaut to hold NASA's top job), and combat pilot. The combat experience might come in handy.

New species - hard to keep track

A report just out tallies all the new species for 2007: 18,516. Over 75% were invertebrates, while 11 percent were plants and 6.7 percent were vertebrates.
The report from the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University also named a "Top 10" new species from 2008 (total numbers for the year are still being tallied.) They include a palm tree that dies when it flowers (it's humbling to think we don't even know how many kinds of trees live on this planet), the world's longest insect, the world's smallest snake (both described earlier in this blog), one fossil species (a fish preserved in the act of giving birth) and extremeophile bacteria surviving in hairspray.
COMMENT: The conceit that we know all the species, or at least all the vertebrate animals, on Earth, takes new hits every year. Still, if a poll was taken, I suspect the average citizen would presume we knew all the vertebrates.

Little Primate, Big Star

The term "missing link" sends shudders through anthropologists. THere cannot be one missing link in any fossil tree - evolution is far too messy and meandering for that. Rather, there are missing puzzle pieces. One was filled in by a primate 47 million years old and the size of a small cat. At a gala unveiling in New York worthy of a newly discovered Picasso, the remarkably preserved skeleton of Darwinius masillae met its public. The animal does not solve the mysteries of primate evolution, but it gives us a breathtakingly good look - down to fingernails and stomach contents - of a creature near the base of the primate family tree.

MicroSpace News: PharmaSat, Tacsat-3 orbit

After some annoying delays for weather and other reasons (par for the course in this business), DoD's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) office has its 400kg TacSat-3 imager in orbit. Along for the ride: NASA's tiny PharmaSat and three CubeSats. The 5-kg PharmaSat has a laboratory with 48 containers of yeast cells on board.

Getting to the end of the NASA Administrator search

Looks like the long, hard slog will end today when Charles Bolden meets with President Obama. Bolden is well regarded throughout the space community, although there's not unanimous approval of his (entirely legal but controversial) work for ATK as a lobbyist for the Ares-1 booster. A lot of decisions about the agency's long-term path, especially the human spaceflight program, need to be made almost immediately. Kudos to Chris Scolese for his yeoman work as Acting Administrator. Now to find the path forward.

"Out there - thataway." - Captain James T. Kirk's course direction in Star Trek - The Motion Picture

Exploring the changing seafloor

In the space of five years, the volcanic vent NW Rota-1, near Guam, built up a new cone 40 meters high and 300 across. THe ecosytem around it changed as new vents opened and new life forms colonized the evolving topography. A National Sceince Foundation - funded team has been watching the evolution of the seafloor in fast forward, as it were. They studied new processes, the appearance of species only known from a long distance away (how does a shrimp from the site. "The 'Loihi' shrimp has adapted to grazing the bacterial filaments with tiny claws like garden shears. The second shrimp is a new species--they also graze as juveniles, but as they grow to adult stage, their front claws enlarge and they become predators."

Giant population of giant reptiles confirmed

The leatherback turtle is in dire straits, but not quite as dire as we feared. Scientists studying turtles using the nesting beaches of Gabon have confirmed 15,000 - 41,000 females use them each year (that's pretty imprecise, you may think, for counting animals which may be 2m long and weigh 500kg, but it's not like the turtles cooperate by using only the beaches under watch and hanging around when the aerial surveys were taking place). The WCS' Angela Formia said, "These findings show the critical importance of protected areas to maintain populations of sea turtles. Gabon should be commended for creating a network of National Parks in 2002 that have provided a sanctuary for this endangered species as well as other rare wildlife." Cool fact: it was only in 1984 that we confirmed leatherbacks were visiting Gabon at all.

Hail Atlantis

Five spacewalks. Several components replaced in Hubble. Five to ten additional years of life for our greatest science instrument. One wonderfully successful mission that reminds us there are still some tasks in space humans can do that even our best machines (and they are impressive) cannot.

How good were those Indian smoke signals?

All the old westerns has smoke signals in them. Now researchers are doing some real-world tests to find out how the Navaho used them to warn of invaders. The Navaho in the Four Corners area may have used them to relay signals long distances.