Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

Gaggle of squid ashore in California

2009-07-13T12:40:00.002-06:00

Dozens of Humboldt squid, a meter or more long, washed up together on a beach in La Jolla, CA. As happens in some cases of beached whales, the animals seemed disoriented and were washed back up after kindly bystanders had hauled them off the sand into the ocean. It's been speculated a 4.0 earthquake just offshore disoriented the squid, although scientists said the two phenomena were not necessarily linked.
COMMENT: I suppose some owners of beach-side restaurants saw this as the ultimate convenience. You have to love it when the calamari delivers itself.

Happy Birthday, Loren Coleman

2009-07-11T19:21:00.004-06:00

My best wishes to Loren Coleman, one of the preeminent North American cryptozoologists and a guy who has done invaluable service for science whether you think that any of the major "cryptids" are likely to be real or not. Loren has tens of thousands of artifacts (ranging from animal skeletons to a life-size pterodactyl from the defunct TV show FreakyLinks), books, articles, and other items in his International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, ME. This is an irreplaceable trove of information on animals known, unknown, and alleged, and Loren barely keeps it going with his own income plus donations. Without the Museum, this collection would be hopelessly dispersed, if not lost altogether.
Loren and I have differences on some subjects, such as whether the evidence for unknown North American primates is compelling (he thinks so, I'm not convinced), but the Museum is the ONLY cause for which I regularly ask readers of this blog to make contributions. I hope you'll celebrate Loren's birthday by looking into it.

VASIMR: Space propulsion advances

2009-07-11T19:08:00.005-06:00

Several years ago, at JSC on a consulting assignment to help NASA prioritize funding for future systems, I watched a test-firing of the plasma ignition system for an interesting, if far from mature, superhigh-efficiency propulsion technology called the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). Now being tested in Houston by the Ad Astra Rocket Company, founded by former astronaut and VASIMR inventor Franklin Chang-Diaz, the system has advanced to the point of test-firing an engine "to spaceflight levels." This version used 30kw of power: a flight test engine to be tried at the ISS in 2012 or later will use 200kw. Power levels in the hundreds of megawatts, for which the only practical near-term option is a nuclear fission reactor, would be needed for the ultimate goal: an engine that could send a spaceship to Mars in 39 days.

NASA abort system test (cool video)

2009-07-11T19:02:00.002-06:00

NASA successfully flight-tested the Max Launch Abort System (MLAS) from its Wallops Island facility. This is a step toward an abort system for operational Orion/Ares launches. As NASA puts it, "While the Orion launch abort system has a single solid launch abort motor in a tower positioned above the Orion Crew Module, the MLAS concept for an operational vehicle would have four or more solid rocket motors attached inside a bullet-shaped composite fairing." The launch system pieced together for this test is an interesting gadget in itself, with "drag plates" and eight fins used to bring the stresses on the abort system closer to those of an operational launcher.

Urban wildlife report: bear in my downtown

2009-07-11T11:03:00.002-06:00

A bear wandered - somehow - into downtown Colorado Springs yesterday. As wildlife officers played hide and seek, the 200-lb bruin sought refuge in the parking garage under my company's office building. I was picturing our boss looking through the employee manual. "Bad invoices... bomb threats...nope, nothing about bears." The animal was safely tranquilized and hauled away to some less peopled part of Colorado.

Dramatic photo - lighting and the Shuttle

2009-07-11T10:59:00.003-06:00

A bolt strikes the lighting arrestor mast at Pad 39A as the shuttle is readied for this evening's launch. NASA still hopes to go around 7PM EST.

UPDATE: NASA slipped the launch until Sunday to check everything out and make certain there was no damage to electrical systems on the space vehicle or in its ground support systems.

UPDATE TO UPDATE: Monday now.

New genus of salamander from the U.S.

2009-07-09T06:48:00.002-06:00

A tiny, colorful, lungless salamander described from the Appalachian highlands of the southeastern United States is so unusual its discoverers had to create a new genus to put it in. Urspelerpes brucei is only 25mm long, brightly colord in an off-yellow, with dark stripes adorning the males only. The last new genus of salamander from the U.S. was discovered in 1961, nearly a half-century ago. Professor Carlos Camp said, "The salamander fauna of the US, particularly of the southern Appalachians, has been intensively studied for well over a century, so the discovery of such a distinct form was completely unsuspected."

Latest new monkey from Brazil

2009-07-07T19:27:00.002-06:00

The Brazilian rainforest has produced a barrel of new monkeys over the last decade (yeah, it's an overworked line). The latest is a colorful little creature called Mura's saddlebacked tamarin. It's about a half-meter long, most of which is tail. Fabio Rohe of the WCS said, "This newly described monkey shows that even today there are major wildlife discoveries to be made."
Amen to that.

Crocodile resembling armadillo found

2009-07-07T15:00:00.004-06:00

Cool fossil species: Armadillosuchus arrudai.
This 2-meter, 120-kg reptile roamed Brazil 90 million years ago. It lived in a dry, hot area (a surprise for any crocodile) and it had bony plates on the back and neck. These made it look a bit like a somewhat flattened giant armadillo (albeit with a fearsome skull full of teeth), or maybe a predatory version of the armored ankylosaurs it shared the Cretaceous period with. It's a major addition to what we know about those ancient survivors, the crocodilians.

A cheaper way to do heavy lift?

2009-07-06T16:18:00.002-06:00

This story from the Orlando Sentinel reports on (and includes a link to) a new NASA study of a heavy-lift launch idea that has been around for a while. The concept is to use Space Shuttle solid boosters with the Shuttle external tank, with a cargo pod mounted on the side where the Shuttle orbiter goes now. While the rocket would lift less than the proposed Constellation program heavy-lift Ares V, it is feasible and appears affordable.
COMMENT: While the Ares V likewise appears feasible, it only makes sense if we continue with the Ares I human spaceflight booster, which would validate most of the hardware. And Ares I is in trouble.

See this NASAWatch/SpaceRef recap for the conflicting information about Ares and Constellation costs. Have aspirin handy.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/ares_costs_unde.html

Fiction Review - Meg: Hell's Aquarium

2009-07-05T17:13:00.015-06:00

Meg: Hell's Aquarium, by Steve Alten. 2009.
This is long for a review by me, but Alten is the most successful writer of cryptozoological-themed fiction, and I like analyzing his novels and thinking about what works and what doesn't.
I have to start by saying that, as a science writer, I find Alten's submerged (as in under the known seafloor) ancient sea habitat is not easy to believe in. I do give the author credit for offering a foreword that goes into the geology and palentology of his scenario. I have other problems with the science, and I was harsh about this in reviewing of the first two Meg novels. I won't rehash the details, though: It's the author's setting, it's now a given, and what the reader wants is to see is how well he uses it.
As prose, this book seemed a step back from Alten's The Loch, which I thought a very good novel. Hell's Aquarium uses a breathless style with lots of dashes and exclamation points in the narrative. You get used to it, but Alten's work in his Loch Ness novel showed he didn't need that sort of gimmick, and I'm not sure why he uses it here. There are a few editing mistakes: a sunken WWII cruiser used quite cleverly in the plot is referred to once as a "destroyer," and a character who competes in triathlons quotes a finishing time appropriate to the marathon portion only.
Most of the characters in Hell's Aquarium are three-dimensional: Alten has improved on this from book to book. The basic plot involving humans works well enough, and the villians' motives are believable.
Alten's strength, as always, is fast-moving action, and there are some real page-turner moments. Alten has a knack for incorporating popular culture, and I loved the Internet contest that resulted in naming two captive Megalodons Mary-Kate and Ashley. A final thing I liked was the ending, not necessarily for its plausibility, but for springing genuine surprises about who lives, who is traumatized, and who dies.
Alten likes to pile on the creatures and maximize their sizes in his work. This is ok: it's fiction, and if Peter Benchley can use a 100-foot squid, Alten can use a 122-foot Liopleurodon. (I liked his 25-foot evolved form of the vampire squid Vampyroteuthis infernalis - that would be scary as hell in real life.) It's not clear how creatures from eras over 200 million years apart could have ended up in this habitat, although I'll buy anything that brings my favorite predator Dunkleosteus on stage. Alten takes pains to emphasize there's a complete food web in the "aquarium," although, like Peter Jackson's take on Skull Island, it still seems too slanted toward megapredators. All the big Mesozoic reptiles are here (evolved gills and all), along with a squadron of sharks and even a monster turtle. This makes for an exciting series of beast-on-beast conflicts as the humans mainly try to avoid becoming snacks. Alten has some good moments of description concerning the creatures and their dark, cold, deep habitat. I'll wager Alten read Richard Ellis' nonfiction Aquagenesis as part of his research: a very similar list of large predators shows up in both books.
As a cryptozoological researcher, I kept thinking of Bernard Heuvelmans' dissection of sea-serpent reports into as many as nine species. (I allow for one and possibly two.) Alten's beasts could cover all those categories and then some. It would have been fun to see Alten throw in a prominent cryptozoologist to react to the fact that, while cryptozoology has been chasing a new shark here and a giant eel there, there's been a horde of spectacular creatures unguessed-at. Maybe in the next book.
The level of cooperation and intelligence shown by some of Alten's sharks goes beyond what we know of real sharks, although the Megs, at least, have had 60 million years to evolve this way, so mark that as a permissible liberty taken by a writer of fiction. At the end, two escaped Megs are setting themselves up as new apex predators of their own patch of the coastal Pacific, violently displacing the orcas which have been used to ruling unchallenged. I'll be curious to see whether Alten follows that up in another sequel. There's some interesting science he could go into, if he so chooses, about what would happen in an event like that.
I thought the third Meg novel was a little better written than this fourth one. I thought The Loch was better still, and it puzzles me that Alten has slipped back from the quality (in this reader's opinion, of course) of his best novel.
Overall, Hell's Aquarium is what it's supposed to be, which is fun. It's like going to a Transformers film. You may wonder about some of the the science and the implausible escapes, but you came to see the robots in action. You pick up an Alten novel to see the creatures in action. Hell's Aquarium gives you what you pay for.

A very blonde black bear

2009-07-04T17:31:00.003-06:00

A good shot of a very blonde black bear, by wildlife photographer Steve Kozlowski - who was startled by the animal coming right up to his tent.

Dinos down under

2009-07-03T11:51:00.002-06:00

Australian paleontologists have announced the finding of three large new dinosaur species, a significant addition to the prehistoric fauna of a continent whose past is still an evolving story. Paleontologist John Long, said, "It not only presents us with two new amazing long-necked giants of the ancient Australian continent, but also announces our first really big predator." All came from a dig at Winton, in Queensland. In addition to the two large sauropods (one relatively stocky, the other taller and longer-necked) we have Australovenator, nicknamed Banjo, a predator built for speed and equipped with strong arms and three fearsome claws on each hand. They are dated at 98 million years old, which puts them in the Cretaceous.
COMMENT: New dinosaurs, especially sauropods and nasty predators, are always just plain cool to read about. I thought so when I was 8, and I still do.

Endangered species: not good news

2009-07-01T21:15:00.002-06:00

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reports that over 800 species of animals and plants have gone extinct in the past 500 years. The number now threatened? We don't know exactly, as we don't know all the species on the planet (not by a long shot), but the IUCN estimate based on known species is just shy of 17,000.

Re-creating Germany's Stealth Fighter

2009-06-30T17:25:00.002-06:00

A lot of the material out there on German "wonder weapons" is overhyped or simply invented. There were significant advances made in aircraft, though, and the Horten Ho229 would have been a big leap if it had gone past the prototype stage and into mass production. Enthusiasts at Northrop Grumman built a replica from German blueprints and the materials available in 1945 Germany. They found that, as advertised, the plane would have been hard to pick up on WW2 radar.
COMMENT: Would it have won the war? No. The Allies would have beaten it the same way they beat other German jet and rocket planes - using the numbers and range of their fighters, especially the P-51, to shut down its airfields and ambush it on takeoff and landing. But it was one heck of an impressive technological advance, and it would have driven the Allies to distraction for a while.

Wild lynx kittens born in Colorado

2009-06-29T17:24:00.002-06:00

Another bit of good conservation news from my home state: the effort to transplant the lynx back to Colorado has resulted in the first litters recorded since 2006. And you have to see the lynx kitten in this article to believe how darn cute it is.

Wandering off topic: SF movie remakes

2009-06-29T17:07:00.003-06:00

The redo of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" converted the original (a taut, sincerely felt two-character drama) into a special effects / eco-preaching mess. I'd overlooked the news of a "Forbidden Planet" remake in the offing, but it's coming. When I first saw the original just a couple of years ago, I thought, "I hope they don't remake it. The story can't really be improved, or at least it won't be - the remake would just graft CGI and sex onto a well-written and -acted classic." Silly me. Of course they are going to remake it.
There's a lot of interest in cryptozoological circles about the remake of one of the best cryptozoology-themed movies of the 50s, "The Creature From the Black Lagoon." Are we going to get the same good story, with better science? Of course not. We're going to get a creature mutated by pharmaceutical waste. Making classics politically correct doesn't improve them.
(One thing that sometimes does improve with time: I like butt-kicking leading ladies much better than the passive victims in films like "Creature," but that alone is not a good enough reason to mess with success. And the original of "Day" had a better female lead than the remake anyway.)
Science fiction can be a great tool for entertaining people while introducing important scientific concepts. Filmmakers seem only interested in the first half. OK, those 50s classics were limited to the science and scientific vision of the times, but they were such good stories it didn't matter as much. Yes, I'm applying a double standard, and I don't care. To any filmmakers who wander across this post: if you're going to do science fiction, either new or remade, put some science in it. Real science, not looks-cool-but-impossible stuff (yeah, Star Trek, that means you) or simplistic preaching. It won't turn people off. There is intelligent life in the American public. You're just not trying to communicate with it.

Quote for the day: space exploration

2009-06-27T18:57:00.000-06:00

B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart:
"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."

Alan Bean: A Moonwalker's Artistic view

2009-06-26T14:24:00.002-06:00

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean has become an artist whose painting of the space program have fetched up to $175,000. For Bean, though, any commercial success is unimportant. What matters is capturing the days we set foot on another world. As this article in the NYT puts it,
"He has had to give up the hyper-rational way of seeing the world he had learned as a Navy test pilot and engineer. He has trained himself to see things not as they are but as they feel to him, to translate emotions into colors and to resist his scientific urges."
Bean builds models of every scene he paints to get shadows and other physical features just right, but he varies his palette to try to convey the feelings each scene inspires.
COMMENT: It works.

Tiny new bat from the Comoros

2009-06-25T19:12:00.003-06:00

An international team inventorying the wildlife of the Comoros archipelago (where the coelacanth was discovered in 1938) has added a tiny mammal to the reference books. The new bat Miniopterus aelleni weighs only five grams. Kitti's hog-nosed bat, from Thailand (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) weighs only two grams, so this isn't a record. But it's startlingly small nonetheless.

Reviving the tiger - one gene at a time

2009-06-24T07:16:00.001-06:00

OK, scientists have determined it is not possible to resurrect the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus), from the genetic material available in museum specimens. But they have done something important. They have been able to reassemble a single gene from this extinct marsupial and put it in a living animal (a lab mouse) to see what its function was. So far, it does not appear to do much of anything when spliced into a mouse, but that's not the point. The point is that, on a very limited scale, something with great implications - the resurrection of extinct genetic material - has proven possible.

E.T. is phoning - and he's mad

2009-06-23T19:50:00.002-06:00

In today's sample of news that makes people question the existence of intelligent life on Earth, the Examiner warns that NASA's plan to smash a probe into the Moon may precipitate conflict with "known extraterrestrial civilizations."
Really.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
- Calvin and Hobbes

NASA's budget... this never gets better

2009-06-23T19:40:00.001-06:00

I don't spend much time on the blow-by-blow of NASA's budget - you can get that on a lot of sites. But I sometimes can't help lamenting that the agency just can't win. The 2010 budget showed a one-time, almost-adequate increase - and the House voted to slash that. (Aren't you House leaders in President Obama's party?)

Microbes awake after 120,000 years

2009-06-23T19:29:00.003-06:00

Microbes have been revived after spending 120,000 years frozen under 3km of Greenland ice. It makes planetary scientists think about the ice left under the surface of Mars from the times the planet had liquid water.

A real creature behind "merpeople" tales?

2009-06-22T09:14:00.002-06:00

Cryptozoologists sometimes speculate that behind the stories of mermaids and mermen there might be (or might have been, at one time), some kind of sea mammal with an oddly human appearance. It seems unlikely, though, especially because of the mermaid sightings stories (which, incidentally, do persist until the present day) where the upper half of the creature is almost indistinguishable from a long-haired Caucasian female. (The only difference that sometimes gets reported is the existence of taloned hands.)
Any mammal that has evolved into an aquatic lifestyle is simply not going to look like a terrestrial human because the environments and adaptations are different. Even if you assume a formerly terrestrial primate somehow evolved to have a tail, the upper half would not look human. It would look somewhere between the ancestral primate and the known aquatic mammals. The long hair in particular would be pointless. The same is true even if you subscribe to the highly speculative (and, in my view, not credible) Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) that our own ancestors we through a seagoing phase. An ape or even a primitive human that stayed with the marine lifestyle would not present the appearance of a modern human.
I think it most likely these stories are what most scientists think they are: some honest misidentifications or seals or manatees plus some deliberately exaggerated accounts of same.