8.24.2006
UPDATE: Pluto is NOT a planet!!
So the big dogs met today, and surprise—Pluto is NOT a planet after all! Aw, poor thing.
(Read the full story from the Washington Post)
8.18.2006
''Yes, Virginia, Pluto is a planet.''
Next week in Prague, a group of astronomers are planning to tell the
International Astronomical Union--the body that decides, officially,
what is or is not a planet--that there are not nine planets, but 12.(Read the full story.) Here's what a few Johns Hopkins astronomers had to say about the whole affair (p.s.--dontcha just love nerdspeak?)
Richard Conn Henry, physics and astronomy professor:
"I think the notion that Pluto is a planet is absurd. When it was initially discovered,it was thought to be vastly more massive than it turned out to be. Its orbit is radically different from that of all the other planets. Down with Pluto, is what I say!"
Karl Glazebrook, physics and astronomy professor:
"...if I were in charge, I would insist on a diameter of greater than 1,000 kilometers to define a 'planet' in order to remove Ceres from the list. But that would be an arbitrary cut to preserve the order of the main nine and to save the hassle of rewriting textbooks...Definitions and naming really matter little physically, anyway."
William P. Blair, research professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and chief of observatory operations for NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer Satellite:
"This is really not a burning issue for most astronomers. It really is a 'classification' problem more than an issue of science...From what I can tell, they have tried to come up with a consistent definition: an object roughly spherical under its own gravity, orbiting a star, and not orbiting something else. OK, so far. Then they are apparently willing to immediately bend this relatively simple definition and allow Charon to itself be called a planet, with Pluto and Charon being a 'double planet' system. This goes too far and seems inconsistent to me."
Harold A. Weaver Jr., project scientist at Applied Physics Laboratory:
"...we must not forget that any attempts by us to pigeonhole objects in the universe are bound to have shortcomings. The classification schemes that we invent help us to place diverse objects in context, but we must also recognize that nature often doesn't adhere to our attempts to categorize things...In any case, I doubt that the IAU could come up with a resolution that would please everyone."
Andy Cheng, Applied Physics Laboratory:
"...the new definition of planet does not work for me, because 'hydrostatic equilibrium' is an idealization -- it is approximately correct for planets like Earth but is not exact. There is still no criterion for deciding how far from hydrostatic equilibrium an object can be and still qualify as a planet."
8.17.2006
The latest in looking for life on the Red Planet
It's been three months since I finished my thesis on the hunt for life on Mars. Here's a great lil story I picked up on digg about what's next on the horizon...but I'll betcha those sturdy rovers will still be kickin' around up there when the Lander arrives...
"The launch of the Mars Phoenix Lander is just a year away. The spacecraft will be aiming for the martian north pole, and if it lands successfully it will dig in snow and ice in one of the few places on Mars where scientists think life could be preserved."
read more | digg story
8.16.2006
Have we all gone nano-crazy?
Seems like every product in the CVS aisle is trying to jump on the nanotechnology bandwagon. And thanks to a website created by the nonprofit group Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies earlier this year, anyone with a computer can browse the 200+ nano-products now commercially available. (The list includes, among the somewhat mundane face creams and household cleaners, the more surprising odor-eating shoe inserts, foam neck-support pillows, and even chocolate-flavored bubble gum.)Here are a few of my favorite products, along with the hype they tout on their websites about those teeeeny tiny nano-ingredients (in no particular order):
Fullerene C-60 Day and Night Cream
Zelens, UK
“Fullerene C60 is a naturally occurring microscopic form of carbon, of the same purity as a diamond, which was found to have remarkable anti-oxidant properties. The key to the power of Fullerenes C60 lies in its shape. Its 60 carbon atoms are arranges like a soccer ball, with 32 surfaces. Each of these surfaces attract, and neutralise, the damaging free radicals, leading scientists to call Fullerene C60 the ‘radical scavenger.’”
(http://www.zelens.com/)
Rénergie Microlift
Lancome, France
“Microlifters are made of nano-particles of silica and proteins form a network to immediately lift and tighten skin.”
(http://www.lancome-usa.com/_us/_en/skincare/animations/renergiemicrolift/ discover.aspx?CategoryCode=AXESkincare&&&&)
Nanosilver Antibacterial and Deodorant Insole
Goodweave textiles Co. Ltd., Taiwan
(NB: for this one, I only wonder how much hype was lost in translation…)
“Nanosilver textile fiber has the ultra strong bacteriacidal power. Sterilization rate reaches as high as 99.99%. It may deodorize, stop itching and effectively prevents the athletic foot blood circulation, a moisture absorption and release of perspiration. The high permeable material quality, it can often guarantee the foot dry and neat.”
(http://www.goodweaver.com/)
Nanoceuticals Slim Shake Chocolate
RBC Life Sciences, USA
“NanoCeuticals™, with nanoscale ingredients, allow RBC to create products that:
-Scavenge more free radicals
-Stimulate the source of energy
-Increase hydration
-Balance the body’s pH
-Reduce lactic acid during exercise
-Reduce the surface tension of foods and supplements to increase wetness and absorption of nutrients
(http://813312.royalbodycare.com/Nanotechnology_Revolution.aspx)
Contour-Foam Silver Neck-Support Pillow
Sharper Image, USA
“Ultra-fine silver particles are infused throughout Sharper Image's exclusive space-age Contour-Foam Silver products. Created by advanced nanotechnology ("nano" indicating one billionth), these silver nanoparticles average only about 25nm (nanometers) in diameter — one 200 thousandth of a human hair — invisible to the eye but adding immeasurably to you well-being by making this pressure-free, comforting part of your home environment cleaner, fresher and healthier.”
(http://www.sharperimage.com/us/en/catalog/productview/sku__ZN004)
Nanover Hair Care
GNS Nanogist, Korea
“NANOVERTM Shampoo using nanosilver technology, ingredients go into hair quickly and deeply, has outstanding moisturizing and dandruff removing effect.”
(http://www.gnsnanogist.com)
NDMX Golf Balls
Nanodynamics, Inc., USA
“The much-anticipated launch of the revolutionary ball based on patented NDMX™ hollow metal core technology is ready for fairways and greens worldwide. Not only that, NanoDynamics™ has added a nano-enhanced polymer companion ball, the NDLiNX™, to its offering!”
(http://www.nanodynamics.com/Home/webstore)
8.15.2006
Secret Sharing...
My West Wing wife, crossword puzzle partner, and deepest-secret sharer just moved to California. For five years. So I’m feeling so blue. But! There’s always writing….and Ben & Jerry’s. And! I’ve just discovered a website that made me smile: Share Your Secret. In case you don’t live in NYC and haven’t seen the site’s HUGE metro advertisements, Share Your Secret is a place where anyone can anonymously post any secret (sponsored, of course, by Secret deodorant). Below are a few goodies…
“I want to keep having babies so I don’t have to go back to work.”
“I am addicted to peanut M&Ms.”
“I want to get over him, but I can’t.”
“I sleep with a teddy bear.”
“Sometimes I pretend I am a cook on a T.V. show in my kitchen.”
“I talk to myself.”
“I want to keep having babies so I don’t have to go back to work.”
“I am addicted to peanut M&Ms.”
“I want to get over him, but I can’t.”
“I sleep with a teddy bear.”
“Sometimes I pretend I am a cook on a T.V. show in my kitchen.”
“I talk to myself.”
8.10.2006
Plan B: Pros and Cons
In 2003, medical advisors at the FDA declared that Plan B--Barr Pharmaceuticals' morning after pill--was safe and effective enough to sell over the counter, to women of any age. Three years pass.
This Tuesday the FDA met with Barr and finally decided to make the drug available to women 18 or older. It could be on pharmacy shelves in a matter of weeks.
But not everyone thinks this is such a good idea...pro-lifers, overprotective parents, and The Onion have all formed strong objections. Read The Onion's piece if you're in the mood to laugh.
7.27.2006
Wirehaired Bugs
A study released last week reveals that many kinds of bacteria sometimes grow minuscule protein-and-iron wires that conduct electricity. The researchers say the wired microbes "will give us insights into all of microbiology that we can't even dream of yet," potentially allowing us to build more-efficient biological fuel cells and understand an important dynamic in the life of bacteria.
...read the rest of my article on Discover's website: http://discover.com/web-exclusives/nanowiredbacteria/
7.18.2006
It's Deathly Hot...
...in the city this week. I can't go outside without melting. A new study shows that summertime heat claims more lives than all other weather-related disasters combined, including tornadoes and hurricanes.
from the press release:
“Heat is a stealth killer,” says Dr. Scott Sheridan, Kent State associate professor in geography. Funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, Sheridan recently finished conducting a study on how effectively heat warning systems have been implemented in four cities for which he developed heat warning systems, including Dayton, Ohio, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Toronto, Ontario.
Sheridan surveyed residents 65 and older in each of the four regions about their perception of heat vulnerability, their knowledge of options for dealing with the weather, and why they did or did not take action to avoid negative health outcomes during the heat emergency.
He found that almost 90 percent were aware a heat warning was issued, but only about half of the people did anything about it. Many thought messages were targeting the elderly and did not view themselves as part of that group. For those who did change their behavior on hot days, it was not necessarily due to heat warnings issued by weather forecasters but instead based on their own perceptions of heat.
from the press release:
“Heat is a stealth killer,” says Dr. Scott Sheridan, Kent State associate professor in geography. Funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, Sheridan recently finished conducting a study on how effectively heat warning systems have been implemented in four cities for which he developed heat warning systems, including Dayton, Ohio, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Toronto, Ontario.
Sheridan surveyed residents 65 and older in each of the four regions about their perception of heat vulnerability, their knowledge of options for dealing with the weather, and why they did or did not take action to avoid negative health outcomes during the heat emergency.
He found that almost 90 percent were aware a heat warning was issued, but only about half of the people did anything about it. Many thought messages were targeting the elderly and did not view themselves as part of that group. For those who did change their behavior on hot days, it was not necessarily due to heat warnings issued by weather forecasters but instead based on their own perceptions of heat.
7.13.2006
Bugs sprouting tiny, tiny wires
When Yuri Gorby discovered that a microbe that makes toxic metals safe can sprout tiny electrically-conductive wires from its cell membrane, he reasoned this anatomical oddity and its metal-changing physiology must be related. Bacteria will, under particular environmental conditions sprout nanowires that can shuttle electricity to other cells.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
6.30.2006
oooo that stings...
Scorpion venom--of all things!--may be the key to treating brain cancer.discover.com/web-exclusives/scorpion/
6.29.2006
62-year-old Science Teacher Fights Back Against ID
...Babs Greene, another administrator, "asked if I was almost finished teaching evolution," Ms. New recalled. "I explained to her again that it is a unifying concept in life science. It is in every unit I teach. There was a big sigh."...In a country where 50-odd-percent of citizens don't believe we descended from apes, it's heartening to see that a mild-mannered middle school science teacher can stand up to the religious convictions of the administrators in her Georgia public school district. Read the New York Times story about the courageous Ms. Pat New at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/28/education/28education.html?ex=1152158400&en=15100578c104079f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
6.27.2006
New neurons may not make you smarter...
Check out da latest Discover clip: http://www.discover.com/web-exclusives/newneurons/
6.24.2006
God for rich people
I hadn’t realized religious fundamentalism had caught on with NYC yuppies, until this morning, when I read the mini-sermon printed on my Starbucks cup:
“The Way I See It #92”
You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. –Dr. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life
“The Way I See It #92”
You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. –Dr. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life
6.18.2006
6.17.2006
read about Frank the poet...
...in the June issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine:
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0606web/poetry.html
6.08.2006
Helllllo NYC!
All moved into the most fabulous city in the country--NYC! I'm working as an intern at Discover Magazine, and here is my very first clip!
http://discover.com/ web-exclusives/drowsophila/
4.26.2006
4.19.2006
How to Make a Life-Detector
“To some people it may seem that the very strangeness of Martian life precludes for it an appeal to human interest. To me this is but a near-sighted view. The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it be.” Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals
On a Thursday afternoon in early February, in a residential neighborhood of Chevy Chase Heights, the dingy-brown building of Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory looms from the top of a steep and grassy hill. At the bottom of the hill is a wooden entrance sign, just 20 feet from a pile of logs and tree stumps. On one branch of one naked magnolia a gray hooded sweatshirt hangs forgotten. The grass of the grassy hill is dead, and crunches when you trudge through it. The lab houses one hundred and fifty of the nation’s best scientists, but only a handful of cars are parked along the edge of the driveway that winds up sharply to the front door. When the elderly secretary enters the door’s security code, you can hear the slow punch of the buttons, and the soft shuffle of her shoes on polished linoleum as she escorts you down the empty corridor. In short, it’s everything you might expect from a Martian-life-detection lab.
In 1996, NASA triumphantly announced the find of ALH84001, the meteorite that supposedly harbored fossils of ancient Martian life. Andrew Steele was the young Brit who showed, just months after the announcement, that meteorite ALH84001 was contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. In the last decade, with the help of groups who study the biological workings of extremophiles on Earth, many astrobiologists and astronomers have tried various approaches to the hunting of life beyond Earth’s orbit. Steele’s group, focused on making life-detection instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, finds a home in a few of the microbiology labs in the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers, the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Arctic Circle island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit), even in August’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (Steele’s crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano that has the kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the rock harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips coated with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes in a rock different life-specific molecules—like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes—and when it finds them, it glows. Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, much larger than the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are up there now. In their two years of exploring, Spirit and Opportunity have each traveled about three miles. By comparison, the MSL is a tank; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, rovers aren’t enough; you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features, like bedrock. Also, their controllers on Earth can’t manipulate the machines in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that a rover doesn’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineering team spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains. Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientist team decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them an incredible view of the surrounding geological features, including those that might indicate an ancient flow of liquid water. As he explains: “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
In addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would allow planet exploration by astronauts. “We’re making computing technology, like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice for the astronauts of the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything—on the Moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on creating technology for astronauts spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars,” he says, “because you think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
Detecting “Habitable” Worlds
Iain Neill Reid is an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the birthplace of the Hubble Telescope. Though Reid had been using the Hubble to study dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, he switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a telescope project conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new, and hasn’t been built yet. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-powered telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the TPF won’t look for just for any old planet. Its job is to look for habitable planets like Earth. A planet like the Earth, Reid says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. So to make a planet visible, you need to use telescopes (very elaborate, expensive telescopes) that block the light from the star. And once an astronomer can see clearly the planet in question, Reid says, “we could tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and then, they could tell us what could live there.”
In 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). He says they wanted to “ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said the project—searching the entire universe for Earth-like planets—was too ambitious. So for the next couple of years, Reid’s group funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K,” Reid says, “but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation became the basis of a new, scaled-back NAI proposal the team submitted in October of last year, where they suggested to look only at stars within 25 parsecs of our Sun.
While Reid and his team were searching for planets, others were looking for stars—stars that would be best suited to host a planet with intelligent life. Though intelligent alien life has long been the stuff of popular science fiction, a large group of scientists, involved in a project called the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is seriously hunting for real ETs beyond our solar system. This February in St. Louis, a panel of astrobiologists from SETI and elsewhere held a press conference at the meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The panel explained how to go about looking for intelligent life—that is, how to send messages to beings that could, in turn, send messages back to us.
The task is a big one: 100 billion galaxies are thought to exist, each with 100 billion stars—a gazillion places that could potentially receive and acknowledge our messages. Astronomer Maggie Turnbull of the Carnegie Institute is starting to narrow down the astronomical list. As she announced at AAAS, Turnbull has identified a mere 19,000 stars whose solar systems might provide a “habitable zone”, and of these, has made a top-five list from which to begin searches.
“When I was given the charge of making the target list for SETI,” Turnbull explained to National Public Radio, “I asked myself, just what is it about the Sun that makes it a good parent to life forms on Earth?” Most important, she said, is stability—she sought stars that didn’t change their level of brightness too “quickly” (sometimes quickly meant billions of years) for life to evolved on their surrounding planets. This requirement ruled out all of the massive stars in the galaxy, because they don’t live long enough. Because SETI is interested in intelligent life, Turnbull’s second requirement for a good “star parent” was a practical one: “Close stars are better than further stars,” she explained, because we wouldn’t be able to send radio signals to stars too far away. These eliminations brought the list down to 19,000. “Obviously 19,000 is quite a lot of stars and it will take quite a long time to go through all of those,” Turnbull explained. So she then arbitrarily whittled 19,000 to five, “for the purposes of communicating it to the public.”
With the star list thus narrowed, SETI has set up the Allen Telescope Array (named for and mostly funded by billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft), a cluster of 350 radio antennas in northern California. The antenna network, which should be built by 2008, is designed to “listen” for radio transmissions sent from intelligent civilizations in the solar systems of Turnbull’s chosen stars. Jill Tartar, head of the SETI Institute, says that old systems were able to scan about 1,000 stars in a decade; in the next ten years, the Allen Array will scan at least a million.
These searches are based on finding life as we know it—i.e., self-sustaining chemical systems that undergo evolution at the molecular level. But some scientists and philosophers think this is the wrong approach. “What we really need to do is to search for physical systems that challenge our current concept of life,” says Carol Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology, “systems that both resemble familiar life and differ from it in provocative ways.” Cleland says looking for life different from ours may not be as difficult as one might think. Life on Earth works using only about 20 basic proteins (called amino acids), even though nature provides more than 100. This means that, as Cleland argues in the January 16 issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology, an “alternative microbial life” could exist on Earth, and therefore, could also exist on other planets.
Cleland says the latest life-detection instruments, based on our current definition of life, limit our ability to find life on other planets. “If the DNA in an alien organism was even slightly different than the DNA in life on Earth,” she says, “we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it. Instead of looking for life as we know it, scientists may be better served to look for anomalies, which amounts to looking for life as we don’t know it.”
NASA Pulls the Plug
No matter what kind of life they’re looking for, all of these scientist-hunters recognize that some of the biggest mysteries are found right here on Earth. Steele says of finding Martian life: “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But actually, I’d be more interested if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? Why is Earth special? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year Moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step: “The human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves.” Bush’s exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly by 2014, carry men to the Moon no later than 2020, and then eventually, carry them to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.”
All of this life-detection work—Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s TPF telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine—began, and continues, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But this February, two years after announcing his new vision, the President’s budget didn’t give NASA as much money as it was hoping for, causing NASA head Michael Griffin to funnel money into manned space flight and out of astrobiology. Consequently, all three of these life-detection projects have been put on hold.
Which begs the question: If a manned missions does find life on Mars, will the Earthlings in charge then put more funding into astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
On a Thursday afternoon in early February, in a residential neighborhood of Chevy Chase Heights, the dingy-brown building of Carnegie Institution’s Geophysical Laboratory looms from the top of a steep and grassy hill. At the bottom of the hill is a wooden entrance sign, just 20 feet from a pile of logs and tree stumps. On one branch of one naked magnolia a gray hooded sweatshirt hangs forgotten. The grass of the grassy hill is dead, and crunches when you trudge through it. The lab houses one hundred and fifty of the nation’s best scientists, but only a handful of cars are parked along the edge of the driveway that winds up sharply to the front door. When the elderly secretary enters the door’s security code, you can hear the slow punch of the buttons, and the soft shuffle of her shoes on polished linoleum as she escorts you down the empty corridor. In short, it’s everything you might expect from a Martian-life-detection lab.
In 1996, NASA triumphantly announced the find of ALH84001, the meteorite that supposedly harbored fossils of ancient Martian life. Andrew Steele was the young Brit who showed, just months after the announcement, that meteorite ALH84001 was contaminated with Antarctic bugs. But even after undercutting NASA’s triumphant find, Steele still believed we might one day find life on the Red Planet. In the last decade, with the help of groups who study the biological workings of extremophiles on Earth, many astrobiologists and astronomers have tried various approaches to the hunting of life beyond Earth’s orbit. Steele’s group, focused on making life-detection instruments for both rover and manned missions to Mars, finds a home in a few of the microbiology labs in the creepy building on the hill.
Though a decade has passed since he trumped NASA’s claim, Steele still looks like a grungy twenty-something. He’s tall, lean, and slightly apish. His wavy blonde hair covers the letters printed on the back of his t-shirt, so you can’t quite read the name of the garage band that’s printed on it; his blue jeans are so faded they’re white. He’s dirty, but wears jewelry—rainbow bracelets on his wrist and a heavy Celtic cross around his neck. He walks lightly on old green sneakers, the same ones he had in August, when he traveled to the other side of the world to test his gadgets.
In August of 2003, 2004, and 2005, Steele and his colleagues went to the Arctic Circle island of Svalbard. Svalbard is not only cold—dropping down to -12 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit), even in August’s 24 hours of daylight—but dusty, and dangerous. (Steele’s crew, armed with shotguns, had to switch between crushing up rock and watching for polar bears.) The island is the only place on Earth with a volcano that has the kind of rock that was sampled on the Viking missions. And most important, the rock harbors microorganisms that Steele’s gadgets can try to detect.
The gadgets are called microarrays, matchbook-sized glass chips coated with different kinds of antibodies. Each antibody recognizes in a rock different life-specific molecules—like nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), amino acids, proteins, or certain carbon isotopes—and when it finds them, it glows. Steele says the chips will be used on NASA’s next big rover project, the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). The MSL, part of NASA’s larger Mars Exploration Program, plans to send a nuclear-powered rover to Mars, much larger than the golf-cart sized Spirit and Opportunity rovers that are up there now. In their two years of exploring, Spirit and Opportunity have each traveled about three miles. By comparison, the MSL is a tank; it will travel up to 90 miles per hour, roll over obstacles 30 inches high, and will have a full on-board laboratory for testing climate changes and geological samples.
But to gain a true understanding of the landscape and really probe for life, Steele says, rovers aren’t enough; you need men. “Rovers are pretty easy now, we could send rovers all over the place for about $900 million a shot,” he says. “But a human being is a thousand times more capable than any robot.” Rovers have to stay on a horizontal plane, for instance, so they often don’t have the right visual perspective to find subtle-yet-important geological features, like bedrock. Also, their controllers on Earth can’t manipulate the machines in real time; they’re eight minutes behind. But the biggest problem, according to Steele, is that a rover doesn’t have object recognition. “An elephant could run in front of it,” he says, “and it wouldn’t know the difference.”
To make his point, Steele cites one rover story NASA hasn’t released. A few months ago, a wire broke on Spirit’s arm. “So the engineering team spent a few days fixing it, slowly working the arm to loosen the dust they thought got into the motors,” he explains. Since Spirit was immobile for a few days, the scientist team decided to take high-resolution photographs of the landscape, instead of the usual low-resolution ones. And the result was amazing: Steele says the new photos gave them an incredible view of the surrounding geological features, including those that might indicate an ancient flow of liquid water. As he explains: “They said, ‘oh my god, those crossbeds are fantastic. This is just brilliant,’ but normally, the rovers would never have caught all of that detail. A human would have seen it right away.” And the detail, in this case, was crucial: “it was evidence,” Steele says, “of water-induced features in the rocks.”
In addition to tweaking the rover machines, Steele’s also working on what he calls the next generation of gadgets: those that would allow planet exploration by astronauts. “We’re making computing technology, like GPS and camera systems, and a barcode system that automatically labels samples,” he explains. This would have been nice for the astronauts of the Apollo missions because, as Steele says “the geezers don’t have time to get everything—on the Moon they often forgot to record locations and label properly.” But with the new toys, he says, “the astronaut merely needs to bag it, tag it, and the rest is done.”
This emphasis on creating technology for astronauts spurs Steele to visit extreme environments like Svalbard over and over again. He plans to go back for the next three Augusts, until the MSL is launched. “It’s good for the scientists to think they’re on Mars,” he says, “because you think: where is my next meal coming from? It makes you realize you have to make the science as easy as possible for the astronauts, because they’ve got to concentrate on staying alive.”
Detecting “Habitable” Worlds
Iain Neill Reid is an astronomer at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the birthplace of the Hubble Telescope. Though Reid had been using the Hubble to study dwarf stars for many years, in 2003, he switched gears. “A few of us here just started looking at how we could work in astrobiology,” he says, “partly because the emphasis was switching at NASA, but also because at that time there was a lot of effort going into thinking about the Terrestrial Planet Finder.”
The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), a telescope project conceived by the brains at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is new, and hasn’t been built yet. It was only in 1995, after all, that astronomers used high-powered telescopes to discover that solar systems besides our own even exist. Since then, astronomers have found over 100 planets orbiting other stars. But the TPF won’t look for just for any old planet. Its job is to look for habitable planets like Earth. A planet like the Earth, Reid says, is about 100 million times fainter than its star. So to make a planet visible, you need to use telescopes (very elaborate, expensive telescopes) that block the light from the star. And once an astronomer can see clearly the planet in question, Reid says, “we could tell the microbiologists ‘here’s what the conditions might be like,’ and then, they could tell us what could live there.”
In 2003, Reid joined Frank Robb and a few other extremophile experts at the Center of Marine Biotechnology and submitted a proposal to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). He says they wanted to “ask if there are particular places in the galaxy that are more favored to life than others.” But the NAI Committee at the time, Reid recalls, said the project—searching the entire universe for Earth-like planets—was too ambitious. So for the next couple of years, Reid’s group funded what they could themselves. “We had a small amount of research money here at Space Telescope, only like 50 or 60K,” Reid says, “but it was enough to pay for a grad student and get equipment.” The shoestring operation became the basis of a new, scaled-back NAI proposal the team submitted in October of last year, where they suggested to look only at stars within 25 parsecs of our Sun.
While Reid and his team were searching for planets, others were looking for stars—stars that would be best suited to host a planet with intelligent life. Though intelligent alien life has long been the stuff of popular science fiction, a large group of scientists, involved in a project called the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI), is seriously hunting for real ETs beyond our solar system. This February in St. Louis, a panel of astrobiologists from SETI and elsewhere held a press conference at the meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The panel explained how to go about looking for intelligent life—that is, how to send messages to beings that could, in turn, send messages back to us.
The task is a big one: 100 billion galaxies are thought to exist, each with 100 billion stars—a gazillion places that could potentially receive and acknowledge our messages. Astronomer Maggie Turnbull of the Carnegie Institute is starting to narrow down the astronomical list. As she announced at AAAS, Turnbull has identified a mere 19,000 stars whose solar systems might provide a “habitable zone”, and of these, has made a top-five list from which to begin searches.
“When I was given the charge of making the target list for SETI,” Turnbull explained to National Public Radio, “I asked myself, just what is it about the Sun that makes it a good parent to life forms on Earth?” Most important, she said, is stability—she sought stars that didn’t change their level of brightness too “quickly” (sometimes quickly meant billions of years) for life to evolved on their surrounding planets. This requirement ruled out all of the massive stars in the galaxy, because they don’t live long enough. Because SETI is interested in intelligent life, Turnbull’s second requirement for a good “star parent” was a practical one: “Close stars are better than further stars,” she explained, because we wouldn’t be able to send radio signals to stars too far away. These eliminations brought the list down to 19,000. “Obviously 19,000 is quite a lot of stars and it will take quite a long time to go through all of those,” Turnbull explained. So she then arbitrarily whittled 19,000 to five, “for the purposes of communicating it to the public.”
With the star list thus narrowed, SETI has set up the Allen Telescope Array (named for and mostly funded by billionaire Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft), a cluster of 350 radio antennas in northern California. The antenna network, which should be built by 2008, is designed to “listen” for radio transmissions sent from intelligent civilizations in the solar systems of Turnbull’s chosen stars. Jill Tartar, head of the SETI Institute, says that old systems were able to scan about 1,000 stars in a decade; in the next ten years, the Allen Array will scan at least a million.
These searches are based on finding life as we know it—i.e., self-sustaining chemical systems that undergo evolution at the molecular level. But some scientists and philosophers think this is the wrong approach. “What we really need to do is to search for physical systems that challenge our current concept of life,” says Carol Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology, “systems that both resemble familiar life and differ from it in provocative ways.” Cleland says looking for life different from ours may not be as difficult as one might think. Life on Earth works using only about 20 basic proteins (called amino acids), even though nature provides more than 100. This means that, as Cleland argues in the January 16 issue of the International Journal of Astrobiology, an “alternative microbial life” could exist on Earth, and therefore, could also exist on other planets.
Cleland says the latest life-detection instruments, based on our current definition of life, limit our ability to find life on other planets. “If the DNA in an alien organism was even slightly different than the DNA in life on Earth,” she says, “we probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it. Instead of looking for life as we know it, scientists may be better served to look for anomalies, which amounts to looking for life as we don’t know it.”
NASA Pulls the Plug
No matter what kind of life they’re looking for, all of these scientist-hunters recognize that some of the biggest mysteries are found right here on Earth. Steele says of finding Martian life: “If we find it—fantastic! Brilliant! Superb! Let’s go get it, let’s study the hell out of it, let’s classify it. But actually, I’d be more interested if we don’t find life on Mars, and then why there isn’t life there. What went wrong? Why is Earth special? For me, that’s the biggest reason for going.”
On January 14, 2004, following reports of the success of Spirit and Opportunity, President Bush made a speech outlining his new “Vision for Space Exploration.” Reminiscent of Kennedy’s 10-year Moon challenge in 1960, Bush proclaimed that rovers were necessary, at first, to serve as “trailblazers,” and “the advance guard to the unknown.” But ultimately, he said, we need to go the next step: “The human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements. We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves.” Bush’s exact plan called for the development of a new spacecraft, called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly by 2014, carry men to the Moon no later than 2020, and then eventually, carry them to Mars. Bush said the main purpose of the Crew project is to take astronauts beyond our orbit, “to other worlds.”
All of this life-detection work—Steele’s life-detection chips, Reid’s TPF telescopes, Turnbull’s Earthshine—began, and continues, on the promise of financial support from Uncle Sam. But this February, two years after announcing his new vision, the President’s budget didn’t give NASA as much money as it was hoping for, causing NASA head Michael Griffin to funnel money into manned space flight and out of astrobiology. Consequently, all three of these life-detection projects have been put on hold.
Which begs the question: If a manned missions does find life on Mars, will the Earthlings in charge then put more funding into astrobiology? “Maybe, maybe not,” Reid says wryly. “We might get cut off for getting the wrong answer.”
4.02.2006
New Clips!
Some newbies from Hopkins Mag…
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/alumnews.html#kahn http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0406web/wholly.html#egypt http://www.son.jhmi.edu/jhnmagazine/pages/otp7_dyingchldrn.htm
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/alumnews.html#kahn http://www.jhu.edu/jhumag/0406web/wholly.html#egypt http://www.son.jhmi.edu/jhnmagazine/pages/otp7_dyingchldrn.htm
3.31.2006
Lion Manes Are Just for Show
A lion’s mane may look like a shaggy security blanket, but new research from the plains of the Serengeti shows the long locks offer no protection when two rival males fight for the chance to mate. The study suggests the male lion’s mane serves mostly as a lioness magnet, and played an important role in the way male fighting strategy evolved.
The purpose of the male lion’s mane has long perplexed biologists. Because female lions roam in groups of three or four, and allow only one male to reside with them, competition between males is fierce. Rival males often fight to the death—with their enormous teeth and claws—to gain coveted access to a pride. This led many biologists to assume that the function of the thick manes was to make it harder for attackers to reach the vulnerable throat area. But over the years this assumption has been questioned, because field biologists who actually saw lion fights in action noticed the mane area was rarely targeted.
Evolutionary biologist Peyton West and her colleagues from the University of Minnesota used life-size lion dummies to test if manes indeed offered protection. The researchers first lured some big cats to the testing area by playing tapes of hyenas feeding at a kill, then presented them with the fake rivals. “Of course we worried that the lions wouldn’t be fooled,” West says. But many of the real lions attacked the fakes with a vengeance. (Sometimes the fakes worked so well, in fact, that even after the real lions knocked them over, according to West, “they tended to stick around and maul them some more.”)
The real lions attacked the models not at the neck, but on the back and hindquarters, putting a serious snarl in the protective mane hypothesis. To see if the males were avoiding the neck because the mane was acting as shield, the researchers repeated the tests with “maneless” fakes. But even with these exposed-neck models, the real lions went first for the backside. “We were pretty surprised to find so little evidence for protection,” West says, because “it’s so intuitive that the mane would work that way.”
But it turns out those shaggy manes are used for attracting females. In previous research published in 2002, West had shown that males with longer and darker manes were older, better fed, and better fighters. And because females rely on males to protect their cubs, it makes sense that females would prefer males with large manes. “Just as songbirds can advertise their quality though visual cues, so, apparently, do lions,” says field biologist Jon Grinnell of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. Grinnell says West’s study is “new and interesting, because it forces us to look at lions differently.”
Even though manes don’t offer protection now, West says a protective role could have been the reason the trait evolved in the first place. In the early evolution of the trait, she says, males may have gone straight for the neck, making individuals with manes harder to attack and thus more favored by natural selection. As evolution continued and more and more males developed manes, attacking the neck area would no longer have been an effective fighting strategy—leaving our modern lions with manes.
“The lion is an intensively studied species and probably the best known wild cat on earth,” says field biologist Luke Hunter of Wildlife Conservation Society-International, “but this study shows that good science is still revealing new things about the species and turning over popular misconceptions.”
Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, March 2006 (vol 71, p 609)
The purpose of the male lion’s mane has long perplexed biologists. Because female lions roam in groups of three or four, and allow only one male to reside with them, competition between males is fierce. Rival males often fight to the death—with their enormous teeth and claws—to gain coveted access to a pride. This led many biologists to assume that the function of the thick manes was to make it harder for attackers to reach the vulnerable throat area. But over the years this assumption has been questioned, because field biologists who actually saw lion fights in action noticed the mane area was rarely targeted.
Evolutionary biologist Peyton West and her colleagues from the University of Minnesota used life-size lion dummies to test if manes indeed offered protection. The researchers first lured some big cats to the testing area by playing tapes of hyenas feeding at a kill, then presented them with the fake rivals. “Of course we worried that the lions wouldn’t be fooled,” West says. But many of the real lions attacked the fakes with a vengeance. (Sometimes the fakes worked so well, in fact, that even after the real lions knocked them over, according to West, “they tended to stick around and maul them some more.”)
The real lions attacked the models not at the neck, but on the back and hindquarters, putting a serious snarl in the protective mane hypothesis. To see if the males were avoiding the neck because the mane was acting as shield, the researchers repeated the tests with “maneless” fakes. But even with these exposed-neck models, the real lions went first for the backside. “We were pretty surprised to find so little evidence for protection,” West says, because “it’s so intuitive that the mane would work that way.”
But it turns out those shaggy manes are used for attracting females. In previous research published in 2002, West had shown that males with longer and darker manes were older, better fed, and better fighters. And because females rely on males to protect their cubs, it makes sense that females would prefer males with large manes. “Just as songbirds can advertise their quality though visual cues, so, apparently, do lions,” says field biologist Jon Grinnell of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. Grinnell says West’s study is “new and interesting, because it forces us to look at lions differently.”
Even though manes don’t offer protection now, West says a protective role could have been the reason the trait evolved in the first place. In the early evolution of the trait, she says, males may have gone straight for the neck, making individuals with manes harder to attack and thus more favored by natural selection. As evolution continued and more and more males developed manes, attacking the neck area would no longer have been an effective fighting strategy—leaving our modern lions with manes.
“The lion is an intensively studied species and probably the best known wild cat on earth,” says field biologist Luke Hunter of Wildlife Conservation Society-International, “but this study shows that good science is still revealing new things about the species and turning over popular misconceptions.”
Journal reference: Animal Behaviour, March 2006 (vol 71, p 609)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
