Monthly Archive for January, 2012

By Joseph R Mendelson III from American Scientist

I learned great and terrible lessons in my first year of graduate work in 1989—more than I expected and more than I realized at the time. My advisor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Jonathan Campbell, arranged for me to spend a field season in Guatemala surveying the amphibians and reptiles in the environs of a coffee plantation near Pueblo Viejo, in the Department of Alta Verapaz. I was going it alone with no Spanish language skills in the midst of a brutal civil war. But there had never been any herpetological work done in this particular part of the country, so I balanced my apprehension with a vision of myself following in the footsteps of the intrepid tropical natural historians and explorers whose monographs I was intensely studying.

During that summer I assembled a good collection of reptiles from Pueblo Viejo, but only a poor collection of amphibians. We all assumed at the time that the paltry representation of amphibian specimens was due to my incomplete skills; where I come from in southern California, reptiles are common and amphibians are scarce. Twenty years later, it is clear to all herpetologists that I had arrived on the scene of a massacre. That field trip launched my research career as an amphibian taxonomist and, indeed, I discovered my first species of frog new to science at Pueblo Viejo. Since then I have had the pleasure of discovering and naming dozens of new species, but some of them I “discovered” on museum shelves and not in the field. My finds had become extinct before they were even named. I chose to become a herpetologist, not a paleontologist, because I enjoy working afield with live animals. Recent reflection has forced me to reconsider my academic title. I am a forensic taxonomist.

To Read More…

From TXCHNOLOGIST

In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky crane,” the lander will gently lower the one-ton Curosity rover on the surface of Mars. Curiosity, which weighs five times more than any previous Martian rover, will perform an unprecedented battery of tests for three months as it scoops up soil from the floor of the 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. Its mission, NASA says, will be to “assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life.”

For all the spectacular engineering that’s gone into Curiosity, however, its goal is actually quite modest. When NASA says it wants to find out if Mars was ever suitable for life, they use a very circumscribed version of the word. They are looking for signs of liquid water, which all living things on Earth need. They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive. In other words, they’re looking on Mars for the sorts of conditions that support life on Earth.

To Read More…

Photo of Stephan Hawking

By Sean Carroll from Discover Magazine

Sorry for the light blogging of late. Actual work intervenes, and it might remain that way for a while. But I’ll try to pop in whenever I can.

Stephen Hawking is celebrating his 70th birthday today. That in itself is an amazing fact, just as it was amazing when he celebrated his 40th, and 50th, and 60th birthdays, as well as every other day he’s lived and thrived with a debilitating neuron disease. The extra fact that he continues to make contributions to science pushes beyond amazing to practically unbelievable.

Everyone likes to tell Hawking stories, and this blog is no exception. So here is mine, meagre as it is. I’ve gotten more than enough mileage out of this one in person, I might as well put it on the blog so I won’t be tempted to tell it any more.

To Read More…