Actual Top Ten Animals of 2013

Not so much a popularity contest as an altitude contest.

10: Himalayan Jumping Spider

The fuzzy and springy Euophrys omnisuperstes lives on the world's highest mountains. It's been found 6,700 meters (a little over four miles) high on Mount Everest. Some birds can fly at higher altitudes, but the spider lives there full-time, apparently subsisting on unlucky insects carried up to it by the wind.


9, 8: Iranian Space Monkeys

Twice this year, Iran announced that it had successfully sent a monkey on a sub-orbital rocket flight. The trips allegedly happened in January and December, both reaching heights of 120 kilometers (75 miles) before safely returning their rhesus macaque-nauts to Earth. But the Associated Press pointed out that the launches couldn't be confirmed by outside sources, and that one post-launch photo showed an entirely different monkey than pre-launch.


7, 6, 5, 4, 3: Russian Rocket Zoo

On April 19 of this year, a Soyuz rocket took off for space carrying a capsule full of animals. Called Bion-M1, the capsule held mice, mongolian gerbils, geckos, fish, and snails. The mice were shared between Russian scientists and NASA, whose researchers would study the effects of low gravity on cell growth, blood flow, joint movement, and sperm motility, among other body functions. The mission orbited Earth for 30 days.

NASA writes, "All of the mice that Russian scientists had shared with their U.S. colleagues returned from space in good health." The Russian scientists must have kept the dead ones for themselves, then, because 29 out of the 45 mice didn't survive. All 8 gerbils perished too, along with the fish. There appeared to have been technical problems with the systems built to feed and keep the animals alive onboard.


2, 1: Imaginary Mars Rock Animals

"NASA Curiosity Rover spots iguana on Mars," declared a Fox News headline in November. It was actually a rock shaped vaguely like a lizard. But someone from a website called UFO Sightings Daily was calling it an "animal" and doing news interviews. Back in May, the same paranormal website had announced the discovery of a "Mars rat" in another one of the rover's photos. It was, of course, also a rock.

Will any Earth animals travel farther from the planet's surface in 2014? If they do, here's hoping they fare better than a Mongolian gerbil.


Honorable mention for effort: NASA launchpad frog.

New Journal Celebrates Animal Stalking

Christmas arrived early this year for people who love animals carrying transmitters around. A new open-access journal called Animal Biotelemetry launched this week, and it promises to bring new tales of mind-blowing bird migrations and seals that study climate change (without exactly having volunteered for the job). Also, sharks.

Published by BioMed Central, the journal will include all kinds of research having to do with biological data gathered by instruments attached to animals. This is a field that's been expanding as the technologies themselves shrink. A few decades ago, scientists were limited to studying the movements of giant land animals such as bears or elk—because transmitters and battery packs were too bulky to comfortably attach to other creatures. Now, miniaturized electronics (aided by GPS satellites) mean that even lightweight birds can carry tracking devices.

Editor A. Peter Klimley describes the history of the field in an introduction to the journal. Klimley himself is a professor and shark guy at the University of California, Davis. His biography claims that he "is known to have held his breath while diving up to 100m deep in order to hand-tag hammerhead sharks with a dart gun." In case "biotelemetry" didn't sound exciting to you.

To mark the occasion, here are some earlier posts involving animals carrying transmitters around, since I am one of the aforementioned people who love them.

Monitoring from Space Shows Even This Giant Crab Can Navigate Better than You

Climate-Studying Seals Bring Back Happy News

This Penguin: An Unexpected Journey


Klimley, A. (2013). Why publish Animal Biotelemetry? Animal Biotelemetry, 1 (1) DOI: 10.1186/2050-3385-1-1

Image: by MEOP Norway North

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 8: Square Peg in a Round Universe

We can all agree there's too much round stuff in space, right? All those planets and stars and orbital paths and moon craters and disks of debris get old. The most variation you can usually hope for is an astroid shaped like a potato.

Here, for some relief, is the aptly named Red Square nebula. Researchers Peter Tuthill of Sydney University and James Lloyd of Cornell University created this image of the cloud, which surrounds a star called MWC 922.

The researchers think its square shape might be due to a lucky viewing angle on our part. The nebula may really be two cones of gas pointing outward, as if the star at the center were a cheerleader holding a giant megaphone in either hand. From our angle, the nebula looks like a giant X or square. If it turned 90 degrees, we'd find ourselves facing—yet again—some round stuff in space.

Image: Peter Tuthill, Sydney University Physics Dept., Palomar and W.M. Keck observatories (via APOD)

12 Days of Inkfish, Day 3: Reverse Sun

"Astronomy! People go crazy studying that!" a Christmas tree farmer said this week after asking my younger sister her college major. He made a head-exploding gesture to illustrate his point.

That farmer might have been distressed by this image. Despite its similarity to sperm tackling an egg, it's really a color-inverted picture of our sun. The background is a field of stars, also with its colors reversed.

Turning the colors around lets us see features on the sun's surface we might not otherwise. The little bumps and crinkles are called granules; they're where hot gas is rising to the outside of the sun before cooling and sinking again. According to a textbook of my sister's, these bumps are "typically the size of Texas."

The image comes from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day, which provides new head-explosions every 24 hours.

Image: Jim Lafferty

Are You Healthy Enough to Be a Space Tourist?

Space travel for regular folks is almost here. But before jumping on board the nearest spacecraft, amateur astronauts and their doctors might want to consider the health risks. Although standard air travel is more boring than spaceflight, it's also less likely to shrink your bones or deform your eyeballs.

"Practically only the healthiest people have flown in space so far," says Marlene Grenon, a vascular surgeon at UCSF who researches the effects of microgravity on the body. Government astronauts go through extensive medical testing and training. But even these extra-fit fliers have suffered ailments ranging from cardiac dysrhythmia to good old-fashioned vomiting. What's in store for the rest of us?

Grenon is the lead author of a paper in BMJ asking that question. The researchers say that doctors will have plenty to consider before sending their patients to boldly go where no civilian has gone before.

"Space motion sickness would be expected to be the most common" medical problem, Grenon says, "particularly for short-duration flights." If your inner ear is easily confused by sitting still in a moving vehicle, just imagine what happens when that vehicle has no up or down.* NASA's parabolic flights—trips on aircraft that fly in steep up-and-down waves, simulating weightlessness for astronauts in training and scientists researching low gravity—have earned the nickname "vomit comets" for a reason.

Life without gravity is hard on the bones and muscles as well as the barf reflex. NASA astronauts onboard the space station exercise for two hours every day to counteract bone loss, muscle atrophy, and a decrease in cardiovascular fitness. Grenon says she doesn't yet know how weightlessness might act on people who are less fit to begin with, or overweight.

Exercise may prevent muscle atrophy but it doesn't do much for squished eyeballs. A study last year found that after a six-month space mission, astronauts were likely to have "flattened globes" and other eye problems. The shifting of fluids inside the head, free to bounce off the walls just like the astronauts themselves, might be to blame. Even after shorter trips, many astronauts reported worsened eyesight.

The authors of the new paper name several medical conditions that might worsen in microgravity. For people with diseases of the blood vessels, fluids drifting around might be dangerous. Aneurysms could rupture during takeoff. Bone loss in space could be especially bad for people who already have osteoporosis. Acid reflux could worsen when the esophagus no longer knows which way is up. And don't forget radiation exposure.

But the most ordinary complaint that might ground you is an infection. Grenon writes that even people with simple ear or skin infections should consider postponing trips to space.

That's because the immune system changes during spaceflight, Grenon says. Although these changes are not well understood, they "could place the spaceflight participants at higher risk of infection." Additionally, she says, "Some research has also hinted [at] the fact that bacteria grow stronger in microgravity." And radiation might make people more susceptible to infection—or make bacteria mutate more quickly. Overall, the changes in space favor bacteria over your immune system. These risks would be greater on longer flights.

Still want to fly? Virgin Galactic is accepting reservations. If you're willing to put down $200,000 up front, you can still get a spot on their first round of flights. For a cool million you can reserve a private trip for yourself and five friends—that's a buy-five-spaceflights, get-one-free deal. Make sure you pack enough barf bags.


Grenon, S., Saary, J., Gray, G., Vanderploeg, J., & Hughes-Fulford, M. (2012). Can I take a space flight? Considerations for doctors BMJ, 345 (dec13 8) DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e8124

Image: U.S. Air Force

*For an exceedingly thorough discussion of space barfing, as well as other bodily functions performed in microgravity, I recommend Mary Roach's book Packing for Mars.

Monitoring from Space Shows Even This Giant Crab Can Navigate Better than You

It was crabnapping for a just cause. But the crustaceans that found themselves suddenly plucked from their burrows, stuffed into opaque sacks, and carried off through the forest couldn't know that. When the scientists freed their captives, they waited to see whether the crabs would find their way home or be stranded forever. They'd be watching—from space.

The best way to find out exactly where and how far an animal travels is to tag it with a GPS tracker. But if you're interested in invertebrates, most of your subjects are too small or squishable to carry around such a device. Enter (scuttling in from stage left) the robber crab, Birgus latro. Also called the coconut crab because of its predilection for cracking open coconuts, the species is the largest arthropod on land. Legs included, it can grow to nearly a meter across.

Robber crabs live on islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, tucking themselves into hollow trees and rock crevices during the day to keep their shell-less bodies from drying out. Females make an annual migration to the coast to lay their eggs in the ocean. Less is known, though, about the movements of male crabs. To find out what they're up to—and because the heavier males presumably wouldn't mind the bulky GPS tags so much—Jakob Krieger of the University of Greifswald and other German researchers tagged 55 male robber crabs on Christmas Island.

During the day, the GPS satellites didn't return much data, since the crabs were mostly hidden in their burrows. At night, they began to roam.

The crabs were highly faithful to their homes, usually staying close to the one to three hiding spots they preferred. But during the time the scientists were monitoring them—up to three months—15 of the crabs went on mysterious, long-distance journeys to the coast.

The authors report in PLOS ONE that these journeys were up to 4.2 kilometers long, a distance that might not seem impressive, except that the top speed observed in the study was 150 meters per hour. If you set a shuffling robber crab at one end of a soccer field at the beginning of a game, you just might be able to retrieve it from the opposite end at halftime.

All the journeying crabs traveled along a similar route, sharing a "migratory corridor" toward the ocean. Why do they go on these arduous errands, visiting the coast for 1 to 10 days before returning home? Krieger says he and his coauthors are "convinced that it is most likely a combination of factors."

One possible factor is reproduction; athough they mate inland, male crabs may try to boost their success by pursuing females out to shore. Another is nutrition. Krieger says the crabs may need to drink saltwater to get the calcium and sodium that keep their skin sturdy. They also get the nutrients they need by eating other crabs, such as the red crabs that migrate en masse across Christmas Island every year. Traveling robber crabs may take advantage of this mobile red-crab buffet. (Here's a worthwhile video of red crabs dodging traffic and clinging to cliff faces during their own journeys.)

The fact that male robber crabs traveled at all was news to the scientists. But they also wanted to know how well robber crabs can navigate, and that's where the crabnapping came in. A dozen crabs were bagged, moved a kilometer or so, and re-released to see how they'd manage.

Crabs that were freed somewhere within the migratory corridor, that popular robber crab highway, found their way home with no problem. But those released someplace unfamiliar were lost. The GPS data showed that these crabs used their release points as a new home base from which they took exploratory trips outward, trying to get their bearings. Yet they never found their old homes.

Though robber crabs might navigate using cues such as the position of the sun or moon, the scent of the ocean, or the earth's magnetic field, they seem to especially rely on memorizing a path in one direction and retracing it on the way back. The GPS data showed crabs following identical routes on their way to and from the ocean.

The researchers also crabnapped one of their victims twice, and saw that he followed precisely the same path homeward (along the migratory corridor) both times. This suggests that robber crabs remember the landmarks they find along their routes. Of course, when you're moving at a crab's pace, there's plenty of time to observe the scenery.


Krieger, J., Grandy, R., Drew, M., Erland, S., Stensmyr, M., Harzsch, S., & Hansson, B. (2012). Giant Robber Crabs Monitored from Space: GPS-Based Telemetric Studies on Christmas Island (Indian Ocean) PLoS ONE, 7 (11) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0049809

Image: John Tann (Flickr)

Space Census Finds Extra Penguins, Poop

Playing what might have been the world's most tedious game of Where's Waldo?, scientists used photos taken from space to count all the emperor penguins in Antarctica. They found more than a hundred thousand birds that hadn't been spotted before. The news may affect the penguins' fate in a warming world. Besides, what's a better surprise than extra penguins?

Researchers from several institutions, including the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, undertook the emperor penguin space census. They thought previous penguin counts might not be accurate. For one thing, the last estimate of the Antarctic penguin population is almost 20 years old. For another, humans can't easily travel very far from their Antarctic research bases to seek out half-frozen bird huddles. So penguin colonies that are farther out in no man's land might have never been spotted by people.

Thanks to emperor penguins' habit of clumping together in giant colonies during breeding season--and their convenient lack of camouflage against the snow--the researchers knew high-resolution satellite photos should reveal the penguins. They used images from all around Antarctica's coastline, where penguin colonies camp out. Forty-six colonies appeared, including several that hadn't been counted before.

A penguin colony on the Antarctic coastline, spotted from above.

After zooming in on each colony and sharpening the images, the researchers used computers to count the penguins one by one. The challenge was for the computer to decide which dark pixels represent penguins, rather than shadows on the snow--or penguin poop. Author Peter Fretwell explains that in this method, "you 'train' the computer to recognize the pixels that are penguin, guano, snow or shadow by giving it sample pixels. The computer then goes away and splits the whole image into each pixel type."

Zooming in on a penguin colony and sharpening the image. I think I found the guano.

As long as the images have a high enough quality, Fretwell says, this technique is "usually quite accurate." Where the satellite pictures were more shadowy, penguin counts would be a little less certain. For some of the colonies, though, researchers were able to check their numbers against estimates others had made from the ground or from aerial photography.

And then there were the missing penguins. All the satellite images were taken during the breeding season, when emperor penguins congregate to create adorable new baby penguins. The new parents take turns babysitting: While one penguin takes care of the chick, the other goes out to sea and swallows lots of fish to regurgitate later. While the chicks are small, they spend most of their time balancing on top of their parents' feet to keep warm. Once the chicks are old enough to walk around on their own, both parents may leave to forage.

So for every individual counted in a satellite photo, the authors assumed there was a hidden chick and a second adult at sea hunting for food. (They were only interested in counting breeding adults, not the chicks, most of which will die.) Later in the season, some of the penguin pixels may have been kids instead of adults. But since a young penguin standing on the ice probably has two parents away foraging, the researchers figured that pixel still stood for two adult penguins.

The final count was about 595,000 adult emperor penguins in all of Antarctica. That's roughly the (human) population of Milwaukee. It's also substantially higher than the last estimate, which put the population between 270,000 and 350,000 adult birds.

The census could easily have overestimated or underestimated the true number of penguins. But, Peter Fretwell says, "The main thing is that this gives us an initial benchmark from which we can monitor emperor penguin numbers in the long term."

As climate change tightens its grip on every part of the globe--all the way to the poles--penguins will certainly see some changes around them. The sea ice along the coastlines they inhabit will disappear; shifting food webs may make their prey scarcer; and severe storms might become more frequent. Knowing how many emperor penguins are there now, and where to find their colonies, will help scientists monitor how the species is coping with the changes. We might even be able to keep them from becoming harder to find than Waldo.

Fretwell, P., LaRue, M., Morin, P., Kooyman, G., Wienecke, B., Ratcliffe, N., Fox, A., Fleming, A., Porter, C., & Trathan, P. (2012). An Emperor Penguin Population Estimate: The First Global, Synoptic Survey of a Species from Space PLoS ONE, 7 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033751 


Image: Close-up penguins from Hannes Grobe/AWI/Wikimedia Commons; satellite images from Fretwell et al.


Note for British readers: You may know Waldo as Wally.

Weightless Flies Have Wanderlust

To astronauts, science fiction writers, and entrepreneurs selling tickets on private space flights, the question of how weightlessness affects an organism is crucial. Our cells and organs are fine-tuned for life within the comfortable harness of Earth's gravity, so what happens to them when we're cut loose? There's at least one way to study this question without the prohibitive price tag of sending something all the way to space. A group of magnetically levitated fruit flies, though they couldn't report on their experience, seemed to find it just as good as the real thing.

University of Nottingham researcher Richard Hill and his colleagues used a powerful magnetic field to create a small, zero-gravity "arena" for fruit flies. Though magnetic fields attract magnetic substances such as iron, they also weakly repel certain other materials that are called "diamagnetic." These include water and organic matter--in other words, most of what's in a fruit fly. (Or in you. But there isn't a magnet big enough to try this trick on a person.)

By carefully aligning their disc-shaped fly arenas inside a superconducting solenoid magnet, the researchers were able to create environments of roughly 1g (equal to Earth's gravity), 2g (twice Earth's gravity), and 0g (whee!). They also left one fly dish outside the magnet, so they could compare the 1g environments and make sure the magnetic field didn't just make all the flies crazy.

Though the researchers provide many mathematical descriptions of their result, you can see it easily and immediately in this video. The 0g flies are on the top left.

Fruit flies' normal behavior is to roam, but the 0g flies are tearing around their dish.

Unlike human astronauts, who don't have much choice but to float, fruit flies have grippy little feet and the power of flight. So the weightless flies spent most of their time walking on the floor, walls, and ceiling as usual. (You might spot a few of them floating dazedly in the center of the dish, though.) What was unusual was the speed and amount that they traveled.

This might be simply because it's easier for flies walk without gravity. If it takes less energy than usual to walk, a fruit fly that's putting the normal amount of effort into moving around will find itself at a near-sprint. The 2g flies supported this theory by walking more sluggishly than usual.

Another possibility is that the flies' altered perception of gravity affected their behavior. Like human astronauts who go ricocheting off the walls for fun, the fruit flies might have noticed something was different and reacted to that feeling.

The finding that weightless flies speed-walk isn't new: Experiments done on the International Space Station and on the space shuttle Columbia found the same result. But replicating the finding here on Earth shows that it wasn't a fluke caused by some other factor, such as the trauma of takeoff. The flies' altered behavior was directly due to their low-gravity environment, making it relevant to humans and any other organisms we might carry into space.

Hill's study also shows that zero-gravity experiments, at least on very small organisms, don't have to be done in space. Studies done inexpensively here on Earth can provide real insights into life in outer space, and help create safer technologies for the lucky humans who get to go.

Hill, R., Larkin, O., Dijkstra, C., Manzano, A., de Juan, E., Davey, M., Anthony, P., Eaves, L., Medina, F., Marco, R., & Herranz, R. (2012). Effect of magnetically simulated zero-gravity and enhanced gravity on the walk of the common fruitfly Journal of The Royal Society Interface DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2011.0715 


Movie: Hill et al., data supplement; Photo: NASA

Cephalopods Not in Space

After 15 days in orbit, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour will be returning to solid ground tomorrow. Their mission has been notable for several reasons: It's the second-to-last NASA space shuttle mission ever, and the last trip Endeavour will take before heading to its retirement home in a Los Angeles museum. The commander of the mission is Mark Kelly, husband of almost-assassinated Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. The shuttle's crew successfully delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an extremely expensive piece of particle physics equipment, to the International Space Station.

And, of course, there are some squid on board. I wrote earlier about Squids in Space, a project to study whether friendly, glowing bacteria that live inside squid behave badly in a low-gravity environment.

I also asked you all to go to YouTube and vote for a question I'd submitted for the PBS News Hour's "You Talk to Endeavour" interview. There were more than 1,800 questions submitted by the public. My question was about the future: What will it mean to be an astronaut in 25 years or so, when today's teen space fanatics have joined the space program? I was hoping to use the answer in my magazine, and I got enough votes to stay near the top of the pack (thank you!). The interview took place on May 19. Hi, astronauts!

I think being in space gives people a slightly jolly appearance, since their cheeks float up into their faces a little bit.

Sadly, PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien--yes, like the Star Trek character--didn't include my question in his interview with the Endeavour crew. But he did have a nice conversation with the astronauts about the Mississippi River (they could see the floodwaters), Gabby Giffords (she watched the launch), and personal trinkets the astronauts take into space. 

He also asked the astronauts to do a group somersault. Judging by the speed with which they complied--the question was barely out of O'Brien's mouth before Mark Kelly went heels-over-head--I suspect they've practiced.

They may as well live it up now. Gravity returns tomorrow, along with the reality of the shuttle fleet's retirement. But the science experiments the crew helped with will carry on without them, including the AMS's cosmic-ray measuring and whatever happened to those squid. As for NASA, we'll see where it heads next.

Images: Google/PBS NewsHour/YouTube

Shine for the Camera!

Images of the earth at night may strike you as beautiful (if you're someone with a penchant for satellite photos) or distressing (if you're concerned about the effect of light pollution on migrating animals and/or you're a sea turtle). Some economists look at these photos and see tools for gathering data about other countries.

Previous research has found that luminosity--how much light a geographic area gives off at night--is a kind of shorthand for that area's economic productivity. Countries with a higher GDP (gross domestic product) have more stores that stay open at night, more cars on the road, and more electric lights guiding their citizens. More light means more business.

A new study by Yale economists Xi Chen and William Nordhaus asks just how useful this shorthand is. Can we use satellite photos to estimate the GDP of countries that don't collect or give out economic data? Haiti is one such country, lacking the resources for things like census collection. (You can see the clear dividing line in luminosity between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the picture below. Puerto Rico is the well-lit island all the way to the east.)

The researchers used satellite images taken between 1992 and 2008. One benefit of these data is that they consist of very high-resolution images, even though the satellites that took the pictures were actually studying cloud cover.

Looking both at entire countries and at smaller regions within countries, the authors created detailed measurements of luminosity and compared them to economic data. They found that looking at nighttime lights was, in fact, useful--under certain circumstances.

For countries that already provide plenty of economic data, luminosity doesn't add much to our understanding. And for countries with extremely low luminosity, there's not enough data to go on. But in general, for countries that don't share much information with us, nighttime lights can serve as a consistent proxy for economic productivity.

(North Korea, a country that certainly doesn't share much information with the outside world, is on the west side of the picture. It's the almost shockingly black space below China and above South Korea. Japan, all the way on the east, is bustling and bright.)

The study is a neat example of how much can be learned just by looking. It also demonstrates how resourceful researchers can use already-existing data sets to generate new information. When economists can use pictures from a cloud-measuring satellite to gather GDP data about other countries--instead of starting a new research project--it means we can save a bit of our own GDP for something else. 

UPDATE: In the comments, Shelby asked about those swirling lights between Korea and Japan. They didn't seem to be related to shipping, since the lights don't follow direct paths. I took a quick spin around the globe on Google Earth and didn't find the same light patterns anywhere else. But an internet search turned up the answer: squid fishing (the link is a PDF), which is an especially large industry in Japan. Fishermen work at night and use powerful lights to attract the squid. It all comes back to inkfish!

Images: Google Earth

Cephalopods in Space

The space shuttle Endeavour* is scheduled to blast off this afternoon at 3:47 EDT. It will be the second-to-last launch before NASA retires their shuttle fleet for good. The shuttle's commander, Mark Kelly, has spent much of the last few months at the bedside of his wife, senator Gabrielle Giffords, while she recovers from being shot in the head. It's been a long countdown, to say the least.

Now the shuttle is almost in the air, and along with its human passengers, it will be carrying some tentacled cargo: Squids in Space. No really, that's the official name of the project. (It's also referred to as Squid in Space, since the plural of "squid" is whatever you feel like.)

University of Florida scientist Jamie Foster is leading the project, which will study the development of squid embryos in the near-zero gravity of spaceflight. Her Squids in Space team also includes college students and high schoolers who, one hopes, appreciate that they are doing the coolest class project ever.

Foster's concern isn't really about the squid or squids, though; her research interest is bacteria. "Animals, including humans, are walking (or swimming) microbial ecosystems that interact daily with billions of microbes," she said in a press report. Humans' most important microbial interaction is with the bacteria that line our guts. But the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, utilizes bacteria differently: as soon as it hatches, it absorbs a glow-in-the-dark species of bacteria from the water around it. The bacteria, Vibrio fischeri, lend the squid their bioluminescence. The squid houses the bacteria in a light organ on its body, and their glow obscures the squid's silhouette to predators lurking below.

What happens when squid embryos hatch into a low-gravity environment? "The effects of microgravity on these mutualistic associations are yet unknown," Foster said. In space, "Do good bacteria go bad?" When applied to cephalopods on a shuttle, the question has a bit of a goofy, Snakes on a Plane feel. But it's a question with serious health implications for human astronauts--whatever they're doing after the shuttles are retired.

What will they be doing, anyway? I've especially wondered about this since so many MUSE readers are space aficionados. Actually, "aficionado" might be putting it gently. One reader wrote online that she's observing today's launch by plastering her school with posters, wearing a special shuttle-launch outfit, and handing out cards to her fellow high schoolers. Some of our readers want desperately to be involved in the space program when they're older, even though they have no idea what that program will look like in 20 or 30 years.

So I'm hoping to pose the question to Mark Kelly himself and put his answer in the magazine. PBS is doing a live interview with the shuttle commander on Monday, and they're inviting questions from the public through their YouTube channel. Some of the questions with the most votes will be read during the interview (leaving out, I assume, the many iterations of "have u ever seen a ufo on ur flights, thx, anonymous"). I posted my question online, and if you'd like to vote for it, you can find it by clicking here, scrolling down to the search bar on the right-hand side of the screen, and entering "muse." Voting ends tomorrow night.

Godspeed, astronauts and cephalopods!

UPDATE: Un-shockingly, NASA has had to delay the launch until at least Monday due to technical problems. (But you should still vote for my question. Please?)

UPDATE, MAY 2: Thanks so much for your votes! My question ended up as the top rated in the "Students and Classrooms" category, which included some cute video questions from kids (who will probably get chosen anyway) as well as some hard-hitting journalistic questions ("just plz hear me out was the landing on the moon fake im relly wANT TO KNOW"). Meanwhile, NASA has again delayed the shuttle launch, this time until at least May 8. The astronauts have been sent back to Houston for more training. No word yet on the squid.

*Why the British spelling that makes your computer send up squiggly red underlines everywhere? The shuttle, christened in a nationwide student contest, is named after a ship sailed by James Cook. Even NASA has found the British affectation tricky at times; they misspelled the name of the shuttle on a giant launchpad sign in 2007.

Photo: NASA FSGC

Lost and Found

Back in December, I reported that NASA had lost a solar sail in space. Good news: they found it again!


The solar sail started out tightly bundled inside a tiny satellite called NanoSail-D. Actually, NanoSail-D is a "nanosatellite," and it was launched inside a "microsatellite" called FASTSAT. At the beginning of December, like a parade of nesting dolls (or iPod iterations), the microsatellite was supposed to eject the nanosatellite, which was then supposed to eject and unfurl its cargo: a 100-square-meter reflective sail.


But when NanoSail-D failed to report back to scientists, they reluctantly admitted that something had gone wrong. Maybe the sail had tangled or the satellite had lost power. Whatever it was, they wouldn't be able to gather any data about the solar sail. This enticing technology, which might someday carry spacecraft through the sky, gathers its power from the sea of photons sent out by the sun.


On January 21, NASA announced that the missing satellite, and its sail, had turned up. After dawdling inside its parent satellite for weeks, NanoSail-D popped free on January 17, then opened its sail as planned. Now it's in orbit around Earth, where it will remain for 70 to 120 days before burning up in the atmosphere. You can track its orbit here and wave hello when it passes overhead. (Naturally, the satellite also has a Twitter feed.)


Science Guy and solar sail researcher Bill Nye congratulated the NanoSail-D team on the good news. But congratulations are also due to the ham radio club members who first heard the satellite beeping away up there.


Image: NASA.

I'll Take Penguins in Peril for 500, Alex. (a quiz)

Which of this week's science news stories did you catch? I know Watson would ace this quiz.

1. Distressingly, a long-term study has shown that king penguins with tracking bands attached their flippers are more likely to:

a. die

b. develop infections

c. become obese

d. abandon their young

2. Testing anxiety can cause students to underperform on exams. But researchers at the University of Chicago showed that in a high-stakes test environment, both high-school and college students did better on exams when they:
a. studied less
b. wrote about their feelings for 10 minutes before the test
c. ate chocolate before the test
d. watched a film about Stephen Hawking before test




3. Daily Double!! What is this?

a. a colony of bioluminescent bacteria
b. the surface of an exoplanet
c. a picture of the universe
d. part of Fermilab's particle accelerator, which will be shut down this year






4. At a 6,000-year-old site in an Armenian cave, researchers discovered the world's oldest:
a. zoo
b. flower garden
c. bakery
d. winery


5. In February, you'll be able to watch a Jeopardy match on TV between Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-playing robot, and two humans. Who won this week's demonstration match?
a. Human champion Ken Jennings, who won 74 games in a row in 2004
b. Human champion Brad Rutter, biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy
c. The computer
d. No one, because the match was suspended when Watson froze just before Double Jeopardy




Answers are in the comments.


Image: M. Blanton and the SDSS-III

Bees and Other Stocking Stuffers

Happy holidays! Inkfish found some exciting goodies in its many-tentacled stocking this year (thanks, tipsters!), including:


Toys for chimpanzees
While observing a chimpanzee community in Uganda for 14 years, researchers Sonya Kahlenberg and Richard Wrangham saw the animals use sticks in several different ways. They poked narrow sticks into holes to search for water or honey; they threatened other chimps with sticks, or used them for hitting or throwing. Perhaps most surprisingly, they saw some chimps carrying branches or chunks of bark in a way that suggested carrying a doll.

The behavior was seen most often in young female chimps. Because the chimps sometimes carried their sticks into their nests or played with them in a maternal way, the researchers think the stick-carrying behavior is really play-mothering. And since adults don't carry sticks, the young chimps in this community are learning the behavior from each other.

Coyote cops

The city of Chicago is perfectly aware that several dozen coyotes are roaming the parks and streets at night (even, in this video, trotting down the center of State Street, in the loop). In fact, the coyotes are out with the government's blessing. 

Cook County has put radio collars on more than 60 coyotes and allows them to run around Chicago without interference. This lets the Coyote Project gather data about how coyotes travel, while the animals themselves get to kill all the rats they want. And, um, only an occasional house cat.

Adorable pocket-sized scientists (with bonus bees!)

A group of 8- to 10-year-old students at Blackawton Primary School in the United Kingdom are probably the youngest researchers ever to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Teacher Dave Strudwick and neuroscientist Beau Lotto led the kids in an awesome classroom study about bees. The students wanted to study whether bees could use spatial reasoning to solve a puzzle. So they presented the bees with different arrangements of colored circles, some holding sugar water, and concluded that the bees did learn which patterns were the best "flowers" to visit.

The students' paper was published in Biology Letters. It includes many samples of the students' own language, such as the confusing statement, "We then put the tube with the bees in it into the school's fridge (and made bee pie :))...No bees were harmed during this procedure," as well as the heartening conclusion that "Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before." 

Volcanoes made out of ice
Based on images and data from Cassini, a spacecraft orbiting Saturn, scientists think that Titan (one of Saturn's moons) has Earth-like volcanoes on its surface. Unlike Earth volcanoes, though, these volcanoes might spew ice. Take that, Eyjafjallajokull!

A new family member
Did you ever ask your parents for a baby sister or brother for Christmas? How about a new cousin? In Denisova Cave in Siberia, researchers found a 30,000-year-old finger bone. They managed to sequence its DNA, and concluded that it belonged to a previously unknown human relative. 


These ancient people, the "Denisovans," were more closely related to Neanderthals than to Homo sapiens. Though the Denisovans lived at the same time as modern humans, they're long extinct, along with Neanderthals and the "hobbit" people that may have lived on the island of Flores. We still don't know what became of our ancient cousins, leaving us the only hominids around. But a tiny bit of Denisovan DNA seems to persist in the genomes of Melanesians--a gift they didn't know they'd gotten.




Images: cell.com, rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org, NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/University of Arizona

Lost: One Solar Sail

Last week, Japan's Akatsuki probe, which was supposed to swing into orbit around Venus, missed the planet entirely and kept right on going into space. Japanese scientists may get another shot in six years, when the hapless probe loops back around the sun. 


Any NASA scientists who were secretly entertained by Akatsuki's accident will be feeling pretty embarrassed this week, since NASA has now lost one of its own expensive metal boxes: in this case, a very tiny probe called NanoSail-D that held exciting cargo.


NanoSail-D was, as often described, about the size of a loaf of bread. It was launched from another satellite called FASTSAT, short for Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite. (Really, guys? "Fast" is both part of the name and part of the acronym? As long as you're taking liberties, why not FASTASTSAT?) On December 6, NanoSail-6 seemed to successfully launch from the larger satellite. 


After three days in space, giving the miniature satellite time to get away from FASTSAT, NanoSail-D was supposed to deploy its fragile cargo: a square sail, 10 meters by 10 meters and made of a whisper-thin reflective polymer. It was a solar sail, designed to be powered by the sun. But on December 10, NASA acknowledged that they'd lost contact with the tiny satellite and its sail.


NASA isn't sure what happened--the sail may have gotten tangled as it tried to unfurl, or the satellite may have never launched from its parent satellite in the first place. Or (more mundanely) the satellite's battery may have died.


It's a disappointing development in a fascinating field. A solar sails is meant to be propelled only by photons from the sun. The energy of the photons hitting the big, ultra-light sail gives it momentum. The contribution of each photon is unimaginably slight. But because the sun is always sending out photons, the sail's acceleration is constant. According to the Planetary Society, another group working on solar sails, this means a solar sail could hypothetically reach 3700 kilometers per hour (2300 mph) after 12 days in space. This is the technology that might take us to Mars, or beyond.


Planetary Society Vice President Bill Nye (yes, the Science Guy) says: "We can sail by starlight. How cool is that?" Pretty cool--as long as we can keep track of our ships.


Image: NASA

Chocolate Sea Worms (a quiz)

Sharpen those digital pencils--it's quiz day!


1. The scientists who discovered this bizarre new species (above) swimming thousands of meters under the Pacific Ocean appropriately dubbed it the:
a) squiderpillar
b) squidworm
c) Worminator
d) tentipede


2. In one of these M&M-eating studies I am somehow never invited to take part in, researchers discovered that subjects ate fewer M&Ms after they:
a) saw pictures of insects
b) ate an insect
c) imagined being obese
d) imagined eating a bunch of M&Ms


3. Back in 2003, controversial "hobbit" bones were discovered on the island of Flores, leading some scientists to believe that a miniature hominid race once lived there. Researchers have now found evidence that these hobbit people (if they existed) lived alongside:
a) dinosaurs
b) regular-sized people
c) giant storks
d) miniature elephants


4. In a meta-analysis (a study of other studies), researchers found that a person's risk of death from several common cancers can be lowered by a daily dose of:
a) aspirin
b) fish oil
c) vitamin D
d) chocolate


5. In May, Japanese researchers launched a probe called Akatsuki toward Venus. Akatsuki was supposed to spend two years orbiting Venus and sending back data about its atmosphere and weather. On Monday, the probe:
a) crashed into the surface of Venus
b) was put out of commission by space debris
c) melted in the planet's intense heat
d) missed Venus entirely






Answers are in the comments. Image: Laurence Madin/WHOI.