Ahira's Hangar

New Horizons rockets to Pluto
Journey to planet will take almost 10 years

Thursday, January 19, 2006; Posted: 4:39 p.m. EST (21:39 GMT)

New Horizons lifts off Thursday afternoon atop an Atlas V rocket bound for Pluto.

MISSION TO PLUTO
The New Horizons mission to Pluto cost approximately $700 million.


The spacecraft should reach the Earth's moon in nine hours, Jupiter in 13 months and Pluto in almost 10 years.


The craft will produce less energy than is used by two 100-watt lightbulbs.


The probe will use Jupiter as a slingshot to reach the outer edge of the solar system.


New Horizons has two cameras named Ralph and Alice for the bickering couple from the classic TV show "The Honeymooners."


Discovered in 1930, Pluto is the smallest planet in the solar system and the only one classified as an "ice dwarf." It has three moons.


Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt, a mysterious region that lies beyond Neptune at the outer limits of the planetary system. Scientists believe the Kuiper Belt holds clues as to how the outer solar system was formed.

Source: AP/NASA
(CNN) -- NASA's New Horizons spacecraft roared into space Thursday afternoon bound for the planet Pluto. The spacecraft is the fastest ever launched, according to NASA.

New Horizons lifted off atop a Lockheed Martin Atlas V rocket at 2:00 p.m. ET from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to begin a 10-year, 3-billion-mile mission.

"New Horizons spacecraft is on its way to the very edge of our solar system," said Atlas control.

Thursday's launch comes after two scrubbed attempts earlier this week -- one due to weather, the other because of a power outage. NASA had until February 14 to launch the probe.

About 43 minutes into launch, the spacecraft seperated successfuly from the rocket's third stage -- mission controlers cheered the news.

New Horizons will reach a speed of about 47,000 miles per hour (75,600 kph), more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet. According to The Physics Factbook, a bullet from a large-caliber rifle travels at about 1,500 meters or 5,000 (1,500 meters) feet per second -- about 3,400 miles per hour (5,400 kph).

It took Apollo 11 three days to reach the moon in 1969. New Horizons will fly by it about nine hours and reach Jupiter in a little more than a year, the space agency said.

If all goes as planned, it will then execute a "gravity assist" maneuver, slingshotting around Jupiter to pick up speed.

The maneuver will increase New Horizons' speed to 21 kilometers per second -- 47,000 mph, NASA said.

From there it will travel nine more years in more or less a straight line to Pluto.

The probe, about the size of a baby grand piano, will capture the first up-close imagery of Pluto, its moons and a region of the outer solar system called the Kuiper Belt.

The 10 years it will take New Horizons to reach Pluto will be a long wait for the scientists and engineers who have designed the mission, but they say the payoff will be worth it.

"The New Horizons mission is going somewhere no mission has gone before," project scientist Hal Weaver said. "This is the frontier of planetary science."

The Kuiper Belt is a region of icy, rocky bodies that populate a part of the solar system beyond the planet Neptune.

"It is fantastically interesting to me to have a chance maybe within my lifetime for scientists to see up close what those objects look like and to begin our reconnaissance of that region of space," NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said Tuesday morning.

Scientists think the bodies are debris left over from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. Researchers theorized for decades that such an area probably existed in the solar system, but the first Kuiper Belt object was not identified until 1992.

Since then, hundreds have been found, some of them quite large. Planetary astronomers now believe Pluto is a Kuiper Belt object.

"It's the capstone of the initial reconnaissance of the planets," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern said. "It's something that will go down in history, not just for the way it changes textbooks, but for the sort of society we are, that we do these things of lasting historic importance, that we explore beyond our own world."

Weaver said, "This is one of the most important regions of the solar system. It hasn't been explored yet, and New Horizons is going to be the first mission to go out there and look at it up close and personal."

Plutonium to indirectly power craft
With the spacecraft containing 24 pounds of radioactive plutonium-238, the New Horizons launch is somewhat controversial.

The craft is not directly nuclear-powered, but the decay of the plutonium generates heat to fuel a battery, which in turn will power the probe as it moves far away from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system.

Critics have expressed concern that an accident on launch could spread deadly plutonium over a wide swath of central Florida.

In an environmental impact statement NASA was required to file before making final flight plans, the space agency indicated that a 1-in-620 chance exists of an accident on liftoff that would release plutonium into the environment.

As a worst-case scenario, NASA estimated the chances at "1 in 1.4 million to 1 in 18 million" that an "extremely unlikely launch area accident" could release up to 2 percent, or about half a pound, of the plutonium on board the spacecraft.

NASA critic Karl Grossman, author of "The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet," said he doesn't agree with NASA's interpretation of the risks.

"Is NASA again crossing its fingers and hoping?" he asked. "If it's 2 percent or it's 6 percent or if it's 20 percent or if it's 100 percent, when you're talking about plutonium, you're talking about the most toxic radioactive substance known."

New Horizons scientists say the benefits of the project outweigh the risks associated with launch.

"In order for us to continue our exploration of the universe, we have to do these kinds of things," Weaver said.

"The exploration of space, the detailed study of the planets, including Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, are going to be some of the things that people look back on as the achievements of our civilization."

Stern added, "I wouldn't be bringing my friends and family, my children if I thought they were at serious risk."

CNN's Kate Tobin contributed to this report.

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Web site tracks Augustine's every move
Volcano most heavily instrumented in Alaska

Friday, February 10, 2006; Posted: 10:47 a.m. EST (15:47 GMT)
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- From his home in Nanwalek, Vince Evans can stare across the water at Augustine Volcano as it pumps out clouds of ash and steam, but like many residents in the isolated village, Evans prefers to check the Internet for the latest on the erupting island mount.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory's (AVO) popular Web site lets the public track Augustine's activity, from live earthquake data to hourly updates on the blasts of ash and rocky pyroclastic flows that have rumbled down the snowy volcano since it began erupting in mid-January.

"When I wake up, I turn it on and keep track of Augustine through the night," said Evans, a 43-year-old health practitioner in the south-central Alaska community.

With a network that includes seismic stations, cameras and Global Positioning System receivers, Augustine is the most heavily instrumented volcano in the state.

In the last decade, scientists have concentrated equipment on the uninhabited island because it is a short flight from Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula and has less vegetation, ice and snow than other nearby volcanoes in the Alaska Range.

Because of the Web site, residents of remote Alaska communities like Nanwalek can make better decisions about whether to shut down schools, carry dust masks to church or take the time to cover heating vents with pantyhose to filter volcanic ash.

"We can go online and see the wind direction and see when ash is going to fall," Evans said. "Before, it just happened, now there's more preparation."

The Web site provides information Evans did not have during a major eruption 20 years ago, when a dark cloud filled with ash and spiked with lightning headed across Cook Inlet toward Nanwalek, a 200-person village only reachable by plane or boat.

"We just went home and watched it through our window," Evans said. "Information we just got through TV and radio."

Augustine dusted small communities in south-central Alaska with extremely light ashfall during two series of eruptions in January. Alaska Airlines, the state's largest carrier, grounded dozens of flights during one day of ash explosions. The string of sporadic eruptions could go on for months, scientists said.

The wealth of data, combined with easy communication through the Internet, has allowed the public to glean more timely and useful information about Augustine's eruptions than those of any other volcano in the state's past.

"No erupting volcano in Alaska has ever been this closely monitored before," said Game McGimsey, a volcanologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The observatory's Web site has tallied about 158 million hits this year, said Seth Snedigar, an analyst programmer for the state Department of Geological and Geophysical Surveys.

Regularly updated Web camera images of the 4,134-foot volcano receive the most mouse clicks, he said. One camera sits on Augustine's eastern flank, while another records the volcano from the town of Homer, 75 miles northeast across Cook Inlet.

Observatory scientists also use the site as a public journal of the research trips they take to the island during lulls between explosions, as well as aerial photos of Augustine. Data collection also is safer for scientists now that volcanoes have more instruments on site.

"The public can see almost everything we see," McGimsey said. "Even the seismic data is exactly what's posted in our operation room right now."

People can also e-mail their own observations or ask questions through the site. Hundreds have written from all 50 states and a host of foreign countries and scientists have replied to every missive. Many Alaskans have mailed ash samples to the observatory after following the site's step-by-step guide on ash collection.

Improvements in volcano monitoring have helped the Federal Aviation Administration and airlines make more accurate decisions on flying restrictions during a volcanic eruption.

"The FAA and folks having to make the call to delay flights can almost do it in real time," said FAA spokesman Allen Kenitzer.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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The last days of Kennewick Man

Monday, February 27, 2006; Posted: 4:07 p.m. EST (21:07 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kennewick Man was laid to rest alongside a river more than 9,000 years ago, buried by other people, a leading forensic scientist said Thursday.

The skeleton, one of the oldest and most complete ever found in North America, has been under close analysis since courts sided with researchers in a legal battle with Indian tribes in the Northwest who wanted the remains found near the Columbia River reburied without study.

Douglas Owsley, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, discussed his findings in remarks prepared for delivery Thursday evening at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle.

"We know very little about this time period," Owsley said in a telephone interview. "This is a rare opportunity to try and reconstruct the life story of this man. ... This is his opportunity to tell us what life was like during that time."

Researchers have disagreed over whether Kennewick Man was buried by other people or swept up in a flood and encased in sediment.

Owsley concluded the man was deliberately buried, between two and three feet deep, his body placed in the grave, head slightly higher than feet, hands placed at his sides.

The location was riverside, with the body parallel to the river and head pointing upstream.

Using an industrial CT scanner, Owsley was able to study the skeleton in fine sections and also get a better look at a spear or dart point imbedded in Kennewick Man's hip.

The point has previously been described as a Cascade point, typical of the region, but Owsley said that is not the case. Cascade points tend to have two pointed ends and are sometimes serrated, he said, while the point in Kennewick Man has a pointed end and a stem.

The spear or dart entered the man from the front, moving downward at a 77-degree angle, Owsley said. Previous analysis had indicated it might have hit from the back, he noted.

The point was not the cause of death, he said, saying, "This is a healed injury."

"There was no clear indication in the skeleton of cause of death," Owsley said. Kennewick Man had undergone "a lot of injuries, this guy was tough as nails."

There are three types of fractures in the bones, Owsley said, ones the man suffered in his lifetime and which had healed; fractures that occurred after burial from aging of the bones and the ground settling, and breaks that occurred when the skeleton was unearthed.

A team of 20 forensic scientists has been studying the skeleton, he said, and have concluded that the skull doesn't match those of Indian tribes living in the area.

"We know very little about this time period. Who the people were that were the earliest people that came to America," Owsley said. "We are finding out they were coming thousands of years earlier than we had thought," arriving not just over the Bering Strait but by boats and other means.

"This is a very rare discovery. You could count on your fingers the number of relatively complete skeletons from this time period," Owsley said.

Following discovery of the bones in 1996, the Umatilla, Yakama, Nez Perce and Colville tribes urged that the skeleton be reburied without scientific study. They argued that the bones were covered under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Scientists sued for a chance to study the remains and a federal court ruled there was no link between the skeleton and the tribes.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Mars orbiter closes in on Red Planet

Monday, February 27, 2006; Posted: 10:46 a.m. EST (15:46 GMT)

NASA's orbiter is on a search for evidence that water persisted on the surface of Mars for a long time.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is headed into a perilous phase after a seven-month journey from Earth, aiming to start looping around the Red Planet on March 10, space agency officials said on Friday.

If it manages to reach its planned orbit, a process that will take another seven months, the spacecraft could collect unprecedented data about Earth's next-door planetary neighbor, which could help scientists determine where to land the next Mars rovers and even to make preliminary plans for a human landing site.

"It's going to be difficult to get it into orbit," Doug McCuistion, who heads the NASA Mars Exploration Program, said at a briefing. "Mars is hard, Mars can be unpredictable, but we've got a good team here."

NASA has only a 65 percent success rate in getting space probes to orbit Mars, as opposed to a more than 80 percent success rate in managing to land spacecrafts on its surface, he said.

The tricky part is getting the orbiter to slow down enough to be captured by the planet's gravity.

"We're getting into the dangerous portion of the mission," said James Graf, the project's manager.

At just 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) from Mars, the orbiter has cruised for nearly 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) since its launch on August 12, 2005.

As it approaches the planet, controllers on Earth expect a signal from the spacecraft indicating a 27-minute engine burn meant to slow it down and let Martian gravity capture it.

At 21 minutes after the engine burn begins, the spacecraft will go behind Mars and be out of radio contact with Earth, and stay that way for another half hour, Graf said.

If this procedure -- known as aerobraking -- works, the spacecraft will be in an extremely elliptical orbit around Mars, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) at the closest point and about 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometers) at the farthest.

Over the next six months, the spacecraft will use aerobraking and the drag of the Martian atmosphere to reel itself in from an elongated 35-hour orbit to a nearly circular two-hour orbit. When that is accomplished, scientific operations can begin.

The orbiter's six scientific instruments are designed to collect more data than all previous Mars probes combined, including information on the planet's weather, color images and even radar to look deep below the Martian surface.

Since NASA's exploration of Mars has consistently focused on the search for signs of water -- a requirement for Earth-type life -- the orbiter's instruments will be able to look for any sub-surface clues to this as well, which could give future rovers a place to start looking.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Scientists: T. rex ferocious killer, or bad dancer?

Friday, February 17, 2006; Posted: 10:58 a.m. EST (15:58 GMT)
Was Tyrannosaurus rex a lumbering scavenger or a swift and agile predator?

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (Reuters) -- New methods of analyzing fossils have scientists arguing more than ever about whether Tyrannosaurus rex was a lumbering scavenger or a swift and agile predator.

A CAT scan study of Tyrannosaurus rex skulls shows it had the inner ear of a much smaller, swifter predator. But a close look inside its thigh bone shows it had the ungainly body of a heavier creature.

"I think what we have to do now is re-model dinosaurs," said Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University's College of Osteopathic Medicine and colleagues used computed tomography, a type of X-ray also known as CT or CAT scans, to look at the skulls of more than 100 dinosaur fossils.

"It turns out that inner ear provides some very important clues about behaviors (and) also about their relative movements -- how agile they were or how stately they were," Witmer told a news conference at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis.

"The hearing part is long and delicate in T. rex, suggesting that it could potentially discriminate sounds effectively and that hearing was important behaviorally."

In comparison, Diplodocus, a large, four-legged herbivore, had a smaller ear canal. "Dinosaurs are famous for their small brains and Diplodocus is a great example of that," Witmer said. "It has an ear that reflects that. It is a very stubby or dumpy-looking ear."

The inner ear also gives clues as to posture and shows that T. rex held its head in an alert, forward-looking position, while Diplodocus looked down, presumably to graze.

And T. rex seems to have an enlarged brain region that is associated with a sense of smell in modern animals, Witmer said.

"This is interesting because T. rex was a gigantic animal. T. rex actually had some very heightened senses," Witmer said. "It also strongly employed relatively rapid turning movements of its eyes and head."

But Horner found evidence that T. rex was not as lithe as such measurements would suggest. His team has been cutting into the fossilized leg bones of the dinosaurs, which lived during the last part of the Cretaceous period, 85 million to 65 million years ago, in what is now western North America.

They found soft bone tissue and within it, the nuchal ligament, which connects the vertebrae. "We took a microsection through the bone and there it was -- soft tissue," Horner said in an interview. "We were surprised."

The structure appeared to have been very stiff, Horner said.

"I am not arguing with Larry (Witmer) on his information about the ear. But it is really odd that we have an animal that looks like it should be agile but isn't. It is one of those puzzles that we have with dinosaurs."

Horner believes that T. rex was a scavenger, in part because its fossil skeletons are so common. "Top predators are rare," Horner said.

And it had bone-crushing teeth.

"If you are an animal that does the killing, you don't need to crush bone. You just eat the meat and leave," Horner added.

Perhaps T. rex was a predator as a juvenile and turned into a scavenger as it aged, Horner suggested.

"I don't have any problem with it moving its head around," he added.

But Horner, one of the world's leading experts on dinosaurs, said there is no evidence they were ever as fast or agile as, say, a modern ostrich.

"I don't think T. rex could dance, he said. "It couldn't jump up and down."

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Scientists: Pluto might have rings
By Ker Than
SPACE.com


Wednesday, February 22, 2006; Posted: 2:47 p.m. EST (19:47 GMT)
(SPACE.com) -- The two moons discovered around Pluto last year were likely formed from the same giant impact that created the planet's much larger satellite, Charon, scientists say.

The idea suggests that other Kuiper Belt Objects might also harbor multiple satellites and raises the possibility that Pluto is encircled by rings fashioned from debris ejected from the surface of the tiny moons.

The two moons, called P1 and P2 for now, were discovered in May 2005 using the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists now think the two moons are roughly 37 and 31 miles (60 and 50 kilometers) in diameter. Charon has an estimated diameter of about 750 miles (1,200 kilometers).

The moons' tiny sizes raise the possibility that even more satellites might be discovered around Pluto in the future.

"The very small masses of P1 and P2 relative to Charon beg the question of why ... there are not more small satellites of Pluto," a team of researchers write in the February 23 issue of the journal Nature. "Perhaps there are other, still fainter satellites that escaped detection."

Because of how P1 and P2 move, scientists think they were formed from the same collision that, according to the leading theory, spawned Charon.

"The small moons are in circular orbits in the same orbital plane as Charon, and they are also in, or very near, orbital resonance with Charon," said study leader Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

For every twelve orbits Charon makes around Pluto, P1 makes almost two orbits and P2 completes nearly three. This ratio would likely not be constant if P1 and P2 were merely passing objects captured by Pluto's gravity. The most likely explanation for this arrangement, scientists figure, is that all three moons were born of the same event.

Collisions between large objects helped shape many aspects of our solar system. The Moon, for example, is believed to have formed when a Mars-sized object slammed into Earth 4 billion years ago. The crash that's thought to have created Pluto's moons is believed to have occurred at around the same time.

Scientists will get a closer look at Pluto and its moons when NASA's recently launched New Horizon mission reaches the system in 2015. (Full story)

Scientists have determined that up to a fifth or more of known Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs)harbor satellites or belong to binary systems; the new modeling suggests that there could also be numerous systems consisting of three, four or even more bodies grouped together.

But finding these systems is difficult because of the distances involved. The Kuiper belt is a region of space populated by asteroids and comets and other rocky, icy bodies; it is located beyond Neptune, between 30 and 50 AU from Earth. One AU is equal to the distance from the Earth to the sun.

"Finding small satellites around KBOs is difficult because their large distances from the Sun makes them appear very faint," said study team member Andrew Steffl of SwRI.

However, KBOs and their satellites are occasionally ejected from the Kuiper Belt and get flung closer to the Sun, where they become easier to spot. Steffl said a good way to determine whether KBOs with multiple satellites are unusual or the norm is to search for satellites around these outcasts, which are known as "Centaurs."

"We hope to use Hubble to search for faint moons around some of them," Steffl said.

The discovery of P1 and P2 also raises the intriguing possibility that impact debris from the small moons is captured by Pluto's gravity and coalescing into rings or even arcs around the tiny planet. If confirmed, it would be the first example of a ring system around a solid body rather than a gas giant planet.



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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Scientists uncover lost civilization

Tuesday, February 28, 2006; Posted: 3:43 p.m. EST (20:43 GMT)


Researches believe they have unearthed the remains of the lost civilization of Tambora.

NARRAGANSETT, Rhode Island (AP) -- Scientists have found what they believe are traces of the lost Indonesian civilization of Tambora, which was wiped out in 1815 by the biggest volcanic eruption in recorded history.

Mount Tambora's cataclysmic eruption on April 10, 1815, buried the inhabitants of Sumbawa Island under searing ash, gas and rock and is blamed for an estimated 88,000 deaths. The eruption was at least four times more powerful than Mount Krakatoa's in 1883.

Guided by ground-penetrating radar, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and the Indonesian Directorate of Volcanology recently dug in a gully where locals had found ceramics and bones.

They unearthed the remains of a thatch house, pottery, bronze and the carbonized bones of two people, all in a layer of sediment dating to the eruption.

University of Rhode Island volcanologist Haraldur Sigurdsson, the leader of the expedition, estimated that 10,000 people lived in the town when the volcano erupted in a blast that dwarfed the one that buried the Roman town of Pompeii.

The eruption shot 400 million tons (363 million metric tons) of sulfuric gases into the atmosphere, causing global cooling and creating what historians call "The Year Without a Summer." Farms in Maine suffered crop-killing frosts in June, July and August. In France and Germany, grape and corn crops died, or the harvests were delayed.

The civilization on Sumbawa Island has intrigued researchers ever since Dutch and British explorers visited in the early 1800s and were surprised to hear a language that did not sound like any other spoken in Indonesia, Sigurdsson said. Some scholars believe the language more closely resembled those spoken in Indochina. But not long after Westerners first encountered Tambora, the society was destroyed.

"The explosion wiped out the language. That's how big it was," Sigurdsson said. "But we're trying to get these people to speak again, by digging."

Some of what the researchers found may suggest Tambora's inhabitants came from Indochina or had commercial ties with the region, Sigurdsson said. For example, ceramic pottery uncovered during the dig resembles that common to Vietnam.

John Miksic, an archaeologist at the National University of Singapore, has seen video of the dig and said he believes Sigurdsson's team did find a dwelling destroyed by the eruption.

But he doubts the Tamborans were from Indochina or spoke a language from that area. If Vietnamese-style ceramics reached the island, it was probably through trade with intermediaries, Miksic said.

During the dig, Sigurdsson's team found the charred skeleton of a woman who was most likely in her kitchen. A metal machete and a melted glass bottle lay nearby. The remains of another person were found just outside what was probably the front door.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Mexico's Mayan underworld wonder

Monday, March 20, 2006; Posted: 10:57 p.m. EST (03:57 GMT)
TULUM, Mexico (Reuters) -- The ancient Mayan people once believed that Mexico's jungle sinkholes containing crystalline waters were the gateway to the underworld and the lair of a surly rain god who had to be appeased with human sacrifices.

Now, the "cenotes", deep sinkholes in limestone that have pools at the bottom, are yielding scientific discoveries including possible life-saving cancer treatments.

Divers are dipping into the cenotes, which stud the Yucatan peninsula, to explore a vast underground river system.

Hefting air tanks, guidelines and waterproof lamps, they have so far mapped 650 kilometers (405 miles) of channels that form part of a huge subterranean river delta flowing into the Caribbean sea, and they are only just starting.

Scientists investigating the network of caverns and galleries, formed by rainwater passing through porous limestone, have found a wealth of archaeological relics and prehistoric animal bones.

They also have identified dozens of new aquatic species specially adapted to the extreme environmental conditions which could have medical applications.

In the Riviera Maya, a strip of Caribbean tourist resorts including the world-famous archaeological site of Tulum, there are more than 500 cenotes. Some are open to the jungle, while others have tiny eye-like holes letting in sunlight and jungle roots.

Their waters have filtered through sponge-like limestone which leaves them so transparent that divers say they feel like they are floating in space. The pools range in depth from a few feet (a meter) to an abyss where explorers have still not touched bottom at over 500 feet (150 m.)

"It is proving to be a totally unique environment," said marine biologist Tom Iliffe of Texas A&M University. "We are finding things down there including forms of life that no one had ever guessed existed, and there is a lot more work to be done."

Blind fish and mammoths
The Yucatan sits on a limestone plateau where rainwater percolates down to nonporous rock below ground. Over millions of years, underground river systems have formed that flow out to the sea through caves.

The region's 7,000 to 8,000 cenotes were formed when caves collapsed in on themselves. The resulting sinkholes became a vital water source and a focus for Mayan sacrifices to honor Chac, the volatile, crocodile-like rain deity.

In recent years, biologists delving into the underlying river systems, which unlike the sinkholes are jet-black because of the lack of sunlight, have identified 40 entirely new species, mostly blind shrimps and fish which have adapted to life in the system's harsh conditions, where dissolved oxygen and food are scarce.

Among the startling discoveries are microorganisms that live in the transitional zone where the fresh water rivers flow out into the Caribbean, and salt-water sponges which may contain anti-tumor compounds.

"Research is at an early stage, but it is quite possible that the bacteria and sponges may have potential biomedical applications including cures for cancer," Iliffe told Reuters in a telephone interview. "There is a great deal of scientific excitement about it."

Other finds made by divers roaming the deep, dark corridors include the bones of giant jungle sloths, rabbits and even mammoths dating back beyond the last ice age.

"When you come up and tell people there are elephants down there they really think you've gone crazy," said Sam Meacham, an underwater explorer and conservationist.

Threatened by development
In the past three decades the population of the Riviera Maya has soared 10-fold to close to 1 million people as tourists from the United States, Europe and Mexico flock to the palm-fringed strip to soak up the sun.

Environmentalists say that the explosive development has been only patchily regulated and warn that waste produced by resort hotels and service towns in the area is already polluting the complex underground oasis.

"It's totally the Wild West, when what is needed is carefully planned, sustainable development," said Meacham, who runs the Quintana Roo Water Systems Research Center, a local non-profit group that raises consciousness about water issues in schools.

Water conservation will be a key issue when ministers, hydrologists and environmentalists from around the world meet at the World Water Forum in Mexico City from March 16-22.

Meacham says human sewage is pumped deep underground, and that at least one water system in the Yucatan has been polluted with fecal matter. The impact of 250 tonnes of trash dumped in landfills each day has yet to be evaluated.

The hundreds of tourists who dive and snorkel each day in any of a dozen cenotes and caves open to the public are also unwittingly destroying the ecosystems before they can be properly understood, Iliffe says.

"Fish are following the divers into the caves and they gobble up all the life, and they (the caves) are left biologically sterile," he said.

"When you consider that they could possibly lead to a cure for cancer, it is essential to conserve them."

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Fabled ivory-billed continues to spark debate

Thursday, March 16, 2006; Posted: 3:48 p.m. EST (20:48 GMT)


The ivory-billed woodpecker once spread across bottomland hardwoods and mountain pine forests of the southeastern U.S.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Was it or was it not an ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird already declared extinct, that was reported spotted in an American swamp?

Experts are still arguing a year later, as bird fanciers flock to the part of the state of Arkansas where the bird was said to have been seen and heard.

The issue takes wing again in the Friday's issue of the journal Science, with one set of researchers arguing that the bird videotaped last year probably was a common pileated woodpecker and another group stoutly defending the identification as an ivory-bill.

It's an important distinction. The ivory-billed woodpecker had been thought extinct, and if one is alive, there probably are more.

Identification of the bird in the videotape as an ivory-billed woodpecker "rests on mistaken interpretations of the bird's posture," according to a research team headed by David A. Sibley of Concord, Massachusetts.

In addition, they contend that "several features visible in the video contradict identification as a typical ivory-billed woodpecker, and that other features support identification as a pileated woodpecker."

Not so fast, say John W. Fitzpatrick and colleagues, responding that their critics are misinterpreting the under-wing pattern of a pileated woodpecker, are using inaccurate models of takeoff and flight behavior and are mistaking "video artifacts" as feather patterns.

Sibley, a bird illustrator, said he was at first excited by the announcement that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been sighted and even went to Arkansas hoping to see one.

After returning home he looked again at the video. "It struck me, watching it then, it could be a pileated woodpecker. I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach," he said in a telephone interview.

He then analyzed the video closely along with audio tapes and other sighting reports with his co-authors and concluded that the evidence was not sufficient to prove the bird was an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The quality of the video is not good enough to see clearly the white stripes on the bird's back that would mark it as ivory-billed, and the large amounts of white seen while it is flying can be accounted for by the underside of the wings of a pileated woodpecker, they wrote.

Ivory-billed woodpeckers may well exist in the area, they said, but the available evidence does not prove it.

Fitzpatrick, of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, responded that the angle of the video shows white plumage on the upper surface of the wings that is unlike the pattern on a pileated woodpecker, and the black trailing edge of the pileated wing is absent from the bird they found.

In addition, Fitzpatrick and colleagues said data on the wingspan and flight characteristics of the bird point to it being an ivory-billed woodpecker.

The identification of the bird also was questioned last year, prompting the Cornell University researchers to provide audio tapes of the bird for a group of ornithologists in California.

The recordings included the unusual double-rap sounds that ivory-bills produce as well as distinctive nasal sounds they have been known to make.

Whatever the outcome of the debate, the search for the woodpecker has been a boon for the Big Woods section of Arkansas, with tourist business up an estimated 30 percent and shops selling woodpecker memorabilia.

Indeed, Brinkley, Arkansas, even held a woodpecker celebration in February.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Study: Plants helped ants evolve

Friday, April 7, 2006; Posted: 11:13 a.m. EDT (15:13 GMT)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Ants evolved far earlier than previously believed, as far back as 140 million to 168 million years ago -- and they have plants to thank for their diversity, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

A team at Harvard University who used a genetic clock to reconstruct the history of ants found the ant family first arose more than 40 million years earlier than previously thought, but did not diversify into different genera and species until flowering plants came onto the scene.

The study sheds light on one of the most important and numerous animals, which includes hundreds of different species.

"We estimate that ant diversification took off approximately 100 million years ago, along with the rise of flowering plants, the angiosperms," Naomi Pierce, a professor of biology who led the study, said in a statement.

"These plants provided ants with new habitats both in the forest canopy and in the more complex leaf litter on the forest floor, and the herbivorous insects that evolved alongside flowering plants provided food for ants."

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers said they reconstructed the ant family tree using DNA sequencing of six genes from 139 ant genera, encompassing 19 of 20 ant subfamilies around the world.

Such "molecular clocks" are widely used, alongside fossil and other evidence, to determine how old species are. They work on the basis that DNA mutates at a steady and calculable rate.

"Ants are a dominant feature of nearly all terrestrial ecosystems, and yet we know surprisingly little about their evolutionary history: the major groupings of ants, how they are related to each other, and when and how they arose," said graduate student Corrie Moreau.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Orbiter photos show surface of Mars

Sunday, April 9, 2006; Posted: 3:42 p.m. EDT (19:42 GMT)

Craters and valleys are seen in this false-color image taken 1,549 miles above the surface of Mars.
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Scientists have processed more than a dozen new photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the Red Planet last month, including its first color image.

The crisp test images released Friday revealed pocked craters, carved gullies and wind-formed dunes in Mars' southern hemisphere.

The diverse geologic features show the importance of water, wind and meteor impacts in shaping the Martian surface, scientists said.

The orbiter, the most advanced spacecraft ever sent to another planet, reached Mars on March 10 and slipped into an elliptical orbit. (Full story)

Over the next six months, it will dip into the upper atmosphere to shrink its orbit, lowering itself to 158 miles above the surface.

Last month, the orbiter beamed back the first view of Mars from an altitude of 1,547 miles.

Those first test images were meant to calibrate the high-resolution camera aboard the spacecraft.

The latest images were taken at the same time, but scientists spent several weeks processing them.

The Reconnaissance Orbiter will begin collecting data in November, and scientists expect the resolution of those images to be nine times higher.

The $720 million mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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New rings found around Uranus

Thursday, April 6, 2006; Posted: 4:25 p.m. EDT (20:25 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two outer rings, one red, the other blue, have been observed around the distant planet Uranus.

While Uranus had been known to have inner rings of neutral color, the newly discovered outer rings show color contrasts that researchers think are caused by light reflected off particles that differ in size from one ring to the other.

The outermost ring is only the second blue ring to have been observed, a team led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, reports in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Also blue is Saturn's outermost ring, the researchers said. And they noted that each of the known blue rings has a moon embedded within it, while the red rings do not.

They speculated that the moons swept up larger pieces of debris, leaving only dust and tiny items that reflect more blue light than the red ring, which could have larger pieces of debris.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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NASA to crash space probe into moon
Search for water intended to help future human outposts

Monday, April 10, 2006; Posted: 7:40 p.m. EDT (23:40 GMT)
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA plans to crash a space probe into the moon in 2009 -- a collision so violent it will be visible on Earth through a telescope, the space agency said Monday.

The moon crash, part of a larger mission that includes a lunar orbiter, is a quest for ice. Water is the key ingredient for supporting future human outposts on the moon, a goal of the Bush administration.

NASA scientists say the collision should excavate a hole about a third the size of a football field and hurl a plume of debris into space.

After the crash of the space probe, the mother ship that released it will fly through the plume and look for traces of water ice or vapor -- similar to NASA's Deep Impact mission last July, which blasted into a comet. (Full story)

The moon collision and orbiter will be the first of several lunar robotic projects before astronauts are sent to the moon, targeted for 2018. The entire mission will cost more than $600 million, with the impactor project cost-capped at $80 million.

The mission is set to launch in October 2008, with a rocket that carries both the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and impactor.

The orbiter will circle the moon for at least a year, mapping the surface, searching for water and scouting for potential future landing sites to send astronauts. The orbiter will pay particular attention to the south pole, which NASA considers a prime candidate for a future outpost.

The lunar spacecraft will target the south pole, too, releasing its SUV-sized impactor probe in January 2009 on a suicide plunge at about 5,600 miles per hour toward a frozen crater believed to contain hidden ice.

If ice is found, it could be melted and the water used to help make rocket fuel or oxygen.

"These resources can make [a] future human return to the moon and future human occupation of the moon much more cost-effective," said Butler Hine, robotics deputy program manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in northern California, which is developing the impactor.

In the 1990s, several robotic probes found elevated levels of hydrogen, a component of water, around the moon's poles, suggesting ice might lie beneath the frozen surface. But they failed to find vast expanses of it.

The 2008 mission won't be the first time NASA has crashed a robotic probe into the moon.

In the 1960s, the space agency launched nine Ranger spacecraft on such a mission, but only three were successful, beaming back close-up pictures as they crashed.

The 1999 orbiting Lunar Prospector collided into the moon, but it was considered a disappointment because it failed to kick up a cloud of debris.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Bound for Venus
European probe to arrive at shrouded planet
By Tariq Malik
SPACE.com


Monday, April 10, 2006; Posted: 3:29 p.m. EDT (19:29 GMT)


Venus Express will fire its engine for 50 minutes on Tuesday. The burn will slow the probe down and pull it into orbit around Venus.

3:17 a.m. EDT (0717 GMT) -- Venus Express's main engine fires for 50 minutes.

3:45 a.m. EDT (0745 GMT) -- Loss of radio contact for almost 10 minutes as Venus Express travels behind the planet so that the line of sight to Earth is blocked.

3:55 a.m. EDT (0755 GMT) -- Reacquisition of radio signal.

4:07 a.m. EDT (0807 GMT) -- Main engine burn ends.

5:12 a.m. EDT (0912 GMT) -- Telemetry of orbit received from craft.



(SPACE.com) -- A European probe bearing down on the planet Venus is set for a Tuesday arrival to take a close look at the world's soupy atmosphere.

After five months of spaceflight, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Venus Express orbiter is expected to fire its main engine in a nearly hour-long maneuver to begin its planet-watching duties.

"I don't dare get too excited because we have to be calm if there are any problems," Venus Express project manager Don McCoy told SPACE.com. "It will feel good once we know we're in orbit around the planet."

The ESA launched the $226 million (220 million Euro) Venus Express mission spaceward in November 2005 on what the space agency has billed its fastest mission to fly.

Not since NASA's Magellan mission ended with the spacecraft's death plunge into the Venusian thick atmosphere in 1994 has the planet had a dedicated orbiter around it.

"It's getting very close and everything is working well, so that is comforting," said Hakan Svedhem, Venus Express project scientist, in a telephone interview.

The 2,799-pound (1,270-kilogram) Venus Express spacecraft is expected to fire its main engines for 50 minutes beginning at 3:17 a.m. EDT (0717 GMT) Tuesday to place itself on the proper orbital trajectory.

By the maneuver's end the spacecraft is expected to be flying in an orbit that reaches 248 miles (400 kilometers) above the Venusian surface at its low point and about 217,479 miles (350,000 kilometers) at the high end, mission managers said.

"It's a very eccentric orbit," said McCoy, adding that it should take Venus Express a full nine days to complete its first orbit while observing the planet.

"It's the only time during the entire mission that we'll be able to see the entire planetary disk."

Unveiling Venus
Venus Express carries seven primary instruments, many of which were spares left over from previous ESA missions such as the agency's Mars Express and comet-bound Rosetta programs, to peel back the layers of the Venusian atmosphere.

Researchers hope the spacecraft will unveil the source of Venus' dense, turbulent and toxic atmosphere.

"We think that volcanism is the mechanism that would produce that atmosphere," Svedhem said. "And if we find that this is the case, well that I think would be very exciting."

Svedhem and his colleagues also hope to better understand how trapped carbon dioxide, water vapor and sulphuric aerosol gases factored into the "greenhouse effect" that appears to superheat Venus' atmosphere to an average temperature of about 869 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degree Celsius).

Venus Express is expected to begin its primary science mission -- a 15-Earth month period that translates into two of Venus' long sidereal days -- in June after a series of maneuvers to reach its final operational orbit.

"It's just straight propulsion," McCoy said of the orbital posturing, adding that unlike NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter -- which is currently using Mars' atmosphere to shape its orbit in a process called aerobraking -- Venus Express will rely solely on its engines. "It's lot faster than aerobraking and, in that sense, it's easier."

Venus Express' transit to its target planet required less of the probe's 1,256 pounds (570 kilograms) of fuel than anticipated, allowing for some leeway in the process, ESA officials said.

"In principal, we're all ready to go," McCoy added.
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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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Prehistoric trip to the dentist had to hurt
Researchers: Ancient man invented dental drill 9,000 years ago

Wednesday, April 5, 2006; Posted: 1:08 p.m. EDT (17:08 GMT)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Proving prehistoric man's ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday's journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought -- and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth.

The holes went as deep as one-seventh of an inch (3.5 millimeters).

"The holes were so perfect, so nice," said study co-author David Frayer, an anthropology professor at the University of Kansas. "I showed the pictures to my dentist and he thought they were amazing holes."

How it was done is painful just to think about. Researchers figured that a small bow was used to drive the flint drill tips into patients' teeth. Flint drill heads were found on site. So study lead author Roberto Macchiarelli, an anthropology professor at the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues simulated the technique and drilled through human (but no longer attached) teeth in less than a minute.

"Definitely it had to be painful for the patient," Macchiarelli said.

Researchers were impressed by how advanced the society was in Pakistan's Baluchistan province. The drilling occurred on ordinary men and women.

The dentistry, probably evolved from intricate ornamental bead drilling that was also done by the society there, went on for about 1,500 years until about 5500 B.C., Macchiarelli said. After that, there were no signs of drilling.

Macchiarelli and Frayer said the drilling was likely done to reduce the pain of cavities.

Macchiarelli pointed to one unfortunate patient who had a tooth drilled twice. Another patient had three teeth drilled. Four drilled teeth showed signs of cavities. No sign of fillings were found, but there could have been an asphalt-like substance inside, he said.

Dr. Richard Glenner, a Chicago dentist and author of dental history books, wouldn't bite on the idea that this was good dentistry. The drilling could have been decorative or to release "evil spirits" more than fighting tooth decay, he said, adding, "Why did they do it? No one will ever know."

Macchiarelli said the hard-to-see locations of the drilled teeth in jaws seem to rule out drilling for decorative purposes. Frayer said the prehistoric drillers' skill is something modern-day patients can use to lord over their dentists.

"This may be something to tell your dentist: If these people 9,000 years ago could make a hole this perfect in less than a minute," Frayer said, "what are they doing?"

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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