What's up with Pluto?

Pluto, that used to be a planet but got laid off, is giving itself a make over. Hubble imagery analyzed over several years by planetary scientist Marc Buie at the Southwest Research Institute shows rapid color changes between 1994 and 2003. The Hubble is a powerful telescope but Pluto is rather small and very far away so this is still amazing:

Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Buie (SwRI).

The color changes are considered to be the result of methane ice sublimating into the atmosphere as the northern spring progresses. Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams noted this gives rise to a new mystery:

I thought the liveliest part of the teleconference on Pluto yesterday was Marc Buie’s response to what had appeared in his datasets. Buie (Southwest Research Institute) was looking at imagery collected by the Hubble Space Telescope from 2002 to 2003 and comparing it with the results of earlier ground-based observations, as well as with Hubble pictures taken in 1994. The dramatic reddening seems to have occurred between 2000 and 2002, even as the illuminated northern hemisphere continued to get brighter.

Asked about his reactions to the newer Hubble imagery, Buie was candid:

“The color change in such a short period had me scared, because it’s so hard to understand. I’ve been checking absolutely everything I can think of, wondering if I screwed this up somehow and got the wrong answer. If I did, I can’t find the mistake.”

Another key point: In the Hubble imagery, the color of Charon remains the same throughout, whereas the reddening of Pluto is pronounced.

Credit: NASA, ESA and M. Buie (SwRI).

Something weird is going on way out there. The enigmatic object, now considered to be a Kuiper belt object has some stories to tell. Rather than a frozen ball of ice, Pluto is turning out to be a dynamic world, with seasons, an atmosphere and a varied surface silently lurking in the dark.

New Horizons is due to reach Pluto and Charon in 2015 to capture the first close-up images of the frigid ex-planet. In addition it will acquire chemical and spectral data so maybe Pluto will tell us a few of those stories and hint at a few more. Bet on surprises. I can hardly wait.

Ahead of their time

Seems there was a race of super-geniuses. Discovered in South Africa in 1913, fossil skulls showed a brain capacity bigger than modern humans. Not only that, but:

These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

Why did they die out? Without more information, scientists can only speculate:

Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.

...

Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.

Wonder what they would say about life today?

The next big thing

Yo, digital artists! You want to go here. 3D fractal rendering. Fantastic landscapes, objects and surfaces.

Snow rollers?

Proof that God likes to mess with us.

Who is cutting the farts of Mars?

The discovery of methane in the atmosphere of Mars has both astronomers and biologists in a tizzy. There really shouldn't be any in the atmosphere so this is a very exciting mystery. There are a few equally plausible reasons it could be there. A geological one, in that internal heat causes subsurface water to react with carbon dioxide, a chemical one from the oxidation of iron, and a biological one, being made by the waste of bacteria. Naturally it's the last one that's generating interest. Given the many depictions of martians in popular culture, it would be deliciously ironic that we would finally find them by their flatulence. Image credit: NASA

World's smallest aquarium

MIT has created a planktonic ecosystem on a microscope slide. They're using it to study the carbon cycle in the oceans and they wanted to focus on plankton without all the other creatures getting in the way. It's the perfect new conversation piece for our downsized economy!

Photo credit: Donna Coveney

Why we are here

Via Palaeoblog there's an interesting paper by a father and son research team out of Finland that considers why life arose. Not why-because-God-was-bored why, but why an assemblage of chemicals on an infant planet became flora and fauna.

The reason is due to entropy. In this case, the entropy being the reduction of energy differences between chemicals on early Earth. It's like when you put a hot object next to a cold object. The hot object warms the cold one, and the cold object cools the warm one until they're the same temperature. Since the sun and the Earth's core were (and are) pumping energy into the system, the reactions between chemicals and the chemicals themselves got steadily more complex until they fit our definition of life. Physorg gives a more thorough description here.

Creationists will go nuts over this because they make two points. One is that life is ultimately a series of reactions that can be described by thermodynamics.  The other is that life didn't arise by an event. It became what we describe as life gradually by simple reactions growing in complexity.

In a nutshell, we're here because life was brewed. Like beer.

4:20 - time for your Alzheimer's vaccine

Smoking weed might prevent Alzheimer's. Works for me.

Plantimal

Via Carl Zimmer, there's this new genetic study of a photosynthetic sea slug. It's taken the symbiotic algae technique a step further and incorporated photosynthetic ability into it's own DNA. The lead researcher has given it its own website.

Winter wonderland

Nasa's Phoenix Lander has detected snow falling on Mars.

Mother of all geese

Dasornis, an enormous relative of geese lived 50 million years ago in southern England. It had a 17-foot wingspan and teeth-like structures on its beak. It soared over the waves much like an albatross. I wonder what the white meat tasted like.

Image courtesy of Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum.

Yet another reason to vote for Obama

With John McCain growing more infantile by the minute, there is no shortage of reasons to vote against him. This makes us forget that there are just as many reasons to vote for Obama. Here's another one; 61 Nobel science laureates endorse him because he understands the importance of research.

Cool palaeo stuff

Laelaps has an article on an early whale discovered in Georgia. Georgia Southern University has a cool interactive view of the skeleton.

New research shows that dinosaurs were the underdogs of the Triassic, being somewhat outclassed by crurotarsans (crocodiles are surviving crurotarsans). Something happened and dinosaurs took over. Similarities to this election?

This article combines two of my favorite topics, evolution and beer! Though it's not palaeontology, research done on the evolution of yeast strains by breweries in Europe gets down to basics on the difference between ale and lager, and shows which breweries use which strain of yeast.

Cool Astronomy Stuff

Lots of interesting discoveries lately:

Phoenix has hit paydirt on Mars. It was sent there to look for water ice and that's what it found.

A lake of liquid ethane was found on Titan. That makes Titan the only other body besides Earth to have a surface liquid.

Scientists have figured out what the first star looked like. Centauri Dreams speculates what that means for civilizations besides our own.

Cheap, clean power storage

This is huge. This, along with new advances in panels, will make solar power much more viable. I'm still on the grid because storing the electricity from my panels would require a huge, toxic, expensive battery and adding more panels. Being able to store my electricity would make me independent of PG&E. No more blackouts, cost run-ups or terrorism threats.