Kapton, Salt, and Bubbles

Pretty, isn't it?

NASA's Genesis Discovery Mission returned particles of solar wind to Earth a couple of years ago. You may recall that Genesis had a rather hard landing. Most of the solar wind collectors broke into larger or lesser pieces. But the collectors had solar wind particles embedded in them; Genesis did bring back its prize. In so doing, it opened up fascinating questions. How do you tell the difference between genuine extraterrestrial material and unwanted contamination in consequence of a crash landing in the Utah desert? How do you document and distinguish atoms of solar wind from traces of a) spacecraft, b) Utah, or c) the residue solvents used to clean off a) and b)? Inventive NASA scientists are developing incredibly sophisticated techniques to document the contamination and clean the pieces.

Starting early on, choice pieces of collector material with embedded solar went to scientists around the world. The first Genesis science results were announced at the Lunar Planetary Conference in 2006. The last results could unfold in the mid 21st century or even later. The beauty of curating extraterrestrial material is that it's safely tucked away while analytic instrumentation evolves and the planetary science community hones new questions and approaches. The Apollo moon rocks have whispered their secrets to scientists for almost 40 years.

The Genesis samples are a lot smaller than moon rocks and the contamination issues orders of magnitude more subtle. Thus there's been a lot of high resolution microscopy. Here, courtesy of the Genesis Discovery Mission's contamination control lead scientist, are some interesting images.

1. Above and one below are two takes on a scrap of Kapton tape. At the macroscopic level, this is translucent, light-gold-colored tape that's ubiquitous on American-built spacecraft, especially securing dark gold sheets of mylar. Kapton is like masking tape for spacecraft. In microscopy in the wake of a spacecraft crash, it this is what it looks like. This stray bit of tape resides on silicon carbide collector material.






2. The blue stuff is salty Utah mud with a cementlike consistency. Cleaning it off silicon carbide is a challenge.










3. The bubbles haven't yet been conclusively identified. But they look cool.

First thing we do...

...is beat the crap out of all of the lawyers? Being one myself, I have to say there is something rather awesome about seeing a lawyer in a black suit lobbing a tear gas canister back at the riot police. What do you suppose it would take for that to happen here? (Earlier this year, I wrote a story of domestic revolt that featured BMWs burning in the middle of the golf course -- maybe that could still happen!)



Like a cross between Tianamen Square and an old Robert Longo print -- definitely an image with some legs.


[Image: Robert Longo, "Dancing Trio I, from the 1980s "Men in the City" series.]

Meanwhile, in other news, NYT reports on the crazy hijink's at Iraq's Police Academy.



According to IMdB, there hasn't been a new installment in the wacky Police Academy series since 1989's "Police Academy 6: City Under Siege." So here's the pitch for a perfect writer's strike scab job: "Police Academy 7: Back to Baghdad." Think Leslie Nielsen does Ahmad Chalabi.

Rubbing it in

Klaw does C-Nak chez Vandermeer.

El Chupacabra unmasked!

As promised, the mystery of our age revealed! In any event, this result is far more sensible than that awful chupacabra-is-a-fungus-from-outer-space episode of the X-Files.

Texas State researchers solve mystery of Cuero chupacabra

Biologists at Texas State University-San Marcos have succeeded in identifying the strange, hairless, doglike creature that gained fame throughout South Texas this summer as the mythical chupacabra.

Reality, it turns out, is far more mundane than the exotic origins one would expect for a supernatural creature: It’s a coyote.

“The DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote (Canis latrans),” said Mike Forstner of the biology department at Texas State. “This is probably the answer a lot of folks thought might be the outcome. I, myself, really thought it was a domestic dog, but the Cuero chupacabra is a Texas Coyote.”

The odd-looking beast turned up this past summer on a ranch outside of the small town of Cuero, Texas, and almost immediately people began comparing it to the bed-time horror, chupacabra.

“Not often do we have genetic material available from an animal that has been linked to a legendary myth,” Forstner said. Normally, the only evidence available consists of blurry photographs, low-light video or other “untestable” pieces of evidence. This time, a south Texas rancher, Phyllis Canion, found a dead animal and preserved the head of the beast in her freezer, creating the opportunity for DNA testing. Hairless, odd beasts have turned up before in South Texas, and this time the stage was set for some scientific work to help solve the mystery. Forstner viewed this as an opportunity, not just to solve the mystery, but also to help people understand how science answers questions.

“This is fun, not scary, but if people are worried about the chupacabra, it is probably even more important that we explain the mystery,” he said. “Folks can fear what they don’t understand, and a big part of the goal in science is to explain the natural world.”

Joe Conger of KENS 5 news provided a tissue sample from Canion’s preserved animal to Texas State’s director of the Wildlife Ecology program, John Baccus, and Baccus passed the sample on to Forstner’s lab, which normally does DNA testing on a large number of different kinds of animals from bats to toads. Forstner assigned doctoral student Jake Jackson and master’s student Jim Bell to the project, who viewed this as just another lab project--albeit with a pop-culture twist.

“DNA tells a story. It allows us to determine the difference between animal species, and while I thought it was a canid (one of the members in the dog family), I could not tell from the photographs which one it might be,” Forstner explained, pointing out that KENS 5 financed the testing. “From my perspective, we were interested in providing a direct answer from the DNA, testing the best guesses of experts by using the evidence from the animal itself.

“Jake extracted DNA from the sample, then we used PCR to generate template DNA and a Beckman Coulter Automated DNA sequencer to read that sequence,” he said. “We choose a part of the mitochondrial DNA genome that is very informative in mammals, called the D-Loop. Once we had the sequence, it was very easy to make an initial ‘match’ of the Cuero sample using the online genetic database, GENBANK. We also completed other analyses, but really, that first match told the tale.”

The main mystery might be solved, but the DNA match doesn’t explain the other looming question: Why does this coyote look so un-coyotelike?

“That is the best part about science--the first answers often lead to more questions and then better explanations of the world in which we live,” Forstner said. “We’ve taken additional skin samples and we will try to determine the cause of the hair loss.

“Texas State is a great school with excellent facilities for genetic work and this has been a very... different experience for my students as they worked on this with all the media attention,” he said. “It’s been remarkable for them, seeing both the power of the media and their work on this project come together.”

No word yet on whether Jimmy Kimmel still wants a bite of "chalupacabra."

Pumpkins and Tiggers and Scares, Oh My

The neighborhood I live in and the adjacent neighborhood where I like to walk came through again this year for Halloween. Pumpkins galore. Real pumpkins; plastic pumpkins; a string of orange pumpkin-lights strung around a palmetto palm. Then there was the inflatable yard art ranging from the cute (Pooh and Tigger) to the usual (ghosts, still more pumpkins) to the macabre: a darn near life-size, inflated hearse driven by a ghastly skeleton in a tux.

My favorite in the inflatable category was the humongous snow globe with a haunted castle inside it and - thanks to the motorized blower - scads of bats flying around the castle.

We also had the annual infestation of spiders. Huge inflatable purple ones one with red eyes, and others that are smaller but look meaner because they're hairy. One particularly hairy black spider was artfully positioned on a weblike rope hammock in a front yard. Very effective. My crocodile brain said, no way are we getting near that thing.

One house had a nifty front yard witch outlined in green and orange lights. There was a grim reaper to keep the witch company. But upon closer inspection of the grim reaper, he was actually an extra from the Christmas light show - a Manger scene shepherd, complete with a staff, but with the addition of an improvised sickle blade on the staff. The pink lights outlining grim reaper guy's robe were a dead giveaway. So was his bland, bearded face. Oh, my.

But the scariest scare of the year was a yard sign with a cartoon of a vicious-looking high rise building.

It's a 23-story structure intended to be shoehorned into a Rice University-area corner where the surrounding houses are nice and old and the trees are taller than the houses. In other words, it's a monstrosity of a development that would ruin the look, feel and traffic flow of that neighborhood for blocks around. Fortunately the residents who would be most adversely affected by this thing are fighting mad about it and well-off enough to hire good PR and top-notch attorneys. And I hope they win.

Houston lacks zoning ordinances. It's the largest US city without same. As a result, development is out of control. Whole neighborhoods can lose their historic character almost overnight. Historic homes or movie theaters get razed without fanfare and replaced with highrises, pretentious commercial centers, or even pawnshops and parking lots.

Unlike most of the Halloween yard art, which looks quaint in the light of November 1, that Ashby High Rise sign is every bit as scary today as it was yesterday.

The Chupacabra Cometh...

Watch this space. All will be revealed (and No Fear of the Future will be the first blog to have it. I know, because I wrote the press release).

Steampunk goes mainstream

You know the hip factor has utterly fled a movement when Newsweek comes calling. Steampunk is the subject this time, only the literary sub-genre itself is given but a passing mention. Instead, the article focuses on steampunk as a fashion style applied to our glossy, high-tech world. The long and short of it is folks retrofitting computers and other such modern conveniences to look as if they originated in the time of Verne or Wells, or Walt Disney's Tomorrowland at the very least. Naturally, you can't bring up steampunk and design without invoking Chairman Bruce:

"I'm kind of touched to see these guys becoming pop stars," says Sterling, "The Difference Engine" co-author. "To me it's a sign of social health. People can look on the legacy of the past and grab it and use it. It's an industrial cut-and-paste aesthetic. And I think that the 20th century's love for 19th-century technology is going to be matched by the 21st century's love of corny 20th-century technology. We're going to see Atompunk."

Personally, I love the concept (zeppelin obsession notwithstanding) even if I haven't had much opportunity to retrofit the old Dell on my desktop. That's not to say I haven't given it much thought. I actually blogged about the aesthetic coolness that are wooden computers more than a year ago. It's not exactly the same thing, mind you, but the concepts are simpatico.