Dec 29 2009
Skeptical Musings about 2009
This is the time of year for looking back at the big news stories of the previous year. I’m not going to give any numbered top-ten list – but will simply reflect, in no particular order, on those science news items that made an impression on me this year.
Ardipithecus ramidus
Ardi, as he is known, was certainly the coolest fossil of the year. The remains of 17 individuals were actually found in 1993 and first described in 1994, but this year the first full analysis of these fossils was published, along with the new genus designation of Ardipithecus. Ardi is the oldest hominid species now known, displacing Lucy – an Australopithecus afarensis.
Ardi is an excellent example of how a fossil can reinforce what we already know about evolution, while simultaneously surprising us. It is an outstanding transitional species – getting very close to the common ancestor between humans and chimps. Ardi walked upright, but had a small chimp-size brain, and had features indicating they still spent time in the trees. It dates to a time and place we would expect for such a transitional species also. There is no way around the fact that Ardi is powerful confirmation of evolutionary theory, and specifically human evolution.
And yet, Ardi surprised us in the details. It was thought that bipedalism evolved on the plains of Africa, but Ardi suggests that bipedalism evolved while our ancestors were still in the trees.
Ardi also reminded us that the common ancestor between humans and chimps was not a chimp, but something else. Chimps are as evolved from that common ancestor as humans.
Darwinius masillae
As much of a sensation as Ardi was, Ida was equally a flop. The fossil itself, of a primate ancestor that might link the branch that led to monkey and apes with the older branch of prosimians such as lemurs, is a beautifully preserved specimen. It also fills in a gap in the picture of primate evolution.
What flopped was the media blitz surrounding Ida – reminiscent of the fanfare accorded King Kong. The scientists tried to be media-savvy – to use the media, new and old, to promote not only their interesting find, but science in general. And to be blunt, they blew it.
First, they oversold the science. They tried really hard to say that Ida finally connects mankind to the rest of the animal kingdom – because it links (potentially – that has not even been settled yet) two branches of primates, one of which contains humans. It was a stretch no one bought. And – what about all those hominid fossils?
It seems that the more they tried to hype their fossil, the more skeptical people became.
Lesson learned – you can’t sell real science like a used-car salesman. Leave that to the pseudoscientists.
Ida earns my science-media fail for 2009.
Large Hadron Collider
The LHC came online in 2009 and started smashing protons and even producing publishable science. The LHC represents big-ticket science – it shows that we are committed to investing billions in a massive engineering project just so we can understand the universe a little better.
And the science that the LHC is likely to produce will be as awesome as the machine itself. At half power, the LHC is already the most powerful collider in the world. As soon as protons started colliding, all the delays and mishaps were forgotten.
Water on the Moon
It had been hypothesized that water from comets might be permanently frozen in the shadows of deep craters at the lunar poles. This speculation was confirmed this year when NASA smashed a couple of probes into one such crater, finding water in the plumes.
This can potentially have a huge significance for a future lunar base. The limiting factor of any such base may be raw materials – water, oxygen, fuel. If there is water that can be mined from the lunar regolith, then all three are already there on the moon waiting for us. This increases the feasibility of a lunar base.
Apollo 11
While I am on the moon – this year was the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon. NASA finally admitted that they lost the original footage of the Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the moon.
But on a brighter note – the Lunar Recon Orbiter (LRO) took pictures of the Apollo landing sites. You can see not only the equipment left behind, but the paths through the regolith of the shuffling walks of the astronauts as they went on their missions.
This is smoking gun evidence that NASA really did go to the moon, several times. This won’t, of course, make the lunar hoax nutcases go away, but it will make them seem even more ridiculous as they try to explain away this evidence.
Methane on Mars
This year we discovered that there is methane on Mars. This is significant because methane is a highly reactive molecule so it doesn’t hang around for long. Therefore, if there is methane in the martian atmosphere it is being replenished from somewhere.
One possibility is that it is being deposited by asteroid and comet impacts on Mars. But this has been ruled out by astronomers – there simply aren’t enough impacts, by orders of magnitude, to explain the amount of methane on Mars.
Another possibility is geological activity – methane is trapped beneath the martian surface and is being released. However, there is currently no known geological activity on Mars that can explain the release, nor is there the other elements we would expect to be released if such activity were present.
The third and most intriguing possibility is that there is life on Mars – microbes that produce methane as part of their metabolism. Anything that increases the possibility that there could be alien life within reach of human scientists to me is mega-cool.
All the more reason why we should make sending people to Mars a high priority.
Conclusion
There is so much more, but I think that’s enough for one blog post. These are the items that stuck out in my memory.
Let me know which science/skeptical news items made the biggest impression on you.
10 Responses to “Skeptical Musings about 2009”
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Great post as always!
Regarding the comment about moon water providing fuel, physicist Bob Park claims that it requires more energy to break a water molecule than the energy that you recover, which makes it a self-defeating process. He makes the obvious point that if our planet is covered in fuel, why do we have an energy crisis?
http://bobpark.physics.umd.edu/WN09/wn052209.html
I’ve never heard or read anyone suggesting that it’s possible that if the martian methane is indeed from life, it could be from contamination from scientific exploration of Mars. The first missions that landed on the surface were launched in 1971. Is it possible that the methane is from life exported on one of our vessels in the last 40 years?
The original NASA celluloid archive was reproduced on videotape, and then more recently, the digital media was remastered, its release was 2009 for the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing.
Although NASA admits that the original tapes of the moon landing have been misplaced, the images transmitted from the moon were taped at Apollo Tracking Stations. NASA has since extracted video from these tapes and other recordings from television networks and individual recordings of monitors by NASA personnel and converted them to higher quality images. For an interesting and detailed discussion of NASA’s use of unique technology to capture the moon landing and their search for the missing tapes and ultimate use of alternative sources to replace the original footage, see the August and September 2009 issues of Government Video magazine – http://www.governmentvideo.com.
I don’t think the methane on Mars can be due to contamination from Earth. There’s too much methane and it’s spread out too much.
method – you are right, but the point is not to use it as a source of energy, but as raw material. You can get the energy from solar collectors, use that to split the water into oxygen and hydrogen, which you can then use as fuel.
Raw material might be more precious on a lunar base than energy.
One of my favourite scientific discoveries of 2009 was the staggering advances in nano scale imaging techniques with both optical near-field microscopy that can go beyond the diffraction limit of light and photon-induced near-field electron microscopy.
One story that had escaped my attention during the year caught my eye while reviewing the top science stories of 2009. It was about the Linac Coherent Light Source, located at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
Described in ScienceDaily:
“In early October, researchers from around the globe began traveling to SLAC to get an initial glimpse into how the X-ray laser interacts with atoms and molecules. The LCLS is unique, shining light that can resolve detail the size of atoms at ten billion times the brightness of any other manmade X-ray source.
“No one has ever had access to this kind of light before,” said LCLS Director Jo Stöhr. “The realization of the LCLS isn’t only a huge achievement for SLAC, but an achievement for the global science community. It will allow us to study the atomic world in ways never before possible.”
Early experiments are already revealing new insights into the fundamentals of atomic physics and have successfully proven the machine’s unique capabilities to control and manipulate the underlying properties of atoms and molecules. Earlier this month, researchers used the LCLS’s strobe-like pulses to completely strip neon atoms of all their electrons. Researchers also watched for two-photon ionization — an event where two photons pool their energy to eject a single electron from an atom. Normally difficult to observe at X-ray facilities, researchers at the LCLS were able to study these events using the extreme brightness of the laser beam.
Future AMO experiments will create stop-action movies of molecules in motion. The LCLS’s quick, short, repetitive X-ray bursts enable researchers to take individual photos as molecules move and interact. By stringing together many such images to make a movie, researchers will for the first time have the ability to watch the molecules of life in action, view chemical bonds forming and breaking in real time, and see how materials work on the quantum level.”"
Sorry for the long post, but this sounds like really incredible stuff. I can’t believe that I missed this story. I guess the LHC has a better press agent.
Hoping that the next decade will feature news coverage of fossils without needing to point out that it “reinforces evolution” or insisting that it needs to “baffle scientists” for it to be newsworthy.
In 2009, Kepler was lauched. In 3 to 4 years it will probably change our understanding of our place in the Cosmos in no small way.