Here we have an image of the Phoenix Lander and surrounding area taken on February 25, 2010.

The Phoenix Lander succumbed to the cold of the Martian winter. Keep in mind Phoenix was not intended to last the winter; yet mission managers are hoping beyond hope that it might have made it through.

The northern winter on Mars is subsiding and you just never know so the Mars Odyssey orbiter is listening for any tell tale signal the increasing sunlight may have warmed the lander enough to revive.  There has been two listening periods so far, one in January and one in February.  The geometry of the orbits allowed for 60 passes in four days in February.  So far – nothing.  The next set of passes is in April and it sounds like if nothing is heard at that point, then mission managers will call it over.

Out with the old and in with the new I suppose.

There is a new Mars rover being built, the Mars Science Laboratory, named Curiosity, being built.  The builders recently put the robotic arm through a series of tests to be sure not only that it functions but as they put it: “plays nice with the rest of the system”.  Apparently the tests went well and the arm will be affixed to the Curiosity later this year.

I would imagine the work load stress is just starting to be felt in earnest as the September 2011 launch date is approaching.  Sounds like a long time but I bet it’s not.

For a larger version of Curiosity’s arm, click here.   Sorry there isn’t one for the Phoenix picture, but here’s the press release.

Images:  NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona (Phoenix) and NASA/JPL-Caltech (Curiosity)

Remember that time you and your sibling couldn’t stop fighting over a toy, so your mom wouldn’t let either one of you have it? It seems the same thing happens to unhappy neighboring countries and Mother Nature.

The island in the Bay of Bengal that Bangladesh called South Talpatti and India called New Moore or Purbasha appeared after a devastating cyclone, and it appeared right near the territorial boundary between the two. Decades of fighting over the uninhabited speck of land led to no political resolution. But now there’s a perfectly clear geographical resolution: The sea has reclaimed the island, scientists say.

According to oceanographer Sugata Hazra, the island was never very big, peaking at around 1.3 miles by 1.1 miles. The island began shrinking in the 1990s, part of an 81-square-mile decline in land mass in the Bay of Bengal’s Sunderbans mudflats over the last 40 years, Hazra said. And 27 square miles more has been lost to erosion. In the 1990s, the island was only 2 meters above sea level [Los Angeles Times]. Some experts say that in addition to erosion, rising sea levels caused by global warming are also to blame. Oceanographer Sugata Hazra, who discovered the island’s disappearance while looking at satellite photos, argues that sea-level rise caused by climate change was ‘’surely” a factor in the island’s inundation…. ‘The rate of sea-level rise in this part of the northern Bay of Bengal is definitely attributable to climate change,” he said [Sydney Morning Herald].

And this island is hardly alone in its shrinkage; people have already abandoned other isles in the bay. The island of Lohachara was abandoned in 1996, while 48 per cent of Ghoramara is reportedly underwater. Thousands of so-called climate-change refugees have already fled. At least 10 other islands are said to be immediately at risk [The Independent].

So why did the two nations spend so much time fighting over a tiny island with no future? Location, location, location. It sits right in the mouth of the Hariabhanga River, the boundary between India and Bangladesh. Technically, possession of the island depends on which side of the island the main channel of the river flows. That has never been agreed by the two countries [The Independent]. The island’s strategic importance, then, has led to some unusual gambits. In 1981 India dispatched navy ships to plant its flag on the island and try to cement its claim. Says Sanjoy Hazarika, a policy analyst based in New Delhi, “This didn’t go down as a great moment of Indian diplomacy” [Los Angeles Times].

The rising seas in the Bay of Bengal are cause for concern, especially with the low-lying Bangladesh mainland home to so many people. But with South Talpatti/New Moore, it’s hard not to feel at least a small satisfaction at seeing the hubris of nations earn its just reward: nothing.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: A Perfect Storm Forecast, looking at the Bay of Bengal
80beats: “Catastrophic” Sea Level Rise Is a Real Threat, Coral Records Suggest
80beats: A Rising Tide Swamps All Coasts: New Estimates of Sea Level Rise Spell Global Trouble
80beats: Maldives President Says His Country Must Save Up for a New Homeland

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Nafis Ahmed Kuntal

In 2008, archeologists working at the Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains discovered a tiny piece of a finger bone, believed to be a pinky, buried with ornaments in the cave. Scientists extracted the mitochondrial DNA (genetic material from the mother’s side) from the ancient bone and checked to see if its genetic code matched with the other two known forms of early hominids–Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans. What they found was a real surprise. The team, led by geneticist Svaante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute, discovered that the mtDNA from the finger bone matched neither–suggesting there might have been an entirely different hominid species that roamed the planet about 50,000 years ago.

Looking back at the region and the cave, where scientists earlier discovered artifacts from humans and Neanderthals, Paabo thinks that it is possible that all the three species (modern humans, Neanderthals and the mystery hominids) could have possibly met and interacted with each other. The findings, which were published in journal Nature, present an unexpected twist in the story of human evolution and migration.

Scientists say the DNA analysis also suggests that this hominid left Africa one million years ago, in a previously unsuspected migration. Anthropologists generally believe that the exodus from Africa took place in waves, starting with Homo erectus leaving 1.9 million years ago, followed by the Neanderthals between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, and then by the modern humans who exited about 50,000 years ago. With X-woman, as the Denisova specimen has been nicknamed, the divergence date of one million years is too young to have descended from Homo erectus and too old to have been a descendant of Homo heidelbergensis, another ancient human thought to have originated around 650,000 [BBC]. Paabo and his team are now working to extract nuclear DNA from the Denisova fossil to verify their suspicion that X-woman is indeed from another species.

Physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall, who was not involved in the research, called the Denisova hominid a “significant addition” to our understanding of human evolution. “We are the only hominin around today, so we tend to think that’s how it’s always been. But the evidence is accumulating that the human evolutionary tree is quite luxuriantly branching. There were multiple species that competed in the evolutionary arena, rather than a single lineage that was honed from primitiveness to perfection” [Time].

For an in-depth look at the science and the implications of this discovery, check out Carl Zimmer’s post on the DISCOVER blog, The Loom.

Related Content:
The Loom: The X-Woman’s Fingerbone
DISCOVER: Out of Africa, All of Us
80beats:A Fossil Named Ardi Shakes Up Humanity’s Family Tree
The Loom: Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last
80beats: Did a Strangely Human-Like Primate Give Rise to Monkeys, Apes, and Us?
DISCOVER: The 2% Difference examines what sets us apart from chimpanzees

Image: Johannes Krause

I’ve added comments from biologist Laurent Excoffier to my X-woman post. His verdict: probably another species of hominid.

Brendan Nyhan, an old friend of mine who's now at the University of Michigan, has a must-read oped in theNew York Times today:
For Democrats nervous about political fallout from the bill in the November midterm elections, it’s reassuring to imagine that the myths about the legislation — that it provides free coverage to illegal immigrants, uses taxpayer money to subsidize abortions and mandates end-of-life counseling for the elderly — will be dispelled by its passage.
But public knowledge of the plan’s contents may not improve as quickly as Democrats hope. While some of the more outlandish rumors may dissipate, it is likely that misperceptions will linger for years, hindering substantive debate over the merits of the country’s new health care system. The reasons are rooted in human psychology. Nyhan goes on to talk about how we ideologically filter information to support our political presuppositions--e.g., conservatives will hold on to lies about "death panels" long after the bill's passage. It's a great piece, but it is missing, I think, an important angle. I believe the Internet makes this problem of misinformation and ideological filtering a lot, a lot worse. I wonder what Nyhan would say to that. Furthermore, we know well around here which blogs ...

One of my favorite things about astronomy is that it opens our eyes to things those eyes literally cannot see.

I have been to dark sites countless times and gazed up at the Milky Way; that dim and fuzzy path of light that represents the combined glow of billions of stars, gas clouds, and dust. To my eyes, it’s bright enough to see some details, and it’s lovely… but what we see is a facade, the barest skin draped thinly over depth and grandeur we can hardly perceive.

That is, until we look at our galaxy with new eyes: ones tuned to the far, far infrared. Then we see magnificence on a scale so breathtaking we can hardly comprehend it. Behold!

That is what lurks beneath the dim view our eyes collect! It’s what the European Space Agency’s Planck observatory sees when it looks at the Milky Way.

Wow! This image is a whopping 55 square degrees of sky — 280 times the area of the full Moon on the sky — centered near the constellation of Aquila the Eagle. The resolution of the data is about 5 arcminutes, meaning objects as small as 1/6th the size of the Moon on the sky can be distinguished; that’s very high-res for images in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum. And as an astronomer who is pretty familiar with the night sky, I have to say it’s very weird to see an image like this and have almost no idea what’s in it.

I mean, I know a lot of what I’m seeing in general, but specific objects are totally impossible to identify. That’s because this image is hugely removed from visible light. It’s a three-color image composed of separate shots in the wavelengths (think of them as colors) of 100, 350, and 540 microns. For comparison, the longest wavelength of light our eyes can see is about 0.7 microns or so; these Planck images are therefore way the heck and gone in the infrared.

What we’re seeing is very cold dust, and by very cold I mean very cold: much of it is a frigid 12 Celsius above absolute zero. In Fahrenheit, that’s -438°. Yes, four hundred thirty eight degrees below zero.

This represents dust far away from the warming light of stars, dust that is sitting in deep space, radiating away feebly in the far infrared. Mapping this dust tells us much about it, like how stars make dust and fling it into space, and how the dust behaves when it’s out there.

See that bright line right down the middle? That’s the dust located in the disk of the Milky Way galaxy itself. Our galaxy is a flat disk 100,000 light years across, but maybe only 1% of that in thickness. We’re located inside that disk, so that when we look in that direction we see it projected as a line across the sky. That’s where most of the gas and stars in the galaxy are located, so that’s where most of the dust is as well.

But I’m fascinated by the structure of the dust above the galactic plane. There are swoops and swirls, filaments and ribbons. I’m drawn to the long thin line on the right that must be dozens or hundreds of light years long; it appears to end in a swirl of dust. What the heck could be causing that? I’m not sure. There’s so much going on here that it’ll be some time before astronomers can sort it all out.

One thing I want to point out is the one component of that image taken at 350 microns, seen here on the left. This is extremely cold dust, and as a major geek I can’t help wonder if the structure seen here was diverted by Malcolm McDowell to swing past Veridian III.

And if you’re looking for irony, you’ve found it: Planck is designed to investigate the Cosmic Microwave Background, the faint glow leftover from the Big Bang. As far as Planck is concerned, the Milky Way is a foreground object blocking the view! It has to map our local space very carefully so that emission can be removed from the actual target data, and reveal what the far more distant background Universe can tell us.

It’s true in astronomy as well as so many other aspects of life: what’s signal to one is noise to another.

Credit: ESA and the HFI Consortium