Discovery's STS-131 payload canister is raised into the launch pad's payload changeout room. Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder

The shuttle Discovery is sitting on the launch pad being readied for a scheduled April 5th launch.  You can see the payload canister being readied to load into the payload bay in the image above.  The crew members are having their prelaunch physicals.

This will be the 33rd trip to the International Space Station in what will be known as STS-131 when Discovery  lifts off.

The STS-131 mission will be staffed by:

• Commander Alan Poindexter
• Pilot Jim Dutton
• Mission Specialists Rick Mastracchio, Clay Anderson, Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson and Naoko Yamazaki of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The mission will deliver a multi-purpose logistics module filled with science racks for the laboratories aboard the station. There will be three planned spacewalks, with work to include replacing an ammonia tank assembly, retrieving a Japanese experiment from the station’s exterior, and switching out a rate gyro assembly on the S0 segment of the station’s truss structure.

We’re coming down to it folks, only three more scheduled missions after this one.  Somehow it seems fitting Discovery will be the last scheduled shuttle to visit the ISS.  That is unless of course,  somebody in Washington decides taking a back seat to the world in the space pursuits is not a very good idea and decides to keep things going.

This is fascinating news: 90% of the distant Universe was thought to be missing, but it was recently found. And what’s weird is, it was found to be in the red. Quite literally.

[Note: before you ask, this has nothing to do with dark matter. See below!]

First, a bit of background. Galaxies are filled with hydrogen gas, and that gas is a major component of the clouds that collapse to form stars. When that happens, the hot stars ionize the gas: the flood of ultraviolet light strips the electron away from the proton, freeing both. If the electron gets near the proton again, they can recombine. Because of quantum mechanics, the electron can only exists in certain energy states, which are a bit like steps in a staircase. You can jump from the third step down to the second, but there is no second-and-a-halfth step.

So it is with electrons. It used to be taught that this levels were like orbits, but that’s not a great analogy; the staircase is better. So if the electron is on the second level and drops to the first, it gives off energy in the form of light (just like when you step down you lose a bit of energy too, and it takes energy to go up a step). For the 2 to 1 step in hydrogen, the photon emitted is in the ultraviolet, and has a special name: Lyman alpha.

Ionized hydrogen gas clouds tend to blast out lots of Lyman alpha. This makes it a good way to search for distant star forming regions; just look for that wonderful wavelength of light associated with the 2 – 1 transition of hydrogen.

As it happens, we know that when the Universe was young, about a quarter the age it is now, star formation was going on at a much higher rate on average than it does now. So astronomers figured, hey, why not do searches for distant galaxies using Lyman alpha? They should pump it out, and make them easy to see.

So they looked. And to their surprise, they only found about 10% of the galaxies they predicted they should!

Uh oh.

This has been a problem for some time. But it’s not anymore: a recent experiment by astronomers shows that the galaxies are there, but they’re hidden!

What they did is look in one part of the sky, using the GOODS South field (part of which is pictured above), trying to find Lyman alpha emitting galaxies. Then they looked at the same region, but looked instead for H alpha, the line emitted when an electron jumps down from the third energy level to the second. And guess what they found: tons of galaxies!

The problem, they surmised, is that the galaxies are actually there and emitting Lyman alpha. But before that ultraviolet light can get out of one of those galaxies, it gets reabsorbed by gas inside the galaxy itself. We never see it.

But H alpha can more easily escape the galaxies once it’s produced. For one thing, it’s red light, and that can penetrate the gas and dust better than the ultraviolet Lyman alpha light can. There are other more complicated reasons as well, but the point is, the galaxies were simply hidden from us before, but not anymore. By extrapolating their results, it looks like they found 90% of the distant Universe!

I’ll note: this has nothing to do with dark matter. As it happens, 90% of the matter in the Universe is in a form that emits no light, but affects other matter through gravity. We know it exists, and you can find out why here. We know it exists locally, in nearby galaxies and clusters of galaxies, too. This new result doesn’t affect that, since the now un-hidden galaxies are very far away, like many billions of light years away. They can’t possibly affect nearby galaxies, so they don’t account for dark matter.

I love this study. It’s a great application of simple logic, though it wasn’t so simple to do: they had to use a lot of time on a monster 8 meter telescope to do it! But they were able to answer a question that has been around for some time, and it really does look like they’ve solved it.

And, as always, it makes me wonder what else is lurking out there in space, hidden but for a leap of logic and technology that will allow us to unveil it. Science is all about thinking around problems, and peeking into dusty corners. Sometimes the most interesting things are found there… including, in this case, the vast majority of the Universe!

In a victory for East Asian nations that consume sharkfin soup, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has shot down three of four proposals to protect sharks. Member nations of CITES who gathered in Doha, Qatar, rejected proposals that would have required countries to strictly regulate — but not ban — trade in several species of scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitetip and spiny dogfish sharks [The New York Times]. Japan also lobbied against the protections, because it strongly opposes extending the convention’s protections to any marine species (including the bluefin tuna that is so beloved by Japan’s sushi connoisseurs).

The only proposal that managed to get through was a proposal from the European Union and the island nation of Palau to protect the porbeagle shark, which is prized for its meat. But even this victory is a shallow one, as the proposal passed by a margin of just one vote, and could be overturned at the conference’s final session on Thursday.

Marine biologists have long warned that hammerhead and whitefin sharks are being overfished, particularly by countries like China where sharkfin soup is a prestigious delicacy. Fishermen harvest the fins and typically throw the sharks back into the sea to die. The rate of species decline in some areas is an astounding 90 percent. Japan led opposition to the four measures, arguing that management of shark populations should be left to regional fisheries groups, not CITES [Sydney Morning Herald].

The current CITES meeting has been seen by some conservation experts as a dispiriting sign that the convention isn’t making its decisions about endangered species based on scientific findings, but is instead bowing to politics and economic interests. “It appears that science no longer matters,” said Elizabeth Griffin of wildlife conservation group Oceana, based in Washington. “CITES is not fulfilling its obligation to protect species threatened by international trade” [Sydney Morning Herald].

Stuart Beck, Palau’s ambassador to the United Nations, neatly summed up the anger felt by conservationists after the shark protections failed, saying in a statement: “I am sure that, properly prepared, bald eagle is delicious. But, as civilized people, we simply do not eat it” [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Endangered Species Meeting Brings Good News for Elephants, Bad News for Coral
80beats: Bluefin Tuna is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: DNA Forensics Traces Sharks Killed for Their Fins
80beats: Human Appetite for Sharks Pushes Many Toward Extinction

Image: Wikimedia

Some people play Mozart to unborn babies in hopes of increasing their brain power, or talk to their plants in hopes of making them grow faster, so will subjecting cows to hours of video footage of the verdant Swiss Alps make them more productive?

Well, we don’t know yet. But a Russian farmer has invested the time and the LCD TV’s to find out.

News reports indicate that the farmer has rigged one side of his shed with 40-inch LCD TVs so that one row of cows can watch footage of the Swiss Alps, where the grass is green and the skies are blue. The cows on the other side are afforded no such diversion.

The farmer is monitoring his cattle to see if the TV-watching cows are more “happy and productive.”

TV is great, but you know what might be even greater? Letting the cows out of the shed once in a while to let them get a taste of the real green stuff.

Related Content:
80beats: Cows Can Feel the Pull of Magnetic North
Discoblog: Want More Milk? Then Name Your Cows
DISCOVER: Fighting Cow Methane With Food
DISCOVER: All Aboard The Cow Train
Discoblog: Scientists Build Fake Burping Cows

Image: Gizmodo/Ecorazzi

Earlier this month, a study in the journal Science tried to put to bed for good the question of dinosaur extinction: It was an impact from space, not large-scale volcanic activity, that wiped them out 65 million years ago, the study argued. That’s all well and good for the dinosaur’s end, but what about their beginning?

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists say they’ve studied the period about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs first came to power, and found that while catastrophic volcanic activity may not explain dinosaur extinction, it could have explained why dinosaurs’ competitors disappeared and the terrible lizards took over the planet.

Around the time of dino emergence, the continents were all locked up in the supercontinent Pangaea. As it pulled apart, researchers say the seismic activity gave rise to hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity, creating lava fields on the surface of the Earth the size of the continental United States. For this study, Jessica Whiteside and colleagues surveyed wood remnants, wax from ancient leaves, and whatever else they could extract from the volcanic flow’s remains to reconstruct what was happening in the climate of this period.

The scientists examined how two different isotopes (or forms) of carbon fluctuated during these volcanic eruptions. They found that the “heavy” form of carbon was depleted relative to the “light” form. They say this reflects disturbances in the carbon cycle at this time, including a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and aerosols (fine solid particles) [BBC News].

That finding, Whiteside says, reinforces the connection between volcano-induced runaway global warming and the great extinction 200 million years ago, which marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods and the ascendancy of the dinosaurs. Before the rise of the dinosaurs, the animal world was dominated by crurotarsans, ancient relatives of modern crocodiles. But as their populations crashed, early therapods, the group of dinosaurs that includes all meat-eating species from Velociraptor to Tyrannosaurus rex, gained ground and thrived [The Guardian].

This leaves at least one burning question, though: If raging volcanoes and lava flows the size of the United States made the planet hot and inhospitable, why did the dinosaurs survive while their competitors vanished? Scientists who study the crurotarsans found that they evolved at a similar rate as dinosaurs, who were not superior except for having evolved slightly more rapidly. The researchers also found that there were more varieties of crurotarsans, who were also more numerous and more adapted than dinosaurs, and thus had greater chances of prospering and ruling on Earth [AFP]. Thus, Whiteside says, it might have been no more than dumb luck that permitted dinosaur survival—and world domination.

Related Content:
80beats: Rock-Solid Science: A 6-Mile-Wide Space Rock Did Wipe Out the Dinosaurs, Experts Say
80beats: Forget “The Asteroid”: Could Supervolcanoes Have Killed the Dinosaurs?
80beats: In the Permian Period, Erupting Super-Volcanoes May Have Killed Half the Planet
80beats: Dinosaurs Ruled the World Because They “Got Lucky,” Say Scientists

Image: Jessica H. Whiteside (Site in Nova Scotia, Canada. The end-Triassic layer is in white.)