In these difficult economic times, cap and trade couldn't survive. Wall Street, massive industry opposition, and political polarization were among the leading factors that killed the bill by Waxman and Markey. Now what? Senators Cantwell and Collins have proposed a 39-page plan called "cap and dividend." It's very similar to what Obama discussed during his campaign and would auction 100 percent of pollution permits to producers and fossil fuel wholesalers and return three-quarters of revenue to consumers for high energy costs. Not bad. Additionally, Senators Kerry and Graham are working on a new bill. According to The New York Times, it would:
include a cap on greenhouse gas emissions only for utilities, at least at first, with other industries phased in perhaps years later. It is also said to include a modest tax on gasoline, diesel fuel and aviation fuel, accompanied by new incentives for oil and gas drilling, nuclear power plant construction, carbon capture and storage, and renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
I'll be following the energy policy discussion as it continues with great interest. What do you want to see in the bill?

On April 14th, 1970, a new crater was carved into the surface of the Moon:

How do we know it’s new? Because we made it.

That’s the impact scar of the third stage of the Saturn V rocket (technically designated S-IVB) that carried Apollo 13 to — but sadly, not on — the Moon. Earlier missions had placed seismic instruments on the lunar surface to measure if the Moon had any activity. They found it did, and in fact several moonquakes were big enough that had you been standing there, you would have felt them quite strongly (and probably been knocked on your spacesuit’s backside).

The S-IVB upper stage accelerated the astronauts to the Moon from Earth orbit. Once that was done, they had one final mission: in Apollos 13 – 17 the stages were aimed at the Moon itself, and impacted a few days later. The impacts were detected by the seismometers and could be used to determine how seismic waves travel through the lunar surface, a trick that’s been used on Earth for a long time. This information can be used to figure out what the lunar subsurface structure is like.

The crater image above is from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and shows the Apollo 13 booster impact. The crater itself is a few dozen meters across, and the material ejected forms a blanket around it for many meters more. The bright material indicates this is a fresh crater; note how gray the more distant undisturbed material around the crater is.

The impact site looks obvious in that picture, doesn’t it? But try finding it in the original full-resolution image returned from LRO and see if you can locate it, then! I found it relatively quickly starting at the top, and was shocked at how far I could trace the rays — the linear ejected debris features around the crater — from the impact site. One of them is clearly about a kilometer long… that’s over half a mile! Those rays are from plumes of material ejected from the impact site, a common feature. They also indicate the crater’s youth: over time, cosmic rays, the solar wind, and even thermal stress from the Moon’s day/night cycle slowly erase the rays. Any crater with such extensive rays has to be young.

Some of the other S-IVB impact sites have been identified; the LRO blog has an image of the Apollo 14 S-IVB crater, for example. Knowing where these impact sites are helps scientists understand the Moon better, since it a more precise location means the data from the old Apollo missions can be interpreted more clearly. I wonder if future colonists may visit those sites the way we do Plymouth Rock, or Jamestown, or other early exploration and colony sites on Earth?

Credit: NASA, NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Launched on January 19, 2006, New Horizons robotic spacecraft left the Earth at the fastest launch speed ever recorded for a man-made object – 58,536 km/h (36,373 mph).  It will reach Pluto July 14, 2015.  How fast is New Horizons going?  It took only 9 hours to reach the moon.  Let me rephrase that… IT TOOK ONLY NINE HOURS TO REACH THE MOON.  That’s called hauling the mail.  Yeah, I know what else it’s hauling, but this is a family site.  It’s not the fastest spacecraft ever launched (that would be Voyager I), but it did blaze off the Earth the fastest of any ever launched.

New Horizons Liftoff, Image NASA/KSC

So… New Horizons will fly by and take pictures of Pluto, right?  Well, sure, but it’ll do more than that.  Considering it’ll have only one fly by, then head into the Kuiper Belt, I think the mission objectives are pretty great.  Straight from the New Horizons web site:

New Horizons: Mission Objectives

• Map surface composition of Pluto and Charon
• Characterize geology and morphology (“the look”) of Pluto and Charon
• Characterize the neutral atmosphere of Pluto and its escape rate
• Search for an atmosphere around Charon
• Map surface temperatures on Pluto and Charon
• Search for rings and additional satellites around Pluto
• PLUS… conduct similar investigations of one or more Kuiper Belt Objects
  

By the way, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the cost of these NASA missions; our glorious politicians say it “just isn’t worth it”, and the money could be spent elsewhere.  Okay, the cost of the mission ($700 million), divided by the US population at launch, spread out over a ten year period, comes to a cost of 20 cents per person per year.  Even if you have to pay that all at once, it’s only $2.00 per person.  Oh, wow.  That puts my yearly budget right on into the red, let me tell you.

Good grief.

New Horizons, Image NASA/JPL

Anyway, New Horizons carries some cultural artifacts in addition to all the really cool scientific equipment on board.  It has an American flag, a Florida state quarter, a disk with over 400,000 names (remember waaaaay back before launch when NASA had the “Send Your Name To Pluto” publicity drive?), and some of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes (he discovered Pluto).

New Horizons, Location on March 29, 2010 credit NASA/New Horizons web site

Right now, New Horizons is a little more than half way to Pluto.  It did receive a gravity boost from Jupiter (and took some really cool images on the way).  Take some time and cruise through the New Horizons web site. There’s an education section that will tell you everything you ever thought you wanted to know about Pluto.  It’s great.

I’m looking forward to 2015 when New Horizons reaches Pluto.  I think it’ll be awesome.

When I saw this painting, I got tears in my eyes. Seriously.

I just love this. I think it’s the angles; the 3/4 turn of the grandmother and baby, the look of absorption on the baby’s face, and the semi-gibbous phase of the Earth.

And, of course, the sentiment. You can read a lot into this painting. But isn’t that what art is for?

This work is by Chase Stone, who has a lot of amazing art posted on DeviantArt. I strongly recommend going through his stuff.

Tip o’ the spacesuit visor to Reddit.

Most of life on Earth is a mystery to us. The bulk of biomass on the planet is made up of microbes. By some estimates, there may be 150 million species of bacteria, but scientists have only formally named a few thousand of them. One of the big causes of this ignorance is that scientists don’t know how to raise microbe colonies. If you scoop up some dirt and stick it under a microscope, you’ll see lots of different microbes living happily there. If you mash up all the DNA in that mud and read its sequence, you’ll discover an astonishing diversity of genes belonging to those microbes–thousands in a single spoon of soil. But now try to rear those microbes in a lab. When scientists try, they generally fail. A tiny fraction of one percent of microbe species will grow under ordinary conditions in Petri dish.

This staggering difficulty is the reason why E. coli and a few other species became the laboratory darlings of biologists during the 1900s. As I write in Microcosm, E. coli will happily explode in a flask full of broth. As a result, a lot of what we know about life we know from E. coli. Certainly a lot of those lessons hold true for any species–genes encoded in DNA, DNA used to produce RNA and proteins, a genetic code, and so on. But there are a lot of microbes that are very unlike E. coli. Even in our gut, for example, E. coli is just a minor player in an ecosystem made up of hundreds or thousands of species. Yet we know relatively little about its neighbors.

One reason for the trouble we have in raising microbes is that the environment we like is not the environment a lot of them like. If you are feeding on minerals in boiling water at the bottom of the ocean, it’s possible that you might find life in a luke-warm flask in an oxygen-rich atmosphere at sea-level air pressure unbearable–perhaps even toxic.

But the physical surroundings of microbes can’t account for all the trouble they pose for would-be microbial zoo-keepers. If you scoop up some wet sand from a pleasant beach, you will still be hard-pressed to get more than a few species to grow in the lab.

To coax bacteria to grow, microbiologists have been upgrading their Petri dishes. They have been building cages that mimic the natural habitat of the bacteria, and in some cases taking their chambers out of the lab and putting them in the environments where the bacteria live.

These semi-wild chambers have brought scientists more success, and they’ve also helped scientists figure out why the microbes are so hard to grow in the first place. Along with the right physical conditions, microbes need to live alongside the right microbes.

In the new issue of Chemistry and Biology, Tony d’Onofrio of Harvard and his colleagues report a striking success in cultivating bacteria that were previously impossible to cultivate. They made their discovery while studying some bacteria that live on a beach near Boston. Some of the bacteria, while unable to grow on their own in a Petri dish, grew if they were near certain other species. Perhaps, the scientists speculated, the hard-to-grow bacteria depended on something the other species made.

The scientists tested different molecules made by bacteria to see if any of them were fostering the growth. They eventually figured out that the responsible molecule was something known as a siderophore. Some species of bacteria make siderophores as a way to get their minimal daily required does of iron. Iron is essential for the growth of cells, but in many environments free iron is in short supply. So bacteria make iron-trapping molecules–siderophores–and release them through special channels. The siderophores drift around, and sometimes manage to snag iron atoms. They fold up around the iron, assuming a shape that allows them to slip through other channels back into the bacteria. Once inside, they open up again and set their iron free.

It turns out that a lot of species on the beaches around Boston–and presumably in a lot of other places in the world–don’t make their own siderophores. Instead, they rely on other species to produce siderophores, and once those molecules swallow up the iron, the bacteria that don’t make siderophores snatch them up. The scientists found that with different kinds of siderophores made by different species of bacteria, they could suddenly get a lot of microbes to grow.

Discoveries like these are exciting both in a practical and intellectual way. We’ve already harvested lots of valuable molecules from microbes, such as antibiotics and gene-copying enzymes. If scientists can raise lots of new species of microbes, they may be able to find new molecules. But the result is fascinating in itself. Apparently, a lot of microbial species depend on the kindness of strangers. And apparently, there are bacteria out there that are churning out siderophores despite the fact that other species are slurping up the iron they forage. If that was all there was to the story, this would not be a situation that could last long. The cheaters would thrive by skipping the effort of making siderophores, and eventually there wouldn’t be enough honest bacteria left to keep all the microbes supplied with their iron. It’s likely, instead, that the cheaters are not cheaters at all, but rather have services of their own to offer the microbial community.

And so the reason that we know so little about life on Earth may be that we have yet to figure out the complicated social life of microbes.

This spring, many beekeepers across America opened their hives and found ruin within. At a time when they should have been buzzing with activity, the hives were half-empty, with most adult bees having flown off to die. A new federal survey indicates that 2010 has been the worst year so far for bee deaths. Another study suggests that pesticides might be to blame for the mass wipeout of adult honeybees.

This winter’s die-off was the continuation of a four-year trend. At any given point, beekeepers can expect to see 15 to 20 percent of their bees wiped out due to natural causes or harsh weather. But this alarming phenomenon, termed colony collapse disorder (CCD), has seen millions of bees perish in a mysterious epidemic, with some farmers losing 30 to 90 percent of their hives.

As for the cause of this epidemic, experts say their best guess is that many factors are combining to sicken bees, with the list of culprits including parasites, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, and pesticides. Now a new study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE strengthens the case for pesticides’ culpability.

In the study, researchers found about three out of five pollen and wax samples from 23 states had at least one systemic pesticide — a chemical designed to spread throughout all parts of a plant [AP]. The scientists say that in the 887 wax, pollen, bee, and hive samples, they found 121 different types of pesticides. The pesticides weren’t present in sufficient quantities to kill the bees, they say, but when combined with the other detrimental factors the mix could prove lethal for the tiny workers.

This is the fourth year of honey bee losses across the United States. In 2007, the nation’s beekeepers lost 32 percent of their colonies. In 2008 they lost 36 percent. In 2009, 29 percent [Discovery News]. With the official 2010 numbers (which will be announced in April) expected to be even worse, farmers across the United States are worried. About one-third of the human diet is from plants that require pollination from honeybees, which means everything from apples to zucchini [AP]. Almond growers in California are particularly concerned; the state is one of the largest producers of almonds in the world, and with the decline in the bee population, pollinating the trees has been a challenge. CCD has also dealt a tough economic blow to the beekeepers who truck their hives to the orchards. For Zac Browning, one of the country’s largest commercial beekeepers, the latest woes have led to a $1 million loss this year [AP].

As federal, state, and private agencies hunt for the elusive bee killer, the USDA has advised people not to use pesticides indiscriminately—especially at midday when honey bees are most likely out foraging for nectar. The agency is also asking people to plant and encourage the planting of good nectar sources like red clover, foxglove, bee balm, and joe-pye weed to give the besieged honey bees a boost.

Related Content:
80beats: Honeybee Murder Mystery: “We Found the Bullet Hole,” Not the “Smoking Gun”
80beats: Are Reports of a Global Honeybee Crisis Overblown?
80beats: Honeybee Killer Still at Large
DISCOVER: The Baffling Bee Die-Off Continues
DISCOVER: Beepocalypse

Image: Flickr / Todd Huffman

There are aliens among us!

Don’t believe me? Then gaze upon this picture, O Foolish Human:

BABloggee Jeremy Theriot sent this picture to me. It looks innocent, doesn’t it? Ah, certainly, until you see it from a different angle…

J’accuse! Obviously, they walk among us! Or, more accurately, they are rooted among us. If prickly pear cacti have roots. I think they do. Yeah, let’s assume they do.

So maybe they’re not a major threat, but have you ever seen one up close? I’m positive I don’t want one probing me, I assure you. There’s a reason they’re prickly…

P.S. This one provides even more evidence that they photosynthesize among us.

The Kennecott Garfield Smelter of the Bingham Canyon Mine is located 17 miles west of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It sits between the south shore of the Great Salt Lake and the Oquirrh Mountains. As the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi River, the Kennecott stack rises 1,215 feet from a 124-foot-diameter base. The Bingham Canyon Mine, owned by global mining giant Rio Tinto, has the distinction of being the biggest man-made excavation on the face of the earth, daily producing 150,000 tons of copper ore and 270,000 tons of “overburden.” Called “The Richest Hole on Earth,” it is nearly a mile deep and about three miles wide at the top, and still expanding.

As photographer Michael Light points out, if you look closely at this photograph, you will see the beach of the prehistoric freshwater Lake Bonneville, behind the top half of the stack, to the left. Shooting from the open side of a helicopter, with nothing between him and the void but a lap belt, Light was in the air for about two hours, shooting some 450 exposures using a large format aerial camera loaded with 5” roll film. “Photographing Bingham Canyon is an act of looking at one geological epoch precisely as it merges into another, the Holocene becoming the Anthropocene,” writes Light.

Garfield Stack, Oquirrh Mountains, and Ancient Beach of Great Salt Lake.

All images are by Michael Light, courtesy Radius Books/Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

After six months in the International Space Station, two astronauts, a Russian and an American, returned to earth on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 in the Soyuz TMZ-16. The Soyuz dropped into four feet of snow in a remote region of Kazakhstan. NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, who has been shooting for NASA since 1991, says that one of the hardest parts of shooting a landing is trying to catch the rockets on the spacecraft that are supposed to fire milliseconds prior to landing, in order to cushion it. Ingalls arrived in the first group of recovery helicopters on the scene that circle the landing zone. The same snow that blocked the ground recovery vehicles from reaching the Soyuz also made it difficult for Ingalls to tell how high above the ground the it was, and when the rockets would fire.

He shot at a high shutter speed using motor drive to capture it all. Ingalls had made his shot, but for the astronauts, the journey was hardly over. Coming all the way from outer space back to earth is only part of the commute from the Space Station. After recovery from the snow at the landing site near Arkalyk, these hardy spacemen then traveled two and a half hours by helicopter to Kustanay, Kazakhstan. There they participated in a ceremony at the airport, where the locals presented them with traditional hats. Then they hopped on a plane for another two and a half hour ride before finally coming to rest at Star City, outside of Moscow.

Image courtesy Bill Ingalls/NASA

When a person has a heart attack, the heart repairs its damaged muscle by forming scar tissue. As a result, the heart never truly goes back to the way it was. But when a zebrafish has a heart injury, like having a large chunk of it chopped off, it grows a brand new piece to replace it.

Two independent reports published in the journal Nature show that within days of an injury to its heart, the zebrafish has the remarkable ability to regenerate most of the missing cardiac tissue using mature heart cells–not stem cells, as some researchers had suspected.

The findings help explain why human beings can’t regenerate a heart or missing limbs. The reports contradict a previous study (pdf) done by one of the research teams in 2006 that suggested that stem cells, the general all-purpose cells that develop into all the mature and functional cells of the body, were responsible for self-repair.

The finding suggest that doctors have been on the wrong track with recent stem cell-based therapies for heart attack patients. Many heart patients have received injections of stem cells, often ones taken from their own bone marrow. But the beneficial effects have generally been unremarkable [The New York Times].

In one study, a team led by Chris Jopling and Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte genetically engineered the fish’s heart muscle cells so that when they proliferated they would synthesize a fluorescent green protein [The New York Times].Then they chopped off part of the fish’s heart and watched to see if the fish would employ stem cells to regrow the heart or use mature heart muscle cells, known as cardiomyocytes.

In just a few days, scientists found the zebrafish had regrown the missing piece of heart. On further observation, scientists found that all the cells in the new part of the heart glowed green, proving that existing heart muscle cells were the principal or only source of the new tissue [The New York Times]. Further experiments showed that the cardiomyocytes near the injury site seem to take a step backward in development, detaching from one another and losing their typical shape—presumably to make it possible for them to start dividing again as they replenish the lost tissue [ScienceNOW]. Experiments conducted by Kenneth Poss, the researcher behind the 2006 study, showed similar results. Both teams say the next step is to identify the cellular signals that trigger the regeneration process.

The scientists say that prior to heart failure, mammalian heart cells go into a state called hibernation, where the muscle cells stops contracting in an effort to save themselves. Hibernating cardiomyocytes are also seen in zebrafish, but unlike the mammal cells, the fish cells then take another step and begin proliferating. Scientists are trying to understand what gives the fish cells the ability to start multiplying, and hope to conduct further studies on mice to see whether mammalian cells can be induced to follow suit. “Maybe all they need is a bit of push in the right direction,” Jopling said [HealthDay News].

Related Content:
80beats:Injecting Special Protein Could Make Hearts Heal Themselves
80beats: Could Stem Cells Patch Up a Broken Heart?
80beats: Researchers Could Grow Replacement Tissue to Patch Broken Hearts
80beats: Harvesting Infant Hearts for Transplants Raises Ethical Questions
80beats: The Upside of Nuclear Testing: Traceable Radioactivity in Our Heart Cells

Image: Chris Jopling. The green-glowing heart cells are shown at 7, 14, and 30 days after injury.

Today Discover gains two new bloggers: Razib Khan and Ed Yong. But while they’re new to Discover, they’re far from new to the science blogosphere. I’m a long time reader of both of their blogs, and urge everyone to check them out, too. Welcome!

I am delighted to welcome two of our favorite science bloggers on the planet to their new home with us at Discover Blogs! Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science and Razib Khan of Gene Expression begin settling in today and I cannot imagine two better additions to the family! In case you're not already familiar with these phenomenal blogs, Ed's an award-winning science writer who breaks down research papers into easy to understand posts like no one else. He only uses the primary literature and Not Exactly Rocket Science was just named Research Blog of the Year, Best Lay-Level Blog, and home of the Best Post of the Year in the Research Blogging Awards. In other words, Ed's writing is a must-read for anyone interested in science online. Razib's also a superstar blogger and covers genetics better than anyone! He not only reports on the latest research, but he synthesizes and analyzes the data from primary sources in novel ways--ways that often impress those scientists originally engaged in the studies. Razib offers new insights on topics from human migration to standards of beauty and I always learn something new when I visit his site. He also makes me laugh. On top of ...

Race day one is almost done here in Houston, and the college and high school engineers are starting to surmount the technical difficulties and put up extraordinary numbers with their cars.

When we last left Durand High School, the team’s ethanol-powered car had swiped another vehicle around turn one and wrecked. But the car got back on the road, and the team recorded two full runs, including one of 345 miles per gallon. Three of the cars in the fuel cell category scored more than the equivalent of 1,000 MPG. And the girls from Granite Falls High School got as high as 182 MPG in the pink-and-green diesel “Iron Maiden.”

Tomorrow: How you drive these crazy things, how you build a car when your college forbids welding, and the final tallies from Shell Eco-marathon Americas.

As we saw this morning, just taking a vehicle designed strictly with mileage in mind and getting it around a track 10 times in no easy task. Grand Rapids High School, who we covered this morning, saw their car “The World’s Fastest Indian” bottom out over a bump near the final turn and grind to a halt. As of this moment the team had gone through an emergency session in the garage—which is actually a huge room in the convention center littered with tools and frantic young engineers—and headed out to try it again.

The key, says coach Michael Werner of Granite Falls High School in Washington state, is to just get on the board. The two-seater diesel his boys’ team built managed to chauffeur Shell’s Marvin Odum on a tour of the track, but thereafter suffered some transmission problems. The girls’ team had their aptly-named “Iron Maiden” roadster on the way to a successful run this morning when it threw a chain. “I think we’re on Plan E, F, or maybe G,” he says.

But fortune turned for Granite Falls, and this afternoon the girls finished all 10 laps around the downtown Houston track, erupting in a chorus of cheers as the car pulled in to have its fuel milage measured by Shell volunteers. Werner says he told them to forget the mileage and just get the car over the line. Once you get a number on the board, he says, it’s there, whether it’s 50, 100, or 200 mpg.

Now that Granite Falls has a score, the girls plan to drive with a little more strategy, tweaking their fuel use to go for a big number. Many of the other drivers that have already completed a successful lap or two have begun to figure out the course, giving the engine a burn at the start of the home stretch and coasting the rest of the way to save gas, and staying tight through the backside turns.

Even if the team misses its mileage goals, Werner says they’ll be strong in the other competitions, like ergonomics or safety. “They’re as comfortable as you can be in a sardine can,” he says of the drivers. Now he just needs to get the boys team on the board, which may take a little more garage time, and some motivation. “We’ll be out here, with the successful ones,” he teased one of the boys headed inside for continued repairs.

Not so long ago, the Purdue University solar car team was competing in the American Solar Challenge, an endurance race spanning more than 1,000 miles. The Shell Eco-marathon here in Houston is a totally different animal, however, requiring just 10 short track laps but asking the utmost in fuel efficiency. That sent the Purdue team back to the shop.

Pulsar, the team’s prototype entry here, is a scaled-down version of the long-distance Spot II. “We don’t have the nice long curvature,” team member Joe Trefilek tells me about the body design. While the motor and body size are both reduced, Shell adds the requirement that the solar entrants produce more energy than they consume.

Pulsar’s broad top covered in solar panels make it stick out like a sore thumb in the prototype category, which is mostly populated by sleek and small gas-powered cars stripped down to the bare minimum to maximize mileage. But while Pulsar is slightly less concerned with aerodynamics, it’s more at the mercy of the weather.

Before the race, Trefilek says, the team made computer maps of how shadows cast by the tall hotels and office buildings in downtown Houston would fall on the track to see how the driver might need to balance the energy load. He says the team wondered, ”Would we have to faster in the shade, and slower in the sun?” Thankfully, the sun shined steadily here this morning.

To compete head-to-head with the other energy sources, solar cars have to compare their energy use to the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline and do the math. Trefilek says Purdue made two solid runs this morning, and while official word from Shell hasn’t come down, he says Pulsar’s on-board meter showed they’d reached the equivalent of 4,400 mpg.

This afternoon the urban concept division of cars hits the track. There are far fewer of these, because the idea is that they be much closer to a street legal car. For next year, Purdue wants to make a hybrid of their its solar cars and build something for the urban concept division.

Besides the slew of large universities, there’s also a contingent of plucky high school teams competing here at the Eco-marathon. Though for some the first morning has been a struggle.

Tiny Durand High School from Wisconsin boats the only ethanol vehicle in the field. But it wasn’t the engine that kept them from completing the course. With another car on the right, Durand’s driver got too close to the inside curb on turn one and clipped it, then the other car, leaving both of them stuck.

For Durand coach Bill Rieger, it was a heartbreaker. “I want to cry right now,” he said, because the team was so close to putting results on the board. Once the car completes 10 laps, race officials make the official mileage measurements. But Durand’s #50 car completed only 7, and there are no pro-rated mesasurements. The 50 car is custom-built, so it won’t be an easy fix to get it ready for the later trial runs. “We need to find a bike shop and see if we can bend our spindles back,” Rieger says.

Hope isn’t lost: the students from Grand Rapids High School in Minnesota tell DISCOVER that despite the competition, the teams help each other out. Still, the high school students want badly to succeed, and especially out-do the college team. Grand Rapids took 7th overall last year. This year started slower for them, as their morning session run made only a single lap. But their still hopeful, saying the new gasoline engine this year could achieve 700 miles per gallon.

Corey writes, “I got this tattoo as an homage to the pain of my graduate work. It’s a model of fulvic acid which is a representation of natural organic matter in the soil. I work with this molecule for my grad work and I figured I might as well get it etched into my skin so I can look at it and say, ‘Well, at least it hurt less than grad school at Cornell.’”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Rob at 12:10 CDT

How about a nice, easy riddle to play with this Saturday?  We’ve had a string of fairly hard riddles, and of course the Bonus Riddle was challenging.  Here’s a nice, comfortable riddle for you to kick around for a few minutes, so let’s get right to it:

This is an object.

It is not visible to the unaided eye.

This object was predicted mathematically years before it was actually discovered.

Although we don’t know too much about this object, what we know is strange.

We have hopes of knowing much more about it in a few years.

This object has companions.

It has recently been the center of controversy.

Some scientists believe it’s not what we have always thought it is.

This object is well represented in popular fiction.

There you go… now isn’t that easy?  I’m lurking, so come to the comment section and give it a shot.  We’re building a list of participants for the next bonus riddle, and we’d sure like to put you on the list.

Trudy Sees a Spider

And they’re off. This morning Shell’s Marvin Odum waved the ceremonial green flag, and the 50 vehicles that came down for the Shell Eco-Marathon Americas are getting ready to make their test runs around the oval track on the streets of downtown Houston. It’s the first time the event has come here, and Mayor Parker Annise Parker says it belongs in a car city like hers. “We want to figure out a way to be Houston, but be better about it,” she says. “We’re still a car city, and we get excited for moving vehicles.”

It was a long road just getting here, in the literal and metaphorical sense. University of Missouri team member Jon Tylka says “It’s really a miracle we have a car.” Missouri’s car, seen here, is the only entry in the smaller of the two divisions, urban concept, to run on a hydrogen fuel cell, and it was a couple years in the making. Tylka says the team was formerly working on a solar car, but solar vehicle competitions have been receiving less funding.

Despite the weeks and months that went into the project, Tylka and the team spent three or four all-nighters (it’s hard to remember how many when you’re sleep-deprived) preparing the car before and after the 15-hour drive down from Columbia, Missouri. Its driveshaft sheared before competition, and its electrical system caught fire. Missouri’s car is one of the few equipped with a suspension; they wanted to make the vehicle as close to a real car as possible, but that has presented difficulties too. One team member who speaks German had to call Europe to fix a last-minute bug in the fuel cell. At one point even the horn failed. “The horn has to work, or else we can’t race” Tylka says. Thankfully, they found a replacement.

We’ll keep you posted on how the Tigers do. While it’s a friendly competition, the team has one particular priority: Avoiding the ignominy of losing to one of the high school teams present.

I am traveling extensively for my Sooper Sekrit Project™, and staying in one interchangeable hotel after another. But one recent hotel was a bit special: while perambulating to my room down an outside corridor, I spotted this on the floor:

As it happens, the town I am in — forgive me for not revealing the location! — is very religious, and in a way that shapes like this would easily be revered as some sort of icon of God’s presence. The resemblance to an angel is obvious.

But of course, I happened to be walking back to my room from lunch. Had I instead been walking to lunch when I spotted it, I would’ve seen this view on the left. I suppose angels have to breathe, too, so this could be interpreted as a divine pulmonary system, but somehow I doubt it.

What does it look like to you?