Science is the best way to dig out the truth of the natural world, but that doesn’t prevent many people from denying truths that are inconvenient or contrary to their preconceptions or faith.

ENLARGE

U.S. 30, east of Blair, Neb. June, 2011, Iowa DOT

The stunning floods, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves in 2011 caused more Americans to accept global warming — even if climate whizzes are chary of attributing individual weather events to the warming trend.

In the last month, denial of global warming has subsided in the wake of a string of floods, droughts and heat waves, culminating in the “summer in March,” 2012. Although Americans’ attitudes toward warming ebb and flow, on April 17, a Yale University poll reported that 69 percent think global warming is affecting the weather in the United States.

In the same month, however, a Discovery Channel series called “Frozen Planet” attracted ire when scientists noted that it documented massive melting at the poles, but ignored the “why?” question. Scientists have said for decades that polar warming would be an early sign of global warming.

In the recent past, this phenomenon of “denialism” has also appeared in doubts about issues that have long been settled in the scientific community, such as whether:

An April conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison delved into the origin and development of denialism. Is a refusal to face facts growing more common? Are there better ways to explain how the world works?

Denial in the brain

Scientists, by training, are professional skeptics, but if after decades of debate 97 percent of them accept the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, why are so many unconvinced? “The theory is that if we tell people what we know, they will change,” says Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, but that ignores how people really listen and make decisions.

Speaking to a high-level gathering of science journalists in Madison, Lupia said the problem does not reside with the audience. “The problem is us. Our expectations aren’t consistent with how humans react to information, what they will listen to, or what they will remember. People don’t pay attention, or they don’t remember what we said or what we intend them to remember.”

To change an opinion, you must first attract and then hold the audience’s attention, but attention wanders all the time. No matter how important you think your message is, Lupia says, “Biology does not change its rules … about when people will think about things that challenge them. … If I am saying something abstract, that does not connect to your core aspirations,” you may be more interested in counting tiles on the ceiling.

Can you hear me now?

To communicate with a general audience, Lupia says, “You have to make it close, concrete, immediate. I understand the joy of telling the whole story about climate, but there are some audiences that can’t handle it; in their reality, it’s not the most immediate thing. They might be more receptive if you make the conversation about pollution, energy security or energy costs.”

Information is filtered by attention and ideology, Lupia concludes. “Learning is always an away game. All the real action occurs in the audience’s heads,” he says.

Reasoning: Logical or “motivated”?

Ideally, science adheres to logical reasoning: the conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

But psychologists say it’s common to see “motivated reasoning,” the tendency to fit new information into existing attitudes.

Making a judgment or decision can often involve a “fundamental tension between believing what you want and believing what you have to believe based on the information in front of you,” says Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California-Irvine.

“There is overwhelming evidence” that hopes, fears and social connections affect our judgments, Ditto adds, “but it’s not just that we believe whatever we want. I want to be taller, but I don’t believe that because the data won’t let me.”

Since processing information and making judgments have major emotional components, the standards for evidence are skewed in favor of reinforcing our preconceptions. We are more skeptical about ideas that are new, or that conflict with our thoughts and opinions, Ditto contends.

Over the course of evolution, bad events — but not beneficial ones — forced our ancestors to focus on whether to fight or flee. “People are the same way about information,” says Ditto.

The social element in motivated reasoning surfaced in a 1950s experiment, when six people convinced a seventh, the only real subject, that two lines were equally long. One line was clearly shorter than the other, Ditto says, “But six of them are confederates, and a substantial number of [subjects] go with the obviously wrong answer. That’s the power of having other people who believe as you do. It’s much easier to believe something that does not comport with reality if a whole bunch of others” hold the same erroneous belief.

History of denialism

Although denial of global warming and the erroneous link between vaccines and autism both originated in the 1990s, the organized rejection of evolution dates to the 1920s, when some American Christian fundamentalists promoted creationism — a Biblical explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

In a 2009 survey, 87 percent of scientists, but only 32 percent of all Americans, agreed that organisms have evolved over time through natural processes. Thirty-one percent of Americans thought humans and other living things “have existed in the present form since the beginning of time.”

Scientists and other Americans certainly have a different understanding of how organisms change through time!

Scientist data and general public data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys, May-June 2009. For question wording, see survey toplines. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding. Reprinted from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Much of the attention to the issue comes from battles over teaching of evolution or creationism in public schools, but there is “a lot of misunderstanding,” about the anti-evolution movement in the United States, says Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and longtime student of the movement.

Although creationism is commonly considered a backlash against science, “Virtually nobody in the movement [in the 1920s] thought of themselves as anti-scientific,” Numbers says. “They were denying the scientific status of evolution.”

The dictionary defines science as “organized, certain knowledge about nature, and they said, ‘Nothing is certain about evolution, nobody has seen it.’”

During the 1970s, primarily in response to court decisions, creationism morphed into “creation science” or “scientific creationism,” Numbers says. “The anti-evolutionists realized that evolution had a great deal of scientific support … so their approach was that they, too, were scientific.”

Unlike most anti-evolutionists in the 1920s, the new creationists used a literal interpretation of the Bible to date creation to less than 10,000 years ago. But this created a problem, Numbers says, since according to the Bible, on the sixth day, “God created the animals and Adam named them all.”

No way Adam could rattle off the more than 1 million names of the modern species so quickly, but Numbers notes that the Bible refers to “kinds,” not “species.” If those “kinds” — created in Eden and saved on Noah’s ark — were equivalent to taxonomic families, they could have evolved into the profusion modern species.

“So creationists can accept evolution within the family, and all the evidence for speciation is welcome, because in only about 4,300 years since the flood, they have to have evolution of all the species,” says Numbers. “It’s evolution in fast-forward,” but only among closely related species.”

Even if “kind” equals family, anti-evolutionists exempt humans from this reasoning, allowing them to reject human descent from apes — our fellow hominids.

“It’s strange, I know,” says Numbers. “They are anti-evolution, but most of the evidence evolutionists use against them, they are happy to embrace! One thing that has not been true for 50 years, but lingers in the popular mind, is that creationists deny all forms of evolution.”

The manual of denialism?

Evolutionary biologists regard evolution through natural selection as the organizing principle of biology. Yet for 30 or 40 years, surveys have shown a substantial fraction of Americans, even a majority, who do not “believe in” evolution, Sean Carroll, vice-president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told the denial conference.

Carroll, who like many biologists is aghast at the effort to squeeze evolution into a biblical straitjacket, says, “The denial of evolution was my introduction to denialism.”

ENLARGE

American Museum of National History

In 1954, children got a “Polio Pioneer” card, and a piece of candy after getting a jab of polio vaccine.

Typically, biologists have approached the evolution debate by amassing evidence, but “it’s never been about the data,” maintains Carroll, who is also a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And if it’s not about the data, what are we talking about?”

An earlier example of denialism occurred in the 1950s, after Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, a breakthrough that halted a dreaded, paralyzing disease.

Many chiropractors, Carroll found, opposed vaccines since they negated the central premise of chiropractic — that all disease results from misalignment of the vertebrae. “It shocked me. They actively opposed, disputed the efficacy of the polio vaccine. The opposed the March of Dimes, and federal and state efforts to get everybody vaccinated.”

Five hallmarks of denialism

The opposition continued — even after the polio epidemic tapered off as a result of the mass vaccination that started in 1955, says Carroll. And he identifies the tactics used then as a “playbook” of science denial that is echoed in more recent struggles over evolution, vaccines and global warming:

We just don’t agree!

Add it up, and the theme is this: The science must not be allowed to endanger a key philosophy, Carroll says.

But the cost of denialism is high, Carroll maintains. “It’s difficult, as an evolutionary biologist, to realize that half the county is deaf to anything you have to say, especially if the story you have to tell is about a magnificent achievement, understanding the complex relationship of living things on the planet, the deep history of our species.”

To reach young people, Howard Hughes has begun producing and giving away a series of videos on evolution called The making of the fittest.

Go to links for videos

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

To bring science to the masses, Hughes has produced videos on evolution; this one describes how cold-water fish evolved “anti-freeze” genes.

The idea is to engage in storytelling — to help people understand and remember facts by putting them into a narrative framework, Carroll says. As a professor, he’s seen the power of a story. “When I got lost, off-topic, and students see me years later, they say they still remember some of those stories, and I know they don’t remember any of the genetics. Stories count.”

Time (dis)honored tactics

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, has written about the “merchants of doubt.”

The message, she says, is simple: The facts are not all in. We need to hold judgment until the scientists agree.

This kind of corrosive doubt — in the face of scientific certainty — is “very depressing” if you “believe that knowledge is power,” Oreskes says. “Knowledge is not powerful enough — an ideology is more powerful still. It’s about ideas, not facts.”

During the last half-century, she says, “Political powers are willing to attack rational truths, and those who deliver them.”

There is also money at stake in many of the issues, especially in the case of climate change, which threatens the fossil-fuel industry.

Car exhaust from eutrophication&hypoxia; smoky butt from Raul Lieberwirth

What do these have in common? Many companies in the oil and tobacco industries have sown seeds of doubt about the long-term effects of their products.

The model for such campaigns, Oreskes said, came from the tobacco industry in the 1960s. Facing growing evidence linking their profitable product to lung cancer, the industry settled on a strategy of promoting “Questions, manifested in a memorable maxim: “Doubt is our product.”

And for decades, doubt helped big tobacco deride and deny a tidal wave of evidence that cigarettes cause lung and heart disease.

December, 2011, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

After the crazy weather of the past year, pollsters have seen a bump in the number of Americans seeing “solid evidence” for global warming.

The same strategy, Oreskes says, was adapted to undermine “nuclear winter” (the discovery that huge clouds of ash and dust released during nuclear war could freeze and starve the planet), the dangers of the insecticide DDT, acid rain caused by power-plant pollution, the ozone hole, and global warming.

The tactics were to “challenge the evidence, claim the science is not settled, cherry-pick the data, to demand balance from journalists and threaten to sue if they don’t,” says Oreskes.

Changing the climate change story

The basic physics of global warming have been known for 100 years, Oreskes said. Scientists started exploring the subject with early computerized climate models in the 1980s.

In 1992, Oreskes said, the first President George Bush, “Called for concrete action to protect the planet. We had political leadership that committed us to doing something, yet we never did take the concrete steps that Bush called for. It’s a story about political challenges, selling uncertainty, about science in the age of denial.”

The doubters, funded by the oil industry, included some prominent Cold-War physicists who had been advocates for Ronald Reagan’s anti-missile defense system. “They said the science was unsettled, that it would be premature to act,” says Oreskes, who was intrigued to find that one of those physicists, Frederick Seitz, had been a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company.

In 1998, Seitz organized a petition against the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to control greenhouse gases.

Seitz and his fellow doubters, Oreskes says, “Found a new enemy: environmental extremism. You see anxiety about environmentalists as socialists, using climate change as a lever to effect social or economic change.”

What began with a handful of people with roots in the Cold War has since spread to “a range of free-market think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute,” Oreskes says.

The arguments against the settled scientific debate over warming, she adds, “are not just different interpretation of the data; that’s a normal part of scientific life. This is not about normal scientific claims. These are the scientific equivalent of saying Belgium invaded Germany during World War I.”

Why deny? Because it works, Oreskes implies. Almost 25 years after the scorching summer of 1988 brought global warming into the public sphere, the United States has yet to get serious about controlling greenhouse gases.

“We ignore the facts of nature at our peril,” says Oreskes. “Ignoring them is not going to make them go away.”

On March 10, atmospheric chemist “Sherry” Rowland of the University of California-Irvine died in the company of his son and his wife of almost 60 years. Rowland became prominent in the 1970s after warning that common chemicals would destroy ozone 10 kilometers above Earth, exposing life to a shower of harmful radiation.

While exploring how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) degrade after being released into the atmosphere, Rowland and graduate student Mario Molina realized the CFCs would float to the upper atmosphere, be cleaved by sunlight, and release chlorine that would destroy ozone through a chain reaction.

(Ozone contain three oxygen atoms; most oxygen molecules contain two oxygens.)

By intercepting cancer-causing UV radiation, ozone in the stratosphere allows life to exist on Earth. Significant damage to this ozone would cause an epidemic of human and animal cancer, and likely damage plants as well.

This alarming prospect was not popular in industries that relied on CFCs, but it sparked a long and largely successful effort to restrict and then ban production of the chemicals.

And although Rowland never retreated from his findings, his calm, charismatic personality helped his cause. Ralph Cicerone, now the president of the National Academy of Sciences, recalls collaborating with Rowland on CFCs. “We talked on the phone nearly every day. I considered Sherry to be my best friend, and over time I learned that many people considered him to be their best friend, too. In the midst of the debates over CFCs, he never exaggerated the dangers, always cited the science, and treated other people with dignity and respect.”

What must a scientist do?

According to the University of California-Irvine’s press service, Rowland knew his results mattered far beyond the lab: “Mario and I realized this was not just a scientific question, but a potentially grave environmental problem involving substantial depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Entire biological systems, including humans, would be at danger from ultraviolet rays.”

At the time, scientists were studying the health implications of ozone-bearing smog in the lower atmosphere, but few people knew or cared about “good” ozone in the stratosphere.

The sudden notoriety of CFCs had a certain irony: The chemicals were invented in the 1920s at General Motors, maker of Frigidaire brand refrigerators, as a stable, non-toxic alternative to the ammonia and explosive propane used in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

CFCs later were used to expand plastic foam, clean electronic parts, and propel paint and deodorant in the mushrooming aerosol-spray business.

Antarctic ozone hole, 2011

   

Video: NASA

Chlorine and bromine in the upper atmosphere cause rapid ozone destruction in the super-chilled polar winter. Although the ozone “hole” (blue) is declining with the phase-out of CFCs, it still recurs.

They publish lest we perish!

Rowland’s 1974 study¹ ignited a long squabble over CFC production. Aerosol Age, the spray-can industry’s trade journal, implied that Rowland was a member of the Soviet KGB who wanted to destroy capitalism!

CFCs remained a back-burner issue, however, until the British Antarctic Survey discovered an alarming absence of ozone in 1985. The “Antarctic ozone hole” gave the theoretical worry sudden significance, and as the industry gradually found substitutes for CFCs, the ozone hole stopped expanding.

Today, as we watch the faltering response to global warming, it’s comforting to recall that the ozone threat prompted prompt collective action: The Montreal Protocol, a treaty to restrict CFC production, became effective in 1989 and has since been tightened after further alarm over ozone destruction, and 196 nations — essentially all of them — have signed the original Protocol. Production of ozone-depleting substances has fallen by more than 95 percent.

“CFCs were extremely useful compounds and their use was pervasive,” says Rudy Baum, editor in chief of C&EN (Chemical and Engineering News). “Although manufacturers maintained that there would be dire consequences if the use of CFCs were restricted or banned, it became clear pretty quickly that alternatives could be found in most cases.”

And yet ozone is still a problem, as shown by a 40 percent drop in Arctic ozone in the winter of 2010-2011. Continuing destruction is blamed on the stability of CFCs and the fact that the replacements, while less damaging, still destroy ozone. “Ozone can be thought of as a patient in remission, but it’s too early to declare recovery,” said Susan Solomon of the University of Colorado.

Not bounded by the lab walls

Nonetheless, the Montreal protocols are considered an epochal case of planetary preventive medicine, and Rowland, Molina and Paul Crutzen, who also worked on CFCs, were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

But for 10 or 15 years, Rowland had played the role of maverick — speaking outside the laboratory about the importance of what he had found inside it. It’s not a comfortable role for many scientists; many find it safer to stay in the lab and let others figure out what to do with their results.

Jonathan Fink, vice-president of research at Portland State University, says “The culture of science is pretty deep in terms of how we are trained. Most science grad students are taught to focus on being the best at something, rather than thinking about the application of what they do to society.”

All along, Rowland explained the science and gently reminded us of our stake in an intact ozone layer. He continued to study atmospheric chemistry, mentor younger scientists, and show by example how scientists could speak responsibly about what their results mean for the rest of us.

Somehow, Rowland managed to fight his battles without making enemies, at least outside the industries that had inadvertently begun calamitous destruction of ozone.

Why do scientists like Rowland speak out? “Because they’re scientists and scientists are addicted to facts and what facts tell them,” says Baum. “I knew Sherry Rowland pretty well — I was the West Coast correspondent for C&EN from 1991 to 2004 … he was a gracious, dignified, reserved individual, certainly not a rabble-rouser. But he knew that his science was solid and that it told him that humans were doing something that would have catastrophic consequences if they didn’t stop. So he spoke out. Simple as that.”

A new disaster unfolds

Even before the Montreal Protocol was signed, climate scientists were starting to warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would enhance the greenhouse effect and trigger global warming. In testimony to the U.S. Senate in the torrid summer of 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen linked rising temperatures to rising levels of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels.

The debate over global warming and climate change had begun, and going public put Hansen in much the same position as Rowland had occupied 15 years before. Via email, Hansen credited Rowland and atmospheric scientist Don Hunten as “role models… . They showed that it was possible to do first-rate science and also uphold our responsibility to make clear the implications of our research for society.”

Rowland redux?

Until then, Hansen had been a well-regarded but faintly visible NASA expert in planetary atmospheres. He had studied Venus, where an atmosphere choked with carbon dioxide produces a “runaway greenhouse effect” that raises the surface temperature to 460° C.

After making news in 1988, Hansen retreated from the public discussion of warming, but in the early 2000s, as temperatures continued to rise, he began to speak up again. In 2005, after the Bush White House tried to muzzle him, he went public with a vengeance.

Why? Journalist Mark Hertsgaard, who has written extensively about global warming and repeatedly interviewed Hansen, says he “thinks like a scientist, believes if you find the information, and present it properly, the truth should carry the day. I think he came out of hibernation in 2005 only because he felt he had to. He looked around and saw that the information alone was not carrying the day.”

Hansen’s regular emails combine climate facts with political opinions for a broad audience. For example, a recent commentary argued that “Scientists attempt to communicate, but are flummoxed by the ability of the profiteers to manipulate democracies. The scientific method (objective analysis of all facts) is pitted against the talk-show method (selective citation of anecdotal bits supporting a predetermined position).”

On Aug. 29, 2011, Hansen was arrested at the White House with hundreds of others protesting the Keystone XL tar-sand oil pipeline. Tapping such a vast reservoir of carbon, Hansen believes, will bring us that much closer to a “tipping point” on greenhouse warming. “Now we’ve got the spectacle of one of the world’s foremost climate scientists getting arrested and urging others to get arrested,” says Hertsgaard. “This is way beyond speaking out.”

Hertsgaard, a native of Minnesota, says it’s “very hard for [Iowa native] Jim Hansen the person to speak out.” In the Midwest, Hertsgaard says, “it is just not seemly to draw attention to yourself or bring up a topic that is likely to discomfort others. … but it’s not corny to talk without irony about the importance of doing the right thing.”

The scientific culture

A fully indoctrinated scientist is chary of talking much beyond the lab, Hertsgaard says. “Many scientists very much frown on taking the public agitator role, and that’s another tribute to Hansen’s courage. He was prepared not only to take brickbats from the Exxon-Mobil front groups, but to endure the judgment of his own peers, who said ‘That’s not what scientists do.’ He remembers that he’s not just a scientist, he’s a human being too.”

Despite the successful example of the Montreal Protocol, the global warming problem is vastly harder to solve, says Baum of C&E News. “The scale of fossil fuel use is several orders of magnitude larger …. Humans consume between 80 million and 90 million barrels of petroleum every day, and that represents only about a third of the fossil fuel that is consumed.”

Finally, while the specter of cancer caused by increased UV radiation is unsettling, “people actually like the warmer conditions, at least for now,” Baum wrote. “We didn’t have a winter in Washington, D.C., this year … and people loved it.”

So will the environmental victory over CFCs that started with Rowland and Molina be mirrored by serious action over global warming? Maybe not, says Spencer Weart, a long-time chronicler of warming. Comparing the ozone battle to the fight over global warming “is like comparing a single battle to a world war. Ozone depletion (once the ozone hole was detected) was clearly an urgent problem, with a straightforward solution. But with global warming, it’s hard for people to worry much about something that seems remote in space and time — isn’t it just a problem for polar bears and our grandchildren?”

Slowing warming “will require wholesale changes in our entire world economy,” Weart says. “And that must begin with government regulation of the fossil fuels industry, the largest concentration of economic power the world has ever seen. The pushback has been fierce, beginning with industries that suspected their profits would be restricted, and extending to people who fear governmental threats to their freedom.”

Rowland was once libeled as a Soviet spy, but “Scientists who have put themselves into politics like Jim Hansen … have been subject to ad hominem attacks: crude vilification and direct threats far beyond anything that Rowland experienced.”

Hansen and his colleagues, says Weart, “have persisted nevertheless. For the logic of their scientific understanding forbids them from keeping silent about the dangers they foresee.”

Iraq resents American drones that monitor outside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran is delighted to capture a high-tech U.S. drone. And the United States plans more drone purchases even amid slowing growth of the military budget.

As remote-control airplanes get cheaper and better, drones seem to be everywhere:

And it turns out that drones are ideal for watching wildlife: rabbits, sea lions, gulls and a range of elusive or inaccessible species.

Counting the mini-bunnies

Researchers in Idaho have used drones to track the pygmy rabbit, a hand-size mammal that eats sagebrush. The rabbit, a “species of concern” in Idaho, is already extinct in neighboring Washington State.

Pygmy rabbits are reclusive, spending much of their time inside burrows, says Jennifer Forbey, an assistant professor of biology at Boise State University. Forbey, along with Janet Rachlow at the University of Idaho, the U.S. Geological Survey, and Washington State University, is using used military drones called Ravens to explore how habitat factors like cover, forage quality and temperature affect rabbit populations.

The Ravens are small, and able to carry only one of these instruments at a time:

The drone can cover the entire two-kilometer square site in about three hours, but its gadgetry sees neither rabbits nor their burrows. Because the drone noise would scare the rabbits back into their burrows, the plane does not work when the bunnies are likely to be active.

To find the animals, Forbey says, “We have to walk for days and days, to identify where the rabbits are. We hike around, looking for fresh fecal pellets, fresh digging, fresh clipping on plants.”

But the data on forage quality, combined with tried-and true shoe-leather counting, shows that the rabbits are discriminating eaters. “They are specialized to sagebrush, but not all [sagebrush] plants are created equal, some types are more palatable, and also provide better cover for them,” Forbey says.

It’s possible that in winter drones could get a better picture of rabbit activity by looking for tracks in the snow.

To actually see rabbits from the air without frightening them, Forbey suggests a back-to-the-future approach — perhaps lighter than air craft.

“We are trying to develop some other platforms, maybe blimps, that could stay static over burrows to get infra-red video of rabbits without making noise.”

Although airborne surveys have begun, they are a help but not a panacea, says Forbey. “Not much is known about pygmy rabbits. They are cryptic. You have to spend the time walking the habitat.”

Gulls in Spain

Black-headed gulls nest in large colonies, and like many colonial birds, monitoring from the ground is difficult, and viewing from conventional aircraft can be expensive and confusing.

Pick up a battery-powered, radio-controlled model airplane, and the picture changes, says Francesc Sarda, at the Center for Forestry Technology of Catalunya, in Spain. When the drone flies over at an altitude of 30 to 40 meters, “The gulls hear it, but they don’t identify it as predator, don’t know what kind of element it is, and so they do not care about it.”

In a 2010 study,¹ Sarda equipped the plane with a still camera, pointing straight down. A video camera in the “cockpit” broadcast a live feed to a laptop on the ground, where the “pilot” operated controls.

The plane is “easy to fly, many people do it for hobby,” says Sarda, and it’s affordable — at just 1,400 Euros for the plane and the equipment. Depending on wind, the plane can stay aloft for 15 to 20 minutes, but batteries are cheap, and easily replaced before the next flight.

Water birds often nest in dense colonies, and can be difficult to study. Those that nest on cliffs can be observed from the side. On flat land, wildlife biologists may have to walk through the colony, but “If there are thousands of birds, it’s very difficult to count,” Sarda says.

Encounters with human counters can also annoy the birds, he adds. “In our case, they will fly away, even if there are chicks or eggs on the nest. You have to be very careful.”

The drone sidesteps this problem, he says. “You can do your count, and repeat your sampling” after a week or a month, to assess changes.

Laws about low-level flight are much less stringent in Spain than in the United States, Sarda says, and the system is “very cheap, compared with manned aircraft. You can use it yourself, whenever you want.”

See the sea lion

Sea lions and the fishing industry are squaring off in the Gulf of Alaska, where a rapid population decline of Stellar sea lions has been blamed on a scarcity of the fish they eat. But studying these fearsome and elusive creatures is difficult and data are sketchy, says Greg Walker, who manages the unmanned aircraft program at the University of Alaska. “The sea lion is an endangered species, and it’s affecting the fishery, but the science behind it is pretty spotty. The sea lions that have been monitored are healthy, not starving.”

Fishing restrictions are costly to the industry, and Walker observes that boats are catching more fish in the same amount of time, which suggests no scarcity of prey. “Their technology is no better than it was five years ago, and if they are catching more fish, maybe there are more fish” in the Gulf, he says.

Currently, sea lions are counted by looking at “haulouts,” rocky locations along the shore where these mammals mate and give birth, but the Aleutian Islands are hardly an ideal place to fly, Walker says. Airports can be hundreds of miles apart, and weather predictions cannot accurately say if clouds will block the view, wasting time and money.

Last June, Walker and his colleagues launched a drone from a fishing boat standing offshore. After a 12-mile flight, the drone flew over the colony, without causing obvious disturbance, and obtained video and photos clearly showing the sea lions.

Ironically, the same restrictions on fishing that were enacted to protect the sea lion have made fishing boats scarce. “We started working with a fishing cooperative; would fly off their boat while they were fishing, since they were going to be in the area anyway,” says Walker. “But closing the fishery has meant fewer fishing boats in the area,” and the lack of convenient launch pads could raise the price of drone-based monitoring.

If cost can be contained, larger surveys are possible, Walker says. “We will try to survey more of the island coastline, not just the historic haulouts. We want to know, is this a real population decline, or are they just in another part of the habitat? If you are always looking at the same street address, when someone moves down the street,” you may think they are dead, he notes. “Maybe a more consistent survey would find more of the sea lions.”

Eventually, if he can round up a bigger drone, Walker would like to use synthetic aperture radar, which can see through clouds, and could sidestep, finally, the cloud problem. But he also hopes the drones can fly at 500 feet, beneath many clouds. Flying that low is dangerous for manned aircraft, but that concern does not apply to disposable drones.

Having proved the concept of drone-powered surveillance of the sea lions, Walker and associates are planning to begin a three-week campaign in March.

Stop us from droning on!

Drones have a broad range of advantages compared to other ways of studying the environment. We’ve already mentioned how they can get access to awkward locations without bugging the animals.

Flying low and slow, drones can also identify and measure invasive weeds or many other types of ecological dislocation.

H. Franklin Percival, program leader for unmanned airplane research at the University of Florida, says safety is a critical motivation for using drones. “Low-level manned aircraft is the leading cause of workplace mortality for wildlife biologists. Wildlife biologists do this kind of thing all the time, studying salmon nesting, alligators in Florida, seals in Alaska, there’s a lot of low-level stuff.”

In 2010, a pilot and two biologists died in a helicopter crash while studying salmon nesting on the Selway River in Idaho. “That drives the interest [in drones] now,” says Percival. Before nesting, salmon fan away sand and gravel on the river bottom, “and we can see these from the air.”

FAA blues

In the United States, a major limitation on scientific use of drones comes from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is, rightly, worried about collisions between piloted planes and drones. Currently, the FAA requires that the pilot or a spotter be a licensed pilot, and limits a drone’s range and altitude to avoid danger. Those restrictions raise both the cost and bureaucratic rigmarole, and ecologists and the unmanned airplane industry are hoping for a change.

On Feb. 6, the Senate sent legislation to the President requiring FAA action on the issue within three years, USA Today reports.

If the concern is safety, new, more relaxed standards seem most appropriate to drones that fly short distances at low altitude.

If the FAA redrafts regulations to maintain safety while allowing more civilian use of drones, Forbey of Boise State expects ecologists to be lining up for unmanned aircraft. “This integration of technology with ecology and conservation is really exciting. I think what these planes provide is a spatial level that you can’t get from satellite, and can’t get from being on the ground. Both in terms of the area they can cover, and the type of data they offer, they fill a gap.”

Let a thousand drones bloom

Robot planes and the associated technology of cameras, communications and GPS-based recording of location are moving ahead even as the FAA promulgates regulations. At the University of Florida, Percival, who has directed the development of five generations of a robot plane called Nova, says drones should be designed according to the scientific goal. “What are the data required? Can it deliver that kind of data, and can you do the appropriate statistics to give reliable information? The airplane should be built around your question.”

As drones with ever more sophisticated sensors return a growing quantity of data, Percival favors automating data-processing to spit out reliable data that can be manipulated statistically. “To estimate the number of nesting birds in a pelican colony, we want to differentiate the components in the imagery with a computer as opposed to some guy’s eyeballs.”

Photos show a lot, but they do not automatically reflect reality, Percival says. “Just because we can see well does not mean the numbers are as precise, as accurate, as we’d like.”

2010 marked the completion of a bizarre telescope composed mainly of ancient ice. One billion tons of ice.

Buried a mile deep in the ice at the South Pole, IceCube is the world’s strangest telescope. Composed of water, it’s looking for the neutrino, nature’s most unusual particle. Eighty years after the neutrino was “invented” to balance a physics equation, it remains ultra-difficult to detect, measure and understand.

IceCube is focused mainly on particles that come all the way through the Earth. In other words, this telescope looks down.

Scientists say neutrinos can pass unscathed through a long bar of lead. How long? Say, one light year long — about 10 trillion kilometers. Because neutrinos can slip through everything in their path, including stars, galaxies and vast clouds of dust, they are unrivaled tattle-tales of ancient explosions in the deep universe.

The bad news is that the same property makes neutrinos extremely difficult to see.

But if you can somehow observe the neutrino’s insanely rare interaction with matter, you could learn something about the universe, and the gargantuan energy released by exploding stars.

Roots of a frozen telescope

That is the promise and the premise of IceCube, a $271-million project intended to solve a problem posed in 1930, when physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new and rather odd particle. Tiny, energetic, with no electric charge and not necessarily any mass, it would be virtually undetectable.

Pauli himself admitted “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”¹

The “now-you-don’t-see-it-and-you-never-will” neutrino was tailor-made for controversy; scientists detest what they can’t detect. Pauli’s idea was mocked² as “simply wrong” or “crazy.”

Today, scientists are sure nature is full of these shadowy characters: Rough calculations say a hundred trillion neutrinos whistle through your body every second.

Why make a big deal about neutrinos, which are, after all, less offensive than campaign ads? Because that ability to pass through all manner of interstellar crud allows neutrinos to carry messages from the far reaches of the universe.

Moreover, some neutrinos carry more punch than the wildest gamma ray. And just as you can’t pull a hot coal from a cold fire, you shouldn’t get “hot” neutrinos from “cool” sources like ordinary stars. These neutrinos, in other words, may deliver signals of some hip, blazingly hot stuff — neutron stars, active galactic centers, and exploding stars.

Finally, according to some scenarios, lower-energy neutrinos may comprise a small proportion of the mass — the stuff — of the universe, but they played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

In astronomy, as in love and antiques, “hard-to-get” translates into “most-wanted.” “The hope is that the particle that is almost nothing will tell us almost everything about the universe,” says Francis Halzen, a theoretical physicist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Halzen directs IceCube, and did the same at IceCube’s predecessor, AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array.

Search strategy for an elusive character

Neutrinos may be shy, but once in a great while, they actually hit an atom and produce a subatomic particle called a muon, which is easier to see.

Because the odds of a neutrino hitting anything are so dismal, physicists require bigger targets. It’s the same principle that lottery players use to “beat” the tiny odds of winning by buying hundreds of tickets.

Previous neutrino targets have included tubs of oil or dry-cleaning fluid and 5,000 tons of steel plates salvaged from battleships. To block spurious signals due to cosmic rays rather than neutrinos, these detectors have been sunk in the ocean or placed inside deep mines.

IceCube relies on a two-step detection sequence: First, the tiny percentage of neutrinos that interact with atomic nuclei in the ice produce muons. Second, these muons create Cherenkov light when they interact with matter.

When the detectors see Cherenkov light, they digitize the data and send it through electric cables to the surface for analysis. The detectors are housed inside 5,160 crush-proof glass spheres placed in holes drilled through the ice, and located 1450 to 2450 meters deep.

Another 324 detectors at the surface detect muons made by cosmic rays arriving from the Southern sky.

The Antarctic ice also has little radiation, and the detectors are so deep that air bubbles have been squeezed out, ensuring great optical clarity. Yet while the detectors are shielded from damage, they are under crushing pressure, and if they go bad, they will be busted forever.

IceCube will only look at muons that trigger at least eight detectors, says Halzen, and is most interested in muons moving upward — coming from the Northern Hemisphere. Downward signals can be confusing, as most of them are due to cosmic rays or lower-energy neutrinos, which Earth blocks.

Data from IceCube should suggest where the neutrinos originated and what sort of cosmic engine started them on their journey.

This desire to concentrate on neutrinos rather than cosmic rays explains why this frozen telescope, oddly but logically, looks downward.

What can these neutrinos tell us?

Neutrinos, “invented” to balance a physics equation, have grown to fascinate astrophysicists, galactic voyeurs seeking signals from astonishingly energetic structures and events in the deep universe. The direction and energy of neutrinos from each source should offer clues about the origin:

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO

Located 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a massive star that died in a violent supernova 325 years ago. The dead star (turquoise dot in center) became a neutron star surrounded by a shell of junk blasted away in the explosion. Image is a composite from three orbital telescopes: Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is red; Visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope is yellow; Chandra X-ray Observatory data is green and blue.

Although supernova neutrinos have low energy and are hard to detect, a nearby supernova could light up IceCube enough to overwhelm the system. To prep for a supernova, Reina Maruyama, an assistant professor of physics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working to ensure that IceCube can handle this once-in-a-lifetime chance to get good data on a stellar explosion.

If something like the 1987 supernova exploded nearby in our galaxy, Maruyama says, “there would be so many neutrinos, the whole ice would glow. We expect that a few supernovas will occur each century in the galaxy, if one goes off, IceCube has to be ready. We stand to learn a whole lot about how they explode, and about the particle nature of neutrinos.”

Dark matters

Even weirder than neutrinos, IceCube may explore dark matter, a type of, well, something, that comprises 23 percent of the overall universe. A measly 4 percent of matter, including the galaxies, stars and planets, is visible. The balance is an even stranger quantity called dark energy.

The first inkling that some matter is invisible came in the 1930s, when a physicist noticed that galaxies rotate too fast: their visible mass would create too little gravity, and thus they should spin themselves into oblivion.

The explanation for that increased gravity is now called dark matter, and the race is on to detect it.

Since dark matter affects gravity, Maruyama says it must gather in the sun and the galaxies. When dark matter particles collide, they are expected to release a type of neutrino called muon neutrinos. But IceCube found no muon neutrinos coming from the sun and the Milky Way, using a technique that was 1,000 times more sensitive than previous ones.

Does absence make the heart grow fonder?

It depends on your perspective whether that’s good or bad, says Halzen. “There was a big celebration when we published, because we placed limits on that particular type of dark matter, but I looked at it another way: We had gone 1,000 times deeper, and it was very disappointing not to see dark matter.”

However, an experiment in Italy may have seen dark matter interacting with a hunk of sodium iodide, based on an annual variation in the signal. If Earth indeed orbits through a cloud of dark matter, the detector would register alternating downstream and upstream motions that could account for that annual cycle.

The cycle could, however, be due to something unrelated to dark matter.

To answer that riddle, Maruyama wants to place a similar detector deep in the Antarctic ice, and has already piggybacked two prototypes onto IceCube strings. The prototypes are working well enough to justify a larger, more expensive detector, Maruyama says.

If and when the experiment is replicated in Antarctic Ice, Maruyama says, “A positive result would be interesting, and a negative result would be interesting. If we can see a signal with the same timing, that confirms the [Italian] results. If we don’t see a signal, the source must be something aside from dark matter.”

Lurking behind the IceCube project is the tantalizing prospect of learning more about the bizarre particle it detects — the neutrino. We already know that neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, and that they range in energy through at least 30 orders of magnitude — an unimaginable range of energies. There have been recent — and controversial — reports that neutrinos can travel faster than light — breaking a basic law of physics.

Why so weird?

That’s another indication that neutrinos exist at the edge of the standard model that attempts to explain everything by gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear forces, Halzen says. “We are measuring the properties of neutrinos any way we can, and extrapolating to see what the standard model predicts, and looking for variations. The simple way to describe the experiment is that we collect muons and neutrinos, and everything you don’t understand is a discovery, either it’s physics beyond the standard model, or it’s new astrophysics.”

Halzen anticipates spotting an extremely high-energy particle called the GZK neutrino. “These are predicted by theory, and if one hits the detector, we won’t have to do any analysis, we will be able to look at the event display and know that we have made the discovery.” GZK neutrinos are, according to theory, made by cosmic rays that strike photons in the microwave background, Halzen says, and thus could finally reveal the origin of the cosmic rays, one century after their discovery.

Neutrinos are slippery characters; shy, coming in incomprehensible numbers, being emitted by sources we cannot pinpoint. Maruyama notes that neutrinos seemingly change to a different “flavor” without any apparent cause, and says this “oscillation” from one state to another is the strangest part of the neutrino story. “Oscillation could have implications on how the universe evolved to have matter, and not anti-matter,” she says. “These tiny particles could have such an influence on the universe.”

So what?

Why should non-scientists worry about neutrinos? Halzen, who has answered this question many times, says “I have a personal answer. The reason we know our place in the universe is not because of French philosophers, it’s because of physicists. With dark matter and dark energy, we know most of the universe is not made of the same material we are made of. … Is that important to know? I think so.”

IceCube is not intended to produce technology or solve today’s problems, Halzen acknowledges. “This is total curiosity-driven science, and you are allowed not to care. But if you don’t do fundamental research, we’re going to be a developing country, that is clear.”

Particle physics proves that theoretical pursuits can have results that are unpredictable, yet practical and profitable, Halzen says. “My previous job was at CERN [the European particle-physics lab], where people discovered the Web in 1989, to enable collaboration among remote scientists. I think we have paid for all theoretical physics with that one discovery.”

Robots are great at what they do — if the job is dull and predictable. Throw in the unexpected, and robots can do the unpredictable.

The task of programming a robot’s brain for the real world can be gnarly, says Josh Bongard, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. “It turns out that building a robot, and programming it to do something interesting is a very non-intuitive process, and it’s a difficult one for humans to do well.”

The real world, he says, “is quite messy.”

Robots, in the jargon, need “adaptive behavior” to accommodate changing circumstances, says Bongard. When programming a free-roaming robot, “We are not likely to factor in a lighting change or people moving in and out of the field of view.”

It’s not clear how animals or people make adaptations, Bongard says, “and so it’s difficult to program a robot to do them.”

Robots: Are they alive?

Bongard, like a number of roboticists, is turning to biology for answers. But he does not want to emulate living structures. Instead, he wants to use evolution to craft robot control.

The process is akin to the “artificial selection” that helped lay the foundation for the science of evolution. Darwin, after all, wrote about how animal breeders had changed their livestock by repeatedly breeding the best animals and eating the rest.

In January, 2011, Bongard reported that he had taught four-legged, digital robots to stand and run toward a light source, by grading their control software on its ability to meet those goals.

Adaptive behavior was necessary, he says, because the light source could appear anywhere, or even take evasive action, “so the robot can’t just move its legs blindly every time.”

The robots had five seconds to do or die, and their first movements were grotesque because the control software initially moved their body parts at random. After every attempt, the control programs were graded by their ability to walk, stay upright and approach the light.

It’s brutal. More than 100 million failed programs went to the virtual graveyard in the name of science, Bongard says. The programs that showed some promise were retained, randomly varied and re-tested.

The same process is found in nature, where successful genes that face random mutation are re-tested by tomorrow’s environment.

Like the average biological mutation, the mutated robot software usually failed. But over a year of supercomputer time — equivalent to 1,000 years on a desktop computer — the winning programs evolved the ability to walk toward the light.

Weird winners

Considering the amount of trial and error, that was a satisfying but not necessarily surprising result. But here’s something to chew on. Bongard found that robots “born” with four legs had a handicap. During repeated simulations, the robots that started as snakes and developed legs during the five-second experiment were much quicker to learn the task.

You might guess — we would have — that the quick learning would have occurred in robots with full-time four-leg drive, given their longer experience with legged locomotion, but Bongard says the leg-free starters benefited by chunking the challenge: a) learn to approach the light, and b) learn to walk.

These robots “could evolve the ability to go from point A to point B while they still look like a snake, they don’t have to worry about balance, because they are already on the ground,” Bongard says. “Once evolution has figured out how to move toward the light, the ability to move on four legs could evolve.”

Meanwhile, the four-legged counterparts may still be flipping, flopping and floundering (Note to self: sell soul as political hit-man if science-writing gig crash-burns?) “The robots that had to stand upright would fall over, and it took evolution a long time to master balance,” Bongard says.

The approach — take the winners and vary them for a retest — resembles directed chemical evolution, which aims to create a better antibiotic by modifying and retesting molecules that show some ability to kill bacteria. “It’s basically the same idea,” says Bongard, “but instead of a candidate drug, we have virtual robots, and instead of selecting for … resistance to disease, they are selected for the ability to get to the light.”

Robots resemble rodents?

As a final exam for the digital robots, Bongard tested their balance with a blast of air. Although the leg-less robots “had evolved into legged robots that looked exactly like the other species, they were better able to run around under simulated windy conditions,” Bongard reports.

Bongard is first to acknowledge that he is “stealing from biology to help us build better robots,” but says, “the more interesting question is what this tells us about biological evolution. This recent work suggests that robots that change their bodies gain an adaptive advantage … and you see the same radical changes in body plan in nature: in insects, reptiles and in humans as they develop from infant to adult.”

If you’ve hung around a big-city park, you may think that pigeons are countless — or uncountable. But according to scientists from New Zealand, pigeons now join the short list of animals that can count — or at least, can places images containing two countable items in numerical order.

It’s blue news for those who think only humans deserve human capacities. From empathy and altruism to murder and war, animals seem to have caught on to some of our best — and worst — tricks.

Now Damian Scarf, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Otago, with his colleagues, has taught three pigeons to order pairs of numbers in the range from one through nine.

This is not exactly counting, but it certainly is a sign of numerical awareness in birds.

More important, the researchers have taught these retired racing pigeons the concept of smaller-to-larger, Scarf says. “Previously, this number abstraction was only known in primates, and now we have shown that it is not unique to primates.”

Serious screen-time serves science

The experiment began with a year-long training period, during which the birds were shown pairs of images, each containing one, two or three countable items. If the birds pecked at both images, smaller number first, they were rewarded with some wheat. (Although the images never contained a numeral, we refer to the “number” they contain for brevity.)

To prevent the birds from focusing on color, shape or other non-numerical details, the images showed a range of items, so that the only correct answer would reflect their number rather than other distinctions.

“The training time reflects how difficult it is for them to abstract,” Scarf says. “It’s such a foreign situation, number is not the first port of call when presented with a stimulus to discriminate. That’s why we had so many shapes, colors, surface areas.”

Even if the birds originally made their judgments based on color, “we pushed them to use a different strategy, to break away from that. Number is not the default discrimination mechanism” for pigeons, says Scarf, who worked under advisor Michael Colombo of Otago.

A genius for abstraction?

This does not mean that the birds are counting, says Scarf. “It’s more a fuzzy representation in the brain of what ‘three’ is. We can apply this verbal label to three, but they cannot. Pigeons, and animals in general, don’t have a definite idea of a number, that’s why they don’t perform perfectly, and why we see the distance effect.”

When the numbers on the test pair are further apart, Scarf found, “the fuzziness overlaps a little less.”

A greater distance between the numbers produced a quicker response and greater accuracy. For adjacent numbers, like four and five, the birds scored about 66 percent accuracy, compared to more than 95 percent for numbers separated by at least six. Once the difference rose to at least three, the pigeons did as well as monkeys in a path-breaking 1998 study that opened the field of numerical “thinking” in animals.

Scarf stresses that the birds were not just regurgitating what they had learned, but were learning numerical rules. “The goal was to find out whether they could acquire an abstract rule. We were just training for one through three, but they learned some flexibility, an abstract, ascending rule for ordering numbers” that would apply to other numbers on the screen.

Rooted in evolution, but where?

Being able to recognize that one thing is more numerous than another could help an animal survive, Scarf says. “When food is available in multiple places, an animal has to develop an optimal strategy for figuring out where the most food is, and I think we have subverted that capacity for this task.”

Where this capacity arose is anybody’s guess at this point. The evolutionary lineage of mammals and birds divided about 300 million year ago, Scarf says. “If this derived from a common ancestor, it’s very old. It’s also possible that primates and birds have evolved this independently.”

“I do think it’s important, just as our study of mirror self-recognition in monkeys, from the fundamental standpoint of how these abilities come about,” says Luis Populin, a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has found that, under certain conditions, monkeys can recognize themselves in a mirror. “It’s very nice and is yet another step toward understanding how our cognitive functions develop.”

You have to hand it to these birds, which have set a new standard for avian aptitude. “The new part is the idea that this abstraction of numbers is not tied to training,” says Scarf. “Most numerical tests with animals involve training and testing with the same numbers, but we were training with a limited set of numbers and testing them with numbers outside the range. They learned an abstract rule, and that’s what makes this study unique.”

If you drop a worker ant from an Amazonian treetop, what happens? In the species Cephalotes atratus, 87 percent of the time, that ant will wind up back where it started — a few meters lower down the same tree. Drop things that drift down at random, and only 5 percent of them will hit the tree.

In other words, these ants are controlling their flight — even though they don’t have wings.

That finding, which Stephen Yanoviak, Robert Dudley and Michael Kaspari¹ reported in 2005, provides a great starting point for untangling one of the mysteries of biology:

When and how did so animals take to the air?

Fly high

Flight is pretty common — among critters with wings, or something that resembles them, like a stretched membrane of skin. Birds, bats, moths and butterflies can fly. Even some lizards, snakes, fish and squirrels can glide under control toward the ground, which is not the same thing as falling.

Studies of ants in South America provide good data on “controlled aerial descent,” says Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California at Berkeley. In the course of some rather entertaining research, he and his colleagues have found that Cephalotes atratus ants:

During the controlled descent, at speeds above 4 meters per second, the ants perform “rapid postural adjustments,” Dudley says. “The limbs are moving, it’s not like a paper airplane.”

Dudley, an expert in the biomechanics of flight, says hundreds of species of tree-living ants in tropical Amazonian forests have evolved controlled gliding. Dropping to the forest floor can make them a meal for a mean and hungry ground-dwelling ant.

Looking at evolution

Perhaps the coolest part of the story is its evolutionary angle. Previously, scientists intrigued by the origin of flight have looked for evidence of wings and feathers, which appear more than 100 million years back in the fossil record.

But if flight really originated in arthropods that could not survive a fall from a tree or a cliff, that could wind the evolutionary clock back a good deal further. (Arthropods are animals with external skeletons and jointed legs, including spiders, insects and crustaceans like the horseshoe crab.)

Gliding under control is neither rare nor constrained to ants, Dudley says. “There are wingless aphids and flat spiders that live under the bark that can glide at a 45° angle. Controlled aerial descent has hundreds or thousands of independent origins in terrestrial arthropods.”

As old as the hills?

Over all, Dudley says, directed descent probably originated about 280 million years. If jumping like a flea or grasshopper is also deemed a form of flight, the origin could date back more than 400 million years.

The gliding hypothesis would not only help explain the origin of a common and cool behavior, but could take wind out of the sails for a favorite anti-evolutionary argument. Creationists, Dudley notes, have long demanded to know how wings evolved by asking, “What good is half a wing?” But according to the gliding hypothesis, wings unable to hold an animal airborne could still have evolved to help control a descending behavior that had long been in existence.

Flight of the control freaks?

Controlled gliding, Dudley says, “preceded the origin of wings, and so the evolution of flight is more about control than about the formation of wings.”

The new analysis “addresses qualms about the [supposed] lack of intermediate forms in the fossil record,” Dudley says. “Here is a viable intermediate form. There are lots of behavioral and ecological contexts where stubby, partial airfoils are useful.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Interested in waterfront property in Southern California? A new study of a continental schism running east of Los Angeles offers a clear “buy” signal for the long-term investor: The North American continent is splitting apart along a rift, and if you got the patience, we have the real-estate-appreciation potential!

In just a few million years, as the North American continent sunders in a weak zone called the Salton Trough, the Gulf of California will stretch further north.

On our unstable Earth, not even the continents are rock solid. Instead, they shift around like blocks of sea ice that join, fissure and separate once again — over millions of years.

Geologists know the process is occurring in the Southern California desert, and we’ve just read a sophisticated analysis that finds an ominous thinning of the strong crustal layer in the Salton Trough.

Ominous, that is, unless you are planning a waterfront resort here, with a grand opening in, say, 2,002,011.

The study helps to fill a gap in our understanding of the earth, says first author Vedran Lekic, a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at Brown University. “The main question is, how do continents come to break apart? This process is really fundamental to shaping how the Earth looks; if not for rifting, once Pangaea formed, it would never have broken apart and we would have only one continent.”

Pangaea is a giant agglomeration of continents that broke up about 150 million years ago, creating our current collection of continents.

Scoping out the Earth

The lithosphere, Earth’s crust and the rigid rock beneath it, essentially floats on the asthenosphere, the soft and hot outer layer of the mantle that is located tens of kilometers belowground.

As a continental rift grows, one would expect to find a thinned lithosphere at the Salton Trough. But Lekic says the actual thinning was more dramatic than expected — as much as a 50 percent reduction compared to adjacent areas.

By studying earthquake waves passing through Earth, Lekic and colleagues measured the thickness of the lithosphere by locating its lower border. They knew that one type of wave converts to a faster wave type as it passes up from the asthenosphere into the lithosphere, so the conversion could be used to mark the base of the lithosphere.

It turned out that the lithosphere measured about 40 kilometers thick beneath the Salton Trough, compared to 60 to 80 kilometers on nearby areas. That thinning translates into a weakening that will eventually allow open water into the Trough, and myriad real-estate opportunities along the new shoreline.

Previous efforts to estimate the lithosphere’s depth have relied mainly on surface data, says Lekic, and that limited our knowledge of how the continental splitsville takes place. From relying on “surface observations of faults, topography, heat flow, and some studies of the crustal structure, we have not been able to image the detailed topography of the base of the tectonic plate, as it looks during rifting.”

Rift terrific

Although the study relied on the interest in Southern California seismology that is a response to extreme seismic activity, the finding says little about earthquake probabilities.

But earthquakes are not the only tectonic game in town, says Eugene Humphreys, a professor of geophysics at the University of Oregon. “While most people know southern California is being sheared by the San Andreas and related faults, most people are not aware that the region also is being pulled apart as the Pacific plate also moves slowly away from North America. These researchers have imaged the deep structure of the plate where it is being torn apart by this process, and contrary to what many have thought, the tears go through the entire plate right where the surface expression of this rifting is seen. It’s exciting work.”

The study provides insight into deep structure and processes of fluid migration up into the plate, says Humphreys. “These lower-plate interfaces were not expected to exist at all, and the scientific community is excited but struggling to determine what could create relatively sharp interfaces.”

Although Earth warms with depth, that is unlikely to explain the weakness, Humphreys says, “so the search for other causes is on. By associating the position and shape of these interfaces with a specific deformation history, this study provides important information on the origin of these interfaces.”

Lekic, who worked with co-author Karen Fischer of Brown, on the study, says that “Even at great depth, we see the same stretching and deformation that we see near the surface. At the bottom of the lithosphere, there is this persistent weakness, in a zone that runs more or less vertically, and that’s surprising.”

But as scientists wrestle with the geological goulash that is Southern California, we suggest you send a down payment to Rift ‘n Grift Realty on the ocean-front lot of your dreams – and wait a few million years!

— David J. Tenenbaum

UPDATE 27 APRIL 2012: The retired space shuttle Enterprise will fly over New York City today, aboard a jumbo jet, as part of the move to its final resting place at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the Hudson River. END UPDATE

For advocates of space travel, the news is grim. In July, 2011, the last U.S. space shuttle was parked, as planned. Over 30 years, the shuttles helped build the International Space, but two explosions killed 14 astronauts, and each flight cost nearly half a billion dollars.

On August 24, 2011, a clogged pipe caused the crash of a Russian Soyuz rocket. Soyuz is a reliable space-truck whose ancestor launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957.

With the shuttles in the old-age home, any delay of a Soyuz launch to resupply the space station, planned for Nov. 14, 2012, could force the station’s evacuation.

Abandoning the space station after a decade of continuous occupation might have limited scientific impact, as the station is not proving to be a scientific bonanza as promised. (However, on Sept. 21, NASA reported that a Japanese astronaut did perform “bubbling experiments” on green tea before staging a “traditional Japanese tea ceremony.”)

The growing problem of getting into space got more attention on Aug. 24, when a sub-orbital space taxi built by Blue Origin, a company funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, crashed in West Texas, setting back the nascent space-tourism industry.

People have been going into space for 40 years, but the process is neither cheap nor routine. For comparison, 40 years after the first automobiles, millions of cars were changing the U.S. economy and landscape. And 40 years after Kitty Hawk (1903), airplanes had circled the globe and become a dominant force in World War II.

So, 40 years after Yuri Gargarin became the first space-farer, why is it so hard to get people into space?

It’s the gravity, stupid!

The first clue to the difficulty of reaching orbit is evident in the controlled explosion needed to launch anything: reaching orbit requires a speed of almost 18,000 miles per hour and overcoming gravity.

And gravity is a stern customer.

Although gravity is fixed, a changing political backdrop has deprived the space program of its historic justification, says Howard McCurdy, a professor of public administration and policy at American University, and student of the space program. “The key problem, as a political scientist, was the end of the Cold War. Now the rationale for a lot of human space program is jobs, but in the absence of Cold War competition, we get these anomalies,” like thumbing a ride to space from your former enemy.

Faced with the prospect of being stuck on Earth, on Sept. 14, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift rocket and space capsule designed to reach earth orbit and beyond. “American leadership in space will continue for at least next half century,” Bolden said. “We have laid the foundation for success.”

Better than nothing?

The reaction to SLS was a bit ho-hum. The proposal “has been controversial because some say it’s just the same old technology, a combination of Apollo, Saturn V, and the shuttle, and we really should be advancing the technology, doing something new that will get us to deep space more quickly,” says astrophysicist Jack Burns, who has served on the NASA Advisory Council science committee, and is vice-president emeritus for academic affairs and research at the University of Colorado System.

But what else is there? Burns asks. “I look at SLS as a practical vehicle that will get a lot of mass into orbit, and then to the moon, the asteroids. Having a heavy lift vehicle, for the first time since the mid ’70s, when we did away with Saturn V, should be an important part of U.S. space architecture.”

The shuttle, whose demise has forced the current concern over space launching, was hatched in 1972, by Pres. Richard Nixon, who proposed a reusable, flying bus to reach low orbit and “take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.”

Getting to orbit didn’t turn out to be cheap: NASA chalks up the average price tag on 135 shuttle launches at $450 million.

Consternation over Constellation

In 2005, faced with mission failures and an aging shuttle fleet, Pres. George W Bush called for the shuttle program to end after the space station was constructed. As a replacement, Bush proposed Constellation, a new rocket, and Ares, a new spaceship, which would visit the moon and then Mars.

However much the Mars mission was beloved by space-travel enthusiasts, it carries certain health hazards…

Cost estimates for Constellation and Ares rose faster than a rocket and by 2010, the projects had black-holed $9 billion, and the guesstimated price of launching a single Ares-1 had reached $1 billion. So Pres. Obama trash-binned the twin projects and directed NASA to come up with something cheaper and faster – which turned out to be the poetically-branded “Space Launch System.”

The proposal has, as we’ve said, met grudging acceptance at best. “This is a turning point for all kinds of reasons,” says Michael G. Smith, a space historian at Purdue University. “The shuttle program is finished after 30 years — it was too expensive, too old — and the Bush program to take us to the moon is finished.”

Although NASA has another job — the SLS — the manned space program needs goals with more focus, Smith says. Because Obama has failed to set a clear challenge before NASA, “they have nothing to prove, no short-term mission.”

In a sense, Smith adds, the Obama plan conforms to American desires. “There’s a paradox. A Gallup poll says the American public wants a space program, and is proud of it, but does not want to pay for it, and that’s the Obama Administration approach: ‘We want something, we have announced something, without a clear-cut commitment to what it is.’”

Take the money and … design?

In an era that is short of cash and jobs, however, NASA has an immense constituency in its legion of employees, contractors and their employees, Smith says. “Lawmakers with NASA investment in their districts are challenging the administration’s lack of clarity.”

But viewing a space program as a jobs program is unlikely to maximize either cost savings or scientific breakthroughs. “NASA has half-lost the ability to innovate,” says McCurdy. “People are hunkering down like turtles, protecting what they have, playing defense to hang onto the field stations [such as Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama], and Congress is pushing them in ways that are inefficient for cost reduction. Most members want to know if contracts are still going to their districts.”

Space is inherently expensive, and McCurdy questions whether the current NASA budget will accomplish much space travel, or mainly rocket design and construction. “A big issue for NASA is whether the budget for exploration is going to be sufficient to actually develop, build and test the rocketry,” he says. “It looks like it will be sufficient to provide aerospace jobs, but they need a little bit more money to bend metal.”

Confronting costs

It’s odd, McCurdy says, that developing a new rocket and space vehicle are expected to cost $100 billion, considering that Saturn V, which launched Skylab and the moon shots, cost about $10 billion in 1960 dollars. “Multiply that by five to get today’s price — $50 billion — and that included the production line, a test vehicle and the actual rocket.”

Much engineering has been done for Constellation and previous rockets, and McCurdy, who acknowledges that the engineering and manufacturing expertise and the Saturn assembly line have long disappeared, wonders why NASA cannot produce a heavy-lift rocket for $50-billion.

Cutting the budget to the bone can be penny wise and pound foolish, McCurdy adds. “Once they got the assembly line going for Saturn V, it was very efficient, but if they build only one rocket every two years, it becomes more of a craft rocket.”

What are the other options for launching people into space?

Government rocket, private rocket

International rockets such as Ariane have gotten into the satellite-launch business, but most of them are not powerful enough to take people into orbit, or to leave earth orbit and reach the moon.

China, with one satellite orbiting the moon, and an imminent launch of an 8.5 ton component for its first space station, definitely has the lift capacity, but we’ve not heard about any discussions about launching U.S. space equipment.

Government is not the only game in town, however, and many hope that the genius of private enterprise will fill the gap, even if some of the efforts are watered with buckets of federal funds. If you place a challenge before rocket manufacturers, “both the startups and old horses, somebody may come up with a breakthrough,” says McCurdy. Even so, he adds, NASA must still “pick a winner before knowing whether it is a working design, and they are no better at that than I am at picking stocks.”

So how is the private sector faring in the human space travel biz?

the private role

Corporations are contending for two roles in space. Many are interested in space tourism, a business that began in 2001 with a seven-day visit to the International Space Station but today is focused on sub-orbital flights – spending a few minutes in micro-gravity beyond the edge of the atmosphere:

Photo: Jim Campbell/Aero-News Network

SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites, slung beneath White Knight, the mother ship that lifts it toward the edge of space.

Blue Origin, a secretive operation funded by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire, is working on “New Shepard,” a sub-orbital vehicle. According to the website, “We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and … we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along.” Blue Origin has a NASA contract to develop a taxi for hauling astronauts to orbit, but recently lost a spaceship at 45,000 feet.

Scaled Composites, an advanced aircraft maker, won the $10-million X-prize in 2004 for attaining 328,000 feet twice within 10 days. The firm is working with Virgin Galactic to enhance its a sub-orbital spaceship-mother-ship combination. Virgin says 430 private-nauts are already put down a deposit for flights that will cost $200,000.

Xcor Aerospace is also selling seats on an unfinished spaceship, for a suborbital flight priced at $95,000, starting with a spare-change deposit of $20,000. Buy now, and your seat-mate could be a Victoria’s Secret model… Honest!

Let’s really go to space!

Above the sub-orbital realm, however, comes the real high-technology interest: resupplying the space station, or reaching the moon or an asteroid. In this realm, one company has grabbed most of the headlines: SpaceX, founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk.

SpaceX is developing two types of “Falcon” rockets, and has a $1.6 billion NASA contract to launch 12 loads of cargo to the space station (the first flight is scheduled for Nov. 30), in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. (Orbital Science Corp. is the other contractor in the program.)

In December, 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to launch and recover a spaceship. “The technology has advanced,” says Burns, “but so far SpaceX only has a couple of launches of the Falcon 9. It’s a long way from that all the way to orbit, with real live astronauts. It’s a risky venture.”

SpaceX says it emphasizes reliability, and the business end of Falcon 9 houses nine individual rocket engines. The rocket is supposed to reach space even if one engine goes kaplooey.

A human role remains

When President Ronald Reagan proposed and promoted what is now called the International Space Station, a howl went up among scientists who called it a diversion of resources from the more productive unmanned spacecraft. Carting people around raises the price and the stakes at every stage of design, production and operation, and these scientists accurately forecast a fruitful program of robotic exploration — everything from the Hubble Space Telescope, to the Opportunity and Sojourner rovers on Mars to the Galileo spaceship that explored Jupiter.

Those robots were awesome and inspiring, says Burns. “Opportunity is U.S. technology, it’s something we all should be proud of it, it has well exceeded its lifetime, the engineers were very clever in the design and operation. That good old-fashioned American ingenuity ought to get kids excited about going into science, engineering, math, whether that gets directed to space or something else.”

The manned vs. robot argument had merit in its time, given that the space station alone has cost NASA north of $50 billion (with other countries contributing about the same amount), and NASA never has enough money for all the scientists who write grants, which leads some critics to question whether the money is well spent, or would have been more productive if spent on funding conventional science.

But the manned vs. robot dichotomy may be fading, says Steven Collicott, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, who placed an experiment about the fluid flow in micro-gravity on the space station. “There is a great benefit to doing both. The astronauts who have operated space station experiments I have been involved in have been incredibly creative thinkers, problem solvers.”

The flow experiment cannot be performed on Earth, Collicott says. “We do everything we can to test on earth, or on short-duration, low-gravity [aircraft] flights, but there are times when … the camera position needs to be changed, or a liquid gets trapped. An astronaut can unbolt and shake the experiment … or act on their observations to explore a new phenomenon immediately, without reprogramming, relaunching or rebuilding, which involves years and millions of dollars.”

Human hands, eyes and brains are irreplaceable, Collicott says. “If people were not needed for research of this type, why would we be spending money to send people to Antarctica each year?”

human vs. robot — the dichotomy wanes

“I never felt comfortable with the manned versus unmanned argument,” says Purdue’s Smith. “We have always pursued both [approaches]. Satellite, probes and telescopes… There is no ICBM [inter-continental ballistic missile] system without satellites, there is no exploration of the moon or Mars without the [robotic] probes we have sent there.”

More on the manned vs. robot issue…

Yet despite the phenomenal allure of space-telescope photos, manned exploration plays a critical motivational role, Smith adds. “Without an orbital station, and the public interest and international cooperation that revolve around it, NASA can’t do anything. Satellites and probes just don’t drive that public interest.”

What Smith calls “fierce debates” between astronomers, who favor robotic exploration, and engineers who favor manned exploration are “not about policy or philosophy, they center on funding; those seem to me very parochial questions.”

Burns offers one suggestion for merging people and robots: sending astronauts to a low-gravity point above the far side of the moon (which never faces Earth), where they could control a moon rover. “Astronauts who are familiar with geological exploration could operate the rover in real time, there’s much less delay [in the radio signals]. They could visit the oldest [known] impact basin in the solar system, and it would not require a human lander, would be cheap, and would give you the kind of experience that is going to be needed” for further exploration of the solar system.

The quest to populate the solar system would entail a search for signs of life – and for water and useful minerals, Burns says. “This is going to require knowledge of geology, chemistry, astronomy and mechanical engineering; it will be very different than the first few flights to the moon that were just trying to get there. I argue that the difference between manned and unmanned travel is going to start to fade.”

Historic moment

Tele-operation, as remote-control is currently called, is being used every day by earthbound “pilots” in Nevada to fly drones in the Middle East, highlighting the firm link between space engineering and the military.

Rockets and satellites have military roots, and the space race was an early and intense focus of Cold-War competition, as the United States and Soviet Union both relied on German rocketeers who had helped the Third Reich try to conquer Europe. Now the United States and Russia, World-War II allies, then Cold-War enemies, have become allies once again, at least in terms of space cooperation.

Dating back to the late 1950s, Smith says, “Space policy has always been as much about perception as reality. It goes all the way back to the first ballistic missiles, the space race, the missile gap.”

John F. Kennedy warned about a “missile gap” while running for president, and even though it proved illusory, the fear of Soviet supremacy — Sputnik was in orbit while American rockets were exploding in front of TV cameras — supported the development of missiles that could be used for global nuclear war or putting men on the moon.

The result was lavish budgets for rockets and space.

But the easy goals have been reached, and visiting the moon is so last-century. Visiting an asteroid will answer important scientific questions, but will never have the sex appeal of visiting the man on the moon. As Smith says, today, “We are in another gap; an ambition gap.”

David J. Tenenbaum

We approach the Cave of the Mounds, a landmark (so to speak) in Southwest Wisconsin, along a walkway painted with fossils and markings that start at the Ordovician era (450 million years ago), when the limestone beneath our feet was deposited as a rain of sea shells on an ocean floor. Finally, at the cave’s entry, the asphalt calendar enters the last million years, when the cave started to be excavated by flows of acidic water.

The geological markings under our feet are one indication that the cave-men and -women who operate this site are intent on linking past and present, above- and below-ground.

Cave of the Mounds was discovered in 1939 by workers blasting in a limestone quarry on one of the highest spots in southern Wisconsin. Today, it is a tourist destination with a message — a cool, underground mecca, strategically illuminated, where tour guides leave the nettlesome lectures above ground, and offer easy-to-digest science along the cave’s alleyways.

The above ground section of the site features resurrected prairies and oak savannas, but the main attraction is the stalactites hanging over stalagmites, flowstone, the fossils embedded in ancient limestone, and the rare opportunity to see geology at work as you observe the earth from the inside out.

Aftermath of a flood unparalleled

What caused the huge erosion features, ancient shorelines, and scoured potholes in the “channeled scablands” in Eastern Washington state? In 1923, J. Harlen Bretz coined that ominous moniker and proposed that the features had been created by a gigantic flood.

During this time, geology was ruled by a “uniformitarianism” dogma, which highlighted gradual processes like deposition and erosion, and discounted the power of sudden events like floods (and perhaps even earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes).

Skeptics demanded to know the source of all that water in an arid region, and Bretz had a reputation as a kook. Then, geologists gradually realized that the ice-age flood had originated to the east, in glacial Lake Missoula, which had been plugged by the lobe of a glacier emanating from Canada.

In the 1950s, the idea that this huge lake had eaten through an ice dam and then coursed downstream with phenomenal power started gaining acceptance, and in 1979, Bretz, age 96, received the highest award from Geological Society of American for solving this great Earth riddle. Today, scientists believe the floods may have recurred every few years or decades as the ice age was waning, around 14,000 years ago.

The evidence for the floods comes in all sizes. Alternating stacks of coarse gravel and fine sand show gravel left by flood currents under sand left by slower water when the floods receded. A dry river bed called the Grand Coulee, in Eastern Washington, was gouged by the astonishing flow of uncorked glacial melt water. The periodic cascades that shaped Dry Falls, now in Sun Lakes State Park are considered the largest known waterfalls in Earth’s history.

The unbearable whiteness of being

The world’s largest field of gypsum dunes, at White Sands National Monument in south-central New Mexico, could arouse anybody’s inner drywaller, as gypsum is the mineral basis for both drywall and plaster. But here, where 275 square miles of gypsum dunes have built a hot, severe and scorchingly beautiful landscape, there’s not a sheet of drywall in sight.

Set aside as a national monument by President Herbert Hoover in 1933, the dunes trace their origin to vast deposits of hydrated calcium sulfate — gypsum — that were laid down on an ancient lake a quarter-billion years ago. After a geological uplift, they were exposed roughly 10 million years ago, and eventually moved to the present site in a geologic eye-blink — the last 7,000 years.

Mammoth tracks have been seen in the dunes, but they could get buried with time: Some dunes are moving 30 feet a year, as the wind piles them up on the windward side and gravity avalanches them down the lee.

The gypsum dunes are said to be the largest in the world, but what’s most amazing is not the geology, but the evolutionary adaptations life has used to survive these harsh conditions. At least seven species of animals, including three lizards, that are closely related to darker varieties living in the surrounding desert have turned white for camouflage in this bleached world. (The drywalling lizard or the plastering mouse must be here somewhere!)

Visiting the Sands? Ponder a trip to Trinity, the site of the first test of the atomic bomb.

Science museums: Try the trifecta!

The Windy City boasts not just one, but three cool science destinations, all next door to each other on the Museum Campus along the shore of Lake Michigan.

To explore some of the world’s biological and cultural wonders, spend the day at the Field Museum of Natural History, a collision of anthropology, botany, geology, paleontology and zoology. The permanent exhibits include the DNA Discovery Center, a journey through four billion years of earthly life, and Sue, the largest (and most expensive?) complete skeleton of the ferocious T. rex. Among the temporary exhibits was a recent one on the horse and its deep relationship with humans (an exhibit that particularly excited one horse-crazy Why Filer).

If your palate is whetted for a wetter world, walk to the Shedd Aquarium to explore underwater life from the Amazon, the Caribbean and both poles. Green sea turtles, beluga whales, moray eels, piranhas and penguins will be among your hosts.

If otherworldly science is more your thing, visit the Adler Planetarium. Chat about the stars with real space scientists at their Space Visualization Laboratory, or just sit back and watch the star show. Adler’s centerpiece is the Doane Observatory, the largest publicly accessible telescope in the Chicago vicinity. While you can only peer through the lens after dark, this could make for a great conclusion to your trip.

Discover a life aquatic

An Australian freshwater crocodile grows in Baltimore. Seriously. The National Aquarium Baltimore boasts more than 660 species of fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals, totaling around 16,500 marine creatures.

In addition to its rich marine menagerie, the aquarium has a collection of special exhibits and interactive oceanic enjoyment. See the world through a dolphin’s eyes at Our Ocean Planet, a show that teaches visitors about dolphins and the connections between people and their seafaring friends. Or soak in ocean sensations with a movie at the 4-D Immersion Theater, where you can experience sea life in multiple dimensions, including the smell and feel of (simulated) mist and wind. Or take an expert-led tour, including behind-the-scenes peek of the sharks’ quarters.

The aquarium is also a center for conservation. For example, its Marine Animal Rescue Program tracks the progress of rescued animals after release. Other conservation projects include restoring wetlands and investigating the impacts of mercury on the marine food chain. After all, protecting the life that sustains the ocean ecosystem benefits everyone—not just aquarium visitors.

An excursion exotic to Melville

What’s more breathtaking than seeing the world’s largest animals in the wild? Whale watching puts you up close and personal with these magnificent marine mammals. Since the 1950s, in a 180° turnaround from Herman Melville’s day, people have been flocking by the boatloads to glimpse whales doing what they do rather than to kill them.

Both the U.S. east and west coasts have whales to watch, though you must catch them in the right season during their migration. There’s no guarantee, but on the western seaboard, you could spot orcas and gray whales. The east is home to the right, fin and sei whales. Humpbacks, minkes, and blue whales troll both coastlines.

Several cetaceans (a scientific category including whales, dolphins and porpoises) are endangered, including the North Atlantic right, blue, fin, sei and gray whales. In any case, marine mammals are heavily protected by law, so whale watching should be done with professionals who obey the rules.

Celebrating, protecting southern nature

With more than 500 full-time employees and an annual budget exceeding $30-million, Audubon Nature Institute sounds more like a business than a private, non-profit organization dedicated to explaining and preserving the wonders of nature with a Cajun flavor. The group operates a zoo, aquarium and assorted parks in and around New Orleans. The Aquarium of the Americas focuses on the Caribbean, Amazon, Gulf of Mexico (complete with oil-drilling replica) and Mississippi River.

A primate exhibit in the Audubon Zoo shows dozens of our opposable-thumbed relatives. Its 360 species of animals include a jaguar shown in a replica Amazon jungle. The “Embraceable Zoo” is devoted to full-contact animal admiration, and you can also eyeball, if not pet, a prickly Indian crested porcupine. Audubon maintains two locations that focus on captive breeding and survival of endangered species; these are closed to the public, but we expect to see you at the new insectarium, located in the old Federal customs house, for the beetle races on Sept. 3.

North Carolina: decapitation capitol

Every summer, vacationers flock to North Carolina’s coast for a beach getaway. But beach vacations would have been a hard sell early in the 18th century, as the coast was the stomping grounds of the South’s most feared pirate, Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard.

Nowadays, the area is proud of its sordid past, attracting pirate-curious tourists and archaeologists alike. In 1996, Blackbeard’s biggest and final ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, was found off the coast of Beaufort, where it had been hiding for more than 270 years. While the dives did not uncover much treasure, archaeologists estimate the wreckage holds up to 750,000 artifacts, some of which are displayed at Beaufort’s North Carolina Maritime Museum.

Blackbeard is a primary local industry. Ocracoke Island, a favored Blackbeard anchorage, was where he met his fate at the hands of what he mocked as a rabble of “cowardly puppies.” Bath has the legendary ball of light, presumed to be Blackbeard’s ghostly severed head.

So why watch Johnny Depp impersonate a pirate at the multiplex when you can check out the history of this famous scoundrel? Like we said, this old, dead, head-free pirate is a godsend for small business…

Tar is my name. Fossils are my fame

If you’re stuck for a scientific sojourn in Southern California, head for the pits. Since long before there was a Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits have been an oozing, 3-D flypaper for animals, now with that all-too-trendy urban accent. Asphalt, we learn, is not just good for roads, but also for trapping live animals and preserving their fossils. Since their first description in a scientific publication in 1875, the pits have produced prodigious prizes for paleontology. The onsite Page Museum houses more than 650 species of plants and animals, all removed from the black goo, and dating back 11,000 to 50,000 years.

The tar pits were a graveyard for thousands of carnivores, including the dire wolf, coyote and saber-toothed cat, and a smaller number of herbivores, including mammoth and bison. In an effort to transcend the “heroic” era of paleontology and flesh out (if we can put it that way) a comprehensive picture of life in the era of ice, researchers have recently shifted their focus to fossils of plants and smaller animals, including millipedes, 31 species of mollusks, and 25 species of beetles.

Listen hard: Hear the galaxies?

Love big? Dig distant, mysterious and unfathomably old? At the Very Large Array, in western New Mexico, you can gawk at 27 giant antennas used by astronomers to “listen” to radio signals from the universe. When you’re done rubber-necking the hardware, check out exhibits at the visitor center.

Then climb an observation tower to get another view of the world’s premier radio telescope zoo. Notice how every single antenna has silently and inexorably changed its orientation, and is now pointing to another invisible spot in the heavens? You are looking at visual proof of our planet’s normally insensible rotation.

It takes a lot of work, and some hefty equipment, to pry loose the secrets of the universe, and here, the scale of the operation is written across the desert. Since 1980, the VLA has, alone or in tandem with other telescopes, been collecting the astrophysical evidence for the formation and destruction of stars and galaxies. The new “enhanced VLA” can “hear” three times as many radio bandwidths as the VLA and is 10 times more sensitive. How sensitive is that? They say it could hear a cellphone calling from Jupiter…

Go under cover in the capital city

Explore life under cover (and the technology that allows a spy to hide in plain sight) at the International Spy Museum, the only public museum of its kind in the United States. With the largest public collection of international espionage artifacts, the museum provides a unique global perspective of this covert profession — said to be the second oldest — and how it has shaped the past and present.

Before you start your mission, you are challenged to adopt a secret identity. As you snoop about, you’ll discover the Secret History of History, which highlights the influence of spies through the ages; gadgets and stories of espionage during the American Civil War, World War II, and Cold War; and a gallery of spy technology. You can even see if you have what it takes to be an agent in the Operation Spy interactive experience, in which you must find a missing nuclear trigger before it ends up in the wrong hands. Just don’t blow your cover!

Visit the “Boneyard”

Warplanes go to the desert to die, and there, for a fee, you can tour thousands of mothballed fighters, bombers and helicopters at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. Bus tours run from the Pima Air and Space Museum, on the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz. With more than 4,200 planes, the “boneyard” is the ultimate in aerial combat nostalgia.

Some of these planes will be scrapped, others may be sold or salvaged for parts, or pressed back into service during future wars. Seldom celebrated, but perhaps more important from a technological point of view, the site also stores 350,000 tools used to make these machines, including, we presume, the one-of-a-kind tools and dies used to shape jet engines, wings and fuselages.

Ogling killing machines may seem macabre, but then, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you’ve already paid for this stuff… might as well check it out, and witness how the technology of aerial warfare has changed over the decades!

Edison’s Garden of Invention

In 1887, after he had patented the first practical electric light bulb, mega-inventor Thomas Edison invented an inventor’s playground in West Orange, N.J., just outside Manhattan. Edison stocked the lab with every resource needed to crank out movie cameras and projectors, teletypes, recording and playback devices, batteries and countless other electric gadgets for the fast-modernizing nation.

With labs focusing on chemistry and physics, and with shops devoted to woodworking and metal-working, Edison could concentrate on his strong points: cranking out ideas and masterminding publicity stunts that helped ensure his commercial success. During World War I, 10,000 people cranked out electrical devices for the military at the factories clustered around the lab. Edison worked at the West Orange lab until his death in 1931.

Think of Edison as primarily an inventor? Then you have to wonder how his name wound up on the companies selling electricity to New York and Chicago. God may have made the Garden of Eden, but Thomas Edison made the garden of invention in north Jersey, and it awaits your visit.

– David J. Tenenbaum & Jenny Seifert