Antidote: It's Confirmed

NASA manages to do some good work in spite of the current regime. We've successfully completed the farthest ever fly-by of an object in space:

NASA now has proof that its New Horizons probe completed its record-setting flyby of the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule. The mission team confirmed the flypast at 10:31AM Eastern Time after receiving telemetry data indicating that the spacecraft was "healthy." It technically flew past Ultima Thule at about 12:33AM , but the combination of data collection and the six-hour signal travel time left the New Horizons crew waiting until much later to receive the A-OK from their pride and joy.

Scientific data won't arrive until sometime around 200 UTC on January 2nd (9PM ET on January 1st). You'll have to wait a while for an up-close snapshot, then.

The confirmation isn't just a relief for the New Horizons team. This marks the farthest-ever flyby in human history -- at about 4 billion miles from the Sun, Ultima Thule makes Pluto seem like a next-door neighbor by comparison. It also promises a raft of potential scientific insights, including clues to the formation of dwarf planets. Some of those discoveries may take a long time, but they'll be worthwhile if they shed light on the Solar System and the cosmos at large.

So, no pictures yet, but eventually.

This is a lot more exciting that a mythical wall.

I almost feel as though I should spend the day at the planetarium. Almost.

Via Joe.My.God.

"A mere billion years. . . "

after the earth formed, it says here:

Scientists analysing Australian rocks have discovered traces of bacteria that lived a record-breaking 3.49 billion years ago, a mere billion years after Earth formed.

If the find withstands the scrutiny that inevitably faces claims of fossils this old, it could move scientists one step closer to understanding the first chapters of life on Earth. The discovery could also spur the search for ancient life on other planets.

These traces of bacteria "are the oldest fossils ever described. Those are our oldest ancestors," said Nora Noffke, a biogeochemist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk who was part of the group that made the find and presented it last month at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.

One thing that I find fascinating about this is that the cyanobacteria they're discussing are responsible for the first mass extinction: they're the ones that started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere and killed off all their anaerobic brethren.

But still -- "a mere billion years"? I guess it all depends on your point of view.

Something to think about.

Speaking of Migrations

This is just too wonderful:

Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia happens to have been built next to a mango tree that one family of pachyderms have always visited when the fruit ripens.

When they returned one year and found the luxury accommodation in the way, they simply walked through reception.

Thanks to Alas, a Blog.

Neat Diagram

Thanks to PZ Myers, we have this diagram to show us how the main mammal lineages diverged.

'Possum Note

I saw the resident 'possum this morning for the first time in months. He (she?) was trundling through the yard with a big wad of dead leaves held in his tail. I suspect there's nest-building going on, but I can't figure out why. 'Possums don't need nests for their young -- they have these handy pouches that serve until the little ones are big enough to hang on to mom's back. I would expect nest construction to be a fall activity, what with needing shelter from the cold and snow.

Another of life's little mysteries.

(Random thought: we think of evolution backwards. That is to say, when we say an organism has adapted to an evironment, that exactly 180 from what actually happened. Any population -- and evolution is a matter of populations, not individuals -- has a range of potentials. When an environmental niche arises, some individual or group of individuals in that population is most likely going to be able to take advantage of it, so the adapation actually happened before it was necessary. That's quite a different thing.

Chalk it up to our indoctrination into linear, cause-and-effect thinking, which leads to mistakes like think that we are the pinnacle of evolution: that's where the idea of "common ancestors" comes into play. Every organism alive today is just as highly evolved as we are. It's just that none of the others evolved in quite the way we did, so you can't really think of chimpanzees as not-quite-people. They are chimpanzees.)

Winter Cheer

I am going to have flowers soon. Colmanara Wildcat, known as "Old Reliable," is putting up two new spikes. I'm not sure when they'll flower -- probably toward the end of the month -- but it looks at though I'll have orchids through January.

Check out this site for some wonderful orchid photos. Makes me wish I had some place to grow them again.

Bug Art

This is just too cool. Sort of throws a whole new monkeywrench into the "What is Art?" issue.



There's something very Chinese about this one.

By all means, check out this site. (And yes, he's very careful of the bugs.)

"Where The Hell Is Matt?"

You have to check this out.