Monday Science Links

This week's sciencey goodness:

• Mike at Mike Brown's Planets has discovered there's fog on Titan!: Look! Titan has fog at the south pole! All of those bright sparkly reddish white patches are fog banks hanging out at the surface in Titan's late southern summer. I first realized this a year ago, but it took me until now to finally have the time to be able to put all of the pieces together into a scientific paper that is convincing enough that I can now go up to any person in the street and say: Titan has fog at the south pole! I will admit that the average person in the street is likely to say hmph. Or yawn. Or ask where Titan is. So let me tell you why finding fog at the south pole of Titan has been the scientific highlight of my summer.


• At archy John has a post with pictures on the disappearing Aral Sea: The Aral Sea (actually a lake) was a landlocked body of water in Central Asia. A half century ago, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea. It was fed by two rivers, the Syr Daria and the Amu Daria (the ancient Oxus). Beginning in 1959, the Soviet Union began a series of large irrigation projects aimed at increasing amount the amount of commercial crops, mostly cotton, grown in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. As less and less water reached the sea, it began to dry up. As the shoreline receded, fishing villages became landlocked. Soon, that ceased to be a problem as increasing salinity killed most of the fish in the sea. Dust blowing off the lake bed, carrying with it salt and various pollutants, has become a public health hazzard. With the loss of the moderating effect of a large body of water, the summers have been getting hotter and the winters colder in that part of Central Asia.


• At the Tet Zoo, Darren talks about ducks, especially the Madagascar pochard: The recent article about Meller's duck Anas melleri inspired me to recycle my ver 1 article about another of Madagascar's endemic ducks, the Madagascar pochard Aythya innotata [male shown below]. Meller's duck is endangered, with a global population of between 3000 and 5000, but the Madagascar pochard is in an even worse position: in fact, it was regarded as extinct until 2006, when a small group of less than 20 was discovered. In fact, just last month a joint group representing the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, The Peregrine Fund, and Ministry of L'Environement et Forêts went in quest of this population: you can read about their expedition at The Dodo Blog. Anyway, here's the 2006 article... So by now the cat is out of the bag, and the news isn't news anymore anyway: the Madagascar pochard Aythya innotata, supposed extinct since 1992 (when the 'last' specimen died in captivity), has been rediscovered. Ducks are another of those tetrapod groups that we take for granted and regard as mundane, yet they're actually a-maz-ing. Before getting into pochards into any detail, let's remind ourselves how amazing ducks are.


• At Bad Astronomy, Phil shows us cool moon photo: OMFSM. I love this picture. Love love love. Love. Is it a ring of fire on Mercury? A look into the gateway of hell? A promo for Halo 3? Nope. It’s far cooler: it’s the rim of the lunar crater Erlanger poking into the sunlight.


• And at John Hawks' Anthropology Website there is a look at late Miocene African apes: Time for some attention to the Miocene apes. I've neglected them for the last few years, and there have been some interesting finds. I don't mean the stuff that most people find interesting -- near-complete skeletons, or discovery of rare postcranial elements. There've been some of those, but they're European. No, I mean interesting as in African, which means potential ancestors of humans, gorillas or chimpanzees. Or all three. This is a part of the fossil record that potentially can confirm (or disconfirm) details of the genetic comparisons between living apes. We have an increasingly detailed model for the speciation of humans and chimpanzees from their chuman ancestors. That model has been built from the complete genomes of humans, chimpanzees and macaques, and the partial genomes of the other apes. But there are potential reasons for uncertainty in the timing and duration of speciations among these living hominoids. What we need is a fossil record. And now we have just a tiny bit of one.

Enjoy!