The Athenaeum

Nautical Archaeology: The Wreck Of The Evelyn (Norcom)

Using LIDAR (light detection and ranging), INA researchers were able to obtain more than 160 million data points on the 1908 sternwheeler Evelyn.

 

The Evelyn (renamed Norcom) was originally a U.S. registered, wooden-hulled stern wheel steamboat built at St. Michael, Alaska in 1908 by Bratnobar for the Upper Tanana Trading Company. Her hull measured 39.6 meters by 8.7 meters with a depth of 1.28 meters. The vessel was powered by two horizontal, high pressure cylinders. At some point the ship was sold to the Northern Navigation Company- it wrecked in the Tanana River. Her machinery was removed & taken to St. Michael where a new hull was built.  She was converted to Canadian registry in 1913, & then owned by the British Yukon Navigation Co. in 1919. She was beached on Shipyard Island & her engines installed in the Steamer Keno in 1922. Registration was  cancelled in 1931.

The ship now lies on blocks at a once important (now abandoned) shipyard & wintering area between Dawson City & Whitehorse, at the base of the Thirty Mile Section of the Yukon River. One boiler & smokestack remain- the rest of the machinery has been removed. The paddlewheel axle, flanges, & crank lie near the ship. While the upper superstructure is largely collapsed, the hull & freight deck are intact. The three tiller-rudder assemblies are complete- they still work.

The LIDAR Survey

The mission of the Yukon River Survey was to locate/document historic Yukon River shipwrecks & hulls. Canada's Yukon Territories contains more accessible early sternwheelers than anywhere else in North America. Approximately 290 sternwheelers once plied the Yukon River, of which 110 were built in 1898 in response to the Klondike Gold Rush. Unlike broken fragments found in the Mississippi or Columbia River systems, the Yukon's steamer wrecks are intact to the point you can walk their decks, swing their tillers, watch their rudders turn. A July 2007 project marked the beginning of detailed documentation in the Yukon. In the first phase, an INA team & EPICSCAN staff spent five days at Shipyard Island, 60 km from the nearest road, & LIDAR-surveyed the 39.6 meter 1908 wooden-hulled sternwheeler Evelyn. The result was a data "cloud" of millions of highly accurate survey shots inside & outside of the vessel, such that features down to 3 mm in width were recorded. The 3-D model shows all timbers & planking.  It can be cross-sectioned as required.

The image quality of the animation below has been reduced for online viewing.

Reduction was done by EPICSCAN:

 

(courtesy of inadiscover.com)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Undated photograph of the Evelyn (Norcom)

 

 

-Maureen Lang

 

 

Domestic cats kill 3.7 billion birds/year in the US

"Domestic cats in the United States kill up to 3.7 billion birds and as many as 20.7 billion mice, voles and other small mammals each year, biologists estimated on Tuesday. Puss is probably the biggest human-induced killer of these species, outstripping better-known culprits such as habitat loss, agricultural chemicals or hunting, they said in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. A team led by Scott Loss at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Washington looked at published research into the predation habits of cats. Cats that have outdoors access kill between 30 and 47 birds apiece in temperate parts of Europe and North America each year, and between 177 and 299 mammals, according to past investigations."  AFP

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We used to have a couple of Persian cats.  They were unintelligent, and physically clumsy but would come to me when I summoned them.  They could not catch their own tails, much less birds.  I am a dog person.  PL

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gypdcc9Gc_Kdle0rOlMUamrF36qw?docId=CNG.076e294a319ce60310b0aaa0ea75423a.781

Non-Solar Images: Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 3

 

(click on images to enlarge)

Aurora Near The Chukchi Sea:

Comet 17P Holmes:

Comet Hale-Bopp:

Daytime Venus-Moon Conjunction:

Full Moon Near Perigee:

ISS & Shuttle in Ursa Major:

July Thunder Moon:

Perigee Moon:

 

 

-John Minnerath

Hydrogen Alpha Images- Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 2

 (click on images to enlarge)

7.30.12 Four frames across solar disk:

9.29.12 Mosaic in Ha:

 

2012 Venus Solar transit:

 

Annular Eclipse on 5.20.2012:

April 13, 2012 Large Solar flare.  Moving at +750,000 MPH:

August 5, 2012 Large filament:

White Light Solar Images- Astrophotography by John Minnerath, Part 1

Here are a few images of the Solar Photosphere, the outer layer of the Sun. These are referred to as taken in WL (white light), which is the full visible spectrum. What we would see of the Sun with no special filtering but to remove harmful UV rays and to reduce brightness to a tolerable level for our eyes. Some in B&W, which I think shows better detail. And some colorized because a lot of people like them. For most of my WL images I use a 6" f8 achromatic refractor with a Baader WL filter plus usually a couple other colored filters that help cut through atmospheric turbulence. Various barlows are used to increase focal length for as much magnification as I can manage with the seeing conditions at the time. The camera is a pure monochromatic high speed video camera which captures frames at about 60 per second. Each capture is usually 1 minute for about 3600 frames which are then processed into a single image. The individual image scale is fairly small and most of these are mosaics of a number of frames combined into one larger one. Close ups with good conditions show a granular surface. These granules are ~1000 km across and have a life of about 10 to 20 minutes. Good WL photography is hard to do, but show great beauty in visible light of the active Solar surface.     Below is an image of the shadow of Venus transiting the Sun.  This is one of the rarest phenomena dealing with the Sun we get to see, occurring in pairs every 243 years. The next occurrence will be in 2117, followed by the second in 2125. I was lucky to be in a place where it would be visible. All day we were blanketed with clouds and I fretfully watched the sky as the time of transit approached and then passed. Suddenly the sky cleared and I got a few minutes to see it and capture the event. It was really an amazing thing to see.    -John Minnerath

Bigfoot is a human hybrid species?

"“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species. Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens. Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA. “The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum. "  DNA Diagnostics

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Well!    pl  

http://www.dnadiagnostics.com/press.html

 

The "Curiosity" landing.

Opening a thread now on tonight's attempt to land "Curiosity" on Mars.  pl

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-me-0805-mars-rover-curiosity-landing-countdown-20120805,0,2172787.story

This picture is from NASA.  pl

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-509693/Life-Mars-Amazing-photos-Nasa-probe-reveal-mystery-figure-Red-Planet.html

 

 

Strength In Numbers: The Mighty Salp

Phytoplankton-eating, transparent, smallish gelatinous blobs though they may appear, an onslaught of salps was the cause of the Reactor #2 shutdown at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant (located on the Central California coast) this past week:

Diablo Canyon knocked offline, powerless against tiny jellyfish-like creature

A bit of info on the "mighty" salp:

Super-efficient Salps help lock up CO2

They may look like rather unexciting little bags of jelly, but salps may be the most efficient filter feeders in the ocean, according to a study just out in the journal PNAS. And this could make them important players in the draw down of carbon from surface waters into the deep sea.

Salps are a variety of tunicate, a group of animals that also includes sea squirts and are, surprisingly, evolutionarily related to vertebrates. They are filter feeders a few centimetres long that are either solitary or live in chains that can be hundreds of salps long.

Until now, scientists thought that although they were very efficient at filter feeding using a mucous ‘net’ type structure, they could only catch food that was larger than the holes of the net – a fairly sensible assumption to make if you think about things like fishing nets and sieves. But Kelly Sutherland and her colleagues used lab experiments where they offered salps specifically sized polystyrene balls of 0.5 to 3 micrometers in diameter and showed that even the smallest particles were picked up at a higher rate than expected.

So it turns out that salps can eat food in a huge range of sizes – in the words of one of the paper’s authors, ‘like being able to eat everything from the size of a mouse to a horse!’. And this is extremely beneficial as it allows salps to thrive on a wide range of different phytoplankton, zooplankton and other particles.

Another really interesting suggestion made by the authors is that the salps could be contributing more than expected to take down of carbon into the deep ocean. Because they consume tiny, tiny particles and then combine them into much larger faecal pellets, that allows carbon to be taken out of the top layer of the seawater and sink down to the ocean floor.

So, efficient and important for the environment – again proof that you shouldn’t judge an animal by its looks!

References

- Kelly Sutherland et al (2010). Filtration of submicrometer particles by pelagic tunicates. PNAS.

 

 

 

 

 

-Maureen Lang

Archaeology News- February/March 2012

ALASKA: In a pit house dating to around A.D. 1200, archaeologists uncovered a cast-bronze buckle that appears to be East Asian in origin and older than the house in which it was found. The oldest known cast bronze in Alaska, the artifact may have been part of a horse fitting, perhaps traded in from as far away as Manchuria. It was probably used as a charm or noisemaker by a local Inupiat shaman.  (Courtesy Jeremy Foin, University of California, Davis) TEXAS: The last issue of Archaeology detailed sites at risk (Top Ten Discoveries of 2011"), including those exposed by the drought in Texas. In addition to wrecks and human remains, receding waterlines revealed a mysterious 4-foot aluminum sphere. NASA officials confirmed that it was a fuel-cell tank from the space shuttle Columbia, which was destroyed during reentry in 2003. Along with other remains from the shuttle, it can teach us something about the effects of high-speed atmospheric reentry.  (Courtesy Nacogdoches, Texas, Police Department) GRENADA: People on the tiny island of Carriacou may have feasted on animals imported from South America over 1,000 years ago. Remains of South American animals, including piglike peccaries, armadillos, and guinea pigs—none of which are native to the island today—were excavated from prehistoric middens. The find suggests regular contact between natives and people on other islands and the mainland, but because the bones are scarce, archaeologists think only a select, high-status few got to eat these exotic treats.  (Wikimedia Commons) ENGLAND: Using stable isotope analysis, researchers examined remains of infants from the crypt at Christ Church in Spitalfields, London, to study breastfeeding in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that prolonged breastfeeding was common in the 19th century among this relatively well-off population, which does not necessarily agree with the idea that more women were entering the workforce at the time as a result of industrialization. The breastfeeding mothers of these infants may have had the means to hire wet nurses—or they may have been homebound due to an economic downturn.  (Wikimedia Commons) SWITZERLAND: High-end Swiss watchmaker Hublot has created a wrist-mounted version of the Antikythera Mechanism, the mysterious 2,000-yearold astronomical machine recovered from a Greek shipwreck in 1901. It contains 495 precision elements in a 3x4-centimeter package. The manufacturers claim that it is the first watch inspired by an archaeological finding. Would a wrist-mounted sundial count?  (Courtesy Hublot)

CHINA: A cracked skull may be the oldest known evidence of interpersonal aggression among modern humans. A CT scan of the skull, which is around 130,000 years old and known as Maba Man, revealed evidence of severe blunt force trauma, possibly from a clubbing. Remodeling of the bone around the injury, however, shows that he survived the blow and possibly was well cared for after his injury—for months or even years.  (Courtesy Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Science) JAPAN: An excavation at a train yard in Dazaifu has revealed the remains of two large, prestigious buildings, as well as expensive eating utensils and pottery. The finds, including tin and copper alloy spoons, Chinese and Korean pots, and Nara tricolored ware (the finest tableware in Japan at the time), date to the 8th and 9th centuries. The assemblage appears to identify the site as a diplomatic facility, mentioned in ancient documents, that housed and fed envoys from China and Korea.  (Courtesy Nobumasa Inoue, Board of Education of Dazaifu, Japan) PAKISTAN: 4,500-year-old Indus city of Harappa is thought to have been relatively peaceful. A new analysis of human remains excavated at the site found that while the overall level of violence in the city was on the low side for a statelevel society, it was not evenly distributed. Some communities endured much higher levels of trauma, inflicted on women in particular, suggesting a potentially brutal social hierarchy.  (Images of Asia) PAPUA NEW GUINEA: The seafaring Lapita, who settled the South Pacific more than 3,000 years ago, were not thought to have lived in Papua New Guinea. Findings from a new dig there have overturned that idea. The remains of several villages, including stone tools, shell ornaments, and thousands of pottery fragments have been discovered. The site is both unusually deep—including pre- and post-Lapita sequences—and perhaps the largest Lapita landscape yet discovered. According to researchers, the site opens a whole new chapter in Pacific history.  (Courtesy Steve Mortin, Monash University) OMAN: It's often thought that modern humans emerged from Africa through the Arabian Peninsula by hugging its shores, which may have protected them from swings in climate. However, 100,000-year-old stone tools found in the Dhofar Mountains suggest that some people traveled over the now arid—though once wet—interior. The find adds another layer of complexity and understanding to the path that modern humans took on their way around the world.  (Courtesy Jeffrey Rose, University of Birmingham)

(courtesy of www.archaeology.org)

-Maureen Lang

Hubble Reveals New Class Of Extrasolar Planet

Observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. It's smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth.

Zachory Berta of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and colleagues made the observations of the planet GJ1214b.

"GJ1214b is like no planet we know of," Berta said. "A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water."

The ground-based MEarth Project, led by CfA's David Charbonneau, discovered GJ1214b in 2009. This super-Earth is about 2.7 times Earth's diameter and weighs almost seven times as much. It orbits a red-dwarf star every 38 hours at a distance of 1.3 million miles, giving it an estimated temperature of 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ1214b, finding it likely that it was composed mainly of water. However, their observations could also be explained by the presence of a planet-enshrouding haze in GJ1214b's atmosphere.

Berta and his co-authors used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to study GJ1214b when it crossed in front of its host star. During such a transit, the star's light is filtered through the planet's atmosphere, giving clues to the mix of gases.

"We're using Hubble to measure the infrared color of sunset on this world," Berta explained.

Hazes are more transparent to infrared light than to visible light, so the Hubble observations help tell the difference between a steamy and a hazy atmosphere.

They found the spectrum of GJ1214b to be featureless over a wide range of wavelengths, or colors. The atmospheric model most consistent with the Hubble data is a dense atmosphere of water vapor.

"The Hubble measurements really tip the balance in favor of a steamy atmosphere," Berta said.

Since the planet's mass and size are known, astronomers can calculate the density, of only about 2 grams per cubic centimeter. Water has a density of 1 gram per cubic centimeter, while Earth's average density is 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. This suggests that GJ1214b has much more water than Earth does, and much less rock.

As a result, the internal structure of GJ1214b would be an extraordinarily different world than our world.

"The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like 'hot ice' or 'superfluid water,' substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience," Berta said.

Theorists expect that GJ1214b formed farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system's history. In the process, it would have passed through the star's habitable zone, where surface temperatures would be similar to Earth's. How long it lingered there is unknown.

GJ1214b is located in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus, and just 40 light-years from Earth. Therefore, it's a prime candidate for study by the planned James Webb Space Telescope.

A paper reporting these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

CONTACT

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu

David Aguilar / Christine Pulliam
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
617-495-7462 / 617-495-7463
daguilar@cfa.harvard.edu / cpulliam@cfa.harvard.edu

Zachory Berta
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.
617-495-4484
zberta@cfa.harvard.edu

(courtesy of http://hubblesite.org)

 

 

-Maureen Lang