When legendary marine biologist Sylvia Earle started exploring the ocean 50 years she couldn’t fathom anything people could do to hurt the pristine blue waters that dominate the globe. In her 2009 TED Prize talk she says, “Then, not Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cousteau or Rachel Carson could imagine we could do anything to harm the ocean by what we put into it or what we took out of it.”

Back then, she says the leading oceanographic minds considered the world’s ocean to be a sea of Eden. But now she says, “We are facing a paradise lost.”

As the recipient of a TED Prize, she called upon the world to recognize that we have fished 90 percent of the big fish in the last 50 years. We are losing sharks, squid, blue fin tuna and other species at a rapid rate. There are dead zones appearing in the oceans that affect not just the animals and plants that call it home but all of us.

She says, “I hope for you help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and in so doing secure hope for human kind. Health to the ocean means health for us. And I hope Jill Tarter’s wish to engage Earthlings like us includes dolphins, whales and other sea creatures in this quest to look for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And I hope Jill that we will find evidence one day that there is intelligent life among humans on this planet.”

She says, “Nothing else will matter if we fail to protect the ocean. Our fate and the ocean are one.”

As the winner of a TED Prize, Dr. Earle received $100,000 and a wish to change the world.

Young Sea Turtle Swims in Sea of Plastic

After her inspiring talk the work to fulfill her wish began immediately. VeriSign (the web encryption software) founder Addison Fischer gave $1 million to fund a project which grew into Mission Blue Voyage. The TED Prize team worked with Fischer and other offers to build on Earle’s wish.

Then just 14 months after she made her wish Sylvia Earle led a four-day Galapagos sea-voyage of 100 peopleLeonardo DiCaprio, Edward Norton, Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Steve Case, Ted Waitt, Bill Joy, Jackson Browne, Damien Rice, Chevy Chase, Jean-Michel Cousteau and 30 of the world’s leading marine scientists.

That’s where Jackson Browne began thinking about the role of the ocean in our lives and that connection to Sylvia Earle and her TED wish prompted him to go on to write his song, If I Could Be Anywhere.

Browne says he started the song on the Galapagos trip but finished it the night before presenting at TEDx Great Pacific Garbage Patch in November 2010.

His song grew out of a talk that Jeremy Jackson gave on the trip. Browne says, “When he said we need to change who we are I really got that.” He says we are going to have to eat differently, consume differently and travel differently because business as usual is hurting the planet and the ocean in particular.

Since that trip Browne, who has long been a supporter of the environment and social movements (including Occupy Wall Street) has begun touring on a bus powered by biodiesel and he has banned all disposable plastic backstage at his concerts.

He says, “I’m committed to carry as much of what I’ve learned here and heard here back into my everyday life and my work.”

Huffington Post Interview with Jackson Browne aboard the National Geographic Endeavor, April 2010.

Plastic in the Ocean

In 2010 Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute published a 22-year study that found a huge amount of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea in addition to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch we’ve been hearing about for years. In this study, the researchers examined their haul of 6136 surface plankton net tows between 1986 and 2008. During that time they found over 60 percent of them contained some plastic. Students sifted through and hand-picked the millimeter-sized fragments with tweezers. They collected over 64,000 pieces in total.

So plastic does break down in the ocean. Generally it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces until plastic particles resemble jellyfish food, plankton or even grains of sand. And over 400 years the material does degrade fully. But in the meantime it is contributing to the deaths of albatrosses on low-lying atolls. It is killing turtles and other surface-dwelling creatures who get tangled or just slurp up some plastic with a fish they are eating. Larger plastic gets lodged in animal throats while babies often get fed plastic by their mothers which leads them to starve since there is no nutritional value in plastic.

Five Ocean Gyres and Home of Five Global Garbage Patches

After learning about the gyres and the vast amount of plastic pollution, Jackson Browne was moved to sing about the dire straits of the ocean.

If I Could Be Anywhere

Music and Lyrics by: Jackson Browne

Sliding through the shimmering surface between two worlds
Standing at the centre of time as it uncurls
Cutting through a veil of illusion
Moving beyond past conclusions
Wondering if all my doubt and confusion will clear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere right now, I would want to be here

Searching for the future among the things we’re throwing away
Trying to see the world through the junk we produce every day
They say nothing lasts forever,
But all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere
If I could be anywhere in history, I would want to be here

The Romans, the Spanish, the British, the Dutch
American exceptionalism, so out of touch
The folly of empire, repeating its course
Imposing its will and ruling by force
On and on through time

But the world can’t take it, very much longer
We’re not gonna make it, unless we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

If I could be anywhere,
If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change things, it would have to be now.

They say nothing lasts forever,
but all the plastic ever made is still here
No amount of closing our eyes will make it disappear

And the world can’t take it, very much longer
It’s not gonna make it, ‘less we’re smarter and stronger
The world is gonna shake itself free of our greed somehow

And the world can’t take it, that you can see
If the oceans don’t make it, neither will we
The world is gonna shake itself all the way free somehow

If I could be anywhere, If I could be anywhere in time
If I could be anywhere and change the outcome, it would have to be now.

Golden orbweaver spiders from Madagascar secrete the only spider silk that is gold in color, not white. And now a five-year project to create a cape is finished and on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. This is the first spider silk textile made since the late 19th Century.

Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers with Their Spider Silk Cape

Clothing designer Nicholas Godley designed the garment. He says, “The color is just incredible. It’s incredibly strong, incredibly soft, incredibly sticky.” But his creation goes beyond being just a fashion experiment. He adds, “In the scientific and medical world at least spider silk is many ways the Holy Grail — in many ways it’s one of the most incredible materials.”

1.2 million spiders made the golden silk thread that built the gold brocaded cape.

Textile expert Simon Peers explains the process, starting with the spiders. He says, “You can’t keep spiders together because they are cannibals — they eat each other.”

Golden Orbweaver Spiders from Madagascar

Once the spiders have finished their work, four strands of silk are twisted together to make an ultra-strong and extremely flexible golden thread for a team of humans to sew into fabric. This particular spider silk stretches another forty percent of its resting length, which makes it very difficult to work with as a textile.

Peers is a British expatriate who moved to Madagascar over 20 years ago where he established a business to promote and explore the island nation’s heritage of weaving.

According to Wired.com in 2009,

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

Science News tells a slightly different tale.

At some point, Peers shared what he had learned with a friend who was doing academic research on Madagascar’s textiles. “And she enthused about this whole idea of spider silk,” Peers recalls. “In fact, she pursued it a little further than I did,” turning up details of the original machine that was used to “silk” spiders for that World’s Fair fabric. While in France, she had one small element of the silker reproduced and made Peers a present of the mechanical piece.

It then sat on a shelf in his office for years. Many, many years.

At the time the Godley and Peers project had made a large piece of fabric but had not cut the garment yet into a cape yet.

Textile expert Simon Peers and Fashion Designer Nicholas Godley Flank Model Bianca Gavrilas Wearing a Hand-Embroidered Spider Silk Cape

Molecular biologist Randy Lewis is also stuck on spider silk and is always looking for new practical applications for the material in the real world. With a tensile strength greater than steel and even kevlar (used in bullet-proof vests) spider silk is an ultralight weight material that could stop a speeding bullet.

Lewis lives in Wyoming and decided to combine his knowledge of animal husbandry with cutting-edge genetics. In the process he made transgenic goats that produced spider silk in their milk. That’s one way to overcome the spider labor problem faced by Godley and Peers.

Peers estimates that the spider silk project took hundreds of thousands of hours when you factor in the work of the spiders.

Excerpt from NOVA’s Making Stuff show about spider silk, featuring Simon Peers and Randy Lewis.

Leann Lloyd had the dubious honor of lugging a metallic rock through airport security in Missouri. She was on her way back to Albuquerque and the Meteorite Museum at University of New Mexico after retrieving the missing meteorite.

She says, “It stopped the line and caused a big hub-bub and three or four agents came over and pulled it out.”

The meteorite isn’t that big but because of its density weighs about 50 pounds. And apparently a suspect just walked out of the museum through the front door carrying the space rock before winter break.

Sikhote Alin Meteorite, Stolen from UNM Museum

The museum director noticed the empty case when he was giving a private tour during the holiday closure. He immediately put out an all-points meteorite bulletin through an international collector’s group and within a day had tracked the rock to Missouri, where Lloyd was sent to bring it home.

After orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for eons, the rock hit Russia about 60 years ago and landed in New Mexico when a Russian scientist gave the remarkable specimen to the first director of the musuem. Since then the rock sat still until straying off course just before Christmas.

Kent agee says the rock, which sold for $1,700 is not just a great scientific specimen but also one of historical significance. He places the value of the meteorite at about $40,000. The suspect who sold the stolen space rock used his real name in the transaction so the International Meteorite Collectors Association was able to track him easily.

Though he has not been arrested yet the thief stole the Sikhote-Alin, a 9,000 gram iron-nickel meteorite for the money. The UNM meteorite museum is closed while a full security review is conducted.

John Schooler, a meteorite collector and dealer in Missouri sees occasional alerts on the IMCA site. He says, “It’s not good. But like anyhting of value it has the potential of being stolen. They’ve done this for generations. The size here is unusual. He had to show some physical exertion to do it not just stick it in his pocket.”

A new theory posits that an instantaneous light burst at the moment of Jesus’ resurrection left the imprint of his image in the cloth used to bury him.

Just in time for what believers call a Christmas miracle, a team of Italian scientists has concluded that the cloth believed to hold the image of Jesus at the moment of his resurrection was not faked. They studied the chemical properties of the image and found it would be impossible to forge.

Previous attempts to study the cloth concluded that it was not 2,000 years old but part of a Medieval hoax dating back about 700 years. Those vying for the Shroud of Turin to be authentic claim that radio carbon dating in 1988 was flawed because it was done on a section of the cloth that was repaired after fire damage during the Middle Ages.

The current testing of the shroud, which is said to hold the electromagnetic image of Jesus’s face, proves the image was not faked using any known 14th Century technology.

Lead researcher Paulo Di Lazzaro told MSNBC.com science editor Alan Boyle, “It is obvious that a serious scientific work cannot prove any supernatural action.”

But the group of researchers, sympathetic to the story of the shroud as Jesus’ burial cloth, thinks they have proved the image’s chemical authenticity.

The group doing the latest tests on the shroud worked outside of business hours on their “curiosity-driven” research, which was not funded by the ENEA Research Center, where they work.

They team started with a question: could radiation have produced the Christ-like image etched in the cloth?

The short answer is yes. But there’s more to the story.

Di Lazzaro and his colleagues blasted modern-day cloth with an ultraviolent laser and they claim that they were able to reproduce the exact depth of the coloration — .2 micrometers — in the Shroud of Turin. Over five years, the team tested and re-tested, blasting the experimental cloth with laser pulses of varying lengths. They say that pulses lasting less than 50 nanoseconds produce the right “superficial Shroud-like coloration of linen yarns in a narrow range of irradiation parameters.”

Because lasers didn’t exist in the Middle Ages the team concludes that the shroud couldn’t have been faked. Previous studies suggested that the image of the bearded man was painted on the cloth. But Di Lazzaro refutes that, claiming that no brush stroke could be evenly painted at that miniscule depth.

Di Lazzaro and his team conclude, “These processes may have played a role in the generation of the body image on the Shroud of Turin.”

But Joe Nickell, who has been studying shroud science, also known as sindology, for decades says that Di Lazzaro’s research team stacks the deck in favor of the shroud’s authenticity by starting with the premise that the shroud is an impossible image.

Shroud of Turin

He tells MSNBC.com, “Making the assumption of a miracle is a really, really, really, really, really big assumption. That it’s done in the name of science is just astonishing.”

But the shroud team holds strong saying, “The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining … is impossible to obtain in a laboratory.”

Nickell argues that the team starts with the answer and looks for scientific evidence to back up the claim. He says the latest tests don’t prove anything new despite their use of lasers and high-tech tests.

The Italian shroud team is careful not to draw conclusions about the shroud itself. And they stop short of offering any supernatural explanation for the image of a crucified Jesus in the cloth.

They say, “When one talks about a flash of light being able to color a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes. We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals.”

The research was presented at a science conference in May but kept under wraps until the British media pounced on this Christmas story, which will no doubt be an early Christmas present for shroud believers, but is likely to be greeted with a bah-humbug by those who doubt that the sepia-colored, 14ft-long cloth dates back to the date Jesus Christ’s crucifixion 2,000 years ago.

For seven million years at least 80 ancient whale skeletons have been preserved in the high desert of Chile. Now a road project threatens the ancient burial ground. But developers of the new highway project have given scientists another month to remove and study as much of the area as they can.

Whale Fossils Lie Exposed Next to Pan American Highway

3D modelers and paleontologists from the Smithsonian have been on site in Chile trying to gather as much data as they can before the highway expansion project resumes in Copiapo near the city of Caldera in the northern part of Chile.

Site manager John Vega says, “In 15 days, we have had almost 15 whales. It really was a surprise. We didn’t expect to find so many fossils in one place.”

Overlapping Whale Fossils

Palaeontologist Sol Squire says, “The whale discovery is a discovery of global importance. There has never been a find of this size or diversity anywhere in the world, which is one of the very special parts of Atacama region.”

Smithsonian Team Stands Over Whale Fossil

Other groups of prehistoric whales have been found together in Peru and Egypt, but the Chilean fossils stand out for their staggering number and beautifully preserved bones. Over 20 of the 80 skeletons are nearly intact, something that is crucial for new research and to determine how the animals all ended up in the same area.

That is the top question on the mind of Suarez, the director of the local Paleontological Museum in nearby Caldera. He is focused on how the this group of aquatic animals which died between two and seven million years ago wound up over 1,200 feet above sea level on top of a desert hill, about 40 miles from the nearest beach.

In addition to ancient whales, the team found an extinct aquatic sloth, an ancient seabird with a wingspan of over 17 feet, and the fossil remains of an unusual tusked dolphin that had previously been unearthed only in Peru.

First Whale Fossil Unearthed in August 2010

A vertebrate paleontologist at Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia told the Associate Press that the well-preserved and relatively complete fossil bed provides a “rare combination in paleontology and one that will likely shed light on many facets of the ecology and evolution of these extinct species.”

Seven billion is a big number. It looks like this: 7,000,000,000. According to National Geographic magazine If you started counting out loud to 7 billion, it would take you 200 years. And, If you took 7 billion steps it would take you around the globe 133 times.

By the end of October, that’s how many people will inhabit Earth. This symbolic population milestone comes with a list of caveats and some opportunities as well. The lucky 7 billionth planetary citizen will likely be born in India or China, the leaders in global population.

We add 80 million people per year as water tables are falling, soil is eroding, glaciers are melting, and fish stocks are vanishing.

China is number one with 1.34 billion, followed closely by India with over 1.2 billion while the U.S. is a distant third with 312 million.

However, demographers at the United Nations Population Fund estimate that we are adding 219,000 people to the planet per day, which puts on target to reach 8 billion by 2025 and 10 billion people by 2083.

With all those people and a finite supply of space and resources, there are some challenges that lie ahead. Namely, poverty, access to food and water and a hope for a clean environment.

In Sub-Saharan Africa 900 million people suffer under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and the world’s deepest poverty. In 40 years that region will house almost 2 billion people, accounting for almost half of the projected growth, according to the New York-based Population Council.

Rural families flock to cities. Now 21 cities have populations larger than ten million. Over 335 cities have more than one million. And only 9 of those cities are in the U.S.

John Bongaarts, a spokesman for the research organization tells the Associated Press, “Most of that growth will be in Africa’s cities, and in those cities it will almost all be in slums where living conditions are horrible.”

The International Water Management Institute predicts that by 2025 1.8 billion people will live in places from severe water scarcity.

Many African nations are realizing that smaller families are more favorable for food production and access to water.

Lagos, Nigeria is about to overtake Cairo, Egypt as Africa’s biggest city. There, the former Nigerian health minister says reaching the 7 billion global population number should be a wake up call. He supports formal education for girls, getting teenage girls to stay in school and for women to control the number of children they have.

Babatunde Osotimehin says, “It’s an opportunity to bring the issues of population, women’s rights and family planning back to center stage.” He says there are over 215 million women worldwide who need family planning but don’t have access. He adds, “If we can change that, and these women can take charge of their lives, we’ll have a better world.”

But around the world, the challenges of a growing population are different. In Europe population numbers are barely growing and that’s only because of immigration, which in itself is highly controversial. The death rates in developed countries are outpacing birthrates. But shifting populations from around the world are offsetting those losses and creating steady population growth.

In India, there is a population imbalance. More than half of India’s population is under 35. This “youth dividend” could either be a boon to the Indian economy or it could zap their resources and slow the nation’s population growth, which by 2025 could be 1.6 billion people, making it the most populous country.

A population demographer in New Delhi says, “If the young population remains uneducated, unskilled and unemployable, then that dividend would be wasted.”

India also has a growing gender gap, where boys are outpacing girls in the latest census data. Indian families are showing a preference for sons and because of a surge in sex selection tests, many female fetuses are being aborted.

In China, after decades of forced family planning where urban families are allowed on child and rural families two children, the population growth has slowed rapidly. Perhaps too rapidly. Soon, China will have a shortage of young people to take care of a massive elderly population.

Like India, China has a gender gap. The United Nations says there are 43 million missing Chinese girls because parents restricted to one child opted to abort female fetuses.

In the western world France and the U.S. have the steadiest growth rates, both bolstered by immigration. Italy and Spain are both facing people shortages to help with a rapidly aging population. For the last consecutive four years more people have died in Italy than have been born.

But Lagos, Nigeria is clipping along at a six percent annual population growth. With 15 million and growing in the capital city, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country with over 160 million. In Nigeria, 60 percent of the population is under 30 and needs education, training and access to healthcare.

Ndyanabangi Bannet, the U.N. Populations Fund’s representative in Nigeria says, “It is a plus if it is taken advantage of but if it is not harnessed, it can be a challenge, because imagine what hordes of unemployed young people can do.”

A recent article in the journal Nature suggests that with drastic changes in agriculture we can accommodate a bigger population. University of Minnesota ecologist Jonathan Foley says there are five key changes we need to make to boost food output and accommodate a bigger global population.
1. Stop farming in places like tropical rainforests, which have high ecological value and low food output
2. Improve crop yields in regions of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe where farmland isn’t meeting its potential
3. Change farming practices to better manage water, nutrients, and chemicals
4. Shift diets away from meat
5. Stop wasting food (up to one-third of all food grown is wasted either in production, transport, or after purchase)

But with 696,000,0000 million able bodies under the age of 30 in India and Nigeria alone, we have the opportunity to change the world for the better before the next 3 billion arrive.

When Alex de Voogt couldn’t get a crumbling sheath to release an early 20th Century Egyptian knife, he turned to a cutting-edge, high resolution, computed tomography (CT) scanner for help. Using the advanced x-ray technology he was able to see inside the knife covering and reveal writing on the knife blade without disturbing the artifact.

Museum scientists around the world are continually studying parasites, people, or planets. And to learn more about their subject of choice, they routinely use cutting-edge imaging technologies such as infrared photography, scanning electron microscopes, and CT scanners to make it possible to examine details that were previously unobservable.

Now the American Natural History Museum in New York City is offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science as told through the pictures scientists capture in pursuit of their science.

This exhibition, called Picturing Science was the brain child of Mark Siddall, curator in the museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology. He gathered more than 20 sets of large-format images that showcase the wide range of research across many different scientific disciplines being conducted at the Museum. The exhibit also showcases how various optical tools are used in scientific studies.

Picturing Science: Museum Scientists and Imaging Technologies is on exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History from June 25, 2011 – June 24, 2012 and is free with Museum admission.

“Very rarely do you find a scientific paper that doesn’t have a picture in it, a scientific figure of some sort. But there’s this wonderful aesthetic that goes with some of these pictures that are just beautiful to look at.” — Mark Siddall, Invertebrate Zoology Division Curator, American Natural History Museum.

A clock started ticking the minute a bulldozer driver discovered a fossil dating back more than 50,000 years last October. He was clearing an area for a reservoir above Snowmass Village, high in the Colorado Rockies. What Jesse Steele discovered could be the biggest high-elevation Ice Age fossil preserve.

Now a feverish archaeological dig is underway to unearth as many bones and fossils of animals that became trapped in the thick peanut butter-like mud thousands of years ago. And they have to complete the $1 million project by July 1 when the planned expansion of the reservoir begins.

Partially funded by the newly formed Snowmastadon Fund, the sleepy ski village of Snowmass, Colorado has turned into a scientific wonderland. The Snowmastadon Project, established by the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, the town of Snowmass Village, and the Snowmass Water and Sanitation District, covers the immediate cost of activities related to the fossil excavation at the Ziegler Reservoir near Snowmass Village.

After the bones are dated, studied and cleaned, they will go on exhibit at the museum.

Since the dig began almost a week ago paleontologists are discovering prehistoric relics every day. So far they have found giant animal bones, ivory mastadon tusks and even a claw from a giant ground sloth. SnowMassIceAge.com is the place to go to follow the action as the dig continues. Already the 43 paleontologists at the site have discovered over 300 sizable bones.

But the biggest prize may not be the treasure trove of ancient bones. Kirk Johnson, the curator at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature says, “Believe it or not, scientifically, this lake may give us the first good climate picture in the Rocky Mountains.”

For over 50 years, human audiences have been fascinated by natural history television shows and big screen movies. From Disney Nature to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, we have explored every crack and crevice of the planet in search of weird, wonderful and unexpected creatures that share the planet with us.

In recent years, entire television networks devoted to life on Earth have dotted the cable TV landscape. Discovery Communications signature Discovery Channel, Planet Green, the Science Channel, National Geographic and even Animal Planet all share one thing in common. They all examine the curious world around us from the perspectives of plants, animals and other unknown Earthly inhabitants.

Now, the makers of the award-winning series Planet Earth and Life are turning the camera around and looking at the most intelligent and creative creature to ever roam the planet — us.

This Earth Day, we know that the ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, that sea levels are rising faster than they should naturally. We know that we need to recycle, consume less and reuse more. These typical Earth Day messages ring a little hollow since many of us are concerned with these problems all year long. We don’t need to set aside a special day to focus on the Earth. It’s front and center in our minds all the time.

So this Earth Day, let’s celebrate ourselves, our unimaginable achievements, our place in this world and our ability to solve our most complex social and natural problems.

Happy Earth Day!

WHAM TV’s Norma Holland talks to Dale Templar, producer of the Discovery Channel series The Human Planet.

Mireya Mayor explores remote areas of the world is search of elusive and endangered species. The wildlife expert and anthropologist also educates students and parents about the importance of conservation wherever she goes.

After watching the movie Gorillas in the Mist before practice one day, the former Miami Dolphins cheerleader decided to devote her life to science.

Now she is being called the real life Indiana Jones and is the author of the new book, Pink Boots and the Machete.

She is also part of the National Geographic program Find Your Footprint and Proctor and Gamble’s Future Friendly project.

The fabled lost city of Atlantis has been found — again. This time the ringed city made famous in the writings of Plato 2,700 years ago is located in southern Spain.

A new National Geographic special believes there is sufficient evidence to show that Atlantis existed and is buried in a marshy area near the city of Cadiz. Further evidence of Atlantis can be found stretching 150 miles away from the presumed site in towns that resemble the early descriptions of the city.

That archaeological evidence is said to have been left by Atlantean refugees who fled the city after a devastating tsunami destroyed and submerged their advanced civilization. Those few who would have survived would have moved inland and tried to rebuild using the a familiar style.

A team of scientists, led by Richard Freund, believe that gives credence to their argument that Atlantis has been found.

The lost city of Atlantis has been supposedly found numerous times, including a recent sighting off the west coast of Africa where some ocean floor geography looked suspiciously like a city grid.

The island of Santorini and numerous Mediterranean Sea sites as well as several places in the Caribbean have all been candidates for the lost city. So far, none has passed all the tests to qualify. Will the the site at Cadiz prevail? Only time will tell.

If Jonas Salk and Carl Sagan are your celebrities, we have a trip for you. From researching global warming in Antarctica to monitoring space flight, Bloomberg Businessweek explores the growing tourism niche of science travel.

It’s a marriage of ecotravel and scientific research.

Here are some leading Science Travel companies.

Abercrombie & Kent
American Museum of Natural History — Explorers Program
Habitat Adventures
Wildland Adventures
Explorers Club
National Park Service
Earthwatch Institute

It sounds like something right out of Jurassic Park but scientists in Japan have plans to bring the long-extinct mammoth back to life using cloning technology within the next 5 years.

Akira Iritani, a professor emeritus at Kyoto University in Japan, is looking to resurrect the woolly mammoth using a new cloning technique.

The plan would take genes from a mammoth and insert them into an embryo which would be placed inside an elephant. If the clone is successful a baby mammoth would be born.

No doubt this will spark an ethical debate about reviving extinct species and cloning.

Some scientists say the odds of getting the necessary mammoth tissue and creating a successful clone in five years are less than 50-50.

Mammoths have been extinct for about 8,000 years.

First, physicist Dr. Michio Kaku looks back over the natural disasters that rocked the world and does some future disaster forecasting as well.

2010 started with a major earthquake that killed 200,000 and 3 million homeless in Haiti. Then later in the year a gigantic quake in Chile knocked the Earth off its axis and shortened our 24-hour day by one micro-second. Dr. Kaku insists that the planet is not trying to seek revenge on the human species, which has also been very busy this year.

Top Bio Stories

According to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News 2010 was a big year for biology. Last year third-generation gene sequencers came to market which opened the door to generate DNA sequences as well as epigenetic information with single-molecule sensitivity in real time. This was also the year that synthetic biology became mainstream. J. Craig Venter created a bacteria from scratch, making Synthia the first fully synthetic, self-replicating cell.

2010 Also saw the gene patent wars heat up. In the Spring a New York court declared the patent on the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and 2 invalid. This case will likely end up before the U.S. Supreme Court before it’s finished but the Justice Department now supports the lower court’s ruling, saying that naturally occurring phenomena such as genes should not be subject to intellectual property laws.

Stem cells, aging and cancer rounded out a full year for biotech. After President Obama repealed former President Bush’s ban on research involving embryonic stem cells this year a federal court judge placed the future of embryonic stem cell research in limbo again.

After all the excitement about the anti-aging benefits of sirtuins, the chemical found in red wine, is still not well understood. A couple of drug candidates involving the activator and inhibitor are in clinical trials but haven’t made the medical strides they promised last year.

A cancer vaccine called Provenge made it to market this year to help treat prostate cancer. Several other treatments are in late stage clinical trials and could be ready next year.

Top Physics and Space stories

One of the most inspiring space endeavors to finish a rocky trip in 2010 was the Japanese Hayabusa mission. It rendezvoused with asteroid Itokawa in 2005 after being pummeled by a large solar flare in 2003. The goal was to gather dust from the asteroid and bring it back to Earth.

After all the technical mishaps Japanese researchers didn’t hold much faith that the probe would return with any dust. But after a triumphant return to Earth in June, a few specks of the asteroid were identified. Now scientists have another tool to understand the beginnings of our solar system.

But 2010 was all about space water. Remember water on Mars? That was so last year. This year confirmed water on the moon and on one of Saturn’s moons.

Saturn's Moon Enceladus, as viewed from NASA's Cassini Spacecraft

The ever-impressive NASA Cassini Equinox mission continues to blow us away with amazing imagery from the Saturnian system, including what appears to be liquid water shooting from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The spacecraft has been orbiting the ringed gas giant since 2004, buzzing past its many moons and delivering some of the most detailed observations of this iconic planet we have ever seen.

But closer to home, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found that the moon not only has water ice stored in the shadows of its deepest and darkest craters, but there appears to be a lot of water just below the surface.

Discovery News asks how much water is there.

Writer Ian O’Neill says, “Bucketloads. 600 million gallons stashed away in 40 craters as measured by a NASA instrument that flew on board the Indian Chandrayaan-1 mission. But how much water is 600 million gallons? That’s enough water to fulfill Seattle’s water needs for a whole year… or enough water to manufacture 588 billion bags of Cool Ranch Doritos (according to one commenter who obviously has way too much time on his hands).”

(Artist rendering of moon landing...not a real picture)

2010 was the year that President Obama canceled the Constellation manned space program and scrapped plans to go to the moon. But it was also the year that commercial space flight became a reality. Leading the way into space is Virgin Galactic. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are helping to privatize the space industry and will be fulfilling space services for NASA once the shuttle program is retired in early 2011.

But the biggest space story of the year was happening right here on Earth. Or rather under the Earth at the European nuclear science lab CERN. There particle physicists in search of the elusive Higgs Boson or God particle have successfully trapped antimatter for the first time.

Physicists capture antihydrogen for the first time in 2010

Capturing antihydrogen will allow physicists to study the beginning of the universe and try to figure out why if both matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts during the Big Bang that matter is all that mattered for its formation.

Top Stories by Accident

Science makes some its greatest discoveries through accidental encounters and without looking. A few stories found their way to us that way this year, mostly from the animal kingdom.

The most distressing story resulted from pictures of oil covered seabirds struggling in the slimy Gulf of Mexico after the BP Horizon Deepwater oil rig explosion and disaster. Months later, clean up efforts are still underway and scientists are looking at long term consequences of the largest oil spill in U.S. history.

But across the world, a two-foot long isopod — that looks like something Hollywood cooked up for a sci-fi movie — hitched a ride to the surface aboard a deep sea submarine, giving the world a glimpse of this rare giant creature.

Deep Ocean Submarine Finds Giant Hitchiking Isopod

A team of scientists is on a mission to provide 3D maps and models of the wreckage of the Titanic before it disappears. The nearly 100 year old shipwreck is falling apart. To preserve the famous ship as it is the Waitt Institute is using side-sensing autonomous underwater vehicles to map the Titanic.

Oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution join the expedition along with Waitt Institute and RMS Titanic, Inc. to create the most comprehensive map of the site to date.

The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg in 1912. The wreck was discovered on September 1, 1985.

Follow the expedition on Facebook and follow the action on Twitter

Visit the official website: ExpeditionTitanic.com

The race is on to humanize scientists. Mad, messy-haired white men in white coats in a dark, cold laboratory are out. Long distance running, singer-photographer, daredevils are in. These are the new faces of science.

mechanical engineer and an all-purpose daredevil, Nate Ball is also an accomplished jazz pianist, a NCAA champion pole-vaulter, and a grandmaster beatboxer. And he hosts a reality TV show on the side

The PBS NOVA series The Secret Lives of Scientists & Engineers is an online series that tries to show that there is more to scientists than their science.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is a familiar face and host of PBS’ NOVA. But this expert on the cosmos also enjoys a little whimsy. Dr. Tyson is an avid tie collector. His cosmological clothing choices put a new spin on this astrophysicist.

2004 Miss Massachusetts Erika Ebbel is a biochemist who went on to compete in the Miss America beauty pageant. The MIT graduate is now pursuing her PhD at Boston University School of Medicine. But she is an accomplished pianist and an expert at waving.

Well known climate scientist Gavin Schmidt is juggling an amazing amount of data in his quest to build a 3-D model of Earth to better understand how the climate is changing. So it’s no wonder he juggles balls, pins and beanbags in his offtime.

More scientists are getting out of the lab and showing what else makes them tick.

Teen astronomer Caroline Moore is an avid singer. Roboticist Colin Angle is an extreme athlete while ethnobotanist Ina Vandebroek is a salsa dancer.

Movies and TV are embracing the scientist-as-person phenomenon. Shows like the Big Bang Theory and even a band of smarties, including a chemist and a biologist on the reality TV series Big Brother.

Do you know a scientist who has a really cool job or one that does something surprising when not trying to understand how the world works? If so send your nominees to tips@realscience.us.

The “Mummies of the World” exhibit opens in Los Angeles featuring 150 specimens of human and animal remains and related artifacts from across the globe.

Mummy Science

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center partnered with the German Mummy Project to perform CT scans of the mummies included in the exhibition.

“If the mummy is from a culture where it is bandaged or wrapped in layers of textiles, it is always interesting to see what it under the wrappings.” — Heather Gill-Robinson, scientific curator for the German Mummy Project

Google is documenting the artifacts of Iraq’s national museum. Google chief Eric Schmidt toured the museum Tuesday, and said the photographs would be available for viewing online in 2010.

Here’s the gist of the kitchen sink hoax. It starts with the end of the Mayan calendar, adds a mystery planet on a crash-course with Earth. Then there is some nonsense about the planets aligning on Dec. 21, 2012, heralding the end of the world. There are about six different pieces to this hoax, which seems to be gaining public momentum.

But the science just doesn’t hold up. Only a few pieces–yes, we will be experiencing a solar maximum and we will be in the galactic plane during this time–are actually true.

Here’s the hoax sorted out. Listen for yourself.

Visualization of a river bed created using VisTrails, a system developed by University of Utah computer scientists Photo by: Juliana Freire and Claudio Silva, University of Utah

A two-year experiment to build a framework to analyze the massive amount of data scientists are collecting will push research to better understand our planet, our bodies and the limits of the Internet.

The National Science Foundation initiative called Cluster Exploratory or the CLuE program is a partnership between I.B.M. and Google to put scientists to work solving the problem of how to deal with so much information.

The answer? Cloud computing. Using virtual locations online to cope with the large data stream will allow science to answer some big and complex questions.

Top 8 in the Science Cloud:

Sloan Digital Sky Survey–obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars.

Visible Human–is an anatomical data set licensed from the National Library of Medicine, Visible Human Project.

IRIS Seismology Database–allows you to monitor global earthquakes in near real-time, visit seismic stations around the world, and search the web for earthquake or region-related information.

Protein Data Bank–contains information about experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies.

Linguistic Data Consortium–supports language-related education, research and technology development by creating and sharing linguistic resources.

TerraFly–View images and data anywhere in the United States and in much of the World.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope–A large aperture, wide field survey telescope and 3200 Megapixel camera to image faint astronomical objects across the sky.

Open Topography–provides integrated access to high-resolution topographic data and web-based processing tools as well as enables its user community to share knowledge, resources and build science collaborations.

While most serious scientists are wringing their hands, wondering who will win the Nobel prizes, a different group of scientists is celebrating the lighter–but just as bona fide–side of science.

The 19th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony shined a silly look at science at Harvard last week. Here’s a breakdown of the winners in each category. The Ig Nobel goes to…

Economics:
Icelandic bank management and auditors–for demonstrating how to bankrupt a national economy.

Math:
Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank–for printing currency ranging from one cent to 100 trillion dollars.

Public Health:
Elena Bodnar–for inventing a bra that’s good during an emergency.

Physics:
Katherine Whitcome, Daniel Lieberman and Liza Shapiro–for answering the question: Why don’t pregnant women tip over?

Medicine:
Donald Unger–for proving his mother wrong and discovering that knuckle cracking doesn’t cause arthritis.

Veterinary Medicine:
Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson–for discovering that cows with names give more milk at dairy farms.

Peace:
Stephan Bollinger–for determining that empty beer bottles will do more damage then full ones when smashed over someone’s head.

Chemistry:
Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor Castano–for making diamonds out of tequila.

Biology:
Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei–for finding a bacteria in panda poop that eats kitchen garbage.

Literature:
Ireland’s Police Service–for writing more than 50 traffic tickets to Prawo Jazdy, the most frequent driving offender in Ireland. The name in Polish means…”Driving License.”

Last week, after 17 years of secrecy, scientists announced they had found the oldest example of the human lineage. Her name is Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus, and she is a 4.4 million year old fossil.

Ardi was found in the famous Rift Valley of Ethiopia, where other fossils, like Lucy were discovered. Its unique geology pushes fossils to the surface where torrential flash floods both preserve specimens and uncover them.

Now scientists are trying to find the common ancestor that both humans and chimpanzees shared. They believe the two lines diverged sometime between 7 and 8 million years ago.

Urban geologist David Williams is a big stone kinda guy. He is not one to shy away from a nice chunk of gneiss. Nor will he wilt at the sight of weathered brownstone–one of his favorites.

Now, the author of Stories in Stone: Travels in Urban Geology, Williams shares his passion for rocks–from travertine to pop–in his new book that gets at the heart of Earth.

It’s a tour-de-force through plate tectonics, dinosaurs and even the possibility of life on other planets but the stories that stones tell are firmly rooted in our cultural and economic lives.

REALscience sat down with Williams and discovered why he is so passionate about these rocks.

Just over a year old, the Apple iTunes App Store is churning out–or rather independent developers are–applications to calculate tips, find restaurants and even play countless games. But there is little for the science-interested smart phone users.

Oh sure, among the tens of thousands of applications currently available there are a handful of sci apps but relatively few. The subject doesn’t even merit its own category.

But several lists have been generated, touting the few useful science applications currently available.

And, we’ve tried to separate the intelligent from the app crap.

Listen here.

A few Select SciApps:
Atoms in a Box
Molecules
EleMints
Starmap
Formul8
Genetic Decoder
Get All the Science
The Extraordinaires

The Extraordinaires–on-demand volunteering for citizen scientists

Story written and produced by Michelle Ma

A new fossil in the ever-growing list of incremental species that outline the history of human evolution may not be the missing link after all. A week after Ida’s debut on the paleontological scene, scientists are taking a closer look at her place in our phylogenetic map.

A new documentary on the History Channel called The Link reveals the 47-million-year-old fossil for the first time, following its blockbuster announcement on May 19 in New York City.

The exclusive agreement with the independent production company required two years of secrecy, which bucks scientific convention when it comes to big discoveries.

Not everyone is pleased with how Ida is being elevated to rock star status, among other fossil ancestors, like Lucy. P.Z. Myers over at Pharyngula is especially incensed.

History Channel’s IDA THE LINK EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW

The nearly complete and remarkably preserved skeleton of a small lemur-monkey found in Germany was displayed Tuesday by scientists who said it would help illuminate the evolutionary roots of monkeys, apes and humans.

“This is as good as it gets,” says Dr. Jorn Hurum, the University of Oslo paleontologist who directed the discovery of the 47-million-year-old fossil named Ida.

for more information, click here.

The the most famous hominid ever found just returned to her home in Ethiopia after a two-year trip to the U.S. She spent five months at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, where she wowed over 100,000 visitors with her tiny size and bipedal nature.

She left many scratching their heads, wondering if she is more chimpanzee than human.

But a group of middle school students from Moses Lake, WA turned a lackluster showing for a science exhibit into a big win for the science center’s mission–to inspire lifelong interest in science.

For 3.2 million years she lay in wait, entombed in stone, biding her time. Then in 1974, Lucy became the world’s most famous fossil, filling in a crucial gap in the timeline of human evolution and answering important questions about our biology over millions of years.

Listen here.

Dr. Helen Fisher, the author of Why Him, Why Her talks about the power of love–from a chemical point of view. The chemicals dopamine, serotonin, estrogen, and testosterone and are powerful forces in attracting a mate.

Does the opposites-attract idea hold up under scientific scrutiny? Or is like drawn to like? The answer? It depends who you are. Find out your chemical profile, based on the research of this anthropologist and scientific advisor for dating site Chemistry.com.

Flickr photo courtesy of squidminion

A new National Academy of Sciences report has found that many of the clever ways crime scene investigators analyze evidence and find suspects is itself suspect and not based on a lot of science.

But forensic evidence is one of the most widely used practices in the criminal justice system. And, to call much of it unscientific could send shock waves through law enforcement agencies.

The report found that so many of the methods investigators use have not been properly studied to determine how scientific they really are.

Are you a taster, a non-taster or a super-taster? If you are a taster you probably think broccoli, spinach and brussels sprouts taste bitter.

New research shows how duplicate copies of the bitter taste gene is important to uncovering secrets of the human genome.

The University of Texas digitally scanned an ancient pre-human fossil known as “Lucy”. She is currently on Exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. See her before she heads back to Ethiopia after March 8.

2009 is Darwin year, the bicentenary of the British naturalist’s birth, and 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work “The Origin of Species.” An exhibition has opened in London’s Museum of Natural History.

The major milestone was to have begun the Year of Evolution but the idea itself evolved into the Year of Science. Charles Darwin’s birthday is Feb. 12.

Here’s the official list of Darwin-related events.

They look like the animated robots, called Furbys, from the 1990s. And, they could be mistaken for the fictional gremlins.

But pygmy tarsiers are real. And, much to the surprise of many scientists, they are not extinct.

They are alive and well in the mountainous region of one island in Indonesia.

Chew on this. The old adage, “You are what you eat” may not hold water after all.

Anthropologists have uncovered evidence that ancient humans were built to eat hard, crunchy objects but they probably didn’t eat them unless softer foods are scarce.

Douglas Kennett

A controversial new theory about the disappearance of Clovis man and 35 North American animal species is making waves in geology circles. Two University of Oregon anthropologists are part of a group of 26 who think a comet crashed into Earth 13,000 years ago, causing a major global freeze. Now all they have to do is prove it.