Meeting planners were smart and put the session on 'the archaeology of intoxication' in a relatively large room in the convention center. It attracted an early-afternoon crowd who were probably looking forward to a little bit of every archaeologist's favorite intoxicant - alcohol - by the end of the day.

One thing that soon became clear is just how many ways ancient peoples dreamed up to get high. Ancient Peruvians took a version of snuff. Native Americans of the American Southwest and Mexico experimented with all sorts of mind-altering cacti, including but not limited to the famous peyote buttons. The Maya regularly administered enemas of hallucinogenic substances. Pretty much everywhere archaeologists look, they find more evidence like this.

Sean Rafferty, of the University of Albany in New York, reported on some work about how Native Americans of eastern North America used mind-altering substances. Tobacco, it turns out, was king. It may have actually been one of the first tended crops on the continent, he suggests - traces of nicotine decay products are present in two smoking pipes, from West Virginia and Vermont, that dated between 500 BC and 300 BC. Yet alcohol use didn't take off until much later in the New World.

In other words, early North Americans were apparently too busy smoking to take up drinking.

Posted by Alex Witze at 12:08 AM | Permalink

Although this is a meeting of American archaeologists held on Canadian soil, the common link of Great Britain made an appearance in a special session on Stonehenge, the iconic standing stones in southern England that were constructed starting around 2600 BC.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project has been excavating for the past couple of seasons at both Stonehenge and at Durrington Walls, a few kilometers away. Because of the huge interest in the site, much of the team's findings have been reported already (see for instance Nature's earlier story on the topic, subscription required). In short: Stonehenge wasn't an isolated site but was instead linked as part of a far larger complex to the giant timber henges and settlements at Durrington Walls.

Michael Parker Pearson, one of the excavation's leaders, talked here about how Durrington Walls may have served as the place of the living, and Stonehenge the place of the dead. At least 52 cremation burials, plus more than 40 unburnt human bones, have been unearthed at Stonehenge - perhaps the remains of a royal dynasty. People who weren't important enough to merit burial at Stonehenge may also have been cremated but dumped instead into the River Avon; last summer, the excavation team uncovered three large timber monuments that may have been viewing platforms overlooking the Avon for such cremation burials.

All this goes to show that Stonehenge is more than a place of mystical rituals and a tourist must-see. Millennia ago, it was the biggest cemetery in Britain and a hugely significant place to transition from the living to the dead.

More small digs are planned for next week - so keep an eye out for more news from Stonehenge shortly.

Posted by Alex Witze at 11:33 PM | Permalink

It's a little hard to figure out how to think about last night's session on 'consideration for archaeological property during military conflict'. In essence, we heard Army archaeologist Laurie Rush talking about how she tries to train US soldiers not to destroy significant archaeological sites in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is of course a noble goal, but one cannot help but wonder whether, as her colleague James Zeidler of Colorado State University quoted the critics, this is too little, too late. The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 led to the looting of innumerable artifacts from the Iraqi national museum and elsewhere, though many were later recovered under the guidance of Col. Matthew Bogdanos and others.

But Bogdanos has a master's degree in classics. What to make of the 18-year-old recruit who knows little of the rich history of Mesopotamia? How do you tell him that the rubble underfoot might just be a world-class archaeological site that needs to be preserved?

Rush's solution: give them playing cards. With input from academics and many others, the Department of Defense has crafted a deck of cards featuring the archaeology of Iraq and Afghanistan. Try not to think immediately of the 'most wanted' playing cards that circulated around the time of the invasion, with Saddam Hussein as the ace of spades and his most-wanted lieutenants as the other cards. Zeidler swears their inspiration was far more mundane - a set of environmental awareness playing cards also put out by the defense department.

Each archaeology card features an artifact or other piece of information about archaeological awareness (mostly whatever the organizers could find free high-resolution pictures of, says Zeidler). For instance, the seven of clubs pictures Iraq's Ctesiphon Arch with the caption: "This site has survived 17 centuries. Will it and the others survive you?" The four of hearts exhorts that "Protecting art and archaeology is the responsibility of all ranks within the unit." And there's always room for a 9/11 reference; the jack of diamonds has the Statue of Liberty captioned "How would you feel if someone stole her torch?" The cards also remind soldiers of 'ROE first!' - Rules of Engagement, or go ahead and defend yourself if under attack, take precedence in all cases.

Each suit has a theme: diamonds are for precious artifacts, hearts to win the hearts and minds of the local people, spades to remind soldiers not to dig, and clubs to raise cultural awareness. More than 60,000 decks have already been distributed, and the National Guard has just ordered another 50,000, says Rush, of Fort Drum in upstate New York.

Sadly, the cards are not for sale to the general public. The only way you can get a deck is if you're already enlisted...and on your way to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Image courtesy of US Army

Posted by Alex Witze at 04:09 PM | Permalink

You'd think that all those criminal-forensic television shows - CSI, Bones, Law&Order - would have turned a whole new generation on to science. After all, what kid doesn't want to drive around Miami in a Hummer, nabbing bad guys while getting tan?

That's true to a certain extent, and the rising number of people enrolling in forensic-science studies even has garnered a name: the 'CSI effect'. But it's not as straightforward as you might think, cautioned archaeologist and crime-scene photographer Jules Angel in a paper read here at the SAA by one of her collaborators.

Angel has been working with an Ohio-based group, the PAST Foundation, which aims to deeper public understanding and awareness of cultural heritage. As part of it, she set up a series of overnight and day camps for high school girls on CSI-style work. The girls got to do things like process a crime scene inside a car, conduct DNA analysis, try to link remains to actual missing-persons cases, and then prepare and testify as an expert in a mock jury trial.

Sounds cool, huh? Well, not quite. The main problem with the overnight camps? Kids stayed up all night talking and were too exhausted to handle the intricacies of collection procedures the next morning. A lot of them thought bugs were icky. And the worst bit of all according to the students, the thing that might just turn off a whole generation of girls to a career in science?

All the paperwork they had to do.

Image from NBC

Posted by Alex Witze at 03:29 PM | Permalink

The Society for American Archeology meeting kicks off today in lovely Vancouver, Canada (the picture is of the scenic convention center here). Of all the scientific meetings I've been to -- these include geology, physics, neuroscience, astronomy, you name it -- the archaeologists are by far the best at coming up with paper titles.

There seems to be some kind of unwritten rule that one must have a punchy, preferably pun-laden title followed by a colon and then what you actually mean to say. Take for instance the (not-so-interestingly titled) symposium tomorrow on 'Socially Embedded Violence in the Ancient Americas: Beyond Sacrifice and Cannibalism'.

Here one will be able to sample the wonders of talks such as:
'On Stars and Skeletons: reflections on the role of religion in state-sponsored violence'
'Talking Heads and the Grateful Dead: unpacking the meaning of trophy heads at Tiwanaku'
and
'Killing Them Softly, Killing Them Loudly: warfare and violent display in the Andes'

You must admit, those sound far sexier than any talk on neurogenesis in rat brains...

Image courtesy Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre

Posted by Alex Witze at 01:23 AM | Permalink

It's almost time for the American Chemical Society's spring meeting. This year it is in New Orleans. I'll be there from April 6th to April 10th, blogging and looking out for chemical news and gossip.

Check out In The Field for regular updates from this the largest of chemistry conferences.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson at 05:19 PM | Permalink

The meeting is winding to a close, and it's just about time for me to high-tail it to the airport. Thank goodness, too. It seems like every day here in New Orleans is at least 10 percent warmer than the last.

This conference let me catch up on some of the hottest fields, but new developments can happen so fast. I wonder if listening to the latest results at next year's conference will feel like it did this year -- getting blasted with a firehose full of new information. I guess I'll just have to find out. Hope to see you in Pittsburg.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 08:25 PM | Permalink

Things are winding down here in League City, and I'm going to bust out before I find myself trapped in the 90 degree weather on the Houston freeways. I've enjoyed the conference immensely. It's important scientifically and still somehow a hidden gem, not yet overrun with us media types.

But co-organizer Steve Mackwell, director of LPI, says LPSC has become so big that it might have to move to a different city next year. Now don't get me wrong -- I'll be happy to head to San Fran, LA, Denver or wherever next year. But the humid coziness of League City -- you're forced to commingle because there's nothing else to do -- will nevertheless be missed.

Posted by Eric Hand at 07:50 PM | Permalink

All you theoretical superconductor folks certainly seem to be good collaborators. I don't know about polite, but network analysis seems to indicate you have a pretty tight community.

With roughly 17,000 authors listed in 7,000 March meeting talks, it’s hard to imagine finding any order to it all. But science is a collaborative pursuit, and Jake Hofman thinks network analysis could say something about the various physics communities hidden in that massive list.

Hofman, a graduate student at Columbia University, downloaded the list when the abstracts came online a few months ago. He used the data to create a network, linking physicists who were listed as co-authors on a talk.

Many presenters were only connected with a handful of other physicists. But there was also a group of 6755 physicists (the largest connected component, for network nerds) who were all linked to each other in one way or another – think six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Hofman then ran an community-identifying algorithm he's working on to look for clusters of physicists that seem particularly closely linked.

To the right you’ll see the visualization he ended up with. It’s a little tricky to interpret (and also quite preliminary), but the basic idea is that each of the 6755 physicists is shown in order on both the x- and y- axis. Blue points indicate co-authors, and white points show no affiliation. Large clumps of blue show communities, most of which seem to correspond to particular subfields.

Hofman just started analyzing the data, but he’s already highlighted some particularly collaborative communities. The visualization also shows that there are multiple communities that focus on the same thing. There are, for instance, at least two fairly large graphene communities. Rivalry!

For the nitty gritty details on Hofman’s approach, check out his paper in the arxiv.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 07:01 PM | Permalink

A pair of meteorites discovered in Antarctica last year has geologists here atwitter, mostly because they just don't know where the thing came from. “It's a weirdo,” says Yang Liu, of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “There's nothing like it.”

Three different consortia got rights to analyse wee bits of the rocks and are comparing their results. It's very old -- about 4.5 billion years. Based on that age, and its oxygen isotope composition, both the Earth and Mars are ruled out as sources. It probably didn't come from the Moon, because it has too much sodium in it.

Liu says it could have come from an especially big asteroid, maybe even a former planet -- but it had to be big enough to have heat for melting rocks below a crust. An alternative theory -- one that has people most excited -- is that the rock came from Venus. If so, it would be the first Venusian meteorite -- and the first sample at all from that planet.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Venera probes touched down on Venus' surface and found basaltic material, like flows from a volcano. This particular meteorite has too much silica to be a basalt, but recent studies have shown that magma compositions on Venus could be more varied than previously thought.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Swiss cheese texture on Mars' south pole is getting holier – so fast that the cheese will soon be gone.

Earlier this week, Shane Byrne, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, presented a model that explained the strange ice dynamics observed by HiRISE. At the south pole, there's a thin layer of water ice overlain by a layer of frozen carbon dioxide ice that varies in thickness between two to 10 metres. There are pits in the dry ice -- the so-called Swiss cheese textures -- that tunnel down to the water ice. And observations have shown that the pits are growing.

Once they start to grow, the reflectivity of the dry ice is reduced, more heat is trapped, and the process accelerates. Some have proposed that Mars' climate is changing. But Byrne asks the question: How can a residual carbon dioxide cap, with these pits, survive for us to observe? The process is so fast that we'd have to be awful lucky to observe the changes.

Byrne ran a model that doesn't need to invoke any climate change. He starts with a very thin layer of dry ice with a certain degree of roughness. At first, the layer is smooth enough that reflectivity is high, and each winter, more ice condenses. But as the ice layer grows, its roughness increases. After about 30 years, instabilities occur in places with the highest slopes. Pits begin to form. Even as the pits grow, the overall height of ice table grows for while in the intervening flat areas.

But eventually, a tipping point is reached, and all the carbon dioxide disappears. At that point, a smooth, flat film of dry ice could condense to start the process all over again. The whole process, Byrne argues, is the inevitable consequence of starting with an ice surface that isn't perfectly flat.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:13 PM | Permalink

Darkening a lecture room after a full day of sessions seems like a dangerous prospect. But Wednesday's Town Hall meeting on ultra-high pressures was actually pretty lively.

The basic idea? Squeeze hard on any element, ratchet up the temperature, and you end up with some unexpected new phases. At high enough pressures and temperatures, ordinary, transparent water becomes opaque. Push even further, and it becomes transparent. Dive down into Jupiter's atmosphere, and the pressures quickly become so high that even hydrogen becomes metallic.

This relatively small field of physics is expected to get bigger as the National Ignition Facility comes online, which might happen as early as next year. So the talks came with a request -- a call to arms for fellow physicists who might contribute.

"If as a result of this talk I infuriate you because I have overlooked some result or some phenomenon, then I have succeeded," said Raymond Jeanloz of the University of California, Berkeley, adding that his goal is to engage as many people to think about the subject as possible. But aside from the sheer excitement of mapping new phases of matter, what's the draw?

For one, it might help resolve some open questions in planetary formation. David Stevenson of Caltech told attendeees that when he was a grad student in the 70's, the picture of Jupiter's interior was clear. It had dense core of rock and ice, weighing in at roughly five Earth masses.

Then everyone wasn’t so sure. Later experiments squeezing and heating hydrogen, the primary element in Jupiter’s composition, increased the error bars on what hydrogen might look like in the planet. Jupiter might not have a core after all.

Stevenson says NASA's Juno mission, which is set to launch in 2011 and reach Jupiter by 2016, could help answer that question -- improving our picture of the planet's gravity field as well as its magentosphere (which the metallic hydrogen helps sustain).

But interpreting Juno's data will depend on a precise understanding of how hydrogen depends on temperature and pressure. "I would like to see a community effort to really understand the equation of state of hydrogen," Stevenson said. Even a small uncertainty, Stevenson said, could make the difference between core and no core.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 05:15 AM | Permalink

The poster was just one among hundreds, an analysis of craters bigger than 2.2 kilometres on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. But the author, Brian Karpes, was a bit more unusual.

On 14 February, Karpes, a geology graduate student at Northern Illinois University, was taking notes in a crowded lecture hall when a gunman burst in and began firing randomly with a shotgun and three handguns. The gunman, a former sociology student, killed five people before turning the gun on himself. Karpes was shot five times, including once in the head, and was taken by helicopter to the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital.

The LPSC poster was unattended, but dozens of colleagues had signed its border, wishing him well. There was a note in the middle of the poster: “Despite being shot FIVE times, Brian finished his LPSC poster Friday afternoon March 7, 2008. Because one bullet penetrated his skull and this wound has not yet fully healed, his doctors will not let him fly. He gets shot FIVE times and he still turns in his homework!!”

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Graphene has been one of the hot topics at APS this year, consistently overflowing rooms. The atom-thick carbon sheets show lots of strange new physics, as well as the potential for exciting new technology.

But graphene guru Andre Geim isn't so keen on talking about the applications. At a packed lecture today, he prefaced a slide on what you can do with graphene disks with a parable.

On a trip to Florida, Geim said he was mesmerized by the graceful jumping of dolphins. It was all quite lovely until a little boy ruined the mood, shouting "Mom, can we eat that?"

In other words, asking about the utility of elegant basic research can be a bit of a downer. Despite his distaste, Geim proceeded to discuss how transparent, conductive graphene films might be useful in LCD and solar cell technology.

Then he got in a not-so-subtle dig. "In terms of applications, I didn't expect them to come so soon. But maybe they're not as exaggerated as other topics at this conference." There was hearty (maybe knowing?) laughter all around.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 11:13 PM | Permalink

I wondered why everyone kept clustering around Tony Irving, of the University of Washington at Seattle. Then I realized: if you're the guy holding a moon rock at a lunar science conference, you're pretty popular. Here's Tony with his 600-gram, 1-centimetre thick slice of the moon, taken from the 2nd largest lunar meteorite ever, an 11.5 kilo monster found in Morocco last summer. That's just shy of “Big Muley,” an 11.7 kilo sample that was the biggest returned by the Apollo astronauts.

Meteorite hunting has become big business in the dry deserts of northwest Africa and the Arabian peninsula. You can buy moon rocks on eBay, where little flakes sell for hundreds and thousands of dollars. Randy Korotev, who maintains a wonderful lunar meteorite Web site at Washington University in St. Louis, estimates that, per gram, you pay more for moon than you would for diamond or gold.

Assuming a bargain basement price of $1,000 per gram, Tony's slab would be worth half a million dollars, and the 11.5 kilo monster it came from would be worth more than $10 million. But Tony insists: “It's a scientific treasure, not a financial treasure.”

The rocks are important because they represent a wider distribution of the types of rocks that exist on the moon. The Apollo missions only retrieved rocks from a few specific areas. Whereas the 56 known lunar meteorites, which result from random impacts, sample a far greater area. This one, Tony says, comes from highlands on the lunar far side. He says it's an important rock because it contains bits of iron nickel metal that are exotic to the moon.

When I spoke with him, Tony was expecting, that afternoon, lab results that would estimate the period of time the rock had sat in the Moroccan desert. Then he plans to do another test to find out how long the rock spent in space. He already can guess the rough age of the rock itself: something on the order of 4 billion years, when the moon became a cold, dead place.

But this cold, dead rock was arousing some lively discussions. As Irving walked around, many stopped to stare at the sample sealed within the vacuum of the Captain Nemo, submarine-style chamber. “Some people say it looks like a map of France,” he says.

Posted by Eric Hand at 10:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Although the conference has now passed its middle point, I've met few physicists who've shown any visible signs of exhaustion. Perhaps it's the chummy receptions each evening, or maybe everyone has just gotten used to the overwhelming flood that is 120 sessions a day. Some folks I've spoken with admit they've been spending more than a little time outdoors, enjoying sunny days that top 22 C.

Still, the conference must go on, and interesting work keeps popping up. Following a press conference this afternoon, I caught up with Bodgen Dragnea who has been studying a crystal system composed of virus capsids and gold. Dragnea, a chemist at Indiana University Bloomington, studies virus proteins that self-assemble to form capsid shells. Ordinarily these shells protect a virus' key RNA or DNA, but last year Dragnea's lab reported they had created a system of virus shells with gold nanoparticles inside. Because these 'virus-like particles' are so uniform, they also self-assemble, forming a uniform lattice.

Since his last publication, Dragnea's lab has begun using Raman scattering to measure slight changes in the distance between gold cores on the lattice. Capsid shells may swell, compress, or denature entirely depending on the chemical properties of their environment. Those changes in the virus shell would then show up in measurements of the lattice. Dragnea says he should eventually be able to identify particular conditions that make for especially stable shells. "Then the next question is if there is a place in the cell that has that same environment," he says.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 04:37 AM | Permalink

The wonderfully named Wendell Mendell, manager for office of human exploration science at Johnson Space Center, talked at the end of the day about making sure that science capabilities were included in the lunar exploration architecture. His talk didn't include many slides, but he did have one with three statements. Two, he said, came from official NASA documents. And one came from Mad magazine. Wendell wouldn't reveal which was which, but I was still amused trying to guess.

A) The problem on landing on the lunar dark side is that terrain is usually dark.

B) Washout: high light angles do not allow reflected light to reach the eye.

C) Althouth the Moon is 1/49th the size of the Earth, it is farther away.

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:20 AM | Permalink

Here's a meme you sometimes hear repeated in space science communities: The return of humans to the moon -- formerly known as President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration -- has nothing to do with science. We've already been there. We already know everything. It's just a waste of money -- money that would be better spent elsewhere.

Now, to be fair, there are some reasons to be cynical about NASA's human exploration program; the rocket builders who push people into space sometimes view science as something to be tacked on. And many space scientists argue that robots will always bring more science bang for the buck.

But to say that there aren't space scientists who are excited to get another crack at understanding the moon -- either via manned or unmanned missions -- is just plain wrong.

There are scientists at this conference trembling to return. Some of them may actually return: There are signs that NASA, this time, will try to recruit some geologists and geochemists to be astronauts.

Lunar science is back in vogue, and this particular conference is living proof. As I overheard one Johnson Space Center scientist saying to a colleague today: “This meeting will be the resurrection of the Moon. I mean, lunar sessions are standing room only. Mars sessions? So so.”

NASA is lining up a string of lunar missions to support the science: LRO (mapping), then GRAIL (gravity), LADEE (dust), a couple robotic landers, then the start of the International Lunar Network, a set of geophysical stations spaced around that gray globe.

But it's not just the missions. If you really want to know what drives space science, look at the research and analysis money that NASA allocates for specific subjects. R&A, as it's called, is the bread and butter money that both inspires and sustains working scientists.

And Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, put up some telling figures this afternoon. In 2007, NASA spent $3.8 million on lunar research. They have $18.7 million allocated in 2008. And in 2009, they plan on spending $25 million on lunar science.

That's a hair more than the former favorite, the Mars program, will get in R&A in 2009 ($24.938 million). Might NASA have a new teacher's pet?

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:04 AM | Permalink

Some physics experiments are just patently fun -- the science seems to sneak in by stealth, changing the way you view ordinary objects. Take crumpled balls, for example. An unassuming object with an extraordinarily complex shape. The path to get from an almost two-dimensional sheet to a three-dimensional object involves many energetic choices – whether it’s more efficient to fold in one direction or stretch in another. Understanding how crumpling happens has the potential to illuminate a lot of interesting physics about how folding happens in nature.

On Monday, Dominique Cambou presented the first results of a ostensibly simple project: mapping the 3D structure of a crumpled ball of aluminum foil. Cambou, a graduate student in Narayanan Menon's lab, systematically crumples balls and then subjects them to x-rays to image their internal structure.

Analysis is still in its early stages, but Cambou says she has already observed some interesting patterns.
The density of foil, for example, seems to be highest close to the surface. There seems to be something that inhibits folding closer to the center of the sheet. "It seems counterintuitive to me, since the entire sheet is connected," says Cambou. There also seems to be an unusual amount of layering in the foil.

Here's a picture of a reconstructed cross-section of a foil ball. The lines show the foil passing through the plane; the thinner the line, the more perpendicular the foil.

Eventually Cambou says she hopes to link the final shape of the balls to the complex energetic path a sheet takes to achieve its final conformation.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 01:17 AM | Permalink

Maria Zuber often starts her presentations with a Maya Angelou quote: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” If so, then the man in the Moon must be writhing in pain.

At an LPSC session on Tuesday, Zuber, of MIT, flashed a cross section showing what is known about the structure of the Moon's interior. The answer is: not much. “There are a lot of question marks,” she says. “We don't actually know that the Moon has a core.” She's fairly sure the GRAIL gravity mapping mission will change all that.

Zuber described the mission in the first public presentation since NASA awarded her the Discovery class mission in December. Later we went to a nearby Chinese restaurant (not so bad for League City, really) to further discuss how GRAIL would, umm, unearth the secrets below the Moon's surface.

GRAIL would send two orbiters to the Moon. The two satellites, in constant communication via radio beacons with each other and the Earth, would circle the Moon in a polar orbit, 50 kilometres above the surface, separated by about 200 kilometres. The Moon would precess slowly below, so over the course of a month, GRAIL could map the whole planet.

Whenever the first satellite approaches a surface feature, like a crater rim, or a dense body hidden underneath, the tiny extra bit of gravity associated with the feature would tug the first probe ahead ever so slightly. The radio beacon would capture this minute change in distance between the probes, until the trailing probe, arriving at the surface feature, is tugged back into place. “These two spacecraft essentially chase each other around the Moon,” Zuber says.

The measurements are so precise that the science team will have to filter out the gravitational effects of every other planet in the solar system. They even have to subtract the slight motions of the tectonic plates that underlie the tracking stations in California, Spain and Australia.

Zuber says the instruments are two or three orders of magnitude more sensitive than the gravity instrument on the Japanese Kaguya (SELENE) orbiter that's currently in operation, and GRAIL will be able to map squares down to resolutions of 20 kilometres, four times better than Kaguya.

Once she has the complete surface of equal gravitational potential – called the selenoid – she can compare that to the precision topographic maps that are going to be made by orbiters such as the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter, scheduled to launch later this year. Zuber will subtract the gravitational effects of the topography. And that would leave her with the signal associated with an inner core, outer core and mantle. She'll be able to tell which parts are still molten, if at all.

She credits a perfect storm of two overlapping events for allowing her to win the mission. GRACE, a mission to map the Earth's gravity field, was proven to work well using a similar approach. And then Lockheed Martin came along, willing to declassify a satellite technology that they had been testing for the US Air Force.

Zuber has such high hopes for GRAIL, she's pretty sure that, afterwards, there won't be many moony questions to work on, and she'll have to move on to another planet. “The kind of experiments I love are the kind that put me out of business.” GRAIL is planned for launch in September of 2011. Here's Maria polishing off her hot and sour soup:

Posted by Eric Hand at 12:14 AM | Permalink

This is the first time that NASA Administrator Mike Griffin has spoken at LPSC -- perhaps a sign of the growing importance of the conference. But there is also a valedictory air to Griffin's talk tonight. Many doubt that he will survive the coming election and continue as administrator in a new US administration. It is the first time I have seen Griffin -- always competent, ever irascible, seemingly indomitable -- look weary.

The main conference hall is packed. People line the walls. Griffin begins reading from a prepared script. His speeches are always well written. But tonight, his delivery is flat. At one point, he offers perfunctory praise to the Mercury Messenger mission, and says he is looking forward to the next flyby. “I don't know about you, but I can't wait,” he says in a monotone.

What? Is he being sarcastic? No, he's just not very good at faking enthusiasm. Griffin is a straight-shooter who refuses to wear rose-colored glasses. His lucidity and clarity are never questioned. He's not so much a pessimist as he is a pathological realist.

He continues speaking, mostly in the dark, until a technician finally realizes that the lights above the podium need to be turned on. Griffin opens the floor for questions. His energy comes back. He relishes this part.

Usually, Griffin is seated before Congressional representatives at hearings. They query him, and they demand answers. They often want to understand why the NASA program in their home district isn't being favored. Griffin has to be polite. But he has no difficulty, ever, in parrying their parochial concerns.

And they are always parochial. Why does Griffin always have to explain that he has finite resources? That to fund a current project, he has to take from another? That there are always winners and losers? And that the losers are never happy?

At the LPSC talk, it isn't much different: the losers line up at the microphones to complain. The current losers in the NASA budget are scientists in the Mars program, which saw significant reductions this year. A European scientist says that she will have difficulties convincing European ministers that the US is a serious partner in Mars Sample Return if the US is not seen as reliable, and reliably engaged in Mars exploration. “We're having our legs cut out from under us,” she says.

Griffin, now aroused, fires straight back. Mars funding is tapering down, he explains, as the flagship Mars Science Laboratory tapers. If NASA is ever going to fly a flagship mission to Europa or Titan or Ganymede, funding for it needs to ramp up. That money has to come from somewhere. He notes that the National Academies has recently given NASA report card grades for its various activities. NASA got an 'A' for Mars exploration. It got a 'D' for outer planet exploration.

Finally, Griffin says, it's not like the Mars program has been zeroed out. It still is getting roughly $400 million year -- hardly “chump change.” The program is merely being returned to its 25-year average level of funding. Griffin insists that he will not tolerate a sense of entitlement among any of NASA's programs. “Now, I'll be gone soon. But while I'm here, that won't happen.”

A few minutes later, someone else stands up to complain about the Mars cuts in a different way. Griffin tries a golf analogy, from his days as a competitive amateur. If his putting was suffering, just as outer planets exploration was, would he really want to spend all his time at the driving range? Still later, a graduate student circles back yet again to the Mars budget. What would happen to all the students who had specialized in Mars science? she asks. Griffin's advice: “Don't specialize. Specialization is for insects.”

Griffin seems to be just warming up. His penchant for argumentation is matched by a gift for rhetoric. In the talk he quotes both JFK and LBJ. He seems to alternate between 'high' and 'low' rhetoric, as if JFK and LBJ were hovering above each shoulder. One moment, he's repeating an old folky aphorism from the South (“The sun don't shine on the same dog all the time.”). And the next moment, he's quoting Shakespeare (“The fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”)

Finally, the Mars complaints are exhausted, and a questioner, recognizing the autumnal tone of the evening, asks Griffin what he will view as his legacy. What is his greatest achievement and what is his greatest disappointment?

Griffin says he is most proud of choosing top managers at NASA headquarters that were experts within their respective fields. They aren't just middle-level managers who were seeking bureaucratic sinecures. And Griffin could just say this, that he is proud of his lieutenants. He could say it blandly. Instead he says this: “You may agree or disagree with some of the decisions my management team makes. But none of them took the job at HQ as a nervous virgin. They all had been around the block a few times in the space business.”

His greatest disappointment? Not being able to minimize the long gap between the retirement of the Space Shuttle and the development of the replacement Ares rockets. Then Griffin adds, “I also regret the loss of my two handicap which I had when I joined.”

The last questioner actually thanks Griffin – she apparently is glad that an outer planet mission will be funded. She also asks about the future of small rocket launches. Griffin shrugs off the praise so he can dwell on the awful rocket situation. “Space transportation in this country is in a mess. Has been for years. Is going to be.” He's inconsolable. No one would ever accuse him of drinking the Kool-Aid. If anything, he knows how to turn lemonade into lemons. “I find it to be a distressing, and nearly disgusting, situation.”

And on that jarring note, he ends his talk. The crowd rises to give him a standing ovation. But he's already off the podium. I can't stop smiling. I can't imagine any replacement Administrator matching Griffin's particular brand of curmudgeonly competence. Why is it so unthinkable for the next US administration to want him back?

Posted by Eric Hand at 06:22 AM | Permalink

So I spoke too soon about the weather. After lunch, thunderclaps began to punctuate the talks, and it ended up raining all afternoon. But it cleared some of the humidity. And man, do I love the way Texas clouds roll in and out. Here's the view from the conference center. Across the marina, in the distance, the folks at Johnson Space Center must be celebrating the successful launch of the Jules Verne ATV.

Posted by Eric Hand at 03:51 AM | Permalink

This afternoon, I was blithely walking to a session when I found myself trapped between three very avid volunteers for the American Physical Society. All conference-goers caught in the cross-hairs were urged to sit down at a computer terminal to sign a letter calling for additional physics funding. It was an impressive example of technology meets advocacy. Fill out your contact information, click a few buttons, sign your name on a digital pad, and bang – letters to your local congresspersons are set to go.

Advocacy is a tradition at the March Meeting, but this year the stakes seem a bit higher. By the end of the day, it looked like every third physicist boasted an "I support science funding" sticker on their badge. The volunteers told me that sticker affords safe passage, the only way to avoid their cajoling the rest of the meeting.

Posted by Rachel Courtland at 07:40 PM | Permalink

Posted on behalf of Rachel Courtland:

Greetings from New Orleans, which is likely jazzed to host the American Physical Society March Meeting, dedicated to all things solid state and condensed matter. Some conference-goers arrived over the weekend, enjoying sunny weather and steam-calliope music along the riverbank. But the weather turned cloudy this morning, driving everyone in to 40 early-morning sessions dedicated to everything from the latest results on graphene properties to the dynamics of shaking cat paws.

Conference organizers are waiting for registration to finish before declaring this physics conference 2008's largest (it's met with some rivals in recent years). But the program, which tops out at 665 pages, no longer has room to display short abstracts for each talk, an indicator there's lots of great physics to be discussed.

After a quick cup of press room coffee, I'm off for round two of sessions. Stay tuned for more as the conference gets into a groove.

Posted by Alex Witze at 05:53 PM | Permalink

Monday is Mercury day at LPSC. It's only been a month and a half since Messenger flew past Mercury, and the images and analyses keep on coming. I'm always surprised by the speed and volume of the work that occurs after these planetary missions. Messenger principal investigator Sean Solomon, of Carnegie, began the day's sessions, and said the team got 500 megabytes of data from its instruments, and 1,213 images.

Most of this stuff has already been reported in the press, in press conferences just after the flyby. And much of the really juicy stuff – understanding the origin and history of Mercury's magnetic field and tectonics – will have to wait until Messenger settles into orbit around the planet a few years from now.

But I learned a few interesting things. Dave Smith of NASA Goddard noticed an interesting gravity anomaly that was measured as Messenger flew past. The anomaly can't be explained by twiddling with Mercury's mass or its equatorial bulge. Smith says it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something physical there (such as a high or low density mass that causes the force of gravity to vary slightly). But he says scientists will probably find that Mercury has strange mass concentrations like the moon. MIT's Maria Zuber later said how Smith's gravity anomaly happened to coincide with a deep basin that was recorded with the laser altimetry instrument she's using.

Of all the Mercury pics incorporated into the presenters' slideshows, the showstopper is still 'The Spider' (above). This is a starburst of radial cracks exploding outward from the center of Caloris Basin, one of the largest impact structures in the solar system. Louise Prockter of APL says this find has proved very popular – she's getting all sorts of 'imaginative' suggestions from the public for what could have caused this swarm of cracks. Jim Head of Brown University thinks that they come from dikes below the surface, which at one time were filled with magma that strained and split the crust into the dikes. As the deep interior split a little bit, the crust overhead dropped, creating the radial cracks that are also known as graben (geologists never run out of names for things). “But why would you have this thing in the middle of Caloris Basin, for crying out loud?” Head asks. The original impact that caused Caloris, he says, could have triggered an upwelling of magma.

But the Spider might not last for long. Prockter says they're already considering changing the name to something more formal. Why do they always have to end up with stuffy, Latin-ized names? One of the potential new names for it is the 'Parthenon Fossae'.

Posted by Eric Hand at 05:31 PM | Permalink

Why did I bring sweaters? Too habituated to wintry weather in Washington, DC, I suppose.
The weather here in Houston, Texas (well, League City, actually) is expected to be in the mid-70s all week (that's pretty warm for you Celsius types). I actually turned on the air conditioning in my hotel last night.

But now I'm hunkered down in the cool, dark conference center, thumbing through the inch-thick, 250 page abstract book. This conference has really grown leaps and bounds.

This morning is going to be all Mercury. I'm fortified by a four cups of coffee and a sausage and egg biscuit, courtesy La Quinta Inn, so I'm all set. Let's see what Sean Solomon, Mr. Mercury Messenger himself, has to say...

Posted by Eric Hand at 04:25 PM | Permalink

Join Eric Hand at the LPSC this year in League City, Texas. He'll be sending back diary reports to this blog page from 10-14 March.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 12:02 PM | Permalink

Listen to Michael Hopkin's report from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault grand opening.

Posted by Nicola Jones at 10:37 AM | Permalink