July 20, 2006 2:01

Vanishing Bees

MIKE EDWARDS
Andrena gravida, a wild bee declining in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

A couple of months ago we told you about the recent drop in migratory bird populations, based on a study done in the Netherlands. Now there's more troubling news from that part of the world: a study released today by the journal Science reports that there's been a dramatic loss of diversity among wild bees over the past 25 years in Holland and also in Great Britain — up to a 70% decline in the variety and distribution of bee species in some areas.

A loss of biodiversity is more subtle than an overall drop in absolute numbers of insects or plants, but it's still considered a problem because the fewer species in an ecosystem, the more the system depends on each one of them--and if disease or some other disaster wipes out a species, its function could go unfilled. In the case of bees, that function is to pollinate plants--both wild and crop plants. And as the authors of the study show, there's been a parallel decline in plants that were once pollinated by the disappearing bees. Indeed, it isn't clear which came first--the plant decline or the decline in bees.

It's also not clear that any crops are in trouble--only that there's a potential for it if this trend continues. It's also not clear why it's happening. Climatic changes caused by global warming is a possibility, but so is the destruction of wild habitat in both countries, as population and industry both expand.

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July 11, 2006 12:27

Holy Ornithopter!

DAVID COOPER / TORONTO STAR / ZUMA
The ornithopter, a mechanical flapping wing plane aproaches the runway in Downsview, Canada yesterday making aviation history for sustaining a flight over a third of a kilometer for 14 seconds.

You've seen them in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and in those improbably speeded-up film clips from the 1920s, but until last week, nobody had actually taken off and flown in an ornithopter--that is, an aircraft that flies by flapping its wings, more or less like a bird. But last Saturday, James DeLaurier, a retired professor of aeronautical engineering at the University of Toronto, achieved a career-long dream as he watched "the flapper," an ornithopter he'd been working on for more than a decade (and if you count his lifelong dreams of someday building one, ever since he was a teenager), take off and fly for 14 seconds. It may not sound like much, but the Wright Brothers' first successful flight in 1903 lasted for only 12 seconds. "I would have felt like a coward if I had this chance to pursue it and I didn't," he told the Toronto Star.

The next stop for the flapper, which sustained some damage when it made a hard landing, will be the  Aerospace Museum at Downsview Park, near Toronto. But while ornithopters may have some military and conservation applications (small, remotely operated ones can be made to look like birds, thus allowing them to penetrate unnoticed behind enemy lines or among endangered birds for surveillance), they're not likely to be flapping down in an airport near you anytime soon. They're mechanically amazing, but they could never be efficient enough or fly smoothly enough to carry passengers in any practical way.

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July 6, 2006 1:40

Global Warming and Wildfires

Hot, dry weather is pretty much always a big factor in how bad the wildfire season is in the American West. Hotter, dryer weather in that part of the country is one of the predicted effects of global warming. Anyone see some dots to connect here?

A team of scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona does. They've published a paper in Science that makes a good case for a warming-fire link that's already measurable. Meticulously cataloging every fire that burned over 1,000 acres between 1970 and 2003--there were more than 1,100 of them--the scientists found that the number of fires every year quadrupled beginning in the late 1980s, when warming first became pronounced. The fires burned an average of five weeks, compared with about a week in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the total area of devastation was about six times greater.

That's bad news for two reasons. First and most obviously, wildfires can be deadly to people and destructive of property. But secondarily, fires destroy plant life, which tends to breathe in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. With less forest to absorb excess CO2, more will stay in the atmosphere, which will only accelerate the warming. Which will lead to more wildfires...and so on.

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July 6, 2006 8:52

The Shuttle is Aloft! I Don't Care!

A few years ago, then-NASA-Administrator Daniel Goldin came to visit the editors of Time, who grilled him about the International Space Station. Wasn't it true, we asked, that the station was no more than  an orbiting pork-barrel project? Surely it was obvious that the station was great for keeping engineers from Russia, Europe, Japan and other "international partners" employed, but pretty much useless for science, right?

Goldin issued the usual denials, of course. But then he got real for a moment. Listen, he said (I'm paraphrasing): The station is up there. We're going to keep working on it. There's really no point ranting about it. Just deal with it.

And that, in a nutshell, is what this week's shuttle mission is all about. No matter what they said at the time of the first shuttle flight, it's not about humanity's unquenchable yearning to explore. It's not about science, although there will be, as always, some token science experiments aboard (this time they're carrying fruit flies, to try and answer the age-old conundrum of what happens to fruit flies in space). It's about finishing a largely useless space station so we can stop using the absurd, fantastically expensive shuttle and try to figure out what our national attitude toward space really ought to be.

We could do science in a serious way if we really wanted to--but that would involve cutting back drastically on the human spaceflight program (unless Congress were willing to double NASA's budget, which isn't going to happen). The agency can point to a few dramatic successes in science, like the Hubble Space Telescope. But because policy dictated it had to be shuttle-launched, the telescope went into space years late, triggering huge cost overruns. True, if not for the shuttle, the Hubble's faulty mirror could never have been fixed. Given the cost of each shuttle launch, though, NASA could have put an entirely new telescope into space instead.

Fortunately, the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, will go up on a rocket. It's going to be less powerful and much later than originally planned, though, because human spaceflight is eating up the budget and squeezing science. The Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope project, which is supposed to find Earthlike planets around other stars is languishing because we have to finish that useless space station. The list goes on and on--missions to explore Mars and Venus and the outer planets and the universe, all limping along at best while NASA dumps money on an endeavor so complex and risky and full of lowered expectations that it's big news nowadays when a shuttle takes off and doesn't injure itself in the process.

If, on the other hand, our goal is to learn to live and work in space, either to satisfy the human spirit, or, as Stephen Hawking argued recently, to have someplace to go when a cataclysm makes the planet unlivable, we need to get real. By deliberately turning the original Mercury 7 astronauts into national heroes, to get Americans behind JFK's promise to get to the moon, NASA made us care about them as individuals. We came to expect 100% safety, and  when any of them died, like in the Apollo 1 fire or the Challenger or Columbia crashes, we had to stop and rethink our commitment to space. That doesn't happen when a test pilot crashes in an experimental fighter plane. It's a tragedy, but it's also expected. The problem is fixed, and whoever is building the plane moves on.

That will never happen as long as the government is in charge of space exploration. Military men and women can die, but space explorers can't. That's how it was set up in the beginning. If we're really going to conquer space, it's going to be through private enterprise--companies and people who are willing to take big risks in search of even bigger profits. That's why my eye is not on NASA, but on people like Richard Branson and Burt Rutan, entrepreneurs who have a clear vision of where they're going in space and a determination to get there by the most effective means possible.

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