Smithsonian.com

In a happy turn of events for the quake-stricken Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, three pandas gave birth to four babies over the weekend. The center’s future had looked anything but bright after the devastating earthquake in May, which toppled 14 panda houses, killed one panda, and killed or injured 100 people in the area. But all the emergency panda rations and psychological counseling seem to have paid off.

Though panda babies perennially rank among the cutest of all living things, glimpses on this Chinese news video suggests they do have an ugly-duckling stage. At one day of age, the pink squirmers bear an uncanny resemblance to naked mole rats. That said, it is heartwarming to watch a momma panda clasp one in its mouth and nestle the little nipper against her belly for a meal.

The three adults became mothers within 14 hours of each other: first, with twins, was 9-year-old Qiyuan (her name translates as Magic Luck), then 8-year-old Chenggong (Success), and 8-year-old Zhuzhu (Pearl), according to MSNBC. Pandas can live 30 years or more.

Giant pandas, which in the wild number only about 1,600, are notoriously difficult to breed. For years on end, researchers beat their heads against the wall at the sight of male pandas contentedly munching bamboo mere feet from an unattached female roommate.

Happily, recent advances, including the discovery that female pandas ovulate as infrequently as a few days every two or three years, have helped researchers boost panda birth rates in captivity - lending some hope that pandas will still be around to serve as mascots the next time the Olympics come to China.

(Image: China Daily)

p.s. In case you can’t wait for these newborns to grow out of the awkward stage, YouTube has plenty of archived cuteness.

Famed paleontologist Jack Horner is out in the dusty badlands of eastern Montana, aiming his chisel at ancient bone fragments that may once have belonged to a Triceratops. He’s working in 100-degree heat at the aptly named Hell Creek Formation, a chunk of bedrock that’s between 67 million and 65 million years old. And since the dinosaurs vanished in a puff of meteoric mayhem 65 million years ago, that means these are some of the last dinosaurs ever to live.***

Last year at this site, he and his team uncovered two Triceratops, one big adult and a younger, smaller one. In other years, they’ve found duck-billed dinosaurs (”hadrosaurs”) as well as the big kahuna, Tyrannosaurus. As someone who has looked for but never found a fossil larger than my thumbnail, I can’t imagine the feeling of brushing the rock chips off a giant, three-horned skull the size of an armchair.

Horner, a paleontologist at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, is perhaps most widely known as the inspiration for the velociraptor-battling Dr. Alan Grant from Jurassic Park.

Yesterday, Horner took a break from digging to make a video call over to the British Natural History Museum. On the other end of the line was the museum’s own paleontologist, Angela Milner and a crowd of curious museum visitors. The whole event went out live on the Internet (watch the archive here).

In case the webcast doesn’t quite fill up your curiosity, you can move on to the Smithsonian’s own animated Triceratops website, play a fossil-digging game (warning: the paper towels are a lot harder to handle than the rock hammer), or read about a recent Wyoming dig through the eyes of a young journalism student.

(Image: a Triceratops roams Michigan; Flickr image by Kim Scarborough)

***Unless you count birds as living dinosaurs, that is. Horner certainly does - see his suggestion, last year, about “discovering” the dinosaur bones in your Thanksgiving Turkeyosaurus.

You’ve still got a couple days this month to step outside, look up, and enjoy a tremendous yellow moon. One of my favorite features is that little belly-button of a crater at the bottom, called Tycho. When the moon is full, this crater and the long rays emanating from it always make me wonder if perhaps the whole orb is just a delicate paper lantern.

But if appreciating a real Moon involves too much squinting, or if the mosquitoes where you live simply won’t permit prolonged viewing, give thanks that you live in an era of unprecedented space exploration. Since last year, a Japanese probe called SELENE has been taking thousands of high-resolution images of Tycho. Now the scientists have pieced the images together into an animated video flyover of the crater in fantastic detail.

In these days of Google Earth and computer-rendered fighting pandas, it can be difficult to appreciate reality as anything more than a poor approximation of a movie. But the cliffs, plains, and pinnacles sweeping past in the video really are up there, rotating in space and baking under the glare of the Sun.

That pinprick in Tycho’s center, for example, is a mile-high mountain range complete with jagged peaks, old remains of landslides, and what looks like a totally manageable hike up one side. SELENE takes you on a 360-degree, eye-level tour and then, just as a flourish, spins out to the crater rim and zooms along the side like a NASCAR driver going into a turn.

Incidentally, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s SELENE homepage offers a refreshing and inimitably Japanese take on what a space agency’s website can look like.

(Images: Joe Huber/Wikipedia; JAXA/SELENE. Hat tip to Bad Astronomy, who is currently on something of a lunar bender owing to Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary and an actual time-lapse, color video of the moon crossing in front of the Earth).

Here’s a refreshing bit of good news to chew on next time you fill up your car: high gas prices are saving as many as 1,000 American lives each month.

After being stung at the pump, it seems, we’ve made up our minds to drive less and to drive more slowly. For instance, certain bloggers you may have heard of are driving their Volkswagen Gist - I mean Golf - only every other day, turning the car off at long lights, and generally avoiding gunning the massive 2.0 liter engine altogether.

And I’m not the only one taking it easy. The bottom line is more than 20 billion fewer miles driven so far this year. And as two medical researchers reported at a meeting last month, that means fewer cars to crash into each other, and less forceful impacts when they do.

The researchers found a 2.3 percent decline in fatalities for every 10 percent increase in gas prices. The amazing part is that it’s not some statistical quirk emerging from the last month or two of records - it’s a solid relationship that’s apparent from 1985 through 2006 - the last year for which statistics have been compiled (back when gas was a paltry $2.50 a gallon).

With America’s traffic toll hovering around 40,000 deaths per year, the researchers expect gas prices to do what seat belts, airbags, driver ed classes, and innumerable highway patrol speed traps haven’t managed yet: save another 1,000 lives per month. Do I hear $5 a gallon, anyone?

(Image: National Museum of Natural History)

It’s been a good week for people who look through microscopes at fossils. First off, Scientific American told us about some German scientists who discovered evidence of 400-million-year-old life trapped in seawater trapped inside volcanic rock.

Far more buzz circled around the second report: that we may be able to figure out what color dinosaurs and ancient birds were. This means that one day, paleontologist-artists may have to stop dreaming up rosy purples and outlandish greens to clothe their dinosaurs in (remember Mark Witton’s lovely pterosaurs a few posts ago?).

Is there any ephemeral detail that scientists can’t discover about long-dead creatures through clever chemistry? They’ve figured out the diet of an extinct seabird, learned about Aztec travels from records in exhumed teeth, and now they’ve put back together the stripes on a 100-million-year-old bird.

The evidence sat in front of them for years in the form of a powdery residue on some fossils. It was long thought to be the meaningless remains of carrion-eating bacteria, but Yale graduate student Jakob Vinther’s electron microscope revealed the powder looked exactly like the pigment-bearing sacs that occur on modern-day feathers. Nowadays, those sacs are full of melanin which give birds colors ranging from black to russet brown.

Though the work was done on fossil birds, the scientists report that similar residues from dinosaur scales and the hair of ancient mammals may reveal their colors as well. The researchers were also careful to point out that the residues didn’t contain any intact melanin (unlike the T. rex discovered in 2005 with actual protein still preserved inside a massive thigh). A hundred million years is a long time, after all.

(Image: J. Vinther/Yale)