Note the absence of a red gorget, which means that this is either a female or a subadult male. No way of telling them apart.
You can get your coffee sugared, or without sugar, but never, never, ever decaf.
As you can see, it has serious racks of java.
This is one reason why Brazil is capable of building its own satellites, and why they are very close to being able to launch them with their very own launch system. Coffee delivery infrastructure is critical for engineering and science.
These are the two NASA WBs - known from their fleet numbers as simply 926 and 928. They are modified B-57 Canberras, made by Martin based on the original English Electric design. Both were originally made in 1963, and their wings were modified in 1967 by General Dynamics for high-altitude reconnaisance missions. 926 was RB-57D 53-3974 while in the USAF, and 928 was RB-57B 52-1536, and they most probably did high altitude sampling over US and Chinese nuclear tests. Lately they have flown through the exhaust plumes left by the shuttle's SRBs and main engines.
To provide high-quality imaging of the shuttle, SRBs and the external tank (ET) during ascent, both 926 and 928 will be carrying specially manufactured imaging systems. NASA contracted the Aerospace Corporation and the Southern Research Institute to put together the equipment and plan the mission for the WBs. This is a shot of the imaging package - a Celestron telescope lens provides an aperture for near infra-red (NIR) and HDTV imaging, and an NTSC system provides the initial sighting for the tracking software.
In order to track the shuttle's ascent, a turret and gimbal system will be attached to the nose of the aircraft. This is the hangar at JSC where they are doing the first mods to attach the turret.
During the actual launch, the WBs will fly at 60,000 feet along tracks on either side of the ascent path, giving views of the orbiter, ET and SRBs through SRB separation+10. The technical constraint areas for the position of the WBs during a particular ascent moment are the blue boxes.
These are simulations done by the Aerospace Corp. for what the HDTV FOV should be from both aircraft, at different times during the ascent. WAVE stands for WB-57 Ascent Video Experiment.
Of course, since the data will be in HDTV, I am sure that NASA's PR Office is already salivating. But no, it will not be shown live - the data is being recorded on board, and will have to be downloaded at Patrick AFB when the birds return. Time to release, probably about launch + 30 hours. I can't wait. I hope to be in Orlando during the launch window, and will keep my eyes glued to the East.
As I suspected it would, the death of Pope John Paul II hit me hard. I'm not sure why, since I am an errant Catholic, but he seems to have attracted many in that way. I dug out a set of rosaries he blessed while I was at the Vatican in December of 1993, and I have been carrying them around in my pocket. And no, I didn't get an audience with His Holiness - he blessed the rosaries as I held them out above my head among the large crowd in St. Peter's Square (Catholics count such things as legitimate blessings), and then took them back to my mother, who was dying at the time.
In creating the following table, I was trying to figure out how long conclaves have lasted, what the lengths of the interregnums between Popes have been, and what the lengths of papal reigns have been. Well, of course, it wasn't that simple.
First was finding a listing of Popes - since the Papacy extends back nearly 2000 years, there are several different lists, and they differ in agreeing who was and was not a Pope. The two 'best' lists I found were at advent.org and in the wikipedia papal list (I suspect the wiki author(s) used advent.org as a source, which yields the good agreement - I have posted discussions of this dangerous sampling tactic before). The Vatican website, surprisingly, has very little covering this set of basic facts (in any language - I looked, they all go back only to Leo XIII).
The second issue was that the advent.org listing did not have dates, and the article under each of the links for the Popes did not consistently give dates for birth, death, election or the beginning dates of the electing or following conclaves, even for recent Popes. The first of my questions, "what have lengths of conclaves been?" had to be abandoned due to lack of (quickly available) data. There is a good set of articles on the more recent conclaves at wikipedia, and a listing of conclaves at Salvador Miranda's site.
The other questions, the length of interregnums and reigns, quickly ran into problems for several reasons. Although the Wiki site has dates listed by each Pope's name, I was not sure of several things: was the start date the election or the coronation? (the definition of when the elected person becomes Pope has changed with time). There are also some overlapping dates - the death of a Pope post-dates the election/corontaion of the next. Are these abdications and/or resignations? I did not go back to check these cases.
The most fundamental question revolved around the dates themselves: for dates before 1752, I was not sure whether the stated dates were using the Gregorian, proleptic Gregorian, or Julian calendars. Also, since 1752 was the year the U.K. and its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, and the events were occurring in Rome, which had dropped the Julian calendar during Gregory XIII's reign in 1572, what about the dates between 1572 and 1752? Under which calendar were they stated? And of course, the exact dates get very hazy as one goes further back, and there are cases of second or even third terms after depositions/revolutions. etc. I decided only to take this list back to Popes since the year 1000.
To top it all off, Excel cannot handle dates before 1900 (1903 on a Mac) without special add-in functions, so calculations for these pre-1900 dates were impossible until I hunted down free extended date add-in functions (which, incidentally, do not properly account for the fact that 14 September 1752 was the day after 2 September 1752, in the U.K. at least).
So, with the above caveats, here is the table:
| Pope | Length of Reign | Date of Death | Length of FOLLOWING interregnum | Date of Election |
| John Paul II (the Great) | 9,665 | 2-Apr-2005 | 16-Oct-1978 | |
| John Paul I | 33 | 28-Sep-1978 | 18 | 26-Aug-1978 |
| Paul VI | 5,525 | 6-Aug-1978 | 20 | 21-Jun-1963 |
| John XXIII | 1,679 | 3-Jun-1963 | 18 | 28-Oct-1958 |
| Pius XII | 7,161 | 9-Oct-1958 | 19 | 2-Mar-1939 |
| Pius XI | 6,213 | 10-Feb-1939 | 20 | 6-Feb-1922 |
| Benedict XV | 2,698 | 22-Jan-1922 | 15 | 3-Sep-1914 |
| Pius X | 4,034 | 20-Aug-1914 | 14 | 4-Aug-1903 |
| Leo XIII | 9,280 | 20-Jul-1903 | 15 | 20-Feb-1878 |
| Pius IX | 11,559 | 7-Feb-1878 | 13 | 16-Jun-1846 |
| Gregory XVI | 5,606 | 9-Jun-1846 | 7 | 2-Feb-1831 |
| Pius VIII | 610 | 1-Dec-1830 | 63 | 31-Mar-1829 |
| Leo XII | 1,962 | 10-Feb-1829 | 49 | 28-Sep-1823 |
| Pius VII | 8,559 | 20-Aug-1823 | 39 | 14-Mar-1800 |
| Pius VI | 8,961 | 29-Aug-1799 | 197 | 15-Feb-1775 |
| Clement XIV | 1,953 | 22-Sep-1774 | 146 | 18-May-1769 |
| Clement XIII | 3,864 | 2-Feb-1769 | 105 | 6-Jul-1758 |
| Benedict XIV | 6,468 | 3-May-1758 | 64 | 17-Aug-1740 |
| Adoption of Gregorian calendar in the U.K. and its colonies | ||||
| Clement XII | 3,496 | 6-Feb-1740 | 193 | 12-Jul-1730 |
| Benedict XIII | 2,096 | 21-Feb-1730 | 141 | 27-May-1724 |
| Innocent XIII | 1,034 | 7-Mar-1724 | 81 | 8-May-1721 |
| Clement XI | 7,421 | 19-Mar-1721 | 50 | 23-Nov-1700 |
| Innocent XII | 3,364 | 27-Sep-1700 | 57 | 12-July-1691 |
| Alexander VIII | 483 | 1-Feb-1691 | 161 | 6-Oct-1689 |
| Innocent XI | 4,707 | 11-aug-1689 | 56 | 21-Sep-1676 |
| Clement X | 2,276 | 22-jul-1676 | 61 | 29-Apr-1670 |
| Clement IX | 903 | 9-dec-1669 | 141 | 20-Jun-1667 |
| Alexander VII | 4,428 | 22-may-1667 | 29 | 7-apr-1655 |
| Innocent X | 3,765 | 7-jan-1655 | 90 | 16-sep-1644 |
| Urban VIII | 7,663 | 29-jul-1644 | 49 | 6-aug-1623 |
| Gregory XV | 874 | 3-jul-1623 | 34 | 9-feb-1621 |
| Paul V | 5,736 | 28-jan-1621 | 12 | 16-may-1605 |
| Leo XI | 11 | 12-apr-1605 | 34 | 1-apr-1605 |
| Clement VIII | 4,781 | 3-mar-1605 | 29 | 30-jan-1592 |
| Innocent IX | 62 | 30-dec-1591 | 31 | 29-oct-1591 |
| Gregory XIV | 314 | 15-oct-1591 | 14 | 5-dec-1590 |
| Urban VII | 12 | 27-sep-1590 | 69 | 15-sep-1590 |
| Sixtus V | 1,951 | 27-aug-1590 | 19 | 24-apr-1585 |
| Gregory XIII | 4,715 | 10-apr-1585 | 14 | 13-may-1572 |
| Julian calendar dropped by the church | ||||
| St. Pius V | 2,306 | 1-may-1572 | 12 | 7-jan-1566 |
| Pius IV | 2,176 | 9-dec-1565 | 29 | 25-dec-1559 |
| Paul IV | 1,548 | 18-aug-1559 | 129 | 23-may-1555 |
| Marcellus II | 22 | 1-may-1555 | 22 | 9-apr-1555 |
| Julius III | 1,870 | 23-mar-1555 | 17 | 7-feb-1550 |
| Paul III | 5,507 | 10-nov-1549 | 89 | 13-oct-1534 |
| Clement VII | 3,956 | 25-sep-1534 | 18 | 26-nov-1523 |
| Adrian VI | 401 | 14-feb-1523 | 285 | 9-jan-1522 |
| Leo X | 3,189 | 1-dec-1521 | 39 | 9-mar-1513 |
| Julius II | 3,401 | 21-feb-1513 | 16 | 31-oct-1503 |
| Pius III | 26 | 18-oct-1503 | 13 | 22-sep-1503 |
| Alexander VI | 4,023 | 18-aug-1503 | 35 | 11-aug-1492 |
| Innocent VIII | 2,887 | 25-jul-1492 | 17 | 29-aug-1484 |
| Sixtus IV | 4,752 | 12-aug-1484 | 17 | 9-aug-1471 |
| Paul II | 2,521 | 26-jul-1471 | 14 | 30-aug-1464 |
| Pius II | 2,188 | 15-aug-1464 | 15 | 19-aug-1458 |
| Callistus III | 1,216 | 6-aug-1458 | 13 | 8-apr-1455 |
| Nicholas V | 2,940 | 24-mar-1455 | 15 | 6-mar-1447 |
| Eugene IV | 5,836 | 23-feb-1447 | 11 | 3-mar-1431 |
| Martin V | 4,849 | 20-feb-1431 | 11 | 11-nov-1417 |
| Gregory XII | 3,138 | 4-jul-1415 | 861 | 30-nov-1406 |
| Innocent VII | 750 | 6-nov-1406 | 24 | 17-oct-1404 |
| Boniface IX | 5,446 | 1-oct-1404 | 16 | 2-nov-1389 |
| Urban VI | 4,208 | 15-oct-1389 | 18 | 8-apr-1378 |
| Gregory XI | 2,643 | 26-mar-1378 | 13 | 30-dec-1370 |
| Blessed Urban V | 3,004 | 19-dec-1370 | 11 | 28-sep-1362 |
| Innocent VI | 3,555 | 12-sep-1362 | 16 | 18-dec-1352 |
| Clement VI | 3,866 | 6-dec-1352 | 12 | 7-may-1342 |
| Benedict XII | 2,683 | 25-apr-1342 | 12 | 20-dec-1334 |
| John XXII | 6,693 | 4-dec-1334 | 16 | 7-aug-1316 |
| Clement V | 3,211 | 20-apr-1314 | 840 | 5-jul-1305 |
| Blessed Benedict XI | 259 | 7-jul-1304 | 363 | 22-oct-1303 |
| Boniface VIII | 3,212 | 11-oct-1303 | 11 | 24-dec-1294 |
| St. Celestine V | 161 | 13-dec-1294 | 11 | 5-jul-1294 |
| Nicholas IV | 1,503 | 4-apr-1292 | 822 | 22-feb-1288 |
| Honorius IV | 731 | 3-apr-1287 | 325 | 2-apr-1285 |
| Martin IV | 1,495 | 28-mar-1285 | 5 | 22-feb-1281 |
| Nicholas III | 1,001 | 22-aug-1280 | 184 | 25-nov-1277 |
| John XXI | 254 | 20-may-1277 | 189 | 8-sep-1276 |
| Adrian V | 38 | 18-aug-1276 | 21 | 11-jul-1276 |
| Blessed Innocent V | 153 | 22-jun-1276 | 19 | 21-jan-1276 |
| Blessed Gregory X | 1,592 | 10-jan-1276 | 11 | 1-sep-1271 |
| Clement IV | 1,393 | 29-nov-1268 | 1,006 | 5-feb-1265 |
| Urban IV | 1,130 | 2-oct-1264 | 126 | 29-aug-1261 |
| Alexander IV | 2,356 | 25-may-1261 | 96 | 12-dec-1254 |
| Innocent IV | 4,203 | 27-dec-1254 | -15 (?) | 25-jun-1243 |
| Celestine IV | 16 | 10-nov-1241 | 592 | 25-oct-1241 |
| Gregory IX | 5,270 | 22-aug-1241 | 64 | 19-mar-1227 |
| Honorius III | 3,895 | 18-mar-1227 | 1 | 18-jul-1216 |
| Innocent III | 6,764 | 16-jul-1216 | 2 | 8-jan-1198 |
| Celestine III | 2,476 | 8-jan-1198 | 0 (?) | 30-mar-1191 |
| Clement III | 1,194 | 27-mar-1191 | 3 | 19-dec-1187 |
| Gregory VIII | 57 | 17-dec-1187 | 2 | 21-oct-1187 |
| Urban III | 693 | 19-oct-1187 | 2 | 25-nov-1185 |
| Lucius III | 1,485 | 25-sep-1185 | 61 | 1-sep-1181 |
| Alexander III | 8,028 | 30-aug-1181 | 2 | 7-sep-1159 |
| Adrian IV | 1,732 | 1-sep-1159 | 6 | 4-dec-1154 |
| Anastasius IV | 218 | 15-feb-1154 | 292 | 12-jul-1153 |
| Blessed Eugene III | 3,065 | 8-jul-1153 | 4 | 15-feb-1145 |
| Lucius II | 368 | 15-mar-1145 | -28 (?) | 12-mar-1144 |
| Celestine II | 164 | 8-mar-1144 | 4 | 26-sep-1143 |
| Innocent II | 4,970 | 24-sep-1143 | 2 | 14-feb-1130 |
| Honorius II | 1,886 | 13-feb-1130 | 1 | 15-dec-1124 |
| Callistus II | 2,141 | 13-dec-1124 | 2 | 2-feb-1119 |
| Gelasius II | 369 | 28-jan-1119 | 5 | 24-jan-1118 |
| Paschal II | 6,735 | 21-jan-1118 | 3 | 13-aug-1099 |
| Blessed Urban II | 4,156 | 29-jul-1099 | 15 | 12-mar-1088 |
| Blessed Victor III | 476 | 16-sep-1087 | 178 | 28-may-1086 |
| St. Gregory VII | 4,420 | 29-may-1085 | 364 | 22-apr-1073 |
| Alexander II | 4,221 | 21-apr-1073 | 1 | 30-sep-1061 |
| Nicholas II | 964 | 27-jul-1061 | 65 | 6-dec-1058 |
| Stephen X | 239 | 29-mar-1058 | 252 | 2-aug-1057 |
| Victor II | 837 | 28-jul-1057 | 5 | 13-apr-1055 |
| St. Leo IX | 1,892 | 19-apr-1054 | 359 | 12-feb-1049 |
| Damasus II | 23 | 9-aug-1048 | 187 | 17-jul-1048 |
The average papal reign over the last 1,000 years: 2,973 days.
The average interregnum: 93 days.
Here the arrows indicate the flexible, fibrous, even 'stretchy' material left after de-mineralization - sure, it looks like a piece of meat with gristle, but the media's main focus was the blood cells and the nuclei, and these photos certainly don't show those.
So here is a set of four pictures, also used with permission from Science, that illustrate how startlingly good the preservation is in these samples, and that you probably did not see in the paper or on TV. Schweitzer was particularly careful to avoid calling these things 'capillaries,' 'nuclei,' 'organelles,' or even 'cells.' And I will be too. More on that later.
1) This is a shot of an area about 2 mm across, showing the structure of the interior of the femur on the T. rex MOR-555, from the Museum of the Rockies, also known as the "Wankel rex" after its discoverer. I don't know how often you dine on meat with the bone in it, and if you ever pick at marrow within that, but this texture is absolutely identifiable as bone interior:
2) This is a photomicrograph of the Wankel rex again, showing tubular structures about 50 micrometers across, with the enclosed darker spheres. I'd love to have a medical student look at this without knowing what it was, just to hear what they said:
3) This is a shot of a piece from "Sue," showing the same type of micro-structures:
Note that you can see darker centres to some of the red spheres in both of the above photomicrographs.
4) Here is a shot of a microstructure from the 2003 juvenile T. rex, MOR-1125, which shows internal structure, as well as thin extensions protruding from the main body:
This looks very much like an osteoblast or osteocyte, or a bone-producing cell, from any modern animal. The extensions are known as filipodia and they fit into thin channels called canaliculi that allow the cells to pass information and nutrients through the dense calcium phosphate (apatite) bone matrix (here is a slide showing osteocytes in place from a fossil theropod's toe!). While osteocytes have been seen before in fossils, we had never seen internal structure. The microstructures inside the 'osteocyte' in the picture above are interpreted as the remnants of cellular organelles. Schweitzer's team also found microstructures in the other two T. rexes and the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus MOR-794 that looked very much like osteocytes. Immunoassay tests done against the materials from the first T. rex, MOR-1125, indicate that proteins from the original bone are highly likely to be present.
We do not know as much about what fossilization does and does not destroy as we thought we did. What Schweitzer's current work shows is that there are certain levels of physical microstructure that are preserved that we did not think were possible. Not much has yet been published about the possible preservation of the biochemical microstructure inside these things, which is where the holy grail of dino-DNA lies (but more on that later). It is slowly becoming clear that fossilization can preserve some very odd things - shapes of things certainly, like bones (even delicate ones in embryos), but also the overall shapes of soft tissues, like feathers, bananas, dinosaur heart, and even jellyfish. There are cases where fossil beetle casings and dinosaur feathers/hair (?) preserve their pigmentation, or colour.
But until now, no one had thought that cellular-level physical structures might be preserved. We knew that some of the original chemicals could be preserved - I worked with Heinz Lowenstam and Joe Kirschvink while I was at Caltech, and collected 63 million year-old Cretaceous ammonites (Baculites inornatus) from Baja California that still had mother of pearl lustre in them, in the unstable aragonite form (here are examples from Japan and from South Dakota). Based on ion exchange chromatography, Weiner, Lowenstam, Taborek and Hood found that the organic matrix in the shells of 80 million year old molluscs from Tennessee (Scabrotrigonia thoracica) probably had the primary, secondary and possibly even tertiary conformations of their proteins preserved. Weiner and Lowenstam also found that the isoleucine in fossil shells was sometimes not racemized - that is, it was still all of the same chirality (handedness), when most materials will naturally devolve into a 50-50 mix of epimers. The lack of epimerization for the shell in the intervening 63 million years, when the characteristic epimerization time is about 10^5 years, is thought to be due to the stabilization of the amino acids by the bioinorganic phase of the shell matrix. Whereas dinsoaur blood had never been found, traces of hemoglobin had been seen, by Schweitzer and others.
It exactly is this 'protection' afforded by the surrounding minerals in the dense bone that contributed to the preservation in the dinosaur soft tissues - as well as the burial under anoxic conditions in sediments that apparently did not allow bacterial action, or later flow of fluids that so often severely alter biological materials. The study of all this, how living materials become fossils, is called 'taphonomy,' and obviously these latest results will have a large impact on this field. One large point in the Schweitzer article is that these types of microstructures have never been found before not because they are rare, but because we had never thought them possible, and so had never even looked.
So the question really comes down to 'exactly what level of detail is preserved in these specimens, and can we expect even better examples?'
We can probably expect to learn a good deal about cellular structure, since the morphology seems to be well preserved, whether with the original biomolecules, or with substituted materials. If original biomolecules are present, or even their degradation products, then a lot can be learned - consider that the presence of certain proteins is in fact a flag for certain DNA sequences and metabolic pathways, so there can be a lot of work done on dino-DNA by inference. And this of course will be very closely watched by folks looking at the phylogeny of the dinosaurs - are modern birds really descendants of the theropods? Were the dinosaurs warm-blooded? Proteins will play a very large part in decyphering those stories.
It turns out I have an inside track on this one, since Mary Schweitzer, the scientist who found the soft tissue in the Tyrannosaurus rex bones, is working with funding from a paleontology program I co-direct. So I picked up the phone and called her - to congratulate her, and also to get an idea of what was ahead, now that the media was paying attention. She was also amazed at the media response, and had been on the telephone pretty much continuously for the whole week.
She is working on another publication, this time looking more closely at bone sub-types and physiological function as well as chemistry - 'nuff said. I had asked her for permission to use a particularly spectacular picture that was not in the Science article for this posting, but it is being used in the new article, so I will leave it for a later date. Although we did not speak about it, I can only assume that future work by Mary and others will explore whether dinosaur fossils have the types of cells associated with bone formation and maintenance (osteoblasts and osteocytes), as well as the cells that break down bone to supply calcium when needed (osteoclasts, for making egg shells, or bones in embryos).
In an interesting aside to all this, I saw that the discovery of well-preserved materials like this is always picked up by short-time creationists (1, 2, 3), as evidence that the Earth cannot be millions of years old. It's an interesting exercise to try and refute this argument, because both sides of Occam's razor are being used: it's a simple explanation (dino bones are only thousands of years old, not millions) and yet you would have to throw away a lot of other work to accept it (all the stratigraphy and geochronology). Here's one refutation. Then again, there are also long-time creationists in the fray...
Of course when I told my nine year old son about the dinosaur marrow, he came right back with: "Did you see the special the other night on Discovery Channel where they had found a real dragon?" After probing a bit, I think he knew the dragon was not real, but the fact that dragons had been mixed with dinosaurs on the TV show made him less apt to believe in the dinosaurs themselves - an interesting effect.
