Discovery News: Reporter Journal

Boston + Robots = Awesomeness

Matthew Danzico — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:23:06 -0400

Greeting from the North! I’m in Boston, and oh is the whether dandy.

You know what else is quite dandy? Robotic snails! On Monday, Discovery Channel’s Tracy Staedter and I checked out a snail-like robot at MIT. Professor Peko Hosoi has been studying the movements of snails in order to create robots that can move over any surface in hopes of one day using them in search and rescue missions. I mean, who needs Robocop when we have Robosnail?

Hosoi has found that a snail’s amazing ability to stick and move along any surface can be attributed to both the manner in which it contracts and expands its body as well as the slime that it excretes. The robot that Hosoi engineered is capable of similar actions, and the slime that the robot uses has a consistency similar to that of mayonnaise. Yummm, robotic snail mayonnaise.

Later on that day we spoke with Mort Webster about governmental climate change policy in relation to actual climate change. Webster believes the US government falls inline with a theory called “path dependency.” In this context, path dependency refers to the fact that governmental bodies have historically been unable to keep up with climate change. Webster maintains that policy reform simply moves too slow in relation to a fast-moving like phenomenon like global warming. Essentially, the US government is running a race that it simply is not winning. Webster maintains we need to get ahead… and fast!

After finishing up the day’s interviews and some rather pleasant couch crashing that night by yours truly, Tracy and I headed 2 ½ hours west to University of Massachusetts Amherst to meet up with a few folks who have figured out a way of making gasoline from woodchips. Personally, I could not stop thinking of Back to the Future when Marty shoves whatever waste he could find into the DeLorean. In this situation – replace waste with wood and Marty with some chemical engineering PhD students, and it’s pretty much the same thing. So, how does it work? These chips referred to as biomass are combined with a catalyst, the catalyst then makes it way inside the molecules of biomass, and out comes glorious gasoline! The folks working on the project have been experimenting with a ton of catalysts and have found some work better than others.

Tracy and I tried collecting some sticks outside to make enough gas to get back to Boston, but were soon scolded.

Our last stop on the trip was with a few engineers that are working on a robot that can interact with foreign environments and objects. One of the large drawbacks until now has been that robots are unable to recognize pretty much anything unfamiliar to them. However, these engineers have created a gigantic rolling arm named UMAN that has been programmed to interact with whatever is in front of it. To do this, UMAN pushes around what it sees and scans what moves and does not move. The robot then tries to approximate where joints are located in the objects it’s touching, thus allowing it to pick up what it sees.

Well, my dogs are barkin’ and my half-opened eyes are telling me it’s time to go back to DC to get some rest. Hmmm. Maybe I should bring UMAN along so he could point me in the direction of the plane.

Stay cool,
Matt

New York, You Farming Wonder!

Matthew Danzico — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:10:58 -0400

I write you this while traveling 80 miles an hour over a somewhat rickety bridge in Delaware. How exactly am I doing this you ask? The Bolt Bus, of course! The Bolt Bus is a new bus service linking Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC that provides high speed Internet access to its customers while on the road. Ohhh future… you wild thing.

Anyway, enough bus talk! I traveled to New York this time around to investigate urban agricultural possibilities. I sat down with Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier. Around two years ago, Despommier and his students came to the realization that large scale farming in densely populated areas is actually possible. Granted in the past, it made sense to import food from rural communities when the world's population was spread apart. Now that everyone is in concentrated geographic areas, what's the point?

Well, Despommier's has envisioned 30-story glass buildings that are one city block in diameter in places like New York City that could grow crops like corn, tomatoes, and lettuce and raise animals like shrimp and even pigs. He calls this concept vertical faming and maintains that buildings of this size would be able to continually provide enough food to feed 50,000 people each. Sounds crazy, right? Well, hold on to your pajamas, here's the crazier part -- Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has signed on to the idea and is looking to put together a serious proposal for a vertical farm in Manhattan. That means that the folks living in Midtown may no longer be waking up at 2 a.m. to call the police on the 20-somethings making all that racket across the hallway, but may soon be calling animal control to quite down the potbelly pigs oinking the night away next door.

After speaking with Despomierre, I headed to New York City's Science Barge, to speak about sustainable urban agriculture. The Science Barge is New York City's first completely sustainable urban farm. The barge grows tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce without the use of pesticides and without producing carbon emissions or even runoff. The folks from the Science Barge plan to use their fully sustainable farm to promote the installation of these manner of agricultural spaces on rooftops throughout major cities.

For more on these stories stayed to tuned to Discovery-News.com!

Now go grow some tomatoes!

Matt

I touched Dino Guts

kasey-dee gardner — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:55:34 -0400

Today I am in Houston, Texas where I 've just met a very old (77 million year old) dinosaur named Leonardo. Leonard is something of an anomaly in the paleontology world. Leonardo is an inside-out mummified duckbilled dinosaur that was found in Malta, Montana almost fully intact. Today I interviewed the curator for the exhibit, Dr. Bob Bakker, and he wanted me to actually feel Leo's last meal of conifers and plants. It look and felt just like bone to me, but under a microscope I am told you can actually see what food was in the tummy. So....I touch a dino tummy!

Dr. Bob Bakker and his team have spent the last few years studying Leo and his contents. Aside from finding out what Leo's last meal was, they've also found skin around the eyes, and possibly a heart. It's pretty cool stuff. I will be posting a lot of Leonardo-related content in the next few weeks to: www.discoverychannelnews.com. The Discovery Channel will also be premiering "Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy" on the Discovery Channel on September 14.

But right now, I need to board my connecting flight so I don't get stuck in Nashville.

Cheers,

Kasey-Dee
stayed tuned. this is really cool stuff

The Relative Beauty Of Sarah Jessica Parker As It Relates To The Montana Countryside

James — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:07:41 -0400

The following provocative conversation took place between Kasey and I on our way to the dig site in Northern Montana.

JAMES: This landscape is beautiful, isn’t it?

KASEY: Eh. Not really. It’s okay.

JAMES: What are you talking about?? Are you looking at the same thing I am? How can you not think this is beautiful?

KASEY: I think it’s beautiful in the way Sarah Jessica Parker is beautiful, it's uniquely beautiful....but it's not Angelina Jolie beautiful. Now that's real beautiful.

Personally, I think they're both pretty so I was happy at each location.

Dino Digging Until Dark in the Land Before Time

kasey-dee gardner — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:31:27 -0400

A short photo tour of Discovery News' day at Jack Horner's "SuperDuck" dig site in Rudyard, MT. A team of five paleontologists are working on excavating, as you might have guessed, a Duck-billed (Hadrosaurid) dinosaur. There's some interesting news coming out of the site -- some new findings on this particular dino. Don' worry, I will give you the full story in the next few weeks. As you can see below, James and I got our own shot at prospecting for bones...here's some highlights.

The view from the SuperDuck site. That's the Badlands. Oh Beautiful Badlands!

Here I am a not-so-happy reporter overcoming my fear of ledges in where else but Montana's Badlands. A "don't hold onto that...that's a loose rock" comment came as I was climbing.

James and paleontologist Cary Woodruff prospecting in Rudyard, MT for dinosaur bones. As I was filming this shot, they were discussing the possibility of "running" into a rattlesnake! boys!

oh, what's that!?!?! James
found a fossil!

A very old bone --- 75 million years old!

Who doesn't love anything resembling 'Land Before Time?'

We offroaded the offroad...

James — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:07:55 -0400

This is Kasey and I in Montana. (I'm James...on the left).

This is Kasey and I in Montana following Jack Horner on his ATV to his dig site near the Canadian border. What's really amazing is that we could see anything at all through all the dead bugs on the windshield.

Jack kept making turns off the offroad road that kept getting more offroady until we ended up here:

That's Canada in the background there. In the foreground is Kasey chatting with Jack Horner. The dig site is just down the cliff. Pix tomorrow, but it's COOL.

So...earlier in the day we were at a base camp near a different site near Matla (2.5 hours to the East). Some of the dino diggers had found a bunch of cow, horse and deer bones lying around, so of course they did what people who love exploring bones for a living do: They made hybrid cow-horse-deer skeletons. I sat in the middle of them.

Tomorrow we're hanging out under the tarps as a crew digs away at the cliff side. WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY'LL FIND!?!?! YOU WILL! - we'll update tomorrow.

Bumpy Ride to Find Big Sky Country Dinos

kasey-dee gardner — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:12:33 -0400

James Williams and I have made the not- so- seamless trek across Montana in search of dinosaurs....well...the people who hunt for them. And it's been a journey....it's totally worth it cause we're going to link up with some paleontologists who are doing cutting edge research in Eastern Montana.

From takeoff (Washington, DC) to reaching our destination (Malta, MT) was about a 14 hour adventure. After two flights and one long ride, we arrived in the wee town of Malta and headed a few miles north to find the campsite where we will be spending parts of tomorrow learning about some cool new tools the dino teams are working with this year. Crews from both Montana State University and the North Carolina State have set up the first-ever on-site mobile lab which basically analyzes the fossils right after they're excavated. We will tell you very soon why this is so important to science! Plus, this is a first. It's pretty jarring to see a "clean room" set up in the middle of a dino pit. We will have more on this tomorrow -- we only got a quick tour.

There's also been a little bit of craziness it sounds like at the campsite -- including a hail storm and lighting strikes -- the dangers of digging for dinos.

After spending the morning at the mobile lab, James and I will be making the three-hour-drive west ( two hours highway, one hour dirt road) where we'll be linking up with the legendary Jack Horner and hopefully we'll get to see some old bones.

Night.

Kasey-Dee

The Big Natural Musical Apple

Matthew Danzico — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:05:24 -0400

I'm in New York, and to say that it is simply hot and muggy here is to mock Mother Nature's ability to make us feel sticky during the summertime. I write you this post as I peel my tube socks from feet that during the past two days of walking have begun to look more like soggy, awkward flapjacks rather than the combination of toes, heels, and ankles I remember. But like anyone else in the New York, I revel in it and find myself muttering time and time again, "What a city!"

Aside from weather, my trip to the Big Apple has reminded me of just how unknowingly revolutionary New York, and New Yorkers, can be.

I came to the city to research and report on two topics: the New York Waterfalls, an art installation that is challenging New Yorkers to recognize nature in urban environments, and Indaba Music, a web-based application that is transforming music collaboration by removing the need for musicians to live and work close to each other.

Yesterday, I began reporting on the waterfalls that were installed last month in New York City by asking locals about how they felt being surrounded by inordinate amounts of concrete. If the creator of the waterfalls, Olafur Eliasson, intended to raise awareness of nature in New York, I first wanted to know whether locals even cared to see a tree, let alone a four waterfalls. So, I camped out in New York’s Union Square to pounce on passersby asking whether they felt nature was as prevalent in New York as it could or should be. To my surprise, not only were the strangers I stopped receptive, but they had an incredible amount of suggestions on how New York can go green (in the literal sense). Whether or not the New York Waterfalls filled this void is debatable. You’ll just have to tune in to Discovery-news.com this Friday for that answer.

I then finished up the trip today with a stop at Indaba Music. Indaba has created a social network for musicians online, which allows individuals who otherwise may have never found one another to meet and record music via digital means. These musicians record their music, upload their open-ended sessions to the Internet, and wait for others to add on to what they have already recorded. Indaba’s story is important because less than a decade ago the same manner of technology nearly killed the music industry through file-trading, while today digital communication is providing tools for musicians to fight back.

Well, it’s time to wash some socks and prepare for a breezy drive back to Washington, DC tomorrow morning. Check out Discovery-news.com for more on these stories soon!

One, Two, Three Times a Spacecraft

Dave Mosher — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:26:00 -0400

Dave Mosher of Discovery Space here, and VERY tired.

It's been a whirlwind couple of days at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD for myself and Jorge Ribas. We got some great video of not one, not two, but three spacecraft!

Our first stop was the gigantic cleanroom where the Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission's payload can be found. Ok, so it's not a spacecraft proper -- but it is a bunch of neat hardware which astronauts will plug into a spacecraft.

If all goes as planned, Hubble will be left with a "full tool kit" to probe the universe. And that means even more amazing images than we get already. (This one is a great example.)

We couldn't drive on Goddard's grounds that day, thanks to NASA's authoritarian hyperactivity, so Ed Campion -- Goddard's news chief -- had to drive us to the building to scope out Hubble's new gear.

So there we are waiting in a building that just hosted a press conference, and Ed parks his car outside. He comes in for about five minutes and we go outside to an unpleasant site. To the right is my caught-on-camera parking violation shot. (Sorry Ed!)

We avoided further security breaches the rest of our trip, thankfully.

They had a nice mock up of the Wide Field Camera 3 outside of the Hubble servicing cleanroom, so Jorge swept his camera over it for some cool point-of-view shots. It looked like he was vacuuming the thing, so I took a picture. Which was apparently funny.

And we not only bumped into blogger Ray Villard during the trip, but also CollectSPACE.com founder Robert Pearlman (guy in the gray-blue shirt). Robert recently wrote a "My Take" for Discovery Space on preserving the flame trench bricks from launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, which were blown all over the place during the STS-124 space shuttle mission. (Oh, and that's me on the right.)

Jorge and I came back the next day to check out the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). LRO is headed to the moon to scope out spots for new lunar bases, while SDO will float a few thousand miles above New Mexico to keep an eye on the sun for any solar misbehavior. Cool stuff.

I'm going to post shortly on Space Disco about the nitty-gritty of these two spacecraft, including some behind-the-scenes shots from Jorge's and my trip. Be sure to check it out!

Swimming with Sharks And...

kasey-dee gardner — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:03:04 -0400

Shark Week is just around the corner here at the Discovery Channel. And when such a big week comes around, the news team is always looking for interesting stories to cover. A few weeks ago, I came across a new program that just opened at the Georgia Aquarium, Swimming With Gentle Giants, aka swimming with sharks. I pitched the story to my boss and two weeks later I have just experienced something very, very rare -- the opportunity to swim with four Whale Sharks! The Georgia Aquarium is the one of only a few aquariums in the world to have Whale Sharks in captivity and the only place that offers this opportunity.

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the ocean --- they can grow up to 60 feet! They're filter feeders, who prefer plankton over people (whew), very gentle, and are extremely curious creatures. They really like to get all up in your grill and scare the life out of you.

I spent all day at the aquarium learning about the plight of sharks, conservation methods, habitats, caring for sharks ... but the most exciting 30 minutes came at the end of the day. I was able to hop spend a half an hour in the tank, seeing the sharks up close.

But what I didn't know going into the dive was that the tank (a 6.3 million gallon tank with around 55,000 thousand fish --the world's largest tank of it's kind) also is home to other sharks too .... like a Hammerhead that I honestly thought was stalking me. Do sharks smell fear? Maybe that's bears....

Other fun fishes I got to spend some time with were the Blacktip Reef Shark, Zebra Shark, Spotted wobbegong, Leopard whipray, the Largetooth sawfish, among many others.

Check out Discovery News in the next week or so, I've captured the whole experience on camera.

Dinnertime --- I am sticking with a chicken salad tonight.

Cheers,

Kasey-Dee