E7 Bar-Tailed Godwit

Alaska Bird Makes Longest Nonstop Flight Ever Measured

Dave Hansford in Wellington, New Zealand

for National Geographic News

September 14, 2007

A female shorebird was recently found to have flown 7,145 miles (11,500 kilometers) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand—without taking a break for food or drink.

It's the longest nonstop bird migration ever measured, according to biologists who tracked the flight using satellite tags.

The bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed the journey in nine days.

In addition to demonstrating the bird's surprising endurance, the trek confirms that godwits make the southbound trip of their annual migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian coast, scientists said.

"This shows how incredible and extreme birds can be," said Phil Battley of New Zealand's Massey University, who took part in the study.

"The prospect of a bird flying all the way across the Pacific was so much further than what we thought possible, it seemed ludicrous," he said.

"Like Running for a Week"

The long haul was documented during a study of godwit migration conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey and PRBO Conservation Science, a California-based nonprofit dedicated to bird research.

Some 70,000 godwits make the epic journey from their northern summer breeding grounds in Alaska down to New Zealand each September, before flying all the way back the following March.

To study this annual trek north, Battley and his colleagues fitted satellite transmitters to 16 godwits at two locations in New Zealand last summer.

Battley was amazed, he said, to find that one of the birds, dubbed E7, flew some 6,340 miles (10,200 kilometers) directly to a wetland on the North Korea-China border (see map).

After feeding and resting there, she continued another 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) to Alaska.

The flock's arrival in the U.S. was supposed to mark the end the study, but some of the tags' transmitters continued to send data, giving scientists the unexpected bonus of tracking the birds' return trip.

Scientists found that, on E7's way back south, with the help of tailwinds, she made the epic 7,145-mile (11,500-kilometer) flight to New Zealand uninterrupted.

"This organism is absolutely outstanding," said Rob Schuckard, a team leader at the Ornithological Society of New Zealand, which helped with the migration research.

"It's the equivalent of a human running at 70 kilometers an hour [43.5 miles an hour] for more then seven days."

According to satellite data, E7 flew at an average speed of 34.8 miles an hour (56 kilometers an hour), seeking favorable winds at elevations between 1.85 miles (3 kilometers) and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers).

Along the way, the bird "slept" by shutting down one side of her brain at a time and burned up the huge stores of fat—more than 50 percent of her body weight—that she had piled on in Alaska.

E7 found her way by analyzing polarized light to get a fix on the sun by day, even in heavy clouds, and by following the stars at night, Battley said.

"They learn the rotation of the sky when they're young," he explained.

"They can work out where north is, but presumably they have to learn a Southern Hemisphere compass as well. It's no good looking for the North Star in New Zealand."

An Uncertain Future

Despite the birds' hearty endurance, Schuckard fears for the godwits. The number of birds successfully reaching New Zealand each year has fallen sharply, he said, from around 155,000 in the mid-1990s to just 70,000 today.

"Something is seriously wrong," he said.

He suspects that widespread development along the Yellow Sea, which sits between China and North and South Korea, is depriving the birds of vital food sources, as mudflats and wetlands there are drained.

At one such site, the Saemangeum wetlands of South Korea, recognized as a crucial staging site for waders, a 20.5-mile (33-kilometer) seawall built last year has drained 154 square miles (400 square kilometres) of tidal flats.

"That's equal to the entire New Zealand estuarine habitat [where rivers meet the sea]," Schuckard said.

Battley agreed that godwits and other migrating waders face serious threats, as their feeding and resting grounds dwindle.

"Loss of habitat on the staging grounds is a real concern," he said. "The Yellow Sea is a particular problem, because virtually every godwit from New Zealand will go through there. If you look at South Korea, it's full of seawalls—they reclaim entire estuaries at a go."

Some mudflat loss has been offset by increased sediment loads dumped by China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, he added.

"[But] the problem now is that with all the dams on those rivers, the Yellow River is running dry half the year, and the Three Gorges Dam is trapping most of the sediment that came down the Yangtze," Battley said.

"Shorebird migrants, through the Yellow Sea at least, have a very tough time coming up [north]," he said.

The Toughest Little Bird You've Never Heard Of

by ROBERT KRULWICH

September 21, 201110:05 AM

A Bar-tailed Godwit in Australia

Leo Berzins via Flickr

They're nothing to look at. They're not colorful. They seem so ordinary, in mottled brown, black and gray, if you noticed them at all, you'd think, "ah, just another shore bird, pecking at something in the water." But you'd be so wrong. Bar-tailed Godwits are special. So special, they deserve special attention.

They are the only birds known to fly more than 7,000 miles nonstop, that means no food breaks, no water breaks, no sleep breaks, no pausing, just pushing through cyclones, storms, headwinds, flappity flap, flap for days and nights — and this is their championship season. In September and October, they leave Alaska, head straight for the ocean. Though they are land birds, and cannot fish or rest on the sea, they will cross most of the Pacific Ocean, and fly all the way to New Zealand. Many of them are young, and have never done this before. No other bird can do what they do, and they're doing it right now.

Map of the southward Bar-tailed Godwit migration, from a study published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2009.

Robert E. Gill, et al/USGS/The Royal Society

As you read this, a bunch of Bar-tailed Godwits or Kuakas, as they're called in New Zealand, are hanging out in western Alaska, eating a rich medley of clams, worms, seeds and berries, guaranteed to add ounces to their slight frames (check our exclusive Kuaka Workout Program below). They eat so much, they double their body weight. To do that, their intestines and gizzard, not much needed in flight, literally shrink, making space for more fat.

Then they wait. What they want is a good wind to help them south. This time of year, at the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska, the weather often obliges.

Map of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

Source: NPR

Credit: Stephanie d'Otreppe

According to wildlife biologist Bob Gill and his colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey Science Center, between late August to early November, roughly "two and five cyclones track into the Gulf of Alaska each month that generate winds favorable for southward departure." So when a storm system comes their way, they somehow know it's time, and off they go, up into the sky, riding the winds, which keep them moving at, Gill figures, an average speed of 35 miles an hour, with storms, gusts and cyclones boosting them south.

Fighting The Winds

Black-tailed Godwits flying.

Gidzy via Flickr

Pacific winds will constantly change; both for them and against them. Once they hit mid-passage, equatorial breezes slow, and the bird has to beat his or her way south without much help. They burn half their body weight as they fly, and sleep, bird-style, by shutting down one side of the brain at a time. Past the equator, they bump into the southeasterly trades, which is the runner's equivalent of an uphill slog, pushing them west, so they have to navigate to keep on course.

How they do that, many of them never having been in the southern hemisphere, never having seen the southern stars, nobody seems to know. But they manage. One female, dubbed E7, because that was the code on her wireless transmitter, is the current world champion: she flew 11,680 kilometers (7,369 miles) in 8.1 days. Non-stop. (Gill knows that because the transmitter told him so.)

Bar-tailed and Black-tailed Godwit in flight

Marj Kibby via Flickr

Nobody Does It Better

What a bird! There are 70,000 of them, but they seem to be losing population. The trek back north in the spring takes them west, to Asia, where they stop and feed. Wetlands are being drained in that part of the world, which may make it hard for them to make the last leg home to Alaska. It would be a terrible thing to have these fierce, athletic birds wink out.

So while they're with us, performing their unmatched Kuaka feats of flight, I think it's only right that we go to bat for them, pr-wise, get them a show on Bravo ("The Real Kuakas of New Zealand"), get them booked on Leno and Letterman, get Mario Batali to reproduce their miracle diet, and — why not? — reach out to other birds who might want to know a little more about the "Kuaka lifestyle."

I asked my friend Josh Kurz to work on a few ideas — he has dabbled in advertising — and he came up with an ad that celebrates these birds so much, you're going to have to click on it two times to read it all. It's aimed, strangely, at owls and turkeys — who don't share the Kuaka's migratory urge, but hey, Josh is just publicizing what the rest of us — human, bird, whatever — really ought to know: that these birds may look puny, but under those plain brown feathers lies a mighty heart.

272 Words

Lincoln's 272 Words, A Model Of Brevity For Modern Times
by SCOTT SIMON
November 02, 2013 6:46 AM
http://www.npr.org

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago this month, President Abraham Lincoln uttered 272 words (which he did not write on the back of an envelope) that defined a nation and embodied eloquence when he spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pa.

It is difficult for those of us who write to say we need more words to tell a story when Lincoln did so much with just 272.

For decades, presidents and politicians have uttered words turned out by speech-writing teams. Lincoln wrote his own; and 150 years later, his speeches are recited around the world.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation has asked a number of people, including presidents, poets, Sandra Day O'Connor, Nikki Giovanni, Steven Spielberg, Billy Collins and sailors aboard the USS Lincoln to write their own 272 words on the Gettysburg Address for its exhibit: 272 Words: The Power of Words. Here's what I wrote:

"Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is the soul of brevity. Not just in the clarity, economy, and musicality of Lincoln's language, but his hard-learned esteem for brevity as a view of life.

"The average life expectancy of an American in our times hovers around (I dare put it this way) four score. In Lincoln's time, it was not even three score (and of course, he died four years shy of that). We are surrounded today by drudgery-sparing, timesaving, life-extending technologies — hot water at the touch of a button! Instantaneous communication over oceans! Open-heart surgery! — that was unfathomable in Lincoln's time. Yet I doubt many of us feel that we have more time.

"Lincoln knew life was often brief and mean. His mother died when he was a boy. Two of his boys died in childhood. He knew that tens of thousands of people — so many of them young — had died in a war which, however necessary and noble we deem it now, had unleashed unprecedented and even unimaginable bloodletting by Abe Lincoln's own hand.

"The slaughter was senseless. But we could go on living if those deaths could breathe life into a more free, just and moral nation — 'that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.'

"Lincoln's words remind us at once of the brevity of life and the imperishability of humanity. The clock ticks, the calendar flips. No power exists to slow them down or manufacture more hours and years. Abe Lincoln reminds us to make our own lives count by filling the hours we have with what's worthy, kind, funny and honorable."

THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY FOUNDATION

A message and challenge from the CEO,

Dr. Carla Knorowski

This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln’s writing and delivery of the Gettysburg Address. On that November day back in 1863, Lincoln was challenged to speak about the enormity of Gettysburg. The loss and lessons of the battle were so great, so devastating, and so humbling, that Lincoln used the fewest number of words--272--with the fewest number of syllables to convey the greatest, most important message of the time--some say of all time. Today, some seven-and-a-half scores later, we still hold sacred its message.

To commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Address, on the 19th day of the 11th month of this, our 2013th year, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Museum and Foundation challenge you to participate in an historic project: “272 Words,” wherein people from all walks of life write 272 words in the spirit of the 16th U.S. President. You can write about Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address or a cause which stirs your passions, but remember, in the spirit of Mr. Lincoln, write only 272 words.

Challenging? Totally.

Humbling? Definitely.

Rewarding? Infinitely.

“272 Words” is an opportunity to share your voice. Submit an essay and who knows, you might just see it on display in the Museum along with Lincoln’s own 272-word masterpiece. We invite you to honor Mr. Lincoln and commemorate this historic anniversary with your participation. In a small, but significant way, your 272 words will continue to advance the “unfinished work” we as a united, freedom-loving nation will always have before us.

These are my 272 words. Now why not grab a quill and go write yours?

http://www.alplm.org/272

NPR November 3, 2013

http://www.npr.org

Einstein and Quantum Theory

In Einstein and the Quantum: The Quest of the Valiant Swabian, theoretical physicist A. Douglas Stone writes that whereas Einstein is best known for his theory of relativity, his truly revolutionary idea was the development of quantum theory—an idea that escaped many of the age's most brilliant minds.

http://sciencefriday.com

Drone Wars

America’s Drone Wars

November 1, 2013

http://billmoyers.com

This week, members of Congress heard testimony for the first time from victims of drone attacks, including that of 13-year-old Zubair Rehman, from Pakistan, who spoke of a strike last year that killed his grandmother and wounded him and his little sister. “I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey… When the sky brightens, drones return and we live in fear,” Rehman told the five members of Congress who showed up for the testimony.

The use of drones has intensified under President Obama’s leadership as the number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas has been scaled back. But the drones often kill innocent civilians, including children. That is the subject of Robert Greenwald’s new documentary, Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars. Here, we look at clips from the film, which shares testimony, stories and alarming news on the fatal impact of our drone strategy.

Calvin and Hobbes

The Blues and Paramount Records

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band in Chicago in 1923: Louis Armstrong is kneeling, from left to right behind him are Honore Dutrey, Baby Dodds, King Oliver, Lil Hardin, Bill Johnson and Johnny Dodds.

Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images

Paramount Records: The Label Inadvertently Crucial To The Blues
by TOM COLE
November 02, 2013 5:33 AM
http://www.npr.org

Imagine that all of your favorite music — from Wynton Marsalis to Kanye West — was released by the same record label. Well, if you were African-American back in the 1920s, odds are that was the case. What makes the story even more interesting is that this record label was launched by a company that made chairs. Its name was Paramount Records and its roster eventually included Ma Rainey, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Ethel Waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson — most of the top African-American blues and jazz performers of the day. Despite that firepower, the label folded after just 15 years in business. Now, a new reissue project tries to recapture some of the Paramount magic.

Novelist and teacher Scott Blackwood wrote a book about Paramount that's included in the reissue package. This is a portion of it:

Ma Rainey Georgia Jazz Band posing for a studio group shot in the mid-1920s, with Thomas A. Dorsey at the piano.

"1917. A young black man on a train moving up the Illinois Central Line to Chicago. Outside the window, a great emptiness crosshatched with railroads, threaded by a river. A few no account towns. A sea of prairie. He opens his trombone case across his knees. The brass glints. He feels the promise of the slide between his fingers. All that space out there concentrated into this."

"My goal was to really find the real visceral stories that told us who these people were," Blackwood says. "How this tremendous music came about and who the Paramount people were."

They were, for the most part, a bunch of white guys in Port Washington, Wis., who made furniture — chairs and cabinets for phonographs. Sam Brylawski, editor of the American Discography Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says they got into the music business for the same reason some of today's entrepreneurs have.

"Why did iTunes start? ITunes started because Apple needed to have a supply of portable recordings to put on its iPods. ITunes was started in order to sell iPods, just like Paramount Records was started to help sell Paramount — or Wisconsin Chair Co. phonograph machines."

At first, Paramount didn't even have its own studio. The label licensed recordings from other companies, releasing whatever was popular — mostly dance bands to start. Neither the company's records nor its phonographs were selling well. In 1920, another label — Okeh — released Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues." It was a smash, and suddenly record buyers went, well, crazy for the blues. Paramount executives dived in, recording as many female blues singers as they could: Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter.

Almost by accident, Paramount became the leading producer of a new kind of record, and, says Blackwood, the female singers became pioneers. "These women were incredibly powerful at a time when women weren't able to control many aspects of their lives."

The discs they made came to be called "race records." The term was used in ads Paramount placed in African-American newspapers like The Chicago Defender. Alex van der Tuuk, author of the 2003 book Paramount's Rise and Fall and a co-producer of the reissue, explains the term and how, once again, Paramount's white executives became unwitting industry leaders: "They were one of the first, if not the first, to even use the slogan 'the popular race record,' and 'race,' of course, [was] being used as a word of pride and that was what the Chicago Defender also said: 'Be proud of your race.' "

"Because they specialized so heavily in that music," says R. Crumb, the seminal underground comix artist, "their ads were not insultingly racist, as were some of the other companies." Crumb was first attracted to the old 78s he now fervently collects by the graphics on their labels. It was only later that he saw the ads.

"Paramount, for being this small company, run on the cheap, certainly focused strongly on the graphic promotion of the record, more than any other company, I think. As far as blues goes and all that. They really put out these lurid ads, which were great. And nobody knows who those artists were. Unsung heroes — I don't think any of the original art has ever turned up."

Nobody knows who many of the musicians were either. Paramount kept lousy ledgers, and those that the label did keep were mostly destroyed in scrap drives during World War II. Guitarist and singer Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes and founder of Third Man Records, a label partner in the reissue project, says Paramount hustled as many musicians in and out of the studio as fast as it could.

"People who recorded one record and no one knows who they are; there's no photograph of them, there's no history of them," White says. "They were in the studio for 10 minutes and left and are gone. Who are they? We don't know, and we will never know and that is unbelievable."

Paramount recorded plenty of musicians we do know, though: Charlie Patton, the giant of the Delta blues; Blind Blake, the master of ragtime guitar; Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Texas guitarist and singer who's been called the first rock star of the '20s. Brylawski says Paramount recorded what others did not. "Paramount was the first to record a solo male singing blues with a stringed instrument. You know, this is what we think of, more often than anything, as blues. First one ever made was made for Paramount."

Papa Charlie Jackson was discovered on a Chicago street corner by a fledgling record producer who literally fell into Paramount's lap — knocking on the label's door one day offering to run its Chicago operations.

Mayo Williams was a graduate of Brown University and had worked for other labels selling their records. Like the men who ran the Wisconsin Chair Co., he had no real experience in the music industry. But he did have a vision.

"His whole idea was to raise the consciousness of the race," says Blackwood. "He actively sought out and tried to recruit black opera singers and was really kind of obsessed with this idea, primarily because he thought that refined culture was what African-Americans really needed and wanted, if he could just get it to them."

But his customers wanted blues and jazz, so that's what he delivered.

By some estimates Paramount made more than 100,000 recordings. Documenting the label's accomplishments was one reason Dean Blackwood launched the current reissue project. He's Scott's brother and the co-founder, with the late guitarist John Fahey, of Revenant Records — the other label partner in the project. The reissue includes six LPs, two books and a thumb drive containing 800 tunes and 200 ads and other images. All contained in an oak box designed to look like a portable phonograph case from the 1920s. It's being sold in a limited edition of 5,000 for a hefty $400.

"It's not just about the tunes; it's about this narrative that's told about these white men operating out of a chair factory who really had no idea what they were doing and that's what makes it all the more remarkable that they almost inadvertently create one of the greatest repositories of early American music, albeit cheaply recorded, cheaply produced, cheaply pressed," Dean Blackwood says. "It makes for a really intriguing tale and so we definitely wanted it to be more akin to a museum exhibit than what you'd see in a typical music release."

For such a remarkable story, Paramount's end was fairly prosaic. The company always struggled — then the Great Depression hit. The label sold most of its metal masters for the copper in them. It gave employees records in lieu of a final paycheck. Here's how Scott Blackwood writes the end in his narrative:

"December, 1933. Evening. Grafton, Wisconsin. A knot of bundled up white people, factory workers, clerks, even a few secretaries, are standing on the roof of the Grafton Record Factory along the banks of the Milwaukee River. They're angry. They've just been fired during the company's Christmas Party.

They sling the records into the dark, toward the river. They can hear some of them smash on the rocks along the river bank. Others make it to the water, drift downstream, they imagine, or settle to the clay bottom.

This is how the story ends, they're thinking. But the voices out there in the anonymous dark drifting downriver still have something to say."

Indeed they do.

Arecibo

Earth’s Giant Ear Marks 50 Years of Listening for Signals From the Cosmos

BY NADIA DRAKE 11.01.13 9:30 AM

Special thank you to director Robert Kerr and the staff of the Arecibo Observatory for help in reporting this story.

http://www.wired.com

Arecibo at sunset. (Nadia Drake/WIRED)

ARECIBO, Puerto Rico — The Arecibo Observatory, home of the world’s largest single radio telescope, celebrates its 50th birthday today. In that half-century, the giant, iconic dish and its three towers have become a symbol of the quest to understand the cosmos and whether we are alone in the universe. Its endurance also points to the ingenuity of the scientists and engineers who dreamed up and then installed a massive, world-class observatory in a Caribbean sinkhole in the early 1960s.

“Arecibo is one of the most powerful and amazing instruments ever made — ever,” said physicist Richard Behnke of the National Science Foundation at a conference celebrating the observatory’s 50th trip around the sun.

I’m here with my dad, Frank Drake, who was once the director of the observatory; it’s not the first time he’s brought me to Arecibo, though I barely qualified as an intelligent life form on my last visit (I was four months old).

What began as a complex engineering challenge has since become a destination for both researchers and tourists. Now, more than 100,000 visitors come to see the telescope each year. And unless you’re a VIP with helicopter landing pad privileges, which we were not, the journey to the observatory involves traversing 10 miles of winding, narrow roads past colorful concrete houses and thick vegetation.

The road is carved into the area’s rugged karst terrain where rounded hills bubble up as though the earth were frozen in mid-boil. It’s a sticky and unforgiving landscape, and it’s more wildly beautiful than I could have imagined.

The most obvious thing to say about the telescope is that it’s enormous. Even when you’re standing right next to it, or on it, the size of the telescope is hard to comprehend.

The dish is 1,000 feet across and covers 20 acres. Above, a 900-ton platform is suspended from 3-inch-thick cables. A funny-looking dome hangs beneath the platform and holds two secondary reflectors – a relatively late addition to the site’s hardware that helps focus incoming radio waves. The cables attach to three towers that rise as much as 365 feet above the hills like a trio of sentinels keeping watch over a sensitive, cosmic ear.

A 1961 photo of telescope designer William Gordon, with some sketches in the background. 

(Photo courtesy of Arecibo Observatory)

The observatory grew out of a 1950s plan to study Earth’s ionosphere. Fifty years ago, radio astronomy was still in its infancy. Sputnik had just been launched, NASA had just been born, and the U.S. government was concerned about whether we could detect Soviet satellites. One of the telescope’s many objectives was to find out whether satellites zooming through the atmosphere left detectable trails of charged particles in their wake.

So, with funding and support from what was then called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA), William E. Gordon, an astronomer and engineer, began designing a giant radio telescope that would also have a radar transmitter. He needed to build it somewhere in the tropics, where all the planets in the solar system pass nearly overhead – in case radio astronomers wanted to study them. Ideally there would be a natural sinkhole, so a giant hole wouldn’t have to be dug for the telescope’s enormous dish. Oh, and it should be located in a place with a friendly government.

That meant Cuba was out, and Puerto Rico was in.

Construction began in 1960. Three years and $9 million later, the telescope opened for business on November 1, 1963, managed by Cornell University.

At first it didn’t work very well – the spherical reflector, built so that the telescope could be aimed at stuff instead of staring at a fixed point, wasn’t very efficient (most radio telescopes use parabolic reflectors that concentrate incoming waves at a single point, and Arecibo’s spherical surface concentrated them over a 96-foot-long line).

After a few upgrades – including an early fix for that initial inefficiency, a new surface comprising 38,778 aluminum panels in 1974, and the 1997 installation of the dome, which houses secondary reflectors that focus incoming signals – radio astronomy had grown up into a mature discipline, and the telescope was among the most sensitive cosmic detectors on the entire planet.

Today it still listens for the tap-dancing transmissions from distant pulsars, for the humming of hydrogen atoms and the murmurings of interstellar and extragalactic molecules, for the whispers from faraway civilizations. But it’s not a one-way receiver — the observatory also sends signals into space.

In 1974, the original dish surface was replaced with aluminum tiles. Cornell University president Dale Corson slipped the last tile — #38,778 — into place. 

(Photo courtesy of Frank Drake)

One of the most famous was the 1974 interstellar postcard beamed toward the globular cluster M13. My dad, along with Carl Sagan and others, designed the message, which used binary code to describe such things as Earth’s place in the solar system, the structure of DNA and the four base pairs, chemical elements, the Arecibo telescope, and a human. The connection between Arecibo and civilizations among the stars is strong: The observatory has been the site of numerous SETI searches and still compiles the data distributed by UC Berkeley’s SETI at Home project. It was also part of the set for the 1997 movie Contact.

The observatory can also turn the skies overhead into a laboratory. One early experiment, for example, involved launching rockets carrying barium payloads into the air above Arecibo. At a high altitude, the rockets would release the barium into the atmosphere so scientists could observe how the barium atoms behaved when ionized by the sun. Barium, one of the alkaline earth metals, is highly reactive and easily broken into charged particles by sunlight, forming a plasma. Scientists wanted to use that plasma as a proxy to study how the actual ionosphere behaves should a nuclear bomb explode above it.

But first, researchers needed a rocket launch pad – something capable of launching Arrow-B rockets. “There was an abandoned military base near there,” said Frank Drake, who was director of the observatory at the time. “So we went in and made a concrete launch pad for the rockets.”

After two failed launches in 1968, the final available rocket set the pre-dawn sky above the observatory ablaze with the brilliance of a second sun as Earth’s home star illuminated the barium cloud. When the cloud ionized and broke apart – the charged particles being guided by magnetic fields — it changed color. “I went outside and looked up at the sky, and wow,” said space physicist Herb Carlson, now at Utah State University, who worked on that early experiment. “It looked like a bull’s eye – different colors, and with rings.”

Later, in 1979, the observatory played a role in the infamous Vela incident, in which Israel reportedly conducted a nuclear test off the coast of South Africa.

Turns out, if you explode a nuclear bomb high up in the atmosphere, the folks at Arecibo will know: Atmospheric waves produced by the blast travel through Earth’s ionosphere carrying a distinct, high-energy signature. In 1979, that’s just what Richard Behnke saw.

At the time, he was at the observatory studying the atmospheric ripples produced by an Atlas rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. Then he noticed a weird signal in the data he’d been processing. It looked as though something huge had exploded high above the Earth. The shock wave had smashed into the ionosphere and set it trembling, sending atmospheric gravity waves, which are kind of like ocean waves, around the planet. Behnke calculated the speed of the waves as they arrived over Arecibo (about 600 meters per second) and the direction they came from (the southeast), and reached the unmistakable conclusion that something had dumped enormous amounts of energy into the atmosphere off the South African coast.

Behnke didn’t know yet that the American Vela satellite had also detected something strange — a double pulse of light, the sign of a nuclear explosion – off South Africa. In the next few months, word began circulating that the Israelis, in cooperation with South Africa, had conducted a nuclear test over the Indian Ocean.

The U.S. government then convened a panel of scientists to review the observations. They reached a very different conclusion: The event was the result of a meteorite hitting the satellite. The story, and Behnke’s differing conclusions, aired during Walter Cronkite’s last two evening broadcasts on CBS.

“What are the odds that some young Ph.D. is going to end up talking about the ionosphere and gravity waves on the last two Walter Cronkite news shows?” Behnke said.

A 1974 photo of then-graduate student Russell Hulse working in the observatory’s control room (check out the tick marks on the side of the box). That year, they discovered the first binary pulsar. 

(Photo courtesy of Joe Taylor)

Arecibo’s less controversial discoveries include showing that Mercury’s rotation rate was nowhere near what people thought it was (59 days instead of 88), the identification of the first millisecond pulsar, the discovery of the first pulsar planets, and the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of a binary pulsar.

In the 1970s, pulsars were trendy in radio astronomy. But no one had ever seen two of them circling one another — until 1974, when graduate student Russell Hulse and his advisor Joe Taylor found the first binary system. At the time, Hulse was in Arecibo and Taylor was back in Amherst, Mass., teaching classes – so they communicated by writing letters or by using a faster but fairly complicated relay of short-wave radio and phone calls.

By studying the binary pulsar system, Hulse and Taylor were able to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity. More specifically, they indirectly proved Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves. The binary pulsar was “a very ideal relativity laboratory,” Taylor said, “with what amounts to a very accurate clock, moving in an orbit where only gravity is important.”

Not every experiment conducted at the observatory moved science forward in prize-winning leaps. Once, graduate students tried to predict how many times a basketball, hurled sideways at the dish’s rim, would circle the reflector before falling toward the center (answer: zero. It went straight down). Another experiment confirmed that, yes, one could ride a motorcycle up the catwalk to the suspended platform, according to a scientist with first-hand knowledge of the event, who insisted on anonymity.

For decades, these scientists and engineers have been coming back to Arecibo. The telescope still operates 24 hours a day, peering through dust and clouds and searching for answers.

It’s a hard place to say goodbye to, and I hope it won’t be three more decades before I can return. We left when darkness fell and the stars turned on, when the red lights on the towers became blazing beacons in the night and the coqui frogs began singing a sweet nighttime melody – a song interrupted only by the whirring of the telescope as it swiveled to listen to the murmurings of another faraway object.

The Beauty of Mathematics

"Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music." —Betrand Russell
By Yann Pineill & Nicolas Lefaucheux
parachutes.tv