It’s just a little dandelion, poking its way up through the grass, but isn’t it pretty? Dandelions are composites, a kind of plant that has dozens or hundreds of flowers all packed together in a flower-like shape. Each of those yellow petals and curly reproductive bits is attached to a tiny flower, anchored into the base that you’ve seen–it’s the litle plug left behind when the tiny seed-parachutes blow away. Asters, daisies, and sunflowers are all composites. I think they’re my favorite plant family.

By the way, dandelions are an introduced weed in North America, but they’re native to Europe and Asia. Which doesn’t mean the person in charge of this lawn necessarily wants them there. But still, they’re less foreign here in Narvik than in Maryland or Montana.

Rawr.

I encountered this wolverine yesterday in Narvik, a town in northern Norway. In the train station, in fact. What is a stuffed wolverine doing in a train station waiting room? A plaque says it was hit by a train on October 10, 1997. At least the little guy’s body didn’t go to waste.

There are a few passenger trains to Narvik every day, but most of the trains on the line carry iron ore. That’s what the train line was built for. Kiruna, where I’m currently living, sits on top of a very productive iron mine. In the early 1900s, a mining company built the train line from Kiruna to Narvik’s large, ice-free harbor. In fact, there’s no rail connection from Narvik to the rest of Norway; it’s a dead end on the Swedish rail network.

Wolverines are the largest land-dwelling members of the weasel family. (Some otters are bigger.) They are tough little carnivores that live in mountains and the way north, with strong jaws that help them eat frozen meat and big paws that help them get around on snow. As of the mid-90s there were about 150 in Norway and about 250 in Sweden. Trains are not a major threat. Their range has shrunk a lot over the years, probably mostly because of deforestation and development. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, they’re doing ok worldwide, but the European wolverines are in more trouble. The IUCN has details.

Here’s a bonus scenic shot, taken from the train as it descended from the Swedish border to Narvik.

Those iron pellets get a mighty nice view on their way to sea.

I took this picture yesterday evening.

The patches around the trees were the first to emerge from under the snow. It started a few weeks ago, with trees on a west-facing slope that got lots of nice sunlight in the afternoon. This tree is in the woods, with less direct sun. My best guess from asking Dr. Google is that snow melts around trees first because the bark absorbs heat from the sun.

The piece I wrote yesterday had nothing to do with their peskiness. It was about their hearing, which goes to very high pitches. They hear way up into ultrasound range. Ultrasound is defined as anything above the range of human hearing, which tops out around 20-23 kHz. Dogs make it to about 45, mice get up to 90 or so, and these moths get to 300 kHz. That’s high. (The ultrasound machines used to look inside your body are much higher-pitched, in the megahertz range.) Find out more at the Science website.

photo: Ian Kimber of http://ukmoths.org.uk

The book is out now and we’ve been hearing lots of nice things about it. I don’t have a copy myself, because I’m way too cheap to pay international shipping to get it sent to me here in Sweden (and if I did get it sent here, I’d just have to lug the darn thing home again). But I look forward to reading it when I’m back in the U.S.!

This bug was on the snow in front of the Swedish Institute for Space Physics in Kiruna, Sweden. It’s a fly. A big, fuzzy one. That is as far as I am willing to go with insect identification.

These little guys really were the first sign of spring. First I saw one in an office. A few days later, I found one banging itself against a window in my apartment. I opened the casement and wafted it out. It was in the 30s, but maybe Swedish flies like the cold. This one seems to.

See other bugs in the Bug on my Window series.

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about a study on dolphin diet. The researchers compared DNA data from poop to data on the stomach contents of dead dolphins that were picked up through the Florida Marine Mammal Stranding Network. Find out what they learned.

Cité de l’Espace isn’t about looking at space-related artifacts, and there aren’t many. It’s about having fun and learning scientific concepts. Most of my pictures are of one of us doing something, like the track that lets you bounce and soar as if you were in the low gravity in the moon.

Which was fun, and worth the half-hour wait in line.

They do have some actual stuff, though, like a section of a Soyuz spacecraft. The one they have is a training module.

You’ve probably heard of Soyuz. It was designed in the space-race days of the 1960s. Here’s the crazy thing, though–while the U.S. moved on from the Apollo designs, the Soviet Union didn’t.

The U.S. developed the Space Shuttle and the Soviets, and later the Russians, kept on using the Soyuz. The Shuttle has been retired–so when astronauts go to the International Space Station, they go in a Soyuz. The instruments have been updated since the 60s, but basically astronauts are getting to space today like some of the first cosmonauts did. It’s old, but it’s cheap and it works.

If you go to Cité de l’Espace, you can climb into a Soyuz, too. We happened to be walking by at the beginning of the two-hour window when it was open, so we were near the front of the line. And it was pretty cool. You take off your shoes, climb a few stairs, then lower yourself in through a hatch. It looks like it would be awfully cramped with three full-grown adults in there, but once you get inside it doesn’t seem so bad.

Once the astronauts are in space, there’s a second module they can go into, although I think it’s not particularly large, either. I imagine after two days together you’re ready for the comparative roominess of the International Space Station. Actually, I just learned, they’ve recently shown that it’s possible to get to the ISS in six hours, but it means maneuvering both the Soyuz and the space station very, very carefully, and they may just stick with the two-day plan in the future.

However you get up there, it only takes a few hours for a Soyuz to leave the station, enter the atmosphere, open its parachute, and go thunk on the ground somewhere in Central Asia.

Outside there are full-sized replicas of a Mir space station and an Ariane 5 rocket, the European Space Agency’s new way to get satellites into space.

Fun fact: The Ariana 5 is launched from French Guiana, along the northern edge of South America. When you launch something into space, you want a big stretch of open water to the east, to catch the bits of rockets that are meant to fall off. (And the ones that aren’t.) You also want to be near the equator, for reasons I understand less well. Note that these are two things the Guiana Space Centre has in common with Cape Canaveral.

The entrance fee to Cité de l’Espace is high, more than $25 when we were there, but you don’t have to pay extra for any of the attractions, like the aforementioned moonwalk, the IMAX, or the planetarium shows. And you learn a lot about space.

I actually spent yesterday in Longyearbyen, on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. I’m up here at 78 degrees north for a story. It’s cold! And scenic! And wonderful! More details to follow when the story is published, later this year.

This sign on the way out of town tells you that the warning applies everywhere in Svalbard.

The book comes out in a few weeks, which means the publicity machine is on the move. It’s sort of a homemade publicity machine–a few dozen people, all working together to get the word out.

Our fantastic web team has started a great website with new blog posts daily, and authors are hitting up conferences and events around the country to talk about it. Some attendees at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs meeting wrote about a panel featuring some of the book’s authors.

Preorder it now!