Welcome. Can you stay for our Infinite Footprints Tour?



The beat is on. Do you remember your first thoughts of footprints?



I do. Animal tracks in deep winter snow. Not as intriguing as the Anasazi footprints on volcanic rocks.



Those ancient footmarks would not be regarded as the oldest in the world. Here is the oldest as known today:



"At approximately 570 million years old, this new fossil not only provides the earliest suggestion of animals walking on legs, but it also shows that complex animals were alive on Earth before the Cambrian."(1)



That animal left its footprints of little dots in two parallel rows on a rock that was once in a shallow sea in Nevada. Similar fossil trails were found in Canada and in South China.



Contrast these with the house footprints that are left after a devastation by tornadoes or hurricanes. Temporary ruins to be cleared away. How about the footprint of the Apollo Lunar Module on the Moon? Had you thought of that instead of Neil Armstrong's footprints?



While on the Moon, imagine an infrared telescope in space. Spitzer has generated in recent years much detailed data for two different gas exoplanets, HD 209458b and HD 189733b.(2) Astronomers seek more spectra that would lead them to the footprints of life, i.e. molecules of life, such as oxygen and possibly chlorophyll.



Outer space, inner space. Discovery of the footprints of shared protons:(3)



"Historically it has been very difficult to isolate the signature of an excess proton in a complex environment like a cell membrane."



"When we cool the isolated systems, the protons sing out their sharp vibrational frequencies, and therefore provide clear signatures that are characteristic of each kind of interaction."



(Simple. The shared protons vibrate between the molecules as a local oscillator.)



Speaking of sharing, the International Space Station (ISS) is now home for the digitized DNA sequences of some of the world's most famous minds.(4) Notice, not the real DNA but, a 'symbolic human footprint' is being stored in the orbiting ISS.



Headline "US game designer blasts into space with DNA cargo" is about Richard Garriott who paid his trip to re-photograph the Earth footprint of his astronaut father. Owen Garriott had taken pictures from the U.S. station Skylab in 1973. Changes on the Earth surface should be measurable in their photographs.



Back on Earth. Invisible footprints of tiny tide tourists. "Imagine trying to gauge the tides that sweep through a Kenyan mangrove forest: how far the water rises up a given tree depends on the season, the phase of the moon, and the tree's position. Yet a pinkie-toe-size snail, Cerithidea decollata, seems to predict the height of the incoming tide. It ascends a trunk just high enough to escape inundation, then descends when it's safe to forage in the mud below."(5) Now that reminds me the oldest aquatic animal tracts in Nevada. Footprints in the soft mud. I did that once, did you, too?



Our Infinite Footprints Tour is over but the beat goes on. And on.





(1) http://www.science20.com/news_releases/570_million_year_old_tracks_in_ne...

(2) http://www.science20.com/news/spitzer_telescope_first_to_crack_open_ligh...

(3) http://www.science20.com/news/yale_scientists_discover_footprints_of_sha...

(4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7878510

(5) http://www.livescience.com/animals/081015-nhm-tide-travelers.html