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In 2009, we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (check out the magazine in February for Smithsonian’s take on the subject, including how his life relates to that of his birthday companion, Abraham Lincoln). With all of the events planned throughout the year to honor Darwin, I wondered: Could you plan a trip for the entire year in which everything you did was Darwin-related? Well, sort of, if you take some time along the way to catch your breath (highly recommended when traveling).

Here’s the first four months:

January 5 – 31: Voyage of the Beagle by private jet (via the Stanford Alumni). Includes a special seminar at Stanford, the Galapagos Islands, Easter Island, Tasmania and Cape Town, South Africa. Ends with a cruise to London’s National Maritime Museum.

February 1 – 3: Fly home. Do laundry. Pack for next trip.

February 4: Fly to Milan.

February 5 – 6: Darwin meeting at the Natural History Museum in Milan, Italy.

February 7: Fly from Milan to Ithaca, NY.

The Cornell campus (Cornell University Photography)

February 7 – 15: Ithaca Darwin Days, hosted by Cornell University and the Paleontological Research Institution. Includes a Darwin birthday lecture by Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes. (He was president of Cornell when I attended. His guest lecture in my freshman biology class—on evolution—was a highlight of that year. The only downside to this is that it’s in Ithaca in February.)

February 16 – 18: Wait out snow or ice storm in Ithaca.

February 19: Fly to London. Travel by train to Cambridge.

February 20: Darwin College (Cambridge) lecture series. Craig Moritz of the University of California, “Evolution and Conservation of Biodiversity.”

February 21 – 22: Visit the home of Charles Darwin, Down House in Kent, England.

February 23: Darwin Big Idea Big Exhibition, Natural History Museum, London.

February 24: Visit friends in Cambridge.

Darwin College, Cambridge (courtesy of Flickr user tz1_1zt)

February 25: Tour Darwin’s alma mater, Christ’s College, Cambridge and view a special exhibition housed in Darwin’s rooms.

February 26: Charles Darwin in Europe, a colloquium hosted by Christ’s College.

February 27: Darwin College (Cambridge) lecture series. Steve Jones, University College London, “Is Human Evolution Over?”

February: 28 – March 2: Travel to Rome. Visit botanical gardens.

March 3 – 7: “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories” conference at Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome.

March 8 – 15: Fly home. Check on cat/kids/spouse/parents/job. Pack warm weather wear for Florida.

March 16 – 28: Origins ’09, Florida State University, Tallahassee. NPR’s Science Friday will broadcast live from the campus on March 20, and E.O. Wilson speaks on March 23.

March 29: Fly to San Francisco.

March 30: Visit the California Academy of Sciences.

March 31: Fly to San Diego.

April 1 – 4: University of California San Diego Dean’s Symposium on Evolutionary Biology.

April 5 – April 14: Fly to Darwin, Australia, which is named for Charles Darwin. Recover from the jet lag.

April 14 – April 21: Cairns, Australia. Since you’ve taken the trouble to travel this far, you might as well see the Great Barrier Reef (before it’s gone). Darwin wrote about the formation of coral reefs before he tackled natural selection.

Kangaroo Island koalas (courtesy of Flickr user `◄ccdoh1►)

April 22 – April 28: Visit Kangaroo Island. Marvel at the weirdness of evolution on the Australian continent.

April 29 – May 8: Visit friends in Sydney. Check out the Powerhouse Museum and the Australian Museum. Gaze at incredibly poisonous snakes safely behind glass at Sydney Wildlife World. (Why are there so many poisonous creatures on this continent? Spiders, snakes, jellyfish. Even some trees can cause a rash.)

May 9 – 11: Travel back to London.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Year of Darwin Ultimate Tour.

(Many thanks to Darwin Online for compiling the list that contained many of these events.)

The Wild Things column in the magazine is, by far, the most fun part to work on. The meetings in which we review potential papers and discuss what would make a good mix for the page often turns into half a dozen adults drowning in giggles. Read on and you’ll see what kept us laughing throughout the year.

After they emerge, larvae cause the dying caterpillar to swing its head violently and scare away predatory bugs. Courtesy of Prof. Jose Lino-Neto

January: Orcas working together to create waves that wash their prey–seals and penguins–off of ice floes

February: The Lily White flower has a set of roots just for digging

March: Hubble Space Telescope software adapted to identify whale sharks

April: A parasite makes the abdomen of its ant host look like a berry

May: The American alligator adjusts its lungs to maneuver

June: Whiskered auklets use feathers for feelers

July: Juvenile locusts have some cannibalistic tendencies

August: Zombie caterpillars

September: Lizards popping wheelies

October: Pen-tailed tree shrews drink alcohol but don’t appear to get drunk

November: Female fallow deer judge mates by their groans

December: Self-sacrificing ants

The waters around the Phoenix Islands Protected Area are home to yellow and blueback fusiliers; courtesy of Paul Nicklen / National Geographic Image Collection

The week before the new year is a time for reflection, right? And so I though I would share my favorite stories from the magazine. Through Smithsonian, we visited some strange creatures — cassowaries, hyenas — and some familiar ones, like giraffes. We traveled to one of the most remote and beautiful places in the world (a marine reserve in Kiribati) and gazed upon the unseeable (the black hole at the center of the Milky Way). We discovered that the coldest place in the universe is a tiny spot in a lab in Massachussetts (who knew?) and learned how to make a diamond. And we traced the paths of our ancestors as they colonized the planet.

What’s in store for 2009? You’ll just have to wait and see.

My favorite science stories of 2008:

8. Things Are Looking Up for Niger’s Wild Giraffes: In desolate Niger, wild giraffes are making a comeback despite having to compete for resources with some of the world’s poorest people.

7. Diamonds on Demand: Lab-grown gemstones are now practically indistinguishable from mined diamonds. Scientists and engineers see a world of possibilities; jewelers are less enthusiastic.

6. Victory at Sea: The world’s largest protected area, established this year in the remote Pacific, points the way to restoring marine ecosystems.

5. The Coldest Place in the Universe: Physicists in Massachusetts come to grips with the lowest possible temperature: absolute zero.

4. Invasion of the Cassowaries: Passions run high in an Australian town: Should the endangered birds be feared–or fed?

3. Who’s Laughing Now?: Long maligned as nasty scavengers, hyenas turn out to be protective parents and accomplished hunters. And new research is revealing that their social status may even be determined in the womb.

2. The Great Human Migration: Why humans left their African homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize the world.

1. Homing in on Black Holes: To gain insight into the most mysterious objects in the universe, astronomers shine a light at the chaotic core of our own Milky Way.

Christmas Tree Cluster, courtesy of ESO

If it is clear out tonight, grab your binoculars or a telescope and look up at the constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn. There you will find NGC 2264, a region of space that includes the Christmas Tree Cluster, named for its triangular shape (upside-down here) and sparkly blue stars. Astronomer William Herschel first noticed the cluster January 18, 1784, and he catalogued the Cone Nebula—the triangular feature at the bottom—on December 26, 1785.

This photo was created from images taken at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Happy Holidays!

Attercopus fimbriunguis, courtesy of the University of Kansas

The oldest fossil spider was thought to be Attercopus fimbriunguis, which lived around 386 million years ago. But the scientists who discovered that fossil 20 years ago have found a few more in recent years and have now rethought their original conclusion. What they really found, they report this week in PNAS, was a proto-spider.

These proto-spiders didn’t have spinnerets, which modern spiders use to spin silk and weave a web, the researchers realized. Instead, the proto-spider could weave sheets of silk from modified hairs called spigots that sat on plates attached to its underside. The proto-spider also had a tail.

Though the proto-spider could produce silk, the researchers don’t think it could spin a web; the spigots weren’t flexible enough for this. Instead, they envision the creature using the silk to line burrows or maybe subdue prey. “We knew that it wasn’t used for making webs initially, for catching insects, because there were no flying insects when the earliest spiders were around,” the study’s lead author, University of Kansas paleontologist Paul Seldon, told BBC News.

So when did the earliest true spider live? They show up in the fossil record about 80 million years after the proto-spiders. And the two apparently co-existed for another 100 million years before proto-spiders went extinct.

Rubber ducks, courtesy of Flickr user Gaetan Lee

Missing: 90 yellow rubber duckies dropped into a moulin (a tubular hole) in a melting Greenland glacier approximately three months ago.

Identifying features: They have “science experiment,” “reward” and the email address of project scientist Alberto Behar of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory written on them in three languages, including Inuit.

Reward: $100 to the first person who finds a duck.

The bathtub toys were supposed to float along the paths of the melting water under the Jakobshavn Glacier where they were released along with a GPS ice-tracking system (also missing, presumed stuck in the ice). The data from the probe and the locations of the toys’ exit would help scientists better understand what is going on underneath the ice. The Jakobshavn Glacier holds particular interest because nearly 7 percent of the ice coming off Greenland (including, possibly, the iceberg that sank the Titanic) originates with that glacier. (The melting of the Greenland glaciers is a concern because if they all melted, sea level would rise by 23 feet.)

Rubber duckies may seem like an odd choice for studying water movement, but there is a precedent. For years, oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer has been tracking the landings of thousands of rubber ducks and other bath toys were swept overboard and lost in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1992 to trace the motion of that ocean’s subtropical and subpolar gyres.

The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) from Doctor Who, courtesy of Flickr user aussiegal

We have gotten conflicting information during this holiday season on clean coal—that mythic technology that would let us burn all the coal we want without any pollution or carbon emissions. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity created the Clean Coal Carolers, lumps of coal that sing of “Frosty the Coalman” who is “getting cleaner every day,” is “affordable and adorable” and “helps our economy roll.” On the also dramatized but more realistic flip side, you might have seen the television commercial from a group of environmental organizations that takes you on a tour of a state-of-the-art clean coal facility—an empty field.

But if clean coal did exist, would it be a good idea? I would argue “No,” and my support comes from an unlikely place—Doctor Who.

In one episode, “The Sontaran Strategem,” from Season 4, the Doctor returns to earth to investigate a device called ATMOS that has been fitted to nearly every car on the planet. ATMOS was a dreamed-of technology that removed the carbon from the cars’ emissions (and came with a free sat-nav system), but the Doctor noted one small problem: “ATMOS means more people driving, more cars, more petrol. End result: the oil’s going to run out faster than ever. The ATMOS system could make things worse.”

Clean coal technology has a similar problem—even if you’re not emitting any carbon or other pollution, and even if you can mine it without destroying mountains and rivers, coal (or any other fossil fuel) cannot be a long-term energy solution because the resource is finite. There is only so much coal, natural gas and oil in the earth, and once it is gone, you can bid farewell to our fossil fueled lifestyle.

(At least we won’t have to deal with alien stratagems to use clean coal technology to conceal their attempt to convert the earth into a breeding planet for their clone race, as with ATMOS in the Doctor Who episode. Or so I hope.)

Jupiter and Ganymede, courtesy of NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)

How far we have come from 1609, when Galileo Galilei first aimed his telescope towards the little twinkly dots in the sky and saw stars and planets. Turning his sights on Jupiter in 1610, he noticed that some stars near the planet disappeared over the following nights—he had discovered some of the Jovian moons.

But Galileo never saw Jupiter and its largest moon, Ganymede, as clearly as in this photo, a composite of three images from the Hubble Space Telescope. (The planet’s Great Red Spot wouldn’t even start storming for another 100 years after Galileo viewed the swirling Jovian atmosphere.)

Galileo noticed the moons because they disappeared over days. What would he have thought of this video that shows Ganymede moving behind Jupiter in just two hours?

Video courtesy of NASA, ESA, E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona), and G. Bacon (STScI)