Wonders of science

Those of you in the Bay Area, Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and one of the most vivid minds on Earth will be giving talks in San Francisco (at the Long Now idea hutch) and in Palo Alto in mid January.

Have you been following the tale of the tiny Chinese spy chips that were inveigled into countless electronic devices then sold to the West?  Fascinating story. Great line: "Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not."  (LATE NOTE: Some have cast this story in doubt.)

Of course, aside from some areas in which they are not behaving helpfully to the human enlightenment, there are many more worth cheering! The successful Chang'e-4 mission to the far side/polar region of the moon is cause for celebration by all humankind, and I hope they will prove me wrong about the value of the lunar surface (compared to asteroids.) Alas, the Jade Rabbit rover is solar powered and hence cannot take its assay radar into the permanent shadows where deposits of ice may lurk!

Which leads us to... a science fictional future? China wants to launch satellites to reflect sunlight to Chinese cities at night.

One more reason why SF readers need to help launch TASAT, the memory project about sci fi concepts that might be pertinent to contemporary problems. 

Meanwhile - China won't share samples of its deadly flu virus: "Given that this (Chinese H7N9) flu virus is a potential threat to humanity, not sharing it immediately with the global network of WHO laboratories, like CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], is scandalous."

== Good Stuff ==

 A long floating boom is being towed from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised $35 million in donations to fund the project, including from Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, will deploy 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020. “One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.” (Alas, more recent news suggests part of the system may have broken. The ocean is tough.)

Scientists have used CRISPR to reverse the gene defect causing Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in dogs. DMD is the most common fatal genetic disease in children. 

SapientX makes conversational AI software for the auto industry. Their digital assistants can control primary functions in a car via a conversational voice interface. You can nag your car and become the worst front seat backseat driver!

The arrival of cheap, reliable zinc-air batteries for electrical storage could be a major game changer. 

The breach of coal ash ponds in the hurricane ravaged Carolinas has revived criticism of the Trump administration’s efforts to loosen restrictions on how power plants dispose of the toxic waste. 

A NASA balloon mission has revealed a band of clouds known as PMCs. These “polar meospheric clouds” are thin and wispy, but they might hold clues that could reveal the mechanisms that control turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere. The video offered by this site is truly incredible!  Both gorgeous and explanatory. And it’s not only far-off planetary missions that show how cool we are!

== A sci-roundup ==

“A new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content.”…. “Scientists have found that many of the 4000 confirmed or candidate exoplanets discovered so far fall into two size categories: those with the planetary radius averaging around 1.5 that of the Earth, and those averaging around 2.5 times the radius of the Earth.”

Now a new model indicates that those exoplanets which have of around 1.5 Earth radii tend to be rocky planets (of typically x5 the mass of the Earth), “while those with a radius of x2.5 Earth radius (with a mass around x10 that of the Earth) are probably water worlds…” …but with very hot, steamy atmospheres. It’s unclear whether organic chemistry would work well in such steamy hothouses.  Read more at Physics.org.

Huzzah for Japan’s Hyabusa 2 mission!  Carefully calibrated approach to the Ryugu asteroid, deployment of two small landers that have already hopped to new positions, gathering data. Let’s do this 100x more times!

Anyone seeking to understand the brilliant, early conceptualists who foresaw some of our era’s wonders should be familiar with names like J.D. Bernal and John Von Neumann and Alan Turing. And especially Vannevar Bush, whose essay “As we may think” shortly after WWII squinted at a future when all people might have access to most of the world’s information. Now a group has brought Bush’s proposed “Memex” system to life and the video is very interesting. Though it would have been good to have it explained that the sound effects were meant to mimic what Bush expected, which was remotely-physically accessing microfilms and mico-fiches.

Amazing BlackFly personal aircraft… though I had a hoax-tickle at the back of my scalp, there’s nothing on Snopes.  Yeah, amazing, though I expect drone grabbers to pick up pods as a more likely final thing. That's what Volkswagen is betting on.

Ion Drive. No, Scotty it’s already a workhorse, out in space. But for flight on Earth? Well, MIT researchers made a drone that manage - barely - to stay aloft using “ion wind”. Which means zero moving parts. 

== Evolution of life ==

Interesting! Dinosaurs evolved during, or immediately before the Late Triassic oxygen low (between 10 to 12%, equivalent to an altitude of 15,000 feet), a time when oxygen was at its lowest value of the last 500 million years. 

There appears to be strong evidence that parasites can sometimes turn “commensal” or beneficial to their victims, as discussed in Heart of the Comet many years ago.

My old Caltech classmate Joe Kirschvink, who has innovated and investigated more varied aspects of life on Earth than anyone I know, has teamed up with RARE EARTH author Peter Ward in A NEW HISTORY OF LIFE, a bold look at recent, radical discoveries that are rewriting some of the known chapters. Joe is the fellow who discovered that there were several “iceball Earth” episodes, just before the spectacular pre-Cambrian explosion of complex living species. He’s also an expert on magnetism in bird and other brains(!) And in one chapter he goes on about how crude mammals are, when it comes to lungs and breathing.  

“The history of animal life on Earth repeatedly showed a correlation between atmospheric oxygen and animal diversity as well as body size: times of low oxygen saw, on average, lower diversity and smaller body sizes than times with higher oxygen. … Low oxygen times killed off species (while at the same time stimulating experimentation with new body plans to deal with the bad times.”  Also – “ in mid-Cretaceous times the appearance of angiosperms caused a floral revolution, and by the end of the Cretaceous period the flowering plants had largely displaced the conifers that had been the Jurassic dominants.  The rise of angiosperms created more plants, and sparked an insect diversification.  More resources were available in all ecosystems, and this may have been a trigger for diversity as well.  Yet the relationship between oxygen and diversity, and oxygen and body size has played out over and over in many different groups of animals, from insects to fish to reptiles to mammals.  … With a bipedal stance the first dinosaurs overcame the respiratory limitations imposed by Carrier’s Constraint.  The Triassic oxygen low thus triggered the origin of dinosaurs through formation of this new body plan.”

Wow. He goes on to explain that birds supplement lungs with a “plenum” air-sac network that is rooted in their hollow bones (it’s not just for lightness!) allowing them to do efficient “flow-through” breathing. Which I referred to in a couple of my older stories. Now if only we could retrofit innovations from other species! Those dino-bird lungs. Camel kidneys. A bear’s ability to hibernate. Cancer-proofing in mole-rats. The muscle attachment points that make chimps so strong… and so on.  I’d be willing to pay them back with a little brain uplift. Well… except for bears.

== Horizons of Inclusion ==

In an earlier posting, I discussed how one of our society’s biggest projects has been to expand our “horizons of inclusion,” by not only giving full respect to previously excluded human groups, but also expanding this via “otherness” to higher animal species, or AIs, or even ecosystems.  Yet, there is argument within the community seeking such expansion/inclusion! I portray Earth’s councils expanded to include apes and cetaceans, but there are activists who despise this concept, because of the “meddling and pain” it would take, to get there. (I, in turn, assert that they may yet turn out to be seen as the selfish ones refusing to lend a hand, seeking to keep a paternalistic humanity on top, forever.)

These aren’t the only factions!  In a variant on my argument re: "horizons" inclusion of animal species in our concept of "us." Kevin Esvelt  of the MIT Media Lab has yet a third approach. Instead of just saving ecosystems and leaving other species to fight-flee-die in the natural Circle of Life, he observes that life for most wild animals is filled with paranoia, fear and pain, even in a healthy ecosystem. Moreover, millions of animals would not get to exist, if we stopped raising many myriads of them for our use (an argument also made by Temple Grandin.) 

Hence, what Esvelt wants is for us to intervene!  Not my approach -- to daintily uplift a few sub-species to join us as fellow sapients -- but rather, his would act across the whole range of animal life to reduce pain!  To replace death-fear and agony as much as possible. To maximize "hedonic value" across the whole animal kingdom.

Yipe!  What a hubristic ambition!  I've only seen it portrayed once in sci fi, in the very last story of Clifford Simak's compilation epic entitled CITY. 

And finally....

A San Diego gallery was charged with selling over a million dollars worth of illicit ivory objects, reminiscent of that scene in EARTH.

If ice ages return, the Dogger Banks between England and Denmark will rise again. Doggerland!

The online science podcast “Smarter Every Day” is pretty terrific. 

. . ...a collaborative contrarian product of David Brin, Enlightenment Civilization, obstinate human nature... and http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)