I’ve just done a slightly tongue in cheek post for the Bristolcon website. Behind it, however, is a very serious piece of physics. NASA scientists are actively considering the ideas of Professor Miguel Alcubierre for constructing a warp drive for faster-than-light travel. Alcubierre got his doctorate at the University of Wales in Cardiff, and therefore deserves a place in the annals of Welsh science fiction (rumors that he worked part-time helping to set up the Torchwood Institute while he was in Cardiff have been officially denied by the Welsh Parliament). However, Alcubierre is Mexican by birth, and as of this year he is back home heading up the the Nuclear Sciences Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. So, friends in San Antonio, how about talking to NASA and getting them to send you Alcubierre and one of their experts to talk about FTL drives?
Science
Gender: Stranger Than We Thought
Gender science is a complicated business. Quite aside from the difficulties of doing the job, you have to somehow steer a path between the idiot males who assume that any slight biological difference (such as having boobies) is scientific proof that all females are inferior to all males in every way, and the equally daft hardline feminists who refuse to countenance any biological difference whatsoever. Nevertheless, people still persist in trying to find ways in which male and female behavior might somehow be defined by biology. One of the reasons that they may not have got very far is that in many animals the source of difference may not be in the brain, but in the nose.
Yes, you read that right. Most vertebrates have a small sensory organ in the nose called the vomeronasal organ. Recent research in Harvard has discovered that, at least in mice, this organ controls gender-specific behavior. Remove that organ from an adult female mouse, and she’ll start adopting typical male gendered behavior, including becoming sexually aggressive and losing interest in child-rearing. Hormone levels in the female mice were unaffected.
Mice, of course, are not humans. To start with we, in common with our nearest primate relatives, do not have a vomeronasal organ. Also we have larger brains and complex social behaviors that all help complicate the issue of gender. Nevertheless, the discovery that an apparently unrelated organ can have such a dramatic effect on gendered behavior has thrown a huge spanner in the works of gender science. The more we find out, the more we discover that we don’t understand.
Here too is a question for those evolutionary biologists who love to concoct theories as to why arbitrary social codes are the result of evolutionary necessity. How come higher primates evolved to lose this organ which so successfully suppresses male-like behavior in females? Could it be that, for highly intelligent and social animals, having strong gendered behavioral differences proved a disadvantage?
(On second thoughts, don’t answer that. Quite enough nonsense gets talked under the banner of evolutionary biology already. Let’s not create more wild hypotheses.)
Mad Cosmology
It’s has been a while since the last “we’re all going to die” post, but this one is seriously cool. According to Nature, our galaxy is on a collision course with our nearest neighbor, Andromeda. Eventually the two galaxies will meet. Stars will smash into each other. The giant black holes at the center of each galaxy will duke it out for supremacy, one eventually eating the other. It will be awesome!
Um, except if you are caught in the middle of it. The astronomers who made this discovery have run simulations and they reckon that, as we are way out on the edge of our galaxy, we’ll probably be OK. They don’t say anything about the possibility of being bathed in vast fountains of gamma rays, though.
Still, the good news is that it won’t happen for 4 billion years. And long before that we may find that a trip to the nearest galaxy is no further than one to the other side of our own. How cool will that be?
Of course galaxies falling towards each other through gravitational attraction is not the norm for our universe. We know now that the universe is not only expanding, but that the rate of expansion is increasing. The latest Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to the guys whose observations proved that.
How that can be true, and what is means for cosmology, is explained in the following TED talk by Brian Greene. Along the way he gets into String Theory and explains how the ever-expanding universe might be proof that there are many others universes — not the classical multiverse produced by all probabilistic outcomes being true somewhere, but actual independent universes with their own separate big bangs.
The sad news is that we can’t see any of these other universes. Or at least, we won’t be able to unless our universe happens to accidentally collide with another one. Ooh, err…
SF at the Olympics
This article in today’s Observer annoys me in many ways. There’s the casual assumption that an intersex person who has been raised as a girl is “really” a man because some medical test says so. There’s the suggestion that Caster Semenya is only being allowed to compete (and rightly so in the eyes of the author) because she’s being forced to undergo some sort of treatment to render her less “male”. But eventually it goes way beyond this.
The main point that the author is making in this article is that some people have genetic advantages over others when it comes to sport, and that this is unfair and should not be allowed. At first sight that sounds crazy. Should we have labelled Joel Garner a “cheat” because he was taller than the average fast bowler? Then again, people have labelled Muralitharan a cheat because of his abnormal physiology.
The reason this is important, and relevant to science fiction, however, is that we are rapidly approaching the point where it will be possible to modify human embryos to add genes that are believed to lead to sporting success.
Sooner or later I’m sure there will be a version of athletics that is more akin to Formula 1, where success is very much a factor of how much effort and investment you put into the design of your equipment.
A Time Before Time
Flicking through the iPlayer catalog this morning I noticed an Horizon program I hadn’t seen before. It was apparently first broadcast in October 2010, but must have been repeated recently for it to show up again. It is called What Happened Before the Big Bang? and it deals with the current state of bleeding edge cosmological theory.
Cosmologists are understandably concerned about the Big Bang theory because it appears to create something from nothing, and this program checked in on a number of possible explanations as to how that might have come about. They include things like repeating cycles of expansion and collapse, and the idea that our universe was born inside a black hole in another universe. However, I want to talk about just one of the alternatives.
This particular theory was first published in 2006 by Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, an Albanian physicist currently working at the University of North Carolina. I’m not sure if it has a name, but it is mathematical treatment of string theory that views the universe as a wave form. The interesting thing about it is that it purports to explain some existing cosmological mysteries such as Dark Flow. Perhaps most excitingly for SF writers, Mersini-Houghton’s theory not only postulates the existence of multiple universes, but claims that we can actually see evidence of one.
I am, of course, in no way equipped to judge such theories, though I’m aware that string theory itself is still controversial. I am, however, rather pleased with the prospect that other universes might exist, and that they have been discovered by a woman physicist from Albania. If anyone reading this knows more about the subject, please do comment. I’m also hoping that if I type the magic words “Hannu Rajaniemi” loudly enough that an expert on string theory might drop by and explain things to me.
Dual Natures
Oh dear, I haven’t blogged all day, have I? Bad Cheryl.
More books tomorrow, but for now here’s something much more weird. In my Google Reader feeds today I found this post about a new type of experiment in quantum physics. One of the really odd things about quantum theory is that particles can behave as either waves or particles, which to our eyes is hugely inconsistent of them. The new experiment, if I understand it correctly, says that we are wrong, not the particles. That is, particles have a consistent nature but, due to our flawed understanding, or possibly perception, of the universe, we can only see them as having this odd dual nature.
Er, can someone who understands physics better than I do please check to see if I have understood this correctly?
And talking of dual natures, Demon Knights #4 is out. Paul Cornell has been trailing this as featuring the origin of the Shining Knight, and so it does, but we don’t really learn much. For those of you not following the book, the Shining Knight is a) Welsh and b) apparently trans or intersex. You can see why I am interested. DC and the other characters in the book consistently refer to the Knight as “she”, but the Knight is drawn fairly androgynously and rejects the female label. Well, in the new issue we find out how the Knight got super powers and a quest, but not much more than that. There’s one key panel in which Marlin says, “You interest me, young squire. You have two natures”. And that’s all we are getting, for now.
Wave/particle. Male/female. Maybe we are not just looking properly.
And if that hasn’t broken your brains, here’s Andrej Pejic being fabulous.
Ada Lovelace Day: Rachel Armstrong #ALD11
Today, as many of you will know, is Ada Lovelace Day: the day on which we are all encouraged to write about women working in science and technology. I have been rather busy of late, and haven’t managed to compose anything lengthy, so I’m going to be lazy. Here is Rachel Armstrong doing what she does best — talking about living architecture.
That was recorded in 2009. I first met Rachel when she talked about the Venice project at the Architectural Association last year. When I met her at the British Library last month she told me that the project is currently mired in Italian politics. Given the popular suspicion of “gray goo”, this is hardly surprising, but it is still a very cool SFnal idea.
The Origins of Original Sin
I’m now caught up on Horizon again. Yesterday’s episode was titled “Are You Good or Evil?” and looked at the psychology, neurology and genetics of evil. Here are a few highlights.
Contrary to what Christianity teaches, it seems that most children are born with an innate sense of empathy and morality. (I’m a bit dubious about this one, for the same reasons I’m dubious about psychological tests of gendered behaviour.)
There are clear diagnostic brain patterns that are indicative of psychopathic behaviour. Put someone under an MRI scanner and you can tell if they are a potential psychopath.
Psychopathic behaviour is also linked to a particular gene. Having the diagnostic brain pattern and the “warrior gene” is very bad news.
Even so, a happy childhood and moral upbringing can make a decent human out of someone with all of these diagnostic indicators. An abusive childhood coupled with the diagnostic indicators is likely to create a very dangerous individual. (Radical feminists please note: we have both nature and nurture at work here.)
Well adjusted psychopaths can find other outlets for their antisocial tendencies. The proportion of people with the diagnostic indicators is four times higher in the senior management of big corporations than it is in the general population as a whole.
It’s a shame that the programme couldn’t find anyone who had tested politicians. Psychopaths are characterized by a great deal of charisma and lack of moral compass, which sounds to me like an ideal combination for politics.
If you write horror fiction, I think you’ll get a lot of food for thought from this programme.
Getting Ready to Flip?
I’m a bit behind with Horizon as there’s a new episode showing right now, but today I got to watch the previous one, “The Core”. Once again I’m impressed.
The programme is all about the innards of the planet we call home. The center of the Earth is a lump of nickel-iron alloy almost as big as the Moon. But it is not a spherical lump of rock. Experiments putting the material under high temperature and pressure in a laboratory show that under those conditions it forms rod-like crystals. The Earth’s inner core, therefore, is a giant cluster of linear crystals. Some of the properties of the core are defined by its structure including, of course, its magnetic field. The north-south alignment follows the alignment of the crystals.
But things are not that simple. Surrounding the inner core is a sea of molten metal about the same diameter as Mars. Like all fluids, it is dynamic, and can be turbulent. The “weather” in this outer core affects how the magnetic field behaves.
We have known for a long time that the Earth’s magnetic field sometimes flips. What is now the north pole has spent time as magnetic south, and vice versa. These changes have happened as often as five times in a million years, but there hasn’t been one for almost 800,000 years. It looks like we may be due.
What geologists have discovered, however, is that the flip is not a sudden event. Indeed, there are parts of the outer core where the field is already reversed. One of the most notable is an area currently centered under Uruguay which causes the South Atlantic Anomaly. We don’t notice this much of the time because the magnetic field that we experience is the sum of the fields generated by all parts of the core. If you were to stand in Montevideo with a compass it would not point south. However, if you measured the strength of the field it would be a lot less than you would find at other points on the globe.
Where this can matter is out in space. The Earth’s magnetic field protects us from all of the charged particles thrown out by the sun. Where the field is weaker, the Van Allen Belts, where those particles are confined, are closer to the surface. That’s still a long way up, but the Hubble telescope has to switch off its instruments when it passes over the Anomaly because of the interference. Astronauts have been affected as well, though as yet none of them have become superheroes.
So, are we due for a flip? If so, how soon, and what will the effects be?
Of course we don’t know. This will be the first time that human civilization has experienced a flip. We do know, however, that the South Atlantic Anomaly has been getting more pronounced of late. We know that the overall strength of the magnetic field has been falling constantly since regular measurements began in the 19th Century. And archaeological evidence suggests that the field was twice as strong in Roman times as it is now.
The good news is that no major extinction events have been correlated with past flips. There may be particular problems for species that depend on the magnetic field for things such as navigation on migrations, but it seems like the field still protects us from most of what the sun throws at us, and life will continue to be possible during a flip.
What a flip will do to our increasingly electronics-based technology is another matter.
Those of you outside the UK who are blocked from using the iPlayer might like to investigate TunnelBear. I have not used it, but Neil Gaiman has been tweeting happily about it while he has been in the UK so it may work the other way around too.
Visions of the Future?
The British Library panel on Sunday was a strange beast, but full of interesting material all the same. I’m not entirely sure what it was supposed to be about, but the panellists managed to entertain us anyway.
On the panel were Neil Gaiman, who I guess is primarily considered a fantasy writer; Rachel Armstrong, who I last talked about here; Peter Hamilton, who mostly writes space opera; and Kari Sperring who has a PhD in Celtic history and writes fantasy but was also very useful for her knowledge of Hong Kong cinema. Farah Mendlesohn had the difficult job of forging a conversation between these people without much of a topic.
Neil started out by noting that the visions of the future that people his (and my) age had admired as a kid — those produced by Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein — had mostly not come to pass, whereas those of Ballard and Dick had. I’d add John Brunner to the list of startlingly prescient writers.
Rachel is a bundle of irrepressible fangirl squee when it comes to whiz new science, and what she’d love to get out of us science fiction types are lots of stories enthusing people about science and coming up with great new ideas for avenues of research. She has boundless confidence in The Future, which is kind of rare in the West these days.
The panel showed early signs of degenerating into an Us Against The Americans rant, but Neil, who lives in America and has an American wife, so like me has a much more nuanced view of Over There, started talking about China, and suddenly we had a topic.
You see, while we Westerners might be deeply disillusioned about science (as I said in a question towards the end, our prevailing narrative of science appears to have come more from Michael Crichton than any other SF writer), other countries are not. Neil noted that a couple of years ago he was invited to an SF convention in China that was sponsored by the Chinese government. The Chinese had got the idea that they needed innovation as well as manufacturing expertise, and they had noticed that young engineers in places like Silicon Valley were all science fiction readers. Consequently they decided that SF needed to be encouraged. Damien Walter writes more about this here.
China, of course, is by no means the only country with an economy on an upswing and the confident view of the future that SF feeds off. Places like India, Brazil and Nigeria are all looking to become economic powerhouses. This could make for some interesting and different science fiction. Kari mentioned Aliette de Bodard’s recent post on getting away from American cultural tropes. We could soon be seeing some very different futures.
China, however, is by far the biggest market, and also the least known in the English-speaking world. Frankly, they don’t need us. China’s biggest science fiction magazine, Science Fiction World, claims a print circulation of 300,000. There are other publishers as well. New Realms of Fantasy & Science Fiction is apparently one of the best new magazines and is available free as a PDF or EPUB. It is all in Chinese, but it looks fabulous.
Finding Chinese SF in English is rather more difficult, but we did publish a Chinese story in Clarkesworld last month. It is by Chen Qiufan, who uses the Anglicised name of Stanley Chan. I was delighted to see that he was one of the people following the live Hugo coverage that Kevin and Mur Lafferty hosted from Reno, and he works for Google, so he’s definitely “one of us”. The translation was by Ken Liu, who kindly helped me with some of the research for this post.
As you should all know, science fiction is not really about predicting the future. Mostly it is about looking at the present through the distorting lens of speculative fiction. Even when it does try to look forward, it can be nothing more than a thought experiment. But if we start seeing SF from all over the world we will get some very interesting experiments.
These won’t all agree on what sort of future we should be envisioning. While I was tweeting about the panel a link came through for this Guardian article about British scientists creating an “artificial volcano” to test out ideas for combating climate change. I showed it to Rachel afterwards, and she was all over it, but I can just imagine what a committed environmentalist like Mark Charan Newton would make of the idea. I suspect that the drive for bold technological solutions will come mainly from other, more confident cultures. Hopefully they will find our doom-saying a useful corrective to their more wild imaginings, and they will manage to forge forward in a more considered way than we did.
Building Better Babies
The new season of Horizon continues to provide lots of food for thought. This week’s episode, “The Nine Months That Made You”, looks at how the environment in the womb may affect the future lives of babies.
If you think about it, it is fairly obvious. We undergo far more “development” before we are born than afterwards. If we, as children and adults, are sensitive to diet and chemicals in the environment, how much more sensitive must we be as foetuses? It is certainly worth investigating.
The bulk of the program revolved around the idea that our susceptibility to things like heart disease and diabetes is a function of the quality of nutrition we get in the womb, as well as of diet and lifestyle after we are born. The statistical evidence presented seemed fairly convincing, and the doctors in India who worked on the project were convinced enough to launch a large-scale and long-term experiment in Mumbai to try to improve the health of the poor by improving the diet of young women.
This isn’t a simple process. It is not just a question of making sure that pregnant mothers get enough to eat. The levels of micro-nutrients such as vitamins are apparently crucial. Also it is a multi-generational project. Some of the factors involved may depend on whether certain genes are switched on in the mother’s eggs and, as women are born with a fully stocked ovaries, your ability to bear a healthy child may be in part dependent on the quality of diet your mother had when she was bearing you.
What interested me most, however, was when they went beyond health issues and started to look at personality. There was a nice experiment in which they showed that foetuses have clear personalities (something that most mothers know, but doctors need to prove), so the sort of person we become is not entirely down to our environment and upbringing.
Another experiment related the level of testosterone in the womb to the type of gendered behaviour shown by the resulting children. Girls exposed to higher levels of testosterone are apparently more likely to exhibit gendered behaviour that is generally associated with boys. I’m pretty sceptical of such experiments because they are often carried out by people with a poor understanding of gender, and with lots of cultural bias, but it does hold out the possibility of starting to understand the origins of transsexuality.
Talking of gender differences, I saw a report yesterday that purported to explain why women are much less fond of horror movies than men. Apparently women get much more stressed by the clues that something bad is about to happen. Again I am sceptical of such things. There may be a lot of cultural training and expectation involved here. All I can say is that I’m very female-typical here and always have been. My mum had to take me out of The Wizard of Oz when I first saw it because I found it too scary.
Of course I also view such things as a science fiction reader. If we can build better babies, how far will people take this? How much human variation do we want to “cure”? Whereas the treatments being given to poor women in Mumbai are cheap and simple, what procedures will be developed that only the rich can afford? Science, as always, is a double-edged sword.
One Culture
Here’s something interesting. The Royal Society is putting on a weekend festival of arts and science with the objective of promoting the idea that there is just one culture, not two. The dates are October 1st/2nd and the location is the Royal Society’s offices on The Mall in London. China Miéville and Ian Stewart are appearing on the Sunday. For further details see the festival website.
Optical Illusions
Judging from Twitter, most of my UK-based friends spent all of last night glued to the television news. Except, of course, for the idiots like me who spent it working. But today I caught up with some other TV, because there is a new series of the BBC’s science program, Horizon, just started, and the opening episode is well worth a dive into the iPlayer archives.
The program looks at the idea of color, how we perceive it, and what effect it has on us. Many of the findings may surprise you. For example, color influences not just our emotions, but also how awake we feel, and even our sense of the passage of time. Color perception is different for different people as well. For example, your ability to tell the difference between two colors depends heavily on how the language you speak divides up the spectrum into categories. That’s because as a child you learn to distinguish colors on the basis of the words you learn to describe them. And that’s fascinating because it means that our experience of art can be subjective on a very basic level.
Interestingly, our ability to perceive color is dependent on our expectations. So, for example, we will identify a banana as yellow under a range of different lighting conditions, but a patch of yellow paint has no such clues. That means that our brains are making up the color we see, based on their expectations of what we are looking at.
Color can also influence what we think we are seeing. In combat sports contestants are randomly allocated blue or red clothing. Experiments, including digitally altering the color of film, suggest that expert judges will tend to favor the contestant in red. Studies of sports at the Olympics suggest that in a close bout wearing red confers a significant advantage.
All of this is fascinating, but I can’t help but wonder if it is the tip of a very big iceberg. I have this sneaking suspicion that an awful lot of what we think that we see is influenced by our environment, and by our expectations of the things we are looking at.
For those of you who don’t have access to the iPlayer, there is an article about some of the issues raised during the program here.
Nature: Yet More Wild and Wonderful
Just when I think nature can’t surprise me any more, some new piece of information is discovered. This time it happens to involve gender science.
Whenever you see an article about gender surgery in a major online venue you can bet that someone will post a comment along the lines of, “changing sex is impossible, your sex is imprinted in your chromosomes, and they are in every cell of your body, nothing can alter that”, right?
Well wrong, because intersex people exist. Some of them have strange chromosome patterns, such as XXY, and some of them have perfectly standard chromosomes, but their bodies don’t match what you would expect from those chromosomes.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School and College of Biological Sciences have discovered a gene that, if removed, causes male cells to become female. And that’s in adult tissue. Specifically the experiments were done on mouse testes. Taking away the Dmrt1 causes the cells in the organs to turn into something that looks like ovary cells. And it doesn’t take too much extrapolation to suggest that an embryo born with XY chromosomes but no Dmrt1 gene will grow up with a female body.
Talking of intersex people, many of you will have seen newspaper stories over the past few weeks about hundreds of parents in India having their girl children surgically altered to “become boys”. The papers loved the story, because it gave them an opportunity to be morally superior to brown people and trans people at the same time. But was it true? Mercedes Allen, one of the best trans activist bloggers around, decided to try to find out. You can read her report here.
For those of you not willing to click though, the short version is that most of these operations appear to have been carried out on intersex children. There are well over a billion people in India, so the existence of a few hundred intersex babies is only to be expected. Similar things happen in North America and Europe too. Doctors and parents all over the world want to “fix” intersex people.
Unfortunately, as Mercedes points out, this is a dangerous practice, because the surgery is often done long before the child is able to express a gender identity, and there is therefore a big risk of creating a transsexual child — that is, someone whose gender identity does not match the gender to which that person is being expected to conform. Annabel, by Kathleen Winter, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, tells the story of such a tragedy. It is on my “to read” pile.
New Fundamental Particle Found
No, not the Higgs Boson yet, but another one of the holes in the family of particles predicted by the Standard Model has been observed. Fermilab has confirmed sighting of the neutral Xi-sub-b particle, made up of three quarks: strange, up and bottom. No jokes, please.
Music Of The Spheres
Dear me, a music review. Whatever next?
Normally, of course, I don’t get asked to do such things, especially for classical music. I mean, what do I know? But this is a little different.
Back in 2009, Arthur B. Rubinstein and the Symphony In The Glen orchestra played a special concert at the Griffith Observatory near Los Angeles. The event was organized by the Friends of the Observatory, a non-profit support group, whose motto is, “Inspiring the Future, One Imagination at a Time”. They sound like our sort of people, right?
Since then Rubenstein and his team have been busy creating a version of the concert in studio conditions, and the resulting CD is now available from Intrada Records. I got sent a copy. Here’s my take.
The concert opens with a fanfare — the Toccata from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. It is a lovely, stirring piece. Researching the music, I discovered that it sounds quite different played on period instruments (Wikipedia has a recording), but I must say that I like the drum-based arrangement that Rubenstein has produced (though I’m happy to be corrected by CN Lester who knows far more about Baroque Opera than I ever will).
Why this piece? Well the concert follows the developing relationship between mankind and the heavens. Monteverdi wrote the opera at around the same time that Galileo invented the telescope. There’s a theme.
Next up we have a selection of music from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera, Castor et Pollux. We are now firmly in the stars, as these are the famous twins supposedly immortalized as Gemini. It is 18th Century music, which often sounds stiff and formal to me, though I acknowledge the mathematical beauty of much of what was done at the time.
Arriving in the 19th Century, we have another French composer, Henri Duparc. “Aux étoiles” (“To the Stars”). This is the 1911 orchestral work, apparently composed as an intermission piece (entr’acte) for a dramatic work that was never performed. It is a beautifully romantic piece, and well worth its inclusion despite being apparently quite obscure.
My favorite selection is the representative from the 20th Century. Yet again the composer is French. Darius Milhaud’s La création du monde is a short (20 minute) ballet which I’m sure at the time drew comparisons with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, if only because of the equally outraged reception it received when first performed. It is heavily based on African folk tales (I’m guessing West African given the French connection). The ballet itself is rarely performed these days, but the music is quite popular and was recently featured by the San Francisco Symphony.
The African connection doesn’t end with the plot of the ballet. Milhaud wrote the music after returning from a trip to the USA where he was inspired by what he heard in New Orleans. If you are a lover of Gershwin, which I am, you will find several familiar themes in the music. But La création du monde premiered the year before Rhapsody in Blue. The works were both inspired by the music being played by jazz musicians at the time they were composed.
Dave Brubeck, who studied under Milhaud in Paris for a while, said:
Milhaud’s Création du Monde was the first and remains the best jazz piece from a classical European composer.
And who am I to argue with that.
Those pieces take up the first half of the performance. The rest is given over to a new work composed by Rubinstein especially for the concert. It is called “Observations”, and it follows the theme of the collection. There are two versions: the second is purely orchestral, but the first includes a narration by Leonard Nimoy that tells the story of mankind and the stars. I suspect that the anthropology of what Nimoy says early on wouldn’t stand up long under examination, but he has a wonderful voice and very professional delivery. It is a pleasure to listen to him.
“Observations” itself is designed to be the background to the narration, so it doesn’t work all that well alone, but it is interesting to be able to listen to it on its own. I’m sure that people who are more into the music than cosmology will appreciate the opportunity.
The album itself has no direct financial connection with the Observatory — that was just for the concert. However, purchase of the album does help support the free concerts that Symphony in the Glen puts on in Los Angeles, which is a wonderful thing.
Every so often someone will complain about the “silly name” of Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form, which “everyone knows” is “Best Movie”. Well, no. The Hugo category exists to reward any sort of dramatic presentation, and albums that are of interest to science fiction fans definitely come under that description. This one isn’t so much about fiction, but it is very much aimed at people like us. I suspect that many of you will enjoy it.
(By the way, if you do want to nominate it next year, you’ll need to get an exception for limited distribution granted in Reno, because the concert counts as first publication.)
Dinosaur Blood – Proof At Last?
First we thought that dinosaurs were cold-blooded, just like modern-day lizards. Then we thought that they might be warm-blooded. Then we realized that, short of cloning one, it was impossible to prove it one way or another. Or is it?
A team of researchers at Caltech have come up with a cunning technique that involves measuring concentrations of carbon and oxygen isotope in sauropod teeth. In an article in the latest issue of Science they report measurements for Brachiosaurus and Camarasaurus, revealing that the giant beasts had blood temperatures in the range 36° – 38°C.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it), this hasn’t solved the mystery. You see, the bigger and animal is, the hotter it gets. Elephants have warmer blood than we do (which I guess may explain why they are no longer hairy). Calculations for sauropods suggest that their blood should be up around 40° – 45°C, which would cook their innards. So clearly they had some means of keeping cool. Or maybe they kept their blood warm in a different way than we do. It is all, still, very mysterious.
Scots Can Read Your Mind
Well, a few clever people at the University of Glasgow can, though they can’t do it very well and they may not be Scots, but why should that get in the way of a good headline?
Anyway, the point is that these clever folks at the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology are starting to decode the various brainwave patterns associated with different activities of the brain. Specifically they can now tell, from looking at your brainwaves, whether a face you are looking at is showing particular emotions such as happiness, fear and surprise. That may not be hugely useful right now, but it is an early small step on a long and interesting road. Details here.
Of course such scientific advances are of minor interest compared to the massive breakthrough of brainwave controlled cat ears.
From Beyond the Dawn of Time
This is something I have been meaning to mention for a week or two, and was reminded about by Neil’s Doctor Who episode, in which our heroes travel to a destination outside of our universe. That’s using a time machine to travel outside space-time, which is an interesting idea, but apparently not impossible.
How do I know this? Because of this story that suggests that so-called “primordial” black holes may date from before the Big Bang. The supposition is that instead of the universe collapsing into a singularity (the Big Crunch) and then expanding again (the Big Bang), the actual collapse wasn’t quite as neat, and some small black holes were never fully eaten.
These primordial black holes are apparently very small. So small, in fact, that they may be unable to eat other matter. According to this paper, a black hole with a mass of less than 1012 kg is unable to feed.
And here’s where it gets very interesting. If these things have been around since the Big Bang then they are probably evenly distributed throughout the universe. And if there are enough of them then they could be a very good candidate for an explanation for Dark Matter. Cool.
It wouldn’t be a proper science post, however, without some element of “we’re all going to die!”, so here’s the latest thing to be scared of. The universe, including our little corner of it, is full of mini black holes. Because they can’t feed, these mini black holes pass through our planet without us noticing them. And we know where they came from. So…
The Earth is being bombarded with Black Holes from Beyond the Dawn of Time!
How cool is that?
Solstice in the Arctic
A couple of days late, but I have been pointed at this lovely time-lapse photo of the sun’s track across the sky during the Winter Solstice in Fairbanks, Alaska. The photo came from ScienceBlogs, and there are several other beautiful time-lapse pictures in the post. Thanks to my pal Otto for alerting me to it.
You can see why people might have been worried about the sun not coming back.