Scientists may have found the world’s oldest intact rocks in a 10-square-kilometer patch of bedrock on the eastern shore of
Geochemical analyses of the
Thursday, September 25, 2008
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SciNoFi Blog Roundup - Fringe Edition
To paraphrase the Hold Steady, we like to stay positive. At Science Not Fiction, staying positive means that we don’t debunk (or nerdgas.) If the sonic screwdriver solves the problem, then by all means whip it out.
That being said, this show Fringe is seriously stretching us to the limit.
Fringe Gets Fast Aging and Frozen Optics Wrong [Popular Mechanics]
Fringe “violates basic tenets of biology, chemistry and physics without any explanation.” [Polite Dissent]
Now that we’ve gotten that off our chest, here are few other links to help lighten the mood:
You say Obama? I say Adama for President. [LA Times]
H.P Lovecraft as the Whitman’s Sampler copy writer [McSweeney’s]
Eureka: Out With A Bang
Last night’s midseason finale of Eureka tied up a number of loose ends, and set up a number of new plot points for the second half of the third season, set to air sometime in 2009. (Incidentally, last minute struggles with the script for this episode were responsible for Eureka co-creater Jamie Paglia having to sprint through the San Diego Convention Center to make it on time to DISCOVER’s Comic-Con panel on the Science Behind Science Fiction.) One of the things that Sheriff Carter finds himself contending with is a “nanoparticle syntactic foam” that goes from foam to something harder than concrete in a few seconds—the ideal substance for sealing off the abandoned underground facility that has been featured throughout the season, but not something you’d want to spill on yourself.
Terminator: At Least Cyborgs Enunciate
Ever since the first Terminator movie in 1984, Terminator cyborgs have had the ability to duplicate the voice of any given human they hear, an ability deployed again in last night episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, when our plucky band of heroes has its cell phones intercepted. It’s not so far fetched — pretty much this exact scenario has been worrying real security researchers for some time.
Artificial Blood: Coming To A Hospital Near You?
The theme of HBO’s new series, TrueBlood, is based on a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood. The breakthrough allows vampires to “come out of the coffin” and progress from freakish villains to fellow citizens. (Just stop into a local TrueBlood bank for a snack, and humans are off the menu.)
5 Greatest Space Operas (And No, Foundation Isn’t One Of Them)
Space Opera is one of my favorite sub-genres of science fiction, and in recent years has gained a new lease of life (I recommend reading The New Space Opera anthology for good snapshot of the current state of affairs). Like all definitions, saying what exactly is and isn’t space opera can be a highly subjective exercise, but for me, works of space opera all try for a certain grand sweep: the canvas is broad, often involving a good chunk of at least one galaxy. The themes are big–space opera is where entire space-faring civilizations can collide–and awesome technologies are frequently brought into play.
Dreaming of Carnivorous Plants and Life-Saving Bacteria
The sci-fi blog io9 recently announced the winners of their Mad Science Contest, in which they invited their readers to dream up useful or just really sweet ways to use synthetic biology. The two winners were:
Vijaykumar Meli, who laid out a plan for a bacterium that would improve the nitrogen fixation of rice plants, thereby decreasing pollution from fertilizer run-off and improving yield, which could save plenty of lives in the developing world. Meli says the technique could be accomplished using current technology, including parts from the BioBricks collection of standard biological parts.
Elliott Gresswell, who stumbled upon the fictitious lab notebooks of researchers who inadvertently create walking, nanotech-caused-gray-goo-living carnivorous trees, illustrated here by comic book artist Kevin O’Neill. (These fantastic monsters wouldn’t be too out of place with the space-faring fungus hats that Jaron Lanier has imagined in synthetic biology’s future.)
Hats off to the winners. (In Gresswell’s case, perhaps that would be, “Heads off”…)
Eureka: The Death of Stars
On Tuesday’s nights Eureka, a miniature sun was accidently born in the skies above the town, wreaking destruction. The solution? To shoot iron into the sunlet’s core.
This is in fact not far off how some real stars die: iron poisoning. Read the rest of this entry »
Fringe: The Ultimate Test Tube Baby
Fringe, J.J. Abrams’ (of Lost and Alias fame) latest show, last night featured the unintended fall out from an attempt to grow humans in tanks. Since the goal of the original attempt was to produce fully grown soldiers, bypassing the normal wait time of 9 months plus 18 years, some liberties were taken with growth hormones in order to accelerate aging. Thus fall out, such as a baby that goes from conception to death of old age within a few hours.
Growing human beings outside the confines of a real uterus–ectogenesis–has been a staple of science-fiction since at least Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World: it was a critical element in The Matrix, and even featured in a recent Doctor Who episode. It’s also been a staple of real science for some time: in 1996, Japanese researchers were able to keep goat fetuses alive and developing for 3 weeks in their artificial womb. In 2002, researchers at Cornell were able to keep human embryos alive and developing for several days, after which the experiments were terminated to stay within embryonic research ethics rules.
This real research is driven by the desire to help childless people, or dangerously premature babies, and not, say, a hankering for a super-soldier production line. But if the day comes when we can produce a child with just a smear of genetic material and a machine, then we will have to do some deep thinking. On the one hand, this kind of technology could allow us to colonize distant star systems (instead of trying to keep humans alive for hundreds of years of interstellar travel, send a robot and some DNA), while on the other it could lead to the creation of an entirely new underclass of humanity, a la the “tanks” of Space: Above and Beyond.
Terminator: Better Pool Hustling Through Technology
In last night’s episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron accepts the invitation (and wager) of a couple of security guards to play a game of pool. Having gotten close enough to scan their security badges, Cameron then proceeds to smoke them at the game, thanks to a little known pool mode in her Point-Of-View display, which, thus far, has tended to show more in the way of helpful information about the caliber of weapon she is using or instructions like TERMINATE.
In the real world, enter Deep Green. Read the rest of this entry »
Stargate Atlantis: Gene Therapy
On Friday night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, one of the characters had to go undercover in order to convince a faction of the show’s resident villians, the Wraith, to accept a gene therapy. The therapy would eliminate the Wraith’s need to feed on human beings, something which has become a bone of contention between the Wraith and other residents of their galaxy.
Gene therapy works by rewriting a patient’s genetic code, an impossibility with conventional medicines, and could be used to combat diseases such as hemophilia, Parkinsons, and cancer. It’s a beautifully simple idea in concept, but the real world scientists that are working to make it a common-place reality are finding the execution to be a tough problem.
Anathem Review
Okay, here’s the one thing that some fans of Neal Stephenson will want to know: yes, it has a ‘proper’ ending. (Although Stephenson defends his authorial choices vigorously, a criticism leveled at some of his books by some readers is that they don’t end, so much as just stop.) While there are still some interesting questions left by the end of Anathem, the characters do see resolution to their stories. (Also, the hockey jerseys now make perfect sense.)
So, that settled, what’s the beginning and middle of the book like? Awesome. Despite its length at 960 pages, the fast pacing of the book is reminiscent of Stephenson’s earlier, shorter, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. However, he also takes the time and room to delve into subjects ranging from orbital mechanics to Plato’s Theory of Forms. The book revolves around the adventures of a young scholar called Erasmas, who has lived most of his life within the confines of a millennia-old order mostly devoted to theoretical research. When an enigmatic and unexpected arrival settles into orbit around his world, Erasmas’ life is turned upside down.
The book’s release is well timed, coinciding with the activation of the big daddy of particle accelerators, the Large Hadron Collider. The Large Hadron Collider is part of a quest to understand just how arbitrary are the laws of physics–a question that becomes significant within Anathem.
Stargate: Moving on From Atlantis
Stargate Solutions interviewed Joe Mallozzi, showrunner for the recently cancelled Stargate Atlantis, where he talks about the reaction of the cast to the news and his thoughts on the plans to continue the Stargate franchise.
Eureka: The Fine Art of Dumpster Diving
Last night on Eureka, Sherriff Carter was faced with a bumbling superhero who had constructed his gear from discarded pieces of technology thrown out by the town’s scientists. In this, our wannabe superhero was participating in the ultimate expression of the fine old art of dumpster diving.
Terminator: DIY Tech Support
The new season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles kicked off into high gear last night, promising some great TV to come. The episode picked up seconds after the last season left off, when Cameron–a terminator reprogrammed and sent back from the future to protect John Connor, leader-of-the-human-race-in-waiting–became the victim of a car bomb.
A damaged Cameron finds herself in need of some significant hardware and software repairs: unfortunately, it’ll be years before any terminator technical support facilities are built. Cameron must fix herself. In the real world, it’s exactly this problem that researchers are actively struggling with–how to create computers that can realize they’re malfunctioning and restore themselves to working order.
Dear Russell Davies: Our Plan to Fix Torchwood
The release of the Torchwood Series 2 DVD gave us the opportunity to watch (in some cases watch for the first time) every episode of the second season.
And the verdict? In the immortal words of Ed Grimley, “totally decent, I must say.” John Barrowman still rocks.
With that out of the way, I’ll add that the show is also showing troubling signs of flaming out after the upcoming mini-series। Series Two had at least one genuinely terrible episode (”From Out of the Rain”) and a few marginal ones (”Something Borrowed,” “To The Last Man”). http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
Unlike Doctor Who, Torchwood doesn’t have a multi-decade reserve of goodwill and nostalgia to fall back on। Unlike Buffy, Captain Jack isn’t a teenager whose adolescent angst can be mined for a season’s worth of new story arcs. http://louisejesheehan.blogspot.com
Here are five things we’d like to see more (and less) of in the Series 3 mini-series that would improve the prospects for the show to live on.
Friday, September 19, 2008
exposed
Lost in The Snow
Former Olympic hockey player Eric LeMarque was snowboarding alone in the Sierra Nevada in 2003 when thick fog settled around him, limiting his vision to 10 feet. Soon he was lost in the snowy wilderness with no food and a dead cell phone. He wandered through 15-foot snowdrifts in freezing temperatures for seven days before National Guard searchers found him.
When exposed to bitter cold, your body shivers, and this involuntary movement creates heat the same way exercise does. If you stay in the cold and your body temperature continues to drop, shivering will stop when the muscles no longer have enough energy to move, says David Richard, a professor of biology at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. He teaches the course “Exercise and Extreme Physiology” and is an authority on the processes that sustain life under extreme conditions—and on what happens when the human body is exposed to more than it can withstand.
After prolonged exposure to intense cold, Richard says, your body’s chemical reactions begin to slow until they generate too little energy for your muscles to work. By carefully regulating blood flow, your body will protect your key organs while preserving your extremities—at least for a while. In the cold, blood is generally directed to the core of the body and flows only intermittently to the extremities to bring oxygen to cells there. After prolonged exposure to cold, blood travels only to the most essential parts—your brain and heart. As severe hypothermia sets in, these organs may be the only ones left functioning.
In a 2000 paper in The Lancet, a team of Norwegian doctors described resuscitating a woman who had been trapped in icy water for 40 minutes and whose core temperature had dropped to 57 degrees. This is very unusual; most people do not survive a core temperature below 70 degrees, Richard says. Still, upon finding a victim, rescue workers make no assumptions (“They’re not dead until they’re warm and dead,” the saying goes.) You may be breathing so imperceptibly that you look dead, but you might survive if an alert emergency worker warms and resuscitates you.
Frostbite occurs when the temperature in your tissues falls to one or two degrees below freezing. As the water in your tissues turns to ice, salts in body fluids and cells become more concentrated, interfering with proteins so much that the cells die. At the same time, the sharp edges of microscopic ice crystals can tear cell membranes. Don’t rub your frostbitten skin: The force of rubbing can shred already-damaged areas.
Falling Out of a Plane
In 1942 a Soviet pilot named I. M. Chisov plunged 22,000 feet without a parachute after bailing out of his Ilyushin 4 bomber. German pilots had attacked Chisov’s plane, and he didn’t open his chute because he was afraid it would allow his attackers to find him. He landed on a snow-covered slope and rolled downhill, badly hurt and unconscious—but alive.
According to aerodynamics experts, a skydiver without a chute reaches a terminal velocity of about 120 miles per hour after dropping roughly 500 feet. That actually isn’t any faster than the speed you’d reach if you fell from a moderately tall building. “But it’s not falling that kills you; it’s the landing,” Richard says: The abrupt pressure of an impact is likely to break open blood vessels such as your aorta, damage internal organs, and shatter your bones.
The worst thing to hit is a hard surface that brings you to a halt almost instantly. If you land on snow (like Chisov) or hit something that gives way, such as a skylight (as happened to U.S. Air Force Sergeant Alan Magee, who survived a 20,000-foot drop into a French train station in 1943), you will suffer less damage. In such a situation, it is the ability of the bones of your skull and spine to withstand the impact that can potentially preserve your life, according to a report conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Struck by Lightning
Roy Cleveland Sullivan, a forest ranger in Virginia, was hit by lightning seven times in his 71 years. The lifetime odds of being struck by lightning are higher than you might think—about 1 in 5,000—but it still takes bad luck (and a dangerous lifestyle) to be hit more than once.
About 80 percent of people who are struck are not killed. When lightning strikes, less than 1 percent of the bolt’s current flows through your body, according to a recent study in the Journal of Electrostatics. The rest travels over the surface of your skin, which has a lower resistance to electricity. Lightning bolts, which typically pack a 100-million-volt wallop but are only about as wide as a pencil, may burn your skin or leave featherlike markings called Lichtenberg figures. These form where electric current or the resulting shock wave in the body bursts capillaries in your skin. The burns are not usually severe, however.
Your biggest worry is dying because your heart stops beating, says Michael Cherington, former director of the Lightning Data Center in Colorado. Current from the bolt may interfere with the impulses that drive your heartbeat. In a 1998 paper, Cherington presented evidence that during the heart’s normal cycle of contracting and relaxing, there is a small window of time when the chambers are filling with blood and the heart is especially vulnerable to electrical disruption. If you are unlucky enough to be struck during this window, death may be much more likely.
If you live, you will probably have damage to your nervous system, as 70 percent of lightning-strike survivors do. “On an MRI, it can look like a stroke,” Cherington says, making lightning strikes difficult to diagnose. (People sometimes black out and don’t realize they were hit.) According to a National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration report, you might wind up with bleeding and swelling in your brain, which kills neurons, or suffer other types of nerve damage, leading to seizures or partial paralysis. Short-term memory loss and personality changes may affect you. Finally, you might contract cataracts, as the current and heat of a strike can turn proteins in the lens of your eye opaque.
Adrift at Sea
For 76 days in 1982, Steven Callahan floated 1,800 miles alone at sea in a five-foot life raft after his boat, the Napoleon Solo, sank in the Atlantic. (He made it nearly to Guadeloupe and was rescued by passing fishermen.) Callahan, a naval architect and experienced sailor, survived by catching fish with a makeshift spear and drinking from his raft’s solar stills—inflatable plastic tents that captured one pint of evaporated freshwater from seawater each day.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Dehydration will be a big worry. The length of time you can survive without any water varies; in a hot desert you won’t last as long as you will in a cool, humid forest, according to David Richard. As your body’s moisture dwindles, he explains, your blood thickens so much with salts and clotting proteins that if you accidentally nicked yourself with your fishing spear, you might not even bleed. Your heart strains to generate enough force to pump the gluey fluid, and your blood coagulates easily, paving the way for a stroke or heart attack.
As your kidneys toil to rid your body of salt, your urine darkens. If you don’t find a source of fresh water, rising levels of sodium and potassium wreak havoc on your muscle and nerve cells: Their proteins fall to fragments, and cell membranes leak, Richard says. Pacemaker cells in your heart soon malfunction, sending it into irregular rhythms. Delirium and then unconsciousness set in as brain cells deteriorate. If you succumb to the temptation to drink seawater, that just makes things worse. Seawater is so loaded with salts that your body wastes more water in the urine in an effort to excrete them than it gains in the first place.
Trapped in The Desert
Italian runner Mauro Prosperi got more than he bargained for during the 1994 Marathon des Sables, a weeklong, 145-mile race across the Sahara. A ferocious sandstorm knocked him far off course, leaving him stranded. Prosperi managed to capture a few bats to sustain himself for the nine days he wandered through the bleak landscape, where peak temperatures above 120 degrees Fahrenheit are not unusual. Eventually a group of Tuareg nomads found him and brought him on camelback to an Algerian village.
In the desert, the effects of intense heat compound the threat of dehydration, Richard says. Your heart rate will speed up as your body warms, generally about 10 beats per minute per degree, but your heart has limits. Normally, veins that deliver blood to the heart fill its chambers between contractions. As body temperature increases, though, your heart may contract so frequently that there is not enough time for the chambers to fill between beats, and less blood leaves your heart with each beat. When the heart is already near its maximum due to extreme heat, it cannot pump any faster, making physical activity impossible. Pretty soon you can hardly move at all—not a good situation when you’re stranded without water.
Sitting still in a sauna, you could survive much higher temperatures. In Finland, competitors actually vie to see who can stay the longest in a 230-degree F sauna (winners typically last about 12 minutes). At temperatures much above that, the structures of cell membranes and proteins crumble and the body’s cells become a gooey mess: Think of a soft-boiled egg.
Exposed to a Vacuum
Engineer James C. LeBlanc climbed into a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in 1965 for a routine test of a spacesuit. His suit leaked, and for 14 harrowing seconds he was exposed to a near vacuum. LeBlanc later said that he could feel water boiling off his tongue. He then passed out, but technicians and engineers quickly repressurized the chamber; LeBlanc survived with no permanent damage.
Medical researchers at NASA estimate it is possible to revive someone exposed to a vacuum for as long as 30 seconds. Air will be sucked out of your lungs immediately, and trying to hold your breath will be futile against the pressure. In a vacuum the gases and liquids in the body expand rapidly, animal studies show, but your skin and blood vessels maintain enough pressure on your body and its fluids that you will not instantly explode—no matter what you’ve seen in Hollywood films. According to NASA’s analysis, your tissues will swell slowly as water boils away and gases like nitrogen come out of solution, pushing against the membranes of your cells, stretching them and damaging your organs.http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
If you are fully exposed in outer space, the intense ultraviolet radiation from the unfiltered sun will give you a nasty sunburn on one side. In a vacuum, heat is not lost easily, however, so even though the temperature in deep space is –454 degrees F, you will not freeze immediately. Much sooner—after about 15 seconds—your oxygen-deprived brain will shut down. At that point you will black out, and you will probably die in another minute or two.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Wasklewicz
Researchers have developed a way to use laser-based surveying instruments to create detailed images of ancient etchings on stone. The new technique, which provides far more information than photographs do, could enable archaeologists to quickly catalog the ancient rock art, or petroglyphs, at sites that are geologically unstable or vulnerable to theft or vandalism.
The prototype equipment uses a green laser beam that scans back and forth to generate three-dimensional maps of objects and terrain, says Thad Wasklewicz of the University of Memphis in Tennessee. Those maps, which can be compiled in just a few minutes, span a 40° field of view and contain up to 1 million data points—each of which is accurate to within 6 millimeters.
Ancient artists created petroglyphs by scraping away a dark, mineral-rich coating called desert varnish (SN: 1/3/04, p. 14: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040103/note15.asp) to expose underlying light-colored material. The intensity of laser light that reflects off the varnish is different from that which bounces back from exposed rock. After field data have been collected, analysts can digitally assign a different shade of color to each intensity level of reflected light and thereby create high-resolution, false-color images of the art.
Wasklewicz and his colleagues field-tested their technique at a site near Little Lake, Calif., where some petroglyphs date back as long as 14,000 years ago. With their equipment, the researchers generated large-scale maps of the ancient lava flows, as well as detailed images of art on individual rocks. In some cases, the laser scans picked up the faint traces of ancient petroglyphs that couldn't be seen with the naked eye because they were obscured by a fresh coat of desert varnish, says Wasklewicz.http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1
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