Month: March 2021

Scientists are making great strides in the development of lab-grown or cultured meat.

The idea behind lab-grown or cultured meat is actually quite simple. First you extract a few cells from a tasty region of an animal’s body, let’s say the prime rib area of a cow or a chicken’s breast. Just a few cells, not enough to harm the animal. Then you grow those cells in the lab, billions of them, enough to make them into beefsteaks and chicken breasts or other cuts of meat that you can then sell as food to your customers.

It won’t be long now before this image becomes real! Look for it in your Supermarket tomorrow! (Credit: Food Navigator)

There are several advantages to producing meat in the lab. First of all you don’t have to waste energy and materials producing the non-eatable parts of the animal, like bones and skin. In fact you don’t even have to produce the less popular cuts of meat like the brains or intestines. Then there’s hygiene and quality control. Meat produced in the lab is less likely to be infected with bacteria or absorb toxic chemicals like mercury from the environment.

It all seems so clean and anti-septic, and no animals were harmed in the production of this burger. (Credit: SGS)

Then there’s the morality aspect. Cultured meat doesn’t require the death, or indeed any real harm to the animal who supplied the original small number of cells that started the whole process. In today’s world there are many people who are concerned about the welfare of the animals we raise and slaughter to feed ourselves. Lab grown meat would require far fewer animals, who would probably be given far better living conditions in order that they produce the best possible cells, and aside from an occasional biopsy to procure some of those cells they would never be harmed. In other words ethical treatment of animals! 

Certainly being a vegetarian is more complicated than being a carnivore, and besides I never met a sausage I didn’t like! (Credit: Signature Market)

Sounds crazy but it’s actually been done. In my post of 7 April 2018 I reported on the first ever cooking of a hamburger made from lab grown meat back in 2013. Those few reporters who were granted a taste of that burger pronounced it to be tasty, but rather dry and a bit too tough.

Dr. Mark Post with his creation, the first lab grown hamburger patty. (Credit: The Guardian)

That’s been the trouble so far, texture and juiciness. You see the meat we buy in a supermarket, the meat that comes from a once-living animal, is more than just muscle cells. There are also fat cells as well and not only is the ratio of muscle to fat cells important to get a nice juicy meat but the two distinct kinds of cells have to be ‘assembled’ in a way that mimics the texture of naturally produced meat.

A pair of researchers at McMaster University in Canada’s Department of Biomedical Engineering have been working on that problem. Starting with a technique that produces thin sheets of living tissue in a nutrient solution for human transplants (See my post of 16 May 2020) Ravi Selvaganapathy and Alireza Shahin-Shamsabadi succeeded in stacking those sheets of muscle and fat cells. Each of those sheets has a thickness about that of a sheet of printer paper and when stacked together the cells would begin to bond to each other spontaneously.

Dr. Shahin-Shamsabadi working in his lab. (Credit: CBC)

The initial experiments were carried out with cells gathered from labouratory mice but the researchers decided not to sample their ‘mouse steak’. Instead Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi performed a second experiment with rabbit cells with a result that Selvaganapathy proclaimed. “It felt and tasted just like meat.”

A spoonful of mouse meat, hummmm…tasty! (Credit: CBC)

One advantage of Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi’s technique is that the muscle / fat ratio can be varied quite precisely to match the desires of potential customers. The researchers are convinced that their technique will work equally as well for a range of other meats, beef, pork and chicken being obvious choices. Personally I’m curious as to whether the technique would work as well for fish, like a nice salmon or tuna fillet.

Lab grown fish could help to eliminate the overfishing of many endangered species. (Credit: Los Angeles Magazine)

Selvaganapathy and Shahin-Shamsabadi are now hoping to increase the scale of production. They’ve formed a start-up company to explore the commercial possibilities of their process. They certainly have a good marketing slogan that they can use. “Real Meat built to Order.” They may have to get used to some competition however, there are at least 38 different companies seeking to gain a foothold in what could soon be a very profitable industry.

Lab grown meat companies, right side of chart, also have competitors in plant and fungi derived meat alternatives, left side. (Credit: Meduim)

Food production in general is poised to undergo a revolution during the 21st century. Whether it be aquaculture or urban farming or cultured meat the way we produce our food in thirty to fifty years from now is going to look nothing like the farms and ranches where food has been grown for the past ten thousand years. It has to change because those old ways of agriculture are unsustainable in a world of eight billion or more human beings.

Paleontologists are still debating both when and why our ancestors became fully bipedal. A new study of a fossil from Ethiopia may help to answer these critical questions.

Everyone knows that very few animals walk on only two legs or more technically, are bipedal. It’s true that some creatures, like a bear may rear up onto their hind legs in order to grab some fruit from a tree or to get a better look at their surroundings like a prairie dog. Such species don’t walk very far however and are glad to get back down onto all fours. Then there are some animals like the kangaroo or a Tyrannosaurus rex who walk all the time on two legs but have a have a nice big tail to give them balance.

Some animals, like this Grizzly Bear, are capable of standing on two legs for a short period of time and even taking a few clumsy steps but really they’d rather be down on all fours! (Credit: Reddit)

Our close relatives the great apes often walk on two legs when they are carrying food or perhaps a child but even they prefer to knuckle walk, gaining some balance and propulsion from their forelegs. Only humans walk fully upright, on two legs with no tail. In fact paleontologists have created a special name for those species of ape who walked fully upright, they are called hominids and consist of two geneses, our own genus Homo and our extinct relatives the Australopithecines.

This famous illustration of human evolution shows upright posture and brain size evolving in parallel. Actually our ancestors were fully upright before our brains got much bigger than a chimpanzee’s. (Credit: History.com)

When and why did our hominid ancestors evolve such an unusual way of getting about? There’s good fossil evidence that our ancestors were primarily bipedal going back at least 3.5 million years ago (MYA). The leg and arm bones of the famous fossil ‘Lucy’ discovered in the 1970s show that her species, Australopithecus afarensis, was fully bipedal that long ago. So somewhere between 3.5 million years ago when A afarensis lived and about 7 million years ago when our ancestors broke away from the ancestors of the Chimpanzees is when we became fully upright. Exactly when is still a matter of debate.

Australopithecus afarensis, our ancestor of about 3-3.5 million years ago. In many ways A afarensis was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human, but they walked fully upright! (Credit: Science Photo Library)

Why our ancestors became bipedal is even more hotly contested. Charles Darwin, who correctly pointed out that chimps and gorillas were our closest living relatives, suggested that our ancestors became more and more bipedal as we used our hands more to carry things or use tools. Later evolutionists have theorized that as our ancestors moved out of the African forest into the savanna the ability to see above the tall grass may have been the cause. Another possibility that has received some support is that a fully upright posture would reduce the amount of skin that is exposed to the harmful effects of sunlight, remember this is also the same period of time where our ancestors were losing a large part of their body hair.

Homo habilis making a stone tool. Did our ancestors become bipedal in order to better use their hands for toll making or did they make more tools because they were bipedal? (Credit: MutualArt)
Either way they made a lot of tools! (Credit: Live Science)

With so much controversy any piece of additional evidence becomes even more important. That’s why a new study by a team of anthropologists with lead author Thomas C. Prang of the Department of Anthropology at Texas A&M University and published in the journal Science Advances of a 4.4 million year old partial skeleton has gathered attention. The fossil belongs to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus or simply ‘Ardi’ for short. Ardi may be only a partial skeleton, too poorly preserved to tell if it was fully bipedal or not, however it does date from the critical time between our last common ancestor with chimps and A afarensis. More importantly Ardi’s left hand is exceptionally well preserved. This allowed the team of researchers to make a series of morphological comparisons to the hands of our modern knuckle walking relatives, chimps and gorillas as well as modern humans and even our fully upright ancestors like A afarensis.

‘Ardi’, Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton used by Thomas Prang in his study. Notice how well the left hand, the upper hand in the image, is preserved. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

What the researchers found was that in a number of key features including the size and shape of individual bones of the hand Ardi was much closer to that of modern apes then that of any hominid, modern or ancient. According to Doctor Prang, “…,we found evidence for a big evolutionary ‘jump’ between the kind of hand represented by Ardi and all later hominin hands, including that of Lucy’s species. This ‘evolutionary jump’ happens at a critical time when hominins are evolving adaptations to a more human-like form of upright walking and the earliest evidence for hominin stone-tool manufacture and stone tool use, such as cut marks on animal fossils, are discovered.” That time frame of somewhere between 4.4 MYA and 3.5 MYA is also crucial because it was during that time that our ancestors lost their opposing big toe so that unlike our cousins the chimps and gorillas we can no longer grasp things with our feet.

One of the techniques used to compare ‘Ardi’s’ hand to those of more modern humans as well as modern apes. (Credit: Thomas C. Prang et al)

If the results of the study hold up to scrutiny that will greatly reduce the time frame during which our ancestor became fully bipedal, from about 3.5 million years to a little less than one million years. Sometime between 4.4 MYA and 3.5 MYA our ancestors took a big step toward becoming human. With an upright posture they could expand their use of primitive tools. Greater tool use would then cause an evolutionary push toward a bigger brain initiating a feedback loop of more intelligence and greater tool use.

The end result of that evolutionary ‘jump’ is our modern, human dominated world. Let’s just hope our brains and tools are sufficient to enable us to stop destroying it.

Every year millions of birds are killed when they fly into illuminated glass windows. The National Audubon Society has established a ‘National Lights Out’ program in an attempt to reduce those deaths.

We usually hear it first, we’ll be sitting in our living room or maybe bedroom at night with the lights on when suddenly there’s a bang against the window. Whether we go out to look at what happened immediately or wait until the next day doesn’t matter, either way we’ll often find a small dead bird lying on the ground beneath the window.

Birds are actually fairly smart animals but understanding the whole concept of a window is a bit beyond their capabilities. (Credit: Twitter)
The end result is often an unnecessary tragedy. (Credit: All about Birds)

It’s easy to understand what happens, of course birds can’t understand what either artificial lights or transparent glass are and so they get confused and fly straight into our window, to deadly effect. And if this tragedy happens once or twice a year for a residential home it happens nightly for those tall office buildings with hundreds of brightly lit windows that remain on all night long.

For a migratory bird passing through, Philadelphia at night is a confusing mass of colours, lights and deadly glass windows. (Credit: Tripsavvy)

There are also certain times of year when the problem becomes even worse because millions of birds that are not regular city dwellers like pigeons or starlings migrate through populated areas resulting in thousands of completely unnecessary deaths. My hometown of Philadelphia lies right along North America’s east coast bird migratory route and last fall the city saw an especially terrible night on the second of October. Because of bad weather combining with a large number of migrants passing through the city an estimated 14,000 birds died in a single night. In fact Philadelphia has a long history of studying such accidental bird kills with the Academy of Natural Sciences preserving specimens of birds who died by crashing into buildings dating back as far as the 1890s.

The United States is crossed by several major bird migratory routes. My hometown of Philadelphia is only one of the big cities the lay along a migratory path. (Credit: Pinterest)

Last year’s high death toll may have had something to do with the decision by civic leaders to add Philadelphia to the growing list of cities that participate in the National Lights Out initiative. National Lights Out is a concerted effort by both naturalists and business leaders to just turn off as many unnecessary lights as possible, especially those in high rise office buildings. Think about it, what use is anybody getting by having all of the lights on in an empty, let’s say accounting firm on the 20th floor of some skyscraper. It’s a waste of energy and money as well as being a danger to innocent birds and all it takes is someone remembering to turn out the lights when they go home for the night.

Part of the carnage the happened on 2 Oct 2020 in Philadelphia. (Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences)
Saving energy, saving money and saving birds! And all it takes is someone remembering to turn out the lights out when they’re not needed! (Credit: Trendsmap)

Now participation is voluntary, our city council is considering a bill to promote the initiative but there’ll be no penalty for those businesses that fail to join in. The effort to convince landlords and tenants to join in is being led by the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club and the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Audubon Society along with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.

Just a few of the organizations leading Philadelphia’s effort. (Credit: Academy of Natural Sciences)

The movement has also gained the support of our local Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and the Building Industry Association of Philadelphia. So far these organizations have succeeded in recruiting some of the biggest businesses in Philadelphia to take part including Comcast Corporation, owner of the two tallest buildings in the city. Also pledging their support are Brandywine Realty the city’s largest landowner as well as more than a dozen other building owners or operators.

Comcast Corporation’s two towers are the tallest buildings east of the Mississippi outside of New York City so Comcast’s cooperation with ‘Philly Lights Out’ is a big deal. (Credit: Visit Philly)

Now Philadelphia is not the only city getting into the National Lights Out effort, in fact we’re actually kinda late in joining in. The first city to take part was Chicago back in the year 1999 and since then New York, Boston, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and some thirty other cities have taken part.

Cities across the country are joining in the effort to save birds, is yours? (Credit: City and County of Denver)

As I mentioned above migration periods are the critical times for the National Lights Out initiative. For most North American cities that means April and May in the spring as the birds fly north and August 15th to November 15th as they fly south. But really at any time of year how much effort does it take to remember to turn out the lights when everybody has gone home for the night? It saves energy, saves money, eliminates some greenhouse gasses as well as saving the lives of some birds. 

And before I go I’m going to add one more reason to turn out the lights, light pollution. I my opinion the night sky is simply beautiful but you can’t see it in a city because of all the glow from artificial lights. Really, on a good clear night you should be able to see about three thousand stars along with a planet or two and the pale wisp of the Milky Way. When I step outside my house here in Philly however I’m lucky to see a couple of dozen stars and forget about any sign of the Milky Way. That’s because of all the streetlights, lights from nearby businesses as well as lights from my neighbor’s homes. I have seen the night sky from a darkened Navy Destroyer in the middle of the Atlantic, from the desert of Arizona more than a hundred kilometers from any town and from the high peaks of the Rockies and I can tell you that the night sky near any big city pales in comparison because of all that light pollution.

Just a little hint of what light pollution can do to the night sky. If you think about it, today there are millions of people who really have no idea what the heavens look like! (Credit: Reddit)
In my opinion the best place to do naked eye astronomy is from the middle of the ocean on a darkened navy ship. I did that from the deck of the USS Damato DD871. (Credit: Facebook)

In fact backyard astronomers like me have even started an initiative of our own, the ‘Dark Skies’ project to turn off or reduce all of the unnecessary artificial lights so that we can enjoy the beautiful natural lights that the Universe has provided us. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a post about that before too long.

Scientists propose a new state of matter, an active form of matter they call the Swirlonic state.

We all remember back in our science classes how scientists classified matter into three basic states, solid, liquid and gas and each of these different states have very different physical properties. Solids for example do not change their shape to fit into their container, in fact solids are the only state of matter that holds its shape without a container, and solids are not at all easy to compress into a smaller volume. Liquids on the other hand flow in order to fit their shape to match that of their container but like a solid liquids are not easily compressible. Finally a gas will fill its container like a fluid but unlike the other states it is comparatively easy to compress or expand the volume of a gas.

The three classic states of matter are solid, liquid and gas but of course reality isn’t quite that simple. (Credit: Gillibrand Primary School)

We were also told that most materials go from one state to another depending on their temperature, water being the classic example with ice, liquid water and steam. Going from a solid to a liquid is of course called melting, the reverse is called freezing while going from a liquid to a gas is either boiling or evapouration, the reverse is called condensation.

Now these classifications are not quite hard and fast, see my post about glass in 23 January 2021. Some materials do have quasi-states where they show characteristics of two or more states at the same time. However, the vast majority of the behaviour of the majority of substances in our everyday lives can be pretty well pigeonholed into solid, liquid or gas.

Quasi states of matter are a hot topic in materials science right now because they have been found to possess a vast number of useful properties. (Credit: Wiley Online Library)

Or can they? In a paper published in the journal Nature mathematicians at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow Russia and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Leicester in the UK have described what they consider to be a new state of ‘active matter’ that displays properties greatly different from those of the other three states of matter.

The mathematicians were inspired by the behaviour of schools of fish or flocks of birds but the researchers quickly realized that complex but non-living chemical compounds that react with their surroundings often displayed similar properties. One particular class of complex compounds is known as ‘Janus Particles’ because one side of the particle has different chemical properties than the other.

If we consider the individual fish in a large school to be ‘particles of matter’ then the school itself behaves as a new state of matter! Notice the swirl. (Credit: JSTOR Daily)
Named for the two faced Roman god of entryways, get it you can go in and out, a Janus particle has distinctly different properties on its different sides. (Credit: Semantic Scholar)

Soap is an excellent example of such a Janus particle, see my post of 2May2020. This is because at one end of a soap molecule is a polar structure that will dissolve in water, a property formally known as hydrophilic. At the other end however is a non-polar structure that will dissolve in oil, a property called hydrophobic. Because of these different properties at different ends when a large number of soap molecules are dissolved in water they tend to group themselves in a circular or spherical shell structures with the polar end facing out and a void in the middle, like a soap bubble. The researchers found that such self-assembly into spherical shell configurations were typical of active matter in general and in addition that the shells showed a tendency to rotate or swirl, which prompted the scientists to name their new state Swirlon.

Molecules of soap possess a water loving, hydrophilic side and a water hating, hydrophobic side. This allows them to form a bubble around an oil droplet when dissolved in water. (Credit: AwesomeStories)

The mathematicians developed a computer simulation that allowed them to study the behaviour of their swirlonic matter under a variety of different conditions. What they found was that swirlonic matter displayed many strange behaviours including the ability to self-assemble in a variety of shapes.

Evolution of the swirlonic state. Researchers have found that active particles tend to form themselves into spherical clumps that possess a swirling motion.

The mathematicians are now interfacing with Materials scientists who are working with the types of ‘active matter’ they simulated in order to both confirm their results but also to promote new real world materials with new useful properties. In the future the researchers hope to increase the information processing capabilities of their simulated particles in order to better understand the behaviour of living ‘active particles’ like flocks of birds or swarms of insects.

A flock of birds or a new state of matter. Guess it kinda depends on your point of view. Notice the swirl! (Credit: How it works)

‘Active matter’ is a new class of materials that are now becoming the subject of intensive study, both in the lab and in computer simulations. At the present time we are only beginning to learn how to put their strange properties to useful purposes but several have already shown great promise. New materials with new properties, or in a single word, progress.

Space news for March 2021: Special Space Tourist Edition.

Space tourism is actually nothing new. Back in the 1990s the breakup of the old Soviet Union left the Russian space program in a severe budget crisis. At that time the USSR possessed the only operating space station, a collection of modules named Mir, Russian for Peace. So desperate were the Russian space engineers to try to keep Mir functioning that they were forced to look outside of their own country for the necessary funds.

Like the present International Space Station (ISS) Russia’s MIR space station was a collection of modules assembled in orbit. (Credit: Wikipedia)

One of the ways that the Russians considered to get the money they needed was to provide a few rich capitalists with the vacation of a lifetime, a trip into space with a stay on the Mir space station. It took a few years to set up and the first paying customer for the Russian’s was not actually a tourist but rather a journalist named Toyohiro Akiyama. It was Akiyama’s employer, the Tokyo Broadcasting System who paid an estimated $30 million USD for his weeklong stay at Mir in 1990.

Toyohiro Akiyama, a journalist with the Tokyo Broadcasting System was the first paying customer to go into space spending a week at the Mir station. (Credit: The Japan Times)

The first real space tourist was American businessman Dennis Tito. Tito was originally scheduled to fly to Mir but when the decision was made to de-orbit the Russian station in order to concentrate on the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) Tito was able to rearrange his plans to a weeklong stay at the ISS. The reported price was a cool $20 million. Since then six other men, and yes only men so far, have paid the necessary price to ride into space aboard Russia’s Soyuz capsule.

American businessman Dennis Tito paid an estimated $20 million for a week’s vacation aboard the ISS becoming the first space tourist. (Credit: BBC)

The end of NASA’s shuttle program in 2011 however left Soyuz as the only means for real astronauts to get to the ISS. With seats on the Russian spacecraft at a premium the space tourism business was put on hold until NASA’s commercial crew program could get underway and provide a second means of putting a man into orbit.

With the success of Space X’s first two manned missions however the space tourism ‘industry’ is now poised to begin a new phase of growth. Both Space X and Boeing, if it ever works out the problems in its Starliner capsule, have expressed interest in scheduling missions entirely devoted to space tourism whether they be to the ISS or simply into Low Earth Orbit (LOE).

The Space X Crew Dragon has successfully taken six astronauts to the ISS in two missions. As a private, commercial company Space X has indicated it is willing to launch paying customers into space. For the right price. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In fact the first such purely tourist space mission is already tentatively scheduled for sometime late this year. Designated as the Inspiration4 mission the flight is being paid for by the billionaire Jared Isaacman. Isaacman has contracted with Space X to launch him and three guests into space aboard the corporation’s Dragon capsule for a flight that could last as long as five days in orbit. Isaacman intends for the trip to help promote his favourite charity, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital so the remaining seats aboard the capsule will be filled with St. Jude’s in mind. The second astronaut for the trip has already been chosen and is St. Jude’s physician’s assistant Hayley Arceneaux who was herself a cancer patient at St. Jude’s when she was a child.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman likes to fly jet planes for fun. Soon he’ll be taking the Space X Dragon Capsule into orbit! (Credit: The New York Times)
Hayley Arceneaux, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude’s Hospital for Children and a childhood bone cancer survivor herself, will become the first ‘guest’ to be treated to a vacation in outer space! (Credit: The Guardian)

One of the remaining two seats will be chosen from a sweepstakes drawing to benefit St. Jude’s while the final seat will go to a randomly selected customer of Isaacman’s Shift4 corporation, a payment processing company. Notice that I failed to mention any NASA astronaut going along on the trip. That’s because Isaacman, who holds a pilot’s license plans on commanding the mission himself once he’s taken some training from Space X.

 Inspiration4 may be the first but it certainly won’t be the last Space X mission dedicated to paying tourists. In fact Space X has teamed with a company called Axiom Space 1 to begin taking paying customers to the ISS beginning in 2022. And Space X has further ambitions as well, in 2017 the company’s CEO Elon Musk announced that he had made a deal with Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa to send the millionaire and up to eight ‘artists’ on a trip around the Moon using Space X’s Starship rocket. Now that rocket is still under development so no time frame for the trip has been announced.

Elon Musk, CEO of Space X hopes that his Starship vehicle now under development will be able to make atrip around the Moon in just a few years! (Credit: Futurism)

Some other companies have equally ambitious dreams, let’s just call them that for the moment. Both Bigelow Aerospace Corporation and Orion Span Corporation intend to launch modules of their ‘luxury space hotels’ into LOE sometime in the next few years. The idea is that Space X or Boeing or maybe even the Russians will launch the tourists to the ‘hotels’ and then bring them back after a month or so in space. All of these plans depend on the companies involved getting sufficient financial backing so don’t be surprised if there’s a delay of a couple of years or so.

Bigelow Aerospace Corporation hopes to launch their inflatable B330 module into LOE in just the next few years. (Credit: Universe Today)

So if space tourism is about to ‘take off’, excuse the pun, as an industry, who’s regulating it? According to a UN treaty outer space doesn’t belong to anyone so what governmental agencies are going to be responsible for safety, training, launch schedules and hundreds of other mundane bureaucratic tasks?

Well, again according to the UN, the nation from which the space tourist mission will be launched shall have jurisdiction over how those missions shall be regulated and conducted. To that end the Federal Aviation Authority here in the United States has already opened an Office of Commercial Space Transportation. This office has been granted the power by act of congress to license all commercial space flights, including those under NASA’s commercial crew program, with an emphasis on safety for personnel and property.

In today’s world nothing can be done until all of the red tape has been filled out in triplicate! (Credit: SlideServe)

So when will you be able to take a trip into space? Well if you happen to have a spare $20 million or so it looks like you could get your chance sometime in the next five years or so. For the rest of us however it’s probably going to be a rather long time.

Book Review: ‘The Wandering Earth’ by Cixin Liu.

‘The Wandering Earth’ by the Chinese SF author Cixin Liu is the sort of science fiction book that has become something of a rarity nowadays, a collection of short stories. Time was, during the ‘golden era’ of SF that there was a big market for short stories. Magazines like Amazing, Astounding, Weird Tales, World’s Beyond, Cosmos and others bought hundreds of short stories every year. Then, once an author had published a dozen or so stories in those magazines they would arrange to have a collection of their stories published as paperbacks. I have dozens of such collections in my library.

‘Eight Stories from the Rest of the Robots’ by Isaac Asimov is a collection of stories that didn’t make it into his original collection ‘I Robot’. Just one of the many collections of short SF stories in my library. (Credit: www.isfdb.com)

Recently however series of novels, like George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Fire and Ice’ or even Cixin Liu’s ‘Three Body Problem’ triology have become the norm. There are few magazines left today who can pay enough to make writing short stories worthwhile, let alone a way to make a decent living. Most unknown writers today may write a few short stories to build a resume and get a little notice but as soon as they can they’re writing those series because that’s where the money is!

Writing is a business, like everything else. Today the money is in trilogies or series like Cixin Liu’s ‘The Three Body Problem’ trilogy which I have reviewed in this blog. (Credit: Android Authority)

So when I came across a collection of short stories by Cixin Liu I was quite excited. Having already given very favourable reviews to four of Mister Cixin’s novels in this blog I wanted to see if he could reproduce the same sense of wonder in short form.

The Cover of ‘The Wandering Earth’ by Cixin Liu. (Credit: Amazon.com)

I’m happy to say that ‘The Wandering Earth’ is a great read. The ten stories contained within the collection are each in their own way both thought provoking and entertaining. The first story gives its name to the collection and concerns a future time when the Sun is running out of its nuclear fuel and becoming unstable. In order to survive the human race converts the Earth into a spaceship that heads out toward Proxima Centauri.

While all of the stories do have the Earth as their stage they still pretty well run the gamut of SF stories. There are aliens, both invading and benevolent, as well as stories with only human protagonists. Most of the stories take place in the near future but several are set in more distant times. And just for a bit of fun Mister Cixin even makes himself a character in one story.

Science Fiction author Cixin Liu. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

One of the things I thing I like best about Cixin’s brand of SF is that he does give you enough information to at least figure out a bit of what’s going on. In the story ‘Devourer’ for example I was able to guess who the attacking aliens were and how humanity would fight back before the big reveal near the end of the story.    

One thing however, before I started writing this review I got out my old copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Reach for Tomorrow’, one of his short story collections, and compared it to ‘The Wandering Earth’. ‘Reach for Tomorrow’ contained 12 stories in 166 pages while ‘The Wandering Earth’ held 10 stories in 447 pages. That means that the average story in ‘The Wandering Earth’ is three times as long as the average one in ‘Reach for Tomorrow’. In fact several of the ‘”stories” in ‘The Wandering Earth’ actually have chapters to them. I suppose it’s just the fashion of the time, novels have become series and even short stories are now long enough to be divided into chapters. Writers today just seem to feel that they have to stretch each and every good idea they have into as many words as they can.

The Cover of my old copy of ‘Reach for Tomorrow’ by Arthur C. Clarke. I may be an old fogie but I like short stories that are short enough that you can read half a dozen of them whenever you have a spare hour r so. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Despite that ‘The Wandering Earth’ has plenty of good ideas so if you’re looking for a collection of SF short stories worth reading ‘The Wandering Earth’ is the best I’ve seen in a long time.

The title short story in ‘The Wandering Earth’ is now a major motion picture in China and now available on Netflix. (Credit: ScreenAnarchy)

P.S. The short story ‘The Wandering Earth’ has been turned into a movie by the Chinese film industry and is apparently available in an English dubbed version on Netflix. I have not seen it yet but the reviews I’ve read rate the effects as very good but dialog and character development as pretty bad. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 70% with 48% audience approval. I’ll have to check it and and I’ll let ya know what I think!

Black holes and Wormholes, what are they, how are they alike and how are they different?

Did you ever stop to think about how you would describe a straight line? Sounds easy, but be honest, you’ll probably end up calling it a line that isn’t curved or something similar. Describing it as what it’s not rather than what it is. Even my American Heritage Dictionary defines straight as extending continuously in the same direction without curving.

The Greek mathematician Euclid used the concept of a straight line as the foundation of his geometry. So much so that a space that allows the existence of a true straight line is now known as a Euclidean space. (Credit: SlidePlayer)

A straight line seems like something so intuitive that we scarcely give it a second thought. In fact the Greek and other classical mathematicians like Pythagoras or Euclid just defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two different points and then extending out to infinity in both directions from there.

So obvious, yet so difficult to put into words was the concept of a straight line that nobody really thought about the problem until Einstein. You see in his Special Theory of Relativity Einstein had developed the concept of space-time that recognized that measurements of both time and space looked different to observers who were traveling at close to the speed of light relative to each other. Then, as he tried to incorporate the force of gravity into his ideas he found that he could describe the path of a particle in a gravitational field as following the straightest possible line in a ‘curved space-time’. The core principle of the general theory of relativity is that gravity bends space and therefore a truly, that is Euclidean straight line can only exist in an empty Universe.

In Special Relativity time is treated as a dimension like the three dimensions of space. For every observer a light cone extends into both the future and the past. Only events that occurred within that cone can definitely be said to occur in the past or future. Everything else is indeterminate! (Credit: Byjus)

In 1915 mathematician Karl Schwarzschild, not Einstein found an analytic solution to Einstein’s general field equations that indicated that a gravitational field could become so strong that it would bend space-time a full 90º. In that case later physicists realized that any object, even a particle of light that got too close would never be able to get back out, it would just continue falling forever into what became known as a black hole. Just to give you an idea of how concentrated the gravitational field of a black hole is you would have to take the entire mass of our Sun, 300,000 times the mass of the Earth and squeeze it down to just about one and a half kilometers in radius for it to form a black hole, and you would have to squeeze the mass of Earth down to less than half a centimetre to make it a black hole. No evidence for the existence of black holes was found during Einstein’s lifetime and he himself was never sure whether they were real or just a theoretical oddity, Schwarzschild died in WW1 just months after making his discovery so he never even considered the problem. It’s really only in the last few decades that enough evidence has accumulated to convince the majority of physicists that black holes are real.

Schwarzschild’s solution for a point mass to the field equations of General Relativity. When the distance to the point mass r equals twice the mass, r=2m, the second term on the right explodes. This point is formally known as a ‘Schwarzschild Singularity’ or more popularly the event horizon of a black hole! (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

Then in 1935 Einstein and his assistant Nathan Rosen were considering the problem of the fields associated with elementary particles. They were trying to describe elementary particles as something very similar to a black hole when they mathematically derived a formula for a black hole in one ‘space’ connecting up with another black hole in another ‘space’. Formally this is known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge but the concept has popularly become known as a wormhole in space.

Basic geometry of a Einstein Rosen bridge. The two planes represent different regions of ‘normal’ space or perhaps two entirely different Universes? (Credit: SlideShare)
It was actually in one of Einstein’s attempts to remove the ‘Schwarzschild Singularity’ that he and Nathan Rosen discovered wormhole. (Credit: Pinterest)

Wormholes have become known to all Science Fiction fans as a shortcut through space, a path between two distant places in the Universe that is shorter than an Einstein straightest possible line in normal space. A wormhole would therefore be one way to circumvent the cosmic speed limit imposed by the velocity of light. All a space traveler has to do is drop inside a wormhole and come out in some part of space that is thousands, or millions or billions of light years away. Since the distance through the wormhole is shorter than the distance in normal space you’re not actually going faster than light even though you’re getting there faster than a beam of light could.

The whole plot of ‘Star Trek Deep Space 9’ was built around a wormhole near the planet Bajor. (Credit: Pinterest)

Now it took a long time for astronomers to gather enough evidence to support the idea of black holes but that was easy compared to finding evidence for wormholes, at present there is simply none. One of the difficulties is that from the outside, and thousands of light years away, how can you tell the difference between a wormhole and a black hole? In fact it is quite possible that some of the black holes we know about, say the supermassive one at the center of the Milky Way, could actually be wormholes connecting up to other black holes elsewhere in the Universe.

The first ever image made of a black hole. Or is it really just one side of a wormhole? (Credit: NPR)

Now a team of theoretical physicists at Central Astronomical Observatory Pulkovo in Saint Petersburg Russia has published a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Society where they discuss certain characteristics of wormholes that should allow astronomers to distinguish them from black holes. The key difference between the two types of object of course is that while even light can’t come back out of a black hole a wormhole allows two-way traffic. That is, things can go into this end of a wormhole and come out the other while things that go into the other end can come out of this end.

Travel through a wormhole is a dream of science fiction but could it also be a reality? (Credit: Live Science)

 The Russians considered two possibilities; the first was that gas flowing in from both ends could collide in the middle of the wormhole. Those collisions would generate heat and that heat could be detected as a recognizable spectrum of gamma rays. The second possibility was that the gravitational fields of objects on the other side of the wormhole might leak through and effect the motions of objects on this side. In fact it was by observing the motions of stars at the center of our galaxy that the supermassive black hole there was first discovered.

The postulated gamma ray spectrum emitted from a wormhole. (Credit: Piotrovich et al 2020)

Now this paper is about theoretical calculations, astronomers have not yet begun to search for the predicted signs of a wormhole coming from what are presently considered to be black holes. There is a growing interest in black holes throughout the astronomical community however so I’ll bet it won’t be long before somebody starts searching. In fact a quick and cheap way to start the search would be to re-examine existing data already taken of black holes.

Originally called Quasars, Active Galactic Nuclei generated by supermassive black holes have been studied for more than 60 years. Could a re-examination of all that data actually show that they are wormholes? (Credit: Astronomy Magazine)

How long it will take before wormholes are discovered is anybody’s guess at present. However, considering the length of time it took for the existence of black holes to be accepted it could take quite a long time. Still, if wormholes are proven to exist it would be further proof, if any more were needed, that the Universe in which we live is a truly weird and wonderful place.

To sleep, perchance to dream, aye there’s the rub. What does go on inside our brain as we dream? Scientists may soon have some answers as they have now succeeded in communicating with people while they dream.

We all dream though no one really knows why. We do know that most of our dreams occur during the Rapid Eye Movement or REM stage of sleep. REM sleep, which lasts for an hour or two during the middle of a good night’s sleep, is characterized by quick left-right, up-down movements of our eyes even while our eyelids are shut. REM sleep is also the period of sleep where brain activity peaks when measured with an electroencephalogram or EEG.

Daybreak by Maxfield Parrish is pretty much my idea of a nice dream! (Credit: Pixels)

We generally have three to four dreams a night and they can last from as little as just a few seconds to as much a half an hour. The content of our dreams can vary from the fantastical to the ordinary but unfortunately most of our dreams are quickly forgotten once we’ve woken up. One thing the scientists have discovered is that dreams are more likely to be remembered if we are awakened during REM sleep, in other words just as we’re dreaming.

Every night our body and brain goes through several stages of sleep. Nearly all dreaming occurs during REM sleep. (Credit: Verywell Health)

We tend to dream less as we age with older people dreaming only about a fifth of the time they are asleep while babies can dream as much as half the time they sleep. And people who have been blind for most of their lives dream with their other senses.

Typical EEG traces for while we’re awake and in the several stages of sleep. Notice how the REM sleep trace resembles the awake trace. (Credit: Lisa Evelyn – WordPress.com)

A little more than a century ago the psychologist Sigmund Freud developed the idea that our dreams were an expression of our secret desires or repressed fears. In other words if we have the hots for a certain actress we may dream about her or if our boss has been riding us hard then we’ll dream about standing up to him. Freud also asserted that almost everything in a dream was related to sex in some way.

Even Freud had to admit that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! (Credit: Goodreads)

Few psychological researchers today subscribe entirely to those concepts. Instead dream research has indicated that some dreaming is involved in memory formation, our brain taking the day’s events, stored in the hippocampus, and turning them into long term memories that are stored in the neocortex. At the same time however many dreams appear to be composed of nothing more than random brain activity.

During the day we load up the Hippocampus with short term memories. Then, while we sleep some of those memories are uploaded to the neocortex for longer term storage. (Credit: Brainline.org)

One particular type of dreaming has become the subject of a considerable amount of study in the last few years. This type has been given the name ‘Lucid Dreaming’ and is defined as those dreams where we know that we are dreaming. Not everyone has these dreams but those who do often report being able to control their dreams to some extent. One thing that dream researchers have discovered is that some people can learn to lucid dream and with practice even become better at it.

Lucid dreaming has become so popular that you can even buy books instructing you on how to lucid dream! (Credit: Simon & Schuster)

Now researchers at Northwestern University, in cooperation with colleagues at Osnabrü University in Germany, the Paris Brain Institute, Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Bologna in Italy have succeeded in communicating with sleeping test subjects while they are having lucid dreams. The test subjects for the study consisted of 36 student volunteers across the four Universities, each of whom had experience in lucid dreaming.

Researcher Karen Konkoly watches an EEG monitor connected to a test subject. (Credit: K. Konloly)

The study was carried out simply enough; the test subjects were allowed to go to sleep after being wired up to an EEG. Once the subject had entered REM sleep, as confirmed by both the EEG as well as observing eye movement, they were asked simple questions such as ‘can you speak Spanish’ or to solve easy arithmetic problems like ‘what is eight minus two’. Other tests included having the test subject count the number of times a light was flashed in the labouratory or even whether or not they were being touched by the researcher. The test subjects had all been told before going to sleep to reply to the questions with movements of their eyes and the researchers watched carefully for any response.

The Researchers at Northwestern and in Europe attempted to communicate with their sleeping subjects in several ways and about 50% of the time they got a correct answer! (Credit: Sci-News.com)

Forty-nine percent of the time the test subjects responded with the correct answer clearly showing that communicating with a dreaming individual is possible. When woken up and asked about how they ‘heard’ the questions they’d been asked many test subjects replied that the sound just seemed to come out of the air, as if it were not a part of the dream. Others individuals however experienced the questions as a part of the dream; one even related that they heard the questions over a radio that was in the dream.

According to psychologist Ken Paller from Northwestern, a participant in the study and co-author of the paper. “We found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real time communication.”

If you think about it, isn’t it the people who dream while they’re wide awake who really change the world! (Credit: Fine Art America)

Now a 47% correct response is not a great success rate, but it is a start, and the psychologists hope that before long they will be able to develop ways of improving on that figure. If a reliable technique for asking people about their dreams, while they’re dreaming can be found it may go a long way to helping us discover how, and why it is that we dream.

War of the Electric Vehicles, Battery (BEVs) versus Fuel Cell (FCEVs).

O’k so its not really much of a war, but there is a lot of pretty heated discussion going on amongst renewable energy engineers over which design of electrical vehicle (EV) has the best chance of replacing the fossil fuel burning, internal combustion engine vehicles now dominating our highways. The two contestants are battery powered electric vehicles (BEVs) and hydrogen fuel cell electrical vehicles (FCEVs). Each type of electrical vehicle has its advantages; each has its problems. So let’s take at look at them.

Electric Cars, here’s one from Toyota, still tend to be a bit small, a bit underpowered and a bit expensive! (Credit: Digital Trends)

BEVs are really just scaled up versions of the little battery powered toy cars we all played with as kids. A bank of chemical batteries supplies the electric current that drives one or more electric motors; in most modern designs each wheel has its own motor. That toy I played with years ago worked until the battery ran out, always too soon as I recall.

Remember playing with one of these? Well a modern Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) is really just a version big enough for passengers. (Credit: Amazon.com)

And that’s the biggest problem with BEVs since modern battery technology has barely improved since I was young. The current state of the art today are the Lithium-ion batteries that hold perhaps twice as much energy as the antiquated lead-acid batteries still being used in gasoline powered cars. It’s true, whereas over the last 50 years computer technology has improved by orders of magnitude chemical battery technology has scarcely improved at all.

General Motors (GM) is hoping to develop an entire series of BEVs based upon a common platform of batteries between two electric motors. (Credit: WardsAuto)

Even though half of the mass of a BEV can consist of its battery pack their low energy density places a severe constraint on the vehicle’s range, which is far less than that of a gasoline powered car. And recharging those batteries is another big problem for BEVs. Whereas it generally takes a minute or two to pump a car’s gas tank full charging the battery pack in a BEV can take hours. These limitations basically restrict BEVs to shorter trips, say back and forth to work during the day while they recharge at night, not long family vacations. In fact many families that have purchased a BEV also own a gasoline powered second car for just such longer trips.

Charging stations for BEVs are becoming more common but the time needed to charge a BEV is so long that almost every parking spot may need to become a charging station! (Credit: Fox Business)

FCEVs on the other hand, generate their electric power by combining a gaseous fuel, usually hydrogen, with oxygen in the fuel cell. During the space race hydrogen fuel cells gained a lot of attention as the way the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules produced their electricity.

A hydrogen fuel cell combines the hydrogen fuel with oxygen in the air to produce electricity with the only exhaust being water vapour. (Credit: Doosan Mobility Innovation)

In terms of energy density, kilowatt hours per kilogram of mass, a hydrogen fuel cell easily beats even the best lithium-ion batteries. This means that FCEVs do not have range restriction that plagues BEVs, current FCEVs can travel as far as a gasoline powered vehicle before needing to be refueled. And with current compressed gas technologies it is possible to refuel a FCEV in about five minutes, a little longer than it takes to pump a tank of gasoline but much less than the hours it takes to charge a lithium-ion battery.

Refueling an FCEV is a lot quicker that charging a BEV but the fuel is much harder to obtain! (Credit: Popular Mechanics.)

The problem for FCEVs is that unlike gasoline there’s no easy source of hydrogen for fuel. Hydrogen is so reactive, that’s what makes it a good fuel, that there is no source free hydrogen on the planet so it has to be manufactured. Usually this is accomplished by using electricity to separate water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. And once that is accomplished the hydrogen then has to be either compressed or liquefied in order to be stored in a bottle that will fit into a FCEV. Those operations require energy, quite a lot of energy, which greatly lowers the overall efficiency of FCEVs.

Separating water into hydrogen and oxygen is so easy even a child can do it! But on a industrial scale it’s both difficult and expensive. (Credit: Navigating by Joy)

There is also the fact that while both systems, BEVs and FCEVs claim to be carbon emissions free that’s only true once the vehicle is completely charged / fueled. The electricity used to either charge the batteries of a BEV or to separate and compress hydrogen for a FCEV comes from the present electrical power grid and currently that is mainly produced by burning fossil fuels! Nevertheless, as we install more wind turbines and build more solar arrays the percentage of power generated by fossil fuels will decline and both BEVs and FCEVs will become greener, cleaner technologies.

A comparison of BEVs and FCEVs to standard petrol fueled cars. Of course what’s not mentioned is the damage to the environment caused by burning fossil fuels! (Credit: Euronews)

Currently it is BEV technology that seems to be leading the race for market share with Elon Musk’s Tesla Corporation producing nearly half a million vehicles in 2020. At the same time other, more traditional auto manufacturers like Ford, GM and Toyota are all making a big push for BEVs. GM has gone so far as to assert that they will no longer produce gasoline powered cars after 2030.

Elon Musk introducing the latest Telsa model BEV. Currently Tesla leads in the race to turn electric vehicles into a money making business but they’re now facing a lot of competition. (Credit: Business Insider)

On the other hand the European countries seem to be betting on hydrogen. Last July for example the German government allocated $8.2 billion for the development of hydrogen technology along with an additional $2.3 billion to promote international partnerships involving hydrogen.

One reason for the interest for hydrogen in Europe is that there are many industrial processes that require very high temperatures, steel and concrete production to name two. Currently such processes burn fossil fuels to provide the heat and converting to electricity would be both difficult and inefficient. Burning hydrogen with oxygen however would provide more than enough heat and the only emissions generated would be water vapour.

Making steel requires very high temperatures, something easier to produce by burning hydrogen than with electricity. (Credit: Mining News)

So as you can see the war between battery or fuel cell technology is far from over. Much more research needs carried out if we are going to get the maximum benefit from both techniques and only time will tell which technology comes to dominate. Nevertheless the age of the internal combustion engine is rapidly drawing to a close, the age of the electrical vehicle will soon be upon us.