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Book Review: 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Cover of 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Audiobooks)

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction author best known for his Mars trilogy (Mars Red, Mars Green and Mars Blue) about the colonization of and terraforming of Mars. “2312” is a recent novel but Robinson is such a prolific writer that he already has a new novel “Aurora” just coming out so you’ll have to forgive me for being a bit behind.

Kim Stanley Robinson (Credit: Davis Enterprise)

As you can guess “2312” takes place three hundred years from now when the human race is well on its way to the complete colonization of the Solar System. Mars has been terraformed and the terraforming of Venus is underway. Meanwhile Mercury and Earth’s Moon along with three of Jupiter’s and two of Saturn’s moons all have substantial population. Not only that but numerous asteroids have been hollowed out and turned into small worldlets, each with its own particular ecosystem. The image below is an artists impression of the interior of such an asteroid.

The Interior of an Asteroid / Worldlet (Credit: Reddit.com)

Swan Er Hong is a citizen of Mercury, an artist and designer of some of the asteroid / worldlets whose grandmother Alex has recently died. In her grandmother’s will Swan is tasked with taking some vital information to several of Alex’s confidants out at Saturn. The information is very sensitive in nature and cannot be trusted to transmission by radio. In carrying out this task Swan becomes involved in a secret organization trying to defend humanity against a conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions.

It’s the actual fight against this conspiracy that is the weakest part of “2312”. Aside from an attack on Mercury’s only city, most of the population manages to escape; the bad guys don’t really do much. In fact it isn’t until you’re 7/8ths of the way through the novel that you can point at someone and say, he’s a bad guy. There’s a lot of theorizing about who the bad guys could be and what their motives are but nothing concrete until near the very end. In fact the motives of the bad guys are never made really clear. And the final defeat of the bad guys itself is rather anti-climatic, the interplanetary police just round them all up in about two pages.

The reason for reading “2312” is all of the descriptions, they are wondrous. In “2312” you get to visit every planet, yes even Pluto, and every one of them is a unique world unto itself. Between Sunwalking on Mercury or surfing the “F” ring of Saturn you’ll read about things you never imagined.

In fact some of the most interesting things are the asteroid / worldlets that I should also mention have been given engines so traveling from one planet to another usually involves jumping on an asteroid that’s going your way. Many of these asteroid / worldlets have ecologies that preserve one of Earth’s damaged ecosystems (Earth is in kinda bad shape). There are other, more interesting worldlets as well however, let’s just say Jurassic Asteroid! The image below shows what such an asteroid could look like from the outside.

An Asteroid Spaceship in 2312 (Credit: Regina Flores Mir)

The people of the early 24th century are also very different as humanity adapts to life in space. Although it’s not mentioned explicitly there must be some kind of gene editing going on. There certainly is with the dinosaurs and woolly mammoths.

Kim Stanley Robinson is a writer best known for his interests in ecology, culture and politics and that’s certainly what you get in “2312”. O’k the plot may be a little thin but think of “2312” as a roller coaster ride, you have a lot of fun so does it really matter if you don’t get very far?

“2312” is like a visit to the early 24th century, that’s something that it does very well.

Some Stories from the Animal Kingdom.

Over the last week or so there have been a number of small but nevertheless interesting stories concerning a wide assortment of different animals. Since none of them were extensive enough to warrant a post of their own I’ve decided to collect several of them into the same post.

Let’s start close to home, for me at least. For many years a species of Green Crab (Carcinus maemas) native to Europe has been causing a lot of destruction along the coasts off New England. The green crabs consume both juvenile clams and eelgrass, both of which are important for many of the seafoods that are collected in those waters. This is another example of an invasive species that hopped a ride on one of our ships and has now become a pest in the environment in which we accidentally placed it. The image below is a green crab.

European Green Crab Carcinus maenas (Credit: NRDC)

The story is now getting worse however, because a newer, larger and more aggressive variety of the green crab is moving south from the waters around Nova Scotia. Whereas the green crabs New Englanders had become familiar with are shy and try to hide from large creatures such as humans the Canadian crabs are so belligerent that researchers who try to collect specimens find themselves being attacked by the crabs. “Any time I went to grab one they went to get me instead,” said Louis Logan, a University of New England graduate student taking part in the research. In the labouratory a comparison of the destructive abilities of the two varieties clearly showed that the more aggressive species caused far more damage.

Since the green crabs originally came from Europe I guess it’s only fair that our next story should come from Europe. The small town of Aitoliko is sometimes known as the ‘Venice of Greece’ because of it’s many picturesque canals but over the past week Aitoliko has become famous for something much ickier. A vast carpet of spider webs is now covering Aitoliko, every tree and many of the buildings are completely enclosed within a layer of spider silk, see images below.

Spider Web in Aitoliko Greece (Credit: The Japan Times)

Now to produce such a monstrously huge blanket of webbing you’d think you would have to have a monstrously large spider but you’d be wrong, spiders of the Tetragnatha genus have a leg span usually less than two centimeters but can produce sheet-like coverings than serve as homes to thousands of individual spiders.

Spiders of this genus are known to often produce web systems similar to those now seen in Aitoliko although rarely are they this extensive. There’s no mystery, no mad doctor behind the enormous population surge in spiders however. The temperature this summer in Aitoliko has been just perfect for the breeding of the spider’s chief source of food, gnats. So with a lot of gnats breeding a lot more gnats you get a lot more spiders and a small Greek town covered in spider webs.

“It’s a simple prey-predator phenomenon,” according to Fotis Pergantis a Greek biologist. “…Once the temperatures begin to drop the gnat populations will die out, the spider population will decrease as well.”

Another story this week concerns another type of arthropod predator. The Praying Mantis is arguably the fiercest, most voracious killer for its size of any animal on Earth. The stick-like insect will literally devour anything it can grab, in fact female praying mantis are legendary for eating their mates during the act of mating. See image below.

A Female Praying Mantis eating her Mate (Credit: Australian Geographic)

Now, for the first time the praying mantis has been observed in the act of fishing. That’s right, if a small enough fish comes close enough to a praying mantis it’s dinner.

The observation was made in India, home to the giant Asian mantis, Hierodula tenuidentata, at a small artificial rooftop pool. The pool is stocked with the common freshwater fish the guppy and for five nights in March of 2017 the pool was visited by a male giant Asian mantis.

The mantis was observed to perch on one of the water lilies that grew in the pool and wait, a typical hunting strategy of mantises. Over the course of the five nights the mantis was seen to catch and eat nine of the guppies. See image below.

Fishing Praying Mantis (Credit: National Geographic)

As I said earlier, the praying mantis has a reputation of simply being one of the best hunters you will ever find. Now for the first time we know that they’re not too bad at fishing either.

Which brings me to my last story, which actually is about a robotic sea creature. You may recall my post of the 8th of September where I discussed several aquatic hunting robots that were being developed to help eradicate invasive species in the waters of Florida and The Great Barrier Reef, well this story is about another robotic sea creature, although a gentler one.

Engineers at Florida Atlantic University and the US Office for Naval Research have been working on the design and development of a robot jellyfish which is intended to serve as an instrument to monitor and study ocean environments such as coral reefs. The robot, see image below, is based upon the anatomy of the larval stage of the moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and the first prototypes were made by 3-D printing.

Robot Jellyfish Swimming (credit: Jennifer Frame et al)

The development team hopes to soon incorporate a variety of sensors onto their robot jellyfish soon along with the ability to navigate through complex ocean terrain.

O’k so maybe a robot jellyfish isn’t an actual animal but it certainly is an example of how the lessons learned from the animal world are being incorporated into our robots even as we learn more and more about the many different ways animals have evolved in order to live in this world.

Psychologist Walter Mischel, originator of the famous, or infamous Marshmallow test, dies at the age of 88.

Doctor Walter Mischel, a leading researcher in the fields of personality theory and social psychology died on the 12th of September 2018 in New York City, aged 88. At the time of his death Dr. Mischel was Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Columbia University but it was at Stanford University back in the 1960s and 70s that Dr. Mischel conducted his most well known experiments, the Marshmallow test. The image below is of Walter Mischel.

The Marshmallow test is simple enough on the surface. The test subjects were children who all attended Stanford’s Bing Nursery School, ages 4 to 6. The children were placed in a room with only a table and chair (child sized) where an adult tester gave each child a treat, a marshmallow or a cookie. The tester told the children that if they didn’t eat the treat until the tester returned they would be given a second treat. The tester then leaves the room, usually for fifteen minutes and the child was filmed during the entire test.

The test is a study of the psychology of delayed gratification, whether or not the test subject has the patience to wait for a greater reward. Dr. Mischel’s original intent was to discover at what age between 4 and 6 this patience developed but over the course of time the test unveiled a great many other secrets as well.

The Marshmallow Test (Credit: Performance Coach University)

As you might guess, the majority of the children simply eat their treat the moment the adult leaves the room. The most interesting initial discovery however was that those children who succeeded in waiting generally did so by distracting themselves, even if it was no more than just turning their chair around so that they couldn’t see the treat. Of the 600 children who took part in the original set of tests, just over a third waited and received their promised second treat.

In 1988 and 1990 Dr. Mischel conducted a follow up study of the children who had taken part in the test and were now teenagers preparing for college. What Dr. Mischel found was that those who had as children waited and gotten the second treat had statistically preformed much better in school, even had significantly higher scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAP) needed for admission to college. It was found that even the children’s parents considered them to be more mature, more reliable. The same psychological traits that had enabled them to succeed at the marshmallow test were now allowing them to succeed in later life.

Marshmallow Follow Up (Credit: Slideshow)

This is not to say that the results of the marshmallow test can be used to predict future success. Even Dr. Mischel strongly cautioned against any such assumptions, “The idea that your child is doomed if she chooses not to wait for her marshmallows is really a serious misinterpretation,” he said in an interview. In fact later studies would show that social and economic status were critical factors in determining whether or not a child would wait for the second treat.

Before I go it’s important to note in our current political climate that Doctor Walter Mischel was an Austrian Jew whose family fled the Nazi occupation of Austria in 1938 and who entered the United States as a political refugee. Arriving in the United States at the age of eight with basically nothing Walter Mischel managed to get his Ph.D. from Ohio State University and taught at the University of Colorado and Harvard along with Stanford and Columbia. Another example of how the United States profited from someone that another country didn’t want because of blind racist hatred.

However Science can only take us so Far! (Army HEALTH)

Space news for September 2018.

Without doubt the biggest news in space recently has been the discovery of an air leak onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and even more disturbing, the possibility that the leak had been deliberately made “by human hand”! Indeed with the discovery of drill bit marks around the, too circular to be natural hole the idea that the leak had been caused by a micrometeorite has been officially ruled out. The image below is of the hole.

Hole discovered in the ISS (Credit: BGR.com)

The tracking down of the hole itself had taken nearly a week after the loss of air pressure due to the leak was first noticed. It was finally found inside the Russian Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft that had carried the three members of ISS crew 56 to the station. The image below shows the Soyuz spacecraft docked at the ISS.

Soyuz Spacecraft docked at the ISS (Credit: NBC News)

Now the crew 56 Soyuz capsule had been docked to the ISS since June 6th of 2018 so the fact that a leak was only discovered in September is strong evidence that the hole was not already in the spacecraft before it was launched. It seems very possible therefore that one of the six astronauts currently serving aboard the ISS made the hole with a hand drill; the perpetrator and his motive are as yet unknown.

So the Russians are crying sabotage while the Americans just want to stop the rumor mill and find out exactly what did really happen. With the political tensions growing between the two countries this is a serious development. Space has recently become the last area of cooperation between the US and Russia and if that is no longer true the future of the ISS is in grave doubt.

So much for the bad news, if you want some good news in space these days it seems that you can always rely on Space X Corporation. In the early morning hours of September 10th a Space X Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral carrying the Telstar 18 Vantage communications satellite, the 16th successful launch for Space X so far this year. The image below is of the Telstar satellite.

Telestar 18 Communications Satellite (Credit: YouTube)

With all of the reliability we’ve come to expect from Space X the Telstar satellite was delivered to its correct geostationary transfer orbit. Meanwhile the Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed on Space X’s recovery drone ship so that it can be reused on some future mission. The image below shows the liftoff of the Falcon 9 carrying the Telstar satellite.

Launch of the Telestar 18 Satellite aboard a Falcon 9 Rocket (Credit: Advocator)

The block 5 Falcon 9 first stage variant is designed to be reflown 10 times with only minimal cleanup and maintenance between flights. After every 10 flights the rocket will undergo a major overhaul and it is hoped that eventually the first stages can be reused as many as 100 times.

Getting back aboard the ISS the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is preparing to launch it’s seventh Kounotori H-II supply capsule to the space station. Along with 6,000 kilos of food and equipment for the astronauts the Kounotori H-II will carry two ‘cubesats’ which may be small but who are going to conduct an experiment that could have huge consequences.

The two satellites measure only 10cm on each side and will be deployed outside the ISS. A 10-meter long steel tether will link the two cubesats together while a tiny motorized vehicle will attempt to move back and forth between them. The image below shows an artists illustration of the two cubesats.

Japanese Experimental CubeSats (Credit: JAXA)

This test is intended to be the first demonstration in outer space of technology that will be needed in order to build a space elevator, a staircase to the stars that is one of the favourite ideas in science fiction novels.

For those who haven’t heard of the space elevator it is literally a tower built all of the way up to geostationary orbit (That’s 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface). Elevators will then take passengers and cargo into space without the danger and expense of a rocket launch. It is thought that a space elevator could reduce the cost of going into space to as little as $100 / kilo. The image below shows a possible space elevator.

A Possible Space Elevator (Credit: Trendsderzukunft)

The theory behind the space elevator is sound. The problems may be numerous and difficult but do not require any radically new or unknown scientific knowledge. The technology that will be tested by the cubesats is relativity simple but even simple things sometimes behave strangely in space. The experiment will be a small first step to building a space elevator, but it will be the first step.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer aboard The International Space Station and its search for an Anti-Atom.

It was some ninety years ago now that physicist Paul Dirac first suggested the existance of anti-matter and only a little more than a year later that another physicist, Carl Anderson observed anti-electrons (he called them positrons) in cosmic rays striking the Earth. In the years since then physicists have not only observed many different anti-particles but actually produced them using particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. We also know that the collisions of cosmic ray particles in outer space produce single anti-particles because we often observe them as well.

Anti-Matter differs from ordinary Matter by a switching of the charge. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

In fact all of the experiments we have performed with our particle accelerators, and all of the theories we have developed tell us that there should be exactly as much anti-matter in the Universe as there is matter. The big bang should have produced just as much anti-matter as matter. But there certainly aren’t large amounts of anti-matter, not anywhere around Earth at least.

The logic goes like this: The Earth is made of matter and since the solar wind is in contact with the Earth’s upper atmosphere without causing matter/anti-matter annihilation it must be made of matter as well, so the Sun is made of matter. Since the solar wind is also in contact with everything else in our solar system as well all of the planets; moons and etc must be made of matter just as the Earth is. (Let’s not forget that we have now landed probes on several other bodies so they certainly aren’t anti-matter)

Matter and Anti-Matter annihilate each other producing Energy (Credit: Fandom)

We can even go further because the solar wind reaches out into the interstellar medium where the gas and dust particles must be made of matter or again they would interact with the solar wind. Finally that means that, since all the solar winds from all of the other stars in our galaxy are also in contact with the interstellar medium all of the stars in our galaxy must be made of matter.

What about other galaxies? You may ask. Could there be entire anti-galaxies made of anti-matter out there? And if so, how would we know? That question has been the subject of much debate over the last half a century.

Again, here’s the logic: if anti-galaxies do exist then they must have anti-supernova that produce anti-cosmic ray nuclei just as normal cosmic ray nuclei are produced in our galaxy. Eventually a very few of those anti-cosmic ray nuclei will find their way to Earth and if our scientists could find a single undeniable anti-nucleus that would be strong evidence that there are anti-galaxies with anti-stars out somewhere out there.

That’s the goal of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) currently operating aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Launched into space by the space shuttle on the 16th of May in 2011 the AMS-02 has been observing cosmic ray particles above our atmosphere now for eight years.

The AMS-02 Mounted on the International Space Station (Credit: NASA)

(By the way, yes there was an APS-01, a Proof-of-Concept model that went into space with the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998.)

The AMS-02 operates in many ways like one of the detectors at CERN or one of the other high energy physics labs. First ignoring any particles that do not pass from the top to the bottom the AMS-02 measures the time each particle takes passing through, that gives particles velocity. At the bottom the particle then enters a calorimeter which measures the particles energy. Once you know the velocity and energy you can calculate the mass and together they tell you what kind of particle it is.

Breakdown of the Components of the AMS-02 (Credit: NASA)

Finally the whole detector is surrounded by a large permanent magnet. The magnetic field will bend the path of charged particles and if you know what kind of particle it is, and the direction it bends you know whether it’s matter or anti-matter.

AMS-02 has spent the last eight years searching for an anti-helium nucleus and so far found nothing. Physicists feel that this result puts a very strong constraint on the possibility of large amounts of anti-matter existing anywhere in the observable Universe. It really appears that for some reason still unknown the big bang produced only matter, even though much less powerful interactions since then have always produced matter and anti-matter in equal parts.

If you’d like to learn more about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) click on the link below to be taken to NASA’s webpage for AMS-02.

https://ams.nasa.gov/

There is obviously still a lot to be learned about how our Universe came into being.

The Robots are Coming: To Kill!!

This is my fourth post concerning the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), and drone technology in activities that used to require human beings to accomplish (see posts of 2Sept2016, 12Feb2017 and 17Jun2017). I have talked about driverless cars, automated warehouse workers and other developments in robotics. Today I’m going to talk a bit about two independent efforts to develop automated drones that are actually intended to kill living creatures.

Now don’t panic, we’re not talking about some military funded program to build terminator type robot soldiers. In fact the animal targets in both programs, and we are talking about animals here, are invasive species that are doing great damage in the ecological systems into which they’ve been introduced. And as it happens both species are sea creatures.

The first robotic hunter I’ll talk about is being developed by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) to eliminate a species known as the Lionfish (Genus Pterois) from the coastal waters off Florida. See the image of a Lionfish below.

The Lionfish, Genus Pterois (Credit: Live Science)

The lionfish is a native of the Red Sea and eastern Indian Ocean and is considered as a prized possession among saltwater aquarium hobbyists, I’ve had several friends who have owned one. The long spines the animal sports are actually poisonous although the poison is usually not fatal in humans.

Several lionfish kept in aquaria must have been released into the waters off Florida and without their native predators their population has exploded much to the detriment of native species. The lionfish is itself an active predator and specimens have been dissected to find hundreds of juvenal native fish in their bellies. Over the past several years scuba divers in Florida have been actively hunting lionfish not only because of the damage to the ecosystem the fish is causing but also because lionfish are quite tasty and fetch a good price of up to $40 per kilo.

Human drivers can only do so much however, our time underwater is limited and lionfish are known to dive considerably deeper than is safe for the average scuba diver. So that’s where WPI’s robotic lionfish killer comes in, see image below.

Lionfish Hunting Robot being developed at WPI (Credit: Digital Trends)

On the left hand side of the robot can be seen the revolver-like carriage of eight spear tips with orange foam. The foam is intended to bring the spear to the surface so that it can be recovered and the fish harvested, it’s worth $40 per kilo remember. To the right of the spears are two small boxes containing cameras. Behind the upper camera is a chamber containing the electronics while behind the lower camera is a tank to control buoyancy.

“The goal is to be able to toss the robot over the side of the boat and have it go down to the reef, plot out a course, and begin its search (for lionfish),” according to Craig Putnam who is senior instructor in computer science and associate director of WPI’s Robotics Engineering Program.

On the other side of the world a similar solution is being developed to help protect the corals of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia. The enemy species here is not a fish but a species of invertebrate known as the Crown of Thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), see image below.

Crown of thorns starfish (Credit: JSTOR Daily)

The crown of thorns moves slowly over the coral, ingesting the small polyps that make coral a living rock. The starfish have grown so numerous that large sections of the reef have been devoured, destroying the habitat of hundreds of species of fish and other creatures.

In the same way that WPI is developing a robot to hunt down lionfish here it is the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) who have developed the Crown-Of-Thorns-Starfish Robot (COTSbot) to help protect the reef. See image below.

COTSbot hunting Robot (Credit: Business Insider)

Unlike the lionfish the starfish is not desirable, and it moves much more slowly making the COTSbot’s job a good bit easier. In fact the COTSbot patrols the reef, spots a starfish with 99% accuracy and injects it with a poison to kill them.

The success of both of these two programs depends finally on the ability of computer systems, of AI to recognize their intended target. Whether such systems can be reliable enough to be trusted to act autonomously in a complex ecosystem is still a open question.

It’s true that both of these programs are intended to restore an out of balance ecology. It’s also true that neither program has any connection to the military so we’re not discussing anything like the Terminator. Or are we, after all these are computer controlled robots designed to kill living creatures without any human supervision. Anyway you put it that just doesn’t sound right to me. Or have I just been reading to much Science Fiction.

Space Weather

So far this year has turned out to be a pretty mild one as far as Space Weather is concerned. What’s Space Weather, you ask? Isn’t space a vacuum and you can’t have weather is a vacuum, can you?

It is certainly true that the density of matter in the space between Earth, the Moon and the other planets is usually less than ten atoms per cubic centimeter, that’s less than one billionth billionth of air density at sea level! Not only is the density extremely low but the matter that is out there is usually in the form of elementary particles, protons and electrons rather than stable atoms. How could such nothing have anything that could be called weather?

Well it turns out that while there may not be very much out there, what there is has a lot of energy in it. In fact those few protons and electrons go speeding through the Solar system at more than 10,000 times the wind speed of a hurricane! And since those particles have electric charge at that speed they can generate some pretty powerful voltages and magnetic fields.

As you might guess space weather is almost totally dominated by the Sun with more than a million tons of material evaporating away from the Sun’s surface every second. Known as the Solar Wind this flow of particles was first predicted in 1957 by the astrophysicist Eugene Parker, for whom NASA’s new Parker Solar Probe is named.

Eugene Parker Explaining the Solar Wind (Credit: New York Times)

It is the Solar Wind that is responsible for both the Aurora and the belts of radiation that circle the Earth known as the Van Allen belts. Further out in space it is the Solar Wind that generates the tails of comets and which keeps those tails pointing away from the Sun.

Space Weather is Caused by the Sun (Credit: NOAA)

The power of the Solar Wind varies with the Sun’s approximately eleven-year sunspot cycle and right now the Sun has been quite quiet. During periods of intense sunspot activity however the Solar Wind becomes not only more powerful but more erratic, with massive explosions on the Sun’s surface called Solar flairs blasting out millions of tons of material generating events known as Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs.

Although it went unrecognized at the time, the first detection of a CME striking the Earth occurred in early September in 1859! On the first of September that year British astronomer Richard Carrington noticed a bright spot on the Sun, a Solar flair. The next night, the night of the second a huge auroral display was seen over much of northern hemisphere, even as far south as Panama. At the same time the brand new U.S. telegraph system experienced unexplained electrifications with operators being shocked and telegraph paper being set on fire.

A similar strike by a CME today would destroy most of the satellites we have in orbit and lead to massive electrical blackouts here on Earth. In fact a magnetic storm from the Sun in March of 1989 is credited with causing a total blackout of the Hydro-Quebec power grid in Canada. Also, the effect that so much radiation might have on astronauts out in space is still unknown but is expected to be a serious health risk.

These days NASA and other space and scientific agencies keep a constant watch on the Sun using satellites such as the joint NASA-ESA Solar Heliospheric (SOHO) and the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. To these satellites will soon be added the Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft that will travel closer to the Sun than any other man-made device ever has. A daily report for space weather is now being issued to provide warnings for satellite operators, communications corporations as well as power grid utilities.

The SOHO Satellite and an image it took of a Solar Flair (Credit: NASA)

Many scientists and engineers are presently working to develop technologies to protect our electronic infrastructure against the ravages of extreme Space Weather; I know quite a few of them in fact. But the next solar storm could strike at almost any time and there’s a great deal of work to be done. If you’d like to visit NOAA’s website for the daily space weather report click on the link below. (It’s a really cool site!)

https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/

A hundred years ago Space Weather was completely unknown and almost impossible to detect. As our modern societies grow ever more dependent on electronics however the destructive potential of Space Weather is one more way that outer space is now becoming a place that we need to pay close attention to.

Gene Editing discovers a potential cure for Muscular Dystrophy, and a look back at the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

These next three days are celebrated as the Labour Day weekend here in the US and is also considered the unofficial end of summer. Back when I was growing up it was also the time of the Jerry Lewis telethon to benefit the fight against the disease Muscular Dystrophy (MD), a disorder that causes an almost total loss of strength and control of the muscles and is the leading genetic cause of death in children.

The Jerry Lewis Telethon began in 1966 and continued until 2010 (Credit: CBS)

Starting in 1966 and continuing until 2010 Jerry hosted the annual charity event which featured other celebrities and entertainment and which managed to raise $2.45 billion dollars for the study and treatment of MD. Despite the success of the telethon, and the large amount of money raised however MD has proven to be an intractable illness with little progress being made toward a treatment.

For those who aren’t familiar with MD it is a genetic disorder that prevents the production in the cells of the muscles of a shock absorbing protein called dystrophin. The lack of dystrophin causes the muscle cells to weaken and degenerate leading to a general failure of the bodies muscles. The first symptoms usually appear before a child is one year old.

Since MD is a genetic disorder it is not contagious but rather must be inherited from both parents, each of whom must carry a single recessive MD gene. Having a single MD gene does not cause the disease but by looking at the image below you can see how a man and woman, each of whom have one MD gene on their chromosome pair, can pass it on to their children.

Inheritance of a Recessive Genetic disorder such as MD (Credit: Human Illnesses)

Since a child gets one gene from each parent 25% get clean chromosomes from both parents, the child on the left. This child will not develop MD nor can it pass the mutated gene to its children. 50% of the offspring will get an MD gene from one parent but not the other; these are the two children in the middle. These children will not develop MD but carry the gene and can pass it on to their children just as they received it from their parents. Only the child on the right, the 25% who receive the MD gene from both parents, will actually develop the disease.

There has recently been some progress that offers a glimmer of hope in the fight against MD. The research was conducted on a family of dogs, King Charles Spaniels to be exact, who were found about ten years ago to also suffer from MD. The research used the new science of gene editing and in particular the gene cutting tool CRISPR that I discussed at some length in my post of 5Aug2018.

To put it simply CRISPR uses a virus, yes a virus to cut a section of DNA out of a chromosome with a cell and replace it with a different DNA section. The work was led by Eric Olsen at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and consisted of using CRISPR to replace the mutated DNA in four one-month old male dogs.

CRISPR Working at the Molecular Level (Credit: Science)

Gene editing and CRISPR have been used before to treat other genetic disorders but MD was considered a long shot because the gene that manufactures dystrophin is the largest in the human genome and a large number of different mutations can lead to the disease. Still Dr. Olsen and his team injected the four dogs with millions of CRISPR viruses that were programmed to find and replace the mutated dystrophin gene.

The results were better than the researchers had expected. According to Dr. Olsen the dogs ‘…showed obvious signs of behavioral improvement…running, jumping…it was quite dramatic.”

Now this is only a test on four dogs, much more research will have to be carried out before any testing is conducted on humans. Still this is one more case where gene editing, and CRISPR in particular are giving us tools to fight diseases against which we once had no hope.

Which brings us to the ethical question. Changing the genes of a one-month old infant, dog or human, is playing god if anything is. And the technology that can ‘repair’ a child with MD can also create a ‘designer baby’ if that’s what we want.

As I said in my post of a little over a year ago my opinion is that we should move forward with gene editing but slowly, maintaining ethical controls on the research. I also that it is very important that we have a full-scale public debate now about how we as a society will regulate and control gene editing.

I’ve now told you my opinion, what’s yours?

Drought in England is helping to reveal lost Archeological sites.

Over this summer of 2018 Climate Change has brought extreme weather conditions to many of the regions of Europe. In both Portugal and Southern France monsoon-like rains have caused widespread flooding while areas to the north have seen droughts more severe than any in recorded history. England in particular is suffering from an almost complete lack of rain.

But every cloud has a silver lining they say (weather pun intended) and in England archeologists have been making the best of the situation by rediscovering hundreds of ancient homesteads, villages, hillforts and other sites, from the air! Flying over the parched, brown grasses of the English countryside ghostly lines known as cropmarks become visible appearing to trace the outlines of long vanished human habitation. See images below.

Per-Historic Ceremonial sites in Eynsham, Oxfordshire (Credit: Historic England)

Roman Farm, Bicton, Devon (Credit: Historic England)

It’s hard to imagine how a buried stonewall or even a ditch that was filled in long ago could still effect the plants that are now growing above them. However even tiny chemical differences in the soil can show up as a slight variation in plant colour under the right conditions, such as a drought. These differences may be almost imperceptible from the ground but from the air…well the images speak for themselves. According to Historic England’s Chief Executive Duncan Wilson, “This spell of very hot weather has provided the perfect conditions for our aerial archeologists to ‘see beneath the soil’ as cropmarks are much better defined when the soil has less moisture.”

Pre-Historic Enclosure in Churchstanton, Somerset (Credit: Historic England)

Damian Grady, the Manager of Aerial Reconnaissance for Historic England agrees adding, “This has been one of my busiest summers in 20 years of flying and it has been very rewarding making discoveries in areas that do not normally reveal cropmarks”. By the way, just last year the Aerial Reconnaissance branch of Historic England celebrated it’s 50th birthday.

Aerial Reconnaissance is becoming one of the most important tools in the field of archeology with good reason. Trying to find Iron Age or older farm sites by exploratory digging is both expensive, time consuming and can often come up empty handed. On the other hand, a pleasant afternoon’s flight in a small plane with a camera can disclose the exact location of dozens potential areas worth excavating.

Abandoned Medieval Settlement in Nobel Northamptonshire (Credit: Historic England)

All of the sites aren’t ancient. This is a WWII AA Battery from Bolton upon Dearne (Credit: Historic England)

While England is at present one of the leading countries for aerial archeology the Middle East and even South America are also using the technique to great effect, rediscovering sites lost to mainstream history. (See my post of April 4th 2018.) There are still large areas of the world remaining to be surveyed from the air however. The great steppes of Russia and central Asia have been inhabited for tens of thousands of years and we know very little about the people and cultures that arose there. Aerial reconnaissance could cover those seemingly endless square kilometers of grassland and potentially discover hundreds of places to excavate and study.

Even while they are excited to be making all of these wonderful discoveries the archeologists at Historic England know that their good luck has come at the expense of all of the farmers whose crops are withering from a lack of rain. Another example of how Climate Change may very well bring some benefits to a small percentage of the human race, even as it brings ruin to the lives of many.

If you’d like to know more about Historic England’s aerial reconnaissance of if you’d just like to see some more of these fascinating images click on one of the links below to be taken to their website.

https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/research/50-years-flying/

https://historicengland.org.uk/whats-new/news/hot-dry-summer-reveals-hidden-archaeological-sites

Was there a Universe before the Big Bang? Two Researchers think they have found the evidence in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

For over fifty years now the ‘Big Bang Theory’ has been the cornerstone of our understanding of how the Universe came into being. According to the theory a little more than 13 billion years ago an incredibly dense ‘singularity’ exploded hurling matter and energy out into space (Which didn’t exist before the explosion). That matter would slowly cool to form stars and quasars and galaxies and all of the other astronomical objects we see through our telescopes today.

The strongest evidence for the Big Bang comes from observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), literally the leftover heat from that explosion that fills all of space. The image below shows the CMB as measured by the WMAP Satellite.

The Cosmic Microwave Background as measured by the WMAP satellite (Credit: NASA)

Still, right from the very first there have been physicists and cosmologists who asked: What was going on before the Big Bang? What in fact caused the Big Bang? (Actually, since on cosmic scales time and space are pretty much the same those two questions can be combined as: What is going on outside of the Big Bang?)

Cosmologists have speculated about cyclic Universes where the expansion of the Big Bang comes to stop, leading to a collapse called a Big Crunch which then rebounds as another Big Bang starting the cycle all over again. Then they are other theories about a ‘Multi-Verse’, where our Big Bang was just one of an infinite number of Big Bangs of various sizes, shapes and properties. My favourite theory is that our Universe is just a Black Hole inside an even bigger Universe. What we call the Big Bang was the instant the Black Hole in that other Universe formed.

If you think these ideas border on crazy, well wouldn’t any theory about how our Universe began sort of have to be! The problem with all of these theories however is that the evidence needed to confirm any of them would have to have come through the Big Bang. In other words that evidence would have had to survive the unimaginable temperatures and pressures at the beginning of our Universe and few physicists thought such survival was possible.

Now however two mathematical physicists think they have found just such evidence buried within the data of the CMB. V.G. Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia along with Roger Penrose of The Mathematical Institute in Oxford in the UK have been working on a variation of the cyclic Universe that they call Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). In CCC each Universe, remember we’re talking about a cycle of Universes now, expands until all of the matter has spread so thin that time and space no longer really exist because there is nothing with which to measure them! The Universe has now returned to the initial condition of the Big Bang so another Big Bang occurs to start everything all over again!

One of the interesting things about CCC is that in the theory the Big Bang itself takes a little longer and is therefore less violent. Less violent enough for some traces of really powerful events, like a merger of supermassive black holes for example, to send some evidence through the Big Bang.

It would work like this, see image below. The start of a merger of two supermassive black holes would send a powerful ripple of electromagnetic and gravitational energy spreading through space and time. Once the merger is completed the ripple would cease. As the ripple spread out it would form a cone in space-time which eventually would impact on the next Big Bang causing the formation of concentric circles that could show up on the CMB.

Effect of a Black Hole Merger on a subsequent Big Bang (Credit: Penrose and Gurzadyan)

Now searching through all of the CMB data for such traces is the sort of tedious, painstaking work that only a computer could do but Penrose and Gurzadyan believe they have found some. The plots below show some of the evidence, the data peaks being the rings. The image below that shows two superimposed rings on the CMB data. (That means the rings have been artificially placed on the data as an aid to seeing them) I have to admit that I have some trouble seeing the signal through all of the noise but nevertheless I’m intrigued by the possibility of detecting ‘fossils’ of pre-Big Bang existence.

Data Plots from the WMAP Satellite data (Credit: Penrose and Gurzadyan)

Rings Superimposed on WMAP data to illustrate fossil traces from pre-Big Bang Event (Credit: Penrose and Gurzadyan)

Theories like that of Penrose and Gurzadyan are always greeted with a good deal of skepticism, as they should be. Other physicists and cosmologists will now scrutinize Penrose and Gurzadyan’s math and calculations to see if they can find any flaws. At the same time I’m certain that Penrose and Gurzadyan will be looking for more ‘fossils’, more evidence to support their claims.

If Penrose and Gurzadyan are right it would be one of the biggest finds in science in this century. Only time and more data will tell for sure.