Book Review: “The Fall of Gondolin” by J. R. R. Tolkien

Now I know what you’re thinking. One of J. R. R. Tolkien’s stories from his imaginary mythology cannot by any stretch be considered Science Fiction. I also know that throughout the two plus years that I’ve been writing this blog I’ve been very strict about not letting the fantasy genre creep in to my reviews.

I’m making an exception for ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ however because this story is almost certainly going to be the last book that will ever be published with J. R. R. Tolkien listed as author. After all Tolkien died over 40 years ago in 1975 and although his son Christopher has been going through all of his father’s notes, editing and publishing several books from those notes, there aren’t many notes left and Christopher himself is now 94 years old. So ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ will undoubtedly be our last journey to that fabled land of Elves and Men called Middle-Earth.

J. R. R. Tolkien with his Pipe (Credit: Crisis Magazine)

It’s appropriate that ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ should be Tolkien’s last book because, as best Christopher can determine from his father’s notes, it was actually the first of the stories of the elder days that J. R. R. ever began. The basic idea of the hidden city of Gondolin was first set down while Tolkien was recuperating in a hospital from the injuries he had received at the battle of the Somme in 1916. Think about that, not too many stories can be said to have taken more than a hundred years to go from initial conception to actual publication.

The Fall of Gondolin Book Cover (Credit: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

And what you get in the ‘Fall of Gondolin’ isn’t a completed story anyway. Instead there are two lengthy sketches, the first sketch (completed in 1924) is an early complete story that has not been thoroughly fleshed out while the second (started in 1952), is a perhaps more fleshed out than necessary version of the first third of the complete story. Along with the sketches are Christopher Tolkien’s comments on his father’s notes.

For those who aren’t familiar with Tolkien’s mythology let’s just say that in the elder days the elves are fighting against the evil power of a devil named Melko or Melkor but called by the elves Morgoth (this is a problem I’ll discuss in a bit). After a battle one of the elves’ leaders Turgon decides to take his people into the mountains where he finds a valley and founds the ‘hidden city of stone’ or Gondolin in the elfish language.

Map of Tolkien’s Mythical Beleriand including Gondolin (Credit: Tor.com)

By the way humans (always referred to as Men) are just coming into existence during this war. One man, Tuor, the son of either Peleg or Huor, is given a mission by the sea god Ulmo, or Ylmir to find Gondolin and warn the city that they can’t hide from the bad guys forever.

I think you just got a taste of Tolkien’s problem here. He couldn’t stop tinkering, he couldn’t just finish a story and he loved coming up with names! Between the 1924 complete sketch and the 1954 first third more than a dozen new names or places that link to other stories have been added while a half dozen names have been completely changed.

In one sense it was this continuous reworking that made Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ the intricate tapestry that is was, but it also meant that he hardly ever finished anything!!! His poor son has spent forty years shifting through his father’s notes trying to satisfy the lovers of his father’s works who want the whole story, but there just isn’t one!

I’d like to quote Leonardo da Vinci if I may. “No work of art is ever completed, it is merely abandoned”. That is true whether you are painting a portrait or composing a symphony or writing the mythology of Middle-Earth. Yes you have to edit and revise, usually several times but eventually you have to put your pen down and send your glorious work off to the publisher or no one else will ever get the chance to see how wonderful it is!

For example I have forced myself to write two posts every week for this blog. I know that I have to publish two posts and of course I try to do my best to have everything make sense, as well as making it interesting. Yes I do revise and edit every post several times but eventually I have to just finish them and publish them so that you can read them.

A Scene from ‘The Fall of Gondolin. The Elf Ecthelion fights the Balrog Gothmog (credit: Don’t Hate the Geek)

Tolkien’s final word on Middle-Earth, ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ isn’t for everyone simply because, despite Christopher Tolkien’s best efforts, it isn’t a complete anything. I do recommend it for true lovers of fantasy however, especially fans of Tolkien. Such readers will not just enjoy it they will have to have it. I would also recommend ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ to would be writers because from it you can learn a fair bit about the writing of intricate stories like Tolkien’s, as well as a warning about some of the pitfalls.

 

Space News for October 2018

The big news story this month has to be the launch failure of a manned Soyuz spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch took place from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 11th of October at about 0847 GMT but it was only a few minutes into the mission that the failure occurred. The image below shows the Russian Soyuz vehicle taking off before the trouble began.

Launch of the failed Soyuz Mission to the ISS (Credit: The Verge)

Thankfully the two-man crew, one Russian and one American, were able to escape from the failed rocket booster rocket and have been safely rescued. The bad news is until a thorough investigation of what went wrong is conducted the entire human race is without a means of putting anyone into outer space. The men on the ISS can return, they have their return Soyuz capsules already up there, but no replacements can go up to take their place.

At the moment there are few details as to the precise nature of the failure. So far it appears that the launch rocket’s second stage failed to separate from the first stage but it could be months before we learn exactly what happened. Ironically an astronaut already on the ISS was filming the launch from orbit and may have in fact have photographed the failure as it occurred. The image below is from that filming.

Soyuz Failure as seen from the ISS (Credit: BGR.com)

Both NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency have already begun investigations but there is no way of telling how long they may take. Until both space agencies are convinced that they have found and fixed the problem the Soyuz is grounded, there will be no more manned space launches.

This disaster has been a possibility ever since NASA ended the Space Shuttle program seven years ago. In all of that time the US has been completely dependent on the Russians to take our astronauts back and forth to the ISS, at about $60 million dollars a ticket! Having only a single space system capable of manning the ISS, a single point of failure, is always a risky way to operate.

The immediate effect of the Soyuz failure on mission of the ISS is that two crewmembers will not be able to undertake their scheduled mission of staffing and maintaining the ISS, although NASA director James Brindenstine has announced that he still expects a December Soyuz launch to go forward. As to the long-term effect, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

 

Is there any other solution? Is there nothing we can do except wait for the Soyuz to be recertified for manned missions. Well an announcement by NASA just a few days before the Soyuz failure may point to the way forward.

For the past several years NASA has been funding Space X and Boeing in their development of manned capsules under the Commercial Crew Program (See my post of August 4th 2018 for the announcement of the planned first crews). Well NASA has just announced a tentative timetable for the first manned launches to take place from American soil since 2011.

Space X will conduct an unmanned test mission of their Dragon capsule in January of 2019 and if all goes well that will be followed by a manned mission to the ISS in June 2019. Boeing meanwhile will conduct its unmanned test launch of its Starliner capsule in March with a manned mission to the ISS in August.

Now before you say, that’s great, at most we won’t be able to send astronauts to the ISS for eight or nine months and after that we won’t even have to pay the Russians for a ride; that schedule is assuming everything goes according to plan. Also, the first missions to the ISS were intended to be for a one week stay only. Will NASA be prepared to risk a longer mission to the ISS with unproven spacecraft? That’s a very good question and I’ll wager that the engineers working on the commercial crew program, NASA, Space X and Boeing are very busy right now considering that option. The images below show Space X’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner capsules.

Boeings Starliner and Space X’s crewed Dragon Capsules (Credit: Space News)

Anyway you look at it the next the next year in manned spaceflight is going to be very eventful.

In the long term however there has also be some interesting news that may show us a glimpse of the future of manned space exploration. This week Lockheed Martin released its preliminary design for a reusable Moon lander that would take four astronauts from Lunar orbit to the surface and back to Lunar orbit after a week’s stay. The lander, see image below, would then be refueled in orbit for subsequent missions.

Lockheed Martin’s Preliminary Design for a reusable Moon Lander (Credit: Space News)

 

This idea of a reusable lander would be an extension of NASA plan for a space station in Lunar orbit known as the Lunar Gateway (See post of March 24th 2018 for more details).  In other words we’re taking about systems that won’t be ready for ten years at the very least so all of this is very preliminary!

It does seem as if, after several decades of going nowhere, the various space programs around the world are starting to find their way forward in the manned exploration of space.

A New Season of Doctor Who, and a Very New Doctor

Did you see it? Did you catch the season premier of Doctor Who? The first episode of the 2018-2019 season was simultaneously broadcast by the BBC around the world on Sunday October 7th at 1845 Hrs UTC time, that’s 1:45PM Eastern Daylight Time for me.

Doctor Who on the BBC (Credit: BBC)

Now every Doctor Who fan knows that the character of the Doctor is an alien scientist who travels throughout time and space in his Tardis (which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space). The Tardis is a Time / Space machine that looks like a policeman’s box and is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!

The Tardis (Credit: All Posters)

Being an alien whenever the Doctor is badly wounded he doesn’t die but rather he regenerates. This regeneration has allowed the show to use twelve different actors in the role, and allowed Doctor Who to be the only scripted, dramatic show to last now for 55 years.

The first episode was broadcast way back on November 23, 1963! The original Doctor was portrayed by William Hartnell as an eccentric old man but over the years the Doctor has become younger and more athletic in order to better fit into his role as a heroic protagonist (and wouldn’t we all like to be able to do that).

The First Twelve Doctors (Credit: PPC Wiki)

This year’s season premier also brought a new Doctor, and the big news is that lucky number 13 is a woman, the actress Jodie Whittaker. Judging by the first episode she’s gonna be a good one, she seemed to fit right into the essential personality of the Doctor while already showing something of where she wants to take the role.

Jodie Whittaker as Doctor Number 13 (Credit: RTE)

You see, like every fictional hero The Doctor fights for justice and equality while defending the weak. Unlike most good guys however, The Doctor fights exclusively with his, and now her brains. This is the essential Doctor, the inner core values they all share. Around that core each actor playing the Doctor must fashion their own character, and in that way the show reincarnates itself with every new incarnation of The Doctor.

As you can probably tell, Doctor Who is the hero of the nerds of the world, their Superman or Rambo, or I suppose I should say our Superman or Rambo. Like Odysseus or Sherlock Holmes or Mister Spock the Doctor wins by brains not brawn, and in my opinion at least that is our best, our only hope.

This season’s premier also saw the introduction of a new species of enemy for the Doctor. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot but while the creature was sufficiently menacing it seemed a little bit too much of a takeoff on the alien from the ‘Predator’ series of movies. We only get to see a single bad alien however so maybe if the producers decide to use the species again they’ll flesh them out a bit.

Anyway, we have a new season of Doctor Who to look forward to, and a brand new Doctor. Man or Woman it really makes no difference, and maybe shows like Doctor Who are what we all need in order to make us realize that the differences between us are insignificant compared to all of the things we share.

Nobel Prizes for 2018, Medicine, Physics, Chemistry.

The first week of October is always an exciting time in the scientific community; it’s when the Nobel Prizes are announced. The order of announcement changes ever year and this year it went Medicine, then Physics and finally Chemistry so I’ll follow that order as well.

The two winners of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology are Doctors James P. Allison of the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. The research conducted by the two scientists consisted in both understanding why our immune systems refuse to attack the cancer cells that are destroying our bodies along with discovering the first drugs that enable our immune systems to fight cancer.

2018 Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine. Tasuku Honjo (l) and James Allison (r) (credit: The Daily Star)

This has always been the biggest difficulty in fighting cancer, because cancer cells are actually our own cells gone berserk the white blood cells in our immune system won’t fight them. For decades scientists have searched for some way to alert those white blood to attack the cancer cells.

Drs. Allison and Honjo worked by studying the chemical ‘checkpoints’ that white blood cells use to recognize ‘friendly’ cells. Dr. Allison succeeded in identifying one such checkpoint that he called CTLA-4 while the checkpoint Dr. Honjo discovered he named PD-1. Once these two checkpoints were understood it became possible to develop drugs that inhibited their function. Without the correct recognition signal the white blood cells now attacked the cancer cells.

This new technique is not without its problems. For one thing it is expensive, the chemical checkpoints differ for every person. For another the drug sometime simply fail to work and rarely they can even cause the patients immune system to begin attacking healthy cells. Nevertheless, checkpoint inhibitors as the drugs are known, have brought miraculous recoveries in patients whose cancer had been deemed untreatable by other techniques. The work of Drs. Allison and Honjo has brought us a powerful new weapon into our fight against cancer.

 

The three winners for the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics are all pioneers in the use of Lasers in both biology and medicine. Doctor Arthur Askin of Bell Laboratories received his share of the prize for his development of lasers as ‘Optical Tweezers’. You see the particles of light do have momentum and a beam of light can direct ‘radiation pressure’ on an object it strikes. This allowed Dr. Askin to employ the intense light of lasers to actually to hold and even manipulate tiny objects such as individual cells and even down to single atoms.

2018 Nobel Prize winners in Physics, Donna Strickland (l), Gerard Mourou (c), and Arthur Askin (r) (Credit: The India Express)

The two other scientists sharing the physics prize are Doctor Donna Strickland of the University of Waterloo and Gerard Mourou for their work in high intensity, short pulse duration lasers. The work of Drs. Strickland and Mourou has had extensive applications in industry and medicine and is perhaps best known for it use in Lasik eye surgery.

This years physics Nobel also garnered some attention because Dr. Strickland became the first woman in fifty-five years to receive the award, and only the third woman ever. The only comment I’ll make on that aspect of the award is that I hope the day soon comes when the sex or ethnicity of a Nobel Prize winner is a matter of no importance whatsoever.

 

Finally we have the 2018 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry who are Francis H. Arnold of the California Institute of Technology along with George P. Smith of the University of Missouri and Sir Gregory P. Winter of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, UK. All of these scientists have worked in the field of organic chemistry with some of the most complex chemicals known to science.

Chemistry Nobel Laureates for 2018. Gregory P. Winter (l), Francis H. Arnold (c), and George P. Smith (Credit: NPR)

Doctor Arnold’s research has concentrated on “the directed evolution of enzymes” those organic catalysts that perform so many important functions in living creatures. Meanwhile Dr. Smith developed a technology known as ‘phage display’, using a virus that infects bacteria to develop new forms of proteins while Dr. Winter used phage display to direct the evolution of antibodies, thereby producing new pharmaceutical drugs. Many drugs are now being developed by this technique including some that neutralize toxins, combat rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis and other autoimmune diseases.

The yearly choice of those scientists who receive the Nobel Prize is often the only time that the important work being carried out by scientists receives any publicity in the news media. Perhaps, given the acrimonious, contentious and partisan nature of so much of our news these days it might do us good if our nightly news programs spent a little more time on stories about the advances of science being made everyday. Stories like those about this year’s Nobel Prize recipients.

 

 

 

Have you ever seen the Spacestation with your own eyes as it orbits around the Earth; it’s actually really easy.

I know that I’ve probably mentioned the International Space Station (ISS) a hundred times in the posts of this blog. I also know that I’ve shown at least a score of pictures of the ISS, and of course you can easily find a thousand images of the ISS on the web. The image below is of the ISS.

The International Space Station as seen from Space (Credit: NASA)

But have you ever seen the Space Station itself, with your own eyes as it streaks across your sky shortly after sunset or shortly before dawn. Well with a little help from NASA it’s really pretty easy. I know because I’ve seen it myself close to fifty times by now.

Now the orbit of the ISS is inclined to the Earth’s equator at an angle of 51.56º so sooner or later it will pass over every point on Earth between latitudes 51.56ºN   and 51.56ºS. That means that the ISS regularly flies right over the head nearly 80% of the human race.

But you can’t see it during the daytime, the brightness of the Sun will simply drown it out. And you can’t see it in the middle of the night either because it will be in the Earth’s shadow and therefore not illuminated. You have to catch it during the short periods of time when you on the Earth’s surface are in darkness but 400 kilometers above you the station is still in the sunshine.

But don’t worry, NASA’s already done all of the work for you, and the right conditions happen fairly frequently. Before you go to NASA’s site however let me give you a few hints about seeing the station. First of all you’re going to need a clear sky, I hope that doesn’t surprise anyone. You’re also going to need to know the directions of the compass at your viewing place, that is you’ll need to know what direction is North, South, East and West. Another important thing to keep in mind is to try to get away from trees and buildings. You want to be able to see as much of the sky as you can!

Click on the link provided below to be taken to the space agency’s “Spot the Station” website.

https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

Now when you get to the “Spot the Station” site at the top of the page in the middle you’ll see Spotting Opportunities”, click on that to be taken to another page with a map of the world. Successively clicking on your location will eventually get you to the calculated position closest to your home. For me that is Independence Hall in Philadelphia, see image below.

Information on Spotting the Space Station (Credit: NASA)

Looking at the table in the lower right of the image you can see that there are five columns. The first column is labeled Date, giving the date and time that the ISS will become visible where you are. You can see that for Philadelphia there are quite a few opportunities.

The second column is Visible, which tells you for how long the ISS will be visible.

The third column is Max Height: this tells you the maximum elevation, in degrees that the ISS will attain during that sighting. Now the horizon itself is 0º and 90º is straight up. Obviously the larger the Max Height the easier the ISS will be to spot but I have seen on occasion when it when it got no higher than 15º.

The fourth column is labeled Appears. This tells you both the compass heading and the height in degrees above the horizon of the point where the station will appear. As a good rule of thumb, your fist held at arms length is about 10º so if the station is going to appear 20º above the west lets say, that’s two fists above the horizon in the western sky.

The fifth and final column is Disappears, this is identical to Appears except that this is where the ISS will vanish

So what does the ISS look like as it passes overhead? Well to me it looks like a very bright, silvery star that moves quite fast across the sky. The glow of the ISS is steady, there’s no blinking lights as with an airplane.

If you have binoculars, and a steady hand, the ISS will become a definable object, small but no longer just a point. There are even amateur astronomers who have succeeded in photographing the ISS from the ground. I’ll leave you today with one such image of the station silhouetted against the Sun, and if you look close you can see that the space shuttle is docked there. Good luck in trying to catch the International Space Station.

ISS and Space Shuttle seen against the Sun (Credit: Wired)

Mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah claims that he has proven the Riemann hypothesis concerning the distribution of Prime Numbers.

Sir Michael Atiyah is considered to be one of the World’s leading mathematicians; he has already received two of the highest awards in the field, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize. And the Riemann hypothesis, that an equation known as the Riemann zeta function can produce all of the Prime Numbers, has been called math’s most important unsolved problem. So when a top mathematician announces that he has solved the biggest problem its major news. The image below is Sir Michael.

Sir Michael Atiyah (Credit: Scientific American)

But that’s just what happened on the 24th of September on a stage at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. At that forum Sir Michael presented what he himself described as a “radically new approach.” Dr. Atiyah’s proof will still have to be reviewed by other mathematicians before it will be accepted but the very possibility of that this problem could be solved has riveted the math world.

Now I don’t pretend to completely understand Sir Michael’s proof, yet. I just downloaded a copy and am working my way through it, remember I’m a physicist not a mathematician specializing in number theory. However I hope that I can explain something about prime numbers and why the Riemann hypothesis is so important.

We’ve all heard of prime numbers, those numbers that are divisible only by the number one 1 themselves. For example, while the number 6 can be written as 2×3, the number 7 can only be written as 1×7, 7 is a prime number. The prime numbers below 100 are given below. (one is traditionally not considered prime).

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89 and 97.

Now take notice first of all that the number 2 is the only even prime number. That’s because all of the other even numbers can be divided by 2. You can also see how the distance between successive prime numbers is getting bigger, primes spread out as the numbers get bigger.

We’re not certain whether it was the Egyptians or Mesopotamians who first noticed that primes were different from other numbers but we do know that it was the Greeks, either Pythagoras or one of his students, who proved that there were an infinite number of primes. The proof is simple, and only takes three lines so what do you say. Shall we give it a try?

We will start by assuming that there is only a finite number of primes, let’s say p1, p2, p3, through  pn, that is we have n prime numbers total. Now we will demonstrate that that assumption is false. First we multiply all n of the prime numbers and add 1 to get, I’ll call it X.

X= (p1 x p2 x p3 x  …x pn) +1

Now, if we divide X by any of the primes, let’s say pi there will always be a remainder of the 1/pi. This means that either X must itself be prime, or evenly divided by some other prime not in our set of primes. In either case our assumption that we had all of the primes must be wrong, there are an infinite number of prime numbers.

O’k so how do we find those numbers that are prime? Is there some equation that will generate all of the primes for us?

Well, mathematicians searched for just such an equation for a very long time. Several partial equations, that is formulas that worked for a while, generating some primes were developed. One of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Bernhard Riemann worked for many years on prime number theory, his equation is known as the Riemann Zeta function. By the way Bernhard Riemann also developed the equations of geometry that Einstein used for his theory of gravity. The image below is Bernhard Riemann and beneath him is his Zeta function.

Bernhard Riemann (Credit: Famous Mathematicians)
The Riemann Zeta Function (credit: Public Domain)

Riemann published his zeta function back in 1859 and in the years since then it has been checked, and confirmed, for the first 10,000,000,000,000 (that’s ten trillion!) primes but that doesn’t mean that it will work for all primes. Remember there are an infinite number of primes so ten trillion is actually not very many!

Sir Michael Atiyah claims to have proven that the zeta function works for all primes and if he’s right that will be a tremendous achievement. Other mathematicians now get to try to pull the proof apart. We’ll see what happens.

 

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)
More Spider Webs (Credit: USA Today)

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.

Walter Mischel (Credit: AZ Quotes)

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.