Archives for 2015

This has been a strange week for me. Every time something seemed to be headed in the right direction it would blow up. In one instance, literally. Fortunately no one was injured but it does sum things up nicely. In the case of the last event a gentleman was trying to prove that gasoline couldn’t burn if struck with a lit match. This is, in fact, true. However, like all facts gleaned exclusively from the internet, some context is due. While liquid gasoline requires a much higher temperature to burn, otherwise your car would be a rolling bomb, gas fumes do not. Especially if they are mixed with enough oxygen. Then you get an instant flame thrower. As I said no one was hurt so here’s hoping lesson learned. Just FYI, don’t try this at home. In the right, rare, circumstances, you can light the gas on fire. At least the top layer and fumes which will start a nasty burn off.

Now, what good is this lesson? Well, oddly enough, it could help keep generations of others from making the same mistakes. As long as they’re your descendants. Darold Treffert, at Scientific American, explains how your memories become their’s.

Steven Pinker’s 2003 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, refutes the “blank slate” theories of human development. Brian Butterworth, in his 1999 book, What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math, points out that babies have many specialized innate abilities, including numerical ones that he attributes to a “number module” encoded in the human genome from ancestors 30,000 years ago.

Whether called genetic, ancestral or racial memory, or intuitions or congenital gifts, the concept of a genetic transmission of sophisticated knowledge well beyond instincts, is necessary to explain how prodigious savants can know things they never learned.

We tend to think of ourselves as being born with a magnificent and intricate piece of organic machinery (“hardware”) we call the brain, along with a massive but blank hard drive (memory). What we become, it is commonly believed, is an accumulation and culmination of our continuous learning and life experiences, which are added one by one to memory. But the prodigious savant apparently comes already programmed with a vast amount of innate skill -and knowledge in his or her area of expertise–factory-installed “software” one might say–which accounts for the extraordinary abilities over which the savant innately shows mastery in the face of often massive cognitive and other learning handicaps. It is an area of memory function worthy of much more exploration and study.

Experiments have been done on mice wherein they were exposed to pleasure when faced with one object and pain with another. Other mice were faced with the same objects with no ramifications. The spawn of the mice that had faced ramifications would gravitate towards the pleasure inducing item, while avoiding the other, even though they had no reason to do so. Spawn of the mice not affected simply went out and lived their little mousey lives.

These experiments are lending scientific credence to people who claim to experience past lives. Nothing supernatural at all, just a genetic memory that tagged along with your life.

So what else is trapped in those genes you’re carrying? Josh L. Davis, at IFL Science, says you have the ability to regrow limbs.

Of all living four-legged animals, known as tetrapods, only salamanders have the ability to truly regenerate their limbs. Scientists have long questioned this impressive feat, because all other tetrapods develop their limbs in a strikingly similar way, making salamanders seem like the black sheep. But new research hints at the possibility that rather than being an evolutionary oddity, salamanders are actually the only ones to have retained this ability, which was once common to all tetrapods.

The study, published in Nature, looked back at fossil tetrapods from the early lineages of both amphibians (frogs, salamanders, and caecilians) and amniotes (mammals, birds, and reptiles), from around 300 million years ago. This is roughly 30 million years after the two groups are thought to have split, and so the logic goes that if fossils from both lineages at around this time share characteristics, it’s highly likely that the last common ancestor before the split had these characteristics, too.

When animals re-grow limbs, they sometimes leave tell-tale signs such as fused digits, extra digits, or digits missing altogether. It was these signs that the researchers were looking for in the record from both groups, and this is exactly what the researchers found in the fossils from both lineages, indicating that they could both indeed regenerate body parts. This leaves the intriguing proposition, though, that while salamanders were able to hold onto limb regeneration, most other four-legged animals lost it.

“At first sight it is astonishing that a character that is so obviously beneficial like the capacity of limb regeneration has been lost in most extant tetrapods (i.e., in all amniotes),” Brown’s Florian Witzmann told IFLScience in an email. “We have no definite explanation for this, although a number of hypotheses exist related to the cost-benefit ratio of regeneration. Regeneration of limbs and other parts of the body is certainly energy expensive, and in some cases, the costs might be greater than any advantages.”

There are those who think that the regeneration genes might be able to be turned on in injured humans. It would have to be done under controlled circumstances and would require the patient to constantly have access to food, a/k/a fuel, but all the parts are there. We just don’t know how to make them work.

Yet.

Oh, and one last one you might be curious about; can processed meats cause cancer?

Short answer? Yes. But it’s not that simple. I’ll let Aaron E. Carroll from the NY Times explain.

The I.A.R.C. published that for each 50 grams of processed meat eaten daily, the risk of colon cancer goes up by 18 percent. That sounds scary. But that’s a relative risk increase. What we really need to know is the absolute risk increase. I went to the National Cancer Institute’s colorectal cancer risk assessment calculator, and plugged in all of my information. I had to say I’m 50, because it doesn’t have risks for people younger than that. It determined that 50-year-old me has a lifetime risk of 2.7 percent of getting colon cancer.

That’s not nearly as scary as what many headlines would have you believe. Even with all that processed meat (which I am not going to eat), a 0.5 percent increase in the lifetime risk of something is still pretty small. Eating it occasionally, which is more likely, is not going to affect my lifetime risk measurably at all.

Let’s be clear. Rational people are willing to accept small risks of harm to obtain something they value. The example I always like to use is cars. The No. 1 killer of children in the United States is, by far, accidents. Every time we put a child in a car, we are exposing them to the thing most likely to kill them.

We don’t see headlines like “Cars Found to Kill Kids in Record Numbers!” or “Putting a Child in a Car Increases Their Risk of Death by 20 percent!” That’s because we have all recognized that while cars do increase the risk of a bad outcome, the gains from driving outweigh the potential and very small absolute risks of death.

The same is true of many things. I like Scotch. I like skiing. I like the occasional steak. All of these things may increase my absolute risk of death someday by some very tiny amount, but the daily happiness and satisfaction I gain from them outweigh those future, and most likely very small, risks.

What I said about red meat still holds, as do my recommendations for healthy eating. If you’re consuming multiple portions of processed meat a day, then you may see some small benefit in the lifetime risk of cancer by cutting back. But if you’re like most people I know, enjoying bacon or prosciutto a couple of times a week, this news most likely doesn’t affect you at all.

Your body is sturdier than you might think and a lot of that comes from thousands of generations figuring out how to survive and passing that info down to you. In other words, hoist a beer to your great-great ancestor, enjoy a nice BLT, and try to pass useful memories to your descendants.

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I loved Halloween as a kid and have kept right on loving it as the years have gone by. Once, in a pinch for a last minute costume, I wore a black body suit with some white tape pieces placed in even rows and a couple of toy cars attached using Christmas ornament hangers. That’s right, I went as a parking lot. Another year, since I happened to be at a nudist colony, I went as a pull toy. That proved popular and I’ll just leave the rest to your imagination. That being said, Halloween has become many things to many people. From Trick or Treating for Unicef to Tricks and Treat there are many variations. The latter is when kids have to tell you a joke to get candy. It was implemented to stop the violence of Devil’s Night a/k/a Mischief Night, etc. It’s been very successful in Des Moines and St. Louis. Not so much so in Detroit where Devil’s Night is treated as some sort of Constitutional right.

But most people, when asked, tend to think of it as a relatively young holiday. It’s far from it. The nice folks at History.com have done a great job of piecing the whole thing together.

Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.

ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

HALLOWEEN COMES TO AMERICA
Celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems there. Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland’s potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday.

TODAY’S HALLOWEEN TRADITIONS
The American Halloween tradition of “trick-or-treating” probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.

HALLOWEEN SUPERSTITIONS
Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many people believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.

Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween superstitions relies on the good will of the very same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.

Halloween around the world brings us everything from the custom of hiding knives in Germany (to keep the dead from injuring themselves), to leaving out food with all the lights turned on bright in Austria (to help the dead see and grab a snack. They really care for the dead in this part of the world), to staring into a dark mirror in the UK and parts of the US (turn off the lights, look into a mirror and see your future spouse. If you see a skull you gonna DIE!!!!), to the fortune telling Barmbrack cake in Ireland to the fortune telling apple peels in Scotland (lots of fortune telling in that area), to Dios de la Muerte in Mexico where they invite their dead ancestors home for a snack and some tequila. That holiday concludes with a family picnic on the 3rd day at a graveyard.

So whether you’re dressing up as a Sexy Ebola Nurse (God help us) or a parking lot, have a safe and Happy Halloween.

It’s been an interesting week. With the Cubs in the playoffs, and a World Series win predicted by Back to the Future II (i.e., what passes for science education in Texas), a large portion of the media spent an incredible amount of time trying to figure out what the movie got right or wrong. Side note, in Norway the word texas (all small letters) is slang for crazy and/or stupid. In line with that comment I should let you know that one right wing blog claimed that the movie proved there is a liberal oligarchy in Hollywood since there was no mention of Benghazi. No I am not making this up but nor am I linking to them. This site doesn’t promote stupid. For the most part though it was harmless fun. If you want a complete list of every prediction in the movie and how each panned out just click here and feel your work day slip away. Before you fire off the angry email about the article saying there are no flying cars, there really aren’t. There are several in various stages of production but none commercially available. The one upshot of all this is that it got people thinking about real science too.

So let’s take a look at some of that.

Leukemia is the disease that killed my mom so I tend to carefully read any articles on it. And, no, grapefruit doesn’t cure it. Quit reading your emails. Anyway, Robin Andrews says there is an unlikely new candidate to kill leukemia cells, leukemia cells themselves.

No, she’d not drunk.

Leukemia, a group of cancers affecting the bone marrow and blood, is notoriously difficult to treat, often relapsing and becoming resistant to treatment. But a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could offer hope, revealing that it’s possible to make leukemia cells kill each other.

More accurately, the researchers from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have construed a technique that convinces the leukemia cells to transform into leukemia-killing immune cells, rewriting their biological programming. The key, so to speak, is an extremely rare human antibody. But where did the researchers find it, and how does it work?

Antibodies are proteins produced naturally by the human body’s immune system. They act as the “handcuffs” to the white blood cells’ “police,” sticking to foreign invaders like microbes and either directly neutralizing them or tagging them for destruction.

Recently, the scientists were attempting to find antibody therapies to treat people with immune cell deficiencies in which the bone marrow doesn’t produce enough white blood cells. They hoped that they could find antibodies that would activate receptors on immature bone marrow cells that would cause them to change into mature cells. Over the last few years, they have succeeded in doing this. What they didn’t expect to see, however, was that a handful of these growth-induced antibodies turn immature bone marrow cells into completely different types, such as cells normally found in the nervous system.

Speaking of mysterious stuff in your body, have you ever had the feeling you lived in a previous time? Maybe that you were reincarnated? The World News Desk over at Soul Surfing says there might be a very logical reason for that. It appears that memories can be transmitted genetically.

New research from Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA. During the tests they learned that that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.

According to the Telegraph, Dr Brian Dias, from the department of psychiatry at Emory University, said: ”From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.

“Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

This suggests that experiences are somehow transferred from the brain into the genome, allowing them to be passed on to later generations.

Obviously there needs to be a ton more research conducted but many scientists are calling this early evidence compelling and are willing to look into it further. Some even think that we may, one day, be able to access our ancestors’ memories. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. What if you could only access the sexy time your grandparents had?

Ewwww!

Another thing that sounds kind of crazy but could be a real boon for mankind, not a cancer curing boon but still cool, is a material that can’t get wet. Caroline Reid has the story.

Objects that are kept underwater eventually succumb to the inevitable decay associated with being submerged – metal rusts, wood rots and human hands go all wrinkly. These effects could be delayed in the future by a new type of rough coating that “deflects” water.

The material uses the same strategy as water-walking insects such as water striders. Both bug and material take advantage of protrusions on their rough surfaces to resist water and stay dry. As long as the gaps between the grooves on the material (or hairs on the insect) are less than a micrometer apart, then it has the ability to stay dry when in contact with water.

The team exploited the fact that water can be prompted to evaporate using the right combination of surface roughness and chemistry. The little pockets of water vapor that form are trapped in the framework of the material. They act as a first line of defense against liquid water drops, deflecting them to keep the surface dry.

In fact, the rough surface kept material samples dry for up to four months when constantly submerged in water. It could be longer, but the test will have to run for a longer period of time to know for sure what the time limit is. The research can be found in Scientific Reports.

The commercial possibilities are staggering. Bridges could last hundreds of years as long as they were structurally sound. The same for water pumps, sewage plants and anything else that needs to work under water.

Oh, and of course, you’d never need to worry about your Versace getting ruined by that nasty old weather stuff.

In another cool development, not foreseen in BTTF II, you may soon get your internet service from a lightbulb. Pavlos Manousiadis, Graham Turnbull and Ifor Samuel tell us all about it and, no, none of them were drunk either.

Visible light spectrum has huge, unused and unregulated capacity for communications. The light from LEDs can be modulated very quickly: data rates as high as 3.5Gb/s using a single blue LED or 1.7Gb/s with white light have been demonstrated by researchers in our EPSRC-funded Ultra-Parallel Visible Light Communications programme.

Unlike Wi-Fi transmitters, optical communications are well-confined inside the walls of a room. This confinement might seem to be a limitation for Li-Fi, but it offers the key advantage that it is very secure: if the curtains are drawn then nobody outside the room can eavesdrop. An array of light sources in the ceiling could send different signals to different users. The transmitter power can be localised, more efficiently used, and won’t interfere with adjacent Li-Fi sources. Indeed the lack of radio frequency interference is another advantage over Wi-Fi. Visible light communications is intrinsically safe, and could end the need for travellers to switch devices to flight mode.

A further advantage of Li-Fi is that it can use existing power lines as LED lighting so no new infrastructure is needed.

This technology could hit the market sooner than you think. If it does the only change in your home system, or business, would be to have a line run from your router to each room so it would have a dedicated signal. It would also eliminate the need for a password since no one outside of a room could access the signal.

I should also note that it will be cheaper than the current methods.

Speaking of light, Michigan State University has developed transparent solar panels. You replace your windows with them and you have free power forever.

Here’s what it looks like.

It’s not commercially available yet but could be in a year or so.

Here’s an interesting bit for you to chew on; Paul Devaney posits that humans may not be the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Before you laugh think about how we define intelligence and how it could be defined.

Cetologists observe, document, and decipher evidence that points to a profound intelligence dwelling in the oceans. It is an intelligence that predates our own evolution as intelligent primates by millions of years. – Paul Watson

I had a profound experience while kayaking in Hawaii this past winter with friends. We were visited by a whale and there is no doubt that this majestic being was coherent, aware of us, and enjoying our company as much as we were enjoying his. We put our snorkeling masks on and jumped in and could easily see the whale gently make eye contact with each of us. With one thrust of his tail he could have left in an instant but he stayed with us for over an hour. A mammal with a brain bigger than ours and complex migration songs that change every year, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of thoughts could be going through his mind. The recent piece by Dawn Agnos on UPLIFT about a conversation with a horse shows that emotional intelligence and empathy are a language that many animals understand. It was only recently that terms like emotional intelligence emerged and it is interesting to consider that there are many different kinds of intelligence. Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd makes a good argument in a recent Facebook post that perhaps humans concept of intelligence is anthropocentric and lacking in breadth.

Watson starts early in his essay with the bold assertion that, “Biological science is provoking us to shatter our image of human superiority.” Though indigenous wisdom has always considered humans a part of the circle of life rather than above it, that sentiment has almost been completely destroyed by generations of colonial indoctrination. The very roots of colonial indoctrination not only conclude that humans are superior to all other life forms, it also considers some humans as superior to others. Social Darwinism, a myth, was an effort to use science to validate the behavior of employing superior weaponry to oppress other humans. Though we owe much respect to western science we must also understand the cultural and religious backdrop from which this discipline emerged. We must also be willing to explore the assumptions within science if we are to evolve it.

If technology is not the true measure of intelligence then our search for life in the cosmos just got more interesting.

And it is with that thought that I bring you this one.

Have we already discovered an alien civilization?

The short answer is “maybe” with a high probability of “no.”

LA Blake over at ABC television has the story.

Take it away LA!

A recent conundrum about a star 1,500 light years away discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope has extraterrestrial enthusiasts crying “alien” as an explanataion, but scientists studying the star are saying “not so fast.”

The strange nature of the star, KIC 8462852, was brought to public attention by the citizen scientists of the Planet Hunters program, ABC News reports. The program enlists the public’s help in studying dips in light from the 150,000 stars discovered by Kepler, usually caused by planets passing in front of them. With KIC 8462852, though, the light pattern has irregular, large dips — not like those of a planet– and scientists aren’t sure why.

The explanation that some jumped to? Large alien spacecrafts. The dips in light are caused by the alien megastructure periodically crossing between Kepler and the star, the theory goes.

The alien theory fire was further fueled when Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, mentioned that aliens might provide a possible explanation in a paper, saying that “Kepler would be able to detect large alien megastructures via anomalies like these.”

After the theory went viral, Wright wrote a blog post to clarify that “we didn’t have anything ready to show our professional colleagues so that they can give reporters informed takes on it” and recommending, “You should reserve the alien hypothesis as a last resort.”

Instead, Wright says he’s pondering the theory of Tabetha Boyajian, who published a paper about the star in the Monthly Notes of the Royals Astronomical Society. Though the Yale University astronomer said the star had her scratching her head, she said the most likely scenario was that the strange light pattens could have been caused by a group of comets from a nearby star.

“I would put low odds on that being the right answer, but it’s the best one I’ve seen so far,” Wright wrote, “(and much more likely than aliens, I’d say).”

Yes, logically, the answer should be that the results are caused by an array of comets caught in a gravity well or the remains of a planet that was destroyed.

But hundreds of stationary solar panels fueling a planet as it passes by also works. That’s why they’re looking into it more deeply.

And how do we do that?

We hang out in China.

Tom Hale tells us why.

China is in the final stages of building the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. The state-owned China Central Television has released drone footage showing their progress, as well as the vertigo-inducing size of it.

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is being built deep in the misty mountains of Pingtang County, located in the Guizhou Province of southwest China. Construction has been going on since 2011. When completed in 2016, the FAST will become the largest radio telescope on the planet – at 500 meters (1,640 feet) in diameter, its dish will trump Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, which is 300 meters (984 feet) wide.

Wu Xiangping, the director-general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, said to Xinhua News, “Having a more sensitive telescope, we can receive weaker and more distant radio messages. It will help us to search for intelligent life outside of the galaxy and explore the origins of the universe.”

Here’s a look at this sucker.

The fact is that searching for alien life in space is hard. A civilization too advanced for us may be undetectable. Likewise, anyone that’s evolved but not past its industrial age may as well be invisible. Keeping in mind that any such detectable transmissions will have to travel for hundreds or millions of years to get to us and you see the problem. They might be our equals now but a million years ago they would have been excited by pointy sticks.

Let’s start by taking a look at a few of the bad things that man is doing right now. There is an unsubtle irony that rising waters are going to render NASA, the home of climate research, useless in a few decades if the trend isn’t reversed. The walls that some are trying to have built around Miami and other places in Florida are short term stop gaps, at best.

But, as my granny would say, God does have a sense of humor. Which is why, the home of the constant obfuscation and denial when it comes to climate change, Washington D.C., is sinking.

John Johnson tells us all about it.

It sounds like a metaphor but is geological reality: Washington, DC, is sinking. In fact, researchers led by a team at the University of Vermont predict that the ground will drop another six inches by the end of the century, reports UPI. The cause isn’t man-made: It’s the result of an age-old geologic process that will continue to unfold for thousands of years. But it’s presenting the DC region with a dangerous double-whammy—the ground is sinking at the same time that sea levels are rising because of warming temperatures, say the UV researchers. The study confirms a long-held theory on why sea levels around DC are rising faster than any other stretch along the coast, reports the Washington Post.

“Right now is the time to start making preparations,” says lead study author Ben DeJong. “Six extra inches of water really matters in this part of the world.” He and his team drilled dozens of boreholes around the Chesapeake Bay to figure out what’s happening. The culprit is an ancient ice sheet that covered much of North America, then retreated, and the land is oh-so-slowly settling back into place. DC was actually in an area just outside the sheet and “bulged upward,” as the Post puts it. “It’s a bit like sitting on one side of a water bed filled with very thick honey,” says DeJong. “Then the other side goes up. But when you stand, the bulge comes down again.”

At least that one’s not our fault. Just bad planning. Although rising water levels due to warming could exacerbate the problem in unforeseen ways. Swimming at the Smithsonian anyone?

But one that is our fault is happening in the wonderfully backwards state of Arizona. Rob Quinn says that the state is literally fracking Phoenix into a pit.

Researchers say that while there’s no need for residents of Phoenix to panic, parts of their city are slowly and unstoppably sinking into the ground. Land subsidence caused by the extraction of huge quantities of groundwater over the decades is to blame, and the Arizona State University researchers say it’s causing some parts of the metropolitan area to sink by roughly 0.75 inches a year, Sonoran News reports. Residents may not notice much change year to year, the researchers say, but over time, the problem will affect things like canals, utility lines, and sewers and, eventually, the foundations of buildings. The depletion of groundwater has changed the sediment under the area, so the drop is irreversible.

The lead researcher tells the Arizona Republic that the subsidence has “the potential to cause costly structural damages, and is something to keep an eye on.” The sinking is happening at an uneven rate—with some areas actually rising a little—meaning floodwaters could cause major problems in affected areas. Another problem, the lead researcher warns, is that the sediment changes have left the ground unable to store as much water as it used to. “We live in a desert, and our underground canteen is getting smaller,” she tells the News. The Republic notes that the problem is widespread across the US, with Denver, parts of California, and the New Jersey coast among the many areas starting to sink.

Just FYI, in case the above wasn’t clear, fracking uses a ton of groundwater.

Also, as noted above, the constant mining of subsurface water is also to blame. And, while not sinking at the moment, Oklahoma has seen a meteoric rise in the number of Earthquakes in ares where fracking is practiced. That leads to weakened infrastructures such as sewer lines, roads (which require stable beds) and pretty much anything you thought was built on solid ground.

Things like businesses and homes and stuff. Maybe they don’t need those in Oklahoma.

So, where is the good news? East of here. As in the Far East.

In countries where they don’t use harmful methods of energy extraction or have come around to the fact that maybe, just maybe, we might not want to kill the planet, they are taking measures to reduce the human imprint. And they are using some creative methods to accomplish that goal.

Dan Lewis reports that China is surrounding the Gobi Desert with billions of trees to stop dust storms and encroachment. He also reports its working.

One Chinese news agency, citing the State Forest Administration, reported in 2007 that “more than 20 percent of the lands affected by desertification in the project areas have been harnessed and soil erosion has been put under control in over 40 percent of the areas that used to suffer soil erosion in the past.”

And in 2014, the Daily Mail echoed these results, reporting that “a study says the measures are working, despite previous criticism.”

There are still problems. Trees tend to wither and die in desert conditions. So they are having to reroute water to stabilize the environment. The good news is that, as China clamps down on pollutants around the country, they have more fresh water to work with than ever before.

But, because China is still China, one of the methods they are using to save and reroute water, the Three Gorges Dam, is so large it will alter the rotation of the Earth.

Raising 39 trillion kilograms of water 175 meters above sea level will increase the Earth’s moment of inertia and thus slow its rotation. However, the effect would extremely small. NASA scientists calculated that shift of such as mass would increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and flat on the top. It would shift the pole position by about two centimeters (0.8 inch). Note that a shift in any object’s mass on the Earth relative to its axis of rotation will change its moment of inertia, although most shifts are too small to be measured (but they can be calculated).

Just remember this when someone tells you that man can’t alter anything on Earth.

Speaking of trees, and here altering the Earth in a good way, Amanda Froelich reports that Milan Italy is building the world’s largest vertical forest.

In an age where harmonious innovation is becoming more celebrated, sustainable designs to preserve the Earth and contribute to wellbeing are being implemented at a rapid rate. One such innovation to recently be accepted for development is a vertical forest designed by Stefan Boeri Architects.

The first ever vertical forest will soon be the greenest building in Milan. Because the average household in a city produces approximately 25-30 tons of CO2 per year, implementing greener architecture in highly populated areas cannot come soon enough.

This stunning development is part of a vision presented by BioMilano which promises to incorporate 60 abandoned farms into a greenbelt surrounding the city. Part of the mission is to create a vertical forest building which boasts a stunning green façade planted with dense forest systems to provide microclimate and to filter out polluting dust particles. According to Inhabit, there are two buildings currently under construction.

The greener architecture will help absorb CO2, oxygenate the air, moderate extreme temperatures, and lower noise pollution. The bio-canopy is not only aesthetically pleasing to the eye, but it helps lower living costs.

So it saves money, makes living in a city healthier and helps the earth be a better place to live. Bonus? It’s pretty too. Here’s a pic.

But how do you put all of those ideas together? How do you stop erosion while simultaneously upgrading the planet?

Amy Frearson says that one answer is to build a really fucking cool school and that Vo Trong Nghia is doing just that.

According to Vo Trong Nghia Architects, the structure is intended to promote sustainable development in Vietnam, in response to rapid industrialisation that causes frequent power shortages, increasing temperatures, high levels of pollution and reduced green space.

“It is our goal to create a green university building that counters these problems as well as instils sustainable practices to these future generations,” said the design team.

Creating 11,000 square metres of floor space, the seven-storey facility will feature a prefabricated modular concrete structure that can flexibly accommodate different uses, while also keeping construction costs to a minimum.

The building is orientated to face the prevailing wind, allowing for efficient cross ventilation, and large trees positioned in front of every window will help to lower the temperature of the air flow through the interior.

A shallow plan will also allow daylight to permeate each storey, reducing the need for artificial lighting.

Vo Trong Nghia Architects – whose previous projects include a naturally ventilated school and a thatched bamboo bar – says the structure provides an alternative to the air-conditioning-reliant buildings that dominate South-East Asia.

That’s important because not only does it reduce waste created by artificial air systems it reduces, dramatically, the amount of power needed for people to live.

Bonus? It’s pretty damn pretty too. Here’s a rendering from the architect.

Look at it this way, if monkeys and other primates really are evolving to full sentience (spoiler alert: they are) at least we’ll leave them a nice place to live.

Last week, at the behest of a few listeners, I popped up a summary of what was to come on the radio show and a few extra bits for folks at home to enjoy. That turned out to be mind numbingly popular so I’m going to do it again. I’m easy to manipulate. Also, for the right fee, I will do children’s parties. Ah, just kidding, I’m not even sure if it’s legal for me to be near kids in the first place. Bachelorette parties, on the other hand, are good to go. Just FYI, Google’s spell check wanted me to change Bachelorette, which is spelled correctly, to bacteriologist. That, kids, is why you NEVER edit with spell check. Anyway, since I’m in a sciencey mood this week I figured I’d do a breakdown of some of the cooler things happening right now. Cooler even than the pic to your left of the WNC weekly podcast which gets recorded on WBIG 1280 AM.

All right, on to the fun.

Let’s be honest with each other here for a moment. You live in fear of dying before you get to enjoy the glorious world of manned robo-warriors facing off in death matches. I know that since we are a lot alike, you and I. Well, Sunshine, I have some good news for you. TEAM USA has challenged TEAM JAPAN to a giant robot duel and that challenge has been accepted. Images of both robots are below.

As you can readily tell the American robot on the right is going to get its ass kicked unless it gets some serious upgrades. That’s why TEAM USA has started a Kickstarter campaign to cover the costs. Forget porn or megachurches, this is a tremendous cause to throw money at.

Now what do you do with all the resulting tech that will come from this? Quite a bit actually. Dr. Chauncey Siemens, from I Fucking Love Science, says that one use you may not have thought of is building robot bears to help people commit suicide.

No, I’m not drunk.

SeppuKuma, which loosely translates to “Suicide Bear” has robotic arms that are able to carry up to 80kg of weight, hands that are powerful enough to crush human bone, and roller legs that can retract or extend from a base as necessary when bending to pick someone up out of bed or when maneuvering through tight spaces like doorways.

The robot weighs 140kg and it is powered by specially designed software and advanced actuators (a type of motor that controls mechanisms). SeppuKuma also offers 23 very different methods one can choose to end their life, including Everlasting Sleep (lethal injection), Pillow Kisses (suffocation), Peaceful Breath (helium asphyxia) and Sleepy time Hug which is where the robotic bear strangles its partner until their pulse stops for 15 minutes. All of these attributes enable the SeppuKuma to give it’s patient the power to choose how they get to end their own life. An official from the JSDD says that, so far, robots have never been used for this purpose in any hospital.

“We really hope that SeppuKuma will lead to advances in the Right to Die movement, it’s important to give those who want to end their lives the power to do so in a safe and responsible manner. We intend to continue with research toward more practical robots capable of providing powerful yet gentle euthanasia to elderly people and those battling with either shame or depression,” said Tsuneki Suko, leader of the Artificial Intelligence Systems Research Team at the JSDD-Orient Institute Center for Human-Interactive Robot Research.

And not only is it lethal as fuck it’s also, THANKS JAPAN, cute as a button.

See how happy she is? Don’t you want to be that happy too?

Let’s move on to healthier thoughts.

Matt Damon is starring in a new movie called The Martian. The story is simple; NASA goes to Mars, the mission goes tits up on the carpet, one guy dies, oops, dead guy’s still alive. Now what? As they say in the trailer “(you’ve got to) science the shit out of this.”

NASA has already previewed the flick and given it rave reviews. It’s based on a book by a real rocket scientist so the science is solid. Or, close enough to solid that no one’s bitching.

So how close is any of this stuff to being real? Tracey McMahon, over at NASA, says a hell of a lot closer than you think.

Without air or water humans simply cannot travel, live or work in space. Marshall is responsible for the design, construction and testing of regenerative life support hardware for the International Space Station, and maturing these technologies for the journey to Mars.

The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) installed on the International Space Station includes two key components – the Water Recovery System and the Oxygen Generation System – that reduce the need for constant resupply of the basic needs from Earth. That leaves open valuable cargo space to carry items necessary to explore and conduct research once we reach our destination. To date, ECLSS has processed more than 25 tons of water, including 5 tons that have been converted to oxygen.

The Water Recovery System provides clean water by reclaiming wastewater, including water from crew members’ sweat and urine, cabin humidity condensation, and waste generated during spacewalks. The system filters and recycles wastewater for reuse as potable clean water, reducing by 15,000 pounds per year the net mass of water and consumables that would need to be launched from Earth to support six crew members.

The Oxygen Generation System produces oxygen necessary for the crew to breathe, as well as for replacement of oxygen lost due to experiment use, airlock depressurization, module leakage, and carbon dioxide venting. The OGS technology consists mainly of an electrolysis system, pulling oxygen from water by running an electric current through it.

Ed Mazza, another really smart person, says that, at our current pace, we could be living on Mars in fifteen years.

We’re going to Mars — and we’re going in the not-too-distant future.

NASA says preparations for a manned mission to the Red Planet are proceeding as planned, with humans expected to set foot on Mars in the 2030s.

“We are farther down the path to sending humans to Mars than at any point in NASA’s history,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said at an event last week, according to Space.com. “We have a lot of work to do to get humans to Mars, but we’ll get there.”

That work includes completing the development of the rockets and spacecraft that will get humans there and back again, including the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, which are still being tested.

The next Mars rover, planned for a 2020 launch, will carry the Mars Oxygen ISRU experiment. MOXIE, as its known, will take carbon dioxide out of the thin Martian atmosphere and produce oxygen, the space agency said.

If it can do so successfully, humans will have oxygen to breathe and rockets will be able to use that oxygen to help power the return trip home.

“We’re going to make oxygen on another planet — the first time ever to make oxygen on another planet,” said NASA deputy administrator Dava Newman, according to The Space Reporter. “These experiments — they’re real, they’re here.”

Andy Weir, author of “The Martian” which has been made into a film starring Matt Damon, was at the NASA event. He recently said the main barrier is funding — and that given enough money, a manned Mars mission could happen in the 2030s as planned.

“But I don’t have faith in Congress to give them enough money to make that happen, so I’m being a little more conservative,” the novelist told Space.com last month, guessing that humans would set foot on the Red Planet by 2050.

Oh, ye of little faith. I never dreamed I’d have sex with a supermodel and now, at the tender age of fifty four, I can attest that I’ve done so twice. If it can happen to me it can happen to NASA.

Also, for better or worse, the Bush administration privatized a lot of NASA’s functions by outsourcing contracts to non-government agencies. We will soon find out whether Ayn Rand was right and all corporations will do what is best for humanity or if it’ll be the Alien Hunger Games.

Either way, companies now have the financial incentive to make things like this happen.

For example, fusion power has been the butt of jokes for decades; “Fusion power is only thirty years away … and always will be.”

Those wacky theoretical physicists. Don’t forget to try the veal.

Now, David Chandler, over at MIT, yes, THAT MIT, money has magically appeared and allowed scientists to develop a true fusion reactor.

Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it’s one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils “just ripples through the whole design,” says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. “It changes the whole thing.”

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

Power plant prototype

The new reactor is designed for basic research on fusion and also as a potential prototype power plant that could produce significant power. The basic reactor concept and its associated elements are based on well-tested and proven principles developed over decades of research at MIT and around the world, the team says.

“The much higher magnetic field,” Sorbom says, “allows you to achieve much higher performance.”

Fusion, the nuclear reaction that powers the sun, involves fusing pairs of hydrogen atoms together to form helium, accompanied by enormous releases of energy. The hard part has been confining the superhot plasma — a form of electrically charged gas — while heating it to temperatures hotter than the cores of stars. This is where the magnetic fields are so important—they effectively trap the heat and particles in the hot center of the device.

While most characteristics of a system tend to vary in proportion to changes in dimensions, the effect of changes in the magnetic field on fusion reactions is much more extreme: The achievable fusion power increases according to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Thus, doubling the field would produce a 16-fold increase in the fusion power. “Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win,” Sorbom says.

In just today’s column we’ve dealt with being able to create water, air and now power on an alien world. What about food? Some fertilizer, some seeds and you’re good to go. You’ve got water. You’ve got air. You’ve got power to create a climate controlled enclosure. In other words, you’ve got food.

All in all what this means is that, right now, as you’re reading this, we have the technology to travel the solar system. We have the capability to settle an alien world. We can access resources in space to keep our settlers alive.

We can. Now, will we?