Science Made Cool

Cool Stuff

Two really neat inventions.

First, an astronaut creates an orbital coffee mug which makes use of surface tension to keep the coffee from floating around in blobs. This is an old problem, of course, and previously NASA solved it by packaging all liquids in sealed bags or tubes. But there are some things -- coffee and wine in particular -- that you just don't want to suck through a straw. Now you can drink in style in space. (Spotted by the always-fascinating Ephemeral Isle 'blog.)

Second, a functioning mermaid tail for a woman legless since childhood, created by the mad geniuses at Weta Workshop. These guys can build Orcs and rayguns, and now, apparently, mermaids as well. (There's an old Avram Davidson story about a girl unable to walk who takes up a career as a mermaid in a remote part of central Europe.) (Spotted by the ever-vigilant David Thompson.)

Lulin Update

Comet Lulin is about as close to the Earth as it's going to get right now, and for the next couple of nights there's no pesky moonlight to interfere with the viewing. From here on out the comet will get fainter as it moves away from the sun. So if your sky is clear tonight, grab some binoculars, go outside, and look up. Sky and Telescope has some online finder charts to help.



Photo of Lulin on February 20 by Paolo Candy.

They Love Him in Russia

We just got word that Jim's story "Balancing Accounts" (F&SF, February 2008) has been translated and reprinted in the Russian SF magazine Esli (That's "If" for all you folks who can't speak the lingo. And actually, it looks like it got into the magazine back in March of last year, but this is the first we've heard of it!)

Politicians Linked To Underworld Figure

The Illinois State Senate has decided to get involved in the matter of whether or not Pluto is a planet. Apparently they are eager for a break from impeaching Governors and trying to take back U.S. Senate appointments. An Illinois Senate committee unanimously voted to send a bill to the floor for a vote, declaring that 1) Pluto IS SO a planet, and 2) March 13 is "Pluto Day" in the land of Lincoln.

The ostensible reason for the bill is to honor Illinois-born Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto back in 1930. (Tombaugh left Illinois in childhood and did most of his growing up in Kansas, which means that not only could this movement gain some national momentum, we even have the potential for an interstate minor planet rivalry.)

Of course, that's just what they say. Veteran political observers can easily detect the hand (or pseudopod) of the influential Helium-Breather lobby.* Given that this is Illinois we're talking about, the only real question is how much did Pluto pay them?



*I should point out that most Helium-Breathing-Americans are fine upstanding citizens, despite their lack of rigid skeletal systems.

Wealthy Tech Billionaires Seek Alien Civilizations For Long-Term Relationship

In the past I've linked to a couple of the famous TED talks, part of a series of lectures given at the annual TED Conference. The conference is basically a hipper version of the Bohemian Grove or the old Ivy League alumni clubs -- a way to put smart people together with rich people and powerful people to accomplish vaguely benevolent goals. The TED conference replaces the older groups' secrecy and ritual with high-tech glitz, but the underlying mission is unchanged. Now that our society is more diverse and spread out, one can't depend on people simply bumping into each other at Jock Whitney's house or during the intermission at the Met.

Anyway. In addition to the conference, the TED group gives an annual prize. It's not just money -- the winner basically gets the support of the TED community, and that's some pretty major mojo. This year's winner is Jill Tarter, the tenacious advocate of SETI research. For years, scientists looking for extraterrestrial life have had to scrabble for observing time on radio telescopes, or come up with clever workarounds like the [email protected] project.

Now, with people like Paul Allen writing the checks and a dedicated telescope array, SETI is finally big-time science. Of course that does pose a unique dilemma. Up to now, the answer to the Fermi Paradox ("Where are they?") has been, "we haven't really looked." But now that won't wash. It's put up or shut up time for extraterrestrial life. SETI will either find them, or establish that they aren't there to be found.

As Walt Kelly famously put it, either way it's a mighty soberin' thought.

Ministry of Space

As America's Space Shuttle fleet slides into obsolescence, scheduled to be replaced with a vehicle described as an "Apollo capsule on steroids," there's a surprising new entry into the reusable spaceplane category. Behold the Skylon. It's a British project which both looks and sounds like something from the days of Dan Dare or Gerry Anderson. 

I have my doubts about whether the Skylon will ever get built; blue-sky projects are a dime a dozen (actually they tend to cost a great many dimes, even if they never fly). But here's hoping that a revival of postwar British technological optimism is in the works. The Ministry of Space would be proud!

Moonshine

I just finished a highly entertaining book:  The Sun and the Moon:  The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York, by Matthew Goodman (Basic Books, 2008). After such a long subtitle, a summary of the book seems hardly necessary.

The Sun and the Moon covers a much wider swath of territory than its title would suggest. The ostensible focus of the book is the New York Sun, its editor Richard Adams Locke, and the remarkable "Moon Hoax" he pulled off in 1835. Locke wrote a series of articles purportedly based on a paper in a Scottish scientific journal, about the amazing discoveries made by Sir John Herschel using a radical new type of telescope at the new observatory in Cape Town. Locke's articles described all manner of marvels on the Moon, including forests, mountains of amethyst, unicorns, and bat-winged humanoids. The series was a sensation, and for a few weeks in the fall of 1835, the Sun had the highest circulation of any newspaper in the world at the time.

But there's more to Goodman's book than Locke's hoax. He braids into it the early career of P.T. Barnum, who was vying for the attention of New Yorkers at the time with his exhibition of Joice Heth, a woman said to be 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. Another of Goodman's threads follows Edgar Allen Poe, who envied Locke's successful hoax and attempted one of his own a decade later with his "Balloon Hoax." He also describes the early days of mass-market journalism, in the days when editors occasionally settled disputed with fistfights, and when hoaxes and outright lies in the press were nearly as prevalent as they are today.

Finally, he paints a fascinating picture of New York itself in the Jacksonian era -- a city where pigs rooted in the streets, mobs occasionally burned the homes of abolitionists, and farm boys from Connecticut could become newspaper magnates. Boston and Philadelphia were the cultural capitals of the country in those days, and New York was its hard-charging, brawling boomtown.

There are some laugh-out-loud moments, particularly at the imaginative insults hurled between Locke and his arch-rival James Gordon Bennett, or at the sheer shamelessness of Barnum's humbugs. Recommended for anyone interested in history, science fiction, science, or good old-fashioned hoaxing.

Late Hits on Darwin: Getting It Wrong

I know, Darwin's bicentennial was last Thursday, but the guy's too big a topic to cover in one weekend, even a long weekend with no mail delivery to distract us with bills and colorful catalogs.

One interesting feature of the theory of evolution by natural selection is how closely it is linked to its originator. We don't refer to electrodynamics as "Maxwellism" or quantum mechanics as "Planckism." The only parallel -- and it is strikingly close -- is the way Albert Einstein came to personify the theory of general relativity. Both Einstein and Darwin are honored like intellectual saints by physicists and biologists respectively. Moreover, both men have seeped into the public discourse as iconic figures. But that's where they diverge. Einstein is a generally benevolent figure with his basset-hound eyes and unruly hair, a symbol of scientist as pacific sage, perfect fodder for bumper sticker slogans about war and technology. Darwin is the scientist as rebel, still a controversial figure after 200 years, and a villain to biblical literalists.

Unfortunately Darwin doesn't lend himself to good bumper sticker slogans. He lived and wrote in an era when sentences, as expressions of complete thoughts, were long and often exceedingly complex, containing many dependent and subordinate clauses, a great deal of punctuation, and frequently words of a polysyllabic nature, all organized according to the most formal strictures of grammar in the service of clarity rather than felicity of expression or brevity. In other words, Darwin didn't do sound-bites.

Which hasn't prevented people from trying to extract them from his work. Here is a piece by Marlowe Hood on bogus Darwin quotations, generally invented by people who admired him but didn't have buildings big enough to engrave a genuine Darwin quote over the portico.

Meanwhile, people who disagree with Darwin are no slouches at making up bogus quotes, either, as this story about Lady Hope and her imaginary deathbed conversation with the founder of evolution indicates. I was interested to note that her lie first saw the light of day at Northfield Academy, which is just a few miles as the Galapagos finch flies from Science Made Cool World Headquarters.

Finally, both his admirers and detractors have not only misquoted Darwin over the years, many of them have flat out misunderstood him. Arch-skeptic Michael Shermer describes how the terminology we use to express Darwinian ideas includes a great many semantic land-mines -- "natural selection" implies that someone or something is doing the selecting, while the idea of competition among species suggests to some people a ruthless, deadly battle. We even use the word "Darwinian" to describe life-or-death struggles.

Let's hope this year's frenzy of Darwin biographies and celebrations leaves everyone with a slightly better understanding of the man and his work, so that some of these misinterpretations and outright falsehoods can perhaps go extinct.

Friday Parasite: Why Pork is Served Well-Done

Encysted in muscle,
Trichinella spiralis
waits for a new host.

Photo by Lynne Garcia; from the American Society for Microbiology's Microbe Library.

Natural History at the Time of Darwin's Birth

The world was already changing when Charles Darwin was born. Steam-powered engines were replacing waterwheels, sails, and muscle power, cloth was being made in factories instead of cottages, and the first steamboat had paddled its way up the Hudson. Farm laborers were abandoning the countryside and moving into the cities in search of better wages. And new scientific discoveries were overturning old ideas about the way the natural world really worked. Three ideas in particular, each developed only a few years before Darwin’s birth, would play a significant role in his thinking as he made observations during his voyage on the Beagle, and in the decades that followed as he outlined his theory of evolution by natural selection.