Science Made Cool

Kite Power!

Here's a piece from WIRED about the prospects for large-scale use of wind power generated at high altitudes. It's not a bad article, full of gee-whiz and enthusiasm for the idea. It even notes, optimistically, that high-altitude wind power can be tapped directly over major population centers, instead of having to put wind farms on the ground out in the middle of nowhere.

Interestingly, there's a word missing from the article. The word is "airplane." Areas of high population density are also areas with lots of air traffic. Putting what amounts to barrage balloons, reaching up to 40,000 feet, right in the middle of busy air corridors seems to be somewhere between "really stupid" and "incredibly dangerous."

If only we could tap the mighty power of the Atom . . .

White Knight to King's Rook

Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space line has unveiled their space launcher aircraft. The WhiteKnight Two made its debut at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual show in Oshkosh this past week. White Knight will carry the suborbital (and maybe someday orbital) spacecraft SpaceShip Two to high altitude. There the spaceship will separate from the airplane and boost into space. Congratulations to all and best wishes.

And where will this happen? Will eager crowds line up at the perimeter of Mojave Spaceport to watch WhiteKnight take off? Maybe Orlando airport in Florida?

If you want to watch, pack plenty of sunscreen and leave your bacon at home. Virgin Galactic has made a deal with Arab investors to operate out of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Our 2009 WorldCon Schedules

Jim and I will be at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal from August 6-10. The convention schedule is up, and both of us will be speaking on panels of various stripes.

James L. Cambias:
Friday, August 7,  1 - 1:30 pm: Autographing
Friday, August 7,  3:30 - 5 pm: Reading

Saturday, August 8,  9 - 10 pm: What Our Things Say About Us
That collection of kibble you are hiding under the bed
is a lot more revealing than your palm.

Sunday, August 9,  11 am - noon: Library Thing: Good Reads
What cataloguing system do you use?

Sunday, August 9,  12:30 - 2 pm: Lots of Planets have a North
Too much SF depicts a planet-wide civilization as being
one homogenous unit. We know how diverse human civilization is;
shouldn't alien worlds be the same?

Sunday, August 9,  3:30 - 5 pm: Economics of the Star Traders
How do you keep an interstellar economy going?

Monday, August 10,  11 am - noon: Non-Fiction for SF Fans
What non-fiction should SF fans be reading? The panel
recommends and discussed recently published books and perennial
classics.

Diane A. Kelly:
Friday, August 7,  3 - 4 pm: First Contact: Create and Design Aliens
A workshop conceptualizing  other beings: What sort of
biology are aliens likely to have? What might they look like? What
personalities/behaviors?   How will this effect our communications?

Saturday, August 8, 6:30 - 8 pm: Assistive Technology, or When is a Cyborg?
Better, faster, stronger. Has it happened? In 2008, the
International Olympic Committee was debating whether to bar a
double-amputee sprinter because his artificial legs supposedly gave
him an advantage. Our panelists will discuss current and near-future
advances in assistive technology and speculate on how soon they may
give "disabled" people capabilities beyond those of typically-abled
individuals and may offer better senses to all of us.

Parasites and the Red Queen's Race

The Red Queen is a character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, who has to run as fast as she can just to stay in one place. Biologists use the term "Red Queen's Race" to refer to the process by which species must evolve and adapt just to cope with day-to-day threats which are evolving equally rapidly to overcome their countermeasures.

One of the most common sorts of Red Queen's Race is the battle between a host organism and its parasites. The host evolves new ways to repel or destroy the parasites, while the parasites come up with ways to evade the host's immune system. Of course, if the host devotes too much of its resources to stopping parasites, it becomes uncompetitive in other ways -- to change analogies, the host is like a country. Does it spend money coming up with weapons to fight its enemies, or spend it on economic development?

Here's a great example of one such race in action. Snails in New Zealand have to fight off parasites, which means they need to evolve as fast as the parasites do, even though the parasites probably have a faster reproductive cycle than the host snails do. But the snails can make use of a powerful ally:  SEX. (I did that to help our Google search results.)

Sexual reproduction is a great way to jazz up your genetic diversity, helping you evolve better. The snails which are afflicted with parasites are more interested in finding sex partners so they can perform sexual reproduction -- and thereby give their offspring a marginally better chance of fighting the parasites. Snails with no parasites aren't interested in the dating game, and reproduce asexually.

I don't know if this would help humans looking to attract a partner, but it might be worth a shot:  "Hey, sweetie! My genes may help your offspring avoid deadly parasites! Wanna go back to my place and watch Firefly reruns?" Try it and see!

Footprints in the Dust

Happy Apollo Day! Forty years ago men from Earth went to the Moon. They "came in peace for all mankind." Eight others followed . . . and then nothing more. Except for a few footprints and instrument packages, the barren dust of the Moon is as undisturbed now as it has been for a billion years.

I suppose, in a weird way, we have Lee Harvey Oswald to thank for the fact that even those few footprints are there at all. Had President Kennedy not been assassinated, the lunar program he inspired might have died some time in the mid-1960s from budget cuts and more politically useful things to spend the money on. But Kennedy died and the space program lived on as his memorial -- until the goal of reaching the Moon was achieved and the program could be scaled down without any inconvenient complaints about betraying JFK's legacy.

When will the next human step onto the Moon? The current NASA plan calls for 2019 -- the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 -- but already there are problems with the Ares rocket, calls for program changes, and the sound of budget cutting knives being sharpened. My personal guess is that the "return to the Moon" will get pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back, and never actually happen. There will always be some voting bloc more deserving of tax dollars, and the aerospace companies and NASA employees will have to be satisfied with more puttering around in low Earth orbit.

Some time around 2040, perhaps, a spacecraft will set down on the Moon's dusty surface, and human feet will make some new footprints, and a new flag will be hammered into the hard-packed regolith soil. But it won't be the Stars and Stripes.

The future belongs to those who actually go out and build it. Americans have decided not to attend. The future isn't ours anymore.

Apollo 11 Redux

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, the website We Choose The Moon is replaying the live transmissions from the Apollo 11 mission in realtime. At this moment 40 years ago, the Command Service Module was nearly 169,000 nautical miles from Earth, heading toward the moon at 3349 feet/second. They'll be entering lunar orbit around this time tomorrow. And if listening to the radio chatter isn't enough for you, the site also has lots of photos and videos from the mission to explore.

Be warned site is Flash-heavy. (Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the pointer!)

Equally cool: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is currently in orbit around the moon, taking high-definition photographs of its surface. It took images of the lunar landing sites last week. 

Another Fiction Announcement

Got this week's copy of Nature? Flip to the back page. Today's Futures is by our own Jim Cambias.

Alas, subscribers only.

This Writes About Dinner

So you swear you hate chemistry. Do you like to cook? I hate to break it to you like this, but if you cook, you’re a chemist – you’re using controlled reactions to shift raw materials into new chemical forms. The new forms just happen to smell and taste good. Unless, of course, you burn them by mistake.

A few tasty chemical reactions are the focus of Hervé This’ new book, Building A Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism (Columbia University Press 2009, translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise). This is a physical chemist and an early pioneer of molecular gastronomy. He’s written about food and chemistry before in the encyclopedic Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor (also from Columbia University Press), but Building A Meal is a more intimate introduction to the ideas behind molecular gastronomy. This book is certainly less likely to intimidate – instead of presenting a cascade of different reactions, it examines the chemistry underlying a simple, classic menu, from appetizer to dessert. And if the end of the book falls into a muddle of philosophy about cooking, its careful explanation of how to make a perfect hard boiled egg (the key is to pay attention to the temperatures at which white and yolk coagulate) more than makes up for it.

Now I’m off to the kitchen to try the book’s instructions for a whipped chocolate emulsion. Because everything – including chemistry – is better with chocolate.

You can see This in action on YouTube: no translation necessary.

Good News From Outer Space (And Bad News, Too)

The Good:  First private commercial space launch is a success! A SpaceX Falcon rocket put a Malaysian communication satellite into orbit. Three cheers for the New Space Age!

The Bad:  NASA now says they're planning to close down and deorbit the International Space Station in 2016. What the heck? I thought this was supposed to be a permanent (or at least long-term semi-permanent) outpost in space. Why spend years building something if you're just going to drop it in the ocean? What the HELL are they thinking?

I'm a NASA fan from way back. I still think Apollo 11 is the greatest accomplishment of the 20th century, if not all of human history. But news like this makes me think that maybe, just maybe, the agency has lost its way and outlived its usefulness. If getting government funding for space exploration requires the kind of compromises we've seen over the past two or three decades, I find myself wondering if it's really worth it at all. For a long time the argument was, "Sure, NASA's not perfect, but they're the best we've got." I've made that argument myself. But if they're now doing the equivalent of digging $100 billion dollar holes in space and filling them up again, then they're not the best, not by a long shot. We'd be better off if space exploration goes back to being the preserve of eccentric billionaires, crusty old drunken astronauts, and spunky teenagers.

Robot Jellyfish!

Robot Jellyfish! What else need be said? A group of engineers in South Korea have built a robot jelly which swims the same way that living ones do, using electo-active polymers which work like muscles.

But who cares? It's a Robot Jellyfish!