WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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September 2006 Archives
Complexity
Archived From September 26, 2006 (4) Comments
Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.
In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "synergetics:" the output of a system not foreseen by the sum of its parts. In practical application, there's not much worth mentioning, except for the continually unprovable String Theory; in the sciences in general, the term "complexity" is a common metaphor, referring to those systems -- physical, biological, economic, even social -- that operate in a region between order and complete chaos. Despite its ambiguity, it has come to be a buzzword in many disciplines, spanning most dimensions of the socio-scientific-cognitive sphere.
Certainly, many things in our world are inherently complex: the delicate balance of the ecosystem, for example, or the subjectivity that shrouds history, not to mention what happens inside of your brain whenever you look at an object. The prevailing cultural ontology represented in the media, too, is of a world culture defined by its increasing complexity: as though instant communication and the floodgates of information thrust open by the Internet were the harbingers of a new, uber-complex world. Assuredly, the structure of our social lives is experiencing an overhaul; buddy lists, speed dial, and Myspace comments are the new benchmarks of a successful social life, while popularity is often measured by the size of one's email inbox.
However, it does seem a little facile to immediately peg the "Web 2.0" -- you know, that second-generation of web-based services that let users connect on a more peer-to-peer basis -- as a figurehead of a new sociality of complexity. We are easily fooled by social networking websites like Myspace and Friendster, which joyfully show us our place within a whole structure of seemingly intricate relationships; they lead us to believe that we are part and parcel of an intimately interconnected social fabric. In concrete terms, what we're really intimate with are our computers themselves.
Part of me thinks that the reason we decorate and coddle our computers is that we're priming them to represent us out there in the digital sphere, the same way parents dress and educate their children. They're really the ones we're interacting with, blindly anthropomorphizing. I think more people than we realize think their computer is watching them somehow; we're all guilty of speaking forthrightly to our machines. I myself used to tenderly pet and soft-talk my modem so that it would go faster.
Furthermore, although the web is increasingly a social experience, every person views it in a singular way. Browsers, operating systems, connectivity: all these things influence how we use the web, on phenomenological level. What with the fervent, and highly personalized, organization of one's own "Bookmarks" and "RSS Feeds," the community of user-based web sociality is dependent a profoundly personal relationship with the portal to it all: the computer itself.
In theirexcellent piece in the New Scientist, Liz Else and Sherry Turkle -- science columnist and MIT professor, respectively -- point out that although "we insist that our world is increasingly complex...we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think." What Else and Turkle bravely point out is that, despite our "breathless techno-enthusiasm," our newly web-based, socially-networked society often cuts short the full breadth of our feelings. Instant communication brings with it less time to think about the subject at hand; when a response is demanded by an instant message, it must be handed out immediately, in the form of a quick text-byte. We no longer have the time to have emotions; rather, we must negotiate our relationships through emoticons. On-always communications devices enable us to embrace the complexity of social connectivity, while simultaneously abridging the depth of our relationships. At least, that is the risk.
Turkle and Else point out that, yes, we are in the thick of a communications culture, but this isn't "a culture that contributes to self-reflection...self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."
Perhaps what is happening is that we are struggling to find a sense of self which can fit into the emerging model of the "social network;" certainly that anthropomorphic codependency many of us experience with our laptops is evidence that we're becoming plugged into social existence through technology. The Internet -- the Web 2.0, whatever -- is entangling us in a new framework of complexity, one that will become quickly irrelevant if we prove to be incapable of importing the full nuance and depth of our ideas, feelings, and relationships into it.
Relevant Asides:
1) If you are a Universe reader (or "Universist") and live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tijuana, the greater New York Area, or (potentially) Toronto or Burlington, VT, you may be interested in attending a pretty inaugural multimedia/ Power Point tour in which I am in the throes. Subjects discussed above given life through song, light, video, the whole gamut. More information here and here. It would nice to get meta-textual with you.
2) I am in the market for a new publisher. Contact universe@urbanhonking.com for more information.
6:16 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments
A Call to Paws
Archived From September 17, 2006 (7) Comments
These days, few things are as commonplace in the landscape of scientific research than the perpetual yowl of opposition. Despite the fact that huge announcements in the sciences often aren't, off the bat, that thrilling ("two galaxies a million light years away collided and we aren't sure where the mass went!"), there still always seems to be someone that's up in arms. Most of the time, it's the usual suspects -- Baptists, the Bush administration, pro-lifers, and school boards in the midwest -- people whose interests are threatened, ideologically, by the potential of specific knowledge. However, the numbers are growing, and researchers are more often having to defend their work against growing murmurs of antagonism. There's even an Oxford-based organization, Pro-Test, that marshals researchers and scientists into the streets to protest their right to do biological research. Not to mention the fact that science funding is at an all-time low.
Scientists protesting being protested? This is getting complicated, and probably because the issues scientists tend to be dealing with these days are more complex, relevant, and rife with implications than we're used to.
The thing is, Science has been around since Greek-guys-in-sheets times, and there just isn't that much "safe" research to be done. Centuries of experimental trial and error have gotten the rudimentary ideas out of the way, and now we're launched headlong into the big-picture stuff. Front-page science news is more and more mind-blowing, because it concerns the kinds of ideas that freak us out to the core: embryonic stem-cell research, evolution, our effect on the planet's climate, the beginnings and ends of the Universe. Hence, the roar of pundits grows larger, and more vitriolic. The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, in a recent posting on their website concerning the deriving of totipotent stem cells from 8-celled human embryos (a process that doesn't harm the embryo) espoused that "today's scientists must move forward on a solid ethical footing or they risk falling into the same pit that doomed many of Nazi Germany's scientists to a legacy of disgust and moral outrage."
Yikes!
More surprising, however, is objection from leftist groups. I was recently struck by the thundering of dissent against the work of Dr. Charles Roselli, a biologist at the Oregon Health Sciences University, OHSU. Dr. Roselli, who works primarily with sheep, is the author of a series of papers about sexual orientation in rams -- the so-called "gay sheep" -- which suggest that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the animals' brains before birth. Provocative stuff, to be sure, since it may mean that homosexuality is definitely biologically programmed, part and parcel of the natural world, and, therefore, that the rights of homosexual humans should be beyond contention. Duh, I know.
It's unsurprising that Dr. Roselli's work would come under fire; what is surprising, however, is by whom. Of all organizations imaginable, the radically leftist People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, infamous recently for their amazingly tasteless Beyonce Knowles coup, in which they verbally attacked the pop singer in a restaurant for her fur-oriented fashion choices) have taken the OHSU research as a misguided call to arms.
PETA, in a trenchant attempt to stop Roselli's work, posted a petition on its youth-oriented website, claiming that "these experimenters believe that homosexuality is a defect that needs to be fixed, and they're cutting open and killing gay sheep to do it." Meanwhile, Roselli has repeatedly told the media that his work is completely neutral, that he's trying to understand the biological impetus behind complex behavior, and, according to an interview with the Seattle Times, that he isn't even a "nature-versus-nurture kind of dichotomist."
Why would PETA target this kind of research? After all, Roselli and his team deal with a grand total of 16 sheep in their lab, while American meat-packing companies plow through over 4,000,000 yearly -- and no one learns anything from those, other than that they might taste good with a little mint sauce and some potatoes. Of course, a great deal of animal research is morally dubious and, frankly, unnecessary, but the work of these OHSU researchers -- and many others throughout the country -- is in a completely different league: no one's putting shampoo in puppies' eyes here.
Don't get me wrong, I love our animal brothers, but that doesn't necessitate a blind adherence to any and all political group which claims to represent them. It seems that PETA has cherry-picked the OHSU team and manipulated its hot-button modus operandi in order to turn people away from any kind of biological research involving animals, a politically-biased strategy that wouldn't be out of order among Intelligent Designists and those who deny the increasingly obvious presence of climate change. As if we needed another anti-Science group in this country!
PETA's rhetoric is questionable; the petition on their site ends with "I am sure that you want your university to be known for making real medical advancements that actually benefit humans, not for torturing animals and promoting homophobia." It is also sensationalist, borderline silly, and frighteningly similar to the language that the Southern Baptists' Convention uses to criticize stem-cell research. Alls I'm saying is, language is dangerous, but not as dangerous as extremism.
1:21 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
A Sound Of Thunder
Archived From September 7, 2006 (0) Comments
Of all the storied elements of our great folkloric misunderstanding of Chaos Theory, the Butterfly Effect has undoubtedly suffered most from popular conception. It was born innocuous, a slight allegory to explain how changes in a mathematical situation's beginning coordinates have an unprecedented effect on its outcome, and yet the Butterfly Effect has somehow mutated into a beloved believe-it-or-not tenet of pop science. A butterfly flapping its wings on a balmy midwestern afternoon, many of us believe, can cause typhoons on the coast of Japan. The image is lovely, of course, and gives us a world that is wildly interconnected, multifarious, and dangerous. However, any mathematical concept which finishes its career as the title of an Ashton Kutcher movie should be immediately fact-checked.
Although the Butterfly Effect is mathematically, conceptually, solid as a rock, the actual dusty-winged butterfly is only an image, and nary more. The term, some say, comes from a short story about time travel penned by the wonderful Ray Bradbury, a science fiction novelist; others claim it is derived from a 1963 paper by Edward Lorenz for the New York Academy of Sciences, in which he posited, "One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings could change the course of weather forever." Would the image have so much popular appeal if it were a briny seagull beating its wing instead of the more poetic butterfly? Hardly.
This introduction is anecdotal. Mostly, I am trying to use the hackneyed Butterfly metaphor to get at the science-news events of the last few months, which, in case you've been hiding under a piece of Kuiper belt debris, are the equivalent of 1,000 Japanese typhoons. As Kate Becker put it in her Seed Magazine piece, "Best Week Ever," the last few weeks have seen huge announcements in a wide swathe of scientific disciplines "with a cross-disciplinary synchronicity that belies the isolation of their fields."
For one, astronomers -- any many other well-meaning residents of the Solar System -- were all aflutter about Pluto's demotion from its long-standing planet status. Cosmologists, on the other hand, also did their part to rewrite the textbooks, and found evidence of the existence of dark matter, the stuff which makes up 96% of the Universe and, until last week, was unaccounted for. By observing the collision of galaxies in a "bullet cluster," scientists found that most of the post-collision mass lay outside of any observable gas, a phenomenon which is, apparently, impossible to explain without the existence of dark matter. What dark matter (and its counterpart in the Standard Model, dark energy) is actually made of is still mysterious as all get-out, but this is the most compelling evidence to date that it's actually there, and that we don't have to rewrite Newton's laws to explain the visible Universe. Cool!
As if Pluto's booting and Dark Matter's arrival weren't enough, stem cell researchers at the biotechnology firm Advanced Cell Technology figured out a way to make a new stem cell line out of an eight-cell, i.e. pre-sentient, embryo. Important stem cell research without any of the pro-life claptrap? I'd gladly trade an icy old asteroid for that! Although it's probably prudent not to get too excited, this development could have profound implications for the current ethical and legal dilemmas that have limited this critical work in this country. Of course, the Bush administration may yet stick to its clammy guns on the issue of human embryos in any kind of scientific research. Still, the fact that a line of stem cells can be derived from such a basic organism is pretty awe-inspring, considering how complex a human being is.
I have the creeping feeling that these kinds of announcements -- enormous, discipline-altering discoveries -- are only going to be hitting the news more and more often. Maybe butterflies, somewhere, are fervently batting their wings; maybe we're just getting better at wresting Nature's secrets from her gnarled and starry limbs. The question that matters, to me, is whether or not we're ready to have all the answers. After all, it's the act of seeking which has defined the sciences since their inception: the metaphor of the perpetual search for completeness, in all its progressive linearity, has come to serve as a model for how science is understood and practiced. Once we have all the planets lined up, the Universe's components weighed and measured, and the complexity of human cells used to our medical advantage, will we be ready to open our umbrellas and await the typhoon of whatever comes next?
3:57 PM | Permalink |