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The Mad Scientist Random
Ravings of a Retired
Rocket Scientist Meet the author, Woodrow Wilson Contact the author with comments or suggestions. Subscribe to our eZines and receive
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Essays on science, engineering and medicine. A
rocket scientist reflects on the world around us. A great read for young
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FICTION |
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May 22,
2019 More alien than the moon or Mars and right
under our noses, the ocean is cold and dark and deep. We've mapped the moon
and Mars and South Dakota, better than we've mapped the ocean floor. More people have been to the moon than have
been to the bottom of the ocean—and they stayed longer when they got
there. Texas multi-millionaire Victor Vescovo has set a depth record reaching
the lowest point in the Mariana Trench 35,853 feet down. Upon reaching the bottom, he set
another record by remaining at that depth for four hours. The first visitors
to the moon stayed almost a day. His Marianas Trench dive was the fourth in
Vescovo's plans to visit the five deepest spots in Earth's oceans. The other
four—runners-up to the Marianas Trench—have never been explored
before. His fifth target—in the Arctic Ocean—awaits clearing of
its ice cover by fall. Films of his adventures will be presented as a
Discovery Channel series. With no known energy source, it had long been
theorized that there could be no life down there. Someone forgot to tell the
natives. Vescovo viewed local animal life swimming under his submarine's
floodlights at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. These included at least
three previously unknown species. Extreme depths occur at cracks in the Earth's
surface. Shifting tectonic plates collide, and one sheet is thrust under the
other and recycled back to the planet's liquid core. Elsewhere, cracks
between spreading tectonic plates expose the molten magma of Earth's core.
Volcanoes dot these fissures. Deep-water volcanoes superheat water and
percolate minerals into the surrounding ocean. Smoking chimneys develop where
hot water meets cold, and oases of exotic life form around them. Ecosystems
based on hydrogen sulfide thrive in perpetual darkness there. Two-thirds of Earth's surface remains
uninhabited and unexplored. The variety there rivals anything we can hope to
encounter elsewhere in our solar system. There's a strange new world just off
shore waiting to be discovered. |
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May 15,
2019 Medical science hopes to open a new front in the
war on infection with specialized viruses that kill lethal germs. Genetically
engineered viruses may counter drug-resistant infections someday. A hundred
years ago. infectious disease killed millions of
people. Penicillin changed all that. It cured most infections and extended
human life expectancy. Germs fought back. They evolved resistance to
antibiotics. Higher doses and longer treatments were required. New drugs were
developed, and germs beat them too. The fight goes on. Experimental viral therapy may have helped fight
one patient's deadly drug-resistant infection. The young woman was suffering
from multiple life-threatening conditions. She became infected with
Mycobacterium abscessus—a relative of the bacterial tuberculosis germ.
Her infection did not respond to combined medical treatment for her infection
plus her other ailments. She needed something new. Doctors turned to an
experimental therapy. They identified three viruses known to infect those specific
bacteria. Yes, bacteria get sick and die—like every other living thing.
All three viruses were genetically modified to make their attacks lethal to
the host bacteria. The custom-made viruses were added to the patient's
therapy regime. Her infection responded favorably to treatment. These results are encouraging, but inconclusive.
It's an isolated case—only the second apparent reversal of a
drug-resistant infection by virus therapy. This patient was being treated for
a laundry list of serious medical conditions. The contribution of her other
therapies to the defeat of her bacterial infection is unknown. Initial results seem promising. If custom-made
viruses were required, wider application would be prohibitive. Leading
laboratories are pursuing potent viruses for general application against
drug-resistant infection. |
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May 8,
2019 Venus had lakes and rivers and seas once. Venus
hosted liquid water while Earth was covered with ice and snow. If life
evolved there during those billions of years, Venus might have been the
Garden of Eden. Today, Venus is Hell and Earth is Paradise. What happened? Our sun has been getting hotter since its creation.
It was born in a swirling cloud of hydrogen. Gravity tugged the gas inward.
Core pressures rose in the collapsing cloud. Hydrogen atoms were crushed to
extreme densities. Those ignited nuclear fusion and a star was born. The
collapse continued drawing more hydrogen fuel into the nuclear inferno. The
sun's rays have been growing hotter throughout its four billion year history. The sun bakes all planets. Planets too close to the
sun are too hot to host liquid water. Far removed planets are too cold. Only
those in between can have liquid water on their surfaces. The boundaries of
that just-right zone vary with the sun's heat. They extend farther out as the
sun warms. When the sun was half as bright as it is today,
Venus had water—and possibly life. Earth was a barren ice world. As
billions of years passed, the sun grew hotter and the liquid water zone
expanded. Earth's ice melted and Venus's seas evaporated. Solar radiation,
heat and light transformed Venus' environment into today's toxic inferno. Earth has basked in the liquid water zone since
entering it billions of years ago. The sun continues to grow hotter, and the
habitable zone boundaries continue to spread. The too-hot limit is
approaching Earth's orbit. As it does, the planet will heat up. (This is not
the "Global Warming" of political hysteria fame.) Liquid water will
vanish, and air will grow poisonous. There will be no witnesses. By the time
that happens: humans will be either elsewhere, or nowhere. |
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May 1,
2019 There's ample evidence that liquids flowed over the
ancient planet's surface. There's plenty of wishful thinking and zero
evidence that that liquid was water. Mars has never been warm enough to host liquid
water. The sun warms all the planets. The close ones are too hot for liquid water.
The far ones are too cold. In between, The temperature is just right. This is
the so-called Goldilocks zone where liquid water can exist. The sun has been
warming over the past four billion years expanding this special region. Earth
is nearing the end of billions of years in the zone. Mars has yet to enter it. Mars was once in the Goldilocks zone for liquid
natural gas, LNG. That liquid may have filled Mars' rivers and lakes then.
That time has passed. Modern Mars is too warm for LNG and its rivers and
lakes have all disappeared. Traces of methane in the atmosphere may be
residuals of the planet's ancient climate. A vast liquid lake has been
detected a mile beneath the south polar ice cap. Temperatures there make
liquid water unlikely, but seem about right for LNG. Still more methane may
be sequestered in Martian sands, just as it is on Earth. Ancient Mars was not like today's Earth. It must
have been more like Saturn's moon, Titan. Titan is in the LNG Goldilocks zone
today. Data taken by the Cassini probe are showing an LNG-based climate
remarkably similar to our own water-based climate. It rains LNG there. The
seas, lakes and rivers are filled with LNG. |
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April 24,
2019 The sky got more complicated with the invention of
the telescope around 1500. The center of the universe shifted from the Earth
to the Sun. Planets grew moons. Some stars split in two or three. The deeper we look, the more magic we find out
there. More planets, more moons, and more debris. Some points of light turn
out to be distant galaxies with billions of stars of their own. A black hole
looks like Einstein's equations predicted. Nearby stars have
planets—four thousand and counting. We see them jiggling their stars,
or blocking a bit of their light. Many are bigger than Jupiter; others are
smaller than Earth. Many are blazing hot; others are freezing cold. The
variety seems endless. George Lucas took us to Tatooine, a planet with twin suns.
Astronomers are beginning to detect planets in solar systems with more than one sun. Two
stars tumbling across the sky alternatively flash and eclipse each other. One
moves away while its partner flies forward. Their light is both red-shifted and
blue-shifted. A mere planet swinging around them is but a minor perturbation.
Exacting measurements are required to detect those. Scientists are beginning
to map solar systems around dual suns. Two new ones were announced last
month. One has at least three rocky planets orbiting a pair of stars. The
other includes a gas giant thirteen times as big as Jupiter around a red
dwarf/white dwarf pair. Such planetary systems are yet another mystery in
the sky. Where did they come from? Colliding stars will ricochet off one
another. Two stars can bind only if there's a third to carry away so much
energy and angular momentum they can no longer fly apart. Astronomers see
stars forming in vast interstellar nurseries. Most star pairs must form in
that early crowded region. The young stars disperse and further pairing
becomes rare. Was this month's gas giant a failed star orbiting one of the
dwarfs and nearly ejected in capturing the other? Is our nearest neighbor
star Proxima Centuri caught in a half million year
orbit around Alpha Centuri A and B, or is it just passing through? As astronomers' tools grow more sophisticated,
we're uncovering more and more of Nature's secrets. Gravity waves have
spotted neutron star and black hole collisions. A black hole's neighborhood
looks like we expected. Solar systems come in many sizes and shapes. New
telescopes and new technologies will show us things beyond our imagination. |
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April 17,
2019 Optics as big as the Earth took a black hole's picture. Optics demands a telescope that big. Imagine looking at a distant
star. When the cone of its light intersects a mirror, each ray bounces off at
the angle it hit with. If the mirror is concave, the rebounding rays are
focused inward. The right curvature directs them toward a point. It isn't
actually a point; it's a blob that can't get smaller than the wavelength of
the light. Now imagine a second star near the first. It casts a slightly
different cone on the mirror, so light bounces off at slightly different
angles. If the second focuses inside the blob of the first, there's only one
image. A larger mirror samples more of both light cones. Focal points
shift with widening observation angles. A wide enough mirror resolves the
separate spots. Alpha Centuri, the brightest star in the Southern sky, is a
single point to the naked eye, but three on closer inspection. Quantum mechanics
limits the size of optics to separate objects at a distance. Resolving the
neighborhood of a black hole light hours across from a distance of fifty-five
million light years requires planet-size optics. You can't build a mirror that large. Fortunately, a less-than-complete
mirror can still produce an image. A mirror with a piece missing will still
make an image—just a little darker. The same with two pieces missingÉor
three. The remaining pieces still direct light toward the focal point. An international
team of astronomers, the Event Horizon Team, combined eight telescopes
scattered across a hemisphere to obtain the now famous black hole photograph.
The entire network focused on the target for simultaneous observation. The
light received was not reflected to a physical image plane. Instead, the
photograph was computer-generated. Volumes of data far too large for modern
data transmission technology were recorded and delivered on hard discs. The
individual calculations involved were straightforward, but the number
required took a supercomputer. The black hole picture was the first of its kind. Now that the
technology has been demonstrated, the sky is full of mysteries waiting to be
seen. Proxima centuri b and other nearby exo-planets are obvious targets. If
Moore's Law (computer technology doubling every eighteen months) continues,
observations like these may become routine in fifteen or twenty years. The
next step beyond will expand to the moon and its Lagrange points. That would
add a ring of detectors: one on the moon and three more trailing one third,
one half, and two-thirds of the way around the moon's orbit. With Earth-based
systems in the center, those would create a virtual telescope with a half
million mile wide mirror. |
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April 10,
2019 Long ago and far away, two neutron stars
collided. Their violent impact
scrambled local space and time. The bang sent a ripple spreading across the
universe. It was so intense that it was still detectable when it reached
Earth 135 million light years away in 2017. All astronomers' telescopes
turned to view the cosmic debris from the most powerful explosion ever
recorded. A gamma ray burst followed close behind the gravity
wave. It signaled nuclear reactions never seen before had happened out there.
The glow from the ejected cloud showed heavy elements—probably the
products of those reactions. In the beginning, everything was hydrogen. Stars
turned hydrogen into helium. Dying stars collapsed and crushed all that was
left into additional elements up to iron. Production of elements
beyond—gold, silver, platinum, and fifty more—required far
harsher conditions. Shock waves in neutron star collisions generate
temperatures and pressures even beyond those inside stars. They are thought
to be high enough to host heavy element production. Neutron star collisions'
contribution to the inventory of heavy elements is undetermined. Are they the
source? Are they the only source? Future neutron star collisions will provide
scientisits with data to advance our understanding of the nuclear physics of
element synthesis. Heavy element nuclei are believed to grow through addition
of neutrons in a neutron-dense environment. The nuclei created by neutron
addition are usually unstable. They decay quickly. When another neutron is absorbed
before that decay, the rapid process—physicists call it the
r-process—builds heavier and heavier nuclei. Most fall apart. A few
emit a gamma ray and become stable. Some emit an electron to become a
different element. Theoretical calculations estimate neutron densities and
energies are high enough to support such r-process syntheses during neutron
star collision shock waves. Detection of heavy elements in the aftermath of
this first impact incident is consistent with their production during the
event. The output of the next one will provide further data to better
understand the nuclear physics within. The astrophysics community is
preparing for the next alert by surveying known isotopes to identify
signatures that might help bound the nucleosynthetic processes happening
during such collisions. A Notre
Dame group identified Californium-254 as an isotope to look for. It lasts
weeks: long enough to be detected but not long enough to have come from
somewhere outside. Its presence would confirm synthesis of elements beyond
uranium there. The forthcoming Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan
State University will generate a host of previously uncharacterized isotopes.
Understanding these may highlight specific data to be sought the next time.
Colliding neutron stars will provide a nuclear physics laboratory not
possible on Earth. |
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April 2,
2019 Fake news is making children sick. The most diabolical post of
all time is the claim vaccinations cause autism. Its author was a physician
employed by a law firm then suing a pharmaceutical firm that made vaccines.
The alleged study was pure fiction. The paper has been retracted, and its
claims rebuffed. The author's medical license has been pulled. Nevertheless,
mistaken claims still flood the Internet today. Concerned parents believe
them, and refuse to vaccinate their children. Unvaccinated children are
vulnerable to whatever scourge they encounter. Vaccines make the world a healthier place. Nightmare diseases
like polio have been all but eliminated. Only a few zealots—like the
Taliban—refuse polio vaccination and allow pockets of the disease to
persist. Measles were eliminated throughout the Unites States decades ago.
The rest of the world trails behind. Unvaccinated world travelers bring
measles home with them. A single Disneyland visitor infected with a
Philippine strain started a measles epidemic among the unvaccinated a few
years ago. This year, an Israeli strain is spreading among the Ultra Orthodox
Jewish community, and a European strain has infected hundreds in other
communities. As the disease spreads, so do efforts to contain it.
Unvaccinated children have been asked to stay home from school. Quarantines
are now in effect in hard-hit areas: unvaccinated children are banned from
public places. Vaccinations can stop this epidemic in its tracks. Vaccinations won't cause autism in your children, but they may
cure ignorance in their parents. VACCINATE! |
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March 27,
2019 Some planets have suns; some don't. The more we
stare at the sky, the less special we learn we are. There are two hundred
billion stars in the Milky Way. Many of those may be suns hosting solar
systems of their own. Nobody has actually seen an extra-solar planet yet, but
we've detected four thousand of them orbiting nearby stars. Astronomers have
seen stars stagger as giant planets swing around them. They've detected
planets' shadows as they block their star's light in passing. Next generation
telescopes may capture images of exo-planets reflecting their host star's
light. Planets floating free of any star will be even
harder to detect. It's dark out there. There's no light for them to reflect.
It's cold out there. Their outsides have cooled to the near absolute zero
temperature of space, so they don't glow. Some twenty rogue
planets have been detected when they fortuitously obscured the light from a
distant star. Bending of that light by the rogue mass indicates it's there,
and hints at how big the thing is. If twenty have shown up already, there
must be a lot more out there, Where did all these mysterious planets come from?
Planets form along with their host stars. The unattached had to have gotten
separated from their solar systems. Violent incidents capable of separating a
planet from its star are most common early in the life of a solar system.
Stars form in vast interstellar clouds. Hundreds of them form there around
the same time. Many have planets growing in the dusty discs swirling around
their midsections. Juvenile stars bump each other in that overcrowded
star-forming pocket. A University of Leiden study illustrates the effects of
stars' violent beginnings. The team simulated a swarm of fifteen hundred
sun-like stars formed in such a cluster. They let their model star system
percolate for a million years to remove any bias caused by arbitrary
selection of the cloud's initial conditions. Then the team added planets
orbiting five hundred stars—four, five or six apiece. Their computer
tracked the motion of these more than four thousand objects through the next
ten million years as the cluster drifted apart. Approaching stars jostled planetary systems. A
crossing star's gravity distorted bound planets' trajectories or yanked them
from their orbits. Interplanetary collisions exacerbated the passing star's
effects. Gravity scrambling of a planetary system or intrusion of another
star's planets led to occasional impacts. Planets ricocheted out of their
paths. About one in seven planets was ripped from
its star over those ten million years. A few of those were captured by another
star later on. The rest became rogue planets. Most drifted out of the star
cluster within the time span of the simulation. Extrapolating the Leiden
study results suggests that processes like the ones they studied may have
generated fifty billion rogue planets—Earth-sized to Jupiter-size and
beyond—in the Milky Way Galaxy. If there is that much planet-size debris, there
must be a lot more rubble out there. Oumaumau is an asteroid-sized bit of
rogue space junk. It came out of nowhere in 2017, raced through the plane of
the solar system, and out the other side. Had it been a Jupiter-class rogue,
our solar system might be a different place today. |
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March 20,
2019 The solar system bears the scars of growing up in a
rough neighborhood. Pluto's orbit is squashed and skewed. There's been a
planet or two knocked out. The giant planets are far removed from where they
were formed. Comets come predominately from one small sector of the sky. Most
of these things happened before life on Earth began. The sun—like most stars—formed in a
vast star-forming cloud four billion years ago. Hundreds of stars all formed
there around the same time. Many had planets growing in the dusty discs
swirling around their midsections. Juvenile stars bumped each other in that overcrowded
star-forming pocket. A University of Leiden study illustrates the effects of
stars' violent beginnings. The team simulated a swarm of fifteen hundred
sun-like stars formed in such a cluster. They let their model star system
swarm under its own gravity for a million years to start. This would remove
any bias caused by arbitrary selection of the cloud's initial conditions.
Then the team added planets orbiting five hundred suns—four, five or
six apiece. Their computer tracked the motion of these more than four
thousand objects through the next ten million years as the cluster drifted
apart. In the Leiden simulation, passing stars jostled
planetary systems. Planetary systems were scrambled, and orbits distorted.
Some planets were even yanked them from their host stars. Interplanetary
collisions compounded the passing star's gravity effects—especially
among the outer planets. Gravity-induced planet shuffling and intrusion of
another star's planets both caused impacts. Ricocheting planets were thrown
into new orbits or ejected from their solar system all together. About one in
every seven planets was detached from its star over those ten million years.
Planets not ejected often had their orbits perturbed. Many—especially
outer planets—were shifted into elliptical orbits often out of their
original plane. Our solar system shows the vestiges of this kind of
violence in its past. The giant planets of the outer solar system are out of
place. They have to have formed close to the sun where the primordial cloud
carried enough material to make them. This is the normal pattern seen in the
four thousand known planets of other stars. Many are "hot Jupiters"
gas giant planets orbiting close to their stars. The sun's giants must have
formed near the center of creation—not in the wispy outer regions. Only
extreme violence could have dragged the solar system's four giants out to the
edge of the universe where they sit today. Computer simulation of that process
shows there must have been five or six in the beginning. Collisions with
Jupiter are thought to have ejected the one or two missing planets from the
solar system. That incident was probably only the most severe of
a number of early impacts shaping the solar system of today. Pluto revolves
around the sun in a squashed ellipse torqued away from the plane of its
fellow planets. Similar orbit distortions were found in the Leiden
simulations. Most comets come
from one area of space where a companion star grazed the outer solar system a
few billion years ago. Astronomers are just beginning to map what lies beyond
Pluto. Preliminary results suggest some kind of shepherd acted on the
far-flung bodies out there. Astronomers are searching the sky for the postulated
Planet Nine—a super-Earth orbiting far beyond Neptune. |
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March 13,
2019 Combat is safer than doing drugs. According
to the latest National Institute of Health statistics the 702,566
twenty-first-century drug overdose deaths (1999-2017) exceeded the 641,005 US
combat deaths in all our wars combined. The number of peripheral drug-induced
disabilities among our fellow Americans compounds this tragedy. These numbers
do not include the carnage here and in Mexico in gangland wars over who sells
us this poison. The 399,232 opioid overdose deaths alone are
approaching the 426,069 US combat losses in all our twentieth-century wars
put together. The synthetic opioid fentanyl is singled out. It has killed
93,151—more than our 81,110 combat losses in Viet Nam and Korea
combined—nearly twice the 53,402 Americans killed in World War I. The war against drugs is a world war—a
world war we are losing. Afghan opium growers and Chinese fentanyl labs are
killing Americans. Controlling those sources and their pipeline into our
country may be part of a winning strategy. In 2018, ICE intercepted enough
fentanyl to kill the entire US population, but that wasn't enough. As long as
there is a demand for drugs, there will be a supply. An assault on the
criminal elements that market these lethal drugs to us is necessary, but it
will not be sufficient. Even prosecutions for capital murder have not
deterred drug dealers. Rival gangs are a more
credible threats than any US law enforcement. We need to get today's users off drugs and
discourage tomorrow's users from starting down the path to hell. Medical
intervention and organizations like Narcotics Anonymous can't keep up with
the onslaught. More is needed. |
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March 6,
2019 Manned spaceflight is
returning to the USA. Ongoing success of SpaceX tests promise crewed flight
within the next few months. That will be the first time Americans have flown
into space on American rockets since Obama cancelled the US manned space
program in 2011. Private companies are stepping in to the market for
spacefaring with SpaceX and Boeing leading the way. An unmanned SpaceX Dragon
capsule was launched on a SpaceX Falcon rocket. It navigated to the
International Space Station where it docked automatically. (The current space
taxi—the Russian Soyuz capsule—requires human guidance and a
mechanical assist with the Station's robot arm.) When Dragon splashes down in
the Atlantic Ocean, it should be authorized for human transport. The
Dragon/Falcon configuration may begin ferrying astronauts to the Space
Station by summer. Engineering is mere months
behind for the competing Boeing system. Their Starliner capsule is poised for
a comparable test flight in April. By 2020, these two companies should begin
competing for the taxi-to-orbit business. One or two other firms should
follow soon after. The SpaceX and Boeing
capsules are designed for a full-fledged return to space. They will soon go
beyond the International Space Station. SpaceX is reported to have already
sold tickets for a round the moon loop in a Dragon capsule launched on a Big
Falcon Rocket. That trip will zoom out past the moon on an assured-return
trajectory. The passengers—the first space tourists—will look
down on the far side of the moon as they fly over it. The Boeing system will
be moon-capable as well. The two company's systems
will enable the USA to orbit the moon or land on it. President Trump has
directed NASA to prepare to do so. Landings, extended exploration, and
settlements should follow. Commercialization of space may begin. FedEx long
range planning is rumored to include lunar deliveries. |
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February
27, 2019 Kelp mops up CO2.
A quarter of all the CO2 humans emit ends up in the ocean. There,
kelp and other green plants can sequester it in the biosphere. The underwater
process happens just like the one on dry land. There another quarter of
available CO2 is
removed. Photosynthesis transforms the gas into sugar. Plants and animals then
further convert that sugar into all the other organic materials of life.
Little is returned to the environment as CO2. Kelp is giant green algae with a ferocious appetite for CO2.
Given ample sunlight and CO2, it can grow two feet a day.
Underwater jungles of 175-foot tall kelp store vast tonnages of CO2.
Like most sea life, kelp flourishes in cold water, but suffocates in warm.
The main components of air—N2, O2, Ar, and CO2—all
boil away like the bubbles from an open soda. There's little CO2
available to store energy and little O2 to use it. Life grinds to
a halt. A series of warm water events have devastated Australian and
Californian kelp fields. Recovery is slow. Excess CO2 acidifies water. In normal water, a
few H2O molecules break apart into an H+ ion and an OH- ion.
Ideally, there are about a hundred parts per billion (ppb) of each.
Dissolving other things in water may shift those concentrations: more H+ is
acidic, and more OH- is basic. Solubility varies with the H+/OH- balance.
When CO2 dissolves in water, some of it reacts to form carbonic
acid H2CO3. Like water, a few carbonic acid molecules
fall apart into a H+ ion and a HCO3- ion. The additional H+ ions
shift the balance toward acidity. Life in the ocean evolved in water with a few thousand ppb
of OH-. The few extra H+ ions from CO2 shift the ocean
environment. Much ocean life is affected. Shellfish are especially sensitive
to this shift because acids dissolve their shells. Shellfish farmers are
testing kelp plantings for possible local relief from acidifying their clam
and oyster beds. |
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February
20, 2019 What's Mars made of?
NASA's newest Mars mission is about to find out. The latest robot, named
Insight, is parked near the planet's equator with a suite of geophysical
instruments. Astronomers' telescopes and orbiting spectrometers have mapped
the surface composition. Earlier Mars probes brought chemistry sets to spot check those results. Mars is covered with dry dirt
and rocks—no surprise. Satellites have charted local gravity variations
and applied ground-penetrating radar to identify subsurface features. Like
Earth, there's even a lake buried deep under Mars' south pole. Many assume
it's filled with brackish water, but liquid natural gas seems just as likely.
Insight's data will help us
better understand the modern-day structure of our sister planet, and its
evolution. The rocky inner planets of the solar system—Mars, Earth,
Venus, and Mercury—were formed together. The more we learn about their
similarities and differences, the better we can understand our
Earth—where it came from and where it's going. Mars must have had a
molten core like Earth's at one time. The planet's hosting the universe's
largest volcano attests to that. Martian volcanoes are all quiet now. What
happened? Are the core's remnants still hot and conducting
heat into the surrounding body of Mars? Insight will try to drill a
16-foot deep hole and place thermocouples there to measure subsurface heat
flow. If Insight doesn't hit a rock along the way, a clear picture of the
evolution of Mars may be forthcoming. Seismic events and their
echoes will reveal what lies beneath the Martian surface. Insight will use
classic seismology techniques to measure the structure in depth. Here on
Earth, engineers set off explosions and use echo location
to map geology. They listen for shock waves coming straight from the
explosion, and then those bouncing off underground layers. The echoes produce
a three dimensional image of what cannot be seen. Insight will try to do
something similar on Mars. It will have to get along without explosives
though. Instead, Insight will wait for Marsquakes and meteor strikes on the
surface. The planet's thin atmosphere offers little protection from meteors,
so 10 to 200 detectable events per year are expected. Insight data will provide
the first detailed look at the interior of another world. Similarities to
Earth's geology will help us better understand our home planet. Differences
will generate new mysteries. We'll have to wait and see. |
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February
13, 2019 A true two-dimensional material, graphene
fascinates physicists. Graphene is even stronger than diamond. It wouldn't
melt on the surface of the sun. This recently isolated carbon crystal also
conducts heat faster than diamond, and transmits electricity better than
silver. It's the basic building block of familiar forms of carbon as well as
some of the latest carbon composites. It's a subject of active research
interest in both fundamental and applied physics. One atom thick, graphene acts as a two
dimensional material. One pound of graphene has an area estimated to cover
more than half a square mile. Its structure gives it some unusual physical
and electrical properties. It's a sheet of six carbon atom hexagonal unit
cells like chicken wire. There, each atom is locked to three adjacent
atoms—thus its phenomenal strength. Each carbon atom contributes one
extra electron to a delocalized swarm of electrons above and below the
plane—thus its special electrical properties. The electrical properties of graphene suggest
practical applications. Electrical uses under investigation range from
quantum computers to improved solar panels. Those could be more efficient and
would avoid the exotic metals of today's units. Something strange happens
when two layers of graphene are laid one atop the other. Usually they exhibit
the same electrical properties as single layers. But when they are cooled
almost to absolute zero (-459¡F) and twisted ever-so-slightly by 1.1¡, their
electrical resistance vanishes and they superconduct. This magic angle shifts
only slightly when the two sheets are crushed together under
thousands of atmospheres pressure. Why and how this happens is a subject of
active research at laboratories worldwide. Understanding its origin may
contribute to the search for practical superconductors that could reduce the
cost of transmitting electricity. |
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February
6, 2019 Gene therapy may cure
sickle cell anemia. The first test subjects have achieved healthy red blood
cells running through their veins. Only time can tell whether their relief is
permanent. A practical and effective cure would be a boon to the hundred
thousand Americans with the diseaseÉas well as millions more worldwide. Sickle cell anemia evolved
as the lesser of two evils in malaria-prone areas. Malaria bacteria cannot
live in the diseased red cells of sickle cell anemia. The carriers are immune
to the world's leading killer of women and children. It's not much of a trade
off though. Sickle cell's defective hemoglobin lasts weeks instead of months,
leaving victims anemic. Misshapen blood cells get snagged in narrow blood
vessels, cutting off circulation to critical organs. Sickle cell incidents
are painful, often deadly. This is a well-understood
hereditary disease, so it's an obvious starting point for gene therapy. The
disease stems from a single protein defect in the hemoglobin produced by the
victims' bone marrow. That deficiency is the result of one mutation of a
single gene. Correcting that one error should be the route to a cure. Two
such promising approaches are under study. One tactic harvests stem cells
from patient bone marrow and uses special viruses to inject proper hemoglobin
genes into them. Another approach uses gene-editing techniques to correct the
stem cell genes. Stem cells with the corrected genes are infused back into
the body intravenously. Those returning to the bone marrow begin making
normal hemoglobin. Both are showing preliminary signs of success. Another alternative takes
a quite different track. The body has two seperate ways to produce
hemoglobin: fetal and adult. In utero, a baby's blood is normal. Only after
birth does the body produce the defective hemoglobin. Reactivating the fetal
hemoglobin cells while suppressing the adult ones also appears promising. All three methods are
being explored in parallel. Initial successes have encouraged the National
Institute of Health to increase research funding to cure sickle cell anemia.
A cure may become available in three years or so. Progress here will lay the
groundwork for other advances in gene therapy. |
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January
30, 2019 Martian explorers lived in
Hawaii. There was a Martian outpost atop Mauna Loa, an active Hawaiian volcano.
NASA sent Mars astronauts to its Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and
Simulation (HI-SEAS) facility to study non-engineering aspects of visiting
Mars. Crews spent months in mock Mars missions to test the psychological
effects of isolation and crowding. Teams of six explorers
lived and worked in a 1200 square foot structure—a cramped dome small
enough to be transported to the red planet. They existed on government issue
freeze-dried meals and limited water. Communications with home were delayed
40 minutes—just like a real Mars mission. Weekly 30-second showers and
a shared chemical toilet added to the ambience of the facility. Going out for a walk
offered no relief. The mountaintop was barren and virtually
lifeless—much like real Martian terrain. Once a week, crew geologists
explored the lava fields in full space suits. Habitat maintenance was also
performed in cumbersome space suits. Remote-controlled robots performed more
distant outdoor tasks. Expeditions lasting up to
one year ended without serious psychological or morale issues like those
encountered in earlier longer-duration experiments. This is about as long as
the first Mars mission is expected to spend on the planet. The results
encourage NASA planners that a Mars mission could succeed. The Martian explorers have
gone home. HI-SEAS is being reconfigured for new guests: moon people. We'll
return to the moon—this time to stay—long before sending
astronauts to Mars. We'll debug lunar living atop this Hawaiian volcano. |
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January
23, 2019 Clearly the handiwork of the devil, lunar eclipses
terrified our ancestors. They were omens scary enough to alter history. A
total lunar eclipse like the one this week almost ended English colonization
of America in 1635. New England was cursed. The devil was working his
evil magic everywhere there. The young colony was struggling. Colonists were
freezing. Colonists were starving. Colonists were dying. A storm beyond their
wildest nightmares struck on August 16, 1635. Class 3 hurricane winds toppled
trees and drove twenty-foot surf ashore. People were dragged out to sea.
Heavy rains compounded the flooding. Crops were ruined. Ships in port were
dashed against the shore and shattered with nearly total loss of their crews.
Plymouth reported forty-six killed. (The actual number was probably
higher—women, children, sailors, servants and Indians werenÕt
necessarily counted as people then.) Eleven days later, the devil attacked the little
settlement again. The storm survivors watched the moon rise and then
disappear. In an eclipse much like this weekÕs, a shadow spread across the
moon. The moon vanished for hours before slowly reemerging in the sky. This
was the work of the devil. The colony was cursed. New England was the devilÕs playground. Many
colonists wanted to return to England. If they had, the local geography and
history would be different today. Instead, they stayed and spent the next
fifty-eight years purging New England of the devilÕs disciples. He had
spawned many witches and warlocks in that tiny outpost. Their zealous
persecution forestalled further evil events like lunar eclipses. |
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January
16, 2019 SpaceX's Starship, nee Big Falcon Rocket, solves
the easiest of the problems of colonizing Mars. It's just engineering. Humans
already know how to make rockets, and have been building larger ones for
nearly two millennia. SpaceX unveiled a prototype rocket large enough to
carry men and machinery to the moon or Mars. The rocket science is the easy part. Humans are not
so easily reengineered for this new environment. Mars immigrants face eight
months to a year on weightlessness in transit. The crippling effects of six months of zero-g aboard the International Space
Station does not bode well for the colonists' condition on arrival.
Their recovery to a new normal condition under one-third gravity is unknown.
The psychological effects of years crammed together may be as debilitating as
the physical effects. Simulated Mars missions atop a Hawaiian volcano
highlight potential problems. Crew relations sour
and crew morale degenerates. Remember those experimental astronauts arrived
by car, not after being jammed together in a Greyhound bus-size space capsule
for eight months. Radiation exposure compounds the problems of
weightlessness, loneliness, and overcrowding for Mars's pioneers. Beyond
Earth's magnetic field, intense radiation from the sun, the solar wind, beats
down. Radiation health effects are cumulative. It damages DNA. All the body's
cells are vulnerable—especially reproducing cells. Replacement blood
cells are diminished. White cell shortage leaves the patient vulnerable to
infection; red cell shortage makes the patient lethargic. Nausea and vomiting
are common even at therapeutic doses. Exposures exceeding radiation therapeutic
doses will occur with lethal consequences. Systemic damage from higher doses
cripple or kill the victim. Adequate shielding for the trip to Mars will be
heavy. Radiation protection on the Martian surface will be developed to
support the lunar outposts that must come before them. Practical protection
for man and machines may prove inadequate against solar flares. Man's final
frontier will not be easily conquered. |
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January
9, 2019 Are you
lonesome tonight? Elvis Presley sang
a dismal picture of loneliness fifty years ago. It's no better today.
Researchers report an epidemic of loneliness across the country today. (It's
unclear how much of the increase cited is just someone finally stopped and
looked at all the lonely people.)
Studies show loneliness peaks in three age brackets: á
Twenty-somethings
torn away from school. Their friends scattered to the four winds. Thrust
unprepared into the adult world. á
Mid-fifties
sensing they are not immortal. The kids have moved away, and the social
structure built around parenthood crumbles. á
Eighty-year-olds
who have outlived their social structure. Loneliness has consequences. It may be more than
just having a bad day now and then. It can contribute to clinical depression
and post-traumatic-shock-syndrome. Such despair ruins victims' lives and
often ends them. The current rash of suicides among young veterans may be one
manifestation of the loneliness epidemic. Loneliness also adds to death by natural causes. A list of
the physical diseases thought to be exacerbated by loneliness include
AlzheimerÕs, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease,
neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors seem to metastasize
faster in lonely people. It's unlikely that loneliness causes many of these
illnesses, but it probably inhibits recovery from them. It's the placebo
effect or faith healing in reverse. Belief accentuates the ups and diminishes
the downs; the patient feels better and gets better. Loneliness masks the ups
and highlights the downs; the patient feels worse and gets worse. Attitude
cures or kills. Seek
professional help when loneliness seems serious. Be proactive to avoid its
growth. Communicate better with the people you meet. Look them in the eye
when talking, and really listen to them. Listen to respond, not to rebut.
Organizations like Toastmasters can help. Go out
and find unconditional love for yourself. GET A DOG. |
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January
2, 2019 Water is weird. The gas is far from ideal. The
liquid is odd. The solid is bizarre. Ice, the familiar solid form, packs water molecules
in an open crystal structure. The oxygen atoms are bound into hexagons held
together by bridging hydrogen atoms. The whole assembly looks like a
microscopic honeycomb. There's lots of empty space within. Add a little heat
and the bridging bonds shake and begin to break. The lattice structure
collapses. The shards tumble into the voids. The ice has melted. More heat
breaks the fragments up further. The smaller bits fill the open spaces
better, and liquid water contracts as it warms. It reaches its peak density
at 4¡C (39¡F) and then expands like a normal liquid after that. Molten ice is denser than its solid form. So ice
floats on water. (Other solids precipitate in their liquids.) Ice displaces
its own weight in its water host—exactly the volume it will have when
it melts. That's why melting ice doesn't overflow your glass, and why melting
icebergs don't raise sea level. Liquid water expands when it freezes. There's a
considerable force required for that. It's strong enough to shear rocks, or
burst water pipes. When outside pressure becomes too high, liquid water
remains liquid. Its freezing point drops. The continent of Antarctica, and
the moons Europa and Enceladus are blanketed with miles of ice. There, rivers
and lakes of liquid water flow beneath tons per square inch of ice overhead.
Pressure can melt ice—that's how ice skates work. Put your entire
weight on the area of the blade and you exert enough pressure to melt the ice
beneath. You glide on that film of wet ice. Common ice is only one of many forms of crystalline
water. Water molecules are like a triangular Lego blocks. They lend
themselves to assembly into a variety of shapes. Today, seventeen stable or
metastable crystalline ice structures have been identified—most have
been created in the lab. Two low-temperature solid forms exist at normal
pressure. A dozen more ice crystal forms occur under higher pressures. The
full map of their preferred temperatures and pressures resembles a patchwork
quilt. Water may exist naturally in some of those forms on giant planets. Water is everywhere in the universe. Most of it is
in none of these forms. Transition into and between these ordered forms takes time and energy. Most extraterrestrial objects
are too cold for that to happen. Water molecules or droplets are flash frozen
on capture in space—an amorphous blob results. This disordered mass is
a supercooled liquid. It's cold and it's hard; it's just another part of the strangeness
of water. |
|
December
26, 2018 There's water on Mars—solid water. Mars
Express, a European satellite, has mapped a patch of ice twice the size of
Rhode Island. This mile thick slab of ice lies at the bottom of a deep crater
near the north pole of Mars. Water is nearly everywhere throughout our solar
system. There's ice in the canyons on the dark side of Mercury. The sun's
heat and the solar wind have driven water off Venus. Here in the Goldilocks
zone, Earth has solid, liquid, and gaseous water. Solid water is common out
beyond Earth's orbit. Comets are icy rocks. Their ice sublimes away during
close encounters with the sun. (A comet's tail is just the light of the sun
reflecting off its trailing water contrail.) Asteroids, moons, and planets
orbiting out beyond the Goldilocks zone host year-round patches of ice.
Some—like the moons Europa and Enceladus—are covered with miles
of ice on top of lakes or seas of liquid water. Antarctic rivers and lakes
are thought to be similar to those of these alien moons. Water on Mars does not equate to life on Mars.
Neither does its solid state negate the possibility. The search for life on
Mars continues with the robots roaming the planet's surface, and new ones on
their way there. |
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December
19, 2018 Despite advances in medical science, life
expectancy is falling. Too many young people are killing
themselves—killing themselves with drugs, killing themselves with cars,
killing themselves with guns, killing themselves with,.. Drug overdoses are the biggest cause of preventable
death in America today. Fentanyl and other opioids are killing users, plus
those who treat them, and those who police them. Almost fifty years of our
war on drugs hasn't worked. The next step toward controlling this opioid
epidemic may be political. These deadly drugs are smuggled across the Mexican
border to domestic drug distributors. Tightening controls at the border could
strangle the illegal drug traffic. These drugs are not made in Mexico;
they're imported from illicit labs in China. Diplomacy may induce China to
police its pharmaceutical industry. These are just two of the ways the
president is working to combat our opioid overdose epidemic. Drunk driving, drugged driving, and distracted
driving kill nearly as many people as opioids do. Severe penalties and
rigorous enforcement have done little to curtail that one more for the road. Again this year, drunk drivers will ruin
the holidays for families all over the country The struggle against drugged
driving has only begun. We can't fully assess how big a problem it is. The
statistics aren't available yet. The surge in traffic accidents and traffic
deaths in states legalizing marijuana are the tip of the iceberg. They
demonstrate the problem is huge. And then, there's the cell phone. Our young
are talking and texting themselves to death while driving. Drunk drivers, drugged drivers, and distracted
drivers don't do a whole lot better when they step out of their cars. Every
week, we read about someone who walked or biked into oncoming traffic or in
front of a train. Bicyclists and pedestrians don't fare well in those
encounters. Suicide is growing to epidemic proportions. Three
out of four gun deaths in this country are self-inflicted. Too many of these
are young veterans neglected by the VA. Victims using other lethal means
exacerbate this death toll. The true suicide rate is seriously underreported.
What fraction of the so-called traffic accidents are actually suicides? How
many one-car accidents? How many wrong-way freeway drivers? We're losing a
lot of people we shouldn't. Many of their deaths could be prevented. If you
know someone on the edge, get help. Call the suicide prevention hotline 1-800-273-8255. Remember the holidays are peak suicide
season. When in doubt, help out. |
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December
12, 2018 Octopus and squid are smarter than they ought to
be. They use simple tools in the wild. They solve mazes and puzzles in the
lab. They poach fish from neighboring aquariums in captivity, and slink down lab
drains back to freedom. Born orphans—these animals are neither trained
by their elders, nor socialized by their peers. They're smart without
education. Their ancestors evolved the brainpower to rule the
oceans 275 million years ago. Their progress ended there and the world passed
them by. Life in the ocean went from sponges and snails to dolphins and
whales. Life crawled out of the oceans and joined primitive cockroach
ancestors on land. Life here advanced into today's flora and fauna. Octopus
and squid—once top predators—remained as they once were. Each octopus or squid is limited to the brains it
was born with. There's no telling what they might have achieved if they had
educated their young. What might they have become with few hundred million
more years of evolution? Could they have developed an advanced civilization?
That's the history of the extraterrestrials visiting Earth in my Dead
Astronauts novel. Read an excerpt. |
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December
5, 2018 Give a child a book to plant the seeds for a
lifetime of success. Reading for homework garners the stigma of
"work." Reading for fun creates a healthy addiction to books
instead. This year, make sure there's a book under every kid's tree. Readers prosper. Ben Carson is the poster child for
reading. He escaped the depths of the ghetto through books. His uneducated
mother demanded better for her sons. She required they read two books a week.
Those inspired Carson's pursuit of learning. Books transported him from
abject poverty to the pinnacle of success. This offspring of a single mother
grew up to be one of the world's top neurosurgeons, then a candidate for
President of the United States, and now the Secretary for Housing and Urban
Development. Dr. Carson is a model for what is possible. Ben Carson also the inspiration for Col James
"Buzz" Sherman MD, Flight Surgeon and Deputy Commander of the Mars
1 mission in my novel Stranded on Mars. Like the real
Dr. Carson, books raised the fictional Dr. Sherman to prominence. By
contrast, his political appointee crewmate, Luther Queen, is into video
games. Young adults of all ages may enjoy reading Stranded
on Mars. (This is hard science fiction in that the science is solid.)
Any of my fiction or nonfiction books offer entertaining reading for the
future booklovers on your gift list. Click on any cover above to sample your
gift to them. Their journey to a life of literacy starts with you. |
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November
28, 2018 The vast Martian oceans are a figment of some
computer's imagination. Mars rovers detected traces of perchlorates in
Martian soil. Mars satellites mapped perchlorate deposits all over the
planet. Here on Earth, perchlorate formation is often associated with ocean
water. Wishful thinkers interpreted the prevalence of perchlorates on Mars as
evidence of past oceans there. Rigorous reexamination of Mars orbiter data
shows the inference of perchlorates is a computer programming error. The
reported perchlorate expanses do not exist. The data do not support aqueous
oceans on Mars. Mars orbiters survey the planet with hyperspectral
technology—technology at the forefront of the state of the art. On
Earth, or on Mars, high-flying or orbiting camera-like instruments collect
light from below in a line of pixels. Move forward: click another line, and
another, and another. Line-after-line creates a picture of the terrain.
Recording only the brightness of each point makes a black-and-white image;
three colors yield a normal color picture. Hyperspectral imagers capture a
few hundred infrared colors. The local spectrum of each pixel is inverted to
infer the composition of the area imaged. The results provide detailed maps
of the chemistry of the zone. Hyperspectral data overwhelms computers. There's
just too much of it. Sophisticated algorithms handle straightforward
situations. There's always a complex condition beyond the computer's
competence. Programmers can't think of everything. That's when humans need to
step in. For the Mars orbiters, areas including mixed terrain weren't handled
properly. The erroneous results suggested perchlorates in the shadows.
Hurray! That's what the investigators wanted to see. Human checking
discovered the misinterpretation. Perchlorates and oceans vanished. |
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November
21, 2018 We are not alone. There is other intelligent life
on Earth. It's swimming just offshore. The more we learn about Cetaceans—toothed
whales—the more like us they become. Dolphins and orcas are the oceans'
top predators. They rule the seas much the same way humans rule the land.
Advanced communication and social skills make us number one. We both apply
those skills to pass our cultures on and to train our young. We work together
to address threats beyond our individual abilities. Lions and tigers and
bears seldom eat humans; sharks flee dolphin packs. A considerable level of communication has been
established between members of the planets two dominant species. Captive
Cetaceans have been trained to perform complex tasks for humans. Killer
whales have been found to adopt personality traits emulating those of their
trainers. Earth's intelligent creatures are interested in the animal life
around them. Humans have pets, rescue animals, and keep zoos—including
aquariums for dolphins and killer whales. A pod of beluga whales has adopted
a narwhale calf. Tales of dolphins rescuing people abound. How interested are
they in the humans they share the planet with? Fish Story tells a tale
of people kept by dolphins. Read an excerpt telling of
their capture. |
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November
14, 2018 Organic compounds on Mars don't indicate life on
Mars—or not. NASA's Curiosity rover found carbon-bearing
compounds in a dry Martian lakebed. Interpreting those results as indicative
of life there would be premature. Once upon a time, humans thought carbon
compounds could only be made by living things—thus the study of carbon
chemistry was mislabeled Organic
Chemistry. That idea was debunked centuries ago, but label lives on. Life
as we know it means carbon compounds, but carbon compounds do not mean life. Some meteors from Mars carry collections of
carbon-bearing compounds comparable to those Curiosity
discovered on Mars. Close examination of those Mars rocks finds build ups of organics close to catalytic inclusions. The researchers hypothesize these
carbon-rich deposits could have formed by electrochemical or catalytic
inclusion of carbon from the planet's carbon dioxide atmosphere. No
biological processes required. The initial NASA reports compared the composition
of Curiosity's organic deposits to that of kerosene. That would be consistent
with them being the residue of a natural gas lake—like the ones on
Titan today. |
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November
7, 2018 Jupiter has more asteroids than the asteroid belt.
The giant planet has sixty-seven moons (and counting) and more than seven
thousand trapped asteroids. The gravity around any two objects combines in a complicated
way. Five special points track the two bodies as they whirl around each
other. One at 10 o'clock and another at 2 o'clock are stable. At special
spots in those directions, centrifugal forces balance the combined forces of
gravity, and objects there rotate with the rest. Every set of two bodies carries similar potential
wells—larger ones in proportion. Two faint dust clouds accompany the
Earth and its moon. There's more debris at the sweet spots of the Earth/sun
pair. The behemoths of the solar system—Jupiter and the sun—have
trapped a lot more. Jupiter cleared its path around the sun long ago.
Interlopers that wandered onto its track were either consumed by the planet
or captured in one of its two stable spots. Over seven thousand objects large
enough to be detected from Earth—many large enough to merit
names—have been swept up and now orbit with the planet/sun system. Recent human missions have explored asteroids in
the belt between the inner and outer planets. The next step outward will
explore Jupiter's asteroids. NASA's Lucy mission has been approved to
investigate Jupiter's trailing asteroids—the so-called Trojan asteroids
at 10 o'clock. (The 2 o'clock asteroids are the Greek asteroids. Objects in
the two clouds are named for legends from the siege of Troy.) Proposed for
launch in 2021, Lucy's twelve-year mission will visit one belt asteroid and
then eight Trojans. |
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October
31, 2018 The Earth and its moon may be trailing a cloud of
dust as they swing around the sun—or maybe two of them. There are two
sweet spots in space that trap dust swept up as the Earth and moon coast
through space. Dust clouds there—suggested in 1961 by Polish astronomer Kazimierz
Kordylewski—may have been confirmed. Physics creates these special spots in space. Around
a lone body, gravity depends just on separation. Add a second object and
things get complicated. Things near Earth fall to Earth. Things near the moon
fall to the moon. Things may go either way in the space beyond. There are
five special places where things go neither way. Two of these are the sweet
spots leading and trailing the moon in its orbit around the Earth.
Interplanetary debris caught in them is swept into the rotational cadence of
the Earth/moon system. Four billion years of vacuuming its path around the
sun suggest a dense treasure trove of primordial debris might be found there.
That might be that way if the Earth and moon were an isolated system. But
they're not. There's the sun. Every time one of the dust clouds swings around
to the sun side, its strong gravity distorts local gravity and the sweet spot
leaks. Only a wisp remains. Advanced optical techniques are thought to have
detected the Kordylewski clouds a quarter-million miles away—right
where they were expected. |
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October
24, 2018 Drugged driving is as dangerous as drunk driving.
Alcohol kills tens of thousands on the highway every year. Its toll in
injuries and inconvenience is far higher. Narcotics behind the wheel have a
comparable result. Statistics on just how big the effect is haven't been
compiled until now. Alcohol is a single drug; tests for alcohol levels are
easy to administer. There are dozens of illegal drugs in use today; tests for
the range of drugs are more complicated and seldom administered. Without
testing, drivers' Miranda rights produce an underestimate of the frequency of
drug involvement in traffic accidents. Legalization of marijuana demonstrates drugged
driving effects. Drivers high on illegal drugs have always caused an unknown
fraction of traffic accidents. More people are driving under the influence of
the now legal drug marijuana, and they are having more accidents. Statistics
demonstrate the increase—just the tip of the iceberg. Pot has been
legal in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington long enough for reliable data. The
National Transportation Safety Board and the Insurance Institute for Highway
Safety both report a 6% increase in traffic accidents in those states since
they legalized marijuana. If the increase is 6%, how big is the total? We
need better tests to find out—and stricter law enforcement to counter
it. |
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October
17, 2018 Stem cells are living up to expectations. They are
just part of the genetic engineering revolution in medicine. Progress is
happening on many fronts—from the lab to the operating room. Modified immune cells are attacking hard cancers.
Specialized professionals have achieved successes at considerable expense.
The time and resources required limit their extension to clinical
application. A cancer victim's immune cells are extracted and custom-tailored
in the lab Months later, altered cells are returned to the victim. They kill
cancer cells faster than the body's immune system kills them. Successful
cures suggest a promising direction for future research and development. Medical researchers are exploring
avenues to extend this curative potential to a broader audience. One
approach—expected to enter clinical trials in 2019—will mass produce cancer killer immune cells from stem cells.
It is hoped these stem cell derived agents will survive the body's immune
response long enough to attack cancer. In another new development, Johns Hopkins
researchers have induced stem cells to grow into tiny retinas. Degeneration
of the retina is among the leading causes of blindness among the aged. This
may or may not be a step toward reversing macular degeneration. At the least,
it offers a laboratory model for testing potential treatments of this
important malady. Stem cell research proceeds on many fronts.
Personally, I'm waiting for the day when an injection in my jawbone plants
the seed for a new tooth. |
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October
10, 2018 Life was not always
possible on planet Earth. In the beginning, an interstellar cloud collapsed
into a hydrogen gas ball with leftover bits and pieces orbiting it. The
debris became the planets. Gravity crushed the big blob in the center.
Pressures and temperatures there increased until that they ignited fusion of
the hydrogen. That ball of hydrogen sprung to life—lighting the
surrounding bodies. First light wasn't strong
enough to support liquid water on the surface of Earth. The planet was a cold
barren rock for the first billion years. Liquid water could only exist there
under a thick ice crust—as it does today in Antarctica and on some moons
of Jupiter and Saturn. In those early days, only Venus would have had
conditions conducive to retention of liquid water. As its nuclear fires
burned, the sun compressed, and its fires got hotter. Venus fried and Earth
warmed enough for liquid oceans and lakes. Life sprang up in volcanic vents
and inhabited the planet. Enjoy it while you can. The sun continues to warm
and in another billion years or so, Earth will become too hot for liquid
water—and we will all boil away. The so-called Goldilocks
Zone—where temperatures are just right for liquid water—continues
to expand. Venus was once in it. Earth is now in it. The time for Mars is yet
to come. The liquids that once flowed on Mars could not have been free-standing water. Either, they were liquid water beneath
miles of ice, or they were liquid methane. |
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October
3, 2018 Laser technology is unlocking the hidden history of
the Americas. The birth of civilization in the western hemisphere was lost in
the shameful fires that burned the literature of a civilization. Only
hieroglyphics etched in stone remain from three millennia of native American
culture. Their once fertile lands have been reclaimed by impenetrable jungle
growth. Airborne laser technology is stripping away the
jungles and revealing the remnants of a sophisticated society beneath it.
Laser pulses that pass through vegetation bounce off harder surfaces beneath.
Returned reflections map the area below. It's echolocation as in radar or
sonar or bat navigation. Lidar mapping of the jungles of Guatemala are
revolutionizing archeology of the Americas. A recent study found 61,000 rock
or adobe structures in an area not much larger than Los Angeles. An estimated
three to four times the population of Los Angeles lived there. The occupants
depended on surprisingly modern farms supported by complex irrigation
systems. Weeds have repossessed those fertile fields. Twenty-first-century technology may yet help reveal
secrets suppressed by fifteenth-century ignorance. |
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September
26, 2018 Aspirin is not the panacea after all. Clinical
tests of heart attack and stroke victims show aspirin reduces their risk of
further heart issues. A low dose aspirin regime has been widely recommended
for everyone—just in case. Recent trials in healthy adults find no such
benefits for the general population. In fact, a slightly higher death rate is
found with aspirin. Aspirin thins the blood and inhibits clotting.
Clots formed within the circulatory system may break loose and end up
blocking blood flow to essential organs. When they end up in the wrong place
at the wrong time, they cause heart attacks or strokes. People who have
experienced clotting problems in the past benefit from aspirin's effects.
Their rate of repeat coronary incidents is reduced. They live longer. Aspirin may reduce internal clotting for the
general population; however, there are offsetting effects. An investigation
following almost twenty thousand seniors for nearly five years questions the
overall benefits of a low dose aspirin regime. The study—published in
the New England Journal of Medicine—finds that aspirin increases the
occurrence of internal bleeding in the brain and in the bowels. The net
effect is higher mortality among healthy seniors taking aspirin regularly. |
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September
19, 2018 Asteroids are antiques. They're the leftovers from
the formation of the solar system—unchanged throughout time. Want to
know how it all started? We could send a chemist to analyze one. The trip
would take years. A robot chemist would be better. Robot chemists don't ask
for a ride home. A robot miner would be better still. It could scoop up
samples and carry them back to Earth labs. The Japanese probe Hayabusa did
just that. Hayabusa rendezvoused with a nearby asteroid named
Itokawa, surveyed it, and returned a thousand microscopic samples to Earth.
Exhaustive tests and analyses revealed details beyond the miracles performed
on television's CSI show. The asteroid was born 4.6 billion years
ago—about the same time as everything else in our solar system. It was
involved in an collision 1one or two billion years
ago, and recently migrated from the asteroid belt. The Japanese Space Agency followed this success up
with Hayabusa2 which reached a bigger asteroid Ryugu
this summer. It will land there and collect more specimens for return to
Earth laboratories in 2020. The USA probe Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) is closing in on
yet another near-Earth asteroid, Bennu. It will return its specimens in 2023.
These missions will teach us a lot about near-Earth asteroids. Extension to
bodies in the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars is not on anyone's drawing board yet. |
|
September
12, 2018 Reports of coral's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Ocean warming and ocean pollution have bleached coral reefs around the world,
but bleaching isn't necessarily death. Coral is an animal that builds a
limestone burrow around itself. Generations build on the remains of their
ancestors, and huge colonies become the familiar coral reefs. Animals have to eat, so coral nurture algae. These
brightly colored zooxanthellae algae capture energy from the sun and
photosynthesize the nutrients that feed their coral hosts. Zooxanthellae are
sensitive plants that leave when the local temperature, chemistry, or
lighting are not just right. Their departure leaves naked coral trapped in
their white limestone caves. Hunger and then starvation ensue. The strongest
survive awaiting the return of the algae. Coral have endured ocean climate variations over
hundreds of millions of years. Recovery of the world's largest coral reef has
already begun. An estimated thirty percent of Australia's Great Barrier Reef
suffered bleaching in the 2016-2017 summer heat. The Reef & Rainforest
Research Centre reports the reef shows "substantial signs of
recovery" after a milder 2017-2018 summer. |
|
September
5, 2018 Today's simple climate models cannot explain
"the year without a summer." Eruption of Indonesia's super-volcano
Mount Tambora on April 10, 1815 led to heavy rains worldwide. 1816—the
year without a summer—followed. Crops failed. Farms were abandoned.
Famine drove migration to warmer regions. Eruption of the nearby volcano
Krakatoa on August 27, 1883 did not alter global climate. The two events seemed similar. Both
shattered 2.5 cubic miles of mountain—a hundred million billion tons of
rock—and spewed the debris into the atmosphere from about the same
location. The difference in their climatic effects was profound. Recent
analyses have finally suggested an explanation for the disparity between the
two. The explosive force of an eruption shatters the
volcano's rock cone. Shards as big as Buicks and shards smaller than a spec
of dust are hurled out in a stream of super heated gas. The plume rises and
spreads until it hits an inversion layer in the atmosphere above. What we see
of the volcanic cloud is trapped there. It spreads out through the
stratosphere. Volcanic plumes are electrically charged. The
explosive shearing of the volcanic structure happens faster than electricity
can relax. Positive gases are ejected carrying negatively charged particles
with them. Violent lightning storms accompany the plumes. Charge is
neutralized via discharge and collision, but is far from complete during
plume rise. Recent calculations by Mathew Genge (Geology, 21 August 2018) show the
inversion layer may not corral the smallest particles in the plume. The
attraction of the ionosphere's positive charge balances gravity and
aerodynamic drag on the smallest fragments. Charged shards of a few hundred
thousand atoms are electrically levitated into the ionosphere. That's where
clouds form. A temporary excess of nucleation sites makes more clouds, and those
make more rain. As the negatively-charged fragments
spread out, they neutralize the region's natural positively-charged ions.
Genge calculates that a mere five hundred tons of injected debris would be
enough to short circuit the upper atmosphere. That would have profound
effects on the weather until the sun's ultraviolet radiation restored normal
conditions. It might be enough to cause a "year without a summer." |
|
August
29, 2018 Krakatoa erupted 135 years ago this week. On August
27, 1883, the Indonesian volcano rumbled to a crescendo with the force of ten
thousand atom bombs. The explosion tore the island apart and blew 2.5 cubic
miles of debris into the atmosphere--about a hundred billion tons of dust.
Its cloud spread around the globe and colored sunsets for years after. It did
not affect the weather. Years before, the eruption of Indonesian Mount
Tambora on April 10, 1815, had produced the "year without a
summer." That explosion was an
estimated ten times more energetic than Krakatoa. It shattered the mountain
and lofted a comparable amount of dust and debris into the atmosphere. Mount
Tambora's clouds blocked enough sunlight to drop temperatures around the
globe. Summer snows were symptomatic. Crops failed across the northern
hemisphere. Farms failed. Famine was widespread. What was the difference? Why were Mount Tambora's
effects so much different from Krakatoa's? Climate models should contain the
answers. Years ago—when I reviewed early climate models for the Defense
Department—I challenged the modelers to account for these different
effects. We have worldwide weather data for both events. Today, climate model predictions have gone from a
new ice age to global warming, and now to the noncommittal climate change.
None have been able to meet the test and differentiate between the effects of
Mount Tambora and Krakatoa. Why should we mortgage our future based on models
that can't explain the past? |
|
August
22, 2018 The sky is full of surprises. The harder we look,
the more wonders we see. This week, astronomers announced the discovery of a
strange object out there. Too big to be a planet and too small to be a star,
it is on the borderline between the two. It glows as hot as an electric
range. It shouldn't. Not big enough to ignite nuclear fusion, its heat source
is unknown. Intense radio emissions indicate a strong magnetic field and
bright aurorae. Those arise from magnetic fields accelerating charged
particles into the poles. Where those particles come from is a
mystery—one of many. This object is a rouge
planet twenty light-years away: a lone body accompanied by nothing. Rogues
are hard to detect, but they're probably not uncommon. They're the debris
from thirteen billon years of cosmic collisions. When stars pass within a
light-year or so of each other, their orbiting debris clouds are jostled.
Outlying objects are most affected. Planetary orbits are torqued. Far-flung
swarms of asteroids and proto-planets are siphoned off or kicked out. Ejected
bodies become rogues roaming the universe. Most cool to the ambient temperature
of interstellar space—near absolute zero. A few larger rogues may have
internal heat sources that keep their interiors above ambient. The high
temperature of the newest rogue planet is abnormal. Is it a nuclear reaction
we don't understand? Most become invisible against the background of space
until they get close . The recent encounter with the rogue asteroid Oumaumau
may be typical. The giant rock appeared out of nowhere headed toward the sun.
We watched it accelerate through the plane of the planets, turn, and fly back
into oblivion. Oumaumau is probably representative of the cold dark wreckage
filling interstellar space. There's thirteen billion years worth of it out
there. |
|
August
15, 2018 Methicillin-Resistant
Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) has escaped
the hospitals and set healthcare back a hundred years. MRSA makes a twenty-first-century
infection about as dangerous as its nineteenth-century predecessors. Before
penicillin, Staphylococcus Aureus (staph) caused incurable
infections ranging from itchy to fatal. Along came penicillin and staph
became a nonproblem. One dose killed 99% of the staph germs, and the
infection went away. Only the strongest 1% of the bacteria survived. Those
went on to infect again, only to be almost wiped out once more. Soon, the
surviving staph germs became immune to the effects of penicillin—the
drug had killed off the rest. Other antibiotics worked for a while, but
resistance to those evolved too. Through the hundred thousand germ
generations since penicillin, staph has developed immunity to all known
antibiotics. The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention calls MRSA infection the most serious cause of
infectious disease in the United States. They report tens of thousands of
human fatalities every year. Nobody is counting nonhuman deaths, but the San
Diego Zoo lost a baby elephant to MRSA a few years ago. Those bacteria are everywhere. We come in contact
with them every day. Our skin protects us from them—as long as it
remains intact. A break in the skin invites staph in. Open sores turn into
stubborn infections. Those require months-long medical care or surgery. Staph
bacteria that reach the bloodstream attack internal organs with frequently
fatal results. Medical and dental professionals exercise extreme care to
prevent infection in invasive procedures. Others may not be so conscientious.
Tattoo parlors and piercing emporiums look nothing like operating rooms.
Intravenous drug users are notoriously unsanitary, and MRSA infection of
their heart valves kills twenty thousand of them every year. (That's
comparable to their sixty thousand annual overdose death rate.) There's no cure for MRSA infections. The search for
new antibiotics goes on—with the hope of a respite from the staph
epidemic. A University of Iowa study has identified a staph secretion that
may be responsible for some of its most devastating effects. Staph attacks
the circulatory system, especially the valves and linings of the heart. Until
we can cure MRSA infection, we can try to block its most severe effects. The
Iowa study results may point the way. |
|
August 8,
2018 Robots are the future. Competitions
like those organized by RoboNation are bringing
the future to us today. Last week, they held their twenty-first annual
RoboSub competition for autonomous underwater vehicles. Forty-seven student engineer teams from
ten countries created robot submarines to perform tasks simulating actual
underwater work for Navy and industrial applications. They sought objects,
retrieved objects from the bottom, deposited them to a target location, and
more. All without human intervention. Innovation was everywhere
at the event. Student engineers explored ways for their robots to figure out
where they were, and to decide which challenges to attempt. There's more than
one way to snatch something moving around in the turbulence of your own
thrusters. Everything from a claw to a simple stick was used to flip a
switch. The teams were proud of their inventions. Engineering crosstalk means
next year's student robots will be even more sophisticated. Everyone came away a
winner. Building a robot submarine this complex is an accomplishment to be
proud of. The teams who made it to Sunday's final round were some of the
world's leading schools. They were California
Institute of Technology Cornell
University ƒcole de Technologie
SupŽrieure from Canada Far Eastern Federal
University from Vladivostok, Russia Harbin
Engineering University from China Maritime State
University from Vladivostok, Russia National
University of Singapore San Diego Robotics
101 Sunday's podcast of the
final round of competition was viewed by academics, alumni, and engineering
hiring managers world-wide. We were not
disappointed. The judges named Harbin
Engineering University the winner for 2018. They and the forty-six other
teams can be proud of what they did this year. They'll spend the coming year
upgrading their designs and come back better than ever in 2019. |
|
August 1,
2018 #MethaneOnMars Again this week, the news media announced there's water
on Mars. Radar data suggested there's a lake a mile below the planet's south
pole. Ground penetrating radar saw reflection off a smooth surface there. An
underground lake would look like that. The reports assume that this is a lake filled with
liquid water like the ones under Earth's own south pole. The radar data
neither support nor refute the asumption that the lake is filed with liquid
water. Radar can't identify materials. Deep down beneath the Mars south pole,
it's cold, so water would have to be really salty to remain liquid there.
Briny water is what is being reported. Mars's lakes needn't be water lakes. There's
evidence that liquids once flowed on the surface of Mars. What that liquid
was is not clear. Mars has never been in the Goldilocks zone for liquid
water. That's where it's neither too hot nor too cold. Like her poridge, the
temperature must be just right for liquid water. Mars's lakes could be
methane lakes, like those of Jupiter's moon Titan. Mars has been in the
Goldilocks zone for liquid methane. The surface of Mars may have been more
like Jupiter's moon Titan than like Earth. Residues of methane lakes could
lie buried under the Martian surface. At the temperature and pressure under a
mile of Martian rock, methane is liquid with or without dissolved
contaminants. The Martian water in this week's news may turn out to be
liquefied natural gas. |
|
July 25,
2018 Jupiter's Technicolor moon Io is a land of fire and
brimstone. That moon—just a bit bigger than our own moon—has over
400 volcanoes. About 150 of them are active at any given time. All that lava
spreads out and repaves the planet surface, so Io has few or the visible
impact craters that other moons do. The volcanoes spew giant plumes plus
lava, molten iron and sulfur. Sulfur and its compounds come in vivid colors.
The element itself may be red or yellow. Its oxides come in several different
colors. One familiar iron sulfide is "fool's gold." Vast surface
deposits of these minerals give Io its brilliant colors. Io is hell. It is nestled deep inside Jupiter's
radiation belt. Humans and their
probes can't survive long in that environment. Only the most advanced
telescopes can image Io. It has been photographed from afar by deep space missions
picking up a gravity boost on their way past Jupiter. It's just a target of
opportunity when the Juno probe swoops in for close ups of Jupiter. The data to date show hell is an exotic place. The
gravity of Jupiter and two nearby moons create phenomenal tides there.
Hundred foot tall waves propagate through the solid crust of this moon.
(Solids do flow under enough pressure. Chocolate bars sag on a summer
afternoon. Window glass droops over centuries.) The friction of these tides
heats the interior to melting. The core is liquid—possibly liquid iron
like Earth's center. Gravity's pulling and tearing stresses the solid
surface. When it fractures, some fragments are subducted into the liquid
core. Others are twisted in Himalayan-scale mountain ranges. Studying Io's
extreme geology will help us better understand our own planet. |
|
July 18.
2018 Apollo 11 landed on the moon forty-nine years ago
Friday, July 20. Everyone who has ever received a letter from AARP remembers
where he or she was that day. We were all biting our nails as we watched the
moonscape flash past the Lunar Module window. Boulders and debris: the
terrain looked rough. Could they land there? The nation breathed a collective
sigh of relief when the Eagle landed. (Years later, we learned the descent
engine was running on fumes. The mission was only seconds from abort.) Then the world waited while the astronauts did a
few housekeeping chores and ate lunch. They scrubbed the four-hour nap NASA
had scheduled for them, suited up, and stepped out to the moon. An outside
camera showed Neil Armstrong step cautiously down the ladder. Finally, he
took "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
Would the moon be sand or quicksand or bedrock? It supported his weight. He
grabbed a contingency sample just in case, and stepped away. Man's first visit to the moon would be brief. It
was the victory lap in the Space Race with the Russians. The two astronauts
planted the American flag, and received congratulations from President Nixon.
They collected rocks and soil samples, and fielded science
experiments—some of which are still functional today. After less than a
day, they blasted off for home. Their ride back orbited overhead. Space vehicles
had docked in Earth orbit before, but never in lunar orbit. National nail
biting continued until the two ships locked together. The astronauts and
their samples were moved to the Command Module for the trip home. They
jettisoned the Lunar Module. All that was left was one engine burn. It would
take them out of lunar orbit and put them on the homebound trajectory. That
burn would occur on the far side of the moon. The ship popped out from behind
the moon on course, and the world breathed easier, Earth orbit was
guaranteed. The drama was over. Descent from orbit was old hat,
so the public wasn't concerned. Landing in the Pacific Ocean went almost
flawlessly. The astronauts were recovered, wrapped in bio containment suits
and quarantined for two weeks. The Apollo 11 craft was bleached to kill any
alien plagues that might have hitched a ride to Earth. All went well with
parades and honors. A few longer moon missions followed—and then the
world forgot Apollo. Humans are going back after a fifty-year hiatus.
Robots and probes from a half dozen nations are paving the way. SpaceX has
sold two tickets for a tourist loop around the moon. NASA will put Americans
back on the moon within five years. They may meet astronauts from China and
other countries when they get there, GoogleMoon has
mapped every nook and cranny of the place. FedEx is planning deliveries as
soon as there's someone there to sign for a package. |
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July 11,
2018 Can man follow his robots to Mars? The mission is dangerous
and tedious. Weightlessness causes loss of muscle tone. Six months of it can
be crippling. Astronauts often return from the International Space Station in
wheelchairs. The Mars team must step off their lander unaided after eight
months of zero gravity. The beginnings of radiation sickness will compound
the effects of atrophied muscles. Still, they'll be happy to escape from
eight boring months inside a Greyhound bus size space vehicle. Mission
simulations indicate that crowded conditions there will create high levels of
stress. Research is seeking ways to reduce the physical and mental challenges
of the voyage. Getting to Mars is only the beginning. Human
subjects have been exposed to conditions simulating the full Mars mission.
The trip is eight boring months in a tiny vehicle getting there, then eight
months camped in a desolate Martian desert, and finally back onto the bus for
the dreary eight-month ride home. Radiation exposure continues to accumulate
until the return to Earth. The effect of Mars's reduced gravity is unknown.
Will the effects of weightlessness be reversed or will they only slow under
it? Will bone mass loss compound muscle mass loss? Mission simulations show
the psychological issues continue to grow as time moves on. Watch jealousies
and personalities explode in Stranded on Mars. The astronaut is the one mission component that
cannot be reengineered. Hardware development for the rest of the expedition
continues on the ground and in near-Earth orbit. It must be tested in space
before launch to the red planet. The moon offers the ideal test bed for that.
Both the moon and the planet have low gravity and no atmosphere to speak of.
Both are bathed in intense radiation and suffer frequent meteor strikes. The
two have limited natural resources and little water. A moon base would be
almost local test site by comparison—a quarter
million miles vs. a quarter billion. Robots will prefabricate the Mars colony before
astronauts arrive. The prototype construction robots should be debugged on
the moon first. Build a model city there, and then an engineering test lab.
When the robots' work is done, staff the outpost
with human test engineers, and send them the Mars mission equipment to investigate.
This would be the dream "overseas
assignment" for an aerospace engineer. They'd feel right at home there.
FedEx is already planning to provide service to the moon base. |
|
July 4,
2018 The ocean has a climate all its own. The sun drives
both the atmospheric and oceanic climates. Solar heating is concentrated near
the planet's midsection—between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of
Capricorn. Hot water floats on top of cold. Winds push the warm water toward
the poles. The rotation of the earth twists ocean flows into great
arcs—clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the
southern hemisphere. These warm streams dominate the climates of the sea and
the land around it. Just as air streams like the familiar Jet Stream spin
off the swirling local disturbances we call weather, the ocean's main streams
spin off eddies of their own. Cold-water whirls rise from the depths, and
warm water swirls descend into them. These are analogous to the low- and
high-pressure centers seen on weather maps. Both kinds of ocean eddies span
hundreds to thousand of miles and persist for months. Creatures of the sea have evolved to live in them.
Rising whirlpools carry nutrients up from the bottom. Cold water dissolves
more oxygen and carbon dioxide than warm water can. Photo plankton and the
food chain based on plankton thrive in the cold-water flows. Life is
different in the warm-water vortexes. Carbon dioxide shortage limits
photosynthesis and thus the rest of the food chain. Despite that and a
general oxygen deficiency, alpha predators stalk the depths of warm water
whirlpools. There must be plenty of prey there. A three thousand pound fish
does not exist on sardines alone. Great white sharks migrate to warmth. Six years of
tracking two adult great white sharks finds they frequent warm areas near
shore and in the open ocean. Food is more abundant in colder waters, but
these sharks and other predators show a strong preference for warmer areas.
Shark experts suggest this may be the result of the shark's need to maintain
its body temperature. Great white sharks are warm-blooded animals. In the
open ocean, they dive a quarter mile down to hunt, and can stay longer where
they don't lose heat as fast. Two thirds of the earth's surface remains unexplored.
Our oceans are more alien than the moon or Mars. It's a fascinating place.
There may be primitive life all over the solar system, but our oceans contain
the only other intelligent life for light years around. Meet another
Earthling in Fish
Story. |
|
June 27,
2018 An asteroid—bigger than an SUV—exploded
in the sky south of Moscow last week. The superheated rock erupted in a
brilliant flash and trailed smoke and debris for miles. That was a relatively
minor event. Five years before, an asteroid as big as a couple of diesel
locomotives shattered a Russian city. The largest asteroid impact in recent
history flattened an area in Siberia larger than Los Angeles, London, or
Moscow. Long ago, a mountain-size asteroid may have triggered the dinosaur
die off. The sky has been falling since before the Earth
cooled. As our parent
interstellar cloud collapsed to form our sun, wisps of leftovers condensed
into bits and pieces around it. Those began to coalesce into planets, moons
and more. The planet-building process continues to this day. Asteroids and
comets swarm the universe, flying hither and yon until they hit
something—anything. They may shatter or scatter or fuse. Meteors hit
the Earth every day. The next big one may hit tomorrow, or it may hit in a
hundred thousand years. We don't know. Scientists are searching the sky for potential
asteroid hazards. Nearly twenty thousand have been cataloged so far. NASA
posts warnings when a large one will pass closer than the moon. Things
swinging around the sun and coming back at us are harder to predict.
Extra-solar objects like Oumuamua are beyond the
state of the art. No apocalypse-scale asteroid collisions are on the horizon
É yet. What could we do if we saw the big one
coming? Whatever it was would take years to prepare—longer if the
government procurement cycle was required, longer still if an international
effort were mounted. That much time wouldn't be available. Predicting the
intruder's trajectory years ahead of time would be too uncertain to justify
the expense entailed. Whatever response was selected, it would not be a
manned expedition—that's Hollywood. Robots work better and they don't
expect a ride home. A few nuclear detonations properly placed might alter the
trajectory enough to buy a near miss. Smithereens are out of the question.
Intersecting alien intruders at interplanetary standoff distances is the
stuff of video games. So are lasers delivering enough energy to deflect a
heavyweight asteroid. The only technically feasible
response to an apocalypse asteroid is to evacuate the target area. |
|
June 20,
2018 It's ugly out there todayÉon Mars. A dust storm has enveloped a quarter of
the planet. Martian storms are natural disasters so huge they're visible from
orbit. Satellites have watched storms lie these grow as big as Texas and even
planet-wide in scale. Severe Weather like this is a hazard encountered by
every Martian explorer in contemporary science fiction. My latest novel Stranded on Mars is
no exception. Zero visibility may be hazardous to your health. The facts of the planet's climate are not yet
understood. What causes these
storms? Martian summer is beginning. Dry ice frost is subliming—passing
directly from solid to vapor. (There is no liquid carbon dioxide on Mars.)
How do winds of such a wimpy atmosphere raise enough haze to block the sun
and create zero visibility? Could
it be like the Oklahoma dust bowl of the 1930's? There, extreme drought dried
the soil so much that it no longer clumped together. Winds lofted unbound
grains of soil. Mars is far drier than Oklahoma at its worst. Martian weather forecasting is a long way off.
Satellites will track current dust storms as they develop. Further details
may be available from Opportunity
the robot rover trapped in the middle of the current stormÉif it survives.
The robot is solar powered, but it's pitch dark inside the storm clouds. NASA
has put it into hibernation in hopes of preserving enough battery power that
it can awaken after the storm passes. We don't know how long it will have to
sleep or whether its batteries will freeze solid in the interim. It's not
known how much damage blowing Martian debris may inflict on it. Martian dust
is not like than Earth dust. Martian sand grains are electrically charged and
have sharp edges. Opportunity may
be struck by lightning during the storm. Tiny specks hitting seventy mile per
hour chunks may sandblast its optics. Its joints may be filled with grit, and
its solar cells covered with crude. (Here or there: dirty solar panels don't
work well.) If Opportunity
recovers, it will be our "boots on the ground" reporter. We'll be
one step closer to protecting future astronauts and colonists from Martian
Mother Nature. |
|
June 13,
2018 Suicide is a sad fad. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention report a steady rise in suicide deaths over the past
twenty years. This reflects either a disturbing fashion trend or relaxed
reluctance in reporting. Has suicide's stigma worn off? This week, Kate
Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two minor celebrities killed themselves. They both made the front page
for the first and last time. Few people had heard of either one before, and
only their families will remember them after next week. Nevertheless, watch
for copycat suicides by people wanting their own fifteen minutes of
fame—just like the stars. Suicide rates jumped 10% in the months
following reports of Robin Williams' suicide. Suicide happens too often. Suicide deaths outnumber
traffic fatalities or opioid overdose deaths. Three quarters of American gun
deaths are suicides. Women tend to choose poison instead. Others hang
themselves, slash their wrists, or jump off high places. Stepping in front of
fast-moving trains is the latest fad in my neighborhood. That gets you only
local news coverage around here. For real notoriety, point a gun at a cop.
Your death sparks demonstrations about "wrongful death" and
"police brutality." Do those wrong-way freeway drivers really cause
traffic accidents? Or are those incidents murder/suicides? Just because Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the
Tallahassee Bridge doesn't mean you should too. We're losing twenty-two
veterans every day—responsible young men and women with a lot more to
contribute to our country. Suicide is the wrong answer. Lonely? Depressed?
Know someone who feels that way? Friends and professional help may keep some
from hurting themselves and their loved ones. The suicide hotline 1-800-273-8255 is the first step away from harm. |
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June 6,
2018 Telescopes and computers are beginning to unveil a
universe stranger than science fiction. Once upon a time, the moon and a handful
of planets orbited our flat Earth. Heretics who suggested otherwise were
burned at the stake. Not so long ago, there were nine planets—including
Pluto—and a gaggle of moons. Then came the first planet beyond our
solar system; the first ten; the first hundred.
There are thousands known already, and the number keeps growing. Today, computers do the repetitive work to explore
the sky. The tedium of finding Pluto was heroic. Computers don't get bored.
They can stare at reams of data looking for the subtlest variations. The
first extra-solar planets were discovered by a tail-wags-the-dog effect on a
star's spectra. (A star wobbles as its planet spin around it. The stagger in
its step tells us it has planets.) More have been detected by a star's slight
dimming when a planet crosses between the star and us. NASA's Kepler probe
watched a small swatch of sky and found thousands of planets close by. Its
successor TESS will survey a much wider expanse. It should find many more.
There are an estimated ten billion planets in our Milky Way Galaxy alone, and
a hundred billion billion more planets throughout the cosmos. Tomorrow's telescopes will tell us even more about
the worlds out there. The Webb telescope will discover planets beyond those
we've seen so far. The next generation telescopes may able to image and study
the planets around nearby stars. Don't expect maps like GoogleMoon or
GoogleMars just yet. Do look for answers to fundamental questions. á
Which ones
have moons. á
Which planets
or moons have liquid water? á
Which have
atmospheres? Water vapor can be detected in the infrared; nitrogen, oxygen,
and carbon dioxide can't. Radiation or electric storms may generate auroras.
Active volcanoes may spew detectable materials into the planet's atmosphere. á
Which planets
or moons are candidates for extraterrestrial life? Liquid water and
comfortable temperatures suggest a possibility of life
as we know it. Actually detecting life there, intelligent or not,
is beyond the realm of foreseeable technology. We'll have to join the Search
for ExtraTerestrial Intelligence (SETI) in waiting for them to contact us
with a big neon sign saying HI MOM. |
|
May 30,
2018 Mars: getting there is the easy part. NASA is landing
heavier and heavier robots on the surface. SpaceX is soft landing and reusing
the massive first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on Earth. If they can land
something that heavy here, they'll be able to do the same thing on Mars soon.
SpaceX is already pitching tickets to Mars colonists. Those Mars tickets are
one-way tickets though. SpaceX doesn't offer a ride home. The way back is an
engineering, economic, and medical nightmare all its own. A manned round trip to Mars weighs more than we can
loft. Such a trip would have to be launched in stages. All hardware components for the return
trip would be preplaced before the astronauts even left Earth. That equipment
would have to work perfectly after enduring years of extreme cold and intense
radiation. Stranded on Mars
describes the consequences of failure. (Remember, there was no Plan B for the
Apollo astronauts.) The first step home would be launch into orbit. Lifting
a crew off the planet requires something like a Cape Canaveral launchÉwithout
the thousand NASA support engineers back home. They're a twenty-minute
communication delay away. The Mars evacuees are on their
own. Mars is smaller than Earth. Its gravity is lower,
but launch still requires massive amounts of propellants. The launch rocket
itself would be fabricated on Earth, delivered to Mars, and landed there.
NASA hopes to avoid the additional cost of shipping tons of propellants by
manufacturing them on site. Propellants store energy to move the rocket. Solar
energy is the only known energy available on Mars. Sunlight there is only
half what it is on Earth. Mars has limited natural resources to make
propellants from. The atmosphere is carbon dioxide. There are unknown amounts
of methane and water on the planet. An autonomous chemical plant could
synthesize and store oxygen and methane or ethane for the launch. The
visiting astronauts will want to know the tank is full before leaving home. Engineering can fix every element of the Mars
mission except one. Astronauts are not easily modified to accommodate
radiation or weightlessness. Radiation monitors accompanying Mars robot
expeditions show that a single round trip exceeds the recommended lifetime human
exposure to radiation. Astronaut muscles atrophy under weightless conditions.
Six months of it can be crippling. No one can predict the effect of eight
months getting there, a year of one-third gravity on the ground, plus eight
months coming back. Robots don't complain about little things like that, and
they don't demand a ride home. It's not time to send a man to do a robot's
jobÉyet. |
|
May 23,
2018 We search for intelligent life light-years away, but
overlook our own oceans. Intelligence has sprung up all over the world. We'll
find it everywhere if we just look with open minds. It's not just our ape
cousins or our household pets either. Exotic species like squid and octopus
seem to be as smart as our dogs and cats. Humans need to be able to deal with
the range of intelligent Earthlings before encountering the even greater
variety expected in extraterrestrial intelligence. Octopus and squid are nothing like people. Their
intelligence is as alien as their physique. Legends of their problem solving
abound. Octopuses poach from adjacent tanks in captivity and escape secure
lab facilities. Squid hunt in packs. That kind of coordination requires
communication. Humboldt squid change color quickly. When hunting, they flash
red and white so fast they seem to be telegraphing each other. Other colors
for other circumstances suggest a larger vocabulary in a language of colors.
That would be a viable alternative to humans' spoken word for an intelligent
animal. Our intelligent neighbors live in a world unlike
our own. Humboldt squid spend their days lingering at oxygen-depleted
depths—probably feeding on whatever they find there. At night, they
rise to the surface to hunt. Swarms of squid attack schools of fish. Bite-size
ones are consumed on the spot.
Larger prey may be dragged back down to the oxygen minimum zone to
suffocate. Fellow squid may be injured in the violence, and are often eaten
along with the quarry. Anything wandering into squid feeding frenzies is
attacked. YouTube videos show man-size squid mobbing human divers who got too
close. Extraterrestrials have two arms, two legs and one
head in the movies. Expect greater variety in reality. Present day
intelligent Earthlings are just a small sampling of what we may eventually
encounter in the universe. Even those don't always fit the humanoid mold.
Squid intelligence may continue to evolve here on Earth, and may already have
gone far beyond on other planets. The science fiction novel Dead Astronauts
describes squid-like aliens from an ocean-covered planet. When we encounter
intelligent extraterrestrials, they won't be "as seen on
television." |
|
May 16,
2018 San Diego will put the FAST in fast food. Uber
will explore food delivery by drone here. It's part of a Department of
Transportation test of commercial drones. Uber is also testing driverless
cars on San Diego streets, and plans to introduce flying taxis in five years.
The city has been selected as one of several test beds for commercial drones. There's more to commercial drones than just Thirty minutes or it's free. San Diego
organizations will explore applications to improve the health and safety of
the area. UCSD Health will be part of a team looking at drones rushing
medical test specimens to laboratories. Sister cities will look at delivering
blood, drugs or defibrillators where they're needed. GE and the City of San
Diego will develop applications to upgrade infrastructure management. Their
drones may even seek out open parking places—a potential quality of
life benefit. A critical element of the Department of Transportation study
will be avoiding drone interference with civilian and military aviation in
the greater San Diego area. In three years time, the Federal Aviation
Administration can look forward to a blueprint for regulating commercial
drone traffic in cities everywhere. San Diegans can look forward to warmer
delivery pizza, faster turnaround at clinics, and maybe a parking place.
Legitimate businesses can look forward to catching up with the Mexican
cartels, which have been flying narcotics across the border for years. Applications to public safety will not be
overlooked. Law enforcement agencies are developing surveillance drones to
supplement manned aerial platforms.
AT&T will develop remote observers to help focus emergency
response. Qualcomm, AT&T, and GE will look at monitoring incursions
crossing the border with Mexico É or flying over it In three years time, the engineering will be
largely done, and the legal hassles just begun. |
|
May 9,
2018 Insight, a robot geologist is on its way to Mars. It will
sleep through the six-month journey and wake up ready to explore. Orbiting
satellites have mapped the planet. Insight's
robot predecessors have roamed the surface. This one will burrow into the ground beneath it. There, it will field
instruments up to sixteen feet deep to monitor the flow of heat from the
interior of Mars. A companion motion sensor will detect Marsquakes and other
rumbles. Mars is bombarded by meteorites. Their
explosive impacts send seismic waves through the ground. Those signals and
their echoes will paint a picture of the interior structure of Mars. Understanding the planet Mars begins with its
geology. That's why the commander and chief scientist of the first manned
mission to Mars—in my novel—is a geologist. A human could respond
to the unexpected a robot might not detect. The first human geologist won't
go into suspended animation for the six-month journey—like Insight. He'll need to be kept alive
and protected from interplanetary radiation the whole way. He won't chance an
experimental landing technique like the one Insight will use. He'll need a lot more than just a few square
meters of solar panels to survive and function. Last, but not least, he'll
demand a ride home. That's something Insight
isn't getting. That's the failure that leaves the crew of my Mars 1
expedition Stranded on Mars The more we learn about our sister
planets—their similarities and their differences—the better we
can understand our own. The rocky planets of the inner solar system were all
formed out of the same swirling debris cloud four billion years ago. Mercury
turned out small, Venus hot, and Mars cold. Earth turned out just right.
Earth has a strong magnetic field, the others don't. Earth
has plenty of oil and water, Mars has less.
Venus and Earth have volcanoes; Mars seems quiet. Why? The list goes on and
on. We have a lot to learn from our neighbors. |
|
May 2.
2018 If the drug doesn't kill you, the needle
might. Opioid overdoses alone killed more than sixty thousand Americans in
2016—the most recent year tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. That's more than auto accidents, suicides or murders. Users
surviving the overdose epidemic may die from dirty needles. Shared needles
are spreading Hepatitis, AIDS and other infectious diseases through the user
community. The New York Times reports a growing problem
of serious heart effects among those who inject illicit drugs. Germs
introduced into the blood stream along with the drugs spread disease
throughout the body. Massive levels of antibiotics combat the resulting
systemic infections. Survivors carry the scars of bacterial incursion. These
effects may include critical damage to the interior linings and the valves of
the heart. This lethal condition, called endocarditis, requires open-heart
surgery. Endocarditis is rare in the rest of the
community. The underlying infection may arise from invasive medical or dental
procedures, but also from tattoos or body piercings. Some 41% of endocarditis
patients survive treatment unless they are illicit drug users. Addicts return
to the needles that infected them in the first place. Many suffer a second
bout with the condition, and some have gone around a third time. Only 7% of
the drug user patients survive ten years after their first operation.
Frustrated surgeons performing these procedures are starting to demand their
patients undergo drug rehab as part of their therapy. |
|
April 25,
2018 It's raining planets. Five hundred years ago,
heretics were burned at the stake for suggesting stars might have planets. A
hundred years ago, most people believed there must be planets out there
somewhere. Thirty years ago, the first exo-planet was detected. After that,
astronomers found them by the dozen, and then by the hundred. Five years ago,
NASA launched Kepler and the sky's population exploded. Kepler stared at a
narrow sliver of the sky and found thousands. TESS, its successor, will scan
a larger area. Tens of thousands more exo-planets are expected. Like Kepler, TESS will search for planets blocking
some light from their suns. When
one crosses our line of sight, some of the starlight is obstructed. How much
depends on how big the planet is; how long depends on how it orbits its star.
From the size of the host, astronomers infer how big the planet is, how
heavy, how hot, and more. TESS will search for additional nearby exo-planets.
Nearby is a relative term. To an
astronomer, nearby is not somewhere
you could travel to. Proxima B, the closet known exo-planet, is 4.2
light-years away. That's a hundred thousand year trip for the fastest
man-made object yet. (My Dead Astronauts
novel describes the arrival of Proximeans who traveled at one hundred times
that fast. It was still a journey of a thousand years.) Visits to other nearby exo-planets will take a human lifetime at the speed of
light—when we figure out how to do that. Light moves that fast; people
don't. No one has seen an actual exo-planet yet. It is
hoped that the next generation of space telescope—or the one after
that—will accomplish that feat. TESS results will highlight some worth
trying for. What will TESS see? What would it see if it were
out there looking back at us? The mission will monitor the southern sky the
first year and then the northern sky the second. If it were orbiting some
exo-planet, it would watch our sun for a year. Mercury would dim the sun four
times and Venus once or twice during that period. Earth would cross once.
Mars would be fifty-fifty and the rest would be unlikely. They'd want to go
back for a second look to be confident about the inner planets of our solar
system. If they continued studying us, what more could they
see? After a while they'd notice our size varied by five percent between
sightings, and decide we had a large moon. Meticulous spectroscopy would see
a half percent or less effect indicating water in our atmosphere. (Oxygen,
nitrogen and carbon dioxide are invisible.) That would suggest that life
might be possible here. That would probably justify pointing their best space
telescope in our direction. They'd see a blotchy blue-green ball. They'd
interpret the blue as liquid water. They'd wonder what the green patches
were. |
|
April 18,
2018 Sarin: what's sarin? It's a lethal chemical
recently used against Syrian civilians. Sarin is just one of several
organophosphate compounds developed as war gases by German chemists in the
1930s. After World War II, stockpiles of German nerve agents GA through GF
were discovered. None had been used in combat. Following the War, the US implemented
a chemical arsenal around sarin (GB) and the USSR built one based on tabun
(GD). Both stockpiles have since been destroyed. There are a number of nerve agents known. They are
modern chemical warfare agents lethal in microscopic doses. All enter the
body through the lungs, or even through the skin. A couple of high profile
assassination attempts have delivered nerve poisons by contact. A nerve agent
spray broadcasts death over a wide area. Once inside the body, nerve agents
spread out and attack critical nerve junctions. Nerve cells pass messages
along long thin tendrils called axons. One nerve cell or neuron communicates
its message to the next by excreting a wisp of a chemical at their juncture.
Each link contains an enzyme that captures that chemical and turns the signal
off. Humans have billions of neurons controlling every function of our body.
Different functions employ different signal chemicals. The autonomous nervous
system that operates our heart, our lungs, and our gut signals with a
chemical called acetylcholine. Normally, the enzyme acetylcholinesterase
removes that chemical and switches the signal off. Nerve agents destroy that
enzyme and short-circuit the body's control systems. Death or disability is
quick and ugly. Sarin is cheap and easy to make and use. That's why
it's so dangerous. Simple recipes can be found in libraries and online. The
ingredients are all available over the counter cheap. Crude sprayers are all
that are needed to poison a target area. Primitive countries and even a few
small terrorist groups have developed and used sarin. |
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April 11,
2018 The sky is falling. On April 2, 2018, nearly ten tons of debris fell
out of orbit and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, was an orbiting
engineering test bed. Unmanned docking practice was
followed by two manned missions. The experiments validated Chinese docking
technology in preparation for more ambitious space missions. The old lab was
left in orbit pending a controlled crash into an unpopulated area. Communication with the ground was lost
before that could be completed. Tiangong-1 was left blundering uncontrolled
through the sky. Wisps of atmosphere
extend all the way to Tiangong-1's near-Earth orbit altitude. Even that
little bit of air exerts drag on satellites speeding through it. Tiangong-1
lugged its clunky shape—solar panels and all—through that thin
air at over fifteen thousand miles an hour, so the drag slowed Tiangong-1
down. As it did, Tiangong-1 lost altitude and dropped into thicker air. That
increased the drag, and the Chinese space station slowed even more. By April 2,
Tiangong-1 had dropped into air so thick it could no longer hold together.
The solar panels tore off and the main body plummeted. Searing heat and
impact shock shattered the falling body. Pieces scattered over the ocean. No
damage was reported on the ground and no effort to recover the pieces was
mounted. Tiangong-1 was just
the latest in a long line of heavy objects dropping out of the sky and
crashing to the ground. Mir and Skylab, obsolete satellites and expended
rocket stages have been falling since the start of the space age. The flock
of debris in space today will rain space junk down on Earth for millennia to
come. We're adding to that population every day. As space assets grow
heavier, their debris footprints will grow larger. Decommissioning things
like our International Space Station should be planned—not just left to
fa;; from the sky. |
|
April 4,
2018 It's great white shark pupping season along the
southern California coast. The mothers have been pregnant for a year. Now
they're headed for warm shallow waters to deliver their pups. Each mother
conceives dozens of embryos, but the young ate each other long ago. The
strongest in each of every mother's two uteruses survive. Mom is having
twins. The twins will be born hungry. The four- or
five-foot young will hunt the local fishery and grow, but first they'll have
to outswim Mom. She's hungry too, and anything is fair game—her young
or ours. Mom's favorite food is seal. Humans swim like sick
seals. If Mom thinks she's happened on an easy meal, she just might take a
bite. Yech! She'll probably spit
it out in disgust, but a single shark bite can be fatal. Be careful where you
swim. Don't feed the great whites. Dolphins look tasty too, and dolphins can't seek
shelter on shore. They find safety in numbers. Sharks fear dolphins hunting
in packs. Dolphins gang up to kill sharks that threaten them. The last time
we had a great white attack a human around San Diego County, the news carried
drone footage of a dolphin posse hunting the beast. Shark sightings along our
local beaches ended that day. Swim with the dolphins, not with the sharks. |
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March 28,
2018 The solar system was in a hit-and-run accident. A
rogue star system sideswiped the solar system and careened off at a quarter million miles per hour. The sun revolved around
the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at a half million miles an hour. She
dragged her solar system—a light-year wide disc of debris—along
with her. Seventy thousand years ago, a wandering binary star system grazed
the outer edge of that disc. Objects orbiting out there in the Oort Cloud
were deflected by the gravity of the passing stars. Some pieces were kicked
out of the solar system; others were nudged inward. Those became comets.
Those still emanate mostly from the region where the impact occurred. The rogue star system fled the scene. Today, that
system—the recently discovered Scholz's Star—is twenty light
years away. The effect of the collision on that distant rogue is unknown. It
may have picked up some of the ejecta from the Oort Cloud. It may have
injected some of its own orbiting bits and pieces into the orbiting cloud or
spewed them into interstellar space. Impacts like this one are probably regular
occurrences. Near misses of a light year or less are believed to happen about
once in a hundred thousand years. Half light year collisions occur every
million years or so—long times on the human time scale, but just a
blink of the eye on a geological time scale. Close encounters like these may
be the answers to some of the mysteries of the solar system—the odd
orbit of Pluto, for example. The sun is by no means unique. Similar crashes must
happen everywhere. Another may have occurred in the nearby Alpha Centura star
system. Proxima, the closest star to us today, is a dwarf star moving away
from two main stars of the system. It may be rebounding from hitting the
principle stars or it may be orbiting those two with a half million year period. Or both. We can't tell yet. The vacuum of interstellar space is full of
debris—large and small. There are rogue stars and rogue planets, but
most of them are too small to detect. The sky is filled with the wreckage of
thirteen billion years of collisions. At least one chunk is thought to pass
through the solar system every year. Recently, one passed close enough to the
earth and the sun to be detected and monitored. Oumaumau crossed the plane of
the solar system, bent in the sun's gravity, and sped on to its next
interstellar encounter. Collisions like that will continue. Space is a busy
place. |
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March 21,
2018 Spring break is a time to read for fun. Many
students run off to Florida or Cabo, but books can take them anywhere. They
can visit the moon or Mars. They can tour a national monument or a far off
land—all without a passport or shots. Books cost less than airplane
tickets. There are no long lines or flight cancelations. This spring, give a
book to a kid who has been kidnapped by his phone. Enjoy a book yourself
while you're at it. The perils of spring break are legendary. There are
drunk driving and hangovers, drugs and pregnancy
just to name a few. Vicarious perils are better. Follow the misadventures of
two couples whose spring break debauchery drifted into the Bermuda Triangle.
Read about their interrupted revelry in this excerpt from Fish
Story. Buy the complete book there direct from the publisher to see
the consequences. Autographed copies are available. |
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March 14,
2018 There's still plenty to do out beyond Pluto. The
New Horizons science probe accomplished its Pluto mission and continued
outbound. It got past that planet with propellant leftover and instruments
poised to explore where no man-made object has ever been. Opportunities to
explore abound out there and competition for New Horizons' remaining
resources heats up. The spacecraft flew a suite of instruments past the
former planet and turned Pluto from a fuzzy blob into an exotic place. The
probe discovered moons and mapped the planet. It found nitrogen ice plateaus,
methane mountains, and buried oceans of running water. New Horizons didn't
stop there. It flew on into deep space—fully capable of exploring a
planet all over again. What lay beyond? The Kuiper Belt—a ring of
relics from the formation of the solar system. The probe was steered toward a
large chunk it could reach. Things are few and far between out there. Even
New Horizons—the fastest man-made object ever—will take years to
get there. When it does, it will fly by grabbing data on the run—just
like it did at Pluto. It will send those few hours of pictures and
measurements back to Earth as it continues on. We'll learn as much about that
object as we did when the probe explored Pluto. That encounter won't exhaust New Horizons. There
will still be some science left in that old probe. This will be the last chance to reach
that far out into space for decades.
We shouldn't waste it. But what should we do with what's left?
Redirecting the probe toward a second Kuiper belt object is one option. Are
Kuiper Belt objects alike? Turning the probe's science packages into an
extreme deep-space telescope is another idea. Such an observatory would
operate where the sun truly does not shine. It could see things near-Earth
telescopes can't. Other proposals to exploit this once-in-a-lifetime asset
have been suggested. Choosing among them will be hard. |
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March 7,
2018 A swarm of debris orbits the Earth. The bits and
pieces are everywhere from BB-size to entire rocket bodies. Every piece flies
faster than a speeding bullet—twenty
times faster. Each packs a wallop up to fifty times its weight in TNT. Even the smallest scrap can inflict catastrophic
damage. A single paint fleck pitted the windshield of the space shuttle.
Ongoing collisions turn big ones into
little ones up there. The
little ones are still lethal/A Chinese antisatellite weapon test shattered one
old satellite into thousands of pieces. Near Earth orbit is jam-packed with
deadly discards. Hazardous scraps endanger space assets. There are
three to six astronauts aboard the International Space Station at any given
time. The orbiting population will increase as more space-faring nations
emerge, and the race to return to the moon heats up. Even the smallest impact
could kill space farers or their space ships. Satellite services are integral to modern society.
They're critical to navigation, communication, weather forecasting, and more.
A two-cent screw could kill a billion-dollar satellite leaving us lost, alone
and uninformed. How do we protect astronauts and satellites from
space pollution? Air Force radar tracks every orbiting object bigger than a
baseball. The Air Force alerts satellite operators to duck out of harm's way.
That's a good start, but it's not enough. The sky is full of invisible
killers smaller than baseballs. Many orbiters are shielded against unavoidable
impacts with the small stuff. Weight is an issue. Heavy armor is out. Layers
of thin sheets protect targets. Lightweight shields use the fury of the
impact against the impactor. The energy of the initial impact shatters a
projectile. Its pieces spread out before striking the next layer. The second
stage is thousands of smaller projectiles hitting at thousands of points on
the second sheet. Each of those shatters in turn and the process repeats
until the original projectile is ground to dust too small to penetrate any
further layers. Shields begin to look like something out of an old war movie,
but the satellites survive. |
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February
28, 2018 The last generation of human computers took us to the moon, to the planets and beyond. All
computers were humans until about sixty years ago. In those days, slide rules
gave answers good to a percent or two. When that wasn't good enough, pen and
paper was the only option. Notebooks were bound with sequenced pages.
Arithmetic was done in ink in them. Important results were signed and dated. An all-woman math team helped make Jet Propulsion
Laboratory the space science center it is today. A recent book—Rise of the Rocket Girls: the Women who
Propelled us from Missiles to the Moon and Mars, Nathalia Holt, (Little.
Brown & Co, 2016)—describes their role in the Lab's evolution. The Lab began in 1939 when California Institute of
Technology exiled the Suicide Squad's rocket propellant experiments to a
remote desert location. The Lab went to war along with the rest of the
country in 1942—their mission was to develop Jet Assisted Take Off to
lift overloaded bombers off short runways. Success in that project led to
engineering missiles after the war. But the team's interest was space.
America's first satellite Explorer 1 was theirs. Many more Earth satellites
followed. The math group's calculations designed missions to explore the moon
and the nearby planets. Their crowning achievements included the Grand Tour which explored the outer planets despite Washington's
objections, plus Mars orbiters and landers. Their legacy continues to this
day. Today when we whip out a calculator to calculate a
waiter's tip, it's hard to imagine that rockets were engineered and
pioneering space missions flown with pen and paper calculations. Calculators
and electronic computers came late. The first computing machines were moody,
cumbersome and slow. Human computers raced them and won for the first many
years. Electronic computers supported the Apollo flights—but only after
spot-checking against human-computed results. Human computers are extinct
now. The rocket girls' successors have turned their math aptitudes toward
programming electronic computers to continue our march into space. Pick up a
copy of the book and meet the women behind the space program. |
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February
21, 2018 Going to the moon is practice for going to
Mars. The planet Mars is cold
with a little atmosphere and high radiation from the solar wind. Our moon is
a lot like that. It's cold with no atmosphere. It's beyond Earth's magnetic
field so it's bathed in the sun's radiation too. The moon and Mars have a lot
in common. Robots go to Mars and itÕs moons. Humans go to
Earth and it's moon. A Chinese moon landing is expected soon. Japan and India
are reportedly planning one too. After a fifty-year hiatus, the USA is
talking about returning men to the moon. SpaceX has sold two tickets to a
tourist loop around the moonÉsomeday. NASA plans loops, orbits, and landings
within a decade. They are considering a space station orbiting the moon. That
would be the ideal laboratory to test people and equipment under prolonged
exposure to solar radiation and zero gravity. Lunar orbit is a great place to try things out
before sending them to Mars. It's easier and safer to get to. Mars rockets
are on the drawing board; moon rockets are nearing the launch pad. Aborting a
mission is different there. Earth is only three days away when something goes
wrong. Mars is at least eight months off. Stranded on Mars
describes a mission trapped a hundred million miles from help. Humans will follow their robots to Mars. SpaceX
looks forward to colonizing the planet. Their giant rockets are an important
step toward delivering people to the planet's surface. Like today's Mars robots,
tomorrow's Mars colonists will only get a one-way ticket to the red planet. A
round trip is a far greater engineering challenge. Another interplanetary
rocket will be required for the return trip. Most of it can be delivered and
parked in Mars orbit. It must be fully fueled. That's a lot of mass to fly
across the universe. Martian visitors will need an ascent vehicle to fly to
their orbiting ride home. That may—or may not—be the craft they
landed in. In any case, it will need a lot of propellants to reach orbit.
NASA hopes to manufacture some or all of those propellants on Mars to avoid
the cost of transporting and landing all that mass. Returning to the moon is just the next step in the
long journey to Mars. |
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February
14, 2018 Human casualties continue to mount in the war on
mosquitos. The mosquito remains the deadliest animal on Earth. The malaria it
spreads kills one pregnant woman or child every minute despite worldwide
efforts to control the epidemic. A half-dozen other tropical diseases rage on
as well. Last year's Zika outbreak left a trail of brain-damaged infants in
its path. The Zika threat has faded from the headlines, but not from the
hospitals. The battle against man's deadliest enemy goes on.
The latest tactic will release billions of diseased male mosquitos in a Miami
suburb. (The males don't bite.) The offspring of those males infected with
wolbachia bacteria die before reaching maturity. It is hoped that the net
effect of this will be a reduction in the local mosquito population. That
reduction will be temporary at best. The war against the mosquito has been going on
since 1901 when Walter Reed established the connection between the mosquito
and yellow fever. Improving sanitation and reducing mosquito breeding grounds
diminished yellow fever in the tropics. That improved the health of both US
Army occupiers and indigenous populations of tropical territories acquired in
the Spanish-American War. It
enabled the construction of the Panama Canal—which had been thwarted by
mosquito-borne disease up until that time. The success of such mosquito
control operations inspired new standards in public health. The war on mosquitos escalated. Insecticides were
heavily used and widely effective—maybe too much so. Concerns about
collateral effects on the environment led to the banning of DDT—an
affordable weapon against the deadly mosquito. The mosquito population came
roaring back. Modern "green" alternatives like bed-netting and
designer insecticides have proven ineffective and impractical. Testing of
high tech pipe dreams like infected or infertile males will continue while
humans keep on dying. |
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February
7, 2018 Carbon dioxide doesn't deserve the bad rap it's
gotten. The media has been branded CO2 a greenhouse gas, and
blamed it for warming our planet. In fact, CO2 is a feeble
greenhouse gas. Its effect is overwhelmed by that of
water—the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth's atmosphere. There's
a lot of water vapor in the air, and water is infrared active. Together those
two factors together regulate Earth's climate. The CO2 molecule is a rigid symmetric
rod. It behaves more like nitrogen than like its triatomic cousin water. It
freezes 140 F¡ lower than water does and has no liquid phase. Electrically,
the molecule is a rock. It has neither a charge nor a dipole moment, so it's
insoluble in water. Some CO2 gas can be forced into
water, but it bursts out as soon as the champagne is uncorked. CO2 gas is invisible.
Light—infrared and all the rest—is an electromagnetic wave. An
electrical change must accompany its absorption or emission. With no charge
and no dipole moment, the CO2 molecule has nothing to change, so
optical transitions are "forbidden." Only quantum mechanical corrections
give it any infrared spectrum at all. Its absorptions and emissions are faint
and occur in an infrared spectral region dominated by water vapor
absorptions. CO2 absorbs a trace of the infrared that water vapor
leaves behind. This is not the stuff of headline hype. If it were, Mars would
be balmy with 960,000 parts per million CO2. Forget "global warming" or "climate
change." The principle hazard from our CO2 emissions is not
to our atmosphere, but to our oceans. That's where most of the gas goes. A
little dissolved CO2 reacts with H2O to form carbonic
acid H2CO3 that acidifies everything from soft drinks
to the oceans. The falling pH is affecting sensitive ocean ecosystems. |
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January
31, 2018 The flu is serious—deadly serious. Every
year, the flu kills thousands—often many thousands. The 1918 flu season
was the worst so far. It became the deadliest pandemic of all time. An
estimated half billion people caught that disease; some one hundred million
died of it that year—that's one person in every twenty worldwide. Only
the twenty-five million deaths from the Black Plague of the Middle Ages even
came close to that level. This year and every year, the flu will infect
millions. Each body will fight back, and will usually win its battle against
the virus. Once that battle is won, the body becomes immune to further
infection by that virus. New viruses attack vulnerable victims with impunity.
As resistance spreads throughout the population, later viruses find fewer
opportunities to infect and the epidemic dies out. Viruses evolve fast, and a
new one soon appears to take the old one's place. In 1918, the bird flu on a Kansas chicken farm
adapted to human hosts with catastrophic consequences. The first 1918 flu
patient reported to sickbay in Fort Riley, Kansas. Within a week, a hundred
were hospitalized, then five hundred. The new flu started popping up all
around the country. Troops from Fort Riley joined the American Expeditionary
Force entering the First World War carrying this flu with them. Crowding and
unsanitary conditions at the front lines spread the disease. Soon
massive—but still classified—casualty levels showed up on both
sides. German and Austrian forces were especially hard hit. They had to
surrender. The flu ended the conflict.
Highly contagious: it spread beyond the war zone and spanned the
globe. It reached Asia and Australia within months. Hospitals were
overwhelmed. Wards overflowed. Bodies piled up. Mortuaries couldn't keep
pace. Terror spread. The normal flu culls the herd: killing the aged and
the infirmed. The 1918 flu did just the opposite. The effects were
devastating. This flu switched the body's immune system into overdrive. The
body attacked itself. The stronger the body's immune system, the greater the
damage. The healthiest people suffered the harshest attacks. Those often
proved fatal. The 1918 flu decimated the population of healthy
twenty-something adults. The losses from that generation would propagate
through history for decades to come. This year's flu is nasty, but, by no means, a
repeat of the 1918 one. It's sickening millions and killing thousands. Every
year, the Centers for Disease Control tries to
anticipate the latest flu virus and fields a vaccine to combat it. Each year,
the virus comes up with a few surprises, and this year is no different. The
flu shot is never 100% effective, but it's still important in protecting
against the flu. Everyone who can needs to get a flu
shot every year until a universal vaccine is developed. |
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January
24, 2018 Opioid overdoses kill more people under fifty than
anything else. They are the scourge of GenX and GenY. Overdose deaths are a
burden to society, but there's even more to it. There are junkies driving
cars under the influence—killing themselves and others. There are junkies suiciding over their misery. There are junkies
sharing needles picking up hepatitis, AIDS, and more. The walking wounded
left behind are zombies—not much different from dead. Addicts live in la la land. Their families live in hell. Living
with zombies can't be easy. The dread of discovering loved ones dying fills
family member's days. Anything the addict hasn't stolen to put up a vein goes
to treat the problem. A family's life savings, their car, and their house can
vanish in no time. Rehab is expensive and treatment breaks the bank. Finally
the community picks up the user's tab. Naloxone can reverse an opioid overdose if it is administered
in time. It's available to counter the accidental overdoses encountered by
first responders, by law enforcement and by morticians dealing with the drug
epidemic. Emergency medical personnel, police and drug sniffing dogs are
exposed to high levels of opioids in the line of duty. The residues on overdosed remains are
hazardous to handling their bodies. There's a fine line between getting high and overdose.
Antidote availability encourages careless attitudes among drug users. They'll
shoot up in emergency room parking lots for rapid rescue from casual
overdoses. A recent New York Times article about a family with
fentanyl-addicted adult children described a family meeting where the son
overdosed four times in six hours. Each time the family called emergency
responders who revived him. Hours later, he would do it again. Problem places like New Hampshire and West Virginia are stretched
to the breaking point by their opioid users. How long can they afford
to continue reviving junkies who overdose four times in six hours—at
$2000 a pop? |
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January
17, 2018 Dropped from one NASA plan after another, Pluto became
the only unexplored planet in our solar system. So the authorities demoted
it. It was no longer a planet at all—just some
mysterious object in the distant sky. Even the mighty Hubble telescope
could barely see it. The frigid world was a blotchy blur covered in ices of
materials that were gases or liquid everywhere else in the solar system. The
farthest place in the known universe was a place science just had to see.
Pluto exploration would complete NASA's survey of the solar system. A
dedicated mission was planned, then canceled, then revived, and then halved
again. New Horizons—the fastest manmade object ever—was built and
launched before Congress could have its way with the Pluto program one more
time. Twenty years of technology advances made New Horizons the most
sophisticated planetary probe of all time. The little orphan planet Pluto had a few surprises
in store for the visiting space probe. One high-speed flyby captured a flood
of information about Pluto. These data will be the basis of human understanding
for the foreseeable future. (No return visit appears on the agenda of any
space-faring nation today.) Preliminary analysis shows the orphan planet is a
unique place. Rock and ice make up the planet, but Pluto's most obvious
feature is a nitrogen ice glacier twice the size of Texas. The geography is
extreme. There are rifts bigger than the Grand Canyon and mountains as tall
as the Rockies. Coats of nitrogen ice sloughing off those mountains are
building the giant glacier. Much
of the planet is water ice hundreds of miles thick. It is thought to house
liquid water beneath it. Frozen ejecta from cryovolcanos spewing liquid water
dot the surface. Thousand-foot tall columns of methane ice are found there as
well. Analysis of the Pluto data continues. There may be more surprises in
store. In the meantime, New Horizons is flying on to
explore objects in the Kupier belt beyond. There, it will examine relics from
the time of the creation of the sun. Distant Pluto is no longer the farthest known planet.
Since New Horizons was launched, thousands more planets have been discovered
orbiting nearby stars—light-years not light-hours away. We've seen
stars wiggle as their exoplanets swing around them. We've seen stars dim as
their exoplanets blocked them. But we've yet to actually see an exoplanet.
All are far beyond the capability of the Hubble telescope. Someday, we may
get fuzzy images of a few of them. Like yesterday's fuzzy pictures of Pluto,
there will still be lots more to learn about those planets. They may all be
as unique and different as Pluto. |
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January
10, 2018 It's cold and snowing on Mars, too. The planet's poles are water ice. They're covered with drifts of dry ice snow in the winter. Carbon dioxide gas in the Martian atmosphere begins to freeze when the temperature drops below -110¡F. The flakes sublime when things warm up above -110¡F. (Subliming is different from melting. A solid sublimes directly to gas without ever being liquid.) Earth orbits in the Goldilocks zone where water comes in solid, liquid and gaseous forms. Water vapor in the atmosphere condenses and precipitates as either liquid or solid—rain or snow. Our poles are covered with solid water. Much of the area between the poles is covered with liquid water. Our planet isn't the only place with water in all three forms. The moons Enceladus and Europa are covered with layers of water ice. They host lakes and seas underneath all that ice. Cryovolcanos on those moons spew jets of water into space. Vapors and droplets freeze quickly. Some of the water crystals fall back to the surface as snow; some escape to form rings around their planets. There's snow and ice all across the solar system. Io, another moon, has active volcanoes that generate sulfur snow. On Pluto, methane snow falls on nitrogen ice. (Methane freezes at -300¡F and nitrogen at -346¡F.) The snow on the coldest moon Triton is flakes of nitrogen. There are even places on the moon and on Mercury where the sun never shines and water ice and snow is believed possible. We have discovered thousands more planets beyond our solar system. Some are Earth-like. Many are not. As we learn more about them and their moons, we expect to find winter there is just like winter at home. |
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January
3, 2018 Virtual reality is opening new
frontiers in medicine. Virtual reality immerses the user in a
computer-generated three-dimensional world. Viewed via specialized headsets,
fantasy worlds offer modern playgrounds. Real world images support teaching,
planning and operating. Every medical student can now have a
digital cadaver. There's no shortage of volunteers any more. The cadaver
comes down with the disease of the week, and changes genders at the drop of a
hat. Surgeries and dissections run smoothly. With UNDO and REBOOT options,
the patient ends up no worse for wear. The student repeats the process until
mastering it, and returns once more to prepare for exams. Medical school is only the beginning.
The digital body provides a test bed for planning challenging surgeries. It
provides a realistic map of possible routes to a patient's defect or
deformity. Surgical alternatives can be practiced and compared in virtual
reality—where no one dies—before being tested in real
reality—where patients do die. Virtual reality is in today's operating
rooms. Less invasive procedures shorten surgical recovery costs and times.
For those, laparoscopic surgeries use miniscule instruments at the ends of
long tubes going deep inside the body. The doctor has no direct visual image
of the process. Tiny lights and cameras among the laparoscope end instruments
provide real time images of the surgeon's working area. For the more
demanding applications, that data is presented as virtual reality.
Laparoscopic microsurgeries and biopsies done that way have a high success
rate. Advanced versions using the Da Vinci Robot—which isn't a robot at
all—employ the same kind of virtual reality interface between the
surgeon and the operation. The patient fares as well as the virtual reality
avatar. |
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December
27, 2017 How cold is it? People have been asking that
question since the beginning of time. The answers have varied from "it's
a three-dog night" to "it's ten below." We've discovered ways
to put numbers on just how cold it is. Simple materials expand when they get hotter and
contract when they get colder. Just how much gives us a convenient measure of
the temperature. Mercury is just one of many expanding liquids which have
been used in measuring temperature. We trap a drop of it in a bulb leaving
only a narrow channel for it to expand into. We read the mercury's rise there
to tell the temperature. Fine capillaries yield precise measures to assess
fevers; wider ones tell us whether we need a sweater today. Long before there was mercury, there was brandy.
The Galileo thermometer used a collection of balls of slightly different
densities. Those lighter than the brandy floated; those heavier sank. As
things heated up, the host liquid expanded. It became less dense. Fewer balls
could float. How many gave temperature a number. The results were imprecise,
and the Galileo thermometer is mainly decorative today. Solids, liquids and gases all expand and contract
with temperature. Their thermal responses support a range of temperature measurement
and control applications. Metals swell and shrink with
temperature—albeit differently. Binding two metal strips with differing
thermal responses together creates a strip that flexes with temperature. It
twists away from the side that expands more. Coiling such bimetallic strips
amplifies the effect. These are the mechanisms inside many mechanical
thermometers. Metals conduct electricity, so their position is easy to read.
They're the temperature sensors inside many classic thermostats—keeping
us warm inside no matter what the answer is to How cold is it outside? |
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December
20, 2017 The malaria super bug is here. The world's leading
killer of women and children evolves drug resistance faster than humans can
develop drugs against it. Malaria has been a scourge since the beginning of
time. A century of efforts to eliminate the germ have bred a malaria parasite
immune to a dozen malaria drugs. Efforts to eradicate its mosquito carrier
have produced insecticide-resistant bugs. A revolutionary new antimalarial drug, artemisinin,
was successful for a few decades. Artemisinin resistance has now appeared in
Asia and is spreading. Tropical Africa is bracing for the arrival of super
mosquitos carrying super malaria. The current one-a-minute death rate could double
until a new drug is found/ Evolution creates resistance—whether drug
resistance or insecticide resistance. The first dose kills off the little old
lady bugs. The next dose knocks off their wimpy sisters.
And so it goes. All get sick. The weak die. Only the strong survive. The
Hell's Angels bugs pass whatever advantage kept them alive on to their
descendants. Repeat that process a thousand times and a resistant strain is
created. Malaria parasites produce a new generation every couple of
days—mosquitos every few weeks. Malaria rebounds from any medical
threat within a few years. The process repeats with every new drug. When
every drug is defeated, the parasite is a super-bug. |
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December
13, 2017 We're headed for a cosmic collision. Astronomers
warn us that the Andromeda galaxy is headed straight for us at a
quarter-million miles an hour. Andromeda's leading edge will hit the outer
reaches of our Milky Way Galaxy in about two billion years. These galaxies—two
whirling dervishes—will buzz saw through one other and move on. Andromeda will zip across our galaxy for a few
billion more years after it arrives. There will be twice as many stars in the
night sky when that happens—that's about all. With only a few billion
stars each scattered across a hundred thousand light years, both galaxies are
mostly empty space. Their stars won't be crashing into each other. Near
misses—by a light year or two will be more common. Their gravity may
jostle a few stars and distort some constellations. Captive planetary systems
may be distorted or ripped asunder. Bits and pieces may be ejected into
interstellar space to wander as dark asteroids or rogue planets forever. When it's all over, the two galaxies will travel on
looking pretty much like they do today. By that time, our sun will have
burned out. Our descendants will have long-since become an interstellar
species or an extinct species. |
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December
6, 2017 The average American spends
more than forty hours a week watching television and trolling social media.
That's a full-time job without pay. Successful businessmen make time to read
instead. Arthur Blank, a Home Depot founder, allots two hours a day to
reading; billionaire Mark Cuban dedicates three hours a day to it. Successful
people read a lot. Warren Buffett reads five hundred pages a day. Bill Gates
reads a book a week. Mark Zuckerberg reads one every two weeks. If they have
time for books, we and our children do too. Children's reading
shouldn't be just for homework. Don't condemn your kids to another holiday of
season of soap operas and space invaders this year. Treat them to books they
will enjoy—not just schoolwork enhancers—real enjoyable books. If
they're lively, they may inspire a lifelong good habit.. The longest book starts
with the first page. Visit your local library. Fill your home with books. Ask
Santa for science fiction and adventure stories. Check my books out for a few
suggestions. Young adults interested in science, engineering, or medicine may
enjoy short essays like this one collected in What Color Are Little Green
Men? You and your kids can travel from the Bermuda Triangle to the
bottom of the sea or all the way to Mats in my novels. Send the kids
somewhere they've never been before—without ever leaving home. |
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November
29, 2017 A shard from the heavens zipped through our solar
system last month. This interstellar asteroid was as cold as deep space, so
it presented no heat signature. It was only detected by the sunlight it
reflected on its way out of our solar system. The object was detected in Hawaii. Tracking showed
it was not just another asteroid and the world pointed its telescopes in its direction.
The interstellar visitor was given a Hawaiian name Ouamuamua (pronounced like
it came from the Beach Boys silly song Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow
of fifty years ago.) The name means
"scout." It was a small dark solid—probably rock. It carried
no ice or other volatile substance that would have formed a comet-like tail
when passing close to the sun. It was a tumbling needle-shaped object some four football fields long. It was flying at sixty thousand
miles an hour—twice the speed of the fastest man-made object to date.
It must have flown millions of years getting here because there's nothing
close by in the direction it came from. Ouamuamua swerved in the sun's
gravity and flew off into eternal night before we could learn much more about
it. There must be countless others like Ouamuamua out
there. The universe has evolved through almost fourteen billion years of
violence. Interstellar clouds have collapsed into stars that burned bright
for a few billion years, then sputtered and died cataclysmic deaths. Leftovers
from star formation became orbiting discs of debris. Some of that debris
coalesced into solid bits and pieces; those merged into bigger
chunks—asteroids, comets, and even planets. Growth was violent. Hard
collisions shifted orbits and even kicked bodies right into interstellar
space. Crashing into passing stars or planets bumped more pieces off into
space. There's fourteen billion years of cosmic shrapnel out there somewhere. Space is filled with swarms of these interstellar vagabonds,
but they are among the most challenging objects to see. They are cold and
dark—almost as dark as black holes. We've detected a few rogue planets
floating free through space. Those are nearby and large enough to retain some
core heat. There must be many more of them we can't see. Smaller bits and
pieces—like our recent visitor—must be everywhere. |
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November
22, 2017 Earth just emailed extraterrestrials. Astronomers announced the discovery of an
"earth-like" planet a mere eleven light years away. That's the
distance light travels in eleven years—or the distance the fastest
man-made object could travel in a quarter million years É longer than humans
have been around. Look for a return email in twenty-five years or so. A
drop-in visit may take a while longer. There's been no direct observation of the new
planet or of any of the other earth-like exoplanets in the
neighborhood—only the oscillation of their host stars as they orbit.
Images are not possible yet—even for the closest one around Proxima B
where the aliens in my novel Dead Astronauts came from. The
newly discovered planet is a little bigger than earth, and just the right
temperature for liquid water. Whether it or any other of these planets host
liquid water or an atmosphere is unknown. There's always hope that earth-like
conditions have prevailed, and intelligent life has evolved. So why not
plunge ahead and email them? What could go wrong? PLENTY, according to
Stephen Hawking—probably the smartest human alive today. A group dedicated to Messaging Extra Terrestrial
Intelligence, METI, has gone ahead and beamed a message at the planet.
Communicating with humans on the opposite side of the globe is difficult.
Communicating with other intelligent earthlings—like dolphins or squid—has
yet to be accomplished. Communicating with aliens should be a real challenge.
What did the METI message contain? It is reported that they broadcast some
digital music and some basic math to demonstrate our culture and our
technology. METI's next message will contain a callback number and a due
date. No telling how the aliens are expected to decode
the METI messages if they receive them at all. Will they decide to respond?
Or will their own Stephen Hawking urge caution? Look forward to an empty email box. The METI signal
will have dispersed over a cosmic expanse by the time it arrives. Human
technology couldn't detect the METI message or the extraterrestrial answer
against the background of space noise. |
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November
15, 2017 The frontiers of medicine took a giant step
forward. Stem cells and gene therapy reversed a usually fatal genetic
disorder. A young boy's skin couldn't make one of the
proteins that glue the epidermis on. His skin would flake and fall off at the
slightest touch. He was hospitalized with only 20% of his skin attached. His
prognosis was grim. A skin graft was his only hope. His body rejected his
father's donation. He had no closer living relative—except himself. A graft of his own
defective skin would not help. If only the defect could be corrected.
Dermatologists took a patch of his remaining skin, and reversed its
development back to stem cells. They attached healthy copies of the boy's
defective gene to a virus and treated the stem cells with it. That gene would
function as a template for synthesis of the missing protein. The doctors then
reversed the stem cell process and induced the modified ones to mature into
skin tissue. The boy's body didn't reject those laboratory skin cells. Today, medical laboratories are growing skin for
burn victims. Using the same technology, they grew healthy skin for this
patient. At least 80% of his body was covered with his new skin. The
procedure was a success. Two years later, he is leading an unrestricted
life—playing soccer without worrying about his skin falling off. Pioneering efforts like these demonstrate the
potential of medical technologies under development in the laboratory today.
They will make their way into your doctor's repertoire in good time. |
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November
8, 2017 Thinking of traveling to Mars? Be sure to ask about
a round-trip ticket. Getting there is only the beginning. The trip home won't
be nearly as easy as getting there. You left Earth from a dedicated facility
custom-designed to launch you on your journey. It had plenty of electricity
and water. There were redundant backups and a thousand trained experts
standing by. Air was free there. You'll return from a primitive launch pad in the
middle of an alien desert. You'll be on your own with no facilities and no
backups. Your pilot will be the veteran of a thousand simulated launches of a
vehicle that has never been flown before. Air will be more precious than
gold. You'll be dead twenty minutes before Earth knows you're gone. The and back
leg of a Mars mission is an essential part of mission planning. Returning
astronauts will rendezvous with an Earth return vehicle preplaced in Mars
orbit. The bus home will have flown there on a minimum energy trajectory and
then sat unattended in the cold and the radiation of space for a year or two.
There will be no backup. The vehicle must wake up fully capable for the ride
home. That's step two. Step one will be equally unforgiving. Transport
from the planet's surface to orbit will require a major rocket launch. This
massive rocket will be built on Earth, flown to Mars, and landed with the
astronauts. Transporting something that big to Mars will be expensive. It is
hoped that the propellants for the return trip can be manufactured on site.
That would yield a dramatic cost savings. We need to learn more about Martian resources
before proceeding down that path. Mars has water—where and how much we
don't know. Solar-powered electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen has been
suggested. We'll need the oxygen. Hydrogen is hard to store. Hydrogen storage
tanks are huge, and hydrogen gas leaks through most seals. It may be best to
tie the hydrogen to something else—like nitrogen—for storage and
handling. (Hydrazine, a nitrogen/hydrogen compound is a common rocket fuel.)
We may gain hands-on experience turning moon water into propellants before
venturing beyond. Mars also has methane—again where and how much we
don't know. Methane is a much better fuel to store, but is useless without
oxygen. The Martian atmosphere is mainly carbon dioxide. There are catalysts
for solar-powered production of carbon monoxide and oxygen from carbon
dioxide. (Carbon monoxide burns okay.) Whatever approach works, the first
industry on Mars will be a chemical plant. |
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November
1, 2017 American addicts are funding a war on America.
Afghanistan is the principle source of heroin and opium—part of the
opioid epidemic sweeping the country. The New York Times reports the Taliban
is making billions off those drugs. In the beginning, the Taliban taxed the
opium poppy farmers in territory they controlled. Now it has expanded into
the business of refining and processing their crops for export. The equipment
required is simple and cheap. An illicit opium lab can be set up in a day.
Losses to drug raids are rare and affordable. The billions the Taliban earns
make for wealthy warlords and buy weapons to kill American troops and allies.
The demand for drugs funds a criminal empire far
beyond Afghanistan. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl and oxycodone require
more synthesizing opioids have created the current drug overdose epidemic.
The cartels of Central and South America have battled their local governments
for a generation. Addicts' dollars will fund criminal and paramilitary
operations worldwide until we do something about it. |
