How? Use it as a launching platform for paper airplanes.
Nope, I’m not kidding.
Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, a link to this report:
Researchers from the University of Tokyo have teamed up with members of the Japan Origami Airplane Association to develop a paper aircraft capable of surviving the flight from the International Space Station to the Earth’s surface.
The researchers are scheduled to begin testing the strength and heat resistance of an 8 centimeter (3.1 in) long prototype on January 17 in an ultra-high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus (Chiba prefecture). In the tests, the origami glider — which is shaped like the Space Shuttle and has been treated to withstand intense heat — will be subjected to wind speeds of Mach 7, or about 8,600 kilometers (5,300 miles) per hour.
First, a note – I tried checking sources on this, and pretty much everything points back to the Pink Tentacle report. This could all be a joke.
But even if it is, I think that it’s great.
There will undoubtedly be those who say that such activities are a waste of time, money, and scientific talent. Yeah, maybe they are. But you know, if we completely lose all sense of whimsy just because something is associated with “science”, then an essential element of creativity – play – will be missing. This is an excellent way to pique the interest of anyone who has ever thrown a paper airplane, to tie a very basic human toy to real science and technology.
As a public relations move, it’s brilliant. Even if it is just a joke.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Health, NPR, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Organ transplantation used to be purely the stuff of Science Fiction. Now it is fairly routine, though still problematic due to the need for powerful immunosuppressants in most cases in order to avoid rejection. And there is a constant need for donor organs, which has also led to a couple of other staples of Science Fiction: cloning and organ farms.
[Mild Spoiler in next paragraph.]
I use both cloning and organ farming as a plot element in Communion of Dreams, which is revealed with the discovery of Chu Ling’s real history. Scientists have been working on cloning replacement organs, and there have been fairly solid reports of real organ farming (harvested from executed prisoners) to come out of China (one of the reasons that I used China as Chu Ling’s home). But cloning organs hasn’t been solved yet, and even if you have vast sources of donor organs, transplantation is still problematic due to tissue rejection.
Thankfully, scientists tend to be more innovative than writers, and have sought other solutions to the problem of replacement organs. One case I heard about last night on NPR’s All Things Considered uses an actual solution containing an active ingredient in shampoo:
Researchers Grow a Beating Heart
A custom-built replacement organ sounds like science fiction, but researchers working in Minnesota have figured out a way to construct a beating rat heart in the lab.
***
Taylor and her colleagues knew that when nature builds a heart, the cells attach to a kind of scaffold, or frame, made of things like proteins. “It’s basically what’s underneath all of the cells, the tough part that the cells make to hold each other together,” she says.
The researchers decided to see if they could take a dead heart and remove all of its cells, leaving this scaffold behind. The scientists thought they could then use the scaffold to construct a new heart out of healthy cells.
How did they remove all the original cells? With soap:
He tried enzymes, but they dissolved the heart. Other chemicals made the heart swell and change shape. Then one day, Ott grabbed a chemical known as SDS. “It’s a regular component of shampoo,” he says. “It’s a soap.”
At first nothing seemed to happen. Then, patches on the heart began to turn white. The red part, the meaty part, was disappearing.
“You can see the detergent working and making the heart literally translucent so it turns into a jellyfish sort of appearance,” says Ott, who explains that it looks just like a jellyfish shaped like a heart, with all the organ’s intricate 3-D structures.
Read the whole thing, and there is video there as well showing the process. Simply fascinating.
This is the thing that I love about science – a willingness to try crazy ideas, to experiment, to learn and then apply that learning to new problems in ways which could not have been foreseen at the start. And it is the thing I envy about science, because had I proposed such a procedure/technique in my book, it would have been considered absurd and dismissed by most readers.
Bravo to the scientists and researchers.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Health, Hospice, NASA, Phil Plait, Science, Space, Titan
Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, has been at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austen most of this week, and has had a wonderful series of posts about the meeting. He just posted the final one this morning (though there will undoubtedly be follow-up posts once he is home as sorted things out). You can find the whole series on his blog.
* * * * * * *
Jacob sent me this note:
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/16012/1066/
Not exactly related to Communion aside from “tholins”, but I thought you’d be interested.
It is interesting to see that these complex organic molecules have been found in such abundance. The term tholin was coined by Carl Sagan in his early writings about Titan, and I discuss the material extensively in Communion of Dreams (if you haven’t read it -and if not, why not?).
~~~ Thanks, Jacob!
* * * * * * *
Speaking of notes, I got this nice one from Carl:
I just wanted to say that I’ve truly enjoyed your posts since you’ve joined UTI and your novel is top-notch. I’m not a big sci-fi fan, but your characters and description held me all the way through.
* * * * * * *
A brief update on my MIL’s condition: the visit from the hospice nurse on Thursday confirmed what we’d seen this week – continued deterioration. Her BP is very low, pulse weak, and heart rate very high (all worse than they were the previous week), and her lungs have diminished capacity and evidence of fluid. Once again we have tweaked her meds and treatment procedures, but this is mostly just an effort to keep her as comfortable as possible. I think part of the exhaustion my wife and I feel is just ongoing anticipation.
I’ll keep you posted.
* * * * * * *
Jim Downey
Filed under: A.P.O.D., Alzheimer's, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Hospice, Science, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space
I commented via email to a close friend yesterday about the persistent fever my MIL has been running, 2 to 2.5 degrees above her normal. We’d seen fevers come and go for the last several months, but this one seems to have settled in for a while. I got back this:
Any particular reason for it, or is she just being like a star that’s going into its final flameout?
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Like my friend, I grew up after the basic mechanisms of stellar evolution were pretty well understood. What I learned long ago, and seems to still hold basically true is this: stars in the main sequence will develop, go through an initial process of fusion converting hydrogen into helium, and then will evolve one of several ways depending upon initial mass. Small to medium-sized stars will make it into the helium fusion phase (primarily producing oxygen, nitrogen and carbon), before burning out and eventually becoming a white dwarf. Larger stars can go on to greatness, however, and in the sequence of their lives (including supernova) produce all the natural elements we know in a process known as nucleosynthesis. Either way, massive amounts of material are stripped away from the star and disseminated out into the universe through explosion, solar wind, and other similar mechanisms.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
What is oldest, lasts longest. That is the basic equation to understanding Alzheimer’s.
Generalizing: First, the person with Alzheimer’s will lose the ability to learn new skills. Then the most recent memories will slip, and each succeeding layer of memory acquired in their life will melt away. Metaphorically, they are being deconstructed – like some great skyscraper which is slowly dismantled from the top down, floor by floor. Compare this to other diseases and injuries, which are more like an implosion of consciousness, collapsing in on itself all at once.
Because of the way the disease progresses, layer after layer of experience and memory being peeled away, the patient regresses through life, becoming once again a child in many ways. This is likely the origin of the notion that the elderly experience a “second childhood” with dementia.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Looking back over the last three or four months, it has been a difficult time. I read the posts I’ve made here on the topic, and am frankly surprised that things have been as bad as they have been for as long as they have been. No wonder I am exhausted, even with the extra help we’re getting thanks to Hospice.
Yesterday was a bad day. Whether because of the fever, or just her deteriorating condition, my MIL was really in a state of constant confusion about everything starting first thing in the morning. Nothing was easy, and she needed near-constant reassurance and supervision. Then, shortly after I had gotten her up from her afternoon nap, she evidently had another TIA, and for a while only spoke gibberish – complete word salad. Needless to say, this was frightening for her, and she was almost combative in response. After an hour or so she rallied, but it was still a difficult evening until we got her to bed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
We are made of star stuff.
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
Ever since Sir Arthur Eddington sorted out the hydrogen fusion theory of star fuel, which led to the understanding of how the elements are created, there has been a growing awareness that we are, quite literally, the stuff of stars. All of the atoms in our bodies were likely forged in the fusion furnaces of stars now long gone.
And those atoms are shared around. Recycled. I remember seeing somewhere a fun calculation that all of us – each and every person alive – carries with them something like 200 atoms which were in the body of Jesus (or, say Nero, Hitler, et cetera…). Whether a person is eaten by a predator, or their body allowed to decompose in the ground, or burned on a pyre, their atoms just go back into circulation and eventually make their way into all of us.
And one day our own sun will change from a hydrogen-fusing star to a helium-fusing star, if only for a little while. It will likely swell up into being a red giant, and when it does it will consume Earth, or atomize it and blast it into space.
So yes, my friend, in a very literal way, my MIL is exactly like a star that’s going into its final flameout. And I find that oddly comforting. And beautiful.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Connections, DARPA, Expert systems, General Musings, James Burke, Music, Predictions, Science, Society, Survival, tech, Writing stuff, YouTube
I’ve mentioned previously the work of science historian James Burke. This past weekend I finished watching the last couple of episodes of his ground-breaking series Connections. Overall, you would probably enjoy watching the series, and will find a lot of chuckles over what was “high tech” in 1978 versus the reality of what we have today. But the closing bit was just stunning – it was a prediction of the need for and use of the Internet before DARPA had even begun to let the cat out of the bag. Here’s the last ten minutes:
In particular the bit that starts out at about 5:00 is the culmination of his entire thesis about change – that understanding how things change is the key to understanding everything. At about 6:45 is this remarkable passage (transcribed myself, since I couldn’t readily find it online – how’s that for irony?):
Scientific knowledge is hard to take, because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. And the reason why so many people may be thinking about throwing away those crutches is because thanks to science and technology, they have begun to know that they don’t know so much, and if they are to have more say in what happens in their lives, more freedom to develop their abilities to the full, they have to be helped towards that knowledge they know exists and that they don’t possess.
And by ‘helped towards that knowledge’, I don’t mean give everybody a computer and say “help yourself.” Where would you even start? No, I mean, trying to find ways to translate the knowledge, to teach us to ask the right questions. See, we’re on the edge of a revolution in communications technology that is going to make that more possible than ever before. Or, if that’s not done, to cause an explosion of knowledge that will leave those of us who don’t have access to it as powerless as if we were deaf, dumb, and blind.
Digital divide, anyone? Anyway, I find it just fascinating that Burke was so dead-on in his prediction of the Internet, even if he didn’t have the term for it, and yet even he failed to understand how phenomenally all-encompassing it would be. Whereas he thought that it would be impossible to just give people access to the information and say “go to it”, that is exactly what we’ve got – and self-organization of information and resources like Wikis make that information understandable, not just accessible.
When, as often happens, I feel somewhat pessimistic, that our greed or violent tendencies will outstrip our maturing as a culture/species, it is helpful to come across something like this. And I think that is why I read SF, and have written Communion of Dreams: because there, with all the ugliness and human folly, there is nonetheless room for hope. Look at what we’ve done in just the last thirty years – what more can we accomplish in the next forty, if we don’t destroy ourselves?
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Flu Wiki, Guns, Health, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Violence, Writing stuff
As I have mentioned previously, I enjoy shooting. And I carry a concealed weapon (legally – by permit and where allowed by law) pretty much all the time. This isn’t paranoia, just a simple recognition that we live in an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous world. That same mindset applies to preparations for any kind of small-scale disaster, whether natural or man-made. If you live in the Midwest, you understand that power outages occur due to weather (tornadoes in Spring, Summer, and Fall, ice-storms in Winter), and that you may need to be self-reliant for days or even a couple of weeks. I’ve long abided by the Scout motto of “Be Prepared”, and while you wouldn’t find a years worth of supplies and a generator cached here, we could manage pretty easily for a period of a couple of months. That’s not too far off what is recommended by both the government and independent health agencies. As I’ve discussed, the onset of a pandemic flu may well cause a disruption of normal economic activity for a prolonged period, and I cite such a disaster as the background for Communion of Dreams.
Anyway, in an accident during one shooting trip this fall I managed to slice open my right thumb pretty well. I had ridden out to the family farm where I usually shoot with one of my buddies, so didn’t have my car, which contains a fairly complete first-aid kit. And, as it turned out, my buddy didn’t have any kind of first aid supplies in his car. We improvised a bandage from stuff in my gun cleaning kit, and things were OK. When I got home, I added a real first aid kit to my ‘range bag’, and didn’t think much more about it.
Then, a couple of weeks later I was back out at the farm with my BIL. We were walking the border of the property adjacent to a state park and marking it as private, since a lot of people don’t bother to keep track of where they are and we’ve had a lot of tresspassing. At one point down in a secluded valley my BIL and I paused for a breather, and just out of curiosity I checked to see if I had a signal for my cell phone. Nope. Hmm.
Now, it was nice weather, just a tad cool and damp when we set out. But it was November, and the leaves were slick in places where a fall could easily result in a twisted knee or a broken bone. I got to thinking – if I were on my own, what did I have with me that I could use in the event of an emergency? Oh, I had plenty of stuff in my car – but that was the better part of a mile away. What did I have on my person?
In truth, I was in better shape than most people would likely be in such a situation. I always have a Leatherman multi-tool on my belt, a small LED flashlight on my keychain, and a pistol and ammo. But still, since I don’t smoke I’m not in the habit of carrying matches or a lighter, I once again didn’t have any first-aid items, et cetera. I had stuck a small bottle of water in my jacket pocket, but that would hardly last long. I could probably cobble together some kind of splint or impromptu crutch, but it would be a challenge to get out of such a situation on my own.
When I got home I got to doing a bit of research about emergency survival kits. Google that, and you’ll come up with about 30,000 hits to sites offering everything from bomb shelters to equipment for first responders. Not particularly helpful. I decided to take a different tack, and started to think about what I wanted to have in a kit small enough that I would *always* have it with me. I set my goal for constructing a kit which would fit into an Altoids tin, since that is small enough to easily slip into any pocket.
This problem has been tackled by others, and there are actually some such small kits for sale that’ll run you upwards of $50. I looked over the commercially available kits, saw what others have done to solve the problems inherent in such a project, and came up with the following:
What you see there is:
- Surgical Mask (can also be used as a bandage)
- Fresnell lens for magnification or starting fires
- 20mm bubble compass
- Single-edged razor blade
- Suture pack (curved needle mounted with suture thread)
- Band-aids & steri-strips
- Antibiotic packet
- Emergency whistle
- Superglue (repairs, fabrication, wound sealant)
- Mini-lighter
- Cotton tinder tabs
- Water purification tablets (can also be used as antiseptic)
- 30′ of Spiderwire (15 lbs test)
- Safety pins
- Small ziplock bag for water
- Cash
- Painkillers
- Benadryl (anti-histamine, sedative)
- Anti-diarrheal tablets
Yes, it all fits in the Altoids tin. Just. It is not entirely satisfactory, as I would have liked to have a large piece (say 18″x24″) of heavy-duty aluminum foil, a couple of garbage bags, some lightweight steel wire, maybe some duct tape or heavier cord. But it is a pretty good start – any small kit like this is by necessity an exercise in trade-offs. (Edited to add 06/01/08: I wrapped about 15′ of 24ga steel wire around the mini-lighter in a single layer, tightly wrapped. Takes up almost no additional room, and will be easy to unwrap for use.)
In searching out the items I wanted (difficult to find items linked to my sources), it became clear that in some cases I would spend more on shipping for some of the components than I would for the actual items. So I made one such kit for myself, and another half dozen to give to friends. That got the cost down to under $10 each (not including the cash, obviously).
Your best survival tool in any situation is your brain. But it doesn’t hurt to have a few advantages in the form of useful items close at hand. With this small kit, and what I usually have with me anyway, I am reasonably well prepared to deal with most situations that I can envision. And I thought that since I went to the trouble to construct it, I would put the information about it here for anyone else who might have some use for it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Carl Zimmer, Cassini, Health, Hospice, Mark Twain, Predictions, PZ Myers, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, The Loom, Titan, Writing stuff
*This post previously ran at UTI last year. And while some of the personal details mentioned in it have changed – I did indeed keep that promise to tweak my manuscript, obviously, and things have continued to progress with my MIL – the sentiment is the same.
Jim D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This has been a hell of a day. Not as bad as some, perhaps, but as far as routine days go, not the sort you want to pop up often in the queue. It started with my mother-in-law being ill. Now, most adults know how a young child (either their own or one they’ve babysat) can be when sick. Think intestinal bug. Think explosive diarrhea, of the toxic/caustic variety. Poor kid doesn’t understand what’s going on, or how to best cope with their misbehaving body (if they are capable of that on their own yet). Then picture that not in a toddler, but in a 95-pound woman well into dementia before the effects of dehydration and fever kick in. Took my wife and I two full hours to get her and the bedroom cleaned up.
And then I was on deadline to write my final column for my newspaper. Yeah, my *final* column. My decision, and if I want to go back the paper will be glad to have me. But because of the demands of care-giving, I could not adequately keep up with the art scene in my community (what I wrote about – weird to see that in the past tense). And I was feeling a little burned out with it as well. But still, closing off that particular chapter of my life was somewhat poignant.
So it’s been a day. Which is all just prelude to explaining that one of the refuges I seek after such a day is one of my “regulars”. Typically, it’s Twain, likely his Roughing It, which I have long considered some of his best and funniest work. But tonight, I turn to another old friend I never met: Carl Sagan, particularly his book Pale Blue Dot.
I’ve said before that I’m not a scientist. Which is perhaps why I don’t have some of the same quibbles that many scientists have with Sagan. But I really respect someone who can take scientific research and knowledge and present it in a form an intelligent layperson can understand. Stephen Jay Gould could do that for me. PZ Myers does it for me. So does Carl Zimmer. I could name others, but these are people I respect. In that same way, I really respected Carl Sagan, who I knew more as an author than as the host of of the PBS series, most of which I missed in its initial broadcast. Sagan helped introduce me to whole areas of science I had never considered before, and his considerable human decency in his atheism helped me understand that my own misgivings about religion were not an indication that I was lacking in morals or ethics.
So it was that when I started to write my first novel, Communion of Dreams (unpublished – yeah, yeah, I know I need to finish tweaking the mss and send it out again), I set most of the action on Saturn’s moon Titan, as a tribute to Sagan. Sagan had formulated a theory as to the nature of Titan’s atmosphere (that it contained a complex hydrocarbon he called “tholin”) which accounted for the rusty-orange coloration of the moon. His theories were pretty well borne out by the Huygens probe, by the way, though he didn’t live long enough to know this.
So tonight, on the tenth anniversary of his death, on a day when I’ve been through my own trials, I will nonetheless raise a glass, and drink a wee dram of good scotch to the memory of Carl Sagan. And I’ll promise myself, and his memory, that I’ll get that manuscript tweaked and published, if for no other reason than to honor him.
Here’s to Carl: Sorry you had to leave so soon.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bad Astronomy, Jupiter, Man Conquers Space, movies, Paleo-Future, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech, Writing stuff
It is said that it was a single photograph taken by one of Columbia’s crew during Christmas 1961 that changed the course of history. Showing the Earth from the perspective of the Moon changed the mind of the commander of Eagle One from claiming the Moon in the name of the United States (as required by his military commanders) to claiming the Moon for all mankind. After Eagle One’s touchdown in July 1963, followed closely by Eagles Two and Three, the Moon becomes a new and vigorous outpost of humanity. Successive missions range far and wide over Earth’s satellite, discovering sites that in the decades to come would become bases, sources for mining resources, and even a large colony.
Celebrating the early history of space exploration and eventual exploitation, leading up to the recent landings of three manned missions on Mars is a fantastic new documentary: Man Conquers Space.
Wait a second . . . say what?
Via Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy comes news of the Paleo-Future project, an excellent alternative-history of the middle and end of the 20th century. From the website for the project:
This film is based on an alternative timeline to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo era of reality – it is based on the premise that all that had been proposed in the early 1950’s in Collier’s actually came to pass – and sooner than they expected.
Through the expert use of special visual effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI), the world of wonder and imagination expressed though Collier’s has become real. The film Man Conquers Space looks like a documentary made today, and is peppered with archival footage from the dawn of the space age during WWII, through to today, narrated by the people who were there – the engineers, the astronauts, the scientists, the visionaries, the politicians.
Wow. This sort of alternative history is what I have done as the background for Communion of Dreams, leading to a more robust space-faring tech by our own time, and setting the stage for the colonization of other planets in our system by the time of the novel 50 years hence. Fascinating.
I’m very much looking forward to the release of this movie. But in the meantime, poke around their site and check out some of the clips they have posted online.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 