Missing Mary Road

Instead of sending people to the Moon, the US space program is sending robots to the Asteroid Belt. When these robots discover metals in the Belt, how will it affect the economy of Earth?

Discovery’s Robert Lamb reports on a lecture given by Vatican astronomer Guy J. Consolmagno, which was in part about the ethics of asteroid mining. Lamb writes:

Can you put a price tag on an asteroid? Sure you can. We know of roughly 750 S-class asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer. Many of these pass as near to the Earth as our own moon ? close enough to reach via spacecraft. As a typical asteroid is 10 percent metal, Brother Consolmango estimates that such an asteroid would contain 1 billion metric tons of iron. That’s as much as we mine out of the globe every year, a supply worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Subtract the tens of billions it would cost to exploit such a rock, and you still have a serious profit on your hands.

But is this ethical? Brother Consolmango asked us to ponder whether such an asteroid harvest would drastically disrupt the economies of resource-exporting nations. What would happen to most of Africa? What would it do to the cost of iron ore? And what about refining and manufacturing? If we spend the money to harvest iron in space, why not outsource the other related processes as well? Imagine a future in which solar-powered robots toil in lunar or orbital factories.

“On the one hand, it’s great,” Brother Consolmango said. “You’ve now taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”

The question is interesting. A number of authors, including Ken MacLeod and Paul McAuley, have suggested that Earth’s future economy may become rigidly environmentalist to preserve the planet’s habitability. Development planetside will grind to a halt, but old-fashioned dirty industry will thrive in space. So you could wind up with two human economies: A controlled, stable-state one on Earth, and a crazily free market one offworld.

The mystery relates to Saturn’s tiny ice moon Enceladus. Until relatively recently, very little had been known about Enceladus, however scientists expected it to be a cold and dead place given its physical characteristics.

We knew from the prior Voyager missions that Enceladus might have a complex geology, but most people thought that was in the past. Yet it turns out this 500km-across ball of ice is one of the most active moons or planets in the solar system.

‘The pent-up heat – enough to melt the interior, and possibly sustain a liquid water ocean under the ice – would be released as one catastrophic event around every billion years or so. Cassini just happened to fly into it,’ O’Neill said.
‘Eventually you reach a critical point, and the whole thing just blows,’ he said.

The ice sheets would flow like glaciers, the heat causing geysers to pop up all over the active surface, he added.

so apparently, the norwegians are in for a world of hurt, literally. at least according to the Pakistan Daily (which I had never heard of about until today). and which also conveniently leaves out any sources at ALL.

Russian scientists are reporting to Prime Minister Putin today that the high-energy beam fired into the upper heavens from the United States High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) radar facility in Ramfjordmoen, Norway this past month has resulted in a “catastrophic puncturing” of our Plant’s thermosphere thus allowing into the troposphere an “unimpeded thermal inversion” of the exosphere, which is the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

To the West’s firing of this ‘quantum’ high-energy beam we had previously reported on in our December 10, 2009 report titled “Attack On Gods ‘Heaven’ Lights Up Norwegian Sky”.

To how catastrophic for our Planet this massive thermal inversion has been Anthony Nunan, an assistant general manager for risk management at Mitsubishi Corporation in Tokyo, is reporting today that the entire Northern Hemisphere is in winter chaos, with the greatest danger from this unprecedented Global event being the destruction of billions of dollars worth of crops in a World already nearing the end of its ability to feed its self.

The songs blue whales use to communicate and attract mates have been dropping in pitch worldwide for decades, and researchers think it might actually be a sign that an endangered population is recovering.

No one is completely sure what whale songs are used for – theories include mating calls, other forms of communication, and possibly a form of sonar. A group of researchers recently examined whale songs from several decades and from all the world’s oceans. They found that the frequency, or pitch, of blue whale song has been steadily dropping for many years. Recently recorded whale songs are the lowest, while whale songs from the 1960s were higher in pitch.

The researchers don’t know what’s causing the change, but they have a theory based on a correlation with blue whale populations. When the songs were at their highest pitch, blue whales had been hunted to the brink of extinction. Since the International Whaling Commission banned blue whale hunting in the 60s, the worldwide blue whale population has been slowly but steadily increasing (though it’s still a tiny fraction of what it once was). That seems to coincide with the pitch change.

It could be that whales used a higher frequency song when there were fewer whales because those songs traveled farther, hundreds of miles or more. With a sparse population, you’d need a long-distance call to find more mates or family members. With populations rebounding somewhat, the whales are able to use lower frequency songs with more success, since there’s a greater chance another blue whale is nearby.

You may be wondering why higher frequency songs would travel farther, since generally low-frequency sounds are thought to be better for long-distance propagation. I asked the researchers about this, and scientist Mark McDonald explained that whales can sing louder at higher frequencies:

Across the frequencies of blue whale song, the underwater transmission losses are nearly the same regardless of frequency. It is absorption which is the primary cause of frequency dependent transmission losses, rather than dispersion in this case, and the absorption loss only begins to become significant when ranges reach thousands of kilometers. Theory tells us the whales can produce higher amplitude songs at higher frequencies, based on given lung volume.

I was also curious if this was an example of evolution in action, with subsequent generations of whales exhibiting a change in pitch due to natural selection, or if it was a behavioral change, with blue whales choosing to use a lower pitch song. He replied:

We presume it is a behavioral change, but we don’t really know why the whales are changing their song frequency. We don’t find our own best hypothesis entirely convincing.

Which is a pretty excellent example of science in progress. If only we could figure out what blue whales were singing about, so we could just ask them.

remember the old useless fact about cats urine glowing in the dark under black lights? well it’s not the only pee that does so.

Imagine if a cold cup of coffee spontaneously heated up as you watched. Or a cracked pane of glass suddenly un-broke. According to physicist Lorenzo Maccone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you see things like this all the time – you just don’t remember.

In a paper published last week in Physical Review Letters, he attempts to provide a solution to what has been called the mystery of “the arrow-of-time”.
Briefly, the problem is that while our laws of physics are all symmetrical or “time-reversal invariant” – they apply equally well if time runs forwards or backwards – most of the everyday phenomena we observe, like the cooling of hot coffee, are not.

They never seem to happen in reverse.

We have a statistical law that describes these everyday phenomena called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law tells us that the “entropy” or degree of disorder of a closed system never decreases. Roughly speaking, a process in which entropy increases is one where the system becomes increasingly disordered. Windows break, thereby increasing disorder, but they will not spontaneously unbreak. Gases will disperse but not spontaneously compress.

However, entropy describes what happens with large numbers of particles. We presume that it must arise from what happens with individual particles, but all the laws that govern the behaviour of individual particles are time-reversal invariant. This means that any process they allow in one direction of time, they also allow in the other.

So why will your coffee spontaneously cool down, but not heat up?
Maccone’s solution is to suggest that in fact entropy-decreasing events occur all the time – so there is no asymmetry and no associated mystery about the arrow of time.

He argues that quantum mechanics dictates that if anyone does observe an entropy-decreasing event, their memories of the event “will have been erased by necessity”.

so we’re back with the bees and CCD. about two years ago the story about the bees was everywhere. now we’re back with updates on what’s going on with it and how we may potentially save them and how CCD won’t make the whole world go nutty overnight.

The first alarms about the sudden widespread disappearance of honeybees came in late 2006, and the phenomenon soon had a name: colony collapse disorder. In the two years that followed, about one-third of bee colonies vanished, while researchers toiled to figure out what was causing the collapse. A study published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surmises that there may not be a single pathogen involved but a collection of culprits. What have entomologists and beekeepers learned in the last few years of dealing with the crisis?

apparently they’ve also been preparing for an overnight collapse and making research into replacing the honeybee. pretty impressive.

So how many bits are in this instance of H1N1? The raw number of bits, by my count, is 26,022; the actual number of coding bits approximately 25,054 — I say approximately because the virus does the equivalent of self-modifying code to create two proteins out of a single gene in some places (pretty interesting stuff actually), so it’s hard to say what counts as code and what counts as incidental non-executing NOP sleds that are required for self-modifying code.

So it takes about 25 kilobits — 3.2 kbytes — of data to code for a virus that has a non-trivial chance of killing a human. This is more efficient than a computer virus, such as MyDoom, which rings in at around 22 kbytes.

It’s humbling that I could be killed by 3.2 kbytes of genetic data. Then again, with 850 Mbytes of data in my genome, there’s bound to be an exploit or two

so it seems like the ants really do have a plan. check this out. along with the lord of the ants.

We may not all have pointy ears and sharp teeth, but Spanish scientists are convinced that inside every human lurks the best bat-power: echolocation, or navigating by sound. And they’re determined to show us all how to unlock it!

Juan Antonio Martínez and a team of researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares taught a group of volunteers (and themselves) to make palate clicks similar to those used by dolphins — although at a much slower rate. The series of protocols they developed then called for subjects to learn to aim their own sounds, and then to recognize their echos to identify objects around them.

The scientists promise, though, that you don’t need to be blind (like famous echolocaters Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood) to awaken your latent echolocation skills. Martínez tells SINC:

Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and ithin another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement.

In fact, the scientists who taught themselves echolocation can now detect far more than just the terrain ahead of them: they can identify bones and even objects hidden in a bag.
They hope that their techniques can be put to use in the future by firefighters, rescue workers, people lost in fog or those lost in bat-filled caves in West Virginia.

Ant colonies are often part of bigger “mega colonies” that share genetic traits and will not make war on each other. One colony got so big it now rivals the human population in its reach, covering most of the planet.

According to BBC News:

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the “Californian large”, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles . . . “The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society,” the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

The real question is, do the ants have a plan?

the science fiction genre in books and film have long written and shown about the possibilities of time travel and the scenarios that may or may not come with them.  they have nonsensical theories about how you could go murder your parents and be your own grandparents (i’m looking at you heinlein), or you could alter photographs and erase memories a la back to the future, or go see what your future holds in store for you, then go back in time and alter it to favour yourself and then get stuck in infinite time loops and paradoxes.

or not.

discover magazine gets into the nitty gritty of the actual facts behind it all and gets into what actually would be possible if and when we were able to travel back and forth in time. i’ll highlight a couple of points below, click on through to the article to read the rest of the descriptions.

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

1. Traveling into the future is easy.

We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.

2. Traveling into the past is hard — but maybe not impossible.

3. Traveling through time is like traveling through space.

4. Things that travel together, age together.

5. Black holes are not time machines.

6. If something happened, it happened.

7. There is no meta-time.

8. You can’t travel back to before the time machine was built.

9. Unless you go to a parallel universe.

10. And even then, your old universe is still there.

so how long would it take for all the sea water to move around once the ice caps and glaciers melt after all the global warming and what would happen to it.

well here’s your answer!

Twenty inches per decade — that’s the estimate of how rapidly the oceans rose in the last interglacial period about 121,000 years ago, in research appearing in Nature. That’s eight feet over 50 years, in a world just 2°C warmer than we are today.

Not good.

But one little detail bugs me: while we can make educated guesses as to what triggered the sea level increase (glacial melts, presumably), there’s no way of knowing from the fossil evidence when that trigger happened. That is, how long between the prehistoric Antarctic ice sheet collapse (for example) and the resulting surge of ocean water actually making it to the rest of the world?

It turns out that, due to some major currents and the sheer mass of the ocean, dumping megatons of ice (or rock, or whatever) into one part of the sea doesn’t make the whole world’s sea level pop up immediately. It will, eventually, but it takes time, potentially decades — or even centuries.

Imagine that on learning of an impending disaster – perhaps a catastrophic asteroid strike on its planet – the machine resets its memory. Now, an observer sat next to the machine can verify that the “same machine” will still face disaster after the reset. But from the perspective of the machine’s reset memory, the state of the universe in the many-worlds scenario becomes “undetermined”. After all, for all the machine knows, the reset probably occurred for a mundane reason, such as a crash of its operating system.

The next part defies our natural instincts: according to the many-worlds interpretation, all of these undetermined possibilities actually exist and open up to the machine. Even though it followed one particular history up to its resetting, it can be dealt a new card, says Mitra.

Kevin Warwick’s new robot behaves like a child. “Sometimes it does what you want it to, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he says. And while it may seem strange for a professor of cybernetics to be concerning himself with such an unreliable machine, Warwick’s creation has something that even today’s most sophisticated robots lack: a living brain.

Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.