All posts by Edward Willett

I'm a freelance writer in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. I've written more than 30 books (I've lost count) on a variety of topics. My nonfiction titles include books on computers, diseases, genetics, and the Iran-Iraq War, some for children and some for adults. I've also written several biographies for children, on individuals as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien, Orson Scott Card, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a kid (thanks, Andre Norton, Madeleine L'Engle and Robert A. Heinlein!) and have also written young adult fantasy and science fiction. More recently I've turned to adult science fiction. My first adult SF novel, Lost in Translation, was published by Five Star in hardcover in 2005 and reprinted in paperback by DAW Books in 2006. My new SF novel for DAW, Marseguro, will be out in February, 2008. I write a weekly newspaper science column, I love good wine and good food, I'm married and have a daughter, and I'm a professional actor and singer when the opportunity presents itself, and act and sing just for fun when I can't find anyone to pay me for it. My website is at www.edwardwillett.com, and my blog is at edwardwillett.blogspot. com. And that is probably more about me than anyone could possibly want to know...
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Two miles high, one mile wide, and housing a million people

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Cover of The World Inside In Robert Silverberg’s 1971 novel The World Inside (a book I remember fondly for having contributed a great deal to my early sex education), the bulk of the 75 billion people on a future Earth live inside Urban Monads, or Urbmons, each of which is three kilometres tall and houses 800,000 people. (Via io9.)

Architect Eugene Tsui has a proposal on his website for something similar: the two-mile high “Ultima” Tower, intended to be home to a million people:

There are 120 levels to the structure with great heights at each level. The scale of this stucture is such that the entire central district of Beijing could fit into its base. One must not think in terms of floors but, instead, imagine entire landscaped neighborhood districts with “skies” that are 30 to 50 meters high. Lakes, streams, rivers, hills and ravines comprise the soil landscape on which residential, office, commercial, retail and entertainment buildings can be built…the structure itself acts like a living organism with its wind and atmospheric energy conversion systems, photovoltaic exterior sheathing, and opening/closing cowl-vent windows that allow natural air into the interior without mechanical intervention….ecological efficiency is a rule and all areas of the structure feature resource conserving technolgy such as recycled building materials, compost toilets, nature-based water cleansing systems for all buildings, plentiful amounts of forrest, plant life and water-based ecosystems.

Even the setting would be beautiful:

The tower is surrounded on all sides by a lake. Sandy beaches, stone cliffs, water inlets, grass, trees and rocky islands create a beautiful and majestic setting…

Could such a thing ever be built? Well, Tsui’s concept dates back to 1991, and nobody’s breaking ground for it yet, or for similar projects like Tokyo’s SkyCity. (The projected $150 billion price tag might have something to do with that.) But the problems of urban sprawl and overpopulation aren’t going away, and structures like this could be part of the solution.

And to me, at least, it actually sounds like a pretty cool place to live…unlike Silverberg’s rather nightmarish (plentiful–mandatory, in fact–sex notwithstanding) Urbmons.

(Image: Amazon.)

[tags]cities, urban sprawl, overpopulation, architecture, skyscrapers[/tags]

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New microscope has resolution less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom

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Nanobridge of atoms where two gold crystals meet The world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Dubbed TEAM 0.5 (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) it can produce images with a resolution of a half-angstrom: half of a ten-billionth of a meter, or less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. (Via EurekAlert.)

That test image above shows the arrangement of atoms formed where two gold crystals meet.

Advances in electronics and computer technology make the new microscope possible, enabling it to counteract spherical aberration (the aberration that, in an out-of-focus image, makes points of light look like disks), which also enables it to maintain its high resolution with a lower-energy beam of electrons, less likely to alter the subject. TEAM 1, due to be up and running next year, will also be able to counteract chromatic aberration, cased by different wavelengths of electrons being refracted at different angles by the microscope’s magnetic lenses.

The microscope can literally focus atom by atom in a sample, and with a new stage to be installed in TEAM 1, scientists will be able to maneuver samples with such fine control that they’ll be able to create a 3D image of the atomic structure. As the project leader puts it:

“This brings us within reach of meeting the great challenge posed by the famous physicist Richard Feynman in 1959: the ability to analyze any chemical substance simply by looking to see where the atoms are.”

TEAM 0.5 and its components are now undergoing testing and tuning, and the microscope should be available to outside users starting this fall.

Oh, and TEAM 0.5 was the focus of my newspaper science column this week.

(Image courtesy of DOE’s National Center for Electron Microscopy.)

[tags]technology,microscopes[/tags]

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A stage version of The Time Machine

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As the resident person-of-theatre here among the Futurismic bloggers, it behooves me to draw to your attention the first-ever stage version of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which opened at the Women’s Club of Hollywood today for the first of 13 performances. (Via SF Signal.)

The novel has previously been adapted into two films, at least one television movie, and a number of comic books. It seems to be a real labor of love for Julian Bane, who is the producer, the lead actor, and the person who built the title prop and the sets. He also had a hand in the script with writer/director Phil Abatecola.

From Bane’s bio, elements of which will resonate with certain of us:

Born in Curitiba, Brazil in 1967, Julian Bane arrived in the United States at the age of 11. His love for the arts started at an early age: first with comics and drawing superheroes for his school paper to shooting Star Wars action figures and Styrofoam planets with a Super 8 camera, all the while building miniature sets and props. As a young man, Bane admired, leading characters in shows such as DOCTOR WHO and Star Trek. These characters later influenced Bane to become an actor.

“Their impact on my young mind was strong,” says Bane. “The DOCTOR and Captain Kirk were some of the best characters ever created.”

I’d love to know if it’s any good, so if a Futurismic reader happens to take it in…

(I’d also love to know why Bane put DOCTOR WHO in all capitals in his bio, but you can’t have everything.)

[tags]H.G. Wells,time machine,plays, theatre[/tags]

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Robots evolve ability to lie…and be heroes

Robots feeding There’s been lots of discussion here about how we should treat robots; maybe we need to consider how robots will treat each other–and, potentially, us. (Via Gizmodo.)

Discover Magazine reminds us, in its review of the Top 100 Science Stories of 2007, that Dario Floreano and colleagues at the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created robots with light sensors, rings of blue light and wheels, placed them in habitats containing both glowing “food patches” that recharged their batteries and patches of “poison” that drained them, and gave them software genes that determined how much they sensed light and how they responded. The first batch were programmed to light up randomly and move randomly when they sensed light. The “genes” of the most successful first-generation robots were then recombined and given to the next generation, with a little random “mutation” thrown in. By the 50th generation, they had robots that would light up to alert other robots when they found food or poison…and in one of the four colonies of robots they created, they had “cheater” robots that would lie and tell other robots that poison was food, while they rolled over to a food patch themselves without signalling at all. Other robots, though, were heroes: they would signal danger when they found the poison and die so other robots could safely obtain food.

Liars and heroes in just 50 generations with just 30 genes. Maybe we really will soon need a robot psychologist a la Isaac Asimov’s character Susan Calvin to figure out why our robots do what they do.

The original research paper, published in Current Biology, is here, and there’s even a movie.

(Image: Laboratory of Intelligent Systems.)

[tags]robots, technology, ethics[/tags]

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Heads-up displays, "super-vision," via contact lenses

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Contact lens with imprinted circuit Engineers at the University of Washington have managed to create a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights:

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

And, the engineers note, people may find many other applications they haven’t even thought of yet. (Via EurekAlert.)

So far only rabbits have worn the prototype, with no ill effects after up to twenty minutes. The engineers plan to add wireless communication to and from the lens, along with built-on solar cells and the capability to use radio-frequency power. The prototype doesn’t light up, but a version with a basic display showing a few pixels could be operational soon.

(Image: University of Washington.)

[tags]vision,bionics,technology[/tags]