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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Are you ready for personalized genomics?

genome Personalized genomics–a rundown on your inherited risk for certain conditions–is becoming a reality.

A couple of hundred dollars, a few drops of saliva and a stamped envelope is all it takes to get a rundown on your inherited risk of around a hundred more-or-less common conditions, everything from bladder cancer and baldness to male infertility and memory loss. You can place your order by Internet with companies like 23andMe (“genetics just got personal”) and deCODEme (“deCODE your health”).

The cost of sequencing an entire individual genome is about $100,000 right now, and Pacific Biosciences in Menlo Park, California (“a revolution in DNA sequencing is coming”), says it will be able, by 2013, to map all three billion base-pairs of a person’s DNA in a quarter of an hour for a few hundred dollars.

Critics are not enthralled. Many diseases are the result of a complex interplay of many different genes that we’re just beginning to understand. And there is fear that people with dicey genomes could be discriminated against by employers, insurers and banks. (President George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in the U.S. last year for that very reason.)

But here’s the real question: do you really want to know everything your genome could tell you? Is there any benefit in knowing you’re, say, 20 percent more likely to develop a fatal or debilitating disease? Might the worry about that possibility be almost as damaging to your quality of life as the disease itself?

What do you think?

As fast as the technology as advancing, you don’t have long to make up your mind.

(Via PhysOrg.)

(Image: U.S. Dept. of Energy Office of Science.)

[tags]genetics,DNA,ethics,medicine[/tags]

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"Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes"

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warped passages I like to post here (and yes, I do still post here, despite my occasional protracted absences…darn deadlines!) about those odd occasions when the theatrical world intersects with the science fictional or the scientific. But I don’t think I’ve ever run across anything quite like this: Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist in Harvard’s Department of Physics, is writing an opera. (Via IdeaFestival.)

Randall is the author of a 2005 book called Warped Passages that, in the word of Samuel P. Jacobs, writing for the Boston Globe, “introduced nonscientific readers to the possibility of additional dimensions beyond the three we see, and how their existence could account for many of the physical world’s most perplexing phenomena.”

In response to that book Spanish composer Hector Parra, asked Randall if she would try writing a libretto for an opera about her work. Jacobs writes:

The resulting piece, a collaboration with the artist Matthew Ritchie, is scheduled to debut in Paris at the Georges Pompidou Centre this summer, then travel throughout Europe in the fall.

The opera is an intimate work – an hourlong show written for two performers – that carries uncomfortable ideas about our world and how we experience it. The piece has the puzzling title of “Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes,” the seven planes referring to space and to the opera’s seven acts. The work’s broader goal is to suggest new approaches to both science and art. The old-fashioned form of opera, Randall and her colleagues hope, can become a vehicle for modern science, using sound and voice to re-create the many dimensions that physicists now explore.

“It’s kind of mathematical, it is geometrical, and it is looking towards the future,” Randall, 46, says of the title.

Read the whole interview with Randall.

And if anyone actually sees the opera, let us know what you think!

(Image: Barnes & Noble.)

[tags]physics,opera,books,music[/tags]

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Happy birthday, ISS!

ISS Break out the cake and light the candles, the International Space Station is 10 years old today (November 20). (Via Phys.org.)

The Russians launched the first part of the station from Kazakhstan on November 20, 1998; the second piece was carried up by the space shuttle two weeks later, and the first astronauts and cosmonauts arrived two years after that. Since then it has travelled 1.3 billion miles, orbited 57,300 times, and hosted 167 people from 15 different countries. Currently there are ten people aboard, and with the new additions and improvements, courtesy of the current Endeavour mission, the ISS will soon be able to host six people for long-term missions, up from the current three.

I feel a song coming on. Feel free to join in.

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear ISS, happy birthday to you…”

(Or, if you prefer, watch this video of STS-126 Commander Chris Ferguson and Expedition 18 Commander Mike Fincke marking the event in orbit.)

(Image: NASA.)

[tags]space,International Space Station, space stations, NASA[/tags]

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Direct evidence of dark matter detected over Antarctica?

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antarctic balloon A high-altitude balloon experiment above the Antarctic may have just seen a possible signature of the mysterious “dark matter” thought to make up 85 percent of the mass of the universe–but as yet, completely unseen and not at all completely understood. (Via Nature News.)

The experiment, the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC), spotted a surplus of high-energy electrons coming from…somewhere. This matches something the PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics–don’t you love space-exploration acronyms?) satellite mission turned up earlier this year

Electrons at this particular energy could be the result of heavy dark-matter particles colliding, which according to Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is “certainly the sexiest of the possibilities.”

Sexy and, to non-physicists, more than a little weird:

The exact nature of the dark-matter particles that produce electrons is uncertain, but one idea is that they may be ordinary particles that spend part of their lives in a compact extra dimension of space. Whereas the particles would appear relatively stationary to observers trapped in three spatial dimensions, they could be moving at ultra-high speeds in a fourth spatial dimension. At high speeds, they would create a gravitational force that could be felt by matter trapped in three dimensions of space-time. “It’s very wild,” Hooper says.

I’ll drink to that!

Of course, there are other possibilities. In particular, the electrons could be coming from a nearby pulsar, the fast-spinning remnants of a supernova.

How do we figure out? More experiments, of course. A new orbiting telescope called Fermi can spot electrons and positrons (though it’s designed to hunt for high-energy X-rays), and thus may confirm the data, or even pick up other high-energy particles that could be produced by dark-matter collisions.

Check back in the spring.

(Photo: NASA.)

[tags]NASA,dark matter,astrophysics,balloons[/tags]

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Beware of falling rock

Asteroid We interrupt this blog for a weather bulletin–a space weather bulletin, that is:

INCOMING ASTEROID: A small, newly-discovered asteroid named 2008 TC3 is approaching Earth and chances are good that it will hit. Steve Chesley of JPL estimates that atmospheric entry will occur on Oct 7th at 0246 UTC over northern Sudan [ref]. Measuring only a few meters across, the space rock poses NO THREAT TO THE GROUND, but it should create a spectacular fireball, releasing about a kiloton of energy as it disintegrates and explodes in the atmosphere. Stay tuned for updates.

Keep watching the skies! (Via Space Weather).

We now return you to your regular posts.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]astronomy,asteroids,solar system,meteors[/tags]