Author of Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, and the eco-terrorist thriller State of Fear Michael Crichton died two days ago of cancer.
I enjoyed Jurassic Park, and whatever you thought of the controversy surrounding the opinions on global warming expressed in State of Fear he was a decent writer.
Yes. As the title brilliantly puts it, there have been developments in the area of protecting astronauts from deadly solar radiation. This radiation has been seen as one of the big obstacles to transporting astronauts over interplanetary distances:
Large numbers of these energetic particles occur intermittently as “storms” with little warning and are already known to pose the greatest threat to man. Nature helps protect the Earth by having a giant “magnetic bubble” around the planet called the magnetosphere.
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Space craft visiting the Moon or Mars could maintain some of this protection by taking along their very own portable “mini”-magnetosphere. The idea has been around since the 1960’s but it was thought impractical because it was believed that only a very large (more than 100km wide) magnetic bubble could possibly work.
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Computer simulations done by a team in Lisbon with scientists at Rutherford Appleton last year showed that theoretically a very much smaller “magnetic bubble” of only several hundred meters across would be enough to protect a spacecraft.
Now this has been confirmed in the laboratory in the UK using apparatus originally built to work on fusion. By recreating in miniature a tiny piece of the Solar Wind, scientists working in the laboratory were able to confirm that a small “hole” in the Solar Wind is all that would be needed to keep the astronauts safe on their journey to our nearest neighbours.
All in all good news – and since our Glorious Leaders were able to drop five huge into our bust financial system at short notice I am no longer concerned over the cost of long range manned space exploration.
Stephen Fry’s latest blessay on words and their use is splendid, and it also includes a point relevant to the emerging Panopticon:
CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch.
If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials.
For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” …
I for one will immediately adopt this usage (and the equally compelling “SS” or “Surveillance System” Fry goes on to suggest).
It’s a profound point: meaning matters, but so do the shape and nature of the words themselves.
Richard Powers writes an elegant article in The Guardian on becoming one of the few people who have thus far had their entire genome sequenced. In his case by a company called Knome.
“I can tell you that you have the ‘novelty seeking’ gene,” Conde says. He’s referring to a study that associates a longer version of the DRD4 gene on chromosome 11, involved in the brain’s dopamine system, with people who need higher levels of stimulation. “You have three genetic variants associated with aspects of intelligence,” he continues. Reassuring.
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Just like that, I slip into the era of personal genomics. Now I know exactly what I’ve been dealt, and if I don’t take appropriate actions, the onus is on me.
But what actions? I enter my very own war on terror, monitoring lots of ambiguous chatter that is impossible to understand without more context, that I can respond to only indirectly, that I can’t defeat but can at best hold at bay – a standing low-grade condition of Orange alert that demands perpetual increased surveillance.
But beyond my list of health risks, I’ve also learned something extraordinary: 8% of my genetic material contains variations most closely related to the Yoruba population of Nigeria. I’ve become another person, someone else than I thought I was, giving blood in Wellesley, last spring.
As the genome sequencing gets cheaper I imagine it will become something we’ll all get done as a matter of course.
Researchers have discovered that the colour red enhances men’s attraction towards women:
the women shown framed by or wearing red were rated significantly more attractive and sexually desirable by men than the exact same women shown with other colors. When wearing red, the woman was also more likely to score an invitation to the prom and to be treated to a more expensive outing.
Apparently this will have implications for dating and product design, but I think that they’ve already been taken on board in these contexts.