All posts by Tom Marcinko

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DVD gift ideas for science-minded kids

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My son, age eight, has always been interested in animals, extinct or otherwise. But he’s played to death the three-DVD documentary series The Future Is Wild, which depicts the evolution of life on Earth millions of years into the future. The CGI animation is pretty good; the extrapolated life forms in the post-human world are mind-bending.

My son doesn’t seem frightened or depressed by the depiction of a universe without human intelligence or galactic empires, which is more than I can say for his dad. You don’t have to be a kid to get into this. And if you’re even considering writing an sf story about nonhuman aliens, please see it.

There’s an animated TV adventure series on Discovery Kids, but my son and I agree that it’s not as good as the original.

Just as good, and getting almost as much screen time in my house, is Alien Planet, exploring via space probe the planet Darwin IV, where evolution produced creatures like nothing on Earth.

I hope they go over as well in your home as they have in mine.

[Bladderhorn from Alien Planet]

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Strange squid caught on video: This is what ETs should look like

National Geographic News got the footage from Shell Oil, which was running a remote-operated vehicle about 200 miles off the coast of Houston, Texas.

In a few seconds of jerky camerawork, the squid appears with its huge fins waving like elephant ears and its remarkable arms and tentacles trailing from elbow-like appendages.

Despite the squid’s apparent unflappability on camera, Magnapinna, or “big fin,” squid remain largely a mystery to science.

Four species of Magnapinna have been discovered since 1998. They live about 4,000 feet (1,129 meters) deep. (BBC posted a video of one some years ago, but I can’t seem to find the link. They called it a “batsquid,” a term which seems to have been appropriated by H.P. Lovecraft fans)

[Photo: National Geographic via Shell Oil]

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Spain’s solar graveyard

When they perfect that spinach-based solar power, maybe they’ll use it to landscape cemetaries:

Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a gritty, working-class town outside Barcelona, has placed a sea of solar panels atop mausoleums at its cemetery, transforming a place of perpetual rest into one buzzing with renewable energy.

The town doesn’t have a lot of room for solar, so the cemetary was the only place for 462 panels that can light up 60 homes. The panels are arranged above mausoleum niches, and the town’s residents seem to appreciate the respect for the dead shown by the placement.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]

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The Internet will go interplanetary

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NASA finished first tests on a system that

could one day be used to automatically relay information between Earth, spacecraft, and astronauts, without the need for humans to schedule transmissions at each point. …

For the test, dozens of images of Mars and its moon Phobos were transmitted back and forth between computers on Earth and NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft. The craft, which sent an impactor into Comet Tempel 1 in 2005, has been renamed “Epoxi” now that it its mission has been extended to search for extrasolar planets.

Further tests will begin on the International Space Station next year.

[Story: New Scientist; picture: NASA/JPL]

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Stress physically reshapes the brain

A neuroscience conference in Washington, D.C. this week could stress you out all by itself. Lab rats put in stressful situations — like being immobilized and forced to listen to loud rock music — grow fewer fibers that connect neurons. Stress isn’t that great for people, either.

“Stress causes neurons (brain cells) to shrink or grow,” said Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University in New York. “The wear and tear on the body from lots of stress changes the nervous system.”

He said that stress is “particularly worrying in the developing brain, which appears to be programmed by early stressful experience.”

Stress in early life, even in the womb, can later lead to undesirable changes in behavior and the ability to learn and remember. Other consequences may be substance abuse and psychiatric disorders, researchers said…

“Pre-natal stress can change the brain forever,” said Tallie Baram, a neurologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Stress changes how genes are expressed throughout life.”

[1899 drawing of pigeon neurons by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Wikimedia Commons]