All posts by Tom Marcinko

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Garden on the moon

grand-lunar“The Selene Gardening Society,” anybody? Two corporations want to grow vegetables and flowers in a bell jar-like miniature laboratory greenhouse on the moon.

The “Lunar Oasis” has a certain poetry going for it.  “Imagine a bright flower or a plant in a crystal clear growth chamber on the surface of the Moon, with the full Earth rising above the Moonscape behind it...” says Paragon Space Development founder and Biosphere 2 veteran Jane Poynter. Plants have never been grown in a fraction of Earth’s gravity.

Candidates for the experiment besides flowers include aquatic plants and also the unpoetic brassica family (which includes cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts).  The garden could be sprouting as early as 2012.The project is a contender for the Google’s $30 million lunar robotics prize.

H.G. Wells, Pierre Boulle, Steve Erikson, and presumably Busby Berkeley must be smiling.

[Image: Grand Lunar (OK, U.S. Rep.) Gabrielle Giffords with lunar greenhouse prototype, Paragon Space Development]

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Happy Ada Lovelace Day

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adaIt’s late in the day in my time zone, but maybe not too late to celebrate women’s contribution to technology.

In a nutshell:

Today has been declared Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration of women in technology named after the first computer programmer. Born Augusta Ada Byron—yes, that Byron—she was schooled in mathematics at her mother’s insistence and, as Wikipedia says, her “interest in mathematics dominated her life even after her marriage.” (OMG NO WAY. ::facepalm::)

And here’s a list of inspirations, including none other than Xeni Jardin.

The BBC also has a roundup, with a link to a swell map of the tubes.

Feministing lists some notable achievers, too.

And if this puts you in a steampunk mood, check out the Babbage Engine, or an amazing pictorial from Wired last year.

[Portrait of the lady, Wikimedia Commons]

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Climate change: Can’t the media do better than this?

george-willChris Mooney, author of the forthcoming Unscientific America, asks:

Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.

In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult. Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.

He’s looking at George Will (there’s a link to his column if you want to follow it):

Will wrote [among other things] that “according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was “1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.” Again, though, there’s a bigger issue: Will’s focus on “global” sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it’s not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists’ expectations — according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.

Mooney ends with a tall order:

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists — following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It’s also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be — now more than ever.

[George Will picture: Wikimedia Commons]

Along the same lines, now that a volcano in Alaska is spewed smoke and ash at least five times in the last day or so, shouldn’t Gov. Jindal feel dumb about mocking volcano monitoring as wasteful spending?

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‘A world avoided’: Banning CFCs 22 years ago paid off

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not-spray-can“It is a real horrible place.” That’s how NASA atmospheric scientist Paul Newman describes an alternative world:

A NASA study about ozone-munching chemicals from aerosol sprays and refrigeration used a computer model to play a game of what-if. What if the world 22 years ago didn’t agree to cut back on chlorofluorocarbons which cause a seasonal ozone hole to form near the South Pole?

…In mid-latitudes like Washington, DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation would have increased more than sixfold. Just 5 minutes in the summer sunshine would have caused a sunburn, instead of 15. Typical midsummer UV levels, now around 10 or 11, would have soared to 30. Summer thunderstorms in the Northern Hemisphere would have been much stronger.

Nice to know that a little foresight can pay off. There must be a lesson. What could it be? Oh:

Newman, the co-chair of the protocol’s scientific panel, said the study provides hope that the world can do the same thing on another looming but even harder to solve environmental problem: Global warming.

[Image: This is not a spray can by badjonni]

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Pupil-dilation stress-scanner: You’re walking through an airport…you come across a tortoise…

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pkdThe Guardian reports that the U.S. government is looking for a way to spot evildoers by scanning for “physiological abnormalities.” A call for proposals says:

Early research has shown that pupil size varies with changes in a person’s cognitive processing load. Current but unproven studies suggest that a cognitive decision to deceive or practise deception will result in an increased pupil size due to the greater cognitive processing required in comparison to truthful recall.

Sounds more than a bit like the Voight-Kampff replicant-detector test from Blade Runner (it was Philip K. Dick’s idea, Guardian, not Ridley Scott’s). The reporter adds an appropriate note of skepticism:

I wonder how often a system might raise a false alarm, since a lot of people are pretty stressed going through airports even when they’re not up to anything mischievous.

[Image: Torley]