Blog

Warp Factor Zero

2 Comments

Star Trek trikeThe science fictional faster-than-light warp drive, despite being a staple of books and movies in which scientific plausibility is at best a tertiary consideration, is actually based on a genuine scientific theory by a fellow called Miguel Alcubierre.

Unfortunately for those looking forward to boldly going where no human has gone before (and doubtless delivering colonial civilisation and moral homilies to aliens with suspiciously lumpy yet humanoid faces), an expansion of Alcubierre’s theory to include quantum mechanics suggests that the warp drive is not a phenomenon we’ll actually be able to use for space travel after all:

Alcubierre imagined a small volume of flat spacetime in which a spacecraft might sit, surrounded by a highly distorted bubble of spacetime which shrinks in the direction of travel, bringing your destination nearer, and stretches behind you. He showed that this shrinking and stretching could enable the bubble–and the spaceship it contained–to move at superluminal speeds.

The conclusion is the result of classical thinking using the ideas of general relativity but physicists have long wondered what would happen if you threw quantum mechanics into the mix? Now Finazzi and pals have worked it. For a start, they say that the inside of the bubble would be filled with Hawking radiation, making life rather uncomfortable for any spacecraft within it.

Not to mention for the occupants of said spacecraft… I guess we’ll just have to put off establishing the Galactic Federation and learn how to make do with what we have to hand, at least until some benevolent sponsor race gives us the key to the subatomic universe. Selah. [via FuturePundit and many others; image by Timm Williams]

Blog

Recycled plastics make crims harder to catch

heaps of plastic for recyclingThe increasing prevalence of recycled plastics in the manufacturing industry – doubtless due in part to the currently-struggling Chinese trash-trawling industry – means that a lot of everyday objects are now made from what you might call “mongrel plastics”, a blend of different chemicals with similar physical properties. Which is good news… unless you’re a detective who needs to lift fingerprints from the stuff, that is.

The recycled products may look similar, but the physical and chemical properties differ so widely from the plastics they replace that the techniques honed over recent decades to lift fingerprints off plastics are no longer effective, he says.

Traditionally plastics were made from just one or two chemical building blocks, arranged in a predictable structure. But even plastics with just a trace of recycled feedstock become much more complex. Although consumers are encouraged to separate their plastics for recycling, the resulting plastics are inevitably more of a mongrel product than the pedigree plastics they replace.

Now there’s a nice little rogue state niche industry waiting to be exploited – custom mongrel plastics that defy forensics efforts. The cost of hiring an out-of-work plastics geek would be offset by the higher prices you could charge to your secretive customers. [image by meaduva]

Blog

Longevity personality traits

personalityTo those of us with an interest in living long enough to live forever any indicator of exceptional longevity is of interest. Here researchers have identified particular personality traits associated with longevity:

Because personality traits have been shown to have substantial heritable components, the researchers hypothesized that certain personality features may be important to the healthy aging observed in the offspring of centenarians.
…

Both the male and female offspring of centenarians scored in the low range of published norms for neuroticism and in the high range for extraversion. The women also scored comparatively high in agreeableness. Otherwise, both sexes scored within normal range for conscientiousness and openness, and the men scored within normal range for agreeableness.

Obviously you can’t do much to change your personality, but the conclusions are interesting.

[from Physorg][image from kol on flickr]

Blog

What would you ask Kim Stanley Robinson?

8 Comments

Kim Stanley Robinson portraitWell, what? If you could put any question to Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the legendary Mars Trilogy as well as the more recent Science in the Capitol series, what would it be? [Image from Wikipedia]

This is not a rhetorical question, by the way. The nice people at Harper Collins are soon to be launching their new VoyagerBooks.co.uk website and getting to grips with the intermawebz, and as part of the preliminaries they’re throwing six of their biggest genre fiction authors on the mercies of six different genre fiction blogs, including Big Dumb Object, SFF Chronicles, SFF World, Speculative Horizons and Book Geeks. The good Mr Robinson has been chosen to appear here at Futurismic, and you lot get to pick the questions.

I dare say it’s a pretty good match; Robinson’s interests – science, politics, climate change and space – are very much in line with the stuff we talk about here from day to day, and I’m sure he’ll be amenable to questions about his writing in more general terms (provided you don’t ask him where he gets his ideas from).

So, here’s the way we’re gonna do it: if you’ve got a question you’d like to put to Kim Stanley Robinson, leave a comment below.

Simple enough? There are some basic rules, though – honest and non-snarky questions only (I’ll just ignore or delete anything silly or rude, I’m afraid, but controversial science and politics are fine), keep them to a reasonable scale (something that can be answered in a few paragraphs or so), and the deadline will be 1800 hours GMT this Wednesday, 8th April 2009. If there are too many, I’ll pick out the best.

Yep, that’s the lot. So, thinking caps on, folks; I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting questions. 🙂

Blog

Magazines2.0 – does print-on-demand spell doom for the news-stand?

3 Comments

magazines at the news-standIt’s no secret that a big part of the problem for science fiction magazines – and many other sorts of periodical publication – are the cost and logistical issues attached to printing and distributing the final product. You can buy the best fiction on the planet, hire the best columnists and artists… but if you can’t get that final product into the customer’s hands (or at least in front of their eyeballs), you’re going to struggle to sell copies. [image by Diane S Murphy]

Enter Hewlett Packard, who describe their new MagCloud service as “YouTube for magazines”. MagCloud has similarities to LuLu.com as well; basically, you upload your finished magazine as a PDF file, which MagCloud then lists in its catalogue for no charge. When a customer wants a copy, they log in, pay the cost… and get a printed version made especially for them.

Arch-fan (and Clarkesworld non-fiction editor) Cheryl Morgan can see a route ahead:

Where I do think that there is a potential business case is with small press magazines. The sales pitch would go something like this: yes, you can read it for free on the web; yes, you can download a PDF and print it yourself, but if you really want something glossy and physical then order it from MagCloud.

I’ll go one step further – there are server-side software engines that can be used to stitch together PDFs from HTML files, so you could allow your reader to custom-build a magazine to their own specifications from your stock of stories and articles, and then buy a unique printed version. If nothing else, it would mean you could avoid paying for a magazine which contained a story by an author whose work you just don’t enjoy.

Of course, as TechDirt points out MagCloud’s potential success is predicated on the assumption that interest in magazines among people tech-savvy enough to be aware of the service will continue for long enough for the business to grow (and, more importantly, for the currently prohibitive unit costs to fall)… and while I’m convinced that dead-tree books will last for a good few decades yet, I’m not so sure that the magazine format will have the same longevity.

What do you think? Would you be interested in a print version of sites like Futurismic – a story or two a month, a couple of essays and a sprinkling of blog posts selected from your favourite tags and search terms – or is the webzine at its best in its native non-physical environment?

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001