All These Worlds Except…

“Robinson said the high radiation environment around Jupiter and distance from Earth would be a challenge. When NASA sent Galileo to Jupiter in 1989, it took the spacecraft six years to get to the fifth planet from the sun. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute astronomer Laurie Leshin said it could be ‘a daring mission to an extremely compelling object in our solar system.’…Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb said going to Europa would be more exciting than exploring dry Mars: ‘There might be fish under the ice.'”

NASA sets aside some money for a robotic mission to Europa. “No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial officer Elizabeth Robinson said Tuesday that it would be launched in the mid-2020s.”

Forget the Ground Floor.

“‘I think in parallel to full space elevators, partial space elevators are definitely worth exploring more,’ says space engineer Stephen Cohen…Today’s materials aren’t strong enough to support a huge, full space elevator to those heights, the McGill University study argues. Instead, a much smaller elevator looks less far-fetched. ‘We could view it as the first building blocks of a [full] space elevator,’ says study co-author Pamela Woo of McGill University.”

Also in space news, National Geographic makes the case for a “partial” space elevator, whereby ground launches would go into low-earth orbit to drop off their payloads. (See also this New Statesman article from August 2012.) “A space elevator untethered to Earth, with both of its ends hanging in space, might cut the costs of space travel to high orbit by 40 percent, researchers report.”

Great Strides in Nonsense.

“According to Nature News, Cyril Labbé, a French computer scientist, recently informed Springer and the IEEE, two major scientific publishers, that between them, they had published more than 120 algorithmically-generated articles. In 2012, Labbé had told the IEEE of another batch of 85 fake articles. He’s been playing with SCIgen for a few years—in 2010 a fake researcher he created, Ike Antkare, briefly became the 21st most highly cited scientist in Google Scholar’s database.”

“Sarcasm detector…now that’s a really useful invention.” In Slate, Konstantin Kakaes explains how academic science journals have been routinely snookered by algorithmically-generated nonsense. “First, academic publishing became an enormously lucrative business. And second, because administrators erroneously believed it to be a means of objective measurement, the advancement of academic careers became conditional on contributions to the business of academic publishing.”

Jurassic World.

“The earth is about to become a lot less ‘natural.’ Biologists have already created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic code of countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo, but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecating pigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the fact that will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction.”

By way of Follow Me Here, the NYT’s Nathaniel Rich examines the promise, challenges, and ethics of reviving extinct species, and beyond:

“What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else. De-extinction ‘is the most conservative, earliest application of this technology,’ says Danny Hillis, a Long Now board member and a prolific inventor who pioneered the technology that is the basis for most supercomputers.”

A World of Worlds.

“‘This is the largest windfall of planets — not exoplanet candidates, mind you, but actually validated exoplanets — that’s ever been announced at one time,’ Douglas Hudgins, exoplanet exploration program scientist at NASA’s Astrophysics Division in Washington, told reporters today.”

NASA announces 715 new planets found by the Kepler telescope, and that’s only from the first two years of data. “About 94 percent of the new alien worlds are smaller than Neptune, researchers said, further bolstering earlier Kepler observations that suggested the Milky Way galaxy abounds with rocky planets like Earth…four of the worlds are less than 2.5 times the size of Earth and reside in the ‘habitable zone,’ that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist on their surfaces.”

“The Blood Harvest.”

“‘Every drug certified by the FDA must be tested using LAL,’ PBS’s Nature documentary noted, ‘as do surgical implants such as pacemakers and prosthetic devices.’ I don’t know about you, but the idea that every single person in America who has ever had an injection has been protected because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature with a hidden chemical superpower makes me feel a little bit crazy. This scenario is not even sci-fi, it’s postmodern technology.”

In The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal unearths the amazing secrets, and industry, surrounding horseshoe crab blood. “The thing about the blood that everyone notices first: It’s blue, baby blue…The iron-based, oxygen-carrying hemoglobin molecules in our blood give it that red color; the copper-based, oxygen-carrying hemocyanin molecules in theirs make it baby blue.”

Small World, Big Universe.

“Most of us have trouble visualizing the height of buildings, or the distance it takes to get home from work, let alone things on an intergalactic scale. The above interactive graphic made by 14-year-old Cary Huang may be the best tool to help us understand our place in our vast universe. The interactive piece allows the viewer to zoom through scale and space, from quarks to galactic clusters.”

By way of Dangerous Meta and H-Twins, a handy and interactive chart of the scale of the universe. “The real genius of the interface is the ability to scroll back to a familiar object like a car — the time spent scrolling helps to convey a sense of size and distance.”

Actually, It Gets Worse.

“Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.”

The New Yorker‘s Adam Alter surveys the recent data suggesting something that accords well with my overall worldview: Positive thinking is for suckers. “In a provocative new analysis, Oettingen and her colleagues have suggested that public displays of positive thinking may even predict downturns in major macroeconomic outcomes…the staggering results in this most recent paper are consistent with more than a decade’s worth of studies in Oettingen’s lab.”

Better Living Through Nanotech.

“A team of chemists and engineers accomplished the feat by inserting tiny synthetic motors inside living cells, moving them around with ultrasonic waves and steering them magnetically. Clearly, it’s not as elegant as the self-propelled, self-guided nanobots envisaged by futurists and scifi, but it’s an important first step. These same basic principles could conceivably be refined and upgraded.”

A glimpse of the future: A Penn State team manage to insert synthetic nanomotors into living cells for the first time. “We might be able to use nanomotors to treat cancer and other diseases by mechanically manipulating cells from the inside. Nanomotors could perform intracellular surgery and deliver drugs noninvasively to living tissues.”

The End of All Things (Pt. 6).

“The worst mass extinction of all time came about 250 million years ago [the Permian-Triassic extinction event]. There’s a pretty good consensus there that this was caused by a huge volcanic event that went on for a long time and released a lot of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. That is pretty ominous considering that we are releasing a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and people increasingly are drawing parallels between the two events.”

The WP’s Brad Plumer talks with Elizabeth Kolber about her new book, The Sixth Extinction, and the many grim portents for life on our planet these days. “I think many scientists would say that what we’re doing to the chemistry of the oceans is the most significant. One-third of the carbon-dioxide that we pump into the air ends up in the oceans almost right away, and when CO2 dissolves in water, it forms an acid, that’s just an unfortunate fact.”