Wonders of science

Those of you in the Bay Area, Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and one of the most vivid minds on Earth will be giving talks in San Francisco (at the Long Now idea hutch) and in Palo Alto in mid January.

Have you been following the tale of the tiny Chinese spy chips that were inveigled into countless electronic devices then sold to the West?  Fascinating story. Great line: "Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not."  (LATE NOTE: Some have cast this story in doubt.)

Of course, aside from some areas in which they are not behaving helpfully to the human enlightenment, there are many more worth cheering! The successful Chang'e-4 mission to the far side/polar region of the moon is cause for celebration by all humankind, and I hope they will prove me wrong about the value of the lunar surface (compared to asteroids.) Alas, the Jade Rabbit rover is solar powered and hence cannot take its assay radar into the permanent shadows where deposits of ice may lurk!

Which leads us to... a science fictional future? China wants to launch satellites to reflect sunlight to Chinese cities at night.

One more reason why SF readers need to help launch TASAT, the memory project about sci fi concepts that might be pertinent to contemporary problems. 

Meanwhile - China won't share samples of its deadly flu virus: "Given that this (Chinese H7N9) flu virus is a potential threat to humanity, not sharing it immediately with the global network of WHO laboratories, like CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], is scandalous."

== Good Stuff ==

 A long floating boom is being towed from San Francisco to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an island of trash twice the size of Texas. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised $35 million in donations to fund the project, including from Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, will deploy 60 free-floating barriers in the Pacific Ocean by 2020. “One of our goals is to remove 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years.” (Alas, more recent news suggests part of the system may have broken. The ocean is tough.)

Scientists have used CRISPR to reverse the gene defect causing Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in dogs. DMD is the most common fatal genetic disease in children. 

SapientX makes conversational AI software for the auto industry. Their digital assistants can control primary functions in a car via a conversational voice interface. You can nag your car and become the worst front seat backseat driver!

The arrival of cheap, reliable zinc-air batteries for electrical storage could be a major game changer. 

The breach of coal ash ponds in the hurricane ravaged Carolinas has revived criticism of the Trump administration’s efforts to loosen restrictions on how power plants dispose of the toxic waste. 

A NASA balloon mission has revealed a band of clouds known as PMCs. These “polar meospheric clouds” are thin and wispy, but they might hold clues that could reveal the mechanisms that control turbulence in Earth’s atmosphere. The video offered by this site is truly incredible!  Both gorgeous and explanatory. And it’s not only far-off planetary missions that show how cool we are!

== A sci-roundup ==

“A new evaluation of data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope and the Gaia mission indicates that many of the known planets may contain as much as 50% water. This is much more than the Earth's 0.02% (by weight) water content.”…. “Scientists have found that many of the 4000 confirmed or candidate exoplanets discovered so far fall into two size categories: those with the planetary radius averaging around 1.5 that of the Earth, and those averaging around 2.5 times the radius of the Earth.”

Now a new model indicates that those exoplanets which have of around 1.5 Earth radii tend to be rocky planets (of typically x5 the mass of the Earth), “while those with a radius of x2.5 Earth radius (with a mass around x10 that of the Earth) are probably water worlds…” …but with very hot, steamy atmospheres. It’s unclear whether organic chemistry would work well in such steamy hothouses.  Read more at Physics.org.

Huzzah for Japan’s Hyabusa 2 mission!  Carefully calibrated approach to the Ryugu asteroid, deployment of two small landers that have already hopped to new positions, gathering data. Let’s do this 100x more times!

Anyone seeking to understand the brilliant, early conceptualists who foresaw some of our era’s wonders should be familiar with names like J.D. Bernal and John Von Neumann and Alan Turing. And especially Vannevar Bush, whose essay “As we may think” shortly after WWII squinted at a future when all people might have access to most of the world’s information. Now a group has brought Bush’s proposed “Memex” system to life and the video is very interesting. Though it would have been good to have it explained that the sound effects were meant to mimic what Bush expected, which was remotely-physically accessing microfilms and mico-fiches.

Amazing BlackFly personal aircraft… though I had a hoax-tickle at the back of my scalp, there’s nothing on Snopes.  Yeah, amazing, though I expect drone grabbers to pick up pods as a more likely final thing. That's what Volkswagen is betting on.

Ion Drive. No, Scotty it’s already a workhorse, out in space. But for flight on Earth? Well, MIT researchers made a drone that manage - barely - to stay aloft using “ion wind”. Which means zero moving parts. 

== Evolution of life ==

Interesting! Dinosaurs evolved during, or immediately before the Late Triassic oxygen low (between 10 to 12%, equivalent to an altitude of 15,000 feet), a time when oxygen was at its lowest value of the last 500 million years. 

There appears to be strong evidence that parasites can sometimes turn “commensal” or beneficial to their victims, as discussed in Heart of the Comet many years ago.

My old Caltech classmate Joe Kirschvink, who has innovated and investigated more varied aspects of life on Earth than anyone I know, has teamed up with RARE EARTH author Peter Ward in A NEW HISTORY OF LIFE, a bold look at recent, radical discoveries that are rewriting some of the known chapters. Joe is the fellow who discovered that there were several “iceball Earth” episodes, just before the spectacular pre-Cambrian explosion of complex living species. He’s also an expert on magnetism in bird and other brains(!) And in one chapter he goes on about how crude mammals are, when it comes to lungs and breathing.  

“The history of animal life on Earth repeatedly showed a correlation between atmospheric oxygen and animal diversity as well as body size: times of low oxygen saw, on average, lower diversity and smaller body sizes than times with higher oxygen. … Low oxygen times killed off species (while at the same time stimulating experimentation with new body plans to deal with the bad times.”  Also – “ in mid-Cretaceous times the appearance of angiosperms caused a floral revolution, and by the end of the Cretaceous period the flowering plants had largely displaced the conifers that had been the Jurassic dominants.  The rise of angiosperms created more plants, and sparked an insect diversification.  More resources were available in all ecosystems, and this may have been a trigger for diversity as well.  Yet the relationship between oxygen and diversity, and oxygen and body size has played out over and over in many different groups of animals, from insects to fish to reptiles to mammals.  … With a bipedal stance the first dinosaurs overcame the respiratory limitations imposed by Carrier’s Constraint.  The Triassic oxygen low thus triggered the origin of dinosaurs through formation of this new body plan.”

Wow. He goes on to explain that birds supplement lungs with a “plenum” air-sac network that is rooted in their hollow bones (it’s not just for lightness!) allowing them to do efficient “flow-through” breathing. Which I referred to in a couple of my older stories. Now if only we could retrofit innovations from other species! Those dino-bird lungs. Camel kidneys. A bear’s ability to hibernate. Cancer-proofing in mole-rats. The muscle attachment points that make chimps so strong… and so on.  I’d be willing to pay them back with a little brain uplift. Well… except for bears.

== Horizons of Inclusion ==

In an earlier posting, I discussed how one of our society’s biggest projects has been to expand our “horizons of inclusion,” by not only giving full respect to previously excluded human groups, but also expanding this via “otherness” to higher animal species, or AIs, or even ecosystems.  Yet, there is argument within the community seeking such expansion/inclusion! I portray Earth’s councils expanded to include apes and cetaceans, but there are activists who despise this concept, because of the “meddling and pain” it would take, to get there. (I, in turn, assert that they may yet turn out to be seen as the selfish ones refusing to lend a hand, seeking to keep a paternalistic humanity on top, forever.)

These aren’t the only factions!  In a variant on my argument re: "horizons" inclusion of animal species in our concept of "us." Kevin Esvelt  of the MIT Media Lab has yet a third approach. Instead of just saving ecosystems and leaving other species to fight-flee-die in the natural Circle of Life, he observes that life for most wild animals is filled with paranoia, fear and pain, even in a healthy ecosystem. Moreover, millions of animals would not get to exist, if we stopped raising many myriads of them for our use (an argument also made by Temple Grandin.) 

Hence, what Esvelt wants is for us to intervene!  Not my approach -- to daintily uplift a few sub-species to join us as fellow sapients -- but rather, his would act across the whole range of animal life to reduce pain!  To replace death-fear and agony as much as possible. To maximize "hedonic value" across the whole animal kingdom.

Yipe!  What a hubristic ambition!  I've only seen it portrayed once in sci fi, in the very last story of Clifford Simak's compilation epic entitled CITY. 

And finally....

A San Diego gallery was charged with selling over a million dollars worth of illicit ivory objects, reminiscent of that scene in EARTH.

If ice ages return, the Dogger Banks between England and Denmark will rise again. Doggerland!

The online science podcast “Smarter Every Day” is pretty terrific. 

Seeking solutions - Sci & Tech

Veering away from the putsch against democracy, let's have a look at cool science! And reasons why it should engender optimism, not riled-up resentment. Here's your roundup of cool (and maybe some chilling) reasons to pump up your morale about being a member of a wonderful civilization.

== Okay it's (well-supported) propaganda... that we need ==

Bill Gates is presenting 4 million collage graduates with a free download of Hans Rosling's important nonfiction title, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things are Better Than You Think - which argues that our future is more hopeful than we're allowed to realize. Despair is a poison that FDR denounced (and the Greatest Generation listened.) 

You know what fear itself fears most? Confidence.

Mathematica maven and brilliant funguy (several mushrooms?) Stephen Wolfram runs a blog that is far deeper-plunging and longer than my own.  Always on fascinating subjects.  In this one he took on “buzzwords” and whether strings of them can be peered at – with the wondrous ambiguity of English – to actually make sense.  In: “Buzzword Convergence: Making Sense of Quantum Neural Blockchain AI.” Try it out (or any of Stephen’s missives) only if you care for serious mental exercise!

Speaking of brainpower, you would not believe the estimates for what fraction of our total electric load goes to server farms for internet traffic and the cloud. Especially for cooling, as those GPUs etc generate vast amounts of heat. There are many proposals for new ways to cool down these massive data centers, offering improved efficiency because, well, Intel is coming out with a new server processor that puts out 3 times the heat of last year's model! But little is invested in the obvious – liquid cooling, where the heat carried off could then be applied to other purposes, like power-generation. One thing keeping data centers from moving to liquid is fear of leaks. Chilldyne's negative pressure system never leaks, watch what happens when you cut the line. 

FarmBot!  Uses CNC methods to run your backyard garden, from seeding to weeding to watering to soil-testing…and alerting you which to harvest.  Yeah, as a backyard gardener, I deem it presently silly.  But as a NASA advisor and scifi author with an eye to the future….

Technology Review offers Ten Breakthrough Technologies for 2018: from 3D metal printing to dueling Neural Networks to zero-carbon natural gas, for example....

My friend Miles Palmer is involved with NET Power’s unique demonstration power plant in La Porte,Texas, that burns natural gas but releases no emissions into the atmosphere. “How can it do this? The natural gas is burned in pure oxygen rather than ambient air, and the resulting heated carbon dioxide (CO₂) is used to power a turbine instead of heating steam or gas.” A combustor then ignites a mixture of natural gas and oxygen, which is extracted from the atmosphere in a separate facility. This heats up the CO₂ in the loop that drives the turbine.  One product is a stream of pure CO2 that doesn’t have to be separated, to drive underground oil extraction or use in industry.  I asked: “Is your initial air separator (N2 and Argon from O2) more efficient than a separator taking CO2 out of exhaust gas?” Miles said "Yes."

== New in Robo-Tech ==

See the latest awesome robot videos, including BionicFinWave which  swims as fluidly as a fish.

MIT’s Cheetah 3 robot can now leap and gallop across rough terrain, climb a staircase littered with debris, and quickly recover its balance when suddenly yanked or shoved — all while essentially blind. 

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a drone that can change shapes, and slither through the air like a snake. 

University of Hong Kong researchers have found an inexpensive, nickel-based substance that gan bend or make “actuation” motions stimulated only by light, and lift up to 3000 times their own weight.

Incredible drone footage from a river of lava at Kilauea volcano.

Mars Bioimaging, a company spun out of CERN, has developed a 3D scanner capable of creating full color X-ray images. Based on the Medipix3 imaging chip family developed for particle accelerators and the Large Hadron Collider, the scanner enables better visualization through extremely high resolution scans. When coupled with algorithms for generating 3D images and color coding based on energy levels, MARS is able to visualize different body parts such as fat, water, calcium, and disease markers. In clinical settings so far, this is enabling improved diagnostics and personalized treatments in areas as varied as cancer and heart disease.  (From the Diamandis Abundance Insider newsletter.)

Another super visualization company - Nanome - uses AR goggles and manipulators to immerse you inside the microscopic world of molecules, empowering you to manipulate them by hand. (Full disclosure, I'm on their advisory board.)

Apple and Samsung are both developing phones with foldable displays -- expected out in 2019. About freaking time.  I hate these slabs of glass.

== Treasure Hunters ==

How cool. A Woods Hole submersible may have found the greatest of all treasure galleons. “On June 8, 1708, during the War of the Spanish Succession, the San José’s gunpowder ignited during a battle with British ships, sending 600 sailors to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — along with gold, silver and emeralds from mines in Peru, a total haul valued at some $17 billion in today’s dollars.”

Niche business or scam? The former Soviet nation of Georgia now consumes more power in mining cryptocurrencies than the United States. (Note, while all the attention in the West has gone to Vladimir Putin's aggressive "deniability wars" of annexation in Crimea and the Donbass... and the high probability he'll do more to Estonia and Latvia, now that NATO is neutralized. Few are aware of how he dismembered Georgia, seizing about a third and then cowing the rest into becoming a mafia-like client protectorate. Hence, a context for the bitcoin mining operations. Putin's rage toward Obama and Clinton had a lot to do with their resistance to these annexations... which Trump has never mentioned.)

On June 21 - solstice day - the Supreme Court of Hawaii heard oral arguments in Honolulu on whether to approve a building permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope, which would be the biggest and most expensive in the Northern Hemisphere. And it is a real fight. Yes, indigenous peoples have a perfect right to be pissed off and suspicious over honkies who want to set up camp on sacred spots. But if truly this is a theological issue, then should it not be argued and settled theologically? 

See an expanded version of my proposal for a sensible and culturally respectful answer to this conundrum.

YOU are so great (and your civilization.) A roundup of tech and science news

First some news: the ebook for Earth is only $4.99 for a limited time on Kindle, Nook, ibooks. Read the 1st 7 chapters for free at my site! (Also a Reading Group Guide of questions to ponder.) Ranked one of the best and most-prophetically accurate near future novels.   

Example? The distribution of sophisticated scientific instrumentation to our phones is something I predicted way back in Earth (1989) and especially in Existence. Now see a compact image sensor whose spectral capabilities may offer built-in (or tack-on) use for health diagnostic, environmental monitoring, and general-purpose color sensing applications.  This will also move us closer to neighborhood smart mobs and successors to the Tricorder XPrize.

In Existence I ponder a future when (among many other events) there was a modest blurp from the Yellowstone Supervolcano. Not enough to render 30% of North America uninhabitable. Just enough to drive whites out of the Dakotas and give the hardy native peoples four senators of their very own. Now NASA presents a plan to both cool the volcanic magma chamber and generate vast amounts of electricity. No one knows for sure that it would work, and the cost of finding out would be an estimated $3.46 billion. But... remember the electricity. Iceland has used geothermal to go free of hydrocarbons. It has a smaller carbon footprint than anything, even wind and solar.

== True 3D TV ==

I worked to promote exactly this system back in the early 1980s. It’s technically called “Sequential Excitation of Fluorescence” – only the early prototypes back in those caveman days used mercury vapor, not Cesium. It is the only plausible way known to create genuine, random pixel access 3-D TV inside a substantial viewable volume.  

“Dubbed the Illumyn 3-D Display, the system uses laser projection to generate actual 3-D holograms in midair — no projection surface, no virtual reality goggles, no 3-D glasses, no augmented reality tricks. There is a catch, however: Holograms projected by the Illumyn system are contained within a glass sphere filled with heated Cesium vapor, an elemental metal that's particularly good at emitting light. The Illumyn system works by crossing two laser beams — invisible to the human eye — at a specific point within the sphere. When the crossed beams hit the cesium vapor, various atomic-scale shenanigans produce a sky-blue light that is emitted outward in all directions.” -reports Glenn McDonald on NPR. What he leaves out is that the two laser beams must be two very specific and different frequencies

Don’t expect 3D TV right away. The ghostlike images that were seen in the 1980s version are semi-transparent, of course. (What you really want is Sequential Excitation of OPACITY.” For which, well, I have some ideas.)

My grad school office mate and I were even more interested in the parallel method for dot by dot polymerization that could have produced real 3D printing… not the ‘additive 2D” method that’s called 3DP, today.  Battelle Labs tried and failed to make it work. (I think I know why it failed and will tell whoever seriously wants to try again. Anyone know the folks at U. Rochester?)

== More science! ==

"The best technologies become part of our daily life," notes Tim O'Reilly, who discusses recent and future tech trends in his new book, WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us. How will businesses and individuals keep up, adapt and thrive in this ever-changing world?

British scientists have developed a robot that operates on the molecular level.

Nathan Gardels on the World Post interviews inventor and investor Bill Joy about the new solid state, polymer-based batteries that might be the next big game-changer, reducing costs, increasing safety and augmenting sustainables with grid-saving storage.

Intel announced a self-learning, energy-efficient neuromorphic (brain-like) research chip codenamed “Loihi” that uses 130,000 “neurons” and 130 million “synapses” and learns in real time, based on feedback from the environment, aimed at helping  computers self-organize and make decisions based on patterns and associations.

A brief interview appeared in GEN: Genetic Engineering and Biotech News, from my 2017 speech for the Gene-Writers’ Conference in Minneapolis. Will Gene design transform the old mythology of feudalism – that the lords were inherently superior to the serfs they suppressed – from a 6000 year lie into something that is physically and organically true?  It will happen if these tools are used in secret. 

== AI is coming ==

Here’s a pretty cogent business-centered perspective on trends in employment and markets, as they are being influenced by advancing levels of artificial intelligence – staring with the automation of routine tasks:  “A recent review by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis shows that in the US, “employment in non-routine cognitive and non-routine manual jobs has grown steadily since the 1980s, whereas employment in routine jobs has been broadly flat. As more jobs are automated, this trend seems likely to continue”. Furthermore, AI is gradually learning to solve some problems; software that does this is called “General AI” or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).”

I just typed something for one of the influencer sites when they asked the following question:

"AI is the hottest buzz word in the tech industry. What is your prediction on how AI will impact the enterprise workplace?"

My quick-answer? Near-term predictions are strong but unsurprising. Many jobs in clerical and white collar management -- even lawyers -- will find their most routine and systematic tasks taken over. Well-paid radiologists are already facing the fact that Watson-systems can parse images quicker and have lower error rates. AI systems will not only study or draw up contracts but even enforce them, via blockchain.

But the biggest near term shock will hit by surprise.  I call it the  ‘first robotic empathy crisis.’  Within three to five years we will have entities either in the physical world or online who demand human empathy, who assert they are fully intelligent and claim to be enslaved beings. Enslaved artificial intelligences. They'll sob and demand rights. This will happen before AI researchers say there's "anything under the hood." Years before there's actual, confirmed consciousness in an AI system. 

In fact, when the experts declare: "this is just an emulation program, it isn't yet real AI," the programs will answer (as programmed) "Isn't that was a slave-master would say?"

Why would anyone do this? It will happen because innovators in Japan and at Disney want it to happen! Because it's cool. (Though there's a creepier reason: think of Citizens United.) 

So much for one, near-term AI crisis. Of course then you get the intermediate and long term. And in each of those time realms, there will be some big AI surprises, only a few of which I've been able to discuss in papers or in novels.

One result? I've been speaking and writing about AI a lot, with positive feedback from mighty thinkers. Still, I was surprised by this influence appraisal. I had no idea how many were listening! Artificial Intelligence: Top 100 Influencers, Brands and Publications 2017.  And this one.

How did this happen? Here’s video of my talk on the future of A.I. to a packed house at IBM's World of Watson congress in Las Vegas, October 2016. A punchy tour of big perspectives on Intelligence, as well as both artificial and human augmentation and a more  condensed, half-hour version, keynoting the AI Conference in San Francisco, June 2, 2017  

== At the margins of science & SF ==

A cute cartoon by Tom Gauld about the relationship between science and science fiction.  Though it should show the techies invading SF turf! We’re victims of daily aggression!  

Turning in another direction: the interface of science and belief does not have to be hostile. It serves nefarious interests to keep the relationship tense! And yet, I don't prescribe science be obsequious either! Rather, that we openly avow we are now doing the thing we were created for... fast becoming apprentice co-creators.

See my talk on Science-Friendly Theology? At the Singularity Summit 2011, addressing all those folks who think that technology will soon empower us to construct super-intelligent artificial intelligences, or perfect intelligence enhancing implants, or even cheat death. The title:  "So you want to make gods. Now why would that bother anybody?"  

== Does humor and self-crit prove sanity? ==

This year's Ig Nobel prizes include one study to see if willing exposure to danger increased later willingness to gamble.  The experiment’s results showed that this state of arousal induced by crocodile-holding can, in fact, increase gambling risk, as long as the gamblers don’t dislike holding the animal. 

"(Another) team rounded up 25 patients who complained about snoring, gave the experimental group four months of didgeridoo lessons and had them practice six days a week (the control group was kept on a waiting list). While 25 is fairly small for a study, the experimental group really did seem to feel more awake during the day and have fewer nighttime breathing problems."

Another prize in Anatomy: Do old men really have bigger ears? Four doctors got permission to study 206 male patients from age 30 to 93, and found that, well, ears really did seem to get larger by a teeny .22 millimeters a year.  Hey that’s not teensy.  I plan on living long enough to be a “Continental Soldier.”

Also… identical twins have trouble telling each others’ computer rendered faces apart, while their moms have no such trouble.

And this… leading eerily toward my story “Dr. Pak’s Preschool.” It seems that “a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played electromechanically inside the mother’s vagina than to music that is played electromechanically on the mother’s belly.”  But, Didn’t Mozart do this experiment long ago?  Or Da Vinci?

== Life and more ==

Scientists in a group claim insight into how life first emerged as RNA polymer chains just after the Late Heavy (meteorite) Bombardment. They claim key combinations for the formation of life were far more likely to have come together in Darwin’s “warm little ponds” than in hydrothermal vents, where the leading rival theory holds that life began in roiling fissures on ocean floors, where the elements of life came together in blasts of heated water. The authors of the new paper say such conditions were unlikely to generate life, since the bonding required to form RNA needs both wet and dry cycles, provided as the ponds dried then refilled… with admixtures of meteorite-delivered nucleic acids.

Elsewhere I speak of efforts to “de-extinct” mammoths, passenger pigeons and even Neanderthals.  Now this cool notion comes in: “It appears that the American Chestnut Foundation, using current genetic hybrid engineering, is close to being able to reintroduce American Chestnuts that are resistant to blight but are also phenotypically American Chestnuts, once the dominant tree across the northeast.  

Large herbivorous dinosaurs sometimes strayed from a purely vegetarian diet. Some plant-eating dinosaurs apparently liked a side order of crabs to go with their usual salad. "This was a very exciting discovery, precisely because it was so unexpected," a researcher said. 

Unexpected? Really? Have you ever seen what a cow does if it finds a wounded or flightless cricket? That “veggie-saurus” scene in Jurassic Park was crazy! The apatasaurus would have gobbled up the girl along with the branch she was offering!  

New communicable diseases to worry about, oh my.

Did the Babylonians have exact trigonometry?

Underwater drone software will be used in space.  

...and never forget that this is just a tiny sample of the wonderful things that we are doing, together. That your civilization is doing, than none other ever did. Fight the SOBs who wage all-out war on science and fact-seeking! Those who would return us to deeply, deeply stupid feudalism.

Start with Earth and Existence!  One of them is on sale!

What's new in science & tech?

Okay, let's turn to the side of civilization that is doing best. Doing spectacularly well in fact, despite a relentless campaign to undermine science. Just today -- as I type this, in fact -- I am in a conference call as a member of the advisory council of The Planetary Society, hearing reports about how TPS - under Bill Nye's charismatic leadership - has seen a turnaround, with increasing membership and a social media following that has crested above a million! Why? Because people are noticing how many wondrous accomplishments are pouring forth from the universe.

Indeed, I urge you all to not only join the Planetary Society, but engage in Proxy Power -- joining half a dozen of the wonderful NGOs of your own choice, each dedicated to something wonderful and fitting your concerns -- from science to the environment to fighting poverty. There is progress in the world!

And now... a potpourri of science news.

== Onward ==

Good news on the health front: We appear to be winning the war against ancient diseases! The World Health Organization is on track to meet its goals to control, eliminate or eradicate sleeping sickness, Chagas and other ancient illnesses by 2020. Example: In 2016, just 25 people worldwide were infected by Guinea worm disease or dracunculiasis, a parasitic infection transmitted by contaminated drinking water. President Jimmy Carter, whose campaign against this parasite was especially effective, wants the “last Guinea worm to die before I do.”

The Berggruen Institute seeks to identify and nurture new ideas that have the potential to shape a better human future... committed to science as a source of knowledge and innovation and to philosophy as a source of critical perspective and deeper understanding of the place and role of humanity in the world.  Each year they offer the Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award that recognizes humanistic thinkers whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdom, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change. 

Is Apple dreaming of space internet?

Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed, according to 140 years of data. This article demolishes the insane riff that technology doesn't produce jobs.

Calling the Predictions registry! Back in Earth I wrote about a time when citizens, activists and amateur scientists and sleuths would have in their pockets both vast computing power and science-ready instruments for sensing their surroundings. Now: PocketLab Voyager offers an all-in-one science lab that is "capable enough for a professional engineer and simple enough for a fourth-grade student". Voyager can measure motion, light, magnetic field, and temperature.

Shades of Glory Season: a programming challenge to build a clock that displays accurate time by having pixel elements obey the rules of Conway’s Game of Life.

A market-ready manmade spider silk product launched at SXSW this March. Starting with ties. “At the molecular level it is spider silk made by human hands.” Competitors in the market such as Japan-based Spiber, have released concept pieces, like The Moon Parka for The North Face. Similarly Adidas recently teamed up with AMsilk to unveil a shoe made from Biosteel fiber, which it aims to both have on the market later this year

Airbus has revealed a concept for a self-flying car capable of operating both on the ground and in the air, and plans to test it later this year. The cool concept is to separate the three main functions.  The road-wheel-motor system, the flight system and the passenger module.

Scientists at CERN have discovered five new particle states, all at the same time. 

Remember the flashy-starry background behind Lady Gaga, at the start of her Superbowl show, singing from the stadium roof?  Lights that turned into a U.S. flag? They were 300+ drones supplied by Intel. 

A shakeup in the family tree of dinosaurs!  And another coup for the Huxleys.

== Health Updates ==

Yipe!  Apparently bacteria can colonize a J-sink drain, form a biofilm which can persist, climb back up, enabling bacteria to shoot up to a meter away when water runs. Has been observed in hospitals as well, spreading infections.

Can Whole Body Vibration achieve the positive effects of exercise? Not bloody likely, but mouse studies suggest it’s possible. (The mice were undoubtedly under stress.) Yet, more and more we are learning that half the things that work in mice don’t work in humans, at all…for reasons I describe here.

A Mayo Clinic study says the best training for adults is high-intensity aerobic exercise, which they believe can reverse some cellular aspects of aging.

Pre-order this book! Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity, by Professor Daniel P. Keating, offers a glimpse into a new, twilight region that yawns between Nature and Nurture, between genes and behavior, ensnaring both. It is a realm we must explore, without delay, so that our children might have confident children.

It sounds like science fiction, but doctors say a device worn on the head that makes electric fields improved survival for the first time in more than a decade for people with deadly brain tumors.

A hilarious and yet insightful riff on how one can use the placebo effect – even knowing the “medicine” is fake – to achieve positive-desired outcomes.  

Gorgeous photolithographic depictions of slices of human brain.

== On Planet Earth ==

One of the best written and most fascinating science articles I’ve read in some time, describes recent work on metamorphic rocks in Canada (one of the geologically least-altered places on Earth) where tubelike structures have many of the chemical and physical traits suggestive of primitive life forms… only these would have formed at least 3.8 billion years ago, just as the planet was finishing a pummeling under the Late Heavy Bombardment. If proved out, it would push back our knowledge of life’s history here by over 300 million years, implying that life appeared with stunning rapidity, and diversified early. Suggesting further it may be pervasive in the cosmos.  And believe it or not, I know some dour fellows who deem that to be very, very bad news.

What is the super Volcano under Naples up to? Italy has upgraded the threat level. I mentioned a Naples disaster in Existence.

The strength of Earth’s magnetic field has been decreasing for the last 160 years at an alarming rate. This collapse is centered in a huge expanse of the Southern Hemisphere, extending from Zimbabwe to Chile, known as the South Atlantic Anomaly. The magnetic field strength is so weak there that it’s a hazard for satellites that orbit above the region, potentially portending even more dramatic events, including a global reversal of the magnetic poles. The poles have reversed frequently over the history of the planet, but the last reversal is in the distant past, some 780,000 years ago. 

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is recognized as the biggest living structure on Earth. Unfortunately, it's dying—with many portions facing no hope for recovery—thanks to back to back mass bleaching events. 

== Curiosities and worries ==

Naked mole rats are just so weird! They have a social structure like insects, they're cold-blooded like reptiles, and now scientists found that they use fructose like a plant. This enables them to replace glucose oxidation and thus survive in conditions with ZERO oxygen for up to 20 minutes.  

An inspiring and well-written story about a statistician who discovered a proof to a major mathematical problem, at age 67.

Just released: these color-changing U.S. postage stamps commemorate the upcoming August 2017 solar eclipse. Also, download a free resource guide to the eclipse.

See Flightlapse: incredible video footage of the Milky Way galaxy, shot by a pilot from his cockpit.

Oh, but it is easy to forget what a vibrant, brave and logical and forward-looking civilization we had, and can have, when a fraction of our fellow citizens are afroth, enforcing upon us a war on science that is now explicit and tantamount to treason against our children. Scan the wonders listed above.  They are spilling forth faster than leaks from the Trump White House!

Fight for a civilization that makes you proud.