Science Updates!

== We are still busy, even while sabotaged ==

Among my messages that get the most buzz, is proclaiming that we need to be militant and proud! This spectacular and near-miraculous, scientific civilization can only be defended by folks who start by admitting it's wonderful. That the incessant campaign to undermine science - and every other fact-using profession - is an existential threat... not just to our nation, civilization and survival... but to something that may even be crucial to our galaxy.

Make no mistake, among all of the fact-using professions, science is the one that most stands in the way of an oligarchic-putsch. And hence, see how "Trump has tried to restrict science almost 100 times already."

A lot more than that, since I know of many cases not listed in this daunting compilation.

In sharp contrast, see my TED-style talk where I castigated the theme song of whining Baby Boomers ("I'm mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!") and called for it to be replaced by something vastly smarter and more useful.

== Worrisome news ==

Each year a  report, titled Global Catastrophic Risks, is based on the latest scientific research, and contains contributions from leading academic experts all over the world, detailing major global risks, and provides a summary of what actions are being taken to manage them. Of course nearly all of them can be addressed by a confident, transparent and scientific civilization. Failed models like “traditional” feudalism will not work.

But danger can be stunningly beautiful! “Hurricane Harvey as a ball of swirling sea salt. Hurricane Irma scooping up the sands of the Sahara. Hurricane Ophelia, bizarrely, taking smoke from Portugal and pulling it up to the coast of Ireland. A new visualization from NASA shows the hurricanes from 2017 season from a new perspective — that is, their impact on particles carried in the wind.” 

Dig it, the folks doing this are smart and know stuff.  Alas, in 2017 that makes them the enemy, at least according to those who cry: "ignore all the category 5 storms that used to be rare!"

Ah but.. The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history, while confederates fiddle in denial, Earth burns.

== Ah, the future (sci fi) is here ==

Tentatively, we may have edged forward a notch in understanding the origins of life. Scripps chemists found a compound, diamidophosphate (DAP), that seems to have played a crucial role in the formation of cell-based biochemistry, allowing for the combining of three ingredients that are critical to early life forms — short nucleotide strands to store genetic information in, short amino acid chains to carry out the majority of cell work, and lipids to form cell wall structures.. It was even shown to phosphorylate simple sugars, which could have led to the creation of carbohydrates that supported the formation of early life.

And now this... Mail-order DNA CRISPR kits allow anyone to hack DNA: Some would call this the Beginning of the End and the solution to the Fermi Paradox.  In EARTH and EXISTENCE, I called such desktop gene splicers "MolecuMacs": Desktop kits will enable hobbyists... biohackers to edit bacterial DNA (for only $170 -- now on Amazon).

== Biomedicine ==

Researchers have experimented with psychedelics with more rigor lately, including LSD and psilocybin the main ingredient in magic mushrooms, which seem likely to be added to treatments for depression. After the treatment, there was less blood flow in the part of the brain that is involved in emotion processing, called the amygdala. 

Weird. Men who received blood from women who had been pregnant were more likely to have died after three years, compared to men who received blood from a male donor or from a woman who had never been pregnant. Well, I’m doing my part. I just reached my 11^th donated gallon.  That’s over 40 liters, to you modern folk….

In a small study researchers found that most dyslexics had dominant round spots in both eyes - rather than in just one - leading to blurring and confusion. They discovered differences in the shape of spots deep in the eye where red, green and blue cones - responsible for colour - are located. In non-dyslexics, they found that the blue cone-free spot in one eye was round and in the other eye it was oblong or unevenly shaped, making the round one more dominant. But in dyslexic people, both eyes had the same round-shaped spot, which meant neither eye was dominant.

An Australian-made 3D-printed  titanium and polymer sternum and ribcage has successfully been implanted into a 20-year-old. The movie KickAss was prophetic.

I always suspected this: “Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.  That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics…. (T)here’s evidence to suggest that there’s a burst of brain energy as someone dies.”

== In other news ==

These people have one thing in common  ... they don't exist.  These face images were generated in NVIDIA's research lab by an artificial neural network.  These people don't seem to be residents of Uncanny Valley to me.  

Unlucky dinosaurs! Scientists estimate that only 13% of the Earth’s surface would make the perfect target for the 10km asteroid that struck Earth 66million years ago. Anywhere else, and the gases and aerosols spewed into the atmosphere would likely have been a bit milder, allowed some dinos to survive the ensuing winter.

Underwater archaeologists return to excavate the Antikythera Shipwreck.

Urban quadcopter taxis will arrive soon. The software for quadcopters is very well-developed and AirBus is betting that the battery energy density is improving fast enough. Expect to see more flying taxis and services within the next few years as the technology is further developed and tested.  Especially in LA, where, until last year, all high rises had to have flat-tops and heliports.  That rule ironically ended just before this new era!

== And back to the war to save us ==

VITAL (non-Brin) Weekend reading: The most recent edition of The World Post (carried on the WP site) is one of the most important ever, compiling a dozen links about how not-helpless we are, to deal with climate change.  Hope can be more disturbing and demanding than "all-is-lost" nihilism! But in fact, we may be able to turn the corner on this, if our ship's tiller can be yanked out of the hands of rich morons.

--- EXAMPLES: "From the oil belt of California’s San Joaquin Valley, Bridget Huber reports that climate policies are not killing jobs, but creating them. Through the prism of on-the-job training and apprenticeship programs of the ironworkers’ and electrical workers’ unions in Fresno, she traces the return of robust job and wage growth to what had become a depressed economic zone. This is largely thanks to state mandates to meet requirements for renewable energy production. “Solar saved our bacon,” one veteran ironworker told her. Also contributing in a major way to high-wage employment, she reports, are the construction jobs associated with California’s massive high-speed rail project running through the region.

"Brian Barth reports from farms in eastern North Carolina where pork production giant Smithfield Foods — the largest producer of pork in the world — has rolled out efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of its meat production “According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” writes Barth, “agriculture accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as the combined total for electricity and heating, and well above the transportation sector, which contributes just 14 percent. Add emissions from refrigeration, shipping and other activities required to get your dinner from farm to plate, and the food system’s share of global greenhouse gases climbs to roughly a third, making it easily the most climate-unfriendly sector of the global economy.”

"Barth discusses Paul Hawken’s book “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution,” in which the environmentalist lays out the top 100 solutions to climate change. Of these, “11 are related to food systems, seven to energy systems and none to transportation systems. Electric vehicles are #26, while ‘tree intercropping’ — planting strips of apple trees throughout a corn field, for example — is #17. The top food-related practices — reducing food waste (#3) and switching to a plant-rich diet (#4) — are largely consumer-driven solutions.” Yet Barth’s reporting suggests that farmers and producers play a crucial part in reducing emissions as well. Barth also discusses silvopasture — a “mashup of forestry and grazing” — which is the highest-ranked agricultural solution to climate change in Hawken’s analysis.

"The challenge for all these distributed cases of climate action is how to scale them up to realize the potential for massive change as the clock ticks. The political roadblocks of vested interests which always resist change aside, what has been true throughout history is that, in the end, scale and resources follow cultural commitments. That commitment will only grow deeper if society becomes more fully aware of the whole picture of what it is already doing."

First a pro-forma announcement: “Just so you know: there are no 3rd party ads on my site. No guest posts. No one can buy a slot or a referral. I try always  to  attribute quotations, especially lengthy excerpts. And yes, I write this much. Phew.”