The Roots…and Future... of Humanity

== Digging into the roots of humanity ==

In a study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Medicine and the University of Cologne, it was found that the children of obese mothers who subsisted on a high-fat diet during the course of their pregnancy are at a higher risk for obesity and related metabolic disorders all their lives.

But help is on the way!  The world's first genetically modified babies have been born -- with genes from three parents. This news is not quite as big as it sounds.  The third parent only contributed the mitochondria of the fertilized egg, so no meddling in the chromosomal "human DNA" parts happened.  Still, it is a milestone.

More meddlesome methods are coming! Utilizing the he CRISPR/Cas9 method, RNA can be specifically designed to cut a particular part of the genome, allowing specific genes to be targeted. Once cut, the gene can be knocked out or replaced with a slightly different copy to replace faulty ones with healthy copies. Now, in China, this method has been used to alter the first "GM monkeys."

And in the same … vein… researchers at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) have developed a robotic “nanobiopsy” system that can extract tiny samples from inside a living cell without killing it. The single-cell nanobiopsy technique is a powerful tool for scientists working to understand the dynamic processes that occur within living cells. While the therapeutic and scientific uses are huge, it might also affect the Singularity Movement… by determining whether or not intracellular computing  takes place to any large degree.  If it does, then the dream of replicating human cognition in-silico may be many more Moore's Law doublings away.

And what about those human roots? As few as 300 matings could have inserted the Neanderthal heritage in the genome of the common ancestors of Europeans and East Asians. The strongest remnant of our Neanderthal heritage appears to be centered around as-yet unknown changes in skin and hair that likely proved advantageous. 

Take a look at this video showing one anthropologist's best reconstructions for the evolution of the human face over seven million years.

Where are we headed? The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, explores the  threats humanity faces now…and in the future. In fact, even if humanity does mark the "anthropocene" with devastation through nature, there have been five preceding MAJOR mass extinctions… but very many more of lesser types. Frankly, I am amazed that by 2014 the worst forecasts have not (yet?) come true.  Are we in the process of wising up in time?  You gotta hope so.  You gotta work to make it so.

Of course, remamber we can be replaced! With a plummeting shrimp industry, fishermen in the US southeast are throwing nets to collect… jellyfish. Certain types that are loved by Asian countries… and by sea turtles… are being harvested by the kilotons. As the seas appear to be trending more friendly to jellies and less so for fish. (As I portray in Existence.) Let's consider before thoughtlessly changing the Earth too much.

And finally… while we're on the bio-news… why has the rate of abortions in the US declined so steeply?  Explanations range from interesting to flat-out absurd.

== Technology! ==

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) can be used as a potential therapeutic tool to control and train specific targeted brain regions. A new brain-imaging technique enables people to ‘watch’ their own brain activity in real time and to control or adjust function in pre-determined brain regions.  Will this finally lead to those excellent teaching-games  we were promise 20 years ago?

This animation of a mouse brain looks like driving down a highway and watching buildings on the roadside appearing, becoming larger, and then shrinking in the rearview.

From Elon Musk: Forward-looking Innovations that will change our future.

As crystalline silicon module prices crashed in recent years, developers and installers benefitted greatly from the low prices and sudden economic feasibility of solar in new markets. Now attention is paid to reducing racking and mounting cost and microinverters and high-voltage configurations stand to accelerate those reductions.

== Sustaining our world ==

 Cool roofs — painted white or other light colors to reflect sunlight — as well as green (vegetation covered)  roofs have surged in popularity as cities such as New York promote their use and research shows they lower the need for air conditioning. Now comes another federally funded study that reinforces that idea — with caveats.  "Each can completely offset the warming due to urban expansion and can even offset the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions," says the study author.  A newer Berkeley Lab study, published online last month, found white roofs are more cost-effective than black or green ones over a 50-year period when installation, maintenance and a building's subsequent energy use are considered. But that leaves out the edible produce from green roofs!

We've all seen calculations comparing sustainables to fossil fuels… and undeniable is the trend -- much faster than anyone expected -- for solar and wind etc to break even with oil and coal. We should all rejoice (all except the coal and middle-eastern-petro princes)… though I think not without a tinge of gratitude for the biggest thing that fossil fuels gave us: an industrial revolution that lifted billions out of poverty, raising generations of children so comfortable that they could then start contemplating the dismal side effects of over-reliance on fossil fuels!

(If you are unable to appreciate ironies, then you are WAY too dogmatic.  Loosen up.)

But there is one calculation we never see… thermodynamic comparison of the total investment costs of fossil fuels by the Earth, weighing in the inefficiencies of the hundred million years it took to cook each utterly irreplaceable pool of liquid gold down there.  According to this study, solar is better by a ratio of 100,000:1!  All right, that Big Picture Perspective is too grand, even for me.  Still….

== physical stuff! ==

Did Google buy a "quantum computer" that's not-so-quantum, after all?  It's harder than you might think, to tell the difference, at least in these early days.  A month or two ago, preliminary models suggested D-Wave's machine "did the Q."  Now, researchers at IBM reveal it may not necessarily be so.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have invented a plasmonic graphene nano-antenna that can be efficiently used at millimeter radio wavelengths, taking one more step toward smart dust. Utility fog. Programmable matter. Grey and blue goo. Cooperating swarms of micron-sized devices (motes) offer completely new solutions and capabilities that can hardly be imagined. Except… well… by Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear and at least one other science fiction author I could name…

And now some good news? At least under some sets of assumptions and parameters,  the Large Hadron Collider appears to have excluded having seen any signs of the production of micro-black holes.  So… my doom scenario in EARTH is impossible? Reassuring… a little bit.

Can we see inside super-dangerous volcanoes like Vesuvius? Hiroyuki Tanaka of the University of Tokyo reasoned that the throat of a volcano could be "x-rayed" with energetic muons produced in cosmic-ray showers. The number of muons passing through the volcano would depend on the density of intervening rock, so measuring the number of muons passing through various parts of the volcano could yield a crude, 3-D view of the interior.  One of the fellows with a NASA NIAC grant showed us even more spectacular potential uses for this method… a way to peer inside asteroids!

== Astronomy! And space! ==

The oldest star (known so far) in the universe (13.7 billion years) was found using ANU's Skymapper, which has a "unique" ability to "find stars with low iron from their color." This comes in handy for stars such as this one which the astronomers believe to be a "first star" originating from the earliest days of the Big Bang itself.

A new map of asteroids developed by researchers from MIT and the Paris Observatory charts the size, composition, and location of more than 100,000 asteroids throughout the solar system, and shows that "rogue" asteroids are more common than previously thought.

Looking to our future in space: In 2018, NASA hopes to put a rover on the Moon. RESOLVE will sift through the Moon’s regolith (loose surface soil) and heat them up, looking for traces of hydrogen and oxygen, which can then be combined to make water. A similar payload would be attached to Curiosity’s successor, which is currently being specced out by NASA and will hopefully launch in 2020. This second IRSU experiment will probably suck in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, filter out the dust, and then process the CO2 into oxygen.

More about NASA soon, with my report from the annual NIAC Symposium!

== Ah… the climate ==

The US government is creating seven new "climate hubs" that will help everyday people, particularly farmers, handle the effects of global warming, which have recently caused wild gyrations of drought and record temperatures alternating with severe storms and winter plunges -- exactly as the models predicted. Only we should stop calling it Global Warming and use"climate instability."  Let's see the denialists worm their way out of that one. See my article: Perspectives on Climate Change and the Ritualization of Denial.

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United States and a few countries in Europe, CO2 emissions have not dropped back to those levels.  What might it mean? Reports Science2.0: "Climate scientists have been scrambling to explain it and think they have an answer; rearrangement in the energy flow of the climate system and how the ocean stores heat. Scientists have speculated that one of the causes of this ‘plateau’ in sea-surface temperature could be a change in the exchange of ocean water between warm, surface waters and cold, deep waters below 700 m – as if the warming is ‘hiding’ underwater. Temperature measurements at this depth cover a relatively short period.

But the warm water won’t hide below the surface forever: scientists believe that it may re-emerge later or affect other climate indicators, such as sea level or ocean circulation."

Indeed, more and more cracks appear in the Edifice of Deliberate Lobotomization.  For example… Televangelist Pat Robertson reacted Wednesday to the big debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham over the age of the Earth and so on. Robertson actually took issue with one of the central arguments of creationism and said it’s “nonsense” to say the world’s only six thousand years old. He brought up the findings of a bishop centuries ago who came up with that figure and said, “There ain’t no way that’s possible.”

Read the rest… and use it.

== and… ==

The oldest human footprints have been found outside Africa.

Right now, with a couple of exceptions, Africa's population density is relatively low; it's a very big continent more sparsely populated than, say, Europe or East Asia. That's changing very quickly. The continent's overall population is expected to more than quadruple over just 90 years.  The United Nations Population Division, which tracks demographic data from around the world, has dramatically revised its projections for what will happen in the next nine decades. The new statistics, based on in-depth survey data from sub-Saharan Africa, tell the story of a world poised to change drastically over the next several decades.

Steering the Future: on Earth and in the Heavens

Skype founder Jaan Tallin, in conjunction with the Gruber and Templeton Foundations, is sponsoring an essay contest: "How Should Humanity Steer the Future?"

"Dystopic visions of the future are common in literature and film, while optimistic ones are more rare. This contest encourages us to avoid potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of gloom and doom and to think hard about how to make the world better while avoiding potential catastrophes. Our ever-deepening understanding of physics has enabled technologies and ways of thinking about our place in the world that have dramatically transformed humanity over the past several hundred years. Many of these changes have been difficult to predict or control—but not all. In this contest we ask how humanity should attempt to steer its own course in light of the radically different modes of thought and fundamentally new technologies that are becoming relevant in the coming decades."

Ponder it!  But most of all, believe that we can steer the wheel of destiny. Cynics are of no use to anyone.

==Conquering the future==

 A look at...The Future of Transportation, by Sci Fi author William Hertling (The Last Firewall).

The Guinea worm may be the next human pathogen to be eliminated. 

Fellow author Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) on Why the future of war will be even bloodier.  Ouch. Got… to… make… Star Trek…

For a view that progress is possible, see Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, by Steven Johnson. 

== The libelous distraction that scientists are lemmings  ==

In The Very, Very Thin Wedge of Denial, Phil Plait discusses one stunning disparity between the blog-claims of climate change deniers and the way that actual mode-consensus is achieved by real scientists, who can read data and understand the Navier-Stokes Equations.

Fox-centered denialists claim that the 97% of atmospheric scientists who agree that humans are altering the climate (less than 1% dissent) are doing so out of lemming-like herd mentality, chasing pathetic Al Gore inspired grants -- never explaining how ditto-agreeing with a standard model will get any researcher even a penny. In fact, the top atmospheric scientists already have stable incomes (thank you) from their fantastically successful day-jobs creating (for example) the miraculous ten-day weather forecasts we now rely upon (much improved from a mere two hours, 20 years ago), or successfully modeling climate on six other planets. I know these guys and gals and lemmings they are not. Rather, top scientists are the smartest and most fearlessly competitive humans our species ever produced.

Plait offers an example of how the openly questioning competitive process works: "In 1998, two teams of researchers found evidence that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down, as expected, but actually speeding up. This idea is as crazy as holding a ball in your hand, letting go, and having it fall up, accelerating wildly into the sky. Yet those papers got published. They inspired lively discussion (to say the least) and motivated further observations. Careful, meticulous work was done to eliminate errors and confounding factors, until it became very clear that we were seeing an overturning of the previous paradigm. It took years, but now astronomers accept that the Universal expansion is accelerating and that dark energy is the culprit.

"Mind you, dark energy is far, far weirder than anything climate change deniers have come up with, yet it became mainstream science in a decade or so. Deniers have been bloviating for longer than that, yet their claims are rejected overwhelmingly by climate scientists. Why? Because they’re wrong."

Alas, Plait never mentions my own strongest argument against the denialist cult.  That their smug-pat jpegs and Fox-snips are all financed by the industry that will become less outrageously profitable if humanity develops more efficient energy systems. Promoting efficiency falls into the category of TWODA - or Things We Ought to be Doing Anyway.  Even if human generated climate Change were to prove 100% false, we would all be better off for taking reasonable measures toward energy efficiency… and those so vigorously preventing TWODA are enemies of our species, no matter how many twisted ways you rationalize or cut it.

== Science miscellany! ==

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) researchers are developing an electrodynamic tether designed to generate electricity that will slow down space-based debris.  Such a system features prominently in chapter one of my novel Existence, written when this notion was a glimmer in the eye of brilliant space engineer Joseph Carroll, who almost singlehandedly kept the technological doors open for this approach to solving problems in space.  It's good to see the problem of space debris given serious attention, perhaps inspired by the movie GRAVITY.

In my fiction I have oft portrayed "gill masks" that allow a diver to extract oxygen directly from the surrounding water.  Has this miracle already arrived?  I would bet no.  But how cool if this actually works?

Ultrasound is one of several noninvasive methods that stimulate the brain. Another is transcranial magnetic stimulation, which apparently provokes more activity in the brain with magnets. A third is transcranial direct current stimulation, which uses electrodes to deliver a weak electrical current to the brain through the scalp. The new study suggests that ultrasound may be the best of the bunch.  (Though I still think reading is a more effective way to stimulate thinking. ) Oh what a brave (or interesting) new world.

This spring will also see the premiere of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. According to Deadline, the series will debut on Fox on March 9th at 9PM, with bonus footage coming to the National Geographic Channel a day later at 10PM. Tyson's show is a reboot of Carl Sagan's revered Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, a short series with a broad scientific focus that first aired in 1980. Tyson's Cosmos will explore the discovery of physics, with a promise to present complicated concepts in clear ways and with a proper dose of grandeur.

== Looking outward…to Space! ==

Terrific footage of the new Chinese "Jade Rabbit" lunar lander, at touchdown and then letting the rover roll off, putting new human tacks onto Luna.  Congratulations!

Dennis Tito has a backup for his plan to  take advantage of a once-per-30- years opportunity for a Free Return flyby past Mars -- like Apollo 8 & 13, there would thus be no need to schlepp a landing capsule or return fuel, bringing a human crewed Mars mission forward by perhaps 30 years. (Tito wants to send a "qualified, older married couple" ...and my wife reminded me we both have PhDs in Planetary Science and the kids are almost out of the nest!)

Alas, with less than 5 years to prepare, there seems no way Tito and his Inspiration Mars team can pull this off. Especially now that NASA has begged off Tito's request for $700M and use of the new NASA heavy launch system. Still, all may not be lost.  "There is a backup to the proposed 2018 flyby to Mars mission which envisions a 2021 launch that would feature flybys of both Venus and Mars. That would add 88 days to the just over 500 day mission and would involve more radiation hazards to the two person crew."  Also, since $700M is kind of chump change for such a major undertaking, Tito has begun talking to the Russians and the Chinese.

Including Venus may add some radiation hazard. But Yipe. To be first living humans to TWO planets? And I would get so much writing done, while huddled inside the water tank, hiding from cosmic rays!

So…. Has there been a recent "collapse" in funding for planetary exploration? It appears to be so, at least in the United States.  Have a look at a simple chart from The Planetary Society showing how our efforts to explore outward, which had been rebuilding in the first Obama term, suddenly fell to pieces amid the battles over shutdowns and health care.  This merits your attention. (Though always look at such charts to see if the bottom was chopped-off!)

Redefining the Habitable Zone: Here is good discussion of the Sun's "goldilocks" or Continuously Habitable Zone, where water might remain on the surface in liquid form for evolutionary time scales.  And a related article on the search for "life" exoplanets. Yet again we see that Earth might be exceptional in one way… that we skate near the inner edge of our sun's CUZ. Which helps explain why even a little human generated greenhouse gas can make a real difference… and may help to explain the Fermi Paradox.

The European Space Agency plans to re-awaken the Rosetta Probe!  It has been dormant out at more than 4 AU, saving energy till the day its orbit could approach a comet from behind at a great distance (the only way it can be done: you listening Hollywood?)  The hope?  To "land" on the comet before it gets too active and study its physical characteristics.  Then, harpooned to the surface, attempt to ride out the violent passage by the sun that we described in HEART OF THE COMET.  Hoping to learn how much my doctoral dissertation got right!

Is Mining on the Moon's Horizon? Moon Express, based in Mountain View, Calif., just unveiled the design for a small robot spacecraft about the size of a coffee table that it says could move about the moon's surface powered only by solar panels and hydrogen peroxide. The company hopes to build the robot and send it to the moon by late 2015, win the $30 million Lunar X Prize from Google for the first privately funded moon rover, and eventually get around to putting on the moon an operation capable of extracting valuable minerals.  

Um what minerals are they talking about?  I know of none to be found in that wasteland that we can at-present use. Sorry, you luna-tics out there, but in the near term, asteroids are vastly the better bet… though I do approve of some continuing lunar activity!  The best possibility?  Let billionaires finance it with tourism junkets.  Call it money-recycling that will have a positive outcome.

Telescopes that unfold light weight plastic optics, these may open up a new era of astronomy or earth science -- or spying -- in space.

Kinda weird.  Using gravitational "microlensing" -- an almost-fey capability that would have given George Ellery Hale the creeps -- a team thinks they have found a candidate for a pair of bodies comprising a free-floating exoplanet-exomoon system.  Wooof!

Most common exoplanets are weird 'mini-Neptunes.' "Mini-Neptunes dominate the inventory of 3000-plus planets discovered by Kepler," says lead scientist and planet-hunter Geoff Marcy.  Worlds up to twice the size of Earth are dense and probably rocky, resembling our own planet. Those between two and four times Earth's width are lighter, so are either wetter or gassy – more like versions of Neptune, which is itself four times Earth's width.  Several observational bias effects make it difficult to make good statistical predictions based on the Kepler discoveries.  But every month we seem to have new "huh!" stuff to ponder!

Folks ask me for examples re my prediction of a looming "Age of Amateurs" in which ever-more expertise will be found in realms outside of the licensed professions… in avocations, retirees and so on. The trends are all around us, but nowhere more vividly than in amateur science.  See this especially vivid example of a passion for astronomy.  And yes, I portray this becoming dramatically important, in some fiction.

And finally. This optical illusion is so so SO worth your time.  I mean it.  You'll thank me.

== Late flash from Mars ==

This very recently from the Curiosity Rover: a mysterious rock appeared on the planet's surface that wasn't there just a few weeks ago.  Strange properties!