Science progress and updates

It's science Wednesday! A report offering proof that we remain a vigorous, exploratory, vividly smart and fact-oriented civilization, despite efforts to crush all of that.

All right, you knew this was coming… if you subscribed to my Psi channel. Scientists Demonstrate Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans, through non-invasive sensors.

News showing all is not hopeless, if we invest (as historian Toynbee demanded) in our “creative castes” –

Better access to hydrogen? Pulsing electric current through a layered molybedenum telluride catalyst has allowed researchers to almost double the amount of hydrogen produced per millivolt of electricity used , helping make clean hydrogen a potentially valid fuel, especially if this can be combined with super-proliferation of things like Elon’s solar roof.

Separately! Another potential game changer – announced last March: solar cells that produce hydrogen as well as electricity.

== What we eat ==

Bear with me – this is all related: Universities starting to ban beef from their campus menus. This is something I’ve long spoken about and portrayed in Earth (1989) And yet, I am actually surprised how quickly the meme is taking hold, this very year. If all of this had come just two years earlier, it might have helped prevent the deliberate fires in the Amazon, this year. 

The campaign will gain steam, faster than any of us expected. Here’s a video denouncing factory farming. And yes, of course I expect to be a convert. Oh, but is a ‘healthy’ diet also better for the planet? It appears so. 

A new algae-based Eos Bioreactor is capable of sucking in as much carbon dioxide as 400 trees. But rather than consuming an acre of forest land, it measures just 63 cubic feet—smaller than a traditional telephone booth. Hypergiant plans to make its design open source, allowing businesses and individuals to build variants for easy integration in homes and offices spaces. The growing algae can be harvested and used as a high-protein food source, biofuel, or textile. Now if this can scale up to use sunlight falling on the south sides of urban buildings, we could see a major game changer!

What could combine all of this? Cities where tall buildings use the sunlight falling upon their entire sunward-facing sides, feeding in CO2 plus agricultural or sanitation effluent, getting hydrogen, algae and clean water. Exactly the technologies we’ll also need in space. If your corporation is planning to build a big edifice soon, consider talking folks into incorporating bio-reactive or urban-farming components along that sunward side.

And - a new bioreactor that captures as much carbon as an acre of trees.

And meanwhile, despite frenetic assistance from Republicans, the obsolete and poisonous coal industry keeps plummeting as states and power companies find cheaper, cleaner sources. Will Trump’s failure to deliver on this promise hurt him in Appalachia? Not likely. His voters care only about symbolism.

Oh, you cynics who wallow is gloom, will you admit that your snarls are based simply on laziness? How much simpler if there weren’t just tons of good news. Sorry, but there’s kilotons. And if you can’t participate alongside the innovators, at least you can get active politically, and help block the monsters who thwart science at every turn.

Another prediction happening: in Earth (1989), I portrayed Sea State using power-generating kites. Now Google’s “X” team at Makani has moved closer the day when a kite massing far, far less might generate as much power as a massive windmill tower.   One use here is offshore platforms, potentially floating ones, or getting small island nations off diesel generators.  Later, much more.

== Yipe! ==

Remember that nasty nuclear accident in northern Russia, a couple of months back? Here’s an interesting dissection of the kinds of "nuclear rocket” that Russians may have been testing in Archangelsk, before the explosion. And yes, such desperation plus incompetence combinations are really scary.

Note also it was one of three disasters just that month. Watch this amazing footage from the munitions dump going off in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Mythbusters eat your hearts out. Are we witnessing signs of a “cool war”?  Read the Frederik Pohl novel by that name. Seriously. 

The alternative is that the plague of utter incompetence that brought down the USSR hasn't changed much. Except competence at messing with others... as they are messing with us.

And just as dangerous. More powerful a greenhouse gas than methane, just one kilogram of Sulfur Hexa Flouride SF6 leaking from the electricity industry warms the Earth to the same extent as 24 people flying London to New York return.

== Biology Time! ==

Forget Spider-Man! I want to see Naked-Mole-Rat Queen! These guys (mostly gals)  are… amazing. And what a super-hero title. Say it a few times.

Aaaaand… Scientists in Japan have reported a new method which allows them to separate mouse sperm carrying an X chromosome from those carrying a Y chromosome, meaning that sperm can be selected based on whether they will result in female (XX) or male (XY) offspring when used to fertilize an egg. This is very mixed news. Yes, in culturally macho countries this will exacerbate the male-excess already caused by selective abortion and will be much harder to stop.  The result 20 years later could be a major fertility decline, helping save the planet(?) but also creating a huge pool of frustrated, mateless males. Dangerous… unless technology comes to the rescue. You know what technology I mean.

Bizarrely consistent with the old notion of "recapitulation," anatomists have found one of the oldest, albeit fleeting, remnants of evolution seen in humans -- muscle attachments seen in very early fetuses that we last roughly 250 million years old - a relic from when reptiles transitioned to mammals. Fascinating. And consistent with something else that I theorize may have happened at that same time... speculated in my story "Chrysalis," available in Insistence of Vision.

Why creative experts may be better at imagining the future: Dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC): Involved in social directed thought such as determining or inferring the purpose of others' actions. As part of the default mode network it is primal for “distal” or distant thinking about the future as well as empathy. The medial prefrontal cortex was activated when visualizing proximal  near term events. 

Platinum grains and such support the notion that there was an extraterrestrial impact or comet air burst that caused the Younger Dryas climate event, 12,800 years ago, leading to a mini ice age about the time that giant animals such as mastodons, mammoths, saber-toothed cats and ground sloths disappeared from the Earth. Well, contributed, maybe. But not too long before there had been real ice ages. The suddenness might have amplified the effects. But I still put money on a different kind of stony impacts. Spear-points. 

== Miscellany! ==

From the brilliant Stephen (“Mathematica”) Wolfram -- just published: Adventures of a Computational Explorer (assisted by a blurb from yours truly ;-) “Most of the pieces I wrote in response to some particular situation or event. Their topics are diverse. But it’s remarkable how connected they end up being. And at some level all of them reflect the paradigm for thinking that has defined much of my life.

It all centers around the idea of computation, and the generality of abstraction to which it leads.”

One more for the prediction registry? “It Slices, It Dices, It Binds, And Stops Bugs: Dental Floss Is Your Secret Multitool.” Yeah. In The Practice Effect, my hero uses dental floss to tear down a wall and escape from prison.