Solar Storms, Solar Cells, the Origin of Life and more...

It's been a while since I've posted a science roundup.  But I figure you all are tired of my socio-political rants and could use a break!  So... (while other authors are obsessing on the suddenly volcanic "civil war in science fiction")... let's dive into the "biggest" scientific news...

The Milky Way galaxy may be at least 50 percent larger than is commonly estimated, according to new findings that reveal that the galactic disk is contoured into several concentric ripples.  These - in turn - may have serious implications re past extinction events, as I prophesied in a long ago Analog Magazine article "The Deadly Thing at 2.4 kiloparsecs."

== Origins? ==

In a step forward toward illuminating the origin of life, some chemists report that a pair of simple compounds, which would have been abundant on early Earth, can give rise to a network of simple reactions that produce the three major classes of biomolecules — nucleic acids, amino acids, and lipids—required for the earliest form of life to get its start. The team created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), and ultraviolet (UV) light. Conditions that produce nucleic acid precursors also create the starting materials needed to make natural amino acids and lipids.

I noted long ago that this was already true of the molecules based on adenine....

Of course it gets frustrating. Each time we take a step forward on the long trail of “solving f(L)” (the Drake Equation term for the fraction of water worlds that might develop life), it just shows that there’s a next step, and a next one!  True, every step revealed so far has proved to be very, very easy for nature to have achieved, on the ancient Earth.  

But those who deny evolution always backpedal, move the goal posts and shout “well the NEXT one after that will prove too hard to achieve just by chance!”  Is it any coincidence these folks overlap so much with the other - much more dangerous - climate denialist cult?

Okay then? Go ahead and keep moving the goal-posts. We’ll just keep marching downfield.

== Solar Tech =

In only five years of development, hybrid perovskite solar cells showed the same power conversion efficiencies that took decades to achieve with other types of top-performing materials.  

Notably, I had a hunch about this mineral form, which is not plentiful here on the Earth’s surface, but that makes up a large portion of the planet’s mantle layer. I speculated… in my 1989 novel EARTH … that some forms of perovskite would be found to have high temperature superconducting properties (and some research suggests this may be so) and semiconducting properties, like those that make them good candidates for solar cells. 

Okay, it may be too soon for the predictions registry. (Pages about my novel EARTH track such predictions. And the climactic events in EARTH ... that make very very large scale use of these perovskite properties... may be low probability.)

Meanwhile...the utilities industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.  e.g. an Arizona utility voted to impose a monthly surcharge of about $50 for “net metering,” a common practice that allows solar customers to earn credit for the surplus electricity they provide to the electric grid.

Yes, it is true that the shared grid must be maintained and has real value. We need a conversation how to do that.  But there is pure guilt-by-association, here.  So long as this campaign is pushed and financed by carbon barons, we can safely assume that the utilities’ excuses are feigned and that they have chosen alliance not with us or our children, but with the devil.

 == Technology and the Future =

A ground-breaking super-fast 3D printing technique, Carbon3D, can grow elastic objects from resin -- using a process called Continuous Liquid Interphase Printing, or CLIP. 

Watch the TED talk: What if 3D printing was 100x faster?

Next up: Turning smartphones into personal, real-time pollution monitors. 

Want to see this extended magnificently?  Follow the Tricorder X Prize program! The medical examiner /director of this pioneering venture -- Erik Viirre -- has his office two doors down from mine at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD, where the test tricorder modules will arrive in just three weeks!

A recent study by University of Waterloo researchers suggests that smart phone users who are intuitive thinkers tend to use search engines rather than their own brainpower.  

Will cyborg beetles fly into danger zones to help with search and rescue?

Are the “vaxxer” types always wrong? Right and left, they do share with the rest of us an instinctive feel that more eyes should be looking for problems that just the “establishment.’  I agree with that!  Take this example, where states with fluoridated water might – (possibly preliminary-maybe) – feature higher rates of ADHD.  Eyes open!  But also… um… it does no good to discredit yourself when you wage war on science itself.

(LATE NOTE: Apparently, the anti-flouride study reported in Newsweek was authored by two psychologists. It was published in Environmental Health Journal, a for-profit, advertiser-supported journal that charges authors $2,020 per article. Looks like more decline in journalistic professionalism. But yay for our community of commenters (e.g. David Galiel.))

== Solar Storms ==

Wow, I am not sure I know what to make of this video, Magnetic Storms, Solar Eruptions. At one level it seems a vastly multilayered "weather report" that starts with the sun and moves through almost every look at Earth that can be packed into five minutes of distilled instrumentation data, gorgeously rendered.

 Sure, alarm bells went off when the narrator seemed to correlate some things that... well, linking solar coronal holes to earthquakes in the Caribbean stretched my credulity.  On the other hand, this site does illustrate the truly vast amounts of information that science is starting to give us directly, as citizens, to collate and interpret as we will! Isn't that the way things ought to be?

And so, what this guy is doing will become ever more common, and reciprocally competitive. Moreover, that an amateur compilation should weave together so much pro-data is... well... tasty to this coiner of the term "Age of Amateurs."

There is an over-arching lesson. All of the people who created these wonders are declared enemies by the Murdochian cult, that yammers at American conservatives that they should and must hate science.

So boys? Then show us your smartest people. James Imhofe?  Ted Cruz? Sean Hannity? The fellow who illustrates how low libertarianism has fallen -- Rand Paul?

Oh, I believe you.  They probably are.

And Finally...

This video is wonderful! Hermit crabs line up to exchange shells. Nature is amazing and here’s proof that mutual benefit can be compellingly practical.  (But after watching the cool video, read the whole article, all the way to the end.)