In The Departure I call this Gene Bank.
Tag: Science
Arsenic-based Life.
Ah, so this was what all the fuss was about:
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical12.02.10 Image of Mono Lake Research area
NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
“The definition of life has just expanded,” said Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it.”
NASA Announcement
Here’s a bit more on that upcoming NASA announcement. Still the rumour mills are turning and no one really knows what’s going to be said.
It could be arsenic based life on Earth, life on Mars or life on Titan. Who knows? The announcement is at 2.00PM EST which is, I think, 7.00PM GMT???
Update:
Here’s the Register’s take on it. I guess the clue is in the words: “a finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”.
WTF!
Thanks to Jan Harald Fonas for putting this my way. I wonder what, exactly, it means?
…
WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
…
Solar Death Ray
Well, it’s not quite the Elysium smelter mirrors, but it’s getting there…
Parasites.
A couple of evenings back I watched an episode of QI, which often comes out with some interesting facts. This particular episode touched on something that’s been a fascination of mine for some years: parasites (and I don’t mean the human kind). Here’s the little darling they were talking about:
The Spotted Rose Snapper Fish, which lives off the coast of California, is oft victim to another freaky parasite. The Cymothoa exigua parasite, a type of crustacean, swims into the fish’s mouth and attaches itself at the base of the poor Snappers tongue. It leeches blood from its victim and as it grows, the tongue withers and dies due to lack of blood supply. Eventually when the tongue dies completely, either diminishing or falling off, the parasite then switches places with the stump and acts as a working replacement for the organ, allowing the fish to use it just like a normal tongue.
The parasite spends the rest of its life living off both the fish’s blood and bits of food that enter the fish’s mouth. The Cymothoa exigua is the only parasite known to effectively replace a body organ.
If any of you have read any of the interviews with me you’ll know that The Skinner and the ensuing Spatterjay books can all be traced back to one instance. I was loaned a book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms) by a vet, and read through it with growing fascination. I think the thing that got me first was the sheer number of transformations in the lifecycles of various parasites when, before, the limit of my knowledge on such changes was egg-caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly, and how some parasites actually change their host for their own benefit. Two of them stuck in my mind. One includes both ants and sheep in its life cycle. It interferes with the ant’s brain and makes it climb to the top of a stalk of grass and cling there, waiting for a grazing sheep. Another gets inside a snail to breed, but to protect itself, causes the snail to grow a thicker shell. Here, with Cymothoa exigua, are a few more.
This reading resulted in various short stories: The Thrake, The Gurnard, Out of the Leaflight, Choudapt, Spatterjay and Snairls. They then resulted in the novella no one can get hold of: The Parasite. Then I took two short stories, Spatterjay & Snairls, and on the basis of them wrote The Skinner. I definitely must read some more of this stuff.
Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Iron Man
I picked up the DVD of Iron Man in the supermarket about a year ago and have only just got round to watching it. What can I say? It was great fun and, if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do.
Of course the usual big hole was there: power supply. In this they got round it by ‘genius creates a palm-sized fusion reactor in a cave’. It’s the kind of thing we saw a lot in SF many decades ago but we’re too wise to go with now … or could it be that we’re too cynical and pessimistic? Thinking on this sort of thing let me to You Tube where I note that military exoskeletons are getting closer:
However, note the power cables. Power storage is always going to be a problem … unless of course you actually wear the battery?
Freeman Dyson
This article is pretty well-balanced for the New York Times, and very interesting. This particular paragraph had me chuckling:
At Jason, taking problems to Dyson is something of a parlor trick. A group of scientists will be sitting around the cafeteria, and one will idly wonder if there is an integer where, if you take its last digit and move it to the front, turning, say, 112 to 211, it’s possible to exactly double the value. Dyson will immediately say, “Oh, that’s not difficult,” allow two short beats to pass and then add, “but of course the smallest such number is 18 digits long.” When this happened one day at lunch, William Press remembers, “the table fell silent; nobody had the slightest idea how Freeman could have known such a fact or, even more terrifying, could have derived it in his head in about two seconds.” The meal then ended with men who tend to be described with words like “brilliant,” “Nobel” and “MacArthur” quietly retreating to their offices to work out what Dyson just knew.
And this comment got to me too:
His older sister Alice, a retired social worker still living in Winchester, remembers how her brother “used to lie on the nursery floor working out how many atoms there were in the sun. He was perhaps 4.”
Dyson is a genius, but also a contrary and original thinker and, it seems, of a kind that we just don’t see so many of now. Where are the upcoming people like Einstein, Feynman, Oppenheimer and Bethe now? I wonder why we don’t see them? Maybe something to do with politicized consensus science? Being brilliant and original doesn’t really work in the groupthink that so much science has become.