HoodedHawk

Cool! I just won an advance reading copy of the novel “Frozen Fire” by Bill Evans and Marianna Jameson. I had entered a drawing for this on the Tor website a few weeks ago and…guess what arrived in my mailbox today? Not bad, since they only gave away 50 copies. It’s an eco-thriller; I’ll put it on my queue and let y’all know how it is once I get to it. It officially comes out on June 23, 2009.

Tonight I went to a booksigning and a panel of SF authors at Reiter’s Scientific Bookstore in DC. Among the authors present were: Dr. Catherine Asaro, Greg Bear, Bud Sparhawk, Tom Purdom, Tom Ligon, Yoji Kondo (Eric Kotani), John Hemry (Jack Campbell), Charles E. Gannon, and Dr. Arlan Andrews. The roundtable discussion topic was “How Science Fiction Changes Everything” - How Science Fiction Serves the National Interest. The Washington Science Fiction Association also sponsored the event.

Catherine Asaro

Some (all?) members of the panel are also members of SIGMA:

SIGMA is a group of science fiction writers who offer futurism consulting to the United States government and appropriate NGOs. We provide a new concept in public service “think tanks”– an association of speculative writers who have spent careers exploring the future. Many of us have earned Ph.D.s in high tech fields, and some presently hold Federal and defense industry positions. Each is an accomplished science fiction author who has postulated new technologies, new problems and new societies, explaining the possible science and speculating about the effects on the human race.

The event was mostly the panel fielding questions from the audience. I enjoyed the evening; it was quite interesting to hear the viewpoints of various SF authors, especially Bear and Asaro, as I’m a fan of both. At the signing Dr. Asaro mentioned that the cover of Alpha was her favorite. The artist was going to go with a flowing gown, but she told him, no, I’d rather look like this:

SF Authors: Bear, Asaro, etc. Roundtable at Reiter's Bookstore

Greg Bear

Greg Bear

 

Lisa Randall at Smithsonian

On Friday (April 24, 2009) I went to see Physicist Lisa Randall receive the Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award from The Smithsonian Associates and the Creativity Foundation. Professor Randall discussed the role of creativity in her life and work with University of Chicago professor Michael Turner. The talk was in the Baird Auditorium of the National Museum of Natural History - nice venue!

After the talk I was able to get Prof. Randall to sign my copy of her book, “Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions“. Great book!

From the press release:

Randall is best known for her work involving extra dimensions of space, or “warped” geometries, and her suggestion that could explain the relative weakness of gravity and that we may live in a world with an infinite extra dimension—possibly even in a three-dimensional sinkhole in a higher-dimensional universe. This has resulted in her being one of the most-cited theoretical physicists in the world. Time magazine included her in its 2007 list of the 100 most influential people, and Newsweek cited Randall as “one of the most promising theoretical physicists of her generation.” Her book “Warped Passages” was included in the New York Times’ list of the 100 most notable books of 2005.

Randall is a professor of physics at Harvard University and is tenured at Princeton and MIT. She has served on the editorial boards of several major journals and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Oh, they just don’t make science kits like they did 50 years ago. This one came with radioactive sources. It was $50.00 at the time (and can fetch more than $7000.00 if you can find one now):

The set came with four types of uranium ore, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source (Ru-106), a gamma source (Zn-65?), a spinthariscope, a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a geiger counter, a manual, a comic book (Dagwood Splits the Atom) and a government manual “Prospecting for Uranium.”

Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951)

Preston, Dylan and I went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History yesterday. Preston just loved the Insect Zoo. No way was Dylan going to hold a bug, but it was hard to keep Preston away. He also held a big beetle, but I couldn’t get a picture as I had to help keep Preston from squishing it.

Click any picture below for larger slideshow…

The new Ocean Hall is quite good. Even Dylan was impressed by the giant jellyfish (seen in foreground). Full-size right whale hangs from the ceiling, and videos of ocean scenes line the walls. Lots of informative exhibits about the ocean.

A lot more pictures are viewable via the Photography page (Natural History link)

 

The Vatican press office today had a presentation on an upcoming conference, “Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A critical appraisal 150 years after ‘The Origin of Species’”. The event is due to take place in Rome from March 3 to 7, 2009. The congress has been jointly organized by the Pontifical Gregorian
University in Rome and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, U.S.A., under the patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Saverio Forestiero, professor of zoology at Rome’s Torvergata University and a member of the organizing committee stated (emphasis mine):

“It is my view … that this congress represents an opportunity, neither propagandistic nor apologetic, for scientists, philosophers and theologians to meet and discuss the fundamental questions raised by biological evolution - which is assumed and discussed as a fact beyond all reasonable doubt - in order to examine its manifestations and causal mechanisms, and to analyse the impact and quality of the explanatory theories thus far proposed”.

and Fr. Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross said (again, emphasis mine):

“from the perspective of Christian theology, biological evolution and creation are by no means mutually exclusive. … None of the evolutionary mechanisms opposes the affirmation that God wanted - in other words, created - man. Neither is this opposed by the casual nature of the many events that happened during the slow development of life, as long as the recourse to chance remains a simple scientific reading of phenomena”.

From the conference website:

Thanks to recent discoveries, we can reconsider the problem of evolution within a broader perspective then traditional neo-darwinism. In particular, we refer to the role of epigenetical mechanisms in evolution as well as to new developments produced by the theory of complexity and by the study of incidence on the environment of living species, especially in regards to the value and significance of intelligent behaviour. In this context, which witnesses the intertwining of several fields of knowledge, an appropriate consideration is needed more than ever before.
…
The conference is organized into sections which will first present those facts that are known, then expand on the scientific theories that try to explain evolutionary mechanisms, on humanization, on philosophical questions and finally on the theological issues about Evolution.

I can’t make the conference, but I am definitely looking forward to the proceedings when they are published.

A 3-D image of Cleopatra has been rendered by computer imaging based on images from ancient artifacts.

Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton of Cambridge University says the image(s) reflect the Queen’s Greek heritage. Cleopatra was born in 69BC into an Egyptian - Greek dynasty. She took the throne at 17 and by 20 had seduced Julius Ceasar…

Xylocopa has a set of Alphabet blocks engraved with pictures of all the equipment and training a budding mad scientist will need:

A - Appendages | B - Bioengineering | C - Caffeine | D - Dirigible | E - Experiment | F - Freeze ray | G - Goggles | H - Henchmen | I - Invention | J - Jargon | K - Potassium | L - Laser | M - Maniacal | N - Nanotechnology | O - Organs | P - Peasants (with Pitchforks) | Q - Quantum physics | R - Robot | S - Self-experimentation | T - Tentacles | U - Underground Lair | V - Virus | W - Wrench | X - X-Ray | Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow | Z - Zombies

Also:

…the blocks have a super-secret built in encryption function - if you rotate any block 180 degrees, it’ll encode to ROT13. If it’s good enough for Adobe Acrobat, it’s good enough for Mad Science!

-via BoingBoing

Researchers at PennState have published the DNA sequence of an extinct Woolly Mammoth; see the news article at Nature.com, or the November 20, 2008 issue of Nature for a paper by Miller, et al. (Nature 456, 387-390: “Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth“).

Mammoths went extinct some 10,000 years ago, but have been found preserved in Russian permafrost. The hair from one of these preserved (mummified) ancient beasts was used to retrieve DNA. Hair is useful for such extractions as it is relatively easy to wash away contaminating (foreign) DNA.

One tidbit that I found quite interesting: where did the researchers get the Mammoth hair? They bought the hair on Ebay.com! You can too, for only $175.00 for 2.5 grams. Yes, the researchers did verify that this was actual mammoth hair. Anyway, the big question is whether or not we will shortly have a Mammoth clone. Short answer: not any time soon. This is just the first step, but is a major one.

Our ancestors did see live woolly mammoths; here’s a cave painting in France depicting one:

While:

…nanostructures are building blocks for many important technological advances, including high-performance solar cells and batteries, new methods of diagnosing and treating disease, next-generation computer processors and memory, and lightweight composite materials… [from Nanobama.com ]

you can also use them to create nifty structures like the Nanobama above, just for fun. Note that each of the Obama faces shown is made up of about 150 million nanotubes - about one for each person who voted in this election. And for scale: each face is only about 0.5mm wide (about 10 hair-widths). Created by a team at the University of Michigan.

See also: Mechanosynthesis.