News Roundup -- I'm not dead yet

Hey, a news post. I haven't done one of these for a while.

• Giant Squid: Fear them, reprinted by Slate to honor the fact that U.S. scientists accidently caught a giant squid this week. A humorous look at the scariest creature to live beneath the waves.


• Incidentally, this article on a new rewrite of a Jane Austen classic (this time with giant crabs and man eating jellyfish!) is worth a read. These things seem to be all the rage, these days. Why is it that Jane Austen novels seem to perk right up with the addition of Vampires, Zombies, or similar monsters? We may never know.


• EEStor requests UL certification for their Ultracapacitor. This is big news. EEStor has been in the news for a while now, touting a truly monstrous capacitor that could, potentially, give cars 300 miles of driving. With a five minute charge time. And cheaper than batteries. When can I get one of these for my laptop? Check out Wikipedia for some (still unverified) details on EEStor's technology. Fascinating stuff.


• Ice near equator on Mars and, in the same week, water discovered on the moon. It's been a good week for dihydrogen monoxide discoveries in space. Unfortunately, the moon water is found in such small quantities that it could be from solar wind, which would imply that it's a fairly ephemeral substance on the moon. Mars ice is much more exciting -- and frustrating, since the ice was discovered near the area where Viking-2 landed. The Viking program results indicated that Mars was a dry, dead world, with no water -- how would our image of the planet be different if Viking had dug four inches deeper and encountered ice, thirty some years ago? Hard to say... But it would certainly have changed NASA's direction away from the gas giants towards the inner planets.

Science News Roundup

Best of science news, straight to your RSS readers:

• A new algorithm for disc packing, which seems like a decent approach but also more than a bit heuristic. Without getting too derailed, I'm always amazed at how much theoretical computer science scoffs at the work necessary to solve real problems. This certainly seems more reasonable than strict, no-regret optimization.
• A new experiment finds that Dark Matter may be more complicated than previously thought. Pretty neat. Any article suggesting the existence of an as-yet-hypothetical "dark force" has to be an interesting read.
• Kepler launches successfully. I know lots of people were biting their nails about this one after the recent failure of the NASA OCO. Unfortunately, such failures are part of life with satellites. I'm glad to see that Kepler was successful and hopefully we'll see some excellent exoplanet data in the next couple years.

News Roundup: 28 February, 2009

Fresh from the intertubes, via my Google Reader:

• John McCain still doesn't like science funding, which is one of many reasons why academics and scientists probably lean democratic. Science funding is, in my humble opinion, one of the best things that the U.S. Government does. Of course, our economy is in a crisis and maybe science shouldn't be the number-one priority, but marking all science funding as "pork" is ridiculously short sighted and stinks of partisan badgering more than anything. Personally, I think that the funding marked in the article is a great use of public funds, as astronomy suffers from a shortage of good observatory time. Of course, never mind that funding science with grants like this produces more graduate students, allowing the U.S. to continue attracting bright people from other countries to study here. Fortunately, Obama seems to get this; see here for details on the science component of the most recent budget.
• An article on how NPR deals with solar outages. One thing noticeably missing from the article (maybe it's in the video -- I couldn't watch it) is a description of other problems faced by GSO satellites. For example, at night, the satellites pass into the Earth's shadow. Since the satellites are solar powered, this is not a happy time for the satellites, and a good chunk of their weight is devoted to keeping them powered during this time. Also, the temperature difference between in-shadow and out-of-shadow is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 degrees celsius, also unhappy for the circuitry on the satellite. Still, it's a good description of a problem I didn't even realize existed until I took up my current job.
• The Unofficial FAQ for the 21st Century, from the remarkably prescient and eloquent Charles Stross. Fascinating and a bit depressing, but probably right on the button. Anyone who hasn't read Stross's Halting State should do so immediately; his vision of cell-phone technology over the next twenty years is equally fascinating and, I hope, prescient.

Movie Review: Gattaca

The other day, Urmi and I watched Gattaca, which I had seen years ago but Urmi had never seen. I was reminded of how much I loved the movie -- both the themes it considers as well as the overall presentation. The movie is set in what it proclaims to be the "near" future, but in a world where genetic selection is commonplace. Parents have their children's embryos genetically screened before implantation, removing embryos with harmful genetic combinations (heart defects, myopia, etc). Many years after this practice came into being, the human race has stratified into two groups: Valids, those who were screened to remove the harmful genes, and In-valids, those who were not.

The core theme of the story is discrimination. In Gattaca, discrimination is based on genetics rather than skin color, gender, or other obvious characteristics. In-valids are explicitly barred from holding certain jobs. The protagonist of Gattaca is an In-valid named Vincent who dreams of being an astronaut -- and is willing to masquerade as a Valid to achieve his goal. Most of the movie is about how Vincent narrowly avoids detection during a murder investigation. The core theme, however, is how the Vincent's dedication to his dream allows him to overcome his genetic handicaps. Quite inspiring, really, although the movie is often about as subtle on this point as a Mack truck.

Although the theme of overcoming one's handicaps is touching and universally applicable, I think the movie's greatest aspect is the presentation of a biological dystopia in easily understood terms. The movie does an excellent job of describing the possible after effects resulting from widespread genetic screening as well as fast and efficient genetic identification. What would the world be like when it takes less than ten seconds to accurately determine whether someone has a heart defect? Or the possibility of going blind? What would happen to medical insurance, life insurance, and employment? Gattaca gives one answer to these questions: Things would not be good for the In-valids. The presentation, however, is key. Science fiction books have been toying with these concepts since the genetic code was first discovered, but I feel that movies like Gattaca do a better job of reinforcing the consequences of such inventions. Personally, the questions running through my head after watching such a movie are more fun than the movie itself.

In short, Gattaca is well worth watching (I give it an 8/10 -- 9/10 for science or genetic buffs) not just for the story and themes, but just for the exposure to an excellently thought out "what if" scenario. This is the sort of thing that Science Fiction is all about, and Gattaca excels at it.

Mimic Octopus

I'm not normally a Youtube person, but I've read about Mimic Octopi and this clip was just too cool not to post. Mimic Octopi are far and above the coolest animals I have ever seen. Be sure to watch the whole thing, as it shows the octopus in slow motion at the end. (Source: Wired Science 10 Fantastic Marine Biology Videos)