Maybe not all of them, but it turns out that crows will take proper care of better tools than plain sticks.
This goes even if the good tool was made by somebody else...like, say, a friendly human.
I wonder what thank you is in crow.
Was there a dinosaur civilization? The more I find out about bird intelligence, the more I wonder.
A big one.
Turns out that the launch of the JWST was managed well enough that the likely life of the instrument has been more than doubled...from the original 5 years to more than 10!
Somebody got the fuel calculations very right indeed. Spiriyual descendant of the Apollo-era computers.
I salute them. Thank you.
...and they'll be ours. Researchers are developing a design for a levitating drone that could be useful for exploring the moon and large asteroids. It works by manipulating the static charge generated by solar plasma in the absence of an atmosphere and uses very little fuel.
Makes one wonder...
https://www.sciencealert.com/mit-scientists-invent-a-flying-saucer-that-could-cruise-across-the-moon
So, how are mantle materials from the Galapagos winding up in Panama? The answer appears to be a hole or crack in the continental plate and some kind of mantle flow...does the mantle have "rivers"? Ot seems possible.
Or there are dinosaurs down there.
...and you can track its progress here.
Yes, it is already more than a quarter of the way to L2. The initial voost is followed by a long coast, so it will slow down.
The high rate antenna just deployed and everything seems nominal. of course the fun of sunshield and mirror deployment is yet to come. I think some people are going to get stiff fingers from crossing them.
Santa isn't going to need Rudolph's nose this year...his way will be nicely lit by unusually bright auroras, triggered by a solar storm that arrives today.
Happy Holidays, sun!
Did you know that sea water is magnetic? Well, it is. And this is leading to new possibilities for predicting tsunamis. The microscopic magnetic changes before a tsunami can be matched to the height of the wave, helping inform who should evacuate. It doesn't give much more warning, but every little bit helps.
Hand has been repaired. Anyone know of any good dictation software for Mac? The built in is just not accurate enough.
Our possibly cursed, haunted pandemic-era Worldcon is in the can!
There was totally not a fire. We should have left a wee dram in suite 870 for the ghost.
My Worldcon was awesome. Only bad moment was technical problems trying to do a virtual item from the hotel. We have a few things to learn there if future Worldcons do more virtual programming.
And the highlight. The slowly dawning realization during the archaeology panel...let's just say me and Marie Brennan had a same dig moment! (Castell Henllys in mid Wales, which is apparently now a quite well pit together open air museum). I wish I could have seen my own face.
Oh and I have a new Aitune Press mascot but have to wait to do some alterations which will require two working hands.
I'm broken. Fell off a horse and fractured my hand. My dominant hamd Whee! Special edition illegible autographs... WorldCon appears to be jinxing authors...Hildy Silverman is marketing our reading session as "The Walking Wounded Tour"
Signed a contract with The Land Beyond the World Magazine for publication of "The Face of Our Fear."
One of the issues astronauts experience is changes in vision. Most astronauts on the ISS have to wear glasses during their flight. Microgravity causes changes in the shape of the eyeball.
Researchers have now developed a special sleeping bag which pulls fluids back out of the brain. It might also help with potential cardio problems and the brain fog astronauts sonetimes experience. One wonders if it could also be useful for people who are bedbound for a long period of time.
Welp, I'm broken. I managed to have the worst horseback riding fall of my adult life right before WorldCon, and wrote my dominant hand
This means anyone getting a book signed at wildcard will be getting a special edition completely illegible autograph. I cannot write with my left hand I figured this would be more entertaining than dropping out.
I have an appointment with the hand doctor before the con so I will have more of an idea than what my treatment plan actually is. Sadly, that's my only news. I wish I had some good news to mitigate it with, but not right now. Also, text to speech sucks.
At least if you don't live in a place with light pollution and, currently, a lot of clouds.
Comet Leonard is here. You will need binoculars or a small scope to see it, and you will have to get up before sunrise. Or wait until right after sunset.
This article explains how to find it. It's not a very big or bright comet, but 2021 hasn't been a year for comet viewing, so it's what we have.
Do we really want to check out the cube on the far side of the moon? Of course we do!
The cube-shaped object is probably an unusually square boulder, but it could be obtrusive, meaning it was knocked out by an impact. So it could teach us something.
But also, cube on the far side of the moon.
Because the Yutu 2 rover is small and slow it will take it 2 to 3 months to crawl the 260 feet to the cube to find out what it is, but we're doing it. Because of course we are.
All these worlds are yours...
Those geeks at NASA finally managed to come up with a way to do it. Well, technically it's Brigham University, but...
...we now have a Solar-wind with Hydrogen Ion Exchange and Large-scale Dynamics team. Because of course we do.
I needed the laugh this morning.
The science they are doing is fascinating, too, they're exploring the shape of the heliosphere, which protects us from cosmic radiation. And is, thus, also a shield. We are, however, yet to have a helio-carrier.
Having flashbacks to a certain very famous short story on finding out that there will be a solar eclipse in Antarctica.
In the middle of summer, when the sun doesn't set.
Then I got a little more serious.
Imagine you live in the far north, above the Arctic circle. You're, say, one of the Sami people, who do range that far north.
And the sun goes out in the middle of summer.
Imagine how scared, not knowing the mechanism, you would be.
Now, what could well hit your brain is "Something ate the sun." Something fast enough to catch the sun. Something like, say, a wolf.
The Sami influenced Norse mythology in a number of ways...no doubt stories exchanged around a campfire in a harsh environment by traders.
So, is the Ragnarok story of the Fenrir wolf eating the sun...actually a folk memory of a solar eclipse in the middle of Arctic summer.
Somebody who has more time can do the math and work out how likely this is, but it seems so, so plausible.
Also Nightfall.
Stanford engineers have reverse engineered the amazing talons of the peregrine falcon to create a drone that can perch on trees and potentially capture other drones, possibly without damaging them. The point of perching is that hovering uses a lot of battery life, but landing on the ground means you lose the drone's capabilities.
Potential use cases include acting as a camera trap in rainforest canopies or in high canopies such as redwood or Scots pine forests (counting crested tits!), assisting with wildfire watch in California, or taking out drones that fly too close to airports in a less disruptive manner than having to shoot them down.
Or...well, we can think of a lot. Some of them more nefarious (surveillance) than others. It's also kind of adorable.
...along with pretty much every other piece of science fiction set in the asteroid belt.
The Canterbury would have been completely unnecessary. Turns out that a cubic meter of asteroid dust may contain...as much as 20 liters of water.
Belters would not need to resupply for water at all, and would likely be growing at least some of their food.
Oh, and if you have water, you also have oxygen.
The asteroid belt is wet. And that changes a lot of things.
...uh oh. Who thinks self-replicating biological robots are a good idea? The name "Von Neumann" comes to mind.
Thankfully, the xenobots need to be fed frog stem cells that they then use as building blocks. It's actually very hard to get them to breed across multiple generations.
The likely use of such machines? Building organs or medicines in he lab or potentially in your body. The researchers are also trying to design xenobots that will collect microplastics from the environment.
I have a love/hate relationship with machine learning. Partly because people use it for things that need to be done by people. (People who know me have heard my quip about things which should not be left unsupervised.
One thing it does very well, though, is comb through vast quantities of data for patterns. ExoMiner has found over 300 new exoplanets in the old Kepler data (I have a dim memory of when they were asking citizen scientists to help train it).
Until AIs are people, though...can we stop using them for stuff like, oh, I don't know, trying to provide customer service beyond the very basics? Or banning people from Facebook...
I can't promise it won't change again, but this is my WorldCon schedule.
Wed 4:00 PM 50 Min Capitol Room 1059 Reading - Hildy Silverman and Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 1:00 PM 50 Min Autographs 2 1032 Signing - Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 5:30 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 598 The CW's Contribution to Genre TV
Thu 7:00 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 599 Archaeological Fact in Historical Fiction
Fri 7:00 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 572 Welcome to Clone Club
Sat 10:00 AM 1 Hr Diplomat Ballroom 568 They Flubbed the Landing: Disappointing Finales
Sat 11:30 AM 1 Hr Harris 582 The Tiffany Problem in Historical Fantasy
Sat 5:30 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 627 Why Won't You Stay Dead?!
Start Time Duration Room Name Session ID Title
Wed 4:00 PM 50 Min Capitol Room 1059 Reading - Hildy Silverman and Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 1:00 PM 50 Min Autographs 2 1032 Signing - Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 5:30 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 598 The CW's Contribution to Genre TV
Thu 7:00 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 599 Archaeological Fact in Historical Fiction
Fri 7:00 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 572 Welcome to Clone Club
Sat 10:00 AM 1 Hr Diplomat Ballroom 568 They Flubbed the Landing: Disappointing Finales
Sat 11:30 AM 1 Hr Harris 582 The Tiffany Problem in Historical Fantasy
Sat 5:30 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 627 Why Won't You Stay Dead?!
Start Time Duration Room Name Session ID Title
Wed 4:00 PM 50 Min Capitol Room 1059 Reading - Hildy Silverman and Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 1:00 PM 50 Min Autographs 2 1032 Signing - Jennifer R. Povey
Thu 5:30 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 598 The CW's Contribution to Genre TV
Thu 7:00 PM 1 Hr Calvert Room 599 Archaeological Fact in Historical Fiction
Fri 7:00 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 572 Welcome to Clone Club
Sat 10:00 AM 1 Hr Diplomat Ballroom 568 They Flubbed the Landing: Disappointing Finales
Sat 11:30 AM 1 Hr Harris 582 The Tiffany Problem in Historical Fantasy
Sat 5:30 PM 1 Hr Forum Room 627 Why Won't You Stay Dead?!
,,,for those in the U.S.
Enjoy your turkey, but try to do so with some awareness of the past...and how we can make the future better.
Last night, what might prove to be a very important rocket was launched. The DART mission went up from the Vanderbilt Space Force Base in California on a SpaceX mission.
The test impactor will be flown into a small asteroid named Didymos, which presents no threat and will prove a good proof of concept for the idea of simply hitting an asteroid with a heavy object to adjust its orbit.
The Chelyabinsk air burst in 2013 showed how critical this is. I mean, the crows don't seem to mind being crows, but they might rather be dinosaurs...
It's all our fault. We put a launch party to watch the Webb launch on the schedule so, of course, it's delayed again.
The issue appears to be a minor vibration, but of course we can't take any chances with something so valuable and fragile. Fingers crossed for a holiday present all the same.
Philcon went pretty well. Attendance was about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, which has been consistent for the cons I've gone to so far.
I suspect it will ramp back up through 2022. Also, by then the hotel will have new elevators. Believe me, that hotel needs new elevators.
The highlight of the con was probably the "Beware the Second Banana" panel, which spawned some very interesting discussion and at least one panel for next year (those are always the best). I finally remembered Avon as pretty much the ultimate sidekick who takes over the show! (Watch Blake's 7. The special effects are terrible, but if you liked Firefly...)
Oh, and thanks to the con suite volunteer who brought soda to the vendor room.
A day early because I leave for Philcon tomorrow morning!
Find me (or at least my books) at the Rantings of a Wandering Mind booth.
Another update:
Signed a contract with Other Worlds Ink to include "Old McDonald Saved the World" in their Save the World anthology.
This is a sequel anthology to Fix the World, so I'm very proud to be in both.
Additionally, "The Woman Who Had Been" has been accepted into the feminist horror magazine The Last Girls Club. I love the title.
We generally think of vaccines as preventing contagious diseases...especially right now. However, cancer "vaccines" are used to train the immune system to attack tumors.
And now a Phase I clinical trial has started at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston of a nasal vaccine to prevent...Alzheimer's.
The trial will be in 16 participants who are showing signs of Alzheimer's, but otherwise healthy.
It works in the way you might expect...by activating the immune system to clear the beta amyloid plaques in the brain that cause Alzheimer's. They're putting it up the nose so it doesn't have as far to travel.
This trial is to establish safety.
There's no good treatment for Alzheimer's, so I think a lot of people will be watching this one.
..except we can't, because they don't stay stable for long enough (we don't have any Prophets to keep it open for us).
Or can we?
It appears the math does in fact support the theoretical possibility that a traversable wormhole might exist.
Traversable by particles, that is. Unfortunately, diving into a black hole and hoping to come out through a white hole...still isn't likely a survivable proposition.
Sad.
...hot black ice, anyone? Apparently it's possible to turn ordinary water into "superionic" ice at, well, temperatures and pressures similar to the center of the Earth.
It's a solid and a liquid at the same time. Because, yeah, water is weird that way. Basically, the oxygen becomes solid and the hydrogen wanders around, which is what makes it black.
We don't know where it might form elsewhere, yet, and in the lab it can only be created for a microsecond.
But is it possible for there to be a true water world out there...water all the way through? Maybe!
Here is my (hopefully final, but one never knows with cons) schedule for Philcon:
Friday 6:00pm - Perils and Pitfalls of Near Future Scenarios
Friday 7:30pm - Reading (As I don't have a new book this year, I will most likely be reading from The Lay of Lady Percival as I've neglected that one lately, but I reserve the right to change my mind).
Saturday 10:00am - Lois McMaster Bujold: An Appreciation
Saturday 3:00pm - Communicating with Aliens (At which I will probably talk about the unpublished series I'm working on).
Saturday 4:00pm - Reimagining Babylon 6
Sunday 11:00am - Writing Magical Beasts (MOD)
Sunday 1:00pm - Beware the Second Banana (This is a panel about sidekicks and secondary characters who just steal the entire show).
We don't really use silk the way we did. Cotton is easier to produce, synthetics are cheaper.
But that might change. Researchers have found a way to treat silk that reflects 95% of sunlight. This could be used for cooling clothing (more important with climate change) and to make sun shirts and the like out of.
Of course, the question is how expensive this is going to be...but a shirt that keeps your skin about 8 degrees Celsius cooler? Sign me up.
So, researchers at the Florida Institute of Technology's Aldrin Space Institute have been growing tomatoes in simulated Mars conditions.
Heinz used them to make ketchup. Sadly, you can't buy the Marz Edition ketchup, but I would be interested to hear a report on its flavor and whether they had to adjust the recipe to compensate.
The purpose? Ketchup is quite significant in a dehydrated space diet, so our first intrepid Mars explorers...who will likely be on the red planet for months...will want to make their own.
(And we all know from the Martian that they will...okay, they probably will take potato seeds. French fries and ketchup on Mars, anyone? Probably using an air fryer...)
Amongst bees, you make a queen through diet. I often wonder what selection criteria the colony applies.
But one species of ant has succession fights. When the queen dies, the workers fight over who gets to take her place. The winners start laying eggs.
So, basically, worker ants in this species fight for the right to undergo puberty. Their brains change. And a single protein "switch" appears to be behind it.
We don't quite know how...and now we need to look into other species. For example, does royal jelly contain a substance which activates a similar protein switch to turn a worker bee into a reigning queen?
I stress...this is a partial and preliminary schedule, but here are the panels I am currently scheduled for for Discon III.
Thursday, 5:30pm - Calvert Room - The CW's Contribution to Genre TV
Thursday, 7:00pm - Calvert Room - Archaeological Fact in Historical Fiction (MOD)
Friday, 7:00pm - Forum Room - Welcome To Clone Club (MOD) (This is the Orphan Black panel).
Saturday, 11:30pm - Harris - The Tiffany Problem in Historical Fantasy (MOD). Special note: This is a virtual panel. There will be a Vimeo link available to both on site and virtual attendees.
Saturday, 5:30pm - Palladian - They Flubbed the Landing: Disappointing Finales (MOD).
I am moderating most of my panels because I was brought onto programming primarily to address the perennial shortage of people who like moderating.
Again, this is preliminary and subject to change. I'm not doing a kaffeeklatsch because I don't feel I'm famous enough to ask for one just yet. I did request a reading, which I may or may not get. We have a lot less programming space than a typical Worldcon due to the closure of the Wardman Park, and can only make up some of it by doing virtual items.
Hoping to see at least some of you there!
If all goes well, the space telescope will launch in December.
But then it has to go through an incredibly complex deployment that will take a full two weeks.
All of which it will be doing on its own while everyone on Earth...let's just say I don't think they'll be needing their nail clippers.
They do have some options. For example, they have a command to make the observatory shimmy to potentially unstick something.
Which is just...going to be the worst for them. And then we still have to wait about 180 days to actually start doing science.
So, there is a field of glass in the Aracama Desert, and we now know for sure what caused it.
Investigating the glass fragments found mineral grains that don't occur naturally on Earth. Some of them were found in the comet sample return mission in 2004.
It appears that we had a comet air burst. Interesting, it coincides with about the time humans arrived in the area.
I would love to poke around in the stories of the indigenous people to see what they remember about it.
Apparently the ISS astronauts got to enjoy some Mexican food...or at least some soft tacos. I'm not sure about trying to eat tacos in microgravity.
It's all part of an experiment to answer a "burning" question: Are space peppers hotter or milder than their Earthbound kin.
(Well, actually, it's also about microbes and what shape they grow and...but we all know what the biggest question was).
It's possible we just discovered a new human ancestor.
Dubbed Homo bodoensis, they lived in Africa about 600,000 years ago and appear to be a direct ancestor. They survived until 200,000 years ago or so before disappearing, but their legacy survives.
Homo bodoensis appears to be the common ancestor of both modern humans and Neanderthals, with the latter leaving Africa well before the former.
We don't know much about how they lived, but we do know that they lived...and for a very long time.
The 99 Tiny Terrors kickstarter ends on Sunday! Please pledge and try and get to the 8k stretch goal, which will cover a 1 hour video conference with some of the writers.
This is also one of the few ways to get either the limited edition hardcover or the pseudo leather bound book! Or pick up a special deal on the ebook...everyone who backs will get a free e-novel from Pulse Publishing too and for $6 that's pretty awesome.
It's also the only way to get a free bonus short story, although I don't know what it is either ;).
In other news...well, watch this space. I expect to have some more by next week.
...might be confusing and upsetting spiders. It seems that jumping spiders can't tell the difference between a fake spider and a real one.
So, they think it's a bigger spider that might eat them and run away. Poor things. No word on a way to un-confuse the spiders...not sure there's much we can do.
Maybe choose ones that are so big they clearly aren't a bigger spider? I don't know...
New studies give strong support to the theory that when a great white shark bites a human, it's because they mistake you for a seal.
Specifically, it's young sharks...inexperienced hunters...making this mistake. Which shows that the best way to not get bitten is to find some way to telegraph "I am not a seal."
We're still working on that, but patterned clothing and surf boards/paddle boards is probably the way to go. Sharks don't see color, so we'll have to do it with stripes or whatever.
That way we can reduce shark bites without hurting the sharks...in fact, as human is not tasty to sharks and they don't want to eat us, they will probably appreciate a nice big "I Am Not A Seal" notice so they can go find something far more delicious.
Coexisting with sharks matters.
We now have the ability to detect...possibly...planets in other galaxies. That's just an unimaginable distance away.
The possible exoplanet is in Messier 51 (M51), also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy. It's 28 million light years away.
It was discovered using one of our first techniques for detecting exoplanets, by detecting its slight occlusion of its sun. The reason we can see out this far is by using X-ray astronomy.
If it's real, it's a very large gas giant...
In a move which surprises no one, the Artemis I mission, which will be an uncrewed mission, has been pushed back to February 2022. The planned launch window is now February 12.
I expect it will be pushed back further given how this program has gone, but to be fair, they are literally trying to do a moonshot during a pandemic.
Ah, wooden utensils. They don't cut through anything and they leave a taste in your food that might be either bad or, depending on your personal history, vaguely nostalgic.
But Teng Li, at the University of Maryland, has come up with a way to make a wooden steak knife that works just as well as steel. And they're pretty durable too. I'd imagine there will be a number of uses for this.
Also, it's just plain neat.
Plotbunny for something?
Astronomers have discovered evidence that in the HD 172555 system, only 95 light years from Earth, an Earth-sized planet was hit by something so big it blew off part of the atmosphere.
I can see space archaeology here...
(It also tells us we got lucky with the impact that created the moon...)
I mean, if you don't think sea otters are cute, I do rather question your taste. No offense.
But it turns out they're also vital for the survival of eelgrass meadows. It goes like this:
A software bug causing thrusters to burn incorrectly while docking a brand new module to the ISS I'll give you.
Doing it with a Soyuz? What's going on over there? Where are all your good coders? Don't answer that.
(Yes, the Russians knocked the ISS out of orientation with a software bug on a test thrust. Yes, they did it again. They're almost as incompetent as the Washington Metro).
...except Europa.
So, Europa has water vapor in the atmosphere. Only in one hemisphere (we don't know why but my guess is that it has something to do with the tidal effect of Jupiter).
We don't know where it's coming from. Well, we do, it's coming from the under-ice ocean somehow.
But it does make one wonder, doesn't it.
I have received an invitation to be on programming at Philcon, which is taking place slightly later this year (November 19-21). No further details yet, but I'm sure it's going to be amazing.
The con is requiring vaccination and masks.
My story, "Honor the Midwife," will be published on the Land Beyond the World Website on Monday. This story takes place in a very early version of Yirath, so note all the changes between it and Firewing. It's still a neat little story, though, that I'm quite proud of.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been shipped to its launch site in French Guiana. Now it needs to be checked again before it can be put on a rocket for launch.
As a note, I'm starting to get more and more in favor of a name change, but I don't have anything good to call it instead. Webb was apparently an asshole and homophobic. We need a nickname for this thing. Or maybe I can find the official designation under the name somewhere...
Either way, we might finally get this thing launched and on its way to L2...and we're going to do a heck of a lot of science.
Imagine that you're woken up by a loud crash and leap out of bed, look back and find a rock right where your head would have been.
Imagine calling the cops and having them investigate where it came from.
Now imagine that the answer is "Outer space."
Ruth Hamilton in British Columbia very nearly became one of the few people in recorded history to be killed by a meteorite. And I just used this as an example of things people shouldn't worry about...
(We shouldn't. The chances really are incredibly low).
(She's keeping it).
No, seriously, they are. Plankton releases dimethyl sulfide, which turns into sulfuric acid, which then seeds clouds above the ocean.
Oh, and also, one cloud does not feel lonely. The more clouds there are already, the fewer clouds form, simply because the existing clouds attract the sulfur. Clouds are hungry and devour their young.
All of this could be useful for understanding cloud formation...and potentially mitigating climate change.
Nope, it's not Columbus Day.
Columbus Day only became a federal holiday in 1937, and it started as a way for Italian immigrants to be celebrated.
Most Italian-Americans I've talked to no longer have any desire to celebrate it. To be fair, Italians were persecuted (much like the Irish) for many years. It's not the same thing as racism, but it has to be acknowledged.
Columbus Day, thus, did not start as a celebration of white people finding the Americas (which is a good thing because that happened centuries earlier), but as a way to keep Italians from being lynched by emphasizing their allegiance to America.
Of course, this pushed indigenous people under the bus. The first state to ditch Columbus Day was South Dakota in...1990. It's been Native American Day there ever since.
Two years later, Berkeley, California, replaced Columbus Day with the Day of Solidarity with Indigenous People.
These two things sparked the movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day. This is official in several states, either replacing Columbus Day or, in Oregon, alongside it. Even Columbus, Ohio, the largest city named for him has made the switch.
But what about the Italians?
First of all, Christopher Columbus was, and I don't say this lightly, an evil man. He enslaved people, he pissed off the King and Queen of Portugal with the way he treated natives so much they put him in jail. His crews hated him.
Second of all, Italians are now recognized fully as white. They aren't persecuted anymore. Pizza is as American as burgers. They don't need a holiday which celebrates an oppressor. (I mean, if we could have National Eat Pasta Day the way we have National Drink Green Beer Day I'd be totally behind it and I'd imagine most Italian-Americans would be too).
It's time to retire Columbus Day.
Thus, happy Indigenous Peoples Day and please take a moment to acknowledge the struggles and ongoing heritage of the people who did discover this continent, tens of thousands of years ago.
No real news this week (I already gave everything I had from Capclave).
Still plodding along trying to get stuff done.
As a note, I found my books on a Russian site, readfrom.net. Please do NOT go to this site to get free books (mine or anyone's). It's full of malvertising that can get past an active, quality adblocker and I dread to think what's on there if you are NOT running a blocker. As it's based in Russia, I can't really do much about it except warn everyone to stay clear.
If you want a review copy of anything, just ask.
...the size of a chicken. Neglected fossils in a museum drawer turned out to be the oldest species of carnivorous dinosaur yet found in the U.K.
In...a mine in Wales.
We don't know what color it was, but...this article has an artists' reconstruction and it is absolutely adorable.
Believe it or not, it's a relative of T. Rex.
Exhibit, the fact that it's 2021 and we just identified a new orca culture. Orcas (sometimes called killer whales) have distinct groups with their own language and culture...and we were missing one completely.
Evidence indicates that this new group, which we might call an ethnicity or a tribe if they were humans, live further out than most orcas and are big game hunters, going after young whales and elephant seals.
(How intelligent are orcas? We don't know, but it's entirely possible they may be sapient).
Oh, wait. We may have missed two. There might be another group that lives even further out. Maybe.
Point is?
The ocean is dang big and we still don't know everything about it.
So, we have done a bunch of studies that prove what all dog people already knew.
Yes, your dog does know how you are feeling. Dogs even experience an increase in cortisol, a stress hormone, when they hear a baby crying...just as humans do. In other words, your dog wants to comfort your crying baby. (I will bet right now that if we checked cats...)
If you yawn, your dog yawns. And vice versa. I've caught myself yawning when I see a picture of a dog yawning.
They also discovered that dogs will pay more attention to somebody who is crying or laughing. Unless they don't know them, in which case they get kinda stressed.
So, yes, your dog coming over and begging for a cuddle when you're upset? They're coming to give you the hug they can tell you need.
I am pretty sure this absolutely applies to cats too. I've walked into a space with a cat when I was a bit depressed and it was clear that the kitty recognized I was...and came over to give me some purr therapy!
Horses, too. Horses can absolutely pick up on your mood and react accordingly.
But next time you're feeling depressed and your dog tries to climb into your lap, let them. They're only trying to help.
First of all, congratulations to T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) for winning the WSFA Small Press Award with "Metal Like Blood in the Dark."
This wasn't my first choice from the nominated stories, but it is an excellent story and I'm honored to ever be mentioned in the same breath. Vernon will be guest of honor at next year's Capclave.
Second, thank you to everyone who was abiding by the rules. We really didn't have any huge problems with people not following protocols. And thank you to Capclave for the clear mask (The two I bought for myself turned out to be almost unwearable). I need to find out where they get those masks from, just in case.
Third, the person who brought an actual robot to the panel on robots in science fiction basically won the con.
All packed and ready to head to Capclave. I'll be in the dealer room at 3pm ready to sell some books.
It's so good to be back on the circuit again even if I do have to hide my mug behind a mask for now. Hopefully, by next year, we won't even need those.
Get vaccinated and be careful and we'll all get our lives back.
No, it's not a cryptid.
It's a large predatory dinosaur unearthed on the Isle of Wight. 9 meters long, a horny and bumpy skull, teeth like a crocodile...and the hunting habits of a heron. That is, we think this thing stood by the water and waited for fish or other aquatic prey to show up. The crocodile-style teeth were well suited for grabbing large fish.
It's in the Spinosauridae family and I'm kinda glad I'll never meet one. Well, maybe. See one from a good distance, sure, and be glad I'm not a fish.
...how about methane removal? It's a lot trickier because methane is so low, but apparently it could "save" us anything up to 1 degree Celsius in temperature increase.
(Methane capture at source is a lot easier, dairy farmers are already doing it).
It's something we need to be considering and investing in, at any rate.
Present Australia has some interesting critters, and so does past Australia.
In this case, an unusual eagle that liked koala for breakfast. They actually found an almost complete skeleton of the bird near Lake Pinpa. It wasn't like modern eagles - it had a short wingspan and hunted through trees like modern goshawks and Cooper's hawks.
As Australia dried out, the eagle vanished. Australia is now home to the wedge-tailed eagle, which is about the same size as a bald eagle. Except being Australia, we know which one would win in a fight. (Of course, that's an Australian site, so they're probably biased).
A technique called "DNA phenotyping" is giving us the picture.
This article shows reconstructions of three men who lived (or at least died) in Abusir el-Meleq somewhere between 1380 B.C. and A.D. 425.
As you can see, the middle guy looks distinctly African, the right hand guy looks very Middle Eastern or eastern Mediterranean, and the one on the left looks like he had ancestry from both.
Which is about what I would suspect.
The argument about whether ancient Egyptians were Black or Middle Eastern is easy enough to settle: Both.
A major trade route and waves of migration (these men were not closely related to modern Egyptians) would have made Egypt a cosmopolitan country with people with all kinds of ancestry. Probably some people from further north too... One can imagine the streets of Alexandria filled with people from all over the known world...silk traders from Asia, spice traders from sub-Saharan Africa. Northern Europeans selling furs...
The full range of human diversity.
Not much news this week. Getting ready for Capclave (and hoping to see some of you there, although quite sympathetic for any who don't feel it's safe quite yet).
Working on the first round of edits on the second volume of the series that is why I haven't released anything lately. The first book is now back from betas, but I plan on writing book three before editing it. It's progressing, if slower than I was hoping. Writing all these aliens is fun, but tough.
No, this isn't some kind of weird conspiracy theory.
In the early Medieval period, the climate in Europe cooled dramatically.
This resulted in crop failures in the north and led to the Saxon settlement of England and, almost certainly, to increased raiding by the normally peaceful Norsemen. (They went a-viking for a reason, people).
The cause of the climate change?
The eruption of the Ilopango caldera in what is now El Salvador, which was an area inhabited heavily by the Maya.
Who, of course, had to run like crazy. When they came back, they built a pyramid out of rock and ash spewed by the volcano, likely to appease whatever angry mountain spirit.
We're all pretty dang connected. Even when we don't know about each other.
Some people wish we did have tails. Anyone who goes to SF cons has seen the person wandering around with ears and a tail.
But like all apes, we only have the coccyx or tailbone, a small set of vertebrae that extend just beyond the pelvis. Our tail is completely vestigial and invisible.
And now we've found the genetic underpinning. It's a mutation in a gene called TBXT...and unlike many mutations that cause taillessness (Manx cats, for example, have a lot of back pain), it doesn't seem to cause any issues. You can use genetic engineering of this gene to breed tailless mice that do just fine.
Except that doesn't answer the question.
What we don't quite know is what evolutionary advantage not having a tail gave to our ancestors. Gibbons, after all, have truly splendid appendages. The common wisdom is that we don't bother to grow one because it's not useful, but that doesn't quite explain it. Very few mammals are naturally tailless.
At some point in the transition from monkey to ape, tails got in the way...but we still don't quite understand why.
...welp. Turns out they actually did.
The cause was not, however, magical invocation of God via trumpets.
So, what happened? About 3,600 years ago, an asteroid similar in size to the one which struck Tunguska hit the city of Tall el-Hammam, 14 miles away from Jericho. That city was destroyed (the real Sodom, perhaps?).
The shockwave blew down Jericho's walls.
So, yeah. Jericho's walls really did get blown down. And in the typical manner of oral history written down many years later...
...while it's unlikely it happened during a siege because it would probably have killed most of the besieging army, did the Hebrews take advantage of this to take a city they'd been planning on capturing? And what else could it have appeared to them as but an act of God?
So, some monkey and ape mothers will keep carrying their dead infant around for a while. This is really disturbing, but appears to be part of the grief process.
We also know that human mothers who are allowed to hold a stillborn baby process their grief better.
Other primates will return to the corpse for a while and talk to it (lemurs).
Is this the root origin of many of our rituals around death? It's easy to see how returning to a corpse and calling to it would evolve into, well...putting flowers on a grave.
(Sorry for the morbid topic, but it's kind of fascinating).
I have my VERY tentative schedule for Capclave (October 1-3). Yes, this is in person, but everyone will be vaccinated and masked.
Saturday 11am - Non-Traditional Protagonists. (I think I may be moderating this one, but it's not clear.
Saturday noon - Why Write Short Stories?
Saturday 4pm - Reading. I'm going to read my WSFA Small Press nominated story so everyone knows what the hype is about ;).
Saturday 8pm - Mass signing and award ceremony.
Sunday 10am - Writing Fantastic Creatures
Sunday 11am - A Century Of Robots.
Again, this is tentative. I will also be in the dealer room at the Rantings of a Wandering Mind booth with books...all the books.
I'm jealous of these kids. I got to do plenty of things as a kid...but not discover a new species!
A group of kids went fossil hunting in Kawhia Harbour, New Zealand, and found a giant penguin. Not some little thing, but a 1.4 meter tall penguin.
And it turned out to be a new species of giant penguin, equipped with longer legs than the other giant penguins. It's been named Kairuku waewaeroa, the second part coming from the Te reo Mâori for "long legs."
The kids donated the fossil to the Waikato Museum, but they used the 3D scans used in investigation to make them a replica.
New meaning to Club Penguin?
...with people wanting to recreate the woolly mammoth. First, lets get something out of the way:
We can't bring back the mammoth.
What we can do is breed mammoth-elephant hybrids, which would be raised by elephants and thus act like elephants.
They do claim that releasing a few thousand mammoths in Siberia might help climate change (and there's some indication it might help the health of the tundra).
But also...
...elephants are endangered, so is it really ethical to have elephant moms bring hybrids into the world? Esp. as nobody can ask the elephants and they're pretty smart critters.
Uh, so they've been experimenting with making concrete out of simulated Martian soil and they've discovered that the best compounds to turn it into really good concrete...
...are in blood, urine, sweat, and tears. In other words, the bodily fluids of astronauts might be used to provide the organic components necessary to make good concrete.
And yes, it does need that blood. Or rather, it needs a protein found in plasma called albumin.
You can't get blood from a stone, but you can apparently get stone from blood.
Assuming, of course, this doesn't result in health issues for the astronauts.
But yeah, blood, sweat and tears is usually a metaphor...
...could be in our genes.
So, a lot of our "junk" DNA is fossil strands of virii. (Yes, a virus can rewrite your DNA, but the result is usually quarantined. There are a few exceptions where evolution has found the virus useful, which includes the mammalian placenta.
These are called EVE.
Bats and marsupials have more EVA than most mammals. And bats are well known for being highly resistant to viruses.
Marsupials, meanwhile, move on to the pouch stage of development without functioning immune systems.
Turns out these are not coincidences. It turns out that the reason we store all the viral DNA we can is so that we can use it to create antivirals.
Mammals don't do this as much because we have developed other immune system aspects, but there's still the possibility that this ancient defense system is still active and usable.
Does generational exposure to an ancient coronavirus explain why some people are "mysteriously" resistant to COVID-19?
...one step further. Scientists have found a way to turn hydrogen sulfide into hydrogen fuel.
Hydrogen sulfide comes from a variety of sources, but one of the major ones is, uh...poop.
So, yes, in the future we might be extracting this gas from waste treatment plants and turning it into hydrogen for fuel cells. Manure piles would also be a good source.
(It also comes from paper production, mining, and a few other industrial sources).
I'll believe it when it actually happens, but NASA has chosen a launch window for the new telescope.
18th December.
Which, if it happens, happens to be the Saturday of the also delayed WorldCon.
Kind of feels like serendipity.
They've found the gene that acts as a switch and determines whether your kitty is tabby or not. It's the Dickkopf 4 (Dkk4) gene.
In Abys and other ticked cats, it's mutated, which explains how ticking can be so reliably bred for.
The next step is to look at how this gene works in other felines, which might lead to...
...an actual explanation for How the Leopard Got His Spots.
As some people know I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of an observatory on the lunar farside.
So I like to bring it up every now and then. NASA has allocated funding for the design. A huge radio telescope in a crater, that will be built entirely by robots. It will allow us to detect signals with a wavelength greater than 10m, which may answer a lot of the questions we still have about the origins of the universe.
They are also talking about a visible light observatory.
Let's make this happen. We would learn soooooo much.
I couldn't make this up. Somebody hand reared an Australian musk duck, and apparently he can now call people bloody fools.
A duck.
So I did some poling around. The Musk Duck, Biziura lobata is only "distantly" related...possibly...to other stiff-tailed ducks. The males have a weird leather lobe under their bill. They're diving ducks.
And they differ from other ducks in a few ways too. They're not monogamous, but in fact are lek breeders (the males display, the females pick the best one, mate, then go off to raise the eggs alone). The males produce a strong musk when in rut. They don't even like other ducks. And they fly so little that for a while people thought they were flightless.
I'm starting to question whether these things are, in fact, ducks? They walk like them...but they don't quack like them. Well, unless they're mimicking them.
I mean, they sure don't act like ducks and while I have known many waterfowl (usually geese) who would call humans bloody fools if they could...this is the first evidence that any member of the Anserinae family can.
Have we done a DNA test on these fools?
So, here's an interesting one. At Castel di Guido in Italy (close to Rome) we've found evidence of almost production-line like creation of tools...from elephant bones.
The theory is that they had a lot of elephants and no flint, so they were using the bones instead of flint. So instead of the typical primitive bone tools, they had sophisticated bone tools. (There was a water hole that attracted a lot of elephants).
Oh, and this was 400,000 years ago. Hi, Neanderthals. Nice tools you have there...can I borrow one?
So far, it's only been tested in rats, but a stimulator device implanted at the site of a tendon injury can apparently apply electrical therapy (which dramatically increases healing) with no power source other than the animal's own movements.
This could be a game changer for athletes with tendon injuries (including non-human athletes...tendon injuries are a common cause of significant downtime for horses and probably also for working dogs).
It's really kinda neat...and although it's an implant, it's relatively easy to put there and then you just do whatever physical therapy and exercises are recommended.
...call any object in space "The Accident." Haven't you ever read a Peter F. Hamilton book?
The Accident is, in fact, an unusually old brown dwarf that's currently zipping past us about 58 light years away.
But...oh, they haven't watched any Doctor Who either.
Or they have and know what effect the name will have. Ahem. Geeks.
We're talking about sending people to Mars, but at the end of this fantastic journey, where will they live?
Likely in...a cave.
Caves shield from the radiation that bombards Mars (no magnetic field = no global protection). So it's very likely that Martian outposts will be built, at least to start with, inside caves and lava fields. Some of these caves have skylights, so you would be able to grow food in them.
Of course, the small issue is that if there's any life remaining on Mars...it's probably going to be using those caves.
We might even get this thing launched in October. I'll believe it when it hits orbit, but the telescope has completed every one of its preflight tests.
(Note, this thing is now 14 years behind schedule. 14. years.)
It's planned to replace (although not completely) the aging Hubble, which is now 31 years old.
Time for a free story! Go here to read Ka-thump, which won this month's Apparition Lit Flash Contest and includes one of my favorite things...space lesbians!
Everything else is plodding along. It's really warm this week and my water pitcher died, so not the best week of my life, but I've had far, far worse.
Now, here's a plot bunny.
So-called Hycean worlds might harbor life...but not, Jim, as we know it.
These are larger planets with hydrogen-rich atmospheres (too small to be gas giants). Their surface is entirely ocean, so a technological civilization is relatively unlikely.
Or is it?
I mean, these worlds can be as hot as 200 degrees Celsius, but we still think there might be microbes in the ocean.
And there are a lot of them.
Hrm.
Thoughts churning yet?
Everyone should check these out.
Especially the panoramic video. It's so hard to believe this really is another planet.
The universe is so vast, so wonderful, and we are so small in comparison...and yet so powerful in our own way.
It gives me just that little bit of hope.
Uh, so, it's a tad technical, so bear with me.
It turns out that some of our "junk" DNA, which mutates very rapidly, is bound together by specific proteins.
And these proteins differ between species and this, not different chromosomes, may be the key that prevents species from interbreeding.
Which implies that canines, which interbreed happily, all have the same strategy for holding together their junk DNA.
It also means that a bit of genetic engineering could fix the hybridization problem...
...which means that in the future we might be able to make fertile, true-breeding...
...mules...
I love mules, but that scares me.
Kind of!
While mapping the galaxy we discovered that there's a bunch of nebulas in the Sagittarius Arm that are kind of sticking out at an angle, like a broken bone poking through the skin (eww).
No, we don't know what exactly causes this, but we've seen it in other spiral galaxies (it's harder to map the one you're standing in).
It might well be caused by some kind of gravitational disruption. Perhaps a large, roaming black hole is the culprit?
Who knows, but it's kind of cool.
First of all, this year's Triangulation anthology, containing my story "Homestead," is now available! The theme is Habitats.
So, it's about all the places we have, do, and may yet live. Homestead is about asteroid colonies!
Get your copy here.
Second, I'm pleased to announce that my story "Ka-thump" won this month's Apparition Lit Flash Fiction Contest. It's about space lesbians because, well, we all need space lesbians.
Come to think about it, Homestead has space lesbians too. Are we detecting a theme?
A new prehistoric mammal has been named Beornus honeyi, but it's about the size of a house cat. So why name it after the giant werebear?
Probably because by the standards of its time, it was a giant. It was a condylarth, which eventually gave way to hoofed mammals. (I'm envisioning it next to an 18 hand draft horse now).
And also because its huge molars gave it puffy cheeks, like Beorn. It was one of three new condylarth species discovered, part of an explosion of diversification after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.
And it's adorable. I want one.
...or at least a fake Mars? NASA is looking for people aged 30 to 55, nonsmoker, proficient in English...to spend a year living in a fake Mars colony. It's called an analog mission, and the point is to help us understand and predict the challenges astronauts might face.
Because of the way launch windows work, astronauts will likely have to stay on Mars for a long time and we need to know how they will deal with various (simulated crisis). And work out how to keep them from wanting to kill each other. Ahem.
Of course, you do have to meet some of the astronaut requirements, so this isn't an opportunity for everyone. But...well...here it is.
So, there's a lava tube in Saudi Arabia which is full of bones.
Some of these bones are 7,000 years old.
Some of them are human.
The culprit? Hyenas, who like to collect and stash bones and don't always do anything with them. Judging by the growling, they're still at it.
The cave, Umm Jirsan, promises to provide useful information as bones generally don't preserve well in the desert.
I'm a finalist!
"Guest Athletes," which was published in Dimensions Unknown III: The Phantom Games from Excalibur Books (the one based in Tokyo as there is, unsurprisingly, more than one Excalibur Books).
I'm in the kind of company authors dream of. Find the full list of finalists here, and it includes two Hugo nominees.
So, yes, I'm celebrating this weekend.
The award will be presented at Capclave, October 1-3, Rockville Maryland.
It's unusual in that the voting is completely blind and in theory neither the jury nor the voters know either the author or the publisher. Of course, there might be cases when somebody read a story before, but they keep it as fair as possible.
Thank you John Paul Catton for buying the story.
We have formalized and ritualized ways of starting and ending social interactions.
Turns out? So do our closest relatives. Chimps and bonobos both do various signals to say hello and goodbye. Bonobos, which are more advanced socially, do it more.
Also, in bonobos, the better they know each other? The shorter the entry and exit signals.
Oh, and just out of interest, one of them is holding hands. They hold hands as a way to show the intent of socialization.
Just how old is the handshake, anyway?
Let's hope none of them bite anyone named Peter (or Miles).
Scientists have genetically engineered daddy-long-legs/harvestmen (which despite their appearance are scorpions, not spiders) into, well, daddy short legs.
The experiment was designed to test genetic engineering tools and also to improve our understanding of the arachnid genome.
But no biting any young men, okay?
...probably. But scientists found two mummified cave lion cubs, one of which is in such good condition she still has whiskers. Sparta, as they've called her, honestly looks like a well-played-with plush.
One useful piece of information from this? They were a different color from the adults we've found, indicating that cave lions probably, like many other mammals, had different baby coats.
The cubs were very young and probably died in an accident. I am still feeling sorry for the grieving mother all those thousand years ago.
Well, not any more, but Thapunngaka shawi, a species of pterosaur with a 22 foot wingspan used to soar over the Australian outback...back when it was mostly a vast inland sea.
It has large wings, a small body and a huge, huge head. (The name means Shaw's Spear Mouth).
So, what did it snap up with those huge jaws? Most likely...fish. It would have been able to fit a lot of them in there.
Nom.
Yes, I actually have news this week!
First, my application to be on programming for Discon III has been officially accepted. Obviously, with the con not happening until December, I don't have any details yet...but watch this space.
Second, my story "So Simple," is a runner-up in the Theme of Absence Philosophical Science Fiction and is now available to read free on their site here. It's a quick read and I would love it if people left comments.
Some quantum physicist in London is now claiming that an advanced alien civilization is modifying the light coming off stars to communicate.
It's conceivable, but reeeally? That's something out of a Hamilton or Reynolds novel, not something that seems to make sense.
Oh, and it uses quantum entanglement. And it's encrypted by naturally hiding it, so we don't notice.
Sorry, Dr. Rudolf, this sounds like a pure conspiracy theory. I like it, but I don't buy it.
Who hasn't used this metaphor? I've occasionally extended it to my train of thought going crashing off a cliff.
Now we've discovered that our brain circuits...uh...yeah...they actually work that way. Something called dentate spikes act as little switches to move information processing around in your hippocampus.
So, use that metaphor with confidence, because your itty bitty brain train probably just did switch to a new destination, leaving you stuck desperately trying to find the old one.
We use "bird-brained" as an insult and somehow see birds as stupid creatures. But new research has demonstrated why they alone survived the mass extinction event.
It could be because they were the smartest group of dinosaurs.
Birds appear to have a more developed forebrain, which may have allowed them to adapt to the post impact world faster than they could evolve (the key advantage of intelligence).
So next time you're tempted to insult somebody's intelligence by comparing them to a bird, think twice.
It might even be a compliment.
Birds steal fur. I mean, we were pretty sure, but scientists have now properly observed and catalogued the behavior.
And now we know who's fur they prefer: Predators.
And they do it more in higher latitudes. The scientists keep coming up with all kinds of reasons why they prefer wolf fur over horse fur.
My thought:
Because predators spend more time lazing around, they have thicker fur. So maybe it's just about keeping their eggs warmer.
The animals don't seem to mind. Maybe the birds prefer fur that's about to shed anyway and it's like a good grooming...
Okay, this time it wasn't a docking issue. A malfunction with the new Russian science module caused its thrusters to fire...
...knocking the ISS out of position for 45 minutes while the astronauts scrambled to stabilize it. There's multiple plot bunnies in there.
(What happens if a huge docked starship fires its engines? I'm going to have to use that somewhere...)
...yeah, don't they eat all the light?
Yes, but they also create a gravitational lens, and it's possible to see the light from behind the black hole, that has been warped by it and bent. Einstein predicted this, but now we know.
To understand this, think about a lunar eclipse. During an eclipse, the moon turns blood red, which used to be considered a bad omen.
The reason is that the Earth is blocking direct light, but red light that is refracted by the atmosphere can still get there and reflect. Our atmosphere is filtering out every color but red. (This is why the sky is blue).
While it's not the same effect, it can help understand what might happen to light on the other side of a black hole.
It's called the Galileo Project, and it's designed to look for technosignatures. Unfortunately, the entire thing is based on the flimsy hypothesis that 'Oumuamua was a technological object.
This has mostly been debunked, but a few scientists still like the idea.
I have a feeling the project will find something interesting, but it probably won't be aliens.
So, science lost another great. Steven Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for contributing to the Standard Model (with Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam).
He was a scientist and a science educator, who wrote books that helped explain the most esoteric aspects of particle physics. He received numerous prizes and awards.
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts a human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy"-Steven Weinberg in The First Three Minutes.
He inspired many, many people to go into science and is a great loss to the field.
We can actually confidently say:
We don't actually know!
That might seem unbelievable, but an amateur astronomer just found one more. It's not that exciting, it's in a moon cluster called the Carme group.
But it does show that we haven't found all of them yet, and that's kind of neat.
Eventually...long after we've likely become extinct or evolved into something else, the sun will turn into a red giant and then shrink into a white dwarf.
This will destroy Earth. But it might not be the end of the solar system's story. The math allows for the possibility that planets in the outer system might be pulled inwards as the sun collapses...into the habitable zone.
And then the sun will stay that way for billions of years. There's a plotbunny to tease out here...
Okay, so the billionaire space race is rather dick comparing (and esp. Bezos because, all offense, that rocket ship looks like a giant dildo).
Ahem.
But the little trip into space did, in fact, go well. While I think SpaceShip Two is more immediately useful than New Shepard, I'm very intrigued by the technology they're using to make the capsule touchdown no more of a bump than a hot air balloon landing. It involves compressed air, so I don't know how well it would work in a vacuum, but it might end up being very useful for landing people and fragile things on Mars.
Also, the spaceport looks like it belongs on Tatooine or some other backwater planet, just saying. I think they should lean into that and make it all rugged and frontier-y.
...but don't worry, all they assimilate is DNA from other organisms. While studying environmental DNA, scientists found long strands of DNA that contained genes from microbes and other stuff. They were looking for viruses.
The borg are about a million base pairs long and exist outside cells. They might tell us something about viral evolution.
But they're also associated with microbes that oxidize methane, and could be involved in that process...and we really need microbes that oxidize methane.
Unfortunately, they can't be studied in the lab because without other organisms they can't do their thing. Which means, are they real or just some kind of bizarre contamination?
For that matter, does it matter what they are. If we can work out how to grow their hosts, then maybe we'll find out...and it might help us come up with ways to get methane out of the atmosphere. Like, say, introducing these bacteria to the manure heaps at dairy farms...
And...this has been a really quiet week. I do have plenty of stuff in the works, but nothing ready to announce just yet.
Give it time...
Okay, definitely monkey, but imagine a lemur that weighs as much as you do!
Koala lemurs were five feet long, averaged 187 pounds, and ate mostly leaves. And yes, they still lived in trees. (Un)fortunately these giants have been extinct for at least 500 years. Possibly our fault, possibly not. There are no longer any giant lemurs on Madagascar.
They were apparently a close relative of the red-fronted lemur. And it's kind of a shame they aren't around any more. (They're called koala lemurs because they had hands similar to koalas).
So, you've probably heard the story.
The island of Rapa Nui (which we inaccurately call Easter Island) had a large population, but they cut down all the trees, introduced rats, spent all their time building giant heads and ended up with massive famine.
Wrong.
It turns out Rapa Nui never had that many people (no doubt the white people thought more people were needed to walk the statues than were) and that when white colonists got there, the population was, in fact, increasing. The island was well-managed land with productive gardens and they had drought-resilient water sources.
We just assume they wrecked the environment because we're so good at it.
It's called Denisova Cave, and it's where we found the first evidence of an Asian human subspecies, the Denisovans.
But it actually has more of a history than that. Based off of "environmental DNA" studies (where we get DNA fragments from the soil), Denisova Cave was used (possibly occupied) by humans for 300,000 years.
And it held three different subspecies.
Oh, and we also found a fossil there of a kid who had one Denisovan parent and one Neanderthal.
The Denisovans found the place first, lived there for a long time then left or disappeared. A different ethnic group of Denisovans then took over. Neanderthals showed up in different groups, and appear to have been cheerfully making babies with the Denisovans.
And then 45,000 years ago, "modern" humans also reached the cave...and there were both Neanderthals and Denisovans there.
We can't be sure, but Denisova Cave appears to have ended up with three different human subspecies at once.
So...what was so special about this site? That part we don't know.
We don't even know, yet, if it was special or if this kind of thing was going on all over the place.
What we do know is that our ancestors weren't necessarily particularly fussy about...ya know. Mating.
I was so excited about tobacco vaccines that I forgot to give my updates!
First of all, my story Cavesong was published in Daily Science Fiction on Friday. If you're not a subscriber, follow the link to read! (Although it's labeled as Modern Fantasy, be aware that one reader did regret reading this story at 2am...which is a high compliment!)
Second, Parsec Ink has an Indiegogo for the Triangulation: Habitats anthology, which contains my asteroid colonization story "Homestead." Please preorder your copy and help them afford to pay us ;). They also have a couple of interesting looking book packages containing other Triangulation books. Well worth checking out.
Additionally, I've signed a contract to publish "Honor the Midwife" in the Land Beyond the World magazine. It will be in the October 2021 issue.
Just found this article. It's behind a free account wall, unfortunately.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/your-next-vaccine-could-be-grown-in-a-tobacco-plant
It's about using plants as bioreactors to create vaccines. Medicago, a Canadian company, has one in trials for flu (advantage: No eggs) and is working on one for COVID-19. They're using tobacco plants to create the vaccine (advantage: Something to do with tobacco now fewer people smoke it).
Even more intriguing, though, is the experiments on growing vaccines in common...lettuce. The advantage of this approach is that they are hoping to just be able to grind up the vaccine-infused lettuce and make pills out of it.
I can hear the hopeful sighs from everyone afraid of needles from here.
Oral vaccines also have another advantage...they can be used to vaccinate wild animals. Oral bait vaccine for rabies has all but eliminated it from swathes of Europe. With COVID-19, there's a very real risk of it reservoiring in mustelids, and being able to vaccinate wild mink, otters, and ferrets (especially black-footed ferrets, I'm quite worried about the species if it gets into their surviving wild population) would help us get it further under control.
Plant-based vaccines would also probably make quite a few vegetarians happy AND they're guaranteed to be kosher and halal...
This category finally got me to watch The Old Guard, which is so far up my alley that I have been talking about it all week.
Netflix actually provided the entire movie to WorldCon members. I believe this is a first for long form. (Of course, anyone who was going to get a membership just to see it already has at this point). It's not a great movie, but it's a fun movie.
The other contenders are all movies I haven't seen. The creators of Palm Springs provided a shooting script and a trailer that told me everything I need to know. (I do not like American romantic comedies where the male lead is a total jerk...and stays a total jerk and gets the girl anyway. Bleh).
Soul did look intriguing from the trailer. I hear it's very cute (in a good way).
I haven't beeb able to see the other nominated movies and the studios provided nothing. I do wonder how many people will vote for Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga just because so many people were screaming that it shouldn't be eligible...
If you're young and don't remember, Richard Donner directed the Lethal Weapon series, The Goonies, and the Christopher Reeve Superman movies...well, he directed the first two, but was removed from the second halfway through.
(There's a Donner cut available to see what he actually did with it, which was released in 2006).
This appeared to have been over a fight between Donner and the Salkinds that left nobody on speaking terms.
Oh, and they fired him by telegram. Wow. Drama. I never heard about it at the time because I was too young.
The good news was that this gave Reeve more creative control, a condition for continuing without Donner.
Donner was also responsible for Ladyhawke, and we won't even go there. Ahem. Although he did marry a producer...
But I'll be honest. Reeve will always be my Superman and Donner has to be in part responsible for that.
It's a bad year not to be Hades.
The temporary (but hopefully to be permanent) addition of a Best Video Game Hugo came in a year when there are two games everyone's been playing: Animal Crossing and Hades.
And Animal Crossing has the significant disadvantage in a popular choice contest of being console specific, while Hades is multi platform.
Everyone has been playing Hades, the "rogue-like" (I personally argue real time combat makes it a rogue-lite) about breaking out of the Greek underworld, which has an intriguing plot demonstrating a lot of knowledge of Greek mythology. And Cerberus. Don't forget to pet Cerberus.
There has been significantly more buzz about it than other nominees: Final Fantasy VII Remake, The Last of Us, and Spritfarer.
Honestly, the last of those is my actual favorite, a delightfully melancholy time management-ish platformer about dying. It's cute, it's cozy, it's adorable.
But the biggest competition for Hades is undoubtedly the bizarre free browser game Blaseball. Which I just can't get into at all.
I'm still thinking it's a bad year not to be Hades.
A little disappointed Galactic Journey, which is always fun, didn't make the cut this year.
Our nominees were Journey Planet (As esoteric as ever, including an entire issue about the history of the British war anthology comic Battle). Lady Business was also up to their quality, as was Nerds of a Feather.
Charles Payseur will no longer be doing Quick Sip Reviews after this year, which is a shame, although he plans on continuing to write.
The Full Lid was also pretty impressive. I felt the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog was weaker, but still worthy.
Still impressed by the weird stuff Journey Planet finds to write about. They aren't afraid to go very niche (although the winner is still the time they did the history of the trains in the Disney parks).
The fan awards tend to be a bit of a "usual suspects" round up, so I was pleased to see Elsa Sjunneson (If you need to find out information about writing disabled characters, she's one of your girls) in the mix.
Alasdair Stuart needs to test his files...unfortunately his package was difficult to read...but was up to his usual standard.
I was particularly impressed with Cora Buhlert's very insightful analysis of Rogue One.
All of the finalists more than deserved to be there and it was a very difficult choice. Don't forget to vote in the fan categories if you have the time; they often get lower turnout.
So, I have been in North Carolina...and was able to get quite a bit of Hugo reading done.
This year, I started with the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and here are my thoughts.
Jenn Lyons, in her second year of eligibility, appears to be determined to be the spiritual successor of Brandon Sanderson. This is not a criticism - Jenn is a brilliant writer - but she writes tomes, not books, as it were.
A.K. Larkwood provided only an excerpt of The Unspoken Name, and I sadly found it kind of forgettable.
Emily Tesh's Silver In The Wood was a story I was already familiar with, and should appeal to anyone who is interested in stories based off of British folklore.
Lindsay Ellis provided her science fiction/first contact novel Axioms End. I have to admit that I struggled with it, and the authors note revealed some clues as to why. (Anything else would be spoilery)
Micaiah Johnson is a definite talent. I didn't read the full book of The Space Between Worlds, but it's a fascinating exploration of a similar concept to Connie Willis' time traveling historian books applied to the multiverse. With more Black people.
Finally, Simon Jimenez offered an excerpt of The Vanished Birds, which I also found a bit forgettable. Maybe it's just that I did too much reading this week?
I do still think they all deserved to be there, though.
Washing clothes in space might seem simple. But the laundry detergents we use don't recycle well in a tight closed loop system. (Don't think about the pee).
Which is why NASA has hired laundry company Tide to make a detergent that rapidly degrades. If it works, then it may have a place here on Earth too...and other companies will no doubt follow suit with similar designs.
Laundry detergent, see, isn't exactly great for the environment or for aquatic life. A fully degradable detergent that's gone before it gets to the treatment plant would be a major advantage for everyone, and one I'd gladly pay a little bit more for. So, let's hope this works. (And stop whining about "space stuff")
Tectonic activity on Venus isn't the same as it is on Earth. The plates are much smaller...and act more like pack ice.
And some of it's recent enough that Venus may be tectonically active, like Earth. We need so much more information, though.
How did the crust fragment like that and is it connected to Venus' runaway greenhouse? Hopefully the new missions to Earth's "evil" twin will give us some answers.
Ever wondered how the Enterprise detects life signs?
Or, for that matter, what "life signs" are? The meta explanation is, of course, that it's convenient to the plot.
Except...
...we can now detect "life signs." Specifically, we now have instruments that can detect specific light refraction created by living things. It works by leveraging the fact that life is homochiral. We're not sure why it is (or whether it's true of all life), but living molecules all spiral to the right, whilst inorganic molecules can go either way.
And we can detect it from a helicopter.
It's not hard at all to go from that to detecting it from orbit. Until, of course, we find heterochiral life and get a nasty/pleasant (depending) surprise.
So "life signs" really do exist and can be remotely detected. Despite everything, we do live in an age of wonders.
So, tomorrow is Juneteenth, and yesterday Congress voted at the last possible moment to make it a federal holiday.
Which means this white chick is not talking about herself this week. Instead, I'm going to suggest my readers check out some of the wonderful Black authors doing fantastic work right now. (I'm not going to talk about Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor, because you already know them unless you've been under a rock ;)).
Here's a few names to look at.
Tomi Adeyemi - I loved her Children of Blood and Bone, although I haven't got around to the sequel yet. Amazing African-flavored secondary world fantasy.
Jordan Ifueko - His YA novel, Raybearer was my choice for the Nebula this year, although it lost out in the final vote to T. Kingfisher's A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. It's also up for a Hugo. More African-flavored secondary world fantasy, subverts the soulmate trope beautifully and has a significant asexual character, as well as being delightfully written. Get it for your kids...and a second copy for yourself.
P. Djeli Clark - responsible for such gems as The Black God's Drums, Ring Shout and my personal favorite, The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Clark does his best work in the novella and novelette lengths, so if you're looking for a quick read, he's one worth checking out. Also a really nice guy.
Rivers Solomon - I really loved their dark take on mermaids in The Deep, which was based off of a song which was based off of...I forget, but it's been circling. Basic concept is mermaids descended from pregnant slaves who didn't survive the Middle Passage. But they have some other work out too.
Tochi Onyebuchi - Riot Baby made me uncomfortable and that's exactly why all of my white friends should read it.
Tade Thompson - also a really nice guy and his Rosewater takes biopunk and cyberpunk to Africa in a very interesting way.
I also recommend checking out FIYAH, the magazine of black speculative fiction, which provides a wonderful sampler of the best working today.
Please celebrate Juneteenth by reading and recommending books by Black authors.
...obviously, not a kaboom.
It turns out that a cold spot on a star that size actually sends out a lot of gas. The gas got between us and the star, amplifying the dimming effect of the cold spot. It just happened to be on the right side...this probably happens a lot more, but usually not pointed right at us.
Mystery solved, and we now understand a bit more about how supergiant stars work.
Imagine a mirror which can be literally turned on and off. Researchers are pretty close to creating such a thing, using liquid metal and a current.
While this might seem like a party trick, it could be used to create art by switching the material between reflective and scattering states in different areas.
It could also potentially be used to 3D print electronically controlled optics, which would be useful for making certain health testing devices.
Oculadentavis khaungraae was identified as a hummingbird-sized dinosaur.
Nope, it's a lizard.
A new species in the genre, Oculadentavis naga has proven this. It's just a very, very strange lizard.
Specifically, it had scales (dinosaurs have smooth skin or feathers), lizard teeth rather than dinosaur teeth (lizards have teeth that attach to the jawbone directly unlike both dinosaurs and mammals), and a hockey stick-shaped skull bone that is very specific to scaled reptiles.
Part of the issue was that khangraae's skull looks very like that of a bird, with a thin beak-like jaw.
Naga also has a raised crest and appeared to have a chin pouch that could be used in display. It's...a lizard, but not like any of the ones we know.
If we're transporting animals (and even humans) to another planet, we'll need to preserve genetic diversity.
One great way to do so is to take along quantities of sperm. However, the obvious concern is that sperm exposed to cosmic radiation will develop all kinds of mutations.
Seems that's not true! Researchers stored mouse sperm on the ISS for almost six years, brought it back to Earth, and used it to produce perfectly healthy, genetically normal and fertile mice. You can't even tell.
So...yeah. Space sperm is a thing.
The first draft of Tyranis is finally done. Next step is to start edits on Kyx and also work out exactly where Glyn is going.
Starting to feel like I might actually get this series done now the pandemic stressors have eased off some ;).
Other than that, it's raining and also raining cicadas. Fun!
Some scientists think we should. The theory is that by dropping crushed olivine, we can counteract ocean acidification and help corals recover.
But other scientists think it's really stupid and reckless.
I dunno. There's some proof of concept, but I think the idea of breeding corals that are more acid tolerant has more merit...
Juno caught some wonderful images of Ganymede as it flew by. The pictures show striations caused by tectonic activity and craters in the icy surface. They show dark and light areas, but the best is yet to come.
The spacecraft should also have snapped pictures that can be processed into the first color images of Ganymede. Because deep space probes have limited bandwidth, it's going to take a while to actually get those images back to Earth, but when we do, we'll know what Ganymede really looks like.
In the meantime, just take a look at the wonders on the other side of that link.
"I have a bad feeling about this" and "I have a gut feeling about this" overlap.
A recent study has shown that the less well balanced the gut in a baby, the more they are afraid. (Yes, they scared babies. Don't worry, it was an age-appropriate experiment involving ugly masks. I wonder what it will do to their tolerance for horror as they get older).
Oh, now, that's an interesting thought. Does our gut determine what kind of horror we like?
It's all very preliminary, but it might indicate that we could use adjusting somebody's gut microbiome to help them deal with, say, a severe phobia.
...we just discovered a completely new way of generating electricity. All you have to do is dip carbon nanotubes into a solvent that likes electrons.
It literally just pulls electrons off the tube, creating a current. This current can then be used to power certain chemical reactions. Oh, and it could power microbots.
No, it won't be powering your car any time soon, but there are some really intriguing things we can do with this.
