So, About the COVID Numbers

 Haven't been talking about it in a while.

But, I'm going to point something out that I've noticed.

Our vaccination program is going well, but we're also seeing case numbers start to surge.

Is this the beginning of a Europe-style wave? It might be, but there's something else.

For the last few weeks I've also been looking at case numbers in Israel, which is the most vaccinated country on the planet.

We are seeing the same pattern of infection Israel was at the same point in the process.

Infections and sickness are way down in the senior population, which is now almost 50% fully vaccinated.

They are surging upwards amongst younger people.

I think there are a couple of things to blame here:

1. Just because Grandma is now vaccinated does NOT mean you can stop taking precautions. Younger people are being hospitalized. Younger people are dying. Younger people are staying sick for months.
2. Is it possible that hospitals are admitting younger patients that they would have had no choice but to send home when the ICU was full of very sick elders?

But the good news is that Israel proves vaccination can stop the surge in its tracks. It's harder here, because we are such a big country, but if everyone gets their shots as soon as they are able to get an appointment and doesn't start to relax too much, we can do it.

Oh, and in other news, trials show that the Pfizer vaccine is safe and effective in kids aged 12 to 15. If the same is true of Moderna (likely, as they're very similar vaccines), we may be able to get them vaccinated in time for school in the fall.

We can win this.

Do Octopuses Dream?

 We've been kind of assuming not. But they have two alternating sleep stages...active and quiet sleep. And one of them might resemble REM sleep.

This would make dreaming far more universal than we thought. We used to think it was only mammals and birds, but it's at least some reptiles.

And now octopuses and cuttlefish.

Is dreaming essential to the working of any kind of biological computer?

Do octopuses have nightmares?

So, About that Ship

 Yeah. That one.

I figured I'd just give my opinions on the matter because everyone else is.

The Ever Given is now on the move, under its own power, and moving to the Great Bitter Lake for an inspection. Thankfully, the moon is at perigee, which really helped.

So, how did it happen? I've heard people say the canal is too narrow (not true, you should see what they squeeze down the Manchester Ship Canal). Or that it was obviously the helmsman's fault.

First of all, this is not the first time this ship has been in the news, although the first time was several years ago and much more minor: The Ever Given got blown sideways in a harbor in Germany and took out a (thankfully empty) commuter ferry.

In length, this is as long a ship as current materials science allows. This means it is extremely wide and also stacked very high with cargo. That cargo essentially acts as a sail.

There was a sandstorm with high winds. I like the theory that the helmsman was steering into sustained high winds...and then the wind dropped, and he steered the ship straight into the bank. This isn't human error (although obviously investigations need to happen) but a side effect of the fact that we are probably making these ships too big. They're hard to handle and it's easy to lose control...in this case with amusing but disastrous results.

(I have every respect for the salvage specialists who managed to get the ship free without needing to unload cargo in the middle of the desert, which would have taken weeks).

Friday Updates

 Finally getting significant amounts of Tyranis done.

Other than that, no real news per se. It's spring here (which also means those pesky cherry blossoms). Suddenly went from needing a light sweater in my apartment to being too warm in a t-shirt.

Everyone stay safe and get those shots as soon as you can.

Why Are There Huge Bits Of Weird Rock in the Earth?

They're called "Large low-shear-velocity provinces" and basically they're big blobs of dense rock in the lower part of the mantle. They mess with the Earth's magnetic field.

Now we have a new theory as to what they are. In Earth's early history, it collided with another planet, Theia. One huge chunk flew off into space and became our moon.

The theory is that the LLSVPs are bits of Theia's mantle, which was denser than Earth's. Weird, eh?

And one of them is right under Africa.

Why do I see some vague plotbunny here?

Ooh, Kaboom

If you live in the northern hemisphere and own a telescope, you might want to get out and look at these coordinates as soon as you can:

Right ascension 23 24 47.73, declination +61 11 14.8 - not far from the Cassiopeia star Caph, and an even shorter distance from B-type star HIP 115566. 

If you're lucky, you will see a star that wasn't there before...a classical nova which probably came from CzeV3217 (we won't be sure until it dies down). Classical novas are massive stellar flares that come from white dwarfs that are in close binary with a main-sequence companion. They're caused by the white dwarf stealing hydrogen from its buddy.

Pretty cool, right?

The Brood is Coming

 ...thankfully, I don't mean the X-Men villains.

I mean the periodic cicadas. Here in the DC area we're looking forward to the emergence of a 17 year cicada brood.

It's going to be loud and the foxes, raccoons, etc are going to be quite, quite happy. I'm tempted to try and grab a few myself and see how they fry up.

Periodic cicadas are a weird beast. We don't know how they evolved their extended lifespan, we don't know how they know when to come out (although a portion always tend to emerge early or late). And they only exist in the eastern U.S.

The evolutionary advantage is, of course, that so many of them come out that we can't eat them all.

(Mmm, fried cicada?)

The Right Stuff - on the Ground

 I just found out that Glynn Lunney died.

Lunney was the NASA Flight Director who oversaw much of the Apollo program. He's the guy who directed the moon landing...and helped get Apollo 13 safely home.

He also worked on the shuttle program as a manager. We tend to remember the names of the astronauts, but not so much those who support them from the ground.

Lunney was a key part of America's manned space program for many years.

He was 84 years old.

Friday Updates

Mostly working on Nebula voting and Council of Worlds this week.

Other than that, still no real news. Anyone else feel like the world is kind of holding its breath right now?

Nebula Award Finalists Announced

Because I forgot to do this, here's my initial reaction to the Nebula Award finalists, which can be found here.

In novel, I had a feeling everything I read was weak...and nothing I read made it onto the list. Partly because I could have sworn Network Effect (the Murderbot novel) was coming out in 2021 so I didn't look for it. Pleased for the field to see C.L. Polk's fantasy romance The Midnight Bargain in there, even if I'm personally allergic to the word "regency."

Novella, I liked "Tower of Mud and Straw" and also The Four Profound Weaves.

Novelette was very competitive this year. I would have nominated "The Pill" if I hadn't already had a full slate when I saw it. "Stepsister" was excellent and hit on my love of twisted fairy tales. The A.T. Greenblatt story is rare...a superhero story getting a Nebula nomination?

This year saw some excellent short stories, but what got nominated wasn't my first picks. "My Country Is a Ghost" is a truly moving exploration of immigration, however, and "Badass Moms in the Zombie Apocalypse" is amusing in a dark way.

I didn't read much YA this year, so the Andre Norton is books entirely unfamiliar to me. I have heard that Little Badger's Elatsoe is absolutely fantastic, though. It's sitting on my tablet waiting to be read.

Game Writing saw no nods to the tabletop industry, which is unsurprising given how many major products were put off until 2021. Hades is almost certainly going to take the video game Hugo Discon III added and has a good chance here (I will, however, die on the hill I'm over that it is not a roguelike. Can't be a roguelike with real time combat, dangit).

Four video games and one interactive fiction book. The last, The Luminous Underground is a typically excellent Choice of Games production. I'm playing through Kentucky Route Zero right now, interesting storyline, trying not to let the graphics get in the way. Oh, and Blaseball, which is fantasy baseball as if it took place in Nightvale is completely free to play in browser. If you like baseball and clickers, check it out.

What was 'Oumuamua?

 We think we actually now know what it was. And no, it wasn't a derelict alien spaceship.

Analysis of how the sun altered the object's course has allowed scientists to make a good guess as to what it was made of...

...and it was mostly made of nitrogen ice. In fact, the composition was similar to that of the surface of Pluto, indicating that 'Oumuamua may have been a fragment of a Pluto-like planet and almost certainly came from somebody else's Oort Cloud.

Which is useful and fascinating and also makes a lot of sense.

Now if we could work out where exactly it came from.

Microbes in Space

 No, it's not alien life. It's Earth life. But three of the four strains of bacteria found living on the ISS were new to science.

These are soil bacteria that got up there as part of experiments to grow plants, and now we're studying the soil to find out what microbes thrive in microgravity. The fact that some of them were previously 'unknown' only says that we don't know as much as we could about things which live and thrive in soil.

The goal of sequencing is to find microbes that promote plant growth and also don't mind hanging out without gravity, pun intended. They may also show radiation tolerance.

One of the four strains turns out to be very nice for plants.

When it will get really interesting is when we find a microbe on the ISS that does not thrive when brought back to Earth, as that could indicate the first Earth organism to fully adapt to life "on the float."

Wandering Black Holes?

 Supermassive black holes are the anchors of galaxies. They're the gravitational source that keeps a galaxy together.

Which means that while they do move very slowly, they generally sit in the middle of the galaxy and are orbited by everything else.

Except when they're not.

Spiral galaxy J0437+2456 (yeah, sorry for the mouthful of catalog number), which is 228 million light years away, appears to have a central black hole that is wobbling. And we're not sure why. This could be the aftermath of a galactic collision.

Or it could be evidence of something that theoretically should be happening but that we've never found: A binary pair of supermassive black holes.

Hopefully we'll work it out, but in the mean time, at least we can trust our supermassive black hole to stay firmly put.

Friday Updates

 No real news this week. It appears to be spring, but this is Virginia, winter might decide to come back any time before April 1.

Writing some short fiction, not sure what will end up being done with it yet.

I've Seen a Library...

 ...but some engineers are now proposing a different kind of archive on the moon.

DNA.

Because while it's expensive to transport it to the moon, once it's there all you have to do is put it in a lava tube, and you have perfect storage conditions. The idea is to collect DNA from as many species as possible (as well as a nice variety of human DNA). They think it would take 250 launches. It would be solar powered.

Doesn't seem like something we can do tomorrow, but is it a good idea? Perhaps.

(It's also major story bait).

Birds are Dinosaurs are Birds

 A fossil discovered in the Jiangxi Province near Ganzhou City (this fossil bank is a wealth of cool stuff) tells us that dinosaurs are more birdlike than we thought.

The incomplete skeleton of an adult oviraptoid was found crouching on a clutch of 24 eggs.

Specifically, she (or he, we have to assume that some dinosaurs traded off the duty or even left it entirely to males) was brooding.

This is the first evidence of a dinosaur brooding (as opposed to guarding) eggs.

The embryos in the eggs showed some difference in development, which indicates asynchronous hatching. Asynchronous hatching means that the mother starts brooding as soon as the first egg is laid, rather than waiting for them all to be on the ground. The eggs don't start to develop until the parent begins brooding. Eggs can be laid days apart in modern bird species that practice this.

It's seen in certain species of owl and raptor, and is a mechanism for ensuring that only the hatchlings that can be fed survive. This indicates a somewhat unpredictable diet. (Yes, it's kinda cruel, but in years where prey is hugely plentiful, it allows for a fast population increase).

Oh, and they also found evidence of a crop full of stones, something else modern birds do.

Dinosaurs are birds are dinosaurs.

(And those poor hatchlings would have been so cute).

Self-Decapitating Slugs

 Sea slugs are weird.

Sea slugs are really weird.

Elysia cf. marginata and Elysia atroviridis have the wonderful habit of severing their own heads and then growing a new body. (No, the body doesn't grow a new head).

It appears they do this when they either become infested with parasites or nibbled on a bit too much by a predator. It takes a couple of weeks, and for some of that time they don't even have a heart.

We're still working out how the detached head keeps itself alive.

Oh, and these slugs also photosynthesize by absorbing algal chloroplasts, in an echo of how multicellular life developed in the first place.

(If you want to make photosynthesizing humans for your SF story, here's a mechanism that might actually work with enough genetic engineering).

Noses Are Good

 ...if you need to live with less water. Turns out humans need about half as much water as chimps do, despite sweating a lot more. Even our breast milk has less water in it.

It's probably a savannah species versus forest species difference.

And our noses are part of why. Despite not being that large, our noses actually capture water vapor we're breathing out.

(Which might explain why if you're engaged in heavy activity and end up having to breathe through your mouth, you get thirstier).

And it took us this long to work this out...

Friday Updates

So, I am very happy with the Balticon Science Fiction Society right now. Why?

They just awarded their lifetime achievement award, the Compton Crook, to one of my favorite writers of all time, the amazing C.J. Cherryh.

Which means she will be at virtual Balticon. As will I.

No actual news, just had to fan-squee for a moment.

How did I Not Know About This?

I'm familiar with the fact that scientists are generally a quite humorous bunch, but how did I not know about the annual competition to portray one's doctoral thesis through...

...interpretive dance.

How?

This is absolutely awesome and I need to watch these videos when I don't have as much work.

Delayed Gratification

 You're at the party, but it would be rude to reach for the treats just yet.

Humans show the ability to delay gratification. We can turn down inferior food because we know superior food is coming. For example, leaving space for dessert.

A lot of animals can't do that. Delayed gratification as a foraging behavior is limited to "higher" animals, and is demonstrated in great apes (and some other primates), parrots, corvids.

We test for this using the marshmallow test. In 1972, we studied a bunch of kids to see just how long they were willing to ignore one pretzel on the promise of two, to see when self control develops in children. (It supposedly also proved that more self control equals a better life, but larger studies showed it isn't a significant effect). Not being able to wait is a symptom of ADHD.

Now we have added a new animal to the list of species able to pass the marshmallow test: Cuttlefish.

Cuttlefish.

A non-social, non-tool using invertebrate. The theory is that while social species practice delayed gratification to improve social bonds, cuttlefish have learned it so that they can prioritize not being eaten over snatching food right then.

Of course, cephalopods are pretty intelligent. There's a reason I don't eat calamari.

Neanderthal Grunts?

 Not quite!

A recent study showed that unlike an early hominid, Sima, Neanderthals had a hearing system that is particularly sensitive in a certain bandwidth...

...the one used by speech. Specifically, it shows that Neanderthals had hearing designed to pick up on consonants (If you listen to chimpanzees vocalize, they only produce vowels).

The scientists caution that it doesn't move that they had the ability to understand speech, only the physical anatomy to hear and produce it.

But it seems to me as if those two things had to go hand in hand.

(Plus, why would we have interbred with people we couldn't communicate with to at least some degree?)

Golden Globes

 It's that time of year (I've been furiously reading for Nebula and Hugo nominations).

Well, it's two months late because COVID, but we finally have Golden Globe winners.

In Best Television - Drama, The Crown beat out Lovecraft Country and The Mandalorian.

Musical or Comedy was, no surprise here, Schitt's Creek.

Limited Series, Anthology Series or Motion Picture Made for Television was also no surprise. It was that crazy chess series The Queen's Gambit. (Not genre, but all my genre buddies were into it).

Everything else was non-genre stuff in a year that really will go down as "exceptionally weak" for obvious reasons.

2021 might look quite different.

(Also, CBS, you use italics for shows and movies, "s are for individual episodes. This is not that hard).