...but this guy from Harvard wants to check anyway.
He wants to run an expedition to find the interstellar meteor that crashed off Papua New Guinea in 2014 in the hope that it's a bit of somebody's ship. Or something.
I'm definitely not averse to finding it. (Also, this is being reported by tabloids. Which I almost typoed as "rabloids" but I'll save that for the next time We're All Gonna Die. So...)
But it's probably not aliens.
Finding it, though, might teach us something, so why not?
Bloodworms or bristle worms are sea-dwelling critters that hide in the seabed and come out to grab prey. They're disagreeable, territorial, aggressive creatures that fight with each other using their copper jaws.
Wait, copper?
Yup. The worms harvest copper from the sediment, transport it to their teeth, and bond it to melanin to make really good teeth. The bonding protein is called multi-tasking protein (MTP)
Now we're going to try and replicate it to create new materials.
But now I can think of a few aliens that might use metal bonding like that in other ways.
(Also, could we possibly tweak bloodworms to take up and isolate other metals?)
After a three-year shutdown, the large hadron collider is starting it's third science run, which will last through 2024.
During the three years they've been making some improvements. The LHC is now even more powerful, the detectors are more sensitive, etc. We're going to try and find out how often antimatter forms, get a better understanding of cosmic rays, and study quark-gluon plasma. Whatever that is.
Oh, and they're already planning the next overhaul, so apparently this is going to be how it operates. A few years of SCIENCE and then a few years of making it even better.
And no, it won't destroy the universe...
So, here's my schedule for Ravencon 2022. I will have books to sell at my signing.
Friday, 4pm: Religion in Speculative Fiction. This is about made up religion not real life religion.
Friday. 5pm: Meet the pros
Friday, 8pm: Hey, Let's Kill All The Orcs!: Morality in RPGs
Friday, 10pm: Fantasy and Paranormal Romance: Where's the Line? (Moderator)
Saturday, noon: Reading with Gray Rinehart.
Saturday, 1pm: Signing (in the dealer's room)
Saturday, 4pm: Mythological Influences on Fantasy (Moderator)
Saturday, 9pm: Defending THOSE Movies. Let's see if any of my friends can guess which movie I will be bringing to the table ;).
Sunday, 11am: Doctor Who: After the Regeneration. This isn't the what's next on Doctor Who panel, we're actually going to talk about regeneration itself and how it's used.
Sunday, 2pm: Horses Behave Like Horses. (Moderator)
The discovery of Homo floresiensis rewrote bits of human history. The so-called hobbits (affected by island dwarfism) appeared to be endemic to Flores Island.
And the humans who live there have stories. Stories about little ape-men that hide in the forest.
Is it possible that they are still there?
After all, the ivory-billed woodpecker has been hiding from us really well.
Gregory Forth thinks so. He thinks that the creatures described by the Lio tribe fit the bill. The Lio don't consider them people, but animals that look a lot like people, from which one can assume that if they are still there, there's no communication. Or maybe they are letting us think they're animals.
The Lio don't like them very much, but claim they are descended from humans.
Could just be cryptids, but it seems like a strange coincidence, doesn't it...
...try to get the attention of aliens.
I mean, the Vulcans showing up would be awesome right about now, especially if they could trade us a roadmap for immune system enhancement.
But what if it's the Romulans?
A NASA-led team is considering broadcasting math, physics, the constituents of DNA and...a return address.
We've all seen Species, right?
Don't get me wrong...I wouldn't mind a conversation with a being who evolved on a different planet. One of the themes of my work is absolutely interspecies friendship and bonding (and if I wrote more, shall we say, adult material, we know where it would go). I work on interspecies friendship fairly commonly, after all. (Yes, horses can make friends).
But some people are a bit concerned about attracting an invasion.
To which I would say this:
By the time the message reaches its destination, who knows what state our civilization and species will be in.
And one scientist says we should follow the Prime Directive...and not attempt to contact anyone until we are moving out into space.
Thoughts?
...reality is now space fantasy.
We're working on quantum computers and one of the ways to do so is to use light. Which requires crystals.
So apparently there's a really rare crystal found primarily in Namibia, called cuprous oxide, which can be used to create Rydberg polaritons, quasiparticles made of both light and matter.
It's not vibranium, but it might as well be...
https://www.sciencealert.com/an-ancient-namibian-stone-could-hold-the-key-to-unlocking-quantum-computers
...sadly, it's a book title, but I can finally share a couple of things with you all.
Check out the wonderful cover of this year's installment of the "Writers Save the World" hopepunk anthology series. This one focuses more directly on climate fiction. Twenty writers present stories that are focused on solutions to climate change, on practical things we can potentially do to bring the planet back into balance.
It contains:
I love my story (and thankfully so does the editor, the wonderful J. Scott Coatsworth).
You can already preorder the ebook, but the paperback isn't quite ready yet. Go take a look here.
So, what's holoportation?
Holoportation is a term NASA has coined (and I like it and am using it) for projecting a real time (ish) 3D image of a person to a distant location. This allows the person to communicate with those on site as if they were actually there. And it's here.
Quietly, NASA has been developing the technology, and have now holoported a medical doctor onto the ISS. The next step is to make the communication more two way and realistic.
NASA plans to use this technology to allow specialists who can't take the stress of a launch communicate more directly with astronauts. Also, while light speed lag will still be a problem, it might be used to allow astronauts on the journey to Mars to better communicate with their families. And adding touch is feasible. (Which means exactly what your dirty minds think it does. Ahem).
They also plan on using the technology to provide psychiatric services to astronauts on long trips.
On Earth, holoportation could be used in all kinds of ways. These might include telemedicine, having a relative who can't afford (or medically can't) travel for Thanksgiving be able to sit at the table and, of course, entertainment.
Maybe one day we'll have people sitting on panels at conventions by this means and the other panelists and moderator will be able to interact with them naturally. Ya know, when somebody has to cancel because their doctor won't let them fly.
I had no idea we had it. NASA has been so quiet about this one. But the possibilities...
(Also, this is the first step to the holodeck).
It's not necessarily a bad thing. One day we might be able to turn one of them into an amazing radio telescope.
But it's an interesting observation that the farside of the moon...which we don't see...has a lot more craters.
Is it because it's tidally locked?
No.
It's because the near side has huge lava fields that covered up a lot of the craters. With no atmosphere, there's very little erosion on the moon.
And these lava fields were created by a huge collision, which made the South Pole-Aitken basin, a huge crater 1,600 miles wide. We now know that the asymmetric nature of the lava field was because of the heat plume flowing more easily on the nearside.
...and we don't understand why. Neptune's southern hemisphere is supposed to be in early summer right now, but global temperatures have plummeted. (Then again, given how spring has been here).
At the same time, the pole is...warming?
I wonder if Neptune has something like polar vortexes? Jet stream shifts? When summer lasts forty years, "weather" probably moves more slowly too.
https://www.newser.com/story/319228/scientists-baffled-by-neptunes-temperature-swings.html
The tabloids are having fun with the fact that we have discovered no less than 5,000 new virus species in the ocean...and a new phylum.
So, time for a reminder:
Not all viruses are evil.
We have our own personal virome and while we don't understand the role of all of them, we aren't sick all the time.
Not all viruses are pathogens just as not all pathogens are viruses.
Our virome includes:
Potentially pathogenic viruses that we're currently living in harmony with, such as herpes.
Bacteriophages, which infect either our beneficial bacteria or the bacteria we need to keep under control. In short, there are some viruses in your body right now preventing you from getting sick by slowing the reproduction of certain bacteria and keeping your biome balanced.
"Passengers," which are viruses that are using us to live in, but aren't making us sick. Whether any of these are "paying rent" by providing a service is not entirely clear, but some clearly do. If you have hepatitis G, which doesn't always cause disease, it will help you by keeping out AIDS. (Yes, viruses fight each other). Herpes infection appears to be beneficial to the immune system.
Viruses that were infecting our food and aren't going to survive in us for long, which often means plant viruses.
And then there's the endogenous viruses which we've long since coopted, one of which is vital to making us what we are...
...the virus that gave us the codes to make a placenta.
The 5,000 new species we just found in the ocean aren't human pathogens. They're just a part of the ecosystem...just as some viruses are part of us.
...albeit not the intelligent or even living variety. Turns out a 2014 meteorite that exploded over Papua New Guinea was not from around here.
We weren't able to confirm it because the U.S. Navy was keeping some of the needed data classified. But now we know.
And we're going to hunt for bits of it to see if we can get a sample of interstellar material. It's probably a stray bit of somebody else's Oort Cloud.
(And not alive. Although we've all seen that movie).
The list is here.
My thoughts:
Short fiction is particularly interesting. Seanan McGuire has been nominated for "Tangles," with the publisher listed as Magicthegathering.com...tie-ins pretty much never get nominated. Even when they're written by a McGuire.
And a person named Blue Neustifter has been nominated for "Unknown Number," with the publisher listed as...Twitter.
Twitter fiction getting nominated is probably a good thing for the field in general. Variety is fun. But I didn't exactly expect it.
Ellen Datlow's absence from Best Editor, Short Form is conspicuous. I wonder if people got tired of her winning every year or if she finally did the right thing and recused herself. (Don't get me wrong, Datlow is a fine editor, but there comes a point when it's professional to say that you have won enough).
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is just leaping into the field. He has nominations in two categories...but those categories are Best Novelette and Best Editor, Short Form. How many people have been nominated in an editing category and a writing category in the same year? Not many! And when it's somebody who's new on the scene too...this is very much a watch this space. "O2 Arena," while not hugely to my personal taste, is brilliantly written.
As every year, a rant got nominated for Best Related Work. It's a rant I mostly agree with, I'm just tired of ranty blog posts being nominated. Although at least the trend of nominating entire online conventions lasted precisely one year. Nothing against the people who got nominated, it was just quite time consuming to fairly judge them. However, I'm slightly disappointed that it's only books this year, I enjoy when something weird or fun shows up.
I don't really have any other thoughts, working on my full analysis which I'm going to post on Medium later.
(And expect my final analysis on the Nebs by the voting deadline too).
I dimly remember when "an asteroid killed the dinosaurs" was one of several competing theories.
Now, for the first time, we have fossils of dinosaurs that were killed by the asteroid. How do we know?
They were found in a massive tangle with fish that had molten rock particles in their gills.
Also in the tangle...the leg (just the leg) of said dinosaur, a turtle skewered by wood, skin from a horned triceratops, a pterosaur egg...and a fragment of the impactor.
Holy...the violence of the impact, the sheer power of this disaster...the disaster which made us.
We still aren't doing science with the James Webb telescope...but NASA is already thinking about the next space telescope.
And it's going to be a fluid beast. In the near future, astronauts on the ISS will do a test of a liquid mirror. Turns out that in microgravity you can make a water droplet very, very large indeed. (This is why if liquids escape on the space station they produce big spheres).
The experiment will test the feasibility...and these liquid lenses could be ten, even 100 times the size of Webb's mirrors...and give us an even better view of the universe.
They weren't being entirely honest with us. When they sequenced the genome in 2003, it was only 92% of it.
Now, with the help of AI, we have the full DNA sequence. Which will tell us a lot about human genetic variation, particularly something called the centromere. This is where DNA splits when cells divide, so when it makes mistakes you get evolution...or cancer.
The big finding is that it supports the fact that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than outside it. Because non-Africans are all descended from the relatively small group of people who left.
Oh, and it might give some massive insights into why we are the way we are.
There was a trope that circulated for a little while in SF that the universe is a lot smaller than we think and we're seeing all the way round it.
Kepler just found an exoplanet 17,000 light years away that looks just like Jupiter...
(Of course, while we haven't disproved the wrap around hologram theory, we've seen stars much further away, but it's still kind of weird to find a Jupiter twin that far away. Similar mass, almost the same orbital distance...I bet there's a little planet between it and its sun on which somebody is looking through a telescope and maybe even saying "Hey, that really distant exoplanet we just found...)
I have part of my Ravencon schedule, but am not going to announce it until it's official. But there are some *very* fun panels planned. The con is April 27-29 and will be requiring masks and vaccination or negative test (I know things seem to be winding down, but we need to be extra careful when people from different areas are mixing for now).
I will also be at the Rantings of a Wandering Mind table at AwesomeCon 2022 with Joab Stieglitz and plenty of books for sale.
