Category Archives: Science

An Interesting Question

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We are rapidly approaching an interesting time in human history, the moment when our phonotypical nature becomes utterly under our control. Right now we have limited ability to alter our appearance. We can dye our hair, insert inert implants to alter our shape, to an extent, suction away fat cells, and it a limited degree we can even dye our skin, altering the appearance of our pigmentation. This is as crude as the amputations and drugs used by the ship board doctors of the 18th century compared to what I think is coming in our near future. A future so near that I expect to survive to see it. The moment when we have enough genetic knowledge and control that switching on and off with ease and control will become available to the local physician and practiced upon the general population. Continue reading →

Global Warming and particle physics

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Late year I blogged about the habit of some AGW supporters using the term denier to denigrate their opponents. In that post I referred to the GCR hypothesis for global climate changed. In a nutshell it runs like this, GCR (Galactic Cosmic Rays)  when present increase cloud formation, which reflects sunlight back into space before it get to earth, and this cools the planet. When GCR decrease, cloud formation drops and the Earth warms as more sunlight reaches the surface. The Solar magnetic field determines the amount of GCR reaching the Earth, so the solar magnetic field is a principle driver of climate changes on the planet.

The key here is cloud formation, a process not very well understood as the science not stands. The GCR theory is an outlier for cloud formation theory and as such the GCR aspect of global climate changes have been discounted by climatologist in general. (Note: I am not accusing people is hiding or ignoring evidence, some idea takes awhile to become accepted, provided the fact support them and they are falsifiable. To with look at the history of continental drift, once considered a crackpot idea.)

Well the GCR hypothesis for cloud formation has leapt over a major hurdle. The fine physicists at CERN have established with particle accelerators that GCR do play a major part in cloud formation. As current climate models all ignore GCR as a factor in cloud formation, and cloud formation is a critical element of climate modeling, the current models have the be redone. It is possible, perhaps even likely, that all of the climate change we have seen so far is due to increased GCR reaching the Earth as the solar cycle varies.

Really Interesting Medical News

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Scientists have developed a cancer test that can detect free-floating cancer cells in the blood stream. It is sensitive enough to detect individual cancer cells at a ratio of one to one billion.

This is really incredible stuff people. The yahoo article is basic, but once this gets refined and mass produced it will dramatically effect cancer survival rates in my untrained opinion.

I am getting to the age where I think about such things much more often than I used to and news likes this brightens my day.

There was a Dragon in the sky today!

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Earlier today, December 8th 2010, SpaceX successfully launched their Dragon space capsule into orbit. After two orbits, apparently without and flaws, they de-orbited the craft and brought it down for a soft landing in the pacific ocean.

I think this is the first time a private enterprise spacecraft has flown to orbit and back. SpaceX, and companies like SpaceX, (such as Xcor) are the pioneers of a bold new tomorrow.

I salute them and sheer their victory today!

Back From Convention

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We got back last night from Loscon 37, the Los Angeles Area SF convention. This was a good Loscon and I had a great time. There were lots of interesting panels and presentations plus Saturday night I enjoyed the parties so much I stayed out past my knees’ endurance.

I would chat more about the convention, but I’ve been headachy today and am so now. This is going to be a brief post before bed.

It does, however, look like there is a road trip in the near future. The Mojave Air and Spaceport has an open house event every third Saturday they call Plane Crazy Saturdays, and on those Saturdays Xcor — a private enterprise rocket company — hosts open-houses. Xcor is a cool company staffed by cool people and if they stay on schedule they’ll be flying their sub-orbital spaceplane next year.

Not a dropship like Spaceship one and Two, but a craft that takes off like an airplane, scoots above the atmosphere into space — briefly — and then return to the spaceport to be readied for another flight.

SciFi thought of the Day

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I’m having a really bad arthritis knees day so I will leave you with this one thought.

How Many people live on Coruscant? Wikipedia lists the fiction planet as having a population of 1 trillion.

From the films we can see it is a densely populated world and we are told that the entire planet is one big city. (In George Lucas’ mind all planets have one dominate feature, Desert, Ice, Forrest or City.)

So let’s assume a population density matching that of Manhattan. (That’s a low ball figure considering the height of the buildings but it gives us something to work with.)

And a surface land-area equal to the earth’s.

Manhattan Density : 27,485 per km square.

Earth Land Surface area: 148,940,ooo km square.

27,485 X 148,940,000 =4.0936159^12 people. or 40,936,159,00,000 almost 41 trillion people.

Seems to me the wikipedia entry is a bit of a low ball figure based on the fantastic nature of the planet,

Here’s an interesting thing to run, given that population density how big of an area would the Earth’s current population take up?

Current population: 6,812,000,000 / 27,485 = 247, 844 square kilometers.

That’s smaller than the state of Nevada at 286,367 square kilometers. Every man woman and child on planet earth fits into Nevada if we all live like New Yorkers. That really gives SF colony designers something to think about.

Where does a person’s rights really begin? (Part III)

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So in the first section of this rambling set of thoughts, I covered how some people feel that rights begin at conception, and that these people in general will draw a distinction between a fertilized egg and an induced pluripotent cell in terms of what is a person. (The fertilized egg being considered as person with the protections that implies. While the Induced Pluripotent Cell does not.) It seems that being a person in potential is the key factor.

In the second section of the missive I discussed the new field in biology, epigenetics which deals with the factors that govern when and how genes function and that these factor can be influenced by environment and these environmental influences have surprisingly been show to be inheritable.

Now it’s time to combine these two idea and see where they lead us.

With epigenetics we can now see that action we take today can have an adverse effect on generations down time from us. This is not a generalized or metaphorical statement, but a direct corollary of cause and effect. For example let’s hypothesize that smoking can have an inheritable epigenetic effect that makes your grand children much more susceptible to autism. This is pure speculation at this point but not an unreasonable one. So what rights of the unborn and unconceived grandchildren have? Does my choosing to smoke violate their rights? IF I know that my smoking can cause autism two generations downstream, should I be held criminally liable for smoking and the damages it creates?

Of course I could never have children, but this is an exception to human  behavior not the rule. Most people want to have children and want families. So do those future generation have rights?

I am not answering that question. My intention was merely to pose it. Everyone has to find their own answers, but what we do know that is life, biology, and the realities of inheritance are far more complex than we generally give them credit for.

Where Does a person’s rights really begin? (Part II)

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Now wether we are talking about the pro-choice or right-to-life side I generally see some hypocrisy in dealing with the issue of rights and the unborn.

For example we know that alcohol consumption by pregnant women is likely to result in serious health issues for the unborn child. The pro-choice side has certain shown a desire to regulate this in the name of the unborn child but without ever recognizing that the unborn child’s right have begun. While on the right-to-life-side they’ll insist that the unborn child has rights but refuse to pass laws to protect those rights — such as the drinking example — except where it pertains to abortion. That said I want to look at the situation as if we applied it logically, consistently, and using the most up to date understanding of human biology. This is not an argument to adopt a particular viewpoint, but an exploration of the viewpoint that rights begin before birth and possibly before conception. Continue reading →

Where does a person’s rights really begin?

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This is of course the classic question in the abortion debate. The prochoice side generally selecting some moment after concept and sometime only after birth for considering the unborn to have right and with the right-to-life side generally selecting some point before birth or right at conception.

I am not going to debate the merits of either side here. Abortion is a topic on which very few minds are capable of being changed. What I want to do is take the idea that the unborn have rights and play them back within our new understand of human biology. Continue reading →