Lunar greenhouse to nowhere

At the University of Arizona, they're figuring out designs for hydroponic, easily transported greenhouse systems for growing vegetables on the moon.

What a pity there's no way of actually getting them there for the foreseeable future. Maybe they should sell them to the Chinese.

More on Morals

There's a short interview with Sam Harris at New Scientist, in which he's talking about his new book in which he argues that morality should simply be based on science. The interview includes this quote:

I happen to think that the scientific study of morality is the lever that, if pulled hard enough, will completely dislodge religion from the firmament of our concerns.

Why, yes, Sam, the first round of science's attempt to inform ideas of morality went just swimmingly well in the 20th century, didn't it?

Suicidal thoughts

No, no, I'm not having them personally, but if you are interested in a very detailed examination of the characteristics of the way people think or feel when they are susceptible to suicide, you could do much worse than read this long column by Jesse Bering* in Scientific American.

* For once, he is not talking about sex and its variations, and I wish he would avoid the topic more often.

You knew you were going to read this

Psychology Today notes that there is soon to be published evidence of people having a small, but apparently consistent, ability to be influenced by the future. The experiments sound quite interesting:

For example, we all know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words on the list as practice words and the participants were asked to retype them several times. The results of the study showed that the students were better at recalling the words on the surprise recall test that they were later given, at random, to practice. According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to "reach back in time to facilitate recall."

In another study, Bem examined whether the well-known priming effect could also be reversed. In a typical priming study, people are shown a photo and they have to quickly indicate if the photo represents a negative or positive image. If the photo is of a cuddly kitten, you press the "positive" button and if the photo is of maggots on rotting meat, you press the "negative" button. A wealth of research has examined how subliminal priming can speed up your ability to categorize these photos. Subliminal priming occurs when a word is flashed on the computer screen so quickly that your conscious brain doesn't recognize what you saw, but your nonconscious brain does. So you just see a flash, and if I asked you to tell me what you saw, you wouldn't be able to. But deep down, your nonconscious brain saw the word and processed it. In priming studies, we consistently find that people who are primed with a word consistent with the valence of the photo will categorize it quicker. So if I quickly flash the word "happy" before the kitten picture, you will click the "positive" button even quicker, but if I instead flash the word "ugly" before it, you will take longer to respond. This is because priming you with the word "happy" gets your mind ready to see happy things.

In Bem's retroactive priming study, he simply reversed the time sequence on this effect by flashing the primed word after the person categorized the photo. So I show you the kitten picture, you pick whether it is positive or negative, and then I randomly choose to prime you with a good or bad word. The results showed that people were quicker at categorizing photos when it was followed by a consistent prime. So not only will you categorize the kitten quicker when it is preceded by a good word, you will also categorize it quicker when it is followed by a good word. It was as if, while participants were categorizing the photo, their brain knew what word was coming next and this facilitated their decision.

There are other types of experiments as well. I see now that the actual paper is available, but at the moment I don't have time to read it.

The effect was apparently small but statistically significant and consistent, and also showed that some people showed stronger future influence than others.

Well, this is all pretty fascinating, isn't it? It would be great if this type of experiment can be repeated and holds up over time in different labs. Until now, I think it's fair to say that Ganzfeld experiments have been held up as the most convincing proof of a psi effect, as they have been repeated in many different labs and generally been considered to show small but positive results. (A good detailed history of this type of experiment, and the controversy over whether they really are showing a psi effect or not, is given in this Wikipedia article.)

However, as the examples that Dean Radin has been providing at his website lately show, there is always an element of interpretation involved in scoring the "hits". (In fact, in this example Radin gives of someone trying to guess the correct photo, what I find surprising is that all 4 photos seem to have elements the woman is "receiving", even though the "sender" only sees the target.) But clearly, it would be great to get away from experiments that involve interpretation of what constitutes a "hit" in proving a psi effect.

Of course, we are yet to hear the skeptic take on the new Bem studies, and I guess we do have to wait to see if other psychologist can replicate them, but they sound rather promising.

The origins of morality considered

There's a good article in the New York Times at the moment by Frans de Waal about the evolution of morals as a mammalian thing. He maintains a certain respect for religious views on morality too, however.

There are many things that could be said about this topic, but I don't have the time right now.

It did come to mind when I was watching the second episode of Last Chance to See on Sunday night, when they were showing two orphan chimps being introduced to a new chimp group. You can watch the clip here. The evolutionary aspect of human bonding and how touching we find it is illustrated well.

Can the sensible one come back now, please?

Has anyone else noticed how, while Tony Abbott has been doing things like travelling the world, shooting off  guns and his mouth, and changing his opinions more often than a Japanese astronaut changes his underwear,  Malcolm Turnbull has been doing things like, well, making sense. 

Yesterday it was his proposal to force the government into the proper investigation into the financial viability of the National Broadband Network.  Today, it’s an article emphasising the importance of spending money to get irrigation in the Murray – Darling system water efficient.

On the latter, I’ll admit it’s an issue I have not followed in detail, and it does appear to be both a scientifically and politically complicated one.  As far as I can tell, the Coalition is saying that Labor pulled back spending on water efficiency and is now wanting to concentrate purely on water buy back, but I could have that wrong.

During the angry scenes of rural meetings last week where the idea of 30% water allocations was going over like a lead balloon, the thought did occur to me that if we are talking of inefficient irrigation still existing on many of those farms, is it possible to still get the same yields with the lower allocation being compensated with increased efficiency in delivery?   Has the relevant body had Israel involved in how to grow stuff with minimal water?

Probably all this has been taken into account, but there’s no harm in asking.

Local hero

Maybe he’s had some media attention here before – but if so I’ve missed it.

In any event,  here’s the great story (in the Christian Science Monitor) of an old guy who has almost certainly saved a great many people from committing suicide at The Gap in Sydney. 

Even when he has failed, it hasn’t deterred him from continuing to approach people he fears are about  to jump and invite them in for a cup of tea.   He’s a real hero for many, many families, I am sure.

Give up, climate change skeptics! Kirk is against you.

Important news from Climate Progress.  (Even more important than 2010 being the hottest year on record so far, and the long list of countries that last link provides which have broken high temperature records this year.)

William Shatner is an environmentalist!  And he does ads for Sierra Club which sound rational and credible.

You know your on the losing side when Cap’n Kirk is against you.

Stellar mysteries

Two unusual stories of stars were in the news last week:

1.  a pulsar discovered that doesn’t seem to have the right type of surface magnetic field for the way pulsars are normally meant to work.   This means there is a bit of work to be done to see how this type of pulsar gets its power.  (My comment:  first alien artefact found?)

2. the Milky Way seems to have kinks in its arms, making it a bit more like a pinwheel than your usual Andromeda galaxy, curvy armed, classic shape.  Other galaxies that look like this have been seen before, so this is not considered completely weird, apparently.

But – how does any galaxy get angles in arms like that?  I would have thought that nature (and gravity in particular) loves circles and curves.   Odd.

New nuclear designs considered

There’s a really good article in Physics World from 1 October that discusses the “next generation”designs for nuclear reactors in a pretty straight forward fashion.

There are several paragraphs devoted to the pebble bed, noting this in relation to the recently ended South African program:

Opinion is divided on the significance of the South African project's termination. Stephen Thomas, an energy-industry expert at the University of Greenwich in London, calls it a "major setback" for the development of very-high-temperature reactors, since, he says, South Africa's efforts appeared to be more advanced than research being carried out elsewhere. However, Bill Stacey, a nuclear engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, disagrees with this assessment, adding that South Africa was "just one of many players and not one of the major ones". China, Japan, France and South Korea are also developing technology for high-temperature reactors, some of which is also designed to use pebbles.

For its part, the US is pursuing a variant of the pebble-bed design known as the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). Intended to reach temperatures of 750–800 °C, the NGNP will allow for different fuel configurations, with the coated fuel kernels held either in pebbles or hexagonal graphite blocks. According to Harold McFarlane, technical director of GIF and a researcher at the Idaho National Laboratory, the US Congress approved the construction of a prototype NGNP in 2005 but has so far awarded funding only for preliminary research and development.

Spring sprung

It’s traditional at this blog at this time of year for some photos to appear from the garden.  This has taken longer than usual to happen in 2010, due to the very unseasonably wet and grey weather Brisbane has had for the last 6 weeks or so.

But, today is sunny and nice, the grass has already  been mowed, and here are some photos from this morning:

 

Open access to climate change material!

I'm not sure if I have made the point before here, or only on other blogs, but...

I see from the Nature website that Martin Weitzman has a review of Lomborg's latest book. Yet it is behind a paywall and would cost $32 (!) to get the article. There are also a couple of studies reported about the role of CO2 as the key greenhouse gas. One is in Science, behind a paywall (but available here via a skeptic site!), the other "companion" study one will be coming out in a different journal, and will almost certainly also be paywalled.

Routinely, important new papers on climate change (and ocean acidification) are behind paywalls. If you're lucky, sometimes bloggers or others made a .pdf of the article available.

Look, if those who edit and own the major scientific journals feel that climate change is a serious forthcoming threat for the whole of humanity which is capable of a political response now to modify the threat, why don't they adopt a policy of making such material in their journals available for free? It would be a modest but important attempt to make important material available to the public, who are, after all, pretty damn important in the political process.

If they say they can't do it financially, ask governments, or Bill Gates, or Google, to cover the (surely modest in the big scheme of things) cost of doing this.

I'm sick of this current system on the biggest scientific/political issue that we've ever seen.

Space underwear to the rescue

The Japan Times reports on this important contribution to the Chilean mine rescue:

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency sent high-tech "space underwear" last month to the 33 trapped miners in northern Chile, who on Tuesday local time started to emerge after 69 days underground, officials said Wednesday.

Developed by JAXA and fabric manufacturers, the underwear is effective at absorbing moisture and odors. Temperatures in the mine are reported to be around 35 degrees, the officials said.

The underwear is made of the same high-tech material as was worn by astronaut Naoko Yamazaki during a two-week mission in April aboard the space shuttle Discovery to and from the International Space Station, they said.

I have mentioned another Japanese astronaut and his long lasting silver impregnated Japanese space underwear before. (He said he wore the same pair for 2 months on the space station!) I wonder if you can buy them yet? ** People would be able to arrive at the office each morning and announce things like "day 35 and counting."

Lately, I've also taken to wondering about what they use for toilet paper in the ISS. I mean, according to this story at NASA, they get to change their "normal" underwear maybe every 3 to 4 days.

Given that frequency (especially if you're using Japanese underwear), one would imagine the need for a pretty good clean after using the toilet might be fairly important. And given the way the toilet works (air suction is meant to draw it away from your backside,) I'm assuming things might sometimes take a detour on the way "down", so to speak.*

So does mere paper do the job, or moist towelettes, or what? I think I may have found the answer. An astronaut talks about what he used for some seed sprouting experiment:

Lacking soil, you need some sort of substrate that will retain both seeds and water. I considered using an old shirt or sock but decided the Russian supplied toilet paper was best. This toilet paper is not like what you normally think of as toilet paper. It consisted of two layers of coarsely woven gauze, 4 by 6 inches in dimension sewn together at the edges with a layer of brown tissue sandwiched in-between. It works very well for its intended purpose.

This is the only reference to space toilet paper that I have found. So it's Russian. (So's the toilet.) And I presume it comes back to Earth:

Liquid waste is collected in 20 litre containers. Solid waste is collected in individual micro-perforated bags which are stored in an aluminum container. Full containers are transferred to Progress for disposal.

Your education has been enhanced.

* Updates: apparent confirmation in this description by an astronaut:

For number two, the seat lifts up, revealing a small hole. You’ve really got to get to know yourself, and get good at lining things up for this operation! The system again uses airflow to collect and hold things down where they’re supposed to go. After you’re finished, the bag is tied off and pushed down into the replaceable silver can.

Accidents do happen, and by international agreement, you clean up your own mess!

Is it worth it? One of my crewmates on Space Shuttle once told me that he wished that we could land every morning, so that he could take care of business there, before launching back into orbit. Yeah, it’s not pleasant, but you get used to the hassle of doing these hygiene tasks.

** Yes you can! A mere US$115, and with the AUD at parity, what a bargain.

Considering krill

The ABC is carrying a short report as follows:

Tasmanian scientists have released ground-breaking research which shows increasing ocean acidification is deadly for Antarctica's main food source.

The team at the Antarctic Division has studied the impacts of increased levels of carbon dioxide on the shrimp-like krill.

Scientists exposed the laboratory krill embryos to varying levels of carbon dioxide; from as little as 380 parts per million which is the current surface level, to 2,000 parts per million.

The embryos exposed to the highest level did not survive.

Krill Biologist Rob King says with carbon dioxide levels predicted to double by the end of the century, the next step is to find the exact tipping point.

Well, given that 2000ppm is (I think) never likely to be reached, I'm not exactly panicked about effects at that level. But, even if the effect at around the 500 - 800 ppm mean less successful reproduction, it could be a worry.

The hostile witness

Barrie Cassidy gives his forthcoming book on Rudd a bit of promotion, and tells the story of Rudd trying to make an early strike.

I expect we’ll hear more about extracts from the book, and it will be entertaining.

All mine

Danny Katz has a very amusing story of plagiarism on the internet in The Age today.

Am I supposed to have explicitly claimed some form of copyright on my own blog?  I’ve sometimes idly wondered.

Missing George and the happy medium

There's a brief commentary piece in New Scientist making the same point I was thinking to myself yesterday. Namely, if the science community thought George W Bush's administration was anti-science, just wait til the Tea Party movement starts to exert more influence:

On the surface, the movement seems impelled by the economic pain Americans are feeling. But look more closely and it's hard to miss what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" in US politics, marked by "exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy". An essential strand of that is anti-intellectualism and disdain for science.

Nearly every Senate candidate with Tea Party backing rejects the established reality of human-caused global warming, usually with gusto. "I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change. It's not proved by any stretch of the imagination," Wisconsin candidate Ron Johnson has said. "I think it's far more likely that it's just sunspot activity, or something just in the geological aeons of time."

I think a lot of the complaints from lefty scientists about the Bush administration were concerning his attitudes to biology and stem cell research, informed by his pro-life position.

But in fact, while I am consider myself strongly pro-science (yes, despite the fact that I thought physicists were not taking the potential for danger from the LHC seriously enough), the field of biological research is exactly the one about which I think reasonable conservatives (like me!) have a right to be concerned. I'm not comfortable with the virtual routine use of IVF fertility treatments, let alone extracting stem cells from embryos. It's the philosophical and practical implications of the commodification of human life, (or proto-life, if you want,) that I think should concern more people than it does. For IVF, the strong desire to have one's own baby overcomes all such broader social and philosophical issues. I am similarly somewhat sympathic to the concerns of genetic engineering in plants and animals, and have my doubts that patents for genes is a good idea.

Yet it is, as with many areas of politics at the moment, just about impossible to find anyone who strikes the happy medium in the field of science policy. You either have a choice of pro-lifers who share my concerns about stem cells and all forms of fiddling with embryos, but they are almost certainly going to be climate change disbelievers who are happy to completely ignore scientific warnings of global scale dangers. Their opponents tend to be led by gung-ho culture warrior types whose attitude to the environment I can share, but little else. They are often arrogant about, and completely dismissive of, religious impulses, although they will live with a kind of woolly headed environmental spiritualism . And those with the strongest environmental concerns are often very uninterested in space exploration, yet in my view a truly long term view for those who would like to see humanity survive suggests it would be a good idea not to leave all of life's eggs in the Earth basket.

By and large, I guess I do agree with most Catholic sentiment regarding science, yet Catholic politicians in Australia and the US do not seem to feel particularly impelled to do anything about following such idea legislatively. And while the Church is often unfairly criticised for arguing that reliance on condoms is not the magic answer to HIV anywhere, it's much harder to justify from a logical point of view why it should teach that contraception that prevents fertilisation at all should be treated as being morally defective, at least if all other aspects of the sex are licit (like the couple being married.) So even within the Church you have this "all or nothing" kind of attitude that infects teaching with a scientific aspect.

Yes, it has become very hard to find the happy medium in the world at the moment. My installation as the dictatorial but benevolent political and religious leader of the Earth by alien invaders seems to be the only solution. It's a long shot, I know, but hope remains.

The Light on the Dill

Seriously, Tony Abbott’s capacity for cringe inducing rhetoric just never fails him. Yesterday, encouraged by Alan Jones, he tried to make political points by commenting on the controversial decision to prosecute some Australian soldiers for their actions in Afghanistan. This is dangerous territory for a politician to tread into, but no doubt his sense of opportunism again outweighed caution, and hey the soldiers let him shoot a Steyr over in Afghanistan last week, so I guess he owed them.

But the most cringe-worthy bit of the interview was about the allegedly appalling treatment he got from Gillard*, which somehow compelled him to make the lamest excuse since the dog ate his homework. The SMH reports it this way:

The clash came as Mr Abbott continued to claim that Julia Gillard had set him up by leaking that he had declined her offer to accompany him to Afghanistan.

This, he contended, had lulled him into making his infamous excuse that he rejected the offer because he did not want to arrive for a conference in London suffering jet lag.

While Ms Gillard said yesterday she no longer intended to comment on the saga and thus fuel it, Mr Abbott said he needed to keep defending himself because he was the gatekeeper of the nation's values.

''One of the things that so disappoints me about the election result is that I am the standard bearer for values and ideals which matter and which are important and … as the leader of the Coalition, millions and millions of people invest their hopes in me and it's very important that I don't let them down.

''When I am unfairly attacked, I've got to respond and I've got to respond in a tough way.''

Tony Abbott, standard bearer for politicians everywhere who can't think on their feet, and then whine about it.

* That is, inviting him to come with her on a visit to Afghanistan instead of making his own trip, and then not leaking about the invitation.

A commercial break

Time for some colour and movement:



Found via First Things. (While this parody is amusing, I remain a bit puzzled as to why the original was so popular, though. I didn't think it so exceptional.)

Might work

The BBC notes that there is some talk of using the International Space Station for something more than whatever it is they currently use it for:

The possibility of using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon is to be studied by the station partners.

Letters discussing the concept have been exchanged between the Russian, European and US space agencies.

The Moon flight would be reminiscent of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission which snapped the famous "Earthrise" photograph.

The agencies want the station to become more than just a high-flying platform for doing experiments in microgravity.

They would like also to see it become a testbed for the technologies and techniques that will be needed by humans when they push out beyond low-Earth orbit to explore destinations such as asteroids and Mars.

Using the station as the spaceport, or base-camp, from where the astronauts set off on their journey is part of the new philosophy being considered.

Sounds expensive, though.