What’s in a Name

By: | August 30, 2011

The best thing that ever happened to the Big Bang is its name. For scientists, the acceptance of a scientific concept depends on its explanation of existing data, its prediction of observable phenomena, the observation of those phenomena, and the duplication of those results. But for non-scientists—well, for scientists, too—the popularity of a concept can come down to a show biz maxim: You gotta get a gimmick.

The need for a name for the origin of the universe didn’t arise until Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery of evidence that the universe appeared to be expanding from…something.  The “primeval atom,” suggested the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître shortly thereafter. The “Primeval Fireball,” suggested the Princeton theorist John Archibald Wheeler, once the leftover radiation from the event was discovered in the mid-1960s. From a commercial standpoint, however, neither term had a chance against the competition.

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Guest Post: Wonder TK

By: | August 29, 2011

One of the well-thumbed books in our house is Gary Larson’s There’s a Hair in My Dirt!, which chronicles the adventures of a daffy maiden who sees nature through a rose-colored magnifying glass. She cuddles up to invasive squirrels, delights over frolicking fawns, and beats the heck out of a snake as it tries to suffocate a mouse. (The mouse carries a virus that kills Harriet, the maiden, for her trouble).

I usually laugh along until I come to the part about fireflies. Harriet squeals over these magical, fairy-like creatures (which, Larson points out, are actually beetles)—and I cringe, because squealing is exactly what I do, too. Continue reading →

The King Must Die

By: | August 26, 2011

A little over two weeks ago, on the evening of August 10th, a young Irish heavy-equipment operator spotted what he thought was an old leather car seat jutting out of the drained fields of Cashel Bog. Jason Phelan was nearing the end of a long day on a harvester, a giant machine that slices peat from drained bogs and rakes it into piles for garden compost. But Phelan knew that Ireland’s bogs occasionally cede strange treasure. So he hopped down from the cab to take a closer look.

The object, half-buried in the turf, was chestnut-brown. It looked like old leather, a piece of something–something, on closer inspection, that was definitely not a car seat. Phelan puzzled over it, considering the possibilities. Then he took hold of it and gave it a tug. A pair of ancient, twisted human legs slipped loose from the turf. Continue reading →

Body and Soul

By: | August 25, 2011

I just wrote a story about robots whose brains are based on the neural networks of real creatures (mostly cats, rats and monkeys). Researchers put these ‘brains’ in an engineered body — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — equipped with sensors for light and sound and touch. Then they let them loose into the world — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — and watch them struggle. Eventually, the robots learn things, like how to recognize objects and navigate to specific places.

These so-called ’embodied’ robots are driven not by a top-down control system, but by bottom-up feedback from their environment. This is how humans work, too. If you’re walking on the sidewalk and come across a patch of gravel, your feet and legs feel the change and rapidly adjust so that you don’t topple. You may not even notice it happening. This embodied learning starkly contrasts with most efforts in the artificial intelligence field, which explicitly program machines to behave in prescribed ways. Robots running on conventional AI could complete that sidewalk stroll only by referring to a Walking-On-Sidewalk-with-an-Occasional-Patch-of-Gravel program. And even then, they’d have to know when the gravel was coming.

Most advocates of embodied AI are motivated by its dazzling array of potential applications, from Mars rovers to household helpers for the elderly. But I’m more curious about the philosophical implications: whether, in loaning robots visual, memory, and navigational circuits from real biological systems, the researchers might also be giving them the building blocks of consciousness.
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Is passion for science a heritable trait?

By: | August 24, 2011

My dad and I share an obsession with endurance sports. We don’t just love to get outside and ride our bikes, we actually feel antsy and anxious if we go too many days without working up a sweat. As I’ve written elsewhere, our compulsion for exercise has a genetic basis. Dad and I probably have an exercise inclination gene (or genes) that my mom and sister —who think we’re crazy— don’t.

On a recent visit to my parents, I wondered if a passion for science might also have some inherent basis. The thought occurred to me as Dad showed me some old photos. In one of them his parents, Mennonite wheat farmers who never went to college, are standing with Dad at his graduation from Taylor University. How did a farm kid from Kansas who grew up without ever knowing a single scientist end up with a master’s degree in physics, I wondered. Continue reading →

Found Photos

By: | August 22, 2011

I don’t know where you’re sitting right now, but do me a favor: zoom out to a space shuttle’s eye-view of your spot on the blue marble. Now spin the globe until you’re looking at exactly the opposite side.

If you were here with me in London, our antipodal opposite would be (approximately) New Zealand. So now zoom back in with me, past the pretty blue beaches and the cabbage trees, maybe into one of those sweet little bungalows in Auckland, into its neatly decorated living room, where tucked into the drawer of an end table you’ll find a wedding album. Flip past the smiling bride and groom, and eventually the pictures will start to look weirdly familiar. Because behind their tired, happy honeymoon smiles, you can’t help noticing the architectural idiosyncrasies of your home town. And there, in the far left corner of the picture–that’s you.

I’m going to be honest here. You don’t look great. That pissy grimace is because you’ve just spilled coffee on your clean white shirt, a fitting end to what looks to have been a very long day. Unfortunately, I’m also noticing that this picture was taken during that phase when you were trying to bring back Hammer pants. If this image appeared in your Facebook feed, you’d detag it in a New York minute. You might even ask the “friend” who uploaded it to reconsider.

But here, safely tucked into a random stranger’s album in a drawer on the other side of the planet, that radioactively unflattering picture is fine with you. And the happy couple certainly doesn’t care: to them, you’re just human scenery.

Random strangers in our pictures are a prosaic fact of life on par with breathing and gravity. The question of how many tourist pictures we’re in is an exercise in stoner philosophy on par with whether we’re all really perceiving exactly the same color when we say “red”. Interesting enough, but fundamentally unknowable.

But those days are numbered. Continue reading →

An Arctic Land without Its Top Predator

By: | August 19, 2011

I’d just sat down when the first carver approached me. It was my second evening in Iqaluit on southern Baffin Island, 2000 kilometers north of Ottawa, and all around me well-heeled bureaucrats were tucking into Arctic char and steak. But the carver, a small weathered-looking Inuk, skirted them and made a beeline toward me. In his calloused hands, he held out a small sculpture for sale. It was a bear–a polar bear carved exquisitely from hard green serpentinite. With its long neck stretched and its head lifted, the carved bear tasted the air. Its maker, Jutai Noah, knew his subject intimately.

As it happened, I had just come back from a nine-day stay in a remote field camp on southern Baffin Island, and I’d just heard a lot about polar bears. Baffin forms a large part of the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, and Nunavut is home, I’m told, to the largest population of polar bears in the world, as many as 15,000 of these large carnivores. But opinions vary wildly on how these legendary bears are doing in Nunavut these days. Continue reading →

Dose Response

By: | August 18, 2011

The college year in Japan starts in October, so in the fall of 1999 I had an extra month of summer vacation. It was going to be tough committing to a year in such a different place, while navigating a long-distance relationship with my boyfriend in Toronto, but life is for adventure. I arrived at Kansai International Airport in the last week of September, planning to take a week’s diversion to catch up with my friend Ian, who had taken a job teaching English in a small town in Fukushima Prefecture, roughly 75 miles (120 km) North-East of Tokyo. After that, I would head down to my new home in Ohbaku – a suburb of Kyoto – for my stint as a foreign student at Kyoto University, or Kyodai, as it’s known locally.

I was impressed that the local school had provided Ian and his girlfriend an entire house, with traditional tatami floors and sliding paper doors. It seemed like such a grown-up way to live, especially after our previous haunt at the university residence back in Canada. I happily settled in for the first night in my new country.

The next morning, 30 miles (50km) away, Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara and Yutaka Yokokawa were preparing a small batch of uranium dioxide fuel for a nuclear reactor, and they were under considerable time pressure. They opted for 10-litre stainless steel buckets rather than a dissolving tank, and then they poured their mixture, including about 16 kg of enriched uranium, directly into a precipitation tank, rather than the buffer tank designed to preclude the onset of criticality. Midway through pouring the seventh bucket, Cherenkov radiation flashed a brilliant blue, illuminating the workers, one leaning over the edge of the tank, another holding a pouring filter.

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