Random Linkage 14/11/09

LCROSS Impact Data Indicates Water on Moon
'The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.
'Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
'NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.'
(When it starts to crack really bad puns, you can tell when the group mind of NASA is really excited, and quite right too. How long before some high-end Hollywood restaurant is selling Moon water at $1 million a bottle?)

Spirit Begins Extraction Process
On Monday, November 16, 2009, Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will begin the much-anticipated, weeks-long process of extricating itself from a patch of powdery soil that stopped it in its tracks six months ago. It will begin by driving forward to the north, following its tracks out, even though its right front wheel is broken and immobilized.
(The rover driving team have about four months to get their brave little toaster free of the sandpit before winter comes and its power levels drop.)

Ghostly 'Spokes' Puff Out From Saturn's Rings
Massive, bright clouds of tiny ice particles hover above the darkened rings of Saturn in an image captured by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 22, 2009, around the time of Saturn's equinox.

Bizarre Lives Of Bone-eating Worms
'It sounds like a classic horror story -- eyeless, mouthless worms lurk in the dark, settling onto dead animals and sending out green "roots" to devour their bones. In fact, such worms do exist in the deep sea. They were first discovered in 2002 by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), who were using a robot submarine to explore Monterey Canyon. But that wasn't the end of the story. After "planting" several dead whales on the seafloor, a team of biologists recently announced that as many as 15 different species of boneworms may live in Monterey Bay alone.'
(Now imagine them growing bigger, and crawling out of the sea...)

12 claustrophobic space capsules

A joyride through the nanoscale

Science Fiction that Isn't Science Fiction (4)

Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade—novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.

Nader Elhefnawy does a very credible job of tracking the rise and fall of the technothriller, drawing a straight line from Edisonades of the nineteenth Century, though H.G. Wells' The War in the Air, Heinlein&Co, to Clancy and those other guys.

While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance.

No kidding about video games; they've thoroughly absorbed and reengineered technothriller tropes; the best are sophisticated and melancholy studies of the loneliness of the long distance warrior.

When I Was A Scientist

Last night I dreamed I was in a laboratory again.

We all have a particular anxiety dream that we return to over and again. Mine is about being unable to get together the various things required to maintain the clone I looked after, on and off, for twenty years. It's a natural clone of a simple freshwater animal, green hydra, distant relative of corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. That's it in the photo above - some of you may remember it from university or school biology classes. It's about a half a centimetre long, and has a simple body plan: a tube constructed from an outer ectoderm and inner gastroderm, both mostly one cell thick and separated by an acellular mesoglea (the jelly in jellyfish). At one end is a mouth ringed by tentacles that contain four different kinds of nematoblasts, cells with capsules that explode when triggered, enjecting prey with poison and wrapping barbed coils around them. At the other is a foot by which it adheres to a suitable substrate. Green hydra are an example of a mutualistic symbiosis. They contain, in gastrodermal digestive cells, populations of single-celled Chlorella algae. The algae supply the animal with nutrition; the animal provides the algae with shelter, and nutrients they need to grow.

Hydra can reproduce asexually by budding, which is what the specimen in the photo is doing; eventually that bud at its waist will develop tentacles and a mouth and pinch off from its parent and take up an independent existence. And that means you can clone up from a single specimen a population of genetically identical individuals, ideal for use in experiments. I used to grow thousands of them for my research, which investigated how the intimate relationship between these two very different organisms was regulated.

Hydra aren't difficult to grow. You keep them in artificial pond water made up with simple chemicals, supply them with light and a constant temperature between 15 and 20 degrees Centigrade, feed them with freshly-hatched brine shrimp, and keep the Pyrex trays in which they grow nice and clean. My dream, the one I return to (or which returns to me) is that I can't quite manage this routine. I've forgotten to hatch the brine shrimp, or forgotten to clean the trays after feeding, or I don't have any artificial pond water and the chemicals to make it are missing, or there's something wrong with the incubator cabinets that keep the trays of hydra at the right temperature . . . And I wake up in that state of unresolved anxiety we all have, from time to time.

Other people dream of missing planes or trains, or being unable to find their way out of or into a building, or of arriving at a concert of business meeting without a stitch of clothing. I used to dream about exams, although not in the way that most people do - of having to take an exam without knowing anything about the subject. No, I used to dream about invigilating exams, another part of my former job. That went away after a while, but I still dream about culturing hydra, even though I quit science more than thirteen years ago. Funny, isn't it, what sticks in the mind?

Tranquility Base

Now the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter has settled into its mapping orbit just 50 kilometres above the Moon's surface, it has been returning some spectacular images of the Apollo landing sites. Above is a close-up of an image of the the Apollo 11 site, just released by NASA. It's about 150 metres across, with the LEM landing stage and the pads of its legs clearly visible, as well as the various compenents of the science package. And, of course, the tracks left Armstrong and Aldrin, showing how close they stayed to their home on the Moon in the few hours they spent outside, reminding me all over again of watching them in the early hours of that July morning forty years ago.

More Spaceship Goodness

Hey, it's the cover for the US edition of Gardens of the Sun, scheduled for publication in March 2010. Kudos to artist Sparth and hero editor Lou Anders.

Leipzig, 1989

In 2002, I was one of the guests of honour at a science-fiction convention in Leipzig. I had a fine old time. My hosts took me and the other guests to the top of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal War Memorial, the largest war memorial in Europe, and held a celebratory dinner in Auerbach’s Keller, the cellar restaurant where Goethe is supposed to have received inspiration for Faust. I visited the monumental train station, too, and the church of St Thomas, where Bach was cantor, and where he is buried (a choir was rehearsing one of his cantos: a spine-tingling moment). My hosts also took me to the Nikolai Church, in the heart of the medieval part of the city, and showed me the former Stasi headquarters, partly converted to a nightclub, past which, in the last days of East Germany, candle-carrying citizens had walked once a week, risking their freedom in peaceful protest against the communist regime. The Nikolai Church and the story of the Monday demonstrations and those candle-lit walks left a lasting impression on me, and got me interested in nonviolent protest, something I'd later work into some of my fiction.

The fall of the Berlin Wall didn't begin in Berlin; it began in Leipzig, with those peaceful protestors. In 1989, prayers for peace, a regular Monday-night event in the Nikolai Church, became so swollen by citizens dissatisfied with the Communist government that nonviolent demonstrations began to be held in the nearby Karl Marx Square. Towards the end of October, over 320,000 people gathered in nonviolent protest - more than half the population of the city - and by then similar protests were being held in squares of other cities in East Germany: an inexorable tide of protest that led to the toppling of the wall, the end of the East German government, and the eventual reunification of Germany. Nonviolence doesn't always succeed, of course, but even when it's beaten down by determined and ruthless opponents, it can leave behind the seeds for change. In 1968, student protests in Warsaw and the Prague Spring were swiftly subdued; yet afterwards, as Michel Gorbachev admitted, nothing was the same again. The Soviets and their puppet governments had lost credibility, and the support of the people. When they were challenged again, twenty years later, they fell apart.

Where do science fiction writers get their ideas? Isn't it obvious?

Random Linkage 07/11/09

Data from Kaguya's prime mission to the Moon has been released
'Yesterday, the Japanese space agency announced the public release of the data from the primary mission of the Kaguya (a.k.a. SELENE) lunar orbiter. The release covers the period from December 21, 2007 to October 31, 2008, and includes data from all of the science instruments (which excludes the HD camera, not a science instrument). This release formally opens up the data for use by all scientists and enthusiasts around the world, not just the Kaguya science team, and will be a rich resource for lunar scientists.'

Speed Limit To The Pace Of Evolution, Biologists Say
'Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a theoretical model that informs the understanding of evolution and determines how quickly an organism will evolve using a catalogue of "evolutionary speed limits." The model provides quantitative predictions for the speed of evolution on various "fitness landscapes," the dynamic and varied conditions under which bacteria, viruses and even humans adapt.'

Mass extinction blamed on fiery fountains of coal
'FOSSIL fuels have a new crime to live down. A frenzy of hydrocarbon burning at the end of the Permian period may have led to the most devastating mass extinction Earth has ever seen, as explosive encounters between magma and coal released more carbon dioxide in the course of a few years than in all of human history.'

Neutered HIV Virus Delivers Treatment to Fatally Ill Boys
'Researchers may have taken a step towards curing the rare, inherited brain disease made famous by the movie Lorenzo’s Oil–and also towards ushering a new era of gene therapy. To help two young boys suffering from the disease, researchers tried an experimental treatment using a deactivated version of the HIV virus. The virus delivered working copies of a gene to stem cells from the patients’ bone marrows. The HIV virus, stripped of genetic material that makes it toxic, integrates permanently into the DNA of cells it enters, scientists said. That means the modified gene remains in the blood-forming stem cells for the life of the patient.'

Widescreen Mars

A stunning portfolio of images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's Hi-Rise camera, selected by the Boston Globe's Big Picture.

2012

Fulfills every expectation of a Roland Emmerich disaster flick: big, noisy, national monuments in the firing line, totally infused with Emmerich's talent for presenting spectacular CGI destruction as flatly as Powerpoint, and killing billions of people and failing to make you care for any of them. But if it's dumb spectacle you want, he's your man, there's a nice twist in the story, and I can't help but having a sneaking regard for a film whose hero is a failed SF writer.

Most interesting aspect of these films, for me, is the use of found media footage to titivate the mise en scene. We're already in the middle of an apocalypse, and like the frog in the pot on the stove, don't realise the water is growing fatally warm.

Bonus Awful Warning: the Stephen Somers remake of When Worlds Collide due next year: 'Alpha Centauri is on a collision course for Earth, and mass hysteria of biblical proportions breaks out in the streets...'

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (3)

Roland Emmerich’s 2012 claims to be inspired by ancient Mayan prophecies, but with its lovingly detailed CGI shots of the destruction of the temples of Mammon and saving of a small band of the blessed, it’s actually square in the Christian apocalyptic tradition - something that’s almost as old as Christianity itself. The last book in the Bible, the Book of Revelation (also known as Apocalypse, from the verb apokalypto, to reveal), was written towards the end of the first century AD. It’s a visionary warning of the End Times, when the damned will flock to the AntiChrist, the Earth will be visited with every kind of destruction, and true believers will at last ascend into the infinite bliss of the New Jerusalem. Outbreaks of apocalypse fever have swept through Christianity ever since, peaking around 1500, when dozens of sects proclaimed the coming of the End Times (see Norman Cohen’s The Pursuit of the Millennium), and again around the end of the last century. Millions of premillennialists (especially Evangelical Christians in the United States; one of the Founding Fathers, Cotton Mather, was an ardent premillennialist) still expect at any moment to experience the Rapture of bodily ascent into Heaven as a prelude to the harrowing of Earth by a returned Christ.


This apocalypse is the subject of Victorian painter John Martin’s ‘The Great Day of His Wrath’ (above); this, and other huge, sensationalist canvases, were allegedly inspired by commercial dioramas animated by use of artificial lighting - precursors of present-day blockbuster movies. While Martin’s themes were biblical, most of the apocalypses in Hollywood movies are secular,with nuclear war, asteroids, or Arnold Swarzenegger as substitutes for God’s wrath. But an outfit outside the Hollywood machine, Cloud Ten Pictures, has been making movies for a Christian audience that deploy the tropes of premillennialism with deadly seriousness. They’ve produced a trilogy based on the bestselling Left Behind series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, a literal portrayal of the End Times of the premillennialists, as well as several thrillers that share the same post-Rapture setting, as well as the same villain, UN President Nicolae Carpathia, aka the AntiChrist (played by Gordon Currie - what must his fan mail be like?): Revelation, Apocalypse, and Tribulation (starring Gary Busey and featuring Margot Kidder and Mr T as, er, Mr T).

They look like science fiction, or science thrillers, but they aren't. As far as the people who made them and their intended audience are concerned, they embody a literal truth.

Plume Run

The Cassini Orbiter completed its seventh close encounter with Saturn's small but highly active moon Enceladus yesterday, passing within a hundred kilometres of the south pole and ploughing through the plumes of water ice fired into space by some as yet unknown process deep beneath the surface. For much of the pass, Cassini was using various instruments to sample the plume, but it took pictures before and after the encounter; Emily Lakdwalla has pasted a couple of the best images in her blog over at the Planetary Society's site, including one of fissured and folded terrain that reminds me all over again that despite its small size, just five hundred kilometres in diameter, Enceldaus possesses an extremely varied and geologically active surface. It's easy to imagine climbing one of those ridges and looking out at a tangle of long, low bright hills snaking towards the sharply curved horizon . . .

Random Linkage 31/10/09

Symbiosis by Jelte van Abbema
'Dutch designer Jelte van Abbema won the €10,000 Rado Prize at the Dutch Design Awards last week for a body of work including Symbiosis, an experimental project that involved printing with bacteria.'

Detecting Life-Friendly Moons
'Forty years ago, the Apollo astronauts traipsed across our Moon, making it "inhabited" for the first time – albeit for only two and half hours. A bona-fide habitable moon has never been found, but astronomers are considering how we might find one around distant stars.'

Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy
'Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars.'

Novel Evolutionary Theory For The Explosion Of Life
'The Cambrian Explosion is widely regarded as one of the most relevant episodes in the history of life on Earth, when the vast majority of animal phyla first appear in the fossil record. However, the causes of its origin have been the subject of debate for decades, and the question of what was the trigger for the single cell microorganisms to assemble and organize into multicellular organisms has remained unanswered until now.'

Tiny banner ads attached to flies generate buzz
'A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.'

Zombie Creatures: What Happens When Animals Are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?
'From fungi to flies, some parasitic species have figured out how to control their host's behavior to get what they need. See what happens when bugs go really bad.'

Solar Power Footprint

See it? That little black square in the middle of Saudi Arabia? It's 231 kilometres on a side, covering some fifty-three thousand square kilometres. That's the total area of solar panels needed to supply global electricity needs at its current rate of consumption, some 2 trillion Watts. Calculated by Professor Raymond Pierrehumbert of Chicago University, in an open letter that corrects global-warming denying innumeracy in Superfreakonomics.

(via Carl Zimmer)

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction (2)

At first, when death appeared improbable, because it had never visited him before, Knight could think of no future, nor of anything connected with his past. He could only look sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, and strive to thwart her.

From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a huge cylinder, having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the cove to the extent of more than a semicircle, he could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him. Grimness was in every feature, and to its very bowels the inimical shape was desolation.

By one of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now.

In this scene from Thomas Hardy’s third published novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Knight, a geologist, has just saved the woman he loves and now finds himself hanging from a precarious ledge high on a Cornish seacliff. It's not only the prototypical cliffhanger, dutifully replicated in just about every Hollywood action film; it's also an early instance of another kind of vertiginous thrill: the abrupt contrast between ordinary human life and deep time that creates the famous 'sense of wonder' science fictional affect.

Hardy is best known for his Wessex novels, which mythologise a large swathe of south and south-west England where rural life embedded in landscape and its rhythms and seasons is undergoing changes forced by industrialisation. But at the time of writing A Pair of Blue Eyes, the early 1870s, Britain was in the throes of a scientific revolution too. Darwin's evolutionary theories threatened to displace mankind from the centre of creation; and geology and paleontology were opening up vast backward and abyssal vistas of time. Confronted by the dead gaze of the trilobite, Knight is immediately plunged into a vivid vision of scenes from the history of life on Earth that wouldn't be out of place in an SF novel:

Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts--perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon--all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines--alligators and other uncouth shapes, culminating in the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things.

Hardy and other late Victorian novelists were concerned with both human individuality and the problems thrown up by industrialisation, urbanisation and scientific revolution. But after modernism overwhelmed the realists, and rejected the authority of science along with that of God and government, SF moved in to take up arguments and themes that have only just been rediscovered by the mainstream.

Science Fiction That Isn't Science Fiction

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

Arthur C. Clarke?
Olaf Stapledon?
Stephen Baxter?
Nope. Friedrich Engels.

Via infinite thought

More Distraction

On Twitter.

51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E

To Greenwich and the Royal Observatory on Friday, to take part in a discussion about ‘whether science fiction authors are wasting their time writing about interplanetary travel, space colonisation and the spread of mankind across the universe given everything science has taught us about the realities, possibilities and costs of doing so’. The answer to which is of course no, they are not, but I hope the various ramifications and byways my colleagues and I explored were sufficiently entertaining to the small but perfectly formed audience. The organisers may have been a tad optimistic to expect large audiences for the three panel discussions and the screening of Star Trek which were all running at the same time, but I can’t fault the location: our event took place in the circular library at the top of the observatory - the place where the telescope used to be housed, in fact. The round table at which we sat (with an inlay indicating true north) was directly beneath the dome that once opened to the night sky; there were some fine brass telescopes, astrolabes and other instruments in glass cabinets, and all kinds of wonderful books on the shelves running around the room.

The Royal Observatory is also the location of the Prime Meridian, where longitude is 0̊, the dividing line between east and west. Its location is arbitrary, defined by Sir George Airy in 1851, ratified by the International Meridian Conference in 1884 and observed by international convention (although not by everyone, to begin with; the French continued to use the Paris Meridian for a number of years). Appropriate then, that our panel discussion several times touched on the arbitrary division between science fiction that’s based on what’s possible, and science fiction that uses traditional but implausible tropes such as aliens and faster-than-light travel, reminiscent of a recent declaration by Margaret Atwood that she writes speculative fiction rather than science fiction, defining the difference between the two with her usual laser-like precision:

Speculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see. We can do the lineage: Sci-fi descends from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds; speculative fiction descends from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I’m sort of sympathetic to Atwood’s need to avoid the science fiction tag (she believes that being defined as an SF writer would be the kiss of death to her career as a literary novelist), but her distinction between ‘speculative fiction’ and ‘sci-fi’ is not only as arbitrary as locating the Prime Meridian at 51̊28'38"N 0̊00'00"E, but is completely wrong-headed.

Obviously, novels about Martian invasions lie on the far side of the improbability, but it’s not always easy to predict what we’ll be able to do in the future. Who, in the nineteenth century, could have predicted that their great-great-grandchildren would be able to teleport photons, calculate the number of universes in the multiverse, or create black holes? These seem fantastical even now, yet they are as plausible as Verne’s deep-ocean submarine - if not more so, given that the Nautilus was coal-fired.

Wells’s The War of the Worlds is a realistic depiction of what we in the twenty-first century know must be a fantastical event - the invasion of Earth by Martians. We know now that the only Martians that might plausibly exist are some kind of bacteria or archaeobacteria because observations of the planet from orbit and from the surface have conclusively demonstrated that it is incapable of supporting advanced forms of life. But when Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in 1898, there was a strong strand of scientific opinion that Mars was not only habitable, but inhabited. In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed patterns of lines on Mars which he called ‘caneli’ - channels. Twenty years later, Percival Lowell argued that these channels really were canals, part of an irrigation network built by an ancient civilisation to transport water from the polar caps. He and others also claimed to have observed seasonal advance and retreat of vegetation across the surface of Mars. In the late nineteenth century, then, it was not at all fantastical to write about Martians because belief that some kind of life existed on Mars was commonplace.

Of course, even though some scientists in the late nineteenth century believed that there might be Martians does not mean that, when it was published, The War of the Worlds could have been included in Atwood’s speculative fiction category. There was no absolute evidence that Martians existed; photographing or dissecting a Martian was not something that scientists could actually do. (Although the Martian heat-rays, then fantasy, now are not.) But it’s a trivial exercise to think of novels that were once ‘speculative fiction’ but are now ‘sci-fi’ simply because the science or universally held assumption on which their speculations were based has since been disproved. One of the tropes in Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is the creation of weird new hybrid species of animals and plants by genetic engineering. But while that seems a pretty probable development of current science, we can’t predict with absolute certainty that one day splicing parts of two different genomes together may be routine. We already know that genomes aren’t simple instruction manuals but are highly dynamic and packed with delicate checks and balances, and there’s now experimental evidence that rewinding evolution and deriving ancestral forms from modern genomes is far more difficult than was formerly believed. What was once rock-solid speculation too often melts into thin, thin air.

In any case, defining novels by a single characteristic - how realistic they are, how close they are to things we can actually do - is dangerously simplistic. The War of the Worlds is not just about a war of the worlds; at the heart of its narrative is a lesson in hubris founded on a powerful and unsettling scientific truth. Wells makes a famous comparison in the opening paragraph of his novel:

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Wells studied biology under Thomas Huxley, who rejected current ideas of vitalism and strongly (and correctly) believed that all characteristics of living creatures could be explained by interactions between their constituent chemicals, and was a ferocious and famous supporter of Darwinism (he coined the term). And the idea that most strongly informs The War of the Worlds is not the possibility of life on other worlds, but Darwin’s theory of evolution. If life could evolve on Earth, Wells argues, then why not on Mars? And if there are two separate kingdoms of life, what would happen when one contacts the other?

The war of the worlds is not a war between Martians and men, but an extreme example of the struggle for existence that has shaped the evolution of every species on Earth. Human beings are incidental to the struggle. They are collateral damage. Wells has his Martians land in England when it is at the height of its pomp: the centre of the British Empire, the largest ever known; the epitome of industrial enterprise and scientific innovation. Yet the combined might of the British armed forces is swatted aside by the Martians, English civilisation is swiftly reduced to anarchy, and in the end the Martians are not defeated by microscopic bacilli to which, because they are from another world, they have not evolved resistance.

The epigraph of The War of the Worlds, taken from Kepler’s The Anatomy of Melancholy,* asks ‘how are all things made for man?’ Wells’ answer is that the world and all that is in it is not made for us at all; that the belief that, by divine right, we are masters of the world and the apex of creation is a false and dangerous illusion. That’s the heart of his novel, and we know that it is as true and real as television. Against that, the so-called difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi is trivial indeed.

*EDIT: Oops, actually a quotation from Kepler used by Burton in his The Anatomy of Melancholy, and then borrowed by Wells. Thanks to Cosma for spotting it.

Random Linkage 24/10/09

Smart rat 'Hobbie-J' produced by over-expressing a gene that helps brain cells communicate
‘Over-expressing a gene that lets brain cells communicate just a fraction of a second longer makes a smarter rat, report researchers from the Medical College of Georgia and East China Normal University.’

Algae and Light Help Injured Mice Walk Again
‘In the summer of 2007, a team of Stanford graduate students dropped a mouse into a plastic basin. The mouse sniffed the floor curiously. It didn’t seem to care that a fiber-optic cable was threaded through its skull. Nor did it seem to mind that the right half of its motor cortex had been reprogrammed.’

Killer Algae: Key Player In Mass Extinctions
‘Supervolcanoes and cosmic impacts get all the terrible glory for causing mass extinctions, but a new theory suggests lowly algae may be the killer behind the world's great species annihilations.’

Giant Impact Near India — Not Mexico — May Have Killed Dinosaurs
'A huge, mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater ever found on Earth. And if a new study is right, this impact may supercede the one that created the Chicxulub crater off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula as what may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of researchers have been studying a 500-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) depression on the Indian Ocean seafloor which was likely created by a bolide perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter. Such an event would have triggered worldwide climate changes, including intensified volcanism, that led to mass extinction.'

New Concept May Enhance Earth-Mars Communication
‘Direct communication between Earth and Mars can be strongly disturbed and even blocked by the Sun for weeks at a time, cutting off any future human mission to the Red Planet. An ESA engineer working with engineers in the UK may have found a solution using a new type of orbit combined with continuous-thrust ion propulsion.’

Moon scientist arrested on spy charges
'A US scientist who had high-level security clearance and was a principal investigator on a current NASA Moon mission has been arrested for attempted espionage.'
(It's not every day that Nature features an espionage story; still, it would be even better if he'd been arrested on the Moon.)

Serving Your Space Porn Needs Since 2006

The Big Picture has posted a stunning selection of images taken by the Cassini orbiter during Saturn's equinox. Do I need to tell you to get over there right away and check them out?

Yesterday's Future Today

Here's an exciting example of cutting edge medical science, combining a clever molecular biology technique with a race-against-time detective story:

In a dramatic illustration of the power of emerging genetic technologies, Yale University researchers have reported making a clinical diagnosis for the first time using comprehensive DNA sequencing of all the protein-coding genes in the genome. The information changed the course of treatment of a baby boy suffering from symptoms of dehydration thousands of miles away in Turkey.

The baby boy presented symptoms that suggested he was suffering from a genetic condition affecting the way his kidneys functioned. Researchers extracted DNA from a small blood sample and applied a technique, whole exome sequencing, that analyses the small percentage of the genome that contains exons. Exons are stretches of DNA in genes that code for the sequences of amino acids that make up proteins. In eukaroyotes (basically, any organism with a cell nucleus), exons are separated by long stretches of DNA, introns, that don't code for amino acids in proteins. Genomes also contain huge amounts of so-called junk DNA between functioning genes, as well various other kinds of non-amino acid coding DNA. As a result, the DNA that codes for proteins makes up just 1% of the human genome, so a technique that exclusively reads exons saves a lot of time and money, and can quickly and accurately pinpoint mutations.

To cut a long story short, the researchers found that the mutation wasn't, as first suspected, the one that causes a rare condition known as Bartter syndrome, but affected a gene that regulates uptake of chloride and water by cells lining the gastrointestinal tract. Since most (but not all) genetic diseases are caused by mutations in the exome, this has all kinds of implications for fast, rapid, and accurate diagnosis of many diseases, and could help unravel the kind of complex syndromes that Dr Gregory House deals with on a weekly basis.

I'm especially interested in this not only because it is a very clever and neat technique, but it's also a powerful illustration that the future is a lot closer than we think. Or in this instance, than I thought. One of the characters in The Quiet War used a similar technique to diagnose a problem with a microalgal culture essential for the quickening of a biome. Macy Minnot applied a belt-and-braces approach I assumed would be commonplace in her present, our future: a comprehensive reading not only of the entire genome of the recalcitrant microalgal species, but also of its proteome (the complete array of structural and functional proteins in a cell). A little crude compared to the finer focus of exome sequencing, maybe, but able to capture a holistic snapshot of everything going on inside a cell, including all kinds of regulatory functions coded in non-exomic DNA. And by a funny little coincidence pinpointing a problem with another kind of transport gene, this one regulating uptake of phosphate.