Popular Science - New Technology, Science News, The Future Now

Retractions Won't Help If Nobody Reads Them

Colin Lecher — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:30:00 GMT

A scientist explains the frustrating road to publishing contradictory findings, and why he ended up pulling his own article instead.

Science runs on replication: if a study can't be reproduced, then it's probably not worthwhile. So, if a paper isn't being reproduced, you'd think scientific journals would jump at the chance to publish opposing findings. Except that's not always the case, as researcher David Vaux explains in an article for Retraction Watch.

The science behind the story is a little on the specialized side, but more or less, a paper published in Nature back in 1995 suggested certain types of cells could be transplanted without causing negative effects in patients, which could have important ramifications in medicine. Vaux wrote an article for the journal's News and Views section extolling the implications of the findings. But after some independent research, he found that replicating the process on mice "[provoked] more, not less, of an inflammatory response." In fact, a closer look at the literature determined other studies had made the same findings as Vaux. After unsuccessfully attempting to publish his findings in Nature again, Vaux asked for a retraction on his News and Views article, which he got.

The study Vaux refuted (and still refutes) has been cited 976 times. About 700 of those citations were after 1998, when Nature published Vaux's retraction to his own article. (Vaux's original article was cited at least 25 times, while his retraction was cited 16 times.) As Vaux points out, that seems to suggest some researchers are citing the findings without seeing the contradictory research.

What does this say about retractions? In fairness, it's still just one side of the story, and standards at Nature (and other journals) might've changed since 1998. But regardless, the story doesn't reflect well on the retraction process as a whole. As Vaux puts it: "Clearly, the processes that allow the scientific record to self-correct can be improved, not least by Nature."

We've contacted the editors at Nature for comment and will update when and if we hear back. You can read Vaux's full article here.

[Retraction Watch]

The Greatest Heists In History [Infographic]

Colin Lecher — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 18:00:00 GMT

Or, how to steal the Mona Lisa in a few easy steps.

Well-executed heists make for good stories, but history's greatest heists, as this infographic shows, are so unbelievable they're almost art.

Take, for example, this: a man on board a Portland-to-Seattle flight in 1971 passed a note to a flight attendant between orders of whisky. The note said he had a bomb. His demand? A $200,000 hostage ransom and parachutes. The plane landed, the highjacker got the ransom, and after taking off again, he skydived out of the plane, holding on to the cash. Some of the dough washed up near the Columbia River, but the highjacker, if he lived, was never found.

Then there's the other end of the equation: thieves with a plot so simple it's shocking it ever worked. In 1911, a man stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Crazy. But even crazier? All he did was hide in the museum on a Sunday, then stuff the painting under a smock and walk out. The story's slightly more complicated than this infographic makes it out to be--but not much.

Anyway, there's a lot of interesting info here. Oh, and if you start reading up on the heists and realize 25 minutes have passed, here's a fun fact: The Great Royal Mail Train Robbery was pulled off in that time.

[visual.ly]

A Cocktail Scientist Debunks Myths About Ice Cubes

Paul Adams — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 16:30:00 GMT

The cold, hard facts

True or false?: Ice cubes get cloudy because of mineral impurities.
True or false?: Larger ice cubes melt more slowly than small ones.
True or false?: Shaking a martini "bruises the gin."

Many of us use ice every day, and soon we start to think we know all there is to know about it. When to shake, when to stir, the difference between one big cube in a drink versus lots of little ones, and so forth. But Kevin Liu, who is one fifth of Science Fare, has published a very fine guide to how we don't know as much as we think we do.

Liu's article goes into the practical science of dilution, crystallization, and aeration, and shows you how to make perfectly clear ice, perfectly chilled cocktails, and perfectly irrefutable pronouncements about cocktail technique. Read it at Serious Eats.

What Makes You Want To Click This?

Shaunacy Ferro — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:30:00 GMT

A University of Bristol study tells us the biggest rule of clickbait: No one wants to read about finance.

It's the holy grail of Internet journalism: The click. How can I persuade you, in a few capitalized words, that this article will be worth the load time?

According to a new study from researchers at the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory, the answer lies in using "sentimentally charged language" and skewing toward entertainment and crime.

The study looked at which stories were placed in the "Top Stories" and "Most Popular" feeds on 14 different news sites, including the BBC, NPR, The New York Times and Forbes. The researchers created models for the reader preferences of each publication based on an 18 month period, by looking at which stories were published on the home page (the top stories) and comparing that to what stories readers actually clicked on (most popular).

The "global appeal" of news articles increased when the language they used was more subjective--tabloids were found to be more appealing than the BBC, for example. Articles that were about "public affairs"--i.e. elections, the economy, business and politics--didn't perform as well generally across all audience models as "non-public affairs" articles--those covering those always-fun topics like disasters, crime, fashion and weather.

There are a couple shortcomings to note: The models were based on articles' headlines and short descriptions, but didn't take into account other determining factors, like how great/terrible the stock photographs were on the articles. And since it couldn't take into account the various demographics of readers of specific articles, the study had to assume that each publication's readers would behave in the same way.

While this could prove fairly useful for SEO junkies, even if we knew everyone in the world would click on "31 Robotic Cats You Didn't Know Were Sexting," there's no guarantee those people would actually finish the reading.

10 Spectacular Bees Native To The U.S.

Francie Diep — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:03:32 GMT

Honeybees aren't native to U.S., but these other amazing bees are. And they contribute to pollinating delicious American crops such as pumpkins, blueberries and tomatoes.

The Augochloropsis anonyma looks like a weird bee. It's got that familiar bee shape—tilted abdomen, oblong eyes—but its body fuzz is white, instead of yellow; its eyes are white; and its skin is iridescent jade-aqua-blue-purple. It has all the colors of an oil puddle in the sun.

Yet the real weirdos are our familiar yellow-and-black honeybees, says U.S. Geological Survey biologist Sam Droege. The Augochloropsis is one of 4,000 bee species native to the U.S. Honeybees, on the other hand, are more recent settlers that European farmers brought to America in the 1600s. Surveys done in the past few years have found that both types of bees contribute to pollinating U.S. crops, with native bees playing an especially important role for American plants such as pumpkins, blueberries and tomatoes.

Click here to enter the gallery

Droege considers honeybees weird because their habits differ from those of most native bees, which tend to be solitary or "primitively colonial," Droege says. "The whole multi-year queen, waggle dance, hive, honey, etc. are absent from our native species," he wrote to Popular Science in an email. Only native bumblebees, which comprise about 40 species in North America, have a formal colonial social structure with workers and queens.

Honey- and bumblebees' social structures mean people are able to cultivate them in hives and drive them around to places that need them. They're especially important in industrial farmlands, such as those in central California, where there's little habitat left for native bees.

Fields on the East Coast and others that are surrounded by some native plants, however, may be pollinated partly or mostly by native bees. In 2009, researchers studied 11 apple farms in New York State and found 81 species of native bees. Small farms could depend entirely on native bees, though larger farms required honeybees. The natives may be especially effective at pollinating foods native to the Americas, including eggplant, cherries and cranberries.

Another major difference between native and honeybees is that the natives don't suffer from colony collapse disorder, a mysterious condition that's killed off, on average, one-third of domestic honeybee colonies every year since 2006. That's because native bees don't suffer from the same pests and viruses that honeybees do and they don't have the same social order, Droege says. Nevertheless, native bees may be threatened by pesticide residues, but that hasn't been well studied, Droege says.

The U.S. Geological Survey has set up a program to capture and record bee species all over the continent. The survey will ramp up this winter to include 50 collection sites. Droege hopes to collect enough data to know whether native bee populations are rising or falling. In the meanwhile, he and his collectors have gotten great photos of Augochloropsis and other weird natives. Check them out above.

10 Spectacular Bees Native To The U.S.

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 14:00:14 GMT

Honeybees aren't native to U.S., but these guys are. And they contribute to pollinating delicious American crops such as pumpkins, blueberries and tomatoes.

Exhibit Explores The Dazzling Beauty Of Space Photography

Lacey Henry — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Visions of the Universe exhibit showcases captivating cosmic images

A new exhibit at the National Maritime Museum in London celebrates the beauty of space photography and its role in scientific discoveries. Up until September 15, Visions of the Universe will feature more than 100 dazzling images of space.

The exhibit takes visitors on a cosmic journey, covering everything from the earliest findings of Galileo to the latest footage from the Mars rover Curiosity. Highlights include Edwin Hubble’s breakthrough 1923 photograph, which confirmed the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way, and the centerpiece "Mars Window," a curved wall onto which images are projected, creating the impression of looking through a giant window out to the Martian landscape.

Check out our gallery for more supernova fun!

Click here to enter the gallery

Photo Gallery: New Exhibit Explores Dazzling Beauty Of Space Photography

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Visions of the Universe exhibit showcases captivating cosmic images

Before Directing 'District 9,' Neill Blomkamp Illustrated For Popular Science

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:30:45 GMT

We've rounded up some of Blomkamp's work here, and get some advice on moviemaking from the director himself.

Now, Neill Blomkamp is the acclaimed director of sci-fi flick District 9 and the upcoming Elysium. But not so long ago he was also an artist at visual effects firm The Embassy, which contributed illustrations to Popular Science articles. We've got those here, and also caught up with Blomkamp to get these two pieces of advice on making great science fiction.

CULTIVATE BELIEF

"When I design something, whether it's for a movie or PopSci, I need to believe it can work. If I don't believe it, the audience won't either. What leads to a unified vision is when the director has all those visuals in his head."

TELL REAL STORIES

"Science fiction is just a filter to look at real life. I'm not trying to tell a story that takes place in 2154. Elysium is a rich-and-poor film. A hundred fifty years from now, Earth will probably look a lot like the film: mass poverty, plagues, disease, too many people, and too few resources. And all the crazy life-changing technology will be in concentrated areas of wealth, with armed guards at the gate. What happens then?"

First Known Four-Quark Particle Pops Up In Japanese Collider

Francie Diep — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:30:00 GMT

This new finding confirms the particle exists.

Physicists have observed what they're confident is the first known particle with four quarks.

This isn't the first time the Belle detector, housed with the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan, has appeared to observe a four-quark particle, called a Zc(3900). This time, however, another particle accelerator, the Beijing Electron Positron Collider, confirmed the findings, Nature reported. There's only a 1 in 3.5 million chance that the observation is not true.

As Nature explains, current physics laws don't say that four-quark particles can't exist, but before the Belle observations, physicists only ever saw particles with two quarks and three quarks. Protons and neutrons have three quarks.

Check out Nature for more on the debate over how exactly the four quarks in the Zc(3900) are put together—and whether the particle represents a whole new building block of matter.

[Nature]

Director Neill Blomkamp's Illustrations For Popular Science

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:52:19 GMT

What Happens In Your Brain When You Try To Do Impressions

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Sympathies to the researcher who had to listen to amateur impressions all day.

Scientists have identified what happens in our brain when we mimic a foreign accent or impersonate another person, according to a recent study from the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The researchers, led by psychologist Carolyn McGettigan from Royal Holloway University of London, wanted to explore the way the brain controls the non-verbal aspects of our speech--the different tones or styles people use when talking in different contexts, like talking to your boss on the phone versus chatting with a friend in a coffee shop or hitting on someone at a bar.

Popular selections included Sean Connery, Elvis and Bill Clinton.
Before the study began, participants--all "non-professional impressionists"--were asked to make a list of 40 different accents and 40 people, from their mother to Arnold Schwarzenegger, they could try to impersonate. They then had to recite a few lines of a nursery rhyme in some of those accents while in an fMRI scanner. (Some popular selections included Sean Connery, Elvis and Bill Clinton.)

When study subjects consciously changed their voices, either with a new accent or during an impersonation, the left anterior insula and the interior frontal gyrus (LIFG), areas associated with planning and producing speech, lit up in fMRI images.

Impressions in particular generated greater responses in other regions of the brain, the posterior superior temporal/inferior parietal cortex and right middle/anterior superior temporal sulcus, but there was no difference in the increase in activity in the LIFG between accent and impersonation planning.

This research "could potentially lead to new treatments for those looking to recover their own vocal identity following brain injury or a stroke," lead author Carolyn McGettigan explained in a statement. Identifying the regions of the brain involved in controlling the voice could be helpful in treating rare afflictions like Foreign Accent Syndrome, a condition that distorts speech patterns, often after brain damage, giving a person a completely different accent.

[Cognitive Neuroscience Society]

Where To Hide When The Ecopocalypse Hits [Infographic]

Colin Lecher — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:00:00 GMT

Let this map of U.S. states scaled by volume above sea level guide you to your water-damaged, dystopian home of the future.

Thanks to climate change, our oceans could rise by as much as 20 or 30 feet in the coming centuries. You can either build an ark (which sounds like an awful lot of work) or high-tail it to higher ground.

This map, designed by MIT music professor Michael Scott Cuthbert and researched by writer/designer Nate Barksdale, can help you plan your trip. The United States is organized by volume above sea level: the more high-reaching areas a state has, the more space on the map it gets. So the mountainous Southwest ends up holding on to a lot of its space, while the relatively low-lying South has almost completely vanished. If you're into cooler climes, Alaska seems to be doing pretty well, too. Rhode Island doesn't have much space left at all--but maybe if there's a tiny bit post-apocalypse you can create a Waterworld-style fortress island.

[Boston Globe]

Want To Study A Dragonfly? Put A Teeny Backpack On It

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:30:34 GMT

Strapped in for learning

How do you figure out the way a dragonfly's mind works? That's the challenge for Anthony Leonardo, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farms Research Campus who studies the role neural circuits play in behavior. He's currently exploring the neuroscience of how dragonflies and salamanders capture their prey.

To study the hunting behavior of dragonflies, Leonardo and his team needed to record how their neurons and muscles responded mid-flight. So they developed a teeny backpack for their flighty subjects, one that would amplify the signals from electrodes recording the dragonflies' brain signals.

As Leonardo told Co.Create, "to load an insect up with gear is like dancing in a ballet wearing a backpack filled with rocks. You can put double the dragonfly’s body weight on these creatures and they can fly, but they won’t try to catch their prey."

The final version of the insect-borne pack is light enough that the dragonflies aren't dragged down by it. It weighs 40 milligrams, about 10 percent of a dragonfly's weight, and is secured to its body with a little dab of superglue. It's powered by radio waves gathered by the long antennae extending from the pack.

Once the dragonflies were strapped in for studying, the researchers set them loose in a room designed to look like a meadow, with turf and a pond--a plain white room stressed them out too much, and they spent too much time trying to escape rather than hunt down flies. In the artificial lushness of the fake meadow, Leonardo and his team could watch their subjects dart around on the hunt through high-speed infrared cameras.

Leonardo's goal is to figure out how the dragonflies' neurons translate the visual information of their surroundings and their prey into a definitive attack plan.

[Wired]

The World's Only Known White Gorilla Was The Result Of Incest

Dan Nosowitz — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:30:04 GMT

How the world's only known white gorilla came to be.

Snowflake, the long-lived gorilla who died in 2003, was famous for being the only known albino gorilla. He became a wildly popular attraction at the Barcelona Zoo in Spain, where he lived almost his entire life, becoming almost a mascot for the city. But until now, nobody knew why Snowflake looked the way he did.

Snowflake was a western lowland gorilla--the smallest subspecies of gorilla. It's not the rarest subspecies, but no gorilla subspecies are particularly healthy; the western lowland gorilla is listed as critically endangered. But it's the most common to be found in zoos, and in 2012, its genome was sequenced. That's what finally enabled researchers at the University of Pompeu Fabra to figure out what made snowflake so unusual.

Albinism is caused a genetic mutation; there are four specific ones in humans. Things don't work quite the same way in gorillas, but albinism in other animals, like mice, is fairly well-understood. Using a vial of frozen blood taken from Snowflake before he died, the researchers were able to sequence his genome and compare it with a non-albino gorilla genome. Then they could search for any of the other mutations known to cause albinism in animals.

The researchers pinned Snowflake's albinism down to a single gene: SLC45A2. The gorilla inherited the mutation from his parents--but why only Snowflake? The genome sequencing also revealed that Snowflake had large stretches of inherited genes from his mother and father that were identical--in fact, his mother and father shared 12 percent of their DNA, which indicates that they were uncle and niece.

Western lowland gorillas don't normally struggle with inbreeding, but as their population decreases and their habitat is destroyed, it's increasingly becoming a problem. Snowflake appears to be the result of that--though he lived a long and healthy life, fathering six children to adulthood and living to the ripe old age of 40 (western lowland gorillas usually only live to about 25).

[via Christian Science Monitor]

Excerpt From '2312'

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:39:58 GMT

2312 is available on Amazon.

Prologue
The sun is always just about to rise. Mercury rotates so slowly that you can walk fast enough over its rocky surface to stay ahead of the dawn; and so many people do. Many have made this a way of life. They walk roughly westward, staying always ahead of the stupendous day. Some of them hurry from location to location, pausing to look in cracks they earlier inoculated with bioleaching metallophytes, quickly scraping free any accumulated residues of gold or tungsten or uranium. But most of them are out there to catch glimpses of the sun.

Mercury’s ancient face is so battered and irregular that the planet’s terminator, the zone of the breaking dawn, is a broad chiaroscuro of black and white—charcoal hollows pricked here and there by brilliant white high points, which grow and grow until all the land is as bright as molten glass, and the long day begun. This mixed zone of sun and shadow is often as much as thirty kilometers wide, even though on a level plain the horizon is only a few kilometers off. But so little of Mercury is level. All the old bangs are still there, and some long cliffs from when the planet first cooled and shrank. In a landscape so rumpled the light can suddenly jump the eastern horizon and leap west to strike some distant prominence. Everyone walking the land has to attend to this possibility, know when and where the longest sunreaches occur—and where they can run for shade if they happen to be caught out.

Or if they stay on purpose. Because many of them pause in their walkabouts on certain cliffs and crater rims, at places marked by stupas, cairns, petroglyphs, inuksuit, mirrors, walls, goldsworthies. The sunwalkers stand by these, facing east, waiting.

The horizon they watch is black space over black rock. The superthin neon-argon atmosphere, created by sunlight smashing rock, holds only the faintest predawn glow. But the sunwalkers know the time, so they wait and watch—until—a flick of orange fire dolphins over the horizon and their blood leaps inside them. More brief banners follow, flicking up, arcing in loops, breaking off and floating free in the sky. Star oh star, about to break on them! Already their faceplates have darkened and polarized to protect their eyes.

The orange banners diverge left and right from the point of first appearance, as if a fire set just over the horizon is spreading north and south. Then a paring of the photosphere, the actual surface of the sun, blinks and stays, spills slowly to the sides. Depending on the filters deployed in one’s faceplate, the star’s actual surface can appear as anything from a blue maelstrom to an orange pulsing mass to a simple white circle. The spill to left and right keeps spreading, farther than seems possible, until it is very obvious one stands on a pebble next to a star.

Time to turn and run! But by the time some of the sunwalkers manage to jerk themselves free, they are stunned—trip and fall—get up and dash west, in a panic like no other.
Before that—one last look at sunrise on Mercury. In the ultraviolet it’s a perpetual blue snarl of hot and hotter. With the disk of the photosphere blacked out, the fantastic dance of the corona becomes clearer, all the magnetized arcs and short circuits, the masses of burning hydrogen pitched out at the night. Alternatively you can block the corona, and look only at the sun’s photosphere, and even magnify your view of it, until the burning tops of the convection cells are revealed in their squiggling thousands, each a thunderhead of fire burning furiously, all together torching five million tons of hydrogen a second—at which rate the star will burn another four billion years. All these long spicules of flame dance in circular patterns around the little black circles that are the sunspots—shifting whirlpools in the storms of burning. Masses of spicules flow together like kelp beds threshed by a tide. There are nonbiological explanations for all this convoluted motion—different gases moving at different speeds, magnetic fields fluxing constantly, shaping the endless whirlpools of fire—all mere physics, nothing more—but in fact it looks alive, more alive than many a living thing. Looking at it in the apocalypse of the Mercurial dawn, it’s impossible to believe it’s not alive. It roars in your ears, it speaks to you.

Most of the sunwalkers over time try all the various viewing filters, and then make choices to suit themselves. Particular filters or sequences of filters become forms of worship, rituals either personal or shared. It’s very easy to get lost in these rituals; as the sunwalkers stand on their points and watch, it’s not uncommon for devotees to become entranced by something in the sight, some pattern never seen before, something in the pulse and flow that snags the mind; suddenly the sizzle of the fiery cilia becomes audible, a turbulent roaring—that’s your own blood, rushing through your ears, but in those moments it sounds just like the sun burning. And so people stay too long. Some have their retinas burned; some are blinded; others are killed outright, betrayed by an overwhelmed spacesuit. Some are cooked in groups of a dozen or more.

Do you imagine they must have been fools? Do you think you would never make such a mistake? Don’t you be so sure. Really you have no idea. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. It’s like seeing the face of God, some people say, and it is true that the sun powers all living creatures in the solar system, and in that sense is our god. The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that.

So there is reason to worry about Swan Er Hong, a person more inclined than most to try things just to see. She often goes sunwalking, and when she does she skirts the edge of safety, and sometimes stays too long in the light. The immense Jacob’s ladders, the granulated pulsing, the spicules flowing… she has fallen in love with the sun. She worships it; she keeps a shrine to Sol Invictus in her room, performs the pratahsamdhya ceremony, the salute to the sun, every morning when she wakes in town. Much of her landscape and performance art is devoted to it, and these days she spends most of her time making goldsworthies and abramovics on the land and her body. So the sun is part of her art.

Now it is her solace too, for she is out there grieving. Now, if one were standing on the promenade topping the city Terminator’s great Dawn Wall, one would spot her there to the south, out near the horizon. She needs to hurry. The city is gliding on its tracks across the bottom of a giant dimple between Hesiod and Kurasawa, and a flood of sunlight will soon pour far to the west. Swan needs to get into town before that happens, yet she still stands there. From the top of the Dawn Wall she looks like a silver toy. Her spacesuit has a big round clear helmet. Her boots look big, and are black with dust. A little booted silver ant, standing there grieving when she should be hustling back to the boarding platform west of town. The other sunwalkers out there are already hustling back to town. Some pull little carts or wheeled travois, hauling their supplies or even their sleeping companions. They’ve timed their returns closely, as the city is very predictable. It cannot deviate from its schedule; the heat of coming day expands the tracks, and the city’s undercarriage is tightly sleeved over them; so sunlight drives the city west.

The returning sunwalkers crowd onto the loading platform as the city nears it. Some have been out for weeks, or even the months it would take to make a full circumambulation. When the city slides by, its lock doors will open and they will step right in.
That is soon to occur, and Swan should be there too. Yet still she stands on her promontory. More than once she has required retinal repair, and often she has been forced to run like a rabbit or die. Now it will have to happen again. She is directly south of the city, and fully lit by horizontal rays, like a silver flaw in one’s vision. One can’t help shouting at such rashness, useless though it is. Swan, you fool! Alex is dead—nothing to be done about it! Run for your life!

And then she does. Life over death—the urge to live—she turns and flies. Mercury’s gravity, almost exactly the same as Mars’s, is often called the perfect g for speed, because people who are used to it can careen across the land in giant leaps, flailing their arms for balance as they bound along. In just that way Swan leaps and flails—once catches a boot and falls flat on her face—jumps up and leaps forward again. She needs to get to the platform while the city is still next to it; the next platform is ten kilometers farther west.

She reaches the platform stairs, grabs the rail and vaults up, leaps from the far edge of the platform, forward into the lock as it is halfway closed.

SWAN AND ALEX
Alex’s memorial ceremony began as Swan was straggling up Terminator’s great central staircase. The city’s population had come out into the boulevards and plazas and were standing in silence. There were a lot of visitors in town as well; a conference had been about to begin, one that had been convened by Alex. She had welcomed them on Friday; now on the following Friday they were holding her funeral. A sudden collapse, and they hadn’t been able to revive her. And so now the townspeople, the diplomat visitors: all Alex’s people, all grieving.

Swan stopped halfway up the Dawn Wall, unable to go on. Below her rooftops, terrace patios, balconies. Lemon trees in giant ceramic pots. A curved slope like a little Marseilles, with white four-story apartment blocks, black iron-railed balconies, broad boulevards and narrow alleys, dropping to a promenade overlooking the park. All crowded with humanity, speciating right before her eyes, each face intensely itself while also a type—Olmec spheroid, hatchet, shovel. On a railing stood three smalls, each about a meter tall, all dressed in black. Down at the foot of the stairs clustered the sunwalkers who had just arrived, looking burnt and dusty. The sight of them pierced Swan—even the sunwalkers had come in for this.

She turned on the stairs and descended, wandered by herself. The moment she had heard the news, she had dashed out of the city onto the land, driven by a need to be alone. Now she couldn’t bear to be seen when Alex’s ashes were scattered, and she didn’t want to see Mqaret, Alex’s partner, at that moment. Out into the park, therefore, to wander in the crowd. All of them standing still, looking up, looking distraught. Holding each other up. There were so many people who had relied on Alex. The Lion of Mercury, the heart of the city. The soul of the system. The one who helped and protected you.

Some people recognized Swan, but they left her alone; this was more moving to her than condolences would have been, and her face was wet with tears, she wiped her face with her fingers repeatedly. Then someone stopped her: “You are Swan Er Hong? Alex was your grandmother?”

“She was my everything.” Swan turned and walked off. She thought the farm might be emptier, so she left the park and drifted through the trees forward. The city speakers were playing a funeral march. Under a bush a deer nuzzled fallen leaves.

She was not quite to the farm when the Great Gates of the Dawn Wall opened, and sunlight cut through the air under the dome, creating the usual horizontal pair of yellow translucent bars. She focused on the swirls within the bars, the talcum they tossed up there when they opened the gates, colored fines floating on updrafts and dispersing. Then a balloon rose from the high terraces under the wall, drifting west, the little basket swaying under it: Alex; how could it be. A surge of defiance in the music rumbled up out of the basses. When the balloon entered one of the yellow bars of light, the basket blew apart in a poof, and Alex’s ashes floated down and out of the light, into the air of the city, growing invisible as they descended, like a shower of virga in the desert. There was a roar from the park, the sound of applause. Briefly some young men somewhere chanted, “A-lex! A-lex! A-lex!” The applause lasted for a couple of minutes, and arranged itself as a rhythmic beat that went on for a long time. People didn’t want to give it up; somehow that would be the end, they would at that very moment lose her. Eventually they did give it up, and lived on into the post-Alex phase of their lives.

She needed to go up and join the rest of Alex’s family. She groaned at the thought, wandered the farm. Finally she walked up the Great Staircase, stiffly, blindly, pausing once to say, “No, no, no,” for a time. But that was pointless. Suddenly she saw: anything she did now would be pointless. She wondered how long that would last—seemed like it could be forever, and she felt a bolt of fear. What would change to change it?

Eventually she pulled herself together and made her way up to the private memorial on the Dawn Wall. She had to greet all those who had been closest to Alex, and give Mqaret a brief rough hug, and withstand the look on his face. But she could see he was not home. This was not like him, but she could fully understand why he might depart. Indeed it was a relief to see it. When she considered how bad she felt, and then how much closer Mqaret had been to Alex than she had been, how much more of his time he spent with her—how long they had been partners—she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like. Or maybe she could. So now Mqaret stared at some other reality, from some other reality—as if extending a courtesy to her. So she could hug him, and promise to visit him later, and then go mingle with the others on the highest terrace of the Dawn Wall, and later make her way to a railing and look down at the city, and out its clear bubble to the black landscape outside it. They were rolling through the Kuiper quadrant, and she saw to the right Hiroshige Crater. Once long before, she had taken Alex out there to the apron of Hiroshige to help with one of her goldsworthies, a stone wave that referenced one of the Japanese artist’s most famous images. Balancing the rock that would be the crest of the breaking wave had taken them a great number of unsuccessful efforts, and as so often with Alex, Swan had ended up laughing so hard her stomach hurt. Now she spotted the rock wave, still out there—it was just visible from the city. The rocks that had formed the crest of the wave were gone, however—knocked down by the vibration of the passing city, perhaps, or simply by the impact of sunlight. Or fallen at the news.

A few days later she visited Mqaret in his lab. He was one of the leading synthetic biologists in the system, and the lab was filled with machines, tanks, flasks, screens bursting with gnarled colorful diagrams—life in all its sprawling complexity, constructed base pair by base pair. In here they had started life from scratch; they had built many of the bacteria now transforming Venus, Titan, Triton—everywhere.

Now none of that mattered. Mqaret was in his office, sitting in his chair, staring through the wall at nothing.

He roused himself and looked up at her. “Oh, Swan—good to see you. Thanks for coming by.”

“That’s all right. How are you doing?”

“Not so well. How about you?”

“Terrible,” Swan confessed, feeling guilty; the last thing she wanted was to add to Mqaret’s load somehow. But there was no point in lying at a time like this. And he merely nodded anyway, distracted by his own thoughts. He was just barely there, she saw. The cubes on his desk contained representations of proteins, the bright false colors tangled beyond all hope of untangling. He had been trying to work.

“It must be hard to work,” she said.

“Yes, well.”

After a blank silence, she said, “Do you know what happened to her?”

He shook his head quickly, as if this was an irrelevance. “She was a hundred and ninety-one.”

“I know, but still…”

“Still what? We break, Swan. Sooner or later, at some point we break.”

“I just wondered why.”

“No. There is no why.”

“Or how, then…”

He shook his head again. “It can be anything. In this case, an aneurysm in a crucial part of the brain. But there are so many ways. The amazing thing is that we stay alive in the first place.”

Swan sat on the edge of the desk. “I know. But, so… what will you do now?”

“Work.”

“But you just said…”

He glanced at her from out of his cave. “I didn’t say it wasn’t any use. That wouldn’t be right. First of all, Alex and I had seventy years together. And we met when I was a hundred and thirty. So there’s that. And then also, the work is interesting to me, just as a puzzle. It’s a very big puzzle. Too big, in fact.” And then he stopped and couldn’t go on for a while. Swan put a hand to his shoulder. He put his face in his hands. Swan sat there beside him and kept her mouth shut. He rubbed his eyes hard, held her hand.

“There’ll be no conquering death,” he said at last. “It’s too big. Too much the natural course of things. The second law of thermodynamics, basically. We can only hope to forestall it. Push it back. That should be enough. I don’t know why it isn’t.”
“Because it only makes it worse!” Swan complained. “The longer you live, the worse it gets!”

He shook his head, wiped his eyes again. “I don’t think that’s right.” He blew out a long breath. “It’s always bad. It’s the people still alive who feel it, though, and so…” He shrugged. “I think what you’re saying is that now it seems like some kind of mistake. Someone dies, we say why. Shouldn’t there have been a way to stop it. And sometimes there is. But…”

“It is some kind of mistake!” Swan declared. “Reality made a mistake, and now you’re fixing it!” She gestured at the screens and cubes. “Right?”

He laughed and cried at the same time. “Right!” he said, sniffing and wiping his face. “It’s stupid. What hubris. I mean, fixing reality.”

“But it’s good,” Swan said. “You know it is. It got you seventy years with Alex. And it passes the time.”

“It’s true.” He heaved a big sigh, looked up at her.

“But—things won’t be the same without her.”

Swan felt the desolation of this truth wash through her. Alex had been her friend, protector, teacher, step-grandmother, surrogate mother, all that—but also, a way to laugh. A source of joy. Now her absence created a cold feeling, a killer of emotions, leaving only the blankness that was desolation. Sheer dumb sentience. Here I am. This is reality. No one escapes it. Can’t go on, must go on; they never got past that moment.
So on they went.

There was a knock at the lab’s outer door. “Come in,” Mqaret called a little sharply.

The door opened, and in the entry stood a small—very attractive in the way smalls often were—aged, slender, with a neat blond ponytail and a casual blue jacket—about waist high to Swan or Mqaret, and looking up at them like a langur or marmoset.
“Hello, Jean,” Mqaret said. “Swan, this is Jean Genette, from the asteroids, who was here as part of the conference. Jean was a close friend of Alex’s, and is an investigator for the league out there, and as such has some questions for us. I said you might be dropping by.”

The small nodded to Swan, hand on heart. “My most sincere condolences on your loss. I’ve come not only to say that, but to tell you that quite a few of us are worried, because Alex was central to some of our most important projects, and her death was so unexpected. We want to make sure these projects go forward, and to be frank, some of us are anxious to be sure that her death was a matter of natural causes.”

“I assured Jean that it was,” Mqaret told Swan, seeing the look on her face.

Genette did not look completely convinced by this reassurance. “Did Alex ever mention anything to you concerning enemies, threats—danger of any kind?” the small asked Swan.

“No,” Swan said, trying to remember. “She wasn’t that kind of person. I mean, she was always very positive. Confident that things were going to work out.”

“I know. It’s so true. But that’s why you might remember if she had ever said anything out of keeping with her usual optimism.”
“No. I can’t remember anything like that.”

“Did she leave you any kind of will or trust? Or a message?

Something to be opened in the event of her death?”
“No.”
“We did have a trust,” Mqaret said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t have anything unusual in it.”

“Would you mind if I had a look around her study?”

Alex had kept her study in a room at the far end of Mqaret’s lab, and now Mqaret nodded and led the little inspector down the hall to it. Swan trailed behind them, surprised that Genette had known of Alex’s study, surprised Mqaret would be so quick to show it, surprised and upset by this notion of enemies, of “natural causes” and its implied opposite. Alex’s death, investigated by some kind of police person? She couldn’t grasp it.

While she sat in the doorway trying to figure out what it could mean, trying to come to grips with it, Genette made a thorough search of Alex’s office, opening drawers, downloading files, sweeping a fat wand over every surface and object. Mqaret watched it all impassively.

Finally the little inspector was done, and stood before Swan regarding her with a curious look. As Swan was sitting on the floor, they were about eye level. The inspector appeared on the verge of another question, but in the end did not say it. Finally: “If you recall anything you think might help me, I would appreciate you telling me.”

“Of course,” Swan said uneasily.

The inspector then thanked them and left.

What was that about?” Swan asked Mqaret.

“I don’t know,” Mqaret said. He too was upset, Swan saw. “I know that Alex had a hand in a lot of things. She’s been one of the leaders in the Mondragon Accord from the beginning, and they have a lot of enemies out there. I know she’s been worried about some system problems, but she didn’t give me any details.” He gestured at the lab. “She knew I wouldn’t be that interested.” A hard grimace. “That I had my own problems. We didn’t talk about our work all that much.”

“But—” Swan started, and didn’t know how to go on. “I mean—enemies? Alex?”

Mqaret sighed. “I don’t know. The stakes could be considered high, in some of these matters. There are forces opposed to the Mondragon, you know that.”

“But still.”

“I know.” After a pause: “Did she leave you anything?”
“No! Why should she? I mean, she wasn’t expecting to die.”
“Few people are. But if she had concerns about secrecy, or the safety of certain information, I can see how she might think you would be a kind of refuge.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, couldn’t she have put something into your qube without telling you?”

“No. Pauline is a closed system.” Swan tapped behind her right ear. “I mostly keep her turned off these days. And Alex wouldn’t do that anyway. She wouldn’t talk to Pauline without asking me first, I’m sure of it.”

Mqaret heaved another sigh. “Well, I don’t know. She didn’t leave me anything either, as far as I know. I mean, it would be like Alex to tuck something away without telling us. But nothing has popped up. So I just don’t know.”

Swan said, “So there wasn’t anything unusual in the autopsy?”
“No!” Mqaret said, but he was thinking it over. “A cerebral aneurysm, probably congenital, burst and caused an intraparenchymal hemorrhage. It happens.”

Swan said, “If someone had done something to—to cause a hemorrhage… would you necessarily be able to tell?”
Mqaret stared at her, frowning.

Then they heard another tap at the lab’s outer door. They looked at each other, sharing a little frisson. Mqaret shrugged; he had not been expecting anyone.

“Come in!” he called again.

The door opened to reveal something like the opposite of Inspector Genette: a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos—toad, newt, frog—even the very words were ugly. Briefly it occurred to Swan that onomatopoeia might be more common than people recognized, their languages echoing the world like birdsong. Swan had a bit of lark in her brain. Toad. Once she had seen a toad in an amazonia, sitting at the edge of a pond, its warty wet skin all bronze and gold. She had liked the look of it.

“Ah,” Mqaret said. “Wahram. Welcome to our lab. Swan, this is Fitz Wahram, from Titan. He was one of Alex’s closest associates, and really one of her favorite people.”

Swan, somewhat surprised that Alex could have such a person in her life without Swan ever hearing of it, frowned at the man.
Wahram dipped his head in a kind of autistic bow. He put his hand over his heart. “I am so sorry,” he said. A froggy croak. “Alex meant a great deal to me, and to a lot of us. I loved her, and in our work together she was the crucial figure, the leader. I don’t know how we will get along without her. When I think of how I feel, I can scarcely grasp how you must feel.”
“Thank you,” Mqaret said. So strange the words people said at these moments. Swan could not speak any of them.

A person Alex had liked. Swan tapped the skin behind her right ear, activating her qube, which she had turned off as a punishment. Now Pauline would fill her in on things, all by way of a quiet voice in Swan’s right ear. Swan was very irritated with Pauline these days, but suddenly she wanted information.
Mqaret said, “So what will happen to the conference?”

“There is complete agreement to postpone it and reschedule. No one has the heart for it now. We will disperse and reconvene later, probably on Vesta.”

Ah yes: without Alex, Mercury would no longer be a meeting place. Mqaret nodded at this, unsurprised. “So you will return to Saturn.”

“Yes. But before I go, I am curious to know whether Alex left anything for me. Any information or data, in any form.”

Mqaret and Swan shared a look. “No,” they both said at once.

Mqaret gestured. “We were just asked that by Inspector Genette.”
“Ah.” The toad person regarded them with a pop-eyed stare. Then one of Mqaret’s assistants came into the room and asked for his help. Mqaret excused himself, and then Swan was alone with their visitor and his questions.

Very big, this toad person: big shoulders, big chest, big belly. Short legs. People were strange. Now he shook his head and said in a deep gravelly voice—a beautiful voice, she had to admit—froggy, yes, but relaxed, deep, thick with timbre, something like a bassoon or a bass saxophone—“So sorry to bother you at a time like this. I wish we could have met under different circumstances. I am an admirer of your landscape installations. When I heard that you were related to Alex, I asked her if it might be possible to meet you. I wanted to say how much I like your piece at Rilke Crater. It’s really very beautiful.”

Swan was taken aback by this. At Rilke she had erected a circle of Göbekli T-stones, which looked very contemporary even though they were based on something over ten thousand years old. “Thank you,” she said. A cultured toad, it seemed. “Tell me, why did you think Alex might have left a message for you?”
“We were working together on a couple of things,” he said evasively, his fixed gaze shifting away. He didn’t want to discuss it, she saw. And yet he had come to ask about it. “And, well, she always spoke so highly of you. It was clear you two were close. So… she didn’t like to put things in the cloud or in any digital form—really, to keep records of our activities in any media at all. She preferred word of mouth.”

“I know,” Swan said, feeling a stab. She could hear Alex say it: We have to talk! It’s a face world! With her intense blue eyes, her laugh. All gone.

The big man saw the change in her and extended a hand. “I’m so sorry,” he said again.

“I know,” Swan said. Then: “Thank you.”

She sat down in one of Mqaret’s chairs and tried to think about something else.

After a while the big man said in a gentle rumble, “What will you do now?”

Swan shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll go out on the surface again. That’s my place to… to pull myself together.”
“Will you show it to me?”

“What?” Swan said.

“I would be very grateful if you were to take me out there. Maybe show me one of your installations. Or, if you don’t mind—I noticed that the city is approaching Tintoretto Crater. My shuttle doesn’t leave for a few days, and I would love to see the museum there. I have some questions that can’t be resolved on Earth.”

“Questions about Tintoretto?”

“Yes.”

“Well…” Swan hesitated, unsure what to say.

“It would be a way to pass the time,” the man suggested.

“Yes.” This was presumptuous enough to irritate her, but on the other hand, she had in fact been searching for something to distract her, something to do in the aftermath, and nothing had come to her. “Well, I suppose.”

“Thank you very much.”

Lists (1)
Ibsen and Imhotep; Mahler, Matisse; Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain;
Homer and Holbein, touching rims;
Ovid starring the rim of the much larger Pushkin;
Goya overlapping Sophocles.
Van Gogh touching Cervantes, next to Dickens. Stravinsky and Vyasa. Lysippus. Equiano, a West African slave writer, not located near the equator.
Chopin and Wagner right next to each other, equal size.
Chekhov and Michelangelo both double craters.
Shakespeare and Beethoven, giant basins.
Al-Jāi, Al-Akhal. Aristoxenus, Ashvaghosha. Kurosawa, Lu Hsün, Ma Chih-yüan. Proust and Purcell. Thoreau and Li Po, Rūmī and Shelley, Snorri and Pigalle. Valmiki, Whitman. Brueghel and Ives. Hawthorne and Melville.
It’s said the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union got hilariously drunk one night at their annual meeting, took out a mosaic of the first photos of Mercury, recently received, and used it as a dartboard, calling out to each other the names of famous painters, sculptors, composers, writers—naming the darts, then throwing them at the map.

There is an escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.

Kids With Autism May Not Enjoy The Sound Of The Human Voice

Dan Nosowitz — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:29:19 GMT

All human voices, not just the annoying ones.

The causes, symptoms, and effects of autism are some of the most puzzling mysteries in all of psychology and neuroscience, but researchers at Stanford University may have connected a few of the dots. They dove deep into the brains (not literally) of a selection of kids with and without autism, and found that those with autism respond differently to the human voice than those without.

The researchers took 20 kids with similar IQs and reading abilities, 10 with high-functioning autism and 10 without any sign of autism, and examined activity between several parts of the brain. There is a theory, says the lead researcher, that social cues don't interact with the brain's reward system in the same way as in non-autistic people. This study supports that: it found that in the brains of the kids with autism, there's a significantly weaker connection between the parts of the brain that interprets voices and the part that doles out pleasure. In other words, the sound of the human voice gives those with autism less joy.

There's also a weaker link between those voice-processing centers and the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that deals in emotion. That suggests a neurological reason for an autistic person's inability or disinterest in social cues--their brains don't reward them for caring about these things.

The study doesn't have any immediate ramifications for the treatment or even diagnosis of autism, and it only tested one very particular segment of those on the autism spectrum. Still, it's pretty fascinating, and may lead these or other researchers down a path that could help treat or diagnose autism in the future.

[Health.com]

Common Sweetener Could Help Treat Parkinson's Disease

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:00:00 GMT

Mannitol, a plant-produced sweetener used in gum and candies, has proven effective at blocking production of a Parkinson's-related protein.

A sweetener produced by most plants could hold the key to treating Parkinson's disease, a recent paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry asserts.

Mannitol, a sugar alcohol found in plants and fungi, is used as a sweetener for candies and jams, as well as as the dusting powder on chewing gum and in chewable pharmaceutical tablets. Researchers from Tel Aviv University have found it can also prevent a protein called α-synuclein from clumping in the brain, which has been associated with Parkinson's Disease.

After discovering that mannitol could effectively prevent the protein from clumping in test tubes in the lab, the researchers studied the locomotive abilities of fruit flies that had been genetically altered to carry the gene for α-synuclein by watching their climbing behavior in a test tube. Only 38 percent of the transgenic flies could climb up a test tube at first, versus 72 percent of normal flies.

After eating food laced with mannitol for almost a month, 70 percent of the transgenic flies could then climb up the tube. The protein's presence in the brain had also been reduced by 70 percent.

One of the study's authors, Daniel Segal, a professor of molecular microbiology and biotechnology at Tel Aviv University, suggests that combining mannitol with other Parkinson's medications may help the other treatments break through the blood/brain barrier.

Mannitol would be an attractive treatment option because it's already approved for various medical uses by the FDA, as a diuretic and as a rinsing agent during certain surgical procedures.

Excerpt From 'Parasite'

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:57:15 GMT

Parasite is available for pre-order on Amazon.

August 17, 2015: Time stamp 15:06.

[The recording is crisp enough to look like a Hollywood film, too polished to be real. The lab is something out of a science fiction movie, all pristine white walls and gleaming glass and steel equipment. Only one thing in this scene is fully believable: the woman standing in front of the mass spectrometer, her wavy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail, a broad smile on her face. She is pretty, with a classic English bone structure and the sort of pale complexion that speaks less to genetics and more to being the type of person who virtually never goes outside. There is a petri dish in her blue-gloved hand.]

DR. CALE: Doctor Shanti Cale, Diphyllobothrium symbogenesis viability test thirty-seven. We have successfully matured eggs in a growth medium consisting of seventy percent human cells, thirty percent biological slurry. A full breakdown of the slurry can be found in the appendix to my latest progress report. The eggs appear to be viable, but we have not yet successfully induced hatching in any of the provided growth mediums. Upon consultation with Doctor Banks, I received permission to pursue other tissue sources.

[She walks to the back of the room, where a large, airlock-style door has been installed. The camera follows her through the airlock, and into what looks very much like an operating theater. Two men are waiting there, faces covered by surgical masks. Dr. Cale pauses long enough to put down her petri dish and put on a mask of her own.]

DR. CALE: The subject was donated to our lab by his wife, following the accident which left him legally brain dead. For confirmation that the subject was obtained legally, please see the medical power of attorney attached to my latest progress report.

[The movement of her mask indicates a smile.]

DR. CALE: Well. Quasi-legally.

[Dr. Cale crosses to the body. Its midsection has been surrounded by a sterile curtain; the face is obscured by life support equipment, and by the angle of the shot. She pulls back the curtain to reveal the gleaming interior of the man’s sliced-open abdomen. The skin has been peeled back, and the blood has been suctioned away, revealing a wide array of colors. Liver brown, intestinal green and glistening white, and the smooth pink sac of the stomach. Calmly, she reaches into the man’s body, pushing organs aside until the surface of the small intestine is revealed.]

DR. CALE: Scalpel.

[One of the masked men passes her the requested tool. She takes it, pressing down against the man’s intestine. He does not move. Her hand does not tremble.]

DR. CALE: I am not following strict sterile protocol, in part because infection is not a risk. The subject’s immune system has been supplemented. D. symbogenesis eggs were introduced to the subject’s system six days ago, fed into his body along with the nutrient paste we have been using to preserve basic biological functions.

[The surface of the intestine splits, spilling a thin film of brownish liquid over the surrounding organs. Dr. Cale ignores it as she sets the scalpel aside and thrusts her hand into the man’s body. He still does not move as she digs through his small intestine. When she finally retracts her hand, she is clutching something. She pulls down her mask with her free hand and directs a beatific smile toward the camera.]

DR. CALE: I am pleased to report that we have multiple fully-formed proglottids present in the subject’s body, as well as some partial strobila.

[She holds out her hand. The camera zooms in on the white specks writhing against her gloved fingers.]

DR. CALE: D. symbogenesis is capable of maturing when cultured inside a living human host. Ladies and gentlemen . . . at long last, it’s alive.

[The film ends there. There are no notes in Dr. Cale’s progress reports relating to the eventual fate, or original identity, of the first human subject used to culture D. symbogenesis. The medical power of attorney referenced in the recording has never come to light.]

[End report.]

June 23, 2021: Time stamp, 13:17.

This is not the first thing I remember.

This is the first thing that I was told to remember; this is the memory that has been created for me by the hands and eyes and words of others. The first thing I remember has no need for hands, or eyes, or words. It has no need for others. It only needs the dark and the warm and the distant, constant sound of drums. The first thing I remember is paradise.

This is not the first thing I remember. But this is the first thing you will need to know.

Sally Mitchell was dying.

She was up against an army—an army that had begun with paramedics, moved on to doctors, and finally, to complicated life support machines that performed their function with passionless efficiency—but none of that seemed to make any difference. She had always been determined, and now, she was determined to die. Silently, and despite everyone’s best efforts, she was slipping farther and farther away.

It was not a swift process. Every cell in her body, damaged and undamaged alike, fought to retain cohesion. They struggled to pull in oxygen and force out the toxins that continued to build in her tissues and bloodstream. Her kidney function had been severely impaired in the accident, and waste chemicals had ceased to be automatically eliminated. She no longer responded in any meaningful way to external stimuli. Once she was removed from the machines that labored to keep her body functional, her life would come to an end in very short order.

Sally Mitchell existed in a state of living death, sustained by technology, but slipping away all the same.

Her hospital room was crowded—unusually so, for a woman standing in death’s doorway, but her doctor had hoped that by bringing her family to see her, he could better plead his case for taking her off life support. The damage from the accident had been too great. Tests had shown that Sally herself—the thinking, acting girl they remembered—was gone. “Clinical brain death” was the term he used, over and over again, trying to make them understand. Sally was gone. Sally was not coming back. And if they kept her on artificial life support for much longer, more of her organs would begin to shut down, until there was nothing left. If her family approved the procedures to harvest her organs now, her death could mean life for others. By pairing her organs with splices taken from her SymboGen implant, the risks of rejection could be reduced to virtually nothing. Dozens of lives could be saved, and all her family had to do was approve. All her family had to do was let her go.

All they had to do was admit that she was never waking up.

Sally Mitchell opened her eyes.

The ceiling was so white it burned, making her eyes begin to water in a parody of tears. She stared up at it for almost a minute, unable to process the message she was getting from her nerves. The message wanted her to close her eyes. Another part of her brain awakened, explaining what the burning sensation in her retinas meant.

Sally closed her eyes.

The doctor was still pleading with her family, cajoling and comforting them in turn as he explained what would happen next if they agreed to have Sally declared legally dead. His voice was no more or less compelling than the buzz of the machines around her. None of his words meant anything to her, and so she dismissed them as unimportant stimuli in a world that was suddenly full of unimportant stimuli. She focused instead on getting her eyes to open again. She wanted to see the white ceiling. It was . . . interesting.

The second time Sally opened her eyes, it was easier. Blinking came after that, and then the realization that she could breathe—her body reminded her of breathing, of the movement that it required, the pulling in of air through the nose, the expelling of air through the mouth. The respirator that was supposed to be handling the breathing process began beeping shrilly, confused in its mechanical way by her sudden involvement. The stimulus from the man in the ceiling-colored coat became more important as it grew louder, hurting her ears.
Sally sat up.

More machines started to beep. Sally winced, and then blinked, surprised by her own automatic reaction. She winced again, this time on purpose. The man in the ceiling-colored coat stared at her and said something she didn’t understand. She looked blankly back at him. Then the other people in the room started making noise, as shrill and confused as the machines around her, and one of them flung herself onto the bed, putting her arms around Sally and making a strange sound in her throat, like she was choking.

More people came into the room. The machines stopped making noise, but the people kept on doing it, making sounds she would learn were called “words,” asking questions she didn’t have answers for, and meanwhile, the body lived. The cells began to heal as the organs, one by one, resumed the jobs they had tried to abandon.

Sally Mitchell was going to live. Everything else was secondary.

Excerpt From 'Abaddon's Gate'

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:57:06 GMT

Abaddon's Gate is available on Amazon.

Manéo Jung-Espinoza – Néo to his friends back on Ceres station – huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the Y Que. After almost three months, there were maybe fifty hours left before he made history. The food had run out two days before. The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through him more times than he could count. Everything he could turn off, he’d turned off. The reactor was shut down. He still had passive monitors, but no active sensors. The only light in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float away, wasn’t even powered. His broadcast and tightbeam transmitters were both shut off, and he’d slagged the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull. He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was coming.

Fifty hours – less than that – and the only thing he had to do was not be seen. And not run into anything, but that part was in los manos de Dios.

His cousin Evita had been the one who introduced him to the underground society of slingshots. That was three years ago, just before his fifteenth birthday. He’d been hanging at his family hole, his mother gone to work at the water treatment plant, his father at a meeting with the grid maintenance group that he oversaw, and Néo had stayed home, cutting school for the fourth time in a month. When the system announced someone waiting at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting him for being truant. Instead, Evita was there.

She was two years older, and his mother’s sister’s kid. A real Belter. They had the same long, thin bodies, but she was from there. He’d had a thing for Evita since the first time he saw her. He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off. What it would feel like to kiss her. Now here she was, and the place to himself. His heart was going three times standard before he opened the door.

“Esá, unokabátya,” she said, smiling and shrugging with one hand.

“Hoy,” he’d said, trying to act cool and calm. He’d grown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres station just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat frame that marked him as an Earther. He had as much right to the cosmopolitan slang of the belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her. When he said it, it was like he was putting on someone else’s jacket.

“Some coyos meeting down portside. Silvestari Campos back,” she said, her hip cocked, her mouth soft as a pillow and her lips shining. “Mit?”

“Que no?” he’d said. “Got nothing better.”

He’d figured out afterward that she’d brought him because Mila Sana, a horse-faced Martian girl a little younger than him had a thing, and they all thought it was funny to watch the ugly Inner girl padding around after the half-breed, but by then he didn’t care. He’d met Silvestari Campos and he’d heard of slingshotting.

Went like this: Some coyo put together a boat. Maybe it was salvage. Maybe it was fabbed. Probably at least some of it was stolen. Didn’t need to be much more than a torch drive, a crash couch, and enough air and water to get the job done. Then it was all about plotting the trajectory. Without an Epstein, torch drive burned pellets too fast to get anyone anywhere. At least not without help. The trick was to plot it so that the burn – and the best only ever used one burn – would put the ship through a gravity assist, suck up the velocity of a planet or moon, and head out as deep as the push would take them. Then figure out how to get back without getting dead. Whole thing got tracked by a double-encrypted black net as hard to break as anything that the Loca Greiga or Golden Bough had on offer. Maybe they ran it. It was illegal as hell, and somebody was taking the bets. Dangerous, which was the point. And then when you got back, everyone knew who you were. You could lounge around in the warehouse party and drink whatever you wanted and talk however you wanted and drape your hand on Evita Jung’s right tit and she wouldn’t even move it off.

And just like that, Néo, who hadn’t ever cared about anything very much, developed an ambition.

…

“The thing people have to remember is that the Ring isn’t magical,” the Martian woman said. Néo had spent a lot of time in the past months watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, and so far, he liked her the best. Pretty face. Nice accent. She wasn’t as thick as an Earther, but she didn’t belong to the Belt either. Like him. “We don’t understand it yet, and we may not for decades. But the last two years have given us some of the most interesting and exciting breakthroughs in materials technology since the wheel. Within the next ten or fifteen years, we’re going to start seeing the applications of what we’ve learned from watching the protomolecule, and it will—”

“Fruit. Of. A poisoned. Tree,” the old, leathery looking coyo beside her said. “We cannot allow ourselves to forget that this was built from mass murder. The criminals and monsters at Protogen and MaoKwik released this weapon on a population of innocents. That slaughter began all of this, and profiting from it makes us all complicit.”

The feed cut to the moderator, who smiled and shook his head at the leathery one.

“Rabbi Kimble,” the moderator said, “we’ve had contact with an undisputed alien artifact that took over Eros station, spent a little over a year preparing itself in the vicious pressure-cooker of Venus, then launched a massive complex of structures just outside the orbit of Uranus and built a thousand-kilometer wide ring. You can’t be suggesting that we are morally required to ignore those facts.”

“Himmler’s hypothermia experiments at Dachau—” the leathery coyo began, wagging his finger in the air, but now it was the pretty Martian’s turn to interrupt.

“Can we move past the 1940s, please?” she said, smiling in a way that say I’m being friendly but shut the fuck up. “We’re not talking about space Nazis here. This is the single most important event in human history. Protogen’s role in it was terrible, and they’re been punished for it. But now, we have to—”

“Not space Nazis!” the old coyo yelled. “The Nazis aren’t from space. They are right here among us. They are the beasts of our worst nature. By profiting from these discoveries, we legitimize the path by which we came to them.”

The pretty one rolled her eyes and looked at the moderator like she wanted help. The moderator shrugged at her, which only made the old one angrier.

“The Ring is a temptation to sin,” the old coyo shouted. There were little flecks of white at the corners of his mouth that the video editor had chosen to leave visible.

“We don’t know what it is,” the pretty one said. “Given that it was intended to do its work on primordial Earth with single-celled organisms and wound up on Venus with an infinitely more complex substrate, it probably doesn’t work at all, but I can say that temptation and sin have nothing to do with it.”

“They are victims. Your ‘complex substrate’? It is the corrupted bodies of the innocent!”

Néo turned down the feed volume and just watched them gesture at each other for a while.

It had taken him months to plan out the trajectory of the Y Que, finding the time when Jupiter, Europa, and Saturn were all in the right positions. The window was so narrow it had been like throwing a dart from a half-klick away and pinning a fruit-fly’s wing with it. Europa had been the trick. A close pass on the Jovian moon, then down so close to the gas giant that there was almost drag. Then out again for the long trip past Saturn, sucking more juice out of its orbital velocity, and then farther out into the black, not accelerating again, but going faster than anyone would imagine a little converted rock-hopper could manage. Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bulls-eye smaller than a mosquito’s asshole.

Néo imagined the expressions of all the science and military ships parked around the Ring when a little ship, no transponder and flying ballistic, appeared out of nowhere and shot straight through the Ring at a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers per hour. After that, he’d have to move fast. He didn’t have enough fuel left to kill all his velocity, but he’d slow down enough that they could get a rescue ship to him.

He’d do some time in slam, that was sure. Maybe two years, if the magistrates were being pissy. It was worth it, though. Just the messages from the black net where all his friends were tracking him with the constant and rising chorus of Holy Shit It’s Going To Work made it worth it. He was going down in history. In a hundred years, people were still going to be talking about the biggest-balled slingshot ever. He’d lost months building the Y Que, more that that in transit, then jail time after. It was worth it. He was going to live forever.

Twenty hours.

…

The biggest danger was the flotilla surrounding the Ring. Earth and Mars had kicked each other’s navies into creaky old men months ago, but what was left was mostly around the Ring. Or else down in the inner planets, but Néo didn’t care about them. There were maybe twenty or thirty big military ships watching each other while every science vessel in the system peeked and listened and floated gently a couple thousand klicks from the Ring. All the navy muscle there to make sure no one touched. Scared, all of them. Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same little corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across that was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were trivial. There was a lot more nothing than something. And if he did hit one of the flotilla ships, he wasn’t going to be around to worry about it, so he just gave it up to the Virgin and started setting up the high-speed camera. When it finally happened, it would be so fast, he wouldn’t even know whether he’d made the mark until he analyzed the data. And he was making sure there was going to be a record. He turned his transmitters back on.

“Hoy,” he said into the camera, “Néo here. Néo solo. Captain and crew of souverän Belt-racer Y Que. Mielista me. Got six hours until biggest slipper since God made man. Esta being for me Mama, the sweet Sophia Brun, and Jesus our lord and savior. Watch close. Blink it and miss, que sa?”

He watched the file. He looked like crap. He probably had time he could shave the ratty little beard off and at least tie back his hair. He wished now he’d kept up with his daily exercises so he wouldn’t look so chicken-shouldered. Too late now. Still, he could mess with the camera angle. He was ballistic. Wasn’t like there was any thrust gravity to worry about.

He tried again from two other angles until his vanity was satisfied, then switched to the external cameras. His introduction was a little over ten seconds long. He’d start the broadcast twenty seconds out, then switch to the exterior cameras. More than a thousand frames per second, and it still might miss the ring between images. He had to hope for the best. Wasn’t like he could get another camera now, even if a better one existed.

He drank the rest of his water and wished that he’d packed just a little more food. A tube of protein slush would have gone down really well. It’d be done soon. He’d be in some Earther or Martian brig where there would be a decent toilet and water to drink and prisoner’s rations. He was almost looking forward to it.

His sleeping comm array woke up and squawked about a tightbeam. He opened the connection. The encryption meant it was from the black net, and sent long enough ago that it would reach him here. Someone besides him was showing off.

Evita was still beautiful, but more like a woman now than she’d been when he’d started getting money and salvage to build the Y Que. Another five years, she’d be plain.

He’s still have a thing for her, though.

“Esá, unokabátya,” she said. “Eyes of the world. Toda auge. Mine too.”

She smiled, and just for a second, he thought maybe she’d lift her shirt. For good luck. The tightbeam dropped.

Two hours.

…

“I repeat, this is Martian frigate Lucien to the unidentified ship approaching the Ring. Respond immediately or we will open fire.”

Three minutes. They’d seen him too soon. The Ring was still three minutes away, and they weren’t supposed to see him for until he had less than one.

Néo cleared his throat.

“No need, que sa? No need. This is the Y Que, racer out sa Ceres station.”

“Your transponder isn’t on, Y Que.”

“Busted, yeah? Need some help with that.”

“Your radio’s working just fine, but I’m not hearing a distress beacon.”

“Not distressed,” he said, pulling the syllables out for every extra second. He could keep them talking. “Ballistic is all. Can fire up the reactor, but it’s going to take a
couple minutes. Maybe you can come give a hand, eh?”

“You are in restricted space, Y Que,” the Martian said, and Néo felt the grin growing on his face.

“No harm,” Néo said. “No harm. Surrender. Just got to get slowed down a little. Firing it up in a few seconds. Hold your piss.”

“You have ten seconds to change trajectory away from the Ring or we will open fire.”

The fear felt like victory. He was doing it. He was on target for the Ring and it was freaking them out. One minute. He started warming up the reactor. At this point, he wasn’t even lying anymore. The full suite of sensors started their boot sequence.

“Don’t fire,” he said, as he made a private jacking-off motion. “Please, sir, please don’t shoot me. I’m slowing down as fast as I can.”

“You have five seconds, Y Que.”

He had thirty seconds. The friend-or-foe screens popped up as soon as the full ship system was on. The Lucien was going to pass close by. Maybe seven hundred klicks. No wonder they’d seen him. At that distance, the Y Que would light up the threat boards like it was Christmas. Just bad luck, that.

“You can shoot if you want, but I’m stopping as fast as I can,” he said.

The status alarm sounded. Two new dots appeared on the display. Hijo de puta had actually launched torpedoes.

Fifteen seconds. He was going to make it. He started broadcast and the exterior camera. The ring was out there somewhere, its thousand kilometer span still too small and dark to make out with the naked eye. There was only the vast spill of stars.

“Hold fire!” he shouted at the Martian frigate. “Hold fire!”

Three seconds. The torpedoes were gaining fast.

One second.

As one, the stars all blinked out.

Néo tapped the monitor. Nothing. Friend-or-foe didn’t show anything. No frigate. No torpedoes. Nothing.

“Now that,” he said to no one and nothing, “is weird.”

On the monitor, something glimmered blue and he pulled himself closer, as if being a few inches closer to the screen would make it all make sense.

The sensors that triggered the high-g alert took five hundredths of a second to trip. The alert, hardwired, took another three hundredths of a second to react, pushing power to the red LED and the emergency Klaxon. The little console telltale that pegged out with a ninety nine g deceleration warning took a glacial half second to excite its light emitting diodes. But by that time Néo was already a read smear inside the cockpit. The ship’s deceleration throwing him forward through the screen and into the far bulkhead in less time than it took a synapse to fire. For five, long seconds, the ship creaked and strained, not just stopping, but being stopped.

In the unbroken darkness, the exterior high-speed camera kept up its broadcast, sending out a thousand frames per second of nothing.

And then, of something else.

Stanford's Artificial Neural Network Is The Biggest Ever

Shaunacy Ferro — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:54:01 GMT

It's 6.5 times bigger than the network Google premiered last year, which has learned to recognize YouTube cats.

Last summer, in conjunction with Stanford researchers, Google[x], the R&D arm where ideas like Project Glass are born, built the world's largest artificial neural network designed to simulate a human brain. Now Andrew Ng, who directs Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab and was involved with Google's previous neural endeavor, has taken the project a step further. He and his team have created another neural network, more than six times the size of Google's record-setting achievement.

Artificial neural networks can model mathematically the way biological brains work, allowing the machine to learn to think in the same ways that humans do--making them capable of recognizing things like speech, objects and even cats like we do.

The model Google developed in 2012 was made up of 1.7 billion parameters, the digital version of neural connections. It successfully taught itself to recognize cats in YouTube videos. (Because, what else is the human brain good for?)

Since then, Ng and other Stanford researchers have created an even bigger network, with 11.2 billion parameters, that only requires the computational power of 16 servers with graphics processing unit, or GPU, computing--compared to the 16,000 CPU processors Google's network required. The technology is being presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Atlanta this week.

From an AI standpoint, that means we're getting a smidgen closer to being able to give our robots (or drones) human-level intelligence. On the other hand--we should probably just accept the fact that we're that much closer to the sentient-robot takeover. Looking on the bright side, compared to what you're lugging around on top of your neck, 11 billion neural connections isn't that many--the human brain boasts some 100 trillion connections.

How Amelia Earhart Flew Across The Atlantic 85 Years Ago Today

Rose Pastore — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:30:00 GMT

From the Popular Science archive, the story of Amelia Earhart's historic journey on June 17, 1928.

"First Woman Flies Overseas," republished in full below, originally appeared in the September 1928 issue of Popular Science magazine. On June 17, 1928, 30-year-old Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an airplane.

"The flight of the Friendship is intended to point the road toward the seaplane instead of the land plane as a means of flying across oceans, and multiple-engined planes instead of single-engined. It will help toward more comfortable flying; when women demand planes not only comfortable, but luxurious, men will build them."

Those statements of Miss Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, expressed the true importance of her recent flight, with Wilmer Stultz, pilot, and Lou Gordon, co-pilot, from Trepassey Bay, Newfoundland, to Burry Port, Wales. In less than twenty-two hours they flew 2,000 miles, much of the way through fog.

Their machine was a three-motored Fokker seaplane, originally designed for Commander Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition. It was the first crossing in a plane equipped with pontoons, on which to float if forced down.

Daring a journey which already had cost the lives of three women, Miss Earhart had planned herself to handle the controls, but fog, and the consequent necessity of flying by instruments alone, prevented that added glory.

Click here to see this article as it appeared in the September 1928 issue of Popular Science.

Magnetic Graphene Clouds Can Be Made To Appear And Disappear

Shaunacy Ferro — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:01:48 GMT

Toggling graphene's magnetic field on and off could lead to faster, smaller electronics.

Add another point to the list of reasons why graphene, the darling child of material physics, is a wunderkind. A team led by researchers at the University of Manchester has succeeded in turning magnetism on and off in graphene, an important step for the field of spintronics, the study of the way electrons spin in solid-state physics.

Spintronic memory has great theoretical potential to make computers faster and more efficient, but scientists have struggled to switch magnetic fields on and off the way electronic transistors do.

As announced in Nature Communications last week, we might come a little closer to spintronic transistors with graphene. When carbon atoms in graphene's honeycomb-like structure are removed, electrons around the resulting holes form clouds that act like microscopic magnets. The researchers found the electronic clouds could be dissipated and condensed again, switching off the magnetism.

Irina Grigorieva, who directed the study, explained the achievement in a press statement:
This breakthrough allows us to work towards transistor-like devices in which information is written down by switching graphene between its magnetic and non-magnetic states. These states can be read out either in the conventional manner by pushing an electric current through or, even better, by using a spin flow. Such transistors have been a holy grail of spintronics.

Another co-author, Antonio Castro Neto of the Graphene Research Centre in Singapore, added that this could lead to a new type of magnetic device that would be as thin as a single carbon atom. "These new devices can be incorporate [sic] in electronic circuits in order to create functionalities for control of magnetism and charge that did not exist before. They unify magnetic memories with electric circuits," he said in the statement.

What Mice Do When You're Not Looking

Colin Lecher — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:45:00 GMT

24/7 trackers give researchers insight into how mice mate, form social hierarchies, and more. Behold the rodent equivalent of 'Big Brother.'

Turns out Americans aren't the only ones getting spied on lately. By hooking up groups of mice with precise trackers, researchers have gotten a closer look at how societies form. At least in mice, the answer is: fast.

Weizmann Institute scientists introduced mice fitted with tracking chips into a square, 4-meter pen lined with video cameras. The scientists recorded the mice's movements 30 times a second for up to months at a time. (It's fun to imagine there were little mouse-propaganda posters advertising the Ministry of Truth or something, but alas, probably not.)

The researchers, unsurprisingly, gathered a lot of data from the voyeurism: they learned when the mice ate and drank, when they slept or fought, and more. Eventually, the team could determine whether each mouse was an introvert or extrovert, and could even predict, with more than 90 percent accuracy, how the mice would mate.

Here's the really intriguing part: With varied personality types inside the pen, the mice eventually bowed down to a dominant mouse in just 24 hours. By that point, they'd even developed a class system based on personality type. That was done with a group of "normal" mice. By including mice genetically inclined toward shyness, the researchers got a very different result: the mice didn't pick a leader, and when they did, the leader was quickly overthrown.

Why is this sort of experiment significant? Because it's not simple to track an animal society (or a human society) with such granular detail. This experiment shows it's possible, at least for small animals running around a small space.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

The Difference Between A Geek And A Nerd [Infographic]

Colin Lecher — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

They're not the same. A data-geek (or nerd?) explains.

Are you a geek or a nerd? Because they're not quite the same. (It's okay to admit which one you are, by the way! Popular Science is a safe place.)

Burr Settles at SlackPropagation broke down the difference by using data. The methodology here is a little on the nerdy side (or is it geeky side???) but, more or less, Settles mined Twitter for the words most likely to appear near "geeky" or "nerdy." The higher along the y axis, the geekier the words; the farther along the x axis, the nerdier.

Academic words show up frequently on the nerdy side of the graph: "Harvard," "#studymode," "biochemistry." (Also, inexplicably, "goths.") On the geeky side, it's more about tangible objects: "iPod," [Joss] Whedon," #appletv." Star Wars falls on the geeky side, but only barely, because, hey, everybody likes Star Wars.

So what did we learn? Settles writes:

In broad strokes, it seems to me that geeky words are more about stuff (e.g., “#stuff”), while nerdy words are more about ideas (e.g., “hypothesis”). Geeks are fans, and fans collect stuff; nerds are practitioners, and practitioners play with ideas. Of course, geeks can collect ideas and nerds play with stuff, too. Plus, they aren’t two distinct personalities as much as different aspects of personality. Generally, the data seem to affirm my thinking.

An awesomely nerdy project. Although "infographic" does fall onto the geeky side of the spectrum.

[SlackPropagation via FlowingData]