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The Britney Spears Problem » American Scientist

Good recent Walrus.

I continue to be baffled by why the strike that hit my tent was so glancing. Was it side splash, the point coming to ground somewhere nearby, leaping a fallen log or tag alder and hitting my tent somewhat tired out? Or was it the speed of the bolt that spared me, current zooming through the poles at 220,000 kilometres an hour? But if lightning’s temperature is thousands of degrees, why didn’t my tent simply vaporize?

I’ll never know. What was plain in that particular storm, in that particular place, is that my aluminum poles acted similar to a Faraday cage around me and took the heat. Another time, who knows?

The more we learn, the more capricious and imponderable lightning becomes. It’s the wild card, familiar but eternally a wonder. How many imponderables do we have left? We have so mastered, so paved over this world, but there is still something ungovernable we must live with, a supremely random force of nature, quite outside ourselves.

Struck By Lightning

Biologists have a pretty good idea of both how flies become resistant to DDT and how humans and primates have diverged over time.

We do not understand how cultures evolve nearly so well. The majority of human evolution does not involve changes in our DNA, but rather alterations in the gigantic library of nongenetic information, the culture, that our species possesses. This library is orders of magnitude larger than that of our genetic information, and the elements on its diverse shelves usually have meaning only in connection with other elements. Indeed, there has been a long, bitter debate about whether it is sensible even to use the term evolution to describe changes in culture.

Despite the great difficulties of building a comprehensive theory of cultural change deserving of the label of "evolution," progress in that direction has begun. We are finally starting to understand the patterns of culture change and the role of natural selection in shaping them. And since everything from weapons of mass destruction to global heating are the results of changes in human culture over time, acquiring a fundamental understanding of cultural evolution just might be the key to saving civilization from itself.

Cultural Evolution

From Publishers Weekly:

Novelist and science writer Sue Halpern wades bravely into the morass of modern memory research to sort the truth from a wide assortment of hyperbole and promises and platitudes. The news is mixed: most of us won't develop Alzheimer's, but everyone will suffer some memory loss. After describing the different types of memory, Halpern gamely undertakes a series of brain scans used to reveal brain damage and tries diagnostic tests that measure memory through the ability to recall words, images and smells. Researchers have identified a gene closely linked with Alzheimer's, but drugs to treat or prevent memory loss are still far from reality, Halpern says, adding that for many drug companies, the success of a remedy is measured only by how quickly it moves off the shelves. Armed with a mix of hope and healthy skepticism, the author also examines claims that eating chocolate (among other things) or solving puzzles can improve brain function. So much of who we know ourselves to be comes from what we remember, Halpern writes, and her timely book offers a vivid, often amusing introduction to a science that touches us all.

Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research

From Publishers Weekly:

In this intriguing volume, futurist and author Michael G. Zey (The Future Factor) imagines a time in which technology has stretched human life spans to 400 years or more. Genetic engineering, cloning technology and stem-cell science should eradicate disease and allow for nanoscopic repair and maintenance of the body, while "smart drugs" and "caloric restriction" programs ensure healthy bodies and sharp minds more or less indefinitely. Grounding his speculation in a thorough understanding of contemporary scientific research and present-day concerns (the environment, the post-boomer labor market, etc.), Zey's optimistic vision sees between-career hiatuses replacing retirement, and leisure time spent in the multi-generational home or on intense cross-cultural "immersion travels." Key players in the debate include supporters like Cambridge University scientist Aubrey de Grey, who envisions 5000-year life spans, and the radical futurist author Ray Kurzweil, who foresees the merging of humans and computers; meanwhile, organizations like the Coalition to Extend Life lobby the government for immortality research funding and find opposition in the President's Council on Bioethics and "deep ecologists" advocating zero-population growth. Criticizing current environmental trends as "anti-progress" and "anti-human," Zey's own solutions include controversial measures like human control of weather, colonization of outer space and genetically modifying food. He concludes that the "eventuality" of "a modern Fountain of Youth" is "closer than we think"; Zey's educated guess may not be entirely convincing, but it is both thorough and fascinating.

The Quest for Superlongevity and Physical Perfection

Lester K. Little:

Plague was a key factor in the waning of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Eight centuries before the Black Death, a pandemic of plague engulfed the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and eventually extended as far east as Persia and as far north as the British Isles. Its persisted sporadically from 541 to 750, the same period that witnessed the distinctive shaping of the Byzantine Empire, a new prominence of the Roman papacy and of monasticism, the beginnings of Islam and the meteoric expansion of the Arabic Empire, the ascent of the Carolingian dynasty in Frankish Gaul and, not coincidentally, the beginnings of a positive work ethic in the Latin West. In this volume, the first on the subject, twelve scholars from a variety of disciplines-history, archaeology, epidemiology, and molecular biology- have produced a comprehensive account of the pandemic's origins, spread, and mortality, as well as its economic, social, political, and religious effects. The historians examine written sources in a range of languages, including Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Old Irish. Archaeologists analyze burial pits, abandoned villages, and aborted building projects. The epidemiologists use the written sources to track the disease's means and speed of transmission, the mix of vulnerability and resistance it encountered, and the patterns of reappearence over time. Finally, molecular biologists, newcomers to this kind of investigation, have become pioneers of paleopathology, seeking ways to identity pathogens in human remains from the remote past.

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750

Robert Zimmerman:

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most stunning images of the cosmos humanity has ever seen. It has transformed our understanding of the universe around us, revealing new information about its age and evolution, the life cycle of stars, and the very existence of black holes, among other startling discoveries. The Universe in a Mirror tells the story of this telescope and the visionaries responsible for its extraordinary accomplishments.

Robert Zimmerman takes readers behind the scenes of one of the most ambitious scientific instruments ever sent into space. After World War II, astronomer Lyman Spitzer and a handful of scientists waged a fifty-year struggle to build the first space telescope capable of seeing beyond Earth's atmospheric veil. Zimmerman shows how many of the telescope's advocates sacrificed careers and family to get it launched, and how others devoted their lives to Hubble only to have their hopes and reputations shattered when its mirror was found to be flawed. This is the story of an idea that would not die--and of the dauntless human spirit. Illustrated with striking color images, The Universe in a Mirror describes the heated battles between scientists and bureaucrats, the perseverance of astronauts to repair and maintain the telescope, and much more. Hubble, and the men and women behind it, opened a rare window onto the universe, dazzling humanity with sights never before seen.

This book tells their remarkable story.

From the archive:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It

Hamid R. Ekbia:

This book is a critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of cognitive science - it seeks to examine what we have learned about human cognition from AI successes and failures. The book's goal is to separate those "AI dreams" that either have been or could be realized from those that are constructed through discourse and are unrealizable. AI research has advanced many areas that are intellectually compelling and holds great promise for advances in science, engineering, and practical systems. After the 1980s, however, the field has often struggled to deliver widely on these promises. This book breaks new ground by analyzing how some of the driving dreams of people practicing AI research become valued contributions, while others devolve into unrealized and unrealizable projects.

Artificial Dreams: The Quest for Non-Biological Intelligence

P. G. Maxwell-Stuart:

A pre-cursor to contemporary chemistry and physics, alchemy began as the pursuit of knowledge, initially in China as a search for the secret of immortality, and appearing independently in Egypt as an attempt to produce gold through the arts of smelting and alloying metals. In The Chemical Choir, P.G. Maxwell-Stewart authoritatively traces the fascinating history of alchemy from its earliest incarnations right up to its legacy in modern science as we know it today.

Continuing from its roots in China and Egypt, alchemy received a great boost in Europe from work done by Islamic and Jewish alchemists, whose written accounts were translated into Latin and combined with what was known of Greek natural science to produce an outburst of attempts to manipulate matter and change it into transformative substances called the Philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. Alchemy's heyday in Europe was the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as practiced by the great minds of the age of Reason, including, among others, Sir Isaac Newton.

During this time, demonstrations of the alchemist's art were performed in royal courts under conditions meant to obviate any fraud, and specimens of the gold so transmuted can be seen in various museums. During the nineteenth century, attempts were made to amalgamate alchemy with the religious and occult philosophies then growing in popularity; and in the twentieth century psychologists--principally Carl Jung--perceived in alchemy a powerful vehicle for aspects of their theories about human nature. At the same time, laboratory scientists continued to experiment in ways very similar to those of their medieval and early modern forebears.

A lively overview of alchemy and its practitioners from the earliest times to the present, P.G. Maxwell-Stuart explores the changing importance and interest in alchemy through its historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts, revealing that the study of alchemy is not merely one of the stranger byways of antiquarianism, but rather a living part of the history of science itself.

From the archive:

Galileo was an astrologer.

Newton was an alchemist.

Chemical Choir: A History of Alchemy

Karl Neder - physicist, Communist and all-round maverick - thinks he has made a discovery that will offer mankind energy for free. But no one believes him - or rather, no one understands him. And so he is forced to wander like a vagabond across Cold War Europe, an outcast from his native Hungary, leaving chaos and half-built machines in his wake." "But who, and where, exactly is Karl Neder now? Young journalist Lena Bomanowicz wants to find out, hoping to kick-start a stalled career but driven more by motives she would rather not interrogate. Yet to understand Karl Neder, she must wrestle with his story, which ranges from the castles of Transylvania to the rocket labs of NASA, from Viennese cafes to the blasted borderlands of the Soviet Union.

Philip Ball writes a "Lab lit" novel;. See reviews here and here.

The Sun and Moon Corrupted