Figure 1 – American bullfrog, the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge. (c) DE Wolf 2021.
When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs. Perhaps if you judge by the number of times that I have watched the Jurassic Park series, I still do. No correction, I definitely still do!
Earlier this week I was delighted to find this (Figure 1) fist-sized American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbeianus) starring back at me at the Assabet RIver National Wildlife Refuge in Sudbury, MA. As he nervously eyed me, I had a moment to think about the pudgy dinosaurs of the amphibian age. Indeed, the prototype dinosaur ichthyostega lived 370 million years ago in the Devovian period. Icthyostega was pudgy, but he had a tail, as do tadpoles today. Actual frogs appear to have evolved around 190 million years ago. It is sobering. They’ve been around a lot longer than we have and quite probably will out date us at the rate, which we are going. Frogs are extremely adaptable, which gave them an edge when mass extinction led to the demise of the age of dinosaurs and will, in all probability give them an edge when the demise of the age of hominids comes.
Mark twain famous said that “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” I am not personally interested in eating frogs. Call it the dinosaur loving child in my heart. But the important point that Twain is making is that it is best in life to tackle each day’s most difficult task early and first. It is your frog.
Tying these two themes together, it would perhaps be worth our while to eat the frog of climate change before it eats us!
Figure 1 – This image of the planet Neptune was obtained during the testing of the Narrow-Field adaptive optics mode of the MUSE/GALACSI instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The corrected image is sharper than a comparable image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.Credit:ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)
Figure 1 is something new and astounding. It is a photograph taken with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile’s Atacama Desert using adaptive optics. Look closely and you will see clouds and a multitude of subtle shadings. Significantly the image rivals images such as that of Figure 2 taken with NASA’s Hubble Telescope in Earth orbit. What this mean is that it is possible to obtain images from a Earth-bound telescope that rival images taken from space. Said differently, what it means is that we now have a second pair of truly amazing eyes focused on the universe.
As anyone who has used a telephoto lens on a atmospheric day knows, water in the atmosphere between you and the subject scatters and fuzzes out the image. That’s one of the reasons that its so hard to get a good and sharp image with a long telephoto lens. Worse still for a telescope, convection (heat flows) in the atmosphere causes minute localized changes in index of refraction which cause fluctuations in the focus and position of the object in the sky. Orbit-based telescopes solve this problem by going above the atmosphere. ESO’s VLT takes a different approach, it uses lasers to create guide stars and fluctuations in the focus and position of these guide stars is used to adjust the array of mirrors that make up the primary mirror of the telescope, The telescope’s thin, deformable mirror compensates for these fluctuations by shifting its shape 1,000 times a second to correct the distorted light. And the result are the super sharp images like that of Figure 1.
With this demonstration land-based astronomy has entered a new phase, one that, like the Hubble, will take us to new worlds.
Figure 2 – Image of Neptune taken with NASA’s Hubble Space telescope. Credit: NASA.
Figure 1 – NASA’s Aqua satellite captured infrared temperature data on Hurricane Irma on Sept. 8 at 2:29 a.m. EDT (0629 UTC). The image showed very cold cloud top temperatures colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) in the storm, stretching over Hispaniola, eastern Cuba and the Bahamas. Credits: NASA JPL/Ed Olsen
“I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage. If he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.”
William Shakespeare “The Tempest (1623)“
We are all now glued to the news, television and internet, watching cliched, yet iconic images from Southern Florida. It is like the storm in Shakespeare’s “Tempest,” which was meant to take place in Bermuda. But hurricane Irma is not conjured up by any wizard Prospero, as much as it seems along with the California wildfires and hurricane Harvey to be the wrath of nature. Global warming has turned up the heat and more so the oceanic storms boil violently.
I thought it appropriate to share an image of Irma today and knew just where to look – on the NASA website. It is a frightening gallery, yet in an eerie way so beautiful – the violence of the storm shown in so many different ways. But what struck me as the image that was so frighteningly beautiful and at the same time heuristic was an image taken on September 8 at 2:29 am EDT. Figure 1 was taken with the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite. This is a thermal camera and what you see are the temperatures of the cloud tops in the upper atmosphere. See the scale on the top of the image. Churning, churning, churning. It captures the very energy, gigantic convective waves, of the storm driven by the ocean temperatures. The eye is so well-formed and the darkest clouds above the strongest thundershowers are colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius).
These are truly the engines of destruction. And we have turned up the power. Back in May, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said: “I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.” OK, but we may remember the famous quote from English political theorist Algernon Sidney: “God helps those who help themselves.” Famously, Benjamin Franklin later used it in his Poor Richard’s Almanack (1736).
The tempest is so like the looming clouds above NYC’s West Side in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters. Who you gonna call, people? I suspect that there will be no defeated Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Gozer will not be vanquished, and we will awake in the morning to the same old terrifying memetic images of destruction.
Marine debris similar to that found on Henderson Island – this in the Hawaiian islands. By NOAA – http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/marinedebris101/photos_ecosys.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3834865
Henderson Island is a pacific atoll island among the Pitcairn Islands, so remote that the closest human settlement 120 miles away is where the Bounty mutineers hid out. It would seem a place where one could walk the beaches and marvel at the purity of nature, just as Darwin did close to two hundred years ago. But not so fast! Henderson Island lies uniquely at the nexus of the great swirling pacific currents. It is effectively the flushing point, the toilet, of the Earth, and as a result if you walk its should-be pristine beaches you are greeted by an incomprehensible amount of human trash. It is effectively buried in plastic.
The numbers are indeed staggering. According to Jennifer Lavers, a research scientist at the University of Tasmania in Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This was “the highest density of plastic I’ve really seen in the whole of my career.” A new study by Ms. Lavers and her colleagues published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that there were 17.6 tons of debris on the shores of the tiny island. But the most alarming aspect of this is that this amount of plastic garbage is produced by humans on the Earth every 1.98 seconds.
We should weep for Gaia. But at the same time we must do something about the uncontrolled creation and disposal of plastics and other human effluence. It is not a question of maybe but of must. It is extreme arrogance and folly to believe that we can ignore her powers, the very forces that drove evolution long before and will continue long after human existence on this planet.
“The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It’s only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little, and destroy a good bit of the population. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence.” ― Cleve Backster
Figure 1 – Moses and the Ten Commandments, Edward S. Curtis, photographer. Scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, Photographs of the filming of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, PC-RM-Curtis, courtesy, California Historical Society, PC-RM-Curtis_587.
The time has come to stand up for science, and I begin with defense of truth. What is truth? We may look it up. There are three definitions, but the one that we are concerned with here is the following:
“that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.”
Pretty simple, yes? Truth is not relative. There are not alternate truths or alternate facts.
I know that there is a tendency to believe that our belief in truth and the approbation against not telling it, aka lying, stems from our religions. And yes, we are told in, for instance, Proverbs 6:16-19 (King James Version)
“These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him:
A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood,
An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief,
A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.”
Somebody needs to stuff that into the President’s fortune cookie. And speaking of “an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations,” we learn in John 37-38.
“Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.
Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.”
We all know how well that story ended. But I think that it is much simpler than that. We get our morality, our ethics, from our parents. My mother taught me not to lie and that is why I do not lie. This fundamental truth is at the core, the root, of human civilization. It defines moral society. And it is essential for democracy.
When I was growing up, in the age of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, we used to mock the fact that the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party was “Pravda,” or “Truth.” It is the supreme irony that this President has taken us to the level of what we once loathed. It is like a parody of George Costanza of Seinfeld’s fourteen justifications for lying:
“1. It’s not a lie if you believe it.
2. It’s not a lie if it doesn’t help you.
3. It’s not a lie if it hurts you.
4. It’s not a lie if it helps someone else.
5. It’s not a lie if it doesn’t hurt someone else.
6. It’s not a lie if everyone expects you to lie.
7. It’s not a lie if the other person knows the truth.
8. It’s not a lie if nobody can prove it.
9. It’s not a lie if you don’t get caught.
10. It’s not a lie if you don’t need to tell another lie to cover it up.
11. It’s not a lie if you were crossing your fingers.
12. It’s not a lie if you proceed to make it true.
13. It’s not a lie if nobody heard you say it.
14. It’s not a lie if nobody cares.”
And number fourteen is the critical point, friends. If we care about our country, then it is time for us to stand up in defense of the truth. Donald Trump, Kelly Anne Conway, Sean Spicer have taken us into a world of Orwellian Double Speak – language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. We know the truth. Our mothers taught us the truth. So now, we are tested with the question, do we care?
Figure 1 – Into the maelstrom. Image of Saturn’s North Pole taken by the Cassini satellite on November 22, 2012. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute and in the public domain in the United States.
It seems appropriate to take note of the pending death of the Cassini Spacecraft, which for nearly two decades has been amazing us with photographs of Saturn and its moons. Figure 1 is a striking example of the images taken by these beautiful robot eyes. This image from NASA’s Cassini mission was taken on Nov. 27, 2012,using its narrow-angle camera. The camera was pointing toward Saturn’s North Pole from approximately 224,618 miles (361,488 kilometers).
Cassini will “not go gently into that good night.” Its final set of “low altitude” orbits of the planet are taking it within the Saturnine Ring System. Over the period of April and September 2017, Cassini will execute a series of twenty-two orbits that will dive between the planet and its rings. On its final orbit, Cassini will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere, sending back data and images of its own suicide. Congratulations NASA and congratulations Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
One is tempted in writing this epitaph to say something like, who could have imagined such a thing. But the answer to that question was a boy who five decades ago sat in the cool darkness of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, watching the planetary orbs circling in mechanical precision against the stars projected upon a pitch-black darkness. The air was always cool and paradoxically there was always oxygen to breathe. He dared to imagine.
The great twentieth century physicist Ernest Rutherford famously stated that “A theory that you can’t explain to a bartender is probably no damn good.”And so I found myself, this afternoon, at the juncture between physics, well chemistry actually, and bartending and beer-making.When I took this photograph the bartender was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was off in some corner communing with Lord Rutherford’s ghost. Perhaps Rutherford was testing his thesis, describing the Rutherford model of the atom, explaining the nature of the atomic nucleus, and the existence of the proton. Who knows?
Figure 1 – A stingray showing bilateral undulations that control forward locomotion. Image from the Wikipedia by Jeremy Collins and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license.
We hear all the time Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that “The Singularity is Near.” Well, maybe it’s not so very near, since Kurzweil firmly predicts the singularity as occurring around 2045 – when “humans transcend biology”.
“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”
But, the bottom line is that we cannot, nor should we want, to control the pace of technological development. We must embrace it, and we must develop the means of establishing ethical boundaries and controls on the use of this technology. The ethical dilemma here is similar to that of controlling the use of atomic energy, and the jury is not in yet.
It remains irrevocably the case that the singularity is an exciting concept that in many ways will alleviate, or at least reduce, human suffering and improve the world. Therein, lies the second part of the ethical dilemma. How will we make sure that’s its benefits are universally distributed?
While it is still, perhaps, twenty-nine years away, if you look closely, increasingly there are signs of it: Jeopardy winning computers, cochlear implants, and bionic limbs to name a few. A lot of what we think about as “singularity worthy” are indeed machines or machine parts incorporated into humans.
However, there is the other side to this, biological tissue incorporated into machines. A stunning example of such “biohybrid devices” was described last week in an article in Science Magazine by Harvard scientist, Kevin Kit Parker, and his collaborators, entitled ” Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray”
What the group has done is create a miniaturized aquatic ray about 1.6 cm long. The ray has a flexible skeletal structure overlain with ~ 200,000 rat embryonic heart muscle cells. The cells have been modified so that they can be triggered by light, thus creating a propagating wave. This optogenetic approach involves the incorporation of genes that code for light-sensitive calcium channels. In general, biological motor systems do not follow the man-made approach of rotating screws and motors because these require a separated surface-on-surface contact that enables continuous rotation. Rather organisms tend to utilize approaches like flagellar beating or, as in the ray, bilateral flapping. By triggering preferential beating on one side of the miniaturized ray, it can be made to turn.
If there is any doubt that this miniaturized robotic ray is anything but an incremental step towards the singularity, one has only to read the concluding statement of the paper,
“Our study is but a first step in engineering multilevel systems that link neurodynamics, mechanics, and complex controllable gaits—coupling sensory information to motor coordination and movement that leads to behavior. This work paves the way for the development of autonomous and adaptive artificial creatures able to process multiple sensory inputs and produce complex behaviors in distributed systems and may represent a path toward soft-robotic “embodied cognition”.”
Figure 1 – Astronomers are using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study auroras — stunning light shows in a planet’s atmosphere — on the poles of the largest planet in the solar system, Jupiter. Credits: NASA, ESA, and J. Nichols (University of Leicester)
July 5, 2016 Switch to toroidal low gain antenna 2:41 UTC
I am the time traveler and I can project myself back in time fifty years, and there I am sitting in the American Museum’s Hayden Planetarium watching the outer planets. The planetarium is dark and cool. It is ever dark and cool. Forever, that is my sensation of space. I am sitting at the very dividing line between the real and the imagined.
July 5, 2016 Begin nutation damping activity to remove remaining wobble 2:46 UTC
This border is where science, both physical and biological, invariably takes us. There is no ambiguity at this nexus. As our reality reaches outward so too does our imagination. We have only to imagine new wonders.
July 5, 2016 Begin fine-tune adjustment of the orbit insertion attitude 2:50 UTC
And, as scientists, we are always imagining. I used to put my desk lamp on the floor and create little eclipses with my globe and a rubber ball. I used to experiment with the umbral and penumbral shadows – ever imagining that I was in that cool dark place called space, where physics ruled everything.
July 5, 2016 Begin spin-up 2:56 UTC
Figure 1 is an image of Jupiter taken, not with the Juno space probe, but with the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows aurora around the Jovian North Polar, so real, right, and more than imagination. Actually it is even more than real, because modern science and human imagination have given us new ways of seeing. To more vividly observe these auroras Hubble uses its Imaging Spectrograph to create deep ultraviolet images.
July 5, 2016 Jupiter orbit insertion burn 3:18 UTC
Scientists know this, but most people just take it for granted. Our eyes which used to be limited to the visible spectrum are now seeing ever so vividly all over the electromagnetic spectrum. We are even mapping other forms of energy. We can even choose an ever so precise wavelength that picks up the distribution of a particular element on a star’s or planet’s surface.
July 5, 2016 Orbital capture achieved 3:38 UTC
So we can abandon, if only for a moment, all of the harsh realities of our world and we can marvel once again, as we did when we were young, at what we may achieve. We may remember, but really imagine, that it was in 1418 that João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira discovered Porto Santo in the Medeira Archipeligo. And it was seventy years later that Bartolomeu Dias defied death and rounded the “Cape of Storms” (Cape of Good Hope). Four years later, in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the Bahamas, Cuba, and “Española” (Hispaniola). Between 1519 and 1522 Ferdinand Magellan‘s expedition completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. Almost another century would pass before the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the establishment of the Plymouth Colony in 1620.
July 5, 2016 Terminate insertion burn 3:53 UTC
This timeline is sobering. Even factoring in the fact that we have come to take for granted the break-neck pace of our world and the technology that drives it. We arrogantly assume that we can move faster. Inevitably discovering new worlds takes time.
July 5, 2016 Begin turn to sun-pointed attitude 4:07 UTC
But last night, as Juno ended its 1.8 billion mile journey, inserted itself into Jovian orbit and oriented itself so as to be able to absorb energy from the feeble sunlight at that distance (~1/25th that at the surface of the Earth), I was taken back in time to those days in the Planetarium fifty years ago and I also traveled forward in time to imagine where we will be fifty years hence.
July 5, 2016 Switch telecom to medium gain antenna, begin telemetry transmission 4:11 UTC
As signal was received last night at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory the scientists erupted into cheers and applause. Scott Bolton, Juno’s Principal Investigator announced that “We just did the hardest thing NASA has ever done. That’s my claim.” During the next two years, before Juno plunges into the planet, we will learn a lot about the planet and about the origins of our solar system. Right now we can only imagine. The words of Tennyson come ever to mind as we contemplate the border between reality and imagination,
Do I have to convince people of the practical importance of science? This past May I watched a dear friend of mine saved from leukemia by “modern medicine.” Then a few weeks later I was sitting at the Michael Edidin Celebration at the Johns Hopkins and marveling at how over the last three decades our understanding of immunology has led to real advances in in cancer treatment, the very one’s that saved my friend’s life.
So I am alarmed by the British vote to exit the European Union. Britain is a leader in world science. The UK is a relatively small country with only about one percent of the world’s population. But, according to the Atlantic, it is home to 3.3% of the world’s scientists, 7% of the worlds scientific output, and (as scientists like to measure success) 15% of the most most cited papers come out of British laboratories. That’s amazing, but for those of us who walk in scientific circles not in the least surprising!
But, but, but … and again according to the Atlantic, a very sizable portion of funding for scientific research in the United Kingdom comes from EU grants. Between 2007 and 2013, the U.K. received €8.8 billion (~$10 billion) for scientific research. Over the last three decades there has been an ascendancy of European Science. Advances in particle physics no longer bear the dateline of National Argonne Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois, but dateline CERN, Geneva, Switzerland. This, of course, culminated in the March 14, 2013 discovery of the long-sought after Higgs Boson. Similarly, we laud the accomplishments of the European Space Agency, most notably the August 6, 2014 successful landing of the Rosetta Probe on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. on 6 August 2014. I got up early in the morning to watch both of these events – just like I did in the sixties to watch America’s space launches. “We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” These projects are important and are stunning examples of international scientific cooperation.
Where do we go from here? Last week’s vote casts a pall of doubt and throws a huge number of scientist’s lives and livelihoods into a turmoil of uncertainty. What of these great cooperative scientific ventures? What of scientific funding in the United Kingdom? What about the jobs of English scientists living in Europe and of European Scientists living in the UK?
This is all part of the “collateral damage” caused by last Thursday’s vote in the United Kingdom. As Prime Minister David Cameron said last Friday in his resignation speech, “… the British people have made a very clear decision to take a different path,” and as a result the process is set in motion. It has to be that way because such is the meaning of democracy. The likely victims are all of us. We must all pay the piper.
