On June 2nd the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission will finally launch, after multiple delays. This is supposed to be the first step of NASA's plan to return to the moon permanently by 2020.

However, what really excites me about this mission isn't the LRO! I am far more interested in a piggyback mission: LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite). LCROSS is a two-part experiment consisting of an impactor (the upper stage of the LRO launch vehicle) and a sensor package which follows close behind it.

The impactor will smack into the depths of one of the deep craters of the north or south lunar poles; places which never get any sun and in which previous missions found hydrogen signatures indicating the possible presence of water ice. This impact will send up an ejecta plume consisting of up to a thousand tons of lunar material which the sensor package will study before it also crashes into the lunar surface.

At the same time the Hubble space telescope and other instruments will be studying the plumes from both impacts. This is easily our best chance to find out if the moon can be settled permanently as water is one of the main limiting factors for long-term habitation. (Other limiting factors include nitrogen and trace minerals necessary for growing food.)

Besides the importance to space colonization, I love the audacity of whacking an SUV-sized spacecraft into the lunar surface in order to conduct an experiment. Now that's science!

Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning:

Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned.

Of course it wasn't exactly Jurassic Park:

Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects.

It appears that global warming can have an upside, if you live in Greenland.

Atheist and evolution blogger P.Z. Myers was ejected from a screening of a pro-creationism film because the director didn't want him to attend. The punch-line is delicious!

Five months ago I wrote a futurism essay about a possible technology which would change picture taking forever: Capturing a perfect moment.

Today Immersive Media publicly announced their Dodeca 2360 camera. Yeah, pretty close to the first generation of the technology I predicted. No, I didn't know about this beforehand.

Does that mean I get a Futurist Point?

This is a kind of reverse futurism: 'How Sputnik changed your life'.

As always with Ken, the essay swerves all over the epistemological map; pushing memes before it into a gigantic, tangled heap that somehow looks like a patchwork temple to Athena when he gets to the last sentence. (How does he do that?)

End result? A case study in the Lancet. Of course...

We've all been there. That perfect moment that you want to last forever. Maybe it is a sunset and a lover watching it with you. Maybe it is a child's first steps, a box of puppies on a sunny day, or a steelhead taking the hook at your favorite fishing hole. Maybe it is hearing an old song in a new way at a rock concert. Maybe it is simply standing inside a cathedral as clouds move across the sun and fill the nave with a shifting kaleidescope through the stained glass...

Whatever that perfect moment is, you know it when it happens and you know you will never be able to capture it in a way you could share it with others or (most sadly of all) with your own future self. Yet it is a very human thing to try -- from cave paintings to HD cameras, we have applied technology to the problem with varying degrees of success.

And yet, in most cases the best we can do is to capture a memento of that perfect moment; the personal equivalent of a snow globe from Las Vegas. Often little more than something to jog our own memory and almost never enough to put another person into the same space we inhabited right then. This is why we love to show our vacation pictures and others find them so boring.

(Interestingly, we have focused largely on visual representations as mementos despite the fact memory is tied more strongly to the sense of smell. Recent research indicates that you can even force the loss of long term memory in rats via blocking a brain enzyme related to olfactory processing.)

Of course, to some extent the quality of our mementos is dependent on the person making it. There is a definite artistic component involved, whether the person is sketching with charcoal or taking a photograph. If someone is good enough with a particular medium they can bring us, more or less, into that perfect moment. If the artist is truly good we invoke our imagination, suspend our belief in our current reality and, (almost magically) we inhabit that moment in a way that transcends the limitations of the medium. But, like all art, this response is personal and only works for those attuned to it. The next person to look at the painting or watch the movie in question may have a different, and less moving, experience.

Still technology marches on and that which was only available to the rich becomes a tool of the masses. We are rapidly approaching the moment when half the planet will carry a camera-equipped cell phone in their pocket. The quality and quantity of mementos produced increases even if the people making them lack the skill and perceptions of the true artist. We saw the first step in this evolution with the Brownie camera and now we have easily affordable HD camcorders and panoramic cameras.

Recently we entered into Steam Engine Time for the technology of creating mementos: The tools have reached a cusp point. Everything required is there to enable anyone to capture a moment in a way that makes inhabiting that perfect moment anytime in the future a better quality experience than the best great artists can accomplish with the mediums currently at their disposal. All it takes is a little integration work.

I could create this technology myself. Give me six months, an electrical engineer, and four other programmers and I could demo a consumer device that represents the first stage of this new memento technology. Give me twenty programmers and another year and I could give you the second stage. The third, and final, stage requires some technology that isn't ready for prime time, but is getting there.

And, if I can think of this thing, most likely someone else, smarter and better funded that I, has as well. Somewhere in the world engineers are already working to make this new device a reality. What will the first version look like?

There would be a base unit. It might look like a pole on a conical stand or it might be something you can mount on a camera tripod. Besides the base unit there will be at least three, and possibly more, satellite units that look much like the base unit, only smaller. At the top of each unit will be a rotating camera and a stereo microphone. To use it you will place the base unit in the center of the place you want to record and scatter the satellite units around at some distance to record the same scene from other angles.

That's pretty much it, other than some software to integrate the results. When activated the device would establish the exact positions of all its units and then scan its surroundings for a short period of time. The results would be fed into the integration software and the end result would be a looping 3D animation of the place and time you wanted to record. If the software (or the person operating it) was really good, and the recorded scene supported it, you could even make the loop seamless to the extent that it would be difficult to tell when the loop reached its end and started over. When replaying it you could 'walk' around the recorded space and time in any way you liked, inspecting many details and hearing the ambient sounds as if you were actually there. Yes, it would be on a computer screen. But it would be amazingly detailed and lifelike, barring some artifacts introduced by the recording process and the software.

How can this be? Converting photographs into 3D models is nothing new, but recent improvements in visualization software have enabled a whole new landscape of possibilities. As I said, all the other pieces (panoramic cameras, 3D rendering, virtual environments) already exist; all it takes is putting it together.

And this is just the first stage. The second stage will do the same thing without the satellite units or by automatically deployed satellites (perhaps autonomous remote units the size of flies) and the results will have much higher definition than the first stage. Moving elements like humans, animals, and machines will be rendered with much more precision and detail. The playback technology will improve as well, possibly via head mounted displays.

The third stage? Just improve the second stage incrementally and add the ability to record smells as well.

Like any medium, this new one will work best in the hands of the true artist. But even the most thumb-fingered individual will be able to record amazingly lifelike representations of a child hitting their first home run. It will enable new arts as well; interactive 'movies' may finally enter into the mainstream. Websites could host the scenes to allow a form of virtual tourism. Places that do not exist or that cannot be reached may be rendered by artists so that we can enjoy a concert in fairy-land or stroll on the surface of the sun.

The only downside is the distinct possibility that experiencing something with all this detail may not be anywhere as good as simply remembering it from behind a filter of years...

Did organic life begin in comets?

The Cardiff team suggests that radioactive elements can keep water in liquid form in comet interiors for millions of years, making them potentially ideal "incubators" for early life. They also point out that the billions of comets in our solar system and across the galaxy contain far more clay than the early Earth did. The researchers calculate the odds of life starting on Earth rather than inside a comet at one trillion trillion (10 to the power of 24) to one against.

-- OR --

Does life have to be organic at all? (Details here.)

Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.

Over at Edge they have an excerpt from his new book where Freeman Dyson challenges the common wisdom of global warming:

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Dyson continues with two more 'heresies'...

There has been a lot of talk about the Fermi Paradox lately, partially sparked by George P. Dvorsky's recent essay 'The Fermi Paradox: Advanced civilizations do not…' Today Centauri Dreams follows up with a very interesting post on what we should be looking for.

I highly recommend reading both essays, but I should point out that I have my own theory to explain the Fermi Paradox.

It's going to take me a while to digest this one...

James V. Stone of Sheffield University has a research article ponderously titled Distributed Representations Accelerate Evolution of Adaptive Behaviours. In it he describes something called (rather more prosaically) 'Free Lunch Learning':

In humans, FLL has been demonstrated using a task in which participants learned the positions of letters on a nonstandard computer keyboard. After a period of forgetting, participants relearned a proportion of these letter positions. Crucially, it was found that this relearning induced recovery of the non-relearned letter positions.

More recently, a set of theorems provided a formal characterization of FLL in linear neural network models. In essence, FLL occurs in neural network models because each association is distributed amongst all connection weights (synapses) between units (model neurons). After partial forgetting, relearning some of the associations forces all of the weights closer to pre-forgetting values, resulting in improved performance even on non-relearned associations . . .

In a nutshell, this means that you can learn a group of things one time, forget them, and by simply re-learning a single part of the group the whole thing comes back to you.

Now this might seem like a scientist spending a lot of fifty and seventy-five cent words to say something obvious, but he goes on to apply this to evolution:

Now consider an organism b2 which is born with a genetically specified set of neuronal connections. These connections are organised such that, if b2 learns one subset A2 of associations then another subset A1 is usually learned. In other words, the organism b2 happens to be born with neuronal connections similar to the connections of an organism b1 which had once learned and then forgotten subsets A1 and A2 (e.g., isotropically distributed around w0 in Figure 1). Just as FLL ensures that if organism b1 relearns A2 then subset A1 is usually relearned (see Figure 2), so if b2 learns A2 then A1 is usually learned. In both cases, FLL ensures that learning one subset of associations induces learning of the other subset. Critically, whereas the FLL exhibited by organism b1 depends on previous learning and forgetting, FLL in organism b2 depends on being born in a state such that the first time A2 is learned, the associations A1 are also usually acquired. Such a network can be evolved using a genetic algorithm, as shown below.

The use of two distinct subsets in this paper is clearly unrealistic when considered in the context of skill learning. However, the use of two subsets lies at one extreme along a continuum of tasks. At one extreme, associations are learned one by one in a strict order, and at the other extreme, all associations are learned simultaneously. In a biological context, the components of a skill which are learned first act as "scaffold" for others, and this effectively imposes a temporal order to the acquisition of different skill components. This is the type of scenario assumed for the simulations reported in this paper. Essentially, learning A2 is assumed to consist of a subset of skill components which provide a scaffold for the skill components in A1.

This concept of a 'scaffolding' for skills is interesting on several levels. Applied to machine learning it means that the trick is to create the right scaffolds. Applied to human learning it means that we might be able to actually do the kinds of things predicted by Timothy Leary's theory of an 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness; specifically the Neuroelectric Circuit and metaprogramming.

I don't want to get too far out there into woo-woo land on this. For example, I don't actually believe in Leary's circuit model of consciousness nor am I certain Stone's FLL ideas will stand up to scientific scrutiny. (Heck, I'm not even certain I actually understand it correctly.) Plus I am bypassing his real point; that evolutionary changes in individuals will result in a genetic scaffolding for certain learned behaviors within thirty generations. (WTF? Thirty generations?)

Still...

Apparently an entire reef of glass sponges has been found off the Washington coast. These sponges are colony organisms that build structures out of silica and, until relatively recently, were thought to have gone extinct over a hundred million years ago.

Previous discoveries of glass sponges were found in Canadian waters. This new discovery seems to be living in deep waters in an ecosystem based on methane seeping out of the ocean floor.

Scientists may have isolated the part of the brain that makes us human (as opposed to just being hairless apes); the Amygdala appears to be related to the senses that govern social behavior:

Semendeferi lead a group that measured area of the 12 amygdalas and low and behold found that the human amygdala was much larger than those of the other apes. That’s not too surprising. Our brains are the largest of the group they compared, so I would expect regions within the brain, like the amygdala to be proportionally larger as well.

Curiously, though, the lateral nucleus occupied a bigger portion of the amygdala than the other sub-regions in humans than the other primates compared. On top of having a larger lateral nucleus, more incoming connections from the temporal lobes, were noted in the human brain as well.

The temporal lobes are home to some critical social senses. The primary auditory cortex is located in the temporal lobe, and so the temporal lobes specialize in auditory processing. They are also heavily involved in speech and vision processing. This implies that as humans, the larger lateral nucleus in the human amygdala allowed more auditory and vision information to be processed.

Gene Expression comments on this as well.

Remember Resveratrol? (Resveratrol might explain the health effects of red wine.)

Well, human tests have begun on a drug with chemical similarities to Resveratrol that has shown lifespan increases and diabetes relief in animal tests. Only, get this, it worked best on overweight mice!

What he said.

Mr. Wizard, aka Don Herbert has passed away from multiple myeloma.

Dang...

Over at the Makezine Blog, Phillip Torrone is soliciting comments and rememberences of Mr. Wizard.

Using applied plasmonics to control an electron's spin:

The new technology, which the researchers call spinplasmonics, may be used to create incredibly efficient electron spin-based photonic devices, which in turn may be used to build, for example, computers with extraordinary capacities.

“We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this field, but we believe we have the physics sorted out and one day this technology will be used to develop very fast, very small electronics that have a very low power consumption,”

Is it just me? Or does 'spinplasmonics' sound like something out of 1950's era science fiction or a bad episode of Star Trek NG?

NASA Rover finds surprising evidence for Mars' watery past.

The best part? A mechanical malfunction led directly to the discovery:

One of Spirit's six wheels no longer rotates, gouging a deep impression as it drags through soil. That scraping has exposed several patches of bright soil, leading to some of Spirit's biggest discoveries in its Gusev Crater exploration site, including the most recent find.