SPACE: Congratulations, Bigelow Aerospace!

A big, Las Vegas sized CONGRATULATIONS to Bigelow Aerospace, the Las Vegas based aerospace company that has just flown the first scale model of its planned inflatable modules that will, in turn, be assembled into the first private space station - and space hotel. Once you're that far out of the gravity well, more exotic destinations are within much easier reach. This is an historic moment.

The essence of this event's importance is its uniquesness. In recognizing its uniqueness - who else has flown a private spacecraft without an immediate commercial mission, but as part of an ambitious long-term program? - one has to ask why this event is unique. Plenty of people - dozens - have the wherewithal to do this. Some, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, could fund an ambitious, historic program like BA's without even noticing its financial impact. Yes, there are quite a few players in the suborbital arena, but the raw, pulse-pounding drama is to reach orbit, not pause, poised at the top of gravity's rainbow, before falling back to Earth like Icarus.

Soon we'll have ways to reach space affordably, and thanks to BA, somewhere to stay, focus, and regroup before leaving on the next stage of the journey.

Way to go, Bigelow!

SNAKES: Snakes that fly, oh my

The gentle reader should be aware that snakes, though not particularly aerodynamic, can fly. One of Sable Systems' customers, Jake Socha of the Argonne National Labs, is the world expert in this area. Seed magazine recently featured some of his outstanding photography of flying snakes (not all are flying; some are merely photogenic, which is enough). You can see them here.

PHYSICS: 120 Orders of magnitude? Orders, Schmorders

Ya hafta love modern physics and especially modern cosmogeny. From a sleepy and rather certain view of the universe, the weirdness coefficient has grown exponentially until new units of weirdness are now required. I'm not sure what the fundamental unit of weirdness is, or even if there is an associated particle, but the homely weird is now measured in kiloweirds or megaweirds.

To drive this home, consider what happens when you trap several prominent physicists on a tropical island, as described here. As the convener of the group said,

What you couldn't understand was how to cancel a number to a hundred and twenty decimal places and leave something finite left over. You can't take two numbers that are very large and expect them to almost exactly cancel leaving something that's 120 orders of magnitude smaller left over. And that's what would be required to have an energy that was comparable with the observational upper limits on the energy of empty space.

We knew the answer. There was a symmetry and the number had to be exactly zero. Well, what have we discovered? There appears to be this energy of empty space that isn't zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century. And it may be the first half of the 21st century, or maybe go all the way to the 22nd century.

Unqualified as I am, I can think of a few others that begin to rival empty space energy. Dark energy and dark matter, to name just two - if, in fact, they aren't artifacts of a failure to understand gravity fully. We are realizing, finally, that human intelligence might not be up to every task we assume it can master. The metempsychosis from carbon to silicon might just change that, too. And it might, just might, happen in our lifetimes.

INSECTS: Outstanding macro photography

An outstanding collection of macro images, mostly of insects, comes recommended by my friend Bill Jordan the science writer. He's the author of Divorce Among the Gulls, A Cat Named Darwin, and other future epics. He, Robbin and I are owners and fans of muscovy ducks, but that's another story.

The images are reminiscent of the South African master macro photographer Anthony Bannister, who's also known for his wildlife photography. His work on Skaife's African Insect Life was classic. My copy of that book, which I bought while living with Menan du Plessis in Cape Town, is one of my few treasured possessions.

A big part of the wonder and magic of insects is their utterly different body plan. We wear our bones on the inside; they, on the outside. We have our hearts close to the front; they, running just inside their backs (yes, they have multiple hearts). We have our distal CNS running along our backs; they, along their fronts. Our eyes are single and paired; theirs multiple and paired plus a couple of extras. We obtain oxygen via lungs and respiratory pigments; they, via the tracheal system that delivers it directly to their cells. They are so alien that they might as well have evolved on another planet - yet biochemically we are brother and sister. And our finest AI experts and roboticists have yet to come up with anything one thousandth as self-aware as a Drosophila.

The new macro site is called pishmo.com and can be accessed here. It's entirely in Cyrillic so I have no idea what these good people do for a living, if the concept even applies to them. The image hyperlinks directly to the macro page on their site; click on it to visit.

Here's the thing with links like this: By linking directly to an image on their site I'd be stealing their bandwidth, but by copying the image, reducing its size, and posting it on this blog's server (as I did), I might be violating copyright. Assuming the Pishmolians want their macro photography recognized, I wonder which violation they prefer. No need to send the Russian Mafia; a polite email is all that's necessary.

VIDEO FEEDBACK: Deja recursion

If asked, we at Sable Systems International would of course refuse to comment about any video development projects we might or might not be undertaking or not undertaking - hypothetically speaking. Keeping one's counsel is wise in a world of monkey see, monkey do.

Be that as it may. Pointing a video camera at a computer screen is a source of unpredictable wonder in a world that is full of wonders, of course, but few this obvious. As images build and decay with a logic at once delicate and wild, galaxies and unearthly creatures of the mathematical underworld form, regard the world beyond the screen (or seem to) and dissolve back into the chaos from which they formed.

This beautiful process seems almost like a metaphor of consciousness itself.

ZZYZX: The scorpion expedition

Well, last night's scorpion shoot at Zzyzx was a hoot. It turns out that the new UV LED flashlights are a huge improvement over those nasty, fragile fluorescent tubes plus bulky batteries we used to have to haul around. Rob Fulton, the Zzyzx research station manager, had two and Frank brought two as well. We shot a few intro scenes on the bajada overlooking the Soda Lake playa, then took off to Baker for dinner at the Mad Greek's.

Baker is a curious place, boasting "The World's Tallest Thermometer", which the locals refer to as the rectal thermometer because they claim it's in the asshole of the Mojave Desert. However the Mad Greek's is a fine Big Fat Greek restaurant, blue and white (natch), its Grecian themes swaggering about on anabolic steroids. They serve the Onassis Burger, which is quite simply the best hamburger on the planet, with a lamb-and-beef patty topped with pastrami. On the way back to Zzyzx a desert storm bucketed down on us so hard that steering was mostly guesswork lit by blinding lightning. Fortunately the worst was on the long dirt road leading from the Zyzzx turnoff, part of which became a broad river, where there was no other traffic to worry about.

After the storm cell moved on, with lightning dancing on the nearby hills and thunder troubling the air, amid the intoxicating scent of moist creosote bushes, we soon found a couple of small scorpions, then Robbin found a monstrous Hadrurus (the Giant Hairy Scorpion). Jeni, the narrator, was terrified as she knelt next to the beast and pointed out its wonders while it was in the "you-just-try-that" stance. Later at Rob's house we watched the scorpion film a BBC crew had filmed last time we were at Zzyzx with Phil Brownell. Lots of dramatic special effects. Michael Attenborough sounding - well, as usual. Then we watched our footage and were amazed at the clarity and gorgeousness of the luminous scorpions.

CANNIBALISM: The TV series

There are many scorpions in the world (some might think too many), especially in desert areas such as the Mojave Desert outside Las Vegas. I had the pleasure of discovering why, in collaboration with Phil Brownell, the world's leading scorpion dude (you can read the details here). Of course we used the planet's finest respirometry equipment. In the process we found the best explanation to date of why scorpions eat other scorpions, including their own children.

What happens is this. Scorpions have extremely low metabolic rates - about 25% of a normal insect or other arthropod of the same mass. Thus, for a given trophic energy flow, you'll get about 4x the biomass of scorpions and thus, all things being equal, 4x the number of scorpions compared to, say, insects. This explains the superabundance. What about the cannibalism?

Well, scorpions are predators, and because they're 4x more numerous than they "should" be, they'll also bump into each other about 4x more often than more conventional arthropods will. Hence, cannibalism. Actually there's a lot more to it than that, including the hypothesis that scorpions use their young as a kind of living, self-sustaining energy storage mechanism! If you're a scorpion, eating your children is a good idea. Do not try this at home. For more details see the paper.

So, tonight sees us heading out to Zzyzx to film scorpions in their natural habitat. We're doing a show-and-tell for the inimitable Frank van Breukelen's Desert Survivors series. At last I'll get to try out some of those new UV LED scorpion-finders (scorpions, as you probably know, fluoresce under UV light; they look like intricately carved, living jewels of lime fire). If enough bizarre things happen (as they usually do) we'll post the details.

CLIMATE CHANGE: Sable Systems' solution?

We receive a lot of email here at Sable Systems. Apart from the inevitable spam - which gets quickly deleted by our IT antibodies - and the always welcome requests for quotes, we get occasional letters like this one, received yesterday:

Dear Sable Scientists,

Probably a very silly question, but is it even remotely possible that CO2 scrubbing principles could be applied to the problem of the ever-increasing amounts of CO2 going into the atmosphere and causing global waming? (to hell with the cost!)

Could scrubbers be incorporated, for example, in catalytic converters on cars, or even factory emission outlets? Is there any way we could chemically emulate nature's superb scrubber - the tree?

I look forward to your response.

Dr [xxxx xxxxxxx]

Retired dentist, England

This is an excellent idea. Just one problem: The scale of operations, which exceeds human capability by several orders of magnitude. Also, the scrubber material would have to be mined and treated before it was used, both of which would cause enormous environmental damage, not least by using fossil fuels in staggering amounts. Then would come the problem of the disposal of the sequestered carbon...

But, we can speculate. We are not endorsing the scenario below. Just speculating.

Humanity would be faced with a tremendous surplus of something rather resembling marble, and would have little choice but to compress it and use it for building things. Given the scale of the problem, we would have to build structures on a grand scale not seen since the days of ancient Egypt. Pointless grandeur can't be sustained without a religion, which will evolve for the purpose. Every culture will evolve its own variant, part of its central dogma being the inferior nature of all other variants. The result would be a positive feedback cycle of hostile irrationality similar to the one tearing the Middle East apart now, but on an even grander scale, with the construction of larger and larger, and more and more ostentatious buildings thrown in as the variant religions compete with each other.

Finally the CO2 will be gone, mostly, and the planet's climate will hesitate before crashing and locking the biosphere into a snowball earth scenario.

When the ice clears, only the buildings will remain.

But what buildings!

Do you have a scenario of your own that you'd like to share?

ECOLOGY: Musings on the home ranges of species

Saw an interesting article in PLOS Biology (DOI:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040208). It deals with with the range over which critters of a given species can be found, specifically birds. You'd expect a greater home range in areas with low productivity and more variable climate which enforces migration, which translates to closer-to-the-poles, both southern and northern (this commonsensical hypothesis is called Rapoport's Rule).

Not so! This pattern holds broadly true for some parts of the northern hemisphere, not coincidentally where most biologists are located. It falls apart with dramatic thoroughness in the southern hemisphere. Look at the article's Figure 2 and you'll quickly see why; the huge land masses of the upper northern hemisphere feature the largest home ranges, while the more restricted landmasses of the lower southern hemisphere show home ranges that wouldn't be out of place in the tropics. The reason appears to me to be obvious: The largest home ranges occur across the largest land masses, both in Eurasia and north America. Climatic variability is huge because the moderating influence of nearby oceans is small, seasonal food availability varies dramatically, ergo - larger home ranges, out of necessity. As Rapoport observed. But in the southern hemisphere, this doesn't hold because the land masses are far smaller.

The authors say that "spatial patterns in geographic range size may be due to geographical variation in the processes of speciation and extinction that ultimately generate biodiversity", but frankly, the simple fact of geophysical/climatic variability seems the parsimonious explanation for the observed home range effect. It also underlies the dynamics of speciation and extinction - and perhaps even the fundamental characteristics of metabolic rate, as my friend (and Sable Systems customer) Barry Lovegrove has been pointing out for years in a different context.