Puck

The more I learn about plants, the more convinced I am that we have to start asking the question, Who is cultivating whom?

The latest nudge in that direction is “Botany Without Borders.” This

short clip (10 minutes) outlines the importance of plants and those who study them. It explores the magic and wonders plants represent and the people who unlock their secrets. Link

I gleaned this video from its maker, Christopher Julian, who taught a one-day class I attended at the Seattle Film Institute. His editing for documentary and narrative film class was thought-provoking, and I admire him for embracing the big, psychological, cognitive, and philosophical questions regarding film and video editing. He has a high-res but shorter clip of “Botany Without Borders” on his site.

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The Rochester Institute of Technology School of Photographic Arts and Sciences has published the Web version of a photo exhibition that showed at RIT in October. The images are amazing.

This image, by Chris J. Barry of the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia, uses a photo-slit lamp camera equipped with adjustable external electronic flash lighting:

This ophthalmic photograph reveals a rare, congenital, and incomplete iris formation that was present at birth. This condition is likely to lead to the development of glaucoma later in life as a direct consequence of the malformations of the iris and related structures. In this region of the eye there are a number of muscles and connective tissues that all work synchronously. The stroma found in the iris connects sphincter muscles which contracts the pupil, and a set of dilator muscles that allow the iris to open. The back surface of the iris is covered by a pigmented epithelial layer, and the front of the iris has no epithelium. The high pigment content blocks light from passing through the iris. The iris influences the effects on intraocular pressure and indirectly on vision. The ability to see the physiology of this condition is greatly aided by using the photo-slit lamp camera. The very small and highly directional light produced by this instrument allows visualization of structural details often invisible using other more common illumination techniques.

Check out Images from Science 2.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Climate change is inevitable, says Wallace Broecker, and it’s already happening, so he teamed up with journalist Robert Kunzig to tell us what we can do about it.

Fixing Climate comes in three parts. There’s a highly skimmable prelude by way of memoir explaining how Broecker came to be a scientist. The bulk of the book is a fast-moving glacier of evidence arguing for the possibility of sudden change in global climate patterns. Extreme desertification, rising sea levels, and shifting agricultural regions are in our future; we need to accept the facts and learn to deal with them, Broecker argues. The last part of the book is a survey of technological fixes or, rather, of extreme engineering ideas that might stabilize the planetary carbon load.

The evidence is largely familiar, as Broecker is a climate-change godfather, and much of his research and speculation have entered the collective mythos as a set of inconvenient truths. Decades ago, Broecker was one of the first scientists to point out that dumping billions of extra tons of carbon into the environment was bound to turn on a climatic burner. He was able to come to that conclusion in the early ’80s because he’d been studying millions of years of carbon deposition since the 1950s. Broecker ran one of the first carbon-14-dating labs; some people follow the money, others follow the carbon. Continue Reading »

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Science Daily reports that there has been a “major discovery” is converting solar energy to energy usable by humans. “In one hour, enough sunlight strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet’s energy needs for one year,” the Daily writes. The problem has always been A) efficiency of collection and B) storing the energy once it is collected. Two MIT scientists claim to have made a breakthrough in the storage department by finding a cheap and easy way to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, just as plants do using the energy of photosynthesis.

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, [Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT] and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

“Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon,” Nocera said.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a “giant leap” toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.

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Science Daily is a great site for weird stories. Here are some snips from the past few days.

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Watermelon may have a viagra-like effect: Continue Reading »

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My friend B. wrote me this:

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Continue Reading »

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Jayme Jacobson keeps finding these… things in her home. Here’s one now:

Eclectons, they’re called:

Eclectons spontaneously assemble out of everyday household products. If you pay close attention, you can catch them at the instance of assemblage (IA). After that, they fade from view, moving beyond the perceptual capacities of human beings.

But where, we wonder, do they do when they fade from view? We do, after all, live in a universe where energy is conserved. Jayme has some insight for us:

“Where do eclectons go?’ asked one of my young friends. It’s a good question because, as we know, they disappear from view shortly after IA (instance of assemblage). Evidence is a bit sketchy but one theory is that they are trying to get back to Eclectonia, a poorly understood galaxy about 450,000 light-years away that was recently picked up by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Check out more electons here.

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poem by Robin Pugh Yi

From bitter cold predawn shadows you called out, “Hey, come here!”

The woman pretended not to hear as she hurried away. You persisted, “I want to show you something,” your deep voice echoing every storybook villain.

She barely restrained herself from running away, searched the street for an escape route, for anyone else awake who might save her.

“It’s a telescope,” you insisted, not considering the possible innuendo. “You can see the rings of Saturn.” She slowed to an almost normal pace as she approached the street corner, wondering if this stranger might really be offering nothing more than free candy.

“They’re so beautiful. I just want to show someone.” You almost couldn’t see her turn slightly toward you. You shoved your hands into your pockets, kicked some fallen leaves, resigned to whatever decision she would make. Hesitantly, she turned to walk back. Her face lit with wonder at the stunning shiny rings. She bowed a little to thank you.

I saw her leave as I approached, and shook my head at how oblivious you were to her fears. Then, teeth chattering in the eerie wind, you showed me those rings. And luminous sister Venus. Blurry hints of the Martian canals swam like a river of old stories. Candy from the dark, stranger man.

As a young girl’s mother, I’m not supposed to confess all the rides I’ve taken with strangers, the candy I’ve eaten, how often I’ve looked at what someone just wanted to show me in the shadows. I can’t deny meeting the ravenous wolf there. Can’t tell you to stop protecting yourself and your children. Please forgive my rashness in answering the ugly clichéd assumptions in the phrase, “You know how men are.” Yes, I do. I’ve accepted countless invitations called from the dark. The ravening wolf is rare. The call of the wild promises joy. The shadows teem with souls who ache to share the night sky.

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David Memmott’s long poem “Disciples of Paradox” is on Strange Horizons. “Paradox” is dedicated to Stephen J. Hawking,

suspended and wired for half-life
in a wheelchair spaceship
you must have considered
that those who stand on your shoulders
may one day bury your equations
in a painted wooden boat
moored in the sand
where all horizons are defeated
by mirage.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change
Fred Pearce
Beacon Press, 2007
Cloth, $16.47

Buying a Prius and locally grown foods may convince you that you’re reducing your carbon footprint, but for Fred Pearce in With Speed and Violence, the damage may already be done. The planet’s carbon load is high enough that we may already be careening towards a tipping point, a moment when the climate changes suddenly, “with speed and violence.” Any way it goes is bad for humans (biology is fragile, and culture especially so), but hot looks especially pernicious.

Pearce is a self-described climate-change skeptic. He’s not a naysayer. To the contrary and while remaining skeptical, Pearce thinks the mainstream of climate science may not go far enough. So he’s kindly assembled a menagerie of horrors which, perversely, make for fascinating reading. Continue Reading »

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