Puck

The threat of an asteroid crashing into Earth has captivated the imaginations of movie audiences for years. Now, however, Russia is working to develop a very real plan to counter such a threat.

The Russian space agency says it is working to prevent a large asteroid from colliding with Earth.

Without giving many details, a spokesman for the agency said it is working on a way to divert the path of the asteroid, named Apophis, without destroying it.

NASA’s latest calculations put Apophis at having only a one in 250,000 chance of hitting Earth by, or during, the 2030s.

via Russia, US at Odds Over Future Asteroid Hit | Science and Technology | English.

There’s more! Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid

When Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez gave U.S. President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, thousands of Americans bought the book, pushing it to the number two slot on Amazon.

Although Galeano’s trilogy, Memory of Fire, was published in English (and a couple dozen other languages), he has enjoyed only a cult following in the U.S. Memory of Fire will hopefully now receive a wider readership, perhaps carrying with it some of the other great but ignored writers of Latin America.

At once grand in scope but full of close-up details of the most personal kind, Memory of Fire traces the history of Latin America — the continent, its people, gods, plants and animals — from its origins to the present day. Galeano eschews the grand narrative tradition with its fascistic master tropes in favor of the strategic vignette, which opens for both writer and reader contemplative freedom in a vast landscape of possibility. For my money, Galeano’s approach is the honest one, and his latest book, Mirrors, proves why. Read the rest of this entry »

Wino, the Seattle-based magazine for wine lovers with an attitude, has just posted my latest column on the science of wine and the importance of micronutrients on grapes.

When humans don’t get enough zinc, we can get sick with cancer and suffer immune-system dysfunction. The same is true of plants. Micronutrients such as boron, zinc and copper, although only a tiny part of a plant’s diet, can have a profound effect on the plant’s health.

via Higher Learning: A Pinch of This, a Dash of That -.

Parody is now a crime? Tell it to the Yes Men or anyone else in the long history of literature who has issued a critique through this tried and legally true form.

In an effort to raise money against the outspoken freshman Democrat [Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida], a Republican activist named Angie Langley has launched “mycongressmanisnuts.com” — a Web site that parodies Grayson’s re-election site, “congressmanwithguts.com.”

via Slashdot and FOXNews.com

In a first for Latin America, Mexico City's legislature voted to legalize gay marriage Monday night, changing “the city's civil code definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the 'free uniting of two people.'”

via Mexico City Approves Gay Marriage | MetaFilter.

This post is especially for Zoe over at Zoe in Wonderland. If you haven’t checked out her site (it’s in Puck’s blog roll), I highly recommend it as a source of wondrous, fantastical art and writing.

There’s a new paper on the sources of inspiration for the famous works of the mathematician Charles Dodgson — better known to most of us as Lewis Carrol, author of the Alice books.

In an article in New Scientist, doctor of philosophy student and literary scholar Melanie Bayley proposes that Dodgson wrote his books as an attack on the new-fangled mathematics making headway in his day. Dodgson was a conservative geometer, Bayley claims, who was deeply upset by the seemingly arbitrary manipulation of numbers and, especially, figures:

The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the…  scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.

Bayley points out that, surprisingly (though not really, considering the great divide between the arts and sciences), there are few critical works on Dodgson that take into account the fact that he was a mathematician. Bayley goes a long way toward remedying that situation. Her piece should be a model for literary scholars who turn a blind eye toward science and math when commenting on literature.

Via Slashdot:

“Surendra Pal, associate director of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Satellite Centre says that Chandrayaan-1 picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface. ‘The findings are being analyzed and scrutinized for validation by ISRO scientists and peer reviewers,’ Pal said. At a press conference Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union fall conference, scientists from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter also hinted at possible organics locked away in the lunar regolith. When asked directly about the Chandrayaan-1 claim of finding life on the Moon, NASA’s chief lunar scientist, Mike Wargo, certainly did not dismiss the idea.”

The U.S. has long had a secret base on the moon manned by astronaut-spies with telepathic powers. Telepathy is used to communicate with Earth-based controllers in order to avoid detection by foreign powers monitoring radio frequencies.

A new bike wheel from the folks at MIT turns a regular bike into a hydrib e-bike. Called the Copenhagen Wheel, it was unveiled at COP15 on Dec. 15.

Smart, responsive and elegant, the Copenhagen Wheel is a new emblem for urban mobility. It transforms ordinary bicycles quickly into hybrid e-bikes that also function as mobile sensing units. The Copenhagen Wheel allows you to capture the energy dissipated while cycling and braking and save it for when you need a bit of a boost. It also maps pollution levels, traffic congestion, and road conditions in real-time.

Controlled through your smart phone, the Copenhagen Wheel becomes a natural extension of your everyday life. You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you. As you cycle, the wheel’s sensing unit is also capturing your effort level and information about your surroundings, including road conditions, carbon monoxide, NOx, noise, ambient temperature and relative humidity. Access this data through your phone or the web and use it to plan healthier bike routes, to achieve your exercise goals or to meet up with friends on the go. You can also share your data with friends, or with your city – anonymously if you wish – thereby contributing to a fine-grained database of environmental information from which we can all benefit.

How freekin cool is that? Want me one!

For the first time, a study on humans proves what we’ve known for years: corn-derived fructose is bad for you.

“This is the first evidence we have that fructose increases diabetes and heart disease independently from causing simple weight gain,” said Kimber Stanhope, a molecular biologist who led the study. “We didn’t see any of these changes in the people eating glucose [natural sugar].”

A spokesperson for the processed food industry of course denies that HFCS is dangerous: “It makes no sense to highlight one single ingredient as a cause of obesity.”

More details in the Times of London online…

When the Clash sang “Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust” I did a little jig. I’ve never had much use for the mop-tops. As time passed, and the only two good Beatles became dead Beatles, I figured the rest of the planet would give up on them, too.

I mean, we still have the Rolling Stones, and how many self-cloning sixties copy-cats do we need?

And then there was Paul McCartney’s pro-war, post-9/11 song, “Freedom.” (“I don’t know what came over me,” he later said. I do: he’s always been a jerk.)

Now, the biggest-selling album of the decade is by…. gods dammit! The Beatles. Could we have some integrated pest management, please? I mean, before things get ugly?