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Interview with Rasheedah Prioleau

Posted by LN Gibson on October 21, 2015 at 12:03pm

The Blog Tour for Everlasting: Da Eb’Bulastin (Sa’Fyre Island Series Book 1) has stopped at Lngibson.com, and I am excited to interview fellow speculative fiction author, Rasheedah Prioleau.

The book, Everlasting: Da Eb’Bulastin, is a page-turner—filled with excellent prose and the trill of suspense and horror. The main setting is the Gullah Islands, which is an enigmatic character within itself. Prioleau spins an unforgettable story of suspense, secret family dynamics, vexing cultural obligations, and pure horror.

  1. What was your inspiration for writing Everlasting: Da Eb’Bulastin?

 

I always wanted to write a story that encompassed the Gullah culture. I’d just finished releasing my first novel, and quite frankly I was getting tired of talking about it.   I wanted to do something new, and I knew that Halloween would be a great time to change the conversation a bit. American Specter, while fun and exciting was a bit tame. So wanted to get a tad grittier and take a risk doing something a bit darker.

 

 

  1. What has been the highlight of your career so far?

 

There are so many highlights it would be hard to pin one thing. But, the best part is meeting all types of people who have connected with my work. They continue to fuel the fire that pushes me to keep writing.

Continued...

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Needle In A Haystack...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 19, 2015 at 9:19am
Image Source: Discovery News (link below)

Topics: Astrophysics, Dyson Sphere, Exoplanets, Kardashev Scale, Kepler Telescope, SETI

There's kind of a rush when you read articles like this, at least initially. Then, you start asking yourself critical thinking questions to "peel away the onion" so to speak. In essence, they've seen some fluctuations in luminosity from a star the Kepler Telescope is observing 1,500 light years away (not exactly across the street). Also humbling we, as the human species on Earth circa 515 CE were essentially savages; beneath any potential advanced aliens' notice.

To quote the Discovery article:


"Follow-up studies focus on two interesting transit events at KIC 8462852, one that was detected between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and between days 1510 to 1570. The researchers have tagged these events as D800 and D1500 respectively. The D800 event appears to have been a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent, whereas D1500 was a burst of several transits, possibly indicating a clump of different objects, forcing a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. To cause such dips in brightness, these transiting objects must be huge.

"The researchers worked through every known possibility, but each solution presented a new problem. For example, they investigated the possibility of some kind of circumstellar disk of dust. However, after looking for the infrared signal associated with these disks, no such signal could be seen. Also, the star is a mature F-type star, approximately 1.5 times the size of our sun. Circumstellar disks are usually found around young stars.

"The researchers also investigate the possibility of a huge planetary collision; could the debris from this smashup be creating this strange signal? The likelihood of us seeing a planetary collision is extremely low. There is no evidence in data taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) that a collision happened, creating a very tiny window of opportunity between WISE’s mission end and the beginning of Kepler’s mission (of a few years) for an astronomically unlikely cosmic event like this to occur.

"The only natural explanation favored by the researchers seems to focus on an intervening clump of exocomets."

All of that is fairly reasonable. If you explore the many links in the article, you'll get to the actual Physics arXiv paper in one of its conclusions states "the break-up of a exocomet provides the most compelling explanation."

Then...well, here you go:

"This research paper focuses only on natural and known possible causes of the mystery transit events around KIC 8462852. A second paper is currently being drafted to investigate a completely different transit scenario that focuses around the possibility of a mega-engineering project created by an advanced alien civilization.

"This may sound like science fiction, but our galaxy has existed for over 13 billion years, it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to think that an alien civilization may be out there and evolved to the point where they can build megastructures around stars."

From The Atlantic: Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The only mega - or very large - structure I can think of is a Dyson Sphere, postulated by Freeman Dyson in 1960 (now infamous for other things). An extremely old and advanced extraterrestrial civilization - a Type III on the Kardashev Scale (well beyond Kirk and Picard) could conceivably build a series of solar collectors around their own host star (or, in the case of the link I provide from earlier this year, a white dwarf star). Such a civilization should be well beyond our current geopolitical morass, fossil fuel addiction, tribalism and xenophobia of each other. Or, maybe not. We only assume functional alien societies are too advanced to be autocratic and authoritarian; that democratic republics are the natural order of things, when in our civilized time span, it's only a recent political invention. I hope our assumptions are correct, of course and more importantly: that we're not tasty.

Star Trek kind of had their own "rule" to answer the question posited by the Fermi Paradox ("where are they?") by the Prime Directive, meaning that no space faring warp-capable species would dare interfere with the development of a pre-warp society. This absurdly presumes faux aliens as rude as the Klingons and Romulans were both "down" with this as well. It was a Roddenberry stretch, but it's held the franchise together.

The reality might be, looking at some of our television transmissions - the now blurred lines of politics and reality TV; Internet postings and carbon signature writ/planet large, they might still find us primitive, boring...and terrifying. Waiting for the second paper...

Discovery News: Has NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovered an Alien Megastructure?
Dr. Ian O'Neill

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Schrö...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 20, 2015 at 7:40am
Calculating cat: Schrö makes her way through a quantum computer. (Courtesy: IQC)


Topics: Computer Science, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics, Schrödinger's Cat


I'm a bit dubious about shortening the names of physicists to sell an app. It downloads easily enough; for cat lovers, it meows. It will likely occupy a lot of time for me offline, like I needed other distractions...

The Internet loves cats and our readers love quantum mechanics so a new mobile app called Quantum Cats just has to be the lead item in this week’s Red Folder. Created by physicists at the Institute for Quantum Computing and researchers at the University of Waterloo Games Institute, the app immerses the user in the adventures of four cats: Classy, who obeys classical physics; Digger, who is a master of quantum tunnelling; Schrö, (above) who is a superposition of quantum states; and Fuzzy, who embodies the uncertainty principle. It’s available on Google Play and the App Store, so have a go and tell us what you think.

Physics World:

Hamish Johnston
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Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 16, 2015 at 7:06am

Topics: Entropy, Information, James C. Maxwell, Mark G. Raizen, Thermodynamics


Thought experiments that long puzzled the thermodynamics community are now being performed in the lab—and they’re forging a deeper understanding of the second law.

Almost 25 years ago, Rolf Landauer argued in the pages of this magazine that information is physical (see Physics Today, May 1991, page 23). It is stored in physical systems such as books and memory sticks, transmitted by physical means—for instance, via electrical or optical signals—and processed in physical devices. Therefore, he concluded, it must obey the laws of physics, in particular the laws of thermodynamics.

But what is information? A simple, intuitive answer is “what you don’t already know.” If someone tells you that Earth is spherical, you surely would not learn much; the message has low information content. However, if you are told that the price of oil will double tomorrow, then, assuming that to be true, you would learn a great deal; the message has high information content.

Mathematically, a system’s information content can be quantified by the so-called information entropy H, introduced by Claude Shannon in 1948. The larger the information entropy, the greater the information content.1 Consider the simplest possible information-storage device: a system with two distinct states—for example, up and down, left and right, or magnetized and unmagnetized. If the system is known with certainty to be in a particular state, then no new information can be gained by probing the system, and the information entropy is zero.


Figure 3. Bringing Maxwell’s demon to life. A pair of laser beams can be tuned to atomic transitions and configured to create a one-way potential barrier; atoms may cross unimpeded in one direction—right to left in this figure—but not in the other. (a) When the barrier is introduced at the periphery of a V-shaped magnetic trap, the atoms that cross the barrier will be those that have converted nearly all their kinetic energy to potential energy—in other words, the cold ones. (b–c) By slowly sweeping the barrier across the trap, one can sort cold atoms (blue) from hot ones (red), reminiscent of James Clerk Maxwell’s famous thought experiment, or cool an entire atomic ensemble. Because the cold atoms do work against the optical barrier as it moves, their kinetic energy remains small even as they return to the deep portion of the potential well. (Adapted from ref. 8 , M. G. Raizen.)

Citation: Phys. Today 68, 9, 30 (2015); http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.2912

However, owing to remarkable technological progress achieved in recent decades, experiments with atoms and small particles have now become feasible. Maxwell’s demon, Szilard’s engine, and Landauer’s erasure principle can now be rigorously studied in lab experiments.

One of the first such experiments was performed by Mark Raizen and coworkers at the University of Texas at Austin. 8 They confined an ensemble of atoms in a magnetic trap, as shown schematically in figure 3. Initially, all the atoms are in the same internal state. The group then introduced a one-way optical barrier, composed of two laser beams arranged side by side: One beam promotes atoms to an excited state, and the other is tuned such that it has no effect on excited atoms but repels atoms in the ground state. An atom (red) approaching from the excitation-beam side gets promoted to an excited state, passes unimpeded through the second beam, and then relaxes to the ground state by emitting a photon. An atom approaching from the other side, by contrast, encounters the repelling beam first and is turned around—it can’t get through. The two beams behave as an atom diode.

Physics Today: Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser
Eric Lutz and Sergio Ciliberto

8. G. N. Price et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 093004 (2008); http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.093004
M. G. Raizen, Science 324, 1403 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1171506

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DOSSOUYE II IS IN THE HOUSE!

Posted by Charles R. Saunders on February 2, 2012 at 1:56pm

I am proud to announce that "Dossouye: The Dancers of Mulukau" is now available at http://www.lulu.com. The novel is the sequel to "Dossouye." It's another superlative effort by Sword & Soul Media publisher  Brother Uraeus. And the cover art by Mshindo Kuumba is breathtaking. I'd say that even if this were not my novel. Dossouye is back, and she's as tough as ever. She and her war-bull, Gbo, are in a new environment, facing dangers different from the ones she has already overcome. The odds are steep ... but never count out a woman and her war-bull. I hope you enjoy this new installment of Dossouye's adventures.

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CNOT Gate...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 15, 2015 at 8:04am
Image Source: Joint Quantum Institute


Topics: Quantum Computer, Quantum Dots, Quantum Mechanics, Semiconductor Technology


The first quantum-logic device made from silicon has been unveiled by researchers in Australia and Japan. Their controlled-not (CNOT) gate, which is a fundamental component of a quantum computer, was made using conventional semiconductor manufacturing processes. The researchers now plan to scale up the technology to create a full-scale quantum-computer chip.
Spin doctors: Menno Veldhorst (left) and Andrew Dzurak with the equipment used to cool and monitor their CNOT gate.

Quantum computers exploit the weird laws of quantum mechanics to perform some calculations much faster than conventional computers – at least in principle. The main challenge facing physicists trying to build quantum computers is how to preserve fragile quantum bits (qubits) of information, which tend to deteriorate rapidly in real-world devices.

One approach is to use the spin of the electron – which can point up or down – as a qubit. Spin qubits have been made from tiny pieces of semiconductor called quantum dots, and quantum-logic devices have been made by coupling these qubits together. Unfortunately, the spin states in these devices rapidly deteriorate – or "decohere" – by interacting with nuclear spins in the compound-semiconductor materials normally used to make quantum dots.

Physics World: Silicon quantum logic gate is a first, Hamish Johnston

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Rotating Curves & Wormholes...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 13, 2015 at 6:48am
Image Source: Space.com - What is a wormhole?


Topics: Astrophysics, Cosmology, General Relativity, Quantum Cosmology, Wormholes

Abstract


In this work, we analyse static spherically symmetric solutions in the framework of mimetic gravity, an extension of general relativity where the conformal degree of freedom of gravity is isolated in a covariant fashion. Here we extend previous works by considering in addition a potential for the mimetic field. An appropriate choice of such potential allows for the reconstruction of a number of interesting cosmological and astrophysical scenarios. We explicitly show how to reconstruct such a potential for a general static spherically symmetric space-time. A number of applications and scenarios are then explored, among which traversable wormholes. Finally, we analytically reconstruct potentials which leads to solutions to the equations of motion featuring polynomial corrections to the Schwarzschild spacetime. Accurate choices for such corrections could provide an explanation for the inferred flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies within the mimetic gravity framework, without the need for particle dark matter.

Physics arXiv:
Static spherically symmetric solutions in mimetic gravity: rotation curves & wormholes
Ratbay Myrzakulov, Lorenzo Sebastiani, Sunny Vagnozzi, Sergio Zerbini

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CV Nation Season 3 Indiegogo campaign

Posted by scott f evans on October 8, 2015 at 9:32pm

What's up fam? CV Nation has been a passion project of mine for the past few years. Producing and growing this show has been my constant focus. I believe in it, it has value and in my humble opinion, shows like ours are necessary. We all know that the best way to move forward is together and co--creator DeWayne Copeland and I have reached a point in the series development where we understand that to take the Nation to that next level, we're going to need your help. So click that link below and come along with us on this journey!

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cv-nation-season-three#/

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Space Faring Species...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 9, 2015 at 6:44am
CGI by XIXO


Topics: International Space Station, Moon Base, NASA, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Space Junk, Tribalism


In no particular order - inspired by both Interstellar and The Martian - this is a purely speculative post regarding becoming a space faring species, i.e. no longer confined to Earth and what that could possibly mean. A math nerd note: Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon are the Venn diagram intersection points of both space opera features. I have no qualifications other than a STEM background, enthusiasm, imagination and wonder.

International Space Station: Some projections have it going beyond 2020, and it is international with 15 member nations participating. It's not only the longest-running science experiment on human endurance, it's the best thing we have so far of mutual cooperation, the UN notwithstanding.

Moon Base: This is a possibility, only in the fact the moon has far less gravity than on Earth, therefore it would be easier to launch vehicles into space from here. The caveat is radiation from the sun and far-away sources in the form of cosmic rays and meteors - some really big, and others the size of boulders. A sturdy, 3-D printed domicile for mostly surface sensors would have to be piezoelectric - perhaps a combination of lead zirconate titanate and titanium. The humans could use volcanic caverns underneath that could be made reasonably habitable. Launches from platforms beneath the surface would be just as easy as on the surface with bay doors made of the same previously speculated material.

NASA: The agency and its viability will last as long as we have the vision to fund it. The spin off technologies fuel economies, and if the United States didn't do that, European or Asian countries are more than poised to take the lead in that sphere, and profit from the venture. This will create jobs for their fellow countrymen in an ever-changing employment landscape.

Space Exploration: A lot is made of Exoplanets in the Goldilocks habitable zone, but not much regarding Exomoons: like our own companion, a moon or moons in orbit would stabilize a planet's climate, giving it predictable seasons that are hopefully suitable for us as well. In the movies Interstellar and The Martian, since we can't create artificial gravity like Star Trek, parts of our spacecraft (as each illustrated quite well) will have to rotate, using centrifugal force to create surfaces on a rotating ring, or in a Bernal Sphere in a planet's geosynchronous orbit so we can stand up and bear our own weight. Experiment Example: Take a bucket of water with a wire handle and attach the handle to a rope. Fill it halfway with water and swing it above your head by the rope - I promise as long as you're swinging it, you won't get wet (that will likely happen when and how you stop). This of course, eliminates the great space battles we've come to thrill to in the movies - in light of our aggressive tendencies, I don't think this is a bad idea, really. Part of what we've learned so far is that in a weightless environment, astronauts loose bone density and muscle mass very rapidly. It is also a good thing if you're going to have deep space missions whereby it may take a few lifetimes to get to say, Alpha Centauri. Newton's Third Law of motion is the likely reason despite attractions astronauts in weightless environments have never been as "frisky" as Captain Kirk or Commander Riker. It would be...awkward.

Spaceflight: Voyager leaving our solar system (or, at least the heliosphere of the sun) actually made us officially an interstellar space faring species! I don't think the transition was appreciated much by the media. I know EVERY Trekkie wants to go warp drive! However, we're not even at the level as a species just yet to generate a craft going at 0.10 c (one-tenth the speed of light) that would have us to Alpha Centauri - if it has habitable planets - in about 40 years. Hence the need for using Newton's Third Law to our advantage! This star ship would have to be shielded from cosmic radiation and meteorites (tricks we'd have learned from our Moon Base). Either fission, fusion or a very large solar powered sail would propel our craft. The sail would have to be propelled by lasers or masers we'd bring with us. For those of you that are interested, the 100 Year Star Ship project by former NASA astronaut Dr. Mae C. Jemison may give you vision for at least our great-grandchildren making the journey.
Popular Mechanics - How To Build a Starship

Space Junk: Not a sexy topic, but we've been chucking things to the Clarke Orbit since Sputnik. There's a lot of debris floating above us, and with the right training, the opportunity to employ people and possibly recycle the metals and materials used to build probes that outlive their usefulness and technology. Subset: We have a lot of Earth junk we need to clean up, both physical and atmospheric. I've often said, before we attempt Terraforming another planet, we ought to try Terraforming Earth.

Tribalism: We're in a special time in human history I kind of talked about in Terms of Indifference. This is the basis of our historic and current woes; geopolitics has always balanced on a knife's edge, especially as many of us long for a nostalgic utopia (literally "nowhere place") that never was, fearing constantly what's ahead. Many are resorting to either political fiat or violence to realize their vision on their respective populations using authoritarian means that inevitably restrict the rights of certain groups. The past cannot change, nor is time travel (except in certain relativistic cases) possible, but the future - relentlessly coming - we can plan for. "Failure to plan is planning to fail."

 As things come to light, now briny water on Mars may point to a life form: a closer microscopic analysis of the Martian salt water might have a Tardigrade/Water Bear staring back at us! Such a discovery would change our collective history, our culture, our poetry and literature; our sense of ourselves. Part of being a space faring species would hopefully break down the artificial barriers we've erected separating us from our fellow humans. On a Martian or Moon Base - I've wondered - if you're an Imam conducting prayers: what then would be your reference to Mecca? Or, for any of the various human faiths, a large part of their identity is "where" they began, as then the humans there said: "we are the people of"... As more of us experience the Overview Effect, like our astronauts - a very limited group for now - more of us (I hope) will view the whole Earth as our home; ourselves as Earthlings.
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SOS...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 8, 2015 at 7:03am
Image Source: Support Our Science [1]


Topics: Economy, Education, Science, STEM


A play on the maritime acronym: in this case, it's Support Our Science, though with the tremendous outside pressures to muddy the waters of K-12 with pseudoscience, Save Our Souls is also quite descriptive. Another gem from the Science Channel, and this technically at the commercial breaks, mind you! I plan to help as much as possible, I hope I've inspired you to do the same.
The Science Channel, along with Discovery Communications, recently announced their Support Our Science initiative which seeks to bring innovative science programming and educational tools to get kids interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
(Photo : Lars Plougmann) [2]

Science is everywhere. It’s the DNA for progress and possibility. Support Our Science is committed to igniting students’ passion for science, technology, engineering and math on-air, online, in the classroom and in local communities. Science Channel and Discovery Education, together with partners, The Planetary Society, Girls Inc, and Maker Ed will ensure our kids are the next generation of innovators, problem solvers, and game changers.

1. Site: Support Our Science
2. Tech Times:
Science Channel Launches 'Support Our Science' Initiative, Robert Burks

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2015 Nobel Prize in Physics...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 6, 2015 at 5:24am


Topics: Neutrinos, Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize, Physics


The IB Times prediction:

There are no betting lines for the Nobel Prize in physics, but there's plenty of speculation about the award. Many believe, based on perceived patterns of voting, that a cosmology discovery will be awarded the prize. Ben Stein, director of the American Institute of Physics' Inside Science who correctly guessed the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics, believes Vera Rubin and Kent Ford will win for establishing the presence of dark matter.

The actual winners (can't win em all, Ben):

A classic, obviously before the Internet in 1921 (but he had something to do with it):

Presentation Speech by Professor S. Arrhenius, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, on December 10, 1922*

Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.

There is probably no physicist living today whose name has become so widely known as that of Albert Einstein. Most discussion centres on his theory of relativity. This pertains essentially to epistemology and has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles. It will be no secret that the famous philosopher Bergson in Paris has challenged this theory, while other philosophers have acclaimed it wholeheartedly. The theory in question also has astrophysical implications which are being rigorously examined at the present time.**

NobelPrize.org: Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize Speech
(**Being too remote from Sweden, Professor Einstein could not attend the ceremony)

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Finally

Posted by Leah Ashton on October 6, 2015 at 2:29pm

I finally did something about going to school for writing. I am now a student in Full Sail University.  I am enrolled in their Creative writing for entertainment program.

I'm excited. I really think this school will help me develop the talent i already have. I have passed my first two classes. When I pass the first four, they will send me a fully loaded Mac book Pro. it will be loaded with all the software i will need for a career in the entertainment industry.

This means a lot to me so I want to do my best, and grow with this chance. I have always wanted to be an author. I just have to make sure my stories are ones that haven't been told already. That much i think will work. I love the supernatural and anything dealing with it.  I get a lot of flack from my church for some of the things i write about.

See because I am Christian, I'm not supposed to believe in the supernatural. My pastor told me something that made me glad I spoke to him about it. He told me, "How can you believe in Jesus and the miracles he did and not believe in the supernatural?"

with that, he helped me get over my fear of being judged by members in my church. Writing is my god given talent and if I don't try and use it, I just might wake up to find, this gift was taken back.

I know there are a lot of books about witches and wizards, so it might be good for me to write about something else. As long as its supernatural, I will be just fine.

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Moogega...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 7, 2015 at 6:18am
Image Source: LA Weekly (link below)


Topics: African Americans, Diversity, Diversity in Science, HBCU, NASA, Women in Science


If you watch How The Universe Works on the Science Channel (as I'm apt to), you might have caught a glimpse of this young lady doing several monologues in the series. She was pretty easy to find with such a unique spelling (and apropos meaning) of her name. The pronunciation of the same is below, phonetically and brilliantly explained by the article's writer (likely with Moogega's help). She is the picture of the strength of diversity, and the talent Historically Black Colleges and Universities can produce.

Somewhere on Mars, the initials of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, J-P-L, are written in Morse code spanning hundreds of meters across the red planet. It's this kind of detail that thrills JPL scientist Moogega Cooper - especially since JPL, considered NASA's little brother, accomplished this on the sly.

"Initially, for the robotics missions, we had JPL [stamped] on the wheels so that as it rolls along Mars it would tag Mars: JPL, JPL, JPL. And NASA stepped in and said, 'No, you can't do that,'?" Cooper explains. "So JPL said, 'OK, sure, we'll take that off.' And instead they put it in Morse code."

Cooper, named rainbow or "moo-jee-gae" by her Korean mother and raised by her African-American World War II veteran father, is a human comet of beauty, intelligence and creativity. The scientist graduated from high school at 16, and at 24 earned her Ph.D., then launched her NASA career.

Now 28, she is a planetary protection engineer at JPL. A big part of her job is making sure that NASA doesn't contaminate other planets with terrestrial microorganisms or any other Earth life, and vice versa - bacteria from, say, Mars, that could potentially harm humans.

She's currently working on a 2020 Mars mission, which involves drilling core samples from the planet, and contamination prevention during NASA's orbit of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. "It's so great! We recently saw that there are geysers on the surface of Europa and that means it's much more active than we thought," Cooper says. [1]

Moogega Cooper: You know, I say Pasadena is my hometown but I actually grew up in Beverly, New Jersey until I was 11 when we moved to Hampton, VA. I was pretty sheltered growing up so I spent most of my time playing with my siblings or by myself. I attended college at Hampton University where I majored in Physics and minored in Space, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences. The program was beyond amazing and that is where I learned my first programming language and worked with real NASA satellite data at 16 years of age. I have so many people to thank at Hampton who significantly contributed to where I am today (Including my main mentor, Dr. James Russell III). [2]

1. LA Weekly: Moogega Cooper: The JPL's Space Engineer, Sophia Kercher
2. Madame Moire: College At 16, NASA Career, & Reality TV: Moogega Cooper Is A NERD And PROUD Of It, Lauren DeLisa Coleman

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The Martian...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 2, 2015 at 6:37am
Image Source: Link Below


Topics: Astronaut, Astronomy, Mars, NASA, Science Fiction, Space Exploration


The Martian is a geek's dream: blogging a story, self-publishing it and seeing your creation on the big screen! Kudos to Andy Weir. I look forward to his future creations and success.

Matt Damon has had a few rough days opening his mouth and inserting his foot quite deeply. To prop up his street creds post-Bourne Trilogy, Interstellar and embarrassing serial Tourette's syndrome, he kind of needs this distraction.


Seriously though: Mr. Weir got a lot of help with the science from other experts specializing outside of his area of Computer Science that perused his prose, correcting some plot lines. There are inevitably going to be random conspiracy provocateurs that ties this movie's release to who-knows-what, though I'm sure we'll be impressed by their chutzpah and hubris - the Jade Helm 15 hysteria comes to mind.

For humanity to even try a voyage to Mars, we're going to need [from the Astronomy article] "a surge" of interest beyond our social media distractions. Ironically, the things that are the core of our distractions - integrated circuits - were developed by industry and MIT for NASA to design a new guidance system and reduce rocket payloads. First the explorers are financed by governments; then the entrepreneurs and spin offs follow. This was during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, so the government in this case was the United States almost exclusively. As we venture forth into the "final frontier," we're going to need to cooperate beyond borders. When Apollo happened - and we actually saw a man on the moon - we started briefly (ever so briefly), seeing ourselves as a species, devoid of imagined boundaries, creeds and nationalities. It was during the sixties, near the end of the Civil Rights era; many of us reeling from the death of Dr. King. As a country; as humanity, we needed such a boost - and still do.

Astronomy: Behind the science of The Martian, Eric Betz
NPR: How 'The Martian' Became A Science Love Story, Geoff Brumfiel

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Fait Accompli...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 3, 2015 at 6:00am
Image source (sigh): here


Topics: Commentary, Fait Accompli, Politics


Thursday night I was at work, numb from the news of yet another shooting. I remember an essay I wrote titled "I'll be famous," a sentiment from the perpetrator of a mall shooting in Utah (apparently, a breakup with his girlfriend sparked it). I repent of blaming mental illness in this and related cases, the go-to knee jerk shtick of every pundit and schlock spouting psycho-babble on flat screens for ratings. I recall the graph I pulled from NASDAQ data on Smith and Wesson (the only publicly traded stock of a weapons manufacturer I could find), and correlated it to an apparent increase in value after every significant, newsworthy shooting. The president's remarks were emotional, genuine and probably a few outlets took him up on his challenge of comparing ten years worth of public shootings to terrorist attacks. My guess is a few affiliates, likely after their statisticians compiled the data, opted not to broadcast it as it went against their stated dogma.

I live in upstate New York, and visited Newtown, Connecticut Christmas Day in 2012 with my family - my wife, my daughter-in-law; my sons to pay our respects. The emotions we encountered were still raw and dour; variations of twenty-six angels erected as we slowly drove or walked through; the flowers and teddy bears fresh. Alex Jones suspected a "false flag operation," which supports he knows little to nothing of the term's origin by his overuse of it to everything of evidence he won't accept. Despite our current naval-gazing and "soul searching," I sadly have come to a dark conclusion:

When twenty children and six educators could be gunned down in their own school and our lawmakers did absolutely NOTHING, it was pretty much a wrap after that!

We...are...nothing...to them.

We are of no importance to elected officials that are behind metal detectors; bomb shelters and have their own armed congressional security - and equally impressive at their progeny's private schools; we are nothing to 47% of legislatures who are themselves millionaires or multimillionaires: how does a body like THAT raise taxes on THEMSELVES? We are especially gnats compared to pachyderms when we cannot write checks in the thousands of dollars to fund their next election to keep their jobs (with taxpayer subsidized health benefits and a really GOOD retirement) for 20, 30, 40, 50 years! In the case of the presidency, both major candidates must raise close to a BILLION dollars for a job that pays $400,000.00. Let that irony sink in.

So, as much as I agree with the president's statements, I am both a rationalist and realist. Like the mythical Chris Kringle, I no longer believe in jolly old elves sliding down chimneys; nor unicorns; Bigfoot; UFOs or Loch Ness Monsters. There are however, monsters, and I'm not talking the "lone wolf"/individual psychopath trooped out to steer the conversation toward a faux angst about "mental health"...it is US.

Like Texas textbooks, we can classify Africans as "workers" as if they willingly boarded the "Good Ship Jesus" to the New World seeking opportunity: the word "slave" or slavery appears at least 21 times in the official articles of secession, just not in these textbooks. We can say "all men are created equal," ignoring 3/5th a person; lynchings, castrations, burning crosses; burning people at stakes (usually after lynchings and castrations); voter suppression, poll taxes and personhood conferred to corporations not by Citizen's United, but the 14th Amendment during Robber Baron days. We can say "remember the Alamo," and forget the entire state that legally CAN'T secede used to be the territory of Mexico. We can dismiss the thousands of Asians that built the railroads for those barons, losing their lives and the Japanese Americans like George Takei's family (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek) interned on suspicion based on their appearance. We can call it "western expansion" and "Manifest Destiny" and completely ignore the indigenous people whose land was taken; populations wiped out, "Trail of Tears" in Oklahoma, and their only compensation thus far has been "reservations." We can bury recent history under a dark carpet - Iraq had no "weapons of mass destruction"; was not affiliated with Al Qaeda, but we invaded it anyway and stayed for longer than WWII, after two tax cuts for the wealthy; an unfunded Medicare Part D, and loosened financial regulations that caused our economy to go into free fall before the 2008 elections. Hell, if we can ignore all that, climate change denial is a snap!

If "corporations are people," then America is a psychopath. It at least explains a lot regarding our current political morass and ineptitude, and maybe that it's always been.

The last paragraph of Tim Kreider's superb essay in The Week, May 29, 2014 brings it home with a punch. I invite you to read it in its entirety:

If we're not going to do anything again, I'd just like to make one request: given that we've all agreed, if only by our passive acquiescence, not to keep this from happening, can we please quit pretending to care? Let's just skip the histrionics this time: no pro forma shock, condolence photo ops, somber speeches, flags at half-mast, meaningless noises from liberals about legislation, meaningless counter-noises from the NRA about armed guards in elementary schools. Why bother going through the motions of soul-searching when we know very well there's nothing to search? If we can't be brave we might at least be honest: when we see the familiar helicopter shots of ambulances outside a school, the clusters of classmates hugging, the sobbing parents being led away, the makeshift shrines of candles and plush toys, instead of looking stricken or covering our mouths or saying "Oh my God" or "How horrible," let's just all look each other in the eye and say: "Shit happens." Jeb cleaned it up.

If that is to be all our fates, let that be our epitaphs without further pretense, or delay!
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Charlotte's Web...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on October 1, 2015 at 6:09am
Figure 3. A snapshot from a cosmological simulation shows relatively cool gas flowing into two rotating protogalactic disks (magenta) from filaments (gray-green) of the cosmic web. Hot ionized gas at temperatures greater than 106 K is shown in red. (Courtesy of Philip Hopkins/Caltech.)


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Big Bang, Cosmology, Early Universe


A strand of the web appears to be conducting gas into the protogalaxy.

The clumpy universe we see today can be traced back to quantum fluctuations during the period of inflation, just after the Big Bang. Cosmologists think that as the universe cooled, the fluctuations seeded emerging matter that then collapsed into giant walls, and within those walls it collapsed further into filaments separated by great voids. The network of filaments, dubbed the cosmic web, is revealed—if indirectly—by astronomical surveys that show galaxies strung across the presumed filaments, with bigger galaxies and galaxy clusters at nodes where filaments intersect.

Direct observation of the filaments themselves is difficult because their constituents, mostly dark matter and cold gas, are either invisible or too faint. But with help from a quasar 10 billion light-years from Earth, Christopher Martin of Caltech and his colleagues have been able to take a close look at a strand of the cosmic web.1 The astronomers trained the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch (5.1-meter) Hale Telescope on the neighborhood of quasar QSO UM287 and observed, illuminated by the quasar’s intense UV radiation, a cosmic-web filament attached to a rotating, actively forming galaxy.

1. D. C. Martin et al., Nature 524, 192 (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14616

Physics Today:
Astronomers observe a nascent galaxy stuck to the cosmic web, Sung Chang

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The Trouble With Time Travel

Posted by Tonya R. Moore on September 30, 2015 at 5:58am

Time travel is what we call the notion of moving from one point in time to another, by means other than simply existing throughout the passage of time. If my present self were to somehow physically visit the past or the future, I would have achieved time travel.

Popular science suggests that time travel should be possible in some way, shape or form but the truth is, humans know too little about time itself to claim with much confidence that time travel is either possible or impossible.

We have a general idea of how time behaves, based on how we perceive events unfolding in the universe around us. We can clearly distinguish between points in time. We distinguish things that have happened (the past) from things that are happening (the present) and we can speculate about or anticipate the future–things that have not happened yet. Our understanding of what time is depends upon the manner in which we experience the passage of time.

What if everything we think we know about time is wrong?

Scholars once assumed all time is linear (flows in on direction: past to present to future) and an inflexible constant, based upon the way we observe events unfolding in the universe around us and the effects that the progression of time has on our minds, bodies and environment.

Learning more about our cosmic neighborhood and the way celestial bodies interact with each other has lead academics to believe that time is not so simplistic in nature. Now, mathematicians and physicists have come to regard time as more of a fluid and complex entity.

In his article “IS TIME TRAVEL POSSIBLE?” Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York explains how Albert Einstein’s Relativity Theory led him to reject the notion of past, present and future as anything more than illusions invented to satisfy the human mind.

Instead, he suggested that what we call time is something like a river with currents that slow or speed up depending on velocity and proximity to certain celestial bodies. Kurt Gödel had also previously suggested this theory, further stating that this “river” would be populated by “whirlpools” that bend time into a sort of circle and traveling along the curve of this circle would ultimately make going backward in time possible.

The notion of traveling backwards in time presents a very popular set of problems though. The Grandfather Paradox, for example, presents the following question: if I were to travel back in time and change my own past in a way that would cause my present self to not have ever been born, how could I have ever existed to travel back in time in the first place? Not to mention, if humans in the future will achieve the capability to travel back in time, where are all the time travelers?

Quantum Physics presents an elegant solution to the above problems via Multiverse Theory which says there may be multiple universes existing in parallel. So, there would be a universe for every single possible event and outcome—a universe for everything that has ever happened and will happen, and universes for everything else that ever could have happened and might happen in the future.

In this case, some multiverse denizen travels back into the past and changes the future. History as we know it continues as we’ve always known it but the time traveler has shifted to a new timeline and now exists in a universe in which a time traveler journeyed to the past and committed whatever act created that universe’s particular outcome of that event.

If anything, these clashing arguments serve to drive home the point that what we know of the universe is extremely limited. We can only interpret the function of a universal mechanism such as time based on our limited understanding and capabilities. Our current knowledge of quantum physics and cosmology only allows us to theorize that time travel might be achievable.

Whether or not humans have the wherewithal to accomplish it someday is something that will have to be left to the imagination, for the time being. Sadly, most time travel stories hit that wall of causality and wind up detouring to that sad, sad place where TV tropes go to die.

As a speculative fiction writer, I WANT to believe in the possibility. As a sci-fi fan, I long to read a truly interesting time travel story that chucks out all the old cliches and gives voice to a truly entertaining, yet plausible tale. Is there a writer out there who can satisfy this desire?

Dare I try? Dare you?

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