THE AUSTRALIAN SPECULATIVE fiction (an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy and related genres) community is small but perfectly formed. At Conflux 9, writers, artists, editors, publishers and fans mingled on largely equal footing. It’s Australia’s 52nd such convention, and the ninth in Canberra. Held from 25 to 28 April 2013 with some 270 attendees, it offered insights into the hearts of the genre and its people.

A window into humanity

According to Melbourne-based writer Claire McKenna, “science fiction is technology as a metaphor for the human condition”, and numerous panels explored such themes. ‘Am I not human?’ flitted between discussion of humanity’s biological basis, whether Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was more human than some of the ‘real’ people he encountered, and whether we’ll remain human as we continue to outsource our brains to Google. Here was literature as a window into the depths of psychology – relationships, body horror and fear of mortality.

Fear of death is a recurring theme, reappearing on a panel on ‘The ethics of immortality’. Panellists examined why people desire immortality and the costs of never dying. What might it mean for the planet – or even for science, with the suggestion that it might take one obsessive scientist a hundred years to cure cancer. The consequences of uploading yourself: How many copies should you make? Will you still be human? In place of answers, we had book suggestions; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Iain Banks’s The Hydrogen Sonata were two of many.

The once and future genre

A panel on ‘What was great about SF when we were young?’ explored the genre’s future as well as its past. A recurring contention was the notion that science fiction is being displaced by fantasy because we are now living in the technological future of our past. But science fiction (in concert with science itself) is still our best guidebook for the future, and as such retains its value.

In later discussion, Perth-based librarian Grant Stone agreed, noting that Hugo Gernsback included science fiction in his science magazine in the early 20th century because he realised that it was a “nexus to keep the brain active and agile, and thinking about the potential for the future”, and was the only way prepare for the future and turn ideas to reality.

Optimism about the industry was obvious. “This is the most exciting time to be writing science fiction – or any speculative fiction – in Australia; it’s just booming here at the moment,” said Sean Williams, a writer based in Adelaide. “You can tell by walking around Conflux – the number of published authors has got to be at an all-time high.” Stone agreed, and pointed out that there’s quality as well as quantity. “I’ve never been to a con with so many book launches,” he exulted. “The literature is being raised to such a standard, and being praised by people who know. It’s a very healthy time.”

Publisher and editor Russell Farr, of Perth-based Ticonderoga Publications, noted that “people with good science knowledge can write amazing things”, but that Australian sci-fi writers tend to be snapped up by large publishers, mainly overseas, perhaps giving an impression that the nation produces less science fiction. He also pointed to a culture less likely to venerate science and its achievements: “We don’t put up statues of scientists, despite being proud of the things Australians invent. But our science fiction writers put us on the world stage first – people like Greg Egan, Damien Broderick, A. Bertram Chandler.”

We the people

Conflux 9 might have brimmed over with ideas, but the people expressing these thoughts and drinking them in were what made the event. Co-chairperson and writer Donna Maree Hanson noted that what struck her when she was new to conventions was the egalitarian feel; at these events, writers, publishers and fans mix freely at the bar and elsewhere, discussing big ideas and sharing knowledge as friends and colleagues. “Some of us only get to see each other once a year,” writer and COSMOS fiction editor Cat Sparks said. “It’s like a family reunion.”

Con highlights

* On the first evening, COSMOS fiction editor’s first short story collection, The Bride Price, was launched by Sean Williams to a packed-out room. By early accounts, it’s a dark collection of science fiction and some fantasy.

* The Ditmars award ceremony, which featured real-time Lego building, and cheeky hosting and live tweeting.

* The sense of home felt while in a panel where most panellists and audience members seemed to know every Doctor Who episode by heart.

* Some confusion about the difference between science and science fiction – from other hotel guests.

Old fella in the bar: Bloody busy in here. Me: Yeah, sorry. It’s the National Science Fiction Convention. Him: Bloody scientists! #Conflux9

— AlanBaxter (@AlanBaxter) April 27, 2013

The post The state of flux appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

My first full-time office job was with Cosmos Media; I started as a trepid grad in March 2008. Filled with highly educated, literary writers and designers from diverse backgrounds, the office teetered constantly on the edge of debate.

From the philosophy of knowledge and Plato’s allegory of the cave to whether one should limit their use of toilet paper for sustainability reasons, these good-humoured and passionate debates would explode at some point during the day and at 5:30pm would often continue out the door and down to the pub. If there is such a thing as the office lottery, I thought I’d won it.

The office was like this every day. Except Thursday.

Thursdays would begin like any other day: sporadic conversation would rock and lull about the office, like a sailboat at sea and in want of a breeze. A passing comment or a news story would begin to stir someone, a flicker of passion would cross their face.

But before any debate could begin, before any raised voices could echo though the stylish warehouse office in inner Sydney, someone or other would glare at the offender. “Shh!” they’d hiss. Our voices would drop and we’d all whisper to one another, ominously: “It’s newsletter day.” Back then, COSMOS Update was laboriously put together in a seemingly unending string of HTML, where a single interruption and lost train of thought could lead to a load of additional work.

Since its inception on 31 August 2006, COSMOS Update has been churned out every Thursday by the COSMOS online editor. And it is with sadness that today, its 324th issue, I will send the last one.

There are several reasons for this. Partly, we are seeing a changing digital landscape – where communications are rapidly shifting to social media and other platforms. In an era where even Facebook is increasingly passé, the future of digital media will not be found in email.

But I appreciate that some of you might still want to receive science updates through your email. I can recommend ABC Science Online’s Science Updates, which has a broad spread of science news from around the world as well as audio from ABC Radio National, the monthly CSIRO Snapshot which gives in-depth reports at the work done by Australia’s national science agency and the Australian Geographic Newsletter, which is more narrative-driven, magazine-style articles, and has a strong Australian slant.

Also, two weeks ago, big changes were announced at COSMOS. Two of the magazine’s four founders, CEO Kylie Ahern and Editor Wilson da Silva, sold their portion of the business to the other two founders, Alan Finkel, Melbourne entrepreneur and chancellor of Monash University, and Elizabeth Finkel, contributing editor and award-winning science writer. This will see several changes across the company, including moving operations to Melbourne. As we focus on a seamless transition, we needed to put time into other areas of production.

The COSMOS Update has seen a few twists and turns along the way. From 29 September 2007, the online editor wrote a mini-editorial for the Update, called In Focus. This was one of the most popular parts of the Update, and would eventually evolve into the blogs section of COSMOS Online. We used the Update’s editorial to discuss trends we were witnessing across science and science reporting, important developments in science, and, well, as a way to mouth off about a topic that we wouldn’t ordinarily publish in the magazine or on the website. Headline rules were relaxed and we had fun with them: “Sorry about the whole genocide thing” (Wilson da Silva, May 2011), “Congratulations, you survived Valentine’s Day” (Becky Crew, February 2012) and “The ‘C’ word” (Jacqui Hayes, 23 July 2010).

Most notable, though, was the fourfold increase in the number of subscribers after COSMOS Media ran Hello From Earth in August 2009. In an intense 13-day project, COSMOS collected messages from the public, which were then beamed to the nearest Earth-like planet by NASA. Many of the participants chose to receive the weekly COSMOS Update.

So to those who joined us in the beginning, those who joined us during Hello From Earth and those who joined us somewhere in between, thanks for coming on the journey with us. So long, and I hope to see you out there again, somewhere in the cosmos.

Jacqui Hayes
Digital Editor

The post A farewell to COSMOS Update appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Parliament House in Canberra; scientists - like politicians - are also driven by the desire to make things better. Credit: ACT Tourism

PARLIAMENTARIANS ARE LIKE anyone else: tickled pink to rub shoulders with celebrities, and awed by the wonder of the cosmos.

But it’s not often that the celebrity is a Nobel laureate, and that they have a chance to peer excitedly through telescopes as he explains the expanding universe.

That was the scene on a recent cold September night as Brian Schmidt, co-winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, conducted an astronomy masterclass on the roof of Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra.

It was the inaugural event of the Parliamentary Friends of Science, a new crossbench group of 51 MPs launched later that night at a dinner in the Great Hall below.

Every September for the past 13 years, scientists from around Australia have descended on Canberra to take part in a two-day event: Science Meets Parliament.

Almost 200 scientists come for two days to Australia’s capital city and get a crash course in politics, with seminars on policy development, the budget process and communicating with politicians.

There’s a gala dinner in the Great Hall, where each table has one or two parliamentarians surrounded by a cluster of scientists. The next day, scientists visit politicians’ offices, describe their work and ask questions of the MPs.

The annual event is organised by Science & Technology Australia, an umbrella body that since 1985 has represented the various scientific associations, learned societies and academies and their 68,000 scientists.

“We truly believe that when you do understand the absolute rigour that is science, and the peer review process, people do respect it,” Anna-Maria Arabia, Science & Technology Australia’s outgoing chief executive.

Science is a way of thinking, rather than a dogma, she said; which is why, at the dinner I attended this year, she argued for politicians to have the courage to respond to scientific evidence: “Changing your mind based on new evidence is not a backflip. It’s leadership.”

It was a line echoed by Schmidt: “Science and politics do not always have an easy partnership,” he wrote in an opinion piece about the gathering. “Politicians talk in absolutes, they use their skills of communication for persuasion – they are often driven by ideology and the short-term imperatives of maintaining public support.

“Scientists… question everything. We never prove theories, we just attempt to disprove them until they exist beyond doubt, and even then waves of questioning continue.”

“Science is not about being 100% right and showing other people are 100% wrong – it’s about having ideas, putting them to the test and extending our collective understanding of our world. It’s our most powerful way of thinking, where the answers to questions are judged by the painstaking collection of evidence, not by our preconceptions and prejudices,” he added.

Schmidt argued for more scientific evidence to be used in developing government policy: for proposals to “consider the best available evidence and be nuanced by the political considerations of the day, not the other way around.”

He pointed to Britain, which has a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology providing British MPs with independent, balanced and easy-to-understand analysis of policy involving science, research and technologies.

In addition, most major departments have a chief scientist who provides evidence-based advice to bureaucrats and ministers. The parliament even has a “Principles of Scientific Advice to Government” which governs how evidence should be used by ministers in policy making.

This doesn’t mean ministers can’t overrule evidence; but where they do so, they should acknowledge this, and explain their reasoning.

Speaking at the gathering, Chris Evans, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research, supported more scientific evidence in helping shape government policy. But he argued strongly that evidence should never determine policy.

On my table was Warren Entsch, a grazier first elected as a Liberal MP in 1996 and former parliamentary secretary for science under the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard.

He represents Leichhardt in rural Far North Queensland. He’s also a founder of the Parliamentary Friendship Group for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex Australians, and often speaks out in support of gay issues.

I asked what got him into politics. He said the community division triggered by native title, and a sense that Aborigines were being treated unfairly and graziers painted as greedy.

“So it was, ultimately, conviction that got you into parliament – a desire to change things, make them right,” I suggested.

He nodded in agreement: “Anyone who comes here for anything else, they don’t last.”

It occurred to me that scientists and politicians have one important thing in common: conviction. Both face challenges and opportunities, both are seeking answers, and both ultimately want to make the world a better place.

So maybe they’re not that far apart: they just approach it differently.

The post Common ground appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Sonya the slow loris was the star of a 2009 YouTube that went viral. Credit: Dmitry Sergeyev

A few years ago, I was travelling through Indonesia when I found myself at a dinner party with animal smugglers.

Of course, I didn’t know they smuggled animals when I agreed to dine with my otherwise amicable companions. One was a friend whom I’d met travelling through Asia a year earlier, and the others were a group of his friends from around the region. By coincidence, they were all in Jakarta at the same time, and I’d been delighted to be invited to one of Jakarta’s ‘traditional’ Indonesian restaurants.

Perhaps I was naïve – it was my first time to Indonesia, and I’d only been there a couple of days – because in retrospect, it seems like the dawn of realisation for me was slow. I’d innocently assumed that a story about a “pet turtle” – one of which had died recently because they’d overfed it – were your garden-variety, pet-shop species – not an ancient, 60 kg endangered ocean farer plucked from its natural habitat and kept in a backyard, as I later discovered.

That was, quite simply, too far beyond the boundaries of my experience. We were well into dinner before all the pieces fell into place, and I fully grasped what was being alluded to in their stories.

I asked as many questions as I felt I could get away without someone saying, “What are you – a journalist?”. As it turned out, they weren’t professional smugglers; they all had very respectable day jobs. They simply took advantage of an opportunity: they would sometimes buy animals when they visited Jakarta, where there are numerous wild animal markets, and fly them home to keep as personal pets, or to give as a gifts.

But there was still more to discover about my friend. To my horror, he revealed that he owned a pet slow loris – an endangered forest primate with big round eyes, and the adorable star of many a YouTube video. I can still recall the waves of shock and disgust that passed over me as he recalled how he flew it home: sedated, packed in a box full of seashells and wrapped like a Christmas present – a nerve-wracking trip for him, wondering if he would get through airport security.

He did.

Eventually, though, the disgust gave way to intrigue, and I wondered what it was like to own one. He spoke of his slow loris the same way people talk of their family cat or dog: the love was clear.

He spoke fondly of how it liked sleeping on his computer, because of the warmth; he told stories of when he panicked because it wasn’t there when he got home, but it was never too far away – it is, after all, named as such because it moves so slowly.

After a while, the dinner conversation moved on and the subject wasn’t revisited.

A couple of days later, I re-learnt an important lesson about communication in Asia – it’s a lesson I learn anew every time I visit the region. I met up again with my friend for breakfast, and he had some bad news to tell me. He had been talking with his friends after the dinner and unfortunately, he reported, they were not able get me a slow loris.

Not registering the look of confusion on my face, he went on to explain that there were two reasons why. The first was that there was almost no chance that they would get it into my home country of Australia unnoticed. The second was that, once caught, they wouldn’t be able to pay their way out.

In Australia, we have so-called ‘low context’ communication, where the words we say are exactly what we mean, regardless of the context. Many Asian cultures, however, have ‘high context’ communication, where the whole context – the location, body language and facial expression of the speaker, as well as social protocol and the intricate relationships of the listeners to the speaker – all have to be taken in account before meaning can be deciphered.

My dinner companions had interpreted my interest in animal smuggling, and the fact that I described the slow loris as “adorable” – and possibly other terms of endearment I cannot now remember – as a request for a slow loris. There are no words for the horror I felt at the mere suggestion I would keep a wild and endangered animal for my personal entertainment.

In Australia, it’s illegal to keep most of our native wild animals as pets, let alone exotic wild animals. People caught with an illegal animal can face jail sentences of up to five years and fines of $110,000. Border security officers are vigilant and, thankfully, almost all are not for sale; Australia has one of the lowest rates of corruption in the world.

Travelling through Southeast Asia in the past, I’ve found plenty of reasons to feel ashamed of being Australian. But during that conversation at breakfast was one moment when I’ve felt most proud.

I’ve been reminded of this moment recently, as an international group of researchers announced that they had identified three new species of slow loris. As news of the species spread through the Internet, so too did posts about how ‘YouTube is killing the slow loris’.

The barrage of anti-YouTube comments have followed in the wake of the BBC Natural World program Jungle Gremlins of Java, which aired in January 2012, and followed primate conservationist Anna Nekaris as she visits the forests of Java, the main island of Indonesia, and the exotic pet markets of Jakarta.

Nekaris also implies that the 2009 YouTube video of Sonya, a pet slow loris, being tickled, sparked a series of similar videos and a recent fad in slow loris pet ownership. (For his part, the creator of the original video says he lives in Russia, where he can legally own a slow loris, and it had been bred in a local slow loris nursery – Sonya “was never in the wild”, he claims.)

In her journey, Nekaris sees how infant slow lorises are removed from their parents and their venomous front teeth are pulled out. The majority of slow lorises taken from the wild don’t survive long enough to become pets.

It’s a tragic and heartwrenching journey, but to conclude that YouTube is killing the slow loris is to overlook the real issue: when it comes to wildlife trading in Asia, the risks are minimal and the profits are high. In most Asian countries, people caught with illegal animals are let off with a fine, which can be much less than the value of the animal on the black market. By comparison, carrying illegal drugs in the same countries can result in hefty jail terms or even the death penalty.

To say that ‘YouTube is killing the slow loris’ also overlooks the plight of other animals who endure similar treatments in the wildlife markets. Big cats, for example, are popular among men in the Middle East; and reptile pets, such as venomous snakes or Komodo dragons, are becoming more popular in Asian cities. They are all mistreated. They are underfed, dehydrated and crammed into cages far too small for them.

What’s more, the slow loris was the pet du jour before it became a YouTube star – my friend bought his well before the viral YouTube video. The slow loris is popular because it is remarkable in its similarity to a human baby: they’re shaped like a baby, they have big eyes, small hands and a clumsy, slow demenour. The slow loris hits all our cute buttons, and in combination with its docile nature, the animal has become a popular pet, particularly among women.

It’s cruelly ironic that a human response that evolved so we would feel a desire to protect the youngest members of our own species is now part of the reason why another primate species is being driven to extinction.

The rise in exotic pet ownership isn’t the only threat to the future of the slow loris: habitat destruction is the obvious one, but they are also at risk of being eaten and are used in traditional medicine.

In Cambodia, for example, women consume parts of the slow loris to help heal following childbirth and in the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

One argument for continuing to say that ‘YouTube is killing the slow loris’ might be that is raises awareness for the issue; it’s a one-liner that makes for an easy headline, or a Facebook post that draws people in and then engages with the issue.

But what happens when the slow loris pet fad is over? Will that have helped the next pet du jour?

The post A dinner party with animal smugglers appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Credit: iStockphoto

by Lisa Hedlund

Well it’s almost that time of year again. The time when Santa Claus loads up his sleigh and visits all the children around the world. But how does he manage this?

Lets take the world’s approximate population (7,021,836,029 according to Index Mundi). Even if we assume Santa only visits children until they reach 14 and that he only visits children who are Christian, non-religious and atheist, that still means he has to visit 827,525,483 children (with rounding) in only one night – even if it’s only to leave them a lump of coal if they’re on the naughty list.

According to some calculations, even with the 31 hours he has to work with thanks to time zones, he still has to travel more than 120 million kilometres all in one night. It’s hard to imagine anyone could move this fast and not disintegrate into flames from the air resistance, even with magic reindeer.

Scientists, such as John Brown, the tenth Astronomer Royal for Scotland, however, think they may have worked out how Santa could manage such a feat. Brown has suggested Santa might not solely rely on his flying reindeer, which surely couldn’t move quickly enough to get him all around the globe before the sun rises.

Instead, he could be using portable black holes to create wormholes in order to shorten the long journey.

Assuming Santa Claus has found a way to remain uncrushed from the strong gravitational pull, one benefit from Santa travelling by black holes, aside from being a much-needed short cut, is that it has been theorised that black holes distort time. This means that Santa wouldn’t have to rush all night to deliver presents and the occasional lump of coal to each child. Instead, he can manipulate space and time and reuse it over and over until he has completed his night’s work, which is helpfully tracked by the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) every year for people to see.

But even sorting out exactly how Santa can travel around the world in a single night, how can he possibly transport all those gifts – and carry them all in a sack, no less?

By using nanotechnology, of course.

While currently in its early stages, nanotechnology could allow us to build anything atom by atom. Santa, it seems, has already beaten us to the end result. If we accept that Santa’s ‘magic’ sack isn’t there to carry toys, but instead acts as a sort of factory that builds any toy Santa requires at an atomic level, this means he can make any toy he wants right then and there out of anything: chimney soot, candy cane particles, even out of the atoms in the air! Now we can see how Santa can bring every child what they want for Christmas, even large or heavy items like bikes and surfboards that would normally be difficult to fit through a chimney.

As for why nobody has managed to see Saint Nicholas despite so many children staying up past their bedtimes with hopes of catching him in the act? Easy. He wears an invisibility cloak, which works by using metamaterials that are capable of manipulating which path light travels on, so they go around the object in question, making it look like nothing is there. Using this, Santa could walk right past any child trying to sneak a glimpse of him and they wouldn’t see a thing.

So, between the black holes, the nanotechnology and the invisibility cloak, it seems as though Santa Claus can do the job after all.

The post The science of Santa appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Credit: iStockphoto

You’ve probably heard the ‘boiling frog’ anecdote, based on 19th-century experiments: if a cold-blooded frog is dropped in boiling water, it will jump out; but if it is placed in cold water that’s slowly heated, it won’t perceive the danger and will, ultimately, be stewed to death.

It’s often used as a metaphor for our inability to react to momentous changes that occur gradually. But we now know, thanks to modern biologists, that it isn’t true: frogs detect the danger and escape before it’s too late.

Another version of this experiment is under way, but on a much larger scale, and on a different species: humans. And the medium isn’t a saucepan of water, but the oceans, the lands and the atmosphere of our entire planet: it’s global warming.

And the question is: are we as clever as frogs?

In July 2005, the Australian Government released a report entitled Climate Change Risk and Vulnerability. It outlined a disturbing future for Australia, with more frequent and more severe droughts and floods; more severe storms and cyclones along the eastern seaboard, with storm surges amplified by rising sea levels; remote northern communities facing depopulation, and even some towns “at risk” of being unliveable.

These changes would occur “over the next 30 to 50 years irrespective of global or local efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions,” it said.

In my foreword to a themed issue on climate change in September 2005, I concluded: “Climate change is no longer a topic of debate, it’s something you prepare for – like your retirement, or paying off a house, or planning a big overseas trip.”

Our special issue was based on the best science available at the time, but the future it forecast seemed strange and unbelievable.

I added a comment from environmentalist Tim Flannery that I felt was justified by the evidence, although I feared it would be seen as exaggerated, that there’s “a real possibility that within a century, some cities in Australia will fail and be abandoned. It’s likely that large numbers of people will perish the world over as the changing climate plays havoc with crops, rainfall and sea levels, or as freakish weather intensifies and natural disasters like cyclones become more common and more ferocious.”

On the day that issue hit newsstands, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The world watched in horror as bodies floated along flooded streets, people fought each other for food and shelter in cramped stadiums, overwhelmed police abandoned their posts, and buildings were smashed as if made of matchsticks.

Within three days, New Orleans – one of the world’s unique cities and the birthplace of jazz – fell to its knees, and officials called for residents to leave. The toll: 1,833 dead and US$100 billion in damage.

In October 2005, I wrote: “The fall of New Orleans is a warning: it shows us how quickly our proud cities – seemingly powerful and resilient – can buckle in the face of Nature’s onslaught. How quickly our technologies fail and our intricate networks and vast resources can nevertheless be overwhelmed.”

Seven years later, Hurricane Sandy struck several Caribbean countries and later, winding down into an enormous superstorm, numerous U.S. states. It hit New York on October 29.

At dawn the day after, one of the world’s wealthiest and best known cities was crippled: streets flooded, half of Manhattan was without power, and the subway – relied on by more than five million people every day – was under water. All of this in the last week of a hard-fought national U.S. election where climate change was hardly, if at all, mentioned by political parties.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, broke the political silence: “Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality… part of learning from this is the recognition that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable.”

He added, “It is not prudent to sit here… and say it’s not going to happen again.”

Did global warming cause Sandy? No: climate change does not create storms; but it was likely a performance enhancer, turning Sandy from appalling to horrific.

Did global warming make Sandy worse? Yes: the storm flung the sea onto the northeast U.S. coast, and because of warming, there’s 15–20cm more ocean there to fling.

If such instant destruction can happen to a rich and iconic city in a powerful nation, what of the hundreds of cities that may be battered – again and again – as freakish weather becomes commonplace and storms more violent?

Scientists have been warning us that this is the kind of world we can expect by 2030 or 2040; but what if it’s already here?

The post You have been warned appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Amanda Bauer waits for the moment of totality. Credit: Amanda Bauer

~ by Amanda Bauer

Last week, I travelled to Far North Queensland to witness one of the most amazing astronomical events accessible to earthlings: a total solar eclipse. My perspective was unlike most amateur and professional astronomers who travelled from afar to feel the chill of the Moon’s shadow, because I camped out at a music festival that occurred along the path of eclipse totality. From our location, the eclipse, when the Moon passes exactly in front of the Sun, was perfect.

The energy among the crowd the night before the eclipse was intensifying. Many festivalgoers stayed up all night, listening to the continuous music from any one of six stages. I opted to wake up early, before sunlight brightened the horizon, in preparation for the 6:38 am beginning of totality. I walked to the main open area of the festival park, along with thousands of other excited people.

When the Sun finally broke above the line of distant mountains, the crowd basked in a crisp orange sunrise glow. We all cheered with the recognition that the Moon was already covering a tiny sliver of the Sun. Our anticipation grew as the Moon slowly slipped in front of the sun, and the pair rose slightly higher above the horizon.

About 40 minutes later, the light around us started to fade and grow noticeably redder. The temperature had risen with the sunrise, but dropped down several degrees as the Moon covered more and more of the Sun. We looked through our solar glasses, awaiting the big event.

And then it happened. The otherworldly moment when the Moon’s shadow swept over us, and the very bright, eye-damaging yellow photosphere we recognise as our star disappeared. A dark orb hung in the sky, unrecognisable as the Moon, backlit by huge, unfamiliar, shimmering rays of white light.

The sight felt so strange, so eerie. The excited crowd settled into a stunned silence, before erupting in a collective rumble of appreciation and awe. What must ancient people who witnessed this event have thought when the sun faded to black so unexpectedly, only to pop back to normal mere minutes later?

Intellectually, I thought I knew the feeling I would be experiencing, since this would be the second total solar eclipse I would witness, after an eclipse in China in 2009, but I was completely overwhelmed. As soon as the darkness set in, the Sun’s corona stretched so unbelievably far out around the tiny black moon, my mouth stuck itself in a goofy grin of pure pleasure, and tears came instantly to my eyes – much to my annoyance, because they blurred my vision!

During totality, I was overcome with a feeling that I was more unified with the universe. Despite knowing the fact that we live on a giant sphere of rock, zooming around a big ball of fire at an unfathomable pace, witnessing this event made me feel that power. For two full minutes we sat wonderstruck, staring at the surreal object hanging in the sky, yelling out insufficient adjectives while feeling the chilled air on our skin.

And then it was over. The brightness of the edge of the Sun crept around the Moon. The small black circle disappeared in a flash and we were instantly back to normalcy. How quickly the vision of the bright Sun snapped us out of our revelries. Home again, more connected to the cosmos.

Most of us sat still, watching the Moon finish its path across the Sun’s face, reflecting on the experience and its unexpected intensity. After another 30 minutes, the music started playing again and many entranced witnesses began dancing in the restored morning sunlight.

I have not seen a single photograph or video that has captured the pure magic feeling of witnessing a total solar eclipse. It’s an unexplainable life event. It’s a lucky coincidence that our Moon and our Sun happen to appear as the exact same size in our sky and even cross paths once every 18 months or so. Incredibly inspiring.

I’m already excited for the possibility of chasing the Moon’s shadow and witnessing another eclipse, despite the knowledge that earthly weather could prevent the success of such an endeavor. The feeling is worth the effort. I’m officially hooked!

Amanda Bauer is a Super Science Fellow at the Australian Astronomical Observatory in Sydney where she researches galaxy formation.

The post Chasing shadows appeared first on COSMOS magazine.

Marketing executives, chief technology officers and bankers spent two days with statisticians and computer scientists in Sydney, Australia, discussing how to exploit the untapped potential of the mind-boggling amounts of raw data – the by-product of the digital revolution – at their disposal.

Barely more than a decade ago, the information storage buzzword that captured our imaginations was a terabyte – that’s 1,024 gigabytes, roughly 1.1 trillion bytes, or about seven million floppy disks. Remember them? Me either.

Nowadays, a terabyte of data storage costs less than $100 and Google alone is estimated to process about 40 petabytes, or 1,024 terabytes, of data every day. And in a staggering example of just how far we’re still powering ahead, the Square Kilometre Array – the world’s largest radio telescope, due to begin operation in 2024 – is predicted to generate more than 900 petabytes of raw data daily, about 10 times global Internet traffic, processed with centralised computing power equivalent to about 100 million PCs.

Every time you use your smartphone or the Internet, or pay for something by card, or even – as technology becomes ever-more sophisticated – appear on CCTV or send a handwritten letter, you are contributing to a data explosion that is fast leaving Moore’s law gasping for breath in its wake. And from government to marketing, its equally massive potential doesn’t seem to have escaped anyone’s notice.

But will Big Data really “change the essence of humanity as we know it,” as conference delegate Clive Gold, marketing CTO at information management company EMC Australia, enthused?

Rami Mukhtar, a senior researcher in data analytics at National Information and Communications Technologies Australia (NICTA), doesn’t think Gold’s claim is far off the mark.

“Just think about the digital footprint that you leave on the Internet everyday and what we could do with that,” says Mukhtar, who compared Big Data to the untapped crude oil of this generation. That is, it’s everywhere, more or less directly under our feet, and as yet untapped as we’ve only just begun to understand its true worth.

“For millions of years, there weren’t wars fighting for oil,” Mukhtar said at the conference, furthering the analogy. “Now that we’ve realised that data is the crude oil of our time, the question is, how do we monetise it?”

The upshot of using Big Data to its full potentual, Mukhtar says, will be an ability to more or less predict the future, from your next online purchase to the impact of a new government policy, using the sophisticated machine-learning techniques and algorithms that gave us Watson, a software program that, last year, famously became world champion on U.S. game show Jeopardy.

“Machine learning is what artificial intelligence (AI) has really evolved to loosely,” explains Mukhtar. “Ideas around AI have become more of a science where we can predict and quantify the performance of these techniques in a more rigorous mathematical way.”

The key, many at the conference said, would not be the technology or even the data – there’s plenty of that – but knowing the right questions to ask.

Mukhtar lists a few that could have big implications for how we run our society: “How should we better plan our cities? What is the effect of putting ticket prices up on public transport on the amount of C02 emissions? What is going to be the unemployment rate in six months time? If I’ve stopped buying coffee, or if I’ve spent more time in a cafe tomorrow, what does that tell me about my feeling about my job security?”

So does all this mean that privacy is set to become a quaint, old-fashioned concept?

Mok Oh, computer scientist, entrepreneur and former chief data scientist at U.S. ecommerce giant PayPal, says there’s already a growing generational gap regarding privacy.

“There’s already a big cultural shift going on,” he says. “There’s Facebook where kids know that whatever they publish is public and they’re okay with that.”

Oh said PayPal already has algorithms in place to predict what each of its 120 million users are likely to buy next, enabling the company to make the kinds of targeted offers and ads that already appear on your Facebook page and email.

Muktah agrees that the advent of relevant, targeted marketing, among other benefits, will outweigh any privacy qualms.

“Users want relevancy, especially young users,” he says. “I guess as time goes on, people will learn to accept that using that [data] in an anonymised fashion will actually benefit either themselves or greater society. But there’s a lot to be worked out on the trust side, and on what users are prepared to give.”

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Joss Whedon released a sproof political ad, endorsing Mitt Zombie. (This image has been cropped and flipped) Credit: Joss Whedon

Zombies. Sigh. I think it’s the fact that I need my stories to have a realistic explanation of events that I’ve always resisted zombie movies and TV shows. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for others to enjoy the unbridled creativity involved in purely imaginary scenarios. T. rex and Big Bird can knock themselves out having bubble baths together on Mars, as long those stories stay firmly planted in the fantasy section and I can skip over it on my way to science fiction.

But even I can’t avoid the resurrection of the zombie. There’s been a string of hit TV shows and movies with zombies recently, including The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Cabin in the Woods. Behind the scenes here at COSMOS, our science fiction editor, Cat Sparks, has been trying hard to convince us that zombies are slowly but surely lumbering from fantasy into the realm of science fiction. We finally relented, publishing The Dragon and Minutemen as our first zombie science fiction pieces.

And now it seems like everyone is jumping on the zombie bandwagon. Two days ago, a team of physics PhD students working at CERN released the trailer to their movie Decay. Set on the grounds of CERN and in the tunnels deep underground, the trailer explains that some kind of “Higgs bioentanglement” might act on living tissue. In other words, artificially creating a Higgs boson in the LHC has kick-started a zombie apocalypse.

“What if the world’s largest particle accelerator created something nobody expected?” the trailer asks. Watch it here:

CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland, is the kind of place zombies could hide out unnoticed for a little while, even if the organisation has been clear about not authorising or endorsing the film. I worked for a year in CERN’s rabbit warren of more than 600 old buildings, where even the veteran staff got lost in half-floors, unusual staircases and long corridors; it’s the kind of place where, late at night on a weekend of sub-zero temperatures, I passed unfamiliar building emitting an eerie buzz and occasional flash of bright light. All that’s before you get to the sleep-deprived physicists mindlessly walking to their experiments to start the graveyard shift.

And let’s not overlook the fact that Switzerland is also the country that Mary Shelley was visiting in 1815 when she came up with the idea for Frankenstein. Coincidence?

But, no, Switzerland alone is not responsible for feeding our current zombie narrative. There’s also the U.S. presidential election. Falling just after Halloween, on November 6, the election has provided good fodder for us fearless Internet dwellers. Yesterday, The Avengers director Joss Whedon released a spoof political ad endorsing Republican candidate Mitt Romney as the “one with the vision and determination to cut through business-as-usual politics and finally put this country back on the path to the zombie apocalypse.”

“Romney is ready to make the deep rollbacks in healthcare, education, social services, reproductive rights that will guarantee poverty, unemployment, overpopulation, disease, rioting. All crucial elements in creating a nightmare zombie wasteland,” Whedon says in the video.

He also says that the “one percent” will no longer be the very rich, but the very fast – anyone who can run, or do parkour of any kind.

So, what can all of this obsession with zombies tell us? In November 2008, following the Obama win, Peter Rowe from the San Diego Union-Tribune investigated a correlation between which U.S. political party was in power and which genre of films was most popular: zombies or vampires.

Titled With Obama election comes the return of the vampire, he noted that Night of the Living Dead opened a month before Republican Richard Nixon’s election, inspiring a zombie film boom, but that Democrat Jimmy Carter’s election coincided with a vampire spike, including Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, the Frank Langella Dracula and Love at First Bite.

And, in 2008, Obama came to office amid a similar spat of vampire hits, including True Blood, Twilight and Let the Right One in.

Marc West, statistics lover and host of the Mr Science Show, plotted the vampire and zombie moves back in 2009. He concluded that “there is a 5.7% chance that there is no significant difference between the zombie results under Democrats and Republicans. This is very close to the 5% level most statisticians accept for significance, and as such is a very intriguing result.” He also stated that that was little chance of a significant correlation for vampires.

Is there an explanation for the correlation? “Democrats, who want to redistribute wealth to ‘Main Street,’ fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry,” Annalee Newitz, editor-in-chief of io9.com, a science fiction and technology blog, told Rowe. After all, she pointed out, Count Dracula arose from the aristocracy. “Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and disenfranchised, dressed in rags and coming to the White House to eat their brains.”

Newitz is not alone in her view. In Whedon’s video, he says Romney is “not afraid to face a ravening, grasping horde of subhumans. Because that’s how he sees poor people already.”

Was Rowe right? Could our recent obsession with zombies mark an upcoming transition of the U.S. presidency? Is it prophetic? Or is it just another pesky case of an unrelated correlation?

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Credit: iStockphoto

THE COLOSSAL ERUPTION of Indonesia’s Mount Tambora in April 1815 was the biggest in recorded history: ejecting 160 cubic km of debris into the air, killing 71,000 people and disrupting climate patterns around the world. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1816 came to be known as the Year Without a Summer: rain and cold dominated, agricultural crops failed and livestock died, triggering a severe famine.

On the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, battered by cold and dreary weather all summer, a group of holidaying Britons were unable to enjoy the outdoors as they had planned. So they stayed inside, read and wrote poetry, told ghost stories, and tried to make the best of it. Among them were 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (better known as Mary Shelley) and her lover (and later husband) Percy Shelley, who were staying with their friend, the English poet Lord Byron.

Sitting around a log fire one night, Byron suggested they each write a supernatural tale. That night, Mary Shelley had a powerful dream about a young medical student who reanimates a corpse; this inspired her to write a short story that eventually grew into a novel. In 1818, it was published as Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. Byron and his friend John Polidori wrote story fragments based on legends Byron had heard while travelling in the Balkans; from this was born the novel, The Vampyre, published in 1819. Thus, two legendary stalwarts of literature began in the same place.

These days, it is the vampire genre that has exploded in popularity, expanding into crime, fantasy, police drama, soap opera and even teenage romance. But what remains fascinating about Shelley’s vision is the uneasy tension it shows, even at the beginning of the 19th century, between scientific advancements in medicine and their cultural acceptance. Yes, the young Victor Frankenstein re-animates lifeless matter – a stupendous achievement. But his creation is rejected by society, and turns on the populace and on his creator. It’s clear from Shelley’s tale where she stands: the unnatural creature is an abomination.

This unease with medical advances has flared up sporadically over the nearly two centuries since Shelley’s gothic novel. For instance, anaesthesia – which has become an essential part of surgery, and especially childbirth – was slammed by some moralists, who argued that it was an interference with the natural order and would diminish our character. Similarly, the introduction of heart transplantations in the 1950s generated much heat and debate. In the 1970s, it was in-vitro fertilisation (IVF): detractors argued that test-tube babies would be psychologically harmed by the knowledge that they weren’t conceived naturally.

Today, anaesthesia is taken for granted, heart transplants are one of medicine’s glories, and the public approval rate of IVF is over 70%, from just 15% in the early 1970s.

Nick Bostrom, director of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute in Britain, argues that we need to overcome this ‘yuck factor’: “One lesson [from history] is that our immediate emotional reactions to medical developments are an unreliable indicator of their morality. We are prone to prejudice and to narrow-minded underestimation of the long-term benefits of technological development.”

If our unease was a problem before, it is likely to be tested more forcefully in the years ahead. For we are on the cusp of dramatic advances in medical science: stem cells, robotics, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, genetics, artificial intelligence and cellular biology – all of these technologies are accelerating, and converging around medical solutions.

The world’s population is ageing fast, thanks to declining fertility and steady improvements in life expectancy. The baby boomer generation is the best-educated, healthiest and wealthiest generation ever to reach their twilight years – and they are demanding a high quality of life. There are 450 million baby boomers worldwide, and by 2025, a third of Europe’s population will be aged 60 years and over.

This is driving an explosion in medical innovation, which is itself driving up average life expectancy. “We will not be like our parents or grandparents,” says Joseph Coughlin, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, and himself a baby boomer. “If we are tired or suffer from a little bit of pain, that’s not what we’re going to accept as a natural part of ageing. We’re going to have a higher set of expectations. And the expectations are going to be driven by our aspirations and our money to be able to go after what we want.”

In our More Than Human special issue, we review some of the inspiring advances being made in medical science. Many are truly amazing, and offer hope to thousands of people – now and into the future. But some of them are likely to trigger Bostrom’s yuck factor: if not stem cells derived from foetal tissue, then artificial organs printed to order, genetic engineering to remove unwanted traits, synthetic organisms living within the body, or perhaps something as simple as artificial eyes looking back at you.

It’s said that science moves faster than the legal system, which is often true. But it is also able to leap ahead of community expectations, and bring back the unease that was so prevalent in Shelley’s 1818 masterpiece: still able to disorientate with its moral, ethical and social implications. For example, while IVF as a technology has widespread backing today, support can soften when applying it to a woman in her fifties or when used by a gay couple.

If history has taught us anything, it is that we become quite quickly accustomed to technology that might at first alarm us. There are no men with red flags walking ahead of automobiles as was once thought necessary, and we’ve all learned to deal with people walking the streets with tiny earpieces, seemingly talking to no-one in particular.

It is, in a sense, an ode to our extraordinary adaptability as a species. We may be uneasy at first, but if there is a benefit to the individual and to society, we learn to absorb, process and adapt. Even if, one day in the far future, humans are mostly composed of artificial parts, I suspect we will still think of ourselves as human – perhaps, even more than human – and be comfortable with the idea.

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