Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.
Not that year.
Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants
“Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?"
"The third planet is incapable of supporting life," stated the husband patiently. "Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Well, that settles that. Up and coming, Valentine's Day,
"It snowed and snowed, the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned."
Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago
"....when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight.”
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
Scientists May Have Found a Material for Building on Mars | WIRED "Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem, because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base."
‘Trained Immunity’ Offers Hope in Fight Against Coronavirus | Quanta Magazine "Trained immunity is a form of memory exhibited by the innate immune system — a less studied, much older branch of our defenses that evolved more than a half-billion years ago, before vertebrate animals and the adaptive immune system existed."
Charlie Bolden says the quiet part out loud: SLS rocket will go away "The Falcon Heavy is not as capable as the SLS rocket, but its success has clearly demonstrated that private companies can build large, powerful rockets. Moreover, it's not just SpaceX, but also Blue Origin with its New Glenn booster, that seeks to build heavy lift rockets with private money. And although they are rivals, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos both agree that rockets need to be capable of reuse to be viable. The SLS will cost about $2 billion to launch and then fall into the ocean."
How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age? | The New Yorker "People generally don’t become artists for the money. In fact, they are probably drawn to art as a refuge from thinking about money in the first place. What they don’t bargain for is an inquisition calling into question the very reality of their day-to-day work as an artist. The vast majority of American artists are like DeMars, essentially freelancers who generate little in the way of profit."
What does Titan smell like? | Astronomy.com "This leads to an interesting thought experiment: If an airtight spacesuit is not a necessity on Titan, then it might be possible to get a whiff of your surroundings through your oxygen mask. In that case, what would Titan smell like?"
Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker "'Piranesi' often feels like a book about writing a book, the unending halls a version of the boundless and unruly possibility of a work that has yet to take on the form it must adopt if it is ever going to be accessible to other people. Its narrator lives in a kind of dream that obscures the truth about his past and about his relationship to the Other."
Are aliens hiding in plain sight? | Science | The Guardian "Bartlett, working with astrobiologist Michael Wong of the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that we need to escape the straitjacket of Earth-based thinking about life. They propose introducing a broader category called “lyfe” (pronounced, in an oddly West Country fashion, as “loif”), of which life as we know it is just one variation."
Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel | WIRED "Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust."
Wild theory suggests COVID-19 came to Earth aboard a space rock | Astronomy.com "Panspermia is, broadly speaking, the idea that life arrived on earth from space, and continues to do. The notion goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but in its modern form it dates back to the 1970s and the work of two astronomers, Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe."
A nearby supernova could have caused the Devonian mass extinction | Astronomy.com "The radioactive isotopes created by supernova debris interacting with Earth’s atmosphere would have decayed long ago. So if researchers can find evidence of these isotopes in rocks from the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary, it would directly suggest that at least one nearby star exploded around that time."
Margaret Atwood talks about ‘The Testaments,’ ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ politics and more "...she recently completed an unusual reading project: rereading both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, in order to annotate them for an auction. 'I creeped myself out quite a lot,' she said. In terms of the world today, 'they’re just a little bit too accurate.'"
How the Bits of Quantum Gravity Can Buzz | Quanta Magazine "But recently published papers challenge this view, suggesting that gravitons may create observable “noise” in gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory."
The Force Is Still Strong with the “Star Wars” Composer John Williams | The New Yorker "'It has been an extraordinary journey with these films, and with my entire career as well. The idea of becoming a professional film composer, never mind writing nine ‘Star Wars’ scores over forty years, was not a consciously sought-after goal. It simply happened. All of this, I have to say to you, has been the result of a beneficent randomness. Which often produces the best things in life.'"
How Pandemics Wreak Havoc—and Open Minds | The New Yorker "Great crises tend to bring profound social change, for good or ill. The consequences of wars and economic depressions have been amply studied; the consequences of pandemics, less so. This spring, in order to understand our possible future, I decided to look at the past through the eyes of Gianna Pomata, a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University..."
The Sexist Legacy in Star Trek’s Progressive Universe | io9 "'With Picard we have equality. Old baldy, sorry, sir old baldy, he’s the first on the call sheet, but other than that we’re equal. There are men and women and there’s not a preponderance of one sex over the other.'"
The Tricky Math of Herd Immunity for COVID-19 | Quanta Magazine "Ultimately, the only way to truly escape the COVID-19 pandemic is to achieve large-scale herd immunity — everywhere, not just in a small number of places where infections have been highest. And that will likely only happen once a vaccine is in widespread use."
Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA | Quanta Magazine "With a series of toy models, the researchers calculated that the biased cosmic ray particles were ever-so-slightly more likely to knock an electron loose from a “live” helix than from an “evil” one, an event that theoretically causes mutations."
All black holes should sport light rings | Astronomy.com "The reason we don’t see a black hole wrapped up in a glowing sphere of light is because we can only see the photons that have escaped the orbits around the black hole at the moment that they were flying directly at us, as they were being slingshot out of a circular cross section of the spherical shell, which looks like a ring of light to us."
If we find life on Mars, what might it be like? | Astronomy.com "By reaching into progressively deeper layers of Mars, investigators may first encounter spores associated with a relatively recent geological era. And by going to even greater depths, they might even find fully vegetative microbes."
The coronavirus is even more sinister than we suspected - Los Angeles Times "Researchers exploring the interaction between the coronavirus and its hosts have discovered that when the SARS-CoV-2 virus infects a human cell, it sets off a ghoulish transformation. Obeying instructions from the virus, the newly infected cell sprouts multi-pronged tentacles studded with viral particles."
Scientists use Neanderthal genes to grow tissue in a Petri dish - UPI.com "Differences in the genes of modern humans have allowed researchers to reconstruct approximately 40 percent of the Neanderthal genome, but scientists say they aren't sure exactly how these archaic genes influence human development."
Chinese study: Antibodies in COVID-19 patients fade quickly | CIDRAP "The authors observe that their findings contrast with what's known about the duration of antibodies to two other key coronaviruses, SARS-CoV, which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus). Previous findings indicate that antibodies to those viruses last at least a year and often longer, they said."
Susan Choi: When Is a Writer Supposed to Read? | Literary Hub "For a working writer to be cloistered in their house or apartment is not necessarily the strangest set of circumstances. Do you feel that? Do you feel that I’m ready for this and to handle this?"
Katherine Arcement · Diary: Fanfic · LRB 7 March 2013 "If the lure of reading fan fiction is clear, the lure of writing it is less obvious. On the surface, writing fan fiction is pointless: there is no hope of getting paid and very limited glory. So why do people do it?"
Dark Matter Experiment Finds Unexplained Signal | Quanta Magazine "They have uncovered an unexpected excess of events inside their detector that could fit the profile of a hypothetical dark matter particle called an axion. Alternately, the data could be explained by novel properties of neutrinos. More mundanely, the signal could come from contamination inside the experiment."