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Perhaps the most interesting (or the only interesting) job I have had, was working as an intern at Smithsonian’s Marine Systems Laboratory in Washington DC in 1993. The Smithsonian Natural History Museum employed an ecological engineer named Walter H. Adey (?) who had built a synthetic mangrove ecosystem in a spare greenhouse amidst the national orchid collection. The fake everglades ecosystem (which I described more thoroughly in an earlier post) had been built decades earlier and it was starting to fail in some critical ways. However in a larger sense, the failures were the point of the project, since they elucidated the innumerable fragile connections which make living systems possible.
All told, the terrarium world was about the size of a large suburban home and, at its heart was a miniature ocean built out of a calcium carbonate pit filled with thousands of gallons of salt water. The water was continuously filtered over algal mats which cleared out the ammonia and nitrogenous waste (and other waste products too). The ocean itself was filled with many tiny cnidarians, copepods, and suchlike micro-invertebrates, however larger animals were scarce (indeed animals larger than a small paperclip were dying out of the entire habitat). The only large fish were a pair of venerable striped sea bass who were definitely not reproducing.
It turns out that ray-finned marine fish almost all go through an extensive (and rather poorly understood) “larval” stage where the infinitesimal and quasi-transparent fish hunt the zooplankton while being hunted by innumerable ocean predators. This phase is nearly impossible to reproduce in captivity (although any ichthyologists or aquaculturists out there should feel free to jump in with additional information). Think of how depressing that is! Almost all of the 20,000 species of exquisite ocean fish are tied inextricably to the ocean! They can’t be conserved or preserved in some zoo or time capsule or artificial paradise, because we have no idea how to do that. If we broke through every sort of technological barrier and built an ark ship to blast off to Alpha Centauri, we wouldn’t have tuna or triggerfish or basking sharks with us.
The tiny fake sea (and the brackish mangrove swamp) were not empty though. There were species of small live-bearing fish which lived there and had managed to reproduce. Generations of these robust little minnows lived and died in the ersatz ocean and their delicate stripey shadows could be seen flitting about in bait balls in the depths. I should have asked what species they were–however the fascinating Wikipedia entry on Mangrove killifish should give you an idea of what sort of survivors these characters were.
I have written before about my own terrible childhood experiences keeping aquariums, and (although I still regard myself as a profoundly ineffectual failure on nearly every level), I think the sorts of problems I encountered reveal bigger issues than my jejeune fishkeeping skills. This is a long-winded way of reminding Elon Musk (or whoever else) that Earth’s oceans keep the planet alive and are the defining feature of our world. We would need such things anywhere else–but we know next to nothing about synthetic ecology. It doesn’t seem like a field where just adding more metal tubes and freaky machines actually helps all that much…
Welcome back to Ferrebeekeeper’s Halloween special feature concerning bats! If you like you can check out last week’s posts concerning bat mascots, Honduran white bats, and the Chinese good luck symbol Wu Fu. Bats are exceedingly wonderful and I love them…but where is the chilling Halloween horror?
Well, bats do have a dark side (at least to humans, when we eat them or intrude too far into their world). They are an infamous vector for zoonotic viruses which jump easily to closely related mammalian species. Although we are most attuned to this year’s worldwide pandemic, covid 19 (which seems not to have come from snakes, but from horseshoe bats) both the SARS and MERS epidemics were caused by bat-borne coronaviruses. Less memorably, bat coronavirues also jumped into the farmyard and caused a serious viral epidemic in China’s pigs. Bats are the natural reservoir for Ebola, Hendra virus, Nipah virus. A single bat can host many different viruses without getting sick. Because they live in close proximity in (sometimes enormous) colonies, viruses readily infect huge numbers of bats. Additionally bats are unlike other small mammals such as rodents and shrews in that they have long lifespans. Most bats can live 20 to 40 years (although, sadly, most do not because, as any World War I aviator could tell you (if any were alive), flying presents certain dangers).
All of this begs the question of why bats are so prone to viruses and yet also so resistant to their effects. Zoologists and Cell biologists are only beginning to unravel this puzzle, but what they have found presents a fascinating picture of the interplay between cellular biology and the physical characteristics of animals.
In the course of metabolizing, reproducing, fighting diseases and so forth, cells are sometimes destroyed in novel ways which release free DNA into places it should not be. This is potentially a big problem and animals cope with it through a mechanism known, sensibly, as DNA-sensing. Alas, this is about as far as I can reasonably describe this process, but you can check out a diagram which explains cytosolic DNA sensing machinery in humans below.
Uhhh…at any rate, among mammals bats have uniquely rigorous physiological demands due to the energy requirements of flight. The high-impact demands of flying lead to substantial cellular damage, but also preclude the solution other mammals adapt (which, as you can see above, is inflammation). If bats were prone to inflammation to the same degree as other placental mammals, they would lose their ability to fly. Instead they have lost various genes and have a more muted response to miscellaneous DNA. This diminished ability to clean up random intracellular DNA makes our fluttery friends more prone to all sorts viruses, yet they have found some other way to endure viruses without over-responding.
As you can probably tell, the cytological processes we are talking about seem to play huge and important roles in cancer, autoimmune disorders, and a host of chronic metabolic disorders like heart disease & diabetes. Not only would it be immensely beneficial to understand bats’ seemingly unique DNA sensing apparatus (and response) in terms of virology and epidemiology, it might bear fruit in many other branches of medical inquiry.
Alas, this sort of blue skies research (or should we call it dark skies research in honor of our nocturnal subjects?) is exactly the sort of thing which enormous companies are disinterested in and which the Federal government has turned its back upon. Fortunately (?), the Chinese government is extremely interested in finding out more about but-human zoonoses and has been diligently working to figure out more about DNA sensing and concomitant immune response in chiroptera. In fact, if the grotesque bowdlerization of the subject which I have presented in this post does not satisfy your curiosity, you can read a rather fine (albeit technical) Chinese article from 2018 about the subject.
Greetings from New York City in this, the year of the plague, 2020. I wanted to write about something today other than coronavirus, since we don’t seem to have actually learned much new information about the virus itself (or if we have, it is information in peer-to-peer medical journals about immunoglobulins, virology statistics, lipid membranes and whatnot). However, whenever I try to write anything else, I keep getting distracted and looking at frothy coronavirus articles, which are really opinion pieces about political or business concerns. Clearly the only subject anyone cares about is novel coronavirus, so why force myself to write a piece about sidewinders or limpets? But what do we write about?
We already explored the hypothesized snake/bat zoonotic leap (concerning which matters I have never heard any further news) and we have talked about the “crown” (corona) embedded in the very name of this virus. I suppose we could write about the President’s stunning incompetence, but we already know that this authoritarian dolt is at best a conman, and, more likely, likely an outright traitor who owes billions of dollars to Russian mobster (of course, if that isn’t the case, he can easily prove this hypothesis wrong by releasing comprehensive financial records).
But our horrible president is not my real target here. I want toget back to talking about an enormous issue that our nation has been failing to deal with: the disastrous trope that “government is the problem”. This concept was cooked up by libertarian plutocrats as a tool for embezzling, defrauding, and plundering the country and it continues to undermine our collective well-being. It is insidious because it is self-fulfilling. As government is defunded and abused, it keeps getting worse. The plutocrats (or their mouthpieces) then say: “See: government doesn’t work! Only private industry produces results!” (although when the economy crashes they demand bailouts for their too-big-to-fail cartels).
Not many people love heeding rules (even good ones). As the government is captured by the people it is meant to regulate, the rules become even more onerous and complicated…and yet they don’t seem to address root problems (does this sound familiar?) This isn’t because of the nature of government! It is because moneyed interests are taking advantage of society!
If this continues, within a few years we will all be sitting in cardboard boxes in the toxic runoff of dead factories talking about how America is the world’s greatest country as other places sale past us. In fact, that sort of sounds like now, doesn’t it?
We have been on the wrong path for forty years and yet we knowingly continue to walk down it. Coronavirus offers us a chance to get off this evil road to serfdom and ignorance. The goal of society is not making a bunch of cartoonish monopoly men much richer. The goal of society is to learn more about existence. That knowledge can be further utilized for saving the world’s ecosystems, and making ark-ships, immortality potions, and all-powerful robot servants. It could be used to keep you and your family healthy and prevent you from dying from zoonotic viruses, Or it could be used for other aims, or for nothing at all! Knowledge stands beyond mere utility. It is not merely a means to an ends, but arguably the most precious of ends already, just in its own right.
Private enterprise is incurious about learning things unless there is a way to immediately use that knowledge to make money. Since this is almost never the way that knowledge works, private enterprise shirks away from from learning things. It revels in ignorance. This is why humankind’s forward technological progress has halted except for very slight incremental progress in consumer-side fields like robotics and computer science.
Whether the doomsayers are proven right and coronavirus kills hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people, or whether quarantines and restrictions succeed in mitigating casualties, this crisis has already reminded us of something critical. Government is not the enemy. Government is us. We need to de-monetize politics to whatever extent we can (and throw quite a lot of white-collar criminals in jail) and we need to get back to research and development. We can once again be a nation that makes astonishing discoveries and builds incredible things and helps people. Right now we are not headed that direction. Do you really want to keep going this way? Think about it as you weather this crisis. Also, best wishes to you and your families! As always, let me know what you think in the comments below.
To celebrate the beginning of the twenties, Ferrebeekeeper featured a wish-list article which requested (1) democratic reforms, and (2) more money for scientific research. Today we are following up on the second part of that post with a somewhat dispiriting report from the boringly named National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (a federal statistical agency within the National Science Foundation). As you might imagine, the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics has compiled a list of statistics concerning the state of science and engineering in the USA (it is their mission to present such a report to Congress every two years).
The report concentrates on 2017, when the United States spent $548 billion on research and development–more than any other nation! However the report also analyzes larger R&D trends among all nations over time–which makes our relative decline more apparent. In 2000, nearly 40% of the worldwide R&D budget was spent here in America. By 2017, the total world R&D budget was 2 trillion dollars, which means the American share is down to (approximately) 25%.
You would probably guess that a lot of the new worldwide R&D budget is Chinese, and that is correct. The report’s authors speculate that by 2019 (which was too recent for the statisticians to have comprehensive numbers) the Chinese R&D budget actually surpassed the American research budget. I guess we will see. China tends to spend more money on applied research, whereas we are still world leaders in blue-sky research, but they are catching up everywhere.
More and more national wealth is being pointlessly hoarded by robber barons. Do these plutocrats imagine they will live forever? Why not spend their ill-gotten lucre on developing robot workers, immortality potions, and alligator soldiers to guard them against popular insurrection? Even if the prospect of astonishing & miraculous innovations don’t beguile the Davos class, you would think the prospect of Chinese supremacy in tomorrow’s marketplace and battlefield would get them to spend more money on the lab. In the lack of business/private leadership (which, frankly, hasn’t been leading America to anywhere other than the underworld anyway) the solution is obvious. Write to your elected officials and demand more money go to scientific research. The future is on the line (and I wouldn’t mind some immortality potions and omniscient robot servants, even if the 1% don’t care for such things).
Happy 2020! This first Ferrebeekeeper post of the (de-facto) new decade arrives on January 2nd, a historically glum day, as people leave holiday merriment behind and return to their futile dayjobs. As far as we can currently tell, the ‘teens were not a good decade. Not only were there few major scientific or technological breakthroughs (beyond garden-variety “slightly better fuel economy” sorts of things), but, even worse, all of the politically expedient bunts which spineless or feckless leaders have made since the Cold War began to truly catch up to the world’s great democracies. Again and again, government figures of intellect, probity, and conscience were outmaneuvered by sinister oligarchs and pro-business cartels who used dark money, demagogic tricks, manipulative new technology, and straight-up cheating to thwart the popular will. The decade’s putative bright spot, a roaring bull economy is really a sugar rush made of frack gas and stock buybacks. In the meantime, the dark side of global consumer capitalism becomes more & more painfully evident in the form of desertification, ocean acidification/warming, climate change, and general ecological devastation.
This is all pretty discouraging to face as you go back to pointless drudgery in your horrible open office. Maybe I could have at least listed some of the compelling new tv shows or ranked good-looking celebrities or something?
Well don’t worry! I believe the situation could become much brighter than it presently seems. All is not yet completely lost. The 2020s do not necessarily need to be another lost decade like the teens. By adapting two sensible reforms, we can make the next decade actually good instead of good only for crooked billionaires and their mouthpieces. But when I say two major reforms, I mean two MAJOR reforms which would change how power and resources are allocated at a society-wide scale. As an American, I am addressing the problems here in America, but I believe these concepts are broadly applicable to democratic societies. The year is already getting longer so I will state these big concepts bluntly and succinctly.
1) Our broken political system needs to be fixed. Right now partisan polarization is ripping the country apart. Even broadly popular common-sense solutions are impossible to implement. Stunningly, extremists on both sides of the aisle would rather deny the opposite party a victory than do what is best for everyone in the country. The way to stop this polarization is through ranked-choice voting in state-wide elections and through independent election redistricting. The current system helps extremists. Ranked choice voting would make it much more difficult for fringe candidates to be elected. Independent redistricting would mean that voters choose their political representatives rather than vice versa. Since polarization would no longer be rewarded, political leaders could work together to gather some of the low-hanging fruit which has been left dangling by all of these sequesters, filibusters, pocket vetoes, hearings, and other scorched-earth political gambits. Obviously we can’t just implement such a plan instantly (it would be stopped dead by political gridlock). But if we started using ranked choice voting just for primaries and local elections it would help. Soon we might start seeing politicians with plans and ideas from both the red and blue parties, instead of these despicable apparatchiks we now have.
2) Public investment needs to be poured into blue sky scientific research, applied research and development, education, and infrastructure. In the market system, corporations will spend money on things which will make money for them in the immediate future. Government and universities do the heavy lifting by conducting real research on real things. The government makes the internet. Private companies make Netflix. Since corporate behemoths (ahem…monopolies) have an ever greater say in how money is spent, less money is being spent on science, education, and fundamental real physical systems (transportation, communication, sewage, water, and electric grids). R&D, education, and infrastructure are the seed corn of future prosperity. Right now, corporations are eating that seed corn (in the form of Trump’s stupid tax cuts for the economy’s wealthiest players). Right now, research scientists–the people whose ideas will keep you from dying horribly of a disease or keep the the future from becoming an unlivable hellscape–are being forced to grind their teeth as some character with an MBA from Sloan or Wharton explains that fundamental scientific research to understand the universe does not meet critical business metrics. I don’t mind busting the budget, but we should at least get something in return for the money.
Of course these two broad objectives things will be hard to accomplish, but I believe they are well within our collective grasp. Best of all, as things begin to improve, virtuous feedback loops will unlock even further progress. 2020 will be a hard year as we push against the corruption and failures of the past decade (or two) but I believe that if we keep these two broad goals in mind, we can make the twenties a roaring success that everyone will talk about with pride and happiness… in a future world which still exists!
It is the 50 year anniversary of the Apollo moon landing! It is a glorious anniversary: the moon landing was surely one of humankind’s proudest moments to date! Human beings left the Earth and walked upon the surface of a different world and returned to tell the tale! Yet it is a bittersweet anniversary too. Today we are too politically paralyzed, too indebted, and too subservient to world-bestriding monopolies to accomplish anything similarly stirring. It is unlikely we could even repeat the same feat! The president talks of returning to the moon by 2024, but anybody following the affairs of NASA recognizes that this is not going to happen (even assuming the current administration remains in place to push these particular space priorities).
In 1967, the Apollo program, by itself, was taking 4 percent of total government spending. That was an era when the USA’s GDP represented 38% of the total world economic output (it is around 24% today). There are lots of cranks and bumpkins who grouse about such outlays, but that money was spent here on Earth and it yielded rewards far beyond the moon landing itself. The communications, materials, and technology innovations which have changed so many aspects of life largely flowed out of the space program (and its shadowy military sibling programs).
Perhaps you are wondering why this is not a nostalgic & triumphalist post about an epochal human accomplishment. Maybe you are also perplexed about why I am writing about budgets and GDP instead of, you know, about landing human beings on the moon (although there has not been a human on the moon during my lifetime).
This is not just an anniversary post, it is also a polemical post about current policy failures. We are not investing any such vast outlays in long-term, open-ended research today. It is going to come back to haunt us in a future of reduced prospects and lackluster breakthroughs Fifty years hence, are we going to look back on 2019 and enthuse about an Instagram filter, or slight improvements in immunotherapy, or blockchain technology?
Wikipedia blandly notes ” blue-sky projects are politically and commercially unpopular and tend to lose funding to more reliably profitable or practical research.” The real genius of the moon-landing was that the end result was so spectacular and stupendous that it upended this conventional wisdom. U.S. politicians of the sixties had the genius to perceive that the Apollo program could bring us together, boost our national prestige, bankrupt the Russians, and yield enormous technological and scientific rewards all at the same time.
In 1969, it must have seemed like the beginning of a golden age of space exploration. After our heroic moon conquest we would build nuclear reactors on the moon and then create space cities in domed craters. There would be giant lunar rail guns, torus space stations, spaceplanes, and Mars missions (and my floating Venutian city). Instead we have the moldering hulk which is the International Space Station and some worn out space planes in museums. Our vision and our willpower faded as our greed grew greater.
But it is never too late! Space is still out there, bigger than ever. The moon landing showed that the impossible is possible if we work together. That’s still true too and it is something we should all think hard about as we look up at the night sky and make plans for what to do next.
I haven’t written very much about the current state of politics lately, not just because President Trump makes me angry & unhappy, but also because the deadlock in Washington (and precipitous national decline) make me sad and anxious. I would like to continue this precedent: paying breathless attention to all of Trump’s stunts and bullying just make him stronger (although I do think it is worth noting that he has been signing Bibles as though he were the author–and his devout Christian followers absolutely love it!). However, the latest enormities fall in the realm of policy and planning, so let’s take a look at the proposed 2020 Discretionary budget which was released by the White House yesterday. Predictably, this budget delivers slight funding increases to the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, while stripping safety net and environmental programs fairly drastically. I suppose this is not unexpected under any Republican president, even one such as this one, (although it raises eyebrows after the colossal tax giveaway to the rich). However, what truly raises eyebrows in the budget are the appalling cuts to scientific and medical research. Here are the actual numbers:
Proposed Discretionary Budget Changes
All dollar amounts are in billions.
|
Department Or Agency
|
2019 Budget (Estimate)
|
2020 Request
|
$ change
|
% change
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Defense1 | $685.0 | $718.3 | $33.4 | +5% |
| Veterans Affairs | $86.6 | $93.1 | $6.5 | +8% |
| Health and Human Services | $101.7 | $89.6 | -$12.1 | -12% |
| Education | $70.5 | $62.0 | -$8.5 | -12% |
| Homeland Security | $48.1 | $51.7 | $3.6 | +7% |
| Housing and Urban Development | ||||
| HUD gross total (excluding receipts) | $52.7 | $44.1 | -$8.6 | -16% |
| HUD receipts | -$9.3 | -$6.5 | $2.8 | -30% |
| State Department and other international programs2 | $55.8 | $42.8 | -$13.0 | -23% |
| Energy | $35.5 | $31.7 | -$3.8 | -11% |
| National Nuclear Security Administration | $15.1 | $16.5 | $1.3 | 9% |
| Other Energy | $20.4 | $15.2 | -$5.2 | -25% |
| NASA | $20.7 | $21.0 | $0.3 | +1% |
| Justice | $29.9 | $29.2 | -$0.7 | -2% |
| Agriculture | $24.4 | $20.8 | -$3.6 | -15% |
| Interior | $14.0 | $12.5 | -$1.5 | -11% |
| Commerce3 | $12.3 | $12.3 | * | <1% |
| Labor | $12.1 | $10.9 | -$1.2 | -10% |
| Transportation | $27.3 | $21.4 | -$5.9 | -22% |
| Treasury | $12.9 | $13.1 | $0.2 | +2% |
| Social Security Administration | $10.5 | $10.1 | -$0.4 | -4% |
| National Science Foundation | $7.8 | $7.1 | -$0.7 | -9% |
| Environmental Protection Agency | $8.8 | $6.1 | -$2.8 | -31% |
| Army Corps of Engineers | $7.0 | $4.8 | -$2.2 | -31% |
| Small Business Administration | $0.7 | $0.7 | * | -5% |
| Other agencies | $21.3 | $19.1 | -$2.1 | -10% |
Notes
* $50 million or less
1. Includes $9.2 billion for emergency border security and hurricane recovery funding
2. Includes funding for the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, Treasury international programs and 12 international agencies
3. Appropriations for 2019 are incomplete.
Source: White House
Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR
I guess Kudos for very slightly increasing the NASA budget (although even there, there is apparently no money for the new space telescope) but otherwise this proposal contains a lot to be angry about. I suspect you will find your own sources of fury in this spreadsheet (although please remember that this budget will never pass the House), but what jumps out at me are the substantial cuts to the National Science Foundation. Additionally, buried in that Health and Human Services number is a $4.5 Billion (11%) cut to the National Institute for Health, the agency which works to prevent pandemics, eradicate communicable disease, spearhead general research into life saving medicine, and generally keep Americans alive! Not only do Federal science dollars stave off the plague, they support blue-sky research which will lead to the next wave of innovations, and technological breakthroughs. What the U.S. Federal Government spent for scientific research in the past has made today’s most prominent, important (and lucrative) companies a possibility.
To use an overused metaphor, cutting these numbers is like not buying seed for next year’s crops. Additionally we are counting on fundamental research to counteract the impact expected from climate change, agricultural upheaval, forest loss, and energy problems (although, all of those problem will, of course, be exacerbated by other cuts in this budget).
Beyond scientists, environmentalists, and people who would like to see humankind survive into the future, there is another group that should perhaps be angry about this budget: Republican budget hawks. For all of its deep cuts and raw lack of appeal, this budget still blows up the deficit by 40% over the next 10 years, (from $22 trillion to $31 trillion). If President Obama had released this budget proposal (if he had been bitten by a rabid dog or a radioactive Ed Meese or something) I have a feeling that Republicans would have flown into apoplectic rage about the proposed deficit spending.
We will keep an eye on this budget. The 2019 Trump budget proposal was similarly problematic and Republican legislators simply ignored it and passed nice budget raises for the research arms of the government (which Trump duly signed, either because he did not care or did not notice). Yet a budget proposal reveals the priorities and moral choices of its creators, and this budget is blind to the needs of the future in almost every conceivable way.
One of the great mysteries of neurobiology is how memories are stored. We have a few tantalizing clues, but the precise biological mechanism for how memories are created and where they are stored in cells is still unknown. All of your lost loves and childhood dreams, your family’s birthdays and preferences, your own name and darkest secret…nobody knows where they are in your head. And, um, we still don’t know…however, thanks to research on sea snails, we have some new clues.
Scientists have long believed that memories are stored within the structure and connective patterns between the synapses which connect neurons. The new experiment suggests that this may prove to be a misconception.
Scientists trained a particular sort of sea snail (which have “small” brains with only 20,000 neurons) to respond in certain unusual ways to electrical shocks. Then the team removed ribonucleic acid (RNA), from nerve tissue of the trained snails and injected it into the circulatory system of untrained snails. Other “control” snails which were untampered with responded to electrical shocks naturally, however the snails which were treated with RNA from snails taught to curl their tails for prolonged periods immediately demonstrated this unusual behavior.
The findings suggest that our conjecture about where memories are stored may be quite wrong…or at least disturbingly incomplete. The snail research indicates that, at some fundamental level, memories are stored in the nuclei of neurons. Now scientists will try to replicate the results in other animals to test this hypothesis. Everything in this sort of research ends of being more complicated and interlinked than initially thought, so don’t forget about those synapses just yet. We are still at the beginning of this tantalizing scientific quest.
So, the super massive ulti-mega-omnibus funding bill passed today (despite a last-minute executive tantrum) and the bill is…good? This goes against all of the doom-and-gloom scenarios which dominate the news (and this blog), and it is unpalatable to praise any product from the 115th Congress of the United States of America, but, despite the president’s recommendation for massive cuts to fundamental scientific inquiry, Congress coughed up a LOT of new money for science.
I know you are all smart, so let’s get straight to the numbers. For its annual budget, the NIH received 3 billion dollars more than last year (an 8.7 % increase). The National Science Foundation got a $295 million budget raise (3.9 % increase). The USGS received a $63 million budget (6%) expansion, while Congress increased the budget of the NOAA by $234 million (4%) to $5.9 billion. The Department of Energy received a whopping 16 percent raise of $868 million dollars: their annual budget is now $6.26 billion (obvs. we need shiny new nuclear weapons…but maybe there is some money for fundamental nuclear research in there too). Even the EPA kept the same budget as last year and experienced no cuts.
Best of all NASA gets a much-needed lift. To quote The Atlantic (which was the source of these numbers):
Nasa will receive $20.7 billion, $1.1 billion more than the previous year. The space agency’s science programs will increase by about 8 percent to $6.2 billion and its planetary-science program, in particular, by 21 percent, to $2.2 billion.
Of course, the biggest slice of the pie goes to the military, however a lot of Defense Department money ends up going to research too… although I would be happier if, instead of building manned aircraft appropriate for the Cold War, they spent more money on blue sky research and moonshot scifi stuff like wormholes, grasers, super robots, and railguns. But that research (and more) is in there too…somewhere…so hooray!
I have been marching around with a pitchfork and a torch demanding that Congress be defenestrated…but this budget unexpectedly satisfies my most cherished demands. Maybe if there were more blueprints like this I could swallow some more tax give-aways and religious idiocy and what not. When I am having political arguments, I always say I will support any stupidity as long as there is more money for fundamental scientific research. This government has really pushed just how far such a bargain extends…and yet they came through in the end.
Of course, there may be some people who cry out that all of those millions and billions could be given to impoverished communities (Democrats) or to needy multi-billionaire plutocrats (Republicans), but ensuring scientific research and keeping Visigoth hordes from swimming the ocean and sacking our cities are the two things the government MUST do to ensure there is a future….and they have done that. The future generations who will have to pay this leviathan $1.3 trillion tab, might actually get something for their money: a yet-unknown equivalent of the internet, the capacitor, the moon landing, or the wonder vaccines of yesteryear. At least the government is trying to fulfill humankind’s most fundamental aspiration—to know more about the universe and how it works so we don’t destroy ourselves (sadly, this great quest, as construed by the powers-that-be, involves building tons of super-weapons with which to destroy ourselves, but nobody said life was easy).
Of course it is a tumultuous time and I may be saying a very different thing next week, but for the present the seed corn for the crops of the future has been stowed away. I am pleasantly surprised to say “Good job!” to our elected officials.
Exciting news from the world of mollusk research! Scientists have discovered new insights into how cuttlefish blend in so seamlessly with their underwater world. Cuttlefish are chameleons of the undersea realm: they have the ability to change their color and texture in order to blend in with seaweed, coral, the ocean floor or whatever habitat they encounter. Yet, even more remarkably, they can mimic the rough coloration and shape of other organisms, thereby fooling predators and prey by mimicking crabs and fish.
Cuttlefish copy the textures they find in their environment by means of small nodules known as papillae. The cephalopods extend and retract these intricate bumps using muscles. They can become perfectly smooth in order to maximize their speed and maneuverability or they can take on the texture of rocks, coral, or even seaweed. Scientists have discovered that the cuttlefish accomplishes this not by means of continuous concentration, but instead with muscles which can be locked in place by means of certain neurotransmitters (it pays not to contemplate the vivisection through which this knowledge was obtained). If a cuttlefish takes on a certain texture and then promptly loses use of the relevant muscle nerve, the neurotransmitters remain active and it takes hours for the creature’s metabolism to return it to its neutral shape.
This may seem like a minor insight, but learning that cuttlefish (and presumably the squids and octopuses which use the same sort of papillae to alter their texture) are utilizing a muscle trick which is not unlike mechanism by which clams lock their shells in place is another step in unlocking the mysteries of these remarkable tentacled masters of disguise.
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