Werner Herzog gets geological

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , ,

Posted on behalf of Noah Baker

InfernoThe film Into the Inferno opens with a grand spectacle. The camera glides up and over tiny figures clustered on the peak of the volcanic island of Ambrym in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. Far below, an ominous lava lake splutters to a bombastic choral soundtrack. There is a sense of ritualistic grandeur here that sets the tone for what follows.

The documentary, created by legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog and Cambridge volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, straddles the science and culture of volcanoes. It is strong on exploring the significance of volcanoes to humanity — their role in local mythologies, traditions and lifestyles, now and through the centuries. The film even suggests that our relationship with these geological giants stretches back to early hominids living in the shadows of volcanoes in East African rift valleys.

Like many Herzog films, Inferno goes off on tangents and strays into quirky side stories, hopping about among unusual locations. One moment we’re hearing from a volcanology station in North Korea, where Oppenheimer, in a rare international collaboration, has been working with local volcanologists for several years. The next we’re in the midst of an archaeological dig in Ethiopia, scientists scraping away at the soil in search of early hominid remains. The stories and locations do link back to volcanoes, but sometimes a little obliquely.

Oppenheimer occasionally brings insights into the science among the craters and cones, but his central quest remains cultural. And that yields a trove — not least the ‘cargo cult’ on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu. Its members worship a US serviceman called John Frum, who they claim lives in local volcano Yasur.

Noah Baker is senior editor in Nature’s multimedia team. Hear his Nature Podcast interview with Oppenheimer here.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Show home for the Red Planet

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , , ,

Posted on behalf of Elizabeth Gibney

Mars show home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London.

The National Geographic Mars show home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, London. The habitat is the work of Wild Creations in consultation with observatory astronomers and Stephen Petranek, author of How We’ll Live on Mars.

National Geographic mini-series MARS runs through 19 December

A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit.

The mock-up, in London this week to 16 November, promotes the National Geographic channel docudrama MARS, by director Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Launched on 13 November, the mini-series charts the 2033 journey of a fictional first crewed mission to Mars by a blissfully collaborative International Mars Science Foundation, and subsequent attempts to establish a settlement.

As Earth’s second-nearest neighbour after Venus, Mars is widely seen as the best candidate planet for human colonization. But it lacks Earth’s thick atmosphere and global magnetic field, and is extremely inhospitable in myriad other ways. Colonists would need to be protected from temperatures that plummet to -70 degrees Celsius at night at the equator, as well as the high-energy cosmic particles and ultra-violet solar radiation that pummel the planet’s surface.

Author Stephen Petranek with Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory Greenwich public astronomer.

Author Stephen Petranek with Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory Greenwich public astronomer.

National Geographic mini-series MARS runs through 19 December

The Martian igloo, the work of display and model-making company Wild Creations, is a fun way of exploring what constraints the environment would put on design. The walls are a whopping 60 centimetres thick — just an eighth of the almost 5-metre depth they would need to be capable of protecting colonists from the radiation, said Stephen Petranek at the show-home opening. His book How We’ll Live on Mars inspired the series, and he consulted on the show home alongside the observatory’s public astronomer Marek Kukula. Moreover, Petranek notes, it would need to be built of bricks made by microwaving a mixture of polymer granules with Mars’ clay mineral-based soil. And an igloo is just one possible design. The same bricks could easily make bigger structures, even a large Gothic cathedral, he says. Or homes on the Red Planet could be built in the natural underground hollows that once housed lava, or in the side of craters.

Daily life for the 10,000 people Petranek imagines might some day dwell in this kind of shelter does not look appealing. Accessed via an ‘airlock’ stuck into the igloo wall, the dome’s interior is claustrophobically small — just a few paces across. Features would have to include an exercise machine to combat muscle wastage in the low-gravity environment, and an indoor farm. The small potted plants I spot on a mezzanine near the building’s ceiling hardly look substantial enough to sustain a hungry Martian for more than a few weeks — in contrast to the heaps of potatoes ingeniously grown by fictional astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) in Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian. Settlers would also need access to water, which (assuming it is there) may only exist in liquid form dozens of metres down in the planet’s concrete-hard ground.  

Artist's depiction of the show home in situ.

Artist’s depiction of the show home in situ.

National Geographic

The message here seems to be about thinking big to encourage ambition, as with the MARS mini-series. That uses an innovative format: the drama unfolds amid “flashbacks” to interviews with actual scientists and space pioneers, such as Musk. These highlight how real progress often initially involves failure, but  also serve to make the dramatised scenes seem even more fictional.

Petranek notes that plans such as Musk’s are “much more realistic than people give them credit for”. And whether or not they succeed, SpaceX is driving all space exploration in the direction of human missions to Mars, he argues. But for now, most planetary scientists still see living there as science fiction, and that’s not just because of unfeasible costs or optimistic technology projections.

Many researchers don’t actually want to send people to the Red Planet yet. It could well have harboured life billions of years ago, and finding that would tell us that life on Earth was not a one-off fluke. NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the China National Space Administration all plan to put rovers on Mars in the 2020s to scour it for ancient life. But while rovers can be carefully sterilised to prevent contamination, sending humans would almost certainly contaminate the planet, and could mean we never find out. From that perspective at least, there is no hurry.

Elizabeth Gibney is a reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @LizzieGibney. Listen in to her Nature Podcast talk with Andrew Coates, the planetary scientist working on the ESA’s first Mars rover. 

MARS runs through 19 December on the National Geographic channel. 

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

 

The warp and weft of wearable electronics

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Zhang 1

Optical microscope image of a battery electrode made of metallic textiles and active materials.

Dongrui Wang

 

3Q: Zijian Zheng

One of today’s challenges for materials scientists is wearable electronics — smart materials that monitor ailments, harvest energy, track performance or communicate. These remain expensive and hard to produce in bulk, and are often unattractive. Polymer scientist Zijian Zheng takes inspiration from his designer and business colleagues at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Institute of Textiles and Clothing. His solution: lightweight electronic yarns that can be made into textiles by adapting existing production processes.

 How do you create wearable electronics?

People need to feel like they’re not wearing electronics, so the materials must be lightweight and flexible. They must also be high-performance, as devices have to charge rapidly, last for a long time and be sweat-proof. Applying all these criteria, we create electronic textiles in which the fabrics themselves form the sensors and devices – from light-emitting diodes, photovoltaics, organic transistors and supercapacitors to batteries. We can make a supercapacitor using conductive yarn, made by coating cotton with nickel, and penetrating it with a form of graphene oxide. If you put a pair of these strands together in parallel, and fill the space between with an electrolyte gel, you can make it work as a supercapacitor storing energy as positively and negatively charged ions collect at the different wires. You could use that to power other devices, such as sensors, or store energy generated from photovoltaics. We’re working on making lithium batteries using the same principles.

Polymer scientist Zijian Zheng.

Polymer scientist Zijian Zheng.

What are your biggest challenges?

When integrating different materials together in an electronic textile, the interfaces create the biggest problems. You can get mismatches between mechanical and thermal expansion properties, and in a flexible system the weakest points are where the device twists or bends. In my group we focus on using polymers to address these issues. For example, we make new polymers that add texture to the surface of textiles, allowing them to be coated in copper at low temperatures for durability. To ensure scalability, our goal is to make textiles that can be integrated with the technology the clothing industry has used for the past 200 years. Our composite yarns can be used in sewing machines, and complicated patterns can be created from them using machine embroidery. From there, you start to add active materials to make devices in ways that are compatible with textile processing. For example, we’re now making photovoltaic cells printable via textile colour-printing technology and encapsulating them with textile-finishing technology. And we are set to make a radio-frequency identification tagging device within a garment, powered by a supercapacitor. We’ve designed it to hide the supercapacitor as an embroidered pattern, like camouflage. We also have a student working with local textile company EPRO Development, trying to put the metallic, conducting textile into real production. Devices will come a bit later as they are ten times more complex to make. Cost is a challenge too: the textile industry cares about every penny. In introducing functional elements into garments such as a breathable section, you might only be allowed to increase production costs by around 10 cents.

Zhang 2

One hank of copper-coated cotton yarns used for making wearable devices and circuits.

Ka-chi Yan

How do the different disciplinary strands in your institute work together?

My institute covers the whole chain of production for textiles and clothing – with materials science and chemistry groups sitting alongside business and design. So we have three streams of students and teaching is totally different for each. The major challenge when I lecture is how to deliver my engineering or scientific-based content to a bunch of artists. We tend to give them an overview to help them understand first, with lots of examples, before we come down into the fundamentals. It’s very different from the physical science students, where we take them through a logical sequence from beginning to end. The artists ask so many questions. Generally they want to know if they can do something with a material, and don’t care about why it functions. They seldom ask “Why does this electron go through there?”

Interview by Elizabeth Gibney, a reporter on physics for Nature based in London. She tweets at @LizzieGibney.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

The art of engineering: 9 Evenings revisited

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Composer John Cage's xxxx at 9 Evenings, October 1966.

John Cage, Variations VII, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, October 1966.

Adelaide de Menil

I’m gazing at a stage draped in white when a giant zipper suddenly appears, projected onto one wall. As it works its way noisily around, more projections — live-streamed or pre-recorded moving images of buildings, blurred pedestrians, discarded clothing and simmering water — judder on crumpled backdrops. An apparently random urban soundtrack lulls and roars in the background. In the foreground, performers skip rope and cut hair; one solemnly rips up, boils and eats her shirt. It’s quite an evening.

Robert Whitman at performance of Side Effects, October 2016.

Robert Whitman (centre) at performance of Side Effects, October 2016.

Christopher Fernandez

The artist behind this indeterminate, playful, technologically rich and vaguely disturbing piece, Side Effects (commissioned by Arts Catalyst) is Robert Whitman. The evening is an homage to 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a legendary series of performances that, 50 years ago, galvanised New York with an unprecedented mix of cutting-edge technologies and avant-garde art. Whitman was one of 10 artists — among them multi-media maverick Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage and choreographer Lucinda Childs — who collaborated one-to-one with 30 engineers, most from research powerhouse Bell Labs and including, notably, the visionary electrical engineer Billy Klüver. Klüver was adamant about involving technologists rather than scientists, feeling that technology is essentially about “the material and the physicality”. It was a moment that paved the way to crossover disciplines such as digital art.

There was a utopian edge to technology then, as America literally reached for the Moon. For artists seeking new media, high-tech expertise enabled fresh explorations in sound and vision. For the engineers, artists expanded what Klüver (already a veteran of collaborations with Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Rauschenberg and Cage) saw as constrained horizons. Whitman, whom I caught up with after the performance of Side Effects, recalled that the 9 Evenings teams included a lot of “arranged marriages”, but worked if goals and enthusiasms chimed.

Billy Kluver in 1965.

Billy Klüver with Robert Rauschenberg’s work Oracle in 1965.

New York Times, courtesy of E.A.T.

By that time (October 1966), Whitman had been creating immersive pieces for some years, combining film, performers and ‘shape-changing’ props such as plastic sheeting. His 1960 The American Moon, for instance, had a hallucinatory quality and a sense of “slow time”, according to fellow experimentalist Claes Oldenburg. 9 Evenings offered a chance to push the boundaries in a bold venue.

That was the 69th Regiment Armory, a hangar-like midtown Manhattan edifice where, over 50 years before, another exhibition had exploded America’s cultural complacency with artworks such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. For 9 Evenings, some 1,500 people a night filed into its reverberating spaces.

Signal splitters, Geiger counters

Whitman’s contribution Two Holes of Water – 3 featured input from a number of engineers, including cellular telephony researcher Robby Robinson. The piece involved 23 performers, seven plastic-wrapped cars equipped with film projectors, one of the first fibre-optic miniature video cameras, film shot using an optical device with parallel mirrors, and a signal splitter that allowed a performer’s front and back view to be superimposed. A projected live image of water being poured into a glass on the Armory floor and documentary footage of Alaskan flora and fauna also featured.

Equally bravura was Cage’s composition Variations VII (pictured above), which harnessed live feeds from numerous sound sources. As Cage ‘played’ several transistor radios, 10 telephone lines picked up ambient noises from locations round the city, including the 14th Street Con Edison electric power station and the press room of the New York Times. Signals from two Geiger counters were converted into sounds; six contact microphones amplified noises generated by performers handling devices such as juicers, while data from electrodes on the forehead of another were converted into sound waves.

Robert Whitman in the 1970s.

Robert Whitman in the late 1960s.

A&T archives, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Some critics tore into the event, as technology historian Patrick McCray has noted. Whitman, Rauschenberg, Klüver and fellow engineer Fred Waldhauer, however, had already forged ahead with another venture. The non-profit foundation Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) took the cross-fertilisation further. By 1969, E.A.T. comprised 2,000 artists and as many technologists, riding the wave of innovation in electronics and communications. Their Projects Outside Art series, for instance, featured Telex: Q&A, which linked public spaces in India, Japan, New York and Sweden to encourage citizens of each to question future possibilities.

Meanwhile, a programme with aims similar to E.A.T.’s had sprung up at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Art and Technology, the brainchild of curator Maurice Tuchman, boasted star physicist Richard Feynman as consultant. Whitman was also involved. So began his immensely fruitful teamwork with optical scientist John Forkner, then at Philco-Ford, the company that built the equipment at NASA’s Johnson Space Center mission control.

Optics scientist John Forkner.

Optical scientist John Forkner.

A&T archives, courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art

“This public-relations official introduced me to a guy with a long beard. I was lucky,” says Whitman. “John was a natural genius in optics and very interested in music and art. I remember that at one point I was sitting in a car with Feynman and he said, ‘Where’d you find him? He’s terrific.’”

Over 18 months, Whitman and Forkner created a spectacular installation for LACMA at the US Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. Tuchman described the work as an “optical tour de force” incorporating 1,000 corner-shaped mirrors reflecting the viewer’s multiplied image to them, as well as pulsating mylar mirrors and “eerily bright three-dimensional objects (a pear, drill, goldfish bowl with live fish, a knife, a clock, ferns, etc.).”

E.A.T. was equally busy at Expo ’70: the Pepsi Pavilion was a focus for several of its cutting-edge collaborations. A major element was a spherical mirror over 27 metres in diameter that created real images of visitors, hanging in space above their heads. Whitman contributed here too, along with physicist Elsa Garmire, while artist Fujiko Nakaya worked with physicist Tom Mee to create the evocative fog sculpture capping the structure. It was clear that by this time, as McCray puts it, artists and engineers between them had “rewired modern art”.

Mirror dome room at the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.

Mirror dome room at the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka.

Shunk-Kender

Whitman is now 81, and busy. Many other movers and shakers behind 9 Evenings and E.A.T. are gone. As for E.A.T. itself, it has effectively ended as an entity, but “exists as an idea,” notes its director Julie Martin (Klüver’s widow). Klüver himself, in a 1999 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, said, “once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together, there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist”.

I asked Whitman what he thought about 9 Evenings now. “Looking back is what I call ‘dead guy stuff’. You need to get onto the next thing. As for the future, it’d be fun to be around.” There is something there of the unquenchably optimistic technophile, always looking for the next innovation. Yet just for a moment, he did look back. “I didn’t know it at the time, but for me it all started with Emmett Kelly,” he told me. On a childhood visit to the circus in the 1940s, Whitman had been galvanised by the iconic American clown, who had a routine where he swept up the spotlight with a broom. “I was staring at everyone around me, wondering why they weren’t seeing this miracle. It set me on my way.”

I thought of the spotlit zipper in Side Effects, and began too to see how an early bent towards flux and illumination led him to performance, advanced technology and the intensive mix of both that was 9 Evenings. And beyond.

Arts Catalyst’s 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering Revisited 1966/2016 continues to 29 October.

Archival information on 9 Evenings and E.A.T. can be accessed at the Daniel Langlois Foundation Collection. Maurice Tuchman’s report on LACMA can be accessed here. My thanks to Robert Whitman, Julie Martin and Patrick McCray for additional information. McCray is currently writing a book (tentatively entitled Art Rewired: Engineering a New Creative Culture) on the art-technology nexus in that era. His Leaping Robot blog meanwhile offers much fascinating detail on 9 Evenings, E.A.T. and more.

Science fiction: journey to the East

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Cixin Liu

Cixin Liu.

Li Yibo

Posted on behalf of Iulia Georgescu

Last week’s Chinese Sci-Fi event at the London Literature festival was irresistible: I love science fiction and have a keen interest in the Far East. The star here was Cixin Liu, whose 2008 Hugo-awarded novel The Three-Body Problem is a huge best-seller in China and, since its English translation (Head of Zeus, 2015), beyond. (See Nature’s interview with its translator, sci-fi writer Ken Liu, here.) Liu’s fellow panellist was Xiaolu Guo, the award-winning, genre-defying Chinese novelist and filmmaker now living in Britain, whose works include the 2014 I Am China and 2012 UFO In Her Eyes.

Xiaolu Guo.

Xiaolu Guo.

provided by Xiaolu Guo

Both Cixin Liu and Guo had much to say. They agreed that sci-fi is a Western concept imported into China in the late 1970s and 80s. Post-Cultural Revolution China had the perfect climate for nurturing the genre, they said. First, there was a void in fantastic and speculative literature: much of Chinese literature in the twentieth century was focused on realism. Secondly, as science education was very poor at that time, sci-fi was a means of educating about science. The public fell upon it, eager to learn more about the latest discoveries.

Although Liu was heavily influenced by Western sci-fi writers, Chinese sci-fi has unique features. The difference, he seemed to think, lies in the Christian tradition imprinted on Western fiction. For instance, there is much discussion of whether the ethical implications of human cloning are perceived differently in China (see this Nature article). Liu averred that more than that, the idea of a doomsday, so dominant in Western thought, is less so in Chinese culture, which enshrines the concept of time flowing continuously and eternally.

imagesThat said, Liu’s The Three-Body Problem is about the end of the world — which is perhaps one of the reasons for its international popularity. (Japanese sci-fi is rich in apocalyptic scenarios too, for example in classics such as Kobo Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4, Sakyo Komatsu’s Japan Sinks, or the Neon Genesis Evangelion media franchise.)

Liu and Guo agreed that for them, the appeal of sci-fi lies in its departure from realism. Guo suggested that sci-fi is perhaps the only way for writers living in China to talk about political and social issues, as with Jingfang Hao‘s Hugo-winning novelette Folding Beijing (set in a future where three social classes inhabit Beijing in different spatial dimensions that only occasionally overlap). For Liu, sci-fi allows him to explore a bigger picture – humanity as a whole and its place in the Universe, as in the last book of his Three-Body trilogy, set in the very distant future.

The event made me realize anew how little of contemporary Asian literature has been translated into English. I hope that Liu’s popularity prompts publishers to more translations: I already have a long wish list.

Iulia Georgescu is senior editor, Nature Physics.

 

Access Nature’s science fiction special here; and Nature’s science-fiction column Futures (and Future Conditional blog) here. For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Smoke on the water

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Posted on behalf of Rich Monastersky

41818dc4-5a71-11e6-8ecd-005056b70bb8

© 2016 Lionsgate

Nobody loves disasters more than movie producers. If threats in real life matched their frequency on screen, we should be in a constant state of panic over the risks of alien invasions, zombie viruses and asteroid impacts. Given the film industry’s appetite for catastrophes, it is no surprise that it has finally focused on the greatest environmental disaster in US history: the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began with explosions that killed 11 people and sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Peter Berg’s film, Deepwater Horizon, is filled with Hollywood heavyweights. Mark Wahlberg plays an everyman electrician who finds his inner hero during the disaster. Kurt Russell portrays the grizzled rig chief who steps up while everything is collapsing, and John Malkovich is the company man chasing profit at the expense of prudence. But the real star is the rig itself. Berg provides a rare look at life on board one of the most sophisticated drilling platforms on the planet. For that reason alone, the film is worth watching, despite the unnecessary liberties it takes with several key facts.

Deepwater Horizon was a US$560-million marvel of engineering, with a gleaming steel deck bigger than a football field perched on four immense floating legs. In 2009, the vessel had distinguished itself by drilling the deepest oil well to date. Owned by the company Transocean, Deepwater Horizon was leased to BP at the time of the disaster and was finishing drilling operations on the Macondo oil well, which reached 18,360 feet (5,596 metres) below sea level.

Fire boat response crews battle the blazing remnants of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. A Coast Guard MH-65C dolphin rescue helicopter and crew document the fire while searching for survivors. Multiple Coast Guard helicopters, planes and cutters responded to rescue the Deepwater Horizon's 126 person crew.

Firefighters try to extinguish blazes on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the aftermath of explosions that killed 11 people.

US Coast Guard

The movie’s producers spared no expense on their star. Production designer Chris Seagers and his crew of 85 welders worked for eight months to build an 85% scale replica of the Deepwater Horizon, which helped to drive the cost of the movie to an estimated value well over $100 million.

To most of the public, the name Deepwater Horizon brings to mind the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed into the Gulf over 87 days after the catastrophic blowout. For the filmmakers, the spill is literally an afterthought — a few words that scroll on screen at the movie’s end. The drama concentrates instead on the first few hours of the disaster, when the crew was racing to finish its work on the long-delayed oil well.

Berg’s movie brings to life an industry that touches everybody but is seen by few. Oil and gas operations on land and offshore bore the holes that provide more than half the energy used across the globe. And yet the industry is overlooked, even shunned, in a society where most of us prefer not to dwell too much on the potentially disturbing origins of our gasoline, steak and smartphones.

Well from hell

Deepwater Horizon puts faces on the drillers, electricians, crane operators, toolpushers and mud engineers who were among the 126 people on board at the time of the explosion. That day began tensely: the crew was behind schedule in finishing up operations on the “well from hell”. Deepwater Horizon’s assigned task was to drill the hole and then seal the walls of the Macondo well with steel casing and concrete. On 20 April, the crew had finished pumping concrete to the bottom of the hole and was testing the seal job. After that, Deepwater Horizon would depart and a smaller production rig would move in to extract the oil and gas.

To the credit of Berg and the screenwriters, the movie accurately portrays many details of the critical testing phase, during which the first signs of problems arise. But in the interest of creating an engaging narrative, the filmmakers turn these pivotal scenes into a cartoonish contest of good versus evil. BP employees — particularly Malkovich’s character, Donald Vidrine — come across as primarily responsible for the disaster, while the Transocean crew members are the heroes more focused on safety.*

deepwater-cover-250That stark contrast in the way the movie treats BP and Transocean does not match the conclusions of several investigative panels, which found that representatives of both companies on the rig failed to heed important warning signs that immense pressure was building up in the well. The report to President Obama from the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling found plenty of blame to go around, including government regulations and the company Halliburton, which had previously identified problems in the type of cement slurry it used in the Macondo well on the morning of the blowout.

The movie also neglects to mention that Transocean did not tell the Deepwater Horizon crew about a similar pressure problem that had almost turned disastrous at one of its wells in the North Sea in late 2009 — a point raised by the National Commission in its report.  And Transocean did not identify problems with a crucial safety device, called a blowout preventer, according to an investigation by the US Chemical Safety Board, which issued its report this year. The blowout preventer is a 400-tonne apparatus that sits on the seafloor and is designed to seal the well if the pressure inside rises to uncontrollable levels. But the crew on Deepwater Horizon did not act quickly enough when evidence of trouble first appeared and the blowout preventer failed in the crucial moment.

In the end, though, blame is not central to the movie. It is more concerned with the heroic actions of many members of the crew, including some of those who perished, which saved most of the lives on the Deepwater Horizon. Although the film alters some facts here, too, it captures the central truth that some ordinary people stepped forward in the darkest hour and committed acts of extreme bravery.

*The US government indicted Vidrine and Robert Kaluza, another BP employee on the rig at the time of the explosion, on charges of involuntary manslaughter but later dropped the charges. Vidrine pleaded guilty last December to a misdemeanor pollution charge and was sentenced to 10 months of probation, a $50,000 fine and community service. Kaluza was charged with the same offence but took the case to trial and won in February.

Rich Monastersky is news features editor at Nature, based in Washington DC. He tweets at @RichMonastersky.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

The rise and fall of the UFO

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Posted on behalf of Daniel Cressey

ARC028 - UFO - CoverIt seems amazing that anyone ever believed in them. In the mid-twentieth-century heyday of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), grainy pictures of flying saucers hovering in the sky were a staple even in  respectable magazines such as Time and Life. Volumes were written earnestly detailing the visits of aliens. This novel form of cold war paranoia seemed to seep into the collective psyche on both sides of the Atlantic.

For believe they did. A sizeable section of the public ate up cheap books on saucers and devoured tales of visitors from beyond our planet, whether their intent was good or ill. Fortunately for anyone enamoured of American subcultures in all their garish glory, the speculative-fiction writer Jack Womack has amassed a huge collection of these books, from sex-obsessed adult novels to earnest pseudo-academic treatises. He reproduces many of these gems in his lavishly illustrated menagerie of the tracts, Flying Saucers Are Real.

ARC028 - UFO - MIichael, C - Round Trip To Hell In A Flying Saucer

A 1955 title.

They range from what Womack calls the “finest science fiction cover to ever appear on a non-science fiction book” (The Flying Saucers Are Real by Donald Keyhoe) to the mundane (Richard S. Shaver’s 1948 I Remember Lemuria).

While Womack is deeply invested in these books, he doesn’t spare them. UFO Photographs Around the World Vols 1 and 2, he notes, “offers the most complete compilation of lens flares, camera smudges, film imperfections, blurs and jiggled shots ever published”. Womack points out that British linguist Gavin Gibbons (author of The Coming of the Space Ships (1956) and They Rode In Space Ships (1957)), and others from the UK brought “a wide-eyed if not overly creative spirit to the field”. Gibbons rewrote other people’s UFO encounters, “managing to make their accounts far less interesting”.

This is no attempt to deconstruct the reasons behind the rise and fall of the UFO. Instead, Womack seems to be attempting to understand a bizarre lost cult by collecting the artefacts they left.

We learn of George Adamski, born in Poland in 1891, who ended up founding the “Royal Order of Tibet” in California (and co-writing the 1953 Flying Saucers Have Landed) before setting up an eatery. Adamski’s ‘close encounters’ include a man who claimed to be from Venus — evidenced by the fact that his “trousers were not like mine”. In Britain, Leonard G. Cramp’s 1966 UFOs and Anti-Gravity purported to lay bare the engineering of the flying saucer, complete with detailed blueprints, which he apparently thought revealed an anti-gravity system “similar to one of his own devising”.

Womack describes another book, Flying Saucer from Mars (1954), as written by “Cedric Allingham” — a hoax said to have been perpetrated by a now-deceased British astronomer and his friend. This friend apparently admitted pretending to be Allingham to give a talk to a flying saucer club, during which he wore a false moustache.

Harold T. Wilkins's 1954 text.

Harold T. Wilkins’s 1954 text.

Womack’s book can be as confusing to follow as the arguments of his UFO proponents. The typefaces switch to signal passages from source materials, and covers, photos and drawings abound. Following the huge numbers of authors mentioned and whether they are believers, hoaxers or fictional becomes something of a task. There is no clear logic to this collection of what science-fiction luminary William Gibson calls “testimonials to certain human needs” in the introduction.

Some of the notes accompanying the awesome images are brief and baffling. We read on page 10: “When John C. Sherwood was seventeen, Gray Barker published his book, Flying Saucers are Watching You (1967), a dry account of events during the 1966 Michigan Flap. Barker’s congratulation, post-publication, ‘Evidently the fans swallowed this one with a gulp.’” Who Sherwood and Barker are, and what the “Michigan Flap” was, we can only guess.

Womack’s collection is heading to Georgetown University Library in Washington DC, to be preserved among its special collections. It may stand as a monument to collective lunacy, a testament to how easily people can be led down the garden path, or simply a collection of egregious publishing mistakes. Whichever it is, Womack has preserved a record of something that felt very real to a great many people. These books began emerging, after all, around a decade after the filmmaker and theatre impresario Orson Welles inadvertently frightened an estimated 1.2 million US listeners during his famous 1938 radio broadcast of an adaption of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds.

Today, the ubiquitous advanced cameras mean the lack of convincing photographs is more and more of a problem for believers. The evidence collected here is as ‘real’ as flying saucers will ever get.

Daniel Cressey is a senior reporter for Nature in London. He tweets at @dpcressey. Flying Saucers Are Real is the first book release of New York City publisher Anthology Editions, a partnership between Boo-Hooray Gallery and Anthology Recordings.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Humboldt biography wins Royal Society prize

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Alexander von Humboldt (oil painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806).

Alexander von Humboldt (oil painting by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806).

If fame were measured in namesakes, Alexander von Humboldt might reign supreme. The moniker of the brilliant biogeographer, naturalist and explorer graces dozens of species and phenomena, from the hog-nosed skunk Conepatus humboldtii to a sinkhole in Venezuela. Yet the Prussian polymath’s reputation has lagged somewhat behind that of, say, Charles Darwin. Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature went some way towards changing all that. Now this immensely acclaimed biography is burnished anew by winning the Royal Society’s Science Book Prize, sponsored by Insight Investment.

Wulf writes as if electrified by the fierce intellect of her subject. The Invention of Nature is also a model of concision, I feel, given the range of  Humboldt’s prodigious findings over his long life (1769–1859). He defined climate zones, predicted climate change, experimented with geomagnetism and conducted a gruelling five-year expedition in South America, discovering the Peru Current and numerous plant species, making a record ascent of Chimborazo and amassing 30 volumes of data.

Andrea Wulf.

Andrea Wulf.

Antonina Gern

Wulf’s tour de force is in good company, as one of the six that were up for the prize (and all reviewed in Nature).

Tim Birkhead’s The Most Perfect Thing: Inside (and Outside) a Bird’s Egg (Bloomsbury) (reviewed here) is a 360-degree tour of the avian egg, unshelling the chequered history of oology and the natural history of the thing itself — from formation in the ovary to the functions of their elegant colouration. As reviewer John Marzluff noted, we have yet to crack all their mysteries: “Why, for example, does the egg of a chicken travel through the hen pointed end first until the very last minute, when it turns through 180° on the horizontal plane to be laid blunt end first?”

Birkhead chose the ubiquitous. In The Hunt for Vulcan: How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet and Deciphered the Universe (Head of Zeus) (reviewed here), Thomas Levenson chronicles the nonexistent: a planet hypothesised to explain oddities in the orbit of Mercury, only to be quashed by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In the telling, Levenson achieves what many science writers aspire to — a narrative weaving discoveries, backstories and implications into a synthesised tapestry.

From history to the here and now — Jo Marchant’s Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body (Canongate) (reviewed here) is a revved-up, research-packed explication of the use of mind in medicine, from meditation to guided visualisation. Marchant’s nimble reportage on the work of scientists in novel fields such as psychoneuroimmunology and her discussion of placebos are as fresh as her reminders of how stress and poverty affect wellbeing are timely.

Equally apropos for our disordered times is The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton (Granta) (reviewed here). Morton’s journey through climate fixes is an assured tour of the science, the history of climate interventions and, as reviewer Jane Long noted, the “ethical, political and social implications if climate intervention became available”.

Finally, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History (Bodley Head) (reviewed here) is a book of two halves. Mukherjee’s treatment of early genetics controversially skips over some complexities, but  reviewer Matthew Cobb felt it picks up from the 1970s onward with compelling detail on clinical work, the burgeoning of biotech and discoveries such as the genetic basis of Huntington’s disease.

Certainly, from Mendel to CRISPR–Cas9, the story of genetics has been a wonder. Yet it’s just a strand in the grand scientific saga that, luckily for us, continues to inspire fine writers.

The judges of this year’s prize included chair Bill Bryson, whose books include A Short History of Nearly Everything, which won the Royal Society’s Aventis Prize; lecturer and Royal Society University Research Fellow Clare Burrage; American evolutionary ecologist and ornithologist Devorah Bennu (GrrlScientist); author and Science Museum Group director of external affairs Roger Highfield; and award-winning author Alastair Reynolds.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

 

Star Trek puts its stamp on the future

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: ,

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© USPS 2016

As Star Trek boldly sails into its second half-century, you might wonder what other impacts on science and culture this astonishing franchise could have. ‘Live long and prosper’, for instance — could the show hold clues to hyper-longevity? (Certainly ‘Bones’ McCoy managed to survive an incurable terminal illness, xenopolycythemia, during heated skirmishes on the asteroid-ship Yonada in an early series). Might the weird paradoxes the series harnessed to explain time travel ever transpire?

We can only wait. But in the meantime, on 2 September the US Postal Service issued a stunning set of Star Trek ‘Forever’ stamps — a time-bending product useable for posting a first-class, 1-ounce letter into perpetuity “regardless of star date”, they assure us.

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© USPS 2016

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© USPS 2016

Launched in June at a ceremony featuring a talk by Walter Koenig (the original series’ inimitable navigator Pavel Chekhov), the stamps’ designs feature motifs of the USS Enterprise, Starfleet insignia and a crew member in mid-transport. The stamp featuring the Enterprise inside the silhouette of a Vulcan salute is frankly awesome, and sure to fulfil (as Spock might say) “the needs of the many”.

They don’t promise delivery at warp speed, but these stamps are a beautiful reminder, if we needed another one, of our deep, enduring affinity with Gene Roddenberry’s brainchild.

Sidney Perkowitz’s essay on Star Trek’s 50-year impact is just part of Nature’s packed science-fiction special, a cornucopia of offerings including Shamini Bundell’s podcast segment on how the franchise is used to teach ethics in engineering and beyond.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.

Breaking barriers: the US space programme’s black women mathematicians

Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: , , ,

Posted on behalf of Alexandra Witze

Mathematician Katherine Johnson at NASA's Langley Research Center, where she worked as a "computer" from 1953 to 1986.

Katherine Johnson at NASA’s Langley Research Center, where she worked as a “computer” and mathematician from 1953 to 1986. Her illustrious career included calculating Apollo 11’s trajectory on its flight to the Moon.

NASA

Some of the most intriguing stories in the history of US science have emerged over the past few years. It’s about time. These books centre on something long under wraps: the centrally important roles women played starting some 70 years ago in the great technological transition that gripped the twentieth century. Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City (Touchstone, 2013) chronicled the contributions of the women who worked at the secret atomic-bomb laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during the Second World War. Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt (reviewed here) depicted the mathematicians or “human computers” who crunched numbers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California from the 1940s. In this catalogue, Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures is more than just another entry.

Shetterly’s book is an exploration of the groundbreaking achievements and shocking discrimination experienced by a group of talented mathematicians in all aspects of their professional and personal lives. These African-American women — Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson and Christine Darden among them — began working from the early 1940s at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, then the nation’s premier aeronautical laboratory. That wartime breakthrough was to propel many of them into long and successful careers at the heart of the space race. (A feature film based on the book and starring Taraji P. Henson will be released in January.)

Christine Darden in the control room of Langley's Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Darden became an expert on sonic booms and supersonic flights.

Christine Darden in the control room of Langley’s Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Darden became an expert on sonic booms and supersonic flights.

NASA

These stellar scientists broke major political and social barriers. Virginia in the American South was a segregated state. Beginning after the Civil War and lasting until the civil-rights era of the 1960s, “Jim Crow” laws enforced a rigid racial hierarchy. Shops, restaurants, public transportation — all viciously discriminated against African-Americans in matters as basic as where to use the toilet.

The mathematicians whose experience Shetterly unveils came of age in this reality. Members of a thriving African-American middle class, they went to universities such as Howard in Washington DC — historically black institutions where they were taught by eminent faculty trained at universities such as Harvard, who could not secure a position there because of their race. These accomplished young women became teachers, then generally the sole career option for educated black women. (Postgraduate education was not even possible in some states; rather than admit African-American students to its state university for graduate studies, between 1936 and 1950 Virginia paid them “scholarships” to attend graduate school elsewhere.)

Top flight

But after America entered the war in 1941, new professional opportunities opened. Langley, where engineers designed and tested technological advances that permitted US planes to fly higher and faster, needed an awful lot of number-crunchers to calculate, say, the ideal air flow over an aeroplane wing. That crushing demand opened the gates to women. Female computers began working through calculations that kept Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bomber  aloft and the North American Aviation P-51 Mustang fighter manoeuvering through the skies.

Even here, however, segregation persisted. Vaughan and her colleagues were placed in Langley’s ‘West Computing’ unit. White women computed on the east side. At the back of the Langley cafeteria, a white cardboard sign labeled COLORED COMPUTERS directed the West mathematicians to sit together at lunch rather than mingle. Eventually, “tiny firebrand” Miriam Mann stole the sign, and the table was left unlabelled.

Margot Lee Shetterly.

Margot Lee Shetterly.

Aran Shetterly

Shetterly, who grew up in Hampton, illuminates this remarkable group’s professional careers and personal travails. Simply getting housing as a black woman was fraught with difficulty in these decades. It was only by harnessing the strong social networks of the African-American middle class that these mathematicians finally got a toehold in the American dream. Shared work experiences bound the group outside Langley: Vaughan and Mann brought their families together for local activities including a phenomenal performance in Hampton by iconic African-American singer Marian Anderson.

Postwar, the future was unclear, Shetterly shows. Would women be pushed out of the workforce? The Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 changed all that. In 1958, the Langley lab became part of the newly formed NASA and the centre of Project Mercury, the programme for crewed space travel. The West computers scattered to other divisions to begin work on the complex calculations of getting spacecraft into orbit.

HiddenFigures_HC HiResIn 1959 Johnson and her colleague Ted Skopinski first calculated the mathematics of firing a capsule into ballistic flight. The equations described the flight of a spacecraft, from the angle of launch, to point of re-entry, to the effect of Earth’s rotation. Their work underlay the successful 1961 suborbital flight of astronaut Alan Shepard. The following year, when John Glenn was about to make the first US orbital flight, he personally requested Johnson to double-check, by hand, the calculations of his trajectory. Johnson went on to an illustrious career in the US space programme. Her mathematics dictated the trajectory of the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s descent to the surface, and their tricky rendezvous with the command module in lunar orbit in order to make it safely home. Later, she worked on the space shuttle programme. In November 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama.

Vaughan, who in the 1950s had served as Langley’s first black supervisor, forged a successful career in computer programming. Jackson achieved the rank of engineer, then turned her attention to helping other women and minorities into high-level positions. Darden, one of the next generation to benefit from the barriers broken by this group, became a world expert on sonic booms and supersonic flight.

Hidden Figures is not the definitive history of women in the space programme, nor of women at Langley. It does not need to be. It lies at the intersection of the greatest scientific advances and the greatest civil-rights battles in US history.

Alexandra Witze is a correspondent for Nature based in Boulder, Colorado. Her email is witzescience@gmail.com and she tweets at @alexwitze.

 

For Nature’s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com/news/booksandarts.