The Way the Future Blogs

 

If you’re driving a People’s Gas truck and the fuel tank is running low, head for the North Side of Chicago. There the first of three filling stations has been operating for a year, turning waste cow dung into truck fuel with the help of an Obama Administration grant. An anerobic converter changes half a million gallons of cow manure into clean fuel a day, enough to drive a truck 20,000 miles, with the help of live bacteria.

Me and Milly

Psychologist Emile van der Zee, at the University of Lincoln in the U.K., is studying how dogs perceive differences between objects. When a human being hears the word “ball” he forms a visual image of something marked by its roundness — the most marked trait he observes by looking at it and handling it.

His dog, however, does not rely on those inputs. Its principal source of information is its mouth, and it isn’t clear what traits it considers most significant when dogs handle things with their mouths, which seems to suggest that size and texture are more important.

Researchers taught a collie dog named Gable made-up names for some objects, one of them being a horseshoe-shaped thing they named a “dax.” Asked to fetch a “dax,” Gable brought something larger or smaller, but not necessarily retaining the “shape” bias.

Illustration of the interior of 55 Cancri e — an extremely hot planet with a surface of mostly graphite surrounding a thick layer of diamond, below which is a layer of silicon-based minerals and a molten iron core at the center. (Image by Haven Giguere)

It’s not surprising that astronomers are discovering new planets almost every day. Almost all of them are the same boring type as our old Earth — wisps of gas and dust orbiting around a star that, under the influence of their mutual gravitation, gradually accrete into planet-sized bodies. But last year, Yale researchers found out that a big planet, twice the size of Earth, is apparently the core left when a great supernova blew most of its gases way.

The remaining core was carbon. Under the influence of ts own brutal gravity it crystallized its entire mass, And what is floating around out there — fortunately for the De Beers company, too far away for anybody to even think of mining it — is a gigantic diamond, the size of the planet Jupiter.

If there is a race of super-huge, super-intelligent aliens out there, what an engagement ring for their emperor to give his fiancee.

Researchers led by Andrew Jarosz at the University of Illinois at Chicago devised an experiment to check the conviction, held by some, that an author’s work desk is not complete without a typewriter, some paper and (at least) one open bottle of beer. They gave 40 men either a vodka and cranberry drink or a non-alcoholic one, after which they all took a test which required them to link groups of words with a given concept.

The vodka drinkers solved 38 percent more problems than the teetotallers and reached the correct answer faster. And so (identities withheld) are vindicated at last.

Barack Obama.

When an election is near, politicians do their best to avoid doing or saying anything unusually evil or asinine because they know that people are watching. At times like the present, though, they know that most voters are sick of the subject and aren’t paying much attention any more.

So let’s fool them and pay attention. What I am doing, for example, is writing a letter, essentially the same letter to each individual politician in an office I voted on — from President and U. S. Senator down to local councils. It goes like this:

Dear President Obama:

First, let me congratulate you on your victory in the 2012 election, and I wish you the best of luck in your task of trying to fix some of the things that are wrong with areas of our government. I know there are many important questions that must be resolved, but there is one — in many ways, the most important of all — that has fallen through the cracks. It threatens the future of our whole world. And yet in all the debate, almost everywhere in our country, it was hardly mentioned.

If we don’t find some way of lessening the violent storms, droughts, floods and other consequences of our reckless tampering with the very air we breathe we endanger everything we attempt. Nearly every legitimate scientific organization in the world has joined in the warning that the inhabitability of the Earth cannot survive our forever increasing the carbon load in the atmosphere.

May I ask, then, what new steps or plans you will offer to slow the endless burning of fossil fuels?

Yours sincerely,

Frederik Pohl