Science

Unemployed, I spent a week in April digging a small pond in our back yard. At the time, it was a distraction. Now it is… actually, a different sort of distraction.

Because although it’s not a very big pond — about 3 meters by 2, maximum depth about 70 cm — it has very quickly and suddenly filled up with life. The first water skater appeared literally on day one. Now there are about a dozen of them. We’ve also picked up water beetles, a couple of aquatic snails, some little swimming shrimp-like things, and several of these guys:



Ichthyosaura alpestris, “fish-lizard of the Alps”, aka the Alpine Newt.

But how did they get there?
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And then the light of an older heaven was in my eyes
and when my vision cleared, I saw Titans.

— Alan Moore

Today’s Occasional Paper comes to us from the James Webb Space Telescope.

So let’s start with some basics:  nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.  So when a telescope looks out into space, it’s also looking back into time.  Look at the moon?  You’re seeing it as it was when the light left it’s surface about 1.5 seconds ago.  Look at the Sun?  You’re seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.  The Sun could have exploded 5 minutes ago, and there’s no way you could possibly know about it until 3 minutes from now.

Okay, so keep going.  Look at the nearest star?  You’re seeing it as it was about four years ago.  Look at the center of our galaxy?  30,000 years.  The light from there left around the high point of the last Ice Age.  Look out of our galaxy, at our neighbor galaxy Andromeda?  About 3 million years.

Now it starts to get weird and interesting.  Because as we start to look at things that are billions-with-a-b light years away — very distant galaxies — things start to change.  That’s because we’re looking back into the distant past of the Universe.  And the Universe is only 13.5 billion years old, so… yeah.  In theory, if you had a strong enough telescope, you could see back to the Big Bang and the beginning of everything.

Of course it’s not that simple.  The Universe is expanding.  Distant galaxies are receding from us.  More distant galaxies are receding faster, often at significant fractions of the speed of light (from our perspective).  This means that the distance to them is greater than you might expect.  It also means that their light is “red shifted” by the Doppler effect.  Also, while the Big Bang was very bright, once it cooled down the Universe was just a hot dark cloud of gas, mostly hydrogen with a bit of helium mixed in.  In that earliest pre-dawn epoch, there was not much to see, and no light to see with… until the first stars switched on.

And now for a brief historical digression.

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The blue-ringed octopus! An elegant little creature, native to the southwest Pacific, particularly the waters around Australia. Pretty to look at… but mostly famous for being very, very venomous. The blue-ring’s bite is deadly.  A single sharp nip can kill an adult human in minutes.

But why? The blue-ring is a modest little creature that lives in shallow water, preying on small fish and crustaceans. A bite that can paralyze a 10 gram fish or a 20 gram crab, sure. A bite that can kill a 70 kilogram human dead? What’s the point of that?

Well: the good news is, a recent paper has discovered just why the blue-ringed octopus is so deadly. The bad news is… um, it’s kind of disturbing.

Trigger warning for sexual assault, cannibalism, and existential horror. I am not kidding.

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There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.

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So my wife took this picture in our garden yesterday, here in Kigali, Rwanda:



Take a close look.  This little bird — about the size of an American cardinal, or a European robin — is facing us.  It’s also facing the sun, though you can’t see that.  It is holding two twigs with its little claws, and… it’s puffing out its breast feathers in a very weird way.  It looks like a breeze is ruffling them.  But there is no breeze.

So we did a quick look-up and found: this is Colius Striatus, the Speckled Mousebird.  Long tail, “scruffy” crest, check.  Thin, rather hairlike breast feathers, check. Very common across tropical Africa, okay.  And then this:  

“Speckled mousebirds… can often be spotted roosting in groups where they’ll buff up their feathers. They do this to allow more sunlight to hit their bodies which helps speed up the fermentation process.”

Wait, what?

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So in the last couple of decades we’ve discovered that many plants rely on networks of soil fungi to bring them critical trace nutrients. This is a symbiotic relationship: the fungal network can access these nutrients much better than plants can, and in return the plants provide the fungus with other stuff — particularly energy, in the form of glucose sugar, made from photosynthesis.

It turns out this relationship is particularly important for large, long-lived trees. That’s because trees spend years as seedlings, struggling in the shade of their bigger relatives. If they’re going to survive, they’ll need help.

The fungal network gives them that help. The fungus not only provides micronutrients, it actually can pump glucose into young seedlings, compensating for the sunlight that they can’t yet reach. This is no small thing, because the fungus can’t produce glucose for itself! Normally it trades nutrients to trees and takes glucose from them in repayment. So it’s reaching into its own stored reserves to keep the baby seedling alive.

Gosh that’s beautiful isn’t Nature great! Well… yes and no.

Because the fungus isn’t doing this selflessly. The nutrients and glucose aren’t a gift. They’re a loan, and the fungus expects to be repaid.

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“You’re always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I’m here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you’ll have finally managed the real thing.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s ‘you’ in the collective. Your species.”

— William Gibson, Neuromancer


Sometime in the next 100 days, a star will explode.

The star’s name is T Coronae Borealis, and normally you can’t see it without a telescope: it’s too far away. But when it explodes, you’ll be able to see it just fine. It won’t be the brightest star in the sky, or anything like that. But it will be a reasonably bright star — “second magnitude”, if you’re an astronomer or a nerd — in a place where there was no star before.

It won’t last, of course. The new star — “nova” is the term, which of course just means “new” in Latin — will shine for a few days, then gradually fade back into obscurity.

Maybe you’ve heard of a supernova? Okay, so this isn’t that. This is it’s less spectacular little cousin, the plain and simple nova. A nearby supernova would light up the sky, potentially glowing as bright as the full Moon. This will just be a middling bright star that will (to our eyes) appear from nowhere and then, over a few days or weeks, fade away.

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Here’s a metaphor. There’s an elderly person you’ve known for years.  Not a close relative, no, but someone whose career you’ve followed.  You feel tremendous respect for them, maybe some affection. They’re getting old and frail, but they’ve kept active.  Now and then you might see an article or something, and you’ll think, huh: still with us.

And then something terrible happens, and they’re incapacitated, helpless, unable to speak anything but gibberish. Death seems imminent.

So the family rolls the dice on high risk, experimental brain surgery. And to everyone’s surprise, it works! 

Mostly works. Your friend is still very frail, and they’ve definitely lost a step. The inevitable end has only been delayed.

But — they can speak, slowly but clearly. They can take care of themselves and carry out basic functions. They’re alive. You can talk to them.  They’re even still able to work!  At least, a little.  So you maybe haven’t seen the last article.  It’s an unexpected, surprise reprieve: you have them for a bit longer, another year or two or three.

That’s what it feels like.

So about five hundred million years ago, give or take, there was this little creature called Plectronoceras.  It was about 2 cm long — just under an inch — and it had a conical shell with a bunch of tentacles sticking out.  It was a cephalopod, an early member of the group that includes octopuses and squid.  And it was an /armored/ cephalopod, with most of its soft body protected by that hard little shell.

Let’s pause here and rewind:  this was five hundred million years ago.  That’s the late Cambrian, if you’re a geology nerd.  It’s before the dinosaurs.  It’s before sharks or cockroaches or ferns.  This is *old*.  Complex life had barely gotten started.  Life in general was pretty much confined to the oceans.  But there were no fish yet — just invertebrates.   Half a billion years, yeah?  Long, long time.

And a lot of the stuff swimming around was weirdly alien.  Again, if you’re a geology nerd, you know about stuff like Opabinia, Anomalocaris, or Hallucigenia.  If you don’t, then let’s just say that you wouldn’t have recognized much from those ancient seas.  Not just “no fish”.  There were no clams or lobsters, no starfish or barnacles or crabs or anemones, no coral or kelp.  The world was new.  Those things hadn’t evolved yet.

But almost from the beginning, there was this thing: shell, plus tentacles.

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Okay so, we all know how the Earth ends, right? In six billion years or so, the Sun swells up into a red giant, and the Earth gets melted. Pretty straightforward.

But it turns out that /life/ on Earth will end long before that. There are reasons to think that the biosphere will collapse about a billion years from now — long enough!  But still long before the planet itself gets melted.

Why? Basically two reasons.

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Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die.

Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan Am, F.W. Woolworth, Fotomat booths, Borders bookshops, and Pier 1. Americans were watching Happy Days, M*A*S*H and Charlie’s Angels on television; their British cousins were watching George and Mildred, The Goodies, and Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. If you turned on the radio, “Hotel California” by The Eagles was alternating with “Dancing Queen” by Abba (and, if we want to be completely honest, “Car Wash” by Rose Royce). Most cars still ran on leaded gasoline, most phones were still rotary dial, and the Internet was a wonky idea that was still a few weeks from a working prototype.

_The Thorn Birds_ was on top of everyone’s bestseller list. The first Apple II home computer had just gone on sale. The Sex Pistols were in the studio wrapping up _Never Mind The Bollocks_; they would tour on it for just three months and then break up, and within another year Sid Vicious would be dead of a heroin overdose. Barack Obama was a high school junior living with his grandparents in Honolulu, Hawaii: his grades were okay, but he spent most of his time hanging with his pot-smoking friends in the “Choom Gang”.  Boris Johnson was tucked away at the elite Ashdown House boarding school while his parents marriage was slowly collapsing: although he was only thirteen, he had already adopted his signature hair style.  Elvis had just died on the toilet a few weeks ago.  It was the summer of Star Wars.

And Voyager 1 was blasting off for a tour of the Solar System.

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I mentioned that parasite biology was one of my interests. It didn’t used to be.

When the children were smaller, we had bedtime rituals. The two oldest shared a room, so they would both get something at bedtime. Perhaps it would be a chapter from a book (Charlotte’s Web was a big hit, as was From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). Or it might be a story. Stories could be about anything, but history and science were particularly popular.

So one night, they asked for a science story. About… bugs!  *Creepy* bugs. Yeah!

Well. After a moment’s thought, I decided to tell them a little bit about wasps. I paused a moment, because wasps can get quite creepy… quite creepy indeed. But okay, they did ask, and I could avoid the most disturbing bits. [click to continue…]

In my academic job, I’ve just started a new 5-year project called ‘Visions for the future‘. In the first year of the project, I’ll tackle some methodological questions, including working out the discussion we had here some years ago on normative audits, and the question what ‘synthetic political philosophy’ is (on which Eric also has, and is further developing, views).

For the subsequent 3 years, I want to experiment with, and also develop the idea of ‘team philosophy’ (and I will hire three postdocs to be part of this). But what is ‘team philosophy’?
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