Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 283

Good News Tuesday

Let’s start with the weird and interesting today, shall we? I think this first item fits the bill:

Remarkable New Theory Says There’s No Gravity, No Dark Matter, and Einstein Was Wrong

Professor Erik Verlinde, an expert in string theory from the University of Amsterdam and the Delta Institute of Theoretical Physics, thinks that gravity is not a fundamental force of nature because it’s not always there. Instead it’s “emergent” – coming into existence from changes in microscopic bits of information in the structure of spacetime.

I love it! Gravity isn’t really there! I don’t have the background to believe that this makes sense / conclude it is nonsense, but it’s neat. This guy also argues that there’s no such thing as dark matter. Sounds reasonable to me. The idea that there’s some mysterious matter that makes up 95% of the universe but can’t be detected . . . to a nonphysicist, that does sound a trifle like special pleading to justify a special theory.

Another neat entry:

The Secret is Out: Scientists Figured Out How Tardigrades Became Immune to Radiation

Tardigrades are amazing creatures famous for their extreme survival skills. Their collection of abilities make up for their small stature. They are capable of surviving under the harshest conditions including the vacuum of outer space, extreme temperatures, great pressure (equivalent to six times as much pressure under the ocean), dehydration, and being frozen solid for years…. To top it off, tardigrades can survive radiation levels that are very lethal to most organisms. Now, scientists have finally unlocked what makes this all possible.

Tardigrades are described by Wikipedia thus: “Tardigrades (/ˈtɑːrdɪˌɡreɪd/; also known as water bears or moss piglets) are water-dwelling, eight-legged, segmented micro-animals.” I love this discription. They sound perfect for an SF novel. If you blow them up out of the micro-animal size, of course.

Here’s something also very SF:

NASA’s working on a nano-starship that travels at 1/5 the speed of light

Alas, this isn’t a real spaceship:



In April, a team of scientists including Stephen Hawking announced a mind-boggling new project to explore interstellar space, using lasers to propel a nano-spacecraft the size of a postage stamp to our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

I mean, that’s cool and all, but … the size of a postage stamp? Somehow I would be more impressed by, say, a colony ship.

Well, it’s a start.

Meanwhile, of perhaps more immediate importance:

1 Patient, 7 Tumors and 100 Billion Cells Equal 1 Striking Recovery

The remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer, after treatment with cells from her own immune system, may lead to new options for thousands of other patients with colon or pancreatic cancer, researchers are reporting. Her treatment was the first to successfully target a common cancer mutation that scientists have tried to attack for decades. Until now, that mutation has been bulletproof, so resistant to every attempt at treatment that scientists have described it as “undruggable.” The patient … has an unusual genetic makeup that allowed the treatment to work. She is now cancer-free, though not considered cured. The treatment was a form of immunotherapy, which enlists a patient’s immune system to fight disease. The field is revolutionizing cancer treatment.

I bet we all know someone who’s died of colon cancer. Faster, please.

Meanwhile:

Blind man sets out alone in Google’s driverless car

“This is a hope of independence. These cars will change the life prospects of people such as myself. I want very much to become a member of the driving public again.”

That’s exactly what it is. MUCH faster, please!

And one more:

Controlling a Hand Exoskeleton With Your Mind

Researchers have developed a hand exoskeleton that can be controlled solely by thoughts and eye movements, according to a report published yesterday in the inaugural issue of Science Robotics. Six quadriplegic individuals tested the device in everyday situations; they successfully picked up coffee cups, ate donuts, squeezed sponges, and signed documents, the researchers reported.

This sort of thing looks like magic to me. The best kind of magic! The people who are developing this technology, wow, what a service to the world.

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Recent Reading: One Night in Sixes by Arianne (Tex) Thompson

I picked up this book after meeting Tex, complete with what seems to be a signature scarlet Stetson hat, at Archon this past fall. She writes weird westerns, she said.

One Night in Sixes is indeed a weird western. Oh yes. It certainly is.

On the third day, God said: Now you just stay there and think about what you did.

So Elim stood there where they’d tied his hands to the two posts of the main street promenade, leaning into the dwindling shade as the sun climbed higher. The rest of the dust-choked street was long sense deserted.

Which left just Elim, standing spread-armed between the beams, struggling to keep his aching head shaded and his sluggish thoughts pious as his bare back and shoulders roasted in the sun.

That is certainly a catchy first line. Elim is perhaps not quite coherent at this moment, I will add.

Let me tell you about this world. It’s something else, that’s for sure. It’s kind of like the Old West, if the various native tribes weren’t human, possessed magic, threw out the white Northmen who attempted to settle their lands, and went on about their own somewhat mysterious business. For example, there are the a’Krah, the crow people; and the Ara-Naure, the dog people; and the mereaux, the fish people, who sometimes go to quite a lot of trouble so they can pass for human. Or at least not fish people. Also, of course, there are Northmen, from Eaden, who are white. And retain an ability to chill or freeze items, so they too fit the “weird” criterion.

People of mixed race are called mules or appaloosas or piebalds or two-bloods and as you might guess from this list of terms, they are often spotted or colored in patches. What an idea, eh? There’s a lot of prejudice against them, one gathers.

Elim is an appaloosa two-blood, and his companion Sil is a young Northman, something between a friend and an employer and a kid Elim’s supposed to look after. They have, perhaps unwisely, entered the lands of the indigenous tribes in order to pursue matters of trade. The snippet above is from the prologue. After that we go back and see how Elim got into this fix and after that we go on and see what happens next.

What I liked: Thompson’s writing is very good. The worldbuilding is extremely good, thoroughly peculiar and detailed and elaborate, with plenty of history. Incidentally, there is a glossary in the back which you may find helpful if you try this. I wish I’d noticed that before I read the book.

What gave me trouble: I had a hard time with the two main characters. I sort of liked them both. Thompson did an admirable job giving each of them a very different and opposing point of view, but while I admired how she handled this, I had difficulty trying to figure out whether either Elim or Sil was actually right in his perception of what was going on. Basically not, it turns out. I think this made it difficult to connect emotionally with either protagonist. I value competence in a protagonist, and neither Elim nor Sil actually handled the situation they got into very well, though their flaws and strengths are very different and so they wind up in very different places at the end.

Also, there were a lot of shorter bits from many other points of view, and I had trouble seeing how everything fit together. But I think this was mostly a problem that arose from a failure to connect to the main protagonists. Without that connection, I just wasn’t too interested in figuring out the complicated details of the setting and story.

The general feel of this story is definitely on the gritty end of the spectrum; a little too much so for me, probably. That also stopped me from really falling into the story. It took me a long time to read the whole thing because I kept putting it down to read something more approachable. On the other hand, I kept coming back to it, and you know I don’t generally finish books I dislike. I don’t think this story is going to wind up actually grimdark, but it continues in at least one sequel, so without reaching the ending, it’s hard to be sure.

Who should try this story: If you enjoyed Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, I bet you’d love this. Ditto with the Gunslinger series. I didn’t like either of those – I liked this better, in fact, both for the worldbuilding and for the actual writing. But I think those are the series that definitely fit in the same subgenre and have a lot of the same feel to them.

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Public service message: Open Road Media

I feel I ought not be the only one with an exploding TBR pile, so let me mention to you all that Open Road Media is having a massive, massive sale of free Kindle books on Amazon. The sale extends through December 20th. Mike S is the one who tipped me off, and I’m sure he won’t mind my sharing a list he’s put together of some of the authors whose books are included. This is not an exhaustive list.

If you search for any author and don’t at first see the free books, sort by low-to-high and they’ll pop up to the top of the list.

I’m still going through this list, but I guess I’ve probably picked up more than two dozen free books so far. Thanks, Mike!

Algis Budrys

John Shirley

4 of the Barbara Hambly fantasies

8 Greg Bear books

8 George Zebrowski books

Several Harlan Ellison

David Feintuch

Howard Fast

2 of the Tomoe Gozen books by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

Ru Emerson

John Bellairs

3 Elizabeth A Scarborough books

Several R.A. MacAvoy books

All the John DeChancie Castle Perilous books!

Many Fritz Leiber books

Orphans Trilogy and Geodesica Ascent by Sean Williams and Shane Dix

Boatloads of Robert Sheckley books!

2 Chip Delaney Neveryon books

Oceanspace and Angel of Europa by Allen Steele

4 James Morrow Titles

Tourists, Travellers in Magic, and Summer King, Winter Fool by Lisa Goldstein

The 4 books of the Jerusalem Quartet by Edward Whittemore

Jane Yolen

a ton of Nancy Springer!!

5 Jonathan Carroll books

The Frank Lauria Doctor Orient books, and a few others

A bunch of Poul Anderson

A bunch of Robert Silverberg

A ton of Brian Aldiss

A ton of Andre Norton

James Gunn

Dave Duncan

Elizabeth A Lynn

Michael Coney

John Brunner

Fay Weldon

Mary Renault

Philip Wylie

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Recent Baking: Experimenting with peculiar cookies

I’ve had a couple of recipes for somewhat out-of-the-way cookies sitting right here on my kitchen island for some time. Months, probably. Both originally from Food52, by the way. What with the low-carb thing I hadn’t yet made them, and I figured if I didn’t make them now, for Christmas, it might be a good long while before I found an excuse to try them.

So I made them. I made them tiny and fancied them up and put them right in with the more ordinary cookies and so far one is getting good reviews and the other is facing a more ambiguous reception. I’m going to offer both recipes here and you can try them if you like.

So, first, the more iffy cookie:

Food52 says this recipe comes originally from Kermanshah near Beirut, so this is a traditional cookie that generations have continued to make. Yet I couldn’t help but view this recipe with some concern. I like rosewater a lot. I like cardamom a lot, too. That leaves rice flour as a possible concern. There’s a reason you don’t just substitute rice flour one-for-one for wheat flour. It doesn’t behave the same in recipes, it doesn’t give at all the same results, and so I felt rather uneasy about trying this recipe. Especially since I am rather low on rosewater and this recipe uses quite a bit, relatively speaking. But I finally did try this, once as originally given and once as a variant. I’ll tell you about the variant in a minute. First, the original recipe:

Rosewater Cardamom Rice Cookies

4 oz butter, melted

4 oz sugar

1 egg

1 Tbsp rosewater

8 oz rice flour (meaning ordinary rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour)

½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp ground cardamom

Combine butter and sugar, beat in egg, beat in rosewater. Combine the dry ingredients and stir in. Shape dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill overnight. Let set at room temp half an hour if necessary (I found the dough workable straight out of the fridge). Roll out ¼ inch thick, cut out with a circular cutter, and place on parchment-lined baking sheets. I used the cap off some bottle or other, an inch and a quarter diameter or something like that, but certainly you could use an ordinary cookie cutter. I just wanted the cookies to be quite small and round, not with fluted edges.

If you bake, you may well be wondering what the dough was like to handle. Actually, it wasn’t bad. It took a bit more patience and care than rolling out a wheat-flour dough, and certainly the circle of dough tended to crack around the edges, but it wasn’t bad at all. The dough didn’t stick (I dusted the counter lightly with ordinary flour), it cut cleanly, and the circles lifted off the counter easily. I re-rolled the dough and cut more cookies until the dough was basically all gone, and really I did not add very much extra flour at all as I re-rolled and re-rolled.

Okay, now, pay attention: pre-heat the oven to 250 degrees. That is really two hundred and fifty degrees, not a misprint. Bake the cookies for 15 minutes or so, until dry but still white, rotating the cookie sheets once if your oven tends to bake hotter on one side or the other.

There, that’s basically the original recipe. I found these cookies had a wonderful, vivid flavor, but they were quite dry. Crumbly isn’t unexpected with rice flour, but I don’t mean they crumbled and shattered; they were just unpleasantly dry in the mouth. I imagine one would generally eat them with coffee. I certainly wanted water. In order to try to improve the texture of the cookie, I made them again, this time with half rice flour and half ordinary all-purpose wheat flour. This improved the texture, but not all the way – and the wheat flour muted the flavors. So I’m not sure what to advise. If you try these cookies or a variation on the theme, let me know what you do and how it turns out, okay?

What I did was make little sandwich cookies because I figured icing would improve the dryness problem. I used a wonderful icing I had already made for the Aphrodite cookies: a lovely pink rosewater icing that plainly would suit these rosewater cookies perfectly. It did improve the cookies, but they are still probably going to strike most people as a bit too dry.

Aphrodite Icing (originally from TigersAndStrawberries blog)

½ stick butter, softened

4 oz cream cheese

1 lb powdered sugar (I probably use a little less)

3 Tbsp heavy cream

2 tsp rosewater

Pink food coloring

Cream the butter and cream cheese together. Start beating in the powdered sugar, adding the cream and rosewater as you go. You could make this icing a little stiffer or a little less stiff depending on what you plan to do with it. If you’re going to make sandwich cookies, it doesn’t need to be quite as stiff and that’s why you can probably get away with adding a bit less powdered sugar.

This recipe yields enough icing to make sandwich cookies using two recipes of Aphrodite cookies or four recipes of the rosewater cookies given here. It might be enough to ice a two-layer white cake, which I bet would be lovely and popular. Or you can use the extra icing on, say, warm scones. I happen to think that is just swooningly delicious and reason enough to make this icing.

However, can’t have roses in everything, right? So moving on:

Now, this next cookie is unusual in a quite different way: it uses pepper!

Yep, pepper. Years ago I tried a peppercorn shortbread type of cookie and quite liked it, and I love cayenne in this one apple cake I sometimes make, so I was really inclined to try this. These cookies turned out great: nice texture, chocolate-y, and with an interesting flavor that I’m not sure people will tend to identify as pepper. Let the flavor bloom in your mouth for a few seconds and I think it is more identifiable. Eat the cookie fast and then scarf something else and I’m not sure you would figure it out.

South African Chocolate Pepper Cookies

16 oz bittersweet chocolate chips, divided (I actually used 8 oz bittersweet and about 6 oz semisweet)

12 Tbsp butter

2/3 C brown sugar

2 eggs

2 C flour

2/3 C baking soda

1 Tbsp freshly ground black peppercorns (I used a mélange of black, white, green, and pink peppercorns because I had that handy, but I’m sure just black would be fine)

Now, listen, freshly ground black pepper is nothing like that stuff that comes pre-powdered in cans. If you are not used to freshly ground pepper, this recipe ought to provide you with the excuse you’ve been waiting for to invest in a decent peppermill or a spice grinder. You can do what you want, I’m not the boss of you, but seriously, freshly ground is just worlds better.

Anyway, once you’ve got the ground pepper, melt 8 oz of bittersweet chocolate. I recommend a microwave, thirty seconds at a time. You are not likely to burn bittersweet chocolate if you take any kind of care; it’s a lot more forgiving than milk chocolate. Cream the butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time. Beat in melted chocolate. Combine flour, baking soda, and pepper and stir that in. Stir in the remaining chocolate chips – I didn’t feel a whole ’nother 8 ounces was necessary, and as I said, I used semisweet at this point. Either way, drop by tablespoons on parchment-lined cookie sheets –

Unless you are making these for Christmas. In that case, you may want to try a fancier presentation. So chill the dough a couple of hours, roll into small balls, toss the balls a few at a time in powdered sugar, and then place the cookies on the baking sheets. Now you will get a chocolate-crinkle kind of cookie, much prettier than any drop cookie could ever dream of being.

Bake cookies at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. It’s hard to tell when chocolate cookies are done, so touch one lightly and see if it feels firm-ish. In my opinion, with this cookie you are better off erring on the less-baked side than the overdone side, but obviously you should suit yourself.

Cool. The flavors will bloom better if the cookie is not hot when you taste it. A little warm is okay. If you make these, let me know what you think! For me, this recipe is a keeper.

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Nature Photographer of the Year

Here’s something kinda neat: The National Geographic Photographer of the Year, who won with a pretty amazing picture of gannets and dolphins catching sardines.

…the ocean was full of energy. We were escorted by hundreds of dolphins. From a point on the horizon ahead of us, the frantic sounds of gannet birds became louder and their dives from the air seemed to accelerate as they shot down, piercing the surface of the sea. … Before jumping into the water, I could not have imagined the incredible spectacle that would unfold beneath the surface.

If you have a minute, click through and check out the photos and story.

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Advertising is communication — or should be

I rather like this post by Nancy Friedman at Fritinancy, a blog which evidently focuses on names, brands, and the writing associated with commerce.

The particular post considers this billboard:

And here is what Friedman says about it:

It’s not that I don’t get the tiny, unconvincing joke, O Hipster Ad Agency. Nothing rhymes with orange. Haha.

Here’s the thing (and it pains me to have to point this out):

Billboards are meant to grab your attention in a split-second. They’re not supposed to be convoluted in-jokes. They’re supposed to sell.

And they’re supposed to sell your stuff. Not roses, not “this billboard,” not even florists or poets. If you’re Thumbtack, you want people who see your ad to grok the glories of Thumbtack.

At the risk of repeating myself: We don’t know? Are you effing kidding me? Your website says you’re “reshaping local economies.” You’re “getting things done.” If you don’t know, who does?

And finally: Why is the most important message – “Hire skilled pros for absolutely everything” – in the tiniest type?

Actually I did not quite get the joke. I will defend myself by noting that, as Friedman points out, I was not looking for a convoluted joke on this billboard. That’s not what I expect from billboards. Wordplay, maybe, but something very simple and catchy.

Also, yes, it’s quite puzzling why anybody would put the actual advertisement part of the billboard’s message in practically unreadable type. I guess we can file that in: Somebody overthought this one a little too much.

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Recent Reading: Heart of Gold and “Blood” by Sharon Shinn

So, recently Sharon Shinn kindly sent me a link to this review of Mountain at Romantic Times, plus a tip that 4½ stars is as good as it gets for RT Reviews because some time ago they apparently defined a book as perfect and 5 stars and declared they were never again giving another book 5 stars. Which is a great story, isn’t it? I don’t know which book that was, but it must have been something.

Anyway, this led to a conversation about this and that, including your favorite little details you put in a book that you’re not sure a reader is going to notice, and that led to my re-reading the novella “Blood” in the collection Quatrain, which is by far my favorite story in that collection and if you’ve read the stories, did you happen to notice any little artistic details about the way the stories begin and end? Because I totally missed them until Sharon told me about them and I took my copy off the shelf and looked again.

And this is all a long lead in for why I finally read Heart of Gold, which has been on my TBR pile for quite some time . . . possibly over a decade . . . or two. I was not in any hurry because from the outside this book looks a good deal like a story wrapped around an Important Message About Racism and Sexism and my tolerance for that kind of thing is, shall we say, limited. Regardless of the author.

Now that I’ve read it, I think the first thing you need to know about Heart of Gold is that it isn’t a heavy-handed Message Story about Racism, which it definitely might be given the indigo and gulden races. This story is about race, sure, and prejudice, and so on, but neither race maps at all well onto any real-world race, which really saves it from reading like Message Fic. This lets the much more complicated and thoughtful exploration of small-r-racism read as thoughtful rather than preachy.

The second thing you need to know about Heart of Gold is that it also isn’t a heavy-handed Message Story about Sexism, despite the agrarian / matriarchal indigo society and the industrial / patriarchal gulden society. Both are about as extreme as you can get, but neither society is presented as much better or way worse than the other. No, really.

I wouldn’t actually want to live in either society – both are highly constraining, and neither is at all ideal. Neither the indigo nor the gulden society is exactly nice, neither the indigo nor the gulden are the good guys – you have to look to specific individuals for that. So what we have in this story are individuals of both races who struggle to find their place in their own society and cope with individuals of the other race and society. Shinn develops the sexism thing, sure, but with way more complexity than you might guess.

The third thing you need to know about Heart of Gold is that it isn’t a Romeo-and-Juliet story at all. I mean, sure, it’s a romance, because this is Sharon Shinn, right? When we encounter Kitrini, an indigo woman with an all-consuming passion for a gulden man, we could be mistaken for thinking Oh my God, here comes an angst fest. But this is actually not the central relationship. Which we ought to guess from the limited amount of time we spend with Kitrini, because though she’s important, she definitely plays second fiddle to Nolan, an indigo man who is actually the central protagonist. Let me add that the back cover, all about he’s-a-rational-scientist / she’s-a-rebel-at-heart is not exactly wrong, but it’s pretty misleading, because that is also handled with more complexity than the description implies. Everything in this story is handled with more complexity than the description implies.

The fourth thing you need to know about Heart of Gold is that the novella “Blood” in the collection Quatrain is set in the same world, and it’s just outstanding. Remember not that long ago when I took a stab at sorting out my ten favorite books by Sharon Shinn? Well, I forgot about “Blood” because it’s a novella, not a novel. But seriously, you should pick up the collection just for “Blood.” It’s that good. Also, it stands perfectly alone, so there’s no particular need to read Heart of Gold first, or at all, for that matter, in order to read “Blood.”

I should add that the other stories in the collection are pretty good too; it’s just that “Blood” is the best and the one I go back to and re-read.

If you have read “Blood,” what did you think? If you read it now – a good plan that I thoroughly endorse – let me know what you think. I bet you all give it two thumbs up.

Now that I’ve finally read it, I will add that Heart of Gold may also be somewhere in the top ten for me. Even Kitrini wasn’t too hard to connect with despite her emotional volatility, not my favorite character trait, and Nolan is wonderful. The plotting is good; I didn’t guess who the actual bad guys were until the reveal. (I even pegged the wrong person as nefarious. Whoops.) The science is good – Sharon has commented to me in the past that science is not her thing, but she did a fine job with this one. Not that I couldn’t quibble, but making the details of the science fit your plot has a long and honorable history in science fiction. (I say as I confidently invent not one but two forms of FTL drive for my space opera.)

Also, while we’re on the subject of artistic details the author puts in that the reader might miss, let me add that the bit where Kitrini is really arguing with herself while teaching Nolan gulden verbs is just delightful. If you read this now, I hope you all enjoy that part as much as I did.

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Will Amazon Eat Grocery Stores?

Via The Passive Voice, this post by Karen Webster at Seeking Alpha: Will Amazon Eat Grocery Stores for Lunch?

[T]he combination of the Amazon Go app, a turnstile at the entrance/exit, deep learning and sensors all enable a cashier-less, counter-less checkout experience for the consumer. When said consumer leaves the store, the items she purchased will be charged to her Amazon account, and a digital receipt will itemize all of what she bought.

Click through and read the whole thing for an explanation of how this works.

I’m pretty pleased with the self-check-out lanes at stores now, but I can see a rapid and painless transition to Amazon’s no-check-out-at-all model. Painless as far as the consumer is concerned, I mean. What an idea.

I will add that one biiig reason this post caught my attention is that after my REALLY REALLY ANNOYING recent experiences trying to get someone at AT&T to talk to me — rather than their utterly useless automated system — I would LOVE to see Amazon eat phone companies for lunch. LOVE IT. This is perhaps not the attitude many extant companies would prefer their customers to have, so let me suggest that such companies might consider IMPROVING THEIR EXPLETIVE-DELETED CUSTOMER SERVICE in order to forestall a stampede of customers the minute another option becomes available.

I never did get through to AT&T, btw. But the problem with my phone line might have fixed itself, so I guess maybe someone else with more patience or skill managed to actually inform AT&T that there was a problem. Whoever that person was, I’m grateful to them.

I suppose the way to drag this post back around to the ostensible point is to add: I wonder if Schnooks and so on are planning to at least develop a ready-to-deploy technology of their own or whether they plan to just roll over and die if Amazon’s new model proves out? I don’t think existing companies are usually very good at innovation, but we’ll see.

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Good News Tuesday

Some very nice links today, both good news and interesting news.

I like this one, which actually makes me think of Cordelia Naismith. Remember how she feels about eating real animals? Well, check this out:

Lab-grown meat may be meal of the future

The final step will be to bypass the animals altogether and create meat in a lab.

A couple years ago the $300,000 hamburger made the news. This burger was made entirely of lab-grown meat at enormous cost. No cow involved. The benefit of cultured meat is that it avoids the use of growth hormones and antibiotics (many farmed animals are pumped full of them), thereby avoiding unnecessary exposure to drugs we don’t need, antibiotic resistance, and cost.

I’m not actually a bit worried about the health problems said to be associated with eating meat — the article emphasizes this aspect, but Gary Taubes persuaded me that actually the health benefits all point the other way: that a diet high in animal protein is vastly better for you than a diet that emphasizes carbohydrates. But. I really am not a fan of modern mass-produced animal farming. Sure, I buy meat. But I would be very pleased to see the majority of the meat on grocery store shelves come from labs instead of farm animals.

Speaking of meat and health:

Mercury levels drop in Atlantic bluefin tuna

A recent study led by Stony Brook University’s Cheng-Shiuan Lee took advantage of an archive of Atlantic bluefin tuna tissue samples from fish caught between 2004 and 2012 to find out whether mercury levels are improving as regulations and declining coal use reduce North American emissions that drift over the Atlantic. … each age group showed a consistent pattern of declining mercury concentrations — a drop of about 19 percent between 2004 and 2012. Because of the age of the fish, that actually represents changes in the Atlantic Ocean going back to about 1990.

Good to know! Let’s keep going with the reduction in mercury pollution! I expect the tuna would be happier with less mercury in their prey species, too.

Okay, now about this next item — very SF —

Japan Testing “Space Tether” to Knock Junk Out of Orbit

The KITE experiment will use a half-mile long cable to guide some of the 500,000 chunks of space junk out of orbit … According to JAXA, Japan’s space agency, the anti-space junk measure—known as the Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment (KITE)—will be tested for a week before Kounotori burns up in Earth’s atmosphere. The 2,296-foot line is weighted at its outer end by a 44-pound mass. Its movement through Earth’s magnetic field generates an electric current that can help redirect space junk towards the lower atmosphere, where it is destroyed. … It’s one of many projects aimed at dealing with space junk, a problem that is growing worse year by year.

Neat, eh?

Here’s one that caught my eye — wouldn’t this be great for a whole lot of worried parents:

New nonsurgical repair of common heart defect in premature babies is shown to be effective

A new minimally invasive technique for repairing the most common cardiac birth defect in extremely premature newborns can be performed safely with a high success rate in babies as small as 755 grams – about 1.6 pounds – only a few days after birth. … The study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions, details the results of a catheter-based approach to repairing patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), commonly referred to as “a hole in the heart. … If left untreated, PDA can cause heart failure and lifelong complications,” said Evan M. Zahn, MD, an expert in congenital heart disease and director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute’s Guerin Family Congenital Heart Program. “Current treatment options are not optimal and are fraught with complications.”

Yeah, I don’t know about prematurity, but PDA is pretty common in puppies, too. And a lot of puppies are smaller than one and a half pounds. I’d like to see this technique refined and made available for dogs, too. But it’s a great thing as it is.

This next one is not good news as such, it’s just neat:

Parrotlets flying through a field of lasers and microparticles helped test three popular models that predict the lift generated by flying animals. The work could help develop better flying robots.

Parrotlets! I’ve never heard of such a bird before. They must be some little miniature parrot? Here’s what Google shows me:

Cute, eh? Anyway:

The protective goggles are tight, the chin strap secure. Conditions are calm and the lasers are ready; the air is infused with tiny aerosol particles that are primed to scatter and track at the slightest disruption. Wait for the signal.

It’s just another day at the office for a parrotlet named Obi.

Pretty snazzy.

And along with birds paving the way for flying robots, here’s a jumping robot that mimics a primate:

Jumping Robots Mimic Adorable Big-Eyed Primates

A jumping robot — whose design was inspired by small primates known as bush babies — can spring off walls to gain height faster than any previous robot and could one day help rapidly scan urban disaster zones, researchers say. … Despite being just 10 inches (26 centimeters) tall and weighing only 0.2 pounds (100 grams), the one-legged robot, named Salto, can leap up more than 3.2 feet (1 meter) high from a standing position.

Now, bushbabies I’m familiar with! Here’s how they jump — in a vertical posture — a lot of prosimians jump like this:

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On the lighter side

Over at Kill Zone Blog: It’s the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards!

You’ve been waiting for it all year with bated breath. Your pulse rises every time you think about it. Some of you, oh faithful TKZ regulars, have even been emailing me begging to know when I was going to post my one annual post you can’t live without.

Yes, friends, just in time for Christmas, wrapped up here in a big blue-language bow, is THE LITERARY REVIEW’S BAD SEX IN FICTION AWARDS!

This is the 24th year the Literary Review has honored an author who has written the most “outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel.” Past winners have included Norman Mailer, David Guterson, and Thomas Wolfe and the nominees pretty much include every big literary name you’ve heard of. I like presenting this every December because, if nothing else, it makes us mere mortal writers understand that when it comes to sex, we’re all human — or, in one case this year, maybe bovine. The award was announced at a lavish ceremony Nov. 30 at the In & Out Club in London. No, I did not make up the name of that club. It is a distinguished private gathering place for members of the British armed forces.

And yes, the excerpts offered in this post are indeed funny, especially since some of them clearly are not meant to be. Click through if you are, ahem, in the mood.

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