Kate Rauner's Blog, page 19

Stunning Short Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction – award winning anthology #shortstories #scifi #amreadingfantasy

Four friends issued a collection of eight short stories – otherworldly adventures we enjoyed writing, that you’ll enjoy reading. Now, Yee Ha! Our anthology won 2021 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards. Celebrate with us! Free Kindle and other favorite formats from favorite stores. Click here now. Enhance your karma and leave a review – a few words is all it takes to help other readers find the book. Thanks

Thanks New Mexico Book Co-op! 2021 winners and finalists listed here: http://nmbookcoop.com/BookAwards/BookAwards.html

Analog Astronauts on Simulated Mars #Mars #Space

For a Mars expedition to succeed, we need as much data as possible.

[In October] the Austrian Space Forum – in cooperation with the Israel Space Agency as the host agency and D-MARS – will conduct an integrated Mars analog field mission in the Negev Desert in Israel – the AMADEE-20 Mars simulation. oewf.org

OEWF ExploringTomorrow. ExploringMars
#AMADEE20 #simulateMars

They’ll evaluate space suit design, deploy instruments and robotic vehicles, and simulate the time lags and Earth-to-Mars coordination that a real mission will encounter.

That last bit may be more difficult than you’d expect. Even with the International Space Station, friction arises between astronauts and earthbound controllers. I suspect that, on Mars, astronauts will demand more autonomy than ever, especially if they plan to stay for the rest of their lives.

Mars isn’t the organization’s only mission. They also launch cube-sats and have a mission underway to remove space junk from Earth orbit. “Scientific models estimate the total number of space debris objects in Earth orbit to be more than 170 million for sizes larger than 1 mm, having impact energies comparable to a gun bullet.” ADLER-1 That’s a lot of junk.

Mars simulations are proliferating here on Earth, but the only way for you to go to Mars today is via science fiction. Check out my Mars series, the first colony, for stories that nail it for realism.

Find the Complete Series at Amazon and Other Favorite Store

Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties – where do they come from? #halloween2021 #ghost

What will you see Halloween night, either when you’re out Trick-or-Treating or just walking the dog?

We’ve all seen this explanation:

“If you’re walking in the woods and you see movement, you can make two errors,” says Michiel van Elk, a professor of social psychology at Leiden University. “You can either think it’s nothing, and it could be a potential predator, or you can think there’s a predator, and there’s nothing.” Psychologists suspect humans evolved a cognitive bias toward the latter mistake for good reason: Our ancestors had to keep a constant lookout for stealthy hazards like leopards and snakes, and folks with a “better safe than sorry” attitude were more likely to survive and reproduce. That’s why a snapping twig can activate the fight-or-flight reflexes that make us scream. Popular Science

The article offers more explanations for seeing spirits:

Zhong Kui, the vanquisher of ghosts and evil beings, painted sometime before 1304 A.D. by Gong KaiWe want to believe, to be part of the great ghost-hunting tribe.Ghosts aren’t all bad, so why not? “In a 1995 survey in The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 91% of participants said their encounter had at least one upside, such as a sense of connection to others.”Our brain is having problems from seizures or schizophrenia to drugs (recreational and otherwise.) Infrasound! That’s as weird as any ghost. Sounds that are “inaudible to human ears, whose range bottoms out at 20 Hz, the interval creates some fairly insidious side effects.”Geological phenomena where someone knows the explanation, but it’s not me and you. Here’s a fun name for the effect: “the devil’s magic.”

No one’s ever proved ghosts exist, at least not scientifically, and – no – listening to faint garbled radio signals on a device with no proper antenna or frequency tuning is not proof. Neither are those green-lighted night-vision offerings on cable.

Still looking over your shoulder? Here’s a solution from my past, tried and true:

When I was a kid, the door to our house’s attic was in my bedroom. Eek! Every night as night fell and the house cooled, creaks and groans floated down to me. I outwitted the monsters by lining all my stuffed animals up facing the door. I know the scary thrill and the sweet relief.

Thanks to Popular Science for their article at https://www.popsci.com/story/science/ghosts-real-science/

Bring Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to TV? Good Luck

Apple TV+ is bringing an adaptation of the classic scifi tales to TV, and I thought: go heavy on the “adaptation” part. The image heading this article about the effort shows a Black actress, but there are almost no females of any sort in Foundation. I understand that some characters have undergone sex change, and that there are significant departures from the source material. Those are hopeful signs.

Asimov’s tales, crafted from Golden Age zine stories he wrote between 1941 and 1949 and assembled into a book in 1951, may be one of the most important books in scifi history, but it truly shows its age. As I’ve written before…

… don’t expect a lot of action. Each story is primarily conversations among the characters. The style is almost Socratic in its questions, answers, and explanations. It makes sense that Amazon ranks the book under Political and Literary Fiction

Also, don’t expect diversity, and don’t expect aliens either, though Asimov used elements of science fiction that are iconic today: force fields, hyperspace, and holograms among them. Nuclear power was the epitome of high-tech and fills the books.

Asimov’s original can feel very dark (as well as pedantic.) All his governments are dictatorships – usually kingdoms and empires. Humans in general appear only in negative terms as mobs and fools. Even the [all male] heroes manipulate populations on a planetary scale without remorse, and religion is a cynical tool of “conquest by missionary.” Society does not fare well. Maybe it is inspiration for our times.

I recommend the books (there is a trilogy) if you’re interested in the history of science fiction. As to the TV adaptation… there’s nothing wrong with finding inspiration in the Golden Age. I don’t subscribe to Apple TV+, so I suppose I’ll never know what happens. If you have a chance to view Foundation, let us know what you think in the comments.

Ever Read That a Scare Turned Someone’s Hair White? Yeah, That’s a Thing, Though Not the Way Stories Tell It #scarystory #science

The wheezy old horror story trope about terror turning someone’s hair white is true! Though, stress can’t bleach hair that’s already grown out. Only peroxide does that. But stress can kill off the cells that give hair color.

There are many ways your hair can lose its color, but Ya-Chieh Hsu, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard, and his team have a study out in Nature that identifies one cellular pathway resulting from stress. In a study on rats:

The team began searching for corresponding changes in the physiological pathways that give rise to coat color. They were particularly interested in the behaviors of two types of cells: differentiated melanocytes, which produce pigment in the hair and skin, and melanocyte stem cells, the raw material from which melanocytes develop. popsci.com

A fancy rat, the breed used for pets

Pushed by a flood of stress-induced noradrenaline, the relevant stem cells completely disappeared from hair follicles, never to return. Without stem cells to replenish the color-creating melanocytes, hairs grew out white.

While this is a nifty discovery, I do cringe a bit at how the rats were stressed. The scientists injected the rats with resiniferatoxin, an analogue of the chili pepper compound capsaicin, which causes pain.

I want to understand my hair as much as the next guy, but do we have to specifically cause pain to do it? I would guess there’s no permanent damage, and any stress inducer is something the rats wouldn’t volunteer to endure, but it makes me queasy.

Serial Stories – Have You Met Vella? #Vella #stories

Charles Dickens published his stories this way, and so did Flash Gordon (well, his writers and film-makers did.) It’s the serial!

Have you seen Amazon’s latest format? It’s called Vella, and it presents stories in the time-honored serial format. You get to read a couple episodes for free and then use tokens to buy more of the story. No subscription needed and, to borrow a phrase, you only pay for what you read.

I don’t know all the details, but if this sounds like fun, click over to my Vella page and be sure to claim your free tokens, available now, just to have in your back pocket in case this format tickles your fancy.

I’m giving the format a whirl, so please read my episodes. Be sure to Follow the story and click the Thumbs Up at the end of each episode. You’re doing me a big favor. No need to write a review to help me out – just click. Thank you, thank you, because now others will find my story too. You make all the difference!

Armageddon, One Sucker at a Time
Action / Adventure Scifi Fantasy about Con Artists and the End of the World

Flint Benning has an underground stash of N95 masks and freeze-dried food to last for decades. With a career in black operations, he’s an expert in survival. Surely the world’s elite will pay him for the ultimate Armageddon hide-away.

So why is he bankrupt? Flint will die a pauper in the rubble of humanity’s despair.

Until he meets dooms-dayers with more imagination.

The end of the world is going to be fun.

Thanks to Deposit Photos for Cropped shot of young businessman holding stack of cash at an ethereum mining farm, and to FEMA for the nuclear explosion image.

When the Virus Kept Humans Home #sciku #haiku #whales #nature

Covid anthropause
Whales respond to quiet seas
But what do they say?

Michelle Fournet of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA, realized that the Covid lock down presented her with a once-in-a-lifetime chance. She could listen to the whales of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park when they were free of cruise ship traffic. And she discovered a difference. The humpbacks sounded like a 45-year-old recording, before cruise ships proliferated, from nearby Frederick Sound. Thanks to Hakai for the article. There are bound to more more studies coming out about wildlife reactions to human’s withdrawal during the pandemic: to the anthropause.

Why Are Science Frauds So Easy to Detect? #sciencematters

This question led me to learn a new bit of British slang: Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. As in, wow, is that an obvious lie.

Scientists examine Piltdown Man, a fraud from 1912 that took 40 years to definitively prove to be faked fossils. That was a highly successful fraud.

[In] a common feature of scientific frauds that involve fake data… Often, the fake data does not stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Which is puzzling. If you’re going to commit scientific fraud, presumably you want to get away with it. So why commit fraud in such a transparently obvious way? dynamicecology

The article’s author, Jeremy Fox, notes that art forgeries are often brilliant. “It’s a striking contrast with the laughable obviousness of many scientific frauds.”

What’s the deal? Maybe it’s because journals hate to “waste” space on endless tables and graphs, or maybe because there’s little reward for careful examination and replication.

Data are unlikely to be closely inspected by anyone. Heck, until fairly recently your data were unlikely to be inspected by anyone because you weren’t expected to show them to anyone! And even these days, when post-publication data sharing is increasingly the rule in many fields, it’s still rare for the shared data associated with any given paper to be inspected by anyone. dynamicecology

Fox notes that, in science or art, fakers put in as much effort as the curious will expend examining the fake. I think of it as conservation of energy. Or perhaps some fakes are the product of researchers who are panicked, lazy, or irrational. After all, scientists (and wanna be scientists) are only human. Some frauds are only exposed when the good guys’ tools catch up with the bad guys’ efforts. And there are plenty of good guys. That’s science in action, which is why science remains the best way to learn about the physical world we all share.

It’s Not Kinetic #sciku #haiku #physics

Patterns repeating
Crystals exist in space-time
Through four dimensions

Thanks to popularscience.com for their article on time crystals. What a great term, but when you consider… what else could you call them? Crystals repeating patterns of atoms in the XYZ planes should be called space crystals. Add the fourth dimension we all live with every day (even if we can only ride time’s arrow forward) and what would you expect?

Makes me think of a song: You know Dancer and Prancer and Comet and Blitzen… you know Gases and Liquids and Solids and Plasma…

A standard crystal with atoms arranged in 3D space. Suppose one type of atom flips repeatedly between quantum states? Without absorbing any energy! Perpetually in motion without kinetic energy.

Climate Data From my Yard #climate #citizenscience

If you follow climate science, you may have seen this:

The required rain gauge in my yard.

Every 10 years the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) calculates new climate normals for the United States. The 1981-2010 normals have been used for the past 10 years. On May 4th, the normals for the period 1991-2020 were released and will serve as the base period with which to compare our current weather until 2031. CoCoRaHS

Data for the updates come from many sources. For the first time ever, CoCoRaHS stations are included in the calculation of normals. CoCoRaHS is an organization of citizens across the country who record precipitation daily: rain and snow. My spousal unit and I have been members for enough years that our data qualified to be included.

There’s more detail here: https://www.cocorahs.org/Content.aspx?page=climate-normals

Understanding the Earth’s climate is a big task, and its importance to you, me, and future generations is huge. I’m glad to play a tiny part. You – if you live in the USA, Canada, or the Bahamas – you can too Learn about joining here.