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Tag: sci

morning computer playing dead

Published December 4, 2025 by Warren Ellis

New research conducted on a NASA-discovered bacterium shows the microbe is capable of entering an extreme dormant state, essentially “playing dead” to survive in some of the cleanest environments on Earth.

The finding could potentially reshape how scientists think about microbial survival on spacecraft and the challenges of preventing contamination during missions to space. Preventing contamination matters because it helps keep space missions safe, while ensuring that any signs of life spotted elsewhere in the solar system can be trusted.

“It shows that some microbes can enter ultra-low metabolic states that let them survive extremely austere environments, including clean rooms that naturally select for the hardiest organisms,” said Nils Averesch, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Science and a member of the Astraeus Space Institute. “The fact that this bacterium can intentionally suspend its metabolism makes survival on spacecraft surfaces or during deep-space cruise more plausible than previously assumed.”

“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.”  — Tom Stoppard.

A spectre is haunting the best contemporary literary writing, the spectre of necromodernism…

Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff.

Necromodernism!

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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telemetry 8nov25

Published November 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics, University of British Columbia Okanagan adjunct professor Mir Faizal and colleagues say they’ve proven that the fundamental nature of reality simply cannot be simulated on any computer.

By using mathematical theorems, they argued that some truths can only be understood through non-algorithmic understanding.

From ARMAGEDDON GOSPELS (2019)

We’re racing towards a future in which devices will be able to read our thoughts. 

You see signs of it everywhere, from brain-computer interfaces to algorithms that detect emotions from facial scans. And though the tech remains imperfect, it’s getting closer all the time: now a team of scientists say they’ve developed a model that can generate descriptions of what people’s brains are seeing by simply analyzing a scan of their brain activity.

They’re calling the technique “mind captioning,” and it may represent an effective way for transcribing what someone’s thinking, with impressively comprehensive and accurate results.

One from 2010 today:

Also, GOD DESTROYER, Osvor, 2011:

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The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

Published September 12, 2025 by Warren Ellis

The Missing Time Travelers of 3025 Could Be a Real Scientific Problem

“[The paper] shows that time travel—by enabling timeline alterations—induces a dynamic instability that—with very high probability—leads to its own erasure,” Jackson wrote. “This self-suppressing mechanism results in the asymptotic convergence of all timelines toward states in which no time machines ever exist.”

September 12, 2025 at 02:00PM

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Flying Frogs And Crashed Rocketships

Published March 31, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Some years back, Dr. Andrey Geim succeeded in levitating a frog through magnetic fields. Briefly, we lived in a world of hovering frogs. Following that, it was revealed that a parallel line of research has achieved the levitation of other small creatures through ultrasound. From my perspective, that was a strange day. Yesterday, animals were floating on music you cannot hear.

There’s a line in A E Van Vogt’s novel THE SILKIE, where it’s noted that the Silkies of the title, enhanced humans, have music that sounds like monotone drone to ordinary humans, because they can’t hear the ultrasonic variations built into it for superhuman Silkie ears. This connects with the minor cause celebre a while back concerning messaging devices with sonic tones designed to be inaudible to adults. Only young ears could pick up the sounds. It’s probably no coincidence that most people of my generation and beyond have had our hearing wrecked by loud music. I remember Kevin Shields gloating in an interview that all of us who listened to his band My Bloody Valentine’s “Feed Me With Your Kiss” with the volume cranked up have been rendered deaf as posts by the dissonance and feedback. Bastard.

I share a conviction with many that we live in a science fictional world. Not the one everyone expected, of course. But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. It’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.

People have spoken at length over the years about the death of sf, and even of the death of futurism. This isn’t new. In the 1980s, grand masters of the form such as Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley talked of sf losing its way when the common visions of the form were abandoned: Silverberg in particular (author, curiously, of some of sf’s most depressing stories) spoke of the cyberpunk/radical hard sf landscape being one he did not choose to inhabit, and so turned to writing fantasy. Today, sf, like so many arts, is utterly fractured, with several competing movements, none of them gaining much traction, while sales slip, magazines struggle and the written genre slides out of general view, dragged down to Davy Jones’ locker by the bony hands of the Western.

I love science for the fiction in it. Every great scientific innovation has poetry in it. In a BBC TV play about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson says upon seeing the assembled DNA double helix for the first time; “I knew it’d be pretty.”

The challenge in sf now is, to an extent, the one William Gibson met in PATTERN RECOGNITION by not writing sf. When we live in the science fiction condition, what’s left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer? If we’re living in the science fiction condition, why invent castles in the air? Especially when it turns out that the space elevator technology for reaching them will see you dead of radiation poisoning before you reach the top, as has recently been deduced — you can’t shield the elevator ribbon from the Van Allen belt, and if you shield the car you pay a weight penalty that not even an array of frog-levitators can alleviate…

(originally written 29 December 2006)

CONNECTED:

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The Dark Big Bang

Published November 25, 2024 by Warren Ellis

The search for the universe’s dark matter could end tomorrow—given a nearby supernova and a little luck. The nature of dark matter has eluded astronomers for 90 years, since the realization that 85% of the matter in the universe is not visible through our telescopes. The most likely dark matter candidate today is the axion, a lightweight particle that researchers around the world are desperately trying to find.

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Astrophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, now argue that the axion could be discovered within seconds of the detection of gamma rays from a nearby supernova explosion. Axions, if they exist, would be produced in copious quantities during the first 10 seconds after the core collapse of a massive star into a neutron star, and those axions would escape and be transformed into high-energy gamma rays in the star’s intense magnetic field.

Dark matter obviously fascinates me. But one of the things that hooks me is: if it doesn’t exist, our standard model of the universe doesn’t work and we know nothing.

Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.

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Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.

There’s lovely accidental poetics in science, all the time:

In 2023, Freese and Winkler proposed that dark matter, unlike ordinary matter, may have arisen from a distinct Big Bang event, which could have taken place months after the conventional Big Bang. In this model, dark matter particles are produced via the decay of a quantum field that only couples to the Dark Sector and is initially trapped in a false metastable vacuum state.

The Dark Sector! The Dark Big Bang!

On Sunday November 23, 1924, 100 years ago this month, readers perusing page six of the New York Times would have found an intriguing article, amid several large adverts for fur coats. The headline read: Finds Spiral Nebulae are Stellar Systems: “Dr. Hubbell Confirms View That They Are ‘Island Universes’; Similar to Our Own.”

We’ve only known there is more than one galaxy for a hundred years.

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QUANTUM, Manjit Kumar

Published July 8, 2024 by Warren Ellis

This is the book I wish I’d read before I read Carlo Rovelli. A very readable book that accesses archives of correspondence and records of conversations to make the emergence and codification of quantum theory into a warm, living thing. Almost gossipy, since Wolfgang Pauli was apparently universally considered to be a bit of a dick. And this made me laugh:

‘Princeton is a madhouse’ and ‘Einstein is completely cuckoo’, wrote Robert Oppenheimer. It was January 1935 and America’s leading home-grown theoretical physicist was 31.

It is, in fact, full of funny, human moments.

Paul Ehrenfest, sensing Einstein’s disbelief at the boldness of the Born-Heisenberg assertion that quantum mechanics was a closed theory, scribbled a note and passed it to him: ‘Don’t laugh! There is a special section in purgatory for professors of quantum theory, where they will be obliged to listen to lectures on classical physics ten hours every day.’

Also lots of instances of Pauli being amusingly awful to people. And, towards the back, Einstein finding new and interesting ways to fuck with Niels Bohr. He distrusted Bohr’s path to what became the Copenhagen Interpretation that froze quantum theory in place, for several reasons. You come to believe that one of those reasons was the mystic aura that Bohr took on.

According to the Copenhagen interpretation, a microphysical object has no intrinsic properties. An electron simply does not exist at any place until an observation or measurement is performed to locate it. It does not have a velocity or any other physical attribute until it is measured. In between measurements it is meaningless to ask what is the position or velocity of an electron. Since quantum mechanics says nothing about a physical reality that exists independently of the measuring equipment, only in the act of measurement does the electron become ‘real’. An unobserved electron does not exist.

And there it is in a nutshell. Kumar is excellent at showing the building blocks towards the Interpretation, the intellectual struggles and combat, and manages to always ground it in people and personalities. It’s a really fun read.

QUANTUM, Manjit Kumar (UK) (US+)

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