In general though, dolphin brains are incredibly fascinating things. There's still so much we don't know about them -- things like fMRI machines tend not to work too well on aquatic mammals. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on Cetacean intelligence; here's the section on how they're different from other mammal brains:
Although dolphins are themselves mammals, their brains are constructed and act differently than those of most mammals. Unlike most mammalian brains, which have six neocortical layers, dolphins have five. While most sleeping mammals go through a stage known as REM sleep, dolphin studies have not shown any brain wave patterns associated with REM sleep. Unlike terrestrial mammals, dolphin brains contain a paralimbic lobe, which may possibly be used for sensory processing.
Dolphin brain stem transmission time is faster than that normally found in humans, and is roughly equivalent to the speed found in rats. As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment -- analogous to eyes in primates -- and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, support speedy processing of sound. The dolphin's dependence on speedy sound processing is evident in the structure of its brain: its neural area devoted to visual imaging is only about one-tenth that of the human brain, while the area devoted to acoustical imaging is about 10 times that of the human brain. (Which is unsurprising: primate brains devote far more volume to visual processing than almost any other animals, and human brains more than other primates.)
I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing.
I'd be curious to see where you read that, as it doesn't seem to be true. The only increased cancer rates I've heard of are those of people who were actually there in 1945.
Q: Are there any current health concerns for people if they were to move and live in Hiroshima/Nagasaki for an extended period of time?
A: Literally millions of people have lived in and around Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the 1945 bombings. No adverse effects from the radiation have been identified, except in those who were present at the time of the bombings. There is no reason for concern about moving to or living in these areas now or in the future.
Darn, I was in the middle of preparing a submission on Cosmos 1 when I saw this. Anyways, I have a little more info which people might find interesting, so I'll go ahead and paste it below:
Countdown to First Solar Sail Spacecraft
The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1, the first spacecraft to be propelled by a solar sail, has just been loaded onto a converted ICBM in preparation for its launch from a Russian submarine this Tuesday, June 21. This is the first mission by a non-profit space advocacy group and is being funded by private donations. Project Operations Assistant Emily Lakdawalla is posting a running description of events on the official blog. Videos and animations describing the mission are available, including commentary from the Planetary Society's Vice President, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Downloadable print-out model kits are also available.
One of the many neat things about this project is that if the first phase of regular solar sailing is successful, they'll run a later experiment with focusing a microwave beam on the sail to see how well it propels the craft. I wish the Planetary Society the best in this high-risk endeavour.
I recently found out about paraterraforming, which seems like an ideal way to do things. Basically, instead of terraforming an entire planet at once over a period of centuries, you construct a habitat which expands over time. From Wikipedia:
Also known as the "worldhouse" concept, paraterraforming involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals. A worldhouse can be constructed with technology known since the 1960s.
Paraterraforming has several advantages over the traditional approach to terraforming. For example, it provides an immediate payback to investors; the worldhouse starts out small in area (a domed city for example), but those areas provide habitable space from the start. The paraterraforming approach also allows for a modular approach that can be tailored to the needs of the planet's population, growing only as fast and only in those areas where it is required. Finally, paraterraforming greatly reduces the amount of atmosphere that one would need to add to planets like Mars in order to provide Earthlike atmospheric pressures. By using a solid envelope in this manner, even bodies which would otherwise be unable to retain an atmosphere at all (such as asteroids) could be given a habitable environment. The environment under an artificial worldhouse roof would also likely be more amenable to artificial manipulation.
It has the disadvantage of requiring a great deal of construction and maintenance activity, the cost of which could be ameliorated to some degree through the use of automated manufacturing and repair mechanisms. A worldhouse could also be more susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event of a major breach, though this risk can likely be reduced by compartmentalization and other active safety precautions. Meteor strikes are a particular concern in the absence of any external atmosphere in which they would burn up before reaching the surface.
Small Worldhouses are often referred to as "Domes".
This debate me of something I saw over on SciScoop some time ago:
(pasted below)
I recently heard Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation speak on a couple of related issues, and he gave us a very interesting perspective on all this - to paraphrase as best as I can remember:
"There are three distinct philosophies on doing things in space, which we can identify with three individuals: Carl Sagan, Wernher von Braun, and Gerard O'Neill. To the Sagans of the world, space is wondrous, grand, amazing, spectacular, and we should be learning all we can about it - but 'don't touch'! To the von Brauns, space is a proving ground for national grandeur, a place where we show how our engineers are the best, where we build the biggest rockets, the best space stations, and parade our astronaut heros to the world. To the O'Neills, however, space is the new American West: a place of hope and economic opportunity for all people."
Both the Sagans and the von Brauns have strong and traditional representations at NASA - the scientific and robotic missions follow that Sagan philosophy of "explore, but don't touch". Apollo was of course the quintessential von Braunian project, and the manned programs at NASA have attempted to follow in that mode ever since. But the O'Neill vision of space as a place for all people, as a location with resources bringing economic opportunity for the world, has had very little say in NASA up to this point.
Back to the current discussion, on the topic of terraforming Saganites seem to be against it quite often, as they're afraid of humans disturbing the sanctity of space. There's also bioconservatives who tend to see humanity as a virus which they want to keep quarantined to Earth, if not eradicated completely.
Many von Braunians are in favor of terraforming, while O'Neillians are very much in favor of both terraforming and orbital settlements. I personally think of myself as a Saganite that's recently "converted" to being an O'Neillian. There are few things I want to see more than see humanity become a multi-planet, spacefaring species.
Whatever happened to launching from lighter-than-air platforms? With conventional rockets, so much weight goes into fuel to move the fuel you'll burn later to move the fuel that comes even later. Surely someone's doing something with a straightforward idea like this?
The other thing I'd like to see is someone actually developing a Martian greenhouse design.
I've commented about this in the past, but here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on Elon Musk:
In 2001, Musk had plans for a "Mars Oasis" project, which would land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith. He put this project on hold when he discovered that launch costs would dwarf the mission development and construction costs for the project, and decided to work on lowering launch costs by founding SpaceX.
If I recall correctly, he actually hired a team of engineers and scientists to do a feasibility study, and I'm betting they put together at least some preliminary designs. Hopefully we'll see him return to this project once he gets launch costs lowered some.
Oh, I see. Typically, when I hear somebody mention "space truck," what they mean is something more like the space shuttle: a jack-of-all-trades which not only takes payloads up, but also brings people up, and can recapture satellites and bring them back down. The consensus seems to be that going down that path tends to increase costs dramatically with little benefit.
I'm personally hoping that SpaceX will succeed in their goal of creating a cheap "space truck."
Thing is, I'm not sure how they could possibly benefit from cooperation, except on things like trying to make regulations suck less. The approaches Virgin and Blue Origin are taking to suborbital launches are completely different from each other: different fuels, different launch methods (carrier aircraft vs. VTOL), different vehicle structures, and so on. It'll be interesting to see which approach ends up having the better cost-benefit ratio in the long run.
Is this actually a real venture or just a pipe dream to conveniently write tax dollars off against?
Since when do you judge a secret project by the quality of its website? Also, I might be mistaken, but I'm not sure how Blue Origin would serve as a tax write-off.
The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin, a company that is working to "develop a crewed, suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space flight?
Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.
Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.
As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
EVERY single telecom company will dissagree with you. As will every national intelligence agency.
I'm not sure if I understand this comment, but are you trying to claim that every single telecom company and every national intelligence agency launches payloads on the Space Shuttle? I assure you they most certainly do not.
Would you want your children flying a space shuttle that hasn't been properly beta-tested?
Screw that. If the chance of coming back alive is at least as good as it was on the 100+ other shuttle launches, I'd give almost anything to go myself. I guess some additional beta-testing might be nice, but how much will it cost?
(So, how many of you/.'ers out there knew that Deep Impact is about to launch a probe into the comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July? Raise your hands... oh dear.)
It's definitely not an ignorant question. Certainly, most slashdotters seem to be in conflict about what the answer is. Some say that NASA's goal is science, others say it's exploration, others say it's just an arm of the military, others say it's a prelude to colonization.
One of the really neat robots at the expo that I read about was a ballroom dance robot. There were articles on it at CNN and Yahoo. Basically, as it dances it matches the upper body movements of a human partner, sort of like what happens in real ballroom dancing.
It reminded me of research by an MIT student last year on swing dancing robots. Clever haptic interfaces are cool.
By the way, where'd you find the impact factors? I looked around to try to find the impact factor for the journal before submitting the story, without any luck.
Wow, did you really just link to Mentifex's page? For those not familiar with him, he's an infamous kook from the early days of Usenet who spammed newsgroups claiming (and still claims to this day) that he's "solved AI" and implemented it in Forth and JavaScript. More recently, he's expanded onto places like slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
In general though, dolphin brains are incredibly fascinating things. There's still so much we don't know about them -- things like fMRI machines tend not to work too well on aquatic mammals. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article on Cetacean intelligence; here's the section on how they're different from other mammal brains:
e #Differences_from_other_mammalian_brains
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cetacean_intelligenc
Although dolphins are themselves mammals, their brains are constructed and act differently than those of most mammals. Unlike most mammalian brains, which have six neocortical layers, dolphins have five. While most sleeping mammals go through a stage known as REM sleep, dolphin studies have not shown any brain wave patterns associated with REM sleep. Unlike terrestrial mammals, dolphin brains contain a paralimbic lobe, which may possibly be used for sensory processing.
Dolphin brain stem transmission time is faster than that normally found in humans, and is roughly equivalent to the speed found in rats. As echo-location is the dolphin's primary means of sensing its environment -- analogous to eyes in primates -- and since sound travels four and a half times faster in water than in air, scientists speculate that the faster brain stem transmission time, and perhaps the paralimbic lobe as well, support speedy processing of sound. The dolphin's dependence on speedy sound processing is evident in the structure of its brain: its neural area devoted to visual imaging is only about one-tenth that of the human brain, while the area devoted to acoustical imaging is about 10 times that of the human brain. (Which is unsurprising: primate brains devote far more volume to visual processing than almost any other animals, and human brains more than other primates.)
I've read that Hiroshima and Nagasaki still experience cancer rates well above normal levels, and it's been 60 years since the bombing.
I'd be curious to see where you read that, as it doesn't seem to be true. The only increased cancer rates I've heard of are those of people who were actually there in 1945.
http://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q3645.html
Q: Are there any current health concerns for people if they were to move and live in Hiroshima/Nagasaki for an extended period of time?
A: Literally millions of people have lived in and around Hiroshima and Nagasaki since the 1945 bombings. No adverse effects from the radiation have been identified, except in those who were present at the time of the bombings. There is no reason for concern about moving to or living in these areas now or in the future.
S. Julian, DDS, PhD
Darn, I was in the middle of preparing a submission on Cosmos 1 when I saw this. Anyways, I have a little more info which people might find interesting, so I'll go ahead and paste it below:
Countdown to First Solar Sail Spacecraft
The Planetary Society's Cosmos 1, the first spacecraft to be propelled by a solar sail, has just been loaded onto a converted ICBM in preparation for its launch from a Russian submarine this Tuesday, June 21. This is the first mission by a non-profit space advocacy group and is being funded by private donations. Project Operations Assistant Emily Lakdawalla is posting a running description of events on the official blog. Videos and animations describing the mission are available, including commentary from the Planetary Society's Vice President, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Downloadable print-out model kits are also available.
One of the many neat things about this project is that if the first phase of regular solar sailing is successful, they'll run a later experiment with focusing a microwave beam on the sail to see how well it propels the craft. I wish the Planetary Society the best in this high-risk endeavour.
I recently found out about paraterraforming, which seems like an ideal way to do things. Basically, instead of terraforming an entire planet at once over a period of centuries, you construct a habitat which expands over time. From Wikipedia:
r aforming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming#Parater
Also known as the "worldhouse" concept, paraterraforming involves the construction of a habitable enclosure on a planet which eventually grows to encompass most of the planet's usable area. The enclosure would consist of a transparent roof held one or more kilometers above the surface, pressurized with a breathable atmosphere, and anchored with tension towers and cables at regular intervals. A worldhouse can be constructed with technology known since the 1960s.
Paraterraforming has several advantages over the traditional approach to terraforming. For example, it provides an immediate payback to investors; the worldhouse starts out small in area (a domed city for example), but those areas provide habitable space from the start. The paraterraforming approach also allows for a modular approach that can be tailored to the needs of the planet's population, growing only as fast and only in those areas where it is required. Finally, paraterraforming greatly reduces the amount of atmosphere that one would need to add to planets like Mars in order to provide Earthlike atmospheric pressures. By using a solid envelope in this manner, even bodies which would otherwise be unable to retain an atmosphere at all (such as asteroids) could be given a habitable environment. The environment under an artificial worldhouse roof would also likely be more amenable to artificial manipulation.
It has the disadvantage of requiring a great deal of construction and maintenance activity, the cost of which could be ameliorated to some degree through the use of automated manufacturing and repair mechanisms. A worldhouse could also be more susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event of a major breach, though this risk can likely be reduced by compartmentalization and other active safety precautions. Meteor strikes are a particular concern in the absence of any external atmosphere in which they would burn up before reaching the surface.
Small Worldhouses are often referred to as "Domes".
This debate me of something I saw over on SciScoop some time ago:
(pasted below)
I recently heard Rick Tumlinson of the Space Frontier Foundation speak on a couple of related issues, and he gave us a very interesting perspective on all this - to paraphrase as best as I can remember:
"There are three distinct philosophies on doing things in space, which we can identify with three individuals: Carl Sagan, Wernher von Braun, and Gerard O'Neill. To the Sagans of the world, space is wondrous, grand, amazing, spectacular, and we should be learning all we can about it - but 'don't touch'! To the von Brauns, space is a proving ground for national grandeur, a place where we show how our engineers are the best, where we build the biggest rockets, the best space stations, and parade our astronaut heros to the world. To the O'Neills, however, space is the new American West: a place of hope and economic opportunity for all people."
Both the Sagans and the von Brauns have strong and traditional representations at NASA - the scientific and robotic missions follow that Sagan philosophy of "explore, but don't touch". Apollo was of course the quintessential von Braunian project, and the manned programs at NASA have attempted to follow in that mode ever since. But the O'Neill vision of space as a place for all people, as a location with resources bringing economic opportunity for the world, has had very little say in NASA up to this point.
Back to the current discussion, on the topic of terraforming Saganites seem to be against it quite often, as they're afraid of humans disturbing the sanctity of space. There's also bioconservatives who tend to see humanity as a virus which they want to keep quarantined to Earth, if not eradicated completely.
Many von Braunians are in favor of terraforming, while O'Neillians are very much in favor of both terraforming and orbital settlements. I personally think of myself as a Saganite that's recently "converted" to being an O'Neillian. There are few things I want to see more than see humanity become a multi-planet, spacefaring species.
t/Space recently released a paper with more details of the air-launch method and the flight tests here:
t LAD_Test_Program.pdf
http://transformspace.com/document_library/media/
Whatever happened to launching from lighter-than-air platforms? With conventional rockets, so much weight goes into fuel to move the fuel you'll burn later to move the fuel that comes even later. Surely someone's doing something with a straightforward idea like this?
That's pretty much what JP Aerospace is doing, "airship to orbit." RLV News has some additional info and news items on them.
Was it just me, or did anyone else read that as a Scaled Composites Protoss Carrier aircraft?
;)
Funny thing is, now that I think about it, just about all of Burt Rutan's designs actually end up looking like Protoss aircraft.
The other thing I'd like to see is someone actually developing a Martian greenhouse design.
I've commented about this in the past, but here's a quote from the Wikipedia article on Elon Musk:
In 2001, Musk had plans for a "Mars Oasis" project, which would land a miniature experimental greenhouse on Mars, containing food crops growing on Martian regolith. He put this project on hold when he discovered that launch costs would dwarf the mission development and construction costs for the project, and decided to work on lowering launch costs by founding SpaceX.
If I recall correctly, he actually hired a team of engineers and scientists to do a feasibility study, and I'm betting they put together at least some preliminary designs. Hopefully we'll see him return to this project once he gets launch costs lowered some.
People like Elon Musk (XCOR) and others have said that if the demand is there, they will build it.
Quick nitpick: Elon Musk is head of SpaceX, Jeff Greason is head of XCOR.
I'm thinking I read somewhere Richard Branson said something like $1,000,000 for his package.
The ticket price for Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson's service) is US$200,000.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/en/when.asp
I mean should we not obtain direct observation from something before we proclaim it "discovered"?
How many discovered subatomic particles have been directly observed?
Oh, I see. Typically, when I hear somebody mention "space truck," what they mean is something more like the space shuttle: a jack-of-all-trades which not only takes payloads up, but also brings people up, and can recapture satellites and bring them back down. The consensus seems to be that going down that path tends to increase costs dramatically with little benefit.
I'm personally hoping that SpaceX will succeed in their goal of creating a cheap "space truck."
Thing is, I'm not sure how they could possibly benefit from cooperation, except on things like trying to make regulations suck less. The approaches Virgin and Blue Origin are taking to suborbital launches are completely different from each other: different fuels, different launch methods (carrier aircraft vs. VTOL), different vehicle structures, and so on. It'll be interesting to see which approach ends up having the better cost-benefit ratio in the long run.
Is this actually a real venture or just a pipe dream to conveniently write tax dollars off against?
Since when do you judge a secret project by the quality of its website? Also, I might be mistaken, but I'm not sure how Blue Origin would serve as a tax write-off.
Here's the obligatory quote from his slashdot interview:
The Wikipedia lists you as a part-time advisor for Blue Origin, a company that is working to "develop a crewed, suborbital launch system." What is it that you do for them and has the recent winning of the X-Prize by the Spaceship One team had any effect on Blue Origin's plans? What are your visions of future private space flight?
Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.
Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.
As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
"We don't NEED a space truck "
EVERY single telecom company will dissagree with you. As will every national intelligence agency.
I'm not sure if I understand this comment, but are you trying to claim that every single telecom company and every national intelligence agency launches payloads on the Space Shuttle? I assure you they most certainly do not.
My other tattoo is on the back of my neck like a shirt tag and is:
::fiddles a little with ascii table::
01100111
01100101
01100101
01101011
Which is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out.
That is -so- cool.
Would you want your children flying a space shuttle that hasn't been properly beta-tested?
Screw that. If the chance of coming back alive is at least as good as it was on the 100+ other shuttle launches, I'd give almost anything to go myself. I guess some additional beta-testing might be nice, but how much will it cost?
(So, how many of you /.'ers out there knew that Deep Impact is about to launch a probe into the comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July? Raise your hands ... oh dear.)
:)
Hey, I know about it.
A slightly ignorant question:
What is NASA doing?
It's definitely not an ignorant question. Certainly, most slashdotters seem to be in conflict about what the answer is. Some say that NASA's goal is science, others say it's exploration, others say it's just an arm of the military, others say it's a prelude to colonization.
One of the really neat robots at the expo that I read about was a ballroom dance robot. There were articles on it at CNN and Yahoo. Basically, as it dances it matches the upper body movements of a human partner, sort of like what happens in real ballroom dancing.
It reminded me of research by an MIT student last year on swing dancing robots. Clever haptic interfaces are cool.
By the way, where'd you find the impact factors? I looked around to try to find the impact factor for the journal before submitting the story, without any luck.
Woah, deja vu. ;)
Wow, did you really just link to Mentifex's page? For those not familiar with him, he's an infamous kook from the early days of Usenet who spammed newsgroups claiming (and still claims to this day) that he's "solved AI" and implemented it in Forth and JavaScript. More recently, he's expanded onto places like slashdot.
There's a fairly extensive FAQ on him here:
http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html