The problem with the possibility of having a giant radio telescope in your back garden is that you find it difficult to look at anything else. It is unashamedly ego-centric but the Square Kilometre Array has eclipsed everything else that was happening. (Writing a book about the SKA definitely hasn’t helped the radio telescope navel-gazing and tea-leaf reading.)

Following the latest delay, I looked up and realised that there was life in the rest of the scientific world. So, here are some sound bites of what’s been happening in the past month or two:

BACK FROM THE DEAD

In March, South Korea and Russia signed a deal to clone a woolly mammoth. Can you hear the Jurassic Park theme tune in your head? But this endeavour isn’t as scientifically dubious as extracting blood from a mosquito; they actually have the remains of a mammoth. In many cases, mammoth remains don’t actually fossilise (turn to stone), but are preserved in an organic state because of the intense cold. That means it may be possible to extract cells from undamaged tissue, which will probably be the most difficult part. These will then be cloned with elephant cells. Well, that is what the scientists think will be the most difficult part. However, there are down stream practicalities: where do you keep a 2m to 3m high woolly mammoth? And if they do manage to do it, it will be the only woolly mammoth in the world, a rather sad and pathetic life for an animal which – if it is socially similar to its elephant brethren – usually lives with its family.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

You think space craft, you think rockets. How else could we propel hundreds of kilograms into space? Well, the Startram Project thinks they have a better idea. Possibly the most expensive and insane catapult science fiction writers have come up with: accelerating spacecraft using magnets. They say that it all starts maglev technology.

Shanghai has the world’s first commercial high-speed maglev train, which stands for magnetic levitation. The line is 35km long, running from Shanghai to Shanghai Pudong International Airport, and the trip takes less than eight minutes. With large magnets on its undercarriage, the magnetised tracks cause the train to levitate 1cm to 10cm above the track. Yup, that’s right: a flying train.

It has no moving parts, which means no wear and tear, and is propelled down the track using electromagnetism, which is when an electrical current is used to create a magnetic field. So there is no friction and the only thing standing between silly-fast and stupid-fast is air resistance. The highest recorded speed of a Maglev train is a toe-curling 581km/h, while Shanghai’s achieves a top speed of 431km/h. In practical terms, Shanghai’s Maglev could take you around the world, at the equator, in less than four days.

There is of course the challenge of how to start moving without giving commuters whiplash and how to turn corners without plastering them to the sides of the carriage.

The Startram Project says that it would be possible – this is all somewhat hypothetical – to accelerate a spacecraft in a magnetised tunnel and spit it out into space; in other words, a very expensive canon where you are the ball. Perhaps that is why the Startram Project estimates that a people-capable version could be built for $60bn and be built within 20 years. You need a good couple of years to figure out how you can avoid your customers being pasted across the windscreen of the spacecraft. This is where we move into the realm of strait-jacket fast.

THE MODERN SUNFLOWER

It all sounded really exciting until I saw what it was called. Artemis Innovation Management Solutions has been given money by Nasa to build a satellite than can collect energy from the Sun’s rays and beam it back to Earth. It looks like a large tulip in space, made out of small reflective mirrors which would channel sunlight to small solar panels. The solar cells would convert the energy into microwaves which would then be broadcast back to an Earth-bound receiving station.

If you think people are upset about the possible electromagnetic radiation from cellphone towers, take a moment and picture the anti-solar-microwave-radiation lobby.

It could also be built piece-meal, which means that all the components could be transported using existing spacecraft technology and assembled in space. The Nasa money is seed funding to prove the concept and see whether it is feasible. Unfortunately it is called the Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrary Large PHased Array, or SPS-ALPHA. It may be a personal preference, but nothing that costs that much money should ever have the word “arbitrary” in the title. It should rather be the SPS via Very-Well-Thought-Out-And-Meticulously-Planned Large PHased Array.

Today’s Business Day ran a portion of my National Space Strategy story, with the rest being sacrificed at the altar of limited space. The most useful aspect of a blog is that you can always win the newspaper-space-constraint battle.

This is what the full story looks like: 
SA’s National Space Programme,  known as “Vision for 2030”, will be a roadmap guiding SA’s space activities for the next 20  years.

 The fledgling South African National Space Agency (Sansa) needs a space programme in order to get funding for projects by the state. It is mandated to co-ordinate SA’s space science and technology research,  and act as an advisory body to the minister, and it is state funded to do that.
“What will our space programme be in 2030?” Sansa CEO Sandile Malinga asks. “What system will we have, what technologies will we have? What people will we have? What programmes and services will we be running?”

Last week, expert panels gave presentations about what they thought should be included in the National Space Programme. These presentations were effectively a wish list of what the different panels would do in the next 20 years.

They represented four areas of space technology: earth observation, space operations, space engineering and space science.

Earth observation supplies satellite data on natural resources, such as water, land use and crop monitoring;  disaster management; and integrated spatial planning,  amongst other things.

One of the points  the earth observation team raised was connectivity. “We need to get data from Sansa to the municipalities,” the Agricultural Research Council’s Terry Newby said. Linked to this was outreach and awareness “to promote earth observation in daily decision making and planning”.
The only aspect with an  obvious price tag is an earth observation data centre, a central hub to collate and disseminate information. “It would require hardware, software, wetware — those are the people — and business systems,” Dr Newby said.

However, if space engineering got everything on its wish list, it would come at a hefty price. Space engineering’s responsibilities include building and putting satellites into space.

This group had a number of possible projects: earth observation missions, space science missions, flexible commercial missions, human capital develop training missions and possibly the development of launching capacity.

Each of these categories is divided into time frames: immediate (one to two years), short-term (two to five years), medium term (five to 10 years) and long term (10 to 20 years).

The earth observation mission plugs into the African Resource Management Constellation (ARMC). SA, Algeria, Kenya and Nigeria are part of the constellation, which requires each member to launch a satellite to monitor their region’s water, agriculture, climate and human settlement patterns.

The most immediate project would be SA’s contribution to the constellation, “a technology demonstrator”, says Herman Steyn from Stellenbosch University’s space engineering group.
“(We have) to prove that we have the technology that can operate (our contribution) which will be built with more money than was used for Sumbandila,” he said.

SumbundilaSAT was SA’s now-defunct “pathfinder” and had an official price tag of R26m, which is very cheap for a satellite. Communication with the satellite was lost last year. In the short-, medium and long-term, there were proposals for a number of constellations to observe the region’s natural resources.

SA also has an Ibsa (India-Brazil-SA) agreement to put a research satellite into orbit to observe the Southern Atlantic Anomaly, an area  which exposes  satellites to elevated levels of radiation.

This should form part of the National Space Programme, Dr Steyn said. Brazil would supply the majority of the science baseload, India would provide the launch and ground support, and SA would build the satellite.
 A thorny issue is the development of launch capacity.

Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor last year mentioned the possibility of reviving SA’s old rocket-launching facilities, which would allow the country to launch its own satellite-bearing rockets.
In the Apartheid regime, the rocket-launching facility was linked to the development of nuclear weapons.
 She also said her department’s aim was to capture a share of the global market for small- to medium-sized satellites.

Eugene Avenant spoke for Sansa’s space 0operations division, a long running programme offering tracking and telemetry support for satellites.  “We know our clients, we know what we are doing…. We’re not starting things from scratch,” he said.
“Our requirement is defined by the other groups.”

This group’s main request was to become part of Egnos, the European Geosynchronous Navigation Operating System, which is responsible for correcting errors in GPS. “There is a strategic and economic benefit to being part of Egnos…. We’ve booked a place, but we haven’t paid for it yet. It’s urgent or we miss the train,” Mr Avenant said.

Presenter for space science, Lea-Anne McKinnell, said: “Whatever we come up with, we have to sell according to its importance to the nation.”
She highlighted scientific disciplines such as the status of the space environment, life forms in space, space science in remote areas such as Antarctica, and threats from space, such as adverse space weather.

“If you’re going to do science, you need to ask the big science questions,” she said, saying that their panel had come up with three.

“What is the global space impact on earth? What are its effects on the sustainability of life in our solar system? How important is the magnetosphere to the development and survivability of life?” The magnetosphere is the region surrounding Earth that is formed by the Earth’s magnetic field, and solar winds and magnetic field.

All of the panels highlighted human capital development as a focus area.
“We don’t have the depth of knowledge required to handle a space programme,” Dr Newby said.

Dr McKinnell said that it was mistaken to think that only scientists were needed for a space programme. “We don’t only need physicists. We need engineers, mathematicians, software engineers….
“The space programme must use those people, and the excitement (generated) so that people are queuing at the door to be part of this programme,” Dr McKinnell said. “We need to develop programmes that would enable people to do space science, but also to develop skills that would allow them to go anywhere, such as industry.

However, the government’s pockets are not infinite. Dr Malinga says the programme proposed to the government would come in options: “The business as usual option, the intermediate option and the super-duper option.”

“The plan we provide will prioritise things, with things that are essential and need to be done as a matter of urgency,” he says.
All discussions and reviews of the National Space Programme would be completed by June, Sansa said.
wilds@bdfm.co.za

How many Planet of the Apes reincarnations to we have to watch before people get more concerned about fiddling with monkeys?

Enter the latest: a chimeric monkey.

There are a number of “chimera” definitions.

One hails from the nightmares of Greek mythology: a fire-breathing monster, with the body of a lioness, a tail that ended in a snake head and goat’s head sprouting from its back.

Another is genetic: an animal comprising of two or more populations genetically distinct cells, which retain their own character. Now, this isn’t as Sci-Fi as you think, and is sometimes found in humans, such as non-identical twins.

But researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Centre at Oregon Health & Science University have taken this to a whole new level.

They have produced the world’s first chimeric monkeys, through “glueing” as many as six or more genomes from separate rhesus monkeys together.

This has been done previously with mice, with the first chimeric mouse being created in 1960s. It is considered “very important for science”. According to the Wiki oracle, they offer “insights into such problems as the tissue specific requirements of a gene, cell lineage, and cell potential”.

Researcher Shoukhrat Mitalipov, in an interview with Physorg.com, explained that it enabled researchers to track specific genes and eliminate targeted ones.

He said: “The cells never fuse, but they stay together and work together to form tissues and organs…. The possibilities for science are enormous.”

“We cannot model everything in the mouse,” he said.

“If we want to move stem cell therapies from the lab to clinics and from the mouse to humans, we need to understand what these primate cells can and can’t do. We need to study them in humans, including human embryos.”

He flagged the fact that producing human chimera was not on the agenda.

He has a point regarding necessary advancements in stem cell research. However, Wild on Science spent large tracts of the festive season documenting the links between comic book superheroes’ (and villains’) powers and scientific causes, both intended and otherwise. Think Spider-Man, Dr Octopus, Cpt America, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Batman (although that’s scientific innovation). All this movie watching and comicbook reading was for research purposes, naturally.

Mutant monkeys? That strikes me as something to watch very closely.

On day 10 of the COP17 talks, I finally realised the truth: NGOs have more fun.

After having been trapped in Durban’s ICC for nine days, I decided it was finally time to have a nosey around the expo centre, and chat to folk about who they were and what they were doing there.

And do you know what I discovered? People enjoying themselves. What next??

Everyone at the ICC is terribly serious, and by day 10 even the press have lost the skip in their step. People cluster together and have intense conservations, or march the hallways with intent, accompanied by their stern expressions. Small talk isn’t really an option unless you’re bitching about how long it takes to get coffee.

But at the expo area people approach you to chat. It may be boiling hot and humid, but smiling people sit and drink coffee, struggling to understand each other through their different accents. But trying anyway.

You stand with your back to the airconditioning unit, and people shift up to make more room! (This is a widespread past time.)

The negotiators are drafting texts that could change the way we live, although one negotiator told me yesterday that it was like arguing with 193 grammar Nazis about where a comma should be. They have an important job to do, and it shows.

But it must be said that the NGOs and exhibitors definitely look like they’re having much more fun.

The vibe on Day 3 of the COP17 climate change talks is very different to the pomp-and-circumstance of Day 1. The dignitaries have left, the cavalcades went with them, and negotiators have gotten down to business.

Delegates and the media seem to have found their bearings, and so walk determinedly from venue to venue, rather than clogging up passage ways with a confused Brownian motion. Day 1 gave me an incorrect impression that this was a large and self-congratulatory cluster … um … talk, but in fact people are here to work.

From the government negotiators to NGOs to the media, everyone has something to do – whether it is traipse through forests’ worth of paper (more on that later), hand out fliers, get to interviews, file stories or just try not to melt into a sweaty puddle on the floor.

In terms of fashion, I can’t remember a more eclectic conference. There are naturally the folk in penguin suits – and we feel very sorry for them in this heat – women in flowing Indian print skirts, African delegates in traditional dress, women in burqas, the press with their natural laissez-faire attitude to dress-sense. One thing every person here seems to have is a laptop and a backpack for collecting the miscellaneous million handouts.

The grand irony of the day: we’re at a conference on climate change, where people are talking about protecting forests and conserving resources, and yet there’s a documents centre that hands out tens of thousands of A4 pages a day. Probably more. The reason you need a backpack/suitcase is to lug it all about with you.

So I have a theory about the United Nations and paper. Harry Potter fans will get the analogy. In a vault in the wizard bank Gringotts, there is a spell which makes everything you touch multiply 10-fold. The intended result is that you get crushed under the weight of gold treasure you were trying to steal. It’s the same with the UN and paper – everything it touches seems to make the paperwork multiply 10-fold (possibly more).

“Delegate crushed by paper avalanche” actually seems like a plausible headline.

Do you wish you’d come to the COP17 climate change talks in Durban? Had you hoped to get a glimpse of bureaucrats bureaucrating? Well, this is how Day 1 went down.

Few places in SA make you as keenly aware of the environment as Durban, while a bead of sweat trickles down the back of your leg. Summer in Durban is a beautiful thing. It makes you appreciate the finer things in life, such as cold water, airconditioning and (no offence, Durbanites) that you live somewhere else.

In terms of the UN talks themselves, all of those are taking place in the ICC. There’s a large expo hall outside, and a number of peripheral initiatives. But if these talks deliver anything, it’s going to come out of this building.

You can feel the bee-hive-esque industry, the purpose, as people mill about the venue, get lost, ask someone for directions, get more lost.

So, you’ve probably heard the major snippets of news online: “We need a global solution, no just a focus on national interests.” This sentiment was echoed by President Jacob Zuma, UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, and SA’s International Relations Minister, and now president of COP, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

That was the main message of the day: countries need to stop looking after themselves because climate change is a global problem. Whether their poignant comments will make any difference remains to be seen.

Ms Figueres made an “appeal to negotiators that they don’t delegate issues upwards. Leave out only the political ones” for next week when the heads of state arrive at the talks.

But that’s the main reason that the COP talks haven’t really gotten anywhere recently: politics and the protection of national interests. Take a look at this link for a (very) brief overview: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/Content.aspx?id=159320

The word of the day has been “reassurance”. Developing countries want reassurance that they will be given funding to deal with climate change, while developed countries want reassurance that everyone will come to the party on emissions targets.

But those decisions can’t be made on the ground by negotiators and bureaucrats. The negotiators are here with mandates from their governments – so if minds need changing, they need to change up there.

And it makes you feel sorry for personified Durban: “Durban needs to do this”, “Durban should deliver that”. And what no one has said, but which someone should: “We want Durban to achieve the impossible … And if it can’t, it’ll be Durban’s fault.”

At the moment, science news is dominated by neutrinos that move a little too quickly and Nasa’s soon-to-be-launched Mini Cooper-sized science laboratory headed for Mars. And it would be impossible to forget about the UN climate change talks in Durban (but more on that next week).

There’s a lot more happening out there. Here are some awesome odds and ends that haven’t made international headlines.

• Water off a butterfly’s wing

It’s another triumph of biomimcry, the science of using natural designs in human engineering. Through nanotechnology, a team of researchers from Sweden, the US and Korea have managed to develop a surface that repels water and traps light by mimicking a butterfly’s wing. The mountain swallowtail butterfly’s wings have tiny air traps – a collection of bumps and potholes – and the air trapped in these teeny pockets acts as an air buffer between the wing and water. Researchers have replicated this in silicon by etching micro-sized pores and cones, creating a hierarchy of air sinks. They also trap light, especially wavelengths just above the visible range.

Physorg.com

• Mediate yourself healthy and happy, says science

Meditation seems like one of those things that could be a good idea, but we never have time for it. Or it’s too hippy and new age. However, science says it’s good for you and, in a way, helps you get over yourself.

A team at Yale conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging – which maps blood movement to neural activity – to scan people while meditating. Lead author of the study Judson Brewer highlights that mediation helps people to “stay focused on the moment” which is associated with increased happiness.

In experienced meditators, they found that there was decreased brain activity in the default mode network – which is activated when people daydream, remember memories or envision the future. This area of the brain is associated with attention lapses, ADD and Altzheimer’s disease warning signs. When this area was active in experienced meditators, there was corresponding activity in the self-monitoring and cognitive control areas.

“Meditation’s ability to help people stay in the moment has been part of philosophical and contemplative practices for thousands of years,” Dr Brewer says.

“Conversely, the hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect. This gives us some nice cues as to the neural mechanisms of how it might be working clinically.”

Physorg.com

• It’s in your genes

Could a 500 000-year-old genetic mutation be responsible for human language and speech? Christiane Schreiweis, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, seems to think so. The gene is called FOXP2 (and you have to be linguistically capable to say it), and mice that were genetically modified to produce the gene appeared to learn faster than their non-fiddled-with companions.

The gene was discovered in the 1990s, by studying three generations of a British family who suffered from severe language and speech problems. They were found to have another mutation of the gene, which is allegedly is instrumental in the development of brain circuits necessary for learning.

Most vertebrates have the same version of the gene, but the variant found in modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) was different. Another neuroscientist Faraneh Vargha-Lhadem, based at University College London, who studied the British family with the mutated gene, claims the gene could be responsible for mastering the facial movements required for speech.

Ewen Callaway, Nature

When I was younger, I wanted to be an astronaut – the excitement, the adventure, the freedom and infinite space. And then I learned the truth: the majority of your time is spent in a tin can, eating freeze-packed food and trying to stop your muscles from atrophying.

The simulated mission to Mars ended on Friday – 520 days, trapped in a tiny cubicle with five other people. If I’d been opening that shuttle door, I’d have expected a scene from Lord of the Flies.

Remember: when they went into that shuttle (June 2010), the Arab Spring revolution hadn’t happened; Gaddafi was still alive; Obama hadn’t announced the recall of troops out of Iraq; Europe was only beginning to feel the tug of fiscal doom that would spiral into a whirlpool.

It was mainly a psychological endurance test, to see if they could cut it:  17 months of your life in metal room with no windows.

Taiwan News reported that the astronauts were paid $100 000 for undergoing the test. That’s less than $200 a day, or R1600.

The question is: Is it enough?

Last week, I met with a sleep specialist, who is comparing older and younger people’s circadian rhythms (your natural biological clock). She had previously been working in Boston, US, where one of her institute’s main clients had been Nasa.

This was because, if you’re an astronaut in deep space, keeping your circadian rhythm in check is extremely important. The sun’s cycle, as the light hits the spacecraft, is nine minutes, she told me. And if astronauts aren’t careful and vigilant about sleep and their body clocks, they go a bit mad: sleep deprivation results in mental impairment.

Now, there’s a recipe for disaster: sleep-deprived, mad people eating bad food, trapped in a box.

However, derisive I am about the idea of doing it myself, you have to admire that kind of dedication — 17 months, it’s just short of a year and a half.

While the money may not adequately compensate a poor, deranged, starved astronaut, there is a consolation prize.

That has to be the worst job they’ve ever had. I’m battling to think of anything that could be worse. Whatever job they have after that will be better.

More than a thousand years ago, the Vikings – Norse warriors and merchants to the magnanimous, or pirates, raiders and general war-lusty miscreants to the less generous – sailed as far afield as Asia, Europe and the North Atlantic Islands.

Now, what has puzzled people is how they did it. Yes, they were phenomenal sailors, able to read the sun, night sky, landmarks, water currents. But that doesn’t adequately explain how they travelled thousands of kilometres away from home without a compass.

Myth has spoken of a sunstone, a stone which would allow the Vikings to determine the position of the sun even if it was cloudy. And if you’re that far north and in a variety of climates, being able to see the sun isn’t guaranteed – and getting lost means a pretty certain, and rather painful, death.

An international team of researchers claim it isn’t a myth.

They argue that Vikings used naturally occurring transparent calcite crystal – also known as Iceland spar – to locate the sun through the clouds.

The researchers, as reported by physorg.com, explain that the stone can depolarise light, filtering and fracturing it along different axes.

If you make a mark on the top of the stone, two marks appear if you look at it from below.

“Then you rotate the crystal until the two points have exactly the same intensity or darkness. At that angle, the upward-facing surface indicates the direction of the Sun,” the researchers told physorg.com.

“A precision of a few degrees can be reached even under dark twilight conditions…. Vikings would have been able to determine with precision the direction of the hidden Sun.”

Now, if mythical stones can be real, what else is going to be walking out of legends? Coming up next: the return of Big Foot, the Truth of Nessie, and Merlin’s sceptre.

(Note: this blog is heavily indebted to physorg.com)

We all accept SA has a skills shortage. It’s the talk of government and business, and, as the head of a South African science agency told me last week, “The skills aren’t there…. We advertise positions and we can’t find people. We have a high unemployment rate, but also poor skills.”

So what can large science organisations do? There’s the reality that a matric pass in maths is now 30%, which in effect means that you can pass by not knowing 70% of the work. People can be trained in house – which is what I understand the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and other organisations do – but how does that help the basic skills level?

(By the way, these questions aren’t going to be answered in a blog – here are just some interesting snippets I’ve heard in the past week.)

At the presentation of the CSIR’s annual results last week, CEO Sibusiso Sibisi said that there was no quick fix, and that it was difficult for skilled scientists to engage directly with learners.

The first reason is that just because you understand the science doesn’t make you a good teacher. In fact, you can often do more harm than good. For example, a matric student asks you how to work out the co-ordinates of a parabola’s peak. Someone with a PhD will start talking about differentials and advanced calculus, taking a simple standard grade question (although I’m not sure if SA’s matric candidates have a standard grade option anymore) and leaving in its wakes a carnage of confusion.

There’s also the reality that it undermines teachers. Dr Sibisi gave this example (which is paraphrased): Imagine we, at the CSIR, have matric students here on a Saturday for extra maths or science classes. A scientist could explain something differently to a teacher, and then the student goes back to the teacher and says “You’re stupid. The smart person at the CSIR said this.”

Each science institution chief I interview always mentions human capital development: the CSIR CEO, the South African National Space Agency CEO Sandile Malinga, Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor, and more.

They mention bursary schemes and internships, but the reality is that you need the basics first, and that’s what we’re missing in SA.