What's wrong with scientific papers? Ask physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford, who tackles the question in a wonderful pastiche for COSMOS. "The sad truth is that hardly anybody ever reads a paper all the way through," Benford writes. "A study by a British physics journal showed that the average number who get through the whole paper was 0.5 - and that included the author! Apparently, most scientists can't bear to reread their own work." Benford's 'study' appears under the title "How to write an awesome scientific paper." Using the nom de guerre Bea Realist, he skewers over-inflated prose and bloated egos without mercy. A sample, touching on the awful overuse of the passive voice: The scientist is, by his reliance on the passive voice, hobbled, leading to sentences like this one, in which the subject, a lumpy noun, is acted upon by pallid adjectives and wan verbs, all without ever saying exactly who the action is done by, so that the sentences get longer and longer as...

A recent post by Greg Laughlin on his systemic site triggers memories of a Twilight Zone episode called 'The Midnight Sun.' Laughlin (UC-SC) was speculating about what would happen to the Earth's orbit if the Solar System were disrupted by another star. That inevitably called up the still vivid image of two women sweltering in a New York apartment (one of them, the actress Lois Nettleton, is pictured above). The plot: The Earth has moved closer to the Sun, and all hell is about to break loose. Here's Rod Serling's introduction, following the brief introductory scene: "The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is 'doomed,' because the people you've just seen have been handed a death sentence. One month ago, the Earth suddenly changed its elliptical orbit and in doing so began to follow a path which gradually, moment by moment, day by day, took it closer to the Sun. And all of man's little devices to stir up the air are now no longer luxuries - they...

Chris Rowan, who writes Highly Allochthonous, a fine weblog with an earth sciences bent, has now put together Philosophia Naturalis #5, a carnival of weblog entries from various scientific disciplines. Don't miss this, because Chris links to numerous science blogs with high-quality content, covering everything from the topology of the universe to the top breakthroughs in nanotechnology for 2006. Can the universe usefully be described as a computer? Is string theory a blind alley? You'll find plenty to read here. What I appreciate about the ongoing 'carnival' idea is that it collects good writing that I would otherwise have missed and leads me to science bloggers I want to read again. While you're at Chris' site, be sure to read his thoughts about water on Mars and the alternatives to the liquid water hypothesis. This is yet another blog I will add to my RSS aggregator.

When I think about Carl Sagan, the tenth anniversary of whose death we remember today, the first thing that comes to mind is a quote about the wonders of relativistic interstellar flight. It's worth quoting at length: If for some reason we were to desire a two-way communication with the inhabitants of some nearby galaxy, we might try the transmission of electromagnetic signals, or perhaps even the launching of an automatic probe vehicle. With either method, the elapsed transit time to the galaxy would be several millions of years at least. By that time in our future, there may be no civilization left on Earth to continue the dialogue. But if relativistic interstellar spaceflight were used for such a mission, the crew would arrive at the galaxy in question after about 30 years in transit, able not only to sing the songs of distant Earth, but to provide an opportunity for cosmic discourse with inhabitants of a certainly unique and possibly vanished civilization. Despite the dangers of...

Now here's a grand idea for a book: describe propulsion systems that can propel spacecraft with little or no fuel onboard. That's just what Greg Matloff and NASA's Les Johnson are doing with their new title Living Off the Land in Space (Copernicus & Praxis), which should be available come January. Matloff (New York City College of Technology) is well known in these pages as the co-author of The Starflight Handbook: A Pioneer's Guide to Interstellar Travel (Wiley, 1989). It's the seminal text, the one interstellar buffs return to again and again for the broad view of the kinds of technologies that might eventually get us to the stars. Matloff produced The Starflight Handbook with the late Eugene Mallove and went on to write Deep Space Probes (Springer/Praxis 2000), now in its second edition. His new book with Johnson grows out of their work together in Huntsville at NASA's In-Space Propulsion Technology Program, where mission concepts include everything from solar sails to solar...

In a book so stuffed with insights and quirky oddments that it belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in interstellar flight, Carl Sagan and I.S. Shklovskii once made a stunning calculation. Their 1966 volume Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day) presents the argument that with an average annual growth rate of just 1/3 of one percent, energy demand will outstrip the total solar radiation falling on the Earth by a factor of 100,000 within 2500 years. The re-building of the Solar System into something like a Dyson sphere may be inevitable. But isn't it a pipe dream to assume that growth will continue at even these modest levels? That was certainly my initial response, for so many things can throw a spanner into a civilization's works. But Andrew Kennedy (The Chronolith Project, Seville Spain) takes a hard look at growth issues in a recent paper with interesting results. Kennedy believes that growth is far more tenacious than generally accepted. Economic...

Science writer Larry Klaes passed along a quote from French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion that he posted in the SETI League's BioAstro list. It speaks nicely to the power of telescopes over the human imagination, even if it reminds us that the pleasures these instruments give often get lost in the distractions of everyday life. Here's the quote: "What intelligent being, what being capable of responding emotionally to a beautiful sight, can look at the jagged, silvery lunar crescent trembling in the azure sky, even through the weakest of telescopes, and not be struck by it in an intensely pleasurable way, not feel cut off from everyday life here on Earth and transported toward that first stop on celestial journeys? "What thoughtful soul could look at brilliant Jupiter with its four attendant satellites, or splendid Saturn encircled by its mysterious ring, or a double star glowing scarlet and sapphire in the infinity of night, and not be filled with a sense of wonder? Yes,...

Finding single reasons for major events is curiously satisfying. Thus the notion that an asteroid strike did away with the dinosaurs -- pinning their mysterious demise on one hammerblow from outer space makes sense out of what had seemed inexplicable. But a new theory challenges the single-cause notion of mass extinctions, and questions whether sudden catastrophes in combination aren't needed to deliver the punch. The work, to be presented today at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Philadelphia, divides the last 488 million years of geologic history into distinct groups and characterizes each. So-called Pulses are times of sudden, catastrophic events like asteroid impacts, whereas Presses are periods of multigenerational stress on ecosystems, such as massive volcanic eruptions. Nan Crystal Arens and Ian West (Hobart & William Smith Colleges) chart the history of marine organisms and extinctions through the fossil record to conclude that extinctions in times...

When is a space mission too expensive to fly? It's a question much in the mind of proponents of robotic exploration, who can point to lower cost as one excellent reason to leave human crews out of our deep space missions. But robotic missions can suffer the same fate as human ones, with technology advances like miniaturization exploited not to pack more instruments on board but to reduce costs. Faster, cheaper, better, but bureaucratic inefficiencies can trump the savings. Giancarlo Genta (Politecnico di Torino) offers up an interesting perspective on the cost question. In a keynote he delivered last year at the Fourth IAA Symposium on Realistic Near-Term Advanced Scientific Space Missions in Aosta, Italy, Genta compared the cost of space missions to other public enterprises like the construction of motorways or infrastructure projects like Alpine tunnels. In that light, the notion that space missions are unbearably costly is simply false. And he goes on to say this: The same if we...

by Marc Millis Apropos of our recent discussion of species differentiation and what may happen when humans spread into the Solar System and beyond, Marc Millis forwarded a whimsical piece he wrote for Aerospace Frontiers, the internal news publication of NASA Glenn Research Center. The item ran in August of 2000 and makes for an enjoyable weekend diversion. From the Author: The visions presented here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of NASA Glenn, "Aerospace Frontiers," or even the author himself. What this story does represent, however, is a light-hearted glimpse of an unintended turn of events. History itself is a collection of unplanned twists and turns, so our visions of the future should prepare us for more of the same. Prepare yourself. ------- It finally happened. Access to space became cheap enough so that the average "Joe" and "Joanne" could venture beyond the bounds of Earth, and long-duration space habitats became robust enough to provide reliable places to live...

Freeman Dyson among others has speculated about the physical changes that could occur as the human species spreads into the cosmos. How will evolution deal with a colony world in a distant star system, and how long will it take before serious differentiation begins to occur? For that matter, what about the crew aboard a multi-generational starship -- will humans have adapted so thoroughly to a space-borne environment when they arrive that some opt to make their planetary excursion no more than a brief research stop before pushing on to yet other solar systems? Or will they one day adapt to the vacuum itself? Such questions are called to mind by recent work from Virginie Millien (McGill University), whose new paper in the open source journal PLoS Biology examines islands as test beds for evolution on Earth. It has long been assumed that isolation would create selective pressures unique to an island environment. A so-called 'island rule' has small animals evolving into outsized...

The idea of interstellar flight forces long-term speculation. Barring unexpected breakthroughs, we are looking at mission times that, at best, are counted in the decades if not centuries. One of the purposes of Centauri Dreams is to encourage the kind of long-term thinking that plans and executes such missions. That such thinking -- focused well beyond individual human lifetimes -- is a worthy goal in and of itself should also be obvious, and it is actively championed in projects like the 10,000 year clock of the Long Now Foundation. A partial spinoff from the Long Now called the Long Bets Foundation is increasingly active in providing a competitive arena for predictions about the future. It's a fascinating concept, both a forum for discussion about long-range issues and a tool for philanthropic giving. People make predictions which, if challenged, become bets. Each prediction requires a $50 fee to the foundation, while a minimum of $200 is required to challenge a prediction. After a...

A recent acquisition has me looking backward rather than forward to begin the week. It's the January 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, a magazine then in its glory years under the editorship of John Campbell. Some of the authors here ring few bells: Sam Weston, for example, weighs in with "In the Day of the Cold," as does D.L. James with "Moon of Delirium." But this is also the issue of Robert Heinlein's "Requiem," and it contains good work by Lester del Rey and Edward E. Smith as well. Astounding's science articles mixed with its ever reliable stories gave it a special place in the history of the pulp magazines, and many a scientist has told me that it was through Astounding or its later incarnation as Analog Science Fiction & Fact that a career path in physics or astronomy emerged. Which brought to mind science fiction writer Frederick Pohl, a distinguished editor in his own right. Pohl's 1978 memoir The Way the Future Was catches the magazine's exciting heyday. He evokes...