The film opens with a close, telephoto shot of a sun rising, and as it rises, music (distinctively Ennio Morricone) quietly plays. Thinking about Morricone reminds me that I really should rewatch A Fistful of Dollars, a film set (but not filmed) near the US-Mexico border, and thinking about that area reminds me of Dead Man’s Walk, a novel by Larry McMurtry that I heard as an audiobook a little while back. The Texas Rangers in McMurtry’s historical novel are forced to walk the Jornada del Muerto, an inhospitable stretch of terrain that in 1945 became the site of the first atomic bomb test. The test isn’t alluded to in the novel, but it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine the travellers’ arduous journery taking them straight through Trinity’s ground zero.

It is strange to connect Westerns, and even spaghetti Westerns, with nuclear weapons and global wars. When Clint Eastwood appears on screen in a Leone film, he could be anywhere, anytime: he is a figure from the past, but he’s insulated from history, insulated from context. His world is bounded by the mountains, the desert, the sky. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, we don’t know where he comes from, and so he seems disconnected from the world, our world: elemental, pure, fearsome. (Is a fear of a man with no past, no future, the same as a fear an empty space, the “horror vacui”?) Where did cowboys come from and where did they go? Deadwood tackles the second question, on one level, but ultimately holds back from pulling the story into the modern: the town begins to modernise, but the people are out of time, Swearengen et al. forever scrubbing bloodstains from the boards.

Atomic bombs and men without names. Blood and sand, shadows and stone. In less than a century, a lifetime, from gunfights “out west” to “the light from a thousand suns” in a lonely patch of desert named (possibly) after a German man fleeing the Inquisition. Strange times.

A photograph of the Trinity nuclear test explosion by Jack Aeby of the Special Engineering Detachment, Manhattan Project, Los Alamos. (Source)

The Dartford bridge holds awful proof of age: the concrete leprous, pitted, whittled by wind, warty with cysts of rusting steel. Pelicans line the rods and girders like sailors on the rigging of a shattered windjammer. Cables have snapped and frayed, the roadway seems to hang by magic, and the magic’s wearing thin. Whole sections have gone from the raised approaches, leaving piers in the water like rows of prehistoric megaliths.

We made it our business to know what the centuries could do to corbel vaults and marble arches, to the grainite slabs of pharaohs’ tombs, to Roman concrete and Akkadian ziggurats. We knew the work of seepage on mud-brick, of termites on ironwood lintels, of acid rain on marble caryatids. But how much time would it take to make a modern structure look like this?

Time and heat. Your rat is gnawing. What happened here?

Warming, obviously, as many foresaw. But for the reasons they foresaw? Or something else, something for which we can’t be blamed: an asteroid smaking the planet in the chops; or the world relapsing like a malaria patient into its old sweats and chills?

I remember Skef saying — as an aside in his prehistory lectures — that the ice would rumble south again one day grind the spires of Cambridge into sand. But not to worry; we’d had a good long run since the glaciers stalled — a hundred centuries in which to tame our food, and tame ourselves, and invent civilization in half a dozen fertile spots from China to Peru — and he saw no reason why the fair weather shouldn’t last. […]

You can read parts of the novel on Google Books, here.

Thinking about things like this brought to mind various other things: The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (and also his Collapse, naturally), and The Road to Corlay, the first book in Richard Cowper’s White Bird of Kinship series. The rising and falling of civilisation has my brain abuzz.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm impermanence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting year.

The prospects of saving the world’s coral reefs now appear so bleak that plans are being made to freeze samples to preserve them for the future.

A meeting in Denmark took evidence from researchers that most coral reefs will not survive even if tough regulations on greenhouse gases are put in place.

Scientists proposed storing samples of coral species in liquid nitrogen. That will allow them to be reintroduced to the seas in the future if global temperatures can be stabilised.

Late in April 2009, astronauts aboard the International Space Station observed a strange circular area of thinned ice in the southern end of Lake Baikal in southern Siberia.  Siberia is remote and cold; ice cover can persist into June.  The upper image, a detailed astronaut photograph, shows a circle of thin ice (dark in color, with a diameter of about 4.4 kilometers); this is the focal point for ice break up in the very southern end of the lake.  A sequence of MODIS images indicates that the feature was first visible on April 5, 2009.

Baikal contained another, very similar circle near the center of the lake above a submarine ridge that bisects the lake (ice circles are indicated by arrows in the lower MODIS image from April 20).  Both circles are visible through April 20, 2009.  Clouds cover the center of the lake until April 24, at which point the circular patch of thin ice was becoming a hole of open water. Similar circular ice patterns — although not nearly as distinct — have been documented in the same central area of the lake in April 1994 (during the STS-59 Shuttle mission) and in 1985 (during the STS-51B Shuttle mission).

While the origin of the circles is unknown, the peculiar pattern suggests convection (upwelling) in the lake’s water column.  Ice cover changes rapidly at this time of year.  Within a day, the ice can melt almost completely and freeze again overnight.  Throughout April, the circles are persistent: they appear when ice cover forms, and then disappear as ice melts.  The pattern and appearance suggest that the ice is quite thin.  The features were last observed in MODIS images on April 27, 2009.

Below is the photograph taken by the astronaut on the International Space Station and a MODIS satellite image with the unexplained circles (for what it’s worth, I think they’re caused by submerged UFOs that are attempting to start their anti-matter drives) circled in red:

One of the strange circles that have appeared in the ice. (Source)

Sunken UFOs preparing to leave? (Source)

Belgian firm Vincent Callebaut Architectures have designed a vertical farm based on the wings of a dragonfly.  Located along the East River at the south edge of Rooselvelt Island [sic] in New York City the tower is a true living organism being self-sufficient in water, energy and bio fertilizing.  Spanning 132 floors and 600vertical meters, the dragonfly can accommodate 28 different agricultural fields for the production of fruit, vegetables, grains, meat and dairy.

That’s from an article on archiCentral, a very pretty blog.

(via grinding.be)

(via Hugo Teixeira)

Synesthesia […] is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.  People who report such experiences are known as synesthetes.

I’m always looking for more information on synaesthetic experiences as its a phenomenon that seems very difficult to effectively describe, or portray.   A few weeks ago I saw a pretty good documentary exploring the science behind the phenomenon (the transcript is available on the BBC’s Science website, but not the programme itself), but I watched it I was left wanting to know more, just as I had been left wanting to know more after I was first introduced to synathaesia in secondary school by Miss Porter, my Media Studies teacher.   Let me know if you’ve come across any good books, documentaries, or articles.

“There is a very positive as well as a worrying aspect of our discovery of a gigantic bacterial bloom detoxifying hydrogen sulphide,” said Dr [Marcel] Kuypers.  “Hydrogen sulphide is toxic to higher life and even at low concentrations it will instantly kill fish, oysters, shrimps and lobsters.  The good news is that the discovered groups of bacteria seem to consume the hydrogen sulphide before it reaches the surface waters where fish are living.  It is worrying news, however, that an area the size of the Irish Sea or the Wadden Sea was affected by sulphidic bottom waters, without this being visible on satellite photos or detected at the monitoring stations closer to the coast.”

Hydrogen sulphide has been responsible for mass extinctions, so it is indeed worrying that we don’t really have any idea of how much of it is currently floating around in the deeper reaches of the ocean.

This is a satellite image of a bloom that wasn’t detoxified:

That photo came from the image gallery on the MODIS Rapid Response System website.  There’s a lot more amazing satellite imagery on there, too, if you have time to browse; or if browsing is too much effort, grab the RSS of their Image of the Day.  And don’t forget the bacteria that may be holding back the apocalypse.

(via Physorg.com)

The photograph above was taken by Zee Evans at Palmer Station, the only U.S. research station north of the Antarctic Circle.  I can’t find much information about Evans, but after a lot of Googling it seems she is a photographer specialising in Antarctic photography.  I’d love to know more about her, and about how she came to do what she does, as Antarctic photography strikes me as being an idyllic specialisation; but right now the internet isn’t throwing up anything useful.

I originally saw Evan’s photograph in an Antarctic-themed post on The Big Picture, a blog “compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor.”  If you’re interested in photography, The Big Picture is an essential addition to your feed reader or bookmark folder or whatever thing you use to keep track of good things on the internet.

Here is the press release that accompanied it:

Illustrating the power of submillimetre-wavelength astronomy, [the above] APEX image reveals how an expanding bubble of ionised gas about ten light-years across is causing the surrounding material to collapse into dense clumps that are the birthplaces of new stars.  Submillimetre light is the key to revealing some of the coldest material in the Universe, such as these cold, dense clouds.

The region, called RCW120, is about 4200 light years from Earth, towards the constellation of Scorpius.  A hot, massive star in its centre is emitting huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, which ionises the surrounding gas, stripping the electrons from hydrogen atoms and producing the characteristic red glow of so-called H-alpha emission.

As this ionised region expands into space, the associated shock wave sweeps up a layer of the surrounding cold interstellar gas and cosmic dust.  This layer becomes unstable and collapses under its own gravity into dense clumps, forming cold, dense clouds of hydrogen where new stars are born.  However, as the clouds are still very cold, with temperatures of around –250˚ Celsius, their faint heat glow can only be seen at submillimetre wavelengths.  Submillimetre light is therefore vital in studying the earliest stages of the birth and life of stars.

The submillimetre-wavelength data were taken with the LABOCA camera on the 12-m Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, located on the 5000m high plateau of Chajnantor in the Chilean Atacama desert.  Thanks to LABOCA’s high sensitivity, astronomers were able to detect clumps of cold gas four times fainter than previously possible.  Since the brightness of the clumps is a measure of their mass, this also means that astronomers can now study the formation of less massive stars than they could before.

The plateau of Chajnantor is also where ESO, together with international partners, is building a next generation submillimetre telescope, ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array.  ALMA will use over sixty 12-m antennas, linked together over distances of more than 16 km, to form a single, giant telescope.

APEX is a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) and ESO.  The telescope is based on a prototype antenna constructed for the ALMA project. Operation of APEX at Chajnantor is entrusted to ESO.

This is a photograph of the aforementioned Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX):

It looks like it would be a great place to work.

You can read more about it here.

As we head into the traditional western Holiday Season, I’d like to present this Hubble Space Telescope imagery Advent Calendar.  Every day, for the next 25 days, a new photo will be revealed here from the amazing Hubble Space Telescope.  As I take this chance to share these images of our amazing Universe with you, I wish for a Happy Holiday to all those who will celebrate, and for Peace on Earth to everyone.

I’m looking forward to seeing each new star of wonder.

This is the explanatory text that accompanied the image:

How massive can stars be?  Big, hefty stars live short violent lives that can profoundly affect their environments.  Isolating a massive star can be problematic, however, since what seems to be a single bright star might actually turn out to be several stars close together.  Such was the case for two of the brightest objects visible in the open star cluster Trumpler 16, located in the southern Carina Nebula.  Upon close inspection by the Hubble Space Telescope, WR 25, the brightest object in the above image, was confirmed to consist of at least two separate stars.  Additionally, Tr16 –244, just to the upper right of WR 25, was resolved for the first time to be at least three individual stars.  Even so, the brightest star in WR 25 appears to be about 50 times the mass of our Sun, making it one of the more massive stars known.  Winds from these stars are likely significant contributers to the large bubble that the star cluster sits in.  The Carina Nebula, home to unusually shaped dust clouds and the famous variable star Eta Carina, lies about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Ship’s Keel (Carina).

And this is the image rotated ninety degrees anti-clockwise (the full-size original is extremely beautiful):

The image is credited to NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía.

The illustrations were produced as part of a design study conducted by the NASA Ames Research Centre during the 1970s.  It is genuinely reassuring to know that people are thinking about this.