The power of the Gulf Stream

Florida researchers are looking into whether the powerful Gulf Stream might be a renewable-energy resource. Florida Atlantic University is trying to find out if underwater power-generating turbines could harness the current off Florida's east coast.

Sounds good, right? Well, Stan Ulanski, author of "The Gulf Stream: Tiny Plankton, Giant Bluefin, and the Amazing Story of the Powerful River in the Atlantic," thinks it might work -- but it also might have costs. On the University of North Carolina Press blog, he writes:

Though the Gulf Stream can move for surprisingly long distances, hugging the eastern seaboard from Florida to North Carolina, southern Florida probably has the greatest potential for success for such a project....

How much energy can safely be extracted versus the environmental effects?

Potential obstacles to a full-blown project include the effects the turbines might have on the marine life, recreational activities, and shipping.

How the turbines might affect the Gulf Stream's flow, if at all, is another question he raises. While sailors and fishermen have known bits about ocean patterns for decades, the details of the workings of the Gulf Stream are yet to be fully understood. In the opening to his book, Ulanski outlines one serendipitous accident that set off a new line of scientific inquiry:

In January 1992, a merchant ship encountering storm conditions near the International Date Line in the North Pacific lost 12 containers overboard due to the heavy seas. Part of this cargo was 29,000 floatable, plastic bathtub toys: turtles, frogs, beavers, and yes, ducks. Some of these toys began coming ashore in southeast Alaska 10 months later. This unfortunate accident became a scientific gold mine.... Since 1992, these providential discoveries have continued as oceanographers tracked other floating objects, including 34,000 hockey gloves, 5 million Lego pieces, and at least 3,000 computer modules.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Key Biscane, Fla. Credit: joiseyshowaa via Flickr

Happy birthday, Oliver Sacks

Today, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks turns 76. His most recent book, 2007's "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain" is, we wrote in our review, "not so much a greatest-hits collection as a purposeful set of remixes" of cases he'd written about before, shifting attention to the issues of music and the brain.

The stories Sacks tells are so fascinating that his storytelling is, perhaps, overlooked. Take the title of his 1985 book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" -- it's wonderful, isn't it? It could easily have been called Case Studies in Neuroscience, or Perceptual Aberrations Today. But chances are it wouldn't have become a bestseller.

In an interview with the National Review of Medicine last year, Sacks talked about taking time off after med school and traveling in Canada. 

I kept a journal, called Canada Pause, in 1960. Canada Pause because travelling in Canada, especially in the Rockies, was sort of an interim for me. I had left England but was not sure what to do, not sure I wanted to stay in medicine. I wanted to write, but I had no idea what about.

As he undertook his medical career, his writing developed in tandem. Tim McIntyre interviewed Sacks for the Whole Earth Review in 1985.

TM: Your passion for literature seems to come through with the numerous literary references that you make in your books.

OS: I don't think of them as "literary references." I don't feel like a very literary person, but they just seem to apply. I mean, when I was reading Donne's Devotions, which I quote a lot in "Awakenings," it just seemed so close: "Diseases hold consultations. They seem to multiply among themselves." This was not just poetry: it was actually what seemed to be happening in front of me, and it was like a sort of science.... I think that medicine, and case history in particular, allows us a blending of art and science. That's why I like it.

Sacks is devoted to classical music -- Bach over Beethoven, as he demonstrated when they filmed his brain as he listened to both for the recent Nova television show Musical Minds. Back in 1995, McIntyre asked him about the music, writing and reading.

TM: I think you can hear the music in a lot of the best writing. James Joyce, for instance. His sentences have a musical feel to them, and supposedly he had a beautiful tenor singing voice.

OS: And for that matter there's Saul Bellow, whose "Mr. Sammler's Planet" I'm now reading. Some of the paragraphs, you know they're obviously ... This is a voice: this is the voice of the writer. There's the wit and the observation of the writer and everything else, but there's also the sheer music of the prose. And I think if that music runs through you, you have to sing or write or talk.

Happy birthday to Dr. Sacks.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Oliver Sacks speaks in June at Columbia University in New York City. Credit:  Chris McGrath / Getty Images

Does language shape our thinking?

An essay on how language influences thought from the pop-science anthology "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science" has been posted on The Edge. Author Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford, writes:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

She brings up experiments and other examples involving use of language and direction, time, color and gender, all of which seem to demonstrate that yes, language shapes how we think.

But my favorite is this example above. Only a linguist -- or perhaps a social scientist -- would put Chomsky in a hypothetical.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: poplinre via Flickr

Dr. Larry Dossey and your internal crystal ball

Ever have a gut instinct that something just isn’t right? Ever think: Maybe I shouldn’t go tonight. Maybe I should call home, or something feels wrong.

According to Dr. Larry Dossey, those little things you sense might be more important than you think.

Dossey’s latest book, “The Power of Premonitions: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives,” breaks down what premonitions are, where they come from, who has them, how we can cultivate them and why we should care.

Through a series of real-life cases and psi research, Dossey shows how we might already know the future and how we can welcome subconscious knowing into our lives to improve how we live or, in some cases, save ourselves.

Dossey explains his theories and research here:

Jacket Copy: You begin your book saying there is a connection between noticing, meditation and premonition. “Become a good listener,” you write. “Pay attention to the feelings, hunches, and intuitions that flood your life every day. If you do, you will see that premonitions are not rare, but a natural part of our lives.”

Does everyone have premonitions? And if so, why aren’t we avoiding more accidents, making more money and falling in love faster?

Dr. Larry Dossey: Surveys show that the majority of Americans have experienced premonitions at one point or another in their life. Some are of jaw-dropping intensity. Others are vague feelings, vague knowings, what people call “hunches.” They come in all varieties. Most people’s premonitions are not that dramatic.

There are quite a few people who attribute their fortunes to premonition. There’s a growth industry now cultivating “business intuition.” Though I’m not recommending premonitions as the end-all solution to life’s problems.

JC: You are a medical doctor. Do you believe spirituality has a place in science? And if so, how much should we rely on black-and-white facts versus gut instinct?

LD: Both are required. I think we get into trouble when we try to work with just either. I think we are geared and wired for both.

I think the evidence for spirituality in health is just overwhelming. People’s wishes, wants and desires for others, when put to the test, do affect others.

JC: Describe your first premonition. Clearly, that event stuck with you. Is that why you wrote this book?

LD: That’s what sort of captured my attention early on. It wasn’t the only reason for writing the book.

I had a dream premonition. It sort unnerved me. It was so eerily precise. It had to do with the 4-year-old child of one of my colleagues. A tech was attempting to do some sort of test on his head. And he wasn’t having it; he went berserk. His mother tried to comfort him, but it just wasn’t working. Finally, the medical tech threw up her hands and said: “I quit!”

It seemed so vivid. What some people called “realer than real.”

The next day, I was having lunch with my colleague in the lunch area. My colleague’s wife walked into the area where we were having lunch with the child, and his head was wet. They had been in the EEG laboratory, and they had been there for the boy to have a brain scan.  Basically, she described my dream to her husband in great detail.

I was stunned. I had dreamt about it hours before it happened. I was shaken up by that. I didn’t know what to do with that experience. We are taught that information can’t flow from the future into the present. So I sat on that for quite a while. 

What's coming after the jump? Can you sense it?

Hubble's billion-year review

To kick off 2009, I decided to look backward -- a couple billion years backward -- by spending time with National Geographic's "Hubble: Imaging Space and Time." The 224-page book has more than 200 photographs from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope (with the help of a few terrestrial telescopes along the way). The pictures aren't just of galaxies very far away; they're from a long, long time ago too. Authors David Devorkin and Robert Smith explain:

Telescopes are time machines: They allow us to see back in time as well as out into space. Light travels at around 186,000 miles per second, and so when we look at the moon, the light we see has taken over a second to reach us. The light we see from our nearest star, the sun, left that body over eight minutes ago. On clear fall evenings, high in the sky in the constellation of Andromeda, is a faint smudge of light known as the Andromeda Nebula. This is in fact a galaxy, very close to our Milky Way in cosmic terms; even so, light from Andromeda takes around 2.5 million years to cover the distance to us. We are seeing Andromeda as it existed 2.5 million years ago.

The Hubble images go back much further than that; the Hubble Deep Field, which describes a set of 300 exposures taken in 1995, captures galaxies 2.5 to 10.5 billion light years away. 10.5 billion light years. When I hold the book in my lap, I'm looking at snapshots of light that was emitted before the Earth was formed. It's mind-boggling.

It's also beautiful. Some of the brilliant colors are natural, while others are the result of filters that help clarify what's being seen. The colors often reveal the invisible, chemical elements or spectra that our eyes would not detect. Many of the images are composites made from multiple exposures. "Hubble images should not be compared to our visual experience," the authors caution. What appears on these pages is art as well as science. Like the above photo of the Carina Nebula, which was "imaged" in 2007 to celebrate the 17th anniversary of Hubble.

Covering an area 50 light-years wide, this mosaic includes the slow Nova Eta Carinae at the far left. ... This huge star-forming region contains at least a dozen stars between 50 and 100 times the mass of the sun. In addition to intense ultraviolet radiation, such stars give off very active stellar winds consisting of highly charged particles. These forces push the gas and dust in the cloud complex into contorted bubbles, streamers, walls, and knots and lead to the accelerated production of new highly massive stars.

There is plenty of layperson-friendly text like this to explain the images. The book also includes information about Hubble the telescope and Hubble, Edwin, the astronomer for whom it was named.

Many of the images are available in the galleries of the Hubble website, but the book, with its oversize square format -- which matches the Hubble images -- is nevertheless spectacular.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

For a dry ice martini, try the Hungry Scientist Handbook

Do you like to play with your food? Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns, the authors of "The Hungry Scientist Handbook," do. In the book -- officially out next Tuesday, but available now on Amazon -- they bring their love of technology into the kitchen and share simple DIY instructions for light-up lollipops, pomegranate wine and more.

Many of the projects in the book, which were inspired by group dinners near San Francisco, began with questions. Can you fold up wonton wrappers like origami paper? Yes: the book has complete instructions for making the crane croutons above. Could you create conductive frosting, so that a birthday cake could be decorated with LED lights instead of candles? After some icky false starts, they hit on a tasty recipe, explained in chapter four.

There are also crafty/construction projects; one, which requires some tools and skill, is building an oversize outdoor barbecue-like contraption called a hotbox. Just about anybody could make the portable camp stove from three cans of cheap beer (one needs to remain unopened, which is probably best for everyone).

This is not a kiddie book, as can be seen in the photos accompanying the first project: edible caramel lace lingerie. It's really for grownups with a sense of fun, for people who think fizzy lemonade would be more zesty with dry ice -- the same kind of people who'd love to sip a dry ice martini (stirred, not shaken, because once it's added to the shaker the martinis begin "bubbling like crazy").

The thing about DIY manuals is that they begin to make you believe that you really could do any of this yourself. Me, I'm wondering if there's a way to get dry ice into the martinis in people's hands, so they get to see the spectacular bubbling. Maybe dangle some in a tea infuser? Since there's a resource list in the back of "The Hungry Scientist Handbook," I'm halfway there -- I know where to find some edible dry ice.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Lenore M. Edman of www.evilmadscientist.com

Sean M. Carroll: life at the edge

Today Brett Levy reviews "Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge," an anthology of scientists and science fiction writers looking very far forward.

Among the contributors is Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who is among the bloggers at Cosmic Variance, an essential if occasionally mind-blowing Web stop. There you'll find him writing about physicist-y stuff, including excerpts of a paper on a long-range "fifth force": "A long-range fifth force coupled to dark matter can induce a coupling to ordinary matter if the dark matter interacts with Standard Model fields." But just when your brain starts to hurt, he'll post with exasperation about a billboard campaign that says, "Sex can wait" because "I want to be an engineer."  "That's why you should become scientists, kids!" he blogs. "(Because engineers don't have sex.  You want me to spell it out for you?)"

But back to the book. Levy notes that Freeman Dyson is the progenitor of many of the authors' ideas. In 2003, Dyson spoke at the TED conference; that video has just been made available online. And it's after the jump.

Listening to Leonard Susskind

In college, I had a roommate who came off an acid trip babbling endlessly about "the universal hologram." When she became obsessed with repeatedly washing down the walls of our room with bleach, I chalked it up to post-trip craziness. But maybe I should have paid closer attention: Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind has proposed a holographic principle that might just be crazy enough to be true, according to Jesse Cohen, who reviews Susskind's latest book today.

In "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind not only discusses the holographic principle and string theory, the book is also "a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship."

In this interview with rock musician and physicist Brian Cox, Susskind shows his amiability while discussing string theory over wine.

If you like Susskind's style, you can sit in on his continuing education class in quantum mechanics; Stanford has put the series of all nine lectures online.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ice on Mars is no surprise ...

... at least not to award-winning sci-fi writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford ("Timescape," "If the Stars Are Gods," "The Sunborn").

When the UC Irvine professor and his (uncredited) coauthor, biologist Elisabeth Malartre, were researching their bestselling 1999 novel, "The Martian Race," they were "fairly certain" that ice eventually would be found on Mars, especially near the poles.

"Since 1999, NASA has found caves (large, identified from orbit) and plenty of signs of recent fluid flows down slopes, from momentary melting," Benford wrote in an e-mail after NASA announced that the substance uncovered by the Phoenix lander was most probably ice.

The before and after images -- of white stuff uncovered in a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic claw that disappears over a few days -- are spectacular in their simplicity. They underscore, for me at least, the Red Planet's grip on the human imagination. Why is that?

Post-Festival of Books: Science fiction notes

Joe Hill and his dad: It was nice to find Joe Hill completely at ease talking about his father, Stephen King, during the science fiction/fantasy/horror panel Sunday morning. "He's my first reader," he said. "I've learned a lot from him." But, as he told the audience, he decided not to approach publishers as Joseph Hillstrom King (his given name) because "it would have been beneficial for me only in the short run."

  "If I had done that, I'm sure they would have been willing to publish work that wasn't ready, just for the advantage of having a tie to my family," he said.

But because "Heart-Shaped Box" received favorable reviews, Hill feels comfortable enough now when the question is raised about his father. When an older audience member approached the mike and even complained -- "There's a lot that's wrong with horror today, all that slasher stuff, and much of it has to do with Stephen King" -- Hill responded that his father's work "in large part explores the experiences of the middle class, what they're feeling. I think he prides himself on being a reporter of what's going on. But if you want Lovecraft and all that, go ahead, man. It's a wide field. You can always find something else to read."

Other bits: Kevin Anderson, who completed Frank Herbert's "Dune" saga with Herbert's son, Brian, told the audience that a new motion picture of "Dune" may be in the works. "Let's keep our fingers crossed," he said. The special effects technology that's available today, he said, might lead to an even richer realization of that book than what one sees in David Lynch's 1984 film.

James Howard Kunstler wasn't on this panel (he was on a fiction panel later in the day), but he easily could have been for his novel "World Made By Hand." His novel looks at life in a future world where energy resources have run out and people revert to an existence resembling 19th century life.

I'm mentioning it here because Kunstler explained that he wanted his book to respond to the post-apocalyptic picture of the world that readers get in Cormac McCarthy's harrowing novel "The Road." "I want people to feel some hope about the future," he said. "I just want them to realize that there are alternatives to what that novel presents."

-- Nick Owchar 

Joe Hill photo: Beth Gwinn