Climate change threatens NASA

Climate  changes challenges us in plenty of ways. There are droughts all over the earth, flooding in others, the polar ice is melting endangering polar bears and other Arctic animals. But who’d think that NASA would be up against problems from a warming planet?

Rising seas are the problem and it just so happens that NASA’s prime launch centers are based right on the water. The most famous site is the Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral, Fla.), which is threatened by shrinking dunes and a damaged shoreline, according to Discovery.com.

Apparently, NASA made the decision many years ago to launch its spacecraft over water because any falling debris or crashes of spacecraft would not harm people. (I guess harming whales and dolphins is okay.) However, the problem now is that climate change is causing these launch areas to become unstable—not now, but surely in coming years.

The other NASA facilities are close to rising water, including the Langley Research Center and the Wallops Flight Facility, both in Virginia. And don’t forget that the Johnson Space Center center is perilously close in Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. Plus, the Michoud Assembly Facility in Louisiana is below the water level of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River near New Orleans.

“The nation’s problem is also NASA’s problem,” said Micheal J. Carlowicz, the chief technical writer at the agency’s sciences ad exploration division. He told Dicovery.com that “Sea level rise hits especially close to home because half to two-thirds of NASA’s infrastructure and assets stand within sixteen feet of sea level.”

Researchers have concluded that the NASA coastal centers almost are certain to become vulnerable in the future.

So before any proposed manned Martian flight, we may be seeing a launch center moved far inland.

Fantastic World

It’s taken as a given that by the time you’ve reached 12 years old, you know if you’re a male or female. However, scientists have discovered that, due to a quirky gene dysfunction, some young girls in a small town in Indonesia are finding out—surprise!—that they are really boys.

The sudden sex change is the result of a rare genetic disorder that occurs because of a missing enzyme which prevents the production of a specific form of the male sex hormone – dihydro-testosterone – in the womb. When the child is born, it appears to have female genitalia, and the parents go about raising their baby as a girl.

The Telegraph of London interviewed, Johnny,  a young man of 24 from the Indonesian town who remembers wearing a red dress to school, where he rarely played with the girls. He was named Felicita and first started showing signs of maleness when he was nine. For this person, the sex change was not stressful or traumatic, because he already felt like a boy.

“When I changed I was happy with my life,” Johnny told the newspaper.

The number of girl-turned-boys is so large that the local town has a name for them: “guevedoces,” which literally means “penis at 12.”

Strangely, some of the guevedoces decide not to change their female names and go on as “Maria” or “Catherine.”

These unusual children were first discovered by Cornell University endocrinologist Dr. Julianne Imperato in the 1970s.  But now more cases are being reported in the Sambian villages of Papua New Guinea.

“By a quirk of chance Dr Imperato’s research was picked up by the American pharmaceutical giant, Merck. They used her discovery to create a drug called finasteride, which blocks the action of 5-α-reductase. It is now widely used to treat benign enlargement of the prostate and male pattern baldness. For which, I’m sure, many men are truly grateful,” according to Dr. Michael Mosely of the BBC, who is presenting a British special on how the human body develops.

So far, the condition is extremely rare in the world, and seems to have developed in these small towns because the villagers were so isolated. But because the disorder is well-known and accepted in the Dominican Republic, the country now has three sexual categories: male, female and pseudohermaphrodite.

Imagine how we would deal with this issue if it popped up in the U.S. And we thought transgender folks have it tough.

When fantasy and science-fiction readers ponder the possibility of alternate time zones, they are doing more than exercising wishful thinking. They might be considering a concept that some physicist think could be a real phenomenon.

According to Scientific American, not every physicist believes that time moves the way we perceive it in daily life. To us, time moves forward (sometimes blindingly so). Stars emit light, the universe expands, and we grow older each day. However, if a fascinating theory of the workings of gravity is true, the big bang is not the beginning and “we may live in a past of a parallel universe.”

The physics is extremely complicated and much too dense for the lay person to understand, but the gist of what Julian Barbour of the University of Oxford, Tim Koslowski of the University of New Brunswick, and Flavio Marcati of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics are saying is that all matter starts in a low-complexity state and then expands outward in both temporal directions. That means there would be two symmetrical and opposite flows of time. Gravity then pulls matter together into ordered structures.

At that point time can go on two divergent paths. As Scientific American puts it, “the model has one past but two futures.” However, the observer will be able only to see one of the two.

“It is the nature of gravity to pull the universe out of its primordial chaos and create structure, order, and complexity,” Mercati said in Scientific American. “All the solutions break into two epochs, which go on forever in the two time directions, divided by this central state, which haas very characteristic properties.”

If you are scratching your head about now, realize that many other physicists are doing the same thing, for this theory is far from universally popular The model is considered crude and doesn’t address quantum physics or general relativity. Still, the meaning of the two futures theory is mind-blowing. It would suggest there was no cosmic beginning, but a timeless and eternal universe.

“This two-futures solution would exhibit a single, chaotic past in both directions, meaning there would be essentially two universes on either side of this central state,” Barbour said. “If they were complicated enough, both sides could sustain observers who would perceive time going in opposite directions. Any intelligent beings there would define their arrow of time as moving away from this central state. They would think we now live in their deepest past.” And to that, I can only add a big wow!

Some physicists disagree saying that increasing entropy in the future is causing time to flow forward. One researcher, Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology says, “Everything that happens in the universe to distinguish the past from the future is ultimately because the entropy is lower in one direction and higher in the other.”

Carroll praises the work of Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati and asks, “Is our universe like that? That’s the hard part.”

Fortunately for readers of fantasy literature, imagining two futures is the easy part.

You say you have a song in your heart? Well, it seems that’s natural, because it’s in your DNA.
Scientific American reports that scientists have discovered by sequencing 48 genomes of different bird species that birdsong is related to human speech. Only a few animals have the ability to sustain and modulate vocal signals.Birds and humans—along with dolphins, whales and elephants—are in that elite group.

The more you look, the more the spiritual dictum “We are all one” proves to be true.