Science plus art is a potent mixture to be encouraged
Danielle Olsen is absolutely right in advocating that the arts should go hand in hand with science. The popular and much misguided tendency is to see the two as mutually exclusive, with the arts often dismissed as a mere frivolity(7 January, p 21).
While the arts may provide a different type of stimulus for the brain, it is one that doubtlessly complements its more logical counterpart by providing freedom of thought, relatively unrestrained by accepted rules 鈥� that is, an ability to think outside the box.
Imagination, inspiration and inventiveness have proved to be valuable not only in conjunction with the treatment of mental health conditions, but also as the basis of many scientific discoveries previously deemed implausible due to the existing limits of knowledge.
was an accomplished musician who regarded music as intrinsic to his scientific work. Faced with a physics conundrum, he would adjourn to the piano or the violin before returning to his work, seeing the creative stimulation of music as having inspired the solution.
Alien messages could be written in meteorites
Abigail Beall rightly questions what we are trying to say to aliens, either via radio signals or with artefacts on space probes(17/24 December 2022, p 64, p 66).
Meanwhile, at the end of Becca Caddy’s interesting article on digital storage, she mentions using lasers to encode data into silica glass by creating data-dense nanostructures that a microscope can read, creating a virtually eternal data storage system.
Imagine ourselves in 50 to 100 years’ time, a spacefaring species still dependent on a dying planet: might we not consider storing all our knowledge on such silica “rocks” to serve as a warning to alien life forms, as well as to give them technologies that could avoid their own downfall? We could launch suitable vehicles to exoplanets to scatter the rocks.
Putting the boot on the other foot, perhaps a doomed alien species would similarly target such rocks at worlds beyond their planetary system, including Earth? Maybe careful examination of anomalous meteorites could yield some interesting information?
Plenty of nitrogenous waste is going to waste
You report a plan to produce environmentally friendly food from bacteria using only green hydrogen, carbon dioxide and ammonia. The ammonia in this recipe will almost certainly be produced by means of the Haber-Bosch process, which is a major source of CO2 emissions(31 December 2022, p 16).
The odd thing is that each of us excretes a nearly pure solution of nitrogen-rich urea every day, and we just flush it away. If we changed our plumbing to make use of it, we could pretty much eliminate our dependence on the Haber-Bosch process.
For blind people like me, melatonin seems to work
When it comes to the efficacy 鈥� or not 鈥� of melatonin for sleep, one group that got no mention is totally blind people(31 December 2022, p 41).
Random trials are hard to come by, as we are such a small group, but I know several blind people who say that melatonin makes a significant difference to sleep.
For years, I had poor sleep, sometimes only 2 or 3 hours per night. This was unrelated to mood, whether life was going well or not, and no behavioural changes made a difference. With melatonin, my sleep has increased by hours, I am able to nod off after waking and have more dreams. If I have tricked myself, long live the placebo.
Try spotting the mega spaceship drive instead
If aliens are flying Jupiter-mass spacecraft around the galaxy, surely we are more likely to detect the effects of the drive required to accelerate and decelerate such a large mass 鈥� which is likely to travel at a significant fraction of the speed of light 鈥� rather than the minuscule ripples in space-time generated by the moving craft?
Perhaps the fleeting alignment of such a spaceship drive with our telescopes explains something that we have already observed: gamma-ray bursts(17/24 December 2022, p 9).
Let's turn a lot more data into sound
You report that the use of sonification in astronomy to turn data into audio has led to surprising discoveries. Surely other scientific fields with vast quantities of data to be analysed, sometimes urgently, could benefit from the use of sonification(31 December 2022, p 46).
Areas that jump to my mind are volcanology, MRI and CT scans seismology, criminology and the detection of flaws in pipes.
As your article states, for noisy and multidimensional data sets, sonification provides a chance for human input to help identify interesting features, as well as to discern the significance of outliers and anomalies. There must be umpteen disciplines where this could improve analysis.
Is animal personality enough for personhood?
Annalee Newitz’s new novel, The Terraformers, reviewed by Sally Adee, raises the issue of how we assign the quality of personhood to non-humans(7 January, p 30).
Pet owners and animal lovers know that animals have personalities. I scatter birdseed each morning and enjoy seeing the doves and pigeons take it. There is something in a tilt of the head to show curiosity, or in the raising of an eyebrow, that is very human. They make one suspect there is more going on in those small heads than meets the eye.
Perhaps it isn’t so much intelligence as personality that should make us ascribe personhood to animals.
Dig for climate victory in the central Asian region
You pondered solutions to save the world, including building a sunshade in space to confront global warming. I have another geoengineering idea. A canal dug between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea would provide central Asian countries with access to global shipping and increase precipitation in the region. The extra rain would enable carbon-sequestering forests to grow and maybe help refill the Aral Sea(7 January, p 38).