Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Let’s colonize the clouds of Venus

However, Venus holds a secret — it has some of the most Earth-like conditions (that we know of) in the Solar System. 50km above the rocky, smoking surface the atmospheric pressure is the same as on Earth, and average temperatures rarely exceed 50°C or drop below zero. The atmosphere — 96 percent carbon dioxide — is so dense that large metal structures filled with the nitrogen and oxygen mix we call ‘air’ would float with half as much lifting power on Venus as helium has here.--https://medium.com/weird-future/4da31237b2ac

Monday, November 11, 2013

Amiri Baraka on Charles Olson & Sun Ra in Gloucester, MA

Amiri Baraka on Charles Olson & Sun Ra in Gloucester, MA

By gkappes
 http://urbanwritersmixtape.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/amiri-baraka-on-charles-olson-sun-ra-in-gloucester-ma/

Amiri Baraka—dramatist, novelist, poet, and activist—is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. He was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, NJ. After leaving Howard University and the Air Force, he moved to the Lower East Side in Manhattan. There, in 1957, he co-edited the avantgarde literary magazine Yugen and founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Olson.

In May of 1959 he published Projective Verse and gave Olson a standing offer to publish anything he wished. Olson went on to have pieces published in Yugen, Kulchur and Floating Bear. Later that year Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen, Donald Allen and Jones visited Olson in Gloucester. Olson's tour with his friends resulted in his writing of Maximus from Dogtown – I. In a letter to Robert Creeley he says, "In fact the past year he (Jones) has saved my life in publishing..." With the beginning of Civil Rights Movements during the sixties, Baraka explored the anger of African-Americans and used his writings as a weapon against racism. He published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) is still regarded as the seminal work on Afro-American music and culture. He also edited The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America, published in 1963.

His reputation as a playwright was established with the production of Dutchman at Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in 1964. The controversial play subsequently won an Obie Award for Best Off-Broadway Play and was made into a film. The play was revived by Cherry Lane Theatre in January 2007 and has been reproduced around the world. His numerous literary honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, the Langston Hughes Award from The City College of New York, and a lifetime achievement award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

http://www.capeannmuseum.org/events/amiri-baraka/

Bird and Diz

Alan Turing. Strange Oceans of Thought

Published on 21 Nov 2012 Share Festival 2012 | Open Your City 09th nov -- 6PM -- Regional Museum of Natural Science Alan Turing. Strange Oceans of Thought Bruce Sterling

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Lake Vostock, Tardigrades, strange fishes, Icy Moons and Cthulhu?

 I have the feeling that this discovery maybe a turning point, or a tipping point for humanity coming to terms with it's fishy past.--steve, fly 2019

Antarctic Lake Vostok 'might have fish'

Lake Vostok Researchers have to drill through thousands of metres of ice to reach the surface of Lake Vostok

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There could be some complex animals living in Lake Vostok, which lies close to 4km below Antarctica's ice sheet.
The possibility is raised by scientists who have sifted genetic material in ice drilled from close to Vostok's surface.
They found signatures for organisms such as bacteria that are often associated with marine molluscs, crustaceans and even fish.
But the team cautions in the PLoS One journal that this material may also represent past contamination.
Scientists now recognise that Antarctica is underlain by a complex network of rivers, and many of the identified organisms, or their traces, could perhaps have been delivered to Vostok from the ocean. The lake is 200m below sea level.
It is, nonetheless, another fascinating twist in the story of this deeply buried lake.
First identified in 1956 by the Russians and mapped in the 1990s by the British, Vostok covers an area of 15,000 square km, and in places is 800m deep.
Researchers believe it has not been open to the atmosphere for many millions of years, and a drilling effort has recently tried to sample its waters.
The new PLoS study examined genetic material - stretches of RNA - isolated from ice that froze on to the ice sheet as it moved above the lake. The supposition was that this content might hint at the type of life present in Vostok.
Thousands of unique matches were identified with sequences already listed in public databases.
The vast majority (94%) of these matches were with bacteria, while a smaller group (6%) were with more complex, multi-cellular organisms (eukaryotes). A handful of links were made also to archaea - very primitive, single-celled microbes.
A large number of bacterial sequences, reports the team, were from "animal commensals, mutualists and pathogens… including those associated with annelids, sea anemones, brachiopods, tardigrades and fish."
The team also found matches to types of bacteria that thrive in hot environments, such as around volcanic hydrothermal vents on the sea floor. If such vents existed in Vostok, they could "provide sources of energy and nutrients vital for organisms living in the lake", the team writes in PloS One.
Lake Vostok is the largest of about 375 sub-glacial bodies of water now mapped under Antarctica's ice sheet.
These "ghost" lakes are kept in a liquid state by heat rising from the rockbed below and from the pressure of all the ice pushing down from above.
Astrobiologists have a particular interest in the lakes.
Conditions in them may not be that different from those in the liquid water bodies thought to exist under the surfaces of icy moons in the outer Solar System.
Places like Europa, which orbits Jupiter, and Enceladus, which circles Saturn, may be among the best places beyond Earth to go to look for alien organisms.
Map 
 
 Concerted efforts have been made recently to drill into lakes Vostok, Whillans and Ellsworth