Global warming seems to be speeding up the growth of the longest living organisms we know of.  Bristlecone pines can live for almost 5,000 years and the information stored in the growth of their rings is a treasure trove of climate data.  Because their growth is a function of the weather, analyzing the size of the rings they develop each year can tell us what that period’s climate was like.

At an elevation of 12,000 feet, where almost no rain falls, temperature is the driving influence on tree growth, while lower down, rainfall is the strongest factor in tree growth, Salzer said in an interview.

Matthew Salzer,  Malcolm K. Hughes and a team of dendrochronologists from the University of Arizona have just published a paper in which they explain that the outermost rings of Bristlecones – the most recent ones – tend to be significantly larger than most of the earlier ones.  In the last 50 years, the trees have been growing faster than they did in the previous 3,700.

Salzer has done work on Mt. Washington for his studies and shared data with Long Now.  The information from the trees on the future Clock site has provided Long Now with a helpful understanding of the area’s climate dating back several thousand years.

The current study is an indication that climate change is affecting these trees and the delicate ecosystems that support them.  This high-altitude temperature change has significance for more than the Bristlecones and the local environment, however.  The mountains this phenomenon is documented in are an important source of snowmelt for much of California and Nevada:

Hughes said that increasing temperatures high in the mountains could have significant effects elsewhere. In many areas of the western U.S., mountains are a key source of water for farms and urban areas at lower elevations.

“If the snow melts earlier, the mountains won’t be able to hold onto water for as long,” Hughes said. “They won’t be as effective as water towers for us.”

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe made its final flyby of the Earth on Friday in order to fling itself off towards its target: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Launched in 02004, Rosetta has made several planetary flybys in order to gain the velocity necessary to approach and eventually orbit the comet so that a small landing craft can touchdown upon and sample some of the comet’s material.  Scientists hope that a better understanding of the make-up of a comet will be like a key that will unlock many secrets about the formation of the planets and the development of our solar system.

Included on the craft is one of the early Rosetta Disks produced by Long Now.  The highly durable, format-independent linguistic archive will survive as long as the craft continues to orbit Comet 67P.  Unlike the Voyager Disks, this terrestrial artifact will remain in our solar system orbiting the comet, which is orbiting the Sun and will continue to do so until it runs into something (which could be quite a while).

You can see lots of great photos and amazing animations on the Rosetta blog, run by the ESA.  In addition, there was a lovely little piece in the Guardian highlighting the mission’s long-term nature:

The scientific pay-off from Rosetta could be huge. But contemplate the generosity of vision that made the mission possible. Some of those who lobbied for Rosetta will have died by the time the first results are delivered. Some young scientists who will build their careers on the data from Rosetta were not born when the mission was conceived. If, as Harold Wilson famously observed, a week is a long time in politics, Rosetta is a reminder that we can also think on a celestial timescale.

The Genome 10k Project is currently just getting started, but if 65 scientists get their way, the University of California Santa Cruz could eventually house an extensive database of vertebrate genetic evolution.  The plan is to build an archive of the entire genomes of 10,000 vertebrates.  A library of this sort would assist in answering many questions within evolutionary biology and would allow for the construction of a highly detailed natural history of vertebrate evolution.  Genome sequencing is still a costly process, but is quickly becoming more affordable as computing power grows.  The project’s leaders say that once a genome can be sequenced for $3,000 dollars, they’ll be “good to go.”

From their site:

The Genome 10K project aims to assemble a genomic zoo—a collection of DNA sequences representing the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species, approximately one for every vertebrate genus. The trajectory of cost reduction in DNA sequencing suggests that this project will be feasible within a few years. Capturing the genetic diversity of vertebrate species would create an unprecedented resource for the life sciences and for worldwide conservation efforts.

The growing Genome 10K Community of Scientists (G10KCOS), made up of leading scientists representing major zoos, museums, research centers, and universities around the world, is dedicated to coordinating efforts in tissue specimen collection that will lay the groundwork for a large-scale sequencing and analysis project.

The plan is to add this new vast collection to UC Santa Cruz’s existing Genome Browser, a publicly accessible archive of 45 genomes and to enhance The Encyclopedia of Life, a wiki with pages for each known species.  (Long Now’s All Species Inventory was spun off and folded into the EoL.)

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is holding its 10th anniversary Quantum to Cosmos Festival this month in Waterloo, Ontario.  The 10 day extravaganza has the theme this year of “Ideas for the Future” and seeks to “take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe.”

They’ve got lots of great lectures that are free to view online, including several by speakers in our seminar series:

• Stewart Brand will be on The Agenda with Steve Paikin Friday night to discuss science’s evolving role in society and on Saturday he’ll be giving his own lecture on his Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline.
• Peter Diamandis spoke on Sunday about the X Prize Foundation.
• Neal Stephenson spoke with Lee Smolin and Jaron Lanier about using fiction as a window into science and he’ll be joining Tuesday night’s panel on The Agenda with Steve Paikin to discuss our increasingly wired lives.

There are many other scientists and thinkers on the schedule, and each of these lectures will become available online shortly after the live event, so keep checking back on the full list to see what’s new.  (A play button will appear on the icon for each event once the video is released.)

John Goodman is an engineer that admires intuition, a reluctant artist who enjoys elegant approximations. His best known creation,
The Annosphere, was recently showcased at the Cambridge Science Festival in Massachusetts, where he lives and works.

The Annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.

(more…)

I just came across the World Digital Library site launched in April of this year by the Library of Congress and several other national archives, libraries and other partner institutions.  Most impressive is that the interface to the data is not only spatial – a world map- but also uses a timeline…  a 10,000 year timeline.  The collection currently only has about 1100 items, but each has extensive normalized meta-data in 7 major world languages.  Producing meta-data at this level is quite difficult but will indeed be very valuable over the long haul.  Hopefully it wont provide too large a barrier to getting more data into the repository. They launched the effort with some extremely high value items, and are taking a very top down meta-data approach (as opposed to something like Wikipedia that allows the masses to annotate):

 The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. “There are many one-of-a-kind documents,” Billington said in an interview.

“All of this is dependable, authoritative commentary,” Billington said. – Washington Post

Also very interesting is that the BBC reports that the WDL is one of the first customers for the recently announced Rosetta Stone 1,000 year digital memory product developed in Japan and reported here last month.

For last month’s feature in National Geographic about the ancient Cambodian metropolis of Angkor, a team of Monash University faculty created a detailed digital animation of the city and its surroundings.

Continuing a long running collaboration with the University of Sydney’s Greater Angkor Project, these animations attempt to visualise, and animate, the landscapes and daily life in 13th Angkor, Cambodia. The scenes draw upon a wide range of archaeological and historical data, including bas reliefs (pictorial sculptures), Chinese eye witness accounts, and extensive mapping undertaken by the Greater Angkor Project and the EFEO.

Digital recreations of this kind are becoming more prevalent, as technology enables new tools for humanities research, and new funding programs like NEH’s Digital Humanities make virtualization projects possible. One project funded by this program is Digital Karnak, a project undertaken by a team at UCLA that recreates a religious complex built by Queen Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt.  Their model goes a few steps further than the Angkor project as it documents the physical structure of the temple over two thousand years so that you can see how it was added to and modified by successive pharaohs.

The result of two years of painstaking research by a team of more than 24 scholars and technicians, Digital Karnak explores how scores of existing ruins may have originally looked and demonstrates how they came to be altered over time as generations of pharaohs put their stamp on the site that served as the religious center for Thebes, the Ancient Egyptian capital during the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.

 Patrick Wlaters sent in this great tidbit about the oceans “thermohaline currents” driven by salinity and temperature gradients.

The ocean conveyor gets it “start” in the Norwegian Sea, where warm water from the Gulf Stream heats the atmosphere in the cold northern latitudes. This loss of heat to the atmosphere makes the water cooler and denser, causing it to sink to the bottom of the ocean. As more warm water is transported north, the cooler water sinks and moves south to make room for the incoming warm water. This cold bottom water flows south of the equator all the way down to Antarctica. Eventually, the cold bottom waters are able to warm and rise to the surface, continuing the conveyor belt that encircles the globe.

It takes almost 1,000 years for the conveyor belt to complete one “cycle.”

This month some results were published from the now 72 year long Happiness Study at Harvard of 268 wealthy and priveleged men.  NPR also ran a story on this recently with interviews of the case researchers.  What was most striking to me is that in all cases, the money and success were not indicators of happiness.  It was having good relationships with other people that was the universal key.  Here is a synopsis from the longer Atlantic article on the study.

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

 Through our partnership with Applied Minds we were invited to include one of our materials on a NASA material experiment called MISSE on the International Space Station. We included a sample of commercially pure titanium, that was black oxide coated, and laser etched (pictured below).  This is the same material/process that we made the front side of the Rosetta Disk out of. Now we get to find out how well the disk would hold up if exposed to open space for several years…

This experiment is a continuation of sorts of the material research started back in 01984 with the Long Duration Exposure Facility that Kevin Kelly posted about earlier.