Year of the ET
Year of the ET Feedback is crossing our fingers for , China鈥檚 foremost proponent of SETI, the astronomy field鈥檚 search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This mild-mannered academic has spent the past eight years funding his own search for intelligent alien life, labouring from his home office, in between lectures and marking student work.
He got his big break a couple of years ago when he was given 17.5 hours to gather data using Sky Eye, a 500-metre aperture radio telescope in China鈥檚 Guizhou province. On 15 June, a report on the website of the official newspaper of China鈥檚 Ministry of Science and Technology revealed that Zhang and his team of two had found 鈥� only for the post to vanish a few hours later.
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Did an overenthusiastic press officer get a ticking off? Or are our alien neighbours manipulating time and reality? Feedback has another explanation. In an interview with Chinese news site Sixth Tone, Zhang鈥檚 colleague Zhao Haichen says he was inspired to join the project after reading Liu Cixin鈥檚 novel . Which is, should you need reminding, the story of a SETI researcher who brings down an alien invasion upon the Earth.
Time to heal
In China again: President Xi Jinping鈥檚 pledge to achieve national net-zero carbon emissions by 2060 has been raising eyebrows for some time. How will China meet such ambitious targets? Enter another Chinese sci-fi writer, Chen Qiufan, author of 2013鈥檚 fantastic noirish eco-thriller Waste Tide.
Chen鈥檚 new work boasts the rather more pedestrian title Net Zero China. He : 鈥淭he protagonist lives today, but can travel through time. He travels to 2060 and witnesses how society works with the help of all kinds of technological breakthroughs and a smooth system that helps the country reach net zero. At the end, he travels back with the new ideas he learned in 2060 and shares them with people who help reach the climate goal.鈥�
Not only is this cheating, it also makes no mention of what we imagine to be time travel鈥檚 catastrophically huge carbon footprint. Mind you, if you used time travel to arrange some crafty off-setting scheme鈥�
Why the long face?
Called simply (because why gild the lily?), on 13 June this most quixotic of races once more pitted species against species across a 36-kilometre course in deepest Powys, UK. This year, Homo sapiens triumphed. 鈥淚t鈥檚 great to win the event and beat the horse,鈥� the winner declared, not at all concerned at undermining a 5000-year effort to get Equus ferus caballus to bear us.
鈥淚鈥檝e never rode a horse in my life,鈥� he added. 鈥淚 once rode a donkey at Blackpool though.鈥� Regular reader Ceri Brown asks that we immortalise this runner鈥檚 name: it is Ricky Lightfoot.
Cover your ears
Far too late for any Legionnaires who happen to be reading this, but these days, the World 午夜福利1000集合 Organization speedily renames diseases so that ill-chosen names don鈥檛 spread stigma.
It takes a dim view of animal names in particular, and its director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is already planning action on the , not least after an open letter from more than 30 scientists on the message board of .
When we last looked, the comments on that post contained only a single suggestion for a new name: Human Orthopox Syndrome, or HOPS. Feedback wonders if this suggestion will, like Beatrix Potter鈥檚 Peter, creep under the wire?
The kraken wakes
Public outreach is a chore for some scientists, but not for Connecticut marine biologist Sarah McAnulty, whose natty embroidery cephalopods can be found on her page. Now she is courting a prang or two from tailgaters by , across the back of her car, an invitation to text 鈥淪QUID鈥� to her hotline for the latest squid facts. So far, , a staggering 39,260 cephalophiles have reached out.
Do the squirm
鈥淟imbless crawling is ubiquitous in biology,鈥� at the University of California, San Diego. It is rampant here, too, especially when it comes to Feedback鈥檚 pay review. The physicists鈥� recent joint paper, 鈥淥ptimal Locomotion for Limbless Crawlers鈥�, reveals convergent evolution in all its peristaltic magnificence. The physics of undulating locomotion offers, say the authors, 鈥渋nsights and tools for optimal bioinspired crawling robots鈥�. Would that they had not gone on to mention 鈥渁pplications in search and rescue, endoscopy and burrowing鈥�. At the very least, those ideas need putting in a happier order.
Thank me very much
Finally, may we congratulate Charles Corfield who, through a glitch, has just received a New Scientist gift subscription from himself. Feedback isn鈥檛 sure if cloning has suddenly made strides or we are just ahead of the times.
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