Inside a nondescript office building in Mountain View, California, a gathering took place recently that might have been a glimpse into the future.

At first, the people, like the building, didn’t offer many hints of what that future might look like. They came from all walks of life: young, old, students, businesspeople, men and women.

Then they started talking.

Rockets, microgravity, space planes, moon bases, gas stations in orbit – if you didn’t know better, you would think you had walked into a science fiction conference. But, in this case, reality is much better than fiction. These everyday people were learning how to design science experiments to take place in low Earth orbit.

The majority of attendees at the Space Hackers Workshop weren’t scientists. They were part of the growing movement of citizen science, experiments performed in a distributed way by non-specialists, tinkerers, and the scientifically curious. And now, building on the growing market for private space travel, citizen science is edging toward a new frontier: space.

How to get to space

Though the future of federal funding for American space travel is questionable, the space industry is currently experiencing incredible private sector growth. No fewer than twenty-three different vehicle designs capable of carrying passengers into space or low Earth orbit are currently in development or actively being tested. Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are the most visible of the contenders due to their recent successful test flights. Consequently, the opportunities for citizen scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to be part of humanity’s expansion into space are set to increase dramatically while at the same time becoming much more affordable.

The workshop, held May 4-5, was brimming with talks explaining the ways in which citizen scientists could get involved in space research and exploration.

In a presentation about the Lynx, a two-seat, reusable launch vehicle currently in development by XCOR, Khaki Rodway ran down a long list of scientific experiments that could fit into the 20 kg and 120 kg payloads of the suborbital spaceplane: everything from electronics testing for future technologies to be used on Earth or in space to remote imaging to help authorities fight forest fires more effectively.

Citizen scientists can design experiments individually or as part of a team and have them sent up as payload in spaceplanes like the Lynx. XCOR, expecting to make much of its profits from payload use, has laid out guidelines for payload development on their website. Payload cost will vary according to company and amount of space required, but XCOR quoted the range of $5,000 to $500,000. If you want to go to space alongside your experiment be prepared to shell out at least $95,000. NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program acts as a middleman to help scientists find flights for their projects.

Another option is to launch your own satellite. Small satellites called CubeSats are available to anyone, although academics, companies, and amateur satellite builders are currently the primary market. The present cost of sending a CubeSat into low-earth orbit ranges between $100,000-200,000 for construction and launch. However, several open-source components, including variations on arduino programming boards, alongside advancing smartphone technologies, are bringing down the cost for building and developing experiments.

Finally, there’ll be competitions. Initiatives in the mold of the XPRIZE have had success in soliciting research ideas from individuals and companies, and space research is following suit. Citizens In Space, a project of the United States Rocket Academy, has announced a High-Altitude Astrobiology Challenge which will award cash prizes of up to $10,000 to ordinary citizens for the development of devices to collect microbes from space. The group has also said that they plan to sponsor 100 citizen science experiments to fly on suborbital missions in the Lynx spaceplane.

The questions such research could answer are nearly limitless. For example, it’s thought that studying small aquatic invertebrates called waterbears (or tardigrades) might give us insight into human biology in space; synthetic biology could design useful microbes to transform waste into energy for long space missions; protein crystallization studies, sometimes easier in microgravity, have already led to pharmaceutical breakthroughs.

From basic biology and chemistry to more instantly applicable technology, there is more unknown about space than known at the moment, and a lot of room for ordinary people to iterate upon ideas.

Small businesses join the action

In addition to science, attendees were there with an eye toward business. Entrepreneurs discussed opportunities like 3-D printing in space, mining of objects in the solar system, manufacturing on the moon and Mars, and space tourism. Jim Kerevala, CEO of Shackleton Energy, and Jason Dunn, the Chief Technologist for Made In Space, both made the case that small-scale experiments in sub-orbital or orbital payloads will be the driving force behind new business development in the fledgling sector of space services.

For instance, the process of soldering, essential to electronics and metal work here on Earth, is not effective in microgravity. However, questions related to the soldering process can be tested easily on sub-orbital flights (and more cost-effectively than on the ISS). Anyone able to solve the problem of soldering in space and commercialize the solution stands to make a lot of money as more business moves off-planet.

However, new space-related businesses do still face an uphill battle. Sentiment about who is qualified to explore space needs to change if funding is to find its way into the hands of space-entrepreneurs. Currently, space advocates and entrepreneurs are thought of as “early adopters” whose projects often produce looks of incredulity and giggles in conversations with the uninitiated. Persistent communication programs will be a huge part of making space science and exploration more mainstream and fundable.

States step in

Implicit in all the presentations was the need for access to space: more rockets and space planes run by more companies are required before space really becomes a democratic place. But, as NASA steps back from its role in exploration, several states see the potential financial revenues and are stepping in. California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, New York and Texas are all currently discussing or planning spaceports. Texas and Florida, in particular, are working to entice space-related companies to base enterprises in their states. It looks as though Texas might get both SpaceX and XCOR, but it is still unknown who will be the victor in the state race for space.

As for the future vision of the space industry as a whole, that differs depending on who you talk to. Some see it as a place for industry or science, while others imagine that it will be populated by tourists.

In either case, in the near future – within just a few years – trips into suborbital space will be a daily occurrence in many parts of the U.S.

And the future of space will be a product of the combined efforts of everyone who labors to create it. (As Jim Kerevala of Shackleton Energy put it, “The supply chain doesn’t exist yet!”) The same way that ordinary people with extraordinary ideas have painted the current cultural and commercial landscape on the surface of the Earth, citizen scientists will be particularly important for the development of humanity’s expansion off of the planet. In conjunction with professional scientists, they will be among the first wave of explorers to shine a light on the darkness that surrounds us, and among the first experimenters to have a shot at testing the widgets upon which future space tourists will depend.

Dr. Kiki Sanford is a specialist in neuroscience and behavior. When not studying her toddler son, she tries to explain science and technology to anyone who will listen. She also hosts the weekly kickass science show This Week in Science, and harbors secret dreams of vacationing on the moon.

Image by BiterBig / Shutterstock

Mathematically, the Greco-Roman-Etruscan number system is an endlessly repetitive number system that is inefficient and cumbersome. To write 3333, which we do by repeating the sign 3 four times, a Roman would have had to scribble down MMMCCCXXXIII—three times as many characters. And I challenge anyone to multiply this number by MMDCCCLXXIX—using only the Roman system (meaning without translating these numbers into what they would be in our base-10 number system and then back into Roman numerals). Surprisingly, this clunky old Roman number system, with its ancient Greek and Etruscan roots, remained in use in Europe until the thirteenth century!

Our base-10 system derives its power and efficiency from the fact that we use a zero. The zero here is not just a concept of nothingness (and something every schoolchild learns you are forbidden to divide by), but also a place holder. The zero is a sign we place in a location in a number when there is nothing there—to tell us, for example, that 40 means four tens and no units, or that 405 is four hundreds, no tens, and five units.

Numbers on a dial

The zero thus turns the numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 into what algebraists call the ring Z(10). When you stack such rings one on top of the other, and you let them represent, in turn, the units, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, and so on, based on each ring’s location, you get the highly efficient number system we have today. Think of each ring as a dial—when it goes around full circle, you get 0 and you add a 1 to the ring above it. As an example, start with the number 5—this means only the lowest ring, that of the units, is nonempty, and has the number 5. Now add to this the number 7. Five units from the 7 will bring the units ring to 0 and make the tens ring jump up to 1. The remaining 2 from the 7 will make the lowest ring (the lowest dial) now show 2. Thus we have that the sum of 5 and 7 is 12. Without the place-holding zero, which makes each “dial” start repeating itself after going through zero, we couldn’t do this.

The ancient Babylonians (preceded by the Akkadians and Sumerians) had a base-60 number system, without a zero. So already 4,000 years ago, people in ancient Babylon understood that it is efficient to make numbers become “circular” or dial-like, in the sense that 60 was like our 10, and 3600 (60 squared) was like our 100, and so on. But the Babylonians didn’t use a place-holding zero, so there were serious ambiguities in their system.

Our number system is far superior to the old Babylonian base-60 system, because our base is much smaller and because we use a zero, and it is also superior to the 3,000-year-old Greco-Roman-Etruscan letter-based system. Zero is the incredible invention that made our number system so efficient. This system was popularized in Europe after the publication, in 1202, of the book Liber Abaci (The Book of the Abacus), by Fibonacci (of the famous Fibonacci sequence). Presumably, Fibonacci learned the use of the 10 numerals with zero from Arab traders, with whom he dealt on behalf of his merchant father, and that is why we often call them the Arabic numerals. But Fibonacci himself refers to them in his book as the “nine Indian numerals” with zero, which he calls zephirum, perhaps originating from the Arab sefir.

The original zero

But who invented the zero, which gives so much power to our number system? We don’t know who invented it, but we are pretty sure that the zero is an Eastern invention. The oldest zero in India with a confirmed date is from the mid-ninth century, and found in the Chatur-bujha temple in the city of Gwalior.

At one point, an older zero was known. In the 1930s a zero from the year AD 683 was found in Cambodia, and its great antiquity allowed a French researcher by the name of Georges Coedes to prove that the zero is of Eastern provenance. This is because, while the Gwalior zero is concurrent with the Arab empire based in Baghdad (the Caliphate), the zero from 683 predates extensive Arab trading. It also comes from a location that is much farther east than India. Its existence thus makes it highly unlikely that the zero was invented in Europe or Arabia and traveled east through Arab traders, as some had believed in the early 20th century. The Cambodian zero proved that zero was an Eastern invention. But this zero disappeared during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, and no one knew if it still existed.

I felt very strongly that it was important to recover the world’s oldest zero. I spent five years researching its whereabouts and developed various hypotheses about where it might be found. Then last year I was awarded a generous research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which enabled me to travel to Cambodia to search for this precious find. As is well known, Cambodian artifacts have been plundered for decades and sold illegally on the international antiquities markets. During the Khmer Rouge era, while killing 1.7 million of their own people, Pol Pot and his henchmen also looted, vandalized or destroyed more than 10,000 ancient statues or inscriptions.

The location where the oldest zero in the world—on a seventh-century stone inscription—was kept was plundered by the Khmer Rouge as late as 1990. I traveled to that location, not far from the famous Angkor Wat temple, and after weeks of searching among thousands of artifacts, many of them damaged or discarded, I was able to discover the inscription. It is shown in the photo below, taken by my wife.

Inscription K-127, from Sambor on Mekong. Photo Credit: Debra Gross Aczel

The zero is the dot in the middle, to the right of the spiral-looking character, which is a 6 in Old Khmer. The numeral to the right of the dot is a 5, making the full number 605. The inscription says: “The Chaka era reached year 605 on the fifth day of the waning moon…” We know that in Cambodia the Chaka era began in the year 78 AD. Thus the date of this zero is 605 + 78 = 683.

I notified the Cambodian Government of my discovery, and His Excellency Hab Touch of the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, who had helped me in my search, promised me to place this inscription—one of the most important finds in the history of science—in the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh, where it rightly belongs. So anyone interested in the history of science and the birth of numbers should soon be able to see the first zero ever discovered.

Amir D. Aczel writes often about physics and cosmology. His book about the discovery of the Higgs boson, Present at the Creation: Discovering the Higgs Boson, was published in paperback by Broadway Books in November 2012.

Top image by yanugkelid / Shutterstock

The recent boom in fracking has turned America into the Saudi Arabia of natural gas, almost overnight.

Proponents say that this burgeoning industry has ensured U.S. energy independence for years to come, and created a more climate-friendly alternative to dirtier-burning fuels like coal and gas. It has arguably also hastened the demise of the coal industry, as power plants switch in large numbers to the cheaper gas, resulting in U.S. CO₂ emissions sinking to their lowest levels in nearly two decades. And with less smog-producing particulates and deadly mercury in the air, we can hope that respiratory illnesses like asthma may begin to decline.

But fracking poses its own risks. While our air has been getting cleaner, opponents argue that America’s water has been getting dirtier as the result of the hydraulic fracturing of shale. Fracking uses lots of water—up to seven million gallons for every well drilled—which is mixed together with sand and a witch’s brew of industrial chemicals, then blasted a mile into the earth to the shale formations where the natural gas is located. This high pressure stream shatters the rock and releases the gas, which geysers up to the surface to be recovered.

But what exactly happens to the water which is shot into the earth? A study published today in the journal Science says that we don’t entirely know the answer to this yet—and what we don’t know may harm us.

The missing half

What we do know is that about half of the fracking fluid gushes back up to the surface. “People focus on what exactly are the chemicals that we are putting into frack fluid,” said Radisav Vidic, the lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Pittsburg, in a Science podcast. “But a more significant problem is what comes out—because the quality of what comes out is many, many times worse than the quality of the water that was injected into the well.”

That’s because the frack water picks up contaminants underground—a variety of salts, benzene, heavy metals, organic compounds and radioactive substances such as radium-226, which is found in high levels in the Marcellus Shale formation that is being fracked from West Virginia to Pennsylvania.

The hydraulic fracturing water cycle. Courtesy EPA

Vidic says that disposing of this briny and highly contaminated water can be a problem. Either it is re-injected deep into wells in the earth where, theoretically, it remains for perpetuity; or it is purified in a waste treatment facility and then either recycled or discharged into a river.

If all of this goes smoothly, our water supply remains pristine. But the study warns that accidents can, and do, happen. In one well-publicized incident, improperly treated fracking fluids were discharged into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water for most of Pittsburgh, forcing 325,000 residents of the region to switch to bottled water for several weeks.

Another potential problem area is the roughly half of the water used in fracking which does not migrate back to the surface through the drilling shaft, but remains interred underground. Ideally, Vidic says, this contaminated water will never come in contact with the groundwater, which sits in the aquifer thousands of feet above it. But he adds that there is a lot that we still don’t know about how water moves underground.

A leaky system

Gas companies argue that the frack fluid is prevented from fouling the groundwater by the thick cap of bedrock which sits between it and the aquifer. However, the Pennsylvania researchers point out that geological formations are not watertight. There can be networks of fractures in the rock which permit toxic fracking fluids to flow back up towards the surface under certain circumstances.

Marcellus Shale underlies a U.S. East Coast region from New York to Virginia. Courtesy USGS

This flow underground might account for some of the reports of tainted water in wells near gas drilling sites. But there are also other ways that fracking fluids can get into our water; for example, through cracks in well casings, well blowouts, and surface spills from trucks or containment ponds. Anthony Ingraffea at Cornell University found that there was an 8.9 percent failure rate among wells in the Pennsylvania Marcellus region in 2012, and he predicts that leaks and other problems will become increasingly common as the wells age.

What kind of impacts might these leaks have? There have been numerous anecdotal reports of illnesses in people living near fracking wells, but not yet any long-term epidemiological studies. One stumbling block is that the chemical mix added to the fracking fluid is a mystery. Many of the scores of industrial chemicals being used are not currently regulated by the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act, says the Science study, due to a loophole introduced by former Vice President Dick Cheney which exempts natural gas drilling from certain provisions of the environmental law. Drillers have so far refused to reveal their formulas, claiming this is proprietary information.

But Vidic and his colleagues say that companies need to disclose the exact composition of the injection fluid—information which is critical for scientists and regulators in their efforts to ensure water quality. The researchers also point out that states including Pennsylvania are not yet consistently collecting the kinds of hard data about surface water and well water quality which would allow us to assess the impact that fracking is having.

Until this monitoring takes place, they argue, fracking’s effect on our water supply is anybody’s guess.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books based in New York City. You can read more of his work here.

Top image by Nato via Flickr

Bees are dying all over the world, and nobody is sure why it is happening. Up to 40 percent of U.S. beekeeper hives failed to survive the past winter, making this the worst season so far on record. In part this was the result of a mysterious and growing phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which bees fly off en masse and never return to their hive.

Agricultural production is beginning to take a hit from the loss of bees. In California’s Central Valley at the end of February, there weren’t enough commercially bred bees to pollinate all of the 800,000 acres of almond trees. Some desperate almond farmers actually flew in the precious insects from Australia to service their trees. Almonds aside, fully one out of every three bites of food that we eat were produced with the help of insect pollinators.

Domestic bees aren’t the only ones in trouble. Wild pollinators have been diminishing too. Feral honey bee populations in the U.S. have dropped an alarming 90 percent in the last 50 years. Some species are teetering on the edge of extinction. Fifteen pollinators are listed as endangered in the U.S. alone. The World Conservation Union forecasts that, largely as a result of global declines in wild pollinators, over 20,000 flowering plant species are likely to disappear over the next few decades.

While some food crops like almonds depend on commercially bred bees, others use primarily wild insects  to pollinate them. A study published in the journal Science in March concluded that wild pollinators are equally if not more important than domestic honey bees. The continued loss of feral pollinators, the researchers warn, could spark a crisis in our agricultural system from which it would be difficult to recover.

Pollinators, moreover, are considered indicator species for the overall health of the environment. When domesticated bees and their wild cousins fare poorly, it is a sign that all is not well in the natural world.

Chemical contributors

But scientists are finding it hard to pinpoint which factors in particular are the most responsible for the rise in pollinator mortality. That’s because a lot of different things have gone wrong lately. For one thing, wild habitats such as meadows and grasslands that the pollinators depend on for a varied diet are shrinking, as urban sprawl and the spread of monoculture agriculture encroaches upon them. The introduction of non-native species has also reduced the numbers of native pollinators in the U.S. and elsewhere. The European honey bee, which is the one that commercial beekeepers raise, is actually an invasive species which is competing with American insects for limited resources. In some areas, moreover, there is evidence that erratic weather and shifts in rainfall patterns due to climate change may already be a factor in the decline of certain species.

Something else that has been getting a lot of attention, especially in Europe, is the impact of agro-chemicals on both wild and domesticated bees. In a landmark move late last month, the European Union imposed a provisional two year ban on the use of the most common class of pesticides in the world, the neonicotinoids (neonics for short). A growing body of research now shows that the neonics, a chemical relative of nicotine which acts as a nerve poison in insects, harm bees by disrupting the navigational ability which they use to find flowers and make their way back to the hive.

In one of the most widely publicized studies, scientists at Harvard were actually able to duplicate the symptoms of CCD by exposing bees over a 23 week period to a low dose of  imidacloprid, a neonic which is produced by the German  company Bayer AG. Another report published in PLOS One found “remarkably high” levels of neonics and other agro-chemical toxins in pollen collected by honeybees, leading, the researchers said, to significant reductions in overall honey bee fitness. Yet another study conducted by Jeffrey Pettis, the head of the US Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory, concluded that exposure to the neonic imidaclopid (the most popular pesticide in the world) makes bees more susceptible to infection by a variety of common pathogens.

Only part of the problem

While these chemicals clearly hurt bees, most researchers believe that insecticides are only a part of the problem. The spread of the blood-sucking bee parasite the Varroa mite may also be weakening bees and making them more prone to CCD. Another suspect is the Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin in the pollen of genetically modified corn, which German scientists found compromised bee immune systems.

And certain practices of commercial beekeepers could be contributing to the collapse of their own hives as well. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month suggests that the high-fructose corn syrup that bees are fed lacks critical elements which help bees fight off the ill effects of environmental toxins, like the neonics, as well as pathogens. The entomologists from the University of Illinois said that this nutritionally bereft equivalent of junk food deprives bees of the enzyme p-coumaric found in their own honey, which is crucial in the regulation of their immune systems.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a report [pdf] last Thursday which points to a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” including agro-chemicals, as likely suspects in recent bee die-offs. But it stopped short of making any specific policy recommendations. The Environmental Protection Agency says that it is currently reviewing the situation and will come out with its own recommendations in 2018.

This seemingly casual approach led commercial beekeeper Larry Pender to comment, “I can’t wait for the regulators to take their time, because we need these bees now.” He told CBS News that he lost a half million dollars last year alone, and had to lay off five of his seven workers. Beekeepers like Pender are clearly hurting. But with so much of our human food supply on the line, the stakes could not be higher for the rest of us as well.

Richard Schiffman is an environmental journalist, poet and author of two books based in New York City. You can read more of his work here.

Image by Marjan Veljanoski / Shutterstock

The thing about crossing into uncharted territory is that you may not know when, exactly, you have crossed into it. No one needs to tell that to the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is currently at the center of a controversy about where the solar system ends and interstellar space begins.

Today, a press release from the American Geophysical Union initially stated Voyager had left our solar system. Two hours later, though, they issued a correction calling Voyager’s current location a “new region of space,” which is considerably less flashy (but equally scientifically valuable). The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees the spacecraft, weighed in with a press release saying that no, in fact Voyager was still in the solar system.

So why the controversy? What is the debate about the boundary of the solar system? And what is this “new region” of which the scientists speak?

Let’s begin at the beginning. NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977. Since then, the 1,600-pound (722 kilogram) probe has been zipping away from Earth and toward the edge of the solar system. It is currently more than 11 billion miles from the Sun, which is nearly three times as far out as Pluto is (don’t worry, Pluto; Voyager isn’t a planet, either).

But moving 11 billion miles from home isn’t always enough to free you of its influence. In the case of the solar system, the region where the Sun’s influence dominates is known as the heliosphere. Here, the Sun has blown high-speed, charged pieces of itself into a womb-like bubble.

Since 2004, Voyager 1 has been traveling in a subsection of the outer heliosphere: the heliosheath, where the solar wind slows down in response to pressure from the interstellar medium, which is the combination of winds from other, distant stars. When the influence of the solar wind and the interstellar medium are equal, the solar system ends, or so we say, and actual interstellar space begins. But determining whether or not Voyager has arrived there is no simple task.

The paper causing all the controversy has to do with cosmic rays (high-energy charged particles) both in and from outside the solar system. The authors state that on August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 saw a 90 percent drop in anomalous cosmic rays (those trapped in the solar system). At the same time, the number of galactic cosmic rays, from outside, doubled. Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces and an author of the paper, calls this abrupt change the “heliocliff,” a coinage that deserves to catch on.

The flip in cosmic ray intensities caused some scientists to say Voyager was now primarily under the influence of Space with a Capital S rather than ensconced in our protective heliosheath.

But other scientists asked those scientists to hang on a second, because what about the magnetic field?

Well, the magnetic field is supposed to change at the edge of the solar system, when the Sun’s magnetic influence tapers off. The data of what Voyager is seeing in terms of magnetic field, however, have not been released yet.

If the magnetic field and the cosmic ray counts changed at the same point in space, we may soon see another press release with the title “Voyager 1 has left solar system”—but only time, and publications forthcoming in Science, will tell. Till then, and forever after, Voyager 1 will continue to travel farther and farther away, and even if it hasn’t crossed out of the heliosphere yet, it certainly will one of these days.

Sarah Scoles is an associate editor at Astronomy magazine. Follow her on Twitter @ScolesSarah.

Image courtesy NASA JPL

The Casino Pier Star Jet roller coaster submerged in the sea on January 13, 2013 in Seaside Heights, NJ. Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Diamond City, North Carolina, is not actually a city, in that no one actually lives there. People did live there, though, back in 1899. That was when a major hurricane hit the community, on a small barrier island near Cape Hatteras. Homes were destroyed, animals were killed, and graves were uncovered or washed away in the storm according to a conservation group in the area. By 1902, all 500 residents in Diamond City had picked up and left.

Left, Rasmus Midgett sits on the wreckage of the Priscilla after the San Ciriaco Hurricane. Right, another ship driven ashore in the storm. Images courtesy State Archives of North Carolina.

The people there didn’t have computer climate models, or rapidly rising seas, or any understanding of increasing storm vulnerability; they just had a desire not to deal with what they assumed would be a constant problem. That problem, of course, is one that anyone living on the East Coast is confronting, especially with the waters of Hurricane Sandy still slowly receding from our coastal consciousness. The question is, when should people in New Jersey, Long Island, Maryland, and elsewhere start thinking about leaving behind their own versions of Diamond City?

Straw that breaks the camel’s back

Dylan McNamara, a complex systems researcher at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is trying to answer that question. He and colleague Andrew Keeler, of East Carolina University, have created a coupled model combining physical properties of the coast—beach erosion rates, varying degrees of sea level rise, storm vulnerability, and other factors—and economic and human factors involving risk perception and government subsidies. The model—published in the journal Nature Climate Change—can be used to examine, basically, when people will begin to abandon those houses at which Sandy huffed and puffed.

McNamara says that locales are particularly vulnerable to desertion if the economics aren’t good to begin with. “Right before [a major] storm the financial returns on their investment are just barely overwhelming the costs of being there, but then the storm comes,” McNamara says. “That’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Presently the model paints a general picture, but the researchers are working on adapting it for use in specific communities, essentially predicting when certain coastal property has negative value and the residents simply get up and leave. In general, though? Sea level rise of 10 mm per year could send some of America’s coastal residents running inside of 50 years from now.

Do you believe in sea level rise?

McNamara’s model incorporates a range of “actors”—imaginary people who buy and sell coastal property. These actors can be what he calls “observationalists,” meaning people who rely largely on what has happened in the past to inform their decisions; or they can be “model believers,” those who listen to what science is saying about impending sea level rise and increasingly damaging storms.

Debris left from Sandy in Seaside Heights, NJ. Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Not surprisingly, if the coast has only observationalists, the time to abandonment is substantially longer. Model believers, in contrast, abandon their properties more quickly, and as a result they suffer less property damage overall. This creates an unfortunate “equity issue,” in that both disaster relief and beach nourishment are subsidized heavily by the federal government (meaning, taxpayers). In other words, the few are capitalizing on the generosity of the many.

“[Taxpayers] are subsidizing people who may think very differently about the environment,” McNamara says. “And more importantly, the amount that they’re subsidizing is strongly tied to that belief.” Less belief in climate change means longer time to abandonment, which means more damage over time and more money flowing from taxpayer to the stubborn coastal resident.

The modeling on that divergence is striking: with low sea level rise of 3 mm per year, the two types of property owners suffer similar amounts of damage. But if sea level rise reaches 12 mm per year, “observationalists” begin to suffer an average property damage of over $100,000 per year while the model believers’ damage actually drops toward $30,000 per year or so. Why? They know when to leave.

But an important part of the model is that it isn’t just belief in climate change and sea level rise that drives coastal property decisions. The federal government is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

Destroy, rebuild, repeat

“There seems to be this universal agreement amongst a lot of people that the way we’re doing things at the coast right now is dumb,” says Robert Young, a professor at Western Carolina University who studies coastal processes and management. “At the moment, I don’t see any need for most of these folks to think about climate change, because the federal government isn’t thinking about climate change.”

Young points out that the Sandy relief funding approved by Congress not only included money to help rebuild infrastructure and give aid to families who lost homes, but also had $3.4 billion slated for the Army Corps of Engineers to work on protecting against future storms, an odd add-on for an emergency response package. For the better part of a century coastal communities have relied on beach nourishment—sand brought in to raise dunes and widen beaches to protect homes from erosion and storms—which is often subsidized to the tune of 65 percent or so.

Courtesy Glynnis Jones / Shutterstock

Young cited the case of Dauphin Island, Alabama, which he says has received a federal disaster declaration at least eight times in a quarter of a century. “This is a place that you would think would have been abandoned,” he says. “It’s barely a sandbar. And yet we continue to rebuild the roads on that place with federal funds, every time there’s a storm.”

Federal dollars vs. rising seas

Those federal subsidies are key to the model’s predictions. In a scenario involving sea level rising at about 3 mm per year, removing the subsidies changed the time to abandonment by as much as 250 years. Interestingly, as sea level rises faster, the subsidies play less of a role; if confronted with nature’s encroachment on a massive scale, we care a bit less that someone else is paying to raise a dune.

So the question of when we will start to abandon Ocean City, Maryland, and the southern edge of Long Island, and particularly vulnerable parts of the Jersey Shore, relies heavily on what the government does. If the storms keep coming—they will—and the seas rise faster and faster—they will—then it’s likely that Diamond City’s fate won’t look so strange anymore. And once we’re gone, we would probably stay gone: no one has ever tried to move back to Diamond City.

Dave Levitan is a freelance science journalist based in Philadelphia. He writes about energy, the environment, and occasionally zombies. Find more of his work here, and follow him on Twitter @davelevitan.

Just over a week ago, at three miles above sea level in the Chilean Atacama desert, Atacameño indians offered gifts to Mother Earth in a traditional ceremony to bless a decidedly modern object: the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Four days later, on March 13, the largest-ever ground-based astronomical observatory was officially inaugurated. “ALMA is now a reality, and not a fairy tale anymore,” said Dutch astronomer Thijs de Graauw, the project’s director.

ALMA (Spanish for “soul”) consists of 66 antennas, most of them 40 feet across. They are equipped with sensitive receivers to detect millimeter and submillimeter waves from space – radiation in between radio waves and infrared light. This relatively long-wavelength radiation is emitted by the coolest objects in the Universe, such as the dark molecular clouds that spawn new stars and planets. What’s more, interstellar molecules, including complex hydrocarbons and other molecules necessary for life, can only be identified using this type of radiation. Cosmic millimeter and submillimeter radiation has never been observed in much detail before, so astronomers all over the world have eagerly anticipated the ALMA inauguration.

The relative elevations of some famous astronomical observatories, including ALMA, for comparison. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

Because such radiation is absorbed by atmospheric water vapor, however, ALMA has to be extremely high up. The Chilean Chajnantor plateau, east of the backpacker township of San Pedro de Atacama, is perfect: It’s extremely high and the air is extremely dry. As an added bonus, the scenery is stunning: the plateau is surrounded by volcanoes. The downside, of course, is that working at this altitude, with half the normal amount of oxygen, is prohibitive. One day before the inauguration, many visitors experienced dizziness, nausea and loss of concentration. Some weren’t even allowed to visit the “high site” for medical reasons like hypertension.

“This is the second-highest man-made building in the world,” says head of engineering Michael Thorburn. “The Tanggula railway station in Tibet is slightly higher – but we have more computing power,” he joked.

A Google Maps for space

Preliminary science operations began over a year ago, when only half of the 66 antennas were operational. French astronomer Pierre Cox, who will be ALMA’s new director as of April 1, says now expectations run high, and rightfully so. “We are in the middle of a renaissance of millimeter and submillimeter observations,” he says.

For one thing, ALMA will reveal very distant starburst galaxies, where the star formation rate is hundreds of times as high as in our own Milky Way. By changing the configuration of the array – the antennas can be close together or spread out over an area 10 miles wide – astronomers can use ALMA as a “zoom telescope,” says de Graauw. In its compact configuration, ALMA has a bigger field of view, but lower resolution. In contrast, the extended configuration provides a much sharper vision than the Hubble Space Telescope, but only for small areas in the sky. “It’s like zooming in on a city in Google Earth, revealing individual houses,” says astrochemist Ewine van Dishoeck of Leiden University.

A close-up of one of ALMA’s antennas. Credit: research.gov

ALMA will also shape our understanding of the formation of stars and planets, hopefully observing planet formation in action. ALMA will also be able to study the distribution of organic compounds in the clouds of gases – the raw materials for planets – surrounding newborn stars. Sugar and water have already been detected in these kinds of disks. Says van Dishoeck: “If we find the right molecules, we can go to the biologists and say, ‘Here are the ingredients – can you make life out of it?’”

Long in the making

ALMA is a one-billion-dollar international project with contributions from North America, Europe and Eastern Asia. At the inauguration ceremony on Wednesday, representatives of the three participating agencies expressed their excitement about the facility’s completion. Tim de Zeeuw, director-general of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), told the audience how surprised he was to read about an ALMA-like observatory in the science fiction novel The Inferno by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, published in 1973, just after the discovery of the first interstellar molecules.

Chilean president Sebastián Piñera added that the local Atacameños must have been pretty visionary too, when, many centuries ago, they chose the name Chajnantor for the high plateau where ALMA is now located. “Chajnantor means ‘point of observation,’” he said, “so they knew it.”

For soon-to-be director Cox, the biggest challenge will be to lead ALMA into a whole new phase. “Construction will make place for operations,” he says. “My job is to turn ALMA into a real observatory.” And the observatory’s future looks bright. During its projected operational lifetime of thirty years, the array can be constantly upgraded by using more sensitive receivers, or expanded by adding more antennas. Looking back at the design and construction phase of ALMA, head of engineering Michael Thorburn remarked “It has been quite a journey.” But the real journey, of course, is only just beginning.

Govert Schilling is a freelance astronomy writer in the Netherlands. He attended the ALMA inauguration at the invitation of the European Southern Observatory.

 ALMA’s numbers

10^-13 seconds: ALMA’s accuracy in synchronizing the signals from the various antennas

0.35 millimeters: the shortest wavelength that ALMA can observe

1 astronomical unit (Sun-Earth distance): ALMA’s spatial resolution in nearby star-forming regions

4 kelvin: the temperature of the ALMA receivers, obtained through cryogenics

7 millimeters: the longest wavelength that ALMA can observe

7 meters: the diameter of twelve of the sixteen Japanese antennas (the other four are 12 meters in diameter, just like the 25 American and the 25 European antennas)

10: the number of wavelength bands in which ALMA will eventually be able to observe (some are still under construction)

16 kilometers: the equivalent diameter of the telescope that is synthesized by combining the signals of the 66 ALMA antennas

25 micrometers (about the width of a human hair): the surface accuracy of the ALMA dishes

28: the number of wheels of the two 130-ton ALMA transporters

30 years: the minimum projected operational lifetime of ALMA

54: the number of antennas currently in operation at the Chajnantor plateau

66: the total number of ALMA antennas (25 from North America, 25 from Europe, 16 from Eastern Asia)

100 metric tons: the weight of a single ALMA antenna

192: the number of foundations at which ALMA antennas can be positioned

5,000 meters: the altitude at which ALMA is located

7,000 square meters: the total collecting area of the ALMA array

134,000,000: the number of processors in the ALMA correlator that combines the signals from the 66 antennas

1,000,000,000 dollars: the estimated total project costs of ALMA

17,000,000,000,000 flops: the number of floating point operations per second that the ALMA correlator carries out

Is the film industry guilty of lowballing the intelligence of its audience? It’s not hard to find bloggers, critics and movie insiders (including actor Colin Firth) who think so. A common criticism is that Hollywood seems to believe that viewers are bereft of any creative thought or imagination, and simply want to ingest a pasty mush of cozy clichés, simplistic story lines and cartoon characters. Audiences, the complaint goes, simply aren’t being asked to do any work. This criticism implies that being made to do some mental work is a vital part of what makes a movie rewarding and pleasurable.

Film critic Katherine Monk clearly buys into this view, but offers an original slant: in a recent article for the Vancouver Sun, she blames sophisticated visual effects technology for what she argues is the growing trend to treat viewers as passive sets of eyeballs detached from human imaginations. The problem, she writes, is that current technology has gotten too good at depicting reality, robbing us of the opportunity to construct our own with whatever materials the movie is able to offer.

“When George Méliès launched a cardboard rocket into the face of the moon 110 years ago, giving birth to narrative film, he had no desire to make it seem ‘real,’” Monk writes. “Méliès’s raison d’etre was make believe, and he created a visual spectacle that could spur the imagination in new and unexpected ways. The trick was engaging the viewer’s own brain, because all the magic and machinery in the world would never be able to match the mind’s flawless eye.” But now, complains Monk, “audiences have faux worlds laid out before them in such pristine detail, they don’t have to engage a single neuron of creative power.”

Interesting thought. But is there actually any evidence that mental work for the audience carries an aesthetic payoff? Or is this just the idle grumbling of a member of a crotchety generation who believes in the character-building magic of walking barefoot to school or working a 5 a.m. paper route for pocket change?

Less is more

Certainly, the view is espoused by some acclaimed film artists who argue for the power of the implicit over the explicit, and who compel their viewers to assemble an interpretation from cinematic puzzle pieces. For instance, in his 2012 Ted talk, filmmaker Andrew Stanton argued that humans have an urgent need to solve puzzles and that “the well-organized absence of information” is what draws us into a story—a theory that he says was amply confirmed by his work on “WALL-E,” a film entirely without dialogue.

In this lovely video clip, Michel Hazanavicius, writer and director of the 2011 silent film The Artist, talks about how something was lost when films acquired sound technology. With sound, he suggests, viewers can “watch” a film while checking their cell phones, because the sound allows them to track the story line. But silent films require them to pay attention.

“Dialogue is very efficient,” he says. “But to say the important things, you don’t use dialogue. The sound is so important to a movie that when I leave that responsibility to the audience, people do it so much better than I could do.”

He points out that viewers spontaneously make inferences about the emotional states and motivations of characters out of the most basic ingredients. This was famously demonstrated early in the last century by Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov: he alternated a shot of an expressionless actor’s face with various other shots—a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, an attractive woman. Exactly the same facial shot was believed by viewers to express hunger, sadness, or lust, depending on what they believed the actor was “looking at.” Though the face itself expressed no emotion, viewers projected emotion onto it based on their interpretation of how the images were related—and perhaps were all the more moved for having been deeply involved in creating that emotional interpretation.

The allure of the unsaid

There isn’t a very large body of scientific work looking at whether it’s more impactful for people to construct an interpretation that is covertly hinted at rather than simply receiving one that’s explicitly laid bare. But the studies that do exist seem to suggest so. Interestingly, much of this work comes from researchers who work with language, simply because language allows for fairly controlled comparisons of implicit versus explicit information.

Everyday speech, it turns out, is shot through with linguistic “Kuleshov effects.” A great deal of important information is constantly being left unsaid, to be filled in by the hearer. Consider for instance: “Dan admitted to the sordid affair. His wife left him.” A natural interpretation is that the wife fled as a result of the affair. But let’s now edit in a different context sentence: “Dan thinks a sordid affair is just what he needs. His wife left him.” Here, you might be tempted to interpret the wife’s departure as the cause of an affair. We constantly make smart guesses about the connections and relationships between sentences, and to hear everything spelled out would make language incredibly tedious.

Evidence to this effect comes from a 1999 study by Sung-il Kim. In this study, participants read versions of stories in which critical information was either verbally spelled out or left unstated, to be inferred by the reader. Readers judged the more enigmatic versions of the story to be more interesting than the explicit ones.

More understanding, more time

Other evidence suggests that forcing readers to connect the dots themselves leads to deeper understanding. For instance, in their book Psychonarratology, researchers Marisa Bortolussi and Peter Dixon discuss a study in which doctoring an Alice Munro story in such a way as to make a character’s internal emotional state blatantly obvious actually made it harder for readers to get inside the character’s head.

Even studies of scientific texts have shown the benefits of extra mental work for readers in what’s known as the reverse cohesion effect: in some cases, readers who already know a fair bit about a particular subject can gain more understanding from texts that are somewhat disjointed and don’t clearly mark cause-and-effect relationships. Paradoxically, these ambiguous texts are harder to read, but because they force readers to activate their knowledge base in order to interpret them, they may lead to the information ultimately becoming better organized and retained.

But these benefits of puzzling their way through informational gaps only show up if people are actually able to resolve the puzzle in the first place. For example in Kim’s study, readers found the implicit texts more interesting than the explicit ones only if they were given enough time to compute the right inferences; when the text flew by at a rate that left readers with just enough time to allow for decoding, but not enough to elaborate on what they read, the difference between the two versions disappeared. Quite likely, then, whatever artistic advantages come from letting movie viewers connect the dots might quickly evaporate if they’re distracted by their cell phones, or aren’t able or willing to invest the cognitive resources to draw inferences, or don’t have the right background knowledge to bring to the task.

If art is all about getting the audience’s synapses to fire in all the right ways, then maybe true artfulness lies in mastering a delicate dance with the audience. It’s not just about creating a puzzle for the audience to solve, but also about gauging whether they have the right pieces in hand, the right amount of time, and most of all, in seducing them into devoting the necessary brainpower. No easy task.

And maybe technological tools—whether sound or CGI—do make it just that much easier for filmmakers to abandon the dance in exchange for a dazzling technical display. In that case, movies become something different—more like on Olympic event in which we sit in the stands as awed observers of other people’s ability to bring their own imaginations to life. Surely this can be impressive and inspiring in its own right. But if movies never ask us to dance, it makes it that much harder for us to fall in love.

Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.

Image courtesy Nando Machado / Shutterstock

The year was 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its peak, and it had been only days since President Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was establishing missile sites in Cuba. The U.S. Air Force was on DEFCON-2. American and Soviet military forces were an order away from launching a nuclear attack.

But on Saturday, October 27, it wasn’t a military general or political leader who nearly upended that delicate world balance and set off World War III. It was the aurora borealis.

A Pilot on a Mission

Charles Maultsby was a seasoned fighter pilot. He’d flown F-80 fighters during the Korean War before he was shot down and held as a prisoner of war in China for 22 months. But his current assignment left much to be desired. He was stationed at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska where the early winter days were short and cold. His missions weren’t any more exciting than his arctic abode: he was flying atmospheric sampling missions in U-2 planes.

Air Force Captain Charles Maulstby. Credit: National Security Archive.

The U-2 was primarily a high-altitude spy plane. Ultra lightweight, it was designed to fly at 70,000 feet and maintain a healthy distance from enemy aircraft. It was also outfitted with a sophisticated camera that could resolve details on the ground, gathering invaluable photoreconnaissance from its formidable cruise altitude.

Maultsby’s upper atmospheric sampling missions were reconnaissance missions of a different type. When a nuclear bomb detonates, the resulting cloud of gas and debris floats relatively intact around the planet before it slowly dissipates. Atmospheric sampling missions had pilots fly right into the cloud after a Soviet or Chinese bomb test, collecting the material on special filters. Technicians could learn a lot from the samples – whether the bomb had been detonated on the ground or in the air, where in the country the bomb was detonated, and how advanced the bomb’s trigger and weapons systems were. Maultsby’s mission the morning of October 27 was simple: fly from his base to the North Pole and back. It was a straightforward, eight-hour flight.

The Aurora Borealis

Maultsby woke up at 8 o’clock Friday night. He ate a high protein low-residue breakfast of steak and eggs. He breathed pure oxygen to rid his blood of nitrogen before donning his pressure suit. At midnight, he settled into the U-2’s cramped cockpit. As Friday night turned into Saturday morning, he lifted off the runway.

Though the flight path was simple, navigating it was another matter. An hour into the flight, Maultsby passed a radio beacon at Barter Island on Alaska’s northern coast, his last point of contact for six hours. U-2 missions demanded radio silence, and magnetic compasses didn’t work so close to the planet’s magnetic poles. For the bulk of his flight, Maultsby would be following the stars. A navigator at Eielson, Lieutenant Fred Okimoto, had prepared a stack of star charts showing what Maultsby should see in the sky at given times in the mission. It was up to the pilot to verify his position using a sextant and correct his heading as needed.

As he got close to the North Pole, Maultsby aimed his sextant at one of the brighter stars on his horizon. But he couldn’t get a clear view. Every time he tried to focus on a star, orange lights danced across his scope and dazzled his eyes. It was the aurora borealis. Completely without warning he’d flown into one of the brightest – and in this case most disorienting – natural phenomena. The light of particles hitting the Earth’s atmosphere drowned out the light from the stars. Suddenly without any navigational aides over an entirely barren landscape, Maultsby decided the safest course of action was to turn around – turn 90 degrees to the left then 270 to the right – and fly towards home until he flew back over the beacon at Barter Island.

By 8 a.m., though, Maultsby was starting to get worried. He should have reached Barter by then but his radio remained silent. He also noticed that Orion wasn’t where it ought to be.

Suddenly, the crackling voice of a rescue pilot came over the radio.Concerned that he didn’t have a visual on Maultsby, the rescue pilot started firing signaling flares before asking the U-2 pilot to identify stars. Maultsby radioed that he saw Orion 15 degrees to the left of his nose. A quick check of his own star charts had the rescue pilot instruct Maultsby to turn 10 degrees to the left, but this advice was immediately contradicted by another voice ordering him to turn 30 degrees to the right. Maultsby had no reason to distrust either order; both had used a correct call sign.

The conflicting orders added to the Maultsby’s growing concern. He didn’t know exactly where he was, but he did know that he was running out of fuel. He’d left Eielson with nine hours and 40 minutes of fuel and had been airborne for over eight hours. If he couldn’t get his bearings and get back to the base soon, he’d have to bail out of the U-2, and that wasn’t an appealing prospect. The best advice he’d been given about bailing out of a U-2 flying above the Arctic Circle was to not pull the cord on his chute: it was a better way to go than freezing to death on the ground.

World War Three

Though no one in the air knew where he was, there were people on the ground tracking Maultsby’s flight path. Unfortunately, they were the wrong people. The voice that had come over the radio directing him to turn 30 degrees to the right was, unbeknownst to him, a Soviet voice.

An annotated map with key points along Maultsby’s flight path. Map via Google Maps.

Just before 8 a.m. Maultsby had crossed into Soviet airspace. He was nearly a thousand miles west of Barter Island, flying blind over the desolate northern shore of the Chukotka Peninsula. The Soviets had been tracking the flight, just waiting for him to come within range. The minute he’d crossed the Soviet border, two groups of MiGs took off from two different airfields with orders to shoot down the intruder.

But unbeknownst to the Soviets, the Air Force Strategic Air Command was looking at the same information over their shoulders. Being highly security-conscious, the Soviets didn’t use a strong encryption system for their air-defense radar net; they needed their information to be available in real time for tracking stations all over the sprawling Russian country. The data carried by high-frequency radio transmissions skipped off the ionosphere and bounced down to American listening posts miles away. Spying on the Soviets this way was invaluable and a closely-guarded SAC secret, one they were hoping not to have to divulge in the effort to bring Maultsby home.

But the Americans had to find some way to alert the pilot as to his position. A lost U-2 straying over the Soviet Union at the peak of the missile crisis was about the worst thing that could happen. The already-paranoid Soviet leaders would assume the pilot was on a secret mission to drop the first bomb of the Third World War while everyone was distracted by Cuba; an American U-2 pilot had been shot down over the island just hours before. The fear in Washington was that the Soviets might try to preempt an American strike by firing on the United States first, an action that would likely force Kennedy to respond in kind. SAC needed a way to get Maultsby home to avoid a potential nuclear war.

The Return

Gradually the pieces started falling into place. Okimoto, the navigator at Eielson, noticed a faint red glow on the eastern horizon while he reviewed the path he’d plotted for Maultsby’s flight. It was the sun beginning to rise in central Alaska. It was perfect. If Okimoto could get the pilot in a position to see the sun, he could get him home.

Okimoto jumped on the radio. He asked Maultsby if he could see the sun coming up; the pilot couldn’t, confirming the navigator’s suspicions that he was too far west into Soviet airspace. Okimoto told Maultsby to turn 15 degrees to the left, putting Orion off his right wing tip and the pilot on a flight path back east. Maultsby acknowledged the order, but transmissions from Alaska were getting weaker. As he strained to hear the instructions he picked up a signal from an ordinary radio station. The music that met his ears wasn’t American pop music but Russian balalaikas. The reality of his situation hit like a ton of bricks.

By the time he was on an eastern heading, Maultsby’s fuel situation was fast becoming dire. With ten minutes left and far longer to fly, he decided to shut down his engine and save his remaining power in case things got worse. Shutting off the engine meant he had no more power. The cockpit was plunged into darkness and the cabin depressurized, triggering his pressure suit to inflate. Maultsby went from sleek U-2 pilot to Stay Puft glider pilot in an instant.

The elements that made the U-2 such a tricky aircraft to fly – its 80 foot wingspan dwarfs its 63 foot long body – became Maultsby’s chief ally. The U-2 was a formidable glider. It was ten minutes before the aircraft started losing altitude, and all the while Maultsby remained focused on keeping his wings level and his angle of attack steady to maintain a smooth glide. He’d dropped 45,000 feet and reentered American airspace before he caught the glow of the sun on the horizon.

Maultsby also met two friendly F-102 fighters. The pilots welcomed him back to America and guided him to a nearby airfield, an ice strip at a military radar station at Kotzebue Sound. Maultsby made an initial pass over Kotzebue to scope out the runway: he found it was little more than a snow-covered peninsula jutting into the sea. On his second pass he attempted a landing, extended his flaps and released a parachute to slow his airspeed. But even unpowered the ultralight plane wanted to stay in the air. It finally belly-flopped onto the runway, skidded along the ice, and came to a stop in the snow banks. Maultsby opened the canopy to the cold morning air, the ordeal finally behind him. And the first thing he did was relieve himself in a snow bank.

The Aftermath

Though the incident didn’t turn the Cold War hot, it did reinforce to both Kennedy and Khrushchev that the risk of an accidental nuclear war was very real. On October 28, the day after Maultsby’s flight, Khrushchev and Kennedy came to an agreement: the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba if the Americans agreed not to storm the island, ensuring Fidel Castro’s leadership wouldn’t be challenged.

Maultsby never flew north of Alaska again and died, in relative obscurity, in 1998 at the age of 72. Over the course of his career he was awarded 18 decorations for military service including the Purple Heart, Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Air Medal. Fellow pilots, however, remember him as the man who set the record for longest U-2 flight, dazzled by the Northern Lights.

Amy Shira Teitel is a freelance space writer whose work appears regularly on Discovery News Space and Motherboard among many others. She blogs about the history of spaceflight at Vintage Space, where this post originally appeared, and tweets at @astVintageSpace.

Top image courtesy Jamen Percy / Shutterstock

What can you learn from getting your genome sequenced? If you’re a relatively healthy person like me, the answer is, not much… at least not yet.

I embarked on a mission to get myself sequenced for my recent article “The Gene Machine and Me.” The article focused on the sequencing technology that will soon enable a full scan of a human genome for $1000, and to make the story come alive, I decided to go through the process myself. I got my DNA run through the hottest new sequencing machine, the Ion Proton, and had it analyzed by some of the top experts on genome sequencing, a team at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine.

The Baylor team has been intimately involved in many of the most important advances of genome sequencing over the last decade. And their accomplishments reveal both the astoundingly rapid progress of the technology, and how far we have yet to go. Here’s a synopsis: the story of five genomes.

Genome #1: A mashup

In April of 2003, the federally funded Human Genome Project finished the first complete human genome. It had taken an army of researchers about 13 years and $3 billion to accomplish the task, but finally the researchers had the sequence of about 3 billion nucleotides, the complete genetic code for a human being.

The genome constructed by the Human Genome Project was a “consensus genome” made by combining the genetic material of a handful of people. By averaging the variations between these genomes, the researchers came up with their best approximation of what it means to be a healthy, functional person. It was a monumental achievement. Three years earlier, in 2000, President Bill Clinton had announced the completion of the human genome’s “rough draft,” and called it “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.”

Genome #2: James Watson

Once the Human Genome Project was completed, researchers were eager to start sequencing individual human beings, and to examine the genetic variations that define each individual’s traits and quirks. If the cost of sequencing a genome had continued at $3 billion a pop, there would be no way to conduct such experiments. But in 2007, the company 454 Life Sciences invited James Watson, the genetics pioneer who helped discover the double helix structure of DNA back in 1953, to be the first individual to be sequenced on the company’s new machine. The machine would bring the cost down to about $1.5 million per genome. Baylor’s team would do the analysis.

When the sequencing was complete, Watson flew down to Houston. (Another genetics pioneer, Craig Venter, was also sequencing his personal genome at the same time, but the Baylor team says Watson’s was completed first.) Watson received his results from Baylor researcher and physician James Lupski, a preeminent geneticist. “I had to be the one to say, ‘Well, Jim, we don’t know what the hell your DNA means, because you’re the first one to be sequenced,’” Lupski recalled with a laugh. Lupski was exaggerating a bit for comic effect, but the truth was, medical research didn’t have much to tell Watson.

Genome #3: James Lupski 

The next step in genomic medicine, the Baylor researchers decided, was to sequence someone who wasn’t entirely healthy. They chose as their subject their own James Lupski, who has an inherited neurological disease called Chacot-Marie Tooth Disease. A variety of mutations can cause this disorder, and Lupski wondered if a whole-genome scan could identify the particular mutation that caused his family’s problems. “There still was the question, could we find things that were important for medical management?” Lupski told me. “Was the signal above the noise?” The noise, he explains, is the thousands of genetic variants found in each individual, because “everybody truly is unique.”

His genome scan, completed in 2010, did indeed reveal the mutation that is the source of Lupski’s disorder. But did that knowledge have any affect on Lupski’s medical treatment? No, he admitted to me. Still, finding the cause of his disease was “very gratifying,” Lupski said. What’s more, the discovery of the Lupski family mutation, a genetic variant that hadn’t previously been connected to CMT disease, may allow for new directions in medical research, and could potentially lead to new treatments for the disease down the line.

Genome #4: The Beery twins

Treatment is exactly what Baylor researchers had next in their sights. The team achieved an early victory in genomic medicine with the 14-year-old Beery twins, who suffered from a palsy-like movement disorder. In 2011, whole-genome sequencing revealed not only the genetic variants responsible, it also revealed which neurotransmitters were affected, and suggested a new drug regimen that worked remarkably well to control the twins’ symptoms. For the researchers, the case was a trail-blazing example of how genetics can not only provide a more precise diagnosis, but can also, in the best case, allow doctors to tailor their treatments to better fit their patients.

Still, the twins’ outcome is exceptional. Baylor recently opened a commercial lab to provide genetic sequencing for patients who are on “diagnostic odysseys,” meaning that they suffer from mysterious symptoms for which test after test hasn’t revealed the cause. The Baylor lab has only about a 30 percent diagnostic success rate, though, and finding results that lead to a better treatment plan is even tougher.

Genome #5: Your correspondent

Then, in 2012, I came along. I was a relatively healthy 33-year-old with no known inherited diseases. I wanted to have my genome sequenced and analyzed to see if doctors could predict my medical future: Could they find predispositions to cancer or adult-onset diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s? Would they be able to identify my genetic weak points, and counsel me on screening regimens or lifestyle changes that could help me stay healthy? Would I get a sneak peak at a future where genome scans will be a routine part of medical care?

For $7000—a fraction of the $1.5 million it cost just six years ago—the Baylor researchers ran just the coding portion of my DNA through the sequencing machine. They put the resulting data through a software program that identified genetic variants of interest, and then had a team of experts look for those variants in the medical literature. They came out with a six-page report that listed a number of possible and scary fates: I have variants (in other words, mutations) in genes that have been linked to ailments like heart disease, kidney failure and Parkinson’s, among others. But my particular variants of those genes haven’t been proven to cause any symptoms or problems whatsoever. There’s no guarantee that I’ll suffer from these ailments.

The doctors told me to examine the results in the context of my family medical history. There’s no history of Parkinson’s in my family, I told them, but there have been serious cases of heart and kidney disease. And this is where I become a pretty good example of the current state of genetic medicine: I can view my genetic findings as red flags, and as I go through life, I can be on the lookout for symptoms of heart or kidney problems.

A decade after the first human genome was completed, genome scans still can’t give most people definitive predictions about their medical futures. But as more becomes known about genetic predispositions to disease, these reports will get more and more useful. If advances in genomic medicine continue at the breakneck pace we’ve seen over the last decade, it may just be another decade before genome scans start turning up in the doctor’s office.

Eliza Strickland is an editor for the technology magazine IEEE Spectrum. The biomedical beat has recently allowed her to cover exoskeletons, bionic eyes, and IBM Watson’s next career as an oncologist.

Image courtesy phloxii / Shutterstock