Speculative Nonfiction

Speculative Hard Science and Science Fiction. And Metal.

Saturday, April 20, 2019

If Threonine and Aspartate are Detected on Europa, They Must Have Been Recently Generated

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Important paper for detecting biosignatures elsewhere in the solar system. Truong et al measure the decomposition rate of amino acids in co...
Friday, April 12, 2019

Warm Spot on Europa Produces Plume

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Image credit space.com Current explanations for this warm plume (in fact, authors refer to it as a hotspot) are thermal inertia (basic...
Thursday, April 11, 2019

The Evidence - 2013 Metal Versions of Synchronicity II (The Police, Synchronicity, 1983) and Pressure (Billy Joel, The Nylon Curtain, 1982)

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I've always thought that both of these uncharacteristically intense (for eighties "adult contemporary") and well-written songs...
Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Molecules with MW > 200 Found in Enceladus Vapor

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That's bigger than all amino acids and nucleobases. (Note, 9 months old, I had missed this before.) Press release here , paper here . ...
Sunday, March 31, 2019

Putting Numbers on Panspermia: Material From Earth Impacting Outer System Moons, and Escaping Solar System

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In a simulation, Worth Sigurdsson and House (2013) (WSH) retrodict that Europa, Callisto, Titan, and Enceladus have received 1,900, 370, 51...
Friday, March 29, 2019

Asteroid Bennu is Ejecting Dust; Also, "Alien Tech" on Bennu? (Hint: No)

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One solution to the Fermi paradox is that there's evidence around us and we just haven't noticed it yet. An estimate of 20 MA for c...
Thursday, March 28, 2019

Security Precautions for Keyless Ignition vs Remote Entry

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This is certainly the most practical post in the history of this blog, but it involves the hazards of relying on modern technology; specific...
Friday, March 22, 2019

AIs Are Beating Experts at Old, Relevant, Real-World Problems

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When I was a molecular biology undergrad in the mid 90s, the Big Question in biochemistry was protein folding - how to predict the 3D struct...
Saturday, March 9, 2019

STOP METI

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tl;dr if you worry about the singularity or bio-terrorism as an existential threat, you should help the effort to stop efforts to announce o...
Sunday, February 24, 2019

More on the C. elegans that Survived Re-Entry During the Columbia Disaster

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Living roundworms made it intact to the ground after the Columbia crash , as noted multiple times before ( here and here .) There is more ...
Friday, February 15, 2019

Excerpt from The Cleveland Wrecking Yard (Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan, 1967)

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Until recently my knowledge about the Cleveland Wrecking Yard had come from a couple of friends who’d bought things there. One of them bough...
Sunday, February 10, 2019

Mozart, Symphony #25 in G minor, 1773

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Could Modern Bacteria Seed Early Earth? Could Bacteria in Earth Ejecta Do the Same for Extrasolar Planets?

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The C-index is this : how close would we have to be to an identical twin Earth to detect them with our SETI searches, given our current det...
Thursday, February 7, 2019

Van Halen, Hot For Teacher, 1984 (covered by Dillinger Escape Plan, live, 2008)

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Bonus - Rebel Yell by Billy Idol, covered by Children of Bodom (Skeletons in the Closet, 2009): Double bonus - Disposable Heroes (...
Sunday, January 13, 2019

Reaction: Gun, With Occasional Music (Lethem)

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Highly recommended; spoilers follow. Science fiction which only recycles the surface trappings of the genre without using them as a vehic...

Dying Fetus, Your Treachery Will Die With You (Descend Into Depravity, 2009)

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Thursday, January 3, 2019

Arkona, Stenka na Stenku (Stenka na Stenku, 2011)

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H/T Chris. Who know that the folk metal genre was rich enough to be sub-sub-divided into eastern and western folk metal? Also check o...
Saturday, December 22, 2018

Deoxyribose From Abiotic Space Conditions

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Another biomolecule, the pentose sugar that serves as the backbone of DNA, quickly produced in un-directed synthesis under conditions that o...
Monday, December 10, 2018

Space Colonies Will Be Run By Dictators; Or, Why Science Fiction Is About Government Space Travel

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Settling colonies in the age of exploration was easy. Jamestown in particular seemed like a breeze . There was air, water, food, and even ...
Saturday, November 10, 2018

Interstellar and Intergalactic Panspermia

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Active colonization time estimates for the galaxy are invariably much shorter than the lifespan of the galaxy . Passive diffusion would ta...
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Michael Caton
I am a physician, writer and trail runner. You can reach me at mdcblogs@gmail.com.
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