Friday, July 01, 2005
Big Science
Looking for ways to celebrate the 125 years since Thomas Edison first published his 
Science on July 3, 1880, the magazine's editors have decided to hail the demise of ignorance. Tracing the largest holes in our scientific knowledge, the editors published a list of 25 "big questions," which they think have the greatest chance of being answered over the next quarter of century.
Though boredom is a state rarely experienced by Astralavista readers, if you find your brain underutilized over the upcoming long weekend, try to tackle this sampling. Even better, come up with your own and post it here. Here we go:
* What is the universe made of? In the last few decades, cosmologists have discovered that the ordinary matter that makes up stars and galaxies is less than 5 percent of everything there is. What is the nature of the "dark" matter that makes up the rest?
* What is the biological basis of consciousness? In contrast to Rene Descartes' 17th-century declaration that the mind and body are entirely separate, a new view is that whatever happens in the mind arises from a process in the brain. But scientists are only just beginning to unravel those processes.
* Why do humans have so few genes? To biologists' great surprise, once the human genome was sequenced in the late 1990s, it became clear that we only have about 25,000 genes -- about the same numbers as the flowering plant Arabidopsis. The details of how those genes are regulated and expressed is a central question in biology.
* How much can human life span be extended? Studies of long-lived mice, worms and yeast have convinced some scientists that human aging can be slowed, perhaps allowing many of us to live beyond 100, but others think our life spans are more fixed.
* Will Malthus continue to be wrong? In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth will inevitably be checked, for example by famine, war or disease. Two centuries later, the world's population has risen sixfold, without the large-scale collapses that Malthus had predicted. Can we continue to avoid catastrophe by shifting to more sustainable patterns of consumption and development?
Image: Artist's impression of the early universe, less than 1 billion years old. Courtesy of A. Schaller of the STScI
Science on July 3, 1880, the magazine's editors have decided to hail the demise of ignorance. Tracing the largest holes in our scientific knowledge, the editors published a list of 25 "big questions," which they think have the greatest chance of being answered over the next quarter of century.
Though boredom is a state rarely experienced by Astralavista readers, if you find your brain underutilized over the upcoming long weekend, try to tackle this sampling. Even better, come up with your own and post it here. Here we go:
* What is the universe made of? In the last few decades, cosmologists have discovered that the ordinary matter that makes up stars and galaxies is less than 5 percent of everything there is. What is the nature of the "dark" matter that makes up the rest?
* What is the biological basis of consciousness? In contrast to Rene Descartes' 17th-century declaration that the mind and body are entirely separate, a new view is that whatever happens in the mind arises from a process in the brain. But scientists are only just beginning to unravel those processes.
* Why do humans have so few genes? To biologists' great surprise, once the human genome was sequenced in the late 1990s, it became clear that we only have about 25,000 genes -- about the same numbers as the flowering plant Arabidopsis. The details of how those genes are regulated and expressed is a central question in biology.
* How much can human life span be extended? Studies of long-lived mice, worms and yeast have convinced some scientists that human aging can be slowed, perhaps allowing many of us to live beyond 100, but others think our life spans are more fixed.
* Will Malthus continue to be wrong? In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth will inevitably be checked, for example by famine, war or disease. Two centuries later, the world's population has risen sixfold, without the large-scale collapses that Malthus had predicted. Can we continue to avoid catastrophe by shifting to more sustainable patterns of consumption and development?
Image: Artist's impression of the early universe, less than 1 billion years old. Courtesy of A. Schaller of the STScI
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