Apparently, a growing body of research–gathered essentially as a by-product of other research into everything from pesticides and flu viruses to sunlight and vitamin D–suggests that the month a baby is conceived in can have serious health consequences later in life. Infants conceived in June appear to suffer from birth defects at a higher rate than others, for instance. But babies born in the fall (conceived in November or December) tend to have more asthma. Even a baby’s gender can be influenced by timing that’s out of parents’ hands: research has shown the birth of baby boys dips nine months after stressful world events such as Sept. 11.

As researchers busy themselves filling in this veritable new zodiac, parents-to-be wonder how closely they should study the calendar.

Check out some of the other weird correlations based on month of conception:

* Research out of Indiana suggested a link between American babies being conceived between April and July and a higher risk of birth defects, including spina bifida, cleft lip and Down syndrome.

* A study out of Bristol in Britain, released in February, found that late-summer and early-autumn babies in Avon were on average slightly taller (5 millimetres) and had thicker bones (12.75 centimetres squared) than those born in winter and spring.

* A team in Nashville found a 30-per-cent increase in the risk of asthma for children born four months before flu season, in late fall and winter.

* An Israeli study found that babies born in June and July had a 24 per cent greater chance of becoming severely myopic than those born in December and January.

* Many studies have found that babies born in the Northern Hemisphere in February, March and April have a 5 to 10 per cent higher risk of schizophrenia.

The full article can be found here.

– S.

It’s been a long-standing desire of mine (for a number of obvious reasons) to write, in essence, a science fiction version of the Harry Potter books. Perhaps the kids could be Space Cadets attending some sort of astronaut academy, etc…

I’m hardly alone in this desire and if it were so easy to do that any number of writers would already have succeeded. Which gets to the heart of the problem with the Harry Potter books and, really, any and all best-sellers: no one–not author, not agent, not editor–really knows what it is that sets them apart.

Oh, there are lots of theories and you can buy (as I have) any number of books that claim to give you the secret checklist of the kinds of things to include when building your story that best-sellers or break-out or blockbuster novels have in common.

But lots of people have these books and apply their lessons, and any number of those books get published and some of those go on to success…but none of them make it like Harry Potter made it.

And the question is why? What is it about those books–that ineffable, unteachable, unplanable quality–that makes those books (or others like The DaVinci Code, for instance) such a cultural phenomenon and massive best-sellers?

While I don’t pretend to know the answer to that (if I did I’d be working on my book instead of this blog…) but I’ve often wondered whether the application of careful market research (and some of the math modeling, statistical analysis, and hard- and social science they use in modern marketing is downright scary) could deduce what the French call a certain “I don’t know what.”

Well, looks like I’m not (surprise, surprise) the only one to wonder the same thing. Scientists (in an old study that I’ve only just come across) seem to have identified quantifiable evidence of the anecdotal publishing wisdom that the best way to nail a best-seller is word-of-mouth recommendations.

Duh. This is one of those times where you shake your head and think: “They needed a study to tell them that?” It is, however, a step in the hard-fact, cold-light-of-science direction that we need in order to quantify this element.

But more interesting to me, in a slightly different context, is news that Disney has a whole marketing force, including a so-called “kid whisperer”, dedicated to tapping into that most elusive of markets: tween boys.

Getting tween girls to jump on trends and buy whatever they’re told to by the media and their peers is apparently the marketing equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel, but boys in the same 11-14 year old range remain either too savvy or too oblivious to marketing ploys to spend in the way that their female counterparts do.

Not to sound sexist, but other market data indicates that more men and boys read sci-fi than do women and girls (who tend to read more fantasy and do most of the book buying, too). So if my Harry Potter in Space series is to fly, I think I need to tap into this kind of marketing data. After all, I think it was getting young boys reading that really launched Harry Potter in to the sales stratosphere.

So if you’ll excuse me I need to go turn my skateboard the other way ’round…

– S.

My fear of intelligent computers and Termintor-style killing machines is well known. So perhaps you can understand how my blood ran cold when I read this…

If this computer could deduce in a day what it took humanity centuries to deduce do we really want something that much faster and smarter than us running around? Hmm?

– S.

Further to my post from Monday, here’s a few more sites (one of them a bit dated in its discusson of the Fall ’08 television season…) that make some interesting points about the current state and potential future of the SF genre:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/007318.html

http://io9.com/5065675/why-science-fiction-still-hates-itself

http://io9.com/5050871/do-you-really-want-science-fiction-books-to-be-more-literary

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4065242.ece

– S.

Hi all –

Missed this when it first came out, but NEW SCIENTIST had sci-fi special edition for their Nov. 15, 2008 issue, and at least some of the content is available now at their website. It includes, among other things, the usual discussions about whether SF is dying/relevant anymore. Worth checking out.

Get the full article HERE.

– S.

One of the things that fascinated me most in my high school and university biology classes was study of vertebrate evolution, and specifically that sequence of photos in the textbooks showing various vertebrate embryos at different stages of development during gestation: at some point in the womb, human beings look a lot like lizards, and birds, and all sorts of other things that we used to be on our way to be primates and eventually homo sapiens.

Well, now this same principle is being considered by some scientists to create what you might call “chickenosaurus”. While not exactly Jurrasic Park, some evolutionary biologists are teaming with paleontologists in hopes of genetically altering a chicken embryo to express some of the dormant traits held over from the days when birds used to be dinosaurs.

It wouldn’t be a dinosaur, and while genetically chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken, it wouldn’t exactly be a chicken, either. It might look something like Archaeopteryx–the earliest and most primitive bird known–having arms with claws instead of wings, teeth, and a tail; what science calls “atavistic structures”. Chickenosaurus would be a sort of evolutionary throwback–certain genetic signaling switches would be turned off or on depending on what features we were trying to express.

The book How To Build A Dinosaur by Jack Horner and James Gorman came out last week and an excerpt of the book in the Globe and Mail can be found here.

I may have to pick up that book…

– S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Which comes first? The dinosaur or the egg?
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg. In this excerpt from their book How To Build a Dinosaur, paleontologist Jack Horner and co-author James Gorman explore why we should take this leap.

JACK HORNER AND JAMES GORMAN

From Saturday’s Globe and Mail

March 28, 2009 at 12:00 AM EDT

Among the potential benefits of causing a chicken embryo to develop dinosaurian characteristics is that this is a project that could capture the popular imagination. It could be a demonstration of evolution that would be felt at gut level by nonscientists who might be uninterested in the details of genomes and embryos.

Anything that brings home to the public the reality of evolution, and its place as the foundation idea of modern biology, is important. Anything that dispels the fog of confusion about science and religion would be enormously positive.

Hatching a dino-chicken would be shockingly vivid evidence of the reality of evolution – not a thought experiment but an Oprah-ready show-and-tell exhibit. The creature would be its own sound- and vision-bite. It certainly wouldn’t convince anybody who didn’t want to be convinced. But it would cause discussion and thought.

Creating a demonstration suitable for sound-bite television is not, however a reason to do scientific experiments. In order to get to the point where the question “How did you do that?” could be answered, we would have to learn a great deal. And we would tie molecular biology to macroevolution. We would zero in on a significant passage in vertebrate evolution, the transition from non-avian dinosaurs to birds, and pin it down to molecular changes in embryonic cells.
It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg.
Enlarge Image

It may sound like a Jurassic Park sequel, but scientists at McGill and several U.S. universities are working toward hatching a live dinosaur from a regular chicken’s egg.

This is the heart of the promise of evolutionary developmental biology.

Vertebrate paleontology may seem to be so remote from the daily problems of the modern world that it exists apart from society. If I were to be harsh, I might ask, “What good is it?”

There is an aspect of vertebrate paleontology that is highly useful and of great importance to us as vertebrates. That vertebrate body plan is one we share with dinosaurs, chickens, and countless other creatures.

The result of this commonality of life, in this case in the specific fraternity of four-limbed vertebrates, is that lessons we learn about the growth of any tetrapod embryos may have significance for the growth of human embryos.

If we learn about the growth factors that signal the neural tube to continue developing, it’s possible that this knowledge could be useful in preventing birth defects.

In spina bifida, for instance, incomplete development of the spinal cord can leave an infant with painful and sometimes lethal birth defects.

In the 1980s researchers pinned down the importance of folic acid to the development of the spinal cord in human embryos. This discovery was made partly by gathering information about the diets of pregnant women and the incidence of spinal-cord birth defects like spina bifida, and partly with animal research. The simple remedy of adding folic acid to the diet of pregnant women now prevents countless cases of these defects.

Knowing that there are great potential benefits answers some questions about whether such research should be done. But there are others. Is it a morally justifiable act to play with life in order to go back in time? Is it cruel? Is it dangerous?

Experimentation of all sorts on chicken embryos is widely accepted and, I think, the correct assumption is that we are not causing the embryo pain. As to ultimately sacrificing the embryo, or a fully grown chicken, there are far greater injustices and indignities that billions of chickens face every day. Common sense would suggest that not allowing an egg to hatch, or humanely killing even a full-grown chicken, are actions that society recognizes as legitimate, given even the small return of a meal. The potential return is much greater here.

No one is ready to let an embryo experiment hatch yet. But when that point is reached, when the plan is to have a fully formed dinosaurlike chick hatch, then the experiment will come under review boards that deal with animal welfare. My sense is that providing a chicken with arms with claws instead of wings, with teeth, and with a tail, would not be cruel. In fact, if the atavistic structures grew improperly or were malformed in a way that would cause the animal pain, that in itself would mark a clear failure, since the whole point is to re-create functioning atavistic characteristics, not monstrosities.

There is a whole range of possible objections that have nothing to do with the health or life conditions of what we could probably call chickenosaurus. And that is fear for the environment, for interfering with the delicate ecological balance of the planet.

But if the embryo is not allowed to hatch, then it won’t be out in the environment at all. If it were allowed to hatch, and somehow escaped, the only problem would be the chickenosaur figuring out how to survive. It would not be a danger to the environment or to the billions of chickens in the world, because we would not be changing its genetic makeup. By manipulating growth signalling factors we would be switching genes on and off at different times during development, but not changing the genes themselves. Genetically, chickenosaurus would still be a domestic chicken. And if it were somehow to breed with a chicken, the result would only be more chickens.

I can say what interventions I would find reasonable, but I am not the one to decide. That is for society at large.

What I and other scientists can decide is whether or not to pursue knowledge that has the potential to teach us a great deal and to provide powerful tools that could be used for good purposes and bad.

My work is all about finding things out, about learning, and I operate on the principle that we should try to find out as much as we can about the way the world works.

I don’t stop and say, “Could this research find out something that might be misused, might cause more evil than good?”

I follow my nose to see what is interesting. When it comes to the question of how that knowledge is used, I am just another citizen.

Reprinted by arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from How to Build a Dinosaur, by Jack Horner and James Gorman.

By now, six people who were voluntarily locked into a cloister of cramped, hermetically sealed tubes woven inside a Moscow research facility the size of a high school gymnasium are entering their second week of self-imposed isolation. They are eating dehydrated food, breathing recycled air and are being denied conversation with practically everyone else but one another.

And they must stay inside for 105 days.

In a small step in the direction of Mars, the international crew is embarking on a simulated flight to the planet to test the limits of human tolerance for the isolation and monotony of interplanetary travel.

The full article from the New York Times is here. What I found most surprising about the simulated trip to Mars is the legitimately ugly simulated wood paneling inside the crew quarters of the ‘space ship’…

– S.

I suppose it was only a matter of time…

Saw an article in the Globe and Mail about the birth of the “Twitterzine”: Twitter feeds that are used for ultra-short flash fiction.

While my stated opinion is that Twitter is silly, I do enjoy the unintended consequences of tweeting for fictional purposes. I really wonder whether the designers of Twitter ever thought there would be online storytelling via 140-character installments. Or maybe they, like many of the great internet pioneers, weren’t sure exactly what all the uses of their site would be except that users would find all sorts of unique and creative things to do with the technology.

It’s exploring that element of the unexpected and unanticipated where people and their technology interface that keeps me coming back to science fiction again and again…

Speaking of which, there are already a couple of so-called “Twitterzines” in the SF genre that I’m aware of (there may very well be more):

Outshine, a venue for “optimistic, near future prose poems” with Jetse de Vries (late of Interzone) as editor and

Thaumatrope, market for science fiction, fantasy, and horror presented in 140 characters or less.

– S.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Seriously short stories
On Twitter, authors are finding a new way to flex their creative muscles – and soak up instant reader feedback in the process

PHILIP MOSCOVITCH

Globetechnology.com

March 24, 2009 at 2:26 PM EDT

Arjun Basu may be Canada’s most prolific author.

Since November, the Montreal-based writer has produced some 500 short stories. But this is short fiction with a twist: Follow @arjunbasu on Twitter and you’ll be reading lots and lots of very short stories — all exactly 140 characters long.

“It started as a lark and relatively quickly became something I was mildly obsessed with,” says Basu, the editorial director for custom publisher Spafax and author of last year’s short story collection Squishy.

“In the beginning I was doing one a day. Now I’m up to four or five, if not more. And slowly but surely, like all things Twitter, people start noticing you and what you’re trying to do, and they start following you and telling other people about it.”

A selection of recent stories from Arjun Basu’s Twitter account:

He woke up and went out to the balcony. I am love, he shouted. I am everything! Someone threw a cupcake at him. I’m also cupcakes, he yelled 1:34 PM Mar 19th

He opened the door and announced, my nipples are so cold they could cut glass. And then he saw his future inlaws in the kitchen drinking tea 2:17 PM Mar 21st

He takes a look at his feet and realizes he can’t wear flip flops. I’ve become a girl, he tells his wife. I already knew that dear, she says 6:22 PM Mar 21st

He was stuck in that neverland between sleep and needing to pee. The night was over but the day had yet to begin. Story of my life, he sighs 6:31 AM Mar 22nd

Given the 140-character limit, Basu manages to evoke a surprising range of moods in his micro-stories. Some are wry: “The lawn reminds me of my fourth wife; feral but sort of beautiful. The grass needs cutting, my son says. Oh, it needs more than that, I say” (Basu occasionally squeezes out an extra character by dropping the final period). Many hint at loss: “They argued the merits of Roxy Music until they realized they were both old. All our tunes are commercials for unglamorous things, Joe said.” And some are sheer fun: “The kid says yay I don’t have to do anything today. The dad says why not? The kid says my teacher said so. She said it’s the idles of March.”

Basu is one of a growing number of writers who are using Twitter to create pieces of micro-fiction and to develop a more immediate relationship with readers. There are writers producing short science fiction, scenes captured in images, and even using the site to publish longer original works.

Take Clare Bell, for example. On March 14, the California-based writer began releasing the novelette Ratha’s Island — the latest instalment in her young adult series about giant, talking cats living 20 million years ago — in bursts of 140 characters or fewer on Twitter.

Bell is a former electric vehicle engineer (she used to drive her electric Porsche in races in Arizona), and, with an engineer’s efficiency, she carefully planned out an online campaign to support her book, Ratha’s Courage, released last year.

But Twitter hadn’t been part of the plan, until publisher Sheila Ruth of Imaginator Press encouraged her to create an account.

“At first I thought it was just a toy. You couldn’t do a whole lot with 140 characters,” Bell says. “But I began to realize that people were adapting it for all sorts of purposes. I started out exchanging messages with Sheila and others, and then I had an idea … Let’s see if I can do a little prequel to the book I just published — basically for publicity and to entertain people.”

In addition to posting as herself, Bell started to write tweets she called “ClanChirps” in the personas of her characters, and had them tell a story in dialogue. It ran through most of the second half of 2008.

Readers responded, and Bell and her publisher began to think about releasing a whole new story through the website.

“I wrote the draft out in fairly short pieces, but they weren’t as short as 140 characters. It’s a little more difficult than writing straight narrative. It takes some more engineering.” Bell said in an interview the day before the story began appearing online.

“The trick is to get the entries so they fit into the Twitter format, so they’re not choppy and they draw the reader into the next one. There’s also much more of a focus on clarity since these posts are going to be separated in time.”

While Bell’s Twitter fiction extends a world she’s already created into a new medium, Basu just fell into writing fictional tweets.

After a few banal tweets (“total conference call hell”), Basu posted his first twister on Oct. 28. “I had this image in my head of a kid trying to reach a cookie on a table. I don’t know why, but I wrote a little scene out of it. When I got to the end, I was two characters over, and I thought ‘Oh, I have to amend this.’ So I got it into 140 characters perfectly. And then I did it again a few minutes later, and I thought it was kind of interesting. To write the ultimate flash fiction within the rules Twitter’s established.”

Now, more than 500 twisters later, he says he has signed on with a New York agent who discovered him through Twitter and is confident he can land him a book deal.

Bell also hopes Ratha’s Island ends up in print. For now, she is archiving the posts for fans who come into the story partway through and want to catch up easily.

In addition to the challenge of trying to fit fiction into the 140-character limit, Basu says part of the fun of writing on Twitter “is that the feedback is almost instantaneous, and writers don’t usually get that. Some twisters go out there and people start writing you within seconds. For a writer that’s almost like catnip.”

He adds, “I expend a lot of creative capital on this now. It’s affecting the way I write. I’m thinking in these little snippets now. I was recently asked to write a short story for a magazine, and I had to wrap my head around it. It was long. Well, it wasn’t long — but it was longer than 140 characters.”

The above photos are of a cane toad caught by our guide in Australia’s Kakadu National Park. He explained to us what an ecological menace they are and then…well, let’s just say this toad had a very bad day after that.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Australia targets toxic cane toads

KRISTEN GELINEAU

Associated Press

March 26, 2009 at 9:37 AM EDT

SYDNEY — For decades, the poisonous cane toad has plagued Australians, breeding rapidly, eating voraciously and bestowing death upon most animals that dare try to consume it.

So officials came up with a novel — some say poetic — solution: Hold a festive mass killing of the creatures and turn the corpses into fertilizer for the farmers who have battled the pests for years.

On Saturday, residents of five communities in cane-toad-plagued northern Queensland state will grab their flashlights and fan out into the night to hunt down the hated animals as part of the inaugural “Toad Day Out” celebration. The toads will be brought to collection points the next morning to be weighed and killed, with some of the remains ground into fertilizer for sugarcane farmers at a local waste management plant.

“It’s just a circle of poetic justice!” Toad Day Out organizer Lisa Ahrens said. “Seventy-five years later, they’re a benefit to the cane farmer.”

The toads were imported from South America to Queensland in 1935 in a failed attempt to control beetles on sugarcane plantations. The problem? The toads couldn’t jump high enough to eat the beetles, which live on top of cane stalks.

The ample amphibians, which grow up to 20 centimetres in length, bred rapidly, and their millions-strong population now threatens many local species across Australia. They spread diseases, such as salmonella, and produce highly toxic venom from glands in their skin that can kill would-be predators. The toads are also voracious eaters, chomping up insects, frogs, small reptiles and mammals — even birds. Cane toads are only harmful to humans if their poison is swallowed.

“The cane toad is probably the most disgusting creature and the most destructive creature,” said Queensland politician Shane Knuth, a long-time loather of cane toads, who came up with the Toad Day Out idea. “They’re killing our native wildlife, they’re taking over our habitat and they’re hopping all through this country.”

Mr. Knuth, who has been pushing a proposal to offer a 28 cent (U.S.) bounty on the creatures since 2007, said each adult female cane toad can produce 20,000 eggs. “So if we’re able to remove 3,000 female toads, we have the potential in the long run of removing 60 million toads from our environment,” he said. No one knows exactly how many cane toads live in Australia.

Organizers are trying to woo thousands of people to take part in the hunt by offering prizes for those with the biggest toad and the highest total weight of toads. Goodies range from cane toad trophies (made of actual stuffed cane toads) to a gift certificate for a local resort.

An organizers’ tip sheet gives advice on how to create toad traps — or “detention camps” — and recommends that participants “study detention techniques to ensure your own, as well as the toad’s safety — they must be alive and unharmed for interrogation.”

Live toads brought to the collection points will be examined by experts to ensure they’re not harmless frogs and then killed, either by freezing or by being placed in plastic bags filled with carbon dioxide.

Haydn Slattery, manager of the SITA waste management plant in Cairns, said he’s hoping to receive about 220 pounds.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has applauded the effort — with one caveat. “We’re only supportive of the plan if the toads are killed humanely — in other words, they’re not hit with baseball bats or cricket bats and golf clubs,” said spokesman Michael Beatty.