Prompts: Of Moons and Invisible Men
Today I’m posting from Paris. I’ve been here all week for work and I’m taking an extra week for vacation with my wife. I have to admit, the stuff they have here is extremely inspiring in terms of story ideas. The art, the history. Just a stroll through Versailles and I could have an entire trilogy percolating. But if you’re in a creative mood, the stuff here is just as good as stuff anywhere else. The point is you need to be on the lookout, keep your creativity engaged so that spark can grow into a fully formed idea. For instance, here’s some of the news items I run across every day in my job, just to demonstrate that there’s good story stuff everywhere:
Invisibility appears to be the next possible advance in the use of Terahertz radiation in medicine, security, and communications. A research team from Northwestern and Oklahoma State universities claims to be first to cloak a three-dimensional object from view in a broad range of Terahertz frequency light, which lies between infrared and microwaves.
In the team’s paper, Cheng Sun of Northwestern describes how a rigid sponge-like cloaking structure less than 10 millimeters long on a side was built up in 220 layers, each precisely defined to vary the index of refraction and bend light to render invisible anything located beneath a shallow concave bump on the cloak’s bottom surface. The group showed that both the physical geometry and the spectrographic signature of a chemical strip about the width of 10 human hairs disappeared when cloaked.
According to Sun, this demonstration shows that the new “transformation optics” principles and 3-D lithography techniques they used to make the cloak can also enable optical components for guiding and focusing terahertz light in a variety of ways—in new medical and scientific diagnostic tools, airport security scanners, and data communication devices. (Read more…)
An honest to goodness invisibility cloak. How Harry Potter can you get? While this research is at the very early stages, it’s not hard to peek ahead thirty, forty years and see where this is going. The security and military applications are obvious. But it is foolish to think that somebody isn’t going to figure out how to make these items cheaper and faster. And soon enough, presto: invisibility cloak knock-offs available at Target.
Before long, everyone will have one. And why not? Who wouldn’t want to sneak around a little, spy on your friends and neighbors, totally unseen, slip into a movie. You know you’ve thought about it. But what if there’s an unwanted side effect that isn’t apparent until repeated use over a prolonged period of time?
What if the optical properties of the cloak can become absorbed by human skin, permanently? Imagine the first time someone takes off the cloak and they’re still as see-through as a sliding glass door? Now imagine that’s happened to the majority of humans. A race of invisible people. How would we live? No more privacy, ever. But also no more society based on appearances. Our lives would be turned upside down. Until one day, in an attempt to reverse the process, a researcher succeeds in turning everyone visible again, but there is an unfortunate error. He screwed up the melatonin levels. Nobody is the same skin color they were before. Do people choose to return to invisibility? Or do they live with the skin they got?
Happiest Places Have Highest Suicide Rates Says New Research
The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, researchers, have found.
The new study found that a range of nations – including Canada, the United States, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland – each display relatively high happiness levels and yet also have high suicide rates. To confirm the relationship between levels of happiness and rates of suicide within a geographical area, the researchers turned to a single country, the United States.
Comparing U.S. states in this way produced the same result. States with people who are generally more satisfied with their lives tended to have higher suicide rates than those with lower average levels of life satisfaction. For example, the raw data showed that Utah is ranked first in life-satisfaction, but has the 9th highest suicide rate. Meanwhile, New York was ranked 45th in life satisfaction, yet had the lowest suicide rate in the country. (Read more…)
It’s a seeming paradox, higher suicide rates in places with happier people. What could explain it? Researchers are certainly planning more studies, and maybe one researcher thinks to see if there are any long-term trends. He notices that periods of more happiness and increased suicide tend to follow patterns over several-year intervals, waxing and waning from state to state.
Puzzled, the researcher tries to study this further, but his funding is abruptly cut off. Doubly perplexed, he attempts to contact the government agency responsible, but he’s completely shut out, and soon blackballed from any more federally financed research. Now unemployed and destitute, he receives an anonymous phone tip: an address and floor. He checks it out, 7th floor in a non-descript office building. But when he gets off the elevator, there’s heavy security, no way in.
Desperate, the researcher disguises himself as a delivery boy and sneaks inside. He walks around. Most of the people seem like normal government workers, there are even a few high-ranking officials. And also a couple of guys who look like Gandalf, beards, long robes, staffs, the works. He catches the name of the branch he is in, the Department of Well Being. He overhears a conference call regarding the next “adjustment” that will take place at midnight in the middle of the local park.
The researcher hides in a tree and watches as suits stand around the Gandalf guys in the middle of a torch lit clearing. The Gandalf guys start to chant, their staffs glow, it’s all pretty impressive. The researcher guy goes home. What does it all mean? He wakes up in the middle of the night, realizing the trends he had been tracking paralleled with election cycles in each state. He makes the leap: The Gandalf guys are wizards, hired by states who want to keep their voters happy. But there’s a catch. All the depression, the negative emotions get sucked away, but they have to go somewhere, into a few unfortunate souls who pay the price for everybody else’s emotional well being.
It’s a crazy theory, and the next morning, the researcher doesn’t know what to do about it. Maybe nothing. Maybe he’ll just stay in. He’s starting to feel a bit down about things…
Icy Moon Zaps Saturn with Electron Beams
Scientists working with data from NASA’s Cassini mission – now in its sixth year of operations at Saturn – have discovered an electrical current running between Saturn and its moon Enceladus that creates an observable emission on the ringed planet.
“The ion beam seen by the camera appears at exceptionally high energy, between about 30,000 and 80,000 electron volts, surprising for an interaction with such a small moon,” says Don Mitchell, Cassini science team co-investigator and co-author of a paper on the research appearing in the April 21 issue of the journal Nature.
This planet-moon connection also happens at Jupiter; Io, Europa and Ganymede all produce visible auroral footprints. The electrons discovered by the researchers were of sufficient energy that they could stimulate an observable auroral output on the planet, a glowing spot formed the same way as the Earth’s northern lights — with electrons precipitating into the ionosphere. At Earth, however, the electrons come from interplanetary space; at Saturn they represent an enormous current system looping through Enceladus all the way back to Saturn, more than 150,000 miles away. (Read more…)
So Saturn is connected to one of its moons, just like Jupiter is connected to some of its moons, by incredibly high voltage electron beams. Are these just pretty interstellar phenomena? Or something more? Maybe in 2054 we’ll find out when a manned expedition makes the voyage to investigate. They approach in their space ship, but there’s a malfunction and the craft unavoidably drifts directly into the beam shooting from Saturn to Enceladus. There’s a crackle and flash as all the instruments go haywire, and the astronauts all feel momentarily disoriented, but the moment passes as the ship clears the electron beam. Everything goes back to normal.
The ship returns to Earth with a wealth of data, and the astronauts all clear quarantine with clean bills of health. Fast forward to a month later. The mission leader calls one of the research specialists from the mission. *How are you feeling?* *Not so hot.* *Me either.* *Feel like you got the flu?* *Hey, how’d you know? Me too.*
Another week goes by, new symptoms appear. Skin lesions, tiny at first, but they grow to form a hard crust-like substance that slowly spreads. All the astronauts have it, and they all report to mission control for quarantine and medical care. But nothing works, the crust covers their entire bodies, which begin to change, thickening, becoming stiff and hard. They start to increase in size, becoming larger, less defined. Analysis of the data from their mission comes back: the electron stream is not just energy, it’s filled with billions of tiny particles, nano-minerals and elements previously unknown. They have a theory, the stream is like an umbilical cord. Saturn is actually nursing the moon Enceladus, which has been growing steadily over the past few decades.
What does that mean for the astronauts? They absorbed a blast of the microminerals, they’re becoming planetoids. Can the process be stopped before they completely transform…?
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See? There’s good stuff to inspire you everywhere. You don’t have to go to a foreign country to find it, but I can tell you that Paris is lovely this time of year. :) Adieu!
-Jason Kahn
Mad Scribblings From the Edge
The Dark InSpectre
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Authors: Jason Kahn. Form: Column. Length: 1500 words. Editor who accepted this story: Previous Editors.
Author Bio
A medical editor by day, Jason Kahn lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. His stories have appeared in Baen’s Universe, Damnation Books, Something Wicked, and numerous anthologies. His hobbies include rooting for his University of Michigan Wolverines and chasing after two mischievous gnomes who claim to be his children.
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