Tag Archives: Space

Seti: how microbes could communicate with alien species

Predrag Slijepcevic is a Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London.
“I am a bio-scientist interested in the philosophy of biology. In particular, I investigate how biological systems, from bacteria to animals and beyond, perceive and process environmental stimuli (biological information) and how this processing, which is a form of natural learning, affects the organism-environment interactions. I aim to identify those elements in the organization of biological systems that lead to forms of natural epistemology, or biological intelligence, that may qualify them as cognitive agents.”

Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe is Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham. He is a world-renowned astronomer, astrophysicist and a pioneer of astrobiology. In 1977 together with the late Sir Hoyle he proposed the theory of cometary panspermia – the theory that comets carry the seeds of life and that life is distributed throughout the Universe. Discoveries in astronomy, geology and astronomy continue to provide evidence in support his theory known as cometary panspermia. He was a former Fellow of Jesus College Cambridge and a Founder Member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. From 1973-2010 he was a Professor at Cardiff University. He is now an honorary professor at several universities world-wide and continues to publish books and research papers in astrobiology.

Analog Astronaut

Richelle Gribble is an expeditionary artist exploring planetary connectivity, both on and off Earth. Her work explores connectivity in a world where human impact, technology, and the environment collide. She has completed 18 art residencies as part of her project The Nomadic Artist, where she travels the world to reflect social and environmental changes across the globe. She is an Analog Astronaut and Head of Creative Research for analog space missions on the Moon and Mars via Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), Sensoria Program, and Lunares Research Station.

Living Light

Living Light is an artwork designed by the Beyond Earth artist collective for spaceflight. It combines biology, artificial intelligence, and aerospace technology. Living Light explores the connections between our blue planet and the boundlessness of outer space. Beyond Earth modeled the design to nest within Spaceship Neptune, referencing the Roman God of the sea. Its form was inspired by the vast biodiversity of aquatic life on Earth.. The artwork traveled to space on June 18 2021 aboard Neptune One, Space Perspective’s inaugural test flight.

Dark Matter and other poems

Lynne Goldsmith’s first book, ‘Secondary Cicatrices’, won the 2018 Halcyon Poetry Prize, was a 2019 Finalist in the American Book Fest Awards, a 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Award Gold Winner and won a new Finalist Award in the International Book Awards. Her poetry has been published in Backchannels Journal, Spillway, Thimble Literary Magazine, Environmental Magazine, Red Planet Magazine, among others, with upcoming poems in Tiny Seed Literary Journal and Scotland’s 2020 Geopoetry Conference program. Her poetry book ‘Secondary Cicatrices’ recently won a Book Excellence Finalist Award.

Connecting the Microcosm and the Universe

Seiko Tachibana’s distinctive work balances Asian tradition with minimalist modernity, with works having a poetic beauty that explores the essential patterns of life. She creates images that suggest both a world in microcosm as well as the immensity of the universe. A recurring theme in her work is “the ways in which many small pieces come together to make up a larger whole,” and how modular and accumulating forms can create structures and dynamics.

A thread of the cosmic web: astronomers spot a 50 million light-year galactic filament

Ray Norris is a British/Australian astronomer in the School of Science at Western Sydney University, and with CSIRO Astronomy & Space Science. He researches how galaxies formed and evolved after the Big Bang, and the process of astronomical discovery with large data volumes. He also researches the astronomy of Australian Aboriginal people.
Ray was educated at Cambridge University, UK, and moved to Australia in 1983 to join CSIRO, where he became Head of Astrophysics in 1994, and then Australia Telescope Deputy Director, and Director of the Australian Astronomy MNRF, before returning in 2005 to active research.
He currently leads an international project – the Evolutionary Map of the Universe – to image the faintest radio galaxies in the Universe, using the new ASKAP radio telescope recently completed in Western Australia. He also leads the WTF project which is exploring machine learning techniques to discover the unexpected.
He frequently appears on radio and TV, and has published a novel, Graven Images.

What is nothing? Martin Rees Q&A

Lord Martin Rees is the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and Former Master) of Trinity College. He is a member of the House of Lords, and a former President of the Royal Society. His research interests include space exploration, black holes, galaxy formation, the multiverse and prospects for extraterrestrial life. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risks at Cambridge University (CSER). In addition to academic publications, research papers he has written many general articles and ten books, most recently ‘On the Future: Prospects for Humanity’.

The art and beauty of general relativity

Margaret Wertheim is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Science Communication, The University of Melbourne. She is an internationally noted writer and exhibition curator whose work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. The author of six books, including ‘The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,’ a groundbreaking exploration of the history of Western concepts of space from Dante to the Internet.

Wertheim is the founder and director of the Institute For Figuring, a Los Angeles-based organization devoted to the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of mathematics and science. (www.theiff.org) Through the IFF, she has designed exhibitions for galleries and museums in a dozen countries, including the Hayward Gallery in London and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. The IFF’s “Crochet Coral Reef” project – spearheaded by Margaret and twin sister Christine – is the largest participatory science-and-art endeavor in the world, and has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), the Science Gallery (Dublin), New York University Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. Through an unlikely conjunction of handicraft and geometry, the Crochet Coral Reef offers a window into mathematics while addressing the issue of reef degradation due to global warming. Wertheim’s TED talk on the topic has been viewed more than a million times, and translated into 20 languages, including Arabic.

Five ways artificial intelligence can help space exploration

Deep Bandivadekar is a PhD student at the Aerospace Centre of Excellence, University of Strathclyde and does research work as part of the Intelligent Computational Engineering Laboratory (ICE-Lab). His research interests are Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Thermodynamics, Hypersonics, Artificial Intelligence, Design Optimisation, Global and Multi-objective Optimisation.

Audrey Berquand is a PhD candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Strathclyde. Her research question asks – “Can all the data and lessons learned harvested online, collected from previous current and future studies, be reused and enhanced with computational intelligence methods to advance current concurrent engineering design processes and decision making at the early phases of space missions design?”

We’re teaching robots to evolve autonomously – so they can adapt to life alone on distant planets

Professor Emma Hart is Chair in Natural Computation, Edinburgh Napier University. She is active world-wide in the field of Evolutionary Computation, an Editor-in-Chief of Evolutionary Computation (MIT Press) from January 2016 and an elected member of the ACM SIGEVO Executive Board. She is also a member of the UK Operations Research Society Research Panel.