Light Pollution Erases Stars From the Sky, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from WIRED space writer Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Citizen Scientists Show Light Pollution Erases Stars From the Sky
For millennia, people have peered at the same night sky their ancestors and their ancestors’ ancestors did. But no more. Thanks to a decade of observations amassed by citizen scientists around the world, astronomers have tracked how the faintest stars have already begun to vanish from view. The sky is now brightening by a whopping 10 percent annually, but solutions do exist.
A Bold Plan to Beam Solar Energy Down From Space
Researchers at the European Space Agency and elsewhere are studying how one might loft an array of solar panels and transmit energy from the sun down to cities on Earth. I’m admittedly a little skeptical about this idea, but it just might work. (Let’s remember though: Climate change remains a political problem, not one of engineering.) This was my most popular story in WIRED over the past month.
Spotted a UFO? There’s an App for That
The startup Enigma Labs just launched a mobile app for people to document their sightings of UFOs or ‘unidentified anomalous phenomena,’ as they’re now sometimes called. People in the UFO community have been distrustful of government agencies, but we’ll see if they embrace this company’s app.
In other writing…
The case for free-range lab mice
Scientists test their experimental drugs and treatments on laboratory animals all the time, from rodents to monkeys. But it can be a big leap from animals to humans, and moreover, shouldn’t we be concerned about the unnatural physical and social lives of the creatures in all those experiments? Sonia Shah explores these questions in an interesting New Yorker piece.
Speaking of the hidden lives of animals, I also recommend this new Harper’s essay focused on pets by Anne Fadiman.
The spaceport at the edge of the world
“Spaceports have a history of leaving local communities in the dust.” Will this one on the northern edge of Scotland be any different? Tomas Weber lays out the stakes in this feature story in WIRED.
The violin doctor
I’ve played the violin for most of life (though not so much after having kids), and I’ve always been fascinated by the specialized art and technique of violin repair. I don’t read many profiles, but I particularly enjoyed this one by Elly Fishman in Chicago magazine about an increasingly well-known violin repairer who doesn’t himself play the instrument.
The stuff we’re made of
We’re all made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan once said, and the atoms in our sun, our world and our bodies have taken a complex and circuitous route to get here. I liked this short and well-written book review by Emily Cataneo in Undark magazine.
What I’m reading: The Terraformers, a science fiction novel by Annalee Newitz, and Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg.
Looking back: Three years ago, I penned this essay in Aeon magazine about the social and psychological challenges of long-distance space travel. I think NASA’s taking these concerns more seriously now (and I’ll be writing more about that soon).
More about me: I’m the space writer at WIRED magazine, and I’ve recently moved from San Diego to the Bay Area. I used to be a freelance writer and journalist, and before that, an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter @raminskibba. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.