Turning Space into Music, 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.
Hope you all are staying cool during this summer heat wave. I’m taking a vacation break next month, so there will be no newsletter then. See you all in September!
How to Make Space Images Accessible: Turn Them Into Music
A group of astrophysicists and musicians figured out how to transform spectacular images, such as from NASA’s James Webb and Chandra space telescopes, into music and sounds. Finally, blind and low-vision people can experience these space photos, and sighted people (including me) enjoy these “sonifications” too. I wrote this piece for the WIRED 30 series.
Futurama’s New Season Successfully Brings the Show Into 2023
I’ve always liked the cartoon Futurama, and I’m glad the writers and voice actors revived it. The reboot feels like classic Futurama, with all the satirical humor and hilarious characters we know and love, but with plenty of parodies and jokes about today’s brave new world.
An Astrobiologist’s Search for Life in Space—and Meaning on Earth
Aomawa Shields has a unique perspective, as a Black woman in astronomy and a classically-trained actor. We published my interview with her here, about her upbringing, acting, research, parenthood, and her new book, Life on Other Planets.
Here Comes Euclid, the Telescope That Will Search for Dark Energy
In 2009, I almost took a job in Bologna, Italy, where I would’ve been simulating maps of galaxies the European Space Agency’s Euclid would observe. I took a different path, but I’m excited this space telescope is finally up in orbit. Within a few years, it could have a big impact on our understanding of dark energy and dark matter. This was my most popular story over the past month.
In other writing…
The galaxy in the woods
Fireflies are fascinating creatures, and I totally understand the rising tourism of people going out in the woods to catch glimpses of their bioluminescent displays. But lightning bugs are disappearing too, and their habitats need protection. I liked this piece by Josh Sokol in bioGraphic magazine.
A good prospect
Companies are ”mining climate anxiety for profit,” argues Nick Bowlin in this piece in The Drift. Growing demand for electric vehicle batteries and chargers, solar panels and wind turbines has led to more demand for critical metals like lithium, copper, cobalt and graphite, and their rapid extraction creates more environmental problems. I also liked this piece, The Bad Patient, by B. D. McClay in the same magazine.
The vice of spice: confronting lead-tainted turmeric
As someone who cooks a lot with turmeric, I was alarmed by Wudan Yan’s Undark magazine piece, showing how turmeric producers have dangerously added lead chromate to enhance the spice’s yellowish color, especially in Bangladesh and other countries with poor regulatory control. It’s not the only commonly adulterated spice, too.
Love in the time of sickle cell disease
It’s horrible that some people’s relationships come with rolling the genetic dice, where the combination of two people’s genes poses risks, such as of sickle cell disease. Genetic testing, where available, does help. This is an interesting, essayistic piece in Harper’s magazine by Krithika Varagur, focused on Nigerians.
The last word on AI and the atom bomb
As K. C. Cole writes in WIRED, never over the past 80 years did anyone put the brakes on nuclear weapon technologies, despite warnings from the physicists who designed them. Now we have tech leaders warning about AI applications that could get out of control, and little is being done about it. And speaking of the bomb, I recommend this series by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the Doomsday Clock people) about Oppenheimer, especially the interview with director Christopher Nolan.
RIP National Geographic. It’s heart-breaking seeing all the layoffs at the magazine. Friends and colleagues of mine used to write for them, including Michael Greshko, Craig Welch, Nadia Drake, and Annie Roth. It’s not really the end for Nat Geo, just the end of the era. The magazine continues but only with freelance writers, and I hope they’re given the respect and pay they deserve. I also wish the former FiveThirtyEight staff writers the best, too. (Disney is the parent company of both outlets and they’ve made widespread cuts and layoffs.)
What I’m reading: Not Too Late, edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and All We Can Save, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. This pair of climate books includes experts and eloquent writers providing a call to action and reasons for hope as we take on the climate crisis.. I’m also looking forward to reading The Deepest Map, a new book by Laura Trethewey about scientific, environmental and commercial ocean explorers.
Looking back: Six years ago, I wrote in FiveThirtyEight about planetary scientists looking for chemical signatures of extraterrestrial life by scanning the atmospheres of other worlds. (I’ve also written for National Geographic too.)
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.