Andrew Grant

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A bunch of my favorite articles from 2012. (A couple of pieces from December 2011 are included since I do these lists before the absolute end of the year.) All ungated and free.

  • Pedestrian Mania(Brian Phillips, Grantland): Beautiful piece about world-famous 1870s long-distance walking champion Edward Payson Weston, subject of the book, A Man in a Hurry.
  • Brains Plus Brawn(Daniel Lieberman, Edge) Incredibly fun article about endurance, which points out, among many other things, that as quick as Usain Bolt may seem, your average sheep or goat can run twice as fast.
  • A New Birth of Reason” (Susan Jacoby, The American Scholar): Great essay about Robert Ingersoll, the largely forgotten secularist who was a major force in 19th-century America, taken from the writer’s forthcoming book, The Great Agnostic.
  • One’s a Crowd” (Eric Kleinberg, The New York Times): Great Op-Ed piece about the increasing number of people living alone.
  • How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” (Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times): A deep and penetrating explanation of the complicated forces at play in job outsourcing.
  • The Power of Habit“ (Charles Duhigg, Slate): An excerpt from the author’s bestseller of the same name which explains how Pepsodent became omnipresent.
  • We’re Underestimating the Risk of Extinction (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic): I didn’t necessarily agree with the premise (or conclusions) of this interview with philosopher Nick Bostrom, but I enjoyed its intelligence immensely.
  • Hustling the Cloud” (Steven Boone, Capital New York): Wonderful piece about a bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night search for free Wi-Fi–and anything else that would seem to make sense–in a time of dire economic straits.
  • Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World (Wil S. Hylton, The New York Times Magazine): Fascinating examination of the titular biologist, who wants to make breathing bots that will cure the world’s ills.
  • The Machine and the Ghost(Christine Rosen, The New Republic): The author riffs on how the rise of smart, quantified gizmos and cities necessitates a new “morality of things.”

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A bunch of my favorite articles from the first half of 2012. All available for free.

  • How to Survive the End of the Universe,” (Andrew Grant, Discover): Fascinating account of how humans can escape oblivion as our solar system changes over the next few billion years.
  • Was Frankenstein Really About Childbirth?“ (Ruth Franklin, The New Republic): Provocative piece that makes a strong case that the dread of childbirth was a major impetus for Mary Shelley’s classic.
  • One’s a Crowd” (Eric Kleinberg, The New York Times): Great Op-Ed piece about the increasing number of people living alone.
  • How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work (Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, The New York Times): A deep and penetrating explanation of the complicated forces at play in job outsourcing.
  • The Power of Habit“ (Charles Duhigg, Slate): An excerpt from the author’s bestseller of the same name which explains how Pepsodent became omnipresent.
  • We’re Underestimating the Risk of Extinction” (Ross Andersen, The Atlantic): I didn’t necessarily agree with the premise (or conclusions) of this interview with philosopher Nick Bostrom, but I enjoyed its intelligence immensely.
  • Hustling the Cloud” (Steven Boone, Capital New York): Wonderful piece about a bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night search for free Wi-Fi–and anything else that would seem to make sense–in a time of dire economic straits.
  • Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World” (Wil S. Hylton, The New York Times Magazine): Fascinating examination of the titular biologist, who wants to make breathing bots that will cure the world’s ills.

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"The oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will dry out as water vapor leaks into space." (Image by Pierre Cardin.)

As the sun ages, its light becomes stronger, not weaker. What to do when the future grows too bright, if we even make it that far? From Andrew Grant’s excellent new Discover article,How to Survive the End of the Universe“:

“For [theoretical physicist Glenn] Starkman and other futurists, the fun begins a billion years from now, a span 5,000 times as long as the era in which Homo sapiens has roamed Earth. Making the generous assumption that humans can survive multiple ice ages and deflect an inevitable asteroid or comet strike (NASA predicts that between now and then, no fewer than 10 the size of the rock that wiped out the dinosaurs will hit), the researchers forecast we will then encounter a much bigger problem: an aging sun.

Stable stars like the sun shine by fusing hydrogen atoms together to produce helium and energy. But as a star grows older, the accumulating helium at the core pushes those energetic hydrogen reactions outward. As a result, the star expands and throws more and more heat into the universe. Today’s sun is already 40 percent brighter than it was when it was born 4.6 billion years ago. According to a 2008 model by astronomers K.P. Schröder and Robert Connon Smith of the University of Sussex, England, in a billion years the sun will unleash 10 percent more energy than it does now, inducing an irrefutable case of global warming here on Earth. The oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will dry out as water vapor leaks into space, and temperatures will soar past 700 degrees Fahrenheit, all of which will transform our planet into a Venusian hell-scape choked with thick clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxide. Bacteria might temporarily persist in tiny pockets of liquid water deep beneath the surface, but humanity’s run in these parts would be over.

[Astronomer Greg] Laughlin was intrigued by the idea of using simulations to traverse enormous gulfs of 
time: ‘It opened my eyes to the fact that things will still be there in timescales that 
dwarf the current age 
of the universe.’

Such a cataclysmic outcome might not matter, though, if proactive Earthlings figure out a way to colonize Mars first. The Red Planet offers a lot of advantages as a safety spot: It is relatively close and appears to contain many of life’s required ingredients. A series of robotic missions, from Viking in the 1970s to the Spirit rover still roaming Mars today, have observed ancient riverbeds and polar ice caps storing enough water to submerge the entire planet in an ocean 40 feet deep. This past August the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter beamed back time-lapse photos suggesting that salty liquid water still flows on the surface.

The main deterrent to human habitation on Mars is that it is too cold. A brightening sun could solve that—or humans could get the job started without having to wait a billion years. ‘From what we know, Mars did have life and oceans and a thick atmosphere,’ says NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay. ‘And we could bring that back.'”

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