Linketies: Science Friday

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  It's no secret that human beings aren't so good at measuring risk -- we worry a lot about things that there's little point in worrying about or that are unlikely to happen in the first place. At the same time, we don't always worry about what we should worry about. People will worry about all sorts of uncontrollable end-of-the-world type scenarios that an individual has no control over, but an astounding number of us won't take the simplest precautions against far more likely dangers, such as washing our hands frequently during flu season or using seat belts every time we drive. The problem gets even trickier when we try to look at the types of events that affect cities, nations, or the whole world, which is why risk management is such a difficult field.
  
  So what should we worry about? Literary agent John Brockman has been putting an annual question to a wide variety of scientists, writers, and thinkers for the past fifteen years. This year, Mr. Brockman asks a distinguished group of people what they think we should worry about. Responses from over 150 different people are available at Mr. Brockman's website.
  


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  One of my ongoing themes for choosing Science Friday articles over the past year has been the rise of private space exploration. With space no longer strictly a government domain, could widespread space tourism be just around the corner? National Geographic takes a look at seven current initiatives that may help you blast off sometime within the next ten years. Some of these are already taking bookings. All are currently very expensive and outside most of our budgets. But keep in mind that new technologies, in their beginning stages, are always very expensive and rarely work very well. Typically, all of that changes over time until the technologies are priced for a mass market and work a whole lot better.
  


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  Out of all the planets in our solar system, only one is known to be able to support life, with many unanswered questions about the potential for life on a second. That means that six out of eight planets are virtually certain to be dead worlds, unless you consider the notion of living blobs floating around in the atmospheres of the gas giants. But when you expand the search to the moons of the gas giants, the possibilities for life become more numerous. We've now discovered somewhere around 800 new exoplants outside of our solar system and now scientists are starting to think about the possibility that moons around those extra-solar worlds might also be candidates to support life.
  


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  Scientists have now devised the simplest clock yet known. It consists of a single atom of cesium. Livescience discusses this new development, along with the possibility that more exotic types of clocks could be developed in the future which could have all sorts of implications in our understanding of time. Recall that by the rules of relatively, time is inextricably linked with space, distance, velocity, and mass, so new types of clocks the implications could seep into other areas of our understanding of the universe as well.
  


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  It turns out that reading the classics benefits our brains and is better for self-reflection than self-help books. If correct, that finding has wider implications in a digital world where fewer people -- particularly younger people -- bother reading the classics anymore and we're all conditioned to express thoughts in 140 characters or less.
  


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  And finally, responded to the famous petition to the White House to build a Death Star the Obama administration has. Their answer: No.