The Best Australian Science Writing 2014

by Ashley Hay

  The journey towards a cure has just started for little Massimo Damiani. What has been the hardest thing all along, according to his parents Stephen and Sally, is living with the uncertainty of their son’s future. From here on in they take solace in knowing they are not alone. The Damianis are realistic in their expectations, but determined to take another leap into the unknown towards developing a therapy and maybe a cure for their son, and for others around the world with this condition.

  ‘We have something tangible to fight now that the disease has a name.’

  * * * * *

  Postscript: Ryan Taft has since moved back to the US to become a director of scientific research at Illumina. In June 2013, the US Supreme Court stated that ‘a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated’. The ruling invalidates all such claims on natural human genes.

  From Alzheimer’s to zebrafish

  Uniquely human

  Life, the universe and Boolardy

  Richard Guilliatt

  You can learn a lot travelling around the outback with an astrophysicist.

  You learn that there are billions of galaxies out there, separated by mysterious dark matter that’s technically known as ‘Dark Matter’. You learn that most galaxies spin like pizzadough, except for the ones that are fluffy. You find out that the universe was once a swirling blob of smooth hydrogen paste with not much going for it, until it started to change and become …

  ‘Lumpy – the universe is lumpy,’ says Dr Lisa Harvey-Smith, as she steps down from a rented 4WD onto the rust-red earth of central Western Australia. ‘Early on the universe was pretty featureless, just a swirling eddy of gas – a pretty crap place to be, really. But then gravity took over and things started clumping together to form stars and galaxies and superclusters. So if you were God … well, I don’t believe in God, but if you were the Big Fella looking down on the universe now, you’d see it’s lumpy.’

  Around us the semi-desert of the Murchison plains stretches out to a distant horizon, a vast expanse of scrubby saltbush, spindly skeletal mulga trees and waist-high termite mounds 300 kilometres inland from the mid-WA coast. In the neardistance, a cluster of what look like towering white satellite dishes rises above the terrain, each of them roughly six storeys tall and pointed skywards. They’re the reason we’re here, and the reason Harvey-Smith is offering an idiot’s guide to the cosmos while stepping artfully around sun-baked piles of cattle-dung. Those dishes are in fact radio telescopes, aimed at the further reaches of the universe, a few billion years back down the space– time continuum. Out here on Boolardy Station – population: two people and 1500 cattle – the world’s most futuristic astronomy project is taking shape.

  If all goes to plan, the ochre rangeways here will eventually be planted with 100 dishes and several million pole-antennae, all of them wired to computers that will piece together panoramic images of deep space. The first stage of the project, the prototype, is already built – 36 dishes now dot the landscape, like giant abandoned merry-go-rounds bleached white by the sun, while several hundred smaller telescopes resembling oversized robotic spiders squat on the earth in four-by-four formations. They’re connected by fibre-optic cables that snake underground for several kilometres to a supercomputing centre, housed inside a hermetically sealed steel shed that’s fenced off from the roaming emus and cows.

  ‘This is going to push the boundaries of astronomy,’ says Harvey-Smith, a diminutive 33-year-old Brit who is so alarmingly youthful she could almost pass for a teenager. ‘When the first radio telescopes were built in the 1940s, they were revolutionary. This will be another revolution – it’ll be like switching from a camera that can only see one small piece of the universe to using this very wide-angle lens to capture panoramic views.’ The epic sky overhead seems to mirror those words – at night it’s a light show of stars, planets and distant galaxies arrayed by the thousands. Yet that dazzling spectacle is not really why this 330 000-hectare cattle station has become an astronomy mecca. Technically, the telescopes here are blind. Rather than capturing visible light from deep space, they capture radio waves – radiation from the low-frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Boolardy was chosen primarily because it’s quiet: across the surrounding 50 000 square kilometres of Murchison Shire there are only 113 people scattered around 29 properties, making electronic interference from mobile phones and other equipment negligible.

  The WA government and Harvey-Smith’s employer, the CSIRO, plunked down $5.42 million to buy Boolardy four years ago, a mere fraction of what has so far been a $435 million investment of state and federal money to make Australia an international leader in astronomy. This is a project so big it can make your head throb. The dishes and antennae will have a combined surface area of one square kilometre, hence their name – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Half of them will be here, the other half in southern Africa. The computers processing the data are so powerful they have to be watercooled to stop them exploding. The total cost of the project is more than $2 billion.

  What we’ll get from it – apart from prestige, and potential income from commercial applications of the science – is a peek into the parts of the universe that optical telescopes can’t see, either because they’re obscured by clouds of cosmic dust or because they’re simply too far back in space–time. Radio waves are especially interesting to astronomers because, unlike visible light and other electromagnetic radiation, they travel the entire breadth of the universe without being absorbed and scattered by intervening matter.

  As chief salesperson for the project in Australia, Harvey-Smith’s unenviable task is to make it comprehensible, even to journalists. Thankfully, despite having written a doctoral thesis on 4.6 GHz hydroxyl masers (don’t ask), she knows the value of a simple metaphor and an occasional wisecrack.

  Early in her career, while working at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK, she informed the Royal Astronomical Society that she’d discovered a giant cloud of alcohol nearly 463 billion kilometres wide floating around the Milky Way, but sadly it wasn’t ‘fit for human consumption’. Radio telescopes, she explains, are the ‘X-ray specs’ of astronomy.

  That kind of drollery is handy out here in the remote midwest, where the locals are a sceptical lot toughened by a lifetime of mind-roasting summers, occasional cyclonic storms and encounters with venomous snakes. Since buying Boolardy and refitting it as a radio observatory, the CSIRO has worked hard to win over the neighbours, both black and white. The local Wajarri community has given its blessing to the telescopes, which all sport indigenous names, and Boolardy itself has been kept as a working cattle station managed by veteran pastoralist Mark Halleen and his wife Carolyn, who now find themselves hosting an ever-shifting roster of visiting physics nerds, computer technicians and international dignitaries.

  For Halleen – who’s lived out here for 41 years, having arrived at Boolardy as a ten-year-old – sharing breakfast with a bunch of people discussing interstellar gas clouds has proved a nice change of pace. ‘It’s good chatting to all these people,’ he says. ‘When they first came out we couldn’t get them in for tea – the sky is so clear here at night they just couldn’t take their eyes off it.’

  The weekend of our visit, the CSIRO and the locals have pitched in to stage Astrofest, a meet-the-astronomers day held every two years under sunshades at the shire office, a low-slung building on the flat dirt highway next to the Oasis roadhouse motel. (Murchison Shire doesn’t actually have a town, despite being larger than the Netherlands.) A healthy crowd of around 300 turns out, including locals, visiting amateur astronomers and adventurous tourists here for some star-gazing and astrophysics lessons. One of the pastoralists donates a cow for the roast dinner, the Wajarri community brings along a few dead kangaroos to cook in a camp-stove, and deputy shire president Rossco Foulkes-Taylor – third-generation owner of nearby Yuin Station – opens proceedings with a bone-dry bushman’s take on the theory of supermassive bla
ck holes.

  ‘I remember at the last Astrofest someone asked what would happen if the Earth gets too close to one of these black holes,’ Foulkes-Taylor tells the crowd laconically. ‘And they reckoned we could be squashed into an area almost as small as a basketball. I thought, “Jeez, a basketball! That seems pretty tight.” Then about 15 minutes later someone else said that if you recalculate it, it could actually be as small as a golf ball. That was where he lost me. A footy, maybe – but a golf ball?

  ‘But I shouldn’t make fun of them,’ Foulkes-Taylor adds generously. ‘They’re a lot smarter than me.’

  The star speaker at this year’s Astrofest is Professor Ken Freeman of the Australian National University, a 73-year-old astrophysicist who won the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science in 2012 and is widely credited with discovering the mysterious, invisible substance known as dark matter that permeates the universe. After being introduced as a scientist with ‘more medals than a South American dictator’, Freeman promises to keep his speech simple. But the Astrofest audience is soon sitting in polite incomprehension as he begins extemporising on the fascinating nature of axions, neutralinos, gigaelectronvolts, dwarf spheroidal galaxies and the cosmic ratio of baryons to total matter.

  Afterwards, during the smoko break, a local station worker turns to his companion and remarks: ‘That was really interesting – but he lost me after “G’day”.’

  * * * * *

  Astronomy is a slow and expensive business. It’s now more than two decades since the International Union of Radio Science proposed the idea of a massive radio telescope made up of thousands of linked antennae, and 16 years since Australia signed up as one of six countries backing the project, by then officially known as the Square Kilometre Array. Longterm Murchison residents remember hearing as far back as 2001 that this futuristic project might come to their neighbourhood.

  Australia has long been a world leader in astronomy, partly because the Southern Hemisphere offers a more widescreen view of the heavens and partly because our low population density means ideal conditions for radio telescopes. Large swathes of the Murchison have no mining, and no mobile phone towers; very few people live there. As part of its lobbying bid to host the SKA, Australia committed to building a prototype radio telescope and supercomputer facility in Western Australia.

  By the time Lisa Harvey-Smith came aboard the project in 2009, two years after arriving in Australia to pursue post-graduate work, the Federal Government had committed more than $100 million to it. Construction of the 36 prototype radio dishes, known as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), began in 2010. Boolardy underwent a total refit that included accommodation blocks, power generators and a supercomputing system, while down in Perth a second supercomputer facility, the Pawsey Centre, was built for $80 million. A separate radio telescope system called the Murchison Widefield Array – those spider-like contraptions – was jointly built by the CSIRO and 12 other Australian and international science bodies. The total cost so far, according to a ministerial statement released in mid-2013, has been $70 million in WA government funding and $365 million in federal money.

  Given all the build-up, there was an undercurrent of anticlimax when the committee overseeing the SKA announced in May 2012 that the telescopes would be split between Australia and Africa. The Murchison, it turns out, won’t be dotted with 3000 radio dishes, as artists’ drawings had envisaged – Africa will get the lion’s share. Still, says Harvey-Smith, even snagging a piece of the SKA is a massive coup that presages a golden era in Australian astronomy and physics research.

  ‘Australia is really the envy of the world,’ she says. ‘When we go to Europe, they’re having a miserable time with funding for astronomy. Here it’s a renaissance, really.’

  This being astronomy, it’s a renaissance that won’t happen quickly. The dishes of the ASKAP will remain in test-mode for at least a year. Construction of the SKA itself won’t begin until 2018 and it won’t be operational for a decade, on current projections. But the smaller spider-like telescopes of the Murchison Widefield Array have just come on-stream and are already sending their data to the supercomputers in Perth; the digital information is distributed to astrophysicists around the world who know how to translate it into cool technicolour pictures of the universe’s farthest reaches.

  How that’s done is a process even Lisa Harvey-Smith struggles to explain, except to say that it involves interferometry and Fourier Transform theory – two subjects that fall under the broad heading ‘Trust me, I’m an astrophysicist’. Some people, of course, are wont to ask why we’d spend upwards of half a billion dollars to study a swirling miasma of hot gas 10 billion light-years away, a question that can make astronomers a little defensive.

  Astrophysics, they point out, has produced many unforeseen spin-offs, including medical imaging and wi-fi, which the CSIRO helped develop, reaping royalties of hundreds of millions of dollars. The supercomputers attached to the SKA could produce the next such innovation, and will be available to researchers across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

  ‘It isn’t just intellectual curiosity,’ says Harvey-Smith. ‘Space is our most valuable laboratory to test fundamental theories of physics, because it’s full of vast distances and unimaginable extremes of temperature and pressure. Einstein’s theories of space, time and matter were developed and tested through measurements of outer space, and the science that has flowed from that has led to massive advances in life expectancy and the technology that enables us to watch live footy, use mobile phones, have CT scans and surf the internet. It would be hard to overstate how profoundly it’s affected our lives.

  ‘Anything else you want to know?’

  Yes: don’t astrophysicists ever feel existentially overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of all those billions of galaxies and trillions of stars expanding through infinite time and space?

  ‘No, you try not to think about that, it’s too depressing. After a while you just accept that you’re a speck.’

  * * * * *

  Back at Boolardy, on the morning of our departure, station manager Mark Halleen is sitting on his trailbike when a battered truck trundles up. Behind the wheel is Sandy McTaggart of neighbouring Mt Narryer Station. McTaggart’s 200 000 hectare property is named after the granite mountain that rises within its boundaries, a place where geologists back in the 1980s retrieved fragments of zircon that proved to be the oldest known substances on Earth. A lot of geologists have been back to Mt Narryer and nearby Jack Hills since that discovery, and have confirmed that their craggy red terrain dates back more than 4 billion years, to a time when Earth was not much more than a ball of hot lava. It’s the most ancient landscape on the planet, which makes the location of the nearby radio telescopes – pointed back through time to the earliest moments of the universe – feel remarkably synchronous.

  The McTaggarts tried to buy Mt Narryer in order to protect it for future generations, only to discover that freehold possession is legally impossible. These days they’re hoping that the government’s massive investment in the SKA will rule out mining in the area – the future safeguarding the past. Like a lot of pastoral properties in the Murchison, Mt Narryer Station has been depleted by drought and historical overgrazing: Sandy McTaggart only runs 500 head of cattle these days, and the morning he turns up at Boolardy he’s earning some extra income doing road-work for the shire. You could forgive him for grumbling – the money spent running these telescopes for three days would pay an entire year of the shire’s wild-dog bounty – but it turns out that cosmology quite fascinates him.

  ‘I’m interested in the origins of the universe,’ he says affably. ‘They reckon that the deeper into space you look, the further back in time you go. So when you’re looking at other galaxies you’re actually looking at light from millions of years ago. It’s the big question, isn’t it: how did it all begin? Every religion was spawned on the basis of it.’

  Halleen nods and says: ‘That’s dead right.’

/>   A short walk in the Australian bush

  The oldest known star

  Liner notes, Voyager Golden Record

  Meredi Ortega

  01 blue planet ambassadors well versed in sifting emptiness

  cut star to star from space, humpbacks still appear safety scissored

  in need of pasting back

  after UN greetings, they sing something along the lines of

  the water’s beautiful, come on in

  all twinkle-eyed leviathan

  02 this mudpot is spluttering oes in another clabbery universe

  this grey mud is falling in love, taking up flute

  03 crickets chirping in space

  it gets funnier as the centuries pass and there’s the rub

  of flight into song, thunder into surf

  perhaps what those Californians say is true, about crickets and elephants

  and planets all quavering the same way

  all harking back to the big nothing or something

  04 hyena’s laugh bone ravening, raving

  we send the devil interstellar

  played backwards

  it is only moon chirr and the lone night song of a prairie mouse

  05 first tools Carl Sagan searched Midtown for stones to record

  spalling not rolling

  but the city sold knives and its roads were unknappable

  he might have known it was too simple

  such reduction would require samples experts, goggles, gloves

  06 morse code di-dah dah-di-dit, stars through hardships, to the stars

  sh-star star-sh-ship through the hard to the tsars

  07 horse and cart before horses turned into Saturn V rockets

  they were Lucky and Daisy, collared to the endless schlep of things

  prehensile lipped, crumping hay and snickering at the moon