For those people seeking some long-term postmortem respect, you could always go the route of the Royal Tenenbaum epitaph and have your hyperbolic greatness engraved upon a headstone. But we all know weather eventually gets the better of those words, and besides: Why settle for one measly sentence when you could speak directly to your descendants from beyond the grave?

The Objecs company has the answer: RosettaStone “technology enhanced memorial products,” which, preloaded with your autobiographical information, will attach to your grave. From Discovery News:

When your great-great-great granddaughter stops by sometime in the next century and wants to know who you were, she’ll touch her NFC-RFID enabled cellphone (or whatever device we’re using by then) to one of those symbols on the granite iPod-looking device on your headstone and she’ll get your note.

NFC stands for “near-field communication” which is a subset of RFID – “radio frequency identification.” You’re probably using this technology already. RFID is what allows you to pay a toll while driving 30 mph by way of the little box stuck to your rearview mirror.

As the above passage notes, the practicality of RosettaStone depends on it working with the cellphone technology of the future that will probably be directly implanted in your head, or perhaps that someone will care enough after you’re gone to drop by the cemetery and upgrade your headstone.

Still, it could work. So please, no stupid text abbreviations in your autobiography. This is for posterity.

Related Content:
Discoblog: “Gravestone Project” Takes Citizen Science to the Cemetery
80beats: Egypt Finds Tombs of Pyramid Builders, And More Evidence They Were Free Men

Image: Objecs LLC

A few months ago, I wrote about an art exhibit in NYC based on my book Death from the Skies! Brian George, one of the artists who put this exhibit together, just posted a very cool blog entry about it too.

He posted some great picture on Picasa, which you can see in the slideshow below or on Picasa directly.

I am totally blown away by the sculpture Solar Flares and CMEs. In the book, I describe how the tangling of the Sun’s magnetic field lines is like a bag full of springs under tension. How I pictured that in my head is almost exactly duplicated by that piece.

I could not get to NYC for the exhibit, but I really wish I had. The artwork is amazing, almost as amazing as the feeling I get thinking that a book I wrote for my own nefarious purposes actually inspired a group of artists to create such wonderful and astonishing pieces. My thanks to all of them for swelling my head just a little bit more.

There’s a lot more going on beneath those huge sheets of Antarctic ice than you might think. NASA researchers say they uncovered a major surprise in December: The team drilled an eight-inch hole and stuck a video camera 600 feet down, hoping to observe the underbelly of the thick ice sheet. To their amazement, a curious critter swam into view and clung to the video camera’s cable [Washington Post]. The three-inch crustacean in their video (and pictured in the image here) is a Lyssianasid amphipod, a relative of a shrimp. The team also retrieved what they believe to be a tentacle from a jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate” [AP]. Indeed, researchers previously believed that nothing more complex than microbes could live in such a hostile place, beneath an ice sheet in total darkness. While complex organisms have shown up before in retreating glaciers, this seems to be the first time any have been found 600 feet down below an intact sheet of ice.

The sheer unlikeliness of the find (what would these creatures eat, after all?) cast doubt in the minds of some scientists that this is the organisms’ true habitat. The site is connected to the open sea, says Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey. But given the distance to that open sea—12 miles–study coauthor Stacy Kim says it’s highly unlikely such small creatures made such a journey under an ice sheet. In addition, the hole NASA drilled measured only eight inches across. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said [AP].

If crustaceans really can tough it out buried beneath the ice, perhaps complex organisms can live in more places than we give them credit for. Astrobiology enthusiasts are probably already thinking of the ice-covered moons in our solar system, like the Jovian moon Europa and the Saturnian moon Enceladus, and wondering whether extraterrestrial critters could be lurking beneath those frozen surfaces. First, though, there’s a lot left to sort out about this intriguing puzzle.

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Related Content:
80beats: An Iceberg the Size of Luxembourg Breaks Free from Antarctica
80beats: Is the Once-Stable Part of Antarctica Starting to Melt?
80beats: Fossils of Shrimp-Like Creatures Point to Warmer Antarctica in the Distant Past
80beats: Floods Beneath Antarctica’s Ice Sheet Create a Glacial Slip-and-Slide

Image: NASA

I had fun sampling Rush Limbaugh in the latest Point of Inquiry (around minute 3:30), as he stunningly suggests to Andy Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying?”

First, for the original clip of Rush’s extremism in all its glory, listen here:

I couldn’t resist asking for Revkin’s response to Limbaugh, which came at around minute 13:00 of the show. Revkin first set the stage for Rush’s performance as follows:

I was speaking about three very tricky things: population growth, United States consumer habits, and climate–in one riff. I was participating via video hookup with a Wilson Center event, and basically I said, “Look, if you’re going to go with the whole carbon-centric meme, and we’ll have carbon credits for this, that, and the other, and you live in America, where we’re heading from 300 million to 400 million people in the next 30 or 40 years, why shouldn’t a family get carbon credits for having fewer kids?”

It was what I would call a thought experiment. And that got picked up by some right wing blog, and that got picked up by Rush Limbaugh, who I’m sure never saw the original video thing….Just hearing the audio [of Limbaugh] is amazing. And of course I wrote a thorough critique of what he had said on DotEarth, and then he spent the next week nibbling, almost apologizing. Suicide is a realm you don’t go into, without having to draw a lot of ire from a lot of people who have actually experienced the loss of family members. So he almost apologized, but not quite.

Hey, why apologize when you’re Rush Limbaugh?

[For more Point of Inquiry, listen here, or subscribe here via iTunes.]