SciTechStory | Tracking the impact of science and technology

A black hole of good news – bad news

Funnybone: March 4, 2010

Tucson, Arizona – Astronomers at the University of Arizona have dubbed a new observation – the “chaos cloud.” Discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope on March 1, the swirling, 10 million kilometer wide cosmic cloud has been likened to nothing ever seen before.

Although measurements are preliminary, astronomers said the cloud would sweep through Earth at approximately 09:15:30.1 GMT on June 14, 2013.

“The good news is that this finding confirms several leading-edge concepts in theoretical physics,” announced Dr. Adelbert de Casselum, a Tucson based astrophysicist with close ties to NASA, ESA, and JIRI but not affiliated with the University of Arizona. More »

Posted in Funnybone | Tagged black holes, cosmology, humor | Leave a comment

A different kind of lens for time

News: Cosmology March 3, 2010

In the sense that a lens refracts (bends) light, you could say that using galaxies as a lens is reasonable – if the scale of measurement is nothing less than the age of the universe. It never hurts to have confirmation (in science and a lot of other things). While we know from various studies that the age of the universe is about 13.75 billion years (+/- 170 million), to have this confirmed by another method is…comforting, in a cosmological way. The method in this case is kind of breathtaking. More »

Posted in News: Cosmology | Tagged cosmology, galaxies, gravitational lensing, Hubble constant, Hubble Space Telescope, Keck Telescope, universe age | Leave a comment

Can culture change the genome?

Impact: Genetic Modification March 3, 2010

Almost from the beginning of our knowledge of genetics, it’s been asked, “Can the way we (humans) live change our genetics?” These days this is much the same as asking if culture can change the genome. It’s actually a relatively old question.

The question got its biggest boost from one who is now a boogeyman for biology, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). Lamarckism is the idea that an organism can pass on to its offspring characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime. This is sometimes called Lamarckian inheritance or soft inheritance and was a popular idea until Darwin, Mendel, and modern genetics put various nails into the Lamarckian coffin. (Lamarckian ideas, zombie like, resurfaced very politically as Lysenkoism for a while in Soviet Russia.) The mechanics of genes, DNA, and reproduction as we now understand them rule out the ‘genetic codification’ (ad hoc, as it were,) of such fleeting characteristics as appeared in an individual. This is also interpreted to mean that cultural influences, say, whether you drank a lot of milk or not, are not part of the genetic patterns. More »

Posted in Impact: Genetic Modification | Tagged biology, culture, DNA, EDAR, epigenetics, evolution, genes, genetic modification, genetics, genome, Lamarck, molecular biology, RNA | 1 Comment

Oh please, “skinput”

News: Computer Power March 3, 2010

Research work from a collaboration between Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University (USA) has resulted in an armband that can sense taps on human skin (the arm in this case) and uses sound vibration detection (an acoustic biosensor) to determine the location for a kind of crude ‘button’ or ‘keyboard’ arrangement. It also uses a picoprojector (like a tiny LED projector) to display the buttons on the skin. They call it skinput.

Obviously the advantage here is that nothing needs to be implanted under the skin to create an arm control panel. Of course, the external wristband is subject to the usual problems of a wristwatch – banging it against something, losing it, breaking the clasp. Although technology marches on, it can always use some tweaking.

Is anybody asking why ‘skinput’ is needed? (Be careful what you scorn – in a decade or two skinput might seem perfectly routine.)

Posted in News: Computer Power | Tagged acoustic, biosensor, buttons, computer, keyboard, picoprojector, skinput | Leave a comment

Technology predictions so awful, they’re good

Spun: March 2, 2010

Making predictions about future technology, or even the impact of current technology is tempting fate. That is to say, you’re fated to be wrong, much of the time…at best. I should know; it’s what this blog does a lot. However, I’ve always liked the definition of an expert, attributed to Niels Bohr or Werner Heisenberg that goes, “An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes in his field and how to avoid them.” I’m working on the how to avoid them part.

However, there’s falling off a chair, and there’s falling down a mountain. There are degrees of bad in making predictions. Some predictions are so bad, they are outstanding. Farhad Manjoo, one of the best IT/Technology bloggers around (over at Slate), has latched on to something that’s been going around the internet for a little while. It’s a 1995 Newsweek column by Clifford Stoll titled The Internet? Bah!. That gives you a clue. Manjoo’s post That Whole Internet Thing’s Not Going To Work Out summarizes Stoll’s article quite well, but reading the original doesn’t hurt. More »

Posted in Spun | Tagged 2001, Bohr, futurism, Heisenberg, prediction, science, Stoll, technology | 1 Comment

Update: More Moon water

News: Space Exploration March 2, 2010

Last year, in a flurry of “NASA Bombs Moon!” stories, the NASA LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) project deliberately crashed into a deeply shadowed crater to kick up dust and test its contents – looking particularly for water. They found it. [SciTechStory: On the Moon or elsewhere follow the water] The quantities found were relatively small, but any water at all on the Moon was something of a breakthrough. At that point the stock of ‘Moon Base’ ideas went up, because water is such a versatile substance (like humans need it, and it can make rocket fuel). Now there’s more – more water that is, as confirmed by the Chandrayaan-1, India’s spacecraft that was sent to the Moon about the same time as LCROSS. Among other things, before it conked out, Chandrayaan-1 used its on-board Mini-SAR instrument (mini-Synthetic Aperture Radar, a piece of NASA equipment) to scan the Moon’s north pole craters for water. More »

Posted in News: Space Exploration | Tagged Chandrayaan, craters, exploration, LCROSS, Moon, Moon base, NASA, north pole, satellite, water, water-ice | Leave a comment

Cutting cancer cell immortality short

News: Major Disease Cures March 1, 2010

One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they don’t die of old age. In a sense, they’re immortal – though of course they can be killed. The main reason for their longevity has been traced to telomeres a strip of non-coding genes at the ends of chromosomes. When normal cells replicate very often a piece of the telomere is lost, snipped off so to speak. Eventually the entire telomere is lost, which is sort of like losing the plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces that keeps them from unraveling. When the telomere is gone, the reproduction machinery gets no signal that it’s at the end of the chromosome, and it malfunctions. The cell dies (which is normal). With cancerous cells, however, telomeres are constantly lengthened and the cell goes on reproducing without end. (The so called ‘wild growth’ of cancer.) More »

Posted in News: Major Disease Cures | Tagged cancer, chromosomes, Fbx4, proteins, telomerase, telomeres, TIN2, TRF1 | 1 Comment

First time: Watching the unfolding story of proteins in living cells

News: Proteomics March 1, 2010

Think of looking at cells in vitro (the biologists way of saying the cells are in a Petri dish or a test tube – ‘in glass’) as watching animals in a zoo. It looks relatively natural, but it isn’t. There could be differences, perhaps important differences between the way a cell behaves in vitro and what it does in vivo (in life, or as biologists sometimes say, ‘in the wild’). These differences may also exist for the behavior of proteins within cells – their constant folding and unfolding – but until recently, nobody had seen this activity in vivo. It required some new methods by a team of scientists at the University of Illinois (USA). More »

Posted in News: Proteomics | Tagged Fast Relaxation Imaging, fluorescence microscopy, in vitro, in vivo, protein folding, proteomics, UV | Leave a comment

Should junk science be banned from movies and television?

Essay: February 28, 2010

Most of you reading this will think – yeah, banning junk science that wouldn’t be bad – but you’re probably skeptical. You don’t need to work in the entertainment industry to know that scientific accuracy is almost never a priority. So a ban on bad science? Good luck with that – right?

An academic complaint

What got me started on this subject were some guidelines mentioned by Sidney Perkowitz (professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia) during a recent speech to the convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Very simply (paraphrased):

Every film should be allowed just one major suspension of disbelief for the sake of the story.
Films should avoid internal inconsistencies – breaking scientific rules established in earlier scenes.

Posted in Essay | Tagged Avatar, bad science, Cameron, junk science, movies, Perkowitz, science fiction, SEE, Star Trek, Star Wars | Leave a comment

Giving Roger Ebert a voice

Impact: Computer Power February 27, 2010

The Pulitzer prize-winning movie critic, Roger Ebert, lost his voice to cancer several years ago. He is one among many thousands of people a year who lose their ability to speak from disease or injury. There are some technology fixes for replacing the physical reproduction capability. (See SciTechStory: Replacing the larynx with a palatometer) However, for Ebert and many others, physical repair is impossible. His hope for a voice lies almost entirely with digital technology – artificial voice production. Although Ebert knew about computers producing voice, like most of us, his recollection of these voices is of the odd off-human sounds heard on automated telephone menus. Many years ago the physicist Steven Hawking began using a computer driven voice producer, which (if you’ve heard any interviews with him) is the typical squawk-box. Not for Ebert; he reasoned that Hawking was stuck with ‘ancient’ technology – there must be something better and he began ‘moseying’ (his word) around the web to see what he could see. More »

Posted in Impact: Computer Power | Tagged cancer, Ebert, Hawking, movies, Oprah, vocal chords, voice production | Leave a comment

Newly named: Copernicum (element 112)

News: Nuclear Physics February 27, 2010

It’s official. The universe’s newest named element (the universe according to human perspective, of course) is: Copernicum – element 112. This isn’t the most important news in science, in fact, it’s not news since the element was discovered in Sigurd Hofmann’s lab at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 – but still, new elements and their names don’t come along often. The new ones discovered recently are, in a sense, artificial and exist only in brief seconds inside of atomic colliders. The last natural element on the table is Uranium (92); thereby Copernicum is transuranic and super-heavy with 112 protons. There you have it, a newly named element, as officially recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The name honors Nicolaus Copernicus – he of the ‘Earth revolves around the Sun’ fame.

Posted in News: Nuclear Physics | Tagged atomic mass, Copernicum, Copernicus, Darmstadt, element, super-heavy | Leave a comment

Making jet fuel from biomass

News: Alternative Energy February 26, 2010

One of the critical problems identified with ‘peak oil’ – that point where stocks of petroleum begin to inexorably decline – is the resultant shortage and expense of aviation jet fuel. As traditional jet fuel sources decline, it’s bad enough for a world that’s knit together by (relatively) inexpensive air travel, but there’s another problem – the lack of an alternative source. Bio-fuels made from agricultural products simply do not have enough energy density to function as jet fuel. To address this problem – and find one of those inimitable ‘technological fixes’ – a team from the University of Wisconsin (Madison, USA) actually started with a problem of their own. More »

Posted in News: Alternative Energy | Tagged biomass, catalysts, formic acid, GVL, jet fuel, levulinic acid, peak oil | Leave a comment

Nanobubbles are really slick

News: Nanotechnology February 26, 2010

One thing nanotechnology can do, besides create new materials, is use some ‘old’ things in new ways. Take, for example, bubbles. Some bubbles are trapped air. Air repels water, or more specifically air and water don’t mix (immediately) so bubbles are formed. Thinking like a nanotechnologist: What if there were nano-sized bubbles trapped in a substrate, could this make a surface that is super water repellant? To find out, a team from Brookhaven National Laboratories (U.S.A.) created a surface in silicon with nano-cavities (that’s tiny pockets less than one thousandth the diameter of a human hair) – a trillion cavities on an otherwise flat surface. Then they used a surfactant (in this case, a waxy coating) to seal the cavities and forming nanobubbles. More »

Posted in News: Nanotechnology | Tagged nanobubbles, nanocavities, nanotechnology, Teflon, water-repellant, x-ray | Leave a comment

Quantum physics (like life?) in higher temperature entanglement

News: Quantum Physics February 25, 2010

It’s been ‘common knowledge’ in the physics community that experiments with quantum entanglement, that weird state where two objects share the same existence, can only take place at extremely low temperatures – roughly a maximum of 4 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. (That’s about -457F or –272C.) It therefore gives physicists something like what Americans call ‘the willies’ (shivers up and down the spine) to see studies from plant biologists indicating that photosynthesis uses some kind of quantum entanglement at room temperatures. (See the post SciTechStory: Quantum mechanics in photosynthesis, oh my.) Now a research team under Fernando Galve at The University of the Balearic Islands (Spain) adds to the mix by demonstrating quantum entanglement (in a physics lab) at much higher temperatures. More »

Posted in News: Quantum Physics | Tagged absolute zero, entanglement, Heisenberg uncertainty, Kelvin, quantum oscillators, quantum physics | 1 Comment

The Bloom Box fuel cell system

Impact: Alternative Energy February 25, 2010

Normally this would be a simple news item: Bloom Energy, Inc. (California, USA) introduces a new electric power producing fuel cell device – the Bloom Box. There would be some description: The Bloom Box uses inputs of methane-type fuel (from natural gas to bio-fuels), burns them at about 1000C, and with proprietary catalytic converters produces electrical energy. It’s a power plant in a relatively small box, the current model is about the size of a standard fridge, and produces about 100KW of electricity – enough to provide significant supply for, say, computer data centers. The units cost around $700,000, although mass production and much less expensive units are planned. End of story? Hardly.

For one thing, few products of its kind (or any kind) get a prime-time push from the respected CBS “60 Minutes” network television show, or have dignitaries standing around at the launch such as Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger of California and Gen. Colin Powell (a company board member). With about $400 million in venture capital behind it and some big name customers in front of it (WalMart, Google, FedEx, Staples, eBay), this brain child of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former NASA scientist, K.R. Sridhar, is surrounded with the kind of hype normally reserved for, well, Apple. For a product with a price in six figures? More »

Posted in Impact: Alternative Energy | Tagged alternative energy, Bloom Box, catalyst, ceramic, ethane, fuel cell, green energy, methane | Leave a comment

Ribozymes and the origin of life

News: Origin of Life February 24, 2010

It could be called the search for the origin of life, but instead of a sweeping theory (primordial soup and lightning), microbiologists are concentrating on the many pieces that, one way or another, came together to constitute ‘life.’ Some new research from a team at the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA) points to the smallest RNA enzyme ever known to produce a chemical reaction within a cell. Most cells have RNA with thousands of genetic units (nucleotides), but the research called for something simple: a ribozyme, a form of RNA that catalyzes chemical reactions, but has only five nucleotides. More »

Posted in News: Origin of Life | Tagged biochemistry, enzyme, microbiology, origin of life, primordial soup, proteins, ribozyme, RNA | Leave a comment

Small RNA: New pathways for gene regulation?

Impact: DNA Decoding February 24, 2010

Sometimes research discovers more than expected. (It could be called serendipity.) In this case, researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (Germany) were exploring the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which is a microscopic beasty that lives in the gut of about 50% of humanity. H. pylori, as it is abbreviated, has been linked to a number of major diseases – cancer, cardiovascular. So it’s a worthy target. Its genome was among the first to be sequenced, way back in 1997. Even then it was noticed that H. pylori didn’t seem to have enough genes to regulate its genetic transcription. Were some genes missing? What turned gene expression on and off?

These are the types of questions that beg for research, even for a field with more than its share of work to be done. The reason is that while exploring the peculiarities of H. pylori, it might also be possible to discover something more generally insightful. This, in fact, happened. More »

Posted in Impact: DNA Decoding | Tagged biochemistry, DNA, genetics, Helicobacter pylori, junk DNA, pathogen, RNA, sRNA, transcription | Leave a comment

New medical paradigm: Growing human organs in animals

News: Synthetic Biology February 23, 2010

The ability to manipulate genetics cuts in a number of ways. This way may sound a little strange: Take a mouse; implant human liver cells in it; watch them grow into a mouse-sized but human liver. It’s more complicated than that, but it works. There are reasons to do this. A lot of tests for new drugs, say for liver diseases, are never going to start with human test subjects – but a mouse with a ‘human’ liver, or one that functions just like it with human liver cells – that’s appropriate. In fact, liver diseases – especially Hepatitis-C – are very difficult to set up for experiment. Liver cells don’t take to growing in a dish, and small animals (e.g. mice, rats) can’t get Hepatitis-C. More »

Posted in News: Synthetic Biology | Tagged DNA, genetics, Hepatitis-C, liver cells, microbiology, NBTC, synthetic biology | Leave a comment

Follow-up: Another ‘junk DNA’ study

News: DNA Decoding February 23, 2010

The blog Science Life (University of Chicago Medical Center) has an excellent follow-up piece to the story about the discovery of non-coding DNA that contributes to heart disease (SciTechStory: More ‘junk DNA’ that actually does something) The Science Life post mentions that work and details another study done by the University of Chicago and the National Institute of Health (NIH, USA), which also considered the vast stretches of ‘junk DNA’ and decided to look for DNA switches – pieces of DNA that do not code for proteins, but instead are used to switch on or off protein building in heart related cells. More »

Posted in News: DNA Decoding | Tagged base pairs, chromosomes, DNA, genetics, heart cells, junk DNA, sequence | Leave a comment

Spaceport America, not far from Truth or Consequences

Spun: February 22, 2010

If you think that U.S. President Obama’s new initiative for space – not only for NASA, but also for the nascent private space industry – is a chimera, well, check out this article in the New York Times: A New Exit to Space Readies for Business.
The article, with tongue moving quickly from cheek to cheek, describes the milieu of what hopes to be the launching pad for the future (literally and figuratively) – Spaceport America. More »

Posted in Spun | Tagged entrepreneur, launch, NASA, orbit, private orbiters, rocket, space, Spaceport America | Leave a comment

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SciTech Birth Day: March 11

Nicolaas Bloembergen - 1920

SciTech Impact Areas

01. Climate Change
02. Alternative Energy
03. Computer Power
04. Nanotechnology
05. Stem Cells
06. Communications
07. Hydrocarbon Use
08. Clean Transportation
09. Online Information
10. DNA Decoding
11. Cell Biology
12. Proteomics
13. Quantum Physics
14. Genetic Modification
15. Degrading Oceans
16. Robotics
17. Nanomedicine
18. Neuroscience
19. Extending Lifespan
20. Overpopulation
21. Scientific Instruments
22. Synthetic Biology
23. Nuclear Physics
24. Artificial Intelligence
25. Body Implants
26. Major Disease Cures
27. Water Shortage
28. Species Loss
29. Brain Enhancement
30. Origin of Life
31. Sensor Technology
32. Pandemics
33. Exogenous Life
34. Dark Matters
35. Cosmology
36. Energy Storage
37. Virtual/Augmented Reality
38. Space Exploration
39. Impact Event

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