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Bacteriophage appears to be an alternative to antibiotics for fighting bacteria. An article (you have to pay to access it) in Discover Magazine by Peter Radetsky about bacteriophage was published in November, 1996. It was mentioned by a man named Caisey Harlingten in a Horizon documentary on the BBC, and seems to have been an important publication that set things into motion. What isn't mentioned in the transcript is that right at the end of the documentary, text appears that says the deal between the American company called Georgia Research, Inc. set up by Harlingten and the Eliava Institute fell apart.

Wired wrote a follow up article on the story. One of the disputes involved another man, Alexander Sulakvelidze, opposing the seemingly pointless aim to genetically engineering phages, which Harlingten wanted to do. This possibly has something to do with the fact that genetically engineered products are protected by patents and can be regulated by intellectual property laws, whereas natural phages are not. This is what Harlingten is up to now. He is trying to apply phage therapy to multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis . And this is what Sulakvelidze is up to now, applying phage therapy to livestock.

Evergreen State College and the Rowland Institute at Harvard have pages about bacteriophage. Phage therapy may have some side effects, however. Some types of phage carry genes that can actually make bacteria pathogenic (briefly mentioned at end of page). This has been observed in E. Coli as a response to antibiotics.

Bacteriophage appears to be an alternative to antibiotics for fighting bacteria. An article (you have to pay to access it) in Discover Magazine by Peter Radetsky about bacteriophage was published in November, 1996. It was mentioned by a man named Caisey Harlingten in a Horizon documentary on the BBC, and seems to have been an important publication that set things into motion. What isn't mentioned in the transcript is that right at the end of the documentary, text appears that says the deal between the American company called Georgia Research, Inc. set up by Harlingten and the Eliava Institute fell apart.

Wired wrote a follow up article on the story. One of the disputes involved another man, Alexander Sulakvelidze, opposing the seemingly pointless aim to genetically engineering phages, which Harlingten wanted to do. This possibly has something to do with the fact that genetically engineered products are protected by patents and can be regulated by intellectual property laws, whereas natural phages are not. This is what Harlingten is up to now. He is trying to apply phage therapy to multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis . And this is what Sulakvelidze is up to now, applying phage therapy to livestock.

Evergreen State College and the Rowland Institute at Harvard have pages about bacteriophage. Phage therapy may have some side effects, however. Some types of phage carry genes that can actually make bacteria pathogenic (briefly mentioned at end of page). This has been observed in E. Coli as a response to antibiotics.

There already is a viable plan.

It's raising the several billion dollars when any revenue is 10-15 years off that's proving to be the problem.

p

This is the process that Discover magazine published two articles about (one intoduction in May of 2003, and a one-page update in July of 2004)
Anything Into Oil.
Anything Into Oil (update.)

The first application that this process is being put to is the disposal of slaughterhouse waste (blood, guts, and bones) by turning them into fertilizer and fuel oil (at 85% energy efficiency!) I find this highly exciting, as it promises a future where an individual human's bio-load on the planet may be reduced by the reprocessing of the waste that he produces into resources that then don't need to be drawn from non-renewable sources.

I anxiously await reports of sucessful full-time operation of their 200-ton-a-day plant in Carthage, Missouri this Fall.

This is the process that Discover magazine published two articles about (one intoduction in May of 2003, and a one-page update in July of 2004)
Anything Into Oil.
Anything Into Oil (update.)

The first application that this process is being put to is the disposal of slaughterhouse waste (blood, guts, and bones) by turning them into fertilizer and fuel oil (at 85% energy efficiency!) I find this highly exciting, as it promises a future where an individual human's bio-load on the planet may be reduced by the reprocessing of the waste that he produces into resources that then don't need to be drawn from non-renewable sources.

I anxiously await reports of sucessful full-time operation of their 200-ton-a-day plant in Carthage, Missouri this Fall.

If I recall correctly, in the introduction or possibly the afterward of The Fountains of Paradise (at least in this edition), Clarke does indeed mention he was not the original idea man behind the space elevator, and goes on to give praise to Yuri Artsutanov.

The Wikipedia entry for "space elevator" mentions, though, that idea was first proposed by another Russian, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in 1895(!).

And finally, for those of you who might be interested, this month's Discover magazine has an all-to-brief article on the space elevator. However, being Discover, it is a bit of a fluff piece, but decent nonetheless.

Sounds like you ought to check out Discover magazine. They have lots of good stuff for those who are science literate, but don't want to get in over their heads.

The only thing I always read cover-to-cover is Discover.

I'll second the (July 04) Discover article, a summary of which is at their site. A full version may go up online in July. Quite the informative bit of work. It went a long way to convincing me it might be a good idea.

Local satellite cells residing outside the muscle fibers answer this call. First these muscle-specific stem cells proliferate by normal cell division, then some of their progeny fuse with the muscle fiber, contributing their nuclei to the cell. Both progrowth and antigrowth factors are involved in regulating this process. Satellite cells respond to insulinlike growth factor I, or IGF-I, by undergoing a greater number of cell divisions, whereas a different growth-regulating factor, myostatin, inhibits their proliferation.

Another article by Sweeney on the ethics of using gene threapy in athletes is in Discover. The main point here is that since you can drive overexpression of human IGF-1 injected directly into muscle (as opposed to the circulation), this is an essentially undetectable method for "doping" athletes.

Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.

Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.

Discover Magazine ran an interesting article on glassy metals back in their April issue, but to see the full article on-line you have to be a subscriber. However, if you can find someone who has a copy, it's a good read.

of course, to build it requires some brand spankin new materials so that it could support it's own weight.

I'm claiming no other knowlege than what I read in This article, but it appeared to cover everything I had questions aboot.

There's a lot more detail in the Discover article - it looks like this process could be a big deal. Enough to make us tree-huggers wet our pants.

The conspiracy theorist within me fears that these types of technologies will not take off because oil companies have so much power.

Here is the decent overview article.
Here is the article on deep ocean microbes.
Here is the article on killer lakes.

Before the Big Bang By Michael D. Lemonick Feb 2004 - Astronomy & Physics "Maverick cosmologists contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world ..."

Tell you what. If Slashdot is still around in five years, I'll post a follow up post. And in 2012 too.

In the mean time spend a few hours and read this book and this one.

Fact: there are at _best_ 1000 billion barrels of oil left that we know about and most oil geologists strongly suspect that the numbers have been significantly fudged higher since 1988.

Fact: new discoveries of oil have been a piddly 10 billion barrels a year for quite some time and dwindling. Last year there were only 8 billion new reserves discovered spread over 300 small, economically challenging fields.

We, as a global civilization have burned 1000 billion barrels since the turn of the century. We currently burn 80 billion barrels a year, and India and China are accelerating rapidly. In 2003 the USA imported 63% of their oil (over 10 billion barrels).

Anyone familiar with performance analysis of real-time systems and servers knows that as a rule of thumb you don't want to use more than 50% of your system resources, and at 80% usage an alarm should page you. The same thing applies here (it's a system ya know!), the cost of oil will sky-rocket long before we get to 50% of current reserves remaining. So, at 800 billion barrels left -- a somewhat realistic value, less than the optimists but significantly more than the dooms-dayers say, we have at _best_ ten years left before there is a significant economic disruption in the world.

A modern high-tech civilization barely 200 years old and we're going to be up against a serious energy watershed event within 10 years.

Bottom line, oil production peaked sometime between 2000 and 2003.

For all you Polyannas out there, there are two potential straws you can grasp onto for hope.

1. There is a school of thought that the oil and gas reserves are much higher and that the United States has been very deliberately encouraging this idea of a an impending oil crisis for their own ends. Ie, national security, pretext for war and empire building. There is some evidence (easy to find with a google search) that the US has been capping known good wells and pumping natural gas back into underground reservoirs for some time now.

2. There is another school of thought, initiated by the Russians that "fossil" fuels are not fossil fuels at all. Many of the newest wells are 3, 4 or even 5 miles deep, much deeper than any fossils, or ancient sea beds are to be found. There are two variations on this; one that the oil is primordial and seeps up from the depths, the other that the oil is produced by extremaphiles - bacteria deep in the earth's crust that live off of the heat, oxygen, carbon, sulfer in the rock and produce oil (google for abiotic oil).

On a related note, there was a story here on Slashdot not long ago about thermal depolymerization technology, if we can create oil in minutes why do we suppose the earth takes millions of years to do the same thing? Alternatively, if this technology is for real, shouldn't these plants be popping up everywhere? Keep an eye on its development as an indicator of crisis vs. business-as-usual.
Same thing regarding STMicros $0.20/watt solar cells.

No matter how you slice it, we're either rapidly running out of oil, or world governments have been engaging in a massive cover up. Take your pick. Once you adopt and incorporate either belief which meds to _you_ need? ;-)

See ya! Have fun while it lasts! :-)

Tinfoil hat Cassandra boy signing off.

Sincerely yours,
JSMS III

p.s.
With out trying to be too defensive, there are well known psychological studies that show that type B personalities and depressives

linkified

• discovered pentaquarks,
• maybe (or maybe not) found gravitons,
• discovered a new subatomic particle with theoretically impossible properties, and
• found evidence that space-time is actually smooth.

Although they can get cancer, not all animals have increasing cancer rates as they age, as humans do.

Can Turtles Live Forever?

It's not quite immortality, but it seems that cancer is 'just another disease' in some turtles, rather than the eventual destiny of long-lived humans that don't fall to senescence.

for more, see Discover on tweaking the theory of gravity, and Sky & Telescope on evidence against it.

You know, I recently read a Discover magazine in which just that topic was discussed. Gravity. There is a physicist named Moti Milgrom who in 1994 gave a talk at Cambridge University about the subject of gravity. He has a "tweak" for Newton's equations whose results predict just such a slow down. Here is the Discover Magazine article that discusses his findings. It is entitled nailing down gravity.

While Discover is not a technical publication by any stretch of the imagination, it is a fun read. Hope you enjoy it.

Unfortunately, until we change our voting system it will be [virtually] impossible to get a third-party president.

In the USA we use what is called a plurality vote. This means that you choose one person that you want from a list.

Other ways of voting include the following:
Approval Vote - check the box next to anyone you wouldn't mind seeing in office. As many or few as you like. The winner is the one with the highest total.
Borda Count - Similar to the aproval vote, but you rank your choices. Ranking can either start at a given number, i.e. rank your top five choices, or it could allow for the whole field. The winner is the one with the total number of points.

To use the previous ellection as an example, both of the above methods would allow someone like me to show my approval of Nader, Gore, and Bradly (and maybe even McCain). If we used one of those methods McCain would probably be president as he was generally like by most and seemed like a decent human being (for a republican at least ;-) ).

Using our plurality vote though, "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" as it removes a vote from Gore.

Another wrench thrown in (and which partially stems from the plurality vote and is completely exasperated as a problem by the plurality vote) is the primary system. In our primary system, the candidates must play to the extremes of their party, meaning that those who go to the general election are not the centrists who most of the country would be happy with. This invariably leads to our constant situation of having to choose between the lesser of two evils.

Whew. Discover Magazine had an excellent article on this which I got much of my info from.

Great post, but here's the corrected link to the Discover story...

http://www.discover.com/issues/may-03/features/fea toil/

This is likely, IMO, a much more economically viable investment than olfactory testing (which is a relatively impractical and elitist technology, at best). With the implimentation of the devices in the link above, people won't have to worry about the odors, anyway - or electricity.

As far as the intense nature of ranching and animal biproducts, I can personally attest to their vile nature. Cattle waste is by far a lesser offender than swine biproducts, however. Even human waste pales in comparrision to the foulness of swine biproducts.

Out here, in South Dakota, there are large hog barns spotted across the state. Many of them belong to Hutterite colonies (somewhat like a modern-agriculture, German version of the Amish people). Some are commercially run. All of them are the foulest thing you could imagine. They stink up the country for tens of miles in the direction of the wind - which, of course, varies in direction. People hate the things. Even in my old town, where there was a hog processing plant on the outskirts of town, and maybe 150 hogs a day passed through (just guessing, but I seem to recall such a statistic), there was massive stench - and these facilities were scoured daily, and had no perminant storage for the swine, so there wsan't any sort of waste storage concerns.

Your typical hog barn consists of a very sturdy, sterile barn stretching a couple hundred feet. Intense regulation is done to make sure nobody brings in any viruses or sicknesses, because pigs are incredibly sensitive to such things. Pens are washed out several times a day, etc. And yet the inside still stinks (done a little work for my dad, who as an engineer out here, has dealings with these folks from time to time for design purposes).

Then, there is a large pit in the ground several hundred feet away. In this pit, there is usually something that looks like bubbling mud. However, it's not. It's pig shit. Lots, and lots of it. There is enough methane and other such gasses coming from this pool to power a smallish town (a couple thousand?) I've heard, if it were to be harnessed in a fermentor. However, it isn't. They switch between two pools of shit over time, fill one up, go to the next, and let the first one rot off - let all the toxins essentially biodegrade and ferment out (IIRC, there is usually a very thick liner underneath these pools to prevent toxic waste leakage - seriously). Then, once one of hte pools has reached a certain PH, it can be sold for fertilizer, where it is deluted with water and spread on fields (being as it's still too toxic for straight application). I might also add that the toxins in an unfermented batch of this soup are strong enough to kill a man in a matter of minutes, if he were to fall in. There's be no hope in even trying to save them.

The actual strength of the odor is kind of hard to describe, since the odor is actually physically painful, even at a relative distance (half a mile or so?). It will burn your nostrils, all the moreso if you have sensitive skin or other such traits as a strong sense of smell. The whole process that occurs in the shit pools is mostly anoxidous. If any of you are familiar with with composting your own garbage, you've likely run into situations where you didn't turn the compost soon enough, and you ended up with obscenely foul white, yellow, or blue fungus growing between the layers - possibly a bad thing, because that's where things like anthrax like to breed. At any rate, the odor is similar to that, except that in this case, it's not things like rotting leaves, grass, eggshells, bannana peels, or apple rinds - it's pig shit. Pigs stink, and pig shit stinks, innordinately, even before fermentation. That's as close as I can get to describing it.

Needless to say, soething needs to be done about the stench of such facilities (as well as the feeble odor of cattle facilities). Harvesting the methane and other things to power local small communities would, in my opinion, be a very

We don't quite have the technology. We are missing a power system. There's nothing that provides enough power for long enough to be useful that can still be mounted on a person-sized powered suit. See this Discover article.

It takes 26 lbs. of corn to make a gallon of ethanol, with the benefit that we're only using solar energy that would have hit the earth in the same year, and not adding net carbon dioxide to the earth, as burning stuff out of the ground does.
It takes a lot of energy to produce ethanol. Either you're burning fossil fuels (increasing net CO2 emissions), or you're burning a lot of your potential ethanol. Did you actually read the article you linked to three posts up?

"According to the research from Cornell, you need about 140 gallons (530 liters) of fossil fuel to plant, grow and harvest an acre of corn."

So the acre of corn which produces 328 gallons (1241 liters) of ethanol requires burning 530 liters of gasoline (or 795 liters of ethanol) just to grow the corn. There goes 64% of your energy right there. By the time you factor in energy spent to distill, transport, and sell the ethanol, I would not be surprised if the whole exercise ended up as a net loss of energy.

Ethanol as a motor fuel is a crock. In the long run, we need practical fusion or orbital solar stations and electric or hydrogen-powered transportation, and in the short run, thermal depolymerization is a better process for turning organic stuff into fuel.

We're just starting to do that...used to be this process made poor quality oil and took as much energy as you got out of the resulting oil, but the new tech is 80% energy-efficient and makes a good product.

I may be stretching things a bit when I say "research". Here is a fledgling industry that turns pounds into gallons, not tons:
Not just research

This isn't theoretical, this is working technology that replicates the process that created the oil in the ground. So these numbers come from actual measurement of input and output. The Utah guys, I have to conclude, are full of it.

(By the way, fundamentally, TD is not a new technology, but before it was inefficient and poor quality. Now it's 80% energy efficient and makes good oil. A pilot plant is just now going into production, turning leftover turkey guts into fine #2 fuel oil.)

Anything Into Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.

According to the above article the U.S. could end its dependancy upon foreign oil and not have to worry about EVER running out.

Discover has an interesting article on how current waste products are begin turned into Texas lite crude. Too good to be true?

Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year

Here is the company's link.

I read an interesting article at Discover.com. Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year.

I think this is a huge step in the right direction, I'll be very interested to see what happens once the plant is online.

Here is a great article about thermal depolymerization. Apparently they opened a plant in May. I'll be interested to see how successful they are in a few months.

You're absolutely right on the northern ice caps melting having no effect on the water level of the Earth. However, there's also the south. Antarctica is a continent, so all that ice is trapped on land. Melting occuring at the south pole most certainly will affect the Earth's water level.

Even without the water level rising, there could be problems caused by adding that much freshwater into the ocean. Discover Magazine had an article some time ago about how this could disrupt the Gulf Stream, which is a significant force in distributing temperature, and thus lead to serious climate change.

It is likely that most large-scale monocultural industires can (economically) convert their waste products into something useful. Such innovation is occuring in the poultry industry now [see citations below]. However, I have deep seated doubt that any of these technologies will be implemented on a national scale until the majority of the populace reckognizes the need to use available resources more efficently.

Jouney to Fuel | Chicken Manure Fuel

Anything into Oil | Discover

And while you're at it, learn to make proper links:

Biomass
Turkey guts or Anything into oil
Gyromills

I agree that the BBC article is woefully short of details, like how much additional energy was released, and the like. But before rejecting the conclusion out of hand, keep in mind that we're not entirely sure about a lot of "core" facts about our own planetary neighbors:

You need that core in standard formation models before you can accrete the hydrogen and helium gas.

According to this space.com article from 2001, extrasolar gas giants are throwing doubt on the "accretion" model of planet formation:

In the traditional view, Jupiter first formed a rocky core several times the size of Earth, which then attracted a still larger outer envelope of gas. This process is known as "accretion."

If this is the case, the large gaseous planet would have taken a very long time -- current estimates range between 10 million and a billion years -- to develop by the gradual build-up of material.

However, recent observations of distant stars suggest that planets have at most a few million years to gather up as much dust and gas as they can before the protoplanetary disk that feeds them disappears. There simply isn't enough time for massive planets like Jupiter to form.

If these new theories (yes, just theories) are correct, then you have a lot of very dense Hydrogen and Helium held together by its own gravity, not a big, rocky core. This makes the gas giants just small, dirty versions of the sun.

Of course, there are those who go the other way... Iron-core Sun, anyone?

It's a great time to be interested in the sky... fewer and fewer of the questions I got "right" on the middle school science test would be correct today.

Watch this process turn your garbage into oil.

Then again, that may be a bit high a price to achieve sound location abilities.

Surprisingly this, too, has been done , albeit in a slightly more complex form.

Before anyone comments that this is an old technique that doesn't really work, read the article. There's been a breakthrough.

You need to unbold parents. It has been shown that the only *positive* *direct* contribution parents make to behavior is genetic--although it is possible for parents to fuck up their kids via neglect and abuse. (My parents are conservative fundamentalist Christians. Despite their efforts, I'm a moderate humanist/atheist. Go from there.)

The other big contribution to behavior is the child's peers, so maybe we should look at who they were hanging out with.

I would suggest you read this little blurb (or better yet, get the book): The blank slate.

This isn't really news -- except to the majority of people who listen to the ecological ideologues rather than checking out the actual data. It's been known for thirty or forty years that places with high background radiation (like Colorado, especially Pueblo and Grand Junction) have suspiciously low cancer rates, and that these cancer rates absolutely contradicted the EPA's most common assumption, of a completely linear dose-response rate. (That is, what is called the "conservative assumption" is that the response to low doses of radiation is linear because at doses above about 30 roentgen the response is linear.)

One interesting thing about this is that, if hormesis is true, as it appeaers, then all those people who have spent a small fortune clearing radon out of their basemants may have actually increased their chances of cancer.

Here's another link, this from Discover magazine.

Finding Martians is one thing, but why are people so excited about finding some bacteria living underground on Mars? What would that mean? That life doesn't require Earth? I guess that's interesting in the same way that Newton's Principia proved a lot of things people knew and used practically already.

I'm far more interested in either colonizing Mars or visiting nearby stars after we make contact with them. Yes, they're harder, but they would capture the public's attention and are achievable if the public is behind it.

From Discover magazine, a biology study indicates the tonal orientation of their languge gives a large number of them perfect pitch. It also indicates that perfect pitch can be learned given the appropriate environment. So while the parent post may look like a troll, the moderator didn't do their research.

by running an exterior light all night in the first place?

Light polluting scum.

If you find that interesting it's worth reading about a robot called WISOR that was built by a company called Honeybee Robotics. WISOR is uses for inspection and repair of high temperature and pressure steam pipes under the city of New York. It moves through the pipes like a very large inch worm.

There's even a movie (a really odd movie in fact) about it.

John.