Let me qualify my statement. I am a professor of chemistry at a top ten school in the US.
The materials-related claims that are made in the rebuttal are far-fetched. How can the interviewee state that 'we could build one today' if we can, at best, produce several grams of CNTs using the Smalley technology, which is probably as good as it gets right now. Where would the other nanotubes come from? Aliens?
I agree that this is science fiction not science. Chance favors the prepared mind and this is a case that, as many readers have pointed out, is best characterized by a group of developers waiting for miracles to spontaneously occur.
First. Who on earth is going to introduce a potentially pathogenic strain of bacteria into their bodily fluids--for example cerebral spinal fluids. I have no problem with science fiction, but let's keep the distinction between science/science fiction obvious.
Second. This idea of harnessing bacteria to move things around has already been done several times over now. The first demonstration was by Hiratsuka with Mycoplasma. Then Berg (Harvard) had a different approach with Serratia. Then Whitesides (Harvard) used Chlamydomonas. In fact, Wired magazine had a short summary of much of this work in the December 2006 issue.
Correct me if I am wrong but I don't see why this article has been slashdotted. Whoever checked off on this article needs to read up on science a little more closely.
It is toxic because it gets converted into methanol and the body oxidizes it to formaldehyde which cross links proteins. It was probably toxic for the cow, but not for the diner.
First, I ride a bike, so unfortunately, there is no comparison.
Second of all, no, your diesel really doesn't run cleaner than a gas-powered ICE. Unless you are driving a Mercedes that is only a year or two old, then no, your emission dumps out more particulate matter than a gasoline engine. Diesel engines don't combust the fuel completely. They are messy. You have probably never seen the puff of black smoke that escapes your exhaust when you drive off from a red light, but everyone else behind you has.
Third, 'spewing' is a strong word. It implies (arrogantly) that the person making the statement doesn't know what they are talking about when they post. I am a chemist and I understand combustion like you obviously don't understand your car.
We need the EPA to OK the use of nanoparticles in cleaning agents, and yet, diesel engines spew out metric tons of organic nanoparticles on a daily basis. It seems a bit ironic.
Apologies if this comment was already made but I was unwilling to spend an entire afternoon reading through all of the replies/comments.
What I find so troubling about this article, and several others that New Scientist has posted on this topic in the past six months, is that we are going to reach a point (at the present trajectory) where each one of us will be weighed in productivity against a peer or colleague that is taking Modafinil. Clearly one can produce more work per unit of time (particularly if that unit of time is >24 hrs) on modafinil. Those taking modafinil will have a 'competitive' edge that will motivate others to take the drug and so on and so forth. It is the sleep equivalent of steroids (and performance enhancing drugs) in sports or stockpiling nuclear warheads.
However, the real issue at hand is how many of us are willing to improve our productivity by taking a drug for which we know absolutely zero about in terms of its long term impact on human health. If people continue to plunge into physiological uncertainty by self-prescribing Modafinil, how will it impact us: that is, the group that refuses to even the playing field by sacrificing our long-term health and mental stability.
I appreciate the bravado, but this philosophy is nuts. I recently shut down an old email address at Harvard because I was getting >200 spams a day. Do you know how much work it becomes to sift through 200 messages a day to find the one legit message? There is nothing more frustrating than starting the day spending 10 minutes deleting spam.
I am a professor at a large highly ranked national university and I hire students that can code (high school or whatever). I have tons of projects I would like to work on that require programming (typically in Matlab but also in other programs), I don't have time to do it all myself, and I am in a department in the life sciences where we don't necessarily get students who can program.
I agree with Czyl. Contact a professor at a local college/university and I think that you will find an opportunity. Make sure you come across as being motivated, smart, and dependable.
You know, I think you are wrong. It isn't laziness, it is greed. I found this story disturbing because apparently this guy has forgotten that his JOB is to educate students (especially in an area such as English, where, let's be honest, your research is going to have very little impact on society).
I am going to email this guy now. let's flood his inbox
No, it is different. In the story a year ago, a korean group found that if you suppress telomerase in cancer cells--an enzyme that makes cells 'immortal' by continually adding repeats of bases on to the ends of chromosomes--the cells die. the summary on the slashdot page is not exactly correct--telomerase is not an enzyme specific to cancer cells.
In this present work, it is a gene that, in a way, computes a differential equation--weighing the importance of replacing cells using stem cells from its cache against the risk that the replication of cells will result in a cancerous cell.
"To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate."
it is a fundamentally different story and is interesting.
I, on the other hand, think these ads are brilliant. Of course they are bending the truth--don't most ads? When you see a commercial for a Saab (such as those they looped over and over during the tour de france), do you really think that the Saab can outpace six fighter jets? no, of course not. They do an excellent job poking fun at PCs. And why not? It is fun. If the world were divided into IBM and Apple (as the market nearly was long ago), you can bet IBM would be dealing the cards right back at Apple.
I look forward to seeing more. In terms of entertainment value and amusement, they are an A, possibly an A+.
i would like to point out that chemists have been doing these experiments for ages--the difference is that chemists typically don't document the steps and posting them on the web.
a typical experiment (and one that has been repeated many, many times by many different people) is to pull a 1 lb brick of sodium out of a container of mineral oil and toss it into the charles river as you are walking over one of the bridges late at night.
i agree with the other comments about the shameless promotion of products. wrong venue. and since when did it become reasonable to slashdot ones own work/page/poster/anything?
Why don't they give an estimate for the conversion of algae to biodiesel? The reason is, that if you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much 'biofuel' you get out of a single cell based on its lipid membrane (you can even factor in an order of magnitude higher lipid if you are feeling quite generous), and you scale that up to the number of cells you typically get in a liquid culture growing at log phase, you end up with a number that is miniscule. In other words, a lake full of algae produces, harvested once, produces on the order of a micromole (!!!!) of 'biodiesel' that then has to be reformed (reduced) to produce hydrocarbons for combustion. I did this calculation once on a train two or three years ago and was amazed at how low the number was. With a micromole of alkane you could keep a cigarette lighter lit for maybe a few seconds.
I wanted to read more about the process, since I am very skeptical, so I fingered Berzin at MIT -- not very surprising that nobody exists at MIT by that name (*everyone* at MIT is listed on their directory).
As far as fixing CO2 goes -- plants do it just fine. You don't have to go to the trouble of growing up massive amounts of algae just to fix CO2. And actually, plants are much more efficient b/c of the lower solubility of CO2 in water versus in air (and mass transport, diffusion, etc..), so we would all be better off planting more trees than growing gigantic vats of algae.
This article has about as much creditability as the prior article on producing current using trees. You can get a volt out of a lemon, but the *current* is extremely low, so the overall power produced is essentially zero.
-Doug
for the most interesting stuff, see:
Drew Endy or Tom Knight (MIT)
James Collins (Boston University)
Michael Elowitz (Princeton)
Stanislas Leibler (Rockefeller University)
if you read the article (Langmuir) and then read what new scientist wrote, you can see that they screwed up by writing that it is possible to pattern single bacteria. the article hints that this might be the direction that the scientists are moving, but that they aren't at this level yet.
Organisms that reduce other metals have been known for a long time - for example mercury. There are already programs using these sorts of bioorganisms for detoxifying heavy metal-containing soil and water.
they actually do "tip" - tip usually refers to inducing an electronic state from lower to higher energy. when a nuclei is excited from a lower state to a higher state using RF, the nuclei subsequently experiences decay in which relaxation occurs back to the lower energy state and RF is emitted at a different frequency.
Good point, but you have to consider that 6 yrs ago laptops were hovering close in size to that of a desktop and weren't nearly as fast. Apple's design was clearly a unique move.
It was the computer that brought Apple back from the duldrums. Six years ago it was a revolutionary move to bundle the components like the classic Mac.
The correct URL for a previous description of McClintock's work is the following 1998 ABC article - http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/living/DailyNe ws/pulse_sexsmells0328.html.
I was surprised to read this CNN article from a team at Penn who have apparently done nothing more than to reproduce a set of experiments that were carried out in 1987 by Martha McClintock's group (http://cns.bsd.uchicago.edu/faculty/mMcClintock.h tml) at the University of Chicago. You can read the gist of their experiments in a Newsweek article dated 1/12/87 (http://www.athenainstitute.com/mediaarticles/news week.html)
Slashdot Mirror
Let me qualify my statement. I am a professor of chemistry at a top ten school in the US. The materials-related claims that are made in the rebuttal are far-fetched. How can the interviewee state that 'we could build one today' if we can, at best, produce several grams of CNTs using the Smalley technology, which is probably as good as it gets right now. Where would the other nanotubes come from? Aliens? I agree that this is science fiction not science. Chance favors the prepared mind and this is a case that, as many readers have pointed out, is best characterized by a group of developers waiting for miracles to spontaneously occur.
First. Who on earth is going to introduce a potentially pathogenic strain of bacteria into their bodily fluids--for example cerebral spinal fluids. I have no problem with science fiction, but let's keep the distinction between science/science fiction obvious.
Second. This idea of harnessing bacteria to move things around has already been done several times over now. The first demonstration was by Hiratsuka with Mycoplasma. Then Berg (Harvard) had a different approach with Serratia. Then Whitesides (Harvard) used Chlamydomonas. In fact, Wired magazine had a short summary of much of this work in the December 2006 issue.
Correct me if I am wrong but I don't see why this article has been slashdotted. Whoever checked off on this article needs to read up on science a little more closely.
The technology in this article about MIT research has been slashdotted at least one other time in the last 12-24 months. See, for example: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/1 1/1718256
It is toxic because it gets converted into methanol and the body oxidizes it to formaldehyde which cross links proteins. It was probably toxic for the cow, but not for the diner.
First, I ride a bike, so unfortunately, there is no comparison. Second of all, no, your diesel really doesn't run cleaner than a gas-powered ICE. Unless you are driving a Mercedes that is only a year or two old, then no, your emission dumps out more particulate matter than a gasoline engine. Diesel engines don't combust the fuel completely. They are messy. You have probably never seen the puff of black smoke that escapes your exhaust when you drive off from a red light, but everyone else behind you has. Third, 'spewing' is a strong word. It implies (arrogantly) that the person making the statement doesn't know what they are talking about when they post. I am a chemist and I understand combustion like you obviously don't understand your car.
We need the EPA to OK the use of nanoparticles in cleaning agents, and yet, diesel engines spew out metric tons of organic nanoparticles on a daily basis. It seems a bit ironic.
What I find so troubling about this article, and several others that New Scientist has posted on this topic in the past six months, is that we are going to reach a point (at the present trajectory) where each one of us will be weighed in productivity against a peer or colleague that is taking Modafinil. Clearly one can produce more work per unit of time (particularly if that unit of time is >24 hrs) on modafinil. Those taking modafinil will have a 'competitive' edge that will motivate others to take the drug and so on and so forth. It is the sleep equivalent of steroids (and performance enhancing drugs) in sports or stockpiling nuclear warheads.
However, the real issue at hand is how many of us are willing to improve our productivity by taking a drug for which we know absolutely zero about in terms of its long term impact on human health. If people continue to plunge into physiological uncertainty by self-prescribing Modafinil, how will it impact us: that is, the group that refuses to even the playing field by sacrificing our long-term health and mental stability.
I appreciate the bravado, but this philosophy is nuts. I recently shut down an old email address at Harvard because I was getting >200 spams a day. Do you know how much work it becomes to sift through 200 messages a day to find the one legit message? There is nothing more frustrating than starting the day spending 10 minutes deleting spam.
I am a professor at a large highly ranked national university and I hire students that can code (high school or whatever). I have tons of projects I would like to work on that require programming (typically in Matlab but also in other programs), I don't have time to do it all myself, and I am in a department in the life sciences where we don't necessarily get students who can program. I agree with Czyl. Contact a professor at a local college/university and I think that you will find an opportunity. Make sure you come across as being motivated, smart, and dependable.
And Harvard too
You know, I think you are wrong. It isn't laziness, it is greed. I found this story disturbing because apparently this guy has forgotten that his JOB is to educate students (especially in an area such as English, where, let's be honest, your research is going to have very little impact on society). I am going to email this guy now. let's flood his inbox
No, it is different. In the story a year ago, a korean group found that if you suppress telomerase in cancer cells--an enzyme that makes cells 'immortal' by continually adding repeats of bases on to the ends of chromosomes--the cells die. the summary on the slashdot page is not exactly correct--telomerase is not an enzyme specific to cancer cells. In this present work, it is a gene that, in a way, computes a differential equation--weighing the importance of replacing cells using stem cells from its cache against the risk that the replication of cells will result in a cancerous cell. "To offset the increasing risk of cancer as a person ages, the gene gradually reduces the ability of stem cells to proliferate." it is a fundamentally different story and is interesting.
I, on the other hand, think these ads are brilliant. Of course they are bending the truth--don't most ads? When you see a commercial for a Saab (such as those they looped over and over during the tour de france), do you really think that the Saab can outpace six fighter jets? no, of course not. They do an excellent job poking fun at PCs. And why not? It is fun. If the world were divided into IBM and Apple (as the market nearly was long ago), you can bet IBM would be dealing the cards right back at Apple. I look forward to seeing more. In terms of entertainment value and amusement, they are an A, possibly an A+.
i would like to point out that chemists have been doing these experiments for ages--the difference is that chemists typically don't document the steps and posting them on the web.
a typical experiment (and one that has been repeated many, many times by many different people) is to pull a 1 lb brick of sodium out of a container of mineral oil and toss it into the charles river as you are walking over one of the bridges late at night.
i agree with the other comments about the shameless promotion of products. wrong venue. and since when did it become reasonable to slashdot ones own work/page/poster/anything?
Why don't they give an estimate for the conversion of algae to biodiesel? The reason is, that if you do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much 'biofuel' you get out of a single cell based on its lipid membrane (you can even factor in an order of magnitude higher lipid if you are feeling quite generous), and you scale that up to the number of cells you typically get in a liquid culture growing at log phase, you end up with a number that is miniscule. In other words, a lake full of algae produces, harvested once, produces on the order of a micromole (!!!!) of 'biodiesel' that then has to be reformed (reduced) to produce hydrocarbons for combustion. I did this calculation once on a train two or three years ago and was amazed at how low the number was. With a micromole of alkane you could keep a cigarette lighter lit for maybe a few seconds. I wanted to read more about the process, since I am very skeptical, so I fingered Berzin at MIT -- not very surprising that nobody exists at MIT by that name (*everyone* at MIT is listed on their directory). As far as fixing CO2 goes -- plants do it just fine. You don't have to go to the trouble of growing up massive amounts of algae just to fix CO2. And actually, plants are much more efficient b/c of the lower solubility of CO2 in water versus in air (and mass transport, diffusion, etc..), so we would all be better off planting more trees than growing gigantic vats of algae. This article has about as much creditability as the prior article on producing current using trees. You can get a volt out of a lemon, but the *current* is extremely low, so the overall power produced is essentially zero. -Doug
for the most interesting stuff, see: Drew Endy or Tom Knight (MIT) James Collins (Boston University) Michael Elowitz (Princeton) Stanislas Leibler (Rockefeller University)
if you read the article (Langmuir) and then read what new scientist wrote, you can see that they screwed up by writing that it is possible to pattern single bacteria. the article hints that this might be the direction that the scientists are moving, but that they aren't at this level yet.
yup. is there shame in slashdotting yourself? i read slashdot and i do science.
Organisms that reduce other metals have been known for a long time - for example mercury. There are already programs using these sorts of bioorganisms for detoxifying heavy metal-containing soil and water.
they actually do "tip" - tip usually refers to inducing an electronic state from lower to higher energy. when a nuclei is excited from a lower state to a higher state using RF, the nuclei subsequently experiences decay in which relaxation occurs back to the lower energy state and RF is emitted at a different frequency.
atoms do not spin on axes. you are mistaking atoms for nuclei - it is nuclei that give rise to MRI phenomenon.
Good point, but you have to consider that 6 yrs ago laptops were hovering close in size to that of a desktop and weren't nearly as fast. Apple's design was clearly a unique move.
It indeed is a sad day...
I was surprised to read this CNN article from a team at Penn who have apparently done nothing more than to reproduce a set of experiments that were carried out in 1987 by Martha McClintock's group (http://cns.bsd.uchicago.edu/faculty/mMcClintock.h tml) at the University of Chicago. You can read the gist of their experiments in a Newsweek article dated 1/12/87 (http://www.athenainstitute.com/mediaarticles/news week.html)