I really don't see -- and am hoping to be enlightened by the Slashdot masses -- why it is so interesting if there really is water on Mars. I clearly understand that this may be an indication of simple forms of life, ie. microorganisms, inhabiting the planet, but what does this really do for humanity over the long run?
Does this lead people to think that the herculean effort of trying to terraform a planet like Mars is more feasible?
Does this lead credence to the concept of Mars previously having been inhabited by more complex organisms?
To point out a correction, insulin is naturally produced by the body. You must be referring to modern synthetic forms of insulin (Lyspro, Glargine) in your comment that insulin is unnatural.
Vulcan Scrap Metal Co. in Stamford, Connecticut is a remarkable source for used electronics, optics, cables, etc.. Although they historically dealt primarily in scrap metal, they began capitalizing on companies such as Perkin Elmer, National Semiconductor, etc.. folding their Connecticut facilities and looking for a quick way to unload masses of interesting stuff.
The really good stuff is usually located in the attic of the main office and you have to ask to see it. I grew up scouting through the place with my father as we built up a large home lab and have seen everything from defibrilators to turbopumps.
Their information:
Vulcan Scrap Metal Co, 60 Taff Ave, Stamford, CT 06902, (203) 357-1720
Hm.... Clean diesel - why? This would defeat the concept of diesel fuel which it provide a cheaper and less-refined petroleum product (C14 vs C8 for gasoline). I don't think cleaning up diesel is worth the energy you put into the cleaning process.
SOx is the least of the gaseous polutants that we have to worry about. Additionally, it would probably be easier and less costly to clean SOx out of a waste stream, then it would be to clean up thiols out of diesel.
There is a major shortsight to a hydrogen economy not mentioned in Schwartz' article. I apologize if this has already been mentioned and I have been too lazy to scroll through the replies.
Peter Schwartz neglects to mention something that is perhaps not immediately obvious - hydrogen is currently produced from petroleum. It is going to be extremely, extremely difficult to transition to a hydrogen economy while leaving petroleum behind. To do this is going to require a major advance in science - namely the development of an inorganic system for splitting water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. There have been many great minds working on this for years and currently the record for doing this is around 1% at best (based on the conversion of hydrogen from a single photon).
Clearly, a hydrogen economy devoid of an intimate connecting with fossil fuels is not going to be a reality any time in the near future.
The first way to begin easing the dependency on petroleum is to both decrease consumption and increase the efficiency of processes that consume energy. The first of these is obviously not a simple task. The second is. John Deutch (MIT) has argued that if all cars in the US were hybrid, we would reduce the daily consumption of petroleum by approximately 30% (I recall it would be around 3 million barrels/day vs 30 million). And this is just the start - think about all of the other technologies that could be improved by improving efficiency.
My point is not to shoot down the article, but simply to note that the switch to a hydrogen economy is absolutely going to be connected to petroleum - there is currently no other way to produce hydrogen as efficiently (currently steam reforming hovers around 60-80% in terms of the yield).
No - you are actually off. ABC has slanted their article in a way that gives one the impression that this farmer is just doing this on the side. If you think about the amount of time this guy spent troubleshitting his crap-powered biological fuel cell, you would realize that this has gone way beyond just being a byproduct of his farming ways.
The point others are making, and which you have missed, is that the time investment sunk into such a venture is a poor return on capital. He would have been much better off, as would his down-wind neighbors, having taking the years he has been experimenting with this and putting it into developing a much more efficient technology.
"This has to be the way of the future," Haubenschild said. "Industries are going to have to eventually be sustainable if we're to maintain our Earth as we see it today."
I couldn't disagree more and am surely not alone in thinking that stewing up a gnarly crap sludge at 100 degree for days is a step forward for renewable energy.
If you do a rough calculation of the efficiency of this energy scheme, it hovers around zero. This is for the obvious reason that the cow extracts around 98% of the "fuel" from a plant as it digests them. You would blow this crap cooker out of the water by growing plants on the same acreage and using their 1% quantum yield (of plants harvesting photons) to make a biological solar cell that could power something useful.
Then there is also the downside of the smell - those poor neighbors that live downwind...
Clearly bicycles would be at the very top of the list. Computers and software - yeah, yeah, yeah... they do their job. Cars - blah, blah, blah.. A truly innovative technology that will never cease in its importance is the bicycle.
In Western countries bicycles are more of a recreation than a real means of transportation. In far-eastern countries, millions and millions of people ride a bicycle every day for tranportation.
Only a few things come close to the feeling of liberation and freedom that accompany a good bike ride.
Kudos to Baron Karl von Drais....
Re:Singlet oxygen from immune cells!
on
Humans Make Ozone
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· Score: 1
It's mentioned in the original article (that singlet oxygen is produced en-route to the cellular production of ozone).
Singlet oxygen from immune cells!
on
Humans Make Ozone
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That immune cells have been found to produce singlet oxygen is much more interesting, I think, than the finding that bodies produce ozone.
Dude, if you thought that ozone is bad news, singlet oxygen is highly toxic to just about everything biological.
Actually a number of organisms have already developed resistance to vancomycin. Epothilone, and its derivatives, are the new antibiotics of last resort.
Not really - farmers are probably more to blame than doctors. The amount of oral antibiotics consumed by the agricultural industry would make your head spin.
If you are going to blame physicians, you will have to blame patients as well. It is all too common that patients stop taking an antibiotic when they feel better - instead they should be taking it for the prescribed amount of time which insures that no partially-resistant microorganisms survive.
Surely a chess computer is only as good as the person who programmed it?
This comment is dead on correct. No sorrow should be shed over Garry tying Deep Jr. A failure to win this series should not be translated into a blow to human intelligence by a computer. These games are, as was correctly pointed out in the above comment, simply about intelligence in a human vs human context. The computer runs iterations. Without a human to cleverly, and with the aid of a handfull of chess masters, program the computer, there would be no worthwhile matches. Although I am not a huge fan of Garry Kasparov, I commend him on keeping his cool this time around.
As far as more information on Lovley's study, there aren't many details floating around. The article still hasn't appeared in print in Science (possibly this week). I did find some press releases from UMass that shed a bit more light on their work:
While I found Liz Kalaugher's article to be well written, there are serious issues with the science that is being reported AND the unrealistic application of using this technology to clean up CFCs.
First - the self-assembly of solids at the interface of perfluorodecalin and water is not a new system - this area was pioneered by researchers at Harvard University. Thus the group at Uln is clearly reporting a phenomenon that is clearly not new. Add to this that they haven't even clearly characterized the phenomenon that they are claiming, which makes things more uninteresting.
Second - since when are CFCs anything like perfluorodecalin? This would be on par with comparing apples and oranges. If one compares the physical characterics of these molecules such as the dipole moment, solvation energy, etc.., it would become clear that they would be chemically unsimiliar and would hence behave differently.
In all reality this report represents yet another example of nano pie-in-the-sky.
Thanks to those that have clearly posted that regardless of whether this system could be used to clean CFCs it would be of little use - CFCs have been banned in most developed nations for years.
Let's see some articles on real nano work by those that are clearly pioneering this area - Charles Lieber, Hongkun Park, or Paul Alivasatos.
Re:my question to anyone who can answer it...
on
Examining Influenza
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· Score: 1
Yes, this is correct. Virulent microorganisms (those that infect humans) require a suitable host in order to survive and propogate. Without one, they would soon perish.
It would be a waste of time to work on a vaccine against the common cold. Vaccines are typically designed to target an immune response based on coat proteins (the antigen) displayed on the exterior of a microorganism.
Unfortunately, the high mutation rate of many microorganisms causes these coat proteins to dramatically change between successive generations, which would make a vaccine against one generation of a bug ineffective against another generation.
PNAS usually waits a few months before putting an electronic version of a volume on the web to subscribers. It is unfortunately an annoying fact of life.
The article is interesting, but falls a bit short of describing why this study describing how viruses package themselves and spread is so important (it does briefly mention the influenza pandemic of 1918 which is believed to have killed tens of millions worldwide, thereby illustrating the devastation of influenza).
What the article fails to mention is how strains of influenza can become particularly virulent against humans. Traditionally, as in the 1918 pandemic, this occurs when a strain of swine and avian influenza combine. The likelyhood of this recombination occurring to produce a lethal strain is low (consider that the Spanish Influenza was brought about by a strain of avian influenza believed to originate in China and a swine strain believed to have originated from another area of the world). However, statistics show that this recombination occurs regularly enough to pose a serious risk and that it is only a matter of time...
If one traces outbreaks of influenza worldwide, it becomes clear that every ~20 years, an outbreak occurs due to a recombination of swine and avian viruses that leads to the infection of humans.
Let's hope that scientific strides, such as that made in this recent PNAS article, can be used to nip future viruses in the bud, or be used to make new vaccines.
Actually, this is quite incorrect. The half-life of carbon-14 has nothing to do with the robustness of ancient DNA samples (C-14 is really only used for carbon dating). Isotopes of carbon with masses of 12 and 13 are entirely stable and would continue to exist millions of year after dinosaurs departed this earth.
No, I think you have completely manages to miss the point of Dyson's article. It is not an article geared to impress the masses on his command of science, rather, it is one meant to point out the serious, very serious, flaws that people like Bill Joy and Crichton have with their outlook on nanotechnology. When you read into their arguments and "forecasts" about nano, it becomes clear that Joy and Crichton really don't have an inkling on what they are talking about. The result of their writings, based more on emotion than hard logic, is the disillusionment of the masses against a science that is not properly understood.
I find it of great annoyance that a popular author, such as Crichton, is willing to put himself in the position of being one to predict how the future of nano will unfold. The reality is that by applying fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, one can quickly dismiss the dream-land nanotechnology scenarious proposed by people such as Drexler, Joy, and Crichton, as the stuff that fairytales are made of.
Kudos to Freeman Dyson!
Uncle Tungsten
on
Uncle Tungsten
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· Score: 0, Redundant
This book is tremendously well written - Oliver Sacks truly has a brilliant mind and was a character as an adolescent.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this lead people to think that the herculean effort of trying to terraform a planet like Mars is more feasible?
Does this lead credence to the concept of Mars previously having been inhabited by more complex organisms?
Does this...
To point out a correction, insulin is naturally produced by the body. You must be referring to modern synthetic forms of insulin (Lyspro, Glargine) in your comment that insulin is unnatural.
The really good stuff is usually located in the attic of the main office and you have to ask to see it. I grew up scouting through the place with my father as we built up a large home lab and have seen everything from defibrilators to turbopumps.
Their information: Vulcan Scrap Metal Co, 60 Taff Ave, Stamford, CT 06902, (203) 357-1720
SOx is the least of the gaseous polutants that we have to worry about. Additionally, it would probably be easier and less costly to clean SOx out of a waste stream, then it would be to clean up thiols out of diesel.
Just my 0.02$
Peter Schwartz neglects to mention something that is perhaps not immediately obvious - hydrogen is currently produced from petroleum. It is going to be extremely, extremely difficult to transition to a hydrogen economy while leaving petroleum behind. To do this is going to require a major advance in science - namely the development of an inorganic system for splitting water to produce hydrogen and oxygen. There have been many great minds working on this for years and currently the record for doing this is around 1% at best (based on the conversion of hydrogen from a single photon).
Clearly, a hydrogen economy devoid of an intimate connecting with fossil fuels is not going to be a reality any time in the near future.
The first way to begin easing the dependency on petroleum is to both decrease consumption and increase the efficiency of processes that consume energy. The first of these is obviously not a simple task. The second is. John Deutch (MIT) has argued that if all cars in the US were hybrid, we would reduce the daily consumption of petroleum by approximately 30% (I recall it would be around 3 million barrels/day vs 30 million). And this is just the start - think about all of the other technologies that could be improved by improving efficiency.
My point is not to shoot down the article, but simply to note that the switch to a hydrogen economy is absolutely going to be connected to petroleum - there is currently no other way to produce hydrogen as efficiently (currently steam reforming hovers around 60-80% in terms of the yield).
You are too quick to correct plalaonde - get out yer glasses and read it again' grampa
The point others are making, and which you have missed, is that the time investment sunk into such a venture is a poor return on capital. He would have been much better off, as would his down-wind neighbors, having taking the years he has been experimenting with this and putting it into developing a much more efficient technology.
I couldn't disagree more and am surely not alone in thinking that stewing up a gnarly crap sludge at 100 degree for days is a step forward for renewable energy.
If you do a rough calculation of the efficiency of this energy scheme, it hovers around zero. This is for the obvious reason that the cow extracts around 98% of the "fuel" from a plant as it digests them. You would blow this crap cooker out of the water by growing plants on the same acreage and using their 1% quantum yield (of plants harvesting photons) to make a biological solar cell that could power something useful.
Then there is also the downside of the smell - those poor neighbors that live downwind...
In Western countries bicycles are more of a recreation than a real means of transportation. In far-eastern countries, millions and millions of people ride a bicycle every day for tranportation.
Only a few things come close to the feeling of liberation and freedom that accompany a good bike ride.
Kudos to Baron Karl von Drais....
It's mentioned in the original article (that singlet oxygen is produced en-route to the cellular production of ozone).
Dude, if you thought that ozone is bad news, singlet oxygen is highly toxic to just about everything biological.
Actually a number of organisms have already developed resistance to vancomycin. Epothilone, and its derivatives, are the new antibiotics of last resort.
If you are going to blame physicians, you will have to blame patients as well. It is all too common that patients stop taking an antibiotic when they feel better - instead they should be taking it for the prescribed amount of time which insures that no partially-resistant microorganisms survive.
This comment is dead on correct. No sorrow should be shed over Garry tying Deep Jr. A failure to win this series should not be translated into a blow to human intelligence by a computer. These games are, as was correctly pointed out in the above comment, simply about intelligence in a human vs human context. The computer runs iterations. Without a human to cleverly, and with the aid of a handfull of chess masters, program the computer, there would be no worthwhile matches. Although I am not a huge fan of Garry Kasparov, I commend him on keeping his cool this time around.
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/archive/2002/01170 2electrodes.html
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/archive/2002/11130 2harbor.htm
First - the self-assembly of solids at the interface of perfluorodecalin and water is not a new system - this area was pioneered by researchers at Harvard University. Thus the group at Uln is clearly reporting a phenomenon that is clearly not new. Add to this that they haven't even clearly characterized the phenomenon that they are claiming, which makes things more uninteresting.
Second - since when are CFCs anything like perfluorodecalin? This would be on par with comparing apples and oranges. If one compares the physical characterics of these molecules such as the dipole moment, solvation energy, etc.., it would become clear that they would be chemically unsimiliar and would hence behave differently.
In all reality this report represents yet another example of nano pie-in-the-sky.
Thanks to those that have clearly posted that regardless of whether this system could be used to clean CFCs it would be of little use - CFCs have been banned in most developed nations for years.
Let's see some articles on real nano work by those that are clearly pioneering this area - Charles Lieber, Hongkun Park, or Paul Alivasatos.
Yes, this is correct. Virulent microorganisms (those that infect humans) require a suitable host in order to survive and propogate. Without one, they would soon perish.
Unfortunately, the high mutation rate of many microorganisms causes these coat proteins to dramatically change between successive generations, which would make a vaccine against one generation of a bug ineffective against another generation.
PNAS usually waits a few months before putting an electronic version of a volume on the web to subscribers. It is unfortunately an annoying fact of life.
What the article fails to mention is how strains of influenza can become particularly virulent against humans. Traditionally, as in the 1918 pandemic, this occurs when a strain of swine and avian influenza combine. The likelyhood of this recombination occurring to produce a lethal strain is low (consider that the Spanish Influenza was brought about by a strain of avian influenza believed to originate in China and a swine strain believed to have originated from another area of the world). However, statistics show that this recombination occurs regularly enough to pose a serious risk and that it is only a matter of time...
If one traces outbreaks of influenza worldwide, it becomes clear that every ~20 years, an outbreak occurs due to a recombination of swine and avian viruses that leads to the infection of humans.
Let's hope that scientific strides, such as that made in this recent PNAS article, can be used to nip future viruses in the bud, or be used to make new vaccines.
I had a little bird It's name was enza
I opened the window
And in-flu-enza
Actually, this is quite incorrect. The half-life of carbon-14 has nothing to do with the robustness of ancient DNA samples (C-14 is really only used for carbon dating). Isotopes of carbon with masses of 12 and 13 are entirely stable and would continue to exist millions of year after dinosaurs departed this earth.
Well, yeah, I agree. I was thinking more along the lines of nano than dinosaurs.
No, I think you have completely manages to miss the point of Dyson's article. It is not an article geared to impress the masses on his command of science, rather, it is one meant to point out the serious, very serious, flaws that people like Bill Joy and Crichton have with their outlook on nanotechnology. When you read into their arguments and "forecasts" about nano, it becomes clear that Joy and Crichton really don't have an inkling on what they are talking about. The result of their writings, based more on emotion than hard logic, is the disillusionment of the masses against a science that is not properly understood. I find it of great annoyance that a popular author, such as Crichton, is willing to put himself in the position of being one to predict how the future of nano will unfold. The reality is that by applying fundamental rules of physics and chemistry, one can quickly dismiss the dream-land nanotechnology scenarious proposed by people such as Drexler, Joy, and Crichton, as the stuff that fairytales are made of. Kudos to Freeman Dyson!
This book is tremendously well written - Oliver Sacks truly has a brilliant mind and was a character as an adolescent.