Energy technology can be produced by private industry, used by private industry, and will be traded on the free market to everyone. Even if a Chinese company develops the technology, we (and others) will be able to purchase it and benefit from it.
Will we be able to buy the technology itself? Or only the energy that it produces? If I invented a really workable source of clean renewable energy, and I was interested in extracting all the personal benefit from it that I could - I wouldn't sell the goose, just the golden eggs.
This is the concern here. Technologies that companies develop for economic gain (or political/military gain, in the case of a nationally-owned company) do not have to be sold directly. Computer chip makers don't sell you the fab or information on their lithography process - they sell you the product. There's nothing of xenophobia or nationalism in this - American companies act the same way. (Companies also trade the technology, and this also benefits the consumer - but not in the scenario where I buy the details to Intel's i7 and try to make it home.)
Whoever develops technology that really makes "alternative energy" workable (and can implement it reliably, and bring the energy to market at a price that drastically undercuts any competition) would - will? - have very substantial economic power. And there will be nothing at all that requires them to share that technology - even in this country, and still less in some others.
Re:One of the most un-American things I've ever re
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The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 1
"Making... a job doing what you love" involves finding someone who's got money and convincing them that your work (what you love) is worth spending their money on. In other words, persuading someone to fund you because you're needed.
There's nothing, technically, stopping smart scientists or engineers from doing exactly that, and in fact some have done so - they've collected donations to start a research institute. It's a lot more rare than getting VC to start a company that makes something technical, for the reasons that you yourself (and others) already gave.
That said - the strategy of "strike out on your own, dazzle people into helping you create a job for yourself doing basic research" is difficult for most scientists to imagine, perhaps partly because of how we're trained: by collaboration and learning directly from others. "Lone wolf" self-teaching works well in some fields, but only occasionally in science.
That's interesting, can you give me a list of useful scientific accomplishments that rely on the Theory of Evolution?
Yes: medicine.
Bzzt. "Medicine" is when you take a list of symptoms, look for the immediate cause (a germ, a nutrient deficiency, an imbalance, a defect in anatomy, a new growth or lack of growth), and figure out how to remove the symptoms by removing the cause. The practice of medicine is much more similar to repairing a car than it is to "science". (Scientific research in medicine does exist, of course, but either as statistics on which treatments are effective, or as an offshoot of fundamental research on biology or biochemistry.)
A "theory of evolution", generically stated, may well help to explain why that particular cause is possible. It tries to explain the origin of that particular germ, the reason why that nutrient is needed, or the reason why this particular organ in the human animal is like a similar structure in the fruit bat.
Answers to "where did this tissue ultimately come from?" have very little to do with keeping it in good repair.
I'm a chemistry prof, currently teaching the "general chemistry for science majors" track at a comprehensive university. (So, these aren't the most brilliant students ever, but they're not stupid; most did take at least one chem class in HS, and about half took Honors or AP level.)
We teach them spreadsheets in lab, and they pick it up fairly quickly. The best way for most of them is by peer example, which is why it works better teaching that in a lab setting. We expect to teach them spreadsheets, even the engineering students.
If you really want to help your students learn chemistry by using technology, then focus on what they're worst at. You *are* keeping records on how well they do on different concepts or types of questions, right? (There's an excellent use for "spreadsheets in the classroom", even if it's just behind the scenes.) Use that data to identify one or two concepts per year. Maybe computers could be used to animate gas molecules to help them picture kinetic theory. Maybe computers could be used to do nice "3D" displays of crystal structures. Or maybe the easiest and most effective way to get that across would be with a hands-on model, or a game.
Students in the first semester chem class - and again, these are STEM majors, many of them in calc/precalc for math - are weak on some very basic concepts: Units & unit conversions. The mole. Names of ions - it's astonishing that some of them don't seem able to understand that there's a difference between words like "chlorite" and "chlorate" or "sulfate" and "sulfide". (Then again, they're just as insensitive to errors in English spelling.)
Teach them how to take "the chemistry" in a problem and decide whether it's better to express that relationship in math, or to analyze it in a qualitative ("cartoon picture in my head") sense. Help them learn to pick the right formula, plug in the given values in the right spots, and manipulate it to get the right answer. Help them start to look for patterns in different kinds of problems - "isotopic abundance problems" and "density of a mixture of two liquids" are indistinguishable once you strip off the chemistry and start working them algebraically, but it takes some of them literally forever to see that they aren't radically different kinds of problems. Instead of expanding coverage, it might even help to reduce coverage - drop a couple of chapters if it gives them more time to really understand the basics. What's the point in getting them turned on by making nanotubes in lab or whatever other sexy demo/lab project you can come up with, if they go off to college and discover they're already behind from the first week of classes?
Would computers help with that? Sure. Some kind of Flash game, maybe; I'm trying to decide whether an idea I've had for one would be more effective as Flash or as hands-on game pieces. But computers aren't automatically the solution to "they can't convert miles to nanometers".
And no, I don't know of any "chemistry software" that I'd expect them to know coming in. Molecular modeling tools might be a help, but the good ones are expensive to license and require deeper knowledge to use than 99% of HS students probably have. Spreadsheets might be useful, but again, they'll learn those as freshmen anyway.
> We should have an inalienable right to communicate as we wish, by whatever means we wish.
Okay, sure, whatever. This doesn't mean that you can go to T-Mobile (or Cingular or Verizon or anyone else) and *demand* that they respect your "inalienable right to communicate" by supplying you with every possible means of doing so.
Problem is, that strips away the objective response that's possible in *anonymous* review. At least half of the papers I've reviewed in the past few years (since I started doing it) have been seriously flawed in one way or another. I've felt no hesitation in saying so. If there's an open link along the lines of "George thought your paper was utter crap, Bob wanted major revisions, Tim said he didn't know so he passed it to his newest grad student who said it must be great because he didn't understand it"... then that freedom goes away.
Journal editors (or conference paper committees) are the ones who need to know this sort of thing, not individual authors. And they already do, and already use that information to decide who to send a manuscript to -- "Hmm... this one should go to ____, but he takes six months to read anything, so he's out... Jill's fast but she's dead against the approach this takes so she'll be an automatic 'no', better send it to John too except that the grammar's going to need work and he'll get too caught up in that..."
"A question mark will be placed..." on their own work? Just because someone's a lousy reviewer doesn't mean their research is bad. In the same way that being a good (or bad) researcher doesn't automatically mean one's a good (or bad) teacher.
So, the good part of your idea is already done, and the rest of it shouldn't be.
Not to continue this ad infinitum, but why is it "unfortunate"? Should alumni give money whether or not they think the school's doing anything useful? Those schools that have huge endowments got them by persuading the world they're worth funding -- in part through PR.:)
Of course they're looking for more grant funding. Everyone is, always.:)
At least at my school (and apparently at Georgia Tech as well), there's a separate "news office" that does the reports like this -- an internal "journalist" (or half reporter, half PR person) comes to the lab and interviews the professor when they get wind of something impressive/marketable. They write the article, based on background and specifics given by the professor. They distribute it, via the university's website and alumni magazine and possibly the student newspaper (if it's big enough).
That's why the "article" is credited to "Institute Communications & Public Affairs" rather than the individual lab, and why the "article" describes it as a "wavelength demultiplier". If the academics had prepared it, or even had approval on the final copy, they surely would've caught the mistake. (The question of why such "reputable" science bloggers as Roland Piquepaille didn't catch it is easily answered -- paraphrasing the PR is easier than condensing the actual article.)
Every single school, from the community college on up, is going to do everything it can to convince its alumni, students, faculty, and benefactors that it's doing useful and important work. Even "MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc." issue the exact same kind of PR. It's necessary everywhere.
The Bad Thing is confusing the explanation in the PR with the real research or discovery, or assuming that it's actually important because the school PR office thought it sounded neat. Which is how Roland Piquepaille wound up propagating the PR writer's mistake on the terminology ("demultiplier").
Only trouble with that is that scientific journalism isn't aimed at scientists; it's aimed at the generally-educated layman, who outnumber scientists hundreds to one. And so the average reader isn't going to be very impressed by "this new device could allow the integration of another optical component onto the chip rather than the reader, reducing the cost of the reader and the risk of carryover" -- or at least, he'll find "will allow 'lab on a chip' devices" a lot more impressive. There's already plenty of literature aimed at scientists.
Scientific journalism really *is* PR; the reason universities and "Scientific American"-type magazines publish these things is to show people what science is doing lately... and why you should encourage your kids to grow up to be scientists, why you should write to your Congressman to support the NIH, why you should make a generous bequest to your alma mater, etc.
That said, it really isn't correct to report an incremental advance as more than that. (And not even one actually ready yet for micro-TAS systems; they demonstrate a device optimized for 24 channels over 1.5-1.6 um.) Not to say that it's not an impressive bit of work.
Re:The Linux Flaw
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Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In other words, "there's lots of cool stuff you can do if you know how, but it's not always immediately obvious how". So... you want it spelled out for you or what? Except... wait... that's just what's already been done in this book. Except... wait... apparently the simple fact that this book is potentially useful is "what's wrong with Linux". Linux should make it blindingly obvious how to handle the "special case of configuring a seven button mouse with a tilted scroll wheel to work properly". (Does Windows, yet?)
I haven't seen the book but I've used (K)ubuntu and most of the stuff sounds like information that's already pretty freely available -- for instance, "know how to enable audio and video applications bundled with Ubuntu to play these restricted media files" turns out to be covered very nicely on the Ubuntu support wiki. Dunno how much extra this book adds to that info, but the wiki already includes the "takes the prize" tip on how to get stuff from iTMS.
In other words -- don't complain that people are working hard to make it much easier for "non-techy" users to do "oridinary" tasks (like spelling).
You'll need four things, all readily available: Microstructured cellulose sheets, a device for depositing thin layers of graphite in controlled patterns, a flexible optical transducer (broad spectral response, high spatial resolution) to read out the data, and a sophisticated neural network to bring them all together.
Nothing beats the flexibility of writing stuff down on paper. Over and over again, if need be. Flash cards, notes, whatever. If you're determined to use a computer, you don't need a program to build a fancy directed graph with HTML hyperlinks and SMILES structures and... -- I did it just fine with a text editor and a bit of creativity in the notation.
You'll also find that the reactions are generally organized pretty well in the textbook or lecture material.
Finally, "organizing" means either "doing pretty pictures" or "recognizing that this is SN2". It's very easy to spend so much time making pretty pictures that you don't actually learn any of the content. If you recognize reactions by type (mechanism) and substrate (secondary amine with a phenyl ring two carbons away), then all that's left is "reflux this at 120C in toluene with SnCl2", and... well, you'll have to memorize that anyway.
In short -- get through organic first, then (with a bit of background to understand what's important in "organizing" and "presenting", and better knowledge of what's already available) go on and write your own tool to "bring bring some software sanity to the life sciences". Don't expect to take the world of chemistry by storm, though; that sort of thing's been tried before, and the general reaction is "can't kids these days memorize anything?"
Then again, it's probably also easier to write a "New Age" type book than to write a book full of solid science expressed in ways that the average layman can understand. And a book with a catchy title "explaining" the connection between the pyramids, aliens, and alternative medicine is probably going to catch more eyes than one (seriously) discussing two-year-old predictions of the future of nanotech.
Tabloids sure do sell, and they sure are easy to make up. I've known people to drop a buck just to see how bad the "300-pound baby with the head of a turtle!" story really is. Doesn't mean they took it seriously.
> Wouldn't it be a better use of resources to incorporate this into a browser or word processor?
AbiWord has already done for some time.
> I already know who sang the song - they're my legal copies
Yes, but this isn't about looking up the song somehow to see who sang it (try MusicBrainz for that). It's about looking up the band to read about their history or other news. (Wikipedia does have articles on a surprising number of bands.) And nothing says that amaroK (not Amarock) would insist on popping up a Konqueror window with the results from every new song -- lots of features can be disabled as a preference, or not even compiled in in the first place. (In the same way that you'd only want your word processor to do this with words you highlight instead of *every* word you type.)
And of course there's already a list of other KDE stuff that could integrate this to benefit from information that's already been collected, instead of duplicating information on stars and chemical elements and countries (for instance).
So it's *already* been incorporated into a browser *and* word processor (there's a search plugin for Firefox); why not add it to amaroK and Kalzium and KStars and.... ?
Oh, sure. They could have funding drives a couple times a year, with a nice six-hour TV special in the evenings: show pictures, go through the data, explain how these projects are still producing useful information that justifies $4.2 million a year. Pretty pictures, spiffy graphs, careful "artist's rendering"s. And not just for these missions - do it for all of them, for that matter. And toll-free numbers people can call to make a pledge - operators are standing by!
"Jerry's Spacecraft", anyone?
And yeah, this started out ironic, but actually I'd watch it - far better use for public TV than most. For that matter, it could be done -- required? -- of *every* government agency/program with a total budget above a certain threshold... much more useful for informing the taxpayer than C-SPAN.
The excitation wavelength/absorption spectrum for unsaturated organics depends on the number of consecutive double bonds. Single double bonds (ones by themselves, instead of long chains of double bonds) absorb starting around 210 nm - vacuum UV, with no visible emission to speak of at all. Long chains of double bonds shift the emission up to higher wavelengths (a result of conjguation). (This also happens with fused aromatic rings, found in most useful fluorescent dyes, including the ones that Tan's group uses.)
In ground beef, presumably the unsaturated fats that might interfere would be fairly evenly dispersed, giving a uniform low background fluorescence that's pretty easy to filter out and ignore, either during collection or after. The labeled antibodies show up as very bright spots, like in the pictures in the article. (In raw samples, the fat would be concentrated into fatty spots that can also be ignored by only looking at "meat" regions instead of "fat" bits.) It worked well for the stamping oil because, when there's not supposed to be any fluorescence in a part, it's very easy to see the glow of oily residues.
I'm not sure that this is really intended as a "quick consumer test" at the restaurant level (there'd have to be a LOT of E. coli on the burger before the whole surface glows), but it's much better than having to do amplification (PCR) before checking for E. coli DNA.
Yeah, and Tom Swift, too. Perry Rhodan, a bit. Maybe. But I didn't really discover any of those until a bit past my formative years, so I wound up a chemist instead. Oh well.
Childrens' books won't be her only source of understanding. You want her to know what you do? spend time with her. Tell her yourself. Explain it to her as best you can for whatever age she's at when she wants to know.
My dad's a physicist. I don't remember any kids' books (when I was nine months, nine years, or now) that really "feature" physicists on the same level as truck drivers and cops. I learned what he did because he told me. And I cared 'cause he was there to tell me;)
To paraphrase something rather different, "you may be the only book about programmers your daughter ever reads".
If the goal of the super-intelligent filter is to get as far from 0% accuracy as possible... and if having filtered no spam because there was no spam received to filter counts as 0% accuracy... wouldn't the filter start sending (itself?) spam to keep itself happy? Or perhaps a mix of fake-ham and uber-spam. Of course, this is a whole separate doom.
"huge amounts of energy"?? We're not talking about giant 1000-watt spotlights to pump water into your swimming pool. I imagine they'd hope to use this effect with mW ultraviolet LEDs or some equivalently small, low-power light source.
"why"? Because at this scale, it becomes fairly difficult to precisely, reproducibly move droplets of water around. Pumps and water hoses (as someone else wondered about) don't really work too well. Channels in microfluidic devices are tens to hundreds of micrometers across - this is to move microliter droplets, not buckets.
One problem with this is that it would apparently limit devices to one layer of channels (or at least, limit the complexity of the devices); the "damaging" electric fields can give pretty precise flow control in devices with several layers, etc. There's also the alternative of using "centrifugal force" for power on rotating disc devices - Bachas' group at Kentucky built nifty parallel microfluidic devices on CDs that work like that. This new light-based approach works for moving individual drops around, but there are microfluidic things that it doesn't do (at least yet).
Finally, this is just a preliminary report that something pretty cool is actually possible - they don't describe even a simple device based on this, they're not announcing commercial availability of a complete home lab that uses this. If you don't get "why"... well, wait a few years and a nifty application of it will be all the answer necessary.
Not to sound unsympathetic, but why should dogs be changed (genetically modified, presumably) for the sake of your sinuses? Especially when the protein(s) that bother different people might be completely different?
I'd rather hope for the protein to be identified, as you said, and then for some sort of medicine created that specifically binds to that protein and blocks your immune response. Repeat for cats, plants, whatever else people are allergic to, you've got a nice allergy spray that really really works.
DMS does get oxidized, eventually, to sulfates (i.e., one of the acids in 'acid rain'). Is this important? Depends on how much is being produced this way, obviously, but according to this estimate the overall sulfur emission from oceanic sources (plankton, etc.) is about 20% of the emission from human activities (globally; it's more like 10% in the N. hemisphere, much higher anthropogenic emissions - mostly coal burning).
So the evil death plankton's sunscreen is some kind of factor in acid rain, but not the biggest one.
Slashdot Mirror
Energy technology can be produced by private industry, used by private industry, and will be traded on the free market to everyone. Even if a Chinese company develops the technology, we (and others) will be able to purchase it and benefit from it.
Will we be able to buy the technology itself? Or only the energy that it produces? If I invented a really workable source of clean renewable energy, and I was interested in extracting all the personal benefit from it that I could - I wouldn't sell the goose, just the golden eggs.
This is the concern here. Technologies that companies develop for economic gain (or political/military gain, in the case of a nationally-owned company) do not have to be sold directly. Computer chip makers don't sell you the fab or information on their lithography process - they sell you the product. There's nothing of xenophobia or nationalism in this - American companies act the same way. (Companies also trade the technology, and this also benefits the consumer - but not in the scenario where I buy the details to Intel's i7 and try to make it home.)
Whoever develops technology that really makes "alternative energy" workable (and can implement it reliably, and bring the energy to market at a price that drastically undercuts any competition) would - will? - have very substantial economic power. And there will be nothing at all that requires them to share that technology - even in this country, and still less in some others.
"Making ... a job doing what you love" involves finding someone who's got money and convincing them that your work (what you love) is worth spending their money on. In other words, persuading someone to fund you because you're needed.
There's nothing, technically, stopping smart scientists or engineers from doing exactly that, and in fact some have done so - they've collected donations to start a research institute. It's a lot more rare than getting VC to start a company that makes something technical, for the reasons that you yourself (and others) already gave.
That said - the strategy of "strike out on your own, dazzle people into helping you create a job for yourself doing basic research" is difficult for most scientists to imagine, perhaps partly because of how we're trained: by collaboration and learning directly from others. "Lone wolf" self-teaching works well in some fields, but only occasionally in science.
That's interesting, can you give me a list of useful scientific accomplishments that rely on the Theory of Evolution?
Yes: medicine.
Bzzt. "Medicine" is when you take a list of symptoms, look for the immediate cause (a germ, a nutrient deficiency, an imbalance, a defect in anatomy, a new growth or lack of growth), and figure out how to remove the symptoms by removing the cause. The practice of medicine is much more similar to repairing a car than it is to "science". (Scientific research in medicine does exist, of course, but either as statistics on which treatments are effective, or as an offshoot of fundamental research on biology or biochemistry.)
A "theory of evolution", generically stated, may well help to explain why that particular cause is possible. It tries to explain the origin of that particular germ, the reason why that nutrient is needed, or the reason why this particular organ in the human animal is like a similar structure in the fruit bat.
Answers to "where did this tissue ultimately come from?" have very little to do with keeping it in good repair.
I'm a chemistry prof, currently teaching the "general chemistry for science majors" track at a comprehensive university. (So, these aren't the most brilliant students ever, but they're not stupid; most did take at least one chem class in HS, and about half took Honors or AP level.)
We teach them spreadsheets in lab, and they pick it up fairly quickly. The best way for most of them is by peer example, which is why it works better teaching that in a lab setting. We expect to teach them spreadsheets, even the engineering students.
If you really want to help your students learn chemistry by using technology, then focus on what they're worst at. You *are* keeping records on how well they do on different concepts or types of questions, right? (There's an excellent use for "spreadsheets in the classroom", even if it's just behind the scenes.) Use that data to identify one or two concepts per year. Maybe computers could be used to animate gas molecules to help them picture kinetic theory. Maybe computers could be used to do nice "3D" displays of crystal structures. Or maybe the easiest and most effective way to get that across would be with a hands-on model, or a game.
Students in the first semester chem class - and again, these are STEM majors, many of them in calc/precalc for math - are weak on some very basic concepts: Units & unit conversions. The mole. Names of ions - it's astonishing that some of them don't seem able to understand that there's a difference between words like "chlorite" and "chlorate" or "sulfate" and "sulfide". (Then again, they're just as insensitive to errors in English spelling.)
Teach them how to take "the chemistry" in a problem and decide whether it's better to express that relationship in math, or to analyze it in a qualitative ("cartoon picture in my head") sense. Help them learn to pick the right formula, plug in the given values in the right spots, and manipulate it to get the right answer. Help them start to look for patterns in different kinds of problems - "isotopic abundance problems" and "density of a mixture of two liquids" are indistinguishable once you strip off the chemistry and start working them algebraically, but it takes some of them literally forever to see that they aren't radically different kinds of problems. Instead of expanding coverage, it might even help to reduce coverage - drop a couple of chapters if it gives them more time to really understand the basics. What's the point in getting them turned on by making nanotubes in lab or whatever other sexy demo/lab project you can come up with, if they go off to college and discover they're already behind from the first week of classes?
Would computers help with that? Sure. Some kind of Flash game, maybe; I'm trying to decide whether an idea I've had for one would be more effective as Flash or as hands-on game pieces. But computers aren't automatically the solution to "they can't convert miles to nanometers".
And no, I don't know of any "chemistry software" that I'd expect them to know coming in. Molecular modeling tools might be a help, but the good ones are expensive to license and require deeper knowledge to use than 99% of HS students probably have. Spreadsheets might be useful, but again, they'll learn those as freshmen anyway.
> We should have an inalienable right to communicate as we wish, by whatever means we wish.
Okay, sure, whatever. This doesn't mean that you can go to T-Mobile (or Cingular or Verizon or anyone else) and *demand* that they respect your "inalienable right to communicate" by supplying you with every possible means of doing so.
Problem is, that strips away the objective response that's possible in *anonymous* review. At least half of the papers I've reviewed in the past few years (since I started doing it) have been seriously flawed in one way or another. I've felt no hesitation in saying so. If there's an open link along the lines of "George thought your paper was utter crap, Bob wanted major revisions, Tim said he didn't know so he passed it to his newest grad student who said it must be great because he didn't understand it"... then that freedom goes away.
Journal editors (or conference paper committees) are the ones who need to know this sort of thing, not individual authors. And they already do, and already use that information to decide who to send a manuscript to -- "Hmm... this one should go to ____, but he takes six months to read anything, so he's out... Jill's fast but she's dead against the approach this takes so she'll be an automatic 'no', better send it to John too except that the grammar's going to need work and he'll get too caught up in that..."
"A question mark will be placed..." on their own work? Just because someone's a lousy reviewer doesn't mean their research is bad. In the same way that being a good (or bad) researcher doesn't automatically mean one's a good (or bad) teacher.
So, the good part of your idea is already done, and the rest of it shouldn't be.
So we're safe as long as we don't hang out too long in pockets of subspace, then. Phew!
Not to continue this ad infinitum, but why is it "unfortunate"? Should alumni give money whether or not they think the school's doing anything useful? Those schools that have huge endowments got them by persuading the world they're worth funding -- in part through PR. :)
Of course they're looking for more grant funding. Everyone is, always. :)
At least at my school (and apparently at Georgia Tech as well), there's a separate "news office" that does the reports like this -- an internal "journalist" (or half reporter, half PR person) comes to the lab and interviews the professor when they get wind of something impressive/marketable. They write the article, based on background and specifics given by the professor. They distribute it, via the university's website and alumni magazine and possibly the student newspaper (if it's big enough).
That's why the "article" is credited to "Institute Communications & Public Affairs" rather than the individual lab, and why the "article" describes it as a "wavelength demultiplier". If the academics had prepared it, or even had approval on the final copy, they surely would've caught the mistake. (The question of why such "reputable" science bloggers as Roland Piquepaille didn't catch it is easily answered -- paraphrasing the PR is easier than condensing the actual article.)
Every single school, from the community college on up, is going to do everything it can to convince its alumni, students, faculty, and benefactors that it's doing useful and important work. Even "MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc." issue the exact same kind of PR. It's necessary everywhere.
The Bad Thing is confusing the explanation in the PR with the real research or discovery, or assuming that it's actually important because the school PR office thought it sounded neat. Which is how Roland Piquepaille wound up propagating the PR writer's mistake on the terminology ("demultiplier").
Only trouble with that is that scientific journalism isn't aimed at scientists; it's aimed at the generally-educated layman, who outnumber scientists hundreds to one. And so the average reader isn't going to be very impressed by "this new device could allow the integration of another optical component onto the chip rather than the reader, reducing the cost of the reader and the risk of carryover" -- or at least, he'll find "will allow 'lab on a chip' devices" a lot more impressive. There's already plenty of literature aimed at scientists.
Scientific journalism really *is* PR; the reason universities and "Scientific American"-type magazines publish these things is to show people what science is doing lately... and why you should encourage your kids to grow up to be scientists, why you should write to your Congressman to support the NIH, why you should make a generous bequest to your alma mater, etc.
That said, it really isn't correct to report an incremental advance as more than that. (And not even one actually ready yet for micro-TAS systems; they demonstrate a device optimized for 24 channels over 1.5-1.6 um.) Not to say that it's not an impressive bit of work.
In other words, "there's lots of cool stuff you can do if you know how, but it's not always immediately obvious how". So... you want it spelled out for you or what? Except... wait... that's just what's already been done in this book. Except... wait... apparently the simple fact that this book is potentially useful is "what's wrong with Linux". Linux should make it blindingly obvious how to handle the "special case of configuring a seven button mouse with a tilted scroll wheel to work properly". (Does Windows, yet?)
I haven't seen the book but I've used (K)ubuntu and most of the stuff sounds like information that's already pretty freely available -- for instance, "know how to enable audio and video applications bundled with Ubuntu to play these restricted media files" turns out to be covered very nicely on the Ubuntu support wiki. Dunno how much extra this book adds to that info, but the wiki already includes the "takes the prize" tip on how to get stuff from iTMS.
In other words -- don't complain that people are working hard to make it much easier for "non-techy" users to do "oridinary" tasks (like spelling).
You'll need four things, all readily available: Microstructured cellulose sheets, a device for depositing thin layers of graphite in controlled patterns, a flexible optical transducer (broad spectral response, high spatial resolution) to read out the data, and a sophisticated neural network to bring them all together.
... -- I did it just fine with a text editor and a bit of creativity in the notation.
Nothing beats the flexibility of writing stuff down on paper. Over and over again, if need be. Flash cards, notes, whatever. If you're determined to use a computer, you don't need a program to build a fancy directed graph with HTML hyperlinks and SMILES structures and
You'll also find that the reactions are generally organized pretty well in the textbook or lecture material.
Finally, "organizing" means either "doing pretty pictures" or "recognizing that this is SN2". It's very easy to spend so much time making pretty pictures that you don't actually learn any of the content. If you recognize reactions by type (mechanism) and substrate (secondary amine with a phenyl ring two carbons away), then all that's left is "reflux this at 120C in toluene with SnCl2", and... well, you'll have to memorize that anyway.
In short -- get through organic first, then (with a bit of background to understand what's important in "organizing" and "presenting", and better knowledge of what's already available) go on and write your own tool to "bring bring some software sanity to the life sciences". Don't expect to take the world of chemistry by storm, though; that sort of thing's been tried before, and the general reaction is "can't kids these days memorize anything?"
But you cared enough to post that you don't care? if you don't care about an article then *skip over it*.
Then again, it's probably also easier to write a "New Age" type book than to write a book full of solid science expressed in ways that the average layman can understand. And a book with a catchy title "explaining" the connection between the pyramids, aliens, and alternative medicine is probably going to catch more eyes than one (seriously) discussing two-year-old predictions of the future of nanotech.
Tabloids sure do sell, and they sure are easy to make up. I've known people to drop a buck just to see how bad the "300-pound baby with the head of a turtle!" story really is. Doesn't mean they took it seriously.
> Wouldn't it be a better use of resources to incorporate this into a browser or word processor?
AbiWord has already done for some time.
> I already know who sang the song - they're my legal copies
Yes, but this isn't about looking up the song somehow to see who sang it (try MusicBrainz for that). It's about looking up the band to read about their history or other news. (Wikipedia does have articles on a surprising number of bands.) And nothing says that amaroK (not Amarock) would insist on popping up a Konqueror window with the results from every new song -- lots of features can be disabled as a preference, or not even compiled in in the first place. (In the same way that you'd only want your word processor to do this with words you highlight instead of *every* word you type.)
And of course there's already a list of other KDE stuff that could integrate this to benefit from information that's already been collected, instead of duplicating information on stars and chemical elements and countries (for instance).
So it's *already* been incorporated into a browser *and* word processor (there's a search plugin for Firefox); why not add it to amaroK and Kalzium and KStars and.... ?
Oh, sure. They could have funding drives a couple times a year, with a nice six-hour TV special in the evenings: show pictures, go through the data, explain how these projects are still producing useful information that justifies $4.2 million a year. Pretty pictures, spiffy graphs, careful "artist's rendering"s. And not just for these missions - do it for all of them, for that matter. And toll-free numbers people can call to make a pledge - operators are standing by!
"Jerry's Spacecraft", anyone?
And yeah, this started out ironic, but actually I'd watch it - far better use for public TV than most. For that matter, it could be done -- required? -- of *every* government agency/program with a total budget above a certain threshold... much more useful for informing the taxpayer than C-SPAN.
The excitation wavelength/absorption spectrum for unsaturated organics depends on the number of consecutive double bonds. Single double bonds (ones by themselves, instead of long chains of double bonds) absorb starting around 210 nm - vacuum UV, with no visible emission to speak of at all. Long chains of double bonds shift the emission up to higher wavelengths (a result of conjguation). (This also happens with fused aromatic rings, found in most useful fluorescent dyes, including the ones that Tan's group uses.)
In ground beef, presumably the unsaturated fats that might interfere would be fairly evenly dispersed, giving a uniform low background fluorescence that's pretty easy to filter out and ignore, either during collection or after. The labeled antibodies show up as very bright spots, like in the pictures in the article. (In raw samples, the fat would be concentrated into fatty spots that can also be ignored by only looking at "meat" regions instead of "fat" bits.) It worked well for the stamping oil because, when there's not supposed to be any fluorescence in a part, it's very easy to see the glow of oily residues.
I'm not sure that this is really intended as a "quick consumer test" at the restaurant level (there'd have to be a LOT of E. coli on the burger before the whole surface glows), but it's much better than having to do amplification (PCR) before checking for E. coli DNA.
> pulls down big bucks.
:)
Bare-handed? or does she hunt the deer with dogs?
Yeah, and Tom Swift, too. Perry Rhodan, a bit. Maybe. But I didn't really discover any of those until a bit past my formative years, so I wound up a chemist instead. Oh well.
Childrens' books won't be her only source of understanding. You want her to know what you do? spend time with her. Tell her yourself. Explain it to her as best you can for whatever age she's at when she wants to know.
;)
My dad's a physicist. I don't remember any kids' books (when I was nine months, nine years, or now) that really "feature" physicists on the same level as truck drivers and cops. I learned what he did because he told me. And I cared 'cause he was there to tell me
To paraphrase something rather different, "you may be the only book about programmers your daughter ever reads".
If the goal of the super-intelligent filter is to get as far from 0% accuracy as possible... and if having filtered no spam because there was no spam received to filter counts as 0% accuracy... wouldn't the filter start sending (itself?) spam to keep itself happy? Or perhaps a mix of fake-ham and uber-spam. Of course, this is a whole separate doom.
"huge amounts of energy"?? We're not talking about giant 1000-watt spotlights to pump water into your swimming pool. I imagine they'd hope to use this effect with mW ultraviolet LEDs or some equivalently small, low-power light source.
... well, wait a few years and a nifty application of it will be all the answer necessary.
"why"? Because at this scale, it becomes fairly difficult to precisely, reproducibly move droplets of water around. Pumps and water hoses (as someone else wondered about) don't really work too well. Channels in microfluidic devices are tens to hundreds of micrometers across - this is to move microliter droplets, not buckets.
One problem with this is that it would apparently limit devices to one layer of channels (or at least, limit the complexity of the devices); the "damaging" electric fields can give pretty precise flow control in devices with several layers, etc. There's also the alternative of using "centrifugal force" for power on rotating disc devices - Bachas' group at Kentucky built nifty parallel microfluidic devices on CDs that work like that. This new light-based approach works for moving individual drops around, but there are microfluidic things that it doesn't do (at least yet).
Finally, this is just a preliminary report that something pretty cool is actually possible - they don't describe even a simple device based on this, they're not announcing commercial availability of a complete home lab that uses this. If you don't get "why"
Not to sound unsympathetic, but why should dogs be changed (genetically modified, presumably) for the sake of your sinuses? Especially when the protein(s) that bother different people might be completely different?
I'd rather hope for the protein to be identified, as you said, and then for some sort of medicine created that specifically binds to that protein and blocks your immune response. Repeat for cats, plants, whatever else people are allergic to, you've got a nice allergy spray that really really works.
DMS does get oxidized, eventually, to sulfates (i.e., one of the acids in 'acid rain'). Is this important? Depends on how much is being produced this way, obviously, but according to this estimate the overall sulfur emission from oceanic sources (plankton, etc.) is about 20% of the emission from human activities (globally; it's more like 10% in the N. hemisphere, much higher anthropogenic emissions - mostly coal burning).
So the evil death plankton's sunscreen is some kind of factor in acid rain, but not the biggest one.