Monthly Archives: September 2004

Better All The Time #18

Did you miss us as much as we missed you? Better All The Time is back with some good news to brighten up your week.

Today’s Good Stuff:

    Quote of the Day

  1. The Speculist Returns
  2. Cold Fusion to Make a Comeback?
  3. Planet Discovered
  4. Nanotech Vs Cancer
  5. Salvaging Genesis
  6. Gadget Roundup
  7. New Nickels

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Quote of the Day

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

– Christina Baldwin, via ThinkExist

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Item 1
The Speculist Returns

We’re back.

Myriad porn spams and a corrupt Berkeley database couldn’t keep this site down for long. We are back in action. We’ll be migrating material from the old site to this new location over the next few months. So if you’re not finding what you’re looking for here, try here.

Commenting now requires TypePad registration. Check it out. It’s free! Registering will enable you to write comments for many blogs, not just The Speculist.

PS: Don’t forget to update your bookmarks and blogrolls. That new address is:

https://www.blog.speculist.com

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Item 2
Cold Fusion Back from the Dead

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy will receive a report from a panel of experts on the prospects for cold fusion�the supposed generation of thermonuclear energy using tabletop apparatus. It’s an extraordinary reversal of fortune: more than a few heads turned earlier this year when James Decker, the deputy director of the DOE’s Office of Science, announced that he was initiating the review of cold fusion science. Back in November 1989, it had been the department’s own investigation that determined the evidence behind cold fusion was unconvincing. Clearly, something important has changed to grab the department’s attention now.

Behind the scenes, scientists in many countries, but particularly in the United States, Japan, and Italy, have been working quietly for more than a decade to understand the science behind cold fusion. (Today they call it low-energy nuclear reactions, or sometimes chemically assisted nuclear reactions.) For them, the department’s change of heart is simply a recognition of what they have said all along�whatever cold fusion may be, it needs explaining by the proper process of science.

The good news:

It’s this sort of thing that makes predictions about future energy capacity and capabilities so difficult to predict. (For that matter, it’s this sort of thing that makes the future in general so difficult to predict.) Cold Fusion may yet be a long way off, but the fact that it could be back on the table only goes to show the risks involved in assessing the future based on present capabilities. Things might just be better than we think.

Interesting Implications:

We’ve seen a lot of discussion in the blogosphere recently about the viability of changing to a “hydrogen economy.” The big problem with hydrogen is extracting it from water (or some other source, although water is probably the most likely.) A lot has been written about the impracticality of solar power, wind power, nuclear power, etc. But there hasn’t been much written about cold fusion, either as a direct energy source or as a means of enabling hydrogen as an energy source. A while back, Steven Den Beste had this to say on fusion:

Wake me when it actually works.

Well, we won’t nudge him just yet.

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Item 3
Have We Seen an Exoplanet?

Astronomers may have taken the first ever photograph of a planetary system outside our own solar system. Gael Chauvin of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and colleagues in Chile, Germany, France and the US have taken images of what appears to be a planet orbiting a young brown dwarf about 230 light years away. The results could shed more light on how planetary systems form (Astronomy & Astrophysics in press).

The good news:

While we’ve known for some time now that planets exist outside our solar system — we can “see” them by the gravitational effects they have on the stars they orbit — this may be the first actual picture of such a planet. May there be many more.

The downside:

The problem is that planets, particularly earth-sized planets, are very dim bulbs located on astronomical scales right next to a very bright star. Even with a resource like Hubble at our disposal, they’re never going to be easy to spot.

Luckily…

A couple of super geniuses have set their minds to the task of designing the next generation of space-based telescopes. Wow, somebody should be paying those guys a lot of money.

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Item 4
Pinpointing Cancer Fight

In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.

The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.

The good news:

The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that “cook” tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We’ve been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It’s gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.

More good news:

Meanwhile, research shows that a very different form of treatment also offers very real benefits to cancer patients:

Hypnosis can relieve suffering and improve the quality of life of cancer patients, researchers said on Thursday.

Although it has been used to help people to give up smoking, lose weight and overcome phobias, its real therapeutic potential is still untapped, they believe.

Dr Christina Liossi, of the University of Wales in Swansea, said there is medical evidence that hypnosis helps to relieve the depression, nausea, vomiting and pain suffered by cancer patients.

There have also been suggestions that hypnosis could increase survival in patients with the disease, but she added there is not enough evidence to support them.

Still more good news:

RNAi treatment, touted as the next big thing in biotechnology is now being given its first try:

The first clinical trial of a therapy based on the much-heralded technique of RNA interference, or RNAi, will begin within several weeks to treat a condition which can lead to blindness.

If the results of these tests prove fruitful, RNAi treatment may soon be used to help cancer patients as well as those afflicted by a host of other medical problems.

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Item 5
Scientists Recover Critical Genesis Parts

NASA scientists said they have recovered some critical pieces of the Genesis space capsule intact and are optimistic the wreckage will yield valuable information about the origins of the solar system.

“We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals,” physicist Roger C. Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Friday.

The good news:

Apparently, the individual compartments that were used to gather sample atoms from around the solar systm got fused together pretty well, but atoms are kind of hard to destroy. So it’s possible that just a few of them will be sufficient to give the scientists the information they’re looking for.

Here’s hoping.

Also, NASA is envisioning future missions that avoid the problem of parachute malfunctions altogether:

As currently envisioned, the Mars Sample Return mission uses a completely passive entry vehicle. A return craft holding the specimen canister would be aerodynamically stable throughout its landing on Earth. The MSR entry craft would not require a parachute…

In other Space News…

As the age of space tourism draws ever closer, some some would-be amateur astronauts are likely to prepare themselves by taking one or more zero G flights, which are about to be offered on a commercial basis:

The Zero Gravity Corporation has been given the thumbs up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct “weightless flights” for the general public, providing the sensation of floating in space.

Tickets are on sale for around $3,000.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

Hmmm…at $3000 a pop, these flights will not only make the passengers weightless, they should go a long way towards lightening their wallets as well.

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Item 6
Better Living Through Gadgets

Here’s a small sampling of recent gadget news. How did we ever get by without these things?

  • Sony Handheld Computer with Electroluminescent Display
    Who even knew that liquid crystal displays were on the way out? The display is 48-x320 pixels, and has a 1000:1 contrast ratio. The unit saves power by not turning on black pixels. Good thinking! You can get anywhere from four to eight hours of video viewing on it.
  • P2P Phones
    It looks as though the inital version will only enable sharing of photos and text, but audio and video files are reportedly on the way.
  • In-Flight Mobile Phones
    Airbus is working on plans that will allow passengers to use their mobile phones in-flight by the year 2006. That’s good news because, by then, we should have full audio and video P2P available on mobile phones (see previous item).
  • Tiny Robotic Helicopter
    When a big, bulky, non-robotic helicopter just won’t do.
  • Follow Your Nose
    Picture this: rather than having to move a mouse around on your desktop, you simply point your nose where you want the cursor to go. Need to left-click on an item on screen? Just blink your left eye. Need to right-click? You get the idea. It may sound frivolous, but this invention promises to offer profound benefits to disabled computer users. And if it revolutionizes computer gaming in the process, well that’s just gravy.

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Item 7
Nickels to Get a New Look

There’s change in store for Thomas Jefferson � on the nickel that is. He’s getting his first makeover since being put on the coin in 1938.

The good news:

The new nickel looks better and includes the word “liberty” in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting. Plus, Jefferson is featured more prominently. Moreover, for the nostalgic, the new coin has a buffalo on the back.

The downside:

The changes to the nickel comes on the heels of other currency updates, which include adding color the to $50 bill. Change is good and all, but we’re not sure how we’re going to feel about swapping greenbacks for Monopoly money.

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Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.

More good news: Arthur Chrenkoff gives the latest good news from Iraq. And here’s the latest edition of Winds of Discovery.

Live to see it!

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Weightless

As the age of space tourism draws ever closer, some some would-be amateur astronauts are likely to prepare themselves by taking one or more zero G flights, which are about to be offered on a commercial basis:

The Zero Gravity Corporation has been given the thumbs up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct “weightless flights” for the general public, providing the sensation of floating in space.

Tickets are on sale for around $3,000.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

Once they’re offered to the general public, zero-G flights will run passengers about $3000. According to the linked article, passengers will first experience reduced gravity, approximating the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, before experiencing absolute weightlessness. It’s hard not to wonder how long the flights will last (the article doesn’t say.) At $3000 a ride, I wonder how much the passengers will be paying for each second of weightlessness?

Raising Our Sights

After Kurzweil reported yesterday that we now have the first photograph of an exoplanet (a planet outside the solar system), Phil and I had an email conversation about the future of spotting planets visually.

The problem is that planets, particularly earth-sized planets, are very dim bulbs located on astronomical scales right next to a very bright star.

The planet that was photographed is very large and is in a wide orbit around a relatively dim star. Astronomer Gael Chauvin managed to take this picture with an earth-based telescope employing “adaptive optics” to compensate for the blurring of our atmosphere. The telescope that was used was part of the “Very Large Telescope array at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.”

Chauvin’s team now plan to make more detailed observations to confirm whether the object is indeed a planet in orbit around 2M1207. “Our discovery represents a first step towards opening a new field in astrophysics: the imaging and spectroscopic study of planetary systems,” says team member Anne-Marie Lagrange from the Grenoble Observatory in France. “Such studies will enable astronomers to characterise the physical structure and chemical composition of giant and, eventually, terrestrial-like planets.”

Instead of having to compensate for our atmosphere, wouldn’t it be great to have an array in space? What I suggested yesterday to Phil was an array in the configuration of a toy jack.

jacks.jpeg

Or, to be more scientific, in the xyz cartesian axes configuration. At the end of each leg would be a 3 axes movable “eye.” These 6 eyes could work separately or be coordinated together. This could give you monoscopic vision in up to 6 directions at once, stereoscopic vision in up to 3 directions at once, or, if a scientist needed to take a really good look at something, up to 6 eyes could be trained on an object.

Phil had a better idea. Instead of having these space telescopes physically connected together, why not separate them further? Much further.

The thing to do would be to launch one of these jack telescopes way, way out there. Say, 100 AU. The signals would take a long time to get back to Earth, but think of what we would see! Going with the stereoscope idea, what if we put two single lenses out in space on opposite sides of the sun, again each about 100 AU from the Sun or about 200 AU from each other. With that kind of distance between the two lenses, I wonder what kind of leverage you would get towards resolving distant objects? 200 AU seems huge to us, but it’s still pretty miniscule in interstellar terms. Maybe we should be thinking in terms af 1000 AUs.

We need some cool nanotech way to make the lenses realy enormous, too. Say 1/100th the diamter of the moon or so. Now that would be a pair of binoculars!

No rescue missions for those Hubbles. You would need nanotech not just to build them, but to maintain them.

Stillness Part V, Chapter 45

I have to begin this story where I can. It isn’t the beginning of the story; it’s the first day of my life that I really “remember”— in the common sense of the term. It’s the day I left the home. It was also the day the Phenomenon occurred, as well as being the day that any number of people that I knew (presumably along with some people I did not know) were removed.

That’s an unfortunate word, but it’s the best one I’ve ever been able to come up with to describe what happened. They were removed. Other terms used by those of us who discuss this subject (a small group) include undone, unmade, uncreated, destroyed, eliminated, and erased. Erased is probably the most popular. I don’t deny that it’s a good fit, but I prefer removed.

Todd says that removed is a euphemism. He suggests that there is something Orwellian in my selection of the term, that I’m trying to hide the awful reality of what occurred behind a word that obscures tragedy with its vagueness, like when an airline makes reference in its annual report to a mysterious mid-air explosion killing all 257 people on board one of its planes as a “conversion” or “replacement” of its aircraft. I believe Todd is mistaken on this point. The word removed is not vague, nor does it shy away from reality. If there was an explosion, I would say explosion. If we knew people were killed, I would say they were killed.

But we don’t know any of that. We don’t know that anyone has been erased, or eliminated or destroyed. There is this nagging sense, this appalling and overwhelming fear, that they might have been. But we don’t know that for sure. Far from obscuring the horrible reality, I think the word drives the horror home. They were here, they’re gone, and we have no idea what happened to them.

Virgin Galactic

No, that headline is not a joke.

Sir Richard Branson today announced that he had signed a licensing deal to create a fleet of spacecraft offering commercial flights to space by 2007-8.

Speaking at the launch of Virgin Galactic Airways, Sir Richard said he planned to invest £60m in space tourism, making it accessible to the general public.

Branson has signed a deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures and plans to build a fleet of spcaecraft which will take up to five passengers into space at a time, at a cost of about £115,000. He estimates that his fleet will carry 3,000 amateur astronauts into space over a period of five years. The first of them will be, of course, Sir Richard Branson.

Whether this idea takes off or not, the idea of space tourism just a got a whole lot more mainstream. And somebody needs to tell Branson about this idea.

Welcome (Back) to The Speculist

[NOTE: I'm leaving this message at the top for the next week or so. There is new stuff below!]

We’re back.

Myriad porn spams and a corrupt Bekeley database couldn’t keep this site down for long. We are back in action. We’ll be migrating material from the old site to this new location over the next few months. So if you’re not finding what you’re looking for here, try here.

Commenting now requires TypePad registration. Chek it out. It’s free! Registering will enable you to write comments for many blogs, not just The Speculist.

Oh, and um…live to see it!

PS: Don’t forget to update your bookmarks and blogrolls. That new address is:

https://www.blog.speculist.com

Salvaging Genesis

Check this out.

NASA scientists said they have recovered some critical pieces of the Genesis space capsule intact and are optimistic the wreckage will yield valuable information about the origins of the solar system.

“We should be able to meet many, if not all, of our science goals,” physicist Roger C. Wiens of the Los Alamos National Laboratory said Friday.

Apparently, the individual compartments that were used to gather sample atoms from around the solar systm got fused together pretty well, but atoms are kind of hard to destroy. So it’s possible that just a few of them will be sufficient to give the scientists the information they’re looking for.

Here’s hoping

Meanwhile, NASA continues to investigate why the parachute didn’t open. While they’re reviewing the matter, they should consider giving some kind of award to the design team for building a probe that can still yield results after such a traumatic crash. And the FAA ought to think about hiring these folks to help them design their next generation of black boxes.

Nanotechnology to Take On cancer

This is pretty cool:

In the fight against cancer, some scientists are thinking small. Really, really small.

The National Cancer Institute launches a five-year, $144 million project today to investigate using nanotechnology, the science of building devices on the atomic level, to fight cancer.

The treatments that will be looked at include, among other approaches, the use of gold nanoshells that “cook” tumor cells to death and nanoparticles that deliver chemotherapy on a cell-by-cell basis. We’ve been tracking these developments over the past year (here and here, for example). It’s gratifying to see these lines of research get additional funding. Moreover, with the blessing of the National Cancer Institute, it would seem that nanomedicine is well on its way to being mainstream.

(via Kurzweil AI)

9/11

Below are my reflections on September 11 from last year, slightly revised. It occurs to me on rereading this essay that there are probably some who would find the dreaded “hubris” in our assertion that the world is getting better all the time. Thinking back on the horror of that day, the optimistic worldview, even that of the serious optimist, seems hard to defend.

Has the world become a better place since September 11, 2001? That, after all, is the position that the optimist would be called on to defend. But I’m not sure the question is for us to answer. I would leave it to those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And even if they tell us that the world has gotten no better, that there is still strife and violence and uncertainty, that they continue to be victims of powers who care nothing about them, I would only say this (as I did in response to the Iraqi soccer coach who complained that his country is “still occupied” and “not free”): these people certainly seem to enjoy their freedom of speech. I wonder how long they’ve had it?

This weblog is dedicated to the idea that the future is open; it is something
that we can create together. I’ve written recently about the kinds of changes
that can occur that serve as signposts dividing the past from the present, or
the present from the future. In the face of those kinds of changes, it often
seems that we have no choice, no say in what might happen next. Here’s an image
that will always haunt me, something that occurred in the final hours of the
previous era.

It was September 9, 2001.

My wife and I were wrapping up our weekend in Manhattan. We had done a little
shopping, eaten some good food, seen a few sights. We were on the Statue of
Liberty tour boat heading back towards Battery Park. The World Trade Center
loomed before us.

It’s too bad, I observed, that we didn’t make time to visit the observation
deck on top of one of the towers. On a clear day like this, the view would be
spectacular.

Maybe next time, my wife said. We had already discussed coming
back with my daughter to do more sightseeing.

Sure, I said. After all, it’s not like those towers are going anywhere.
If those bastards couldn’t take them down with their car bomb, I doubt anything
will ever take them down.

I’m not sure why I said it. Earlier that day, we had walked past a small
exhibit commemorating the bombing and its victims. I guess it was on my mind.

Two days later, I was working at home in Denver. I went downstairs to pour myself a second
cup of coffee and decided (against any kind of precedent) to turn on the TV
and see what the headlines were. There were the towers — the invincible
towers of recent memory — now seen from a different angle, with thick,
black smoke billowing out of each.

They would only be standing a short while longer.

Maybe there was no way to foresee the horrible events of that day (although
others did.) But I had something to learn about making facile statements to
the effect that things will work out, as well as arrogant assumptions that things
will not change.

The future is open. It is something we can create together. We must continue
to try to do so, with our hopes as high as ever. And our eyes wide open.

But wait. If we take such a simplistic approach, don’t we then run the risk of engaging in hubris? Wasn’t it hubris, after all, that lead us to build those towers in the first place? I think not. I may have been guilty of hubris in the poorly considered statements I made on the ferry. But there was no overbearing pride or presumption inherent in building the World Trade Center. The people who went to work there that day were not guilty of arrogance. Nobody had it coming to them. The events of that day did not reflect divine justice handed down from Mt. Olympus; they were the acts of psychotic murderous fanatics.

The World Trade Center was a glorious achievement. I hope that it’s replacement proves to be just as glorious. Those who build it, like those who endeavor to achieve any great thing, will need to temper their ambition with caution against the harm that nature or evil men can do. But they must not, and we must not, temper our ambitions out of false humility or the fear of retribution from some deity so small and petty that he feels threatened by the works of humanity.

If anything, I think God laments the fact that, all too often, our thinking isn’t nearly big enough.

Still a Mystery

The human brain remains a mystery, in spite of the major strides in understanding that we’ve made in recent years. Consider this report on the use of hypnosis to relieve the suffering of cancer patients:

Hypnosis can relieve suffering and improve the quality of life of cancer patients, researchers said on Thursday.

Although it has been used to help people to give up smoking, lose weight and overcome phobias, its real therapeutic potential is still untapped, they believe.

Dr Christina Liossi, of the University of Wales in Swansea, said there is medical evidence that hypnosis helps to relieve the depression, nausea, vomiting and pain suffered by cancer patients.

There have also been suggestions that hypnosis could increase survival in patients with the disease, but she added there is not enough evidence to support them.

Liossi goes on to say that it has been established that hypnosis can affect the immune system, although unfortunately, the article does not cite any references for this. It’s one thing to say that hypnosis might alleviate pain. We all know that pain is, truly, “all in your head.” But the suggestion that hypnosis might increase cancer survivability or that it can somehow work directly on the immune system seems an entirely different proposition. Hypnosis almost begins to sound kind of spooky or magical.

Of course, there’s no reason to interpret such results that way. If the only physiological effect of hypnosis is pain reduction, that alone could account for greater rates of cancer survivability and a strengthened immune system. A body that endures less pain is a body that has been subjected to lower levels of stress, and therefore has additional strength to work through the course of a disease. It seems likely that a stronger, less-taxed body would also have a better immune system.

It’s surprising that we don’t hear more about a treatment option that offers such benefits. One of the researchers, Professor John Gruzelier of Imperial College London, suggests that the silence has a simple explanation: we don’t know how hypnosis works. The medical establishment is understandably shy about dealing with treatments that seem to work, but that can’t be explained.

Gruzelier is using brain-imaging techniques to study the changes that occur within the frontal lobe when an individual is hypnotized. Here’s hoping that his work helps make the brain a little less mysterious.