Monthly Archives: March 2005

Dolly the T-Rex?

First there was this startling announcement:

A frozen mammoth dug up from the Siberian tundra has been unveiled in central Japan in a preview of the six-month World Exposition, which is expected to draw millions of tourists.

A group of Russian and Japanese scientists hope to clone mammoths from the animal’s remains by using elephant egg cells.

The multimillion-dollar project between Russia and Japan to examine the beast is intended to find out why mammoths became extinct in the Ice Age.

And then this one:

For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70-million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.

If scientists can isolate proteins from the material, they may be able to learn new details of how dinosaurs lived, said lead researcher Mary Higby Schweitzer of North Carolina State University.

If the Japanese scientists are able to pull of their ambitious mammoth project, what are the chances that we might get to see an actual living dinosaur one of these days?

I guess that’s still pretty hard to say, but I’ll tell you one thing for sure. They’re definitely going up.

PlanetShine

This is big news:

NASA’s Spitzer telescope has detected the light from distant planets for the first time. Until now, extrasolar planets have only been discovered indirectly, by the effect of their gravity on their parent star. Astronomers first detected two planets using indirect methods, and then used Spitzer to perform followup observation with its infrared instruments. They detected the difference in star brightness when the planet was in front and behind the star, and were able to calculate how much of this light was supplied by the planet.

ITF #164

In the future…

…maybe we can teach them to cover top 40 hits.

Of course, any clubs they play in will have to have exceptionally big (and sturdy) stages.

Alternating Fast Extends Life?

FuturePundit takes a look at research indicating that alternate-day fasting may produce the same life-extension benefits for mice as calorie restriction:

A new study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, raises such a possibility. It shows that healthy mice given only 5 percent fewer calories than mice allowed to eat freely experienced a significant reduction in cell proliferation in several tissues, considered an indicator for cancer risk. The key was that the mice eating 5 percent fewer calories were fed intermittently, or three days a week.

What is encouraging about the findings is that the reduction in cell proliferation from that intermittent feeding regimen was only slightly less than that of a more severe 33 percent reduction in calories. Until now, scientists have been certain only of a link between a more substantial calorie reduction and a reduction in the rate of cell proliferation.

Randall speculates:

Would even shorter fasting periods provide any benefit? It would be interesting to see if any benefit could be derived by eating very day but having at least 12 hour stretches every day when no food is consumed. That might be more achievable. Don’t eat before bedtime and then entirely skip breakfast and make lunch be the first meal of the day.

In the past, I’ve thought about using an approach like this for achieving weight loss. And I’ve lamented that simple calorie restriction is too difficult. I wonder if something like what Randall is suggesting could be made workable?

Kass Employment Watch – Day 1

Leon Kass has an obvious bias against life extension. This is no state secret. So when Kass announced last week that he is abandoning the “tiresome question” (whether a cloned blastocyst is a person) in favor of an offensive strategy, Phil and I jumped on the logical inconsistency:

If the ethical question of “is it a baby or isn’t it” is discarded by Kass and company, all the anti-life extension guys have left is an old geezer mumbling, “why in my day we dropped dead at 45 and we were dang proud to do it!”

But we missed (at least I missed) a big political problem that Kass’ “coming out” may cause him. He is exceeding his mandate as Chairman of The President’s Council on Bioethics.

According to The Washington Post, Dr. Kass has teamed up with Eric Cohen, editor of the excellent journal of science, politics and philosophy The New Atlantis, to devise “a bold and plausible ‘offensive’ bioethics agenda…[aimed at] tak[ing] advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans on some of the most egregious biotechnological practices.”

The merits of Dr. Kass’s preferred policies are irrelevant here. The problem is that by hitching his star to a particular set of policies he has breached the trust set in him by the President, whose executive order creating the council asked it to “explore specific ethical and policy questions related to these developments; [and] to provide a forum for a national discussion of bioethical issues.”

Tech Central Station via Instapundit

You’ll want to read the whole thing.

I’m sure that Kass knows that this policy is exactly what the President wants. But we are a nation of laws, not men. Let’s see if we will live up to that ideal in this case. Today is DAY 1 of the Kass Employment Watch.

Million Dollar Mouse

I’m late in getting something up on this, but it’s big news:

In a move that will push the Methuselah Foundation’s M Prize over the $1 million mark, Dr. William Haseltine, biotech pioneer of Human Genome Sciences fame, has joined the Three Hundred, a group of individuals who pledge to donate $1000 per year to the M Prize for the next 25 years. “I am delighted that my decision to join the Three Hundred has pushed the prize fund over its first one million dollars, which I trust is only the first of many millions,” said Dr. Haseltine of his decision. “There’s nothing to compare with this effort, and it has already contributed significantly to the awareness that regenerative medicine is a near term reality, not an IF.”

Go, mousie, go!

Via our good friend Reason, of course.

Things are About to get Interesting

We’ve seen how Napster, Kazaa, and other file sharing protocols shook up the music industry. The film industry is next as broadband technology allows larger exchanges of data. These shakeups, as significant as they’ve been, are just a small taste of what’s ahead. I’ve written several times about fab labs (here, here, and here), but I’ve never fully explained why I find these machines so fascinating.

Fab labs are going to rock the world economy like no technology has since the advent of the internal combustion engine. People wonder about the future potential of the Internet – this is a big part of it.

At first, fab labs will be a novelty. They will be hailed as a way for U.S. manufacturers to compete with cheap overseas labor. For the most part manual labor will be eliminated altogether. These first fabricators will be large machines capable of a narrow range of manufacturing. Consumers will be happy with the new goods, mostly plastic toys at first, cheap and marked “Made in America.” The Chinese will grumble.

Then some electronics manufacturer, perhaps even a Japanese firm like Sony, will begin single-step fabrication of electronics in factories close to the markets – often right here in the U.S. These electronics will be cheap and tough. The toughness is fortunate because they won’t be repairable. They will be a solid piece of plastic with the electronics embedded within. The electronics will be embedded, printed really, within the plastic like another layer of ink on a page. Again, consumers will be happy.

Around this time a large home-building operation will start fabricating homes. The homes will be compared to Henry Ford’s Model T. A three-man crew will be able to run a fabricator capable of producing a completed home within three days. The homemaker will run three shifts so that the fabricator can operate night and day.

Homebuyers will love these new cheap homes. Homeowners will grumble as home prices dip.

But the real shakeup will begin when some enterprising computer firm offers the first home fab lab. It will connect directly to the computer and look like a large printer. But it will also “print” solid objects. The first models will be capable of fabricating simple things. Manufacturers will laugh nervously at these first models. “Who wants to pay $5,000 to wait 48 hours to print a toothbrush?” they will ask. And they’ll be right. At first just a few nerdy enthusiasts will have them. But they’ll begin writing and exchanging fab plans.

That whoosing sound you’ll hear will be money flying out of the manufacturing and distribution sectors into computer companies (and elsewhere). The home fab labs will get cheaper, faster, and more capable.

And the file sharing black market will grow by leaps and bounds. There will be congressional hearings as companies like Apple and Motorola complain that their intellectual property, the plans for iPods and telephones, are being cloned or just flat stolen and posted on the Internet. There will be efforts to outlaw or limit these devices. People will be jailed for fabricating illegally powerful new fab labs. Others will go to jail for intellectual property theft. But consumers will demand better and better fab labs. Ultimately the majority will rule.

We’ll get the fab labs, but intellectual property theft will be prosecuted more and more seriously. Other types of petty theft will become less common. Why shoplift when you can steal the fab plans for the Playstation 5 off some obscure website or file sharer? File sharing will be heavily policed, but the black market will always be with us.

farmmarket.jpgThere will be other changes. Brick and mortar retail stores will be converted to public spaces or abandoned. Some public spaces will be restaurants, coffeehouses, clubs, bars, and churches. But multi-use space will be in increasing demand as connectivity tools allow easy coordination of impromptu events.

Large retail stores could be converted to neighborhood industrial fab labs. These heavy-duty fab labs will fabricate products that are too big or complicated to fabricate at home.

Engineered town areas may seem artificial, but so is the isolation of sitting alone in front of a computer all day. People will want to congregate in places like this, even as the need for shopping is reduced. Reduced, but not eliminated. We won’t be eating fab food anytime soon. Just like the restaurants, the grocery stores will be with us.

UPDATE: Correction on the fab food speculation: We’ve all seen cakes with pictures printed into the icing with food coloring. At least one chef is experimenting with these food printers in the preparation of more sophisticated dishes.

Organic Electronics

Back during the Drexler/Smalley debates, Drexler argued that “The ultimate existence proof of the feasibility of a molecular assembler is life itself.”

Smalley responded that life is “wet nano” – that many things that may be possible in molecular biology will prove impossible to duplicate with “dry” nanomaterials. And though I’d love for Drexler to ultimately win this debate, I believe (as I wrote here) that biological systems, either natural or artificial, will have physical limitations that would keep them from being all-purpose nanobots.

While I believe this is true, biological nanobots (biobots) might be able to do much more than refine petroleum.

Researchers from Stanford University have constructed an extremely small transistor from a pair of single-walled carbon nanotubes and organic molecules. A single-walled carbon nanotubes is a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms.

The transistor is two nanometers wide and regulates electric current through a channel that is just one to three nanometers long. Today’s computer chips sport millions of transistors that have 90-nanometer channels.

TRNmag.com via KurzweilAI

To be a practical technology, we’ll need a cheap way to assemble and organize billions of these tiny transistors. Organizing organic molecules is exactly the sort of thing that biobots might be good for.


nature02498-f3.2.jpgOne of the reasons that organic materials haven’t already displaced silicon in electronics is that electricity passes faster through silicon than carbon. This disadvantage would be more than compensated for by making transistors 30 times smaller – 90 nanometers v. 3 nanometers. It is also thought that these tiny transistors would be useful in ultra-low-power electronics.

Last April the science journal Nature published a paper explaining how organic electronics could lead to ultrathin and flexible electronic devices.

Bloody Pragmatist

Virginia Postrel:

If there’s one thing Leon Kass isn’t, it’s pro-life.

Heh. You go, girl.

Postrel refers to a Washington Post article (annoying registration required) outlining The Luddite General’s new “offensive” on cloning and human embryo research. She comes to the above rather startling conclusion by pointing out that Kass is more interested in preventing life extending therapies from being developed than he is in protecting the lives of human embryos.

Admittedly, that’s a pretty odd stance for a “pro-life” leader such as Kass to take. And far be it from me to leap to the defense of perhaps the biggest Buzzkill of our era.

However.

This paragraph kind of got my attention:

But Kass and others have concluded that Brownback’s approach has been a strategic mistake, causing the debate to degenerate into endless discussions about whether a cloned human embryo is a cloned human, and whether an embryo in a lab dish has the same moral standing as one in a womb. Kass advocates separating the issue of cloned embryos for research from related issues of technological baby-making.

So apparently Kass is trying to do what good he can (from his point of view) while avoiding getting dragged down a particularly nasty rat hole which I have dubbed The Tiresome Argument. While I don’t agree with Kass’s motives or tactics, much less his ends, I can certainly understand that impulse.

But here’s a warning for you, Leon Old Friend. If you try to take anything like a pragmatic approach to these kinds of issues, you risk subjecting yourself to the scorn of the those who question your definitions. Moreover, it’s only a matter of time before some blogger or one of his buddies accuses you of being an advocate of slavery, a nazi, a guy who eats babies for breakfast, etc.

Actually, I’ve just checked both of those sites, looking for an outraged condemnation of Kass and his bloody pragmatism. Nothing so far, but just you wait. After all, for the sake of consistency if nothing else, these guys are bound to come down pretty hard on their old hero.

<crickets-chirping> So I’ll just keep checking back to see what they have to say…</crickets-chirping>

via Rand Simberg

Speech Update

This evening I won first place in the Area Competition with the same speech with which I won Local two weeks ago.

On to District…