On Saturday I took third place in the district competition with the same speech with which I won the area competition last month.
That was a lot of fun. And now it’s time to write some new speeches.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
Terrestrial Aliens
The New York Times published an Op-Ed yesterday from Paul Davies, astrobiologist and author of many books including The Fifth Miracle: the search for the origin of life.
One tenet of evolutionary biology is that all life on Earth is related – that all plants and animals all the way down to microbes are descended from a single instance of bio-genesis about four billion years ago. Dr. Davies is not so sure.
…Huge asteroids and comets mercilessly pounded the planet, creating conditions more reminiscent of hell… The biggest impacts would have swathed our globe in incandescent rock vapor, boiling the oceans dry and sterilizing the surface worldwide.
How did life emerge amid this mayhem? Quite probably it was a stop-and-go affair, with life first forming during a lull in the bombardment, only to be annihilated by the next big impact.
If life got started more than once, then Earth once harbored life very different from what we know today. It might have been as alien as anything light years away. These microbes could still be here with biologists overlooking them everyday.
Under a microscope, many microbes appear similar even if they are as genetically distinct as humans are from starfish. So you probably couldn’t tell just by looking whether a microorganism is “our” life or alien life. Genetic sequencing is used to position unknown microbes on the tree of life, but this technique employs known biochemistry. It wouldn’t work for organisms on a different tree using different biochemical machinery. If such organisms exist, they would be eliminated from the analysis and ignored. Our planet could be seething with alien bugs without anyone suspecting it.
Davies suggests a simple and inexpensive experiment that could prove the existence of these native aliens. Life as we know it uses left-hand amino acids. Mirror image right-hand amino acids exist, but are useless to known life. Biologists believe that life could work just as well with those bizarro amino acids, it’s just that familiar life went left.
If life started more than once, there’s an even chance that it uses right-hand amino acids. Davies suggests preparing a dish of anti-food, place any unusual microbes you might find in the dish and wait. If it grows it would be a very big deal.
The discovery of a second sample of life on Earth would confirm that bio-genesis was not a unique event and bolster the belief that life is written into the laws of the cosmos. It is hard to imagine a more significant scientific discovery.
This wouldn’t answer the question of whether complex or sentient life exists elsewhere, but it would convince most scientists that microbial life is common in the universe. And this discovery would certainly move the Foresight Exchange.
Bionic Lab
Last August I wrote briefly about a small company by the name of Correlogic. The Wheeling Intelligencer brought me up to date with an article published last week. Correlogic has developed a method to glean information from the data generated from a mass spectrometer.
A mass spectrometer is a machine that can ionize the molecules in a sample of blood serum and then propel those molecules down a tube about a meter in length. The machine will then measure the number of ions that hit the end of the tube during any given moment.
This process will effectively separate the molecules by mass. It is then possible, said [Ben Hitt of Correlogic] to determine whether there is, say, a relatively large amount of a molecule with a molecular weight of 500 versus one with a molecular weight of 510. And in proteomics, the “presumption is that the mass spectra represents proteins in the serum”…
A single blood sample can return as many as 180,000 data points. The trick is to mine that data for information.
“It’s almost revolutionary,” said Hitt, “Given time to develop the test, we ought to be able to have some one go see their physician, take a very small amount of blood, send it to the lab, get a mass spectrum of that blood” and then determine if the patient has a number of possible cancers.
He said it could be possible to use a single sample to test for lung cancer, colon cancer and liver cancer, as well as ovarian and breast cancer in women and prostate and testicular cancer in men..
If a simple blood test was developed that could detect multiple cancers, then the test could become routine. Early detection would allow early treatment and greatly improved survival rates.
Ultimately this technology could be placed into an implanted medical device. This would be a simpler system than what Phil and I have thought about recently (here and here). Instead of a system that would need to send nanobots out into the body to correct damage, this system could simply take blood samples and test them for cancer and other problems (high LDL cholesterol, heart damage, intoxication, blood-sugar, hormone imbalances, etc.). It could then inform you (or your doctor) via cell phone or PDA if there is a problem.
Perhaps this could even be an added function to medical devices like the Cardioverter Defibrillator.
Renewable Resources
Rand Simberg provides an excellent critique of rhetoric about “renewable resources” on Tech Central Station. The money quote has to do with how and where the environment has actually changed, both for the better and the worse:
The environment in the industrialized world, and particularly the US, today is in fact cleaner, our health better, our lifespans longer, our forests larger, than was the case during colonial times. That things are in bad shape in much of the rest of the world is a consequence mostly of awful government, not any intrinsic resource issue per se. The largest environmental disasters have been in countries in which unaccountable dictators made decisions about the allocation of resources (e.g., Saddam draining the marshes, the denuding of Haiti’s forests, the vast environmental messes of the former Soviet Union, etc.) Similarly, it is command economies that waste and destroy resources. For instance, the Soviet Union actually subtracted value, as absurdly demonstrated by the fact that it was generally cheaper for Soviet farmers to feed their hogs with processed bread than with the grain from which it was made. Wealth, property rights and freedom are the best solution to concerns of resource utilization (and renewal).
Well said. Although I think there is also a role for government regulation to play. I’m not sure how much cleaner our environment today would be absent some well-placed laws governing industrial and other forms of pollution.
But Rand really has me scratching my head with this last part:
Even worse, it misleads many into supporting what has become a key (and mistaken) goal of the so-called “environmental movement” — to limit human population, because this is perceived to be necessary in order to conserve those “limited resources.” But to do so is to limit the quantity of human ingenuity itself. And that, as the late Julian Simon pointed out, is the ultimate resource, for which there remains plenty of room on our home planet, and beyond it as well, as long as we continue to renew and make the best use of it.
Well, now if that’s true, I may just have to re-think my whole Save the Planet by Eliminating the Humans strategy. Hmmmmm…..
Relax
Nothing to worry about, apparently:
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. – Scientists say the odds of another catastrophic volcanic eruption in Yellowstone within anyone’s lifetime are extraordinarily remote, but that’s exactly what happens in a made-for-television movie that will air this Sunday.
Discovery Channel has a neat promo for the movie, along with some good geological/historical information about Yellowstone. Should be a fun movie. I’m eager to see whether Denver gets totally wiped out.
Mutants Among Us
GeekPress reports that early risers are mutants.
Actually, the early riser angle is Paul’s spin on the story, but what we’re dealing with, here, is somewhat different:
[Susan]Middlebrook suffers from what is known as familial advanced sleep phase syndrome, or FASPS. Her body’s clock is out of sync with the sleep-wake rhythm most of the world lives by. She goes to bed each night between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. and wakes in the wee hours of the morning.
About three-tenths of a percent of the world’s population lives like this, including two of Middlebrook’s sisters, her daughter, and her mother. “Their whole clock is shifted,” said Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
Three out of a thousand people isn’t many. But that number may be deceptively low. Maybe most of the people with this mutation have found a way to take advantage of it — working second shift or graveyard — and thus don’t realize that they have a “problem” at all. There would definitely have been an evolutionary advantage for early human populations to have some members who naturally stay awake while others sleep. You need guards posted against predators or enemey tribes, anyway. How much better if those selected for that duty are not inclined to doze off when nobody’s looking?
So are these mutants the vestige of a more primitive time, or the vanguard of a coming era in which the clock matters less and less? Surely there are more people who “stay up all night” today than at any previous point in human history. There is a whole world of employment and business opportunities for those who operate on a different clock.
Still, for those who persist in seeing this mutation as some kind of condition needing to be treated…what do you suppose would happen if Susan Middlebrook were to move 4-5 time zones to the east? She could avoid jetlag altogether, and she would find herself in a place completely in sync with her pattern. Problem solved.
But how long would it last?
Charged With Battery
Toshiba has developed a fast-charging lithium ion battery that can charge to 80% capacity within a minute. Hat tip to Kjell Hagen of Norway who suggests that this technology might make electric vehicles practical.
The batteries that Toshiba is working with are meant for smaller items like portable electronics, but Kjell makes an important point. The problems with all-electric vehicles are:
- Range
- Expense of the batteries
- Frequency of replacing batteries
- Environmental impact of battery disposal
- Lack of infrastructure (gas stations are not presently recharging stations)
- and, Time required to recharge.
Power and performance might once have been a consideration, but see here and here.
Most electric cars presently use either lead acid or nickel cadmium batteries because lithium ion batteries are 3 to 4 times more expensive. Lithium ion batteries already offer superior range to those traditional electric car batteries. If these batteries could also be refueled within several minutes, then they might be worth the expense.
Either way, I’m excited about the possibility of a one-minute recharge on my cell phone.
Body Language
A team led by scientists at Sangamo Biosciences in Richmond, California has reported in the journal Nature that they have developed a sophisticated new process for editing DNA without bombarding the genome with foreign genetic material.
They treated the cells in test tubes with the company’s proprietary type of “zinc finger nucleases†(ZFNs)… ZFNs are proteins made up of “fingers†of around 30 amino acids and stabilised by a zinc atom. Each finger binds to a specific combination of DNA bases and is attached to a DNA-cutting enzyme called a nuclease.
By using different combinations of amino acids, they can be designed to latch on to DNA at exactly the place where the mutated gene lies and cut it. This triggers the body’s natural repair process, called homologous recombination, which corrects the gene where the DNA was cut, The researchers provided the cells with a copy of the correct gene as a template.
This could be the beginning of a huge step forward. Previous forms of genetic therapy often caused cancer. Scientists would bombard the genome with the desired information and hope it stuck in the right place. It’s like blindly lobbing paint balloons at a road sign hoping to cover graffiti without obscuring the speed limit. Sometimes it worked, often it didn’t.
This new method is more like word processing. These scientists are hopeful that this advance will yield useful therapies for single gene mutations like that which causes sickle cell anemia or the “bubble boy” disease.
This new method might ultimately have applications beyond treating genetic diseases. Recently Phil and I have been speculating about the possibility of biological cyborgs. These people would remain largely biological, but would have an implanted processor for directing the work of biological nanobots. These “nanobots” might be our own cells redirected as the processor sees fit – cleaning up arteries, compensating for poor eating habits, etc. Obviously such a system would need a sophisticated method for communicating with cells. It would have to speak the language of cells.
A DNA “word processor” might fit the bill.
UPDATE: USAToday has much more. Via KurzweilAI.
A Terabyte on the Desktop
Kurzweil reports this encouraging development:
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies plans to announce on Monday a record for storage density on a disk drive: 230 billion bits per square inch, which would make possible a desktop computer drive capable of storing a terabyte of information.
The technology is known as perpendicular recording because the tiny magnets that represent digits are placed upright, not end to end.
I remember when I was working for a computer magazine years ago getting to try out a hard disk with an almost unimaginable size of 300 megabytes. Imagine trying to get by on so little now.
I wonder how long it will be before a terabyte seems cramped?
More details here (link requires annoying registration).