“I love this feature.” Glenn
Reynolds. (Thanks, man.)
Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world
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A bionic woman, a cat with a keen sense of direction, and an atom-smasher
that couldn’t be bothered to bring about doomsday — it must be time for another
good news roundup!
Today’s Good Stuff:
Quote of the Day
First rule of killing memes is to not talk about the memes you want to kill.
Memes are like Obi-Wan; if you strike them down, they will only grow stronger
Mike D, Speculist reader
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Item 1
Anything into
Oil
The smell is a mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones
and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world—turkey
slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs
swollen with putrid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager
and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20
minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion
process plant in Carthage, Missouri.
Two hours later a much cleaner truck—an oil carrier—pulls up to
the other end of the plant, and the driver attaches a hose to the truck’s
intake valve. One hundred fifty barrels of fuel oil, worth $12,600 wholesale,
gush into the truck, headed for an oil company that will blend it with heavier
fossil-fuel oils to upgrade the stock. Three tanker trucks arrive here on
peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons
of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into
fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to
discharge into a municipal wastewater system.
For Brian Appel—and, maybe, for an energy-hungry world—it’s a dream
come true, better than turning straw into gold. The thermal conversion process
can take material more plentiful and troublesome than straw—slaughterhouse
waste, municipal sewage, old tires, mixed plastics, virtually all the wretched
detritus of modern life—and make it something the world needs much more
than gold: high-quality oil.
The Good News:
An idea that addresses both our energy problems and our waste-disposal problems
at the same time has got to be a good one.
My expectation is that we won’t be terribly reliant on oil for energy a couple
or three decades from now; however, a process such as this might still prove
valuable even in a world where we don’t need oil to power our vehicles. For
one thing, aircraft will probably be slower to adopt alternative fueling strategies
than cars and trucks (which doesn’t mean that alternatives aren’t being
discussed.)
In any case, I like a scenario that relies on human beings continuing to produce
waste. Sounds like a safe bet, doesn’t it?
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Item 2
Large
Hadron Collider "Actually Worked"
The world’s largest atom smasher’s first experiment went off today without
a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.
The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile
(27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss
border.
Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam
down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.
"Oh, we made it through!" one person cried as the beam made it
through a further section of the tunnel.
One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling
all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully—bringing
raucous applause.
The Good News
This is a banner day for science. The Large Hadron Collider will bring us to
new levels of understanding of the intricate workings of the universe.
Plus…
Hey, did you notice? The world didn’t end! We get so used to the world
not ending that sometimes we take it for granted. But in honor of our not being
sucked into a giant black hole or blasted back in time to when our entire universe
was nothing but diffuse particles, the Times
Online has compiled a list of 30 other time the world didn’t end.
If you like that sort of list, keep this in mind: those thirty days are just
a tiny, tiny subset of the total number of days in which the world has not ended.
In fact, we are (and I hope I don’t jinx it or anything by pointing this out)
batting a perfect 1000 on that score.
Meanwhile, Stephen Hawking says that the
LHC is vital to our survival.
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Item 3
Humans
Have Astonishing Memories, Study Finds
If human memory were truly digital, it would have just received an upgrade
from something like the capacity of a floppy disk to that of a flash drive.
A new study found the brain can remember a lot more than previously believed.
In a recent experiment, people who viewed pictures of thousands of objects
over five hours were able to remember astonishing details afterward about
most of the objects.
Though previous studies have never measured such astounding feats of memory,
it may be simply because no one really tried.
In the experiment, 14 people ranging from age 18 to 40 viewed nearly 3,000
images, one at a time, for three seconds each. Afterwards, they were shown
pairs of images and asked to select the exact image they had seen earlier.
The test pairs fell into three categories: two completely different objects,
an object and a different example of the same type of object (such as two
different remote controls), and an object along with a slightly altered version
of the same object (such as a cup full and another cup half-full).
Stunningly, participants on average chose the correct image 92 percent, 88
percent and 87 percent of the time, in each of the three pairing categories
respectively. Though 14 subjects may not sound like a huge sample, the fact
that they each recalled the objects with very similar rates of success suggests
the results are not a fluke.
The good news…
What intrigues me most about this story is that it was a test that had simply
never been tried before. We still have a lot to learn about what human beings
truly are capable of doing, and we may well be surprised — again and again
— to learn that we can do more than we thought we could.
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Item 4
Lost cat returned home after nine years
LONDON (Reuters) – A couple have been reunited with their missing cat after
nine years, the RSPCA said Wednesday.
Dixie, a 15-year-old ginger cat, disappeared in 1999 and her owners thought
she had been killed by a car.
She was found less than half a mile from her home in Birmingham after a concerned
resident rang the animal charity to report a thin and disheveled cat who had
been in the area for a couple of months.
RSPCA Animal Collection Officer Alan Pittaway checked her microchip and confirmed
it was Dixie. She was returned to her owners, Alan and Gilly Delaney, within
half an hour.
The Good News:
Dixie has to get a lot of credit in this story for managing to stay alive as
long as she did and for presumably finding her way back to the old ‘hood. True,
she might have been there all along, but it seems likely in that case that she
would have found her own way home at some point over those nine years.
But the real hero of this story has got to be the microchip. Turned over to
the RSPCA, what are the chances that an un-chipped Dixie would have ever traversed
that final half mile?
Anyway, if you want even more pet-related good news, check out this headline:
Dogs
And Cats Can Live In Perfect Harmony In The Home, If Introduced The Right
Way
Whoa. Dogs and cats…living together.
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Item 5
Where
Sweat Equals Electricity
It sounds like something you’d only see on the Discovery Channel: people
pedaling ferociously to create enough energy to power the television, stereo
and lights.
Launched last week, his "human-powered" gym is one of few fitness
centers in the world that runs on power generated by people working out, Boesel
said.
As members pedal on stationary bicycles, a small motor connected to the stations
charges batteries that power the gym’s television and stereo system.
Boesel said he doesn’t yet have a way to quantify the output but knows that
at the moment it’s relatively small. However, this is just the beginning,
he said.
"Our goal is to someday create 100 percent of the electricity we use
in the gym," Boesel said. "The short-term goal is to get all of
the electricity we can out of the machines."
The good news:
What a great business model — requiring your gym patrons to pay you for the
privilege of generating the electricity you need to run your gym. Of course,
it sounds like Boesel has a long way to go before this activity is really "running"
his gym. He needs to get some elliptical and stair-climbing machines into the
mix.
Also, this raises an interesting hypothetical: what kind of physical condition
would we all be in if we were required to generate, through our own activity,
say 5% (or even 1%) of the total electricity we use?
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Item 6
Nerve
Surgery Leaves Woman With Feeling in an Arm That Isn’t There
Claudia Mitchell may look like your average 20-something college student.
She is anything but.
As a result of an experimental surgery, Mitchell has become the first real
"Bionic Woman": part human, part computer.
The "targeted reinnervation" surgery was developed by Dr. Todd
Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. It was a radical idea:
a robotic arm controlled not by a patient’s stump or shoulder, but by a patient’s
thoughts.
Mitchell, a U.S. Marine, was ready to try anything to have a second functioning
arm. She volunteered for the surgery.
During the six-hour procedure in 2006, doctors took the severed and dormant
nerves in Mitchell’s shoulder, nerves that are used to control the movement
of her arm, and put them under the muscle in her chest.
They wanted the nerves to reawaken and work her chest muscle. The doctors
eventually used the electrical nerve signals from that chest muscle to power
a new bionic arm.
The good news:
The linked article goes on to tell how Mitchell is learning to operate her
arm via her rewired nerves. She can now perform everyday tasks such as folding
clothes and chopping vegetables. And, in a development that only deepens the
mystery of how the human nervous system works — but promises to help us understand
it better one day — sensation has returned to Mitchell’s "hand."
That is, she can feel temperature, pressure, and other sensations in a hand
that is no longer there, or — if you prefer — in a mechanical hand that can’t
possibly experience such feelings.
We’ve all heard of the amputees who feel a twitch or an ache in a long-absent
limb. Maybe we should no longer view the ability to experience such sensations
as some kind of sensory mistake, but rather as evidence of the robustness of
the human nervous system. Of course, there is plenty of evidence of that robustness
to be found in this young woman’s ability to move her robotic arm via thought
— essentially the same way she moves her biological arm. This story offers
tremendous hope not only to amputees but to victims of paralysis who hope one
day to experience the basic sensation of touch.
In a related development, scientists are developing a working bionic
eye which they say will be ready in five years or so. We may not yet understand
the human body, but our ability to replicate its functionality is growing
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Item 7
Daydream achiever
ON A SUNDAY morning in 1974, Arthur Fry sat in the front pews of a Presbyterian
church in north St. Paul, Minn. An engineer at 3M, Fry was also a singer in
the church choir. He had gotten into the habit of inserting little scraps
of paper into his choir book, so that he could quickly find the right hymns
during the service. The problem, however, was that the papers would often
fall out, causing Fry to lose his place.
But then, while listening to the Sunday sermon, Fry started to daydream. Instead
of focusing on the pastor’s words, he began to mull over his bookmark problem.
"It was during the sermon," Fry remembers, "that I first thought,
‘What I really need is a little bookmark that will stick to the paper but
will not tear the paper when I remove it.’ " That errant thought – the
byproduct of a wandering mind – would later become the yellow Post-it note,
one of the most successful office products of all time.
Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a
thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections.
Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings – such as the message of
a church sermon – the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought
and imaginative ramblings. As a result, we’re able to imagine things that
don’t actually exist, like sticky yellow bookmarks.
The good news:
On the most recent FastForward
Radio, we talked about a meme that we think is well worth spreading: the
notion that creativity
is as important as literacy in dealing with our multi-faceted, rapidly changing
world. Daydreams, it would seem, are one of the best tools we have to develop
creativity. The research shows that there are two kinds of daydreams, the ones
that you fall into without realizing it and the ones you enter more or less
as a conscious choice. It’s this latter kind that promotes creativity.
So let’s start building a better future, people. Let’s get going
on some intentional, deliberate daydreaming.
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Item 8
Long-life gene that triples chance of living to 100 found
Men who have two copies of a "long life gene" triple their odds
of living nearly a century, according to a study published today.
The advantage is all down to having two "letters" of the six billion
letter human genetic code that are the same and the scientists who report
the find believe that this kind of understanding could have important implications
for living longer and lowering the risk for age-related disease and disability.
The gene linked with better health and a longer life is called FOXO3A and
although similar genes have been shown to prolong life span in other species,
this is the first time that FOXO has been linked directly to longevity in
humans.
The Good News:
The genetic "cure" for aging has a lot of promise for later generations
of humanity. Once we get comfortable with sequencing heart disease, diabetes,
and breast cancer out of our offspring’s genetic code, nothing will be more
natural than wanting to protect them from the suffering that aging brings about.
We’re still a step or two away from gene therapies that could help people who
are already born avoid aging. But this is certainly an encouraging step in that
direction.
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Item 9
Massive floating generators, or ‘eco-rigs’, to provide power and food to Japan
Battered by soaring energy costs and aghast at dwindling fish stocks, Japanese
scientists think they have found the answer: filling the seas with giant “eco-rigs”
as powerful as nuclear power stations.
The project, which could result in village-sized platforms peppering the
Japanese coastline within a decade, reflects a growing panic in the country
over how it will meet its future resource needs.
The floating eco-rig generators which measure 1.2 miles by 0.5 miles (2km
by 800m) are intended to harness the energy of the Sun and wind. They are
each expected to produce about 300 megawatt hours of power.
The Good News:
These rigs will not just supply much-needed power to the Japanese mainland,
they will be nurseries for coral and plankton, and may ultimately help to
rebuild Japanese fisheries. Plus, I think there’s a fair chance that these
rigs — once implemented — would become interesting communities. Bigger than
a ship, smaller than an island. Tourism might ultimately become a side business.
I know I wouldn’t mind spending some time on one.
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Better All The Time was compiled by Phil Bowermaster. Live to see it!
