Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

What the Heck Was THAT?

Just got home from watching Cloverfield, the much anticipated new monster movie from producer J. J. Abrams. Stephen and special guest Tobias Buckell and I speculated a little about this movie on a recent FFR. We had a few questions:

1. What exactly is the monster?

2. Will the monster ever be shown?

3. Once it is shown, won’t it all be sort of a let down?

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I’m very pleased to report that the answers to these questions are:

1. Beats the heck out of me.

2. More or less.

3. Nope.

I’m also pleased to report that Cloverfield does not disappoint on any level. The closest I came to being disappointed by the film was in seeing, very near the end, about five seconds more of the monster than I really wanted. But in this age of movies that hit us over the head, across the shoulders, down the middle, and back up again by every possible angle of every variation of every fantastic image we could never even hope to imagine, the thing that impresses me most about Cloverfield’s treatment of its subject is summed up in one magic word: restraint.

By limiting the POV to what can be seen through the viewfinder of a handheld camcorder, director Matt Reeves has given us an up-close and in-your-face, at times almost claustrophobic, victim’s-eye view of a city under siege by Some Great Big Thing.

Think Godzilla meets the Blair Witch.

Even so, the movie is neither sparing with its shocks nor parsimonious with its special effects. Once the action starts, you’re hooked. I was quite literally on the edge of my seat several times during the brief 90 minutes or so that Cloverfield requires to tell its tale.

Although the action is all limited to what goes on in a single camcorder, the story involves us in several plot lines, and even manages to pull off a credible flashback sequence which frames the main narrative. There is nothing particularly deep or complex about the soap-opera lives of the beautiful young people on whom this adventure falls, but I have to admit that I got so caught up in their personal drama in the first 10-15 minutes of the movie that it almost came as a shock when the first KAPOW! hit and suddenly I was watching a monster movie.

I won’t say anymore. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone. Okay, except one thing: a number of disgruntled teenagers in my immediate vicinity were highly disappointed by the ending, one even claiming he was going to ask for his money back. All I can tell you is that the end of the movie is clearly spelled out both in the opening frames of the film and in the trailer that I’m sure we’ve all seen by now.

To quote another highly entertaining film: are you watching closely?

Anyhow, go see Cloverfield. You’ll like it.

Facing the Serious Questions

I, for one, welcome our new monkey overlords with their thought-controlled robotic henchmen.

Of course, the real point of this research is that if monkey’s can do it, so can humans. So the serious question about the future that we all have to face is whether we will go with straight-up thought-controlled robotic henchmen, or whether we will develop a human-monkeybrain interface whereby what we think will be carried out by the monkeys, and what the monkeys think (as instructed by us) will by carried out by the robots. I personally prefer this model, in that I get not only henchman, but a tiered reporting structure as well.

But that’s just me

Also, if it matters, this research might have some kind of obscure side benefits for victims of paralysis:

In a major step toward helping victims of paralysis walk again, researchers at Duke University Medical Center today announced that they had proved monkeys can use their brainpower to control the walking patterns of robots.

The Duke researchers, working with the Computational Brain Project of the Japan Science and Technology Agency, implanted Idoya, a rhesus monkey, with electrodes that gathered signals from her brain’s motor and sensory cortex cells as she ambled along on a specially built child-size treadmill. The electrodes recorded the cells’ responses as the monkey walked on the treadmill at different speeds; simultaneously, sensors on Idoya’s legs tracked their patterns of movement. The information was transmitted in real time from their lab in Durham, N.C., to control the commands of a five-foot-tall humanoid robot (see video here) in Kyoto, Japan.

That part all seems a little far-out to me. But who knows? Maybe the human interest angle will help them keep the work funded.

Via GeekPress.

Doctor Gave Me a Pill, and I Grew a New Heart

No, we’re not quite there, yet. But it looks like we’re much closer than we were:

SCIENTISTS have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.

The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein “skeleton” that created its shape was left.

Then the skeleton was seeded with live “progenitor” cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.

The research, by scientists at the University of Minnesota, has so far been done only with rats and pigs and is highly experimental. It is unlikely to be applied to humans for years.
However, Professor Doris Taylor, director of the university’s centre for cardiovascular repair, believes it could be a significant step towards creating custom-built hearts, blood vessels and other organs for people with serious illness.

The big advantage of such an approach is that organs so built would use stem cells taken from the patient so the body’s immune system would not reject them.

“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” Taylor said. “It opens a door to the notion that you can make any organ – kidney, liver or pancreas. You name it and we hope we can make it.”

The promise of this procedure would be difficult to overstate. To be able to give someone whose body has been devastated by heart or kidney disease a healthy organ with no need for a donor and with no real risk that that the transplanted organ will be rejected…that’s huge. I wonder if the same or a similar procedure could be used to re-grow seemingly simpler structures such as bones and teeth? Also, could the same or a similar process be used to replace sections of a damaged spinal cord?

Plus, I have to wonder what the possible life extension implications this development might have. There’s the question of the “age” of the new organ. If I’m 45 and I have a new heart grown in this manner and transplanted in, is it a 45 year old heart? Or is it younger? If younger, what would happen if a person swapped in a new pituitary gland grown in this manner? The new glad might start sending signals out to the older body telling it that it’s younger than it really is. Of course, this won’t repair accumulated cell damage, but this perhaps this could at least slow down the process of a body shutting itself down.

Mind Reading Now Possible?

An MRI can now show, with 78% accuracy, whether you’re thinking about a hammer or thinking about a pair of pliers. Apparently, even a few months ago, the same test could barely distinguish between major categories (e.g, whether the subject was thinking about “places or faces.”)

This a major step forward, but I think — all questions aside as to whether we actually want mind-reading technology — there is still a long way to go. What we’re seeing here is more a step forward in lie detection than actual mind reading. What goes on inside our brains involves a highly complex set of relationships between words, symbols, and images. At best, we’re only able to articulate an approximation of what we’re thinking via the spoken or written word (or visual media.)

The point is that we often don’t really know what we’re thinking. How then could a machine know, much less someone reading the output from the machine?

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The Fundamental Building Block

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the invention that made it all possible. A tremendous technological leap forward in its own right — perhaps one of the clearest points of demarcation between the the technology of the 20th and 21st centuries — this device showcased the kind of fundamental rethinking that we casually refer to as discontinuous change. It was the very epitome of the “paradigm shift” described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And yet this invention, as critical a breakthrough as it was, proves to be only a stepping stone, a building block for something even bigger: a major step forward in how we can capture and use solar energy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s have a look at the original, all-important breakthrough technology…

Switchgrass Looks Promising

Not to get a whole thing going again, but one of the arguments offered against flex fuels is that any flex-fuel program requires ethanol and ethanol (if it could ever work at all) is problematic in that its production requires making energy production competitive with food production, which can drive up the price of produce such as corn which is applicable to both.

One solution, as I noted in the comments section of that lengthy discussion, might be to open up other agriculture markets for fuel production, while relegating corn back to what it’s best at — feeding us and our livestock. At the same time, we might look at crops that would give us a bigger bang for our buck in terms of domestic ethanol production. As reader Odograph pointed out, it would be next to impossible for the US to match Brazil’s successful ethanol program, partly because corn just doesn’t crank out energy as efficiently as sugarcane, and partly because we’re such pigs when it comes to energy consumption.

Solutions such as plug-in hybrids might at least cut down our rate of consumption of liquid fuels for powering cars (if not our total energy footprint). I mentioned crops such as sugar beets, fodder beets, and sweet sorghum which yield ethanol at about the same rate as sugar cane. And here’s another possibility, which we discussed briefly on our most recent podcast — switchgrass:

Previous studies on switchgrass plots suggested that ethanol made from the plant would yield anywhere from 343% to 700% of the energy put into growing the crop and processing it into biofuel. But these studies were based on lab-scale plots of about 5 square meters. So 6 years ago, Kenneth Vogel, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues set out to enlist farmers for a much larger evaluation. Farmers planted switchgrass on 10 farms, each of which was between 3 and 9 hectares. They then tracked the inputs they used–diesel for farm equipment and transporting the harvested grasses, for example–as well as the amount of grass they raised over a 5-year period. After crunching the numbers, Vogel and his colleagues found that ethanol produced from switchgrass yields 540% of the energy used to grow, harvest, and process it into ethanol. Equally important, the researchers found that the switchgrass is carbon neutral, as it absorbs essentially the same amount of greenhouse gases while it’s growing as it emits when burned as fuel.

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Switchgrass looks promising, but it’s no panacea. As a natural part of the North American prairie ecosystem, this plant has been touted by some as a crop that could solve all our energy needs with minimal fertilizer, herbicides, or other inputs. But the research says not so fast:

A final significant finding, Vogel says, is that yields on farms using fertilizer and other inputs, such as herbicides and diesel fuel for farm machinery, were as much as six times higher than yields on farms that used little or no fertilizer, herbicides, or other inputs to grow a mixture of native prairie grasses. That result contrasts sharply with a controversial study published just over a year ago in Science that suggested that a mixture of prairie grasses farmed with little fertilizer or other inputs would produce a higher net energy yield than ethanol produced from corn (Science, 8 December 2006, p. 1598). Instead, the current study–published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences–shows that switchgrass farmed using conventional agricultural practices on less-than-prime cropland yields only slightly less ethanol per hectare on average than corn. “The bottom line is that low-input systems are not economically viable,” Vogel says.

Switchgrass may be part of the overall solution, but it’s going to take some real effort to make it work.

Adding Hours to the Day?

Next time Stephen packs up his family for one of those all-nighter cross-country excursions, maybe he will benefit from this development:

As the line between science fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurry, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has always led the pack in terms of cool, weird, wacky and frightening innovations. This time Darpa-funded scientists have found a drug that eliminates sleepiness with a nasal spray of a key brain hormone. The spray has worked well in lab experiments, with no apparent side effects. The hope is that the hormone will serve as a promising sleep-replacement drug in humans.

The spray contains a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A. In tests, monkeys suffering from sleep deprivation were treated with the substance and were subsequently able to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. Darpa is no doubt interested in the spray for it’s promise of keeping soldiers awake and alert during battle, but for those suffering from narcolepsy, the discovery may offers a potential treatment. Even those with less severe sleep disorders may be interested. According to the National Sleep Foundation, than 70 percent of Americans get less than the generally recommended eight hours of sleep per night and consequently suffer some type of sleep-deprivation symptoms.

I, for one, have about a six-cup daily coffee habit that I would like to shake. I would go cold turkey, but I don’t think I could take three weeks or so of being (alternately) comatose and psychotic. Maybe this stuff could help?

As there are no side-effects (yet identified), I wonder what possibilities there are for long-term use? You want to talk about kicking the habit — could those who are so inclined kick the sleep “habit” once and for all? One could potentially add north of 25% productive (or fun) time to one’s day. Second career, night school, hobbies — the possibilities are intriguing.

If this stuff were to become readily available, I can see it being widely used. But given the option, would people give up sleep altogether?

Would you?

Cosmological Good News / Bad News

I know. You’re supposed to start these things with the bad news so as to make the good news seem better, but believe me, it’s just more fun to approach this one the other way around.

So with that in mind…

The good news: You know that whole mysterious thing about how the most distant parts of the universe are accelerating? Remember how it threw so much scientific thinking into disarray? Remember all the problems and confusion it caused? Well, the good news is that maybe the outer edges of the universe aren’t really accelerating at all. Some clever scientists have come up with an alternative explanation.

Which leads us to…

The bad news: So, okay, their alternate explanation is that time itself may be slowing down. At first, time slowing down doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. But it’s one of those things that sort of catches up with you eventually. Still, it probably isn’t something that we need to get all that worked up about:

In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether – and everything will stop.

“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. “Our planet will be long gone by then.”

So to recap: the good news is that maybe the universe isn’t weird in a way that we thought, and the bad news is that maybe it’s weird in a completely different way that will eventually be the end of everything. But the other good news is that this will only be a problem for those of us planning to live many billions of years. And since most of us planning to do that a also plan to end up functioning in a different substrate — probably silicon, for starters — we can look forward to much faster mental function, which will give us a bit of a subjective offset where time coming to an end is concerned.

Plus, we can’t rule out subjective immortality kicking in there somewhere down the line. Could happen. We just need to get it started at some point before that final tick of the Big Ticking Clock.

Oh, well. Nothing like a deadline to inspire productivity, I suppose.

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Zubrin on the Glenn and Helen Show

Robert Zubrin is featured on the most recent Glenn and Helen Show, talking about his book, Energy Victory — which is apprently doing quite well. (He was also a guest on FastForward Radio not long ago.) Now Glenn reports that a member of John McCain’s campaign staff has contacted him to point out how Senator McCain is all about Flex Fuels.

Here’s hoping that some (or all) of the other candidates chime in. Before Christmas, I started a list of people who I think need to read Zubrin’s book. Let’s add all the candidates’ names to that list. A sane energy policy could be closer then we think!