Oddities and Items: From Biotech to LaserTech

Let's take a break from dour murmurs of geopolitical danger. How about the sort of breakthroughs that will save the day!

Like in what ways will technology shape the workplace of the future? Fast Company takes a look at: What Work Will Look Like in 2025. 

Tech advances will depend on our ability to mine efficiently... All right so the Chinese used clever market ploys and environmental-health carelessness to corner the market on rare earth elements, needed for high function magnets in a myriad modern devices.  Well, markets react...  “Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have created a new magnetic alloy that is an alternative to traditional rare-earth permanent magnets.” See elsewhere my posting about how other companies are getting licenses to mine manganese nodules under the sea, for their own heaps of rare earth metals.

Of course, in the long run Planetary Resources and its ilk will transform it all, by giving us access to riches from space.

 == Updates in Physics ==

This is actually pretty … cool.  A graphene film with thermal conductivity capacity that is four times that of copper may help remove heat from electronics, easing a real problem.  

A cogent and clear run-down on the current industrial situation regarding graphene, the miraculous – and highly-hyped – wonder material.  And now...physicists announce graphene's cousin, stanene -- a 2D layer of Sn -- tin atoms. And "black phosphorus."

Amazing electrically conducting fibers that can be reversibly stretched to more than 14 times their initial length and whose electrical conductivity increases 200-fold when stretched.

Some excellent physics videos!  This one introduces Quantum Mechanics!

Cracking the Nutshell: This delightful site dissects some very, very deep concepts of free will and quantum mechanics.

In a new study, researchers demonstrated that they could slice up and entangle each photon pair into multiple dimensions using quantum properties such as the photons’ energy and spin. This method, called hyperentanglement, allows each photon pair to carry much more data than was possible with previous methods. Quantum entanglement could allow users to send data through a network and know immediately whether that data had made it to its destination without being intercepted or altered.

While we're all tangled -up in quantum knots.... See me discuss entanglement, multiverses and the Physics of Free Will with two other astrophysicists - Brian Keating (UCSD) and Andrew Friedman (MIT) - in this fun shared lecture a couple of weeks ago at UCSD's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.

== Transportation and Energy  ==

NASA has announced the successful completion of testing for its morphing airplane wing design. Known as Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge (ACTE) flight control surfaces, they replace a plane's conventional, rigid flaps with a flexible composite material.  Watch it flex and lift heavy weights!  

Based on the X-51 Waverider prototype tested in 2013, the U.S. Air Force is planning to build an airplane that travels at five times the speed of sound (about 3800 miles per hour), or Mach 5, going from New York to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes.  A system for machines, not us. Sorry.

You’ve watched astronauts create balls of water that hold together with surface tension, till the astronaut gulps it down? Well you can do that on Earth!  It takes a little kitchen chemistry.  Edible water bottles and the strange chemistry of spherification!  

Lightweight composite metal foams are effective at blocking X-rays, gamma rays, and neutron radiation, and are capable of absorbing the energy of high-impact collisions. The finding holds promise for use in nuclear power plants and space exploration. 

Construction on the new lane of Egypt’s Suez Canal, which runs alongside part of the existing canal, started less than a year ago but is now complete.  Huh.  

A Japanese research laser is 100 meter long and it’s firing a beam as powerful as 2 petawatts. However, the powerful laser was only able to run for two seconds.  

Boeing's new Compact Laser Weapon System (LWS) is capable of generating an energy beam of up to 10 kilowatts that can, depending on the power level, be used to acquire, track, and identify a target -- or even destroy it -- at ranges of at least 22 miles. The weapon is designed specifically to track and attack moving aerial targets such as incoming artillery rounds, and low-flying aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles.  Combine this with the new radars’ ability to track-back shells to pinpoint their origin, and we may be witnessing the end of Napoleon’s dictum that artillery is Queen of the Battlefield.  Of course the ones paying closest attention to all this?  Not Boeing’s customers or potential adversaries…. But sci fi authors.  

== Updates in Biotech ==

Phototonic PCR: UC Berkeley bioengineers develop an ultra-fast method to copy DNA using LED light: this may enable on-site DNA testing of smaller samples, such as blood left at a crime scene.

Pocket sized spectrometer Scio can analyze chemical composition of anything.. with data sent to your smart phone.

Smartphones are so smart...they can now test your vision!

Sites illustrating coolness in Biology!  Explore OneZoom: Tree of Life Explorer: Starting with browsable phylogenetics portrayed as a kind of fractal-branching tree. Lots of surprises.

A Chinese surgeon has carried out more than 1,000 head transplants on mice and is now looking to test out the procedure on monkeys. After receiving its new head in a ten hour procedure – or would it be more accurate to say “its new body? -- the mouse could open its eyes and move around – but it died shortly after. Meanwhile… Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero gears up to make an announcement on what he believes will be the world's first human head transplant. Eep. Makes the Chinese guy look responsible. 

Telemeres are the end caps on chromosomes that act as decay buffers, protecting the genes. Some believe they are timing-clocks that wear down then cause aging. “Earlier this year, scientists were able to successfully lengthen telomeres for the first time by using artificial RNA to encode a telomere-extending protein. This was celebrated as a revolutionary step in “turning back the internal clock” of human cells.”  But I said it was not going to be that simple. Sure enough. Scientists have linked long telomere length with lung cancer. Psigh.

Dentists will be able to use 3D printing to create anatomically correct teeth, crowns and veneers.  Oh, the aggravation our kids will never know.  The wonders they will take for granted.

== Computers and Gadgets ==

Intel and Micron have announced XPoint, a brand new memory technology that is up to 1000x faster and 1000x longer lasting than conventional flash memory.  This could change things.  

When Microsoft's new Internet Explorer replacement, officially dubbed Edge, arrives with Windows 10, it will offer users some new features, including the ability to annotate webpages and share notes. "Baked-in annotation features could be one area that sets Edge apart, considering most Web browsers can't handle them without third-party plug-ins or extensions. In fact, it's somewhat unbelievable that this hasn't become a standard feature in Web browsers yet." Windows 10 users can keep track of what is and isn’t useful within each webpage or document without extra steps. They can underline, place arrows and circle specific parts directly on webpages as they browse. 

iFixit has a lot of great videos and PDF guides for repairing many different kinds of electronic gadgets.

== Miscellaneous items of interest ==

Chinese billionaire Li Jinyuan decided to take 6,400 of his top distributors on an all-expenses-paid trip to France, hoping to  generate a wave of publicity to help offset the $14.5 million he shelled out for chartered jets, 30,000 hotel stays and a private tour of the Louvre. With the number of Chinese taking trips overseas exploding -- they made more than 107 million trips outside the mainland last year, up almost 20% over 2013-- and with more Chinese going abroad, their nation has become deeply self-conscious about the image its travelers leave behind. And this is where *I* cash in! Tony Fisk, does this count as a class A 100% spot on prediction from EARTH?  To the registry-wiki!

While in the Central Kingdom… a study of nearly 500,000 Chinese people over seven years found that those who ate spicy food three times a week cut their risk of dying by 14 per cent compared with people who abstained.

Richmond, California police have been inundated with calls for help from people who feel under attack from space-based weaponry because of a City Council resolution passed last month, in support of a 2001 bill introduced by then-U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, in an effort to ensure that Richmond residents would not be targets of space-based weaponry. Versions of it referred to alleged technologies including chemtrails, particle beams, electromagnetic radiation, plasmas, extremely low-frequency or ultra high-frequency energy radiation and mind control technology. 

“My Virtual Dream: Collective Neuro-feedback in an Immersive Art Environment” – was part experiment and part demo-art in Toronto.  More than 500 adults aged 18 and older wore wireless electroencephalography (EEG) headbands and participate in a brief collective neurofeedback experience in groups of 20 inside a 60-foot geodesic dome, along with spontaneous musical interpretation by live musicians on stage.

== Was that cool enough for you? ==

Lots of amazing stuff happening.  And it's tip of the iceberg. And those of you still wallowing in gloom?  How about this hypothesis.  That it's more your personality than our prospects, that determines your mood.

We face immense challenges.  Now join the immensely talented men and women who have a very real chance of solving them.

Seeing Further With Science!

Congratulations New Horizons and Pluto!  But more on those results, later.  This posting is largely about... medicine and biology. Starting with...

An epidemic of short-sightedness. No, not the all-too rampant political kind. But actual myopia, which has seen a steep rise over the last few decades. In China, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, 80 to  90% of teens are nearsighted, compared to 10 to 20% of youths sixty years ago. The same trend is seen in the U.S. and Europe, where nearly half of young adults are now myopic, twice as many as fifty years ago.

Clearly there is a genetic component to myopia, but this can't explain these rapid changes. Data does not back up a frequently-cited explanation due to reading or computer use. - though there is a pattern of increasing myopia with years of schooling. The strongest correlation is with environmental exposure, hours spent outdoors. Myopia is virtually unknown among hunter-gatherer tribes -- though some suggest that diet may also play a role. 

One hypothesis, according to a report in Nature: "light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development."  Animal studies support this idea: it is possible to induce myopia in chicks by controlling the level of natural light. One study showed a 23% decrease in myopia among Chinese children who spent an additional 40 minutes outdoors. Australian researchers estimate that children need to be exposed to about three hours a day of bright light (at least 10,000 lux) to be protected against myopia. Lighting levels should be taken into account in school design -- a classroom typically offers only 500 lux. 

A new study has shown that soft lenses, worn only at night, can prevent the progressive elongation of the eye in children.

== New in  Biosciences! ==

Envisioning disease...From just a single drop of blood, VirScan can detect the remains of more than 1,000 strains of 206 viruses that are infecting or have ever infected a patient. After screening blood from 569 people on four continents, experts found people were exposed to 10 viruses on average; two had antibodies for 84 different viruses. This is important.

First steps towards developing bio-artificial replacement limbs suitable for transplantation, using an experimental approach previously used to build bioartificial organs to engineer rat forelimbs with functioning vascular and muscle tissue. Some of you saw this in my story "Chysalis," in Analog Magazine a while back -- where I took it more than a bit farther.

U.S. and Chinese scientists have developed a method to inject microelectronic devices such as wires and transistors directly into the brain (or other body parts) to measure or stimulate neural activity. 

Scientists have for the first time documented the actual formation of newly learned concepts inside thebrain. Thanks to recent advances in brain imaging technology.  

Networked monkey brains: And now they are linking animals mentally! Via electrodes, rats and monkeys can coordinate their brains to carry out such tasks as moving a simulated arm or recognizing simple patterns. In many of the trials, the networked animals performed better than individuals.

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have been able to successfully inhibit alcohol and drug addiction by using a drug, israpidine, that is already approved by the FDA to treat high blood pressure.  The drug is able to erase (at least for rats) the unconscious memories that may underlie addiction.  

A new view of autism? “For decades, autism has been viewed as a form of mental retardation, a brain disease that destroys children’s ability to learn, feel and empathize… A new open-access study shows that social and sensory overstimulation drives autistic behaviors and supports the unconventional view that the autistic brain is actually hyper-functional.”  This fits in with the fact that when two hyper-functional people breed together, the odds of autism in offspring go up. It suggests a drastic shift in approaching the suite of syndromes. Autistics in future may benefit from a wide range of tech-enhanced opportunities to engage with the world… as I portray in EXISTENCE.  

Oh, speaking of David Brinn books... and I spelled that correctly.  Jerusalem Post editor and journalist David Brinn has co-written a book with Alex Kerten on one of the modern trends in medicine -- using body movement to combat nerve degenerative ailments. Getting nerves and muscles practice firing together in organized ways. I cannot vouch directly for "Goodbye Parkinsons, Hello Life!" But movement-exercise systems are showing promise. May none of you need this. But get moving, anyway. 

Researchers at Dundee University have discovered a new compound which could treat malaria while protecting people from the disease and preventing its spread, all in a single dose. 

Looking toward the end... George Dvorsky on io9 presents a very interesting rundown of recent research and arguments regarding the reason life forms age and die. Alas, George does not pursue the elephant in the room… why are humans the methuselahs of mammals?  Of course, I have my own theory about that. (See: Do We Really Want Immortality?)  

== Physics & Light ==

The science of light: Scientists have now captured an image of a photon as both a wave and a particle for the first time. Moreover, this experiment shows that the future talks to the past! That later events influence earlier ones.  “Time went backwards. Cause and effect appear to be reversed. The future caused the past. The arrow of time seemed to work in reverse.”

We live in boggling times. 

There is also good evidence that quantum processes take place inside our brains and within our body cells, as reported by the Guardian last year. 

== And only somewhat less "biological"

Frequency combs on fiber optic cables could remove distortions, giving us faster, more efficient internet signals. 

These students built a (very tiny) working hyper loop. 

Researchers from MIT have developed a new algorithm that lets autonomous robots divvy upassembly tasks on the fly, an important step forward in multirobot cooperation.

Another way of looking further: Augmented Reality: I spoke at AWE 2015 the Augmented Reality Conference, in Santa Clara, in June (My interview on AWE.tv has been posted online). There I saw how very many companies are suddenly diving into augmented reality. Take a look at Epson’s “Moverio” system.

The U.S. Air Force – according to unverified reports - has developed an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) device that is analogous to the EMP version of a sniper rifle, rather than a bomb. In a single test mission in Utah, CHAMP successfully blacked out all seven of its targets in a single flight. 

The Batteriser, a new $2.50 gadget promises to bring your AA and C batteries back from the dead, by maintaining voltage levels instead of letting them decline as the battery's chemical supply depletes.  However David Jones on EEVBlog systematically disputes these claims.

Why so many science-based blog postings from me, lately?

Because we live in amazing times. And we should all be paying attention. Anyway, you'll be fed up with me and politics, by the time 2016 is over!  Hang in there. Keep up!

   

DIY Biology or Our Biohacker Future

Science journalist Lee Billings is releasing his long-awaited tome entitled Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars, (a nod to the Gabriel García Márquez masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, while referring to the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life - at least, so far.)  Lee's book confronts the puzzle over whether or not we are alone in the cosmos, not from a systematic point of view as I have done (meticulously ticking off possibilities and plausibilities). Rather, Billings takes the reader on a journalist's personal voyage of perspective, with each chapter revolving around the story of a scientist or philanthropist or some other personality whose curiosity helped to push back the shrouding fog, opening up the skies a bit, allowing light to fall upon our biggest enigma.

It is an engrossing book that you'll enjoy anywhere, from that transcontinental flight to enjoying it at the beach… as our planet's ponderously reliable rotation makes a glowing ball of fusion-heated gas seem to "descend" in the west.

== Our Biohacker Future ==

Biohackers constructed their temple for amatuer bio-creativity in 2009, with the establishment of Brooklyn-based Genspace, the world's first government-compliant DIY biotech lab.

As Casey Research commentator Doug Hornig put it in Biohackers, Our Next Computer Revolution or Global Catastrophe in the Making?: "Genspace is the democratization of science in a nutshell, a nonprofit funded by membership dues, tuition fees, and donations from supportive nonmembers. You can attach yourself to one of the scientists already embarked on a project, or you can set up one of your own. The only credential you need to bring is your enthusiasm for the subject, with Ph.D.s onsite to help you through the rough spots."

The idea is spreading across the globe. In the U.S. alone, there are now about a dozen community biolabs, or "hackerspaces," as they're known. Along with Genspace, they include Boston's Open Source Science Lab, BOSSLAB, BioCurious in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Los Angeles as well as Bio, Tech and Beyond, which just opened near me at Carlsbad California. More information on local groups and standards for laboratory safety can be found at DIYbio.org.

Hornig again: "Everyone admits that there are risks involved in fooling around with synthetic life forms. But the biggest one is the threat of bioterrorism, and that's probably not going to come from the public DIY Bio community. The horrible killer virus that unleashes World War Z is far more likely to emerge from a secret lab of some dedicated terrorist group. And you can be sure that the international intelligence agencies are on high alert for signs of any such development."

As for regulation, the U.S. government so far hasn't taken any steps to control at-home biology.

Or will we hack in code? Arduino's Raspberry Pi  "computer on a board" has dazzled members of the Do It Yourself movement. Now Intel has leaped in with an improved version. It will give away 50,000 of them to universities soon.

There are already hundreds of active Hackerspaces around the globe.

Then there are the replicators. Little mobile M-blocks created by researchers at MIT can seek each other out and self-assemble into larger robots.  This article cites Terminator but I recall Stargate.  Let's do it smart, eh?

Or will nature hack us first? Ask the hornets. Some giant varieties are spreading due to warmer weather and people are dying, especially now that Asian Hornets have spread to Europe and Korea. Reminiscent of a novel I just read (and blurbed) -- Invasive Species by Joseph Wallace.

Not if we get real smart, real fast! Do it by emulating Einstein's brain!  Here's an interesting article about how it differed.

== Clues for our next hacks ==

Naked mole rats have what any animal would want. They live long lives—about 30 years—and stay healthy until the very end. Now biologists at the University of Rochester have new insights into the animal's longevity — better-constructed proteins.

Bad news for Singularity Zealots! Our brains may be much more complex than simply the sum of a trillion synapses . Although the human brain contains roughly 100 billion neurons, it contains billions more non-electrical brain cells called glia.  I have long held that this network of cells does a lot more than just support and feed neurons.  Indeed, I've suggested -- way back in EARTH (1989) -- that the glia and astrocytes might be true computational centers and the neurons serve as flashy communications hubs between them. All major glial cell types in the brain — oligodendrocytes, microglia and astrocytes — communicate with each other and with neurons by using chemical neurotransmitters and gap junctions, channels that permit the direct transfer between cells of ions and small molecules.  Research is revealing that glia can sense neuronal activity and control it. Now this "second brain" is getting a fresh look.

Ray Kurzweil may not agree that glia and internal neuron structures do computing. But he does offer an interesting discussion of the tradeoffs in developing artificial intelligence (AI) taken from James Barrat's new book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. Dolorous musings abound.  For example, as George Dyson wrote, “In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.” Indeed, Ray asks: "How can we get an AI to learn what our idealized values are?"  I see no sign - alas - that Barrat and Kurzweil and Dyson have thought this through ... as American women are dying younger than the previous generation.

I've just written a creepy story about this:  Tissue Engineering: How to Build a Heart. With thousands of people in need of heart transplants, researchers are trying to grow new organs.  The "scaffolding" approach is gaining steam.  Watch next year for my novelette that takes it to… extremes!

== Sci Miscellany ==

Only 80 light-years from Earth, a 12 million-year-old planet has properties similar to those of gas-giant planets orbiting young stars. Because it is floating alone through space, rather than around a host star, astronomers can study it much more easily. The planet, which has only six times the mass of Jupiter, was identified by its faint and unique heat signature.

Researchers found that some fruits — strawberries, oranges, peaches, plums and apricots — had no significant effect on the risk for Type 2 diabetes. But eating grapes, apples and grapefruit all significantly reduced the risk. The big winner: blueberries. Eating one to three servings a month decreased the risk by about 11 percent, and having five servings a week reduced it by 26 percent.

Substituting fruit juice for whole fruits significantly *increased* the risk for disease.

A PhD student at University College London, is trying to give schools cheap access to the expensive imaging capabilities that allowed her team to capture the first in-water image of the DNA helix structure.  And to do that, she and her colleagues are developing a £300 open-source atomic force microscope (AFM) that uses 3D-printed parts, Arduino computers and Lego bricks.

Rice University theorists calculate that atom-thick carbyne chains may be the strongest material ever, if and when anyone can make it in bulk. Carbyne is a chain of carbon atoms held together by either double or alternating single and triple atomic bonds. That makes it a true one-dimensional material, unlike atom-thin sheets of graphene.

A Penn State anthropologist can identify the sex of some of the people who placed their handprints on rocks and cave walls. Interestingly, he found that the first cave painters may have been mostly women.  

Like something out of a Robert Heinlein novel, students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have built a metal rocket engine using 3D printing techniques and conducted a hot fire test for a 3D-printed metal rocket engine in California’s Mojave Desert.

== And finally… ==

Marek Kohn offers an excellent rumination on "horizons" and why some modern efforts are returning to the view held by medieval cathedral-makers… that it is worth planning on the scale of a millennium.  "At a Hindu monastery in Hawaii, the Iraivan Temple is being built to last 1,000 years, using special concrete construction techniques. Carmelite monks plan to build a gothic monastery in the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming that will stand equally long. Norway’s National Library is expected to preserve documents for a 1,000-year span.

The Long Now Foundation dwarfs these ambitions by an order of magnitude with its project to build a clock, inside a Nevada mountain, that will work for 10,000 years. And underground waste disposal plans for the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in Finland have been reviewed for the next 250,000 years; the spent fuel will be held in copper canisters promised to last for millions of years."

Explore similar topics in a nonfiction book by Gregory Benford: DEEP TIME: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia.  Here is Chapter one.