WC Archive

The article refers to this as "neuromarketing," and suggests that it might be the next revolution in consumer culture. Some ads result in stimulation of pleasure centers, some in the stimulation of identity centers, and others in the stimulation of cognitive centers. The tricky part is that which sections of the brain get the most stimulation varies from person to person. Presumably, this stimulation will also shift over time, as consumers develop brand loyalties and react to shifting styles.

This hits close to home for me, not because I'm in marketing or have access to a home MRI kit, but because I just finished a science fiction game book called Toxic Memes which spends quite a bit of time discussing the implications of a world where brain functions have been fully mapped and many people wear devices that tap directly into cognitive functions. I figured something like this would happen soon, but not this soon.

We still understand only a small fraction of how the brain works, but neuroscience is learning more every day. The development of vision systems for the blind that tap directly into the brain and implants that allow a primate brain to control remote devices would have been considered fanciful science fiction a decade ago, and will seem primitive and clumsy a decade from now. What will the world look like when we can send instant messages to each other not through thumb-driven handheld devices, but simply by thinking? Or when we can tap into each other's cognitive abilities in order to make big decisions? What will "grid" neurosystem networks look like?

You think things are weird now? Just wait.

Rob Carlson knows biotech. He should - he's a research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, and a research scientist at the Microscale Life Sciences Center at the University of Washington. When he talks about just how emerging biotechnologies could be misused, and what we can do about it, pay attention.

Now, the traditional view among many scientists and science-enthusiasts is that the dangers of people with bad intent getting their hands on powerful biotechnologies are so great that we must clamp down, censoring the public release of research which could be used by bioterrorists.

Carlson disagrees. In the most recent issue of the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, he argues that, instead, our best defense is openness. Closing research, he says, would lead directly to black markets, driving much research underground, making it all the more difficult to monitor and respond to unsanctioned and irresponsible work.

I've advocated this position for quite a while. Locking down research and information doesn't keep us safe, it just makes it harder to recognize when a problem has occurred, inhibits effective response, and pushes those responsible for controlling the information to under-report violations in order to protect their own jobs. It's good to see this argument made by a respected scientist in a reputable journal.

If you could use biotech, nanotech, and intelligence augmentation to repair and rebuild your body, would you? Many people would say no, but a growing number of people say "bring it on*." The notion of using emerging technologies to make oneself better, stronger, faster (and smarter, longer-lived, with better breath, etc.) is known these days as "transhumanism." Problem: most of the vocal proponents of this sort of stuff tend to be adamantly, aggressively, cyberlibertarian. On their nice days.

So where are the post-humans who actually like people? A goodly number of them hang out at the Cyborg Democracy blog, which calls itself a home for

democratic transhumanists, nanosocialists, revolutionary singularitarians, non-anthropocentric personhood theorists, radical futurists, leftist extropians, bioutopians and biopunks, socialist-feminist cyborgs, transgenders, body modifiers, basic income advocates, agents of the Culture and the Cassini Division, Viridians and technoGaians - transmitting a sexy, high-tech vision of a radically democratic future

Very cool. I'm all for it.

The blog seems to be all over the map, covering culture and tech and politics, both U.S. and international, usually (but not always) with a strong Transhumanist bent. Definitely worth checking out.

*...and I have to say, after dealing with a month-long series of arthritis attacks, I can more than sympthize.

We here at WorldChanging are great fans of foresight. The idea of actually thinking through the implications of emerging trends, technologies, and whatnot fills us with heady glee. When the possibilities are simultaneously distant and world-changing (ahem), foresight is all the more important. It gives us all a chance to consider options, prepare for challenges, and attempt to generate a bit of wisdom without having to go through more painful experiences first.

Which is all to say that I'm very happy to note the activities of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. A combination research team, advocacy group, and news source, CRN focuses on the ethical, legal, and social implications of molecular nanotechnology. They approach the issue with a bias that nanotechnology has the potential to do very good things for humanity, and thus research and development should continue -- but, because of the dangers inherent to the technology, such R&D should be done responsibly and carefully.

Biologists at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives, led by Dr. Craig Venter -- of mapping the human genome fame -- have constructed a "bioactive" bacteriophage out of scratch. This isn't the very first time a virus has been constructed from off-the-shelf chemicals (a synthetic polio virus was built a bit over a year ago), but this virus took only two weeks to create (the polio virus took several years to build), and is indistinguishable from its natural counterpart (the synthetic polio virus had numerous genetic defects). This is the first real evidence that functional biological organisms can be constructed gene-by-gene.

The implications for this are enormous; in many ways, this is a far more important biotech development than cloning. While the bacteriophage constructed by the team, "phiX," is an existing virus, this was a necessary first step for the construction of wholly original forms of life. Venter's crew is focusing on building microbes for the production of energy resources (such as hydrogren), but bacteriophages may have broad applications, including serving as novel forms of antibiotics when traditional medicines fail.

But larger questions loom. If novel life forms can be built using off-the-shelf material and well-understood techniques, how do we defend against misuse? (I have already posted some ideas about this issue.) If a lab builds a new organism, do they own it? Is it a patented product, a copyrighted genome? Are we about to enter the era of GRM, or Genetic Rights Management?

Although the Human Genome Project (and the various plant & animal genome projects that preceded it and continue on) was often hyped as the key to unlocking human biology, it's only the first step in a bigger process. Genes code for proteins. Of far greater utility than a genome map -- and of far greater complexity -- is a map of protein interaction, sometimes called a "proteome." Proteins form the building blocks of tissues, and their interactions are the basis for biological systems. In short, proteins actually carry out the details of being a living being.

A draft map has just been completed of the protein interactions for Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly. The abstract is available here; the full article PDF is here. According to the researchers (at CuraGen and a variety of universities), the "map serves as a starting point for a systems biology modeling of multicellular organisms including humans." They also state in their report that they intend for the map "to serve as a public resource for interested scientists."

Believers in the precautionary principle and the application of responsibility and foresight to biotech research should be really pleased by this. Protein interaction maps are critical for understanding the more subtle results of genetic manipulation. Among the concerns reasonable people have about bioengineering is the possibility of unforeseen interactions between apparently distinct biological systems. As biologists build more of these proteomic maps, the better ability we'll have to avoid problems down the road -- and a better idea we'll have about how to fix things to survive in a rapidly changing climate.

Scientists in Israel have built working transistors using carbon nanotubes self-assembled via binding to DNA, according to New Scientist.

Carbon nanotubes have remarkable properties, including the ability to function as conductors, resistors, and semi-conductors, depending upon how they're structured. Building circuits using nanotubes has been an expensive, time-consuming process, however. Using the biological method of self-assembly, costs could drop dramatically.

All very cool and nanotechy and still a decade or more away, so... so what?

For me, the key 'so what' is that this underscores the degree to which the key to the future will be biology. Nanotechnology, material science, and information technology are all gradually finding themselves under the umbrella of biotechnology. It is quite likely that, in the coming years, understanding how these now-disparate technological systems work will require understanding how biological systems work.

As environmental shifts (and the corresponding social problems) loom ever-larger around us, a shift towards approaches intended not to replace or control biology, but to work with it -- to collaborate with biology, if you will -- are more likely to be both sustainable and successful.

If I have an underlying theory or agenda in my postings to WorldChanging.com, it's that understanding -- knowledge -- is the fundamental tool for making the world a better place. In most cases, there is a clear link between improved understanding of the world around us and a course of action. But not always. Sometimes, the value of knowledge is not in its application, but in its creation.

The Elegant Universe is the title of a book and six hours of NOVA, the PBS science showcase. PBS has now put the full six hours of The Elegant Universe up on its website in streaming video, in both Quicktime and RealVideo formats.

The Elegant Universe talks about string theory, the latest attempt to create a unified "theory of everything" -- a way to consistently explain it all, from the minutae of quantum interactions to the universe-spanning effects of gravity. Along the way, string theory results in 11 dimensions, parallel universes, and tears in the fabric of space. The NOVA episodes, hosted by physicist Brian Greene (author of the book), tell the story of string theory in a way that both engages and illuminates.

Watch it, and be enthralled. It may not give you practical advice for fixing the environment or saving the planet, but it will give you a greater understanding of the how the planet fits into the universe as a whole.

Plastic was to the 1960's what cryonics was to the 1980's -- symbolic of the Future. While freezing one's head after death never really made it to the mainstream, plastics are all around us. With a couple of recent developments, plastic may well again be the wave of the future.

MIT has just announced the development of a new method for creating and forming plastics. Normally, plastic shapes are made at fairly high temperatures, melting polymers and pouring them into molds. Plastic objects made in this way have limited recyclability, as the heating and cooling process weakens the polymers -- so called "thermal degradation." The MIT method can shape plastics at room temperature using high pressure, resulting in "baroplastics" which can be reshaped with no thermal degradation. Plastic objects created with this process require less energy to be produced, too. Less energy use, more recyclable... works for me.

But squeezing plastics into shape isn't the only recent breakthrough. An Engineering professor at USC has invented a low-temperature method of doing plastic sintering, more popularly known as 3D printing or fabbing. 3D printers are a relatively recent invention, using powdered polymers (and, occasionally, metals) and a high-powered, laser to build up objects layer-by-layer. Originally used for rapid prototyping, 3D printers are now used by aerospace companies for direct manufacturing of components. The USC method dramatically reduces the heat necessary for sintering, which in turn greatly lowers the cost.

This is pretty big news. 3D printing, if brought down to consumer-level prices, would reshape the way we make and use various home and office products. If all you need to make a toy or kitchen device is a fabber, a supply of raw polymer powder, and a design file, how long before we see "Napster Fabbing?" Things get even more revolutionary if the plastics used can be easily recycled to be used for the next bit of 3D printing.

And we're not just talking about dolls, garlic presses, and iPod pouches. Electroactive polymers -- "flexonics" -- allow for electronic circuits to be embedded in fabbed objects. This would make printing out a new individually-fit ergonomic keyboard, for example, just as easy as printing out a coffee cup.

A plastic future may not be so bad...

At 25 light years away, Vega is one of the closer stars in the night sky, and one of the brightest. British astronomers, working at the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii, have discovered that it possesses a planetary system which is something of a twin to our own.

Vega's system seems to have a gas giant planet about the size of Neptune orbiting at about the same distance as Neptune does from the Sun. This gives Vega plenty of room for smaller, rocky planets to orbit closer in, in what would be Vega's "habitable zone," the "just-right" distance neither too hot (leading to a Venus) nor too cold (leading to a Mars). Just as important, the presence of a gas giant in the outer system means that debris (such as asteroids, comets, and whatnot) tends to get swept up by the larger planet's gravity before it can get deeper into the system, potentially hitting any Earth-like planets.

Arizona State University researchers have developed a new model "biochip" -- an all-in-one laboratory on a chip able to detect and analyze microorganisms and chemicals in the field. While such chips have been built before, the ASU design cuts the price and size. The plastic biochip measures 12x6 cm, and only 2mm thick.

Technology Review notes: "The chip performs all the work needed to test from a raw sample like whole blood, including target cell capture using immunomagnetic beads, cell preconcentration, purification and lysis, and DNA multiplication and detection. The researchers' prototype detected a disease-causing E. coli bacteria in a sample of rabbit whole blood in 3.5 hours."

Moving from R&D to the field may take several more years.

Cheap, powerful bio-detection and analysis chips are key to ongoing measurements of environmental conditions, and to monitor biological or chemical hazards. They can also aid in grappling with climate change. The cheaper the chips are, and the easier they are to produce, the more they can be used, thereby letting us understand how environments are -- or aren't -- functioning. As one of the hallmarks of climate change is the increase in unexpected shifts in local and regional ecosystems, the more we can monitor environmental status, the better chance we'll have of reacting effectively.

Even if you don't agree with the magazine's politics or its approach to economic theory, The Economist remains one of the better print sources of news and information around. Every quarter they run a special issue going over interesting developments in the world of technology. The current version includes pieces on high-resolution weather forecasting, biometrics, and advances in chemical sensor technology, among others.

Both the December and September Technology Quarterly articles are freely available. (via CyborgDemocracy)

Add carbon nanotubes to the list of items that we at WorldChanging can't get enough of. Word from the latest Technology Research News is that carbon nanofibers provoke far less tissue resistance when used for medical implants than traditional materials. Less scarring, less rejection -- oh, and a potential ability to connect to neurons, facilitating brain and nervous system implants. Carbon nanotubes are almost certainly a key structural component of a changed world...

Despite all of the breakthroughs in biology over recent years, the functioning of the human brain retains significant mysteries. Chief among these is how memory functions: just how does the mind record events, feelings, ideas in a way which allows later recall? Neuroscientists at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research think they've figured out how memories are stored -- but, surprisingly, the mechanism for storage turns out to be prions, the class of proteins considered responsible for neurodegenerative diseases such as mad cow.

Central to a protein's function is its shape, and most proteins maintain only one shape throughout their lifetime. Prions, on the other hand, are proteins that can suddenly alter their shape, or misfold. But more than just misfolding themselves, they influence other proteins of the same type to do the same. In all known cases, the proteins in these misfolded clusters cease their normal function and either die or are deadly to the cell – and ultimately to the organism.

For this reason, Kausik Si, a postdoc in Kandel's lab, was surprised to find that a protein related to maintaining long-term memory contained certain distinct prion signatures. The protein, CPEB, resides in central-nervous-system synapses, the junctions that connect neurons in the brain. Memories are contained within that intricate network of approximately 1 trillion neurons and their synapses. With experience and learning, new junctions form and others are strengthened. CPEB synthesizes proteins that strengthen such synapses as memories are formed, enabling the synapses to retain those memories over long periods.

This is one of those discoveries that has the potential to open up incredible new vistas. At minimum, better understanding of the role that properly-functioning prions play in biology can help us figure out ways to block or repair badly-behaving prions. Similarly, figuring out the mechanisms of memory could lead us towards cures for memory-attacking diseases such as Alzheimers (which, in its most severe forms, displays symptoms similar to the effects of CJD, the human form of mad cow). Finally, this moves us further on the path towards unlocking deep brain physiology and really figuring out how the brain and mind work.

Witchfinder General (and frequent WorldChanging comment participant) "smerkin" let us know about the current edition of IEEE Spectrum, the house journal for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In it, scientists and science writers provide reports about developments in six different technological realms: Communications, Electric Power, Semiconducturs, Transportation, Computers, and Bioengineering. The Spectrum editors chose three reports for each category; one was deemed a "winner," one a "loser," and one a "grail" -- a development so significant that, if/when it comes about, our daily lives will be changed. (As the introductory essay notes, "loser" doesn't mean that the idea is bad, just that, for a variety of technical and social reasons, the editors deemed the idea to be unlikely to bear fruit in the near future, if ever.) All of the developments featured in these articles are in progress, and while some are further along than others, none of them are "blue sky" speculation.

The "winner" articles read like a week's worth of solid "Unlocking the Code" postings on WorldChanging. They include: "analysis engines" able to figure out the meaning of search terms (and, perhaps, provide a way out of the information overload we are now buried in); "smart hybrid" vehicles combining pure-electric motors with hybrid-electric internal combustion engines (making it possible to drive electric-only for short runs, but switching seamlessly to "normal" hybrid-electric for longer trips, with reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions more than twice that of a current-model Prius); and the Alberta Supernet, a model for extending high-speed broadband throughout public facilities and remote communities.

The "loser" articles range from projects with fatal flaws, such as Microsoft SPOT to good-but-insufficient responses to big problems, such as carbon sequestration.

The "grail" essays focus on projects with longer timelines, but massive payoffs. Digital long-term preservation of knowledge, self-sustaining fusion, and fiber to the home are each given some attention. These are ideas which may have significant flaws, but their potential is so vast if they are successful that investment (in time, in money, in knowledge) is more than warranted.

If you're interested in what may lie ahead technologically, this is a good place to start.

If you're even an occasional visitor to Blogistan over the past few days there's no way you could have avoided the abundance of celebratory links about the successful landing of the Mars probe "Spirit" (although I prefer the more dignified official name, "Mars Exploration Rover-A"). Here at WorldChanging, we're certainly ready to do our part to welcome our glorious new Martian overlords. Here are some interesting Mars-related links you may not already have encountered:

• Maps! -- Want to know more about the neighborhood for good old MER-A (and, in three weeks, MER-B)? Try the MER 2003 Prime Landing Sites page at NASA, which includes massive topographic maps of Gusev Crater (where Spirit now sits) and Terra Meridiani (soon to be home to the second lander, "Opportunity"). Also included are the maps of the now-rejected candidate sites. Perfect for covering your walls!
  
• Pictures! -- But not just the current photos. The NASA Photojournal site includes thousands of photos of Mars and every other planet in the solar system (including Pluto, although Pluto may not really be a planet, but a big KBO). Among the pictures from MER-A are the three "descent imager" photos taken by the lander on the way down.
  
• Video! -- This is very cool. "Six Minutes of Terror" is a set of interviews cut with high-end computer graphics of the MER during its "Entry, Descent, and Landing" (EDL) phase. This is a Quicktime movie, and totally rocks. I'm serious.
  

Awhile ago, I referred to Technology Review's "10 Emerging Technologies..." article from January 2003, and noted that the 2004 edition would be out real soon now. Well, real soon now is here. This year's list of "10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World" is a heady combination of stuff you've probably already heard about, stuff you've probably never heard of, and stuff you may well already be using. Worth reading, and well worth thinking about the implications.

Spacewatch is a 24-year-old University of Arizona astronomy program which monitors small bodies in our solar system, such as asteroids, to look for potential targets for interplanetary missions and, not incidentally, to watch for objects which might pose a hazard to the Earth. The Spacewatch telescopes keep a constant vigil, taking multi-minute exposure images of the night sky. Problem is, computer software actually doesn't work well to evaluate these images to find potential dangers. The human eye does a far better job.

Enter the Fast Moving Object, or FMO, Project. Announced last October, FMO relies on volunteer amateur astronomers and space-buffs to keep an eye out for asteroids which may be on a collision-course with Earth. Last week, for the first time, a volunteer for the program found something -- a 60-to-120-foot diameter asteroid which came within about 1.2 million miles of the Earth on Thursday, the astronomical equivalent of missing the Earth by a hair's breadth. Although the asteroid would have caused no damage had it actually struck, the discovery was a proof-of-concept that using a multitude of volunteers to watch for asteroids could work.

All you need to be a part of the FMO Project are good eyes, interest, and a willingness to watch computer images for signs of asteroid motion. Knowledge about astronomy is helpful, but not required. Unlike some other collaborative science efforts, this one can't be done by letting your computer do all the work. This one requires a bit more effort, but the payoff could be enormous -- the more people get involved, the better the chances of spotting something before it's too late.

The big drawback of the current Spacewatch system is that it only has two telescopes scanning the heavens. Right now, that's what's available. But on the horizon may be something a bit more radical...

Modern amateur telescopes, although still made using familiar laws of optics, have increasing computer sophistication. Right now, you can buy for around $300 a low-end amateur telescope able to find objects in the sky once it is told the current time and location; spend more money, and you can get one which has a built-in GPS system so that you don't have to tell it. Furthermore, many amateur scopes, particular the mid- to high-end ones, are made to work with CCD camera, so that you don't actually look through the telescope, you watch through a monitor, or even on your computer.

We're not far from the day when we could connect a huge number of amateur efforts into an effective planetary protection system, by collecting the output from amateur scopes over the internet, and using SETI@Home-style distributed computing to grind through the data looking for signs of previously-uncatalogued asteroids. On the input side, you'd have telescopes able to keep track of precisely where in the sky they're pointing, and you could even have networked telescopes running nightly observation routines when not otherwise in use, so as to get maximum coverage; on the analysis side, you'd have a BOINC-based grid of personal computers analyzing the images, comparing the results with known data.

This would clearly need the cooperation of a lot of people -- are there even enough serious amateur scopes in use to make this possible? -- and (based on the report about FOM) would require a new generation of image-processing software to be able to detect the faint traces of distant asteroids. Still, it seems like an idea which could become reality, and relatively soon. I think SpaceWatch@Home has a good ring to it...

1,500 years ago, something happened to the world. Crops failed everywhere, there was massive starvation, and the spotty historical record shows frost conditions in the middle of the summer. Now two undergraduate students at Cardiff University, in the UK, think they've figured out why.

A half-kilometer-wide comet may have hit the Earth, exploding in the atmosphere, spreading soot and ash. This would have partially blocked the sun, reducing the amount of light and heat hitting the surface. Tree ring data shows a global reduction in temperatures for the years 536-540; the amount of material in the atmosphere required to cause that degree of temperature drop is nicely explained by a moderate-sized comet, big enough to cause problems but small enough to explode in the air rather than actually impact the ground.

If this theory is supported by subsequent research, it will be further evidence that disastrous comet/asteroid strikes are relatively commonplace in our history. A similar-sized hit would exacerbate global climate instability, and the loss of crops resulting from the temperature drop would leave millions starving. It's a wildcard, but nowhere near as unlikely as we'd like to believe. It wouldn't take a technological breakthrough to be able to watch out for dangerous spaceborne objects, just a willingness to do so.

Stephen Wolfram is smart. Very, very smart. As a young man, he developed software able to do all sorts of high-level, sophisticated mathematics, and went on to form a company to sell it. Once he got the company up and running, he decided to spend the next few years writing a book on the use of software models for interpreting the way the world works. The resulting tome -- a massive, 700+ page treatise -- was called A New Kind of Science, and it argued that the world around us, from physics and biology to economics and group behavior, could be understood as the complex result of simple elements. The reactions of those who got through it ranged from outright dismissal to full-on epiphany, with quite a few variations on "huh?". The enormous physical size and high price didn't engender high sales, however, so not many people actually had a chance to find out for themselves whether Wolfram is on the right track.

Well, you can now. The entire book, along with commentary, notes, downloadable images, software, and corrections, is now available online at WolframScience.com. I'd suggest reading chapter 1, skimming 2-6 -- he spends a great deal of time establishing the myriad nuances of software models of complexity -- and reading in detail again with chapters 7+. You may not agree with his interpretations of reality, but your brain will still get a workout.

If you've read Neal Stephenson's brilliant novel The Diamond Age, you will certainly remember his description of "toner wars" -- clouds of carbon-based nanoparticles fighting it out as tools of economic or political dominance. Breathing in the microscopic machines wasn't good for you, but that was related to the various nasty things that the overly-aggressive nanoassemblers might do once in your system. In reality, the danger from such a threat would may have more to do simply with how small they are.

According to Technology Review, a variety of researchers around the world are starting to take a look at the biological effects of nanoscale materials. As buckyballs and carbon nanotubes hold the potential to do so much good, it's imperative to understand the potential downsides of the technologies so as to make reasonable choices and to develop countermeasures. The first bit of research suggests that carbon nanotubes (which we've talked about here a few times) can embed themselves into air sacs in the lungs, leading to toxic effects.

A variety of groups are looking into nanoparticle safety concerns, including the American Food and Drug Administration and Environmental Protection Agency, the Royal Society in the UK, and the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University.

Developing a realistic sense of the environmental dangers of nanoparticles is crucial both for protecting our health and for encouraging the development of world-changing (in the positive sense) technologies. It's far better to learn early what the problems may be -- and have the pace of technology innovation slow in order to allow for corrective measures to be developed -- than to plow ahead at full steam and run into public fear, lawsuits, and over-reaching legislation down the road.

Just a quick note: the current issue of Science reports (non-free subscription required) that researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a system for converting ethanol into hydrogen cheaply and efficiently. As most techniques for producing hydrogen for fuel cells use fossil fuels as source material, this will be a significant step away from non-renewable energy resources. The press release at the UMN website gives details.

When coupled with a hydrogen fuel cell, the unit - small enough to hold in your hand - could generate one kilowatt of power, almost enough to supply an average home, the researchers said. The technology is poised to remove the major stumbling block to the “hydrogen economy”: no free hydrogen exists, except what is made at high cost from fossil fuels.

[...]

The researchers see an early use for their invention in remote areas, where the installation of new power lines is not feasible. People could buy ethanol and use it to power small hydrogen fuel cells in their basements. The process could also be extended to biodiesel fuels, the researchers said.

[...]

Ethanol is easy to transport and relatively nontoxic. It is already being produced from corn and used in car engines. But if it were used instead to produce hydrogen for a fuel cell, the whole process would be nearly three times as efficient. That is, a bushel of corn would yield three times as much power if its energy were channeled into hydrogen fuel cells rather than burned along with gasoline.

“We can potentially capture 50 percent of the energy stored in sugar [in corn], whereas converting the sugar to ethanol and burning the ethanol in a car would harvest only 20 percent of the energy in sugar,” said Schmidt. “Ethanol in car engines is burned with 20 percent efficiency, but if you used ethanol to make hydrogen for a fuel cell, you would get 60 percent efficiency.”

I posted the other day about the issue of safety regarding nanoparticles, particularly carbon nanotubes. It's worth noting that there's a good reason why some of the environmental groups looking at nanotechnology (such as Greenpeace(PDF)) have not asked for a moratorium on research. The environmental benefits of advances in molecular nanotechnology could be staggeringly positive. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology blog has a great post summarizing the various ways in which nanotechnology will help protect and repair the global environment.

Environmental degradation is a serious problem with many sources and causes. One of the biggest causes is farming. Greenhouses can greatly reduce water use, land use, runoff, and topsoil loss. Mining is another serious problem. When most structure and function can be built out of carbon and hydrogen by molecular manufacturing, there will be far less use for minerals, and mining operations mostly can be shut down. Manufacturing technologies that pollute can also be scaled back.

In general, improved technology allows operations that pollute to be more compact and contained, and cheap manufacturing allows improvements to be deployed rapidly at low cost. Storable solar energy will reduce ash, soot, hydrocarbon, NOx, and CO2 emissions, as well as oil spills. In most cases, there will be strong economic incentives to adopt newer, more efficient technologies as rapidly as possible. Even in areas that currently do not have a technological infrastructure, self-contained molecular manufacturing will allow the rapid deployment of environment-friendly technology.

Building a green future will not come from the relinquishment of advanced technologies. If such a strategy was ever possible, we have gone too far in our degradation of the planetary ecosystem for it to work now. Repairing the Earth's environment, instead, will require the proper application of intelligently-designed tools and systems.

A new generation of microtechnologies received had its coming-out party this week at the annual meeting of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). "MECS" -- Microtechnology-based Energy and Chemical Systems -- have the potential to channel large amounts of liquid or gas through microscopic channels allowing for heat transfer, chemical reactions, or material identification.

Chemical and biological warfare suits worn in warm climates, such as the Iraqi desert, can become unbearably hot. The solution may be a portable cooling system that weighs just several pounds.

The concept that makes this possible also is leading to miniature sensors for detecting chemical and biological toxins, as well as tiny chemical reactors for hydrogen fuel processing or environmental cleanup.

In a nutshell, small is powerful. These devices send large amounts of liquid or gas through thousands of microchannels that stand roughly as tall as a human hair. In each channel, heat transfer or chemical reactions happen more efficiently than they do in larger spaces, permitting better process control, shorter channel lengths and overall system miniaturization.

"The channels are to microfluidic devices what wires are to microelectronics," said panelist Brian Paul of Oregon State University.

More pieces coming together for a world filled with realtime observation and analysis of environmental conditions. (Via Ken Novak's Weblog)

In a bit of serendipity, several items about the future of power generation popped up on my radar recently. They nicely demonstrate alternative sources of electricity now, in the near future, and a bit down the road. Quick synopsis: the days of massive generators like the one shown to the right are numbered.

(Read the extended entry for details:)

When I was in London earlier this month, I visited the British Museum. The pieces of ancient civilization and the various plunderings of empire were interesting, but what I really wanted to see was the Rosetta Stone (that's my picture of it at right). The Rosetta Stone, found by Napoleon's troops in Egypt in 1799 and transferred to British control in 1802 as a spoil of war, was a largish piece of basalt covered with an official pronouncement about Pharaoh Ptolemy, written in ancient Greek, demotic, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. That dark gray slab embodies a fascinating mix of anthropology, archaeology, and cryptography. Prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphics were considered indecipherable pictograms; after the Rosetta Stone, hieroglyphics were a window into the workings of ancient Egypt. It's entirely possible that, had the Rosetta Stone never been found, the meaning of hieroglyphics would have been lost forever. (Simon Singh's fascinating text on cryptography, The Code Book, has a good chapter on how the Stone led to figuring out hieroglyphics.)

Linguists and ethnographers estimate that fifty to ninety percent of the planet's 7,000 languages will disappear over the course of this century. Many of them are poorly-documented, at best. Without language archives, scholars of the future will have no way of translating or understanding a dismally large portion of global civilization. The Long Now Organization, which tries to encourage very long-range thinking about our planet and society, started the Rosetta Project a couple of years ago in order to build an archive of more than a 1,000 languages:

We are creating this broad language archive through an open contribution, peer review model similar to the strategy that created the original Oxford English Dictionary. Our goal is an open source "Linux of Linguistics"- an effort of collaborative online scholarship drawing on the expertise and contributions of thousands of academic specialists and native speakers around the world. [...]

The resulting Rosetta archive will be publicly available in three different media: a free and continually growing online archive, a single volume monumental reference book, and an extreme longevity micro-etched disk.

The disk is physically etched with words in 1,000 languages, requiring a high-power optical microscope to read. This is a more survivable format than digital media; there's no risk that the particular reader technology will be lost to obsolescence or market whims. The disk contains 10 categories of linguistic descriptors for every language, including a parallel text (Genesis chapters 1-3, which is apparently the most widely, and carefully, translated text on Earth).

Starting from the premise that "lots of copies keeps stuff safe," the disk will be mass-produced and globally distributed. Actually, very shortly it will be extraterrestrially distributed, as well. A copy of the Rosetta Project disk has been fitted to the ESA's Rosetta comet-chaser probe. As the disk is designed to withstand extreme environmental conditions, its presence on a space probe on a very long orbit around the sun means that the language data it contains will be archived for a very, very long time. (The probe was supposed to launch today, but high winds at the launch site delayed the lift-off for a day.)

The Rosetta Project is more than the disk. The Archive is a regularly-updated online database of languages. It currently contains 1,671 different languages, and the Rosetta Project recently received seed funding to build a database of all documented human languages. The effort to preserve human civilization continues.

In the end, we hope the process of creating a new global Rosetta, as well as the imaginative power of having a 1,000 language archive on a single, aesthetically suggestive object, will help draw attention to the tragedy of language extinction as well as speed the work to preserve what we have left of this critical manifestation of the human intellect.

The Human Genome Project completed its first draft listing of humankind's genetic blueprint in 2001, but did so in an unusual way. A publicly-funded, international consortium finished a draft blueprint and made the data available via the U.S. National Institutes of Health, while a private concern, Celera, completed an alternative draft -- which varied in some important ways -- but kept the data largely private, only available to corporate subscribers. Fortunately, according to the Genome News Network, that's about to change.

Now the complete Celera sequence, which included publicly available data generated by the HGP, will be in the public domain.

A second Celera human genome sequence, this one created months after the first and never made public, will also be placed in GenBank. The second sequence includes only DNA sequences generated at Celera.

[...]

Differences in the sequences are attributable at least in part to the methods used, say the researchers. Celera used the whole-genome shotgun method, while the HGP used a more traditional method as well as the shotgun method.

It's one of those assertions that a reasonable person might immediately dismiss -- sound waves can make bubbles in liquid blow up in such a way that they produce temperatures and pressures equivalent to the inside of the sun. But sonoluminescence is a well-known phenomenon (here is an intro to the subject from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories); since 1934, physicists have known that pulsing low-density sound waves through a liquid medium can causes flashes of light. Now, a group of physicists at Purdue university have concluded that, under the right conditions, pulsing sound through liquid can result in sufficient energy to produce nuclear fusion.

The device is a clear glass canister about the height of two coffee mugs stacked on top of one another. Inside the canister is a liquid called deuterated acetone. The acetone contains a form of hydrogen called deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Normal hydrogen contains only one proton in its nucleus.

The researchers expose the clear canister of liquid to pulses of neutrons every five milliseconds, or thousandths of a second, causing tiny cavities to form. At the same time, the liquid is bombarded with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which causes the cavities to form into bubbles that are about 60 nanometers - or billionths of a meter - in diameter. The bubbles then expand to a much larger size, about 6,000 microns, or millionths of a meter - large enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

"The process is analogous to stretching a slingshot from Earth to the nearest star, our sun, thereby building up a huge amount of energy when released," Taleyarkhan said.

Within nanoseconds these large bubbles contract with tremendous force, returning to roughly their original size, and release flashes of light in a well-known phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. Because the bubbles grow to such a relatively large size before they implode, their contraction causes extreme temperatures and pressures comparable to those found in the interiors of stars. Researches estimate that temperatures inside the imploding bubbles reach 10 million degrees Celsius and pressures comparable to 1,000 million earth atmospheres at sea level.

There are still plenty of questions about the discovery, but the paper reporting the work apparently went through a far greater-than-usual checking process at Physical Review E, where it will be published. Unlike Cold Fusion, the sonofusion work seems to have both good data and an explanation for the mechanism that doesn't require rewriting any physical laws. Skeptics are (quite correctly) waiting for other labs to be able to replicate the experiment before celebrating the find.

Assuming the discovery is validated, what does it mean for the world? At minimum, much more work. The sonofusion research is still in the earliest of stages, and requires much more power to produce the effect than is produced -- the so-called "breakeven" level required for fusion energy to be useful. Even if breakeven is achieved, there's no guarantee that it could scale to a point where it would be competitive with other methods.

But what this discovery does do right now is provide us with a friendly reminder that we can't assume that all the tools we'll have for fighting global problems have already been invented. New discoveries, new technological or social innovations add to our response capabilities. While we certainly shouldn't assume that a deus ex machina is going to save us all, neither should we despair that our current abilities are insufficient for the task at hand.

New Scientist reports that Stanford University researchers have figured out a way to boost the power output of miniature hydrogen fuel cells by up to 50%. The trick is to reduce the size and increase the number of channels leading from the fuel source to the cell's center. Laptop fuel cells which could run for 20 hours with earlier versions can run nearly 30 hours. Researchers hope to replace batteries with fuel cells because of their longer life and fewer toxic components.

Ah, yes, the catch: this only works with hydrogen fuel cells. Methane mini-fuel cells have been the preferred choice so far, because methane is easier to handle than hydrogen and packs more power per volume. But methane produces CO2 as waste, while hydrogen fuel cells produce only water. Environmentally, H2-based mini-fuel cells would be better than methane ones. This Stanford discovery makes hydrogen minis once again a reasonable alternative... if someone comes up with a good, safe way of distributing the hydrogen for the fuel cells.

This is important not just because having one's laptop battery give out after 3-4 hours is annoying, but because the batteries most often used in portable electronics these days -- lithium-ion -- contains sufficient levels of toxic lithium metal [PDF} that they are largely prohibited from landfills. Given that it's been estimated that over a hundred million mobile phones will be discarded (along with their batteries) in the US in 2005 alone, moving to a portable power source that doesn't threaten to leach metals into groundwater seems wise. If the alternative doesn't add to carbon emissions, all the better.

Continuing with my space-themed weekend, I want to give a warm WorldChanging welcome to Sedna, our solar system's 10th planet. Probably. We'll know more tomorrow, when NASA has a press conference about it.

Discovered last November using Caltech's Palomar telescope on Earth, and just confirmed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, Sedna is a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) -- one of the ice and rock bodies out past Neptune. Several large KBOs have been discovered over the past few years, but none have been as large as Pluto, also a KBO but also generally considered a planet, too. Sedna appears to be roughly as big as Pluto, or possibly even a bit bigger, and is in a normal orbit. If Pluto's a planet, then Sedna is, too.

Sedna is the Inuit goddess of the ocean -- perfect for the deep black sea of space.

Here is a press release from CalTech with a bunch more information, and here is NASA's information page, which includes the first pictures taken of Sedna:

(Updated.)

No, it's not a new sport, it's the new record for a length of carbon nanotube. Given that the previous best length was around 30 centimeters, this is a bit of an improvement. The process sounds oddly familiar:

The carbon nanotubes are made by injecting ethanol into a fast-flowing stream of hydrogen gas. The gas carries the carbon-containing molecules into the centre of a furnace where temperatures soar above 1000° C.

The high temperature breaks the ethanol down and the carbon atoms reassemble into nanotubes, each about a micron in length. These float in the stream of hydrogen, loosely linked to each other in what Windle describes as an "elastic smoke".

When a rod is poked into this amorphous cloud, it catches a few nanotubes. Rotating the rod pulls on these, which in turn pull on their neighbours, dragging out a continuous thread of closely-aligned nanotubes. This wraps around the rod at a rate of centimetres per second.

It is similar to spinning wool, Windle told New Scientist: "You have this ball of entangled wool and you put a needle in to pull out the threads".

Spinning wool? Maybe. But it sounds more to me like making cotton candy.

But don't start planning your space elevator trip just yet; the nanotubes created by this method are nowhere near as tough or conductive as traditional carbon buckytubes. Still, it's a good step towards making this nanoscale material more usable in the macro world.

Image of traditional nanotubes from University of Basel Nanoscale Science Center

The various forms of carbon (diamond, graphite, buckyball, and the mighty nanotube) now welcome a new sibling: nanofoam. According to PhysicsWeb:

Physicists in Greece, Australia and Russia have made a new form of carbon that has the lowest density ever reported for a solid - just 2 milligrams per cubic centimetre. The material is a nano-foam of carbon clusters and is the first form of pure carbon to display ferromagnetism, albeit temporary, at room temperature.

Welcome to the family!

One of the problems with the use of rechargeable batteries, particularly batteries used as a replacement for liquid-fuel systems (such as in cars), is that they take awhile to recharge. And while current-generation nickel-metal-hydride and lithium-ion batteries are much better than older nickel-cadmium batteries, they can still take more time to recharge than one might want. But this may soon change:

NEC Corp has developed a battery that can be recharged only in 30 seconds, company sources said. Called an organic radical battery, it can be recharged to the same level of power as that stored in nickel-hydrogen cells, which are widely used in digital cameras, portable MD players and other electronic devices.

It takes only about 30 seconds to recharge the battery enough to allow 80 hours of continuous operation of an MD player, compared with around an hour needed by conventional rechargeables, the company claims.

The cost, once production ramps up, sh