July 30, 2004
Better All the Time #17
After this weeks festivities in Boston, whether you viewed them as a tremendous renewal of hope for our nation, a massive hot-air-athon, or an unwlecome disruption of your summer re-run viewing, what better wrap-up could there be than a little good news?
- Quote of the Day I
- Lung Cancer Gene Identified
- Raising Nicer Rats. And Monkeys. And Children.
- Richer All the Time
- Frozen Ark
- Stem Cell Therapy Even a Mother Could Love
- There's Never an Alien Around When You Need One
- IP Addresses for
EveryoneEverything!
Quote of the Day II
Update
We've discovered the secret of life.
-- Francis Crick
via BrainyQuote
Item 1
Lung Cancer Gene Isolated?
The Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer Consortium (GELCC) examined 52 families who had at least three first-degree family members affected by lung, throat or laryngeal cancer. Of these 52 families, 36 had affected members in at least two generations. Using 392 known genetic markers, which are DNA sequences that are known to be common sites of genetic variation, the researchers generated and then compared the alleles (the different variations each gene can take) of all affected and non-affected family members who were willing to participate in the study.
The good news:
First off, this is good news because it should provide some additional impetus for some people not to smoke. As the article explains:
Another interesting discovery the team made involved the effects of smoking on cancer risk for carriers and non-carriers of the predicted familial lung cancer gene. They found that in non-carriers, the more they smoked, the greater their risk of cancer. In carriers, on the other hand, any amount of smoking increased lung cancer risk. These findings suggest that smoking even a small amount can lead to cancer for individuals with inherited susceptibility.
Of course...
Many will argue that you would have to be crazy to smoke, anyway. Maybe the knowledge that you carry this gene would be enough to scare a long-time smoker into quitting; maybe not. But you would really have to be crazy to know that you carry this gene and go ahead and start smoking anyway.
Anyway...
This news suggests a possible path to gene therapy treatments that could be used to prevent, maybe one day even cure, lung cancer. Great stuff.
Item 2
Nature, Nurture, Tomato, Tomahto
Try connecting the dots between the these three pieces of news.
(1) From Tech Central Station
Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.
Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.
(2) From NewScientist.com:
Good mothering can abolish the impact of a "bad" gene for aggression, suggests a new study, adding spice to the "nature-versus-nurture" controversy.
The new work, on rhesus monkeys, backs an earlier study in people which gave the same result.
(3) From Kurzweil AI:
Scientists have discovered that rat genes can be altered by the mother's behavior.
All newborn rats have a molecular silencer on their stress-receptor gene, they found. In rats reared by standoffish mothers, the silencer remains attached, the scientists will report in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience. As a result, the brain has few stress-hormone receptors and reacts to stress like a skittish horse hearing a gunshot.
The good news:
So it appears that good parenting is as important for monkeys as it is for humans. And if human physiology is similar to that of rats in this regard (which is a leap, of course) it's just possible that kids are better today because we've actually made them...better. Maybe they aren't just making better use of what nature gave them, maybe nature has — through the good offices of their parents — given them a little more to work with than the previous generation had.
Item 3
The Rich Are Getting Richer, and the Poor Are Getting...Richer!
Without a doubt, there is some connection between economic and technological development. Technological development fuels productivity growth, which in turn drives economic growth. This raises an interesting question: is there an economic version of Moore's Law? How fast is our standard of living increasing? If Poor 2004 = Middle Class 1974, is it fair to say that standard of living is doubling every 30 years? And if so, how does that rate of growth compared to what was experienced in years gone by?
The good news:
The article draws a link between increasing economic productivity, technological advancement, and improved standards of living. It seems that these three are related in a very positive way, which keeps pushing all of us towards better and better economic circumstances.
The downside:
As Stephen points out in the comments to the linked entry, although the wealthiest individuals may have vastly more material resources than the poorest, the difference between the two in terms of standard of living is getting smaller and smaller. It's so sad: being super-rich doesn't buy you the same gloating rights it used to.
Boo hoo.
Anyway...
The steady rise in the standard of living over time means most of us, inlcuding some of the poorest among us, richer than kings.
Item 4
DNA Code Freeze
Britain's "Frozen Ark" project boarded its first endangered passengers on Monday: an Arabian oryx, a Socorro dove, a mountain chicken, a Banggai cardinal, a spotted sea horse, a British field cricket and Polynesian tree snails.
The "ark", a project by three British institutions, doesn't include any living animals, but hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue specimens from thousands of endangered species.
Like Noah, the scientists harbour hopes of repopulating the Earth.
The good news:
Everybody complains about the loss of biodiversity through man-made extinctions, and now somebody is doing something about it.
The critical assumption:
The ark approach is similar to cryonics, but the aim is to preserve whole species rather than individual organisms. In both cases, it is assumed that the future holds the key to restoring that which we have lost (or in this case, are losing.)
This project assumes that, in the future, we will have the technology to restore these lost species, and to generate new populations of them. It also assumes that we will have — or have the ability to create — a suitable habitat for them. To support a project such as this may involve believing that the present is not all it should be, but one could not possibly get behind such an endeavor without believing that a better future is possible.
Prediction:
Most of us reading this will live to see the restoration of at least one "extinct" species of animal.
Item 5
Fetuses Give Pregnant Women Stem Cell Therapy
Diana W. Bianchi, M.D. of the Tufts University Sackle School of Graduate Biomedical Research has found that cells from fetuses during pregnancy cross over into mothers and become a large assortment of types of specialized cells in the mothers and persist for years.
The good news:
This good news on a couple of fronts. First, it suggests a heretorfore unimagined health benefit associated with motherhood. What could be more deserved than that? Perhaps even more importantly, it suggests that we may have found a new source of fetal and embryonic stem cells, one that may be free of the controversey which has surrounded stem cell research up to this point.
As Randall Parker explains it:
My guess is that a large fraction of the hESC research opponents will decide that extraction of hESC from a mother's blood is morally acceptable. No fetus will be killed by the extraction. The cells so extracted are not cells that would go on to become a complete new human life. If a sizable portion of the religious hESC opponents can be satisfied by this approach for acquiring hESC then Bianchi's research may well lead to a method to get hESC that will open the gates to a much larger effort to develop therapies based on hESC.
On thing is for sure...
It will prove a lot easier to "win" the stem cell debate by coming up with a solution that both sides like than it would have been to get one side to agree that we should walk away, or the other side to agree that it's okay to kill an embryo. There's a lot to be said for the win-win scenario.
Item 6
Close Encounter Soon?
Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute is predicting "First Contact" with an alien civilization within a generation. To be specific the prediction is:
If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades.
The good news:
If there's anybody out there, and these calculations based on the Drake Equation are correct, we should know about it in a fairly short period of time (relatively speaking. And if there isn't anyone out there, we will be more sure of that if we haven't heard anything within the next 20 years or so.
The downside:
The problem with Drake's equation (which Drake would certainly acknowledge) is that all variables are unknown. We can make educated guesses, but we can't know with any degree of certainty as long as our sample size for known civilizations is one.
Anyway...
Drake's equation has always been better for providing a framework for speculation than for proving anything. But Shostak has expanded Drakes' framework and has given SETI a goal.
Item 7
The Gift of Understatement
Paul Hsieh on the new version six of the Internet Protocol:
The new IPv6 internet naming and number protocol will make it possible for every person (or device) on Earth to have their own IP address.
The Good News:
Every person or device on Earth? Well, er, yeah...and then some. The linked article repeats the same modest claim before getting to heart of the matter:
Vinton Cerf of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) said the next-generation protocol, IPv6, had been added to its root server systems, making it possible for every person or device to have an Internet protocol address.
Cerf said about two-thirds of the 4.3 billion Internet addresses currently available were used up, adding that IPv6 could magnify capacity by some "25,000 trillion trillion times."
The Good News Amplified:
Our friend Alex Lightman gave a talk a while back that touched on a number of interesting topics, one of which was the introduction of IPv6. He estimates that IPv6 will provide enough IP addresses so that every atom in the known universe can have one.
Now that oughta hold us for a while.
Watching science catch up to science fiction. Portable computers, Star Trek communicators, all that stuff has actually happened and there’s more on the way.
-- Major Robert Blackington, USAF, on what's best about living in the future.
UPDATE
It's Official
SpaceShipOne will fly September 29, 2004, making the first of its two qualifying flights required to win the X Prize.
We'll be there. (Virtually, of course.)
For more good stuff, don't miss the latest Winds of Discovery.
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, Kathy Hanson, and Michael "El Jefe Grande" Sargent. Live to see it!
July 13, 2004
Better All The Time #16
There are so many exciting developments taking place every week that it's sometimes hard to narrow them down to seven. We'd like to think that the following items are a representative sample, but failing that, they're at least a good start.
- Quote of the Day
- More Hardware from Veggies
- Stem Cells Grow Up
- Hope for Hubble
- Now All We Need is a Tiny, Portable Sofa
- Bug-Proof Duds
- Stoneage Sistine Chapel Discovered
- Is This Really "Good" News?
Only those who will risk going too far, can possibly find out how far they can go
-- T. S. Eliot
Item 1
You Call it Corn, We Call it Optical Disks
In September 2003, Sanyo Electric introduced the concept of a new optical disc, dubbed 'MildDisc' and based on poly lactid acid produced from corn. These discs will have a lifetime of 50 to 100 years and are biodegradable.
The good news:
A CD made from corn? What could be better for running on your spinach-powered laptop? We live in amazing times.
The downside:
The disks have been delayed coming to market. Apparently they do not do well with high temperatures. (Is it possible that their failure is accompanied by a loud popping sound?)
Anyway...
Roland Piquepaille comments on the production of the disks:
[H]ere are interesting numbers. Sanyo said that an ear of corn would be enough to deliver 10 discs. There are about 9 billions of CDs produced annually, and the yearly world corn production is estimated to be around 600 million tons. So only 0.1 percent of the world corn's production would be enough to satisfy the worldwide disc market, according to the company.
Item 2
If I Only Had a Heart, the Nerve, some...Teeth
Our good friend Randall Parker, the FuturePundit himself, has run a series of stories over the past week about major breakthroughs in the use of adult stem cells:
Helmut Drexler of University of Freiburg, Germany and his colleagues treated sufferers of acute myocardial infarctions (i.e. heart attacks) with bone marrow stem cells and found that the bone marrow stem cells boosted the volume of blood pumped by the left ventricle of the heart.
...
Better Humans reports on research by Siddharthan Chandran of the University of Cambridge, UK Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair on the use of a mix of growth factors to successfully turn skin cells into neural stem cells.
...
Working with freshly extracted human third molars (wisdom teeth) scientists have been able to isolate stem cells that can turn into the ligament that hold teeth into place.
The good news:
Adult stem cells are the often-ignored older siblings of embryonic stem cells, which hold so much promise and which are surrounded by so much controversey. The conventional wisdom is that embryonic stem cells are more or less "universal assemblers" capable of replenishing or creating anew virutally any cell in the body, where adult stem cells are much less flexible, having only one direction that they can grow. The second item cited above, which describes adult skin cells being converted to neural stem cells, would appear to fly in the face of the conventional wisdom. We may yet see universal cell assemblers grown from adult cells. And even if we don't, it seems that new applications for adult stem cells are being found all the time — which is tremendous news in its own right.
The downside:
Randall explains:
In the United States the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is throwing up roadblocks even for adult stem cell therapy. The FDA's stance has nothing to do with the debate about embryonic stem cells. Rather, it is part of the FDA's never-ending quest to protect people with fatal diseases from the risk that experimental therapies might harm them. In my view people with fatal diseases ought to be allowed to try experimental therapies and the FDA's position both slows the rate at which treatments are developed and unjustifiably takes away the individual's right to choose which treatment risks are worth taking.
Hear, hear.
Anyway...
It's encouraging to see that progress is being made in so many different areas at once. We can expect to hear a lot more about adult stem cell therapy in the months and years to come.
Item 3
Keep Hubble Repair Options Open - Experts
NASA should not rule out sending a shuttle to fix the aging Hubble Space Telescope, an expert panel told the space agency on Tuesday, six months after a planned repair mission was dismissed as too risky.
The good news:
We are big believers that the Hubble telescope, which has opened the eyes of the world to a universe we could scarcely have imagined, is worth saving. It's gratifying to see NASA coming to the same conclusion.
Anyway:
In a week in which the Cassini probe has survived being peppered by ring chunks, and speculation is increasing about passengers on SpaceShipOne, we didn't want to miss this very positive development.
Obscure Blogosphere Reference:
James Taranto would have headlined this piece as follows:
What Would the Hubble Telescope Do Without Experts?
Item 4
New Portable Multimedia Entertainment Devices Head for Stores
Get ready to feel obsolete with your iPod. Portable media players will be available within weeks, and they store and play not only music, but movies, recorded TV shows, and photo slide shows.
The good news:
These gadgets can be configured with up to 40 GB of storage, "enough to store every episode of The Simpsons." Kawabunga, Dude!
The downside:
The screen sizes are 3.5 and 3.8 inches, which might prove to be a bit of a strain for tired old eyes. Also, at an estimated street price of $500, they are a smidge more expensive than an iPod.
On the other hand...
It's 1984.
The phone rings, and you answer it. It's you, calling from the future:
"Hey, Me-From-20-Years-Ago. How's it going?"
"Okay. How about with you, Me-From-20-Years-Ahead?"
"Great! You'll never guess what I just bought."
"Tell me."
"Well, it's a portable combination TV, VCR, stereo."
"Portable? What does it use, tiny little tapes?"
"No tapes. It stores everything in computer memory."
"No kidding. Can it hold as much as a six-hour extended play vhs tape?"
"It can hold hundreds of hours of video and music."
"Whoah. So you say it's portable. What does it weigh, 15-20 pounds?"
"It weighs about the same as your beloved Sony Walkman. And it's just a little bigger than the Walkman. You could carry it in your coat pocket if you wanted to."
"I don't believe it! How much did it cost?"
"Guess."
"Well, let's see. I just bought some stuff. My TV cost me about $500. My VCR was about $200. My stereo was about $300. That's $1,000 in 1984 money. I'm thinking the device you're talking about must have set you back a good $10,000. What, are we like rich in the future?"
"Gotta go. See you in 20!"
"But, wait I want to know —"
[Click]
So you see, "expensive" is a relative notion.
Item 5
West Nile fears boost protective clothing sales
Recently, the battle of man vs. insect has spawned a new tool: clothes that appear normal in every way, except for their built-in repellent that keeps bugs at bay.
"This is the first new development in personal insect protection since DEET," says Haynes Griffin, CEO of Buzz Off Insect Shield of Greensboro, N.C. DEET is the active ingredient in most tick and insect repellents.
The active ingredient in Buzz Off clothing is permethrin, a synthetic version of pyrethrum, a natural insect repellent derived from the daisy-like flowers of a plant in the chrysanthemum family.
The good news:
You might be wondering just how effective these bug-proof clothes really are. It seems that West Point Academy has reported a reduction in the incidence of Lyme disease from 10 cases to zero one year after switching to field uniforms made from the fabric.
That's pretty impressive.
The downside:
In the long run, insect-proof clothes are probably bad news for, say, the people who make Off.
Anyway...
The Better All The Time Wardrobe grows. Insect-proof clothes now join power-generating clothes, self-cleaning clothes, and bullet-proof shirts.
An elaborately decorated cave ceiling with artwork dating to 13,000 years ago has been found in Nottinghamshire, England, according to a press release issued today by the University of Sheffield.
The site of the find, Church Hole Cave at Creswell Crags, is being called the "Sistine Chapel" of the Ice Age because it contains the most ornate cave art ceiling in the world. The ceiling extends the earliest rock art in Britain by approximately 8,000 years and suggests that a primary culture unified Europeans during the Ice Age.
The good news:
The fact that this important find is just now being discovered in a well-known cave is evidence of how much we still can still learn from known archeological sites.
The scope of the discovery:
Jon Humble, inspector of ancient monuments for a preservation group called English Heritage, commented, "The text books say that there is no cave art in Britain. These will now have to be rewritten. It is remarkable to consider that some 500 generations ago people created pictures on the wall of the caves depicting the world that they knew, which certainly was not as we know it."
Moreover...
It seems we know less than we think we do about the world we live in. There's more to learn, folks.
Item 7
Extended Life For Baby Boomers!
In a radio interview, famous futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that health conscious baby boomers have a good shot of living long enough to benefit from life extension technologies - to bootstrap into indefinite lifespans.
On "Living Forever," Kurzweil discussed how to dramatically slow down the aging process, even stop and reverse it, and the social and cultural ramifications. He also described his forthcoming book, "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever," co-authored with Terry Grossman, M.D.
"The book makes the scientific case that immortality is within our grasp," says Kurzweil. "Our health program enables people to slow aging and disease processes to such a degree that we can remain in good health and spirits until the more radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies, now in the research and testing pipeline, become available.
Here's an real audio link to the interview.
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Kathy Hanson. Live to see it!
June 28, 2004
Better All The Time #15
With so much pain, suffering, and uncertainty in the world, how could anyone claim that things are getting better? Well, one could start by considering the following...
- Quote of the Day
- Smarter All the Time
- SpaceShip Won!
- Really Getting Away from it All
- That's Why They Travel in Schools
- iMac or Popeye Mac?
- Save the Whales (& the Pandas & the Cheetahs & the Black-footed Ferrets)
- What About Blob?
Update: Iraq
Saying that extending old people's lives is not so important as extending young people's lives may be justified today, when older people have less potential life to live (in terms of both quantity and quality) than younger people, but when that difference is seen to be removable (by curing aging), one would have to argue that older people matter less because they have a longer past, even though their potential future is no different from that of younger people. That's ageism in its starkest form, and we've learned to put aside such foolish things as ageism in the rest of society; it's time to do it in the biomedical realm too.
Item 1
Here Comes the Intelligent Internet
Kurzweil AI provides an enticing summary of a Futurist column in Government Computer News:
Information and communication technologies are rapidly converging to create a new transformative global communication system.
The "intelligent Internet" should allow people everywhere to converse naturally and comfortably with life-sized, virtual people while shopping, working, learning, and conducting most social relationships.
The good news:
The linked column discusses how small, but significant, developments have put us on a trajectory leading to a very different kind of online experience from what we're used to. Amtrack, for example, has replaced its annoying push-button menus on its customer service line with speech recognition and a virtual assistant. But that sort of thing is only the beginning. Here are a few of the major developments the column predicts are coming soon:
* Reliable speech recognition should be common by 2010.
* IBM has a Super Human Speech Recognition Program to greatly improve accuracy, and in the next decade Microsoft's program is expected to reduce the error rate of speech recognition, matching human capabilities.
* General Motors OnStar driver assistance system relies primarily on voice commands, with live staff for backup; the number of subscribers has grown from 200,000 to 2 million and is expected to increase by 1 million per year. The Lexus DVD Navigation System responds to over 100 commands and guides the driver with voice and visual directions.
* Smart computers will be learning and adapting within a decade.
* The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is developing a hypersmart computer that can maintain itself, assess its performance, make adaptive changes, and respond to different situations.
* The Department of Energy is creating an intelligent computer that can infer intent, remember prior experiences, analyze problems, and make decisions.
* BCC Corporation estimates total AI sales to grow from $12 billion in 2002 to $21 billion in 2007.
The downside:
Artificial intelligence has been hyped and re-hyped so thoroughly over the past three decades that its emergence as a real factor in everyday business (and other) interactions may go more or less unnoticed.
On the other hand...
Maybe the lack of fanfare is a good thing. These incremental changes each seem useful, but we hardly notice where they are leading us — namely, to a computing environment with which we can interact more or less in the same way that we interact with other people. We might well reach the Symbiotic Age, a major step on our journey to the technological singularity, without even realizing it.
Item 2
The Dawn of the Private Space Age
Melvill on the flight: "It was a mind-blowing experience...and everything worked just as he [Rutan] said it would."
Rutan: "It's hard for me to talk right now...several times tears came to our eyes...I am absolutely delighted..."
The good news:
The headline in the index at the top of the page is only a little ahead of itself. SpaceShipOne hasn't actually "won" anything yet (the X-Prize looms large on the horizon), although pilot Mike Melvill has earned the right to be called an astronaut. The maiden space voyage of Burt Rutan's brainchild is an extremely exciting development. The future of the private development and settlement of space has never looked brighter.
Here's the whole story of the flight as viewed from Speculist Headquarters in Colorado:
Saw the Launch
Now Past 50K
We Have Separation
Over the Top
Mission Accomplished
Wheels Down
Civilian Pilots
Weightless M&Ms
Good Summaries
Also, see the definitive slide show here.
The downside:
There is no downside, here; although there is some concern about a few technical problems that SpaceShipOne encountered along the way.
Anyway...
We're eager to see what Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, and Mike Melvill do next.
Item 3
The Future of Travel: Aquatic to Cosmic Destinations
Future travelers will be putting down their luggage in far-flung places, underwater, in the air and around the planet. They'll get amazing views from bizarre living quarters that build on "outrageously successful" billion-dollar projects on Earth, and they'll take adventures that have long been the province of science fiction.
The good news:
Some pretty exciting vacations lie ahead. When we're not "cosmoplaning" to the excellent hiking trails of Turkmenistan or elegant resorts in Qatar, apparently we'll be "zorbing" — follow the link; we're not telling — skydiving, contemplating our navels, or frolicking with Polar bears.
And yes, the final frontier is definitely shaping up as a future vacation destination.
However:
Eventually being able to take vacations in space will involve overcoming a couple of little difficulties:
The obstacle is not technology...The Catch-22 is that a space hotel won't be affordable until there is a mass market for space tourism … and there won't be a mass market until it's affordable. You can't have a successful hotel if you don't have the means of getting people there."
Luckily...
Burt Rutan and company are working hard on perfecting the means of getting there. Plus, there's more than one way to get the space tourism business going.
Item 4
Fish Consumption Tied to Better Cognitive Development In Babies
Julie Daniels, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, has found in a population of English children that consumption of fish by mothers during pregnancy is positively correlated with cognitive development after controlling for educational levels of the mothers and some other factors.
The largest effect was seen in a test of the children’s understanding of words at age 15 months. Children whose mothers ate fish at least once a week scored 7 percent higher than those whose mothers never ate fish.
The good news:
Eating fish is certainly easier than strapping headphones onto an expectant mother's abdomen and piping Mozart into the womb. Plus, it offers a number of health benefits in its own right.
The downside:
There are health risks associated with eating too much of certain kinds of fish:
Women should definitely avoid shark, swordfish, king mackerel and tilefish, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Food and Drug Administration...Those fish are higher on the food chain and have greater accumulation of pollutants.
The FDA publishes a handy guide for tracking mercury levels in fish. It looks like the trick is to limit fish to the correct amounts of the right kinds.
Anyway...
Smarter kids are all very well, but what about stronger? Next we need to find out what the parents of the German super-baby have been eating.
Item 5
A Spinach-Powered Laptop?
Nature reports that researchers from the MIT have made solar cells powered by spinach proteins. These prototype solar cells which transform light into 'green' energy could be used one day to coat and power your laptop.
The good news:
Of course, we all want our technology to be as green-friendly as possible. Well, how does Spinach sound? Green enough for you?
We can expect spinach-derived power sources to be a lot easier on the environment in terms of their manufacture and their disposal.
The downside:
There is still work to be done before becoming a commercial product. Right now, the prototype delivers current for only three weeks. And they are not very efficient, converting only 12% of the light they absorb into electricity.
So we're not quite there yet. Stay tuned.
Anyway...
This is the kind of merging of biotech and other "techs" (nano, info, etc.) that we can expect to see a lot more of. Spinach-powered computers are only the beginning. While biotech helps us make our technology greener and cleaner, infotech and nanotech promise to bring about myriad improvements in our lives, both external and internal.
Item 6
Fertility Techniques Save Endangered Species
Fertility techniques that have enabled millions of couples to have children are helping scientists to save endangered species.
From killer whales and giant pandas to cheetahs and black-footed ferrets, assisted reproductive technology (ART) has allowed scientists to breed wild animals in captivity and learn more about how they reproduce.
The good news:
Any time we preserve a species from extinction, it is cause for celebration. The fact that these efforts have derived from a seemingly unrelated line of research only makes the story that much more exciting.
The downside:
This will be bad news for those who view human reproduction and the survival of other species as a zero-sum game. Here we have heroic efforts to produce more babies leading to the preservation of other species that might otherwise have gone extinct. Go figure.
Item 7
Beach blob mystery solved at last
(via GeekPress)
Marine biologists have definitively shown that the "Chilean Blob" and other similar mysteries are simply the remains of whales.
The good news:
Another nightmare scenario averted...
The downside:
"An ocean without unnamed monsters," wrote John Steinbeck, "would be like sleep without dreams." But the dream that a new species of sea monster washed up in Chile in 2003 is over.
By putting preserved samples through similar tests, the researchers have confirmed that the "giant octopus of St Augustine" from 1896, the 1960 Tasmanian west coast monster, two Bermuda blobs from the 1990s and the 1996 Nantucket blob are also just the washed-up remains of whales.
But you've got to wonder — how did these poor whales' innards get separated from their bones?
Anyway...
Around here, if we're going to report on squishy, slimy sea creatures, we prefer to do it from a warm and fuzzy angle.
Update: Iraq
U.S. Hands Power to Iraqis Two Days Early
The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government two days early Monday in a surprise move that apparently caught insurgents off guard, averting a feared campaign of attacks to sabotage the historic step toward self-rule.
We've tracked some of the positive developments in Iraq over the past few weeks (here and here), now culiminating with the transfer of power from American occupation to a provisional Iraqi government. This is a big next step for the people of Iraq.
The timing of the hand-off was very smart. Enemies of freedom and self-determination for Iraq may have been planning terrorist attacks to coincide with the June 30 hand-over. Looks like they missed their big chance. There may yet be future attacks (although we sincerely hope the Iraqi authorities will be able to prevent them), but whatever they do now, they will be doing against Iraqis. The claim that they're only fighting against an occupation force has lost most of its punch.
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.
SpaceShipOne, Government Zero.
June 17, 2004
Better All The Time #14
It's not that Better All the Time is a weekly feature. It's just that — here lately — we've been doing about one a week.
- Quote of the Day
- Smart Pills for Everybody
- Where No Atoms Have Gone Before *
- Clotheslines May Make a Comeback
- Back to Work!
- A Spam-Free Diet
- Not the Least Bit Sad(r) to See Him Go
Update
Sometimes a picture of a kid standing in the driveway with a wagon full of apples is just that--a good and hopeful thing in a good and hopeful place.
-- James Lileks
Item 1
Strange food for thought
"We're about to be handed a bunch of powerful new capabilities ... to refashion ourselves, improve ourselves," notes Martha Farah, a director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania[.]
Modafinil was developed to treat narcolepsy, a rare condition causing daytime sleepiness. But now it is used by those who simply want to be wakeful and alert, and recently seven American track and field athletes admitted to using it to boost their mental preparation. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, used for nearly two decades to treat depression, has also been found to enhance problem-solving abilities in normal individuals.
The good news:
We certainly like the idea of being more alert, and being able to solve problems better. Such enhancements might just help us to get out more editions of Better All the Time!
Plus, these kinds of upgrades are only the first step. Eventually, we'll be able to load knowledge directly into our heads, making life an awful lot easier for, say, grad students and would-be contestants on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
The downside:
Improved brain imaging, or mapping, is yielding new techniques such as "brain fingerprinting," which purports to be able to locate memories within the brain, raising troubling possibilities for invasion of privacy. "There's nothing more private and personal than a person's memories," says Richard Glen Boire, codirector of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics in Davis, Calif.
In addition to privacy concerns, there are questions as to what the long-term effects of some of these enhacements will be. Such concerns will have to be addressed adequately before enhancements become widespread
Unexpected consequences...
Berlitz and Pimsleur will become pharmaceutical companies. Those SAT and GRE prep books will be available in handy, easy-to-swallow capsules available over the counter.
Item 2
Scientists Demonstrate Teleportation with Atoms
Physicists in the United States and Austria for the first time have teleported "quantum states" between separate atoms.
The breakthrough may not yet make it possible for people to disappear and reappear somewhere else, like actors in a science fiction television show. But it could help lead to "quantum computing" technology that would make superfast computers.
The good news:
Quantum computers promise to solve a number of problems and bring almost unimaginable processing speeds. Plus, it isn't just (really good) science fiction that they may eventually be used to determine whether parallel universes exist.
The downside:
As the linked article indicates, we're still a long way off from what Star Trek fans normally think of when they hear the word "teleportation."
Anyway...
Previous teleportation experiments were done with photons. That's a significant step, seeing as how we're all made of atoms.
Item 3
Clothes launder own fabric
(via FuturePundit)
In the classic 1951 film, The Man in the White Suit, Alec Guinness played a scientist who invents a fabric that never gets dirty or wears out. A chemist's pipe dream perhaps, but the prospect of self-cleaning clothes might be getting closer.
Scientists have invented an efficient way to coat cotton cloth with tiny particles of titanium dioxide. These nanoparticles are catalysts that help to break down carbon-based molecules, and require only sunlight to trigger the reaction. The inventors believe that these fabrics could be made into self-cleaning clothes that tackle dirt, environmental pollutants and harmful microorganisms.
The good news:
Where we once hung laundry out to dry, perhaps we will soon hang it out to wash.
The downside:
Let's see...less time spent doing laundry...another good reason to go outdoors...ah, jeez — can we get back to you on the "downside" thing?
Item 4
Jobless Claims Dip, Leading Indicators Up
The number of new people signing up for jobless benefits dropped last week and a closely watched gauge of future economic activity rose more than expected in May, suggesting the U.S. economy can continue a sturdy expansion through the summer.
In another sign of a broadening recovery, the Labor Department's Producer Price Index, a measure of prices before goods reach store shelves, posted the largest increase in more than a year.
The good news:
Very little explanation required, here. Fewer people are out of work, and our best available yardstick says the good times are going to be with us for quite a while.
The downside:
The uptick in the Producer Price Index, while generally an indicator of a growing economy, also raises the possibility of inflation. Yikes.
However...
The other thing that the PPI is a good indicator of is the level of business confidence. Businesses who are feeling a little weak in the knees don't tend to raise their prices. Management confidence is an excellent indicator of economic growth, if only as a self-fulfilling prophecy. (All of those confident managers are just about bound to make something good happen.)
Item 5
Programs: ChoiceMail Puts a Stranglehold on Spam
I don't need Viagra, my credit is fine, and somehow I doubt the PhD offered via e-mail with "no required tests, classes, books, or interviews!" is going to be worth much. If you're inundated and infuriated by spam, the newly released free version of DigiPortal Software's ChoiceMail may prevent you from going postal.
The good news:
A reliable cure for Spam e-mails? And it's free?
If we weren't the BATT guys, we would swear that sounds to good to be true.
The downside:
There's a bit of work involved in setting up your initial "whitelist" of allowed e-mail addresses. After that, however, the software runs interference anytime an unknown e-mail address pops up. Legitimate correspondents get the chance to request to be included on the whitelist. Everybody else gets filtered out.
Anyway...
They need to create a version of this thing to weed out unwanted blog comments. We get awfully tired of deleting junk comments from one "Enis Enlargement," or whatever the heck his name is.
Item 6
Rebel Cleric Signals End to Shiite Insurgency in Iraq
(via Instapundit)
Radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr sent his fighters home on Wednesday in what may mark the end of a 10-week revolt against U.S.-led forces that once engulfed southern Iraq and Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines.
With the formal end of U.S.-led occupation just two weeks away, Sadr issued a statement from his base in Najaf calling on his Mehdi Army militiamen to go home.
The good news:
Even though al-Sadr was hailed as the leader of the Iraqi "minutemen" by Michael Moore, and had his newspaper endorsed as a "legitimate voice" by John Kerry, he never really got very far with his plan to take over Iraq.
Good for Iraq.
The downside:
The news from Iraq isn't all good, but this is a very encouraging development. No doubt there are some radical clerics in Iran who are pretty disappointed by this turn of events, however.
Item 7
Monogamy in Our Genes?
Imagine turning a bed-hopping lothario into a dedicated, monogamous mate with the flip of a genetic switch. A new study shows it may be possible, at least for the notoriously promiscuous meadow mole.
Accomplishing the same feat in humans may be a bit more complicated, but researchers say they've found a gene that appears to have a profound effect on the social behavior of animals.
The good news:
We've reported in the past how technology may one day threaten the institution of marriage, so we're glad to see a scientific development that might actually help marriage.
Gene therapy would certainly be an unexpected arrow to put in the marriage counselor's quiver. But, hey, anything that helps...
The downside:
A development like this could have a devastating impact on the country music recording industry.
Moreover...
It's a good thing that Las Vegas currently doesn't rely too heavily on revenues brought in by meadow moles. Or they might be in trouble, too!
Reader Kert was good enough to point out our lack of space news in this edition (see below), so we thought we should try to make up from the deficiency. Fortunately, Winds of Change has just published the second edition of Winds of Discovery, which includes a number of interesting items about space — along with a thorough and informative roundup of other science news. Check it out!
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon.
I am therefore I am.
*Sorry, but references to "beaming up" or "Scotty" would have just been too obvious. (Back)
June 10, 2004
Better All The Time #13
Welcome to our lucky 13th edition of "Better all the Time." Grab your lucky horseshoe, rabbits foot, or four-leaf clover and join us!
- Quote of the Day
- First Treatable, Then Curable
- Will Gibson and Glover Be Available for the Movie?
- Are We Not Men? We Love Tivo
- Tiny Robots in Your Bloodstream
- Ding, Dong the Grey Goo's Dead
- These Fingerprints Are No Myth
- This Might Get Even Us Back to School
Quote of the Day II
Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.
-- Ronald Reagan
I guess that I just don't feel that way. I've watched people I love age and die, and it wasn't "beautiful and natural." It sucked. Aging is a disease. Cataracts and liver spots don't bring moral enlightenment or spiritual transcendence. Death may be natural -- but so are smallpox, rape, and athlete's foot. "Natural" isn't the same as "good."
As far as I'm concerned, I'd rather see my tax dollars spent on longevity research than, well, most of the other things they're spent on. I wonder how many other people feel that way.
Well, you've got two of them right here, Glenn. And there are many others besides. Keep fighting the good fight.
Also, that idea about how death sucks really resonates...
Item 1
Drugs May Turn Cancer Into Manageable Disease
Brett Smith, the father of two young children, was only 26 three years ago when he was found to have advanced melanoma, a deadly skin cancer. Several drugs failed to stop the cancer, while leaving him frail, depleted and ill.
But two years ago, Mr. Smith began taking an experimental pill along with chemotherapy, and his tumors disappeared. He dropped the chemotherapy nearly a year ago but still takes the pill twice a day. And his disease, though it may return one day, is still at bay.
The pill Mr. Smith takes, known by the awkward code name BAY 43-9006, could reach the market in one to three years. It is one of a new generation of "targeted" therapies that are transforming cancer treatment by attacking the underlying molecular mechanisms of the disease.
The good news:
Good news on the cancer front is good news for all of us. Rates of contraction of various forms of the disease have been on a steady rise for some time. We believe, however, that the growth rate of cancer is no match for the speed with which new developments are being made to combat the disease. We very much expect to live to see the end of the cancer threat.
Prediction:
Within our lifetimes, most forms of cancer will be either eliminated outright or relegated to a treatable condition that people can live with. Best-case: cancer is gone altogether. Worst case: some people live with cancer the way people currently live with diabetes.
Also...
This is a very interesting approach: "attacking the underlying molecular mechanisms of the disease." See Item Four, below, for an overview of the next generation of weapons we will have for carrying out such an attack.
Item 2
Nonlethal Weapons
Test subjects can't see the invisible beam from the Pentagon's new, Star Trek-like weapon, but no one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds. People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.
[The beam] is among the most potent of a new generation of futuristic, "less-than-lethal" weapons being developed by the Defense Department - tools that could dramatically alter the way police control riots and soldiers fight wars.
The good news:
A weapon such as this could be particularly useful in close quarter combat. Imagine how useful this weapon would be in a hostage rescue opperation or in other instances where there is a high risk of friendly fire.
The downside:
Just because it's harmless doesn't mean we want to experience being shot with one of these things. The very fact that it leaves no evidence of trauma could increase the likelihood that it is misused as an instrument of torture.
Anyway...
The availability of nonlethal weapons could have some interesting implications for the gun control debate. The linked article doesn't have much to say about individual weapons; the weapons described are more the combat or crowd-control variety. But assuming that a viable nonlethal alternative to the handgun could be developed, think of the benefits:
Gun advocates would be able to promote an alternative means of self-sefense lacking the dangerous downsides of handguns.
Gun control advocates could sleep soundly at night knowing that the new proliferation of weapons would help ensure that no one is going to get killed.
Yes, there would be risks. And there would definitely be potential for abuse. But a de-stigmatized, nonlethal alternative to the handgun could go along way toward making us safer from the bad guys and (if need be) ourselves.
Item 3
New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV
The Internet, in jumping past the personal computer and into the living room television set, is starting to give viewers the possibility of bypassing traditional cable and satellite services.
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet. It is just one of a growing group of large and small companies that are looking at high-speed Internet to deliver video content to the living room.
The good news:
Stand-alone Internet devices have not been as successful as computers. Just as the Internet became an added function for computers in the early 90's, Internet on TV has a better chance of success as an added function to another device like TiVo or Playstation than as a stand-alone device such as WebTV.
This could prove to be the video version of iTunes. In addition to providing a much-needed legal aspect to the practice of downloading movies on the Internet, we suspect that the Tivo service will prove slightly more efficient than the alternatives. For example, it has been reported that Kazaa user spent nearly three weeks trying to download an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 before suffering some kind of breakdown — he referred to it as "having an epiphany."
He now lives on a communal farm in Oregan where he carves figurines from soap. Organic soap.
Further Good News:
More fun toys for all you video geeks out there.
How's that?
Okay..all us video geeks. Jeez, this whole "full disclosure" thing gets awfully tiresome.
The downside...
Bad news for anyone who happens to be married to a video geek and who doesn't share the passion. Sorry, folks. Maybe you'd like to take up a hobby. Soap carving, anyone?
Item 4
Cell Repair Nanorobot Design And Simulation
A new Russian study by Svidinenko Yuri simulates cell-repair nanorobots. Yuri has generated several models based on the book Nanomedicine by Robert A. Freitas Jr.
The good news:
As we reported in Item 1, above, making repairs at the molecular level may very well be the key to fixing cancer (and, perhaps, aging). Nanomedicine advocates also believe that molecular repairs will be the solution to such diverse conditions as tooth decay and heart disease. Here's a picture of the doctor of the future:
The downside:
For now, alas, it is only an artist's conception. But stay tuned.
Obscure Reference that Shows our Age:
Cool! This is going to be just like Fantastic Voyage, only without the tiny Raquel Welch!
Item 5
Speaking of Tiny Robots...
Eric Drexler, known as the father of nanotechnology, published a paper on Wednesday that admits that self-replicating machines are not vital for large-scale molecular manufacture, and that nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly non-biological and inherently safe.
Talk of runaway self-replicating machines, or “grey goo”, which he first cautioned against in his book Engines of Creation in 1986, has spurred fears that have long hampered rational public debate about nanotechnology. Writing in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, Drexler slays the myth that molecular manufacture must use dangerous self-replicating machines.
The good news:
...comes in two parts. First, it's good news that we can benefit from molecular manufacturing without the self-replicating assemblers that some skeptics still say are impossible or impractical (but see this recent study that indicates otherwise).
Second, the very fact that we can exploit the nanocosm without self-replicating assemblers will allow us all to give our “grey goo” worries a rest.
The downside:
Bill Joy and Prince Charles will no doubt find something new to worry about.
Anyway...
Publishing this paper is a stroke of genius on Drexler's part. Rather than continuing to argue about the feasibility of self-replication (in fact, the Foresight Institute has been talking in terms of non-self-replicating assemblers for some time now), he has made what is viewed as a concession, thus "changing the subject" in the ongoing dialog about nanotechnology. Instead of more coverage of grey goo and other nightmare scenarios, we might begin to see more serious coverage of this developing field in the mainstream media.
Item 6
Genetic fingerprints will help extend life
A drop of blood from a thumbprick will be enough to test 10,000 elements of our health a decade or two from now, says a leading scientist.
A pioneer of the US biotechnology industry, Dr Leroy Hood, told the Bio 2004 conference in San Francisco yesterday that scientists would soon be able to spot the genetic fingerprints of most ailments by running that drop of blood through a computer.
Six-monthly genetic checkups would warn of the susceptibility to diseases such as heart disease, allowing people to take cholesterol-thinning pills and change their diet long before the at-risk age for heart attacks.
It would also catch cancer and other slow-growth diseases early enough to allow treatment.
"My prediction is that, if this comes through over the next 30 years or so, we will see an enormous elongation of perhaps 10 to 20 years in the productive lifespan of each individual," he said.
The good news:
Let's review. Cancer is now much more treatable than it used to be. New technologies may soon provide much more effective ways of addressing cancer at the molecular level. Those technologies are more likely to be developed now that an ongoing smear job against them has been discredited. And if none of that is enough for you, we now read that a drop of your blood may soon add 10 to 20 years to your life, independent of any of the above.
And that's just one day's worth of developments.
You know, we're actually starting to feel kinda sorry for the people who don't recognize that the world is getting better and better. What are they...delusional?
Item 7
Earn Your PhD While Playing Games
Yes, it is possible to get a PhD while playing games, at least if you're studying at the University of Southern California. In "A PhD in Mortal Kombat" (free registration needed), the Los Angeles Times reports today that a "pioneering USC group tries to get into the heads of players to learn if the pastime harms or can help." The Annenberg Studies on Computer Games is a 20-person multidisciplinary group which studies "the impact of computer game-playing on individuals, groups, and society at large." The group wants to understand how some players become "addicted" to gaming. The students will also investigate why some gamers develop "anti-social" behavior while others see an improvement of their interpersonal skills.
The good news:
Academic credit for goofing off. It doesn't get any sweeter than that.
The downside:
We're guessing the hours we've already put into these games won't count toward "life experience" credit.
Anyway...
It's good fodder for Grumpy Old Man-style complaints.
"In my day, we didn't get school credit for playing com-puter games. We etched out our calculus assignments on tiny little slates with only piece of chalk to share among the whole class. And we liked it!"
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon. Special thanks to Kurzweil AI for making it so easy to find good news.
It's morning in America!
June 04, 2004
Better All The Time #12
You want good news? We've got optimistic Americans, tiny robots, aligning planets, and SUVs that will save the environment. Enjoy!
- Quote of the Day
- Most Americans Get It
- Mercy, Mercy Me, The Air Is Cleaner Than it Used To Be
- Yeah, Baby, She's Got It
- Old MacDonald had a Biopharm, FDA I Owe
- Gene Therapy Takes a Leap
- Nanobots are Coming to Town
- Winds of (Accelerating) Change
The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
Item 1
Glass Half Full for Most Americans
Americans are optimistic, "very satisfied with life" and have confidence in their public institutions, especially the U.S. armed forces and law-enforcement agencies, two new polls show.
Fifty-six percent of Americans say their personal situation has improved over the last five years, up seven points since last year, and 68 percent expect their personal situation to improve over the next five years, up five points from 2003, a Harris poll released yesterday found.
The good news:
Cynicism is self-defeating and is, frankly, un-American. We Americans are an optimistic people. We've always had hope that things are getting better all the time.
The downside:
Apparently 32% of us don't believe that our lives will improve in the next five years. Perhaps these people should start reading The Speculist!
Anyway...
The majority in this case is correct. Here's a quick example: Glenn Reynolds reports that there's good news on the employment front. For another example, see next item. (For further examples, just keep scrolling.)
Item 2
North American Pollution Falls 10%
Pollution in North America fell 10 percent over three years...
The 10 percent drop occurred from 1998 to 2001, said the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a three-nation panel established by the United States, Canada and Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In 2001, the latest year for which figures were available, the total amount of pollution released or transferred elsewhere in North America was 3.25 million tons, the commission said in a study. Of the total, nearly 1 million tons went to recycling operations and more than 600 thousand tons was sent to treatment, energy recovery or disposal facilities...
Chemical pollutants released into the air from all industrial sources decreased 18 percent over the three years, falling to 832,000 tons in 2001. But chemical pollutants from power plants fell only 9 percent, to 376,000 tons, the study said.
All but four of the top 50 air polluters in North America were coal-burning power plants.
The good news:
Everybody wants a cleaner environment.
The downside:
If you're an angry activist type, news like this kinda takes the wind out of your sails, doesn't it?
Anyway...
The nation that originated the environmental movement continues to show leadership in making and keeping the world cleaner. The article doesn't say whether we've made any progress on greenhouse emissions, but then again not everyone is agreed that such emsissions are truly to blame for the increase in global temperature.
Besides, the real solution to greenhouse emissions is SUVs. Big ones.
That might sound a little whacked, but bear with us.
Step 1: Hybrid gas-powered and hydraulic SUVs (and pickups) will become the next big thing in must-have vehicles. Unlike dorky-looking electric hybrids, these vehicles are big and powerful. Plus, the hydraulic booster can actually give you more torque and accleration than gas-powered vehicles alone. Moreover, the bigger they are, the better the hydraulics work. People will buy these vehicles primarily because they're cool and useful, with the environmental angle serving as a strong rationale for spending a little more.
Step 2: Once hybrids are established as THE thing to have, gas-hydrogen-hydraulic hybrids will be introduced. (We reported [item 5] the coming gas-hydrogen hybrids a while back.) The cool factor will be the determining factor once again. "Oh, you're still driving a non-hydrogen hybrid? Wow. I gues that's like really...retro..."
Step 3: Now that everyone is driving a huge monster truck or SUV that runs on hydrogen anyway, all we have to do is start swapping out the gas tanks and conversion units with fuel cells. Once again, it's all about having the latest and greatest. "Yeah, just got me a new F-950. Four tons. Man, can she haul. Pure hydrogen, too. What about you? Are you still burning gas in that old Hummer of yours?"
Answer: he won't be for long.
Item 3
First Transit of Venus in 124 years is June 8
Astronomy enthusiasts everywhere will soon have the chance to see an event nobody alive has seen – the transit of Venus.
Venus will appear to drift across the face of the sun as it passes directly between it and the Earth for the first time since 1882. Such events help define Earth’s role in the cosmos, including the distance from it to the sun and stars, according to a news release from the Minnesota Planetarium.
The good news:
We need to celebrate these rare solar system events when they occur. Even with tremendous strides in life extension, we won't have a chance to see this again for 121 years or so!
Item 4
Group: 'Biopharming' Industry Growing
Biotechnology companies are quietly pushing to splice more human genes into food crops after the practice was nearly abandoned last year, a Washington-based advocacy group says.
The news comes some 18 months after College Station,Texas-based Prodigene Inc. caused an uproar by accidentally mixing such crops with conventionally grown plants in Nebraska. At the time, giant food manufacturers called for tighter regulation of such experiments, and biotech titan Monsanto Co. announced it was pulling out of the field.
The number of federal regulatory approvals and applications for these outdoor plantings — often called "biopharming" because the idea is to lower drug-making costs by using plants as delivery agents — have nearly doubled in the last 12 months when compared to the previous year, according to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest.
"The biopharming industry seems to be back in business," the group concludes in a report being released Wednesday that is based on publicly available U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
The good news:
Reason once again triumphs over the superstitious dread that many seem to have about biotechnology. (We reported similar good news just a short while back.)
The downside:
It was a stupid and costly mistake that put biopharming into the position of having to start back up. We certainly hope that the lesson has been learned and that we won't see a repeat.
Anyway...
Can we hope that (some) lower-cost drugs are on the horizon? We can, indeed.
Item 5
Researchers Report Major Advance in Gene Therapy Technique
[Researchers from the University of Wisconsin Medical School, the Waisman Center and Mirus Bio Corporation] have discovered a remarkably simple solution [to safely and effectively get therapeutic DNA inside cells]. They used a system that is virtually the same as administering an IV (intravenous injection) to inject genes and proteins into the limb veins of laboratory animals of varying sizes. The genetic material easily found its way to muscle cells, where it functioned as it should for an extended period of time...
In the experiments, the scientists did not use viruses to carry genes inside cells, a path many other groups have taken. Instead, they used “naked” DNA, an approach Wolff has pioneered. Naked DNA poses fewer immune issues because, unlike viruses, it does not contain a protein coat (hence the term “naked”), which means it cannot move freely from cell to cell and integrate into the chromosome. As a result, naked DNA does not cause antibody responses or genetic reactions that can render the procedure harmful.
-hat tip to Randall Parker
The good news:
We just love news like this. Can't you just see some grad-student hesitantly raising her hand in the middle of an interminable viral vector lecture to ask the stupid question, "Has anybody ever tried just injecting the DNA?"
The downside:
The only downside here is that they didn't think of it sooner.
Item 6
Study: Self-Replicating Nanomachines Feasible
A useful self-replicating machine could be less complex than a Pentium IV chip, according to a new study (PDF, 1.73 MB) performed by General Dynamics for NASA.
General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems recently concluded a six-month study for NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts that examined the design of "kinematic cellular automata," a reconfigurable system of many identical modules. Through simulations, the researchers demonstrated the feasibility of this kind of self-replication, which could in a decade or more lead to the mass manufacture of molecularly precise robots, display monitors and integrated circuits that can be programmed in the field, the study said.
The good news:
Self-replicating molecular machines have the potential to bring unimaginable benefits to humankind. Eventually we may use them for projects as diverse as cleaning up the environment, eliminating poverty and hunger, and curing every known disease. Plus, since NASA is involved, it's only fair to mention that they might be the key to exploring the universe.
However, none of these awesome possibilities is news to a reader of The Speculist. This article is significant because in the longtsanding debate about whether such technology will ever exist, the "yes" crowd has just scored a substantial victory.
The downside:
On the heels of this announcement, we should start a countdown as to when a major national publication will express "grave concern" and raise the grey goo scenario or other hysterical (albeit sometimes entertaining) nonsense.
But fortunately...
The study also examined machine designs that would meet guidelines established by the California-based nanotech think-tank Foresight Institute to ensure the safety of self-replication techniques. The preliminary study is believed to be among the first U.S.-sponsored studies on self-replication in two decades.
"While self-replication is not necessary for achieving the goal of molecular manufacturing, it's good to see that these NASA-funded system designs are in compliance with the Foresight Guidelines safety recommendations," said Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute.
Okay? Everybody got that?
Item 7
Winds of Discovery
The Winds of Change blog is beginning a monthly feature called Winds of Discovery that promises to take us "on a wild ride across the spectrum of science and discovery."
We intend to be regular readers.
Topics this week include: Sperm storage record broken; UK advances on embryonic stem cell research; Leroy Hood's latest venture; Search continues for Alzheimer's Disease cure; Nanotech turnaround?; The first nanochips; Metal rubber; Venus crosses the sun; Size of the universe; Birth of the sun; Space elevators; Lomborg thinks like Hitler?; Maunder minimum; Running out of oil?; Ban on trans-fats; Monsanto wins patent case; Dinosaurs fried within hours; Must we love cicadas?; Hippo sweat.
The amazing parallels:
"Hippo Sweat?" Hmm...seems we've heard about that somewhere before.
Anyway...
Congrats and best wishes to Glenn Halpern. Nothing could be more timely nor important than news on the amazing frontiers that science is opening up every day.
And on a selfish note, we're looking forward to finding lots of material to use here for Better All the Time!
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon. Brought to you by the Speculist, where futurists, visionaries, and transhumanists "keep it real."
June 01, 2004
Better All The Time #11
The end of a three-day weekend can be a little depressing (for some), so it always helps to remember that the difficult "Monday" you face after such a weekend is really Tuesday. The next weekend is closer than you think!
For more good news, just keep reading.
- Quote of the Day
- Stem Cell Breakthrough
- Wouldn't Miss It for Anything
- Getting a Better Look at the Brain
- It's Going to Be a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad-Cow-Free World
- Martian Wake-up Call
- No One Can Eat Just One
- The Love Patent
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Item 1
German Doctors Say They Create New Stem-Cell Method
German scientists said Friday they had developed a "pioneering" method of extracting stem cells from the human body that could render obsolete the controversial practice of harvesting the cells from embryos.
Researchers at the Frauenhofer Institute and the University of Luebeck succeeded in extracting cells from human and rat glandular tissue that have similar properties to embryonic stem cells, the institute said in a statement. Researchers said they took cells from a 74-year-old person and a rat that were extremely stable, and easily multiplied them and conserved them by freezing.
The good news:
This is fantastic news.
Stem cell research has shown incredible promise for treating injuries, aging, and a variety of degenerative conditions. The potential benefits would be difficult to overstate. In a few years, when we're all living much longer, healthier lives, stem cell reserach will probably have a lot to do with it.
The current controversy surrounding stem cell research derives from the fact that a human embryo is destroyed in in the process of creating a stem cell line. As we have argued extensivley on this sight (look here and here and here for a few examples) the optimum solution to this problem would be to find a way to create new embryonic stem cells from mature cells. If embryonic stem cells (or, more accurately, cells that act just like them) could be produced from mature cells, the ethical concerns would disappear.
Now it looks as if a group of researchers have done exactly that.
If they really have done it, the current restrictions will soon be irrelevent, and we can all look forward to reaping the benefits of stem cell reserach that much sooner.
One note of caution:
A lot hinges on the statement that these cells have "similar properties" to embryonic stem cells. We'll be watching very carefully to see just how similar they really are.
Item 2
Soldiers in Iraq See Texas Graduations
Victor Rogers' father was thousands of miles away in Iraq, but he was still able to see the 18-year-old graduate from high school Saturday. Several schools near Fort Hood worked with the Army post to broadcast this week's graduation ceremonies to soldiers in Iraq through the Internet and a live satellite hookup. Deployed parents also spoke with graduates in private video conferences.
The good news:
The death of distance continues. Serving one's country has always meant long separations from loved ones and often missing out on important milestones. But that's changing fast.
The downside:
A TV broadcast and videoconferencing are awkward subsititutes for being there for your kid's big day.
Anyway...
We'll see much more of this kind of thing in the future. After all, the technology is getting better all the time.
Item 3
Doctors Peer Into Brains to Gauge Antidepressants
Aspect Medical Systems Inc. has developed a system based on the EEG, which records the firing of brain cells, blood flow and other activity, to gauge the effectiveness of antidepressants.
"You can see changes in the brain 48 hours after the patient takes the drug," said Andrew Leuchter, vice chairman at UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Leuchter, who has an advisory role at Aspect, said the monitoring device could cut 80 percent off the time it normally takes to do human clinical trials.
The good news:
The current methods for testing antidepressant effectiveness are intrusive, take a long time, and pose a number of health risks for patients. Plus they aren't very relaible. This development is very good news for those who suffer from depression, as well as those who care about them.
Item 4
Mad Cow-Resistant Bovine Developed
Japanese and U.S. scientists have genetically engineered a bovine embryo that is resistant to the deadly mad cow disease and they plan to breed several of the cows to use them to make medicines to treat human diseases, an official said Monday.
The cows will not be bred to produce mad-cow-free meat. Instead, blood and milk extracted from them will be used in drugs to fight pneumonia, hepatitis C and rheumatic diseases such as arthritis, for the U.S. market by 2013, Nakano said.
The good news:
Mad cow disease is a formidable foe, but in the long run it it doesn't stand a chance against science.
The downside:
Unfortunately, these new mad-cow-resistant cows will not be a solution to the problem of tainted meat. As the linked article explains, meat from genetically engineered cattle is just too expensive a proposition to be practical.
At least for the present.
Anyway...
It's a step in the right direction. And while they're hard at work using the blood and milk of these cows to develop treatments for a variety of human diseases, maybe these scientists (or some of their colleagues) will look into developing a cure for mad cow disease. Just a thought.
Item 5
Mars Rover Survives 'Deep Sleep' Mode
NASA's Mars rover Opportunity endured a martian winter night despite being put into a new energy-saving but risky "deep sleep" mode, a mission flight director said Friday.
The good news:
By saving energy, NASA will be able to lengthen the Opportunity's lifespan. The longer we have it, the more it can teach us.
More Good News:
With all the trouble that NASA has had with its Mars missions over the years, it's pretty good news when routine procedures are carried out as planned. But when they manage to do something that they've come right out and called "risky," it's time to start popping corks.
Item 6
Healthy chip sales forecast
Global chip sales are likely to grow 28.4 percent to a record $213.6bn in 2004, boosted by strong demand for PCs, cellphones, DVD recorders and other electronics products, an industry group said on Tuesday.
The good news:
The forecast, if correct, is more than just good news for the folks who make and sell computer chips. Chip sales can serve as a pretty good economic barometer. Chips are like hot dog buns. If we read a report that shows that hot dog bun sales were at an all-time high over Memorial Day weekend, we can pretty much rest assured that it was also a good weekend for hot dogs and potato salad.
Likewise, if more chips are being sold, then more things that contain chips are being sold. So this is good news for the folks who make and sell PCs, cellphones, DVD recorders, and lots of other stuff — the fact that they're buying more chips indicates that they plan on selling more of the things they build.
Moreover:
This could be very good news for all of us, even those of us who don't benefit directly from the sale of chips or items that contain chips. After all, the forecast is predicated on the idea that we, the general public, will be buying more of these items in the near future. If the forecast is right, it means that we are not only going to have more money, we've also got some nifty new gadgets to look forward to.
Item 7
EHarmony.com Patents Matchmaking Formula
Chemistry? Forget it. Psychology and statistics best determine whether two people will have a happy marriage. At least so claims an online dating service that's patented its matchmaking formula.
EHarmony.com Inc. this month received U.S. Patent No. 6,735,568, which describes a "method and system for identifying people who are likely to have a successful relationship."
The good news:
Love is a wonderful thing, and one of our favorite topics. According to the testimonial page, Eharmony.com's patented process seems to be doing an excellent job bringing people together. That's great!
On the other hand:
If compatibility can be reduced to a few hundred answers on a questionnaire, it won't be that difficult — in the near future — to program an artificial person to be your perfect significant other. Don't laugh. Researchers are already trying to figure out how to make computers that care about people. And we observed a while back that some people are apparently a lot more willing to have dalliances with virtual lovers than they would with the real thing. How much more alluring will be a piece of software with which one is likely to have a "successful relationship?"
What have these Eharmony.com people done? Here's hoping they guard their secret love formula very carefully.
Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon. Don't forget to stop and smell the roses...especially the blue ones.
May 27, 2004
Better All The Time #10
If the thought of a three-day weekend, the official beginning of barbeque season, and (for those to whom it applies) the end of the school year aren't enough good news for you, perhaps it's time to reflect on the men and women who have served so bravely over the years to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity." We owe them a lot. In fact, we owe them everything.
And then if you want still MORE good news, may we suggest the following seven items...
- Update: the Debate Continues
- Ever See a Sunburned Hippo?
- Awwww, Isn't it Cute?
- Genetic study Shows Chimps are Less Human
- Mars Rover Output Starts to Dim
- Smart Batteries
- The Birth of Individualized Medicine
- A Modern Rip Van Winkle (Kinda)
Quote of the Day
Update
More Fun with Mr. Farlops
The debate over the "Better all the Time" series between Mr. Farlops and us continues, but with much agreement:
Yes, I guess I really meant that subjective happiness is always chronic. Objectively global health continues to improve and the global middle class continues to grow and clearly by those standards it really is getting better all the time.
And one way of improving subjective happiness is to celebrate objective improvements. That's what the "Better all the Time" series is all about.
But at the same time we must admit that every technical advance delivers unexpected consequences both good and bad. In the early twentieth century, who would have thought that cars would contribute to the atrophy of back muscles from lack of walking? Or to changing sexual and romantic mores as kids got privacy away from parents?
Hey, you're not knocking "parking" are you? Some of us wouldn't be here if… er, we may have said too much.
While the global middle class continues to grow and its health continues to improve, population pressure and resource use continues to rise. Nanotech will relieve that quite a bit, along with declining birth rates but, it's something to worry about.
Over-population is less of a problem than exploitative government. Have you ever noticed that the famines never seem to occur in democratic/capitalistic countries? Where there is freedom to innovate, population is not a liability, but an asset.
I guess what I am trying to say is that it's not going to be all roses and it's not going to be all horrors. It's going to be both and neither. The main thing is that it's going to be surprising.
We agree, except that we'll wager that our biggest surprise will be how good we'll have it in about twenty years.
Once one problem is solved, we humans always find something else to grouse about. I guess I am saying that the quest for utopia is a never-ending process. The journey itself is better than the goal. Also the challenge of avoiding dystopia is also a never-ending one; new dangers arise all the time.
Yeah, that's the only bad thing about Utopia. It would be too boring for us humans. We are happiest when we are busy solving some problem or fixing something. The unexpected new challenges created by our improvements mean that perhaps we shouldn't worry about utopian ennui setting in any time soon.
It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
(from BrainyQuote)
Item 1
For the Ultimate Sunscreen, Try Hippo Sweat!
The colourful secrets of hippopotamus sweat have been uncovered. Researchers have identified the chemicals responsible for the timeless myth that hippopotamus sweat blood...
Kimiko Hashimoto and his colleagues at Kyoto Pharmaceutical University, Japan, revealed that hippos' secretions are neither blood nor sweat, but a mixture of pigments that function both as sunscreen and antibiotic. This mixture keeps hippos' cool and protects them from the harmful effects of the sun.
The good news:
This could mean that you will never have to come face-to-face with a hot, sunburned, infectious hippo!
The downside:
Hippos aren't likely to surpass plastic bottles as the preferred sunscreen container. Hold it. Come to think of it, that isn't really a downside.
Item 2
NASA Scientists Discover Baby Planet
NASA scientists have discovered what may be one of the youngest planets known to man.
The infrared Spitzer Space Telescope identified the planet which is thought to be a million years old, meaning it is a mere baby.
The object is in the constellation Taurus, 420 light-years away.
Until now the youngest known planets observed are several billion years old...
Spitzer is the fourth and final spacecraft in NASA’s Great Observatory series, which began with Hubble and continued with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, now gone, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The good news:
Witnessing the birth of new planets will increase our understanding of how our own solar system was formed.
The downside:
Too bad we can't see it up close.
Item 3
Genetic study shows chimps are less human
Genetically, chimpanzees are 98.5 percent identical to humans. But the differences between the species are clearly profound and geneticists have been laboring to find out how such subtle variations in DNA can be so crucial…
The team of scientists from China, Japan, Germany and the Republic of Korea (ROK) compared chromosome 22 on three different chimpanzees to its counterpart in humans, chromosome 21, where certain genetic problems can lead to severe diseases, including Down's syndrome.
Insiders say the comparison will help understand disease and also help in comparing one person's genetic sequence to another by helping to set a "base" genetic sequence…
The scientists looked for differences that would help separate the human sequence from the chimp sequence, and found 1.44 percent of the DNA was different…
They reported in Nature that many of the differences were within genes, the regions of DNA that code for proteins: 83 percent of the 231 genes compared had differences that affected the amino acid sequence of the protein they encoded, and 47 showed "significant structural changes"…
Some of the genetic differences they found may have direct implications for disease. They found differences between chimp and human immune system genes, for instance, and molecules involved in early brain development.
Besides, significant genetic differences in the brains and livers of the two species, for example, may help explain why chimps rarely have symptoms of complicated human diseases, such as AIDS, malaria and hepatitis C, even after they are infected with the same viruses.
The good news:
Understanding the genetic differences between us might well be the key to making us less susceptible to those nasty diseases listed that we get but chimps don't. To Bonzo, Cheetah, J. Fred Muggs, and anyone we may be forgetting: a hearty thank you.
Moreover:
Does it strike anyone else as kind of a relief to learn that we're not all that closely related to chimps, after all?
Item 4
Mars Rover Output Starts to Dim
The slow and inevitable build-up of dust on the solar panels of the Mars rover Opportunity is prompting scientists to cut overnight heating to the vehicle in hopes of eking out a few more hours for investigations by day.
The cold, however, could mean the death of one of the rover's most productive science instruments, an infrared sensor called mini-TES that scientists have been using to detect minerals from afar and measure surface and atmospheric temperatures.
The good news:
Not running the heater at night is apparently risky only to the one instrument, the mini-TES. Even if this is the end of the useful life of that instrument, the rover can still do useful work as long as its solar panel provides enough electricity to function.
Opportunity has now been on Mars 124 days. It was