Make Your Own X-Rays!

Yes, all you need is some regular Scotch tape and a vacuum chamber!

Wildlife Battle

You may have seen this, but if you haven't it's worth the time. It's a video shot by some tourists on a safari. It starts with some lions stalking some buffalo, and then they attack and catch a baby buffalo. But that's where things get interesting. Let's just say that by the time the video is over another predator makes an appearance, a lion flies through the air like a house cat, and we see some surprising herd behavior.

The Metric Revolution

It seems that on this day in 1790, the French proletariat which had just taken over the country in the ongoing French Revolution decided to create what became the metric system. One thing I didn't know but that my nerdly mind finds very cool:

The system was elegant. All conversions were based on 10, with Greek prefixes (deka-, hecto-, kilo-) for multiples and Latin (deci-, centi-, milli-) for fractions.

I never realized that the multiple and fractional prefixes were from different languages. I guess kilo is Greek for 1000 and milli is the Latin word for the same number, and thus the etymology of the words explains the difference between kilometer and millimeter.

Among the changes that were made that didn't catch on: the 10-day week and the 10-hour day.

Be sure to check out the (short but great) article.

Medical Arrogance and Butterfly Collecting

Wired is a technology magazine, and this essay takes an interesting perspective on the need for the medical profession to use technology to enhance our knowledge of human wellness as opposed to human illness.

If you had died 50 years ago, your body would have stood a pretty good chance of serving science. In the 1960s, autopsy rates at US hospitals exceeded 50 percent. Pathologists weren't necessarily looking for what killed people — they were taking advantage of the fact that a body was available and ready for inspection. There was still much to learn about normal human biology, the thinking went, so every corpse was an educational opportunity.

It turns out that autopsies are now comparatively rare now as modern medicine is much more confident about its current body of knowledge. However, it seems that in medicine (as other fields such as in spying) our capacity to gather information has exceeded our capacity to understand it.

In heart disease, for example, CT screening tests can spot abnormalities in arterial plaque — but no research exists on whether that information is actually predictive of heart disease or stroke. "We need to know normal variation," says Pat Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine. "It's really underappreciated as a part of science." In too many areas, Brown argues, we're too quick to jump at any blip without understanding whether it's a true red alert or just normal background noise.

I believe that alternative medicine has something to offer in instances where conventional medicine doesn't have answers because conventional medicine tends to discount things in areas that are considered well-understood. Instead of ignoring apparent red herrings, the medical community should focus more on better understanding of normalcy (and thus a better understanding of abnormalcy).

It seems like it would be easy just to step back and survey the broad picture. But research costs money, and studying what's normal is generally considered trivial, dismissed as mere butterfly collecting. At the National Institutes for Health, for instance, all grants are given a "priority score," an indication of a project's novelty, originality, and "scientific merit." Normal need not apply.

Very interesting stuff.

Electric Car, by Teenager

My last post was about the bazillion-dollar efforts of a multinational corporation to build a new kind of hydrogen-electric car; this one is about a sixteen-year-old who built a plug-in electric pickup using 20 regular car batteries, an '88 Mazda, and $6K from his part-time job.

Taken together, I think that this is just another thing that's great about America. You've got a backyard do-gooder kid contributing to this effort (to create cleaner cars) because he believes it's the right thing to do, and a giant company doing the same thing--not because some government bureaucrat came up with an appropriate incentive to induce them to do so, but because it will be good for their bottom line. That's the kind of green innovation I like to see.

(thanks for the link goes to Carlos, the Official Brother-in-Law of the Brink)

GM's Hydrogen Car

Today's automaker produces tons of models, and each model may be available with several combinations of transmissions and engines; plus there are countless electrical, mechanical, and computer systems, each with thousands of parts; making each different model means combining tens of thousands of components together; each model then has to be tested, etc. This is all very difficult and expensive.

GM is trying to revolutionize the auto industry with their hydrogen projects, and I've been keeping my eye on them for several years now because the whole concept is so cool. The idea is this: instead of the situation above, you can produce a single chassis that looks like a giant foot-thick skateboard and contains the motors (small electric motors near the wheels), the fuel storage (it runs on hydrogen), and the fuel cell (to convert the hydrogen to electricity). The steering will be electronic so there's no need for a steering column connecting to the wheels, so pretty much all of the working parts are in the chassis--to choose between a sedan, a pickup or a minivan you simply bolt the body you want on top. Since it's electric there's no transmission, so there are extremely few moving parts (which means very few possible things to break down). Theoretically, the cost and time required to develop new models could be a fraction of what it is currently; cars might eventually begin to last much, much longer as airplanes do (small planes routinely last for decades--they have very few moving parts outside of the engine).

Of course, there have been huge obstacles to overcome, some major ones being the safe storage of notoriously unstable hydrogen (remember the Hindenberg?), the efficient operation of the fuel cell (especially in cold weather), and fueling issues (consumers expect to be able to fuel quickly and to be able to carry enough to drive 300 miles on a fill-up).

Anyway, it seems that things are getting fairly close to production now, as apparently GM is still planning to have production models on the road by 2010. Below is a video of a British show driving GM's second-generation hydrogen vehicle the Hy-Wire.



And here's a link to photos and info on the third-gen vehicle, the Sequel, which is pretty obviously less futuristic and more acceptable to today's consumers than the Hy-Wire, which incorporated more futuristic ideas like controlling the acceleration and braking on the steering wheel instead of via pedals.

If you'd like to geek out about this stuff like some people, check out these links: Here's a blow-by-blow of the engineering and politics behind the beginning of GM's hydrogen projects between 2000 and 2003; here's a 2004 road test review of the Hy-Wire; and finally here is a science/engineering-heavy look at the Hy-Wire from HowStuffWorks.

Other auto companies, notably Honda and Toyota, seem to be advancing rapidly with similar technology, but info on them seems much harder to come by. I don't know if they're behind or if they are way ahead and are just waiting to spring their cool new stuff all at once. Honda's new FCX, which is supposed to enter limited circulation this summer (to the rich and famous?), seems to focus more on the hydrogen but still uses a more conventional setup with a large single motor and a transmission; still cool, but not the quantum leap in manufacturing simplicity and flexibility that GM's initiative promises.

Sleep in a Bottle

As I attempt to return from some months of overwork and undersleep, this article is of particular interest. It seems that DARPA (the Department of Defense's Research and Development arm) might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness. The military has long been interested in technology to help keep humans awake, for obvious reasons--they gave pilots amphetamines as early as WWII.

This new stuff, still in early testing, is a nasal spray and seems to pretty well mimic natural sleep. Of course science doesn't seem to understand sleep very well at all, so who knows how this will turn out. These kind of things never seem to work quite as well as you'd think, and I speak as someone who has ingested way more caffeine than is really healthy of late.

End of the Mouse?

Jeff Han was a New York University computer scientist minding his own business when inspiration suddenly struck. Looking at a water glass one day, he was intrigued by the way his fingers interacted with the glass and he hit on an idea to take touchscreen technology to a new level.

Word of his multi-touch interface reached last year's TED conference curator, Chris Anderson, who invited him to give a brief demo, sandwiched between other lengthier talks. Han was the surprise hit of the show and became a geek rock star overnight. Since then he's had a crazy year developing a company, Perceptive Pixel, with Phil Davidson, and has sold some of their first products to the CIA. He's back at TED this week by popular demand. -- from Wired.com -- click above for the full story

Longevity and the Bible

An interesting article here positing the theory that, as God decreed the maximum age of humanity to be 120 years in the book of Genesis, the ages given in subsequent genealogies drop significantly (but not immediately) due to a supernatural adjustment to their DNA which is still measurable today.

Notable for, if nothing else, the ages compiled from the Bible showing spectacular lifespans (900+ years) of early humans dropping significantly toward more familiar lengths.

click on the title above for the full article...

What Science Doesn't Know

Wired Magazine's current issue (February 07) has a very interesting cover story about the limits of current scientific knowledge. As I read it I realized that the gaps in our scientific knowledge receive very little press, while scientific achievements are shouted from the mountaintops. While this is certainly understandable, it's good to realize the very real limits of what we know.

click the headline for the full story...

Secular Humanism: Defined

Secular Humanism is the dominant western viewpoint of our day--but what is it, exactly? This question is answered in detail, with quotes from humanists and a bibliography, by the attached article.

click the title above for the article...

Dolly The Cloned Sheep Died Young

Am I the only one who missed this? Dolly, the famous sheep product of cloning, died young of a disease that usually afflicts older animals and was found to have aged prematurely... Hmm. Maybe cloning is still a bit more complicated than we thought.

click on title for the full story...

Cat Nurses Puppy; Nature v. Nurture Debate Erupts

A 6-day-old Rottweiler puppy rejected by its mother and taken in by the Humane Society has been adopted by a family of cats. Treated as a brother by the kittens and a kitten by their mother, we here at The Brink hope that little Charlie will become a powerful advocate for his adopted species and known across the planet as the world's largest house cat. Alternatively, he will grow up to be a dog.

click headline for the full story...

Paradigm: The Story of the Creationist/Evolutionist

A very interesting story here, and with some personal relevance: Dr. Michael Dini, who made national news for refusing to write letters of recommendation for graduate study for creationist students, is referenced in this story and has come up in discussions with friends recently.

KINGSTON, Rhode Island : There is nothing much unusual about the 197-page dissertation Marcus R. Ross submitted in December to complete his doctoral degree in geosciences here at the University of Rhode Island.

His subject was the abundance and spread of mosasaurs, marine reptiles that, as he wrote, vanished at the end of the Cretaceous era about 65 million years ago. The work is "impeccable," said David E. Fastovsky, a paleontologist and professor of geosciences at the university who was Ross's dissertation adviser. "He was working within a strictly scientific framework, a conventional scientific framework."

But Ross is hardly a conventional paleontologist. He is a "young earth creationist" — he believes that the Bible is a literally true account of the creation of the universe, and that the earth is at most 10,000 years old.

For him, Ross said, the methods and theories of paleontology are one "paradigm" for studying the past, and Scripture is another. In the paleontological paradigm, he said, the dates in his dissertation are entirely appropriate. The fact that as a young earth creationist he has a different view just means, he said, "that I am separating the different paradigms."

For the rest of this story click on the headline above...

Underwater Logging

It turns out logging has sunk to a new low, literally speaking: harvesting underwater trees. Turns out that there is billions of dollars of lumber preserved under lakes made by dams, and one company has designed an underwater remote-controlled logging robot to go get them. As an added bonus, there is no forest wildlife or neighbors to disturb, and since the trees are dead anyway it's a home-run with conservation activists. The wood can be sold for a premium as "green", environment friendly, and it turns out it's actually cheaper to harvest this way. Gotta love free enterprise. (Click the headline above for the full story.)