World of Only Women . . . . No Stinkin' Men

Female mice can be turned "lesbian" by deleting a single gene at embryo stage, scientists have discovered. The simple procedure causes the modified mice to reject the advances of their male counterparts and attempt to mate with fellow females.
Researchers found that disabling the FucM gene – which influences the levels of oestrogen to which the brain is exposed – caused the mice to behave as if they were male as they grew up.__Telegraph

A world of women, without any men, has been a dream of feminists, lesbians, and science fiction writers for over a century. Science is learning how to create such a world, genetically and by other means. Korean research on mice opens the door to one interesting approach to a world ruled by women:

Professor Chankyu Park of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejon, South Korea, who led the research, said: "The mutant female mouse underwent a slightly altered developmental programme in the brain to resemble the male brain in terms of sexual preference."
Scientists have long sought a genetic link to homosexuality.. _Telegraph_via_BrianWang

A world of lesbian women would still need to reproduce -- which opens up more challenges. Will the world of women keep clutches of male breeders in corrals, roused at dusk and dawn each day for machine milking into the artificial insemination tanks? Or will a sexless form of reproduction be developed, eliminating the need for men altogether?

And what form would a world of only women take? What would be taught in the universities? What type of buildings would be raised? How would only women travel from place to place? How would they communicate across vast distances?

We live in a world of technologies based largely upon the work of uber-geeks of the male persuasion. Our jetliners, our skyscrapers, our communications satellites and supercomputers, our farming machinery, our railways and shipyards -- all designed, built, and operated mainly by men. What sort of world will the only-women build?

More later.

Update on Efforts to Stop the Oil Spill in the Gulf

1. New cap over the blowout preventer (BOP) to allow more efficient oil recovery:

BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) told the U.S. Coast Guard late Friday that it would start work on a new containment Saturday instead of waiting until it has hooked up a third vessel to handle oil recovered from its leaking deepwater well in the Gulf of Mexico.

In a letter to Ret. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, BP projected it could finish the new-cap operation in five days if is doesn't encounter any unexpected hurdles. Its contingency plan puts the finish time nine days from now.

The accelerated plan is designed to take advantage of an eight-day window of favorable weather. _WSJ

While the new cap could capture more oil, it would require taking off the old cap, which would release more oil into the sea until the new cap was placed over the BOP.

Even with a new cap, some oil would still be escaping, Allen explained, since the seal cannot be 100% effective.

Additionally, a partial leak is desirable, he said, because oil coming out means seawater is not intruding into the pipe, which if it did would lead to icy hydrate formation and the eventual plugging of the pipe. _Upstream

Update 10July: Work has begun on replacing the LMRP cap with a new cap capable of capturing a larger volume of oil and gas.

2. New recovery vessel Helix Producer to be added next week to bring oil recovery above 50,000 barrels per day. The Helix Producer had been delayed by bad weather, but should be moved into play fairly soon.

BP also said the third oil-collecting vessel, known as the Helix Producer, could start up by Sunday. It should roughly double the site's capacity to capture oil to about 53,000 barrels a day. _WSJ

3. Floating riser system to be installed next week, following installation of the new LMRP cap.

The system, which would have floating riser systems leading to four vessels at the surface would have more processing capacity (up to 80,000 barrels per day) and would be more resilient in bad weather.

The first floating riser containment system, which will be attached to the Helix Producer, is now expected to be ready towards the end of the week, said BP.

Hooking up the new system requires BP to replace the current containment cap with one that would be firmly attached to the well, which could potentially catch all of the oil. _Upstream

4. Relief wells for ultimate securing of the Macondo well:

Allen also said the first of two relief wells intended to intercept and plug the leak should bore into the stricken wellbore in seven to 10 days.

But he said the plugging process could be lengthy, so the target date remains early to mid August rather than this month.

BP managing director Bob Dudley told the Wall Street Journal, "In a perfect world with no interruptions, it's possible to be ready to stop the well between 20 July and 27 July." _Upstream

What will have to happen is when the relief well is adjacent to the well bore and close enough to be able to turn to make the penetration, then we'll first penetrate the area outside the well pipe.

And we will see if there is oil there or not. At that point mud will be pumped into the wellbore to see if that contains the well. If that does not, the mud and a (inaudible) plug will be inserted and then we will drill again into the inner pipe.

That will be the second attempt to plug the well if oil is coming up through the pipe with mud and cement. These two procedures will take us into August. There're things that could happen that could shorten that but right now into August is what the official estimate is. _TOD

"Heading Out", a professor of mining who writes at The Oil Drum, exressed frustration with President Obama's "brains trust", which apparently has been sitting on some of the plans -- unable to decide whether to give the go-ahead.

The bottleneck here is the “brains trust” that Secretaries Chu and Salazar have assembled, and who will vet the idea. Here is my gripe. They have known about the design and the plans for weeks now. They have a short window of opportunity before the next storm rolls in and stops the effort, and they are only now getting the paperwork that they have to approve. It does not seem unreasonable to ask why this wasn’t done over a week ago, so that approval was in hand the moment that the weather allowed the procedure to begin. If the weather closes in again before the approval is given and the process completed, whose fault is this?

If the new cap is on, then when mud flows up the well it will go through the BOP and the sealed cap and up to the surface so that there is an additional pressure on the bottom of the well. If it is not, then the mud column weight above the BOP is lost. But the Federal Government is in charge, and processes and procedures must be followed, as they are repeatedly now informing folk. Sigh! So if the opportunity is lost, why that is just the way things go! _TOD

This points up the different mentality between bureaucrats such as Salazar, academics like the "brains trust", and people in the real world who have to get things done within certain windows of opportunity.

BP has to do everything according to government bureaucratic regulations -- or be subject to ruinous fines and penalties on top of what it is already paying. But government regulations are not always compatible with getting the job done, in the real world.

If the federal government cannot break through its own bureaucratic red tape in a situation such as this, then that government has become so sclerotic that it is living on borrowed time.

Meanwhile, how long can the sycophantic media continue to cover for the incompetence of this congress and this administration?

How to Artificially Create More Girl Geniuses than Boys

American.com
The chart above is based on extensive research of a type that is no longer allowed by the PC Thought Police. It reveals that males make up the majority of both geniuses and imbeciles.  The higher on the IQ chart you go, the more male geniuses there are, compared to female geniuses.  This is important, since most of the transformative sciences and technologies which distinguish the advanced world from the more primitive third world, are based upon work by males (and a few females) at the higher end of the IQ curve.

From Christina Hoff Sommers at American.com :

...on standardized intelligence tests, more males than females get off-the-chart test scores—in both directions. The greater variance of males on intelligence tests is one of the best-established findings in psychometric literature. More males are mentally deficient, and more are freakishly brilliant. The difference in variation isn't huge, but it is large enough and consistent enough that a fair selection process should produce more boys than girls in a gifted and talented program.

The Bloomberg administration imposed a uniform and transparent admission process so that all applicants (about 15,000 four- and five-year-olds) now take the same two standardized tests. Only children who score in the 90th percentile or above can enter the programs. This approach leaves little room for parental lobbying.

The reformers believed this open and consistent procedure would yield a more ethnically diverse group of students. So far it has not. It has yielded more girls than boys. As the Times reports (and disgruntled mothers of boys say on websites like UrbanBaby ), the test is “more verbal than other tests” and it plays to girls’ strengths. Boys are especially disadvantaged by the necessity to sit quietly for one hour and focus exclusively on the test. Pre-kindergarten boys with mental abilities three or four standard deviations above the mean have astonishing talents. But as Terry Neu, an expert on gifted boys, told me, sitting still for an extended period of time is not one of them. The capacity to remain seated for a long test does not reliably measure brilliance, but requiring pre-K children to do it is a sure way of securing more places for girls than boys in a gifted program.

The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not signal that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it exemplifies how well-intentioned government officials and educators can disregard boys’ needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies detrimental to boys’ well-being. It is a small part of the long story of how American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools.

There you have it. To artificially create more girl geniuses than boys, start with a pre-pubertal population. Then slant the cognitive tests to favour the strengths of the girls -- more verval skills, better able to sit still for testing, etc. Before you know it, you have a population of gifted students on the fast track to success -- with a lot more girls included than boys.

MJPerrySuch a strategy spread across the curriculum has been successful in bringing the proportion of female college graduates in the US close to 60% for Bachelor's and Master's degrees -- over 60% for Associate's degrees.

Just make school as unpleasant as possible for males, until many of them -- and some of the smartest -- give up in disgust. You waste a lot of male talent that way, but you can get an awful lot of females through college and into the work force. A radical feminist's dream of gender payback.

Society pays a huge price for the politically and sociologically designed destruction of human capital. But the policies which assure the continuation of this destruction are well entrenched, and not likely to be changed before the US government itself collapses. Of course, at the rate Obama Pelosi is going, that may not take much longer.

Redeeming Older Brains: Possible New Alzheimer's Wonderdrugs

New nerve cells are constantly born in the hippocampus, but even in the normal adult brain, most of these newborn neurons die before they become functional.

And they fare much worse in the hippocampus of Alzheimer's patients.

Physical activity, an active social life and other intellectually and emotionally enriching experiences promote the birth and maturation of new neurons.

The scientists wanted to find compounds that can protect newborn neurons from dying.

P7C3 was selected from among about 1,000 compounds tested on mice.

The compound was found to help the survival of neurons in adult mice, which were genetically engineered to lack a gene that is crucial for the survival of newborn nerve cells. _IndiaToday

ScienceDaily
University of Texas Southwestern have reported in Cell the discovery of a molecule -- P7C3 -- that has the ability to protect brain cells, and trigger the production of new neurons. The scientists believe that new compounds in the same class as P7C3 may hold the key to slowing or temporarily reversing the progress of Alzheimer's Disease and other neurodegenerative conditions.

In a new study published today in the journal Cell, researchers screened 1000 molecules in mice to see which ones enhanced production of new neurons in a brain area involved in learning and memory. This region, known as the hippocampus, is one of two spots known to birth new neurons in the adult mammalian brain. It takes 2 to 4 weeks for the cells to migrate to the appropriate location and integrate into the existing neural circuitry, and many of them die along the way.

The researchers found that one compound, dubbed P7C3, protected these newborn neurons from dying. When given to mice genetically engineered to have very little new nerve cell growth, the compound seemed to repair the abnormal hippocampus. It could also increase birth and survival of new neurons in older rats, according to a press release from UT Southwestern Medical Center. The animals also had improved memory: they could better remember the location of a platform submerged in water, a standard test of learning and memory in rodents.

...

According to a release from the journal Cell, where the paper was published;

Two other drugs (Dimebon and Serono compounds) - both of which bear structural similarities to P7C3 -also encourage the growth of new neurons. It's tempting to think that all three compounds work in the same way.

In fact, Dimebon first came to the attention of researchers based on anecdotal reports by Russian physicians that the drug may ameliorate the symptoms of age-related cognitive decline. Unfortunately, unpublished reports from a phase 3 clinical trial have since failed to provide evidence that the drug could stave off the memory loss that comes with Alzheimer's disease.

In light of the new findings, it may be worth another look. "The speculative idea that these chemicals share a common mode of action will only be rigorously tested upon identification of their molecular target(s)."

 _TechnologyReview

Pieper, McKnight and colleagues tested more than 1000 small molecules in living mice. One of the compounds, designated P7C3, corrected deficits in the brains of adult mice engineered to lack a gene required for the survival of newborn neurons in the hippocampus. Giving P7C3 to the mice reduced programmed death of newborn cells -- normalizing stunted growth of branch-like neuronal extensions and thickening an abnormally thin layer of cells by 40 percent. Among clues to the mechanism by which P7C3 works, the researchers discovered that it protects the integrity of machinery for maintaining a cell's energy level.
To find out if P7C3 could similarly stem aging-associated neuronal death and cognitive decline, the researchers gave the compound to aged rats. Rodents treated with P7C3 for two months significantly outperformed their placebo-treated peers on a water maze task, a standard assay of hippocampus-dependent learning. This was traced to a threefold higher-than-normal level of newborn neurons in the dentate gyrus of the treated animals. Rats were used instead of mice for this phase of the study because the genetically engineered mice could not swim.
Prolonged treatment of aged rats with P7C3 also enhanced the birth of new neurons. "Aged rats normally show a decline in neurogenesis associated with an inability to form new memories and learn tasks," Pieper explained.

In their study, rats treated with P7C3 each day showed evidence of an increase in the formation of newborn neurons and significant improvements in their ability to swim to the location of a missing platform, a standardized test of learning and memory in rats.

The researchers pinpointed a derivative of P7C3, called A20, which is even more protective than the parent compound. They also produced evidence suggesting that two other neuroprotective compounds eyed as possible Alzheimer's cures may work through the same mechanism as P7C3. The A20 derivative proved 300 times more potent than one of these compounds currently in clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease. This suggested that even more potent neuroprotective agents could potentially be discovered using the same methods. Following up on these leads, the researchers are now searching for the molecular target of P7C3 -- key to discovering the underlying neuroprotective mechanism. _ScienceDaily

The study was two-tiered: First the scientists screened over a thousand small molecules in knockout mice, to find the one that provided the best protection for new hippocampal neurons. Then they tested the compound in senescent rats, looking for both behavioural improvements and better survival of new hippocampal neurons. They were successful on all counts.

H/T Brian Wang of NextBigFuture

Easy Answer: Maybe They're Just Lazy-Assed Fockers

Average study time for university students has dropped from 24 hours a week down to 14 hours a week since 1961, according to researchers at California's UCSB and UCR. The question appears to be: "why are the little dears no longer studying like they once did?"

Well, of course, the little dears who once studied are not the same little dears who no longer study, of course. And the reasons why the little dears are not studying may be different for different schools and sets of students. Certainly if one's focus of study is "Ethnic and Queer Studies", or "Enlightenment Basket Weaving Studies", the need for study outside of class is less pressing than if one were to study in a relevant area -- such as math, physics, engineering, science, medicine, accounting, computer science, etc.

The foundation for learning has to be laid before the child arrives at university. If the parent expects the university to take a poorly raised, poorly prepared child and turn it into a rational, successful adult -- they are sailing down a river in Egypt.

According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

The decline, Babcock and Marks found, infects students of all demographics. No matter the student’s major, gender, or race, no matter the size of the school or the quality of the

SAT scores of the people enrolled there, the results are the same: Students of all ability levels are studying less.

“It’s not just limited to bad schools,” Babcock said. “We’re seeing it at liberal arts colleges, doctoral research colleges, masters colleges. Every different type, every different size. It’s just across the spectrum. It’s very robust. This is just a huge change in every category.”

The research, accepted to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, has already sparked discussions in faculty lounges and classrooms across the country. Some question whether college students ever could have studied 24 hours a week — roughly three and a half hours a night. But even if you dispute the historical decline, there is still plenty of reason for concern over the state of 21st-century study practices. In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.

But when it comes to “why,” the answers are less clear. The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them. _BostonGlobe

Al Fin edumacologists suspect that professors are demanding much less of students these days. Combine grade inflation, social promotion, and the greater ease of "faking it" with internet resources, and getting good grades may not require as much sweat as was once the case. Particularly if all the professor cares about is whether you can unthinkingly reflect back to her what she wants to see and hear. Here's more on the question:

Advent of Pass-Fail Classes, Fewer Language Requirements Mother Jones commenter hollywood writes, "Many colleges dropped foreign language requirements for degrees (languages require a lot of study time); schools adopted pass-fail courses with the natural response 'why knock myself out?' There was significant grade inflation--more people got better grades with less effort. Perhaps this lack of study by students reduced the motivation of profs to kill themselves prepping lectures and grading exams when there were journal articles to crank out."

Studying Methods Became More Efficient G. Powell theorizes, "While the amount of time that I spent on course work outside the classroom decreased, the quality of that time increased.... The Internet is also a huge productivity gain when it comes to tracking down information. What once took me hours in basement stacks to track down now often only takes seconds."

Rise in Publishing Requirements Means Professors Assign Less Work An anonymous college professor explains, "This time period does correspond with the increase in publishing expectations in Academia. I haven't been teaching long enough to see the trend, but I definitely weight the length of a problem set assignment against my research time in a way I don't think prior generations of professors did."

More Working Part-Time as Scholarships Decline Mother Jones commenter dob suggests, "I'm willing to bet that students working jobs while going to college accounts for at least a substantial fraction of that time. That characterized both me and at least half of my college friends in the 90's. Scholarships and student loans aren't what they used to be."

Students Less Comfortable With Long-Form Reading Mother Jones commenter sjw muses, "More and more students are uncomfortable with reading. They read less. They don't enjoy reading. Most of the homework that a professor assigns is reading or involves reading -- it's not just busy work, as a commenter above alleges -- so the 'collective mass' can't handle what professors would like to assign. Whether tv or the internet are to blame is not an argument that need be broached here; clearly, however, the time that a student would put into studying is now going elsewhere." _Atlantic

In reality, besides being intolerant indoctrinators, more professors are lazy shites, and their students learn sloppy habits of thinking and working from professors, to add to the sloppy habits they learned in high school.

College has become a place to go to binge drink, fornicate, and get a world-class indoctrination. It is becoming old-fashioned to think of university as a place to learn and to hone one's thinking and learning skills, developing the talents that allow one to make one's way in the world.

Today's child feels entitled to deferential treatment and top pay on the basis of not very much at all. But this feeling of entitlement has been growing for generations -- this sense that one can demand to be well taken care of by virtue of having a heartbeat, and certain scribbles on pieces of paper. The Obama Pelosi economy may disillusion some recent graduates of these delusions, and certainly as society demands more of a rapidly diminishing talent pool, certain individuals here and there will begin to catch on. But by then it will likely be too late.

Will this growing Idiocracy become an apocalypse? No. It will lead into an extended down period, during which a lot of violence and hardship will occur on a widespread basis. But the troubles will not obliterate all the progress that has been made, and that will continue being made beneath the veneer of problems.

It can be quite challenging, imagining the way through the obstacles. But the way is there, despite all the hard work being done in the Obama Pelosi regime to make sure that their hard-fought institutional changes have been made irrevocable. The decline is not irrevocable, however.

More on this later.

Perhaps This Time, The World Really Will Come to an End?

Best-selling author Matt Ridley grew up in the 1970s, when the world was coming to an end. The world is always coming to an end, if you listen to the right messengers. But Ridley survived the many crises of his youth: " They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future." _Source

Now Ridley is taking on the enviro-industrial complex of doom in order to tell you something: Things could be getting better. There will be ups and downs, due to incompetent leadership for example. But as long as bad leadership does not cause the total collapse of global civilisation, the things that are being learned and put into practise in research centers around the world, will stand us in good stead.

I began to pay attention and a few years ago I started to research a book on the subject. I was astounded by what I discovered. Global per capita income, corrected for inflation, had trebled in my lifetime, life expectancy had increased by one third, child mortality had fallen by two-thirds, the population growth rate had halved. More people had got out of poverty than in all of human history before. When I was born, 36% of Americans had air conditioning. Today 79% of Americans below the poverty line had air conditioning. The emissions of pollutants from a car were down by 98%. The time you had to work on the average wage to buy an hour of artificial light to read by was down from 8 seconds to half a second.

...Yet if anything the pessimists had only grown more certain, shrill and apocalyptic. We were facing the `end of nature', the `coming anarchy', a `stolen future', our `final century' and a climate catastrophe. Why, I began to wonder did the failure of previous predictions have so little impact on this litany?

I soon found out. Like others who have tried to draw attention to improving living standards - notably Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg - I am beginning to be subjected to a sustained campaign of vilification by the pessimists. They distort my argument, impugn my motives and attack me for saying things I never said. They say I think the world is perfect when I could not be clearer that I advocate progress precisely because we should be ambitious to put right so much that is still wrong. They say that I am a conservative, when it is the reactionary mistrust of change that I am attacking. They say that I am defending the rich, when it is the enrichment of the poor that I argue for. They say that I am complacent, when the opposite is true. I knew this would happen, and I take it as a back-handed compliment, but the ferocity is still startling. They are desperate to shut down the debate rather than have it.

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

Ah, that phrase again. I call it turning-point-itis. It's rarely far from the lips of the prophets of doom. They are convinced that they stand on the hinge of history, the inflexion point where the roller coaster starts to go downhill. But then I began looking back to see what pessimists said in the past and found the phrase, or an equivalent, being used by in every generation. _Source

Catastrophes happen. But earth-ending doom is another matter. America should outlive the incompetence of its current government, the corruption and criminality of the Chicago Way, the Philadelphia Way, the Detroit Way, the Albany Way, the Sacramento Way, and so on. The Gulf of Mexico will get past this oil spill, or this hurricane, and move on until the next one comes along. Economies have crashed and recovered, over and over again, for multiples of millenia.

There are disasters of course. Trends of "debt and demography" assure the citizens of Europe and the Anglosphere that they will be forced to change their ways, sooner or later. But humans are learning secrets from nature and the universe which gives them more and more reason to celebrate the future and what they are learning to do and to become.

These are not particularly happy-smiley times, not when our futures are being sabotaged from within our own ranks by people who use "doom" as an excuse to create long-term hardship. We need to learn to deal with these doomseekers without sacrificing our own forward momentum.

When skiing rapidly downhill through a snow-covered forest, look at the clear spaces -- not the trees!!! Just be aware that the trees are there. But focus on your clear path through.

More: Don't miss the flip side of the doomer syndrome, -- the "It can't happen here and now" syndrome.

Is the Phrase "Delusional Belief" Redundant?

EnergyTribune
The human brain is set up to believe things it cannot prove. Beliefs can be either religious or secular. The religious term for this phenomenon is "faith". The coldly [psycho] logical term [given that most human beliefs are wrong] is "delusion." Looking at the belief in climate catastrophe, it has become clear from inspection that such a belief is an act of quasi-religious faith, and a delusion.

Well known and respected French scientist and engineer, Christian Gerondeau, takes a closer look at this particular delusional belief in "Climate, the Great Delusion."

Christian Gerondeau, a well-known French scientist and engineer, with more than ten books to his credit, has just published in English one of the most devastating, lucid and convincing books on the climate debate. It is a short book, just about 150 pages, and it comes at the heels of the French edition of the book, which made the best-seller list there under the title CO2: Un Mythe Planétaire.

...Gerondeau, a former scientific adviser to French Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, poses just five simple questions in this book. And it would be great if all reasonable people, on either side of the global climate debate, pause for a minute to contemplate them. (Unless of course the polarizing, highly ideological and acrimonious debate of the last few years, has poisoned everyone’s minds. Personally, I admit that I have grown to have little tolerance for climate alarmism but I still have enough of an inquisitive mind to be persuaded otherwise in the climate science.)

Gerondeau does not take a real position nor does he seem to care much about the anthropogenic contribution to climate change. But he deflates both sides on the effects of emissions, mine included, as actually irrelevant. His questions:

Question 1: “Is it possible that mankind would leave any oil, natural gas or coal that would be economically exploited in the planet’s underground?”

Question 2: “Is it possible to stop mankind’s use of oil, natural gas and coal resulting in the release of CO2 when burned?”

Question 3: “Is it realistic to try to prevent the continued increase in the concentration of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere?”

For all three questions, the answer is an unequivocal no. For obvious economic reasons even if the developed world gets together, as attempted first in Kyoto and last year in Copenhagen, to put mandatory limits or stops on carbon emissions, the developing world headed by China and India, and not just them, will continue to burn fossil fuels. The overall production of CO2 and its concentration in the atmosphere will not change from its current trends. Gerondeau, like me, has grave doubts of the feasibility of sequestration and he goes further to say that the current official wish in Europe and the United States to halve CO2 emissions by 2050 from the current level and therefore to a quarter of the current trends is just “wishful thinking”.

What is his take on the future of the planet becomes clear with the next two questions.

Question 4: “Will CO2 emissions continue indefinitely?”

Question 5: “Are we heading for disaster?”

Again the answer to both questions is a no. Since most emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels, their peak will bring about the eventual exhaustion of these fuels and their emissions. He thinks this will happen by the end of the twenty first century. For the catastrophe Cassandras he has this to say. “In the distant past, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been… twenty times what it is today and life on earth was not harmed. No serious examination backs the apocalyptic predictions we are fed daily about the consequences of the inevitable increase in the CO2 concentration in our atmosphere. We are told so many obvious falsehoods… which have no basis in scientific truth that is hard to trust those who express them.”

In a methodical and classic engineering and scientific mode, Gerondeau continues in the rest of his book to demolish myth after myth in stunningly simple and, at times witty, prose. _EnergyTribune

Religious believers do not take kindly to the demolishing of their cherished beliefs. Hence the recent PNAS blacklist of heretical scientists, who lack sufficient faith.

Heretics tend to step on sensitive toes, and can expect fierce retribution for their ability to resist groupthink delusions. And yet, what else can a heretic do, when he sees through the flimsy artifice of unfounded beliefs and delusions?

Humans are made to believe. They cannot help that. But they can choose not to believe the most absurd and counter-productive delusions, which would lead to irreversible economic decay if the proposed prescriptions of the orthodoxy (eg cap and trade) were ever put in place.

...hidden within the Cap-and-Trade bill is a provision prohibiting homeowners from selling their homes unless they completely retrofit their homes to comply with energy and water efficiency standards. The costs will, for many, make it impossible to sell their home.

A Wall Street Journal editorial stated that “The whole point of Cap-and-Trade is to hike the price of electricity and gas…These higher prices will show up not just in electricity bills or at the gas station, but in every manufactured good, from food to cars…Americans should know that those Members (of Congress) who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history.”

There no scientific or economic justification for the passage of Cap-and-Trade legislation. The President knows this. The Democrats in Congress know this. It’s more than just a tax. It is a nation killer. _Source_via_TomNelson

See catastrophism. See catastrophism fall. See catastrophism run for the hills before it is tarred, feathered, and burned for the destructive foolishness that it is.

Nano-Magnets: Controlling the Worms in Your Brain

Scientists at the University of Buffalo have devised a means of using magnetic nanoparticles implanted in the "heads" of worms, to control the worms' burrowing behaviour.

"We targeted the nanoparticles near what is the 'mouth' of the worms, called the amphid," explains Pralle. "You can see in the video that the worms are crawling around; once we turn on the magnetic field, which heats up the nanoparticles to 34 degrees Celsius, most of the worms reverse course. We could use this method to make them go back and forth. Now we need to find out which other behaviors can be controlled this way."

The worms reversed course once their temperature reached 34 degrees Celsius, Pralle says, the same threshold that in nature provokes an avoidance response. That's evidence, he says, that the approach could be adapted to whole-animal studies on innovative new pharmaceuticals.

..."By developing a method that allows us to use magnetic fields to stimulate cells both in vitro and in vivo, this research will help us unravel the signaling networks that control animal behavior," says Arnd Pralle, PhD, assistant professor of physics in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and senior/corresponding author on the paper. _Physorg_(more video)

Picture a miniature version of the sandworms of Dune, plowing through the tissues of your brain. Instead of being guided by gill-hooks, they are being ridden by invisible electromagnetic waves, steering them to ever more sensitive parts of your brain.

"Wake up, Mr. Fin! You were only dreaming."

"Oh, my, thank you, Valerie. Wait! Don't push the "Publish" button! . . . .

Drat that Too, Too Persistent Gender Gap!

... persistent male-female SAT math test gap over time. The 35-point gap in math test scores in 2009 (average score of 534 for boys and 499 for girls) is basically unchanged from the 36-point test score gaps in 1973 (525 vs. 489) and 1974 (524 vs. 488). In other words, the male-female SAT math score gap has persisted for decades for a large sample size of more than 30 million American high school students who have taken the SAT since 1972. _CarpeDiem

MJPerry
The gender gap at the upper levels of math and science testing just will not go away, no matter how much money the forces of politically correct faux egalitarianism throw down the drain.

A study that examined 30 years of standardized test data from the very highest-scoring seventh graders has found that performance differences between boys and girls have narrowed considerably, but boys still outnumber girls by more than about 3-to-1 at extremely high levels of math ability and scientific reasoning.

At the same time, girls slightly outnumber boys at extremely high levels of verbal reasoning and writing ability

....The findings come from a study performed by Duke University's Talent Identification Program, which relies on SAT and ACT tests administered to the top 5 percent of 7th graders to identify gifted students and nurture their intellectual talents. There were more than 1.6 million such students in this study.

Researchers Jonathan Wai, Megan Cacchio, Martha Putallaz and Matthew C. Makel focused in particular on gifted seventh graders who scored 700 or above on the SAT's math or verbal tests, which is higher than most high school juniors score.

Among these students at the very top of the performance curve, the differences in verbal and mathematical performance have maintained a persistent gender gap over the last 15 years, said Jonathan Wai, a post-doctoral research associate at Duke TIP, and lead author on a paper appearing in the July/August issue of the journal Intelligence. _SD

Gender difference deniers use a combination of not-so-subtle tricks in an attempt to whitewash the persistent score gap. They will often look at pre-pubertal (or early pubertal) scores, which do not reflect the significant transition that occurs in brains of young men and women going through puberty. They also look at mid-levels of performance in math and science -- such as scores in routine math or physics course, or numbers of math teachers by gender -- which fail to examine the issue in question: top level math and science performance.

As opportunities for women in science, math, and engineering have multiplied -- and as billions of dollars have been spent to try to force young women into technical and scientific fields -- the performance of women at the highest levels of math and science as measured by top level awards of achievement, have not significantly changed.

The brains of human males and females tend to develop differently in response to hormonal stimulation at various stages of development. During puberty, the differences become particularly evident, both to brain scanning and to cognitive testing. You could even say that humans before puberty exist in a type of "larval stage." Any comparisons of male and female abilities during the larval stage are somewhat academic -- yet the minions of faux egalitarianism persist in arguing from such comparisons, and others that are similarly invalid.

This would not be nearly as much of a problem if not for the destructive effect of public policy which attempt to force a faux egalitarian outcome on a society made up of individuals and population groups which are simply not technically or practically equal. What we have, in effect, is a War Against Boys, in an expensive and heavy-handed social engineering project to destroy natural differences using bureaucratic means.

The result is a society that is falling behind in engineering and the math-intensive sciences -- if not for a massive importation of young men from other countries to fill the engineering and math-intensive science slots, which native-born American males have been push out of by educational malpractise in the early and middle years.

The longer these fools are left in charge, the greater the overall destruction to society.

Can A Stealthy Flying Submarine Escape the Madness?

Seaplanes and flying boats have been around for some time. But a flying boat that can also run submerged, is a bird of another feather. Multiple teams are now attempting to design such a bird ... er, fish ... er, loon. Loons, for example, are excellent swimmers, and can fly long distances at up to 70 miles per hour, and dive to 150 feet, staying submerged for several minutes (up to 15 minutes).

This is a DARPA project, in progress. Designers have been forced to abandon the deep dive capability of the flying sub, due to the excessive weight of the batteries necessary to maintain undersea life support and ship's functions. This may only be a temporary setback, however.

...rather than using electric power, the Auburn team favours propelling the vessel with a gas turbine fed by air drawn in through a 10-metre snorkel. That means the sub will have to stay close to the surface. While DARPA has yet to specify at what depth the flying sub should operate, being restricted to a limited depth might not matter. "As long as it is not visible, there's not much reason to dive far below the surface," says Bob Allwood, engineer and chief executive of the Society for Underwater Technology in London. "The problem is that the craft has still got to be slightly denser than water to submerge."

Hawkes, however, does not see this as a problem. In fact he doesn't accept that the craft has to be made heavier to sink beneath the waves, any more than a normal aircraft has to become more buoyant to take off. "You can't build an aeroplane that is also a balloon, and an aeroplane can't go under water in the same way a sub does. You're mixing two fundamentally different modes of operation."

Hawkes already builds submarines that are lighter than water (New Scientist, 12 February 2000, p 36). To overcome their natural buoyancy and keep them below the surface, they are equipped with wings that generate downward "lift". "Think about it as flying under water," he says. "It can be done. It just needs a lot of work."

...To operate below the waves as well as above them, these wings will have to be a bit out of the ordinary. "One important thing is that the craft's wings will need a symmetrical aerofoil, unlike the asymmetrically curved wing that gives aircraft lift," he says. So when the craft is airborne, the wing will need a positive "angle of attack": in other words, it will need to be angled upwards relative to the airflow. To achieve this, the craft will have to fly in a nose-up attitude. Conversely, when under water it will need a negative angle of attack, so the craft will travel nose-down...

... Hawkes foresees jet engines playing a dual role, propelling the plane through the water as well as through the air. There's no reason why the compressor and turbine blades in a jet engine can't be driven by an electric motor to generate thrust under water, he says. It should be possible to build an engine that runs on kerosene in air and switches to electricity when submerged.

Others are already thinking along these lines. Last year, aircraft manufacturer Airbus patented a hybrid electric jet engine for airliners which can be powered by both conventional kerosene and electricity. Most jet engines have an electric starter motor, and this motor could spin the turbine's shaft under water, Hawkes suggests. The blades would rotate more slowly than normal, he says, and the engine won't be particularly efficient. "But I believe this could work perfectly well."_NewScientist

Al Fin engineers (submarine, marine, and aerospace) have taken a look at the project, and believe that the vessel simply begs to be nuclear powered. A potentially viable nuclear powered airplane was designed -- but never built -- by the US government. The tricks will be to make the engine design compatible with high velocity flight and deep sea diving in saltwater.

Stay tuned.

Killing the Well, and Tales of "A Whale"

The leading relief well is now at 17,000 feet, and slowly closing in on the Macondo bore. Meanwhile, on the surface, testing continues on the giant, 21 million gallon a day tanker-skimmer, named "A Whale."

The latest hopes are riding on a massive new skimmer to clean oil from near the spewing well in the Gulf of Mexico, while a local Louisiana parish's plan to block the slick has been rejected by federal officials. A 48-hour test of the Taiwanese vessel dubbed "A Whale" began Saturday and was to continue through Sunday.

TMT Shipping created what is billed as the world's largest oil skimmer by converting an oil tanker after the April 20 explosion sent millions of gallons of crude spilling into the Gulf.
The vessel was expected to cruise a 25-square-mile test site just north of the Macondo Deepwater well site, company officials said.

The U.S. Coast Guard and BP are waiting to see if the vessel, which is 10 stories high and as long as 3½ football fields, can live up to its makers' promise of being able to process up to 21 million gallons of oil-fouled water a day. The ship works by taking in water through 12 vents, separating the oil and pumping the cleaned seawater back into the Gulf.

"In many ways, the ship collects water like an actual whale and pumps internally like a human heart," TMT spokesman Bob Grantham said in an e-mail.

A Whale is being tested close to the wellhead because officials believe it will be most effective where the oil is thickest rather than closer to shore.

The ship arrived in the Gulf on Wednesday, but officials have wanted to test its capability as well as have the federal Environmental Protection Agency sign off on the water it will pump back into the Gulf, which will contain trace amounts of crude. The wait has frustrated some local officials, who say the mammoth skimmer would be a game-changer in keeping oil from reaching vulnerable coastlines.

During a Thursday tour of the inlet to Barataria Bay, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said it was exasperating to have A Whale anchored offshore instead of being put to immediate use.
"They've used the war rhetoric," Jindal said aboard a boat floating in oil-slicked waters near Grand Isle. "If this is really a war, they need to be using every resource that makes sense to fight this oil before it comes to our coast." _al.com

The US EPA will need to relax its absurd regulations -- which require all water re-injected into the Gulf to be 99.999% pure. Such unrealistic demands in the face of foul floating oil slicks and sheens only slows down recovery and rehabilitation efforts. But what can you expect from bureaucrats and politicians who have essentially no contact with reality? Most modern, tenured, lifetime academics are in the same category, unfortunately.

Bad as the BP Gulf oil spill is, the federal government's moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling seems certain to dwarf the spill's economic pain.

...Although President Barack Obama's shut-down order is nominally for six months, the legislative and rule-writing process it will invoke means that realistically businesses should expect it will be a year or more before it is lifted -- and longer yet before deepwater rigs resume operations.

...A ruling last month by U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman overturned the moratorium, nominally a six-month halt while a commission appointed by Obama makes policy recommendations to improve the safety of deepwater drilling. The government has appealed; another hearing is scheduled for Thursday. Feldman's order did not restart drilling because oil rigs are too big and complex to start up and shut down based on the latest signal from the courthouse.

...Scott, the Baton Rouge economist, cited a Morgan Stanley study advising that if ...[Obama]... prevails, there is a 60 percent chance the moratorium will last a year to a year and a half: That's six months for a safety commission to review and make recommendations, and up to a year for Congress to legislate and move new standards to the drilling rig floor.
To date, three rigs have served notice they are leaving the Gulf to drill elsewhere. _Nola

Governments of the western world are increasingly under the thumb of enviro-apocalyptics, true believers in the religions of human-caused apocalypse. Reality takes a back seat to their religion, which has gained an unbelievable influence over most governments of Europe and the Anglosphere.

Events such as the Macondo spill and various economic crises are sending shock waves through the body politic, revealing the incompetence of governments and bureaucracies, and spurring normal people to take more of an interest in how things are being done and run.

Who Is Really Killing the Birds?

We estimate that from 500 million to possibly over 1 billion birds are killed annually in the United States due to anthropogenic sources including collisions with human - made structures such as vehicles, buildings and windows, power lines, communication towers, and wind turbines; electrocutions; oil spills and other contaminants; pesticides; cat predation; and commercial fishing by-catch. _fs.fed.us

ImageSource Bird Deaths in Millions of Birds
With all of the tear-jerking photos of oil-covered birds circulating through the media lately, it may help to review the real threats to bird life as a result of human activities. (we will overlook for now all the things humans do to preserve bird life)

Window strikes – estimated to kill 97 to 976 million birds/year – Millions of houses and buildings, with their billions of windows, pose a significant threat to birds. Birds see the natural habitat mirrored in the glass and fly directly into the window, causing injury and, in 50% or more of the cases, death. Simple steps can be taken to reduce the number of birds striking windows. Decals that stick to the glass are not very effective, but strips of tape on the outside of the glass, or strings or feathers hanging outside the window, each no more than 10 inches apart, are fairly effective. Decorative features like stained glass designs or window dividers can achieve the same result. Outside screens are very effective both to reduce the reflection and to cushion the impact. In short, anything that reduces or breaks up the window’s reflection will reduce bird strikes. Lots of excellent info at FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) ; follow the link to collision prevention and be sure to check out the “CollidEscape” film.

Communication towers – estimates of bird kills are impossible to make because of the lack of data, but totals could easily be over 5 million birds/year, and possibly as many as 50 million. Towers have proliferated in recent years, with an estimated 5000 new towers erected per year during the 1990s, mainly for the cell phone and digital TV industries. Any tall structure will kill birds by collision, and lighted towers attract birds at night. Theoretically cellphone towers are less dangerous than the taller structures, but there is no data either way, and the sheer number of cell phone towers may outweigh any other advantage. More info at FLAP (Fatal Light Awareness Program) and TOWERKILL .

High tension line collisions – may kill up to 174 million birds per year. This figure extrapolates from European studies to the millions of miles of aerial wires in North America. There are very few data in North America.

Electrocutions kill tens of thousands of birds per year. This occurs mainly when large birds such as raptors make contact between a live electrical wire and a ground such as a pole. The relatively small number of birds affected belies the significance of this threat, since species such as Golden Eagle are more susceptible. Large predators like eagles have smaller population sizes and lower reproduction rates than songbirds, so removing a few thousand birds from the population will have a much larger impact than removing the same number of, say, Savannah Sparrows. Studies byHawkWatch International revealed an electrocution rate of just under 1 bird per 100 poles per year, or 547 birds at 74,000 poles in Utah in 2001-2002. About 10% of the birds killed were Golden Eagles, 34% Ravens, and another 25%Buteos (Red-tailed, Swainson’s and Ferruginous Hawks). Fortunately PacifiCorp, the owner of the poles, is committed to making changes to reduce electrocutions, and hopefully other regions will follow.

Cars may kill 60 million birds per year. Of over 8 million lane miles of roads in the US, 6.3 million, or over ¾, are in rural areas where most birds are presumably killed. There’s not much we can do about this source of bird mortality short of changing our driving habits, but landscaping the roadside to discourage birds from congregating there is helpful. My own sense is that small cars with more aerodynamic designs hit fewer birds, while large boxy vans and trucks hit more birds, but I don’t think this has been studied. By the way, 100 years ago there were fewer than 250 miles of paved roads in North America, all in urban centers.

Wind turbines may kill 33,000 birds per year, and, as in the case of electrocutions, these birds tend to be large and scarce (e.g. raptors). The recent surge of interest in wind power has heightened concerns about their effect on birds, and has led to at least the discussion of efforts by the wind power industry to design more benign windmills and to choose locations that are less “birdy”. It’s difficult for an environmentalist to come out against renewable energy like wind turbines, but as long as the electricity generated is considered a “supplement” to satisfy increasing demand, wind power will not really help the fight against global warming. Establishment of wind farms should go hand-in-hand with drastic cuts in electricity use, and there is a real need for more study of the relationship between birds and wind farms. _SibleyGuides

We know that wind turbines kill more birds than BP. As more large wind turbines are built, the number of bird (and bat) kills will rise into the millions a year. Green mulch-for-brains faux environmentalists promote the building of huge numbers of giant bird-killing wind turbines, while clamouring for the shutdown of oil drilling, coal mining, and nuclear power plants.

Why don't they just come out and admit that they hate birds almost as much as they hate people? It seems as if the "great human dieoff" being promoted by faux environmentalists is not just for humans, after all. What other species do Greenpeace, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation and the rest of the poseurs have a planetary sized grudge against?

The Frontier Diet: Learning to Live Through the Twilight

America and western civilisation are experiencing the twilight of peak influence and power. Debt and demography -- plus abysmally incompetent leadership -- are leaving western nations in a position where they will be unable to resist the inevitable crises that will hit them with implacable and increasing frequency. That means that you will be responsible for yourself and those you care about. It is critical that you prepare yourself for a variety of unfortunate circumstances.

Survival Blog is a repository of useful information, usually from people who have been through difficult life trials, and lived to tell about them. This entry details the "Frontier Diet," a spartan dietary approach to staying alive on the way to something better.

This I call the Frontier diet – four high-speed, low drag foods that can get where you are going without weighing you down....The four foods are: Coffee (or tea), hardtack, parched corn, and pemmican. All are easy to make at home, with the exception of the coffee and all offer excellent storage lives, ease of preparation, and all may be eaten cold if necessary. Each offers a specific set of advantages and they all can be used together to provide a bit of variety in your meals.

The coffee I am talking about is the commercial, freeze dried product found in small, one-cup packets. I would not consider any other type of packaging – the packets are air-tight, waterproof and frankly, I find the flavor to be superior. I suffered through many years with the “coffee product” found in C rations, Long Range Patrol Rations, and more recently in MREs. All were pretty nasty, at least in my opinion.

The value of coffee in the Frontier diet is in its use as an appetite suppressant. Strong tea (green, black or other non-herbal teas) will also provide the same effect. Tea normally requires hot water to provide a satisfactory product – though cold soaking tea bags for several hours will provide a drinkable product. Freeze dried coffee will quickly mix with water at any temperature.

... Hardtack or hard bread has been part of a soldiers ration since Roman times. Often reviled, always hated, hardtack (or sailor/pilot bread) serves to provide a long lasting, lightweight food that offers needed calories for travel. Commercially baked hardtack or hard bread is a staple in both Alaska and Hawaii. Modern commercial hardtack is seen as “Saloon Pilot” crackers in Hawaii and in Alaska as my favorite “Sailor Boy” pilot bread. Very long lasting when stored properly and eatable by itself cold, hardtack is improved with anything you might have, from peanut butter to apple sauce.

You can make your own hard bread, SurvivalBlog has several recipes already posted or you can use this one. Remember, if you add salt to your home made hardtack, it will reduce the storage life as the salt attracts moisture. Store in a cool, dry location and physically protect the product, lest weevils become part of your travel diet.

...Corn has been a staple of frontier ‘dining’ since before the United States was an independent nation. Made from dried corn, parched corn offers a very long term storage item, a useful addition to your diet and adds both calories and variety to the food you eat. You can make your own or purchase a commercial product. I will have to say parched corn is an acquired taste but offers many options as a food.

I make my parched corn in a cast iron skillet with just a bit of olive oil. Start with dried corn, heat the skillet and add the corn one layer (or kernel) deep. Keep the corn moving in the pan until it plumps and turns brown. If the corn starts to pop, reduce the heat slightly. Dump the parched corn in a bowl to cool. It is ready to eat. Add any spices or salt after the corn is cooked. The corn should be browned, plump and soft when you bite into it. If not try again. Start with small batches until you are happy with the results.

I pack mine in a wide-mouth water bottle (airtight container), and store in the cool location. I also grind some of the parched corn in the wheat grinder with the stones set in an 'open' position to give a course meal.

...The last item in our travel food bag is pemmican, food of trappers, fur traders and Antarctic exploration teams. A mixture of tallow and dried meat. It is a staple that has a long storage life. It may be eaten cold and contains nutrients needed to keep you going in tough times. The famed explorer Amundsen used pemmican made with dried peas, a key reason his party survived with the Scott expedition did not. Made from tallow and dried meat, pemmican is an energy dense food with excellent keeping properties.

Several folks have posted their recipes on the site, so use the keyword search as "Pemmican". If the thought of eating fat leaves you a bit queasy, you can try pemmican made with peanut butter.

This version of pemmican uses peanut butter rather than melted suet or lard as the binding agent, which is likely more palatable with the younger members of your family. Grind [or pound] the dried meat to a mealy powder. Add any dried berries, seeds or nuts if peas are not to your taste. Heat the peanut butter until softened. Blend all ingredients. When cooled, store in a plastic bag or sausage casing in a cool dry place. It will keep for months if stored properly. Some pemmican recipes call for honey, cayenne pepper and other spices. Experiment now, while you can. _SurvivalBlog

That is one person's short list of survival foods, ready for a quick getaway.

By all means, keep a good stockpile of food, water, supplies, power generation apparatus and fuel, etc. at your home. Most crises may allow you to stay home and tread water while society is rearranging itself into a more sustainable form. But just in case you have to run for it, be ready for that too.

Remember that you may not have much time to pack for the wild ride to safety. Have your bags ready to go, and consider keeping extra bags cached at likely locations -- workplace, schools, friends' or relative's houses, etc.

Food, water & water purification, fire starters, essential tools, emergency pharmaceuticals etc. Stick to barest essentials. Make sure your bugout food has a long shelf life.

Society is being progressively weakened by disastrous public policy and incompetent leadership. The particular shock that pushes things over the edge -- and makes it necessary for you to seek a safer environment -- cannot be accurately anticipated.

The Adventure of Ducted Fan Flying Machines

Ducted fans can allow for a greater payload and better efficiencies than open propeller systems.

The core technology, around which we have designed our products, looks deceptively simple. It consists of a set of counter-rotating fans, inside a set of ducts, attached to a central gearbox and drive train, and then to a power plant. Our proprietary advantage is that we know the proper combinations of these items, and have developed the software which operates the computerized fly by wire system, which makes this combination of items able to deliver the power and control necessary for this genre of powered-lift vehicle to fly.

Ducted Fans

The shape of the duct and its mated fans is critical for optimal performance. It is our advanced proprietary CFD model, which allows us to develop the optimal combination for nearly any application. We have designed ducts with weight as one of the primary concerns. We have been able to build ducts from composite materials with extremely tight tolerances to produce the proper combination for optimal thrust. _Trek

Logi Aerospace is using the Trek design for ducted fan propulsion, in an attempt to win a lucrative DARPA contract.

The real magic of this vehicle lies in the Shrouded Propellers developed by Trek Aerospace. This is not just an ordinary shroud or nacelle around the propellers. This shroud has been specifically designed to optimize airflow. The result – at takeoff, nearly half the lift is provided by the shroud and not the propellers. This means the propellers cover only half the area of a helicopter and still lift the same amount of vehicle weight.

This also means the propellers are lighter and smaller, so too, are the wings and structures making the vehicle lighter. A lighter vehicle can be flown with a smaller propeller, which makes the wings, the structure and the whole vehicle lighter. It has an iterative effect on the design and scales the vehicle down in size. This scale reduction means our vehicles can often be built for less than half the empty weight, and cost, of other vehicles that don’t have our shroud technology. This also means, that on average, our vehicles have around 1/3 of the propeller area of other vehicles that carry our payload using non-optimized shrouds. This is because our shroud is more efficient and the vehicle at takeoff is lighter. _Logi

The ducted fan design also lends itself to exoskeleton designs for single person flying with light payloads.

The Dragonfly is an imaginative design from Trek.

H/T Brian Wang

DARPA's design specs PDF for their military flying car (50 + pages) via NextBigFuture

It is likely that some version of ducted fan flier will be viable. The versatility and superior safety characteristics of the ducted fan will lend itself to new types of flying machines for a wide variety of tasks. Just as important as the fans, are the engines and drive trains that will be required, as well as the fail-safes.

Ducted fans could easily power hovercraft, ground effect hovercraft, helicopter-type craft, amphibious boat / VTOL planes, and other designs not yet conceived.

Learning to Create a Line of Big Brained Geniuses

The discovery of a master-gene for controlling human brain development may eventually open the door to the creation of a genetic line of big brained genius humans. UW-Madison scientists learned that the transcription factor Pax6 is something of a master-controller for the development of human brain cells.

The research, reported this week in Cell Stem Cell, provides "exciting new insights into the fundamental process of neural induction," said Kate Storey, a developmental biologist at the University of Dundee in the UK who was not involved in the research, in an email.

Pax6 is one in a family of paired box (Pax6) transcription factors that control embryonic development in a variety of cell lineages. The best-studied of the Pax factors, Pax6 is highly conserved and important to the development of eyes, pancreas, and cerebrum across many species. Now, Su-Chun Zhang and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report that Pax6 is also the master regulator of early specification of the neuroectoderm, the outer layer of an embryo that develops into all neural tissues, in humans but not in mice.

...When Zhang's team silenced Pax6 in mouse ESCs, the cells still generated neural stem cells when other factors, such as Sox proteins, compensated. But when they did the same in human ESCs, no neural stem cells developed, either in a Petri dish or in vivo. "It's very different from what we see in animals," said Zhang. Though the protein has the exact same amino acid sequence in mice and humans, it seems to be playing a novel role in human brain development.

"The early expression of Pax6 in humans probably has something to do with our unique brain size and intelligence," said Zhang. "For better or for worse," he added with a laugh.

Zhang pursued the protein to determine how it works in human neural development. Through a series of additional experiments, the team found that Pax6 is responsible for suppressing stem cell genes, like Oct4 and Nanog, while simultaneously activating neural-specific genes. Because of these dual roles, Zhang said, it is appropriate to call Pax6 a "master switch," turning some genes on and others off. The factor is so powerful, said Zhang, that even when the researchers tried to block the development of neural cells through three different non-genetic methods, such as adding factors to guide ESCs toward a mesoderm fate, Pax6 won out. As long as the factor was being expressed, cells went on to become neurons. "It's a very powerful factor in humans," he said.

Since Pax6 so strongly drives hESCs to become neural stem cells, the team is now looking to see if Pax6 can also be used to maintain an adult population of those same cells. While ESCs and iPS can be maintained in a pluripotent state, it is currently very difficult to do the same in adult somatic stem cells -- over time they begin to differentiate and lose their potential. Zhang is also interested in seeing if Pax6 can reprogram other adult cells directly into neural stem cells, skipping the iPS cell state altogether. "Because of its powerful effect in multiple aspects, we are looking at many areas," said Zhang. _the-scientist(blog)

Neurology and anatomy professor Su-Chun Zhang said the discovery could lead to new treatment options for major brain-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Zhang says it could also be possible for researchers to rejuvenate brain stem cells inside a patient’s body, instead of in a lab dish to repair damage from diseases. _WHBL

"In human brain development, this plays a really important role," says Xiaoqing Zhang. "In humans, the cortex is a major part of the brain. In the mouse, the cortex is a much smaller part of the brain."

Adds Su-Chun Zhang, "In a way, it makes sense that the human brain is regulated in a different way. The brain distinguishes the human as a unique species."

In practical terms, the new finding will help scientists refine and improve techniques for making specific types of neural cells. Such cells will be critical for future research, developing new models for disease, and may one day be used in clinical settings to repair the damaged cells that cause such conditions as Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig's disease.

"This gives us a precise and efficient way to guide stem cells to specific types of neural cells," says Xiaoqing Zhang. "We can activate this factor and convert stem cells to a particular fate."

The discovery of the new role of Pax6, says Su-Chun Zhang, is the first time researchers have discovered a single genetic factor in human cells that is responsible for shepherding blank slate stem cells to become a particular tissue stem cell type. "Until now, for any organ or tissues, we didn't know any determinant factors. This is the first," he says.

There are certainly other genes at play in the cells of the developing brain, says Su-Chun Zhang: "You may need additional genes, but they're in a supporting role. Pax6 is the key." _Eurekalert

Of course there are many other factors present in the developing brain which influence the fate of neuronal stem cells. But we need an entry point into the multi-dimensional interplay of the thousands of factors influencing the gene expression of the brain. The UW-Madison study raises more questions than it answers, but then most truly good science will do that.

When intervening in the development of the human brain, it is more likely that one will do harm rather than doing good. The brain is an organ of chaos, after all. Although we crave to understand our brains as a whole, we tend to comprehend them only by bits and pieces. We will need new ways of seeing and comprehending, before we will be in a position to effectively make ourselves more intelligent -- in a harmonious and fulfilling manner.

We will have to perform a large number of experiments in systems and synthetic biology. We may have to resort to feeding artificial components into the machinery of life. We are unlikely to stumble across a "magic mushroom" that transforms our mundane thought processes into those of a super-genius of great wisdom and knowledge.

Champions of machine super-intelligence have thrown down the gauntlet, and have declared the obsolescence of the human body and brain. They have done so somewhat prematurely, it would seem to me, but their chain of logic is fairly clear.

We have seen that the natural trend for human intelligence is downward. If nothing is done to reverse the trend, the global average human IQ will drop from near 90 points currently to the mid to low 80's by mid-century. The dysgenic trend is occurring due to differential birth rates, which are somewhat to very high in low IQ populations and quite low in most high IQ populations.

What can be done? Think about it.

Bioremediation of Hydrocarbon Polluted Soil

There are several approaches being promoted for bioremediation of the water, sand, and soil impacted by the Macondo oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some companies are promoting bacterial remediation, some are promoting enzymatic remediation, and some are promoting fungal remediation.

The video above looks at an experiment conducted on six mounds of diesel-contaminated soil, using 6 different approaches to bioremediation.

According to the narrator, the fungal approach was the only type of remediation that restored the badly contaminated soil fully to a thriving micro ecosystem. Who knew that oyster mushrooms love diesel and other hydrocarbons?

Of course you can't grow oyster mushrooms in seawater, where bacterial approaches make more sense. In fact, bacteria that naturally break down oil are contained within the oil itself, and in the seawater of the Gulf of Mexico and other naturally oil-rich waters. Nature has dealt with hydrocarbon contamination for billions of years, and has learned how to recover from an oil spill.

We just need to learn the best way of giving nature a hand.

Flying Cars and Motorcycles Set You Free

Larry Neal's motorcycle / autogyro kits have been sold and flown for several years. Watch it drive around town, and fly above town, in the video above.

Terrafugia's Transition is now certified as a Light Sport Aircraft by the US FAA, which makes it much easier for novice pilots to get licensed to fly it. Watch it fly in the above video. The company is taking deposits for new planes, and plans to begin delivering finished models to new owners next year.

The Parajet Automotive Skycar is expedition tested. Watch it fly above the desert in the video above.

The Ramphos flying boat can also travel awkwardly on land.

An optimal escape craft would allow travel on all surfaces -- mud, sand, water, pavement, ice, snow -- plus provide full flight capabilities. Submersible travel safely down to 300 metres would be a big plus.

Hovercraft with flight and submersible capabilities would be ideal.

Check out Gizmag's roundup of flying cars and cycles