DNA Video: Wrapping and Replication

Online Science Video Sites:
Free Science Videos and Lectures

Free Science Online

101Science.com

Redwood Center Neurolectures

Vega Science Trust

And many others available through video searches on YouTube and GoogleVideo. Also look under the main sidebar at alfin2100 under audio/video archives.

Small Energy News

Speaking of small energy, this vibration powered micro-generator is a clever idea for operating sensors and monitoring devices placed around vibrating locations such as roadways, rotating machinery, and objects vibrated by winds and waves.

Here is a look at some of the near-term improvements for automobile batteries.

And we all know that supercapacitors fill an important gap in the attempt to replace the internal combustion engine. The very high power density of the supercapacitors is a fine complement to the high energy density of storage batteries and fuel cells.

Speaking of fuel cells, most efficient fuel cells are sized for industrial uses--in the tens and hundreds of kilowatts range and above. But these little fuel cells are for toys, and progress is being made on better residential and automobile fuel cells. Even short range aircraft will soon be powered by fuel cells.

It is important for developed nations to come up with clean, sustainable energy technologies for all scales of use--from the terawatt to the microwatt. It is not possible for an advanced culture to progress without highly centralised energy technologies such as nuclear, at this time.

But as storage technologies improve, much of the renewable energies that are currently wasted--solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, etc--will be put to better use. This will limit the demand placed upon large scale, centralised projects, and fossil fuels such as coal, oil, bitumens, and gas.

Kamchatka Volcano Honours US 4th of July

Kamchatka is so much like Alaska--where I spent part of my childhood--that it takes my breath away at times. The Klyuchevskoy Volcano seems to be reflecting that similarity--providing geologic fireworks in time for the US celebration of the 4th.The Ring of Fire includes portions of Kamchatka as it includes portions of Alaska. Alaska and Kamchatka could almost be mirror images if looked at in a certain way.

When one contemplates the rapidly shrinking ethnic Russian population--and the reasons for the collapse--one cannot help but wonder about the future of the Russian Empire. The future of Siberia in particular, is in question.

For while Russia has a vast and advanced nuclear strike capability, its conventional forces are sadly decrepit, corrupt, and ineffectual. If faced with strong pressure from China to give up large sections of Siberia, as time passes Russia will have less and less deterrent.

How much of Russia's natural wealth resides in Swiss bank accounts registered to ex-KGB bureaucrats and operatives? More every day.

As Russia's muslim population grows, and its ethnic Russian population suicides, emigrates, and shrivels, what good will all those nukes do when China comes demanding? What good will all those billions of dollars in the Swiss accounts of Putin cronies do for the common Russian citizen?

Putin cannot control the periphery of the empire any longer. The days of the empire are numbered.

Encephalon #26

Neurophilosophy Blog has moved to Science Blogs, and to celebrate is hosting the 26th Edition of Encephalon. If you have not yet visited Neurophilosophy, or waded through an edition of the Encephalon blog neurocarnival, I strongly encourage you to jump in without delay.

Mind The Enchantment

The human mind is subject to various forms of enchantment. Not a magical enchantment, but more like a trance, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

Because our minds are "self organised", they are subject to falling into distinctly different states, at particular "bifurcations."An illustration of this phenomenan is the "bistability" of particular images. Following the series of images above, can you say exactly where the transition occurs? What if you saw only that one image?

But the deeper you dive into the mechanisms of consciousness, the larger the number of possible mind states, so that bistability becomes tristability and so on. Just the single topic of synaptic plasticity quickly acquires a complexity to confound most scientists.

Hypnosis takes advantage of the inherent ambiguity of consciousness, and "adjusts the weighting" of various competing states of mind. Since mind is inherently a self-organizing, ongoing trance-like process, it is often likened to "riding the wave," or staying on the "bucking bronco." From the moment of waking to the release of sleep, that "blinking cursor" of consciousness compels us to provide answers and solutions, even to unknown or nonexistent problems.

For anyone who is curious about some of the underlying neurophilosophy of consciousness, I suggests looking over this article by Edelman and Tononi--two prolific and respected students of consciousness. Or look over this overview of Models of Consciousness from Scholarpedia.

Understanding human consciousness is difficult enough. But a lot of people wish to create intelligence in machines. This dream goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But since the computer age beginning in the 1940s, multiple generations of ingenious scientists of mind and computation have dashed their skulls against the wall of computational complexity (not to mention a lack of understanding of the complexity of human cognition or intentionality).

Each person experiences a consciousness of an enchanted mind. Not a mind of equations and computations. Rather a mind of metaphor and narrative. An entranced mind where real world expediencies intrude on waking dreams. Complex trances of strange attractors and slippery bistable conscious surfaces.

There would be no point in trying to emulate all of that in a machine. Not unless that is the only way we can find to create a conscious machine. Perhaps it is better to settle for machines that only seem conscious or intelligent, as viewed by a simple Turing test. After all, we are only looking for help in making better decisions and devising a better world for smarter, healthier, longer-lived people.

We may be entranced, but why burden our machines with all of that? It is our trance that we wish to enjoy far into the future, not the trance of a machine.

Singularity Summit in San Francisco 8,9 September 2007

Michael at Accelerating Future announces several upcoming Singularity Events. One of these is the Singularity Summit II: AI and the Future of Humanity, September 8,9 at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre in San Francisco. Go here for photos and bios of the speakers.

The Singularity movement is fascinating, but it is not new. Long before Kurzweil, there was Timothy Leary's SMI2LE, and before Leary there was Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point, and so on and on.

Here is a quote from the overview page of the Summit, attributed to Kurzweil:

this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself. Understanding the singularity will alter our perspective on the significance of our past and the ramifications for our future. To truly understand it inherently changes one's view of life in general and one's own particular life.

Notice how similar to a religious (or quasi-religious) conversion experience this sounds. It is described as an external event that forces a psychological discontinuity on intelligent beings.

Although it will be difficult to "drop out" of the Singularity, it is inevitable that many people will try. Certainly North Korea's Kim will try, and many muslim groups will also try to avoid the singularity tsunami.

I strongly suspect that most "connected" humans will adjust their time frames, or internal clock speeds, to compensate somewhat for the accelerating change.

There is always a time lag between the inventive idea and the real product of change. That time lag has been reduced by advanced telecom and powerful software/hardware tools. Once high speed personal prototypers are widely available, and particularly once molecular manufacturing is available, the time lag will shrink even more.

Many singularitarians believe that better-than-human-brain machine intelligences will be necessary before the pace of technological change becomes breathless enough to be called "the singularity." More likely to my mind is that more hyper-specialised machines and software will be developed that will act as "augments" to particular areas of research and development. These specialised machines will not be intelligent in the general sense, any more than championship chess playing computers are intelligent outside their narrowly designed and programmed specialty.

When very clever designs for hardware are combined with well crafted software and specialised physical actuators, machines can be an enormous help without having general intelligence.

The idea that all that is needed is faster processors or more clever algorithms is more probably slowing down the actual achievement of general machine intelligence. It is called chasing the wild goose.

It is clear to me that the modularity of the human brain will have to be imitated in hardware, before humans can build anything that possesses human-like intelligence. It is also clear to me that going from a chimp-like intelligence to a human-like intelligence to a superhuman-like intelligence will not be an almost instant process.

The actual hardware involved will be far more complex than any "thinking machines" that humans have devised up until now. Trying to achieve this with Von Neumann style digital computers is a laughable proposition, in my opinion. More later.

Global Warming Regulations Choking Germany's Economy

It is one thing to regulate industry in the interest of clean water and clean air. Regulating pollution and toxic emissions is a necessary part of the government's role in protecting the populace--just as protecting the people from religious terrorists is a necessary government role.

Clear thinking persons understand that Carbon Dioxide is not a pollutant, but rather a vital constituent of Earth's atmosphere/biosphere. What is the price Germany is likely to pay for the fundamental misunderstanding of CO2 on the part of Germany's planners and government regulators? 500,000 or more jobs lost in high-energy utilisation industries. Since Germany is already losing professionals and scientists in the hundreds of thousands, it can ill afford to lose these engineering and technology jobs.

The government's aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 40 pct by 2020 are 'illusory,' Schulz told the newspaper.

'Excessive regulations can have serious consequences for Germany's economy,' he said.

He said the government should take into account the reasonable doubts of the country's industrial players on the costs of shutting down nuclear power plants and reducing emissions.

Source

Global warming predictions are being skewed by tainted data. In the US, much of the surface station data being used to predict future climate is tainted. This scandal has been kept under wraps so far, at least from the general public that does not keep up with things. Dr. Pielke at Climate Science would like to pull the wraps off the scandal.

The debate is not over, but is rather just beginning. Billions of dollars in research funding is at stake, and millions of industrial and high technology jobs in the western world. Europe stands to lose big, if it continues with its commitment to an unproven remedy to an unproven problem.

Climate Science Grows Up

Global Circulation Models (GCMs) of climate are still at an early, primitive, infantile stage of development. As science gets better at filling the many large gaps in knowledge about the many factors influencing climate, the models will eventually become more trustworthy. NASA's Tropical Composition Cloud Coupling study is designed to fill one of the huge gaps in climate comprehension--understanding the chemical, dynamic, and physical processes occurring in the tropical upper troposphere and tropopause transitional layer.

the Tropical Composition Cloud Climate Coupling (TC4) field campaign will examine a somewhat mysterious layer of the atmosphere that could provide a crucial link to climate change. To better understand how ozone-depleting pollutants move from earth to the vulnerable, ozone-rich stratosphere, about 100 scientists will study the space between: the tropical tropopause transition layer (TTL), which can funnel air and its pollutants much faster than other atmospheric movements.

According to TC4 program scientist Dr. Brian Toon, air involved in a cloud convection column can take “only 10 or 20 minutes to move from the ground level to the top of the troposphere. An airplane can’t follow it up—I’ve tried.” During these violent updrafts, storm-type clouds nearer the earth’s surface containing very fine particles and pollutants transfer their cargo into tiny ice crystals—on the order of microns—that balloon into extremely long-lasting, expansive, often sub-visible clouds in the stratosphere.

To track the debris as it passes through the TTL, the high-tech research team in Costa Rica will be the first to extensively utilize and verify data collected by the so-called “A-train,” a recently completed group of five satellites launched to gather complementary data profiling the earth’s atmosphere. The newest of these satellites, launched last year, come equipped with radar and special “LIDAR” sensors, which measure laser light pulses and reflections to help draw conclusions about atmospheric chemistry.

In addition to these indirect measurements from above, several air-sampling balloons and three high-altitude planes will develop the first three-dimensional, contact-based understanding of the TTL. The airplanes, including a civilian-science version of the Air Force’s U-2 reconnaissance platform, are capable of flying at the edge of space—so high that pilots and scientists must begin breathing pure oxygen an hour before flight in order to acclimate, and must wear space-suit-style pressure suits to protect them in the otherwise fatal event of cabin depressurization.

Source

The tropospheric temperature anomaly is one of the many things that GCM's cannot get right--and it strikes at the very heart of the reliability of the models (or lack thereof). But honestly, there are so many problems with the IPCC's well funded but unreliable models, that only someone without good scientific instincts would even hint at basing economic, industrial, and environmental policy on the failed models. Much better to allow the infant science of climatology to grow up and learn to walk.

Smelling Cancer With Nanotechnology

We have known for years that dogs are capable of smelling cancer on a person's breath or urine. Now scientists are developing nanotech protein sensor arrays for "smelling" cancer--as early screening tests.

To create the protein sensors, the scientists used six gold nanoparticle–fluorescent polymer conjugates. These particles serve as both selective recognition elements as well as quenchers for the polymer. The subsequent binding of protein analytes displaces the dyes, regenerating the fluorescence.

....By modulating the nanoparticle–protein and/or nanoparticle–dye association, distinct signal response patterns can then be used to differentiate the proteins. The fluorescent indicator displacement assay does not require special instruments, and its sensitivity (due in large part to the high surface area provided by the nanoparticles) and speed facilitate protein detection.
Rotello points out that real-world applications require identification of proteins at varying concentrations and of unknown identity. "Varying protein concentrations would be expected to lead to the drastic alteration of fluorescence response patterns for the proteins, making identification of proteins with both unknown identity and concentration challenging. To enable the detection of unknown proteins, we have designed a protocol combining LDA and ultraviolet (UV) measurements."
In their experiments, the researchers also used a series of unknown protein solutions for quantitative detection. The unknown protein solutions were submitted to the testing procedures: of the 52 unknown protein samples, only three samples were incorrectly identified, affording an identification accuracy of 94.2%.
"Our overall goal is to develop a more holistic approach to detecting diseases" says Rotello. "The plan is to monitor levels of proteins in the body, as opposed to looking for just a single marker." Of course, the key question is whether disease can effectively be 'smelled' – are there detectable differences in the relative ratios of proteins that can be used for diagnostic purposes?"

Source

Hat tip Our Technological Future and Nanotechnology Now.

The potential for near-term development of nano-sensors for health care, research, and industrial safety and process control, is enormous. In ten years it will be difficult to imagine life without ubiquitous nano-sensors, just as it is difficult now to imagine life without cell phones, wireless internet, and mp3 players.
;-)

Inexpensive urine tests and breath tests will provide physicians and practitioners with early alerts that should save tens of thousands of lives a year, at the least. As the technology improves, the utility of these nano-sensors will grow as their dimensions shrink.

Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Image hat tip Numberwatch.

Much more detail here.

Sometimes you simply must go back to quantum theory.

Update: Here's more on the effects of the sun on climate.

Futurism: Thomas Frey vs. The Idiocracy

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, has inspired leaders of government and industry with his revolutionary vision of the future.

ET: What technologies do you think would be with us in the future?

Thomas: 1. Binary power is the concept where two otherwise harmless beams of energy will intersect at some point in space, creating a source of power.

To better explain binary power, think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect as a glowing point of light. Binary power will eventually replace all light bulbs. And lest you think it can only be used for intense forms of power, it will also be used to create ‘points’ of sound, eliminating the need for speakers and headphones.

2. Proof has to be demonstrated on two very fundamental levels before there is reason to think that time travel is truly possible. The first is to be able to communicate across time, and the second is to be able to view things across time. If we cannot first communicate across time, or view real life images of another time, how can we possibly imagine sending people across time?

So the ‘viewing things across time’ technology that I think most promising is – viewing the past. Think in terms of setting up sensors around a room and being able to replay images of past events, as much as 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

3. Disassembling matter. Imagine a technology capable of breaking all of the molecular bonds in any given material. As an example, place a rock on a table, focus a beam on the rock and visualise all the molecules in the rock separating and falling in a pile onto the table.

....Thomas: In the past, computer programming has been focused around architecting the flow of electrons. In the future, nanotechnology will be focused around architecting the flow of matter.

Laboratories in the future will be akin to thought factories where the outputs will be visualisations with several million permutations. Inventions will happen so quickly that few people will understand the line between what is real and what is still only imagined.

What would the PC of tomorrow be like? Will the PC even be around or is it just going to be 'ubiquitous' computing in the full sense of the word—every object being a computer, the whole environment being the user interface, etc?

Thomas: Our goal will be to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. Presently, the PC is a rather clunky way of making that connection.

PCs will go away within the next 10 years and a variety of devices will be created to take their place. But we eventually would not want to be bothered by physical devices.

I like to think in terms of information swarms – invisible particles that hover around us, communicating with our minds whenever we desire to ‘plug in’. While much of the information swarm will communicate directly with our minds, we will also have visual interfaces that float in space in a way that is only viewable by us.


....In my mind, patents are only useful when they move the state of the art forward. Too much of what is going on today is nothing more than corporate gamesmanship.
As an example, a typical cell phone will touch on as many as 200-300 patents. If every patent required a $5 royalty, our cell phones would cost a fortune. Many of our emerging technologies will not be able to make it to market because of too many demands on the revenue streams. Once the patents expire, the products become affordable.

ET: On a lighter note, by when do we expect the DaVinci Institute to have its branch on Mars (read: migration to other planets)?

Thomas: Travelling to Mars will be measured in decades, but colonising other planets will likely begin close to a century from now. The first human colony on another planet will be called – Colony 42, because 42 is the meaning of life.

Source

Contrast Frey's visions here and at previous posts, with the mainstream idiocratic view of "futuristic scenarios:"

To be honest, we didn't find the positive scenarios to be all that interesting. So we decided to consider: what if it all went wrong - even horribly wrong?

One possible future we envisioned was "gridlock". The left-right split of today's politics gave way to a deeply divisive standoff between "naturals" and "enhanceds". Enhanceds used all the tools of science to make life better, with intelligence-enhancing drugs and genetic screening of embryos for positive or negative traits (such as a predisposition to cancer). Naturals, a novel alliance of science sceptics from the old left and religious fundamentalists from the right, rejected enhanceds' "meddling" with nature

The worst world we envisioned we called "No Glue", where the financial, political and even social bonds of society all came apart. We considered a rapid evolution of virtual worlds that completely outpaced the ability of governments and international institutions to cope. Financial markets moved quickly into these virtual worlds because they were a much more efficient way of doing business than in the past. Virtual currencies became the medium of exchange. As nations declined and virtual worlds rose, offline social bonds frayed and people lost trust in each other. War and terrorism declined but the world was plunged into constant low-level conflict.

The latter view of "the future" clearly exposes the lack of "grist" contained in the imaginations of mainstream thinkers. These products of conventional educational brain-binding could not possibly dream up a possible future, in their wildest imagination. Because, frankly, their imaginations are hardly wild at all. This is the problem with modern journalists and academics. No grist. No imagination. They are laying the perfect groundwork for the coming Idiocracy.


The fly in the ointment for the architects of the Idiocracy, is that contrary-minded thinkers have access to advanced technology of communication, computation, and correlation. With modern communication, entire new fields of study can arise and thrive overnight, just as entire new fields of commercially viable enterprise arise virtually overnight.

This is extremely bad news for those who wish to control all sources of instability in a society. Bad news for dictators, bad news for religious control freaks, bad news for ideologues and politically correct thought police.

Stay tuned to the undertow.

Democracy is the Art of Getting Votes from the Poor and Campaign Contributions from the Rich . . .

. . . by promising to protect each from the other. With apologies to Oscar Ameringer. The inherent contradictions in "democracy" should be apparent to anyone who looks closely. It is only when a political system protects citizens from democracy, that democracy becomes workable.

Most people erroneously believe that democracy is equivalent to "freedom," "rule of law," and "constitutional republic." Nothing could be farther than the truth.

The controversy over "basic human rights" brings this issue into the clearest focus. The American concept of human rights is based upon freedom from oppression by a tyrannical government. The US emerged from an era where governments were relatively unconstrained by rules or laws limiting their action against citizens. The US Constitution was an attempt to delimit the rights of governments and the rights of citizens--to clarify the freedoms from arbitrary governmental oppression for the citizens of the new country.

Freedom from arbitrary governmental oppression was the basis of the US Constitution and the founding of the US republic. For over 200 years, such freedom from oppression defined human rights. One way to summarize this view would be: "the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law."

The view of human rights has changed significantly in much of the rest of the world, outside the US. For example: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

The UN definition of human rights is open-ended, and more subject to wildly varying interpretation. In other words, while a constitution based upon the 18th century American view of human rights might survive for many centuries, a constitution based upon the UN view of human rights would be unlikely to survive a single century. Simply put, laws based upon insubstantial enthusiasms can not be adjudicated.

Which brings us to the problem of pure democracies. A pure democracy is not constrained by hard-headed principles of rule of law. A pure democracy very quickly devolves to a "people's democracy", administered by a "servant of the people" such as Idi Amin, Hugo Chavez, or Robert Mugabe, "presidents for life."

It could not be any other way. Fuzzy headed concepts of benevolence toward all, that are not backed up by adjudicable law, inevitably decay to dictatorship. Unconstrained democracy is always dangerously unstable, except on a very small scale--such as the intentional community. But even in the small intentional community, a well thought out set of community by-laws must be strictly adhered to.

Bacterial Genome Transplanted, Next Step--Synthetic Organism?

After replacing DNA in mycoplasma capricolum organism with the chromosome from mycoplasma mycoides, scientists at the Ventner Institute are planning work on a completely synthetic organism.

Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a genomics research facility, transplanted a bacterial chromosome from one type of bacteria into another, and have completely replaced an entire bacterial genome and its expression. The work of Carole Lartigue, Ph.D. and colleagues was published in the latest issue of Science:

The JCVI team devised several key steps to enable the genome transplantation. First, an antibiotic selectable marker gene was added to the M. mycoides LC chromosome to allow for selection of living cells containing the transplanted chromosome. Then the team purified the DNA or chromosome from M. mycoides LC so that it was free from proteins (called naked DNA). This M. mycoides LC chromosome was then transplanted into the M. capricolum cells. After several rounds of cell division, the recipient M. capricolum chromosome disappeared having been replaced by the donor M. mycoides LC chromosome, and the M. capricolum cells took on all the phenotypic characteristics of M. mycoides LC cells.

As a test of the success of the genome transplantation, the team used two methods -- 2D gel electrophoresis and protein sequencing, to prove that all the expressed proteins were now the ones coded for by the M. mycoides LC chromosome. Two sets of antibodies that bound specifically to cell surface proteins from each cell were reacted with transplant cells, to demonstrate that the membrane proteins switch to those dictated by the transplanted chromosome not the recipient cell chromosome. The new, transformed organisms show up as bright blue colonies in images of blots probed with M. mycoides LC specific antibody.

The group chose to work with these species of mycoplasmas for several reasons -- the small genomes of these organisms which make them easier to work with, their lack of cell walls, and the team's experience and expertise with mycoplasmas. The mycoplasmas used in the transplantation experiment are also relatively fast growing, allowing the team to ascertain success of the transplantation sooner than with other species of mycoplasmas.

According to Dr. Lartigue, "While we are excited by the results of our research, we are continuing to perfect and refine our techniques and methods as we move to the next phases and prepare to develop a fully synthetic chromosome."

Source

Synthetic biology is one of many approaches to studying the mechanisms of life. Craig Ventner says that he will create an organism that will solve the energy crisis. Perhaps he will. As long as western civilisation survives the onslaughts of anti-enlightenment thinking, I suspect that organisms that can produce unlimited energy will be the least of achievements from synthetic biology, nano-biology, biologic computing etc.

Because western educational systems do not teach students to use their broad intellectual capacities, most humans--even in the developed world--do not have a clue about the multiple revolutions in scientific discovery that are teetering on the very brink of the activation energy hump. Some students of the singularity believe that the true revolution will require the creation of a friendly superhuman machine intelligence.

Personally, I believe that machine augmentation of human intelligence will be enough--once humans learn to use the intellects they possess. But since the educational establishments are incapable of helping humans learn about their intrinsic capacity, there may be some delay.

Carnivals--One Way to Cover Your Web Interests

We all have particular areas of interest. One of the huge benefits of browsing blogs is the large number of people who may be blogging on an interest of ours, at any given time. Blog carnivals are blog postings that collect exceptional blog entries on particular topics, and post them together in one place. The blog carnival operator browses the blogs so you do not have to. That is the theory. In reality, there is a lot of serendipitous discovery when reading blog carnivals, just as in browsing the web or doing web searches. So if you are avoiding blog carnivals because you think they are too tame, perhaps you should check some of them out occasionally--at least the ones that overlap with your interest set.

Carnival of Space #9

Carnival of Online Education

Personal Development Carnival It should be noted that personal development is the enemy of ideology and established institutions.

All Things Medical Things to look for in everyday life that may mean something, or may not.

Or browse the blog carnival index--watch for the most recent editions of each carnival.

Genesis II Launches Successfully

A Russian rocket boosted Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis II inflatable space habitat into orbit yesterday.

"It was beautiful," Bigelow Aerospace corporate counsel Mike Gold, who attended the launch, told SPACE.com immediately after the Dnepr blastoff. "Genesis 1 is about to have company."

Genesis 2 is a near-twin of Bigelow Aerospace's Genesis 1 module, which launched in July 2006 and remains operational today, but carries a series of enhancements and additional cargo, the Las Vegas, Nevada-based spaceflight firm has said. Both spacecraft are prototypes for future commercial orbital complexes that Bigelow Aerospace, and its founder and president Robert Bigelow, hope to offer for use by private firms and national space agencies.

....The Genesis 2 module sports a similar look as its Genesis 1 predecessor, but carries a suite of new sensors and avionics to monitor and control the spacecraft in orbit. The sensors will watch over internal pressure, temperature, vehicle attitude control and radiation levels, Bigelow Aerospace officials said.

Once in space, the 15-foot (4.4-meter) module is designed to deploy eight solar arrays and expand from its launch width of 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) to a flight diameter of eight feet (2.54 meters). Genesis 2 carries 22 cameras - more than the 13 imagers aboard Genesis 1 - to record scenes within the spacecraft's 406-cubic foot (11.5-cubic meter) volume.

Unlike its predecessor, Genesis 2 also sports a multi-tank system to inflate the module with compressed air. That improvement, the firm has said, adds vital redundancy in the inflation process and allows better control of the craft's gas supplies.

If all goes well, Genesis 2 is expected to have a long orbital life akin to that of Genesis 1, which continues to operate nearly a full year after its July 12, 2006 launch. Bigelow Aerospace officials said the older module may even continue to function through the next eight to 13 years.

Source

Inflatable space habitats may play an ever larger role in space exploration, given the potential launch weight and space savings involved. In a vacuum, and inflatable structure can provide a great deal of strength. Radiation and micro-meteorite protection can be built into the lining of the structure. On a planetary surface, the inflatables can be partially surrounded with soil, providing further protection.

Over time, the sophistication of these habitats for both orbital and planetary structures should grow considerably.

Pharmaceutical Innovation--Squeezing the Last Bastions

For several years, analysts have warned about the decline in innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. When profits of drug companies are held artificially low by government regulation, there will be less money available for R&D.

# For over 100 years, Europe has been a powerhouse of pharmaceutical progress and innovation. Over the last decade, however, Europe has gradually lost its leadership in the pharmaceutical sector, with a steady transfer of its R&D to the US - where policies and market conditions are more favourable to pharmaceutical innovation.
# Key benchmarking indicators show that between 1990 and 2002, R&D investment in United States rose more than fivefold, while in Europe it only grew 2.5 times.
# In 1990, major European research-based companies spent 73% of their worldwide R&D expenditure on the EU territory. In 1999, they spent only 59% on the EU territory. The USA was the main beneficiary of this transfer of R&D activity.
# The latest data on new molecular entities (period 2001-2005) show the predominance of the US which has now become the leading inventor of new molecules in the world (61 against 51 for Europe)
# The top 20 companies worldwide shows the leadership of US companies. In 2005, nine (9) of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world are of American origin (against 8 for Europe).
# US companies significantly increased their share in the world's top selling medicines. On the top 30 worldwide products in 2005, 21 originate from the US against 8 from Europe.
# US companies are more successful in disseminating their new medicines at international level: 70% of the sales of new medicines launched on the world markets during the period 1998-2002 were made in the US, compared to only 18 % in Europe.
# Whereas the European pharmaceutical market was still the world's largest market in 1990 (representing 37.8% of the world market), it now only represents 30% of the world market (compared to 47 % for the North American market).

Source

There is much more at the source above. Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum have been sparring about this issue recently. The basic gist of their argument is that Sullivan wants to keep US politicians from recapitulating the failures in Europe. Drum seems to want to copy Europe's approach exactly.

Government regulations and controls often bring many adverse consequences to a financial market or industry. For those who are committed to ever increasing government control over the marketplace, these adverse consequences are easily ignored and denied.

Economies are like biological ecosystems. It is easy to "overcontrol" an ecosystem, resulting in loss of vitality and diversity. The same is true in economic systems.

Socialists will never understand the issue, because ever increasing control of society is a socialist's lifeblood. For Europe, it may be too late. For most of the Anglosphere, there may still be some time.

Leftist Intolerance Running Rampant At Universities

The University experience has become more about enforcing ideological purity than about teaching students to think clearly and independently.

The latest conflict in the academy between freedom of expression and ethnic and sexual diversity took place at Vassar College recently when minority students called for the banning of a school newspaper called "The Imperialist" because it criticized the creation of special social centers for minority and gay students.

...As is commonly known, events of this kind have been multiplying at universities over the last decades. The New York Times article that reported the incident reminds us of a low moment in 1997 at Cornell when university administrators defended as "symbolic" speech "the burning of conservative newspapers that printed a provocative article." There have been so many instances of this kind in recent years that an organization called the Foundation for Individual Right in Education (FIRE) was established in the nineties to watchdog campus freedoms.

....the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.

....But there has also been a continuing tension between the need to speak what is perceived as the truth and the need to protect minority feelings--between the need to achieve excellence (now known as "elitism") and the need to maintain an illusion of egalitarianism (now known as "political correctness")--and this has inevitably led to some kind of speech suppression.

....Given the history of dissent in the academy, one would have expected that university students and university professors would also have cherished these freedoms, and would also have fought to protect them, but that seems to be less and less the case. In the fifties, the liberties of many universities were suspended under pressure of McCarthyism. Today, they are under siege from their own faculties, administrations, and student bodies.

Source

Those who question the frequency and importance of academic intolerance need to spend some time at the FIRE website. Go through the archives and read the details of the many cases FIRE has undertaken.

At one time, academic freedom and free speech on campus were important to leftists. Now it seems more important to leftists to shut down free speech on campus--in an attempt to create groupthink, clone think--the type of thinking that grew and typified the monstrous genocides of Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, and the other social engineers responsible for forced deaths of tens and hundreds of millions.

Given time to grow, leftist intolerance as is seen on modern university campuses would tend to become like those examples. This becomes particularly clear when one observes the growing alliance between leftist groups and islamist groups that support muslim terror. The fact that such alliances appear on the surface to be contradictory and unworkable does not erase their existence. Expediency is a powerful motive, when two apparently conflicting groups share a common enemy.

Consumer Reports Looks at Nanotechnology

Consumer Reports is a veteran magazine of product reviews for consumers. It is fitting that CR does a story on nanotechnology for consumers, on the doorstep of the nanotechnology age.

Imagine these technological marvels: drugs that seek out and destroy cancer cells, paint that changes color when viewed from different angles, molecular “ink” that encodes millions of pages of information in a square inch, and contact lenses that let you check your blood sugar by just looking in the mirror.

Those and a host of other innovations are already here, or soon will be, thanks to a scientific revolution called nanotechnology, which promises to change our world as profoundly as did electricity and the internal combustion engine.

Nanotech researchers create new materials in two main ways. They can reduce the particles in standard materials to sizes as small as a nanometer, or about one-hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair. At the nanoscale, where the ­mind-bending principles of quantum physics can apply, the characteristics of materials change: Carbon becomes 100 times stronger than steel, aluminum turns highly explosive, and gold melts at room temperature.

In addition, researchers can manipulate individual atoms and molecules, like tiny Lego pieces, to form microscopic tubes, spheres, wires, and films for specific tasks, such as generating electricity or transporting drugs in the body.

Exploiting the vast potential of those discoveries, manufacturers are bringing nanoengineered products to market at breakneck speed, spurred by a torrent of federal funding since 2001 for research and development. About $2.6 trillion worth of goods worldwide are expected to use nanotech by 2014, up from $50 billion in 2006. “Nanotechnology is creating fundamental changes in almost everything on earth,” says Mike Roco, the National Science Foundation’s senior adviser on nanotechnology, “and what we’re seeing now is just a hint of what’s to come."

The story then briefly discusses the dangers of nanotechnology to humans, which is appropriate for a magazine like CR. The problem is that no one truly understands the dangers of nanotechnology, not really. We will probably learn about those as they come up.

Michael Anissimov has looked at these issues at his website, as has Brian Wang. The Lifeboat Foundation likewise has devoted a lot of space to studying such threats.

It is nice for CR to mention this issue to its readers, just to cover the bases. But to really understand the issues, you should start with the websites above, or at The Foresight Institute website.

If Only It Could Fly!

Sure, it can drive on the highway at speeds up to 100 mph, and it can skim the surface of the water at up to 30 mph--pulling a water skier. But for my needs, it should also fly 1500 miles at 250 knots. One more thing--it really should be able to submerge to a depth of 100 meters with an underwater range of 500 miles.

The instrument panel would have to be flat panel computer screen--software transformable between instruments for flying, driving, boating, and submarining.

I feel that I am not really asking for a lot, and I am certain that many of you agree with me.

The Ultimate Thrill Sport

Space diving is like sky diving, except higher, faster, and scarier. The only thing between you and vacuum is your space suit--made to shield you from the heat of re-entry.

This post gives more details.

Jumping out of a plane is scary enough, but jumping out of a spaceship in vacuum? That separates genuine thrillseekers from big talkers. Anyone can buy a ticket from Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin. But can they leave their spaceship at the peak of its trajectory, and return on their own?

It really comes down to the reliability of the space suit/individual re-entry vehicle, does it not?