Mind control so simple even a monkey can do it
Margaret Munro
Canwest News Service
Thursday, May 29, 2008
CREDIT: Courtesy, University of Pittsburgh school of medicine, Reuters
A rhesus monkey named Arthur uses a thought-controlled robotic arm to pick up marshmallows and eat them. (photograph)
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 6&sponsor=
In a remarkable experiment, monkeys have used mind control to get a robotic arm to feed themselves fruit and marshmallows.
The robot, controlled by the animals' thoughts, reaches out for the treat, removes it from a small peg and then pops it into the monkey's mouth.
It works so well the monkeys seem to regard the robotic device as part of their own bodies, say researchers, who hope the technology will one-day enable maimed and paralyzed people to regain control of everyday actions like eating, drinking and combing their hair.
Andrew Schwartz and his team at the University of Pittsburgh, which reports on the monkey experiment in today's edition of the journal Nature, said the experiments are paving the way toward prosthetic devices that "could ultimately achieve arm and hand function at a near-natural level."
Observers agree the work is promising, but caution it will take years to perfect the technology that uses electrodes implanted in the brain to control robotic devices.
"We should not get carried away and leap to the conclusion that neuroprosthetic robots will soon be available at the local rehabilitation clinic," says neuroscientist John Kalaska, at the Universite de Montreal.
But Kalaska says the monkey experiment is "very exciting," and shows so-called "brain-machine interface" technology can do a lot more than move cursors around on computer screens, as shown in earlier research. 0
The two rhesus macaque monkeys involved in the experiments had fine electrode probes implanted into their motor cortex, the brain region where voluntary movement originates as electrical impulses.
Schwartz says it took a few days for the monkeys to learn to use the robot, which they operate while sitting in a chair with their arms gently restrained in sleeves to stop them from grabbing the treats with their own hands.
They quickly got the hang of making the robotic arm retrieve marshmallows, grapes and other fruit. Just by thinking about it they got the arm to reach out, stop and close its thumb-like "gripper" on the treat, remove it from a small peg and bring it back to their mouths, all in one fluid motion.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
Computer trained to read minds
Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, May 30, 2008
A computer has been trained to read people's minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said Thursday.
They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information. This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning
Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.
"The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?" Mitchell said in a telephone interview.
Mitchell's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain scan that can see real-time brain activity.
They calibrated the computer by having nine student volunteers think of 58 different words, while imaging their brain activity. They imaged each of the nine people thinking about the 58 different words, to create a kind of "average" image of a word. Then the test came.
"After we train on the other 58 words, we can say 'Here are two new words you have not seen, celery and airplane.' " The computer was asked to choose which brain image corresponded with which word.
The computer passed the test, predicting when a brain image was taken when a person thought about the word "celery" and when the assigned word was "airplane."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Maggie Fox
Reuters
Friday, May 30, 2008
A computer has been trained to read people's minds by looking at scans of their brains as they thought about specific words, researchers said Thursday.
They hope their study, published in the journal Science, might lead to better understanding of how and where the brain stores information. This might lead to better treatments for language disorders and learning disabilities, said Tom Mitchell of the Machine Learning
Department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped lead the study.
"The question we are trying to get at is one people have been thinking about for centuries, which is: How does the brain organize knowledge?" Mitchell said in a telephone interview.
Mitchell's team used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a type of brain scan that can see real-time brain activity.
They calibrated the computer by having nine student volunteers think of 58 different words, while imaging their brain activity. They imaged each of the nine people thinking about the 58 different words, to create a kind of "average" image of a word. Then the test came.
"After we train on the other 58 words, we can say 'Here are two new words you have not seen, celery and airplane.' " The computer was asked to choose which brain image corresponded with which word.
The computer passed the test, predicting when a brain image was taken when a person thought about the word "celery" and when the assigned word was "airplane."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
"As the pace of history accelerates, developments that occurred over fifty years in my lifetime will happen in fifteen or even five years for your generation." (Speech by His Highness the Aga Khan at the Graduation Ceremony of the Masters of Public Affairs (MPA) Programme at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), 15 June 2007)
June 3, 2008
Findings
The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
By JOHN TIERNEY
Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.
He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.
Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)
“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.
Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.
“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
June 3, 2008
Findings
The Future Is Now? Pretty Soon, at Least
By JOHN TIERNEY
Before we get to Ray Kurzweil’s plan for upgrading the “suboptimal software” in your brain, let me pass on some of the cheery news he brought to the World Science Festival last week in New York.
Do you have trouble sticking to a diet? Have patience. Within 10 years, Dr. Kurzweil explained, there will be a drug that lets you eat whatever you want without gaining weight.
Worried about greenhouse gas emissions? Have faith. Solar power may look terribly uneconomical at the moment, but with the exponential progress being made in nanoengineering, Dr. Kurzweil calculates that it’ll be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in just five years, and that within 20 years all our energy will come from clean sources.
Are you depressed by the prospect of dying? Well, if you can hang on another 15 years, your life expectancy will keep rising every year faster than you’re aging. And then, before the century is even half over, you can be around for the Singularity, that revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software.
At least that’s Dr. Kurzweil’s calculation. It may sound too good to be true, but even his critics acknowledge he’s not your ordinary sci-fi fantasist. He is a futurist with a track record and enough credibility for the National Academy of Engineering to publish his sunny forecast for solar energy.
He makes his predictions using what he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, a concept he illustrated at the festival with a history of his own inventions for the blind. In 1976, when he pioneered a device that could scan books and read them aloud, it was the size of a washing machine.
Two decades ago he predicted that “early in the 21st century” blind people would be able to read anything anywhere using a handheld device. In 2002 he narrowed the arrival date to 2008. On Thursday night at the festival, he pulled out a new gadget the size of a cellphone, and when he pointed it at the brochure for the science festival, it had no trouble reading the text aloud.
This invention, Dr. Kurzweil said, was no harder to anticipate than some of the predictions he made in the late 1980s, like the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s and a computer chess champion by 1998. (He was off by a year — Deep Blue’s chess victory came in 1997.)
“Certain aspects of technology follow amazingly predictable trajectories,” he said, and showed a graph of computing power starting with the first electromechanical machines more than a century ago. At first the machines’ power doubled every three years; then in midcentury the doubling came every two years (the rate that inspired Moore’s Law); now it takes only about a year.
Dr. Kurzweil has other graphs showing a century of exponential growth in the number of patents issued, the spread of telephones, the money spent on education. One graph of technological changes goes back millions of years, starting with stone tools and accelerating through the development of agriculture, writing, the Industrial Revolution and computers. (For details, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
Now, he sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.
This serene confidence is not shared by neuroscientists like Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, who discussed future brains with Dr. Kurzweil at the festival. It might be possible to create a thinking, empathetic machine, Dr. Ramachandran said, but it might prove too difficult to reverse-engineer the brain’s circuitry because it evolved so haphazardly.
“My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer,” Dr. Ramachandran said. “You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”
Dr. Kurzweil’s predictions come under intense scrutiny in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, which devotes its current issue to the Singularity. Some of the experts writing in the issue endorse Dr. Kurzweil’s belief that conscious, intelligent beings can be created, but most think it will take more than a few decades.
He is accustomed to this sort of pessimism and readily acknowledges how complicated the brain is. But if experts in neurology and artificial intelligence (or solar energy or medicine) don’t buy his optimistic predictions, he says, that’s because exponential upward curves are so deceptively gradual at first.
“Scientists imagine they’ll keep working at the present pace,” he told me after his speech. “They make linear extrapolations from the past. When it took years to sequence the first 1 percent of the human genome, they worried they’d never finish, but they were right on schedule for an exponential curve. If you reach 1 percent and keep doubling your growth every year, you’ll hit 100 percent in just seven years.”
Dr. Kurzweil is so confident in these curves that he has made a $10,000 bet with Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus software. By 2029, Dr. Kurzweil wagers, a computer will pass the Turing Test by carrying on a conversation that is indistinguishable from a human’s.
I’m not as confident those graphs are going to hold up for fields besides computer science, so I’d be leery of betting on a date. But if I had to take sides in the 2029 wager, I’d put my money on Dr. Kurzweil. He could be right once again about a revolution coming sooner than expected. And I’d hate to bet against the chance to be around for this one.
Martian dirt scooped for salt study
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 1&sponsor=
Dan Whitcomb
Reuters
Saturday, June 07, 2008
CREDIT: NASA, Reuters
Soil is scraped up from the surface of Mars with a robotic arm. NASA scientists will examine the sample for signs of life on the red planet. (photo)
The Phoenix lander has scooped up its first, cup-sized sample of Martian dirt for analysis, kicking off the spacecraft's primary science mission of searching for water or signs of life on the red planet.
The small sample includes a large Martian dirt clod crusted with white matter that intrigues NASA scientists because they believe it could be salt left behind by evaporated water or ice.
The soil was scraped from the surface of Mars by the lander's robotic arm Thursday and will be deposited into the craft's Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) for study over the next week or so.
"This is a really important occasion for us," Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith said at a briefing. "We are very curious whether the ice we think is just under the surface has melted and modified the soil."
The analysis will allow scientists to determine how much water is in the soil and what minerals make up the dirt at the arctic circle of Mars, where Phoenix touched down on May 25.
"Salt would be very interesting because that's what is left behind as water evaporates. That would be a very nice discovery, particularly if we knew exactly which salts they were," Smith said.
"This looks like a really good sample for us. TEGA's instruments are particularly sensitive to any water getting into the oven."
The scientists are eager to find evidence of water on the surface of Mars because they are trying to determine if the red planet has ever supported life.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 1&sponsor=
Dan Whitcomb
Reuters
Saturday, June 07, 2008
CREDIT: NASA, Reuters
Soil is scraped up from the surface of Mars with a robotic arm. NASA scientists will examine the sample for signs of life on the red planet. (photo)
The Phoenix lander has scooped up its first, cup-sized sample of Martian dirt for analysis, kicking off the spacecraft's primary science mission of searching for water or signs of life on the red planet.
The small sample includes a large Martian dirt clod crusted with white matter that intrigues NASA scientists because they believe it could be salt left behind by evaporated water or ice.
The soil was scraped from the surface of Mars by the lander's robotic arm Thursday and will be deposited into the craft's Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) for study over the next week or so.
"This is a really important occasion for us," Phoenix principal investigator Peter Smith said at a briefing. "We are very curious whether the ice we think is just under the surface has melted and modified the soil."
The analysis will allow scientists to determine how much water is in the soil and what minerals make up the dirt at the arctic circle of Mars, where Phoenix touched down on May 25.
"Salt would be very interesting because that's what is left behind as water evaporates. That would be a very nice discovery, particularly if we knew exactly which salts they were," Smith said.
"This looks like a really good sample for us. TEGA's instruments are particularly sensitive to any water getting into the oven."
The scientists are eager to find evidence of water on the surface of Mars because they are trying to determine if the red planet has ever supported life.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
High energy prices may lead to an invention that changes everything
Dan Gardner
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, June 20, 2008
The easily obtained supplies were running out. To get more of the energy source that fuelled a nation, workers had to explore and dig to unprecedented depths. Costs rose steadily and some experts were certain there was no solution. Progress would halt. In the future lay crisis and collapse.
The year is 1712. The nation is England. The energy source running dangerously low is coal. I didn't mention this at the beginning lest the reader think these facts are somehow obscure or irrelevant to the struggle for energy we face today. They are neither.
It wasn't England's first energy crisis. That came in the 13th century, when population growth and deforestation led to a shortage of wood. The Black Death of the 14th century brought a brief respite, but steadily increasing population and shrinking forests in the centuries that followed forced the English to shift to a much inferior source of energy: coal.
When burned, coal gave off an acrid smoke that blackened lungs and walls and tainted the taste of food. It was even unsuitable in smelting furnaces.
But with firewood having become an expensive commodity, Englishmen made do. They devised new technologies and techniques that reduced or eliminated coal's many failings. By the beginning of the 18th century, the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution could be discerned. But then, disaster. The seams of coal lying near the surface were dug to extinction. Miners had to burrow deep into the Earth -- so deep the mines flooded with water.
Teams of horses hitched to pumps could drain the mines, barely, but the cost of pumping was enormous and the price of the coal they produced soared. Just as an era of cheap energy passed when wood became scarce, so did the era of cheap coal. But not for long. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented a clanking, belching, hissing machine -- fuelled by coal -- that sucked water out of the mines at a fraction of the cost of horse-powered pumps. Flooded mines re-opened. New mines were sunk to depths previously unimagined. The era of cheap energy returned. And it brought the Industrial Revolution with it.
Today, of course, we are told the era of cheap energy, cheap oil in particular, has passed. Again. And this time we are told it ain't ever coming back. The more excitable doomsayers foresee the end of the world as we know it -- whether due to gentle decline or apocalyptic collapse. I don't buy it. The history of civilization is the history of people running into walls and figuring out how to climb over, go around or tunnel under. We are an inventive species.
The most important thing to remember about the energy crisis is that there is no energy shortage. We are awash in energy. The Earth's core is a mighty furnace. Air and water swirl with unfathomable kinetic energy. In a single minute, enough solar energy hits the planet to fuel all of humanity's needs for a year. What we lack is cheap energy. A large, easily accessed, conventional oil deposit is a wonderful thing because it delivers a huge amount of energy in exchange for the very modest energy needed to pump the oil and put it to work. As oil companies drill in ever-more remote locations, the energy input required to get oil out of the ground and into the economy rises. The same is all the more true for unconventional forms of oil, particularly Alberta's oilsands.
In 1712, there was plenty of coal. The problem was getting water out of the mines at a cost that didn't turn coal into an expensive energy source. With the prospect of great profit driving them on, investors backed Thomas Newcomen's work and the solution was found.
With oil topping $100 a barrel, and $200 a barrel a realistic possibility, there are spectacular profits to be had by those who develop new forms of cheap energy. Venture capital is gushing into energy research as investors search for this era's Thomas Newcomen.
Schemes, dreams, visions and inventions are leaping from mind to paper to reality. Lots of what's coming is familiar, whether it's improvements on solar energy, or hydrogen fuel cells, or wind turbines. In the skies, engineers are working on massive kite-like arrays, which would capture the relentless energy of high-altitude winds. In the water, ever-bigger and more efficient turbines are being driven by the surge of tides and currents.
A Canadian company has devised a process that sucks oil out of the contaminated tailings ponds left behind by oilsands development -- cleaning the water and delivering a new energy source at the same time.
Biofuels fell out of favour when they were blamed for diverting food crops to fuel tanks, but the next generation of biofuels won't use corn or sugarcane. It will use grasses to produce ethanol -- or weeds, wood chips, or almost any plant matter imaginable. One British researcher is working on a process that would see farms dump straw and other refuse into a vat, which would then be processed and shipped straight to the refinery. Then there's my personal favourite: A company called LS9 feeds wood chips or some other plant matter to genetically engineered bacteria and the bugs excrete crude oil. It would be "renewable petroleum." The process even promises to be carbon negative -- meaning it would suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits.
Or maybe it won't work. Who knows? The point is that countless brilliant minds backed by powerful funders are exploring a plethora of possibilities. Most will fail and be forgotten. But not all. The hardships inflicted by rising energy costs are undeniable. Job losses. Declining income. Rising poverty. It's all too real. But history is also likely to record this was a time when someone invented something that changed everything.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Dan Gardner
The Ottawa Citizen
Friday, June 20, 2008
The easily obtained supplies were running out. To get more of the energy source that fuelled a nation, workers had to explore and dig to unprecedented depths. Costs rose steadily and some experts were certain there was no solution. Progress would halt. In the future lay crisis and collapse.
The year is 1712. The nation is England. The energy source running dangerously low is coal. I didn't mention this at the beginning lest the reader think these facts are somehow obscure or irrelevant to the struggle for energy we face today. They are neither.
It wasn't England's first energy crisis. That came in the 13th century, when population growth and deforestation led to a shortage of wood. The Black Death of the 14th century brought a brief respite, but steadily increasing population and shrinking forests in the centuries that followed forced the English to shift to a much inferior source of energy: coal.
When burned, coal gave off an acrid smoke that blackened lungs and walls and tainted the taste of food. It was even unsuitable in smelting furnaces.
But with firewood having become an expensive commodity, Englishmen made do. They devised new technologies and techniques that reduced or eliminated coal's many failings. By the beginning of the 18th century, the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution could be discerned. But then, disaster. The seams of coal lying near the surface were dug to extinction. Miners had to burrow deep into the Earth -- so deep the mines flooded with water.
Teams of horses hitched to pumps could drain the mines, barely, but the cost of pumping was enormous and the price of the coal they produced soared. Just as an era of cheap energy passed when wood became scarce, so did the era of cheap coal. But not for long. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen invented a clanking, belching, hissing machine -- fuelled by coal -- that sucked water out of the mines at a fraction of the cost of horse-powered pumps. Flooded mines re-opened. New mines were sunk to depths previously unimagined. The era of cheap energy returned. And it brought the Industrial Revolution with it.
Today, of course, we are told the era of cheap energy, cheap oil in particular, has passed. Again. And this time we are told it ain't ever coming back. The more excitable doomsayers foresee the end of the world as we know it -- whether due to gentle decline or apocalyptic collapse. I don't buy it. The history of civilization is the history of people running into walls and figuring out how to climb over, go around or tunnel under. We are an inventive species.
The most important thing to remember about the energy crisis is that there is no energy shortage. We are awash in energy. The Earth's core is a mighty furnace. Air and water swirl with unfathomable kinetic energy. In a single minute, enough solar energy hits the planet to fuel all of humanity's needs for a year. What we lack is cheap energy. A large, easily accessed, conventional oil deposit is a wonderful thing because it delivers a huge amount of energy in exchange for the very modest energy needed to pump the oil and put it to work. As oil companies drill in ever-more remote locations, the energy input required to get oil out of the ground and into the economy rises. The same is all the more true for unconventional forms of oil, particularly Alberta's oilsands.
In 1712, there was plenty of coal. The problem was getting water out of the mines at a cost that didn't turn coal into an expensive energy source. With the prospect of great profit driving them on, investors backed Thomas Newcomen's work and the solution was found.
With oil topping $100 a barrel, and $200 a barrel a realistic possibility, there are spectacular profits to be had by those who develop new forms of cheap energy. Venture capital is gushing into energy research as investors search for this era's Thomas Newcomen.
Schemes, dreams, visions and inventions are leaping from mind to paper to reality. Lots of what's coming is familiar, whether it's improvements on solar energy, or hydrogen fuel cells, or wind turbines. In the skies, engineers are working on massive kite-like arrays, which would capture the relentless energy of high-altitude winds. In the water, ever-bigger and more efficient turbines are being driven by the surge of tides and currents.
A Canadian company has devised a process that sucks oil out of the contaminated tailings ponds left behind by oilsands development -- cleaning the water and delivering a new energy source at the same time.
Biofuels fell out of favour when they were blamed for diverting food crops to fuel tanks, but the next generation of biofuels won't use corn or sugarcane. It will use grasses to produce ethanol -- or weeds, wood chips, or almost any plant matter imaginable. One British researcher is working on a process that would see farms dump straw and other refuse into a vat, which would then be processed and shipped straight to the refinery. Then there's my personal favourite: A company called LS9 feeds wood chips or some other plant matter to genetically engineered bacteria and the bugs excrete crude oil. It would be "renewable petroleum." The process even promises to be carbon negative -- meaning it would suck more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than it emits.
Or maybe it won't work. Who knows? The point is that countless brilliant minds backed by powerful funders are exploring a plethora of possibilities. Most will fail and be forgotten. But not all. The hardships inflicted by rising energy costs are undeniable. Job losses. Declining income. Rising poverty. It's all too real. But history is also likely to record this was a time when someone invented something that changed everything.
[email protected]
© The Calgary Herald 2008
June 25, 2008, 11:12 pm
A Genetic Quest for Better Chocolate
By Steve Lohr
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/2 ... ?th&emc=th
(Credit: Ruby Washington/The New York Times)(UPDATED 6/26/08 10:33 a.m.| Corrected reference to cocoa trees’ lack of presence in the United States. They do grow in Hawaii.)
At a time when world food prices are soaring and the hungry are protesting in the streets in developing nations, the challenges of growing cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, might seem no great priority.
But Mars, the giant candy maker (think M&M’s and Snickers bars), takes cocoa very seriously. Tropical diseases, pests and climate change, Mars says, are among the threats — not only to the globe’s collective sweet tooth but also to the livelihood of more than 6.5 million cocoa growers, mostly families working their small farms, about 70 percent in Africa.
So to protect its long-term supplies and help sustain cocoa farmers, Mars approached researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture and then sought big-time computing firepower at I.B.M. Labs. The result, to be formally announced Thursday, is a five-year project to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome.
The goal is to deploy the most advanced tools of computational biology to discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor. The potential payoff is not just discovery but also faster improvements in cocoa crops, said Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars, in a telephone interview Wednesday from Rome, where he was attending a conference at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Computational biologists and supercomputers can drastically accelerate the pace at which promising new strains of cocoa trees come out of the greenhouse, from the traditional length of five to seven years down to 18 months or so, Dr. Shapiro said.
Isidore Rigoutsos, manager of the bioinformatics and pattern discovery group at I.B.M. Labs, explained, “You still need the basic biology and work in the greenhouse, but we can help plant experts zoom in. At the end of the day, the desirable traits being sought in cocoa are all genetic sequences.”
CORRECTED|Cocoa trees, to be sure, do not grow in the mainland United States (they do grow in Hawaii). But the government’s agriculture agency has a team of experts in breeding tropical plants, and for every dollar of cocoa imported, between one and two dollars of domestic agricultural products are used in making chocolate products. Mars, for example, is the nation’s largest purchaser of whole peanuts, as well as a big buyer of milk products and sweeteners.
The results of the research will be freely available to anyone through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture at:
www.pipra.org
A Genetic Quest for Better Chocolate
By Steve Lohr
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/2 ... ?th&emc=th
(Credit: Ruby Washington/The New York Times)(UPDATED 6/26/08 10:33 a.m.| Corrected reference to cocoa trees’ lack of presence in the United States. They do grow in Hawaii.)
At a time when world food prices are soaring and the hungry are protesting in the streets in developing nations, the challenges of growing cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, might seem no great priority.
But Mars, the giant candy maker (think M&M’s and Snickers bars), takes cocoa very seriously. Tropical diseases, pests and climate change, Mars says, are among the threats — not only to the globe’s collective sweet tooth but also to the livelihood of more than 6.5 million cocoa growers, mostly families working their small farms, about 70 percent in Africa.
So to protect its long-term supplies and help sustain cocoa farmers, Mars approached researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture and then sought big-time computing firepower at I.B.M. Labs. The result, to be formally announced Thursday, is a five-year project to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome.
The goal is to deploy the most advanced tools of computational biology to discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor. The potential payoff is not just discovery but also faster improvements in cocoa crops, said Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars, in a telephone interview Wednesday from Rome, where he was attending a conference at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Computational biologists and supercomputers can drastically accelerate the pace at which promising new strains of cocoa trees come out of the greenhouse, from the traditional length of five to seven years down to 18 months or so, Dr. Shapiro said.
Isidore Rigoutsos, manager of the bioinformatics and pattern discovery group at I.B.M. Labs, explained, “You still need the basic biology and work in the greenhouse, but we can help plant experts zoom in. At the end of the day, the desirable traits being sought in cocoa are all genetic sequences.”
CORRECTED|Cocoa trees, to be sure, do not grow in the mainland United States (they do grow in Hawaii). But the government’s agriculture agency has a team of experts in breeding tropical plants, and for every dollar of cocoa imported, between one and two dollars of domestic agricultural products are used in making chocolate products. Mars, for example, is the nation’s largest purchaser of whole peanuts, as well as a big buyer of milk products and sweeteners.
The results of the research will be freely available to anyone through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture at:
www.pipra.org
There is a wonderful and interesting video showing the CT scan of a heart linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/busin ... ?th&emc=th
June 29, 2008
Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart
By ALEX BERENSON and REED ABELSON
A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart?
The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue.
Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests. And they expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.
Dr. Rosenblatt worried that he and other doctors in his clinic would feel pressure to give scans to people who might not need them in order to pay for the equipment, which uses a series of X-rays to produce a composite picture of a beating heart.
“If you have ownership of the machine,” he later recalled, “you’re going to want to utilize the machine.” He said no to the offer.
And yet, more than 1,000 other cardiologists and hospitals have installed CT scanners like the one Dr. Rosenblatt turned down. Many are promoting heart scans to patients with radio, Internet and newspaper ads. Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey have also extolled the scans, which were given to more than 150,000 people in this country last year at a cost exceeding $100 million. Their use is expected to soar through the next decade. But there is scant evidence that the scans benefit most patients.
Increasing use of the scans, formally known as CT angiograms, is part of a much larger trend in American medicine. A faith in innovation, often driven by financial incentives, encourages American doctors and hospitals to adopt new technologies even without proof that they work better than older techniques. Patient advocacy groups and some doctors are clamoring for such evidence. But the story of the CT angiogram is a sobering reminder of the forces that overwhelm such efforts, making it very difficult to rein in a new technology long enough to determine whether its benefits are worth its costs.
Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.
No one knows exactly how much money is spent on unnecessary care. But a Rand Corporation study estimated that one-third or more of the care that patients in this country receive could be of little value. If that is so, hundreds of billions of dollars each year are being wasted on superfluous treatments.
At a time when Americans are being forced to pay a growing share of their medical bills and when access to medical care has become a major political issue for states, Congress and the presidential candidates, health care experts say it will be far harder to hold down premiums and expand insurance coverage unless money is spent more wisely.
The problem is not that newer treatments never work. It is that once they become available, they are often used indiscriminately, in the absence of studies to determine which patients they will benefit.
Some new treatments, like the cancer drug Gleevec and implantable heart defibrillators, undoubtedly save lives, contributing to the United States’ reputation for medical breakthroughs. But others — like artificial spinal disks, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to implant but have not been shown to reduce back pain in many patients, and Vytorin, a new cholesterol drug that costs 20 times as much as older medicines but has not been proved superior — have been criticized for not justifying their costs.
And sometimes, the new technologies prove harmful. Physicians were stunned, for example, when clinical trials showed last year that expensive anemia medicines might actually hasten death in kidney and cancer patients. Such drugs are used more widely in the United States than elsewhere.
“We have too many situations where we thought we knew what the answer was and it didn’t turn out like everyone thought,” said Dr. Mark Hlatky, a cardiologist and professor of health research and policy at Stanford University.
A Tool of Dubious Value
More in the link provided in the beginning of the post
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/busin ... ?th&emc=th
June 29, 2008
Weighing the Costs of a CT Scan’s Look Inside the Heart
By ALEX BERENSON and REED ABELSON
A group of cardiologists recently had a proposition for Dr. Andrew Rosenblatt, who runs a busy heart clinic in San Francisco: Would he join them in buying a CT scanner, a $1 million machine that produces detailed images of the heart?
The scanner would give Dr. Rosenblatt a new way to look inside patients’ arteries, enable his clinic to market itself as having the latest medical technology and provide extra revenue.
Although tempted, Dr. Rosenblatt was reluctant. CT scans, which are typically billed at $500 to $1,500, have never been proved in large medical studies to be better than older or cheaper tests. And they expose patients to large doses of radiation, equivalent to at least several hundred X-rays, creating a small but real cancer risk.
Dr. Rosenblatt worried that he and other doctors in his clinic would feel pressure to give scans to people who might not need them in order to pay for the equipment, which uses a series of X-rays to produce a composite picture of a beating heart.
“If you have ownership of the machine,” he later recalled, “you’re going to want to utilize the machine.” He said no to the offer.
And yet, more than 1,000 other cardiologists and hospitals have installed CT scanners like the one Dr. Rosenblatt turned down. Many are promoting heart scans to patients with radio, Internet and newspaper ads. Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey have also extolled the scans, which were given to more than 150,000 people in this country last year at a cost exceeding $100 million. Their use is expected to soar through the next decade. But there is scant evidence that the scans benefit most patients.
Increasing use of the scans, formally known as CT angiograms, is part of a much larger trend in American medicine. A faith in innovation, often driven by financial incentives, encourages American doctors and hospitals to adopt new technologies even without proof that they work better than older techniques. Patient advocacy groups and some doctors are clamoring for such evidence. But the story of the CT angiogram is a sobering reminder of the forces that overwhelm such efforts, making it very difficult to rein in a new technology long enough to determine whether its benefits are worth its costs.
Some medical experts say the American devotion to the newest, most expensive technology is an important reason that the United States spends much more on health care than other industrialized nations — more than $2.2 trillion in 2007, an estimated $7,500 a person, about twice the average in other countries — without providing better care.
No one knows exactly how much money is spent on unnecessary care. But a Rand Corporation study estimated that one-third or more of the care that patients in this country receive could be of little value. If that is so, hundreds of billions of dollars each year are being wasted on superfluous treatments.
At a time when Americans are being forced to pay a growing share of their medical bills and when access to medical care has become a major political issue for states, Congress and the presidential candidates, health care experts say it will be far harder to hold down premiums and expand insurance coverage unless money is spent more wisely.
The problem is not that newer treatments never work. It is that once they become available, they are often used indiscriminately, in the absence of studies to determine which patients they will benefit.
Some new treatments, like the cancer drug Gleevec and implantable heart defibrillators, undoubtedly save lives, contributing to the United States’ reputation for medical breakthroughs. But others — like artificial spinal disks, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to implant but have not been shown to reduce back pain in many patients, and Vytorin, a new cholesterol drug that costs 20 times as much as older medicines but has not been proved superior — have been criticized for not justifying their costs.
And sometimes, the new technologies prove harmful. Physicians were stunned, for example, when clinical trials showed last year that expensive anemia medicines might actually hasten death in kidney and cancer patients. Such drugs are used more widely in the United States than elsewhere.
“We have too many situations where we thought we knew what the answer was and it didn’t turn out like everyone thought,” said Dr. Mark Hlatky, a cardiologist and professor of health research and policy at Stanford University.
A Tool of Dubious Value
More in the link provided in the beginning of the post
July 1, 2008
Scientists Identify the Brain’s Activity Hub
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/healt ... nted=print
The outer layer of the brain, the reasoning, planning and self-aware region known as the cerebral cortex, has a central clearinghouse of activity below the crown of the head that is widely connected to more-specialized regions in a large network similar to a subway map, scientists reported Monday.
The new report, published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology, provides the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior. The paper also provides a striking demonstration of how new imaging techniques focused on the brain’s white matter — the connections between cells, rather than the neurons themselves — are filling in a dimension of human brain function that has been all but dark.
In previous studies, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valleys of neural activity when people are doing various things, like making decisions, reacting to frightening images or reliving painful memories. But these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved — about which brain regions speak to one another and when. Previous estimates of network structure, based on such imaging, have been sketchy.
The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine.
“This is just about the coolest paper I’ve seen in a long time, and forward-looking in terms of where the science is going,” said Dr. Marcus E. Raichle, a professor of neurology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the research. He added, “They’ve found in the brain what looks like a hub map of the airline system for the United States.”
In the study, a collaboration that included the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Harvard and Indiana University, researchers studied the brains of five healthy male volunteers using a new technique called diffusion spectrum imaging. The technique allows scientists to estimate the density and orientation of the connections running through specific brain locations. Using a computer analysis of the results, the researchers ranked the busiest spots on the cortex in order, by the number of connections they had. Finally, they plotted those spots back onto the brain maps of the five volunteers.
The hubs clustered in each man’s brain, in a region about the size of a palm, were centered atop the cortex like a small skullcap. “We haven’t had a comprehensive map of the brain showing what is connected to what, and you really need the whole thing before you can ask certain questions, like what happens if activity is clogged up at one of the hubs? How does that effect function?” said Olaf Sporns, a psychologist at Indiana University and the senior author of the paper. His co-authors were Patric Hagmann, Leila Cammoun, Xavier Gigandet, Reto Meuli, Christopher J. Honey and Van J. Wedeen.
To check their findings, the researchers performed a standard functional M.R.I. scan on the participants, measuring which areas of their gray matter — which bundles of their brain cells — were most active when the men were at rest. Sure enough, the same areas overlapped with the network hubs that the group had already identified. In previous studies, activation in these areas has been associated with wandering thought and acute self-awareness. In the jargon of the field, these areas “run hot” continuously during waking hours and consume far more energy than more peripheral areas.
Dr. Sporns said continued research should help produce a complete and detailed neural wiring diagram, what he called the “connectome” of the brain. “We hope we can get to a place where we have, in effect, a brain simulator, in the same way we have computer models that can simulate the climate,” he said, “so we can simulate activation patterns we see in clinical cases,” like psychiatric problems and brain injuries.
****
July 1, 2008
A Conversation With James P. Evans
Biologist Teaches the Nation’s Judges About Genetics
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
James P. Evans, a physician and molecular biologist, teaches genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He also directs the school’s Clinical Cancer Genetics Services, counseling patients about genetic testing. On weekends Dr. Evans, under the auspices of the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center — a Congressionally mandated program — teaches the nation’s judges about genetics. Dr. Evans, 49, was interviewed recently in New York; he had come to speak at the World Science Festival.
Q. WHY DO JUDGES NEED TO KNOW THEIR GENETICS?
A. Because they are frequently trying cases that hinge on genetics. And many don’t know what DNA is. They may have a rough idea. But they don’t understand the fine points.
If they sit in a criminal court, they are increasingly seeing homicide and sexual assault cases where DNA evidence is used to identify defendants. In the civil court, they are seeing cases on who owns genetic information and on whether environment or a genetic disposition caused cancer in a plaintiff. Cancer is the largest single cause of medical negligence suits — and it is, at its most fundamental level, a genetic disease. These jurists are seeing cases where the question is, “Was this person’s cancer triggered by environmental factors, or was it caused by a genetic predisposition?”
Many of the judges say that they fear their lack of scientific knowledge could cause them to make mistakes. They say they don’t know how to weigh DNA evidence. They are afraid of being snookered by expert witnesses.
Q. ARE JUDGES THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE AFRAID OF SCIENCE?
A. This is a huge issue. Yes! A lot of judges report that they did prelaw in college because it did not involve science. One of my favorite judges, a brilliant man, is fond of telling people he “flunked science in kindergarten.” So in these workshops, I think of myself as a newfangled type of science teacher, instructing extremely smart and distinguished adults in science fundamentals.
Q. HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
A. I try to demystify all of science and, specifically, genetics. I begin by telling them exactly what DNA is, and how we find it. We do a mini-lab where they isolate their own DNA and look at it. When they can hold it in their hands, the mystique melts. Then, I describe how we use DNA to identify a unique individual. We talk about the pitfalls of doing DNA typing. Once we have the basics down, we do a practice court, where we make up fact patterns in hypothetic cases that might involve DNA. We ask the judges to speculate on how they might use DNA evidence and why. We might go: “You’ve got a murder case where some DNA from a suspect is found in the trunk of a victim’s car. Under what conditions could this be evidence of guilt?”
Q. AND THE ANSWER IS?
A. If the defendant was a friend of the victim, they might have been lifting something into the car trunk and shed some DNA there. But if the defendant didn’t know the victim at all, score one for the prosecution. Humans shed DNA easily. Our testing is highly sensitive. If it’s in a place it shouldn’t be — let’s say in the vagina of a rape victim or at a crime scene — it can be incriminating.
I think the judges appreciate the hands-on nature of our course. After a recent workshop, a judge asked me, “Exactly how much DNA is a nanogram’s worth?” When I informed him that the DNA in our test tube was 10,000 times more than a nanogram, he was relieved. He’d just decided a case that hinged on the quantity of DNA found at a crime scene. By working with his own DNA, he could see he’d rendered the right decision.
Q. BEHAVIORAL GENETICS IS THE HOT NEW AREA OF STUDY. ARE CRIMINAL COURT JUDGES BEGINNING TO SEE “MY GENES MADE ME DO IT” DEFENSES?
A. Yup. We know some antisocial behaviors — drug addiction, alcoholism, a propensity toward violence — have genetic components. Therefore, one can easily imagine things reaching a certain level of predisposition and a lawyer going, “My client is not responsible for his actions any more than someone mentally ill is responsible.”
In reality, those claims have not made it very far — yet. One judge, after learning about behavioral genetics, said to me, “If this proves out, our entire conception of culpability in crime and punishment will have to be reconsidered.”
Q. DO SCIENTISTS AND JUDGES HAVE MUCH IN COMMON?
A. Well, a scientist almost never says anything absolutely. Everything is a theory, to be disproved or adjusted later on. Judges worry a lot about the certainty of conclusions, too. Judges are used to thinking of truth as an elusive concept. A lot of judges, when you bring up “the truth,” they roll their eyes. They say, “I don’t know what to say about truth. I do know about probabilities.”
Q. AND ISN’T THAT WHAT YOU DO — WORK WITH PROBABILITIES?
A. Yup. That’s what a geneticist does. We’re all about probability. In my medical genetics clinic, when I counsel someone who’s had a gene test, I might say: “The BRCA2 mutation you were found to carry confers about a 50 to 85 percent risk of breast cancer and a 25 percent risk of ovarian cancer.”
Q. THAT’S A HUGE LIKELIHOOD. WHAT ELSE DO YOU TELL HER?
A. I say: “You have two main choices. You can engage in heightened surveillance, but of course that isn’t actually prevention. The most effective strategy is prophylactic mastectomy and removal of your ovaries, which reduce your risk of those cancers by over 90 percent.”
Q. THAT’S A HORRIBLE CHOICE.
A. But it’s all we’ve got right now. I can understand why many women wouldn’t opt for it. Those who opt for it tend to be women who’ve seen a lot of family members die of breast cancer.
Listen, when it comes to genetic medicine, the only point to testing is to obtain information you can act on. Right now, there are only a handful of genetic diseases which we can do something to prevent. BRCA2 breast and ovarian cancers are among them. For other diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, the only value to knowing is for life-planning. There’s no prevention.
Q. DO YOU LIKE YOUR WORK?
A. I sure do. With my patients, I can take a full hour with each one and show them how their genes might predict their future. An hour with an individual patient is a huge luxury these days, but it can save lives. With the judges, I feel gratified when a few of them tell me, “Gosh, now I understand what DNA is.” What makes me feel even better is when one of them says, “I hated science in school, but genetics sounds real beautiful.”
Scientists Identify the Brain’s Activity Hub
By BENEDICT CAREY
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/healt ... nted=print
The outer layer of the brain, the reasoning, planning and self-aware region known as the cerebral cortex, has a central clearinghouse of activity below the crown of the head that is widely connected to more-specialized regions in a large network similar to a subway map, scientists reported Monday.
The new report, published in the free-access online journal PLoS Biology, provides the most complete rough draft to date of the cortex’s electrical architecture, the cluster of interconnected nodes and hubs that help guide thinking and behavior. The paper also provides a striking demonstration of how new imaging techniques focused on the brain’s white matter — the connections between cells, rather than the neurons themselves — are filling in a dimension of human brain function that has been all but dark.
In previous studies, scientists have used magnetic resonance imaging to identify peaks and valleys of neural activity when people are doing various things, like making decisions, reacting to frightening images or reliving painful memories. But these studies, while provocative, revealed virtually nothing about the underlying neural networks involved — about which brain regions speak to one another and when. Previous estimates of network structure, based on such imaging, have been sketchy.
The new findings, while not conclusive, give scientists what is essentially a wiring diagram that they can test and refine.
“This is just about the coolest paper I’ve seen in a long time, and forward-looking in terms of where the science is going,” said Dr. Marcus E. Raichle, a professor of neurology and radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the research. He added, “They’ve found in the brain what looks like a hub map of the airline system for the United States.”
In the study, a collaboration that included the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Harvard and Indiana University, researchers studied the brains of five healthy male volunteers using a new technique called diffusion spectrum imaging. The technique allows scientists to estimate the density and orientation of the connections running through specific brain locations. Using a computer analysis of the results, the researchers ranked the busiest spots on the cortex in order, by the number of connections they had. Finally, they plotted those spots back onto the brain maps of the five volunteers.
The hubs clustered in each man’s brain, in a region about the size of a palm, were centered atop the cortex like a small skullcap. “We haven’t had a comprehensive map of the brain showing what is connected to what, and you really need the whole thing before you can ask certain questions, like what happens if activity is clogged up at one of the hubs? How does that effect function?” said Olaf Sporns, a psychologist at Indiana University and the senior author of the paper. His co-authors were Patric Hagmann, Leila Cammoun, Xavier Gigandet, Reto Meuli, Christopher J. Honey and Van J. Wedeen.
To check their findings, the researchers performed a standard functional M.R.I. scan on the participants, measuring which areas of their gray matter — which bundles of their brain cells — were most active when the men were at rest. Sure enough, the same areas overlapped with the network hubs that the group had already identified. In previous studies, activation in these areas has been associated with wandering thought and acute self-awareness. In the jargon of the field, these areas “run hot” continuously during waking hours and consume far more energy than more peripheral areas.
Dr. Sporns said continued research should help produce a complete and detailed neural wiring diagram, what he called the “connectome” of the brain. “We hope we can get to a place where we have, in effect, a brain simulator, in the same way we have computer models that can simulate the climate,” he said, “so we can simulate activation patterns we see in clinical cases,” like psychiatric problems and brain injuries.
****
July 1, 2008
A Conversation With James P. Evans
Biologist Teaches the Nation’s Judges About Genetics
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
James P. Evans, a physician and molecular biologist, teaches genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He also directs the school’s Clinical Cancer Genetics Services, counseling patients about genetic testing. On weekends Dr. Evans, under the auspices of the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center — a Congressionally mandated program — teaches the nation’s judges about genetics. Dr. Evans, 49, was interviewed recently in New York; he had come to speak at the World Science Festival.
Q. WHY DO JUDGES NEED TO KNOW THEIR GENETICS?
A. Because they are frequently trying cases that hinge on genetics. And many don’t know what DNA is. They may have a rough idea. But they don’t understand the fine points.
If they sit in a criminal court, they are increasingly seeing homicide and sexual assault cases where DNA evidence is used to identify defendants. In the civil court, they are seeing cases on who owns genetic information and on whether environment or a genetic disposition caused cancer in a plaintiff. Cancer is the largest single cause of medical negligence suits — and it is, at its most fundamental level, a genetic disease. These jurists are seeing cases where the question is, “Was this person’s cancer triggered by environmental factors, or was it caused by a genetic predisposition?”
Many of the judges say that they fear their lack of scientific knowledge could cause them to make mistakes. They say they don’t know how to weigh DNA evidence. They are afraid of being snookered by expert witnesses.
Q. ARE JUDGES THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE AFRAID OF SCIENCE?
A. This is a huge issue. Yes! A lot of judges report that they did prelaw in college because it did not involve science. One of my favorite judges, a brilliant man, is fond of telling people he “flunked science in kindergarten.” So in these workshops, I think of myself as a newfangled type of science teacher, instructing extremely smart and distinguished adults in science fundamentals.
Q. HOW DO YOU DO THAT?
A. I try to demystify all of science and, specifically, genetics. I begin by telling them exactly what DNA is, and how we find it. We do a mini-lab where they isolate their own DNA and look at it. When they can hold it in their hands, the mystique melts. Then, I describe how we use DNA to identify a unique individual. We talk about the pitfalls of doing DNA typing. Once we have the basics down, we do a practice court, where we make up fact patterns in hypothetic cases that might involve DNA. We ask the judges to speculate on how they might use DNA evidence and why. We might go: “You’ve got a murder case where some DNA from a suspect is found in the trunk of a victim’s car. Under what conditions could this be evidence of guilt?”
Q. AND THE ANSWER IS?
A. If the defendant was a friend of the victim, they might have been lifting something into the car trunk and shed some DNA there. But if the defendant didn’t know the victim at all, score one for the prosecution. Humans shed DNA easily. Our testing is highly sensitive. If it’s in a place it shouldn’t be — let’s say in the vagina of a rape victim or at a crime scene — it can be incriminating.
I think the judges appreciate the hands-on nature of our course. After a recent workshop, a judge asked me, “Exactly how much DNA is a nanogram’s worth?” When I informed him that the DNA in our test tube was 10,000 times more than a nanogram, he was relieved. He’d just decided a case that hinged on the quantity of DNA found at a crime scene. By working with his own DNA, he could see he’d rendered the right decision.
Q. BEHAVIORAL GENETICS IS THE HOT NEW AREA OF STUDY. ARE CRIMINAL COURT JUDGES BEGINNING TO SEE “MY GENES MADE ME DO IT” DEFENSES?
A. Yup. We know some antisocial behaviors — drug addiction, alcoholism, a propensity toward violence — have genetic components. Therefore, one can easily imagine things reaching a certain level of predisposition and a lawyer going, “My client is not responsible for his actions any more than someone mentally ill is responsible.”
In reality, those claims have not made it very far — yet. One judge, after learning about behavioral genetics, said to me, “If this proves out, our entire conception of culpability in crime and punishment will have to be reconsidered.”
Q. DO SCIENTISTS AND JUDGES HAVE MUCH IN COMMON?
A. Well, a scientist almost never says anything absolutely. Everything is a theory, to be disproved or adjusted later on. Judges worry a lot about the certainty of conclusions, too. Judges are used to thinking of truth as an elusive concept. A lot of judges, when you bring up “the truth,” they roll their eyes. They say, “I don’t know what to say about truth. I do know about probabilities.”
Q. AND ISN’T THAT WHAT YOU DO — WORK WITH PROBABILITIES?
A. Yup. That’s what a geneticist does. We’re all about probability. In my medical genetics clinic, when I counsel someone who’s had a gene test, I might say: “The BRCA2 mutation you were found to carry confers about a 50 to 85 percent risk of breast cancer and a 25 percent risk of ovarian cancer.”
Q. THAT’S A HUGE LIKELIHOOD. WHAT ELSE DO YOU TELL HER?
A. I say: “You have two main choices. You can engage in heightened surveillance, but of course that isn’t actually prevention. The most effective strategy is prophylactic mastectomy and removal of your ovaries, which reduce your risk of those cancers by over 90 percent.”
Q. THAT’S A HORRIBLE CHOICE.
A. But it’s all we’ve got right now. I can understand why many women wouldn’t opt for it. Those who opt for it tend to be women who’ve seen a lot of family members die of breast cancer.
Listen, when it comes to genetic medicine, the only point to testing is to obtain information you can act on. Right now, there are only a handful of genetic diseases which we can do something to prevent. BRCA2 breast and ovarian cancers are among them. For other diseases, like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, the only value to knowing is for life-planning. There’s no prevention.
Q. DO YOU LIKE YOUR WORK?
A. I sure do. With my patients, I can take a full hour with each one and show them how their genes might predict their future. An hour with an individual patient is a huge luxury these days, but it can save lives. With the judges, I feel gratified when a few of them tell me, “Gosh, now I understand what DNA is.” What makes me feel even better is when one of them says, “I hated science in school, but genetics sounds real beautiful.”
Gene find could lead to new contraceptives
Role in ovulation could also help infertility
Jordana Huber
Canwest News Service
Friday, July 18, 2008
A gene "essential" to ovulation has been isolated by a team of Canadian and European researchers who say their findings could pave the way for new contraceptives and treatments for infertility.
Researchers at the Universite de Montreal have discovered how a gene known as Lrh1 affects the ovaries and ovulation, according to Dr. Bruce D. Murphy, director of the animal research centre at the faculty of veterinary medicine.
Until now, the role of the Lrh1 gene in female fertility was unclear but Murphy said his research team has concluded it is key to regulating ovulation and may play a role in fertilization.
"This discovery means we can envision new contraceptives that selectively stop ovulation," Murphy said. "If we can target the gene directly it could be possible to create a contraceptive that would be more effective and produce less side-effects than current steroid-based forms of birth control."
To study the gene, scientists "blocked" it from cells in the ovaries of genetically modified mice. Deleting the gene, they discovered, disrupted hormones, prevented eggs from maturing and effectively stopped ovulation, Murphy said.
The results of the two-and-a-half-year study conducted in collaboration with scientists from the Universite de Louis Pasteur at Strasbourg, France, are published in the current issue of the journal Genes & Development.
Years of research are still needed before any new contraceptives or treatments can be envisioned. However, the findings could lead to the development of new drugs that "activate" the Lrh1 gene, Murphy said.
"The widespread role of this gene in the ovary indicates it may be targeted to stimulate ovulation and, eventually, conception."
Researchers will now focus their efforts on the role the gene plays in the development of eggs and whether they can be successfully removed and fertilized from mice missing the Lrh1 gene, Murphy said.
More study is also needed, he suggested, into the possible link between the gene and polycystic ovarian disease, which is a common cause of infertility.
"Fifteen per cent of couples who want to get pregnant can't and very often this is a failure of ovulation," he said. "This gives us a clue or a track to follow whereby we can start to look at some of these other things that are very important to reproduction and infertility."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Role in ovulation could also help infertility
Jordana Huber
Canwest News Service
Friday, July 18, 2008
A gene "essential" to ovulation has been isolated by a team of Canadian and European researchers who say their findings could pave the way for new contraceptives and treatments for infertility.
Researchers at the Universite de Montreal have discovered how a gene known as Lrh1 affects the ovaries and ovulation, according to Dr. Bruce D. Murphy, director of the animal research centre at the faculty of veterinary medicine.
Until now, the role of the Lrh1 gene in female fertility was unclear but Murphy said his research team has concluded it is key to regulating ovulation and may play a role in fertilization.
"This discovery means we can envision new contraceptives that selectively stop ovulation," Murphy said. "If we can target the gene directly it could be possible to create a contraceptive that would be more effective and produce less side-effects than current steroid-based forms of birth control."
To study the gene, scientists "blocked" it from cells in the ovaries of genetically modified mice. Deleting the gene, they discovered, disrupted hormones, prevented eggs from maturing and effectively stopped ovulation, Murphy said.
The results of the two-and-a-half-year study conducted in collaboration with scientists from the Universite de Louis Pasteur at Strasbourg, France, are published in the current issue of the journal Genes & Development.
Years of research are still needed before any new contraceptives or treatments can be envisioned. However, the findings could lead to the development of new drugs that "activate" the Lrh1 gene, Murphy said.
"The widespread role of this gene in the ovary indicates it may be targeted to stimulate ovulation and, eventually, conception."
Researchers will now focus their efforts on the role the gene plays in the development of eggs and whether they can be successfully removed and fertilized from mice missing the Lrh1 gene, Murphy said.
More study is also needed, he suggested, into the possible link between the gene and polycystic ovarian disease, which is a common cause of infertility.
"Fifteen per cent of couples who want to get pregnant can't and very often this is a failure of ovulation," he said. "This gives us a clue or a track to follow whereby we can start to look at some of these other things that are very important to reproduction and infertility."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Implants treat depression
Brain stimulation effectively 're-sets' mood: study
Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Testing on severely depressed patients shows that brain implants can successfully "re-set" the brain's mood switch from sad to normal, with results that last for at least a year, Canadian researchers are reporting.
Deep brain stimulation not only provided "striking" improvements in more than half of patients treated, around 60 per cent, it also improved mood, anxiety, sleep, appetite control and the ability to put thoughts into action, the team reports in Biological Psychiatry.
"It's like the butterfly flapping its wings," says Toronto neurosurgeon Andres Lozano. "We're seeing changes locally where we're stimulating, and also in the circuitry of the brain.
"And it's not just a temporary response lasting a week or two."
Improvements were seen within a month, "and remained statistically significant for the entire 12 months of the trial," according to the researchers.
"It appears to be sustained," Lozano reports. Some patients are doing well five years after having the electrodes implanted in their brain.
Severe depression affects an estimated 120 million people worldwide. Deep brain stimulation is geared to the 10 to 20 per cent who are "treatment-resistant," meaning antidepressants, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy, or "shock therapy," don't work for them. Their cases are the "worst of the worst," and about 15 per cent commit suicide,
"There's nothing out there that really makes them better," says Lozano.
Three years ago, his team reported on the first six cases of deep brain stimulation in major depression.
Today, they're reporting on the results of those six patients, plus an additional 14, for a total of 20 followed for at least one year.
Nine men and 11 women were treated, the youngest in their 20s, the oldest in their 70s.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Brain stimulation effectively 're-sets' mood: study
Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Testing on severely depressed patients shows that brain implants can successfully "re-set" the brain's mood switch from sad to normal, with results that last for at least a year, Canadian researchers are reporting.
Deep brain stimulation not only provided "striking" improvements in more than half of patients treated, around 60 per cent, it also improved mood, anxiety, sleep, appetite control and the ability to put thoughts into action, the team reports in Biological Psychiatry.
"It's like the butterfly flapping its wings," says Toronto neurosurgeon Andres Lozano. "We're seeing changes locally where we're stimulating, and also in the circuitry of the brain.
"And it's not just a temporary response lasting a week or two."
Improvements were seen within a month, "and remained statistically significant for the entire 12 months of the trial," according to the researchers.
"It appears to be sustained," Lozano reports. Some patients are doing well five years after having the electrodes implanted in their brain.
Severe depression affects an estimated 120 million people worldwide. Deep brain stimulation is geared to the 10 to 20 per cent who are "treatment-resistant," meaning antidepressants, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy, or "shock therapy," don't work for them. Their cases are the "worst of the worst," and about 15 per cent commit suicide,
"There's nothing out there that really makes them better," says Lozano.
Three years ago, his team reported on the first six cases of deep brain stimulation in major depression.
Today, they're reporting on the results of those six patients, plus an additional 14, for a total of 20 followed for at least one year.
Nine men and 11 women were treated, the youngest in their 20s, the oldest in their 70s.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
July 23, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Harvest the Sun — From Space
By O. GLENN SMITH
Houston
AS we face $4.50 a gallon gas, we also know that alternative energy sources — coal, oil shale, ethanol, wind and ground-based solar — are either of limited potential, very expensive, require huge energy storage systems or harm the environment. There is, however, one potential future energy source that is environmentally friendly, has essentially unlimited potential and can be cost competitive with any renewable source: space solar power.
Science fiction? Actually, no — the technology already exists. A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.
Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now.
In terms of cost effectiveness, the two stumbling blocks for space solar power have been the expense of launching the collectors and the efficiency of their solar cells. Fortunately, the recent development of thinner, lighter and much higher efficiency solar cells promises to make sending them into space less expensive and return of energy much greater.
Much of the progress has come in the private sector. Companies like Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences, working in conjunction with NASA’s public-private Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, have been developing the capacity for very low cost launchings to the International Space Station. This same technology could be adapted to sending up a solar power satellite system.
Still, because building the first operational space solar power system will be very costly, a practical first step would be to conduct a test using the International Space Station as a “construction shack” to house the astronauts and equipment. The station’s existing solar panels could be used for the demonstration project, and its robotic manipulator arms could assemble the large transmitting antenna. While the station’s location in orbit would permit only intermittent transmission of power back to Earth, a successful test would serve as what scientists call “proof of concept.”
Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment. (And for those who worry that science would lose out to economics, there’s no reason that work on space solar power couldn’t go hand in hand with work toward a manned mission to Mars, advanced propulsion systems and other priorities of the space station.)
In fact, in a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.
O. Glenn Smith is a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Op-Ed Contributor
Harvest the Sun — From Space
By O. GLENN SMITH
Houston
AS we face $4.50 a gallon gas, we also know that alternative energy sources — coal, oil shale, ethanol, wind and ground-based solar — are either of limited potential, very expensive, require huge energy storage systems or harm the environment. There is, however, one potential future energy source that is environmentally friendly, has essentially unlimited potential and can be cost competitive with any renewable source: space solar power.
Science fiction? Actually, no — the technology already exists. A space solar power system would involve building large solar energy collectors in orbit around the Earth. These panels would collect far more energy than land-based units, which are hampered by weather, low angles of the sun in northern climes and, of course, the darkness of night.
Once collected, the solar energy would be safely beamed to Earth via wireless radio transmission, where it would be received by antennas near cities and other places where large amounts of power are used. The received energy would then be converted to electric power for distribution over the existing grid. Government scientists have projected that the cost of electric power generation from such a system could be as low as 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is within the range of what consumers pay now.
In terms of cost effectiveness, the two stumbling blocks for space solar power have been the expense of launching the collectors and the efficiency of their solar cells. Fortunately, the recent development of thinner, lighter and much higher efficiency solar cells promises to make sending them into space less expensive and return of energy much greater.
Much of the progress has come in the private sector. Companies like Space Exploration Technologies and Orbital Sciences, working in conjunction with NASA’s public-private Commercial Orbital Transportation Services initiative, have been developing the capacity for very low cost launchings to the International Space Station. This same technology could be adapted to sending up a solar power satellite system.
Still, because building the first operational space solar power system will be very costly, a practical first step would be to conduct a test using the International Space Station as a “construction shack” to house the astronauts and equipment. The station’s existing solar panels could be used for the demonstration project, and its robotic manipulator arms could assemble the large transmitting antenna. While the station’s location in orbit would permit only intermittent transmission of power back to Earth, a successful test would serve as what scientists call “proof of concept.”
Over the past 15 years, Americans have invested more than $100 billion, directly and indirectly, on the space station and supporting shuttle flights. With an energy crisis deepening, it’s time to begin to develop a huge return on that investment. (And for those who worry that science would lose out to economics, there’s no reason that work on space solar power couldn’t go hand in hand with work toward a manned mission to Mars, advanced propulsion systems and other priorities of the space station.)
In fact, in a time of some skepticism about the utility of our space program, NASA should realize that the American public would be inspired by our astronauts working in space to meet critical energy needs here on Earth.
O. Glenn Smith is a former manager of science and applications experiments for the International Space Station at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
July 27, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Texas to Tel Aviv
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars?
You’d have the start of an energy revolution.
The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.
Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars. He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi’s prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.
Agassi’s plan, backed by Israel’s government, is to create a complete electric car “system” that will work much like a mobile-phone service “system,” only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.
His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies — 2 gigawatts over 10 years — to power the whole fleet. “Israel will have the world’s first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert,” said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel’s roads next year.
Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. “Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline,” he explained to me. “We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month” — with all the electric fuel you need and when you don’t want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions.
His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car “so cheap, so trivial, that you won’t even think of buying a gasoline car.” Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You’ll be “off heroin,” he says, and “addicted to milk.”
T. Boone Pickens is 80. He’s already made billions in oil. He was involved in some ugly mischief in funding the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry. But now he’s opting for a different legacy: breaking America’s oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies — now being used to make electricity — into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks.
Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” His vision is summed up on his Web site: “We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”
Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he’s spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric — the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone.
But Pickens knows he’s unique. Unless, he says, “Congress adopts clear, predictable policies” — with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure — so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we’ll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week.
If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Then just do it, and get out of the way.
Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.
Op-Ed Columnist
Texas to Tel Aviv
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
What would happen if you cross-bred J. R. Ewing of “Dallas” and Carl Pope, the head of the Sierra Club? You’d get T. Boone Pickens. What would happen if you cross-bred Henry Ford and Yitzhak Rabin? You’d get Shai Agassi. And what would happen if you put together T. Boone Pickens, the green billionaire Texas oilman now obsessed with wind power, and Shai Agassi, the Jewish Henry Ford now obsessed with making Israel the world’s leader in electric cars?
You’d have the start of an energy revolution.
The only good thing to come from soaring oil prices is that they have spurred innovator/investors, successful in other fields, to move into clean energy with a mad-as-hell, can-do ambition to replace oil with renewable power. Two of the most interesting of these new clean electron wildcatters are Boone and Shai.
Agassi, age 40, is an Israeli software whiz kid who rose to the senior ranks of the German software giant SAP. He gave it all up in 2007 to help make Israel a model of how an entire country can get off gasoline and onto electric cars. He figured no country has a bigger interest in diminishing the value of Middle Eastern oil than Israel. On a visit to Israel in May, I took a spin in a parking lot on the Tel Aviv beachfront in Agassi’s prototype electric car, while his sister watched out for the cops because it is not yet licensed for Israeli roads.
Agassi’s plan, backed by Israel’s government, is to create a complete electric car “system” that will work much like a mobile-phone service “system,” only customers sign up for so many monthly miles, instead of minutes. Every subscriber will get a car, a battery and access to a national network of recharging outlets all across Israel — as well as garages that will swap your dead battery for a fresh one whenever needed.
His company, Better Place, and its impressive team would run the smart grid that charges the cars and is also contracting for enough new solar energy from Israeli companies — 2 gigawatts over 10 years — to power the whole fleet. “Israel will have the world’s first virtual oilfield in the Negev Desert,” said Agassi. His first 500 electric cars, built by Renault, will hit Israel’s roads next year.
Agassi is a passionate salesman for his vision. He could sell camels to Saudi Arabia. “Today in Europe, you pay $600 a month for gasoline,” he explained to me. “We have an electric car that will cost you $600 a month” — with all the electric fuel you need and when you don’t want the car any longer, just give it back. No extra charges and no CO2 emissions.
His goal, said Agassi, is to make his electric car “so cheap, so trivial, that you won’t even think of buying a gasoline car.” Once that happens, he added, your oil addiction will be over forever. You’ll be “off heroin,” he says, and “addicted to milk.”
T. Boone Pickens is 80. He’s already made billions in oil. He was involved in some ugly mischief in funding the “Swift-boating” of John Kerry. But now he’s opting for a different legacy: breaking America’s oil habit by pushing for a massive buildup of wind power in the U.S. and converting our abundant natural gas supplies — now being used to make electricity — into transportation fuel to replace foreign oil in our cars, buses and trucks.
Pickens is motivated by American nationalism. Because of all the money we are shipping abroad to pay for our oil addiction, he says, “we are on the verge of losing our superpower status.” His vision is summed up on his Web site: “We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.”
Pickens made clear to me over breakfast last week that he was tired of waiting for Washington to produce a serious energy plan. So his company, Mesa Power, is now building the world’s largest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, where he’s spent $2 billion buying land and 700 wind turbines from General Electric — the largest single turbine order ever. The U.S. could secure 20 percent of its electricity needs from wind alone.
But Pickens knows he’s unique. Unless, he says, “Congress adopts clear, predictable policies” — with long-term tax incentives and infrastructure — so thousands of investors can jump into clean power, we’ll never get the scale we need to break our addiction. For a year, Senate Republicans have been blocking such incentives for wind and solar energy. They vote again next week.
If only we had a Congress and president who, instead of chasing crazy schemes like offshore drilling and releasing oil from our strategic reserve, just sat down with Boone and Shai and asked one question: “What laws do we need to enact to foster 1,000 more like you?” Then just do it, and get out of the way.
Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.
Living to 150 may be future
Technology could lengthen life for those who can pay
Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service
Monday, July 28, 2008
Genetic science, stem-cell research and extreme caloric restriction are all part of a burgeoning "immortality industry" that could soon point the way to a fountain of youth with the potential to stretch the human life span to 125 or 150 years, says a sociologist and consultant on future studies.
Michael Zey, the U.S. author of Ageless Nation, will address the issues at the World Future Society's annual conference in Washington today.
Advances such as nanotechnology -- the emerging ability to manipulate extremely small structures -- could ultimately make it possible to regenerate every cell in the body, he says.
"At that point, we can throw out every idea we have about longevity and even mortality itself."
The effects of human life-extension will be far-reaching, Zey says, potentially spawning second or third careers in people's extra decades and a society of lifelong students using the gift of more time to continually reinvent themselves with new education.
Longer lives also have the potential to impact families and personal lives, he's written in the World Future Society's magazine, The Futurist. "When the life span exceeds 125, our expectation about living with the same person for a century or more might change," he writes, proposing that spouses might "take a 'marriage hiatus' for a year or two to pursue their individual interests."
Like medical tourism today, these technological springs of immortality will, at first, only be available to those with the money and knowledge to access them, he forecasts. But they'll eventually become widely accessible in the same way that computers used to be reserved for major corporations, but now occupy every desktop and backpack.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation already offers full-body cryonic freezing for $150,000, while head-only freezing is a relative bargain at $80,000. The company says most of its 866 members plan to fund the procedure with life insurance, and 86 "patients" are already preserved at its Arizona headquarters in hopes of someday being thawed out and healed with yet undreamed-of medical science.
The extension of human life will also depend on people's lifestyle, Zey says, and the current obesity epidemic, smoking habits and other unhealthy behaviours indicate they don't always make beneficial choices.
People can be "seduced" by breakthroughs they believe will save them from themselves, he says, citing the notion that cholesterol treatment drugs are a licence to dine on lard-laden foods.
"I think there is going to be a tremendous chasm between average life expectancy and life potential," Zey says.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Technology could lengthen life for those who can pay
Shannon Proudfoot
Canwest News Service
Monday, July 28, 2008
Genetic science, stem-cell research and extreme caloric restriction are all part of a burgeoning "immortality industry" that could soon point the way to a fountain of youth with the potential to stretch the human life span to 125 or 150 years, says a sociologist and consultant on future studies.
Michael Zey, the U.S. author of Ageless Nation, will address the issues at the World Future Society's annual conference in Washington today.
Advances such as nanotechnology -- the emerging ability to manipulate extremely small structures -- could ultimately make it possible to regenerate every cell in the body, he says.
"At that point, we can throw out every idea we have about longevity and even mortality itself."
The effects of human life-extension will be far-reaching, Zey says, potentially spawning second or third careers in people's extra decades and a society of lifelong students using the gift of more time to continually reinvent themselves with new education.
Longer lives also have the potential to impact families and personal lives, he's written in the World Future Society's magazine, The Futurist. "When the life span exceeds 125, our expectation about living with the same person for a century or more might change," he writes, proposing that spouses might "take a 'marriage hiatus' for a year or two to pursue their individual interests."
Like medical tourism today, these technological springs of immortality will, at first, only be available to those with the money and knowledge to access them, he forecasts. But they'll eventually become widely accessible in the same way that computers used to be reserved for major corporations, but now occupy every desktop and backpack.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation already offers full-body cryonic freezing for $150,000, while head-only freezing is a relative bargain at $80,000. The company says most of its 866 members plan to fund the procedure with life insurance, and 86 "patients" are already preserved at its Arizona headquarters in hopes of someday being thawed out and healed with yet undreamed-of medical science.
The extension of human life will also depend on people's lifestyle, Zey says, and the current obesity epidemic, smoking habits and other unhealthy behaviours indicate they don't always make beneficial choices.
People can be "seduced" by breakthroughs they believe will save them from themselves, he says, citing the notion that cholesterol treatment drugs are a licence to dine on lard-laden foods.
"I think there is going to be a tremendous chasm between average life expectancy and life potential," Zey says.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
August 1, 2008
Couch Mouse to Mr. Mighty by Pills Alone
By NICHOLAS WADE
For all who have wondered if they could enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion, the answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.
Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.
A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.
“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.
The results, Dr. Evans said, seem reasonably likely to apply to people, who control muscle tone with the same underlying genes as do mice. If the drugs work and prove to be safe, they could be useful in a wide range of settings.
They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise, Dr. Evans said.
The chemicals involved are already available, and such muscle-enhancing drugs would also have obvious appeal to athletes seeking to gain an edge in performance. Dr. Evans said athletes often showed up at public lectures he had given and asked him about the drugs.
With money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Evans has devised a test to detect whether an athlete has taken the drugs and has made it available to the World Anti-Doping Agency, which prepares a list of forbidden substances for the International Olympic Committee. Officials at the anti-doping agency confirmed that they were collaborating with Dr. Evans on a test but could not say when they would start using it.
Experts not involved in the study agreed that the drugs held promise for treating disease. Dr. Johan Auwerx, a specialist in metabolic diseases at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, said the result with Aicar looked “pretty good” and could be helpful in the treatment of diabetes and obesity. “The fact you can mimic exercise is a big advantage,” he said, “because diet and exercise are the pillars of diabetes treatment.”
Dr. Richard N. Bergman, an expert on obesity and diabetes at the University of Southern California, said the drugs might prove to have serious side effects but, if safe, could become widely used. “It is possible that the couch potato segment of the population might find this to be a good regimen, and of course that is a large number of people.”
The idea of a workout in a pill seems almost too good to be true, but Dr. Evans has impressive research credentials, including winning the Lasker Award, which often presages a Nobel Prize. He is an expert on how hormones work in cells and on a powerful gene-controlling protein called PPAR-delta, which instructs fat cells to burn off fat.
Four years ago he found that PPAR-delta played a different role in muscle. Muscle fibers exist in two main forms. Type 1 fibers have copious numbers of mitochondria, which generate the cell’s energy and are therefore resistant to fatigue. Type 2 fibers have fewer mitochondria and tire easily. Athletes have lots of Type 1 fibers. People with obesity and diabetes have far fewer Type 1 and more Type 2 fibers.
Dr. Evans and his team found that the PPAR-delta protein remodeled the muscle, producing more of the high-endurance Type 1 fiber. They genetically engineered a strain of mice whose muscles produced extra amounts of PPAR-delta. These mice grew more Type 1 fibers and could run twice as far as on a treadmill as ordinary mice before collapsing.
Given that people cannot be engineered in this way, Dr. Evans wondered whether levels of the PPAR-delta protein could be raised by drugs. Pharmaceutical companies have long tried to manipulate PPAR-delta because of its role in fat metabolism, and Dr. Evans found several drugs were available, although they had been tested for different purposes.
In a report in the Friday issue of Cell, he described the two drugs that successfully activate the muscle-remodeling system in mice, generating more high-endurance Type 1 fiber. The drug GW1516 activates the PPAR-delta protein but the mice must also exercise to show increased endurance. It seems that PPAR-delta switches on one set of genes, and exercise another, and both are needed for endurance.
Aicar improves endurance without training. Dr. Evans believes that it both activates the PPAR-delta protein and mimics the effects of exercise, thus switching on both sets of genes needed for the endurance signal.
Aicar signals to the cell that it has burned off energy and needs to generate more. The drug is “pretty much pharmacological exercise,” Dr. Evans said.
He said the drugs worked off a person’s genetics, pushing the body to an improved set-point otherwise gained only by strenuous training. “This is not just a free lunch,” he said. “It’s pushing your genome toward a more enhanced genetic tone that impacts metabolism and muscle function. So instead of inheriting a great set-point you are using a drug to move your own genetics to a more activated metabolic state.”
Aicar has been tested for various diseases since 1994 and is in advanced trials for treating a heart condition known as ischemic reperfusion injury. But neither Aicar nor GW1516 has been tested in people for muscle endurance, so the side effects of the drugs, particularly over the long term, are not precisely known.
That may change if pharmaceutical companies pursue Dr. Evans’s findings. “The drugs’ effect on muscle opens a window to a world of medical problems,” he said. “This paper will alert the medical community that muscle can be a therapeutic target.”
The drugs activate at least one of the chemical pathways triggered by resveratrol, a substance that also showed increased endurance in mice. Resveratrol is found in red wine though in amounts probably too low to significantly affect muscle.
In 2006 Dr. Auwerx and colleagues at University Louis Pasteur showed that large doses of resveratrol would make mice run twice as far as usual on a treadmill before collapsing. It is unclear just how resveratrol works, but one of its effects may be to bind with a protein that helps activate PPAR-delta. Dr. Auwerx’s resveratrol-treated mice remodeled their muscle fibers into the Type 1, with greater endurance.
That is the same result Dr. Evans has found can be obtained with Aicar. The relationship between the two drugs is not yet clear. Dr. Evans believes that resveratrol acts on so many pathways in the cell, particularly at high doses, that it is hard to know how it is achieving any given effect, whereas the role of Aicar and GW1516 is well defined. But Dr. Auwerx said he did not think Aicar was necessarily working in the way Dr. Evans described.
****
August 3, 2008
Editorial
Mighty Mouse in a Test Tube
It sounds too good to be true. Nothing so fabulous should be quite so easy to attain. There must be a catch.
Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego have found two drugs that greatly increased the athletic endurance of laboratory mice, converting lazy mice and their more athletic brethren into marathon runners. One drug, fed to relatively sedentary mice, increased their endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. The other drug had no effect on sedentary mice but raised endurance by 77 percent in mice that exercised regularly.
As described by Nicholas Wade in The Times on Friday, the pills trick the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously, thereby generating more high-endurance fibers. If the pills work the same way in humans — a very big “if” — this could be great news for those who want to exercise without actually exercising. And for athletes looking for yet another chemical boost.
Of course, there could be downsides. Harmful side effects might turn up unexpectedly. (Muscle-bound brains? A life of sloth waiting for the next miracle pill to turn ne’er-do-wells into overachievers?)
Any Olympian caught using the drugs would most likely be expelled from the Games or lose ill-gotten medals. The researchers have already devised a test to detect use of the muscle-enhancing drugs and have made it available to doping officials who police the Olympics.
If the drugs work, and the tests do too, at least cheating-prone athletes will be able to stay in shape while watching the Games from their couches.
Couch Mouse to Mr. Mighty by Pills Alone
By NICHOLAS WADE
For all who have wondered if they could enjoy the benefits of exercise without the pain of exertion, the answer may one day be yes — just take a pill that tricks the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously.
Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that they had found two drugs that did wonders for the athletic endurance of couch potato mice. One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.
A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.
“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.
The results, Dr. Evans said, seem reasonably likely to apply to people, who control muscle tone with the same underlying genes as do mice. If the drugs work and prove to be safe, they could be useful in a wide range of settings.
They should help people who are too frail to exercise and those with health problems like diabetes that are improved with exercise, Dr. Evans said.
The chemicals involved are already available, and such muscle-enhancing drugs would also have obvious appeal to athletes seeking to gain an edge in performance. Dr. Evans said athletes often showed up at public lectures he had given and asked him about the drugs.
With money from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Dr. Evans has devised a test to detect whether an athlete has taken the drugs and has made it available to the World Anti-Doping Agency, which prepares a list of forbidden substances for the International Olympic Committee. Officials at the anti-doping agency confirmed that they were collaborating with Dr. Evans on a test but could not say when they would start using it.
Experts not involved in the study agreed that the drugs held promise for treating disease. Dr. Johan Auwerx, a specialist in metabolic diseases at the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, said the result with Aicar looked “pretty good” and could be helpful in the treatment of diabetes and obesity. “The fact you can mimic exercise is a big advantage,” he said, “because diet and exercise are the pillars of diabetes treatment.”
Dr. Richard N. Bergman, an expert on obesity and diabetes at the University of Southern California, said the drugs might prove to have serious side effects but, if safe, could become widely used. “It is possible that the couch potato segment of the population might find this to be a good regimen, and of course that is a large number of people.”
The idea of a workout in a pill seems almost too good to be true, but Dr. Evans has impressive research credentials, including winning the Lasker Award, which often presages a Nobel Prize. He is an expert on how hormones work in cells and on a powerful gene-controlling protein called PPAR-delta, which instructs fat cells to burn off fat.
Four years ago he found that PPAR-delta played a different role in muscle. Muscle fibers exist in two main forms. Type 1 fibers have copious numbers of mitochondria, which generate the cell’s energy and are therefore resistant to fatigue. Type 2 fibers have fewer mitochondria and tire easily. Athletes have lots of Type 1 fibers. People with obesity and diabetes have far fewer Type 1 and more Type 2 fibers.
Dr. Evans and his team found that the PPAR-delta protein remodeled the muscle, producing more of the high-endurance Type 1 fiber. They genetically engineered a strain of mice whose muscles produced extra amounts of PPAR-delta. These mice grew more Type 1 fibers and could run twice as far as on a treadmill as ordinary mice before collapsing.
Given that people cannot be engineered in this way, Dr. Evans wondered whether levels of the PPAR-delta protein could be raised by drugs. Pharmaceutical companies have long tried to manipulate PPAR-delta because of its role in fat metabolism, and Dr. Evans found several drugs were available, although they had been tested for different purposes.
In a report in the Friday issue of Cell, he described the two drugs that successfully activate the muscle-remodeling system in mice, generating more high-endurance Type 1 fiber. The drug GW1516 activates the PPAR-delta protein but the mice must also exercise to show increased endurance. It seems that PPAR-delta switches on one set of genes, and exercise another, and both are needed for endurance.
Aicar improves endurance without training. Dr. Evans believes that it both activates the PPAR-delta protein and mimics the effects of exercise, thus switching on both sets of genes needed for the endurance signal.
Aicar signals to the cell that it has burned off energy and needs to generate more. The drug is “pretty much pharmacological exercise,” Dr. Evans said.
He said the drugs worked off a person’s genetics, pushing the body to an improved set-point otherwise gained only by strenuous training. “This is not just a free lunch,” he said. “It’s pushing your genome toward a more enhanced genetic tone that impacts metabolism and muscle function. So instead of inheriting a great set-point you are using a drug to move your own genetics to a more activated metabolic state.”
Aicar has been tested for various diseases since 1994 and is in advanced trials for treating a heart condition known as ischemic reperfusion injury. But neither Aicar nor GW1516 has been tested in people for muscle endurance, so the side effects of the drugs, particularly over the long term, are not precisely known.
That may change if pharmaceutical companies pursue Dr. Evans’s findings. “The drugs’ effect on muscle opens a window to a world of medical problems,” he said. “This paper will alert the medical community that muscle can be a therapeutic target.”
The drugs activate at least one of the chemical pathways triggered by resveratrol, a substance that also showed increased endurance in mice. Resveratrol is found in red wine though in amounts probably too low to significantly affect muscle.
In 2006 Dr. Auwerx and colleagues at University Louis Pasteur showed that large doses of resveratrol would make mice run twice as far as usual on a treadmill before collapsing. It is unclear just how resveratrol works, but one of its effects may be to bind with a protein that helps activate PPAR-delta. Dr. Auwerx’s resveratrol-treated mice remodeled their muscle fibers into the Type 1, with greater endurance.
That is the same result Dr. Evans has found can be obtained with Aicar. The relationship between the two drugs is not yet clear. Dr. Evans believes that resveratrol acts on so many pathways in the cell, particularly at high doses, that it is hard to know how it is achieving any given effect, whereas the role of Aicar and GW1516 is well defined. But Dr. Auwerx said he did not think Aicar was necessarily working in the way Dr. Evans described.
****
August 3, 2008
Editorial
Mighty Mouse in a Test Tube
It sounds too good to be true. Nothing so fabulous should be quite so easy to attain. There must be a catch.
Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego have found two drugs that greatly increased the athletic endurance of laboratory mice, converting lazy mice and their more athletic brethren into marathon runners. One drug, fed to relatively sedentary mice, increased their endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. The other drug had no effect on sedentary mice but raised endurance by 77 percent in mice that exercised regularly.
As described by Nicholas Wade in The Times on Friday, the pills trick the muscles into thinking they have been working out furiously, thereby generating more high-endurance fibers. If the pills work the same way in humans — a very big “if” — this could be great news for those who want to exercise without actually exercising. And for athletes looking for yet another chemical boost.
Of course, there could be downsides. Harmful side effects might turn up unexpectedly. (Muscle-bound brains? A life of sloth waiting for the next miracle pill to turn ne’er-do-wells into overachievers?)
Any Olympian caught using the drugs would most likely be expelled from the Games or lose ill-gotten medals. The researchers have already devised a test to detect use of the muscle-enhancing drugs and have made it available to doping officials who police the Olympics.
If the drugs work, and the tests do too, at least cheating-prone athletes will be able to stay in shape while watching the Games from their couches.
'Diseased' cells offer new insights
Scientists hope to use it as repair material
Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
Friday, August 08, 2008
Scientists have created stem cells from patients suffering from 10 incurable diseases, from Down syndrome to diabetes and Parkinson's -- immortal cells that might one day be turned into repair material for wasting muscles or damaged brains.
The Harvard University-led team has taken skin and bone marrow cells from diseased patients and re-programmed those cells to behave like cells from days-old embryos.
The feat allows scientists for the first time to watch muscular dystrophy and other diseases unfold in a petri dish, "that is, to watch what goes right or wrong," said Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. The cells will also allow researchers to screen new drugs to treat the diseases.
"In these complex genetic diseases, we're so ignorant at the moment we don't even know when a patient gets diabetes if they all get it the same way," Melton said. "There could be 50 different ways to get Type 1 diabetes." The stem cell lines could help researchers hone in on exactly which mutations are responsible and find "the weak point where you could try to prevent, or treat it."
"We have good reason to believe that this will make it possible to find new treatments, and eventually drugs, to slow or even stop the course of a number of diseases," Melton said.
The new cells are "pluripotent" cells that can be coaxed into making any tissue in the human body, and can grow forever.
It may one day be possible to start with a single stem cell, fix the genetic defect in the cell, and then use it to make healthy muscle, brain or other tissue that could be transplanted back into the patient. "We're many years from that . . . but that in itself is exciting," said Dr. Duncan Stewart, CEO of the Ottawa Health Research Institute and professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.
But, "it's early days. These cells aren't perfect," Stewart said. As well, no one is recommending "that anyone start sticking these cells into patients," he said.
The new stem cell lines will be distributed virtually free to any scientist who wants them, in the hope it will speed research. Researchers are trying to make insulin-producing pancreatic cells and immune cells from the new stem cells.
The new research is published in the journal Cell.
The researchers took skin and bone marrow cells from patients with the diseases and turned them into stem cells with the same genetic mistakes. These "pluripotent" cells are capable of turning into any tissue in the body. They behave like stem cells taken from embryos, until now the only source of "pluripotent" cells.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Scientists hope to use it as repair material
Sharon Kirkey
Canwest News Service
Friday, August 08, 2008
Scientists have created stem cells from patients suffering from 10 incurable diseases, from Down syndrome to diabetes and Parkinson's -- immortal cells that might one day be turned into repair material for wasting muscles or damaged brains.
The Harvard University-led team has taken skin and bone marrow cells from diseased patients and re-programmed those cells to behave like cells from days-old embryos.
The feat allows scientists for the first time to watch muscular dystrophy and other diseases unfold in a petri dish, "that is, to watch what goes right or wrong," said Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. The cells will also allow researchers to screen new drugs to treat the diseases.
"In these complex genetic diseases, we're so ignorant at the moment we don't even know when a patient gets diabetes if they all get it the same way," Melton said. "There could be 50 different ways to get Type 1 diabetes." The stem cell lines could help researchers hone in on exactly which mutations are responsible and find "the weak point where you could try to prevent, or treat it."
"We have good reason to believe that this will make it possible to find new treatments, and eventually drugs, to slow or even stop the course of a number of diseases," Melton said.
The new cells are "pluripotent" cells that can be coaxed into making any tissue in the human body, and can grow forever.
It may one day be possible to start with a single stem cell, fix the genetic defect in the cell, and then use it to make healthy muscle, brain or other tissue that could be transplanted back into the patient. "We're many years from that . . . but that in itself is exciting," said Dr. Duncan Stewart, CEO of the Ottawa Health Research Institute and professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.
But, "it's early days. These cells aren't perfect," Stewart said. As well, no one is recommending "that anyone start sticking these cells into patients," he said.
The new stem cell lines will be distributed virtually free to any scientist who wants them, in the hope it will speed research. Researchers are trying to make insulin-producing pancreatic cells and immune cells from the new stem cells.
The new research is published in the journal Cell.
The researchers took skin and bone marrow cells from patients with the diseases and turned them into stem cells with the same genetic mistakes. These "pluripotent" cells are capable of turning into any tissue in the body. They behave like stem cells taken from embryos, until now the only source of "pluripotent" cells.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
'Smoking' gene raises risk of addiction, cancer
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Saturday, August 09, 2008
For most people, the first experimental drags on a cigarette bring on nausea, coughing and other signals from the brain that say, "Turn back. This is a bad idea." But for some, they bring a wave of pleasure.
Those in the second group likely bear a gene type that not only increases their addiction risk, but has been implicated in the development of lung cancer, researchers said Friday.
"If you have this variant, you are going to like your earliest experiences with smoking," said Ovide Pomerleau of the University of Michigan Medical School, whose research appears in the journal Addiction.
Pomerleau said the finding suggests that for some, smoking even one cigarette is a bad idea. "It's a trap," he said in a telephone interview.
"What they don't realize is if they have this kind of genetic make-up, they are on their way to dependency," he said, and that raises their risk for lung cancer.
The research is part of a growing understanding of genetic factors involved in nicotine addiction and lung cancer.
Teams of scientists reported this year that smokers who had certain changes in three nicotine receptor genes -- which control entry of nicotine into brain cells -- were more likely to develop lung cancer than other smokers.
This week, Canadian researchers said that, by manipulating receptors for the chemical dopamine, they were able to control which rats in a study enjoyed their first exposure to nicotine and which were repelled by it.
Pomerleau said the field may soon lead to new treatments for nicotine addiction and tests to assess addiction risks. Smoking causes nine out of 10 cases of lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide and the second-leading cause of cancer death among women.
Pomerleau and colleagues studied data from 435 people. Some had tried a cigarette but never developed a habit; others smoked at least five cigarettes a day for the past five years.
Regular smokers in the study were far more likely than those who had never smoked to have a change in the CHRNA5 nicotine receptor gene. Smokers were eight times more likely to report liking cigarettes from the start.
Pomerleau said work has begun to develop a genetic screen for the CHRNA5 variant. Two other researchers on the team, Laura Bierut and John Rice at Washington University, hold a patent on the gene variant, which has been licensed by privately held Perlegen Sciences Inc.
Pfizer Inc, maker of the smoking cessation drug Chantix, owns a $50 million stake in Perlegen.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Saturday, August 09, 2008
For most people, the first experimental drags on a cigarette bring on nausea, coughing and other signals from the brain that say, "Turn back. This is a bad idea." But for some, they bring a wave of pleasure.
Those in the second group likely bear a gene type that not only increases their addiction risk, but has been implicated in the development of lung cancer, researchers said Friday.
"If you have this variant, you are going to like your earliest experiences with smoking," said Ovide Pomerleau of the University of Michigan Medical School, whose research appears in the journal Addiction.
Pomerleau said the finding suggests that for some, smoking even one cigarette is a bad idea. "It's a trap," he said in a telephone interview.
"What they don't realize is if they have this kind of genetic make-up, they are on their way to dependency," he said, and that raises their risk for lung cancer.
The research is part of a growing understanding of genetic factors involved in nicotine addiction and lung cancer.
Teams of scientists reported this year that smokers who had certain changes in three nicotine receptor genes -- which control entry of nicotine into brain cells -- were more likely to develop lung cancer than other smokers.
This week, Canadian researchers said that, by manipulating receptors for the chemical dopamine, they were able to control which rats in a study enjoyed their first exposure to nicotine and which were repelled by it.
Pomerleau said the field may soon lead to new treatments for nicotine addiction and tests to assess addiction risks. Smoking causes nine out of 10 cases of lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer death in men worldwide and the second-leading cause of cancer death among women.
Pomerleau and colleagues studied data from 435 people. Some had tried a cigarette but never developed a habit; others smoked at least five cigarettes a day for the past five years.
Regular smokers in the study were far more likely than those who had never smoked to have a change in the CHRNA5 nicotine receptor gene. Smokers were eight times more likely to report liking cigarettes from the start.
Pomerleau said work has begun to develop a genetic screen for the CHRNA5 variant. Two other researchers on the team, Laura Bierut and John Rice at Washington University, hold a patent on the gene variant, which has been licensed by privately held Perlegen Sciences Inc.
Pfizer Inc, maker of the smoking cessation drug Chantix, owns a $50 million stake in Perlegen.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
August 12, 2008
Handle With Care
By CORNELIA DEAN
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.
“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.
Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”
So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”
That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a United Nations group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.
“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.
Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.
But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too late.
Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic discrimination.
But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that still prevails in biotechnology.
“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would recommendations take, all those details.”
But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in these kinds of ethical questions.”
And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.
But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr. Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”
Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”
And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in inaccurate or sensationalized terms.
Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress in genetics. If scientific research has serious potential implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.
In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.
As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it, “with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”
Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,” factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems across a continent.
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”
In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”
In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.
Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as important.
“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... nted=print
Handle With Care
By CORNELIA DEAN
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.
“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.
Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”
So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”
That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a United Nations group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.
“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.
Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.
But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too late.
Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic discrimination.
But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that still prevails in biotechnology.
“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would recommendations take, all those details.”
But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in these kinds of ethical questions.”
And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.
But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr. Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”
Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”
And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in inaccurate or sensationalized terms.
Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress in genetics. If scientific research has serious potential implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.
In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.
As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it, “with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”
Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,” factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems across a continent.
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”
In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”
In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.
Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as important.
“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... nted=print
August 12, 2008
Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward
By KENNETH CHANG
Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.
There is a photograph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... ef=science
This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.
The work involves materials that have a property known as negative refraction, which means that they essentially bend light backward. Once thought to be pure fantasies, these substances, called metamaterials, have been constructed in recent years, and scientists have shown they can bend long-wavelength microwaves.
Negative refractive materials can in principle lead to fantastical illusions; someone looking down at a fish in a pool of negative refractive liquid would see the fish swimming in the air above.
Two separate advances are described in two scientific papers being published this week, one demonstrating negative refraction at infrared and visible wavelengths. The second article will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Both papers come out of the research laboratory of Xiang Zhang, a professor at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Berkeley.
When a ray of light crosses the boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by a property known as the index of refraction. Transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher for visible light, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends toward an imaginary line perpendicular to the surface.
With the engineered metamaterials, scientists can create refractive indices less than 1 or even negative. Light entering a material with a negative index of refraction would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off the imaginary perpendicular line.
In the Nature paper, the Berkeley researchers created a fishnet structure with 21 layers, alternating between a metal and magnesium fluoride, resulting in a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for infrared light. The researchers said by making the fishnet structure even smaller, they should be able to do the same with visible light.
In the Science paper, a different group of scientists in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory used a different approach, building an array of minuscule upright wires, which changed the electric fields of passing light waves. That structure was able to bend visible red light.
Dr. Zhang said both approaches had advantages and disadvantages. “There are many roads to Rome,” he said. “At this point, honestly speaking, we don’t know which road will be the best.”
One application of negative index materials could be a “superlens.” Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”
The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplifies the evanescent waves, preserving detail lost in conventional optics, and the hope is to eventually build an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.
Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward
By KENNETH CHANG
Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.
There is a photograph at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/scien ... ef=science
This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.
The work involves materials that have a property known as negative refraction, which means that they essentially bend light backward. Once thought to be pure fantasies, these substances, called metamaterials, have been constructed in recent years, and scientists have shown they can bend long-wavelength microwaves.
Negative refractive materials can in principle lead to fantastical illusions; someone looking down at a fish in a pool of negative refractive liquid would see the fish swimming in the air above.
Two separate advances are described in two scientific papers being published this week, one demonstrating negative refraction at infrared and visible wavelengths. The second article will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Both papers come out of the research laboratory of Xiang Zhang, a professor at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Berkeley.
When a ray of light crosses the boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by a property known as the index of refraction. Transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher for visible light, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends toward an imaginary line perpendicular to the surface.
With the engineered metamaterials, scientists can create refractive indices less than 1 or even negative. Light entering a material with a negative index of refraction would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off the imaginary perpendicular line.
In the Nature paper, the Berkeley researchers created a fishnet structure with 21 layers, alternating between a metal and magnesium fluoride, resulting in a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for infrared light. The researchers said by making the fishnet structure even smaller, they should be able to do the same with visible light.
In the Science paper, a different group of scientists in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory used a different approach, building an array of minuscule upright wires, which changed the electric fields of passing light waves. That structure was able to bend visible red light.
Dr. Zhang said both approaches had advantages and disadvantages. “There are many roads to Rome,” he said. “At this point, honestly speaking, we don’t know which road will be the best.”
One application of negative index materials could be a “superlens.” Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”
The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplifies the evanescent waves, preserving detail lost in conventional optics, and the hope is to eventually build an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.
Mars lander images reveal microscopic red dust
Dan Whitcomb
Reuters
Friday, August 15, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 7&sponsor=
CREDIT: Reuters
The first microscopic pictures of red Martian dust, released by NASA on Thursday, boost efforts to determine if life exists or ever existed on Mars.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has sent back the first-ever image of a speck of red Martian dust taken through an atomic force microscope, shown at a higher magnification than anything seen from another planet.
The dust particle is about one micrometre -- or one-millionth of a metre -- across and is representative of the dust that cloaks Mars, producing the planet's distinctive red soil and colouring its sky pink, NASA said.
"This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colours seen in sunsets on the Red Planet," said Phoenix co-investigator Urs Staufer of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the lander's microscope.
Phoenix has been exploring the Martian arctic circle since May 25 and already provided definitive proof that ice and water exist. It is the latest NASA spacecraft sent to Mars as the space agency tries to determine if life, even in microbial form, exists or ever existed there.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Dan Whitcomb
Reuters
Friday, August 15, 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 7&sponsor=
CREDIT: Reuters
The first microscopic pictures of red Martian dust, released by NASA on Thursday, boost efforts to determine if life exists or ever existed on Mars.
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander has sent back the first-ever image of a speck of red Martian dust taken through an atomic force microscope, shown at a higher magnification than anything seen from another planet.
The dust particle is about one micrometre -- or one-millionth of a metre -- across and is representative of the dust that cloaks Mars, producing the planet's distinctive red soil and colouring its sky pink, NASA said.
"This is the first picture of a clay-sized particle on Mars, and the size agrees with predictions from the colours seen in sunsets on the Red Planet," said Phoenix co-investigator Urs Staufer of the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, who leads a Swiss consortium that made the lander's microscope.
Phoenix has been exploring the Martian arctic circle since May 25 and already provided definitive proof that ice and water exist. It is the latest NASA spacecraft sent to Mars as the space agency tries to determine if life, even in microbial form, exists or ever existed there.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
August 17, 2008
Guest Columnist
Testing Genes, Solving Little
By OLIVIA JUDSON
London
It was supposed to be simple. Once it became cheap to scan large numbers of people for large numbers of genetic differences, everyone assumed that it would swiftly become straightforward to convert genetic differences into physical differences — that we’d be able to look at someone’s genome and say, this man is between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2, has black hair, green eyes and a high risk of developing diabetes.
Not so. The age of large-scale screening arrived about five years ago, and a hunt for the genes underlying heritable human differences immediately began. But with a few exceptions — almost all of which predate the large screens — the business of genetic forecasting has turned out to be much more difficult than anyone expected. And despite the hype, the era of personal medicine — where your treatment is tailored for your genes — remains frustratingly far away.
At the heart of this story there is a paradox. We have accumulated huge databases on human genetic differences — but many of the differences appear to be more or less irrelevant.
To see what I mean, suppose you set out to analyze a DNA sample from someone you knew nothing about. What could you discover?
You could discover their sex. That’s easy. You could also discover where they are from, genetically speaking. In the past five years, the genetics of ancestry testing has become excellent. So much so that you can reliably tell the difference between someone descended from Swedes, as against Italians.
The reason this works is that in the past, humans didn’t move around much. As a result, genetic differences accumulated slightly differently in different groups. On average, then, Swedes’ genomes resemble each other more closely than they resemble those of Italians or American Indians.
If you discovered someone’s ancestors were Swedish, you’d infer that they themselves are likely to be tall and blond with pale skin. But that’s only because you already know what other Swedes look like. If you didn’t — and this is the odd thing — you wouldn’t be able to infer much from the genes themselves. This is because, by and large, we don’t know how to translate genetic differences into physical differences.
Consider height. This trait has a strong genetic component: we know that as much as 90 percent of the difference in height between you and me is because of differences in our genes. (The rest is because of differences in things like nutrition.) One recent study, which looked at more than 30,000 people, found 20 genes that influence height. But together, these 20 genes accounted for just 3 percent of the variation. That leaves a whopping 87 percent still to be accounted for.
Not all traits are so intractable. If your mystery individual had a particular form of a gene known as melanocortin receptor 1, you’d know they had red hair. A variant in the control region of another gene has been strongly linked to blue eyes. Having variants of still another gene greatly increases the odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease. Forms of several genes have been strongly linked to adverse drug reactions — or to a given drug having no effect at all. And then there are the handful of genetic diseases we already knew about, like sickle cell anemia and Huntington’s disease.
But for many traits, including diabetes, the pattern is similar to what we see for height. Large numbers of people have been screened, and impressively large numbers of genes have been implicated — but no single gene seems to be having a particularly big effect by itself. Moreover, and this is the more important point, a lot of the genetic variation underlying each trait has not yet been found.
What does this mean? There are a couple of possibilities. Either, huge numbers of genes affect most traits, with each gene making a tiny contribution. If this is so, our hopes for finding meaningful risk factors for most genetic diseases is poor. Or, variants of a few genes do have a substantial effect but they are too rare to have been discovered yet. (Most of the screens used today capture only the 500,000 most common genetic differences. Rare differences are essentially invisible.) In which case, we need to change the way we are approaching the problem.
Scientifically, this is fascinating. But from a practical point of view, the results are discouraging. If you want to learn your odds of getting different diseases, consult your family history. Or visit a fortune teller. For most traits, genetic testing is — for now, anyway — little better than consulting the tea leaves.
Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion. She is filling in for Thomas L. Friedman, who is off today.
Guest Columnist
Testing Genes, Solving Little
By OLIVIA JUDSON
London
It was supposed to be simple. Once it became cheap to scan large numbers of people for large numbers of genetic differences, everyone assumed that it would swiftly become straightforward to convert genetic differences into physical differences — that we’d be able to look at someone’s genome and say, this man is between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-2, has black hair, green eyes and a high risk of developing diabetes.
Not so. The age of large-scale screening arrived about five years ago, and a hunt for the genes underlying heritable human differences immediately began. But with a few exceptions — almost all of which predate the large screens — the business of genetic forecasting has turned out to be much more difficult than anyone expected. And despite the hype, the era of personal medicine — where your treatment is tailored for your genes — remains frustratingly far away.
At the heart of this story there is a paradox. We have accumulated huge databases on human genetic differences — but many of the differences appear to be more or less irrelevant.
To see what I mean, suppose you set out to analyze a DNA sample from someone you knew nothing about. What could you discover?
You could discover their sex. That’s easy. You could also discover where they are from, genetically speaking. In the past five years, the genetics of ancestry testing has become excellent. So much so that you can reliably tell the difference between someone descended from Swedes, as against Italians.
The reason this works is that in the past, humans didn’t move around much. As a result, genetic differences accumulated slightly differently in different groups. On average, then, Swedes’ genomes resemble each other more closely than they resemble those of Italians or American Indians.
If you discovered someone’s ancestors were Swedish, you’d infer that they themselves are likely to be tall and blond with pale skin. But that’s only because you already know what other Swedes look like. If you didn’t — and this is the odd thing — you wouldn’t be able to infer much from the genes themselves. This is because, by and large, we don’t know how to translate genetic differences into physical differences.
Consider height. This trait has a strong genetic component: we know that as much as 90 percent of the difference in height between you and me is because of differences in our genes. (The rest is because of differences in things like nutrition.) One recent study, which looked at more than 30,000 people, found 20 genes that influence height. But together, these 20 genes accounted for just 3 percent of the variation. That leaves a whopping 87 percent still to be accounted for.
Not all traits are so intractable. If your mystery individual had a particular form of a gene known as melanocortin receptor 1, you’d know they had red hair. A variant in the control region of another gene has been strongly linked to blue eyes. Having variants of still another gene greatly increases the odds of getting Alzheimer’s disease. Forms of several genes have been strongly linked to adverse drug reactions — or to a given drug having no effect at all. And then there are the handful of genetic diseases we already knew about, like sickle cell anemia and Huntington’s disease.
But for many traits, including diabetes, the pattern is similar to what we see for height. Large numbers of people have been screened, and impressively large numbers of genes have been implicated — but no single gene seems to be having a particularly big effect by itself. Moreover, and this is the more important point, a lot of the genetic variation underlying each trait has not yet been found.
What does this mean? There are a couple of possibilities. Either, huge numbers of genes affect most traits, with each gene making a tiny contribution. If this is so, our hopes for finding meaningful risk factors for most genetic diseases is poor. Or, variants of a few genes do have a substantial effect but they are too rare to have been discovered yet. (Most of the screens used today capture only the 500,000 most common genetic differences. Rare differences are essentially invisible.) In which case, we need to change the way we are approaching the problem.
Scientifically, this is fascinating. But from a practical point of view, the results are discouraging. If you want to learn your odds of getting different diseases, consult your family history. Or visit a fortune teller. For most traits, genetic testing is — for now, anyway — little better than consulting the tea leaves.
Olivia Judson, a contributing columnist for The Times, writes The Wild Side at nytimes.com/opinion. She is filling in for Thomas L. Friedman, who is off today.
August 19, 2008
A Conversation With Nina V. Fedoroff
An Advocate for Science Diplomacy
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
When she was a single mother in the early 1960s, Nina V. Fedoroff, 66, defied odds and conventionality by working her way through college, graduate school and postdoctoral studies. Dr. Fedoroff, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, did fundamental research on plant transposons, or jumping genes, and was among the first to clone plant DNA. She is science adviser to the secretary of state and administrator of the Agency for International Development. We spoke last month in Washington and later on the telephone. An edited version of the conversations follows.
Q. WHEN YOU GAVE A RECENT SPEECH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ADVOCATING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS, SOMEONE SITTING NEAR ME SAID, “OH GREAT, OUR STATE DEPARTMENT IS PUSHING G.M. FOOD. SHE’S THE AMBASSADOR FROM MONSANTO.” WHAT’S YOUR RESPONSE?
A. How do I answer him? My answer is: There’s almost no food that isn’t genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution.
Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.
So a lot of modern plant strains were created by applying chemicals or radiation to cause mutations that improved the crop. That’s how plant breeding was done in the 20th century. The paradox is that now that we’ve invented techniques that introduce just one gene without disturbing the rest, some people think that’s terrible.
Q. WHY DO YOU THINK THERE IS SUCH FIERCE OPPOSITION TO GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS?
A. This is an unintended consequence of our success. We’ve gotten so good at growing food that we’ve gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we’d like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.
But I’m afraid we can’t, in part, because there are just too many of us in this world. If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.
Q. YOU BELIEVE THAT ENVIRONMENTALISTS SHOULD BE EMBRACING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS. WHAT’S YOUR ARGUMENT?
A. If we put more land under cultivation to feed the world’s growing population, we’re going to pull down the remaining forests.
And if that happens, it will contribute tremendously to desertification. The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better. Europe, North America, Australia, Japan — we’ve been extremely successful in applying science to agriculture and we can afford to say, “Let’s go natural.” But there’s collateral damage.
When I went to Rwanda, you saw farmers with holdings of less than an acre.
If their population doubles again, we’re looking at more strife. Arguably, Darfur isn’t about politics, it’s about water. Many of the conflicts in the poorest countries are about too many people chasing too few resources. Do we have time to transition something that looks like Rwanda to a more efficient agriculture and to do it wisely enough to absorb the people?
Q. WHY DOES THE SECRETARY OF STATE NEED A SCIENCE ADVISER?
A. Because science and technology are the drivers of the 21st century’s most successful economies.
There are more than six billion of us, and the problems of a crowded planet are everyone’s: food, water, energy, climate change, environmental degradation. Other nations, even those that have lost respect for our culture and politics, still welcome collaboration on scientific and technological issues.
Q. REPRESENTATIVE GEORGE E. BROWN JR., ONCE THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE, WORRIED THAT BECAUSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AGREEMENTS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES WERE NOT FINANCED, THE UNITED STATES WAS HURTING ITSELF WITH EMPTY GESTURES. WAS HE RIGHT?
A. That’s a great question and a very current one. Yes, the State Department opens doors by negotiating government-to-government S&T agreements. It also takes the first step in fleshing out such agreements by bringing scientists, ministers and agency representatives together to explore mutual interests. But actually supporting collaborative research on problems of mutual interest, that’s just beginning to be recognized as important.
George Brown was right — without the resources to support collaborations, it’s much less than it could be. There are members of Congress who are keenly interested in science diplomacy.
But Congress will have to make a bigger investment for science diplomacy to flourish.
Q. CAN YOU NAME A SITUATION WHERE SCIENCE DIPLOMACY CHANGED HISTORY?
A. History isn’t like a science experiment. You can’t go back and rerun it “without science diplomacy” to see what happens.
Nonetheless, some historians credit ongoing relationships between Soviet and American scientists, particularly physicists, with preventing a flash-over of the cold war.
Today scientific interactions exist between the U.S. and certain countries with which we have no formal diplomatic relations. We’re promoting scientific interactions to address water and health issues among the countries of the Middle East. Our recent interactions with Libya had science and technology as a centerpiece, ranging from a major international astronomical event around a solar eclipse, to addressing issues of health, water desalinization and agriculture.
Another example of science diplomacy is a small group, the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization. A project they’re doing that I’m enthusiastic about involves genetic assessments. There are some diseases unique to the region that may have a genetic basis. The question is: Which genes and how do you identify them? With that group, I see how science is a real force for bringing people together.
Q. WHY CAN SCIENCE CREATE COOPERATION IN PLACES WHERE EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS?
A. Because science is more collaborative than other types of endeavors. It aspires to more democratic principles than many political systems because we have an external reference.
People can have different theories, but we form an experiment to test it. It’s the evidence that matters. So in science, we can have differences of opinion, but we can’t have two sets of facts.
There is an in-built process that says, “You and I may have different religions, different politics, but we can talk about science across chasms.”
A Conversation With Nina V. Fedoroff
An Advocate for Science Diplomacy
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
When she was a single mother in the early 1960s, Nina V. Fedoroff, 66, defied odds and conventionality by working her way through college, graduate school and postdoctoral studies. Dr. Fedoroff, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, did fundamental research on plant transposons, or jumping genes, and was among the first to clone plant DNA. She is science adviser to the secretary of state and administrator of the Agency for International Development. We spoke last month in Washington and later on the telephone. An edited version of the conversations follows.
Q. WHEN YOU GAVE A RECENT SPEECH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY ADVOCATING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS, SOMEONE SITTING NEAR ME SAID, “OH GREAT, OUR STATE DEPARTMENT IS PUSHING G.M. FOOD. SHE’S THE AMBASSADOR FROM MONSANTO.” WHAT’S YOUR RESPONSE?
A. How do I answer him? My answer is: There’s almost no food that isn’t genetically modified. Genetic modification is the basis of all evolution.
Things change because our planet is subjected to a lot of radiation, which causes DNA damage, which gets repaired, but results in mutations, which create a ready mixture of plants that people can choose from to improve agriculture.
In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.
So a lot of modern plant strains were created by applying chemicals or radiation to cause mutations that improved the crop. That’s how plant breeding was done in the 20th century. The paradox is that now that we’ve invented techniques that introduce just one gene without disturbing the rest, some people think that’s terrible.
Q. WHY DO YOU THINK THERE IS SUCH FIERCE OPPOSITION TO GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS?
A. This is an unintended consequence of our success. We’ve gotten so good at growing food that we’ve gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we’d like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.
But I’m afraid we can’t, in part, because there are just too many of us in this world. If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.
Q. YOU BELIEVE THAT ENVIRONMENTALISTS SHOULD BE EMBRACING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS. WHAT’S YOUR ARGUMENT?
A. If we put more land under cultivation to feed the world’s growing population, we’re going to pull down the remaining forests.
And if that happens, it will contribute tremendously to desertification. The more we can grow on already cultivated land, the better. Europe, North America, Australia, Japan — we’ve been extremely successful in applying science to agriculture and we can afford to say, “Let’s go natural.” But there’s collateral damage.
When I went to Rwanda, you saw farmers with holdings of less than an acre.
If their population doubles again, we’re looking at more strife. Arguably, Darfur isn’t about politics, it’s about water. Many of the conflicts in the poorest countries are about too many people chasing too few resources. Do we have time to transition something that looks like Rwanda to a more efficient agriculture and to do it wisely enough to absorb the people?
Q. WHY DOES THE SECRETARY OF STATE NEED A SCIENCE ADVISER?
A. Because science and technology are the drivers of the 21st century’s most successful economies.
There are more than six billion of us, and the problems of a crowded planet are everyone’s: food, water, energy, climate change, environmental degradation. Other nations, even those that have lost respect for our culture and politics, still welcome collaboration on scientific and technological issues.
Q. REPRESENTATIVE GEORGE E. BROWN JR., ONCE THE HEAD OF THE HOUSE SCIENCE COMMITTEE, WORRIED THAT BECAUSE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AGREEMENTS WITH OTHER COUNTRIES WERE NOT FINANCED, THE UNITED STATES WAS HURTING ITSELF WITH EMPTY GESTURES. WAS HE RIGHT?
A. That’s a great question and a very current one. Yes, the State Department opens doors by negotiating government-to-government S&T agreements. It also takes the first step in fleshing out such agreements by bringing scientists, ministers and agency representatives together to explore mutual interests. But actually supporting collaborative research on problems of mutual interest, that’s just beginning to be recognized as important.
George Brown was right — without the resources to support collaborations, it’s much less than it could be. There are members of Congress who are keenly interested in science diplomacy.
But Congress will have to make a bigger investment for science diplomacy to flourish.
Q. CAN YOU NAME A SITUATION WHERE SCIENCE DIPLOMACY CHANGED HISTORY?
A. History isn’t like a science experiment. You can’t go back and rerun it “without science diplomacy” to see what happens.
Nonetheless, some historians credit ongoing relationships between Soviet and American scientists, particularly physicists, with preventing a flash-over of the cold war.
Today scientific interactions exist between the U.S. and certain countries with which we have no formal diplomatic relations. We’re promoting scientific interactions to address water and health issues among the countries of the Middle East. Our recent interactions with Libya had science and technology as a centerpiece, ranging from a major international astronomical event around a solar eclipse, to addressing issues of health, water desalinization and agriculture.
Another example of science diplomacy is a small group, the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization. A project they’re doing that I’m enthusiastic about involves genetic assessments. There are some diseases unique to the region that may have a genetic basis. The question is: Which genes and how do you identify them? With that group, I see how science is a real force for bringing people together.
Q. WHY CAN SCIENCE CREATE COOPERATION IN PLACES WHERE EVERYTHING ELSE FAILS?
A. Because science is more collaborative than other types of endeavors. It aspires to more democratic principles than many political systems because we have an external reference.
People can have different theories, but we form an experiment to test it. It’s the evidence that matters. So in science, we can have differences of opinion, but we can’t have two sets of facts.
There is an in-built process that says, “You and I may have different religions, different politics, but we can talk about science across chasms.”
Giant atom-smashing experiment could alter our understanding of the universe
Sat Aug 23, 11:18 AM
By Sean Patrick Sullivan, The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - Canadian scientists at the forefront of the world's largest science experiment say discoveries made by a giant atom-smasher now whirring deep under European soil could radically alter our understanding of the universe.
In experiments beginning next month, the $10-billion Large Hadron Collider will re-create what happened in the split second after the Big Bang, mind-bending science that may shatter existing theories of physics and prompt the discovery of new particles and unknown dimensions.
It's also designed to prove the existence of the theoretical Higgs boson, once dubbed the God particle, that is theorized to give mass to everything in the universe. The particle is key to the standard model of physics, yet has never been observed.
The first test-runs to circulate a beam in the collider begin on Sept. 10, leading to the first collisions in late October and early November.
Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's TRIUMF national particle and nuclear physics laboratory at the University of British Columbia, said the endeavour could also produce tiny black holes and shed light on the existence of dark energy and dark matter.
"We're on the edge of a major breakthrough in understanding the universe," Lockyer said in an interview at TRIUMF's sprawling compound at the university.
This breakthrough may come from this massive experiment 100 metres under the French-Swiss border, where the particle accelerator essentially lets scientists smash parts of atoms together at blinding speed and study the resulting mess.
The world's largest scientific instrument will use unprecedented amounts of energy to shoot two clouds of protons, with trillions of the particles in each cloud, around a 27-kilometre long circular tube.
The clouds collide at almost the speed of light, blowing the protons to smithereens and - ideally - offering a treasure trove of discoveries.
"We'll know what's out there. We'll know what to do for the rest of our lives," said Isabel Trigger, lead scientist for TRIUMF's contribution to the project.
Canadian researchers built components for part of the project. ATLAS is a soda-can-shaped detector that's roughly half a football field long and weighs 7,000 tonnes.
It will analyze the aftermath of the particle collisions and then ship data out to 10 labs worldwide, including TRIUMF, for years of analysis.
Five university sites - the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta in Edmonton and McGill University in Montreal - will crunch the data produced by TRIUMF.
More than 2,500 scientists and engineers from 35 countries helped build ATLAS, and TRIUMF's contribution of parts and expertise has given Canadian scientists access to the massive machine.
"We want our scientists to be involved in the leading project in this field in the world," Lockyer said.
The demand to work on this "mind-bending science" has been so great that TRIUMF has been turning away eager physics students, he said.
And while the mere mention of protons may invoke dreadful memories of high school science classes for some, the technology that powers electronics such as iPods and digital memory chips all owe a debt to physics advances such as this one, not to mention that the World Wide Web was created at CERN, the research centre hosting the particle collider.
"It's where science has been driving us for the last two or three hundred years," Trigger said.
"Asking basic questions: How does electricity work? How do magnets work? When you understand the connection between those different forces, suddenly you can make TVs and cellphones.
"You put that together and you understand something deeper and something more profound."
A number of fantastical discoveries could come from the experiments, but the crown jewel for scientists is the Higgs boson, the yet-unseen particle.
Though the detectors can't see the Higgs, which decays into other particles in a tiny fraction of a second, physicist Rob McPherson said scientists can infer its existence by measuring how those new particles react.
"It's different than any particle we've seen so far. If it doesn't exist, all of our theories of physics start to break," said McPherson, also with ATLAS-Canada.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/0808 ... particle_1
Sat Aug 23, 11:18 AM
By Sean Patrick Sullivan, The Canadian Press
VANCOUVER - Canadian scientists at the forefront of the world's largest science experiment say discoveries made by a giant atom-smasher now whirring deep under European soil could radically alter our understanding of the universe.
In experiments beginning next month, the $10-billion Large Hadron Collider will re-create what happened in the split second after the Big Bang, mind-bending science that may shatter existing theories of physics and prompt the discovery of new particles and unknown dimensions.
It's also designed to prove the existence of the theoretical Higgs boson, once dubbed the God particle, that is theorized to give mass to everything in the universe. The particle is key to the standard model of physics, yet has never been observed.
The first test-runs to circulate a beam in the collider begin on Sept. 10, leading to the first collisions in late October and early November.
Nigel Lockyer, director of Canada's TRIUMF national particle and nuclear physics laboratory at the University of British Columbia, said the endeavour could also produce tiny black holes and shed light on the existence of dark energy and dark matter.
"We're on the edge of a major breakthrough in understanding the universe," Lockyer said in an interview at TRIUMF's sprawling compound at the university.
This breakthrough may come from this massive experiment 100 metres under the French-Swiss border, where the particle accelerator essentially lets scientists smash parts of atoms together at blinding speed and study the resulting mess.
The world's largest scientific instrument will use unprecedented amounts of energy to shoot two clouds of protons, with trillions of the particles in each cloud, around a 27-kilometre long circular tube.
The clouds collide at almost the speed of light, blowing the protons to smithereens and - ideally - offering a treasure trove of discoveries.
"We'll know what's out there. We'll know what to do for the rest of our lives," said Isabel Trigger, lead scientist for TRIUMF's contribution to the project.
Canadian researchers built components for part of the project. ATLAS is a soda-can-shaped detector that's roughly half a football field long and weighs 7,000 tonnes.
It will analyze the aftermath of the particle collisions and then ship data out to 10 labs worldwide, including TRIUMF, for years of analysis.
Five university sites - the University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta in Edmonton and McGill University in Montreal - will crunch the data produced by TRIUMF.
More than 2,500 scientists and engineers from 35 countries helped build ATLAS, and TRIUMF's contribution of parts and expertise has given Canadian scientists access to the massive machine.
"We want our scientists to be involved in the leading project in this field in the world," Lockyer said.
The demand to work on this "mind-bending science" has been so great that TRIUMF has been turning away eager physics students, he said.
And while the mere mention of protons may invoke dreadful memories of high school science classes for some, the technology that powers electronics such as iPods and digital memory chips all owe a debt to physics advances such as this one, not to mention that the World Wide Web was created at CERN, the research centre hosting the particle collider.
"It's where science has been driving us for the last two or three hundred years," Trigger said.
"Asking basic questions: How does electricity work? How do magnets work? When you understand the connection between those different forces, suddenly you can make TVs and cellphones.
"You put that together and you understand something deeper and something more profound."
A number of fantastical discoveries could come from the experiments, but the crown jewel for scientists is the Higgs boson, the yet-unseen particle.
Though the detectors can't see the Higgs, which decays into other particles in a tiny fraction of a second, physicist Rob McPherson said scientists can infer its existence by measuring how those new particles react.
"It's different than any particle we've seen so far. If it doesn't exist, all of our theories of physics start to break," said McPherson, also with ATLAS-Canada.
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/0808 ... particle_1
September 4, 2008
Editorial
A Bright and Shiny Browser
Google has never shied away from a computing challenge. Searching the Web is synonymous with Google. For many people, E-mail is synonymous with Gmail. In fact, that is one of the things that makes Google worrisome when it comes to guaranteeing security and protecting privacy.
Now, Google is taking on the very foundation of its own existence — the Web browser. On Tuesday, it released a beta version of its new browser, Chrome, a word that programmers use to describe the frame of a browser window.
It’s tempting to think of Chrome in strictly competitive terms, as a challenge to Internet Explorer, the dominant browser from Microsoft. But that is too narrow a take. Google is in the business of distributing advertising to billboards (the browser on your computer screen), and with Chrome it is trying to build a better billboard.
From a technological standpoint, it is a browser that uses fewer of your computer’s resources, is less likely to break down in use and is constructed to a shared, compatible standard. Google says it will offer its innovations in Chrome to other developers without proprietary restrictions. And why not? Anything that is good for the speed, dependability and stability of browsers has to be good for Google (and incidentally for ordinary users).
We would try to explain how Chrome differs from Explorer and other browsers like Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. But Google has already done it with a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud and called “Google Chrome: Behind the Open Source Browser Project.” It says a lot about how browsers work, some of it in language and pictures you can understand. When it deviates too far into geek-speak, focus on the words in capital letters.
If Chrome manages to do its job as well as this comic book does, then the browser world is in for a shake-up. If all instructional and technical manuals were written as well as this Web comic, the electronic world would be a more intelligible place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opini ... nted=print
Editorial
A Bright and Shiny Browser
Google has never shied away from a computing challenge. Searching the Web is synonymous with Google. For many people, E-mail is synonymous with Gmail. In fact, that is one of the things that makes Google worrisome when it comes to guaranteeing security and protecting privacy.
Now, Google is taking on the very foundation of its own existence — the Web browser. On Tuesday, it released a beta version of its new browser, Chrome, a word that programmers use to describe the frame of a browser window.
It’s tempting to think of Chrome in strictly competitive terms, as a challenge to Internet Explorer, the dominant browser from Microsoft. But that is too narrow a take. Google is in the business of distributing advertising to billboards (the browser on your computer screen), and with Chrome it is trying to build a better billboard.
From a technological standpoint, it is a browser that uses fewer of your computer’s resources, is less likely to break down in use and is constructed to a shared, compatible standard. Google says it will offer its innovations in Chrome to other developers without proprietary restrictions. And why not? Anything that is good for the speed, dependability and stability of browsers has to be good for Google (and incidentally for ordinary users).
We would try to explain how Chrome differs from Explorer and other browsers like Firefox, and Apple’s Safari. But Google has already done it with a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud and called “Google Chrome: Behind the Open Source Browser Project.” It says a lot about how browsers work, some of it in language and pictures you can understand. When it deviates too far into geek-speak, focus on the words in capital letters.
If Chrome manages to do its job as well as this comic book does, then the browser world is in for a shake-up. If all instructional and technical manuals were written as well as this Web comic, the electronic world would be a more intelligible place.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/opini ... nted=print
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09 ... 8ty&emc=ty
September 2, 2008, 8:18 pm
Braking the Virus
Most of the time, talk of genetic modification revolves around crops, with claims and counterclaims as to the relative risks and benefits. Such questions are obviously important, but they have been so much discussed I don’t want to consider them again here (at least, not at the moment). Instead, I want to spend the next couple of weeks looking at other possible uses of genetic engineering.
As my first exhibit, I’ve chosen the genetic modification of a virus for the purpose of producing a safer vaccine. I like this example not just for its practical importance, but for its elegance. It exploits a fundamental property of life: the fact that there is more than one way to write a gene.
To recap: genes are instructions for making proteins — long strings of smaller molecules called amino acids. But this raises a question. For any given gene, how does the cell know what the corresponding protein should be? The answer is in the genetic code.
The term “genetic code” is sometimes used casually to refer to someone’s genome, as in, “He can’t help it, it’s in his genetic code.” But the term has a more specific, technical meaning, too. It’s the mechanism that a cell uses for translating genes into proteins.
Genes are usually represented as a string of letters — CAGCCCAGA, say. The letters stand for a set of chemicals, known as nucleotides, that make up a gene’s information content. The machinery of the cell “reads” these chemicals in consecutive groups of three; each group of three corresponds to a particular amino acid. The example above would, therefore, give the amino acids glutamine (CAG), proline (CCC) and arginine (AGA). Each group of three is called a “codon.”
However — and this is where the opportunity to rewrite genes comes in — there is more than one way to specify most of the amino acids. Glutamine, for example, can also be written as CAA. Arginine can be written in six different ways; proline, in four. The reason for this is that the genetic code has a great deal of redundancy. Although there are 64 possible codons (4 different nucleotides for each of three positions), there are only 20 amino acids to be assigned to them. This means that the particular string of the three amino acids given above could be specified in 48 different ways.
Cells have evolved to take advantage of this by using different codons for different purposes. Genes for proteins that need to be made quickly tend to be composed of “favorite” codons — the ones that the cell has evolved to use frequently. Genes for “slow” proteins tend to be made of disfavored codons — the ones the cell uses rarely. The reason is that if a codon is rare, the cell takes longer to recognize it, so it gets translated more slowly. A protein from a gene made entirely of rare codons, or rare combinations of codons — for the combinations can matter, too — will thus be made with a fraction of the efficiency of the same protein made from favorite codons or codon combinations. (Certain codon combinations can slow down the cell’s reading machinery.)
We humans can take advantage of this redundancy too. In principle, we can rewrite a gene so that the protein made from it will be exactly the same as it was before—it will have the same sequence of amino acids — but the process of making it will be slooooowww.
Which brings me to the virus and the vaccine.
Each virus has a set of genes that encode the instructions for making the proteins needed to make more virus. But it can’t make these proteins all by itself. For that, it needs to hijack the machinery of a cell that belongs to a host organism. Sometimes — depending on the virus — that organism will be me or you.
When a virus infects you, your immune system will begin to mount a response. If the virus is an old foe — one the immune system has encountered before — the response will be rapid. So rapid that the virus doesn’t have a chance to make mischief, and you avoid falling sick. This is because the previous encounters have left the immune system primed to recognize the virus. But if you’ve never met this particular type of virus, there will be a lag between the infection and the immune response. Depending on the virus, this lag may leave you dangerously ill, or even dead.
The idea behind vaccines is that you prime the immune system to recognize viruses it hasn’t been exposed to yet. This gets rid of the lag, and allows the immune system to treat a new foe as if it was an old one. The trouble is that in order to generate an immune response from a vaccine — in order to prime the immune system — you have to expose it to the virus in some way. Otherwise, the immune system won’t know what it’s looking for.
For many viruses, the most effective kind of vaccine is made with an attenuated strain — a version of the virus that is still active, but has been rendered harmless. But the problem is, in many of these strains there’s a real possibility that the virus in the vaccine will spontaneously revert to the harmful version and cause disease. The reason is that, usually, the genes of the attenuated strain are very similar to those of the harmful version, distinguished by only a few differences in their genes.
The traditional way to attenuate a virus is through trial and error — a process of selecting harmless versions. But now, attenuation can be engineered. The idea is to rewrite some of the virus’s genes using “slow” combinations of codons. The virus makes the same proteins it did before, but it makes them so slowly that an infection cannot get going.
Electron micrograph of the poliovirus. (CDC/ Dr. Fred Murphy, Sylvia Whitfield)In a recent series of experiments investigating whether such engineering actually works in practice, polioviruses with rewritten genes were 1,000 times less efficient than the viruses found in the wild. This successfully rendered the virus harmless while still letting the immune system get a good look at it: mice that had been exposed to the engineered version were immune to wild poliovirus, whereas mice that had not been were not.
The advantage of this approach to attenuation is that it should be near impossible for an engineered virus to revert to being harmful. The number of changes involved is so large that the chance of a spontaneous reversion to the wild form is remote. If similar experiments with other viruses work as well as those with poliovirus, a new approach to designing safer vaccines may be in the offing.
**********
NOTES:
For information about redundancy in the genetic code, see any biology textbook. For certain codon combinations being translated more slowly than others, see Buchan, J. R., Aucott, L. S., and Stansfield, I. 2006. “tRNA properties help shape codon pair preferences in open reading frames.” Nucleic Acids Research 34: 1015-1027. For the attenuation of viruses the old-fashioned way, see, for example, Badgett, M. R., Auer, A., Carmichael, L. E., Parrish, C. R., and Bull, J. J. 2002. “Evolutionary dynamics of viral attenuation.” Journal of Virology 76: 10524-10529.
For the genetic engineering of an attenuated virus using “slow” codon combinations, see Coleman, J. R., Papamichail, D., Skiena, S., Futcher, B., Wimmer, E., and Mueller, S. 2008. “Virus attenuation by genome-scale changes in codon pair bias.” Science 320: 1784-1787.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon, Jonathan Swire and Eckard Wimmer for comments, insights and suggestions
September 2, 2008, 8:18 pm
Braking the Virus
Most of the time, talk of genetic modification revolves around crops, with claims and counterclaims as to the relative risks and benefits. Such questions are obviously important, but they have been so much discussed I don’t want to consider them again here (at least, not at the moment). Instead, I want to spend the next couple of weeks looking at other possible uses of genetic engineering.
As my first exhibit, I’ve chosen the genetic modification of a virus for the purpose of producing a safer vaccine. I like this example not just for its practical importance, but for its elegance. It exploits a fundamental property of life: the fact that there is more than one way to write a gene.
To recap: genes are instructions for making proteins — long strings of smaller molecules called amino acids. But this raises a question. For any given gene, how does the cell know what the corresponding protein should be? The answer is in the genetic code.
The term “genetic code” is sometimes used casually to refer to someone’s genome, as in, “He can’t help it, it’s in his genetic code.” But the term has a more specific, technical meaning, too. It’s the mechanism that a cell uses for translating genes into proteins.
Genes are usually represented as a string of letters — CAGCCCAGA, say. The letters stand for a set of chemicals, known as nucleotides, that make up a gene’s information content. The machinery of the cell “reads” these chemicals in consecutive groups of three; each group of three corresponds to a particular amino acid. The example above would, therefore, give the amino acids glutamine (CAG), proline (CCC) and arginine (AGA). Each group of three is called a “codon.”
However — and this is where the opportunity to rewrite genes comes in — there is more than one way to specify most of the amino acids. Glutamine, for example, can also be written as CAA. Arginine can be written in six different ways; proline, in four. The reason for this is that the genetic code has a great deal of redundancy. Although there are 64 possible codons (4 different nucleotides for each of three positions), there are only 20 amino acids to be assigned to them. This means that the particular string of the three amino acids given above could be specified in 48 different ways.
Cells have evolved to take advantage of this by using different codons for different purposes. Genes for proteins that need to be made quickly tend to be composed of “favorite” codons — the ones that the cell has evolved to use frequently. Genes for “slow” proteins tend to be made of disfavored codons — the ones the cell uses rarely. The reason is that if a codon is rare, the cell takes longer to recognize it, so it gets translated more slowly. A protein from a gene made entirely of rare codons, or rare combinations of codons — for the combinations can matter, too — will thus be made with a fraction of the efficiency of the same protein made from favorite codons or codon combinations. (Certain codon combinations can slow down the cell’s reading machinery.)
We humans can take advantage of this redundancy too. In principle, we can rewrite a gene so that the protein made from it will be exactly the same as it was before—it will have the same sequence of amino acids — but the process of making it will be slooooowww.
Which brings me to the virus and the vaccine.
Each virus has a set of genes that encode the instructions for making the proteins needed to make more virus. But it can’t make these proteins all by itself. For that, it needs to hijack the machinery of a cell that belongs to a host organism. Sometimes — depending on the virus — that organism will be me or you.
When a virus infects you, your immune system will begin to mount a response. If the virus is an old foe — one the immune system has encountered before — the response will be rapid. So rapid that the virus doesn’t have a chance to make mischief, and you avoid falling sick. This is because the previous encounters have left the immune system primed to recognize the virus. But if you’ve never met this particular type of virus, there will be a lag between the infection and the immune response. Depending on the virus, this lag may leave you dangerously ill, or even dead.
The idea behind vaccines is that you prime the immune system to recognize viruses it hasn’t been exposed to yet. This gets rid of the lag, and allows the immune system to treat a new foe as if it was an old one. The trouble is that in order to generate an immune response from a vaccine — in order to prime the immune system — you have to expose it to the virus in some way. Otherwise, the immune system won’t know what it’s looking for.
For many viruses, the most effective kind of vaccine is made with an attenuated strain — a version of the virus that is still active, but has been rendered harmless. But the problem is, in many of these strains there’s a real possibility that the virus in the vaccine will spontaneously revert to the harmful version and cause disease. The reason is that, usually, the genes of the attenuated strain are very similar to those of the harmful version, distinguished by only a few differences in their genes.
The traditional way to attenuate a virus is through trial and error — a process of selecting harmless versions. But now, attenuation can be engineered. The idea is to rewrite some of the virus’s genes using “slow” combinations of codons. The virus makes the same proteins it did before, but it makes them so slowly that an infection cannot get going.
Electron micrograph of the poliovirus. (CDC/ Dr. Fred Murphy, Sylvia Whitfield)In a recent series of experiments investigating whether such engineering actually works in practice, polioviruses with rewritten genes were 1,000 times less efficient than the viruses found in the wild. This successfully rendered the virus harmless while still letting the immune system get a good look at it: mice that had been exposed to the engineered version were immune to wild poliovirus, whereas mice that had not been were not.
The advantage of this approach to attenuation is that it should be near impossible for an engineered virus to revert to being harmful. The number of changes involved is so large that the chance of a spontaneous reversion to the wild form is remote. If similar experiments with other viruses work as well as those with poliovirus, a new approach to designing safer vaccines may be in the offing.
**********
NOTES:
For information about redundancy in the genetic code, see any biology textbook. For certain codon combinations being translated more slowly than others, see Buchan, J. R., Aucott, L. S., and Stansfield, I. 2006. “tRNA properties help shape codon pair preferences in open reading frames.” Nucleic Acids Research 34: 1015-1027. For the attenuation of viruses the old-fashioned way, see, for example, Badgett, M. R., Auer, A., Carmichael, L. E., Parrish, C. R., and Bull, J. J. 2002. “Evolutionary dynamics of viral attenuation.” Journal of Virology 76: 10524-10529.
For the genetic engineering of an attenuated virus using “slow” codon combinations, see Coleman, J. R., Papamichail, D., Skiena, S., Futcher, B., Wimmer, E., and Mueller, S. 2008. “Virus attenuation by genome-scale changes in codon pair bias.” Science 320: 1784-1787.
Many thanks to Dan Haydon, Jonathan Swire and Eckard Wimmer for comments, insights and suggestions
September 8, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
No Need for Speed
By KENT A. SEPKOWITZ
SPEEDING is the cause of 30 percent of all traffic deaths in the United States — about 13,000 people a year. By comparison, alcohol is blamed 39 percent of the time, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But unlike drinking, which requires the police, breathalyzers and coercion to improve drivers’ behavior, there’s a simple way to prevent speeding: quit building cars that can exceed the speed limit.
Most cars can travel over 100 miles an hour — an illegal speed in every state. Our continued, deliberate production of potentially law-breaking devices has no real precedent. We regulate all sorts of items to decrease danger to the public, from baby cribs to bicycle helmets. Yet we continue to produce fast cars despite the lives lost, the tens of billions spent treating accident victims, and a good deal of gasoline wasted. (Speeding, after all, substantially reduces fuel efficiency due to the sheering force of wind.)
Worse, throughout the various federal documents examining traffic fatalities, the role of speeding is de-emphasized. Speeding is not even an “agency priority” of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its annual assessment of crashes — only alcohol, seat belts, rollovers and vehicle compatibility make the cut. Rather it is in the second-tier “other focus” category, along with large trucks and “intersection-related and roadway departure.” And unlike the statistical attention afforded alcohol (20 pages of a 150-page document), the section devoted to speeding comes in at a measly three pages.
A deeper look at the safety administration’s report on traffic fatalities in 2005 also reveals a strange fact about how speeding-related traffic fatalities are tallied up. Consider this: in Texas, in 2005, 3,504 people died in a traffic accident; 1,426 (about 41 percent) were considered speeding-related. In sharp contrast, for Florida, 3,543 died yet only 239 were considered speeding-related — about 7 percent.
Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana and New Jersey, among other states, also report rates well below 20 percent. This variation is not just shoddy government work. With alcohol, for example, the 39 percent national rate varies only by a whisker when examined state to state (except for Utah’s admirable rate of 13 percent). Is it possible that drivers in some states speed more often than their counterparts across the border?
Not likely. Different states, for various reasons, analyze their automotive fatalities in different ways, but the result is that the safety agency’s official speeding-related fatality rate of 28 percent is almost certainly a low-ball estimate.
Then there is the relationship between speeding and alcohol. According to the agency, in 2006, 41 percent of alcohol-related fatalities were also associated with speeding; and between midnight and 3 a.m., 76 percent of speeding drivers killed in motor vehicle accidents had been drinking.
Despite all this, we Americans insist on the inalienable right to speed. Imagine, for a moment, if E-ZPass kept track of exactly when each car entered one toll booth and exited another, which would allow local governments to do some basic math, dividing distance traveled by time spent. If this calculation showed you to be a speeder, the authorities would send you a traffic ticket. Lives, money and oil would be saved and proof of wrongdoing would be undeniable, but the public outcry would be deafening.
Because the ticket-them-till-they-stop approach simply would not work, we might consider my initial recommendation: build cars that can’t exceed the speed limit. The technology to limit car speed has existed for more than 50 years — it’s called cruise control. In its common application, cruise control maintains a steady speed, but a minor adjustment would assure that vehicles, no matter the horsepower, never go past 75 miles per hour. This safety measure should be required of every new automobile, the same as seat belts, turning signals, brake lights and air bags.
Sure, it would take us longer to get from here to there. But thousands of deaths a year are too great a cost for so adolescent a thrill as speeding.
Kent A. Sepkowitz is vice-chairman of medicine at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Op-Ed Contributor
No Need for Speed
By KENT A. SEPKOWITZ
SPEEDING is the cause of 30 percent of all traffic deaths in the United States — about 13,000 people a year. By comparison, alcohol is blamed 39 percent of the time, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But unlike drinking, which requires the police, breathalyzers and coercion to improve drivers’ behavior, there’s a simple way to prevent speeding: quit building cars that can exceed the speed limit.
Most cars can travel over 100 miles an hour — an illegal speed in every state. Our continued, deliberate production of potentially law-breaking devices has no real precedent. We regulate all sorts of items to decrease danger to the public, from baby cribs to bicycle helmets. Yet we continue to produce fast cars despite the lives lost, the tens of billions spent treating accident victims, and a good deal of gasoline wasted. (Speeding, after all, substantially reduces fuel efficiency due to the sheering force of wind.)
Worse, throughout the various federal documents examining traffic fatalities, the role of speeding is de-emphasized. Speeding is not even an “agency priority” of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in its annual assessment of crashes — only alcohol, seat belts, rollovers and vehicle compatibility make the cut. Rather it is in the second-tier “other focus” category, along with large trucks and “intersection-related and roadway departure.” And unlike the statistical attention afforded alcohol (20 pages of a 150-page document), the section devoted to speeding comes in at a measly three pages.
A deeper look at the safety administration’s report on traffic fatalities in 2005 also reveals a strange fact about how speeding-related traffic fatalities are tallied up. Consider this: in Texas, in 2005, 3,504 people died in a traffic accident; 1,426 (about 41 percent) were considered speeding-related. In sharp contrast, for Florida, 3,543 died yet only 239 were considered speeding-related — about 7 percent.
Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana and New Jersey, among other states, also report rates well below 20 percent. This variation is not just shoddy government work. With alcohol, for example, the 39 percent national rate varies only by a whisker when examined state to state (except for Utah’s admirable rate of 13 percent). Is it possible that drivers in some states speed more often than their counterparts across the border?
Not likely. Different states, for various reasons, analyze their automotive fatalities in different ways, but the result is that the safety agency’s official speeding-related fatality rate of 28 percent is almost certainly a low-ball estimate.
Then there is the relationship between speeding and alcohol. According to the agency, in 2006, 41 percent of alcohol-related fatalities were also associated with speeding; and between midnight and 3 a.m., 76 percent of speeding drivers killed in motor vehicle accidents had been drinking.
Despite all this, we Americans insist on the inalienable right to speed. Imagine, for a moment, if E-ZPass kept track of exactly when each car entered one toll booth and exited another, which would allow local governments to do some basic math, dividing distance traveled by time spent. If this calculation showed you to be a speeder, the authorities would send you a traffic ticket. Lives, money and oil would be saved and proof of wrongdoing would be undeniable, but the public outcry would be deafening.
Because the ticket-them-till-they-stop approach simply would not work, we might consider my initial recommendation: build cars that can’t exceed the speed limit. The technology to limit car speed has existed for more than 50 years — it’s called cruise control. In its common application, cruise control maintains a steady speed, but a minor adjustment would assure that vehicles, no matter the horsepower, never go past 75 miles per hour. This safety measure should be required of every new automobile, the same as seat belts, turning signals, brake lights and air bags.
Sure, it would take us longer to get from here to there. But thousands of deaths a year are too great a cost for so adolescent a thrill as speeding.
Kent A. Sepkowitz is vice-chairman of medicine at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Big Bang theory put to test in collider
Fears of world's end 'nonsense,' physicist says
Robert Evans
Reuters
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
CREDIT: AFP-Getty Images Archive
Scientists plan to smash particle beams together on Wednesday inside the Large Hadron Collider to create mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.
Scientists involved in a historic Big Bang experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins -- but reject suggestions it will bring the end of the world.
And Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organization's $9.2 billion project would spark major advances for human society.
"If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature," said British physicist Brian Cox.
"What I would like to see is the unexpected," said Gerardus t'Hooft of the University of Michigan.
Perhaps, he suggested, the Large Hadron Collider machine at the heart of the experiment "will show us things we didn't know existed."
Once it starts up on Wednesday, scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside the tightly-sealed Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.
Cosmologists say the explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets -- and eventually to life on earth.
A key aim of the experiment is to find the "Higgs boson," named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who in 1964 pointed to such a particle as the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible.
But other mysteries of physics and cosmology -- supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy among them -- are at the focus of experiments in the 27 kilometre circular tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border.
The European Centre for Nuclear Research says its key researchers -- and many ordinary staff -- have been inundated by e-mails voicing fears about the experiment.
There have been claims that it will create black holes of intensive gravity sucking in the research centre, Europe itself and perhaps the whole planet, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a worm hole in space-time.
But a safety review by scientists here and in the United States and Russia, issued on the weekend, rejected the prospect of such outcomes.
"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," Aymar, who has led CERN for five years, said in response to that review. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."
Cox, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Britain's Manchester University, was even more trenchant. "I am immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around," he said.
When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, disaster scenarists will have little to work on.
In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in one direction.
If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one researcher, "will be little ones."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... b&sponsor=
Fears of world's end 'nonsense,' physicist says
Robert Evans
Reuters
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
CREDIT: AFP-Getty Images Archive
Scientists plan to smash particle beams together on Wednesday inside the Large Hadron Collider to create mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.
Scientists involved in a historic Big Bang experiment to begin this week hope it will turn up many surprises about the universe and its origins -- but reject suggestions it will bring the end of the world.
And Robert Aymar, the French physicist who heads the European Centre for Nuclear Research, CERN, predicted that discoveries to emerge from his organization's $9.2 billion project would spark major advances for human society.
"If some of what we expect to find does not turn up, and things we did not foresee do, that will be even more stimulating because it means that we understand less than we thought about nature," said British physicist Brian Cox.
"What I would like to see is the unexpected," said Gerardus t'Hooft of the University of Michigan.
Perhaps, he suggested, the Large Hadron Collider machine at the heart of the experiment "will show us things we didn't know existed."
Once it starts up on Wednesday, scientists plan to smash particle beams together at close to the speed of light inside the tightly-sealed Large Hadron Collider to create multiple mini-versions of the primeval Big Bang.
Cosmologists say the explosion of an object the size of a small coin occurred about 13.7 billion years ago and led to formation of stars, planets -- and eventually to life on earth.
A key aim of the experiment is to find the "Higgs boson," named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who in 1964 pointed to such a particle as the force that gave mass to matter and made the universe possible.
But other mysteries of physics and cosmology -- supersymmetry, dark matter and dark energy among them -- are at the focus of experiments in the 27 kilometre circular tunnel deep underneath the Swiss-French border.
The European Centre for Nuclear Research says its key researchers -- and many ordinary staff -- have been inundated by e-mails voicing fears about the experiment.
There have been claims that it will create black holes of intensive gravity sucking in the research centre, Europe itself and perhaps the whole planet, or that it will open the way for beings from another universe to invade through a worm hole in space-time.
But a safety review by scientists here and in the United States and Russia, issued on the weekend, rejected the prospect of such outcomes.
"The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," Aymar, who has led CERN for five years, said in response to that review. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction."
Cox, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Britain's Manchester University, was even more trenchant. "I am immensely irritated by the conspiracy theorists who spread this nonsense around," he said.
When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, disaster scenarists will have little to work on.
In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in one direction.
If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one researcher, "will be little ones."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... b&sponsor=
There is an interesting related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/scien ... ?ref=world
September 11, 2008
Scientists Activate Particle Collider
By DENNIS OVERBYE
BATAVIA, ILL. — Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of champagne into the future on Wednesday.
After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.
At 4:27 a.m., Eastern time, scientists sent the beam of protons around the collider’s 17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border, and then sent another beam through again.
“It’s a fantastic moment,” said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
An ocean away from Geneva, the L.H.C.’s activation was watched with bittersweet excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which until that moment had the reigning particle collider.
Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new generation in high-energy physics, applauding each milestone of the night as the beam was slowly wrestled into shape at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Many of them, including the lab’s director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even night caps bearing Fermilab patches on them.
Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky as a reminder that the universe is beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.
Dr. Oddone lauded the new machine as the result of “two and a half decades of dreams to open up this huge new territory in the exploration of the natural world.”
Roger Aymar, CERN’s director, called the new collider a “discovery machine.” The buzz was worldwide. Gordon Kane, of the University of Michigan called the new collider “a why machine,” in a posting on the blog “Cosmic Variance.”
Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, have called it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.
But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz and excitement about particle physics. “Bad publicity is still publicity,” he said. “This is something that people can talk to their neighbors about.”
The only thing physicists agree on is that they don’t know what will happen — what laws prevail — when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.
“That there are many theories means we don’t have a clue,” said Dr. Oddone. “That’s what makes it so exciting.”
Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.
But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.
Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on the experts and non-experts gathered here.
At 2 a.m. local time, Herman White, a physicist here, and master of ceremonies for the night, took the stage to announce the night’s schedule. For at least the next few hours, he said, “we are still the highest energy accelerator in the world,” to wild applause.
In an interview earlier that day, Dr. Oddone called it a “bittersweet moment.”
Once upon a time the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab’s Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, anti-protons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts was the world’s largest particle machine.
By the end of the year, when the CERN collider has revved up to 5 trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time towards the Big Bang.
In 1993, the United States Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. That collider, its former director Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas in Austin said recently, would have been in operation around 2001.
Dr. Schwitters said that American particle physics — the search for the most fundamental rules and constituents of nature — had never really recovered from the loss of the supercollider. “One non-renewable resource is a person’s time and good years,” he said, adding that many young people have left the field for astrophysics or cosmology.
Dr. Oddone, Fermilab’s director, said the uncertainties of steady Congressional funding made the situation at Fermilab and physics in general in the United States “suspenseful.”
CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countires, whose budget is determined by treaty and thus stable. The year after the supercollider was killed, CERN decided to go ahead with its own collider.
Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531 million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Dr. Oddone said that Americans constitute about a quarter of the scientists who have built the four giant detectors that sit at points around the racetrack to collect and analyze the debris from the primordial fireballs.
In fact, a remote conrol room for monitoring one of those experiments, known poetically as the Compact Muon Solenoid, was built at Fermilab, just off the lobby of the main building here.
“The mood is great at this place,” he said, noting that the Tevatron is humming productively and accumulating data at a much more rapid pace than the CERN collider will initially produce. There is even still a chance that Tevatron could find the sacred Higgs boson before the new hadron collider, which is bound to have a slow start.
Another target of physicists is a principle called supersymmetry, which predicts, among other things, that there is a vast population of new particle species left over from the Big Bang and waiting to be discovered, one of which could be the long-sought dark matter.
“It would be a very rich life if supersymmetry is found,” Dr. Oddone said. “It would amount to permanent employment for physicists for decades.”
“The truly surprising thing is if we don’t see anything.”
By the time festivities started, at 2 a.m. Chicago time, outside and inside the control room for the solenoid detector, Fermilab had been festooned with balloons and the accelerator was already half an hour late. The superconducting magnets that guide the protons around on their path have to be cooled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin, about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero, and one of the eight sectors of the underground ring was too warm, so they had to wait to cool it back down.
Then Lyn Evans, the collider project director, outlined the plan for the evening: sending a bunch of protons clockwise farther and farther around the collider until they made it all the way. He confessed to not knowing how long it would take, noting that for a previous CERN accelerator it had taken 12 hours. “I hope this will go much faster,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, when the displays in the control room showed that the beam had made it to its first stopping point, the crowd applauded. Twenty minutes after that, the physicists erupted in cheers when their consoles showed that the muon solenoid had detected collisions between the beam and stray gas molecules in the otherwise vacuum beam pipe. Their detector was alive and working.
Finally at 3:27 Chicago time, the display showed the protons had made it all the way around to another big detector named Atlas, whose members quickly confirmed that their experiment had also seen collisions.
At Fermilab, they broke out the champagne. Dr. Oddone congratulated his European colleagues. “We have all worked together and brought this machine to life,” he said. “We’re so excited about sending a beam around. Wait until we start having collisions and doing physics.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/scien ... ?ref=world
September 11, 2008
Scientists Activate Particle Collider
By DENNIS OVERBYE
BATAVIA, ILL. — Science rode a beam of subatomic particles and a river of champagne into the future on Wednesday.
After 14 years of labor, scientists at the CERN laboratory outside Geneva successfully activated the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest, most powerful particle collider and, at $8 billion, the most expensive scientific experiment to date.
At 4:27 a.m., Eastern time, scientists sent the beam of protons around the collider’s 17-mile-long racetrack, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border, and then sent another beam through again.
“It’s a fantastic moment,” said Lyn Evans, who has been the project director of the collider since its inception. “We can now look forward to a new era of understanding about the origins and evolution of the universe.”
Eventually, the collider is expected to accelerate protons to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then smash them together, recreating conditions in the primordial fireball only a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists hope the machine will be a sort of Hubble Space Telescope of inner space, allowing them to detect new subatomic particles and forces of nature.
An ocean away from Geneva, the L.H.C.’s activation was watched with bittersweet excitement here at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, which until that moment had the reigning particle collider.
Several dozen physicists, students and onlookers gathered overnight to watch the dawn of a new generation in high-energy physics, applauding each milestone of the night as the beam was slowly wrestled into shape at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Many of them, including the lab’s director, Pier Oddone, were wearing pajamas or bathrobes or even night caps bearing Fermilab patches on them.
Outside, a half moon was hanging low in a cloudy sky as a reminder that the universe is beautiful and mysterious and that another small step into that mystery was about to be taken.
Dr. Oddone lauded the new machine as the result of “two and a half decades of dreams to open up this huge new territory in the exploration of the natural world.”
Roger Aymar, CERN’s director, called the new collider a “discovery machine.” The buzz was worldwide. Gordon Kane, of the University of Michigan called the new collider “a why machine,” in a posting on the blog “Cosmic Variance.”
Others, worried about speculation that a black hole could emerge from the proton collisions, have called it a doomsday machine, to the dismay of CERN physicists who can point to a variety of studies and reports that say that this fear is nothing but science fiction.
But Boaz Klima, a Fermilab particle physicist, said that the speculation had nevertheless helped create buzz and excitement about particle physics. “Bad publicity is still publicity,” he said. “This is something that people can talk to their neighbors about.”
The only thing physicists agree on is that they don’t know what will happen — what laws prevail — when the collisions reach the energies just after the Big Bang.
“That there are many theories means we don’t have a clue,” said Dr. Oddone. “That’s what makes it so exciting.”
Many physicists hope to materialize a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, which according to theory endows other particles with mass. They also hope to identify the nature of the mysterious invisible dark matter that makes up 25 percent of the universe and provides the scaffolding for galaxies. Some dream of revealing new dimensions of space-time.
But those discoveries are in the future. If the new collider is a car, then what physicists did today was turn on an engine, that will now sit and warm up for a couple of months before anybody drives it anywhere. The first meaningful collisions, at an energy of 5 trillion electron volts, will not happen until late fall.
Nevertheless, the symbolism of the moment was not lost on the experts and non-experts gathered here.
At 2 a.m. local time, Herman White, a physicist here, and master of ceremonies for the night, took the stage to announce the night’s schedule. For at least the next few hours, he said, “we are still the highest energy accelerator in the world,” to wild applause.
In an interview earlier that day, Dr. Oddone called it a “bittersweet moment.”
Once upon a time the United States ruled particle physics. For the last two decades, Fermilab’s Tevatron, which hurls protons and their mirror opposites, anti-protons, together at energies of a trillion electron volts was the world’s largest particle machine.
By the end of the year, when the CERN collider has revved up to 5 trillion electron volts, the Fermilab machine will be a distant second. Electron volts are the currency of choice in physics for both mass and energy. The more you have, the closer and hotter you can punch back in time towards the Big Bang.
In 1993, the United States Congress canceled plans for an even bigger collider and more powerful machine, the Superconducting Supercollider, after its cost ballooned to $11 billion. That collider, its former director Roy Schwitters of the University of Texas in Austin said recently, would have been in operation around 2001.
Dr. Schwitters said that American particle physics — the search for the most fundamental rules and constituents of nature — had never really recovered from the loss of the supercollider. “One non-renewable resource is a person’s time and good years,” he said, adding that many young people have left the field for astrophysics or cosmology.
Dr. Oddone, Fermilab’s director, said the uncertainties of steady Congressional funding made the situation at Fermilab and physics in general in the United States “suspenseful.”
CERN, on the other hand, is an organization of 20 countires, whose budget is determined by treaty and thus stable. The year after the supercollider was killed, CERN decided to go ahead with its own collider.
Fermilab and the United States, which eventually contributed $531 million for the collider, have not exactly been shut out. Dr. Oddone said that Americans constitute about a quarter of the scientists who have built the four giant detectors that sit at points around the racetrack to collect and analyze the debris from the primordial fireballs.
In fact, a remote conrol room for monitoring one of those experiments, known poetically as the Compact Muon Solenoid, was built at Fermilab, just off the lobby of the main building here.
“The mood is great at this place,” he said, noting that the Tevatron is humming productively and accumulating data at a much more rapid pace than the CERN collider will initially produce. There is even still a chance that Tevatron could find the sacred Higgs boson before the new hadron collider, which is bound to have a slow start.
Another target of physicists is a principle called supersymmetry, which predicts, among other things, that there is a vast population of new particle species left over from the Big Bang and waiting to be discovered, one of which could be the long-sought dark matter.
“It would be a very rich life if supersymmetry is found,” Dr. Oddone said. “It would amount to permanent employment for physicists for decades.”
“The truly surprising thing is if we don’t see anything.”
By the time festivities started, at 2 a.m. Chicago time, outside and inside the control room for the solenoid detector, Fermilab had been festooned with balloons and the accelerator was already half an hour late. The superconducting magnets that guide the protons around on their path have to be cooled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin, about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit above absolute zero, and one of the eight sectors of the underground ring was too warm, so they had to wait to cool it back down.
Then Lyn Evans, the collider project director, outlined the plan for the evening: sending a bunch of protons clockwise farther and farther around the collider until they made it all the way. He confessed to not knowing how long it would take, noting that for a previous CERN accelerator it had taken 12 hours. “I hope this will go much faster,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, when the displays in the control room showed that the beam had made it to its first stopping point, the crowd applauded. Twenty minutes after that, the physicists erupted in cheers when their consoles showed that the muon solenoid had detected collisions between the beam and stray gas molecules in the otherwise vacuum beam pipe. Their detector was alive and working.
Finally at 3:27 Chicago time, the display showed the protons had made it all the way around to another big detector named Atlas, whose members quickly confirmed that their experiment had also seen collisions.
At Fermilab, they broke out the champagne. Dr. Oddone congratulated his European colleagues. “We have all worked together and brought this machine to life,” he said. “We’re so excited about sending a beam around. Wait until we start having collisions and doing physics.”
September 12, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course
By BRIAN GREENE
THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.
The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.
After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect?
The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.
The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles.
It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated.
Here’s a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.
Higgs Particles
One of the mysteries that continues to stump physicists is the origin of mass. We can measure with fantastic accuracy the mass of an electron, a quark and most every other particle, but where does mass itself come from?
More than 40 years ago, a number of researchers, including Peter Higgs, an English physicist, suggested an answer: perhaps space is pervaded by a field, much like the electromagnetic fields generated by cellphones and radio broadcasts, that acts like invisible molasses.
When we push something in the effort to make it move faster, the Higgs molasses would exert a drag force — and it’s this resistance, as the Higgs theory goes, that we commonly call the object’s mass. Scientists have incorporated this idea as a centerpiece of the so-called standard model — a refined mathematical edifice, viewed by many as the crowning achievement of particle physics, that since the 1970s has described the behavior of nature’s basic constituents with unprecedented accuracy.
The one component of the standard model that remains stubbornly unconfirmed is the very notion of the Higgs’ “molasses” field. However, collisions at the Large Hadron Collider should be able to chip off little chunks of the ubiquitous Higgs field (if it exists), creating what are known as Higgs bosons or Higgs particles. If these particles are found, the standard model, more than a quarter-century after its articulation, will finally be complete.
Supersymmetric Particles
In the early 1970s, mathematical studies of string theory revealed a striking step toward Einstein’s unfulfilled dream of a unified theory — a single theory embracing all forces and all matter. Supersymmetry, as the insight is called, is mathematically complex but has a physical implication of central relevance to the Large Hadron Collider.
For every known species of particle (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.), supersymmetry implies the existence of a partner species (called, with physicists’ inimitable linguistic flair, selectrons, squarks, sneutrinos, etc.) that to date has never been observed.
Physicists believe these “sparticles” have so far evaded detection because they’re a good deal more massive than their known counterparts, thus requiring more powerful collisions for their copious production.
A wealth of calculations strongly suggests that the collider will have that power.
The discovery of sparticles would be a monumental achievement, taking us far beyond Einstein by establishing a deep link between nature’s forces and the particles of matter. Such a discovery also has the potential to advance our understanding of dark matter — the abundant matter that permeates space but does not give off light and hence is known only through its gravitational influence. Many researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles.
Transdimensional Particles
A tantalizing idea considered since the early part of the last century is that the universe might have more than the three spatial dimensions of common experience.
In addition to the familiar left/right, back/forth and up/down, physicists have contemplated additional directions that are curled up to such a small size that they’ve so far eluded discovery.
For many years Einstein was a strong proponent of this idea. He had already shown that gravity was nothing but warps and curves in the familiar dimensions of space (and time); the new idea posited that nature’s other forces (for example, the electromagnetic force) amounted to warps and curves in additional, as yet unknown, spatial dimensions. Difficulties in applying the idea mathematically resulted in Einstein ultimately losing interest. But decades later, string theory revived it: the mathematics of string theory not only requires extra dimensions but has shown how to resolve the issues that flummoxed Einstein.
And now, remarkably, there’s a chance — albeit a small one — that the collider may find evidence for the extra dimensions. Calculations show that some of the debris produced by the proton collisions may be ejected out of our familiar spatial dimensions and crammed into the others, a process we’d detect by an apparent loss of the energy the debris would carry.
The unknown is just how powerful the collisions need to be for this process to happen, a number itself determined by another unknown: just how small the extra dimensions, if they exist, actually are. The more tightly they’re curled, the harder it would be to cram anything in them and so the more energetic the required collisions.
Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal extra dimensions of space — to overturn our belief that length, width and height are all there is — that would rank as one of the greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe.
Micro Black Holes
Now for the possibility that’s generated the fuss.
Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular opportunity to study them in a laboratory.
The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across) and you’d have a black hole — with the mass of an orange.
Physicists have realized that the collider’s proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form — black holes even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but black holes nevertheless.
Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?
It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.
Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreacking any havoc.
Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don’t disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they’ve been taking place throughout the universe — even here on earth — for billions of years.
Cosmic rays — particles wafting through space — constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven’t resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider’s comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won’t either.
•
Should any of the particles described above be produced at the Large Hadron Collider, from Higgs particles to black holes, corks will rightly pop in physics departments worldwide. But the most exciting prospect of all is that the experiments will reveal something completely unanticipated, something that forces us to rethink our most cherished explanations.
Confirming an idea is always gratifying. But finding what you don’t expect opens new vistas on the nature of reality. And that’s what humans, including those of us who happen to be physicists, live for.
Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “Icarus at the Edge of Time.”
Op-Ed Contributor
The Origins of the Universe: A Crash Course
By BRIAN GREENE
THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.
The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet.
After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the “on” switch for the collider was thrown this week. So what we can expect?
The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.
The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (“E”) and matter or mass (“m”) are convertible currencies (with “c” — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles.
It is through such energy-matter conversion that physicists hope to create particles that would have been commonplace just after the big bang, but which for the most part have long since disintegrated.
Here’s a brief roundup of the sort of long-lost particles the collisions might produce and the mysteries they may help unravel.
Higgs Particles
One of the mysteries that continues to stump physicists is the origin of mass. We can measure with fantastic accuracy the mass of an electron, a quark and most every other particle, but where does mass itself come from?
More than 40 years ago, a number of researchers, including Peter Higgs, an English physicist, suggested an answer: perhaps space is pervaded by a field, much like the electromagnetic fields generated by cellphones and radio broadcasts, that acts like invisible molasses.
When we push something in the effort to make it move faster, the Higgs molasses would exert a drag force — and it’s this resistance, as the Higgs theory goes, that we commonly call the object’s mass. Scientists have incorporated this idea as a centerpiece of the so-called standard model — a refined mathematical edifice, viewed by many as the crowning achievement of particle physics, that since the 1970s has described the behavior of nature’s basic constituents with unprecedented accuracy.
The one component of the standard model that remains stubbornly unconfirmed is the very notion of the Higgs’ “molasses” field. However, collisions at the Large Hadron Collider should be able to chip off little chunks of the ubiquitous Higgs field (if it exists), creating what are known as Higgs bosons or Higgs particles. If these particles are found, the standard model, more than a quarter-century after its articulation, will finally be complete.
Supersymmetric Particles
In the early 1970s, mathematical studies of string theory revealed a striking step toward Einstein’s unfulfilled dream of a unified theory — a single theory embracing all forces and all matter. Supersymmetry, as the insight is called, is mathematically complex but has a physical implication of central relevance to the Large Hadron Collider.
For every known species of particle (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.), supersymmetry implies the existence of a partner species (called, with physicists’ inimitable linguistic flair, selectrons, squarks, sneutrinos, etc.) that to date has never been observed.
Physicists believe these “sparticles” have so far evaded detection because they’re a good deal more massive than their known counterparts, thus requiring more powerful collisions for their copious production.
A wealth of calculations strongly suggests that the collider will have that power.
The discovery of sparticles would be a monumental achievement, taking us far beyond Einstein by establishing a deep link between nature’s forces and the particles of matter. Such a discovery also has the potential to advance our understanding of dark matter — the abundant matter that permeates space but does not give off light and hence is known only through its gravitational influence. Many researchers suspect that dark matter is composed of sparticles.
Transdimensional Particles
A tantalizing idea considered since the early part of the last century is that the universe might have more than the three spatial dimensions of common experience.
In addition to the familiar left/right, back/forth and up/down, physicists have contemplated additional directions that are curled up to such a small size that they’ve so far eluded discovery.
For many years Einstein was a strong proponent of this idea. He had already shown that gravity was nothing but warps and curves in the familiar dimensions of space (and time); the new idea posited that nature’s other forces (for example, the electromagnetic force) amounted to warps and curves in additional, as yet unknown, spatial dimensions. Difficulties in applying the idea mathematically resulted in Einstein ultimately losing interest. But decades later, string theory revived it: the mathematics of string theory not only requires extra dimensions but has shown how to resolve the issues that flummoxed Einstein.
And now, remarkably, there’s a chance — albeit a small one — that the collider may find evidence for the extra dimensions. Calculations show that some of the debris produced by the proton collisions may be ejected out of our familiar spatial dimensions and crammed into the others, a process we’d detect by an apparent loss of the energy the debris would carry.
The unknown is just how powerful the collisions need to be for this process to happen, a number itself determined by another unknown: just how small the extra dimensions, if they exist, actually are. The more tightly they’re curled, the harder it would be to cram anything in them and so the more energetic the required collisions.
Should the Large Hadron Collider have the power necessary to reveal extra dimensions of space — to overturn our belief that length, width and height are all there is — that would rank as one of the greatest upheavals in our understanding of the universe.
Micro Black Holes
Now for the possibility that’s generated the fuss.
Recent work in string theory has suggested that the collider might produce black holes, providing physicists with a spectacular opportunity to study them in a laboratory.
The common conception is that black holes are fantastically massive astrophysical bodies with enormous gravitational fields. But in reality, a black hole can have any mass. Take an orange and squeeze it to a sufficiently small size (about a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a meter across) and you’d have a black hole — with the mass of an orange.
Physicists have realized that the collider’s proton-proton collisions might momentarily pack so much energy into such a small volume that exceedingly tiny black holes may form — black holes even lighter than the one theoretically created by the orange, but black holes nevertheless.
Why might one worry that this would be a problem? Because black holes have a reputation for rapacity. If a black hole is produced under Geneva, might it swallow Switzerland and continue on a ravenous rampage until the earth is devoured?
It’s a reasonable question with a definite answer: no.
Work that made Stephen Hawking famous establishes that tiny black holes would disintegrate in a minuscule fraction of a second, long enough for physicists to reap the benefits of having produced them, but short enough to avoid their wreacking any havoc.
Even so, some have worried further that maybe Dr. Hawking was wrong and such black holes don’t disintegrate. Are we willing to bet the fate of the planet on an untested insight? And that question takes us to the crux of the matter: the collisions at the Large Hadron Collider have never before occurred under laboratory settings, but they’ve been taking place throughout the universe — even here on earth — for billions of years.
Cosmic rays — particles wafting through space — constantly rain down on the earth, the other planets and the wealth of stars scattered throughout the galaxy, with energies far in excess of those attainable by the Large Hadron Collider. And since these more powerful collisions haven’t resulted in astrophysical calamities, the collider’s comparatively tame collisions most assuredly won’t either.
•
Should any of the particles described above be produced at the Large Hadron Collider, from Higgs particles to black holes, corks will rightly pop in physics departments worldwide. But the most exciting prospect of all is that the experiments will reveal something completely unanticipated, something that forces us to rethink our most cherished explanations.
Confirming an idea is always gratifying. But finding what you don’t expect opens new vistas on the nature of reality. And that’s what humans, including those of us who happen to be physicists, live for.
Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “Icarus at the Edge of Time.”
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09 ... 8ty&emc=ty
September 9, 2008, 6:07 pm
A Genetically Engineered Swat
(Being the second part in a series on genetic engineering.)
Last week, I discussed rewriting the genes of viruses in order to make better vaccines. This week, I’d like to discuss the genetic engineering of mosquitoes as a way to stop the spread of dengue fever.
Dengue is caused by any of four related viruses. The disease can take a number of forms, from a mild sense of feeling below par, to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can be lethal. Compared to diseases like malaria, dengue is a minor problem. Each year, more than 500 million people are infected with malaria, compared to “just” 50 million people for dengue. As diseases go, it’s not terribly dangerous either: the death rate from dengue hemorrhagic fever is around 2.5 percent.
But there are several reasons dengue deserves attention. For one, the economic cost of the disease is huge. Brazil, for example, spends more than $1 billion a year on dengue control and care. A study of the economic impact of a dengue epidemic in India in 2006 estimated that cost of the outbreak was $27.4 million.
Moreover, dengue is expanding its range. In the 1980s, it appeared in new parts of South Asia and the Pacific; after an absence of about 15 years, it reappeared in Singapore and much of Central and South America in the 1990s; in the first years of this century, it reappeared in Hawaii and along the Texas-Mexico border. At the same time, the disease seems to be becoming more deadly. It also, increasingly, produces explosive epidemics that paralyze cities and cripple health-care systems. Between January and April this year, the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, had more than 158,000 cases, 9,000 of which required hospitalization.
Dengue, in other words, is on the rise. It is an up-and-coming virus.
But there is no vaccine and no cure. The only way to reduce the incidence of the disease is to control the mosquitoes that spread it. Which is not working.
Aedes aegypti. (James Gathany/CDC)The mosquito chiefly responsible for spreading dengue (as well as several other nasties including yellow fever and chikungunya fever (but not malaria) is a small tropical species called Aedes aegypti. Females transmit the viruses that cause disease when they bite an infected person, and then bite someone else. As usual with mosquitoes, males don’t bite. (Dengue is also spread, though less efficiently, by other Aedes mosquitoes, including the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus.)
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have evolved to live in close association with humans, and often live inside houses. Indeed, they are urban mozzies: they prefer cities to the countryside. Females lay their eggs in small pools of standing water — such as those found in the bottoms of flower pots, old cans, used tires or even showers. The larvae develop in these pools, competing with each other for food, before turning into pupae and then into grown-up mosquitoes.
Because of its lifestyle, A. aegypti is extremely difficult to control: eliminating places for it to breed is almost impossible, and because it lives inside houses, controlling it requires a big, ongoing effort on the part of everybody.
So far, nothing has proved sustainable. For instance, A. aegypti was successfully eradicated from much of central and south America in the 1950s and 1960s (mostly by a paramilitary campaign that involved the intensive spraying of DDT), but the insects have since staged a magnificent comeback, and are now more widespread than they were before the eradication program began. Even Singapore, which has managed to reduce the numbers of breeding sites considerably (the premises index — the proportion of inspected premises found to contain mosquito larvae — is around 2 percent), is experiencing a resurgence of dengue. (There are probably several reasons for this; but one of them is thought to have to do with a shift in surveillance.) One group of scientists, writing earlier this year in the medical journal The Lancet, complained that existing methods of A. aegypti control are “ineffective, expensive, and environmentally aggressive.”
Hence the interest in genetic engineering.
There are several ways that A. aegypti could be engineered so as to interrupt the transmission of dengue. One possibility is to make mosquitoes that are unable to transmit the viruses. The idea would be to release them into the wild in the hopes that they would mate with normal mosquitoes, and resistance would spread.
But I prefer a simpler approach. Here, mosquitoes are engineered to have a built-in flaw: a gene that is lethal when the insect becomes a pupa. Males carrying this gene would then be released. Wild females who mated with one of these males would lay eggs as usual, the larvae would develop as usual — but when they got to the pupa stage, the insects would die. (From the point of view of control, death at this late stage is an advantage, because the animals still occupy the pool as larvae. This is useful because larvae compete with each other for food, so their presence in a pool helps, in and of itself, to keep the population down.)
But if mosquitoes carrying this gene die at the pupal stage, how do you ever manage to rear any males to release? This is the clever part. The mosquitoes are engineered so that whether the gene is lethal depends on what the larvae eat. If their diet contains a certain crucial ingredient, the killer gene does not get turned on. But in the absence of the crucial ingredient, the gene is turned on, and the animals die.
Such a mosquito has been made. In this case, the crucial ingredient is tetracycline, an antibiotic. This is added to the food the larvae eat in the laboratory, but it’s absent from pools of water in the bottoms of tires or old cans. (Tetracycline does sometimes occur in nature. Some bacteria produce it in small quantities; also, since it is used in agriculture, water near farm runoff sometimes contains it. However, polluted water of this sort is avoided by Aedes aegypti females, which are rather fussy about where they put their eggs.)
This system has several attractive features. First, since it is only males who carry these genes, no one will be bitten by genetically engineered mosquitoes. Second, because the gene construct is lethal, it shouldn’t spread into the wild mosquito population — instead, it should eliminate it. Third, the fact that the gene is lethal at the pupal stage means that fewer engineered mosquitoes need to be released. Finally, in a traditional control program, the hardest part is finding the last of the animals you seek to eradicate; in programs of this kind, the males will do it for you. Males, after all, have evolved to be good at detecting females.
Above all, the technology is clean and green: you don’t need to use pesticides. Assuming that field trials show that it works as planned, the benefits of using it could be enormous.
**********
NOTES:
Aedes aegypti is sometimes also known as Stegomyia aegypti; however, Aedes is still the name more commonly used.
Figures for malaria and dengue infection rates are taken from the World Health Organization website. For malaria, go here; for dengue, go here.
For the economic cost of dengue in Brazil, for figures on the recent outbreak there, and for the quotation about the ineffectiveness about mosquito control, see Barreto, M. L. and Teixeira, M. G. 2008. “Dengue fever: a call for local, national, and international action.” The Lancet 372: 205. For the cost of the 2006 outbreak in India, see Garg, P. et al. 2008. “Economic burden of dengue infections in India.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 102: 570-577.
For general patterns in the expansion and resurgence of dengue, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Website.
For the resurgence of dengue in the United States, see Morens, D. M. and Fauci, A. S. 2008. “Dengue and hemorrhagic fever: a potential threat to public health in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association 299: 214-216. This paper also includes discussion of the current state of play on vaccine development.
For a history of dengue control, for the premises index in Singapore, and for a discussion of reasons that dengue has reappeared in that country, see Ooi, E.-E., Goh, K.-T., and Gubler, D. J. 2006. “Dengue prevention and 35 years of vector control in Singapore.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 887-893.
For the genetic engineering of mosquitoes resistant to dengue, see Franz, A. W. E. et al 2006. “Engineering RNA interference-based resistance to dengue virus type 2 in genetically modified Aedes aegypti.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 103: 4198-4203.
For the genetic engineering of mosquitoes with an inducible built-in death gene, see Phuc, H. K. et al 2007. “Late-acting dominant lethal genetic systems and mosquito control.” BMC Biology 5: 11.
Note that I have previously written about genetic modification of Anopheles mosquitoes to eliminate malaria; the method I outlined then differs from the methods described here. For further details, see Burt, A. 2003. “Site-specific selfish genes as tools for the control and genetic engineering of natural populations.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 270: 921-928.
Many thanks to Luke Alphey and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
September 9, 2008, 6:07 pm
A Genetically Engineered Swat
(Being the second part in a series on genetic engineering.)
Last week, I discussed rewriting the genes of viruses in order to make better vaccines. This week, I’d like to discuss the genetic engineering of mosquitoes as a way to stop the spread of dengue fever.
Dengue is caused by any of four related viruses. The disease can take a number of forms, from a mild sense of feeling below par, to dengue hemorrhagic fever, which can be lethal. Compared to diseases like malaria, dengue is a minor problem. Each year, more than 500 million people are infected with malaria, compared to “just” 50 million people for dengue. As diseases go, it’s not terribly dangerous either: the death rate from dengue hemorrhagic fever is around 2.5 percent.
But there are several reasons dengue deserves attention. For one, the economic cost of the disease is huge. Brazil, for example, spends more than $1 billion a year on dengue control and care. A study of the economic impact of a dengue epidemic in India in 2006 estimated that cost of the outbreak was $27.4 million.
Moreover, dengue is expanding its range. In the 1980s, it appeared in new parts of South Asia and the Pacific; after an absence of about 15 years, it reappeared in Singapore and much of Central and South America in the 1990s; in the first years of this century, it reappeared in Hawaii and along the Texas-Mexico border. At the same time, the disease seems to be becoming more deadly. It also, increasingly, produces explosive epidemics that paralyze cities and cripple health-care systems. Between January and April this year, the state of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, had more than 158,000 cases, 9,000 of which required hospitalization.
Dengue, in other words, is on the rise. It is an up-and-coming virus.
But there is no vaccine and no cure. The only way to reduce the incidence of the disease is to control the mosquitoes that spread it. Which is not working.
Aedes aegypti. (James Gathany/CDC)The mosquito chiefly responsible for spreading dengue (as well as several other nasties including yellow fever and chikungunya fever (but not malaria) is a small tropical species called Aedes aegypti. Females transmit the viruses that cause disease when they bite an infected person, and then bite someone else. As usual with mosquitoes, males don’t bite. (Dengue is also spread, though less efficiently, by other Aedes mosquitoes, including the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus.)
Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have evolved to live in close association with humans, and often live inside houses. Indeed, they are urban mozzies: they prefer cities to the countryside. Females lay their eggs in small pools of standing water — such as those found in the bottoms of flower pots, old cans, used tires or even showers. The larvae develop in these pools, competing with each other for food, before turning into pupae and then into grown-up mosquitoes.
Because of its lifestyle, A. aegypti is extremely difficult to control: eliminating places for it to breed is almost impossible, and because it lives inside houses, controlling it requires a big, ongoing effort on the part of everybody.
So far, nothing has proved sustainable. For instance, A. aegypti was successfully eradicated from much of central and south America in the 1950s and 1960s (mostly by a paramilitary campaign that involved the intensive spraying of DDT), but the insects have since staged a magnificent comeback, and are now more widespread than they were before the eradication program began. Even Singapore, which has managed to reduce the numbers of breeding sites considerably (the premises index — the proportion of inspected premises found to contain mosquito larvae — is around 2 percent), is experiencing a resurgence of dengue. (There are probably several reasons for this; but one of them is thought to have to do with a shift in surveillance.) One group of scientists, writing earlier this year in the medical journal The Lancet, complained that existing methods of A. aegypti control are “ineffective, expensive, and environmentally aggressive.”
Hence the interest in genetic engineering.
There are several ways that A. aegypti could be engineered so as to interrupt the transmission of dengue. One possibility is to make mosquitoes that are unable to transmit the viruses. The idea would be to release them into the wild in the hopes that they would mate with normal mosquitoes, and resistance would spread.
But I prefer a simpler approach. Here, mosquitoes are engineered to have a built-in flaw: a gene that is lethal when the insect becomes a pupa. Males carrying this gene would then be released. Wild females who mated with one of these males would lay eggs as usual, the larvae would develop as usual — but when they got to the pupa stage, the insects would die. (From the point of view of control, death at this late stage is an advantage, because the animals still occupy the pool as larvae. This is useful because larvae compete with each other for food, so their presence in a pool helps, in and of itself, to keep the population down.)
But if mosquitoes carrying this gene die at the pupal stage, how do you ever manage to rear any males to release? This is the clever part. The mosquitoes are engineered so that whether the gene is lethal depends on what the larvae eat. If their diet contains a certain crucial ingredient, the killer gene does not get turned on. But in the absence of the crucial ingredient, the gene is turned on, and the animals die.
Such a mosquito has been made. In this case, the crucial ingredient is tetracycline, an antibiotic. This is added to the food the larvae eat in the laboratory, but it’s absent from pools of water in the bottoms of tires or old cans. (Tetracycline does sometimes occur in nature. Some bacteria produce it in small quantities; also, since it is used in agriculture, water near farm runoff sometimes contains it. However, polluted water of this sort is avoided by Aedes aegypti females, which are rather fussy about where they put their eggs.)
This system has several attractive features. First, since it is only males who carry these genes, no one will be bitten by genetically engineered mosquitoes. Second, because the gene construct is lethal, it shouldn’t spread into the wild mosquito population — instead, it should eliminate it. Third, the fact that the gene is lethal at the pupal stage means that fewer engineered mosquitoes need to be released. Finally, in a traditional control program, the hardest part is finding the last of the animals you seek to eradicate; in programs of this kind, the males will do it for you. Males, after all, have evolved to be good at detecting females.
Above all, the technology is clean and green: you don’t need to use pesticides. Assuming that field trials show that it works as planned, the benefits of using it could be enormous.
**********
NOTES:
Aedes aegypti is sometimes also known as Stegomyia aegypti; however, Aedes is still the name more commonly used.
Figures for malaria and dengue infection rates are taken from the World Health Organization website. For malaria, go here; for dengue, go here.
For the economic cost of dengue in Brazil, for figures on the recent outbreak there, and for the quotation about the ineffectiveness about mosquito control, see Barreto, M. L. and Teixeira, M. G. 2008. “Dengue fever: a call for local, national, and international action.” The Lancet 372: 205. For the cost of the 2006 outbreak in India, see Garg, P. et al. 2008. “Economic burden of dengue infections in India.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 102: 570-577.
For general patterns in the expansion and resurgence of dengue, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Website.
For the resurgence of dengue in the United States, see Morens, D. M. and Fauci, A. S. 2008. “Dengue and hemorrhagic fever: a potential threat to public health in the United States.” Journal of the American Medical Association 299: 214-216. This paper also includes discussion of the current state of play on vaccine development.
For a history of dengue control, for the premises index in Singapore, and for a discussion of reasons that dengue has reappeared in that country, see Ooi, E.-E., Goh, K.-T., and Gubler, D. J. 2006. “Dengue prevention and 35 years of vector control in Singapore.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 12: 887-893.
For the genetic engineering of mosquitoes resistant to dengue, see Franz, A. W. E. et al 2006. “Engineering RNA interference-based resistance to dengue virus type 2 in genetically modified Aedes aegypti.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 103: 4198-4203.
For the genetic engineering of mosquitoes with an inducible built-in death gene, see Phuc, H. K. et al 2007. “Late-acting dominant lethal genetic systems and mosquito control.” BMC Biology 5: 11.
Note that I have previously written about genetic modification of Anopheles mosquitoes to eliminate malaria; the method I outlined then differs from the methods described here. For further details, see Burt, A. 2003. “Site-specific selfish genes as tools for the control and genetic engineering of natural populations.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 270: 921-928.
Many thanks to Luke Alphey and Jonathan Swire for insights, comments and suggestions.
Skin cells turned into stem cells
Breakthrough is step toward regenerative medicine
Reuters
Friday, September 26, 2008
Researchers have developed a safer way to make powerful stem cells from ordinary skin cells, taking one more step toward so-called regenerative medicine.
They used a common cold virus to carry transformative genes into ordinary mouse cells, making them look and act like embryonic stem cells.
If the same can be done with human cells, it may offer a safe way to test cell therapy to treat diseases such as sickle cell anemia or Parkinson's, according to a report by Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the journal Science on Thursday.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.
But they are difficult to make, requiring the use of an embryo or cloning technology. Many people also object to their use and several countries, including the United States, limit funding for such experiments.
In the past year, several teams of scientists have reported finding a handful of genes that can transform ordinary skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which in turn look and act like embryonic stem cells.
Retroviruses have been used to get these genes into the cells because they integrate their own genetic material into the cells they infect. This can be dangerous and can cause tumours and other effects.
Hochedlinger's team used a much more harmless virus, called an adenovirus, to carry the required transformative genes into the cells.
"The nice thing about adenoviruses . . . is they deliver proteins inside the cells but they will never, ever integrate their DNA into the cells," Hochedlinger said.
As the cells divide, they dilute the virus until it disappears, he said. But the genetic changes remain.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Breakthrough is step toward regenerative medicine
Reuters
Friday, September 26, 2008
Researchers have developed a safer way to make powerful stem cells from ordinary skin cells, taking one more step toward so-called regenerative medicine.
They used a common cold virus to carry transformative genes into ordinary mouse cells, making them look and act like embryonic stem cells.
If the same can be done with human cells, it may offer a safe way to test cell therapy to treat diseases such as sickle cell anemia or Parkinson's, according to a report by Konrad Hochedlinger of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in the journal Science on Thursday.
Stem cells are the body's master cells, giving rise to all the tissues, organs and blood. Embryonic stem cells are considered the most powerful kinds of stem cells, as they have the potential to give rise to any type of tissue.
But they are difficult to make, requiring the use of an embryo or cloning technology. Many people also object to their use and several countries, including the United States, limit funding for such experiments.
In the past year, several teams of scientists have reported finding a handful of genes that can transform ordinary skin cells into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which in turn look and act like embryonic stem cells.
Retroviruses have been used to get these genes into the cells because they integrate their own genetic material into the cells they infect. This can be dangerous and can cause tumours and other effects.
Hochedlinger's team used a much more harmless virus, called an adenovirus, to carry the required transformative genes into the cells.
"The nice thing about adenoviruses . . . is they deliver proteins inside the cells but they will never, ever integrate their DNA into the cells," Hochedlinger said.
As the cells divide, they dilute the virus until it disappears, he said. But the genetic changes remain.
© The Calgary Herald 2008