Zark's

Transgenics in the Wild

Wiki tells us that a genetically modified organism (GMO) or genetically engineered organism (GEO) is a biological entity whose genetics have been altered through genetic engineering.  Favored in genetic engineering is recombinant DNA which is created through splicing DNA sequences that would not naturally occur.  Transgenic organisms are created by splicing DNA of different species.

You can purchase GloFish today as a pet - genetically enhanced zebrafish that have a fluorescent gene added to produce unnatural colors in the tropical fish.  The company's website explains the original purpose was to create a pollution-detecting fish that would vividly indicate the presence of toxins in their environment.  Skeptical?  See Zebra fish as pollution indicators.  Wiki tells that the green zebrafish had a gene spliced from a jellyfish.  The red zebrafish obtains its color from a sea coral gene.  A yellow zebrafish has a different gene from a jellyfish.

Although popular in the U.S., the European Union has banned the GloFish. 

Another transgenic has been produced - Ruppy, or short for Ruby Puppy.  Seoul National University has cloned five puppies with a fluorescent gene.  The researchers inserted the gene using a retrovirus, but this is sort of like throwing the dice - you don't know where the virus will insert the gene.  They were lucky - when the puppies are illuminated with ultraviolet light, they glow a deep red.

Germany joins the European mutiny over genetically modified crops tells that Germany has banned a genetically modified strain of corn developed by Monsanto.  Five other European countries have similarly rejected the pest-resistant corn.  In contrast, the U.S. is creating medicines and all other sorts of genetically modified products.

Mmm.  Retroviruses can be incredibly dangerous.  Do it yourself DNA: amateurs trying genetic engineering at home tells that home scientists are striving to create new life forms.  It should not be too hard to write a new novel from this!

California Turns Away from Corn Ethanol

Inside the plant: how ethanol is made explains ethanol production is a several-step process.  First, the corn is hammered into a flour which is mixed with water, enzymes, and anhydrous ammonia.  The mixture is heated, which causes the enzymes to begin breaking the starches into sugar.  It is heated again and then fermented for 50 hours.  Then it is distilled in a two step process to produce 200 proof alcohol.  About 1/3 of the American corn crop is converted into ethanol.

Ethanol standards take bite from corn tells that California regulators ruled last week that ethanol carbon ratings must include the total footprint, not just the alcohol itself.  As a result, gasoline is actually 'greener' than ethanol.  Ethanol industry pins hope on panel of experts adds that the ethanol industry feels their product was unfairly treated in last Thursday's ruling.  The California board ruled favorably for hydrogen, electricity, and natural gas.

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) require the carbon content of fuels sold in the state to be reduced 10% by 2020.  As mentioned above, it includes the total footprint of the biofuel.  A biofuel winner was Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, which was determined to have a carbon rating 26% lower than corn ethanol.  The debate concerns the Global Trade Analysis Program (GTAP) developed by Purdue University to compute the total carbon footprint. 

Will California shuck corn ethanol adds that every acre of corn requires 130 pounds of nitrogen and 55 pounds of phosphorus to improve crop yield.  Also, ethanol yields 30% less energy per gallon than gasoline, with a similar loss in gas mileage.

Swine Flu Primer

The latest count from the Center for Disease Control is 40 cases of swine flu inside the United States.  Some good news - Laboratory testing has found the swine influenza A (H1N1) virus susceptible to the prescription antiviral drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir. However, you must start the treatment within 2 days of symptoms.  

The influenza virus is an RNA virus, meaning that it contains a single strand of ribonucleic acid.  Recall that RNA differs from DNA because it contains ribose rather than deoxyribose.  There are five types of flu, with A, B, and C, the most common.  The flu vaccine explains that the influenza mutates rapidly and the seasonal influenza vaccine is actually a blend of three virus strands, selected in February by scientists predicting the prevalent strain for the upcoming winter.  So that flu shot you had last season might help a little, but probably not much.

The CDC tells us that swine flu is a respiratory disease of pigs that has crossed species and is now causing human infection. The usual symptoms are fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue, although some diarrhea and vomiting have been reported.   With most flu viruses, healthy adults may be able to infect others beginning 1 day before symptoms develop and up to 5 days after becoming sick. Symptoms start one to four days after the virus enters the body.

How can you protect yourself?  Wash your hands frequently and avoid touching your nose, eyes, and mouth.  If symptoms occur - see health professionals quickly because the antiviral drugs must be administered early.  Some advice I posted in beginning of flu season:

Believe it or not, Eat your veggies to avoid the flu tells that eating vegetables when exercising to fatigue, reduces the chances of catching the flu.  The study actually revealed two things with laboratory mice - First, strenuous exercise does increase the susceptibility to catching the flu.  Second, quercetin has shown evidence of increasing anti-viral activity.  

Quercetin is a flavonoid found in many vegetables.  Apples, leafy green vegetables, citrus fruits, and many berries have high concentrations of quercetin.  Tea also contains the substance. 

How to deal with swine flu: heeding the mistakes of 1976 reminds us that swine flu infected hundreds of soldiers in February 1976 at Fort Dix.  A vaccine was quickly deployed, but it had a side effect of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease.  Over 30 people died from the side effect.  Of course, scientists were attempting to avoid the 1918 flu pandemic that killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million.  (Gulp.)  The pandemic first broke out at Fort Riley, Kansas, and had an astonishing 50% infection rate. 

Is Coal a No-Win Scenario?

A no-win scenario in gaming theory is also called a lose-lose situation.  An example is when the executioner offers the prisoner a) hanging, b) firing squad, or c) poison.  Whatever the choice, the prisoner loses his life.

I am concerned that coal represents a no-win scenario.  U.S. must lead the world in clean coal tech tells that Steven Chu - U.S. Secretary of the Department of Energy, is advising Congress that America must develop clean coal technology.  China is expanding electrical production by building one new coal-fueled plant a week.  None of these new plants are deploying carbon capture technologies.

Coal's push for carbon storage an impossible dream adds a little more information.  Every metric ton of coal produces 2.7 metric tons of carbon dioxide.  Of course, carbon dioxide is a gas, not a solid or ash that can be easily be disposed.  Under normal atmospheric pressure, a metric ton of carbon dioxide is 500 cubic meters of gas.  To capture that carbon, the gas must be compressed and then pumped underground.  In an earlier posting, The realities of coal, I calculated that burning $23.23 of coal costs up to $200 to neutralize.

The U.K. realizes it has a precarious energy dependency upon Russia and is desperately seeking alternatives.  Coal is lose-lose for the Brits, because it imports 75% of its coal.  The U.S. on the other hand, has the world's largest coal reserves followed by Russia, China, and India.  Ed Miliband promises new era of clean coal tells that the U.K. law requires any new coal plant to immediately capture and bury 25% of its greenhouse emissions.  By 2025, it must capture and bury 100% of the emissions.  (Ed Miliband is the U.K.'s energy secretary.)

Proposals in the U.K. have the consumer paying a 2% surtax for carbon capture and storage.  But that doesn't come close to paying the cost of carbon capture and storage, as provided earlier.  The U.K. power industry is now requesting subsidies from the government instead of attempting to recover costs directly from the consumer.  (Some pundits claim industry knows that clean coal is a myth, but I digress.)

The energy secretaries of both the U.K. and the U.S. are calling for the development of carbon capture technologies.  It is pragmatism, recognizing that China and India will continue building new coal-powered plants.  China, US on collision course over carbon tax on traded goods tells that China estimates 15% to 25% of its CO2 production originates in manufacturing goods for developed countries.  China is arguing that the U.S. should pay China to reduce its CO2 production. 

Sigh.  This just sounds like lose-lose, doesn't it?

How Good Are We?

There are many discouraging stories concerning the Ponzi schemes of Bernie Madoff and others.  Credit card companies capriciously jack the interest rates up to 29% on those least able to pay them (can anyone?).  It would seem that these executives fail a 'goodness' test.  But what about the people that you brush against in the street?  (God, please keep people like Madoff and execs of credit card companies far away from me.)  How good are the people that we brush against?

We left 20 wallets around the GTA.  Most came back tells that the Toronto Star filled 20 wallets with a little over $40, photo ID, baby pictures, receipts, and other items that would be expected in a wallet.  They dropped the wallets in various locations across Toronto, also attempting to determine whether wealthy, middle class, or poor, class status affected a person's honesty.

In their report, 15 of the 20 had already been returned and they had been playing phone tag with two others attempting to return them.  Considering the economic times, 17 of 20 is pretty impressive.  Father Paul McGill of St. Basil's compared the return rate of the wallets to a recent food drive.  He said that the young people had expected great participation from a wealthy neighborhood, but were shocked at how little they collected.  He noted, "People who have experienced deprivation tend to be more generous than the very wealthy." 

A similar study was performed by Reader's Digest - Excuse me, is this your phone?  The magazine dropped 30 phones in 32 cities around the world.  These phones were not the wireless carrier-locked phones like most American cell phones, but phones with SIM cards that permit them to be reused if the finder chooses to keep them.  Unlike the Toronto newspaper experiment, Reader's Digest watched people discover the phones and recorded their responses.

Ljubljana, Slovenia was the most honest - returning 29 of 30.  Toronto (nice city) was 28 of 30.  New York City was equal to Mumbai and Manila in returning 24 of 30.  Okay, you want to know where not to take a cell phone - Kuala Lampur and Hong Kong only returned 13 of 30.

Echoing the Toronto newspaper study, Reader's Digest concluded that wealth or class was not a prime factor in whether someone returned a cell phone.  It was their integrity or spirituality.  In Romania, a 68 year old woman explained, "God would turn me to stone."

Globally Reader's Digest had a 68% return rate, which is disappointing compared to the Toronto 93%.  (A lot of integrity in that city.)  The magazine has been performing this test for some time - The great lost wallet test gives the results from 2001.  Unfortunately, the data is too dissimilar to identify trends.

It was Dwight L. Moody who said, "Character is what you are in the dark."

Whatever Happened to the US Nuclear Industry

Once upon a time, General Electric, Westinghouse, and Babcock and Wilcox led the world in nuclear power.  Some argue that Three Mile Island in 1979 and later Chernobyl in 1986 scared the American public into running away from nuclear power.  Ironically, the French and Japanese kept investing in nuclear technology and building additional infrastructure.

Does America still have a nuclear industry explains that the French nuclear giant, Areva, is 95% owned by the French government.  Mitsubishi purchased Westinghouse Electric in 2006, but the American nuclear industry had been languishing long before that.  British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) had purchased Westinghouse Electric in 1999.  Westinghouse had decided to reinvent itself as a broadcaster and had previously purchased CBS in 1995.

General Electric Nuclear combined with Hitachi in November 2006 to form a $2B operation.  Babcock and Wilcox's nuclear division is now based in Cambridge, Ontario.  Today they provide heat exchangers, reactor vessels, and steam generators.  In 2008, they purchased Nuclear Fuel Services of Erwin, TN.

So what happened?  In What We Learn From Energy Outlook 2009, I wrote that 53% of new electrical power plants in the United States will be powered by natural gas.  This is the latest forecast, taking into account all the troubling data about greenhouse gases and foreign energy dependence. 

A Generation of School Children Missing American Manned Space Flight

The last space shuttle mission is scheduled for 31 May 2010, a 15-day mission to the International Space Station.  (There are only seven more flights before retirement.) Nasa moon launch may be delayed until after 2020 breaks the news that NASA has been briefing contractors and employees there is going to be a two year slip in the return to space.

Unlike the 1960s space program which developed the Saturn V, NASA is simultaneously developing two space boosters - Ares I and Ares V.  The first is a crew launch vehicle, and the latter, a cargo vehicle.  Unlike the Saturn V and Apollo mission, the new lunar mission will have the Ares V heavy lifter boost needed moon components such as the Altair lunar lander into space separately from the Ares I which will launch the Orion Crew Vehicle.  

The original NASA schedule of 2018 had been based upon $4B funding through 2015.  Now it has been whacked to $500M.  NASA awaits new boss, new mission tells that the original first flight of Ares I to the Internation Space Station was scheduled for 2015.  Does the new NASA budget reality mean that instead of a five year gap in manned space flight for America, we will now have seven years? 

At first, I wondered about the impact to school children who would never have the intrigue and excitement of manned space flight discussed in their elementary classes.  How will that affect future scientists and dreamers?  But 5-7 years is a long time.  If it happens, can NASA ever regain proficiency?

Cycles of the Sun

Whenever I walk underneath the Saturn V booster on display at the Kennedy Space Center, the size of it diminishes everything else in the visitor center.  But the yellow disk-like object that crosses the sky every day is truly immense.  Recall from Greek mythology that Helios drove the chariot containing the sun across the sky every day.  A related myth is Icarus, who attempted to escape exile from the island of Crete with his father, Daedalus.  Foolish with his sudden freedom, Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax of his wings melted, plummeting him to death.

Wiki tells that the sun is 74% hydrogen by weight, and 24% helium by weight.  The diameter of the earth is 109 earths.  It represents 98.6% of the entire solar system's mass.  NASA tells that the energy of the sun comes from nuclear fusion reactions that occur deep inside the sun's core. In a fusion reaction, two atomic nuclei join together, creating a new nucleus. Fusion produces energy by converting nuclear matter into energy.  

Also, Fewer than 5 percent of the stars in the Milky Way are brighter or more massive than the sun. But some stars are more than 100,000 times as bright as our sun, and some have as much as 100 times the sun's mass.  We have a relatively young and special star for a sun!

One of the reasons that we have been unable to duplicate the sun's energy production with hydrogen fusion, is that it takes almost 10x temperatures hotter on earth.  The sun's enormous gravitational forces compress the hydrogen gases so tightly that hydrogen fusion occurs without ludicrous temperatures.  Also, those sunspots that occur on the sun - do you know they are so large that 20 earths could fit inside one of them?

Sunspots occur when magnetic fields have discontinuities on the earth's surface.  The sun has 11-year cycles for sunspots and if plotted over time, the graph appears as a butterfly, with the butterfly's body aligned with the sun's equator and the wings sticking up to roughly 30 degrees in latitude.  If you like butterflies, see - Butterflies Escape.

There are other cycles.  Sun at its dimmest for nearly a century, say scientists, tells that the sun's energy output varies over a several hundred year cycle.  There is a strong correlation between the number of sunspots and the energy radiated by the sun.  In the 17th century, we endured the Maunder Minimum, which also happened to be the time of the Little Ice Age.  The recent 1985 was probably the grand maximum for this solar cycle, so we should notice fewer sunspots for the next few hundred years.  Astronomers warn though, that we will not notice the lower radiated output for another hundred years.

The First Cloned Camel, Goat, and How We Got Here

It was almost six years ago that the first sheep, Dolly, was cloned in Edinburgh, Scotland.  The biological engineering first was produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer, where the nucleus from a donor cell is injected to an unfertilized egg that has had its DNA removed.  Dolly was a clone, but not a perfect clone because donor egg had different mitochondria DNA (mtDNA) than the donor.  The mitochondria are the energy centers of the cell, and we still do not understand the possible effects of an mtDNA mismatch with the nucleus DNA.  (Although it makes interesting fiction - see my novel, Roman DNA.)

Iran's first cloned goat born in Isfahan reports that a cloned goat named Hanna was delivered by cesarean section from a black Bakhtiari goat.  Demonstrating the biological engineering feat, Hannah is white and fawn in color.  Similarly, World's first cloned camel unveiled in Dubai explains that a female camel named Injaz was born at the Dubai Camel Reproduction Center.

Iran explains that its desire is to develop recombinant drug technology, whereas Dubai wants to preserve the bloodline of its racing camels.  Recall they now use robots as riders instead of children.  Mmm.  Some science fiction stories are going to become reality. 

Also today - the National Academies Press released, 21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States: Lessons from a Decade of Change: Report of a Symposium.  It is an interesting read - the authors provide a fascinating history of 19th and 20th century technology development for the two countries.  They argue that American government intervention created the U.S. steel industry.  Until that time, Europe dominated in steel technology. 

Likewise, the early American leadership in radio was because the government created a patent pool and established Radio Corporation of America (RCA).  The authors' prescription for future success - universities.  Full disclosure - they are from the University of Texas - Austin and Hitotsubashi University. 

Corn Ethanol Disappointing Environmentalists

Corn ethanol has 1/3 the energy density of gasoline.  About 1/3 of the nation's corn production is used to produce the biofuel, which last year amounted to 1.5 % energy independence.  Arguably, corn ethanol is on the bubble on whether it produces less greenhouse gases than gasoline when the entire footprint of ethanol is considered. 

Golden state may rule corn ethanol no solution to climate change explains that the state of California is required to determine whether the entire CO2 footprint of ethanol production is is an improvement over gasoline.  Ethanol advocates are petitioning governor Schwarzenegger to delay the decision until they have an opportunity to refute the footprint model.  The primary problem - consuming a foodstuff for biofuel production requires conversion of other land such as rainforests for food production.

An independent study published in the National Academy of Sciences in February, found that the total environmental and health costs of gasoline are 71 cents a gallon, whereas corn ethanol ranges from 72 cents to $1.45 a gallon.  Also, the green state of Oregon may limit corn ethanol tells that lawmakers in that state are having second thoughts about the benefits of ethanol.

Controversies continue to swirl over corn ethanol tells that the industry's plants are operating at 80% of capacity, or 2 billions of ethanol a year less than last year.  Not only does ethanol have its environmental benefits questioned, but it also faces a consumption limited by the E-10 blend (10% ethanol) specified by Congress.  (They already have sufficient capacity for the projected U.S. consumption after the recession.)  Ethanol producers would like to elevate the blend percentage, but it damages engines and there is the lower energy density problem as well.