Zark's

Is One Perspective Completely Wrong?

Artist's Perspective of Nuclear Breeder Plant
Image Credit: Department of Energy

No doubt you have seen the headline, Nuclear power in Germany: The reasons behind Chancellor Merkel's U-turn.  Germany has decided to completely forsake nuclear power generation, even shuttering existing facilities.

The Japanese government is understandably introspective on their previous decisions to expand nuclear power generation.  Because of the shock caused by the Fukushima meltdown, decisions may be reversed in Japan, but I anticipate that nation's decisions to be more economic than political as in Germany.

A next-door neighbor to Germany, France produces over 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants and has displayed no second thoughts after Fukushima.  So why the difference in public acceptance?  I suspect that Germany has endured more environmental cleanup than any of the other western nations as it integrated Eastern Germany back into its singular identity.  The Soviet empire was notoriously unproductive, and too compensate, concern and respect for the environment was abandoned in its Cold War competition.  Germany also inherited two Soviet-constructed nuclear power plants which increased concerns about nuclear safety in the country.

Germany is slightly smaller in land area than the State of Montana.  What may be effective for the European countries, does not scale for larger countries such as the U.S., Canada, Russia, Australia, Brazil, China, or India.  Germany doesn't need airplanes for travel between cities, unlike the larger countries.  Their energy needs are lower and perhaps can be supplied by a patchwork of alternative energy sources, including coal.

Just as an outdoor barbecue grill makes sense for a suburbanite, and not for penthouse dweller, nuclear power must still be a preferred source of energy for the U.S.

Inching Forward on Understanding Alzheimer's Disease

Imaging of Brain Activity
Image Credit: National Institute on Drug Abuse

Alzheimer's Disease is a terrible thing to watch as the patient slowly decays toward death.  The National Institutes of Health has useful website on the disease.  Age and family history appear to be risk factors.  Less proven are female, history of high blood pressure and history of head trauma. 

The disease seems to have two variants: early onset and late onset.  Early onset is when the patient develops the disease at an early age.  Typically this variant progresses rapidly and is highly correlated with family history.  Late onset is most common and occurs after the age of 60.  Genetics seems to play a lesser factor with late onset.

The exact cause of Alzheimer's is not known, but there are some physical indicators. Neurofibrillary tangles are when proteins appear to tangle within the brain and block normal neural transport and food delivery. Neuritic plaques are where there are clumps of dead and dying neural tissue. Senile plaques are dead neural cells coagulating around a protein.

Families of Alzheimer's patients are dismayed by the absence of effective treatment against the disease.  It is difficult to study the pathological changes during the course of the disease and equally difficult to deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier which separates our circulating blood from the intracellular fluid of the central nervous system.

Naturally Occurring Plant Alkaloids Could Slow Down Alzheimer's Disease, Study Suggests tells that researchers have identified some naturally occurring molecules that appear to retard the excessive buildup of the tau protein that is characteristic of neurofibrillary tangles in patients. 

J&J to seek US approval for its experimental Alzheimer's drug tells that Johnson and Johnson could have an Alzheimer's drug, bapineuzumab, which appears to stop plaques from forming.  There have been some serious side effects such as brain swelling, which will necessitate additional study and testing.

One other recent note - ANAVEX 2-73 advances Phase I clinical trial for Alzheimer's disease. Although specifics of the drug are not provided, the public release discusses the company's class of drugs which alter cellular biochemical signalling pathways.

Mmm.  Treatment for the disease cannot come soon enough.

Unwrapping the Secrets of Pluripotency

Human Embryonic Stem Cells
Image Credit: National Institutes of Health

Cell Potency indicates the ability of a cell to differentiate into different types of cells.  Wikipedia tells that totipotency indicates the ability to produce all the cells of an organism, even the extraembryonic tissues.  Pluripotency is the ability to produce any cell except extraembryonic tissue such as a placenta.  Multipotency as you might expect is more limited - a few types and unipotency is only a single cell line.

The National Insitutes of Health has a Stem Cell Information website, which you might find useful.  Stem cells are unspecialized cells which are capable of reproducing themselves and when properly stimulated, they can produce specific types of cells, dependent upon its cell potency.  There are ethical issues concerning embyronic stem cells because they can be harvested only at the loss of the embryo.

A promising solution is the reprogramming of adult cells into non-embyronic stem cells.  These have the advantage that stem cell treatments do not require anti-rejection drugs for the life of the patient, since the patient's own cells can be used to derive the stem cell treatment line.  Currently though, these adult stem cells appear more limited in their ability to differentiate into any cell type within the human body.

Perhaps this technique can be improved with the recent, MDC Researchers Discover Key Molecule for Stem Cell Pluripotency.  The Medical News today article tells that the absence of the molecule E-cadherin in embyronic stem cells reduces the ability to differentiate into other types of cells.  The molecule was previously known for its presence in a cell as intra-cellular 'glue'.

Sheesh - life is complicated.  Wikipedia explains that cadherins are named as 'calcium-dependent adhesion' and are class of transmembrane proteins.  E-cadherins are found in epithelial tissue, N-cadherins in neurons, and P-cahderins in the placenta. 

Now that a dependency has been established upon E-cadherin for pluripotency, researchers will be studying its effect upon induced pluripotent stem cells. 

What Would You Think in the Last 3.5 Minutes?

Unidentified airliner over New York, City

Air France 447 was enroute from Rio de Janerio to Paris when it somehow plummeted to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Today, France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) released findings from their study of the black boxes discovered earlier this month.

Their speculation is scary - 3.5 Minutes of Terror: Speed Sensor Failure Led to Air France Crash.  The executive summary is that the pilots were misled by the aircraft's speed indicator and the aircraft stalled and fell 35,000 feet in three-and-a-half minutes.  A stall occurs when the wings are not producing lift - recall the wing's airfoil causes the air to move faster over the top of the wing than the bottom. 

In the stall, the aircraft can be in a flat spin, or a flutter like a dropped pancake.  The Times article tells the airliner probably dropped altitude at 110 mph, about the same speed as when the plane lifts off from the runway (the vectors are different; horizontal as opposed to vertical). 

Most interpretations in the media are calling it pilot error.  I hate that.  The pilots don't have an opportunity to defend themselves, and besides, have you ever been in a situation that you couldn't correct?  I have.

But what gives me pause is the 3.5 minutes that the plane fell vertically.  The crew and passengers knew something was seriously amok.  What would you think?  Or perhaps more to the point, what would you pray? 

Greenland Glaciers Lose Big

Greenland Locator Map
Image Credit: NASA

Wikipedia tells the Greenland Ice Sheet has a volume of 680,000 cubic miles.  The weight of that ice has sunk the central portion of the land mass to almost 1000 feet below sea level.

Two Greenland glaciers lose enough ice to fill Lake Erie explains that over the past decade, Kangerdlugssuaq and Jakobshavn Isbrae have lost over 300 billion tons of mass.  Researchers caution that glaciers have cycles where they speed up and slow down.  However, one of the glaciers would need to accumulate for seven years without any melting to make up for the lost mass.

I'm always a bit skeptical of sea level predictions, but International Business Times warns, Ice Sheets Melt Faster, Sea Levels Could Rise Five Feet by 2100.  Cape Cod, New Orleans and the State of Florida could be seriously impacted.

A Challenge That Changed a Nation

President John F Kennedy Announces the Challenge to Land Man on the Moon
Image Credit: NASA

Fifty years ago, on May 25, 1961, JFK challenged America to land a man on the moon.  His announcement gave the shivers to NASA administrators, because as Chris Kraft writes in Flight, they didn't know how to do it.

SInce that time, we have many lesser challenges that have never been fulfilled - like energy independence or the hydrogen economy.  So how did JFK choose the exact challenge to motivate the nation?

Some claim that he was lucky - fishing for something to distract the nation from the disastrous Bay of Pigs.  I think more of JFK than that.

JFK was a bonafide World War II hero.  (The story is told in PT-109, now finally available on DVD.)  Robert Dallek describes a very complex JFK in An Unfinished Life, although I must admit that I've forgotten my real impressions of the biography.

Chris Kraft tells that in spring 1961, JFK had requested LBJ, the Vice President, to develop a future course for the nation.  It could have been anything, but he ultimately selected a challenge to land man on the moon.  At the time, the U.S. had only placed Al Shepard on a suborbital flight, and America seemed far behind the Russians. 

A brilliant challenge - it was a decision that changed a nation. I'm ready for 2.0.

Will History Repeat Itself With the Keyboard?

Dali Wantabe

I had written previously that I did not like my netbook.  It is slow, and the battery life is terrible.  Curiously, I have dragged it off the shelf and begun using it again.  It only took shopping for a tablet to convince me that it was not so bad.

I replaced my Blackberry several months ago with an Android, primarily so that I could play around with writing some Android apps.  While I love the mobile browsing experience with the Android, I detest the keyboard.  It takes four times as long to take notes or type an email message with the touchscreen keypad.  And if you are on a rental car bus - you wait until you get off.

Nonetheless, I had a hankering for a tablet that I could use comfortably on a plane or even while watching television.  My laptop takes too long to boot and is too large for coach seats on most planes.  So I went shopping. 

The iPad2 is well-designed, but I desired no participation in the Apple eco-system.  I had researched Android tablets and the 10 inch Acer iconia seemed to have some of the better reviews.  Yet as I experimented with it at my local Best Buy, the user interface with the touchscreen seemed inadequate to prepare a blog entry, much less a novel, or anything else that I write.  With surprise, I drove home without purchasing a tablet, and pulled out my netbook.

Mmm.  It wasn't any faster, but there were some tweaks I made to improve the response a bit.  On my next trip, I lugged both my laptop and netbook, using my netbook on the plane.  Although the battery life is much poorer than today's tablets. it lasted for a coast-to-coast trip.  I suppose I had bought into the hype of tablet computers without really thinking about the total package.  Despite the grousing about my netbook, I will not be replacing it with a tablet.

About the photograph - it isn't exactly Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, but it reminds us that once everyone believed digital displays on watches would make conventional dials obsolete.  And for a while, everything was a digital display.  Today though, your wristwatch most likely has a conventional, or analog display.  So we have seen newer interfaces like the touch displays bloom and wane.  I wouldn't write off keyboards, just yet.  Meantime, I wish the computer manufacturers would invest in some additional technology for netbooks.

Meat Directly From a Petri Dish?

Beef Steak
Image Credit: USDA

Wikipedia explains that in vitro meat is an animal flesh product which has not been harvested from a complete, living animal.  Burgers From a Lab explains that many animal protein lovers are excited about a burger that doesn't result in a dead animal.  The NPR article also blames animal agriculture for 20 percent all greenhouse gas emissions.  (I am a bit suspicious of the number.)

Most of the tissue cultivated to date originates as pig stem cells that are grown in broth, and the largest mass is about the size of a contact lens.  (Hardly whopper-sized.)  Curiously, an obstacle is that muscle tissue needs to be excercised, or else it just grows as a texture-less blob.  So scientists are attempting to give the invitro meat electrical impulses to exercise it while it grows.

In Vitro Meat Grown in Test Tubes explains in 2003, researchers invited guests at a French art gallery to sample meat grown from frog cells.  People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has been advocating lab-grown animal protein instead of slaughtering millions of animals each year.

In vitro meat's evolution tells that in 1932, WInston Churchill observed the scrap from a chicken dish and predicted that within 50 years that technology would enable growing the animal protein without the need for an animal body.  The LA Times article also suggests that in vitro meat might prevent cardiovascular deaths induced by unhealthy meat consumption. 

Mmm.  While appealing, I wouldn't bet on in vitro meat replacing the herds of cattle or miles of chicken houses.  Hydroponics offers the same capability for growing plants, but the wheat for our daily bread comes from the fields, not the laboratories.

Indirect Evidence Supports Theory of Dark Energy

Dark Energy, Represented by the Purple Lines Pushes the Universe Apart, but Gravity Pulls it Back Together
Image Credit: NASA/CalTech

Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravity had a paradox.  Why didn't gravity just eventually collapse the universe?  When questioned, Newton responded that the universe was infinite and thus every mass was pulled by another mass and so on, balancing the universe.  That beget the question of why aren't we blinded at night, if there was an infinite number of stars?  Newton didn't have an answer for that.

Today we have experimental confirmation of Einstein's theory of relativity - that gravity is not a force.  Instead, we know it is a warping of time-space near large bodies of mass.  What has puzzled astronomers for several years is that the universe appears to be expanding, rather than contracting.  Even more puzzling is that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. 

The most accepted theory today is that something is out in space that cannot be directly detected by our senses, which are largely based upon electromagnetic forces.  Dark energy and dark matter are called 'dark' because they do not radiate or absorb light, radio waves, and are generally indifferent to normal matter.  With one exception - mass.  They can bend time-space, which results in gravitational bending, lensing, and other effects.

Dark Energy and Gravity - Yin and Yang of the Universe tells that recent measurements indicate dark energy is a smooth force that is dominating over gravity. Consequently the universe is expanding, rather than contracting. 

Improving the Grid's Transmission Towers

Helicopters Hoisting Tower Components
Image Credit: Bonneville Power Authority

One of the challenges of adding windmills and other alternative energy sources to the grid is constructing new transmission lines. The cost is roughly $1 million per mile. 

Recently some out-of-the-box thinking has suggested that instead of running transmission lines, we should find ways to consume the power in the region of production, such as battery charging or hydrogen production.

But if new transmissions are required, Building a Better Transmission Tower explains engineers have designed a better product.  The new design is 20 percent lighter, yet withstands higher winds than conventional products.  Because of the simplicity and economy of scale, the towers cost up to $250K less.

Mmm.  Many have asked about my brother.  I appreciate everyone's kind thoughts and emails.  I wish I could say that I had discovered something that will help others in the futuer.  I did not - it just hurts to lose your kid brother.