Zark's

Blackberry in the Rear View Mirror

It is disconcerting to watch a company that you like or value, to disintegrate before your eyes.  Not too long ago, Palm tanked.  Before that, what about Compaq?  And if we stretch back to the mid 90s, the technical titan, Digital Equipment Company, or DEC as it was known. 

The pundits are saying that Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind Blackberry was too arrogant and dismissed the iPhone challenge.  I'm not so sure it was arrogance.  DEC certainly perceived the personal PC replacing minicomputers and like RIM, made several attempts to change its product line.  But like RIM, it simply could not produce a product much different from the one that made it successful, even though customers were clearly wanting something different.

Reflecting upon these failures, they seem to be genetic.  The DNA of RIM and DEC would not allow them to adapt.  Two modern-day companies that seem to evolve are General Electric and IBM, but I don't consider them leaders in technology.  They have excellent business leadership that has taken advantage of their human and financial capital and successfully changed product lines.  But when did IBM last introduce something like the IBM 360?  Okay, perhaps the IBM PC.  But after 1981? 

It is a leadership dilemma isn't it?  How to be focused sufficiently to be successful, but quickly sight the next product, whether it be on the technology horizon, or at our feet.  It is a very short list of those who have that vision.

 

 

Next Week's Sky Reminds Us of Our Mortality

A double transit: the International Space Station and Venus on June 8, 2004
Image Credit:NASA/Tomas Maruska

NASA tells that on June 5, Venus will cross the sun producing a silhouette that will not be seen again until the year 2112. 

Most living today will not see Venus cross the sun again.  Or will they, if you have been read some of my posts on genetics and emerging medicine?

Halley's Comet appears every 75 or 76 years.  It is known as a short period comet, meaning that it appears at least every 200 years.  Long period comets might appear every thousand or million years.  Because of their rare appearance, their orbits are not known very well. 

But back to Venus.  The transit will be visible from 3:09 PM PDT, for almost 7 hours.  Don't look at the sun directly - use either some astronomy equipment or watch many science websites.

Wikipedia tells that Venus is one of the the brightest objects in the night sky, second only to the moon.  The planet is named after the Roman goddess for love and beauty.

I found the Chronology of Venus exploration interesting.  On February 4, 1961, the Soviet Union attempted a flyby with Sputnik 7.  The U.S. had the first successful flyby with Mariner 2 on August 27, 1962.  The last successful visit to Venus is Venus Explorer was launched by ESA on November 9, 2005, and is still operational with limited capabilities. 

Mental Replay Key to Better Decisions

Human embryonic stem cells in various stages of differentiating into neurons
Image Credit: California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, NIH

You know people, or perhaps you are one yourself, that continually replays an event from the past.  Sometime it can lead to alcohol or drug abuse, but even when it doesn't, that type of fixation is unhealthy.  My advice to friends and colleagues troubled with such thoughts is to not think about it unless there is something you can do about it.

Mental Replay in Memory and Learning tells that neurons replay previous experiences in short bursts called sharp-wave ripples (SWRs).  These occur during periods of brain inactivity such as sleep or texting. These SWRs primarily occur in the brain's hippocampus. 

Researchers at the University of California - San Francisco, experimented with rats exposed to a testing track.  Proper decisions through the maze were rewarded.  The rats were implanted with electrodes to determine when periods of SWRs would occur.  One group of rats had their SWRs interrupted, whereas the other group did not. 

The rats without the benefit of SWRs performed displayed much poorer memory and performance in negotiating the maze.  Researchers plan to continue their testing to discover more about memory and learning.

 

 

The Flesh Eating Bacteria

Group A Streptococcus pyogenes (GAS) bacteria
Image Credit: CDC/ Richard R. Facklam, Ph.D.

Necrotizing soft tissue infection explains that 'flesh eating bacteria' is Streptococcus pyogenes necrotizes soft tissue infection.

This bacteria enters through a small cut or wound and then begins to attack the internal soft tissue. 

The CDC describes the disease as necrotizing fasciitis.  Surviving a flesh eating disease scares us by telling there are many strains of group A streptococcus (GAS) that can generate necrotizing fasciitis. 

The National Institute of Health tells that immediate treatement is necessary to survive the infection.  There are three separate regimens:

• Powerful, broad-spectrum antibiotics given immediately through a vein (IV)

• Surgery to drain the sore and remove dead tissue

• Special medicines called donor immunoglobulins (antibodies) to help fight the infection in some cases

Sheesh.  Although rare, it is a frightening infection.

 

New Discovery in Alzheimer's Research

isol

Neuron Damage Correlated With Alzheimer's Disease
Image Credit: National Institute on Aging

Alzheimer's Disease is a progressive, irreversible brain disease that robs its victims of their ability to live independently.  The disease was first described in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer.  He noted physical changes in her brain such as neural tangles and protein clumps that today are correlated with the Alzheimer's. 

Plaques and tangles are only two of the physical indicators.  Neurons also become isolated and as illustrated in the graphic above, they die without interconnectivity and nutrition.  The current thought is that plaque and tangles begin accumulating in the brain and after a while, the hippocamus becomes affected and memories begin to fail.  Then additional damage occurs, and at death, the brain has shrunk significantly.

NIH-funded research provides new clues on how ApoE4 affects Alzheimer's risk tells that researchers have discovered that ApoE is a biomarker associated with the onset of the disease.  The ApoE gene is correlated with a degradation of the blood vessels supplying blood to the brain.

This is the first time that the brain's vascular system has been correlated with Alzheimer's disease.  Generally ApoE genes help regulate cholesterol within the body, but in laboratory mice, whenever the brain's vascular system is compromised, harmful proteins soon find their way into the brain. 

 

Book Review: A Supreme Court Memoir - Five Chiefs

John Paul Stevens served from December 19, 1975 to June 29, 2010.

I must confess, I was expecting something different.  I was expecting insight into the character or leadership of the Supreme Court Chief Justices he served under.

Instead, Justice Stevens discusses the legal details and nuances of various cases that were important during his tenure.  Perhaps a lawyer or an avid historian might discover this keenly interesting, but I confess that there were pages I couldn't hit the forward button fast enough. 

The historical tidbits about the court traditions such as the spittoons by the side of every justice were exposed by First Monday in October decades ago.  (Justice Stevens said that he never saw one used.) 

Did I learn something?  Mmm.  I kept thinking, 'this has to be how other people read an engineer's biography.'  I'm certain it is fine writing - just not something that interested me.

Science Teams Must Be Careful to Not Distribute Deep Sea Life

A friendly dolphin
Image Credit: NOAA

The observer effect is when the presence of an observer changes the experiment.  Connecting a voltmeter to an electronic circuit can change the behavior of the system.  The presence of an adult observer in the room can change the behavior of others. 

Oceanic scientists have a related problem.  They have to lower their submersibles, whether manned or robotic to the deep bottoms of the ocean.  Aside from changing the habitat or organisms by the observer effect, there is now a Warning over deep-ocean stowaways.

Researchers using the famous Alvin submersible inadvertently allowed limpets from a depth of 9000 feet to catch a ride and then hopped off at another location 370 miles away.  Previously it was believed that the large pressure differences would kill any hitchhiking wildlife and prevent cross-contamination of research regions. 

Despite preconceptions if you have seen the movie, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, a limpet is not a fish.  Instead, they are snails, apparently rather hardy ones.  The researchers at first thought they had discovered a new species, because the nutritional requirements for these limpets were obviously not in the second research area.  Further investigation has led them to conclude that the second batch of limpets had hidden in the flexible sections of a suction hose used to collect specimens. 

Researchers are alarmed because unique habitats could be permanently altered or destroyed by invasive species. 

Balancing Electrical Supply and Demand

It isn't easy, trying to predict how much electricity will be required at any particular moment in time.  In the graph above, imagine that it is cloudy one morning, raining another morning, and blue sky on another.  The electrical demands are going to be different.  Late in the afternoon, it could vary substantially on whether there is a tropical depression or a heat wave. 

The law of large numbers says that if there are enough trials, then the average is usually the outcome.  On one day, you might be sleeping in and not using as much electricity, but if there are enough people in the experiment, everything averages out.  But that doesn't work for weather or environment-related factors that affect (the actual mathematical term is correlate) large numbers of people. 

All of this is on the demand side.  There are variations in the supply side, especially with renewable supplies such as solar or wind.

Electricity storage can smooth out moment-to-moment variations in electricity demand tells that in many locations, electrical generators are switched on hourly schedules.  Conventional coal or oil-fired plants require more warmup time than newer gas turbines. 

One of the first electrical circuit elements that engineers learn is the capacitor.  These are energy-storage elements that absorb fluctuations as shown in the graph above.  Except not really, capacitors cannot store that much energy.  A cousin of the capacitor is the battery.  Usually batteries store energy in an electro-chemical system in contrast to a capacitor which stores the energy in an electrical field.  (And no, that is not a pasture with an electrical fence.  Sorry - an old electrical engineering pun.) 

Tom Sauk Reservoir
Ameren Missouri

Admittedly low-tech, but one that scales well, is hydro-storage as shown by the picture of Tom Sauk.  Water is pumped up a mountain when there is excess system capacity.  When there is more demand than supply, the water is released downhill, producing electricity as the water flows through turbines.

 

Better Hospital and Food Safety With Cold Plasma

Darker, cooler plasma slid and shifted back and forth above the Sun's surface seen here for 30 hours (Feb. 7-8, 2012) in extreme ultraviolet light.
Image Credit: NASA

We typically think of plasma as being extremely hot gas.  Wikipedia defines cold plasma as nonthermal plasma which is not in thermal equilibrium.  While not a precise term, cold plasma can mean the plasma discharge of a much hotter plasma.  In order for plasma to exist, ionization is necessary.  There must be free electrons. 

A blast of cold plasma kills drug-resistant bacteria explains that high energy and temperatures are required to produce plasma - like the sun or lightning.  Recall there must be ionization to create a plasma.  The trick seems to be to ionize only a small portion of the molecules and then those molecules distribute energy to the other particles in the mixture to produce room temperature plasma.

The plasma seems to be very effective against bacteria, even the dreaded MRSA (or superbug) bacteria.  A zap of cold plasma reduces harmful bacteria on raw chicken in Drexel study explains that food processing scientists are excited about the possibilities.

Mmm.  I could not find how the plasma is so effective against bacteria.  I'm guessing it is because the ionization disturbs the cell walls of the bacteria.  But ionization can also produce DNA damage or mutation.  I will be watching for more details on cold plasma.

 

Visions are Rarely Complete

Burlington Northern deep well rig Bureau of Land Management

 Almost four years ago, I blogged, Boone's Plan is More Than Wind.  Wikipedia reminds us the plan was to shift electrical generation to wind-powered turbines, saving domestic natural gas for transportation. 

The Man with the Plan reminds us that Boone grew up in a small eastern Oklahoma town, graduating as a geologist from Oklahoma State and first working for Phillips Petroleum.  In less than four years, he was off working for himself and founded Mesa Petroleum in 1956.  Since that time, he has been at the forefront of U.S. petroleum activity.

But back to his plan.  He believed by shifting to domestic natural gas the U.S. could reduce its dependency for foreign oil.  So far, we haven't shifted to natural gas based transportation, there are environmental issues with the production of synthetic petroleum from natural gas. 

Windpower hasn't been the success envisioned either.  Wind industry's future in question as tax credit nears end tells that wind power costs an average of 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour.  That is probably 1/3 or 1/4 of the cost of nuclear-generated electricity.  But the problem with wind power is two-fold.  First, it doesn't scale easily and it is not an on-demand source.  The wind blows when it blows.  The second is that people don't generally like to live where the wind blows all the time.  Consequently there is an absence of power transmission lines at the best wind farm sites.

But Boone Pickens was right about natural gas.  The nation is afloat with natural gas.  U.S. energy independence is no longer just a pipe dream is a bit stretched, but the nation is much better than it was five years ago, and certainly at the time of the 1973 oil embargo.  Today, the U.S. is the world's fastest growing oil and natural gas producer.  Predictions are that by 2030, the U.S. will obtain 94 percent of its energy from domestic production. 

To Boone's chagrin, natural gas prices have dropped by 80 percent since 2008.  In addition, the U.S. has passed Russia in refined petroleum exports. 

It is interesting how he got it right, but wrong.  But also remember when we thought that solving the nation's oil dependency problem would solve our economics problem?  How did we get it wrong?