Well, of course they were. This makes me think two things:

1. Google must be a pretty fun place to work.

2. What could you do with a really big quantity of that stuff? Industrial sized. Could you make furniture out of it? A house? A swimming pool?

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

Special Edition 12/31/05

Better All the Time, the year in review. Here are 50 good news stories we covered in 2005. We expect that this time next year, we'll be trying to fit 100 pictures into our table of contents collage. At least! Speaking of the collage, here's a bonus game for the kids: how many mouse pictures do you see?

Are you sure? Look carefully!

UPDATE: He may be a screwball, but he makes a good point. I had to resort to using an iFrame for this entry because MT was choking on the size of the file. However, I recognize that it is a problematic approach. So here's the link if the iFrame doesn't work right for you.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Congrats from everyone at the Speculist to Stephen and Melissa Green on the birth of their son, Preston Davis. Be sure to drop by VodkaPundit with your well-wishes.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:01 AM | Permalink

Thanks for the link, Glenn, and welcome InstaPundit readers. For those who inquired about the subtitle and the "1." below -- yes, this is the beginning of a series. I'm hoping to have the second entry up sometime this week. So don't be a stranger.

1. God as Model of the Good

Ray Kurzweil lays out some challenging ideas in The Singularity is Near, perhaps none is more challenging than this passage which concludes the chapter entitled "Ich Bin Ein Singularitarian":

Evolution moves towards greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably towards this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.

This raises some interesting questions about the relationship between God and the Singularity. Just to rattle off a few...

Does the Singularity bring us closer to God?

Does God show up at the Singularity?

Are we going to somehow create God?

Are we going to somehow become God?

These kinds of questions would have gotten me in a lot of trouble years ago at (Southern Baptist) church camp. Actually, the first two wouldn't have, so long as everyone assumed that by "Singularity" I really meant "Rapture." And, come to think of it, the latter two wouldn't have gotten me into trouble so much as they would have worried people sick about the state of my soul, subjecting me to the kind of additional attention and counseling that every 14-year-old boy hopes to get on summer afternoons while everyone else is out swimming and playing softball.

To tell you the truth, even today I'm glad that my Mom rarely looks in on this site. I'm not sure that I would want her to know that I'm raising these kinds of questions. You want to talk about being in trouble...

Anyhow, before we get to the answers, let's spend some time on why we would even be talking about God in relationship to the Singularity. For starters, there's probably not a lot of overlap between theists and Singularitarians. Devout believers tend to view the Singularity as a kind of competing eschatology, while "devout" (doesn't seem to be the right word, does it?) Singularitarians tend to be agnostics and atheists. There are exceptions, of course, but they are mostly outliers -- scientifically minded folks who have room in their world view for an amorphous, noncommital "spirituality" and fringe believers who are okay with making pretzels out of established doctrine (a la Tipler) in order to be able to affirm everything they want.

Those are perhaps needlessly nasty caricatures, but they get the point across. Very much to his credit, what Kurzweil seems to be presenting is a merger of both these positions, absent the cynicism and simplistic rationalizations.

A while back, during a between-session break at Accelerating Change 2005, I had the good fortune to have a chat with two prominent individuals, one a life-extension advocate, the other a thought leader on the subject of artificial intelligence. We were talking about the Singularity and the probability of a hard versus soft takeoff when suddenly we found oursleves on the topic of where this is all going in the long run. One of us dared to suggest that God might figure into the picture, pointing out parallels between the scenario we were examining and a story from the Bible. This was immediately dismissed by another as reliance on "fiction," but the third participant suggested that the Bible story referenced should be viewed as myth, not in a pejorative sense, but as a potential source of wisdom and instruction irrespective of whether it describes something that happened historically.

This was an attempt, I believe, to establish some kind of common ground between believers and nonbelievers. And I think it's similar to what Kurzweil does above by referring to God not as an entity but rather as a collection of characteristics. Some of the characteristics that Kurzweil mentions are things that we would normally associate with the idea of the Technological Singularity, namely:

complexity

elegance

knowledge

intelligence

...while the rest might seem a little out of place:

beauty

creativity

subtle attributes such as love

But then again, maybe not so out of place. If we add empathy and kindness as subheadings under the "subtle attributes," what begins to emerge is something not unlike Friendly AI as defined by our friends at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence:

A "Friendly AI" is an AI that takes actions that are, on the whole, beneficial to humans and humanity; benevolent rather than malevolent; nice rather than hostile. The evil Hollywood AIs of The Matrix or Terminator are, correspondingly, "hostile" or "unFriendly".

Friendly AI is the intelligence of the soft-takeoff Singularity, the version of the Singularity in which good things happen. It is distinguished from non-friendly AI, which we would encounter in the hard-takeoff Singularity -- the version where superhuman intelligence emerges and immediately destroys us, either deliberately or inadvertently. There is a third option, what I call the "missed flight," where the new intelligence emerges, wants nothing to do with us, and starts doing its own thing in such a way that neither hurts nor helps us.

Any of the three flavors of Singularity described above will involve a massive increase in the qualities named in the first list. But only a soft-takeoff, Friendly AI Singularity will involve an increase in the qualities named in the latter list, or at least that final item on it. Arguably, a highly creative intelligence could emerge with a strong aesthetic sense and still have no empathy for us whatsoever. But I believe that if we find a way to instill a notion of beauty into an artificial intelligence, that notion will depend upon an underlying concept of goodness, which -- with any luck at all -- we will help the new intelligence to extend into the ethical as well as aesthetic sphere of thought.

So there, I believe, is the common ground that believers and Singularitarians have in exploring the relationship between God and the Singularity. Both have a keen interest in goodness. In working to bring about an emergent superhuman intelligence, the Singularitarian can find in the idea of God (or at least in some of the more prominent ideas about God) a model, a template, an ideal. A believer might counter that to attempt to create God would be the worst kind of hubristic folly, and blasphemy to boot. We'll look at these objections in greater detail later.

But no one is talking about creating God. A Christian mother who tries to instill Christ-like qualities in her children would not be accused of blasphemy, nor have I ever heard anyone ascribe hubristic folly to that book by Thomas a Kempis. And if anything is blasphemous, surely it's the name "Christian," meaning "little Christ."

As our evolutionary heirs, these intelligences which are to emerge will be either extensions of ourselves or they will be our offspring. Either way, the effort to make them God-like -- or do I ruffle fewer feathers on one side, while perhaps making folks on the other side uncomfortable, if I trade that term for "godly"? -- seems like something we can all agree is a pretty good idea. Technologists will see this as responsible design, akin to the safety considerations that must enter into the introduction of any new machine. Believers will see it as a moral imperative. If the new intelligence is our offspring, the imperative is to raise the child with the right values. If it is a soulless machine, the imperative is to see to it that it is used for the best ends possible.

UPDATE: Here's a follow-up to this entry in response to one of the reader comments. And now Frank Tipler himself has weighed in on the discussion.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Carnival of Tomorrow #16 is up at the Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

Carnival of Tomorrow #17 will be hosted back here at The Speculist.

If you would like to contribute to the 17th carnival or host #18, please write:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com

or

bowermaster {@ symbol} gmail {dot} com

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Size does matter, after all.

UPDATE: And technique is important, too. Thanks, EP. Problem fixed.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Although we tried to cover all the holiday bases in our BATT sign-off, some people draw the line a little differently. Rand Simberg, for example:

And to heck with you Festivus people. Get a non-nihilistic religion.

Festivus nihilistic? Personally, I can do without the Airing of Grievances, but I think there's something to be said for the Feats of Strength.

Anyhow, I wonder if we will now have a huge media flap about Rand's one-man war on Festivus?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

#27 12/24/05

Welcome to the Christmas List edition of Better All the Time. These halls are just about as decked as they are going to get, the shopping is pretty much wrapped up (both figuratively and literally) and some very tempting aromas are beginning to emanate from the kitchen. Sure, there's plenty left to do, but the big rush is over. While you prepare yourselves for the festivities to come, take a moment to review a different kind of Christmas list. This list is made up not of things we hope for some day, but that are here now, improving our world and promising an even brighter tomorrow. 

Today's Good Stuff:

Quote of the Day Foods Rich in Vitamin D Video Games  Big-Ticket Manufactured Goods Flexible Electronics New Neurons More Time Tenth Planet Tiny Gadgets Dry Firewood

  Quote of the Day

Humanity is going through some very, very important kind of transition into some kind of new relationship to the Universe, I'd say, the kind of acceleration that would occur after the child has been formed in the womb, taking the nine months, and suddenly begins to issue from the womb out into an entirely new world.

Buckminster Fuller

Item 1
Vitamin D for Lung Health

Vitamin D may play a role in keeping our lungs healthy, with greater concentrations of vitamin D resulting in greater lung health benefits. A study in the December issue of CHEST, the peer-reviewed journal of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP), shows that patients with higher concentrations of vitamin D had significantly better lung function, compared with patients with lower concentrations of vitamin D.

"Low levels of vitamin D have been associated with osteoporosis, hypertension, diabetes, and cancer," said lead author Peter Black, MB, ChB, Department of Medicine, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. "Our research shows that vitamin D may also have a strong influence on lung health, with greater levels of vitamin D associated with greater and more positive effects on lung function."

The good news:

Amazingly, these studies show that poor lung health is more closely correlated with low levels of vitamin D than it is with smoking. If these findings are confirmed, it would be difficult to overtsate the importance of keeping up healthy levels of vitamin D. FuturePundit Randall Parker has been tracking research in this area for some time. Related blog posts he has authored on the subject include:

Vitamin D Could Decrease Overall Cancer Risk 30%

Higher Vitamin D Reduces Aging Bone Fracture Risks

Both are highly recommended reading. Also check out this summary, with good information on foods that contain vitamin D as well as the risks associated with taking too much.

Everything in moderation, after all.

Item 2
Video Games Are Okay

Well, it turns out that they don't turn players into anti-social, trigger-happy zombies after all. In fact, a few of them might actually tend in the other direction:

The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space.

The good news:

So maybe we can all lighten up. Have some fun. Let our kids have some fun. Granted, a six-hour stretch of World of Warcraft doesn't provide the same benefits as working through some difficult math problems or going out for a brisk bike ride. But then, weren't we just saying something about moderation?     

 

 

Top

Item 3
Big-Ticket Manufactured Goods

WASHINGTON - Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods jumped by the largest amount in six months, reflecting soaring demand for commercial aircraft.

The Commerce Department reported that orders for durable goods were up 4.4 percent to a record $223 billion last month, following a 3 percent gain in October.

The 4.4 percent advance was far above the 1.1 percent increase that Wall Street analysts had been expecting. The strength was led by a 133.8 percent surge in orders for commercial aircraft and parts, which jumped to $25.9 billion from $11.1 billion the previous month.

The good news:

Looks like a lot of folks put airplane parts on their Christmas wish lists. Who would have expected that? Anyhow, while we'll take good economic news any time, it seems especially appropriate here at the end of the year. And then there's this:

The U.S. economy grew at the fastest pace in 1 1/2 years in the summer as booming auto sales offset the adverse effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But the year is expected to end with much slower growth.

The U.S. Commerce Department reported Wednesday that the gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic health, grew at a 4.1 per cent annual rate from July through September.

Hmm, maybe we should have shown a car in addition to an airplane.

And not to pile on or anything, but it appears that investor confidence has hit a 17-month high. Anybody care to throw a Bah, Humbug! on all this good economic news?

No? We didn't think so.

Top

Item 4
Stretchable Electronics

The next wave in electronics could be wavy electronics.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a fully stretchable form of single-crystal silicon with micron-sized, wave-like geometries that can be used to build high-performance electronic devices on rubber substrates.

“Stretchable silicon offers different capabilities than can be achieved with standard silicon chips,” said John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering and co-author of a paper to appear in the journal Science, as part of the Science Express Web site, on Dec 15.

Functional, stretchable and bendable electronics could be used in applications such as sensors and drive electronics for integration into artificial muscles or biological tissues, structural monitors wrapped around aircraft wings, and conformable skins for integrated robotic sensors, said Rogers, who is also a Founder Professor of Engineering, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a member of the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.

The good news:

The age of the wearable computer draws nearer. Here's a good explanation of the concept for the unitiated:

A wearable computer is a very personal computer. It should be worn like a piece of clothing, as unobtrusive as possible. A user should interact with the computer based upon context. It could be a communications device (immediate or store and forward), a recorder (visual, audio, other sensors) or a reference device (local or remote resources).

There's no question that we will have wearable computers sooner or later. The only issue is whether they will look more like this:

Or like this:

Obviously, we're hoping for the latter. And stretchable silicon could go a long way towards getting us there.

Top

Item 5
New Neurons

Scientists from Johns Hopkins' Institute for Cell Engineering have discovered the steps required to integrate new neurons into the brain's existing operations. "GABA is important during fetal development, but most scientists thought it would have the same role it has with adult neurons, which is to inhibit the cells' signals," says Hongjun Song, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Neuroregeneration and Repair Program within ICE. "We've shown that GABA instead excites new neurons and that this is the first step toward their integration into the adult brain." Song added that their discovery might help efforts to increase neuron regeneration in the brain or to make transplanted stem cells form connections more efficiently.

The good news:

The ability to augment our brains could lead to tremendous breakthroughs in the treatment of the degenerative diseases of aging, and may very well also give us the ability to make ourselves smarter.

 

Top

Item 6
More Time

All the uproar over "Cyber Monday" -- the Monday after Thanksgiving, when people supposedly rushed online at work to do holiday shopping -- both about how it was a PR invention, and then that the actual date simply got screwed up has obscured the real truth about online holiday shopping: that it lets people procrastinate. A study says that people spent 29 percent more online last week than they did in the same week last year, spurred on by last-minute promotions and cheaper, faster shipping.

The good news:

Of course, the flip side of "procrastination" is that -- rather than shopping -- people were able to do things they needed or wanted to do more. Online shopping gives us freedom that we never had before, but it can't change certain basic human functions, such as putting off shopping until the last possible moment. The online option merely changes the parameters!

Top

Item 7
10th Planet

We may have it:

On Dec. 13, another group said they’d found an object half the mass of Pluto orbiting twice as far from the Sun as Neptune. The object’s path has them puzzled.

The faraway world is catalogued as 2004 XR 190 and known temporarily as Buffy. It was discovered as part of the Legacy Survey on the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.

"It was quite bright compared to the usual Kuiper Belt Objects we find," said the University of British Columbia’s Lynne Allen, who was part of the international discovery team. "But what was more interesting was how far away it was."

Buffy never gets closer than 52 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, or 52 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. Neptune is 30 AU from the Sun. Pluto ranges from 30 to 50 AU.

What makes Buffy special is its nearly circular path, which extends out to just 62 AU.

The good news:

Welcoming a new member into our exclusive little solar system club is always cause for celebration. We aren't quite there yet, but stay tuned.

About that name...

We kind of hope it sticks. We're going to run out mythological names before we've named 1% of the objects in the Kuiper belt, anyhow. TV characters seems like the logical next step. One day, a tour ship of the outer solar system might include stops at such locales as Fonzie, Frazier, and Floyd the Barber. And that's just the F's!

Top

 

Item 8
Tiny Gadgets

You may not have noticed, but the smallest revolution in world history is under way. Laboratories and factories have begun to make medical sensors and computer-chip components smaller than a single blood cell or the periods on this page.

Viruses are among the most important causes of human diseases and are of increasing concern as agents of bioterrorism. Nanoscale silicon wires could be fashioned into chip arrays capable of sensing thousands of different viruses, ushering in a new era for quick response to viral outbreaks.

Lieber and his colleagues have also built a cracker-size detector for cancer. Someday, such sensors might be used to test people for cancers in doctors' offices.

Other potential nanodevices being looked at may help doctors detect whether cancer has spread, or is shrinking in response to treatments. In the future, nanoparticles might travel through human bodies and deliver cargoes of drugs to malignant tumors, eliminating the need for surgery or greatly reducing the side effects of chemotherapy.

And no one doubts that nanodevices and techniques will make possible many types of smaller, faster computers, medical instruments, and personal gadgets that bring increased convenience and pleasure.

The good news:

The good news pretty much speaks for itself, here. Plus, you can fit a lot of these gizmos into the typical Christmas stocking.

 

Top

 

Item 9

Plenty of Dry Firewood

On Saturday evening, the Mississippi River in bayou country will look much as it has in more than a century of Christmas Eves — with miles of massive bonfires on the levee tops showing Papa Noel, the south Louisiana Santa Claus, the way to children's homes.

For hurricane evacuees like Rhonda Derenbecker, who lost her home, her office, two cars and nearly every other possession, the sight of something so spectacularly enduring will be more than welcome.

Watching locals work on one of the roughly 100 tepee-shaped structures set up along historic River Road, the Bay St. Louis, Miss., attorney said she was grateful she and her 12-year-old son found comfort with family and newfound friends in such a unique part of the world.

A thought:

Of course, our thoughts and best wishes are with all the folks in the Gulf Coast as they continue on the long road of recovery from the devastation earlier this year. Their bonfires for Papa Noel should be an example for us all. May the lights burn bright for each of us this holiday season, guiding peace, joy, and all our dreams swiftly along their way home.

Top

 

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Sargent. A very Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanza, Joyous Festivus, Sublime Solstice, or just plain pleasant wrap-up for the month of December to each of you, as appropriate. Oh, lest we forget...

Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new generation of scientists is here, and ready to take on the really tough questions. First we had the researchers mentioned in our previous item, daring to ask whether the constants that drive our universe are really as constant as we assume. And now this:

Australian scientists have proved what is common knowledge to most people -- that teaspoons appear to have minds of their own.

In a study at their own facility, a group of scientists from the Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health in Melbourne secretly numbered 70 teaspoons and tracked their movements over five months.

Supporting their expectations, 80 percent of the spoons vanished during the period -- although those in private areas of the institute lasted nearly twice as long as those in communal sections.

"At this rate, an estimated 250 teaspoons would need to be purchased annually to maintain a workable population of 70 teaspoons," they wrote in Friday's festive edition of the British Medical Journal.

Fascinating. I would like to see a comparison study in the US. I think our lower rates of tea consumption might have made us less sensitive to this phenomenon. Perhaps teaspoons have been disappearing here and no one even noticed!

On the other hand, maybe our spoons are safe from this strange effect. What we really need in this country -- or at least at my house -- is a serious study of where all those socks are going.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here's some interesting research:

The physical constants of the Universe are thought to have remained unchanged since the Big Bang; many predictions made by cosmologists depend on it. An international team of researchers are using the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to see if things really have gone on unchanged for billions of years. They're looking to measure two universal constants: the ratio of mass between protons and electrons, and something called the fine structure constant.

If those cosntants have nudged even slightly over the eons, the implications are staggering.

Hat-tip: Posthuman Blues.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Entertainment weekly reports:

When Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon looks back on 2005, he can take comfort in knowing that his film-directing debut, the sci-fi Western Serenity, resurrected his canceled-too-soon cult classic TV series Firefly, and was also one of the year's best-reviewed movies. ''I should say I'm above reading reviews,'' he says. ''But I would be lying.'' Alas, Whedon's fond memories are also tainted by Serenity's status as a franchise nonstarter; despite Universal's best marketing efforts, the film only mustered $25 million. ''In the end, it was what it was: a tough sell,'' says Whedon, adding that it appears the Firefly saga has reached its conclusion. He has no regrets — and he's moving on.

That's a real shame. I wonder if the failure of Serenity has anything to tell us about the real sway that the blogosphere has? The free screening looked like a Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash, and we all wrote about the film in favorable terms...yet it flopped.

Maybe we're up to facilitating change in the lesser world of politics, but we're not quite ready to to take on the big time: popular entertainment.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sure, we all know that yummy granulated white sugar is bad and and brown sugar is better but it's still bad and saccharine causes cancer if you eat approximately two oil tankers of it a year and aspartame is not quite as nutra-sweet as we once thought it was, but come on.

This is just too much:

Fructose fruit sugar is not a harmless substitute for glucose.

University of Florida researchers have identified one possible reason for rising obesity rates, and it all starts with fructose, found in fruit, honey, table sugar and other sweeteners, and in many processed foods.

Fructose may trick you into thinking you are hungrier than you should be, say the scientists, whose studies in animals have revealed its role in a biochemical chain reaction that triggers weight gain and other features of metabolic syndrome - the main precursor to type 2 diabetes. In related research, they also prevented rats from packing on the pounds by interrupting the way their bodies processed this simple sugar, even when the animals continued to consume it.

The findings, reported in the December issue of Nature Clinical Practice Nephrology and in this month's online edition of the American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology, add to growing evidence implicating fructose in the obesity epidemic and could influence future dietary guidelines. UF researchers are now studying whether the same mechanism is involved in people.

If you read the whole thing you will learn that it may be more of a fructose + uric acid problem than it is a straight-up fructose problem. FuturePundit concludes with a call for help:

So how can one keep uric acid levels down? Anyone know?

Ah, criminy, so now I have to keep track of my uric acid levels and do something to keep them in check? Don't I have enough to worry about? It's enough to make me consider doing something really desperate and extreme...like give up sweets altogether.

No, wait. What am I saying? That's just crazy talk.

UPDATE

El Jefe (a.k.a. Michael Sargent) adds some interesting thoughts:

Uric acid is the primary culprit in gout (something I’m familiar with due to my father’s affliction with same.)

Thus, a diet low in purines (the metabolic precursor of uric acid) might also offset this new-found hazard of fructose.

High purine foods include:

sweetbreads, kidneys, liver, brains, or other offal meats

sardines

anchovies

scallops

alcohol, especially beer because brewer's yeasts are very rich in purine. (Alcohol is not itself high in purines, but acts as a solvent)

meat extracts, consommés, and gravies

(List from wikipedia.)

This is also beginning to look like “all things in moderation” might be the best advice.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's important:

Researcher John Schloendorn is still looking for soil samples from around the world to screen for useful bacterial enzymes as a part of his work on LysoSENS research. He, and other researchers, are looking for enzymes that can break down age-related by-products that accumulate in and around cells, leading to a range of age-related conditions and general loss of function. If scientists can find a safe way to break down these damaging by-products - such as by using engineered bacterial enzymes - then they will have found a way to repair and prevent one part of age-related degeneration.

Reason has all the details over at Fight Aging! So what are you waiting for?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the fevered swamps of Skull Island to the dazzling skyscrapers of Manhattan, and all points in between, everybody's talking about exactly one thing: the controversial new gay cowboy flick, Brokeback Mountain.

Naw, just kidding. They're all talking about Kong! Kong is King! Kong rules! So in honor of everyone's favorite giant gorilla -- and in no way as some kind of cynical attempt to cash in on a fad -- we have asked the big ape to be our host in this week's journey into the future. So, let the journey begin!

Recently Stephen wrote about Gigantopithecus blackii - a ten foot tall ape that once roamed the Pleistocene.  Stephen suggested that legends of this animal might have have inspired the American Sasquatch myths even if the animal never made it to this continent.

Since methods to clone animals from that era are being perfected, will we one day see a real Kong up close and personal?  We're hopeful...just not too close or too personal...please.

Risk-taking aviators need not ponder buzzing the world's tallest building while being swatted at by a giant simian: Jay Manifold reports that attempting to land at Chicago Midway is plenty dangerous enough, and he's got numbers to back it up.

We all know 'twas beauty killed the beast, but had Kong hooked up with a Girl Geek rather than your garden-variety blonde hottie, said alternative S.O. might just have figured out a way to avoid that whole tragic Empire State Building/buzzing biplanes/nasty fall scenario. Melody tells us all about the women of the future, the aforementioned Girl Geeks, both at her own blog and at Multiple Mentality .

Speaking of women of the future, Virginia Postrel is recommeding a book on the subject of urban sprawl. The book deals with the evolution and adpation that takes place in city design over time; reading it we might well find some clues as to what we can expect cities to look like in the future:

But Bruegmann's book is grounded in a history lesson--one that finds the roots of present-day Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles in Augustan Rome or Restoration London. People of means, he writes, have always tried to get some distance from urban centers, often inhabiting villas outside city walls."

I'm sure you would have found it in the very first city ever established," he says. "Living in cities has almost always been unpleasant and unhealthy--not something most people wanted. If you were in imperial Rome, crowded into dark, dingy, polluted apartment buildings, it would have been a nightmare. Most cities I looked at had just crushing density until about the 18th century."

So cities will probably continue to spread out into clean, safe, sprawling suburbs that provide everything the residents need. And that are free, we might add, from those tempting and dangerous skyscrapers.

Whether Kong decides to go for a Geek Girl or stick with the supermodel type, he needs to focus on getting along okay, especially leading such a high-risk life. Joshua Zader at Mudita Journal has the latest on new research indicating that a marital spat can significantly reduce the body's ability to heal :

The Big Guy must down an awful lot of bananas to keep his huge frame moving. This puts us in mind of the exciting Second Generation Biofuels recently reported on by Green Car Congress.

As Kong gets older, he may be concerned, as many of us are, about the loss of muscle mass. Sci-Tech Daily points us to some new information indicating that part of the answer may be to lay off the bananas in favor of meat .

While we're on the subject of life extension (sort of) Fight Aging! reports that our good friend Aubrey de Grey will be appearing on 60 Minutes in January.

MattG at "Press the buttons" recalls his childhood love of all things Donkey Kong.  Lately the character has had cameo appearances in other games, but...

For all his moonlighting, however, I continue to look forward to his next traditional adventure.

Mike at TechDirt warns of a new software trend that may slow the introduction of new Kong adventures, as well as innovation generally -- copy protection. Meanwhile, BoingBoing directs us to a report detailing how Congress is working to build copy protection in at the hardware level. On the other hand, Lawrence Lessig reports that Sun is trying to open things up at the hardware level. Open-source hardware? Apparently.

FuturePundit reports that power plant operators have decided to take a serious look at nuclear energy.

[Please redo. Need Kong angle.-- Ed.]

FuturePundit reports that power plant operators have decided to stop monkeying around and take a serious look at nuclear energy.

GeekPress directs us to this New Scientist article about how neural networks are being used to determine whether new movies will be a hit.

While the crime rate overall seems to be going down, some crimes are getting bigger. A lot bigger. The Minstry of Minor Perfidy , who will be hosting next week's carnival, reports on a brazen criminal act of King Kong proportions: grain silo theft. Could this be the future of crime?

Mark at Curmudgeon's Corner , while not explicitly addressing the issue of cloning a gigantopithecus, directs us to commentary from a noted paleontologist who raises serious questions about whether a creature such as Kong could ever exist. Then Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings joins the fray with these pertinent thoughts:

Even if he could get enough to eat, for a body with that much mass to move that fast, the heat generated would be much greater than could be radiated out through the skin (mass goes up as the cube of the major dimension, whereas surface area only goes up as the square), particularly through that fur coat, so he'd cook from the inside if he maintained the kind of activity levels presumably depicted. Also, he wouldn't be able to maintain his own weight on those (relatively) spindly legs, once scaled up to that size--they'd splinter like toothpicks.

No point in seeing the movie, folks--it's just not realistic...

A devastating analysis. For those who will now skip the Kong movie as it has been thoroughly debunked, might we recommend a more plausible hit film from last summer, recently out on DVD?

Carnival of Tomorrow #16 will be hosted by The Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

If you would like to contribute to or host an upcoming Carnival of Tomorrow, please write to:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com

or

bowermaster {@ symbol} gmail {dot} com

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hmmm, maybe Wikipedia isn't so reliable after all.

Wikipedia was yesterday described as being as reliable as the Encyclopaedia Britannica despite a sustained attack from vandals intent on further wrecking its reputation for accuracy.

This is despite a surge in the number of spoof articles and vandal attacks which have followed the furore over a biographical Wikipedia article linking John Seigenthaler, a respected retired journalist, with the assassinations of both John F and Robert Kennedy.

In one such fake article, it was suggested today that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's creator, was shot dead at his home by Siegenthaler's wife.

This is kind of a breakthrough. Wiwkipedia makes it possible for people with no programming skills to do hacking of a sort and to unleash viruses. (If we can count deliberately false information as memetic viruses of a sort.) Great.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"The history of the world is none other than
the progress of the consciousness of freedom."

"I am daily ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. Once the realm of ideas is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out."

- G.W.F. Hegel

[These three quotes were lifted shamelessly from Micah Glasser at Event Horizon.]

The third quote reminds me of H.G. Well's universal brain idea:

Quietly and sanely this new encyclopaedia will, not so much overcome these archaic discords, as deprive them, steadily but imperceptibly, of their present reality.

Both men understood that the transformative power of the steam engine would be trivial compared to tools for the mind. Tools for thought (Hegel), and universal connectivity (Wells).

In fairness, this is probably as close as Hegel ever got to considering information machines. He was probably referencing his impenetrable system of philosophy, not computers. But he was correct. Once the realm of ideas is revolutionized...so long status quo.

Kurzweil takes a broader look at this. In the history of the universe there has only been, so far, four information "epochs." What Hegel and Wells foresaw was a movement from Epoch 3 to Epoch 4.

Epoch 1: Information in physics and chemistry
Epoch 2: Information in biology (RNA and DNA)
Epoch 3: Information in brains
Epoch 4: Information in technology

and in the future...

Epoch 5: Merger of technology and human intelligence
Epoch 6: The universe wakes up

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just started this book:

Intriguing premise. I'll provide a full report when I've finished. Here are some more good holiday reading options:

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We were rereading the 2005 Speculist in preparation for a year-end round-up post, when we came across a couple of posts from last May on the South Korean cloning successes:

• The Age of Therapeutic Cloning

• More from South Korea

At the time that Phil and I were writing about this great news we were hopeful that what Dr. Hwang had accomplished was the beginning of a very big thing - witness the title of that first post.

Incredibly, it may have all been an elaborate hoax.

When we read the news late last month that Dr. Hwang may have violated ethics by using the eggs of lab assistants, we were a bit nonplused. If the eggs were given voluntarily, and if Dr. Hwang didn't even know that his assistants were the ones giving the eggs, then why was it so disgraceful?

Considering the magnitude of Hwang's accomplishments and his hero status in South Korea, it seemed strange. We would have expected his country to rush to his defense, create new safeguards to make sure it didn't happen again, and then send Dr. Hwang back out to continue his work. Instead, Hwang (voluntarily or involuntarily) stepped down "from all public posts, including his chairmanship of the World Stem Cell Hub."

The weirdness of that apparent overreaction perhaps should have warned us that the rest of Hwang's research was in question. Nevertheless it came as a great shock to read that Hwang "faked his results."

At least 9 of the 11 tailored stem cell lines were completely faked. The other two can't be proved either - apparently there are presently no living tailored stem cell lines in Hwang's lab. There may never have been.

It's just shocking. Of course we understand the motive. Everybody would like to be a hero. But how did a smart guy like Hwang think he'd get away it? He went from being an anonymous respected researcher, to a pariah. Sure, there was a brief stint at the top of the world, but how satisfying could that have been? It was fake and he knew it.

Anyway, this news story gets our vote for the "Buzz Kill of the Year" award of 2005. It is our hope that the field of stem cell science will quickly recover from the damage this has done.

UPDATE: NPR had a segment on this controversy last night.

This has caused "shock and dismay" within the field of stem cell science and is considered a "national tragedy" in South Korea.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Now here's a blog that really caught my attention. The name of the blog, Science and Politics, is pretty straightforward. But what I like is the subtitle:

Red-State Serbian Jewish atheist liberal PhD student with Thesis-writing block and severe blogorrhea trying to understand US politics by making strange connections between science, religion, brain, language and sex.

Yeah, that's what I hate about the blogosphere. It's always the same stuff over and over.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

...for the Better All The Time thesis. Nothing like a little historical perspective:

Terrorist attacks, a war in Iraq and natural disasters aren't so bad compared to other tough times in America's past, from the Revolutionary War to the Cold War, history professors say.

Asked to compare eight difficult periods of the nation's history, 46 percent of the 354 professors who responded to a nationwide survey agreed the current era was the least trying. The Civil War, 55 percent said, was the toughest.

None of this is to say that the problems we have today aren't real. Of course they are. But by and large, life has gotten safer, cleaner, easier.

I wonder what these scholars would say if asked what the future will be like? Would they expect the trend to continue or would they think we've peaked?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I got word that my good friend Maynard Blake had died. Maynard had a brain tumor removed several months ago and had had clear MRIs ever since -- the cancer was not coming back. However, the recovery was just too much for him. In the end, it was a host of little infections culminating in pneumonia that took him down. For all the medical progress we've made, it is still all too common an occurrence that an operation is a complete success, except for losing the patient.

Maynard was just a great guy. A talented musician. A good husband and father. A good friend. He worked for the last few years counseling people with substance abuse problems, making a real difference in the lives of who knows how many people. He will be sorely missed.

As these things often happen, just shortly after learning about Maynard's passing, I found this e-mail from reader Robert Vreugde:

Just read your essay at link

I attend what would probably be best described as a fundamentalist, bible believing church and generally share most of the beliefs of the people in the church. But I do not share the belief that death is a good thing, a time of "going home", etc.

Exactly one year ago yesterday my father died after being wasted away in a hospital for six months. He was well educated with engineering degrees from Stanford and Cal Tech, hard working and very creative in a variety of fields. All that he was as man, all that he had learned and was still capable of doing - all that rotted away and was destroyed. As you say, death sucks.

Even the bible presents the idea that humans were not originally created to die. Supposedly our physical systems were designed to continue living on indefinitely.

Scientists may not be able to devise a means to halt aging BUT at the least, we ought to eventually fully understand what aging is.

I am glad that there are people like you who are raising the voice that it is time that we start treating death as a (potentially) curable disease and not just resigning ourselves to death as some sort of inevitable fate.

500 years ago humans dreamed of flying but had no idea of how. Only gods or angels were thought to have that ability.

Then perhaps 200 years ago people began to develop technologies that suggested that flight might be possible.

120 years ago people realized that flight was possible - all we had to do was refine the technology.

And then in Dec. 1903 powered flight was accomplished.

And now we fly all the time. We don't think of ourselves as gods or angels or master race supermen.

We just fly.

Well said. Here's looking forward to the day when we "just fly" -- when we don't just assume that we'll be losing those we care about any day now, or that they'll be losing us.

(For anyone who's interested, the original version of Death Sucks can be found here.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not that long ago, it seemed that every other Speculist entry had something to do with some amazing mouse-related achievement. Mice were everywhere: helping with breakthrough cancer treatments, showing us how to grow new neurons, baffling scientists with their appetite hormones, and becoming more and more and more valuable as they live longer and longer.

But here lately, it's all been about the bees. First they were solving puzzles, then they were finding land mines, and now in BoingBoing, we read this:

Scientists have demonstrated that honeybees can recognize human faces, sometimes for days. Adrian Dyer of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues trained the bees to associate photographs of particular human faces with a sugary treat. Later, five bees were able to pick out the right face from a group of others. The results of the study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, may eventually aid the development of computer vision systems.

Stephen recently posted a speculation that the world's first true artificial intelligence might be a modified, oversized rat brain. Possibly. But I wouldn't rule out a highly modified swarm of bees.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world

#26 12/10/05

Welcome to the In Search of Good News edition of Better All the Time. This time out, we thought we would do a little experiment. Rather than cherry-picking a few good news stories from numerous sources around the Web -- which is our normal modus operandi -- this time we decided to see what a general web search for good news would yield. We went to the Yahoo! and Google news sites and grabbed 50 news stories from each. No, we didn't just grab the top 50 news stories from each. It would be all too easy to do that and then bemoan the lack of good news coverage.

Instead, we did a search for "good news" on both the Yahoo! and Google news sites. Having cranked out 25 previous editions of Better All the Time, we know that good news doesn't come leaping off the page from a casual perusal of the headlines. But what happens if you go to the news sites and say, "Hey, how about a little good news, please?"

What follows is a mash-up of the top 100 results.

Today's Good Stuff:

  Quote of the Day

According to Buddhism, there's good news, and there's bad news — the bad news is life is inherently suffering, but the good news is that it's possible to overcome the suffering.

The Daily News Journal, epitomizing the mainstream media's approach to good news.  

Item 1
No Good News

Although media outlets seem to prefer to use the phrase "good news" in a vague and dismissive way (as we'll see with some of the later results), sometimes the phrase crops up in news stories where there was essentially no good news content. This was the case with three of our top 100 results.

Two of these stories talk about a lack of good news; one is a satire about NBC reporting nothing but good news from here on in (mildly funny). None of them have any actual good news to report. They came up in the search more or less by coincidence.

Item 2
No News Is Good News 

The phrase "good news" is part of a couple of formulas that reporters are quite fond of using. By far and away the favorite, as we will see in Item 6, below, is the old standby, "There's good news and there's bad news."   However, another popular choice is "No news is good news." Four out of 100 news search results for "good news" were variations on that theme.

Only one of these news stories, number 7, has any actual good news content. But as is often the case, the good news is doled out as reluctantly as possible. A week of good news, BUT will it last? The assumption here is that no, of course, it can't possibly last. Good news is notable primarily for the fact that it always lets us down.

Item 3
Tidings of Comfort and Joy

The phrase "good news" has a special meaning for Christians. As Christmas approaches, it's not surprising that a news search would pick up several instances of this use of the phrase:

While these stories are of relevance only to a particular demographic, these are our first examples of writers using the phrase because they believe that they're actually on to some good news. Kind of refreshing, isn't it?

Item 4
The Wacky World of Sports

Sports writers use the phrase "good news" quite a bit. Here are the sports stories that emerged in our 100 results:

A few observations on these stories:

1. It can well be argued that "good news" in the field of sports is of slight importance in the overall scheme of things. That's probably why there were no stories about sports in the first 25 editions of Better All the Time.
2. Not all of these are "good news" stories, anyway. Items 19 and 20 are prime examples of the "there's no good news" / "there's good news and there's bad news" stools of reporting. And look at that snarky number 23. Nice. Really nice.
3. Even if one will concede that sports news counts as good news, and manages to find a true good-news story, the good news is often of limited appeal. Look at number 15 -- good news indeed for those of us fortunate enough to be Broncos fans, but of very little significance to anyone else. (And probably pretty annoying to some Kansas City fans.)

Item 5
That Other "Good News" Story

Four of the stories were about the controversial US practice of paying journalists in Iraq to write positive news stories:

These represent good news primarily for critics of the Bush administration on the lookout for new material.

Item 6
Good News, Bad News

Now we come to the first of our two biggest categories. These stories all play the "There's good news and there's bad news" game:

The authors of each of these articles took the position that the good news presented needed to be tempered or countered or put into a some kind of dampening context. Number 48 plays the same game that we saw earlier in number 7: there's good news now, but you don't really expect it to last, do you? Items 57 and 58 are warnings that too much good news might be a bad thing. Items 45 and 46 are actually complaints that there is plenty of good news and that it's being ignored. (Maybe that should have been its own category?) Items 55 and 56 look like reasonably positive stories if you read just the headline and the blurb. You need to go into the actual articles before you get hit by that big BUT. Number 37 could have gone a couple of ways: is it an inspiring story or the chance to wallow in the artist's suffering?

So what is up with this Good News / Bad News thing, anyway? we would guess that journalists would insist that this approach lends balance to a news story. The world is a complex place, and just reporting that things are wonderful -- or that anything is all right -- smacks of overenthusiasm and nonseriousness and other journalistic no-no's. This argument would be far more compelling if bad news stories also required balance and mitigation , but we all know that that's not the case. Journalists can report that things are bad with impunity. In fact, they can even report that things are bad no matter what happens.

Finally, look at that first story, number 28. If we had done our standard Better All the Time this week, that would have probably been our top story. People are living longer. That's good news! Right? Well, it may sound like good news BUT...now there are more old folks who are overweight and have high blood pressure. That's "disturbing" because of the health care costs that these people will incur when their unhealthy lifestyles catch up with them.

Stay with the logic a moment. A few years back, these people would not have lived as long. They would have died of something else before becoming old and fat and hypertensive (probably something related to cigarette smoking.) And in some sense, we would have been better off if they had done so. That's the argument, though they don't want to come right out and say it. In order to be balanced and serious, the position taken here is that we would be better off with some people dead.

Seems like kind of a reach to us (and a nasty one at that.) We're going to take the fact that people are living longer at its face value. It's good news.

Item 7
Limited Good News

Finally we come to the real stuff. The following are all actual good news stories. They represent "limited" good news in that they apply to a relatively small group of people or they are of limited duration or subject to some other fail-safe that makes it okay to report on them. Enjoy!

We are pleased to report that limited good news makes up the single biggest category in our search, almost a third of the total stories found. So even in world where so much is going wrong, and where those who report the news are discouraged from getting carried away with happy stuff, there is some good news out there.

Item 8
The Real Stuff

Finally, we come to the real good news -- goings-on that we can all take comfort in, be inspired by, or simply be glad to know.

It's interesting to note that number 99, the Krauthammer piece, is essentially the same story as numer 7. The only difference is that Krauthammer left out the big BUT. So out of 100 news stories containing the phrase "good news," more than a third really are good news stories and six are the sort of story that we normally run in Better All the Time. Six is nothing to sneeze at, but it's not even enough to make a full edition of BATT.

In linking to us, Glenn Reynolds has noted that this feature tends towards technology news. It's not that we favor technology news over other kinds...well, okay it isn't just that we favor technology news over other kinds. The fact is, if you read the science and technology pages, you'll find that the rate of good news stories is a lot higher than 6%.

That does it for this time. We'll return next time with our normal format and a special Christmas edition. Until then, keep looking for the good news, folks. It's out there. 

Better All The Time is compiled by Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Sargent. For more news on how our world is rapidly changing and improving, check out the latest FastForward Radio and the Carnival of Tomorrow.

UPDATE: Here's another reliable source of good news. Hat-tip: Dave Gobel.

Live to see it!

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This is one of our worst, in action.

The better we understand it, the more resourceful we will be in overcoming it.

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thomas DeMarse of the biomedical engineering department at the University of Florida has developed a "living computational device" from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat embryo.

Then he taught it to fly a jet fighter. The F-22 to be precise.

The 25,000 neurons were suspended in a specialized liquid to keep them alive and then laid across a grid of 60 electrodes in a small glass dish.

Under the microscope they looked at first like grains of sand, but soon the cells begin to connect to form what scientists are calling a "live computation device" (a brain). The electrodes measure and stimulate neural activity in the network, allowing researchers to study how the brain processes, transforms and stores information.

In the most striking experiment, the brain was linked to the jet simulator. Manipulated by the electrodes and a desktop computer, it was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds.

"When we first hooked them up, the plane 'crashed' all the time," Dr DeMarse said. "But over time, the neural network slowly adapts as the brain learns to control the pitch and roll of the aircraft. After a while, it produces a nice straight and level trajectory."

The article doesn't say, but DeMarse must have found a way to reward the brain for flying straight (or punish it for crashing) using hormones like serotonin. Otherwise, why would this brain-in-a-dish prefer level flight to crashing?

The implications are profound. DeMarse' first goal is to study brain function. Until this development, scientists were only able to study a few neurons in a petri dish. Now DeMarse can observe how these neurons work together to compute. Obviously this is important brain research, but it could also be very important computer research. It could also be important to researchers interested in learning how to get a brain to directly communicate with a computer.

Individual neurons are slow by comparison to transistors, but a brain is superior to a contemporary computer in many ways - pattern recognition, redundant fail proofing (the loss of a few neurons doesn't lead to a crash), self-organizing, and after a crash (a stroke) it can rewire itself. This could lead us to develop computers that are more like a brain.

In the meantime it might lead to hybrids - computers with electronic and biological components.

It could also be another route to greater-than-human intelligence. If this brain-in-a-dish is possible, why couldn't this, ultimately, be ramped up to a 20 pound brain? Such a brain would not be limited by a size that is practical to be carried around in a human skull. Nor would it have to be concerned with the "mundane" tasks of managing a body.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 04:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last January it was reported that a group of researchers in the U.K. was busy trying to beat competitors in Japan and the United States in the "printing" of body tissue.

This week Wired reported on progress in the U.S.

Led by University of Missouri-Columbia biological physics professor Gabor Forgacs and aided by a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, researchers at three universities have developed bio-ink and bio-paper that could make so-called organ printing a reality.

So far, they've made tubes similar to human blood vessels and sheets of heart muscle cells, printed in three dimensions on a special printer.

There is some hesitation from the scientists involved to speculate how far this technology could go. But one participate offered this:

"I think this is going to be a biggie," said Glenn D. Prestwich, the University of Utah professor who developed the bio-paper. "A lot of things are going to be a pain in the butt to print, but I think we can do livers and kidneys as well."

Read the whole thing.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cool. Er, rather, downright cold, actually:

Methane-producing microbes have been discovered in two extreme environments on Earth - buried under kilometres of ice in Greenland and living in hot, dry desert soil. The findings lend weight to the idea that similar organisms may have lived on Mars.

Live microbes making methane were found in a glacial ice core sample retrieved from three kilometres under Greenland by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, US. It is the first time such archaea have been found at that depth, says Buford Price, one of the research team...

Scientists had already noticed that the concentrations of methane in the lowest 90 metres of the ice core was 10 times as high as that at other depths. Now the Berkeley scientists have found the likely cause - correspondingly higher levels of microbes that produce methane, known as methanogens.

These robust microbes in Greenland might tell us something about the unaccounted-for concentrations of methane found in the Martian atmosphere. There is no way for methane to persist in the atmosphere of Mars unless it is somehow being renewed. (And volcanoes have already been ruled out as a source.) Could hardy Martian microbes be lacing the atmosphere with methane the same way these microbes are stinking up the deep ice in Greenland?

Maybe.

And who knows? Maybe the two varieties of microbe are cousins.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Okay, actually they're on one of Saturn's moons:

The international Cassini spacecraft has found visual evidence that Saturn's moon Enceladus is geologically active.

Enceladus now joins an exclusive club along with Jupiter's Io and Neptune's Triton, which were previously observed to be geologically active.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Carnival of Tomorrow #14 is up at "Blueprint for Financial Prosperity!"

Carnival of Tomorrow #15 will be hosted back here at The Speculist.

If you would like to contribute to the 15th carnival or host #16, please write:

mrstg87 {@ symbol} yahoo {dot} com

or

bowermaster {@ symbol} gmail {dot} com

UPDATE: Phil reminds me that #16 will be hosted by The Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

If you would like to host a future carnival, let us know early.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 07:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think this idea sounds a lot like this one. Here's my favorite part:

String theory, according to Susskind, presents a compelling explanation of why the cosmological constant is so small, without invoking an intelligent designer. The answer lies in what Susskind calls "the Landscape," which is the set of all possible universes that are compatible with string theory. The Landscape can be thought of as having various locations, corresponding to different values of the cosmological constant and other parameters. In Susskind's estimate, the Landscape contains 10⁵⁰⁰ types of possible universes -- a stupendously large number far bigger than a googol (which is 10¹⁰⁰.)

10⁵⁰⁰ types of universes seems like a good start. But I wonder...how many do we get of each type?

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

It occurs to me that the "mathematical approach to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another" mentioned in the "Utility Fog" post might be a great way to produce carbon nanotubes.

If you could essentially put carbon on a conveyer belt and move it through a system that would dictate how the carbon interacts with other carbon atoms, then why wouldn't you be able to produce carbon nanotubes in the strengths and lengths necessary to do all sorts of interesting things?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...is civil defense. Or so says Engineer Poet. Some good thoughts, there. Check it out.

Hat-tip: Dean Esmay.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Geekpress, Catholic scholars are tossing around some interesting questions:

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Galaxy-gazing scientists surely wonder about what kind of impact finding life or intelligent beings on another planet would have on the world.

But what sort of effect would it have on Catholic beliefs? Would Christian theology be rocked to the core if science someday found a distant orb teeming with little green men, women or other intelligent forms of alien life? Would the church send missionaries to spread the Gospel to aliens? Could aliens even be baptized? Or would they have had their own version of Jesus and have already experienced his universal or galactic plan of salvation?

So does E.T. have a soul?

And if we encounter aliens, what does that say about humanity, our place in the universe, our relationship with God? Will aliens have their own religions? Do human believers have the same duty to share their religious beliefs with aliens as they do with fellow humans?

Those are the kinds of questions that Brother Guy Consolmagno, a Jesuit astronomer and member of staff of the Vatican Observatory, wanted to address when he recently authored a 48-page booklet on the religious implications of discovering extraterrestrial life. Entitled Intelligent Life in the Universe? Catholic Belief and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life, the booklet deals with the questions that Brother Consolmagno often encounters when talking to Catholic groups about his work with the observatory.

A man whose job title includes the words "Vatican" and "astronomer" can only expect to have such questions thrown at him. But should the day ever come that we actually do encounter an extraterrestrial civilization, these questions will take on a significance that far transcends the occasional post-lecture bull session amongst a few catholic astronomy buffs. Suddenly, everyone will be asking them.

There are those who would argue that the first and most important questions we should ask an alien civilization are:

Do you believe in God?

and

What do you believe about God?

Others might argue that our first questions to the extraterrestrials should be about science rather than theology. Or maybe the questions should be even more practical than that: Are you friendly? Do you mean to kill us or enslave us? Did we mention that we have nukes?

But irrespective of the order, it's clear that inquiries into the spiritual lives of our friends from the stars will be of universal interest. What might we expect to learn about them, and from them?

To begin with, the question of whether aliens have souls is a non-starter. If they are intelligent, sentient beings, they get the same presumptive metaphysical accoutrements as we. In other words, if you tend to think that humans have souls, chances are you'll extend that to aliens. If you think that we don't, then you'll almost certainly think that they don't, either. Yes, a few fundamentalists will insist that we have souls and they don't, and a few total flakes will insist that they do and we don't -- but the overall debate about the existence of the soul will be largely unaltered.

If and when we encounter aliens, we will likely find that they have several religions, as well as competing non-religious and anti-religious modes of thought. The science fiction commonplace of mono-cultural alien races -- like the geographically homogenous desert, swamp, and ice planets these beings hail from -- seem improbable. Alien civilizations are likely to enjoy (or endure) the same intra-species diversity of cultural expression as we do, including religion. Some of their religions may look strikingly similar to some of ours, at least at first glance, while others will look completely unlike anything ever believed or practiced on Earth. In any case, it's doubtful that we will find an exact match between any two.

Those who want to find confirmation of their religion via alien religions will find it; those who want to find a refutation of all religion through the differences will find that. Very likely some new interplanetary variety of syncretism will emerge -- Whom we call Zipxonfyr-Abtl, you call Buddha -- that sort of thing.

From reading their history, we will discover that they count certain religious leaders among the most influential members of their species and contributors to their civilization. Religion itself will have had a long and spotty history: nurturing the loftiest of ideals in one place and time and sanctioning atrocities in another. One day a tool of oppression plied by tyrants and scoundrels, the next day a tool of liberation used to smash the oppressors' chains. Here the friend of learning, there it's enemy.

In other words, meeting aliens will teach us exactly nothing about religion or about ourselves; nothing, that is, that we shouldn't already know.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

There's are some "ultimate" technologies that would, if perfected, change the world in ways that we can't imagine. One of these technologies is greater-than-human intelligence. If we, by any means, are able to engineer a greater-than-human level of intelligence, then that intelligence could go on to engineer still greater intelligence and on and on. Kurzweil, sounding much more ominous than usual, said that it would be the last invention unenhanced humans ever need to make.

{Actually, that quote originated with I.J. Good in 1965 - ed.}

Another ultimate tech is the utility fog. This fog would be a nanobot swarm that could serve as any physical object desired. Paint the wall and the wall could be any color you like, or be a television. Make the interior walls out of the stuff and you could change your floor plan every day. A utility fog floor could grow any furniture you need. No need for clothes - the fog could be any kind of clothes you want. And it could keep the body clean and otherwise maintained - except for food or water. No need for any other external or internal technology. It could be an all-purpose communication, computation, work, security, and entertainment device.

And I'm looking for a "My Other Car is a Utility Fog" bumper sticker.

No, you wouldn't have to look like Pig Pen - unless you wanted to. This stuff would be invisible until needed. Anyway, that's the dream - the flip-side of the gray goo nightmare.

Last May I commented that:

Unfortunately, this [utility fog] is not the "next big thing." It's more like the big thing that comes after four or five other big things.

We may have just gotten news of the first preliminary "big thing."

Now Salvatore Torquato, a Princeton University scientist, is proposing turning a central concept of nanotechnology on its head...

Torquato and colleagues have published a paper in the Nov. 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, the leading physics journal, outlining a mathematical approach that would enable them to produce desired configurations of nanoparticles by manipulating the manner in which the particles interact with one another...

"In a sense this would allow you to play God, because the method creates, on the computer, new types of particles whose interactions are tuned precisely so as to yield a desired structure," said Pablo Debenedetti, a professor of chemical engineering at Princeton.

The standard approach in nanotechnology is to come up with new chemical structures through trial and error, by letting constituent parts react with one other as they do in nature and then seeing whether the result is useful...

But Torquato and his colleagues, visiting research collaborator Frank Stillinger and physics graduate student Mikael Rechtsman, have taken an inverse approach to self-assembly...

Instead of employing the traditional trial-and-error method of self-assembly that is used by nanotechnologists and which is found in nature, Torquato and his colleagues start with an exact blueprint of the nanostructure they want to build.

Torquato has demonstrated his theory only with computer models, but the computer-models are very impressive:

If one thinks of the particles as pennies scattered upon a table, the pennies, when laterally compressed, would normally self-assemble into a pattern called a triangular lattice.

But by optimizing the interactions of the "pennies," or particles, Torquato made them self-assemble into an entirely different pattern known as a honeycomb lattice (called that because it very much resembles a honeycomb).

Why is this important? The honeycomb lattice is the two-dimensional analog to the three-dimensional diamond lattice - the creation of which is somewhat of a holy grail in nanotechnology.

New York University physics professor Paul Chaikin is planning to test this theory in the lab.

UPDATE: Ivan Kirigan was inspired to design the bumper sticker:

Get yours at CafePress.

Thanks Ivan.

UPDATE 2: It occurs to me that if you could essentially put carbon on a conveyer belt and move it through a system that would dictate how the carbon interacts with other carbon atoms, then why wouldn't you be able to produce carbon nanotubes in the strengths and lengths necessary to do all sorts of interesting things?

You know, things like space elevators?

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 03:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This is interesting:

Alzheimer’s disease may be a new, third type of diabetes that shares common features of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.

Researchers found that insulin and the cells that process it in the brain drop sharply in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that insulin levels continue to decline as the disease progresses and becomes more severe.

Diabetes is a terrible disease, but it's treatable. And in the case of type 2, sometimes preventable. This discovery could lead to some very positive developments.

Hat-tip: Transterrestrial Musings

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Look, I'm not saying it is; I'm not saying it isn't. Just consider these facts:

It's fairly close to Earth.

It orbits a red star.

It masses 17 times what our planet does. Any being from that planet would have to be many times stronger than a human being.

On the other hand, this planet couldn't possibly be Krypton -- it's still there. The real planet Krypton blew itself into billions of radioactive green, red, gold, and white chunks a few years before a kindly farm couple from Kansas adopted me as their son.

Oh. Maybe I've said too much.

Never mind.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)