Archive for the ‘General Technology’ Category

Science Daily has an article talking about how researchers at Sydney’s Centenary Institute in Australia have managed to view (in real time) and film the process of a parasite infecting an immune cell. Click here to read the article, and see some photos of the process.

—

• Sciencedaily.com: Inner Workings Of The Immune System Filmed

Today, while at work, I was filming a site using a new high definition camcorder with face recognition technology. The camera is impressive, and usually good at picking up faces: front profiles, side profiles, on weird angles — it usually recognizes a face. So what interested me was when it started indicating that there was a face in a piece of fiberglass insulation, which was being removed from a wall. The indicator flashed two or three times, but only very briefly. While I doubt that the camera saw the face of Jesus, it made me start to wonder how in our pursuit to design machines that mimic the human brain, what type of other human phenomena we would see begin to appear in our technology.

This article was linked to on Digg recently, and there has been some misunderstanding of its content. It concerns a discovery of a new catalyst that could make it possible to use sunlight to directly split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This might turn out to be quite important in the future (if we start using hydrogen as fuel, and if this turns out to be more efficient than other ways of producing hydrogen, etc.), but you can’t mention “water” and “energy” in the same sentence without certain people assuming that the useable energy is in the water itself. I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: water is already in its lowest chemical energy state. You cannot extract energy from water using chemical* means. That means no water-powered car engines, no water-powered batteries, etc.

Of course this discovery is interesting enough in itself. Storing solar energy for later use has always been a bottleneck in this particular form of alternative energy, so if you could store it as chemical energy in hydrogen, it could potentially surpass the standard lead-acid or lithium-polymer battery solution. However, this remains to be seen. For the time being, this technology is still in experimental stages.

*Other forms of energy are routinely extracted from water in order to generate electrical power, for example kinetic/potential energy in a hydroelectic station, or thermal energy at a geothermal plant. The hydrogen in water could also be used as fusion fuel**, thus releasing nuclear energy.

**Note that a fusion reaction would far surpass (by several orders of magnitude) the energy required to split the hydrogen and oxygen apart, thus avoiding the problem that makes it impossible to get a surplus of chemical energy from water.

I recently read this article on organic foods over at quackwatch.org. Following the article, the author had posted a reader protest complaining how it was unfair to lump organic farmers/foodies in with other “quacks”. The reader asks:

Honestly, is it so nutty to think we would be better off eating food that ISN’T full of chemicals and additives, preservatives and artificial colors?

Thinking about this question, I realized that the answer is “yes”. Nutty is probably not the word I would use to describe it, but it is a bit strange to think that we would be better off eating “food that isn’t full of chemicals, additives, preservatives, and artificial colors.” More accurately, it is a tad nutty to believe that so-called “natural” or “organic” products do not contain chemicals, additives, preservatives and artificial colors. The truth is that all foods — not just “artificial” foods — contain chemical preservatives and colors! The reader has simply assumed that because the chemicals found in organic foods are naturally occurring, they must also be safe.

This variation on the naturalistic fallacy is the foundation of naturopathy and a lot of modern new-age quackery. We have already explained in previous posts how natural is not always safe. Nature produces just as many harmful substances as it does nutritious substances… if not more. Furthermore, all “synthetic” compounds created by humans are merely variations on the chemicals we have already found in nature. The fact is that any distinction between the natural and artificial (insofar as it applies to the realm of biology and chemistry) is tenuous at best. In reality, human synthesis of chemicals usually involves nothing more than facilitating, or expediting, natural synthesis. Even when we create elements not found in nature, we produce them using other natural elements. Anyways, it is not as if you would find Ununpentium on the ingredients list of your favorite cereal. Conversely, finding all natural Uranium-238 on the ingredients list might be cause for concern.

Read the rest of this entry »

A recent entry in this blog discussed a poll in which Americans were asked whether or not they believed nanotechnology is immoral. According to the poll, it turns out that a minority of Americans believe that research in the field of nanotechnology is moral. Regardless of what this says about the American political landscape, I feel this raises the more important issue of morality in science. Mainly, what role does morality play in science, and to what extent can we call a technology ‘immoral’?
Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent poll performed by the University of Wisconsin, the majority of Americans believe that nanotechnology, or, the development and use of microscopic machines to service the body (and for many other practical purposes) is fundamentally immoral:

That’s according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin who are studying people’s attitudes towards nanotechnology, an emerging scientific field that involves manipulating molecules and atoms. They found that just 29.5% of the 1,000-plus Americans surveyed said they thought nanotechnology research was morally acceptable.

While there’s no way to be certain why so many people are opposed to nanotech, I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Worthen’s conclusion that many, if not all of those opposed are so only because they don’t actually know what nanotechnology is, and so they tie it with related fields such as stem cell research and genetic modification.

If that is the case, then it’s a somewhat disturbing confirmation of what most of us already know; That the uninformed public are predisposed to oppose science.