2,000-year-old Seed to Bear Fruit in Three Years

2,000-year-old seed set to bear fruit in three years

Having been germinated, astoundingly, by an Israeli team more than three years ago, and kept alive since, the “Judean date” sapling appears likely (but not certain) to yield a now-extinct species of date that was renowned in ancient times as a treatment for heart disease, chest problems, the spitting of blood, weakened memory and other medical conditions, possibly even symptoms of cancer and depression.

The seed was discovered during the 1960s archaeological excavations of Masada by Prof. Yigael Yadin, an eminent Israeli archeologist, political leader and the second IDF chief of General Staff.

The Judean Dead Sea region was famous for its extensive and high-quality date culturing in the first century CE. High summer temperatures and low precipitation at Masada contributed to the seed’s exceptional longevity.

Cloak of Silence

Experts unveil ‘cloak of silence’

“The mathematics behind cloaking has been known for several years,” said Professor John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, an expert in cloaking. “What hasn’t been available for sound is the sort of materials you need to build a cloak out of.”
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The Spanish team who conducted the new work believe the key to a practical device are so-called “sonic crystals”. These artificial composites – also known as “meta-materials” – can be engineered to produce specific acoustical effects.
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The research builds on work by scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, US, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Earlier this year, independent teams from the two institutions demonstrated the mathematics necessary to create an acoustic cloak. Other scientists have shown that objects can be cloaked from electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves.

Retooling Theory and Practice

“Education in the composites industry is haphazard at best,” admits Gregor Welpton, president of Black Feather Boats (Douglas, Alaska). Although a number of training programs for both engineers and technicians have been spawned over the years, they are essentially independent and, therefore, largely unrelated efforts. The product of universities, community colleges, regional training centers, technical institutes, private training companies and composites vendors, these offerings run a wide gamut from undergraduate and advanced degrees and technical certifications to short courses and periodic seminars. A variety of teaching methods are employed by these programs, including classroom instruction and/or video-based training, video-interactive training and, least likely, hands-on lab work.

“Currently, composites education is being driven by the individual institution,” explains Andre Cocquyt, president of GRPGuru (Brunswick, Maine) and one of the architects of a new composites training curriculum being developed in Brunswick. “There is no consistent approach, no consistent level of education, no qualification,” he adds. The unintended consequence is a dramatic variation in the competency levels of program graduates.

Speaking for many industry business owners, Welpton says the time has come for a coordinated industrywide education effort: “The industry needs an education initiative,” he says, “so that the employers know what they’re getting out of the institutions and the employees know what is expected of them when they show up to work.”

Buckminster Fuller: Dymaxion Man

Dymaxion Man

Fuller’s schemes often had the hallucinatory quality associated with science fiction (or mental hospitals). It concerned him not in the least that things had always been done a certain way in the past. In addition to flying cars, he imagined mass-produced bathrooms that could be installed like refrigerators; underwater settlements that would be restocked by submarine; and floating communities that, along with all their inhabitants, would hover among the clouds. Most famously, he dreamed up the geodesic dome. “If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.” Fuller may have spent his life inventing things, but he claimed that he was not particularly interested in inventions. He called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist—”a “comprehensivist,” for short—and believed that his task was to innovate in such a way as to benefit the greatest number of people using the least amount of resources. “My objective was humanity’s comprehensive success in the universe” is how he once put it. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”

Related: Buckminster Fuller $100,000 Challenge – Golden Buckyballs – Everything I Know, the historic 42-hour session with Buckminster Fuller

How Computers Boot Up

Things start rolling when you press the power button on the computer (no! do tell!). Once the motherboard is powered up it initializes its own firmware – the chipset and other tidbits – and tries to get the CPU running. If things fail at this point (e.g., the CPU is busted or missing) then you will likely have a system that looks completely dead except for rotating fans. A few motherboards manage to emit beeps for an absent or faulty CPU, but the zombie-with-fans state is the most common scenario based on my experience. Sometimes USB or other devices can cause this to happen: unplugging all non-essential devices is a possible cure for a system that was working and suddenly appears dead like this. You can then single out the culprit device by elimination.

If all is well the CPU starts running. In a multi-processor or multi-core system one CPU is dynamically chosen to be the bootstrap processor (BSP) that runs all of the BIOS and kernel initialization code. The remaining processors, called application processors (AP) at this point, remain halted until later on when they are explicitly activated by the kernel. Intel CPUs have been evolving over the years but they’re fully backwards compatible, so modern CPUs can behave like the original 1978 Intel 8086, which is exactly what they do after power up. In this primitive power up state the processor is in real mode with memory paging disabled. This is like ancient MS-DOS where only 1 MB of memory can be addressed and any code can write to any place in memory – there’s no notion of protection or privilege.

Video Cat Cam

I first wrote about the Cool Cat Cam about a year ago. Next, I interviewed the cat cam engineer. And
a few months ago I posted some photos by Fritz the Cat. Now enjoy some video catcat webcasts: Fritz in Aktion mit Catcam mit Musik – Catcam Smaka takes photos/Video! – Cat wears spy camera, makes film – Mr. Lee CatCam im MDR Aussenseiter-Spitzenreiter And then order your cat cam.

Shaw Laureates 2008

Image of the Shaw Prize Medal

The Shaw Prize awards $1 million in each of 3 areas: Astronomy; Life Science and Medicine; and Mathematical Sciences. The award was established in 2002 by Run Run Shaw who was born in China and made his money in the movie industry. The prize is administered in Hong Kong and awards those “who have achieved significant breakthrough in academic and scientific research or application and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind.” The 2008 Shaw Laureates have been selected.

Astronomy
Professor Reinhard Genzel, Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, in recognition of his outstanding contribution in demonstrating that the Milky Way contains a supermassive black hole at its centre.

In 1969, Donald Lynden-Bell and Martin Rees suggested that the Milky Way might contain a supermassive black hole. But evidence for such an object was lacking at the time because the centre of the Milky Way is obscured by interstellar dust, and was detected only as a relatively faint radio source. Reinhard Genzel obtained compelling evidence for this conjecture by developing state-of-the-art astronomical instruments and carrying out a persistent programme of observing our Galactic Centre for many years, which ultimately led to the discovery of a black hole with a mass a few million times that of the Sun, in the centre of the Milky Way.

Supermassive black holes are now recognized to account for the luminous sources seen at the nuclei of galaxies and to play a fundamental role in the formation of galaxies.

Mathematical Sciences
Vladimir Arnold, together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Jurgen Moser, made fundamental contributions to the study of stability in dynamical systems, exemplified by the motion of the planets round the sun. This work laid the foundation for all subsequent developments right up to the present time.

Arnold also produced extremely fruitful ideas, relating classical mechanics to questions of topology. This includes the famous Arnold Conjecture which was only recently solved.

In classical hydrodynamics the basic equations of an ideal fluid were derived by Euler in 1757 and major steps towards understanding them were taken by Helmholtz in 1858, and Kelvin in 1869. The next significant breakthrough was made by Arnold a century later and this has provided the basis for more recent work.

Ludwig Faddeev has made many important contributions to quantum physics. Together with Boris Popov he showed the right way to quantize the famous non-Abelian theory which underlies all contemporary work on sub-atomic physics. This led in particular to the work of ”²t Hooft and Veltman which was recognized by the Nobel Prize for Physics of 1999.
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Plastic Balls for the Resevoir

photo of Los Angeles resevoir

This photo looks like a April fools joke but I think it is real. Los Angeles Drops 400,000 Balls in Reservoir to Fight Suspected Carcinogen

So why deploy these balls — which are typically used by airports to prevent bird congregation on runways — in particular? Some of the other alternatives, such as a large tarp or metal cover, were considered too costly or impractical. The balls, on the other hand, are (relatively) cheap — costing 40 cents each — and are safe for drinking water; black is also the only color able to deflect UV rays.

The DWP has ordered 6.5 million of these balls, 3 million of which it plans on using to blanket the Ivanhoe and Elysian reservoirs. So, yeah, this probably isn’t the best solution for the city’s water woes but, given the circumstances, maybe the only “realistic” option in the short-term.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power drops 400,000 balls onto Ivanhoe Reservoir:

The water needs to be shaded because when sunlight mixes with the bromide and chlorine in Ivanhoe’s water, the carcinogen bromate forms, said Pankaj Parekh, DWP’s director for water quality compliance. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, he said, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix.

Photo by (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Call me a bit skeptical. Adding a huge number of plastic balls to a water supply in order to try and prevent a chemical reaction caused by added chemicals and sunlight seems a bit crazy to me. But who know maybe it is a good idea.

Bacteria Evolutionary Shift Seen in the Lab

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.
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sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use. Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species.
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The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

Big Drug Research and Development on Campus

Big Drug R&D on Campus

Merck and Harvard just signed an agreement to develop treatments for the bone disease osteoporosis. On Apr. 25 rival Pfizer (PFE) invested $14 million in an alliance with four universities to study diabetes and obesity.

Drugmakers are counting on these deals to solve a persistent problem: underperforming product pipelines. Merck, Pfizer, and others have been losing sales of one blockbuster drug after another as patents expire and competitors charge in with generics. Big drug companies have fought back by spending more on research, yet the number of new medicines approved each year is falling. In the last week of April alone, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration rejected two of Merck’s experimental drugs, prompting the company to lay off 1,200 salespeople.
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Past deals between industry and academia have been hampered by patent disputes and tussles over publication rights, as companies tried to thwart academics who want to share their discoveries with colleagues around the world. So now the companies have devised policies allowing their Ivory Tower partners to patent and publish their discoveries, even as they draw the professors more deeply into corporate affairs.

Funding university activities this way can lead to conflicts and problems but realistically huge amounts of funding are entangled with possible conflicts of interest. The biggest concern I is that universities will bow to the almighty dollar instead of their missions. And inadequate oversight can damage their credibility (not one failure, most likely, but if a pattern emerges). For example: Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay (“The Harvard group’s consulting arrangements with drug makers were already controversial because of the researchers’ advocacy of unapproved uses of psychiatric medicines in children.”). Then find out the companies were paying them well, the professors failed to disclose that and the advocacy is rightfully questioned.