Monthly Archives: January 2013

Recycle your carbon nanotubes

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Don’t get the recycling bins yet as carbon nanotube recycling isn’t quite ready to implemented, from the Jan. 23, 2013 news item on Nanowerk,

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are set to become an important material for the future. That’s because they are light, robust, and highly conductive, both electrically and thermally whilst still being chemically stable. They are used in broad variety of applications ranging from bicycle components to hydrogen storage. The trouble is that the nanotube manufacturing process is not as sustainable and cost-effective as it could be.

The Jan. 23, 2013 Youris news release by Hywel Curtis, which originated the news item, describes a carbon nanotube recycling project and some of its challenges,

The RECYTUBE project, funded by the European Union, aims to reuse CNT scraps created during production to turn them into new plastic nanocomposites. “Conductive polymers need very specific and expensive fillers, so the project is studying how to recycle CNT production waste to make these fillers more cheaply and easily than is currently done,” explained Pascual Martinez, technical and research engineer at Faperin S.L., Ibi, Spain, one of the project’s technical leads. “We have already produced some injected plastic pieces of reused conductive polymer to demonstrate this.”

The critical test for the project will be whether such a solution is taken up by industry. Some believe the main driver would be to save costs. “There is tremendous growing interest in using reprocessed plastics, both in form of regrinds and re-granulates; mainly due to cost reasons in the commodity sector,” Klaus Mauthner, head of research and development at C-Polymers, Tresdorf, Austria, tells youris.com. He adds: “with nano-composites it could work in the same way.”

There don’t seem to be any details on RECYTUBE website about this recycling technology other than this on the home page,

The aim of RECYTUBE is to develop a methodology to reuse the CNT-containing scraps in the masterbach production, compounding and injection moulding conductive plastic parts. To do so, fast in situ (during production) characterisation of the CNT scraps, based in physical, thermal, mechanical and electrical properties measurements, need to be developed in order to assess which proportion of CNT containing scrap must be added to the virgin polymer to get the desired final properties. Finally, two new products for the production of both an external and an internal conductive plastic part for the automotive Industry [sic] will be developed, adapting to industrial scale the masterbach production, compounding and injection moulding processes reusing CNT scraps.

It seems we’re a very long way off from recycling carbon nanotubes.

Science and politics: the UK and the US, two different worlds

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The UK is apparently getting ready to introduce evidence-based science into government policies and decisions. According a Jan. 18, 2013 opinion piece by Michael Brooks for New Scientist, the Department for Education will be one of the first to institute this new approach (Note: Links have been removed),

It has been a long time coming, according to Chris Wormald, permanent secretary at the Department for Education. The civil service is not short of clever people, he points out, and there is no lack of desire to use evidence properly. More than 20 years as a serving politician has convinced him that they are as keen as anyone to create effective policies. “I’ve never met a minister who didn’t want to know what worked,” he says. What has changed now is that informed policy-making is at last becoming a practical possibility.

That is largely thanks to the abundance of accessible data and the ease with which new, relevant data can be created. This has supported a desire to move away from hunch-based politics. [emphasis miine]

Last week, for instance, Rebecca Endean, chief scientific advisor and director of analytical services at the Ministry of Justice, announced that the UK government is planning to open up its data for analysis by academics, accelerating the potential for use in policy planning.

At the same meeting, hosted by innovation-promoting charity NESTA, Wormald announced a plan to create teaching schools based on the model of teaching hospitals. In education, he said, the biggest single problem is a culture that often relies on anecdotal experience rather than systematically reported data from practitioners, as happens in medicine. [emphasis mine] “We want to move teacher training and research and practice much more onto the health model,” Wormald said.

Now what could possibly pose a problem for this charming idea of evidence-based policy planning?

In education, the evidence-based revolution has already begun. A charity called the Education Endowment Foundation is spending £1.4 million on a randomised controlled trial of reading programmes in 50 British schools.

There are reservations though. The Ministry of Justice is more circumspect about the role of such trials. Where it has carried out randomised controlled trials, they often failed to change policy, or even irked politicians with conclusions that were obvious. “It is not a panacea,” Endean says.

…

The biggest need is perhaps foresight. Ministers often need instant answers, and sometimes the data are simply not available. Bang goes any hope of evidence-based policy.

…

Crucial to the process will be convincing the public about the value and use of data, so that everyone is on-board. This is not going to be easy. When the government launched its Administrative Data Taskforce, which set out to look at data in all departments and opening it up so that it could be used for evidence-based policy, it attracted minimal media interest.

…

There are economic issues. Most of the predictable areas where data and evidence would be useful span different departments, and funding for research that involves multiple government departments is near-impossible to come by at the moment. “Only counter-terrorism gets cross-departmental funding,” Wiles says.

And those at the frontline of all this may also need convincing. Some teachers have already expressed reservations. There may be problems with parents not wanting their children to take part in education trials. For instance, in a control group they will feel left out of innovation; in the experimental arm they will worry that the old ways were better. What’s more, teachers may be tempted to halt a trial early if they feel it is not helping students. [emphasis mine]

There’s a basic assumption being made that evidence-based medicine has been a huge and howling success. I see no evidence cited either in this article or anywhere else that this has been the case. Medicine and health care research and practice have bifurcated in some fascinating ways. Researchers and clinicians live in different worlds and have very little contact. It is increasingly difficult (almost impossible) for a clinician to run a research project as the research process has become the province of professional grant writers and others who jump innumerable hoops for monies with the consequence that researchers have scant clinical experience.

No human clinical trial is ever large enough (1000 or 10000 or more) to give perfect insight into a drug’s effects once it gets used in the general population (millions and billions) which is why drugs that have managed to get approval are sometimes shown to be more dangerous and/or less effective than originally believed. There is also the problem of positive publication bias. Researchers publish studies that show positive results because journals don’t tend to print (by a wide margin) studies that have negative or inconclusive results. As for the vaunted evidence-based training process, doctors are learning to do less and less and becoming clerks who fill out referral forms and requests for tests that other professionals perform and interpret.

The loathing expressed towards hunches and anecdotes seems ironic since science is based on those two pillars. Is there a single story about a scientific breakthrough that doesn’t come down to a hunch or whatever you want to call that moment which sparked someone’s curiosity and suspicion? And, the reason for conferences is less about learned papers and more about informal conversations and meetings where people trade anecdotes.

Evidence-based science is a tool. It can be very powerful but it has to be used wisely and, in the case of those teachers who might want to withdraw students from a trial they thought was doing harm, that would be a very wise use of the evidence they’ve observed, wouldn’t it?

In the US, they’re also talking about science and politics but taking a very different perspective. Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University based in Washington DC, has written a Jan. 2, 2013 article for Nature where he opines that scientists should not show political bias,

To prevent science from continuing its worrying slide towards politicization, here’s a New Year’s resolution for scientists, especially in the United States: gain the confidence of people and politicians across the political spectrum by demonstrating that science is bipartisan.

That President Barack Obama chose to mention “technology, discovery and innovation” in his passionate victory speech in November shows just how strongly science has come, over the past decade or so, to be a part of the identity of one political party, the Democrats, in the United States. The highest-profile voices in the scientific community have avidly pursued this embrace. For the third presidential election in a row, dozens of Nobel prizewinners in physics, chemistry and medicine signed a letter endorsing the Democratic candidate.

The 2012 letter argued that Obama would ensure progress on the economy, health and the environment by continuing “America’s proud legacy of discovery and invention”, and that his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, would “devastate a long tradition of support for public research and investment in science”. The signatories wrote “as winners of the Nobel Prizes in Science”, thus cleansing their endorsement of the taint of partisanship by invoking their authority as pre-eminent scientists.

I think science groups/associations should follow the same policy a lot of business groups/organizations do, support/donate to all the viable parties and candidates but give more to your favourites. After all, you never know who’s going to be forming the next government so you want to keep in everyone’s good books.

It’s this suggestion which gives me pause,

If scientists want to claim that their recommendations are independent of their political beliefs, they ought to be able to show that those recommendations have the support of scientists with conflicting beliefs. Expert panels advising the government on politically divisive issues could strengthen their authority by demonstrating political diversity.

This rests on the notion that one’s affiliations are easily categorized. Not all Democrats are the same, nor are Republicans. While the parties are broadly Democrat and Republican within these parties there are subdivisions within subdivisions. It would likely cause more divisiveness than is worthwhile given the proposed benefit to attempt bipartisan panels, etc.

Daniel Lende in a Jan. 21, 2013 posting on the Neuroanthropology blog (member of the PLoS [Public Library of Science] blog network) comments at more length on the problems with Sarewitz’s thesis. For example,

… In Sarewitz’s world, politicians will naturally listen better to bipartisan endorsements. Take a recent example, the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan for “Financial Responsibility and Reform.” Politicians just fell over themselves to enact that bipartisan approach to dealing with a major social problem, didn’t they?

An even better example is smoking. If the model is somehow that by inserting better, more independent information into the political process, more rational and scientific decisions will be made, then that’s the wrong kind of scientific flow chart. Tobacco companies had major profits at stake, and major money to spend. They spent it on politicians and scientists alike. It wasn’t on a search for “the truth” about tobacco.

I’m not familiar enough with US politics to understand that reference to the ‘Simpson-Bowles plan’ but I take it that the bipartisan approach was a big failure in that instance. Lende also mounts an interesting discussion about social science and science as per some of Sarewitz’s comments about how the science community does not want to be perceived in the same light as the social science community (from Nature),

Conservatives in the US government have long been hostile to social science, which they believe tilts towards liberal political agendas. Consequently, the social sciences have remained poorly funded and politically vulnerable, and every so often Republicans threaten to eliminate the entire National Science Foundation budget for social science.

As scientists seek to provide policy-relevant knowledge on complex, interdisciplinary problems ranging from fisheries depletion and carbon emissions to obesity and natural hazards, the boundary between the natural and the social sciences has blurred more than many scientists want to acknowledge. With Republicans generally sceptical [sic] of government’s ability and authority to direct social and economic change, the enthusiasm with which leading scientists align themselves with the Democratic party can only reinforce conservative suspicions that for contentious issues such as climate change, natural-resource management and policies around reproduction, all science is social science.

Lende’s response echoes some of my own feelings on the topic still Sarewitz does have a point of sorts. Sarewitz dances between referring to scientists as individuals and in groups. As an individual, I think scientists should follow their own conscience with regard to whom and what they support but a science association or group should focus as much as possible on their pursuit of science irrespective of the politics. In short, you praise or condemn any and all governments according to what’s best for science.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of Canada’s Conservative party but this Conservative-led government has made some good choices, as well as, bad ones and I reserve the right to ‘praise them or bury them’ accordingly.

Saskatchewan’s Blue Goose Biorefineries and cellulose at the nanoscale and microscale

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Thank you to the reader who put me onto this Saskatchewan-based company that claims to produce nanoscale (sometimes called nanocrystalline cellulose [NCC] or nanocellulose crystals [CNC]) and microscale cellulose in an environmentally friendly fashion. From the Blue Goose Biorefineries’ home page,

BLUE GOOSE BIOREFINERIES INC. TM

Blue Goose Biorefineries Inc. introduces the R3TM (Renewable Residual Refining) technology and process to the Canadian marketplace.  R3TM is the world’s most advanced process and technology for the conversion of  carbon-based biomass into high-value, in-demand market commodities

 Economical, Sustainable, Efficient, Benign

 The Patent-Pending technology and process, together with closely held trade secrets, have created an entirely new, efficient and economically viable perspective on the treatment of biomass for the production of high value-added, sustainable and renewable commodities and energy sources.

 Microcrystalline Cellulose, Nanocrystalline Cellulose, Green Platform Chemicals

 Blue Goose Biorefineries Inc. is a Canadian innovation leader resolving environmental issues and generating economic opportunities through innovative, green, and renewable materials manufactured by our unique process and technology.

There doesn’t seem to be any information about the company’s management team, its products, or its technologies on its website. As well, the Blue Goose website does not host any press releases relating to company developments and/or business deals but there is a July 20, 2012 notice on the Advanced Foods and Materials (AFM) Canada website about a joint project,

Advanced Foods and Materials (AFM) Canada and Blue Goose Biorefineries Inc. (BGB) are pleased to announce they have been awarded a $500,000 grant from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Agricultural Innovation Program. The project will focus on the pre-commercialization and development of biorefining methods for flax and hemp straw in order to produce high value cellulose products, lignin, and green platform chemicals in Saskatchewan. BGB’s core technology is a “green chemistry” based, nano-catalytic biorefining process, Renewable Residuals RefiningTM (R3TM).  The R3TM process fractionates and breaks down the major components in lignocellulosic biomass: lignin, hemicellulose and cellulose. This green technology offers many process advantages over existing biorefining methods including cost, yield, environmental impact, and flexibility. Specifically, the technology offers a very strong industry transforming potential for the production of high value microcrystalline cellulose (MCC), nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC), lignin and green platform chemicals from flax and hemp straw.

The process has been proven at the lab bench scale for flax and hemp straw. Through this project, Advanced Foods and Materials Canada will manage institutional research activities and the pilot plant scale-up of the biorefining process. The production of larger quantities of bioproducts for testing, process development and lock-down including design parameters, engineering costs and tuning, will facilitate the development of a demonstration plant for Blue Goose Biorefineries. The impact of this project’s activities will add-value to Canadian hemp, flax and other cereal crops by creating a more efficient and economical source of high-quality MCC, NCC, lignin, and green platform chemicals for food, pharmaceutical, and industrial applications across North America.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s July 18, 2012 news release can be read here.

There is one other piece of information, Dr. Bernard Laarveld of the University of Saskatchewan lists Blue Goose Biorefineries as a current employer on his LinkedIn profile.

http://www.afmcanada.ca/event/BGBAIP

Analysis of German language media coverage of nanotechnology

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Austria’s NanoTrust project published, in October 2012, a dossier tittled: Nanotechnology in the media; On the reporting in representative daily newspapers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland which has been highlighted in a Jan. 21, 2013 Nanowerk Spotlight article (Note: Footnotes have been removed),

The media can have a significant influence on the public image of science and technology, in the specific case nanotechnology. This is true in particular if only a small percentage of the population only comes directly into contact with such fields of research. Mass media reporting serves to increase awareness of selected topics, informs about current debates involving a wide variety of actors who need to be heard and thus also prepares a basis for future social debates. The population is introduced to central aspects of technical applications, which also include the opportunities and risks associated with the new technologies.

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A media analysis has been conducted of selected quality newspapers within the framework of the “NanoPol” project [cooperation between the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT), the Institute for Technology Assessment (ITA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), TA-Swiss in Berne and the Programme for Science Research of the University of Basel], which analyses the nanotechnology policies of Austria, Germany and Switzerland.

Quality newspapers are characterised by their target group, comprising persons who have a specific interest in national events and information and who are of significance as multipliers for opinion formation amongst the national public. At the same time, mass media as an ongoing observer in the public can contribute to determining the significance of the topic for the public discussion. For each country, two print media were investigated, the investigation period extending over ten years (2000-2009):

– Der Standard and Die Presse (A);

– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and die Süddeutsche Zeitung (D);

– Neue Züricher Zeitung and der Tagesanzeiger (CH).

The media analysis covered almost 2000 articles produced between 2000 and 2009,

Roughly 44 % of all articles were accounted for by the two German print media, while Switzerland and Austria had a share of 29 % and 27 % respectively, with in each case one national newspaper having published significantly more articles with nanotechnology topics. At the beginning of the investigation period, the frequency of articles still varied considerably in the different countries, but converged towards the end of the period.

The reports on nanotechnology are overwhelmingly (88 %) to be found in fact-focused report formats such as news reports or background coverage, while a small percentage of the contributions are drawn up in the form of interviews, comments and essays.

There’s a bit of a surprise (to me) concerning popular topics in that medical applications don’t place first in terms of interest,

Topics related to basic research, which for instance include toxicology and risk research, constituted an in part clear majority in all three countries. Applications in the field of information and communication technology, extending from data media to sensors, were the second most frequently referred to topic. Medical applications, from diagnostics to specific therapies, occupied third place in all three countries, although relatively speaking there were somewhat more reports about medical topics in Austria than in the other two countries.  [emphases mine] Reports from the field of business and politics, dealing above all with companies, research subsidies, environment and economic policies, occupied places four and five.

The conclusion of this Spotlight article seems to hint at a little disappointment,

The reporting on nanotechnology in the media in the three German-speaking countries is largely science-centred and attracts a generally low level of attention amongst the broad public thanks to its less emphasised placing. There is hardly any opinion-focused reporting, with classical news reports and reports relating to current research activities or events predominating. In all three countries, the newspapers’ science departments play a dominant role, and scientists also play a central role as actors.

…

An event-focused positive representation predominates. A focus on risks and controversial reporting, a concern raised regularly in expert circles, was not proven in the present study. Risk topics play a role in fewer than 20 % of articles; the benefits and opportunities of nanotechnology, on the other hand, are mentioned in 80 % of all articles.

Benefits are seen above all for science. Scientific actors are likewise mentioned relatively frequently, which indicates the close connections between science and business, and the economic expectations of nanotechnology. One would have to examine the extent to which the absence of controversies can be attributed to the hitherto lack of evidence of possible dangers and risks or to well-functioning strategic scientific PR work. [emphasis mine]

Why mention  “well-functioning strategic scientific PR work” in the conclusion when there has been no mention of public relations (PR) in any other section of this dossier?  As well, if strategic scientific PR work was that effective, then nuclear power might not be quite so controversial.

Overall, this study doesn’t break any new ground but does confirm a growing consensus of opinion, the public regardless of which country (with the possible exception of France) we are discussing tends not to be all that interested in nanotechnology.

For those curious about the French controversies, there’s a mention in my March 10, 2010 posting (scroll down about 1/4 of the way) about an Agence Science-Presse radio interview with Celine Lafontaine, a Quebec-based academic who studies the social impact of nanotechnology and was in France during a very contentious series of public debates on the subject.

For anyone who found the reference to ‘actors’ in this research a little unexpected, the term is being used by researchers who are using ‘actor-network theory’ as an analytical tool. You can find out more about actor-network theory in this Wikipedia essay.

Self-assembling liquid lenses used in optical microscopy to reveal nanoscale objects

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A Jan. 21, 2013 news item on Azonano highlights some research on microscope and self-assembling lenses done at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA),

By using tiny liquid lenses that self-assemble around microscopic objects, a team from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created an optical microscopy method that allows users to directly see objects more than 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Coupled with computer-based computational reconstruction techniques, this portable and cost-effective platform, which has a wide field of view, can detect individual viruses and nanoparticles, making it potentially useful in the diagnosis of diseases in point-of-care settings or areas where medical resources are limited.

The UCLA Jan. 20, 2013 news release, written by Matthew Chin and which originated the news item, explains why another microscopy technique is needed for viewing objects at the nanoscale,

Electron microscopy is one of the current gold standards for viewing nanoscale objects. This technology uses a beam of electrons to outline the shape and structure of nanoscale objects. Other optical imaging–based techniques are used as well, but all of them are relatively bulky, require time for the preparation and analysis of samples, and have a limited field of view — typically smaller than 0.2 square millimeters — which can make viewing particles in a sparse population, such as low concentrations of viruses, challenging.

To overcome these issues, the UCLA team, led by Aydogan Ozcan, an associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering, developed the new optical microscopy platform by using nanoscale lenses that stick to the objects that need to be imaged. This lets users see single viruses and other objects in a relatively inexpensive way and allows for the processing of a high volume of samples.
…

At scales smaller than 100 nanometers, optical microscopy becomes a challenge because of its weak light-signal levels. Using a special liquid composition, nanoscale lenses, which are typically thinner than 200 nanometers, self-assemble around objects on a glass substrate.

A simple light source, such as a light-emitting diode (LED), is then used to illuminate the nano-lens object assembly. By utilizing a silicon-based sensor array, which is also found in cell-phone cameras, lens-free holograms of the nanoparticles are detected. The holograms are then rapidly reconstructed with the help of a personal computer to detect single nanoparticles on a glass substrate.

The researchers have used the new technique to create images of single polystyrene nanoparticles, as well as adenoviruses and H1N1 influenza viral particles.

While the technique does not offer the high resolution of electron microscopy, it has a much wider field of view — more than 20 square millimeters — and can be helpful in finding nanoscale objects in samples that are sparsely populated.

Here a citation for and a link to the research article,

Wide-field optical detection of nanoparticles using on-chip microscopy and self-assembled nanolenses by Onur Mudanyali, Euan McLeod, Wei Luo, Alon Greenbaum, Ahmet F. Coskun, Yves Hennequin, Cédric P. Allier, & Aydogan Ozcan. Nature Photonics (2013) doi:10.1038/nphoton.2012.337 Published online: 20 January 2013

The article is behind a paywall.

Francophone science blogging

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Québec’s Agence Science-Presse (ASP) has published a list of francophone science blog postings that will be featured in an April 2013 anthology that they will publishing. From the Jan. 14, 2013 posting by Antoine Bonvoisin on the ASP blog,

Et voici enfin la liste des billets sélectionnés pour l’anthologie des blogues scientifiques ! Cette édition 2013, qui sera une première avec des textes publiés entre le 1er novembre 2011 et le 31 octobre 2012, a donné lieu à 173 propositions provenant de 98 blogueurs.

Le livre paraîtra en avril [2013], tenez-vous prêt ! Cette première expérience donnera lieu dorénavant à la publication d’un recueil chaque année. Blogueurs, si vous avez manqué le coche, ne ratez pas la prochaine édition et faites-nous parvenir votre contact à cette adresse (courriel et adresse du blogue). Vous pouvez aussi suivre l’actualité de ce projet sur ce blogue ou sur les réseaux sociaux (Facebook et Twitter).

The listings are largely organized by the institution with which the bloggers are associated, e.g. C@fé des sciences, Radio-Canada, Fondation David-Suzuki, l’Université de Liège, as well as,  a listing for independent bloggers all of whom are drawn from ‘le monde de la francophonie’ (francophone world or french-speaking world).

Here are a couple of the postings I found particularly amusing/interesting,

Karel Mayrand – Monsieur Harper : mon pays c’est l’hiver

This is from the David Suzuki Foundation (Québec) and I loved the reference to Gilles Vigneault’s anthemic song, “Mon Pays,” a song that has been strongly associated with nationalistic feelings in Québec. From the Canadian Encyclopedia’s “Mon Pays” entry,

This chanson has assumed a political character. Benoît L’Herbier, for example, describes it as “a Quebec anthem if there is one at all, hummed with self-respect and pride” (La Chanson québécoise, Montreal 1974). In an interview with Pierre Nadeau, Vigneault denied having intended to compose a national anthem (L’Actualité, September 1979).

Given the post is addressed to Stephen Harper (Canada’s Prime Minister) and is written by someone from an organization that has long campaigned over environmental awareness and climate change issues, it seems the song is being returned to its original metaphorical roots while evoking its ‘assumed political character’ (from the Canadian Encyclopedia; Note: Some links have been removed),

“Mon Pays.” Song commissioned from Gilles Vigneault by the National Film Board for Arthur Lamothe’s 1965 film La Neige a fondu sur la Manicouagan. Vigneault wrote both the words and the music and completed the song in 1964. The opening phrase – “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver” (“My country is not a country, it’s winter”) – provides a good illustration of the metaphoric character of the song, in which Vigneault speaks above all of winds, cold, snow, and ice. The weather of northern Quebec can be viewed as a metaphor for its cultural isolation. But “in this land of snowstorms” the author still vows to remain faithful and hospitable like his father before him, who built a home there: “the guestroom will be such that people from the other seasons will come and build next door to it.” He also evokes in the second verse the solitude of wide open spaces and the ideal of brotherhood.

Here’s the 2nd and final post I’m highlighting,

Riadh Ben Nessib – La Galaxie d’As Sufi (Andromède)

Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi was a great Persian astronomer who amongst many other accomplishment made the first recorded observations of the Andromeda Galaxy. The posting, written March 28, 2012) recounts a session at an astronomy conference where a strong case is made for petitioning the International Astronomy Union to affix a second name to the Andromeda Galaxy and have it also known as ‘As Sufi’s Galaxy’. Here’s more about As Sufi from Wikipedia’s Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi essay (Note: Links and footnotes have been removed),

He was one of the famous nine Muslim astronomers. His name implies that he was a Sufi Muslim. He lived at the court of Emir Adud ad-Daula in Isfahan, Persia, and worked on translating and expanding Greek astronomical works, especially the Almagest of Ptolemy. He contributed several corrections to Ptolemy’s star list and did his own brightness and magnitude estimates which frequently deviated from those in Ptolemy’s work.
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He identified the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is visible from Yemen, though not from Isfahan; it was not seen by Europeans until Magellan’s voyage in the 16th century. He also made the earliest recorded observation of the Andromeda Galaxy in 964 AD; describing it as a “small cloud”. These were the first galaxies other than the Milky Way to be observed from Earth.

He observed that the ecliptic plane is inclined with respect to the celestial equator and more accurately calculated the length of the tropical year. He observed and described the stars, their positions, their magnitudes and their colour, setting out his results constellation by constellation. For each constellation, he provided two drawings, one from the outside of a celestial globe, and the other from the inside (as seen from the earth).

The writer, Riadh Ben Nessib, is an independent blogger and I believe he’s associated with the Tunisian Astronomy Society amongst many other organizations including the Association of British Science Writers (as per this Facebook page).

Make your carbon atoms stand taller to improve electronic devices

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Scientists from Ireland ((Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork [UCC]) and Singapore (National University of Singapore [NUS]) have jointly published a paper about how they achieved a ten-fold increase in the switching efficiency of electronic devices by changing one carbon atom. From the Jan. 21, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily,

These devices could provide new ways to combat overheating in mobile phones and laptops, and could also aid in electrical stimulation of tissue repair for wound healing.

The breakthrough creation of molecular devices with highly controllable electrical properties will appear in the February [2013] issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Dr. Damien Thompson at the Tyndall National Institute, UCC and a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore led by Prof. Chris Nijhuis designed and created the devices, which are based on molecules acting as electrical valves, or diode rectifiers.

Dr. Thompson explains, “These molecules are very useful because they allow current to flow through them when switched ON and block current flow when switched OFF. The results of the study show that simply adding one extra carbon is sufficient to improve the device performance by more than a factor of ten. We are following up lots of new ideas based on these results, and we hope ultimately to create a range of new components for electronic devices.” Dr. Thompson’s atom-level computer simulations showed how molecules with an odd number of carbon atoms stand straighter than molecules with an even number of carbon atoms. This allows them to pack together more closely. Tightly-packed assemblies of these molecules were formed on metal electrode surfaces by the Nijhuis group in Singapore and were found to be remarkably free of defects. These high quality devices can suppress leakage currents and so operate efficiently and reliably. The device can be cleanly switched on and off purely on the basis of the charge and shape of the molecules, just like in the biological nanomachines that regulate photosynthesis, cell division and tissue growth.

The Jan. ??, 2013 University College Cork news release, which originated the news item, provides more details,

The combined experiments and simulations show for the first time that minute improvements in molecule orientation and packing trigger changes in van der Waals forces that are sufficiently large to dramatically improve the performance of electronic devices. Dr. Thompson explains: “These van der Waals forces are the weakest of all intermolecular forces and only become significant when summed over large areas. Hence, up until now, the majority of research into ultra-small devices has used stronger “pi-pi” interactions to stick molecules together, and has ignored the much weaker, but ubiquitous, van der Waals interactions. The present study shows how van der Waals effects, which are present in every conceivable molecular scale device, can be tuned to optimise the performance of the device.”

The devices are based on molecules that act as diodes by allowing current to pass through them when operated at forward bias and blocking current when the bias is reversed. Molecular rectifiers were first proposed back in 1974, and advances in scientific computing have allowed molecular‐level design to be used over the past decade to develop new organic materials that provide better electrical responses. However, the relative importance of the interactions between the molecules, the nature of the molecule-metal contact and the influence of environmental effects have been questioned. This new research demonstrates that dramatic improvements in device performance may be achieved by controlling the van der Waals forces that pack the molecules together. Simply changing the number of carbon atoms by one provides significantly more stable and more reproducible devices that exhibit an order of magnitude improvement in ON/OFF ratio. The research findings demonstrate the feasibility of boosting device performances by creating tighter seals between molecules.

Here a citation and a link to the paper,

The role of van der Waals forces in the performance of molecular diodes by Nisachol Nerngchamnong, Li Yuan, Dong-Chen Qi, Jiang Li, Damien Thompson, & Christian A. Nijhuis. Nature Nanotechnology (2013) doi:10.1038/nnano.2012.238 Advance online publication: Jan. 6, 2013.

This paper is behind a paywall.

Are we becoming machines?

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According to the advertisement (being broadcast in January 2013 on US television channels) for HTC’s Droid smartphone, we’ve already become machines,


This advertisement isn’t the only instance, look at this from a Jan. 17, 2013 news release on EurekAlert,

A nano-gear in a nano-motor inside you

To live is to move. You strike to swat that irritable mosquito, which skilfully evades the hand of death. How did that happen? Who moved your hand, and what saved the mosquito? Enter the Molecular Motors, nanoscale protein-machines in the muscles of your hand and wings of the mosquito. You need these motors to swat mosquitoes, blink your eyes, walk, eat, drink… just name it. Millions of motors tug as a team within your muscles, and you swat the mosquito. This is teamwork at its exquisite best.

It’s not unusual to have bodily processes described in terms that one uses for machines (particularly in science-related publications), what’s different here (for me at least) is the intimacy in the ad. The phone is plugged into your chest and the upgrade is to your brain.

This ad is part of a continuum in the popular culture conversation (e.g. Deux Ex game featuring human enhancement and augmentation as  mentioned in my Aug. 30, 2011 posting and in my Aug. 18, 2011 posting) and the prosthetic in the ear seems to be a reference to cochlear implants but now they are for anyone who might care to augment their hearing past the limits of what has been possible for humans. Congratulations, you’ve been upgraded.

If vat-grown burgers are here, what are the social implications?

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The Jan. 17, 2013 news item on Nanowerk about Dr. Neil Stephens and his research into the social implications of vat-grown (aka, in vitro meat) poses some interesting questions,

he [sic] world’s first laboratory-grown hamburger has been produced by Professor Mark Post and his team in Maastricht, representing something radically new in our world. Dr Neil Stephens, Research Associate at Cesagen (Cardiff School of Social Sciences), has been researching the social and ethical issues of this technology and what this innovation in stem cell science might mean for us in 2013.

Will we be eating burgers made in test-tubes in the near future? That is probably unlikely considering Professor Post’s burger costs around £200,000 to produce.

The University of Cardiff Jan. 16, 2013 news release,which originated the news item, goes on to explain why Stephens is conducting this investigation,

However, the benefits this new technology can deliver – according to the scientists – include slaughter-free meat that is healthier and free from animal to human disease. The meat could also be grown during space travel and could have a much smaller environmental impact than today’s whole-animal reared meat. But it is not yet clear if any of these can be delivered in a marketable form.

Since 2008, Dr Stephens has been investigating these ‘social promises’ by interviewing most of the scientists across the world who are involved in this project. He looks to understand how this community of scientists came together and what strategies they use to justify the promises they make.

Professor Mark Post’s work at the University of Maastricht (Holland) was covered extensively last year when it was presented at the 2012 AAAS (American Ass0ciation for the Advancement of Science) meeting in Vancouver. This Feb. 19, 2012 article by Pallab Ghosh for BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) online highlights some of the discussion which took place then,

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.

The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.

…

Professor Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

They are off-white and resemble strips of calamari in appearance. These strips will be mixed with blood and artificially grown fat to produce a hamburger by the autumn [2012].

…Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.

Prof Sean Smukler from the University of British Columbia said keeping pace with demand for meat from Asia and Africa will be particularly hard as demand from these regions will shoot up as living standards rise. He thinks that lab grown meat could be a good solution.

…

But David Steele, who is president of Earthsave Canada, said that the same benefits could be achieved if people ate less meat.

“While I do think that there are definite environmental and animal welfare advantages of this high-tech approach over factory farming, especially, it is pretty clear to me that plant-based alternatives… have substantial environmental and probably animal welfare advantages over synthetic meat,” he said.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

There doesn’t seem to be any more recent news about vat-grown meat from Post’s team at the University of Maastricht; the interest in Stephens’ sociological work on the topic seems to have been stimulated by his inclusion in the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) annual publication, (Britain in magazine) Britain in 2013.

Here’s more about Stephens’ and his sociological inquiry,

Is your utopia the same as my utopia? Michio Kaku talks about nanotechnology and his utopia

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Dr. Michio Kaku, a prominent US theoretical physicist, claims the reason for the Shaker (religious) community’s (and other utopian communities too) disappearance was due largely to a lack of abundance in his Big Think video talk on the Social Europe Journal website, from the transcript,

Throughout human history people have tried to create utopia, the perfect society. In fact, America, the American dream, in some sense was based on utopianism. Why do we have the Shaker movement? Why did we have the Quakers? Why did we have so many different kinds of religious movements that fled Europe looking to create autopia here in the Americas? Well, we know the Shakers have disappeared and many of these colonies have also disappeared only to be found in footnotes in American textbooks, and the question is why?

One reason why is scarcity because back then the industrial revolution was still young and societies had scarcity. Scarcity creates conflict and unless you have a way to resolve conflict, your colony falls apart.

I have two questions here: (1) if scarcity cause conflict and problems, why aren’t all rich people happy and conflict-free?  (2) regarding the Shakers, wasn’t their policy of prohibiting sexual activity of any kind, i.e. lifelong celibacy, a larger problem? Kaku’s thesis is somewhat reductionist as per the Shaker essay on Wikipedia which suggests a number of interlocking issues,

Membership in the Shakers dwindled in the late 19th century for several reasons: people were attracted to cities and away from the farms; Shaker products could not compete with mass-produced products that became available at a much lower cost; and Shakers could not have children, so adoption was a major source of new members. This continued until orphanages were established and the states began to limit adoption by religious groups.

Kaku has a technology solution for the reductionist problem he has posed,

However, now we have nanotechnology, and with nanotechnology, perhaps, who knows, maybe in 100 years, we’ll have something called the replicator. Now the replicator is something you see in Star Trek. It’s called the molecular assembler and it takes ordinary raw materials, breaks them up at the atomic level and joins the joints in different ways to create new substances. If you have a molecular assembler, you can turn, for example, a glass into wood or vice versa. You would have the power of a magician, in fact, the power of a god, the ability to literally transform the atoms of one substance into another and we see it on Star Trek.

It’s also the most subversive device of all because if utopias fail because of scarcity then what happens when you have infinite abundance? [emphasis mine] What happens when you simply ask and it comes to you?

It’s as if Kaku was creating a question for the US television quiz programme, Jeopardy, where contestants have to construct the question for the answer that’s presented to them. e.g., Answer: nanotechnology will make infinite abundance possible Question: Will we then have utopia?

It’s an interesting question, I just wish it had been contextualized more thoughtfully.