1/26/2010 PERMALINK
Welcome to Breakthrough Alert... ...your weekly briefing on the ultimate in personal technology, hu-mods tech, human genetic & cyborg modifications to regenerate and enhance your mind and body.

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Here are this week's breakthroughs:

Researchers find that giving someone a small dose of chlorophyll (Chla) or chlorophyllin (CHL), found in green leafy vegetables such as spinach, broccoli and kale, appears to reverse the effects of aflatoxin poisoning. Aflatoxin is a potent, naturally occurring carcinogenic mycotoxi. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Several new developments toward moving microelectronics into nexus phase of permanent implantable human/machine interfaces include:

Graduate student Cary Pint has come up with a way to transfer patterns of strongly aligned, single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) from a substrate to another surface - any surface - in a matter of minutes. The process uses the same principal that lets a gecko walk up a wall, defying gravity with electrical attraction, the van der Waals force, between millions of microscopic hairs on its feet and the surface. The same substrate, with its catalyst particles still intact, can repeatedly be used to grow more nanotubes, almost like inking a rubber stamp. Rice University.

And researchers have produced 100 mm diameter graphene wafers, a key milestone in the development of graphene for next generation high-power, high-frequency electronic devices. Electro-Optics Center (EOC) Materials Division at Penn State.

In the cyborg realm, prosthetics maker iWalk will soon be offering the world's first actively powered human foot and ankle replacement part, called Powerfoot One. Their ultimate goal is to offer replace parts that are MORE capable than the originals.

NASA's Puffin concept for a low noise, electric Vertical Take Off & Landing (VTOL) Personal Air Vehicle seems the ultimate motion pod. More like putting on a flying suit than climbing into a vehicle. Were it not for our bad legal system memes that serve to drive personal aviation companies out of business, we could soon have these available.

In other breakthroughs this week:

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have used a natural communication system used by bacteria called quorum sensing to engineer bacteria that can flash in sync.

A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, in Germany, has managed to obtain 3D images of the vesicles and filaments involved in communication between neurons. The method is based on a novel technique in electron microscopy, which cools cells so quickly that their biological structures can be frozen while fully active.

Anthony Atala lecture at TEDMED on the state-of-the-art in engineering organs (now up on YouTube) is well worth watching. Podcast listeners, remember there are links to everything in the text version.

Scientists have determined the critical variable that has limited human running speed to the current 28 mph record held by Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. Offering an enticing insight into how humans might be modded to push up running speed to as high as 45 miles per hour, the theoretical maximum for a human-shaped creature. Southern Methodist University.

The Video Scout is a camera for examining the inside of your body. It features Quad LED illumination, superb image quality and easy product integration, all at a price that enables development of disposable medical imaging bots. Oh, and it is only about the size of an ant, making it also potentially useful for those bug-sized spy bots that the Air Force is working on. Researchers, don't work on WOMO, Weapons of Mass Oppression.

And in our effort to look for better civilization 2.0 memes, consider this story.

With the program shutting down, NASA has been trying to sell their clunky old space shuttle fleet to museums, but no museum has been willing to pay their $40 million price. So NASA is putting their shuttles fleet on sale. Sad isn't it.

I once found myself with a group of NASA engineers at a party and was bold enough to ask them how the shuttle became such a kludge. Their story is a sobering lesson in the bad memes found in government funded research.

The original NASA design for the shuttle, they informed me, was rather elegant. Calling for a smaller crew vehicle that took off at a high altitude from a 747-sized launch plane. Both shuttle and launch plane were completely reusable and this cut the cost of each launch drastically from rockets.

Congress, however, found the initial development cost for such a revolutionary system too much to swallow, so the launch plane got replaced by a strap-on rocket booster rocket.

Then the politicos decided that the shuttle should be able to carry military satellites into orbit, so part of program could be charged to the Pentagon's space budget.

NASA engineers were appalled to learn that the military sates were far too big for the existing shuttle design. Requiring that two larger and much more dangerous solid-fuel rocket boosters be strapped on to get the new pregnant shuttle into orbit.

Engineers had hoped to use only liquid fuel motors, which can be shut off or throttled back by the shuttle pilot if a problem occurred. In contrast, once the solid fuel boosters were lit. They could not be shut off no matter what happened until they burned out.

This Congressional change eliminated the ability of the astronauts to always make a safe landing in an emergency. Once again, astronauts were 'spam in a can' as Chuck Yeager described the early rocket launches that left pilots inside the capsules helpless if anything went wrong.

With two airplane-like vehicles, the original design was both far safer than a rocket and much less expensive per pound launched than disposable rockets. But after Congress got through 'helping' with the design, each launch was far more expensive than with a rocket and turned the shuttle system had been made into the deathtrap that would eventually kill a lot of brave Americans.

While we are on the subject of space, check out the link in the text to a clip of three small robots in space testing a system that will let many small satellites coordinate their activities. Developed by the MIT Spheres project, the system has me imagining a cheap, open source global Internet using tiny low-cost satellites put into orbit with a hydrogen space gun.

Rich people everywhere, want to be the most loved person on the planet? The one who gave humanity true freedom to communicate, impervious to all corporate filters and government censors. A half billion dollars could make such a system happen.

And here is a little more bad news on how research and politics don't mix so well.

Following the net leak of numerous conspiratorial emails from scientists
involved in trying to prove a human-cause for global warming. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has now admitted another claim made by their group was a false piece of propaganda. This time it is their claim that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035.

Here's a meme to remember:

Whenever a particular scientific finding might serve to justify a power grab by politicos, governments will pour money into the labs of scientists willing to work on this issue. And junk science is often the result as scientist seek to get the results politicos desire to keep the millions flowing into their labs.

The tragedy here is that researchers do need to develop ways to control climate.

Over the last billion years researchers have found solid evidence that the existence of New York City was probably only possible about 5% of the time. Most of the time, due to completely natural climate fluctuations, Manhattan Island was either under many meters of water or under many meters of glacial ice.

So now bad political memes have pushed scientists into proving human-causation, when human-causation simply doesn't matter. Climate mods will be necessary even if human-causation of global warming is completely bogus. Either we learn how to control the Earth's climate or natural fluctuation will eventually destroy most of the world's largest cities.

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