I recently got into a discussion with some people on Facebook. A friend had posted a link about the impact of humans on the environment and some of his friends mentioned being supporters of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I couldn't keep quiet even though I generally know better than to argue with extremists on the internet. To my mind, anyone who advocates human extinction is depressed and suicidal on a species-wide scale and needs some mental health care. Obviously, I do realise humans haven't been taking very good care of their environment, but to extinct us just isn't normal and natural behaviour. The VHEM has a lot of arguments for their case on their website, and a lot of them are fallacious or at best one-sided half-truths. My two main arguments in favour of the presence of the human race on this planet are featured as well.
Showing posts with label science and technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science and technology. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 May 2011
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Regeneration and rejuvenation: science fiction... right?
Having just watched Susan Lim and Anthony Atala talk on TEDMED, I'm amazed at what modern science can already do. They can take adult stem cells and turn them back into fully versatile stem cells - similar to embryonic stem cells but without the ethical dilemmas - and use them to regrow broken organs in the body. Another option is to take working cells from the bit of body you need to repair and grow more of them in a Petri dish. Then you take the cells, put them on a 'scaffold' and grow a whole new organ. There's actually someone out there who has a working bladder grown in a lab from her own bladder cells more than a decade ago.
I wonder if this would work for pituitary glands, and other glands in the body? The current research seems to focus on kidneys and livers because that's what the majority of people on the waiting lists for donor organs are waiting for. Are pituitaries more complex than kidneys and livers, or similar?
I imagined a cyborg solution to the problem of broken pituitaries, using nanotechnology. It seems the cell biology approach is the more likely candidate for success.
I wonder if this would work for pituitary glands, and other glands in the body? The current research seems to focus on kidneys and livers because that's what the majority of people on the waiting lists for donor organs are waiting for. Are pituitaries more complex than kidneys and livers, or similar?
I imagined a cyborg solution to the problem of broken pituitaries, using nanotechnology. It seems the cell biology approach is the more likely candidate for success.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Robots are your friend
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Cheaper greener hydrogen car - I want one!
A British company just invented a way to make hydrogen based fuel for cars at a projected 19p/l. Existing cars wouldn't need to be modified in any way, and the fuel could be pumped into them in just the same way as petrol or diesel is now. Hydrogen, I'm told, can be made out of water, and when burned in the car's engine, it emits water vapour again. So as long as we find some (renewable) energy efficient way of splitting water into hydrogen, we can use this cycle as an endlessly renewable fuel-source for all our engines and other machines that currently burn oil.
I've just got a few questions. I don't much believe in human carbon emissions having an appreciable effect on worldwide climate, but if carbon is causing any greenhouse effect, won't clouds of water vapour be even worse? Water vapour is certainly preferable to smoke in busy traffic. But wouldn't it still turn into a big - admittedly clean but still dark and grey - cloud of fog over heavily populated areas? Would all that damp cause problems to the surrounding buildings and infrastructure? I'm thinking for example of conservation isssues in historic buildings made of easily eroding stones.
Other than those practical problems, I am very happy with this news. I've always felt the current 'solutions' to the problem of people burning fossil fuels to drive cars around are ineffective and even counterproductive.
Electrical cars are available, but impractical. They are small and can't drive long distances. So they're fairly useless for most real families. You can't use one to get two children and your luggage to the beach for a weekend break. Charging them up takes too much time as well. Not to mention that it simply shifts the fuel-consumption problem as you charge it with electricity made in primarily coal-fired plants.
A lot of the same problems occur with hybrid cars. There's not a single hybrid people carrier, and on a long haul, you'd need a lot of fuel anyway.
And there's another problem with trying to change the way people drive by changing the way their cars work. It's slow and has the most succes with the wrong people. Electrical and hybrid cars are incredibly expensive. Most families could not possibly afford to upgrade to one, especially not while the car they own right now is so incredibly expensive to run. Raising fuel prices through taxes only reinforces this cycle (it really isn't going to stop people using their cars, obviously!). As long as I'm driving my 'old' car, I spend so much money on it, I'll never save up enough for a new one. Only a few people can afford to buy electrical or hybrid cars, therefore it will remain a luxury article. It may well be that once you have such a car, it 'pays for itself' in saved fuel, but the majority can't afford the initial outlay.
Usually, going green means paying extra, and often it means sacrificing something (comfort, convenience...). That's why it's hard to really do it succesfully. I want to look after my planet, but I also have practical needs to use my car. To really make a change, you've got to produce something that people can switch to easily, and that can be mass-marketed and mass-distributed. If I can simply drive up to the pump in my old car and choose between Diesel at £1.50/l or Hydrogen at £0.19/l, I know what I'll pick!
I'll give the electric and hybrid cars a miss. I'm not forking out for a totally new type of car until I can have a flying one!
I've just got a few questions. I don't much believe in human carbon emissions having an appreciable effect on worldwide climate, but if carbon is causing any greenhouse effect, won't clouds of water vapour be even worse? Water vapour is certainly preferable to smoke in busy traffic. But wouldn't it still turn into a big - admittedly clean but still dark and grey - cloud of fog over heavily populated areas? Would all that damp cause problems to the surrounding buildings and infrastructure? I'm thinking for example of conservation isssues in historic buildings made of easily eroding stones.
Electrical cars are available, but impractical. They are small and can't drive long distances. So they're fairly useless for most real families. You can't use one to get two children and your luggage to the beach for a weekend break. Charging them up takes too much time as well. Not to mention that it simply shifts the fuel-consumption problem as you charge it with electricity made in primarily coal-fired plants.
A lot of the same problems occur with hybrid cars. There's not a single hybrid people carrier, and on a long haul, you'd need a lot of fuel anyway.
And there's another problem with trying to change the way people drive by changing the way their cars work. It's slow and has the most succes with the wrong people. Electrical and hybrid cars are incredibly expensive. Most families could not possibly afford to upgrade to one, especially not while the car they own right now is so incredibly expensive to run. Raising fuel prices through taxes only reinforces this cycle (it really isn't going to stop people using their cars, obviously!). As long as I'm driving my 'old' car, I spend so much money on it, I'll never save up enough for a new one. Only a few people can afford to buy electrical or hybrid cars, therefore it will remain a luxury article. It may well be that once you have such a car, it 'pays for itself' in saved fuel, but the majority can't afford the initial outlay.
Usually, going green means paying extra, and often it means sacrificing something (comfort, convenience...). That's why it's hard to really do it succesfully. I want to look after my planet, but I also have practical needs to use my car. To really make a change, you've got to produce something that people can switch to easily, and that can be mass-marketed and mass-distributed. If I can simply drive up to the pump in my old car and choose between Diesel at £1.50/l or Hydrogen at £0.19/l, I know what I'll pick!This is an innovation that makes ecological, economical and social sense! I'm all for it.
Wednesday, 1 December 2010
Star Trek would have it sorted by now
It's pretty official now... Kirk's developed a condition with a name! Addison's disease.
Besides obviously already having a tumour and having lost all the hormones his pituitary makes, he's also lost cortisol, which is produced by the adrenal gland. Well, at least it has a name, some notoriety, and they make you carry a blue card for emergencies. Kind of cool.
Even cooler would be if the 21st century ever delivered what I've come to expect from the future as presented in the past. Star Trek is just one example. How light they make of those perfectly treatable diseases that were still killing people left and right back in the 20th century. No such luck. No quick diagnosis by tricorder, no immediate treatment with a one-size-fits all hypospray and a short spell in sickbay. Your choice of doctor: grumpy drinker, career mum, genetically engineered genius, or hologram.
Science fiction isn't always far from the truth though. Why recently, for the remake of Tron, they scanned the actors into the computer exactly like they imagined in the original. Back then, they made it up. And within their lifetime, it came true!
Anyway, I've invented the world's first artificial pituitary.
On the one hand, the pituitary gland is a kind of thermostat. It measures the values of certain elements in the blood and reacts accordingly to adjust those levels. It also reacts to certain other bodily states in order to, for example, stimulate more cortisol production in times of stress. As I understand it, fairly simple computers can perform similar tasks, like an electronic blood pressure meter or a fingertip pulse oximeter. Given recent experimental developments like IBM's chip on a molecule (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/ibm_nano_chip/), it should be possible to create a measuring device and processor small enough to be portable or even, ideally, implantable.
Of course, implanting foreign objects in the body can cause rejection, so I would look for a solution by building the processor out of biological materials. There's already been successful experiments of this as well (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/358822.stm). You could use cells taken from the patient's own body. Perhaps even cells from their own pituitary gland, which, helpfully, actually contains adult stem cells so they would be ideally suited to engineer into a new form.
The other role the pituitary fulfils is that, after having monitored the body's needs, it also produces the necessary hormones or stimulating substances for other glands to produce other hormones. Now, making new cells out of scratch can be a tricky proposition. At the moment, replacement hormones are synthesized in big laboratories and then injected or taken as tablets etc. An intermediate solution could be to do much as the continuous glucose monitoring system for diabetics does. A small device is put just under the skin to measure glucose levels and it then radios to another small device to inject synthetic insulin as required. The artificial insulin comes out of vials and needs to be kept topped up.
However, I'm being ambitious here. I'm designing a completely artificial pituitary, to effectively replace a broken one. It needs to be small, implantable, and virtually maintenance free. I'm willing to put up with it needing replacement every 10 years or so (like an artificial heart valve) and I can allow it to be bigger than the actual pituitary gland, as we'd probably not want to implant it in the brain anyway. I was thinking upper arm, and roughly the size of a contraceptive implant.
The replacement pituitary would, similarly to the original one, have to use building blocks that are present in the body to construct the hormones it needs. As we can synthesize hormones in the lab, I assume we have their 'recipe'. Then, it is merely a question of building a finger-sized lab/hormone factory. This would take some serious nanotechnology, but I'm sure both the molecule microchip and biological processors can provide a solution here.
Come on people! This is the 21st century. Let's stop injecting ourselves with needles and taking tablets. None of those methods even come close to mimicking the intricate machinery of the human body. I want my flying car, my robot housemaid, and some miracle medical breakthroughs.
Besides obviously already having a tumour and having lost all the hormones his pituitary makes, he's also lost cortisol, which is produced by the adrenal gland. Well, at least it has a name, some notoriety, and they make you carry a blue card for emergencies. Kind of cool.
Even cooler would be if the 21st century ever delivered what I've come to expect from the future as presented in the past. Star Trek is just one example. How light they make of those perfectly treatable diseases that were still killing people left and right back in the 20th century. No such luck. No quick diagnosis by tricorder, no immediate treatment with a one-size-fits all hypospray and a short spell in sickbay. Your choice of doctor: grumpy drinker, career mum, genetically engineered genius, or hologram.
Science fiction isn't always far from the truth though. Why recently, for the remake of Tron, they scanned the actors into the computer exactly like they imagined in the original. Back then, they made it up. And within their lifetime, it came true!
Anyway, I've invented the world's first artificial pituitary.
On the one hand, the pituitary gland is a kind of thermostat. It measures the values of certain elements in the blood and reacts accordingly to adjust those levels. It also reacts to certain other bodily states in order to, for example, stimulate more cortisol production in times of stress. As I understand it, fairly simple computers can perform similar tasks, like an electronic blood pressure meter or a fingertip pulse oximeter. Given recent experimental developments like IBM's chip on a molecule (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/24/ibm_nano_chip/), it should be possible to create a measuring device and processor small enough to be portable or even, ideally, implantable.
Of course, implanting foreign objects in the body can cause rejection, so I would look for a solution by building the processor out of biological materials. There's already been successful experiments of this as well (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/358822.stm). You could use cells taken from the patient's own body. Perhaps even cells from their own pituitary gland, which, helpfully, actually contains adult stem cells so they would be ideally suited to engineer into a new form.
However, I'm being ambitious here. I'm designing a completely artificial pituitary, to effectively replace a broken one. It needs to be small, implantable, and virtually maintenance free. I'm willing to put up with it needing replacement every 10 years or so (like an artificial heart valve) and I can allow it to be bigger than the actual pituitary gland, as we'd probably not want to implant it in the brain anyway. I was thinking upper arm, and roughly the size of a contraceptive implant.
The replacement pituitary would, similarly to the original one, have to use building blocks that are present in the body to construct the hormones it needs. As we can synthesize hormones in the lab, I assume we have their 'recipe'. Then, it is merely a question of building a finger-sized lab/hormone factory. This would take some serious nanotechnology, but I'm sure both the molecule microchip and biological processors can provide a solution here.
Come on people! This is the 21st century. Let's stop injecting ourselves with needles and taking tablets. None of those methods even come close to mimicking the intricate machinery of the human body. I want my flying car, my robot housemaid, and some miracle medical breakthroughs.
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