* 22 entries including: America's Constitution (series), synthetic biology (series), cruise missile proliferation, super black hole, rapid planetary emergence, & new ARPAs.
* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (7): Life on Earth uses maybe about 5 million proteins, and researchers don't know how most of them work. However, it is clear that what organisms do depends on their proteins. For example, proteins create materials such as wood and leaf, flesh and bone.
Not far away from Zymergen in Emeryville, a startup named Bolt Threads supplies the clothing trade, and its own clothing subsidiary, with threads made of proteins from spider silk, and leather from fungal mycelia. These innovative materials may offer improved properties, may cost less, and won't require the skinning of cattle.
Of course, vegan meats are a big thing these days. Impossible Foods, based across San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, uses engineered microbes for bulk supplies of the leghemoglobin protein, more traditionally found in the roots of some plants, that makes its completely plant-based "Impossible Burgers" bloody without the blood. There is, of course, the issue of getting people to eat foods derived from genetically-modified organisms, even if the risk level is low. Some of those venturing into the plant-based meat business worry it is over-hyped, and faces a shakeout.
Given there are millions of known proteins and we still don't know much about most of them, it may be hard to understand why there is interest in expanding the "protein space". However, even the millions of known proteins are nothing compared to the possibilities. Given 20 amino acids, even a protein chain with only 50 amino acids in it has, in principle, as many as 20^50 == 1.125E65 possibilities. Assuming that the vast majority of those possibilities are useless, that would easily leave trillions of possibilities.
David Baker of the University of Washington in Seattle is interested in probing that protein space. In the 2000s, Baker was a world leader in the field of predicting what the structure of a natural protein would be on the basis of the order of its amino acids. This is extremely difficult to do; the proper 3D structure is determined by the way the protein chain folds up, and there are also vast numbers of ways it can do that. Baker got good enough at it to create Arzeda, a protein design company. More recently, Baker moved on to creating completely novel proteins not seen in nature.
Such designer proteins could be used to create nanomachinery, for uses such as mobile-phone motion sensors, car components and switches for optical circuits. Those are long-term possibilities; one of the more interesting short-term efforts was the product of Chen Zigo, a researcher in Baker's lab. Chen has created 32 pairs of proteins, each member of the pair mating to its partner, and only to its partner. This Lego-block scheme could be used to build nanomachinery, but more practically it might be used to "key" synthetic cellular mechanisms, allowing them to be turned on or off at will. Designer proteins are also being used in schemes to destroy cancer cells, or treat auto-immune disorders.
* Those engaged in the revolution in synthetic biology like to compare it to the computer revolution. Biology is, however, much more complicated and disorderly than computing. Many are afraid that the revolution will be chaotic and, in the end, destructive. However, the possibilities are vast as well. As Jason Kelly and Zach Weinersmith put it in their book SOONISH, synthetic biology may be "like Frankenstein, except the monster spends the whole book dutifully making medicine and industrial inputs".
Synthetic biology will seem, to the pessimistic, a commercialization and debasement of life. Optimists can take the high road, seeing what life could be, extended and enriched by new understanding. Think of it as a music not yet composed, or the scent of a lost flower re-imagined and smelled, as if for the first time. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: After a rocky start, the US airlift out of Kabul, Afghanistan, has ramped up, with over 105,000 people evacuated so far. A suicide bomber attacked the crowd at Kabul Airport on 26 August, killing 13 American soldiers and several times that many Afghans. US President Joe Biden announced that the airlift would continue to the cut-off date of 31 August, and that the attackers would be dealt with. The next day, reporter Peter Doocy of Fox News asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki: "When the President says we will hunt you down and make you pay, what does that look like?"
Psaki, who is very used to Doocy's fatuous questions, blandly replied: "I think he made it clear yesterday that he does not want them to live on the Earth anymore." Drone strikes have followed, inflicting casualties on Islamist terrorists. It appears the primary goal is to keep them off balance until the evacuation is complete.
What happens after 31 August? It is very unlikely that the US will simply forget about Afghanistan. Biden has made comments about "over the horizon counter-terrorism", which suggests some form of covert action, presumably by the CIA and Special Operations Command. Where that goes over the long run, who knows? It seems unlikely that Afghanistan will return to the status quo of before the US invasion. One knowledgeable Afghan said that at best, Afghanistan would become like Iraq -- with a weak but inclusive and recognized government -- and at worst, like Syria -- divided into warring camps.
Incidentally, during the airlift, a USAF Boeing C-17 "Mighty Moose" cargolifter hauled out a staggering 823 passengers, delivering them to Qatar. 183 were kids, sitting on their parents' laps. The C-17s involved in the operation had the radio callsign REACH, with different number suffixes; an Afghan baby was born on one C-17 rescue flight, with the grateful parents naming the girl "Reach".
* Not quite ignored in all the fuss over Afghanistan, this last week the House Thompson Committee, investigating the 6 January Capitol riot, sent requests for records of Donald Trump's conversations and actions around that time to the National Archives & Records Administration and seven other agencies: the departments of Justice, Defense, Homeland Security, and Interior; the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Thompson Committee had been publicly quiet for a number of weeks, but nobody with sense thought the committee had been idle. Obviously, the first thing to do was nail down events on 6 January and then, having done that, start digging. Trump has claimed that he will invoke executive privilege -- which he can do, but the Biden White House can override it. It is very difficult to believe that the Biden Administration would not cooperate with the Thompson Committee, though they may have to invoke some formalities in doing so.
As a demonstration that the Thompson Committee means business, a few days after requesting the information from the White House, the committee requested information relevant to the Capitol riot from 15 social media companies, including 4chan, 8kun (earlier 8chan), Facebook, Gab, Google, Parler, Reddit, Snapchat, Telegram, theDonald.win, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and Zello. The committee seeks "a range of records, including data, reports, analyses, and communications stretching back to spring of 2020."
There is some understandable frustration over how slowly the investigations of Trump are moving along, that frustration being felt personally here. However, it should be noted that, though the authorities were investigating Trump henchman Roger Stone from 2017, they didn't reel him in until 2019. What we are going to see is weeks or a few months of quiet from the investigations, leading to intermittent loud BANGS!
Things are indeed happening. The Thompson Committee is clearly casting a wide net. Trump by himself amounts to little but a low-functioning, reckless loudmouth; he would be nothing without the network of enablers around him, and so the committee is trying to take down both Trump and his network. Things will get interesting.
* In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic is running full bore in the USA, thanks to the new Delta variant. The FDA gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine a week ago; to no surprise, COVIDIOTS simply found other things to complain about -- but it did lead to a tide of vaccine mandates from schools, government organizations, and companies. The Florida and Texas state governments have tried to push back on vaccine mandates and other measures to deal with the pandemic, but they are unlikely to achieve much, as death tolls in those states pile up. Mandating that schools keep fire extinguishers is one thing; mandating that they can't have them is exactly another.
So far, there hasn't been any rush to vaccinate, but the mandates won't really kick in until next month. For the moment, the news media has been playing up antivaxxers who got COVID-19 and died. It is unseemly to gloat, but it is hard to feel sympathetic. Others haven't been so reluctant to gloat. Phil Mason -- a British chemist and noted skeptic who calls himself "Thunderf00t" online, well-known for his extended YouTube series WHY PEOPLE LAUGH AT CREATIONISTS -- commented on Twitter concerning one such case:
thunderf00t / @thunderf00t: Darwin Awards got nothing on this guy -- anti-masker protest organizer dies of coronavirus. This is like turkeys buying stocks in gravy AND voting for Christmas!
* There's also a growing push to make people show their vaccination status to get admission to events and such. I got to thinking that it might be nice to get a vaccine passport on one of my smartphones so I wouldn't have to remember to carry a vaccination card. Quite a number of such apps were offered on Google Play; instead of trying to guess which one was best, I wondered if there was one recommended by the Colorado state government.
I looked around, and to my pleasant surprise, I found that the state offered a neat ID app, named "MyColorado". I couldn't download it on one of my older phones, but it downloaded okay with my Samsung Galaxy S10. The next day, I got time to configure it. I was thinking it might be tricky, but it was straightforward: I entered my personal information, invented a password, and then scanned the barcode on the back of my driver's license. Voila! I had my driver's license on the smartphone. Incidentally, that smartphone license is supposed to be legally valid.
So what about my vax record? That involved jumping through more validation hoops, including scanning my face, plus having to punch in codes sent to me over email, but it wasn't that much more troublesome. The only thing that threw me was that it sent me two different codes consecutively, but I figured that out quickly enough. That done, I had my vax record on the smartphone, too.
I was very pleased with the app. One of these days, we'll have a system of online ID that will cover all the ID bases, and permit secure transactions without having to shuffle papers. I was thinking that might take some time, but it appears ID apps are a growth market, with more states adopting them. The drive towards vaccination passports seems to be giving it a big push. There's work at the Federal level towards a digital ID system. It sure would be nice to perform all my business transactions online, without having to sign piles of papers.
* In other personal tech news, I wanted to share a confidential file with remote family -- confidential in the sense that I'd be financially destroyed if the information got loose. I'd played with my own encryption program for fun, but it wasn't nearly secure enough, and I was the only one who could decrypt with it.
The baseline for good security is the Advanced Encryption Standard / 256-bit password (AES-256) cipher. I looked around for a freeware encryption tool that handles AES-256, and came across the popular freeware 7-Zip zipfile archiver. I wanted the command-line version, since I was going to use it from a Windows batch file; and after some puzzling, found that all I needed was two files, "7z.exe" and "7z.dll". I put them in my Windows directory so they could be found on my system.
The next thing was to puzzle out the command-line options, which ended up being straightforward. To encrypt, enter:
7z a -p<password> <encrypted_archive_name> <files_to_be_archived>
For example:
7z a -pZoMG@PA$$wd safe.7z myfile1.txt myfile2.txt myfile3.txt
-- will create an encrypted archive named "safe.7z" with three text files in it. To decrypt, enter:
7z e -p<password> <encrypted_archive_name>
For example:
7z e -pZoMG@PA$$wd safe.7z
-- will pop out the three text files. I wondered how big a password I needed in practice; it appears one 20 characters long is about right.
Next issue was telling my remote family how to decrypt the file. While I use Windows / Android, they use Mac / iPhone; they could get 7-Zip for the Mac, but I thought they might find the iPhone easier to use. I tracked down a free Android app named "ZArchiver", also available on iPhone, which is functionally equivalent to 7-Zip. I put an encrypted archive on my Android phone and ran ZArchiver; all I had to do was find the archive and select it, with the app asking for a password, then popping out the contents.
"And Bob's your uncle!" Of course, although it was simple in the end, it wasn't simple to figure out what tools I needed and how to get them to work. There are lots of options, and it's hard to sort through them. It was frustrating, but fun and gratifying in the end. Things seem so miserable in the world that it's good to get something right.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (165): Barack Obama's primary ambitions were political. In 1992, he directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign to get more African Americans on the voter rolls. In 1996, he was elected as an Illinois state senator, representing a component of Chicago's South Side. He was re-elected in 1998 and in 2002 -- though in 2000, he had tried to run for the US House of Representatives, and been soundly defeated.
In 2004, he ran for the US Senate, to win by a landslide, to become the sole Senate member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He worked on a number of bills and served on a set of Senate committees. He resigned in 2008 to seek the presidency. In the primary election, he ended up facing off against Hillary Clinton, then a senator from New York, to gradually outpace her. On winning the primary, he chose Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his vice presidential running mate -- it seems largely on the basis of Biden's stature as a senior statesman, to offset Obama's relative youth. Apparently having a white male running mate was seen as a plus as well.
Arizona Senator John McCain, having selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin -- a darling of the hard Right -- as his running mate -- faced off against Obama in the general election. Obama won it handily, 365 electoral votes to 173, 52.9% to 45.7% of the popular vote. He was the first POC to be elected US president; many black Americans were surprised, but whites were his biggest single voting bloc, though more whites voted for McCain.
Among the first actions Obama took in office were to arrange for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and shutting down the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The attempt to shut down "Gitmo" foundered on the refusal of Congress to appropriate funds for the effort, and resistance to the relocation of the detainees there. He also reduced secrecy on US presidential records, and revoked Ronald Reagan's "Mexico City" policy that prohibited federal aid to international family planning organizations that perform or provide counseling about abortion.
Early on, he also signed a bill that reauthorized and expanded the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and reversed a policy implemented by George W. Bush that limited funding for stem cell research -- while promising to impose "strict guidelines" on the research. Later in 2009, he ended the ban on travel by the HIV-positive to the USA, with the Obama Administration taking a close interest in dealing with the AIDS pandemic.
Of course, the US was in the depths of the Great Recession at the time, with the Obama Administration taking steps to deal with it. Only weeks after his inauguration, Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. It was a $787 billion USD economic stimulus package intended to bolster the economy -- provisions including increased Federal spending for health care, infrastructure, education, tax breaks and incentives, and direct assistance to individuals. Tim Geithner, Obama's treasury secretary, introduced a set of programs also intended to boost the economy. In the meantime, the Obama Administration helped bail out ailing auto-makers General Motors (GM) and Chrysler, and helping them reorganize.
Another early Obama initiative was declaring that US combat operations in Iraq would cease in a year and a half, with the last US combat brigade left Iraq -- though the US maintained a presence in the country for support, intelligence, and training.
The biggest initiative undertaken by the Obama was an effort to establish a national health-insurance system. As originally conceived, all Americans would be required to have health insurance, with a "public option" complementing commercial insurance. Republicans refused to support the public option, so it was deleted when Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- better known as "ObamaCare" -- into law in the spring of 2010. The "individual mandate" for all Americans to have health insurance was enforced by a tax penalty, which was bitterly opposed by Republicans. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATION WEEK ("Israel Enters Airborne-Laser Weapon Market" by Steve Trimble, 8 January 2020), the Israelis are now working on a laser self-defense system for aircraft, and are moving towards trials of ground-based laser systems.
Elbit already produces laser countermeasures, rangefinders, and pointers; the company is developing, under a defense ministry contract, a flight demonstrator for use on piloted aircraft and drones. A self-defense laser system includes a beam-tracking system to illuminate the target, and a high-power laser to intercept an incoming missile.
A podded system would contain separate subsystems for power generation and thermal management within the pod. A more advanced system integrated inside an aircraft would demand a significant internal capacity for onboard power generation and cooling. Self-defense lasers for aircraft tend to fall into a power class of 50:100 kilowatts (kW). Elbit Systems' laser technology has evolved from very inefficient flashlamp-pumped to solid state, diode-pumped lasers -- improving overall efficiency from about 1% to about 35%. Nonetheless, that's still only a third, meaning the carrier aircraft must generate triple the power, and get rid of the waste heat.
The Elbit program appears to parallel the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) "Self-protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHIELD)" program. A SHIELD pod will be flight-tested in 2021, with the pod including a Lockheed Martin laser, Northrop Grumman beam tracker, and Boeing pod. The AFRL has demonstrated the ability of the system to shoot down missiles, using a ground-based system as a precursor to the SHIELD pod. The demonstration system was based on the US Army's 150-kW High-Energy Laser Weapon System (HELWS); it seems the same technology is being used in SHIELD, the challenge being to miniaturize it to fit into the pod.
The Israelis have also worked on ground-based lasers. Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit have acknowledged work on such programs; Rafael has promoted their "Iron Beam" system, capable of intercepting drones and missiles. It hasn't been fielded yet, but the Israeli government has committed to development of fixed-site and mobile laser weapons -- along with the aerial system, with all systems undoubtedly sharing technology.
* The Kongsberg "Remote Weapon System (RWS)" weapons turret was discussed here in March 2021. It turns out that Moog INC -- no relation to the Moog synthesizer firm, other than the founders of the two firms were cousins -- makes a similar "Reconfigurable Integrated-weapons Platform (RIwP)" turret. It is now being fielded as the weapons system of the US Army "Initial Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (IM-SHORAD)" combat vehicle, based on the Stryker A1 armored car, intended for battlefield air defense against drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft. The RWiP features:
The Hellfire launcher includes a microwave radar guidance link. The weapons are directed by an electro-optic / infrared sighting system, with day-night sighting capability. It is not clear if the sighting system is "smart" and can track targets automatically after they are acquired. It is also not clear why the Hellfire missiles were included: while they can be used against aerial targets, it seems plausible they were added to provide self-defense against adversary ground vehicles.
General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) is leading the effort, with European defense giant Leonardo being a major player. The US Army plans to acquire 144 IM-SHORAD systems.
* Medical ships are nothing new, but they've traditionally been something like ocean liners set up as hospitals. As discussed in an article from MILITARY.com ("Speedy Ambulance Ships A High Priority For Navy Medicine, Admiral Says" by Hope Hodge, 21 April 2021), the US is now working to adapt two of its fast catamaran vessels to become high-speed "ambulance ships".
Technically speaking, they're "Expeditionary Fast Transport (EPF)" vessels that have been fitted with enhanced medical facilities. The 14th ship in the class, EPF-14, to be called USNS CODY after the city in Wyoming, will be the first of these ships; the yet-to-be-named EPF-15 will be the second. The ships are operated by the Navy's Military Sealift Command, just like the service's two large hospital ships.
These ambulance EPFs will feature an operating room with two operating tables, and 18 intensive care unit beds -- along with about 100 medical personnel. They will have space for a V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft to land on board for patient medical evacuation.
Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy, says: "The ambulance ship, as envisioned, will allow us to respond to ships in distress. Ships that may have been damaged in combat, [we'll] be able to assist in personnel recovery."
Gillingham said the concept for a high-speed medical ship had come about through a review of medical operations supporting the Marine Corps, with its concept of Expeditionary Advanced Basing Operations in far-flung regions like the Pacific. The Navy realized that the two big medical ships now in service simply could not respond as quickly as the concept required, he said.
The ambulance EPFs will still be fast assault transports, medical assistance being a secondary mission. Austal is also working on an "Expeditionary Medical Ship", which will be an EPF with a primary medical mission -- featuring a white hull with red crosses like its hospital ship counterparts.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CRUISE MISSILE PROLIFERATION: As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Developing Nations Are Accelerating Cruise Missile Evolution" by Tony Osborne, 11 February 2021) are a well-established technology, and they are increasingly being built by developing nations. One of the main drivers of cruise missile technology is the emergence of improved air defenses, which leads to a need for stand-off weapons. There is also a push to bypass arms limitations that can be imposed by the US and other countries.
Douglas Barrie, senior fellow for military aerospace at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, comments: "From an air force perspective, I would imagine that if you want a high-level capability, air-launched land-attack, cruise missiles are no longer a 'nice to have' but a 'need to have.'" He points out they are useful because of their long range, big warheads, and pinpoint accuracy.
Brazil, for example, is to become the first Latin American country to introduce a cruise missile, the ground-launched MTC-300 -- discussed here in 2020 -- with an air-launched version being pursued through the country's "Long-Range Cruise Missile (MICLA-BR)" program. Photos show the weapon tested on a Brazilian Air Force Northrop F-5E Tiger II fighter; presumably it will be carried by Brazilian SAAB Gripens in operational service. It is interesting to wonder if there is interest in using the new Embraer KC-390 tanker / cargolifter as a cruise missile carrier.
There is more activity in Asia -- particularly between long-standing rivals India and Pakistan. India has developed land-attack versions of its BrahMos antiship missile, derived from the Russian P-800 Oniks / Yakhont (NATO SS-N-26), with Brahmos carried on ships, submarines, and ground launchers. India has also obtained the European MBDA Scalp air-launched cruise missile, following purchase of the Dassault Rafale.
In addition, India is working on an indigenous cruise missile, the Nirbhay, with a range of at least 1,000 kilometers (620 miles). The Nirbhay is still in flight test; reports suggest the prototypes are powered by a Russian-supplied engine, but production machines will use an Indian-produced small turbofan. The test flights have all been from ground launchers, but an air-launched variant is planned, presumably to be launched by India's Su-30 fighters.
Pakistan is similarly working on its Ra'ad cruise missile, in development since 2007 by the country's National Engineering and Scientific Commission. Initial versions launched from the country's Dassault Mirage 5 fleet had a reported effective range of around 350 kilometers (215 miles), but a new version, the Ra'ad Mark 2, tested in February 2020, has a reported range of around 600 kilometers (370 miles). Few details are available, but low-resolution videos released to the public show the Ra'ad to have a similar configuration to the MBDA Storm Shadow / Scalp, but with a cruciform fin configuration, instead of the twin tailfins on the Shadow / Scalp.
Taiwan, confronted with a surly Chinese dragon, has developed the air-launched Wan Chien cruise missile. The US didn't want to provide Taiwan with such an offensive capability -- though American attitudes toward China have been changing for the worse. It seems unlikely the USA is particularly unhappy about the program, and may now be providing low-profile technical support.
Other nations undertaking indigenous efforts include Turkey, which is reportedly developing a cruise missile named the "Gezgin", which may have a Ukrainian engine. Turkey had already developed, integrated and fielded the Roketsan SOM family of weapons for use on the F-16 and F-4. Of course, Iran is particularly fond of cruise missiles, including the Soumar / Hoveizeh and smaller Ya Ali / Quds, and have used cruise missiles against the Saudis through their Yemeni Houthi proxies. However, not much is known for certain about the Iranian cruise missile program.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (6): Zymergen, Arzeda, and Ginkgo differ in details of their approaches to synthetic biology, but they share a common vision. All three see their current business-to-business approach as a stepping stone, a way of refining their technology and procedures, feeding their machine-learning systems, and making in money while they work on products of their own to sell -- possibly in collaboration with wealthier partners. Ginkgo is spinning out joint ventures with clients to work in specific areas. In 2018, it created a business with chemical giant Bayer to develop microbes that would make fertilizer inside a plant's root system. It has another spin-out working on cannabis, and more recently began a third one developing plant proteins for use in vegetarian foods, including meat substitutes.
All three also focus on high-throughput experiments, with their use of massive amounts of synthesized DNA creating a new way of doing biology on an industrial scale. Jason Kelly, Ginkgo's CEO, spent five years in Endy's lab in the 2000s; Kelly estimates that he ordered a total of 50,000 bases of commercially synthesized DNA. Now Ginkgo is obtaining synthesized DNA at 50,000 times that rate, using it to alter the genomes of thousands of organisms every day. In 2017, Ginkgo bought up Gen9, a gene-synthesis company, to bring DNA synthesis in-house. That hasn't been enough: Ginkgo now has a contract with Twist Bioscience, the world's biggest DNA-synthesis company, for a billion base pairs over the coming years.
Arzeda is smaller -- but Alexandre Zanghellini, its CEO, says it orders around 10,000 new DNA sequences a week, each of which is then put into a microbe so that its computer models about how changes in the sequence change the function of proteins can be tested. Most of the time, the orders are specified by the computer system, and people don't know exactly what the sequences are until they put them to use.
The experiments themselves are designed and managed by computer. Ginkgo went to great effort to develop systems that not only planned out what should be done but, using robotics, ran them. It wasn't easy to do; for ten years, according to Ginkgo's Jason Kelly, doing lab work with the company's imperfectly automated foundries was considerably slower for the company's designers than doing it themselves would have been. However, that ten years amounted to debugging: Kelly says that the company reached "break-even" in productivity a few years ago, and the automated systems are now an order of magnitude more productive. They are steadily getting even better.
Automation increases not just the amount of research that can be done, but permits greater complexity. Many biological experiments are conducted with trays of 96 "microwells", or miniature test tubes. Humans tend to design experiments using these wells in a simple fashion: do A to one subset, B to another, and so on. A computer can design experimental strategies that are much more elaborate, selecting a wider range of hypotheses to test, and then testing many more hypotheses per tray. Given a good robotic test system, the most difficult experimental schemes are practical. According to Markus Gershater, the chief scientific officer at Synthace, the improvements in software and automation offer experimental design can be just as important as gains in speed and throughput.
The use of machine learning in these systems implies a need for floods of data to train the learning systems. Most biology labs don't need mass spectrometers, since they are expensive instruments that produce too much data; of course, synthetic biology companies love them. More data gives a better picture of what's going on with a biosystem, included what's going wrong. Biological studies are notoriously unreliable, often impossible to duplicate. More data means better machine learning, and fewer unreplicable experiments.
Industrialization helps in other ways as well. One piece of kit popular in labs that can afford it is the Echo 655, built by Labcyte. Like a pipetting system, it transfers drops of fluid from one set of wells to another -- but it uses ultrasound instead of suction, permitting smaller amounts, greater accuracy, and no contaminating contact. That means smaller wells and more of them on a tray -- now up to 1,536 -- which in turn means faster experiments. Taking this thought to an extreme, a startup named Berkeley Lights has wells that contain only a single cell, manipulated entirely with laser beams.
The automation of synthetic biology has, for some companies, become more interesting than synthetic biology itself. Synthace originally wanted to design organisms, but now is focusing on software services. The company has developed a computing environment called Antha, where researchers can specify what they want done in relatively high-level terms with the machinery underneath optimizing the experiment's design for the client's instruments, and defining what the instruments are to do.
A startup named Transcriptic wants to go even further, operating "labs in the cloud", in which an experimenter at a terminal anywhere in the world can get a set of experiments done in an automated facility nowhere near them. Ginkgo's Jason Kelly doesn't want Ginkgo to go that far, at least not yet; he believes that having the people designing the organisms and the foundries that make them under one roof matters a lot. Nonetheless, the march of automation in synthetic biology is far from over. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Of course, the big news this last week was the shockingly abrupt fall of Afghanistan to Taliban insurgents. With other US and Western troops largely gone from the country, the Taliban simply moved into Afghanistan's cities, with the Afghan Army generally giving up without a fight and turning over their weapons. Obviously, the surrender had been well negotiated in advance. The Afghan government fled the country.
The Biden Administration was blindsided by the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, having assumed that the Afghans could hold out against the Taliban, at least for a time. As a result, the USA was slow to pull out Americans in Afghanistan, as well as interpreters and other Afghans who were at danger from the Taliban. The consequence was a panic effort to ramp up the evacuation, with transport flights streaming in and out of the Kabul airport.
The Taliban did not see fit to interfere with the evacuation, and indeed has been sounding a conciliatory note, proposing to set up an inclusive government for all Afghans, and allow the education of women. There is widespread skepticism of such claims, in good part because the people making them don't appear to be regarded as anything more than window-dressing by the people who are really in charge. In any case, the US promptly froze Afghan assets to keep the Taliban from getting their hands on them.
The Biden Administration was bitterly attacked for the fiasco. Some of the sniping was for pulling out and letting Afghanistan fall, but there was no substantial public support for staying. The immediate disintegration of the Afghan government underlined the futility of the US involvement in the country: if a patient was on life-support for 20 years and died the instant it was taken away, the patient was a lost cause.
More relevant criticisms focused on the day-late dollar-short handling of the evacuation -- but what's done is done, and no defeat scenario would have looked pretty. There's been much talk of the tremendous damage done to the America's reputation, but that seems overblown. The loudest criticisms are from people who hate Biden anyway, so he loses nothing. A year from now, Afghanistan won't be a real issue; Americans bury and forget their defeats.
Biden had made the right call that nobody before him had really wanted to make, and had to take the heat for it, at least for a while. The evacuation will be completed -- it's supposed to be finished by the end of the month, but it will go on as long as possible. The dust will settle, and things won't seem so bad.
As a footnote to the effort, dozens of Afghan military aircraft and helicopters flew to Uzbekistan; what will happen to them is an interesting question. Vast quantities of other arms fell into Taliban hands, but there are other interesting questions about that matter as well. How much of the more sophisticated gear was left functional? In addition, it is hard to believe that the Afghan Army turned over all of its weapons, it being easier to believe a fair component of it ended up in hidden arms caches.
The Taliban has retaken Afghanistan, but how easy will they find it to rule? It is much easier to blow up bridges than build them. A new Northern Alliance of Afghan tribes is being formed to resist the Taliban, and it seems likely that it will get US assistance. After all, the Americans pulled out of Afghanistan, but they never said they'd stop fighting the Taliban. If the Taliban hits back against the resistance brutally, they will undermine support for their regime. The Taliban may not have changed; Afghanistan has.
The game in Afghanistan is not over, it has instead gone on to a new phase. As can be expected, much of the commentary on Afghanistan has projected a worst-case scenario -- but we really don't know what will happen. Expect surprises.
* As per an essay by Stephen Collinson of CNN ("How The 2020 Census Explains Donald Trump", 13 August 2020), the results of America's 2020 census did not come as much of a surprise -- showing the continued evolution of the USA to a less-white, more diverse, less rural, more urban nation. Certainly the extreme Right has understood that for years, it being an underlying theme on Fox News, and Donald Trump using "white grievance" to win the presidency.
The problem for the Right is that demographic changes are clearly weakening their voter base every election. According to the 2020 census, people of color represented 43% of the US population in 2020, up from 34% in 2010. The non-Hispanic white share of the US population fell to 57% in 2020, down 6 percentage points from the last census in 2010. These changes also pose a challenge to the Democrats: can they appeal to a diverse voter base and still appeal to working-class whites? Tricky.
At a detail level, the census gives insights into regional political battles, such as the current fractious politics of Texas. It shows that Houston, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas-Fort Worth are all growing, while the populations of many rural areas are declining. Many of the political shoot-outs in Texas, such as over voting rights and pandemic control, are between Republican Governor Greg Abbott and legislature against Democratic strongholds in the cities. That's why Texas Republicans are attempting to tweak the state's election laws to impede voting in the cities, while boosting it in the rural areas. Similar changes are underway in Arizona, where Phoenix has been growing rapidly -- also shifting the state towards the Democrats, with similar attempts by Republicans to stack the voting system in their favor.
The Democrats are, of course, entirely alert to Republican attempts to step on Democratic voters. Martin Luther King III -- the eldest son of the great civil rights campaigner, and chairman of the Drum Major Institute -- said in a statement: "Some elected officials are afraid that if they embrace a more diverse America, they will lose their power. Those same people are willing to weaponize the new Census data to gerrymander the vote and rig the system against Black and Brown Americans."
There is much concern that efforts to pass a new Voter Rights Act (VRA) to level the playing field are going nowhere, thanks to conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kirsten Sinema of Arizona, who have made it clear they won't vote down the Senate filibuster. The fears are overblown; anyone playing close attention to Manchin knows that he makes emphatic proclamations, while leaving himself considerable wiggle room. For all the public complaints about Manchin, there's not a hint of any serious feuding among Democrats in Congress; they're effectively on the same page. Manchin's current voting record is solidly in the Democratic camp -- at last count, 88% the same as that of Bernie Sanders.
What Manchin wants, and it appears that Joe Biden along with other Democratic leadership want as well, is a new VRA that has a Republican stamp of approval, so the Republicans won't work to crush it at the first opportunity. There has to be an exit from the current state of political warfare, and it's definitely a goal worth pursuing. What happens if the GOP decides to obstruct instead? Then the Democrats will do whatever they need to do to pass the new VRA. They can do it on their own if they have to. When push comes to shove, they're not going to let the Republicans step on them.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (164): Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on 4 August 1961, making him the only US president to be born outside the 48 contiguous states. His mother was Ann Dunham, who had been born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1934. His father was Barack Obama SR, who had been born in Kenya, also in 1934.
The parents had met in 1960 at a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, where the senior Obama was a foreign student on a scholarship. The two got married in 1961, with Barack JR born six months later. Barack SR had already been married, having had two children. Later in August 1961, Dunham and Barack JR went to Seattle, where she attended the University of Washington for a year.
Barack SR stayed in Hawaii, graduating with a degree in economics in 1962, to then go to Harvard and obtain an MA in economics. The long-distance marriage didn't work out, with the couple divorcing in 1964. Barack SR went back to Kenya, where he would get a job as an analyst for the Kenyan Finance Ministry, and marry again. Barack JR would only see his father once more, at Christmas 1971, before the death of Barack SR in a car accident in 1982.
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro -- an Indonesian, then a grad student in geography at the University of Hawaii. They married in 1965, with Lolo returning to Indonesia in 1966, and Dunham joining him with her son Barack, then six years old, in 1967. Barack attended Indonesian-language elementary schools, complemented by English-language home schooling by his mother. His Indonesian step-father was a practical, disciplined man who had a lot of influence on Barack.
In 1971, Obama went back to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. His mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, along with his half-sister Maya Soetoro, while Ann Dunham was a grad student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii. She graduated in 1975 and went back to Indonesia along with Maya; Barack stayed with his grandparents. In Honolulu, he finished elementary school and then completed high school, graduating in 1979. Ann Dunham spent most of the rest of her life in Indonesia; she divorced Lolo in 1980, got a doctorate in anthropology in 1992, and then died in Hawaii in 1995 of ovarian / uterine cancer.
After graduating from high school, Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles on a scholarship -- to then transfer to Columbia University in New York City as a junior, majoring in political science, with a focus in international relations and in English literature. He graduated in 1983 with a BA, to then work for a time at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer, followed by a short stint as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Group at the City College of New York. In 1985, he moved to Chicago to become director of the Developing Communities Project, a church-based community organization originally made up of eight Catholic parishes in on Chicago's South Side.
In 1988, Obama attended Harvard Law School, becoming a research assistant to prominent constitutional scholar Lawrence Tribe. During the summer of 1989, he worked as a summer hire for the law firm of Sidley Austin in Chicago, where he met Michelle Robinson, to form a long-term relationship. During his second year at Harvard, he became editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, being the first person of color to hold that position, and obtaining some public prominence. In the summer of 1990, he worked for Hopkins & Sutter in Chicago.
Obama graduated with a JD degree in 1991, and returned to Chicago, where he obtained a position at the University of Chicago Law School, lecturing there for 12 years. He married Michelle Robinson in 1992. They would have two children: Malia Ann, born in 1998, and Natasha or "Sasha" in 2001.
In 1993 he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, with the association lasting until 2004. In 1995, he published his first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, a memoir of his upbringing with a focus on race relations. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for July included:
-- [01 JUL 21] ONEWEB 8 -- A Soyuz 2.1b booster was launched from Vostochny at 12.48 UTC (local time - 8) to put 36 "OneWeb" low-orbit comsats into space. OneWeb plans to put a constellation of hundreds of comsats into near-polar low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles).
-- [03 JUL 20] / JILIN 1 x 4, SMALLSAT -- A Chinese Long March 2D booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0251 UTC (local time - 8) to put four "Jilin 1" Earth observation satellites and the "Xingshidai 10" imaging smallsat into orbit for Chang Guang Satellite Technology CO LTD -- a commercial remote sensing company based in China's Jilin province. The company has successfully launched 30 small remote sensing satellites into orbit since 2015. Two types of Jilin 1 satellites were launched:
-- [04 JUL 21] / FENGYUN 3E -- A Long March 4C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 2328 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Fengyun 3E" polar-orbiting weather satellite for the China Meteorological Administration. It had a launch mass of about 2,500 kilograms (5,500 pounds) and a design life of eight years. It joined two other Chinese polar-orbiting weather observatories, Fengyun 3C and Fenygun 3D.
The satellite's payload included microwave and infrared sounders to measure temperature and moisture profiles in the atmosphere; an instrument to measure atmospheric conditions and ocean winds using reflected navigation satellite signals; and a spectral imager to observe clouds and measure sea surface temperatures, a driver of tropical cyclone development. There was also a suite of five space weather instruments, including monitors to measure the Sun's energy output and photometers to measure how solar activity affects the environment around Earth. Fengyun 3E introduced a new instrument named "WindRad", a radar to measure the direction and speed of winds near the ocean surface.
-- [06 JUL 21] TIANLIAN 1-05 -- A Long March 3C booster was launched from Xichang at 1553 UTC (local time - 8) to put the fifth "Tianlian 1" geostationary space communications satellite into orbit. It was developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), being based on the civil DFH-3 comsat and primarily intended to support crewed Shenzhou space missions.
-- [09 JUL 21] NINGXIA x 6 -- A Chinese Chang Zheng (Long March) 6 booster was launched from Taiyuan at 1159 UTC (local time - 8) to put five "Ningxia" AKA "Zhongzi" signals intelligence (SIGINT) satellites into low Earth orbit.
A Long March 6 booster launched the first five Ningxia satellites in November 2019. The satellites were part of a fleet owned by Ningxia Jingui Information Technology CO LTD, which provides radio spectrum monitoring services to commercial and Chinese government customers. They were developed by DFH Satellite CO LTD -- an entity within China's state-owned aerospace apparatus specializing in the production of small spacecraft platforms.
-- [19 JUL 21] YAOGAN 30 -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Xichang at 0019 UTC (local time - 8) to put three secret "Yaogan 30" payloads into orbit. It was a triplet of satellites and may have been a "flying triangle" naval signals intelligence payload. The launch also included the "Tianqi 15" internet of things relay satellite.
-- [20 JUL 21] CREW TEST 1 -- A Blue Origin New Shepard launch vehicle took its first crew on a suborbital flight, after launch at 1311 UTC (local time + 5) from a private site north of Van Horn, Texas. The crew consisted of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, plus his younger brother Jeff Bezos, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and 18-year Dutch student Oliver Daemen.
The single-stage New Shepard booster sent the passenger capsule up to an altitude of 107 kilometers (66.5 miles), with the booster itself returning to base for a soft landing, and the passenger capsule parachuting to Earth nearby.
Bezos, 57, asked his younger brother Mark, 53, to join him on the flight. He also invited 82-year-old female aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who was one of 13 women who endured the same rigorous testing as the all-male original Mercury 7 astronauts. The fourth crew member was Blue Origin's first paying passenger, an 18-year-old Dutch student named Oliver Daemen. Daemen's father is Joes Daemen, founder of Somerset Capital Partners. He participated in the auction for the seats, and won a seat for his son.
Bezos's launch to the edge of space came nine days after billionaire Richard Branson rode his company's rocketplane to an altitude of 282,000 feet (53 miles; 86 kilometers) over New Mexico. Branson's flight was the first time Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocketplane has flown with a full complement of passengers, but the company previously completed three piloted flights over the 50-mile (80-kilometer) mark with the VSS Unity spacecraft.
-- [21 JUL 21] NAUKA (ISS) -- An International Launch Services Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 1458 UTC (local time - 6) to put the "Nauka (Science)" laboratory module into orbit, to be hooked up to the International Space Station. The Nauka module, or the Multipurpose Laboratory Module, also carried the European Robotic Arm to the ISS. The module docked with the ISS eight days later, if with some hair-raising difficulties.
Nauka had a launch mass of about 20.2 metric tons (44,500 pounds) and a length of about 13 meters (43 feet) long. It was the first large pressurized element to be permanently added to the space station since 2011, and one of the biggest modules at the complex.
The bus-sized Nauka research module has been in development for more than 20 years, originally as a backup for Russia's Zarya module, the first element of the space station, launched in 1998. Russia said in 2004 that the backup to Zarya would be converted into a lab module for launch in 2007, but technical problems postponed the launch.
Nauka was the first pressurized module to be added to the space station since the arrival of the small Bigelow Expandable Activity Module in 2016. The last Russian pressurized element of any size launched to the space station was the Rassvet docking module, which was delivered by a NASA space shuttle in 2010.
The Nauka module docked with the nadir -- Earth-facing -- port of the station's Russian Zvezda service module. After docking, Russian cosmonauts installed scientific experiments, prepared a new oxygen generation system for operation, set up a new toilet, and readied a new sleeping compartment for an extra Russian crew member on the space station.
The Nauka module replaced the Pirs module in the nadir port, Pirs having been there since 2001. The Pirs module was discarded, to then re-enter the atmosphere. In service, Nauka will accommodate dockings of Progress resupply ships, Soyuz crew capsules, and Russia's new Prichal node module later in 2021.
The Nauka module also carried the European Robotic Arm (ERA), which was completed 15 years ago, to await an opportunity to fly to the space station. Full-scale development of the 11.3-meter (37-foot) ERA began in 1996; it was supposed to be flown on Nauka, and was delayed along with it. Philippe Schoonejansm, ESA's ERA project manager, said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
ERA is a bit different than the other manipulators that already on the station. It can be fully preprogrammed in advance, which is helpful. It can be operated from an external control panel, which the others do not have. So even when you're doing a spacewalk, you can control ERA by just seeing and operating this control panel. But also it can be operated from inside using only a laptop, so it doesn't need any joysticks.
END QUOTE
The ERA could walk across the Russian segment of the ISS. The ERA could handle a load of 8 tonnes (17,000 pounds), with a precision of 5 millimeters.
-- [29 JUL 21] TIANHUI 1-04 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0401 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianhui 1-04" AKA "Tianhui 1D" cartographic satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. Tianhui 1-04 was the sixth in China's series of Tianhui mapping satellites, joining three similar first-generation spacecraft and two new-generation Tianhui satellites. Tianhui 1-04 was to conduct land and resource surveys, collect data to create and global update maps, and perform scientific research. The satellite was believed to carry multiple cameras, including stereo instruments to generate three-dimensional maps. The spacecraft was built by Aerospace Dongfanghong Satellite CO LTD.
-- [29 JUL 21] STP 27RM (MONOLITH) -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from Wallops Island at 0600 UTC (local time - 13) to put the "Monolith" satellite into orbit for the US Air Force. Monolith was intended to demonstrate how a small satellite could carry a large-aperture payload. This was part of the Space Test Program (STP) series of missions.
-- [30 JUL 21] STAR ONE D2 & EUTELSAT QUANTUM -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2100 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "Star One D2" and "Eutelsat Quantum" geostationary comsats into orbit.
Star One D2 was built by Maxar and owned by the Brazilian operator Embratel Star One. It had a launch mass of 6,190 kilograms (13,646 pounds), a design life of 15 years, and was placed in the geostationary slot at 70 degrees west latitude. It carried transponders operating in Ku / Ka / C / X-band frequencies to deliver telecommunications, direct-to-home television services, and fast broadband to customers in South America, Mexico, Central America, and parts of the Atlantic region. It had an X-band payload for the Brazilian military.
Eutelsat Quantum was built by SSTL and Airbus Defense & Space under the umbrella of a public-private research and development project between the European Space Agency, Eutelsat, and Airbus. It had a launch mass of 3,460 kilograms (7,630 pounds), a design life of 15 years, and a Ku-band payload with eight spot beams, featuring a reprogrammable communications system. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 48 degrees east longitude to provide coverage over the Middle East and North Africa, the software-defined satellite could be reprogrammed for new communications tasks in orbit.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SUPER BLACK HOLE: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("The Fastest-Growing Black Hole In The Universe Has A Massive Appetite" by Ashley Strickland, 2 July 2020), astronomers have discovered a peculiarly massive black hole, designated "J2157", at the center of a galaxy 12 billion light-years from Earth. According to Christopher Onken, lead author of a new study on the black hole, a research fellow at the Australian National University's (ANU) Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics:
BEGIN QUOTE:
It's the biggest black hole that's been weighed in this early period of the Universe. We're seeing it at a time when the universe was only 1.2 billion years old, less than 10% of its current age.
END QUOTE
It dwarfs the supermassive black hole named "Sagittarius A*" in the core of our own Milky Way Galaxy, Onken saying:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The black hole's mass is about 8,000 times bigger than the black hole in the center of the Milky Way. If the Milky Way's black hole wanted to grow that fat, it would have to swallow two thirds of all the stars in our Galaxy.
END QUOTE
J2157 was spotted by the SkyMapper telescope at the ANU's Siding Spring Observatory, thanks to its brightness in ultraviolet light. Follow-up observations from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile validated its mass. While black holes, by definition, don't emit light, matter being drawn into a black hole is compressed to the level of emitting high-energy radiation. In the early days of the Universe, core black holes often generated massive amounts of energy, such active galaxies being called "quasars". Christian Wolf, also an astronomer at the ANU, adds:
BEGIN QUOTE:
This black hole is growing so rapidly that it's shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat. If we had this monster sitting at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, it would appear ten times brighter than a full moon. It would appear as an incredibly bright pin-point star that would almost wash out all of the stars in the sky. It would likely make life on Earth impossible with the huge amounts of X-rays emanating from it.
END QUOTE
Onken is eager to find out more about the black hole:
BEGIN QUOTE:
With such an enormous black hole, we're also excited to see what we can learn about the galaxy in which it's growing. Is this galaxy one of the behemoths of the early Universe, or did the black hole just swallow up an extraordinary amount of its surroundings? We'll have to keep digging to figure that out.
END QUOTE
* As discussed in an article from SPACE.com ("This New, Super-Accurate Way To Pinpoint Our Solar System's Center May Help Spot Monster Black Hole Crashes" by Mike Wall, 2 July 2020), astronomers have found a way to pinpoint our solar system's center of mass to within 330 feet (100 meters) -- which is equivalent to the width of a hair, compared with an athletic field.
Traditionally, astronomers have located the Solar System's "barycenter" -- center of mass -- by carefully tracking the movement of the planets and other bodies orbiting the Sun. The barycenter shifts constantly, depending on the positions of the planets: it can lie near the center of the Sun, just beyond its surface, or in between. However, such calculations were compromised by a limited understanding of planetary motion, particularly that of Jupiter, which is well the biggest planet, and so has the most influence.
To come up with a better estimate, researchers analyzed observations of pulsars made over more than a decade by the North American "Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav)" project. Pulsars are rapidly-spinning superdense neutron stars with a radio "hot spot" that spins in and out of view, generating a highly uniform radio pulse train. NANOGrav monitors pulsars using radio telescopes, such as the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. Given the high uniformity of pulsar signals, any deviation in the timing of their beams may be evidence of warping by gravitational waves -- the ripples in spacetime predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.
The US Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project made the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, with further observations following. Most of these events were generated by ripples were generated by merging black holes, but a few of them involved colliding neutron stars. LIGO is optimized to spot short-period gravitational waves generated by relatively low-mass objects spiraling into each other. An April 2019 detection, for example, was traced to two neutron stars that together amounted to 3.4 times the mass of our Sun.
NANOGrav is, in contrast, is seeking long-period waves generated by merging supermassive black holes, which are common in the centers of galaxies, and can contain billions of solar masses. It's a matter of interest, because such observations could provide significant clues on galaxy evolution and the relationship between galaxies and their central black holes. Establishing our Solar System's center of mass is an important element in that effort.
Nailing down our solar system's center of mass is a key part of that effort. Stephen Taylor -- an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee who was involved in the study -- says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Using the pulsars we observe across the Milky Way galaxy, we are trying to be like a spider sitting in stillness in the middle of her web," How well we understand the solar system barycenter is critical as we attempt to sense even the smallest tingle to the web.
... Our precise observation of pulsars scattered across the Galaxy has localized ourselves in the cosmos better than we ever could before. By finding gravitational waves this way, in addition to other experiments, we gain a more holistic overview of all different kinds of black holes in the Universe.
END QUOTE
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (5): Another attraction of customized genetic codes is that an organism that was based on them could not be targeted by viruses -- the viral genome wouldn't be in the same language -- and such organisms would be immune to any natural virus. There is already work on achieving this in bacteria.
This sort of recoding could be very helpful to existing biotechnology. Fermentation tanks that never get wiped out by infections and antibody-producing cell lines that could not be infected by viruses would be extremely valuable. It is possible to conceive that synthetic biology could lead to "parallel biospheres" of organisms that infect nor are infected, linked to the natural biosphere only to the extent they are designed to.
Stephen Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida and his colleagues took a big step by synthesizing DNA in which the existing bases, A, T, C and G, are supplemented by Z, P, S, and B. This hachimoji ("eight letters" in Japanese) DNA offers much denser data storage than evolution has had at its disposal for the past four billion years. With eight letters to play with, for example, a genome could be designed that used doublets, not triplets, as codons -- though that would, of course, demand redesigning the ribosome, the tRNAs, and many other things.
It's a fascinating idea, but is it useful? We could build an unbounded range of proteins using the existing code. However, alternative DNAs would seem to open doors that go to places we don't know exist just yet.
* For the time being, however, synthetic biologists are mostly interested in just making money. Zach Serber had worked at Amyris, a pioneering synthetic-biology company, when the firm was trying to crack the biofuels market. That was a flop, and so Serber, along with some like-minded individuals, founded Zymergen in Emeryville, California, with a different business model. Instead of trying to manufacture product, Zymergen focused on using synthetic biology to supercharge businesses already using biotechnology.
Biotechnology is already a bigger business than is generally realized. Rob Carlson of Bioeconomy Capital, an investment company, has estimated that money made from GM organisms accounted for about 2% of American GDP in 2017. The contribution was split between three industries: pharmaceuticals and crops, contributing $137 billion USD and $104 billion USD respectively, are the ones that the public knows about -- while the third sector, industrial biotechnology, is much less visible but even more lucrative, worth $147 billion USD. Chemicals used for many purposes, including raw materials for plastics, food additives, some fragrances and biofuels, are already being produced at scale by GM microorganisms in fermentation tanks.
As Zymergen's founders realized, industrial biotech also presents a great opportunity to companies seeking to offer innovation as a service. While coming up with new drugs and genetically modified crops is a long and costly business, replacing one strain of industrial yeast with a better one can be done in a week. Industrial customers tend to have specific needs, and are willing to pay big money to have them met. Tim Fell, the boss of Synthace, a synthetic-biology software company in London, says that in one project the company engineered a 200-fold increase in the rate at which bacteria produced something useful -- he won't say what -- in just four weeks.
About 75% of Zymergen's business, according to Serber, is helping companies re-engineer, for industrial purposes, microbes they are already using, in order to increase production, reduce costs, or both. The company is built around machine-learning systems that suggest changes to the genome which could produce an organism and setting -- temperature, nutrient balance, and so on -- that improves on the status quo. Zymergen engineers make DNA tweaks to such ends, most of them to sequences that regulate gene expression. These tweaks, according to Serber, have helped customers for its "molecular technology" make better margins on hundreds of thousands of tonnes of product.
Arzeda, based in the Interbay district of Seattle, has a similar business model and is based on similar technologies. However, while Zymergen concentrates on empirically derived ways to improve productivity, the expertise of Arzeda's machine-learning systems and scientists is in applying a theoretical understanding of how the shape into which proteins fold determines their function -- making them better at what they do, or able to do something new. Arzeda calls itself "the protein design company".
Ginkgo, the iGEM-born startup in Boston, is another variation on the business-to-business theme. Its focus is not on the specifics of tweaking genomes or coming up with new proteins, though it does both, so much as on developing a systemic expertise in the remaking of microbes. Ginkgo calls itself "the organism company". [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: According to an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Climate Change 'Unequivocal' And 'Unprecedented,' Says New UN Report" by Cathleen O'Grady, 9 August 2021), the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodically releases sets of reports on climate change, the last being in 2013.
The 2021 climate assessment report, the sixth issued to date, paints an alarming picture, but stresses there is still time for swift action to mitigate the worst of the projected impacts of climate change. Current average warming is now estimated at 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial records, the latest estimate adding 0.1C to earlier estimates. Under every emissions scenario considered by the report, average warming of 1.5C -- a major target of the Paris Climate Accord -- will very likely be reached within the next 20 years.
Two more reports will be issued to the end of 2021, each approved by representatives of all 195 member states. The first report outlined the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change and projections on expected warming. The other two reports will detail how climate policies can reduce emissions, and what actions need to be taken to adapt to extreme events such as flooding, heat waves, and drought.
Climate science has much improved since the 2013 report, being driven by powerful climate models and bigger data sets. Evidence from ancient climates has offered a way to constrain estimates of what researchers call "climate sensitivity", meaning the anticipated warming caused by concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide double those present in pre-industrial times. The IPCC panel now estimates a global average temperature rise of 2.5C to 4C -- a narrower range than the previously estimated 1.5C to 4.5C.
In a departure from the last comparable IPCC report 8 years ago, this report's range of emissions scenarios includes projections of population growth, urbanization, and other human societal factors. The report sketches out five different "Shared Socioeconomic Pathways", with emissions ranging from very low to very high. In the best-case scenario, with the world reaching net zero emissions by 2050, warming is projected to peak at midcentury with an anticipated 1.6C warming. Even in this scenario, it is likely the Arctic will see at least one late summer free of sea ice by 2050. And in the worst case scenario, warming will very likely reach 2.4C by midcentury, then continue to escalate to 4.4C -- maybe even as high as 5.7C -- by 2100.
Regional assessments show climate change has already led to extremes in heat in nearly every global region, as well as record precipitation and drought. Some changes to the planet are locked in, regardless of how much humanity reduces emissions over the coming decades. Melting of glaciers and ice sheets and thawing of permafrost is now "irreversible" for decades or centuries to come, the report comments -- while the warming, acidification, and de-oxygenation of the world's oceans are set to continue for centuries to millennia. Continued sea level rise, estimated at 3.7 millimeters each year between 2006 and 2018, is also inevitable: over the next 2000 years, oceans will likely rise by 2 to 3 meters if the planet warms by 1.5C, and up to 22 meters with 5C of warming.
* In more positive news, as reported by an article from CNN.com ("Five Things You Didn't Know Were In The Infrastructure Bill" by Katie Lobosco and Tami Luhby, 10 August 2021), the Biden Administration, after considerable wrangling, the Senate passed a massive $1.2 trillion USD infrastructure package, and did it with 19 GOP votes -- including Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader. The bill still has to go to a House-Senate conference committee to hammer out differences, but no major obstacles are expected there. Major elements of the bill include:
Of the many other elements of the plan, five were of particular interest:
The bill is well less ambitious than President Joe Biden had originally introduced. His original $2.25 trillion USD proposal, known as the "American Jobs Plan", included money for caregiving for aging Americans and for workforce training, which Republicans didn't want to vote for. The Democrats are pushing a separate bill, to be passed via reconciliation, to cover those items.
The bipartisan bill also does not include corporate tax hikes, like Biden first proposed to pay for the spending. Instead, lawmakers found other ways to help cover the cost, like imposing new Superfund fees and repurposing some COVID relief funds approved by Congress during the pandemic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office still estimates that the bill would add $256 billion USD to the Federal budget deficit over 10 years. That is a matter to be addressed later.
* Oh yes, on 13 August, Donald Trump was supposed to be restored to the presidency of the USA. The biggest promoter of this idea was Mike Lindell, of the MyPillow company, and Trump's greatest fan. Actually, the predictions of Trump's triumphant return were half-hearted, and really only hinted that the enthusiasm of Trump's followers is fading.
Lindell, along with alternate Trump stooges Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, is staring down the muzzle of a huge libel suit by Dominion Voting Systems, pressed when the trio said that Dominion voting machines racked up huge numbers of false votes in the 2020 election. They tried to have the suit dismissed, but the court wasn't buying it, writing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Dominion alleges that each Defendant made defamatory statements about its role in the 2020 election. Those statements are too numerous to summarize in their entirety ...
END QUOTE
Bizarrely, Trump fans are gleeful at the suit, insisting that it will actually prove that Dominion voting machines were corrupted after all. This glee was echoed by celebrity lawyer and Trump supporter Alan Dershowitz, who said that the trial would force Dominion to reveal engineering details of its voting machines. I replied to that on Twitter:
Greg Goebel / @Wile_Coyote_ESQ: It's a sign of the mental deterioration of Dershowitz for him to claim that Dominion now has to prove there's nothing wrong with their machines. If Dominion were similarly accused of mass murder when no murders were known, they'd hardly need to prove their innocence.
I mean, Dershowitz is supposed to be a big-shot lawyer, and he doesn't realize the defendants have no case? He's gone the way of Rudy Giuliani. I got a reply:
Brewski Is Infringing On Your Freedumbs / @P_Brewski_965: When I read "Dirty Dersch" was playing beach volleyball naked on Martha's Vineyard a few years back, burning everyone's eyeballs with horrific images they could never forget, I got that he was pretty much gone back then.
The Trump Era, being unsustainable, is on the way out. Along with Trump's failed resurrection, resistance to COVID-19 vaccination is being put under ever greater pressure, as employers impose more vaccination mandates, insurers raise premiums on the uninsured, and any other actions that inconvenience the antivaxxers: "We can't force you to get vaccinated, but we can make life difficult for you until you do."
The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson took a shot at Red State governors like Florida's Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott of Florida who have been interfering with pandemic-control efforts, saying: "The governors of two of the largest states are letting COVID burn because muh freedumb plays to an audience of a network owned by a crank Aussie billionaire." One Allison Carter, an editor at the INDIANAPOLIS STAR, more dryly commented:
Allison Carter / @AllisonLCarter: "I trust my immune system" is such a weird reason not to get the vaccine. Yeah, I trust mine to protect me too, which is why I gave it a detailed dossier on what the virus looks like so it can handle it.
One poster shot back that it would be better to prime the immune system by getting the disease. To such postings, I'm inclined to post an animated GIF of TV Judge Judy saying: "Either you are playing dumb, or it is not an act." In any case, public patience with the clueless and ignorant has run out. Another animated GIF I like to post is from the SOUTH PARK cartoon: "Everybody is really mad at you." That's all their trolling has done for them.
* I got a summons for jury duty at the county court house in Fort Collins, north up the road from here in Loveland. I wasn't particularly happy with being called up, but I intended to do my duty without complaint. I poked around online, and found out that I should expect to have a three-day trial, and so made plans accordingly. I got my weekly chores done on Sunday and Monday, and uploaded all my daily blog entries for the week.
The summons told me to call in a day ahead of time, so I called in mid-morning on Monday. All I got was instructions for Monday jurors -- "nobody has to come in" -- and so I read the summons again, to find I had to call after 1 PM for Tuesday jurors.
I called in again in the early afternoon, with the message saying jurors with some numbers were called, those with other numbers were released. "Where's my juror number?" I checked the summons, I was #3645, in the released range. The message said to check back in after 5 PM to see if there were any changes; it sounded like they just meant some of the people who were called might not be, but I checked again anyway to be sure. No, I wasn't called.
It appears to be more likely than not that a juror won't be called. I think what happens is that they schedule a trial before getting into pre-trial discussions. The case could then be dismissed, or plea-bargained, meaning no trial. It seems criminal cases are often plea-bargained; if somebody's clearly guilty, they get hit worse in a trial than if they cop a plea.
I'd been summoned before, and been released. I checked my blog, and found out that had been in 2008, just before my Florida road trip that year. They didn't have the tidy voicemail system at that time, I had to show up for selection. I was one of the few prospective jurors wearing a tie, which surprised me: no way would I show up a court of law in work or casual clothes.
The case was a drunk-driving rap, the defendant having refused a breathanalyzer test. Looking back, he was clueless and pigheaded -- there was no real reason to refuse the test if he had been sober, so refusing to do so was an effective admission of guilt. I don't know what happened to him, but I suspect he didn't fare well.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICAN'S CONSTITUTION (163): There were two major SCOTUS cases during Bush's second term. The first, in 2007, was MASSACHUSETTS V. EPA, in which the state of Massachusetts, 11 other states, several cities, and a number of environmental groups asked the US Environmental Protection Agency to regulate "greenhouse gas" emissions from motor vehicles. In 2003, the EPA replied that the Clean Air Act (CAA) didn't authorize the agency to regulate greenhouse gases, and that it would not do so.
SCOTUS judged 5:4 in favor of the plaintiffs, saying that the CAA had defined "air pollution" in a broad sense as "any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive ... substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air." That is, any emissions into the air that altered the normal composition of the atmosphere and caused harm to humans were air pollutants. The court agreed that climate change was factual, and so set a significant legal precedent for dealing with climate change -- not that much was done in the short term.
The second case, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA V. HELLER, was more significant, dealing with gun control. Richard Heller, a security guard who carried a firearm for work, wasn't allowed under Washington DC laws to keep a firearm at home for self-defense. He and five others sued, with the case being funded by Robert Levy, a Libertarian lawyer from the Cato Institute.
In 2008, SCOTUS decided in favor of Heller, saying the 2nd Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizens to keep weapons for self-defense, much to the dismay of gun-control advocates. However, those who argued that the government had no right whatsoever to regulate firearms were not happy either, since Justice Scalia -- writing the majority opinion -- said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court's opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. [Earlier decisions] holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those "in common use at the time" finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
END QUOTE
The decision did not rule out regulation of firearm ownership, nor did it prohibit bans on "dangerous and unusual weapons". DC V. HELLER was, in effect, a modern clarification of the 2nd Amendment. The 2nd Amendment had been ambiguously written to the point of perversity, achieving an awkward balance between the rights of individuals to bear arms, as part of state militias, with Federal government oversight. It was hard to see exactly what that meant in practice in the 21st century, all the more so because citizen militias effectively no longer existed.
Ironically, since Justice Scalia was one of the most prominent advocates of originalism, the decision was not particularly based on what the Framers thought about the matter -- which would have been a difficult question to resolve, all the more so because the Framers had strongly divided opinions on the usefulness of citizen militias. As was the custom in SCOTUS decisions, DC V. HELLER was instead based on precedent.
* George W. Bush left the White House with very low approval ratings, and the Left would persist in calling him a "war criminal" for his war in Iraq. However, the world moved on, and he became another "president emeritus", engaging in constructive actions, particularly in collaboration with other ex-presidents.
Bush released his biography, DECISION POINTS, in 2010, saying in an appearance that he believed his biggest accomplishment was in keeping "the country safe amid a real danger", with his biggest failing being the collapse of his Social Security reform efforts. He also took up painting as a hobby, to release a book of portraits in 2017. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from SINGULARITYHUB.com ("The World's Biggest AI Chip Now Comes Stock With 2.6 Trillion Transistors" by Jason Dorrier, 25 April 2021), Cerebras Systems of Sunnyvale, CA, working with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has now introduced its "Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) 2" -- the world's most elaborate system on a chip, with 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 processor cores, each core with its own memory, and fast communications links between cores.
This is obviously not a device that will be found in a smartphone; the wafer-scale chip is about the size of a large dinner plate. The first WSE chip, released in 2019, had a staggering 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 processing cores; the new chip more than doubles that number, with its on-chip memory also increased from 18 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes. The rate it transfers data and instructions to and from memory has increased from 9 petabytes per second to 20 petabytes per second. The chip hasn't got physically bigger, however; Taiwan Semiconductor used a 16-nanometer process for the first chip, a 7-nanometer process for the new chip. There were also improvements in design architecture.
Cerebras likes to compare the WSE-2 to the popular NVIDIA A100 AI processor: the A100 has about 54.2 billion transistors, about 2% of those of the WSE-2, and also about 2% of the surface area. Of course, that means 50 A100s more or less equal the WSE-2, and the A100s are a lot cheaper on an individual basis. However, system integration isn't such an issue with the WSE-2, and it's also faster and more efficient than linking hundreds of AI chips together.
The chip comes packaged in a computer system named the "CS-2", which can fit into a standard server rack. Cerebras offers programming and support software for the CS-2. The company is one of the first to offer wafer-scale systems, with customers including GlaxoSmithKline, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Argonne National Lab working with the WSE-1. Not all the applications are in AI, some instead using traditional supercomputer models. Current applications include cancer research and drug discovery, gravity wave detection, and fusion simulation. Cost? "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."
* As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com, ("Lithium Battery Costs Have Fallen By 98% In Three Decades", 31 March 2021) the price of batteries remains something of an obstacle for development of electric vehicles -- but, as it turns out, batteries have been becoming ever cheaper, at a rapid clip.
In the early 1990s, the storage capacity needed to power a house for a day would have cost about $75,000 USD. The cells themselves would have weighed 113 kilograms (250 pounds), and the battery pack would have been the size of a beer keg. Today the same capability can be provided at a cost of less than $2,000 USD, from a 40-kilogram (90-pound) package about the size of a small backpack.
The drop in cost of batteries has done much to enable renewable energy, by providing increasingly cost-effective energy storage that can provide power when the Sun is down or the wind isn't blowing. Further reduction in cost will promote electric vehicles (EV); batteries currently account for about a third of the price of an EV, and so reducing their cost is vital for ensuring that EVs become competitive with conventional ones.
Micah Ziegler and Jessika Trancik of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have conducted a study that concludes the "learning rate" -- the fall in price that accompanies every doubling of cumulative production -- for batteries increased from 20% to 27% in the past few decades. Every time output doubles, as it did five times between 2006 and 2016, battery prices fall by about a quarter. This trend is driven in part by economies of scale: as more batteries are made, producers can spread out the up-front costs of building factories, and use their influence over suppliers to push for lower prices on crucial inputs. There has also been considerable improvement in battery technology, making them more effective, cheaper, and easier to manufacture. Ziegler and Trancik find that a doubling in technological know-how, measured by patent filings, is associated with a 40% drop in price.
The cost reductions are likely to continue. At the moment, the average cost of a lithium-ion battery pack is about $140 USD per kilowatt-hour (kWH), with the drive being towards $100 USD per kWH. At that cost, EVs are expected to become cost-competitive with piston cars, with the industry expecting that will happen in a few years. Battery storage is also booming: the USA installed a record 1.2 gigawatts of storage in 2020, while Australia, Germany, and Saudi Arabia have all planned large grid-scale projects along similar lines. We're not close to diminishing returns yet.
* As discussed in an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Is Lithium-Sulfur The Answer To Electric Aviation's Battery Limits?" by Graham Warwick, 7 August 2019), the push towards electric transportation has been restrained by available battery technologies. While modern lithium-ion batteries are capable, they still leave something to be desired in weight, capacity, safety, and expense.
Options for improved batteries include solid-state batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte in Li-ion with a solid, making the battery safer and improving energy density. Toyota and other car manufacturers are investigating solid-state batteries, with a particular interest in reducing battery size. Another approach is lithium-metal, which replaces the graphite anode in Li-ion with lithium metal to increase energy density.
Still another new battery chemistry, lithium-sulfur (Li-S), is getting attention. Li-S is being promoted by Oxis Energy of Abingdon, England. According to Mark Crittenden, head of battery development there, Oxis now has Li-S cells with an energy density of more than 400 watt-hours per kilogram (Wh/kg), and expects to have 500 Wh/kg soon. That is twice as much as the 250 Wh/kg for the best Li-ion cells currently today.
Batteries are defined by multiple parameters, not just energy density. Other factors include specific power -- that is, the maximum power a battery can supply at any one time, as well as charge-discharge rate, safety, and cycle life. Lithium-sulfur has high energy density, but not high specific power. As far as cycle life goes, the Oxis battery can handle 200 cycles -- which poor, Li-ion easily handling over a thousand cycles. The company is pushing to get Li-S to 500 cycles.
Li-S, along with better energy density, is potentially cheaper than Li-ion, since it doesn't require expensive materials. Li-S is also potentially safer. Dendritic growth of the lithium within a Li-ion cell can cause a short circuit and destructive thermal runaway. That demands safety features that increase the weight and expense of Li-ion batteries. Not a problem with Li-S, according to Crittenden: "We do not get dendritic growth with lithium-sulfur. Any small bumps that form will be eroded in the next cycle as the lithium is used up. Lithium-sulfur does not degrade in a problematic way."
Safety evaluations of prototype Li-S batteries have revealed no show-stoppers. Oxis hopes to have initial production online by 2022, with a capacity of producing millions of units a year.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RAPID PLANETARY EMERGENCE: As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Baby Planets Are Born Exceptionally Fast, Study Suggests" by Adam Mann, 16 June 2020), astronomers have now found that planets form around young stars much more rapidly than had been believed, in less than half a million years.
Planets form out of massive disks of gas and dust that surround newborn stars. Astronomers had wondered if the accumulation of material was sufficient early on to permit planetary formation. Actually observing the process was troublesome, since both the star and the disk shine far brighter than any relatively tiny planet.
To find out how much material is available for planet formation, researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter-Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to weigh the disks around young stars between 1 million and 3 million years old. Past studies found that some lacked the mass to form even one Jupiter-size world, but now observations show that theory was wrong.
Lukasz Tychoniec -- a graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands -- and his colleagues obtained data from ALMA and the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to study 77 protostars in the Perseus molecular cloud, a giant star-forming region about a thousand light-years away. These infant star systems are believed to be between 100,000 and 500,000 years old.
The dishes at the ALMA and VLA can detect far-infrared light, emitted by dust grains about 1 millimeter in wavelength, that can pass through obscuring gas clouds and reach Earth. Measuring the total amount of infrared light given off by the disks provides an estimate of their dust content, and so their mass. The team found the young disks contained about an order of magnitude more material than disks observed just 1 or 2 million years later, which is plenty to account for planet formation.
The large sample size and the use of two different types of observatories, which see in slightly different wavelengths and so measure different dust populations, lend credibility to the finding. However, only one molecular cloud was inspected, and the Perseus cloud may be an anomaly. Tychoniec says his team plans to cast a wider net to see whether the result holds.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Triple Star System Found With Weirdly Warped Planetary Disc" by Michael Irving, 6 September 2020), astronomers have found a triple star that has a highly unusual structure. Most star systems seem to be orderly, with planets orbiting in a flat disk around the star -- a result of the star system forming from a disk-shaped cloud of gas and dust.
Now, astronomers have observed a system where this flat disc is being bent out of shape. The triple star system, named "GW Orionis", is about 1,300 light-years from Earth. The researchers observed GW Orionis for over 11 years Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. They found that the two inner stars in the triplet orbit each other at 1 astronomical unit (AU) apart -- an AU being the distance between Earth and the Sun -- while the third star orbits the other two at a distance of about 8 AU.
The GW Orionis system is young, and features a "protoplanetary disk", from which planets have not yet emerged. The gravitational dance between these three stars has split the protoplanetary disc into three separate rings, with different orientations. The closest ring is angled almost perpendicular to the rest of the disk; this inner ring contains enough dust to create the equivalent of 30 Earths.
The second ring starts about 185 AU from the center of the system, while the third starts at a distance of 340 AU -- making it the biggest protoplanetary disk observed so far. There is some debate over whether the gravitational influence of the three stars is enough to account for the peculiar disk system; some suggest that an unseen planet in between the first and second disks may be involved as well. Further observations will resolve the mysteries.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (4): One of the primary goals of synthetic biology research is to devise new metabolic pathways, using enzymes long understood, and enzymes significantly re-engineered, working off enhanced knowledge of genomes and better genome synthesis. This sort of system engineering is extremely complicated, since it not only means getting a dozen or so different elements to work together towards a desired end, it also means ensuring that the new system doesn't sabotage the operation of a cell. However, it can be made to work -- offering the possibility that almost more or less any small molecule found in nature can be efficiently synthesized by yeast or bacteria in a fermentation tank.
Two particularly interesting possibilities are the cannabinoids made by marijuana, and the variations on opium and morphine made by poppies. There are many different forms of cannabanoids -- some psychoactive, some not; some therapeutic, some not; many legal for some purposes in some places, many illegal for all purposes elsewhere. A set of cannabinoid-synthesizing pathways described by a team under Berkeley's Jay Keasling therapeutic and recreational possibilities along these lines which will be explored by a startup company named Demetrix. A hugely ambitious 20-protein pathway capable of producing morphine and its relatives, developed Christina Smolke, by a former student of Keasling's perhaps more profound possibilities. Smolke has founded a company, Antheia, to make opiates that are cheaper and so more accessible to the tens of millions around the world unable to get pain relief, and also to make opiates that are less addictive.
Modifying natural processes is one thing; coming up with processes unlike those in nature is another. Chemists can synthesize compounds of carbon and silicon, with such "organo-silicon" compounds used in electronics, pharmaceuticals, building materials, breast implants, and other applications. Biosystems, however, do not make them.
In 2016 Frances Arnold of Caltech managed to evolve an enzyme to create organo-silicon compounds. She now guides her directed-evolution technique, which won her a Nobel Prize in 2018, with machine learning to improve its targeting. Arnold believes that synthetic biology can in principle create enzymes for most of the reactions today's chemists bring about with rare catalysts, high temperatures and pressures, or environmentally unfriendly solvents.
Even more ambitiously, a collaboration of ten laboratories around the world is now rewriting the entire genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, brewer's yeast, in order to make it an even better "lab rat" for genetic research than it already is. The research team is carefully stitching together the most appropriate versions of over 6,000 genes, as well as most of the sometimes vital elements found between them -- the result consisting of over 12 million bases of DNA in all. One of the things the project is writing into the genome is a system that will make it cut itself up and reshuffle its genes when commanded to. This suggests an enhanced ability to evolve that could be exploited.
A deeper way in which what is known as "Sc2.0" differs from the original Saccharomyces cerevisiae proper is that it operates with a slightly different genetic code. Three of DNA's 64 codons describe not an amino acid but an action: specifically, "stop". These three codons -- TAG, TAA and TGA -- tell the ribosome and its tRNAs to stop action. In the re-engineered yeast, though, only two of these three stop codons are used. Wherever the natural, baseline yeast genome marks the end of a protein-coding sequence with a TAG codon, the scientists writing Sc2.0 use one of the other stop codons, TAA or TGA -- which means that in Sc2.0, TAG is free to be used for some alternative purpose.
Proteins use 20 different amino acids, but there are hundreds of them. What might happen if proteins were built that included some of these others? In Sc2.0, it will be possible to make the TAG codon "mean" one of these "other" amino acids by designing a new tRNA molecule that recognizes the codon and new enzymes to attach an amino acid to that molecule.
In addition, DNA codes for the 20 amino acids with 61 codons; there are up to six codon "synonyms" for a particular amino acid. In synthetic biology, there's no reason that synonyms might be used to code for some of the "other" amino acids. One potential of this technology is to fabricate drugs that pathogens can't cope with. Pathogens have evolved to defeat ordinary proteins; put in amino acids they have never seen before, and some of those defenses may not work any more. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Thanks to the pressure of the wave of infections due to the COVID-19 Delta variant, the Biden Administration's efforts to get more Americans vaccinated seem to be paying off to an extent. The pace of vaccinations has picked up in particularly laggard Red states like Alabama and Mississippi. It makes a certain amount of sense: hysteria over vaccines, not based in reality, has nowhere to go but down, as it becomes apparent there have been few problems among the tens of millions of Americans vaccinated, while the virus is still killing people. In addition, the fear-mongering of antivaxxers is getting too repetitive and stale, while businesses are increasingly mandating vaccination.
Florida is getting particularly hammered by the Delta variant, with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis perversely working to frustrate efforts to control the pandemic. President Biden made his frustration with DeSantis -- as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been just as perverse -- perfectly clear:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Florida and Texas account for one third of all new COVID-19 cases in the entire country. Just two states. Look, we need leadership from everyone. If some governors aren't willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic, they should allow businesses and universities who want to do the right thing to be able to do it.
I say to these governors: please help. If you aren't going to help, please get out of the way of the people who are trying to do the right thing. Use your power to save lives.
END QUOTE
In reply DeSantis told Biden, in effect, to take a hike. It is unclear how anyone could think that COVIDiocy could be a winning political strategy over the longer run. It can only weaken over time -- and in fact DeSantis, who was high in Florida polls at the beginning of the year, is now well underwater. Biden has the bully pulpit, DeSantis does not; Biden can bet on coming out the winner in the contest. The "longer run" appears to be finally arriving. DeSantis is clearly after the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, but that can be judged a delusion. It would be interesting to see a national poll on his prospects.
* For the time being, things remain troublesome. There's been a spate of passengers getting rowdy or even violent on airliners, with a case this last week in which one violent white male had to be taped to his seat until the airliner landed, with police then arresting him. Face mask requirements are often involved in these incidents, as is alcohol. The Feds are looking into what can be done to put more teeth into penalties for such incidents; it appears local police, presumably not keen on dealing with matters that don't seem under local jurisdiction, often let the rowdies go.
Trump is the underlying cause of the current dissension. He remains in the shadows for the moment, investigations against him necessarily taking their own time in doing it. However, they are not going away; Trump is not going to be forgotten.
Rick Wilson of the LINCOLN PROJECT recently recycled an essay, written in his usual style back in February, titled: "Trumpists, Here Are Your Terms of Surrender. Also, Fuck You." The essay started out with:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Donald Trump is a war leader who failed. Before he was the leader of a failed insurrection, he was a man who'd stoked the violent and unstable tendencies of his most fanatic supporters into a hot flame that came dangerously close to incinerating the Republic. It's time for Donald Trump and his allies to surrender unconditionally, permanently, and without another goddamn word about a "stolen" election.
END QUOTE
Wilson described how, on 2 September 1945, the Japanese Imperial Government signed an Instrument of Surrender on the decks of the battleship USS MISSOURI in Tokyo Bay. The surrender was accompanied by displays of American military might, to rub in the fact that the Japanese had been completely beaten. He suggested that Republican leadership needed to see a lesson in it:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Like Japan facing loss after loss against America's island-hopping campaign, you rationalized each new defeat. Each time, you promised some new miracle to your people. And each time, you felt the vice tightening, the lies harder to tell, the conspiracies more lurid. Until, on January 6, your shock troops launched a Kamikaze raid on the Capitol. It shook America hard.
... Heroic D.C. Police and Capitol Police pushed back the mob and ended the first and let us hope only battle of the Trump Civil War. They protected elected leaders of both parties from assault, violence, and murder.
... For all of you "leaders" who stoked this fire, these are the terms of your surrender. ... Call for the expulsion, censure, or other consequences for the ringleaders in the Senate and House of the coup plot. You know their names, and let's be honest; you won't really miss them. Josh Hawley. Ted Cruz. Rick Scott. Cindy Hyde Smith. Tommy Tuberville. Matt Gaetz. Jim Jordan. Mo Brooks. Kevin McCarthy. Lauren Bobert. Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Devin Nunes.
They have violated their oaths of office in the most profound and hideous fashion; they were the vanguard of an attempt to overturn a free and fair election, all to reinstall a man into office they privately acknowledge lost this election. They did so for reasons of ambition and partisan gain, nothing more.
... Donald Trump will go down as the worst president in American history, having reached that height on the wings of dozens of enablers, toadies, and climbers who will not be forgotten or forgiven. Over and over you lied to yourselves, the media, and the country that Trump wasn't something new and destructive.
END QUOTE
It wasn't hard for me to see in November 2016 that the election of Trump was a defeat for the GOP: they had obtained the weakest win with the worst leader. Almost five years on, that appears to have been an understatement. We've got so used to political chaos that it almost seems normal, but it cannot be sustained.
Things are quiet, tense, and dull for now, but the war continues. The MAGAbots attempt to sweep the Capitol Riot under the rug, but they can't. Trump and the GOP are slowly rolling on to defeat and collapse. They can make trouble before they go down -- but, no, they are not going to be forgotten.
* In the meantime and for the foreseeable future, I'm finding it an effort to maintain morale; the resurgence of COVID-19, forcing me to start masking again, was a setback. The smell of smoke in the air here lately hasn't helped, either. I've become more reluctant to talk with people, worrying that I might sound too whiny or snappish. Flagging morale does have its uses, since it provides an incentive to rethink things in my life that don't seem satisfactory. Come early next year, I should be firing on all cylinders.
Not having anyplace to go for the time being, my yard is a focus of interest. I figured out that in the heat of summer, it's impossible to keep the lawn from browning to an extent; the trick is to keep the brown areas hand-watered, so the roots don't die. Once the weather gets cooler, the brown areas should grow back to green before winter sets in.
The two catalpa trees I planted in 2017, replacing ashes doomed by the emerald ash borer beetle, honestly seem to love warm weather -- which isn't too surprising, since they're a semi-tropical tree, with oversized leaves and, for a short time each year, spectacular blossoms. The one to the north in my back yard is shooting up to the point where I have to tilt my head back to see the top while watering it.
The one to the south, which is about a year younger, is smaller, and seems to be growing more out than up. I am getting a bit of shade for my bedroom-office window out of it, but not to the extent of any real utility. Come next year, I'll get useful shade out of it; good shade in 2023; that; very good the shade in 2024; all I might want in 2025. In the meantime, I keep them generously watered. The big leaves soak up water like sponges -- well, something like that.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (162): George Bush's second term didn't get off to a good start. Worse was to come, when the global economy took a severe nosedive in 2007, the signal event being the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank. Stock markets and GDP took a plunge, with unemployment rising. Bush signed into law a $170 billion USD economic stimulus package, which sent tax rebate checks to many Americans and provided tax breaks for struggling businesses. The collapse was rooted in weaknesses in the finance industry, and the housing market. The government was forced to bail out the Federal National Mortgage Association -- "Fannie Mae" -- and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation -- "Freddie Mac".
Bush's approval ratings collapsed. He attempted to begin initiatives to pursue clean energy, but he was too conflicted with fossil fuels, and had too little authority to do anything. He attempted to pursue immigration reform. There had been a great influx of immigrants during Bush's first term, including millions of illegals. Bush backed the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, written by a bipartisan group of Senators in cooperation with the Bush Administration. The bill envisioned a legalization path for illegal immigrants, to eventually lead to citizenship; establishing a guest worker program; border security measures; and changes to the "green card" alien residence system. It didn't make it through Congress.
At roughly the same time, everything began to go completely to hell in Iraq, with the "Islamic State (IS)" militant group on a rampage. In January 2007, Bush announced a surge of 21,500 more troops for Iraq, along with more aid for the Iraqi government. Although there was resistance in Congress to pumping more aid into Iraq, Bush held the course, and by the summer of 2008, IS had been generally defeated.
In 2005, following the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Bush nominated Federal Appellate Judge John Roberts as Chief Justice, with Roberts quickly confirmed. Roberts would prove a centrist, with a deep commitment to maintaining the political impartiality of the Supreme Court. Bush had originally wanted Roberts to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, but the death of Rehnquist meant a change of plans; O'Connor was instead replaced by Federal Appellate Judge Samuel Alito, who would judge much more to the Right.
The composition of SCOTUS had been stable since 1994, but now it began to shift towards the Right. Democrats had been able to block a number of Bush's appointments to the Federal Judiciary, but there wasn't enough support among Democrats to block Bush's two SCOTUS appointments. Bush once commented that he would appoint "strict constructionists" to the courts -- a concept that is worth more discussion here.
"Strict constructionism" insists on strong adherence to the letter of the law, and nothing else. There are variations on the idea, such as "textualism" -- which could be briefly described as the same idea, though purists say it is not quite as rigid -- and "originalism" -- which expands on the idea, suggesting that "nothing else" is an impractically restrictive condition.
Originalism became the most visible of these related legal philosophies, being associated with Justice Scalia. It is the assertion that later generations could not arbitrarily violate the "original intent" of the Constitution as it had written. Skeptics pointed that nobody ever did arbitrarily violate the Constitution as written. The Constitution denies the right of anyone not born in the USA to run for president and -- without an amendment -- that's the end of it. That's what the Constitution clearly says, and the "original intent" of the Framers isn't a consideration. After all, they insisted that only those born in the USA could be president to make sure that nobody tried to import foreign nobility to set up as a king, which isn't an issue in modern times.
Put another way, the "original intent" of the Framers could only come into play in cases where the Constitutional text was ambiguous -- generally meaning unable to resolve issues that had not been carefully considered by the Framers, or could not have even been clearly imagined by them. Attempting to second-guess the intent of the Framers on matters they hadn't talked or even thought about was a generally arbitrary exercise, enabled by the convenient fact that the Framers were no longer around to offer their opinions. Worse for originalism, the Framers were rarely of one mind on anything they did consider, with the Constitution being in many cases a compromise between opposing views, not an expression of a uniform consensus.
Of course, strict constructionalism and textualism don't go down the rabbit hole in chasing after the opinions of the Framers, but they still have the same fundamental problem: that nobody can or will violate the Constitution as written, and when the Constitution is ambiguous or does not cover an issue, there is no precise meaning of the Constitution to fall back on. Indeed, the intent of the Framers was to create a document that did not impose rigid restraints on later generations, through the Elastic Clause and other mechanisms. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Fly-Eyed Lens Array Captures Dim Objects Missed By Giant Telescopes" by Govert Schilling, 25 March 2021), ever bigger telescopes keep coming online, allowing ever deeper probes of the Universe. However, though they're outstanding at depth, they're not so good at breadth; there's a big need in astronomy for telescopes that are much more focused on breadth than on depth.
Such telescopes, as it turns out, don't need to be all that expensive -- as proven by Dragonfly, a telescope sited in New Mexico that consists of twin fly-eye arrays of commercially-available Canon telephoto lenses, each with 24 lenses. A decade ago, astronomers Roberto Abraham of UT and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University came to the conclusion that an array of dozens of commercial telephoto lenses could gather as much light as a 1-meter telescope while maintaining the lenses' wide fields of view. Canon had just produced a 14-centimeter (5.5-inch) wide lens with a special coating to reduce scattered light. They obtained the lenses, fitted them with camera chips, installed them in the array, and developed a computer system to control them and obtain their data.
By pointing all 48 lenses at the same part of the sky and summing their exposures, Abraham and van Dokkum hoped to find dim diffuse celestial objects. So far, Dragonfly's main claim to fame has been the discovery of numerous ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDG), some of them as large as the Milky Way, but with hardly any stars. In 2016, the researchers found out one that is spinning far faster than it should, given how few stars there are to hold the galaxy together by gravity. That suggested that about 98% of its mass must be in the form of dark matter -- the unseen mass that constitutes some 85% of all gravitating mass in the universe. In 2018, the Dragonfly team discovered the fast-spinning galaxy's opposite: a galaxy rotating so slowly that it must contain hardly any dark matter at all.
The arrays are now to be updated with a total of 120 more such lenses, which will make the Dragonfly one of the most capable wide-area telescopes in the world. The upgrade will cost a modest $3.65 million USD. The new lenses should allow the Dragonfly team to go after a new target: faint clouds of gas surrounding galaxies. These clouds are the dense ends of gaseous filaments that connect far-flung galaxies, thought to have coalesced around regions rich in dark matter. Filters on the new lenses will transmit only the faint red light of glowing hydrogen or the green glow of ionized oxygen to make these wisps of hot, tenuous gas stand out more clearly.
The expansion of the universe stretches light from cosmic objects to longer wavelengths, depending on their distance. To let this "redshifted" light pass through, Dragonfly's filters can be incrementally tilted, to various degrees. Increasing the light's path length through the glass also increases the filters' transmission wavelength—a trick that will extend the reach of the instrument to gas clouds some 100 million light-years away. Team member Deborah Lokhorst of the University of Toronto (UT) says: "Dragonfly is going to provide a completely new view of the Universe." Dragonfly will be particularly well suited to observe the dim glow of vast, tenuous gas clouds that hold clues to the Universe's unseen dark matter.
To map the much fainter filaments of the cosmic web that lie farther from the galaxies, Abraham would like to expand Dragonfly to a 2000-lens array, giving it the same light-gathering power as a 6-meter telescope. He says: "It's not crazy. Dragonfly could well be the first example of a completely new class of optical telescope."
* As discussed in an article from LIVESCIENCE.com ("Lab-Made Hexagonal Diamonds Are Stronger Than The Real Thing" by Ben Turner, 2 March 2021), everyone knows that diamonds are formed under pressure deep in the Earth, and are extremely hard. These diamonds have a cubic-type crystal structure; as it turns out, there are very rare diamonds, created under more extreme conditions, that have a hexagonal crystal structure.
Hexagonal or "Lonsdaleite" diamonds are found in meteor impact craters. There was some belief that they are stronger than cubic diamonds -- but the samples obtained from impact craters are highly impure, and so nobody was too sure of the properties of hexagonal diamonds. Now researchers have forged pure hex diamonds, and measured their stiffness.
BEGIN QUOTE:
Diamond is a very unique material. It is not only the strongest; it has beautiful optical properties, and a very high thermal conductivity. Now we have made the hexagonal form of diamond, produced under shock compression experiments, that is significantly stiffer and stronger than regular gem diamonds.
END QUOTE
Cubic diamonds usually form more than 150 kilometers (90 miles) beneath Earth's surface, under extreme pressures, and temperatures above 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,732 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers generated the hex diamonds by blasting, using gunpowder and compressed air, a dime-sized graphite disk at a wall at 24,100 KPH (15,000 MPH).
To measure the diamonds' strength and stiffness in the instant before the hex diamonds were smashed into bits, the researchers emitted a sound wave, then measured how quickly it traveled through the hexagonal diamonds with a laser. The sound waves cause the diamond density to fluctuate as it moves through, affecting the path length of the laser beam. The stiffer a material is, the faster sound moves through it. The results showed that hex diamonds are indeed stiffer than cubic diamonds.
The researchers would like to created longer-lived hex diamonds -- both to give them a closer investigation, and for commercial purposes. Hex diamonds might make better drill bits, but due to their rarity, might have a distinction in jewelry.
* As reported by SCIENCENEWS.com ("A Meteor May Have Exploded Over Antarctica 430,000 Years Ago", by Sid Perkins, 31 March 2021), 17 particles recovered from a flat-topped mountain in eastern Antarctica appear to be remnants of a meteor that hit the Earth's atmosphere and exploded hundreds of thousands of years ago.
A group of researchers under Matthias van Ginneken -- a cosmochemist at the University of Kent in the UK -- collected 6 kilograms (13.25 pounds) of samples from on top of Mount Walnumfjellet, 2,500 meters (5,500 feet) high. The samples in question range in size from 0.1 to 0.3 millimeters across, and more than half consist of spherules that are fused together into odd-shaped globs. They are rich in nickel and magnesium, with their composition unlike that of Earth rocks, more closely matching "carbonaceous chondrite" meteorites. Ice coring suggests they are about 430,000 years old.
Particles of very similar composition and age were found at two other sites in Antarctica, one more than 2,750 kilometers (1,700 kilometers) away, suggesting they arose in the same event. A simulation put together by the researchers estimated that the meteorite was from 100 to 150 meters (330 to 500 feet) across, and appears to have burst at low altitude. Blast waves would have slammed across an area of about 100,000 square kilometers (38,600 square miles) in size.
The event didn't leave a crater, but temperatures reached up to 5,000 degrees Celsius (2,750 degrees Fahrenheit), melting a few centimeters of ice. A similar event today over a populated area would result in millions of casualties.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* YET ANOTHER ARPA? In 1958, US President Dwight Eisenhower established the "Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)" -- an office dedicated to "blue sky" military research that the armed services saw as too speculative to fund themselves. The Americans feared falling behind the Soviet Union technologically; Eisenhower, who saw that service chiefs often lacked vision, wanted to stay a step ahead. DARPA -- the word "Defense" was tacked on in 1972 to clarify its military focus -- would prove highly successful, notably to lay the groundwork for the global internet. More recently, DARPA provided funding to develop mRNA vaccines that have proven vital in dealing with the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020:21.
As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("The Rise Of 'ARPA-Everything' And What It Means For Science" by Jeff Tollefson, 08 July 2021), the success of DARPA led to the US government establishing clones:
Japan, Germany, and Britain have all launched ARPA-like efforts themselves. The UK effort, the "Advanced Research & Invention Agency (ARIA)", was launched in 2020, with the equivalent of over a billion USD in funding provided to get it running. However, Laura Diaz Anadon -- who heads the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance at the University of Cambridge in the UK -- warns: "The ARPA model has been successful, and we've learned a lot. But ARPA is not a magic bullet that will apply to everything."
Researchers who have studied DARPA and its clones say it works if executed properly, and if the problems are suited to the approach. Of course, it's not trivial to do. It demands competent management that can set up and run grant programs, with a broad freedom to put together research teams, and follow up speculative ideas.
DARPA functions differently from other major US science funding agencies. It has a relatively modest budget, about $3.5 billion USD a year. Its roughly 100 program managers, borrowed for stints of 3 to 5 years from academia or industry, are given plenty of leash in what they fund, and are encouraged to be hands-on managers. In contrast, projects funded by agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) typically see little engagement between program managers and the researchers they fund, beyond annual progress reports. Projects funded by the NIH and such also tend to be conservative, with a disinclination to fund risky ventures that could have big payoffs.
William Bonvillian -- a policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has studied DARPA -- says that the DARPA model doesn't work if program managers aren't given the freedom to fail, which may be a problem with necessarily risk-averse government bureaucracies. That was the problem with HSARPA, which has never amounted to much. Bonvillian says: "If you don't get the culture right on day one, you have got a problem."
Researchers also point out that DARPA works because they have a customer, the Pentagon, for the technologies the agency develops. DARPA program managers are inclined to seek backers in the military who are interested in production systems based on DARPA projects. ARPA-E enhanced the relationship with possible end users by grant recipients to develop plans for commercialization from the outset -- which DARPA has now adopted as a practice.
ARPA-E got the formula right, and has been a notable success. An office inside the US Department of Energy (DOE), ARPA-E has invested $2.8 billion USD in nearly 1,200 projects, which have attracted another $5.4 billion USD in private-sector investments and led to the creation of 92 companies. ARPA-E has also generated large of patents and research papers.
Researchers have had hesitations over Biden's proposals to create ARPA-C and ARPA-H. Some have suggested it makes more sense to simply expand the scope of ARPA-E, and not bother with ARPA-C. Others have worried that the plan to put ARPA-H inside the NIH is misguided, that the NIH is too stodgy to do the job right.
Others worry that ARPA-H's proposed mandate is too broad; there's plenty of private investment in new drugs and medical therapies for prevalent diseases, and so ARPA-H might be better off investigating neglected diseases common in poor tropical countries that don't get much funding. Advances in treatments of neglected diseases could easily have applications elsewhere. In sum, ARPAs are a good idea, but they're just like anything else: they can be made successful, but won't automatically be successful on their own.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY (3): Along with CRISPR and advanced DNA synthesis, synthetic biology has been boosted by a third factor: machine learning. As MIT's Drew Endy pointed out in a 2005 paper, "the designs of natural biological systems are not optimized by evolution for the purposes of human understanding." Humans have a very hard time making sense of them -- but machines don't concern themselves with trying to come up with a coherent theory, they just find patterns and uncover rules. A consistent grasp of "rules of thumb" -- that is, "this is how it works, don't ask why" -- is good enough to do practical engineering, even without a theoretical framework. The rules can be organized into a coherent framework later.
The boom in synthetic biology promises to come to the rescue of the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries. The pharmaceutical industry has been increasingly plagued with diminishing returns, as the "low-hanging fruit" is picked off. The industry suffers from "Eroom's Law", an inversion of Moore's Law, the rule that described the massive growth in computing power into the 21st century; Eroom's Law describes massive growth in cost, with the number of drugs produced per billion USD pumped into development shrinking relentlessly. It was ten in 1970, well under one today, and still going downward.
That suggests opportunities in developing radically new approaches to medicine. One is reprogramming cells for therapeutic purposes, immune-system cells being the most obvious candidates. The microbiome -- the ecology of microorganisms inside and on the surface of the human body -- is another possibility.
As for the petrochemical industry, synthetic biology got off on the wrong foot. The obvious first step was to develop better ways to produce biofuels, preferably from crop waste and other low-value feedstocks. That was a mistake, at least at the outset, because producing competitive biofuels when the oil industry was so deeply entrenched was very difficult. Having stumbled, synthetic biologists then moved into producing more upmarket molecules, such as fragrances and food additives, with far more added value. Some are looking at making plastics environmentally friendly. Instead of grand ambition, synthetic biologists are moving into petrochemicals step by step. They are likely to achieve their early ambitions eventually.
Synthetic-biology executives say their constraint is not money, but focus and time. Every firm has more revolutionary-looking projects than it can execute, and nobody knows when there will be payoffs. Synthetic biologists are confident that they will win in the end, but they don't know where the end is.
* Synthetic biology involved manipulating DNA, the prime focus being to use it to synthesize proteins, as per a recipe:
The production of proteins from DNA via ribosomes looks vaguely -- if only vaguely -- like a computer at work, suggesting that the process can be hacked.
From the 51 amino acids of human insulin, which in 1978 became the first product made by the first biotech company, Genentech, to artificial antibodies containing more than a thousand amino acids, biotechnology consists largely of getting cells to produce proteins they would not normally make by cutting a gene out of one organism and inserting it into another. Traditionally, biotechnology has leveraged off of proteins found in nature, which can regulate blood sugar, kill pests, or break down grime on laundry. Putting the genes for such proteins into the genomes of bacteria that will then secrete insulin, or of crops that need pest resistance, or fermentation tanks churning out supplements for detergent, was an obvious moneymaker.
However, to an extent, leveraging off natural proteins was necessary, since it was so staggeringly difficult to design a protein from scratch, and it was also hard to get mixes of proteins from different sources to work together. Now, thanks to improved DNA synthesis and much smarter software, it is now possible to produce proteins that, separately or together, do things nature does not. It's hard to find proteins that work perfectly, but automatic of the production process allows generation of many variations, that can be automatically tested. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The significant news of the week was the formal unveiling of the House Select Committee on the Capitol Riot, under the leadership of Bennie Thompson. It kicked off with emotional testimony by Capitol Police, describing the events of 6 January in the Capitol Building.
I knew the Thompson Committee would be a big deal, but it is shaping up to be an even bigger deal than I thought. Initially, the committee will establish the facts through testimony from friendly or cooperative witnesses, and once that is done, then work their way up through Trump enablers -- both inside and outside of Congress. It appears that the Department of Justice will enforce Congressional subpoenas on those outside of Congress; how subpoenas to Members of Congress will work is another question, but it seems likely that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi already knows how that will happen. It will be educational.
I suspect that the agitation of Trump supporters in Congress will become muted once they get hit with subpoenas, in effect asking them to back up their wild charges. It is somewhat more interesting to wonder if Fox News talking heads like Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity will be called as well. Why not? They're traitors, too.
The last person to be called to testify will be Trump himself -- who will be confronted with a mountain of testimony against him, and will fail disastrously. That's why the Thompson Committee is so necessary: Trump has to be taken down in full public view and be discredited, reduced to nothingness. After that's done, it hardly seems important that he be convicted in court -- though he will be, presumably through plea bargaining, a trial being problematic. In any case, the Thompson Committee hearings will be the biggest show in Congress since the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, that brought down Senator Joe McCarthy.
Speaker Pelosi has played her cards well, putting in motion a machine that will take down Trump, and neutralize his supporters. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was carrying on about the Biden Administration's backtracking on COVID-19 measures, in the face of the highly contagious Delta variant now causing a new wave of infections. A reporter asked Pelosi about McCarthy's comments, with the Speaker replying: "He's such a moron!"
That was startling, if not all that inaccurate. It appears that Pelosi has, having neutralized McCarthy, written him off. Trump's influence may be headed for steep decline.
* In the meantime, the emergence of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, said to be as contagious as chickenpox, and the reluctance of many Americans to be vaccinated, has led to a step back in the USA's recovery from the pandemic. The White House is trying everything possible to encourage people to vaccinate, but with limited success. Many people are very hostile to the idea.
... so hostile, in fact, that in Missouri, pharmacists and others administering COVID-19 vaccines report that they are often giving them to people who seem to be attempting to disguise themselves, and plead that no one should be told about the vaccination. It appears that those have come to their senses and decided to get vaccinated are worried about the reactions of family, friends, and colleagues who are opposed to it.
It's very discouraging. I was thinking of taking a road trip from here in Colorado to Seattle in September, but now that's out of the question. I'm going back to masking every time I go shopping again; I don't feel I'm at much risk from the virus myself, but I can be carrying it, and give it to others. Mask mandates are coming back anyway.
Things aren't so bad here in Colorado for the moment, but COVID-19 is clearly on an uptrend. Everything is going bad in Florida, in no small part due to Governor Ron Desantis AKA "DeathSentence", who honestly seems to think that defying pandemic control measures is good for his career. In the meantime, the number of Americans who believe that COVID-19 vaccination should be mandatory is creeping up towards the 2/3rds mark. Blanket mandates are not likely to happen, but smaller mandates are on the increase.
This has its dark humor aspects, of course, as shown on Twitter:
pr94563 / @pr945: For all the fear that the unvaxxed have about being guinea pigs in an "experimental" vaccine, do they realize that they are part of the experiment?
They are the control group.
* Chris Cillizza of CNN commented on a rally Trump performed in Arizona, where Trump said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The county has, for whatever reason, also refused to produce the network routers. We want the routers, Sonny, Wendy, we got to get those routers, please. The routers. Come on, Kelly, we can get those routers. Those routers. You know what? We're so beyond the routers, there's so many fraudulent votes without the routers. But if you got those routers, what that will show, and they don't want to give up the routers. They don't want to give them. They are fighting like hell. Why are these commissioners fighting not to give the routers?
END QUOTE
Huh? What? OK, it's an aspect of the ongoing audit of the vote in Maricopa County, Arizona, with those conducting the dubious audit trying to obtain access to internet routers in the state -- in hopes of determining if Maricopa County voting machines were connected to the internet on election day 2020. This links into an elaborate and completely fabricated tale that the vote was manipulated via Italian communications satellites. The ARIZONA REPUBLIC wrote back in May:
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Senate liaison Ken Bennett has said [the routers] are needed to check whether the county's voting machines were connected to the internet during the election. But a county spokesperson said that the auditors already have the information and machines to perform that check, and a previous independent audit commissioned by the county proved they were not.
END QUOTE
Allowing the auditors to obtain the routers poses several problems:
So ... it won't happen. Trump is just making noise and muddying the waters as usual. The pandemic is bad enough; Trump has become something like a pandemic on top of it. How much longer do we endure? I suspect things will head for a resolution next year. There is the question of how long Trump will remain in business, those who saw videos of him in Arizona saying that he looked unwell. I will say no more about that.
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