Day 66

President Gerald Ford -My Perspective

The nation mourns the loss of an outstanding man, a loving husband, finefather, loyal patriot, superb athlete - a kind and decent man. GeraldFord was a dedicated public official who was shabbily treated by the media and what passed for wit in those days. Those who knew him well described him as a friendly man, modest and unassuming. In their membrances of President Ford the listener has the impression that the tales of his humanity are unforced.

Despite Anthony's oration in Julius Caesar it is the good we remember of the dead and that is well. For those who did not know him our memories are of Ford the President. He was dealt a hard hand: unelected, following the turmoil of Nixon and Watergate and afflicted with a Democratic Congress. Ford had greatness thrust upon him and he responded with openness and an effort to do what was best for the nation.

He was unlucky in the mini-French Revolution brewing in the Congress. During Ford's presidency the economy was a mess and only Jimmy "Esau" Carter could make it worse. Little noted in his eulogies Ford also pardoned the scum who fled the country rather than serve their country. Vietnam fell and the re-education camps opened. Cambodia fell and a horrible genocide begun. In Korea two Army officers were butchered by the North Koreans and Ford did nothing. Under his auspices the obnoxious Helsinki Accords were signed.

President Ford was a man to emulate, a man who should have been given respect for his outstanding qualities. In a better world he would have worked with a Congress that matched his decency and humanity. It was his misfortune and that of the nation that he never had that opportunity.

Day 66

From IW Sustainable Manufacturing: Au Naturel

More evidence that Leftists are seizing control of the Evil Empire -although the news that green (environment) is green (dollars) in more ways than one is good for us all. I imagine the new processes "consume" more land than a traditional plant but getting rid of the pollutants could be a worthwhile trade.

When Alcoa's new smelter in Iceland becomes operational ... it will benefit from natural sustainable technologies previously employed at thecompany's smelting operations in Mount Holly, S.C. It's part of an initiative that Pittsburgh-based Alcoa Inc. developed six years ago and is known as the 2020 Strategic Framework for Sustainability....

Alcoa is using plants, soil and microbes -- rather than tanks, pumps andmechanical systems -- to reduce the volume of water it discharges aswell as to lower the level of pollutants in the discharged water.

Alcoa is working with Roux Associates Inc., an Islandia, N.Y.-based environmental management and consulting firm, on natural systems at three locations: Mount Holly, Iceland and Lafayette, Ind.

The natural approach at Mount Holly, which is still a work in progress, involves "greening" the smelter's production area with runoff-reducing plants, constructing treatment wetlands to remove contaminants from water and using spray irrigation on grass and a grove of polar trees in an application of phytoremediation technology. Phytoremediation is a passive technology that uses fast-growing trees and plants to deal with environmental contaminants, according to Roux Associates.

Even in its pilot stage, the natural approach at Mount Holly has cut process water discharges to the locally owned public water treatment works by 60% to 70%, at a cost "at least" 50% less than conventional technology, says Alcoa.

... at Alcoa's engineered-products plant in Lafayette ... commercially available mushroom compost is being used to remove low levels of PCBs(polychlorinated biphenyl), aluminum, suspended solids, and oil and grease from process and storm water. This natural media filtration system reduced PCB levels to less than 100 parts per trillion from one part per million during its pilot stage... Now the facility is achieving "non-detect levels" of PCBs as measured by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency methods, the company claims.

Alcoa figures when its natural approach at Lafayette is operating full scale, it will have saved $10 million in up-front capital costs compared with conventional engineered methods, and will save $800,000 to $1 million a year in operating and maintenance costs.

Also from IW Materials -- Shape-Shifting Plastics

Cool. I wonder what neat toys will come from this.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and theHelmholtz Association of German Research Centers ... have invented a new class of materials that can assume three different shapes depending on how much heat is applied.

"Triple-shape materials can switch from shape A, then to shape B, and onto shape C," explains polymer chemist Andreas Lendlein of the Helmholtz Institute, who developed the materials with MIT chemical engineer Robert Langer. "Using two, rather than just one, shape changes offers unique opportunities for applications such as 'intelligent' stents or 'smart' fastener systems." Intelligent stents, for example, could assume an oval shape for insertion, a round shape for use and a compressed shape for removal.

In previous collaborations, Langer and Lendlein invented a dual-shape class of materials used to create a 'smart' suture, and a plastic that changes shape with light.

More from IW U.S. Tort Costs Dip In 2005, Analysis Shows

No wonder 2005 was a good year. I wonder if we could find out what caused the decline and repeat it. I'll bet that we can answer Mr.Sutter's question about the Democratic Congress and tort lawyers.

It amazes me that a manufacturer of a legal product can be sued even if the product meets all government standards. A good reform to me would ban all such lawsuits. The only lawsuit against a legal product should be if the product is defective and then the suit should be for actual damages.

U.S. tort costs reached $261 billion in 2005, for a growth rate ofapproximately 0.5% and down significantly from the growth rate of 5.7%i n 2004 and 5.5% in 2003, according to the "2006 Update on U.S. Tort Cost Trends."

The study from the Tillinghast business of professional services firm Towers Perrin points out that the $1.1 billion increase over tort costs in 2004 is the smallest since 1997.

"It's difficult to say whether tort reform measures have impacted this slow down in tort costs growth," says Russ Sutter, Tillinghast principal."We have yet to see what, if any, impact the class-action reform legislation that was passed in February 2005 will have on futureclass-action claims -- as well as whether the newly elected DemocraticCongress will have an impact."

Insured asbestos losses expanded by $7 billion in 2005, lower than increases of $7.3 billion in 2004, $10.2 billion in 2003 and $12.4billion in 2002, the study says.

Looking ahead, the company forecasts growth rates in U.S. tort costs of3.5% in 2006 and 4.5% in the two years after that. "The findings have shown that the trend toward more moderate increases in tort costs appears to be holding in 2006; however, continued lawsuits in the pharmaceuticals industry and obesity-related litigation, as well as asbestos claims and the backdating of options in U.S. corporations have the potential to change things going forward."

MIT creates 3-D scaffold for growing stem cells

Wonderful news. I'm ready for my new body, something without the pot belly and more hair on the head, less in the ears. Why are we waiting?

Stem cells grew, multiplied and differentiated into brain cells on a new three-dimensional scaffold of tiny protein fragments designed to be more like a living body than any other cell culture system. An MIT engineer and Italian colleagues will report the invention-which may one day replace the ubiquitous Petri dish for growing cells-in the Dec. 27th issue of the PLoS ONE. Shuguang Zhang, associate director of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering, is a pioneer in coaxing tiny fragments of amino acids called self-assembling peptides to organize themselves into useful structures.

Working with visiting graduate student Fabrizio Gelain from Milan, Zhang created a designer scaffold from a network of protein nanofibers, each 5,000 times thinner than a human hair and containing pores up to 20,000 times smaller than the eye of a needle. The researchers were able to grow a healthy colony of adult mouse stemcells on the three-dimensional scaffold without the drawbacks of two-dimensional systems.

In addition to helping researchers get a more accurate picture of how cells grow and behave in the body, the new synthetic structure can provide a more conducive microenvironment for tissue cell cultures and tissues used in regenerative medicine, such as skin grafts or neurons to replace brain cells lost to injury or disease.The scaffold itself can be transplanted directly into the body with no ill effects.....In the body, cells are attached to and supported by the cells, otherstructures and proteins around them. A cell's normal environment is a complex network of tiny fibers, gaps and pores through which oxygen,hormones and nutrients are delivered and waste products filtered away. Cells move within their natural environments in response to chemical signals or other stimuli.

Researchers are aware that cells on flat surfaces have skewed metabolisms, gene expression and growing patterns. But the only choices have been glass labware and a product called Matrigel, a gelatinousprotein mixture secreted by mouse tumor cells. While Matrigel does resemble a complex extracellular environment, it also contains growth factors and unknown proteins that limit its desirability for experiments requiring precise conditions. "Synthetic biopolymer microfiber scaffolds have been studied for more than 30 years to mimic a living 3D microenvironment, but concerns exist about their degradation products and chemicals," the authors wrote in the paper.Other synthetic polymer biomaterials are simply too big. Getting cells to grow on them is like forcing spiders to build webs on skyscraper girders. Zhang's nanofiber scaffold, around 1,000 times smaller than the existing systems, is much closer in size to the extracellular matrices that living cells manufacture themselves.With the addition of defined amino acid fragments called active motifs, the scaffold can be fashioned to coax stem cells to behave in certain desirable ways-such as differentiating into needed body tissues or migrating toward bone marrow and other natural destinations.

"What makes these designer scaffolds particularly interesting is that cells survive longer and differentiate better without additional soluble growth factors," Zhang said. "This suggests that extra cellular microenvironments may play a more important role for cell survival andfor carrying out cell functions than previously thought."The active motif method could be readily adapted to studying cell-to-cell interaction, cell migrations, tumor and cancer cell interaction with normal cells, cell-based drug testing and other diverse applications.

"I believe that in the next 20 years all cell cultures will be in 3D with the designer scaffolds, and most textbooks about cell biology will have to be revised when people obtain results from 3D cell culture studies," Zhang said.

The researchers are now testing the designer scaffold with a variety of cells, including tooth, bone, heart, liver, cartilage, skin, pancreas, blood cells and artery-forming cells.

Day 65

Happy New Year and happy blogging.

May all of your entries be linked to InstaPundit.

Rams Won.

They certainly surprised me. I thought they would quit after the Giants won yesterday. Man, if they had played like that all year -. Still a classy game and who knows maybe a return to the playoffs next year.

Day 64

Fish Tales

I have just finished with The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat by Charles Clover. I was surprised by two comments in the book which by the way was an interesting read on the problems of maintaining fish populations.

In the first Mr. Clover noted that the restaurants of the famous and wealthy often serve endangered species. He noted one food purveyor who uses :sustainable" fishes to produce its high quality product. The purveyor is McDonalds. For some reason McDonalds does not tout its green status and unfortunately Mr. Clover's review will not be as widely read as it should. I would think though in a world that admires complexity so much - Saddam wasn't all that bad and so on - that the good done by the evil McDonalds would merit some attention.

Mr. Clover also does an excellent job dissecting the lousy conservation practices of the EU. Another surprise nomination for good guy from this honest European - the US. Oh, he chastises President Bush for "reneging" on the Kyoto Treaty - Mr. Clover betrays an ignorance of how treaties become law possessed by the entire environmental movement - but acknowledges that as far as the fish go the US is ahead of the pack.

Christmas Annoyance

The young have their gifts and the elderly are trying to get the darn things to work. Amid the tears and anger of gifts that do not perform as advertised one that sets my teeth agrinding is a stupid monkey doll. The batteries for the blasted thing are installed in its anus. You pull back the hide unscrew a plastic covering and then when batteries are installed the bloody thing does nothing interesting.

I'm sure some pervert thought it would be funny: people fiddling with a monkey's rear end. But then I think it is funny to return the stupid thing.

Day 63

Death of an American Hero

Jeane Kirkpatrick is gone. For those who admire fortitude, intellectual rigor and mastery of the English language this was the woman for you. The world is a lot better because she was here and because she fought on our side.

Wind Picksup
Materials needed to make wind turbines are limited and the industry fears it will fail to keep pace with growing demand for the clean energy source.

Benefiting from spiraling oil prices and the popularity of green energy sources, wind farms -- mostly on land but also offshore -- have in recent years become an increasingly common sight throughout Europe. Wind-generated power now accounts for 3% of Europe's electricity requirements, according to the European Wind Energy Agency (EWEA). In Denmark the figure is 20%, 8% in Germany and 7% in Spain.EWEA hopes 22% of European electricity requirements will be filled by wind power by 2030.

Wind power in the US has expanded by 36% in 2005 with the help of federal funding. The rush to wind power has proved a boon for the industry in the shape of lucrative contracts but it has also caused problems for companies as they struggle to meet multiplying deadlines. Turbines ordered today would not be delivered until 2008 or possibly 2009.

Carbon Taxes

The UK announced that taxes on airline passenger tickets will double to £10 ($19.80) for most flights from Feb. 1, with duties on long-haul business class tickets doubling to £80 per ticket, as part of an effort to reduce carbon emissions. Aviation accounts for a fifth of carbon emissions produced by transportation.

UK airlines roundly criticized the move, saying it would hurt carriers financially while producing little environmental benefit. Cleaner fuel, more efficient aircraft and ATC management, the industry suggests, are the best ways to address environmental concerns.

Solar poer

A concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive. By using an optical concentrator, sunlight intensity can be increased, squeezing more electricity out of a single solar cell.

The cell uses a unique structure called a multi-junction solar cell. This type of cell achieves a higher efficiency by capturing more of the solar spectrum. In a multi-junction cell, individual cells are made of layers, where each layer captures part of the sunlight passing through the cell. For more information, visit the Solar America Initiative website at: http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/solar_america/.

From Russia but no love

A raid-like search (whatever that is) was reportedly been conducted at IBM 's Moscow offices early Wednesday morning with similar incursions at LANIT and R-Style, Russian partners of IBM, according to a news report from Russian news agency Regnum <http://www.regnum.ru/english/751020.html> .

Masked agents with machine guns from Russia's special police force OMON conducted the search.

Day 62

Boomer Sooner.

Wow. A great game for the Big 12 ( I can not get used to saying that) Conference Championship with the right outcome.

Bio chips.

STMicroelectronics has demonstrated a prototype MEMS device capable of selectively collecting and manipulating biological molecules. The work may result in cost-effective automated sample preparation for medical and forensic diagnostics.

From the press release

The prototype chip contains a tiny channel, measuring about 1mm in length, 0.1mm in width and 50 microns in height which is filled with a solution containing the molecules of interest. On the bottom of the channel, an array of tiny platinum electrodes (25micron wide, separated by 25 microns) provides precise control over the pattern of the electric field in the channel and therefore the forces applied to the biological molecules.

ST says current biotechnological platforms such as its In-Check devices, work for the diagnosis of specific diseases or the monitoring of food and water for bacterial contaminants by allowing the rapid detection of particular genetic material in liquid biological samples. But the preparation of the samples is still a relatively time-consuming process performed with large samples in laboratories using techniques that require skilled technicians and are difficult and expensive to implement with smaller samples.

...the aim of its research program is to explore new methods to automate sample preparation, so that the biological molecules of interest could be rapidly extracted from "raw" specimens such as saliva, blood or biopsy tissues and used as the input to the lab-on-chip diagnostic stage.

The technique used by the ST researchers is based on dielectrophoresis, where an electric field is used to separate biological particles contained in a conductive solution. The careful setting of physical and electrical factors allows precise control of the movement of target particles and researchers demonstrated that this could be exploited for practical uses. Potential benefits include the ability to isolate cells that are present in low concentrations, to increase the concentration of cells in a solution and to extract DNA from the cell nucleus, as well as allowing sample preparation to be performed in the field by personnel with minimal training.

...the researchers also successfully showed that by precisely controlling the voltage applied to different electrodes, cells could be collected at one specific region and then moved to other regions in either direction.

Crazy world Part 1
I want to murder a guy, say a defector from Mother Russia, and instead of shooting him or knifing him or killing in a way that could point to half a billion folks I use a radioactive isotope? A radioactive isotope that can be traced back to Russia? Do I read too many James Bond novels or am I just nuts?

Crazy World Part 2
The local paper carried an article on the ease with which an illegal immigrant can obtain a subsidized home loan. Please do not try this I any country other than America. Here again I'm sure that I'm a lunatic. A guy enters the country illegally and I pay for him to get a home. The bank is so sure that this individual will not be deported that it grants him a loan. Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?

Hydrogen storage

From the press release

Whilst hydrogen is thought to be an ideal fuel for vehicles, producing only water on combustion, its widespread use has been limited by the lack of a safe, efficient system for onboard storage.

Scientists have experimented with ways of storing hydrogen by locking the gas into metal lattices, but metal hydrides only work at temperatures above 300°C and metal organic framework materials only work at liquid nitrogen temperatures (-198°C). Scientists at the University of Bath have invented a material which stores and releases hydrogen at room temperature, at the flick of a switch.

Although its fuel to weight ratio is insufficient to make an entire hydrogen tank from it, the material could be used in combination with metal hydride sources to store and release energy instantaneously whilst the main tank reaches sufficient temperature, 300°C, to work.They hope to have the fully-working prototype ready within two to three years.

"The problem of how to store hydrogen has been a major bottleneck in the development of the hydrogen power technology," said Dr Andrew Weller from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath (UK)."Hydrogen has a low density and it only condenses into liquid form at -252°C so it is difficult to use conventional storage systems such as high-pressure gas containers which would need steel walls at least three inches thick, making them too heavy and too large for cars."

The US Department of the Energy has said that it wants six per cent of the weight of hydrogen storage systems to be hydrogen in order to give new hydrogen powered cars the same kind of mileage per tank of fuel as petrol-based systems.

Whilst metal hydrides and metal organic framework materials can achieve this kind of ratio, they only work at extremes of temperature which are difficult to engineer into an ordinary vehicle.

"Our new material works at room temperature and at atmospheric pressure at the flick of a switch. Because it is made from a heavy metal (Rhodium), its weight to fuel ratio is low, 0.1 per cent, but it could certainly fill the time lag between a driver putting their foot on the accelerator and a metal hydride fuel tank getting up to temperature."

The University of Bath researchers made the discovery whilst investigating the effect that hydrogen has on metals. Having constructed an organo-metallic compound containing six rhodium (a type of metal that is also currently found in catalytic converters in cars) atoms and 12 hydrogen atoms.

They soon realised that the material would absorb two molecules of hydrogen at room temperature and atmospheric pressure - and would release the molecules when a small electric current was applied to the material.This kind of take up and release at the atomic scale makes the material an ideal candidate for solving the hydrogen storage problem.The researchers are now looking at ways of printing the material onto sheets that could be stacked together and encased to form a storage tank.

Potentially this tank could sit alongside a metal hydride tank and would kick into action as soon as the driver put their foot on the accelerator, giving the metal hydride store the time to heat up to 300°C - the temperature that normal petrol-powered engines run at.

"The new material absorbs the hydrogen into its structure and literally bristles with molecules of the gas. At the flick of a switch it rejects the hydrogen, allowing us to turn the supply of the gas on and off as we wish."

Just in time for football

I wish they had had this when Peterson broke his foot.

Dr Gwynne Hannay has built a gadget to promote bone cell formation.Dr His device replicates the mechanical and electrical stimulants which occurred naturally in the body to repair fractured and broken bones.

Dr Hannay's research has advanced the understanding of how bone cells can be stimulated to heal factures and has for the first time combined the artificial reproduction of both mechanical and electrical stimulants.

Combining the two stimulants produces a synergistic effect. Normal fractures that would otherwise heal successfully could be accelerated with the use of these stimulants.

Day 61

Lost Liberty

Britain may be getting closer to Big Brother than some of us realize. The British have begun study programs to determine if they can identify dangerous criminals before they commit crimes. The examples they chose to set up as examples the program would identify are child murders and serial rapists. The team is concentrating on reducing the risk of those with a history of domestic violence turning into murderers. About a quarter of murders in Britain are related to domestic violence. No one would object to stopping these evils before they take place.

However, the Devil is both in the criminals and how they are identified.Experts build psychological profiles of likely offenders. Former partners and mental health workers will provide their views which will be combined with police records. With more confidence than I could muster, a senior criminal psychologist noted that there are some pretty dangerous people out in the community but is confident that risk models based on the gossip will separate the, as she put it "wheat from the chaff."

I have a few problems with this "crime-fighting technique:

1. I've worked with risk models before. They attempt to subscribe objective values to subjective evaluations. How do you determine that one wife-beating equals four drunk arrests in terms of likelihood to commit murders?

2. What are the parameters used to predict future actions other than gossip and criminal records, neither as I understand are good predictors of criminal behavior?

3. How do you determine that these models work? Are there double-blind tests? This seems like a lose-lose situation. You lose if your tests don't demonstrate some correlation and you lose if your tests do show correlation and you "let" someone die.

4. The corrective actions are arrest or medical treatment. Arrest for something you haven't done is wrong. How do you determine when the medical treatment works particularly since even the psychiatrists testify their methods are often unsuccessful?

5. Increased surveillance is proposed as another method to prevent future crimes. How does that work? Since the criminal doesn't know when he will commit his next crime the surveillance must be constant. Does a small army of police follow the poor beggar everywhere he goes? Do we place electronic monitors on him day and night? That might be enough to drive him over the edge.

6. Crimes of passion and of the moment are not covered by this process. Is this a good investment of resources pursuing the outlier criminal?

7. Britain already uses one crime fighting technology: cameras watching for signs of aggression. With over 4 million cameras installed in the past twelve years, the murder rate remains about the same.

You will not find me on the donor's list for the ACLU. However, this idea is a stinker. It is unscientific, won't work and depends on the good graces of psychologists. I trust lawyers and judges and police officers far more than the social scientist to administer the laws.