Sci-Tech News Update

Wonders Abound

Do You Ever Get the Feeling the Oil Countries are Just Laughing At Us?
News like this removes the doubt for me, mostly.

environments on earth, the United Arab Emirates is about to build what is being described as the world's first sustainable city, designed by British architect Lord Foster.

The site is far from promising. Miles from a polluted sea, a fierce sun raises temperatures to 50C (120F) in the summer, and there is no fresh water, no soil and no animals. But tens of billions of petro-dollars will be poured into these seven square kilometres of desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi.

Called Masdar - "the source" in Arabic - the walled city is intended to house 50,000 people and 1,500 businesses. It will have no cars and be self-sufficient in renewable energy, the majority of which will be solar energy.

...

With at least $1trillion (£500bn) invested abroad and sitting on nearly 100bn barrels of oil, Abu Dhabi is the richest city in the world. Its 420,000 inhabitants are theoretically worth about $17m each, and they are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions per capita than any other population in the world.

This week Abu Dhabi is expected to announce a $500m deal to manufacture thin-film solar panels to make Masdar a centre of the global solar energy manufacturing industry.

"This will be the global capital of the renewable energy revolution. It's the first oil producing nation to have taken such a significant step towards sustainable living," said Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud, director of WWF's One Planet Living initiative, which aims to develop sustainable communities. But critics said Masdar is a fig leaf for the rest of the Gulf, heartland of the world's fossil fuel extraction.

Ahh, the joy the rich get in rubbing our noses in it. Of course, they won't be laughing when the world petro-economy crashes and they suddenly realize that they live in an uninhabitable desert with a worthless, or depleted, single resource.

Think of it as a very long-term bubble economy, and then remember the folks who worked for stock options for all those dot-coms and thought they'd be super-rich forever.

Source: The Guardian

Begun, This Clone War Has
So some scientists in California have succeeded in creating cloned embyros from human skin cells. This will, hopefully, eventually lead to a simple process to create stem cell lines from, well, anybody. Which could then hopefully be programmed hormonally, injected into the body to regenerate/regrow/heal... well, almost anything.
This sort of research is presently focused on curing intractable disease like MS, or growing new organs without the risk of rejection, but we're talking about the basic building blocks of the human machine; there's no logical reason to stop there... why not focus on lifespan extension? Plus, if you can reset the age of the cells so that they think they're infantile again, you might have a shot at reducing aging symptoms entirely.

Very neat.

Source: CNN.com

Hinode Mania
The longstanding theory about the Sun's corona, and its mind-bogglingly high temperature being caused by magnetic field waves, has received some serious support from the Japanese solar observatory Hinode.

The magnetic waves — called Alfven waves — can carry enough energy from the sun's active surface to heat its atmosphere, or corona.

"The surface and corona are chock full of these things, and they're very energetic," said Bart de Pontieu, a physicist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California.

The sun contains powerful heating and magnetic forces which drive the temperature to tens of thousands of degrees at the surface — yet the quieter corona wreathing the sun reaches temperatures of millions of degrees. Scientists have speculated that Alfven waves act as energy conveyor belts to heat the sun's atmosphere, but lacked the observational evidence to prove their theories.

De Pontieu and his colleagues changed that by using the Japanese orbiting solar observatory Hinode to peer at the region sandwiched between the sun's surface and corona, called the chromosphere. Not only did they spot many Alfven waves, but they also estimated the waves carried more than enough energy to sustain the corona's temperatures as well as to power the solar wind (charged particles that constantly stream out from the sun) to speeds of nearly 1 million mph.

They then added on to that with some computer simulations and seem to have the theory down. Of course, whenever science finds an answer it seems to come up with two smaller questions:

Many mysteries remain about the sun's restless activities. De Pontieu's group focused on Alfven waves generated by the sun's heat turbulence, but other researchers examined Alfven waves generated when the sun's magnetic field lines stress and snap back together like invisible magnets. That reconnection force also creates jets of X-rays that shoot outwards from the sun, as captured by Hinode's instruments.

Scientists still don't know which source of Alfven waves plays a more important role in the heating the sun's atmosphere, but can use the latest findings as a stepping stone.

"We need to study both more, to see which one dominates," noted De Pontieu. "But it's nice for people to know that Alfven waves can do the job."

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! SCIENTIST FIGHT!!!

Source: Space.com

Real Life Story, Onion-Worthy
It sounds like a joke, but a double-amputee athlete has been banned from Olympic competition because, according to the federation governing the athletic competition, his prosthetics are significantly better for running than human legs. What's more, they may well be right.

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — The IAAF ruled Monday that double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius is ineligible to compete in the Beijing Olympics because his prosthetic racing legs give him a clear competitive advantage.

The International Association of Athletics Federations had twice postponed the ruling, but the executive Council said the South African runner's curved, prosthetic "Cheetah" blades were considered a technical aid in violation of the rules.

..

The IAAF endorsed studies by German professor Gert-Peter Brueggemann, who conducted tests on the prosthetic limbs and said they give Pistorius a clear competitive advantage over able-bodied runners.

"An athlete using this prosthetic blade has a demonstrable mechanical advantage (more than 30 percent) when compared to someone not using the blade," the IAAF said.

..

Brueggemann found that Pistorius was able to run at the same speed as able bodied runners on about a quarter less energy. He found that once the runners hit a certain stride, athletes with artificial limbs needed less additional energy than other athletes.

The professor found that the returned energy "from the prosthetic blade is close to three times higher than with the human ankle joint in maximum sprinting."

Isn't it amazing that we can even have this debate now? Of course, the prosthetics are hardly a replacement for the whole package of a human leg; really they're just very sophisticated pieces of carbon fiber. But still... how long until people start to replace their fleshy parts electively?

The Onion jokes that the time has already come, getting in on a story that, as I said, was just too much like their own satire to begin with:

NEW YORK—An International Association of Athletics Federations ruling Monday disallowing double-leg amputee Oscar Pistorius, who uses special Cheetah-brand racing prosthetics, from participating in the 2008 Beijing Olympics has left over 70 U.S. Olympic track and field hopefuls feeling "pretty stupid" for their recent decisions to cut off their own legs in an attempt to gain a similar advantage

Hehehe.

Sources: The Associated Press
The Onion