Science Channel - Is This a Good Idea?

Al Gore's Energy Challenge

Full disclosure here. While I am indeed extremely concerned about global warming and what we can do to avert a climate catastrophe in the too-near future, there’s an ulterior motive behind this week’s essay as well. I’m hoping, albeit improbably, that my favorite Futurama talking-head-in- a- jar, former Vice-President -turned- Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, will somehow stumble upon this page via Google Alerts and actually deign to post a comment on my blog. As you can see from this picture of his Nashville office, he’s got a few things on his plate right now. But hey, Mr. Vice-President, if you do happen to be reading this, it wouldn’t take too long to pound out a few words of encouragement or wisdom, would it? And while you’re at it, sir, please feel free to weigh in on the recent controversy in this space regarding the relative merits of Survivor vs. Night Ranger when it comes to 1980s Lite Metal mullet-rock. We all could benefit from a statesmanlike resolution of that question.

                     

Robotic Bartenders?

I was going to write this week about Nobel Laureate Al Gore and his bold challenge in a recent speech that the U.S. should endeavor to generate 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2018. But I’ve decided to postpone that weighty discussion and instead examine another visionary proposal: robotic bartenders.

Unlikely as it may seem, there is a six degrees of separation connection between the two ideas. In addition to being the winner of the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election and a climate change crusader, Gore’s resume also includes occasional guest appearances as a talking-head-in-a-jar on the animated series Futurama — whose cast of characters also includes Bender, a hard-drinking automaton that has been known to close down a few 31st-century gin joints.

But I digress. If a robot can paint and weld in automobile plants, fly combat missions in Afghanistan and even vacuum the carpet in your living room, why shouldn’t it be able to mix at least a passable vodka martini?

Personal Jet Packs?

I’m hearing complaints that I tend to blog too much about bleak, scary hypothetical end of the world  scenarios.  As a result, I’m going to put aside my previously planned topic — the pros and cons of various strategies for dealing with a global onslaught of flesh-eating zombies — and instead focus on a subject that inspires a tad more bonhomie: The personal jet pack.

If your only familiarity with the personal jet pack comes from the James Bond flick Thunderball, in which Agent 007 relies upon the gadget to escape some pistol-wielding bad guys, you may be surprised to discover that the jet pack — or rocket belt, as it’s sometimes called — actually is a real, functioning technology that’s been around for more than 60 years. During World War II, German scientists developed the Himmelstürmer (in English, “sky stormer”), a pair of what essentially were miniature V1 missiles  attached to a harness. The device was designed to enable Wehrmacht combat engineers to leapfrog distances of up to 75 yards over minefields, barbed wire and bombed-out bridges. A prototype was captured by U.S. forces and sent back home for study. After the war, the Pentagon wanted to develop a more powerful version, which it dubbed the Small Rocket Lift Device, for use in reconnaissance and amphibious landings.

The first functional personal flying device was the Bell Rocket Belt, invented by engineer Wendell F. Moore in the 1950s and early 1960s, which used nitrogen and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to power twin jet nozzles that sprouted from behind the wearer’s shoulders like angel wings. In 1961, a week after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, an extremely brave individual named Harold Graham made the first unassisted jet-pack flight at an airport near Niagara Falls. He reached an altitude of just 4 feet and traveled about 30 yards, but it was a start. Eventually, Graham managed to elevate to a height of 30 feet and cover slightly more than the length of a football field. That year, he gave a demonstration for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Nevertheless, the military was underwhelmed by the original Rocket Belt, because it had one severe limitation: users could only stay in the air for a maximum of 21 seconds. In the late 1960s, the Pentagon took another stab at the concept, investing $30 million to develop Bell’s Individual Mobility System, which employed a gas-turbine jet engine powered by kerosene fuel. The IMS could stay aloft for 20 minutes and cover much larger distances than the Rocket Belt, but it too had drawbacks. The system weighed a hefty 170 pounds and was loud enough to make it useless for surveillance. The project eventually became a victim of budget cuts.

From then on, other than the jet-pack pilot who made a spectacular landing at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and an occasional appearance as a prop in science fiction movies, the concept was pretty much relegated to the dusty corner of oblivion occupied by the likes of the Amphibicar, the Dymaxion House and the Picturephone.

That is, until recently, when two companies — U.S.-based Jetpack International and a Mexican competitor, Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana — began marketing personal flying devices to civilian thrill seekers who happen to have $150,000 or so to spend. Both are developing next-generation gadgets that promise to break through the previous time and distance limitations. According to a 2007 story in Popular Mechanics, Jetpack’s upcoming $200,000 T73 model, scheduled for release sometime in 2008, will burn jet fuel instead of using hydrogen peroxide, and will remain aloft for 19 minutes with an 11-mile travel range. Meanwhile, TAM is working to develop its own Jet Belt, whose single titanium jet engine will be capable of delivering 490 pounds of thrust.

So will jet packing become the next hot extreme sport? As this YouTube video suggests, it must be incredible fun. The downside: As the manufacturers readily admit, personal flying devices are pretty dangerous and require lots of careful training. Is the prospect of a careless adrenaline junkie running out of fuel and plummeting to Earth — or crash-landing on the roof of your house — simply too great of a risk? Express your opinion below.

Should Scientists Create Artificial Life Forms?

Mycoplasma genitalium is a bacterium that resides on epithelial cells inside the genital tracts of humans suffering from non-gonococcal urethritis. Up to this point, M. genitalium’s main claim to fame was that it is one of the least complex organisms known to man. But now, the humble microbe is the subject of worldwide headlines; researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have just accomplished a scientific first by assembling a near-perfect replica of the bacterium’s 582,970 base-pair genome from its chemical components.  If Venter’s team is able to insert the synthetic genome into a living bacterium, which they hope to do sometime in 2008, in theory, at least, it should take over control of the organism’s functions, in the same way that installing and booting up a copy of a new operating system would run a computer.

The Venter Institute’s feat moves us one step closer to the day when scientists can create totally synthetic life forms that don’t exist in nature. As the New York Times explains:

"Synthetic biologists envision being able to design an organism on a computer, press the 'print' button to have the necessary DNA made and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

'What we are doing with the synthetic chromosome is going to be the design process of the future,' said J. Craig Venter, the boundary-pushing gene scientist."

The ability to create synthetic organisms could be tremendously useful, and profitable too. Scientists might be able to design a fuel-producing microbe that efficiently converts biomass into ethanol, or create custom-made cellular factories to produce ingredients for medicines. (Already, University of California scientist Jay Keasling has used synthetic biology techniques to program yeast cells to produce artemisinin, a substance used in treating malaria, more cheaply than it can be extracted from tree bark.) They even might devise tiny biological robots that could adapt to their environments with greater agility than any machine, or manmade bacteria programmed to attack and kill cancers. It’s not too hard to imagine the creation of synthetic life forms eventually turning into a trillion-dollar global industry.

On the other hand, it might be just as easy to cause incredible harm with such technology. An organism custom designed for a benign purpose might escape into the environment and mutate into a crop-ravaging pest. Worse yet, malevolent governments or terrorist organizations might eventually be able to create new types of lethal pathogens for biological warfare. Here’s an article from The New Atlantis that lays out some of the potential perils.

So what do you think? Should scientists be allowed to create synthetic life forms, or are the potential risks too scary? Express your opinion below.

Should Humans Be Cloned?

If you’re uneasy about the FDA’s recent decision that meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring is safe for human consumption, this story is really going to rock your world. Stemagen, a La Jolla, Calif.-based private-sector stem cell research company, has announced that its scientists have for the first time created a human embryo by cloning adult cells through somatic cell nuclear transfer, the same process used to create cloned animals.

You may be thinking that you’ve heard this before, because you have. Back in 2004, South Korean scientists announced that they not only had created a human embryo via cloning but had successfully extracted stem cells from it. After their work could not be replicated, lead scientist Hwang Woo-Suk was forced to admit that the results had been fabricated.

As a result, Stemagen seems to have taken extra care to document its findings, an article accepted by the peer-reviewed scientific journal Stem Cells. The researchers had an independent lab do DNA fingerprinting to prove that the embryos were true clones of the cells from which they originated.

Stemagen chief executive Dr. Samuel H. Wood, who doubled as a donor of the cells from which some of the embryos were cloned, describes the project as “a critical milestone in the development of patient-specific embryonic stem cells for human therapeutic use, potentially including developing treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.”

But not everybody is going to hail this as a breakthrough. The idea of creating an embryonic clone of a person in order to harvest stem cells — and then discarding the clone — is abhorrent to opponents of most conventional embryonic stem cell research, who consider the destruction of an embryo to be murder. Even those who aren’t outright opposed raise some potentially troubling questions. For example, bioethicist and blogger Arthur Caplan writes:

In the paper announcing the breakthrough, the authors note that they got three out of 25 attempts at clones to turn into human clone embryos. That is a success rate of about 10 percent. Even if that success rate improves in the future, it still means that six or more eggs are going to be required for a researcher to make a stem cell from a clone made from the DNA of one of your own cells.

Where will hundreds of thousands of eggs come from when hundreds of thousands seek cures? Will we pay poor women to create them? Egg-farming, using powerful drugs with serious risks, may not be the most humane way to ask a poor woman to earn a living.

And although this obviously isn’t the Stemagen scientists’ intention, some undoubtedly worry that the process will be used to produce human infants who are perfect genetic duplicates of a cell donor. (It may already have happened, if you buy the 2004 claim of a mysterious outfit named Clonaid that it actually had produced 13 cloned human children; skeptical New York Times journalists pointed out that the company was founded by the leader of a sect that preaches space travelers originally populated Earth through cloning.) If such cloning proved feasible and the process was widely available, would people resort to cloning in an attempt to make themselves (or at least their genetic blueprint) immortal? Or would companies obtain cell samples from the most productive workers and use them to create a generation of super employees who would bump those of us with conventional origins into the unemployment line? Would human clones have the same civil rights as their progenitors? What if terrorists used cloning to create an endless supply of suicide bombers? That all may sound crazy,  but crazy things sometimes happen.

What’s your opinion on human cloning? Say your piece here.

Do We Need a Crash Effort to Thwart Killer Asteroids?

Astronomers’ recent announcement that an asteroid has about a 1-in-25 chance of smashing into the surface of Mars brought back the memory of those alarming headlines in 2002, when a 1,000-to-1,300-foot-long rock named 2001 YB5 hurtled toward Earth. What CNN labeled the "killer asteroid" turned out to miss our planet by 375,000 miles, about 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the moon. But by asteroid standards, that’s way too close for comfort.

Sure, sizeable asteroids don’t strike the Earth very often — on average, an object 1 kilometer (.6 miles) or larger hits every 500,000 years. But when they do, all hell usually breaks loose. Scientists believe an asteroid 6 miles in diameter struck the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago, releasing energy that was the equivalent of 100 million megatons of TNT and generating a planet-wide heat pulse so intense that according to one recent study, it probably killed off the dinosaurs in a matter of hours. In 1908, another asteroid probably caused the Tunguska Event in Siberia, a mysterious aerial explosion that generated enough force to level 80 million trees and cause an earthquake estimated at 5 on the Richter scale.

Nobody is sure how many potential killer asteroids are out there, but astronomers already have discovered more than 5,000 Near Earth Objects (NEOs) — that is, asteroids, comets and meteors whose orbits bring them within 124 million miles of Earth. About 900 of these have been classified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), objects at least 500 feet in diameter that come within 46.5 million miles of our planet (about half the distance between Earth and the sun).

Even the least imposing PHAs have the potential to cause a devastating tsunami, while the bigger ones could wipe out an entire city and kill millions of people. (Imagine, for example, what would have happened if the Tunguska Event object had exploded over Moscow.) But it’s the exceedingly remote but nevertheless possible collision with a Yucatan Event-sized asteroid that really gives cause for concern, because it could wipe out the great majority, if not all, of the living creatures on Earth.

So if we’re threatened with the prospect of annihilation from the cosmos, what are we doing about it? If life were a Hollywood movie — say, the 1998 Hollywood disaster flick Armageddon — NASA simply would launch Bruce Willis and his intrepid team into space on a mission to land on the giant asteroid, drill an 800-foot-deep hole, drop in a nuclear bomb, and then remotely detonate it, cutting the PHA precisely in half so that both pieces narrowly miss Earth. (As the Bad Astronomy blog notes, splitting an asteroid in half might well cause one of the pieces to hit Earth with even greater velocity.) In reality, NASA isn’t doing much at this point beyond surveying space and attempting to identify and chart the NEOs and PHAs out there, a project for which the government has allocated a relatively minuscule $4.1 million a year. (NASA hopes to have that job 90 percent complete by 2020.) A 2007 NASA report to Congress only briefly touches upon possible killer-asteroid mitigation strategies. Instead of trying to split an asteroid into pieces, scientists have contemplated using the gravitational attraction of a giant spacecraft to pull the asteroid in a different direction, or using a giant mirror to focus solar energy on the asteroid’s surface and boil off material, creating thrust that would change its path.

In order to actually be able to do any of these things in the foreseeable future, however, we’d likely have to allocate many billions of dollars to an effort vastly more ambitious than the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program to put men on the moon. Developing effective asteroid-diverting technology might well divert resources and attention away from other important priorities, such as the efforts to mitigate global warming. On the other hand, if a killer asteroid strikes Earth, we might not be around to worry about climate change any more. So what do you think? Should we launch a crash program to deal with the threat of killer asteroids? Offer your opinion below.

Should Scientists Try to Eliminate the Need for Sleep?

During one of my usual late-night Googlethons fueled by potent Vietnamese coffee, I came across a fascinating 2006 article from New Scientist, “Get ready for 24-hour living,” which discusses the recent development of drugs that can allow a person to remain awake for hours or even days without ill effects. One such drug is modafinil, a medication whose maker, Cephalon, describes it as the “first in a new class of wake-promoting agents.” Approved by the FDA as a treatment for narcolepsy, excessive sleepiness caused by obstructive sleep apnea/hypopnea and shift work sleep disorder, modafinil also reportedly is popular off-label with overachievers such as “Yves,” a 30-something software developer from Seattle who has been using it on-and-off for several years, mostly to burn the candle at both ends.

"I find I can be very productive at work," he says. "I'm more organized and more motivated. And it means I can go out partying on a Friday night and still go skiing early on Saturday morning."

But the present generation of eugeroic drugs such as modafinil and CX717, another compound whose sleep depriviation-countering effects have drawn interest from the U.S. military, probably are just the start. New Scientist reports that several pharmaceutical giants are gearing up research on wakefulness drugs, and that the Pentagon is also looking at technologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, which might be used to switch on or off portions of the brain affected by sleep deprivation. The publication quotes Oxford University circadian biologist Russell Foster, who envisions that, in the next decade or two, it’ll be possible pharmacologically to turn off the need for sleep. As a result, according to Foster,  people routinely will be awake and active for 22 hours a day.

The ability to function at a high level without sleeping much — or at all — for long periods would have some definite upsides. Medical residents wouldn’t have to worry about misdiagnosing emergency-room patients because their cognitive faculties have been reduced to goo by brutally long shifts. Truck drivers could pull coast-to-coast runs without slowing down, except for an occasional pie-and-coffee break. Particularly ambitious people could hold two full-time jobs at once or simultaneously earn multiple Ph.D.s. Earning a spot for the longest this-or-that in the Guinness Book of World Records would become a lot easier.

But what about the possible downsides? According to the National Sleep Foundation, less-than-normal amounts of good quality sleep have been linked to health problems such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension and depression. The precise role of sleep in memory processing is not completely understood, either. Would reducing or eliminating sleep cause an epidemic of related health problems? What sort of effects would it have on our personalities and social interactions? With all that additional time to read blogs and watch 24-hour cable news, would we all suffer from mega information overload — or worse yet, become so insufferably well-informed on every subject that we’d bore each other to death?

So should scientists develop wakefulness drugs and technology to their logical extreme? Or should we keep on snoozing? Express your opinion below.

Should Surveillance Cameras and Facial Recognition Software Be Used to Monitor Public Spaces?

Combine the  now-ubiquitous state-of-the-art high-resolution CCTV surveillance cameras with facial recognition software, which analyzes a digital image of a person and tries to match his or her features with a database of subjects, and you’ve got a system that potentially could enable law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spot criminals or terrorists in public places before they have a chance to act. Or maybe you’ve got a tool for authoritarian social control that’s so creepy it belongs in a Philip K. Dick novel. Or maybe both.

The casino industry has been using surveillance cameras and facial recognition software to spot known card-counters and other undesirables for years, and officials in the London suburb of Newham noted that crime declined by 15 percent after they installed such a system in the late 1990s, according to an article from the Independent, a UK newspaper. German and Australian immigration officials now employ the technology to screen travelers arriving in their countries. In the U.S., early experiments with facial recognition surveillance of crowds yielded uneven results. At the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, for example, facial recognition software scanned everyone passing through the turnstiles and came up with 19 possible matches with mug shots of known criminals — but according to a ZDNet.com article, many of those turned out to be false hits.

Since then, however, advances such as three-dimensional face recognition and digital image skin correlation, which analyzes an individual’s unique motion of skin pores when making a facial expression, have emerged. In tests, the DISC method has enabled researchers to identify even subjects who were wearing heavy makeup, and some believe it ultimately may rival the accuracy of that 1800s-vintage biometric gold standard, fingerprint identification.  Given the U.S. government’s post- Sept. 11 tendency to cast a wide net in  surveillance — such as the National Security Agency’s reported amassing of a database of 1.9 trillion phone calls made in the U.S. — it’s not surprising that development of facial identification technology is part of its Homeland Security strategy.  As InformationWeek reported in 2005, In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed venture capital group, has invested in A4Vision Inc., a maker of 3-D facial-scanning and -recognition software and equipment.

Next-generation facial recognition surveillance may not only discern a subject’s identity, but possibly his or her emotional state as well. As this article in Technology Review details, the Japanese company Omron recently demonstrated the abilities of its facial recognition software to analyze a subject’s smile, based on how characteristics such as mouth wideness, eye narrowing and facial wrinkles compare to a database of 10,000 different grins.

It’s not hard to imagine how powerful of a tool facial recognition surveillance could be for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. By imbedding facial recognition software within individual nodes of a video surveillance network, it might be possible to spot and identify a known criminal or terrorism suspect and then automatically follow him with the camera lens — and then continue the monitoring with cameras located elsewhere in the city as he made his way down its streets. By factoring in proximity to likely targets, such a system might give police the ability to swoop in and stop a crime the second it occurs — or to intercept a suicide bomber before he can detonate his weapon.

Unfortunately, it’s also not hard to imagine how a malevolent government could use such technology to stifle protest marches before they can occur, or to track the movements of political dissidents, or to gather embarrassing information about legislators’ extramarital activities that can be used to blackmail them into meek compliance with presidential policies.

So what do you think? If facial recognition technology is perfected, should it be used to monitor public spaces? Join the debate here.

Biological Warfare Against Opium Fields

According to the New York Times, the Bush administration is pressuring the Afghan government to allow aerial spraying of synthetic herbicides in rural areas. The United States wants to eradicate Afghan farmers’ harvest of opium poppies, which supply the raw material for 90 percent of the world’s heroin, and help fund the Taliban insurgency. But Afghan officials are resisting the idea, in part because of fears that the chemicals will contaminate the Afghan water supply. (The chemical that the U.S. wants to use is glyphosate, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns can cause lung congestion, kidney damage and reproductive problems with sufficient exposure.)

But the U.S. government ultimately may deploy a more technologically advanced — and potentially even riskier — solution to destroy the poppy fields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has been working on using both natural and genetically engineered organisms to kill drug crops such as opium poppies and coca, the source of cocaine, according to The Sunshine Project, an international organization opposed to the use of genetic engineering in warfare. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration tried to persuade Colombia to allow use of a U.S.-developed strain of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum against coca fields, but field tests of the organism were halted after international protests. In 2000, U.S. scientists published a study on two fungi with opium-killing properties. Asia Times reported in 2002 that the United Nations Drug Control Program, with research support and funding from the United States, had conducted tests of the effect of the fungus Pleospora papaveracea on opium poppies at the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (a former site of Soviet biological-weapons research). In 2005, Indiana GOP Congress members Dan Burton and Mark Souder, the then-chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, advocated a biological war on drugs, which potentially would include both naturally occurring and genetically manipulated organisms. "We spend millions of dollars every year on counter-narcotic efforts, including drug-crop eradication and interdiction, especially in our joint efforts in Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere, yet the flow of illegal and lethal narcotics continues to be a major problem in our country," stated congressman Burton. "The advent of mycoherbicides and other counter-narcotic alternatives offers us the possibility to cut off the source of these drugs literally at their roots."

The Sunshine Project’s scientists, however, warn that such tactics are "a recipe for environmental disaster." They point to the risk that drug-destroying organisms will harm other plants and insects as well, and estimate that the anti-opium fungus’s spores would persist in the soil for as long as 40 years, making the spread of the fungus difficult to control. In addition, they say that a biowar against drugs could lead to a rise in life-threatening fungal infections among humans with compromised immune systems — such as patients in Afghan hospitals. Worse yet, a scientific paper written by two Sunshine Project scientists warns that "these biological agents are lowering the political threshold for the use of biological weapons and are likely to have tremendous environmental and health impacts. The pursuit of crop-killing fungi as weapons would be a further slide down a slippery slope that, by following the same logic, could easily lead to the use of other plant pathogens, animal pathogens or even non-lethal biological weapons against humans."

There’s also the possibility that drug traffickers could strike back with biowarfare of their own. Wired News reported in 2004 that Colombian cocaine traffickers may have obtained genetically engineered herbicide-resistant coca plants to thwart the U.S. anti-drug effort.

So, should the U.S. wage a biowar against drugs in Afghanistan (or anywhere else)? Express your opinion here.

Human-Animal Hybrids

Back in 2006, you probably were as startled as we were when President George W. Bush, during his State of the Union address, implored Congress to bar scientists from “creating human-animal hybrids.” Not accustomed to having our commander in chief veer off on a tangent that sounded suspiciously reminiscent of a plot line from The X-Files, Americans reacted with a mix of puzzlement and derision. Within a day, Technorati.com listed “human-animal hybrid” as the second-most popular search on the Internet, and a Web-based vendor was offering T-shirts emblazoned with a man-monkey so that wearers could  “help President Bush raise awareness about these terrible half man / half beasts.”

As it turns out, Bush wasn’t actually envisioning a nightmarish race of what sci-fi writers refer to as parahumans. Instead, he was up in arms about the possibility of scientists combining human genetic material with animal eggs to produce hybrid embryos, which then could be harvested for stem cells — a possible way of getting around political and religious conservatives’ opposition to the harvesting of stem cells from leftover human embryos from fertility clinics. (Back in 2001, Bush essentially barred the federal government from funding such research, unless scientists relied upon a limited number of existing stem cell lines.)

The controversy has been revived by the recent decision of the U.K.’s Embryology Authority to propose that British scientists be permitted to create hybrid embryos as a source of stem cells, which may possibly provide eventual treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other conditions. Opponents of such research, in a peculiar twist, are winding their way back to what we thought our president was talking about. As the Times of London reported in June, they’re arguing that if scientists are allowed to create human-animal hybrid embryos, in the interests of preserving life, the embryos should then be implanted in women and carried to term, rather than being destroyed. The conceivable result: a generation of infants that are mostly human but also part animal.

So what do you think? Should scientists be permitted to create human-animal embryos, but only for research purposes? Or should they be allowed to go even further, and create manimals? Post your comments below.