News & Articles

Each year a global futures research tank called the Millennium Project publishes a report on our future, prepared from 10,000 pages of data collected from reliable sources. It is surprisingly positive about the future in a short summary: “It is increasingly clear that the world has the resources to address its challenges. The world is getting richer, healthier, better educated, more peaceful, and better connected.” And most people are living longer. There are about two billion people without adequate toilets, but there are only one billion without cell phones (whatever that means.) With headlines in this country about poverty levels, the shorter life spans of our poor women, and the slowly slogging economy, I wonder if our “futures” people would come up with the same conclusion for the United States. Our current data is not comforting.
   But our planet Earth does seem to make some progress. In a fascinating article in Harper’s Magazine by Alan Lightman, titled “Our Place In The Universe,” this MIT physicist and novelist gives us some hope. He cites our increasing scale of maps. The oldest map discovered so far is a clay tablet from 2500 B.C. It is an outline of 30 acres of a river valley near Kirkuk, Iraq. It took another 2200 years before Earth was measured by a geographer who worked in the library of Alexandria. His calculation of Earth’s diameter may have been off by as little as 1 percent.
   Our astronomers have been very busy since then. We know the size of the Milky Way, and we can measure it in light-years (the distance light travels in a year, which is about six trillion miles). The Milky Way’s diameter is measured at 100,000 light-years. But that is peanuts. We have many galaxies in the universe that average about two million light-years apart. But enough of that. I just can’t cope with light-years and galaxies.

The Future
Could Be Bright

   I keep a file on interesting new “stuff” that nerds, geniuses, and perhaps a few ordinary folks have invented or are working on. This stuff helps me to think that we still have a chance on Earth before we blow it up:

*** In a Chinese factory, thousands of workers assemble electric shavers by hand using only a few tools. In a Netherlands shaver factory, 128 robot arms watched over by about a dozen human workers make as many shavers. The robots hardly ever make a mistake while working so fast the humans have to be protected from the flailing arms by glass cages. The robots work three shifts a day for 365 days a year without a coffee break. The manager of the Netherlands plant says the robots can make any consumer device in the world because of their enhanced dexterity. Apple has plans to build plants to make smartphones in China that will employ thousands of humans—but will also be fabricated for the installation of more than a million robots later on.

*** Swiss scientists have developed a system where a paralyzed human can control a robot using brain signals alone. In a demonstration, a tetraplegic patient operated a robot from over 60 miles away.

*** Growing “bioartificial” body parts in the field of regenerative medicine is fast becoming relatively routine. A 39-year-old Eritrean was in Iceland training to be an engineer when he discovered he had a golf ball-sized tumor growing in his windpipe. Surgery and radiation treatments did not reduce the tumor. Normally fatal. But an Icelandic doctor thought he could develop a replaceable windpipe. The experimental method had been used on pigs before. A copy of his windpipe was made from porous, fibrous plastic and then seeded with stem cells from the patient’s bone marrow. The plastic windpipe was then put in a spinning rotisserie-style machine where a nutrient solution bathed the artificial pipe. In about 36 hours, the old cancerous windpipe was removed and the plastic one with the cells was implanted. The patient is recovering. About a dozen patients in the world are still living after having cadaver windpipes implanted after the cell treatment. One problem: these patients have to take immune system drugs for the rest of their lives. Windpipes are medically necessary. If you can’t cough, you die from bacteria that enter the lungs. It’s fun to learn something every day. Medical labs around the world are experimenting with “scaffold-type” plastic parts to create replacement organs. They do not require immunity drugs.

*** Medtronic of Minnesota is producing and selling a device similar to a pacemaker that delivers a pulse to the sacral nerve to help control bowel movements for people with fecal incontinence.

*** A 1985 John Deere combine had no computers, but now a new model has more than 25 and more than 80 sensors. With a GPS system, a farmer can sit in his pickup and operate the combine if he gets bored riding in it.

*** Australian scientists have developed the world’s tiniest transistor by positioning a single phosphorous atom between two pairs of electrodes about 120 nanometers apart. Professor Michelle Simmons says, “The nano device will enable super computers to perform calculations billions of times faster than today’s computers.” It may take another 15 years before quantum computers are available.

*** University of Minnesota researchers at their laboratory for organ transplants have created a beating rat heart. They took a rat heart and stripped it of all of its functioning cells, leaving only the “scaffolding” of the heart behind. Then they infused it with the live cells from newborn mice and brought it beating back to life. This was a major step toward their idea of clearing out pig organs, infusing them with human cells, and then making it possible to make lifesaving, immune-free transplants. Human and pig organs are quite similar. (This is not a political message!) Miromatrix is the corporation created by the university to work on cell therapy and tissue regeneration. The first product of the corporation is a biomesh tissue to aid in hernia surgery and breast reconstruction.

*** A Swedish company has created a “gaze interaction system” that enables a computer user to control screens with his eyes. By rolling the eyes, a person can scroll through text and perform other tasks such as “thumbing” through photographs, or click on keys with just a glance. Such a system may allow doctors to use their eyes to move x-rays around while using their hands to operate robotics or other equipment, or physically examine a patient.

*** Want to be one of the immortals? This is all preliminary, but scientists are working on hydrozoans (jellyfish). It seems some jellyfish just refuse to die as long as they are fed properly. They have the ability to return to their earliest stage, like a polyp, and then continue to live. When I see Joan Rivers on TV, I’m not sure this is a good idea. Google “Nathaniel Rich” for a quick, effective summary.

*** We have corporations that deal exclusively with auto parts. We also have corporations that are beginning to handle human parts . This business will absolutely overwhelm the auto business shortly.

*** The Morgridge Institute for Research in Madison, Wisconsin, has developed a laser camera that can see around corners. The camera “knits” together reflections of laser light pulses of 50-femtosecond duration (that’s a quadrillionth of a second!) that bounce off walls onto a hidden object to create pictures. Just imagine what this camera can do for soldiers in urban warfare. It may also be able to see tiny distances inside tumors and blood vessels to make judgments about cancers. Law enforcement agencies have asked the Institute to work on radar guns that can see through walls for hostage situations.
*** In a fascinating scientific article in the New Yorker, Michael Specter describes how bacteria not only kill us but also keep us alive. Experts in the field estimate that the normal adult carries around about three pounds of bacteria that keep fighting each other. How much does the average adult brain weigh? Three pounds. It almost makes me believe in intelligent design theories. I said “almost.” Specter has a terrific paragraph about the perpetual battle: “We inherit every one of our genes, but we leave the womb without a single microbe. As we pass through our mother’s birth canal, we begin to attract entire colonies of bacteria. By the time a child can crawl, he has been blanketed by an enormous, unseen cloud of microorganisms—a hundred trillion or more.... They come at us from all directions: other people, food, furniture, clothing, cars, buildings, trees, pets, even the air we breathe. They congregate in our digestive systems and our mouths, fill the space between our teeth, cover our skin, and line our throats. We are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; these cells outnumber those which we consider our own by ten to one, and weigh three pounds. They are our microbiome.”   We inherit 23,000 genes from our parents, but we have at least four million genes from other sources that work constantly in our bodies. Experts in this field now think that teeth cavities are caused by a bacterium called Strepococcus mutans. They are testing a mouthwash that kills S. mutans. This may end all cavities and put some dentists out of business.

We Cannot
Suspend Scientific
Experimentation
And Theorizing

   We have some very serious shortcomings in science in this country. We have the Evangelicals and other Bible-thumpers who reject evolution theory, which really has become a scientific fact, like it or not. A 6,000-year-old earth populated by humans chased by various dinosaurs for lunch and supper just doesn’t cut it anymore. An ark filled with huge excreting elephants and dinosaurs, poisonous snakes and scorpions, humming birds and peacocks, camels and whales, and chimps and chumps floating in an ocean for a year and six days suspends scientific reason.
   Noah and his seven family members had to be terribly busy feeding and cleaning up after each pair of the eight million species that now inhabit the planet. How do you store food for a year without refrigeration? An elephant eats about 500 pounds of grass and other edibles a day. With good digestion, it will produce about 225 pounds of solid waste. An elephant drinks about 300 quarts of water per day and does not have prostate problems. So just two elephants will eat 1,000 pounds of food and drink 150 gallons of water per day. In one year, that’s over 180 tons of food, resulting in over 80 tons of poop and over 36,500 gallons of urine if the kidneys are functioning. This is reality science, not Biblical fantasies. If we are going to lead the world, we must lead it in science while keeping all of our creative juices flowing. Science is gradually eroding the pettiness, the silliness, and the errors of theocrats.
   We have labs working on reconstruction surgery for our wounded soldiers, where human-scale ears made from sheep cells are attached to the bellies of lab rats that provide nourishment. If this works, we will implant the ears on the heads of soldiers who have had their ears blown off by IEDs.
   We have too many science illiterates in Congress to have world-class research and development—but at least we should try. Sometimes research has unintended benefits. Research on jellyfish nervous systems brought about tremendous advances in cancer diagnosis, Alzheimer’s treatments, and even improved detection of poisons in drinking water. Other scientists developed a special ceramic from this research that is now used in bone grafts and prosthetic eyes. Our government R&D developed the Internet, and Google search engines now employ 30,000 people. Research on the sex life of the screwworm cost $250,000 but saved the cattle industry more than $20 billion. That’s a real bargain.