Science, Technology & Health: December 2008 Archives
Alzheimer's Disease may be caused by the herpes simplex 1 virus.
The virus behind cold sores is a major cause of the insoluble protein plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease sufferers, University of Manchester researchers have revealed.They believe the herpes simplex virus is a significant factor in developing the debilitating disease and could be treated by antiviral agents such as acyclovir, which is already used to treat cold sores and other diseases caused by the herpes virus. Another future possibility is vaccination against the virus to prevent the development of the disease in the first place.
If antiviral medications can stop the virus then we could cure Alzheimer's at the source rather than just treating the symptoms.
(HT: RD.)
Mark Roth discovers that hydrogen sulfide derivatives may be useful for putting wounded soldiers in suspended animation until they can be taken to a hospital.
See, it wasn't like Roth ever let go of the dream of immortality. He was still obsessed with the lumps. He just began thinking about them in a different way. Okay, the lumps are immortal -- so what do they do; how do they achieve that end? And here's the answer: They do nothing. They're quiescent. They're couch potatoes! They're immortal, because for all intents and purposes -- in terms of movement -- they're already dead! And maybe that's what immortality is. People always think of it in terms of living forever. But maybe it just means not dying -- not dying when you're supposed to die, surviving the mortal moments. We don't know what life is, anyway. Not really. We just know what life does -- it burns oxygen. It's a process of combustion. We're all just slow-burning candles, making our way through our allotment of precious O2 until it becomes our toxin, until we burn out, until we get old and die. But we live on 21 percent oxygen, just as we live at 37 degrees. They're related. Decrease the oxygen to 5 percent, we die. But, look, the concentration of oxygen in the blood that runs through our capillaries is only 2 or 3 percent. We're almost dead already! So what if we turn down the candle's need for oxygen? What if we dim the candle so much that we don't even have the energy to die?And so began Mark Roth's career as a deanimator. As a gorker. Gorking is...well, gorking. You take away some creature's supply of oxygen, you're gorking it, man. The trick, of course, is bringing it back. In the beginning, that wasn't so easy, because in the beginning Roth was just free-associating. He was using heavy water, rat poison, and he was a deanimator without being a reanimator. Other scientists were laughing at him: Hey, Roth, did you suspend anything today? But then he did. He gorked some nematodes -- roundworms -- with nitrogen. An inert gas, sure, but it crowded out the oxygen available to them; it diminished the atmosphere. Roth took them to the Death Hole, which was an atmosphere of less than 1 percent oxygen. They died. But then he took them beyond the Death Hole, and they came back when oxygen was reintroduced. There was life beyond the Death Hole! So he tried carbon monoxide. Talk about gorking: Colorless, odorless, the agent of choice for many of the world's yearly cull of suicides, CO is Thanatos in a bottle -- but it didn't kill the worms. It just dimmed the candle, not by taking away the supply of oxygen but rather by preventing the worms from using it. And that was the leap that Roth made -- employing toxins for benefit. Using one of the most toxic substances known to man to interfere with the toxic effects of oxygen. See, when creatures die of hypoxia, they don't die because they don't have enough oxygen; they die because they're still burning the oxygen they don't have enough of. What Roth did was find a way to turn off -- or turn down -- the fire. What he did was find a way to separate the living cell not from oxygen itself but from the capacity to use it.
I'm not sure if Esquire's writing style is to my liking, but the content is interesting.
Is our government actually doing something right? Prescription handguns may be covered by Medicare.
We recently reported about a new 9mm handgun that was designed for folks suffering from arthritis and other disabilities affecting the hands. Constitution Arms, the manufacturer of the firearm, is reporting that the FDA has formally designated the gun as a medical gadget.
(HT: NW.)
Spectrum has a good overview of artificial intelligence in games, now and moving into the future.
My friend Bernardo Malfitano gave me permission to post this email he wrote to me explaining why there aren't any blended wing body commercial aircraft.
I think it's just "too different".A couple years ago, someone used a picture of McDonnell Douglas' BWB model, and a CG image from Popular Science from about 8 years ago, and created a fake press-release/leak type thing saying that the "797" would be a BWB. (Do some Googling, you can find it) Despite the obvious fakery (the next "7 N 7" will almost certainly be a 737 replacement, and aviation fans like myself recognized the images used, and the specs listed for the BWB were insane like 900 seats), many aviation sites ended up seeing discussions about the feasibility of introducing of a BWB into commercial service. Some of the points raised were:
- The way that cargo/luggage, food, trash, people, etc, are loaded onto a commercial jet today assumes that you have access to the side of the fuselage, i.e. these mechanisms depend on systems that push people and things horizontally into or out of the side. In a BWB, the "sides" are the leading and trailing edges, and it might not be possible to put doors there, so things would have to be loaded up straight into the belly. That would require a whole new fleet of carts and belts and stairs and so on to get people and luggage and cargo and food and trash into/out of the jet. You'd need to load a BB pretty much the same way you load a bomber.
- Since you can't really put doors on the sides (except perhaps at the very front), how do people get out in case of a belly landing or water landing? You'd probably need a way to get them out onto the top.
- If you're seated in a conventional tube-shaped fuselage, you're at MOST a few seats from the centerline. When the airplane banks, your butt goes up and down a few inches, maybe a foot. But in a BWB you'd have many more people per row, and some of them would be seated way out, and would move up and down several feet when the plane banks. Would people be ok with this? (Then again, people get used to stuff like this. Notice that air sickness bags are not regularly seen anymore. And I would guess that fewer people get carsick today than they did, say, 70 years ago).
- It's harder for the manufacturer to release modified versions. If you want a bigger or smaller version of a 737 or 787 or A320 or whatever, you add or remove a cylindrical section to the tube (and maybe add some area to the wingtips). With a BWB, the cross-section is nowhere near constant in any direction, so you can't really take one and make a bigger or smaller version without redoing the whole thing.
- It's not 100% understood how BWBs stall, or how they spin. A strong gust of sideways wind could induce some funky spinning, and it may or may not be possible to recover. Controllability at the slow-speed edge of the envelope could depend drastically on what we now think are minor aspects to the configuration, like where the engines are and where the control surfaces are relative to each other and to the curvature of the wing. And dynamic stability could be an issue (it has been for all the Northrop flying wings). These are the kind of thing that a fly-by-wire system and big control surfaces (as in the F-22) can overcome, but we don't know 100% for sure, and for commercial operations you'd want something less draggy than the F-22's huge control surfaces. I think it's this set of questions that the X-48 program aims to clear up.
Here are some links about the "797 BWB" thing:
http://www.newtechspy.com/articles06/boeing797.html
http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/2737489/
http://www.snopes.com/photos/airplane/boeing797.asp
More BWB stuff from the last time this idea was "hot" (late 90s), when McDonnell Douglas and NASA Dryden and Stanford were cooperating in looking into the technology:
http://www.twitt.org/bldwing.htm
http://aero.stanford.edu/BWBProject.html
http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/pdf/FS-1997-07-24-LaRC.pdf
http://www.twitt.org/BWBBowers.html
And of course, the X-48:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/bwb_main.html
