Monthly Archives: August 2010

Regulating access to our own genome data

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Trouble brewing: The FDA is looking to put its paws on the nascent direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry. The Association feels that some of the genome services are marketing their products as medical tests, and therefore should provide evidence of their efficacy. Since then, both Congress and the Government Accountability Office have looked into the DTC market, raising the prospects for direct government intervention in the market:

On the most basic level, government intervention in this market has the scent of an invasion of privacy. Shouldn't any citizen have the right to know about the contents of his or her own genome? But it's difficult to separate that basic level of knowledge from the medical implications it has, which is where safety, accuracy, and privacy issues—and government enforcement of them—come in.

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Media and Americans Believe in Global Warming

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By early August 2010, two weeks of devastating monsoon rains had transformed the landscape of Pakistan, pushing rivers over their banks, inundating villages, washing away bridges and roads, destroying crops, and killing livestock. Photo from NASA

Must-read editorial of the week: Take Climate Change Off The Back Burner – And Do It Now. Click here to read it.

Media breakthroughs on climate change are happening everywhere this summer due to the extreme weather all over the planet.  It’s like a little lightbulb went off over their heads.   ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer looked amazed last week at the news on global warming, asking, Could this extreme weather be caused by global warming? The answer was less important (a big yes) than the fact that she brought it up, and then actually interviewed a scientist and did not interview a denier.  (Why should anyone interview deniers?)  A weatherman on CNN finally admitted global warming is happening too. This is progress, finally.  Now if only we could get the politicians to pay attention to us.  From ThinkProgress:

One of America’s most influential global warming skeptics, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, has finally admitted that global warming is “caused by man.” During the hottest year ever recorded, following the hottest decade ever recorded, Russia is burning under heat not seen for at least 1000 years. Heat waves have set records throughout the United States and throughout the world. A monsoon season of unprecedented intensity has displaced tens of millions of people across Asia, threatening the nuclear states of China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. The largest iceberg to calve from Greenland in fifty years has added to its precipitous decline of ice mass since 1980. Decades ago, scientists predicted these consequences of burning fossil fuels and heating the planet.

Yesterday, in what CNN anchor Rick Sanchez billed a “good, smart conversation,” Myers actually recognized the reality of a “consequential global warming caused by man,” when not repeating climate-denier talking points . . . .

He then sort of ruined it by bringing up “sunspots” and the sun in general, which is notoriously and reliably hot. Of course, climate scientists allow for known factors such as the sun’s cycles and heat.  But the sun has been quiet for two years, not active.

Unfortunately, “scientist expert” Chad Myers (actually a bachelor-degree meteorologist, not a climate scientist) also made the blatantly false claim that we are “now in a very hot sun cycle.” [NOPE]  In fact, the sun is just emerging from an extremely low two-year minimum of activity, with years to go before it will reach another peak. Since 1980, average solar irradiance has been on the decline, even as global temperatures have risen.

Americans believe in global warming, according to new surveys, and contrary to right-wing opinion, so we are wondering why the weather “experts”  often skirt the issue.  Not always, but especially [...]

Multi-source, multi-component spray coating technique for solar cells

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Spin coating has been the dominant fabrication method for polymer electronics. However, it is not a high-throughput process and numerous research groups are trying to find a scalable fabrication method for polymer solar cells. One such method, spray coating, is capable of delivering large-area, uniform polymer thin films through a relatively simple process, while offering ample processing possibilities of engineering the film structure. Spray-coating is a high-rate, large-area deposition technique that ensures an ideal coating on a variety of surfaces with different morphologies and topographies. It is frequently used for industrial coating and in-line deposition processes. In spray-coating systems, the ink is atomized at the nozzle by pressure or ultrasound and then directed toward the substrate by a gas. An added advantage of spray-coating is that it is efficient: compared to other techniques only a small amount of the solutions are wasted.

GE Awarded $6.3 Million DARPA Grant to Develop New Bio-inspired Nanosensors

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Scientists at GE Global Research in collaboration with Air Force Research Laboratory, State University at Albany, and University of Exeter, have received a four-year, $6.3 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop new bio-inspired nanostructured sensors that would enable faster, more selective detection of dangerous warfare agents and explosives.