Readers know well that here at the Intersection we care a great deal about increasing the public visibility of science, and trying to ensure that our researchers are recognized as the national heroes they are. That’s what Unscientific America was all about.

And that’s why I’ve decided to team up with an initiative that has dramatic potential to make Americans far more aware of science, and it’s importance to our future.

That initiative is the Geoffrey Beene Gives Back® Rock Stars of Science™ campaign–whose most famous image is pictured at right.

Geoffrey Beene is a designer men’s clothing brand; its foundation funds philanthropic causes–many of them relating to the advancement of biomedical research and the search for cures for devastating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.

For instance, in 2006 it founded the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), and has given over $ 110 million in value from Geoffrey Beene combined entities to innovative translational cancer research.

Rock Stars of Science™ is another Geoffrey Beene initiative, designed to raise the visibility of our leading researchers by pairing them with musicians–and showing that scientists rock and are themselves celebrities and superstars. To that end, it launched a spread in GQ magazine last summer, depicting folks like Francis Collins jamming with Joe Perry. One key goal? Increase funding for medical research–and inspire young people to pursue scientific careers.

The next installment of Rock Stars of Science™ is going to be in GQ’s December “Men of the Year” issue. I’ve seen it–it’s going to get people talking. Stand by for more about that.

But in the meantime, Rock Stars of Science™ has put a call out to any scientists who are also musicians, like Pardis Sabeti or the Professors of Bluegrass, or Andy Revkin’s “Uncle Wade” (surely science journalists also count): Identify yourselves! The Rock S.O.S.™ website is going to feature tons of videos of scientists performing music, and it’s calling for the submission of links to scientist-musician videos.

Know of any musical scientists? Happen to be one yourself? You should send an email to info@rockstarsofscience.org. Include: your name, e-mail address, short bio including research specialty & additional weblinks. And heck–post anything you may know of in the comments section here as well.

(That includes you, Sheril. We all know you’re a drummer.)

I can’t wait to start posting and watching some of these vids….to start off, here’s “Arlington,” written by top science reporter Andy Revkin and performed by his band “Uncle Wade”:

In a great convergence of old and new, Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority are teaming up to digitize the millennia-old Dead Sea Scrolls.

The scrolls are the oldest known surviving biblical texts, created between 150 BC and 79 AD. They are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and include nearly every book of the Old Testament (except the Book of Esther), and several other religious texts.

The scrolls have been tightly guarded because of their delicate nature. Only two scholars are allowed to study the scrolls at a time, which are held in a room where temperature, light, and humidity are all carefully controlled. Public access to the writings will change how they are studied, Rob Enderle told Computer World:

“This is information few have ever seen and a piece of our oldest written history,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst with the Enderle Group. “What makes this epic is that it could be important for generations of religious scholars. This is a project that could have an impact on thousands of years in the future. There are few projects that have that kind of life expectancy.”

As a part of the digitization, the scans will be posted online, and will have accompanying transcription, translations, and bibliography, the press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority said:

…upload not only all of the digitized Scrolls images but also additional data online that will allow users to perform meaningful searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats, which will result in unprecedented scholarly and popular access to the Scrolls and related research and scholarship and should lead to new insights into the world of the Scrolls.

The scans are being done at the highest possible resolution; the picture quality will be equivalent to actually looking at the scrolls, which will help keep the delicate papyrus and parchment from future handling. The scrolls were previously imaged in infrared light (in the 1950s), but the current digitization will be done using light of many spectra, which the press release said may yield new insights:

The technology will also help rediscover writing and letters that have “vanished” over the years; with the help of infra-red light and wavelengths beyond, these writings will be brought “back to life”, facilitating new possibilities in Dead Sea Scrolls research.

The project isn’t just a “plug and chug” exercise. The 900 scrolls have been fragmented into about 3,000 pieces, so the technicians won’t just be sliding papers into a scanner. As Pnina Shor, the Israel Antiquities Authority’s Dead Sea Scrolls project manager, told National Geographic:

“You hear ’scrolls’ and you think of something big and rolled up. But we have thousands and thousands of fragments that are some 2,000 years old. A lot of this work is puzzle work, scholars piecing things together”—both physically and philosophically. “Now hopefully we will have a lot of new readings” by scholars worldwide who wouldn’t have otherwise been able to scrutinize the Dead Sea Scrolls in detail, said Shor.

The imaging will begin in early 2011 and the first images will hopefully be available within six months.

Related content:
Discoblog: World’s Oldest Bible, Now Available on Your Laptop
Discoblog: The Science of Virgin Birth
Discoblog: Retracted Study: Biblical Woman Had Flu, Not Demonic Possession
Bad Astronomy: Are the Ten Commandments really the basis for our laws?
DISCOVER: In Search of John the Baptist

Image: IAA

Bob Guccione, Penthouse Founder, Dies at 79. Playboy has been in decline too.

HUMAN GENE COUNT: MORE THAN A CHICKEN, LESS THAN A GRAPE. Going under 20,000. Hey, it’s just a number, not the measure of a man.

Robert Heinlein, We Never Knew Ye. Fred Pohl’s blog is really interesting.

Only You. And You. And You. This is really confusing: “Terisa Greenan and her boyfriend, Matt, are enjoying a rare day of Seattle sun, sharing a beet carpaccio on the patio of a local restaurant. Matt holds Terisa’s hand, as his 6-year-old son squeezes in between the couple to give Terisa a kiss. His mother, Vera, looks over and smiles; she’s there with her boyfriend, Larry.”

Insulin Sensitivity May Explain Link Between Obesity, Memory Problems. Another reason to lose weight.

According to a new study out in Science Translational Medicine, treating depressed mice with gene therapy in the brain to bolster a protein connected to the neurotransmitter serotonin can make those depressive symptoms dissipate.

Here’s the gist: The gene in question creates a protein called p11 that help carry serotonin receptors up to the surface of a brain cell where they can receive signals from other brain cells. Poor serotonin signaling may be one of the major drivers behind depression, and a dearth of p11 could worsen the problem, according to study author Michael Kaplitt.

“In the absence of p11, a neuron can produce all the serotonin receptors it needs, but they will not be transported to the cell surface,” said Kaplitt. [AFP]

To test this, back in 2006 Nobel winner Paul Greengard (another coauthor on this study) created mice engineered to lack p11. Indeed, those mice developed the signs of severe depression. This time around, the team took similarly depressed mice and injected a reward center in their brain (the nucleus accumbens) with a virus that gave them a shot of p11. According to the researchers, the boost turned around the mice’s depression symptoms and they began to act like normal mice.

“Psychological disorders, such as depression, are increasingly viewed as brain disorders,” says study author Michael Kaplitt of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. “If true, we may be able to help some patients by bringing levels of this protein back to normal.” [USA Today]

That said, the main criticisms of Kaplitt’s study note that depression is much more complicated than a single gene, protein, or receptor. And is a treatment as invasive as gene therapy on the brain really necessary for treating depression, or even effective against the most serious forms of the illness?

Because the treatment is invasive — requiring brain surgeons to drill into the skull and deliver the therapy to the right spot in the brain — it should only be used by severely afflicted patients that don’t respond to other drugs. “But that’s really not what the study tested,” says [Husseini] Manji, whose commentary on the study was also published in Science Translational Medicine today. The mice in the study might well have responded to Prozac, and it is not clear whether the treatment does treat the severest forms of the disorder. [Nature]

Worries aside, these types of therapies are on the horizon. The scientists involved in this study are also testing similar procedures for Parkinson’s disease. Kaplitt is working on a new project to test the p11 treatment in non-human primates, which could pave the way for human trials.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Psychologist Says Antidepressants Are Just Fancy Placebos
80beats: Gene Therapy Hope for HIV: Engineered Stem Cells Hold Promise
80beats: Gene Therapy That Bulks up Muscles Raises Doping Concerns
80beats: Scientists See the Foreshadowing of Depression in Brain Anatomy

Image: iStockphoto

Scientists knew that overweight mothers tend to have more overweight children. But is the same true for fathers? This week in Nature, Margaret Morris and her team demonstrated this effect in male rats, the first time it’s been shown to work in males. The findings are another example of how non-genetic factors, like how much a parent eats, can have a biological impact on offspring.

The researchers put one of their two groups of male rats on a high-fat diet, the other on a normal one. Unsurprisingly, the high-fat rats put on a lot of weight and began to show symptoms of type II diabetes, like insulin resistance and struggles with metabolizing glucose. And then there were their kids:

The real surprise came when Morris’s team went on to examine the obese rats’ female offspring. These too had problems regulating insulin and glucose levels. The healthy fathers, however, had correspondingly healthy daughters. Whether similar defects emerge in sons remains to be seen. [Nature News]

Morris says that the “fat father” effect in the rats’ female offspring was not as obvious as the effect of an overweight mother. That’s to be expected, as the father makes his contribution only at conception, while the mother continues to influence an offspring throughout pregnancy. Thus, Morris says, obesity must cause some profound change in gene expression in the father’s sperm.

The prime suspect, says Morris, is not a genetic mutation in the sperm’s DNA, but an “epigenetic” alteration in chemical tags on the DNA. These epigenetic tags help determine whether a gene is expressed, and they can be passed on to offspring. During sperm development, which is occurring constantly in the male, epigenetic marks are erased and replaced. Environmental factors such as diet may interfere with this process. [ScienceNOW]

In fact, the Nature study found 600 variations in the expression of genes relating to the pancreas in the daughters of fat male rats. But the actual genetic code had not changed, pointing the finger at an epigenetic cause.

This finding is fascinating, says Andy Feinberg, at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “In a way it’s saying the metabolic sins of the father can be visited on the daughters, even if the daughters haven’t been conceived yet,” he says. [NPR]

Of course, you can’t directly translate a mouse or rat study to humans and say we’d be affected in the same way. But if a similar effect is happening in people, it would be one more way the growing obesity problem is spreading across generations.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: DNA Is Not Destiny explains how epigenetics is rewriting the rules of heritability
DISCOVER: How Good Genes Go Bad explores the role environmental toxins play in epigenetics
80beats: Is an Ant Colony’s Caste System Determined by Epigenetics?
80beats: Child Abuse May Leave a Lasting Mark on Victims’ DNA

Image: iStockphoto

Stephen Hsu on developments at the Beijing Genomics Institute:

I was floored today when the director of BGI told me they would soon reach a sequencing rate of 1000 (human) genomes per day (so, 10^5 to 10^6 genomes per year is right on the horizon). According to him, they can be profitable at a price of $5k per genome! [Clarification: I later learned this might mean at 10x coverage ... not exactly sure, although I tried to get a more precise statement.]

Five years ago I asked Armand Leroi:

[Q] 10) If in 10 years you could purchase your own full genome sequence for a month of your salary, would you do it? (assume privacy concerns are obviated)

[A] Yes.

It looks like I didn’t anticipate the rate of change in this area, as 10 years was also certainly too conservative or pessimistic. Dan MacArthur has given a plausible estimate of ~2 years for the realization of a $1,000 genome, but it looks like we’ll hit a genome at the cost of a month’s salary for a professional person on the order of months and not years.

UPDATE:  SOLVED by Patrick at 1:33 CDT

Happy Saturday, everybody.  The riddle is still posting at noon CDT, but don’t think the final decision has been made.  I’m still open for comments on Riddle Business.

Who besides me is completely bowled over by UDFy-38135539?  I am so excited about that.  A confirmed redshift of 8.6″ (or 8.55″, thereabouts)?  WOW!  Don’t worry, the riddle isn’t going to be about this… that would violate Da Rules; but do expect to see a post about it in the near future.

For your riddle today, you are looking for a thing in the real world.

The Hubble ST - NASA

We think of this thing as a single object, but it probably is not.

This was not known to our distant ancestors.

In fact, it was not known until the 20th century.

Subject to random temper-tantrums, we all hope this little Diva will grow up someday…

…but that “someday” may be quite far in the future.

If Jupiter put on a little weight, it might give Miss Thing a run for her money.

This Diva is not known to have companions, but who knows?  Little Divas often have little posses.

It does have the distinction of being “friends” with a Diva who is very beloved to us.

That friendship, however, is half over.

Today’s answer is decently represented in SciFi.

Brought to you by NASA

There.  That should keep you occupied for about, oh, maybe 20 seconds.  I’m once again having bad weather here (“here” is all ABOUT bad weather), so if I crash, Tom’s still with us.  Hopefully.  As far as I know, I’m in the comments.

Autumn is here. And winter is coming.

The fresco to the left is the cover jacket illustration for Why we’re all Romans, a new cultural history which attempts to argue for the unique debts of Western civilization to Rome (in particular as a mediator of the wisdom of the Greeks and Hebrews). If you’re on the culturally conservative side it might be of some interest, it sports endorsements from a Fellow at the Hoover Institute and E. Christian Kopff. The fresco is from Pompeii, explaining its good state of preservation and present day fame and ubiquity. The man’s name is Terentius Neo, a wealthy merchant or magistrate apparently. The woman is presumed to be his wife. A strange question to throw out: am the only one who thinks that he resembles Laurence Fishburne? The fresco is used a lot because of its quality and prior fame, but I always start thinking of something ludicrous like The Matrix when I see it.

I’ve been on a short hiatus from blogging as my laboratory gets set to go to Eindhoven, Holland, for the STRP Festival, one of the largest art and technology fairs in Europe. We are putting the finishing touches on scale, an interactive bio-art collaboration between myself, visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, and composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, who together form localStyle.

As is often done in biological work, my research at Northwestern University focuses on one specific type of animal—an electric fish from the Amazon jungle—which is ideally suited to uncover the answers to our research questions. These questions are chiefly in the area of how we take in information through our various sensory systems and control movement. We build biologically inspired robots based on what we find. These robots feature novel ways to sense and move that could be very useful for new highly agile underwater robots to help with things like monitoring the health of coral reefs or fixing an underwater oil spill.

Our Amazon jungle fish are called “weakly electric fish.” These fish have evolved the remarkable ability to sense the objects around their body through a self-generated weak electric field (about a thousandth of a flashlight battery near the body). Think of them as underwater bats—like bats, they hunt at night, but instead of using sonar, they use electric fields.

A surprising demonstration of this ability is very easy to get with nothing more than a cheap powered speaker, like the type you would connect to your computer. By just dangling the input lead into a tank with one of these fish, you’ll hear a nearly pure tone (something like a tuning fork). The pitch of the tone that you hear depends on the species. Across the 180 or so species that exist, the tone frequency varies from about 30-1200 Hz, approximating the lowest B-natural on a piano to the D- sharp six octaves higher.

In our interactive exhibit, twelve different species of these fish comprise a “choir” whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. Each fish is in its own tank with advanced filtration and water quality control, on tall frames that are arranged in semicircle around the podium. Using a modified Nintendo Wii-mote, participants can select the members of their choir, and then use a touch pad system to add real-time digital effects, generating a unique musical experience.

We hope to foster wider public awareness of their valuable attributes and the fragility of their natural environment via this interspecies artwork. You can hear some of the tones that scale will generate from this short segment from Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ.

The folks at JPL have installed a live webcam in a balcony overlooking the clean room where the next Mars rover, Curiosity, is being built. So you can watch smart NASA and Caltech people build a rover that’s going to Mars!

[Update: Sigh. Of course I post this on a Saturday morning when no one is working. But check back every now and again; I was watching on Friday afternoon and it was busy! And make sure you note the size of the rover; it's far, far larger than the previous ones.]

There’s no audio, so don’t bother with sound. But on the UStream page linked above there’s a chat room.

If memory serves, what you’re seeing is the same clean room where Spirit and Opportunity were built; I visited JPL a few years back and saw them both being put together there. It’s amazing to look down on hardware you know is going to another planet.

Yay smart people!

If you have some time to kill, the Paleo-Future weblog is really awesome. It shows what people thought the future was going to be like (often around the year 2000) from the 1870s through every decade of the 20th century. As usual with this sort of thing it tells you more about the salient aspects of a given time period, as people have a tendency of projecting contemporary fashions, technologies, and trends, rather than being able to anticipate innovation and changes of kind. Here’s a depiction of flying machines which dates to between 1900 and 1910:

Astronomers used 146 images of the Dwarf Planet Vesta taken by the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble to get a look at its 5.34 hour rotation. The imaging was done in preparation for the encounter between the DAWN spacecraft and Vesta in July 2011.

The images were taken in the near-ultraviolet and blue light. Hubble can see features about 25 miles (40km) across.

From the press release (more info and image sizes in the link):

The asteroid is somewhat like our moon, with ancient lava beds (the dark patches) and powdery debris, the pulverized remains of impacts (the orange-colored areas). A flattened area on one end of Vesta is a giant impact crater formed by a collision billions of years ago. The crater is 460 kilometers (285 miles) across, close to Vesta’s roughly 530-kilometer (330-mile) diameter. The asteroid is about the size of Arizona.

Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/UMd

Click here to view the embedded video.

I know, another video.  Sorry, but this does look good and a do like balloon based missions – a simple concept that is deceptively complex.

This is coming on November 4th.  Check out the film website too.  I have high hopes for this!!

Here’s the PBS press release:

New York, NY October 14, 2010 – Welcome to Astrophysics, Indiana Jones style!
Five-time Emmy winner Paul Devlin brings his newest film BLAST! to PBS WNET NY on Thursday, November 4th at 8pm, offering an exciting, enlightening ride around the world and across the Universe.

The Devlin brothers make good and get their adventure science movie all the way to Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report – http://bit.ly/aNsUy6 – one’s an astrophysicist and one’s a filmmaker, and their collaboration, BLAST! brings exciting discovery to mainstream audiences.  BLAST! also broadcast on BBC World News reaching over one-hundred million viewers in August 2010!

BLAST! is a spectacular and suspenseful story of space exploration. Paul Devlin (SlamNation, Power Trip) follows his brother, Mark Devlin, PhD, as he leads a tenacious team of scientists on the journey of a lifetime from Arctic Sweden to the desolate ice of Antarctica. By launching a revolutionary new telescope on a NASA high-altitude balloon, they hope to reveal a hidden Universe of never-before-seen star-burst galaxies, providing clues to the Evolution of Everything.  From catastrophic failure to transcendent triumph, their adventure reveals the surprising real life of scientists.

As in director Paul Devlin’s award winning film Power Trip, BLAST! de-emphasizes talking head interviews and dispenses with anonymous narration in favor of capturing the action as it happens. Dynamic storytelling and unique access provide the rare opportunity to reveal the personal and family sacrifices, the obsessions, and even the philosophical questioning of scientists.

“My intention is to expose a much larger audience to the fascinating lives of scientists by breaking with some of the conventional approaches to science material,” comments Director Paul Devlin.  “This story had all the elements I needed.  The extreme events provide the structure for a classically suspenseful narrative, with a built-in twist at the end.”

BLAST! was filmed on location in 7 countries on 5 continents, and has broadcast and screened nationally and internationally at film festivals, theaters, universities, science centers, and planetariums in conjunction with the International Year of Astronomy in 2009.  BLAST! has been seen by over a million viewers via broadcasts on BBC, Discovery Canada, SVT Sweden, YLE Finland, VPRO Netherlands, DR Denmark, and NHK Japan. In the summer of 2009, BLAST! enjoyed a theatrical run in New York City and Chicago.

We have an asteroid named 2010 TD54 coming so close we could almost have to duck.  Probably by the time you read this the asteroid will be beyond Earth and departing.

Right,  thankfully that means this object isn’t going to hit us.  2010 TD54 is only 6 to 7 meters (19 to 22 feet +/-) but it IS going to pass by at a very close 46,000 km (yes that’s just 28.580 miles!). Hey that’s not much further than our geosynchronous satellites!

The pass is supposed be at 1050 UTC , that’s 6:50 EDT.  They don’t really have the time nailed down super good, so that’s plus or minus 10 minutes.

Hopefully there will be some images of this asteroid and I’ll post links when they become available.   The asteroid is right on the ragged edge for my being able to spot it with my 10 inch Meade, I might give it a go all the same.

Pretty good though, a six to seven meter sized object spotted two days, well three before the flyby.  Way to go MT Lemmon Survey.

Here are some links:

JPL Small Object Database

NEODyS 2010TD54 Close Approaches

The blue streak on Mimas. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/LPI

From the Cassini site:

This enhanced-color view of Saturn’s moon Mimas was made from images obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. It highlights the bluish band around the icy moon’s equator. The view shows the hemisphere that faces forward in Mimas’ orbit around Saturn. The large round gouge on the surface is Herschel Crater.
This composite image was made by processing raw images obtained by Cassini’s imaging cameras from 2004 to 2009. Scientists analyzed frames shot through visible-light, ultraviolet and infrared filters. The processing enhanced our views of these moons beyond what could be seen by the human eye.
The dark, bluish band around Mimas matches patterns one might expect if the surface were being irradiated by high-energy electrons that drift in a direction opposite to the flow of plasma in the magnetic bubble around Saturn. Scientists are still figuring out exactly what is happening, but the electrons appear to be zapping the Mimas surface in a way that matches the Pac-Man thermal pattern detected by Cassini’s composite infrared spectrometer early in 2010.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

In other stuff:
I went out last night to look for comet Hartley 2 with binoculars. The comet should have been near the constellation Perseus, the sky was lovely but no comet even though it should be visible.  I went back out this morning at about 4:30 and looked just off Gemini, again no luck but it was fun just the same. The Bee Hive Cluster was very nice naked eye object. The comet doesn’t place itself well for my telescope.

“BACKGROUND: Increased use of an online educational archive of photographic dermatology case materials (DermAtlas) indicated unexpected pornography-seeking behavior and misuse.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to assess the extent of archive misuse.

METHODS: Web usage/request patterns were examined over a 6-month period for requests by anatomic site, diagnosis, and age group plus anatomic site. Free-text queries and referrals from external Web sites were reviewed.

RESULTS: Of 7800 images, 5.5% contain genital sites. Of all requests, 11% were for anatomic sites (37% genital sites); 62% were specified for diagnoses (12% genital sites). When age group and anatomic site were specified, the relative risk of a child being requested (vs adult) was 1.48 (95% confidence interval 1.44-1.53). Of 10000 free text queries, 12% retrieved images containing genital sites. Of all referrals, 14.3% originated from nonmedical (pornography/fetish) Web sites.

LIMITATIONS: Requests are mixed with legitimate queries.

CONCLUSION: Online photographic dermatology archives are vulnerable to misuse. Monitoring and intervention are necessary to preserve their availability and integrity.”

Photo: flickr/Johan.V.

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality from e-mail addresses.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Writing emails as part of sleepwalking after increase in Zolpidem [Ambien].
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Salvia divinorum: the pot of the future (at least according to YouTube).

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Rare earth metals are a hot commodity in today’s high-tech world. Until recently these elements were fairly obscure members of the periodic table; now, their usefulness in everything from hybrid cars to solar panels has boosted their profile.

The 17 rare earth metals, some with exotic names like lanthanum and europium, form unusually strong lightweight magnetic materials. Lanthanum is used in the batteries of hybrid cars, neodymium is used in magnets in the electric generators of wind turbines and europium is used in colored phosphors for energy-efficient lighting. [Reuters]

Their new necessity has also provided a boost to China, where the vast majority of these elements are currently mined. China’s dominance has been brought into sharp focus over the past three weeks, when China blocked all shipments of rare earth metals to Japan in response to a diplomatic incident concerning a Chinese fishing boat in territorially disputed waters.

Beijing has denied the embargo, yet the lack of supply may soon disrupt manufacturing in Japan, trade and industry minister Akihiro Ohata told reporters Tuesday. [Technology Review]

Despite the name, rare earth elements are actually fairly common in the Earth’s crust. But they’re often difficult to extract profitably without making an environmental mess, and in recent years production has largely shifted to China. The extraction of the metals can be plenty dirty in China too, but environmental regulations aren’t yet stringent there.

In response to the abrupt halt in the export of rare earth metals to Japan, trade officials from the United States and Japan are discussing whether to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization. Meanwhile, Technology Review reports that companies are scrambling to find ways to reduce their reliance on these elements: some car companies are developing motors that don’t use rare earth elements at all, while the U.S. Energy Department is funding research on making powerful magnets out of more prosaic materials.

And there’s one final option for avoiding China’s monopoly: Mine more rare earths here at home.

In California, Molycorp Minerals is looking to reopen rare-earth mines that closed in 2002, amidst low pricing and environmental concerns. In recent weeks, bills have been floated in the U.S. House and Senate aimed at reviving the rare-earth supply chain in the U.S., including mining, refining, and manufacturing. A third bill, in the House, is narrower, focusing on offering loan guarantees to restart mining. [Technology Review]

Related Content:
80beats: Nobel Prize Winner Warns World: We’re Running Out of Helium
80beats: New Element Discovered! But Don’t Ask About Its Name
80beats: China’s Latest Environmental Ills: Oil Spills and Copper Mines
80beats: Isn’t It Ironic: Green Tech Relies on Dirty Mining in China

Image: Wikimedia Commons

What would you do with a spare $640,000? John Graham-Cunning would build a steam-powered computer invented in the 1830s.

And instead of waiting around for this mysterious spare money to show up, he’s started soliciting donations. The plan: Raise the money by January 2011, build the analytical engine from Charles Babbage’s original design, then donate the machine to a museum. Graham-Cunning knows this idea sounds crazy, but it won’t deter him, as he wrote in an article for the O’Reilly Radar:

It might seem a folly to want to build a gigantic, relatively puny computer at great expense 170 years after its invention. But the message of a completed Analytical Engine is very clear: it’s possible to be 100 years ahead of your own time.

If the analytical engine had been built when Babbage thought it up, it would have satisfied all the requirements for a computer, Graham-Cunning told The Telegraph:

“What you realize when you read Babbage’s papers is that this was the first real computer. It had expandable memory, a CPU, microcode, a printer, a plotter and was programmable with punch cards. It was the size of a small lorry and powered by steam but it was recognizable as a computer.”

But the designs were never built, and the world had to wait more than 100 years for the invention of mechanical computers in the 1940s. The analytic engine was designed to replace “computers”–people who wrote out mathematical tables–which would also have been the first example of a person’s job being replaced by a computer. Graham-Cumming explained the machine to The Independent:

“The big difference between it and machines which came 100 years later was that the programme was stored externally, in punch cards,” explained Mr Graham-Cumming. “It is basically a giant number-crunching machine–which is effectively what modern computers are today, it’s just that those numbers appear to us as words or images on a screen.”

And while it sounds like it shouldn’t be that hard to recreate something from the 1800s, there are plenty of confounding factors complicating this project, including the fact that a working model has never been built, says Gizmodo:

Babbage may’ve passed away in 1871, but more than a hundred years later and his computer (which would have run on punched cards containing the programs) still hasn’t ever been fully built. In 1910 his son built part of it, which was able to calculate an incorrect list of pi multiples—but it wasn’t programmable. And who needs a computer than calculates false numbers?

Oh, also, there are no firm set of plans with which to build one from, so they are going to have to go through all of Babbage’s documents to figure out a working design. The plan is to test the designs on a (modern) computer before going through the building process.

When it is fully built, the machine will be about the size of a small steam locomotive, and will be powered by steam. If the project hadn’t been scrapped, imagine how Victorian society would have changed, and how much more evolved technology would be today. We might even have had flying cars by now! Frig!

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Discoblog: Circuit Board Chic: Motherboards Recycled Into Shoes & Underwear
Discoblog: New Robot Would Fuel Itself on Grass, Wood, Human Corpses
DISCOVER: A Look at the World’s First Computer
DISCOVER: Tomorrow’s Computer

Image: Flickr/Gastev

Goodbye and good riddance, rinderpest.

For only the second time in history, humans have eradicated a disease through a long, slogging campaign of vaccinations and global alertness.

Rinderpest, which means “cattle plague” in German, does not affect humans, though it belongs to the same virus family as measles. But for millenniums in Asia, Europe and Africa it wiped out cattle, water buffalo, yaks and other animals needed for meat, milk, plowing and cart-pulling. Its mortality rate is about 80 percent — higher even than smallpox, the only other disease ever eliminated. [The New York Times]

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has been scanning the world for outbreaks, but the agency hasn’t seen a case since 2001, when one popped up in Kenya. Now that nine years have passed without a murmur of rinderpest, the agency says it’s confident that the virus has been wiped out. In the wild, at least. There are still some vials of virus in veterinary labs:

Still to be decided is how much virus to keep frozen in various countries’ laboratories, along with tissue from infected animals and stocks of vaccine, which is made from live virus. Virologists like to have samples handy for research, but public health experts, fearing laboratory accidents or acts of terrorism, usually press to destroy as much as possible. [The New York Times]

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Image: flickr / ILRI