Hey there folks! Got another bumper crop of science for you, so let’s dig in!
As usual, we will be talking about brains, energy, tissue engineering, and miscellaneous cool stuff.
Random Cool Stuff
First off, a story just too damned cool not to cover : using ballistic missiles to deliver aid.
Can you imagine? People are trapped in a war-torn, drought-ridden area. Their lives hang in the balance. Nobody can get aid to them without risking being killed in the crossfire.
But then, a streak on the horizon…. a flash of hope… then a mighty roar as the missile streaks to its destination, shedding parachute crates of food, water, and medical supplies as it streaks overhead too fast for the eye to follow.
That would be damn near religious, man. Like manna from heaven.
Tissue Engineering Frontiers
Some page the Tin Man, because this article tells you how to build a brand new heart .
Well, sort of. Like a lot of these frontiers of tissue engineering stories, the process they are talking about does not exactly create a new heart from raw ingredients.
You still need a heart (or spleen, or whatever) to start with. Then you wash away all the active cells, leaving just the protein scaffolding behind, which you can then populate with lab-grown cells from the potential recipient of the transplant.
Which is still awesome. You are taking a foreign donor heart, which would cause a massive rejection response, and turning into a cell-perfect host heart which will be genetically indistinguishable from the recipient’s real heart.
So I merely quibble. It’s not really making a heart in the lab if you have to start with a heart in the first place. The real magic will be when we figure out how to make that scaffolding build itself.
These people are taking a step in the right direction.
They are working on a 3D system for growing someone a new pancreas, something near and dear to my… duodenum, as I might need a replacement some day.
The 3D is the key aspect here, because one of the major things holding back tissue engineering for generations was our POV being stuck in the 2D world of our microscopes.
But cells, organs, and organisms grow in three dimensions in the real world, and the flattened 2D world of the microscope slide just does not cut it any more.
The pancreas builders are using a gel to suspend and nourish the cells, and this gives the cells a chance to grow in the three dimensional way.
Now THAT is more like it!
Alternative Energy News
The main problem with solar power is obvious : what happens when the sun goes down?
A major solar plant in Arizona has that problem at least partly solved.
This plant can continue to produce power for six hours after the sun goes down via a thermal storage technology that the article is weirdly reluctant to explain. Perhaps it’s a big time trade secret.
But six hours seems like enough. After all, a) even at the winter solstice, that’s half the night covered, and b) people tend to use a hell of a lot less electricity when they are asleep.
So assuming people are cool with using battery powered alarm clocked, this is doable. Less then ideal, especially for us night owls, but doable.
Presumably, the thermal storage can be improved upon in the near future.
Then again, maybe all this thermal storage will be unnecessary because in the future, they can store the juice directly in massive molten air batteries.
Yes. That it seriously what they are called. What the fuck, right?
But they are called that because, unlike traditional batteries, they get their oxygen from the air, not from an oxidizer built into the battery. This makes them super light, which is a very big deal when you are looking for a battery tech for electric cars, and they also have a very high energy density.
Those two factors combined might just be enough to fuel the next big leap in electric cars. Have batteries that are lighter AND store more power?
That is just what the electric car industry needs. It could be just what the doctor ordered to give electric cars more power and more range at the same time.
And now… THE BRAIN!
A new theory of one of the functions of sleep has emerged.
This one starts from the observation that during sleep, the interstitial spaces between neurons increase by as much as sixty percent and there is a large fluid exchange. Protein laden interstitial fluid out, nice clean cerebro-spinal fluid in.
The theory is that this is the body’s way of flushing the nervous system clean, and that all those complex proteins going out are various plaques and other nasty stuff that we don’t need.
It is, literally, brainwashing.
We are constantly adding to our knowledge of the functions of sleep. We used to think sleep must be for one thing and one thing only.
But that would be like thinking all the employees at your local fast food place do after closing is clean the big grill.
No, they do everything that can’t be done when there’s customers there.
Finally, the Big Story. Proof that some people are just born negative.
The brain science is complicated and a tad dry. Genetics, neurotransmitters, and so on.
But I would warn this people against leaping to the conclusion that everyone with this particular gene variant is somehow sad or even clinically depressed. Most of them will be just fine.
The world needs both positives and negatives. The most productive creative and business partnerships have been between the positive person who comes up with tons of ideas and who provides much of the driving force, and the negative one who finds the flaws in the positive one’s ideas so they can correct them together, and who also acts as the necessary voice of restraint and caution.
My guess is that the world has around the same amount of each, and that’s no accident. Having that kind of diversity makes us stronger as a species.
And with that, I am off for the night. See you tomorrow, folks!