According to Inhabitat, there may soon be an effective vaccine for the common cold.
Could the common cold soon be a thing of the past? Scientists have created a breakthrough nasal spray that could block the virus as it tries to enter through the nose, where more than 90% of pathogens get in. The vaccine is called SynGEM, and it treats Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), one of three viruses that cause 80% of common colds.
Scientists can now synthesize proteins that could be incorporated in silicon-based life forms.
Directed evolution of cytochrome c for carbon–silicon bond formation: Bringing silicon to life
Enzymes that catalyze carbon–silicon bond formation are unknown in nature, despite the natural abundance of both elements. Such enzymes would expand the catalytic repertoire of biology, enabling living systems to access chemical space previously only open to synthetic chemistry. We have discovered that heme proteins catalyze the formation of organosilicon compounds under physiological conditions via carbene insertion into silicon–hydrogen bonds. The reaction proceeds both in vitro and in vivo, accommodating a broad range of substrates with high chemo- and enantioselectivity. Using directed evolution, we enhanced the catalytic function of cytochrome c from Rhodothermus marinus to achieve more than 15-fold higher turnover than state-of-the-art synthetic catalysts. This carbon–silicon bond-forming biocatalyst offers an environmentally friendly and highly efficient route to producing enantiopure organosilicon molecules.
Russia, or hackers in Russia, tried to hack an election in Ukraine in 2014 and got caught, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Only 40 minutes before election results were to go live on television at 8 p.m., Sunday, May 25, a team of government cyber experts removed a “virus” covertly installed on Central Election Commission computers, Ukrainian security officials said later.
If it had not been discovered and removed, the malicious software would have portrayed ultra-nationalist Right Sector party leader Dmytro Yarosh as the winner with 37 percent of the vote (instead of the 1 percent he actually received) and Petro Poroshenko (the actually winner with a majority of the vote) with just 29 percent, Ukraine officials told reporters the next morning.
There may not be enough water to go around in Asia, according to Brahma Chellaney writing in Project Syndicate. Key points of conflict are rivers originating in the Tibetan Plateau, controlled by China, the Brahmaputra, which flows from China into Bangladesh and India, the Indus, which has driven contention between Pakistan and India, several rivers flowing from China in Central Asia and Russia, and the Mekong, which feeds important rice growing regions in Southeast Asia.
Asia has less fresh water per capita than any other continent, and it is already facing a water crisis that, according to an MIT study, will continue to intensify, with severe water shortages expected by 2050. At a time of widespread geopolitical discord, competition over freshwater resources could emerge as a serious threat to long-term peace and stability in Asia…
The consequences of growing water competition in Asia will reverberate beyond the region. Already, some Asian states, concerned about their capacity to grow enough food, have leased large tracts of farmland in Sub-Saharan Africa, triggering a backlash in some areas. In 2009, when South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics Corporation negotiated a deal to lease as much as half of Madagascar’s arable land to produce cereals and palm oil for the South Korean market, the ensuing protests and military intervention toppled a democratically elected president.
The race to appropriate water resources in Asia is straining agriculture and fisheries, damaging ecosystems, and fostering dangerous distrust and discord across the region. It must be brought to an end. Asian countries need to clarify the region’s increasingly murky hydropolitics. The key will be effective dispute-resolution mechanisms and agreement on more transparent water-sharing arrangements.
An automated analysis program can produce street tree data using Google Street View.
Google Street View shows promise for virtual street tree surveys
Geospatial technologies are increasingly relevant to urban forestry, but their use may be limited by cost and technical expertise. Technologies like Google Street View™ are appealing because they are free and easy to use. We used Street View to conduct a virtual survey of street trees in three municipalities, and compared our results to existing field data from the same locations. The virtual survey analyst recorded the locations of street trees, identified trees to the species level, and estimated diameter at breast height. Over 93% of the 597 trees documented in the field survey were also observed in the virtual survey. Tree identification in the virtual survey agreed with the field data for 90% of trees at the genus level and 66% of trees at the species level. Identification was less reliable for small trees, rare taxa, and for trees with multiple species in the same genus. In general, tree diameter was underestimated in the virtual survey, but estimates improved as the analyst became more experienced. This study is the first to report on manual interpretation of street tree characteristics using Street View. Our results suggest that virtual surveys in Street View may be suitable for generating some types of street tree data or updating existing data sets more efficiently than field surveys.
Sometimes you look back on a month and feel like nothing very important happened. But November 2016 was obviously not one of those months! I am not going to make any attempt to be apolitical here. I was once a registered independent and still do not consider myself a strong partisan. However, I like to think of myself as being on the side of facts, logic, problem solving, morality and basic goodness. Besides, this blog is about the future of our human civilization and human race. I can’t pretend our chances didn’t just take a turn for the worse.
3 most frightening stories
3 most hopeful stories
3 most interesting stories
Bjorn Lomborg, who is known for not being a big fan of controls on carbon emissions, is concerned about the food supply.
Affordable, nutritious food is one of people’s top priorities everywhere, and one in nine people still do not get enough food to be healthy. With today’s population of 7.3 billion expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050, food demand will increase accordingly. Along with more mouths to feed, stresses on food supplies will include conflicts, economic volatility, extreme weather events, and climate change…
Investment in research and development is vital. According to research conducted for Copenhagen Consensus, which I direct, investing an extra $88 billion in agricultural R&D over the next 15 years would increase yields by an additional 0.4 percentage points each year, which could save 79 million people from hunger and prevent five million cases of child malnourishment. Achieving these targets would be worth nearly $3 trillion in social good, implying an enormous return of $34 for every dollar spent.
Scientific breakthroughs also play a key role in fighting specific nutritional challenges such as vitamin A deficiency, the leading cause of preventable childhood blindness. Robert Mwanga was awarded this year’s World Food Prize for inspiring work that resulted in the large-scale replacement of white sweet potato (with scant Vitamin A content) by a vitamin A-rich alternative in the diets of Uganda’s rural poor.
More R&D seems like a great idea. But I wonder if Bjorn is making the mistake of just projecting past trends linearly into the future. In the past, crops were often limited by the availability of water and nutrients. Once you solve those problems, you can work on breeding plants that make maximum use of the sun’s energy to produce plant parts that humans and animals can eat. Once you solve that problem, the next limit would seem to be sunlight itself, which you can’t increase.
This article published in Forbes the day after the election pretty much says it all: For The Defense Industry, Trump’s Win Means Happy Days Are Here Again. So much for “draining the swamp” and sending the special interests packing. (By the way, this isn’t fair to swamps. Before Washington D.C. was drained and became a cesspool of legalized corruption, it was a highly productive wetland ecosystem. And what I just said isn’t really fair to cesspools which are a low-tech but highly cost-effective means of treating wastewater. How about we just go with shit-pile? But that’s not really fair to shit-piles, which contain valuable nutrients…)
First, Trump has repeatedly stated that he will modernize the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, which consists of missile-carrying submarines, land-based missiles in Midwestern silos, and long-range bombers. The Obama Administration has nuclear modernization plans, but it hasn’t explained where the money will come from. Now, it is sure to come. Big winners: General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries which make subs, Lockheed Martin which makes sub-launched missiles, Northrop Grumman which is building a new bomber, and Boeing which builds tankers and airborne command posts to support the nuclear force. One of these companies will also be tapped to replace land-based Minuteman missiles.
Second, Trump has proposed significantly increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, which will require major equipping initiatives. Vehicle makers BAE Systems and General Dynamics will benefit not only from new production, but also upgrades to the existing fleet making it more lethal and resilient. Helicopter makers Boeing and Lockheed Martin will almost certainly get more money, as will companies like BAE Systems and Raytheon that provide radios, electronic warfare gear, and ground-based air defense systems.
Third, Trump has stated an intention to expand the Navy’s fleet to 350 warships from less than 300 today. That probably means buying aircraft carriers and surface combatants faster, which would be good news for General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls Industries — the nation’s two leading producers of warships. The Obama Administration already has programmed fairly robust spending on Virginia-class attack subs (not to be confused with ballistic missile subs) which are built in partnership by GD and Huntington; Trump’s win will do nothing to undermine that plan, and may expand it. If the Marine Corps grows, Huntington Ingalls will also be building more amphibious warships.
Apparently, a lot of this assessment comes from a report card on the military by the Heritage Foundation, which rates our nation’s military as “marginal” and the army in particular as “weak”, despite the fact that we outspend our “enemies” by orders of magnitude.
A think tank from the opposite end of the spectrum called Center for International Policy had this to say in 2011:
Current reductions must also be measured against the unprecedented growth in Pentagon spending over the past 13 years. Since 1998, the Pentagon’s base budget has grown by 54% (adjusted for inflation).4 Moreover, with the country turning the page on a long decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the planned reductions represent a historically small drawdown when compared with those following the end of Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War…
We spend more on the Pentagon and related military activities than all of our potential adversaries combined – over four times what China spends – and roughly double what we spent in 2001. 6 Defense spending includes not just the Pentagon’s budget, but also intelligence, veteran’s affairs, defense-related atomic energy programs, defense-related interest on the national debt and other defense-related agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security. Altogether, this constitutes 23% of the entire federal budget, more than half of discretionary spending, or $832 billion…
Our conventional and nuclear forces are more capable, better equipped, and better trained than any other military force in the world.14 For example, as former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates explains, with 11 large, nuclear-powered carriers, the U.S. Navy can carry twice as many aircraft at sea as the rest of the world combined, and the Marine Corps is the largest force of its type, exceeding in size most nations’ armies.
Let’s look at a few more numbers. I’m piecing together numbers from multiple sources and years here so I don’t expect them to be highly accurate, just to give a general idea.
So, let me come up with some of my naive policy prescriptions just for fun:
According to Bloomberg, the technology to build roads and parking lots out of solar panels is coming along fast. This could be a big breakthrough considering the sheer amount of area that would be available. As solar panels get closer to being cost-competitive with fossil fuels, the time will come when space to install them is the limiting factor. This could open up enormous new areas compared to only having rooftops available. I can also imagine the possibilities for roads and parking lots being able to fund their own maintenance and repairs, then generate additional revenues for cities, states, and private entities on top of that. This could really be a game-changing technology.
This 17-author paper in Science describes evidence for how natural organisms and ecosystems are already adapting themselves to climate change, and what it means for humans.
The broad footprint of climate change from genes to biomes to people
Species are undergoing evolutionary adaptation to temperature extremes, and climate change has substantial impacts on species physiology that include changes in tolerances to high temperatures, shifts in sex ratios in species with temperature-dependent sex determination, and increased metabolic costs of living in a warmer world. These physiological adjustments have observable impacts on morphology, with many species in both aquatic and terrestrial systems shrinking in body size because large surface-to-volume ratios are generally favored under warmer conditions. Other morphological changes include reductions in melanism to improve thermoregulation, and altered wing and bill length in birds.
Broader-scale responses to climate change include changes in the phenology, abundance, and distribution of species. Temperate plants are budding and flowering earlier in spring and later in autumn. Comparable adjustments have been observed in marine and freshwater fish spawning events and in the timing of seasonal migrations of animals worldwide. Changes in the abundance and age structure of populations have also been observed, with widespread evidence of range expansion in warm-adapted species and range contraction in cold-adapted species. As a by-product of species redistributions, novel community interactions have emerged. Tropical and boreal species are increasingly incorporated into temperate and polar communities, respectively, and when possible, lowland species are increasingly assimilating into mountain communities. Multiplicative impacts from gene to community levels scale up to produce ecological regime shifts, in which one ecosystem state shifts to an alternative state…
The many observed impacts of climate change at different levels of biological organization point toward an increasingly unpredictable future for humans. Reduced genetic diversity in crops, inconsistent crop yields, decreased productivity in fisheries from reduced body size, and decreased fruit yields from fewer winter chill events threaten food security. Changes in the distribution of disease vectors alongside the emergence of novel pathogens and pests are a direct threat to human health as well as to crops, timber, and livestock resources. Humanity depends on intact, functioning ecosystems for a range of goods and services. Enhanced understanding of the observed impacts of climate change on core ecological processes is an essential first step to adapting to them and mitigating their influence on biodiversity and ecosystem service provision.
As smug as we are about the advanced state of our civilization, this planet still gives us an enormous amount for free, and we simply can’t afford to replace all the free goods and services with our own effort and technology. I continue to hear alarm bells sounding from many different quarters on one particular issue – food.