The 8 most fascinating concepts in microbiology

Last year I had spare moments and wanted to learn something new. Hence I set out to familiarize myself with the full details of the cells' inner nature. After all, cells are small and undoubtedly without much room for complexities. As false as this assumption was - it got me engaged in a wonderful journey of learning and revelation.

After having been reading about microbiology for a while I have realized that most of this small scale natural wonder is amazing - while a few things are mind blowing.

Below are the topics I found most fascinating. NB: use with caution - my interpretation might be wrong or misleading.

Proteins, particularly enzymes, does their job propelled mostly by the vibrational force of ambient heat. As their molecules twists and wiggles, they grab their prey and mercilessly act upon them.

Viruses reproduce in host cells. Viruses break into cells, in various ways, and hijacks the cells DNA / RNA production line. When the needed components are reproduced, the virus self-assemble and blows up it's host.

Nerve cells are chemical-electrical. Various kinds of external stimuli, such as stretching, charges or chemicals cause the nerve cells to open it's membranes and absorb ions. This inflow charges the cells and a pulse is generated, traveling their long tails.

Nerve cells can be extremely long. Their signal conveying tails, axons, can reach from your toe to the spinal cord.

Cell membranes are self organizing. The molecules of the cell membrane, lipids, are naturally drawn into spherical shields - due to their hate of water and deep love of their own kinds. Given the right temperature, and some cholestrole, the resulting membranes are even liquid - a perfect home for cells.

Gene regulation allows genetic meta programming. By producing gene blocking proteins, the cells can block certain features of it's own DNA. When these blocking mechanism blocks other blockers - or responds to external signalling - we have a highly flexible, and highly complex, mechanism.

Visual and auditory inputs are passed through fast and slow neural pathways for time shift comparison. The brain receive both real-time and delayed visual input, which when compared can be used to detect motion in the visual scene. This simple mechanism allows seeing organisms to draw attention to important matters, such as a an attacker or prey, or annoyances such as a blinking commercial. The right and left ears' frequency signals are similarly shifted - to detect phase shifts revealing the source's angle to the head.

Some cells, mostly bacteria, exchanges genes to speed up evolution.Called horizontal gene transfer it must be highly useful when someone hatches a trick for synthesizing a useful molecule or for avoiding threats - such as antibiotics. Multiple mechanisms exists, one is a simple tube from one bacteria to another, one uses viruses for delivery.

Recommended reads:

• Wagner - The arrival of the fittest
• Groh - Making space, how the brain knows where we are
• Lots of people - Essential Cell Biology

Commission a drone swarm!

Online shopping promises effortless purchases from your own coach - without the hassles of entering a store and searching the shelves.  But when the goods are purchased, something nasty awaits - literally.  We have to wait, often for several days, before the life improving package arrives.

Drones are suggested as a solution to this, most famously by Amazon’s leading star, Jeff Bezos. They are working with an idea where warehouses in big cities can send books fairly immediately to waiting customers using Amazon’s drones. Reducing the wait to something like an hour, depending on demand, they would be available around the clock.

Technical, regulatory and safety challenges must be resolved before these shipments can be witnessed in the sky, however it all looks feasible and I can’t wait.

This is all good and the future looks bright, but what would be the next step?  Amazon plans to invest in their own drone network and their delivery bots will only serve their owner.  Also, the drones will have to be tailored for their tasks and there will be a limit to how big things they can carry.

What if anyone could order a drone for their transport need, business or private?  What if they could be used to carry anything, anywhere?

To get there, I suggest the future brings us commissionable, stackable drones. These can be owned by anyone - like todays taxis - but accessible through a common central.  If big things are to be transported - the drones stack together and collectively take your shipment.  This can be done either using robot arms or just be flying in formation, eventually using some kind of standardization.  If packages are to travel further than the future’s batteries permits, which is far, one and one drone can be replaced in mid air - or the shipment can be re-droned at centrals.  The customer pays for the number of drones commissioned and perhaps the delivery speed.

When this system is in place it’s only natural that it’s extended to carry people, families and finally - birthday cakes.  That would be some future!

   https://www.flickr.com/photos/frted/5142119589/

Peak Oil - No need to worry

My main problem with the Peak Oil theory is that it seem to look at the demand as too inelastic in terms of the price, and the supply as far too fixed.  There are already several known competitors to oil - the closest being coal and natural gas -with nuclear and renewables threatening in the background.  A shortage of oil would quickly encourage a shift towards other energy sources, perhaps with electric drive technology as the adapter/enabler.  The supply of oil is also a variable to consider, with fields deemed to expensive today, being far more interesting with higher prices - and new technology.  There are also a number of ways to produce oils - with bio-fuel and synfuel as examples.  The following is a poem I have written - in Norwegian:

 Peak Oil - det er jo bare tull.
La smørja ligge - vi fyrer heller med kull.

Skip og kraftverk - last opp med det tørre gull.
Bil og trikk - lad opp din elektronikk.

Fly og helikopter - fyll opp med mais og cellulose.
Vær litt frempå - i havn må vi toriumkraft lose.

Slapp av kineser og amerikaner - griseriet i 5 dollar fatet ender.
Offshoreinstallasjoner blir nyttige - bosted for einstøing og hekkende ender.

Greece - The Final Option

After having followed the discussions and movements in Greece's sovereign debt crisis, there seems to be only a single option left - Greece must leave the Euro.

According to The Economist, although the consequences of a default might be less damaging than many commentators suggests, this weeks austerity plan is far from enough - rendering a future default or damaging restructuring very likely.

It seems the country has a fundamental problem with its economy and traditions.  Europe has been shocked by stories of early retirement, pensions to the deceased and public railways loosing 5 times its income.  The Greek public's response to the crisis and to the austerity plan supports the idea of a deeply rooted cultural problem.

It seems that these problems were not fully revealed, cleverly disguised by the eager contestant, when Greece was admitted into the monetary union. The Euro zone is hopefully equipped to deal with minor differences in culture and performance, but the runaway spending and poor performance surfacing in this ancient superpower does not fit.

Unless all euro countries agree to increase their spending and to raise inflation in accordance, the only feasible solutions is this: Greece must exit the Euro zone.  This should be the long term attention of the crisis team.  First, obviously, the funding and help must be put in place to avoid a short term default.  Then a new currency should be introduced, and all debt converted. Although the value of the new currency, and that of the converted debt will quickly decrease, this will be safer and a more fair fate, than the currently inevitable restructuring of especially privately held debt.

The inflation imposed loss will still hit European banks, but not so much the ones in Greece, where the public bonds represents the largest percentage of banks' equity.  Inflation will also improve the country's competitiveness, and bring hope of increased output.

Finally, the establishment of a grand plan and a final solution might be what's needed for the financial world to start looking forward and move on.

Electric Drive Aircraft - Feasible?

What is Electric Drive? Electric drive in a vehicle means that the engines are electric motors powered by batteries or generators. This is emerging in electric or hybrid cars, where the combustion engine is powering the wheels through electrical components, not directly using shafts and gearboxes. More information can be found here: http://www.electricdrive.org/

It seems to me that the introduction of electric drive in aircraft and their engines could also be beneficial in a number of ways. This could be done by reducing the bypass ratio of the jet engines, and instead gather the energy produed as electricty. The power would then be diverted to motors connected with their own fans.

Advantages:

• Felxibility in design - electric motors could be installed on top of the wing or elsewhere
• Safety - In case of a jet failure, power could be diverted from the running engine, or battery
• Noice reduction - The larger jet cores could be better shielded, or placed on top of the aircraft
• Electric taxiing and ground operation. Taxiing backwards (remember to add a mirror!)
• Energy regeneration during descent and braking
• Grid or battery powered take off boost
• Maintenance cost reduction - electric motors require less maintenance than jet engines
• Solar power - for very slow moving regional aircrafts - solar power could be significant
• Air brakes - the elecrical engines can be reversed when braking power is needed.

I assume in this that a larger jet core, with a smaller attached fan, would be able to produce energy just as, or more, efficient compared to smaller cores.

The use of batteries in the aircraft might not be usefull, as their weigh could potentially cancel out their benefits when regenerating energy or boosting during takeoff. If the right technology and size is found, however, it could still be a valuable addition.

My initial idea for electric drive on aircraft was in the context of large airliners with more than two engines. Here, two of the engines could be replaced with any number of electrical fans. On smaller aircrafts with two engines, the addition of electrical fans could also be usefull and the jet cores could perhaps be moved to the tail, with the fans on the wings.

Searching the web would give you this:
http://ewh.ieee.org/tc/csc/europe/newsforum/pdf/LuongoC_2AP01.pdf

Update: After actually reading the document above I realised that todays electrical engines have a power to weight ratio 6 to 30 times lower than that of the jet core. The copper windings simply produce too much heat to enable more powerfull engines. This complicates things somewhat, but the suggested solution seems to be to use superconducting matrerials to produce the motors. This looks promising for the future!

A Helping Hand to Hydro power

In many countries around the world, falling water is a significant power source. The only requirement being a mountain and regular rainfalls. Some investments are required upfront but during their lifespan the produced electricity is cheap. Norway has a century long history of taming it's waterfalls which has given the population and industry vast amounts of inexpensive electricity. However, with the systems operating and the world in need of more energy, is there anything we can do to increase the efficiency - if only a small bit?

Two properties of many mountainous areas spring to mind - they are windy and cold. The coldness might not be too useful except as a condenser in a thermal engine. The wind, however, could be set to work. I imagine a rough wind turbine connected to the inlet of the hydropower pipelines. Instead of generating power directly they would provide additional speed or pressure to the water in the pipes. With the infrastructure already in place - the wind turbines shouldn't add significant complexity. It would end up being a hybrid hydropower facility.

From my understanding of the physics at hand, pipe loss is an significant energy waster. As the water is moving, the friction at the pipe walls are absorbing some of the joules originally available. A system that can increase the pressure, and reduce the speed might contribute to reduce this drag and increase efficiency - by more than the amount provided directly. Note: For this to be verified - we need to ask someone who actually knows fluid flow physics!

When it comes to rough wind collector systems, I have an idea that might get posted later.

Internet is Public Transport's Rescue

Today's public transport system are usually rather static. Routes and schedules needs to be predictable and they are at best derived from traffic statistics. Very little flexibility is provided for groups of commuters and no influence can be made by individuals - unless they involve media in clever ways.

In Norway, and probably other countries, online services are emerging. It's become possible to search for routes and schedules based on peoples' exact traveling needs and delays can be notified on bus stops or even mobile phones. This development is interesting and most likely providing great value for commuters. However, it's still only a one-way system.

The next logical step, in my opinion, is to allow online users to build and adapt the transport offer themselves. This could be done by providing a specialized auctioning system where transporters and customers meet. Travelers enters their commutes into a map and automated, geographically enabled, services match up the information with other travelers. Suggested routes are then built specifically for these users' needs and travel times/costs will be available for customer and company evaluation.

For this to work economically, a small difference is needed from ordinary auctions. Auctions are normally used to find the consumer with the highest demand, without knowing the attendees' actual financial status and motives. For the transports auctions, however, it might be necessary for attendees to guarantee their demand with a (credit card) deposit. They can say "I want to go from A to B between time a to b and it must cost no more than X large sea shells, of which I guarantee to pay". This way the transporter will know that they have a deal when they have found enough participants for the route to become economically sound. The cost could be lower if desirable or a counter bid can be made, to the customer, if the desired cost isn't feasible.

Such a system will in my opinion be competitive both on a price and flexibility with personal cars and taxis. It's also environmentally beneficial if people can leave their energy inefficient cars at home and go with others. Less empty buses will also been seen in the streets during out of peak hours. A number of problems arises of course when travelers can't make their subscription route and when delays arise. However, since the system is online and knows your traveling need, it's possible that replacement routes could be suggested or altered - so that the unfortunate customer gets to work in time.

I have a lot more details available in this document (unfortunately in Norwegian) or by request.