All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

GM crops and the war on poverty

8 Comments

field of wheatOver at The Guardian, Professor Mark Tester stands up to say that genetically modified crops are an essential component of the struggle to erase world poverty and hunger:

GM crops are not the answer to this shameful global situation, but I argue strongly that they provide another tool, another option to try to address the problem. And I do not think those of us sitting in comfortable wealth have a right to deny people the opportunity to improve their production of food. The technology is just that, a technology. Like nuclear technologies (radiotherapy or nuclear weapons) or mobile phones (communication or bomb triggers), how we use it is the main issue. I hope that the plants we have generated provide a subtle use of GM technology that will allow some positive benefits for the developing world.

He’s quite correct, of course; as we mention here quite often, the morality of a tool comes from the hand that wields it. And therein lies the rub: while GM crops have the potential to improve the lives of those less fortunate than ourselves, they can also be (and allegedly are) used to paint them into an economic corner for the purposes of maximising profits – selling farmers the only seeds that will survive the pesticides which you also manufacture, for example. [image by James Wheare]

I don’t know how it is in the States, but here in the UK GM crops are a hugely sensitive topic with a sharp polarity of opinion that has been amplified by propaganda, celebrity campaigning and emotional button-pushing from both sides of the debate. Such extreme viewpoints actually end up clouding the issue; somewhere in the shades of grey is a way to use genetic modification safely for the benefit of everyone, but until we start meeting each other half way we leave the field wide open for both poverty and profiteering to continue.

Blog

Please support Shira Lipkin’s blogathon

Times are tough all round, but if you can spare a few bucks for a good cause you might want to check out long-term friend-of-Futurismic Shira Lipkin’s forthcoming blogathon in support of the Boston Area Rape Crisis Centre.

She’ll be posting fresh material every half hour for 24 hours on her LiveJournal on the 25th and 26th of July, and the price of your next coffee and pastry combo could help Shira and the other BARCC volunteers support people through the aftermath of rape – and work to dismantle the culture that creates it.

There are so many causes in the world that need financial support, and so little money to go around; I expect many of you have already given to a charity of some sort this year. Those of you who haven’t, please consider stumping up a little cash for this one. I’ve just pledged £10, but even a few dollars would help.

Thanks for listening. 🙂

Blog

This blog post will self-destruct in thirty seconds

If you’ve been hankering for an intersection of nanomaterials and old spy movie cliches, today’s your day: a gang of researchers in Illinois reckon they’ve found a way to use nanoparticles to make messages that erase themselves after a certain amount of time.

A team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, coated gold nanoparticles with a layer of hair-like molecules called 4-(11-mercaptoundecanoxy)azobenzene or MUA. When zapped with ultraviolet light, these filaments change their shape and charge distribution, causing the nanoparticles to congregate together and change colour […]

To put this colour-changing ability to good use, the team dispersed the nanoparticles in a gel and sandwiched it between plastic sheets to produce a thin, red film. When Grzybowski and his colleagues shone UV light at the film, either through a patterned mask or using a UV pen, they found they could print a range of images or write words onto the film in just a few seconds.

The colour change is not permanent, however. In the absence of UV light, the MUA gradually reverts to its original shape, allowing the nanoparticles to disperse and the images to disappear.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to work out how many times more expensive and complicated it would be to use this stuff instead of scribbling a note on some rice paper. Or whether the Etch-a-Sketch people will be tempted to build a 2.0 version.

Blog

Eye in the sky – commercial satellites trace Sudanese arms purchases

Europe seen from space at nightWell, maybe ubiquitous global surveillance isn’t all bad. Remember that big load of tanks and armaments that Somalian pirates scored from a Ukranian cargo ship and subsequently ransomed back? Well, two magazine reporters used commercial imaging satellites to chase down their final destination, proving in the process that they were en route to the breakaway government of South Sudan:

Images captured by DigitalGlobe satellites in March 2009 showed 33 tanks parked at Kahawa Barracks northeast of Nairobi. In parallel, satellite imagery captured from southern Sudan showed tracked vehicles, parked under camouflage, at a Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) compound northeast of Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Jane’s observed that SPLA attempts to conceal the location “were deliberate and masterful, but dimensional analysis, tracked-vehicle scarring and the staging of three vehicles in a tactical perimeter established the concealed vehicles as tanks.”

It’s not particularly good news – governments tooling up for nasty regional conflicts never is – but it’s the sort of news we’re better off having than not. Maybe the UN should be funding more similar satellites so as to keep an eye on governments who are somewhat economical with the truth about their military build-ups? [image by woodleywonderworks]

Maybe we could use them to keep Obama and Medvedev honest with regards to their nuclear disarmament agreement… provided the whole thing isn’t a carefully orchestrated publicity play in the first place, natch.

Blog

Mono-molecular optical transistor brings quantum computing closer

3 Comments

Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have managed to make an optical transistor from a single molecule, offering another potential stay of execution for Moore’s Law.

ETH’s Martin Pototschnig told us more about the molecule used for the experiments. “It is a small hydrocarbon molecule called dibenzanthanthrene (DBATT). The molecules are doped in n-tetradecane, an organic solvent. So the sample is a pink liquid at room temperature. Then we cryogenically cool the small portion of the sample then the n-tetradecane freezes and forms a molecular crystal.”

The molecule itself is about 2 nanometers in size, over ten times smaller than standard transistors, which means that a lot more could be integrated in a single chip.

Great, you may be thinking, but what is it good for? Well, not much. Yet.

By using a laser beam to impose the quantum state of a molecular transistor, the research team demonstrated control of a second laser beam, which reflects the way in which a conventional transistor works.

“The next step is to ‘connect’ two or more [single-molecule optical transistors],” Pototschnig told us with regard to future areas the team will be focusing on. “In other words, we have to connect two molecules in a way that the quantum mechanical superposition state of each molecule is exchanged in a coherent manner. Only that way the strength of the quantum computing principles can be fully taken advantage of. We are in the middle of coming up with actual ways to implement the connection idea.”

Doesn’t really explain much, but then I don’t really fully understand how quantum computing is meant to work, despite numerous attempts to research it a bit further… if anyone can point me towards a good simplified explanation, please pipe up in the comments.

One thing I do know is that a lot of people are skeptical of quantum computing having any practical real-world applications, assuming it ever makes it out of the developmental stages. But then IBM’s chairman of 1943 never imagined the world would need more than five regular computers, and he’s been proved very wrong since then. Human ingenuity being what it is, we’ll find something to do with it once it’s here.