Aleks

= A Glorious Future Awaits Us = = =

= = =Week 4: Helium Crisis =

==In consideration of the idea of sustainability, this week I'd like to address a looming crisis that is receiving remarkably little press. Everyone is abuzz about oil and water, but there is one resource that is more strictly non-renewable than these, and which we are set to run out of sooner than anything else. Helium (article here or here). I hope my coverage helps to spread awareness of this issue. ==

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==1. Aside from lifting balloons and making your voice high-pitched, Helium has many practical uses in industry and science because it is the only lighter-than-air inert gas (safe, low boiling point, low density, low solubility, high thermal conductivity), and it is the least reactive of all the elements, making it excellent for cooling and similar functions. Helium is also vital in most new scientific research (including all rocketry and advanced telescope/microscope-making) as well as being essential to the function of MRI machines, the manufacture of certain goods, industrial welding, pressurizing systems, cryogenics, leak detection, radiation detection, and production of lasers (including bar-code readers and laser pointers). ==

==2. The international demand for Helium far outstrips the supply, which is essentially monopolized by the United States Strategic Helium Reserve, because the US is the only nation with significant amounts of the right kind of rock to mine helium from. ==

==3. There is no chemical process to regenerate the supply of Helium. The only processes that can naturally renew our helium supply are nuclear fusion (so far only effectively implemented in bombs) and natural radioactive decay (it would take an amount of time equal to the lifetime of the earth to bring helium levels to what we had 200 years ago by this method). Once we use up Helium and release it into the environment, there is no way to recollect it either, as it will drift away and eventually escape the earth's atmosphere. ==

==4. For the past twenty years or so, the US has been massively subsidizing Helium sale, artificially driving Helium prices far lower than they have any business realistically being. We are thus not used to regarding Helium as the precious resource that it is, and it has not been economically worth it to recycle used Helium instead of releasing it into the atmosphere. __If the market set the price of Helium, a single balloon's worth these days would cost $100.__ ==

==5. The US Strategic Helium Reserve will run out of Helium on 2015 (and it is in fact mandated by law to sell off all it's helium by then). The international market will then set the price of Helium, which will skyrocket, crippling industry, science, and medicine. ==

==6. At the current rate of consumption, we are estimated to run out of Helium altogether, exhausting all world supplies (excluding atmospheric helium, which cannot feasibly be re-collected because of low concentration), in 25 years. ==

==Think this is a problem? The blatant waste of helium in the world is pretty terrifying with this context, and nobody is working on finding solutions or cutting consumption. It's basically an oil crisis scenario sneaking up on everyone, only faster and less renewable, and when it comes it will catch us all completely unprepared unless something is done. ==

=Week 3: Bicycles and Biorobotics =

==This weeks' excursion for water quality testing involved the use of the humble and unassuming bicycle. The bicycle has existed for over 200 years, and this weeks' story is of the bicycle's continued mystery to us riders. It is relatively well known that a moving bicycle can balance itself for some amount of time without steering, but for the centuries that the bicycle has existed, we have never really understood why. Andy Ruina, of Cornell's Biorobotics and Locomotion Lab (site here), in conjunction with Jim Papadopolous (mathematical theorist) and Arend Schwab (engineer) built a bike to try and find out (article here). ==

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==As explained in the video above, one prevailing theory of bike balance was that of gyroscopic stabilization, provided by spinning wheels. Andy's bike has an additional set of wheels without contact to the ground that spins in the opposite direction, to counter this, and it still balances. Another popular explanation has been that of a "trail", pulling the bike into balance as it turns. Andy's bike has no trail, yet it can still balance. Andy's team is now trying to mathematically understand what, in fact does make a bicycle balance, and apply it to other areas. ==

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==One area, specifically, is that of Biorobotics. This is robotics inspired by biology. Taking designs found in nature, bioroboticists attempt to understand them, model them, and apply them to building a robot. In Andy's opinion, understanding the balance of a bicycle "skeleton" is an important step in understanding the balance of a human skeleton, and the balance of a robot "skeleton" that can then be built. In his own words: ==

====**"So you have this bicycle, which is sort of a bunch of sticks and hinges that balances itself. Then you have the skeleton, which is a bunch of sticks and hinges that balances itself. And so this new idea is that rather than thinking of a person on a bicycle as a person on a machine, think of the person and the bicycle connected together as a bunch of sticks and hinges. It's a more complicated arrangement of sticks and hinges—some of them are made out of metal, some of them are made out of calcium and flesh—but maybe you can write equations to show that [this] thing can balance by itself, too. With that idea, we've built some walking robots that balance themselves without computers."**====

The ultimate goal is to go from this:
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<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">To an ultra-sophisticated version of this:
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==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">With better balance built in at the added benefit of the most environmentally friendly power source for balance. Namely, no power source whatsoever. ==

==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Through bicycles, we can learn about the skeleton. Through knowledge about the skeleton, we can build a great many mimics. In the end, all things are science, and all science is connected. ==

<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #800000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">Week 2: The Future of PCR
==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Multiple stories are involved here. Upon review of the near-universal failure of our efforts at PCR this week, I've dug up information on some new techniques that could resolve the problems we were having and make it easier to run multiple trials. ==

==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">What if you didn't have to do gel electrophoresis after your PCR to get useful data? ==



==**It turns out you don't. Instead, you can do quantitative PCR. With regular PCR, you wait until the cycles are over, and then you run your DNA on an agarose gel to get a single qualitative measurement, which you can only use as a comparison to similarly gathered data. With qPCR (also called real-time PCR), you get quantitative data as the PCR happens, because probes with fluorescent material release measurable amounts of light, depending on the frequency of the DNA sequence you are tagging in your PCR, and you can track the change in light emission through every PCR cycle, not stopping until you have good data. When you finish, you don't have to mess with any gels, you don't have risk of contamination, you don't have to worry about visible banding, and you still get better data.**==

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 * Here's a video highlighting the difference between qPCR and PCR. It's in French, but the idea gets across well.**

==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">The Amazing Pocket-PCR (alternative source)==

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==**Even more amazingly, researchers have developed a micro-scale PCR. The simple little jigger pictured above, next to a penny, is a fully functional PCR machine based on the principle of convection between a hot plate and a cold plate instead of alternate heating and cooling of the whole instrument. Using this method, researchers have built pocket-sized PCR machines that cost $10 to make, run on batteries, and provide such a boost in effectiveness that they can perform DNA amplification on the same scale as our experiment in under ten minutes.** **It still needs to run on agarose gel afterward, but research is being done to unite these two ideas, and equip the pocket-PCR with qPCR capabilities.**==

media type="youtube" key="2VmVomcYHEc" height="315" width="420" ==**This would be revolutionary in providing access to cheaper, simpler, faster, smaller, and more effective PCR analysis to everyone for purposes of disease diagnosis, forensics, and genetic recombination, among other things. The future is going to be awesome.**==

A comic, for your enjoyment:

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<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #800000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 130%;">Week 1: XNA


==<span style="background-color: #eee2e2; color: #000000; font-family: 'Arial Black',Gadget,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Researchers create several varieties of XNA (Xeno-Nucleic Acid), synthetic DNA without a ribose or deoxyribose backbone, yet still capable of replication, transcription, and Darwinian evolution. These XNA are also not biodegradable, not reacting to nucleases which would destroy DNA or RNA. ==

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Click here to view the source article

==**This is an amazing biotechnology advance, on the fringe of the relatively new field of synthetic biology. Although the implications of expansion to artificial life based on materials entirely outside of nature are staggering, the immediate applications of this kind of developing technology are in more effective new drug development aided by non-genetic test samples (itself related to the development of drugs on a mass scale in a much easier way than has previously been capable, with current Med-Chem and Pharmacology techniques), as well as in gene therapy and in speculation on the origins of terrestrial life and the possible basis of extraterrestrial life.**==