We begin this time with a follow-up to our recent entry on "Climate Change Conundrums" and the questionable advisability of geoengineering.
This link is to an article at New Scientist that warns, "The effects of geoengineering could be worse than climate change, so we need to do our homework rather than assume it can stave off disaster."
Although it doesn't cover a lot of new ground, the piece does a nice job of summarizing the difficult trade-offs between relying on unproven planetary engineering projects and simply waiting to see what happens. There are no simple answers.
Next, we have a promising new technique for creating nanotube-filled capsules that could restore conductivity to damaged electronics. This link describes "Capsules for Self-Healing Circuits" and is an excellent example of an emerging technology that may have a real-world beneficial impact in the near-term.
Dropping a cell phone or laptop can, of course, cause irreparable damage. Now researchers are developing a material that could let a circuit self-repair small but critical damage caused by such an impact.
Capsules, filled with conductive nanotubes, that rip open under mechanical stress could be placed on circuit boards in failure-prone areas. When stress causes a crack in the circuit, some of the capsules would also rupture and release nanotubes to bridge the break. The researchers, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also working on capsule additives designed to heal failures in lithium-ion battery electrodes, to prevent the short-circuiting that can sometimes cause a fire.
Best of all, this approach doesn't appear to present any significant ethical concerns -- assuming, that is, that there are no potential health or safety impacts from the nanotubes.
Usually we want to keep foreign materials -- like carbon nanotubes -- from crossing the blood-brain barrier. But in some cases, as with potentially healing stem cells, getting the substance into the brain is the whole point. The question is how best to do it. This link provides a novel idea:
Stem cells show promise for treating a range of neurological conditions, including Parkinson's, strokes and Alzheimer's, but it is tricky getting them into the brain. Perhaps inhaling stem cells might be the answer -- if mice are anything to go by.
Other options all have their drawbacks. Drilling through the skull and injecting the stem cells is painful and carries some risks. You can also inject them into the bloodstream but only a fraction reach their target due to the blood-brain barrier.
The nose, however, might be a viable alternative. In the upper reaches of the nasal cavity lies the cribriform plate, a bony roof that separates the nose from the brain. It is perforated with pin-size holes, which are plugged with nerve fibres and other connective tissue. Since proteins, bacteria and viruses can enter the brain this way, Lusine Danielyan at the University Hospital of Tübingen in Germany, and her colleagues, wondered if stem cells would also migrate into the brain through the cribriform plate.
Finally, this link takes you to a stimulating polemic from our old friend Dale Carrico, titled "So Long As Corporations Are Treated As People, People Will Not Be Recognized As Citizens; So Long As Money Is Treated As Speech, Only Money Will Talk."
Among the tidbits you'll find there are these:
Corporate charters must be re-circumscribed (as they have been in many other eras), their functions specified, their terms limited, their public impacts regulated and rendered accountable to more than their accountants, their liabilities re-figured. Institutions providing indispensable public services must be broken up whenever they grow too big to fail (much of what gets described as finance) or too concentrated to suffer competitors (much of what gets described as utilities and infrastructure), they must be subjected to public competition if they provide services that cannot pass muster as commodities subjected to market competition (much of what gets described as healthcare). . .
We must find our way to public financing of elections to ensure that citizens have the power to restrain abuses through recourse to the regular re-election or overthrow of their representatives, but also through our ability to run for office ourselves with a chance of success equal to our qualifications, even if we lack personal fortunes or refuse to be beholden to moneyed interests. But in the shorter term we have to be able at the very least to track the connections between the fortunate few and those who are elected to represent majorities but who have been bought and paid for by moneyed minorities. Further, we need to regain some purchase on the fraud and fabulizing of the few, we need to be able to hold those who lie and deceive in the pursuit of short-term and parochial profit-taking, in their marketing and advertising and promotion and spin.
We must find our way to public financing of elections to ensure that citizens have the power to restrain abuses through recourse to the regular re-election or overthrow of their representatives, but also through our ability to run for office ourselves with a chance of success equal to our qualifications, even if we lack personal fortunes or refuse to be beholden to moneyed interests. But in the shorter term we have to be able at the very least to track the connections between the fortunate few and those who are elected to represent majorities but who have been bought and paid for by moneyed minorities. Further, we need to regain some purchase on the fraud and fabulizing of the few, we need to be able to hold those who lie and deceive in the pursuit of short-term and parochial profit-taking, in their marketing and advertising and promotion and spin.As we look ahead to new opportunities that emerging technologies may provide, it's important to recognize that all techno-solutions emerge within a set of social, economic, and political realities. It's therefore vital to learn about -- and get to work on -- whatever we can do now to create a better atmosphere for ethical application of those promising new tools.