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Just imagine: Instead of sending Grandma a holiday photo of the family for her fridge, you call up the image on your computer monitor, click “print,” and your printer produces a three-dimensional plastic model ready for hanging on the holiday tree. Scenes like that — in which homes have 3-D printers that build solid objects on demand – are fast approaching reality, according to the cover story in the current edition of Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s weekly newsmagazine.

In the article, C&EN Associate Editor Lauren K. Wolf explains that 3-D printers are on the verge of a personal revolution akin to the one that began in the 1970s and transformed computers from room-size machines to devices that fit on tables and now in pockets. A similar transformation is taking place in the world of 3-D printing, where machines are shrinking and the ability to create detailed objects from a variety of materials is growing. Engineers are now able to create objects out of a number of plastics, metals, ceramics and even foods like chocolate, sometimes with details as fine as a human hair.

The technology promises to foster revolutions in venues ranging from kitchens to hospital operating rooms. Some surgeons, for instance, envision printing bone grafts or replacement blood vessels with embedded proteins and cells that will help them fuse naturally. Chefs could print designer chocolates and gourmet meals with unique textures and tastes. “In 20 years, many people will have a 3-D printer in their kitchen for printing designer foods and other products,” the article quotes one scientist as saying.

via Personal electronics’ next revolution: Home printers that make 3-D objects.

This report by Scientific American’s Steve Mirsky is interesting to me as I keep having to deal with people who insist that industrial-scale animal agriculture is “sustainable.” It may be economically sustainable for the animal ag industry, as long as Americans keeping stuffing themselves with beef, but it is not sustainable in terms of health costs — to humans and the environment.

“We produce nine billion food animals in the United States every year. And most of these animals are fed antibiotics throughout their life. And it’s the single greatest use of antibiotics in the United States.” Lance Price, director of the TGen North Center for Microbiomics and Human Health in Flagstaff, at the ScienceWriters2011 conference on October 16th.

“And then this is the thing that just drives public health people crazy: most antibiotics are fed to healthy animals to promote growth or to prevent diseases that may be just occurring because of the way we’re raising them. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions—we call them production diseases. And so we’re using these lifesaving drugs as production tools. It’s pretty amazing.

“So most animals are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAPOs. I could not honestly engineer a better system for creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria than to introduce antibiotics to this setting. And that’s exactly what we do every day in the United States. If we all recognize that antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest threats to public health that we face today, we have to do something about this.”

via Animal Production Practices Create Antibiotic Resistance: Scientific American Podcast.

Leading demographers, including those at the United Nations and the U.S. Census Bureau, are projecting that world population will peak at 9.5 billion to 10 billion later this century, and then gradually decline as poorer countries develop. But what if those projections are too optimistic? What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100, as a high-end U.N. estimate has projected? Such an outcome would clearly have enormous social and environmental implications, including placing enormous stress on the world’s food and water resources, spurring further loss of wildlands and biodiversity, and hastening the degradation of the natural systems that support life on Earth.

The real possibility of fertility decline stopping before the two-children level is reached requires demographers, policy makers, and environmentalists to seriously consider that population growth in the coming century will come in at the high end of demographic projections. The U.N.’s middle-of-the-road assumption for sub-Saharan Africa — that fertility rates will drop to three children per woman and population will reach 2 billion by 2050 — seem unrealistically low to me. More likely is the U.N.’s high-end projection that sub-Saharan Africa’s population will climb to 2.2 billion by 2050 and then continue to 4.8 billion by 2100. The dire consequences of such an increase are difficult to ponder. If sub-Saharan Africa is having trouble feeding and providing water to 880 million people today, what will the region be like in 90 years if the population increases fivefold — particularly if, as projected, temperatures rise by at least 3.6 degrees F, worsening droughts?

via What if population grows faster than the experts project? | 7 billion: What to expect when you’re expanding—a special series | Grist.

Why did they reject my innovative idea?

This explains a lot!

Most people view creativity as an asset — until they come across a creative idea. That’s because creativity not only reveals new perspectives — it promotes a sense of uncertainty.

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

To uncover bias against creativity, the researchers used a subtle technique to measure unconscious bias — the kind to which people may not want to admit, such as racism. Results revealed that while people explicitly claimed to desire creative ideas, they actually associated creative ideas with negative words such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony.”

Goncalo said this bias caused subjects to reject ideas for new products that were novel and high quality.

“Our findings imply a deep irony,” wrote the authors, who also include Jennifer Mueller of the University of Pennsylvania and Shimul Melwani of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary.”

Uncertainty drives the search for and generation of creative ideas, but “uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most,” the researchers wrote. “Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. … The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.”

via Why we crave creativity but reject creative ideas.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

Wingnut and former president Baby Bush used to say that we needed to go back to the moon and build a base there in order to go to Mars. Huh? That’s like saying you need to go around the world in order to visit your next door neighbor. Even for a certified moron, that’s quite a remarkably dumb idea. But, in fact, Baby Bush was practicing the ancient art of misdirection.

What nobody wants you to know (and which I’ve been telling you for years), is that there is in fact a secret U.S. military base on the moon. Now, for the first time anywhere, we get a picture of it, hidden in a cave. This photo was taken by an Indian space probe.

The secret U.S. moon base is in the hole. Really.

Here’s from a clueless post by Dvice:

Discovered by the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, this chamber is more than one mile long and 393 feet wide. There would be lots of benefits of building a moon base in there, mainly for protection from the nastiness of the surface of the moon. It’d provide a nearly constant temperature of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, unlike the surface, which fluctuates between 266 degrees and -292 degrees. And it would provide protection from radiation, micro-meteor impacts and dust.

So, what’s the holdup? Let’s get building! I want to visit a hotel in a moon base sometime in the next 20 years, please!

Hello, Earth to Dvice (make that, Moon to Dvice): the base is in there. Really. I should know. I was abdicated by the lunar kings and banally probed without mercy until I let go my own top-secret knowledge of just about everything worth knowing.

Plastic Planet - have you had your Bisphenol A today?

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Directed by Werner Boote

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

At the rate we’re going, we’re all going to need to isolate ourselves from the toxins we’ve dumped into our environment by diving into HazMat bubble suits. We’ll have to invent filters that keep the nano-sized particles of cancer-dealing crap out – but, hey, we’ve got the technology for that. And plastics.

On second thought, no: plastics are one of the biggest sources of toxins. Bisphenol A, for instance, is a plasticizer that makes plastic, well, plasticy, and has been a known estrogenic since the 1930s. Estrogenics are those wonderful chemicals that are the secret culprits behind the bitching and moaning of the Iron John crew. Chief among them, Robert Bly has long complained that men have become too feminized, and clearly plastics are to blame, not doting mothers. I mean, look at the amphibians: scientists have been observing them changing sex, male to female, mid-stream for years, so why not humans, too? Is there a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

Loving Lampposts, a documentary by Todd Drezner: highly recommended.

Loving Lampposts: Living Autistic

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4.5 stars (out of 5 possible)
Directed by Todd Drezner
Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

Todd Drezner’s beautiful investigation of autism is motivated by the personal. His son is autistic and loves to look at lampposts. They walk every day they can in Central Park and the young boy gazes up at the lampposts, recognizing them as individuals in ways us mere normals simply cannot.

There is a lot of bad information about autism out there and, with grace and compassion, Drezner gives even the lamest and most discredited notions their moment in the sun. The film is divided into sections and a recurring one is called “Autism is…” The reality is, no one knows for sure. But it is certainly not caused by vaccines or mercury, and it very likely isn’t genetic, either. Read the rest of this entry »

Left to right: WSU Physics and Astronomy majors Kenneth Dorrance, Kyle Welch and Julian Smith/photo and montage by Brian Charles Clark

Next time you’re in a pub with a dart board, pick up a dart, stand at the regulation distance, and toss a bull’s eye. Piece of cake, right? Now, stand in that same pub but throw the dart so that it goes into a nice, near orbit around Neptune. Not so easy this time, eh?

But we’re not done. To make things a little trickier, figure on using Neptune’s atmosphere to brake your dart’s velocity. While you’re at it, calculate the path your dart took to get from the pub to Neptune. Write that path out in a series of differential equations. Write a 500-word abstract. Do all this is 48 hours under the auspices of your faculty mentor. You’re almost done! Last step: enter the paper you’ve just written in the University Physics Competition.

With slight variations on the process above like, they didn’t actually throw a dart, that’s what three WSU physics majors did. Julian Smith, Kyle Welch and Ken Dorrance spent a recent weekend bravely battling the complexities of Lagrangian mechanics to calculate just what it would take to get a rocket from Earth to Neptune. Their efforts won them a bronze award in the competition. Read the rest of this entry »

Honey bee (Apis mellifera) collecting pollen. Photo: Jon Sullivan

The disastrous decline in bees that pollinate most of the world’s food crops will continue unless humans profoundly change their ways, warns a United Nations report released today. More than a dozen factors are linked to the worldwide loss of bees, from the disappearance of flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the global spread of pests, air pollution and climate change.

New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens that can be deadly to bees and other pollinators are now showing up worldwide, migrating from one region to another due to shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade, the report finds. Read the rest of this entry »