Now here’s an interesting subject. Scientists have suspected for the last couple years that the moon had very significant amounts of frozen water stored underground and in craters. One of the limiting factors to space colonization is H2O since it serves a dual purpose: water for human/mechanical consumption and being split for the hydrogen and oxygen components that are used to fuel rockets.

Andrea Thompson, Senior Editor of SPACE.com reports:

It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Snip …

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India’s now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn’t the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there,” Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn’t yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

We need to keep something else in mind here. Water on the moon could be more valuable than anything else in the solar system over time. Besides water, there’s another limiting factor to human colonization of space: $10,000/pound.

That’s what’s required to send something from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit. Earth Escape Velocity is (if memory serves) about 11.2 km/s. That makes human colonization of the solar system VERY expensive.

That may not sound like much, but the moon’s escape velocity is only 2.4 km/s and would make things MUCH less expensive and we’d be able to ramp up solar system exploration and colonization a lot more rapidly.

It’s either factories on space stations in Earth/Lunar orbit or factories on a moon base. There really aren’t a whole lot of other options if we’re ever going to get out there.

Godspeed my friends!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Probe found water on the moon (msnbc.msn.com)
• ‘Large amounts’ of water on Moon (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Water Discovery Fuels Hope to Colonize the Moon (space.com)
• ‘Significant Amount’ of Water Found on Moon (space.com)
• NASA’s Moon-Crashing Spacecraft Gets New Crater Target (space.com)
• NASA Scientists Report That They Found Water On The Moon (pinkisthenewblog.com)
• Moon Orbiter Beams Home Images of Lunar Crashes (space.com)

I stated yesterday that stem cell science and technology was at an absolutely remarkable stage. But it’s difficult to see that going article by article, so I’m going to try something a bit different this time.

Some of these are a bit dated, but they still represent the top of the line technology and are an indicator to what the future of the science and research holds. I set the search to go back just one year. These are just some of the headlines that I’ve seen while surfing:

And I only went to page 9 of 338! There’s a LOT of research going on in this area and I can only report a small (VERY) part of it.

You’re humble moderator is awed and can’t wait to see where this science and technology go in the next 10-20 years!

Godspeed my friends!

Sigh. 3 months gone by that fast huh? Ok. To make it up, I’m going to, over the next few weeks, post a lot of articles about a single topic for now: Stem Cells.

If even half of what I’ve been reading is true, we may have found the fountain of youth after a fashion.

And not embryonic stem cells either, but adult stem cells so the politics can be left out of it.

To start with, let’s define what a stem-cell is so that we’re all reading from the same page.

Here’s a good concise definition from the National Institutes of Health:

So.

A stem cell is a cell that exists with no actual purpose. It’s a cell, but it’s really only a potential cell which hasn’t differentiated itself yet into any special functions such as muscle or liver cells.

And it’s major purpose, or one of them at least, is as an internal repair mechanism for the body. This is the aspect that we’re interested in.

Over the past year or two we’ve done some absolutely REMARKABLE research and experimentation in the area of stem cells. I’m really a computer type but I’ve been watching the development of science and technology for over 30 years and I’m pretty used to advances in these areas. So I don’t make a statement like “absolutely REMARKABLE” lightly.

Here’s one instance:

Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Restores Walking Ability In Rats With Neck Injuries

Results of the cervical study currently appear online in the journal Stem Cells. UCI scientist Hans Keirstead hopes the data will prompt the FDA to authorize clinical testing of the treatment in people with both types of spinal cord damage. About 52 percent of spinal cord injuries are cervical and 48 percent thoracic.

SNIP …

A week after test rats with 100 percent walking ability suffered neck spinal cord injuries, some received the stem cell treatment. The walking ability of those that didn’t degraded to 38 percent. Treated rats’ ability, however, was restored to 97 percent.

These are the building blocks of myelin, the biological insulation for nerve fibers that’s critical to proper functioning of the central nervous system. When myelin is stripped away through injury or disease, paralysis can occur.

Your humble moderator has a 25 year history in the computer industry, not science or technology, but he’s avidly watched the development of these areas for longer than that.

Generally when we read about scientific advances, we see advances in 3-5% of experimental subjects or some low number like that. Nice, but not something to get excited about.

It’s been a very rare occasion when we’ve read about a treatment having a 97% effectiveness.

And as we’ll see in the next couple of weeks, this is only the very small tip of a very large iceberg. We’ve made advances in the regrowth of liver cells, muscle tissue, nerve cells, skin cells and much more. I’ve even read an article about the regrowth of lost teeth in rats. (I’m sure the rats of the world are happy over that )

The series “That’s Impossible” on the History Channel showed stem cells being grown on a biodegradable scaffolding to form a new bladder that was surgically implanted into a human. It also showed the formation of stem cells forming an artificial ear.

And this is just the start. We’ve learned how to grow stem cells at will and all of this is just in the last 5-10 years. There’s a lot of tread left in this science and the technologies that we’re developing.

There’s an ancient Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times!” We do live in interesting times and I consider it a blessing instead of a curse. These are the times to be alive!

Godspeed my friends!

Your humble moderator will grant you that it’ll take a significant amount of time, but the results of this one ought to be spectacular.

Science now reports:

It’s large, it’s fast, and it’s heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation. In fact, the cloud contains enough gas to form a million stars like our sun, astronomers reported here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding also indicates that pristine material is still entering the relatively mature Milky Way.

Many clouds of hydrogen surround the Milky Way. But astronomers didn’t start spotting them until a half-century ago–after the advent of radio telescopes, which are able to detect cold, neutral hydrogen gas. The early observations were not accurate enough to determine the clouds’ distances, masses, or directions of motion, however.

Now, thanks to more powerful telescopes such as the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, these clouds are finally getting their close-up. The first to be spotlighted in extreme detail is Smith’s Cloud, named after Dutch astronomy student Gail Smith, who discovered it in 1963. Curious about the cloud’s elongated shape, a team of astronomers led by Felix “Jay” Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, took tens of thousands of radio brightness measurements. The data reveal that the cloud is just 8000 light-years away from the Milky Way’s central plane, making it the closest one known. Its cometary shape is apparently due to the tidal effects of the Milky Way.

According to this astronomy article, there should be some spectacuar fireworks when this gas cloud gets incorporated into the Milky Way, creating tens of thousand of massive clouds millions of years into the future. It’s going to be some kind of light show.

Your humble moderator has spent a lot of time reading scitech articles and many of them have been about the future of solar cells. I’ve read about them for a long, long time and finally something is being done with them. It would be wonderful if we could capture even a small fraction of the energy of the fusion reactor that is Sol, whether by small steps like these solar cells or a Dyson Sphere.

We have to start somewhere though and this is as good a place to start as anywhere.

The CNet website reports:

Well-financed solar start-up Nanosolar on Tuesday said it has started shipping its flexible thin-film solar cells, meeting its own deadline and marking a milestone for alternative solar-cell materials.

On the company’s blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen announced that the first megawatt of its solar panels will be used as part of a power plant in eastern Germany.

Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen with printed solar cells.

(Credit: Nanosolar)

The release of Nanosolar’s first products is significant because the company develops a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.

The 5-year-old company, based in San Jose, Calif., has raised more than $100 million in financing and has drawn in Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as investors.

It seems to your humble moderator that this kind of computer technology comes under the category of “Big Brother.” It’s easy to say that this kind of thing will be used for productivity gains, but it’s waaaay too easy to corrupt something like this into an all around spy tool that can be put to used by any group from private industry to government to military.

From the Register, UK:

It gives a whole new meaning to the word “micromanager.”

Judging from a recent patent application, Microsoft hopes to build some sort of “activity monitoring system” that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various “physiological or environmental sensors.” These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response.

Yes, galvanic skin response is what drives a lie detector.

Redmond sees this system as a way for companies and, um, governments to monitor “group activities.” “In particular, the system can monitor user activity, detect when users need assistance with their specific activities, and identify at least one other user that can assist them,” the patent application reads, in classic patent speak. “Assistance can be in the form of answering questions, providing guidance to the user as the user completes the activity, or completing the activity such as in the case of taking on an assigned activity.”

In other words: If you don’t do your duty, the system will make sure your duties are assigned to someone else.

The system is designed to provide its unique brand of “assistance” as workers slave away on various computing devices, including desktops, laptops, and cell phones. But it doesn’t just track your physical use of such devices. It also monitors things like “frustration and stress.”

Imagine the ways that something like this can be abused and it can gives your humble moderator nightmares. Of all the technologies in the scitech realm, perhaps computer technology is the easiest to corrupt. Keep in mind that the data that these systems can collect is sent to backup logs and can be used to put together “productivity” profiles over years.

EASILY corruptible! *shiver*

Now this is much needed if accurate. Science Daily reports that scientists at the University of Manchester, England have changed the surface coat of a class of antibiotics, providing a new array of drugs to battle the so-called superbugs that are highly resistant to standard drugs.

Scientists working in The School of Chemistry and the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre have paved the way for the development of new types of antibiotics capable of fighting increasingly resistant bacteria.

Micklefield, Smith and colleagues were the first to engineer the biosynthesis of lipopeptide antibiotics of this class back in 2002. They have now developed methodologies for altering the structure of these antibiotics, such as mutating, adding and deleting components.

This innovation provides access to thousands of lipopeptide variants that cannot be produced easily in any other way.

Dr Micklefield said: “The results from this work are essential in the development of the next generation of lipopeptide antibiotics, which are critical to combat emerging super bugs that have acquired resistance to other antibiotics.

“The potent activity of this class of antibiotics against pathogens that are resistant to all current antibiotic treatments makes them one of the most important groups of antibiotics available.

“Our work relies on interdisciplinary chemical-biology, spanning chemistry through to molecular genetics. It follows the tradition of pioneering work in natural product biosynthesis and engineering that has come out of the UK.”

If accurate and workable, this could lead to new drugs against MRSA and many other drug resistant strains.

“The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.”

Since it’s inception in 2002, the Universal Library (www.ulib.org) has been busily scanning books and manuscripts, both out-of-print and contemporary. The books are available in 20 different languages and represent about 1% of the worlds books.

One possible problem is that your humble moderator went in for a quick peek and chose to browse their astronomy listings. The listings started with books starting with A of course, but back to 1894. However there are options that allow searching and the are also categorized in 50 year increments to locate the information you’re looking for more easily.

One has to wonder where this will end up in the future. How many times have sci-fi authors dreamed over the years of having the knowledge of humanity’s science and technology computerized and available for instant access.

I guess the moral here is: Beware information overload in 1.5 million books

This one is definitely for everybody whether they get into computers and technology or not. Maybe I should say it’s better for people who aren’t into computers.

I’ve been internetting since 1991 and hate to think of the number of home pages that I’ve had since then. This is before even mentioning getting tired of how tired I get of some of the lousiest sites on the planet blaring out, “MAKE US YOUR HOME PAGE!” Blech.

But I’ve finally found one that I really like. Symbaloo is a wonderfully simplistic site that allows you to organize a basic set of pages with a symbolic interface that boils down to a set of buttons that can be programmed to hit sites of your choice.

Your humble moderator believes he has definitely found his homepage into the indefinite future!

I was flipping through some global bookmarks that other people have found and made public at www.diigo.com and saw that Scientific American magazine has an interesting looking article about raising smart kids.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it’s high on my reading list. Some say that intelligence is a result of biology and some that it’s a result of environment. Me? I’ve been a computer geek from way back and have a bit of a different take on what makes someone intelligent.

I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve run across people who, when I tell them that I’m a voracious reader, go “ewwww. I don’t like reading!” I have very few peeves, but I guess this is one of them. I tend to gravitate away from people like this.

Well, for me, that’s half of the intelligence equation. Try operating your computer without a sufficient amount of data. See how short that operation is going to be.

No matter HOW bright your genetics makes you, without the data to operate on, that innate intelligence is going to go to waste, like a rose blooming in a desert and there’s nothing that modern science, technology or medicine can do about it.

So sit back, have a drink and see if you can raise smarter kids and secure their future without them knowing about it