The Era of the 1-Hour Laptop Battery is Over!

I remember attending a seminar about batteries and charges, and even the most efficient metal hydride batteries could only give finite power.

Well, it took some thinking that was outside of the box to get around it.  Or should I say, inside of the cell?

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.

The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

Freakin’ awesome.

Attempting to Control Malaria

I’m not nearly meticulous enough for this kind of work.  But if it works, it’ll save tens of thousands of lives a year.

We’re all from Greenland

As I mentioned before in previous posts, the major problem with biogenesis on the planet is that there had to be some kind of forces at work that would simulate a cell and allow for cell biology to develop.

Well, it looks like life may have its origins in the mica around Greenland:

I like this idea because it really takes a big bite out of the problem with entropy.  One problem with the “primordial soup ocean” hypothesis is that the primordial soup is a horribly dilute solution, and to have formation of larger molecules there is a huge barrier from entropy.

A scientist this week proposed a new answer to that most-existential of questions: “How did life begin?” According to the “soup and sandwich” hypothesis,” the compartments between layers of mica—a common, rather flaky mineral that cleaves into smooth, flat sheets—could have provided the shelter and protection needed for prehistoric molecules to organize into cells.

Hansma’s observations, while far from conclusive, do provide some interesting insights as to a possible “cache” where prebiotic molecules to organize and react.

Can some of this chemistry be reproduced in a laboratory?  Possibly.  The question, of course, is what is the time-frame for the reaction (minutes, hours, years?) and were the larger biological molecules already present in the mica or were they formed in those pockets?

I wonder if she’s working with any chemists on the idea…

The Amazing World of Quantum Mechanics

You’ve heard the famous postulate, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Guess what.  It’s got a real world application in quantum mechanics.

“If the universe is sustained by dark energy, and nobody is around to observe the dark energy, it will not decrease.”  That’s the news from the New Scientist and authors Lawrence Krauss and James Dent.

It’s based on the multiple worlds of quantum mechanics.  It’s hard to grasp, but it all has to do with randomness and the lack of randomness associated with observation.

Let me explain it like this:  if you have a kettle of water on the stove, and you don’t observe it, it can act randomly.  It can boil, stop boiling, turn to ice, spontaneously turn to steam and then back into water–  you’ll never know what it’s doing unless you’re actually looking at it.  But if you stand there and watch the kettle, the only thing it can do is warm up and boil.  All of the randomness of that particular system is removed because you’re observing it.  So the randomness of the universe is removed so long as a system is kept under constant observation!

What does this mean?  In the world of Dark Energy, the energy in between the galaxies that continues to push clusters of star groups apart (and keep some together), that energy is fluctuating at a random interval that, until recently, has gone unmeasured.  Now that humanity is observing Dark Energy, the randomness is removed, which means the Dark Energy is no longer random but finite, and that limits the randomness it can do– all because we’re looking at it!

Of course, the weirdness of this science is in the uncertainty.  Does it have to be humans observing this change, or could it be the universe itself which is noticing the change, and that means the observations by humans are moot as there has been an observing force for eons before we could even understand how to make fire.  And if the universe observes itself, it means the universe has ultimately condemned itself to destruction through self-realization!

In other words, ignorance is bliss!

The more we understand about Dark Matter and Dark Energy, the less we seem to understand about the universe as a whole.  Given that there seems to be spontaneous decay of electrons in the vastness of the space between galaxies, I think our physicist friends are missing something fundamental– how can we have spontaneous decay of matter in a void?  I know some believe that Dark Energy is spontaneously converting to Dark Matter and back again, but I find that hard to understand in the cold void between galaxies.  What I do think is that there are nother neighboring dimensions which “leak” into our universe at weak points– points where there is no matter to define the universe.  Because there’s a null-property reach without gravity, temperature or matter in significant amounts, the reality of the universe, quantumly, is dispersed and weakened, giving rise to bleed from other universes of real material, while at the same time leeching energy and mass that exists in those zones.

We know all energy and mass, when in motion, travel in waves.  We know that space and time are interconnected (just ask Einstein).  If space has definitive value, as it does if it’s a membrane between dimensions, then it stands to reason it travels in waves as well, and that would mean time travels in waves too.  And if everything in the universe travels in waves, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the continuity of the universe we live in is itself a wave.  And if our universe is a wave amongst waves, alternative dimensions could easily be other waves which are adjacent to or intersect our universe.

Fascinating stuff.

Planets and Electrons

They’re finding more and more planets.  This one solar system now has 5 confirmed bodies orbiting the sun.

And that missing mass?  Well, turns out it was just electrons, and it still leaves the universe woefully light.

Oh, and just for Willy– it’s amazing it was all created in 6 days 6000 years ago!

What Al Gore & John Edwards Will Be Driving

The Toyota IQ with great gas mileage and a little bitty eco-footprint!

And the payoff question– will it be able to house Gore & Edwards and their massive egos?

Now you know why they drive those SUVs and private jets.

There’s a Car That Runs On Water, Man!

It may be amusing, but it might also be reality. Very cool, especially the candid nature by which it was discovered.

And note to administrators everywhere– he had the results confirmed before going public.

God Vs. Science, Part 2

Now it’s time to tackle Darwin and evolution and the shortsightedness of the evolutionists. Just as a warning, this post will be heavy in science, so it’ll be annotated and full of jargon. I’ll link to “How Stuff Works” and “Wikipedia” when I can.

Now you should be familiar with the theory of evolution from your schooling. Essentially the idea is all life started from a single point on the planet and gradually evolved, basd upon changing plaentary conditions, to give the various forms of complex life found on the planet today.

Scientists have claimed to have “obvserved” evolution in laboratories, but there’s a fine line between evolution and mutation. Mutation is a genetic anomaly that is forced upon individuals of a species by their environment or random process. Evolution is a species-wide series of mutations which move the species to a functionality that better suits their current environment. Evolution is a positive mutuation as well. It would be hard to state that a man who has a mutation which leaves him with a deformed arm is a positive step towards evolution.

The basis is Darwin’s idea that species conform to their surroundings and that all creatures gradually mutated into the species that occupy the planet.

Darwinists claim that this disputes the existence of God, as it seems to contradict the creation story of spontaneous genesis. However, if it does dispute the existence of God, the Darwinists
do not provide information to explain the anomalies of evolution and, most importantly, how life started on the planet.

Now, I want to say that Darwinists are simply people who believe evolution disproves all religion. There are many people out there who can coexist with the idea that there was evolution and God exists.

What bothers me about the Darwinists is their acceptance of religion without critical application. In fact, the abject belief in evolution as what really occurred on the planet ignores several flaws in the theory.

Flaw #1: Evolution happens so slowly it’s nearly impossible to observe in a laboratory setting. Because evolution is subtle, genetic codes of several generations of animals must be tracked and compared over their lifetime. Without experimentation or detailed observation to verify the theory, it’s more of an idea than actual fact. Humans, for example, have plenty of similar-looking ancestors, but there is no definitive proof that they evolved into what we are today. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, just that evidence supporting it isn’t there.

Flaw #2: Some species are so different it’s hard to place a common ancestor. Primates, for example, are different that most other creatures. Other creatures have litters whereas humans give singular births. In addtion, the larger brains of the higher-order primates are very large. Given that the larger brains take primates longer to reach maturity than other species, it’s hard to say it’s a positive mutation set to take advantage of the local environment. The evolution of advanced intelligence and tool-use also seems odd as it took 4 billion years to produce on species that could do such things.

Flaw #3: This and flaw #4 are the biggest problems with evolution. If we are to believe the species evolved from a common ancestor, the question of “where did that ancestor come from?” is never answered.

There are two prevailing theories which explain where life started from– it started on Earth, or it came from outer space. As the latter is a bit far-fetched, and it also has an origin-point problem, the best pursuit would be that of spontaneogenesis on Earth.

But how did life start on Earth? What is the simplest life form that exists? The ameoba? Bacterium? Actually, the virus is probably the smallest, but because it’s a parasitic life form, it’s unlikely to be the first life form. As animals need a prey of some sort, be it plant or animal, and plants need an environmental source of food, a plant life form would be the most logical to develop.

What does it take to be the first life form on earth? Well, it has to conform to the surface temperatures and likely be water borne in some way. If it is atmospherically active, it should also be a nitrogen-fixer. That is, due to the lack of oxygen, the first life forms had to scavenge something else. As methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide were the prevalent chemicals in the early Earth atmosphere (with nitrogen being the most abundant), the life form must have had a very different biological system than what lives on the planet now. The question now becomes– what was it made of?

First, there must be genetic identifiers– DNA. The strand of early life could be significantly shorter than most. Even so, it must have had a certain number of base pairs per chromosome to give replicating information to its progeny. So we’re looking at two inertwining carbon backbones with interspersed amino acids in their chains. If there’s more than one chromosome, then there’s even more of these complex molecules to deal with. Throw in the messenger RNA, plasma, internal structure and cell membrane, this is a highly-organized system that requires a truckload of carbon arranged into preset structures. The amino acids involved were probably simple, and may have even come from space & comet impacts, but the “where they come from” question isn’t nearly as important as “how could they have stayed in one place long enough, with sufficient concentrations, to spontaneously organize into life forms?”

The biggest problem is thermodynamics. Entropy is the tendency for all things in the universe to become disorganized species. The more a reaction adds to the randomness of the universe, the more it favors entropy. Explosives, for examples, are solids that give off a tremendous amount of entropy when they explode. Typical explosives transmute their solid/liquid forms into gas, which increases the local pressure.. Any time a gas is involved, the system becomes far less organized and more random, which means it favors entropy. Any time a system is more organized, it means it disfavors entropy.

Now, think about the “primordial soup” that generated the first life forms. For all of those chemicals to organize, there must have one wild coincidence. Think about the cell membrane. All of those lipids organizing in a cell structure, capturing the DNA which had formed earlier, and then finding enough nearby material to reproduce (divide)? Not to mention it had to develop a method to consume local resources. Organization of life, even on that small of a scale, really pushes entropy to the forefront of any chemical reaction.

The Gibbs Free Energy diagram, or equation, is a fine example of how entropy dominates the universe. If you look at the equation, it seems pretty simple. H is entropy, the energy of the system (ether endothermic or exothermic). G is the “Gibbs Free Energy”, or the predictor to the spontaneity of the reaction. If delta (D) G is negative, it’s spontaneous. If not, it’s non-spontaneous. T is temperature (reported in Kelvin) and DS is entropy. So, the equation DG = DH - TDS. Now let’s simplify the equation. If DH is positive (endothermic) and TDS is negative (which makes the term a positive value because of the negative sign in front), that means DG is going to be positive, which means there is no self assembly. There can’t be because the thermodynamics tell us the system is not going to proceed on its own. Notice the T value. If T increases (the reaction is heated up), all it does is increase the TDS term and make it less likely to occur. If DH was negative and DS was positive, then the reaction would always be spontaneous (T is always positive, so the entropy value would always be negative because of the sign before TDS, so all DG values would be negative).

To summarize, when a reaction has a positive value for S (Entropy), the reaction will lean towards spontaneity. When a reaction has a negative value for S, the reaction will lean towards non-spontaneity. Bear in mind that a spontaneous reaction does not necessarily mean an instantaneous reaction. When iron rusts, it’s a spontaneous reaction, although it takes a while before the material is consumed.

Now look at what is necessary for the first cellular life to evolve on the planet:

• Long, complex organic molecules have to be formed. Lipids (for cell membranes) need to be made from long-chain carbon compounds, which weren’t all that prevalent in early Earth. There was plenty of methane and carbon dioxide, and volcanoes likely put out PAHs, but those molecules are not in lipid form. Something would have to convert them into long chain hydrocarbons. That means taking small, random gas particles and making them a “solid” compound. That’s a huge negative entropy value (and remember, that leads to non-spontaneity.) The PAHs could be reduced to plain cyclic hydrocarbons and broken down into lipids. The entropy loss here isn’t as bad as with the gases, and opening the rings gives a slight exothermic (DH) change, which may be a plus.
• The cell has to have internal structure formed. These are a variety of long-chain molecules that, again, would work against entropy. In addition, they have to have a function that works towards the life-function of the cell. Some sort of DNA would have to form as well, and that means base-pairs. Notice that oxygen is part of three of the base-pairs, and that’s significant as oxygen gas wasn’t prevalent in the atmosphere when life first formed. (However, water was abundant– it would have to be present for this cell to form.) What’s more interesting is the large amount of nitrogen in the base-pairs. It’s a hold-over from the reducing atmosphere of ancient Earth. Still, these bases had to link together to form DNA– something that’s anti-entropic.
• The cell would have to form a nucleus of its DNA parts. The entire reason the nucleus exists is to make sure the DNA molecules don’t start drifting apart. The nucleus exists if only for the reason to thwart entropy, so by its nature, it’s anti-entropic.
• Finally, all of these diverse organic molecules would have to assemble in one spot. Think about the size of a cell, now compare it to the surface area of the Earth. What’s the likelihood that all of these cell components would form together in one spot? Again, that shows a highly-organized system, something which does not lean towards spontaneity.

If you combine the reasoning of the Gibbs Free Energy equation with the known factors above, the value of S is huge– hundreds of kilojoules of energy. Because all of these systems work against entropy, the sign of entropy here would be negative, which means TDS would give a positive value. The only thing which would validate the system would be an enormous DH of cell and its component parts, it’s got to be a highly exothermic system.

So the formation of a DNA molecule has to be fantastically exothermic to overcome the entropy needed for the reaction. If the lipids formed from gas, they have a problem as well. In order for life to form independently on Earth, there had to be something that would overcome the entropy. And it’s something most Evolutionists haven’t given any thought to.

God Vs. Science, Part 1

I’m taking time out of proposal writing to address something that’s been bothering me for a while– the perceived incongruence of science and religion.

I’ve seen people driving around with magnetic “Jesus fish” on the back of their car, and I’ve also seen people with the “fish with legs” that says Darwin in the middle. It seems to me that many people think you can’t believe in evolution and at the same time be religious, or vice versa. We’re seeing that with the new “Age of Reason” authors such as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Simply put, if you believe in religion, you’re a blight upon society until you change your foolish thinking. I’ve already addressed such thinking here, but I’m going to go in-depth into the idea in this series of posts.

Let’s start with the arguments. Atheist evolutionary biologists will claim that if the theory of evolution stands, then the Creation Story in the Bible is wrong, and if God’s Word is wrong, by science standards, then the entire premise upon which the religion is based is flawed, making the religious believers in a nonsensical fantasy. On the other hand, people who are strict Fundamentalists, believe that everything in the Bible is true, so, to them, the world was Created in 7 days and the Earth is only 6000 years old, tops.

Unfortunately both camps are completely misled, primarily because both viewpoints are viewpoints constructed by man, when instead, the viewpoint should be God-centered.

If God is the all-powerful Creator of the Universe, then to constrain his greatness to the writings of Man is folly. It’s also folly to state the Creator of the Universe is so uncreative that he had to create the Earth with a flash and a bang. If science is true, and I have no reason to think it’s not, then the universe is 10 billion years old. If God created the Universe, and I think there was a fantastic intelligence behind the construction of the Universe, then he not only created the Earth, but the Laws of Physics, Space and Time that govern how our Universe is constructed. Sure he could conjure up a planet from nothing. If someone can start the Big Bang, I’m sure the creation of matter isn’t outside his purview. But why pop something into existence when he’s spent so much time and effort to make a whole Universe?

But, say the Fundamentalists, the Bible is God’s word, and God’s word is perfect and infallible, so the Creation stories have to be true. There was an Adam, there was an Eve, and they were parents of everyone. (Regardless of the proof that inbreeding, which would have to be done if Humanity only had two parents, would produce a horribly deformed human within two generations. Just ask the Habsburgs.) If you’ve read the Genesis stories, you’ll notice that Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, one who murdered the other, which pretty much leaves one son, Cain. So that’s the end of humanity, right? With no female partner, Cain couldn’t procreate, so that’s where the story ends, right? Except that Cain finds a wife after being expelled from God’s presence (Genesis 4:15-17). Where did she come from? In the classic film “Inherit the Wind”, Spencer Tracy asks if “someone pulled another creation in a separate county?” There are contradictions and confusions, and we’re not more than 4 chapters into the Bible.

But the Fundamentalist believes it’s all true. But notice that each story told is not told from an historical significance, but from a moral significance. Genesis is full of such stories, stories about man, man’s free will, man’s nature to sin. Are these all true stories, or are they fables said with the intention to teach?

The Bible is book which lays the foundation of two of the prominent modern religions which permeate today’s culture, Judaism and Christianity (and Islam, although the Bible is less significant in Islam, which refers to the Bible as “The book”). The book is not meant to be a scientific document. Much of it is historical. It was recorded by priests and scholars, relating an oral history from a span of 5000-6000 years. And who were the stories directed to? Scientists? Doctors? The crowd of Reason? No, the book was directed towards farmers, shepherds, carpenters, fishermen– people of simple means and zero education.

It has been suggested that Moses wrote down Genesis and Exodus and possibly other books. Or he dictated them to a scribe. But in all of this oral tradition and transcribing, there’s one common factor– men are involved, and men are fallible. But if God was speaking to Moses, then he had to communicate to a man who was an educated Egyptian who then had to communicate to people who had no education whatsoever. So, if you’re God, do you give Moses the theory of the super-massive Big Bang from which superheated matter shot forth and coalesced into galaxies, globular clusters, quasars, and eventually our own solar system? Do you explain quarks, quantum theory, give him the Periodic Table of the elements? Do you explain about momentum, sine & cosine, wavelengths of light, the relationship between matter and energy? Or do you address things in truthful but simple terms?

Look at the Genesis story. “God created heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, darkness filled the deep, and God was hovering over the surface of the planet.” A formless planet? Sounds like the formation of the solar system. Because the next event is striking. “God said, ‘Let there be light!’” What’s the first event that forms a new solar system? The initial fusion at the core of the new star. The darkness and light were separated because the Sun was formed at that point.

And God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse “sky.” What is the expanse that separates the water in the Air from the water in the ground? It’s called atmosphere. As the planet formed in its molten mass, atmosphere was certainly formed, filled with nitrogen gas, methane, carbon dioxide and water vapor.

And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” What happens as the earth cools? The seas form. An atmosphere laden with water vapor hovered above the molten rock of the Earth’s crust until tha crust cooled, and then the planet itself cooled to a point where water started to condense. And the rain of water from the atmosphere collected in the low points, forming the oceans. Anything above that is the “land”.

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. Now this is interesting. According to this progression, plant life formed on land, not the oceans, as we have come to expect. But it makes sense, and it’s something that will be addressed later. Plant life started on land, initially as a single-cell plant life, and probably as something that’s nitrogen fixing. Once the nitrogen (which started at 80% of the atmosphere) was available as hydrazine or ammonia, newer species could evolve.

In the meantime… And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. At this point, the cosmic “clutter” that filled the solar system began to die down, and the neighboring stars started twinkling through. Far-off light from newborn stars began to reach Earth. In addition, here is the moon. According to this time scale, the massive impact that struck the Earth to form the moon happened after plant life was present on the planet. A mass extinction? Possibly. Having such a cataclysmic event strike the Earth would certainly have a negative impact on the current inhabitants of the planet. But you have to remember that the plants are currently living in hot, near-volcanic conditions already. It is likely they survived the impact.

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. Life in the seas started and evolved into larger organisms. Those organisms turned into land-based creatures and eventually avians. Everything here falls directly in line with Genesis as it would be told to someone without access to the fossil record.

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. Finally, complex life moved from the seas to land, and the final piece of the puzzle was put into place. And what happens once you get animal evolution?

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Everything evolution tells us can be found in Genesis. It only takes a congruence of science with the stories told of old, and your eyes can be opened.

God was telling Moses (or the author of Genesis) the creation story– the story of evolution, as it would be understood by someone from that era!

Evolution doesn’t disprove God’s existence. In fact, when aligned with what we perceive as the likely course of planetary and human evolution, the two parts mesh quite nicely.

In the next post I’ll discuss the problem with evolution and how it defines an intelligence behind the process.

Smoking pot makes you crazy, says Brits

So says a study by the British government. Smoking just 1 joint as a teenager increases the risk of schizophrenia later in life by 40%.

I’ve known several people who have smoked pot. And I’ve seen a small percentage develop what I would call “minor disorders” that would express themselves after getting high. I’ve known some people that have been heavy users since they were teens who have developed a case of paranoia. But I’ve also known these users have taken other drugs as well, so the paranoia could be a side effect of the other drugs.

I would like to see the specifics of this study and see if the participants are just marijuana users or users of other drug platforms.