I suspect that we’re going to see more stories like this as time goes on.
Category Archives: Business
Life Extension
Mice have been reprogrammed to partially rejuvenate.
Faster, please.
[Update a while later]
Here’s more, from Scientific American:
Kaeberlein says the study suggests it may be possible not just to slow aging but to actually reverse it. “That’s really exciting—that means that even in elderly people it may be possible to restore youthful function,” he says. Plus, it is easier to imagine a treatment that makes changes to the epigenome than to consider going into every cell and changing its genes. He also notes that the results of the new study are very similar to those seen when senescent cells—those that have lost function due to aging—are removed from an organism. It is not yet clear, he says, whether “this is another way to shut down or maybe reprogram senescent cells.”
Manuel Serrano, an expert on senescence at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, was not associated with in the new research but says he is impressed with the study and its results. “I fully agree with the conclusions. This work indicates that epigenetic shift is in part responsible for aging, and reprogramming can correct these epigenetics errors,” he wrote in an e-mail. “This will be the basis for future exciting developments.”
Let’s hope.
The Global Warming Movement
Is it on the verge of collapse?
We can only hope so.
[Afternoon update]
The latest climate conspiracy theory. Tough words from Professor Curry:
Get over it, your side lost. Changes of Presidential administrations occur every 4 or 8 years, often with changes in political parties.
Get busy and shore up your scientific arguments; I suspect that argument from consensus won’t sway many minds in the Trump administration.
Overt activism and climate policy advocacy by climate scientists will not help your ’cause’; leave such advocacy to the environmental groups.
Behave like a scientist, and don’t build elaborate conspiracy theories based on conflicting signals from the Trump administration. Stop embarrassing yourselves; wait for the evidence.
Be flexible; if funding priorities change, and you desire federal research funding, work on different problems. The days of needing to sell all research in terms of AGW are arguably over.
I repeat: We can only hope so. But “behave like a scientist” seems to be beyond many of them.
The New Attorney General
This is bad news:
Mr. Sessions has heavily influenced the makeup of the transition team for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, these people said, with many of those appointed favoring greater emphasis on manned exploration missions to the moon and deeper into the solar system.
Candidates for NASA administrator also are being vetted, in part, by Mr. Sessions or his associates, while officials at Boeing Co. and other legacy aerospace giants increasingly believe Mr. Sessions will help temper possible changes inside NASA that would hurt existing, big-ticket projects to ultimately send astronauts to Mars.
Not coincidentally, such exploration would rely heavily on scientists, workers and rocket technology based in Alabama, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Mr. Sessions over the years has been a champion of the agency’s proposed heavy-lift rocket, dubbed Space Launch System, or SLS, and helped protect its roughly $2 billion-a-year price tag from cutbacks proposed by the Obama White House.
I like how Pasztor unironically talks about SLS/Orion as part of sending “astronauts to Mars,” when they’re almost completely irrelevant to it. This pork-mongering is part of the tragedy of Apollo.
This is the first time I’ve seen Doug Cooke’s name as a potential NASA administrator. He’d be as bad as, or worse than, a second stint by Mike Griffin.
[Update a while later]
Yes, Trump should focus on the government, not Boeing or Lockmart. They’re just doing what they’re incented to do.
And he should take a look at SLS.
No Guts, No Glory
NASA wants to see SpaceX do a test landing on Mars before they’ll commit any instruments to it.
Meanwhile, in addition to delaying return to flight into January, they’ve now officially slipped first crew Dragon launch into 2018. Not really surprising, given the recent setback.
Where Is Trump Getting His Cabinet Picks?
Surprisingly (at least to me), he’s poaching Galt’s Gulch.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Robert Tracinski (who actually is an Objectivist) isn’t impressed:
The problem is that Hohmann is trying to fit the Rand angle into a narrative about the supreme awfulness of the supremely awful Trump administration. “The fact that all of these men, so late in life, are such fans of works that celebrate individuals who consistently put themselves before others is therefore deeply revealing. They will now run our government.” Are you frightened now? Because I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to be frightened.
Hohmann would have been better served by asking what these business leaders took from Rand as the message that inspired them. Again, there are a few hints. Puzder says that it’s about encouraging his kids to live “the kind of lives of achievement, integrity, and independence that Rand celebrated in her novels.” Congressman Mike Pompeo (referred to in the article) explained that Rand’s impact was because, “I spent my whole life working hard,” a virtue her novels promoted, and because, “I eat and breathe small government and freedom.”
Oh, no! Important figures in the new administration have been influenced by an author who advocated freedom. And integrity. Does that perhaps sound a little less frightening?
It does to people who hate those things.
Bootstrapping The Solar System
Advances in robotics and additive manufacturing have become game-changing for the prospects of space industry. It has become feasible to bootstrap a self-sustaining, self-expanding industry at reasonably low cost. Simple modeling was developed to identify the main parameters of successful bootstrapping. This indicates that bootstrapping can be achieved with as little as 12 metric tons (MT) landed on the Moon during a period of about 20 years. The equipment will be teleoperated and then transitioned to full autonomy so the industry can spread to the asteroid belt and beyond. The strategy begins with a sub-replicating system and evolves it toward full self-sustainability (full closure) via an in situ technology spiral. The industry grows exponentially due to the free real estate, energy, and material resources of space. The mass of industrial assets at the end of bootstrapping will be 156 MT with 60 humanoid robots, or as high as 40,000 MT with as many as 100,000 humanoid robots if faster manufacturing is supported by launching a total of 41 MT to the Moon. Within another few decades with no further investment, it can have millions of times the industrial capacity of the United States. Modeling over wide parameter ranges indicates this is reasonable, but further analysis is needed. This industry promises to revolutionize the human condition.
Looks interesting. I remember talks like this at the Princeton conferences 35 years ago. It’s technology is finally starting to evolve to allow it to happen.
Related: Carlos Entrena Utrilla has started a series of descriptions of the coming cislunar economy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry for missing link on Carlos’s piece, fixed now.
Wi Fi
A new technique that reduces power consumption by five orders of magnitude.
This is the only down side:
Aside from saving battery life on today’s devices, wireless communication that uses almost no power will help enable an “Internet of Things” reality where household devices and wearable sensors can communicate using Wi-Fi without worrying about power.
Just what we need: More devices to become a part of DDOS botnets.
Repeal, Delay, Replace
That’s the Republicans’ plan to undo the legislative atrocity that is ObamaCare.
[Update a few minutes later]
Democrats plan a fight to save ObamaCare. I agree with Stephen Green:
If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.
The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.
Sadly true.
Sugar
Is it killing us?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that some 75 million Americans now suffer from metabolic syndrome. If sugar consumption is the trigger, as 50 years of research suggests, then it might be as much of a direct cause of diabetes as smoking cigarettes is of lung cancer. Without sugar in our diets, diabetes might be an exceedingly rare disease—as it appears once to have been.
When Yudkin and others suggested as much in the 1970s, the consensus opinion among nutritionists and physicians was that dietary fat was the primary dietary evil; they considered sugar relatively benign. We have been living with the consequences ever since.
It’s worth noting this in the context that lifespan has fallen for the first time in decades: “If you like your longevity, you can keep your longevity“:
In story after story, we read about demographers and medical experts puzzling over what’s gone wrong. They point to heart disease, obesity, drug use, stroke, Alzheimer’s, suicide. The USA Today article notes that since World War II, it’s been rare to see a rise in U.S. mortality rates, and such spikes have usually been linked to highly specific events such as the spread of AIDS in the early 1990s, or a “nasty flu season” in 1980. By contrast, what we’re seeing now are rising mortality rates involving a broad range of causes, especially among middle-aged Americans.
Missing from all these accounts is a single word that ought to command unblinking attention: Obamacare.
While I agree that wrecking the medical-insurance industry is part of the problem, and may account for the most recent decline, it’s compounded by criminally awful nutrition advice from the FDA. One way or another, federal policies are killing us by the millions.
[Update early afternoon]
And it's going to keep getting worse if we don't fix it soon. https://t.co/pXRt3PAt4s
— Michael Eades, M.D. (@DrEades) December 9, 2016