FETs made with fullerene.

Cool.

…through termite guts:

The bellies of these tiny beasts actually harbor a gold mine of microbes that have now been tapped as a rich source of enzymes for improving the conversion of wood or waste biomass to valuable biofuels.

Sounds better than converting food to fuel.

Does anyone know if this is for real, or vaporware?

There is no doubt a significant market for a supersonic business jet. The problem is, they still haven’t found a solution to the sonic boom problem. They’re finessing it with this airplane by (as the Concorde did) flying supersonic over water only, but enhancing performance by flying it just slightly below sonic velocity (almost transonic) over land, which gives them a faster trip than a conventional subsonic jet. But the advantage isn’t all that great, since they’re restricting it to Mach 1.5 (presumably because their fuel costs would go through the roof, and their range to almost nothing, if they went faster).

If you look at the comparisons of trip times, in some cases, it doesn’t make that much difference, and because they haven’t solved the wave drag problem, they still don’t have trans-Pacific range–they have to make a stop to refuel, so it only drops the trip time from fourteen to nine hours or so. Also, they only show a route from the east coast to Japan. If they wanted to fly from, say, LA to Down Under or Taipei, it’s not obvious to me where they’d stop for a refuel. Hawaii’s too far from Asia for their range, and Society Islands are too far from the US. It’s interesting, though, that they claim to have the same range at Mach 1.5 as as Mach 0.85. They really get killed in that transonic region, as expected.

A true supersonic bizjet (say, Mach 2.4, which is about as fast as you could go with aluminum), with adequate range to get across the Pacific, could do it in about five hours, which would be a huge revolution.

Still, there will be a market for this thing, I think, if their cost numbers are valid. They seem to be claiming that they’re comparable to a G550 on a per-mile basis (which also means on a passenger-mile basis for the eight-passenger configuration). I’d like to understand more about them, though. What are they calling “fixed” and “direct” costs?

While they drink a lot more Jet A than the Gulfstream, they claim to have lower fixed costs for supersonic flight. Is this because they spend less time to travel a mile, and get more miles per maintenance? That would explain why they have higher “fixed” costs and lower “direct” (mostly fuel, I assume) costs for the high subsonic mode.

I think they can make some money with this, but it’s not the real breakthrough we need.

Apparently the iPhone isn’t that great for blogging (if I’m allowed an understatement).

Well, neither is the Treo, with the Palm OS. I did a blog post once, just to see if I could do it, but I can’t imagine doing it routinely. It would help if they would come up with a better browser than Blazer. Or maybe they have, and I’m just not aware.

On the other hand, as Stephen Green points out, perhaps it’s just as well.

I don’t know (or frankly, much care), but I think that it would be a neat way to travel, if you have the time. Like an aerial cruise ship. I’ve been thinking since the eighties that the technology has evolved to the point at which dirigibles make sense for specialized applications.

This is a pretty cool distributed computing project

Proteins are biology’s workhorses — its “nanomachines.” Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or “fold.” The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. “misfold”), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project — people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

I thought that SETI@home was an interesting application, but this seems a lot more useful to me. I may set it up to run on my file server, which has a 64-bit AMD CPU that’s idle much of the time. It will help justify the electricity costs to run it.

Megan McArdle, who is now in Cambodia, muses on how anyone managed to figure out how to make silk. One could ask this of all kinds of technologies.

What’s interesting though, is that the thread gets hijacked by a loon who is worried about cruelty to caterpillars.

Given how unevolved we remain, how can we ever be allowed to colonize space?

Leon Kass uses the latest breakthrough to ride his anti-cloning hobby horse:

The alleged need for so-called therapeutic cloning

Alan Boyle has an interview with one of the key researchers. As he notes, this isn’t yet the end of the line for embryonic stem cell research–they need to continue, at least for a while, in order to provide a comparison baseline with the new techniques.

This is a huge story if it pans out, and the headline is exactly right. Researchers create stem cells without destroying embryos. I’ve never been as upset about embryo destruction as many want me to be, but if this can take that issue off the table, it will make it much easier to forge ahead. In fact, what’s great about it is that it seems to be a much more promising technique than nuclear transfer:

…it’s not such a surprise that Ian Wilmut, the man who cloned Dolly the sheep a decade ago, recently said he has been persuaded to give up his own cloning experiments, thanks to news of Dr. Yamanaka’s successes.

“Any scientist with basic technology in molecular and cell biology can do reprogramming,” says Dr. Yamanaka. “If we can overcome the issue [of having to use dangerous viruses to ferry the genes into cells], many more people will move from nuclear transfer to this method.”

As the article notes, it’s surprising how quickly they got to this ability. We could conceivably see it in action within a decade, and perhaps within a very few years. Good news for those of us still in relatively good health. It may significantly accelerate our progress toward actuarial escape velocity.