Leukemia Cure
Leukemia is a type of cancer of the bone marrow and blood. Till date, there is only one way to cure this cancer – chemotherapy, where a series of treatments with powerful chemicals that slows the progress of the disease. The treatments had many nasty side effects, including nausea and sleeplessness. However, now scientists are experimenting with another cure – fighting cancer with radio waves.
Nanotechnology is the engineering of materials at the atomic level. Researchers have thus been trying to combine focused radio waves together with nanotechnology. These nanodevices are only a few nanometers in size – the width of an average molecule. One nanometre is equals to one-billionth of a metre. Using nano-size gold particles, the researchers have been able to attach the particles to cancer cells. The particles are so small that almost 100,000 of them can fit onto a tip of a hair. Although small, it is very effective. When energized with concentrated radio waves, the gold particles heat up and kill the cancer cells with little or no damage to nearby healthy cells, compared to chemotherapy. The treatment requires no surgery and produces no side effects.
However, this idea still needs work. The gold particles have to be engineered so that they can attach themselves to cancer cells after the cancer has metastasized. Metastasized cancer cells are those that have spread through the bloodstream to other parts of the body. Hence, the researchers are now trying to make targeting molecules, which would hone in on special proteins that exist only in cancer cells and attach them to those cells. Cancer patients would be injected with solutions in which the targeting molecules are linked to gold particles. These would rush to the cancer cells wherever they are in the body, and then bombard them with radio waves to clear out the cancer cells.
If everything goes well in this current research, cancer patients would have a higher chance of being cured, to save more innocent lives.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
For 800 years, the Leaning Tower of Pisa had been slowly keeling over. During the 20th century the rate of the tilt accelerated, and by 1990 the situation had reached a crisis.
The great bell tower in Northwestern Italy is an architectural marvel but an engineering mess. It started to lean soon after construction began in 1173. Architects tired to compensate for the tilt by making the upper stories thicker on one side, which made the building slightly banana-shaped. However, that compensation didn’t solve the problem. After the tower was eventually completed in 1360, it kept tilting south.
Rescue attempts only made matters worse. In 1934, concrete was injected into porous stone foundations to strengthen them, but some of the concrete seeped under the foundations and shifted the tower by another centimeter. Meanwhile, the tilt was accelerating. The marble masonry on the south side of the tower was under increasing stress and started to crack. Stress is the concentration of forces in an object, which tend to distort or deform it.
Soon, computer simulations of the tower confirmed that it was so delicately balanced that even a bad storm might tip it over. The simulations also confirmed why the tower leans. The main reason is the soil’s compressibility – how easy it is to squash. The Leaning Tower of Pisa stands on a layer of soft, compressible silt that sags under a great weight. To counter this problem, a solution called soil extraction was used. Small amounts of soil would be removed from underneath the higher northern side of the leaning tower, letting the ground there gradually settle. In 2000, the tower’s tilt was reduced by half a degree, to the same angle as in the early 2800s.
There was another factor pushing the tower south. The water table is slightly higher under the tower’s northern side. Every autumn that side got an upward nudge from the extra rainwater, causing the motion of the tower to accelerate every autumn, around the time of heavy rainfall. That problem was fixed using pipes and wells to drain excess water from the north side. Soon, a report was issued that the tower was safe and is not moving at all.
So tourists can now rubberneck in safety. The Leaning Tower of Pisa won’t topple on them spontaneously. It should even be safe in storms. However, one risk remains, if a big earthquake comes, the Leaning Tower of Pisa will definitely collapse.
Urine as the next natural resource
Environmentalists envision a green future in a world where cars, homes and industry rely on clean and renewable sources, such as wind and solar radiation. However, besides these sources, there is actually one unique special resource: Urine. Earth nearly 8 billion people flush away an estimated 10 billion litres of urine every day, with animals such as cows and pigs releasing twice as much. We may think that what’s so good about urine and how it can be a natural resource. Urine contains what some scientists call “the fuel of the future”. And that fuel is hydrogen.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, constituting of up to 75% of the element mass in the universe. Being the simplest matter in the universe, it does not exist alone, for most of the time, but rather with other hydrogen atoms or elements. Hence, an economical way is to break apart those chemical bonds – in urine. Urine is made up of water, ammonia and urea. Urea is a waste product which is released by the liver. Urea’s compound molecules contain hydrogen atoms. Those atoms are much more loosely bound to each molecule than they are in many other compounds.
Firstly, a catalyst is used to prompt urea to quick release its hydrogen compounds. A catalyst is a substance that starts or speeds up a chemical reaction while undergoing no change itself. Once hydrogen is captured, it can then be supplied to fuel cells, devices that generate electricity through chemical reactions. Some scientists have touted that hydrogen fuel cells as the best replacement for today’s generators and engines as it does not release all pollutants and carbon dioxide gases, the greenhouse gases most scientists blame for global warming as compared to fossil fuels. Furthermore, their only by-product is water and heat.
Most hydrogen is obtained at a very high cost from fossil fuels and from water. Once the hydrogen is separated, it must then be stored, generally as liquid hydrogen under a high pressure at a very low temperature. Unless a network of stored hydrogen gas stations can be developed, mass-produced electric vehicles that run on fuel cells remain a dream. However, urine can make that dream possible. Motorists might one day be driving up to a gas station that dispenses hydrogen fuel derived from urea using a refining process.
The urine from cows and pigs on a farm could also be used to produce the energy needed to run the farm. The same holds for office buildings and other places where large number of people work together. In conclusion, although urine will never meet all renewable energy needs, it can be an important part of the clean energy mix that the world needs along with other types of energy.
Walruses
The word walrus comes from the Old Norse language and means “horse-whale”. However, walruses actually evolve d from relatives of a short-tailed, bear like creature that lived on land about 27 million years ago. Fossil findings indicate that the creature slowly developed limbs with four webbed feet and became amphibious, probably in order to find more food.
Walruses developed other remarkable features. Their hide is nearly 7.6 centimeters thick, helping them to stay warm. Their whiskers are also very sensitive to touch and stiff. Walruses are benthic feeders which dive to the ocean floor to look for food. Their diet includes fish, marine worms and even seals, but mostly bivalves which amount to 7000 a day. A bivalave is a mollusk with a soft, moist body enclosed in a pair of hard shells. A walrus’ mouth is so powerful that it can suck a clam out of its shell in a mere six seconds.
Another prominent feature of a walrus is its curved tusks, which can measure up to 1 metre long. The tusks are enlarged canines – the pointed teeth that many animals use for gripping and piercing prey. Walruses use them mainly for social interaction, but also for movement on the ice and to help themselves get out of the water. Male walruses also wield tusks against predators like killer whales, polar bears, or even other walruses. They will aggressively defend themselves, and sometimes other members of their social groups, when threatened.
Walruses can also make interesting music. Both male and female walruses can make a wide range of sounds – knocks, bleeps, barks, boings, and bell tones. During mating season, the males weave those sounds into compositions that last for days and echo for miles around. Researchers believe that walrus songs rival those of humpback whales and nightiningales in complexity. Males perform their concert s to entice female s or advertise their status to males. Typically, a few bulls position themselves in the water close to a group of females, where they perform intense acoustic displays. After the breeding season, the males depart and congregate in large all-male herds, leaving the females to care for their young.
In the 18th and 19th century, walruses were widely hunted for their blubber, oil, tusks and meat. Their numbers sharply declined. Now walrus hunting is illegal, except among Native Americans, and the walrus population has rebounded. But a new threat has emerged; global warming. The Arctic ice cap is now a third smaller in the summer than it was 30 years ago. Walruses need to haul themselves onto land or ice to rest and tend their young. The lack of available sea ice means fewer areas are available to them, causing them to crowd onto smaller beaches and islands. Walruses also tend to feed in shallow waters along the ice edges, and the changing ocean conditions could affect their prey as well. Those effects are worsening as more and more ice is lost.
What life would be like if there are two suns?
A solar system forms with a nebula collapses under its own gravity. As the material contracts, it begins to rotate and squashes into a flat disk. Material at the outer edge of the disk clumps together to form planets. Material at the centre collapses into a star, or more often, several stars. Astronomers think that a two star system – called binary stars – and multiple-star systems account for well over half the stars in the universe.
Binary stars come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes, both stars are the same size; sometimes one is a thousand times bigger than the other. The two stars may be so close to each other that they actually touch – they are called contact binaries – or they may be trillions of miles apart. Our nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centuari, is a binary star. So is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.
So, what would conditions be like on a two-sun planet? Like most scientists and astronomers would say, there would be two sunrise and two sunsets each day. The two suns might be very different in size and colour, and their movements across the sky would depend on the exact arrangement of their orbits. For a planet orbiting both suns in a closely spaced binary system, the two suns would always remain close to each other in the sky.
Life with two suns would be challenging. For starters, expect extreme temperatures. Having two suns would n not necessarily make the planet twice as hot – both suns might be dimmer or more distant that ours. But temperatures could vary wildly from day to day and season to season. On Earth, local changes in temperature are due mainly to changing amounts of sunlight, which varies from day to night and from summer to winter. On a planet with two suns, daily and seasonal temperature swings would be all the more extreme – perhaps barely survivable.
Expect violent storms too. Temperature variations from place to place are what drive winds and ocean currents. Sunlight warms the air, which rises and becomes unstable, leading to storms. More extreme temperature differences would mean more turbulent weather phenomena, such as hurricanes, tornadoes and sandstorms.
If the heat, cold and storms don’t get us first, the killer meteors might. The gravitational pull of a second star could destabilize the orbits of asteroids and comets in the solar system, causing an increased number of major meteor impacts. On Earth, such impacts have caused sudden climate changes and mass extinctions. The impact of a giant meteorite might have been what bumped off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
For a long time, astronomers assumed that no planets could form in a binary star system. That changed in 1997, when they spotted the first planet orbiting a binary star. Plenty of others have since been found. So far, all of them have been Jupiter-like gas giants, enormous balls of gas many times bigger than Earth. If life exists in a binary system, it will be on a smaller, rocky planet like our own.
3-Dimensional Technology
A human eye cannot see 3-D. We only have access to 2-D images. It is the job of the brain to turn these 2-D objects to 3-D objects by determining the host of clues to determine the depth and create a 3-D image.
The most powerful cue is stereopsis, which is the way our two eyes create a sense of depth by working together. Our eyes look at the same scene only from slightly different angles, while our brain compares these images from each eye and combine these images to create a sense of depth, forming 3-D images. New 3-D movies like Avatar and Toy Story 3 use polarized light to direct a separate image to each eye. Light is a collection of waves vibrating in various directions. However, when a light is polarized, all these waves will vibrate in the same direction. Movies using polarized light employ two images on the screen. One image is polarized in one direction; the other in a different direction. Glasses with polarized lenses only allow light waves vibrating in a certain direction to reach each eye.
Most 3-D TVs use the frame sequential method to create a 3-D effect. We will need to wear special eyeglasses, which are a bit bulky because they require batteries. The electricity quickly changes the two lenses from clear to dark. The lenses change very quickly. When on lens is clear, the other will be dark. They flip back and forth between light and dark more than 100 times per second. Those flippings are synchronised with the TV, which rapidly flashes between two different images. The TV and the glasses work together. When the TV flashes the image meant for the right eye, the right lens is clear and the left lens is dark. Then the TV flashes the image meant for the left eye, and the glasses switch so the left lens is clear. Those changes are so quick that our brain does not consciously notice, thus processes these images to create a smooth 3-D scene.
The 3-D TV does a good job in creating a sense of depth, but the system is not perfect. In a 3-D TV, things appear smaller than they actually do. This problem underscores how hard it is to create good 3-D content. Filmmakers might be able to control stereopsis, but they often mess up bunch of other visual cues that we need to see depth, making images and objects seem smaller than life.
