BC Business Has Extensive Dwave System Quantum Computer Coverage

BC Business has extensive Dwave System [Quantum Computer maker] coverage.

30 generations of quantum computing machines have been made by D-Wave Systems Inc., the makers of the world’s first commercial quantum computers.

DFJ backed such projects as Skype and Hotmail, and started investing in D-Wave in 2003. Jurvetson, who now sits on D-Wave’s board, believes its machines will leave conventional supercomputers in the dust within five years. “Almost all the big winners in the high-tech field seem crazy at first, so the fact that this is an unusual technology right now is a big draw for us. Especially a commercial one like this that has the capability of being more powerful, more flexible and have much more longevity than any computer we’ve seen before.”

The company is currently fabricating 128-qubit chips, which they claim will be about 100 times faster than an off-the-shelf $5,000 conventional computer for solving certain tricky computing problems. But in order for these kinds of quantum machines to become exponentially faster than today’s conventional computers, they will need to scale their technology up to thousands or even millions of qubits. D-Wave plans to have a 1,000-qubit system operating by the end of 2009 that would bump the technology out of the R&D phase and into the real world – appealing to a variety of corporations, including Internet search engines, banks, investment firms and insurance brokers, as well as logistics, travel and pharmaceutical companies. A few dozen academics in robotics and bioscience, and a handful of corporations, including industry goliath Google Inc., are already using D-Wave’s quantum machines.

The four most promising [types of quantum computers] systems developed so far have used trapped ions, electrons in semiconductors, photons or superconductors. D-Wave chose to go the superconducting route: cooling superconducting metal – in D-Wave’s case, loops of mostly niobium – to nearly absolute zero to cause the quantum behaviour.

Meanwhile, D-Wave is facing its own qubit-related constraints issues, as the company’s objective to “go up to millions or tens of hundreds of millions of qubits” butts up against the physical restriction presented by chip size. According to Rose, even these thumbnail-sized qubits are quite large, and shrinking them makes it more difficult to couple them to other qubits and other necessary devices. D-Wave has scaled up through 30 generations of processors to get from 16 qubits to 128 with its newest chip, which the company will soon begin manufacturing in-house. “We can fit roughly 2,000 qubits on our current processor, which is about the limit of where we can go with the current design,” admits Rose. “After that’s achieved, we need to have some other method of going to larger numbers. So the next step in the redesign – or the evolution of the technology – is getting to millions of qubits.”

Unless, that is, D-Wave runs out of investor money first. “I’ve lived through many economic crises, so the next year could be tough for D-Wave,” admits Farris.
Corporate America and the IBMs of the world have said, ‘Everybody will be knocking on your door when you get to 500 qubits.’ But that might change in this economy.

Blacklight Power Response to Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett claims that a pure standard chemical reaction can explain Blacklight Powers energy generation

UPDATE: Dr Mills has responded to an analysis by Rabett"

It is not a question of more accurate heats of formation. They are accurate to at least three significant figures. It is a question of using the correct ones. That was not done as evidenced the the difference between Rabett's erroneous calculated nickel hydride decomposition energy of a "Net heat of reaction per mole of H2 generated= 2*240 kJ/mol - 436 kJ/mol - 204 kJ/mol = -160 kJ/mol (an
exothermic reaction)" and the experimental result of +8.8 kJ/mole H2 [B. Baranowski, S. M. Filipek, "45 years of nickel hydride‹history and perspectives", Journal of Alloys and Compounds, 404-406, (2005), pp. 2-6.]. This post should be redacted at each site that it is posted. Presuming Rabett is really a professor, I'm sure such an
obvious and fundamental mistake would not be tolerated.

Blacklight Power continues to sign commercial contracts with small energy utilities.

Mills says BlackLight has operated the reactor continuously for two hours and that it’s investigating a new type of fuel that yields 10 times as much energy per weight as the sodium hydroxide–doped Raney nickel. He insists the company has disclosed the experiment in detail in a paper available on its Web site, only retaining “some know-how in order to maintain our technical lead.” He says BlackLight is “open to host validators” and is “willing to supply the fuel under an academic license or commercial license.” Eventually, he contends, others will be able to make the fuel themselves.

Pilot plants projected for mid- to late 2009.

So the regular chemistry theory would have an every tougher time explaining ten times as much energy by weight as the sodium hydroxide–doped Raney nickel work.






FURTHER READING
What if Blacklight Power works in 2009 ?

MIT Writes Positively About Scaling Carbon Capture and Storage and Nuclear Power to Address CO2 Problem

Between 11,000 and 23,000 miles of dedicated CO2 pipeline would need to be laid in the United States before 2050, according to PNNL's estimates, in addition to the 3,900 miles already in place (which carry mostly naturally occurring CO2 used to stimulate production from aging oil wells).

The MIT Future of Coal 2007 report estimated that capturing all of the roughly 1.5 billion tons per year of CO2 generated by coal-burning power plants in the United States would generate a CO2 flow with just one-third of the volume of the natural gas flowing in the U.S. gas pipeline system.



There has been identified capacity to store 3.9 trillion tons of CO2, mostly in saline formations in the USA. There are about 1700 large source of CO2 generation which produce 2.9 billion tons of CO2. In comparison the human CO2 generation for the world is estimated at 26 billion tons per year. Currently only a few million tons per year of CO2 are being captured and stored. The current world nuclear power of 372 GW (producing 2608 billion kwh) is preventing 2 billion tons of CO2 per year if that same power was provided by coal plants.







A recent MIT article and the MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change indicates that based on an assessment of currently available technology and pricing (2007 prices and expected cap and trade or carbon taxes) that the two top methods out to 2050 are nuclear power and carbon sequestering for reducing human generated CO2 to 80% of 1990 levels. So the 2100 disaster would be avoided by 2050 even using a combo of existing technology and policy. The pricing policies mainly hit coal prices.

The MIT/PNNL studies aer saying make a massive carbon sequestering effort on the order of 100-500 billion tons over 40 years. There is perhaps 0.1% leakage of CO2 which would be a 500 million ton leak (in the 500 billion ton case) at that point but you would be shoving 15 billion tons per year [worldwide] into the ground or someplace else (a 3% penalty to overcome at that point, for the leak versus annual amount stored). It would be a constant effort while the time is taken to shift to a de-carbonized energy infrastructure. In 2100, there would be about a 1.5 trillion tons in the ground with a 1.5 billion ton leak. You could store 15 trillion tons before the 15 billion tons per year would only be adequate to offset the leak. In the meantime 500-1000 years would have gone by. I don't see how any society that had gone that far had not taken care of total energy source de-carbonization by
2100 at the latest.

I think it is something that works now but which is a stopgap effort until the better stuff is spun up, but worst case the stuff we have now will at least prevent the worst case scenario.

Building analogy
So a worst case scenario is that we can't get better stuff working and have to scale up what we got. And patch our problem with an expensive and relative bonehead solution but a solution that would work. The worst case scenario is not that we fail completely and all die, which is the equivalent of if you cannot get out of your multi-story apartment in 90 years which has a layer of dirt constantly falling on
it now it will fall on you and your neighbors will all die in 90 years because the roof the building will collapse. Carbon sequestering is the tenants shoveling off the dirt for a few hundred or thousand years. The CO2 that is in the air stays there for 3000 years.

So CCS is not the best hope. It is a hope and if you don't get something better then we just sweep it under the ground. It is just better than renewables like solar and wind in their current condition and projecting that condition forward unchanged for forty years.

Carbon sequestering is more a solution that results from economics and carbon taxes than from best science. Economics and policy are real things in our civilization though. It is also more of a peak oil delaying thing.

A better plan which is very different.

80% of money [energy infrastructure spending] and effort on technology that is ready now and deploying it.
20% of money and effort on developing better technology. Spreading it around on as many bets as efficiently as possible. A DARPA of energy looking to prove out home run technology.

The 100% of money is 2-4 trillion per year that will be going into energy infrastructure worldwide.
200-600 billion per year from and for the USA.

A significant portion of the 20% on factory mass produced deep burn fission. $20-40 billion seems certainly enough to develop it and to initiate build-out. Design and prove out a factory mass preducible variant on the liquid fluoride thorium reactor (like the Fuji MSR). Not even all of one year of what would be the US portion of 20% of energy infrastructure spend. Plenty left to fund many different approaches to nuclear fusion and other technology bets.

Repulsive Casimir Force: Casimir-Lifshitz force experimentally verified

A repulsive quantum force, opposite of casimir force, has been verified and measured. This is the cover story, [Measured long-range repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz forces], of the Jan 8, 2009 Nature journal and is from Harvard researchers: J. N. Munday, Federico Capasso & V. Adrian Parsegian.

Controlling the casimir forces is potentially a huge capability and DARPA has been funding work on it.

Last year creating a small scale comb allowed the casimir force to be reduced by 30 to 40%

Sufficient control of the casimir force could enable a breakthrough in space propulsion and energy extraction from the vacuum and highly efficient energy conversion. It could also make nanoscale machines work better with less or more friction as needed. Ultra-low friction bearing are also very high potential.

"When two surfaces of the same material, such as gold, are separated by vacuum, air, or a fluid, the resulting force is always attractive," explained Capasso.

The scientists replaced one of the two metallic surfaces immersed in a fluid with one made of silica, the force between them switched from attractive to repulsive.

Note: it is theorized that metamaterials can reverse and control the amount of casimir force.

The experimental verification that a bizarre quantum effect — the Casimir force — can manifest itself in its repulsive form is pivotal not only for fundamental physics but also for nanotechnology.

In 1948, Hendrik Casimir predicted that two uncharged, perfectly conducting plates in a vacuum would be attracted to each other because of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum's electromagnetic field between the plates. Generalized for real materials by Evgeny Lifshitz2 in 1956, Casimir's prediction has been verified many times and is now known as the Casimir–Lifshitz (C–L) force.

The Nature editors have summarized this Quantum levitation effect

Space is not completely empty; the vacuum teems with quantum mechanical energy fluctuations able to generate an attractive force between objects that are very close to each other. This 'Casimir–Lifshitz' force can cause static friction or 'stiction' in nanomachines, which must be strongly reduced. Until now only attractive interactions have been reported but in theory, if vacuum is replaced by certain media, Casimir–Lifshitz forces should become repulsive. This has now been confirmed experimentally. Repulsion, weaker than the attractive force, was measured in a carefully chosen system of interacting materials immersed in fluid. The magnitude of both forces increases as separation decreases. The repulsive forces could conceivably allow quantum levitation of objects in a fluid and lead to new types of switchable nanoscale devices with ultra-low static friction. Levitation depends only on the dielectric properties of the various materials.

6 pages of supplemental information on the experiments is here

Interstellartech Corp: Trying to use Casimir force to extract power

Fabrizio Pinto published in the Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical on Membrane actuation by Casimir force manipulation.

Fabrizio Pinto is part of Interstellar Tech corp has been looking into trying to trying to create an engine by making use of the Casimir force. No Casimir force-based engine cycle could be devised if one assumed a constant Casimir force.

Areas of emphasis are:

1. Casimir force modulation; [now demonstrated by the University of Florida]
2. Repulsive Casimir force; [Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin 2007 report on theory and now this experimental work]
3. Lateral Casimir force;
4. Casimir force amplification
5. Energy issues in relation to the quantum vacuum.

One can implement a Casimir system engine cycle to transform thermal or optical energy into mechanical or electrical energy.

The Interstellar Tech corp proposal for the Transvacer device. They describe a casimir force-based engine where zero-point energy is transformed into mechanical energy.

Nasa study from 2004 on Casimir force Space Propulsion
A 57 page study of using "Study of Vacuum Energy Physics for Breakthrough Propulsion"

G. Jordan Maclay, Quantum Fields LLC, Wisconsin

Jay Hammer and Rod Clark, MEMS Optical, Inc. Alabama

Michael George, Yeong Kim, and Asit Kir, University of Alabama

4. Gedanken Vacuum Powered Spacecraft (on page 30)

A Gedanken spacecraft is described that is propelled by means of the dynamic Casimir effect, which describes the emission of real photons when a conducting surface is moved in the vacuum with a high acceleration. The maintenance of the required boundary conditions at the moving surface requires the emission of real photons, sometimes described as the excitation of the vacuum. The recoil momentum from the photon exerts a force on the surface, causing an acceleration. If one imagines the moving surface is attached to a spacecraft, then the spacecraft will experience a net acceleration. Thus we have a propellantless spacecraft. However, we do have to provide the energy to operate the vibrating mirror. In principle, it is possible to obtain this power from the quantum vacuum, and this possibility is explored. Unfortunately with the current understanding and materials, the acceleration due to the dynamic Casimir effect is very small, on the edge of measurability. One of the objectives in this paper is to demonstrate that some of the unique properties of the quantum vacuum may be utilized in a gedanken spacecraft. We have demonstrated that it is possible, in principal, to cause a spacecraft to accelerate due to the dissipative force an accelerated mirror experiences when photons are generated from the quantum vacuum.

Further we have shown that one could in principal utilize energy from the vacuum fluctuations to operate such a vibrating mirror assembly. The application of the dynamic Casimir effect and the static Casimir effect may be regarded as a proof of principal, with the hope that the proven feasibility will stimulate more practical approaches exploiting known or as yet unknown features of the quantum vacuum. A model gedanken spacecraft with a single vibrating mirror was proposed which showed a very unimpressive acceleration due to the dynamic Casimir effect of about 3x10−20m/ s2 with a very inefficient conversion of total energy expended into spacecraft kinetic energy. Employing a set of vibrating mirrors to form a parallel plate cavity increases the output by a factor of the finesse of the cavity, 10**10, yielding an acceleration per meter squared of plate area of about 3x10−10m/s**2 and a conversion efficiency of about 10**−16. After 10 years at this acceleration, a one square meter spacecraft would be traveling at 0.1m/s. Although these results are rather unimpressive, it is important to remember this is a proof of the principal, and to not take our conclusions regarding the final velocity in our simplified models too seriously. The choice of numerical parameters is a best guess based on current knowledge and can easily affect the final result by 5 orders of magnitude.

Blacklight Power has signed a Second Commercial Deal. This deal is with Farmer's Electric

BlackLight Power (BLP) Inc. today announced its second commercial license agreement with Farmers’ Electric Cooperative, Inc. of New Mexico, (Farmers’ Electric). In a non-exclusive agreement, BLP has licensed Farmers’ Electric to use the BlackLight Process and certain BLP energy technology for the production of thermal or electric power. Farmers’ Electric may produce gross thermal power up to a maximum continuous capacity of 250 MW or convert this thermal power to corresponding electricity.

About Farmers’ Electric Cooperative, Inc. of New Mexico
Formed in 1937, Farmers’ Electric serves rural consumers surrounding Texico, Clovis, and Tucumcari; and the communities of Melrose, Fort Sumner, Santa Rosa, Conchas Dam, House, Grady, San Jon and Logan with over 4,200 miles of energized lines.

Blacklight Power critics charge that the company and its staff are scammers and frauds and their science is bogus.

UPDATE:

IEEE Spectrum has three pages of online review of Blacklight Power.

“I would say without reservation that if Mills were proved right, it would revolutionize physics and solve the world’s energy problems overnight, and he would easily win a Nobel Prize and become a multibillionaire,” says John Connett, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, who’s tracked Mills’s ideas for several years. “But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and at this point it appears to me that the proof side of the equation is very sadly lacking.”

Mills says BlackLight has operated the reactor continuously for two hours and that it’s investigating a new type of fuel that yields 10 times as much energy per weight as the sodium hydroxide–doped Raney nickel. He insists the company has disclosed the experiment in detail in a paper available on its Web site, only retaining “some know-how in order to maintain our technical lead.” He says BlackLight is “open to host validators” and is “willing to supply the fuel under an academic license or commercial license.” Eventually, he contends, others will be able to make the fuel themselves.

Pilot plants projected for mid- to late 2009.

Mills/Blacklight Power frauds or multi-billionaire nobel prize winning world energy solvers ? 2009 and 2010 will tell the tale. 2011 should have a compelling movie based on either outcome.

This site notes that they have $50 million or more in private money backing them. 2009 seems to be when they will be proving that they can generate power on a commerical basis at a revolutionary cost with revolutionary technology. If this is not proved to be true and the critics are correct then only the private money funders will be losing their money and any potential new funders.

Previous Deal and Information
BlackLight Power (BLP) Inc. today announced its first commercial license agreement with Estacado Energy Services, Inc. in New Mexico, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Roosevelt County Electric Cooperative, (Estacado). In a non-exclusive agreement, BLP has licensed Estacado to use the BlackLight Process and certain BLP energy technology for the production of thermal or electric power. Estacado may produce gross thermal power up to a maximum continuous capacity of 250 MW or convert this thermal power to corresponding electricity.

Background
- Blacklight Power has provided information and assistance to a blogger/chemistry professor looking to validate their process

- Venture Beat investigates Blacklight Power

- Rowan University study provides external confirmation of a substantial amount of extra heat from Blacklight Power materials.

- Blacklight Power Claims

The latest expected unit costs for the Blacklight power system compared to current energy technology:



The Blacklight hydrogen production plant diagram

Potential Applications for Blacklight Power Technology
- H2(1/p) Enables laser at wavelengths from visible to soft X-ray
- VUV photolithography (Enables next generation chip)
- Blue Lasers
- Line-of-sight telecom and medical devices
- High voltage metal hydride batteries
- Synthetic thin-film and single crystal diamonds
- Metal hydrides as anticorrosive coatings

Estacado is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Roosevelt County Electric Cooperative, (RCEC) in New Mexico. With over 2,757 miles of energized lines in east central New Mexico, RCEC serves Dora, Elida, Floyd, Arch, Rogers, Milnesand, Causey and Portales.

FURTHER READING
Details of Blacklight Powers patent dispute in the UK.

In upholding both of the examiner's objections, the Hearing Officer identified the question which he had to address to be whether the underlying theory of GUTCQM was true. In doing so, he identified three criteria which he had to consider in determining whether a scientific theory was true, namely whether:

the explanation of the theory is consistent with existing generally accepted theories. If it is not, it should provide a better explanation of physical phenomena then current theories and should be consistent with any accepted theories that it does not displace;

-the theory makes testable predictions, and the experimental evidence shows rival theories to be false and matches the predictions of the new theory, and whether
-the theory is accepted as a valid explanation of physical phenomena by the community of scientists who work in the relevant discipline.

Critically, the hearing officer went on to determine that he must satisfy himself that it was more probable than not that the theory was true. On this basis, the Hearing Officer found that he was not satisfied that the theory was true and therefore the claims in the applications which relied upon the theory were not patentable.

The appeal focused on whether the Hearing Officer had been right in considering the appropriate test to be whether the theory was true on the balance of probabilities. Blacklight contended that the test that should be applied is whether the theory is clearly contrary to well established physical laws. In considering this, the examiner should assess whether the applicant has a reasonable prospect of showing that his theory is a valid one should the patent be litigated in court. In making these arguments, Blacklight accepted that on the material before the Hearing Officer the theory was probably incorrect.

Examiner has an article on Blacklight Power

Focus fusion $1.2 million two year nuclear fusion project

Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, the group looking to develop dense plasma focus fusion (focus fusion), has provided details of $1.2 million in funding and the project plan.

This approach to nuclear fusion has been covered before on this site

Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc., a small research and development company based in West Orange, NJ, has announced the initiation of a two-year-long experimental project to test the scientific feasibility of Focus Fusion, controlled nuclear fusion using the dense plasma focus (DPF) device and hydrogen-boron fuel. Hydrogen-boron fuel produces almost no neutrons and allows the direct conversion of energy into electricity. The goals of the experiment are first, to confirm the achievement the high temperatures first observed in previous experiments at Texas A&M University; second, to greatly increase the efficiency of energy transfer into the tiny plasmoid where the fusion reactions take place; third, to achieve the high magnetic fields needed for the quantum magnetic field effect which will reduce cooling of the plasma by X-ray emission; and finally, to use hydrogen-boron fuel to demonstrate greater fusion energy production than energy fed into the plasma (positive net energy production).

The experiment will be carried out in an experimental facility in New Jersey using a newly-built dense plasma focus device capable of reaching peak currents of more than 2 MA. This will be the most powerful DPF in North America and the second most powerful in the world. For the millionth of the second that the DPF will be operating during each pulse, its capacitor bank will be supplying about one third as much electricity as all electric generators in the United States.

A small team of three plasma physicists will perform the experiments: Eric Lerner, President of LPP; Dr. XinPei Lu and Dr. Krupakar Murali Subramanian. Mr. Lerner has been involved in the development of Focus Fusion for over 20 years. Dr. Lu is currently Professor of Physics at HuaZhong Univ. of Sci. & Tech., Wuhan, China, where he received his PhD in 2001. He has been working in the field of pulsed plasmas for over 14 years and is the inventor of an atmospheric-pressure cold plasma jet. Dr. Subramanian is currently Senior Research Scientist, AtmoPla Dept., and BTU International Inc., in N. Billerica, Massachusetts. He worked for five years on the advanced-fuel Inertial Electrostatic Confinement device at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received his PhD in 2004 and where he invented new plasma diagnostic instruments.

To help in the design of the capacitor bank, LPP has hired a leading expert in DPF design and experiment, Dr. John Thompson. Dr. Thompson has worked for over twenty years with Maxwell Laboratories and Alameda Applied Sciences Corporation to develop pulsed power devices, including DPFs and diamond switches.

The $1.2 million for the project has been provided by a $500,000 investment from The Abell Foundation, Inc, of Baltimore, Maryland, and by additional investments from a small number of individuals.

The basic technology of LPP’s approach is covered by a patent application, which was allowed in full by the US Patent Office in November. LPP expects the patent to be issued shortly.

FURTHER READING
Technical details

The dense plasma focus device consists of two cylindrical copper or beryllium electrodes nested inside each other. The outer electrode is generally no more than 6-7 inches in diameter and a foot long. The electrodes are enclosed in a vacuum chamber with a low pressure gas filling the space between them.

A pulse of electricity from a capacitor bank (an energy storage device) is discharged across the electrodes. For a few millionths of a second, an intense current flows from the outer to the inner electrode through the gas. This current starts to heat the gas and creates an intense magnetic field. Guided by its own magnetic field, the current forms itself into a thin sheath of tiny filaments; little whirlwinds of hot, electrically-conducting gas called plasma. A picture of these plasma filaments is shown below along with a schematic drawing.

This sheath travels to the end of the inner electrode where the magnetic fields produced by the currents pinch and twist the plasma into a tiny, dense ball only a few thousandths of an inch across called a plasmoid. All of this happens without being guided by external magnets.

The magnetic fields very quickly collapse, and these changing magnetic fields induce an electric field which causes a beam of electrons to flow in one direction and a beam of ions (atoms that have lost electrons) in the other. The electron beam heats the plasmoid to extremely high temperatures, the equivalent of billions of degrees C (particles energies of 100 keV or more).

The collisions of the electrons with the ions generate a short pulse of highly-intense X-rays. If the device is being used to generate X-rays for our X-ray source project, conditions such as electrode sizes and shapes and gas fill pressure can be used to maximize X-ray output.

If the device is being used to produce fusion energy, other conditions can minimize X-ray production, which cools the plasma. Instead, energy can be transferred from the electrons to the ions using the magnetic field effect. Collisions of the ions with each other cause fusion reactions, which add more energy to the plasmoid. So in the end, the ion beam contain more energy than was input by the original electric current. (The energy of the electron beam is dissipated inside the plasmoid to heat it.) This happens even though the plasmoid only lasts 10 ns (billionths of a second) or so, because of the very high density in the plasmoid, which is close to solid density, makes collisions very likely and they occur extremely rapidly.

The ion beam of charged particles is directed into a decelerator which acts like a particle accelerator in reverse. Instead of using electricity to accelerate charged particles, they decelerate charged particles and generate electricity. Some of this electricity is recycled to power the next fusion pulse while the excess (net) energy is the electricity produced by the fusion power plant. Some of the X-ray energy produced by the plasmoid can also be directly converted to electricity through the photoelectric effect (like solar panels).

The DPF has been in existence since 1964, and many experimental groups around the world have worked with it. LPP’s unique theoretical approach, however, is the only one that has been able to fully explain how the DPF works, and thus exploit its full capabilities.

Micronutrient Deficiency Problems for Developed and Developing Countries

Developing countries have a problem of insufficient iodine which degrades intelligence by 10-15 percent. This is mostly solved by adding iodine to salt in the developed world.

Most people are aware of the importance of getting enough calcium, which remains a widespread problem. Common micronutrient deficiencies are zinc, magnesium, iron, folic acid, and iodine. A swiss study also indicates the problem.

If everyone had optimal levels of micronutrients then the IQ of over half of the worlds population would be increased by up to 20 IQ points. (Enough Iodine and Zinc.) Energy levels, productivity and health would also be improved. Also, preventing brain damage from pollution like lead would also help. Increased IQ provides economic benefits and reduced crime levels. Other kinds of drugs and materials are also likely to be found to have intelligence, health and productivity enhancement. There are drugs and things in food that help with concentration and memory. Significant human cognitive enhancement is not a far out Transhumanist concept. Even more is possible with cybernetic approaches, brain computer interfaces, stem cells and gene therapy.

People in the developed world still have widespread deficiency of magnesium.

Magnesium is a must. The diets of all Americans are likely to be deficient........Even a mild deficiency causes sensitiveness to noise, nervousness, irritability, mental depression, confusion, twitching, trembling, apprehension, insomnia, muscle weakness and cramps in the toes, feet, legs, or fingers.

Magnesium (Mg) is a trace mineral that is known to be required for several hundred different functions in the body. A significant portion of the symptoms of many chronic disorders are identical to symptoms of magnesium deficiency. Studies show many people in the U.S. today do not consume the daily recommended amounts of Mg. A lack of this important nutrient may be a major factor in many common health problems in industrialized countries. Common conditions such as mitral valve prolapse, migraines, attention deficit disorder, fibromyalgia, asthma and allergies have all been linked to a Mg deficiency.

Diet can be modified to get more Magnesium. However, studies have shown that food alone may not be enough to achieve optimal micronutrient levels.

The first step, of course, is to basically just eat more magnesium rich foods, especially beans, nuts and vegetables. Vegetables are especially good if you are watching your weight because you can ingest a lot of magnesium for a relatively small number of calories. Calcium is a magnesium antagonist. As such, drinking too much milk or eating too many other calcium rich foods in relation to Mg containing foods may lower magnesium levels.

Supplementation problem: Magnesium is an alkaline mineral and a common ingredients in antacids. We've noticed in my family that taking magnesium supplements for more than a day or two can sometimes cause cramping and diarrhea.

Food alone in all 20 subjects did not meet the minimal Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) micronutrient requirements for preventing nutrient-deficiency diseases. The moreactive the person, the greater the need to employ avariety of balanced micronutrient-enriched foods including micronutrient supplementation as apreventative protocol for preventing these observed deficiencies.

Bruce Ames has developed a bar that would be able to easily enable people to achieve proper micronutrient levels.

Bruce has developed a low calorie bar to top up micronutrient levels more effectively than vitamin pills and other supplements. It should have some limited commercial availability in 2009.



Folic acid deficiency can lead to neural tube closure defects (NTDs) and anemia.

Zinc deficiency affects immune function, contributing to as many as 800,000 child deaths per year.

In spite of the proven benefits of adequate zinc nutrition, approximately 2 billion people still remain at risk of zinc deficiency.

The most vulnerable population groups are infants, young children, and pregnant and lactating women because of their elevated requirements for this essential nutrient.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has categorized iron deficiency as one of the top ten most serious health problems in the modern world.

Iron deficiency anemia (IDA):

-Impairs the mental development of over 40% of the developing world's infants and reduces their chances of attending or finishing primary school

-Decreases the health and energy of approximately 500 million women and leads to approximately 50,000 deaths in childbirth each year

-Is complex because it requires increased iron intake at critical stages of the life- cycle - before and during pregnancy and throughout early childhood

-Various tests of cognitive and psychomotor skills associate lack of iron during infancy and early childhood with significant levels of disadvantage, affecting IQ scores by as much as 5 to 7 points.

Iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of brain damage and it can significantly lower the IQ of whole populations.

Cognitive enhancement
This site has looked at cognitive enhancement before.

Many times along with performance enhancement.

FURTHER READING
There was a completed phase 2 clinical trial of multiple micronutrient biscuits in Vietnam

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BMW Gina car: a real time shape shifting fabric and wire frame fully drivable concept car

In the video, it can be seen that the front headlights can wink open and closed.
The rear lights can shine through the material. The front body can also be seen to reshape by shifting the wires in the frame. The aerodynamics could be modified in real time as needed.

The advantage of such a car would be far less material used for construction and thus more fuel efficient. It would also have a reduced supply chain.





FURTHER READING
Other light weight car concepts which might or might not be developed are inflatable all electric cars.

Carnival of Space Week 85

Carnival of Space week 85 is up at Cheap Astronomy.

This site provided information on space elevator tether strength requirements and development status

Centauri Dreams looks at interstellar mission possibilities.

A longbet was made: the first true interstellar mission, targeted at the closest star to the Sun or even farther, will be launched before or on 6 December 2025, and will be widely supported by the public.

True side of the bet: Tibor Pacher of Perefrinus Interstellar
False side of the bet: Centauri Dreams

Tibor of Pergrinus Interstellar makes his case.

One of the mission specs was a flight time of 2000 years or less to the star of choice. Assuming this is Proxima Centauri simply because of its, well, proximity, we arrive at a minimum average mission velocity of about 650 kilometers per second. That can be compared to Voyager 1’s 17.1 km/s to get an idea of the upgrade in velocity needed, but as we’ve noted in these pages before, the right kind of sail employing a Sun-diver maneuver might get at least close to that speed.

Useful data along the way? Tibor names the targets of opportunity: A craft traveling at 650 km/s gets out to the Kuiper Belt in about a year and reaches the heliosheath at 100 AU. Year two takes it out of the heliosphere entirely, while years five to ten are of note because they take us to the distance of the Sun’s gravitational focus, where Sol acts as a unique lens to magnify distant starlight. Recall that unlike optical lenses (where the light diverges after the focus), a gravitational lens has a focal line that extends to infinity. In other words, separations greater than 550 AU (where the gravitational lensing effect is first available) still offer unique observational possibilities.

Beyond 550 AU, the electromagnetic radiation from the occulted object under study is amplified by a factor of 10**8 (100 million times). The ’spot radius’ (distance from the centre line of the image at which the image intensity gain falls by a factor of 4) has been calculated…to be about 11 km for a Sun-spacecraft separation of 2,200 AU.

Somewhere around year 20 of the Pacher probe’s mission it reaches the Oort Cloud, an area of obvious interest that may, in fact, extend halfway to the target star. We might also mention the Pioneer anomaly, for an outbound Proxima Centauri probe can obviously be studied in terms of anomalous acceleration along its route. Two thousand years after launch, the probe reaches the Proxima Centauri system, but for those who object that surely faster probes would have passed it along the way, I can only agree with Tibor that such a probe would get much done along its route before that happens, given a properly configured mission.

Free Space at Discovery.com has an interview with Elon Musk of SpaceX

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences got a NASA contract for $3.5 billion to deliver stuff to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s share, totaling $1.6 B to start, covered 12 missions, while Orbital, which got an additional $300 million, was responsible for eight.

Elon: The difference is bigger than even the number of launches because our Dragon spacecraft has 50 percent more payload capability than Orbital. It’s actually, if you were to multiple it out, it’s as if we were doing 18 launches and they were doing eight launches.

21st Century Waves looks at an MIT study of the future of human spaceflight

MIT recommends that the International Space Station should be used by the U.S. and its international partners through 2020 to support human spaceflight to Mars. The Bush Vision of Moon exploration should be clarified and expanded so that it is “more, and not less ambitious.”

Novacem Making CO2 absorbing cement and Could Eventually Absorb up to 6 trillion tons of CO2

The UK Guardian reports on Novacem, a company that is making cement from magnesium silicates that absorbs more CO2 as it hardens. Normally cement adds a net 0.4 tons of CO2 per ton of cement, but this new cement would remove 0.6 tons of CO2 from the air. This is competitive with the claims of Calera cement.

Novacem's cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Set up by Vlasopoulos and his colleagues at Imperial College London, Novacem has already attracted the attention of major construction companies such as Rio Tinto Minerals, WSP Group and Laing O'Rourke, and investors including the Carbon Trust.

The company has just started a £1.5m project funded by the government-backed Technology Strategy Board to build a pilot plant. If all goes well, Vlasopoulos expects to have Novacem products on the market within five years.

Vlasopoulos responded that magnesium silicates are abundant worldwide, with 10,000 billion tonnes available, according to some estimates. "In addition, the production process of our cement is of a chemical nature, which means it can also utilise various industrial byproducts containing magnesium in its composition." He is confident the material will be strong enough for use in buildings but acknowledged that getting licenses to use it will take several years of testing.

Standard cement, also known as Portland cement, is made by heating limestone or clay to around 1,500C. The processing of the ingredients releases 0.8 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of cement. When it is eventually mixed with water for use in a building, each tonne of cement can absorb up to 0.4 tonnes of CO2, but that still leaves an overall carbon footprint per tonne of 0.4 tonnes.

Novacem's cement, which has a patent pending on it, uses magnesium silicates which emit no CO2 when heated. Its production process also runs at much lower temperatures - around 650C. This leads to total CO2 emissions of up to 0.5 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of cement produced. But the Novacem cement formula absorb far more CO2 as it hardens - about 1.1 tonnes. So the overall carbon footprint is negative - ie the cement removes 0.6 tonnes of CO2 per tonne used.

0.6 tonnes times 10 trillion tons is 6 trillion tons. The amount of CO2 generated by people is 27 billion tons worldwide and this could increase to 45 billion tons. So 6 trillion tons is about 200 years worth of CO2 storage.

Nutrigenomics and life extension

Nutrigenomics is the study of molecular relationships between nutrition and the response of genes, with the aim of extrapolating how such subtle changes can affect human health. Nutrigenomics focuses on the effect of nutrients on the genome, proteome, and metabolome. By determining the mechanism of the effects of nutrients or the effects of a nutritional regime, Nutrigenomics tries to define the relationship between these specific nutrients and specific nutrient regimes (diets) on human health. Nutrigenomics has been associated with the idea of personalized nutrition based on genotype. There is hope that nutrigenomics will ultimately enable such personalised dietary advice.

A mainstream belief is that the impact over the next ten years on public health will be minor.

OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology has a free issue on Nutrigenomics.

The expectations from nutrigenomics science are substantial. An important promise of nutrigenomics stems from its strong focus on public health and prevention/modification of “pre-disease phenotypes” in apparently healthy individuals. This coincides with a recent shift in emphasis in the biosciences toward treatment of future disease susceptibilities (i.e., preemptive medicine) rather than alleviation of established disease (Ozdemir and Godard, 2007b; Rose, 2006). Thus, in contrast to previous applications of genomics technologies where the goal is to distinguish existing disease from absence of disease, nutrigenomics aims to discern nuanced differences in predisease states such that personalized dietary interventions can be designed to prevent or modify future disease susceptibility.

Gregory Benford talks about the potential of nutrigenomics in his answer to the 2009 Edge question " What will change everything?" Benford answers people living to 150 years or more.

Knowledge comes first, then its use. Science yields engineering. Already there seems no fundamental reason why we cannot live to 150 years or longer. After all, nature has done quite well on her own. We know of a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine, a 400 year old clam—plus whales, a tortoise and koi fish over 200 years old—all without technology. After all, these organisms use pathways we share, and can now understand.

It will take decades to find the many ways of acting on the longevity genes we already know. Nature spent several billion years developing these pathways; we must plumb them with smart modern tools. The technology emerging now acts on these basic pathways to immediately effect all types of organs. Traditionally, medicine focuses on disease by isolating and studying organs. Fair enough, for then. Now it is better to focus on entire organisms. Only genomics can do this. It looks at the entire picture.

Quite soon, simple pills containing designer supplements will target our most common disorders — cardiovascular, diabetes, neurological. Beyond that, the era of affordable, personal genomics makes possible designer supplements, now called neutrigenomics. Tailored to each personal genome, these can enforce the repair mechanisms and augmentations that nature herself provided to the genomically fortunate.

So…what if it works?

Gregory Benford's company is Genescient

A science primer is provided at the Genescient site

Using our 100 proprietary longevity gene pathways, combined with the public data on human gene dysfunction associated with age-related disease, we have identified Designer Therapeutics for the genetic pathways controlling aging. In selecting compounds to test, we search the published literature for compounds that act on one or more of our proprietary genetic pathways of aging. Genescient has sophisticated software that cross links gene function in Drosophila with possible human therapeutics for age-related diseases. Drosophila is an excellent model system of aging and age-related disease that has many genetic pathways that are highly conserved in humans. Therefore, therapeutic substances that act on genetic pathways in Drosophila often work similarly in humans.

The speed and efficacy of our Drosophila testing allows us to test various combinations of compounds to acquire a highly synergistic set of compounds that act through differing aging pathways. This adds greatly to the therapeutic efficacy of the final treatment. Slowing the aging process requires several compounds, acting on several genetic pathways simultaneously. Our screening procedure allows us to identify quickly the best combinations of compounds that can act simultaneously on multiple genetic networks (cardiovascular, metabolic, neurological, etc).

When we find a multipath set of therapeutic compounds, we then do final nutrigenomic testing in humans. We establish dosage levels by prior literature data and our own testing. Once a group of 3 to 4 nutrigenomic compounds has been identified as synergistic in Drosophila, we can evaluate therapeutic efficacy of the nutrigenomic combination in humans using clinical tests such as: athletic performance, cognitive performance, lung capacity, skin elasticity, blood lipids, serum glucose, as well as inflammatory markers like CRP and IL-6. For any particular age-related disease, our proprietary therapeutic compounds could also be tested in specific disease mouse models or in human clinical trials.

Genescient’s Designer Therapeutics fine tune the body’s gene expression to mimic genetically selected longevity and reduced all cause mortality. This approach is in marked contrast to competing Pharma and biotech companies that focus on a single age-related disease or disorder. Genescient is the first company to develop genetic Designer Therapeutics to delay aging and the age-related diseases.