Wednesday, November 27, 2002

Emerging From Chaos Donivan Bessinger, MD writes: Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Western cultural consciousness pervasively treats chaos in an altogether negative way. Even science, in its search for principle and order, has long drawn a line between itself and the realm of that which appears randomly disordered. It is only in the past two decades that science has begun to cross that line, and to study the phenomena of disorder. The experience is totally changing our concept, for in chaos we find that Milton's Chaos is a "myth," that is (in our current conventional use of the word), a fiction. This newest of sciences shows that systems which deteriorate to apparent chaos are not necessarily disorderly. In his 1988 book, Chaos: Making a New Science, science journalist James Gleick is a Guide who helps bridge the abyss between these new findings and our conventional understandings. Much of the important work began in meteorology. In the early 1960's, Edward Lorenz devised computer models that generated wind and temperature patterns that successfully mimicked the behavior of real-time weather. However, when he tried to get the model to reproduce a pattern, he found that the new graph was like the first only for a short while. The system was "sensitive to initial conditions:" The tiniest variation in the initial values made the old graph and the new diverge rapidly, becoming totally unlike. There was a new "chaotic" pattern, but with the same internal order, represented in the mathematical formulas in the computer program. When such curves were graphed on a computer screen in a different way, they showed unexpected loops which spiraled up and around, back and forth, as though they were "attracted" in a strange way by fixed points. The chaos of the system traced an orderly design. Such behavior was found in many different types of chaotic systems at both micro and macro levels. (11/27/02) One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Yulia Latynina writes: The legislators who rammed the amendments through the Federal Assembly were less interested in reprisals against journalists than they were in doing the Kremlin's bidding. But our elected representatives forgot one little thing in their haste to make themselves useful: The amendments they approved could significantly hinder the war on terrorism. No one's questioning that during time of war the mass media cannot and should not serve the function of keeping the public fully informed. War requires deception; fooling the enemy is half the battle. On the other hand, the mass media can and should serve the function of disseminating disinformation -- fooling the terrorists by fooling the people. The press can and should cover those who justify the terrorists' actions and declare that all of their demands will be met in order to lull the terrorists into a false sense of security, thereby increasing the likelihood of freeing the hostages. The press can and should discuss the weapons used by special forces. It's up to the security services to feed the press false information about their arsenal. Parliament has stripped the government of one of its most effective and awesome weapons in the war on terrorism on the pretext that its improper use could result in casualties. In that case let's take away our swat teams' machine guns. They might not understand the gravity of the situation and go hold up the nearest convenience store. (11/27/02) Working Together--One Species Waste is another Species Food MSNBC Science -- In a study appearing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, researchers at Michigan State University say a previously unknown bacteria is able to turn trichloroethane, an industrial chemical that is difficult to clear from groundwater, into a more benign compound that other microbes can render harmless. Benjamin M. Griffin, a Michigan State researcher and a co-author of the study, said the microbe reduces trichloroethane through respiration to chloroethane, a compound that is more easily cleared from groundwater.  “This microbe thrives in the presence of TCA (trichloroethane),” Griffin said. In laboratory experiments, he said, the microbe is grown by adding TCA to its culture medium. The microbe lives in the absence of oxygen, which means it could would be useful for cleaning TCA from aquifers and groundwater where the chemical is a common pollutant, said Griffin. TCA is present in 696 of 1430 cleanup priority sites identified by the Environmental Protection Agency. The chemical is used as an industrial solvent.  (11/27/02) What is a Thermater ? BBC Science -- An Icelandic team of scientists has invented a radical device which can produce electricity from hot water. The Thermator could play a major role in the non-polluting economies of the future. It works by something called the thermo-electric effect, which scientists have known about for many years. But while thermo-electric generators have mainly been used to power spacecraft, such as Voyager and Galileo using heat from radioactive materials, the Thermator is firmly rooted on Earth and works on nothing more than hot water. (11/27/02) What is a full spectrum solar cell ? Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- At first glance, indium gallium nitride is not an obvious choice for solar cells. Its crystals are riddled with defects, hundreds of millions or even tens of billions per square centimeter. Ordinarily, defects ruin the optical properties of a semiconductor, trapping charge carriers and dissipating their energy as heat. In studying LEDs, however, the Berkeley Lab researchers found that the way indium joins with gallium in the alloy leaves indium-rich concentrations that, remarkably, emit light efficiently. Such defect-tolerance in LEDs holds out hope for similar performance in solar cells. ... The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight -- from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet -- to electrical current. "It's as if nature designed this material on purpose to match the solar spectrum," says MSD's Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators in making the discovery. (11/27/02) 6:16:33 AM

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