http://www.futurepundit.com/ Future technological trends and their likely effects on human society, politics and evolution. en-us 2009-11-07T19:29:46-08:00 2009-11-07T22:31:26-08:00 A Fortune Magazine article by Alex Taylor points toqualifiers on claims of the performance of the forthcoming Chevy Volt pluggable hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). Read the whole article. But I found the part about batteries most interesting. That's not all. Also under scrutiny is GM's oft-repeated assertion that the Volt will have an all-electric range of 40 miles. Critics point out that the car needs ideal conditions to do that. For one thing, the 40-mile range depends on ambient temperatures of 60 degrees to 65 degrees. When the temperature drops below 60, the batteries become less efficient. And if it gets hotter than 65, the air conditioner can impose an additional load on the Volt's batteries. Either way, the range... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006697.html Yet another electric battery start-up touting a big advance in battery technology. A start-up based in Menlo Park, CA, plans to sell a new type of anode for lithium-ion batteries that, the company says, will let electric vehicles travel farther and mobile devices last longer without a recharge. Amprius' lithium-ion anodes are made of silicon nanowires, which can store 10 times more charge than graphite, the material used for today's lithium-ion battery anodes. According to the company, electric vehicles that run 200 miles between charges could go 380 miles on its batteries, and laptops that have four hours of run time could last for seven hours between charges. All of the start-up activity in battery technology makes me optimistic that... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006695.html Futuristic speculative questions sometimes become present day practical questions. Have you asked yourself what price you'd be willing to pay to get your genome fully sequenced? Complete Genomics, a start-up based in Mountain View, CA, has again lowered the stick in the financial limbo dance of human genome sequencing, announcing in the journal Science that it has sequenced three human genomes for an average cost of $4,400. The most recently sequenced genome--which happens to be that of genomics pioneer George Church--cost just $1,500 in chemicals, the cheapest published yet. This doesn't mean you can get your genome sequenced for $4400. They also had labor, equipment, and lab space costs as well as data post-processing costs. But the overall costs are... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006693.html What is missing from climate models? OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Oct. 9, 2009 -- For the first time, climate scientists from across the country have successfully incorporated the nitrogen cycle into global simulations for climate change, questioning previous assumptions regarding carbon feedback and potentially helping to refine model forecasts about global warming. My own reaction: amazement. We are in the year 2009 and only now the nitrogen cycle gets added to climate models? What other important factors are not yet in climate models? Does anyone know? I'm looking for a knowledgeable reply, not a rant. What is the state of climate models? What are the prospects for more accurate models 5, 10, 20 years from now? These scientists expect more rapid... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006692.html Why is H1N1 influenza vaccine coming out so slowly in the United States? Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA deputy commissioner, says a few policy decisions slow the production of vaccine. Why do adjuvants matter? An adjuvanted H1N1 vaccine being used in Europe contains 3.75 micrograms of vaccine stock. The same vaccine in the U.S., without the adjuvant, requires 15 micrograms of vaccine for equal potency. If we used adjuvants, we could have had four times the number of shots with the same raw material. Our regulators are more risk-averse. If a much more lethal pandemic flu strain popped up would the regulators continue to be so conservative? We need to move beyond the use of chicken eggs to produce... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006690.html Yet another claimant to the future best battery throne. A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that dramatically outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, and now it has the funding it needs to prove it. The amount of battery innovation seems to have really picked up in recent years. Clamor for better batteries for cell phones and laptop computers provides big demand today. At the same time, a big push by car companies to develop more hybrids and pluggable hybrids provides assurances that a far larger source of demand is building. Government policy provides incentives for the latter as well as money for research. Hence lots of start-ups. An order of magnitude... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006689.html A murderer in Italy got a lighter sentence due to a judge's view that the murderer had a genetically impaired ability to resist violent impulses. A judge's decision to reduce a killer's sentence because he has genetic mutations linked to violence raises a thorny question – can your genes ever absolve you of responsibility for a particular act? Regards the idea of genes absolving someone of responsibility: If they do then I think the genes reduce a person's rights at the same time. If a person has genes that compel him to violate the rights of others then that person lacks attributes needed to make that person into a full rights-possessing being. In my view human rights do not come... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006684.html http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006683.html Could the conventional mainstream wisdom about diet (more carbo, less fat) be, like, totally wrong? Researchers at the Sahlgrenska Academy in Sweden find that children who drink full-fat milk have lower body mass index. Eight-year-old children who drink full-fat milk every day have a lower BMI than those who seldom drink milk. This is not the case for children who often drink medium-fat or low-fat milk. This is one conclusion of a thesis presented at the Sahlgrenska Academy. The study showed that children who drink full-fat milk every day weigh on average just over 4 kg less. "This is an interesting observation, but we don't know why it is so. It may be the case that children who drink full-fat... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006682.html High cholesterol isn't as dangerous as a combination of obesity, high blood pressure, and high blood sugar (insulin resistant diabetes). The team, led by Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at Warwick Medical School Dr Oscar Franco, has discovered that simultaneously having obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar are the most dangerous combination of health factors when developing metabolic syndrome. How dangerous are these factors? Way more. In his study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, Dr Franco has identified the most dangerous combination of these conditions to be central obesity, high blood pressure and high blood sugar. People who have all three of these conditions are twice as likely to have a heart attack and... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006681.html This result strengthens my suspicion that high fructose corn syrup is to blame for the obesity epidemic. Decreased physical activity may have little to do with the recent spike in obesity rates among U.S. adolescents, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Prompted by growing concern that the increase was due to decreased physical activity associated with increased TV viewing time and other sedentary behaviors, researchers examined the patterns and time trends in physical activity and sedentary behaviors among U.S. adolescents based on nationally representative data collected since 1991. The review found signs indicating that the physical activity among adolescents increased while TV viewing decreased in recent years. The results are featured in the October... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006680.html A study in Vancouver BC finds that very few people live in ideal neighborhoods that feature both high walkability and clean air. A new study compares neighborhoods' walkability (degree of ease for walking) with local levels of air pollution and finds that some neighborhoods might be good for walking, but have poor air quality. Researchers involved in the study include University of Minnesota faculty member Julian Marshall and University of British Columbia faculty Michael Brauer and Lawrence Frank. I find these results to be important reminders on the value of electric vehicles. Cities and suburbs would both become better for our health if more vehicles were battery powered. If we had finer granularity maps of pollution I bet it would... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006679.html Fat around your internal organs is thought to be a much bigger risk factor for heart disease than fat near the surface of the skin. Well, if you go on a diet, exercise, get your weight down, and then eventually go off the diet continued exercise will prevent the resulting weight gain from happening where the risk factor is greatest. BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - A study conducted by exercise physiologists in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Human Studies finds that as little as 80 minutes a week of aerobic or resistance training helps not only to prevent weight gain, but also to inhibit a regain of harmful visceral fat one year after weight loss. The study was... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006675.html You've heard that we shouldn't judge people by their appearances and that appearances are only skin deep. Well no. People can predict the aggressiveness of other people after viewing their facial pictures for less than a second. Angry words and gestures are not the only way to get a sense of how temperamental a person is. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression. Facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) is determined by measuring the distance between the right and left cheeks and the distance from the upper lip to the mid-brow. During childhood, boys and girls... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006674.html The brain downshifts to simpler ways of processing information when lacking sleep. Westchester, Ill. —A study in the Nov.1 issue of the journal Sleep shows that sleep deprivation causes some people to shift from a more automatic, implicit process of information categorization (information-integration) to a more controlled, explicit process (rule-based). This use of rule-based strategies in a task in which information-integration strategies are optimal can lead to potentially devastating errors when quick and accurate categorization is fundamental to survival. The experimental subjects were West Point cadets. So they were at similar ages, pretty healthy, and smarter than the average population. The decay here is an average. I would be curious to know what the outliers looked like. Likely a subset... http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006673.html