Mid-Summer Interesting Developments

With the news focused on terrorism, financial woes, employment, unemployment, the military, and so on, much of the most interesting news seems to go unheralded. Just for the fun of it, here in mid-summer, here are a few interesting developments you may not have heard about.
Those teeny tiny particles called genes are making the rounds in all branches of medicine. Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that affects the lungs, pancreas, liver, kidneys and guts. I won’t go into the mucky stuff that is caused by the disease, but it can be fatal and is most certainly life-debilitating. Now, for the first time, 130 patients in a trial have been treated with gene therapy. Gene therapy is basically taking blood out from the body, turning the correct little gene switches back on, and putting the patient’s blood back in. The “on” genes go to work repairing damage caused by their previous slack job at tackling the disease. Of the 130 patients, all showed improvement or stabilizing of the illness. This has been done with cancers as well, sometimes working too well, dissolving tumors so fast the body’s clean-up crew of liver and kidneys cannot cope causing other toxic issues. But all in all, the body’s ability to repair itself seems to be the great new medical adventure – perhaps making all those “fake” faith healing techniques more interesting. If you can turn on disease-fighting genes from outside the body, why can’t the body effect a miracle cure by using the mind to order them to turn on?
Speaking of small, at Texas A&M they have glued microchips with video cameras to the backs of cockroaches and connected electrodes, turning them into mini-robots. What for? Well, imagine there was a part of a nuclear reactor you wanted to inspect but the radiation as to high for a human. Send in the cockroaches! I am not clowning around. The uses, for tight spaces, pipe inspection, dangerous environments when a cockroach might seem dispensable – not a bad use of technology. Of course, Entomology Professor Vinson saying the cockroaches are not hurt and that he was not aware of them experiencing any pain seems a little disingenuous.
For bigger stuff, I’ll skip over self-driving cars, robots, pilotless planes and the like. All those are extensions of technology that is decades old and in development. What’s really, incredibly, new are shape-shifting wings. NASA and the AF have been flying a modified Gulfstream jet with a portion of the wing – the trailing edge – being made of flexible design. Why? So instead of a break in the wing on take-off and landing, the “flaps” command simply bends part of the wing down, keeping the wing smooth and without those gaps you see looking out the window when the plane is landing. Okay, what they are after is a 12% saving in fuel during takeoff and landing (the two times the plane uses almost half of the fuel on board). All that’s cool enough, but it doesn’t end there.
In wind tunnel testing at DARPA and the AF are prototypes of a new sleek plane that allows the whole wing to conform to the speed required. At slow speed the wing has a thicker cross-section, allowing for more lift. When the speed increases, the wing elongates and has a much thinner cross-section. Result? Safer handling at slow speeds, 50% efficiency at higher speeds. Of course, DARPA and the AF are testing for fighters, but their partner Boeing are already working on plane designs that can carry passengers, giant shape-shifting delta wing planes, with a cabin 20 seats across.
Oh, and one more big deal: next week New Horizons, the spacecraft launched years ago, will flyby Pluto and its 5 moons on July 14. The path of the craft will be behind the large moon, Charon that goes around Pluto in under a week, clearing a path of any debris, so New Horizons should be safe in its shadow. Oh, and how cool is this flight? Imagine flying 3 billion miles and hitting a target path 60 miles in radius and within 100 seconds of arrival planning. Oh, and try doing that with messages to the craft taking 268 minutes (4 hours and 28 minutes). Talking about a huge task controlling a craft doing 30,000 miles per hour.