Michio Kaku on the Future of Science

Zero Motorcycles on Green Tech Today

Just published this week: I visited Zero Motorcycles to learn all about their awesome electric bikes. Check it out!

You can subscribe to Green Tech Today at twit.tv.

Michio Kaku on Robots

The Green Remix

So, earlier this summer I worked on a show called Green Tech Today with Sarah Lane at the TWiT Network. It was a highly produced, magazine style program that was meant to whet the green whistle of the TWiT audience and also (hopefully) pull in a bit of a new audience for TWiT.

For a variety of reasons, the show was stopped after releasing only two episodes. We shot five episodes that you may eventually see in various stages of dress in other programming since they will never be released as Green Tech Today. Why?

Well, Green Tech Today has been remixed and gotten a facelift. Thankfully, it wasn’t relegated to the dustbin, but given a second chance. No longer is it the Green Tech variety show. Rather, it’s now:

The TWiT Networks Top 25 Green Tech Innovators Series

I will be hosting it along with the world-famous Becky Worley, who is also the executive producer for this fine show.

And, just released yesterday, here is the first of the new incarnation of Green Tech Today:

If you like the show, be sure to subscribe and get your audio or video preference every week while the series lasts! Some up coming highlights include SeaGen’s wave power and Zero Motorcycle’s electric bikes.

Teach Your Children Well

A line from a song by Crosby, Stills, and Nash that speaks volumes to the report that is out this week on the worsening state of science education in America.

Why is it that we can argue about immigration, health care, the Tea Partiers and whether or not President Obama is a citizen, but stand by idly while the public school system deteriorates?

Is that where the voting public really wants this country to go? Is ‘Idiocracy‘ the future of our country?

I hate to even entertain such thoughts. Thankfully, I know many, many hard working people who care deeply about the education of our country’s children, and who will keep working to see that improvements to the educational system are made, with or without such a report.

Is the situation really as dire as the report makes it out to be? Maybe, maybe not.

In a USA Today article discussing responses to the report, there is a quote from one B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown:

“It’s easy to understand with the America COMPETES Act up for renewal why advocates would frame the situation this way. But it seems less helpful to frame things in a voice of crisis rather than a more reasoned response. Things aren’t as bad as this report paints them.”

Mr. Lowell issued a study in 2007 that concluded there were more than enough science and engineering graduates for the jobs that were available. So, ok, there are lots of graduates, but are they qualified, Mr. Lowell? That could be part of the problem. Just because people are graduating does not automatically make them able to perform a job.

Also, why are there fewer jobs than graduates? Why isn’t our country exploding with technological industry? Wouldn’t funding R&D through the America COMPETES Act lead to more jobs in that sector?

In this issue, as in all others, it does help to try to see as many sides of the issue as possible. But, the side I keep coming back to is the side with the children who are going to be our future. If the children are not educated well, there is not much hope for the future of this country. Shouldn’t protecting the future be something of a priority?

So, Mr. Lowell, I do think that framing this issue as a crisis is necessary. How else will it get the attention it deserves when there are so many loud mouths clogging up the media?

Since when has a reasoned political debate worked to fire up the public (and thus the politicians) in recent history?

Where is Whitney Houston when we need her most!?! (And, I mean pre-crackhead Whitney who sang with such conviction, I almost believed she believed what she was singing)

Michio Kaku on the Moon

You Tell Me

Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour just reached its one year anniversary… yay!!!

What do I do now?

Well, I’d love you to tell me. What have you enjoyed about the show over the past year? What are its strong points? What would you like to see more of? Who would you like me to interview? Is there anything I should change?

All these questions, and more, I am asking of you since this show is for you.

To answer these questions and leave comments for me, you can do several things:

1. send me an email (drkiki at drkiki dot tv),
2. leave a comment here,
3. send me a video message through youtube, or
4. call me and leave me a message (yup, I’m giving you a phone number… 650-741-KIKI).

I will play and read your responses on Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour tomorrow afternoon. This anniversary is about you.

I want to make Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour even better this year, and I would love your help to make it happen.

Watching the Numbers Go By

I became aware of this PBS oil leak widget last week.

There is something mesmerizing about watching the numbers scroll past.

The numbers of gallons leaked is so high at this point that it seems unreal. How did this happen? Why isn’t it fixed yet? Can that really be the low estimate?

I can’t even wrap my brain around the enormity of the disaster. What do the numbers really mean?

So, here are some numbers I’ve calculated as I try to make sense and get perspective:

The low estimate of around 20,414,200 gallons (and rising) is about 486,052 barrels of oil, or 30 Olympic sized swimming pools. This quantity of oil would fill the tanks of approximately 1,360,946 cars, assuming a tank size of 15 gallons. That’s more cars than the number of people who live in San Francisco.

Or, it could fill my car’s tank nearly 1.4 million times. My car gets 25 miles to the gallon on average, and can potentially travel 375 miles on one tank of gas. I could conceivably drive somewhere around 510,355,000 miles with the low estimate of how many gallons have leaked so far. That’s 20,414 times around the earth’s equator, or 2041 times to the moon (or about 1020 round trips).

It’s 93 million miles to the sun, so I could make the round trip there almost two and three-quarters times. And, depending on where Mars is, I could get there and back either 7 times or once.

On the high end of the leak estimates, I’m looking at being able to travel about 4,400,000,000 (that’s 4.4 billion) miles! That could get me to Pluto when it’s at its closest.

Obviously, I know my car couldn’t travel in outer space, but it’s interesting to think of what the oil that’s leaking into the Gulf of Mexico could have done.

The low estimate of the leak is far lower than the amount of oil being produced per day for our consumption, but the high estimate is getting up there… a bit more than China and Iran produce in a day. Interestingly, depending on the estimate you choose to look at, we are either looking at a disaster that is simply two times as large as the Exxon Valdez or something that is somewhere between the first and second worst oil spill in history.

I can only hope that the worst case estimates are not correct, but regardless, this is big and is bound to get bigger until it is fixed. The numbers and constant news reports are mind-numbing, but don’t get complacent.

If it matters to you, make some noise that this is not what you want for your world.

Synthesizing Our World

Most of the media, yours truly included, was abuzz this past week about the news from the J. Craig Venter Institute that they had created a bacteria with a fully synthetic genome. Now, how far the proclamation was taken was a matter of sensationalist bent; was it “artificial life” or something less sci-fi?

In my personal opinion, which I tried to discuss a few places, it is a landmark report if only for the sheer technological know-how. The Venter Institute has proof-of-concept of various techniques working together for the first time. The bacterium they created are copies of an existing bacterium, but the copy genome was produced base by base in a dish rather than inside a living organism. Also, the copy genome was inserted into another species of bacteria whose genome had been removed (it was a shell of its previous self), and successfully took over the management of the bacterial body.

Now, the Venter Institute has generations of little baby bacteria that are the product of successful asexual bacterial reproduction (i.e. cell division) from that first synthetic generation. If they are dividing and multiplying like regular bacteria, I have to say it is a job well done. But, if they truly want to create artificial life, they are going to have to figure out how to create the bacterial body that goes with the DNA.

I’m sure scientists are already working on that problem, but in the meantime, the Venter Institute will be working with the DNA to determine what genes are necessary for life, what the minimum size limit is for a genome to run a microbe, and which genes can be added successfully to bacteria to make them do our bidding.

In addition to this very visible bacteria story, another equally interesting and potentially sci-fi scientific development hit the journal Nature this last week. Robots… little tiny robots that crawl around inside your cells to fix things are a bit closer to reality.

According to Bethany Halford of Chemical &Engineering News:

“Using DNA as the key construction material, one group of researchers created a nanoscale robot that can autonomously walk across a track, and a different group prepared a nanofactory in which DNA robots can carry and deposit nanoparticle cargo.”

The track in question will eventually be your cytoskeleton, the tiny fibers that give your cells their shape, and act as the transportation routes for cellular delivery systems. If the groups involved in these two studies can put their work together, we will have tiny machines that can carry payloads from place to place within your cells – a goal of researchers wanting very specific intracellular chemical delivery.

Also from the article:

“A goal of our field is to refashion and reimagine all the complex biochemical machinery of cells to suit our own purposes—to have synthetic molecules that can move around and carry cargo as protein motors do in cells, to have molecules that act as chemical factories, which make a particular product based on a particular chemical input, and above all to make these processes modular, to make them engineerable,” notes Paul W. K. Rothemund, the Caltech scientist who invented DNA origami.”

So, someday in the possibly not-so-distant future we may have synthetic bacteria that do our bidding in the environment, AND synthetic machines that help us live healthier lives.

Viruses Are Cool

And, yes, they cause colds. But, when it comes down to it viruses are the sneakiest survivalists around… especially considering that they aren’t even alive.

Last Friday, I got to talk with Dr. Vincent Racaniello, Dr. Rich Condit, and Dr. Alan Dove (PhD turned science writer), virus experts the lot of them, on their show, This Week in Virology. Ostensibly, I was invited on the show to discuss my transformation from scientist grad student to scientist media person, but I was really just there for the virus science.

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to this podcast, I highly suggest giving it one. The hosts are Columbia University professors, and they eloquently discuss the finer details of the viruses that make you sick. However, it’s not a show for the scientifically faint of heart. These guys really dig into the nuts and bolts of the living dead. The conversation is fairly high level, but they do a great job of making it interesting. I found myself hanging on their words wanting to learn how the little things work.

But, I am a certified geek. I thrive on the details because to me they add nuance to the scientific story unfolding around my ears.

You will just have to see what you think for yourself. Check it out at www.twiv.tv.