The Promise Of Borophene

Posted: 12/4/2018

Graphene has a contender: Borophene. First predicted by theory in the mid-1990s, different borophene structures were experimentally confirmed in 2015.

“... Though boron is a nonmetallic semiconductor in its bulk (3-D) form, it becomes a metallic conductor in 2-D. Borophene is extremely flexible, strong, and lightweight—even more so than its carbon-based analogue, graphene. These unique electronic and mechanical properties make borophene a promising material platform for next-generation electronic devices such as wearables, biomolecule sensors, light detectors, and quantum computers. ...” (emphasis added; Source 1)

“... Now, physicists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Yale University have synthesized borophene on copper substrates with large-area (ranging in size from 10 to 100 micrometers) single-crystal domains (for reference, a strand of human hair is about 100 micrometers wide). Previously, only nanometer-size single-crystal flakes of borophene had been produced. … ” (emphasis added; Source 1)

“... Bozovic is particularly excited to test whether borophene can be made superconducting. Some theorists have speculated that its unusual electronic structure may even open a path to lossless transmission of electricity at room temperature ...” (emphasis added; Source 1)

Sources:

1. Borophene Advances as 2-D Materials Platform Atom-thin sheets of boron containing large single crystals could provide foundation for fabricating next-generation electronics

Antibiotic Resistance Is History

Posted: 12/4/2018  Updated: 5/28/2019, 3/21/2019

Update Of 5/28/2019

Here is a report on a new drug compound using  against Gram-negative bacteria: New compound which kills antibiotic-resistant superbugs discovered. Unfortunately, the drug compound is not described in any detail, presumably to protect intellectual property.

“The new drug compound has a range of exciting opportunities. … "As the compound is luminescent it glows when exposed to light. This means the uptake and effect on bacteria can be followed by the advanced microscope techniques … The studies ... have shown the compound seems to have several modes of action, making it more difficult for resistance to emerge in the bacteria” (emphasis added)

Update Of 3/21/2019

Just read Solving the efficiency of Gram-negative bacteria. It looks like the protective outer membrane consisting of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) molecules, the production of LPS, the bridge between the bacteria’s cytoplasm and outer membrane, and the transport of LPS from the interior to the outer membrane are now much better understood.

“... first author Owens identifies two crystal structures responsible for extracting LPS from the cytoplasm and moving the molecule onto the protein bridge. Previous research proposed that LPS gets to the bridge via multiple pathways, but Owens' work determined that ATP shuttles the molecule along just one path. … the protein bridge opens and closes gates that keep the LPS moving up toward the outer membrane. "The gate provides an explanation for unidirectional transport," ... "because gate closure prevents backflow."” (emphasis added)

Original Post

Work In Progress

A blog post with this motto: Antibiotic Resistance Is History was on my mind for some time. Never got around to capture salient scientific research on this topic.

As I become aware of new scientific research, I intend to update this blog post.

Fatty Acid Synthases & Tuberculosis

The Weizmann Institute in Israel has just published some very interesting research on particular membrane molecules of the tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis; see FAS Track to Fighting Antibiotic-Resistant TB dated 11/26/2018; Structure of Type-I Mycobacterium tuberculosis fatty acid synthase at 3.3 Ångström resolution; emphasis added):

1. “...Animals and fungi tend to have type 1 (FAS-I), bacteria and archaea type 2 (FAS-II). But the TB bacterium has both FAS-I and FAS-II, and these two cooperate to produce fatty acids that are extra-long -- up to 90 carbon links in the chain, in contrast to the 16-carbon fatty acids in our cells.”
2. “Mtb FAS-I is an essential enzymatic complex that contributes to the virulence of Mtb, and thus a prime target for anti-TB drugs. The structural information for Mtb FAS-I we have obtained enables computer-based drug discovery approaches”

Previous, Related Posts

I have previously blogged about the Scandal of Antibiotic Resistance. Given all the advances in Genetics etc. it is not comprehensible at all why humans should not be able to defeat dangerous bacteria like we have defeated e.g. HIV Aids. There is no excuse!

China Achieves Another Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion

Posted: 11/28/2018

China’s Preeminence In Science

I have little doubt that Chinese scientists could succeed in the very near future to harness nuclear fusion as a new and abundant energy source for humanity. China and its over 1 billion people will need a lot more energy than today as it becomes a fully advanced and developed economy. India will most likely catch up ...

A Tokamak Again

“The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (East) in Hefei has reached a temperature of 100 million degrees C for the first time” (Source 2; emphasis added). This temperature or higher is believed necessary for stable nuclear fusion.

Previously:

1. “... setting the world record by sustaining 101.2 seconds of steady-state H-mode operation of the EAST in 2017” (Source 4) [Impressive]
2. “Around the globe, they are trying to master nuclear fusion - in the United States, Japan, Korea, Brazil and European Union - but none can hold it steady for as long as the team in Anhui. Right now that's 100 seconds and it gets longer every year. Here they're already talking about goals which are 10 times as long, at temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius” (Source 5)

“China independently designed and constructed the East in 2006. The facility is 11m (36 ft) tall, with a diameter of 8m and a weight of 400 tons. The country is the first in the world to design and develop such equipment on its own.” (Source 2) [I believe, the USSR was the first to design and develop a Tokamak based reactor]

“The reactor is an improvement over China's first superconducting tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, built by the Institute of Plasma Physics in partnership with Russia in the early 1990s.” (Source 3)

I am wondering why the Chinese chose again a Tokamak torus design. It is one of the oldest designs for such reactors (invented in the USSR in the 1950s). Is this really the best design possible? How did the Chinese tweak the design?

ITER To Begin Experiments In 2025

I believe, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), proposed in 1987, has taken way too long to be planned and to be built. China is also among its seven funding and managing countries. I am glad China decided to build their own thermonuclear fusion energy facility in the meantime. The Chinese EAST was proposed in 1997 and started experiments in 2006.

It would be an irony, if the ITER is already severely outdated by the time it comes online thanks to the Chinese.

The Long Rocky History Of Nuclear Fusion

Nuclear fusion has for decades been overhyped and overpromised. That said, perhaps this time we are finally near or on the cusp of making this abundant energy resource available to humanity.

Private Investment

I did not have the time to investigate this topic, but if my memory serves me well, than there are a number of private companies investing in nuclear fusion reactors.

Sources:

1. China's 'artificial sun' achieves major breakthrough (perhaps not the most reliable source)
2. China’s ‘artificial sun’ achieves major breakthrough
3. Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak
4. China's 'artificial sun' operates at temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius
5. Will China beat the world to nuclear fusion and clean energy? (older source from April 2018)

Oncolytic Viruses

Posted: 11/25/2018

It almost sounds too good to be true that there are viruses (natural, engineered, or synthetic) that specialize on killing cancer cells without harming healthy cells. This virus possibly also kills surrounding cells (e.g. cancer-associated cells; immunosuppressive cells), if these surrounding cells prevent cancer treatment. And that is not all: The Enadenotucirev virus (formerly ColoAd1) is also reported to be a broad-spectrum treatment; “... it may give the body's natural immune response a boost along the way …” (Source 1)

“Oncolytic viruses hold great promise for the effective treatment of cancer because of their unique cell-killing mechanisms, tumor-selective replication, amplification of the initial therapy dose through replication in vivo, and potential to provoke an anticancer immune response” (Source 3)

Motto: Cancer is history!

Sources:

1. Scientists engineer a virus to take out cancer cells and their accomplices
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enadenotucirev
3. Phase 1 study of intravenous administration of the chimeric adenovirus enadenotucirev in patients undergoing primary tumor resection
4. An Oncolytic Virus Expressing a T-cell Engager Simultaneously Targets Cancer and Immunosuppressive Stromal Cells

Why Did Arizona U.S. Senate Candidate McSally Loose So Spectacularly

Posted: 11/22/2018

First, I have to admit that I did not have the time to follow the election campaign of Ms. McSally or of her contender very closely.

What seems clear so is that her much touted credentials as the first female combat U.S. Air Force pilot and that she was one of the highest-ranking female pilots in the history of the Air Force did not suffice.

In one of her last campaign commercials on radio immediately before the November 2018 Midterm, she was advertising her determination to do something about pre-existing conditions in health care. Yawn! What?

It appears that McSally fundamentally failed to come out as a staunch and credible fiscal conservative who will do everything in her power to cut the runaway federal spending (annual federal deficits for years are to the tune of $1 trillion) and to reduce dramatically the every growing record high and unsustainable federal government debt (almost $16 trillion).

Global Warming Revisited

Posted: 11/19/2018

The Global Hoax Of Our Time

Global Warming (a.k.a. Climate Change) is a hoax (I have blogged about it plenty of times here)! It is the superstition of our times. Many career politicians have exploited the fears of citizens. Many involved scientists were not much better than medieval alchemists!

Human Ingenuity & Freedom

There are at least several solutions of abundant energy and cleaner air on the horizon:

1. Large scale artificial photosynthesis is probably achievable within 10-20 years
2. Nuclear fusion may also become available within the next 20-30 years
3. Hydrogen power based energy production is becoming reality probably within 10-20 years
4. Recent research into superconductivity is finally very promising
5. Why don’t we clean air like water? It’s not impossible!
6. World population is shrinking much faster than we are constantly fooled to believe. More free markets in Africa and elsewhere would surely go a long way ...

Dismiss The Fools

Thus, there is absolutely no need for all these narrow minded, ill conceived, fundamentalist, fanatic demands  for so called renewable energy; abolishment of fossil fuels etc. Many Global Warming/Climate Change advocates are quite irrational and unconvincing!

Battle Of The Sexes

Posted: 11/19/2018

Clarion Call

Men better wake up! Women are trying to take over! For as long as there are still too distinguishable sexes among humans, men ought to be more proactive and alert.

Power Hungry Women

Feminism has become a clever strategy to win power over men by declaring men as the worse of the two sexes. A significant and growing number of power hungry and/or fanatic women are pushing the agenda.

The original female struggle for equality has gone far beyond!

Gentle Nature Of Males

Too many men have accepted the steady indoctrination that women are the oppressed of the two sexes and men are to be blamed. Men are still way too chivalrous, too forgiving, and too generous to such women by giving in to their demands.

Remember: Women are no angels nor saints!

Yoshua Bengio: An Ignorant & Naive Professor From Montreal

Posted: 7/14/2018  Updated: 4/14/2019, 7/15/2018

Update Of 4/14/2019

As of today, Yann LeCun decided to cut me off from commenting on his public posts on his Facebook page. Very fitting for an intolerant leftist full of hubris. He is also one of those hard and naive leftists who can not handle the truth or criticism!

Before I forget, Yann LeCun was just named as one of three AI researchers to win the prestigious Alan Turing Award.

It is his loss not mine! :-)

A Vice President & Chief Scientist At Facebook

Yann LeCun is the VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook according to his LinkedIn profile. Yann LeCun is actually one of the superstars of AI & machine learning.

I have recently liked his Facebook page, therefore about two posts by Yann LeCun appeared on my Facebook page in the past few days. Both of them were openly and kind of directly against President Trump. Not only that, he essentially and unreflectively (I hope) regurgitated typical leftist/progressive and absurd talking points like Trump has a mental issue (e.g. wordplay on paranoid and pronoid) or Peter Strzok’s “fiery” response during the Congressional Hearing about him (LeCun later also commented favorably about Strzok’s possibly fake outrage that Trump insulted a Veteran).

Yann LeCun Responded On His Facebook Posting

I had challenged Yann LeCun on both of his recent Facebook postings listed above. Today (7/15/2018) he responded to one of his two Facebook postings:

“You don't need to be "extreme left leaning" to see that Trump is a lying, incompetent racist who has no sense of basic human decency and no respect for democratic institutions. Anyone, conservative or progressive, who is in favor of democracy and human decency can see that. Are you? Can you?” (emphasis added)

My response to his response in return: “Mon dieu, you entertain a narrow, highly distorted and biased view of the current president. I suspect, it has to do with your upbringing in France (myself I am from Germany). I further suspect, you have a very poor and incomplete understanding of U.S. history and the Declaration of Independence as well as the U.S. Constitution/State constitutions. Recherchez vous si'l vous plait. Merci!”

Zuckerberg About An Extremely Left Leaning Place

About April 10, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, gave a testimony in the U.S. Congress where among other things, he had the courage to admit “I understand where that concern is coming from because Facebook and the tech industry are located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place” (source; emphasis added). I guess, he knew what he was talking about.

I personally do not like these awful show trials of business leaders in the U.S. Congress at all. It is often not much more than grandstanding and chest beating of our elected politicians to drag a business leader before them and lash out at them. In the case of Mark Zuckerberg this was certainly the case!

The Bubble Of Silicon Valley

They think they are so smart, open minded, and sophisticated, working on cutting/bleeding edge technology to the benefit of all mankind. They are so proud of the wisdom of crowd sourcing etc.

Turns out, that they rather live in a serious bubble and they are mightily trapped/stuck in really narrow minded groupthink!

No Harm Intended

I don’t mean any harm to or to judge Yann LeCun’s political views. Everyone is entitled to their opinions! His professional work in AI is excellent/outstanding and greatly admired by many, including myself.

Chrome Browser Annoyances

Posted: 10/26/2018  Corrected: 11/26/2018 Updated: 12/3/2018

System & Environment Info

I am using Fedora Linux on a notebook. I usually have at least three instances of the browser opened at any time with at least 10-20 tabs across the three instances.

Annoyances

I meant to write this blog post for some time. There are plenty of annoyances (many I have forgotten in the meantime). More will be added ...

1. Print to PDF file has a serious limit of a maximum of around 50 pages or so. If the webpage content translates into more than about 50 pages when printing to PDF file stalls and will not complete the preview. Printing the same webpage using Firefox browser succeeds (12/3/2018)
2. Cached stuff is poorly managed. At around 300 MB of cached images and files browser becomes sluggish in responding. After I clear this images and files cache things improve to some extent.
3. For many years now, you cannot log in with different Google accounts in two different instances. Switching between accounts is a pain. Thus, I resort to opening an incognito window, to log into my other Google account. Very cumbersome!
4. Saving a web page as a PDF file would be a nice feature (Correction 11/26/2018: To save a PDF file is actually possible through the print function)

Hope The People Of Canada Will Not Reelect Trudeau

Posted: 10/26/2018

Today, I discovered this:

Prime Minister names new Ambassador for Climate Change (June 5th, 2018). The ambassador’s name is Patricia Fuller.

This son of a famous prime minister is such a Obamesque clown!

Please citizens of Canada do the world a favor, get rid of such a fool coming federal elections in October 2019!

Open Research At The Speed Of AI

Posted: 10/20/2018

Today, I discovered the research publication webpage of the company Salesforce. Just stunning! My jaw dropped! This year (2018) alone this company put out about a dozen or so relevant and perhaps trailblazing research papers regarding natural language processing. The author, whose name appears basically on all of them, is Richard Socher. Socher was or is still an research assistant (Adjunct Professor/Visiting Lecturer) to Professor Christopher Manning at Stanford University. Socher’s lectures can be viewed here.

And this is just one company, i.e. Salesforce. Besides this company, there are Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others who publish constantly lots of great AI research for the whole world to learn about the advances of AI. This technological revolution is well documented and in the public domain.

Probably, one of the greatest bottlenecks of AI is better and new hardware architectures that are more suitable for AI and machine learning. Companies like IBM, Nvidia, Google and others are working hard at improving and developing new hardware. We expect to see a major leaps in AI once better hardware becomes available.