Search Results for: Science

The Bloody Patent Battle Over a Healing Machine

Longreads Pick

A patent for a simple medical device has made its inventors, its marketers, and a university rich—which is why everyone wants a piece of it:

“For Wake Forest University, which licensed the VAC patents to KCI, the device has meant about $500 million in royalties. Based almost entirely on the VAC deal, the university was ranked fifth by the Association of University Technology Managers in its most recent survey of licensing income, trailing only Columbia, New York University, Northwestern, and the University of California system. In recent years the KCI payments have propped up the bottom line of the university’s medical center, and the VAC money has paid for research, recruiting, and construction that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

“As you might imagine, all that success gave KCI and Wake Forest a powerful incentive to build a fence, to protect the patents at all cost. And it gave everybody else an equally powerful incentive to find a way through the fence.

“This is the story of what happens when there are billions of dollars wrapped up in a prosaic piece of technology that at its core is closer to your kid’s science-fair entry than the Human Genome Project, one that despite all the commercial success and some 4 million or so patients still has its share of doubters in the medical community. It’s a story about luck and timing and the squeezing of the health care dollar. It is about betrayal and wrangling over patents. And mostly it is about invention, the tenuous and uncertain act of breathing life into an idea that may or may not have been yours all along.”

Source: Fortune
Published: Oct 30, 2012
Length: 15 minutes (3,893 words)

An Italian inventor may have created a machine that can generate so much cheap energy, it would put oil companies out of business. Or it all may be a spectacular scam:

On the last day of the conference, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Langley Research Center, summed up the state of LENR research. Guys like Rossi play a crucial role, for better or for worse. ‘This will go directly from the garage, the Edisonian experiments, to market, bypassing the science and the rigorous engineering research,’ Bushnell said. ‘And there are major investors ready to move on this—an amazing number—given a credible third-party seal of approval. I mean, this can move fast. If we ever get a credible assessment in the kilowatt range’—one kilowatt will power ten 100-watt lightbulbs—’the world changes overnight.’ Bushnell paused and took a sip of water. ‘We have so screwed up this planet,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘This is one of the few things I know of that’s capable for atoning for our sins.’

To my astonishment, after three days of asking every cold-fusion researcher in the house, I couldn’t find a single person willing to call Rossi a con man. The consensus was that he had something, even if he didn’t understand why it worked or how to control it. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Could Rossi actually have something real? The only way to know for sure was to go to Italy.

“Can Andrea Rossi’s Infinite-Energy Black Box Power The World—Or Just Scam It?” — Steve Featherstone, Popular Science

Can Andrea Rossi’s Infinite-Energy Black Box Power The World—Or Just Scam It?

Longreads Pick

An Italian inventor may have created a machine that can generate so much cheap energy, it would put oil companies out of business. Or it all may be a spectacular scam:

“On the last day of the conference, Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at Langley Research Center, summed up the state of LENR research. Guys like Rossi play a crucial role, for better or for worse. ‘This will go directly from the garage, the Edisonian experiments, to market, bypassing the science and the rigorous engineering research,’ Bushnell said. ‘And there are major investors ready to move on this—an amazing number—given a credible third-party seal of approval. I mean, this can move fast. If we ever get a credible assessment in the kilowatt range’—one kilowatt will power ten 100-watt lightbulbs—’the world changes overnight.’ Bushnell paused and took a sip of water. ‘We have so screwed up this planet,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘This is one of the few things I know of that’s capable for atoning for our sins.’

“To my astonishment, after three days of asking every cold-fusion researcher in the house, I couldn’t find a single person willing to call Rossi a con man. The consensus was that he had something, even if he didn’t understand why it worked or how to control it. The more I learned, the more confused I became. Could Rossi actually have something real? The only way to know for sure was to go to Italy.”

Source: Popular Science
Published: Oct 23, 2012
Length: 24 minutes (6,175 words)

Excerpt from the new book Spillover, on understanding the threat of RNA viruses like Marburg, Ebola, West Nile and SARS—and how humans can help contain them:

During the early 20th century, disease scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation and other institutions conceived the ambitious goal of eradicating some infectious diseases entirely. They tried hard with yellow fever, spending millions of dollars and many years of effort, and failed. They tried with malaria and failed. They tried later with smallpox and succeeded. Why? The differences among those three diseases are many and complex, but probably the most crucial one is that smallpox resided neither in a reservoir host nor in a vector, such as a mosquito or tick. Its ecology was simple. It existed in humans—in humans only—and was therefore much easier to eradicate. The campaign to eradicate polio, begun in 1998 by WHO and other institutions, is a realistic effort for the same reason: Polio isn’t zoonotic. Eradicating a zoonotic disease, whether a directly transmitted one like Ebola or an insect-vectored one such as yellow fever, is much more complicated. Do you exterminate the pathogen by exterminating the species of bat or primate or mosquito in which it resides? Not easily, you don’t, and not without raising an outcry. The notion of eradicating chimpanzees as a step toward preventing the future spillover of another HIV would provoke a deep and bitter discussion, to put it mildly.

That’s the salubrious thing about zoonotic diseases: They remind us, as St. Francis did, that we humans are inseparable from the natural world. In fact, there is no ‘natural world,’ it’s a bad and artificial phrase.

“Where Will The Next Pandemic Come From? And How Can We Stop It?” — David Quammen, Popular Science

More from Popular Science

The Long Shot

Longreads Pick

Following news of the discovery of a new planet in Alpha Centauri, a look at how scientists discover new planets:

“I’d come to meet Debra Fischer, a professor at San Francisco State University. As a co-discoverer of more than 150 planets, nearly half the known total outside our solar system, she is a prominent figure in astronomy. Her work on this lonely mountaintop could propel her past that, though, into realms of myth and legend. Fischer is using a modest, neglected telescope at CTIO to search for Earth-like planets in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own. If they exist, she should find them in three to five years.

“The implications would be timeless, echoing ancient questions of life’s purpose, outlining futures distant yet possible. Against the certainty of another Earth circling one of the closest stars in the sky, the entirety of recorded history would abruptly seem the briefest prelude to an eternal denouement, a fire kindled to be passed on without end. Alpha Centauri could become a beacon illuminating and bringing significance to the accumulated toils of generations. Driven by the spectral hope of another living world unexplored, our own could profoundly change. Or Fischer’s project could simply fail. Many astronomers assume it will.”

Source: Seed
Published: May 19, 2009
Length: 22 minutes (5,602 words)

Member Exclusive: Escape from Evil

Longreads Pick

Our latest Exclusive comes from writer and Longreads Member Maria Bustillos, whose own work has been featured on Longreads in the past. She’s chosen Chapter 8 from Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Becker’s 1975 book Escape from Evil. Maria explains:

“Becker won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Denial of Death, but this one, published posthumously and building on ideas from that earlier work, is far, far better, to my mind, more compact, more advanced, more compelling. This book is pragmatic synthesis of multiple disciplines in the science of man, the place where humanities and science collide. Theories about Becker’s work abound, but for me his great gift was the way he seemed to have led us to the threshold of a new enlightenment, clear-eyed, undeceived, ready to take the next step. It’s a step the reader may be able to intuit, and perhaps even gain, and make practical use of in his or her own life: ‘[W]e have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism.'”

Source: Free Press
Published: Jan 1, 1975
Length: 51 minutes (12,899 words)

A look at the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has invested $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science with the goal of decoding how the human brain works:

Four years later six brains have been donated and four analyzed to some degree. The project is due to be finished this year, but the first brain images, put online in 2010, are already yielding scientific results. So far, the gene expression from the first two human brains in the new atlas varies only a little, yielding hope that scientists will be able to understand some of what it all means.

How might this work? A young University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist named Bradley Voytek used software to match words that frequently appeared together in the scientific literature with matches of where genes are expressed in the Allen atlas. For instance, he found that scientists studying serotonin, the neurotransmitter hit by Prozac and Zoloft, were ignoring two brain areas where the chemical was expressed in their research. It might even play a role in migraines. This data-driven approach led to 800 new ideas about how the brain may work that scientists can now test, leading to hope that computational methods can help decipher the computer in our heads.

“Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain.” — Matthew Herper, Forbes

More from Forbes

Inside Paul Allen’s Quest To Reverse Engineer The Brain

Longreads Pick

A look at the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has invested $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science with the goal of decoding how the human brain works:

“Four years later six brains have been donated and four analyzed to some degree. The project is due to be finished this year, but the first brain images, put online in 2010, are already yielding scientific results. So far, the gene expression from the first two human brains in the new atlas varies only a little, yielding hope that scientists will be able to understand some of what it all means.

“How might this work? A young University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist named Bradley Voytek used software to match words that frequently appeared together in the scientific literature with matches of where genes are expressed in the Allen atlas. For instance, he found that scientists studying serotonin, the neurotransmitter hit by Prozac and Zoloft, were ignoring two brain areas where the chemical was expressed in their research. It might even play a role in migraines. This data-driven approach led to 800 new ideas about how the brain may work that scientists can now test, leading to hope that computational methods can help decipher the computer in our heads.”

Source: Forbes
Published: Sep 18, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,174 words)

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

Longreads Pick

Meet a NASA scientist who suggests the possibility that we’re all living inside a video game:

“Two years ago, Rich Terrile appeared on Through the Wormhole, the Science Channel’s show about the mysteries of life and the universe. He was invited onto the program to discuss the theory that the human experience can be boiled down to something like an incredibly advanced, metaphysical version of The Sims.

“It’s an idea that every college student with a gravity bong and The Matrix on DVD has thought of before, but Rich is a well-regarded scientist, the director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and is currently writing an as-yet-untitled book about the subject, so we’re going to go ahead and take him seriously.

“The essence of Rich’s theory is that a ‘programmer’ from the future designed our reality to simulate the course of what the programmer considers to be ancient history—for whatever reason, maybe because he’s bored.”

Author: Ben Makuch
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Sep 8, 2012
Length: 6 minutes (1,537 words)

A look behind the introverted life of James E. Holmes, a graduate student in the neuroscience department at the University of Colorado, Denver, before the shooting in Aurora:

In the days after the shooting, faculty members and graduate students, in shock, compared notes on what they knew about Mr. Holmes, what they might have missed, what they could have done. Some said they wished they had tried harder to break through his loneliness, a student recalled. Others wondered if living somewhere besides the dingy apartment on Paris Street might have mitigated his isolation.

At a meeting held at Dr. Ribera’s house, a student said, Barry Shur, the dean of the graduate school, said Mr. Holmes had been seeing a psychiatrist. When the authorities told him the identity of the shooting suspect, Dr. Shur said, his reaction was “I’ve heard his name before.”

But all that came later.

No one saw Mr. Holmes much after he left school in June.

“Before Gunfire, Hints of ‘Bad News’.” — Erica Goode, Serge F. Kovaleski, Jack Healy, Dan Frosch, The New York Times