Science Ain't So Bad

A Cable Of Light For Undersea Exploration

HIGH SPEED UNDERWATER WIRELESS “INTERNET”

Texting while driving a submarine? The captain should be so lucky.

Submarine communication is slow and dorky. If it works at all. Electromagnetic waves  get kinda sulky in the ocean; they dissipate too fast to be useful for underwater communications so subs rely on beeps and boops – audio signals – to keep in touch. Which is HOPELESSLY slow. You can’t do ANY of the things we surface dwellers are used to.  Like voice or video.

And, obviously, the cloud computing metaphor’s a little off down there with fish swimming by the porthole.

That’s why robot submersibles (remotely operated vehicles) tend to have an umbilicus – a stiff, heavy cable – which carries transmissions to and from the surface for data and for control of the submersible, itself.

"Squid" submersible (See all the cables?)

But a big cable isn’t exactly an invitation to live wild and free. It grossly limits how far the submersible can go and the kinds of missions it can undertake.

Norman E Farr, a senior engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has, with his team, worked out a  solution – an optical/acoustic network. It is high speed, wireless, and, apparently,  reliable. Farr and team expect to get started in July with the first large scale deployment of this VERY cool “underwater Internet”.

While “breakthrough” is an overused term, this project may just be one – a breakthrough in underwater communications.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 10

One NOISY Laser

LASERS: AIN’T SEEN NOTHIN’ YET

I guess you’re not impressed by lasers.

You’ve got an $8.95 laser pointer from Job Lot. You had some hair removed by a laser. There’s one in your CD player. And they’re inside of things that’re all over your house. You even use one to drive the cat WACKY. And I wish you wouldn’t.

SAME PAGE-INESS

I’ll take a minute here to explain the difference between a laser and, say, an electric light.

Until 1958, when the laser was invented at Bell Labs, all forms of artificial light were “incoherent”. Incoherent light consists of light waves that don’t “line up” particularly well. The crests and the valleys of the waves are “all over the place” as opposed to coherent light where all the crests and valleys DO line up with each other.

What’s the difference? When light is coherent, it behaves itself. Instead of spreading (converging), it remains packed into a tight beam.

Not much of  a difference, I admit. But it makes the light kinda “pure” and “monochromatic” (one and only one frequency)  as opposed to a flashlight which is a great big MESS of frequencies. And a laser light doesn’t spread out the way we’re used to a light beam behaving; instead it just stays in a tight beam.  The science behind it is NICELY described in an article in HOW STUFF WORKS. Which I appreciate because MISTER ScienceAintSoBad is in NO mood to go through all the details, this morning.

The fact that monochromatic laser light DOESN’T  dissipate its energy by spreading out like its more ordinary cousins means it can transmit great power over a long distance or offer real  accuracy for measuring stuff. Its nice tight beam is even useful for communications since it can illuminate light fibers or bounce off of distant targets and still hold onto its properties.

Who would a thought that a laser, which is, after all, just a humble beam of light, would turn out to be so important?

WHY USE SOUND?

The length of a light wave is short.  It’s measured in billionths of a meter. Wanna see how the wavelength varies with color? (Probably not, but just in case, this is fun. )

Frequency, for frequency, the wavelengths of sound are even shorter.  Much, much shorter.  So sound  could be used for WAY more accurate measurements in medicine and other applications.  And a sound-based laser (phonon laser) would, no doubt, have other startling tricks it could do besides measurement, if we really had one.

THE PHONON LASER

Phonon lasers still aren’t available at Job Lot but the work’s movin’ along VERY nicely.  It’s described in Physical Review Letters (who NAMES these publications?)  and in Physics.

Mister ScienceAintSoBad thinks the emergence of the phonon laser is now likely.  Whole new industries will follow.

ScienceAintSoBad Rating= 10

Jabber, Jabber, Jabber

Test: How is political debate different from science?

I will pick up your papers at the end of the class. I don’t want you looking at anyone else’s answers.

Shoot! No Tenure.

THE DARK SIDE

Amy Bishop (Assistant Professor Of Biology at the University of Alabama) figured out that  her colleagues weren’t gonna give her tenure.

So she shot them.

TOO assertive, we think. They say she also  shot and killed her brother in 1986, was a suspect in a bombing, may have assaulted someone in a restaurant and, supposedly, had a long history of hinkey behavior.

WHAT KIND OF SCIENTIST WAS SHE?

You, the readers of Science Ain’t So Bad, aren’t the SORT to be titillated by violence.

Or sex, for that matter.

If you’re here, you’re here to read about science and technology and, I’m sure your questions about Dr. Bishop are more about her scientific work.

Proud OF you!

Well, as a published author, Bishop isn’t prolific. R Douglas Fields (Psychology Today) took a look and says the list is short.

Her newest stuff is about nitric oxide, a compound that has multiple and important uses in human (and nonhuman) biology. Her research leads her to a radical view of the causes of MS –  a view which is still considered pretty “iffy”. Shooting her colleagues, obviously, might not add weight to her arguments, although, strictly speaking, scientific ideas should be evaluated on their own merits.

Still..

An article in the Boston Herald says Bishop included her minor kids on at least one of her papers.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks that’s nice. If she hadn’t done such awful things and if her contributions were solid, the “kids on the research paper” thing wouldn’t get counted as a foul here.

The article by Fields also describes a system for maintaining neurons in cell culture – an “automated Petri Dish” – for which Bishop had obtained a patent. If the device was getting lost in the noise of all the other patents, that should change now. (No such thing as bad news? Do I believe this?). But Fields sounds dubious about the prospects for the invention.

STUDENT REVIEWS

As far as Bishop’s teaching is concerned, her student reviews didn’t seem bad. Look for yourself.

Nobody’s  heartless enough to give a ScienceAintsoBadRating on this one.  Instead, we offer our sincere condolences to those who have suffered, including Bishop’s own family and we mourn the almost certain loss of her  potential contributions to the scientific world and to the community at large.

WORKS GOOD

Anesthesiology: With A Battery Backup

THE INTRO

Has anybody ever put you to sleep?

I KNOW you won’t be dozing while reading MY good-as-coffee articles , but have you ever been put to sleep by a white coated, caring individual who then proceeded to remove your tonsils?

FUN WITH ANESTHETICS

For medical professionals, a visit to the “Ether dome” at Mass General Hospital in Boston’s like a visit to a holy shrine. (MGH is where anesthesia was introduced to the medical world in the 1840s, in case you didn’t know.)

Ether Dome

Try to imagine a modern operation underway with a slug of whiskey dripping down the patient’s chin and four big guys holding him.her down. The doc would have – what? – 30 seconds to drag that old heart out and stuff in the new one?

Not very bloody likely!

Most of the elaborate procedures that are part of medicine, as we know it, require a peaceful sedated patient that can be kept stable for a long time. In fact, many procedures take hours. Some even take days.

Anesthesia is really one of the HUGE successes of our time. Under the command of a doctor or a nurse anesthetist at the head of the operating table, the patient’s signs are carefully monitored and the “anesthetic agents” are carefully controlled. Often, the anesthesiologist manipulates a bag, manually “breathing” for a patient whose lungs are temporarily paralyzed, watching the patient intensely for signs of  ”lightening up”.

GOING UNDER

For a fun surgical experience:

1. You don’t want it to hurt (at least I don’t).

2. You don’t wanna know (unconscious).

3. You don’t want to remember it afterwards. and

4. You (or at least your doctors) don’t want you to be jerking around while tissue near nerves and arteries is being cut with great precision. So it is important that your muscles be paralyzed.

Get it all right (as well as the timing of your wake up call in the surgical suite) and, all you need for a SUPER surgical day is a nice recovery without infection. Even better would be if the hospital sends the bill to the wrong customer and – this may be TOO optimistic, the surgeons managed to remove what they were SUPPOSED to,  instead of the one on the right side.

If only the surgery were as predictable as the anesthesia.

Deaths from anesthesia happen.Nothing’s perfect. But they’re rarer than typos on Science Ain’t So Baud. Less than 1 in 100,000 procedures. RIDICULOUSLY rare!

From time-to-time, however, things go wrong enough that one of the things I mentioned above ( pain, unconsciousness, recall, or paralysis) aren’t as controlled as they  should be and a patient can have a rotten time of it.

There ARE plenty of other issues, by the way, such as “anesthesia brain” which can leave a former patient with mental deficits. However, having scared the crap out of you,  that is ENTIRELY off topic. Another time, maybe.

THE MACHINE

Anyway, getting, finally, to the point, a group from the University of La Laguna (it’s in the Canary Islands) is reporting that it has an anesthesia machine that “closes the loop”, monitoring patients and adjusting the anesthetic as needed.

Adding control to an anesthesiology machine isn’t galaxy shaking. The idea’s been around. Cooper and Newbower (Mass General Hospital) were doing this stuff in the 1970′s and Aspect Medical has been selling “Bispectral Index Monitors”  for years. (They figure out if you’re sleepy enough).

But closing the loop – letting the machine take control – is a dramatic step.

MISTER ScienceAintSoBad doesn’t think’s anesthesiologists will be going out for coffee during the procedure for a few years.

Not if I’m on the damn table!

The way it’s shaping up is this. Computers are better at doing things fast and not losing track of details. But people have got that wisdom thing going and, of course, there’s STILL that Jobs, Jobs, Jobs thing to consider. So, I guess you could think of the anesthesia machine as a truly expensive set of antilock brakes that still need a driver.

This is just a beginning. The machine has only been tried with profol and on a small number of volunteers. But it makes sense medically and scientifically.

It’ll happen.

ScienceAintSoBadRating = 7 .

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