Tag: science

I’ve some notes on this essay by Stephen Fry on Americans lively dinner conversation and global warming.

Jim has deliberately chosen his position due to his own undeclared conflict of interest and his point that many scientists dispute global warming is a common fallacy by people like him. It’s far more complicated than that it really isn’t a debate where there are two sides for climatologist to put themselves, there is dispute over whether it is a natural cycle, what effect global warming will have, whether or not human influence is quantifiable, issues over the fact that warming is uneven across the globe.

Fry’s position of a kind of Pascal wager is I believe the correct one because even if global warming turns out not to be a problem the steps we need to take to tackle it are ones human civilisation needs to make at some point in any case.

Fossil fuels are going to run out (actually I believe that they won’t but that we will cease to use them at some point) and so in order for us to progress as a race we need to move into a post-fossil fuel society.

Wired has some theories about what technologies we’ll be using sooner than later in the place of fossil fuels.

We’ll probably end up moving towards using ethanol or similar produced from corn to power our transportation but this will not be a solution to global warming because of the continued Carbon Dioxide release.

Some research is being done into synthetic biology to create enzymes that can produce even better products than biobutanol to replace petrol entirely and perhaps even offer a performance improvement over gasoline.

But power generation will definitely move away from generating CO2 as sustainable power generation technologies improve they become more viable and more economical than building huge coal fired power stations. We will at some point in the mid 21st century start to see Nuclear fusion power stations come online but until then it makes sense to continue to build fission based stations and the technology has improved greatly in that area also so that the modern stations are far better and safer than those in use in the US and UK currently.

Sydney Morning Herald: New penicillin found in wallaby milk

Scientists have discovered a bacteria-fighting compound 100 times more effective than penicillin – in wallaby milk.

Researchers found the highly-potent compound, tagged AGG01, was active against a wide variety of fungi and bacteria including antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

Research team leader Dr Ben Cocks said the discovery could have a profound impact on both human and animal health.

“This compound has the potential to be commercially synthesised and may prove vital in the war against increasingly resistant human and animal diseases,” Dr Cocks said.

It’s great news to hear that new antibiotic compounds like this are being discovered. Lets hope that society has reached the point where we can use it correctly and not give it out like candy for any old illness or we’ll have just yet another antibiotic that superbugs have become resistant to.

Still there are always Bacteriophages should we run out of effective antibiotics. Research into the therapeutic use of phages is really in it’s infancy even though some research has been carried out for decades it was far more practical to use antibiotic compounds.